Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Differential Muscarinic Modulation in the Olfactory Bulb

Neuromodulation of olfactory circuits by acetylcholine (ACh) plays an important role in odor discrimination and learning. Early processing of chemosensory signals occurs in two functionally and anatomically distinct regions, the main and accessory olfactory bulbs (MOB and AOB), which receive extensive cholinergic input from the basal forebrain. Here, we explore the regulation of AOB and MOB circuits by ACh, and how cholinergic modulation influences olfactory-mediated behaviors in mice. Surprisingly, despite the presence of a conserved circuit, activation of muscarinic ACh receptors revealed marked differences in cholinergic modulation of output neurons: excitation in the AOB and inhibition in the MOB. Granule cells (GCs), the most abundant intrinsic neuron in the OB, also exhibited a complex muscarinic response. While GCs in the AOB were excited, MOB GCs exhibited a dual muscarinic action in the form of a hyperpolarization and an increase in excitability uncovered by cell depolarization. Furthermore, ACh influenced the input–output relationship of mitral cells in the AOB and MOB differently showing a net effect on gain in mitral cells of the MOB, but not in the AOB. Interestingly, despite the striking differences in neuromodulatory actions on output neurons, chemogenetic inhibition of cholinergic neurons produced similar perturbations in olfactory behaviors mediated by these two regions. Decreasing ACh in the OB disrupted the natural discrimination of molecularly related odors and the natural investigation of odors associated with social behaviors. Thus, the distinct neuromodulation by ACh in these circuits could underlie different solutions to the processing of general odors and semiochemicals, and the diverse olfactory behaviors they trigger. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT State-dependent cholinergic modulation of brain circuits is critical for several high-level cognitive functions, including attention and memory. Here, we provide new evidence that cholinergic modulation differentially regulates two parallel circuits that process chemosensory information, the accessory and main olfactory bulb (AOB and MOB, respectively). These circuits consist of remarkably similar synaptic arrangement and neuronal types, yet cholinergic regulation produced strikingly opposing effects in output and intrinsic neurons. Despite these differences, the chemogenetic reduction of cholinergic activity in freely behaving animals disrupted odor discrimination of simple odors, and the investigation of social odors associated with behaviors signaled by the Vomeronasal system.
Midbrain Dopamine Neurons Associated with Reward Processing Innervate the Neurogenic Subventricular Zone

Coordinated regulation of the adult neurogenic subventricular zone (SVZ) is accomplished by a myriad of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The neurotransmitter dopamine is one regulatory molecule implicated in SVZ function. Nigrostriatal and ventral tegmental area (VTA) midbrain dopamine neurons innervate regions adjacent to the SVZ, and dopamine synapses are found on SVZ cells. Cell division within the SVZ is decreased in humans with Parkinson's disease and in animal models of Parkinson's disease following exposure to toxins that selectively remove nigrostriatal neurons, suggesting that dopamine is critical for SVZ function and nigrostriatal neurons are the main suppliers of SVZ dopamine. However, when we examined the aphakia mouse, which is deficient in nigrostriatal neurons, we found no detrimental effect to SVZ proliferation or organization. Instead, dopamine innervation of the SVZ tracked to neurons at the ventrolateral boundary of the VTA. This same dopaminergic neuron population also innervated the SVZ of control mice. Characterization of these neurons revealed expression of proteins indicative of VTA neurons. Furthermore, exposure to the neurotoxin MPTP depleted neurons in the ventrolateral VTA and resulted in decreased SVZ proliferation. Together, these results reveal that dopamine signaling in the SVZ originates from a population of midbrain neurons more typically associated with motivational and reward processing.
Improving Efficiency and Scalability of Formula-based Debugging

