Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Algorithm of Leaf Image Segmentation Based on Color Features

The paper proposes a digital image extraction and segmentation algorithm based on color features. The traditional transformation from RGB model to HSI model is improved, meanwhile the leaf color information is extracted by similarity distance between pixels. The green component of leaf image in the RGB model is strengthened, and then the digital image is transformed to the HSI model by the improved method. Finally the image is divided by similarity distance of pixels’ H weight which determines whether the pixel belongs to the blade. The results of simulation experiment shows that this algorithm can achieve a good image segmentation effect, and it has a high degree of accuracy as well as a clearly distinguish degree and many other advantages such as good consistency with human visual system. It completely meets the effectiveness and clarity requirements of image segmentation.
Long-term Training Modifies the Modular Structure and Organization of Walking

Long-term training modifies the modular structure and organization of walking 1 balance control 2 3 Authors: 4 Andrew Sawers a 5 Jessica L Allen b 6 Lena H Ting b 7 8 Affiliations: 9 (a) Department of Kinesiology, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1919 West 10 Taylor Street, Chicago, Il, 60612. 11 (b) Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory 12 University and Georgia Institute of Technology, 1760 Haygood Drive, 13 Atlanta, GA, United States, 30322 14 15 Corresponding Author: 16 Lena H. Ting, PhD 17 Department of Biomedical Engineering 18 Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology 19 Atlanta, GA 30322 20 Email: lting@emory.edu 21 Phone: 404-727-2744 22 23 Funding: NSF (EFRI) 1137229, NIH HD46922, NIH T32 NS007480-14 24 Articles in PresS. J Neurophysiol (October 14, 2015). doi:10.1152/jn.00758. 2015
Logical design for temporal databases with multiple granularities

The purpose of good database logical design is to eliminate data redundancy and isertion and deletion anomalies. In order to achieve this objective for temporal databases, the notions of <italic>temporal types</italic>, which formalize time granularities, and <italic>temporal functional dependencies</italic> (TFDs) are intrduced. A temporal type is a monotonic mapping from ticks of time (represented by positive integers) to time sets (represented by subsets of reals) and is used to capture various standard and user-defined calendars. A TFD is a proper extension of the traditional functional dependency and takes the form <italic>X</italic><inline-equation> <f> →<hsp sp="0.167"><inf><g>m</g></inf></f></inline-equation> <italic>Y,</italic> meaning that there is a unique value for <italic>Y</italic> during one tick of the temporal type μ for one particular <italic>X</italic> value. An axiomatization for TFDs is given. Because a finite set TFDs usually implies an infinite number of TFDs, we introduce the notion of and give an axiomatization for a <italic>finite closure</italic> to effectively capture a finite set of implied TFDs that are essential of the logical design. Temporal normalization procedures with respect to TFDs are given. Specifically, temporal Boyce-Codd normal form (TBCNF) that avoids all data redundancies due to TFDs, and temporal third normal form (T3NF) that allows dependency preservation, are defined. Both normal forms are proper extensions of their traditional counterparts, BCNF and 3NF. Decompositition algorithms are presented that give lossless TBCNF decompositions and lossless, dependency-preserving, T3NF decompositions.
Quantifying and mitigating the costs of FPGA virtualization

FPGAs are being incorporated into contemporary datacenters in order to improve computational capacity, power consumption, and processing latency. Efficiently integrating FP-GAs in datacenters is, however, quite challenging. Ideally, smaller tasks could share a device and the cloud management layer would be able to partially reconfigure the device to allocate its free resources to incoming tasks. Moreover, to facilitate FPGA hardware upgrades without undue porting effort for previously developed accelerator tasks, the complexities associated with board-specific system-level integration should be abstracted away from designers. By meeting these requirements, FPGAs in the cloud would become multi-user virtualized resources with increased availability and elasticity. The virtualization of FPGAs, however, comes with two major costs in current FPGAs: lower application operating frequency, and extravagant use of routing resources. In this paper, we quantify the costs of FPGA virtualization and demonstrate that for an FPGA that supports four independent tasks, virtualization reduces the task average frequency by 18% to 46% and increases wire usage to 2.6×. We also investigate the cause of these costs and show that the use of hard NoCs in future datacenter-optimized FPGAs would facilitate FPGA virtualization without sacrificing operating frequency or routing resources.
Reduced-Order Proper $H_\infty$  Controllers for Descriptor Systems: Existence Conditions and LMI-Based Design Algorithms

