Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multiobjective Optimization of Control Trajectories for the Guidance of a Rail-bound Vehicle

Self-optimization refers to the ability of a mechatronic system to autonomously adapt the way it performs its functions to changing environmental and operational conditions or user demands. In this work we propose to use multiobjective optimal control to enable the self-optimization of the guidance of a rail-bound vehicle. We consider different strategies to reduce the computational cost of the optimization. Most importantly, a two-degree-of-freedom controller is used to separate optimal trajectory generation from disturbance compensation. Also, in order to solve the multiobjective optimization problem, an approximation of the entire set of optimal compromises of the objectives, the so-called Pareto set, is computed offline at design time. From this, we can derive a collection of weighting vectors that capture the best trade-off between the objectives for different situations. Given this set of preselected weights, for the online optimization, the objective function can be taken to be a weighted sum that best matches the situation at hand. For the guidance system we consider three objectives. Preliminary offline simulation results are presented.
Modelling , control and simulation of a micro electro-mechanical actuator ( MEMS ) for micro-gripper operation in DNA manipulation

This project deals with the modelling, control and simulation of a micro electro-mechanical actuator for micromechatronical tweezers in DNA-manipulation processes. I. THE MICRO-MECHATRONICAL PROCESS The manipulation of biological molecules by using micromechanical and optical devices such as: magnetic tweezers [1], [2], optical tweezers [3], AFM cantilevers [4] and microfibers [5], [6], are nowadays possible thanks to the impressive technological progresses of the last years. This type of manipulation is of particular interest for the characterization of basic properties of biological molecules such as DNA molecules [7]. Silicon nanotweezers, (Figure 1). Introduction Biocharacterizations on DNA Control of tweezers Conclusions Single molecule techniques Silicon nanotweezers for DNA experiments Design of the silicon nanotweezers
Mesenchymal Stem Cells from Fetal Heart Attenuate Myocardial Injury after Infarction: An In Vivo Serial Pinhole Gated SPECT-CT Study in Rats

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) have emerged as a potential stem cell type for cardiac regeneration after myocardial infarction (MI). Recently, we isolated and characterized mesenchymal stem cells derived from rat fetal heart (fC-MSC), which exhibited potential to differentiate into cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells and smooth muscle cells in vitro. In the present study, we investigated the therapeutic efficacy of intravenously injected fC-MSC in a rat model of MI using multi-pinhole gated SPECT-CT system. fC-MSC were isolated from the hearts of Sprague Dawley (SD) rat fetuses at gestation day 16 and expanded ex vivo. One week after induction of MI, 2×106 fC-MSC labeled with PKH26 dye (n = 6) or saline alone (n = 6) were injected through the tail vein of the rats. Initial in vivo tracking of 99mTc-labeled fC-MSC revealed a focal uptake of cells in the anterior mid-ventricular region of the heart. At 4 weeks of fC-MSC administration, the cells labeled with PKH26 were located in abundance in infarct/peri-infarct region and the fC-MSC treated hearts showed a significant increase in left ventricular ejection fraction and a significant decrease in the end diastolic volume, end systolic volume and left ventricular myo-mass in comparison to the saline treated group. In addition, fC-MSC treated hearts had a significantly better myocardial perfusion and attenuation in the infarct size, in comparison to the saline treated hearts. The engrafted PKH26-fC-MSC expressed cardiac troponin T, endothelial CD31 and smooth muscle sm-MHC, suggesting their differentiation into all major cells of cardiovascular lineage. The fC-MSC treated hearts demonstrated an up-regulation of cardio-protective growth factors, anti-fibrotic and anti-apoptotic molecules, highlighting that the observed left ventricular functional recovery may be due to secretion of paracrine factors by fC-MSC. Taken together, our results suggest that fC-MSC therapy may be a new therapeutic strategy for MI and multi-pinhole gated SPECT-CT system may be a useful tool to evaluate cardiac perfusion, function and cell tracking after stem cell therapy in acute myocardial injury setting.
Treating Jarrod: A core vocabulary approach

