Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Supportive evidence for reduced expression of GNB1L in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND Chromosome 22q11 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) increases the risk of development of schizophrenia more than 10 times compared with that of the general population, indicating that haploinsufficiency of a subset of the more than 20 genes contained in the 22q11DS region could increase the risk of schizophrenia. In the present study, we screened for genes located in the 22q11DS region that are expressed at lower levels in postmortem prefrontal cortex of patients with schizophrenia than in those of controls. METHODS Gene expression was screened by Illumina Human-6 Expression BeadChip arrays and confirmed by real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction assays and Western blot analysis. RESULTS Expression of GNB1L was lower in patients with schizophrenia than in control subjects in both Australian (10 schizophrenia cases and 10 controls) and Japanese (43 schizophrenia cases and 11 controls) brain samples. TBX1 could not be evaluated due to its low expression levels. Expression levels of the other genes were not significantly lower in patients with schizophrenia than in control subjects. Association analysis of tag single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the GNB1L gene region did not confirm excess homozygosity in 1918 Japanese schizophrenia cases and 1909 Japanese controls. Haloperidol treatment for 50 weeks increased Gnb1l gene expression in prefrontal cortex of mice. CONCLUSIONS Taken together with the impaired prepulse inhibition observed in heterozygous Gnb1l knockout mice reported by the previous study, the present findings support assertions that GNB1L is one of the genes in the 22q11DS region responsible for increasing the risk of schizophrenia.
Images of self and others as computer users: the role of gender and experience

Gender differences in the pursuit of technology careers are a current issue of concern. We report on two studies that use surveys, drawings and interviews to examine sixth- and eighth-grade students' perceptions of knowledgeable computer users and their self-perception as a computer-type person. In Study 1, participants were asked to generate representations of computer users in pictures or words. The results indicate that the majority of representations were of male users and they frequently wore glasses. Students of both genders were more likely to draw males. Eighth-grade students' representations included more stereotypical features than those of sixth-grade students. In Study 2, students were asked whether they believed that there was such a thing as a computer-type person and whether they perceived themselves to be one. Eighty per cent of students rejected this characterization. They differed from students who accepted it in their levels of past experience, their confidence, and the probability that they shared their knowledge with others. The results of both studies suggest that while there is a male image of computer science in general, it is not overly negative and students' self-perception is not governed by their own gender as much as by other variables.
Bandpass Continuous-Time Delta-Sigma Modulator forWireless Receiver IC

narrowband receiver design in order to reduce the system complexity, increase integration and improve performance by digitizing the bandpass signal directly without prior conversion to baseband. A fully differential feedforward fourth-order continuous-time bandpass delta-sigma modulator is presented. The proposed single-bit modulator can receive 172.8kHz IF signals by using an oversampling clock frequency of 5.53MHz with an OSR of 128. Simulated result showing that dynamic range of 78dB within bandwidth of 21.6kHz is achieved and the current consumption is around 1.2mA at 1.5V power supply. The design had been implemented in 0. 13µm 1P6M CMOS process with MIM capacitors.
Functional Programming and Security

This paper analyses the security contribution of typical functional-language features by examining them in the light of accepted information security principles. Imperative and functional code are compared to illustrate various cases. In conclusion, there may be an excellent case for the use of functional languages on the grounds of better security; however, empirical research should be done to validate this possibility.
Support for distributed teams in extreme programming

1 The author's work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the PhD program “Enabling Technologies for Electronic Commerce” at Darmstadt University of Technology. Abstract The extreme Programming methodology (XP) relies on co-located collaboration of programming teams. This paper discusses problems and possible solutions when distributed teams decide to do XP. Communication and awareness support are the keys to the successful distribution of programming teams. The XP methodology is analysed with respect to these essential issues. We present TUKAN, which is a synchronous distributed team programming environment, which applies groupware research results to the XP domain and solves the problems which arise when XP is carried out by distributed teams.
MOTION SEGMENTATION FOR ACTIVITY SURVEILLANCE

This paper describes an algorithm for segmenting and classifying human activities from video sequences of a shopping center. These activities comprise entering or exiting a shop, passing, or browsing in front of shop windows. The proposed approach recognizes these activities by using a priori knowledge of the layout of the shopping view. Human actions are represented by a bank of switch dynamical models, each tailored to describe a specific motion regime. Experimental tests illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with synthetic and real data.
Oppositional Reinforcement Learning with Applications

