Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The EGR2 targets LAG-3 and 4-1BB describe and regulate dysfunctional antigen-specific CD8+ T cells in the tumor microenvironment

Although the presence of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) indicates an endogenous antitumor response, immune regulatory pathways can subvert the effector phase and enable tumor escape. Negative regulatory pathways include extrinsic suppression mechanisms, but also a T cell–intrinsic dysfunctional state. A more detailed study has been hampered by a lack of cell surface markers defining tumor-specific dysfunctional TILs, and PD-1 alone is not sufficient. Recently, we identified the transcription factor Egr2 as a critical component in controlling the anergic state in vitro. In this study, we show that the Egr2-driven cell surface proteins LAG-3 and 4-1BB can identify dysfunctional tumor antigen–specific CD8+ TIL. Co-expression of 4-1BB and LAG-3 was seen on a majority of CD8+ TILs, but not in lymphoid organs. Functional analysis revealed defective IL-2 and TNF production yet retained expression of IFN-&ggr; and regulatory T cell–recruiting chemokines. Transcriptional and phenotypic characterization revealed coexpression of multiple additional co-stimulatory and co-inhibitory receptors. Administration of anti–LAG-3 plus anti–4-1BB mAbs was therapeutic against tumors in vivo, which correlated with phenotypic normalization. Our results indicate that coexpression of LAG-3 and 4-1BB characterize dysfunctional T cells within tumors, and that targeting these receptors has therapeutic utility.
A framework for the detection and interaction with pedestrian and objects in an unknown environment

In this paper, we present a visual scene description and interaction framework for pedestrian and mobile objects detection and tracking applications. The framework is built upon a previously developed stereo vision system. The proposed algorithms raise up the information level in order to allow to query about the scene using natural language or semantic operators and give a simpler interface with other technologies.
A Random Sampling Scheme for Path Planning

Several randomized path planners have been proposed dur ing the last few years. Their attractiveness stems from their applicability to virtually any type of robots, and their empir ically observed success. In this article, we attempt to present a unifying view of these planners and to theoretically explain their success. First, we introduce a general planning scheme that consists of randomly sampling the robot 's configuration space. We then describe two previously developed planners as instances of planners based on this scheme, but applying very different sampling strategies. These planners are probabilis tically complete: if a path exists, they will find one with high probability, if we let them run long enough. Next, for one of the planners, we analyze the relation between the probability of failure and the running time. Under assumptions characteriz ing the "goodness" of the robot's free space, we show that the
Characterization of a Barium‐sensitive Outward Current following Glutamate Application on Rat Midbrain Dopaminergic Cells

Using intracellular electrophysiological recordings in dopaminergic (principal) neurons of the rat mesencephalon maintained in vitro, we studied a postexcitatory amino acid response (PEAAR). Under current‐clamp mode, bath application of glutamate produced a depolarization that was followed by a hyperpolarization when the perfusion of the excitatory amino acid was discontinued. Under single‐microelectrode voltage‐clamp mode, an outward current followed the glutamate‐induced inward current. The PEAAR was associated with an increase in membrane conductance and reversed polarity at about ‐85 mV (2.5 mM extracellular K+). The null potential for the PEAAR was independent of the intracellular loading of chloride ions and was shifted towards less negative values (˜23 mV) by increasing extracellular K+ from 2.5 to 8.5 mM. The PEAAR was present in neurons treated with tetraethylammonium (5–10 mM), apamin (1 μM) or glibenclamide (1–300 μM). However, it was strongly depressed or blocked by extracellular barium (300 μM to 1 mM), by low‐calcium (0.5 mM) plus cadmium (100 μM) or magnesium (10 mM), and by low‐sodium solutions. An outward response was also generated after an inward current induced by the perfusion of the specific agonists for the ionotropic excitatory amino acid receptors NMDA, a‐amino‐3‐hydroxy‐5‐methyl‐4‐isoxazole (AMPA) and kainate. The PEAAR was not affected by tetrodotoxin (1 μM), saclofen (100–300 μM), bicuculline (30 μM), sulpiride (1 μM) or strychnine (1 μM). In addition, the inhibition of the ATP‐dependent Na+‐K+ pump by ouabain and strophanthidin (1–10 μM) prolonged the glutamate‐induced membrane depolarization/inward current while the subsequent PEAAR was reduced or not observed. Our data indicate that the PEAAR mainly results from the activation of a barium‐sensitive potassium current. This response might limit the excitatory and eventually neurotoxic effects of glutamate.
Regulation of Osmotic Stress-responsive Gene Expression by theLOS6/ABA1 Locus inArabidopsis *

