Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Massive Connectivity With Massive MIMO—Part II: Achievable Rate Characterization

This two-part paper aims to quantify the cost of device activity detection in an uplink massive connectivity scenario with a large number of devices but device activities are sporadic. Part I of this paper shows that in an asymptotic massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) regime, device activity detection can always be made perfect. Part II of this paper subsequently shows that despite the perfect device activity detection, there is nevertheless significant cost due to device detection in terms of overall achievable rate, because of the fact that nonorthogonal pilot sequences have to be used in order to accommodate the large number of potential devices, resulting in significantly larger channel estimation error as compared to conventional massive MIMO systems with orthogonal pilots. Specifically, this paper characterizes each active user's achievable rate using random matrix theory under either maximal-ratio combining (MRC) or minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receive beamforming at the base station (BS), assuming the statistics of their estimated channels as derived in Part I. The characterization of user rate also allows the optimization of pilot sequences length. Moreover, in contrast to the conventional massive MIMO system, the MMSE beamforming is shown to achieve much higher rate than the MRC beamforming for the massive connectivity scenario under consideration. Finally, this paper illustrates the necessity of user scheduling for rate maximization when the number of active users is larger than the number of antennas at the BS.
The impact of single-cell RNA sequencing on understanding the functional organization of the immune system

Abstract Application of single-cell genomics technologies has revolutionized our approach to study the immune system. Unravelling the functional diversity of immune cells and their coordinated response is key to understanding immunity. Single-cell transcriptomics technologies provide high-dimensional assessment of the transcriptional states of immune cells and have been successfully applied to discover new immune cell types, reveal haematopoietic lineages, identify gene modules dictating immune responses and investigate lymphocyte antigen receptor diversity. In this review, we discuss the impact and applications of single-cell RNA sequencing technologies in immunology.
A Combined Multiple Model Adaptive Control Scheme and Its Application to Nonlinear Systems With Nonlinear Parameterization

A combined multiple model adaptive control (CMMAC) scheme, which is a proper combination of the estimator-based MMAC scheme and the unfalsified MMAC scheme, has been proposed with the aim of taking advantage of the strength of each scheme while avoiding their weaknesses. The major novelty of the CMMAC scheme lies in the fact that it monitors not only the adequacy of candidate models in terms of their estimation performances but also the performance of the active candidate controller. As an application of the CMMAC scheme and one example of such new multiple model adaptive controllers, a CMMAC based controller has been designed for a class of nonlinear systems with nonlinear parameterization. Under some sufficient conditions, a strong finite time switching result (which provides a characterization on the maximum number of switching) and the closed-loop stability have been established. A constructive design based on back-stepping is provided for the adaptive control problem of a special class of nonlinearly parameterized systems, which can satisfy all the sufficient conditions to ensure closed-loop stability.
128Gb 3b/cell NAND flash memory in 19nm technology with 18MB/s write rate and 400Mb/s toggle mode

This paper addresses challenges with improvements made over previous NAND generations to achieve high performance while maintaining a low fail-bit count (FBC) and cost savings from an improved architecture and tightly packed peripheral circuits. Air gap [2,3] technology further improves write throughput by reducing neighbor interference and WL RC. A toggle mode 400Mb/s I/O interface reduces system overhead and enhances overall performance.
Hyperactivity in Anorexia Nervosa: Warming Up Not Just Burning-Off Calories

Excessive physical activity is a common feature in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) that interferes with the recovery process. Animal models have demonstrated that ambient temperature modulates physical activity in semi-starved animals. The aim of the present study was to assess the effect of ambient temperature on physical activity in AN patients in the acute phase of the illness. Thirty-seven patients with AN wore an accelerometer to measure physical activity within the first week of contacting a specialized eating disorder center. Standardized measures of anxiety, depression and eating disorder psychopathology were assessed. Corresponding daily values for ambient temperature were obtained from local meteorological stations. Ambient temperature was negatively correlated with physical activity (p = −.405) and was the only variable that accounted for a significant portion of the variance in physical activity (p = .034). Consistent with recent research with an analogous animal model of the disorder, our findings suggest that ambient temperature is a critical factor contributing to the expression of excessive physical activity levels in AN. Keeping patients warm may prove to be a beneficial treatment option for this symptom.
Morphologically abnormal beaks observed in chickens that were beak-trimmed at young ages

