Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved Regret Bounds for Oracle-Based Adversarial Contextual Bandits

We give an oracle-based algorithm for the adversarial contextual bandit problem, where either contexts are drawn i.i. d. or the sequence of contexts is known a priori, but where the losses are picked adversarially. Our algorithm is computationally efficient, assuming access to an offline optimization oracle, and enjoys a regret of order $O((KT)^{\frac{2}{3}}(\log N)^{\frac{1}{3}})$, where $K$ is the number of actions, $T$ is the number of iterations and $N$ is the number of baseline policies. Our result is the first to break the $O(T^{\frac{3}{4}})$ barrier that is achieved by recently introduced algorithms. Breaking this barrier was left as a major open problem. Our analysis is based on the recent relaxation based approach of (Rakhlin and Sridharan, 2016).
Spontaneous Infraslow Fluctuations Modulate Hippocampal EPSP-PS Coupling

Abstract Extensive trial-to-trial variability is a hallmark of most behavioral, cognitive, and physiological processes. Spontaneous brain activity (SBA), a ubiquitous phenomenon that coordinates levels and patterns of neuronal activity throughout the brain, may contribute to this variability by dynamically altering neuronal excitability. In freely-behaving male rats, we observed extensive variability of the hippocampal evoked response across 28-min recording periods despite maintaining constant stimulation parameters of the medial perforant path. This variability was related to antecedent SBA: increases in low-frequency (0.5–9 Hz) and high-frequency (40.25–100 Hz) band-limited power (BLP) in the 4-s preceding stimulation were associated with decreased slope of the field EPSP (fEPSP) and increased population spike (PS) amplitude. These fluctuations in SBA and evoked response magnitude did not appear stochastic but rather exhibited coordinated activity across infraslow timescales (0.005–0.02 Hz). Specifically, infraslow fluctuations in high- and low-frequency BLP were antiphase with changes in fEPSP slope and in phase with changes in PS amplitude. With these divergent effects on the fEPSP and PS, infraslow SBA ultimately modulates EPSP-PS coupling and thereby enables hippocampal circuitry to generate heterogeneous outputs from identical inputs. Consequently, infraslow SBA appears well suited to dynamically alter sensory selection and information processing and highlights the fundamental role of endogenous neuronal activity for shaping the brain’s response to incoming stimuli.
Acquired haemophilia A: A 2013 update

Summary Acquired haemophilia A (AHA) is a rare but often severe bleeding disorder caused by autoantibodies against coagulation factor VIII (FVIII). AHA occurs more frequently in the elderly and in association with several conditions, such as the post-partum period, malignancies, autoimmune diseases or drug exposure; however, approximately 50% of reported cases are apparently idiopathic. Beside the elimination of the underlying disorder, the therapeutic approach to AHA should be directed toward the control of acute bleed and the eradication of FVIII autoantibody production. In this narrative review, we summarise the current knowledge on the epidemiology, diagnosis and clinical features of AHA, focusing in particular on advances in the management of this challenging bleeding disorder.
Dysregulation of Dicer1 in Beta Cells Impairs Islet Architecture and Glucose Metabolism

microRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in pancreas development and in regulation of insulin expression in the adult. Here we show that loss of miRNAs activity in beta-cells during embryonic development results in lower beta-cell mass and in impaired glucose tolerance. Dicer1-null cells initially constitute a significant portion of the total beta-cell population. However, during postnatal development, Dicer1-null cells are depleted. Furthermore, wild-type beta cells are repopulating the islets in complex compensatory dynamics. Because loss of Dicer1 is also associated with changes in the distribution of membranous E-cadherin, we hypothesized that E-cadherin activity may play a role in beta cell survival or islet architecture. However, genetic loss of E-cadherin function does not impair islet architecture, suggesting that miRNAs likely function through other or redundant effectors in the endocrine pancreas.
Encoder-Decoder Shift-Reduce Syntactic Parsing

Encoder-decoder neural networks have been used for many NLP tasks, such as neural machine translation. They have also been applied to constituent parsing by using bracketed tree structures as a target language, translating input sentences into syntactic trees. A more commonly used method to linearize syntactic trees is the shift-reduce system, which uses a sequence of transition-actions to build trees. We empirically investigate the effectiveness of applying the encoder-decoder network to transition-based parsing. On standard benchmarks, our system gives comparable results to the stack LSTM parser for dependency parsing, and significantly better results compared to the aforementioned parser for constituent parsing, which uses bracketed tree formats.
Privacy-enhancing personalized web search