Drought and high salinity induce the expression of many plant genes. To understand the signal transduction mechanisms underlying the activation of these genes, we carried out a genetic screen to isolate Arabidopsis mutants defective in osmotic stress-regulated gene induction. Here we report the isolation, characterization, and cloning of a mutation, los6, which diminished osmotic stress activation of a reporter gene. RNA blot analysis indicates that under osmotic stress the transcript levels for stress-responsive genes such as RD29A, COR15A,KIN1, COR47, RD19, andADH are lower in los6 plants than in wild type plants. los6 plants were found to have reduced phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) accumulation and to be allelic to the ABA-deficient mutant, aba1. LOS6/ABA1 encodes a zeaxanthin epoxidase that functions in ABA biosynthesis. Its expression is enhanced by osmotic stress. Furthermore, we found that there exists a positive feedback regulation by ABA on the expression of LOS6/ABA1, which may underscore a quick adaptation strategy for plants under osmotic stress. Similar positive regulation by ABA also exists for other ABA biosynthesis genes AAO3 and LOS5/ABA3 and in certain genetic backgrounds, NCED3. This feedback regulation by ABA is impaired in the ABA-insensitive mutantabi1 but not in abi2. Moreover, the up-regulation of LOS6/ABA1, LOS5/ABA3,AAO3, and NCED3 by osmotic stress is reduced substantially in ABA-deficient mutants. Transgenic plants overexpressing LOS6/ABA1 showed an increasedRD29A-LUC expression under osmotic stress. These results suggest that the level of gene induction by osmotic stress is dependent on the dosage of the zeaxanthin epoxidase enzyme.
HOW INFORMATION MANAGEMENT CAPABILITY INFLUENCES FIRM PERFORMANCE 1

How do information technology capabilities contribute to firm performance? This study develops a conceptual model linking IT-enabled information management capability with three important organizational capabilities (customer management capability, process management capability, and performance management capability). We argue that these three capabilities mediate the relationship between information management capability and firm performance. We use a rare archival data set from a conglomerate business group that had adopted a model of performance excellence for organizational transformation based on the Baldrige criteria. This data set contains actual scores from high quality assessments of firms and intraorganizational units of the conglomerate, and hence provides unobtrusive measures of the key constructs to validate our conceptual model.
Latvian Supercluster -lasc: Recent Developments

The solution of many problems in modern science and business requires the use of high performance computing (HPC). Traditionally such problems are addressed using supercomputers. However, recent tremendous increase in a speed of personal computers opens relatively cheap and scalable solution for HPC using cluster technologies. In this paper recent developments in the construction of the cluster system at the Institute of Solid State Physics (ISSP) of the Latvian University (LU) within the Latvian SuperCluster (LASC) project are reported. Two parallel programming technologies, installed on the LASC, are also discussed. The first one is the conventional message-passing interface (MPI), and the second one is the parametric execution system “Spider”, developed at ISSP LU. [
Detection of Sialic Acid-Utilising Bacteria in a Caecal Community Batch Culture Using RNA-Based Stable Isotope Probing

