Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Study of BEM-Type Channel Estimation Techniques for 5G Multicarrier Systems

In this paper, we investigate channel estimation techniques for 5G multicarrier systems. Due to the characteristics of the 5G application scenarios, channel estimation techniques have been tested in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM) systems. The orthogonality between subcarriers in OFDM systems permits inserting and extracting pilots without interference. However, due to pulse shaping, subcarriers in GFDM are no longer orthogonal and interfere with each other. Due to such interference, the channel estimation for GFDM is not trivial. A robust and low-complexity channel estimator can be obtained by combining a minimum mean-square error (MMSE) regularization and the basis expansion model (BEM) approach. In this work, we develop a BEM-type channel estimator along with a strategy to obtain the covariance matrix of the BEM coefficients. Simulations show that the BEM-type channel estimation shows performance close to that of the linear MMSE (LMMSE), even though there is no need to know the channel power delay profile, and its complexity is low.
Pain and associated symptoms: comparison between fibromyalgia and temporomandibular disorder

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Fibromyalgia has multivariate symptoms, also affecting temporomandibular region. This study aimed at comparing facial signs and symptoms of females with fibromyalgia and females with temporomandibular disorder. METHODS: This is a crossover study with 61 females divided in two groups: fibromyalgia group (31) and temporomandibular disorder group (30). Evaluated variables in all patients were: pain intensity in temporomandibular joint by means of visual analog scale, report of pain or discomfort during daily activities (mouth opening/closing, during meals, when talking), presence of joint noises (clicking and popping), dizziness, tinnitus, headache and mouth opening capacity. Variables were compared by unpaired t and Chi-square tests. RESULTS: Facial pain was reported by 100% of studied patients with no difference in intensity among fibromyalgia and temporomandibular disorder groups (p=0.2170). Fibromyalgia group has reported more pain during daily life activities as compared to temporomandibular disorder group (p<0.0001). With regard to joint noises, there has been more right temporomandibular joint clicking (p=0.006) in the temporomandibular disorder group. Fibromyalgia group patients have higher percentage of signs and symptoms associated to temporomandibular disorder, such as dizziness, tinnitus and headache (p<0.000). CONCLUSION: Fibromyalgia patients have clinical signs and symptoms similar to those found in temporomandibular disorder patients, being pain, discomfort during daily activities, tinnitus, hum and headache more exacerbated in the fibromyalgia group.
StegNet: Mega Image Steganography Capacity with Deep Convolutional Network

Traditional image steganography often leans interests towards safely embedding hidden information into cover images with payload capacity almost neglected. This paper combines recent deep convolutional neural network methods with image-into-image steganography. It successfully hides the same size images with a decoding rate of 98.2% or bpp (bits per pixel) of 23.57 by changing only 0.76% of the cover image on average. Our method directly learns end-to-end mappings between the cover image and the embedded image and between the hidden image and the decoded image. We further show that our embedded image, while with mega payload capacity, is still robust to statistical analysis.
The effect of variable turbulent intensities on the distribution of zooplankton in the shallow, large Lake Balaton (Hungary)

Key-words: Balaton, vertical migration, current velocity, zooplankton The influence of current velocity on zooplankton organisms is manifold. Moderate current velocity is beneficial for zooplankton, but through various mechanisms too high a current velocity can have detrimental effects. We examined how current velocity acts on zooplankton in Lake Balaton at different levels and found a highly significant, negative relation between current velocity and the density of zooplankton assemblages. Of the studied assemblages, Daphnia galeata × cucullata and Eudiaptomus gracilis exhibited the greatest sensitivity to the degree of current velocity. During calm weather, when the water surface was calm too, nocturnal migration was observed for both Daphnia galeata × cucullata and Eudiaptomus gracilis. We demonstrated that the vertical migration of these two species started before the storm as the usual nocturnal migration, but during the storm the regular pattern was confused.
Video Classification System for Moments in Time Challenge 2018

