Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Operation transforms for a distributed shared spreadsheet

The Distributed Operation Dansform (dOPT), pr~ posed by Efi and Gibbs, is used to dfie concurrently updatable shared objects. Eh and Gibbs give the OP eration tr~orrus that d&e a simple shared text editor supporting single chmacter insertions and deletions on a hear btim. We report here on the construction of operation transforms for a more sophisticated group nwe appficatiou a shared spreadsheet. We identify a set of abstract operations that &aracterize the operations on a spreadsheet. Using Cormack’s Cdtius for Concurrent Update, which extends and corrects dOPT, m’egive the tr~forms on these operations necessary to d~e a shared spreadsheet. ~re use the transforms to btid a shared version of SC, the Unix spreadsheet due to Goshg.
Experimental evaluation of guidance and forbidden region virtual fixtures for object telemanipulation

Telerobotic task performance cannot compare to direct object manipulation with the hands. However, the computer in-the-loop offers the potential to give assistance to a human operator. The present work studies a class of computer assistance functions known as haptic virtual fixtures (VF). The objective is to use practical human trials to discover the ways VFs impact task execution.
An Augmented Fast Marching Method for Computing Skeletons and Centerlines

We present a simple and robust method for computing skeletons for arbitrary planar objects and centerlines for 3D objects. We augment the Fast Marching Method (FMM) widely used in level set applications by computing the paramterized boundary location every pixel came from during the boundary evolution. The resulting parameter field is then thresholded to produce the skeleton branches created by boundary features of a given size. The presented algorithm is straightforward to implement, has low memory costs and short execution times, and is robust with respect to the used threshold and initial shape noisiness. The produced skeletons are very similar to the ones delivered by more complex algorithms. Various 2D and 3D applications are presented.
3D-Printed Scaffolds and Biomaterials: Review of Alveolar Bone Augmentation and Periodontal Regeneration Applications

To ensure a successful dental implant therapy, the presence of adequate vertical and horizontal alveolar bone is fundamental. However, an insufficient amount of alveolar ridge in both dimensions is often encountered in dental practice due to the consequences of oral diseases and tooth loss. Although postextraction socket preservation has been adopted to lessen the need for such invasive approaches, it utilizes bone grafting materials, which have limitations that could negatively affect the quality of bone formation. To overcome the drawbacks of routinely employed grafting materials, bone graft substitutes such as 3D scaffolds have been recently investigated in the dental field. In this review, we highlight different biomaterials suitable for 3D scaffold fabrication, with a focus on “3D-printed” ones as bone graft substitutes that might be convenient for various applications related to implant therapy. We also briefly discuss their possible adoption for periodontal regeneration.
In vivo cooperation between Bcl‐xL and the phosphoinositide 3‐kinase‐Akt signaling pathway for the protection of epidermal keratinocytes from apoptosis

To investigate the function of Bcl‐xL in the skin, we established keratinocyte‐specific Bcl‐x gene‐targeted mice under the keratin 5 promoter (K5). K5.Bcl‐xL– / – mice were viable, devoid of alteration in the development of skin or appendages. However, they harbored spontaneous apoptotic keratinocytes in the epidermis. Bcl‐xL‐deficient keratinocytes cultured in vitro readily underwent apoptosis in the absence of growth factors, but the addition of HGF or EGF resulted in restoration of cell survival, which was reversed by treatment with wortmannin, an inhibitor of phosphoinositide‐3 kinase (PI3K). Topical treatment of K5.Bcl‐xL− / − mice with wortmannin sensitized the skin for apoptosis induced by UV (UV) B, although wild‐type epidermis was only marginally affected by this treatment, suggesting that the resistance to UVB largely depended on PI3K‐Akt signaling in Bcl‐xL‐deficient mice but not in wild‐type mice. Furthermore, UVB irradiation resulted in redistribution of phosphorylated Akt from the basal layer to the suprabasal layer, indicating that Akt could spatially cooperate with Bcl‐xL upon UVB exposure in the upper epidermis where Bcl‐xL is normally localized. These results suggest that Bcl‐xL and the PI3K‐Akt pathway form a cooperative, intercompensatory axis for the protection of epidermal keratinocytes from apoptosis in vivo.
Symmetry Breaking and Establishment of Dorsal/Ventral Polarity in the Early Sea Urchin Embryo