A survey of beak morphological abnormalities was performed on 6,201 chickens (egg-laying hens and chickens for meat production belonging to 25 flocks) brought to a poultry processing plant. The observed abnormalities varied among flocks with occurrence rates ranging from 0.48 to 46.67%. The occurrence was high in flocks subjected to beak trimming and varied significantly according to chicken breed, with the highest rates of abnormalities in a certain chicken breed. The most widely observed abnormalities were: 1) uneven growth of the upper and lower mandibles, mostly with elongation of the lower mandible (accounting for 64.8% of all abnormalities); 2) misalignment of the upper and lower mandibles, causing lateral deviation or crossing (16.3%); 3) sharp or jagged deformities of the mandible tips (10.1%); 4) permanent open beak, a deformity in which the beak did not close completely even when closed (5.8%); and 5) formation of tubercular swellings at the tips of the upper or lower mandibles (3.1%). This is the first report on the occurrence of beak abnormalities in beak-trimmed poultry in Japan.
Association of human leukocyte antigens Class I and Class II antigens with chronic periodontitis in East India

Context: Human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) have an important role in the determination of susceptibility and resistance to periodontal diseases in humans, which may vary from population to population. Aims: The aim of this study was to find out the association of HLA Classes I and II genes with chronic periodontitis in East Indian population. Materials and Methods: In a cross-sectional study design, a total of sixty participants of chronic periodontitis (CP) (mean age: 44.12 ± 5.85) and sixty subjects of periodontal disease-free controls (NP) Periodontitis free controls (mean age 41.85 ± 7.71) were analyzed for their various HLA combinations using serologic (microlymphocytotoxicity test) method. The results are further compared with the HLA profile of 100 samples of blood donors for which periodontal status was unknown. All the data were statistically analyzed by applying Chi-square test, Results: HLA-B7 (P = 0.003), DR7 (P = 0.001), DR53 (P = 0.001), and DQ3 (P = 0.001) were identified as susceptible phenotypes to CP, whereas HLA-A1 (P = 0.010), A3 (P = 0.001), and Cw4 (P = 0.001) phenotypes were identified to be associated with disease resistance. Conclusion: The HLA-B7, DR7, DR53, and DQ3 alleles may represent as risk factors for CP in Eastern Population of India, whereas HLA-A1, A3, and Cw4 may indicate to protective factors for CP of the same.
Trust model for cloud service consumers

In the last few years, Cloud computing has become essential in the research, industry, and business. On the other hands, Cloud computing is based on virtualization over IT resources where virtual storage and computing services are provided. Therefore, trusting of both cloud providers and consumers is considered a critical factor to enhance reliability and security of the cloud environment. Although there are many research studies concern about establishing trust for cloud service providers. In this paper, a trust model has been proposed to determine the trust for cloud consumers. The main component of the proposed trust model is the trust metric stage. The function of this stage is to define the trust percentage for each consumer. Four enhanced techniques have been used and implemented in this stage; Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Multiple Regression (MR), Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP), and PSO-Multiple Regression (MR-PSO). According to implementation results of these techniques, it is found that the PSO is the proper technique to be used to calculate the trust percentage. The performance of the proposed trust model has been evaluated relative to Armor dataset. The experimental results show that the trust percentage according to our proposed model is deviated by 0.017 relative to Armor dataset.
Clepsydra: Modeling timing flows in hardware designs

Emergence of side channel security attacks has challenged the classic assumptions regarding what data is publicly available. As demonstrated repeatedly, statistical analysis of information collected by measuring completion time of hardware designs can reveal confidential information. Even though timing-based side channel leakage can be easily exploited to breach data privacy, conventional hardware verification tools are not yet suited to assess these vulnerabilities. To acquaint the hardware design process with formal security evaluations, we introduce a model for tracking timing-based information flows through HDL codes. Based on this model, we have developed Clepsydra, a tool for automatically generating circuitry for tracking timing flows and generic logical flows within hardware designs in two distinct channels. The circuit generated by Clepsydra can be analyzed by EDA tools to detect timing leakage or formally prove constant execution time. We present proofs regarding soundness and precision of the proposed model along with results of employing Clepsydra to verify security properties on a variety of hardware units including crypto cores, bus architectures, caches and arithmetic modules.
Fast‐scale bifurcation in single‐stage PFC power supplies operating with DCM boost stage and CCM forward stage

This paper describes the fast‐scale bifurcation phenomena of a single‐stage single‐switch power‐factor‐correction (PFC) regulator comprising a boost stage operating in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) and a forward stage operating in continuous conduction mode (CCM). The two stages combine into a single stage by sharing one main switch and one control loop. Using ‘exact’ cycle‐by‐cycle computer simulations, the effects of various circuit parameters on fast‐scale instabilities are studied. The results are qualitatively verified by experimental measurements. This work provides a clear picture of how the variation of certain practical parameters can render such a circuit fast‐scale unstable. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Telomeres, Age and Reproduction in a Long-Lived Reptile

