Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Radar interferometry for safe coal mining in China

Land surface deformation due to underground mining is always a concern to the local communities and environment. The underground coal mines at the study site in Northern China are located quite closely to each other. In order to ensure safe mining as well as to prevent illegal mining activities, differential radar interferometry (DInSAR) was introduced for monitoring mine subsidence. The spaceborne SAR data acquired by ENVISAT (C-band) and ALOS (L-band) were tested in this paper. The limits of radar interferometry were discussed by addressing the issues of decorrelation and deformation phase gradient. The ALOS results show it is more suitable for monitoring the rapid and large land deformation due to underground mining. However, the data acquired in summer season (June – September) have higher noise, which may be caused by the local agriculture.
Highly Sulfated K5 Escherichia coli Polysaccharide Derivatives Inhibit Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infectivity in Cell Lines and Human Tracheal-Bronchial Histocultures

ABSTRACT Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) exploits cell surface heparan sulfate proteoglycans (HSPGs) as attachment receptors. The interaction between RSV and HSPGs thus presents an attractive target for the development of novel inhibitors of RSV infection. In this study, selective chemical modification of the Escherichia coli K5 capsular polysaccharide was used to generate a collection of sulfated K5 derivatives with a backbone structure that mimics the heparin/heparan sulfate biosynthetic precursor. The screening of a series of N-sulfated (K5-NS), O-sulfated (K5-OS), and N,O-sulfated (K5-N,OS) derivatives with different degrees of sulfation revealed the highly sulfated K5 derivatives K5-N,OS(H) and K5-OS(H) to be inhibitors of RSV. Their 50% inhibitory concentrations were between 1.07 nM and 3.81 nM in two different cell lines, and no evidence of cytotoxicity was observed. Inhibition of RSV infection was maintained in binding and attachment assays but not in preattachment assays. Moreover, antiviral activity was also evident when the K5 derivatives were added postinfection, both in cell-to-cell spread and viral yield reduction assays. Finally, both K5-N,OS(H) and K5-OS(H) prevented RSV infection in human-derived tracheal/bronchial epithelial cells cultured to form a pseudostratified, highly differentiated model of the epithelial tissue of the human respiratory tract. Together, these features put K5-N,OS(H) and K5-OS(H) forward as attractive candidates for further development as RSV inhibitors.
Performance Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Networks for Different Radio Models Considering Mobile Event

In this paper, we consider the behavior of a wireless sensor network for TwoRayGround and Shadowing radio models for the case of mobile event. By means of simulations, we analyse the performance of AODV protocol. In the previous work, we considered that the event node is stationary in the observation field. In this work, we want to investigate how the sensor network performs in the case when the event node moves. The simulation results show that the shadowing phenomena, by destroying the regularity of the network, reduce the mean distance among nodes and at the same time increase the interference level and the latency of packet transmission. We found that for mobile event, the Goodput and routing efficiency of TwoRayGround is better than Shadowing, but the Depletion of Shadowing is better than TwoRayGround.
One Hundred Years of Pleiotropy: A Retrospective

Pleiotropy is defined as the phenomenon in which a single locus affects two or more distinct phenotypic traits. The term was formally introduced into the literature by the German geneticist Ludwig Plate in 1910, 100 years ago. Pleiotropy has had an important influence on the fields of physiological and medical genetics as well as on evolutionary biology. Different approaches to the study of pleiotropy have led to incongruence in the way that it is perceived and discussed among researchers in these fields. Furthermore, our understanding of the term has changed quite a bit since 1910, particularly in light of modern molecular data. This review traces the history of the term “pleiotropy” and reevaluates its current place in the field of genetics.
The use of multithreading for exception handling

Common hardware exceptions, when implemented by trapping, unnecessarily serialize program execution in dynamically scheduled superscalar processors. To avoid the consequences of trapping the main program thread, multithreaded CPUs can exploit control and data independence by executing the exception handler in a separate hardware context. The main thread doesn't squash instructions after the excepting instruction, conserving fetch bandwidth and allowing execution of instructions independent of the exception. This leads to earlier branch resolution in the post exception code and additional memory latency tolerance. As a proof of concept, using threads to handle software TLB misses is shown to provide performance approaching that of an aggressive hardware TLB miss handler.
Large Teams Have Developed Science and Technology; Small Teams Have Disrupted It

Teams dominate the production of high-impact science and technology. Analyzing teamwork from more than 50 million papers, patents, and software products, 1954-2014, we demonstrate across this period that larger teams developed recent, popular ideas, while small teams disrupted the system by drawing on older and less prevalent ideas. Attention to work from large teams came immediately, while advances by small teams succeeded further into the future. Differences between small and large teams magnify with impact—small teams have become known for disruptive work and large teams for developing work. Differences in topic and research design account for part of the relationship between team size and disruption, but most of the effect occurs within people, controlling for detailed subject and article type. Our findings suggest the importance of supporting both small and large teams for the sustainable vitality of science and technology.
Improving fairness among TCP flows crossing wireless ad hoc and wired networks