The mechanisms imposing the Dorsal/Ventral (DV) polarity of the early sea urchin embryo consist of a combination of inherited maternal information and inductive interactions among blastomeres. Old and recent studies suggest that a key molecular landmark of DV polarization is the expression of nodal on the future ventral side, in apparent contrast with other metazoan embryos, where nodal is expressed dorsally. A subtle maternally-inherited redox anisotropy, plus some maternal factors such as SoxB1, Univin, and p38-MAPK have been identified as inputs driving the spatially asymmetric transcription of nodal. However, all the mentioned factors are broadly distributed in the embryo as early as nodal transcription occurs, suggesting that repression of the gene in non-ventral territories depends upon negative regulators. Among these, the Hbox12 homeodomain-containing repressor is expressed by prospective dorsal cells, where it acts as a dorsal-specific negative modulator of the p38-MAPK activity. This review provides an overview of the molecular mechanisms governing the establishment of DV polarity in sea urchins, focusing on events taking place in the early embryo. Altogether, these findings provide a framework for future studies aimed to unravel the inceptive mechanisms involved in the DV symmetry breaking.
Noise Provides New Insights on Contrast Sensitivity Function

Sensitivity to luminance difference, or contrast sensitivity, is critical for animals to survive in and interact with the external world. The contrast sensitivity function (CSF), which measures visual sensitivity to spatial patterns over a wide range of spatial frequencies, provides a comprehensive characterization of the visual system. Despite its popularity and significance in both basic research and clinical practice, it hasn’t been clear what determines the CSF and how the factors underlying the CSF change in different conditions. In the current study, we applied the external noise method and perceptual template model to a wide range of external noise and spatial frequency (SF) conditions, and evaluated how the various sources of observer inefficiency changed with SF and determined the limiting factors underlying the CSF. We found that only internal additive noise and template gain changed significantly with SF, while the transducer non-linearity and coefficient for multiplicative noise were constant. The 12-parameter model provided a very good account of all the data in the 200 tested conditions (86.5%, 86.2%, 89.5%, and 96.4% for the four subjects, respectively). Our results suggest a re-consideration of the popular spatial vision model that employs the CSF as the front-end filter and constant internal additive noise across spatial frequencies. The study will also be of interest to scientists and clinicians engaged in characterizing spatial vision deficits and/or developing rehabilitation methods to restore spatial vision in clinical populations.
Soft margin estimation of hidden Markov model parameters

We propose a new discriminative learning framework, called soft margin estimation (SME), for estimating parameters of continuous density hidden Markov models. The proposed method makes direct usage of the successful ideas of soft margin in support vector machines to improve generalization capability, and of decision feedback learning in minimum classification error training to enhance model separation in classifier design. We attempt to incorporate frame selection, utterance selection and discriminative separation in a single unified objective function that can be optimized with the wellknown generalized probabilistic descent algorithm. We demonstrate the advantage of SME in theory and practice over other state-of-the-art techniques. Tested on a connected digit recognition task, the proposed SME approach achieves a string accuracy of 99.33%. To our knowledge, this is the best result ever reported on the TIDIGITS database.
Augmented effect of early antibiotic treatment in mice with experimental lung infections due to sequentially adapted mucoid strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