This paper is the final paper in a special issue of Advances in Speech-Language Pathology. The paper presents an intervention case study of a 7 year old child with severe phonological difficulties described in Holm and Crosbie (). Dodd et al. () hypothesised that Jarrod had an underlying deficit of generating phonological plans for word production and suggested that Jarrod would benefit from core vocabulary therapy. This paper reports on one block of core vocabulary therapy undertaken with Jarrod. Pre- and post-intervention measures showed that Jarrod made significant progress. His speech became more consistent and his accuracy (percent consonants correct) increased.
Toll‐like receptor engagement stimulates anti‐snRNP autoreactive B cells for activation

Autoreactive B cells are the source of pathogenic autoantibodies (autoAb) in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Previous studies have demonstrated that anti‐small nuclear ribonucleoprotein particles (snRNP) B cells from normal background mice tolerize T cells in the periphery and do not secrete autoAb. In this study, we examined whether these anti‐snRNP B cells can be activated for autoAb production by the engagement of Toll‐like receptors (TLR). Anti‐snRNP B cells proliferated vigorously and secreted abundant anti‐snRNP autoAb upon exposure to CpG or polyriboinosinic polyribocytidylic acid [poly (I:C)] in vitro. In addition, the costimulatory molecules CD80 and CD86 were up‐regulated. While both anti‐snRNP B cells and wild‐type B cells produced similar levels of IL‐6 and IL‐10, anti‐snRNP B cells secreted predominately IFN‐γ in response to CpG or poly (I:C) stimulation. Furthermore, we showed that in vivo engagement of TLR stimulated immature anti‐snRNP B cells to further differentiate and produce autoAb and form germinal centers. The activated anti‐snRNP B cells became expanded and migrated into the T‐B cell interface. Moreover, TLR engagement directly or indirectly activated autoreactive B cells via a CD4 T cell‐independent manner. These results provide in vitro and in vivo evidence that BCR/TLR co‐engagement promotes the activation of anti‐snRNP B cells for autoAb production.
A maximum likelihood approach to blind multiuser interference cancellation

This paper addresses the problem of blind multiple access interference (MAI) and intersymbol interference (ISI) suppression in direct sequence code division multiple access (DS CDMA) systems. A novel approach to obtain the coefficients of a linear receiver using the maximum likelihood (ML) principle is proposed. The method is blind because it only exploits the statistical features of the transmitted symbols and Gaussian noise in the channel. We demonstrate that an adequate linear constraint on these coefficients ensures that the desired user is extracted and the resulting linearly constrained maximum likelihood linear (LCMLL) receiver can be efficiently implemented using the iterative space alternating generalized expectation-maximization (SAGE) algorithm. In order to take advantage of the diversity inherent to multipath channels, we also introduce a blind RAKE multiuser receiver that proceeds in two steps. First, soft estimates of the desired user transmitted symbols are obtained from each propagation path using a bank of appropriate LCMLL receivers. Afterwards, these estimates are adequately combined to enhance the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR). Computer simulations show that the proposed blind algorithms for multiuser detection are near-far resistant and attain convergence using small blocks of data, thus outperforming existing linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) blind receivers.
Privacy Interfaces for Collaboration

Privacy is a hot topic today in the worlds of technology, ecommerce, and public policy. However, the vast majority of the public debate about privacy has pitted the consumer against corporations and citizens against their government in terms of collecting and sharing data. While this debate is an important one, researchers should not ignore the technological advances that are providing people with the ability to share information with friends, family, and coworkers in valuable ways. Unfortunately, these technological advances have significant potential to infringe on people’s privacy, and we don’t yet know how to create interfaces that facilitate the use of these technologies while preserving people’s privacy. This paper discusses the privacy problem and results from two lab studies that explored methods to overcome this problem.
When Love Is Blind

