Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-time automatic insertion of accents in French text

Automatic Accent Insertion (AAI) is the problem of re-inserting accents (diacritics) into a text where they are missing. Unaccented French texts are still quite common in electronic media, as a result of a long history of character encoding problems and the lack of well-established conventions for typing accented characters on computer keyboards. An AAI method for French is presented, based on a statistical language model. Next, it is shown how this AAI method can be used to do real-time accent insertions within a word processing environment, making it possible to type in French without having to type accents. Various mechanisms are proposed to improve the performance of real-time AAI, by exploiting online corrections made by the user. Experiments show that, on average, such a system produces less than one accentuation error for every 200 words typed.
Space-time chip equalization for space-time coded downlink CDMA

In downlink CDMA, frequency-selectivity destroys the orthogonality of the user signals and introduces multi-user interference (MUI). A space-time chip equalizer is an attractive tool to restore the orthogonality of the user signals and suppress MUI. Recently, efficient pilot-based methods have been developed to design such a space-time chip equalizer. In this paper, we show how these pilot-based methods can be generalized to space-time coded downlink CDMA. As space-time coded downlink CDMA transmission scheme, we consider the conventional single-antenna downlink CDMA transmission scheme followed by a space-time block code for single-carrier block transmissions that exploits the maximum achievable diversity in a frequency-selective fading channel. Simulation results show improved performance over a pilot-based space-time RAKE-type receiver applied to the space-time coded downlink CDMA transmission schemes that were proposed for the UMTS and IS-2000 W-CDMA standards.
Myelin plasticity, neural activity, and traumatic neural injury

The possibility that adult organisms exhibit myelin plasticity has recently become a topic of great interest. Many researchers are exploring the role of myelin growth and adaptation in daily functions such as memory and motor learning. Here we consider evidence for three different potential categories of myelin plasticity: the myelination of previously bare axons, remodeling of existing sheaths, and the removal of a sheath with replacement by a new internode. We also review evidence that points to the importance of neural activity as a mechanism by which oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) are cued to differentiate into myelinating oligodendrocytes, which may potentially be an important component of myelin plasticity. Finally, we discuss demyelination in the context of traumatic neural injury and present an argument for altering neural activity as a potential therapeutic target for remyelination following injury. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol 78: 108–122, 2018.
Nutzerkommentare in Onlinevideos

Onlinevideos bringen in heutigen Videoportalen eine enorme Menge an Nutzerkommentaren hervor. Die Meinungen über deren Mehrwert gehen dabei stark auseinander. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurden mehrere tausend YouTube Kommentare auf ihr Präsentationsverhalten hin analysiert und ausgewertet. Es wurde untersucht, wie gut die Kommentare von YouTube-Videos von den anderen Nutzern wahrgenommen werden können und welche Leserzahl sich daraus für den einzelnen Beitrag ergibt.
Model-Based Development of an Adaptive Vehicle Stability Control System ∗

: Safety and availability are major requirements for embedded systems in modern vehicles. However, in the automotive domain, neither conventional shutdown mechanisms nor full-ﬂedged redundancy are appropriate means for handling faults such as failures of sensors and actuators. A suitable means for achieving the high requirements on safety and availability at low costs is graceful degradation by adapting the functionality of a system to the current driving situation and the available resources. However, adaptation signiﬁcantly complicates the development of embedded systems. In this paper, we present an approach to the model-based design of adaptive embedded systems that allows coping with the increased complexity posed by adaptation. Furthermore, we show how the obtained models can be formally veriﬁed and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by applying it to a vehicle stability control system.
Effector Functions of Donor‐Reactive CD8 Memory T Cells Are Dependent on ICOS Induced During Division in Cardiac Grafts

