Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
From vocal to multimodal dialogue management

Multimodal, speech-enabled systems pose different research problems when compared to unimodal, voice-only dialogue systems. One of the important issues is the question of how a multimodal interface should look like in order to make the multimodal interaction natural and smooth, while keeping it manageable from the system perspective. Another central issue concerns algorithms for multimodal dialogue management. This paper presents a solution that relies on adapting an existing unimodal, vocal dialogue management framework to make it able to cope with multimodality. An experimental multimodal system, Archivus, is described together with discussion of the required changes to the unimodal dialogue management algorithms. Results of pilot Wizard of Oz experiments with Archivus focusing on system efficiency and user behaviour are presented1.
Bursts of action potential waveforms relieve G‐protein inhibition of recombinant P/Q‐type Ca2+ channels in HEK 293 cells.

1. A variety of neurotransmitters act through G‐protein‐coupled receptors to decrease synaptic transmission, largely by inhibiting the voltage‐gated calcium channels that trigger neurotransmitter release. However, these presynaptic calcium channels are typically inaccessible to electrophysiological characterization. We have reconstituted a part of this inhibition using recombinant P/Q‐type calcium channels and M2 acetylcholine receptors in HEK 293 cells. 2. One of the most interesting features of G‐protein inhibition of calcium channels is that strong step depolarization transiently relieves the inhibition. We have found that short bursts of action potential voltage waveforms can also relieve the inhibition, increasing calcium current through G‐protein‐inhibited channels but not through uninhibited channels. 3. The extent of this relief increased linearly with the duration of the action potential waveforms. 4. This result provides the strongest evidence to date favouring the possibility that relief of G‐protein inhibition can occur during high frequency trains of action potentials. This effect may constitute a novel form of short‐term synaptic plasticity that is sensitive to action potential timing and duration.
Quantification of Rat Kisspeptin Using a Novel Radioimmunoassay

Kisspeptin is a hypothalamic peptide hormone that plays a pivotal role in pubertal onset and reproductive function. Previous studies have examined hypothalamic kisspeptin mRNA expression, either through in situ hybridisation or real-time RT-PCR, as a means quantifying kisspeptin gene expression. However, mRNA expression levels are not always reflected in levels of the translated protein. Kisspeptin-immunoreactivity (IR) has been extensively examined using immunohistochemistry, enabling detection and localisation of kisspeptin perikaya in the arcuate nucleus (ARC) and anteroventral periventricular nucleus (AVPV). However, quantification of kisspeptin-IR remains challenging. We developed a specific rodent radioimmunoassay assay (RIA) capable of detecting and quantifying kisspeptin-IR in rodent tissues. The RIA uses kisspeptin-10 as a standard and radioactive tracer, combined with a commercially available antibody raised to the kisspeptin-10 fragment. Adult female wistar rat brain samples were sectioned at 300 µm and the ARC and AVPV punch micro-dissected. Brain punches were homogenised in extraction buffer and assayed with rodent kisspeptin-RIA. In accord with the pattern of kisspeptin mRNA expression, kisspeptin-IR was detected in both the ARC (47.1±6.2 fmol/punch, mean±SEM n = 15) and AVPV (7.6±1.3 fmol/punch, mean±SEM n = 15). Kisspeptin-IR was also detectable in rat placenta (1.26±0.15 fmol/mg). Reverse phase high pressure liquid chromatography analysis showed that hypothalamic kisspeptin-IR had the same elution profile as a synthetic rodent kisspeptin standard. A specific rodent kisspeptin-RIA will allow accurate quantification of kisspeptin peptide levels within specific tissues in rodent experimental models.
Molecular Mechanisms Behind the Chemopreventive Effects of Anthocyanidins