Three studies investigated the degree and maintenance of idealized images in the marriage relationship. The first study provided strong evidence that one's image of one's spouse is highly idealized vis-a-vis relevant comparison persons. Studies two and three provided evidence that idealization is maintained through a pattern of biased causal attributions, such that one's spouse is credited with responsibility for good behaviors whereas bad behaviors are regarded as situationally caused. The role that idealization serves in perpetuating marital constructions of reality (Berger & Kellner, 1964) is discussed.
Location-enhanced authentication using the IoT: because you cannot be in two places at once

User location can act as an additional factor of authentication in scenarios where physical presence is required, such as when making in-person purchases or unlocking a vehicle. This paper proposes a novel approach for estimating user location and modeling user movement using the Internet of Things (IoT). Our goal is to utilize its scale and diversity to estimate location more robustly, than solutions based on smartphones alone, and stop adversaries from using compromised user credentials (e.g., stolen keys, passwords, etc.), when sufficient evidence physically locates them elsewhere. To locate users, we leverage the increasing number of IoT devices carried and used by them and the smart environments that observe these devices. We also exploit the ability of many IoT devices to "sense" the user. To demonstrate our approach, we build a system, called Icelus. Our experiments with it show that it exhibits a smaller false-rejection rate than smartphone-based location-based authentication (LBA) and it rejects attackers with few errors (i.e., false acceptances).
Neural Potential of a Stem Cell Population in the Hair Follicle

The bulge region of the hair follicle serves as a repository for epithelial stem cells that can regenerate the follicle in each hair growth cycle and contribute to epidermis regeneration upon injury. Here we describe a population of multipotential stem cells in the hair follicle bulge; these cells can be identified by fluorescence in transgenic nestin-GFP mice. The morphological features of these cells suggest that they maintain close associations with each other and with the surrounding niche. Upon explantation, these cells can give rise to neurosphere-like structures in vitro. When these cells are permitted to differentiate, they produce several cell types, including cells with neuronal, astrocytic, oligodendrocytic, smooth muscle, adipocytic, and other phenotypes. Furthermore, upon implantation into the developing nervous system of chick, these cells generate neuronal cells in vivo. We used transcriptional profiling to assess the relationship between these cells and embryonic and postnatal neural stem cells and to compare them with other stem cell populations of the bulge. Our results show that nestin-expressing cells in the bulge of the hair follicle have stem cell-like properties, are multipotent, and can effectively generate cells of neural lineage in vitro and in vivo.
Device therapy in patients with heart failure and preserved ejection fraction (HFPEF): a new frontier?

Implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) have become standard therapy for patients with poor systolic function and low left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), most often due to ischaemic heart disease, but also non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy. Heart failure patients with a preserved ejection fraction (HFPEF) have an almost similar poor prognosis as those with a low LVEF, but treatment options for these patients are limited. Moreover, very little is known about the mode of death in these patients. Often severe left ventricular hypertrophy is present with subendocardial ischaemia, which may be the substrate of ventricular arrhythmias and sudden death. Familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is known to be associated with a high incidence of sudden cardiac death and ICD therapy is indicated in many of these patients. ICD therapy is not currently indicated in patients with HFPEF but—given the substrate—it is tempting to speculate that ICD therapy might be able to reduce mortality in this group of patients as well. Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) has been shown to reduce mortality and improve symptoms in patients with systolic heart failure (i.e. reduced LVEF) and electrical and/or mechanical dyssynchrony. While it was initially thought that CRT should be restricted to patients with severe symptoms (NYHA functional class III or IV), recent randomized studies show that CRT is also effective in patients with few symptoms. Before these randomized trials were performed, evidence from one of the previous landmark trials showed that some patients with significantly better functional class (who were inadvertently included) showed a similar outcome compared with more severely symptomatic patients. This substudy from CARE-HF also highlights that large trials can deviate from their specified inclusion criteria in a significant proportion of patients, especially in fairly subjective parameters such as functional class. LVEF at first glance would appear to be an objectively measured parameter but there are different methods such as echocardiography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and nuclear imaging, and these methods also yield different results and have intraobserver and interobserver variability. In the present issue of the European Journal of Heart Failure, two studies address the use of CRT in patients with ejection fractions that are higher than in the current guideline recommendations. Chung et al. analysed echocardiograms performed in the PROSPECT trial and found that 24% of patients had an LVEF above 35%. Even though this group of patients had lower LV volumes, shorter QRS, and more often had an ischaemic aetiology (which is generally assumed to respond less favourably to CRT), outcome was not
Ontology-based information selection

