Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On Stochastic Optimal Control and Reinforcement Learning by Approximate Inference (Extended Abstract)

We present a reformulation of the stochastic optimal control problem in terms of KL divergence minimisation, not only providing a unifying perspective of previous approaches in this area, but also demonstrating that the formalism leads to novel practical approaches to the control problem. Specifically, a natural relaxation of the dual formulation gives rise to exact iter- ative solutions to the finite and infinite horizon stochastic optimal control problem, while direct application of Bayesian inference methods yields instances of risk sensitive control. We furthermore study corresponding formulations in the reinforcement learning setting and present model free algorithms for problems with both discrete and continuous state and action spaces. Evaluation of the proposed methods on the standard Gridworld and Cart-Pole benchmarks verifies the theoretical insights and shows that the proposed methods improve upon current approaches.
Plasmid-determined resistance to tellurium compounds

Transferable plasmids in gram-negative bacteria that confer resistance to potassium tellurite or tellurate were found. This re-istance was distinct from resistance to mercury, silver, or arsenic compounds and was unrelated to antibiotic resistance. In Escherichia coli, plasmids determine a 100-fold increase in the minimal inhibitory concentration for tellurite and a 10-fold increase in tellurate resistance. Many, but not all, of the plasmids belong to incompatibility group S. In Pseudomonas aeruginosa, tellurium resistance is specifically associated with incompatibility group P-2 and involves a 5- to 10-fold increase in tellurite or tellurate resistance.
Population structure and connectivity of tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) across the Indo-Pacific Ocean basin

Population genetic structure using nine polymorphic nuclear microsatellite loci was assessed for the tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier) at seven locations across the Indo-Pacific, and one location in the southern Atlantic. Genetic analyses revealed considerable genetic structuring (FST > 0.14, p < 0.001) between all Indo-Pacific locations and Brazil. By contrast, no significant genetic differences were observed between locations from within the Pacific or Indian Oceans, identifying an apparent large, single Indo-Pacific population. A lack of differentiation between tiger sharks sampled in Hawaii and other Indo-Pacific locations identified herein is in contrast to an earlier global tiger shark nDNA study. The results of our power analysis provide evidence to suggest that the larger sample sizes used here negated any weak population subdivision observed previously. These results further highlight the need for cross-jurisdictional efforts to manage the sustainable exploitation of large migratory sharks like G. cuvier.
Increase in psychotropic drug use between 2006 and 2010 among adolescents in Norway: a nationwide prescription database study

Background The purposes of this study were to investigate the prevalence of psychotropic (hypnotic, antidepressant, and anxiolytic) drug use among adolescents aged 15–16 years during the period 2006–2010 according to gender and subcategories of psychotropics, and to study psychotropic drug use over the period 2007–2010 among incident users in 2007. Methods This was a one-year prevalence and follow-up study based on information retrieved from the nationwide Norwegian prescription database for the period 2006–2010. The study population consisted of adolescents aged 15–16 years who had filled at least one prescription for a psychotropic drug in the study period. The main outcome measures were filling of hypnotic, antidepressant, and/or anxiolytic drug prescriptions. Results Overall use of psychotropic drugs increased from 13.9 to 21.5 per 1000 among boys and from 19.7 to 24.7 per 1000 among girls during the 2006– 2010 period. Hypnotic drugs, and melatonin in particular, accounted for most of the increase. For melatonin, the annual median amount dispensed was 180 defined daily doses through the period until 2010, at which time it decreased to 90 defined daily doses. In total, 16.4% of all incident psychotropic drug users in 2007 were still having prescriptions dispensed in 2010. Conclusion This study shows an increase in hypnotic drugs dispensed for adolescents in Norway, mainly attributable to the increasing use of melatonin. The amount of melatonin dispensed indicates more than sporadic use over longer periods, despite melatonin only being licensed in Norway for use in insomnia for individuals aged 55 years or older.
24h Urinary Sodium Excretion and Subsequent Change in Weight, Waist Circumference and Body Composition

