Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Survey of Human-Sensing : Methods for Detecting Presence , Count , Location , Track , and Identity

An increasingly common requirement of computer systems is to extract information regarding the people present in an environment. In this article, we provide a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary survey of the existing literature, focusing mainly on the extraction of five commonly needed spatiotemporal properties: namely presence, count, location, track and identity. We discuss a new taxonomy of observable human properties and physical traits, along with the sensing modalities that can be used to extract them. We compare active vs. passive sensors, and single-modality vs. sensor fusion approaches, in instrumented vs. uninstrumented settings, surveying sensors as diverse as cameras, motion sensors, pressure pads, radars, electric field sensors, and wearable inertial sensors, among others. The goal of this work is to summarize the existing solutions from various disciplines, to guide the creation of new systems and point toward future research directions.
Influence of Cellular Trafficking Pathway on Bluetongue Virus Infection in Ovine Cells

Bluetongue virus (BTV), a non-enveloped arbovirus, causes hemorrhagic disease in ruminants. However, the influence of natural host cell proteins on BTV replication process is not defined. In addition to cell lysis, BTV also exits non-ovine cultured cells by non-lytic pathways mediated by nonstructural protein NS3 that interacts with virus capsid and cellular proteins belonging to calpactin and ESCRT family. The PPXY late domain motif known to recruit NEDD4 family of HECT ubiquitin E3 ligases is also highly conserved in NS3. In this study using a mixture of molecular, biochemical and microscopic techniques we have analyzed the importance of ovine cellular proteins and vesicles in BTV infection. Electron microscopic analysis of BTV infected ovine cells demonstrated close association of mature particles with intracellular vesicles. Inhibition of Multi Vesicular Body (MVB) resident lipid phosphatidylinositol-3-phosphate resulted in decreased total virus titre suggesting that the vesicles might be MVBs. Proteasome mediated inhibition of ubiquitin or modification of virus lacking the PPXY in NS3 reduced virus growth. Thus, our study demonstrated that cellular components comprising of MVB and exocytic pathways proteins are involved in BTV replication in ovine cells.
Endothelial growth medium suppresses apoptosis of mesenchymal stem cells in vitro via decrease of miR-29a

The administration of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in cases of cardiac ischemia/reperfusion injury (IRI) has been associated with a significant reduction of myocardial cell death and an effective improvement in cardiac function. However, one major limiting factor in MSCs transplantation therapy is the low survival rate of the transplanted cells. The present study aimed to demonstrate that human amnion-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hAMSCs) cultured with endothelial growth medium (EGM-2) exhibited reduced apoptosis when exposed to serum-free and hypoxic conditions; and that the expression of microRNA (miR)-29a decreased significantly. Furthermore, miR-29a knockdown resulted in decreased apoptosis of hAMSCs and increased myeloid cell leukemia (MCL)-1 at the mRNA and protein levels. These results suggested that EGM-2 promoted survival of hAMSCs partly through the regulation of miR-29a and MCL-1 expression levels. These findings may provide a novel understanding of a potential effective therapeutic strategy for cardiac IRI.
Patient Involvement in Safe Delivery: A Qualitative Study

Introduction: Patient involvement in safe delivery planning is considered important yet not widely practiced. The present study aimed at identifythe factors that affect patient involvementin safe delivery, as recommended by parturient women. Methods: This study was part of a qualitative research conducted by content analysis method and purposive sampling in 2013. The data were collected through 63 semi-structured interviews in4 hospitalsand analyzed using thematic content analysis. The participants in this research were women before discharge and after delivery. Findings were analyzed using Colaizzi’s method. Results: Four categories of factors that could affect patient involvement in safe delivery emerged from our analysis: patient-related (true and false beliefs, literacy, privacy, respect for patient), illness-related (pain, type of delivery, patient safety incidents), health care professional-relatedand task-related factors (behavior, monitoring &training), health care setting-related (financial aspects, facilities). Conclusion More research is needed to explore the factors affecting the participation of mothers. It is therefore, recommended to: 1) take notice of mother education, their husbands, midwives and specialists; 2) provide pregnant women with insurance coverage from the outset of pregnancy, especially during prenatal period; 3) form a labor pain committee consisting of midwives, obstetricians, and anesthesiologists in order to identify the preferred painless labor methods based on the existing facilities and conditions, 4) carry out research on observing patients’ privacy and dignity; 5) pay more attention on the factors affecting cesarean.
Neural crest stem cell maintenance by combinatorial Wnt and BMP signaling

