Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-Drug Resistance ABC Transporter Inhibition Enhances Murine Ventral Prostate Stem/Progenitor Cell Differentiation

Multi-drug resistance (MDR)-ATP binding cassette (ABC) transporters, ABCB1, ABCC1, and ABCG2 participate in the efflux of steroid hormones, estrogens, and androgens, which regulate prostate development and differentiation. The role of MDR-ABC efflux transporters in prostate epithelial proliferation and differentiation remains unclear. We hypothesized that MDR-ABC transporters regulate prostate differentiation and epithelium regeneration. Prostate epithelial differentiation was studied using histology, sphere formation assay, and prostate regeneration induced by cycles of repeated androgen withdrawal and replacement. Embryonic deletion of Abcg2 resulted in a decreased number of luminal cells in the prostate and increased sphere formation efficiency, indicating an imbalance in the prostate epithelial differentiation pattern. Decreased luminal cell number in the Abcg2 null prostate implies reduced differentiation. Enhanced sphere formation efficiency in Abcg2 null prostate cells implies activation of the ste.
A sublanguage based medical language processing system for German

The major accomplishments reported in this thesis are: (1) The development of a computer grammar for a nontrivial sublanguage of German. This grammar, using the LSP (Linguistic String Processor) grammar formalism, solves a number of parsing problems arising in free word order languages such as German. (2) The development of an LSP-based information system that obtains semantic representations of texts in a medical sublanguage of German. (3) The confirmation of the sublanguage hypothesis (explained below). In LSP grammar theory, sentences in a language are derived from a collection of basic sentence types. The basic sentence types are described in terms of the major syntactic classes (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) of the language. Sentences are derived from these basic sentences by the insertion of optional structures called adjuncts, by conjoining, and by substituting words in the major classes. Insertion, conjoining, and substitution are constrained by co-occurrence restrictions between elements in the derived syntactic structures. The restrictions subcategorize the major word classes into subclasses that may co-occur in sentences according to the co-occurrence restrictions. The sublanguage hypothesis elaborates LSP grammar theory in the following way. In a particular domain of discourse, the subcategorization of the major word classes reflects the underlying semantics of the domain. The basic sentence types of the language, represented by sublanguage subclasses instead of major word classes, can function as data structures (called information formats) representing the information of the domain. The LSP Medical Language Processor (LSP/MLP) is an information retrieval/information extraction system based on sublanguage and information formatting. It processes sentences in the English sublanguage of clinical reporting into information formats, which are in turn are converted into database update records for a relational database. The information formats are derived from sublanguage co-occurrence information obtained from a corpus of discharge summaries. The German information formatting system implemented in this work processes German Arztbriefe (doctor letters) of cancer surgery patients into information formats. It confirms the sublanguage hypothesis because it re-uses the sublanguage information (co-occurrence information and formats) of the English LSP/MLP system in an equivalent sublanguage, showing that the sublanguage information reflects the semantics of the domain.
Historic and prehistoric human-driven extinctions have reshaped global mammal diversity patterns

Aim To assess the extent to which humans have reshaped Earth’s biodiversity, by estimating natural ranges of all late Quaternary mammalian species, and to compare diversity patterns based on these with diversity patterns based on current distributions. Location Globally Methods We estimated species, functional and phylogenetic diversity patterns based on natural ranges of all mammalian species (n=5747 species) as they could have been today in the complete absence of human influence through time. Following this we compared macroecological analyses of current and natural diversity patterns to assess if human-induced range changes bias for evolutionary and ecological analyses based on current diversity patterns. Results We find that current diversity patterns have been drastically modified by humans, mostly due to global extinctions and regional to local extirpations. Current and natural diversities exhibit marked deviations virtually everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa. These differences are strongest for terrestrial megafauna, but also important for all mammals combined. The human-induced changes led to biases in estimates of environmental diversity drivers, especially for terrestrial megafauna, but also for all mammals combined. Main conclusions Our results show that fundamental diversity patterns have been reshaped by human-driven extinctions and extirpations, highlighting humans as a major force in the Earth system. We thereby emphasize that estimating natural distributions and diversities is important to improve our understanding of the evolutionary and ecologically drivers of diversity as well as for providing a benchmark for conservation.
Estrela: Automated, Contextual Enforcement of Data Flow Policies across APIs

