Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Progressive Image Denoising

Image denoising continues to be an active research topic. Although state-of-the-art denoising methods are numerically impressive and approch theoretical limits, they suffer from visible artifacts. While they produce acceptable results for natural images, human eyes are less forgiving when viewing synthetic images. At the same time, current methods are becoming more complex, making analysis, and implementation difficult. We propose image denoising as a simple physical process, which progressively reduces noise by deterministic annealing. The results of our implementation are numerically and visually excellent. We further demonstrate that our method is particularly suited for synthetic images. Finally, we offer a new perspective on image denoising using robust estimators.
GraPacc: A graph-based pattern-oriented, context-sensitive code completion tool

Code completion tool plays an important role in daily development activities. It helps developers by auto-completing tedious and detailed code during an editing session. However, existing code completion tools are limited to recommending only context-free code templates and a single method call of the variable under editing. We introduce GraPacc, an advanced, context-sensitive code completion tool that is based on frequent API usage patterns. It extracts the context-sensitive features from the code under editing, for example, the API elements on focus and the current editing point, and their relations to other code elements. It then ranks the relevant API usage patterns and auto-completes the current code with the proper elements according to the chosen pattern.
Bullying and depression: the moderating effect of social support, rejection and victimization profile

Peer relationships can be shaped as influential factors in the prevalence of bullying episodes. This research aims to analyze the effect of school bullying on the levels of depression of the victims and to what extent it is affected by social support and status in the group and by the profile of victimization. Several hierarchical linear regression analyses were calculated, in a sample of 1063 students aged 10 to 14 (47.8% of girls, M = 11.59 years, SD = 1.21 years), from 10 school of the Region of Madrid. The degree of influence of the studied variables was observed: lack of social support, peer rejection, withdrawal and impulsivity behaviors, and the relationship of all of them with victimization and depression. Findings revealed the influence of the lack of social support on the depression of victimized students. However, peer rejection did not show influence on the levels of depression of the victims. In addition, victimization associated with internalizing characteristics showed a greater association with depression than victimization associated with an externalizing profile.
Was this feedback useful? Examining the observation and feedback process for pre-service teachers

ABSTRACT In many teacher preparation programs at institutions of higher education in the United States, pre-service teachers receive mentoring and constructive feedback during their internship placement from an experienced supervising teacher and a university coordinator. Often the feedback loop is closed by asking interns, ‘was this useful? ’ To better answer this question, researchers employed a phenomenological approach to collect interview and focus group data on the lived experiences, perceptions, and understandings of six pre-service special education interns during their internship experience. Emerging themes included satisfaction with level of support provided by supervisory stakeholders, a feeling of isolation from peer support, special consideration of the components within the evaluation tool, and a request to be provided with additional background information for their assigned university coordinators. These lessons were aggregated, presented, and then integrated into the experiences provided to forthcoming pre-service educators.
Treadmill Exercise Preconditioning Attenuates Lung Damage Caused by Systemic Endotoxemia in Type 1 Diabetic Rats

Endotoxemia induces a series of inflammatory responses that may result in lung injury. However, heat shock protein72 (HSP72) has the potential to protect the lungs from damage. The objective of this study was to determine whether prior exercise conditioning could increase the expression of HSP72 in the lungs and attenuate lung damage in diabetic rats receiving lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Streptozotocin was used to induce diabetes in adult male Wistar rats. Rats were randomly assigned to sedentary or exercise groups. Rats in the exercise condition ran on a treadmill 5 days/week, 30–60 min/day, with an intensity of 1.0 mile/hour over a 3-week period. Rats received an intravenous infusion of LPS after 24 hrs from the last training session. Elevated lavage tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) level in response to LPS was more marked in diabetic rats. HSP72 expression in lungs was significantly increased after exercise conditioning, but less pronounced in diabetic rats. After administration of LPS, exercised rats displayed higher survival rate as well as decreased lavage TNF-α level and lung edema in comparison to sedentary rats. Our findings suggest that exercise conditioning could attenuate the occurrence of inflammatory responses and lung damage, thereby reducing mortality rate in diabetic rats during endotoxemia.
A sliding mode observer for fault reconstruction under output sampling: A time-delay approach

