Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Photorealistic retrieval of occluded facial information using a performance-driven face model

Facial occlusions can cause both human observers and computer algorithms to fail in a variety of important tasks such as facial action analysis and expression classification. This is because the missing information is not reconstructed accurately enough for the purpose of the task in hand. Most current computer methods that are used to tackle this problem implement complex three-dimensional polygonal face models that are generally timeconsuming to produce and unsuitable for photorealistic reconstruction of missing facial features and behaviour. In this thesis, an image-based approach is adopted to solve the occlusion problem. A dynamic computer model of the face is used to retrieve the occluded facial information from the driver faces. The model consists of a set of orthogonal basis actions obtained by application of principal component analysis (PCA) on image changes and motion fields extracted from a sequence of natural facial motion (Cowe 2003). Examples of occlusion affected facial behaviour can then be projected onto the model to compute coefficients of the basis actions and thus produce photorealistic performance-driven animations. Visual inspection shows that the PCA face model recovers aspects of expressions in those areas occluded in the driver sequence, but the expression is generally muted. To further investigate this finding, a database of test sequences affected by a considerable set of artificial and natural occlusions is created. A number of suitable metrics is developed to measure the accuracy of the reconstructions. Regions of the face that are most important for performance-driven mimicry and that seem to carry the best information about global facial configurations are revealed using Bubbles, thus in effect identifying facial areas that are most sensitive to occlusions. Recovery of occluded facial information is enhanced by applying an appropriate scaling factor to the respective coefficients of the basis actions obtained by PCA. This method improves the reconstruction of the facial actions emanating from the occluded areas of the face. However, due to the fact that PCA produces bases that encode composite, correlated actions, such an enhancement also tends to affect actions in non-occluded areas of the face. To avoid this, more localised controls for facial actions are produced using independent component analysis (ICA). Simple projection of the data onto an ICA model is not viable due to the non-orthogonality of the extracted bases. Thus occlusion-affected mimicry is first generated using the PCA model and then enhanced by accordingly manipulating the independent components that are subsequently extracted from the mimicry. This combination of methods yields significant improvements and results in photorealistic reconstructions of occluded facial actions.
Structural Role of Compensatory Aminoacid Replacements in the Alpha- Synuclein Protein

2 MD studies of the protein in micelles point to a lower degree of flexibility of huAS(A53T) with respect to the huAS(wt) (39). MD studies of the protein in lipid bilayer provide also interesting insights on the wild type structures, suggesting in particular that the truncated protein (residues 1–95) forms a bent helix due to its collective motions (40), and that the truncated fragment (residues 31−52) assumes a high degree of conformational disorder (41). 3 NMR has provided insights of the protein in the solid state at 263 K (42). mAS(wt) was found to lose transient contacts C/NAC and C/N-terminal contacts. The N-terminal domain was more rigid and the NAC region more solvent exposed relative to that of huAS(wt). Abstract A subset of familial Parkinson's Disease (PD) cases is associated with the presence of disease-causing point mutations in human α-synuclein (huAS(wt)), including A53T. Surprisingly, the human neurotoxic aminoacid 53T is present in non-primate, wild-type sequences of α-synucleins, including that expressed by mice (mAS(wt)). Since huAS(A53T) causes neurodegeneration when expressed in rodents, the aminoacid changes between the wild-type human protein (huAS(wt)) and mAS(wt) might act as intramolecular suppressors of A53T toxicity in the mouse protein, restoring its physiological structure and function. The lack of structural information for mAS(wt) in aqueous solution has prompted us to carry out a comparative molecular dynamics study of huAS(wt), huAS(A53T) and mAS(wt) in water at 300 K. The calculations are based on an ensemble of NMR-derived huAS(wt) structures. huAS(A53T) turns out to be more flexible and less compact than huAS(wt). Its central (NAC) region, involved in the fibril formation of the protein, is more solvent-exposed than that of the wild-type protein, in agreement with NMR data. The compactness of mAS(wt) is similar to that of the human protein. In addition, its NAC region is less solvent-exposed and more rigid than that of huAS(A53T). All of these facets may be caused by an increase of intramolecular interactions on passing from huAS(A53T) to mAS(wt). We conclude that the presence of 'compensatory replacements' in the mouse protein causes a significant change of the protein relative to huAS(A53T), restoring features not too dissimilar to those of the human protein. 4 Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease affecting about five million people worldwide (1). In post-mortem brains of sporadic PD patients, proteinaceous fibrillar aggregates, called Lewy bodies, represent the neuropathological hallmark of the disease. The major components of Lewy bodies …
Livelihood diversification strategies and food insecurity status of rural farming households in North-Eastern Nigeria

