Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cancer Stem Cells in Glioblastoma Multiforme

Aim To identify and characterize cancer stem cells (CSC) in glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). Methods Four-micrometer thick formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded GBM samples from six patients underwent 3,3-diaminobenzidine (DAB) and immunofluorescent (IF) immunohistochemical (IHC) staining for the embryonic stem cell (ESC) markers NANOG, OCT4, SALL4, SOX2, and pSTAT3. IF IHC staining was performed to demonstrate co-expression of these markers with GFAP. The protein expression and the transcriptional activities of the genes encoding NANOG, OCT4, SOX2, SALL4, and STAT3 were investigated using Western blotting (WB) and NanoString gene expression analysis, respectively. Results DAB and IF IHC staining demonstrated the presence of a CSC population expressing NANOG, OCT4, SOX2, SALL4, and pSTAT3 with the almost ubiquitous presence of SOX2 and a relatively low abundance of OCT4, within GBM. The expression of NANOG, SOX2 and, pSTAT3 but, not OCT and SALL4, was confirmed by WB. NanoString gene analysis demonstrated transcriptional activation of NANOG, OCT4, SALL4, STAT3, and SOX2 in GBM. Conclusion This study demonstrated a population of CSCs within GBM characterized by the expression of the CSC markers NANOG, SALL4, SOX2, pSTAT3 and OCT4 at the protein and mRNA levels. The almost ubiquitous presence of SOX2 and a relatively low abundance of OCT4 would support the putative existence of a stem cell hierarchy within GBM.
Navier-Stokes equations interacting with a nonlinear elastic shell

This dissertation is written under the supervision of Prof. Steve Shkoller. We study a moving boundary value problem consisting of a viscous incompressible fluid moving and interacting with a nonlinear elastic shell. The fluid motion is governed by the Navier-Stokes equations, while the shell is modeled by the nonlinear St. VenantKirchhoff constitutive law, and they are coupled together by continuity of displacements and tractions (stresses) along the moving material interface. We introduce new variables so that in order to formulate the problem more easily, and prove existence and uniqueness of solutions in Sobolev spaces.
Rule-Based Highway Maneuver Intention Recognition

Future advanced driver assistance systems or fully automated driving systems require an increased ability to classify and interpret traffic situations in order to appropriately account for, and react to, the behavior of surroundings vehicles. When driving on a highway, humans are able to recognize the maneuver intentions of surrounding vehicles by observing lateral and longitudinal motion cues. The main idea presented in this paper is to adapt this ability to technical systems by formulating simple logic rules for intention recognition of highway maneuvers. As such, the presented algorithm is able to recognize the intention of left and right lane change maneuvers with an accuracy of approximately 89% while maintaining the false positive rate low at approximately 3%. Further, due to the algorithm's low computational complexity, flexibility, and straight-forward design based on easily comprehensible logic rules, the proposed method fulfills the requirements of future advanced driver assistance systems or fully automated driving systems.
Merging DBMs Efficiently – Extended Abstract

In this paper we present different algorithms to reduce the number of DBMs in federations by merging them. Federations are unions of DBMs and are used to represent non-convex zones. Inclusion checking between DBMs is a limited technique to reduce the size of federations and how to choose some DBMs to merge them into a larger one is a combinatorial problem. We present a number of simple but efficient techniques to avoid searching the combinations while still being able to merge any number of DBMs.
Continuous hyperparameter optimization for large-scale recommender systems

While the prediction accuracy of a large-scale recommender system can generally be improved by learning from more and more training data over time, it is unclear how well a fixed predictive model can handle the changing business dynamics in a real-world scenario. The adjustment of a predictive model is controlled by the hyperparameter settings of a selected algorithm. Although the problem of hyperparameter optimization has been studied for decades in various disciplines, the adaptiveness of the initially selected model is not as well understood. This paper presents an approach to continuously re-select hyperparameter settings of the algorithm in a large-scale retail recommender system. In particular, an automatic hyperparameter optimization technique is applied on collaborative filtering algorithms in order to improve prediction accuracy. Experiments have been conducted on a large-scale real retail dataset to challenge traditional assumption that a one-off initial hyperparameter optimization is sufficient. The proposed approach has been compared with a baseline approach and a widely used approach with two scalable collaborative filtering algorithms. The evaluations of our experiments are based on a 2-year real purchase transaction dataset of a large retail chain business, both its online e-commerce site and its offline retail stores. It is demonstrated that continuous hyperparameter optimization can effectively improve the prediction accuracy of a recommender system. This paper presents a new direction in improving the prediction performance of a large-scale recommender system.
Online Classification of Machine Operation Modes Based on Information Compression and Fuzzy Similarity Analysis

