Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Survey of Specularity Removal Methods

The separation of reflection components is an important issue in computer graphics, computer vision and image processing. It provides useful information for the applications that need consistent object surface appearance, such as stereo reconstruction, visual recognition, tracking, objects re‐illumination and dichromatic editing. In this paper we will present a brief survey of recent advances in separation of reflection components, also known as specularity (highlights) removal. Several techniques that try to tackle the problem from different points of view have been proposed so far. In this survey, we will overview these methods and we will present a critical analysis of their benefits and drawbacks.
Reducing Retrieval Latencies in the Web: the Past, the Present, and the Future

One of the main directions of research in the Web is to reduce the time latencies users experience when navigating through Web sites. The work in this direction originated from relevant research in operating systems (e.g. caching), where the aim is to reduce le system latencies. Caching is already being used in the Web domain. However, recent studies indicate that the beneets from this technique are rather limited. Thus, another method that was rst applied in operating systems, prefetching, is now being studied in the Web context. In addition to prefetching, there is a number of other techniques that are being examined in the Web domain and are speciically targeted to this environment. These techniques include compression, and piggybacking of information between the servers and the clients. The main contributions of this survey paper are: A taxonomy of the caching and prefetching techniques, according to the underlying principles, and the algorithms used; a critical survey of the methods that have been proposed so far for dealing with the retrieval latencies problem, and how each one of those ts in the taxonomy; a discussion of the results of the past and ongoing work, and the identiication of future research directions.
Comparison of health-related quality of life after percutaneous coronary intervention and coronary artery bypass surgery

BACKGROUND Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) evaluation is an important measure of the impact of the disease. As more people with coronary heart disease (CHD) live longer, doctors and researchers want to know how they manage in day to day life. It looked like adults with CHD had a decrease QOL. The aim of this study was to comparison of HRQOL of patients who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) and to assess its main determinants in the whole sample of coronary artery disease (CAD) patients. METHODS The study was carried out to estimate HRQOL of 109 patients who underwent invasive coronary revascularization [PCI (n = 75) and CABG (n = 34)]. We applied HRQOL after 6 months and 2 years in both groups and scores were compared. The HRQOL data were obtained using MacNew Heart Disease questionnaire with dimensions emotional, physical and social that estimated. Data entry and analysis were performed by SPSS. RESULTS A total MacNew scale in CABG and PCI group in 6 months after treatment were 45.32 ± 13.75 and 53.52 ± 15.63, respectively (P = 0.010). After 2 years HRQOL mean changed to 51.176 ± 14.80 and 49.55 ± 16.22, respectively, in CABG and PCI group (P = 0.428). Our results in within-group analysis showed total MacNew scale and its subscales were changed significantly after 2 years in CABG and PCI group’s scores were detected. We found in the whole sample of CAD patients those who had a higher level of income and education and were not either overweight or obese experienced better HRQOL. CONCLUSION Our results showed that patients who underwent PCI experienced significantly higher HRQOL in 6 months after revascularization but over 24 months follow-up no difference was observed between the two groups.
Localization of collagen XVIII and the endostatin portion of collagen XVIII in aged human control eyes and eyes with age-related macular degeneration.

PURPOSE Endostatin, a C-terminal fragment of collagen XVIII (coll XVIII) formed by proteolysis, specifically inhibits endothelial cell migration and proliferation in vitro and potently inhibits angiogenesis and tumor growth in vivo. The purpose of this study was to examine the immunolocalization of endostatin and coll XVIII in the retina and choroid of human donor tissue sections from aged control donor eyes and to determine whether the localization or relative levels are changed in age-related macular degeneration (AMD). METHODS Ocular tissues were obtained from six aged control donors (age range, 75-86 years; mean age, 80.5 years) without evidence or history of chorioretinal disease and from nine donors with AMD (age range, 74-105 years; mean age, 88.6 years). Tissues were cryopreserved, and streptavidin alkaline phosphatase immunohistochemistry was performed with goat anti-human and mouse anti-human endostatin antibodies and rabbit anti-mouse coll XVIII. Blood vessels were identified with mouse anti-human CD-34 antibody in adjacent sections. Pigment in RPE and choroidal melanocytes was bleached. Three independent observers scored the immunohistochemical reaction product. RESULTS In aged control eyes, coll XVIII and endostatin (the endostatin portion of coll XVIII) immunoreactivity was observed in large retinal blood vessels and in capillaries in some individuals, but the internal limiting membrane (ILM) had the most intense retinal immunostaining. There was no significant difference in immunoreactivity to both antibodies in retinal blood vessels in aged control eyes. In the choroid, endostatin and coll XVIII were localized to blood vessels, Bruch's membrane, and RPE basal lamina. AMD retina and choroid had a similar pattern and intensity of coll XVIII immunostaining, as observed in control eyes but reaction product was more diffuse in the choroid. Endostatin immunoreactivity was significantly higher in ILM (P = 0.037) in AMD retina and significantly lower in the choriocapillaris, Bruch's membrane, and RPE basal lamina of AMD choroids (P < 0.05) and completely negative in some areas of AMD choroids. CONCLUSIONS These data suggest that reduced levels of the endostatin portion of coll XVIII in Bruch's membrane, RPE basal lamina, intercapillary septa, and choriocapillaris in eyes with AMD may be permissive for choroidal neovascularization.
Applying Adaptive Grammar Based Genetic Programming in Evolving Recursive Programs

