Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coincident postsynaptic activity gates presynaptic dopamine release to induce plasticity in Drosophila mushroom bodies

Simultaneous stimulation of the antennal lobes (ALs) and the ascending fibers of the ventral nerve cord (AFV), two sensory inputs to the mushroom bodies (MBs), induces long-term enhancement (LTE) of subsequent AL-evoked MB responses. LTE induction requires activation of at least three signaling pathways to the MBs, mediated by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), NMDA receptors (NRs), and D1 dopamine receptors (D1Rs). Here, we demonstrate that inputs from the AL are transmitted to the MBs through nAChRs, and inputs from the AFV are transmitted by NRs. Dopamine signaling occurs downstream of both nAChR and NR activation, and requires simultaneous stimulation of both pathways. Dopamine release requires the activity of the rutabaga adenylyl cyclase in postsynaptic MB neurons, and release is restricted to MB neurons that receive coincident stimulation. Our results indicate that postsynaptic activity can gate presynaptic dopamine release to regulate plasticity. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.21076. 001
St. Petersburg Paradoxes in Performance Analysis of Adaptive Wireless Systems

In this paper we present an adaptive transmission scheme that leads to a surprising situation in analysis of a mathematical model of wireless communications. Namely, the average received energy tends to infinity despite the fact that the average transmitted energy and the representative energy gain of the channel are finite. Yet, it is reasonable to postulate that such a scheme should not be used in any practical wireless system. This anomaly is commonly referred to as St. Petersburg paradox. We discuss possible reasons for the St. Petersburg paradox to occur in analysis of wireless systems and how it can be resolved using suitable performance metrics and fading models. For example, the paradox is resolved by optimizing some performance metric which is either bounded or concave function of the received signal-to-noise ratio. The analysis of St. Petersburg paradox brings new intuition to the normalization of fading channels and optimization of wireless systems.
Are Software Companies Aware of UX?

The efforts of addressing user experience (UX) in product development keeps growing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of workshops and conferences bringing together academics and practitioners, who aim at creating interactive software able to satisfy their users. Unfortunately, human-centred design and methods addressing usability and UX are always mentioned in research papers but yet very seldom applied in the current practice of software development in industry. In this paper, some findings of studies we have recently performed with software companies are reported. They show that either companies still neglect usability and UX, or they do not properly address them. Thus, in this workshop that seems to consider UX evaluation as a usual practice and aims to optimize the impact of UX evaluation feedback on software development, our provocative statement is: Are software companies (at least) aware of UX? The studies summarized in this paper show that, in many cases, the answer is NO. We are working to overcome the current situation and the paper concludes by providing some suggestions to fill the gap between research and practice of UX.
The K‐Opioid Agonist, U‐69593, Decreases Acute Amphetamine‐Evoked Behaviors and Calcium‐Dependent Dialysate Levels of Dopamine and Glutamate in the Ventral Striatum

Abstract : The effect of a k‐opioid receptor agonist on acute amphetamine‐induced behavioral activation and dialysate levels of dopamine and glutamate in the ventral striatum were investigated. Amphetamine (2.5 mg/kg i.p.) evoked a substantial increase in rearing, sniffing, and hole‐poking behavior as well as dopamine and glutamate levels in the ventral striatum of awake rats. U‐69593 (0.32 mg/kg s.c.) significantly decreased the amphetamine‐evoked increase in behavior and dopamine and glutamate levels in the ventral striatum. Reverse dialysis of the selective k‐opioid receptor antagonist, nor‐binaltorphimine, into the ventral striatum antagonized the effects of U‐69593 on amphetamine‐induced behavior and dopamine and glutamate levels. Reverse dialysis of low calcium (0.1 mM) into the ventral striatum decreased basal dopamine, but not glutamate, dialysate levels by 91% 45 min after initiation of perfusion. Strikingly, 0.1 mM calcium perfusion significantly reduced the 2.5 mg/kg amphetamine‐evoked increase in dopamine and glutamate levels in the ventral striatum, distinguishing a calcium‐dependent and a calcium‐independent component of release. U‐69593 did not alter the calcium‐independent component of amphetamine‐evoked dopamine and glutamate levels. These data are consistent with the view that a transsynaptic mechanism augments the increase in dopamine and glutamate levels in the ventral striatum evoked by a moderately high dose of amphetamine and that stimulation of k‐opioid receptors suppresses the calcium‐dependent component of amphetamine’s effects.
TAp63alpha Induced Apoptosis Inhibited by Kaposi's Sarcoma Herpesvirus Latency Nuclear Antigen

Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) infects a variety of human cells including cells of epithelial, mesenchymal and endothelial origin. The latency associated nuclear antigen (LANA) of this virus regulates the transcription of a number of viral and cellular genes essential for the survival of the virus in the host cell. TAp63α can induce apoptosis in stressed cells by upregulating various death receptors and loss of mitochondrial membrane potential. The present study demonstrates that LANA inhibits TAp63α-mediated apoptosis by a direct interaction with each other. This interaction also results in a reduction in loss of mitochondrial membrane potential caused by TAp63α. Therefore the present study indicates a possible mechanism of KSHV-infected cells to escape apoptosis and facilitate survival.
Formaldehyde in the Tropical Western Pacific: Chemical Sources and Sinks, Convective Transport, and Representation in CAM‐Chem and the CCMI Models

Formaldehyde (HCHO) directly affects the atmospheric oxidative capacity through its effects on HOx. In remote marine environments, such as the tropical western Pacific (TWP), it is particularly important to understand the processes controlling the abundance of HCHO because model output from these regions is used to correct satellite retrievals of HCHO. Here we have used observations from the Convective Transport of Active Species in the Tropics (CONTRAST) field campaign, conducted during January and February 2014, to evaluate our understanding of the processes controlling the distribution of HCHO in the TWP as well as its representation in chemical transport/climate models. Observed HCHO mixing ratios varied from ~500 parts per trillion by volume (pptv) near the surface to ~75 pptv in the upper troposphere. Recent convective transport of near surface HCHO and its precursors, acetaldehyde and possibly methyl hydroperoxide, increased upper tropospheric HCHO mixing ratios by ~33% (22 pptv); this air contained roughly 60% less NO than more aged air. Output from the CAM‐Chem chemistry transport model (2014 meteorology) as well as nine chemistry climate models from the Chemistry‐Climate Model Initiative (free‐running meteorology) are found to uniformly underestimate HCHO columns derived from in situ observations by between 4 and 50%. This underestimate of HCHO likely results from a near factor of two underestimate of NO in most models, which strongly suggests errors in NOx emissions inventories and/or in the model chemical mechanisms. Likewise, the lack of oceanic acetaldehyde emissions and potential errors in the model acetaldehyde chemistry lead to additional underestimates in modeled HCHO of up to 75 pptv (~15%) in the lower troposphere.
Towards a more efficient static software change impact analysis method

Impact analysis methods are commonly employed to reduce the likelihood of encountering faulty or unexpected behavior from a software program as a result of developers' oblivious modifications. In this paper, we propose a static impact analysis technique that creates clusters of closely associated software program files based on their co-modification history in the software repository. The proposed method benefits from dimensionality reduction techniques to reduce the complexity of the collected information and perform the impact analysis process faster. The method has been tested on four different open source project repositories, namely Firefox, Firebird, Thunderbird, and FileZilla. The results of the impact analysis method performance in terms of precision (impact set identification accuracy) and execution time cost have been reported in this paper. The proposed method shows promising behavior when used with several specific clustering techniques such as DBscan and X-Means.
Securing the cloud with reconfigurable computing: An FPGA accelerator for homomorphic encryption

