Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cathepsin cysteine proteases in cardiovascular disease

Extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling is one of the underlying mechanisms in cardiovascular diseases. Cathepsin cysteine proteases have a central role in ECM remodeling and have been implicated in the development and progression of cardiovascular diseases. Cathepsins also show differential expression in various stages of atherosclerosis, and in vivo knockout studies revealed that deficiency of cathepsin K or S reduces atherosclerosis. Furthermore, cathepsins are involved in lipid metabolism. Cathepsins have the capability to degrade low‐density lipoprotein and reduce cholesterol efflux from macrophages, aggravating foam cell formation. Although expression studies also demonstrated differential expression of cathepsins in cardiovascular diseases like aneurysm formation, neoin‐tima formation, and neovascularization, in vivo studies to define the exact role of cathepsins in these processes are lacking. Evaluation of the feasibility of cathepsins as a diagnostic tool revealed that serum levels of cathepsins L and S seem to be promising as biomarkers in the diagnosis of atherosclerosis, whereas cathepsin B shows potential as an imaging tool. Furthermore, ca‐thepsin K and S inhibitors showed effectiveness in (pre) clinical evaluation for the treatment of osteoporosis and osteoarthritis, suggesting that cathepsin inhibitors may also have therapeutic effects for the treatment of atherosclerosis. —Lutgens, S. P. M. , Cleutjens, K. B. J. M. , Daemen, M. J. A. P., Heeneman, S. Cathepsin cysteine proteases in cardiovascular disease. FASEB J. 21, 3029–3041 (2007)
An investigation into determining head pose for gaze estimation on unmodified mobile devices

Traditionally, devices which are able to determine a users gaze are large, expensive and often restrictive. We investigate the prospect of using common webcams and mobile devices such as laptops, tablets and phones without modification as an alternative means for obtaining a users gaze. A person's gaze can be fundamentally determined by the pose of the head as well as the orientation of the eyes. This initial work investigates the first of these factors - an estimate of the 3D head pose (and subsequently the positions of the eye centres) relative to a camera device. Specifically, we seek a low cost algorithm that requires only a one-time calibration for an individual user, that can run in real-time on the aforementioned mobile devices with noisy camera data. We use our head tracker to estimate the 4 eye corners of a user over a 10 second video. We present the results at several different frames per second (fps) to analyse the impact on the tracker with lower quality cameras. We show that our algorithm is efficient enough to run at 75fps on a common laptop, but struggles with tracking loss when the fps is lower than 10fps.
Tidal breathing parameters measured using structured light plethysmography in healthy children and those with asthma before and after bronchodilator

Structured light plethysmography (SLP) is a light‐based, noncontact technique that measures tidal breathing by monitoring displacements of the thoracoabdominal (TA) wall. We used SLP to measure tidal breathing parameters and their within‐subject variability (v) in 30 children aged 7–16 years with asthma and abnormal spirometry (forced expiratory volume in 1 sec [FEV1] <80% predicted) during a routine clinic appointment. As part of standard care, the reversibility of airway obstruction was assessed by repeating spirometry after administration of an inhaled bronchodilator. In this study, SLP was performed before and after bronchodilator administration, and also once in 41 age‐matched controls. In the asthma group, there was a significant increase in spirometry‐assessed mean FEV1 after administration of bronchodilator. Of all measured tidal breathing parameters, the most informative was the inspiratory to expiratory TA displacement ratio (IE50SLP, calculated as TIF50SLP/TEF50SLP, where TIF50SLP is tidal inspiratory TA displacement rate at 50% of inspiratory displacement and TEF50SLP is tidal expiratory TA displacement rate at 50% of expiratory displacement). Median (m) IE50SLP and its variability (vIE50SLP) were both higher in children with asthma (prebronchodilator) compared with healthy children (mIE50SLP: 1.53 vs. 1.22, P < 0.001; vIE50SLP: 0.63 vs. 0.47, P < 0.001). After administration of bronchodilators to the asthma group, mIE50SLP decreased from 1.53 to 1.45 (P = 0.01) and vIE50SLP decreased from 0.63 to 0.60 (P = 0.04). SLP‐measured tidal breathing parameters could differentiate between children with and without asthma and indicate a response to bronchodilator.
In Vivo RNAi-Based Screens: Studies in Model Organisms

