Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SNARE specificity in membrane protein traffic

Recent findings indicate that there is a role for SNAREs in ion channel regulation. With the discovery of the vesicle trafficking SNARE protein NtSYP121 came the development of the predicted cytosolic domain fragment of the protein. This Sp2 fragment was found in studies to block the responses of guard cell K+ and Cl- channels to ABA. These observations raised questions about the role of SNAREs in ion channel control. In this study, the effects of several plasma membrane SNARE Sp2s and one PVC-localised SNARE Sp2 on the K+ channel KAT1 were investigated. The experiments made use of GFP- and HA- tagged KAT1 to observe the traffic and localisation of KAT1 in tobacco cells. Acetylsalicylic acid was also used to combat the effects of the wound response activated during slide preparation. Coexpression of KAT1 with SYP121-Sp2, SYP122-Sp2 and SYP71-Sp2 resulted in a disruption of trafficking and in microdomains becoming diffuse and mobile at the plasma membrane. No disruption in trafficking or localisation of KAT1 was seen when coexpressed with the PVC-localised SNARE fragment SYP21-Sp2. None of the Sp2s used had any effect on the H+-ATPase PMA2. These results offer evidence of a role for plasma membrane SNAREs in trafficking and anchoring of KAT1 to the plasma membrane.
CHALLENGES FOR IMPLEMENTING OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES BY TEACHERS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are facing a number of problems during the last decades: the need to update the curricula to make it compatible with the similar ones from other national and European universities; demand to update the content and the pedagogical approach due to knowledge, technological and research development. Open Educational Resources (OER) might be a sound strategy for institutions to meet these challenges. At the same time OER are themselves one of the challenges that the teachers are faced with. OER could be implemented in courses in different ways, depending on the types of OER and the educational philosophy adopted by the teachers. The paper describes some challenges for implementing Open Educational Resources by teachers in Higher Education in Moldova: the level of awareness on availability and usage of OER; fair use matters; quality assurance of resources; pedagogical approaches for implementing OER into teaching and learning. The paper also grasps the issues of the digital divide that emerge when investigating these challenges. The judgment is based on the literature analysis and on the author’s teaching experience within courses for initial and continuous professional teachers’ training.
K NOWLEDGE SHARING AND MANAGEMENT IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN TEAMS USING A P ROJECT W EBSITE

In this paper the sharing of knowledge in architectural design teams using a Project Website is discussed. The results of multiple case studies, being part of a recently finished PhD research project to communication and performance of design teams using a Project Website, show that systems for sharing of knowledge in such teams are hard to change and better systems are difficult to implement for various reasons. Sharing of knowledge in such teams is important for collective understanding of a design during its development, to derive insight and overview on progress of design and to prevent misunderstanding and failures. Knowledge about a design is usually, implicitly stored in the participating designers heads, and explicitly as paper and (nowadays) electronic information on drawings, images, and documents. To improve knowledge sharing collectively during the design process, team communication and collaboration is essential. The best well known means for collective communication are face-to-face meetings and dialogues because of their possibilities for interaction and reaching consensus. The use of a Project Website as a new means for collective communication and information sharing is advocated by its Vendors for greatly increasing collective communication and stimulating the sharing of design knowledge. The expectations of vendors are directly related to the characteristics of the means being an information vault that contains all the latest designs produced with the registration of owners and updaters and preventing failures by double and outdated information. The information exchange flows and the frequency of the use of means and tools in these teams were observed before, during and after the introduction of the Project Website. The outcomes of the multiple case studies show that full adoption of the Project Web did not happen and team members still used old, trusted systems despite various management interventions to stimulate use of the Project Web. Architects and structural designers showed to be slowest in adoption or did not adopt the new means, easily developing incongruent technological frames for use. Basically it was concluded that the most stimulating management intervention during the adoption of the Project Website, were collective workshops, organized per team in which knowledge sharing could be optimized to show the benefits of the new means to the participants in daily work. The workshops resulted in substantial increase of adoption of the Project Website but not full adoption. Finally the development of incongruent technological frames in groups and levels in the organization and rivalry of tools will be discussed because of their importance for adoption of a new means for sharing knowledge by such groups with a high number of creative, visionary, abstract thinking
SURVIVING ARCHITECTUREAN EXPLORATION OF THE DESIGN STUDIO’S HIDDENCURICCULUM

