Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extracellular Vesicles from Cryptococcus neoformans Modulate Macrophage Functions

ABSTRACT Cryptococcus neoformans and distantly related fungal species release extracellular vesicles that traverse the cell wall and contain a varied assortment of components, some of which have been associated with virulence. Previous studies have suggested that these extracellular vesicles are produced in vitro and during animal infection, but the role of vesicular secretion during the interaction of fungi with host cells remains unknown. In this report, we demonstrate by fluorescence microscopy that mammalian macrophages can incorporate extracellular vesicles produced by C. neoformans. Incubation of cryptococcal vesicles with murine macrophages resulted in increased levels of extracellular tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), interleukin-10 (IL-10), and transforming growth factor β (TGF-β). Vesicle preparations also resulted in a dose-dependent stimulation of nitric oxide production by phagocytes, suggesting that vesicle components stimulate macrophages to produce antimicrobial compounds. Treated macrophages were more effective at killing C. neoformans yeast. Our results indicate that the extracellular vesicles of C. neoformans can stimulate macrophage function, apparently activating these phagocytic cells to enhance their antimicrobial activity. These results establish that cryptococcal vesicles are biologically active.
Veri cation of Class Liveness Properties with JML ∗

Static checking is key for the security of software components. As a component model, this paper considers a Java class enriched with annotations from the Java Modeling Language (JML). It de nes a formal execution semantics for repetitive method invocations from this annotated class, called the class in isolation semantics. Afterwards, a pattern of liveness properties is de ned, together with its formal semantics, providing a foundation for both static and runtime checking. This pattern is then inscribed in a complete language of temporal properties, called JTPL (Java Temporal Pattern Language), extending JML. We particularly address the veri cation of liveness properties by automatically translating the temporal properties into JML annotations for this class. This automatic translation is implemented in a tool called JAG (JML Annotation Generator). Correctness of the generated annotations ensures that the temporal property is established for the executions of the class in isolation.
Muon anomalous magnetic moment and lepton flavor violation

A nonuniversal interaction, which involves only the third family leptons, induces lepton flavor violating couplings and contributes to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. In this paper, we study the effects of nonuniversal interaction on muon (g-2) and the rare decay tau --> mu gamma by using an effective Lagrangian technique, and a phenomenological Z' model where Z' couples only to the third family lepton. We find that the deviation from the theory can be explained and the induced tau --> mu gamma rate could be very close to the current experimental limit. In the Z' model, M-Z' has to be lighter than 2.6 TeV.
Media Spaces: Environments for Informal Multimedia Interaction

Distributed organizations, with distributed cooperative work, are a fact of life. How can new technologies help? Distributed video is an appealing choice, carrying more contextual information than voice alone and, arguably, better at conveying subtle cues, such as the emotional states. Although new commercial systems are being introduced, they focus primarily on providing new technology. Most are based on relatively simple extensions of two existing models of communication: formal meetings become videoconferences and telephones become videophones. However, research in computer-supported cooperative work has tried to emphasize the user, with models based on Shared Workspaces (to support shared work on a common task), Coordinated Communication (to support structured communication to serve a specified purpose), and Informal Interaction (to support informal, unplanned and unstructured interactions). Although mediaspaces can incorporate all three, they emphasize informal communication, providing people working together at a distance with interactions that they take for granted when they are co-located. This chapter describes some of the pioneering work in media spaces, with more detailed descriptions of our own work at Rank Xerox EuroPARC (RAVE for our own use in the laboratory and WAVE, to support engineers working collaboratively between facilities in England and the Netherlands), concluding with a discussion of the technical, user interface and social issues involved in designing media spaces.
Combination of Sulindac and Dichloroacetate Kills Cancer Cells via Oxidative Damage

Sulindac is an FDA-approved non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug with documented anticancer activities. Our recent studies showed that sulindac selectively enhanced the killing of cancer cells exposed to oxidizing agents via production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) resulting in mitochondrial dysfunction. This effect of sulindac and oxidative stress on cancer cells could be related to the defect in respiration in cancer cells, first described by Warburg 50 years ago, known as the Warburg effect. We postulated that sulindac might enhance the selective killing of cancer cells when combined with any compound that alters mitochondrial respiration. To test this hypothesis we have used dichloroacetate (DCA), which is known to shift pyruvate metabolism away from lactic acid formation to respiration. One might expect that DCA, since it stimulates aerobic metabolism, could stress mitochondrial respiration in cancer cells, which would result in enhanced killing in the presence of sulindac. In this study, we have shown that the combination of sulindac and DCA enhances the selective killing of A549 and SCC25 cancer cells under the conditions used. As predicted, the mechanism of killing involves ROS production, mitochondrial dysfunction, JNK signaling and death by apoptosis. Our results suggest that the sulindac-DCA drug combination may provide an effective cancer therapy.
Nieme: Large-Scale Energy-Based Models