The study examined the effects of households’ livelihood diversification strategies on food insecurity in rural North eastern Nigeria. In order to realise the objectives of the study, primary data were obtained from 444 farmers with the aid of structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, Tobit regression model, Cost of Calorie Function and ANOVA were used to analyse the data. The findings showed that farmers adopted five livelihood strategies of which Cropping, Poultry and Livestock Keeping (CPL) was predominant, accounting for 37.39% of respondents. However, 7.43% of the households practising Cropping, Fishing, Livestock keeping and Off-farm (CFLO) had the highest surplus and least shortfall indices of 0.75 and 0.20 respectively; implying that food secure households in this category exceeded daily RDA of 2250kcal of energy/adult equivalent/day by 75%; but food insecure households fell short of same by 20%. Head count ratio indicated that 58% and 42% of individuals in this category are food secure and food insecure respectively. Thus, a significant relationship between households’ food insecurity and livelihood diversification strategies is established.
Pruning Methods for Optimal Delete-Free Planning

Delete-free planning underlies many popular relaxation (h+) based heuristics used in state-of-the-art planners; it provides a simpler setting for exploring new pruning methods and other ideas; and a number of interesting recent planning domains are naturally delete-free. In this paper we explore new pruning methods for planning in delete-free planning domains. First, we observe that optimal delete-free plans can be composed from contiguous sub-plans that focus on one fact landmark at a time. Thus, instead of attempting to achieve the goal, the planner can focus on more easily achievable landmarks at each stage. Then, we suggest a number of complementary pruning techniques that are made more powerful with this observation. To carry out these pruning techniques efficiently, we make heavy use of an And/Or graph depicting the planning problem. We empirically evaluate these ideas using the FD framework, and show that they lead to clear improvements.
Flux-Tube Twist Resulting from Helical Turbulence: The Σ-Effect

Recent observational studies suggest that active region magnetic flux emerges in a twisted state and that the sense of twist depends weakly on solar hemisphere. We propose that this twist is imparted to the flux through its interaction with turbulent velocities in the convection zone. This process, designated the Σ-effect, operates on isolated magnetic flux tubes subjected to buffeting by turbulence with a nonvanishing kinetic helicity ⟨ ∙ 𝛁 × ⟩. The Σ-effect leads to twist of the same sense inferred from observation and opposite to that predicted by the α-effect. A series of numerical calculations are performed to estimate the magnitude of the Σ-effect in the solar convective zone. The results compare favorably with observations in both mean value and statistical dispersion. We find a further relationship with total magnetic flux that can be tested in future observations. The model also predicts that twist is uncorrelated with the tilt angle of the active region.
The role of adherens junctions and VE-cadherin in the control of vascular permeability