Personalized web search is a promising way to improve search quality by customizing search results for people with individual information goals. However, users are uncomfortable with exposing private preference information to search engines. On the other hand, privacy is not absolute, and often can be compromised if there is a gain in service or profitability to the user. Thus, a balance must be struck between search quality and privacy protection. This paper presents a scalable way for users to automatically build rich user profiles. These profiles summarize a user.s interests into a hierarchical organization according to specific interests. Two parameters for specifying privacy requirements are proposed to help the user to choose the content and degree of detail of the profile information that is exposed to the search engine. Experiments showed that the user profile improved search quality when compared to standard MSN rankings. More importantly, results verified our hypothesis that a significant improvement on search quality can be achieved by only sharing some higher-level user profile information, which is potentially less sensitive than detailed personal information.
Improving robustness of blind adaptive multichannel identification algorithms using constraints

This paper shows that the robustness of the normalized multichannel frequency-domain LMS algorithm reported in [1] can be improved using constraints in the adaptation rule. In the identification of acoustic impulse responses with leading bulk zeros from noisy observations the proposed constraint shows significant performance improvement in terms of normalized projection misalignment. Experimental results for various simulated conditions are presented to justify our claim.
Perspective-Based Illusory Movement in a Flat Billboard—An Explanation

We describe a compelling motion illusion elicited by a huge billboard placed along a street, depicting a building that contains strong perspective cues. When observers move fast along the opposite sidewalk, they perceive the depicted building as rotating in their direction of travel. This is a special case of the ‘following’, or ‘pointing out of the picture’, illusion that elicits a strong illusory motion percept. Here we discuss the cause of the illusory motion and suggest that the brain relies on the depicted perspective cues to infer a 3-D shape and a concomitant motion that is incompatible with the physical pictorial surface.
Time Course of Brain Activity during Change Blindness and Change Awareness: Performance is Predicted by Neural Events before Change Onset

People often remain blind to visual changes occurring during a brief interruption of the display. The processing stages responsible for such failure remain unresolved. We used event-related potentials to determine the time course of brain activity during conscious change detection versus change blindness. Participants saw two successive visual displays, each with two faces, and reported whether one of the faces changed between the first and second displays. Relative to blindness, change detection was associated with a distinct pattern of neural activity at several successive processing stages, including an enhanced occipital P1 response and a sustained frontal activity (CNV-like potential) after the first display, before the change itself. The amplitude of the N170 and P3 responses after the second visual display were also modulated by awareness of the face change. Furthermore, a unique topography of event-related potential activity was observed during correct change and correct no-change reports, but not during blindness, with a recurrent time course in the stimulus sequence and simultaneous sources in the parietal and temporo-occipital cortex. These results indicate that awareness of visual changes may depend on the attentional state subserved by coordinated neural activity in a distributed network, before the onset of the change itself.
Recovery of spermatogenesis after microsurgical subinguinal varicocele repair in azoospermic men based on testicular histology.

OBJECTIVE Analyze whether testicular histologic patterns from a group of azoospermic men with varicocele is predictive of treatment outcome after subinguinal microsurgical varicocele repair. MATERIALS AND METHODS Seventeen azoospermic men underwent bilateral open single testis biopsy and microsurgical subinguinal repair of clinical varicoceles. RESULTS Histopathology of testicular biopsies revealed hypospermatogenesis (HYPO) in 6 men, maturation arrest (MA) in 5, and Sertoli cell-only (SCO) in 6. Overall, presence of spermatozoa in the ejaculates was achieved in 47% (8/17) of men after varicocele repair, but only 35% (6/17) of them had motile sperm in their ejaculates. Only men with testicular histology revealing HYPO (5/6) or maturation arrest (3/5) had improvement after surgery. Median (25%-75% percentile) postoperative motile sperm count for both groups were 0.9 x 10(6)/mL (0.1-1.8 x 10(6)/mL) and 0.7 x 10(6)/mL (0.1-1.1), respectively (p = 0.87). The mean time for appearance of spermatozoa in the ejaculates was 5 months (3 to 9 months). One (HYPO) of 8 (12.5%) men who improved after surgery contributed to an unassisted pregnancy. Postoperative testicular biopsies obtained from patients who had no improvement after surgery revealed that testicular histology diagnosis remained unchanged. Successful testicular sperm retrieval for intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) was achieved in 4 of 9 (44.4%) individuals who did not improve after surgery, including 1 man with testicular histology exhibiting SCO. CONCLUSIONS Microsurgical varicocele repair in nonobstructive azoospermic men with clinical varicoceles can result in sperm appearance in the ejaculate when hypospermatogenesis or maturation arrest is found on testicular histology diagnosis.
Towards a future SCADA

