Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two long homologous retroviral sequence blocks in proximal Yq11 cause AZFa microdeletions as a result of intrachromosomal recombination events.

We mapped the breakpoints of the AZoospermia factor a (AZFa) microdeletion located in proximal Yq11 in six men with complete germ cell aplasia, i.e. Sertoli Cell Only syndrome (SCO). The proximal breakpoints were identified in a long retroviral sequence block (HERV15yq1: 9747 nucleotides) at the 5' end of the DYS11 DNA locus in Yq11, interval D3. The distal breakpoints were found in a homologous HERV15 sequence block mapped to the Yq11 interval D6, i.e. in the distal part of the AZFa region (HERV15yq2: 9969 nucleotides). Compared with the HERV15yq1 sequence, HERV15yq2 is marked by a deletion of a HERV15 sequence domain at its 5' end and insertion of an LINE 1 3'-UTR sequence block (L1PA4) of similar length at its 3' end. The deletion of the L1PA4 element was recognized as the molecular origin of the DYS11 12f2 restriction fragment length polymorphism. For all six AZFa patients it was possible to perform PCR experiments bridging both retroviral sequence blocks, which map in a distance of 781.557 kb in proximal Yq11 in fertile men. The AZFa breakpoint-fusion regions were located in their recombined HERV15yq1/HERV15yq2 sequence blocks in either one of two long identical sequence domains (ID1 and ID2). We therefore assume that intrachromosomal recombination events between the two homologous retroviral sequence blocks in proximal Yq11 are probably the causative agents for most of the AZFa microdeletions observed in men with SCO syndrome. A mean value of 792 kb was estimated for their molecular lengths.
Robust Path Planning and Feedback Design Under Stochastic Uncertainty

Autonomous vehicles require optimal path planning algorithms to achieve mission goals while avoiding obstacles and being robust to uncertainties. The uncertainties arise from exogenous disturbances, modeling errors, and sensor noise, which can be characterized via stochastic models. Previous work dened a notion of robustness in a stochastic setting by using the concept of chance constraints. This requires that mission constraint violation can occur with a probability less than a prescribed value. In this paper we describe a novel method for optimal chance constrained path planning with feedback design. The approach optimizes both the reference trajectory to be followed and the feedback controller used to reject uncertainty. Our method extends recent results in constrained control synthesis based on convex optimization to solve control problems with nonconvex constraints. This extension is essential for path planning problems, which inherently have nonconvex obstacle avoidance constraints. Unlike previous approaches to chance constrained path planning, the new approach optimizes the feedback gain as well as the reference trajectory. The key idea is to couple a fast, nonconvex solver that does not take into account uncertainty, with existing robust approaches that apply only to convex feasible regions. By alternating between robust and nonrobust solutions, the new algorithm guarantees convergence to a global optimum. We apply the new method to an unmanned aircraft and show simulation results that demonstrate the ecacy of the approach.
Verifying cloud services: present and future

As cloud-based services gain popularity in both private and enterprise domains, cloud consumers are still lacking in tools to verify that these services work as expected. Such tools should consider properties such as functional correctness, service availability, reliability, performance and security guarantees. In this paper we survey existing work in these areas and identify gaps in existing cloud technology in terms of the verification tools provided to users. We also discuss challenges and new research directions that can help bridge these gaps.
Effects of Stress, Dietary Restraint, and Disinhibition Upon Eating Habits and Nutrition.