Canonical Wnt signaling instructively promotes sensory neurogenesis in early neural crest stem cells (eNCSCs) (Lee, H.Y., M. Kléber, L. Hari, V. Brault, U. Suter, M.M. Taketo, R. Kemler, and L. Sommer. 2004. Science. 303:1020–1023). However, during normal development Wnt signaling induces a sensory fate only in a subpopulation of eNCSCs while other cells maintain their stem cell features, despite the presence of Wnt activity. Hence, factors counteracting Wnt signaling must exist. Here, we show that bone morphogenic protein (BMP) signaling antagonizes the sensory fate-inducing activity of Wnt/β-catenin. Intriguingly, Wnt and BMP act synergistically to suppress differentiation and to maintain NCSC marker expression and multipotency. Similar to NCSCs in vivo, NCSCs maintained in culture alter their responsiveness to instructive growth factors with time. Thus, stem cell development is regulated by combinatorial growth factor activities that interact with changing cell-intrinsic cues.
Matrix metalloproteinase 14 is required for fibrous tissue expansion

Type I collagen-containing fibrils are major structural components of the extracellular matrix of vertebrate tissues, especially tendon, but how they are formed is not fully understood. MMP14 is a potent pericellular collagenase that can cleave type I collagen in vitro. In this study, we show that tendon development is arrested in Scleraxis-Cre::Mmp14 lox/lox mice that are unable to release collagen fibrils from plasma membrane fibripositors. In contrast to its role in collagen turnover in adult tissue, MMP14 promotes embryonic tissue formation by releasing collagen fibrils from the cell surface. Notably, the tendons grow to normal size and collagen fibril release from fibripositors occurs in Col-r/r mice that have a mutated collagen-I that is uncleavable by MMPs. Furthermore, fibronectin (not collagen-I) accumulates in the tendons of Mmp14-null mice. We propose a model for cell-regulated collagen fibril assembly during tendon development in which MMP14 cleaves a molecular bridge tethering collagen fibrils to the plasma membrane of fibripositors. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.09345. 001
Multi-Agent Framework in Visual Sensor Networks

The recent interest in the surveillance of public, military, and commercial scenarios is increasing the need to develop and deploy intelligent and/or automated distributed visual surveillance systems. Many applications based on distributed resources use the so-called software agent technology. In this paper, a multi-agent framework is applied to coordinate videocamera-based surveillance. The ability to coordinate agents improves the global image and task distribution efficiency. In our proposal, a software agent is embedded in each camera and controls the capture parameters. Then coordination is based on the exchange of high-level messages among agents. Agents use an internal symbolic model to interpret the current situation from the messages from all other agents to improve global coordination.
Generation of idioms in a simple recurrent network architecture

Idioms are an ideal testbed for studying the interplay of lexical (content preparing) and syntactic (structure building) mechanisms in language production. This article contributes to the debate about the nature of these mechanisms and their relationship from the viewpoint of computational modeling. We present a neural network model of sentence generation, which is able to produce continuous and discontinuous idioms within regular compositional sentences. The model is a simple recurrent network extended to include a semantic episode representation as an extra input. Our main contribution consists in a detailed analysis of the representational space of the network’s hidden layer, which shows that (1) an implicit structure-content division can arise as a result of internal space reorganization within a single SRN during learning, (2) idioms can be produced by the same general sequencing mechanism that works for regular sentences, (3) the production of idioms is modulated by content-speciﬁc mechanisms.
Some Solutions to the Missing Feature Problem in Vision

In visual processing the ability to deal with missing and noisy information is crucial. Occlusions and unreliable feature detectors often lead to situations where little or no direct information about features is available. However the available information is usually sufficient to highly constrain the outputs. We discuss Bayesian techniques for extracting class probabilities given partial data. The optimal solution involves integrating over the missing dimensions weighted by the local probability densities. We show how to obtain closed-form approximations to the Bayesian solution using Gaussian basis function networks. The framework extends naturally to the case of noisy features. Simulations on a complex task (3D hand gesture recognition) validate the theory. When both integration and weighting by input densities are used, performance decreases gracefully with the number of missing or noisy features. Performance is substantially degraded if either step is omitted.
Session 2: Personalised nutrition Metabolomic applications in nutritional research

Metabolomics aims to profile all small molecules that are present in biological samples such as biofluids, tissue extracts and culture media. Combining the data obtained with multivariate data analysis tools allows the exploration of changes induced by a biological treatment or changes resulting from phenotype. Recently, there has been a large increase in interest in using metabolomics in nutritional research and because of the intimate relationship between nutrients and metabolism there exists great potential for the use of metabolomics within nutritional research. However, for metabolomics to reach its full potential within this field it is also important to be realistic about the challenges that are faced. Examples of such challenges include the necessity to have a clear understanding of the causes of variation in human metabolomic profiles, the effects of the gut microflora on the metabolomic profile and the interaction of the gut microflora with the host's metabolism. A further challenge that is particularly relevant for human nutritional research is the difficulty associated with biological interpretation of the data. Notwithstanding these and other challenges, several examples of successful applications to nutritional research exist. The link between the human metabolic phenotype, as characterised by metabolomic profiles, and dietary preferences proposes the potential role of metabolomics in personalised nutrition.
Environmental novelty is signaled by reduction of the hippocampal theta frequency