This paper presents our system for the video understanding task of the Moments in Time Challenge 2018. Because of limited computational resources, we only used three features in the system, including 2 visual features and 1 audio feature. After we have the prediction scores of these three features, we combine them using late fusion and obtain the final result. Specifically, we observe average fusion can get promising results in our experiments.
The mTOR Pathway Regulates PKM2 to Affect Glycolysis in Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Objectives: Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma is a highly prevalent cancer withpoor survival rate and prognosis. Increasing evidence suggests an important role for metabolic regulation in treating esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. The pyruvate kinase M2 isoform is a key enzyme in the energy production process, and the upregulation of pyruvate kinase M2 isoform also plays a crucial role in gene transcription and tumorigenesis. The mammalian target of rapamycin pathway regulates an array of cellular functions, including protein synthesis, metabolism, and cell proliferation. The pyruvate kinase M2 isoform and mammalian target of rapamycin pathways both affect metabolism in cancers, and evidence also suggests that the mammalian target of rapamycin downstream transcription factor hypoxia-inducible factor-1α regulates pyruvate kinase M2 isoform. We therefore investigated the regulatory mechanism among pyruvate kinase M2 isoform, mammalian target of rapamycin, and aerobic glycolysis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, hoping to prove that mammalian target of rapamycin pathway regulates pyruvate kinase M2 isoform to affect glycolysis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. Methods: Immunohistochemical staining was used to compare pyruvate kinase M2 isoform and phospho-mammalian target of rapamycin expression in 30 human pathological esophageal squamous cell carcinoma sections and 30 nontumoral esophageal tissues. Short hairpin RNA was used to inhibit pyruvate kinase M2 isoform and activate mammalian target of rapamycin, after which we monitored changes in glucose consumption and lactate production. Finally, we determined the expression of pyruvate kinase M2 isoform and the mammalian target of rapamycin downstream transcription factor hypoxia-inducible factor-1α, as well as glucose consumption and lactate production, following the modification of mammalian target of rapamycin expression. Results: Immunohistochemical staining showed that both phospho-mammalian target of rapamycin and pyruvate kinase M2 isoform expression were higher in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma than in nontumor tissues. Glucose consumption and lactate production measurements demonstrated that altering mammalian target of rapamycin and pyruvate kinase M2 isoform levels caused corresponding changes in glycolysis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma cells. When mammalian target of rapamycin was activated or inhibited, expression of pyruvate kinase M2 isoform and hypoxia-inducible factor-1α as well as glycolysis were altered, indicating that mammalian target of rapamycin regulates pyruvate kinase M2 isoform via the downstream transcription factor hypoxia-inducible factor-1α, thereby affecting glycolysis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. Conclusion: Mammalian target of rapamycin pathway promotes aerobic glycolysis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma by upregulating pyruvate kinase M2 isoform. Both proteins can serve as molecular targets for novel therapeutic strategies.
Poster: Pairika—A Failure Diagnosis Benchmark for C++ Programs

Empirical studies in software testing require realistic benchmarks which are able to mimic industry-like environments. For evaluating automated failure diagnosis techniques, one needs real reproducible bugs with at least one associated failing test. Extracting such bugs is challenging and time-consuming. This paper presents Pairika, a failure diagnosis benchmark for C++ programs. Pairika contains 40 bugs extracted from 7 modules of OpenCV project with more than 490 KLoC and 11129 tests. Each bug is accompanied by at least one failing test. We publish Pairika to facilitate and stimulate further research on automated failure diagnosis techniques. Pairika is available at: https://github.com/tum-i22/Pairika
Submission to Moments in Time Challenge 2018

This paper introduces our solution for the full track of the Moments in Time 2018 video event recognition challenge. Our system is built on spatial networks and 3D convolutional neural networks to extract spatial and temporal features from the videos. We also take advantage of multi-modality cues, including optical flow and audio information to further improve the performances. Our final submission is an ensemble of 5 models: three based on RGB frames as well as one optical flow model and one audio model, achieving top1 38.1%, top5 65.3% on the validation set.
Poster: Towards Sustainable Android Malware Detection

Approaches to Android malware detection built on supervised learning are commonly subject to frequent retraining, or the trained classifier may fail to detect newly emerged or emerging kinds of malware. This work targets a sustainable Android malware detector that, once trained on a dataset, can continue to effectively detect new malware without retraining. To that end, we investigate how the behaviors of benign and malicious apps evolve over time, and identify the most consistently discriminating behavioral traits of benign apps from malware. Our preliminary results reveal a promising prospect of this approach. On a benchmark set across seven years, our approach achieved highly competitive detection accuracy that sustained up to five years, outperforming the state of the art which sustained up to two years.
Effect of TAK1 on osteogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells by regulating BMP-2 via Wnt/β-catenin and MAPK pathway

ABSTRACT Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have the ability to differentiate into osteoblasts and chondrocytes. In vitro osteogenic differentiation is critical but the molecular mechanism has yet to be further clarified. The role of TGF-β activated kinase 1 (TAK1) in MSCs osteogenesis differentiation has not been reported. By adding si-TAK1 and rhTAK1, the osteogenic differentiation of MSCs was measured. Expression levels of the osteoblastic marker genes during osteogenic differentiation of MSCs were checked. As well as molecules involved in BMP and Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathways. The phosphorylation of p38 and JNK was also checked. TAK1 is essential for mineralization of MSCs at low concentration, but excessive rhTAK1 inhibits mineralization of MSCs. It up regulates the expression levels of bone sialoprotein (BSP), osteocalcin (OSC), Alkaline phosphatase (ALP), and RUNX2 during osteogenic differentiation of MSCs. It can also promote TGF-β/BMP-2 gene expression and β-catenin expression, and down regulate GSK-3β expression. Meanwhile, TAK1 promotes the phosphorylation of p38 and JNK. Additionally, TAK1 up regulates the expression of BMP-2 at all concentration under the inhibition of p38 and JNK. Our results suggested that TAK1 is essential in MSCs osteogenesis differentiation, and functions as a double-edged sword, probably through regulation of β-catenin and p38/JNK.
Poster: Semantically Enhanced Tag Recommendation for Software CQAs via Deep Learning

