gebhart/patrepeval huggingface dataset:
Neural Activation Constellations: Unsupervised Part Model Discovery with Convolutional Networks (2015)

Part models of object categories are essential for challenging recognition tasks, where differences in categories are subtle and only reflected in appearances of small parts of the object. We present an approach that is able to learn part models in a completely unsupervised manner, without part annotations and even without given bounding boxes during learning. The key idea is to find constellations of neural activation patterns computed using convolutional neural networks. In our experiments, we outperform existing approaches for fine-grained recognition on the CUB200-2011, Oxford PETS, and Oxford Flowers dataset in case no part or bounding box annotations are available and achieve state-of-the-art performance for the Stanford Dog dataset. We also show the benefits of neural constellation models as a data augmentation technique for fine-tuning. Furthermore, our paper unites the areas of generic and fine-grained classification, since our approach is suitable for both scenarios.
Therapeutical Measures to Control Airway Tolerance in Asthma and Lung Cancer (2012)

Airway tolerance is a specialized immunological surveillance which is activated by the cells of the lung to deal with and distinguish between innocuous and pathogenic inhalants. However, this distinction does not always occur. Airway tolerance is necessary to avoid the development of allergic disorders, such as asthma, which is dominated by a pathological expansion of Th2 and Th17 cells in the airways. By contrast, tumor cells induce tolerogenic factors in their microenvironment to evade T-cell mediated anti-tumor-immune responses. This review updates current understandings on the effect of the cytokines TGF-β, IL-10, and IL-17A on the lung immune responses to antigen, and analyzes their involvement in allergic asthma and lung cancer. The aim of the review is to evaluate where therapeutic intervention may be feasible and where it might fail. The multifunctional role of these cytokines further complicates the decision on the timing and concentration for their use as therapeutical targets. In fact, TGF-β has suppressive activity in early tumorigenesis, but may become tumor-promoting in the later stages of the disease. This dual behavior is sometimes due to changes in the cellular target of TGF-β, and to the expansion of the induced (i)-Tregs. Similarly, IL-17A has been found to elicit pro- as well as anti-tumor properties. Thus, this pro-inflammatory cytokine induces the production of IL-6 which interferes with Treg development. Yet IL-17A could promote tumor growth in conjunction with IL-6-dependent activation of Stat3. Thus, understanding the mechanisms of airway tolerance could help to improve the therapy to both, allergic asthma and lung cancer. Hereby, asthma therapy aims to induce and maintain tolerance to inhaled allergens and therapy against lung cancer tries to inhibit the tolerogenic response surrounding the tumor.
Inhibition of Microglial Phagocytosis Is Sufficient To Prevent Inflammatory Neuronal Death (2011)

It is well-known that dead and dying neurons are quickly removed through phagocytosis by the brain's macrophages, the microglia. Therefore, neuronal loss during brain inflammation has always been assumed to be due to phagocytosis of neurons subsequent to their apoptotic or necrotic death. However, we report in this article that under inflammatory conditions in primary rat cultures of neurons and glia, phagocytosis actively induces neuronal death. Specifically, two inflammatory bacterial ligands, lipoteichoic acid or LPS (agonists of glial TLR2 and TLR4, respectively), stimulated microglial proliferation, phagocytic activity, and engulfment of ∼30% of neurons within 3 d. Phagocytosis of neurons was dependent on the microglial release of soluble mediators (and peroxynitrite in particular), which induced neuronal exposure of the eat-me signal phosphatidylserine (PS). Surprisingly, however, eat-me signaling was reversible, so that blocking any step in a phagocytic pathway consisting of PS exposure, the PS-binding protein milk fat globule epidermal growth factor-8, and its microglial vitronectin receptor was sufficient to rescue up to 90% of neurons without reducing inflammation. Hence, our data indicate a novel form of inflammatory neurodegeneration, where inflammation can cause eat-me signal exposure by otherwise viable neurons, leading to their death through phagocytosis. Thus, blocking phagocytosis may prevent some forms of inflammatory neurodegeneration, and therefore might be beneficial during brain infection, trauma, ischemia, neurodegeneration, and aging.
Carnitine in Human Muscle Bioenergetics: Can Carnitine Supplementation Improve Physical Exercise? (2020)

