Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Traffic sign detection based on convolutional neural networks

We propose an approach for traffic sign detection based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We first transform the original image into the gray scale image by using support vector machines, then use convolutional neural networks with fixed and learnable layers for detection and recognition. The fixed layer can reduce the amount of interest areas to detect, and crop the boundaries very close to the borders of traffic signs. The learnable layers can increase the accuracy of detection significantly. Besides, we use bootstrap methods to improve the accuracy and avoid overfitting problem. In the German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark, we obtained competitive results, with an area under the precision-recall curve(AUC) of 99.73% in the category “Danger”, and an AUC of 97.62% in the category “Mandatory”.
Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment and Transitional Care in Acutely Hospitalized Patients: The Transitional Care Bridge Randomized Clinical Trial.

IMPORTANCE Older adults acutely hospitalized are at risk of disability. Trials on comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) and transitional care present inconsistent results. OBJECTIVE To test whether an intervention of systematic CGA, followed by the transitional care bridge program, improved activities of daily living (ADLs) compared with systematic CGA alone. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This study was a double-blind, multicenter, randomized clinical trial conducted at 3 hospitals with affiliated home care organizations in the Netherlands between September 1, 2010, and March 1, 2014. In total, 1070 consecutive patients were eligible, 674 (63.0%) of whom enrolled. They were 65 years or older, acutely hospitalized to a medical ward for at least 48 hours with an Identification of Seniors at Risk-Hospitalized Patients score of 2 or higher, and randomized using permuted blocks stratified by study site and Mini-Mental State Examination score (<24 vs ≥24). The dates of the analysis were June 1, 2014, to November 15, 2014. INTERVENTIONS The transitional care bridge program intervention was started during hospitalization by a visit from a community care registered nurse (CCRN) and continued after discharge with home visits at 2 days and at 2, 6, 12, and 24 weeks. The CCRNs applied the CGA care and treatment plan. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The main outcome was the Katz Index of ADL at 6 months compared with 2 weeks before admission. Secondary outcomes were mortality, cognitive functioning, time to hospital readmission, and the time to discharge from a nursing home. RESULTS The study cohort comprised 674 participants. Their mean age was 80 years, 42.1% (n = 284) were male, and 39.2% (n = 264) were cognitively impaired at admission. Intent-to-treat analysis found no differences in the mean Katz Index of ADL at 6 months between the intervention arm (mean, 2.0; 95% CI, 1.8-2.2) and the CGA-only arm (mean, 1.9; 95% CI, 1.7-2.2). For secondary outcomes, there were 85 deaths (25.2%) in the intervention arm and 104 deaths (30.9%) in the CGA-only arm, resulting in a lower risk on the time to death within 6 months after hospital admission (hazard ratio, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.56-0.99; P = .045; number needed to treat to prevent 1 death, 16). No other secondary outcome was significant. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE A systematic CGA, followed by the transitional care bridge program, showed no effect on ADL functioning in acutely hospitalized older patients. TRIAL REGISTRATION Netherlands Trial Registry: NTR2384.
Characterization of Young’s modulus and thermal conductivity of graphene/epoxy nanocomposites

Atomistic simulation together with micromechanical analysis was employed to characterize the Young’s modulus and thermal conductivity of graphene/epoxy nanocomposites. Nanocomposites containing pristine graphene, carboxyl (COOH)-functionalized graphene, and COOH- and amine (NH2)-functionalized graphene were considered in the simulations. The effect of atomistic interaction between the graphene and the surrounding epoxy was accounted for in the molecular dynamics simulations and then used to derive the effective properties of graphene. Subsequently, the Young’s modulus and thermal conductivity of nanocomposites containing randomly oriented graphene were modeled using the Mori–Tanaka micromechanical model. The results indicated that the COOH- and NH2-functionalized graphene nanocomposite had superior mechanical and thermal properties to the other two material systems. Moreover, the model predictions were in favorable agreement with the experimental data.
Annotation Length Matters : Recurrent Image Annotator for Arbitrary Length Image Tagging

Automatic Image annotation has been an important research topic in facilitating large scale image management and retrieval. Existing methods focus on learning image-tag correlation or correlation between tags to improve annotation accuracy. However, most of these methods evaluate their performance using top-k retrieval performance, where k is fixed. Although such setting gives convenience for comparing different methods, it is not the natural way that humans annotate images. The number of annotated tags should depend on image contents. Inspired by the recent progress in machine translation and image captioning, we propose a novel Recurrent Image Annotator (RIA) model that forms image annotation task as a sequence generation problem so that RIA can natively predict the proper length of tags according to image contents. We evaluate the proposed model on various image annotation datasets. In addition to comparing our model with existing methods in the conventional top-k evaluation measures, we also provide our model as a high quality baseline for the arbitrary length image tagging task. Moreover, the results of our experiments show that the order of tags in training phase has a great impact on the final annotation performance.
An hybrid eDRAM/SRAM macrocell to implement first-level data caches

