Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extending superquadrics with exponent functions: modeling and reconstruction

Superquadrics are a family of parametric shapes which can model a diverse set of objects. They have received significant attention because of their compact representation and robust methods for recovery of 3D models. However, their assumption of intrinsical symmetry fails in modeling numerous real-world examples such as human, body, animals, and other naturally occurring objects. In this paper, we present a novel approach, which is called extended superquadric to extend superquadric's representation power with exponent functions. An extended superquadric model can be deformed in any direction because it extends the exponents of superquadrics from constants to functions of the latitude and longitude angles in the spherical coordinate system. Thus extended superquadrics can model more complex shapes than superquadrics. It also maintains many desired properties of superquadrics such as compactness controllability, and intuitive meaning, which are all advantageous for shape modeling, recognition, and reconstruction. In this paper, besides the use of extended superquadrics for modeling, we also discuss our research into the recovery of extended superquadrics from 3D information (reconstruction). Experimental results of fitting extended superquadrics to 3D real data are presented. Our results are very encouraging and indicate that the use of extended superquadric is a promising paradigm for shape representation and recovery in computers vision and has potential benefits for the generation of synthetic images for computer graphics.
Clinical and Genetic Review of Hereditary Acral Reticulate Pigmentary Disorders

Reticulated pigmentation is a unique pigmentary change caused by a heterogeneous group of hereditary and acquired disorders. This pigmentation is characterized by a mottled appearance, with lesions that vary in size and pigmentary content. This review discusses the hereditary group of the reticulated pigmentation disorders, such as dyschromatosis symmetrica hereditaria, dyschromatosis universalis hereditaria, and reticulate acropigmentation of Kitamura. The clinical presentation and histopathological features often overlap, making diagnosis difficult. However, each of these hereditary conditions possesses a unique genetic mutation, and genetic analysis is thus more useful in the diagnosis of these conditions. This article delivers an update regarding the clinical features, detailed histopathological description, and genetic information concerning hereditary reticulate pigmentary disorders and aims to provide useful background for use by clinical dermatologists and histopathologists when approaching this group of hereditary disorders.
Effective Size of Receptive Fields of Inferior Temporal Visual Cortex Neurons in Natural Scenes

Inferior temporal cortex (IT) neurons have large receptive fields when a single effective object stimulus is shown against a blank background, but have much smaller receptive fields when the object is placed in a natural scene. Thus, translation invariant object recognition is reduced in natural scenes, and this may help object selection. We describe a model which accounts for this by competition within an attractor in which the neurons are tuned to different objects in the scene, and the fovea has a higher cortical magnification factor than the peripheral visual field. Furthermore, we show that top-down object bias can increase the receptive field size, facilitating object search in complex visual scenes, and providing a model of object-based attention. The model leads to the prediction that introduction of a second object into a scene with blank background will reduce the receptive field size to values that depend on the closeness of the second object to the target stimulus. We suggest that mechanisms of this type enable the output of IT to be primarily about one object, so that the areas that receive from IT can select the object as a potential target for action.
Exploiting side information in locality preserving projection

Even if the class label information is unknown, side information represents some equivalence constraints between pairs of patterns, indicating whether pairs originate from the same class. Exploiting side information, we develop algorithms to preserve both the intra-class and inter-class local structures. This new type of locality preserving projection (LPP), called LPP with side information (LPPSI), preserves the datapsilas local structure in the sense that the close, similar training patterns will be kept close, whilst the close but dissimilar ones are separated. Our algorithms balance these conflicting requirements, and we further improve this technique using kernel methods. Experiments conducted on popular face databases demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms LPP. Further, we show that the performance of our algorithm with partial side information (that is, using only small amount of pair-wise similarity/dissimilarity information during training) is comparable with that when using full side information. We conclude that exploiting side information by preserving both similar and dissimilar local structures of the data significantly improves performance.
Attrition and Completion Issues in Postgraduate Studies for Student Development

The range of postgraduate students keep increasing and striving for excellence. Good resources at this level are of vital importance. Th is culminates support and services offered by university and instituition. A recent st udy in Australia indicated that 60 percent of beginning doctoral candidates in 1992 wo uld have completed successfully by 2003 (that is 11 years after initial enrolment), suggesting an attrition rate of 40 percent [1]. The same study also reported considera ble variation in completion rates between institutions. This issue is worrisome if th e completion rates become lower and lower. Meanwhile, the government and the instit utions is trying to attract more students by making every effort to provide quality education. However, this sometimes are not consistently meet students expect ations. They needs certain support and guidance from instituition so that they can fin ish their study within time frame. Thus, a review of literature and disscussion concer ning the attrition and completion rate in postgraduate studies is hoped to assist the institution and the students to articulate their expectations clearly, and thereby to reduce potential problems and to facilitate the creative process of postgraduate stu dies.
Microbodies: peroxisomes and glyoxysomes