the research here tries to expose the less desired habit and attitude patterns and believes promoted by the studio culture, developed mainly to keep up with the stressful and demanding workload. The resulted figures reflect the negative impact it has on the students’ health and wellbeing. The research also provides insights into the current students’ flow pattern, revealing the occurrence likelihood of the most stimulating, relieving and enduring mental state that might help maintain positive engagement with the act of creation emotionally, psychological; and physically. A qualitative research is carried out in the context of the faculty of architecture, design and built environment, Beirut Arab University, Lebanon. In this study, the literature about the studio culture, hidden curriculum and the flow aided drafting the outline of a survey conducted among a sample of 303 undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 24 attending the same faculty. factual information about the students’ wellbeing is then linked to their expected mental disorder risks, providing an overview and summary of key analytical points of the survey. The findings place a question mark over the emotional wellbeing and mental health of the next generation of architects.
Multiplexed Illumination for Classifying Visually Similar Objects

We propose the use of multiplexed illumination to enable the classification of visually similar objects that cannot normally be distinguished. We construct a compact red, green, blue, and near-infrared light stage and develop a method to jointly select informative illumination patterns and training a classifier that uses the resulting images. We use the light stage to model training samples and synthesize noise-accurate images that drive the training process and a time-efficient greedy pattern selection scheme. The system delivers fast, accurate classification of previously indistinguishable samples, outperforming fixed-illuminant and conventional noise-optimal patterns. This work has potential applications spanning forgery detection and quality control in agriculture and manufacturing.
Fundamental Limits of Byzantine Agreement

Byzantine agreement (BA) is a distributed consensus problem where $n$ processors want to reach agreement on an $\ell$-bit message or value, but up to $t$ of the processors are dishonest or faulty. The challenge of this BA problem lies in achieving agreement despite the presence of dishonest processors who may arbitrarily deviate from the designed protocol. The quality of a BA protocol is measured primarily by using the following three parameters: the number of processors $n$ as a function of $t$ allowed (resilience); the number of rounds (round complexity); and the total number of communication bits (communication complexity). For any error-free BA protocol, the known lower bounds on those three parameters are $3t + 1$, $t + 1$ and $\Omega(\max\{n\ell, nt\})$, respectively, where a protocol that is guaranteed to be correct in all executions is said to be error free. In this work, by using coding theory we design a coded BA protocol (termed as COOL) that achieves consensus on an $\ell$-bit message with optimal resilience, asymptotically optimal round complexity, and asymptotically optimal communication complexity when $\ell \geq t\log n$, simultaneously. The proposed COOL is an error-free and deterministic BA protocol that does not rely on cryptographic technique such as signatures, hashing, authentication and secret sharing (signature free). It is secure against computationally unbounded adversary who takes full control over the dishonest processors (information-theoretic secure). We show that our results can also be extended to the setting of Byzantine broadcast, aka Byzantine generals problem, where the honest processors want to agree on the message sent by a leader who is potentially dishonest. This work reveals that coding is an effective approach for achieving the fundamental limits of Byzantine agreement and its variants.
FastSecAgg: Scalable Secure Aggregation for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

Recent attacks on federated learning demonstrate that keeping the training data on clients' devices does not provide sufficient privacy, as the model parameters shared by clients can leak information about their training data. A 'secure aggregation' protocol enables the server to aggregate clients' models in a privacy-preserving manner. However, existing secure aggregation protocols incur high computation/communication costs, especially when the number of model parameters is larger than the number of clients participating in an iteration -- a typical scenario in federated learning. In this paper, we propose a secure aggregation protocol, FastSecAgg, that is efficient in terms of computation and communication, and robust to client dropouts. The main building block of FastSecAgg is a novel multi-secret sharing scheme, FastShare, based on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), which may be of independent interest. FastShare is information-theoretically secure, and achieves a trade-off between the number of secrets, privacy threshold, and dropout tolerance. Riding on the capabilities of FastShare, we prove that FastSecAgg is (i) secure against the server colluding with 'any' subset of some constant fraction (e.g. $\sim10\%$) of the clients in the honest-but-curious setting; and (ii) tolerates dropouts of a 'random' subset of some constant fraction (e.g. $\sim10\%$) of the clients. FastSecAgg achieves significantly smaller computation cost than existing schemes while achieving the same (orderwise) communication cost. In addition, it guarantees security against adaptive adversaries, which can perform client corruptions dynamically during the execution of the protocol.
Making money selling “maybe” - the pricing of predictions : a literature review of pricing models of goods and services

