Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the NLP Components of the OVIS2 Spoken Dialogue System

The NWO Priority Programme Language and Speech Technology is a 5-year research programme aiming at the development of spoken language information systems. In the Programme, two alternative natural language processing (NLP) modules are developed in parallel: a grammarbased (conventional, rule-based) module and a data-oriented (memorybased, stochastic, DOP) module. In order to compare the NLP modules, a formal evaluation has been carried out three years after the start of the Programme. This paper describes the evaluation procedure and the evaluation results. The grammar-based component performs much better than the data-oriented one in this comparison.
Direct Acetylation of the Estrogen Receptor α Hinge Region by p300 Regulates Transactivation and Hormone Sensitivity*

Regulation of nuclear receptor gene expression involves dynamic and coordinated interactions with histone acetyl transferase (HAT) and deacetylase complexes. The estrogen receptor (ERα) contains two transactivation domains regulating ligand-independent and -dependent gene transcription (AF-1 and AF-2 (activation functions 1 and 2)). ERα-regulated gene expression involves interactions with cointegrators (e.g.p300/CBP, P/CAF) that have the capacity to modify core histone acetyl groups. Here we show that the ERα is acetylated in vivo.p300, but not P/CAF, selectively and directly acetylated the ERα at lysine residues within the ERα hinge/ligand binding domain. Substitution of these residues with charged or polar residues dramatically enhanced ERα hormone sensitivity without affecting induction by MAPK signaling, suggesting that direct ERα acetylation normally suppresses ligand sensitivity. These ERα lysine residues also regulated transcriptional activation by histone deacetylase inhibitors and p300. The conservation of the ERα acetylation motif in a phylogenetic subset of nuclear receptors suggests that direct acetylation of nuclear receptors may contribute to additional signaling pathways involved in metabolism and development.
Novel Co3O4/Carbon Nanofiber Composite Electrode with High Li-Storage Capacity for Lithium Ion Batteries

The platelike Co3O4/carbon nanofiber (CNF) composite materials were synthesized by the calcination of β-Co(OH)2/CNF precursor prepared by a surfactant-free hydrothermal method. As negative electrode materials for lithium-ion batteries, the platelike Co3O4/CNF composites can deliver a high reversible capacity of 900 mAh g-1 for a life extending over hundreds of cycles at a current density of 100 mA g-1. The high Li-storage capacity and excellent cycling performance for Co3O4/CNF composite materials may mainly attribute to the beneficial effect of the CNFs addition on enhancing structural stability and electrical conductivity of Co3O4 platelets.
Oligosaccharides in the stem region maintain the influenza virus hemagglutinin in the metastable form required for fusion activity

The influenza A virus hemagglutinin (HA) has three conserved oligosaccharides located in the stem region at asparagine residues 12, 28, and 478. The biological role of these oligosaccharides has been investigated by mutational analysis of HA of fowl plague virus that was expressed from a simian virus 40 vector in the presence of ammonium chloride for protection from acid denaturation in the trans-Golgi network. Resistance to endoglycosidase H and cleavage of HA into the subunits HA1 and HA2 have been analyzed as markers for intracellular transport. Cell surface exposure has been determined by hemadsorption following neuraminidase treatment, by immunofluorescence staining, and by fluorescence-activated cell sorter analysis. When all three stem oligosaccharides were removed, transport was almost completely blocked. When two of the three stem oligosaccharides, particularly those at asparagine residues 12 and 28, were missing, HA was transported to the surface but showed extremely low fusion activity. With mutants lacking one stem oligosaccharide, fusion was reduced to a lesser extent. Removal of stem oligosaccharides resulted also in an increase in the pH optimum required for fusion. On the other hand, no reduction in fusion activity was observed when oligosaccharides in the head region of the HA spike were removed. These results indicate that the conserved oligosaccharides in the stem stabilize HA in the form susceptible to the conformational change necessary for fusion.
Improvement of Transmembrane Transport Mechanism Study of Imperatorin on P-Glycoprotein-Mediated Drug Transport