A sliding mode observer in the presence of sampled output information and its application to fault reconstruction is studied. The observer is designed by using the delayed continuous-time representation of the sampled-data system, for which a set of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) provide conditions for the ultimate boundedness. It is shown that an ideal sliding motion cannot be achieved in the observer when outputs are sampled. However, ultimately bounded solutions can be obtained provided the sampling frequency is fast enough. The bound on the solution is proportional to the sampling time and the magnitude of the switching gain. The proposed observer design is applied to the problem of fault reconstruction under sampled output. It is shown that, for a sufficiently small value of μ, a perturbation parameter, a transducer or sensor fault can be reconstructed reliably from the output error dynamics. An example of observer design for an inverted pendulum system is used to demonstrate the merit of the proposed methodology compared to existing sliding mode observer design approaches.
Households across All Income Quintiles, Especially the Poorest, Increased Animal Source Food Expenditures Substantially during Recent Peruvian Economic Growth

Background Relative to plant-based foods, animal source foods (ASFs) are richer in accessible protein, iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin B-12 and other nutrients. Because of their nutritional value, particularly for childhood growth and nutrition, it is important to identify factors influencing ASF consumption, especially for poorer households that generally consume less ASFs. Objective To estimate differential responsiveness of ASF consumption to changes in total household expenditures for households with different expenditures in a middle-income country with substantial recent income increases. Methods The Peruvian Young Lives household panel (n = 1750) from 2002, 2006 and 2009 was used to characterize patterns of ASF expenditures. Multivariate models with controls for unobserved household fixed effects and common secular trends were used to examine nonlinear relationships between changes in household expenditures and in ASF expenditures. Results Households with lower total expenditures dedicated greater percentages of expenditures to food (58.4% vs.17.9% in 2002 and 24.2% vs. 21.5% in 2009 for lowest and highest quintiles respectively) and lower percentages of food expenditures to ASF (22.8% vs. 33.9% in 2002 and 30.3% vs. 37.6% in 2009 for lowest and highest quintiles respectively). Average percentages of overall expenditures spent on food dropped from 47% to 23.2% between 2002 and 2009. Households in the lowest quintiles of expenditures showed greater increases in ASF expenditures relative to total consumption than households in the highest quintiles. Among ASF components, meat and poultry expenditures increased more than proportionately for households in the lowest quintiles, and eggs and fish expenditures increased less than proportionately for all households. Conclusions Increases in household expenditures were associated with substantial increases in consumption of ASFs for households, particularly households with lower total expenditures. Increases in ASF expenditures for all but the top quintile of households were proportionately greater than increases in total food expenditures, and proportionately less than overall expenditures.
Thematisation and Prosodic Emphasis in Spoken French A Preliminary Analysis Gaëlle Ferré

This study aims at examining the links between them atic constructions and prosodic emphasis, and the way th e two types of operations can be reinforced by gestures. It was conducted on a corpus of 1h30 of spoken French, inv olving three pairs of speakers in dialogues. Results show t hat although the tendency is for emphatic constructions as a whole not to be reinforced by gestures, there is still a higher proportion of gesture reinforcing with prosodic emp hasis than with syntactic thematisation. The paper describes w hich eyebrow and head movements as well as hand gestures are more liable to accompany the two operations.
Characterization of early cortical population response to thalamocortical input in vitro

The in vitro thalamocortical slice preparation of mouse barrel cortex allows for stimulation of the cortex through its natural afferent thalamocortical pathway. This preparation was used here to investigate the first stage of cortical processing in the large postsynaptic dendritic networks as revealed by voltage sensitive dye imaging (VSDI). We identified the precise location and dimensions of two clearly distinguishable dendritic networks, one in the granular layer (GL) IV and one in the infragranular layer (IGL) V and VI and showed that they have different physiological properties. DiI fluorescent staining further revealed that thalamocortical axons project on to these two networks in the typical barrel like form, not only in the granular but also in the IGL. Finally we investigated the short-term dynamics of both the VSDI signal and the local field potential (LFP) in response to a train of eight-pulses at various frequencies in both these layers. We found evidence of differences in the plasticity between the first two response peaks compared to the remaining six peaks as well as differences in short-term plasticity between the VSDI response and the LFP. Our findings suggest, that at least early cortical processing takes place in two separate dendritic networks that may stand at the beginning of further parallel computation. The detailed characterization of the parameters of these networks may provide tools for further research into the complex dynamics of large dendritic networks and their role in cortical computation.
The role of narcissism, self-esteem and attentional biases in childhood reactive and proactive aggression /

