Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
C-C chemokine receptor type-4 transduction of T cells enhances interaction with dendritic cells, tumor infiltration and therapeutic efficacy of adoptive T cell transfer

ABSTRACT T cell infiltration at the tumor site has been identified as a major predictor for the efficacy of adoptive T cell therapy. The chemokine C-C motif ligand 22 (CCL22) is highly expressed by immune cells in murine and human pancreatic cancer. Expression of its corresponding receptor, C-C chemokine receptor type 4 (CCR4), is restricted to regulatory T cells (Treg). We show that transduction of cytotoxic T cells (CTL) with CCR4 enhances their immigration into a pancreatic cancer model. Further, we show that binding of CCR4 with CCL22 strengthens the binding of T cell LFA-1 to dendritic cell (DC) ICAM-1 and increases CTL activation. In vivo, in a model of subcutaneous pancreatic cancer, treatment of tumor-bearing mice with CCR4-transduced CTL led to the eradication of established tumors in 40% of the mice. In conclusion, CCR4 overexpression in CTL is a promising therapeutic strategy to enhance the efficacy of adoptive T cell transfer (ACT).
Power estimation in global interconnects and its reduction using a novel repeater optimization methodology

The purpose of this work is two fold: first, to quantify and establish future trends for dynamic power dissipation in global wires of high performance integrated circuits; and second, to develop a novel and efficient delay-power tradeoff formulation for minimizing power due to repeaters, which can otherwise constitute 50% of total global wire power dissipation. Using the closed form solutions from this formulation, power savings of 50% on repeaters are shown with minimal delay penalties of about 5% at the 50 nm technology node. These closed-form, analytical solutions provide a fast and powerful tool for designers to minimize power.
NEAT: A Platform- and Protocol-Independent Internet Transport API

The sockets API has become the standard way that applications access the transport services offered by the IP stack. This article presents NEAT, a user space library that can provide an alternate transport API. NEAT allows applications to request the service they need using a new design that is agnostic to the specific choice of transport protocol underneath. This not only allows applications to take advantage of common protocol machinery, but also eases introduction of new network mechanisms and transport protocols. The article describes the components of the NEAT library and illustrates the important benefits that can be gained from this new approach. NEAT is a software platform for developing advanced network applications that was designed in accordance with the standardization efforts on transport services in the IETF, but its features exceed the envisioned functionality of a TAPS system.
A new method of flash image shadow detection and patch-based correction of shadow regions

While capturing an image under flash light, we obtain a relatively sharp and noise-free image but the presence of sharp shadows at silhouettes is unwanted and sometimes it also reduces the overall visual appeal of the image. In this paper, we present a shadow detection as well as removal algorithm to detect and remove shadows at silhouettes from images captured under flash light. We use a pair of flash and no flash images for performing shadow detection and recover the shadow areas to produce an enhanced flash image. This problem has not been addressed explicitly before in literature with major emphasis on flash image enhancement. We compare the accuracy of proposed shadow detection algorithm with an existing method in literature. It is shown that proposed method of shadow detection gives more accurate results and the proposed shadow recovery method gives subjectively better results compared to pixel-wise recovery method.
HMC-Sim-2.0: A Simulation Platform for Exploring Custom Memory Cube Operations