P-glycoprotein (P-gp) affects the transport of many drugs; including puerarin and vincristine. Our previous study demonstrated that imperatorin increased the intestinal absorption of puerarin and vincristine by inhibiting P-gp-mediated drug efflux. However; the underlying mechanism was not known. The present study investigated the mechanism by which imperatorin promotes P-gp-mediated drug transport. We used molecular docking to predict the binding force between imperatorin and P-gp and the effect of imperatorin on P-gp activity. P-gp efflux activity and P-gp ATPase activity were measured using a rhodamine 123 (Rh-123) accumulation assay and a Pgp-Glo™ assay; respectively. The fluorescent probe 1,6-diphenyl-1,3,5-hexatriene (DPH) was used to assess cellular membrane fluidity in MDCK-MDR1 cells. Western blotting was used to analyze the effect of imperatorin on P-gp expression; and P-gp mRNA levels were assessed by qRT-PCR. Molecular docking results demonstrated that the binding force between imperatorin and P-gp was much weaker than the force between P-gp and verapamil (a P-gp substrate). Imperatorin activated P-gp ATPase activity; which had a role in the inhibition of P-gp activity. Imperatorin promoted Rh-123 accumulation in MDCK-MDR1 cells and decreased cellular membrane fluidity. Western blotting demonstrated that imperatorin inhibited P-gp expression; and qRT-PCR revealed that imperatorin down-regulated P-gp (MDR1) gene expression. Imperatorin decreased P-gp-mediated drug efflux by inhibiting P-gp activity and the expression of P-gp mRNA and protein. Our results suggest that imperatorin could down-regulate P-gp expression to overcome multidrug resistance in tumors.
Synthesis and characterization of nanoscale polymer films grafted to metal surfaces

ii DEDICATION.v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . vi LIST OF FIGURES . xii LIST OF TABLES . xviii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW . 6 2.1. Methods of surface modification metals. Introduction . 6 2.2. Low molecular weight compounds in surface modification of metals . 7 2.2.1. Silanes . 7 2.2.2. Thiols . 10 2.2.3. Carboxylic acids.13 2.2.4. Organophosphorus compounds . 15 2.3. Metals surface modification by polymers. Introduction . 17 2.3.1. Theory of polymer brushes . 18 2.3.2. Methods of synthesis of polymer brushes . 21 2.3.3. Physical adsorption . 22 2.3. 4. "Grafting from" approach . 24 2.3. 5. "Grafting to" approach . 27 2.3. 6. Physical adsorption, "grafting from" and "grafting to" approaches in modification of metals surfaces . 30 2.4. Conclusions . 33 2.5. References . 34 CHAPTER THREE: EXPERIMENTAL . 46 3.1. Chemical reagents used . 46 3.2. Polymers used for surface modification . 48 3.3. Principles of experimental and characterization techniques . 51 3.3.1. Dip coating . 51 3.3.2. Ellipsometry . 52 3.3.3. Contact angle measurements . 53 3.3. 4. Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) . 54 3.3. 5. Plasma generator . 55 3.3. 6. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) . 56 ix Table of
A study to measure the effect of framing a robot as a social agent or as a machine on children's social behavior

Framing or priming a situation can subtly influence how a person reacts to or thinks about the situation. In this paper, we describe a recent study and some preliminary results in which the framing of a robot is manipulated such that it is presented as a social agent or as a machine-like entity. We ask whether framing the robot in these ways influences young children's social behavior during an interaction with the robot, independent of any changes in the robot itself. Following the framing manipulation, children play a fifteen-minute game with the robot. Their behavior, such as the amount of conversation, mimicry of the robot, and various courteous, prosocial actions will be coded and compared across conditions.
Monetary Policy Regimes and Beliefs

