Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performing Mathematical Operations with Metamaterials

Computational Metamaterials Optical signal processing of light waves can represent certain mathematical functions and perform computational tasks on signals or images in an analog fashion. However, the complex systems of lenses and filters required are bulky. Metamaterials can perform similar optical processing operations but with materials that need only be a wavelength thick. Silva et al. (p. 160; see the Perspective by Sihvola) present a simulation study that shows how an architecture based on such metamaterials can be designed to perform a suite of mathematical functions to create ultrathin optical signal and data processors. An approach is described whereby metamaterials can be designed to perform a suite of mathematical functions. [Also see Perspective by Sihvola] We introduce the concept of metamaterial analog computing, based on suitably designed metamaterial blocks that can perform mathematical operations (such as spatial differentiation, integration, or convolution) on the profile of an impinging wave as it propagates through these blocks. Two approaches are presented to achieve such functionality: (i) subwavelength structured metascreens combined with graded-index waveguides and (ii) multilayered slabs designed to achieve a desired spatial Green’s function. Both techniques offer the possibility of miniaturized, potentially integrable, wave-based computing systems that are thinner than conventional lens-based optical signal and data processors by several orders of magnitude.
Regulation of microtubule stability by centrosomal proteins

The centrosome executes diverse functions including the nucleation and organization of microtubules. A subset of centrosomal proteins is found to be involved in regulating the nucleation, stability, and dynamics of microtubules. Literature is flooded with reports of centrosomal proteins regulating microtubule nucleation. However, the centrosomal proteins that regulate microtubule stability are underexplored. Here, we review the centrosomal proteins, which either enhance or reduce the stability of microtubules and thereby regulate microtubule dynamics. We also discuss unexplored aspects of the centrosomal proteins that influence microtubule stability. © 2018 IUBMB Life, 70(7):602–611, 2018
An Analysis of Volunteers' Motivation in Large-scale Sport Events and the Management Strategy for Volunteers during 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing

By means of literature review and questionnaires,the authors of this paper have studied the relative reports and references of the participation motivation of the volunteers of Sydney 2000 Olympic games and investigated 223 volunteers who offered service in the 21st Summer Universiade Games.The results indicate that the volunteers' motivations in large-scale sport events include the following five aspects:achievement,need of affiliation,power,self-test,ego-enhancement and relaxation and communication.Therefore,one of the effective managing strategies for administers in large-scale sport events is to understand the motivations of volunteers taking part in their voluntary service,fully take into account their motivations and assign to them the kind of service items that can best satisfy their needs so as to make good use of the resource of volunteers and avoid its waste.
Torch: A Search Engine for Trajectory Data

This paper presents a new trajectory search engine called Torch for querying road network trajectory data. Torch is able to efficiently process two types of typical queries (similarity search and Boolean search), and support a wide variety of trajectory similarity functions. Additionally, we propose a new similarity function LORS in Torch to measure the similarity in a more effective and efficient manner. Indexing and search in Torch works as follows. First, each raw vehicle trajectory is transformed to a set of road segments (edges) and a set of crossings (vertices) on the road network. Then a lightweight edge and vertex index called LEVI is built. Given a query, a filtering framework over LEVI is used to dynamically prune the trajectory search space based on the similarity measure imposed. Finally, the result set (ranked or Boolean) is returned. Extensive experiments on real trajectory datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of Torch.
ReGAN: RE[LAX|BAR|INFORCE] based Sequence Generation using GANs

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have seen steep ascension to the peak of ML research zeitgeist in recent years. Mostly catalyzed by its success in the domain of image generation, the technique has seen wide range of adoption in a variety of other problem domains. Although GANs have had a lot of success in producing more realistic images than other approaches, they have only seen limited use for text sequences. Generation of longer sequences compounds this problem. Most recently, SeqGAN (Yu et al., 2017) has shown improvements in adversarial evaluation and results with human evaluation compared to a MLE based trained baseline. The main contributions of this paper are three-fold: 1. We show results for sequence generation using a GAN architecture with efficient policy gradient estimators, 2. We attain improved training stability, and 3. We perform a comparative study of recent unbiased low variance gradient estimation techniques such as REBAR (Tucker et al., 2017), RELAX (Grathwohl et al., 2018) and REINFORCE (Williams, 1992). Using a simple grammar on synthetic datasets with varying length, we indicate the quality of sequences generated by the model.
Plastic waste associated with disease on coral reefs

