Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TEATIME: A Formal Model of Action Tendencies in Conversational Agents

This paper presents a formal model of socio-affective behaviour in a conversational agent based on the Action Tendency theory. This theory defines emotions as tendencies to perform an action. This theory allows us to implement a strong connection between emotions and speech acts during an agent-human interaction. Our model presents an agent architecture with beliefs, desires, ideals and capacities. It relies on 6 appraisal variables for the selection of different emotional strategies depending on the context of the dialogue. It also supports social regulation of emotions depending on social rules. We implemented this model in an agent architecture and we give an example of dialogue with a virtual insurance expert in the context of customer relationship management.
Challenges associated with parenting youth with neurofibromatosis: A qualitative investigation

Parents of children with the neurofibromatoses (NF; neurofibromatosis 1, neurofibromatosis 2, and schwannomatosis) are at an increased risk for emotional and physical health problems. This study aimed to determine parents' perceptions of stressors associated with parenting a child with NF in order to inform the development of a resiliency intervention. We conducted three live video semi structured focus groups with parents of youth with NF (N = 30), which were subsequently transcribed and coded using qualitative content analysis. Parents reported heightened stress associated with the child's educational, medical, and social needs, as well as concerns about their child's physical and mental health. They also reported stress associated with managing finances, multiple medical appointments, role challenges (i.e., being a parent or partner), and managing the uncertainty/unpredictability of their child's NF diagnosis. These stressors reportedly affected employment status (i.e., work scale backs), relationships (i.e., social, familial, with partner, other children), and the parents' physical and mental health. All participants expressed interest in a mind body program aimed at improving resiliency by teaching coping skills (e.g., mindfulness, adaptive thinking, positive psychology skills) and enhancing social support. Results show parents' enthusiasm for a resiliency intervention targeting stress associated with parenting a child with NF, and provide valuable information for the content of the intervention and its delivery modality.
DMINDA: an integrated web server for DNA motif identification and analyses

DMINDA (DNA motif identification and analyses) is an integrated web server for DNA motif identification and analyses, which is accessible at http://csbl.bmb. uga.edu/DMINDA/. This web site is freely available to all users and there is no login requirement. This server provides a suite of cis-regulatory motif analysis functions on DNA sequences, which are important to elucidation of the mechanisms of transcriptional regulation: (i) de novo motif finding for a given set of promoter sequences along with statistical scores for the predicted motifs derived based on information extracted from a control set, (ii) scanning motif instances of a query motif in provided genomic sequences, (iii) motif comparison and clustering of identified motifs, and (iv) co-occurrence analyses of query motifs in given promoter sequences. The server is powered by a backend computer cluster with over 150 computing nodes, and is particularly useful for motif prediction and analyses in prokaryotic genomes. We believe that DMINDA, as a new and comprehensive web server for cis-regulatory motif finding and analyses, will benefit the genomic research community in general and prokaryotic genome researchers in particular.
Modelling of the Polished Profile in Computer-Controlled Polishing by a Sub-Aperture Pad

High-quality part surfaces with high surface finish and form accuracy are increasingly in demand in the mold/die and optics industries. The computer-controlled polishing (CCP) is commonly used as the final procedure to improve the surface quality. This paper presents a theoretical and experimental study on the polished profile of CCP with sub-aperture pad. A material removal model is proposed based on the evaluation of the amount of material removed from the surface along a direction orthogonal to the tool path. The model assumes that the material removal rate follows the Peterson equation. The distribution of the sliding velocity at the contact region is presented. On the basis above, the approaches to calculate the polished profiles are developed for the sub-aperture pad polishing along a straight path and a curved path. The model is validated by a series of designed polishing experiments, which reveals that polishing normal force, angular spindle velocity, feed rate and polishing path all have effects on the polished profile. The result of experiments demonstrates the capability of the model-based simulation in predicting the polished profile.
Simulation of ballistic performance of coarse-grained metals strengthened by nanotwinned regions

