Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Block-Level Image Service for the Cloud

Businesses increasingly need agile and elastic computing infrastructure to respond quickly to real world situations. By offering efficient process-based virtualization and a layered image system, containers are designed to enable agile and elastic application deployment. However, creating or updating large container clusters is still slow due to the image downloading and unpacking process. In this paper, we present DADI Image Service, a block-level image service for increased agility and elasticity in deploying applications. DADI replaces the waterfall model of starting containers (downloading image, unpacking image, starting container) with fine-grained on-demand transfer of remote images, realizing instant start of containers. To accelerate the cold start of containers, DADI designs a pull-based prefetching mechanism which allows a host to read necessary image data beforehand at the granularity of image layers. We design a P2P-based decentralized image sharing architecture to balance traffic among all the participating hosts and propose a pull-push collaborative prefetching mechanism to accelerate cold start. DADI efficiently supports various kinds of runtimes including cgroups, QEMU, etc., further realizing “build once, run anywhere”. DADI has been deployed at scale in the production environment of Alibaba, serving one of the world’s largest ecommerce platforms. Performance results show that DADI can cold start 10,000 containers on 1,000 hosts within 4 seconds.
ContextBot: Improving Response Consistency in Crowd-Powered Conversational Systems for Affective Support Tasks

Crowd-powered conversational systems (CPCS) solicit the wisdom of crowds to quickly respond to on-demand users' needs. The very factors that make this a viable solution ---such as the availability of diverse crowd workers on-demand--- also lead to great challenges. The ever-changing pool of online workers powering conversations with individual users makes it particularly difficult to generate contextually consistent responses from a single user's standpoint. To tackle this, prior work has employed conversational facts extracted by workers to maintain a global memory, albeit with limited success. Through a controlled experiment, we explored if a conversational agent, dubbed ContextBot, can provide workers with the required context on the fly for successful completion of affective support tasks in CPCS, and explore the impact of ContextBot on the response quality of workers and their interaction experience. To this end, we recruited workers (N=351) from the Prolific crowd-sourcing platform and carried out a 3×3 factorial between-subjects study. Experimental conditions varied based on (i) whether or not context was elicited and informed by motivational interviewing techniques (MI-adherent guidance, general guidance, and no guidance), and (ii) different conversational entry points for workers to produce responses (early, middle, and late). Our findings show that: (a) workers who entered the conversation earliest were more likely to produce highly consistent responses after interacting with ContextBot; (b) showed better user experience after they interacted with ContextBot with a long chat history to surf; (c) produced more professional responses as endorsed by psychologists; (d) and that interacting with ContextBot through task completion did not negatively impact workers' cognitive load. Our findings shed light on the implications of building intelligent interfaces for scaffolding strategies to preserve consistency in dialogue in CPCS.
Comparison of news commonality and churn in international news outlets with TARO

The past decades have seen an increase in academic research and public debates on online news and journalism in general, with an emphasis on fake news and low-quality reporting. This paper presents TARO: a model and a software framework for the collection and analysis of online news sources. The novel aspects of the TARO model and framework are: the distinction between abstract pieces of news and concrete news items, news comparison techniques based on similarity on embedded spaces, and the management of rolling news via so-called snapshot extensions. One advantage of TARO is the ability to perform comparative analysis of international news sources in various languages and across time zones. To prove the applicability and soundness of TARO, two quantitative cases studies related to the concept of churnalism are also presented in this paper. The two case studies provide quantitative insights on two tendencies of news outlets: news commonality (publishing the same news) and news churn (quickly removing recent news to make space for even more recent news).
Why do we Hate Migrants?: A Double Machine Learning-based Approach