Microbodies were first reported at the ultrastructural level in the proximal convoluted tubule ofmouse kidney by Rhodin in 1954 (1) and in hepatic parenchymal cells by Rouiller and Bernhard in 1956 (2) at about the time The Journal of Cell Biology was established . They were reported in plants by Porter and Caulfield in 1958 (3) and by Mollenhauer et al. in 1966 (4) . Microbodies are now recognized as ubiquitous subcellular respiratory organelles in eukaryotic cells . Microbodies from all tissues appear morphologically similar and have similar enzymatic properties, but the metabolic pathways within this subcellular compartment vary, depending upon the tissue . Microbodies (peroxisomes and glyoxysomes) were one of the last major subcellular compartments to be recognized, and it was not until the end of the 1960s that their significance was established by several reviews . Most important were the following two summaries: "Peroxisomes (Microbodies and Related Particles)" by de Duve and Baudhuin in 1966 (5), and "The Peroxisome: a New Cytoplasmic Organelle" by de Duve in 1969 (6) . The Nobel Prize that de Duve received was based on his pioneering work in the discovery and isolation of subcellular organelles, such as microbodies. Material in these two papers is essential reading for new students in the field . Also in 1969, the morphological literature was assembled into a book, Microbodies and Related Particles by Hruban and Rechcigl (7), which summarized the evidence for the widespread distribution of the particle . Another landmark in 1966, also from de Duve's group (8), was the development of procedures for isolating microbodies . The first research symposium, "The Nature and Function of Peroxisomes (Microbodies, Glyoxysomes)," was held in 1969 (9) . Recently there has been such a proliferation of papers about the many aspects of microbodies that in this article we cite only reviews or use only an initial reference to a specific subject. Some of the general reviews are on development and enzymatic content (10), microbodies in leaves (11-13), germinating seeds (14, 15), algae (16), fungi (17), and protozoa (18); other reviews will be cited with specific topics . Nevertheless, we have little knowledge today of the physiological role of microbodies in cellular metabolism . Properties and characteristics of microbodies are still incompletely described, and much of the recent literature has not been confirmed or well established by the few biologists working in this field .
Identifying extreme pluvials in the last millennia using optical dating of single grains of quartz from shorelines on Australia’s largest lake

The filling of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre (KT-LE), Australia’s ‘inland sea’ has captured scientific and cultural interest for over a century and a half. However, despite the presence of multiple shorelines around the modern playa at or near the modern maximum lake-filling levels, no quantitative estimates of major late-Holocene filling events have ever been documented. We develop a preliminary chronological data set using single-grain optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) on lake shoreline samples in order to determine the timing of large lake-filling events (equivalent to 1974 Common Era (CE) as Australia’s wettest year on record) for KT-LE, Australia’s largest lake basin. Despite quartz grains with very low natural dose luminescence (Ln) signal, we derive palaeodoses from geologically recent deposits (decades to centuries) using standard rejection criteria and highlight no signs of partial bleaching but occasional bioturbation in modern deposits. Major modern filling episodes, such as the1974 and 1949/1950 filling events, are successfully captured in the geochronological record, as are two major lake-filling episodes in 1854 ± 21 CE years and 1598–1654 CE. Two additional periods of potential lake-filling events have been identified at 1.2 ± 0.09 and 1.9 ± 0.14 ka, but stratigraphic control on these events is less robust. These chronostratigraphic records, while discontinuous, provide important hydrological evidence for extreme pluvial events akin to 1974 or 1949/1950, and the approach holds promise for identifying climate extremes and landscape response over the late Holocene.
Case study: an empirical investigation of thumbnail image recognition

The use of thumbnails (i.e., miniatures) in the user-interface of image databases allows searching and selection of images without the need for naming policies. Treating parent images prior to reduction with edge-detecting smoothing, lossy image compression, or static codebook compression resulted in thumbnails where the distortion caused by reduction was lessened. An experiment assessing these techniques found resulting thumbnails could be recognised more quickly and accurately than thumbnails of the same parent images that had been reduced without treatment. This pretreatment in thumbnail creation is offered as an improvement.
Mechanisms of Fast Ripples in the Hippocampus