Restraint theory states that for some individuals physiological factors which normally result in eating compete with cognitive efforts to resist eating (i.e. dietary restraint). This disparity has been hypothesized to result in a chronic state of stress which leads to reduced behavioral control and increased negative affect. It has been presumed that dietary restraint is a precondition for overeating. Despite the legitimacy of proposing a link between stress, dietary restraint and overeating this interaction has not received intensive study. Furthermore, studies which have attempted to assess this relationship have not investigated the possible independent and interactive influences each of these factors might have on dietary habits. In the current study, the effects of dietary restraint, disinhibition, and stress on nutritional intake were examined through a 2 (High/Low Restraint) x 2 (High/Low Disinhibition) x 2 (High/Low Stress Condition) factorial design. Higher levels of restraint were associated with pathological scores on some eating disorder measures and a history of repeated dieting, but not on most nutritional variables. In contrast, high disinhibition was related to pathological scores on some eating disorder measures, personality characteristics associated with eating
Fault-tolerant resynthesis with dual-output LUTs

We present a fault-tolerant post-mapping resynthesis for FPGA-based designs that exploits the dual-output feature of modern FPGA architectures to improve the reliability of a mapped circuit against faults. Emerging FPGA architectures, such as 6-LUTs in Xilinx Virtex-5 and 8-input ALMs in Altera Stratix-III, have a secondary LUT output that allows access to non-occupied SRAM bits. We show that this architectural feature can be used to build redundancy for fault masking with limited area and performance overhead. Our algorithm improves reliability of a mapping by performing two basic operations: duplication (in which free configuration bits are used to duplicate a logic function whose value is obtained at the secondary output) and encoding (in which two copies of the same logic function are ANDed or ORed together in the fanout of the duplicated logic). The problem of fault tolerant post-mapping resynthesis is then formulated as the optimal duplication and encoding scheme that ensures the minimal circuit fault rate w.r. t. a stochastic single fault model. We present an ILP formulation of this problem and an efficient algorithm based on generalized network flow. On MCNC benchmarks, experimental results show that for combinational circuits the proposed approach improves mean-time-to-failure(MTTF) by 27% with 4% area overhead, and the proposed approach with explicit area redundancy improves MTTF by 113% with 36% area overhead, compared to the baseline mapping by ABC. This provides a viable fault tolerance solution for non-mission critical applications compared to TMR (triple modular redundancy) which has a 5x–6x area overhead.
Adaptation of a speech recognizer for singing voice

This paper studies the speaker adaptation techniques that can be applied for adapting a speech recognizer to singing voice. Maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) techniques are studied, with specific details in choosing the number and types of transforms. The recognition performance of the different methods is measured in terms of phoneme recognition rate and singing-to-lyrics alignment errors of the adapted recognizers. Different methods improve the correct recognition rate with up to 10 percentage units, compared to the non-adapted system. In singing-to-lyrics alignment we obtain a best of 0.94 seconds mean absolute alignment error, compared to 1.26 seconds for the non-adapted system. Global adaptation was found to provide the most improvement in the performance, but small further improvement was obtained with regression tree adaptation.
Incorporating Variation of Model-specific Score Distribution in Speaker Verification Systems

It has been shown that the authentication performance of a bi ometric system is dependent on the models/templates specific to a user. As a result, some users may be more easily re cognized or impersonated than others. The various categories of users have been characterized by Doddington et al.(1988). We refer to this unbalanced performance across users as the Doddington’s zoo effect. In the context o f fusion, we argue that this effect is system-dependent, i.e., a user model that is easily impersonated (a lamb) in one system may be easily recognized in another system (a sheep). While in principle, fusion system could be trained t o cope with the changing animal behavior of users from system to system, the lack of training data makes it impossib le. We believe that one major cause of the Doddington’s zoo effect is the variation of class conditional scores from ne speaker model to another. We propose a two-level fusion framework that effectively realizes a fusion classi fier adapted to each user. Firstly, one applies a client-specific (or model-specific) score normalization procedure to each o f t e system outputs to be combined. Then, one feeds the resulting normalized outputs to a fusion classifier (common to all users) as input to obtain a final combined score. Two existing model-specific score normalization procedure s are considered in this framework, i.e. Fand Z-norms. In addition to them, a novel score normalization method call ed model-specific log-likelihood ratio (MS-LLR) is also proposed. While Z-norm is impostor-centric, i.e., it makes use of only the impostor score statistics, F-norm and the proposed MS-LLR are client-impostor centric, i.e., the y consider both the client and impostor score statistics simultaneously. Our findings based on the XM2VTS and the NIST 2005 databases show that when client-impostor centric normalization procedures are used to implement the proposed two-level fusion framework, the resulting fusion Norman Poh and Josef Kittler are with CVSSP, University of Su rrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, Surrey, UK. E-mails: normanpoh@i eee.org, j.kittler@surrey.ac. uk
Using plan-based reward shaping to learn strategies in StarCraft: Broodwar

