Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combining human and machine computing elements for analysis via crowdsourcing

Crowd computing leverages human input in order to execute tasks that are computationally expensive, due to complexity and/or scale. Combined with automation, crowd computing can help solve problems efficiently and effectively. In this work, we introduce an elasticity framework that adaptively optimizes the use of human and automated software resources in order to maximize overall performance. This framework includes a quantitative model that supports elasticity when performing complex tasks. Our model defines a task complexity index and an elasticity index that is used to aid in decision support for assigning tasks to respective computing elements. Experiments demonstrate that the framework can effectively optimize the use of human and machine computing elements simultaneously. Also, as a consequence, overall performance is significantly enhanced.
Less is more: Caloric regulation of neurogenesis and adult brain function

Calorie intake is essential for regulating normal physiological processes and is fundamental to maintaining life. Indeed, both extremes of calorie intake result in increased morbidity and mortality. In this review, we discuss the effect of calorie intake on adult brain function, with an emphasis on the beneficial effects of mild calorie restriction. Recent findings relating to the regenerative and protective effects of the gastrointestinal hormone, ghrelin, suggest that it may underlie the beneficial effects of calorie restriction. We discuss the putative cellular mechanisms underlying the action of ghrelin and their possible role in supporting healthy brain ageing.
Stochastic network calculus for performance analysis of Internet networks — An overview and outlook

Stochastic network calculus is a theory for performance guarantee analysis of Internet networks. Originated in early 1990s, stochastic network calculus has its foundation on the min-plus convolution and max-plus convolution queueing principles. Although challenging, it has shown tremendous potential in dealing with queueing type problems encountered in Internet networks. By focusing on bounds, stochastic network calculus compliments the classical queueing theory. This paper provides an overview of stochastic network calculus from the queueing principle perspective and presents an outlook by discussing crucial yet still open challenges in the area.
FULLY ANNONYMOUS ATTRIBUTE BASED ENCRYPTION FOR PRIVILEGE AND ANONYMITY ACCESS CONTROL IN CLOUD

-Cloud computing is a revolutionary computing paradigm, which enables flexible, on-demand, and low-cost usage of computing resources, but the data is outsourced to some cloud servers, and various privacy concerns emerge from it. Various schemes based on the attribute based encryption have been proposed to secure the cloud storage. However, most work focuses on the data contents privacy and the access control, while less attention is paid to the privilege control and the identity privacy. In this paper, we present a semianonymous privilege control scheme AnonyControl to address not only the data privacy, but also the user identity privacy in existing access control schemes. AnonyControl decentralizes the central authority to limit the identity leakage and thus achieves semianonymity. Besides, it also generalizes the file access control to the privilege control, by which privileges of all operations on the cloud data can be managed in a fine-grained manner. Subsequently, we present the AnonyControl-F, which fully prevents the identity leakage and achieve the full anonymity. Our security analysis shows that both AnonyControl and AnonyControl-F are secure under the decisional bilinear Diffie– Hellman assumption, and our performance evaluation exhibits the feasibility of our schemes.
Service needs of depressed older adults following acute psychiatric care

Older persons with mental disorder need mental health services, but the extent to which they have service needs in other domains (medical, functional and psychosocial) is not established, although these needs may compromise the attainment of psychiatric outcomes. This study focuses on 169 older adults hospitalized for depression and documents their post-acute service needs in four domains: psychiatric, medical, functional and psychosocial. Seventy-five per cent of these psychiatric patients had medical conditions that required treatment. Eighty-four per cent needed assistance with routine activities. Nearly two-thirds (67%) were experiencing one or more psychosocial or environmental problems that warranted intervention. The mean number of service needs was 6.5 (SD=1.5). Fifty-seven per cent had needs in all four domains. Older adults admitted to acute care for depression have high levels of service needs stemming from multiple domains: psychiatric, medical, functional and psychosocial. We extend the biopsychosocial model, largely used to address the origins of psychopathology, to conceptualize the multiple domains of service that older adults with mental disorder need. This biopsychosocial model suggests that needs in each domain should be identified and addressed if desired psychiatric outcomes are to be attained.
Age-associated decrease in global DNA methylation in patients with major depression