Endothelial cells control the passage of plasma constituents and circulating cells from blood to the underlying tissues. This specialized function is lost or impaired in several pathological conditions – including inflammation, sepsis, ischemia and diabetes – which leads to severe, and sometimes fatal, organ dysfunction. Endothelial permeability is regulated in part by the dynamic opening and closure of cell-cell adherens junctions (AJs). In endothelial cells, AJs are largely composed of vascular endothelial cadherin (VE-cadherin), an endothelium-specific member of the cadherin family of adhesion proteins that binds, via its cytoplasmic domain, to several protein partners, including p120, β-catenin and plakoglobin. Endogenous pathways that increase vascular permeability affect the function and organization of VE-cadherin and other proteins at AJs in diverse ways. For instance, several factors, including vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), induce the tyrosine phosphorylation of VE-cadherin, which accompanies an increase in vascular permeability and leukocyte diapedesis; in addition, the internalization and cleavage of VE-cadherin can cause AJs to be dismantled. From the knowledge of how AJ organization can be modulated, it is possible to formulate several pharmacological strategies to control the barrier function of the endothelium. We discuss the possible use of inhibitors of SRC and other kinases, of agents that increase cAMP levels, and of inhibitors of lytic enzymes as pharmacological tools for decreasing endothelial permeability.
Does long-term care coverage shape the impact of informal care-giving on quality of life? A difference-in-difference approach

Abstract The impact that providing care to ageing parents has on adult children's lives may depend on the long-term care (LTC) context. A common approach to test this is to compare whether the impact of care-giving varies between countries with different LTC coverage. However, this approach leaves considerable room for omitted variable bias. We use individual fixed-effects analyses to reduce bias in the estimates of the effects of informal care-giving on quality of life, and combine this with a difference-in-difference approach to reduce bias in the estimated moderating impact of LTC coverage on these effects. We draw on longitudinal data for Sweden and Denmark from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) collected between 2004 and 2015. Both countries traditionally had generous LTC coverage, but cutbacks were implemented at the end of the 20th century in Sweden and more recently in Denmark. We use this country difference in the timing of the cutbacks to shed light on effects of LTC coverage on the impact care-giving has on quality of life. Our analyses show that care-giving was more detrimental for quality of life in Sweden than in Denmark, and this difference weakened significantly when LTC coverage was reduced in Denmark, but not in Sweden. This suggests that LTC coverage shapes the impact of care-giving on quality of life.
Reward-Related Cortical Inputs Define a Large Striatal Region in Primates That Interface with Associative Cortical Connections, Providing a Substrate for Incentive-Based Learning

The anterior cingulate and orbital cortices and the ventral striatum process different aspects of reward evaluation, whereas the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the dorsal striatum are involved in cognitive function. Collectively, these areas are critical to decision making. We mapped the striatal area that receives information about reward evaluation. We also explored the extent to which terminals from reward-related cortical areas converge in the striatum with those from cognitive regions. Using three-dimensional-rendered reconstructions of corticostriatal projection fields along with two-dimensional chartings, we demonstrate the reward and cognitive territories in the primate striatum and show the convergence between these cortical inputs. The results show two labeling patterns: a focal projection field that consists of densely distributed terminal patches, and a diffuse projection consisting of clusters of fibers, extending throughout a wide area of the striatum. Together, these projection fields demonstrate a remarkably large, rostral, reward-related striatal territory that reaches into the dorsal striatum. Fibers from different reward-processing and cognitive cortical areas occupy both separate and converging territories. Furthermore, the diffuse projection may serve a separate integrative function by broadly disseminating general cortical activity. These findings show that the rostral striatum is in a unique position to mediate different aspects of incentive learning. Furthermore, areas of convergence may be particularly sensitive to dopamine modulation during decision making and habit formation.
Oriented Measures

* We are deeply grateful to Professor Arrigo Cellina for suggesting the initial problem, for his useful advice, and for his warm encouragement; we also wish to thank Professors Jean-Pierre Aubin and Helena Frankowska, who gave the authors the opportunity to meet together. We warmly thank the referee for asking us to be precise about an unclear point concerning Thoerem 2.2. We thank the D.M. I. of the E.N. S. for the technical support during Ž . the preparation of this paper. The second author C.M. was partially supported by a grant of Ž . the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Grant 203.01. 62 .
Scaling Cognitive Linguistics: Formalisms for Language Understanding