Sialic acids are monosaccharides typically found on cell surfaces and attached to soluble proteins, or as essential components of ganglioside structures that play a critical role in brain development and neural transmission. Human milk also contains sialic acid conjugated to oligosaccharides, glycolipids, and glycoproteins. These nutrients can reach the large bowel where they may be metabolised by the microbiota. However, little is known about the members of the microbiota involved in this function. To identify intestinal bacteria that utilise sialic acid within a complex intestinal community, we cultured the caecal microbiota from piglets in the presence of 13C-labelled sialic acid. Using RNA-based stable isotope probing, we identified bacteria that consumed 13C-sialic acid by fractionating total RNA in isopycnic buoyant density gradients followed by 16S rRNA gene analysis. Addition of sialic acid caused significant microbial community changes. A relative rise in Prevotella and Lactobacillus species was accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the genera Escherichia/Shigella, Ruminococcus and Eubacterium. Inspection of isotopically labelled RNA sequences suggests that the labelled sialic acid was consumed by a wide range of bacteria. However, species affiliated with the genus Prevotella were clearly identified as the most prolific users, as solely their RNA showed significantly higher relative shares among the most labelled RNA species. Given the relevance of sialic acid in nutrition, this study contributes to a better understanding of their microbial transformation in the intestinal tract with potential implications for human health.
Definition and symptoms of underactive bladder

Underactive bladder (UAB) is a symptom syndrome reflecting the urodynamic observation of detrusor underactivity (DU), a voiding contraction of reduced strength and/or duration, leading to prolonged or incomplete bladder emptying. An International Continence Society Working Group has described UAB as characterised by a slow urinary stream, hesitancy and straining to void, with or without a feeling of incomplete bladder emptying and dribbling, often with storage symptoms. Since DU often coexists with bladder outlet obstruction, or storage dysfunction (detrusor overactivity or incontinence), the exact contribution of the DU to the presenting complaints can be difficult to establish. The presence of voiding and post voiding lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) is implicitly expected in UAB, but a reduced sensation of fullness is reported by some patients, and storage LUTS are also an important factor in many affected patients. These may result from a postvoid residual, but often they do not. The storage LUTS are often the key driver in leading the patient to seek healthcare input. Nocturia is particularly common and bothersome, but what the role of DU is in all the range of influences on nocturia has not been established. Qualitative research has established a broad impact on everyday life as a result of these symptoms. In general, people appear to manage the voiding LUTS relatively well, but the storage LUTS may be problematic.
Reusing traces in a dynamic conditional execution architecture

The cost of control and data dependences in superscalar processors is still an open issue, for what no definitive solution was yet found. Moreover, the cost of branch mispredictions is getting worse due to the increasing number of pipeline stages. The dynamic conditional execution (DCE) is a new approach to address this problem. The basic idea is to fetch and execute all paths produced by a branch that obey certain restrictions regarding complexity and size. As a consequence, a smaller number of predictions is performed, and therefore, a smaller number of branches is mispredicted. Although the execution of multiple paths of certain branches allows for a reduction in branch misprediction penalties, it implies on an increase in the number of executed instructions. Thus, an alternative to reduce the overhead created by DCE pipeline is to reuse previously executed values, freeing up resources for more useful instructions. The goal of this work is to analyze the impact of value reuse in DCE architecture. As it is presented, this effectively reduces the overhead produced by the architecture, increasing the overall performance. This paper shows that, in some cases, the speedup gain exceeds 60% over the original DCE architecture.
Dielectric properties of carbon-nanotube/amino-functionalized poly(arylene ether ketone) composites

Novel a-MWNTs/NH2PAEKK nanocomposite, with a high dielectric constant, low dielectric loss and high breakdown field, were prepared to use a solution blending technique. The uniform dispersion of a-MWNTs in the NH2PAEKK matrix was realized. The dielectric constant of percolating nanocomposites (the a-MWNTs volume fraction of 0.09) was as high as 60 at 103 Hz, it was about 20 times larger than the dielectric constant of NH2PAEKK, and the breakdown field was near 41.4 MV m−1. For f a - MWNTs < f c , the dielectric loss of a-MWNTs/NH2PAEKK nanocomposite was always less than 1. The nanocomposites had tensile strength of 69.2 MPa and tensile modulus of 3.0 GPa.
Optimum Statistical Estimation with Strategic Data Sources

