A method for computing Lucas sequences

AbstractMost of public-key cryptosystems rely on one-way functions, which can be used to encrypt and sign messages. Their encryption and signature operations are based on the computation of exponentiation. Recently, some public-key cryptosystems are proposed and based on Lucas functions, and the Lucas sequences are performed as S = V(d)modN. In this paper, we will transform the concept of addition chains for computing the exponentiation evaluations to the Lucas chains for computing the Lucas sequences. Theoretically, the shorter Lucas chain for d is generated, the less computation time for evaluating the value V(d) is required. Therefore, we proposed a heuristic algorithm for evaluating a shorter Lucas chain and then use it to compute the Lucas sequence with less modular multiplications

Extracting transcription factor binding sites from unaligned gene sequences with statistical models

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) are crucial in the regulation of gene transcription. Recently, chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by cDNA microarray hybridization (ChIP-chip array) has been used to identify potential regulatory sequences, but the procedure can only map the probable protein-DNA interaction loci within 1–2 kb resolution. To find out the exact binding motifs, it is necessary to build a computational method to examine the ChIP-chip array binding sequences and search for possible motifs representing the transcription factor binding sites.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed a program to find out accurate motif sites from a set of unaligned DNA sequences in the yeast genome. Compared with MDscan, the prediction results suggest that, overall, our algorithm outperforms MDscan since the predicted motifs are more consistent with previously known specificities reported in the literature and have better prediction ranks. Our program also outperforms the constraint-less Cosmo program, especially in the elimination of false positives.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In this study, an improved sampling algorithm is proposed to incorporate the binomial probability model to build significant initial candidate motif sets. By investigating the statistical dependence between base positions in TFBSs, the method of dependency graphs and their expanded Bayesian networks is combined. The results show that our program satisfactorily extract transcription factor binding sites from unaligned gene sequences.</p

Game Solving with Online Fine-Tuning

Game solving is a similar, yet more difficult task than mastering a game. Solving a game typically means to find the game-theoretic value (outcome given optimal play), and optionally a full strategy to follow in order to achieve that outcome. The AlphaZero algorithm has demonstrated super-human level play, and its powerful policy and value predictions have also served as heuristics in game solving. However, to solve a game and obtain a full strategy, a winning response must be found for all possible moves by the losing player. This includes very poor lines of play from the losing side, for which the AlphaZero self-play process will not encounter. AlphaZero-based heuristics can be highly inaccurate when evaluating these out-of-distribution positions, which occur throughout the entire search. To address this issue, this paper investigates applying online fine-tuning while searching and proposes two methods to learn tailor-designed heuristics for game solving. Our experiments show that using online fine-tuning can solve a series of challenging 7x7 Killall-Go problems, using only 23.54% of computation time compared to the baseline without online fine-tuning. Results suggest that the savings scale with problem size. Our method can further be extended to any tree search algorithm for problem solving. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/neurips2023-online-fine-tuning-solver.Comment: Accepted by the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023

EVALUATION OF RECEIVING ABILITY OF TEENAGE MALE TABLE TENNIS PLAYERS IN TAIWAN

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the forehand receiving ability of teenage male table tennis players. Thirty-nine male players consist of skill levels from junior to senior high school students and national squads were selected. This assessment involves three tests: basic control, judgment, and match-like condition simulation. We found under the basic control test, the junior high school players performed poorer in downspin and left-side downspin in the aspect of accuracy (

InSpaceType: Reconsider Space Type in Indoor Monocular Depth Estimation

Indoor monocular depth estimation has attracted increasing research interest. Most previous works have been focusing on methodology, primarily experimenting with NYU-Depth-V2 (NYUv2) Dataset, and only concentrated on the overall performance over the test set. However, little is known regarding robustness and generalization when it comes to applying monocular depth estimation methods to real-world scenarios where highly varying and diverse functional \textit{space types} are present such as library or kitchen. A study for performance breakdown into space types is essential to realize a pretrained model's performance variance. To facilitate our investigation for robustness and address limitations of previous works, we collect InSpaceType, a high-quality and high-resolution RGBD dataset for general indoor environments. We benchmark 11 recent methods on InSpaceType and find they severely suffer from performance imbalance concerning space types, which reveals their underlying bias. We extend our analysis to 4 other datasets, 3 mitigation approaches, and the ability to generalize to unseen space types. Our work marks the first in-depth investigation of performance imbalance across space types for indoor monocular depth estimation, drawing attention to potential safety concerns for model deployment without considering space types, and further shedding light on potential ways to improve robustness. See \url{https://depthcomputation.github.io/DepthPublic} for data

Microstructural differences in white matter tracts across middle to late adulthood : a diffusion MRI study on 7167 UK Biobank participants

Acknowledgements This research was approved by the UK Biobank (application number: 24089) and was supported by the Roland Sutton Academic Trust (grant number: 0039/R/16) and Taiwan National Health Research Institute (NHRI-EX109-10928NI). We acknowledge the valuable contributions of members of the UK Biobank Imaging Working Group and the UK Biobank coordinating center. The UK Biobank (including the imaging enhancement) was supported by the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The authors are grateful for the provision of simultaneous multislice (multiband) pulse sequence and reconstruction algorithms by the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota. Finally, the authors are extremely grateful to all UK Biobank study participants, who have generously donated their time to make this resource possible. This article was edited by Wallace Academic Editing.Peer reviewedPostprin