In this note, we present a new approach to investigate the existence and design of reduced-order proper Hinfin controllers that provide the same level of performance as that of full-order controllers. By revealing some special features of the LMI-based solvability conditions for the Hinfin control problem for descriptor systems, we obtain a refined bound on the order of Hinfin controllers, which is independent of (invariant under the allowed transformations on) a descriptor realization of the generalized plant. Moreover, we provide LMI-based algorithms to design the reduced-order controllers. This note not only extends in a satisfying way the results on reduced-order Hinfin controllers for state-space systems to descriptor systems, but also provides insight into the mechanism by which the order of Hinfin controllers for descriptor systems can be reduced through a consideration of the unstable finite zeros or infinite zeros.
Hardness, Toughness, and Brittleness: An Indentation Analysis

The ratio H/Kc, wjere His hardness (resistance to deformation) and Kc. is toughness (resistance to fracture), is proposed as an index of brittleness. Indentation mechanics provides the scientific basis for this proposal. The analysis, developed in terms of a model contact system, indicates that all materials are more susceptible to deformation in small-scale loading events and to fracture in large-scale events. By normalizing the characteristic dimensions of the two competing processes and the contact load in terms of appropriate functions of H and Kc a universal deformation/fracture diagram can be constructed. From this diagram the mechanical response of any material of known hardness and toughness may be predicted for any prospective in-service contact loading conditions. The concept offers a simple approach to materials classification for design purposes.
Slow molecular recognition by RNA

Molecular recognition is fundamental to life as demonstrated by the remarkable specificity observed in biological processes mediated by proteins and RNAs. Nevertheless, the most accurate process is of no value to biology if it cannot be carried out rapidly. Proteins associate with ligands with a wide range of association rate constants, with maximal values matching the theoretical limit set by the rate of diffusional collision. As less is known about RNA association, we recently compiled association rate constants for all RNA/ligand complexes that we could find in the literature. Our analysis indicates that RNAs, like proteins, exhibit a wide range of association rate constants. However, the fastest RNA association rates are considerably slower than those of the fastest protein associations and fall well below the diffusional limit. The apparently general observation of slow association with RNAs presumably reflects basic physical properties of RNA and has implications for evolution and for modern‐day biology. We also discuss potential strategies for increasing RNA association kinetics, such as the use of electrostatic forces to accelerate binding, which may provide broadly applicable strategies for developing fast‐binding RNA ligands as well as RNA‐targeted therapeutics.
Changes in calcium transport in mammalian sperm mitochondria and plasma membrane due to 633-nm and 780-nm irradiation

The effect of light on calcium transport in mammalian sperm mitochondria and plasma membrane was studied. Digitonin treated bovine spermatozoa and plasma membrane vesicles were irradiated with a He-Ne laser and a 780 nm diode laser at various intensities and energy doses and Ca2+ uptake was measured by the filtration method. It was found that there is an accelerated Ca2+ uptake by the mitochondria after low He-Ne light and inhibition after high intensity irradiation. The ATP-dependent Ca2+ uptake by the sperm plasma membrane vesicles was not changed due to He-Ne irradiation. It was enhanced due to 780 nm irradiation.
Pronunciation adaptation at the lexical level