Corals wrapped in plastic Coral reefs provide vital fisheries and coastal defense, and they urgently need protection from the damaging effects of plastic waste. Lamb et al. surveyed 159 coral reefs in the Asia-Pacific region. Billions of plastic items were entangled in the reefs. The more spikey the coral species, the more likely they were to snag plastic. Disease likelihood increased 20-fold once a coral was draped in plastic. Plastic debris stresses coral through light deprivation, toxin release, and anoxia, giving pathogens a foothold for invasion. Science, this issue p. 460 Plastic waste entanglement exacerbates the risk of coral disease outbreaks and consequent damage to reefs, as well as the loss of fisheries and coastal protection. Plastic waste can promote microbial colonization by pathogens implicated in outbreaks of disease in the ocean. We assessed the influence of plastic waste on disease risk in 124,000 reef-building corals from 159 reefs in the Asia-Pacific region. The likelihood of disease increases from 4% to 89% when corals are in contact with plastic. Structurally complex corals are eight times more likely to be affected by plastic, suggesting that microhabitats for reef-associated organisms and valuable fisheries will be disproportionately affected. Plastic levels on coral reefs correspond to estimates of terrestrial mismanaged plastic waste entering the ocean. We estimate that 11.1 billion plastic items are entangled on coral reefs across the Asia-Pacific and project this number to increase 40% by 2025. Plastic waste management is critical for reducing diseases that threaten ecosystem health and human livelihoods.
Title : Genetic evidence for a link between favorable adiposity and lower risk of type 2 diabetes , hypertension and heart disease . Short running title : Favorable adiposity and lower cardiometabolic risk Author list :

Recent genetic studies have identified some alleles associated with higher BMI but lower risk of type 2 diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. These “favorable adiposity” alleles are collectively associated with lower insulin levels and higher subcutaneous-to-visceral adipose tissue ratio and may protect from disease through higher adipose storage capacity. We aimed to use data from 164,609 individuals from the UK Biobank and five other studies to replicate associations between a genetic score of 11 favorable adiposity variants and adiposity and risk of disease, test for interactions between BMI and favorable adiposity genetics and test effects separately in men and women. In the UK Biobank the 50% of individuals carrying the most favorable adiposity alleles had higher BMIs (0.120 Kg/m 2 [0.066,0.174]; p=1E-5) and higher body fat percentage (0.301 % [0.230,0.372]; p=1E-16) compared to the 50% of individuals carrying the fewest alleles. For a given BMI, the 50% of individuals carrying the most favourable adiposity alleles were at: 0.837 OR [0.784,0.894] lower risk of type 2 diabetes (p=1E-7), -0.859 mmHg [-1.099,-0.618] lower systolic (p=3E-12) and -0.394 mmHg [-0.534,-0.254] lower diastolic blood pressure (p=4E-8), 0.935 OR [0.911,0.958] lower risk of hypertension (p=1E-7) and 0.921 OR [0.872,0.973] lower risk of heart disease (p=3E-3). In women, these associations could be explained by the observation that the alleles associated with higher BMI but lower risk of disease were also associated with a favourable body fat distribution, with a lower waist-hip ratio (-0.004 [-0.005,-0.003] 50% vs 50%; p=3E-14) but in men, the favourable adiposity alleles were associated with higher waist circumference (0.454 cm [0.267,0.641] 50% vs 50%; p=2E-6) and higher waist-hip ratio (0.0013 [0.0003,0.0024] 50% vs 50%; p=0.01). Results were strengthened when meta-analysing with five additional studies. There was no Page 3 of 58 Diabetes
Bisphenol A (BPA) binding on full‐length architectures of estrogen receptor