l-Carnitine is an amino acid derivative widely known for its involvement in the transport of long-chain fatty acids into the mitochondrial matrix, where fatty acid oxidation occurs. Moreover, l-Carnitine protects the cell from acyl-CoA accretion through the generation of acylcarnitines. Circulating carnitine is mainly supplied by animal-based food products and to a lesser extent by endogenous biosynthesis in the liver and kidney. Human muscle contains high amounts of carnitine but it depends on the uptake of this compound from the bloodstream, due to muscle inability to synthesize carnitine. Mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation represents an important energy source for muscle metabolism particularly during physical exercise. However, especially during high-intensity exercise, this process seems to be limited by the mitochondrial availability of free l-carnitine. Hence, fatty acid oxidation rapidly declines, increasing exercise intensity from moderate to high. Considering the important role of fatty acids in muscle bioenergetics, and the limiting effect of free carnitine in fatty acid oxidation during endurance exercise, l-carnitine supplementation has been hypothesized to improve exercise performance. So far, the question of the role of l-carnitine supplementation on muscle performance has not definitively been clarified. Differences in exercise intensity, training or conditioning of the subjects, amount of l-carnitine administered, route and timing of administration relative to the exercise led to different experimental results. In this review, we will describe the role of l-carnitine in muscle energetics and the main causes that led to conflicting data on the use of l-carnitine as a supplement.
MCT4 has a potential to be used as a prognostic biomarker - a systematic review and meta-analysis (2019)

The role of several metabolic changes, such as hypoxia and acidosis, in the tumour environment has caught the attention of researchers in cancer progression and invasion. Lactate transport is one of the acidosis-enhancing processes that are mediated <i>via</i> monocarboxylate transporters (MCTs). We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate the expression of two cancer-relevant MCTs (MCT1 and MCT4) and their potential prognostic significance in patients with metastasis of different types of cancer. Studies were included if they reported the number of metastatic tissue samples expressing either low or high levels of MCT1 and/or MCT4 or those revealing the hazard ratios (HRs) of the overall survival (OS) or disease-free survival (DFS) as prognostic indicators. During the period between 2010 and 2018, a total of 20 articles including 3831 patients (56.3% males) were identified. There was a significant association between MCT4 expression (high <i>versus</i> low) and lymph node metastasis [odds ratio (OR)=1.87, 95% confidence interval (CI)=1.10-3.17, P=0.02] and distant metastasis (OR=2.18, 95%CI=1.65-2.86, P<0.001) and the correlation remained significant for colorectal and hepatic cancer in subgroup analysis. For survival analysis, patients with shorter OS periods exhibited a higher MCT4 expression [hazard ratio (HR)=1.78, 95%CI=1.49-2.13, P<0.001], while DFS was shorter in patients with high MCT1 (HR=1.48, 95%CI=1.04-2.10, P=0.03) and MCT4 expression (HR=1.70, 95%CI=1.19-2.42, P=0.003) when compared to their counterparts with low expression levels. Future research studies should consider the pharmacologic inhibition of MCT4 to effectively inhibit cancer progression to metastasis.
Solvent properties of hydrazine in the preparation of metal chalcogenide bulk materials and films (2009)

A combination of unique solvent properties of hydrazine enables the direct dissolution of a range of metal chalcogenides at ambient temperature, rendering this an extraordinarily simple and soft synthetic approach to prepare new metal chalcogenide-based materials. The extended metal chalcogenide parent framework is broken up during this process, and the resulting metal chalcogenide building units are re-organized into network structures (from 0D to 3D) based upon their interactions with the hydrazine/hydrazinium moieties. This Perspective will review recent crystal and materials chemistry developments within this family of compounds and will briefly discuss the utility of this approach in metal chalcogenide thin-film deposition.
Automated breast cancer detection and classification using ultrasound images A survey (2009)

Article history: Received 9 September 2008 Received in revised form 16 April 2009 Accepted 14 May 2009
Overview of Environment Perception for Intelligent Vehicles (2017)

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on environment perception for intelligent vehicles. The state-of-the-art algorithms and modeling methods for intelligent vehicles are given, with a summary of their pros and cons. A special attention is paid to methods for lane and road detection, traffic sign recognition, vehicle tracking, behavior analysis, and scene understanding. In addition, we provide information about datasets, common performance analysis, and perspectives on future research directions in this area.
Strategic planning and considerations of broadband access networks (2002)

A methodology for finding out an appropriate access network architecture on B-ISDN is proposed. The authors extract the considerations to determine the most economical and efficient access network architecture and set up the organic interrelationships between them. They also show the network evaluation methods to choose the most appropriate access network architecture among the alternatives. Finally, they propose a broadband access network architecture and its evolution scenarios that are suitable to the Korean environment.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>
Solar cell coverglasses for satellites in the intermediate Earth orbit (2002)

Satellites in an Earth orbit where high levels of radiation are experienced require greater protection for their solar cell arrays than is normal. This may be provided by the use of thicker coverglasses to minimise solar cell degradation. This paper describes the development by Pilkingtons of a new glass CMO, which has a high transmission in the visible spectrum, is radiation stable to high fluences, incorporates a UV 'cut-off' filter and is capable of being manufactured economically in large volume. It has a high emissivity and is durable. The results of an evaluation are given and compared with high purity fused silica.
Mining Parallel Text from the Web based on Sentence Alignment (2007)