Hippocampal fast ripples (FRs) have been associated with seizure onset in both human and experimental epilepsy. To characterize the mechanisms underlying FR oscillations (200-600 Hz), we studied activity of single neurons and neuronal networks in rat hippocampal slices in vitro. The correlation between the action potentials of bursting pyramidal cells and local field potential oscillations suggests that synchronous onset of action potential bursts and similar intrinsic firing patterns among local neurons are both necessary conditions for FR oscillations. Increasing the fidelity of individual pyramidal cell spike train timing by blocking accommodation dramatically increased FR amplitude, whereas blockade of potassium conductances decreased the fidelity of action potential timing in individual pyramidal cell action potential bursts and decreased FR amplitude. Blockade of ionotropic glutamate receptors desynchronized onset of action potential bursts in individual pyramidal cells and abolished fast ripples. Thus, synchronous burst onset mediated by recurrent excitatory synaptic transmission and similar intrinsic spike timing mechanisms in neighboring pyramidal cells are necessary conditions for FR oscillations within the hippocampal network.
Acute Obstructive Apnea Produces Natriuresis in Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats (SHR) by a Renal Nerve-Dependent

The role of renal nerve in excretion was investigated during acute obstructive apnea (OA) episodes in SHR. The animals (SHR and control, C) were presented for renal denervation (D; CD; SHRD) or undenervation (U; CU; SHRU). Tracheal catheterization was performed to induce OA via its total occlusion. Urine samples were collected every 2 min after 20 s of OA. Obstructive apnea resulted in bradycardia, hypotension, and induced elevations in the urinary measurements in SHRU, but not in CU. Conversely, the denervation increased in CD, but not in the SHRD. Urinary excretion was dependent of renal nerve in SHR during OA
Low-level Laser Therapy to the Mouse Femur Enhances the Fungicidal Response of Neutrophils against Paracoccidioides brasiliensis Citation

Neutrophils (PMN) play a central role in host defense against the neglected fungal infection paracoccidioidomycosis (PCM), which is caused by the dimorphic fungus Paracoccidioides brasiliensis (Pb). PCM is of major importance, especially in Latin America, and its treatment relies on the use of antifungal drugs. However, the course of treatment is lengthy, leading to side effects and even development of fungal resistance. The goal of the study was to use low-level laser therapy (LLLT) to stimulate PMN to fight Pb in vivo. Swiss mice with subcutaneous air pouches were inoculated with a virulent strain of Pb or fungal cell wall components (Zymosan), and then received LLLT (780 nm; 50 mW; 12.5 J/cm2; 30 seconds per point, giving a total energy of 0.5 J per point) on alternate days at two points on each hind leg. The aim was to reach the bone marrow in the femur with light. Non-irradiated animals were used as controls. The number and viability of the PMN that migrated to the inoculation site was assessed, as well as their ability to synthesize proteins, produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) and their fungicidal activity. The highly pure PMN populations obtained after 10 days of infection were also subsequently cultured in the presence of Pb for trials of protein production, evaluation of mitochondrial activity, ROS production and quantification of viable fungi growth. PMN from mice that received LLLT were more active metabolically, had higher fungicidal activity against Pb in vivo and also in vitro. The kinetics of neutrophil PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases | DOI:10.1371/journal.pntd. 0003541 February 12, 2015 1 / 19 a11111
Your Career Path Matters in Person-Job Fit

We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of the advancement of technology: automation and AI technology cause the devaluation of human labor, resulting in unemployment. With this background, automatic person-job fit systems are promising solutions to promote the employment rate. The purpose of person-job fit is to calculate a matching score between the job seeker's resume and the job posting, determining whether the job seeker is suitable for the position. In this paper, we propose a new approach to person-job fit that characterizes the hidden preference derived from the job seeker's career path. We categorize and utilize three types of preferences in the career path: consistency, likeness, and continuity. We prove that understanding the career path enables us to provide more appropriate career suggestions to job seekers. To demonstrate the practical value of our proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world data extracted from an online recruitment platform and then present detailed cases to show how the career path matter in person-job fit.
Gastrointestinal modifications and bioavailability of brown seaweed phlorotannins and effects on inflammatory markers

Abstract Brown seaweeds such as Ascophyllum nodosum are a rich source of phlorotannins (oligomers and polymers of phloroglucinol units), a class of polyphenols that are unique to Phaeophyceae. At present, there is no information on the bioavailability of seaweed polyphenols and limited evidence on their bioactivity in vivo. Consequently, we investigated the gastrointestinal modifications in vitro of seaweed phlorotannins from A. nodosum and their bioavailability and effect on inflammatory markers in healthy participants. In vitro, some phlorotannin oligomers were identified after digestion and colonic fermentation. In addition, seven metabolites corresponding to in vitro-absorbed metabolites were identified. Urine and plasma samples contained a variety of metabolites attributed to both unconjugated and conjugated metabolites (glucuronides and/or sulphates). In both urine and plasma, the majority of the metabolites were found in samples collected at late time points (6–24 h), suggesting colonic metabolism of high-molecular-weight phlorotannins, with three phlorotannin oligomers (hydroxytrifuhalol A, 7-hydroxyeckol, C-O-C dimer of phloroglucinol) identified in urine samples. A significant increase of the cytokine IL-8 was also observed. Our study shows for the first time that seaweed phlorotannins are metabolised and absorbed, predominantly in the large intestine, and there is a large inter-individual variation in their metabolic profile. Three phlorotannin oligomers present in the capsule are excreted in urine. Our study is the first investigation of the metabolism and bioavailability of seaweed phlorotannins and the role of colonic biotransformation. In addition, IL-8 is a possible target for phlorotannin bioactivity.
Generating Annotated Corpora for Reading Comprehension and Question Answering Evaluation