BACKGROUND Effects of treatment with tobramycin initiated 1 or 24 h post-infection were investigated in a new version of a pulmonary infection model in mice. The model reflects the differentiated behaviour of Pseudomonas aeruginosa mucoid strains isolated from the lungs of one chronically infected cystic fibrosis (CF) patient at different time periods during chronic lung infection. METHODS BALB/c mice were challenged with alginate-embedded mucoid clinical isolates isolated in 1988, 1997 or 2003. Mice were euthanized on day 1, 2 or 3 post-infection for estimation of quantitative bacteriology, histopathology, and measurement of granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) and macrophage inflammatory protein 2 (MIP-2). RESULTS There was a significant reduction of bacteria when comparing treatment initiated 1 h post-infection with treatment initiated after 24 h for isolates 1997 and 2003. Treatment initiated 1 h post-infection also resulted in a reduction of the pulmonary cytokines G-CSF, for all three isolates, and MIP-2, for isolates 1997 and 2003. Histological evaluation showed a shift from the acute-type inflammatory immune response to a chronic-type in mice infected with isolate 2003. CONCLUSIONS A significant reduction in the number of bacteria was observed when initiating treatment 1 h post-infection compared with initiating treatment after 24 h, although the latest isolate avoided complete clearance. Early antibiotic treatment directed at the mucoid phenotype in mice also reduced the inflammation and, thereby, the lung tissue damage.
Microstrip tunable bandpass filter with dielectric superstrate for UHF-RFID application

This paper presents the microstrip tunable bandpass filter by using the perturbation of the dielectric superstrate. The proposed filter is the coupler line bandpass filter with the dielectric superstrate. It is operated in the frequency of 860 MHz to 960 MHz with a good matching of |S11| less than -10 dB. It can be tuned the frequency band by move the superstrate. From simulated and measured results, it is found that the proposed filter can be tune the operating passband continuously with |S11| less than -10 dB and low insertion loss. It is effectively use in the UHF-RFID application.
Fast-on*: an Extended Algorithm for Graph Isomorphism Problem and Graph Query Processing

Graphs are widely used to model complicated data semantics in many applications. In our paper [8], we proposed Fast-ON, an efficient algorithm for subgraph isomorphism problem. In this paper, we develop an efficient algorithm called Fast-ON* that extends Fast-ON to handle two other problems, namely, graph isomorphism problem and graph query processing. Our performance study shows that Fast-ON* outperforms previously proposed algorithms of the two problems with a wide margin.
Split-Ordered Lists : Lock-Free Extensible Hash Tables

Lock-free data structures allow concurrent access to the data faster than if the entire structure needs to be locked. One particular bottleneck for a concurrent hash table is the need to rehash, which blocks all threads while nodes are being reassigned to new buckets. The split-ordered list avoids this problem by keeping all nodes in one linked list and splitting the list into buckets, rather than moving nodes from bucket to bucket.
Convection and light element evolution from pre-main sequence to the upper asymptotic giant branch

I examine diierent aspects of the physics of mixing in stars: convection model, mixing timescales, mixing at the convective borders (overshooting), and mixing linked to a \second parameter" (rotation and related magnetic elds), in several astrophysical contexts, going from dating of open clusters to lithium destruction and production in stars.
Poster: Reducing power consumption of human activity sensing using compressed sensing

Almost all recent mobile phones are equipped with multiple sensors, such as cameras, GPS, and accelerometers. By exploiting the sensing features, we capture many different events and share them over the mobile network. One of the most important challenges for such a participatory sensing system is the reduction of the battery consumption of the mobile device because the sensing task usually runs as a secondary task and should not disrupt the primary tasks of the mobile phone, such as phone calls. We overcome this problem by compressing the sensed data and sending a minimum amount of data over the wireless link. The compressed sensing (CS) technique is used for this compression with simple matrix operations at the mobile side, and the CPU-intensive reconstruction is performed on the resource-rich machine on the network side. In this paper, we validate this idea by implementing it on the iPhone/iPod platform. Since CS is a lossy compression technique, the reconstructed signal contains errors depending on the degree of sparseness of the original signal. We show that our system can reduce power consumption by approximately 16% compared with ZIP compression, and evaluate the reconstruction error using real sensing data of 86 test subjects.
Significant term extraction by Higher Order SVD

