Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simulating Spiking Neural P Systems Without Delays Using GPUs

We present in this paper our work regarding simulating a type of P system known as a spiking neural P system (SNP system) using graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs, because of their architectural optimization for parallel computations, are well-suited for highly parallelizable problems. Due to the advent of general purpose GPU computing in recent years, GPUs are not limited to graphics and video processing alone, but include computationally intensive scientific and mathematical applications as well. Moreover P systems, including SNP systems, are inherently and maximally parallel computing models whose inspirations are taken from the functioning and dynamics of a living cell. In particular, SNP systems try to give a modest but formal representation of a special type of cell known as the neuron and their interactions with one another. The nature of SNP systems allowed their representation as matrices, which is a crucial step in simulating them on highly parallel devices such as GPUs. The highly parallel nature of SNP systems necessitate the use of hardware intended for parallel computations. The simulation algorithms, design considerations, and implementation are presented. Finally, simulation results, observations, and analyses using an SNP system that generates all numbers in $\mathbb N$ - {1} are discussed, as well as recommendations for future work.
Nonproteolytic Activation of Prorenin Contributes to Development of Cardiac Fibrosis in Genetic Hypertension

In contrast to proteolytic activation of inactive prorenin by cleavage of the N-terminal 43 residue peptide, we found that prorenin is activated without proteolysis by binding of the prorenin receptor to the pentameric “handle region” I11PLLKK15P. We hypothesized that such activation occurs in hypertensive rats and causes cardiac renin–angiotensin system (RAS) activation and end-organ damage. To test this hypothesis, we devised methods of specifically inhibiting nonproteolytic activation by decapeptide spanning the pentameric handle region peptide as a decoy. In stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHRsp) fed a high-salt diet, arterial pressure started to rise significantly with a marked increase in the cardiac prorenin receptor mRNA level at 8 weeks of age, and cardiac fibrosis had developed by 12 weeks of age. By immunohistochemistry using antibodies to the active site of the renin molecule, we demonstrated increased proteolytic or nonproteolytic activation of prorenin in the heart but not in plasma of SHRsp. Continuous subcutaneous administration of the handle region peptide completely inhibited the increased staining by antibodies to the active site of the renin molecule, indicating the increased nonproteolytic but not proteolytic activation of prorenin in the heart of SHRsp. Administration of the handle region peptide also inactivated tissue RAS without affecting circulating RAS or arterial pressure and significantly attenuated the development and progression of cardiac fibrosis. These results clearly demonstrate the significant role of nonproteolytically activated tissue prorenin in tissue RAS activation leading to cardiac fibrosis and significant inhibition of the cardiac damage produced by chronic infusion of the handle region peptide.
A 1.8-GHz Spur-Cancelled Fractional-N Frequency Synthesizer With LMS-Based DAC Gain Calibration

A 1.8-GHz wideband DeltaSigma fractional-N frequency synthesizer achieves the phase noise performance of an integer-N synthesizer using a spur-cancellation digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The DAC gain is adaptively calibrated with a least-mean-square (LMS) sign-sign correlation algorithm for better than 1% DAC and charge pump (CP) gain matching. The proposed synthesizer phase-locked loop (PLL) is demonstrated with a wide 400-kHz loop bandwidth while using a low 14.3-MHz reference clock, and offers a better phase noise and bandwidth tradeoff. Using an 8-bit gain-calibrated DAC, DeltaSigma-shaped divider ratio noise is suppressed by as much as 30 dB. The second-order DeltaSigma fractional-N PLL exhibits in-band and integrated phase noises of -98 dBc/Hz and 0.8deg. The chip, fabricated in 0.18-mum CMOS, occupies 2 mm2, and consumes 29 mW at 1.8-V supply. The spur cancellation and correlation function consumes 30% additional power
Information retrieval failure analysis: Visual analytics as a support for interactive “what-if” investigation

This poster provides an analytical model for examining performances of IR systems, based on the discounted cumulative gain family of metrics, and visualization for interacting and exploring the performances of the system under examination. Moreover, we propose machine learning approach to learn the ranking model of the examined system in order to be able to conduct a “what-if” analysis and visually explore what can happen if you adopt a given solution before having to actually implement it.
CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING: THE IMPACT OF LOAN SALES AND CREDIT DERIVATIVES

Corporate restructurings involving a redeployment of assets into other activities provide an important way in which rms alleviate nancial distress. This paper examines the degree to which loan sales and credit derivatives markets assist or hinder restructurings. We show that loan sales lead to a postponement of restructuring. Furthermore, they may be ine cient in the sense that the initial value of the rm is greater if loan sales are precluded. Credit derivative transactions which permit lenders to adjust their credit exposure without giving up their rights to negotiate in out-of-bankruptcy restructurings accelerate restructurings. JEL Nos: C25, G21, G33.
Diabetic retinopathy: Battling the global epidemic