There are various kinds of adaptation which can be used to enhance the performance of automatic speech recognizers. This paper is about pronunciation adaptation at the lexical level, i.e. about modeling pronunciation variation at the lexical level. In the early years of automatic speechrecognition (ASR) research, the amount of pronunciation variation was limited by using isolated words. Since the focus gradually shifted from isolated words to conversational speech, the amount of pronunciation variation present in the speech signals has increased, as has the need to model it. This is reﬂected by the growing attention for this topic. In this paper, an overview of the studies on lexicon adaptation is presented. Furthermore, many examples are mentioned of situations in which lexicon adaptation is likely to improve the performance of speech recognizers. Finally, it is argued that some assumptions made in current standard ASR systems are not in line with the properties of the speech signals. Consequently, the problem of pronunciation variation at the lexical level probably cannot be solved by simply adding new transcriptions to the lexicon, as it is generally done at the moment.
Information Systems collaborations as boundary spanning: initial survey in a sample of Journals

Information-systems (IS) has become a 'broad church' that includes academics and practitioners in several areas of theory and application. Although collaborations among these and other groups are hailed as a wealthy sign, it is not clear yet though how collaborations are really contributing to firm up, maintain or expand the boundaries of IS as a relevant discipline. We assess the extent to which activities of collaboration in IS have contributed to its development by contextualizing the notion of boundary spanning (BS) from two perspectives, one which privileges the creation and/or accumulation of knowledge; and other which privileges the gaining of jurisdiction over a set of problems. Results of a pilot survey involving four journals and implications for the future development of collaborations are reported. Results indicate that BS is still seen as a process of knowledge accumulation and with it a view of IS as in continuous process of expansion. Further research is needed to study in more depth the dynamics of IS.
Exploiting variety-dependent phones in portuguese variety identification applied to broadcast news transcription

This paper presents a Variety IDentification (VID) approach and its application to broadcast news transcription for Portuguese. The phonotactic VID system, based on Phone Recognition and Language Modelling, focuses on a single tokenizer that combines distinctive knowledge about differences between the target varieties. This knowledge is introduced into a Multi-Layer Perceptron phone recognizer by training mono-phone models for two varieties as contrasting phone-like classes. Significant improvements in terms of identification rate were achieved compared to conventional single and fused phonotactic and acoustic systems. The VID system is used to select data to automatically train variety-specific acoustic models for broadcast news transcription. The impact of the selection is analyzed and variety-specific recognition is shown to improve results by up to 13% compared to a standard variety baseline. Index Terms: accent identification, recognition of accented speech.
The local cell curvature guides pseudopodia towards chemoattractants

Many eukaryotic cells use pseudopodia for movement towards chemoattractants. We developed a computer algorithm to identify pseudopodia, and analyzed how pseudopodia of Dictyostelium cells are guided toward cAMP. Surprisingly, the direction of a pseudopod is not actively oriented toward the gradient, but is always perpendicular to the local cell curvature. The gradient induces a bias in the position where the pseudopod emerges: pseudopodia more likely emerge at the side of the cell closer to the gradient where perpendicular pseudopodia are pointed automatically toward the chemoattractant. A mutant lacking the formin dDia2 is not spherical but has many invaginations. Although pseudopodia still emerge at the side closer to the gradient, the surface curvature is so irregular that many pseudopodia are not extended toward cAMP. The results imply that the direction of the pseudopod extension, and therefore also the direction of cell movement, is dominated by two aspects: the position at the cell surface where a pseudopod emerges, and the local curvature of the membrane at that position.
Synthesis of the sulfate donor PAPS in either the Drosophila germline or somatic follicle cells can support embryonic dorsal-ventral axis formation