In scenarios where wireless ad hoc networks are deployed, sometimes it would be desirable that ad hoc nodes can communicate with servers in wired networks to upload or download data. In these cases TCP connections will span both wireless ad hoc and wired domains. However, TCP often faces severe unfairness in this type of connection scenario, which forces some TCP flows to completely stop transferring any data despite all links being in good states. In this paper, we propose a simple scheduling scheme, which helps competing TCP connections to achieve fairness without much throughput loss. Simulation results show that our scheme successfully eliminates the extreme unfairness existing in above-mentioned scenarios.
Debugging of metacomputing applications

We describe the design and implementation of an adaptive and extensible graphical debugger for metacomputing applications. This "metadebugger" has been developed in the context of the Harness framework, a dynamic and reconfigurable software infrastructure for distributed computing. A major distinguishing feature of this metadebugger is its support for dynamic addition and deletion of nodes in the distributed computing framework at runtime. The metadebugger also includes several other novel features, including a "step into" mechanism for remote method invocations (RMI) that unifies the debugging mechanism for local and remote calls. In addition, an online visualization tool, a navigation tool, a breakpoint manager, and a simple script language interpreter are integrated into the metadebugger. The metadebugger is also capable of invoking third-party debuggers that might implement other useful debugging facilities in heterogeneous computing environments.
Fuzzy logic in gain scheduling of multivariable control

Controlling nonlinear systems is very difficult. Multivariable case makes control even harder. Combining these characteristics results in a problem, which can be solved explicitly very seldom. In this paper the use of fuzzy logic in gain scheduling of nonlinear and multivariable processes is discussed. The developed method is tested using a simulation model and a real heating process. The proposed approach uses a linear controller to control a nonlinear system. The controller is tuned at chosen operating points, which are selected to cover the nonlinear range of the process. Gain scheduling means that the tuned parameters of the controller are collected into a table. The global controller observes the state of the process and chooses proper parameters from the table. Fuzzy logic fits very well for gain scheduling, because the change of the state of the process is uncertain by nature. In multivariable control one of the most difficult problems appears in interactions, which are the reason why scalar controllers have poor performance. To overcome these interactions a multivariable PI-controller is used and combined with fuzzy gain scheduling to form a powerful control scheme.
Neurobehavioral Functioning in Obstructive Sleep Apnea: Differential Effects of Sleep Quality, Hypoxemia and Subjective Sleepiness

This study evaluated the relationship between neuropsychological and affective functioning, subjective sleepiness and sleep-disordered breathing in 100 patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Using principal components analysis, three indices of sleep-disordered breathing were identified from polysomnography: sleep disturbance, extent of nocturnal hypoxemia, and sleep quality. Poorer sleep quality was related to slower processing speed, somatic symptomatology and tension-anxiety levels. Nocturnal hypoxemia was related to visuconstructional abilities, processing speed and mental flexibility. Patients who had high levels of subjective sleepiness had poorer performances on a complex task of executive functioning and higher levels of tension-anxiety. These results imply a differential effect of sleep-disordered breathing on domains of neuropsychological functioning. Additionally, they suggest that a patient’s subjective level of sleepiness is a good predictor of certain aspects of neurobehavioral functioning.
Lithium phthalocyanine: a probe for electron paramagnetic resonance oximetry in viable biological systems.

Lithium phthalocyanine (LiPc) is a prototype of another generation of synthetic, metallic-organic, paramagnetic crystallites that appear very useful for in vitro and in vivo electron paramagnetic resonance oximetry. The peak-to-peak line width of the electron paramagnetic resonance spectrum of LiPc is a linear function of the partial pressure of oxygen (pO2); this linear relation is independent of the medium surrounding the LiPc. It has an extremely exchange-narrowed spectrum (peak-to-peak line width = 14 mG in the absence of O2). Physicochemically LiPc is very stable; its response to pO2 does not change with conditions and environments (e.g., pH, temperature, redox conditions) likely to occur in viable biological systems. These characteristics provide the sensitivity, accuracy, and range to measure physiologically and pathologically pertinent O2 tensions (0.1-50 mmHg; 1 mmHg = 133 Pa). The application of LiPc in biological systems is demonstrated in measurements of pO2 in vivo in the heart, brain, and kidney of rats.
Specification and design of a prototype filter for filter bank based multicarrier transmission

