Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scalable Sweeping-Based Spatial Join

In this paper, we consider the filter step of the spatial join problem, for the case where neither of the inputs are indexed. We present a new algorithm, Scalable Sweeping-Based Spatial Join (SSSJ), that achieves both efficiency on real-life data and robustness against highly skewed and worst-case data sets. The algorithm combines a method with theoretically optimal bounds on I/O transfers based on the recently proposed distribution-sweeping technique with a highly optimized implementation of internal-memory plane-sweeping. We present experimental results based on an efficient implementation of the SSSJ algorithm, and compare it to the state-ofthe-art Partition-Based Spatial-Merge (PBSM) algorithm of Patel and DeWitt.
A survey for potentially zoonotic gastrointestinal parasites of dogs and pigs in Cambodia

There is little information available on parasites of zoonotic significance in Cambodia. In 2011, in an effort to obtain data on potentially zoonotic gastrointestinal parasites in domestic animals, 50 dogs and 30 pigs residing in 38 households located in Ang Svay Check village, Takeo province, Cambodia were examined for parasites from faecal samples. The samples were processed using the formalin-ethyl acetate concentration technique (FECT). Hookworms were the most common zoonotic parasite found in dogs (80.0%) followed by Echinostomes (18.0%). While, in pigs, Fasciolopsis buski was the most common zoonotic parasite (30.0%) followed by Ascaris suum (13.3%). This study provides baseline data on gastrointestinal parasites in dogs and pigs from Cambodia and underscores the importance of domestic animals as reservoir hosts for human parasites for Cambodian veterinary and public health agencies. Follow-up studies are required to further taxonomically characterize these dog and pig parasites and to determine their role in human parasites in this community.
Confluence of social network, social question and answering community, and user reputation model for information seeking and experts generation

Social question and answering (Q&A) is one of the most effective approaches to knowledge acquisition using information seeking and collaboration. Most modern social Q&A systems use a static points-based user reputation model, which has the effect of diminishing the value of experts. In order to overcome this issue, we have developed a dynamic points-based user reputation model that takes user rating and social network analysis as input. The impact weight of each relation and user ratings are not static but are dependent on the current level of asker and answerer and on the difficulty level of the question. We propose a novel social Q&A platform that is the confluence of different features of social network, social Q&A, and the dynamic points-based user reputation model. The beta version of the system was evaluated by conducting a clinical study for 4 months in different academic environments. The results show that the proposed social Q&A outperforms the available static points-based social Q&A systems in representing the actual user reputation with an increased user satisfaction.
Population pharmacokinetics of dolutegravir in HIV-infected treatment-naive patients

Aim Dolutegravir is the newest integrase inhibitor approved for HIV treatment and has demonstrated potent antiviral activity in patient populations with a broad range of treatment experience. This analysis aimed to characterize the population pharmacokinetics of dolutegravir in treatment-naive patients and to evaluate the influence of patient covariates. Methods A population pharmacokinetic model was developed using a non-linear mixed effect modelling approach based on data from 563 HIV-infected, treatment-naive adult patients in three phase 2/3 trials who received dolutegravir (ranging from 10–50 mg once daily) alone or in combination with abacavir/lamivudine or tenofovir/emtricitabine. Results The pharmacokinetics of dolutegravir were adequately described by a linear one compartment model with first order absorption, absorption lag time and first order elimination. Population estimates for apparent clearance, apparent volume of distribution, absorption rate constant and absorption lag time were 0.901 l h–1, 17.4 l, 2.24 h−1, and 0.263 h, respectively. Weight, smoking status, age and total bilirubin were predictors of clearance, weight was a predictor of volume of distribution and gender was a predictor of bioavailability. However, the magnitude of the effects of these covariates on steady-state dolutegravir plasma exposure was relatively small (<32%) and was not considered clinically significant. Race/ethnicity, HBV/HCV co-infection, CDC classification, albumin, creatinine clearance, alanine aminotransferase or aspartate aminotransferase did not influence the pharmacokinetics of dolutegravir in this analysis. Conclusions A population model that adequately characterizes dolutegravir pharmacokinetics has been developed. No dolutegravir dose adjustment by patient covariates is necessary in HIV-infected treatment-naive patients.
The Impact of Detecting Bipolar Disorder in Previously Diagnosed Unipolar Patients at a Specialist Depression Clinic

