Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Polyhedral study for the delay management problem in public transportation

The Delay Management Problem for Public Transportation (DMP) arises in the context of the operational management of an intermodal public transportation network and has the aim of increasing the attractiveness of the network itself. Many passengers often have to use different lines to cover the trip from their origin to the desired destination and the attractiveness of the network is strongly related to the reliability of connections between vehicles. As a consequence, operational decisions are required to protect connections against some unpredictable events like breakdowns or vehicle delays. In such cases, operators have to determine if the connected vehicles should wait for the delayed ones or keep their schedule. The DMP consists of defining the wait/depart policy which minimizes the total delay on the network. In this work, we present a polyhedral study of the DMP. In particular, some new valid inequalities are presented, based on the 0-1 knapsack problem with a single continuous variable. We show that they represent facets for the convex-hull of some special cases of the DMP. The same inequalities are valid for the general case and they can be integrated in a Branch and Cut procedure.
A Petri Net based Model for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

Design of embedded systems must be based on formal representations so that the synthesis process can be carried out systematically. We present PRES, a Petri net based model suited to embedded systems. It can represent several levels of detail using the feature of hierarchical decomposition. This model also includes an explicit notion of time. In PRES tokens hold information and transitions, when fired, perform transformation of data. Concurrency and sequential behavior might be naturally represented in PRES. The representation is formally defined and an example explains different concepts and the semantics of the model.
Glucocorticoids regulate pituitary growth hormone-releasing hormone receptor messenger ribonucleic acid expression.

Glucocorticoids regulate GH synthesis and secretion by influencing both hypothalamic and pituitary function. With respect to GH-releasing hormone (GHRH), an important GH secretagogue, glucocorticoids are reported not only to suppress hypothalamic GHRH expression but also to augment pituitary responsiveness to GHRH. To investigate further this latter observation, we have determined the effects of this steroid on expression of the GHRH receptor (GHRH-R) gene in the rat pituitary in vivo and in pituitary cells in vitro. Adult male rats were adrenalectomized or sham operated and treated with s.c. implants of cholesterol or corticosterone. Adrenalectomized animals showed substantially reduced pituitary GHRH-R mRNA levels, when compared with untreated sham-operated animals. Conversely, administration of corticosterone increased pituitary GHRH-R mRNA levels in intact, as well as adrenalectomized rats. We also analyzed the effects of the synthetic glucocorticoid, dexamethasone, on GHRH-R mRNA expression in cultured rat anterior pituitary cells. GHRH-R mRNA was significantly increased by dexamethasone, with a maximal response observed in the presence of 100 nM hormone. This dose of dexamethasone substantially elevated GHRH-R mRNA after 6 h, 12 h, and 24 h of treatment. Dexamethasone did not increase GHRH-R mRNA in the presence of the transcriptional inhibitor actinomycin D, indicating that the predominant effect of the hormone is to increase transcription of the GHRH-R gene. These data demonstrate that GHRH-R mRNA levels are directly stimulated by glucocorticoids, both in the presence and absence of hypothalamic influences, providing a probable explanation for the ability of this steroid to alter pituitary responsiveness to GHRH.
Anxiety and Suicide in Depression

Dear Sir: There is paucity ofresearch on the countries oforigin ofpatients and professional staff associated with provincial psychiatric hospitals (1-3). We addressed this question by conducting a one-day census of patients and staff in a mental hospital in southeastern Ontario. The place-of-birth classification system adopted by Statistics Canada was used to categorize patients and staff born outside Canada. Point prevalence figures for foreign-born inpatients and outpatients were 17.69% and 18.08%, respectively. The comparable figures for full time staff in psychiatry, psychology and social work were 80.00%, 36.36% and 21.43%, respectively. South Asian physicians were overrepresented in psychiatry whereas groups from Africa and the other Americas were not represented in psychology. Service utilization rates of patients were calculated by dividing the percentage of a group (for example, Asian) in the hospital's catchment area by its percentage in the patient population. The countries-of-origin of the population (over the age of 14) served by the institution were extracted from the Statistics Canada Census 1986 data. The accuracy and best estimate of these figures were ensured by allowing their examination by a representative from Statistics Canada (Dr. Cyril R. Nair). Inpatient utilization rates were highest for people from Africa (411.54%) and Europe (104.11%). People from Africa, Asia and Europe were also overrepresented in the outpatient sector (203.85%, 156.38% and 114.61 %, respectively).
Platelet Integrins in Tumor Metastasis: Do They Represent a Therapeutic Target?