Coarse-grained (CG) metals strengthened by nanotwinned (NT) regions have both ultrahigh strength and good ductility. The presence of the NT regions contributes to their ultrahigh strength, while their good ductility is attributed to the recrystallized coarse grains. These characteristics make them a potential candidate for bullet-proof material. In this paper, numerical simulations based on the mechanism-based strain gradient plasticity and the Johnson–Cook failure criterion are carried out to investigate the effects of twin spacing and microstructural attributes on the ballistic performance of CG copper strengthened by NT regions. We investigate the performance of fourteen idealized microstructures, and find that smaller twin spacing and regular distribution of NT regions are more conducive to the promotion of the ballistic performance. We also uncover that the role of the shape of NT regions is significantly affected by twin spacing. Furthermore, we make a comparison with its CG counterpart without NTs, and find that microstructures with array arrangement of NT regions have higher limit velocities and smaller relative displacements than the single phase CG structure. This makes them a strong candidate for helmets and other personal protective equipments. It is believed that the simulated results could provide useful insights into the development of this advanced class of metals for ballistic protection.
A rate allocation scheme with inter-session network coding in wireless networks

Recently, network coding is proved to be able to increase the network throughput in both wired and wireless networks. In this paper, we focus on multiple unicast sessions problem with inter-session network coding in wireless networks. Since the wireless links are prone to error. We propose a novel rate allocation scheme, named as reliable pairwise inter-session network coding (RPINC) scheme, which is formulated as a convex optimization problem to maximize the network throughput and achieve the proportional fairness. Simulation results show that when the link reliability is considered, our proposed scheme can increase the aggregate network utility significantly.
Alterations in anterior–posterior patterning and its accompanying changes along the proximal‐distal axis during the fin‐to‐limb transition

The evolution from fins to limbs was one of the most successful innovations for vertebrates, allowing them to vastly expand their behaviors and habitats. Fossil records suggest that morphological changes occurred not only along the proximal‐distal axis included appearance of the autopod, but also occurred along the anterior‐posterior axis included reductions in the size and number of basal bones and digits. This review focuses on recent progress in developmental and genetic studies aimed at elucidating the mechanisms underlying alteration of anterior‐posterior patterning and its accompanying changes along the proximal‐distal axis during the fin‐to‐limb transition.
The optical afterglows and host galaxies of three short/hard gamma-ray bursts

In the Swift era, rapid multiband observations led to the discovery of the optical afterglows and host galaxies of short gamma‐ray bursts (GRBs). In spite of these recent advancements, the number of short GRBs with secure detections in the optical is still fairly small. We present photometric observations of the short/hard GRB 051227, GRB 061006 and GRB 071227. We discuss our findings in light of the current models of short GRB progenitors.
Synthesis of gold nano-particles in a microfluidic platform for water quality monitoring applications

Synthesis of Gold Nano-Particles in a Microfluidic Platform for Water Quality Monitoring Applications. (December 2008) Sayak Datta, B.E. , R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Debjyoti Banerjee A microfluidic lab-on-a-chip (LOC) device for in-situ synthesis of gold nano-particles was developed. The long term goal is to develop a portable hand-held diagnostic platform for monitoring water quality (e.g., detecting metal ion pollutants). The LOC consists of micro-chambers housing different reagents and samples that feed to a common reaction chamber. The reaction products are delivered to several waste chambers in a pre-defined sequence to enable reagents/ samples to flow into and out of the reaction chamber. Passive flow actuation is obtained by capillary driven flow (wicking) and dissolvable microstructures called ‘salt pillars’. The LOC does not require any external power source for actuation and the passive microvalves enable flow actuation at predefined intervals. The LOC and the dissolvable microstructures are fabricated using a combination of photolithography and soft lithography techniques. Experiments were conducted to demonstrate the variation in the valve actuation time with respect to valve position and geometric parameters. Subsequently, analytical
Kernelized Multiview Projection

Conventional vision algorithms adopt a single type of feature or a simple concatenation of multiple features, which is always represented in a high-dimensional space. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised spectral embedding algorithm called Kernelized Multiview Projection (KMP) to better fuse and embed different feature representations. Computing the kernel matrices from different features/views, KMP can encode them with the corresponding weights to achieve a low-dimensional and semantically meaningful subspace where the distribution of each view is sufficiently smooth and discriminative. More crucially, KMP is linear for the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) and solves the out-of-sample problem, which allows it to be competent for various practical applications. Extensive experiments on three popular image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our multiview embedding algorithm.
The role of DNA dependent protein kinase in synapsis of DNA ends