This study aimed to examine the short-term clinical impact of identifying bipolar disorder in patients previously managed as having a unipolar disorder. The study was incorporated within a consecutive sample of 1000 patients attending a specialist depression clinic for diagnostic and management considerations. Of those assessed, 34% were evaluated as having a bipolar disorder, with this condition having been diagnosed for the first time in three-quarters of those patients. We reviewed sample members 12 weeks later and compared the courses of the "newly diagnosed" and "established" bipolar subsets. Some four-fifths of the bipolar patients reported a degree of improvement, whereas there were no clear differences between the two bipolar subsets. The nondifferential outcome of the bipolar (previously and newly diagnosed) subsets could suggest that there were nonspecific benefits of assessment or that the management was optimized for both groups. Future studies examining the impact of diagnosing a bipolar disorder would therefore benefit from the close consideration of the optimal control group or control strategy.
URBAN AGRICULTURE : DEFINITION , PRESENCE , POTENTIALS AND RISKS

Ever since the first French geographical accounts of (intraand peri-) urban agriculture (UA) were published on Central Africa in the 1960s, scattered and isolated UA surveys by individual social scientists (e.g. Egziabher et al. 1994) have gradually been giving way to institutional projects led by multidisciplinary teams. As a result, more and better information is now available on a larger number of regions, countries and cities around the world. Over the same period, public initiatives pioneered by few local and national governments have been followed by more widespread awareness on the part of local authorities, in their regional and global fora, for the growth and potential of agriculture in and around cities. More urban governments are now seeking to exchange policy and technical experiences to better deal with a spreading phenomenon in their own city.
Ultra-pure, water-dispersed Au nanoparticles produced by femtosecond laser ablation and fragmentation

Aqueous solutions of ultra-pure gold nanoparticles have been prepared by methods of femtosecond laser ablation from a solid target and fragmentation from already formed colloids. Despite the absence of protecting ligands, the solutions could be (1) fairly stable and poly size-dispersed; or (2) very stable and monodispersed, for the two fabrication modalities, respectively. Fluorescence quenching behavior and its intricacies were revealed by fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy in rhodamine 6G water solution. We show that surface-enhanced Raman scattering of rhodamine 6G on gold nanoparticles can be detected with high fidelity down to micromolar concentrations using the nanoparticles. Application potential of pure gold nanoparticles with polydispersed and nearly monodispersed size distributions are discussed.
Long-Term Intake of Pea Fiber Affects Colonic Barrier Function, Bacterial and Transcriptional Profile in Pig Model

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of long-term intake of pea fiber (PF) on colonic health and the underlying mechanism. Fifty weaned piglets were randomly allocated into 2 groups receiving control and fibrous diet with inclusion of PF from weaning to Day 160 postweaning, with 5 pens in each group and 5 pigs in each pen. Compared with control diet, long-term intake of PF diet induced deeper crypt and increased colonic barrier-related protein expression of mucin and sIgA. As indicated by the increased lactobacillus content, pigs fed PF diet had a stimulating effect on bacterial fermentation in the colon, thus a higher concentration of colonic total short chain fatty acid and acetic acid were observed. DNA microarray results suggested that feeding PF diet inhibited 77% of genes (40 downregulated and 12 upregulated genes) related to colonic cancer, immune response, and lipid metabolism, involving in signal pathway such as intestinal immune network for IgA production, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor signaling pathway and nutrient metabolism-related pathways. Collectively, our results suggested that long-term intake of PF would improve colonic function via altering colonic barriers, colonic immune and metabolism-related protein or gene expressions.
Printing Conductive Nanomaterials for Flexible and Stretchable Electronics: A Review of Materials, Processes, and Applications