A hot topic in current cloud security research, homomorphic encryption is a recently introduced technique allowing computation to take place on encrypted data. This work presents the architecture and implementation of a dedicated FPGA-based accelerator addressing the prohibitive computing demand of homomorphic encryption. In particular, the accelerator targets the most time consuming operation used by the encryption primitive, large integer multiplication. Based on an Altera's Stratix V FPGA platform, the prototype implementation achieves significant improvements in terms of execution time - under a comparable hardware cost- against alternative solutions previously presented in the technical literature.
CONSTANT GROUP VELOCITY ULTRASONIC GUIDED WAVE INSPECTION FOR CORROSION AND EROSION MONITORING IN PIPES

This paper describes a novel ultrasonic guided wave inspection technique for the monitoring of internal corrosion and erosion in pipes, which exploits the fundamental flexural mode to measure the average wall thickness over the inspection path. The inspection frequency is chosen so that the group velocity of the fundamental flexural mode is essentially constant throughout the wall thickness range of interest, while the phase velocity is highly dispersive and changes in a systematic way with varying wall thickness in the pipe. Although this approach is somewhat less accurate than the often used transverse resonance methods, it smoothly integrates the wall thickness over the whole propagation length, therefore it is very robust and can tolerate large and uneven thickness variations from point to point. The constant group velocity (CGV) method is capable of monitoring the true average of the wall thickness over the inspection length with an accuracy of 1% even in the presence of one order of magnitude larger.
MICROPAYMENTS: AN ALTERNATIVE TO ONLINE PAYMENTS BY CREDIT CARDS

Online payments are usually carried out with credit cards because they are the most convenient to use and web sites that do not accept credit cards risk losing their customers. However, there are many problems with credit cards. For example, potential customers might not have credit cards or, for security reasons, might not want to disclose credit card details online. In addition, credit cards are not suitable for small value purchases due to high overhead cost to sellers. This paper presents the concept and advantages of an online payment system known as “Micropayment”. A model named “NEZcard”, developed from a field survey, is proposed. The NEZcard model takes into account factors such as convenience, anonymity, security, and continuity of use.
Extraction of Target User Group from Web Usage Data Using Evolutionary Biclustering Approach

Data mining extracts hidden information from a database that the user did not know existed. Biclustering is one of the data mining technique which helps marketing user to target marketing campaigns more accurately and to align campaigns more closely with the needs, wants, and attitudes of customers and prospects. The biclustering results can be tuned to find users' browsing patterns relevant to current business problems. This paper presents a new application of biclustering to web usage data using a combination of heuristics and meta-heuristics algorithms. Two-way K-means clustering is used to generate the seeds from preprocessed web usage data, Greedy Heuristic is used iteratively to refine a set of seeds, which is fast but often yield local optimal solutions. In this paper, Genetic Algorithm is used as a global optimizer that can be coupled with greedy method to identify the global optimal target user groups based on their coherent browsing pattern. The performance of the proposed work is evaluated by conducting experiment on the msnbc, a clickstream dataset from UCI repository. Results show that the proposed work performs well in extracting optimal target users groups from the web usage data which can be used for focalized marketing campaigns.
The Crisis in Antibiotic Resistance

The synthesis of large numbers of antibiotics over the past three decades has caused complacency about the threat of bacterial resistance. Bacteria have become resistant to antimicrobial agents as a result of chromosomal changes or the exchange of genetic material via plasmids and transposons. Streptococcus pneumoniae, Streptococcus pyogenes, and staphylococci, organisms that cause respiratory and cutaneous infections, and members of the Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas families, organisms that cause diarrhea, urinary infection, and sepsis, are now resistant to virtually all of the older antibiotics. The extensive use of antibiotics in the community and hospitals has fueled this crisis. Mechanisms such as antibiotic control programs, better hygiene, and synthesis of agents with improved antimicrobial activity need to be adopted in order to limit bacterial resistance.
STAT5b, a Mediator of Synergism between c-Src and the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor*