The hippocampal formation (HF) plays a key role in novelty detection, but the mechanisms remain unknown. Novelty detection aids the encoding of new information into memory—a process thought to depend on the HF and to be modulated by the theta rhythm of EEG. We examined EEG recorded in the HF of rats foraging for food within a novel environment, as it became familiar over the next five days, and in two more novel environments unexpectedly experienced in trials interspersed with familiar trials over three further days. We found that environmental novelty produces a sharp reduction in the theta frequency of foraging rats, that this reduction is greater for an unexpected environment than for a completely novel one, and that it slowly disappears with increasing familiarity. These results do not reflect changes in running speed and suggest that the septo‐hippocampal system signals unexpected environmental change via a reduction in theta frequency. In addition, they provide evidence in support of a cholinergically mediated mechanism for novelty detection, have important implications for our understanding of oscillatory coding within memory and for the interpretation of event‐related potentials, and provide indirect support for the oscillatory interference model of grid cell firing in medial entorhinal cortex. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Persuasion and Value in Legal Argument

In this paper we consider legal reasoning as a species of practical reasoning. As such it is important both that arguments are considered in the context of competing, attacking and supporting arguments, and that the possibility of rational disagreement is accommodated. We present two formal frameworks for considering systems of arguments: the standard framework of Dung, and an extension which relates arguments to values allowing for rational disagreement. We apply these frameworks to modelling a body of case law, explain how the frameworks can be generated to reconstruct legal reasoning in particular cases, and describe some tools to support the extraction of the value related knowledge required from a set of precedent cases.
Neural response to pictorial health warning labels can predict smoking behavioral change

In order to improve our understanding of how pictorial health warning labels (HWLs) influence smoking behavior, we examined whether brain activity helps to explain smoking behavior above and beyond self-reported effectiveness of HWLs. We measured the neural response in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the amygdala while adult smokers viewed HWLs. Two weeks later, participants’ self-reported smoking behavior and biomarkers of smoking behavior were reassessed. We compared multiple models predicting change in self-reported smoking behavior (cigarettes per day [CPD]) and change in a biomarkers of smoke exposure (expired carbon monoxide [CO]). Brain activity in the vmPFC and amygdala not only predicted changes in CO, but also accounted for outcome variance above and beyond self-report data. Neural data were most useful in predicting behavioral change as quantified by the objective biomarker (CO). This pattern of activity was significantly modulated by individuals’ intention to quit. The finding that both cognitive (vmPFC) and affective (amygdala) brain areas contributed to these models supports the idea that smokers respond to HWLs in a cognitive-affective manner. Based on our findings, researchers may wish to consider using neural data from both cognitive and affective networks when attempting to predict behavioral change in certain populations (e.g. cigarette smokers).
Influence of Microsite Disturbance on the Establishment of Two Congeneric Invasive Thistles

The successful establishment of invasive species has been shown to depend on aspects of the invaded community, such as gap characteristics. Biotic resistance may be particularly critical for stopping invaders at early life history stages, but new species can often invade following disturbances, which may create microsites with very different characteristics than are usually present. We examine the response of two invasive thistle species, Carduus nutans L. and C. acanthoides L. , to three different microsite characteristics: disturbance type, size, and water availability. The two species initially responded differently to the type of disturbance: C. acanthoides had higher emergence and survival in plots with both above- and belowground disturbance, whereas C. nutans had better early performance in large microsites with above-ground disturbance only. Later in their life cycle, C. nutans performed better in plots that had been disturbed both above- and belowground, whereas C. acanthoides was largely unaffected by disturbance type. Increased emergence and survival, larger size and a higher proportion flowering were observed in larger gaps for both species throughout the life cycle. Watering had a negative impact on C. nutans emergence and fall survival and on C. acanthoides survival to the following summer. Overall, these results suggest that disturbance-generated microsite characteristics (disturbance type and size) may have large impacts on establishment of these two Carduus species, which in turn may persist well beyond the initial stages of growth. Studying invader responses to disturbance can help us to understand under what circumstances they are likely to establish and create persistent problems; avoiding or ameliorating such situations will have significant management benefits.
Tailoring Information Provision and Consent Processes to Research Contexts: The Value of Rapid Assessments