In this paper we introduce NIEME, a machine learning library for large-scale classification, regression and ranking. NIEME, relies on the framework of energy-based models (LeCun et al., 2006) which unifies several learning algorithms ranging from simple perceptrons to recent models such as the pegasos support vector machine or l1-regularized maximum entropy models. This framework also unifies batch and stochastic learning which are both seen as energy minimization problems. NIEME, can hence be used in a wide range of situations, but is particularly interesting for large-scale learning tasks where both the examples and the features are processed incrementally. Being able to deal with new incoming features at any time within the learning process is another original feature of the NIEME, toolbox. NIEME, is released under the GPL license. It is efficiently implemented in C++, it works on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and provides interfaces for C++, Java and Python.
The political sensorium

In this position paper we outline some of the key themes and background research which may help form a better understanding of the relationship between technology and political activity. The paper is written in an attempt to articulate a better understanding of the relationship between political processes, urban environments and situated technologies. The paper is written from a UK perspective, although the ideas have a broader relevance for relatively developed western democracies. To this end we analyse the political and digital divides which are present in western society focusing on local politics in Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK as a case study. Following a brief description of the problem domain we briefly give an outline of an ongoing project Viewpoint which has created a mobile voting system which we are currently deploying in various locations in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
Verifying Server Computation

In many scenarios, clients receive the results of computation which has been performed by a remote server. An example of such a setting is the third-party publishing model, in which a server answers arbitrary database queries posed by clients with data originally provided by a third party, who does not participate in the protocol. Previous work in this scenario has addressed range queries, but there has not previously existed a general solution for detecting cheating on the part of the server for arbitrary queries. We propose different two techniques for approximate proof construction to detect server misbehavior: spot checking and transformationbased checks. We develop proof constructions, using the spot-checking paradigm, for arbitrary database queries. We also offer an illustrative example of a use of the transformation-based check technique.
11 Discriminative Keyword Spotting

This chapter introduces a discriminative method for detect ing and spotting keywords in spoken utterances. Given a word represented as a sequence of pho nemes and a spoken utterance, the keyword spotter predicts the best time span of the phonem e s quence in the spoken utterance along with a confidence. If the prediction confidence is a bove certain level the keyword is declared to be spoken in the utterance within the predicte time span, otherwise the keyword is declared as not spoken. The problem of keyword spotti ng raining is formulated as a discriminative task where the model parameters are chosen so the utterance in which the keyword is spoken would have higher confidence than any other spoken utterance in which the keyword is not spoken. It is shown theoretically and empi rically that the proposed training method resulted with a high area under the receiver opera ting characteristic (ROC) curve, the most common measure to evaluate keyword spotters. We pre s nt an iterative algorithm to train the keyword spotter efficiently. The proposed appro ach contrasts with standard spotting strategies based on HMMs, for which the training proced ur does not maximize a loss directly related to the spotting performance. Several expe riments performed on TIMIT and WSJ corpora show the advantage of our approach over HMM-base d alternatives.
Sincere‐Strategy Preference‐Based Approval Voting Fully Resists Constructive Control and Broadly Resists Destructive Control

We study sincere‐strategy preference‐based approval voting (SP‐AV), a system proposed by Brams and Sanver [1] and here adjusted so as to coerce admissibility of the votes (rather than excluding inadmissible votes a priori), with respect to procedural control. In such control scenarios, an external agent seeks to change the outcome of an election via actions such as adding/deleting/partitioning either candidates or voters. SP‐AV combines the voters' preference rankings with their approvals of candidates, where in elections with at least two candidates the voters' approval strategies are adjusted – if needed – to approve of their most‐preferred candidate and to disapprove of their least‐preferred candidate. This rule coerces admissibility of the votes even in the presence of control actions, and hybridizes, in effect, approval with pluralitiy voting. We prove that this system is computationally resistant (i.e., the corresponding control problems are NP‐hard) to 19 out of 22 types of constructive and destructive control. Thus, SP‐AV has more resistances to control than is currently known for any other natural voting system with a polynomial‐time winner problem. In particular, SP‐AV is (after Copeland voting, see Faliszewski et al. [2, 3]) the second natural voting system with an easy winner‐determination procedure that is known to have full resistance to constructive control, and unlike Copeland voting it in addition displays broad resistance to destructive control (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
A frequency reconfigurable antenna design for UWB applications

