LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
A Boolean map theory of visual attention.

UNLABELLED
A theory is presented that attempts to answer two questions. What visual contents can an observer consciously access at one moment?


ANSWER
only one feature value (e.g., green) per dimension, but those feature values can be associated (as a group) with multiple spatially precise locations (comprising a single labeled Boolean map). How can an observer voluntarily select what to access?


ANSWER
in one of two ways: (a) by selecting one feature value in one dimension (e.g., selecting the color red) or (b) by iteratively combining the output of (a) with a preexisting Boolean map via the Boolean operations of intersection and union. Boolean map theory offers a unified interpretation of a wide variety of visual attention phenomena usually treated in separate literatures. In so doing, it also illuminates the neglected phenomena of attention to structure.
A Survey of Exploration Strategies in Reinforcement Learning

A fundamental issue in reinforcement learning algorithms is the balance between exploration of the environment and exploitation of information already obtained by the agent. This paper surveys exploration strategies used in reinforcement learning and summarizes the existing research with respect to their applicability and effectiveness.
Prospective Study of Surgical Decision-making Processes for Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy in Women With Breast Cancer.

OBJECTIVE
We prospectively examined the psychosocial predictors and the decision-making process regarding contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) among women with sporadic breast cancer.


BACKGROUND
Increasing numbers of women with breast cancer are seeking CPM. Data are limited about the surgical decision-making process and the psychosocial factors that influence interest in CPM.


METHODS
Women with early-stage unilateral breast cancer (n = 117) were recruited before their first surgical visit at MD Anderson and completed questionnaires assessing knowledge of and interest in CPM and associated psychosocial factors. After the appointment, women and their surgeons completed questions about the extent that various surgical options (including CPM) were discussed; also, the women rated their perceived likelihood of having CPM and the surgeons rated the appropriateness of CPM.


RESULTS
Before their first visit, 50% of women were moderately to extremely interested in CPM and 12 (10%) of women had CPM at the time of their primary breast cancer surgery. Less knowledge about breast cancer (P = 0.02) and greater cancer worry (P = 0.03) predicted interest in CPM. Greater cancer worry predicted who had CPM (P = 0.02). Interest in CPM before surgical visit and the likelihood of having CPM after the visit differed (P ≤ 0.001). Surgeons' rating of the appropriateness of CPM and the patient's reported likelihood of having CPM were not significantly different (P = 0.49).


CONCLUSIONS
Interest in CPM is common among women with sporadic breast cancer. The informational and emotional aspects of CPM may affect the decision to have CPM and should be addressed when discussing surgical options.
Characterization of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria associated with chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

Plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) are known to influence plant growth by various direct or indirect mechanisms. In search of efficient PGPR strains with multiple activities, a total of 150 bacterial isolates belonging to Bacillus, Pseudomonas, Azotobacter and Rhizobium were isolated from different rhizospheric soil of chick pea in the vicinity of Allahabad. These test isolates were biochemically characterized and screened in vitro for their plant growth promoting traits like production of indoleacetic acid (IAA), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), siderophore and catalase. All the isolates of Bacillus, Pseudomonas and Azotobacter produced IAA, whereas only 85.7% of Rhizobium was able to produce IAA. Production of ammonia was commonly detected in the isolates of Bacillus (95.0%) followed by Pseudomonas (94.2%), Rhizobium (74.2%) and Azotobacter (45.0%). All test isolates were positive for catalase but none of the isolates produced HCN. On the basis of multiple plant growth promoting activities, 20 bacterial isolates of each genus, in total 80 isolates, were evaluated for their heavy metal tolerance. Among these isolates, Bacillus spp. were tolerant to all the heavy metals (400 μg ml), whereas Pseudomonas spp. were tolerant to Hg (100 μg ml), Co (100 μg ml), Cd (200 μg ml), Cr (100 μg ml), Cu (200 μg ml), Pb (400 μg ml), Zn (200 μg ml). Tolerance to heavy metals was observed less frequently in Azotobacter spp. and Rhizobium spp. The isolates could exhibit more than two or three PGP traits, which may promote plant growth directly or indirectly or synergistically. Further, rhizobacteria tolerant to multiple heavy metals exhibited a couple of PGP activities.
Minimally classifying relative equilibria

Estimates on a minimal classification of relative equilibria in the planarn-body problem of celestial mechanics have been announced in [1], [2]. Our main theorem asserts that these estimates are actually met for anyn≧3 on an open set in IRinf+supn. For anyn≧4, this open set is proper.
Excision and a Theorem of Popa

We give an elementary C*-algebraic proof of a result of Sorin Popa which is of fundamental importance to Elliott's Classification Program.
Nonaggressive systemic mastocytosis (SM) without skin lesions associated with insect-induced anaphylaxis shows unique features versus other indolent SM.