Currently, Power Systems (PS) already accommodate a substantial penetration of DG and operate in competitive environments. In the future PS will have to deal with large-scale integration of DG and other distributed energy resources (DER), such as storage means, and provide to market agents the means to ensure a flexible and secure operation. This cannot be done with the traditional PS operation. SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is a vital infrastructure for PS. Current SCADA adaptation to accommodate the new needs of future PS does not allow to address all the requirements. In this paper we present a new conceptual design of an intelligent SCADA, with a more decentralized, flexible, and intelligent approach, adaptive to the context (context awareness). Once a situation is characterized, data and control options available to each entity are re-defined according to this context, taking into account operation normative and a priori established contracts. The paper includes a case-study of using future SCADA features to use DER to deal with incident situations, preventing blackouts.
Variolite: Supporting Exploratory Programming by Data Scientists

How do people ideate through code? Using semi-structured interviews and a survey, we studied data scientists who program, often with small scripts, to experiment with data. These studies show that data scientists frequently code new analysis ideas by building off of their code from a previous idea. They often rely on informal versioning interactions like copying code, keeping unused code, and commenting out code to repurpose older analysis code while attempting to keep those older analyses intact. Unlike conventional version control, these informal practices allow for fast versioning of any size code snippet, and quick comparisons by interchanging which versions are run. However, data scientists must maintain a strong mental map of their code in order to distinguish versions, leading to errors and confusion. We explore the needs for improving version control tools for exploratory tasks, and demonstrate a tool for lightweight local versioning, called Variolite, which programmers found usable and desirable in a preliminary usability study.
Implementation of an Ant Colony Optimization technique for job shop scheduling problem

Research on optimization of the job shop scheduling problem (JSP) is one of the most significant and promising areas of optimization. Instead of the traditional optimization method, this paper presents an investigation into the use of an Ant Colony System (ACS) to optimize the JSP. The main characteristics of this system are positive feedback, distributed computation, robustness and the use of a constructive greedy heuristic. In this paper, an improvement of the performance of ACS will be discussed. The numerical experiments of ACS were implemented in a small JSP. The optimized results of the ACS are favourably compared with the traditional optimization methods.
Duality of Rate Coding and Temporal Coding in Multilayered Feedforward Networks

A functional role for precise spike timing has been proposed as an alternative hypothesis to rate coding. We show in this article that both the synchronous firing code and the population rate code can be used dually in a common framework of a single neural network model. Furthermore, these two coding mechanisms are bridged continuously by several modulatable model parameters, including shared connectivity, feedback strength, membrane leak rate, and neuron heterogeneity. The rates of change of these parameters are closely related to the response time and the timescale of learning.
Perceptions by an anesthesia care team on the need for medical direction.

A 1992 General Accounting Office (GAO) study on costs of anesthesia found that anesthetics administered by anesthesia care teams (ACTs) were more costly than those administered by Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs) or anesthesiologists practicing alone. In 1994, Medicare implemented a single payment system in response to the GAO report and recommendations by the Physician Payment Review Commission. Restructuring of many anesthesia departments has followed. A study was conducted in a 370-bed public teaching hospital to: 1. Examine how one ACT functionally provided services. 2. Identify roles of CRNAs and anesthesiologists within this team practice. 3. Determine if medical direction was perceived as equally beneficial in all cases. 4. Identify practice modifications which could possibly lower costs. All anesthetics (n = 358), excluding obstetrics, were studied over a 4-week period. Sixty-four variables were collected on each case including patient demographics, case characteristics, provider functions, and outcome data. Most patients were healthy and had low complexity operations. Systat statistical software was used for data analysis. There were clear functional variations in the roles of anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists within the anesthesia care team. Anesthesiologists provided most preoperative and postoperative care, while nurse anesthetists administered the majority of anesthetics. Anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists in this study agreed in their perceptions that more than 70% of these cases did not need medical direction. Logistical regression of variables was used to construct a predictive equation for cases where providers perceived that medical direction was beneficial. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
On the convergence of approximate message passing with arbitrary matrices

Approximate message passing (AMP) methods and their variants have attracted considerable recent attention for the problem of estimating a random vector x observed through a linear transform A. In the case of large i.i. d. A, the methods exhibit fast convergence with precise analytic characterizations on the algorithm behavior. However, the convergence of AMP under general transforms is not fully understood. In this paper, we provide sufficient conditions for the convergence of a damped version of the generalized AMP (GAMP) algorithm in the case of Gaussian distributions. It is shown that, with sufficient damping the algorithm can be guaranteed to converge, but the amount of damping grows with peak-to-average ratio of the squared singular values of A. This condition explains the good performance of AMP methods on i.i. d. matrices, but also their difficulties with other classes of transforms. A related sufficient condition is then derived for the local stability of the damped GAMP method under more general (possibly non-Gaussian) distributions, assuming certain strict convexity conditions.
Why Um Helps Auditory Word Recognition: The Temporal Delay Hypothesis