We propose an optimum mechanism for providing monetary incentives to the data sources of a statistical estimator such as linear regression, so that high quality data is provided at low cost, in the sense that the sum of payments and estimation error is minimized. The mechanism applies to a broad range of estimators, including linear and polynomial regression, kernel regression, and, under some additional assumptions, ridge regression. It also generalizes to several objectives, including minimizing estimation error subject to budget constraints. Besides our concrete results for regression problems, we contribute a mechanism design framework through which to design and analyze statistical estimators whose examples are supplied by workers with cost for labeling said examples.
SCORE: A COMPILER REPRESENTATION FOR HETEROGENEOUS SYSTEMS

Heterogeneous parallel systems incorporate different models of parallelism within a single machine or across machines and are well suited for many diverse applications [1, 2, 3]. These systems offer a wealth of underutilized resources for achieving high performance, but are more difficult to program than homogeneous systems. Compilers can and should assist in handling this complexity. Previous research has not considered the impact of architectural heterogeneity on the compiler structure [4]. A compiler for heterogeneous systems needs to order transformations based on component architectures, represent diverse architectural features, allow extension to cover new machines, and reuse its transformations and intermediate representation (IR) to target different architectures. A compiler’s IR plays a central role in supporting these capabilities. This paper discusses each of these implications in detail and presents an intermediate representation, Score, that meets the needs of heterogeneity. In addition to incorporating nodes to represent a variety of architectural features, Score supports a new bi-level representation of important language constructs and employs a novel approach to defining the interface between transformations and IR nodes.
A Simple Analytical Model for Ad Hoc Networks with Cooperative Nodes

A crucial issue of civilian applications of ad-hoc networks is cooperation of nodes. More precisely, each node has its own authority and may try to maximize the benefits it gets from the network without participating to its services (e.g. without forwarding packets of other nodes). To conquer with this problem, a virtual currency, namely nuglet (Buttyan and Hubaux, 2003), is used to provide an incentive for cooperation by having a node to send its traffic at a given cost, while allowing it to profit every time it forwards others' traffic. Several papers have shown that such a model encourages individual node cooperation. In this paper, we consider a network whose nodes use nuglets except that when a node empties out of nuglets, as a penalty and to enforce more cooperation, it can not forward its own traffic again until forwarding K packets of other nodes. Once the node begins to send its own packets, it proceeds normally until the node becomes empty again. We develop a Markov model of the network to evaluate the system performance in terms of network capacity, data generation delay and the probability that a node empties out of nuglets. We use these performance parameters to show that how the proposed scheme encourages nodes to cooperate with the network. We also show the trade-off between increasing node cooperation and data generation delay and analyze it by defining a total cost function due to non-cooperative behavior and data generation delay. At last, a comparison between our scheme and the scheme proposed in the work by Buttyan and Hubaux (2003), as the most well-known protocol in node cooperation schemes, is presented.
Blockiness detection in compressed data

A novel frequency domain technique for image blocking artifact detection is presented. The algorithm detects the regions of the image which present visible blocking artifacts. This detection is performed in the frequency domain and uses the estimated relative quantization error calculated when the DCT coefficients are modeled by a Laplacian probability function. Experimental results illustrating the performance of the proposed method are presented and evaluated.
Economic Outcomes and Political Support for British Governments among Occupational Classes: A Dynamic Analysis