The recent advent of stacked memory devices has led to a resurgence of research associated with the fundamental memory hierarchy and associated memory pipeline. The bandwidth advantages provided by stacked logic and DRAM devices have inspired research associated with eliminating the bandwidth bottlenecks associated with many applications in high performance computing. Further, recent efforts have focused on utilizing stacked memory devices as last-level caches. In addition to the two aforementioned focus areas, a third area of research is emerging to explore augmenting the stacked memory logic layer with additional operations. This first generation of Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) devices provided rudimentary atomic memory operations. The Gen2 Hybrid Memory Cube devices provide more expressive atomic memory operations that include primitive integer arithmetic operations. Despite the inclusion of more expressive arithmetic operations, many users have expressed interest in more complex and potentially orthogonal custom memory cube, or CMC, operations in future revisions of the Hybrid Memory Cube specification. This work presents recent development associated with the HMC-Sim Hybrid Memory Cube simulation framework that provides users a powerful infrastructure to experiment and research augmented custom memory cube, or CMC, operations within the current Gen2 Hybrid Memory Cube device infrastructure. We provide an overview of extending the original HMC-Sim simulation infrastructure to include support for CMC operations with requiring users to modify the core simulation code base. We also present three examples of building and utilizing custom, user-defined CMC operations in sample simulations to exhibit potential application speedup with future HMC device specifications. In doing so, we present a model to replace traditional thread mutexes with custom HMC mutex commands.
Perfluorinated Chemicals and Fetal Growth: A Study within the Danish National Birth Cohort

Background Perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) are man-made, persistent organic pollutants widely spread throughout the environment and human populations. They have been found to interfere with fetal growth in some animal models, but whether a similar effect is seen in humans is uncertain. Objectives We investigated the association between plasma levels of PFOS and PFOA in pregnant women and their infants’ birth weight and length of gestation. Methods We randomly selected 1,400 women and their infants from the Danish National Birth Cohort among those who completed all four computer-assisted telephone interviews, provided the first blood samples between gestational weeks 4 and 14, and who gave birth to a single live-born child without congenital malformation. PFOS and PFOA were measured by high performance liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometer. Results PFOS and PFOA levels in maternal plasma were on average 35.3 and 5.6 ng/mL, respectively. Only PFOA levels were inversely associated with birth weight (adjusted β = −10.63 g; 95% confidence interval, −20.79 to −0.47 g). Neither maternal PFOS nor PFOA levels were consistently associated with the risk for preterm birth or low birth weight. We observed no adverse effects for maternal PFOS or PFOA levels on small for gestational age. Conclusion Our nationwide cohort data suggest an inverse association between maternal plasma PFOA levels and birth weight. Because of widespread exposure to these chemicals, our findings may be of potential public health concern.
Effect of Mycophenolate Mofetil on Kallikrein Expression in the Kidney of 5/6 Nephrectomized Rats

It has recently been proposed that tubulointerstitial damage plays a key role in the pathogenesis of sodium-dependent hypertension. Since components, enzymes and substrates, of the kallikrein-kinin system (KKS) are synthesized by connecting and collecting tubules, respectively, it is expected that damage of any origin, involving the tubulointerstitial compartment, may affect the functionality of these nephron segments and impair blood pressure control. Therefore, we analyzed renal kallikrein expression in the 5/6 renal ablation model, which is characterized by a progressive tubulointerstitial damage and systemic hypertension. In addition, we studied the renal expression of this enzyme after treatment of healthy and 5/6 nephrectomized rats with mycophenolate mofetil (MMF), an immunosuppressive drug known to reduce tubulointerstitial damage in this model. Twenty-six male Sprague-Dawley rats were included in this study. Seven 5/6 nephrectomized rats (Nx), 4 sham-operated (Sham) rats and 5 Nx rats treated with MMF (Nx + MMF) were studied 4 weeks after surgery. For comparison, 6 healthy rats treated with MMF at the same dose were compared with 4 vehicle-treated controls. Tubulointerstitial damage was significantly high in Nx compared with Nx-MMF and sham-operated rats. Blood pressure was significantly higher in Nx (178 ± 7.8 mm Hg) than in Sham (120 ± 2.0 mm Hg, p < 0.05) and Nx + MMF animals (154 ± 5.6 mm Hg, p < 0.05). Renal kallikrein expression, quantified by a computer image system was significantly lower in the Nx group (1,696 ± 437 density/mm2) than in Sham (9,779 ± 4,068 density/mm2, p < 0.05), and in Nx + MMF groups (4,640 ± 1,578 density/mm2, p < 0.05). Healthy animals treated with MMF did not show tubulointerstitial damage, changes in blood pressure nor changes in the expression of immunoreactive renal kallikrein suggesting that improvement in kallikrein expression after MMF treatment of 5/6 nephrectomy was not due to a direct effect of the drug on kallikrein-producing cells. Our results suggest that protection of the KKS after 5/6 nephrectomy may have additional renoprotective effects and may reduce the progression of renal disease.
4 Description of Algorithms Used 4 . 1 Modularity Based Message Passing

