Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fluorescent and bioluminescent nanoprobes for in vitro and in vivo detection of matrix metalloproteinase activity

Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are zinc-dependent endopeptidases that degrade the extracellular matrix (ECM) and regulate the extracellular microenvironment. Despite the significant role that MMP activity plays in cell-cell and cell-ECM interactions, migration, and differentiation, analyses of MMPs in vitro and in vivo have relied upon their abundance using conventional immunoassays, rather than their enzymatic activities. To resolve this issue, diverse nanoprobes have emerged and proven useful as effective activity-based detection tools. Here, we review the recent advances in luminescent nanoprobes and their applications in in vitro diagnosis and in vivo imaging of MMP activity. Nanoprobes with the purpose of sensing MMP activity consist of recognition and detection units, which include MMP-specific substrates and luminescent (fluorescent or bioluminescent) nanoparticles, respectively. With further research into improvement of the optical performance, it is anticipated that luminescent nanoprobes will have great potential for the study of the functional roles of proteases in cancer biology and nanomedicine. [BMB Reports 2015; 48(6): 313-318]
SiC Schottky power diode modelling in SPICE

This paper concerns the problem of SPICE modelling of the class of silicon-carbide (SiC) Schottky diodes with thermal effects (selfheating) taken into account. Since April 2001 the SiC Schottky diodes made by Infineon Technologies have been commercially attainable. In the paper the SPICE electrothermal (including selfheating) macromodel of Infineon Technologies SiC Schottky diode is presented and detaily investigated. The considered macromodel has been verified experimentally. The silicon-carbide SDP04S60 rectifier has been tested. The nonisothermal characteristics obtained from measurements and SPICE calculations of SDP04S60 diode are compared. Due to the unacceptably large differences between measurements and calculations, some modifications of the macromodel have been proposed.
Adverse effects of herbal drugs in dermatology

Herbal treatments are becoming increasingly popular, and are often used for dermatological conditions. Thus dermatologists should know about their potential to cause adverse events. This review is aimed at addressing this area in a semisystematic fashion. Some agents, particularly Chinese herbal creams, have been shown repeatedly to be adulterated with corticosteroids. Virtually all herbal remedies can cause allergic reactions and several can be responsible for photosensitization. Some herbal medicines, in particular Ayurvedic remedies, contain arsenic or mercury that can produce typical skin lesions. Other popular remedies that can cause dermatological side‐effects include St John’s Wort, kava, aloe vera, eucalyptus, camphor, henna and yohimbine. Finally, there are some herbal treatments used specifically for dermatological conditions, e.g. Chinese oral herbal remedies for atopic eczema, which have the potential to cause systemic adverse effects. It is concluded that adverse effects of herbal medicines are an important albeit neglected subject in dermatology, which deserves further systematic investigation.
Parallelizing Pre-rendering Computations on a Net Juggler PC Cluster

Net Juggler, an open source library developed at LIFO, turns a commodity component cluster running the VR Juggler platform on each node into a single VR Juggler image cluster. Net Juggler parallelizes rendering computationsfor immersive projection environments but pre-rendering computations are redundant. In this paper, we present how a classical parallelization of the pre-rendering computations can be deployed and controlled with Net Juggler. This approach is demonstrated with an interactive fluid flow simulation.
Registration Approaches for Augmented Reality - A Crucial Aspect for Successful Industrial Application

In the past years, a variety of Augmented Reality (AR)-based applications were created, aiming to support industrial processes. Although these first demonstrator applications or prototypes cover all parts of the industrial product process - design, planning and production, service and maintenance - only a few of them actually turned into established and applied solutions. Reasons for this lack of acceptance are - amongst others - their insufficient usability and accuracy. One crucial step in the accuracy chain for an Augmented Reality system is the registration of real and virtual world. This paper presents different approaches for industrial registration, which are being investigated in the context of an Augmented Reality based factory planning application. The resulting toolbox promises to be helpful and valuable for general application in industrial AR. To support the choice for an optimal registration method for a given scenario, the toolbox is currently being evaluated according to usability and accuracy criteria. The current state of this evaluation as well as future planned studies are also outlined here.
Telepointer: Hands-free completely self-contained wearable visual augmented reality without headwear and without any infrastructural reliance

Telepointer is a wearable hands-free, headwear-free device that allows the wearer to experience a visual collaborative telepresence, with text, graphics, and a shared cursor, displayed directly on real world objects. It is completely portable and can be used almost anywhere since it does not rely on infrastructure. It is operated through a Reality User Interfaces (RUI) that allows direct interaction with the real world, establishing a kind of computing that is completely free of metaphors.
Improved decision trees for phonetic modeling