Platelets are small anucleated cell fragments that ensure the arrest of bleeding after a vessel wall injury. They are also involved in non-hemostatic function such as development, immunity, inflammation, and in the hematogeneous phase of metastasis. While the role of platelets in tumor metastasis has been recognized for 60 years, the molecular mechanism underlying this process remains largely unclear. Platelets physically and functionally interact with various tumor cells through surface receptors including integrins. Platelets express five integrins at their surface, namely α2β1, α5β1, α6β1, αvβ3, and αIIbβ3, which bind preferentially to collagen, fibronectin, laminin, vitronectin, and fibrinogen, respectively. The main role of platelet integrins is to ensure platelet adhesion and aggregation at sites of vascular injury. Two of these, α6β1 and αIIbβ3, were proposed to participate in platelet–tumor cell interaction and in tumor metastasis. It has also been reported that pharmacological agents targeting both integrins efficiently reduce experimental metastasis, suggesting that platelet integrins may represent new anti-metastatic targets. This review focuses on the role of platelet integrins in tumor metastasis and discusses whether these receptors may represent new potential targets for novel anti-metastatic approaches.
The outcomes of intravascular ultrasound-guided drug-eluting stent implantation among patients with complex coronary lesions: a comprehensive meta-analysis of 15 clinical trials and 8,084 patients

OBJECTIVE The effects of intravascular ultrasound (IVUS)-guided drug-eluting stent (DES) implantation in patients with complex coronary artery lesions remains to be controversial. This study sought to evaluate the outcomes of IVUS guidance in these patients. METHODS The EMBASE, Medline, and other internet sources were searched for relevant articles. The primary endpoint was major adverse cardiac events (MACE), including all-cause mortality, myocardial infarction (MI), and target-vessel revascularization (TVR). The incidence of definite/probable stent thrombosis (ST) was analyzed as the safety endpoint. RESULTS Fifteen clinical trials involving 8.084 patients were analyzed. MACE risk was significantly decreased following IVUS-guided DES implantation compared with coronary angiography (CAG) guidance (odds ratio [OR] 0.63, 95% confidence intervals [CI]: 0.53-0.73, p<0.001), which might mainly result from the lower all-cause mortality risk (OR 0.52, 95% CI: 0.40-0.67, p<0.001), MI (OR 0.70, 95% CI: 0.56-0.86, p=0.001), and TVR (OR 0.53, 95% CI: 0.40-0.70, p<0.001). The subgroup analyses indicated better outcomes of IVUS guidance in DES implantation for these patients with left main disease or bifurcation lesions. CONCLUSION IVUS guidance in DES implantation is associated with a significant reduction in MACE risk in patients with complex lesions, particularly those with left main disease or bifurcation lesions. More large and powerful randomized trials are still warranted to guide stenting decision making.
The Freiburg Groceries Dataset

With the increasing performance of machine learning techniques in the last few years, the computer vision and robotics communities have created a large number of datasets for benchmarking object recognition tasks. These datasets cover a large spectrum of natural images and object categories, making them not only useful as a testbed for comparing machine learning approaches, but also a great resource for bootstrapping different domain-specific perception and robotic systems. One such domain is domestic environments, where an autonomous robot has to recognize a large variety of everyday objects such as groceries. This is a challenging task due to the large variety of objects and products, and where there is great need for real-world training data that goes beyond product images available online. In this paper, we address this issue and present a dataset consisting of 5,000 images covering 25 different classes of groceries, with at least 97 images per class. We collected all images from real-world settings at different stores and apartments. In contrast to existing groceries datasets, our dataset includes a large variety of perspectives, lighting conditions, and degrees of clutter. Overall, our images contain thousands of different object instances. It is our hope that machine learning and robotics researchers find this dataset of use for training, testing, and bootstrapping their approaches. As a baseline classifier to facilitate comparison, we re-trained the CaffeNet architecture (an adaptation of the well-known AlexNet) on our dataset and achieved a mean accuracy of 78.9%. We release this trained model along with the code and data splits we used in our experiments.
A historical perspective on malaria control in Brazil

Malaria has always been an important public health problem in Brazil. The early history of Brazilian malaria and its control was powered by colonisation by Europeans and the forced relocation of Africans as slaves. Internal migration brought malaria to many regions in Brazil where, given suitableAnopheles mosquito vectors, it thrived. Almost from the start, officials recognised the problem malaria presented to economic development, but early control efforts were hampered by still developing public health control and ignorance of the underlying biology and ecology of malaria. Multiple regional and national malaria control efforts have been attempted with varying success. At present, the Amazon Basin accounts for 99% of Brazil’s reported malaria cases with regional increases in incidence often associated with large scale public works or migration. Here, we provide an exhaustive summary of primary literature in English, Spanish and Portuguese regarding Brazilian malaria control. Our goal was not to interpret the history of Brazilian malaria control from a particular political or theoretical perspective, but rather to provide a straightforward, chronological narrative of the events that have transpired in Brazil over the past 200 years and identify common themes.
Entropy-based Framework Dealing with Error in Software Development Effort Estimation

