Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exosomes/miRNAs as mediating cell-based therapy of stroke

Cell-based therapy, e.g., multipotent mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) treatment, shows promise for the treatment of various diseases. The strong paracrine capacity of these cells and not their differentiation capacity, is the principal mechanism of therapeutic action. MSCs robustly release exosomes, membrane vesicles (~30–100 nm) originally derived in endosomes as intraluminal vesicles, which contain various molecular constituents including proteins and RNAs from maternal cells. Contained among these constituents, are small non-coding RNA molecules, microRNAs (miRNAs), which play a key role in mediating biological function due to their prominent role in gene regulation. The release as well as the content of the MSC generated exosomes are modified by environmental conditions. Via exosomes, MSCs transfer their therapeutic factors, especially miRNAs, to recipient cells, and therein alter gene expression and thereby promote therapeutic response. The present review focuses on the paracrine mechanism of MSC exosomes, and the regulation and transfer of exosome content, especially the packaging and transfer of miRNAs which enhance tissue repair and functional recovery. Perspectives on the developing role of MSC mediated transfer of exosomes as a therapeutic approach will also be discussed.
A 70nW, 0.3V temperature compensation voltage reference consisting of subthreshold MOSFETs in 65nm CMOS technology

Being operated with 0.3V supply voltage in a standard 65nm CMOS process, a new CMOS temperature compensated voltage reference circuit is proposed with subthreshold transistors and native nMOS. The reference drain current provided by the gate voltage of a subthreshold nMOS output transistor is nearly independent of temperature due to the existence of mutual compensation of mobility and threshold voltage variation. The new proposed temperature compensated voltage reference circuit functions well with the output voltage Vref of 168 mV at room temperature as no extra laser trimming is needed after fabrication. The total power consumption is about 70nW. With the VDD power supply of 0.3V, the temperature coefficient (TC) of voltage reference circuit is 105 ppm/°C as temperature varies from -20°C to 100°C. The chip size of the fabricated bandgap reference circuit is 0.0053mm2.
GIS and health care.

GIS and related spatial analysis methods provide a set of tools for describing and understanding the changing spatial organization of health care, for examining its relationship to health outcomes and access, and for exploring how the delivery of health care can be improved. This review discusses recent literature on GIS and health care. It considers the use of GIS in analyzing health care need, access, and utilization; in planning and evaluating service locations; and in spatial decision support for health care delivery. The adoption of GIS by health care researchers and policy-makers will depend on access to integrated spatial data on health services utilization and outcomes and data that cut across human service systems. We also need to understand better the spatial behaviors of health care providers and consumers in the rapidly changing health care landscape and how geographic information affects these dynamic relationships.
Route information piggybacking in multihop wireless networks

Loop-free routing is one of the most desirable qualities for multihop wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a new loop-free mechanism, Route Information Piggybacking (RIP), which emphasizes the utilization of data packets to facilitate route maintenance and loop detection. RIP is a lightweight mechanism and it can be easily integrated into any on-demand distance-vector routing protocol. We have applied RIP to a native but flawed on-demand distance-vector routing algorithm in mobile ad hoc networks, and we call the new routing protocol Simple Mobile Ad hoc RouTing (SMART). Extensive simulation results reveal that SMART achieves loop-freedom effectively, and it outperforms AODV significantly in terms of scalability, routing overhead and delivery ratio.
Transmission system expansion planning with consideration of N-1 security constraints

This paper presents a heuristic method for solving transmission system expansion problems (TSEP) with consideration of N-1 security constraints. The method is divided into two phases. An initial plan is established in the first phase by a search process which is based on a modified simplex method and sensitivity indices. The second phase starts from the initial plan and performs the local search in the defined neighborhood. Additionally, reconstruction of the new lines on the existing right of ways, which is one of the interesting issues of TSEP in the urban area, is taken into account. The proposed method provides very satisfactory results compared with others.
Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies and Public Policy

This volume describes the use of mass media and other communication channels by corporations, bureaucrats, politicians and consumer advocates to influence the development and implementation of public policy in areas of science, technology and social service delivery. It provides answers to the critical question--who sets the media agenda, how, and for what purposes. This book is the first to reveal the degree of inequality that exists between participants in any policy debate.
Politecnico di Torino Porto Institutional Repository [ Proceeding ] A Functional Verification based Fault Injection Environment

Fault injection is needed for different purposes such as analyzing the reaction of a system in a faulty environment or validating fault-detection and/or fault-correction techniques. In this paper we propose a simulation-based fault injection tool able to work at different abstraction levels and with user-defined fault models. By exploiting the facilities provided by a functional verification environment it allows to speed up the entire fault injection process: from the creation of the workload to the analysis of the results of injection campaigns. Moreover, the adoption of techniques to optimize the fault list significantly reduces the simulation time. Being the tool targeted to the validation of dependable systems, it includes a way to extract information from the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis and to correlate fault injection results with estimates.
Cognitive Spectrum and Its Security Issues