Advances in technology is a game changer for business. Today we can predict faster, cheaper and better than ever before (McKinsey, 2018), which enables humans to work smarter and faster. The technological development changes the way the world works and how businesses create, capture and deliver value. Apple transformed the music industry when they in 2003 introduced the iTunes Music Store (Apple, 2003), distributing songs separately online and sidelining the traditional CD. Using technology, they found a new way to deliver their product. When Spotify later launched in 2008, also they made individual songs available (Spotify, 2019). Changing the game was the way they charged their customers. Instead of charging for each individual song, Spotify charged a monthly fee in exchange for access to all available music files. A part of businesses maximizing their benefits from new technological opportunities lies in their pricing scheme. As technology advances and machines can do what humans do, predictions will become both better and cheaper. As a result, the use in businesses will accelerate in the time to come. The main objective of this thesis is to find out how pricing models of goods and services can be used in the pricing of AI-based predictions. Through a literature review of pricing, we identify pricing models guiding the seller in how to charge the buyer. Going through 1,745 articles we identify three broader categories; unit-based, subscription-based and output-dependent pricing. Reviewing 60 articles in detail we placed subcategories of pricing within these categories, forming a picture of the pricing literature from 2000 until today. Combining pricing models found in the literature review with characteristics of predictions we create a model for decision making. Dependent on willingness to pay and degree of judgment needed for the given prediction, we suggest a suitable pricing model. With this we aim to help the decision maker make better and more substantiated choices. In the case of low willingness to pay we suggest subscription-based pricing regardless of the degree of judgment needed. As for high willingness to pay we recommend prediction-sellers to use output-dependent pricing in the state of a low degree of judgment needed and unit-based in the state of high.
Is Corruption ‘Grease’ Or ‘Sand’ in the Wheels of Foreign Direct Investment Inflows in the South Asian Economies?

The objective of this study is to investigate whether the corruption serves as â€˜greaseâ€™ or â€˜sandâ€™ in the wheels of Foreign Direct Investment inflow in South Asian Countries, namely Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh during the period from 2002 to 2018. Using annual time series panel data, the Random Effect method is employed for the analysis. The results derived from the analysis suggest that FDI inflows improve when the perception of the investors over the level of corruption in these countries is favorable to the investment. Therefore, improvement in the perception of corruption towards clean facilitates the foreign direct investment inflow in these countries.
Toward a Comprehensive Platform for IoT Applications in Vietnam Using Machine to Machine Communication

- The Internet of Things (IoT) applications like Home Automation (HA) or Smart Grid presents one of the biggest growth potential in the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication today. Thanks to M2M technologies’ advances recently, the sensors/actuators and smart meters are expected not only require human intervention in sensing environmental parameters, meter the energy/water consumption level and send them back to central platform for processing but also give out proper & automatic responses to the situation. However, there are still many challenges in designing communication protocols and platform to exchange and share of collected information and other various constrains such as the variety of end devices, real-time nature and extra-low power consumption. This article investigates on a number of existing communication protocols and platforms that can be adopted for M2M application development and deployment in Vietnam conditions.
Optimal integration of electric vehicles in smart grids with renewables and battery storage systems under uncertainty

There has been a huge trend to integrate Renewable Energies (REs) and Electric Vehicles (EVs) into energy networks (Figure 1). This is mostly due to the shrinking price of their application and the increasingly strict emission policy. However, the integration of REs and EVs brings new challenges to the network operation [1]. For instance, a considerable amount of REs cannot be accommodated in the network and thus has to be curtailed due to technical limitations [2-5]. For overcoming this problem, Battery Storage Systems (BSSs) can be used to store the surplus energy and consequently increase economic benefits [4].
Do Financial Reforms and Financial Development Enhance Merchandise Trade Performance? Evidence from Eastern and Southern African Countries

Abstract This paper analyses how financial reforms, financial development and trade flows are related in seventeen selected Eastern and Southern African countries. The paper measures trade flows in terms of the shares of exports and imports in world totals for each country, while financial development is proxied by domestic credit to the private sector as a proportion of GDP. A trend analysis of these variables is buttressed by the computation of correlation coefficients. The overall outcome is that financial reforms can be supported as catalysts for financial development which leads to increases in the flows of merchandise trade among ESA countries. The associations appear stronger for exports than they are for imports. However, the exact nature of the associations (as well as their implications on trade balances) tend to vary across countries.
Estimation of Motion Parameters for Ultrasound Images Using Motion Blur Invariants

