Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
secA, secD, secF, yajC, and yidC contribute to the adhesion regulation of Vibrio alginolyticus

Vibrio alginolyticus caused great losses to aquaculture. Adhesion is an important virulence factor of V. alginolyticus. In this study, the relationship between V. alginolyticus adhesion and type II secretion system genes (secA, secD, secF, yajC, and yidC) was determined using gene silencing, qRT‐PCR and in vitro adhesion assay. The results showed that the expression of target genes and the bacterial adhesion exhibited significant decreases after transient gene silencing and stable gene silencing, which indicated that secA, secD, secF, yajC, and yidC played roles in the bacterial adhesion of V. alginolyticus. The expression of secA, secD, secF, yajC, and yidC were significantly influenced by temperature, salinity, pH and starvation. The results indicated that the expression of secA, secD, secF, yajC, and yidC were sensitive to different environmental factors, whereas environmental factors can affect V. alginolyticus adhesion via the expression of secA, secD, secF, yajC, and yidC.
Adaptive Transmitter Precoding for Time Division Duplex CDMA in Fading Multipath Channels: Strategy and Analysis

The recently developed blind adaptive techniques for multiuser detection in code division multiple access (CDMA) systems offer an attractive compromise of performance and complexity. However, the desire to further reduce complexity at the mobile unit has led to the investigation of techniques that move signal processing from the mobile unit to the base station. In this paper, we investigate transmitter precoding for downlink time division duplex (TDD) code division multiple access (CDMA) communications. In particular, we develop a linear minimum mean square error precoding strategy using blind channel estimation for fading multipath channels that allows for simple matched filtering at the mobile unit and is easy to make adaptive. We also present a performance analysis using tools developed for the analysis of conventional (receiver-based) linear blind multiuser detection in unknown channels. We compare the analytical and simulation results to traditional receiver-based blind multiuser detection. It is seen that transmitter precoding offers a reasonable alternative for TDD-mode CDMA when minimizing computational complexity at the mobile unit is a priority.
Spatially-Coupled LDPC Coding in Threshold-Based Lossy Forwarding Scheme

In this work, we propose a new technique of spatially-coupled low-density parity-check coding within a threshold-based lossy forwarding protocol for a multiple access relaying system. Here, block Rayleigh fading is assumed for all transmission links and error-free decoding at the relay is not required. Two schemes are presented in which the relay computes log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) of the network-coded symbols (from the sources) based on the received signals. By comparing the LLRs to a preset threshold, the relay decides to forward hard decisions when the network-coded symbol reliability is higher than the preset threshold. Otherwise, the relay decides to stay silent (first scheme) or to forward the LLRs to the destination (second scheme). Finally, we modify the LLR combining at the destination, based on an expression for the uncoded bit-error probability which is tailored to the proposed schemes. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed relay protocol yields an improved bit-error rate performance compared to competitive schemes proposed in the literature.
DEVELOPMENT OF CELLULASE PREPARATION FOR SACCHARIFICATION OF LIGNOCELLULOSIC BIOMASS

s published in conference proceedings: Saritha M. , Tiwari, R. , Singh, S. , Adak, A. , Arora, A. , Nain, L. Comparative profiling of solid-state and submerged production of glycoside hydrolases by Aspergillus terreus for enzymatic degradation of lignocellulosic biomass. Poster presented at the National Seminar on Recent Advances in Agricultural-, Biomedical-, and Environmental-Biotechnology, Agra, May 1-2, 2015. Saritha, M. , Tiwari, R. , Singh, S. , Nain, P.K. S. , Rana, S. , Adak, A. , Arora, A. , Nain, L. Mixture design approach to enhance glycoside hydrolases production by
Analysis of Message-Passing Decoding of Finite-Length Concatenated Codes

We analyze the performance of message-passing decoding of finite-length concatenated codes. We first show that the message-passing decoder is closely related to a dual optimization decoder. The connections between these two decoders are further elucidated by proving that both of them attain the same objective function value of a generalized linear programming decoder in the limit as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) goes to infinity. Consequently, the framework of pseudo-weight analysis, which was originally proposed for analyzing the linear programming decoder, can be extended to analyze the performance of the message-passing decoder for finite-length codes. We then derive lower bounds to the pseudo-weights of general concatenated codes by utilizing the special structure of their parity-check matrices. We finally present a method to increase the max-fractional weight by adding redundant parity-check constraints and thereby improving the decoding performance. Simulation studies are carried out to assess the performance of the proposed algorithms and substantiate the theoretic claims.
Cognitive and Tactile Factors Affecting Human Haptic Performance in Later Life