Existing solutions for tracking sensitive data and enforcing data usage policies have been intertwined with a specific host language---and multiple host languages in the case of database-backed applications. In this paper, we present an alternate, policy-agnostic approach that automatically enforces API-specific policies. We demonstrate that by associating policy enforcement with the API between the application and database, it is possible to automatically enforce rich and expressive policies across database-backed applications without depending on the application or database language. We present Estrela, a web framework that allows the specification of rich and expressive policies separately from the code and enforces the policies in a highly context-dependent manner. Estrela supports both query-level policies that are applied during data-access, and row-level policies that are more granular, complex and contextual. Estrela works with legacy applications without requiring any modification to the application code or the database for enforcing the policies. We build a prototype of Estrela and a language-agnostic version of Estrela in Python, on top of Django. We evaluate its performance and effectiveness by showing its application to a forum software, a social-networking site, a conference management system, and a company intranet. Estrela adds low overhead to existing applications and supports easy migration of existing applications for policy-compliance.
Analysis of transconductances at all levels of inversion in deep submicron CMOS

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of transconductances in CMOS for advanced analog IC design. Transconductances in a 0.25 /spl mu/m CMOS technology have been measured over a large range of geometries and bias conditions. Gate (g/sub mg/), source (g/sub ms/), drain (g/sub md/) and bulk (g/sub mb/) transconductances are consistently normalized and represented vs. inversion coefficient (IC) from very weak to moderate and strong inversion. The ideal transconductance behavior in particular in weak inversion is analyzed via the analytical structure of the EKV MOSFET model. The new EKV 3.0 MOSFET model shows excellent abilities to correctly represent transconductances at all levels of inversion and channel lengths.
What Azure blues occur in Canada? A re-assessment of Celastrina Tutt species (Lepidoptera, Lycaenidae)

Abstract The identity of Celastrina species in eastern Canada is reviewed based on larval host plants, phenology, adult phenotypes, mtDNA barcodes and re-assessment of published data. The status of the Cherry Gall Azure (Celastrina serotina Pavulaan & Wright) as a distinct species in Canada is not supported by any dataset, and is removed from the Canadian fauna. Previous records of this taxon are re-identified as Celastrina lucia (Kirby) and Celastrina neglecta (Edwards). Evidence is presented that both Celastrina lucia and Celastrina neglecta have a second, summer-flying generation in parts of Canada. The summer generation of Celastrina lucia has previously been misidentified as Celastrina neglecta, which differs in phenology, adult phenotype and larval hosts from summer Celastrina lucia. DNA barcodes are highly conserved among at least three North American Celastrina species, and provide no taxonomic information. Celastrina neglecta has a Canadian distribution restricted to southern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and easternmost Alberta. The discovery of museum specimens of Celastrina ladon (Cramer) from southernmost Ontario represents a new species for the Canadian butterfly fauna, which is in need of conservation status assessment.
Polymerization Induces Non-Gaussian Diffusion

Recent theoretical modeling offers a unified picture for the description of stochastic processes characterized by a crossover from anomalous to normal behavior. This is particularly welcome, as a growing number of experiments suggest the crossover to be a common feature shared by many systems: in some cases the anomalous part of the dynamics amounts to a Brownian yet non-Gaussian diffusion; more generally, both the diffusion exponent and the distribution may deviate from normal behavior in the initial part of the process. Since proposed theories work at a mesoscopic scale invoking the subordination of diffusivities, it is of primary importance to bridge these representations with a more fundamental, ``microscopic'' description. We argue that the dynamical behavior of macromolecules during simple polymerization processes provide suitable setups in which analytic, numerical, and particle-tracking experiments can be contrasted at such a scope. Specifically, we demonstrate that Brownian yet non-Gaussian diffusion of the center of mass of a polymer is a direct consequence of the polymerization process. Through the kurtosis, we characterize the early-stage non-Gaussian behavior within a phase diagram, and we also put forward an estimation for the crossover time to ordinary Brownian motion.
Feasibility Study of Backtracking Algorithm for Virtual Cluster Migration in Cloud Computing