SRAM and DRAM cells have been the predominant technologies used to implement memory cells in computer systems, each one having its advantages and shortcomings. SRAM cells are faster and require no refresh since reads are not destructive. In contrast, DRAM cells provide higher density and minimal leakage energy since there are no paths within the cell from Vdd to ground. Recently, DRAM cells have been embedded in logic-based technology, thus overcoming the speed limit of typical DRAM cells. In this paper we propose an n-bit macrocell that implements one static cell, and n-1 dynamic cells. This cell is aimed at being used in an n-way set-associative first-level data cache. Our study shows that in a four-way set-associative cache with this macrocell compared to an SRAM based with the same capacity, leakage is reduced by about 75% and area more than half with a minimal impact on performance. Architectural mechanisms have also been devised to avoid refresh logic. Experimental results show that no performance is lost when the retention time is larger than 50 K processor cycles. In addition, the proposed delayed writeback policy that avoids refreshing performs a similar amount of writebacks than a conventional cache with the same organization, so no power wasting is incurred.
Analysis of Latvian familial melanoma patients shows novel variants in the noncoding regions of CDKN2A and that the CDK4 mutation R24H is a founder mutation

Hereditary cutaneous melanoma is associated with mutations in the high-risk CDKN2A gene in about 40% of melanoma-prone families. Mutations in the CDK4 gene are the cause in only a few pedigrees. In this study, we analyzed 20 Latvian familial melanoma probands and carried out a comprehensive analysis of CDKN2A including sequencing of its promoter/intronic regions and deletion screening. We also analyzed the critical second exon of the CDK4 gene. One novel intronic variant (IVS2+82C>T) of the CDKN2A gene and a small deletion (c.−20677_−20682delGTACGC) in its promoter region were found. Genotyping of the novel variants in larger melanoma and control groups indicated that the deletion increases the risk of melanoma (odds ratio=6.353, 95% confidence interval: 1.34–30.22, P=0.0168). The CDK4 gene analysis showed a Latvian melanoma family with the mutation R24H carried on the same haplotype as in two previously described Latvian CDK4-positive families. Our study suggests that the main risk gene in Latvian families with a strong family history of melanoma is CDK4 and that most of the other cases analyzed could be sporadic or associated with low-penetrance risk genes.
Subjective uncertainty and limbic hyperactivation in obsessive‐compulsive disorder

Obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD) is often associated with pathological uncertainty regarding whether an action has been performed correctly or whether a bad outcome will occur, leading to compulsive “evidence gathering” behaviors aimed at reducing uncertainty. The current study used event‐related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate neural functioning in OCD patients and controls as subjective certainty was rated in response to sequential pieces of evidence for a decision. Uncertainty was experimentally manipulated so that some decisions were associated with no “objective” uncertainty (all observed evidence pointed to one correct choice), whereas other decisions contained calculable but varying levels of objective uncertainty based on displayed probabilities. Results indicated that OCD patients differed from controls on decisions that contained no objective uncertainty, such that patients rated themselves as more uncertain. Patients also showed greater activation in a network of brain regions previously associated with internally‐focused thought and valuation including ventromedial prefrontal cortex, parahippocampus, middle temporal cortex, as well as amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex/ventral anterior insula. In the patient group, a significantly greater number of positive intersubject correlations were found among several of these brain regions, suggesting that this network is more interconnected in patients. OCD patients did not differ from controls on decisions where task parameters led to uncertainty. These results indicate that OCD is associated with hyperactivation in a network of limbic/paralimbic brain regions when making decisions, which may contribute to the greater subjective experience of doubt that characterizes the disorder. Hum Brain Mapp, 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A New Kind of Nonparametric Test for Statistical Comparison of Multiple Classifiers Over Multiple Datasets

Nonparametric statistical analysis, such as the Friedman test (FT), is gaining more and more attention due to its useful applications in a lot of experimental studies. However, traditional FT for the comparison of multiple learning algorithms on different datasets adopts the naive ranking approach. The ranking is based on the average accuracy values obtained by the set of learning algorithms on the datasets, which neither considers the differences of the results obtained by the learning algorithms on each dataset nor takes into account the performance of the learning algorithms in each run. In this paper, we will first propose three kinds of ranking approaches, which are the weighted ranking approach, the global ranking approach (GRA), and the weighted GRA. Then, a theoretical analysis is performed to explore the properties of the proposed ranking approaches. Next, a set of the modified FTs based on the proposed ranking approaches are designed for the comparison of the learning algorithms. Finally, the modified FTs are evaluated through six classifier ensemble approaches on 34 real-world datasets. The experiments show the effectiveness of the modified FTs.
Study on grafting of starch on natural rubber latex via GDEP method