Guidance requires that consent processes for research be appropriately tailored to their cultural context. This paper discusses the use of rapid assessments to identify cultural and ethical issues arising when explaining research in studies in The Gambia and Ethiopia. The assessments provided insights into appropriate ways of providing information to minimize the risk of stigmatizing vulnerable research populations; research participants' views about the most important information to provide about research and their understandings of research; and perceived constraints upon reaching voluntary decisions about participation. These insights demonstrate that rapid assessments are a relatively quick and inexpensive intervention that can provide valuable information to assist in the tailoring of information provision and consent processes to research context while maintaining and enhancing participants' fundamental protections.
AMR-to-text generation as a Traveling Salesman Problem

The task of AMR-to-text generation is to generate grammatical text that sustains the semantic meaning for a given AMR graph. We at- tack the task by first partitioning the AMR graph into smaller fragments, and then generating the translation for each fragment, before finally deciding the order by solving an asymmetric generalized traveling salesman problem (AGTSP). A Maximum Entropy classifier is trained to estimate the traveling costs, and a TSP solver is used to find the optimized solution. The final model reports a BLEU score of 22.44 on the SemEval-2016 Task8 dataset.
Finite Element Meshing Of Human Bones From MRI / CT Raw Data

Finite element modeling of human bones is quite useful in biomechanical simulations. In the present work a technique is developed to make FE model of bones from MRI/CT scan data. Developed technique is a modification over conventionally used techniques. In conventional technique solid modeling processes intermediate solid / surface generation is essential before getting finite element model from the scan data. In the present work this necessity is eliminated and process time and steps are shortened. Conventional process for finite element meshing from MRI scan data requires two intermediate steps first interior and exterior contour point extraction of bones and second solid modeling from contour data extracted. In the present work an algorithm is developed and implemented to obtain meshed model of bones directly from the contours
Multi-Class Sleep Stage Analysis and AdaptivePattern Recognition

Multimodal signal analysis based on sophisticated sensors, efficient communicationsystems and fast parallel processing methods has a rapidly increasing range of multidisciplinaryapplications. The present paper is devoted to pattern recognition, machine learning, and the analysisof sleep stages in the detection of sleep disorders using polysomnography (PSG) data, includingelectroencephalography (EEG), breathing (Flow), and electro-oculogram (EOG) signals. The proposedmethod is based on the classification of selected features by a neural network system with sigmoidaland softmax transfer functions using Bayesian methods for the evaluation of the probabilities of theseparate classes. The application is devoted to the analysis of the sleep stages of 184 individualswith different diagnoses, using EEG and further PSG signals. Data analysis points to an averageincrease of the length of the Wake stage by 2.7% per 10 years and a decrease of the length of theRapid Eye Movement (REM) stages by 0.8% per 10 years. The mean classification accuracy for givensets of records and single EEG and multimodal features is 88.7% ( standard deviation, STD: 2.1) and89.6% (STD:1.9), respectively. The proposed methods enable the use of adaptive learning processesfor the detection and classification of health disorders based on prior specialist experience andman–machine interaction.
Interplay between partner and ligand facilitates the folding and binding of an intrinsically disordered protein

Significance Specific protein–protein interactions are abundant in, and essential for, cellular life. In contrast to the well-studied docking of two already folded proteins, it has been recently established that many proteins are disordered and unfolded in the absence of their partner protein, but appear folded once bound. Must these initially disordered proteins transiently fold in isolation before binding their partners? We examine a small disordered protein and find that interactions with its (already structured) partner protein are what cause the relatively unstructured protein to fold. Thus, the requirement for one protein to fold is not an obstacle for reliable, fast association between two proteins. This result offers some explanation for the abundance of similar protein–protein interactions throughout biology. Protein–protein interactions are at the heart of regulatory and signaling processes in the cell. In many interactions, one or both proteins are disordered before association. However, this disorder in the unbound state does not prevent many of these proteins folding to a well-defined, ordered structure in the bound state. Here we examine a typical system, where a small disordered protein (PUMA, p53 upregulated modulator of apoptosis) folds to an α-helix when bound to a groove on the surface of a folded protein (MCL-1, induced myeloid leukemia cell differentiation protein). We follow the association of these proteins using rapid-mixing stopped flow, and examine how the kinetic behavior is perturbed by denaturant and carefully chosen mutations. We demonstrate the utility of methods developed for the study of monomeric protein folding, including β-Tanford values, Leffler α, Φ-value analysis, and coarse-grained simulations, and propose a self-consistent mechanism for binding. Folding of the disordered protein before binding does not appear to be required and few, if any, specific interactions are required to commit to association. The majority of PUMA folding occurs after the transition state, in the presence of MCL-1. We also examine the role of the side chains of folded MCL-1 that make up the binding groove and find that many favor equilibrium binding but, surprisingly, inhibit the association process.