The establishment of dorsal-ventral (DV) polarity in the Drosophila embryo depends upon a localized signal that is generated in the perivitelline space of the egg through the action of a serine proteolytic cascade. Spatial regulation of this pathway is determined by the expression of the pipe gene in a subpopulation of ventral follicle cells in the developing egg chamber. The Pipe protein exhibits homology to vertebrate glycosaminoglycan sulfotransferases. In a previous study, we demonstrated that embryonic DV polarity depends upon the sulfotransferase activity of Pipe. Surprisingly, however, our results also indicated that formation of the embryonic DV axis does not require the synthesis of the high-energy sulfate donor, 3′-phosphoadenosine 5′-phosphosulfate (PAPS) in the follicle cells in which Pipe is presumed to function. Here, we resolve this apparent paradox by demonstrating that dorsalized embryos are only produced by egg chambers in which both germline and follicle cells lack PAPS synthetase activity. Thus, PAPS produced either in the germline or in the follicular epithelium can support the requirement for Pipe sulfotransferase activity in embryonic DV patterning. This finding indicates the existence of a conduit for the movement of PAPS between the germline and the follicle cells, which highlights a previously unappreciated mechanism of soma/germline cooperation affecting pattern formation.
Immune Evasion Strategies during Chronic Hepatitis B and C Virus Infection

Both hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections are a major global healthcare problem with more than 240 million and 70 million infected, respectively. Both viruses persist within the liver and result in progressive liver disease, resulting in liver fibrosis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Strikingly, this pathogenesis is largely driven by immune responses, unable to clear an established infection, rather than by the viral pathogens themselves. Even though disease progression is very similar in both infections, HBV and HCV have evolved distinct mechanisms, by which they ensure persistence within the host. Whereas HCV utilizes a cloak-and-dagger approach, disguising itself as a lipid-like particle and immediately crippling essential pattern-recognition pathways, HBV has long been considered a “stealth” virus, due to the complete absence of innate immune responses during infection. Recent developments and access to improved model systems, however, revealed that even though it is among the smallest human-tropic viruses, HBV may, in addition to evading host responses, employ subtle immune evasion mechanisms directed at ensuring viral persistence in the absence of host responses. In this review, we compare the different strategies of both viruses to ensure viral persistence by actively interfering with viral recognition and innate immune responses.
Two-Scale Finite Element Modelling of Microstructures

Modelling the constitutive behaviour of metallic materials based on their microstructural features and the micromechanical mechanisms in the framework of continuum mechanics is addressed. Deformation at the lengthscale of grains is described by crystal plasticity. The macroscopic behaviour is obtained either by a homogenisation process yielding phenomenological equations or by a submodel technique. The modelling processes for two light-weight materials, namely magnesium and titanium aluminides are presented.
Solid pseudopapillary tumor of the pancreas: ‘Experiences’ and ‘Lessons’ at a tertiary‐care oncology center

Solid pseudopapillary tumor of the pancreas (SPT) is a rare and fascinating entity of elusive histogenesis and unpredictable biology. It has a peculiar proclivity to afflict young females and involve the pancreatic body‐tail region. Cytology diagnosis of these rare neoplasms remains a challenge. We analyzed the cytology features of all SPT cases diagnosed on fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) from 2003 to 2009 along with their histopathology slides. Nineteen consecutive cases were diagnosed as SPT on FNAC. Fifteen out of nineteen cases were confirmed as true SPT on histopathology. Amongst the true SPT, all except one occurred in females. Age ranged from 14 to 50 years. Pseudopapillae bearing stout branches terminating in bulbous tips and enclosing transgressing vessels, separated from a collar of tumor cells by a clear zone of myxohyaline coat were pathognomonic of SPT. Singly dispersed monomorphic tumor cells with bland chromatin formed the second diagnostic component of SPT. Nuclear grooves and hyaline globules were in addition helpful in segregating SPT from its close differentials. In four cases diagnosed as SPT on FNAC, histopathology revealed a different final diagnosis (one case each of paraganglioma, extragastrointestinal stromal tumor, metastatic papillary renal cell carcinoma and inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor). Conversely, one case of SPT had been erroneously diagnosed as neuroendocrine tumor on FNAC. Six cases (40%) developed metastasis; commonest site being liver. In conclusion, cytology in conjunction with clinico‐radiologic findings plays a key role in making a correct diagnosis. Awareness of unique cytomorphological features is important in distinguishing this tumor from its diverse mimics. Diagn. Cytopathol. 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The potential for glycemic control monitoring and screening for diabetes at dental visits using oral blood.