The quality of fetal ultrasound images is significantly affected by motion blur while the imaging system requires low motion quality in order to capture accurate data. This can be achieved with a mathematical model of motion blur in time or frequency domain. We propose a new model of linear motion blur in both frequency and moment domain to analyse the invariant features of blur convolution for ultrasound images. Moreover, the model also helps to provide an estimation of motion parameters for blur length and angle. These outcomes might imply great potential of this invariant method in ultrasound imaging application.
Ballistically emplaced impact melt around the lunar crater Pierazzo 1 2

13 Impact melt flows are observed to emerge from the continuous and discontinuous ejecta 14 blanket of the 9 km lunar crater Pierazzo, from the crater rim to more than 40 km away 15 from the center of the crater. Our mapping and modeling results suggest that melt can be 16 incorporated into ejecta and emplaced ballistically. It also confirms the idea that impact 17 melt can travel beyond the continuous ejecta blanket. Our analysis is based on the 18 identification of established melt morphology for these in-ejecta flows, and their 19 occurrence on 6 to 18 slopes too shallow for dry granular flows beginning at rest. We 20 also compared the fractal dimension of the flow boundaries to established melt and granular 21 flows, providing more support for these flows being melt-rich instead of granular in origin. 22 Ejected melt flows are noted within just 1.5% of the mapping area, suggesting that 23 the surface expression of impact melt in the extended ejecta around craters of this size is 24 rare. We hypothesize that a mix of solid and molten ejecta impacts the ground together and 25 continues to travel across the surrounding terrain at speeds high enough to maintain 26 turbulent mixing. This quickly quenches the melt present, preventing most coherent melt 27 pockets from settling out within the majority of the extended ejecta deposit, unless the melt 28 ‘pocket’ is especially large. As most of the flows mapped in this work occur on crater29 facing slopes, the development of defined melt flows within ejecta deposits might be 30 facilitated by influence of high crater-facing topography to stall or impede the ejecta flow 31 soon after it makes ground contact, preventing the continuation of turbulent mixing. These 32 surface expressions of melt within ejecta blankets suggest that melt rock masses can exist 33 within ejecta, creating a heterogeneous deposit. 34
EMPATHY AND IDEA GENERATION: EXPLORING THE DESIGN OF A VIRTUAL REALITY CONTROLLER FOR REHABILITATION PURPOSES

The paper explores the ideation and design of a Virtual Reality (VR) proof-of-concept controller for rehabilitation of users with limited physical mobility (upper-limb disability). An existing tracker solution is used to map input (actions and movements) in VR. The main challenge was integrating some of the default functionalities existing in current commercial VR controllers, while providing an empathic setup and a use-case for disability rehabilitation, as well as keeping the controller compact, lightweight, and handheld. The prototyping process followed a human-centred explorative design idea generation. Only limited functionality of existing commercial controllers was maintained, with the feasibility and readiness for implementing additional functionalities to use the controller with existing applications and future use cases. An experiment was performed to investigate the usability of the system and the effectiveness and reliability of the controller in empathic re-mapping of real-life disability to VR.
University of Groningen Generation of storm runoff and the role of animals in a small upland headwater stream Meijles,

This paper illustrates the hillslope storm runoff mechanisms and the effects of livestock in upland areas. The research site was a small upland catchment area on Dartmoor (Southwest England). It was shown that overland flow on the tracks and paths created by animals in the area responded very rapidly to rainfall, in the same order of magnitude as stream runoff. Livestock stocking densities were significantly different in different vegetation compositions. The topsoil bulk density values, moisture content and spatial track densities were significantly higher in areas associated with higher stocking rates. These areas reach a wetness threshold at an earlier state than surrounding, drier areas. When isolated, the wetter areas start discharging water only locally into downslope drier areas, but are not contributing to storm runoff in the stream. In areas with a high density of animal tracks, water is being discharged onto the track directly. The tracks comprised an ephemeral hydrological network contributing storm runoff to the stream quickly after rainfall. They transmit water rapidly downhill, short-circuiting local areas, reducing runoff lag time and increasing storm stream runoff. The runoff producing mechanism, in which soil conditions, vegetation types and path networks are a complex interplay of contributing factors, may be relevant to other uplands, especially when they act as water reservoir or source area for possible flooding events. Therefore, upland management policies need to take into account that the heterogeneity of hillslopes at local scales have implications for storm runoff at the catchment scale.