This paper proposes a frequency reconfigurable antenna system designed for cognitive radio applications. The antenna structure consists of a sensing antenna and a frequency reconfigurable antenna system. The sensing antenna scans the channel to discover frequency bands while the reconfigurable section is tuning to communicate within these bands. A reconfigurable antenna consists of five different patches and there frequencies cover from 2.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz. The frequency agility is achieved via a rotational motion of the patch antennas. The rotation is controlled by a stepping motor mounted on the back of the antenna structure and the motor's rotational motion is controlled by MEMS switch connected to a microcontroller. A frequency reconfigurable antenna offers many advantages such as easy fabrication, suitability for installation and coverage spectrum UWB (Ultra Wideband).
Analog Placement Based on Symmetry-Island Formulation

To reduce the effect of parasitic mismatches and circuit sensitivity to thermal gradients or process variations for analog circuits, some pairs of modules need to be placed symmetrically with respect to a common axis, and the symmetric modules are preferred to be placed at closest proximity for better electrical properties. Most previous works handle the problem with symmetry constraints by imposing symmetric-feasible conditions in floorplan representations and using cost functions to minimize the distance between symmetric modules. Such approaches are inefficient due to the large search space and cannot guarantee the closest proximity of symmetry modules. In this paper, we present the first linear-time-packing algorithm for the placement with symmetry constraints using the topological floorplan representations. We first introduce the concept of a symmetry island which is formed by modules of the same symmetry group in a single connected placement. Based on this concept and the B*-tree representation, we propose automatically symmetric-feasible (ASF) B*-trees to directly model the placement of a symmetry island. We then present hierarchical B*-trees (HB*-trees) which can simultaneously optimize the placement with both symmetry islands and nonsymmetric modules. Unlike the previous works, our approach can place the symmetry modules in a symmetry group in close proximity and significantly reduce the search space based on the symmetry-island formulation. In particular, the packing time for an ASF-B*-tree or an HB*-tree is the same as that for a plain B*-tree (only linear) and much faster than previous works. Experimental results show that our approach achieves the best-published quality and runtime efficiency for analog placement.
WAM: Wear wear-out-aware memory management for SCRAM-based low power mobile systems

Emerging storage class RAM (SCRAM) devices are power-efficient, byte-addressable, and non-volatile. However, each SCRAM memory cell has a limited lifetime. To use SCRAM to replace power-hungry DRAM in mobile consumer devices, wear-leveling among cells will be a critical issue. Especially, due to the locality of memory access pattern, current operating systems. SCRAM-unaware memory allocator may intensify the wear of certain SCRAM blocks. Wear-leveling requires the redesign of operating systems to distribute memory accesses evenly throughout the entire memory space. This paper suggests two operating-system-level wear-leveling techniques for SCRAM devices. First, this paper proposes a novel memory allocator, called W-Buddy, that considers the wear of memory chunks as it selects a free memory chunk to be allocated. Second, this paper proposes a variable metadata formatting technique for file systems. The experiment results show that the proposed W-Buddy allocator and metadata reformatting technique improve the lifetime of SCRAM devices compared with the techniques of conventional operating systems.
Beyond shape: incorporating color invariance into a biologically inspired feedforward model of category recognition