BACKGROUND
Indolent systemic mastocytosis (ISM) without skin lesions (ISMs(-)) shows a higher prevalence in males, lower serum baseline tryptase levels, and KIT mutation more frequently restricted to bone marrow (BM) mast cells (MCs) than ISM with skin lesions (ISMs(+)). Interestingly, in almost one-half of ISMs(-) patients, MC-mediator release episodes are triggered exclusively by insects.


OBJECTIVE
We aimed to determine the clinical and laboratory features of ISMs(-) associated with insect-induced anaphylaxis (insectISMs(-)) versus other patients with ISM.


METHODS
A total of 335 patients presenting with MC activation syndrome, including 143 insectISMs(-), 72 ISMs(-) triggered by other factors (otherISMs(-)), 56 ISMs(+), and 64 nonclonal MC activation syndrome, were studied.


RESULTS
Compared with otherISMs(-) and ISMs(+) patients, insectISMs(-) cases showed marked male predominance (78% vs 53% and 46%; P < .001), a distinct pattern of MC-related symptoms, and significantly lower median serum baseline tryptase levels (22.4 vs 28.7 and 45.8 μg/L; P ≤ .009). Moreover, insectISMs(-) less frequently presented BM MC aggregates (46% vs 70% and 81%; P ≤ .001), and they systematically showed MC-restricted KIT mutation.


CONCLUSIONS
ISMs(-) patients with anaphylaxis triggered exclusively by insects display clinical and laboratory features that are significantly different from other ISM cases, including other ISMs(-) and ISMs(+) patients, suggesting that they represent a unique subgroup of ISM with a particularly low BM MC burden in the absence of adverse prognostic factors.
The Importance of Mobile Interface Icons on User Interaction

Mobile applications on smart phones and tablets and on mobile devices in general have increased the dependence of the user on icons and graphic elements for effective communication via the interface. Well-designed icons and graphics allow the user to recognize without the need of additional instructions the functions available on the mobile device in question. The present paper offers an analysis of graphic representation by means of icons for mobile devices. In terms of semiotics, the function of representation involves emphasizing the relationship between the object and the interpretant. In particular , we examine how far any icon represents the meaning of the function for which it has been designed, chosen and installed by the mobile phone manufacturer and designer. Among the chief findings are (1) graphical representation affects the recognition rate of icons and influences user perception and (2) there are significant differences in performance in recognizing icons among different age groups.
Linearly implicit methods for nonlinear parabolic equations

We construct and analyze combinations of rational implicit and explicit multistep methods for nonlinear parabolic equations. The resulting schemes are linearly implicit and include as particular cases implicit-explicit multistep schemes as well as the combination of implicit Runge-Kutta schemes and extrapolation. An optimal condition for the stability constant is derived under which the schemes are locally stable. We establish optimal order error estimates.
Human Factors and Ergonomics in transportation control systems

Employing case studies taken from work experience in the UK, USA, Canada and Japan this paper observes the evolution of Human Factors (HF) and ergonomics in the railroadfrom a practitioner’s point of view. Practical areas for application of HF at specific points in railroadsignaling and control systems are described. HF considerations in advanced train control systems and the movement towards automation are discussed as well as the impact of these new technologies on the context of operation itself. There is now a greater reliance on the operator to remain vigilant and react efficiently when intervention on automation is required both within the control room and driver cab environments. This paper illustrates some of the human performance concerns for novel transportation control systems that are faced todayand discusses how this area of cognitive attention, human error and workload is difficult to assess and predict. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of AHFE Conference.
Robust locally linear embedding

In the past few years, some nonlinear dimensionality reduction (NLDR) or nonlinear manifold learning methods have aroused a great deal of interest in the machine learning community. These methods are promising in that they can automatically discover the low-dimensional nonlinear manifold in a high-dimensional data space and then embed the data points into a low-dimensional embedding space, using tractable linear algebraic techniques that are easy to implement and are not prone to local minima. Despite their appealing properties, these NLDR methods are not robust against outliers in the data, yet so far very little has been done to address the robustness problem. In this paper, we address this problem in the context of an NLDR method called locally linear embedding (LLE). Based on robust estimation techniques, we propose an approach to make LLE more robust. We refer to this approach as robust locally linear embedding (RLLE). We also present several specific methods for realizing this general RLLE approach. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data show that RLLE is very robust against outliers. 2005 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Efficient, transparent, and comprehensive runtime code manipulation

