Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An architecture for parallel topic models

This paper describes a high performance sampling architecture for inference of latent topic models on a cluster of workstations. Our system is faster than previous work by over an order of magnitude and it is capable of dealing with hundreds of millions of documents and thousands of topics. The algorithm relies on a novel communication structure, namely the use of a distributed (key, value) storage for synchronizing the sampler state between computers. Our architecture entirely obviates the need for separate computation and synchronization phases. Instead, disk, CPU, and network are used simultaneously to achieve high performance. We show that this architecture is entirely general and that it can be extended easily to more sophisticated latent variable models such as n-grams and hierarchies.
DAS181 Treatment of Severe Parainfluenza Virus 3 Pneumonia in Allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Recipients Requiring Mechanical Ventilation

Parainfluenza virus (PIV) may cause life-threatening pneumonia in allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) recipients. Currently, there are no proven effective therapies. We report the use of inhaled DAS181, a novel sialidase fusion protein, for treatment of PIV type 3 pneumonia in two allogeneic hematopoietic SCT recipients with respiratory failure.
A FOLDED PRINTED QUADRIFILAR HELICAL ANTENNA EMPLOYING A COMPACT FEEDING NETWORK

A folded printed quadrifllar helical antenna (FPQHA) with an integrated and compact feeding network is proposed. The axial length of the proposed antenna is miniaturized of about 54.7% than the conventional PQHA by folding the helix arms into several elements. A T-junction power divider combining with two Wilkinson power dividers is utilized to feed the antenna. A fabricated prototype of the FPQHA using the compact feeding network is presented. The measured positive gain bandwidth covers 380{430MHz with the re∞ection coe-cient below i20dB, axial ratio below 1.5dB and a half-power beamwidth of about 120 - . Details of the proposed antenna design and experimental results are presented and discussed.
Convergence of a branching and interacting particle system to the solution of a nonlinear stochastic PDE

The solution of a nonlinear parabolic SPDE on the circle, with multiplicative Gaussian noise that is white-noise in time and a bonafide function in space, is approximated by a system of branching and interacting particles. Convergence of the system is established in the space of continuousfunction- valued càdlàg processes via a mollification procedure.
Space representation for eye movements is more contralateral in monkeys than in humans

Contralateral hemispheric representation of sensory inputs (the right visual hemifield in the left hemisphere and vice versa) is a fundamental feature of primate sensorimotor organization, in particular the visuomotor system. However, many higher-order cognitive functions in humans show an asymmetric hemispheric lateralization—e.g., right brain specialization for spatial processing—necessitating a convergence of information from both hemifields. Electrophysiological studies in monkeys and functional imaging in humans have investigated space and action representations at different stages of visuospatial processing, but the transition from contralateral to unified global spatial encoding and the relationship between these encoding schemes and functional lateralization are not fully understood. Moreover, the integration of data across monkeys and humans and elucidation of interspecies homologies is hindered, because divergent findings may reflect actual species differences or arise from discrepancies in techniques and measured signals (electrophysiology vs. imaging). Here, we directly compared spatial cue and memory representations for action planning in monkeys and humans using event-related functional MRI during a working-memory oculomotor task. In monkeys, cue and memory-delay period activity in the frontal, parietal, and temporal regions was strongly contralateral. In putative human functional homologs, the contralaterality was significantly weaker, and the asymmetry between the hemispheres was stronger. These results suggest an inverse relationship between contralaterality and lateralization and elucidate similarities and differences in human and macaque cortical circuits subserving spatial awareness and oculomotor goal-directed actions.
Dynamics of bacterial populations during bench‐scale bioremediation of oily seawater and desert soil bioaugmented with coastal microbial mats

This study describes a bench‐scale attempt to bioremediate Kuwaiti, oily water and soil samples through bioaugmentation with coastal microbial mats rich in hydrocarbonoclastic bacterioflora. Seawater and desert soil samples were artificially polluted with 1% weathered oil, and bioaugmented with microbial mat suspensions. Oil removal and microbial community dynamics were monitored. In batch cultures, oil removal was more effective in soil than in seawater. Hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria associated with mat samples colonized soil more readily than seawater. The predominant oil degrading bacterium in seawater batches was the autochthonous seawater species Marinobacter hydrocarbonoclasticus. The main oil degraders in the inoculated soil samples, on the other hand, were a mixture of the autochthonous mat and desert soil bacteria; Xanthobacter tagetidis, Pseudomonas geniculata, Olivibacter ginsengisoli and others. More bacterial diversity prevailed in seawater during continuous than batch bioremediation. Out of seven hydrocarbonoclastic bacterial species isolated from those cultures, only one, Mycobacterium chlorophenolicum, was of mat origin. This result too confirms that most of the autochthonous mat bacteria failed to colonize seawater. Also culture‐independent analysis of seawater from continuous cultures revealed high‐bacterial diversity. Many of the bacteria belonged to the Alphaproteobacteria, Flavobacteria and Gammaproteobacteria, and were hydrocarbonoclastic. Optimal biostimulation practices for continuous culture bioremediation of seawater via mat bioaugmentation were adding the highest possible oil concentration as one lot in the beginning of bioremediation, addition of vitamins, and slowing down the seawater flow rate.
MIMO-OFDM for wireless communications: signal detection with enhanced channel estimation