Formula-based debugging techniques are becoming increasingly popular, as they provide a principled way to identify potentially faulty statements together with information that can help fix such statements. Although effective, these approaches are computationally expensive, which limits their practical applicability. Moreover, they tend to focus on failing test cases alone, thus ignoring the wealth of information provided by passing tests. To mitigate these issues, we propose two techniques: on-demand formula computation (OFC) and clause weighting (CW). OFC improves the overall efficiency of formula-based debugging by exploring all and only the parts of a program that are relevant to a failure. CW improves the accuracy of formula-based debugging by leveraging statistical fault-localization information that accounts for passing tests. Our empirical results show that both techniques are effective and can improve the state of the art in formula-based debugging.
Sexting Behaviors Among Adolescents and Adults

Exchanging sexually explicit messages has become an increasingly common form of interaction for both adolescents and adults. Although sexting has been identified as a risk factor for a variety of negative outcomes, this research has generally been conducted without attention to the relationship context of the communicators. This chapter will examine the prevalence of sexting in the context of existing romantic relationships, and how sexting may relate to features of the relationship. The authors will review existing research examining motivations for sexting with romantic partners, pressure to engage in sexting, and associations between sexting and romantic attachment styles and relationship satisfaction. The chapter will conclude with discussion of important future directions for research.
Parallelizing and Optimizing H.264 on Synchronous Data Triggered Architecture

Synchronous data triggered architecture (SDTA) is advantaged with high-performance, flexible scalability, low-cost communication between processor elements. With the prevalence of multimedia nowadays, it is significant to parallelize and optimize the implementation of OpenMAX DL's video component with SDTA support. H.264 is the core of the video part. In this paper, we propose several optimization techniques for H.264. There are loop unrolling, primitives and vectorization, dependences elimination, batch processing and revision, computing direction transformation, load/store acceleration. With these techniques, we have parallelized all the H.264 APIs, and two representative APIs gain speedups of 5.6, and 6.5 compared to the original sequential ones. Then we propose addition hardware for clip operations. With this hardware, the test benches reduced execution time by 18%, and 38%, respectively, and the speedups are 6.7, and 10.3. We believe that these techniques are especially beneficial to multimedia applications, even other applications on synchronous data triggered architecture.
A Neural Attention Model for Disfluency Detection

In this paper, we study the problem of disfluency detection using the encoder-decoder framework. We treat disfluency detection as a sequence-to-sequence problem and propose a neural attention-based model which can efficiently model the long-range dependencies between words and make the resulting sentence more likely to be grammatically correct. Our model firstly encode the source sentence with a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BI-LSTM) and then use the neural attention as a pointer to select an ordered sub sequence of the input as the output. Experiments show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art f-score of 86.7% on the commonly used English Switchboard test set. We also evaluate the performance of our model on the in-house annotated Chinese data and achieve a significantly higher f-score compared to the baseline of CRF-based approach.
Holonomy Spaces from Invariant Three-Forms

We construct several new G2 holonomy metrics that play an important role in recent studies of geometrical transitions in compactifications of M-theory to four dimensions. In type IIA string theory these metrics correspond to D6 branes wrapped on the threecycle of the deformed conifold and the resolved conifold with two-form RR flux on the blown-up two-sphere, which are related by a conifold transition. We also study a G2 metric that is related in type IIA to the line bundle over S ×S with RR two-form flux. Our approach exploits systematically the definition of torsion-free G2 structures in terms of three-forms which are closed and co-closed. Besides being an elegant formalism this turns out to be a practical tool to construct G2 holonomy metrics.
Calling Academia to Account: Rights and Responsibilities

Part 1 Calling to account in the wider world: values and the world of scholarship rights and responsibilities - academic freedom and professional ethics value for money the public interest. Part 2 Calling to account within universities: structure and purpose institutional autonomy - academics and managers membership, employment, office making the rules - internal legislation the rights of the subordinate and the insubordinate resolving disputes. Part 3 Standards - accounting for academic decisions: the value of a degree peer review and appraisal forming academic judgements ensuring sound procedures reasonableness.
Systemic Reform in Mathematics and Science Education: An Urban Perspective