Bahl et al. (see ICASSP-91, vol.1, p.185-188, 1991) employed decision trees to specify the acoustic realization of a phone as a function of its context. By using a computationally cheap Poisson-based evaluation function, they were able to account for a much wider context than previous researchers (five preceding and five following phones). We extend this work in four ways. (1) We employ the Poisson criterion to find quickly the M best questions at a node during tree expansion, then use an HMM-based MLE criterion to make the final choice from these (and for pruning trees). (2) Bahl et al. use stopping criteria to halt the growth of a tree, which is then used for speech recognition. It is preferable to grow an over-large tree and then prune it; we apply the efficient GRD expansion-pruning algorithm of Gelfand et al. (see IEEE Trans. PAMI, vol.13, no.2, p.163-174, 1991) to the phonetic modeling problem. (3) Like Bahl et al., we allow questions about a large number of preceding and following phones. However, a given search algorithm may make some of these questions difficult to answer. In addition to the "yes" and "no" children of each question, we grow a "don't know" subtree to be used if a question is unanswerable at present. (4) We have experimented with questions based on phonetic features, as well as questions that ask about the presence of specific phones. Our approach permits an arbitrary feature schema to be read in and used in question generation.
High-Order Block Sliding-Mode Controller for a Synchronous Generator With an Exciter System

This paper deals with the design of robust regulation for both angular speed stability enhancement and voltage in synchronous generator machines with an excitation control system. The designed controller is based on the block control technique combined with a sliding-mode (SM) control approach. The block control is used to design a nonlinear sliding manifold with the desired stability property. In order to attenuate the chattering effect which can appear in the presence of the exciter's unmodeled dynamics, a high-order SM algorithm and a robust exact differentiator are employed. The efficiency of the proposed controller, i.e., robustness and high accuracy, is verified via simulations.
Let Me Explain: Impact of Personal and Impersonal Explanations on Trust in Recommender Systems

Trust in a Recommender System (RS) is crucial for its overall success. However, it remains underexplored whether users trust personal recommendation sources (i.e. other humans) more than impersonal sources (i.e. conventional RS), and, if they do, whether the perceived quality of explanation provided account for the difference. We conducted an empirical study in which we compared these two sources of recommendations and explanations. Human advisors were asked to explain movies they recommended in short texts while the RS created explanations based on item similarity. Our experiment comprised two rounds of recommending. Over both rounds the quality of explanations provided by users was assessed higher than the quality of the system's explanations. Moreover, explanation quality significantly influenced perceived recommendation quality as well as trust in the recommendation source. Consequently, we suggest that RS should provide richer explanations in order to increase their perceived recommendation quality and trustworthiness.
Divorcing pressure from viscosity in incompressible Navier-Stokes dynamics

We show that in bounded domains with no-slip boundary conditions, the NavierStokes pressure can be determined in a such way that it is strictly dominated by viscosity. As a consequence, in a general domain we can treat the Navier-Stokes equations as a perturbed vector diffusion equation, instead of as a perturbed Stokes system. We illustrate the advantages of this view in a number of ways. In particular, we provide simple proofs of (i) local-in-time existence and uniqueness of strong solutions for an unconstrained formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations, and (ii) the unconditional stability and convergence of difference schemes that are implicit only in viscosity and explicit in both pressure and convection terms, requiring no solution of stationary Stokes systems or inf-sup conditions.
On the Hamming weight of repeated root cyclic and negacyclic codes over Galois rings

Repeated root Cyclic and Negacyclic codes over Galois rings have been studied much less than their simple root counterparts. This situation is beginning to change. For example, repeated root codes of length $p^s$, where $p$ is the characteristic of the alphabet ring, have been studied under some additional hypotheses. In each one of those cases, the ambient space for the codes has turned out to be a chain ring. In this paper, all remaining cases of cyclic and negacyclic codes of length $p^s$ over a Galois ring alphabet are considered. In these cases the ambient space is a local ring with simple socle but not a chain ring. Nonetheless, by reducing the problem to one dealing with uniserial subambients, a method for computing the Hamming distance of these codes is provided.
Opportunities exist: continuous discovery of places to perform activities

A rich cognitive map of a space can enhance the individual's experience within the space. However, cognitive maps develop gradually through repeated experience; and because of this, on-demand mobile search services (e.g., Google Maps, Yelp) are often used to compensate for missing knowledge. In this work, we developed and evaluated a context-aware place discovery application called Opportunities Exist to assist in the acquisition of spatial knowledge and meaning. The application differs from traditional search in that places are discovered using an activity (e.g., drink coffee, sit in the sun) and the discovery process runs continuously, maintaining a history of places the user can perform her activities as she goes about her day. We conducted a 4-week deployment in two North American cities. The results show that users were able to discover new places to perform their activities in familiar spaces and learned to associate new activities with familiar places. In addition, participants leveraged the application to perform activities opportunistically, and used continuous place discovery as an opportunistic reminder of routines they wanted to break out of or resume.
A new standardised and self-administered quality of life questionnaire specific to obstructive sleep apnoea