Multiple transmit and receive antennas can be used to form multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels to increase the capacity by a factor of the minimum number of transmit and receive antennas. In this paper, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for MIMO channels (MIMO-OFDM) is considered for wideband transmission to mitigate intersymbol interference and enhance system capacity. The MIMO-OFDM system uses two independent space-time codes for two sets of two transmit antennas. At the receiver, the independent space-time codes are decoded using prewhitening, followed by minimum-Euclidean-distance decoding based on successive interference cancellation. Computer simulation shows that for four-input and four-output systems transmitting data at 4 Mb/s over a 1.25 MHz channel, the required signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) for 10% and 1% word error rates (WER) are 10.5 dB and 13.8 dB, respectively, when each codeword contains 500 information bits and the channel's Doppler frequency is 40 Hz (corresponding normalized frequency: 0.9%). Increasing the number of the receive antennas improves the system performance. When the number or receive antennas is increased from four to eight, the required SNRs for 10% and 1% WER are reduced to 4 dB and 6 dB, respectively. Therefore, MIMO-OFDM is a promising technique for highly spectrally efficient wideband transmission.
Modelling network and system monitoring over the Internet with mobile agents

Distributed Network Management is gaining importance due to the explosive growth of the size of computer networks. New management paradigms are being proposed as an alternative to the centralised one, and new technologies and programming languages are making them feasible. The use of Mobile Agents (MAs) to distribute and delegate management tasks is a particularly promising approach to dealing with the limitations of current centralised management systems which appear to be lacking flexibility and scalability. This paper is focused on the impact that mobile code paradigms can have on distributed network and system monitoring. A dynamic, hierarchical management model based on a delegation paradigm is adopted and an MA-architecture for monitoring operations is proposed. Finally, possible uses of the proposed model and architecture for pursuing seamless and timely monitoring are discussed.
Social Cognition, Language, and Prosocial Behaviors: A Multitrait Mixed-Methods Study in Early Childhood

ABSTRACT Research Findings: In this study, we investigated associations among social cognition skills (specifically, emotion knowledge and theory of mind), language abilities, and 3 varieties of prosocial behavior (helping, sharing, and comforting) in early childhood. The effects of age and gender were also taken into account. Participants were 149 Italian children between 24 and 47 months of age (M = 35.6 months, SD = 6.77 months). We adopted a multitrait mixed-methods research design, using direct measures of emotion knowledge, theory of mind, and language as well as naturalistic observations of children’s free play with peers to detect the frequency with which they engaged in prosocial behaviors. Ordinal logistic regression analyses showed that helping behaviors were especially accounted for by emotion knowledge and gender, whereas variance in sharing behaviors was mostly explained by theory-of-mind ability and language. Practice or Policy: The findings encourage those involved in early childhood education to develop training and intervention programs to enhance children’s emotional, linguistic, and cognitive skills. Given that these results were obtained with children as young as 2 and 3 years, preventive intervention should be implemented during the earliest years of life.
Context-aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Twitter Sentiment Analysis in Italian

This paper describes the Unitor system that participated to the SENTIment POLarity Classification task proposed in Evalita 2016. The system implements a classification workflow made of several Convolutional Neural Network classifiers, that generalize the linguistic information observed in the training tweets by considering also their context. Moreover, sentiment specific information is injected in the training process by using Polarity Lexicons automatically acquired through the automatic analysis of unlabeled collection of tweets. Unitor achieved the best results in the Subjectivity Classification sub-task, and it scored 2nd in the Polarity Classification sub-task, among about 25 different submissions.
An Efficient Clustering Algorithm for Microblogging Hot Topic Detection

Microblog has become exceeding popular, with hundreds of millions of tweets being posted every minute on variety of topics. Most hot event will be retweeted thousands of times in short time, which will help us to trace hot event. This paper focuses on tracing those events by mining the text stream in microblog. Although event detection has long been a research topic, the characteristics of microblog bring new challenge. Tweets reporting such events are usually overwhelmed by high flood of meaningless tweets, algorithm needs to be scalable given the sheer amount of tweets. Firstly, we use Bayes classification to filter the meaningless tweets, then detect hot event from the tweets by a mean calculation based incomplete clustering. The experiments show that algorithm can detect hot events real-time from big amount tweets and remain good accuracy.
Dynamics of commitment and contribution quality in collaborative communities