Background In the same period as the increasing obesity epidemic, there has been an increased consumption of highly processed foods with a high salt content, and a few studies have suggested that a diet with a high salt content may be associated with obesity. Objective To investigate the association between 24 h urinary sodium excretion and subsequent change in body weight (BW), waist circumference (WC), body fat (BF) and fat free mass (FFM) among adults. Design A longitudinal population study based on the Danish part of the MONICA project, with examinations in 1987–1988 and 1993–1994. Complete information on 24 h urinary sodium excretion along with repeated measures of obesity, as well as on potential confounders, was obtained from 215 subjects. Linear regression was used to examine the association between sodium excretion, as a measure of salt consumption, and subsequent changes in BW, WC, BF and FFM, and further evaluated by restricted cubic splines. Stepwise adjustments were made for selected covariates. Results Neither the crude nor the adjusted models showed any statistically significant associations between sodium excretion and change in BW or WC. Likewise, we found no significant association between sodium excretion and change in BF and FFM in the unadjusted models. However, after adjusting for potential baseline confounders and the concurrent BW change, we found a significant increase in BF of 0.24 kg (P = 0.015, CI: 0.05 to 0.43) per 100 mmol increase in 24 h urinary sodium excretion (equivalent to 6 g of salt), during the 6-year study period. Moreover, during the same period, we found a significant association with FFM of −0.21 kg (P = 0.041, CI: −0.40 to −0.01). Conclusions These results suggest that a diet with a high salt content may have a negative influence on development in body composition by expanding BF and reducing FFM.
Analysis of Nucleoid Morphology during Germination and Outgrowth of Spores of Bacillus Species

ABSTRACT After a few minutes of germination, nucleoids in the great majority of spores of Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus megaterium were ring shaped. The major spore DNA binding proteins, the α/β-type small, acid-soluble proteins (SASP), colocalized to these nucleoid rings early in spore germination, as did the B. megaterium homolog of the major B. subtilis chromosomal protein HBsu. The percentage of ring-shaped nucleoids was decreased in germinated spores with lower levels of α/β-type SASP. As spore outgrowth proceeded, the ring-shaped nucleoids disappeared and the nucleoid became more compact. This change took place after degradation of most of the spores' pool of major α/β-type SASP and was delayed when α/β-type SASP degradation was delayed. Later in spore outgrowth, the shape of the nucleoid reverted to the diffuse lobular shape seen in growing cells.
Intensity modulation of TMS‐induced cortical excitation: Primary motor cortex

The intensity dependence of the local and remote effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on human motor cortex was characterized using positron‐emission tomography (PET) measurements of regional blood flow (BF) and concurrent electromyographic (EMG) measurements of the motor‐evoked potential (MEP). Twelve normal volunteers were studied by applying 3 Hz TMS to the hand region of primary motor cortex (M1hand). Three stimulation intensities were used: 75%, 100%, and 125% of the motor threshold (MT). MEP amplitude increased nonlinearly with increasing stimulus intensity. The rate of rise in MEP amplitude was greater above MT than below. The hemodynamic response in M1hand was an increase in BF. Hemodynamic variables quantified for M1hand included value‐normalized counts (VNC), intensity (z‐score), and extent (mm3). All three hemodynamic response variables increased nonlinearly with stimulus intensity, closely mirroring the MEP intensity‐response function. VNC was the hemodynamic response variable which showed the most significant effect of TMS intensity. VNC correlated strongly with MEP amplitude, both within and between subjects. Remote regions showed varying patterns of intensity response, which we interpret as reflecting varying levels of neuronal excitability and/or functional coupling in the conditions studied. Hum Brain Mapp, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Parser for Real-Time Speech Synthesis of Conversational Texts

