Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ICE: Enabling Non-Experts to Build Models Interactively for Large-Scale Lopsided Problems

Quick interaction between a human teacher and a learning machine presents numerous benefits and challenges when working with web-scale data. The human teacher guides the machine towards accomplishing the task of interest. The learning machine leverages big data to find examples that maximize the training value of its interaction with the teacher. When the teacher is restricted to labeling examples selected by the machine, this problem is an instance of active learning. When the teacher can provide additional information to the machine (e.g., suggestions on what examples or predictive features should be used) as the learning task progresses, then the problem becomes one of interactive learning. To accommodate the two-way communication channel needed for efficient interactive learning, the teacher and the machine need an environment that supports an interaction language. The machine can access, process, and summarize more examples than the teacher can see in a lifetime. Based on the machine's output, the teacher can revise the definition of the task or make it more precise. Both the teacher and the machine continuously learn and benefit from the interaction. We have built a platform to (1) produce valuable and deployable models and (2) support research on both the machine learning and user interface challenges of the interactive learning problem. The platform relies on a dedicated, low-latency, distributed, in-memory architecture that allows us to construct web-scale learning machines with quick interaction speed. The purpose of this paper is to describe this architecture and demonstrate how it supports our research efforts. Preliminary results are presented as illustrations of the architecture but are not the primary focus of the paper.
The opportunities and risks of large language models in mental health

Global rates of mental health concerns are rising and there is increasing realization that existing models of mental healthcare will not adequately expand to meet the demand. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has come great optimism regarding their promise to create novel, large-scale solutions to support mental health. Despite their nascence, LLMs have already been applied to mental health-related tasks. In this review, we summarize the extant literature on efforts to use LLMs to provide mental health education, assessment, and intervention and highlight key opportunities for positive impact in each area. We then highlight risks associated with LLMs application to mental health and encourage adoption of strategies to mitigate these risks. The urgent need for mental health support must be balanced with responsible development, testing, and deployment of mental health LLMs. Especially critical is ensuring that mental health LLMs are fine-tuned for mental health, enhance mental health equity, adhere to ethical standards, and that people, including those with lived experience with mental health concerns, are involved in all stages from development through deployment. Prioritizing these efforts will minimize potential harms to mental health and maximize the likelihood that LLMs will positively impact mental health globally.
Moving Through Time: The Role of Personality in Three Real-Life Contexts

In English, two deictic space-time metaphors are in common usage: the Moving Ego metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time and the Moving Time metaphor conceptualizes time as moving forward toward the ego (Clark, 1973). Although earlier research investigating the psychological reality of these metaphors has typically examined spatial influences on temporal reasoning (e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002), recent lines of research have extended beyond this, providing initial evidence that personality differences and emotional experiences may also influence how people reason about events in time (Duffy & Feist, 2014; Hauser, Carter, & Meier, 2009; Richmond, Wilson, & Zinken, 2012). In this article, we investigate whether these relationships have force in real life. Building on the effects of individual differences in self-reported conscientiousness and procrastination found by Duffy and Feist (2014), we examined whether, in addition to self-reported conscientiousness and procrastination, there is a relationship between conscientious and procrastinating behaviors and temporal perspective. We found that participants who adopted the Moving Time perspective were more likely to exhibit conscientious behaviors, while those who adopted the Moving Ego perspective were more likely to procrastinate, suggesting that the earlier effects reach beyond the laboratory.
Rethinking 6-Dof Grasp Detection: A Flexible Framework for High-Quality Grasping