The current trend for opportunistic use of the licensed or licensed-exempt wireless spectrum with limited rules, or even without rules, introduces significant scientific and technical challenges for the networks of the future. Until now, for the realization of the cognitive radio paradigm, several spectrum sharing schemes have been proposed, such as centralized and distributed schemes, and cooperative or noncooperative spectrum sharing mechanisms. Unfortunately, some of the existing proposals for spectrum sharing and management introduce significant security leakages, putting into effect unfairness, unavailability, and selfishness, or even malicious behaviors. Additionally, the identification, recording and reporting of selfish, free-riders, malicious and anomalous actions by peers is still an open issue in the majority of the existing spectrum management schemes. This paper discusses and classifies the weak points and the vulnerabilities of the spectrum sharing mechanisms.
Fundamental Economic Shocks and The Macroeconomy

En el ultimo tiempo, se ha observado un renovado interes en evaluar modelos economicos en un contexto de choques economicos especificos identificados empiricamente. Por lo general estos choques se identifican uno por uno, pasando por alto las posibles correlaciones entre ellos, o se identifican en el contexto de un vector autorregresivo estructural (SVAR) usando restricciones solo debilmente relacionadas con la teoria economica. En este articulo desarrollamos un enfoque alternativo que utiliza medidas de choques economicos derivados explicitamente de modelos economicos para identificar multiples impulsos estructurales ortogonales. Con este enfoque identificamos choques tecnologicos, de tasa marginal de sustitucion (oferta laboral) y de politica monetaria en el contexto de un FAVAR. Luego examinamos la distribucion bayesiana posterior para las respuestas de un numero alto de variables macroeconomicas y financieras endogenas a estos tres choques. Los choques dan cuenta de la preponderancia de las fluctuaciones de actividad, productividad y precios. Los choques tecnologicos tienen un impacto permanente sobre las medidas de actividad economica, en tanto los otros choques son mas transitorios. Los insumos laborales tienen una respuesta inicial pequena a los choques tecnologicos, y la respuesta va aumentando en forma consistente sobre un periodo de cinco anos. La lenta respuesta del consumo al choque tecnologico es incoherente con una formulacion simple de la hipotesis del ingreso permanente, pero seria coherente con un modelo de formacion de habitos. La politica monetaria tiene una respuesta mas bien pequena al choque tecnologico, pero tiene una reaccion contraciclica frente al mas ciclico choque de oferta laboral. Este choque mas ciclico tiene el impacto mas fuerte sobre las tasas de interes. Los precios de las acciones responden a los tres tipos de perturbacion. Tambien se revisan varias otras implicancias empiricas de nuestro enfoque.
New efficient SPA-resistant algorithm for the computation of k 1 P + k 2 Q used in ECC

In this paper, a simple but efficient multi-scalar multiplication algorithm against Simple Power Analysis (SPA) attack is presented. Our approach is to transform the Non-Adjacent Form (NAF) of the scalars at first, such that the nonzero digits are regular and sparse in the new signed digit representation. At a cost of very few precomputation, a new efficient SPA-resistant algorithm based on the new representation is proposed, which can save at least 25% operations compared with previous ones.
Gut Microbiota and Developmental Programming of the Brain: From Evidence in Behavioral Endophenotypes to Novel Perspective in Obesity

Epidemiological findings have been sup-ported by experimental evidences in germ-free (GF) mice (mice born and raised in a sterile environment and that are devoid of an enteric bacteria) which demonstrated that exposure to microbial pathogens dur-ing vulnerable periods result in behavioral abnormalities, including anxiety-like behav-ior, impaired cognitive function (Sullivan et al., 2006; Goehler et al., 2008 ), and more elevated home-cage activity counts than conventionalized animals (Backhed et al., 2007).
Staphylococcus lugdunensis Pacemaker-related Infection

We report the first known case of a device-related bloodstream infection involving Staphylococcus lugdunensis small-colony variants. Recurrent pacemaker-related bloodstream infection within a period of 10 months illustrates the poor clinical and microbiologic response even to prolonged antimicrobial drug therapy in a patient infected with this staphylococcal subpopulation.
A multi-agent approach for decentralized voltage regulation in power distribution networks within distributed generators