The specifications of filter banks for multicarrier transmission systems with a large number of subchannels are discussed, with application to xDSL and power line communication in mind. The near perfect reconstruction (PR) modulated approach is considered and the importance, for the system, of the prototype filter delay is stressed. An existing design technique known to be particularly relevant to the context is revisited from a frequency sampling perspective. The performance results in terms of subchannel noise floor and delay are given for several filter lengths and an experimental validation is provided. Finally, an improvement to the design technique is proposed, which brings a gain of 3.3 dB in subchannel interference power level.
Global burden of COPD: systematic review and meta-analysis

The aim of this study was to quantify the global prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) by means of a systematic review and random effects meta-analysis. PubMed was searched for population-based prevalence estimates published during the period 1990–2004. Articles were included if they: 1) provided total population or sex-specific estimates for COPD, chronic bronchitis and/or emphysema; and 2) gave method details sufficiently clearly to establish the sampling strategy, approach to diagnosis and diagnostic criteria. Of 67 accepted articles, 62 unique entries yielded 101 overall prevalence estimates from 28 different counties. The pooled prevalence of COPD was 7.6% from 37 studies, of chronic bronchitis alone (38 studies) was 6.4% and of emphysema alone (eight studies) was 1.8%. The pooled prevalence from 26 spirometric estimates was 8.9%. The most common spirometric definitions used were those of the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (13 estimates). There was significant heterogeneity, which was incompletely explained by subgroup analysis (e.g. age and smoking status). The prevalence of physiologically defined chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in adults aged ≥40 yrs is ∼9–10%. There are important regional gaps, and methodological differences hinder interpretation of the available data. The efforts of the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease and similar groups should help to standardise chronic obstructive pulmonary disease prevalence measurement.
Influence of back-gate bias and process conditions on the gamma-degradation of the transconductance of MuGFETs

The gamma radiation-induced variation of the transconductance in the subthreshold region is studied for different back-gate voltages and for different kinds of SOI MuGFETs: devices with and without Selective Epitaxial Growth (SEG) and 45° rotated transistors. Wide fin devices show a larger degradation when the back-gate is grounded. The back-channel of narrow fin transistors, on the other hand, needs to be inverted before degradation in the transconductance is observed. The radiation behavior of the transconductance is similar for devices with and without SEG. It is shown that the maximum variation in transconductance correlates with the mobility for narrow fin devices. This mobility varies when the transistor is rotated. For wide fin devices this correlation is not so strong.
Gene Regulation Mechanisms Introduced in the Evaluation Criteria for a Hardware Cellular Development System

Genomes for a cellular developmental system include some form of gene regulation. As such, evolution searches for genomes that are evaluated by properties emerging in the interplay between the genome and the emerging phenotype. In this paper an experimental approach is taken to show that information from this iterative process can be used to provide the evaluation process with information of the emerging phenotype. Experiments show that evaluation of gene regulation network can indirectly give information on growth, differentiation and self-regulation in the phenotype. An experiment exploiting these properties towards development of stable self-regulation functional circuits is presented. All experiments are carried out using hardware cellular development and phenotypes that emerge in hardware
You speak, we detect: Quantitative diagnosis of anomic and Wernicke's aphasia using digital signal processing techniques

Aphasia is a common adult language disorder acquired after a stroke, head injury, tumor, etc. Accurate diagnosis influences the prognosis of any speech and language disorder including aphasia. Therefore, in this paper we have proposed a semi-automated Aphasia diagnosis and classification framework employing feature extraction and pattern matching techniques of the digital signal processing (DSP). The proposed scheme evaluates the acoustic properties, time consumed, and speech characteristics for each language component i.e. naming, repetition, and comprehension. The naming and repetition tasks utilize DSP techniques. The proposed solution is highly scalable since it determines the diagnosis based on acoustic properties instead of the language characteristics. Thus, it eases extending into multiple languages. The mathematical relationships calculate the corresponding score for each component. The framework then determines the diagnosis according to the obtained scores. Since it occupies computational analysis of the speech signals, it reduces the subjectivity of the manual diagnosis process, meanwhile increasing the efficiency and accuracy by consistent diagnosis decisions. Finally, it distinguishes two sub types of Aphasia i.e. Anomic Aphasia and Wernicke's Aphasia. The results clearly revealed the efficiency improvement achieved by replacing the live auditory model with pre-recorded auditory model.
Atrial Natriuretic Peptide Regulates Regional Vascular Volume and Venous Tone in Humans