In this paper, we concern ourselves with an application of text-to-speech for speech-impaired, deaf, and hard of hearing people. The application is unusual because it requires real-time synthesis of unedited, spontaneously generated conversational texts transmitted via a Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD). We describe a parser that we have implemented as a front end for a version of the Bell Laboratories text-to-speech synthesizer (Olive and Liberman 1985). The parser prepares TDD texts for synthesis by (a) performing lexical regularization of abbreviations and some non-standard forms, and (b) identifying prosodic phrase boundaries. Rules for identifying phrase boundaries are derived from the prosodic phrase grammar described in Bachenko and Fitzpatrick (1990). Following the parent analysis, these rules use a mix of syntactic and phonological factors to identify phrase boundaries but, unlike the parent system, they forgo building any hierarchical structure in order to bypass the need for a stacking mechanism; this permits the system to operate in near real time. As a component of the text-to-speech system, the parser has undergone rigorous testing during a successful three-month field trial at an AT&T telecommunications center in California. In addition, laboratory evaluations indicate that the parser's performance compares favorably with human judgments about phrasing.
Characterizing memory requirements for queries over continuous data streams

We consider conjunctive queries with arithmetic comparisons over multiple continuous data streams. We specify an algorithm for determining whether or not a query can be evaluated using a bounded amount of memory for all possible instances of the data streams. When a query can be evaluated using bounded memory, we produce an execution strategy based on constant-sized synopses of the data streams.
Stigma Arising From Family Members Of The Mentally Ill Patients In Hospital Taiping

Although public stigma towards the mentally ill is a known challenge, stigma from within the family has not been widely studied. This study aimed to compare the experience of stigma between mentally ill patients and diabetic controls, particularly focusing on stigma arising from family members. This is a cross sectional case control study. The case group consisted of 63 patients who attended the outpatient psychiatric clinic of Hospital Taiping. The control group consisted of 78 diabetic patients attending the outpatient medical clinic, Hospital Taiping and Selama Health Clinic. Patients completed questionnaire assessing stigma experienced by patients. Significantly higher percentage of psychiatric patients (55.6%) experienced stigma compared to diabetic patients (15.4%) (X2 = 25.3, p-value < 0.0001). In addition, significantly higher percentage of patients with psychiatric illness received negative comments during the relapse of illness (57.1% vs 16.7%, chi-square = 5.12, p-value = 0.024) compared to diabetic patients. This study demonstrates that family members themselves could be a source of stigma. The findings support current family psycho-education programs in caring for the mentally ill.
Improving Feature-Rich Transition-Based Constituent Parsing Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Conventional feature-rich parsers based on manually tuned features have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, these parsers are not good at handling long-term dependencies using only the clues captured by a prepared feature template. On the other hand, recurrent neural network (RNN)-based parsers can encode unbounded history information effectively, but they perform not well for small tree structures, especially when low-frequency words are involved, and they cannot use prior linguistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective framework to combine the merits of feature-rich transition-based parsers and RNNs. Specifically, the proposed framework incorporates RNN-based scores into the feature template used by a feature-rich parser. On English WSJ treebank and SPMRL 2014 German treebank, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance (91.56 F-score for English and 83.06 F-score for German), without requiring any additional unlabeled data. key words: constituent parsing, recurrent neural network, system combination
Performance of Pediatric Risk of Mortality Score Among Critically Ill Children With Heart Disease