This report describes the educational milieu in urban schools. The report is based upon studies of student performance in urban schools and the conditions that contribute to performance. The purpose of the study is to identify factors and processes that facilitate or impede effective systemic reform, particularly reforms in math and science education. The review describes the urban context of educational reform and examines literature related to current reforms and effective strategies for teaching inner-city youth. The report presents conclusions and discusses the implications of research on reform in mathematics and science in urban schools.
Improvement of Face Recognition by Eyeglass Removal

In this paper, we present a method based on Active Appearance Model (AAM) to remove eyeglasses from face images. The occluded regions are first roughly detected by the AAM search. Then, an ellipse model is used to fit the eyes’ position. After eliminating the eye blocks, residual regions are further enhanced and extracted more precisely by the adaptive threshold method. Finally, the synthesized image is generated by iterative error compensation. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides an effective solution to the recognition of faces occluded by thick-rimmed eyeglasses.
RESULTS Lowering the response of both Hoxa 1 and Hoxb 1 to endogenous retinoids results in malformations of the facial nerve

Anthony Gavalas1,*, Michèle Studer2,†,*, Andrew Lumsden3, Filippo M. Rijli1,‡, Robb Krumlauf2 and Pierre Chambon1,‡ 1Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire and Cellulaire, CNRS/INSERM/ULP, Collège de France, BP 163 67404 Illkirch Cedex, CU de Strasbourg, France 2Division of Developmental Neurobiology, MRC National Institute for Medical Research, The Ridgeway, Mill Hill, London NW7 1AA, UK 3Department of Developmental Neurobiology, UMDS, Guy’s Hospital, London SE1 9RT, UK
EMG Activity as a Function of the Performer's Focus of Attention

In previous studies of attentional focus effects, investigators have measured performance outcome. Here, however, the authors used electromyography (EMG) to determine whether differences between external and internal foci would also be manifested at the neuromuscular level. In 2 experiments, participants (N = 11, Experiment 1; N = 12, Experiment 2) performed biceps curls while focusing on the movements of the curl bar (external focus) or on their arms (internal focus). In Experiment 1, movements were performed faster under external than under internal focus conditions. Also, integrated EMG (iEMG) activity was reduced when performers adopted an external focus. In Experiment 2, movement time was controlled through the use of a metronome, and iEMG activity was again reduced under external focus conditions. Those findings are in line with the constrained action hypothesis (G. Wulf, N. McNevin, & C. H. Shea, 2001), according to which an external focus promotes the use of more automatic control processes.
Dynamically Evolving

P2P systems are mainly used as distributed ﬁle systems; until recently no P2P version of newsgroups protocol existed. A DHT-based Publish-Subscribe (Pub-Sub) system by Aekaterinidis and Triantaﬁllou is the ﬁrst such a solution: a user interested in a particular topic subscribes it so that later he receives messages on new events on this topic once they occur. Pub-Sub systems as proposed cause severe privacy problems - a user who posts a new message on some subject has to fetch the list of all nodes who subscribed to this content. This in turn means that an adversary has a straightforward and legal tool to get information who is interested in a particular topic. In this paper we show how to enhance the system in order to protect user privacy. This includes anonymizing the users as well as hiding information on system dynamics and delivery of messages through anonymous paths. We also show how to protect such a system from spam activity.
Emotion induction and emotion recognition using their physiological signals

