Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deletion of lpsA Gene of Brucella melitensis Strain M5-90 Promotes Caspase-11 Induced Non-classical Pathways Pyroptosis in Brucella-infected Mouse Macrophage Cells

Brucella utilizes diverse virulence factors to modulate the infectious cycle and lifestyle associated with eukaryotic hosts. Lipopolysaccharides (LPS) play an important role in the establishment of persistent infections of Brucella, but its mechanism in host cell to interfere with the host’s specific signaling pathway related to the elimination of Brucella is still not clear. LpsA, a glycosyl transferase, involves in the biosynthesis of LPS, and may aff ect the intracellular survival of Brucella. This study aimed to investigate the eff ects of lpsA on pyroptosis in Brucella-infected macrophage cells. We constructed the lpsA mutant strain (M5-90ΔlpsA) and the complementary strain (M5-90ΔlpsA-C) of Brucella melitensis strain M5-90 infected mouse macrophages to detect pyroptosis. We found that the inactivation of the lpsA gene weakened the ability of LPS gains access to cytosol during Brucella mutant infections, and reduced the survival of Brucella. Western blot and quantitative real-time PCR assays showed that the mRNA and protein levels of caspase-11 and NOD-like receptor family pyrin domain-containing 3 in M5-90ΔlpsA group were higher than those observed in M5-90 group. These results indicated M5-90ΔlpsA promoted the pyroptosis of RAW264.7 cells (a mouse macrophage cell line) after Brucella infection. The finding reveals that Brucella lpsA plays a partial role in innate immunity and infl ammatory response by inhibiting the LPS-induced atypical pyroptosis pathway.
Investigation of Electrochemical Behavior of Stimulation/Sensing Materials for Pacemaker Electrode Applications II. Conducting Oxide Electrodes

bSt. Jude Medical AB, SE-175 84 Jarfalla, Sweden The electrochemical behavior, interfacial properties, and stability of RuO 2-, IrO2-, sRu1˛xMnxdO2- and sIr1˛xMnxdO2-coated electrodes for pacemaker applications were investigated in a phosphate buffered saline solution, by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and cyclic voltammetry ~CV! The psuedocapacitive properties of these conducting oxides and influence of coating roughness and porosity were examined, and accelerated aging of the electrode materials was simulated by fast sweep rate CV cycles between ˛3 to 1 V vs. Ag/AgCl. Changes in surface composition and structure due to the accelerated aging were investigated using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy. The conducting oxides exhibit high interfacial capacitance. At high sweep rates, not all of total capacitance could be utilized due to voltage drop associated with resistance down the pores. Above a certain sweep rate, the charging/discharging mechanism changes from capacitive to resistive character. Showing the best performance among the investigated materials, the RuO2 exhibits capacitive characteristics at sweep rates up to 20 V/s and excellent stability under the accelerated aging. The IrO 2 coating was not stable during the cycling. The mixed oxides experience limitations at high sweep rates due to the ohmic effects and some degradation due to the accelerated aging.
3D Face Reconstruction from Monocular Video and its Applications In the Wild

3D face reconstruction is a very popular field of computer vision due to its applications in social media, entertainment and health. However, ever since the introduction of 3D morphable models as facial priors, 3D face reconstruction has been dominated by reconstruction from single images due to its ease and proximity to 3D face alignment. Even so, single image reconstruction methods suffer from inconsistent reconstructions across time and view points. Hence a natural extension is to reconstruct 3D face shape from videos. Because of recent methods in single image reconstruction setting the standards for state-of-the-art reconstruction, we introduce a method to fuse single image reconstructions across multiple frames to create a more accurate reconstruction. Furthermore, the lack of structured video datasets that fully captures the face and provide 3D ground truth scans, led us to develop and release the 3DFAW-Video dataset and challenge. We also introduce a symmetric distance metric for benchmarking reconstructions on the 3DFAW-Video dataset that is less affected by reconstruction density. Finally, we discuss the usage of 3D face reconstructions in two different applications to be deployed ’in-the-wild’. In particular, we illustrate applications in mask-sizing from a metric face 3D reconstruction, and present 3D face normalization as a technique to improve vision based non-contact heart rate estimation methods.
A Study of Handgrip Strength in Patients with Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus and Its Association with Some Anthropometric Variables