Printed electronics is attracting a great deal of attention in both research and commercialization as it enables fabrication of large‐scale, low‐cost electronic devices on a variety of substrates. Printed electronics plays a critical role in facilitating widespread flexible electronics and more recently stretchable electronics. Conductive nanomaterials, such as metal nanoparticles and nanowires, carbon nanotubes, and graphene, are promising building blocks for printed electronics. Nanomaterial‐based printing technologies, formulation of printable inks, post‐printing treatment, and integration of functional devices have progressed substantially in the recent years. This review summarizes basic principles and recent development of common printing technologies, formulations of printable inks based on conductive nanomaterials, deposition of conductive inks via different printing techniques, and performance enhancement by using various sintering methods. While this review places emphasis on conductive nanomaterials, the printing techniques and ink formulations can be applied to other materials such as semiconducting and insulating nanomaterials. Moreover, some applications of printed flexible and stretchable electronic devices are reviewed to illustrate their potential. Finally, the future challenges and prospects for printing conductive nanomaterials are discussed.
An Empirical Study on the Interplay between Filesystems and SSD

This study presents a comprehensive empirical investigation on the interplay between actively-deployed file systems and an SSD. We test and analyze the performance of four widely used Linux file systems, which are ext2, ext3, XFS and Reiserfs, on an SSD with a range of different workloads. It is primarily intended to serve two purposes. One is that considering its widespread adoption trend, we are realistically motivated to have first-hand numbers of the actual performance of the emerging storage technology, especially in the contexts of daily deployment scenarios. The other goal is that we attempt to disclose the internal details behind the SSD's thin interface from a high-level perspective, totally different than those previous studies, which are typically micro-testonly. As a result of this study, we obtain several interesting and useful findings: (1) Generally, different file systems perform disparately on the SSD due to their various design principles, sometimes even with up to one order of magnitude of performance discrepancy. (2) File system format/mount options and workload characteristics have significant impacts on performance. (3) SSD would deliver optimal performance if used in a friendly manner. (4) Workloads, file systems and SSD interact in an intrinsically complicated way and in order to have optimal synergistic performance anticipation, users should seriously consider all of the three factors together, when setting up their SSD-based storage systems.
Multimedia Information Systems

This is the third year for the minitrack on Multimedia Information Systems at the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The presence of this minitrack reflects the importance and recent proliferation of multimedia applications. This proliferation has been driven by technological advances resulting in dramatic decreases in price/performance ratios in processing and storage technologies, video and audio input/output devices, imaging systems, and telecommunications. As it is not disputed that multimedia technology will be an indispensable aspect of computer/human interaction in the next-generation computing environment, approaches for applying multi-media technology and mechanisms for managing multimedia information in organizations are in demand.
Efficient Rotation-Scaling-Translation Parameter Estimation Based on the Fractal Image Model

This paper deals with area-based subpixel image registration under the rotation-isometric scaling-translation transformation hypothesis. Our approach is based on parametrical modeling of geometrically transformed textural image fragments and maximum-likelihood estimation of the transformation vector between them. Due to the parametrical approach based on the fractional Brownian motion modeling of the local fragments' texture, the proposed estimator MLfBm (ML stands for “maximum likelihood” and fBm stands for “fractal Brownian motion”) has the ability to better adapt to real image texture content compared with other methods relying on universal similarity measures such as mutual information or normalized correlation. The main benefits are observed when assumptions underlying the fBm model are fully satisfied, e.g., for isotropic normally distributed textures with stationary increments. Experiments on both simulated and real images and for high and weak correlations between registered images show that the MLfBm estimator offers significant improvement compared with other state-of-the-art methods. It reduces translation vector, rotation angle, and scaling factor estimation errors by a factor of about 1.75-2, and it decreases the probability of false match by up to five times. In addition, an accurate confidence interval for MLfBm estimates can be obtained from the Cramér-Rao lower bound on rotation-scaling-translation parameter estimation error. This bound depends on texture roughness, noise level in reference and template images, correlation between these images, and geometrical transformation parameters.
ITP: Description of the Interpretext System as Used for MUC-3