Background Vision and haptics are the key modalities by which humans perceive objects and interact with their environment in a target-oriented manner. Both modalities share higher-order neural resources and the mechanisms required for object exploration. Compared to vision, the understanding of haptic information processing is still rudimentary. Although it is known that haptic performance, similar to many other skills, decreases in old age, the underlying mechanisms are not clear. It is yet to be determined to what extent this decrease is related to the age-related loss of tactile acuity or cognitive capacity. Methodology/Principal Findings We investigated the haptic performance of 81 older adults by means of a cross-modal object recognition test. Additionally, we assessed the subjects' tactile acuity with an apparatus-based two-point discrimination paradigm, and their cognitive performance by means of the non-verbal Raven-Standard-Progressive matrices test. As expected, there was a significant age-related decline in performance on all 3 tests. With the exception of tactile acuity, this decline was found to be more distinct in female subjects. Correlation analyses revealed a strong relationship between haptic and cognitive performance for all subjects. Tactile performance, on the contrary, was only significantly correlated with male subjects' haptic performance. Conclusions Haptic object recognition is a demanding task in old age, especially when it comes to the exploration of complex, unfamiliar objects. Our data support a disproportionately higher impact of cognition on haptic performance as compared to the impact of tactile acuity. Our findings are in agreement with studies reporting an increase in co-variation between individual sensory performance and general cognitive functioning in old age.
Medicinal Chemistry and Actions of Dual and Pan PPAR Modulators

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) agonists are used as adjunct therapy in the treatment of diabetes mellitus. Fibrates, including fenofibrate, gemfibrozil, benzafibrate, ciprofibrate, and clofibrate act on PPAR alpha to reduce the level of hypertriglyceridemia. However, agonists (ligands) of PPAR-beta/delta receptors, such as tesaglitazar, muraglitazar, ragaglitazar, imiglitazar, aleglitazar, alter the body's energy substrate preference from glucose to lipids and hence contribute to the reduction of blood glucose level. Glitazones or thiazolidinediones on the other hand, bind to PPAR-gamma receptors located in the nuclei of cells. Activation of PPAR-gamma receptors leads to a decrease in insulin resistance and modification of adipocyte metabolism. They reduce hyperlipidaemia by increasing the level of ATP-binding cassette A1, which modifies extra-hepatic cholesterol into HDL. Dual or pan PPAR ligands stimulate two or more isoforms of PPAR and thereby reduce insulin resistance and prevent short- and long-term complications of diabetes including micro-and macroangiopathy and atherosclerosis, which are caused by deposition of cholesterol. This review examines the chemical structure, actions, side effects and future prospects of dual and pan PPAR agonists.
"Data Justice" By Design: Building Engagement Through Civic Technologies

The ubiquity of mobile technologies has led communities to engage with environmental and political concerns through collecting, representing, and analysing data. Activist engagement through data collection aims to hold businesses and the state to account--positioning itself against big data and proprietary technologies that foreclose on agency. Design scholars have unique insight to bring as society addresses the ethical and social issues emerging from data-driven technologies and their development. In my dissertation I focus on the design of civic technologies for environmental accountability--map platforms, mapping techniques, and ambient sensor networks for documenting pollution. By adopting an action research framework to investigate these projects, my research examines how critically-informed, participatory practices intervene to build more sustainable and equitable socio-technical systems, contributing an understanding of how these practices can be applied in new contexts.
Understanding What Africans Say

Mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and IoT have undoubtedly been the largest shapers of the 21st century, changing how people live, think and work. Though, many in the developed world and a few privileged in the developing world can attest to this. Due to illiteracy, socio-economic constraints and unavailability of many non-western languages especially African languages on these mobile devices; majority of the people in developing countries are yet to benefit from these mobile devices. Yet, the rise of powerful artificial intelligence and natural language processing present new opportunities for many users of mobile devices to easily interact with their devices in their own vernacular language. Thus, get the best out of their devices. This paper presents results collected through an online survey across 6 African countries to establish what African users think of existing voice assistants, such as Siri, Google assistant and alike. Additionally, provides recommendations based on our findings that will improve these voice assistants to better understand what Africans say. Therefore, improve the user experience of African users.
Set variation-aware shared LLC management for CPU-GPU heterogeneous architecture