Introduction: The long-term diabetic status may affect the handgrip strength in patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus. Objectives: The objectives of the present study were to arrest some anthropometric variables those which affect the handgrip strength of the patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus. Materials and Methods: For this purpose, purposively selected 576 patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus (251 male and 325 female) of age group 35-60 years were taken from different hospitals of Amritsar. A total of 440 controls (152 males and 288 females) were also taken matching everything, except the disease condition, for comparisons. Nine anthropometric variables, i.e. dominant and nondominant handgrip strength, height, weight, upper arm, waist and hip circumference, biceps skinfold and triceps skinfold were taken on each subject following standard techniques. Results: The results showed significantly (p<0.001) lower mean values of dominant and nondominant handgrip strength in diabetic patients, and significantly (p<0.01-0.001) higher mean values in three circumferential and two skinfold measurements than their control counterparts. Again, significant positive correlations (p<0.01-0.001) of dominant and non-dominant handgrip strength were observed with all the anthropometric variables, and significant negative correlations (p<0.001) with biceps and triceps skinfold in patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus. Conclusion: It may be concluded significantly higher circumferential and skinfold measurements were predictive for the lower handgrip strength values in patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus.
Sentence to Sentence Similarity. A Review

—This paper suggests a novel sentence-to-sentence similarity measure. The proposal makes use of both word embedding and named-entity based semantic similarity. This is motivated by the increasing short text phrases that contain named-entity tags and the importance to detect various levels of hidden semantic similarity even in case of high noise ratio. The proposal is evaluated using a set of publicly available datasets as well as an in-house built dataset, while comparison with some state of art algorithms is performed.
S takeholder analysis of critical success factors in ERP implementation

Enterprise Resource Planning systems aim at integrating and streamlining organisational processes. Their adoption, coupled with an attempt to adhere to industry best practice, often bring to light much needed organisational transformation, the social dimensions of which are often sidelined. This latter dimension is also often found to have a strong bearing on success. In a drive to identify the needs for successful Enterprise Resource Planning implementation, this paper aims to categorise known critical success factors and to subsequently present these to multiple stakeholder groups for acceptance.
Photosynthetic Action Spectra of Scots Pine Needles of Different Ages from Seedlings Grown under Different Nursery Conditions

Photosynthetic action spectra of pine needles have been measured with an automatic recording method. A thin longitudinal cut from the flat surface of the needle was placed on top of an oxygen sensor and illuminated with monochromatic light in the range 400–700 nm. Good correspondence between absorption and action spectra was obtained in the range 550–700 nm. In the blue part of the spectrum photosynthetic efficiency was low compared with absorption. This low effect in blue light is probably due to screening absorption by photosynthetically inactive carotenoids. One-year-old needles showed a higher effect in the blue part of the spectrum than did current year needles. Needles from seedlings grown in the open had a lower photosynthetic effect in the blue part than needles from seedlings grown in a greenhouse. Pigment analyses support the idea that these differences are due to differences in the ratio chlorophylls/total carotenoids and/or differences in the composition of the carotenoid pigments.
Understanding corrosion inhibition mechanisms—experimental and theoretical approach

We describe a combined electrochemical and first principle density functional study to probe the corrosion inhibiting and adsorption behavior of methionine (Met) and phenylalanine (Phe) on polycrystalline and nanocrystalline iron in acid media. Met functioned as a better inhibitor for both Fe microstructures, and was more favorably adsorbed on the nanocrystalline surface. The nanocrystalline surface however diminished adsorption of Phe. The comparable values of our computed physisorption energies (−94.2 kcal mol−1 and −86.6 kcal mol−1 for Phe and Met respectively) as well as the stable adsorption orientations of both molecules on Fe suggest a controlling influence of a soft epitaxial adsorption mechanism in which C, N, O, S atoms of the molecules align with epitaxial grooves on the Fe lattice. The significant contribution of physisorptive interactions also correlates with the similarity in experimental inhibition efficiencies on polycrystalline Fe (Phe = 73% and Met = 82%), though for Met the thiol group imparts an added ability for covalent interaction with Fe, which accounts for the higher efficiency. Furthermore, we have related the diminished inhibition efficiency of Phe on the nanocrystalline Fe surface to disruption of the epitaxial patterns on the lattice as the surface becomes increasingly defective, leading to weaker adsorption. The improved efficiency of Met on the nanocrystalline surface is related to scaling up of the covalent interactions around defect sites. Our theoretical conclusions are validated by the consistency with our experimental findings.
Structured Prediction as Translation between Augmented Natural Languages

We propose a new framework, Translation between Augmented Natural Languages (TANL), to solve many structured prediction language tasks including joint entity and relation extraction, nested named entity recognition, relation classification, semantic role labeling, event extraction, coreference resolution, and dialogue state tracking. Instead of tackling the problem by training task-specific discriminative classifiers, we frame it as a translation task between augmented natural languages, from which the task-relevant information can be easily extracted. Our approach can match or outperform task-specific models on all tasks, and in particular, achieves new state-of-the-art results on joint entity and relation extraction (CoNLL04, ADE, NYT, and ACE2005 datasets), relation classification (FewRel and TACRED), and semantic role labeling (CoNLL-2005 and CoNLL-2012). We accomplish this while using the same architecture and hyperparameters for all tasks and even when training a single model to solve all tasks at the same time (multi-task learning). Finally, we show that our framework can also significantly improve the performance in a low-resource regime, thanks to better use of label semantics.
Proxemics and Social Interactions in an Instrumented Virtual Reality Workshop