The Message Handler identifies an individual MUC message unit and controls the flow o f operations of the whole system for one message . It reads sentences, and sends one sentence at a time to the ITP Natural Language Understanding Module . It prunes temporal and locative expressions, which are added back later to modify events . The ITP NLU Module parses one sentence, and maps its parse tree onto a Discourse Representation Structure (DRS) [8],[1] . This DRS is added to the DRS for the whole segment . Temporal/locative reasoning, anaphora resolutio n and discourse segmentation operate upon this larger DRS. When reading sentences for one message is completed, the Message Handler receives the resulting analysis from the ITP NL U Module . The resulting Cognitive Model is a segmented discourse structure for the whole message . The Message Handler sends one discourse segment at a time to the MUC3 Template Reasonin g Module . It fills all of the possible templates based on the information in the segment . MUC3 Message Handler MUC 3 TST Text MUC 3 Template Reasoning Module
Effects of hydroquinone on retinal and vascular cells in vitro

Aim: To explore the molecular pathophysiology that might explain the epidemiologic association between cigarette smoke and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) by examining the effects of hydroquinone (HQ), a toxic compound present in high concentration in cigarette smoke-related tar, on human retinal pigment epithelial cells (ARPE-19), rat retinal neurosensory cells (R-28), and human microvascular endothelial cells (HMVEC). Materials and Methods: ARPE-19, R-28, and HMVEC were treated for 24 h with four different concentrations of HQ (500 μM, 200 μM, 100 μM, 50 μM). Cell viability, caspase-3/7 activation, DNA laddering patterns, and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) levels were analyzed. Results: At 50 μM HQ, R-28 cells showed a significant decrease in cell viability compared with the dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO)-treated controls. At the 100–500 μM concentrations, all three cell lines showed significant cell death (P < 0.001). In the ARPE-19, R-28, and HMVEC cultures, the caspase-3/7 activities were not increased at any of the HQ concentration. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the mechanism of cell death in all three cell lines was through non-apoptotic pathway. In addition, neuroretinal R-28 cells were more sensitive to HQ than the ARPE-19 and HMVEC cultures.
Image Classification Using a Mixture of Subspace Models

This paper introduces a novel method for image classification using local feature descriptors. The method utilizes linear subspaces of local descriptors for characterizing their distribution and extracting image features. The extracted features are transformed into more discriminative features by the linear discriminant analysis and employed for recognizing their categories. Experimental results demonstrate that this method is competitive with the Fisher kernel method in terms of classification accuracy.
The step space: example‐based footprint‐driven motion synthesis

Especially in a constrained virtual environment, precise control of foot placement during character locomotion is crucial to avoid collisions and to ensure a natural locomotion. In this paper, we present the step space: a novel technique for generating animations of a character walking over a set of desired foot steps in real‐time. We use an efficient greedy nearest‐neighbor approach and warp the resulting animation such that it adheres to both spatial and temporal constraints. We use smart aligning and inverse kinematics to ensure spatial constraints and time warping for temporal constraints. We will show that our technique can generate realistic locomotion animations very efficiently even though we impose many constraints on the animation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Does Counting Still Count? Revisiting the Security of Counting based User Authentication Protocols against Statistical Attacks