StarCraft: Broodwar (SC:BW) is a very popular commercial real strategy game (RTS) which has been extensively used in AI research. Despite being a popular test-bed reinforcement learning (RL) has not been evaluated extensively. A successful attempt was made to show the use of RL in a small-scale combat scenario involving an overpowered agent battling against multiple enemy units [1]. However, the chosen scenario was very small and not representative of the complexity of the game in its entirety. In order to build an RL agent that can manage the complexity of the full game, more efficient approaches must be used to tackle the state-space explosion. In this paper, we demonstrate how plan-based reward shaping can help an agent scale up to larger, more complex scenarios and significantly speed up the learning process as well as how high level planning can be combined with learning focusing on learning the Starcraft strategy, Battlecruiser Rush. We empirically show that the agent with plan-based reward shaping is significantly better both in terms of the learnt policy, as well as convergence speed when compared to baseline approaches which fail at reaching a good enough policy within a practical amount of time.
Handwritten Document Editor: An Approach

With advancement in new technologies many individuals are moving towards personalization of the same. The same idea inspired us to develop a system which can provide a personal touch to all our documents including both electronic and paper media. In this article we are proposing a novel idea for creating an editor system which will take handwritten scanned document as the input, recognizes the characters from the document, then proceed with creating the font of recognized handwriting to allow user to edit the document. We have proposed use of genetic algorithm along with K-NN classifier for fast recognition of handwritten characters and use of marching squares algorithm for tracing contour points of characters to generate a handwritten font.
A Category Resolve Power-Based Feature Selection Method

One of the most important issues in Text Categorization (TC) is Feature Selection (FS). Many FS methods have been put forward and widely used in TC field, such as Information Gain (IG), Document Frequency (DF) thresholding, Mutual Information (MI) and so on. Empirical studies show that IG is one of the most effective methods, DF performs similarly, in contrast, and MI had relatively poor performance. One basic research question is why these FS methods cause different performance. Many existing work answers this question based on empirical studies. This paper presents a formal study of FS based on category resolve power. First, two desirable constraints that any reasonable FS function should satisfy are defined, then a universal method for developing FS functions is presented, and a new FS function KG using this method is developed. Analysis shows that IG and KG (knowledge gain) satisfy this universal method. Experiments on Reuters-21578 collection, NewsGroup collection and OHSUMED collection show that KG and IG get the best performance, even KG performs better than the IG method in two collections. These experiments imply that the universal method is very effective and gives a formal evaluation criterion for FS method.
Lentivirus-mediated knockdown of NLK inhibits small-cell lung cancer growth and metastasis

Nemo-like kinase (NLK), an evolutionarily conserved serine/threonine kinase, has been recognized as a critical regulator of various cancers. In this study, we investigated the role of NLK in human small-cell lung cancer (SCLC), which is the most aggressive form of lung cancer. NLK expression was evaluated by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction in 20 paired fresh SCLC tissue samples and found to be noticeably elevated in tumor tissues. Lentivirus-mediated RNAi efficiently suppressed NLK expression in NCI-H446 cells, resulting in a significant reduction in cell viability and proliferation in vitro. Moreover, knockdown of NLK led to cell cycle arrest at the S-phase via suppression of Cyclin A, CDK2, and CDC25A, which could contribute to cell growth inhibition. Furthermore, knockdown of NLK decreased the migration of NCI-H446 cells and downregulated matrix metalloproteinase 9. Treatment with NLK short hairpin RNA significantly reduced SCLC tumor growth in vivo. In conclusion, this study suggests that NLK plays an important role in the growth and metastasis of SCLC and may serve as a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of SCLC.
Using design patterns to evolve system software from UNIX to Windows NT

