Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE COSMIC INFRARED BACKGROUND EXPERIMENT (CIBER): THE NARROW-BAND SPECTROMETER

We have developed a near-infrared spectrometer designed to measure the absolute intensity of the solar 854.2 nm Ca ii Fraunhofer line, scattered by interplanetary dust, in the zodiacal light (ZL) spectrum. Based on the known equivalent line width in the solar spectrum, this measurement can derive the zodiacal brightness, testing models of the ZL based on morphology that are used to determine the extragalactic background light in absolute photometry measurements. The spectrometer is based on a simple high-resolution tipped filter placed in front of a compact camera with wide-field refractive optics to provide the large optical throughput and high sensitivity required for rocket-borne observations. We discuss the instrument requirements for an accurate measurement of the absolute ZL brightness, the measured laboratory characterization, and the instrument performance in flight.
Robotic path planning using hybrid genetic algorithm particle swarm optimisation

The problem of robotic path planning has always attracted the interests of a significantly large number of researchers due to the various constraints and issues related to it. The optimisation in terms of time and path length and validity of the non-holonomic constraints, especially in large sized maps of high resolution, pose serious challenges for the researchers. In this paper we propose hybrid genetic algorithm particle swarm optimisation (HGAPSO) algorithm for solving the problem. Diversity preservation measures are introduced in this applied evolutionary technique. The novelty of the algorithm is threefold. Firstly, the algorithm generates paths of increasing complexity along with time. This ensures that the algorithm generates the best path for any type of map. Secondly, the algorithm is efficient in terms of computational time which is done by introducing the concept of momentum-based exploration in its fitness function. The indicators contributing to fitness function can only be measured by exploring the path represented. This exploration is vague at start and detailed at the later stages. Thirdly, the algorithm uses a multi-objective optimisation technique to optimise the total path length, the distance from obstacle and the maximum number of turns. These multi-objective parameters may be altered according to the robot design.
Apoptosis and atrophy in rat slow skeletal muscles in chronic heart failure

Dalla Libera, Luciano, Roberta Zennaro, Marco Sandri, Giovanni Battista Ambrosio, and Giorgio Vescovo. Apoptosis and atrophy in rat slow skeletal muscles in chronic heart failure. Am. J. Physiol. 277 (Cell Physiol. 46): C982– C986, 1999. —Congestive heart failure is characterized by a skeletal muscle myopathy with muscle bulk loss. The mechanisms responsible for these changes are not clear at present. We have investigated the role of apoptosis in the rat ‘‘slow’’ soleus muscle during the development of heart failure, which was induced by injection of monocrotaline (30 mg/kg). We looked at the time course of apoptosis by studying six animals at each of the following time points: 0, 17, 24, and 30 days. We found a decreased expression of the antiapoptotic protein Bcl-2, which was accompanied by a rise of proapoptotic caspase-3. Ubiquitin levels did not change. DNA nick-end labeling showed an increased number of apoptotic nuclei both in myofibers and interstitial cells when heart failure occurred. At variance with previous observations in the fasttwitch tibialis anterior muscle in the same animals, in which tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a) increased at the time that apoptosis occurred, the magnitude of apoptosis is lower in soleus muscle and there is no appearance of muscle atrophy. In soleus muscle, apoptosis is accompanied by activation of the caspase-3 system. There is no activation of the TNF-aand ubiquitin-dependent protein waste. In conclusion, slow muscles are less prone to develop apoptosis than fast muscles. Muscle atrophy appears earlier in these latter ones.
Recommendations for cervical cancer screening programs in developing countries. The need for equity and technological development.

The cervical cancer screening programs (CCSP) have not been very efficient in the developing countries. This explains the need to foster changes on policies, standards, quality control mechanisms, evaluation and integration of new screening alternatives considered as low and high cost, as well as to regulate colposcopy practices and the foundation of HPV laboratories. Cervical cancer (CC) is a disease most frequently found in poverty-stricken communities and reflecting a problem of equity at both levels gender and regional, and this, is not only due to social and economic development inequalities, but to the infrastructure and human resources necessary for primary care. For this reason, the CCSP program must be restructured, a) to primarily address unprivileged rural and urban areas; b) to foster actions aimed at ensuring extensive coverage as well as a similar quality of that coverage in every region; c) to use screening strategies in keeping with the availability of health care services. In countries with a great regional heterogeneity, a variety of screening procedures must be regulated and standardized, including a combination of assisted visual inspection, cervical cytology and HPV detection; d) regional community intervention must be set up to assess the effectiveness of using HPV detection as an strategy in addition to cervical cytology (pap smear); e) the practice of colposcopy must be regulated to prevent the use of it in healthy women at a population level, thus preventing unnecessary diagnosis and treatment which not only are expensive but also causes unnecessary anxiety to women at risk; f) the operation of those clinical laboratories using HPV as a detection strategy must likewise be accredited and regulated and g) the CCSP program for assuring health care quality should meet the expectations of its beneficiaries, and increase the knowledge in cervical cancer related matters. Finally, though a variety of clinical tests on prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines against HPV are recently being developed worldwide; it will take at least from 5 to 10-years time to have them available in the market. For this reason, it will be necessary to intensify the CCSP programs. All these reasons lay emphasis on the need to reinforce actions for CCSP programs. This paper is available too at: http://www.insp. mx/salud/index.html.
Use of Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy for Removal of Dabigatran in a Patient in Need of Emergent Surgery