At NDSS 2012, Yan et al. analyzed the security of several challenge-response type user authentication protocols against passive observers, and proposed a generic counting based statistical attack to recover the secret of some counting based protocols given a number of observed authentication sessions. Roughly speaking, the attack is based on the fact that secret (pass) objects appear in challenges with a different probability from non-secret (decoy) objects when the responses are taken into account. Although they mentioned that a protocol susceptible to this attack should minimize this difference, they did not give details as to how this can be achieved barring a few suggestions. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by generalizing the attack with a much more comprehensive theoretical analysis. Our treatment is more quantitative which enables us to describe a method to theoretically estimate a lower bound on the number of sessions a protocol can be safely used against the attack. Our results include 1) two proposed fixes to make counting protocols practically safe against the attack at the cost of usability, 2) the observation that the attack can be used on non-counting based protocols too as long as challenge generation is contrived, 3) and two main design principles for user authentication protocols which can be considered as extensions of the principles from Yan et al. This detailed theoretical treatment can be used as a guideline during the design of counting based protocols to determine their susceptibility to this attack. The Foxtail protocol, one of the protocols analyzed by Yan et al., is used as a representative to illustrate our theoretical and experimental results.
Construction and Immunogenicity of Recombinant Adenovirus Vaccines Expressing the HMW1, HMW2, or Hia Adhesion Protein of Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae

ABSTRACT The objective of the present study was to construct and assess the immunogenicity of recombinant adenovirus vectors expressing the HMW1, HMW2, or Hia protein of nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi). These proteins are critical adhesins and potential protective antigens expressed by NTHi. Segments of the hmw1A and hmw2A structural genes that encode the distal one-half of mature HMW1 or HMW2 were cloned into the T7 expression vector pGEMEX-2. These constructs encoded stable HMW1 or HMW2 recombinant fusion protein that expresses B-cell epitopes common to most NTHi strains. A segment of the hia gene that encodes the surface-exposed portion of mature Hia was also cloned into pGEMEX-2. The resulting T7 gene 10 translational fusions were excised from the parent plasmids and cloned into the shuttle plasmid pDC316. Cotransfection of HEK 293 cells with the pDC316 derivatives and pBHGloxΔE1,3Cre resulted in the production of viral plaques from which recombinant adenoviruses expressing fusion proteins were recovered. Chinchillas immunized intraperitoneally with a single 108-PFU dose of either the HMW2 or Hia adenoviral construct developed high anti-HMW2 or anti-Hia serum antibody titers within 4 weeks of immunization. Chinchillas immunized intranasally with a single 107- to 109-PFU dose of the Hia adenoviral construct also developed high anti-Hia serum antibody titers within 8 weeks of immunization. Recombinant adenoviruses represent a promising system to induce mucosal and systemic immunity and protection against mucosal diseases such as otitis media. Recombinant adenoviruses expressing recombinant HMW1, HMW2, or Hia protein will be important new tools in NTHi vaccine development efforts.
RNA Encapsidation and Packaging in the Phleboviruses

The Bunyaviridae represents the largest family of segmented RNA viruses, which infect a staggering diversity of plants, animals, and insects. Within the family Bunyaviridae, the Phlebovirus genus includes several important human and animal pathogens, including Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV), severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome virus (SFTSV), Uukuniemi virus (UUKV), and the sandfly fever viruses. The phleboviruses have small tripartite RNA genomes that encode a repertoire of 5–7 proteins. These few proteins accomplish the daunting task of recognizing and specifically packaging a tri-segment complement of viral genomic RNA in the midst of an abundance of host components. The critical nucleation events that eventually lead to virion production begin early on in the host cytoplasm as the first strands of nascent viral RNA (vRNA) are synthesized. The interaction between the vRNA and the viral nucleocapsid (N) protein effectively protects and masks the RNA from the host, and also forms the ribonucleoprotein (RNP) architecture that mediates downstream interactions and drives virion formation. Although the mechanism by which all three genomic counterparts are selectively co-packaged is not completely understood, we are beginning to understand the hierarchy of interactions that begins with N-RNA packaging and culminates in RNP packaging into new virus particles. In this review we focus on recent progress that highlights the molecular basis of RNA genome packaging in the phleboviruses.