Virtual environments (VEs) can create collaborative and social spaces, which are increasingly important in the face of remote work and travel reduction. Recent advances, such as more open and widely available platforms, create new possibilities to observe and analyse interaction in VEs. Using a custom instrumented build of Mozilla Hubs to measure position and orientation, we conducted an academic workshop to facilitate a range of typical workshop activities. We analysed social interactions during a keynote, small group breakouts, and informal networking/hallway conversations. Our mixed-methods approach combined environment logging, observations, and semi-structured interviews. The results demonstrate how small and large spaces influenced group formation, shared attention, and personal space, where smaller rooms facilitated more cohesive groups while larger rooms made small group formation challenging but personal space more flexible. Beyond our findings, we show how the combination of data and insights can fuel collaborative spaces’ design and deliver more effective virtual workshops.
Loss of mass of non-pluripolar products

It is a well-known fact that the non-pluripolar self-products of a closed positive (1, 1)-current in a big nef cohomology class on a compact Kähler manifold are not of full mass in the presence of positive Lelong numbers of the current in consideration. In this paper, we give a quantitative version of the last property. Our proof involves a generalization of Demailly’s comparison of Lelong numbers to the setting of theory of density currents, a reversed Alexandrov-Fenchel inequality for non-pluripolar products and the notion of relative non-pluripolar products.
Minimum cost flows, MDPs, and ℓ1-regression in nearly linear time for dense instances

In this paper we provide new randomized algorithms with improved runtimes for solving linear programs with two-sided constraints. In the special case of the minimum cost flow problem on n-vertex m-edge graphs with integer polynomially-bounded costs and capacities we obtain a randomized method which solves the problem in Õ(m + n1.5) time. This improves upon the previous best runtime of Õ(m √n) [Lee-Sidford’14] and, in the special case of unit-capacity maximum flow, improves upon the previous best runtimes of m4/3 + o(1) [Liu-Sidford’20, Kathuria’20] and Õ(m √n) [Lee-Sidford’14] for sufficiently dense graphs. In the case of ℓ1-regression in a matrix with n-columns and m-rows we obtain a randomized method which computes an є-approximate solution in Õ(mn + n2.5) time. This yields a randomized method which computes an є-optimal policy of a discounted Markov Decision Process with S states and, A actions per state in time Õ(S2 A + S2.5). These methods improve upon the previous best runtimes of methods which depend polylogarithmically on problem parameters, which were Õ(mn1.5) [Lee-Sidford’15] and Õ(S2.5 A) [Lee-Sidford’14, Sidford-Wang-Wu-Ye’18] respectively. To obtain this result we introduce two new algorithmic tools of possible independent interest. First, we design a new general interior point method for solving linear programs with two sided constraints which combines techniques from [Lee-Song-Zhang’19, Brand et al.’20] to obtain a robust stochastic method with iteration count nearly the square root of the smaller dimension. Second, to implement this method we provide dynamic data structures for efficiently maintaining approximations to variants of Lewis-weights, a fundamental importance measure for matrices which generalize leverage scores and effective resistances.
On the quantization of recurrent neural networks

Integer quantization of neural networks can be defined as the approximation of the high precision computation of the canonical neural network formulation, using reduced integer precision. It plays a significant role in the efficient deployment and execution of machine learning (ML) systems, reducing memory consumption and leveraging typically faster computations. In this work, we present an integer-only quantization strategy for Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network topologies, which themselves are the foundation of many production ML systems. Our quantization strategy is accurate (e.g. works well with quantization post-training), efficient and fast to execute (utilizing 8 bit integer weights and mostly 8 bit activations), and is able to target a variety of hardware (by leveraging instructions sets available in common CPU architectures, as well as available neural accelerators).
Exact observability properties of subelliptic wave and Schr{\"o}dinger equations

In this survey paper, we report on recent works concerning exact observability (and, by duality, exact controllability) properties of subelliptic wave and Schrödinger-type equations. These results illustrate the slowdown of propagation in directions transverse to the horizontal distribution. The proofs combine sub-Riemannian geometry, semi-classical analysis, spectral theory and non-commutative harmonic analysis.
Segregation in model palladium—cobalt clusters

Abstract N-body Sutton—Chen potentials have been developed for fcc Co and the interaction of Co and Pd atoms. These potentials were used to describe the effect of Pd segregation within Pd—Co relaxed clusters. Monte Carlo configurational minimization at room temperature was used to determine the morphology of clusters. For the diffraction patterns averaging over configurations is achieved by molecular dynamics runs. Variation in the position of the 111 peak of the average pattern with cluster alloy composition was compared with X-ray diffraction data for (Pd—Co) silica catalysts. The good fit obtained strongly supports the applicability of the model segregation profile. A key role in the modelling is played by the precise tuning of the Pd—Co potential.
Extreme positions of regularly varying branching random walk in random environment.