Recent monetary history has been characterized by monetary authorities that appear to shift periodically between distinct policy regimes associated with higher or lower average rates of money creation. As policy regimes are not directly observable and as the rate of monetary expansion varies for reasons other than regime changes, the general public must form beliefs over current monetary policy based on historical realizations of money growth rates. Depending on the parameters governing the behaviour of monetary policy, beliefs (and therefore inflation forecasts) may evolve very slowly in the wake of actual regime changes, thereby exacerbating the costs of a disinflation policy. The quantitative importance of slowly adjusting beliefs is evaluated in the context of a computable general equilibrium model.
Bimodality and Increased Amount of Crosslinker Enhances Tensile Properties of the Silicone Networks

Abstract The effect of bimodality i.e. blending short and long chain (0 to 80 % w/w) silicone prepolymers, and that of concentration of the crosslinker on the tensile properties such as percent elongation at break (%Eb), ultimate tensile strength (UTS), 100 % modulus and elastic modulus (E) has been investigated. It was found out that the greater amount of crosslinker used for crosslinking provide an additional reinforcement to the silicone network whereas bimodality further significantly accentuates this effect. Remarkably, the %Eb of the silicone networks was found to increase to an average of 2.4 times than that of the monomodal network, cured in each of the three series of bimodal networks cured with 3.9, 9.1 and 12.3% of crosslinker. The optimum property in each case was observed at about 70 mol % of P100. The over all order of sensitivity of these properties up to about 70 mol % of short chain prepolymer has been observed to be as: %Eb > UTS > 100% modulus > elastic modulus. It has been shown that in addition to the previously published reports the tensile properties are acutely dependent not only upon the degree of crosslinking and primary molecular weight; but also on bimodality and crosslinker concentration for preparation of the unfilled silicone polymer networks. The concept of phase inversion (or phase transition) associated with the optimum properties in polymer blends has for the first time been applied to the bimodal polymer networks. It has been observed that the maxima in tensile properties generally corresponds to phase inversion which takes place at 0.5 volume fraction (70 mol %) of short chain (P100) prepolymer which is in accordance with the literature for other systems.
astitis associated transcriptomic disruptions in cattle

Mastitis is ranked as the top disease for dairy cattle based on traditional cost analysis. Greater than 100 organisms from a broad phylogenetic spectrum are able to cause bovine mastitis. Transcriptomic characterization facilitates our understanding of host–pathogen relations and provides mechanistic insight into host resistance to mastitis. In this review, we discuss effector mechanisms and transcriptomic changes within the mammary gland in response to experimental infections. We compare temporal, spatial and pathogen-specific local transcriptomic disruptions in the mammary gland as well as pathogen-induced systemic responses and transcriptional changes in distant organs. We attempt to explain why studies on transcriptomic changes during critical physiological periods and in response to non-mastitic pathogens may have important implications for mastitis studies. Future perspectives on revealing bidirectional molecular cross-talk between mastitis pathogens and host cells using cutting-edge genomic technologies are also discussed.
Modeling deformable gradient compositions for single-image super-resolution

We propose a single-image super-resolution method based on the gradient reconstruction. To predict the gradient field, we collect a dictionary of gradient patterns from an external set of images. We observe that there are patches representing singular primitive structures (e.g. a single edge), and non-singular ones (e.g. a triplet of edges). Based on the fact that singular primitive patches are more invariant to the scale change (i.e. have less ambiguity across different scales), we represent the non-singular primitives as compositions of singular ones, each of which is allowed some deformation. Both the input patches and dictionary elements are decomposed to contain only singular primitives. The compositional aspect of the model makes the gradient field more reliable. The deformable aspect makes the dictionary more expressive. As shown in our experimental results, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Recycling of Brick Aggregate Concrete as Coarse Aggregate