Software engineering community often investigates the error concerning software development effort estimation as a part, and sometimes, as an improvement of an effort estimation technique. The aim of this paper is to propose an approach dealing with both model and attributes measurement error sources whatever the effort estimation technique used. To do that, we explore the concepts of entropy and fuzzy clustering to propose a new framework to cope with both error sources. The proposed framework has been evaluated with the COCOMO’81 dataset and the Fuzzy Analogy effort estimation technique. The results are promising since the actual confidence interval percentages are closer to those proposed by the framework.
Circuit Techniques for High-Speed Serial and Backplane Signaling

This thesis describes three contributions towards the design and modeling of high-speed serial and backplane signaling systems. Specifically, these contributions address the issues of jitter and intersymbol interference in clock and data recovery circuits. First, this thesis proposes the modeling of jitter in clock and data recovery (CDR) systems using an event-driven model that accurately includes the effects of power-supply noise, the finite bandwidth in the phase-detector’s front-end sampler, and ISI in the system’s channel. These continuous-time jitter sources are captured in the model through their discrete-time influence on sample based phase-detectors. Modeling parameters for these disturbances are directly extracted from the circuit implementation. The jitter predicted by the event-driven model, implemented in Simulink, is within 12% of that predicted by an Hspice simulation, but with a simulation speed that is 1800 times higher. Second, this thesis proposes a new adaptation technique for a 4-PAM decision-feedback equalizer (DFE). The DFE adapts to the channel impulse response by observing an intermittent calibration sequence sent across the channel. Uninterrupted signaling is maintained across a parallel bus by providing an additional channel and using multiplexers to reroute the signals of the channel being calibrated. Using the intermittent calibration sequence, instead of the conventional
Minimization of Download Times for Large Files over Wireless Channels

The emerging proxy-based wireless content delivery networks (CDNs) should to be designed to download huge-size files over fading-affected channels. However, from a radio resource management point of view, several basic problems still need to be solved for such wireless delivery systems to operate efficiently. Specifically, due to the fading nature of the downlink channel, a still open basic problem is how to design optimal energy-allocation (for example, scheduling) policies that minimize the requested download time when constraints on the total available energy and peak energy are simultaneously active. In this contribution, this problem is solved for application scenarios where the downlink channel is slotted and continuous-state, the carried out traffic is elastic, and the resulting conveyed throughput is measured by any desired increasing concave rate function. Specifically, the optimal energy-allocation policy minimizing the download time is computed in closed form, and its performance is compared against that of a basic on-off heuristic energy scheduler on some Rayleigh-faded multi-antenna delivery systems of practical interest. The carried out performance comparisons point out that the presented optimal policy typically may outperform the heuristic one up to two orders of magnitude, especially when the delivery system is strongly energy limited.
Microrna let-7: an emerging next-generation cancer therapeutic

In recent years, various rna-based technologies have been under evaluation as potential next-generation cancer therapeutics. Micrornas (mirnas), known to regulate the cell cycle and development, are deregulated in various cancers. Thus, they might serve as good targets or candidates in an exploration of anticancer therapeutics. One attractive candidate for this purpose is let-7 (“lethal-7”). Let-7 is underexpressed in various cancers, and restoration of its normal expression is found to inhibit cancer growth by targeting various oncogenes and inhibiting key regulators of several mitogenic pathways. In vivo, let-7 administration was found effective against mouse-model lung and breast cancers, and our computational prediction supports the possible effectiveness of let-7 in estrogen receptor (er)–positive metastatic breast cancer. Data also suggest that let-7 regulates apoptosis and cancer stem cell (csc) differentiation and can therefore be tested as a potential therapeutic in cancer treatment. However, the exact role of let-7 in cancer is not yet fully understood. There is a need to understand the causative molecular basis of let-7 alterations in cancer and to develop proper delivery systems before proceeding to therapeutic applications. This article attempts to highlight certain critical aspects of let-7’s therapeutic potential in cancer.
A 2GHz 52 μW Wake-Up Receiver with -72dBm Sensitivity Using Uncertain-IF Architecture