Previous research has shown that the major toxicity mechanism for many environment chemicals is binding with estrogen receptor (ER) and blocking endogenous estrogen access, including bisphenol A (BPA). However, the molecular level understanding the global consequence of BPA binding on the full‐length architectures of ER is largely unknown, which is a necessary stage to evaluate estrogen‐like toxicity of BPA. In the present work, the consequence of BPA on full‐length architectures of ER was firstly modeled based on molecular dynamics, focusing on the cross communication between multi‐domains including ligand binding domain (LBD) and DNA binding domain (DBD). The study proved consequence of BPA upon full‐length ER structure was dependent on long‐range communications between multiple protein domains. The allosteric effects occurring in LBD units could alter dimerization formation through a crucial change in residue‐residue connections, which resulted in relaxation of DBD. It indicated BPA could present consequence on the full‐size receptor, not only on the separate domains, but also on the cross communication among LBD, DBD, and DNA molecules. It might provide detailed insight into the knowledge about the structural characteristics of ER and its role in gene regulation, which eventually helped us evaluate the estrogen‐like toxicity upon BPA binding with full‐length ER.
Substantial convection and precipitation enhancements by ultrafine aerosol particles

Up with ultrafine aerosol particles Ultrafine aerosol particles (smaller than 50 nanometers in diameter) have been thought to be too small to affect cloud formation. Fan et al. show that this is not the case. They studied the effect of urban pollution transported into the otherwise nearly pristine atmosphere of the Amazon. Condensational growth of water droplets around the tiny particles releases latent heat, thereby intensifying atmospheric convection. Thus, anthropogenic ultrafine aerosol particles may exert a more important influence on cloud formation processes than previously believed. Science, this issue p. 411 Water droplet condensation by ultrafine aerosol particles fuels more intense atmospheric convection. Aerosol-cloud interactions remain the largest uncertainty in climate projections. Ultrafine aerosol particles smaller than 50 nanometers (UAP<50) can be abundant in the troposphere but are conventionally considered too small to affect cloud formation. Observational evidence and numerical simulations of deep convective clouds (DCCs) over the Amazon show that DCCs forming in a low-aerosol environment can develop very large vapor supersaturation because fast droplet coalescence reduces integrated droplet surface area and subsequent condensation. UAP<50 from pollution plumes that are ingested into such clouds can be activated to form additional cloud droplets on which excess supersaturation condenses and forms additional cloud water and latent heating, thus intensifying convective strength. This mechanism suggests a strong anthropogenic invigoration of DCCs in previously pristine regions of the world.
Sexually transmitted infections: Need for extragenital screening

Extragenital infections can occur concurrently with simultaneous urogenital infections. Extragenital sites are believed to serve as hidden reservoirs and play a critical role in their transmission. The etiological relationship of the most widespread Sexually transmitted diseases (STD) pathogen to reproductive tract has long been established, but the distribution to extragenital sites appears to be infrequent and its correlation with the sexual practice still requires to be investigated. Optimal-screening strategies for extragenital infections are largely unknown. However, there is a lack of data on clinical outcomes and optimal treatment regimens for rectal and pharyngeal extragenital infections. Further studies are needed in settings other than reproductive health and STD clinics, especially in primary care clinics and resource-limited settings.
Temperature hints for sensornet routing

Real-world experiments have shown that the transmission power and the received signal strength of low-power radio transceivers used in sensornets decrease when temperature increases. We analyze how this phenomenon affects the network layer, and find that temperature fluctuations may cause undesirable behavior by sensornet routing protocols such as CTP and RPL. Furthermore, we present an approach to make these protocols robust to temperature fluctuations by augmenting the ETX link metric with temperature hints.
Experimental Analysis of ViLTE Service