Overexpression of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and its association with the tyrosine kinase, c-Src, is correlated with increased cellular proliferation and tumorigenesis. Previous studies have shown that EGFR and c-Src co-overexpression and association leads to the c-Src-mediated phosphorylation of tyrosine 845 of the EGFR and that mutation of Tyr845 ablates epidermal growth factor (EGF)-induced DNA synthesis. Here, we investigate the contribution of the signal transducers and activators of transcription (STAT5b) in the signaling pathways regulated by EGFR and c-Src overexpression in human breast tumor cell lines as well as in a mouse fibroblast model (C3H10T1/2). We demonstrate that 1) activation of STAT5b by EGF requires overexpression of the EGFR, 2) co-overexpression of c-Src alone does not result in EGF-induced activation of STAT5b but enhances that seen in EGFR-overexpressing cells, and 3) EGF-induced tyrosine phosphorylation of STAT5b requires Tyr845 of the EGFR. Furthermore, the stable overexpression of a kinase-defective c-Src in the context of EGFR overexpression results in a decrease in the tyrosine phosphorylation of STAT5b in response to EGF and a more dramatic decrease in EGF-induced transcriptional activation of STAT5b, suggesting an integral role for c-Src in the physiological actions of STAT5b. Using a dominant negative STAT5b, we provide evidence that one such physiological action is to mediate EGF-induced DNA-synthesis. Finally, the use of site-specific tyrosine mutants demonstrates that EGF-induced phosphorylation of STAT5b involves not only tyrosine 699 of STAT5b, which is required for its transcriptional activation, but also three previously identified tyrosines in the C terminus of STAT5b (Tyr725/Tyr740/Tyr743).
Embedded Forward Error Control Technique (EFECT) for Low-Rate Real-Time Communications

In order to alleviate development cost, many application-oriented wireless networks make use of the off-the- shelf wireless standards such as the Bluetooth, IEEE802.15. 4 (Zigbee), and IEEE802.11, which are originally developed for personal area networks (PAN) and local area networks (LAN). Examples of such applications are medical monitoring and control. These applications do not require data rates as high as these standards, but instead they require higher reliability with lower latency. As a means to meet such requirements based on these standards, we propose an efficient error control technique named Embedded Forward Error Control Technique (EFECT). This technique enables an additional forward error correction to the existing standards without any additional costs. Some design guidelines based on Reed-Solomon (RS) codes and sphere packing bound are proposed and, as a specific example, achievable gains by applying the EFECT are studied for the Bluetooth standard.
The Spoken Web Search Task at MediaEval 2011

In this paper, we describe the “Spoken Web Search” Task, which was held as part of the 2011 MediaEval benchmark campaign. The purpose of this task was to perform audio search with audio input in four languages, with very few resources being available in each language. The data was taken from “spoken web” material collected over mobile phone connections by IBM India. We present results from several independent systems, developed by five teams and using different approaches, compare them, and provide analysis and directions for future research.
Large-Scale Duplicate Detection for Web Image Search

Finding visually identical images in large image collections is important for many applications such as intelligence propriety protection and search result presentation. Several algorithms have been reported in the literature, but they are not suitable for large image collections. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to handle the situation, in which each image is compactly represented by a hash code. To detect duplicate images, only the hash codes are required. In addition, a very efficient search method is implemented to quickly group images with similar hash codes for fast detection. The experiments show that our algorithm can be both efficient and effective for duplicate detection in Web image search
Laser-Assisted Biomimetic Process for Calcium Phosphate Coating on a Hydroxyapatite Ceramic