Background Evidence has supported a role of DNA methylation in the pathophysiology of mood disorders. The purpose of the current study is to examine 5-methylcytosine (5-mc) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmc) levels in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) at different disease states. Methods Forty-nine patients with MDD and 25 healthy control subjects were included. The severity in the disease was assessed by using the 17-item Hamilton Rating Scale of Depression (HAM-D) (HAM-D ≥19 for severe MDD and HAM-D ≤7 for remitted MDD). The 5-mc and 5-hmc levels in leukocyte DNA were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay-based method. Results We found a significant decrease in 5-hmc and trends of decreasing 5-mc levels in patients with severe MDD compared to healthy controls (P=0.059 for 5-mc and P=0.013 for 5-hmc). The decrease in the level exists only in the older age group (P=0.035 for 5-mc and P=0.002 for 5-hmc) but not in the younger age group (P=0.077 for 5-mc and P=0.620 for 5-hmc). In addition, the 5-mc level was found to be inversely correlated with disease severity (P=0.011). Conclusion Our results support a decrease in global DNA methylation associated with age in patients with severe depression. Further studies are needed to clarify the role of the methylation level as a disease marker of depression and whether antidepressant treatment changes the methylation profiles.
Processing of nanocrystalline ceramics from ultrafine particles

AbstractThe recent interest in the properties of ceramics with grain sizes less than 100 nm has created a need for processing routes with which to manufacture such ceramics. This article briefly reviews the variety of techniques currently used to manufacture ultrafine starting powders, compact the powders, and sinter them into bulk nanocrystalline ceramics. The unique challenges associated with processing such fine structures are discussed together with each technique. Major obstacles have included the difficulty (now largely overcome) of producing sufficient quantities of ultrafine powders; the strong tendency of nanocrystalline powders to agglomerate; the difficulty of manufacturing homogeneous, stress free compacts from ultrafine powders; and the ever present obstacle of unwanted grain growth during sintering. Despite numerous technical difficulties, researchers have managed to develop techniques for processing ultrafine powders into nanocrystalline ceramics which are both fully dense (or near fully de.
Multi-bit watermarking of high dynamic range images based on perceptual models

A blind multi-bit watermarking method, specifically designed for high dynamic range (HDR) images, is introduced in this work. The presented embedding strategy takes into account several properties of the human visual system in order to guarantee proper imperceptibility of the embedded watermarks, as well as robustness against tone-mapping operators (TMOs) employed to derive low dynamic range (LDR) representations of the marked HDR content. Specifically, binary marks are embedded into the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) of the just-noticeable difference domain. Additionally, embedding locations are preferably selected in correspondence of the detail parts of an HDR image, determined by exploiting the properties of bilateral filtering. Furthermore, the watermark strength adopted in each DWT subband is modulated depending on a contrast sensitivity function, depending of the subband scale and orientation, to improve the visual quality of the watermarked image. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, in terms of both mark imperceptibility and robustness, several experimental tests are carried out on a database comprising 15 HDR images. Specifically, robustness is evaluated by blindly extracting the embedded messages from both HDR marked images and from their LDR counterparts, thus investigating the effects of TMOs on message recovery. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Multimodal Discriminative Binary Embedding for Large-Scale Cross-Modal Retrieval

Multimodal hashing, which conducts effective and efficient nearest neighbor search across heterogeneous data on large-scale multimedia databases, has been attracting increasing interest, given the explosive growth of multimedia content on the Internet. Recent multimodal hashing research mainly aims at learning the compact binary codes to preserve semantic information given by labels. The overwhelming majority of these methods are similarity preserving approaches which approximate pairwise similarity matrix with Hamming distances between the to-be-learnt binary hash codes. However, these methods ignore the discriminative property in hash learning process, which results in hash codes from different classes undistinguished, and therefore reduces the accuracy and robustness for the nearest neighbor search. To this end, we present a novel multimodal hashing method, named multimodal discriminative binary embedding (MDBE), which focuses on learning discriminative hash codes. First, the proposed method formulates the hash function learning in terms of classification, where the binary codes generated by the learned hash functions are expected to be discriminative. And then, it exploits the label information to discover the shared structures inside heterogeneous data. Finally, the learned structures are preserved for hash codes to produce similar binary codes in the same class. Hence, the proposed MDBE can preserve both discriminability and similarity for hash codes, and will enhance retrieval accuracy. Thorough experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves excellent accuracy and competitive computational efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art methods for large-scale cross-modal retrieval task.
Circadian regulation of phospholipid metabolism in retinal photoreceptors and ganglion cells