RNA interference (RNAi) is a technique widely used for gene silencing in organisms and cultured cells, and depends on sequence homology between double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) and target mRNA molecules. Numerous cell-based genome-wide screens have successfully identified novel genes involved in various biological processes, including signal transduction, cell viability/death, and cell morphology. However, cell-based screens cannot address cellular processes such as development, behavior, and immunity. Drosophila and Caenorhabditis elegans are two model organisms whose whole bodies and individual body parts have been subjected to RNAi-based genome-wide screening. Moreover, Drosophila RNAi allows the manipulation of gene function in a spatiotemporal manner when it is implemented using the Gal4/UAS system. Using this inducible RNAi technique, various large-scale screens have been performed in Drosophila, demonstrating that the method is straightforward and valuable. However, accumulated results reveal that the results of RNAi-based screens have relatively high levels of error, such as false positives and negatives. Here, we review in vivo RNAi screens in Drosophila and the methods that could be used to remove ambiguity from screening results.
Comparative Melodic Analysis of A Cappella Flamenco Cantes

Background in ethnomusicology and music analysis. A cappella singing styles (called cantes in the flamenco jargon) are among the most fundamental song styles within the flamenco repertoire. Until very recently, flamenco singers have been only using oral transmission to learn them. Because of this form of diffusion, melody has become one of the main musical facets to be listened to, remembered, elaborated and spread in flamenco singing styles. Moreover, melody has helped flamenco enthusiasts to remember and identify variants of a particular style or genre. A frequent discussion and unanswered question among flamenco scholars is how to quantify the similarity between two melodies, and how to use this similarity measure to differentiate different styles and variants among performers, and to study the roots and evolution of flamenco styles.
TRIP: An Interactive Retrieving-Inferring Data Imputation Approach

Data imputation aims at filling in missing attribute values in databases. Most existing imputation methods to string attribute values are inferring-based approaches, which usually fail to reach a high imputation recall by just inferring missing values from the complete part of the data set. Recently, some retrieving-based methods are proposed to retrieve missing values from external resources such as the World Wide Web, which tend to reach a much higher imputation recall, but inevitably bring a large overhead by issuing a large number of search queries. In this paper, we investigate the interaction between the inferring-based methods and the retrieving-based methods. We show that retrieving a small number of selected missing values can greatly improve the imputation recall of the inferring-based methods. With this intuition, we propose an inTeractive Retrieving-Inferring data imPutation approach (TRIP), which performs retrieving and inferring alternately in filling in missing attribute values in a data set. To ensure the high recall at the minimum cost, TRIP faces a challenge of selecting the least number of missing values for retrieving to maximize the number of inferable values. Our proposed solution is able to identify an optimal retrieving-inferring scheduling scheme in deterministic data imputation, and the optimality of the generated scheme is theoretically analyzed with proofs. We also analyze with an example that the optimal scheme is not feasible to be achieved in τ-constrained stochastic data imputation (τ-SDI), but still, our proposed solution identifies an expected-optimal scheme in τ-SDI. Extensive experiments on four data collections show that TRIP retrieves on average 20 percent missing values and achieves the same high recall that was reached by the retrieving-based approach.
New Insights into the Kalman Filter Beamformer: Applications to Speech and Robustness

Statistically optimal spatial processors (also referred to as data-dependent beamformers) are widely-used spatial focusing techniques for desired source extraction. The Kalman filter-based beamformer (KFB) [1] is a recursive Bayesian method for implementing the beamformer. This letter provides new insights into the KFB. Specifically, we adopt the KFB framework to the task of speech extraction. We formalize the KFB with a set of linear constraints and present its equivalence to the linearly constrained minimum power (LCMP) beamformer. We further show that the optimal output power, required for implementing the KFB, is merely controlling the white noise gain (WNG) of the beamformer. We also show, that in static scenarios, the adaptation rule of the KFB reduces to the simpler affine projection algorithm (APA). The analytically derived results are verified and exemplified by a simulation study.
Modelling of immune cells as vectors of HIV spread inside a patient human body

The search to understand how the HIV virus spreads inside the human body and how the immune response works to control it has motivated studies related to Mathematical Immunology. Actually, researches include the idea of mathematical models representing the dynamics of healthy and infected cell populations and focusing on mechanisms used by HIV to invade target-host cells, viral dissemination (which leads to depletion of the T-cell pool and collapse of the immune system), and impairment of immune response. In this work, we show the importance of specific cells of immune response, as infection vectors involved in the dynamics of viral proliferation within an untreated patient, by using an ordinary differential equation model in which we considered that the virus infected target-cells such as macrophages, dendritic cells, and lymphocytes TCD4 and TCD8 populations. In conclusion, we demonstrate the importance of each cell-host and the threshold of viral establishment and posterior spread based on the presence of infected macrophages and dendritic cells in antigen-presenting processing, which leads to new infections (by wild or mutant virions) after immune response activation episodes. We presented an $R_0$ expression that provides the major parameters of HIV infection. Additionally, we suggest some possibilities of new targets for functional vaccines.
A recommender for conflict resolution support in optimistic model versioning