Developing system software that is reusable across OS platforms is challenging. Due to constraints imposed by the underlying OS platforms, it is often impractical to directly reuse existing algorithms, detailed designs, interfaces, or implementations. This article describes our experiences using a large-scale reuse strategy for system software based on design patterns. Design patterns capture the static and dynamic structures of solutions that occur repeatedly when producing applications in a particular context [1, 2]. Design patterns are an important technique for improving system software quality since they address a fundamental challenge in largescale software development: communication of architectural knowledge among developers [3]. This article describes our experiences with a large-scale reuse strategy based upon design patterns. We have used this strategy at Ericsson to facilitate the development of efficient OO telecommunication system software. In this article, we present a case study that describes the cross-platform evolution of portions of an OO framework called the ADAPTIVE Service eXecutive (ASX) [4]. The ASX framework is an integrated collection of components that collaborate to produce a reusable infrastructure for developing distributed applications. This article focuses on the ASX framework’s support for event-driven distributed applications. One of the key components in the ASX framework is the Reactor class category [5]. The Reactor integrates the demultiplexing of events and the dispatching of the corresponding event handlers. Event handlers are triggered by various types of events such as timers, synchronization objects, signals, or I/O operations. We recently ported theASX framework from several UNIX platforms to the Windows NT platform. These OS platforms possess significantly different mechanisms for event demultiplexing and I/O. To meet our performance requirements, it was not possible to directly reuse many of the components in the ASX framework across the OS platforms. However, it was possible to reuse the underlyingdesign patterns that were embodied in the ASX framework, thereby reducing project risk. The remainder of the article is organized as follows: Section 2 outlines the background of our work using OO frameworks for telecommunications system softare; Section 3.1 presents an overview of the design patterns that are the focus of this article; Section 4 examines the issues that arose as we ported the components in the Reactor framework from several UNIX platforms to the Windows NT platform; Section 5 summarizes the experience we gained, both pro and con, while deploying a design pattern-based system development methodology in a production software environment; and Section 6 presents concluding remarks.
Characterization of genetic structures of the QepA3 gene in clinical isolates of Enterobacteriaceae

QepA is one of the genes that confer quinolone resistance in bacteria. The aim of this study was to analyze the genetic structures of plasmids that carry a qepA3, a recently discovered allele of qepA in Enterobacteriaceae clinical isolates. 656 non-redundant Enterobacteriaceae clinical isolates were screened for the qepA3 gene and five isolates were identified to carry the gene. Plasmids were isolated from these isolates and were found to increase antibiotic resistance once the plasmids were transferred to Escherichia coli. These plasmids were subcloned and sequenced to analyze the genetic structures surrounding the qepA3 gene. The results showed that the five plasmids had different genetic structures; two of the qepA3-containning isolates had either the blaCTX-M-14 or blaTEM-12 gene instead of the blaTEM-1 gene. The structures of both pKP3764 and pECL3786 have not been previously described. In comparison with pHPA, there were a number of changes in DNA sequences up- and down-stream of the qepA3 gene. These findings provide better understanding of the genetic variations in qepA3 and would be useful for diagnosis and control of quinolone resistance in clinical settings.
A Non-supersymmetric Large N CFT from Type 0 String Theory

We show that type 0B theory has a classical AdS5 × S5 solution and argue that it is stable at the string-theory level for small enough radius. The dual 4-d conformal field theory is the infrared limit of the theory on N electric D3-branes coincident with N magnetic D3-branes. We explicitly construct this SU(N) × SU(N) gauge theory with global SO(6) symmetry and verify that the one-loop term in the beta function vanishes exactly, while the two-loop term vanishes in the large N limit. We find that this theory is related by a certain projection to the maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory suggesting its large N conformal invariance to all orders in perturbation theory.
Evaluating the effects of asthma therapy on childhood growth: what can be learnt from the published literature?