Abstract: AI-based NLP literature has explored antipathy toward the marginalized section of society, such as migrants, and their social acceptance. Broadly, extant literature has conceptualized this as an online hate speech detection task and employed predictive ML models. However, a crucial omission in this literature is the genesis (or causality) of online hate, i.e., why do we hate migrants? Drawing insights from social science literature, we have identified three antecedents of online hate: Cultural, Economic, and Security concerns. Subsequently, we probe -which of these concerns triggers higher toxicity on online platforms? Initially, we consider OLS-based regression analysis and SHAP framework to identify the predictors of toxicity, and subsequently, we use Double Machine Learning (DML)-based casual analysis to investigate whether good predictors of toxicity are also causally significant. We find that the causal effect of Cultural concerns on toxicity is higher than Security and Economic concerns.
Z-Pose: Continuous 3D Hand Pose Tracking Using Single-Point Bio-Impedance Sensing on a Ring

This paper introduces Z-Pose, a method for continuous 3D hand pose tracking that uses swept-frequency RF sensing via a worn ring device. By modeling the hand as an RF antenna and analyzing its geometry-dependent impedance, Z-Pose performs real-time hand tracking based on the unique impedance signature of each pose. Unlike camera-based systems, this sensing technique is robust to occlusion and illumination, performing well in our evaluation studies even with obstructions such as sleeves and gloves. The results indicate that the system achieves an average Euclidean error of 7.2mm across individual hand joints, lending itself to a variety of interactive applications.
HyperBrain: Human-inspired Hypermedia Guidance using a Large Language Model

We present HyperBrain, a hypermedia client that autonomously navigates hypermedia environments to achieve user goals specified in natural language. To achieve this, the client makes use of a large language model to decide which of the available hypermedia controls should be used within a given application context. In a demonstrative scenario, we show the client's ability to autonomously select and follow simple hyperlinks towards a high-level goal, successfully traversing the hypermedia structure of Wikipedia given only the markup of the respective resources. We show that hypermedia navigation based on language models is effective, and propose that this should be considered as a step to create hypermedia environments that are used by autonomous clients alongside people.
Adaptação transcultural para o português dos Questionários de Desejos Intensos por Comida – Estado ou Traço (QDIC-E e QDIC-T) dos State and Trait Food-Cravings Questionnaires (FCQ-S and FCQ-T)

Resumo Este estudo objetivou apresentar a adaptacao transcultural dos Questionarios de Desejos Intensos por Comida – Estado ou Traco (QDIC-E e QDIC-T) dos State and Trait Food-Cravings Questionnaires (FCQ-S and FCQ-T) para o Portugues. Fez-se a traducao e a retraducao dos instrumentos, a avaliacao da equivalencia conceitual, operacional e de itens por especialistas da area e a avaliacao dos instrumentos por uma amostra de universitarios, por meio da avaliacao do grau de compreensao e analise da consistencia interna dos instrumentos pelo coeficiente Alpha de Cronbach. Ademais, fez-se a avaliacao da equivalencia semântica pelo coeficiente de correlacao intraclasse entre os escores obtidos por bilingues em cada questao das versoes em ingles e portugues. Os instrumentos foram considerados de facil compreensao (para os especialistas foi de 95,4% e 97%, para o QDIC-T e QDIC-E, respectivamente, e, para os universitarios, 81,8% os consideraram de facil compreensao), e demonstraram valores de consistencia interna satisfatorios (QDIC-T: variaram de 0,6 a 0,8; QDIC-E: variaram de 0,5 a 0,8). A partir do processo de adaptacao transcultural, os resultados satisfatorios possibilitam a recomendacao da versao brasileira dos QDICs.
Penicillin allergy status and its effect on antibiotic prescribing, patient outcomes and antimicrobial resistance (ALABAMA): protocol for a multicentre, parallel-arm, open-label, randomised pragmatic trial