The usage of optimistic version control systems comes along with cumbersome and time-consuming conflict resolution in the case that the modifications of two developers are contradicting. For code as well as for any other artifact the resolution support moves hardly beyond the choices "keep mine", "keep theirs", "take all changes", or "abandon all changes". To ease the conflict resolution in the context of model versioning, we propose a recommender system which suggests automatically executable resolution patterns to the developer responsible for the conflict resolution. The lookup algorithm is based on a similarity-aware graph matching approach incorporating information from the metamodel of the used modeling language. This allows not only the retrieval of recommendations exactly matching the given conflict situation, but also the identification of similar conflict situations whose resolution patterns are adaptable to the current conflict.
Construction of a SSR-Based Genetic Map and Identification of QTLs for Catechins Content in Tea Plant (Camellia sinensis)

Catechins are the most important bioactive compounds in tea, and have been demonstrated to possess a wide variety of pharmacological activities. To characterize quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for catechins content in the tender shoots of tea plant, we constructed a moderately saturated genetic map using 406 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers, based on a pseudo-testcross population of 183 individuals derived from an intraspecific cross of two Camellia sinensis varieties with diverse catechins composition. The map consisted of fifteen linkage groups (LGs), corresponding to the haploid chromosome number of tea plant (2n = 2x = 30). The total map length was 1,143.5 cM, with an average locus spacing of 2.9 cM. A total of 25 QTLs associated with catechins content were identified over two measurement years. Of these, nine stable QTLs were validated across years, and clustered into four main chromosome regions on LG03, LG11, LG12 and LG15. The population variability explained by each QTL was predominantly at moderate-to-high levels and ranged from 2.4% to 71.0%, with an average of 17.7%. The total number of QTL for each trait varied from four to eight, while the total population variability explained by all QTLs for a trait ranged between 38.4% and 79.7%. This is the first report on the identification of QTL for catechins content in tea plant. The results of this study provide a foundation for further cloning and functional characterization of catechin QTLs for utilization in improvement of tea plant.
Cross time frequency spectra applied to automotive brake noise

We apply a local cross-correlation method to the study of correlating brake sounds perceived inside a car to the vibration produced by the brakes at the source. The method allows one to correlate the time-varying spectral properties of two vibration or acoustic sources. The aim is to identify the possible objectionable sounds by determining the time-varying frequencies that the two sounds have in common. The method utilizes cross-time-frequency distributions, and in particular we use the cross-spectrogram. Examples are given to show the effectiveness of the method.
AAS 15-423 GENERALIZED GAUSSIAN CUBATURE FOR NONLINEAR FILTERING

A novel method for nonlinear filtering based on a generalized Gaussian cubature approach is shown. Specifically, a new point-based nonlinea r filter is developed which is not based on one-dimensional quadrature rules, but rather uses multidimensional cubature rules for Gaussian distributions. Th e new generalized Gaussian cubature filter is not in general limited to odd-order de gre s of accuracy, and provides a wider range of order of accuracy. The method requi s the solution of a set of nonlinear equations for finding optimal cubature poin ts, but these equations are only required to be solved once for each state dimensiona l and order of accuracy. This rule is also extended to anisotropic cases where t order of accuracy is not isotropic in dimension. This method allows for tuning of the cubature rules to develop problem specific rules that are optimal for the given problem. The generalized Gaussian cubature filter is applied to benchmark proble ms in astrodynamics, and it is compared against existing nonlinear filtering meth ods.
Towards the ubiquitous healthcare by integrating active monitoring and intelligent cloud

Personal disease management and prevention are essential for promoting the healthy community. How to establish the health promotion environment becomes an attractive topic in nowadays. In this paper, we investigate the approaches of patient monitoring and care under the cloud-based telecare system. By considering the scenarios for fixed and mobile users, the cost-effective health promoting methods are proposed and simple experiments are conducted verify the effectiveness of the methods.
A Cognitive Approach for Object Discovery

Object discovery is the task of detecting unknown objects in images. The task is of large interest in many fields of machine vision, ranging from the automatic analysis of web images to interpreting data of a mobile robot or a driver assistant system. Here, we present a new approach for object discovery, based on findings of the human visual system. Proto-objects are detected with a segmentation module, generating perceptually coherent image regions. In parallel, a saliency system detects regions of interest in images and serves to select segments, depending on their saliency. We obtain very good results on a database of salient objects and on real-world office scenes.
A multithreaded communication engine for multicore architectures