Robotic grasping is a primitive skill for complex tasks and is fundamental to intelligence. For general 6-Dof grasping, most previous methods directly extract scene-level semantic or geometric information, while few of them consider the suitability for various downstream applications, such as target-oriented grasping. Addressing this issue, we rethink 6-Dof grasp detection from a grasp-centric view and propose a versatile grasp framework capable of handling both scene-level and target-oriented grasping. Our framework, FlexLoG, is composed of a Flexible Guidance Module and a Local Grasp Model. Specifically, the Flexible Guidance Module is compatible with both global (e.g., grasp heatmap) and local (e.g., visual grounding) guidance, enabling the generation of high-quality grasps across various tasks. The Local Grasp Model focuses on object-agnostic regional points and predicts grasps locally and intently. Experiment results reveal that our framework achieves over 18% and 23% improvement on unseen splits of the GraspNet-1Billion Dataset. Furthermore, real-world robotic tests in three distinct settings yield a 95% success rate.
A Novel Bacterial Mucinase, Glycosulfatase, Is Associated with Bacterial Vaginosis

ABSTRACT The modifications to the vaginal habitat accompanying a change to vaginal flora in bacterial vaginosis (BV) are poorly understood. In this study enzymes involved in mucin degradation were measured, including a novel glycosulfatase assay. Women attending an emergency walk-in sexually transmitted disease clinic were studied. One high vaginal swab (HVS) was used to prepare a gram-stained smear to determine BV status, using Ison and Hay's criteria, and a separate swab was used for the purposes of the assays. The median glycosulfatase activity was 8.5 (range, −1.2 to 31.9) nmol h−1 1.5 ml−1 of HVS suspension in patients with BV compared to 0.5 (range, −0.7 to 9.4) nmol h−1 1.5 ml−1 of HVS suspension in patients without BV (P = <0.001). The median glycoprotein sialidase activity was 29.2 (range, −17 to 190) nmol h−1 1.5 ml−1 of HVS suspension in patients with BV compared to −1.1 (range, −41 to 48) nmol h−1 1.5 ml−1 of HVS suspension in patients without BV (P < 0.001). A rapid spot test for sialidase was positive in 22/24 patients with BV (sensitivity, 91.7%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 73 to 99%) and negative in 32/35 patients without BV (specificity, 91.4%; 95% CI, 76.9 to 98.2%) (P < 0.001). Glycosulfatase activity significantly correlated with both glycoprotein sialidase activity and the sialidase spot test (P = 0.006 and P < 0.001, respectively). The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the consortium of bacteria present in BV requires the ability to break down mucins in order to colonize the vagina and replace the normal lactobacilli.
Deep Active Learning: A Reality Check

We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art deep active learning methods. Surprisingly, under general settings, no single-model method decisively outperforms entropy-based active learning, and some even fall short of random sampling. We delve into overlooked aspects like starting budget, budget step, and pretraining's impact, revealing their significance in achieving superior results. Additionally, we extend our evaluation to other tasks, exploring the active learning effectiveness in combination with semi-supervised learning, and object detection. Our experiments provide valuable insights and concrete recommendations for future active learning studies. By uncovering the limitations of current methods and understanding the impact of different experimental settings, we aim to inspire more efficient training of deep learning models in real-world scenarios with limited annotation budgets. This work contributes to advancing active learning's efficacy in deep learning and empowers researchers to make informed decisions when applying active learning to their tasks.
Expression of mammalian paralogues of HRAD9 and Mrad9 checkpoint control genes in normal and cancerous testicular tissue.

Human and mouse paralogues of the evolutionarily conserved mammalian HRAD9 and Mrad9 cell cycle checkpoint control genes have been isolated and called HRAD9B and Mrad9B, respectively. HRAD9B encodes a protein that is 414 amino acids long and is 55% similar and 35% identical to the HRAD9 gene product. The Mrad9B protein is 398 amino acids long and is 50% similar and 35% identical to its paralogue. We demonstrate that the encoded human protein is nuclear and can physically interact with checkpoint proteins HRAD1, HRAD9, HHUS1, and HHUS1B, much like HRAD9. Northern blot analysis to detect tissue specificity indicates that the human and mouse genes are expressed predominantly in the testis. The abundance of HRAD9B RNA, as judged by quantitative reverse transcription-PCR, is very low in most testicular tumors, particularly those of germ cell origin, i.e., seminomas, relative to normal testis control, nonseminomas, or Leydig tumor cells. RNA levels corresponding to HRAD17, another checkpoint control gene, demonstrated a similar pattern, but in general, higher quantities of this message were detected in samples. Furthermore, normal/tumor tissue differences were not as dramatic or consistent from sample to sample, especially for the seminomas. Our results demonstrate for the first time that HRAD9 and Mrad9 are part of a gene family and reveal a new genetic element encoding a product that interacts with multiple, known cell cycle checkpoint control proteins. The findings also indicate that HRAD9B can serve as a biomarker in particular for testicular seminomas and might be causally related to the disease.
Cryptic Bytes: WebAssembly Obfuscation for Evading Cryptojacking Detection

