Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fuzzy Robust H&#8734;Control for Networked Control Systems

This paper is concerned with the robust Hinfin controller design of nonlinear networked control systems (NCSs). A Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model with parametrical uncertainties is used to approximate the NCS in which network-induced delay is time-vary and less than one sample period. In terms of the given model, a fuzzy controller design method is proposed based on Lyapunov approach and linear matrix inequality (LMI). A feedback gain of a memoryless controller can be obtained by solving a set of LMIs. An example is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method
Beneficial Effect of Low Ethanol Intake on the Cardiovascular System: Possible Biochemical Mechanisms

Low ethanol intake is known to have a beneficial effect on cardiovascular disease. In cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance leads to altered glucose and lipid metabolism resulting in an increased production of aldehydes, including methylglyoxal. Aldehydes react non-enzymatically with sulfhydryl and amino groups of proteins forming advanced glycation end products (AGEs), altering protein structure and function. These alterations cause endothelial dysfunction with increased cytosolic free calcium, peripheral vascular resistance, and blood pressure. AGEs produce atherogenic effects including oxidative stress, platelet adhesion, inflammation, smooth muscle cell proliferation and modification of lipoproteins. Low ethanol intake attenuates hypertension and atherosclerosis but the mechanism of this effect is not clear. Ethanol at low concentrations is metabolized by low Km alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase, both reactions resulting in the production of reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH). This creates a reductive environment, decreasing oxidative stress and secondary production of aldehydes through lipid peroxidation. NADH may also increase the tissue levels of the antioxidants cysteine and glutathione, which bind aldehydes and stimulate methylglyoxal catabolism. Low ethanol improves insulin resistance, increases high-density lipoprotein and stimulates activity of the antioxidant enzyme, paraoxonase. In conclusion, we suggest that chronic low ethanol intake confers its beneficial effect mainly through its ability to increase antioxidant capacity and lower AGEs.
Influenza A Viruses Target Type II Pneumocytes in the Human Lung

Abstract Background. Highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses preferentially infect alveolar type II pneumocytes in human lung. However, it is unknown whether this cellular tropism contributes to high viral virulence because the primary target cells of other influenza viruses have not been systematically studied. Methods. We provide the first comparison of the replication, tropism, and cytokine induction of human, highly pathogenic avian influenza A virus subtype H5N1 and other animal influenza A viruses in primary human lung organ cultures. Results. Subytpe H5N1 and human-adapted subtype H1N1 and H3N2 viruses replicated efficiently in the lung tissue, whereas classic swine and low-pathogenicity avian viruses propagated only poorly. Nevertheless, all viruses examined were detected almost exclusively in type II pneumocytes, with a minor involvement of alveolar macrophages. Infection with avian viruses that have a low and high pathogenicity provoked a pronounced induction of cytokines and chemokines, while human and pandemic H1N1-2009 viruses triggered only weak responses. Conclusions. These findings show that differences in the pathogenic potential of influenza A viruses in the human lung cannot be attributed to a distinct cellular tropism. Rather, high or low viral pathogenicity is associated with a strain-specific capacity to productively replicate in type II pneumocytes and to cope with the induced cytokine response.
High Levels of Proinflammatory Cytokines, but Not Markers of Tissue Injury, in Unaffected Intestinal Areas from Patients with IBD

Intestinal alterations in IBD are triggered and maintained by an overexpression of proinflammatory cytokines. Additionally, increased immune activation has been found in the adjacent intestinal areas without displaying any apparent histological alterations, however, the regulatory environment is not well established. Biopsy specimens from patients with ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD), from both affected and unaffected areas, and also from a group of colonic biopsies from healthy controls, were included in our study. Cytokines and markers of mucosal damage were analyzed by real-time PCR, and some of the results confirmed by western-blot and ELISA. Levels of IFNγ, TNFα, IL-6, IL-15, IL-18, and IL-23 were increased (above healthy controls) in both affected and unaffected areas from IBD. IL-1β, IL-6, IL-12, and IL-27 were higher in affected areas compared to unaffected ones in UC but not CD. In general, a correlation was observed between mRNA levels of these cytokines and both iNOS and Granzyme B. SOCS-2 and SOCS-3 were also increased in the affected areas. In conclusion, the unaffected areas from IBD show increased levels of a restricted set of cytokines that may exert immune activating roles in these areas without being able to trigger tissue damage.
Passage Detection in Outdoor/indoor Environments for Robot Navigation

One of the key challenges in the field of service robotics is a safe and efficient robot navigation. Therefore, the robot should be able to navigate among static and moving obstacles. The aim of this thesis is to develop a novel algorithm for creating topological maps from range maps. The nodes of these maps are areas interconncted by passages. Rather than planning a trajectory to the goal configuration, the path is represented by a graph of passages, which is more general and flexible. For room detection in indoor environments, some approaches are known [1, 2]. Based on this results, a novel more general approach should be developed which is applicable for indoor and outdoor environments. Furthermore, different characteristics of the environment should be used to rank the usefulness of each gate. This result is used to improve the result of sampling based planners [3] during a navigation task.
Applying Semi-Order Preference Model in Content-Based Service Discovery