Community detection is a key problem in network science. Identifying communities, defined as densely connected groups of nodes with relatively fewer outgoing edges, can inform properties of nodes and give insight into the nature of the network. However, current methods of community detection often fail to reproduce groupings associated with recorded graph metadata on real-world networks. Although there are many different methods for community detection, ones that incorporate statistical physics are gaining traction. In this project, we focus on the implementation and insight of community detection methods that use statistical physics.
Developing Nervous Systems in Molluscs: Navigating the Twists and Turns of a Complex Life Cycle

Molluscs constitute a richly diversified phylum, containing abundant species that have successfully invaded a variety of habitats. Despite the long-standing importance of its various members as model species for neurobiology, research on the development of the molluscan nervous system has lagged behind that on several other phyla. Recent studies, however, have begun to sketch an overview of neural development during the complex life cycles of these animals, involving multiple larval and postlarval stages and often including processes of torsion and occasionally detorsion affecting the entire body plan. The first neurons appear early in life and innervate a variety of larval organs. The central and peripheral neurons that comprise the adult nervous system generally appear later in larval life. Metamorphosis involves the loss of many neurons and the gain of others, and yet more neurons change to accommodate transitions in modes of locomotion, feeding and habitat. But such large-scale transitions do not stop at metamorphosis as massive changes in body size and behavior occur during juvenile and adult stages, and the nervous system must change accordingly to meet the demands of expanding target tissues and the need to generate new behaviors. Work over the years has gradually revealed some of the genes important in molluscan neural development, but recent whole-genome, EST and microarray projects are now allowing much more rapid progress and providing a valuable molluscan perspective for understanding broader issues concerning the evolution of the nervous system across the animal kingdom.
Word Sense Acquisition from Bilingual Comparable Corpora

Manually constructing an inventory of word senses has suffered from problems including high cost, arbitrary assignment of meaning to words, and mismatch to domains. To overcome these problems, we propose a method to assign word meaning from a bilingual comparable corpus and a bilingual dictionary. It clusters second-language translation equivalents of a first-language target word on the basis of their translingually aligned distribution patterns. Thus it produces a hierarchy of corpus-relevant meanings of the target word, each of which is defined with a set of translation equivalents. The effectiveness of the method has been demonstrated through an experiment using a comparable corpus consisting of Wall Street Journal and Nihon Keizai Shimbun corpora together with the EDR bilingual dictionary.
Lattice Particle Filters

A promising approach to approximate inference in state-space models is particle filtering. However, the performance of particle filters often varies significantly due to their stochastic nature. We present a class of algorithms, called lattice particle filters, that circumvent this difficulty by placing the particles deterministically according to a Quasi-Monte Carlo integration rule. We describe a practical realization of this idea, discuss its theoretical properties, and its efficiency. Ex~ perimental results with a synthetic 2D tracking problem show that the lattice particle filter is equivalent to a conventional particle filter that has between 10 and 60% more particles, depending on their "sparsity" in the state-space. We also present results on inferring 3D human motion from moving light displays.
Sketches and diagrams in practice