Heterogeneous CPU-GPU multiprocessor systems-on-chip (HMPSoC) becomes a popular architecture choice for high performance embedded systems, where shared last-level cache (LLC) management becomes a critical design consideration. We observe that within a sampling period, CPU and GPU may have distinct access behaviors over various LLC sets. In this work, we propose a light-weighted and fined-grained cache management policy to cope with the CPU-GPU access behavior variation among cache sets. In particular, CPU and GPU requests are prioritized disparately in each LLC set during cache block insertion and promotion, based on the per-core utility behaviors and a per-set CPU-GPU miss counter. Experimental results show that our LLC management scheme outperforms the two state-of-the-art schemes TAP-RRIP and LSP by 12.6% and 10.01%, respectively.
Varying Social Experiences in Adulthood Do Not Differentially Affect Anxiety-Like Behavior But Stress Hormone Levels

Social experiences can have profound effects on an individual’s level of anxiety. While various studies have addressed consequences of experiences of a specific type, e.g., social defeat, a recent study in mice investigated the impact of combinations of adverse and beneficial social experiences. Quite surprisingly, mice exposed to benefits during early life phases followed by escapable adversity in adulthood displayed lowest levels of anxiety, even compared to individuals having experienced throughout beneficial conditions. The present study aimed to elucidate whether this phenomenon is restricted to these specific life phases or whether it also exists when all these experiences are made in full adulthood. For this purpose, we compared anxiety-like behavior and stress response of adult male mice exposed to escapable social defeat following beneficial social experiences to that of mice exposed to either throughout adverse or throughout beneficial conditions. More precisely, we performed three established behavioral paradigms measuring anxiety-like behavior and assessed corticosterone metabolites non-invasively via feces sampling. Interestingly, we found no effects of social experience on anxiety-like behavior. In contrast to that, the animals’ stress hormone levels were profoundly affected by current social conditions: escapable social defeat (adverse condition) led to an increase in corticosterone metabolite concentrations, whereas living with a female (beneficial condition) led to a decrease. Thus, on the one hand this study suggests the importance of the timing of social experience for affecting an individual’s level of anxiety. On the other hand, it demonstrates that anxiety and stress hormone levels can be affected separately by social experience during adulthood.
Co-occurring psychiatric conditions in autism spectrum disorder

Abstract Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at increased risk for experiencing one or more co-occurring psychiatric conditions. When present, these conditions are associated with additional impairment and distress. It is therefore crucial that clinicians and researchers adequately understand and address these challenges. However, due to symptom overlap, diagnostic overshadowing, and ambiguous symptom presentation in ASD, the assessment of co-occurring conditions in ASD is complex and challenging. Likewise, individual difference factors, such as age, intellectual functioning, and gender, may influence the presentation of co-occurring symptoms. Relatedly, a transdiagnostic framework may offer utility in assessing and treating co-occurring conditions. However, with the exception of anxiety disorders, treatment research for co-occurring psychiatric conditions in ASD is relatively limited. Therefore, the present paper aims to summarize and review available research on the most common co-occurring psychiatric disorders in ASD, with a focus on estimated population-based prevalence rates, diagnostic challenges, the influence of individual differences, and assessment guidelines. The utility of a transdiagnostic framework for conceptualizing co-occurring disorders in ASD is discussed, and the state of treatment research for co-occurring disorders is summarized. This study concludes with a summary of the extant literature, as well as recommendations for future research.
Effect on Microstructure and Nanoindentation of a AlCoFeMoNi High Entropy Alloy.

High entropy alloys (HEAs) have been known as a new type of material with unusual properties. HEAs contain at least five major elements in equiatomic or near-equiatomic proportions [1], and in general tend to form simple FCC and/or BCC microstructures in form of solid solutions (SS) [2]. Several chemical systems in HEAs have been investigated, but Mo-Ti couple has been rarely reported. The aim of this work was to characterize the microstructure of HEA produced by mechanical alloying (MA) and arc melting on AlCoFeMoNi alloy.
Complex Network Analysis of Men Single ATP Tennis Matches

Who are the most significant players in the history of men tennis? Is the official ATP ranking system fair in evaluating players scores? Which players deserved the most contemplation looking at their match records? Which players have never faced yet and are likely to play against in the future? Those are just some of the questions developed in this paper supported by data updated at April 2018. In order to give an answer to the aforementioned questions, complex network science techniques have been applied to some representations of the network of men singles tennis matches. Additionally, a new predictive algorithm is proposed in order to forecast the winner of a match.
Protective effects of camel whey protein against scrotal heat‐mediated damage and infertility in the mouse testis through YAP/Nrf2 and PPAR‐gamma signaling pathways