AbstractAn extensive investigation was carried out for recycling of demolished brick aggregate concrete as coarse aggregate. For this, demolished concrete blocks were collected from 33 different building sites of different ages and broken into pieces as coarse aggregate. Owing to the lack of availability of stone aggregate in Bangladesh, most of the old structures are constructed with brick chips as coarse aggregate, therefore the recycled aggregate investigated in this study is different from the recycled aggregate investigated in other countries which are mostly made of stone chips. The properties of recycled aggregate, such as specific gravity, absorption capacity, and abrasion were tested. More than 700 cylinder concrete specimens of diameter 150 mm and height 300 mm were made with water-to-cement ratios of 0.45 and 0.55. Concrete specimens were tested at 7, 14, and 28 days for compressive strength, tensile strength, and Young’s modulus. The results are compared with virgin brick aggregate. Extended s.
Grain Size Distribution on Annealed Silicon Steel

Silicon steel is a soft magnetic material very important to the highly industrialized society we live today. Application of magnetic field during annealing treatment has shown to affect positively the microstructure evolution of ferrous alloys leading to a more cost-effective final product. In order to evaluate the effect of magnetic field on the microstructure of GNO silicon steel, cold rolled samples were annealed at 800°C for 3, 15 and 30 minutes inside a 17 T magnetic field. According to the ESEM/EBSD results, the grains seemed to be the most influenced by magnetic field. Magnetic field seems not to affect nucleation of Goss grains but instead it seems to affect its boundary mobility.
Machine Learning on Cell Processor

The technique of delayed stochastic gradient given in the paper titled – “Slow Learners are Fast” theoretically shows how online learning process could be parallelized. However, with the real experimental setup, given in the paper, the parallelization does not improve the performance. In this project we implement and evaluate this algorithm on Cell and an Intel dual core processor with a target to obtain speedup with its outlined real experimental setup. We also discuss the limitations of Cell processor pertaining to this algorithm along with suggestion on CPU architectures for which it is better suited.
Exploring superframe co-occurrence for acoustic event recognition

We introduce in this paper a concept of using acoustic superframes, a mid-level representation which can overcome the drawbacks of both global and simple frame-level representations for acoustic events. Through superframe-level recognition, we explore the phenomenon of superframe co-occurrence across different event categories and propose an efficient classification scheme that takes advantage of this feature sharing to improve the event-wise recognition power. We empirically show that our recognition system results in 2.7% classification error rate on the ITC-Irst database. This state-of-the-art performance demonstrates the efficiency of this proposed approach. Furthermore, we argue that this presentation can pretty much facilitate the event detection task compared to its counterparts, e.g. global and simple frame-level representations.
Software Semantic Provisioning: Actually Reusing Software

Delivering component-oriented architectures is a well-establish ed trend in software engineering and development. Assessing software reuse scenarios goes much beyond the usual "build vs buy" dilemma that so often occurs in early stages of a software process: scouting, comparing, choosing and integrating the right set of components meeting project's requirements is still an ad-hoc and error-prone task, performed by developers with little or no frameworks and tools to support them. This paper describes the SSP (Software Semantic Provisioning) project, funded in its early stages by Google TM Inc., developed during the Google Summer of Code TM 2007 program, and incubated by the Eclipse Software Foundation; the project aims to provide an ontological description of the software domain to underlie a semantic web framework to support developers in scouting and provisioning software components. A prototypical RESTful semantic repository, and an Eclipse plug-in consuming the repository services have been implemented and will be discussed.
Filtering and withdrawing: strategies for coping with information overload in everyday contexts

The study investigates the ways in which people experience information overload in the context of monitoring everyday events through media such as newspapers and the internet. The findings are based on interviews with 20 environmental activists in Finland in 2005. The perceptions of the seriousness of problems caused by information overload varied among the participants. On the one hand, information overload was experienced as a real problem particularly in the networked information environments. On the other hand, information overload was perceived as an imagined problem with some mythical features. Two major strategies for coping with information overload were identified. The filtering strategy is based on the determined weeding out of material deemed useless. This strategy is favoured in networked information environments. The withdrawal strategy is more affectively oriented, emphasizing the need to protect oneself from excessive information supply by keeping the number of information sources to a minimum.
On the interval of fluctuation of the singular values of random matrices

