Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional Mesenchymal Stem Cells Derived From Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Attenuate Limb Ischemia in Mice

Background— Aging and aging-related disorders impair the survival and differentiation potential of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and limit their therapeutic efficacy. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) may provide an alternative source of functional MSCs for tissue repair. This study aimed to generate and characterize human iPSC-derived MSCs and to investigate their biological function for the treatment of limb ischemia. Methods and Results— Human iPSCs were induced to MSC differentiation with a clinically compliant protocol. Three monoclonal, karyotypically stable, and functional MSC-like cultures were successfully isolated using a combination of CD24− and CD105+ sorting. They did not express pluripotent-associated markers but displayed MSC surface antigens and differentiated into adipocytes, osteocytes, and chondrocytes. Transplanting iPSC-MSCs into mice significantly attenuated severe hind-limb ischemia and promoted vascular and muscle regeneration. The benefits of iPSC-MSCs on limb ischemia were superior to those of adult bone marrow MSCs. The greater potential of iPSC-MSCs may be attributable to their superior survival and engraftment after transplantation to induce vascular and muscle regeneration via direct de novo differentiation and paracrine mechanisms. Conclusions— Functional MSCs can be clonally generated, beginning at a single-cell level, from human iPSCs. Patient-specific iPSC-MSCs can be prepared as an “off-the-shelf” format for the treatment of tissue ischemia.
Pupillometry in Infancy Research

The human pupil is a small opening in each eye that dilates in response not only to changes in luminance, but also to novel events. Therefore, changes in pupil diameter are an attractive measure in studies on infants’ and young children’s physical and social cognition. However, designing and interpreting pupillometry studies for developmental populations come with caveats. Here we give an overview of how psychologically induced changes in pupil diameter have been investigated and interpreted in developmental studies. We highlight the methodological challenges when designing experiments for infants and young children and provide several suggestions to address common problems. The fact that pupillometry provides a sensitive measure of the time course of responses to novelty extends the scope of possibilities for researchers studying infant cognition and development.
Transition mechanism in IP-based wireless networks

Based on mobile IPv6, this paper describes a new mechanism for mobility support in IP-based wireless networks during the transition period of IPv4 to IPv6. The new mechanism uses mapping correlation techniques to set up a tunnel for all packets addressed to a roaming mobile node. This new mechanism supports the roaming of a mobile node from its IPv6 home network to any private IPv4 networks and IPv6 networks. With the described approach, modifications are only necessary in the home network, but not in any visited private IPv4 networks and visited IPv6 networks.
Microporous Silica Based Membranes for Desalination

This review provides a global overview of microporous silica based membranes for desalination via pervaporation with a focus on membrane synthesis and processing, transport mechanisms and current state of the art membrane performance. Most importantly, the recent development and novel concepts for improving the hydro-stability and separating performance of silica membranes for desalination are critically examined. Research into silica based membranes for desalination has focussed on three primary methods for improving the hydro-stability. These include incorporating carbon templates into the microporous silica both as surfactants and hybrid organic-inorganic structures and incorporation of metal oxide nanoparticles into the silica matrix. The literature examined identified that only metal oxide silica membranes have demonstrated high salt rejections under a variety of feed concentrations, reasonable fluxes and unaltered performance over long-term operation. As this is an embryonic field of research several target areas for researchers were discussed including further improvement of the membrane materials, but also regarding the necessity of integrating waste or solar heat sources into the final process design to ensure cost competitiveness with conventional reverse osmosis processes.
Cost-Effectiveness of Storage Grids and Storage Clusters

Grid computing has become a driving force of scientific computing. By combining the resources of distributed computing centers under a unified management and offering their computing power (nearly) as seamless as electrical power, grid computing is seen as an important step to solve large scale-out problems. Storage grids and storage clusters try to transfer this idea into the storage domain: By combining the capacity, computing and communication power of storage appliances under a single middleware, storage grids promise to scale in capacity and bandwidth while keeping the administration overhead low. Furthermore, they claim to be more cost effective than standard storage architectures, because they can be built up from standard components. Inside this paper, we analyze the costs related to the least expensive storage grid architecture, which is build solely from standard server components and we show that it is possible to build large-scale architectures with enterprise functionality from standard hardware
An Architecture-Driven Modernization Tool for Calculating Metrics