This thesis addresses the challenges of building a software system for general-purpose runtime code manipulation. Modern applications, with dynamically-loaded modules and dynamicallygenerated code, are assembled at runtime. While it was once feasible at compile time to observe and manipulate every instruction — which is critical for program analysis, instrumentation, trace gathering, optimization, and similar tools — it can now only be done at runtime. Existing runtime tools are successful at inserting instrumentation calls, but no general framework has been developed for fine-grained and comprehensive code observation and modification without high overheads. This thesis demonstrates the feasibility of building such a system in software. We present DynamoRIO, a fully-implemented runtime code manipulation system that supports code transformations on any part of a program, while it executes. DynamoRIO uses code caching technology to provide efficient, transparent, and comprehensive manipulation of an unmodified application running on a stock operating system and commodity hardware. DynamoRIO executes large, complex, modern applications with dynamically-loaded, generated, or even modified code. Despite the formidable obstacles inherent in the IA-32 architecture, DynamoRIO provides these capabilities efficiently, with zero to thirty percent time and memory overhead on both Windows and Linux. DynamoRIO exports an interface for building custom runtime code manipulation tools of all types. It has been used by many researchers, with several hundred downloads of our public release, and is being commercialized in a product for protection against remote security exploits, one of numerous applications of runtime code manipulation. Thesis Supervisor: Saman Amarasinghe Title: Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Real-time synthesis of Chinese visual speech and facial expressions using MPEG-4 FAP features in a three-dimensional avatar

This paper describes our initial work in developing a real-time audio-visual Chinese speech synthesizer with a 3D expressive avatar. The avatar model is parameterized according to the MPEG-4 facial animation standard [1]. This standard offers a compact set of facial animation parameters (FAPs) and feature points (FPs) to enable realization of 20 Chinese visemes and 7 facial expressions (i.e. 27 target facial configurations). The Xface [2] open source toolkit enables us to define the influence zone for each FP and the deformation function that relates them. Hence we can easily animate a large number of coordinates in the 3D model by specifying values for a small set of FAPs and their FPs. FAP values for 27 target facial configurations were estimated from available corpora. We extended the dominance blending approach to effect animations for coarticulated visemes superposed with expression changes. We selected six sentiment-carrying text messages and synthesized expressive visual speech (for all expressions, in randomized order) with neutral audio speech. A perceptual experiment involving 11 subjects shows that they can identify the facial expression that matches the text message’s sentiment 85% of the time.
Voiding urosonography: the study of the urethra is no longer a limitation of the technique

Voiding urosonography (VUS) has proved to be a reliable method for the study of vesicoureteric reflux (VUR). Early reports considered it inadequate for imaging the male urethra. To determine the usefulness of contrast-enhanced VUS for the study of the urethra. A total of 208 children aged 2 days to 10 years underwent VUS to confirm or exclude VUR for different reasons (n = 150) or for follow-up (n = 58). Patients with unconfirmed suspicion of VUR (99 boys and 51 girls) also underwent VUS for the study of the urethra. Examinations were performed using a harmonic imaging mode specific for contrast (Levovist) enhancement. We used a 6–4-MHz convex probe and a transperineal and/or a transpelvic approach. The neck of the bladder and the entire urethra were visualized in all patients (n = 150). The male urethra was considered normal in 95 boys (95.95%). We diagnosed posterior urethral valves in two patients, diverticulum of the prostatic utricle in one, and diverticulum of the anterior urethra in one. All abnormal cases were confirmed using conventional voiding cystourethrography. VUS can replace voiding cystourethrography as the method of choice for the initial study of suspected VUR in children.
3D-based Deep Convolutional Neural Network for action recognition with depth sequences

Traditional algorithms to design hand-crafted features for action recognition have been a hot research area in last decade. Compared to RGB video, depth sequence is more insensitive to lighting changes and more discriminative due to its capability to catch geometric information of object. Unlike many existing methods for action recognition which depend on well-designed features, this paper studies deep learning-based action recognition using depth sequences and the corresponding skeleton joint information. Firstly, we construct a 3Dbased Deep Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN) to directly learn spatiotemporal features from raw depth sequences, then compute a joint based feature vector named JointVector for each sequence by taking into account the simple position and angle information between skeleton joints. Finally, support vector machine (SVM) classification results from 3DCNN learned features and JointVector are fused to take action recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can learn feature representation which is time-invariant and viewpoint-invariant from depth sequences. The proposed method achieves comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods on the UTKinect-Action3D dataset and achieves superior performance in comparison to baseline methods on the MSR-Action3D dataset. We further investigate the generalization of the trained model by transferring the learned features from one dataset (MSREmail addresses: liuzhi@cqut.edu.cn (Zhi Liu), czhang10@ccny.cuny.edu (Chenyang Zhang), ytian@ccny.cuny.edu (Yingli Tian) Preprint submitted to Image and Vision Computing April 11, 2016 Action3D) to another dataset (UTKinect-Action3D) without retraining and obtain very promising classification accuracy.
Efficacy and Safety of Atorvastatin in South Asian Patients with Dyslipidemia: An Open Label Noncomparative Pilot Study