Natural rubber (collected in latex form) as a basic materials in tire manufacturing has its own weakness which is its mechanical properties. The shifting from petroleum-based material to renewable material as the potential solution to overcome the limitation of natural rubber, has accelerated the development of renewable material, especially biomass. Starch which has suitable acoustic properties, good tensile strength, and also density regarding its chain molecule structure and its porous structure is an interesting filler material in natural rubber to improve the mechanical properties of tyre products. However, both materials have a different polarity making them not compatible towards each other, where starch and natural rubber are polar and non-polar, respectively. Functionalization of natural rubber through grafting starch onto it is a promising technique to provide a compatibilizing product hybrid as one of raw materials in the manufacture. Glow Discharge Electrolysis Plasma (GDEP) is a prospective method to the grafting through forming unstable species such as free radical, cation and anion, to initiate the reaction. In this study, the feasibility of grafting starch on natural rubber were investigated. The effect of discharge time (5, 10, and 15 min) and discharge voltage (612.9, 658.3, and 703.7 V) on the efficiency of natural rubber hybrid formation were studied. The experiments successfully indicated a product obtained from the grafting, as an ether bond at 1554 cm−1 in FTIR spectra. Furthermore the sessile drop testing implied a polarity decreasing of the starch. Based on the product yield calculation and the sessile drop testing, the optimum discharge time and discharge voltage were obtained at 10 min and 658,3 V, respectively.Natural rubber (collected in latex form) as a basic materials in tire manufacturing has its own weakness which is its mechanical properties. The shifting from petroleum-based material to renewable material as the potential solution to overcome the limitation of natural rubber, has accelerated the development of renewable material, especially biomass. Starch which has suitable acoustic properties, good tensile strength, and also density regarding its chain molecule structure and its porous structure is an interesting filler material in natural rubber to improve the mechanical properties of tyre products. However, both materials have a different polarity making them not compatible towards each other, where starch and natural rubber are polar and non-polar, respectively. Functionalization of natural rubber through grafting starch onto it is a promising technique to provide a compatibilizing product hybrid as one of raw materials in the manufacture. Glow Discharge Electrolysis Plasma (GDEP) is a prospective m.
SOME HORMONAL AND BIOCHEMICAL BLOOD INDICES IN COWS WITH RETAINED PLACENTA AND PUERPERAL METRITIS

The comparison of some hormonal and biochemical blood indices in healthy cows (C) and cows affected with retained foetal membranes (RFM) or puerperal metritis (PM) was the aim of the study. Blood samples were taken between 12 and 24 h (RFM) or 8-10 d (PM) after calving. The progesterone, 17-β oestradiol, cholesterol, glucose, ketone bodies (KB) and free fatty acids (FFA) levels were similar in all the cows examined. Cows with RFM had higher level (P < 0.05) of cortisol (37.4 nmol/l) between 12 and 24 h after calving than control animals (24.2 nmol/l). The progesterone level was higher (P < 0.05) in cows with RFM (2.61 mmol/l) versus control group (1.59 mmol/l). The cortisol concentration did not show a statistical differences between PM and C animals. These data indicate that the cholesterol, KB and FFA levels can be similar after calving in healthy and RFM or PM cows in the same farm. Cows with RFM can show a higher cortisol level immediately after calving. The progesterone level decreases slower after parturition in RFM cows in comparison to healthy ones.
Cervical Cancer Stem Cells Selectively Overexpress HPV Oncoprotein E6 that Controls Stemness and Self-Renewal through Upregulation of HES1

Purpose: Perturbation of keratinocyte differentiation by E6/E7 oncoproteins of high-risk human papillomaviruses that drive oncogenic transformation of cells in squamocolumnar junction of the uterine cervix may confer “stem-cell like” characteristics. However, the crosstalk between E6/E7 and stem cell signaling during cervical carcinogenesis is not well understood. We therefore examined the role of viral oncoproteins in stem cell signaling and maintenance of stemness in cervical cancer. Experimental Design: Isolation and enrichment of cervical cancer stem–like cells (CaCxSLCs) was done from cervical primary tumors and cancer cell lines by novel sequential gating using a set of functional and phenotypic markers (ABCG2, CD49f, CD71, CD133) in defined conditioned media for assessing sphere formation and expression of self-renewal and stemness markers by FACS, confocal microscopy, and qRT-PCR. Differential expression level and DNA-binding activity of Notch1 and its downstream targets in CaCxSLCs as well as silencing of HPVE6/Hes1 by siRNA was evaluated by gel retardation assay, FACS, immunoblotting, and qRT-PCR followed by in silico and in vivo xenograft analysis. Results: CaCxSLCs showed spheroid-forming ability, expressed self-renewal and stemness markers Oct4, Sox2, Nanog, Lrig1, and CD133, and selectively overexpressed E6 and HES1 transcripts in both cervical primary tumors and cancer cell lines. The enriched CaCxSLCs were highly tumorigenic and did recapitulate primary tumor histology in nude mice. siRNA silencing of HPVE6 or Hes1 abolished sphere formation, downregulated AP-1-STAT3 signaling, and induced redifferentiation. Conclusions: Our findings suggest the possible mechanism by which HPVE6 potentially regulate and maintain stem-like cancer cells through Hes1. Clin Cancer Res; 22(16); 4170–84. ©2016 AACR.
A perceptive evaluation of volume rendering techniques