Alloreactive T‐cell memory is present in every transplant recipient and endangers graft survival. Even in the absence of known sensitizing exposures, heterologous immunity and homeostatic T‐cell proliferation generate ‘endogenous' memory T cells with donor‐reactivity. We have recently shown that endogenous donor‐reactive CD8 memory T cells infiltrate murine cardiac allografts within hours of reperfusion and amplify early posttransplant inflammation by producing IFN‐γ. Here, we have tested the role of ICOS co‐stimulation in eliciting effector function from these memory T cells. ICOS is not expressed on the cell surface of circulating CD8 memory T cells but is rapidly upregulated during cell division within the allograft parenchyma. Donor‐reactive CD8 memory T‐cell infiltration, proliferation and ICOS expression are regulated by donor class I MHC molecule expression. ICOS blockade significantly reduced IFN‐γ production and other proinflammatory functions of the activated CD8 memory T cells. Our data demonstrate that this induction of ICOS expression within peripheral tissues is an important feature of CD8 memory T‐cell activation and identify ICOS as a specific target for neutralizing proinflammatory functions of endogenous CD8 memory T cells.
Distinct Mechanism of Helicobacter pylori-mediated NF-κB Activation between Gastric Cancer Cells and Monocytic Cells*

NF-κB is a critical regulator of genes involved in inflammation. Gastric epithelial cells and macrophages are considered the main sources of pro-inflammatory cytokines. We investigated NF-κB activation by Helicobacter pylori in MKN45 gastric epithelial cells and THP-1 monocytic cells. Although, cag pathogenicity island (PAI)-positiveH. pylori (wild type) activated NF-κB in both cells, isogenic mutant of cagE (ΔcagE) activated it only in THP-1 cells. Supernatant from the wild type culture could activate NF-κB in THP-1 cells but not in MKN45 cells. High density cDNA array analysis revealed that mRNA expression of NF-κB-regulated genes such as interleukin (IL)-8, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα), and IL-1β was significantly up-regulated by the wild type in both cells, whereas it was up-regulated by ΔcagE only in THP-1 cells. Experiments using CD14-neutralizing antibody and IL-1 receptor-associated kinase (IRAK) assay showed that both wild type and ΔcagE H. pylori activated NF-κB through CD14 and IRAK in THP-1 cells but not in MKN45 cells. Macrophages from C3H/HeJ mice carrying point mutation in the Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) gene showed decreased NF-κB activation and TNFα secretion compared with C3H/HeN mouse macrophage when treated with H. pylori. In conclusion, H. pylori-induced NF-κB activation in epithelial cells is dependent on cag PAI and contact but does not involve CD14 and IRAK, whereas in macrophage/monocytic cells it is independent of cag PAI or contact but involves CD14 and TLR4.
Phototoxicity of Herbal Plants and Herbal Products

Plants are used by humans in daily life in many different ways, including as food, herbal medicines, and cosmetics. Unfortunately, many natural plants and their chemical constituents are photocytotoxic and photogenotoxic, and these phototoxic phytochemicals are widely present in many different plant families. To date, information concerning the phototoxicity and photogenotoxicity of many plants and their chemical constituents is limited. In this review, we discuss phototoxic plants and their major phototoxic constituents; routes of human exposure; phototoxicity of these plants and their constituents; general mechanisms of phototoxicity of plants and phototoxic components; and several representative phototoxic plants and their photoactive chemical constituents.
Learning Precise Spike Times in a Two-Variable Spiking Neural Model

We evaluate the ability of reinforcement comparison learning to induce multispike patterns with sub-millisecond precision in a two-variable spiking neural model. We assume that a single reinforcement signal derived from the fit of the produced spike pattern with a target pattern is communicated with the neural model following production of all spikes of the pattern. We find that arbitrary multispike patterns can be learned with a precision of 0.2 msec. Patterns of one to five spikes can be learned with a probability of success ranging from 20% to 70%.
Iterative architecture for value iteration using memristors