Anthocyanins are polyphenolic ring-based flavonoids, and are widespread in fruits and vegetables of red-blue color. Epidemiological investigations and animal experiments have indicated that anthocyanins may contribute to cancer chemoprevention. The studies on the mechanism have been done recently at molecular level. This review summarizes current molecular bases for anthocyanidins on several key steps involved in cancer chemoprevention: (i) inhibition of anthocyanidins in cell transformation through targeting mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway and activator protein 1 (AP-1) factor; (ii) suppression of anthocyanidins in inflammation and carcinogenesis through targeting nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) pathway and cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) gene; (iii) apoptotic induction of cancer cells by anthocyanidins through reactive oxygen species (ROS) / c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK)-mediated caspase activation. These data provide a first molecular view of anthocyanidins contributing to cancer chemoprevention.
Robot Guidance Using Machine Vision Techniques in Industrial Environments: A Comparative Review

In the factory of the future, most of the operations will be done by autonomous robots that need visual feedback to move around the working space avoiding obstacles, to work collaboratively with humans, to identify and locate the working parts, to complete the information provided by other sensors to improve their positioning accuracy, etc. Different vision techniques, such as photogrammetry, stereo vision, structured light, time of flight and laser triangulation, among others, are widely used for inspection and quality control processes in the industry and now for robot guidance. Choosing which type of vision system to use is highly dependent on the parts that need to be located or measured. Thus, in this paper a comparative review of different machine vision techniques for robot guidance is presented. This work analyzes accuracy, range and weight of the sensors, safety, processing time and environmental influences. Researchers and developers can take it as a background information for their future works.
Androgen Suppression of Circulating Immune Complexes and Enhanced Survival in Murine Malaria

Abstract The role of sex hormones as modulators of autoimmune expression, including immune complex deposition and host survival has received considerable attention. In this study BALB/c female mice received 20 mg of depotestosterone cypionate 5 days before and 5 days after infection with the malarial parasite Plasmodium herghei. On Day 15 of the infection, surviving mice were monitored for levels of erythrocytes, hematocrits, absolute parasitemias, and circulating immune complexes (CIC). CIC were determined in serum samples by polyethylene glycol insolubilization and direct measurement by helium—neon laser nephelometry. Treated mice showed a 44% reduction in the quantity of CIC, in contrast to infected controls which received cottonseed oil. Mice given the hormone were afforded protection as evidenced by 100% survival on Day 15 of the infection, versus 68% survival for the infected control group. The circulating erythroid and parasitemic levels did not differ significantly between experimental and control groups. We conclude that androgens suppress CIC levels during malaria and further suggest their involvement in the differential host survival noted herein.
Fault equivalence identification in combinational circuits using implication and evaluation techniques

Efficient identification of fault equivalence relations is essential for effective diagnostic test pattern generation. In this paper, we present efficient techniques for identifying functionally equivalent faults in combinational circuits. The techniques are based on implication of faulty values, and evaluation of faulty functions in cones of dominator gates of fault pairs. This is enhanced by utilizing circuit redundancy information. Both static and dynamic methods are developed to exploit relations among inputs of dominator cones and further speed up the identification of equivalent fault pairs. Experimental results for all ISCAS'85 circuits, full scan versions of ISCAS'89 circuits, and ITC'99 circuits show that most of the equivalent fault pairs are identified. Significant reductions are obtained in the runtime needed to prove equivalence and the runtime for diagnostic test pattern generation compared to previously proposed approaches.
Microblogs as Parallel Corpora

In the ever-expanding sea of microblog data, there is a surprising amount of naturally occurring parallel text: some users create post multilingual messages targeting international audiences while others “retweet” translations. We present an efficient method for detecting these messages and extracting parallel segments from them. We have been able to extract over 1M Chinese-English parallel segments from Sina Weibo (the Chinese counterpart of Twitter) using only their public APIs. As a supplement to existing parallel training data, our automatically extracted parallel data yields substantial translation quality improvements in translating microblog text and modest improvements in translating edited news commentary. The resources in described in this paper are available at http://www.cs. cmu.edu/ lingwang/utopia.
Pandemic influenza 1918.