Purpose. To report the ability to remove serum dabigatran using continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) in a patient with life-threatening bleeding. Summary. A 77-year-old female with history of atrial fibrillation who takes dabigatran for stroke prevention presented with abdominal pain. Patient was found to have bleeding and possible mesenteric ischemia and was taken to the operating room and had continued bleeding postoperatively. CRRT was initiated for the removal of any remaining dabigatran, with serum dabigatran levels collected to evaluate removal of dabigatran with CRRT. This patient had an increased dabigatran level prior to intervention, which decreased to an undetectable level after use of CRRT. Greater than 80% of the drug was removed due to 4 hours of CRRT and residual kidney function. Reversal of dabigatran is an area of current research with recent FDA approval of idarucizumab for use. Conclusion. Bleeding may occur as a result of the use of dabigatran and change in patient's clinical condition. Use of CRRT may be an option in removing serum dabigatran in the case of a life-threatening bleed.
The Neural Bases of Directed and Spontaneous Mental State Attributions to Group Agents

In daily life, perceivers often need to predict and interpret the behavior of group agents, such as corporations and governments. Although research has investigated how perceivers reason about individual members of particular groups, less is known about how perceivers reason about group agents themselves. The present studies investigate how perceivers understand group agents by investigating the extent to which understanding the ‘mind’ of the group as a whole shares important properties and processes with understanding the minds of individuals. Experiment 1 demonstrates that perceivers are sometimes willing to attribute a mental state to a group as a whole even when they are not willing to attribute that mental state to any of the individual members of the group, suggesting that perceivers can reason about the beliefs and desires of group agents over and above those of their individual members. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the degree of activation in brain regions associated with attributing mental states to individuals—i.e., brain regions associated with mentalizing or theory-of-mind, including the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and precuneus—does not distinguish individual from group targets, either when reading statements about those targets' mental states (directed) or when attributing mental states implicitly in order to predict their behavior (spontaneous). Together, these results help to illuminate the processes that support understanding group agents themselves.
Submicroscopic deletion in 7q31 encompassing CADPS2 and TSPAN12 in a child with autism spectrum disorder and PHPV

We performed array comparative genomic hybridization utilizing a whole genome oligonucleotide microarray in a patient with the autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous (PHPV). Submicroscopic deletions in 7q31 encompassing CADPS2 (Ca2+‐dependent activator protein for secretion 2) and TSPAN12 (one of the members of the tetraspanin superfamily) were confirmed. The CADPS2 plays important roles in the release of neurotrophin‐3 and brain‐derived neurotrophic factor. Mutations in TSPAN12 are a relatively frequent cause of familial exudative vitreoretinopathy. We speculate that haploinsufficiency of CADPS2 and TSPAN12 contributes to ASDs and PHPV, respectively. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Expression and role of the universal stress protein, UspA, of Escherichia coli during growth arrest

The synthesis of the small, cytoplasmic protein UspA universal stress protein A) of Escherichia coli is induced as soon as the cell growth rate falls below the maximal growth rate supported by the medium, regardless of the condition inhibiting growth. The increase in UspA synthesis appears to be the result of Induction of the monocistronic uspA gene. Induction of this gene during a heat‐shock treatment is demonstrated to be the result of transcriptional activation of σ70‐dependent promoter which has previously been shown to be activated also during carbon starvation‐induced growth arrest. Mutant cells lacking UspA grow at rates indistinguisible from the isogenic parent at different temperatures and in the presence of different growth inhibitors but are impaired in their ability to survive prolonged periods of complete growth inhibition caused by a variety of diverse stresses, including CdCl2, H2O2, DNP, CCCP exposure, and osmotic shock. Moreover, the uspA mutation results in an increased sensitivity of cells to carbon‐source starvation (i.e. glucose, glycerol or succinate depletion). Also, the mutation causes a marked alteration in the timing of starvation protein expression but protein expression during steady‐state growth appears to be normal. The results presented have prompted us to postulate that UspA may have a general protective function related to the growth arrest state.
SmartKom: Towards Multimodal Dialogues with Anthropomorphic Interface Agents