Long-term evolution (LTE) is a broadband wireless cellular system currently available in about 200 countries. From the mobile network operator point of view, one of the most appealing characteristics of LTE is the possibility of providing the users with mobile broadband services like voice over LTE and video over LTE (ViLTE), with strict quality of service (QoS) guarantees. The success of such services, which usually require a subscription fee, is obviously tightly bound to the users’ quality of experience (QoE), that must be significantly better than the quality perceived in case of free services. This paper attempts to evaluate the perceived quality of the ViLTE service. In more detail, we present the results of an experimental test–bed realised at one of the most popular italian MNO, aimed at evaluating the impact of several network layer QoS parameters on the QoE of the ViLTE service.
Gross morphology and scanning electron microscopy of the Bagrus Bayad (Forskal, 1775) oropharyngeal cavity with emphasis to teeth‐food adaptation

Bagrus Bayad (Forskal, 1775) is a bottom feeder fish feeds on different food items. Its oral cavity anatomy has many types of teeth adapted to the capacity and varieties of feeding. The aim of the present study was to use the gross anatomy and scanning electron microscopy to identify the anatomical characteristic, especially of the teeth and taste buds distributed on the roof and floor of the oropharyngeal cavity. The results clarified that Bagrus Bayad has two types of teeth; curved pointed and blunt teeth of different sizes. The teeth appeared on epithelial protrusions. The pharyngeal region had upper and lower pharyngeal teeth, the upper arranged into two oval prominences while the lower ones arranged into two triangular areas. The higher number of the pointed teeth is prove the carnivorous nature of the Bagrus Bayad. Three types of taste bud (I, II, & III) were found in the oropharyngeal cavity. The tongue present in the floor and free from teeth and characterized by the presence of taste bud type I and II. Many microridges of different arrangement observed on the surface epithelium of oropharyngeal cavity. The upper and lower valve characterized by the microridges, pores and taste buds. The knowledge of the nature of the oropharyngeal cavity of the Bagrus Bayad helps in identifying new and better methods for feeding in aquaculture.
Data-Fusion Techniques for Open-Set Recognition Problems

Most pattern classification techniques are focused on solving closed-set problems in which a classifier is trained with samples of all classes that may appear during the testing phase. In many situations, however, samples of unknown classes, i.e., whose classes did not have any example during the training stage, need to be properly handled during testing. This specific setup is referred to in the literature as open-set recognition. Open-set problems are harder as they might be ill-sampled, not sampled at all, or even undefined. Differently from existing literature, here we aim at solving open-set recognition problems combining different classifiers and features while, at the same time, taking care of unknown classes. Researchers have greatly benefited from combining different methods in order to achieve more robust and reliable classifiers in daring recognition conditions, but those solutions have often focused on closed-set setups. In this paper, we propose the integration of a newly designed open-set graph-based optimum-path forest (OSOPF) classifier with genetic programming (GP) and majority voting fusion techniques. While OSOPF takes care of learning decision boundaries more resilient to unknown classes and outliers, GP combines different problem features to discover appropriate similarity functions and allows a more robust classification through early fusion. Finally, the majority-voting approach combines different classification evidence from different classifier outcomes and features through late-fusion techniques. Performed experiments show the proposed data-fusion approaches yield effective results for open-set recognition problems, significantly outperforming existing counterparts in the literature and paving the way for investigations in this field.
Deep Learning to Detect Medical Treatment Fraud

Excessive treatment or testing of patients is considered one of the most ubiquitous and persistent forms of waste and abuse in healthcare. Some estimates show excessive treatment to be as high as 8% of all medical insurance provider expenditures. It is very difficult to identify an extraneous or unnecessary procedure or drug because there is such a wide variety of diagnoses and an equally large number of treatment options. Our goal in this paper was to show how RBMs can be utilized effectively to ferret out abnormal treatments where the prescribed treatment for a given diagnosis is not strictly followed. To test our hypothesis we generated 200,000 different injuries and injected 10% of the injuries with unnecessary treatments to reflect estimated industry prevalence levels. Using testing and training sets we found that Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) were able to reach AUCs of . 95, lifts at 9.5 and recalls at 50%. Implementing our approach on real-world client datasets have shown performances levels that approach simulation performances despite additional noise.
Hotspots Elimination and Temperature Flattening in VLSI Circuits

