Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Saliency weight and local quadrant constraint for visual search

In recent years, the demand for directly visual searching based on images and videos becomes stronger and stronger. Most large-scale image retrieval systems are based on the Bag of Words (BoW) or its variant. For current visual search algorithms which are under the structure of BoW, there are two critical issues should be solved: the quantified visual words may reduce the discriminative power of the local features and the neglect of spatial relationship among local features. To address the problems, we propose a novel method based on saliency and local quadrant constraint. First, we introduce the saliency weights into the quantization stage of BoW. We utilize the image saliency to do inverse document (IDF) weighting. And while generating the histogram expression of image, we count the saliency of features instead of simply counting the number of features. Second, the saliency and the similarity characteristic of deformations in local areas are introduced into our model in the post-processing step to satisfy the constraint in spatial relationship among local features. The operation evaluates the weights of matching features by the saliency of query and candidate images, finds near neighbors of the matching features by a threshold and then estimates whether all the matching features in the local regions follow consistent geometric transformation or not. We evaluate the geometric transformation by the relative quadrant of the matching neighbors to center feature (Local Quadrant Constraint, LQC). Experiments show that the proposed method achieves promising improvement while comparing to other visual search methods. Our methods are well complementary to current visual search methods and give a new idea in modeling the spatial information of image.
Autooxidative Degradation of Implanted Polyether Polyurethane Devices

While certain polyether polyurethanes have been shown to be biostable, undesirable interactions between polymer, the body environment and device can occur. For example, the corrosion products of metallic parts can cause relatively rapid autooxidation of polyether soft segments. This phenomenon was first demonstrated in our laboratories by immersing polyurethane test specimens in metal ion solutions of different oxidation potentials. Subsequently, the mechanism was reasonably duplicated by immersing Pellethane 2363-80A insulated cardiac pacing leads in 3%, 37°C hydrogen peroxide. In vivo studies after 1 year show that corrosion products from pure Co and Fe produce the most rapid degradation of the polyurethane.
A Recurrent Stop-Codon Mutation in Succinate Dehydrogenase Subunit B Gene in Normal Peripheral Blood and Childhood T-Cell Acute Leukemia

Background Somatic cytidine mutations in normal mammalian nuclear genes occur during antibody diversification in B lymphocytes and generate an isoform of apolipoprotein B in intestinal cells by RNA editing. Here, I describe that succinate dehydrogenase (SDH; mitochondrial complex II) subunit B gene (SDHB) is somatically mutated at a cytidine residue in normal peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and T-cell acute leukemia. Germ line mutations in the SDHB, SDHC or SDHD genes cause hereditary paraganglioma (PGL) tumors which show constitutive activation of homeostatic mechanisms induced by oxygen deprivation (hypoxia). Principal Findings To determine the prevalence of a mutation identified in the SDHB mRNA, 180 samples are tested. An SDHB stop-codon mutation c.136C>T (R46X) is present in a significant fraction (average = 5.8%, range = less than 1 to 30%, n = 52) of the mRNAs obtained from PBMCs. In contrast, the R46X mutation is present in the genomic DNA of PBMCs at very low levels. Examination of the PBMC cell-type subsets identifies monocytes and natural killer (NK) cells as primary sources of the mutant transcript, although lesser contributions also come from B and T lymphocytes. Transcript sequence analyses in leukemic cell lines derived from monocyte, NK, T and B cells indicate that the mutational mechanism targeting SDHB is operational in T-cell acute leukemia. Accordingly, substantial levels (more than 3%) of the mutant SDHB transcripts are detected in five of 20 primary childhood T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) bone marrow samples, but in none of 20 B-ALL samples. In addition, distinct heterozygous SDHB missense DNA mutations are identified in Jurkat and TALL-104 cell lines which are derived from T-ALLs. Conclusions The identification of a recurrent, inactivating stop-codon mutation in the SDHB gene in normal blood cells suggests that SDHB is targeted by a cytidine deaminase enzyme. The SDHB mutations in normal PBMCs and leukemic T cells might play a role in cellular pre-adaptation to hypoxia.
A Species Difference in the Transport Activities of H2 Receptor Antagonists by Rat and Human Renal Organic Anion and Cation Transporters