Computing (CC) is an emerging field in which research scholars from academia and industry professional contribute their knowledge to understand and propagate the dimensions of its applications. One of the popular services in CC is Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) by which the customers can rent a highly configured server, storageetc. from the providers. On the provider's side in order to maintain the numerous servers for myriad reasons like load balancing, faulttolerance, complying to the Service Level Agreements(SLA), they have to migrate these servers from one Physical Machine(PM) to another PM. A Backtracking algorithm is proposed and its feasibility study is done by comparing the approach and working with various similar existing algorithms.
New or interesting hyphomycetes from the Biosphere Reserve of Sierra del Rosario, Cuba

Abstract Two new hyphomycetes, Periconia intermedia and Stanjehughesia fasciculata, are described and illustrated. The first species is characterized by setiform conidiophores and spherical, strongly echinulate conidia that arise from rugose branches located in the middle part, and mainly to one side of each conidiophore. The second species is characterized by caespitose, principally unicellular conidiophores, which produce obclaviform, rostrate, multiseptate conidia with one or two distosepta in the apex where the outer wall is frequently broken and delaminated. Five other hyphomycetes new to Cuba are also reported.
Identificación de Escherichia coli enteropatógena en niños con síndrome diarreico agudo del Estado Sucre, Venezuela

Introduccion. Escherichia coli es uno de los principales agentes causales del sindrome diarreico agudo. Objetivo. Identificar grupos clonales de E. coli enteropatogena en 485 casos de diarrea aguda en ninos entre 0 y 10 anos de edad atendidos en centros de salud de los municipios de Arismendi, Benitez y Sucre del estado Sucre, Venezuela, entre marzo y diciembre de 2011. Materiales y metodos. Previo consentimiento informado, se recolectaron muestras fecales y se identifico E. coli mediante coprocultivo estandar y serologia con antisueros polivalentes y monovalentes. Se aislo el ADN y se amplificaron los genes eae (intimina) y bfpA (bundlina) mediante dos pruebas de reaccion en cadena de la polimerasa (PCR) multiples. Resultados. En 39,6 % de los coprocultivos se determino la presencia de infeccion bacteriana. La prevalencia de E. coli fue de 54,7 %; 82,9 % de estas cepas fue positivo por serologia para los serogrupos y el serotipo evaluados, principalmente en ninos entre los 0 y los 2 anos (37,9 %). El 48,6 % de las cepas de E. coli amplificaron para el gen eae y, de estas, 58,8 % se clasifico como cepas de E. coli enteropatogena tipica (eae+ y bfp+). El ECEP II fue el serogrupo mas frecuente (38,7 %), con predominio de bacterias E. coli enteropatogenas tipicas (60 %). El alelo β de la intimina fue el mas identificado (74,5 %) en las cepas positivas para el gen eae. Solo se identificaron cuatro cepas con el serotipo O157:H7 utilizando antisueros, las cuales no amplificaron mediante PCR para los genes eae y bfpA. Conclusiones. Este estudio demostro la importancia de aplicar pruebas moleculares en la identificacion de las cepas de E. coli causantes de diarrea de diversa gravedad.
Neural network regression for Bermudan option pricing