This paper proposes a new solution to the problem of eliminating hotspots from gate-level netlists as well as examines the effects of timing constraints on the temperature reduction and the overall temperature flattening on the chip. Our core technique consists of three steps. First, a thermal analysis is carried out for logic netlists. (The netlists are assumed to be either isolated or embedded in a larger system with macro-cells.) We then apply a new technique, called isothermal logic partitioning technique ( LP-temp), to the netlists, which essentially builds isothermal logic clusters for the netlists and splits each of the logic clusters exceeding the maximum allowed temperature through its hottest point. This will enlarge a contact point for the hotspot to cool down. Finally, the entire system is replaced using a custom designed temperature-aware floorplanner so that the temperature across the entire system is reduced and flattened. We have developed a thermal-aware design flow, integrating our thermal-aware logic partitioning technique with a timing and thermal-aware floorplanner. Two cases were analyzed: (tight timing) LP-temp combined with the timing and thermal-aware floorplanner, where the partitioned units by LP-temp are replaced locally considering a tight timing budget (5% timing degradation); (loose timing) LP-temp combined with thermal-aware replacement, considering a loose timing budget (10% timing degradation). From experimentations using a set of benchmark designs, it is confirmed that our temperature reduction technique is effective, generating designs with an average of 5.54% and 9.9% more reduction of peak temperature (on average) for the cases of tight and loose timing than that of the designs by a conventional thermal-aware floorplanner without using LP-temp, respectively. We also analyzed the effect of our proposed technique on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in order to contrast its effectiveness on systems with hotspots on hardmacros. Results show that our technique can reduce the temperature in these systems on average 3.40% and 6.61% for the case of loose and tight timing constraints respectively compared to the thermal-aware floorplanner without using LP-temp .
Mechanobiologically optimized 3D titanium-mesh scaffolds enhance bone regeneration in critical segmental defects in sheep

Soft, honeycomb-structured titanium-mesh scaffolds enhance bone regeneration in a large segmental defect in sheep. For better bone, use softer scaffolds Large segmental gaps in bone caused by trauma or disease are typically treated with bone grafts and stiff scaffolds to hold the fractured bone in place, but sometimes these defects fail to heal. To optimize bone regeneration, Pobloth and colleagues modified titanium-mesh scaffold designs to provide specific strains and stresses within the fracture environment. In sheep with critical-sized segmental defects, scaffolds that reduced stress shielding around tibial fractures enhanced bone bridging compared to stiffer scaffolds and shielding plates. Scaffolds can be tuned to evoke specific mechanical and biological responses within bone defects, which could help guide regeneration. Three-dimensional (3D) titanium-mesh scaffolds offer many advantages over autologous bone grafting for the regeneration of challenging large segmental bone defects. Our study supports the hypothesis that endogenous bone defect regeneration can be promoted by mechanobiologically optimized Ti-mesh scaffolds. Using finite element techniques, two mechanically distinct Ti-mesh scaffolds were designed in a honeycomb-like configuration to minimize stress shielding while ensuring resistance against mechanical failure. Scaffold stiffness was altered through small changes in the strut diameter only. Honeycombs were aligned to form three differently oriented channels (axial, perpendicular, and tilted) to guide the bone regeneration process. The soft scaffold (0.84 GPa stiffness) and a 3.5-fold stiffer scaffold (2.88 GPa) were tested in a critical size bone defect model in vivo in sheep. To verify that local scaffold stiffness could enhance healing, defects were stabilized with either a common locking compression plate that allowed dynamic loading of the 4-cm defect or a rigid custom-made plate that mechanically shielded the defect. Lower stress shielding led to earlier defect bridging, increased endochondral bone formation, and advanced bony regeneration of the critical size defect. This study demonstrates that mechanobiological optimization of 3D additive manufactured Ti-mesh scaffolds can enhance bone regeneration in a translational large animal study.