WebAssembly has gained significant traction as a high-performance, secure, and portable compilation target for the Web and beyond. However, its growing adoption has also introduced new security challenges. One such threat is cryptojacking, where websites mine cryptocurrencies on visitors' devices without their knowledge or consent, often through the use of WebAssembly. While detection methods have been proposed, research on circumventing them remains limited. In this paper, we present the most comprehensive evaluation of code obfuscation techniques for WebAssembly to date, assessing their effectiveness, detectability, and overhead across multiple abstraction levels. We obfuscate a diverse set of applications, including utilities, games, and crypto miners, using state-of-the-art obfuscation tools like Tigress and wasm-mutate, as well as our novel tool, emcc-obf. Our findings suggest that obfuscation can effectively produce dissimilar WebAssembly binaries, with Tigress proving most effective, followed by emcc-obf and wasm-mutate. The impact on the resulting native code is also significant, although the V8 engine's TurboFan optimizer can reduce native code size by 30\% on average. Notably, we find that obfuscation can successfully evade state-of-the-art cryptojacking detectors. Although obfuscation can introduce substantial performance overheads, we demonstrate how obfuscation can be used for evading detection with minimal overhead in real-world scenarios by strategically applying transformations. These insights are valuable for researchers, providing a foundation for developing more robust detection methods. Additionally, we make our dataset of over 20,000 obfuscated WebAssembly binaries and the emcc-obf tool publicly available to stimulate further research.
Strain difference of delayed-type hypersensitivity to BCG and its genetic control in mice

Delayed-type hypersensitivity to BCG was remarkably different in two inbred strains of mice, SWM/Ms and C3H/He, when measured by the spleen index, the disappearance of peritoneal macrophage, or the footpad reaction. High responsiveness in the SWM/Ms strain appeared to be dominant over low responsiveness in the C3H/He strain. Results of the footpad reaction test if F1, F2, and backcross hybrids of these two strains of mice suggested that the delayed-type hypersensitivity was mainly controlled by a gene which was transmitted under Mendel's laws and was possibly non-H-2 linked. The spleen cells and their nylon wool nonadherent fraction from BCG-infected C3H/He mice were not reactive to purified protein derivative in vitro, whereas both the spleen cells and the nylon wool nonadherent fraction from BCG-infected SWM/Ms mice reacted well to purified protein derivative. Possible mechanisms of the different responses in the delayed-type hypersensitivity to BCG were discussed.
TEeVTOL: Balancing Energy and Time Efficiency in eVTOL Aircraft Path Planning Across City-Scale Wind Fields

Electric vertical-takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, recognized for their maneuverability and flexibility, offer a promising alternative to our transportation system. However, the operational effectiveness of these aircraft faces many challenges, such as the delicate balance between energy and time efficiency, stemming from unpredictable environmental factors, including wind fields. Mathematical modeling-based approaches have been adopted to plan aircraft flight path in urban wind fields with the goal to save energy and time costs. While effective, they are limited in adapting to dynamic and complex environments. To optimize energy and time efficiency in eVTOL's flight through dynamic wind fields, we introduce a novel path planning method leveraging deep reinforcement learning. We assess our method with extensive experiments, comparing it to Dijkstra's algorithm -- the theoretically optimal approach for determining shortest paths in a weighted graph, where weights represent either energy or time cost. The results show that our method achieves a graceful balance between energy and time efficiency, closely resembling the theoretically optimal values for both objectives.
Federated Bayesian Deep Learning: The Application of Statistical Aggregation Methods to Bayesian Models