In 1969, William Beetham published his work in the journal, Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society about the efficacy of ruby laser in patients with proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). [1] Encouraged by these findings, the Diabetic Retinopathy Study, a National Institute of Health-sponsored landmark clinical trial confirmed the benefits of the panretinal photocoagulation (PRP) laser in PDR patients. Since then, the argon PRP laser became the main-stay treatment in these patients. In the same paper, the authors attributed the successful results to the “reduction in the functioning retina. , or the vasoformative factor, or both. ” Later this vasoformative factor proved to be vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and was targeted in many clinical trials in different retinal diseases. Almost four decades later, another landmark clinical trial, Diabetic Retinopathy Clinical Research Network just published that monthly anti-VEGF injections are no inferior to the gold standard PRP laser treatment and have the advantages of no visual field loss seen with the PRP laser. [2] Thus, we have now two effective evidence-based treatments available for regression of retinal neovascularization in PDR patients. Many other large randomized trials in diabetic retinopathy (DR) in between have taught us how to treat DR patients effectively in DME, PDR, and even in early stages of DR. Ophthalmologists have now several novel drugs including anti-VEGF drugs and steroid implants available in their armamentarium for treating patients with DME and PDR. Many more drugs are in the pipeline in different phases of clinical trials.
Temporal Dynamics of the Integration of Intention and Outcome in Harmful and Helpful Moral Judgment

The ability to integrate the moral intention information with the outcome of an action plays a crucial role in mature moral judgment. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies implicated that both prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortices are involved in moral intention and outcome processing. Here, we used the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to investigate the temporal dynamics of the processing of the integration between intention and outcome information in harmful and helpful moral judgment. In two experiments, participants were asked to make moral judgments for agents who produced either negative/neutral outcomes with harmful/neutral intentions (harmful judgment) or positive/neutral outcomes with helpful/neutral intentions (helpful judgment). Significant ERP differences between attempted and successful actions over prefrontal and bilateral temporo-parietal regions were found in both harmful and helpful moral judgment, which suggest a possible time course of the integration processing in the brain, starting from the right temporo-parietal area (N180) to the left temporo-parietal area (N250), then the prefrontal area (FSW) and the right temporo-parietal area (TP450 and TPSW) again. These results highlighted the fast moral intuition reaction and the late integration processing over the right temporo-parietal area.
wFReDoW: A Cloud-Based Web Environment to Handle Molecular Docking Simulations of a Fully Flexible Receptor Model

Molecular docking simulations of fully flexible protein receptor (FFR) models are coming of age. In our studies, an FFR model is represented by a series of different conformations derived from a molecular dynamic simulation trajectory of the receptor. For each conformation in the FFR model, a docking simulation is executed and analyzed. An important challenge is to perform virtual screening of millions of ligands using an FFR model in a sequential mode since it can become computationally very demanding. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based web environment, called web Flexible Receptor Docking Workflow (wFReDoW), which reduces the CPU time in the molecular docking simulations of FFR models to small molecules. It is based on the new workflow data pattern called self-adaptive multiple instances (P-SaMIs) and on a middleware built on Amazon EC2 instances. P-SaMI reduces the number of molecular docking simulations while the middleware speeds up the docking experiments using a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment on the cloud. The experimental results show a reduction in the total elapsed time of docking experiments and the quality of the new reduced receptor models produced by discarding the nonpromising conformations from an FFR model ruled by the P-SaMI data pattern.
Quality of life and hospital re-admission in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