Machine intelligence techniques contribute to solving real-world problems. Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the machine intelligence techniques with several characteristics that make it suitable for the applications, for which the model of the environment is not available to the agent. In real-world applications, intelligent agents generally face a very large state space which limits the usability of reinforcement learning. The condition for convergence of reinforcement learning implies that each state-action pair must be visited infinite times, a condition which can be considered impossible to be satisfied in many practical situations. The goal of this work is to propose a class of new techniques to overcome this problem for off-policy, step-by-step (incremental) and model-free reinforcement learning with discrete state and action space. The focus of this research is using the design characteristics of RL agent to improve its performance regarding the running time while maintaining an acceptable level of accuracy. One way of improving the performance of the intelligent agents is using the model of environment. In this work, a special type of knowledge about the agent actions is employed to improve its performance because in many applications the model of environment may only be known partially or not at all. The concept of opposition is employed in the framework of reinforcement learning to achieve this goal. One of the components of RL agent is the action. For each action we define its associate opposite action. The actions and opposite actions are implemented in the framework of reinforcement learning to update the value function resulting in a faster convergence. At the beginning of this research the concept of opposition is incorporated in the components of reinforcement learning, states, actions, and reinforcement signal which results in introduction of the oppositional target domain estimation algorithm, OTE. OTE reduces the search and navigation area and accelerates the speed of search for a target. The
TLR Agonist Augments Prophylactic Potential of Acid Inducible Antigen Rv3203 against Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv in Experimental Animals

In general, the members of Lip gene family of Mycobacterium tuberculosis evoke strong immune response in the host. Keeping this fact into consideration, we investigated role of Rv3203, a cell wall associated protein with lipolytic activity, in imparting protection against experimental murine tuberculosis. The data of the present study suggested that archaeosome encapsulated Rv3203 induce strong lymphocyte proliferation, up-regulated Th-1 biased cytokines profile, increased expression of co-stimulatory markers on both antigen presenting cells and T lymphocytes. The immuno-prophylactic response was further modulated by exposure of the animals to zymosan, a TLR2/6 agonist, prior to immunization with archaeosome encapsulated Rv3203. Interestingly, pre-treatment of experimental animals with zymosan boosted strong immunological memory as compared to archaeosome encapsulated Rv3203 as well as BCG vaccine. We conclude that priming of immunized animal with TLR agonist followed by immunization with archaeosomes encapsulated Rv3203 offer substantial protection against tuberculosis infection and could be a potential subunit vaccine based prophylactic strategy.
Applying Genetic Algorithms to Control Gait of Physically Based Simulated Robots

This paper describes our studies in the legged robots research area and the development of the LegGen System, that is used to automatically create and control stable gaits for legged robots into a physically based simulation environment. The parameters used to control the robot are optimized using genetic algorithms (GA). Comparisons between different robot models and fitness functions were accomplished, indicating how to compose a better multi-criterion fitness function to be used in the gait control of legged robots. The best gait control solution and the best robot model were selected in order to help us to build a real robot. The results also showed that it is possible to generate stable gaits using GA in an efficient manner.
An Abstract View on Modularity in Knowledge Representation

Modularity is an essential aspect of knowledge representation theory and practice. It has received substantial attention. We introduce model-based modular systems, an abstract framework for modular knowledge representation formalisms, similar in scope to multi-context systems but employing a simpler information-flow mechanism. We establish the precise relationship between the two frameworks, showing that they can simulate each other. We demonstrate that recently introduced modular knowledge representation formalisms integrating logic programming with satisfiability and, more generally, with constraint satisfaction can be cast as modular systems in our sense. These results show that our formalism offers a simple unifying framework for studies of modularity in knowledge representation.
Stable Model Counting and Its Application in Probabilistic Logic Programming

Model counting is the problem of computing the number of models that satisfy a given propositional theory. It has recently been applied to solving inference tasks in probabilistic logic programming, where the goal is to compute the probability of given queries being true provided a set of mutually independent random variables, a model (a logic program) and some evidence. The core of solving this inference task involves translating the logic program to a propositional theory and using a model counter. In this paper, we show that for some problems that involve inductive definitions like reachability in a graph, the translation of logic programs to SAT can be expensive for the purpose of solving inference tasks. For such problems, direct implementation of stable model semantics allows for more efficient solving. We present two implementation techniques, based on unfounded set detection, that extend a propositional model counter to a stable model counter. Our experiments show that for particular problems, our approach can outperform a state-of-the-art probabilistic logic programming solver by several orders of magnitude in terms of running time and space requirements, and can solve instances of significantly larger sizes on which the current solver runs out of time or memory.
Quality of Hotels ’ Websites : Proposal for the Development of an Assessment Methodology