A clinical drug-drug interaction between famotidine (a H2 receptor antagonist) and probenecid has not been reproduced in rats. The present study hypothesized that the species-dependent probenecid sensitivity is due to a species difference in the contribution of renal organic anion and cation transporters. The transport activities of the H2 receptor antagonists (cimetidine, famotidine, and ranitidine) by rat and human basolateral organic anion and cation transporters [human organic anion transporter (hOAT) 1, hOAT2, r/hOAT3, rat organic cation transporter (rOct) 1, and r/hOCT2] were compared using their cDNA transfectants. The transport activities (Vmax/Km) of famotidine (Km, 345 μM) by rOat3 were 8- and 15-fold lower than those of cimetidine (Km, 91 μM) and ranitidine (Km, 155 μM), respectively, whereas the activity by hOAT3 (Km, 124 μM) was 3-fold lower than that of cimetidine (Km, 149 μM) but similar to that of ranitidine (Km, 234 μM). Comparison of the relative transport activity with regard to that of cimetidine suggests that famotidine was more efficiently transported by hOAT3 than rOat3, and vice versa, for ranitidine. Only ranitidine was efficiently transported by hOAT2 (Km, 396 μM). rOct1 accepts all of the H2 receptor antagonists with a similar activity, whereas the transport activities of ranitidine and famotidine (Km, 61/56 μM) by r/hOCT2 were markedly lower than that of cimetidine (Km, 69/73 μM). Probenecid was a potent inhibitor of r/OAT3 (Ki, 2.6-5.8 μM), whereas it did not interact with OCTs. These results suggest that, in addition to the absence of OCT1 in human kidney, a species difference in the transport activity by hOAT3 and rOat3 accounts, at least in part, for the species difference in the drug-drug interaction between famotidine and probenecid.
A Blame for All ( revised )

Several programming languages are beginning to integrate static and dynamic typing, including Racket, Microsoft’s C# 4.0 (Hejlsberg 2010) and TypeScript (Hejlsberg, 2012), Facebook’s PHP (Verlaguet, 2013), and the research languages Sage (Gronski, Knowles, Tomb, Freund, and Flanagan, 2006) and Thorn (Wrigstad, Eugster, Field, Nystrom, and Vitek, 2009). However, an important open question remains, which is how to add parametric polymorphism to languages that combine static and dynamic typing. We present a system that permits a value of dynamic type to be cast to a polymorphic type and vice versa, with relational parametricity enforced by a kind of dynamic sealing along the lines proposed by Matthews and Ahmed (2008) and Neis, Dreyer, and Rossberg (2009). Our development is supported by a variant of the polymorphic lambda calculus that may be of independent interest. It uses type bindings and static casts to maintain a syntactic certificate of parametricity throughout program evaluation. Our system includes a notion of blame, which allows us to show that when casting between a more precise type and a less precise type, any cast failures are due to the less-precisely-typed portion of the program. We also want to show that a cast from a subtype to a supertype cannot fail. This property holds for a relatively weak notion of subtyping (STOP 2009) but we have found a flaw in our proof for the stronger notion of subtyping, which we explain here. Finally, we show that existentials for untyped programs can be encoded in terms of casts through polymorphic types.
Hot-electron currents in very short channel MOSFET's

The behaviors of the hot-electron gate and substrate currents in very short channel devices were studied. For a test device with electrical channel length of 0.14 µm, the hot-electron substrate current can be detected at 0.9-V drain voltage which is lower than the silicon band gap. The gate current can be measured at 2.35-V drain voltage, which is lower than the oxide-silicon energy barrier for electrons. These measurements support the quasi-thermal-equilibrium approximation and suggest that the hot-electron-induced problems cannot be eliminated in future VLSI MOSFET's of arbitrarily short channels by reducing the drain bias below some constant critical energies. An empirical relationship between the effective electron temperature and the field is found to be Te= 9.05 × 10-3E.
Duplication, insertion and lossiness errors in unreliable communication channels