The parallel corpus is an important resource in the research field of data-driven natural language processing, but there are only a few parallel corpora publicly available nowadays, mostly due to the high labor force needed to construct this kind of resource. A novel strategy is brought out to automatically fetch parallel text from the web in this paper, which may help to solve the problem of the lack of parallel corpora with high quality. The system we develop first downloads the web pages from certain hosts. Then candidate parallel page pairs are prepared from the page set based on the outer features of the web pages. The candidate page pairs are evaluated in the last step in which the sentences in the candidate web page pairs are extracted and aligned first, and then the similarity of the two web pages is evaluate based on the similarities of the aligned sentences. The experiments towards a multilingual web site show the satisfactory performance of the system.
Ionization-based gas sensor using aligned MWCNTs array (2010)

Current gas sensors are mainly categorized into two modes of operation; chemical type operating by gas adsorption and physical type using ionization method. Chemical type conductivity-based gas detectors are large in size, they operate at high temperatures, and their response time is slow. Moreover most of them are only capable of detecting single type gases due to their low selectivity. Physical type ionization-based sensors have better selectivity and response time, but they are still huge and bulky. Both chemical and physical type gas detectors are using semiconductor materials as their sensing elements. With the discovery of nanomaterials, different types of sensing elements have been investigated to produce gas sensors which are smaller in size, one of which is carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Development of high performance sensor is now focused towards CNT-based sensors because of their inherent properties such as small size, large surface area and high electrical conductivity. CNTs based sensors are smaller in size; they have lower power consumption, higher sensitivity and better selectivity compared to existing semiconducting gas sensors. CNT-based gas sensors operate in room temperature which will result in safer environment. The work investigates the structural and electrical characterization of carbon nanotubes array for suitability as an effective sensing element in the ionization-based gas sensor.
Induced plant volatiles allow sensitive monitoring of plant health status in greenhouses (2009)

A novel approach to support the inspection of greenhouse crops is based on the measurement of volatile organic compounds emitted by unhealthy plants. This approach has attracted some serious interest over the last decade. In pursuit of this interest, we performed several experiments at the laboratory-scale to pinpoint marker volatiles that can be used to indicate certain health problems. In addition to these laboratory experiments, pilot and model studies were performed in order to verify the validity of these marker volatiles under real-world conditions. This paper provides an overview of results and gives an outlook on the use of plant volatiles for plant health monitoring.
The impact of switching costs on the customer satisfaction‐loyalty link: mobile phone service in France (2001)

The main objective of customer satisfaction programs is to increase customer retention rates. In explaining the link between customer satisfaction and loyalty, switching costs play an important role and provide useful insight. For example, the presence of switching costs can mean that some seemingly loyal customers are actually dissatisfied but do not defect because of high switching costs. Thus, the level of switching costs moderates the link between satisfaction and loyalty. The purposes of this paper are: to examine the moderating role of switching costs in the customer satisfaction‐loyalty link; and to identify customer segments and then analyze the heterogeneity in the satisfaction‐loyalty link among the different segments. An empirical example based on the mobile phone service market in France indicates support for the moderating role of switching costs. Managerial implications of the results are discussed.
Strapped calix[4]pyrroles: from syntheses to applications (2020)

Supramolecular chemistry is a central topic in modern chemistry. It touches on many traditional disciplines, such as organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, physical chemistry, materials chemistry, environmental chemistry, and biological chemistry. Supramolecular hosts, inter alia macrocyclic hosts, play critical roles in supramolecular chemistry. Calix[4]pyrroles, non-aromatic tetrapyrrolic macrocycles defined by sp<sup>3</sup> hybridized meso bridges, have proved to be versatile receptors for neutral species, anions, and cations, as well as ion pairs. Compared to the parent system, octamethylcalix[4]pyrrole and its derivatives bearing simple appended functionalities, strapped calix[4]pyrroles typically display enhanced binding affinities and selectivities. In this review, we summarize advances in the design and synthesis of strapped calix[4]pyrroles, as well as their broad utility in molecular recognition, supramolecular extraction, separation technology, ion transport, and as agents capable of inhibiting cancer cell proliferation. Future challenges within this sub-field are also discussed.
Cellulose Whiskers versus Microfibrils: Influence of the Nature of the Nanoparticle and its Surface Functionalization on the Thermal and Mechanical Properties of Nanocomposites (2008)