Background: A short, standardised, self-administered quality of life questionnaire would be a useful addition to the outcome measures in obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) research. A study was therefore undertaken to validate a new OSA specific self-administered questionnaire (the Quebec Sleep Questionnaire, QSQ) for use in clinical trials. Methods: This study followed a description of health related quality of life in patients with OSA. Construct validity and responsiveness were tested by comparing the baseline and changes in domain scores (daytime sleepiness, diurnal symptoms, nocturnal symptoms, emotions, social interactions) with those of questionnaires measuring related constructs (SF-36, Epworth Sleepiness Scale, Beck Depression Inventory, SCL-90, and Functional Outcomes in Sleep Questionnaire). Results: Sixty patients (48 men) of mean (SD) age 55 (10) years participated in the study. In the analysis of the discriminative function of the questionnaire, moderate to high correlations were found between the scores in each domain of the QSQ and the corresponding questionnaires. In the analysis of its evaluative function significant differences were found in score changes between patients who were treated and those who were not, and moderate to high correlations were seen between changes in scores in the QSQ and changes in the corresponding questionnaires. Most of these correlations met the a priori predictions made regarding their magnitude. Conclusion: The QSQ is a valid measure of health related quality of life in patients with OSA and is sensitive to treatment induced changes.
The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Insights from expert software design practice Conference Item

Software is a designed artifact. In other design disciplines, such as architecture, there is a well-established tradition of design studies which inform not only the discipline itself but also tool design, processes, and collaborative work. The 'challenge' of this paper is to consider software from such a 'design studies' perspective. This paper will present a series of observations from empirical studies of expert software designers, and will draw on examples from actual professional practice. It will consider what experts’ mental imagery, software visualisations, and sketches suggest about software design thinking. It will also discuss some of the deliberate practices experts use to promote innovation. Finally, it will open discussion on the tensions between observed software design practices and received methodology in software engineering.
Characterization of social media response to natural disasters

Online social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook often serve a breaking-news role for natural disasters: these websites are among the first ones to mention the news, and because they are visited by millions of users regularly the websites also help communicate the news to a large mass of people. In this paper, we examine how news about these disasters spreads on the social network. In addition to this, we also examine the countries of the Tweeting users. We examine Twitter logs from the 2010 Philippines typhoon, the 2011 Brazil flood and the 2011 Japan earthquake. We find that although news about the disaster may be initiated in multiple places in the social network, it quickly finds a core community that is interested in the disaster, and has little chance to escape the community via social network links alone. We also find evidence that the world at large expresses concern about such largescale disasters, and not just countries geographically proximate to the epicenter of the disaster. Our analysis has implications for the design of fund raising campaigns through social networking websites.
An over-actuated modular platform for aerial inspection and manipulation

This video shows an innovative over-actuated aerial vehicle specifically designed for tasks requiring high maneuverability such as aerial inspection of infrastructure and aerial manipulation. The main feature of the system is the fact that the redundancy of actuators allows to obtain maneuvers otherwise impossible for other aerial systems such helicopters or quadrotors. The experiments proposed in the video demonstrate how this improved maneuverability can be exploited both during free-flight operations or when physical interaction with the environment is required.
Information of Binding Sites Improves Prediction of Protein-Protein Interaction

Protein-protein interaction is essential to cellular functions. In this work, we describe a simple, novel approach to improve the accuracy of predicting protein-protein interaction by incorporating the binding site information. First, we assess the importance of the seven attributes that are used by Bradford et. al (2005) for predicting protein binding sites. The leave-one-out cross validation experiments and principal component analysis indicate that some attributes such as residue propensity and hydrophobicity are more important than other attributes such as curvedness and shape index in differentiating a binding patch from nonbinding patch. Second, we incorporate those attributes to predict protein-protein interaction by simple concatenation of the attribute vectors of candidate interacting partners. A support vector machine is trained to predict the interacting partners. This is combined with using the attributes directly derived from the primary sequence at the binding sites. The results from the leave-one-out cross validation experiments show significant improvement in prediction accuracy by incorporating the structural information at the binding sites
Parkin Accumulation in Aggresomes Due to Proteasome Impairment*