Genetic programming (GP) extends traditional genetic algorithms to automatically induce computer programs. GP has been applied in a wide range of applications such as software re-engineering, electrical circuits synthesis, knowledge engineering, and data mining. One of the most important and challenging research areas in GP is the investigation of ways to successfully evolve recursive programs. A recursive program is one that calls itself either directly or indirectly through other programs. Because recursions lead to compact and general programs and provide a mechanism for reusing program code, they facilitate GP to solve larger and more complicated problems. Nevertheless, it is commonly agreed that the recursive program learning problem is very difficult for GP. In this paper, we propose a technique to tackle the difficulties in learning recursive programs. The technique is incorporated into an adaptive Grammar Based Genetic Programming system (adaptive GBGP). A number of experiments have been performed to demonstrate that the system can evolve recursive programs efficiently and effectively.
Willingness to Pay for Land Preservation across States and Jurisdictional Scale: Implications for Benefit Transfer

In stated preference valuation of farmland preservation, respondents are often told that preservation will occur within various jurisdictional scales—that is, community or state—but are not told the specific location of parcels. The resultant availability of welfare estimates for different scales and regions provides numerous avenues for benefit transfer. This paper provides a systematic assessment of transfer error, contrasting different methods for the transfer of farmland preservation values across states and jurisdictional scales. Results drawn from multistate choice experiments suggest that the choice of across scale versus across state transfer method can have significant implications for transfer validity. (JEL Q24, Q51)
Convergence and application of a modified iteratively regularized Gauss–Newton algorithm

Theoretical convergence results for an iteratively regularized Gauss–Newton (IRGN) algorithm with a Tikhonov regularization term using a seminorm generated by a linear operator are established. The convergence theorem uses an a posteriori stopping rule and a modified source condition, without any restriction on the nonlinearity of the operator. The theoretical results are illustrated by simulations for a one-dimensional version of the exponentially ill-posed optical tomography inverse problem for the diffusion (D) and absorption (μ) coefficient spatial distributions. The modified Tikhonov regularization performs the mapping of the minimization variables, which are the coefficients of the spline expansions for D and μ, to physical space. This incorporates the inherently differing scales of these variables in the minimization, and also suggests relative weighting of the regularization terms with respect to each parameter space. The presented modification of the IRGN allows greater flexibility for implementations of IRGN solutions of ill-posed inverse problems in which differing scales in physical space hinder standard IRGN inversions.
Restoring Anticancer Immune Response by Targeting Tumor-Derived Exosomes With a HSP70 Peptide Aptamer.

BACKGROUND Exosomes, via heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) expressed in their membrane, are able to interact with the toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) on myeloid-derived suppressive cells (MDSCs), thereby activating them. METHODS We analyzed exosomes from mouse (C57Bl/6) and breast, lung, and ovarian cancer patient samples and cultured cancer cells with different approaches, including nanoparticle tracking analysis, biolayer interferometry, FACS, and electron microscopy. Data were analyzed with the Student's t and Mann-Whitney tests. All statistical tests were two-sided. RESULTS We showed that the A8 peptide aptamer binds to the extracellular domain of membrane HSP70 and used the aptamer to capture HSP70 exosomes from cancer patient samples. The number of HSP70 exosomes was higher in cancer patients than in healthy donors (mean, ng/mL ± SD = 3.5 ± 1.7 vs 0.17 ± 0.11, respectively, P = .004). Accordingly, all cancer cell lines examined abundantly released HSP70 exosomes, whereas "normal" cells did not. HSP70 had higher affinity for A8 than for TLR2; thus, A8 blocked HSP70/TLR2 association and the ability of tumor-derived exosomes to activate MDSCs. Treatment of tumor-bearing C57Bl/6 mice with A8 induced a decrease in the number of MDSCs in the spleen and inhibited tumor progression (n = 6 mice per group). Chemotherapeutic agents such as cisplatin or 5FU increase the amount of HSP70 exosomes, favoring the activation of MDSCs and hampering the development of an antitumor immune response. In contrast, this MDSC activation was not observed if cisplatin or 5FU was combined with A8. As a result, the antitumor effect of the drugs was strongly potentiated. CONCLUSIONS A8 might be useful for quantifying tumor-derived exosomes and for cancer therapy through MDSC inhibition.
CRFs for estimating the underlying ground surface from airborne LiDAR data