We debated the exact meaning of our instructions ; but the general cut through the discussion by saying characteristically "I've got to carry the can. " He promptly invited Hugh Cairns and Howard Florey to visit him again to resume discussion on the issue they had raised. Harold Bensted and I were invited to be present as witnesses to the conversation. Harold and I agreed to listen without speaking, which we did. I recall the general's exact words, which I think he had memorised because I recall his pacing to and fro reciting words to himself before the meeting. "Gentlemen," said the general, "you warned me of the political importance of the advice I should give on this matter. I accepted your warning. Consequently, I referred the issue for a political decision. I asked that this should go right to the top. We have had our answer. It is written in green ink? you know, I take it, what that means. I am now clear about my advice. It is that penicillin should be used to treat gonorrhoea among the assault troops in Algiers. " The interview ended in polite exchanges and, so far as I know, there were no political repercussions. My own view is that Harold Bensted's military and political judgment was right, and that Leo Poole's way of handling the event proved that he was a wise, shrewd, and honest soldier capable of carrying any can that was handed to him.
Behavioral and Neural Effects of Reasoning Training

My thesis research has focused broadly on how the environment shapes the structure and function of prefrontal cortex, for better or worse. I am interested in understanding in how experience-dependent plasticity can be harnessed to boost, or in some cases, remediate prefrontal function. I focused on training reasoning, the ability to solve novel problems, for two reasons: 1) reasoning is highly predictive of academic outcomes, and 2) reasoning was originally conceptualized as a fixed trait, and many people, both in science and in the general public, still believe that reasoning is set in stone. I conducted two studies, one in children and one in adults, to test the predictions that reasoning ability is malleable, and that repeated practice with reasoning problems strengthens connectivity within the frontoparietal network that supports high-level cognition. In my first study, children from low socioeconomic status backgrounds participated in 8 weeks of training with computerized and non-computerized games that targeted either reasoning ability or cognitive speed. Training led to dissociable behavioral outcomes: children in the reasoning training group improved substantially on a matrix reasoning test, while children in the speed training group improved specifically on a measure of cognitive speed. Reasoning gains corresponded to roughly 10 points in performance IQ. These results indicated that reasoning is modifiable by training in this population.In my second study, I capitalized on the fact that adults are taught reasoning skills by courses aimed at improving performance on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). I recruited young adults who were enrolled in an LSAT preparation course, and age- and IQ-matched controls intending to take the LSAT in the future. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures were collected for all subjects during two scanning sessions separated by 90 days. I first tested whether reasoning training altered functional connectivity at rest. I found strengthened fronto-parietal and parietal-striatal functional connectivity, particularly between hemispheres. I next investigated whether structural connectivity, as measured by diffusion in white matter, had been altered by training. I found training-related radial diffusivity (RD) decreases in white matter connecting frontal cortices, and mean diffusivity (MD) decreases closer to cortex in white matter in left frontal lobe and right parietal lobe. In conclusion, my thesis research has demonstrated that training can improve reasoning ability and, in adults, alter functional and structural connectivity. These results provide evidence for neural plasticity in large-scale networks supporting high-level cognition.
Collision-Free Beacon Scheduling Mechanisms for IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee Cluster-Tree Wireless Sensor Networks

The recently standardized IEEE 802.15. 4/Zigbee protocol stack offers great potentials for ubiquitous and pervasive computing, namely for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, there are still some open and ambiguous issues that turn its practical use a challenging task. One of those issues is how to build a synchronized multi-hop cluster-tree network, which is quite suitable for QoS support in WSNs. In fact, the current IEEE 802.15. 4/Zigbee specifications restrict the synchronization in the beacon-enabled mode (by the generation of periodic beacon frames) to star-based networks, while it supports multi-hop networking using the peer-to-peer mesh topology, but with no synchronization. Even though both specifications mention the possible use of cluster-tree topologies, which combine multi-hop and synchronization features, the description on how to effectively construct such a network topology is missing. This paper tackles this problem, unveils the ambiguities regarding the use of the cluster-tree topology and proposes two collisionfree beacon frame scheduling schemes. We strongly believe that the results provided in this paper trigger a significant step towards the practical and efficient use of IEEE 802.15. 4/Zigbee cluster-tree networks.
How to Reconstruct a Varying Speed of Light Signal from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations Surveys