Most software CQAs (e.g. Stack Overflow) mainly rely on users to assign tags for posted questions. This leads to many redundant, inconsistent and inaccurate tags that are detrimental to the communities. Therefore tag quality becomes a critical challenge to deal with. In this work, we propose STR, a deep learning based approach that automatically recommends tags through learning the semantics of both tags and questions in such software CQAs. First, word embedding is employed to convert text information to high-dimension vectors for better representing questions and tags. Second, a Multi-tasking-like Convolutional Neural Network, the core modules of STR, is designed to capture short and long semantics. Third, the learned semantic vectors are fed into a gradient descent based algorithm for classification. Finally, we evaluate STR on three datasets collected from popular software CQAs, and experimental results show that STR outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of Precision@k, Recall@k and F1-Measure@k.
Homozygous congenital factor VII deficiency with a novel mutation, associated with severe spontaneous intracranial bleeding in a neonate

Objective Herein, a neonate with congenital FVII deficiency is presented. Basic method Diagnosis of congenital FVII deficiency was confirmed by genetic analysis using next-generation sequencing method (MiSeq-Illumina). Result Our patient was found to have a novel homozygous mutation. Conclusion Early diagnosis and treatment of congenital FVII deficiency can be crucial.
Frugal Auction Design for Set Systems: Vertex Cover and Knapsack

We study mechanism design for procurement auctions in which the goal is to buy a subset of items or hire a team of providers. In order to measure the efficiency of a mechanism, one defines an appropriate benchmark which denotes a reasonable expectation of the payments and defines the overpayment of a mechanism based on the benchmark. This ratio is called the \em frugality ratio of the mechanism. Procurement auctions are well-studied and benchmarks proposed for these auctions have evolved over a sequence of papers ~\citearcher2007frugal,chen2010frugal,elkind2007frugality,karlinbeyond,kempe2010frugal. In this work, we introduce a newer benchmark, and based on that, study classic procurement auctions. Our benchmark addresses critical issues raised by the unintuitive behavior of the previous benchmarks. We show two attractive properties for our benchmark which have been lacking in the previous proposals: \em monotonicity and \em smoothness. Based on our benchmark, we provide positive results for vertex cover and knapsack auctions. Prior to this work, \kempefrugal\citekempe2010frugal propose a constant approximation mechanism for vertex cover auctions. However, their analysis suffers from an error. We give a correct analysis to the mechanism of \kempefrugal\citekempe2010frugal with respect to our benchmark. In particular, we prove their mechanism is optimal up to a constant factor. Our analysis is different from what \kempefrugal\citekempe2010frugal propose. We also study the knapsack auctions and give a truthful mechanism for such auctions with a bounded frugality ratio. We show that this is almost tight by presenting a lower bound on the frugality ratio of any truthful mechanism for such auctions. All our results depend on both properties of the benchmark.
Genes and Proteins Involved in qnrS1 Induction

Expression of the quinolone resistance gene qnrS1 is increased by quinolones, but unlike induction of some other qnr genes, the bacterial SOS system is not involved and no lexA box is found upstream. Nonetheless, at least 205 bp of upstream sequence is required for induction to take place. ABSTRACT Expression of the quinolone resistance gene qnrS1 is increased by quinolones, but unlike induction of some other qnr genes, the bacterial SOS system is not involved and no lexA box is found upstream. Nonetheless, at least 205 bp of upstream sequence is required for induction to take place. An upstream sequence bound to beads trapped potential binding proteins from cell extracts that were identified by mass spectrometry as Dps, Fis, Ihf, Lrp, CysB, and YjhU. To further elucidate their role, a reporter plasmid linking the qnrS1 upstream sequence to lacZ was introduced into cells of the Keio collection with single-gene deletions and screened for lacZ expression. Mutants in ihfA and ihfB had decreased lacZ induction, while induction in a cysB mutant was increased and dps, fis, lrp, yjhU, and other mutants showed no change. The essential upstream sequence contains potential binding sites for Ihf and DnaA. A dnaA deletion could not be tested because it provides essential functions in cell replication; however, increased dnaA expression decreased qnrS1 induction while decreased dnaA expression enhanced it, implying a role for DnaA as a repressor. In a mobility shift assay, purified IhfA, IhfB, and DnaA proteins (but not CysB) were shown to bind to the upstream segment. Induction decreased in a gyrA quinolone-resistant mutant, indicating that GyrA also has a role. Thus, quinolones acting through proteins DnaA, GyrA, IhfA, and IhfB regulate expression of qnrS1.
Poster: Understanding Newcomers Success in Open Source Community