Airborne laser scanners (LiDAR) return point clouds of millions of points imaging large regions. It is very challenging to recover the bare earth, i.e., the surface remaining after the buildings and vegetative cover have been identified and removed; manual correction of the recovered surface is very costly. Our solution combines classification into ground and non-ground with reconstruction of the continuous underlying surface. We define a joint model on the class labels and estimated surface, p(c, z|x), where ci ∈ {0, 1} is the label of point i (ground or nonground), zi is the estimated bare-earth surface at point i, and xi is the observed height of point i. We learn the parameters of this CRF using supervised learning. The graph structure is obtained by triangulating the point clouds. Given the model, we compute a MAP estimate of the surface, arg max p(z|x), using the EM algorithm, treating the labels c as missing data. Extensive testing shows that the recovered surfaces agree very well with those reconstructed from manually corrected data. Moreover, the resulting classification of points is competitive with the best in the literature.
Optimal Geometry Analysis for Multistatic TOA Localization

Multistatic time-of-arrival (TOA) localization has recently attracted great attention due to performance advantages offered by multistatic radar. In target localization, the relative sensor-target geometry is an important factor that can significantly affect the localization performance. In this paper, we analyze the optimal geometries for a two-dimensional TOA localization configuration commonly presented in the literature with a single transmitter and multiple receivers. Our analysis is based on minimizing the area of estimation confidence region, which is equivalent to maximizing the determinant of the Fisher information matrix. If the coordinate system is rotated such that the bearing angle of the transmitter with respect to the target is zero, an optimal geometry is obtained when a subset of the receivers are collinear with the target at a bearing angle of π/3 rad and the remaining receivers at a bearing angle of -π/3 rad. The arrangement of the receivers on either branch of the bearing angles, i.e., π/3 rad or -π/3 rad, is decided based on the measurement noise variances at the receivers. We conclude the study with numerical solutions generated by the genetic algorithm and simulation examples for UAV path optimization to verify the accuracy of the analytical findings.
Thermodynamics of the localized D 2 – D 6 System

An exact fully-localized extremal supergravity solution for N2 D2 branes and N6 D6 branes, which is dual to 3-dimensional supersymmetric SU(N2) gauge theory with N6 fundamentals, was found by Cherkis and Hashimoto. In order to consider the thermal properties of the gauge theory we present the non-extremal extension of this solution to first order in an expansion near the core of the D6 branes. We compute the Hawking temperature and the black brane horizon area/entropy. The leading order entropy, which is proportional to N 3/2 2 N 1/2 6 T 2 H , is not corrected to first order in the expansion. This result is consistent with the analogous weak-coupling result at the correspondence point N2 ∼ N6. Research supported by the DOE under grant DE–FG02–92ER40706. Research supported in part by the NSF under grant PHY-0140281. Research supported in part by the DOE under grant DE–FG02–92ER40706. marta,schnitzer@brandeis.edu; naculich@bowdoin.edu
An Optimized System for Multiple Sequence Alignment

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is one of the essential operations for identifying functional and structural relations among proteins. The execution of an MSA algorithm requires high-performance platforms. This paper presents a hardware system that speeds up the popular MSA software ClustalW. The proposed design performs the computation of the most time consuming step of the ClustalW. Test results show that the proposed hardware increases the performance of this step up to 85 times.
Deep Learning for Image Retrieval: What Works and What Doesn't

To build an industrial content-based image retrieval system (CBIRs), it is highly recommended that feature extraction, feature processing and feature indexing need to be fully considered. Although research that bloomed in the past years suggest that the convolutional neural network (CNN) be in a leading position on feature extraction & representation for CBIRs, there are less instructions on the deep analysis of feature related topics, for example the kind of feature representation that has the best performance among the candidates provided by CNN, the extracted features generalization ability, the relationship between the dimensional reduction and the accuracy loss in CBIRs, the best distance measure technique in CBIRs and the benefit of the coding techniques in improving the efficiency of CBIRs, etc. Therefore, several practicing studies were conducted and a thorough analysis was made in this research attempting to answer the above questions. The results in the study on both ImageNet-2012 and an industrial dataset provided by Sogou demonstrate that fc4096a and fc4096b perform the best on the datasets from unseen categories. Several interesting and practicing conclusions are drawn, for instance, fc4096a and fc4096b are found to have a better generalization ability than other features of CNN and could be considered as the first choice for industrial CBIRs. Furthermore, a novel feature binarization approach is presented in this paper for better efficiency of CBIRs. More specifically, the binarization is capable of reducing 31/32 space usage of original data. To sum up, the conclusions seem to provide practical instructions on real industrial CBIRs.
Correlation between XRCC1 Arg399Gln genetic polymorphisms and susceptibility to bladder cancer: a meta-analysis