Abstract The pricing of Bermudan options amounts to solving a dynamic programming principle, in which the main difficulty, especially in high dimension, comes from the conditional expectation involved in the computation of the continuation value. These conditional expectations are classically computed by regression techniques on a finite-dimensional vector space. In this work, we study neural networks approximations of conditional expectations. We prove the convergence of the well-known Longstaff and Schwartz algorithm when the standard least-square regression is replaced by a neural network approximation, assuming an efficient algorithm to compute this approximation. We illustrate the numerical efficiency of neural networks as an alternative to standard regression methods for approximating conditional expectations on several numerical examples.
Mitigating the Hubness Problem for Zero-Shot Learning of 3D Objects

The development of advanced 3D sensors has enabled many objects to be captured in the wild at a large scale, and a 3D object recognition system may therefore encounter many objects for which the system has received no training. Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) approaches can assist such systems in recognizing previously unseen objects. Applying ZSL to 3D point cloud objects is an emerging topic in the area of 3D vision, however, a significant problem that ZSL often suffers from is the so-called hubness problem, which is when a model is biased to predict only a few particular labels for most of the test instances. We observe that this hubness problem is even more severe for 3D recognition than for 2D recognition. One reason for this is that in 2D one can use pre-trained networks trained on large datasets like ImageNet, which produces high-quality features. However, in the 3D case there are no such large-scale, labelled datasets available for pre-training which means that the extracted 3D features are of poorer quality which, in turn, exacerbates the hubness problem. In this paper, we therefore propose a loss to specifically address the hubness problem. Our proposed method is effective for both Zero-Shot and Generalized Zero-Shot Learning, and we perform extensive evaluations on the challenging datasets ModelNet40, ModelNet10, McGill and SHREC2015. A new state-of-the-art result for both zero-shot tasks in the 3D case is established.
CA-RefineNet:A Dual Input WSI Image Segmentation Algorithm Based on Attention

Due to the high resolution of pathological images, the automated semantic segmentation in the medical pathological images has shown greater challenges than that in natural images. Sliding Window method has shown its effect on solving problem caused by the high resolution of whole slide images (WSI). However, owing to its localization, Sliding Window method also suffers from being lack of global information. In this paper, a dual input semantic segmentation network based on attention is proposed, in which, one input provides small-scale fine information, the other input provides large-scale coarse information. Compared with single input methods, our method CA-RefineNet exhibits a dramatic performance improvement on ICIAR2018 breast cancer segmentation task.
A Recursive Algebraic Coloring Technique for Hardware-efficient Symmetric Sparse Matrix-vector Multiplication

The symmetric sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SymmSpMV) is an important building block for many numerical linear algebra kernel operations or graph traversal applications. Parallelizing SymmSpMV on today’s multicore platforms with up to 100 cores is difficult due to the need to manage conflicting updates on the result vector. Coloring approaches can be used to solve this problem without data duplication, but existing coloring algorithms do not take load balancing and deep memory hierarchies into account, hampering scalability and full-chip performance. In this work, we propose the recursive algebraic coloring engine (RACE), a novel coloring algorithm and open-source library implementation that eliminates the shortcomings of previous coloring methods in terms of hardware efficiency and parallelization overhead. We describe the level construction, distance-k coloring, and load balancing steps in RACE, use it to parallelize SymmSpMV, and compare its performance on 31 sparse matrices with other state-of-the-art coloring techniques and Intel MKL on two modern multicore processors. RACE outperforms all other approaches substantially. By means of a parameterized roofline model, we analyze the SymmSpMV performance in detail and discuss outliers. While we focus on SymmSpMV in this article, our algorithm and software are applicable to any sparse matrix operation with data dependencies that can be resolved by distance-k coloring.
Assessing the photometric redshift precision of the S-PLUS survey: the Stripe-82 as a test-case