In this article, we consider a Branching Random Walk (BRW) on the real line where the underlying genealogical structure is given through a supercritical branching process in i.i. d. environment and satisfies Kesten-Stigum condition. The displacements coming from the same parent are assumed to have jointly regularly varying tails. Conditioned on the survival of the underlying genealogical tree, we prove that the appropriately normalized (depends on the expected size of the $n$-th generation given the environment) maximum among positions at the $n$-th generation converges weakly to a scale-mixture of Frech\'{e}t random variable. Furthermore, we derive the weak limit of the extremal processes composed of appropriately scaled positions at the $n$-th generation and show that the limit point process is a member of the randomly scaled scale-decorated Poisson point processes (SScDPPP). Hence, an analog of the predictions by Brunet and Derrida (2011) holds.
Structural Analysis of Multimode DAE Systems: summary of results

Modern modeling languages for general physical systems, such as Modelica, Amesim, or Simscape, rely on Differential Algebraic Equations (DAEs), i.e., constraints of the form f(\dot{x},x,u)=0. This drastically facilitates modeling from first principles of the physics, as well as model reuse. In recent works [RR-9334], we presented the mathematical theory needed to establish the development of compilers and tools for DAE-based physical modeling languages on solid mathematical grounds.At the core of this analysis sits the so-called *structural analysis*, whose purpose, at compile time, is to either identify under- and over-specified subsystems (if any), or to rewrite the model in a form amenable of existing DAE solvers, including the handling of mode change events. The notion of"structure"collects, for each mode and mode change event, the variables and equations involved, as well as the *latent equations* (additional equations redundant with the system), needed to prepare the code submitted to the solver. The notion of DAE *index* (the minimal number of times any equation has to be possibly differentiated) is part of this structural analysis. This report complements [RR-9334] by collecting all the needed background on structural analysis. The body of knowledge on structural analysis is large and scattered, which also motivated us to collect it in a single report.We first explain the primary meaning of structural analysis of systems of equations, namely the study of their regularity or singularity in some generic sense. We then briefly review the body of graph theory used in this context. We develop some extensions, for which we are not aware of any reference, namely the structural analysis of systems of equations with existential quantifiers. For the structural analysis of DAE systems, we focus on John Pryce's Sigma-method, that we both summarize and extend to non-square systems. The uses of these tools and methods in [RR9334] are highlighted in this report.
Exploring Asymmetric Roles in Mixed-Ability Gaming

The landscape of digital games is segregated by player ability. For example, sighted players have a multitude of highly visual games at their disposal, while blind players may choose from a variety of audio games. Attempts at improving cross-ability access to any of those are often limited in the experience they provide, or disregard multiplayer experiences. We explore ability-based asymmetric roles as a design approach to create engaging and challenging mixed-ability play. Our team designed and developed two collaborative testbed games exploring asymmetric interdependent roles. In a remote study with 13 mixed-visual-ability pairs we assessed how roles affected perceptions of engagement, competence, and autonomy, using a mixed-methods approach. The games provided an engaging and challenging experience, in which differences in visual ability were not limiting. Our results underline how experiences unequal by design can give rise to an equitable joint experience.
Managing Self-Phase Modulation in Pseudo-Linear Multimodal and Monomodal Systems

We propose a new semi-analytical model, describing the bandwidth evolution of pulses propagating in dispersion managed (DM) transmission systems using multimodal graded-index fibers (GRIN) with parabolic index. The model also applies to monomodal fiber DM systems, representing the limit case where beam self-imaging vanishes. The model is successfully compared with the direct integration of the (1+1)D nonlinear Schrödinger equation for parabolic GRIN fibers, and to experimental results performed by using the transmission of femtosecond pulses over a 5 m span of GRIN fiber At the high pulse powers that are possible in multimodal fibers, the pulse bandwidth variations produced by the interplay of cumulated dispersion and self-phase modulation can become the most detrimental effect, if not properly managed. The analytical model, numerical and experimental results all point to the existence of an optimal amount of chromatic dispersion, that must be provided to the input pulse, for obtaining a periodic evolution of its bandwidth. Results are promising for the generation of spatio-temporal DM solitons in parabolic GRIN fibers, where the stable, periodic time-bandwidth behaviour that was already observed in monomodal systems is added to the characteristic spatial beam self-imaging.