Federated learning (FL) is an approach to training machine learning models that takes advantage of multiple distributed datasets while maintaining data privacy and reducing communication costs associated with sharing local datasets. Aggregation strategies have been developed to pool or fuse the weights and biases of distributed deterministic models; however, modern deterministic deep learning (DL) models are often poorly calibrated and lack the ability to communicate a measure of epistemic uncertainty in prediction, which is desirable for remote sensing platforms and safety-critical applications. Conversely, Bayesian DL models are often well calibrated and capable of quantifying and communicating a measure of epistemic uncertainty along with a competitive prediction accuracy. Unfortunately, because the weights and biases in Bayesian DL models are defined by a probability distribution, simple application of the aggregation methods associated with FL schemes for deterministic models is either impossible or results in sub-optimal performance. In this work, we use independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID partitions of the CIFAR-10 dataset and a fully variational ResNet-20 architecture to analyze six different aggregation strategies for Bayesian DL models. Additionally, we analyze the traditional federated averaging approach applied to an approximate Bayesian Monte Carlo dropout model as a lightweight alternative to more complex variational inference methods in FL. We show that aggregation strategy is a key hyperparameter in the design of a Bayesian FL system with downstream effects on accuracy, calibration, uncertainty quantification, training stability, and client compute requirements.
Optimal inhalation technique with terbutaline Turbuhaler.

The bronchodilator response after four different modes of inhalation of 0.25 mg terbutaline from a Turbuhaler was assessed, in a double-blind cross-over study, of 14 asthmatic children aged 8-14 yrs (mean 11.6 yrs). The children inhaled as fast as possible (mean peak inspiratory flow rate = 53 l.min-1), because fast inhalations have been found to be more efficient than slow inhalations when the Turbuhaler is used. Tilting the head back during inhalation and a breath-holding pause of 10 s after the inhalation had no significant effect upon bronchodilation. Furthermore, the response was the same whether the children inhaled from residual volume (RV) or functional residual capacity (FRC). These results suggest that this new inhaler can be used with a very simple inhalation technique without any loss of effect. A simple inhalation technique is likely to facilitate teaching and improve compliance.
An eight-century tropical Atlantic SST record from the Cariaco Basin : Baseline variability , 20 th century warming , and Atlantic hurricane frequency

We present the first direct comparison and calibration of a down-core foraminiferal Mg/Ca record to historical instrumental sea surface temperature (SST). Mg/Ca measured on the planktic foraminifer Globigerina bulloides from a Cariaco Basin sediment core strongly correlate with spring (March-May) instrumental SSTs between AD 1870 and 1990. A Mg/Ca-SST equation is derived and a paleo-SST record is presented spanning the last eight centuries, an interval that includes the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. The longterm record displays a surprising amount of variability. The temperature swings are not necessarily related to local upwelling variability, but instead represent wider conditions in the Caribbean and western tropical Atlantic. The Mg/Ca-SST record also captures the decadal and multidecadal variability global land and sea surface temperature anomalies and Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane frequency over the late-19 and 20 centuries. A divergence between the SST proxy record and Atlantic storm frequency around 1970 appears to reflect a fundamental change in Atlantic hurricane behavior noted in historical data. On average, 20th century temperatures are not the warmest in the entire record, but they do show the largest increase in magnitude and fastest rate of SST change over the last eight hundred years. 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
Technical Refinements and Results in Full-Right Full-Left Splitting of the Deceased Donor Liver