In this paper, we present a novel method for term importance, called Tensor Term Indexing (TTI). This extracts significant terms from a document as well as a coherent collection of document set. The basic idea of this approach is to represent the whole document collection in a Term-Sentence-Document tensor and employs higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) for important term extraction. TTI uses the lower rank approximation technique to reduce noise by eliminating anecdotal terms, to mitigate synonymy by merging the dimensions associated with terms that have similar meanings, and to mitigates polysemy, since components of polysemous words that point in the “right” direction are added to the components of words that share a similar meaning. Our evaluation shows that that TTI model can extract significant terms relevant to a topic from a small number of documents which Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency (tfidf) cannot.
Detecting expectation-based spatio-temporal clusters formed during opportunistic sensing

Detecting clusters in the encounter graphs generated from reality mining data is one way of detecting the social and spatial relationships of participants. However, many of the existing clustering algorithms do not factor in the time since encounters, and can only be used to describe a single aggregated snapshot of the data. This paper describes a spatio-temporal clustering technique which has been used to reveal the transient communities within the data.
Two Efficient Algorithms Based on Majority-Logic and Min-Sum Algorithms for LDPC Codes

Recently, an iterative soft information reliability-based majority-logic (ISRB-MLG) decoding algorithm was proposed for Euclidean geometry LDPC (EG-LDPC) and Projective geometry LDPC (PG-LDPC) codes. This paper first presents an iterative soft information reliability-based min-sum (ISRB-MS) decoding algorithm based on ISRB-MLG and traditional min-sum decoding algorithm. The performance of ISRB-MS algorithm is greatly improved with a little more complexity than ISRB-MLG algorithm, it mainly needs integer additions and logical operations. Different from traditional min-sum decoding algorithm, the extrinsic information transfer of ISRB-MS algorithm is simplified, we use the full information that all check nodes pass rather than the extrinsic information to update the bit nodes information. Then a modified iterative soft information reliability-based min-sum (MISRB-MS) decoding algorithm is proposed. Compared to (ISRB-MS) algorithm, MISRB-MS algorithm multiplies a scaling factor, so it needs some extra multiplication, but it achieves better performance. Simulation results show that the two algorithms achieve excellent performance and fast convergence rate, they only needs about 10 iterations, if an appropriate scaling factor is chosen, the performance of MISRB-MS algorithm very closes to that of sum-product algorithm (SPA).
Application of Passive Sampling to Characterise the Fish Exometabolome

The endogenous metabolites excreted by organisms into their surrounding environment, termed the exometabolome, are important for many processes including chemical communication. In fish biology, such metabolites are also known to be informative markers of physiological status. While metabolomics is increasingly used to investigate the endogenous biochemistry of organisms, no non-targeted studies of the metabolic complexity of fish exometabolomes have been reported to date. In environmental chemistry, Chemcatcher® (Portsmouth, UK) passive samplers have been developed to sample for micro-pollutants in water. Given the importance of the fish exometabolome, we sought to evaluate the capability of Chemcatcher® samplers to capture a broad spectrum of endogenous metabolites excreted by fish and to measure these using non-targeted direct infusion mass spectrometry metabolomics. The capabilities of C18 and styrene divinylbenzene reversed-phase sulfonated (SDB-RPS) Empore™ disks for capturing non-polar and polar metabolites, respectively, were compared. Furthermore, we investigated real, complex metabolite mixtures excreted from two model fish species, rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus). In total, 344 biological samples and 28 QC samples were analysed, revealing 646 and 215 m/z peaks from trout and stickleback, respectively. The measured exometabolomes were principally affected by the type of Empore™ (Hemel Hempstead, UK) disk and also by the sampling time. Many peaks were putatively annotated, including several bile acids (e.g., chenodeoxycholate, taurocholate, glycocholate, glycolithocholate, glycochenodeoxycholate, glycodeoxycholate). Collectively these observations show the ability of Chemcatcher® passive samplers to capture endogenous metabolites excreted from fish.
Movement vigor: consistency, conservation, and modulation