BACKGROUND There is some evidence that quality of life (QOL) in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) may predict clinical outcomes and use of resources. This study examined whether QOL scores could prospectively predict re-admission for COPD or death within 12 months of an original admission, and whether QOL scores predicted home nebuliser provision. METHODS The study was carried out in all acute medical wards of Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, Woodend and City Hospitals, Aberdeen over 12 months. A total of 377 patients admitted with an exacerbation of COPD were identified in this time, 111 of whom were not included in the study because they refused the interview or died before discharge. The remaining 266 patients completed the St George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ). Information on spirometric parameters, nebuliser provision at discharge, provision of domiciliary oxygen, and re-admission within 12 months was collected from patient notes. RESULTS The mean age of the patients was 68 years and 53% were men. The mean (SD) forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) was 38.8 (18.0)% predicted and forced vital capacity (FVC) was 58.9 (23.8)% predicted. Higher (worse) scores on the SGRQ were significantly related to re-admission for COPD in the next 12 months (difference = 4.8, 95% CI 1.6 to 8.0). Patients who were re-admitted and died from COPD did not differ in SGRQ scores from those who were re-admitted and survived for more than 12 months. Re-admission was not related to sex, age, or pulmonary function. One hundred and thirty eight patients did not have a home nebuliser before admission. Of these, 14 were provided with a home nebuliser at discharge. Patients provided with nebulisers had significantly worse SGRQ scores and worse FVC. The 41 patients given domiciliary oxygen did not differ in SGRQ or spirometric parameters. Logistic regression analysis of the three SGRQ subscales (Symptom, Impact and Activity), adjusting for lung function, age and sex, showed that all three subscales were significantly related to hospital readmission and that Impact scores were related to nebuliser provision. Women did not differ from men in Symptom scores on the SGRQ but differed markedly on the Activity and Impact scales. CONCLUSIONS It is concluded that poor scores on the SGRQ, a QOL scale which measures patient distress and coping, are associated with re-admission for COPD and use of resources such as nebulisers, independent of physiological measures of disease severity.
Optimal rotations of deformable bodies and orbits in magnetic fields.

Deformations can induce rotation with zero angular momentum where dissipation is a natural "cost function. " This gives rise to an optimization problem of finding the most effective rotation with zero angular momentum. For certain plastic and viscous media in two dimensions the optimal path is the orbit of a charged particle on a surface of constant negative curvature with a magnetic field whose total flux is half a quantum unit.
Further remarks on the winding number

© Annales de l’institut Fourier, 1963, tous droits réservés. L’accès aux archives de la revue « Annales de l’institut Fourier » (http://annalif.ujf-grenoble.fr/) implique l’accord avec les conditions générales d’utilisation (http://www.numdam.org/conditions). Toute utilisation commerciale ou impression systématique est constitutive d’une infraction pénale. Toute copie ou impression de ce fichier doit contenir la présente mention de copyright.
Nested Difference Tests for Examining Effects of Dependability on Enterprise Applications Success in E-Business

Electronic business (e-business) plays a major role in the modern economic network due to shorter cycle time and faster information transactions. Building enterprise applications that can coordinate activities, decisions, and knowledge cross many functions is a good solution for e-business. Hence, how to implement enterprise applications successfully has become an increasingly important management issue. Although information systems (IS) success has received fairly extensive attention from prior research, issues regarding whether service delivered by systems can be justifiably relied by users are seriously ignored, especially for complex systems like enterprise applications. Thus, this paper attempts to extend this kind of concept, perceived dependability, into the DeLone & McLean's IS success model for exploring how it influences enterprise applications success. Results from a survey of 170 respondents taken from six international e-businesses in Taiwan strongly support that dependability is indeed an important factor for enterprise applications success. Additionally, over and beyond the effects of dependability on enterprise applications success, it can help practitioners and managers get deep insights about how to implement e-business successfully
Correspondence between climbing fibre input and motor output in eyeblink‐related areas in cat cerebellar cortex.

The purpose of the present work was to identify sites in the cerebellar cortex which are likely to control eyeblink. This work was motivated by findings suggesting that the cerebellum is involved in the learning and/or performance of the classically conditioned eyeblink response. The identification was based on climbing fibre input to the cortex and on the effects of electrical stimulation of the cerebellar cortex in cats decerebrated rostral to the red nucleus. The cerebellar surface was searched for areas receiving short latency climbing fibre input on periorbital electrical stimulation. Four such areas were found in the c1 and c3 zones of lobules VI and VII in the anterior lobe of the cerebellum and in the c3 zone in the paramedian lobule. Electrical stimulation of the cerebellar cortex with trains (150‐400 Hz) of at least 10 ms duration evoked two types of EMG response in the orbicularis oculi muscle. An early response, time‐locked to the onset of the stimulation, was unrelated to climbing fibre input and a delayed response, time‐locked to the termination of the stimulation, could only be evoked from areas which received short latency climbing fibre input from the eye, that is, the c1 and c3 zones. The delayed responses had long latencies (up to 50 ms) after the termination of the stimulus train and could be delayed further by prolonging the stimulation. Both types of response were abolished by injections of small amounts of lignocaine into the brachium conjunctivum. A number of characteristics of the delayed responses are described. They could be inhibited by a further shock to the same area of the cerebellar cortex. Their latency could be increased by increasing the stimulation frequency. The period between stimulation and appearance of the response often showed a decrease in spontaneous EMG activity. There was a close topographical correspondence between input and output. Delayed responses could be evoked from all four of the areas in the c1 and c3 zones which have climbing fibre input from the periorbital area. They could not be evoked from other areas. In contrast, early responses were only evoked from areas without such climbing fibre input. It is proposed that the delayed responses were generated by activation of Purkinje cell axons leading to hyperpolarization and a subsequent rebound depolarization and activation of cells in the interpositus nucleus. The cortical areas are therefore probably involved in the control of the orbicularis oculi muscle. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Recognizing manipulation actions in arts and crafts shows using domain-specific visual and textual cues