SmartKom is a multimodal dialogue system that combines speech, gesture, and facial expressions for input and output. SmartKom provides an anthropomorphic and affective user interface through its personification of an interface agent. Understanding of spontaneous speech is combined with video-based recognition of natural gestures and facial expressions. One of the major scientific goals of SmartKom is to design new computational methods for the seamless integration and mutual disambiguation of multimodal input and output on a semantic and pragmatic level. SmartKom is based on the situated delegation-oriented dialogue paradigm, in which the user delegates a task to a virtual communication assistant, visualized as a life-like character on a graphical display. SmartKom is a multilingual system that analyses and generates German and English utterances. We describe the SmartKom architecture, the use of an XML-based mark-up language for multimodal content, and the most distinguishing features of the fully operational SmartKom 2.0 system.
Attack Surface Metrics and Automated Compile-Time OS Kernel Tailoring

The economy of mechanism security principle states that program design should be kept as small and simple as possible. In practice, this principle is often disregarded to maximize user satisfaction, resulting in systems supporting a vast number of features by default, which in turn offers attackers a large code base to exploit. The Linux kernel exemplifies this problem: distributors include a large number of features, such as support for exotic filesystems and socket types, and attackers often take advantage of those. A simple approach to produce a smaller kernel is to manually configure a tailored Linux kernel. However, the more than 11,000 configuration options available in recent Linux versions make this a time-consuming and non-trivial task. We design and implement an automated approach to produce a kernel configuration that is adapted to a particular workload and hardware, and present an attack surface evaluation framework for evaluating security improvements for the different kernels obtained. Our results show that, for real-world server use cases, the attack surface reduction obtained by tailoring the kernel ranges from about 50% to 85%. Therefore, kernel tailoring is an attractive approach to improve the security of the Linux
Incentive-based Cyber Trust - A Call to Action

Many problems in cyber trust exist at least partially because the people and institutions involved are not properly motivated to solve them. The incentives are often perverse, misaligned, or missing. By improving economic, social, and personal incentives, cyber trust can be significantly improved. The incentive-based approach is based on modern enterprise risk management methods and experiences. Incentive-based cyber trust includes usability, risk information systems, risk communications, social knowledge, markets, and incentive instruments, along with enabling technology and a supporting legal/ regulatory/institutional framework. While there is research underway into these problems, it is not happening on sufficient scale, scope, or timeframe necessary to deliver breakthrough commercial solutions soon enough. We propose an initiative to drive breakthroughs for incentive-based cyber trust. An initiative will mobilize more resources (money and people) and create new synergies between existing academic disciplines, institutions, consortia, and interest groups. Most important, it will create a critical mass of the brightest thinkers across the globe, provide platforms for collaboration and innovation, and set bold, motivating goals and targets.
Equations The L ∞-Stokes semigroup in exterior domains

The Stokes semigroup on a bounded domain is an analytic semigroup on spaces of bounded functions as was recently shown by the authors based on an a priori L∞-estimate for solutions to the linear Stokes equations. In this paper, we extend our approach to exterior domains and prove that the Stokes semigroup is uniquely extendable to an analytic semigroup on spaces of bounded functions.
Doppler-Aided GNSS Position Estimation With Weighted Least Squares

In contrast to carrier-phase measurements, receiver-generated Doppler measurements have much better availability, even in severe urban canyons or high-dynamic movement applications, while providing centimeter-level precision. Thus, the Doppler-aided approach may improve the positioning accuracy of the receiver. Some Kalman-filter-based applications have been developed in recent years, but the theoretical error analysis is still missing. In this paper, we propose a model-free Doppler-aided position estimation approach. The Doppler measurements are modeled together with the code pseudoranges and then solved as a weighted least square (WLS) problem. In addition, we analyze the lower bound of errors of the approach based on the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB). Simulation results and the error analysis show that the proposed approach may improve accuracy in position estimation.
Touch toolkit: a method to convey touch-based design knowledge and skills