Objective: To evaluate the performance of the Pediatric Risk of Mortality 3 (PRISM-3) score in critically ill children with heart disease. Methods: Patients <18 years of age admitted with cardiac diagnoses (cardiac medical and cardiac surgical) to one of the participating pediatric intensive care units in the Virtual Pediatric Systems, LLC, database were included. Performance of PRISM-3 was evaluated with discrimination and calibration measures among both cardiac surgical and cardiac medical patients. Results: The study population consisted of 87,993 patients, of which 49% were cardiac medical patients (n = 43,545) and 51% were cardiac surgical patients (n = 44,448). The ability of PRISM-3 to distinguish survivors from nonsurvivors was acceptable for the entire cohort (c-statistic 0.86). However, PRISM-3 did not perform as well when stratified by varied severity of illness categories. Pediatric Risk of Mortality 3 underpredicted mortality among patients with lower severity of illness categories (quintiles 1-4) whereas it overpredicted mortality among patients with greatest severity of illness category (fifth quintile). When stratified by Society of Thoracic Surgeons–European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery (STS-EACTS) categories, PRISM-3 overpredicted mortality among the STS-EACTS mortality categories 1, 2, and 3 and underpredicted mortality among the STS-EACTS mortality categories 4 and 5. Pediatric Risk of Mortality 3 overpredicted mortality among centers with high cardiac surgery volume whereas it underpredicted mortality among centers with low cardiac surgery volume. Conclusion: Data from this large multicenter study do not support the use of PRISM-3 in cardiac surgical or cardiac medical patients. In this study, the ability of PRISM-3 to distinguish survivors from nonsurvivors was fair at best, and the accuracy with which it predicted death was poor.
Enhancing M2M Communication with Cloud-Based Context Management

Contextual information are used to describe situations of entities (users and devices) and their interactions. Applications need such information in order to adapt their behaviour in response to changes in the entities context. In certain scenarios and in particular machine to machine, the integration of a large number of components makes the management of the generated contextual information a very complex task. There absence of scalable and easily programmable solution for an efficient context management in complex and distributed environment is a show stopper. In this article, we propose a scalable cloud-based framework for context management able to handle contextual information in large distributed environments. This framework has been implemented and evaluated, it provides applications with a XML-based programming language to allow them customizing subscriptions to context changes and defining how context data.
Intraindividual reaction time variability affects P300 amplitude rather than latency

The neural correlates of intraindividual response variability were investigated in a serial choice reaction time (CRT) task. Reaction times (RTs) from the faster and slower portions of the RT distribution for the task were separately aggregated and associated P300 event-related potentials computed. Independent behavioral measures of executive function and IQ were also recorded. Across frontal, fronto-central, central, centro-parietal and parietal scalp regions, P300 amplitudes were significantly greater for faster relative to slower behavioral responses. However, P300 peak amplitude latencies did not differ according to the speed of the behavioral RT. Importantly, controlling for select independent measures of executive function attenuated shared variance in P300 amplitude for faster and slower trials. The findings suggest that P300 amplitude rather than latency is associated with the speed of behavioral RTs, and the possibility that fluctuations in executive control underlie variability in speeded responding.
Corrosion Behavior of Metallic Materials in Ethanol-Gasoline Alternative Fuels

Corrosion performances of several metallic materials (Al6061 and Al319 alloys, 304 stainless steel and grey cast iron) in the ethanol-gasoline alternative fuels were investigated. Cyclic potentiodynamic polarization tests were used to study their corrosion behavior. Anodizing and plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO) techniques were used to produce oxide coatings on the Al6061 and Al319 alloys, and the corrosion properties of these coatings in the alternative fuel environments were also evaluated. The results showed that, the 304 stainless steel, Al6061 and the coating materials are compatible with the alternative fuels. The oxide coatings on both Al alloys provided effective corrosion protection in the alternative fuel environments.
PPM-based development-and-control strategy of fault tolerant inverter-fed multiphase electromechanical AC systems

New principles of design and control strategy for creation of fault tolerant inverter-fed electromechanical systems (such as inverter-fed AC motor drives, molten metals electromagnetic stirring systems, etc.) have worked out by the authors of this paper. This strategy is based on the use of the phase-pole method (PPM) of control of an inverter and electromechanical energy transformer (EMET; for example, an induction motor). The application of worked out principles allows to develop the above mentioned type electromechanical systems having high reliability (strictly speaking, post-fault vitality) and less EMET mass-and-overall dimensions than existing ones.
Towards a Taxonomy of Software Evolution