It is well-known that commitment is an important ingredient for contributions of high quality. With the Internet heading towards being an actionable social space, rather than a collection of Web-sites, the issue of quality becomes crucial for sharing knowledge and action in collaborative scenarios. We propose a case study for the investigation of the influence of time, user feedback and interface complexity on contribution quality. We plan to exploit different online user groups across two different temporal phases for the evaluation.
Comparative study of turbo decoding techniques: an overview

We provide an overview of the novel class of channel codes referred to as turbo codes, which have been shown to be capable of performing close to the Shannon limit. We commence with a discussion on turbo encoding, and then move on to describing the form of the iterative decoder most commonly used to decode turbo codes. We then elaborate on various decoding algorithms that can be used in an iterative decoder, and give an example of the operation of such a decoder using the so-called soft output Viterbi (1996) algorithm (SOVA). Lastly, the effect of a range of system parameters is investigated in a systematic fashion, in order to gauge their performance ramifications.
Likelihood functions for errors-in-variables models bias-free local estimation with minimum variance

Parameter estimation in the presence of noisy measurements characterizes a wide range of computer vision problems. Thus, many of them can be formulated as errors-in-variables (EIV) problems. In this paper we provide a closed form likelihood function to EIV problems with arbitrary covariance structure. Previous approaches either do not offer a closed form, are restricted in the structure of the covariance matrix, or involve nuisance parameters. By using such a likelihood function, we provide a theoretical justification for well established estimators of EIV models. Furthermore we provide two maximum likelihood estimators for EIV parameters, a straight forward extension of a well known estimator and a novel, local estimator, as well as confidence bounds by means of the Cramer Rao Lower Bound. We show their performance by numerical experiments on optical flow estimation, as it is well explored and understood in literature. The straight forward extension turned out to have oscillating behavior, while the novel, local one performs favorably with respect to other methods. For small motions, it even performs better than an excellent global optical flow algorithm on the majority of pixel locations.
Unmet Goals of Tracking: Within-track Heterogeneity of Students’ Expectations about the Future

Over the last two decades, researchers in the educational field have raised concerns regarding the high educational expectations among American youth. Studies have identified the detracking movement as one of the most important causes of this college-for-all norm. The assumption is that tracked secondary education systems, in contrast to comprehensive systems, lead to realistic expectations because of students’ clear track placement. In other words, tracking creates groups of students with homogeneous expectations. Inspired by the rich literature on the unequal selection present in tracked systems, this article questions this assumption concerning students’ allocation. We examine homogeneity of expectations in a rigidly tracked system, using data from 2,354 students in 28 schools (2013–2014) in Ghent (Belgium). Results from ordinary least squares (OLS) regression show that even in a stringently tracked system, the vocational track has the lowest homogeneity of expectations. We discuss the unmet goals of tracking in view of tracking policy.
Prawn Shell Chitosan Exhibits Anti-Obesogenic Potential through Alterations to Appetite, Affecting Feeding Behaviour and Satiety Signals In Vivo

The crustacean shells-derived polysaccharide chitosan has received much attention for its anti-obesity potential. Dietary supplementation of chitosan has been linked with reductions in feed intake, suggesting a potential link between chitosan and appetite control. Hence the objective of this experiment was to investigate the appetite suppressing potential of prawn shell derived chitosan in a pig model. Pigs (70 ± 0.90 kg, 125 days of age, SD 2.0) were fed either T1) basal diet or T2) basal diet plus 1000 ppm chitosan (n = 20 gilts per group) for 63 days. The parameter categories which were assessed included performance, feeding behaviour, serum leptin concentrations and expression of genes influencing feeding behaviour in the small intestine, hypothalamus and adipose tissue. Pigs offered chitosan visited the feeder less times per day (P<0.001), had lower intake per visit (P<0.001), spent less time eating per day (P<0.001), had a lower eating rate (P<0.01) and had reduced feed intake and final body weight (P< 0.001) compared to animals offered the basal diet. There was a treatment (P<0.05) and time effect (P<0.05) on serum leptin concentrations in animals offered the chitosan diet compared to animals offered the basal diet. Pigs receiving dietary chitosan had an up-regulation in gene expression of growth hormone receptor (P<0.05), Peroxisome proliferator activated receptor gamma (P<0.01), neuromedin B (P<0.05), neuropeptide Y receptor 5 (P<0.05) in hypothalamic nuclei and neuropeptide Y (P<0.05) in the jejunum. Animals consuming chitosan had increased leptin expression in adipose tissue compared to pigs offered the basal diet (P<0.05). In conclusion, these data support the hypothesis that dietary prawn shell chitosan exhibits anti-obesogenic potential through alterations to appetite, and feeding behaviour affecting satiety signals in vivo.
Muslim community volunteering: the civic-religious ‘culture of benevolence’ and its sociopolitical implications