We consider the problem of verifying correctness of finite state machines that communicate with each other over unbounded FIFO channels that are unreliable. Various problems regarding verification of FIFO channels that can lose messages have been considered by Finkel [10], and by Abdulla and Johnson [1, 2]. We consider, in this paper, other possible unreliable behaviors of communication channels, viz. (a) duplication and (b) insertion errors. Furthermore, we also consider various combinations of duplication, insertion and lossiness errors.Finite state machines that communicate over unbounded FIFO buffers is a model of computation that forms the backbone of ISO standard protocol specification languages Estelle and SDL. While an assumption of a perfect communication medium is reasonable at the higher levels of the OSI protocol stack, the lower levels have to deal with an unreliable communication medium; hence our motivation for the present work.The verification problems that are of interest are reachability, unboundedness, deadlock, and model-checking against CTL. All of these problems are undecidable for machines communicating over reliable unbounded FIFO channels. So, it is perhaps surprising that some of these problems become decidable when unreliable channels are modeled. The contributions of this paper are: (a) An investigation of solutions to these problems for machines with insertion errors, duplication errors, or a combination of duplication, insertion and lossiness errors, and (b) A comparison of the relative expressive power of the various errors.
Utilizing Lightweight Semantics for Search Context Acquisition in Personalized Search

In order to answer the query, a search engine has to find full-text matches in the background document corpus and then order the documents so that the more relevant results are placed higher in the list. An ideal ranking function should understand user’s intent – the goal that is expressed via the query keywords, and order the results such that the results matching user’s intent are ranked higher. To understand the user’s intent, we need to understand semantics of the queries and the documents. There are various approaches that leverage semantics, but they are heavy-weight, require external knowledge bases and are very hard to implement in a highly dynamic, opencorpus domain, such as the Web. In our work, we focus on the omnipresent lightweight semantics coming from the search result documents. We propose a flexible metadatabased context model and propose methods that scope it to short-term interests or expand it with additional data. We identify several sources of contextual data for this model: temporal context in form of behavioral search patterns, activity-based context in form of past queries and social context in form of user similarity.
New mode of DNA binding of multi‐zinc finger transcription factors: δEF1 family members bind with two hands to two target sites

SIP1, a Smad‐interacting protein, and δEF1, a transcriptional repressor involved in skeletal and T‐cell development, belong to the same family of DNA binding proteins. SIP1 and δEF1 contain two separated clusters of zinc fingers, one N‐terminal and one C‐terminal. These clusters show high sequence homology and are highly conserved between SIP1 and δEF1. Each zinc finger cluster binds independently to a 5′‐CACCT sequence. However, high‐affinity binding sites for full‐length SIP1 and δEF1 in the promoter regions of candidate target genes like Xenopus Xbra2, and human α4‐integrin and E‐cadherin, are bipartite elements composed of one CACCT and one CACCTG sequence, the orientation and spacing of which can vary. Using transgenic Xenopus embryos, we demonstrate that the integrity of these two sequences is necessary for correct spatial expression of a Xbra2 promoter‐driven reporter gene. Both zinc finger clusters must be intact for the high‐affinity binding of SIP1 to DNA and for its optimal repressor activity. Our results show that SIP1 binds as monomer and contacts one target sequence with the first zinc finger cluster, and the other with the second cluster. Our work redefines the optimal binding site and, consequently, candidate target genes for vertebrate members of the δEF1 family.
Formal Modeling of Complex Commands in Industrial Software Specifications