This study is related with emotions and their recognition. Three different emotional states (boredom, pain and surprise) are evoked by emotional stimuli, physiological signals (EDA, ECG, PPG and SKT) for the induced emotions are measured as the reactions of stimuli, and 27 features are extracted from their physiological signals for emotion recognition. The stimuli are used to provoke emotions and tested their appropriateness and effectiveness. Audio-visual film clips used as stimuli are captured originally from movies, documentary, and TV shows with the appropriateness of 86%, 97.3% and 94.1% for boredom, pain and surprise, respectively, and the effectiveness of 5.23 for happiness, 4.96 for pain and 6.12 for surprise (7 point Likert scale). Also, for the three emotion recognition, we propose a Fuzzy c-means clustering based neural networks using the physiological signals. The proposed model consists of three layers, namely, input, hidden and output layers. Here, fuzzy c-means clustering method, two types of polynomial and linear combination function are used as a kernel function in the input layer, the hidden layer and the output layer of neural networks, respectively. To evaluate the performance of emotion recognition of the proposed model, we use the 10-fold cross validation and a comparative analysis shows that the proposed model exhibit higher accuracy when compared with some other models that exist in the literature.
Inhibitors of Raf Kinase Activity Block Growth of Thyroid Cancer Cells with RET/PTC or BRAF Mutations In vitro and In vivo

Purpose: Papillary thyroid carcinomas are associated with nonoverlapping activating mutations of RET, NTRK, RAS and BRAF, which altogether are present in ∼70% of cases. We postulated that compounds that inhibit a distal effector in the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway would inhibit growth and tumorigenicity of human thyroid cancer cell lines with mutations of RET or BRAF. Experimental Design and Results: We first examined the effects of AAL-881 and LBT-613, two inhibitors of RAF kinase activity, on RAF-MAPK/extracellular signal–regulated kinase (ERK) kinase (MEK)-ERK activation in thyroid PCCL3 cells after conditional induction of expression of H-RASG12V or BRAFV600E. Both compounds blocked RAS and RAF-dependent MEK and ERK phosphorylation. They also potently blocked MEK phosphorylation in human thyroid cancer cell lines with either RET/PTC1 (TPC1) or BRAFV600E (NPA, ARO, and FRO) mutations. Inhibition of ERK phosphorylation was transient in TPC1 and ARO cells, with recovery of ERK phosphorylation associated with concomitant down-regulation of the MAPK phosphatases MKP-3 and DUSP5. Both compounds inhibited growth of all cell lines, with LBT-613 being ∼10-fold more potent than AAL-881. TPC1 cells were more sensitive to growth inhibition (IC50 0.1-0.25 and ∼0.05 μmol/L for AAL-881 and LBT-613, respectively) than BRAF (+) lines (IC50 2.5-5 and 0.1-0.5 μmol/L, respectively). Growth inhibition was associated with G1 arrest, and induction of cell death. Growth of ARO and NPA tumor xenografts was inhibited by LBT-613 or AAL-881. MEK and ERK phosphorylation was inhibited by both compounds in ARO but not in NPA cell xenografts. Conclusions: Compounds that inhibit kinase activity are effective growth inhibitors for poorly differentiated thyroid cancer cell lines with either RET or RAF mutations, and hold promise for treatment of most forms of papillary thyroid carcinoma.
Classifier combination applied to real time face detection and classification

In these paper we propose a complete scheme for face detection and classification. We have used a Bayesian classifier for face detection and a nearest neighbor approach for face classification. To improve the performance of the classifier a feature extraction algorithm based on a modified non parametric discriminant analysis has also been implemented. The complete scheme has been tested in a real time environment achieving encouraging results. We also show a new boosting scheme based on adapting the features to the misclassified examples, achieving also interesting results.
Enhancing Prediction in Collaborative Filtering-Based Recommender Systems

Recommender systems (RS) are introduced to help users with finding the desired information. Collaborative filtering (CF) approach is one of the most widely used techniques in recommender systems. Prediction is the main part of all recommender systems. An enhanced prediction formula that could be employed in all CF-based methods is proposed in this paper. Resnick prediction formula that is the most well-known and employed formula in CF-based RS is used as basis in this paper. Not only the average of active user's ratings, but also the collective average of similar users' ratings and the average of all ratings given to the target item is used in the formula of this study. The results are promising and satisfactory. Results of enhanced prediction formula are compared with the results of unenhanced version to verify the effectiveness of proposed method.
Building a Family of Compilers