Model-driven software development (MDD) is gaining increasing acceptance, mainly because it can raise the level of abstraction and automation in software construction. MDD techniques (see the sidebar "MDD Basic Concepts"), such as metamodeling and model transformation, not only apply to the creation of new software systems but also can be used to evolve existing systems. These techniques can help reduce software evolution costs by automating many basic activities in software change processes, such as representing source code at a higher level of abstraction, providing information to analyze the impact of the changes, or automatically generating software artifacts of the evolved system. Several experiences of applying MDD in platform migration scenarios have recently been published,1'2 but they define ad hoc metamodels that hinder interoperability.
Creating natural dialogs in the carnegie mellon communicator system

The Carnegie Mellon Communicator system helps users create complex travel itineraries through a conversational interface. Itineraries consist of (multi-leg) flights, hotel and car reser-vations and are built from actual travel information for North America, obtained from the Web. The system manages dialog using a schema-based approach. Schemas correspond to major units of task information (such as a flight leg) and define conversational topics, or foci of interaction, meaningful to the user.
Arabic Cursive Text Recognition using 12 Hidden Markov Models and Re-ranking 13

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Is Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology Worth the Extra Money to the Average User?

In the mid-1990’s, Intel Corporation decided to use symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) in order to increase the number of instructions that could execute simultaneously by putting more than one processor on a motherboard. This idea increased the overall performance of a system, but it was too expensive for the average user to afford. Intel then looked into the idea of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) for a single processor. The idea was to allow one processor to execute two threads simultaneously to increase the performance of the system. This technology was applied to Intel’s processors and is called hyper-threading technology. This paper compares SMP to SMT and shows how the two technologies as similar, but very different. It then goes on to describe the hyper-threading technology in a little more detail and shows how hyper-threading compared to non-hyper-threading processors against some benchmarks and tests.
Ocean warming, not acidification, controlled coccolithophore response during past greenhouse climate change

Current carbon dioxide emissions are an assumed threat to oceanic calcifying plankton (coccolithophores) not just due to rising sea-surface temperatures, but also because of ocean acidification (OA). This assessment is based on single species culture experiments that are now revealing complex, synergistic, and adaptive responses to such environmental change. Despite this complexity, there is still a widespread perception that coccolithophore calcification will be inhibited by OA. These plankton have an excellent fossil record, and so we can test for the impact of OA during geological carbon cycle events, providing the added advantages of exploring entire communities across real-world major climate perturbation and recovery. Here we target fossil coccolithophore groups (holococcoliths and braarudosphaerids) expected to exhibit greatest sensitivity to acidification because of their reliance on extracellular calcification. Across the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (56 Ma) rapid warming event, the biogeography and abundance of these extracellular calcifiers shifted dramatically, disappearing entirely from low latitudes to become limited to cooler, lower saturation-state areas. By comparing these range shift data with the environmental parameters from an Earth system model, we show that the principal control on these range retractions was temperature, with survival maintained in high-latitude refugia, despite more adverse ocean chemistry conditions. Deleterious effects of OA were only evidenced when twinned with elevated temperatures.
Fast channel switching for single-loop scalable HEVC

In an IPTV environment, different techniques exist to provide faster random access or equivalently, a faster channel switching experience, but none of them provide backward compatibility and limited overhead at the same time. In this paper, a technique is proposed to increase the random access frequency for the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard by using a single-loop scalable version of it. This is achieved by encoding an enhancement layer with a higher frequency of random access points compared to the base layer. With this scalable configuration, a backward compatible base stream remains present. The proposed technique requires 12.4% less bitrate compared to sending the fast and slow switching streams in a non-scalable way. Compared to the almost standardized multi-loop scalable extension of HEVC, 5.5% less bitrate is needed on the core of the IPTV network and 12.5% less bitrate on the access network during steady state conditions. Moreover, the multi-loop scalable extension does not provide backward compatibility with legacy HEVC decoders.
Robust speech detection and segmentation for real-time ASR applications