ABSTRACT Policymakers across the West seek to promote volunteering among migrants and ethno-religious minorities as a way to foster their social incorporation. Volunteering within a minority community context, however, does not receive the same appreciation and support as volunteering in ‘mainstream’ civil society groups. This applies particularly to Muslim volunteering within mosques or other Islamic organisations, which are often perceived as places of self-isolation and cultural separateness. Drawing on a mix-method study, this article examines Muslim volunteering in different Islamic community groups in Australia. The study found that a majority of Muslim community volunteers were currently, or had previously been, active also in secular organisations. Their decision to volunteering for a Muslim instead of a non-Muslim group is driven primarily by pragmatic rather than ideological reasons. Through their intra-community engagement, most Muslim volunteers pursue community-focussed goals, while simultaneously seeking to contribute to the society at large—both driven by a ‘culture of benevolence’ (Wilson, J., and M. Musick. 1997. “Who Cares? Towards an Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work.” American Sociological Review 62 (5): 694–713) inherent in their Islamic faith. Muslim intra-community volunteering typically strengthens both their religious and their civic identity, and helps them become more engaged, politically interested and critical citizens, with extended social networks within and, to a slightly lesser extent, beyond the Muslim community.
Liver, but Not Muscle, Has an Entrainable Metabolic Memory

Hyperglycemia in the hospitalized setting is common, especially in patients that receive nutritional support either continuously or intermittently. As the liver and muscle are the major sites of glucose disposal, we hypothesized their metabolic adaptations are sensitive to the pattern of nutrient delivery. Chronically catheterized, well-controlled depancreatized dogs were placed on one of three isocaloric diets: regular chow diet once daily (Chow) or a simple nutrient diet (ND) that was given either once daily (ND-4) or infused continuously (ND-C). Intraportal insulin was infused to maintain euglycemia. After 5 days net hepatic (NHGU) and muscle (MGU) glucose uptake and oxidation were assessed at euglycemia (120 mg/dl) and hyperglycemia (200 mg/dl) in the presence of basal insulin. While hyperglycemia increased both NHGU and MGU in Chow, NHGU was amplified in both groups receiving ND. The increase was associated with enhanced activation of glycogen synthase, glucose oxidation and suppression of pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase-4 (PDK-4). Accelerated glucose-dependent muscle glucose uptake was only evident with ND-C. This was associated with a decrease in PDK-4 expression and an increase in AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) phosphorylation. Interestingly, ND-C markedly increased hepatic FGF-21 expression. Thus, augmentation of carbohydrate disposal in the liver, as opposed to the muscle, is not dependent on the pattern of nutrient delivery.
Testing composite hypotheses applied to AR-model order estimation ; the Akaike-criterion revised

Akaike’s criterion is often used to test composite hypotheses; for example to determine the order of a priori unknown Auto-Regressive and/or Moving Average models. Objections are formulated against Akaike’s criterion and some modifications are proposed. The application of the theory leads to a general technique for AR-model order estimation based on testing pairs of composite hypotheses. This technique allows performance control by means of a simple parameter, the upper-bound on the error of the first kind (false alarm probability). The presented simulations and the theoretical elaboration improve the understanding of the problems and limitations of techniques based on the Akaike criterion. Due to the excellent correspondence between the theory and the experimental results we consider the in AR-model order estimation problem for low order AR-processes with Gaussian white noise as solved. Keywords— AIC, Akaike criterion, AR, ARMA, autoregressive processes, composite hypothesis, entropy, maximum likelihood, model order, Neyman-Pearson, system identification, time series analysis.
Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media Bias through Crowdsourced Content Analysis

It is widely thought that news organizations exhibit ideological bias, but rigorously quantifying such slant has proven methodologically challenging. Through a combination of machine learning and crowdsourcing techniques, we investigate the selection and framing of political issues in 15 major U.S. news outlets. Starting with 803,146 news stories published over 12 months, we first used supervised learning algorithms to identify the 14% of articles pertaining to political events. We then recruited 749 online human judges to classify a random subset of 10,950 of these political articles according to topic and ideological position. Our analysis yields an ideological ordering of outlets consistent with prior work. We find, however, that news outlets are considerably more similar than generally believed. Specifically, with the exception of political scandals, we find that major news organizations present topics in a largely non-partisan manner, casting neither Democrats nor Republicans in a particularly favorable or unfavorable light. Moreover, again with the exception of political scandals, there is little evidence of systematic differences in story selection, with all major news outlets covering a wide variety of topics with frequency largely unrelated to the outlet's ideological position. Finally, we find that news organizations express their ideological bias not by directly advocating for a preferred political party, but rather by disproportionately criticizing one side, a convention that further moderates overall differences.