Introduction Incorrect penicillin allergy records are recognised as an important barrier to the safe treatment of infection and affect an estimated 2.7 million people in England. Penicillin allergy records are associated with worse health outcome and antimicrobial resistance. The ALlergy AntiBiotics And Microbial resistAnce (ALABAMA) trial aims to determine if an intervention package, centred around a penicillin allergy assessment pathway (PAAP) initiated in primary care, is safe and effective in improving patient health outcomes and antibiotic prescribing. Methods and analysis The ALABAMA trial is a multicentre, parallel-arm, open-label, randomised pragmatic trial with a nested pilot study. Adults (≥18 years) with a penicillin allergy record and who have received antibiotics in the previous 24 months will be eligible for participation. Between 1592 and 2090 participants will be recruited from participating National Health Service general practices in England. Participants will be randomised to either usual care or intervention to undergo a pre-emptive PAAP using a 1:1 allocation ratio. The primary outcome measure is the percentage of treatment response failures within 28 days of an index prescription. 2090 and 1592 participants are estimated to provide 90% and 80% power, respectively, to detect a clinically important absolute difference of 7.9% in primary outcome at 1 year between groups. The trial includes a mixed-methods process evaluation and cost-effectiveness evaluation. Ethics and dissemination This trial has been approved by London Bridge Research Ethics Committee (ref: 19/LO/0176). It will be conducted in compliance with Good Clinical Practice guidelines according to the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent will be obtained from all subjects involved in the study. The primary trial results will be submitted for publication to an international, peer-reviewed journal. Trial registration ISRCTN20579216.
A Centrality for Social Media Users Focusing on Information-Gathering Ability

In this paper, we propose a centrality metric for social media users that focuses on their information-gathering ability. Existing methods of rating users in social graphs focus on various aspects of users, such as popularity, influential power, and informational quality, but these aspects are related to information-transmitting ability of users. On social media, information-gathering ability is also an important ability, which varies widely from user to user. There have been two well-known metrics related to it: the hub score in the HITS algorithm and Katz centrality. These two methods are, however, not designed for today's social media, and do not take important aspects of social media into consideration. HITS does not consider multi-hop information propagation, and Katz centrality assumes that all nodes in the graph are equally important as information sources and also as information propagation mediators. In the proposed method, we extend Katz centrality by introducing two properties of users: importance as information source and information forwarding probability. The result of our experiment on two Twitter follow graphs shows that our metric produces a ranking different from the existing metrics, and also suggests that it captures some useful aspect of users that are not captured by existing metrics.
Electrically Controlled HTSC/Ferroelectric Coplanar Waveguide

It is shown that in an integrated YBa2Cu3O7SrTiO3 structure coplanar waveguide (CPW) electrical control of microwave propagation characteristics is possible. Microwave losses of less than 0.2 dB/cm at 10 GHz can be achieved at liquid nitrogen temperatures, provided ferroelectric films with perfect crystalline structures are used. Electrically controlled changes in effective dielectric permittivity of more than 40% are predicted at 77 K and 10 GHz. Sections of these CPWs can be used in electrically controlled phase shifters and resonators.
Novel Gurmarin-like Peptides from Gymnema sylvestre and their Interactions with 1 the Sweet Taste Receptor T1R2/T1R3

8 Gymnema sylvestre (GS) is a traditional medicinal plant known for its hypoglycemic and 9 hypolipidemic effects. Gurmarin (hereafter Gur-1) is the only known peptide in GS. Gur-10 1 functions as a sweet taste suppressor in rodents but weakly in humans. Here, eight 11 gurmarin-like peptides (Gur-2 to Gur-9) and their isoforms are reported in the GS 12 transcriptome. The molecular mechanism of sweet taste suppression by Gur-1 is still 13 largely unknown. Therefore, the complete architecture of human and mouse sweet taste 14 receptor (STR) T1R2/T1R3 and its interaction with Gur-1 to Gur-9 were predicted by 15 AlphaFold-Multimer (AF-M). Only Gur-1 and Gur-2 interact with T1R2 and T1R3 16 monomers and the T1R2/T1R3 heterodimer. AF-M predicted that Gur-1 binds to the 17 intracellular domain (ICD) of the T1R2 monomer and to two binding sites in the cysteine 18 rich domain (CRD) of the T1R3 monomer. In the T1R2/T1R3 heterodimer, Gur-1 binds 19 to an additional site on the T1R2 subunit in addition to the ICD. The novel Gur-2 binds to 20 two sites on the T1R2 monomer and one site on the T1R3 monomer, and as Gur-1 to two 21 binding sites on the T1R2 subunit of the T1R2/T1R3 heterodimer. Furthermore, AF-M 22 predicted that the Gα-gustducin (a role in sweet taste transduction) interacts as Gur-1 23 with the ICD of the T1R2 subunit in the T1R2/T1R3 heterodimer, suggesting that Gur-1
Deep multiple-instance learning accurately predicts gene haploinsufficiency and deletion pathogenicity