This paper proposes a computational scheme for online classification of process data sets that represent different operation modes of machines and other systems by use of fuzzy similarity analysis. The classification procedure starts with a preliminary given small number of known operation modes (data sets) which constitute the initial size of the Knowledge Base (KB). During the online classification, the dissimilarity (difference) degree between the newly submitted operation mode and each of the current modes stored in the KB is computed. As a result, depending on the preliminary given threshold for classification, the newly submitted mode is classified as belonging to a certain class (operation mode) from the KB or is considered as a new (unknown and different) mode. In the latter case, this mode is added as a new entry of the KB and used for the further online classification. An unsupervised learning algorithm (a modification of the Neural-Gas leaning algorithm) is used in the paper for compression of the original "raw" data from each operation mode into Compressed Information Model (CIM) with a smaller number of neurons. Then the similarity analysis is performed as a two-input fuzzy inference procedure that uses the Center-of-Gravity Distance and the Weighted Average Size Difference between two CIMs. The membership functions and the singletons of the fuzzy inference procedure are tuned in the paper by using a given set of test operation modes. The whole computational scheme is illustrated and discussed on a real example for classification of 5 main operation modes of a hydraulic excavator.
A-Learning for approximate planning

Abstract We consider a new algorithm for reinforcement learning called A-learning. A-learning learns the advantages from a single training set. We compare A-learning with function approximation to Q-learning with function approximation and find that because A-learning approximates only the advantages it is less likely to exhibit bias due to the function approximation as compared to Q-learning.We consider a new algorithm for reinforcement learning called A-learning. A-learning learns the advantages from a single training set. We compare A-learning with function approximation to Q-learning with function approximation and find that because A-learning approximates only the advantages it is less likely to exhibit bias due to the function approximation as compared to Q-learning.
Socioeconomic Inequalities in Child Malnutrition in the Developing World

Despite the development community's shift in emphasis toward the poor, malnutrition, like other dimensions of poor health, is concentrated among the worst off. Yet targets are still defined in terms of population averages. Consider, then, this information about malnutrition rates among different economic groups in 20 developing countries. Among the conclusions Wagstaff and Watanabe reach about malnutrition rates among different economic groups: · Inequalities in malnutrition almost always disfavor the poor. · It's not just that the poor have higher rates of malnutrition. The rate of malnutrition declines continuously with rising living standards. · The tendency of poorer children to have higher rates of stunting and underweight is not due to chance or sampling variability. Inequalities in stunting and underweight, as measured by the concentration index, are statistically significant in almost all countries. · Inequalities in underweight tend to be larger than inequalities in stunting, which tend to be larger than inequalities in wasting. · In most cases, whatever the malnutrition indicator, differences in inequality between countries are not statistically significant. · Even if attention is restricted to the cross-country differences in inequality that are statistically significant, interesting conclusions emerge. Egypt and Vietnam have the most equal distributions of malnutrition, and Nicaragua, Peru, and, to a lesser extent, Morocco have highly unequal distributions. · Some countries (such as Egypt and Romania) do well in terms of both the average (the prevalence of malnutrition) and the distribution (equality). Others do badly on both counts. Peru, for example, has a higher average level of stunting than Egypt and higher poor-nonpoor inequality. But many countries do well on one count and badly on the other. Brazil, for example, has a far lower (less than 20 percent) stunting rate overall than Bangladesh (more than 50 percent) but has four times as much inequality (as measured by the concentration index). · Use of an achievement index that captures both the average level and the inequality of malnutrition leads to some interesting rank reversals in the country league table. With stunting, for example, focusing on the achievement index moves Egypt (a low-inequality country) from sixth position to fourth, higher than Brazil and Russia (two countries with high inequality). This paper - a product of Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group, and the Health, Nutrition, and Population Team, Human Development Network - is part of a larger effort in the Bank to investigate the links between health and poverty. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Inequalities of Child Health: Comparing the LSMS and DHS (RPO 683-47). The authors may be contacted at awagstaff@worldbank.org or nwatanabe@worldbank.org.
Accelerating SVD computation on FPGAs for DSP systems

This paper presents a fast and generic hardware architecture for channel matrix singular value decomposition (SVD) in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. A fixed-pointed pipelined hardware architecture which implemented Hestenes-Jacobi method was developed to reduce the computing time in order to adapt real time processing requirements. Our proposed design was implemented on a Xilinx Kinect-7 series FPGA, which achieved an 8.5x to 15.3x improvement in speed when compared to software implementation by using MATALB and a 2.1x to 6.3x speed-up when compared to using general-purpose GPU programming scheme in processing 8×8 to 128×128 matrices.
LMC self-lensing from a new perspective