Memristors promise higher device density and design flexibility. Besides utilizing memristors for digital memory, another promising avenue for adoption is the advancement of neural network circuits capable of learning. Neural network implementations with memristors have been proposed, including memristor synaptic training methodologies. This work highlights applications of a neural learning methodology inspired by Q-learning. Memristors are used as analog storage elements to store a large Q-table. The method is qualified with a maze problem in order to show that the proposed network can be used to learn to approximate an optimal path to solving the maze problem. Brief results highlighting the methodology on a maze problem and discussion on generating random keys are provided. This work combines model-free reinforcement learning with neural networks.
Deep Gradient Compression: Reducing the Communication Bandwidth for Distributed Training

Large-scale distributed training requires significant communication bandwidth for gradient exchange that limits the scalability of multi-node training, and requires expensive high-bandwidth network infrastructure. The situation gets even worse with distributed training on mobile devices (federated learning), which suffers from higher latency, lower throughput, and intermittent poor connections. In this paper, we find 99.9% of the gradient exchange in distributed SGD is redundant, and propose Deep Gradient Compression (DGC) to greatly reduce the communication bandwidth. To preserve accuracy during compression, DGC employs four methods: momentum correction, local gradient clipping, momentum factor masking, and warm-up training. We have applied Deep Gradient Compression to image classification, speech recognition, and language modeling with multiple datasets including Cifar10, ImageNet, Penn Treebank, and Librispeech Corpus. On these scenarios, Deep Gradient Compression achieves a gradient compression ratio from 270x to 600x without losing accuracy, cutting the gradient size of ResNet-50 from 97MB to 0.35MB, and for DeepSpeech from 488MB to 0.74MB. Deep gradient compression enables large-scale distributed training on inexpensive commodity 1Gbps Ethernet and facilitates distributed training on mobile.
Interaction Patterns Between Children and their Teachers when Using a Specific Multimedia and Communication Strategy

This study reports on observed interaction patterns between 20 children with autism and mixed intellectual disabilities (mean chronological age = 11:4 years; language age = 4:7 years) and their nine teachers working with a specially developed multimedia program aiming to increase literacy skills. An increase in verbal expression was found over time for the total group. Children with autism also showed increased enjoyment and willingness to seek help from their teachers. Teachers for both diagnostic groups reduced their instructions on how to handle the computer during the program but the decrease was greater in the teachers for children with autism. When the total group of children was subdivided according to language age (high versus low), it appears that those with a low language age showed an increase in verbal expressiveness from start to end of training. Those with a high language age showed increased enjoyment. It is concluded that more detailed studies of the interaction patterns between teachers and children are needed, and these should be related to children’s language level as well as to diagnostic group.
Effect of Glucagon-like Peptide-1 on High-Glucose-induced Oxidative Stress and Cell Apoptosis in Human Endothelial Cells and Its Underlying Mechanism

Abstract: Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) has been demonstrated to play an important role in type 2 diabetes mellitus, leading to cardiovascular diseases. This study aimed to examine the GLP-1 regulation of high-glucose-induced oxidative stress and cell apoptosis in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) and its underlying mechanism. HUVECs were isolated from healthy umbilical cords and cultured. GLP-1 and the GLP-1R antagonist, exendin (9–39), were used to pretreat the cells. The expression of NADPH oxidase subunits gp91 and p22phox messenger RNA was detected by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction. Reactive oxygen species production was detected with flow cytometry and fluorescence microscopy. Lucigenin assay was used to measure the NADPH oxidase activity. The terminal deoxynucleotidyltransferase-mediated dUTP nick end labeling assay was used to investigate endothelial cell apoptosis. Apoptosis proteins were detected by immunoblotting. GLP-1 decreased high-glucose-induced oxidative stress, the expression of gp91 and p22phox messenger RNAs, and NADPH oxidase activation. Exendin (9–39) antagonized the effects of GLP-1 on high-glucose-induced oxidative stress. GLP-1 also increased HUVEC's high-glucose-induced proliferation and inhibited apoptosis. GLP-1 inhibited high-glucose-induced oxidative stress and cell apoptosis in HUVECs through GLP-1R–dependent and GLP-1 (9–36)–related pathways. GLP-1 suppressed high-glucose-induced oxidative stress and consequently may have an antiatherosclerosis effect on diabetes mellitus patients.
Neonatal ventral hippocampus lesion induces increase in no levels which is attenuated by subchronic haloperidol treatment