Copy number losses (deletions) are a major contributor to the etiology of severe genetic disorders. Although haploinsufficient genes play a critical role in deletion pathogenicity, current methods for deletion pathogenicity prediction fail to integrate multiple lines of evidence for haploinsufficiency at the gene level, limiting their power to pinpoint deleterious deletions associated with genetic disorders. Here we introduce DosaCNV, a deep multiple-instance learning framework that, for the first time, models deletion pathogenicity jointly with gene haploinsufficiency. By integrating over 30 gene-level features potentially predictive of haploinsufficiency, DosaCNV shows unmatched performance in prioritizing pathogenic deletions associated with a broad spectrum of genetic disorders. Furthermore, DosaCNV outperforms existing methods in predicting gene haploinsufficiency even though it is not trained on known haploinsufficient genes. Finally, DosaCNV leverages a state-of-the-art technique to quantify the contributions of individual gene-level features to haploinsufficiency, allowing for human-understandable explanations of model predictions. Altogether, DosaCNV is a powerful computational tool for both fundamental and translational research.
Trunk neural crest gene MOXD1 affects embryonic development

Ectoderm-derived neural crest is a transient structure arising during early embryogenesis in vertebrates. Neural crest consists of four derivatives based on their anterior- to posterior location along the body axis; cranial, vagal, trunk and sacral, respectively. We recently showed that trunk neural crest-specific gene MOXD1 functions as a tumor suppressor in trunk neural crest-derived childhood cancer form neuroblastoma and is essential for proper development of healthy adrenal glands. However, the role of MOXD1 during early embryogenesis is not known. Here, we conditionally knocked out MOXD1 in trunk neural crest cells before they become lineage-committed, using a CRISPR/Cas9 approach in chick embryos. Assessment of embryo growth showed that knockout of MOXD1 delayed development with knockout embryos being smaller. RNA sequencing of trunk-derived neural crest cells from control and knockout embryos showed enrichment of genes connected to gland development, copper ion metabolism and neuroblastoma progression. In conclusion, MOXD1 is important during early and prolonged embryonic development with effects on gland formation, possibly mediated via its role in copper metabolism.
High-quality genome of the zoophytophagous stink bug, Nesidiocoris tenuis, informs their food habit adaptation

The zoophytophagous stink bug, Nesidiocoris tenuis, is a promising natural enemy of micropests such as whiteflies and thrips. This bug possesses both phytophagous and entomophagous food habits, enabling it to obtain nutrition from both plants and insects. This trait allows us to maintain its population density in agricultural fields by introducing insectary plants, even when the pest prey density is extremely low. However, if the bugs’ population becomes too dense, they can sometimes damage crop plants. This dual character seems to arise from the food preferences and chemosensation of this predator. To understand the genomic landscape of N. tenuis, we examined the whole genome sequence of a commercially available Japanese strain. We used long-read sequencing and Hi-C analysis to assemble the genome at the chromosomal level. We then conducted a comparative analysis of the genome with previously reported genomes of phytophagous and hematophagous stink bugs to focus on the genetic factors contributing to this species’ herbivorous and carnivorous tendencies. Our findings suggest that the gustatory gene set plays a pivotal role in adapting to food habits, making it a promising target for selective breeding. Furthermore, we identified the whole genomes of microorganisms symbiotic with this species through genomic analysis. We believe that our results shed light on the food habit adaptations of N. tenuis and will accelerate breeding efforts based on new breeding techniques for natural enemy insects, including genomics and genome editing.
Acute hyperoxia improves spinal cord oxygenation and circulatory function following cervical spinal cord injury in the rat