Previous taxonomies of software evolution have focused on the purpose of the change rather than the underlying mechanisms. This paper proposes a taxonomy of software evolution based on the characterizing mechanisms of change and the factors that influence these mechanisms. The taxonomy is organized into the following logical groupings: temporal properties, objects of change, system properties, and change support. The ultimate goal of this taxonomy is to provide a framework that positions concrete tools, formalisms and methods within the domain of software evolution. Such a framework would considerably ease comparison between these tools, formalisms and methods. It would also allow practitioners to evaluate their potential use in particular change scenarios. As an initial step towards this taxonomy, the paper presents a framework that can be used to characterize software change support tools and to identify the factors that impact on the use of these tools. The framework is evaluated by applying it to three different change support tools and by comparing these tools based on this analysis.
PSPACE is provable by two provers in one round

It is shown that every language in PSPACE, or equivalently every language accepted by an unbounded round interactive proof system, has a one-round, two-prover interactive proof with exponentially small error probability. To obtain this result, the correctness of a simple but powerful method for parallelizing two-prover interactive proofs to reduce their error is proved. <<ETX>>
Exploiting Web-Derived Selectional Preference to Improve Statistical Dependency Parsing

In this paper, we present a novel approach which incorporates the web-derived selectional preferences to improve statistical dependency parsing. Conventional selectional preference learning methods have usually focused on word-to-class relations, e.g., a verb selects as its subject a given nominal class. This paper extends previous work to word-to-word selectional preferences by using web-scale data. Experiments show that web-scale data improves statistical dependency parsing, particularly for long dependency relationships. There is no data like more data, performance improves log-linearly with the number of parameters (unique N-grams). More importantly, when operating on new domains, we show that using web-derived selectional preferences is essential for achieving robust performance.
Improving Accuracy, Applicability and Usability of Keystroke Biometrics on Mobile Touchscreen Devices

Authentication methods can be improved by considering implicit, individual behavioural cues. In particular, verifying users based on typing behaviour has been widely studied with physical keyboards. On mobile touchscreens, the same concepts have been applied with little adaptations so far. This paper presents the first reported study on mobile keystroke biometrics which compares touch-specific features between three different hand postures and evaluation schemes. Based on 20.160 password entries from a study with 28 participants over two weeks, we show that including spatial touch features reduces implicit authentication equal error rates (EER) by 26.4 - 36.8% relative to the previously used temporal features. We also show that authentication works better for some hand postures than others. To improve applicability and usability, we further quantify the influence of common evaluation assumptions: known attacker data, training and testing on data from a single typing session, and fixed hand postures. We show that these practices can lead to overly optimistic evaluations. In consequence, we describe evaluation recommendations, a probabilistic framework to handle unknown hand postures, and ideas for further improvements.
Vagus Nerve Stimulation: A New Form of Therapeutic Brain Stimulation

Abstract Although the vagus nerve has traditionally been considered to perform efferent functions, in reality it performs significant afferent functions as well, carrying information from the body, head, and neck to the brain. Preliminary studies examining this afferent activity led to the theory that vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) could successfully control seizure activity in persons who are refractory to antiepileptic medications. Unlike other forms of brain stimulation, VNS is unable to directly stimulate multiple discrete areas of the brain; however, through several pathways, it is able to relay sensory information to higher brain regions. An implantable VNS device known as the VNS™ NeuroCybernetic Prosthesis (NCP) System has been used in approximately 9,000 epilepsy patients in Europe and the United States since 1994. The implant has reduced seizure frequency by an average of 25% to 30%, with minimal side effects. Studies underway are also showing some degree of success in the management of treatment-refractory depression. The future efficacy of the implantable system in other disorders may depend on whether the implant can be more precisely focused to affect different brain regions. Research in this area is underway.