The associations between subtypes of aggression (proactive aggression and reactive aggression), personality variables (inflated self-esteem and narcissism), and attentional biases (subliminal and supraliminal) were examined in the present study. It was hypothesized that aggression would be associated with inflated self-esteem and narcissism, consistent with Roy Baumeister’s theory of threatened egotism. It was also hypothesized that this relation would be stronger for reactive (impulsive) aggression (RA) than for proactive (deliberate) aggression (PA). Further, it was expected that an exaggerated sense of self-worth would mediate the previously established relationship between RA and attentional biases for cues signaling threats to one’s esteem in both subliminal and supraliminal conditions. Seventy children participated in the study by completing a task measuring preconscious and conscious attention allocation and questionnaires assessing self-competence, narcissism, and behavioral and emotional problems. One parent and one teacher for each child participated by completing several questionnaires assessing competence, aggression, and other problematic behaviors. Using hierarchical regression analyses, the predictive link between exaggerated selfworth and general aggression was supported. However, inflated self-competence was more strongly related to PA than RA, contrary to expectations. Findings also revealed the predicted association between subliminal attentional biases and aggression. This ii association did not differentiate between subtypes of aggression. Contrary to expectations, biases for supraliminally presented stimuli were not found. The present findings support the downward extension of Baumeister’s theory to children and provide evidence for differentiating between RA and PA based on underlying personality variables. The present analyses also provide the first evidence of a subliminal attentional bias among aggressive youth.
Utility in Cell Signalling Response Dynamics of Phosphorelays Suggest Their Potential Rapid Response Subject Collections Response Dynamics of Phosphorelays Suggest Their Potential Utility in Cell Signalling

(191 articles) computational biology (196 articles) systems biology (39 articles) synthetic biology Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections Email alerting service here right-hand corner of the article or click Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article-sign up in the box at the top Phosphorelays are extended two-component signalling systems found in diverse bacteria, lower eukaryotes and plants. Only few of these systems are characterized, and we still lack a full understanding of their signalling abilities. Here, we aim to achieve a global understanding of phosphorelay signalling and its dynamical properties. We develop a generic model, allowing us to systematically analyse response dynamics under different assumptions. Using this model, we find that the steady-state concentration of phosphorylated protein at the final layer of a phosphorelay is a linearly increasing, but eventually saturating function of the input. In contrast, the intermediate layers can display ultrasensitivity. We find that such ultrasensitivity is a direct result of the phosphorelay biochemistry; shuttling of a single phosphate group from the first to the last layer. The response dynamics of the phos-phorelay results in tolerance of cross-talk, especially when it occurs as cross-deactivation. Further, it leads to a high signal-to-noise ratio for the final layer. We find that a relay length of four, which is most commonly observed, acts as a saturating point for these dynamic properties. These findings suggest that phosphorelays could act as a mechanism to reduce noise and effects of cross-talk on the final layer of the relay and enforce its input – response relation to be linear. In addition, our analysis suggests that middle layers of phosphorelays could embed thresholds. We discuss the consequence of these findings in relation to why cells might use phosphorelays along with enzymatic kinase cascades.
A Robust Hybrid Multisource Data Fusion Approach for Vehicle Localization

In this paper, an innovative collaborative data fusion approach to ego-vehicle localization is presented. This approach called Optimized Kalman Swarm (OKS) is a data fusion and filtering method, fusing data from a low cost GPS, an INS, an Odometer and a Steering wheel angle encoder. The OKS is developed addressing the challenge of managing reactivity and robustness during a real time ego-localization process. For ego-vehicle localization, especially for highly dynamic on-road maneuvers, a filter needs to be robust and reactive at the same time. In these situations, the balance between reactivity and robustness concepts is crucial. The OKS filter represents an intelligent cooperative-reactive localization algorithm inspired by dynamic Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). It combines advantages coming from two filters: Particle Filter (PF) and Extended Kalman filter (EKF). The OKS is tested using real embedded sensors data collected in the Satory’s test tracks. The OKS is also compared with both the well-known EKF and the Particle Filters (PF). The results show the efficiency of the OKS for a high dynamic driving scenario with damaged and low quality GPS data.
Speech dereverberation using long short-term memory