The neural retina is a key component of the vertebrate circadian system that is responsible for synchronizing the central circadian pacemaker to external light–dark (LD) cycles. The retina is itself rhythmic, showing circadian cycles in melatonin levels and gene expression. We assessed the in vivo incorporation of 32P‐phosphate and 3H‐glycerol into phospholipids of photoreceptor cells (PRCs) and retina ganglion cells (GCs) from chicks in constant illumination conditions (dark: DD or light: LL) over a 24‐h period. Our findings showed that in DD there was a daily oscillation in 32P‐labeling of total phospholipids synthesized in GCs and axonally transported to the brain. This metabolic fluctuation peaked during the subjective night (zeitgeber time [ZT] 20), persisted for several hours well into the subjective day and declined at subjective dusk (ZT 10–12). PRCs also exhibited an in vivo rhythm of 32P‐phospholipid synthesis in DD. This rhythm peaked around ZT 22, continued a few hours into the day and declined by the end of subjective dusk. The major individual species labeled 1 h after 32P administration was phosphatidylinositol (PI) in both PRCs and GCs. Rhythmic phospholipid biosynthesis was also observed in DD after 3H‐glycerol administration, with levels in GCs elevated from midday to early night. PRCs exhibited a similar rhythmic profile with the lowest levels of labeling during midnight. Phosphatidylcholine (PC) accounted for the individual species with the highest ratio of 3H‐glycerol incorporation in both cell populations at all phases examined. By contrast, in LL the rhythm of 3H‐glycerol labeling of phospholipids damped out in both cell layers. Our findings support the idea that, in constant darkness, the metabolism of retinal phospholipids, including their de novo biosynthesis, is regulated by an endogenous circadian clock.
Immunity and Tolerance to Fungi in Hematopoietic Transplantation: Principles and Perspectives

Resistance and tolerance are two complementary host defense mechanisms that increase fitness in response to low-virulence fungi. Resistance is meant to reduce pathogen burden during infection through innate and adaptive immune mechanisms, whereas tolerance mitigates the substantial cost of resistance to host fitness through a multitude of anti-inflammatory mechanisms, including immunological tolerance. In experimental fungal infections, both defense mechanisms are activated through the delicate equilibrium between Th1/Th17 cells, which provide antifungal resistance, and regulatory T cells limiting the consequences of the ensuing inflammatory pathology. Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO), a rate-limiting enzyme in the tryptophan catabolism, plays a key role in induction of tolerance against fungi. Both hematopoietic and non-hematopoietic compartments contribute to the resistance/tolerance balance against Aspergillus fumigatus via the involvement of selected innate receptors converging on IDO. Several genetic polymorphisms in pattern recognition receptors influence resistance and tolerance to fungal infections in human hematopoietic transplantation. Thus, tolerance mechanisms may be exploited for novel diagnostics and therapeutics against fungal infections and diseases.
Nonisothermal Crystallization Kinetics and Microhardness of PP/CNT Composites

The nonisothermal crystallization kinetics and microhardness of nanocomposites consisting of a polypropylene matrix (PP) and carbon nanotube filler (CNT) have been investigated. Three types of PP matrixes have been used: two of them are nonfunctionalized PP that differ slightly in their melt flow index, whereas the third is grafted with maleic anhydride (MA). Ozawa formalism has been used to study the nonisothermal crystallization kinetics. The results show that the CNT filler has a nucleation role in the nonisothermal crystallization of PP. For all nanocomposites, the nonisothermal crystallization rate increases up to 4% CNT and then decreases slightly or remains almost constant at the higher filler content. This fact has been interpreted in terms of an aggregation of the particles at high filler concentration, which leads to a decrease of the nucleation ability of the filler because the number of heterogeneous nuclei decreases. The crystallization mechanism of the PP matrixes almost does not change in the presence of the CNT filler. The microhardness of the two nonfunctionalized PP increases when the filler content increases and then remains constant above a certain filler content. The experimental microhardness values of the composites based on the functionalized PP are lower than those of the corresponding calculated additive values. The decrease of the creep constant with the filler addition is not significant, as should be expected when inorganic filler is added to a polymer matrix. This is due to the very fine dispersion of the fillers into the polymer matrix at the nanoscale level.
Multispectral Imaging Using Multiplexed Illumination

Many vision tasks such as scene segmentation, or the recognition of materials within a scene, become considerably easier when it is possible to measure the spectral reflectance of scene surfaces. In this paper, we present an efficient and robust approach for recovering spectral reflectance in a scene that combines the advantages of using multiple spectral sources and a multispectral camera. We have implemented a system based on this approach using a cluster of light sources with different spectra to illuminate the scene and a conventional RGB camera to acquire images. Rather than sequentially activating the sources, we have developed a novel technique to determine the optimal multiplexing sequence of spectral sources so as to minimize the number of acquired images. We use our recovered spectral measurements to recover the continuous spectral reflectance for each scene point by using a linear model for spectral reflectance. Our imaging system can produce multispectral videos of scenes at 30fps. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through extensive evaluation. As a demonstration, we present the results of applying data recovered by our system to material segmentation and spectral relighting.
Variation in RNA-Seq Transcriptome Profiles of Peripheral Whole Blood from Healthy Individuals with and without Globin Depletion