Efficient service discovery is a crucial process for Web service utilization. Most existing service discovery approaches, based on either functional or non-functional attributes, do not address the issues associated with the impact of subjective expectations and preferences on service discovery. For example, duplicated and similar functionalities existing among services require service consumers to include additional aspects (i.e. content of service) to evaluate the services. The service consumers and providers often have different views on the content of services. This work attempts to alleviate their differences by proposing a multi-agent consensus approach which is based on fuzzy group decision making methods and semantic web technologies in order to assist service providers and consumers in discovering appropriate services with consideration of their expectations and preferences. In addition, a user-friendly tool for constructing agent-based Web service is introduced for assistance in representing user's preference and expectations and managing Web services.
Hartes Toolchain Early Evaluation: Profiling, Compilation and HDL Generation

The aim of the hartes project is to facilitate and automate the rapid design and development of heterogeneous embedded systems, targeting a combination of a general purpose embedded processor, digital signal processing and reconfigurable hardware. In this paper, we evaluate three tools from the hartes toolchain supporting profiling, compilation, and HDL generation. These tools facilitate the HW/SW partitioning, co-design, co-verification, and co-execution of demanding embedded applications. The described tools are provided by the Delft Work Bench framework1. Experimental results on MJPEG and G721 encoder application case studies suggest overall performance improvement of 228% and 36% respectively.
Land cover classification analysis about water and elevation in East Dongting wetland

Remote sensing has been an important mean of resource monitor, especially monitoring wetlands where researchers can hardly get to. This paper applied SPOT-5 image to classify the East Dongting Lake area into five cover types using the decision tree classification method. The five cover types were water, mudflats, bare ground, low-coverage marsh land and high-coverage marsh land. According to results of band analysis, this paper extracted the water by adding fourth band and first band, resulting that the water body boundaries extracted by band calculated using this method are highly consistent with water body in the image after SPOT-5 panchromatic and Multi-spectral bands fusion. Then a multilayer buffer was created based on waterbody through referring to the elevation value distribution histogram. we defined the levels range and divided the elevation into 6 levels. Finally, relationship between various cover types and elevation and relationship between various cover types and water buffers were analyzed, drawing them with water distance relationship.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Multiprotein Biomarkers in Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells

Background Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal progressive motor neuron disease, for which there are still no diagnostic/prognostic test and therapy. Specific molecular biomarkers are urgently needed to facilitate clinical studies and speed up the development of effective treatments. Methodology/Principal Findings We used a two-dimensional difference in gel electrophoresis approach to identify in easily accessible clinical samples, peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC), a panel of protein biomarkers that are closely associated with ALS. Validations and a longitudinal study were performed by immunoassays on a selected number of proteins. The same proteins were also measured in PBMC and spinal cord of a G93A SOD1 transgenic rat model. We identified combinations of protein biomarkers that can distinguish, with high discriminatory power, ALS patients from healthy controls (98%), and from patients with neurological disorders that may resemble ALS (91%), between two levels of disease severity (90%), and a number of translational biomarkers, that link responses between human and animal model. We demonstrated that TDP-43, cyclophilin A and ERp57 associate with disease progression in a longitudinal study. Moreover, the protein profile changes detected in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of ALS patients are suggestive of possible intracellular pathogenic mechanisms such as endoplasmic reticulum stress, nitrative stress, disturbances in redox regulation and RNA processing. Conclusions/Significance Our results indicate that PBMC multiprotein biomarkers could contribute to determine amyotrophic lateral sclerosis diagnosis, differential diagnosis, disease severity and progression, and may help to elucidate pathogenic mechanisms.
Hardware solution of real-time depth estimation based on stereo vision

3D video representation with depth maps is one efficient framework of 3DTV/free viewpoint television (FTV). 3D effect can be reconstructed based on human visional principle of binocular disparity. Texture image plus depth map provides an efficient solution of 3DTV application and real-time depth estimation is one barrier due to huge processing time consumption on complexity algorithm in the processing. An efficient hardware implementation of depth estimation is proposed for real time execution in this paper. The estimation system includes dual-channel video capture, image preprocessing, density pixel matching, pixel correlation and post processing. Each step of the system takes advantage of the hardware resource and adopts pipeline architecture to reduce the latency of combinational logic module at every stage and increase the throughput of the disparity extraction module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the processing time and improves the ability of high resolution processing. The system can reach 131fps and Full HD (1920×1080) resolution, is suitable for adaptive real-time depth estimation and can be used as a subsystem embedded in the capture system of stereo vision.
Frozen ground monitoring using PALSAR/ALOS data.