Let $A$ be a matrix whose columns $X_1,\dots, X_N$ are independent random vectors in $\mathbb{R}^n$. Assume that the tails of the 1-dimensional marginals decay as $\mathbb{P}(|\langle X_i, a\rangle|\geq t)\leq t^{-p}$ uniformly in $a\in S^{n-1}$ and $i\leq N$. Then for $p>4$ we prove that with high probability $A/{\sqrt{n}}$ has the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) provided that Euclidean norms $|X_i|$ are concentrated around $\sqrt{n}$. We also show that the covariance matrix is well approximated by the empirical covariance matrix and establish corresponding quantitative estimates on the rate of convergence in terms of the ratio $n/N$. Moreover, we obtain sharp bounds for both problems when the decay is of the type $ \exp({-t^{\alpha}})$ with $\alpha \in (0,2]$, extending the known case $\alpha\in[1, 2]$.
Mullins effect recovery of a nanoparticle‐filled polymer

Particle-filled elastomers often exhibit a reduction in peak stress after the initial extension under cyclic straining, a phenomenon known as the Mullins effect. In reported literature, long rest periods and elevated temperatures are often necessary conditions to even partially restore stiffness. The stress softening of the polymer nanoparticle composite discussed in this article appeared to be completely reversible in a comparatively short time span (less than 17 h) at room temperature. Although this material acted elastomeric at slow strain rates, significant stiffening, and a pronounced yielding behavior was observed during the first strain cycle at higher strain rates. Subsequent cycling of the material revealed much softer behavior and an absence of the yielding phenomenon, although relatively short rest periods allowed the material to regain its original behavior. The Mullins effect recovery phenomenon was investigated by introducing rest periods of various durations following loading and unloading cycles. Both single and multiple loadings were used in the tests conducted to evaluate recovery. A mechanism of stress recovery was proposed based on the reduction of entanglements and weakening particle-matrix interactions. New entanglements and particle-chain interactions were considered major contributors to the recovery of the stiffness.
Toward a More General Theory of Revenue Assignments

Despite the extensive international experience with the assignments of revenue sources to different levels of government, the public finance literature still lacks a general theory of revenue assignments. Two sets of arguments have been separately developed in the literature to explain and guide the practice of revenue assignments. The first is based on Musgrave and Oates’ tradition, and emphasizes the benefit principle and other means for increasing accountability and efficiency in the allocation of public expenditures. The second is based on optimal taxation principles, which emphasizes the marginal cost of public funds and the correct mix of revenue instruments. The two approaches provide important insights to the problem, but they remain practically unconnected. This paper develops a theory of revenue assignments that integrates the two approaches. We discuss the validity and scope of currently applied revenue assignment rules, and provide practical recommendations to implement an optimal assignment of revenue sources.
Experimental evaluation of the penetration of TiO2 nanoparticles through protective clothing and gloves under conditions simulating occupational use

Titanium dioxide nanoparticles (nTiO2) are found in numerous manufactured products. While a few studies have been carried out to measure the efficiency of chemical protective clothing and gloves against nanoparticles (NPs), they have generally not considered the conditions prevailing in occupational settings. This study was designed to evaluate the resistance of protective clothing against NPs under conditions simulating occupational use. Nitrile and butyl rubber gloves, as well as cotton/polyester woven and polyolefin non-woven clothing samples were placed into contact with nTiO2 in the form of powders or colloidal solutions. Simultaneously, mechanical deformations were applied to the samples. Preliminary results showed that nTiO2 may penetrate some of the materials after prolonged dynamic deformations and/or when the NPs are in colloidal solutions. The effect was partly attributed to modifications in the physical and mechanical properties of protective materials that were induced by repetitive mechanica.