Technology in the field of digital media generates huge amounts of non-textual information, audio, video, and images, along with more familiar textual information. The potential for exchange and retrieval of information is vast and daunting. The key problem in achieving efficient and user-friendly retrieval is the development of a search mechanism to guarantee delivery of minimal irrelevant information (high precision) while insuring relevant information is not overlooked (high recall). The traditional solution employs keyword-based search. The only documents retrieved are those containing user specified keywords. But many documents convey desired semantic information without containing these keywords. This limitation is frequently addressed through query expansion mechanisms based on the statistical co-occurrence of terms. Recall is increased, but at the expense of deteriorating precision. One can overcome this problem by indexing documents according to meanings rather than words, although this will entail a way of converting words to meanings and the creation of an index structure. We have solved the problem of an index structure through the design and implementation of a concept-based model using domain-dependent ontologies. An ontology is a collection of concepts and their interrelationships, which provide an abstract view of an application domain. With regard to the converting words to meaning the key issue is to identify appropriate concepts that both describes and identifies documents, as well as language employed in user requests. This dissertation describes an automatic mechanism for selecting these concepts. An important novelty is a scalable disambiguation algorithm which prunes irrelevant concepts and allows relevant ones to associate with documents and participate in query generation. We also propose an automatic query expansion mechanism that deals with user requests expressed in natural language. This mechanism generates database queries with appropriate and relevant expansion through knowledge encoded in ontology form. Focusing on audio data, we have constructed a demonstration prototype. We have experimentally and analytically shown that our model, compared to keyword search, achieves a significantly higher degree of precision and recall. The techniques employed can be applied to the problem of information selection in all media types.
Post-traumatic stress disorder: The development of effective psychological treatments

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has only relatively recently been introduced into the diagnostic classification of mental disorders. Building on advances in the treatment of other anxiety disorders, a range of effective psychological treatments for PTSD has been developed. The most effective of these treatments focus on the patient's memory for the traumatic event and its meaning. This paper briefly reviews the currently available evidence for these treatments. It then illustrates the process of developing effective psychological treatments by discussing how a combination of phenomenological, experimental and treatment development studies, and theoretical considerations was used to develop a trauma-focused cognitive–behavioral treatment, cognitive therapy (CT) for PTSD. This treatment program builds on Ehlers & Clark's (2000) model of PTSD, which specifies two core cognitive abnormalities in PTSD. First, people with chronic PTSD show idiosyncratic personal meanings (appraisals) of the trauma and/or its sequelae that lead to a sense of serious current threat. Second, the nature of the trauma memory explains the occurrence of re-experiencing symptoms. It is further proposed that the idiosyncratic appraisals motivate a series of dysfunctional behaviors (such as safety-seeking behaviors) and cognitive strategies (such as thought suppression and rumination) that are intended to reduce the sense of current threat, but maintain the problem by preventing change in the appraisals and trauma memory, and/or lead to increases in symptoms. CT addresses the cognitive abnormalities and maintaining behaviors in an individualized, but focused, way. Four randomized controlled trials and two dissemination studies showed that CT for PTSD is acceptable and effective.
Anorexia Nervosa and Antipsychotics: How to Apply Research Findings to the Adolescent Population