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra and by the presence of ubiquitinated cytoplasmic inclusions known as Lewy bodies. α-Synuclein and Parkin are two of the proteins associated with inherited forms of PD and are found in Lewy bodies. Whereas numerous reports indicate the tendency of α-synuclein to aggregate bothin vitro and in vivo, no information is available about similar physical properties for Parkin. Here we show that overexpression of Parkin in the presence of proteasome inhibitors leads to the formation of aggresome-like perinuclear inclusions. These eosinophilic inclusions share many characteristics with Lewy bodies, including a core and halo organization, immunoreactivity to ubiquitin, α-synuclein, synphilin-1, Parkin, molecular chaperones, and proteasome subunit as well as staining of some with thioflavin S. We propose that the process of Lewy body formation may be akin to that of aggresome-like structures. The tendency of wild-type Parkin to aggregate and form inclusions may have implications for the pathogenesis of sporadic PD.
The different options regarding power components in electric circuits

This present paper describes two methods of representation of voltages and currents in electric circuits: in the vector form and in the shape of oscillations, represented as diagrams in the plane. The appropriate power components are discussed depending on the representation of voltages and currents. A special attention is paid to the instantaneous power peculiarities for diverse loads and nonsinusoidal conditions. A case study of power calculations in electric circuit with pluggable capacitor is presented. For this type of transient modes, the instantaneous power is represented in the form of active and reactive components. Calculation of active, reactive and exchange powers for steady-state processes are presented.
The euro changeover and price adjustments in Italy

By estimating a staggered price model over the period 1980Q1 to 2010Q2, this article documents that, after the euro changeover, Italian retailers have increased the number of price adjustments, which has translated into a higher inflation rate, with a detrimental effect on the competitiveness of the Italian economy.
Treatment of patients with the hypereosinophilic syndrome with mepolizumab.

BACKGROUND The hypereosinophilic syndrome is a group of diseases characterized by persistent blood eosinophilia, defined as more than 1500 cells per microliter with end-organ involvement and no recognized secondary cause. Although most patients have a response to corticosteroids, side effects are common and can lead to considerable morbidity. METHODS We conducted an international, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial evaluating the safety and efficacy of an anti-interleukin-5 monoclonal antibody, mepolizumab, in patients with the hypereosinophilic syndrome. Patients were negative for the FIP1L1-PDGFRA fusion gene and required prednisone monotherapy, 20 to 60 mg per day, to maintain a stable clinical status and a blood eosinophil count of less than 1000 per microliter. Patients received either intravenous mepolizumab or placebo while the prednisone dose was tapered. The primary end point was the reduction of the prednisone dose to 10 mg or less per day for 8 or more consecutive weeks. RESULTS The primary end point was reached in 84% of patients in the mepolizumab group, as compared with 43% of patients in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 2.90; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.59 to 5.26; P<0.001) with no increase in clinical activity of the hypereosinophilic syndrome. A blood eosinophil count of less than 600 per microliter for 8 or more consecutive weeks was achieved in 95% of patients receiving mepolizumab, as compared with 45% of patients receiving placebo (hazard ratio, 3.53; 95% CI, 1.94 to 6.45; P<0.001). Serious adverse events occurred in seven patients receiving mepolizumab (14 events, including one death; mean [+/-SD] duration of exposure, 6.7+/-1.9 months) and in five patients receiving placebo (7 events; mean duration of exposure, 4.3+/-2.6 months). CONCLUSIONS Our study shows that treatment with mepolizumab, an agent designed to target eosinophils, can result in corticosteroid-sparing for patients negative for FIP1L1-PDGFRA who have the hypereosinophilic syndrome. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00086658 [ClinicalTrials.gov].).
MSDA: Wordsense Discrimination Using Context Vectors and Attributes

We present MSDA (Major Senses Discovery Algorithm) --a development over the context vector approach to (noun) sense discrimination [20, 24] that uses attributes and values instead of word features to cluster contexts, and does not require for the number of senses to be fixed beforehand. The algorithm achieves a precision of 89% on a dataset including both ambiguous and non-ambiguous nouns, twice that of previous algorithms.
Feature selection for log-linear acoustic models

Log-linear acoustic models have been shown to be competitive with Gaussian mixture models in speech recognition. Their high training time can be reduced by feature selection. We compare a simple univariate feature selection algorithm with ReliefF - an efficient multivariate algorithm. An alternative to feature selection is ℓ1-regularized training, which leads to sparse models. We observe that this gives no speedup when sparse features are used, hence feature selection methods are preferable. For dense features, ℓ1-regularization can reduce training and recognition time. We generalize the well known Rprop algorithm for the optimization of ℓ1-regularized functions. Experiments on the Wall Street Journal corpus showed that a large number of sparse features could be discarded without loss of performance. A strong regularization led to slight performance degradations, but can be useful on large tasks, where training the full model is not tractable.