DNA dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK) plays a central role in the non-homologous end-joining pathway of DNA double strand break repair. Its catalytic subunit (DNA-PK(CS)) functions as a serine/threonine protein kinase. We show that DNA-PK forms a stable complex at DNA termini that blocks the action of exonucleases and ligases. The DNA termini become accessible after autophosphorylation of DNA-PK(CS), which we demonstrate to require synapsis of DNA ends. Interestingly, the presence of DNA-PK prevents ligation of the two synapsed termini, but allows ligation to another DNA molecule. This alteration of the ligation route is independent of the type of ligase that we used, indicating that the intrinsic architecture of the DNA-PK complex itself is not able to support ligation of the synapsed DNA termini. We present a working model in which DNA-PK creates a stable molecular bridge between two DNA ends that is remodeled after DNA-PK autophosphorylation in such a way that the extreme termini become accessible without disrupting synapsis. We infer that joining of synapsed DNA termini would require an additional protein factor.
Physical Properties of Implanted Porous Bioscaffolds Regulate Skin Repair: Focusing on Mechanical and Structural Features

Porous bioscaffolds are applied to facilitate skin repair since the early 1990s, but a perfect regeneration outcome has yet to be achieved. Until now, most efforts have focused on modulating the chemical properties of bioscaffolds, while physical properties are traditionally overlooked. Recent advances in mechanobiology and mechanotherapy have highlighted the importance of biomaterials' physical properties in the regulation of cellular behaviors and regenerative processes. In skin repair, the mechanical and structural features of porous bioscaffolds are two major physical properties that determine therapeutic efficacy. Here, first an overview of natural skin repair with an emphasis on the major biophysically sensitive cell types involved in this multistage process is provided, followed by an introduction of the four roles of bioscaffolds as skin implants. Then, how the mechanical and structural features of bioscaffolds influence these four roles is discussed. The mechanical and structural features of porous bioscaffolds should be tailored to balance the acceleration of wound closure and functional improvements of the repaired skin. This study emphasizes that decoupling and precise control of the mechanical and structural features of bioscaffolds are significant aspects that should be considered in future biomaterial optimization, which can build a foundation to ultimately achieve perfect skin regeneration outcomes.
Within‐host evolution versus immigration as a determinant of Escherichia coli diversity in the human gastrointestinal tract

When a human host harbors two or more strains of Escherichia coli, the second strain is more likely to be a member of the same phylogroup rather than a different phylogroup. This outcome may be the consequence of a within host evolution event or an independent immigration/establishment event. To determine the relative importance of these two events in determining E. coli diversity in a host, a collection of multiple E. coli isolates recovered from each of 67 patients undergoing colonoscopies was used. Whole genome sequence data were available for one example of every REP-fingerprint type identified in a patient. Sequence type (ST) and single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analyses revealed that 83% of strains observed in the host population were a consequence of immigration/establishment events. Restricting the analysis to hosts harboring two or more strains belonging to the same phylogroup revealed that in about half of these cases, the presence of a second strain belonging to the same phylogroup was the consequence of an independent immigration/establishment event. Thus, the results of this study show that despite hosts being exposed to a diversity of E. coli via their food, factors related to the host also determine what E. coli strains succeed in establishing.
Abnormal event detection in indoor video using feature coding

Abnormal event detection in surveillance systems has many applications such as building security, traffic analysis and nursing care. There is a crucial need to investigate the robust and fast methods with high performance for anomaly detection. In this work we used the result of current related methods for anomaly detection regardless of any prior assumption about normal or abnormal events. In this article we have been focused on the unsupervised computer vision algorithm in dynamic scenes. Essentially, the given approach uses a dictionary (basis set) with a completely unsupervised dynamic sparse coding to be adapted to specific data for abnormal events detection. Experimental results on entrance and exit surveillances cameras of subway stations show that the proposed method outperforms other powerfull methods in the literature.
Comparison and evaluation of pesticide monitoring programs using a process‐based mixture model

