High-Resolution Thermal Wave Imaging of Surface and Subsurface Defects in IC Metal Lines

Using a thermal wave imaging system we have been able to detect and identify a variety of microscopic defects commonly found in fine metal Al connector lines used in the IC industry. The defects of interest are hillocks, surface and subsurface Si and Cu precipitates and subsurface voids and notches. Defects as small as 0.1 μm have been detected. This thermal wave imaging system has also been used to detect subsurface defects in Al and W metal contact plugs

Airway CD8+CD8^+ T Cells Induced by Pulmonary DNA Immunization Mediate Protective Anti-Viral Immunity

Vaccination strategies for protection against a number of respiratory pathogens must induce T-cell populations in both the pulmonary airways and peripheral lymphoid organs. In this study, we show that pulmonary immunization using plasmid DNA formulated with the polymer polyethyleneimine (PEI-DNA) induced antigen-specific $CD8^+$ T cells in the airways that persisted long after antigen local clearance. The persistence of the cells was not mediated by local lymphocyte proliferation or persistent antigen presentation within the lung or airways. These vaccine-induced $CD8^+$ T cells effectively mediated protective immunity against respiratory challenges with vaccinia virus and influenza virus. Moreover, this protection was not dependent upon the recruitment of T cells from peripheral sites. These findings demonstrate that pulmonary immunization with PEI-DNA is an efficient approach for inducing robust pulmonary $CD8^+$ T-cell populations that are effective at protecting against respiratory pathogens

Estimation of errors in text and data processing

The company Adiss Lab Lts. obtained 1 000 000 medical reports that are either in free form text, or in XML format. One of the main goals of their development is to integrate an algorithm for information extraction (IE) in their platform. The verification of the algorithm’s output for a report is done by a medical doctor (MD) for a certain fee. Validating the correctness of all data would be overwhelming and very expensive. Hence, the problem, as presented by the company, is to provide a method (algorithm) which determines the minimum amount of reports that will validate the correctness of the IE algorithm and a procedure for selecting these reports. In order to solve the problem we have considered an algorithm-centric approach uses active learning and semi-supervised learning

Unsupervised annotated city traffic map generation

Public bus services in many cities in countries like India are controlled by private owners, hence, building up a database for all the bus routes is non-trivial. In this paper, we leverage smart-phone based sensing to crowdsource and populate the information repository for bus routes in a city. We have developed an intelligent data logging module for smartphones and a server side processing mechanism to extract roads and bus routes information. From a 3 month long study involving more than 30 volunteers in 3 different cities in India, we found that the developed system, CrowdMap, can annotate bus routes wit

Mucosal Application of gp140 Encoding DNA Polyplexes to Different Tissues Results in Altered Immunological Outcomes in Mice

Increasing evidence suggests that mucosally targeted vaccines will enhance local humoral and cellular responses whilst still eliciting systemic immunity. We therefore investigated the capacity of nasal, sublingual or vaginal delivery of DNA-PEI polyplexes to prime immune responses prior to mucosal protein boost vaccination. Using a plasmid expressing the model antigen HIV CN54gp140 we show that each of these mucosal surfaces were permissive for DNA priming and production of antigen-specific antibody responses. The elicitation of systemic immune responses using nasally delivered polyplexed DNA followed by recombinant protein boost vaccination was equivalent to a systemic prime-boost regimen, but the mucosally applied modality had the advantage in that significant levels of antigen-specific IgA were detected in vaginal mucosal secretions. Moreover, mucosal vaccination elicited both local and systemic antigen-specific IgG(+) and IgA(+) antibody secreting cells. Finally, using an Influenza challenge model we found that a nasal or sublingual, but not vaginal, DNA prime/protein boost regimen protected against infectious challenge. These data demonstrate that mucosally applied plasmid DNA complexed to PEI followed by a mucosal protein boost generates sufficient antigen-specific humoral antibody production to protect from mucosal viral challenge

Detecting mobility context over smartphones using typing and smartphone engagement patterns

Most of the latest context-based applications capture the mobility of a user using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors like accelerometer and gyroscope which do not need explicit user-permission for application access. Although these sensors provide highly accurate mobility context information, existing studies have shown that they can lead to undesirable leakage of location information. To evade this breach of location privacy, many of the state-of-the-art studies suggest to impose stringent restrictions over the usage of IMU sensors. However, in this paper, we show that typing and smartphone engagement patterns can act as an alternative modality to sniff the mobility context of a user, even if the IMU sensors are not sampled at all. We develop an adversarial framework, named ConType, which exploits the signatures exposed by typing and smartphone engagement patterns to track the mobility of a user. Rigorous experiments with in-the-wild dataset show that ConType can track the mobility contexts with an average micro-F1 of 0.87 (±0.09), without using IMU data. Through additional experiments, we also show that ConType can track mobility stealthily with very low power and resource footprints, thus further aggravating the risk

Thy1+ Nk Cells from Vaccinia Virus-Primed Mice Confer Protection against Vaccinia Virus Challenge in the Absence of Adaptive Lymphocytes

While immunological memory has long been considered the province of T- and B- lymphocytes, it has recently been reported that innate cell populations are capable of mediating memory responses. We now show that an innate memory immune response is generated in mice following infection with vaccinia virus, a poxvirus for which no cognate germline-encoded receptor has been identified. This immune response results in viral clearance in the absence of classical adaptive T and B lymphocyte populations, and is mediated by a Thy1+ subset of natural killer (NK) cells. We demonstrate that immune protection against infection from a lethal dose of virus can be adoptively transferred with memory hepatic Thy1+ NK cells that were primed with live virus. Our results also indicate that, like classical immunological memory, stronger innate memory responses form in response to priming with live virus than a highly attenuated vector. These results demonstrate that a defined innate memory cell population alone can provide host protection against a lethal systemic infection through viral clearance

Evaluation of Mucociliary Clearance by Three Dimension Micro-CT-SPECT in Guinea Pig: Role of Bitter Taste Agonists

Different image techniques have been used to analyze mucociliary clearance (MCC) in humans, but current small animal MCC analysis using in vivo imaging has not been well defined. Bitter taste receptor (T2R) agonists increase ciliary beat frequency (CBF) and cause bronchodilation but their effects in vivo are not well understood. This work analyzes in vivo nasal and bronchial MCC in guinea pig animals using three dimension (3D) micro-CT-SPECT images and evaluates the effect of T2R agonists. Intranasal macroaggreggates of albumin-Technetium 99 metastable (MAA-Tc99m) and lung nebulized Tc99m albumin nanocolloids were used to analyze the effect of T2R agonists on nasal and bronchial MCC respectively, using 3D micro-CT-SPECT in guinea pig. MAA-Tc99m showed a nasal mucociliary transport rate of 0.36 mm/min that was increased in presence of T2R agonist to 0.66 mm/min. Tc99m albumin nanocolloids were homogeneously distributed in the lung of guinea pig and cleared with time-dependence through the bronchi and trachea of guinea pig. T2R agonist increased bronchial MCC of Tc99m albumin nanocolloids. T2R agonists increased CBF in human nasal ciliated cells in vitro and induced bronchodilation in human bronchi ex vivo. In summary, T2R agonists increase MCC in vivo as assessed by 3D micro-CT-SPECT analysis