We present a formal approach for modeling complex commands characterized by heavy overloading of function, large numbers of parameters, dependencies among parameters, subtle side effects, and lack of abstraction. Complex commands arise in a variety of business settings such as requesting a brokerage order, enrolling in a course, and specifying a product order. In addition, complex commands are also prevalent where specification of commands is strictly separated from multiple, independent implementations as in open software standards. Our approach is based on an inheritance structure known as a command lattice. Like other forms of inheritance, command lattices support incremental definition and abbreviation of specifications. Because a complete command lattice can have a large number of specifications, we develop another structure known as a minimal command tree in which a command lattice is derived from a much smaller number of independent specifications. To map from a minimal command tree to a command lattice, we present algorithms that materialize an arbitrary node of a command lattice and compactly generate the behavior of a command lattice. To demonstrate the potential of command lattices, we have implemented a set of tools that provide convenient specification and powerful reasoning capabilities. Our tool collection includes the Command Specification Language that supports a precise and rich specification of the structural and behavioral properties of commands, the incremental definition tool that ensures consistency of command lattices, the browsing tool that displays a command's inheritance structure, the type checker that ensures structural consistency of commands in expressions, and the target system tracer that simulates a sequence of command executions. We discuss our experiences applying the tools to IBM's Distributed Data Management, a large scale specification of data access on remote and heterogeneous IBM systems.
A Randomised, Double-Blind, Controlled Vaccine Efficacy Trial of DNA/MVA ME-TRAP Against Malaria Infection in Gambian Adults

Background Many malaria vaccines are currently in development, although very few have been evaluated for efficacy in the field. Plasmodium falciparum multiple epitope (ME)– thrombospondin-related adhesion protein (TRAP) candidate vaccines are designed to potently induce effector T cells and so are a departure from earlier malaria vaccines evaluated in the field in terms of their mechanism of action. ME-TRAP vaccines encode a polyepitope string and the TRAP sporozoite antigen. Two vaccine vectors encoding ME-TRAP, plasmid DNA and modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA), when used sequentially in a prime-boost immunisation regime, induce high frequencies of effector T cells and partial protection, manifest as delay in time to parasitaemia, in a clinical challenge model. Methods and Findings A total of 372 Gambian men aged 15–45 y were randomised to receive either DNA ME-TRAP followed by MVA ME-TRAP or rabies vaccine (control). Of these men, 296 received three doses of vaccine timed to coincide with the beginning of the transmission season (141 in the DNA/MVA group and 155 in the rabies group) and were followed up. Volunteers were given sulphadoxine/pyrimethamine 2 wk before the final vaccination. Blood smears were collected weekly for 11 wk and whenever a volunteer developed symptoms compatible with malaria during the transmission season. The primary endpoint was time to first infection with asexual P. falciparum. Analysis was per protocol. DNA ME-TRAP and MVA ME-TRAP were safe and well-tolerated. Effector T cell responses to a non-vaccine strain of TRAP were 50-fold higher postvaccination in the malaria vaccine group than in the rabies vaccine group. Vaccine efficacy, adjusted for confounding factors, was 10.3% (95% confidence interval, −22% to +34%; p = 0.49). Incidence of malaria infection decreased with increasing age and was associated with ethnicity. Conclusions DNA/MVA heterologous prime-boost vaccination is safe and highly immunogenic for effector T cell induction in a malaria-endemic area. But despite having produced a substantial reduction in liver-stage parasites in challenge studies of non-immune volunteers, this first generation T cell–inducing vaccine was ineffective at reducing the natural infection rate in semi-immune African adults.
Energy-Efficient Real-Time Task Scheduling for a DVS System with a Non-DVS Processing Element