Several studies suggest that speech understanding can sometimes benefit from the presence of filled pauses (uh, um, and the like), and that words following such filled pauses are recognised more quickly. Three experiments examined whether this is because filled pauses serve to delay the onset of upcoming words and these delays facilitate auditory word recognition, or whether the fillers themselves serve to signal upcoming delays in a way which informs listeners' reactions. Participants viewed pairs of images on a computer screen, and followed recorded instructions to press buttons corresponding to either an easy (unmanipulated, with a high-frequency name) or a difficult (visually blurred, low-frequency) image. In all three experiments, participants were faster to respond to easy images. In 50% of trials in each experiment, the name of the image was directly preceded by a delay; in the remaining trials an equivalent delay was included earlier in the instruction. Participants were quicker to respond when a name was directly preceded by a delay, regardless of whether this delay was filled with a spoken um, was silent, or contained an artificial tone. This effect did not interact with the effect of image difficulty, nor did it change over the course of each experiment. Taken together, our consistent finding that delays of any kind help word recognition indicates that natural delays such as fillers need not be seen as ‘signals’ to explain the benefits they have to listeners' ability to recognise and respond to the words which follow them.
Kidney donation after circulatory death in a country with a high number of brain dead donors: 10‐year experience in Belgium

Worldwide shortage of standard brain dead donors (DBD) has revived the use of kidneys donated after circulatory death (DCD). We reviewed the Belgian DCD kidney transplant (KT) experience since its reintroduction in 2000. Risk factors for delayed graft function (DGF) were identified using multivariate analysis. Five‐year patient/graft survival was assessed using Kaplan–Meier curves. The evolution of the kidney donor type and the impact of DCDs on the total KT activity in Belgium were compared with the Netherlands. Between 2000 and 2009, 287 DCD KT were performed. Primary nonfunction occurred in 1% and DGF in 31%. Five‐year patient and death‐censored graft survival were 93% and 95%, respectively. In multivariate analysis, cold storage (versus machine perfusion), cold ischemic time, and histidine‐tryptophan‐ketoglutarate solution were independent risk factors for the development of DGF. Despite an increased number of DCD donations and transplantations, the total number of deceased KT did not increase significantly. This could suggest a shift from DBDs to DCDs. To increase KT activity, Belgium should further expand controlled DCD programs while simultaneously improve the identification of all potential DBDs and avoid their referral for donation as DCDs before brain death occurs. Furthermore, living donation remains underused.
Design of compact reversible decimal adder using RPS gates

This paper presents two universal 4×4 `reversible RPS gates' that can function as a reversible 4-bit Binary to BCD converter with a garbage count of zero. The new `fully or partially reversible RPS gate' gives an optimized design of the offset correction circuit of a reversible Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) adder. The paper proposes reversible implementations of BCD adder using fully reversible RPS gates and using combination of HNC-RPS (fully and partially) gates; and the comparisons are tabulated. The HNG-RPS designs achieve a reduction in garbage outputs and logical complexity compared to the existing reversible BCD adder designs. This can form the basic building block of a high speed decimal `Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU)' for a low power reversible `Central Processing Unit (CPU)'.
EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF THE DURABILITY OF FLY ASH-BASED GEOPOLYMER CONCRETE IN THE MARINE ENVIRONMENT

The construction industry is increasingly turning to the use of environmentally friendly materials in order to meet the sustainable aspect required by modern infrastructures. Consequently, for the last two decades, the expansion of this concept, and the increasing global warming have raised concerns on the extensive use of Portland cement due to the high amount of carbon dioxide gas associated with its production. The development of Geopolymer Concretes (GPC) offers promising signs for a change in the way of producing concrete. However, to seriously consider geopolymer binders as an alternative to ordinary Portland cement, the durability of this new material should be evaluated in any comparative analysis. The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the durability characteristics of low calcium fly ash-based geopolymer concretes subjected to the marine environment, compared to ordinary Portland cement concrete with similar exposure. To achieve this goal, 8 Molar Geopolymer, 14 Molar Geopolymer and Ordinary Portland Cement Concrete (OPC) mixes were prepared and tested for exposure in seawater. The test results indicate that the GPC shows excellent resistance to chloride attack, with longer time to corrosion cracking, compared to ordinary Portland cement concrete.
Phase Transitions in Self-organising Sensor Networks

In this paper we consider a multi-cellular sensing and communication network, embedded in an ageless aerospace vehicle, that is expected to detect and react to impact location, intensity and damage over a wide range of impact energies. In particular, we investigate self-organisation of impact boundaries enclosing critically damaged areas, and measure their spatiotemporal robustness. The presented quantitative information-theoretic techniques clearly identify phase transitions, separating chaotic dynamics from ordered and robust patterns.