Sketches and diagrams play an important role in the daily work of software developers. In this paper, we investigate the use of sketches and diagrams in software engineering practice. To this end, we used both quantitative and qualitative methods. We present the results of an exploratory study in three companies and an online survey with 394 participants. Our participants included software developers, software architects, project managers, consultants, as well as researchers. They worked in different countries and on projects from a wide range of application areas. Most questions in the survey were related to the last sketch or diagram that the participants had created. Contrary to our expectations and previous work, the majority of sketches and diagrams contained at least some UML elements. However, most of them were informal. The most common purposes for creating sketches and diagrams were designing, explaining, and understanding, but analyzing requirements was also named often. More than half of the sketches and diagrams were created on analog media like paper or whiteboards and have been revised after creation. Most of them were used for more than a week and were archived. We found that the majority of participants related their sketches to methods, classes, or packages, but not to source code artifacts with a lower level of abstraction.
A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON CRACK HEALING BEHAVIOUR OF Si3 N4 /SiC COMPOSITE CERAMICS

Ceramic (Si3 N4 /SiC) composites have been produced by sintering. From the sintered block, three point bend specimens were cut out. A semi-circular crack was made on the centre of the tension surface of the test specimen with the aid of a Vicker’s indenter. The diameter of the semi-circular crack was about 60–70 μm. The specimens were subsequently heat treated at 1300°C for 1 h in vacuum, nitrogen or air. The bending strength was measured at room temperature, 800 and 1000°C. The specimens heat treated in air recovered considerably their bending strength at 1000°C, several specimens failed at a location different from the healed crack and their average strength showed the same value of that for smooth specimens. From these results, it is concluded that the recovery in bending strength of a cracked specimen was caused by crack healing.
On the zeros of polynomials with restricted coefficients

real zeros. This result, which appears to be the first on this subject, shows that polynomials from . T’n do not behave like unrestricted polynomials. Schur 11 and by different methods Szeg6 12] and Erd6s and Turin [7] improve the above bound to c/n log n (see also [5]). In [6] we give the right upper bound of c/ff for the number of real zeros of polynomials from a large class, namely for all polynomials of the form
On classification of modular categories by rank

The feasibility of a classification-by-rank program for modular categories follows from the Rank-Finiteness Theorem. We develop arithmetic, representation theoretic and algebraic methods for classifying modular categories by rank. As an application, we determine all possible fusion rules for all rank=$5$ modular categories and describe the corresponding monoidal equivalence classes.
How bad is reliable multicast without local recovery?

We examine the impact of the loss recovery mechanisms on the performance of a reliable multicast protocol. Approaches to reliable multicast can be divided into two major classes: source-based recovery, and distributed recovery. For both classes we consider the state of the art: for source-based recovery, a type 2 hybrid ARQ scheme with parity retransmission; for distributed recovery, a scheme with local multicast retransmission and local feedback processing. We further show the benefits of combining the two approaches and consider a type 2 hybrid ARQ scheme with local retransmission. The schemes are compared for up to 10/sup 6/ receivers under different loss scenarios with respect to network bandwidth usage and completion time of a reliable transfer. We show that the protocol based on local retransmissions via type 2 hybrid ARQ performs best for bandwidth and latency. For networks, where local retransmission is not possible, we show that a protocol based on type 2 hybrid ARQ comes close to the performance of a protocol with local retransmissions.
Long-term retention of self-fertilization in a fish clade

Among vertebrate animals, only the mangrove rivulus (Kryptolebias marmoratus) was known to self-fertilize. Here, we use microsatellite analyses to document a high selfing rate (97%) in a related nominal species, Kryptolebias ocellatus, which likewise is androdioecious (populations consist of males and hermaphrodites). In contrast, we find no evidence of self-fertilization in Kryptolebias caudomarginatus (an androdioecious species closely related to the marmoratus-ocellatus clade) or in Kryptolebias brasiliensis (a dioecious outgroup). These findings indicate that the initiation of self-fertilization predated the origin of the marmoratus-ocellatus clade. From mitochondrial DNA sequences and microsatellite data, we document a substantial genetic distance between Kryptolebias marmoratus and K. ocellatus, implying that the selfing capacity has persisted in these fishes for at least several hundred thousand years.
Critical Equalities for Potts Models