The present authors recently developed a new calcium phosphate (CaP) coating technique on an ethylene-vinyl alcohol copolymer substrate utilizing a laser-assisted biomimetic (LAB) process. In the present study, the LAB process was applied to a sintered hydroxyapatite (sHA) substrate for CaP coating. The LAB process was carried out by irradiating the sHA substrate immersed in a supersaturated CaP solution with a low-energy Nd-YAG pulsed laser. Within 30 min of irradiation, contiuous CaP layers with different morphologies were successfully formed on the laser-irradiated sHA surface. A submicron cavernous structure of the CaP layer was developed into a micron flake-like structure as the laser power increased from 1 to 3 W. This result suggests that the secondary nucleation and growth of CaP crystals were accelerated by laser irradiation in a power-dependent manner. Laser absorption by the sHA substrate and the resulting increase in ambient temperature locally near the surface should be responsible for the accelerated CaP nucleation and growth. The present CaP coating technique using the LAB process is simple and quick, hence it would be useful in orthopedic and dental applications as an on-demand surface-functionalization method for biomaterials consisting of sHA.
Collagen-Based Scaffolds for Cell Therapies in the Injured Brain

Current therapies for treating brain injuries, including stroke and traumatic brain injury, are designed to modify symptoms pharmacologically but do not promote full structural and functional regeneration of the brain. Integrating the merits of cell, biomaterials scaffolds and pharmaceutical therapies, biodegradable scaffold-facilitated cell therapy is a promising multifaceted approach to modify the local injury environment, and also to promote transplanted cell replacement and endogenous regeneration mechanisms. Collagen is an attractive candidate for providing a temporary supportive matrix for cell and drug delivery to the brain. With good biocompatibility, design flexibility and biomimetic properties of the natural extracellular matrix, collagen-based cell transplantation has demonstrated therapeutic potentials in preclinical studies of brain injury. In this review, we will discuss the properties and design considerations of collagen-based scaffolds for brain tissue engineering. Also, the current developments of collagen-based scaffolds in conveying different sources of cells, such as mesenchymal stem cells, neural stem/progenitor cells, embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells and derivatives to the brain will be illustrated. Advanced understanding in the interactions between collagen, cells and the local injury environment has greatly expanded the potential of these biomimetic systems to repair and regeneration the brain.
The empirical mode decomposition and the Hilbert spectrum for nonlinear and non-stationary time series analysis

A new method for analysing nonlinear and non-stationary data has been developed. The key part of the method is the ‘empirical mode decomposition’ method with which any complicated data set can be decomposed into a finite and often small number of ‘intrinsic mode functions’ that admit well-behaved Hilbert transforms. This decomposition method is adaptive, and, therefore, highly efficient. Since the decomposition is based on the local characteristic time scale of the data, it is applicable to nonlinear and non-stationary processes. With the Hilbert transform, the ‘instrinic mode functions’ yield instantaneous frequencies as functions of time that give sharp identifications of imbedded structures. The final presentation of the results is an energy-frequency-time distribution, designated as the Hilbert spectrum. In this method, the main conceptual innovations are the introduction of ‘intrinsic mode functions’ based on local properties of the signal, which make the instantaneous frequency meaningful; and the introduction of the instantaneous frequencies for complicated data sets, which eliminate the need for spurious harmonics to represent nonlinear and non-stationary signals. Examples from the numerical results of the classical nonlinear equation systems and data representing natural phenomena are given to demonstrate the power of this new method. Classical nonlinear system data are especially interesting, for they serve to illustrate the roles played by the nonlinear and non-stationary effects in the energy-frequency-time distribution.
Cure and Rheological Analysis of Reinforced Resins for Stereolithography

The rising of consumers’ demands and an ever increasing pressure of international markets imposed a deep change in the product development process to respond to an increasing product complexity and higher quality, as well to the need to promptly introduce products into the market. Stereolithography plays an important role on this new product development context. This technology produces models for thermosetting resins through a polymerisation process that transforms liquid resins into solid materials. In this work, a new route to produce metallic parts through stereolithography is explored. The curing analysis of hybrid reinforced polymeric systems, polymerised through radicalar or/and cationic mechanisms, is investigated. The rheological behaviour of these polymeric systems is also evaluated due to its importance for recoating. The influence of other processing and material characteristics like light intensity, initiator concentration, low powder size of metallic powders, degree of dilution, etc. is also investigated.