Determining cellular and biochemical function of a novel adhesion molecule in kidneys.

Acute kidney injury is an abrupt loss of kidney function that develops in short time with limited effective treatments other than kidney transplantation. We have identified TMIGD1 (Transmembrane immuno- globulin domain 1) as a novel receptor expressed in various organs and tissues, mainly in cell with epithelial origin. TMIGD1 regulates cell morphology and adhesion and its extracellular domain mediates its activity. Knocking down of TMIGD1 using short hairpin RNA (shRNA) increased cell death in human kidney epithelial cells (HK2). On the other hand, HEK293 cells over expressing TMIGD1 protected cells from oxidative stress and nutrient deprivation induced injuries. Furthermore, TMIGD1 expression is reduced in vivo and in vitro kidney injury models. TMIGD1 expression was regulated by ubiquitination and degradation by proteosome 26s. Thus, we present TMIGD1 as a novel receptor that plays important roles in regulation of cell morphology, cell- cell interaction and cell survival

Memory-based vocalization of Arabic

The problem of vocalization, or diacritization, is essential to many tasks in Arabic NLP. Arabic is generally written without the short vowels, which leads to one written form having several pronunciations with each pronunciation carrying its own meaning(s). In the experiments reported here, we define vocalization as a classification problem in which we decide for each character in the unvocalized word whether it is followed by a short vowel. We investigate the importance of different types of context. Our results show that the combination of using memory-based learning with only a word internal context leads to a word error rate of 6.64%. If a lexical context is added, the results deteriorate slowly

Effects of a cloud of strings on the extended phase space of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet AdS black holes

In this paper we study the thermodynamics of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet (EGB)-AdS black holes minimally coupled to a cloud of strings in an extended phase space where the cosmological constant is treated as pressure of the black holes and its conjugate variable is the thermodynamical volume of the black holes. To investigate the analogy between EGB black holes surrounded by a cloud of strings and liquid-gas system we derive the analytical solutions of the critical points and probe the effects of a cloud of strings on $P-V$ criticality. There is obtained resemblance between "small black hole/large black hole" (SBH/LBH) phase transition and the liquid-gas phase transition. We see that impact of a cloud of strings can bring Van der Waals-like behavior, in absence of the Gauss-Bonnet (GB) counterpart. In the other words, in the EGB black hole with $\alpha \to 0$ and when it is surrounded by a cloud of strings the Hawking-Page phase transition would be disappeared and SBH/LBH phase transition recovers. Also there is not happened Joule-Thomson effect.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figur

Code Construction and Decoding Algorithms for Semi-Quantitative Group Testing with Nonuniform Thresholds

We analyze a new group testing scheme, termed semi-quantitative group testing, which may be viewed as a concatenation of an adder channel and a discrete quantizer. Our focus is on non-uniform quantizers with arbitrary thresholds. For the most general semi-quantitative group testing model, we define three new families of sequences capturing the constraints on the code design imposed by the choice of the thresholds. The sequences represent extensions and generalizations of Bh and certain types of super-increasing and lexicographically ordered sequences, and they lead to code structures amenable for efficient recursive decoding. We describe the decoding methods and provide an accompanying computational complexity and performance analysis

Spectro-temporal post-smoothing in NMF based single-channel source separation

In this paper, we propose a new, simple, fast, and effective method to enforce temporal smoothness on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) solutions by post-smoothing the NMF decomposition results. In NMF based single-channel source separation, NMF is used to decompose the magnitude spectra of the mixed signal as a weighted linear combination of the trained basis vectors. The decomposition results are used to build spectral masks. To get temporal smoothness of the estimated sources, we deal with the spectral masks as 2-D images, and we pass the masks through a smoothing filter. The smoothing direction of the filter is the time direction of the spectral masks. The smoothed masks are used to find estimates for the source signals. Experimental results show that, using the smoothed masks give better separation results than enforcing temporal smoothness prior using regularized NMF