Site-directed in vitro immunization leads to a complete human monoclonal IgG4λ that binds specifically to the CDR2 region of CTLA-4 (CD152) without interfering the engagement of natural ligands

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The ability to acquire fully human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) with pre-defined specificities is critical to the development of molecular tags for the analysis of receptor function in addition to promising immunotherapeutics. Yet most of the arriving affinity maturated and complete human immunoglobulin G (IgG) molecules, which are actually derived from single human B cells, have not widely been used to study the conserved self antigens (Ags) such as CD152 (cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen-4, CTLA-4) because proper hosts are lacking.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we developed an optimized protocol for site-directed <it>in vitro </it>immunizing peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) by using a selected epitope of human CD152, an essential receptor involved in down-regulation of T cell activation. The resultant stable trioma cell lines constantly produce anti-CD152 mAb (γ4λhuCD152), which contains variable (V) regions of the heavy chain and the light chain derived from the VH3 and Vλ human germline genes, respectively, and yet displays an unusual IgG4 isotype. Interestingly, γ4λhuCD152 has a basic pI not commonly found in myeloid monoclonal IgG4λs as revealed by the isoelectric focusing (IEF) analysis. Furthermore, γ4λhuCD152 binds specifically, with nanomolar affinity, to an extracellular constituency encompassing the putative second complementarity determining region (CDR2) of CD152, whereby it can react to activated CD3⁺cells.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In a context of specific cell depletion and conditioned medium,<it>in vitro </it>induction of human Abs against a conserved self Ag was successfully acquired and a relatively basic mAb, γ4λhuCD152, with high affinity to CDR2 of CD152 was thus obtained. Application of such a human IgG4λ mAb with designated CDR2 specificity may impact upon and prefer for CD152 labeling both <it>in situ </it>and <it>ex situ</it>, as it does not affect the binding of endogenous B7 ligands and can localize into the confined immunological synapse which may otherwise prevent the access of whole IgG1 molecules.</p

Cyclooxygenase-2 enhances α2β1 integrin expression and cell migration via EP1 dependent signaling pathway in human chondrosarcoma cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cyclooxygenase (COX)-2, the inducible isoform of prostaglandin (PG) synthase, has been implicated in tumor metastasis. Interaction of COX-2 with its specific EP receptors on the surface of cancer cells has been reported to induce cancer invasion. However, the effects of COX-2 on migration activity in human chondrosarcoma cells are mostly unknown. In this study, we examined whether COX-2 and EP interaction are involved in metastasis of human chondrosarcoma.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found that over-expression of COX-2 or exogenous PGE₂increased the migration of human chondrosarcoma cells. We also found that human chondrosarcoma tissues and chondrosarcoma cell lines had significant expression of the COX-2 which was higher than that in normal cartilage. By using pharmacological inhibitors or activators or genetic inhibition by the EP receptors, we discovered that the EP1 receptor but not other PGE receptors is involved in PGE₂-mediated cell migration and α2β1 integrin expression. Furthermore, we found that human chondrosarcoma tissues expressed a higher level of EP1 receptor than normal cartilage. PGE₂-mediated migration and integrin up-regulation were attenuated by phospholipase C (PLC), protein kinase C (PKC) and c-Src inhibitor. Activation of the PLCβ, PKCα, c-Src and NF-κB signaling pathway after PGE₂treatment was demonstrated, and PGE₂-induced expression of integrin and migration activity were inhibited by the specific inhibitor, siRNA and mutants of PLC, PKC, c-Src and NF-κB cascades.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results indicated that PGE₂enhances the migration of chondrosarcoma cells by increasing α2β1 integrin expression through the EP1/PLC/PKCα/c-Src/NF-κB signal transduction pathway.</p

Radial Pressure Pulse and Heart Rate Variability in Heat- and Cold-Stressed Humans

This study aims to explore the effects of heat and cold stress on the radial pressure pulse (RPP) and heart rate variability (HRV). The subjects immersed their left hand into 45°C and 7°C water for 2 minutes. Sixty healthy subjects (age 25 ± 4 yr; 29 men and 31 women) were enrolled in this study. All subjects underwent the supine temperature measurements of the bilateral forearms, brachial arterial blood pressure, HRV and RPP with a pulse analyzer in normothermic conditions, and thermal stresses. The power spectral low-frequency (LF) and high-frequency (HF) components of HRV decreased in the heat test and increased in the cold test. The heat stress significantly reduced radial augmentation index (AIr) (P < .05), but the cold stress significantly increased AIr (P < .01). The spectral energy of RPP did not show any statistical difference in 0 ~ 10 Hz region under both conditions, but in the region of 10 ~ 50 Hz, there was a significant increase (P < .01) in the heat test and a significant decrease in the cold test (P < .01). The changes in AIr induced by heat and cold stress were significantly negatively correlated with the spectral energy in the region of 10 ~ 50 Hz (SE10−50 Hz) but not in the region of 0 ~ 10 Hz (SE0−10 Hz). The results demonstrated that the SE10−50 Hz, which only possessed a small percentage in total pulse energy, presented more physiological characteristics than the SE0−10 Hz under the thermal stresses