A number of European countries run large‐scale pesticide monitoring schemes in watersheds aimed at identifying and evaluating the presence of pesticide residues in the environment. These schemes provide national and regional scale assessments of pesticide concentrations within the context of environmental quality assessment, aiming to ensure some degree of ecological protection. The present study is aimed at evaluating the joint effects of the pesticide mixtures detected in monitoring programs, using a process‐based mixture model that was parameterized for Daphnia magna. In total, over 15 000 samples containing over 1 million individual measurements were evaluated for effects. It was found that there are only a small number of places where one can expect to have effects on daphnids, based on measured concentrations. The most polluted samples would cause extinction of a daphnid population within only 30 h. The results show that effects are mostly triggered by a limited number of pesticide residues at locations with high emissions. It was also shown that the analytical detection limits are basically too high to exclude mixture effects. So, despite all the effort that is put into chemical monitoring programs, it remains a challenge to make statements on whether or not the environment is protected. Recommendations are offered for a different setup of monitoring programs to improve this situation. Environ Toxicol Chem 2016;35:3113–3123. © 2016 SETAC
Structure and Microstructure

Before delving into the details of the physical structure of ZnS, it is important to make some statements about terminology. CVD ZnS has many hierarchies of observable structure and so careful use of nomenclature must be maintained in order to avoid confusion. Figure 3.1 shows these scales of structure and the typical techniques used to access information about them. This chapter will start at the atomic scale and work up to the macroscale. In this section the crystallographic structure of ZnS is presented using data from x-ray and electron diffraction. X-ray diffraction studies show evidence of hexagonality in many if not all of the samples, disordering in the closest-packed direction, and crystallographic texturing. Electron diffraction presents evidence of the nanoscale twinning of ZnS creating hexagonal layers (stacking faults) between regions of cubic sphalerite ZnS.
Superpixel Matching Based Image Retrieval

Local features of images have been widely used in image retrieval, however, the cost is so heavy. To address this issue, a superpixel-based approach for image retrieval is proposed. We first extract the image structure that preserves the main information and removes the redundant information from the image by smoothing and oversegment a smoothed image into a certain number of superpixels. We then extract the positive candidate superpixels by combining superpixels with local descriptors. Finally, we compute the similarity of two images by analyzing two sets of positive candidate superpixels. Experiments on dataset PQ7 demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.
Study of the Local Mechanical Properties of Magnetron Sputtered Nanolaminate Coatings

Nanostructure coatings based on boroncarbide were prepared using magnetron sputtering technique. The mechanical properties of the coatings were tested using quasi-static and dynamic nanoindentation tests with Berkovich and cube-corner indenters. The fracture resistance of the coatings and the coating/substrate interface was studied. Moreover, the dynamic wear and scratch resistance of the coatings was evaluated by means of impact and scratch tests.
Oxidative stress in normal hematopoietic stem cells and leukemia

Leukemia is developed following the abnormal proliferation of immature hematopoietic cells in the blood when hematopoietic stem cells lose the ability to turn into mature cells at different stages of maturation and differentiation. Leukemia initiating cells are specifically dependent upon the suppression of oxidative stress in the hypoglycemic bone marrow (BM) environment to be able to start their activities. Relevant literature was identified by a PubMed search (2000–2017) of English‐language literature using the terms ‘oxidative stress,’ ‘reactive oxygen species,’ ‘hematopoietic stem cell,’ and ‘leukemia. ’ The generation and degradation of free radicals is a main component of the metabolism in aerobic organisms. A certain level of ROS is required for proper cellular function, but values outside this range will result in oxidative stress (OS). Long‐term overactivity of reactive oxygen species (ROS) has harmful effects on the function of cells and their vital macromolecules, including the transformation of proteins into autoantigens and increased degradation of protein/DNA, which eventually leads to the change in pathways involved in the development of cancer and several other disorders. According to the metabolic disorders of cancer, the relationship between OS changes, the viability of cancer cells, and their response to chemotherapeutic agents affecting this pathway are undeniable. Recently, studies have been conducted to determine the effect of herbal agents and cancer chemotherapy drugs on oxidative stress pathways. By emphasizing the role of oxidative stress on stem cells in the incidence of leukemia, this paper attempts to state and summarize this subject.
U . S . Patent

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Future access network framework and capability research

More and more social needs inject more complex social characteristics into future access network and cloud computing converging with access network supports more services. This paper proposes a novel framework and indicator for modeling the future access network. The framework frames the future access network in four dimensions: Highlevel Physical Capability, Softwarization & Virtualization, Service-Oriented Dynamic Networking and Deep Coupling with Social Elements. Based on this framework, an indicator is given which is used to optimize access network capability. Evaluation results demonstrate the framework and the indicator can make networking and service deployment clear and effective.