The display of space filling data is still a challenge for the community of visualization. Direct volume rendering (DVR) is one of the most important techniques developed to achieve direct perception of such volumetric data. It is based on semitransparent representations, where the data are accumulated in a depth-dependent order. However, it produces images that may be difficult to understand, and thus several techniques have been proposed so as to improve its effectiveness, using for instance lighting models or simpler representations (e.g., maximum intensity projection). In this article, we present three perceptual studies that examine how DVR meets its goals, in either static or dynamic context. We show that a static representation is highly ambiguous, even in simple cases, but this can be counterbalanced by use of dynamic cues (i.e., motion parallax) provided that the rendering parameters are correctly tuned. In addition, perspective projections are demonstrated to provide relevant information to disambiguate depth perception in dynamic displays.
Selective lesion of retrotrapezoid Phox2b‐expressing neurons raises the apnoeic threshold in rats

Injection of the neurotoxin saporin–substance P (SSP‐SAP) into the retrotrapezoid nucleus (RTN) attenuates the central chemoreflex in rats. Here we ask whether these deficits are caused by the destruction of a specific type of interneuron that expresses the transcription factor Phox2b and is non‐catecholaminergic (Phox2b+TH−). We show that RTN contains around 2100 Phox2b+TH− cells. Injections of SSP‐SAP into RTN destroyed Phox2b+TH− neurons but spared facial motoneurons, catecholaminergic and serotonergic neurons and the ventral respiratory column caudal to the facial motor nucleus. Two weeks after SSP‐SAP, the apnoeic threshold measured under anaesthesia was unchanged when fewer than 57% of the Phox2b+TH− neurons were destroyed. However, destruction of 70 ± 3.5% of these cells was associated with a dramatic rise of the apnoeic threshold (from 5.6 to 7.9% end‐expiratory P CO 2). In anaesthetized rats with unilateral lesions of around 70% of the Phox2b+TH− neurons, acute inhibition of the contralateral intact RTN with muscimol instantly eliminated phrenic nerve discharge (PND) but normal PND could usually be elicited by strong peripheral chemoreceptor stimulation (8/12 rats). Muscimol had no effect in rats with an intact contralateral RTN. In conclusion, the destruction of the Phox2b+TH− neurons is a plausible cause of the respiratory deficits caused by injection of SSP‐SAP into RTN. Two weeks after toxin injection, 70% of these cells must be killed to cause a severe attenuation of the central chemoreflex under anaesthesia. The loss of an even greater percentage of these cells would presumably be required to produce significant breathing deficits in the awake state.
Truthful Revelation Mechanisms for Simultaneous Common Agency Games

We introduce new revelation mechanisms for simultaneous common agency games which, although they do not always permit a complete equilibrium characterization, do facilitate the characterization of the equilibrium outcomes that are typically of interest in applications. We then show how these mechanisms can be used in applications such as menu auctions, competition in nonlinear tariffs, and moral hazard settings. Lastly, we show how one can enrich the revelation mechanisms, albeit at a cost of an increase in complexity, to characterize all possible equilibrium outcomes, including those sustained by non-Markov strategies and/or mixed-strategy profiles. (JEL C72, D82, D86)
Breakage Probability of Repeated Stressing Of GranulesBy Configuring the Stressing Points

The proposed degradation model is verified by experiments to determine the breakage behavior of inhomogeneous granules. The stressing contact points are configured by repeated stressing. The model represents contact point configuration and distributed mechanical properties within a single granule by fitting Monte‐Carlo data. It is applied to fit the cumulative breakage probability with normal, random, and Weibull strength distributions. The drop weight test verifies the model by testing γ‐Al2O3 and Zeolite 4AK granules. A damage accumulation effect by repeated stressing is observed.
Influence of distributed generations and renewable energy resources power plant on power system transient stability

This paper analyzing influence of distributed generation (DG) on transient stability of power system network operating parallel with large renewable energy resources (RES) power plant. The study is performed in hypothetical power system network envision in the future which contains a large number of DG. Network behavior when subjected to disturbance is compared with different level of DG penetration. The results are compared with the performance of the network without DG and RES power plant as a reference case. It can be concluded that addition of DG and RES power plant makes power system network more transiently stable. This integration enhances the power system network capability in handling more larger disturbances.