OBJECTIVES We examined the potential for glycemic control monitoring and screening for diabetes in a dental setting among adults (n = 408) with or at risk for diabetes. METHODS In 2013 and 2014, we performed hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) tests on dried blood samples of gingival crevicular blood and compared these with paired "gold-standard" HbA1c tests with dried finger-stick blood samples in New York City dental clinic patients. We examined differences in sociodemographics and diabetes-related risk and health care characteristics for 3 groups of at-risk patients. RESULTS About half of the study sample had elevated HbA1c values in the combined prediabetes and diabetes ranges, with approximately one fourth of those in the diabetes range. With a correlation of 0.991 between gingival crevicular and finger-stick blood HbA1c, measures of concurrence between the tests were extremely high for both elevated HbA1c and diabetes-range HbA1c levels. Persons already diagnosed with diabetes and undiagnosed persons aged 45 years or older could especially benefit from HbA1c testing at dental visits. CONCLUSIONS Gingival crevicular blood collected at the dental visit can be used to screen for diabetes and monitor glycemic control for many at-risk patients.
Securing BGP through Keychain-based Signatures

As the major component of Internet routing infrastructure, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is vulnerable to malicious attacks. While Secure BGP (S-BGP) provides a comprehensive framework to secure BGP, its high computational cost and low incremental deployment benefits seriously impede its wide usage in practice. Using a lightweight symmetric signature scheme, SPV is much faster than S-BGP. However, the speed boost comes at the price of prohibitively large signatures. Aggregated path authentication reduces the overhead of securing BGP in terms of both time and space, but the speed improvement is still limited by public key computation. In this paper, we propose a simple key chain-based signature scheme called KC-x, which has low CPU and memory overheads and provides strong incentive for incremental deployment over the Internet. As a generic framework, KC-x has the flexibility of using different signature algorithms. We implement two realizations of KC-x. One is based on RSA called KC-RSA, and the other is based on Merkle hash tree called KC-MT. After characterizing the overheads of KC-RSA and KC-MT, we evaluate their performance with real BGP workloads. Our experimental results show that KC-RSA is as efficient as SAS-V, and KC-MT is even 3-fold faster than SPV with a 40% smaller signature. Through the hybrid deployment of KC-MT and KC-RSA, KC-x can achieve both small signature and high processing rate for BGP speakers.
Cyclosporin A increases hypoxia and free radical production in rat kidneys: prevention by dietary glycine.

The major side effect of cyclosporin A is severe nephrotoxicity. It is likely that cyclosporin A causes vasoconstriction leading to hypoxia-reperfusion injury; therefore, these experiments were designed to attempt to obtain physical evidence for hypoxia and free radical production in kidney following cyclosporin A. Rats were treated daily with cyclosporin A (25 mg/kg ig) for 5 days, and pimonidazole, a hypoxia marker, was injected 2 h after the last dose of cyclosporin A. A dose of α-(4-pyridyl-1-oxide)- N- tert-butylnitrone (4-POBN) was injected 3 h after cyclosporin A to trap free radicals. Cyclosporin A doubled serum creatinine and decreased glomerular filtration rates by 65% as expected. Pimonidazole adduct binding in the kidney was increased nearly threefold by cyclosporin A, providing physical evidence for tissue hypoxia. Moreover, cyclosporin A increased 4-POBN/radical adducts nearly sixfold in the urine but did not alter levels in the serum. Glycine, which causes vasodilatation and prevents cyclosporin A toxicity, minimized hypoxia and blocked free radical production; however, it did not alter cyclosporin A blood levels. These results demonstrate for the first time that cyclosporin A causes hypoxia and increases production of a new free radical species exclusively in the kidney. Therefore, it is concluded that cyclosporin A causes renal injury by mechanisms involving hypoxia-reoxygenation, effects which can be prevented effectively by dietary glycine.