Objective—To date, the contribution of basal atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) levels to resting vascular function in humans is unknown. In the present study we sought to investigate the role of ANP in regulating regional vascular volume and venous tone in healthy subjects. Methods and Results—We used radionuclide plethysmography to examine the effects of ANP and the ANP-receptor antagonist A71915 on forearm vascular volume. Creating pressure/volume relations, we determined changes in vascular volume, compliance, and tone. Performing dose-ranging studies, we additionally assessed the potency and specificity of A71915 in the forearm resistance vasculature. Equilibrium blood pool scintigraphy was then used to assess the effects of systemic administration of A71915 on regional intestinal vascular volume. Infusion of ANP increased forearm vascular volume in a dose-dependent manner (maximum 20%; P <0.001), exerting a maximum venodilating effect at plasma levels similar to that seen in heart failure. A71915 increased venous tone, thereby decreasing vascular volume by 9.6±1.1%, P <0.001 (forearm), and 2.6±0.5%, P =0.01 (intestinal beds). At an infusion ratio of 50:1, A71915 almost completely abolished the effects of ANP on forearm blood flow. Conclusions—ANP locally regulates regional vascular volume and tone without affecting compliance.
Multi-subband interface roughness scattering using 2D finite element schodinger equation for monte carlo simulations of multi-gate transistors

Interface roughness scattering (IRS) is one of the key limiting scattering mechanism for both planar and non-planar CMOS devices. To predict the performance of future scaled devices and new structures the quantum mechanical confinement based IRS models are essential. In this work, the in-house 3D finite element Monte Carlo code with 2D Schrodinger equation based quantum correction serves as a base for implementation of a new multi-subband extended Prange & Nee (EPN) IRS model and for comparison with the previously used 3D Ando model. The transistors selected for the comparison are 10.7 nm gate length SOI Si FinFETs with two cross-sections: rectangular and triangular. The drive current for the rectangular device has been reduced by 25% when using the multi-subband EPN model and even more reduced for the triangular shape, by 44%, at VD = 0.7 V.
Steroid receptor RNA activator protein binds to and counteracts SRA RNA-mediated activation of MyoD and muscle differentiation

The steroid receptor RNA activator (SRA) has the unusual property to function as both a non-coding RNA (ncRNA) and a protein SRAP. SRA ncRNA is known to increase the activity of a range of nuclear receptors as well as the master regulator of muscle differentiation MyoD. The contribution of SRA to either a ncRNA or a protein is influenced by alternative splicing of the first intron, the retention of which disrupts the SRAP open reading frame. We reported here that the ratio between non-coding and coding SRA isoforms increased during myogenic differentiation of human satellite cells but not myotonic dystrophy patient satellite cells, in which differentiation capacity is affected. Using constructs that exclusively produce SRA ncRNA or SRAP, we demonstrated that whereas SRA ncRNA was indeed an enhancer of myogenic differentiation and myogenic conversion of non-muscle cells through the co-activation of MyoD activity, SRAP prevented this SRA RNA-dependant co-activation. Interestingly, the SRAP inhibitory effect is mediated through the interaction of SRAP with its RNA counterpart via its RRM-like domain interacting with the functional sub-structure of SRA RNA, STR7. This study thus provides a new model for SRA-mediated regulation of MyoD transcriptional activity in the promotion of normal muscle differentiation, which takes into account the nature of SRA molecules present.
Exploiting the Immune System for Computation (Profile)

Over the past five years, within The University of Kent’s Computing Laboratory, a group has emerged that is investigating the natural immune system as inspiration for computation. The group has established itself as one of the world leaders in the field of Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), through their work on extracting immunological metaphors for applications in machine learning, optimisation, software testing and fault tolerance. The approach adopted is interdisciplinary, with group members that are experts in various areas of computer science, mathematics and immunology. The group at Kent has been instrumental in the establishment of the International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems (ICARIS) and a UK based academic network for AIS known as ARTIST.
Graph Clustering and Minimum Cut Trees

In this paper, we introduce simple graph clustering methods based on minimum cuts within the graph. The clustering methods are general enough to apply to any kind of graph but are well suited for graphs where the link structure implies a notion of reference, similarity, or endorsement, such as web and citation graphs. We show that the quality of the produced clusters is bounded by strong minimum cut and expansion criteria. We also develop a framework for hierarchical clustering and present applications to real-world data. We conclude that the clustering algorithms satisfy strong theoretical criteria and perform well in practice.
Security Policy Composition for Composite Services

An application based Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA) consists of an assembly of external services and the application is called as a composite service. Acomposite service could be implemented by other composite services hence the application could have a recursive structure, which is one of the features of SOA application. Securing an SOA application is an important non-functional requirement. However, specifying a security policy of a composite service is not so easy because the policy should keep the consistency with other policies of external services which are invoked in the process. We need the way to assure the consistency of policies, but the concrete way is not developed yet to specify a consistent policy for a composite service. Therefore, this paper proposes a security policy composition mechanism from existing policies of external services. Our contribution is creating a security policy of a composite service automatically based on predicate logic, with support for two approaches of policy composition: bottom-up and top-down. Also, we focus on three kinds of security policies, such as a Data Protection Policy, an Access Control Policy, and a Composite Process Policy, and propose the policy composition rules for each policy. Our mechanism makes it possible to validate the consistency of policies by inference without increasing a developer's workload, even if a composite service has a recursive structure.