In this paper we present a thorough discussion about the photometric redshift (photo-z) performance of the Southern Photometric Local Universe Survey (S-PLUS). This survey combines a seven narrow +5 broad passband filter system, with a typical photometric-depth of r ∼ 21 AB. For this exercise, we utilize the Data Release 1 (DR1), corresponding to 336 deg2 from the Stripe-82 region. We rely on the BPZ2 code to compute our estimates, using a new library of SED models, which includes additional templates for quiescent galaxies. When compared to a spectroscopic redshift control sample of ∼100 k galaxies, we find a precision of σz <0.8 per cent, <2.0 per cent, or <3.0 per cent for galaxies with magnitudes r < 17, <19, and <21, respectively. A precision of 0.6 per cent is attained for galaxies with the highest Odds values. These estimates have a negligible bias and a fraction of catastrophic outliers inferior to 1 per cent. We identify a redshift window (i.e. 0.26 < z < 0.32) where our estimates double their precision, due to the simultaneous detection of two emission lines in two distinct narrow bands; representing a window opportunity to conduct statistical studies such as luminosity functions. We forecast a total of ∼2 M, ∼16 M and ∼32 M galaxies in the S-PLUS survey with a photo-z precision of σz <1.0 per cent, <2.0 per cent, and <2.5 per cent after observing 8000 deg2. We also derive redshift probability density functions, proving their reliability encoding redshift uncertainties and their potential recovering the n(z) of galaxies at z < 0.4, with an unprecedented precision for a photometric survey in the Southern hemisphere.
State Estimation in Visual Inertial Autonomous Helicopter Landing Using Optimisation on Manifold

Autonomous helicopter landing is a challenging task that requires precise information about the aircraft states regarding the helicopters position, attitude, as well as position of the helipad. To this end, we propose a solution that fuses data from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a monocular camera which is capable of detecting helipads position in the image plane. The algorithm utilises manifold based nonlinear optimisation over preintegrated IMU measurements and reprojection error in temporally uniformly distributed keyframes, exhibiting good performance in terms of accuracy and being computationally feasible. Our contributions of this paper are the formal address of the landmarks Jacobian expressions and the adaptation of equality constrained Gauss-Newton method to this specific problem. Numerical simulations on MATLAB/Simulink confirm the validity of given claims.
Age-related changes of Glu/GABA expression in the primary visual cortex of cat.

Recent studies show that a reduced effect of inhibitory transmitter system in the visual cortex may underlie aged visual function degradation. Whether excitatory transmitter system changes with age and hence affects intracortical excitation-inhibition balance is not clear. To explore this issue, we used Nissl staining and immunohistochemical methods as well as Image-Pro Express software to examine the density of Nissl-stained neurons, Glutamic acid-immunoreactive (Glu-IR) neurons and γ-Aminobutyric acid-immunoreactive (GABA-IR) neurons in the primary visual cortex of young adult and aged cats. The results showed that there was no significant difference in the density of Nissl-stained neurons between young and old cats (P＞0.05). However, the density of Glu-IR neurons and GABA-IR neurons in the primary visual cortex of aged cats was significantly lower than that of young ones (P＜0.01). The ratio between Glu-IR neurons and GABA-IR neurons was significantly increased in old cats compared to that in young adult ones (P＜0.01). These results indicated that the effect of excitatory transmitter system in the old visual cortex was increased relative to the inhibitory transmitter system, which might cause an imbalance between cortical excitation and inhibition and might be an important factor mediating the visual function decline during aging.
Performance of an alternative SSPA-based payload for next generation broadband multi-spot beam systems

Lately, the increasing demand for broadband services via satellite has pushed industry and research to consider new technologies and techniques that allow either to maximise the system capacity or to reduce the cost of the platform for a given performance. At this regards, multi-beam systems have been the object of many investigations. For large number of spot-beams, one physical limitation is represented by the number of high power amplifiers that the platform can accommodate and the consequent transmitted power. In classic systems with multiple-colour frequency reuse, this can result in a partly or fully noise-limited scenario. This paper assesses the performance of an alternative payload architecture based on SSPAs (Solid State Power Amplifiers) exploitation within the forward link mission of a system with full frequency reuse and interference-limited signal-to-noise ratios. The results are compared with the performance of a classic payload with travelling-wave tubes and four-colour frequency reuse. The use of interference cancellation techniques is also considered.