Objective:Splitting of the liver at the line of Cantlie of otherwise healthy people is accepted worldwide as a reasonable procedure for the donors in adult living donor liver transplantation. A similar operation is still considered as experimental if performed in the deceased donor liver. The aim of this study is to evaluate the technical evolution and the results of this variant splitting technique. Patients and Methods:From January 1999 to August 2004, a total of 35 transplants of hemilivers from deceased donors (segments V–VIII: n = 16 and segments (I)II–IV: n = 19) were performed in our center. Seven splits were performed in situ and 12 ex situ. Splitting of the vena cava was applied in 18 splits and splitting of the middle hepatic vein in 8. Seven adults and 12 adolescents received the left hemiliver with a mean age of 12 years (range, 3–64 years), of whom 21% were UNOS status 1. Recipients of right hemilivers were exclusively adults with a mean age of 48 years (range, 31–65 years), none of them were high urgent. The outcome of these 35 recipients of hemilivers was prospectively evaluated. Results:Mean deceased donor age was 27 years (range, 12–57 years), the donor's body weight ranged between 55 kg and 100 kg. The mean weight of the right and left hemilivers was 1135 g (range, 745–1432 g) and 602 g (range, 289–1100 g), respectively. The mean graft recipient weight ratio in left and right hemiliver group was 1.46% (range, 0.88%–3.54%) and 1.58% (range, 1.15%–1.99%), respectively. Median follow-up was 27.4 months (range, 1–68.3 months). Four patients died (actual patient survival FR group: 87.5% versus FL group: 89.5%), 3 due to septic MOF and 1 due to graft versus host disease. In each of the 2 groups, 2 recipients had to undergo retransplantation, which resulted in an actual right and left hemiliver survival rate of 75% and 84%, respectively. The causes for retransplantation were primary nonfunction in 2 left hemilivers, chronic graft dysfunction in 1 right hemiliver, and recurrence of the primary disease in 1 recipient of a right hemiliver. Primary poor function was observed in 1 recipient of a right hemiliver. Early and late biliary complications occurred in both right and left hemiliver groups at the rate of 37.5% (n = 6) and 21% (n = 4), respectively. Arterial, portal, and venous complications were not observed in either group. Conclusion:The technical development of splitting along Cantlie's line is almost complete with the last challenge being the reduction of biliary complications. The key to success is the choice of adequate deceased donors and recipients. Full-right full-left splitting is safely possible and should be considered as a reasonable instrument to alleviate mortality on the adult waiting list and to reduce the need for adult and adolescent living donation.
Prognostic Significance of Retroperitoneal Lymphadenectomy, Preoperative Neutrophil Lymphocyte Ratio and Platelet Lymphocyte Ratio in Primary Fallopian Tube Carcinoma: A Multicenter Study

Purpose The purpose of this study is to evaluate the prognostic role of preoperative neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and platelet to lymphocyte ratio (PLR) and the need for para-aortic lymphadectomy in patients with primary fallopian tube carcinoma (PFTC). Materials and Methods Ninety-one patients with a diagnosis of PFTC were identified through the gynecologic oncology service database of six academic centers. Clinicopathological, surgical, and complete blood count data were collected. Results In univariate analysis, advanced stage, suboptimal surgery, and NLR > 2.7 were significant prognostic factors for progression-free survival, whereas in multivariate analysis, only advanced stage and suboptimal surgery were significant. In addition, in univariate analysis, cancer antigen 125 ≥ 35 U/mL, ascites, advanced stage, suboptimal surgery, NLR > 2.7, PLR > 233.3, platelet count ≥ 400,000 cells/mm3, staging type, and histological subtype were significant prognostic factors for overall survival (OS); however, in multivariate analysis, only advanced stage, suboptimal surgery, NLR > 2.7, and staging type were significant. Inclusion of pelvic and para-aortic lymphadenectomy in surgery showed significant association with longer OS, with a mean and median OS of 42.0 months and 35.5 months (range, 22 to 78 months), respectively, vs. 33.5 months and 27.5 months (range, 14 to 76 months), respectively, for patients who underwent surgery without para-aortic lymphadenectomy (hazard ratio, 3.1; 95% confidence interval, 1.4 to 5.7; p=0.002). Conclusion NLR (in both univariate and multivariate analysis) and PLR (only in univariate analysis) were prognostic factors in PFTC. NLR and PLR are inexpensive and easy tests to perform. In addition, patients with PFTC who underwent bilateral pelvic and para-aortic lymphadenectomy had longer OS.