The relationship between XRCC1 polymorphisms and bladder cancer has been widely studied. Here, our meta-analysis was conducted to evaluate the correlations between common genetic polymorphisms in XRCC1 and susceptibility to bladder cancer. In order to derive a more precise estimation of the association, 27 clinical case-control studies (which met all the inclusion criteria) were included in this meta-analysis. A total of 8,539 cancer cases and 10,750 controls were involved in this meta-analysis. Overall, no significant association was detected in allelic model (A allele vs T allele odds ratio [OR] =0.87, 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.71–1.06), homozygote comparison (AA vs GG OR =1.12, 95% CI, 0.68–1.85), heterozygote comparison (AT vs TT OR =1.01, 95% CI, 0.81–1.26), dominant model (AA + AG vs GG OR =0.93, 95% CI, 0.85–1.02), and recessive model (AA vs AG + GG OR =1.01, 95% CI, 0.88–1.15), but a moderately significant association was found for AG vs GG (OR =0.241, 95% CI =0.17–0.35). Subgroup analysis based on ethnicity. Ethnicity analysis suggested that genetic polymorphisms in XRCC1 were not correlated with increased bladder cancer risk among Asians (all P>0.05). Therefore, we concluded that XRCC1 genetic polymorphism may not contribute to bladder cancer susceptibility in the present meta-analysis, and further well-designed studies with a large sample size are warranted to validate our conclusion.
Fosphenytoin for the treatment of status epilepticus: an evidence-based assessment of its clinical and economic outcomes

Introduction: Status epilepticus (SE) is a life-threatening condition requiring prompt treatment in the emergency department to control seizures and limit potential neurologic damage. Fosphenytoin is a water-soluble prodrug of phenytoin (an established treatment option for SE) that has been developed to overcome the often severe venous adverse events that can occur following the intravenous administration of phenytoin. Aims: The objective of this article is to review the evidence for the use of fosphenytoin in the treatment of SE. Evidence review: Fosphenytoin can be infused more rapidly than phenytoin and there is evidence that therapeutic drug levels are achieved at least at a similar rate. Although few studies have been conducted in SE patients, there is evidence that fosphenytoin is at least as effective as phenytoin in terms of response and control of SE. There is also moderate evidence that there are fewer vascular adverse events following intravenous fosphenytoin compared with phenytoin administration when both drugs are infused at the recommended dosage and rate. Evidence from pharmacoeconomic studies indicates that a reduction in the incidence of adverse events and their subsequent management are critical factors for cost-effectiveness with fosphenytoin. Clinical value: In conclusion, fosphenytoin is a valuable treatment option for the rapid treatment of SE; the risk of venous adverse events is lower than with phenytoin when administered at the recommended rate.
The GPI anchor of cell-surface proteins is synthesized on the cytoplasmic face of the endoplasmic reticulum

Glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) membrane protein anchors are synthesized from sugar nucleotides and phospholipids in the ER and transferred to newly synthesized proteins destined for the cell surface. The topology of GPI synthesis in the ER was investigated using sealed trypanosome microsomes and the membrane-impermeant probes phosphatidylinositol-specific phospholipase C, Con A, and proteinase K. All the GPI biosynthetic intermediates examined were found to be located on the external face of the microsomal vesicles suggesting that the principal steps of GPI assembly occur in the cytoplasmic leaflet of the ER. Protease protection experiments showed that newly GPI-modified trypanosome variant surface glycoprotein was primarily oriented towards the ER lumen, consistent with eventual expression at the cell surface. The unusual topographical arrangement of the GPI assembly pathway suggests that a biosynthetic intermediate, possibly the phosphoethanolamine-containing anchor precursor, must be translocated across the ER membrane bilayer in the process of constructing a GPI anchor.
Anti-Unification Based Learning of T-Wrappers for Information Extraction

We present a method for learning wrappers for multi-slot extraction from semi-structured documents. The presented method learns how to construct automatically wrappers from positive examples, consisting of text tuples occurring in the document. These wrappers (T-wrappers) are based on a feature structure unification based pattern language for information extraction. The presented technique is an inductive machine learning method based on a modified version of least general generalization ( TD-Anti- Unification) for a subset of feature structures (tokens).
A proposal to estimate human capital depreciation: some evidence for Spain

This article formulates an empirical model for salary determination, which permits the identification of the depreciation rate of the stock of professional qualifications. The analysis is implemented using the 1994 European Community Household Panel data referring to Spanish salaried males. The depreciation rate of the stock of qualifications is estimated at a narrow interval centred at 1%. Empirical evidence also suggests that although the depreciation rate does not vary according to the level of education, it does so depending on unemployment spells endured by the worker in recent years and on whether the worker has undertaken training courses.