Microwave remote sensing has shown proof of its effectiveness for frozen ground mapping due to the high difference of permittivity between frozen and unfrozen soil. However, the characterization of seasonal frozen ground still remains a problematic application. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) on the 24 of January 2006. This satellite has the Phased Array type L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) allowing fully polarimetric data acquisition. Furthermore, ALOS initial calibration phase has been achieved, showing good results for polarimetric calibration. Consequently, frozen ground characterization using PALSAR sensor is investigated in this paper.
Silhouette-based human motion estimation for movement education of young children

To estimate a human motion, in this paper, we propose a neural approach using silhouettes in video frames captured by two cameras placed at the front and side of the human body. To extract features of the silhouettes for motion estimation, the proposed system computes both global and local features and then groups these features into static and dynamic features depending on whether features are in a static frame. Extracted features are used to train a RBF network. The neural system uses static features as the input of the neural network and dynamic features as additional features for classification. In this paper, the proposed method was applied to movement education for young children. The basic movements for such education consist of locomotor movements, such as walking, jumping, and hopping, and non-locomotor movements, including bending, stretching, balancing and turning. The system demonstrated the effectiveness of motion estimation for movement education generated by the proposed neural network.
Scheduling algorithms for cioq switches

Most scalable switches are required to buffer packets at both their inputs and outputs to overcome the slow memory speeds of packet queues. This thesis deals with the design of scheduling algorithms for such Combined Input and Output Queued (CIOQ) switches. For crossbar based CIOQ switches, we demonstrate the underperformance of commercially used scheduling algorithms under overload traffic conditions using targeted stress tests and present ideas to develop robust, stress resistant versions of these algorithms that are still simple enough to be implemented in high speed switches. To regulate the flow of traffic in buffered, multi-stage switches, we introduce a novel mechanism called distributed scheduling. Distributed scheduling is similar to crossbar scheduling used in switches with small port counts, but is both distributed and coarse-grained to enable high-speed implementations of scheduling algorithms in high capacity, high performance switches. In this thesis, we comprehensively study and evaluate distributed scheduling.
Evidence of subpopulations with different levels of insulin resistance in women with polycystic ovary syndrome.

BACKGROUND Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is non-uniformly associated with insulin resistance (IR). We examined IR in women with PCOS. METHODS Sixty-nine PCOS women were subjected to the insulin suppression test (IST) to determine their steady-state plasma glucose (SSPG) as a direct measure of insulin sensitivity. RESULTS SSPG exhibited a multimodal distribution suggesting the existence of subpopulations. The heterogeneous distribution of plasma glucose at 180 min (P = 0.011), with three modes, suggested differences in the plasma glucose level trajectories during the IST. Hence, the population was separated into three groups: (i) (n = 33), subjects with SSPG < or = 152.5 mg/dl, corresponding to the first to fifth deciles; (ii) (n = 29), subjects in the interval 152.5 mg/dl < SSPG < or = 300 mg/dl; (iii) (n = 7), subjects with SSPG > 300 mg/dl, corresponding to the tenth decile. Plasma glucose distributions at 180 min showed differences in their mean values and ranges among groups (P < 0.0001). The trajectories of the groups differed significantly during the IST (P < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS insulin sensitivity in our patients exhibited a discontinuous distribution, implying that PCOS is a heterogeneous disorder possessing subpopulations regarding IR.
Robust Chip-Level Clock Tree Synthesis

Chip-level clock tree synthesis (CCTS) is a key problem that arises in complex system-on-a-chip designs. A key requirement of CCTS is to balance the clock-trees belonging to different IPs such that the entire tree has a small skew across all process corners. Achieving this is difficult because the clock trees in different IPs might be vastly different in terms of their clock structures and cell/interconnect delays. The chip-level clock tree is expected to compensate for these differences and achieve good skews across all corners. Also, CCTS is expected to reduce clock divergence between IPs that have critical timing paths between them. Reducing clock divergence reduces the maximum possible clock skew in the critical paths between the IPs and thus improves yield. This paper proposes effective CCTS algorithms to simultaneously reduce multicorner skew and clock divergence. Experimental results on several test-cases indicate that our methods achieve 30% reduction in the clock divergence with significantly improved multicorner skew variance, at the cost of 2% increase in buffer area and 1% increase in wirelength.
Double Feynman Gate (F2G) in Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA)

— Quantum dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is anticipated to allow for extremely dense nano-scale design and implementation of logic circuit over the Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS). QCA has been considered as a promising alternative to CMOS technology for its lower power consumption, higher scale integration and higher switching frequency. Moreover, the basic element in QCA is majority gate. This paper present Double Feynman Gate (F2G) based on QCA logic gates: the QCA wire, MV gate and Inverter gate. The proposed circuit is designed and verified using QCADesigner.
Social Learning as a Way to Overcome Choice-Induced Preferences? Insights from Humans and Rhesus Macaques