Haloperidol is a potent dopamine receptor antagonist and used to treat psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia. Recent clinical and preclinical studies demonstrated the overactivity of the nitric oxide (NO) system in schizophrenia. Neonatal ventral hippocampal (nVH) lesions in rats have been widely used as a neurodevelopmental model that mimics schizophrenia‐like behaviors. Here, we investigate first whether the nVH lesion causes changes in NO levels in different limbic brain regions in young adults, postnatal day (PD) 81, and second, whether haloperidol treatment from PD60 to PD81 reverses these changes, by determining the accumulation of nitrites. The results show that NO levels at the level of the prefrontal cortex, occipital cortex, and cerebellum are higher in the nVH lesion animals, and that the haloperidol, in part, attenuates these altered NO levels. The NO levels observed in the nVH lesion animals with and without haloperidol treatment may be relevant to behaviors observed in schizophrenia. Synapse 64:941–947, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Auto-tuning of the FFTW Library for Massively Parallel Supercomputers

In this paper we present the work carried out by CINECA in the framework of the PRACE-2IP project which had the aim of improving the performance of the FFTW library by refining the auto-tuning mechanism that is already implemented in this library. This optimization was realized with the following activities: Identification of the major bottlenecks present in the current FFTW implementation; Investigation of the auto-tuning mechanism provided in FFTW in order to understand how performance is affected by domain decomposition; Introduction of a new parallel domain decomposition; Construction of a library to improve the performance of the auto-tuning mechanism. In particular, we have compared the performance of the standard Slab Decomposition algorithm already present with that obtained using the 2D Domain Decomposition and we found that on massively parallel supercomputers the performance of this new algorithm is significantly higher.
Use of p 38 MAPK Inhibitors To Repress Inflammatory Disease : What Have We Learned ?

Chronic inflammatory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), are clinically and socioeconomically important diseases globally. Currently the mainstay of anti-inflammatory therapy in respiratory diseases is corticosteroids. Although corticosteroids have proven clinical efficacy in asthma, many asthmatic inflammatory conditions (e.g., infection, exacerbation, and severe asthma) are not responsive to corticosteroids. Moreover, despite an understanding that COPD progression is driven by inflammation, we currently do not have effective anti-inflammatory strategies to combat this disease. Hence, alternative anti-inflammatory strategies are required. p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) has emerged as an important signaling molecule driving airway inflammation, and pharmacological inhibitors against p38 MAPK may provide potential therapies for chronic respiratory disease. In this review, we discuss some of the recent in vitro and in vivo studies targeting p38 MAPK, but suggest that p38 MAPK inhibitors may prove less effective than originally considered because they may block antiinflammatory molecules along with proinflammatory responses. We propose that an alternative strategy may be to target an antiinflammatory molecule farther downstream of p38 MAPK, i.e., tristetraprolin (TTP). TTP is an mRNA-destabilizing, RNAbinding protein that enhances the decay of mRNAs, including those encoding proteins implicated in chronic respiratory diseases. We suggest that understanding the molecular mechanism of TTP expression and its temporal regulation will guide future development of novel anti-inflammatory pharmacotherapeutic approaches to combat respiratory disease.
H6D polymorphism in macrophage-inhibitory cytokine-1 gene associated with prostate cancer.