This paper provides a solution for robust speech detection that can be applied across a variety of tasks. The solution is based on an algorithm that performs non-parametric estimation of the background noise spectrum using minimum statistics of the smoothed short-time Fourier transform (STFT). It is shown that the new algorithm can operate effectively under varying signal-to-noise ratios. Results are reported on two tasks - HMIHY and SPINE - which differ in their speaking style, background noise type and bandwidth. With a computational cost of less than 2% real-time on a 1GHz P-3 machine and a latency of 400 ms, it is suitable for real-time ASR applications.
New Multiple Antennas Method based Energy Detector for Cognitive Radio over Fading Channels

this paper we presented a DSP processor to be used as a baseband energy detectorbased spectrum sensingfor cognitive radio (CR) under fading channels. We Derived expression for the average probability of detection over Rayleigh fading channels in easiest form and Nakagami-m channels with no diversity. Novelties of this work came from proposing a multiple antennas signal detection technique for spectrum sensing in a multipath fading environment. Without involving the sampling theorems and the accompanying approximation, we derive closed-form expressions for the probability of detection and false alarm over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels for the proposed method. The proposed technique is a low complexity scheme by using two energy detectors and not need prior information about the channel gain in comparison with other methods. Keywords-time Implementation, Cognitive Radio (CR), Energy
The Brain Mechanisms in Metaphor Processing from the Holistic Perspective of Neurolinguistics

The brain mechanisms in metaphor processing have become a hot topic in neurolinguistic field.This study initialized with research method summarization and focused on the three different conclusions in brain mechanisms research,i.e.,right-hemisphere hypothesis,left-hemisphere hypothesis,whole-hemisphere hypothesis.Further analysis is presented on the difference of the theoretical basis and methodology of these three hypotheses so as to provide that metaphor comprehension is not subject to the dichotomy of brain hemisphere,but derives from the holistic involvement of the hemispheres during processing metaphor.
Pushing knowledge management in Web information systems engineering

Knowledge management-based Web information systems (k-WIS) are a novel class of Web information systems whose main goal is to adapt content and presentation with respect to user needs and backgrounds through the execution of knowledge management processes. K-WIS involve complex issues such as knowledge representation, classification and clustering, reasoning, and, more recently, ontologies and semantic Web. In This work we present a methodology for the designing and developing of k-WIS, starting from the application domain analysis. We also provide a reference multilayer architecture for k-WIS and a pruning algorithm, called KM search, that allows to improve Web resources searching and classification. In our opinion, a k-WIS can be considered as an "intelligent knowledge hub" because it makes distributed Web resources available by means of knowledge management techniques such as classification and clustering. Finally, we present a reference model for developing a k-WIS authoring tool able to support our methodology.
WGOMD/SOP Workshop on Sea Level Rise, Ocean/Ice Shelf Interactions and Ice Sheets

Figure 1 from Griffies et al, this issue: Coordinated Ocean-ice Reference Experiments (CORE-II) hindcast simulations from 13 models have been assessed over the years 1993-2007 with a focus on trends in ocean heat content and corresponding dynamic sea level. The top row shows the time mean dynamic sea level (metre) computed from the model ensemble mean, along with observational estimates from JPL/AVISO satellite analysis. The lower panel shows the CORE-II ensemble mean minus AVISO.
The Influence of Personalities Upon the Dynamics of Trust and Reputation

When an agent resides in a community, the opinion of other community members concerning whether a particular individual is trustworthy or not influences the trust level of this agent. Hereby, the precise influence depends on the personality of the agent (e.g. whether he lets his opinion be influenced by others a lot). In this paper, a computational trust model which has dedicated parameters for agent personalities is applied to such a social context. A variety of different communities (containing agents with different personalities) have hereby been simulated. The resulting patterns hereof are shown in this paper. Furthermore, the simulation results are formally analyzed to show that certain patterns do occur in all different communities.
Gigabit packet classification by using lookahead caching

Hashing is a widely used method to perform fast lookup. Several schemes have been proposed to support Internet lookup that includes IP lookup and packet classification. Rectangular search is a well-known packet classification scheme based on multiple hash accesses for different filter length. It shows good scalability with respect to the number of filters; however, the lookup performance is not satisfactory. For example, through experiments, each packet classification takes about 40 hash accesses in a 100,000-filter database and each hash access may take more than one memory access. Obviously, this is insufficient to provide gigabits throughput. We proposed a novel "lookahead caching" which can significantly improve the performance of the hash-based algorithm. The basic idea is to find out the unmatched case for each incoming packet, thus it is different from the traditional caching mechanism. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme can improve the performance by a factor of two. The scheme can be further enhanced using parallel processing.
A Simulation Study to Compare Five Cognitive Diagnostic Models