Background The molecular profile of circulating blood can reflect physiological and pathological events occurring in other tissues and organs of the body and delivers a comprehensive view of the status of the immune system. Blood has been useful in studying the pathobiology of many diseases. It is accessible and easily collected making it ideally suited to the development of diagnostic biomarker tests. The blood transcriptome has a high complement of globin RNA that could potentially saturate next-generation sequencing platforms, masking lower abundance transcripts. Methods to deplete globin mRNA are available, but their effect has not been comprehensively studied in peripheral whole blood RNA-Seq data. In this study we aimed to assess technical variability associated with globin depletion in addition to assessing general technical variability in RNA-Seq from whole blood derived samples. Results We compared technical and biological replicates having undergone globin depletion or not and found that the experimental globin depletion protocol employed removed approximately 80% of globin transcripts, improved the correlation of technical replicates, allowed for reliable detection of thousands of additional transcripts and generally increased transcript abundance measures. Differential expression analysis revealed thousands of genes significantly up-regulated as a result of globin depletion. In addition, globin depletion resulted in the down-regulation of genes involved in both iron and zinc metal ion bonding. Conclusions Globin depletion appears to meaningfully improve the quality of peripheral whole blood RNA-Seq data, and may improve our ability to detect true biological variation. Some concerns remain, however. Key amongst them the significant reduction in RNA yields following globin depletion. More generally, our investigation of technical and biological variation with and without globin depletion finds that high-throughput sequencing by RNA-Seq is highly reproducible within a large dynamic range of detection and provides an accurate estimation of RNA concentration in peripheral whole blood. High-throughput sequencing is thus a promising technology for whole blood transcriptomics and biomarker discovery.
Strength Modeling of Two-component Hybrid Fiber Composites in case of Simultaneous Fiber Failures

The strength of unidirectional short fiber hybrid structures and composites is strongly influenced by the length of the constituent and reinforcing elementary fibers. Based on our earlier fiber bundle-theoretical results, we have developed a simple statistical model and determined the strength of hybrid structures for elementary fibers, which simultaneously fail or debond from the environment in a brittle manner, and the dependence of the strength on the length of the elementary fibers. In the case of constant elementary fiber length, a simple analytical relation is obtained between the average tensile strength and the length of the elementary fiber. Based on these results, formulae have been developed to estimate the strength of unidirectional short hybrid fiber reinforced composites as a function of fiber length and fiber content. Practical applicability of the results has been demonstrated for basalt fiber hybrid composites taking into account fiber fragmentation, imperfect interfacial adhesion, and fiber orientation by using suitable correction factors.
Improved Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for the Stochastic Loader Problem

In this paper, the stochastic loader problem is proposed based on the determinate loader problem. For finding the optimal solution, a new particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm that combines crossover operators and penalty functions is developed. Comparing with the basic PSO and some other optimization algorithms, this improved PSO algorithm can get better convergence efficiency and higher solution precision. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the model.
Functional centering: grounding referential coherence in information structure

Considering empirical evidence from a free-word-order language (German) we propose a revision of the principles guiding the ordering of discourse entities in the forward-looking center list within the centering model. We claim that grammatical role criteria should be replaced by criteria that reflect the functional information structure of the utterances. These new criteria are based on the distinction between hearer-old and hearer-new discourse entities. We demonstrate that such a functional model of centering can be successfully applied to the analysis of several forms of referential text phenomena, viz. pronominal, nominal, and functional anaphora. Our methodological and empirical claims are substantiated by two evaluation studies. In the first one, we compare success rates for the resolution of pronominal anaphora that result from a grammatical-role-driven centering algorithm and from a functional centering algorithm. The second study deals with a new cost-based evaluation methodology for the assessment of centering data, one which can be directly derived from and justified by the cognitive load premises of the centering model.
Granzyme B Expression by CD8+ T Cells Is Required for the Development of Experimental Cerebral Malaria

Parasite burden predicts disease severity in malaria and risk of death in cerebral malaria patients. In murine experimental cerebral malaria (ECM), parasite burden and CD8+ T cells promote disease by mechanisms that are not fully understood. We found that the majority of brain-recruited CD8+ T cells expressed granzyme B (GzmB). Furthermore, gzmB−/− mice harbored reduced parasite numbers in the brain as a consequence of enhanced antiparasitic CD4+ T cell responses and were protected from ECM. We showed in these ECM-resistant mice that adoptively transferred, Ag-specific CD8+ T cells migrated to the brain, but did not induce ECM until a critical Ag threshold was reached. ECM induction was exquisitely dependent on Ag-specific CD8+ T cell-derived perforin and GzmB, but not IFN-γ. In wild-type mice, full activation of brain-recruited CD8+ T cells also depended on a critical number of parasites in this tissue, which in turn, was sustained by these tissue-recruited cells. Thus, an interdependent relationship between parasite burden and CD8+ T cells dictates the onset of perforin/GzmB-mediated ECM.