In the present work, nanowhiskers and microfibrillated cellulose (MFC) both extracted from sisal were used to reinforce polycaprolactone (PCL). We report the influence of the nanoparticle's nature on the mechanical and thermal properties of the ensuing nanocomposites. The surface of both the nanoparticles was chemically modified to improve their compatibilization with the polymeric matrix. N-Octadecyl isocyanate (C18H37NCO) was used as the grafting agent. PCL nanocomposite films reinforced with sisal whiskers or MFC (raw or chemically modified) were prepared by film casting. The thermal behavior (Tg, Tm, Tc, and degree of crystallinity) and the mechanical properties of the nanocomposites in both the linear and the nonlinear range were determined using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), dynamical mechanical analysis (DMA), and tensile tests, respectively. Significant differences were reported according to the nature of the nanoparticle and amount of nanofillers used as reinforcement. It was also proved that the chemical treatment clearly improves the ultimate properties of the nanocomposites.
Hydrolysis of α<sub>s1</sub>‐ and β‐casein‐derived peptides with a broad specificity aminopeptidase and proline specific aminopeptidases from <i>Lactococcus lactis</i> subsp. <i>cremoris</i> AM2 (1999)

Aminopeptidase hydrolysis of alpha(s)1 - and beta-casein-derived synthetic peptides containing non-consecutive and consecutive proline residues was characterised. Aminopeptidase P (Pep P) (EC 3.4.11.9) or post-proline dipeptidyl aminopeptidase (PPDA) (EC 3.4.14.5) along with lysine-paranitroanilide hydrolase (KpNA-H) (EC 3.4.11.1) activities are required in the degradation of peptides containing non-consecutive proline residues. However, both Pep P and PPDA along with KpNA-H are required for hydrolysis of peptides containing consecutive proline residues. The results demonstrate the mechanism by which combinations of purified general and proline specific aminopeptidases from Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris AM2 hydrolyse peptides containing proline residues.
Upcoming perspectives and future challenges for ROF (2007)

The potential use of radio over fiber techniques (RoF) is analyzed and discussed in the context of recent large scale optical fiber deployments in Europe for broadband access but as well in the context of home or in-building networks to provide very high data rates to the end-users in harmony with expected evolution of broadband connections. Main challenges for RoF include the current evolution toward an all IP network, the rapidity with which networks evolve and the lack of standardization work.
Optimal Antimicrobial Catheter Lock Solution, Using Different Combinations of Minocycline, EDTA, and 25-Percent Ethanol, Rapidly Eradicates Organisms Embedded in Biofilm (2006)

Antimicrobial lock solutions may be needed to salvage indwelling catheters in patients requiring continuous intravenous therapy. We determined the activity of minocycline, EDTA, and 25% ethanol, alone or in combination, against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Candida parapsilosis catheter-related bloodstream infection strains in two established models of biofilm colonization. Biofilm-colonized catheter segments from a modified Robbins device and a silicone disk biofilm colonization model were exposed to these antimicrobial agents for 15 or 60 min, respectively. After exposure, segments were sonicated and cultured. To determine regrowth after incubation at 37 degrees C, following the brief exposure to the antimicrobial agents, an equal number of segments were washed, reincubated for 24 h, and then sonicated and cultured. The triple combination of minocycline-EDTA (M-EDTA) in 25% ethanol was the only antimicrobial lock solution that completely eradicated S. aureus and C. parapsilosis in biofilm of all segments tested in the two models, and it completely prevented regrowth. In addition, M-EDTA in 25% ethanol was significantly more effective in rapidly eradicating the growth or regrowth of methicillin-resistant S. aureus and C. parapsilosis biofilm colonization in the two models than the other solutions--minocycline, EDTA, M-EDTA, 25% ethanol, and EDTA in ethanol. We conclude that M-EDTA in 25% ethanol is highly effective at rapidly eradicating S. aureus and C. parapsilosis embedded in biofilm adhering to catheter segments.
Lotus Notes<sup>®</sup>and Collaboration:<i>Plus ça change</i>... (1996)

:Work in organizations is becoming increasingly focused on collaborative work in groups. Groupware is widely touted as the information technology that can support this new mode of work by fostering collaboration. In a study of Lotus Notes®, a popular groupware product, implemented throughout the professional staff of a large American insurance company, we found the impact of groupware to be somewhat different from certain common expectations. While almost everyone was quite pleased with the Notes® implementation and its perceived impact, there was no evidence of a change in the degree of collaboration among organization members. Two key themes are explored as possible explanations for this result: fit of the technology to the organization, and limited training in how best to use this new technology.
The Effects of Contaminants of Fuel on the Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Performance (2007)

We chose metal ions and organic substances as contaminants in fuel in order to clarify influence of contaminants on the DMFC performance in life test. During the life test, the metal ions in the fuel accumulated in the electrolyte membrane and degraded the cell performance. The degradation was in proportion to the amount of metal ions in electrolyte. On the other hand, in the case of some kinds of organic substances degradations were observed. During the life test, the organic substance in the fuel might be oxidized in anode and that oxidized substance might have an adverse affect on the catalysis in the anode electrode.