The first section of the article establishes the political salience of macroeconomic issues to the British electorate, reviews the distributional consequences of macroeconomic outcomes, and suggests that unemployment outcomes in particular have strong class-related distributional effects. The second part presents a dynamic model of how rational voters evaluate the governing party, based on the idea that voters evaluate the cumulative performance of the governing party relative to the prior performance of the current opposition. Since the present relevance of prior outcomes decays over time, voters weight current performance more heavily than past performance informing contemporaneous political judgments. The empirical analyses in the third section include measures of nominal economic performance (inflation and exchange rate movements) and real economic performance (unemployment and real income fluctuations). The regression results indicate that the responses of political support among the occupational classes to macroeconomic changes are sizeable, and that the cross-class variations are consistent with the distributional consequences reviewed at the beginning of the article. The concluding section develops the electoral implications of the empirical results and presents a novel interpretation of trends in class-related political support for the parties. The evidence shows that the argument that there has been a persistent decline of class-based political alignments in Britain is erroneous.
Iron reduction and sustained response to interferon-α therapy in patients with chronic hepatitis C: results of an Italian multicenter randomized study

OBJECTIVES:It has been suggested that iron depletion improves the response to interferon in patients with chronic hepatitis C. We aimed to evaluate whether iron reduction by phlebotomy before interferon improves the rate of virological sustained response in previously untreated noncirrhotic patients.METHODS:One hundred fourteen hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA positive patients with hepatic iron concentrations of ≥700 μg/g dry wt (men) and ≥500 μg/g dry wt (women), stratified according to HCV genotype and γ-glutamyltransferase values, were randomly allocated to interferon alone (6 MU three times a week) (group A) or to phlebotomy until iron depletion followed by interferon (6 MU three times a week) (group B). After 4 months dosage was reduced to 3 MU three times a week for another 8 months.RESULTS:Virological sustained response was observed in 25 patients (22%), nine (15.8%, 95% CI = 7.5–27.9) of group A and 16 (28.1%, 95% CI = 17.0–41.6) of group B. At univariate analysis the variables associated with the response were HCV genotypes 2–3, normal γ-glutamyltransferase, higher levels of baseline ALT, normal ALT values, and negativity for HCV-RNA at the 3rd month of therapy. At multivariate analysis, genotype and ALT levels at enrollment maintained their association with the response. A trend toward a better response to interferon was observed in patients who received phlebotomy (odds ratio = 2.32, 95% CI = 0.96–6.24, p = 0.082). Patients with hepatic iron concentration of ≤1100 μg/g dry wt had a trend toward a higher rate of virological sustained response (p = 0.059) when submitted to treatment B.CONCLUSION:Iron removal by phlebotomy is able to improve the rate of response to interferon, especially in patients with lower hepatic iron deposits; it could be useful as adjuvant therapy to new therapeutic modalities.
Coronary Artery Disease in Peripheral Vascular Patients: A Classification of 1000 Coronary Angiograms and Results of Surgical Management

In an attempt to reduce early and late mortality caused by myo-cardial infarction, coronary angiography was performed in 1000 patients (mean age, 64 years) under consideration for elective peripheral vascular reconstruction since 1978. Those found to have severe, surgically correctable coronary artery disease (CAD) were advised to undergo myocardial revascularization (CABG), usually preceding other vascular procedures. The primary vascular diagnosis was abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) in 263 patients (mean age, 67 years), cerebrovascular disease (CVD) in 295 (mean age, 64 years), and lower extremity ischemia (ASO) in 381 (mean age, 61 years). Severe correctable CAD was identified in 25% of the entire series (AAA, 31%; CVD, 26%; and ASO, 21%). Surgical CAD was documented in 34% of patients suspected to have CAD by clinical criteria (AAA, 44%; CVD, 33%; and ASO, 30%) and in 14% of those without previous indications of CAD (AAA, 18%; CVD, 17%; and ASO, 8%). Cardiac procedures (216 CABG) were performed in 226 patients (AAA, 30%; CVD, 22%; and ASO, 19%), with 12 (5.3%) postoperative deaths. A total of 796 patients underwent 1066 peripheral vascular operations with an early mortality of 2.0% (AAA, 3.4%; ASO, 1.9%; and CVD, 0.3%), but only one death (0.8%) occurred in the group of 130 patients having preliminary CABG. The overall operative mortality for 1292 cardiac and peripheral vascular procedures was 2.6%.