Recently, neural networks have been used for not only phone recognition but also denoising and dereverberation. However, the conventional denoising deep autoencoder (DAE) based on the feed-forward structure is not capable of handling very long speech frames of reverberation. LSTM can be effectively trained to reduce the average error between the enhanced signal and the original clean signal by considering the effect of the long past time frames. In this paper, we demonstrate that considering as long as the maximum reverberation time of the database is effective. Since the effect of reverberation varies depending on the phone-class of the whole speech context, we augment the input of the autoencoder with the phone-class information of the past frames as well as the current frame and call this version of the LSTM autoencoder pLSTM. In the speech recognition experiment using the data set of Reverb Challenge 2014, the LSTM front-end reduced the WER of the multicondition DNN-HMM by 14.5%, and the use of the phone class feature yielded in pLSTM further improvement of 7.5%. The performance with the pLSTM is comparable to that of pDAE, while the number of parameters is only 1/25-1/8. Index Terms: Speech Dereverberation, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Deep Autoencoder (DAE)
Typology of trust relationships: profiles of teachers’ trust in principal and their implications

ABSTRACT This exploratory study is based on a multidimensional perspective of trust relationships proposed in the literature to classify the profiles of teachers’ trust in the principal. The main purpose of the present study was to examine the type and frequency of profiles of teachers’ trust in principal, and the implications of these profiles for teachers’ relational wellbeing and their organisational citizenship behaviours (OCB). Cluster analysis of a field survey data of 654 public primary school teachers in Israel was used to identify the profiles of teachers’ trust in the principal and the prevalence of various profiles. Analyses of variance show differences in teachers’ wellbeing and OCB as a function of trust profile. The findings and their implications are discussed.
Evaluation of immune response after moderate and overtraining exercise in wistar rat

Objective(s): The effect of prolonged overtraining on cytokine kinetics was compared with moderate exercise in the present study. Materials and Methods: Male Wistar rats were randomly divided into control sedentary (C), moderate trained (MT), (V=20 m/min, 30 min/day for 6 days a week, 8 weeks), overtrained (OT) (V=25 m/min, 60min/day for 6 days a week, 11 weeks) and recovered overtrained (OR) (OT plus 2 weeks recovery) groups, (n=6 for each group). Immediately, 24 hr and 2 weeks (in OR) after last bout of exercise blood samples were obtained. The plasma concentrations of TNFα, IL-6, IL-10, IL-4 and IFN were measured by ELISA method. Results: Immediately after last bout of exercise the following findings were observed; IL-6, IL-10 and TNFα concentrations increased in OT and OR groups compared with control (P<0.05–P<0.001). Serum level of IL-4 decreased (P<0.01) but IFN increased (P<0.05) in MT group vs. control. In addition, circulatory levels of TNFα, IL-6, IL-10 and IL-4 were higher but the IFN concentrations were lower in OT and OR groups than MT group (P<0.05-P<0.01). The IFN-γ/IL4 ratio was significantly increased in MT (P<0.01) while it decreased in OT group. There were not statistical differences in TNFα, IL-6, and IFN levels between different time intervals after exercise in MT, OT and OR groups. Conclusion: These data confirm a positive effect of moderate exercise on immune function and a decrease in susceptibility to viral infection by inducing Th1 cytokine profile shift. However, prolonged and overtraining exercise causes numerous changes in immunity that possibly reflects physiological stress and immune suppression.
Board Gender Diversity and Firm Performance: The Moderating Role of Firm Size

This paper investigates the relationships among board gender diversity, firm performance, and firm size. Our paper provides new insights into the relationship between board gender diversity and firm performance by examining whether firm size alters the impact of board gender diversity on firm performance. We use a panel data from A&#8208;share&#8208;listed non&#8208;financial firms in China to examine the relationship during the period of 2007&#8211;2012. Our finding demonstrates that the gender diversity on the board has a positive impact on firm performance if and only if the value of firm size is less than some critical value. In addition, we also find that firm size may undermine the positive impact of board gender diversity on firm performance. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a contingency approach to examine the relationship between board gender diversity and firm performance as well as shedding light on the relationship in the context of a developing economy.
Evaluating quality of experience in IPTV services using MPEG frame loss rate

Current network services such as Voice over IP or IP Television pose new challenges to network providers. Network operators need to know if their services are being properly provided. However, current quality of service parameters commonly used in data networks (e.g. throughput, packet delays, packet losses, etc.) do not show a clear view of what the users are experiencing. Thus, it is necessary to translate such measured quality parameters into a quality of experience value. Several models are being developed to cope with this problem. For instance, some approaches have used the packet loss rate to evaluate the experienced quality of an IP television channel. Unfortunately, packet loss just explains a fraction of the quality behavior. Then, we go one step further, taking into account the different MPEG frame types that are transmitted. In this paper, we have defined a model to predict the experienced quality that is a function of the loss of the different types of MPEG frames, providing a mean opinion score of the delivered service. The final results show that our model is able to better predict the quality of experience of such video services than just using the packet loss rate.