Spinal cord injury is associated with spinal vascular disruptions that result in spinal ischemia and tissue hypoxia. This study evaluated the therapeutic efficacy of normobaric hyperoxia on spinal cord oxygenation and circulatory function at the acute stage of cervical spinal cord injury. Adult male Sprague–Dawley rats underwent dorsal cervical laminectomy or cervical spinal cord contusion. At 1–2 days after spinal surgery, spinal cord oxygenation was monitored in anesthetized and spontaneously breathing rats via the optical recording of oxygen sensor foils placed on the cervical spinal cord and pulse oximetry. The arterial blood pressure, heart rate, blood gases, and peripheral oxyhemoglobin saturation were also measured under hyperoxic (50% O2) and normoxic (21% O2) breathing. The results showed that contused animals had a significantly lower spinal cord oxygenation level than uninjured animals during normoxia. Cervical spinal cord contusion also significantly reduced peripheral oxyhemoglobin saturation, arterial oxygen partial pressure, and mean arterial blood pressure. Notably, the spinal oxygenation of contused rats could be improved to a level comparable to uninjured animals under hyperoxia. Furthermore, acute hyperoxia could elevate blood pressure, arterial oxygen partial pressure, and peripheral oxyhemoglobin saturation. These results suggest that normobaric hyperoxia can significantly improve spinal cord oxygenation and circulatory function during acute cervical spinal cord injury. We propose that adjuvant normobaric hyperoxia combined with other hemodynamic optimization strategies may prevent secondary damage after spinal cord injury and improve functional recovery.
HCR spectral imaging: 10-plex, quantitative, high-resolution RNA and protein imaging in highly autofluorescent samples

Signal amplification based on the mechanism of hybridization chain reaction (HCR) provides a unified framework for multiplex, quantitative, high-resolution imaging of RNA and protein targets in highly autofluorescent samples. With conventional bandpass imaging, multiplexing is typically limited to four or five targets due to the difficulty in separating signals generated by fluorophores with overlapping spectra. Spectral imaging has offered the conceptual promise of higher levels of multiplexing, but it has been challenging to realize this potential in highly autofluorescent samples including whole-mount vertebrate embryos. Here, we demonstrate robust HCR spectral imaging with linear unmixing, enabling simultaneous imaging of 10 RNA and/or protein targets in whole-mount zebrafish embryos and mouse brain sections. Further, we demonstrate that the amplified and unmixed signal in each of 10 channels is quantitative, enabling accurate and precise relative quantitation of RNA and/or protein targets with subcellular resolution, and RNA absolute quantitation with single-molecule resolution, in the anatomical context of highly autofluorescent samples. SUMMARY Spectral imaging with signal amplification based on the mechanism of hybridization chain reaction enables robust 10-plex, quantitative, high-resolution imaging of RNA and protein targets in whole-mount vertebrate embryos and brain sections.
Graminification and Reversal of Mesophication in a Restored Oak Woodland

ABSTRACT Modern fire exclusion in upland oak- and oak-pine-dominated forests has resulted in reduced flammability of surface fuels as a result of the replacement of flammable fuels of oaks and associated vegetation by less flammable fuels produced by mesophytic trees. Some consequences of such “mesophication” include reductions in herb diversity, C4 grasses, and oak regeneration. We tested two hypotheses of the effects of C4 grasses and tree leaf litter on fuel consumption in the field in restored and unrestored oak woodlands: 1) the presence of C4 grasses increases fuel consumption by a late growing-season prescribed fire (“graminification”), and 2) removing tree leaf fuels reduces fuel consumption by a late growing-season fire to a greater extent in areas lacking substantial, slow-to-dry mesophyte tree leaf litter (mesophication reversal). Consistent with graminification, removing C4 grasses in a restored oak woodland reduced fuel consumption, and fuel consumption was greater following tree leaf litter removal in restored woodland plots containing C4 grasses than in areas that had not been restored and that lacked such grasses. Consistent with mesophication reversal, removing tree leaf fuels reduced fuel consumption to a greater extent in areas where tree leaf litter was dominated by pyrophytic oaks than in an untreated area with a significant amount of mesophyte tree leaf litter. We conclude that mesophication can be reversed at early stages of restoration by thinning mesophytic trees and opening the canopy. Increases in C4 grasses (graminification) at late stages of restoration further increase flammability.