We apply a simple analytical criterion for locating critical temperatures to Potts models on square and triangular lattices. In the self-dual case, i.e. on the square lattice we reproduce known exact values of the critical temperature and derive the internal energy of the model at the critical point. For the Potts model on the triangular lattice we obtain very good numerical estimate of the critical temperature and also of the internal energy at the critical point.
Cmpt 825: Natural Language Processing Lectures Outline: 1. Two Aspects: Fluency and Content Transfer Language Model Translation Model 2. Translation Process Fertility Null-insertion Probability Translation Distortion (reordering) 3. Evolution of Smt Word-based Models Phrase-based Models Syntax-based

Lectures Outline: 1. Two aspects: Fluency and content transfer Language model Translation model 2. Translation process Fertility Null-insertion probability Translation Distortion (reordering) 3. Evolution of SMT Word-based models Phrase-based models Syntax-based models 4. Evaluation of MT systems Automatic evaluation WER (from Speech processing community) BLEU Correlation of BLEU with human evaluation Experiments by Philip Koehn Disadvantages of BLEU (going out of vs. going in to English) 5. Sidewalk MT pyramid Rule-based approaches 6. Translation modeling Noisy-channel model IBM Model 3
Improving grapheme-based ASR by probabilistic lexical modeling approach

There is growing interest in using graphemes as subword units, especially in the context of the rapid development of hidden Markov model (HMM) based automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, as it eliminates the need to build a phoneme pronunciation lexicon. However, directly modeling the relationship between acoustic feature observations and grapheme states may not be always trivial. It usually depends upon the grapheme-to-phoneme relationship within the language. This paper builds upon our recent interpretation of Kullback-Leibler divergence based HMM (KL-HMM) as a probabilistic lexical modeling approach to propose a novel grapheme-based ASR approach where, first a set of acoustic units are derived by modeling context-dependent graphemes in the framework of conventional HMM/Gaussian mixture model (HMM/GMM) system, and then the probabilistic relationship between the derived acoustic units and the lexical units representing graphemes is modeled in the framework of KL-HMM. Through experimental studies on English, where the grapheme-to-phoneme relationship is irregular, we show that the proposed grapheme-based ASR approach (without using any phoneme information) can achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art phoneme-based ASR approach.
Turbidimetric Spectroscopy for the Evaluation of Metalworking Fluids Stability

The stability of oil-in-water (O/W) emulsions used as metalworking fluids is a key factor for the economical and environmental balance of the entire metalworking process because used and broken fluids must be recycled or disposed. In this study, the ability of turbidimetric spectroscopy in the ultraviolet and visible light range to detect metalworking fluids destabilization was evaluated. Destabilization was achieved by adding calcium chloride, thus achieving accelerated aging, which leads to coalescence, creaming, and complete emulsion separation. The stability of the metalworking fluids at 5% volumetric concentration in deionized water was monitored using a spectroscopic turbidimeter composed of an optical probe for in-line measurements. Destabilization was also monitored by measuring the vertical profile of backscattered and transmitted light. The results of this offline measurement system were compared with those from the in-line spectroscopic sensor, indicating that the latter can provide local, real-time information on emulsion destabilization, thus enabling control actions.
X-Ray Fluorescence Mapping of Transition Metals in Human KB Cells Undergoing Staurosporine-Induced Apoptosis

Apoptosis, or “programmed cell death”, is the process by which multicellular organisms remove unwanted or damaged cells [1]. This process is essential for normal body plan development, and the failure of cells to respond to apoptotic stimuli is a risk factor for the development of cancer. Thus, it is desirable to understand what factors control the onset and progression of apoptosis. Over the past 30 years, many of these factors have been elucidated, including the roles of intracellular calcium, cysteine-aspartic acid proteases (caspases), and the Ras and Bcl-2 family proteins. However, the role, if any, that transition metal ions play in this process is less clear.