BACKGROUND Accumulating epidemiologic and molecular evidence suggest that inflammation is an important component in the etiology of prostate cancer. Macrophage-inhibitory cytokine-1 (MIC-1), a member of the transforming growth factor beta superfamily, is thought to play an important role in inflammation by regulating macrophage activity. We examined whether sequence variants in the MIC-1 gene are associated with the risk of prostate cancer. METHODS The study population, a population-based case-control study in Sweden, consisted of 1383 prostate cancer case patients and 780 control subjects. From 94 of the control subjects, we constructed gene-specific haplotypes of MIC-1 and identified four haplotype-tagging single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs): Exon1+25 (V9L), Exon1+142 (S48T), IVS1+1809, and Exon2+2423 (H6D). All study subjects were genotyped for the four SNPs, and conditional logistic regression analysis was used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). RESULTS A statistically significant difference (P =.006) in genotype frequency was observed for the nonsynonymous change H6D (histidine to aspartic acid at position 6) between prostate cancer patients and control subjects. Carriers of the GC genotype, which results in the H6D change, experienced a lower risk of sporadic prostate cancer (OR = 0.80, 95% CI = 0.66 to 0.97) and of familial prostate cancer (OR = 0.61, 95% CI = 0.42 to 0.89) than the CC genotype carriers. In the study population, the proportion of prostate cancer cases attributable to the CC genotype was 7.2% for sporadic cancer and 19.2% for familial cancer. None of the other SNPs or haplotypes was associated with prostate cancer. CONCLUSION This study shows an association between a nonsynonymous change (H6D) in the MIC-1 gene and prostate cancer. This finding supports the hypothesis that genetic variation in the inflammatory process contributes to prostate cancer susceptibility.
TASC II and the Endovascular Management of Infrainguinal Disease

The stratifications of aortoiliac, femoropopliteal, and infrapopliteal lesions included in the original comprehensive report of the TransAtlantic Inter-Society Consensus (TASC I) have been commonly used to formally characterize clinical trial populations and to channel investigative discussion among clinicians, while the associated treatment recommendations have become outdated as compared to current clinical practice. The TASC II report is an abbreviated update focusing on key areas of diagnosis and management of peripheral artery disease, with revised stratifications of aortoiliac and femoropopliteal lesions but not infrapopliteal disease. The consensus document keeps new lesion stratifications linked to the same structure of recommendations for initial treatment: endovascular for type A, endovascular (with qualifications) for type B, open surgical (with qualifications) for type C, and open surgical for type D. In general, each TASC II lesion category includes more severe disease than in TASC I, but the TASC II report does not recommend specific endovascular modalities for infrainguinal occlusive disease. We discuss how the new TASC II femoropopliteal lesion categories reflect current research outcomes and clinical practice, including summarized results from some more recent studies that have demonstrated the ability to treat by endovascular means increasingly complex femoropopliteal lesions that would actually be classifiable as type C. Noting that TASC II does not include a separate stratification of infrapopliteal lesions, as did TASC I, we review evidence of recent endovascular treatment of infrapopliteal lesions and contend that TASC classifications in this anatomical area should be upgraded.
Imaging of laser-generated ultrasonic waves in silicon.

This paper reports the results of experiments we have carried out on silicon single crystals using a scanned ultrasonic point—source/point—receiver technique based on laser generation and piezoelectric detection.1 The results are presented in the form of gray—scale scan—images, which display the spatial and time dependence of the radiated waveforms. Pronounced anisotropy is observed in the amplitudes of the wave arrivals, which is the result of bulk anisotropy focusing of the acoustic energy. The scan—images also contain clearly defined structures due to multipass waves and to head waves. We are able to account well for the observed amplitude variations and the various wave arrivals with Monte Carlo simulations based on ray constructs. The amplitude variations are consistent with the known phonon focusing pattern of silicon. The changes arising from the presence of surface damage are described and interpreted, demonstrating the usefulness of scan—imaging for surface characterization.
Contextual Factors and Cost Profiles Associated with Employee Turnover

To gain insights about the nature and expenses of specific aspects of employee turnover, the authors gathered data from thirty-three U.S. hotels and found that the costs of turnover were generally higher for (1) high-complexity jobs; (2) independent properties; (3) high—average daily rate (ADR) properties; (4) large properties; and (5) high-occupancy properties. The authors also identified several activities associated with recruitment, selection, and training that were linked to lower overall costs of turnover. The results shed new light on the nature and consequences of turnover and provide some prescriptive guidance for managing this serious operational and strategic challenge.