Hidden Trends in 90 Years of Harvard Business Review

In this paper, we demonstrate and discuss results of our mining the abstracts of the publications in Harvard Business Review between 1922 and 2012. Techniques for computing n-grams, collocations, basic sentiment analysis, and named-entity recognition were employed to uncover trends hidden in the abstracts. We present findings about international relationships, sentiment in HBR's abstracts, important international companies, influential technological inventions, renown researchers in management theories, US presidents via chronological analyses.Comment: 6 pages, 14 figures, Proceedings of 2012 International Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligenc

PreFallKD: Pre-Impact Fall Detection via CNN-ViT Knowledge Distillation

Fall accidents are critical issues in an aging and aged society. Recently, many researchers developed pre-impact fall detection systems using deep learning to support wearable-based fall protection systems for preventing severe injuries. However, most works only employed simple neural network models instead of complex models considering the usability in resource-constrained mobile devices and strict latency requirements. In this work, we propose a novel pre-impact fall detection via CNN-ViT knowledge distillation, namely PreFallKD, to strike a balance between detection performance and computational complexity. The proposed PreFallKD transfers the detection knowledge from the pre-trained teacher model (vision transformer) to the student model (lightweight convolutional neural networks). Additionally, we apply data augmentation techniques to tackle issues of data imbalance. We conduct the experiment on the KFall public dataset and compare PreFallKD with other state-of-the-art models. The experiment results show that PreFallKD could boost the student model during the testing phase and achieves reliable F1-score (92.66%) and lead time (551.3 ms)

Biological Activities and Applications of Dioscorins, the Major Tuber Storage Proteins of Yam

AbstractYam tubers, a common tuber crop and an important traditional Chinese medicine in Taiwan, have many bioactive substances, including phenolic compounds, mucilage polysaccharides, steroidal saponins and proteins. Among the total soluble proteins, 80% of them are dioscorins. In the past two decades, many studies showed that dioscorins exhibited biological activities both in vitro and in vivo, including the enzymatic, antioxidant, antihypertensive, immunomodulatory, lectin activities and the protecting role on airway epithelial cells against allergens in vitro. Some of these activities are survived after chemical, heating process or enzymatic digestion. Despite of lacking the intact structural information and the detail action mechanisms in the cells, yam dioscorins are potential resources for developing as functional foods and interesting targets for food protein researchers

Identification of overexpressed cytokines as serum biomarkers of hepatitis C virus-induced liver fibrosis using bead-based flexible multiple analyte profiling

Hepatic inflammation is the stimulator to activate hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) and triggers fibrogenesis. Cytokines are produced during liver inflammation and maybe considered as liver fibrosis biomarker. The aim of this study was to investigate whether cytokines can be used as reliable biomarkers of liver fibrosis using flexible multi-analyte profiling (xMAP). A total of 61 chronic hepatitis C patients with different severity of liver fibrosis were enrolled. Liver biopsy was used as standard to assess the severity of fibrosis according to METAVIR classification. Afterward, 15 samples from healthy controls were analyzed and totally 50 cytokines were screened using flexible multi-analyte profiling to discover differential biomarkers. Finally, levels of protein expressions of individual stages of liver fibrosis were measured. In histological examination, the necroinflammatory score (histology activity index, HAI) was increased from F1 to F4 stage in hepatitis C virus (HCV) infected patients, indicating that inflammation was accompanied with the progression of liver fibrosis. Using flexible multi-analyte profiling, four serum cytokines, including IFN-α2 (p=0.023), GRO-α (p=0.013), SCF (p=0.047) and SDF-1α p=0.024), were identified under antibody specific recognition and elevated with HAI score. This study reveals the relationship between cytokines and liver fibrosis, and demonstrated that IFN-α2, GRO-α, SCF and SDF-1 α may be used as biomarkers to predict liver fibrosis. The overexpressed cytokines may play a role in the progression of liver fibrosis and deserves further investigation.Keywords: Cytokine, flexible multi-analyte profiling, hepatitis C virus, liver fibrosisAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 11(29), pp. 7535-7541, 29 April, 201

High Genetic Stability of Dengue Virus Propagated in MRC-5 Cells as Compared to the Virus Propagated in Vero Cells