The physical and psychological symptoms of anorexia nervosa (AN) are intertwined, each affecting each other and each a focus of recovery. Although no FDA approved pharmacotherapy exists for AN, the use of second generation antipsychotics (SGAs) in AN treatment has exponentially increased in the past decade (Fazeli et al., 2012). Frequently, clinicians use SGAs in an attempt to capitalize on the side effects of increased appetite and weight gain often seen with this class of medication. Although it is possible that medication might improve treatment outcomes as part of a multidisciplinary approach initiated during nutritional rehabilitation, there is a lack of data to support pharmacotherapies in this patient population. Recent research has attempted to examine whether (SGAs) are effi cacious for weight restoration in AN. However, the results of research studies thus far are inconsistent and randomized trials looking at outcomes beyond weight increase might better demonstrate the benefi ts of using antipsychotic medication. We will discuss options for future trial designs to test the benefi ts of antipsychotic medications as part of a multidimensional treatment plan.
SP-NUCA: a cost effective dynamic non-uniform cache architecture

This paper presents a simple but effective method to reduce on-chip access latency and improve core isolation in CMP Non-Uniform Cache Architectures (NUCA). The paper introduces a feasible way to allocate cache blocks according to the access pattern. Each L2 bank is dynamically partitioned at set level in private and shared content. Simply by adjusting the replacement algorithm, we can place private data closer to its owner processor. In contrast, independently of the accessing processor, shared data is always placed in the same position. This approach is capable of reducing on-chip latency without significantly sacrificing hit rates or increasing implementation cost of a conventional static NUCA. Additionally, most of the unnecessary interference between cores in private accesses is removed. To support the architectural decisions adopted and provide a comparative study, a comprehensive evaluation framework is employed. The workbench is composed of a full system simulator, and a representative set of multithreaded and multiprogrammed workloads. With this infrastructure, different alternatives for the coherence protocol, replacement policies, and cache utilization are analyzed to find the optimal proposal. We conclude that the cost for a feasible implementation should be closer to a conventional static NUCA, and significantly less than a dynamic NUCA. Finally, a comparison with static and dynamic NUCA is presented. The simulation results suggest that on average the mechanism proposed could improve system performance of a static NUCA and idealized dynamic NUCA by 16% and 6% respectively.
The clinical and genetic spectrum of the Holt-Oram syndrome (heart-hand syndrome)

BACKGROUND The Holt-Oram syndrome is an autosomal dominant condition characterized by skeletal abnormalities that are frequently accompanied by congenital cardiac defects. The cause of these disparate clinical features is unknown. To identify the chromosomal location of the Holt-Oram syndrome gene, we performed clinical and genetic studies. METHODS Two large families with the Holt-Oram syndrome were evaluated by radiography of the hands, electrocardiography, and transthoracic echocardiography. Genetic-linkage analyses were performed with polymorphic DNA loci dispersed throughout the genome to identify a locus that was inherited with the Holt-Oram syndrome in family members. RESULTS A total of 19 members of Family A had Holt-Oram syndrome with mild-to-moderate skeletal deformities, including triphalangeal thumbs and carpal-bone dysmorphism. All affected members of Family A had moderate-to-severe congenital cardiac abnormalities, such as ventricular or atrial septal defects or atrioventricular-canal defects. Eighteen members of a second kindred (Family B) had Holt-Oram syndrome with moderate-to-severe skeletal deformities, including phocomelia. Twelve of the affected members had no cardiac defects; six had only atrial septal defects. Genetic analyses demonstrated linkage of the disease in each family to polymorphic loci on the long arm of chromosome 12 (combined multipoint lod score, 16.8). These data suggest odds greater than 10(16):1 that the genetic defect for Holt-Oram syndrome is present on the long arm of chromosome 12 (12q2). CONCLUSIONS Mutations in a gene on chromosome 12q2 can produce a wide range of disease phenotypes characteristic of the Holt-Oram syndrome. This gene has an important role in both skeletal and cardiac development.