A wake-up receiver (WuRx) is used in wireless sensor networks (WSN) to detect wireless traffic directed to a node's receiver and activate it upon detection, improving network latency and energy dissipation by maximizing data transceiver sleep time. The always-on nature of the WuRx sets a power dissipation floor for the entire system. In realistic WSN scenarios, the adoption of a WuRx leads to energy savings only if it can be realized with about 50muW of power dissipation in Lin, E.Y. , et al, (2004), testing the limits of low-power receiver design. While diode detectors provide for the simplest detector structure, such receivers are strongly gain-limited due to the thresholding effect of the nonlinear detector in Pletcher, N. , et al, (2007) and adding gain at RF to improve sensitivity only increases power consumption. A more attractive approach is to adopt a heterodyne architecture, where the extra gain needed for robust energy detection can be obtained at an intermediate frequency (IF) with a much lower power cost. However, a survey of previous receiver designs for WSN reveals that the power requirements of the required local oscillator (LO) exceed the total power budget of the WuRx in Otis, B. , et al, (2005).
Compact families of Jordan curves and convex hulls in three dimensions

We prove that for certain families of semi-algebraic convex bodies in 3 dimensions, the convex hull of $n$ disjoint bodies has $O(n\lambda_s(n))$ features, where $s$ is a constant depending on the family: $\lambda_s(n)$ is the maximum length of order-$s$ Davenport-Schinzel sequences with $n$ letters. The argument is based on an apparently new idea of `compact families' of convex bodies or discs, and of `crossing content' of disc intersections.
Architectural Mismatch: Why Reuse Is Still So Hard 25t h- a nniver sa r y to p p icks

Many would argue that future breakthroughsin software productivity will dependon our ability to combineexisting piecesof software to produce new applications. An important step towards this goal is the development of new techniques to detect and cope with mis-matchesin the assembledparts. Some problems of composition are due to low-level issues of interoperability, such as mismatches in programming languagesor database schemas. However, in this paper wehighlight adifferent, andin manywaysmorepervasive, class of problem: architectural mismatch . Speciﬁcally, we use our experience in building a family of software design environments from existing parts to illustrate a variety of types of mismatch that center around the assumptionsa reusablepart makesaboutthe structure of the application in which is to appear. Based on this experience we show how an architectural view of the mismatch problem exposes some fundamental, thorny problems for software composition and suggests possible research avenues needed to solve them. Many would argue that future breakthroughsin software productivity will dependon our ability to combineexisting piecesof software to produce new applications [BS92]. By constructing new systems out of reusable building blocks it should be possible to create large, high-quality software applications much more rapidly than we now do with the build-from-scratch techniquesthat dominate most software production. Overthepastdecadethebroad-basedinterestinsupportingcom-positionalapproachestosoftwarehasledtoconsiderableinvestmentinresearchanddevelopmentinreuse
Vaccination recommendations for adult patients with autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases.

BACKGROUND The number of individuals with autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases (AIIRDs) treated with immunosuppressive drugs is increasing steadily. The variety of immunosuppressive drugs and, in particular, biological therapies is also rising. The immunosuppressants, as well as the AIIRD itself, increase the risk of infection in this population. Thus, preventing infections by means of vaccination is of utmost importance. New Swiss vaccination recommendations for AIIRD patients were initiated by the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health and prepared by a working group of the Federal Commission for Vaccination Issues as well as by consultation of international experts. METHODS A literature search was performed in electronic databases (Cochrane, Medline, PubMed, Embase). In addition, unpublished literature was identified through a targeted website search of relevant organisations and international conferences dealing with vaccination, infectious diseases and rheumatology. RESULTS Although data are scarce, the following main points were retrieved from the literature. Inactivated vaccines are safe, but their immunogenicity may be reduced in AIIRD patients, especially if they are under immunosuppressive therapy. Rituximab and abatacept appear to reduce significantly immune responses after vaccination. Live vaccines are generally contraindicated under immunosuppressive therapy owing to safety concerns. Specific exceptions, as well as time intervals for the administration of live vaccines after interruption of an immunosuppressive therapy, have been formulated in this article. CONCLUSION More evidence regarding the immunogenicity and safety of vaccinations in AIIRD patients under various therapies is needed. Vaccination recommendations should be updated on a regular basis, as more scientific data will become available.
Comparison of continuous and discrete-time data-based modeling for hypoelliptic systems

We compare two approaches to the predictive modeling of dynamical systems from partial observations at discrete times. The first is continuous in time, where one uses data to infer a model in the form of stochastic differential equations, which are then discretized for numerical solution. The second is discrete in time: the model one infers is a parametric representation of a time series that can be directly used for computation. The comparison is performed in a special case where the observations are known to have been obtained from a hypoelliptic stochastic differential equation. We show that the discrete-time approach has better predictive skills, especially when the data are relatively sparse in time. We discuss open questions as well as the broader significance of the results.