This work investigated the replication kinetics of the four dengue virus serotypes (DEN-1 to DEN-4), including dengue virus type 4 (DEN-4) recovered from an infectious cDNA clone, in Vero cells and in MRC-5 cells grown on Cytodex 1 microcarriers. DEN-1 strain Hawaii, DEN-2 strain NGC, DEN-3 strain H-87, and DEN-4 strain H-241 , and DEN-4 strain 814669 derived from cloned DNA, were used to infect Vero cells and MRC-5 cells grown in serum-free or serum-containing microcarrier cultures. Serum-free and serum-containing cultures were found to yield comparable titers of these viruses. The cloned DNA-derived DEN-4 started genetically more homogeneous was used to investigate the genetic stability of the virus propagated in Vero cells and MRC-5 cells. Sequence analysis revealed that the DEN-4 propagated in MRC-5 cells maintained a high genetic stability, compared to the virus propagated in Vero cells. Amino acid substitutions of Gly104Cys and Phe108Ile were detected at 70%, 60%, respectively, in the envelope (E) protein of DEN-4 propagated in Vero cells, whereas a single mutation of Glu345Lys was detected at 50% in E of the virus propagated in MRC-5 cells. Sequencing of multiple clones of three separate DNA fragments spanning 40% of the genome also indicated that DEN-4 propagated in Vero cells contained a higher number of mutations than the virus growing in MRC-5 cells. Although Vero cells yielded a peak virus titer approximately 1 to 17 folds higher than MRC-5 cells, cloned DEN-4 from MRC-5 cells maintained a greater stability than the virus from Vero cells. Serum-free microcarrier cultures of MRC-5 cells offer a potentially valuable system for the large-scale production of live-attenuated DEN vaccines

Discovering Chromatin Motifs using FAIRE Sequencing and the Human Diploid Genome

Background: Specific chromatin structures are associated with active or inactive gene transcription. The gene regulatory elements are intrinsically dynamic and alternate between inactive and active states through the recruitment of DNA binding proteins, such as chromatin-remodeling proteins. Results: We developed a unique genome-wide method to discover DNA motifs associated with chromatin accessibility using formaldehyde-assisted isolation of regulatory elements with high-throughput sequencing (FAIRE-seq). We aligned the FAIRE-seq reads to the GM12878 diploid genome and subsequently identified differential chromatin-state regions (DCSRs) using heterozygous SNPs. The DCSR pairs represent the locations of imbalances of chromatin accessibility between alleles and are ideal to reveal chromatin motifs that may directly modulate chromatin accessibility. In this study, we used DNA 6-10mer sequences to interrogate all DCSRs, and subsequently discovered conserved chromatin motifs with significant changes in the occurrence frequency. To investigate their likely roles in biology, we studied the annotated protein associated with each of the top ten chromatin motifs genome-wide, in the intergenic regions and in genes, respectively. As a result, we found that most of these annotated motifs are associated with chromatin remodeling, reflecting their significance in biology. Conclusions: Our method is the first one using fully phased diploid genome and FAIRE-seq to discover motifs associated with chromatin accessibility. Our results were collected to construct the first chromatin motif database (CMD), providing the potential DNA motifs recognized by chromatin-remodeling proteins and is freely available at http://syslab.nchu.edu.tw/chromatin

Discovery of serum biomarkers of alcoholic fatty liver in a rodent model: C-reactive protein

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Excessive consumption of alcohol contributes to alcoholic liver disease. Fatty liver is the early stage of alcohol-related liver disease. The aim of this study was to search for specific serological biomarkers of alcoholic fatty liver (AFL) compared to healthy controls, non-alcoholic fatty liver (NAFL) and liver fibrosis in a rodent model.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Serum samples derived from animals with AFL, NAFL, or liver fibrosis were characterized and compared using two-dimensional differential gel electrophoresis. A matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight tandem mass spectrometer in conjunction with mascot software was used for protein identification. Subsequently, Western blotting and flexible multi-analyte profiling were used to measure the expressions of the putative biomarkers present in the serum of animals and clinical patients.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Eight differential putative biomarkers were identified, and the two most differentiated proteins, including upregulated C-reactive protein (CRP) and downregulated haptoglobin (Hp), were further investigated. Western blotting validated that CRP was dramatically higher in the serum of AFL compared to healthy controls and other animals with liver disease of NAFL or liver fibrosis (<it>p </it>< 0.05). Moreover, we found that CRP and Hp were both lower in liver fibrosis of TAA-induced rats and clinical hepatitis C virus-infected patients.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results suggest that increased levels of CRP are an early sign of AFL in rats. The abnormally elevated CRP induced by ethanol can be used as a biomarker to distinguish AFL from normal or otherwise diseased livers.</p