Being lack of theoretical support from biological cues in computer vision, current computational and learning approaches of object categorization mostly aim at better performances neglecting analysis on framework in human brain for visual information processing materially which cause little-marginal improvement and more complexity. Focusing on the uncertainty of color mechanism in visual cortex and motivating from biological issues on shape information, we present the model incorporating color invariant descriptors and plausible shape feature biologically to formulate the robust representation of each category with only simple SVM classifier to achieve the amazing performance. Our model has the characteristics of illumination, scale, position, orientation, viewpoint invariance, and competitive with current algorithms on only a few training examples from several data sets, including Caltech 101 and GRAZ for category recognition. Also, experimental results show the robustness when challenged by noisy or blurred images.
Dissecting meiosis of rye using translational proteomics.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Much of our understanding of the genetic control of meiosis has come from recent studies of model organisms, which have given us valuable insights into processes such as recombination and the synapsis of chromosomes. The challenge now is to determine to what extent these models are representative of other groups of organisms, and to what extent generalisations can be made as to how meiosis works. Through a comparative proteomic approach with Arabidopsis thaliana, this study describes the spatial and temporal expression of key structural and recombinogenic proteins of cereal rye (Secale cereale). METHODS Antibodies to two synaptonemal complex-associated proteins (Asy1 and Zyp1) and two recombination-related proteins (Spo11 and Rad51) of A. thaliana were bound to meiocytes throughout meiotic prophase of rye, and visualized using conventional fluorescence microscopy and confocal laser scanning microscopy. Western analysis was performed on proteins extracted from pooled prophase I anthers, as a prelude to more advanced proteomic investigations. KEY RESULTS The four antibodies of A. thaliana reliably detected their epitopes in rye. The expression profile of Rad51 is consistent with its role in recombination. Asy1 protein is shown for the first time to cap the ends of bivalents. Western analysis reveals structural variants of the transverse filament protein Zyp1. CONCLUSIONS Asy1 cores are assembled by elongation of early foci. The persistence of foci of Spo11 to late prophase does not fit the current model of molecular recombination. The putative structural variants of Zyp1 may indicate modification of the protein as bivalents are assembled.
Segmenting into Adequate Units for Automatic Recognition of Emotion-Related Episodes: A Speech-Based Approach

We deal with the topic of segmenting emotion-related (emotional/affective) episodes into adequate units for analysis and automatic processing/classification--a topic that has not been addressed adequately so far. We concentrate on speech and illustrate promising approaches by using a database with children's emotional speech. We argue in favour of the word as basic unit and map sequences of words on both syntactic and "emotionally consistent" chunks and report classification performances for an exhaustive modelling of our data by mapping word-based paralinguistic emotion labels onto three classes representing valence (positive, neutral, negative), and onto a fourth rest (garbage) class.
MODALITAT DE BATXILLERAT I RENDIMENT EN LES ASSIGNATURES METODOLÒGIQUES DELS ESTUDIANTS UNIVERSITARIS DE PSICOLOGIA

Resum Els plans d’estudis corresponents a la carrera de Psicologia arreu de tot l’estat inclouen matèries troncals sobre metodologia de la recerca que donen lloc a assignatures com Estadística i Mètodes Quantitatius d’Investigació. Paradoxalment és possible accedir a aquests estudis sense haver cursat cap assignatura relacionada amb les matemàtiques des de l’Ensenyament Secundari Obligatori. Els estudiants que no han cursat assignatures amb continguts matemàtics no només saben menys sobre aquesta matèria, sinó que també poden estar menys motivats per adquirir nous coneixements sobre ella. En aquest treball es vol conèixer quina és l’opció cursada majoritàriament pels estudiants que accedeixen a la carrera de Psicologia de la UdG. A més es pretén comparar el rendiment acadèmic d’aquests estudiants en dues assignatures que en tot o en part tenen continguts matemàtics: Mètodes i dissenys d’investigació en Psicologia I i Estadística aplicada a la Psicologia, segons l’opció de batxillerat cursada. La mostra està formada pels estudiants matriculats als estudis de Psicologia de la UdG des del curs acadèmic 2003-2004 fins al 2006-07. Els resultats indiquen que la major part dels estudiants de Psicologia procedeixen de les opcions de batxillerat en Humanitats i en Ciències Socials. A més, s’observa que el rendiment acadèmic en aquestes dues assignatures dels estudiants procedents de les opcions de batxillerat Científico-tècnica, Ciències de la Salut i Ciències Socials és millor que el dels estudiants procedents de les opcions d’Humanitats i Arts tant pel que fa a les qualificacions obtingudes, com als percentatges de no presentats a les convocatòries oficials. Es discuteix la conveniència d’orientar adequadament als estudiants abans d’iniciar el batxillerat per tal que puguin triar l’opció que més s’adeqüi a la carrera que volen cursar a fi de millorar el seu rendiment i la seva motivació pels estudis.
Mood and the Market: Can Press Reports of Investors' Mood Predict Stock Prices?

We examined whether press reports on the collective mood of investors can predict changes in stock prices. We collected data on the use of emotion words in newspaper reports on traders' affect, coded these emotion words according to their location on an affective circumplex in terms of pleasantness and activation level, and created indices of collective mood for each trading day. Then, by using time series analyses, we examined whether these mood indices, depicting investors' emotion on a given trading day, could predict the next day's opening price of the stock market. The strongest findings showed that activated pleasant mood predicted increases in NASDAQ prices, while activated unpleasant mood predicted decreases in NASDAQ prices. We conclude that both valence and activation levels of collective mood are important in predicting trend continuation in stock prices.