Elevation of scrotal temperature is one of the most important causes of impaired spermatogenesis and male infertility, but the exact mechanism remains controversial. The present study investigated the impact of camel whey protein (CWP) on the mechanisms of heat stress (HS)‐mediated testicular damage in male mice. Exposure to HS was associated with significant increase in the testicular tissues’ oxidative stress. Mechanistically, exposure to HS resulted in upregulation of P53 and Nrf2 expressions; downregulation of Bcl2 and PPAR‐γ expressions; and induction of testicular Leydig cell hyperplasia. Because Leydig cells produce testosterone up on stimulation with Luteinizing hormone (LH), HS mice also exhibited significant reduction in the serum testosterone levels followed by significant reduction in the percentages of progressively motile sperm and higher percentages of immotile sperm, when compared with those of control mice. Interestingly, treatment of HS mice with CWP significantly restored the levels of ROS and the activities of antioxidant enzymes in the testicular tissues nearly to those observed in control mice. Furthermore, CWP supplemented HS mice exhibited complete restoration of Bcl2, P53, Nrf2, and PPAR‐γ expressions; testicular Leydig cell distribution; significant higher levels of testosterone levels; and hence higher percentages of progressively motile sperm and lower percentages of immotile sperm as compared to HS mice. Our findings reveal the protective effects of CWP against testis injury and infertility induced by exposure to HS by rescuing functional Leydig cells. Additionally, the present study has shed light on the molecular mechanisms underlying improved testicular damage following CWP treatment.
Combinatorial Alphabet-Dependent Bounds for Locally Recoverable Codes

Locally recoverable (LRC) codes have recently been a focus point of research in coding theory due to their theoretical appeal and applications in distributed storage systems. In an LRC code, any erased symbol of a codeword can be recovered by accessing only a small number of other symbols. For LRC codes over a small alphabet (such as binary), the optimal rate-distance trade-off is unknown. We present several new combinatorial bounds on LRC codes including the locality-aware sphere packing and Plotkin bounds. We also develop an approach to linear programming (LP) bounds on LRC codes. The resulting LP bound gives better estimates in examples than the other upper bounds known in the literature. Further, we provide the tightest known upper bound on the rate of linear LRC codes with a given relative distance, an improvement over the previous best known bounds.
Second-Order Relational Manipulations Affect Both Humans and Monkeys

Recognition and individuation of conspecifics by their face is essential for primate social cognition. This ability is driven by a mechanism that integrates the appearance of facial features with subtle variations in their configuration (i.e., second-order relational properties) into a holistic representation. So far, there is little evidence of whether our evolutionary ancestors show sensitivity to featural spatial relations and hence holistic processing of faces as shown in humans. Here, we directly compared macaques with humans in their sensitivity to configurally altered faces in upright and inverted orientations using a habituation paradigm and eye tracking technologies. In addition, we tested for differences in processing of conspecific faces (human faces for humans, macaque faces for macaques) and non-conspecific faces, addressing aspects of perceptual expertise. In both species, we found sensitivity to second-order relational properties for conspecific (expert) faces, when presented in upright, not in inverted, orientation. This shows that macaques possess the requirements for holistic processing, and thus show similar face processing to that of humans.
Product opinion mining using sentiment analysis on smartphone reviews

An unexpected increase in the application of social web sites has led to the need in development of a very robustful and trust worthy systems and varied machinery forms in order to analyze such large forms of data and their ware houses which is being collected from various industries. We are always eager and excited to know what people think what they feel and perceive about various aspects of living and non-living beings. In need to understand and analyze various traits of behavior and the varying personality there is a need of opinion mining. It is a collection of all the extracted information from all the available resources and possible instances which could be in the form of hidden emotions, paragraphs and could be text, urban language and various un-identified representations. It is not only related topics like sensex, politics, finance and other meaningful words, but represents many things in the wide area of application. Almost all the sites have provided the option to display and present various medias and their views on various real life events. They can share various aspects of philosophy too and many more. They can represent various opinions on various streams of life which has really become crucial in our daily life to analyze the pattern in which things are exponentially growing. This research paper provides you with sentimental analysis of various smart phone opinions on smart phones dividing them Positive, Negative and Neutral Behavior. This is basically being obtained by studying the various posts being posted by varied number of users considering their areas of interest categorizing the smart phones. Analysis of plenty of words coupled in a sentence represent various sentiments of users and the various experiences and impact that product has given them. This analysis compiles a structural modeling approach and Bayesian Interface system to identify the polarity of the opinion which subsequently classifies positive and negative opinions.