Recently, reading comprehension tests for students and adult language learners have received increased attention within the NLP community as a means to develop and evaluate robust question answering (NLQA) methods. We present our ongoing work on automatically creating richly annotated corpus resources for NLQA and on comparing automatic methods for answering questions against this data set. Starting with the CBC4Kids corpus, we have added XML annotation layers for tokenization, lemmatization, stemming, semantic classes, POS tags and bestranking syntactic parses to support future experiments with semantic answer retrieval and inference. Using this resource, we have calculated a baseline for word-overlap based answer retrieval (Hirschman et al., 1999) on the CBC4Kids data and found the method performs slightly better than on the REMEDIA corpus. We hope that our richly annotated version of the CBC4Kids corpus will become a standard resource, especially as a controlled environment for evaluating inference-based techniques.
Markerless Visual Servoing on Unknown Objects for Humanoid Robot Platforms

To precisely reach for an object with a humanoid robot, it is of central importance to have good knowledge of both end-effector, object pose and shape. In this work we propose a framework for markerless visual servoing on unknown objects, which is divided in four main parts: I) a leastsquares minimization problem is formulated to find the volume of the object graspable by the robot's hand using its stereo vision; II) a recursive Bayesian filtering technique, based on Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) filtering, estimates the 6D pose (position and orientation) of the robot's end-effector without the use of markers; III) a nonlinear constrained optimization problem is formulated to compute the desired graspable pose about the object; IV) an image-based visual servo control commands the robot's end-effector toward the desired pose. We demonstrate effectiveness and robustness of our approach with extensive experiments on the iCub humanoid robot platform, achieving real-time computation, smooth trajectories and subpixel precisions.
Prosodic grouping and relative clause disambiguation in Mandarin

The study discusses the role of prosodic grouping in the Mandarin Relative Clause attachment disambiguation. The grouping effect is explored under the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) from four aspects of sentence processing experiments: default production, contrast production, online processing, as well as offline processing. It is found that (1) the length of RC greatly impacts ambiguity resolutions offline; (2) Prosodic grouping can well reflect the different attachment readings and is consciously used to produce contrastive meanings (3) Online processing can be affected by manipulating the grouping cues: Prominence and pause. The findings support the IPH, and contribute to our understanding about prosodic grouping in Mandarin, which can be applied in spoken language processing. Index Terms: prosodic grouping, disambiguation, Mandarin
Nonexplicit Change Detection in Complex Dynamic Settings

Objective: We employed a computer-controlled command-and-control (C2) simulation and recorded eye movements to examine the extent and nature of the inability to detect critical changes in dynamic displays when change detection is implicit (i.e., requires no explicit report) to the operator’s task. Background: Change blindness—the failure to notice significant changes to a visual scene—may have dire consequences on performance in C2 and surveillance operations. Method: Participants performed a radar-based risk-assessment task involving multiple subtasks. Although participants were not required to explicitly report critical changes to the operational display, change detection was critical in informing decision making. Participants’ eye movements were used as an index of visual attention across the display. Results: Nonfixated (i.e., unattended) changes were more likely to be missed than were fixated (i.e., attended) changes, supporting the idea that focused attention is necessary for conscious change detection. The finding of significant pupil dilation for changes undetected but fixated suggests that attended changes can nonetheless be missed because of a failure of attentional processes. Conclusion: Change blindness in complex dynamic displays takes the form of failures in establishing task-appropriate patterns of attentional allocation. Application: These findings have implications in the design of change-detection support tools for dynamic displays and work procedure in C2 and surveillance.
On estimating random amplitude chirp signals

This paper considers the problem of estimating the parameters of chirp signals with randomly time-varying amplitude. Two methods for solving this problem are presented. First, a nonlinear least-squares approach (NLS) is proposed. It is shown that by minimizing the NLS criterion with respect to all samples of the time-varying amplitude, the problem reduces to a two-dimensional maximization problem. A theoretical analysis of the NLS estimator is presented and an expression for its asymptotic variance is derived. It is shown that the NLS estimator has a variance very close to the Cramer-Rao bound. The second approach combines the principles behind the high-order ambiguity function (HAF) and the NLS approach. It provides a computationally simpler but suboptimum estimator. A statistical analysis of this estimator is also carried out. Numerical examples attest to the validity of the theoretical analysis and establish a comparison between the two proposed methods.