Research in cognitive linguistics has yielded valuable semantic and pragmatic insights that should be incorporated by language understanding systems. These insights have not been expressed in a rigorous enough form to be implemented. We provide a unified formalism for representing four conceptual primitives: schemas, constructions, mental spaces, and maps. These primitives are motivated by the cognitive linguistics literature and can serve as the basis for scalable deep understanding systems.
Immunological T-cell memory in the in vitro-induced experimental autoimmune orchitis: specificity of the reaction and tissue distribution of the autoantigens

Immunological memory has been induced in vitro against testicular autoantigens by priming normal rat T lymphocytes against autologous testis cells, and by permitting the isolated blast cells to revert back to small secondary lymphocytes (secondary EAO cells) in the absence of the priming antigen. The secondary EAO cells vigorously respond in a secondary response when reconfronted with syngeneic testis or lymphoid cells. Their responsiveness to nonself stimulator cells is, however, reduced. Secondary cells derived from concanavalin A-stimulated blasts, do not show that pattern of specificity. The specificity of the secondary EAO cells is definite, and cannot be affected by further culture on allogeneic fibroblasts, which are antigenic for unprimed T lymphocytes. At least part of the autoantigens are determined by the major histocompatibility gene complex (MHC). Factors provided by the culture system do not appear to determine the specificity of this reaction. Only minor cell populations can restimulate secondary EAO cells. One of these populations is presumably phage-like cells within the lymphoid populations can elicit a secondary EAO response. Thus, the autoantigens relevant in the secondary EAO response are either MHC antigens restricted to these testicular and lymphoid subpopulations, or MHC antigens recognized in conjunction with organ-specific non-MHC determinants.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports Consumption Heterogeneity, Employment Dynamics, and Macroeconomic Co-movement Consumption Heterogeneity, Employment Dynamics, and Macroeconomic Co-movement

paper presents preliminary findings and is being distributed to economists and other interested readers solely to stimulate discussion and elicit comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and are not necessarily reflective of views at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors. Abstract Real-business-cycle models necessarily rely on total factor productivity shocks to explain the observed co-movement between consumption, investment, and hours. However, an emerging body of evidence identifies " investment shocks " as important drivers of business cycles. This paper shows that a neoclassical model consistent with observed heterogeneity in labor supply and consumption across employed and nonemployed can generate co-movement in response to fluctuations in the marginal efficiency of investment. Estimation reveals that these shocks explain the bulk of business-cycle variance in consumption, investment, and hours. A corollary of the model's empirical success is that the labor wedge is not important at business-cycle frequencies. ). This is a substantially revised version of a paper distributed as " Labor Supply Heterogeneity and Macroeconomic Co-movement. " The authors thank their discussants, Richard Duttu and Richard Rogerson, for detailed comments, Gianluca Violante for his help with the Consumer Expenditure Survey data, and and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and are not necessarily reflective of views at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.
Music interaction trends in Finland: YouTube and Spotify

Music interaction refers to ways to produce, enjoy, and distribute music. The most common form of interaction is surely listening. Despite its popularity, it has received surprisingly little attention in human-computer interaction studies. In this paper, we describe two case studies that characterize music interaction with streaming services in Finland. We use both public and proprietary data to reveal novel insights about the present music consumption culture in Finland. We first compare two popular streaming music services, YouTube and Spotify. We look at the relative ranking of the most popular music across services and temporal access patterns. We find high correlations of popularity between the two services and consistent peak in listening indicators over Friday and Saturday. In the second part, we document some detailed statistics about user engagement with the most popular Finnish music on YouTube. For instance, we find a highly local audience (>90%) who on average retain their interest in the videos less than 70% of the total duration. We finally connect these findings to existing literature and the call for further qualitative research.
Evaluation of Salivary Glucose, IgA and Flow Rate in Diabetic Patients: A Case-Control Study