Much theoretical attention is currently devoted to social learning. Yet, empirical studies formally comparing its effectiveness relative to individual learning are rare. Here, we focus on free choice, which is at the heart of individual reward-based learning, but absent in social learning. Choosing among two equally valued options is known to create a preference for the selected option in both humans and monkeys. We thus surmised that social learning should be more helpful when choice-induced preferences retard individual learning than when they optimize it. To test this prediction, the same task requiring to find which among two items concealed a reward was applied to rhesus macaques and humans. The initial trial was individual or social, rewarded or unrewarded. Learning was assessed on the second trial. Choice-induced preference strongly affected individual learning. Monkeys and humans performed much more poorly after an initial negative choice than after an initial positive choice. Comparison with social learning verified our prediction. For negative outcome, social learning surpassed or at least equaled individual learning in all subjects. For positive outcome, the predicted superiority of individual learning did occur in a majority of subjects (5/6 monkeys and 6/12 humans). A minority kept learning better socially though, perhaps due to a more dominant/aggressive attitude toward peers. Poor learning from errors due to over-valuation of personal choices is among the decision-making biases shared by humans and animals. The present study suggests that choice-immune social learning may help curbing this potentially harmful tendency. Learning from successes is an easier path. The present data suggest that whether one tends to walk it alone or with a peer’s help might depend on the social dynamics within the actor/observer dyad.
EL NEOLIBERALISMO EN AMERICA LATINA

• Ferdinand Azevedo (Brasil Septentrional); Carlos Cardó (Perú); José Adán Cuadra (Centroamérica); Benjamín González Suelta (República Dominicana); juan Díez Martínez (Chile); Nariano García Diez (Paraguay); Ignacio García-Mata (Argentina); José Adolfo González (Colombia); Mario López Barrio (México); Jorge Machín (Cuba); Afian Mendoza (Ecuador); Emilio M. Moreira (Baltia); Femando Picó (Puerto Rico); Armando Raffo (Uruguay); Marcos Recolons (Bolivia); Joao Claudio Rhoden (Brasil Meridonal); Francisco lverth Simó (Brasil Central); Arturo Sosa A. (Venezuela).
FOXO 3 a Turns the Tumor Necrosis Factor Receptor Signaling Towards Apoptosis Through Reciprocal Regulation of c-Jun N-Terminal Kinase and NF-B

Objective—We evaluated the full range effects of FOXO3a in endothelial cells (ECs) by microarray analysis and investigated the role of FOXO3a regulating TNF receptor signaling pathway. Methods and Results—Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) were transfected with adenoviral vectors expressing constitutively active FOXO3a (Ad-TM-FOXO3a). Ad-TM-FOXO3a transfection caused remarkable apoptosis, which were accompanied with upregulation of genes related with TNF receptor signaling, such as TNF, TANK (TRAF-associated NFB activator), and TTRAP (TRAF and TNF receptor-associated protein). Furthermore, B-Ras1 (I B-interacting Ras-like protein-1) which is known to block I B degradation was found increased, and intranuclear translocation of NFB was inhibited. GADD45 and XIAP, negative regulators of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK), were suppressed and JNK activity was increased. Attenuation of TNF signaling pathway either by blocking antibody for TNF receptor or by blocking JNK with DMAP (6-dimethylaminopurine) or Ad-TAM67 (dominant negative c-Jun) cotransfection, significantly reduced FOXO3a-induced apoptosis. Finally, treatment of vasculature with heat shock, an activator of endogenous FOXO3a, resulted in EC apoptosis, which was completely rescued by Ad-TAM67. Conclusion—FOXO3a promotes apoptosis of ECs, through activation of JNK and suppression of NFB. These data identify a novel role of FOXO3a to turn TNF receptor signaling to a proapoptotic JNK-dependent pathway. (Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol. 2008;28:112–120.)
Enhancing automatic speed estimation systems performance using support vector machines

Speed cameras are systems which normally include a camera, a calibration system, speed estimation software, and a vehicle recognition system (which includes a vehicle type detector and a LPR system). These systems are normally used to detect and identify vehicles disobeying a speed limit in a road. While these systems are used widely in the world, their use in Iran is restricted due to various difficulties in using LPR systems for Farsi license plates. Also, to reduce the setup cost, in many traffic law enforcement systems low-cost low-resolution IR cameras are used, which increases the LPR complexity. In this paper, it has been showed that how using statistical learning methods (specifically SVMs) enhanced the automatic speed estimation systems performance by improving the vehicle identification via reading the license plate. The focus will be on Farsi license plates recognition. Obviously the results can be used in many potential applications such as automatic toll collection and traffic control in restricted areas.