A major interest has recently emerged in understanding how telomere shortening, mechanism triggering cell senescence, is linked to organism ageing and life history traits in wild species. However, the links between telomere length and key history traits such as reproductive performances have received little attention and remain unclear to date. The leatherback turtle Dermochelys coriacea is a long-lived species showing rapid growth at early stages of life, one of the highest reproductive outputs observed in vertebrates and a dichotomised reproductive pattern related to migrations lasting 2 or 3 years, supposedly associated with different environmental conditions. Here we tested the prediction of blood telomere shortening with age in this species and investigated the relationship between blood telomere length and reproductive performances in leatherback turtles nesting in French Guiana. We found that blood telomere length did not differ between hatchlings and adults. The absence of blood telomere shortening with age may be related to an early high telomerase activity. This telomere-restoring enzyme was formerly suggested to be involved in preventing early telomere attrition in early fast-growing and long-lived species, including squamate reptiles. We found that within one nesting cycle, adult females having performed shorter migrations prior to the considered nesting season had shorter blood telomeres and lower reproductive output. We propose that shorter blood telomeres may result from higher oxidative stress in individuals breeding more frequently (i.e., higher costs of reproduction) and/or restoring more quickly their body reserves in cooler feeding areas during preceding migration (i.e., higher foraging costs). This first study on telomeres in the giant leatherback turtle suggests that blood telomere length predicts not only survival chances, but also reproductive performances. Telomeres may therefore be a promising new tool to evaluate individual reproductive quality which could be useful in such species of conservation concern.
ORB-SLAM based semi-dense mapping with monocular camera

In recent years, Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) has been more and more popular especially in the field of unmanned vehicles and augmented reality (AR) applications. The existing feature based SLAM systems such as ORB-SLAM can only estimate sparse mapping and the direct methods such as LSD-SLAM have poor robustness on variety of light intensity. In this paper, we combine the advantages of direct method and indirect method, to accomplish semi-dense mapping based on ORB-SLAM. Our method has two key novelties: (1) when performing epipolar search, we compare the hamming distance of binary descriptor along the epipolar line, and thus the influence of illumination change can be reduced (2) we propose modified bilateral filter to smooth depth estimation. Experimental results show that a denser mapping can be obtained using our system.
“Trust Us”: Mobile Phone Use Patterns Can Predict Individual Trust Propensity

An individual's trust propensity - i.e., a dispositional willingness to rely on others" - mediates multiple socio-technical systems and has implications for their personal, and societal, well-being. Hence, understanding and modeling an individual's trust propensity is important for human-centered computing research. Conventional methods for understanding trust propensities have been surveys and lab experiments. We propose a new approach to model trust propensity based on long-term phone use metadata that aims to complement typical survey approaches with a lower-cost, faster, and scalable alternative. Based on analysis of data from a 10-week field study (mobile phone logs) and "ground truth" survey involving 50 participants, we: (1) identify multiple associations between phone-based social behavior and trust propensity; (2) define a machine learning model that automatically infers a person's trust propensity. The results pave way for understanding trust at a societal scale and have implications for personalized applications in the emerging social internet of things.
Automatic anatomy recognition via fuzzy object models

To make Quantitative Radiology a reality in routine radiological practice, computerized automatic anatomy recognition (AAR) during radiological image reading becomes essential. As part of this larger goal, last year at this conference we presented a fuzzy strategy for building body-wide group-wise anatomic models. In the present paper, we describe the further advances made in fuzzy modeling and the algorithms and results achieved for AAR by using the fuzzy models. The proposed AAR approach consists of three distinct steps: (a) Building fuzzy object models (FOMs) for each population group G. (b) By using the FOMs to recognize the individual objects in any given patient image I under group G. (c) To delineate the recognized objects in I. This paper will focus mostly on (b). FOMs are built hierarchically, the smaller sub-objects forming the offspring of larger parent objects. The hierarchical pose relationships from the parent to offspring are codified in the FOMs. Several approaches are being explored currently, grouped under two strategies, both being hierarchical: (ra1) those using search strategies; (ra2) those strategizing a one-shot approach by which the model pose is directly estimated without searching. Based on 32 patient CT data sets each from the thorax and abdomen and 25 objects modeled, our analysis indicates that objects do not all scale uniformly with patient size. Even the simplest among the (ra2) strategies of recognizing the root object and then placing all other descendants as per the learned parent-to-offspring pose relationship bring the models on an average within about 18 mm of the true locations.
A process engineering approach to increase organoid yield