We describe an alternative way to use future Baryon Acoustic Oscillation observations to perform non-mainstream research. We focus on the so-called Varying Speed of Light theories, in which the speed of light is made to vary in time. Using prescriptions from future BAO surveys (BOSS, DESI, WFirst-2.4 and SKA), we show that, within such surveys, a 1% Varying Speed of Light (VSL) signal could be detected at 3 sigmas confidence level, in the redshift interval [0.75, 1.45]. Smaller signals will be hardly detected. We also discuss some possible problems related to such kinds of observation, in particular, the degeneracy between a VSL signal and a non-null spatial curvature.
An Efficient Method for the Detection of Projected Concentric Circles

Concentric circles are often used as calibration features since they possess good geometric properties. This paper presents an efficient method for the detection of projected concentric circles in the image plane while considering their special geometric properties. The proposed method is capable of detecting partially visible concentric circles. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.
RAC1P29S is a spontaneously activating cancer-associated GTPase

RAC1 is a small, Ras-related GTPase that was recently reported to harbor a recurrent UV-induced signature mutation in melanoma, resulting in substitution of P29 to serine (RAC1P29S), ranking this the third most frequently occurring gain-of-function mutation in melanoma. Although the Ras family GTPases are mutated in about 30% of all cancers, mutations in the Rho family GTPases have rarely been observed. In this study, we demonstrate that unlike oncogenic Ras proteins, which are primarily activated by mutations that eliminate GTPase activity, the activated melanoma RAC1P29S protein maintains intrinsic GTP hydrolysis and is spontaneously activated by substantially increased inherent GDP/GTP nucleotide exchange. Determination and comparison of crystal structures for activated RAC1 GTPases suggest that RAC1F28L—a known spontaneously activated RAC1 mutant—and RAC1P29S are self-activated in distinct fashions. Moreover, the mechanism of RAC1P29S and RAC1F28L activation differs from the common oncogenic mutations found in Ras-like GTPases that abrogate GTP hydrolysis. The melanoma RAC1P29S gain-of-function point mutation therefore represents a previously undescribed class of cancer-related GTPase activity.
Population subdivision of the surf clam Mactra chinensis in the East China Sea: Changjiang River outflow is not the sole driver

The northwestern Pacific, characterized by unique tectonic and hydrological settings, has greatly intrigued marine phylogeographers. However, current studies mostly focus on the influence of Pleistocene isolation of sea basins in population structure of species in the region, leaving the contribution of other factors (such as freshwater outflow and environmental gradients) largely unexploited. Here we shed light on the question by investigating phylogeography of the surf clam Mactra chinensis in the East China Sea (ECS). Genetic information was acquired from 501 specimens collected from its main distribution in the region, represented by mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) and nine polymorphic microsatellite loci. A shallow and star-like phylogeny was revealed for all COI haplotypes, indicating the origin of populations from a single refugium. Although no divergent lineages existed, population subdivision was detected in both data sets. The most striking pattern was the significant differentiation between populations north and south of a biogeographic boundary—the Changjiang Estuary, suggesting a barrier effect of the freshwater outflow to gene flow. For the northern group, substructure was revealed by COI result as one southernmost population was significant different from other ones. Clear latitude gradations in allele frequencies were revealed by microsatellite analyses, likely influenced by environmental gradient factors such as temperature. Our results demonstrate that genetic subdivision can arise for populations within the ECS despite they have a single origin, and multiple mechanisms including Changjiang River outflow, environmental gradient factors and life-history traits may act in combination in the process.
Access Control for Privacy Protection for Dynamic and Correlated Databases