We present a new analysis of the location of the observed microlensing events in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This is carried out starting from a recently drawn coherent picture of the geometrical structure and dynamics of the LMC disk and by considering different configurations for the LMC bar. In this framework it clearly emerges that the spatial distribution of the events observed so far shows a near-far asymmetry. This turns out to be compatible with the optical depth calculated for the LMC halo objects. Our main conclusion, supported by a statistical analysis of the outcome of an evaluation of the microlensing rate, is that self-lensing cannot account for all the observed events. Finally we propose a general inequality to calculate quickly an upper limit to the optical depth along a line of view through the LMC center.
SIGCSE: U: Focused Retrieval of University Course Descriptions from Highly Variable Sources

Finding topically relevant content from sparse disparate sources on the Web requires robust techniques. A focused web crawler is a type of crawler that attempts to make predictions about page relevance and traverse the web efficiently to retrieve relevant information. In this work, we design and test a novel framework of focused crawling tailored to extracting semantically relevant information from disparate seed domains with highly variant structure that do not reference each other. We utilize machine learning techniques to predict the normalized link distance of current pages to target pages by employing two separate Random Forest regressors that rank the current page and potential relevance gain of hyper-links. We use a novel reformulation of page relevance as the normalized link distance to efficiently tunnel through irrelevant pages and reach target pages with close to optimal paths for domains with large interand intra-site variability. We evaluate this system on a concrete problem: retrieving relevant course description and information pages from many university websites with little training data. We use evaluate the training efficiency of the system using mean regression error and evaluate the retrieval efficiency in practice using the harvest rate metric. I. Problem & Motivation The exponential growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) has given rise to an explosion of publicly accessible data in the form of unstructured natural language text and semistructured hyper-text. Often we are interested in semantically similar content that is available in many different web domains because the aggregate of the content can contain richer information than each individual datum. The connections between different data sources are commonly non-existent and a user is forced to search for individual data items separately. However, finding and retrieving this data manually is often unrealistic at scale. Topical crawlers are the specialization of traditional search engines or crawlers to finding relevant pages across domains: a form of “smart” search. A topical crawler makes a basic assumption of “topical locality” within the web that asserts that relevant pages are typically close together between sites, i.e. there is a short link distance between them which enables traversal across sites to find relevant content. Here we address a different reformulation of the topical crawling problem where the topical locality assumption does not necessarily hold: How can we find semantically similar information from separate known sources that do not reference each other? In this work we are motivated by the example application of mining course information and descriptions from multiple university websites. This specific task is difficult for multiple reasons: • Retrieving content on one site doesn’t di∗Partially supported by NSF Grant DUE-CCLI-0920335
2 DISCOVERING AN ECONOMETRIC MODEL BY . GENETIC BREEDING MATHEMATICAL FUNCTIONS

This paper reports on a new “genetic computing” paradigm for solving problems. In this new artificial intelligence paradigm, populations of computer programs are genetically bred using genetic operations patterned after sexual reproduction and based on Darwinian principles of reproduction and survival of the fittest. The paradigm is illustrated by rediscovering the well-known multiplicative (non-linear) “exchange equation” M=PQ/V. Abstract: This paper reports on a new “genetic computing” This paper reports on a new “genetic computing” paradigm for solving problems. In this new artificial intelligence paradigm, populations of computer programs are genetically bred using genetic operations patterned after sexual reproduction and based on Darwinian principles of reproduction and survival of the fittest. The paradigm is illustrated by rediscovering the well-known multiplicative (non-linear) “exchange equation” M=PQ/V.
Five plus two equals yellow: Mental arithmetic in people with synaesthesia is not coloured by visual experience