ABSTRACT Temporal manipulation of the in vitro environment and growth factors can direct differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into organoids – aggregates with multiple tissue-specific cell types and three-dimensional structure mimicking native organs. A mechanistic understanding of early organoid formation is essential for improving the robustness of these methods, which is necessary prior to use in drug development and regenerative medicine. We investigated intestinal organoid emergence, focusing on measurable parameters of hindgut spheroids, the intermediate step between definitive endoderm and mature organoids. We found that 13% of spheroids were pre-organoids that matured into intestinal organoids. Spheroids varied by several structural parameters: cell number, diameter and morphology. Hypothesizing that diameter and the morphological feature of an inner mass were key parameters for spheroid maturation, we sorted spheroids using an automated micropipette aspiration and release system and monitored the cultures for organoid formation. We discovered that populations of spheroids with a diameter greater than 75 μm and an inner mass are enriched 1.5- and 3.8-fold for pre-organoids, respectively, thus providing rational guidelines towards establishing a robust protocol for high quality intestinal organoids. Summary: Implementation of a workflow to identify structural features of intestinal spheroids - an intermediate step in organoid emergence from human pluripotent stem cells - can enrich for pre-organoids.
Genetic Connectivity between North and South Mid-Atlantic Ridge Chemosynthetic Bivalves and Their Symbionts

Transform faults are geological structures that interrupt the continuity of mid-ocean ridges and can act as dispersal barriers for hydrothermal vent organisms. In the equatorial Atlantic Ocean, it has been hypothesized that long transform faults impede gene flow between the northern and the southern Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) and disconnect a northern from a southern biogeographic province. To test if there is a barrier effect in the equatorial Atlantic, we examined phylogenetic relationships of chemosynthetic bivalves and their bacterial symbionts from the recently discovered southern MAR hydrothermal vents at 5°S and 9°S. We examined Bathymodiolus spp. mussels and Abyssogena southwardae clams using the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene as a phylogenetic marker for the hosts and the bacterial 16S rRNA gene as a marker for the symbionts. Bathymodiolus spp. from the two southern sites were genetically divergent from the northern MAR species B. azoricus and B. puteoserpentis but all four host lineages form a monophyletic group indicating that they radiated after divergence from their northern Atlantic sister group, the B. boomerang species complex. This suggests dispersal of Bathymodiolus species from north to south across the equatorial belt. 16S rRNA genealogies of chemoautotrophic and methanotrophic symbionts of Bathymodiolus spp. were inconsistent and did not match the host COI genealogy indicating disconnected biogeography patterns. The vesicomyid clam Abyssogena southwardae from 5°S shared an identical COI haplotype with A. southwardae from the Logatchev vent field on the northern MAR and their symbionts shared identical 16S phylotypes, suggesting gene flow across the Equator. Our results indicate genetic connectivity between the northern and southern MAR and suggest that a strict dispersal barrier does not exist.
Recommendations for the use of antiemetics: evidence-based, clinical practice guidelines. American Society of Clinical Oncology.

THE GOAL OF ANTIEMETIC therapy is to prevent nausea and vomiting completely. This goal is achieved for many patients receiving chemotherapy or radiation therapy, and is based on clinical and basic research that has steadily improved the control of emesis over the last 20 years. As therapy has become more effective, it has also become safer, with few side effects associated with the most commonly used regimens. These regimens are convenient for patients to receive and for health care professionals to administer. However, despite improvements, a significant number of patients still experience emesis, and efforts to reduce this side effect of treatment must continue. As antiemetic usage has grown, the classes of agents available for antiemetic treatment, the number of agents, and the indications for antiemetics have all increased as well. The prevention of delayed emesis and anticipatory emesis is equal in importance to the need to prevent acute chemotherapyand radiation-induced emesis. Additionally, managing special and difficult emetic problems and selecting the proper antiemetic approach necessitate identification of the patient’s emetic risk. Although the neuropharmacologic basis of emesis is still incompletely understood, the selection of an appropriate antiemetic regimen is possible and can have an impact on several aspects of clinical care. Goals related to the complete control of emesis, ie, no vomiting, include providing care that is convenient for the patient, treatment that reduces hospitalization and time in the ambulatory setting, and therapy that enhances the patient’s quality of life. Additionally, practitioners need to be mindful of reducing costs of treatment while achieving these goals. 1-3
An Argument about the Composition of Conceptual Structure

In order for people to be able to talk about what they perceive, there must be a level of mental representation at which information conveyed by language is compatible with information from sensory systems such as vision, nonverbal audition, touch, and so forth. I will call this level conceptual structure. Though the existence of conceptual structure has been more or less taken for granted (especially by the AI community), the need to consider it seriously has been brought to the attention of linguists rather recently, by such works as Fodor (1975) and Miller and Johnson-Laird (1976). This paper will present a combination of linguistic and visual evidence which bears on the nature of conceptual structure.