Voltage regulation (VR) is a procedure to keep voltages in a distribution network (DN) within normal limits. Conventionally, a voltage regulator can read voltage levels from predefined measures, and regulate the voltages. However, due to lacking of a distributed generator's (DG) information, the unexpected electricity from a DG will mislead readings on voltages levels, so as to disturb the VR in a DN. Adjusting a DG's reactive power output is an alternative way for VR. However, because of limited penetration levels, DGs need to collaborate with other devices in order to provide an effective voltage regulation. Therefore, how to efficiently manage DGs to coordinate with other electrical components by considering the dynamics of a DN is a big challenge. In this paper, an innovative multi-agent approach is proposed to solve this problem. The proposed approach employs decentralized control of agents on local VR, and also supports agents collaboration on global VR through dynamic task allocation and communication.
Specifying and generating behavioral service adapters based on transformation rules

Behavioral adapters are a way to establish proper interaction between services that have been developed independently. We present a novel approach for specifying such adapters, based on domain-specific transformation rules that reflect the elementary operations that adapters can perform. We show how complex adapters that adhere to these rules can be generated using existing controller generation algorithms. We discuss some example applications, including real-world business processes.
The epidemiology of primary biliary cirrhosis: A survey of mortality in England and Wales

Primary biliary cirrhosis is a rare disease in the general population. Estimates of its true incidence are difficult but since survival time is unaffected by treatment, mortality may reflect important regional and other variations. One hundred and sixty-five death certificates collected in England and Wales over the five-year period 1967-1971 were inspected and confirmed an overwhelming predilection for females. Deaths rose sharply at ages 50-54 in the latter with a peak of 4·1 million−1 year−1, with perhaps a secondary peak at ages 70-74. No relation of mortality with climate, altitude, soil type, annual temperature range, or occupation was found, although outside the UK a broad correlation exists with total cirrhosis deaths. There was a suggestive excess of deaths among married women. The greater frequency of deaths in the London area, a rise in mortality from country to urban areas, a fall-off in deaths from primary biliary cirrhosis in old age, and predominance for social class I suggest a simple relationship with standards of medical care or diagnosis. An `epidemic' of deaths in 1971 is attributed to greater availability of the mitochondrial antibody test in the regions. The importance of familial primary biliary cirrhosis and various models of pathogenesis are discussed. Both constitutional and environmental factors producing the disease must be widely distributed in the population of this country.
An Efficient Signature-Based Approach for Automatic Detection of Internet Worms over Large-Scale Networks

Internet Worms pose a serious threat to today's Internet. Signature matching is an important approach to detect worms. However, as most signature development processes are manual, they require significant time. They are thus not efficient in reducing the damage worms may cause. In this paper, an efficient signature-based method is proposed for automatic detection of worms over large-scale networks. In the proposed system, detection is performed in a hierarchical manner. Security managers of local networks collect worm-like or suspicious flows and handle these flows to high-hierarchy metropolitan managers. In response, the latter use this information to generate robust signature. The global manager which lies on top of the hierarchy, multicasts the signature to local managers via metropolitan managers. This enables local managers to detect worms that try to penetrate into their networks. The proposed system is evaluated using an off-line real network traffic that contains traces of worms. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system exhibits high detection rates with low false alarm rates.
Analyzing authors and articles using keyword extraction, self-organizing map and graph algorithms

In order to analyze the scientific interests and relationships of the participants of the International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Adaptive Knowledge Representation and Reasoning 2008 (AKRR’08) conference, we have developed SOMPA environment (Self-Organizing Maps of Papers and Authors). SOMPA is a software with webbased interface for collecting and analyzing information on authors and their papers. It produces graphical output including graphs and maps. The program extracts keywords for the papers using Likey keyphrase extraction utility.
Analogue auto-associative memory using a multi-valued memristive memory cell

Most brain-like computing systems build up from neural networks. While there are some essential problems with this approach, it is well-known that the brain functionally operates as an associative memory. Building associative memories using conventional CMOS technology has already been performed, but this approach suffers from a lack of scalability and information density. Additionally, for a long time, one of the differences between analogue and digital electronics was the fact that digital electronics allowed for easier data storage through a variety of different memory cell architectures. These memory designs make extensive use of transistors and generally trade area, performance and power. However, memristors can be used as high density, analogue, passive storage elements and this paper presents 2 memory cell designs that allow for such multi-valued storage. The noise resistance of these cells is tested and indicates a very good tolerance to external influences, while overall they provide for a very accurate storage of data with high information density. Following on from the description of the storage cells, the paper then continues to build them into an associative memory.
The Influence of Space Environment on Microscope Imaging System

The process of cell culture in space is very important, but nowadays, advanced space cell culture with imaging system is absent. To develop a new space microscope imaging system, the first thing for us is to analyze the space factors work on the system. So, in this paper, how the main space environment affect imaging system is presented. Firstly, the model of imaging system is shown, and modulation transfer function (MTF) is to describe the quality of imaging. Then, the influence of atmospheric pressure change, temperature change and machine vibration on imaging system is given. And, we build a relationship model between a single factor and MTF to express the influence of space factors. In the end, the correspondence design rule is given. This will be an important technical support for design space microscope imaging system.
Downlink interference penalty algorithm for power control, scheduling, and user association