An emerging area of new materiality in interactive architecture is the blending of physical computing with architectonic surfaces. As the sense of touch gains increasing significance across many design disciplines, new design knowledge is required for working with technology-mediated tactile interaction and haptic experience. With the introduction of novel forms of tangible, interactive materials, designers are faced with the challenge of acquiring design skills grounded in unfamiliar, tactile properties. We present a new design method comprised of a touch toolkit and accompanying workshop. The toolkit consists of two parts: a graphical user interface and four interactive sample surfaces. The surfaces contain actuators, which change their tactile qualities dynamically (e.g., temperature, texture) according to the GUI settings. A worksheet has been designed to collect data and user feedback, facilitating both the acquisition of touch-based design skills and reflection on the tactile perceptual qualities. A preliminary user study has provided initial confirmation of the usability of the toolkit and the usefulness of the workshop format for introducing novices to this emerging area of touch-based design.
Dual-mode Predictive Control of Constrained Nonlinear Sytems via Linear Differential Inclusion

Presented in the paper is a nonlinear predictive control method. It is known that some nonlinear plants can be transferred into linear time-varying systems after being globally linearized. So it is feasible to solve some certain problems of nonlinear systems via dealing with the corresponding linear uncertainty systems. Based on this idea, a dual-mode predictive control method for a class of constrained nonlinear systems whose trajectories can be embedded within polytopic linear differential inclusions is proposed. After being linearized through the tailor series, the initial nonlinear systems can be embedded into the polytopic description systems by using the maximum and minimum of each partial derivative over a bounded region of the state space. Then polytopic invariance is constructed on the polytopic description system to propose a predictive control algorithm, which is unlike earlier nonlinear predictive control methods that have to tackle online a complex nonlinear non-convex optimization problem, requires the solution of a semi-definite programming with linear matrix inequalities. And this can satisfy the demand of online optimization. Meanwhile, the stability of initial nonlinear system is based on the polytopic description system.
COMPUTER AIDED DIAGNOSIS OF CONFOCAL LASER SCANNING MICROSCOPY IMAGES OF MELANOCYTIC SKIN TUMOURS

aim of this study is to check the application of machine learning algorithms for the computer aided diagnosis of confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) views of skin lesions. The images were dissected in equal square elements where the features, based on spectral properties of the wavelet transform, were calculated out. The images were discriminated according their features by several machine learning algorithms, based on tree classifiers, function classifiers and lazy classi- fiers. The results were evaluated and show that tree classifiers allow the best discrimination be- tween CLSM views of benign common nevi and malignant melanoma.
Meeting the challenges in the design and evaluation of a trackside real-time safety-critical system

Highly distributed, autonomous and self-powered systems operating in harsh, outdoors environments face several threats in terms of dependability, timeliness and security, due to the challenging operating conditions determined by the environment. Despite such difficulties, there is an increasing demand to deploy these systems to support critical services, thus calling for severe timeliness, safety, and security requirements. Several challenges need to be faced and overcome. First, the designed architecture must be able to cope with the environmental challenges and satisfy dependability, timeliness and security requirements. Second, the assessment of the system must be carried on despite potentially incomplete field-data, and complex cascading effects that small modifications in system properties and operating conditions may have on the targeted metrics. In this paper we present our experience from the EU-funded project ALARP (A railway automatic track warning system based on distributed personal mobile terminals), which aims to build and validate a distributed, real-time, safety-critical system that detects trains approaching a railway worksite and notifies their arrivals to railway trackside workers. The paper describes the challenges we faced, and the solutions we adopted, when architecting and evaluating the ALARP system.
Adaptive Interference Avoidance for Dynamic Wireless Systems: A Game Theoretic Approach

In this paper, we present an adaptive algorithm for interference avoidance, which can be applied in a distributed manner by active users in a CDMA wireless system to obtain optimal codewords and powers for specified target signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR). The algorithm is derived using a game-theoretic approach in which separable cost functions with respect to codeword and power are defined, and joint codeword and power adaptation is formulated as a separable game with two corresponding subgames: the noncooperative codeword adaptation game, and the noncooperative power control game. Codeword and power adaptation use incremental updates in the direction of the best strategy, which are desirable in practical implementations since they allow the receiver to follow transmitter changes with corresponding incremental changes of the receiver filter and continue detection of transmitted symbols with high accuracy. The algorithm can also track variable target SINRs or variable number of active users in the system, and is therefore useful for dynamic wireless systems with varying quality of service (QoS) requirements. We illustrate the proposed algorithm with numerical examples obtained from simulations that show convergence and tracking properties of the algorithm for different scenarios