Cognitive diagnosis is an important topic in modern psychometric area. Now more than 70 cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are developed. There are some questions among these models: (1) When the attribute hierarchy structure is known, how to choose the most suitable model? (2) When the attribute hierarchy structure is unknown, and cognitive diagnosis is required, how to do it? These problems seems especially more puzzled for the practice workers. This paper only paid main attention on three international popular models. Therefore, five cognitive diagnosis models (RSM, AHM_A, GDD, DINA and DINA_HC) were compared corresponding to the above questions from psychometric opinion. In this paper, Monte Carlo simulation study was used. Although the number of slips and the hierarchy structure are two important factors that affect the performance on corrected match ratio of cognitive diagnosis, this study would pay attention on other three factors: the distribution of cognitive pattern, the sample size, the number of attributes. The findings identified: specific factor, the five corresponding to the real scenario. And the RSM was the worst cognitive diagnosis method. (2) When the characteristic of data was unknown, an unstructured attribute hierarchy is treated as a coarsened version of a structured one, and the DINA method has a similar performance under unstructured hierarchy with the GDD, DINA_HC methods under structured hierarchy. Thus if the hierarchy structure could not be identified clearly, and the test Q matrix was clear, then the DINA could be adapt.
A Comparison of Kindergarten Storytelling by Human and Humanoid Robot with Different Social Behavior

In this paper, we present a study on the influence of different social behavior on preschool children's perception of stories narrated either by a humanoid robot or by a human teacher. Four conditions were considered: static human, static robot, expressive human and expressive robot. Two stories, with knowledge and emotional content, were narrated in two different encounters. After each story, children draw what they remember of the story. We examined drawings of 81 children to study whether the sociability of the teacher (robot or human) could influence elements and details recorded. Results suggest a positive effect of the expressive behavior in robot storytelling, whose efficacy is comparable to the human with the same behavior or better if the expressive robot is compared with a static inexpressive human.
Behavioral / Systems / Cognitive Slow Oscillation in Non-Lemniscal Auditory Thalamus

In the present study, we investigated the oscillatory behavior of the auditory thalamic neurons through in vivo intracellular and extracellular recordings in anesthetized guinea pigs. Repeated acoustic stimulus and cortical electrical stimulation were applied to examine their modulatory effects on the thalamic oscillation. The time course of the spike frequency over each trial was obtained by summing all spikes in the onset period and/or the last time period of 100 or 200 msec in the raster display. Spectral analysis was made on the time course of the spike frequency. A slow-frequency oscillation ranging from 0.03 to 0.25 Hz (mean SD, 0.11 0.05 Hz) was found in the medial geniculate body (MGB) together with a second rhythm of 5–10 Hz. The oscillation neurons had a mean auditory response latency of 17.3 0.3 msec, which was significantly longer than that of the non-oscillation neurons in lemniscal MGB (9.0 1.5 msec, p 0.001, ANOVA) and similar to the non-oscillation neurons in the non-lemniscal MGB (17.6 5.4 msec, p 0.811). They were located in the non-lemniscal nuclei of the auditory thalamus. Cortical stimulation altered the thalamic oscillation, leading to termination of the oscillation or to acceleration of the rhythm of the oscillation (the average rhythm changed from 0.07 0.03 to 0.11 0.04 Hz, n 8, p 0.066, t test). Acoustic stimulation triggered a more regular rhythm in the oscillation neurons. The present results suggest that only the non-lemniscal auditory thalamus is involved in the slow thalamocortical oscillation. The auditory cortex may control the oscillation of the auditory thalamic neurons.
BSLP: Markovian Bivariate Spread-Loss Model for Portfolio Credit Derivatives

BSLP is a two-dimensional dynamic model of interacting portfolio-level loss and spread (more exactly, loss intensity) processes. The model is similar to the top-down HJM-like frameworks developed by Schonbucher (2005) and Sidenius-Peterbarg-Andersen (SPA) (2005), however is constructed as a Markovian, short-rate intensity model. This property of the model enables fast lattice methods for pricing various portfolio credit derivatives such as tranche options, forward-starting tranches, leveraged super-senior tranches etc. A non-parametric model specification is used to achieve nearly perfect calibration to liquid tranche quotes across strikes and maturities. A non-dynamic version of the model obtained in the zero volatility limit of stochastic intensity is useful on its own as an arbitrage-free interpolation model to price non-standard index tranches off the standard ones.