This thesis is devoted to a better understanding of the vigor with which primates perform everyday actions. Indeed, there are great differences in baseline amounts of movement vigor across individuals. However, vigor depends upon the environment, and the reward landscape. The first portion of this text focuses on the effects that the reward landscape has on movement vigor. Chapter 2 demonstrates the effect of rate of reward on vigor, in particular reaction time and peak velocity. In Chapter 3, we analyze the effects of monetary reward offerings on saccade vigor. We show that choice preference for one reward over another is manifest in saccade vigor at the time of decision. We also show that saccade vigor tracks the decision making process, with a steep drop in vigor once a decision is made. Finally, in Chapter 4, we investigate changes in movement vigor during combined head-free gaze shifts and reaching movements. The objective is threefold: 1. Analyze consistency of head and reaching movements within an individual, across days; 2. Analyze conservation of movement vigor within an individual, across movement modalities; and 3. Assess modulation of movement vigor as a function of time, to determine if changes in one modality predict simultaneous changes in other modalities.
Generalisation and discrimination emerge from a self-organising componential network: a speech example

It is demonstrated that a componential code emerges when a self-organising neural network is exposed to continuous speech. The code's components correspond to substructures that occur relatively independently of one another: words and phones. A capability for generalisation and discrimination develops without having been optimised explicitly. The componential structure is revealed by optimising a necessarily complicated nonlinear moment of the data's distribution, equal to the mean-squared output response of a multi-layered network of simple threshold neurons. Earlier analytical work had predicted that componential codes, generalisation and discrimination should emerge from the self-organisation of threshold neurons of this form, assuming certain properties of the pattern-space distribution of the data.
Estimating Single Leaf Area of Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus grandis x Eucalyptus urophylla) Using Leaf Length and Width

Leaf area plays an important role in tree growth modeling and physiological process. There is an interest for leaf area measurement methods that are simple, quick and that will not destroy the leaf. We developed equations to estimate single leaf area (LA) by using length (L) and width (W) for Eucalyptus ¿ Eucalyptus grandis × Eucalyptus urophylla ¿. Totally, 426 leaves were sampled from 25 trees in south China. The model precisions are beyond 95 percent. It provides a simple and reliable method for estimating single leaf area, and has good potential to be used in a functional-structural model of Eucalyptus.
The Effects of Ageing and Visual Field Loss on Pointing to Visual Targets

Purpose To investigate the effect of ageing on visuomotor function and subsequently evaluate the effect of visual field loss on such function in older adults. Methods Two experiments were performed: 1) to determine the effect of ageing on visual localisation and subsequent pointing precision, and 2) to determine the effect of visual field loss on these outcome measures. For Experiment 1, we measured visual localisation and pointing precision radially at visual eccentricities of 5, 10 and 15° in 25 older (60–72 years) and 25 younger (20–31 years) adults. In the pointing task, participants were asked to point to a target on a touchscreen at a natural pace that prioritised accuracy of the touch. In Experiment 2, a subset of these tasks were performed at 15° eccentricity under both monocular and binocular conditions, by 8 glaucoma (55–76 years) and 10 approximately age-matched controls (61–72 years). Results Visual localisation and pointing precision was unaffected by ageing (p>0.05) and visual field loss (p>0.05), although movement time was increased in glaucoma (p = 0.01). Conclusion Visual localisation and pointing precision to high contrast stimuli within the central 15° of vision are unaffected by ageing. Even in the presence of significant visual field loss, older adults with glaucoma are able perform such tasks with reasonable precision provided the target can be perceived and movement time is not restricted.