BACKGROUND
Rates of coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality are 40% higher amongst South Asian men and women living in the UK compared with the general UK population. Despite an established excess CHD risk, little is known of the efficacy and safety of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A (HMG-CoA) reductase inhibitors (statins) amongst South Asian migrants.


METHODS AND RESULTS
Hyperlipidemic South Asian patients (raised or uncontrolled low-density lipoprotein cholesterol [LDL-C]) were recruited from two UK centers (n = 33). After a five-week period, which included dietary advice, patients received atorvastatin 10 mg/d for five weeks to achieve a target LDL-C goal of < 3.0 mmol/L, titrated to 20 mg, 40 mg, or 80 mg for a further 12 weeks as required. Significant reductions in LDL-C levels from baseline were observed after 4 weeks' and 17 weeks' treatment with atorvastatin (> or = 33.6%; 26.0, 41.2). Overall, 81% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 62.5, 92.6%) achieved the target LDL-C after 4 weeks' treatment with 10 mg atorvastatin. Titration to a dose of more than 20 mg was required in only one patient (40 mg) at any point during the study. Nineteen patients reported at least one adverse event during the study; the majority were mild in severity and considered unrelated to atorvastatin.


CONCLUSIONS
Atorvastatin was effective in achieving target lipid levels and was well tolerated. Statin therapy for high-risk South Asian individuals is likely to benefit CHD outcomes, although further and larger prospective trials are required.
Effect of human placental extract on menopausal symptoms, fatigue, and risk factors for cardiovascular disease in middle-aged Korean women.

OBJECTIVE
In Korea, human placental extract (HPE) has recently been used to treat various diseases (chronic liver diseases, menopause syndrome, chronic fatigue, skin pigment diseases, etc.), but evidence-based studies are not yet sufficient. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of HPE on menopausal symptoms, fatigue, and risk factors for cardiovascular disease in middle-aged Korean women in a randomized controlled trial.


DESIGN
Korean women, aged 40 to 64 years, with menopausal symptoms and fatigue were recruited as participants. The women were randomly assigned to a placebo group or an HPE group. The HPE group received subcutaneous injections of HPE in the abdomen for 8 weeks, whereas the placebo group received normal saline. Then, the Menopause Rating Scale, and Fatigue Severity Scale, and Visual Analog Scale were administered, and risk factors for cardiovascular disease were assessed.


RESULTS
The Menopause Rating Scale total baseline score was not different between the two groups; however, the score of the HPE group decreased significantly at 8 weeks compared with that of the placebo group (P = 0.033). Fatigue Severity Scale and Visual Analog Scale scores of the placebo group did not change, whereas the scores of the HPE group decreased significantly during the study period (Fatigue Severity Scale, P = 0.002; Visual Analog Scale, P = 0.001). The baseline 17beta-estradiol level was not significantly different between the two groups, but the 17beta-estradiol level of the HPE group was significantly increased at 8 weeks compared with that of the placebo group (P = 0.031). No changes in risk factors for cardiovascular disease were observed in either group.


CONCLUSIONS
Menopausal symptoms and fatigue in middle-aged Korean women improved after 8 weeks of HPE treatment, whereas risk factors for cardiovascular disease did not change during the study period.
Towards a contemporary and comprehensive theory of learning

Knud Illeris holds a PhD in Psychology and is Professor of Educational Research at Roskilde University, PO Box 260, Roskilde, Denmark. He is Research Leader of The Learning Lab Denmark Consortium for Research in Workplace Learning and is well known in Scandinavia for his work on Project Education in the 1970s, 1980s and now for his work on general learning theory and his book The Three Dimensions of Learning. He is the author, co-author or editor of more than 70 books and 300 articles on subjects such as learning and motivation, educational planning and practice, theory of qualification and vocational training, workplace learning, adult and youth education from the perspective of the learners. Towards a contemporary and comprehensive theory of learning
Starting from scratch: Developing a pre-service teacher training program in computational thinking

This paper details a series of pre-professional development interventions to assist teachers in utilizing computational thinking and programming as an instructional tool within other subject areas (i.e. music, language arts, mathematics, and science). It describes the lessons utilized in the interventions along with the instruments used to evaluate them, and offers some preliminary findings.