Managing inter-cell interference is one of the main challenges in current and next generation wireless systems that aggressively reuse the frequency. Cooperation between interfering cells has been sought to mitigate interference. In this paper, we address the problem of jointly optimizing the transmit powers, user scheduling, and user association in a cellular network to maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR). To this end, we develop a distributed interference penalty algorithm in which the cells update their transmit powers and user schedule to maximize its utility minus an interference cost. The proposed algorithm involves only limited exchange of information via backhaul and has convergence guarantees. Furthermore, we propose a sub-optimal algorithm with lower computational and backhaul overhead. In it, the users are first associated to the base stations (BSs) based on their signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratios (SINRs). It is then followed by joint optimization of BS transmit powers and user scheduling, for which we develop an interference penalty algorithm as well. We show that the proposed algorithms outperform the computationally complex weighted minimum mean squared error (WMMSE) algorithm.
Phase II trial of combretastatin A4 phosphate, carboplatin, and paclitaxel in patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.

BACKGROUND A previous dose-escalation trial of the vascular disrupting agent combretastatin A4 phosphate (CA4P) given before carboplatin, paclitaxel, or both showed responses in 7 of 18 patients with relapsed ovarian cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients with ovarian cancer that had relapsed and who could start trial therapy within 6 months of their last platinum chemotherapy were given CA4P 63 mg/m(2) minimum 18 h before paclitaxel 175 mg/m(2) and carboplatin AUC (area under the concentration curve) 5, repeated every 3 weeks. RESULTS Five of the first 18 patients' disease responded, so the study was extended and closed after 44 patients were recruited. Grade ≥2 toxic effects were neutropenia in 75% and thrombocytopenia in 9% of patients (weekly blood counts), tumour pain, fatigue, and neuropathy, with one patient with rapidly reversible ataxia. Hypertension (23% of patients) was controlled by glyceryl trinitrate or prophylactic amlodipine. The response rate by RECIST was 13.5% and by Gynecologic Cancer InterGroup CA 125 criteria 34%. CONCLUSIONS The addition of CA4P to paclitaxel and carboplatin is well tolerated and appears to produce a higher response rate in this patient population than if the chemotherapy was given without CA4P. A planned randomised trial will test this hypothesis.
Liquidity Effects of Trading Frequency ( extended version ) . ∗

In this work, we present a discrete time modeling framework, in which the shape and dynamics of a Limit Order Book (LOB) arise endogenously from an equilibrium between multiple market participants (agents). The new framework captures very closely the true, micro-level, mechanics of an auction-style exchange. At the same time, it uses the standard abstractions of a continuum-player game to obtain a tractable macro-level description of the LOB. We use the proposed modeling framework to analyze the effects of trading frequency on market liquidity in a very general setting. In particular, we demonstrate the dual effect of high trading frequency. On the one hand, the higher frequency increases market efficiency, if the agents choose to provide liquidity in equilibrium. On the other hand, the higher trading frequency also makes markets more fragile, in the sense that the agents choose to provide liquidity in equilibrium only if they are market-neutral (i.e. their beliefs satisfy certain martingale property). Even a very small deviation from market-neutrality may cause the agents to stop providing liquidity, if the trading frequency is sufficiently high, which represents a self-inflicted liquidity crises (aka flash crash) in the market. This framework allows us to provide more insight into how such a liquidity crisis unfolds, connecting it to the so-called adverse selection effect.
Transient EUV Reflectivity Measurements of Carbon upon Ultrafast Laser Heating

Time resolved extreme ultraviolet (EUV) transient reflectivity measurements on non-equilibrium amorphous carbon (a-C) have been carried out by combining optical and free electron laser (FEL) sources. The EUV probing was specifically sensitive to lattice dynamics, since the EUV reflectivity is essentially unaffected by the photo-excited surface plasma. Data have been interpreted in terms of the dynamics of an expanding surface, i.e., a density gradient rapidly forming along the normal surface. This allowed us to determine the characteristic time ( τ ≲ 1 ps) for hydrodynamic expansion in photo-excited a-C. This finding suggests an extremely narrow time window during which the system can be assumed to be in the isochoric regime, a situation that may complicate the study of photo-induced metastable phases of carbon. Data also showed a weak dependence on the probing EUV wavelength, which was used to estimate the electronic temperature ( T e ≈ 0.8 eV) of the excited sample. This experimental finding compares fairly well with the results of calculations, while a comparison of our data and calculations with previous transient optical reflectivity measurements highlights the complementarities between optical and EUV probing.