The characteristics of volume, variety, velocity and value for big data have made present privacy protection methods less effective in the protection of user privacy to meet the emerging requirements. In this paper, we analyze the spatial and temporal effects the access to the data on privacy disclosure and propose an access control model to protect user privacy that is related to the number and the frequency of access in the access history of the requester. By introducing the notions of the privacy threshold, the requested items and the access history, the proposed access control model can make the decision on whether to allow the current access request to the protected privacy information. This method can cope with the dynamic and correlative nature of the data for privacy protection while reducing the cost of computation.
Evaluation of a 12-Lead Digital Holter System for 24-Hour QT Interval Assessment

Background: Drug induced QT prolongation may precipitate life threatening cardiac arrhythmias. Evaluation of the QT prolonging effect of new pharmaceutical agents in a ‘thorough QT/QTc study’ is being mandated by FDA. The purpose of this study was to evaluate an automated 12-lead digital Holter system for a thorough QT/QTc study. Methods: Five healthy volunteers underwent 24-hour digital Holter monitoring. Each recording underwent a fully automated QT analysis (AQA) followed by an onscreen complete manual over read (MOR). Each recording was analyzed twice at least 2 weeks apart. The effect of data sampling (5-min segment/hour), the system sensitivity to detect 5-ms increase in QT, and the ability to assess circadian variation were evaluated. Results: The AQA resulted in identical QT for the first and second analyses, but with obvious errors in QT measurements. Compared to the complete onscreen MOR, the mean QT was longer with AQA (416 ± 41 vs. 387 ± 30 ms, p < 0.001), correlation; r = 0.3. The reproducibility of AQA with complete MOR was very good (QT: 387 ± 30 vs. 387 ± 30 ms, coefficient of variation: 0.2%, r = 0.986. The 5-min mean QT intervals correlated well with the hourly mean QT intervals (r = 0.994, p < 0.001, coefficient of variation = 1 ms) and both showed a similar circadian variation. The system was sensitive to detect a 5-ms change in QT intervals (5 ± 2 ms, coefficient of variation = 0.6%, r = 0.998, p < 0.001). Conclusions: The AQA is not an acceptable method, while the automatic analysis with complete MOR is a highly sensitive and reproducible method. Data sampling by analyzing 5-min segments per hour is sensitive and reproducible.
Molecular Mechanisms of Early Lung Specification and Branching Morphogenesis

The “hard wiring” encoded within the genome that determines the emergence of the laryngotracheal groove and subsequently early lung branching morphogenesis is mediated by finely regulated, interactive growth factor signaling mechanisms that determine the automaticity of branching, interbranch length, stereotypy of branching, left-right asymmetry, and finally gas diffusion surface area. The extracellular matrix is an important regulator as well as a target for growth factor signaling in lung branching morphogenesis and alveolarization. Coordination not only of epithelial but also endothelial branching morphogenesis determines bronchial branching and the eventual alveolar-capillary interface. Improved prospects for lung protection, repair, regeneration, and engineering will depend on more detailed understanding of these processes. Herein, we concisely review the functionally integrated morphogenetic signaling network comprising the critical bone morphogenetic protein, fibroblast growth factor, Sonic hedgehog, transforming growth factor-β, vascular endothelial growth factor, and Wnt signaling pathways that specify and drive early embryonic lung morphogenesis.
Amplification and expression of the c‐erb B‐2/neu proto‐oncogene in human bladder cancer

The c‐erb B‐2/neu gene encodes a cell‐surface glycoprotein with extensive homology to, but distinct from, the epidermal growth‐factor receptor. In this study, we compared the c‐erb B‐2/neu gene amplification and expression of tissue specimens obtained from the bladders of normal controls and patients with high‐grade transitional cell bladder carcinoma. Southern blot analysis of DNAs from 24 patients and 5 controls showed 2 cases of c‐erb B‐2/neu gene amplification in patients and none in controls. Western blot analysis demonstrated that c‐erb B‐2/neu was expressed in 67.6% (23/34) of patient specimens but in none of the controls (0/5). This finding agreed with the result of immunohistochemical staining, which showed that tissue from 74.3% (26/35) of the patients and none of the controls (0/7) showed positive immunofluorescence staining. This is the first report suggesting that c‐erb B‐2/neu gene amplification and expression may be associated with human bladder carcinogenesis.