We have developed and maintained a set of closely related compilers. Although much of their code is duplicated and shared, they have been maintained separately because they are treated as different compilers. Even if they were merged together, the combined code would become too complicated to serve as the base for another extension. We describe our experience to address this problem by adopting the product line engineering paradigm to build a family of compilers. This paradigm encourages developers to focus on developing a set of compilers rather than on developing one particular compiler. We show engineering activities for a family of compilers from product line analysis through product line architecture design to product line component design. Then, we present how to build particular compilers from core assets resulting from the previous activities and how to take advantage of modern programming language technology to organize this task. Our experience demonstrates that the product line engineering as a developing paradigm can ease the construction of a family of compilers.
Reliabe data link for power transfer control in an inductive charging system for electric vehicles

This paper presents a novel data link for electric vehicles charged through inductive power transfer (IPT) systems. The data link uses the magnetically coupled coils as transmission medium. The data link is intended to transfer the instantaneous current and voltage values in the power receiving circuitry on the electric vehicle (EV) platform. One key goal is to enable robust and reliable communication for closed-loop operation of the IPT system. By careful system design the data link can be used in the noisy environment of the power transfer. For the communication architecture a fully digital approach is considered. The digital signal processing is done in an industrial controller thus, the data link can be implemented into existing systems with minimum changes. For proof of concept the communication system is connected to a 3kW IPT system and evaluated. These key performance values for simultaneous power transfer and communication will be presented. The data link stands out with its high signal to noise ratio and error vector magnitude, consequently high reliability can be guaranteed.
Ron Knockdown and Ron Monoclonal Antibody IMC-RON8 Sensitize Pancreatic Cancer to Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors (HDACi)

Recepteur d’origine nantais (Ron) is overexpressed in a panel of pancreatic cancer cells and tissue samples from pancreatic cancer patients. Ron can be activated by its ligand macrophage stimulating protein (MSP), thereby activating oncogenic signaling pathways. Crosstalk between Ron and EGFR, c-Met, or IGF-1R may provide a mechanism underlying drug resistance. Thus, targeting Ron may represent a novel therapeutic strategy. IMC-RON8 is the first Ron monoclonal antibody (mAb) entering clinical trial for targeting Ron overexpression. Our studies show IMC-RON8 downmodulated Ron expression in pancreatic cancer cells and significantly blocked MSP-stimulated Ron activation, downstream Akt and ERK phosphorylation, and survivin mRNA expression. IMC-RON8 hindered MSP-induced cell migration and reduced cell transformation. Histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) are reported to target expression of various genes through modification of nucleosome histones and non-histone proteins. Our work shows HDACi TSA and Panobinostat (PS) decreased Ron mRNA and protein expression in pancreatic cancer cells. PS also reduced downstream signaling of pAkt, survivin, and XIAP, as well as enhanced cell apoptosis. Interestingly, PS reduced colony formation in Ron knockdown cells to a greater extent than Ron scramble control cells in colony formation and soft agarose assays. IMC-RON8 could also sensitize pancreatic cancer cells to PS, as reflected by reduced colony numbers and size in combination treatment with IMC-RON8 and PS compared to single treatment alone. The co-treatment further reduced Ron expression and pAkt, and increased PARP cleavage compared to either treatment alone. This study suggests the potential for a novel combination approach which may ultimately be of value in treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Lecture 13 (Compression) | April 9

In the last lecture we considered the successor problem for a bounded universe of size u. We began looking at the van Emde Boas [3] data structure, which implements Insert, Delete, Successor, and Predecessor in O(lg lg u) time per operation. In this lecture we finish up van Emde Boas, and improve the space complexity from our original O(u) to O(n). We also look at perfect hashing (first static, then dynamic), using it to improve the space complexity of van Emde Boas and to implement a simpler data structure with the same running time, y-fast trees.