The difficulties of assessing the effects of asthma therapy on childhood growth were explored in the first part of this review. In this part of the review growth studies with inhaled corticosteroids were selected that included a control group, measured height by stadiometry and were of ≥1 yr duration. The studies were classified as type 1 (placebo control), type 2 (nonsteroidal therapy control), type 3 (comparator inhaled corticosteroid control) or type 4 (“real-life” studies with dose adjustment). The design attributes of these studies were then compared with the recommendations described in the first part of this review. Of the 18 studies identified, 17 were susceptible to one or more important confounding factors. Nevertheless, the outcomes of all 18 studies were mostly consistent. At recommended doses, beclomethasone dipropionate and budesonide demonstrated a small degree of growth suppression over 1–2 yrs (study types 1 and 2), but there was little evidence of such an effect with fluticasone propionate. Studies comparing different inhaled corticosteroids at recommended doses indicated more rapid growth with fluticasone propionate than with beclomethasone dipropionate or budesonide. However, none of the inhaled corticosteroids appeared to affect final height. In conclusion, the results from the majority of published growth studies with inhaled corticosteroids must be interpreted with a degree of caution owing to their potential susceptibility to important confounding factors. Further well-designed studies are needed to establish whether different inhaled corticosteroids have different effects on growth in the long term.
Properties for efficient demonstrations to a socially guided intrinsically motivated learner

The combination of learning by intrinsic motivation and social learning has been shown to improve the learner's performance and gain precision over a wider range of motor skills, with for instance the SGIM-D learning algorithm [1]. Nevertheless, this bootstrapping a-priori depends on the demonstrations made by the teacher. We propose in this paper to examine this dependence: to what extend the quality of the demonstrations can influence the learning performance, and which are the characteristics of a good demonstrator. Results on a fishing experiment highlights the importance of the difficulty of the demonstrated tasks, as well as the structure of the actions demonstrated.
Stereo vision-based visual tracking using 3D feature clustering for robust vehicle tracking

In order to detect vehicles on the road reliably, a vehicle detector and tracker should be integrated to work in unison. In real applications, some of the ROIs generated from a vehicle detector are often ill-fitting due to imperfect detector outputs. The ill-fitting ROIs make it difficult for tracker to estimate a target vehicle correctly due to outliers. In this paper, we propose a stereo-based visual tracking method using a 3D feature clustering scheme to overcome this problem. Our method selects reliable features using feature matching and a 3D feature clustering method and estimates an accurate transform model using a modified RANSAC algorithm. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method offers better performance compared with previous feature-based tracking methods.
The essential role of a ubiquitin ligase, Riplet, in RIG-I-dependent antiviral innate immune responses

Title The ubiquitin ligase Riplet is essential for RIG-I-dependent innate immune responses to RNA virus infection. Author(s) Oshiumi, Hiroyuki; Miyashita, Moeko; Inoue, Naokazu; Okabe, Masaru; Matsumoto, Misako; Seya, Tsukasa Citation Cell Host & Microbe, 8(6): 496-509 Issue Date 2010-12-16 DOI Doc URL http://hdl.handle. net/2115/44745 Right Type article (author version) Additional Information File Information CHM8-6_496-509.pdf
Analysis, Design and Implementation of an Improved ZVZCS-PWM Forward converter

In this paper an Improved Zero Voltage Zero Current Pulse Width Modulation Forward converter which employs a simple resonance snubber circuit is introduced. A simple snubber circuit consists of a capacitor, an inductor and two diodes. In proposed converter, switch Q1 operates at ZCS turn-on, and ZVS turn-off conditions and all-passive semiconductor devices operate at ZVZCS turn-on and turn-off state. The proposed converter is analyzed and various operating modes of the ZVZCS- PWM forward converter are discussed. Analysis and design considerations are presented and the prototype experimental results of a 100w (40 V/2.5A) proposed converter operating at 30 KHz switching frequency confirm the validity of theoretical analysis.