n synaesthesia, ordinary stimuli elicit extraordinary experiences. For example when C. , who is a digit–colour syn-aesthete, views black digits, each number elicits a photism — a visual experience of a specific colour. It has been proposed that synaesthetic experiences differ from imagery in their consistency 1 , automaticity 2,3 and reliance on external stimuli to induce them 4. Here we demonstrate that C. 's photisms are both consistent and automatic, but we find that an externally presented inducing stimulus is not necessary to trigger a photism and that simply activating the concept of a digit is sufficient. As a measure of consistency, we asked C. to name the colour of her photisms elicited by the digits 1 to 9 shown in random order, 10 times each. C. 's pairings between digits and colour names were 100% consistent across repetitions. To assess automaticity, we used a Stroop task. Colour-naming reaction times were recorded for coloured squares (baseline condition) or for digits displayed in colours that were either congruent or incongruent with C. 's photisms (Fig. 1). Her mean reaction times for each condition were: congru-and Tukey post-hoc analyses revealed that incongruent trial reaction times were significantly slower than baseline (P < 0.001) and congruent trial reaction times (P < 0.001) — the last two conditions did not differ. C. 's large significant difference in congruent/incongruent reaction times (245 ms) contrasts with the small, non-significant , congruent/incongruent differences (ranging from ǁ11 to 17 ms) of eight non-synaesthetes tested using identical stimuli. Figure 1a shows the Stroop performance of C. and of the non-synaesthete most similar to C. in terms of baseline-trial colour-naming reaction times. C. 's performance indicates that the digits automatically elicited photisms that interfered with her colour-naming on incongruent trials. For C. , viewing the digit 7 automatically induces a yellow photism. To assess whether C. 's photisms could be elicited without physically showing her an inducing stimulus , we presented, in sequence, a digit (for example, 4), an operator (for example, +), a second digit (for example, 3), and a colour patch. C. had to name the colour patch as quickly as possible, and then report the solution to the arithmetic problem. On each trial, the colour patch was either congruent or incongruent with the photism associated with the arithmetic solution. For example, 5 + 2 was followed either by a yellow patch, which is congruent with C. 's photism colour for 7, or a red patch, …
Living alone and neighborhood characteristics as predictors of social support in late life.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to devise and test a conceptual model that explains how neighborhood quality, fear of crime, and received emotional support affect an elderly person's expectations of future assistance should the need arise (i.e., anticipated support). METHODS Using a nationwide survey of older adults, a series of nested latent variable models was tested to determine if the social support process differs between older adults living alone and those living with others. RESULTS Consistent with a social ecological perspective, data suggest that anticipated support is lower among elders who live in deteriorated neighborhoods than among older adults who live in well-maintained neighborhoods. Moreover, the deleterious effects of run-down neighborhoods appear to be especially pronounced for older adults who live alone. DISCUSSION Select constructs that link deteriorated neighborhoods with anticipated support are explored. Suggestions for future research are made.
Compression-based template matching

Textual image compression is a method of both lossy and lossless image compression that is particularly effective for images containing repeated sub-images, notably pages of text. This paper addresses the problem of pattern comparison by using an information or compression based approach. Following Mohiuddin et al. ( 1984), the authors use the amount of uncertainty or entropy between marks as the criterion for the matching process. The entropy model they use is the context-based compression model proposed by Langdon and Rissanen (1981) and further developed by Moffat (1991). There are two principal issues to investigate when studying template matching methods: their susceptibility to different kinds of noise, and how they respond to errors in the initial registration. Because of the computation-intensive nature of the comparison operation, many schemes have been devised to pre-filter or screen the marks in advance to determine those that will surely fail the match. They present a novel method of screening which uses a quad-tree decomposition and finds local centroids at each tree level. <<ETX>>
Hormonally responsive versus unresponsive progression of prostatic cancer to antiandrogen therapy as studied with the Dunning R-3327-AT and -G rat adenocarcinomas.

The present study has compared the response to antiandrogen therapy of the serially transplantable Dunning R-3327-AT (hereafter called AT) versus Dunning R-3327-G (hereafter called G) rat prostatic adenocarcinoma. Castration or chemical antiandrogen therapy (i.e., cyproterone acetate and diethylstilbestrol) of rats bearing established AT or G tumors results in neither regression of tumor volume nor a cessation of the continuous growth of either tumor. By these criteria, both the AT and G tumors progress following antiandrogen therapy. For the AT tumor, this progression is completely unresponsive to hormonal therapy, and thus such therapy does not increase survival of AT tumor-bearing rats. The AT tumor is therefore an example of hormonally unresponsive progression. In direct contrast, while the G tumor likewise progresses following antiandrogen therapy, this therapy does induce a 1.8-fold decrease in the subsequent growth rate of the G tumor. This positive response during progression of the G tumor results in a 78% increase in the survival of G tumor-bearing rats treated with antiandrogen therapy. The G tumor is therefore an example of hormonally responsive progression. These results indicate neither that prostatic cancers which do not regress or cease growing following antiandrogen therapy can necessarily be considered hormonally unresponsive nor that antiandrogen therapy of such tumors has been completely ineffective, since, as shown in the present study, such progression can be of either a hormonally unresponsive or a responsive type. Regardless of which type of progression occurs, however, additional therapy is required to further increase survival. The present study demonstrates that such additional therapy should probably not include the subsequent use of pharmacological doses of exogenous androgen, since, depending on the type of progression, such treatments can actually decrease survival.