Multiple processing elements are often adopted in the current designs of embedded systems. Such configurations impose challenges on hardware/software co-designs with energy-efficient considerations. This paper targets energy-efficient real-time task scheduling of such popular configurations, in which systems are equipped with a DVS processor and a non-DVS processing element (PE). We consider task scheduling under different power consumption models of the non-DVS PE. When the power consumption of the non-DVS PE is independent on the assigned workload, a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme is developed for energy-efficient scheduling. When the energy consumption of the non-DVS PE depends on the assigned workload, a 0.5-approximation algorithm is developed to maximize the energy saving, compared to the execution of tasks on a DVS processor. Extensive simulations were performed to evaluate the capability of our proposed algorithms. The results show that our algorithms are very effective in energy-efficiency
Photoactivatable GFP tagging cassettes for protein‐tracking studies in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Yeast cell biologists use a variety of fluorescent protein tags for determining protein localization and for measuring protein dynamics using fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP). Although many modern fluorescent proteins, such as those with photoactivatable and photoconvertible characteristics, have been developed, none has been exploited for studies in budding yeast. We describe here the construction of yeast‐tagging vectors containing photoactivatable green fluorescent protein (PA–GFP) for analysis of protein behaviour. We tagged two yeast proteins, Erg6p and Num1p, with PA–GFP and demonstrated specific photoactivation of the fusion proteins in live cells. Fluorescence intensity measurements showed that a short 5 s exposure to 413 nm light is sufficient to produce the maximum level of activated GFP fluorescence. Local photoactivation of cortical Num1p‐PA–GFP showed movement of the marked proteins, providing new insights into the behaviour of Num1p at the cell cortex. Since photoactivation can be achieved using standard mercury arc illumination, the PA–GFP tag represents a convenient and economical way to determine protein dynamics in the cell. Thus, the tagging modules should facilitate protein‐tracking studies in a wide variety of cell biological processes in yeast. Published in 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Sparse Representation for Wireless Communications: A Compressive Sensing Approach

Sparse representation can efficiently model signals in different applications to facilitate processing. In this article, we will discuss various applications of sparse representation in wireless communications, with a focus on the most recent compressive sensing (CS)-enabled approaches. With the help of the sparsity property, CS is able to enhance the spectrum efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) of fifth-generation (5G) and Internet of Things (IoT) networks.
Improving Large-Scale Image Retrieval using Geometric Weighting

central in large-scale image retrieval. The geometrical information is usually involved only in the post-processing spatial verification step usually implemented with the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm. To enable visual search in real-time, RANSAC can be applied only to a relatively small number of top candidates due to its computational requirements. In this work, we propose an alternative method to perform accurate spatial verification with a significantly lower computational cost. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline BOF, and achieves similar performance as RANSAC based spatial verification, despite the major difference in complexity.
Different regulation mechanisms for evolved critical periods in learning

The learning of various skills and behaviors in animals and humans goes through phases known as critical periods, where plasticity is temporarily facilitated. The experiments presented here are designed to shed further light on this phenomenon, by investigating three mechanisms that have been suggested for controlling the timing of critical periods. By evolving neural networks controlled by these mechanisms, we gain an insight into their strengths and weaknesses. We find that the mechanisms based on the developmental stage of an individual can control plasticity under predictable conditions, whereas we need to control plasticity as a function of attention level to adapt successfully to new and uncertain environments.
Peer-Assisted VoD: Making Internet Video Distribution Cheap

We consider the design and potential benefits of peerassisted video-on-demand, in which participating peers assist the server in delivering VoD content. The assistance is done in such a way that it provides the same user quality experience as pure clientserver distribution. We focus on the single-video approach, whereby a peer only redistributes a video that it is currently watching. We first describe three natural prefetching policies for exploiting surplus peer upload capacity. We then study the performance of peer-assisted VoD using stochastic simulation and trace-driven simulation, with traces collected from the MSN Video service. The results of these simulations show that peer-assisted VoD, with the proper prefetching policy, can dramatically reduce server bandwidth costs.
The contribution of Bruce Glick to the definition of the role played by the bursa of Fabricius in the development of the B cell lineage

In 1956, Bruce Glick and Timothy Chang reported that the bursa of Fabricius plays an important role in antibody production. Their demonstration that antibody responses are suppressed in the majority of bursectomized chickens became the cornerstone of modern immunology. Bursa research increased considerably during the 1960s and early 1970s.