Objective: An association between diabetes mellitus and alterations in the oral cavity has been noted. In this study, we evaluated differences between salivary IgA, glucose and flow rate in diabetic patients compared with healthy controls. Materials and Methods: Forty patients with type 1 diabetes, 40 patients with type 2 diabetes and 40 healthy controls were selected. Whole unstimulated saliva samples were collected by the standard method and the salivary flow rate was determined. Nephelometric and Pars method were used to measure salivary IgA and salivary glucose concentrations, respectively. Statistical analysis was performed by Chi-square and t test. Results: There were no significant differences in salivary IgA and glucose concentrations between type 1 and type 2 diabetic patients and their matched control subjects (P>0.05). Salivary flow rate was significantly lower in diabetic patients (P<0.05). In addition, DMFT was higher in diabetic patients than the controls. Conclusion: Determination of salivary constituents may be useful in the description and management of oral findings in diabetic patients.
Performance of FDG PET for Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease in Two Independent Multicentre Samples (NEST-DD and ADNI)

Aim: We investigated the performance of FDG PET using an automated procedure for discrimination between Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and controls, and studied the influence of demographic and technical factors. Methods: FDG PET data were obtained from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) [102 controls (76.0 ± 4.9 years) and 89 AD patients (75.7 ± 7.6 years, MMSE 23.5 ± 2.1) and the Network for Standardisation of Dementia Diagnosis (NEST-DD) [36 controls (62.2 ± 5.0 years) and 237 AD patients (70.8 ± 8.3 years, MMSE 20.9 ± 4.4). The procedure created t-maps of abnormal voxels. The sum of t-values in predefined areas that are typically affected by AD (AD t-sum) provided a measure of scan abnormality associated with a preset threshold for discrimination between patients and controls. Results: AD patients had much higher AD t-sum scores compared to controls (p < 0.01), which were significantly related to dementia severity (ADNI: r = –0.62, p < 0.01; NEST-DD: r = –0.59, p < 0.01). Early-onset AD patients had significantly higher AD t-sum scores than late-onset AD patients (p < 0.01). Differences between databases were mainly due to different age distributions. The predefined AD t-sum threshold yielded a sensitivity and specificity of 83 and 78% in ADNI and 78 and 94% in NEST-DD, respectively. Conclusion: The automated FDG PET analysis procedure provided good discrimination power, and was most accurate for early-onset AD.
Accretion Rates and the Accretion Efficiency in AGNs

We used the standard geometrical thin accretion theory to obtain the accretion rates in Seyfert 1 galaxies and quasars. Combining accretion rates with the bolometric luminosity, we obtained the accretion efficiency. We found most of Seyfert 1 galaxies and radio quiet quasars have lower accretion efficiencies while most of the radio loud quasars possess higher accretion efficiencies. This finding further implies most of radio loud quasars possess Kerr black holes while Seyfert 1 galaxies and radio quiet quasars may not possess Kerr black holes. Considering the difference of the accretion efficiency we found there is a strong correlation between the accretion rate in units of the Eddington accretion rate and the width of the H$\beta$ emission line and most of AGNs are not accreting at Super-Eddington rates.
Scalable Mixed-Focus Collaborative Difficulty Resolution: A Demonstration

In mixed-focus collaboration, users opportunistically switch between synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. We have developed a special case of this collaboration model in which the switch occurs when users face and overcome difficulty and the level of sharing in the synchronous mode can vary. The model supports multiple forms and degrees of awareness of the remote difficulty, and allows multiple kinds and degrees of sharing. It is scalable in that it allows a single helper to resolve the difficulties of a large number of people in difficulty. It has been implemented for a programming class and motivated by experience using a previous system in such a class. However, in principle, its structure is independent of the activity causing difficulty. A video demonstration of this work is available at http://youtu.be/1-AqMCidx48.