The current trend in clusters leads towards an increase of the number of cores per node. As a result, an increasing number of parallel applications is mixing message passing and multithreading as an attempt to better match the underlying architecture's structure. This naturally raises the problem of designing efficient, multithreaded implementations of MPL In this paper, we present the design of a multithreaded communication engine able to exploit idle cores to speed up communications in two ways: it can move CPU- intensive operations out of the critical path (e.g. PIO transfers off load), and is able to let rendezvous transfers progress asynchronously. We have implemented these methods in the PM2 software suite, evaluated their behavior in typical cases, and we have observed good performance results in overlapping communication and computation.
Conversation Analysis of Michael White’s Decentered and Influential Position

The relationship between the therapist and the client is an important consideration for most models of therapy, with all models of therapy emphasizing the importance of establishing a positive therapeutic relationship. Quantitative and qualitative studies have shown that the relationship between the therapist and the client is a predictor of positive outcomes. However, different models define the preferred therapeutic relationship differently. This study was a qualitative exploration of a decentered and influential position of the therapist in narrative therapy. A video of a one-session narrative therapy case conducted by Michael White was analyzed using conversation analysis to answer the following research question: How, if at all, can White be seen to take a decentered and influential position in narrative therapy? The findings of this study provide more knowledge about White’s decentered and influential stance in narrative therapy. It is expected that this knowledge could be useful for education and training purposes, as well as for the improvement of clinical practice.
The Application of Dither and Noise-shaping to Nyquist-rate Digital Audio: an Introduction

This paper discusses the theory of dithered and noise-shaped quantisation, and in particular their application to Nyquist rate digital audio. Dither is shown to be essential if quantisation-related distortion is to be avoided. Careful application of noise-shaping is shown to be of audible beneet by increasing the perceived dynamic range of a signal. Various drawbacks of the technique are discussed. In particular thèfragility' of signals processed in this way is noted, and the ease with which the beneets may be undone is illustrated. to copy and store it in magnetic or electronic form and to make a single hard copy, for private study, educational use or other non-commercial purpose, subject to the following conditions: the document shall remain complete and unaltered, and no charge shall be made for access to it. The author reserves all other rights.
Packet Size Optimization for Improving the Energy Efficiency in Body Sensor Networks

Energy consumption is a key issue in body sensor networks (BSNs) since energy‐constrained sensors monitor the vital signs of human beings in healthcare applications. In this paper, packet size optimization for BSNs has been analyzed to improve the efficiency of energy consumption. Existing studies on packet size optimization in wireless sensor networks cannot be applied to BSNs because the different operational characteristics of nodes and the channel effects of in‐body and on‐body propagation cannot be captured. In this paper, automatic repeat request (ARQ), forward error correction (FEC) block codes, and FEC convolutional codes have been analyzed regarding their energy efficiency. The hop‐length extension technique has been applied to improve this metric with FEC block codes. The theoretical analysis and the numerical evaluations reveal that exploiting FEC schemes improves the energy efficiency, increases the optimal payload packet size, and extends the hop length for all scenarios for in‐body and on‐body propagation.
Working memory impairments in Multiple Sclerosis: effects on stress clash resolution.

WIn this paper, we investigate stress clash resolution, i.e., how speakers readjust the metrical patterns of an utterance to preserve its metrical regularity. We test the effect of working memory (WM) capacities in control (C) subjects and individuals with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) on their ability to look-ahead to the metrical structure of an utterance and compute changes in prominence structure in the clash condition. We predict that if WM capacities affect stress clash resolution, MS patients with low WM capacities will not be able to look ahead and will fail to apply stress resolution. Our results do not provide evidence of stress clash resolution for both C and MS subjects, suggesting neither stress shift nor stress deletion took place. Yet, some evidence is provided that MS speakers with low WM capacities narrow down the scope of the prosodic planning unit, thus suggesting that variation in planning strategies depend on cognitive skills. We discuss our results along different models of French prosody.
Theoretical underpinnings for the efficiency of restorable networks using preconfigured cycles ("p-cycles")

Previous work on restorable networks has shown experimentally that one can support 100% restoration with an optimized set of closed cycles of spare capacity while requiring little or no increase in spare capacity relative to a span-restorable mesh network. This is important and unexpected because it implies that future restoration schemes could be as capacity efficient as a mesh network, while being as fast as ring-based networks because there is no real-time work at any nodes other than the two failure nodes. This paper complements the prior work by giving a greater theoretical basis and insight to support the prior results. We are able to show in a bounding-type of argument that the proposed protection cycles ("p-cycles") have as high a restoration efficiency as it is possible to expect for any type of preconfigured pattern, and are categorically superior to preconfigured linear segments or trees. We are also able to show that the capacity efficiency of a fully preconfigured p-cycle network has the same well-known lower bound as that of a span restorable mesh network which is cross-connected on-demand. These results provide a theoretical underpinning for the efficiency of p-cycles and confirmation of the experimental observations.