We present an approach for automatic annotation of commercial videos from an arts-and-crafts domain with the aid of textual descriptions. The main focus is on recognizing both manipulation actions (e.g. cut, draw, glue) and the tools that are used to perform these actions (e.g. markers, brushes, glue bottle). We demonstrate how multiple visual cues such as motion descriptors, object presence, and hand poses can be combined with the help of contextual priors that are automatically extracted from associated transcripts or online instructions. Using these diverse features and linguistic information we propose several increasingly complex computational models for recognizing elementary manipulation actions and composite activities, as well as their temporal order. The approach is evaluated on a novel dataset of comprised of 27 episodes of PBS Sprout TV, each containing on average 8 manipulation actions.
Signature generation for sensitive information leakage in android applications

In recent years, there has been rapid growth in mobile devices such as smartphones, and a number of applications are developed specifically for the smartphone market. In particular, there are many applications that are “free” to the user, but depend on advertisement services for their revenue. Such applications include an advertisement module - a library provided by the advertisement service - that can collect a user's sensitive information and transmit it across the network. Such information is used for targeted advertisements, and user behavior statistics. Users accept this business model, but in most cases the applications do not require the user's acknowledgment in order to transmit sensitive information. Therefore, such applications' behavior becomes an invasion of privacy. In our analysis of 1,188 Android applications' network traffic and permissions, 93% of the applications we analyzed connected to multiple destinations when using the network. 61% required a permission combination that included both access to sensitive information and use of networking services. These applications have the potential to leak the user's sensitive information. Of the 107,859 HTTP packets from these applications, 23,309 (22%) contained sensitive information, such as device identification number and carrier name. In an effort to enable users to control the transmission of their private information, we propose a system which, using a novel clustering method based on the HTTP packet destination and content distances, generates signatures from the clustering result and uses them to detect sensitive information leakage from Android applications. Our system does not require an Android framework modification or any special privileges. Thus users can easily introduce our system to their devices, and manage suspicious applications' network behavior in a fine grained manner. Our system accurately detected 94% of the sensitive information leakage from the applications evaluated and produced only 5% false negative results, and less than 3% false positive results.
Effects of Unpopular Citation Fields in Citation Matching Performance

Citation matching is a problem of identifying which citations correspond to the same publication. Previous studies on citation matching select typically from a corpus or database of citation records, such as CORA, an arbitrary set of citation record fields such as author, title - a practice informed by "common sense" - in order to automatically group citations that refer to the same document. This study describes a systematic and computational approach to extract out the 'best candidate' citation record fields, to propose that there is always the best combination of citation record fields that helps increase citation matching performance and is applicable regardless of which research framework one may adopt, such as Machine Learning methods or Information Retrieval algorithms. Cross comparisons between previous studies and our approach, shown as pairwise F1 measures, within our framework based on field selection are presented.
Job Stress in Air Traffic Controllers - A Review

Psychosocial factors play an important role in occupational health and safety. Stress is probably the most prevalent psychosocial problem and therefore stress management ranks among the majority promising health as well as safety promoters. This contribution deals with the stress of air traffic controllers (ATCOs) which results from workload on the one hand and the responsibility for air traffic safety on the other. The steps in the stress management has been reviewed through literature available which aims at increasing air traffic safety and reducing stress.
Evidence for central sensitization in chronic whiplash: A systematic literature review

It has been suggested that sensitization of the central nervous system plays an important role in the development and maintenance of chronic (pain) complaints experienced by whiplash patients. According to the PRISMA guidelines, a systematic review was performed to screen and evaluate the existing clinical evidence for the presence of central sensitization in chronic whiplash.
Desiging robot services with ontology and learning

Considering user preferences in defining robot services is important. How to interact with service robots varies from user to user, and providing a user friendly way for the users to interact with robots becomes necessary since the users are usually non-technical people when dealing with service robots. This article focuses on defining robot services that can suit user's preferences. Service robots are typically designed to provide one set of services not targeted to a particular user. However, ways of controlling robots may differ depending on users. Learning from past experiences enables a robot to adapt to the user's specific needs and interacting style. In this research, we use ontology as the design tool for defining robot services and uses case-based reasoning as a means of learning in storing previous interaction experiences as cases. These cases are reused the next time when similar requests are made.