In this article we propose a research whose main objective will be to reach a methodology for assessment, comparing and improving the quality of hotels Websites. The need for this methodology is justified by the fact that, so far, we haven´t identified any methodology that widely integrates and focus the technical quality and the content quality of the Websites. INTRODUCTION Tourism is now one of the greatest social and economic phenomena of the contemporary world (Sarpley 2002, WTO 2008), in which Internet is a facilitator instrument of the relationships between touristic products and touristic entities with whom they relate. Simultaneously, tourism is one of the domains where Internet is more used. In terms of sales, touristic products such as last minute air tickets, hotel rooms and package promotions are the most sold via the Internet, if not considering the sale of books (Arlt 2006). Thus, the Internet works as a main mechanism of reserves. In this context, marketing via the Internet has larger advantages than other means (Douglas & Mills 2004): it reduces the costs of divulgation and publicity activities; it eases the brochures and pamphlets update; it eases and turns its procedure more economical comparing, for example, 174 with the telephone channel; the information is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thus, the hotels Websites becomes a competitive differentiation piece of the modern times, facilitating both the potential customers. The issues related to quality have been worrying many activity sectors in recent years particularly those associated with services and advanced technologies. Various contributions to the quality field as well as different thought schools have focused mainly on the quality definition and how to measure it (Mich et al. 2003). In this paper we adopt the quality definition of ISO (International Organization for Standardization), whether by falls in the same goals, or for its comprehensiveness and completeness, or its prestige of the entity in question, or its adoption in other important investigations (Mich et al. 2003, Ho-Won et al. 2004). Therefore, we believe that quality is " the totality of characteristics (of the product or service) as the basis for satisfying the needs specified and implied " (ISO 1994). Relatively to the approaches for assessment, comparison and improvement of enforcement of quality requirements by Websites, we can identify two in literature: 1. Methodologies focused on the Websites technical quality; 2. Methodologies focused on the Websites content quality; …
Visualization and Automatic Typology Construction of Pottery Profiles

Since the second half of the last century, computers became available to archaeologists. Since then, many have used various multivariate analysis techniques in the classification of archaeological objects with more or less success. Over the last decades, the popularity of multivariate analysis seems to have seized, partly because of the frequently disappointing performance of techniques such as principal components analysis and factor analysis. In particular, these techniques are hampered by their linear nature and by their emphasis on retaining global data structure. In this paper, we discuss a recently proposed technique for multivariate analysis, called t-SNE, which overcomes many of the weaknesses of principal components analysis and factor analysis. We illustrate the strong performance of t-SNE in experiments on a dataset of pottery profile drawings, in which we combine t-SNE with a shape matching technique based on shape contexts. Next to our discussion on t-SNE, we discuss a recently proposed affinity-based clustering technique, called affinity propagation. We show how affinity propagation can be used for the automatic construction of a typology of the shape profile drawings.
Simultaneous localization and grasping using belief space planning

Most approaches to grasp planning assume that the configurations of the object to be grasped and any potential obstacles are known perfectly. As a result, implementations of these “perfect information” approaches to grasp synthesis are necessarily preceded by a perception stage where the the state of the object and obstacles are estimated. Unfortunately, small perceptual errors during the perception stage can cause even good grasp plans to fail. A potentially more robust approach would be to combine perception and grasp synthesis in a single process. Our paper formalizes this as the simultaneous localization and grasping (SLAG) problem. Our formalization casts SLAG as an instance of the belief space planning problem where the robot must reach a configuration where it is very likely that the robot has achieved the task (i.e. grasp) objectives. We apply an approach to belief space planning that is effective in non-Gaussian belief spaces. The approach is demonstrated in a SLAG problem where a robot must locate a cardboard box using a wrist-mounted laser scanner. If a second box occludes the box to be grasped, the robot must push the occlusion out of the way. We empirically demonstrate that our approach is capable of solving this problem and present results over many trials.
Study on the vacuum surface flashover characteristics of epoxy composites with microTiO2 fillers under steep high-voltage impulse