Newcomers and volunteers contributions play an effective role the open source software (OSS) success. This role is confirmed through a rigor set of studies in software engineering discipline. As Open source projects are developed based on social and technical efforts, then it is very important for newcomers to empower their socio-technical skills. This paper focuses on newcomers' success in open source community by analyzing newcomers' reputation on their initial activities in a social coding environment such as GitHub. By applying mining software repositories (MSR) techniques on GitHub data we found the main projects' attributes where successful newcomers contributed to them. These attributes can help other newcomers to select the right project for their initial activities.
Preparation of Enzyme-Activated Thapsigargin Prodrugs by Solid-Phase Synthesis

Since cells in solid tumors divide less rapidly than cells in the bone marrow or cells of the immune system, mitotic inhibitors often cause severe side effects when used for treatment of diseases like prostate cancer and breast cancer. One approach to overcome this problem involves attempts at developing drugs based on general cytotoxins, like calicheamicin and thapsigargin, which kill cells at all phases of the cell cycle. However, such toxins can only be used when efficient targeting to the malignant tissue is possible. In the case of thapsigargin, selectivity for tumor-associated cells is achieved by conjugating the drug to a peptide that is only cleaved in the vicinity of tumors to release the cytotoxic drug or an analog with retained activity. Solid-phase synthesis protocols were developed for preparation of three already validated prodrugs of thapsigargin: one prodrug cleavable by human kallikrein 2, one prodrug cleavable by prostate-specific antigen, and one prodrug cleavable by prostate-specific membrane antigen.
VideoCoreCluster: Energy-Efficient, Low-Cost, and Hardware-Assisted Video Transcoding System

Video streaming is one of the killer applications in recent years. Video transcoding plays an important role in the video streaming service to cope with the various purposes. Specifically, content owners and publishers heavily utilize video transcoders to reconfigure source video in a variety of formats, video qualities, and bitrate to provide end users with the best possible quality of service. In this paper, we present VideoCoreCluster, a low-cost and energy-efficient transcoder cluster that is suitable for live streaming services. We designed and implemented real-time video transcoder cluster using cheap ($35), powerful, and energy-efficient Raspberry Pi. The quality of transcoded video provided by VideoCoreCluster is similar to the best software-based video transcoder while consuming significantly less energy (<3 W). We have proposed a scheduling algorithm based on priority of video stream and transcoding capacity. Our cluster manager provides reliable and scalable streaming services, because it uses the characteristics of adaptive bitrate scheme. We have deployed our transcoding cluster to provide IP-based TV streaming services on our university campus.
Evaluation of dermal collagen stained with picrosirius red and examined under polarized light microscopy*

The special picrosirius red staining highlights the natural birefringence of collagen fibers when exposed to polarized light. The results from birefringence allow to evaluate the organization of the collagen fibers in the tissues. The authors intend to elucidate all steps to obtain and capture images of histological sections stained with picrosirius red and evaluated under polarized light microscopy, as well as possible artefacts that may occur.
Exploring the Exponentially Decaying Merit of an Out-of-Sequence Observation

It is well known that in a Kalman filtering framework, all sensor observations or measurements contribute toward improving the accuracy of state estimation, but, as observations become older, their impact toward improving estimations becomes smaller to the point that they offer no practical benefit. In this paper, we provide an practical technique for determining the merit of an old observation using system parameters. We demonstrate that the benefit provided by an old observation decreases exponentially with the number of observations captured and processed after it. To quantify the merit of an old observation, we use the filter gain for the delayed observation, found by re-processing all past measurements between the delayed observation and the current time estimate, a high cost task. We demonstrate the value of the proposed technique to system designers using both nearly-constant position (random walk) and nearly-constant velocity (discrete white-noise acceleration, DWNA) cases. In these cases, the merit (that is, gain) of an old observation can be computed in closed-form without iteration. The analysis technique incorporates the state transition function, the observation function, the state transition noise, and the observation noise to quantify the merit of an old observation. Numerical simulations demonstrate the accuracy of these predictions even when measurements arrive randomly according to a Poisson distribution. Simulations confirm that our approach correctly predicts which observations increase estimation accuracy based on their delay by comparing a single-step out-of-sequence Kalman filter with a selective version that drops out-of-sequence observations. This approach may be used in system design to evaluate feasibility of a multi-agent target tracking system, and when selecting system parameters including sensor rates and network latencies.