With the tendency towards higher power, higher capacity and less scale of the pulsed-power devices, the vacuum surface flashover strength turns to be a primary limitation of the development of the pulsed-power equipments, as it is much lower than the vacuum breakdown strength. To improve the different capabilities of the epoxy composite material, different kinds of micron inorganics are filled to the epoxy resin. TiO2 (TO) is a typical kind of oxide ceramic, as well as an important sort of broad band-gap oxide semiconductor material. With its unique optical and electrical properties, excellent chemical stability, high dielectric constant and semi-conductive properties, it is widely applied to enhance the performance of the organic composite material. In this article, the experimental results of vaccum surface flashover characteristics of epoxy resin and epoxy resin cast with 1μm powdered TO samples are presented. In addition, their dielectric spectrum and thermally stimulated depolarization current (TSDC) are measured. Considering the influence of the dielectric constant, the conductivity, the trap energy and the trap density, associated with the interface theory, the article analyzes the influence mechanism of micro-scale TO fillers on the vacuum flashover voltage of epoxy composite material.
High-Speed Medical Imaging in 3D Ultrasound Computer Tomography

A promising candidate for sensitive imaging of breast cancer is 3D Ultrasound Computer Tomography (3D USCT). So far its clinical applicability for diagnosis has been limited by the duration of the demanding image reconstruction. In this paper we investigate how signal processing and image reconstruction can be accelerated for diagnosis by using heterogeneous hardware. Additionally, the time and costs for real-time system for a future diagnosis and therapy device is estimated. Reusing the device's built-in FPGA-based data acquisition system (DAQ) through reconfiguration results in a speed-up by a factor of 7 for signal processing and by a factor of 2 for image reconstruction. Applying cutting-edge single FPGAs and GPUs, speed-ups by a factor of 10 (FPGA) and 6 (GPU) for signal processing and 15 (FPGA) and 37 (GPU) for image reconstruction were achieved compared to a recent quad-core Intel Core-i7 CPU. Using quad-core CPUs and a cluster of eight GPUs allowed us for the first time to calculate volumes in less than 30 min with an overall speed-up by a factor of 47, enabling a first clinical study. Based on these results we extrapolated that real-time reconstruction for a therapeutic 3D USCT will be possible in the year 2020 if the trend in density follows the ITRS roadmap.
Adaptive 3D rendering based on region-of-interest

3D processing techniques are really promising. However, several hurdles have to be overcome. In this paper, two of them are examined. The first is related to the high disparity management. It is currently not well mastered and its impact is strong for viewing 3D scene on stereoscopic screens. The second concerns the salient regions of the scene. These areas are commonly called Region-Of-Interest (RoI) in the image processing domain. The problem appears when there are more than one region-of-interest in a video scene. Indeed, it is then complicated for the eyes to scan them and especially if the depth difference between them is high. In this contribution, the 3D experience is improved by applying some effects related to RoIs. The shift between the two views is adaptively adjusted in order to have a null disparity on a given area in the scene. In the proposed approach, these areas are the visually interesting areas. A constant disparity on the salient areas improves the viewing experience over the video sequence.
School autonomy, leadership and student achievement: reflections from Finland

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide national information on school autonomy, leadership and student achievements in Finland. Design/methodology/approach The paper is a literature review on Finnish studies focusing on school autonomy, leadership and student achievement. The studies have been reviewed on the basis of a content analysis. Findings There exists a shortage of studies connecting school leadership to student achievements. School leadership in Finland has been investigated in previous research, especially from the perspective of shared or pedagogical leadership, but vast majority of the studies have focused on teachers and educational staff, not directly on students. An evident reason for this is inaccessible information on school-based data and the nature of education being a “public good”, which is supposed to meet the same standards across the country. Originality/value This review will provide the international audience a deeper understanding in the school autonomy and leadership development in Finland.
Potential bioavailability of particulate phosphorus in runoff from arable clayey soils

Runoff phosphorus (P) associated with eroded soil contributes to eutrophication to some extent. The present work examines two methods for estimating the potential bioavailability of particulate P (PP) in runoff, and studies the concentrations and losses of different P forms in surface and subsurface runoff from arable soils. The potential bioavailability of PP was approximated by extraction with (i) anion exchange resin (AER-PP), giving a measure of desorbable PP under aerobic conditions, and with (ii) bicarbonate-dithionite (BD-PP), which dissolves redox-labile PP. Both methods were applied in runoff analysis without sediment preconcentration.