Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NON-RIGID MOTION AND SCENE LAYER SEGMENTATION

OF THE DISSERTATION Online Non-rigid Motion and Scene Layer Segmentation by Ali E. Elqursh Dissertation Director: Ahmed Elgammal In the past, different kinds of methods were devised to detect objects from videos. Based on the assumption of stationary camera, the now ubiquitous background subtraction learns the appearance of the background and then subtracts it to segment the scene. In practice such assumption is highly restrictive, and to handle moving cameras other methods were devised. For instance, motion segmentation targets the segmentation of different rigid motions in the video, while scene layer segmentation attempts to find a segmentation of the scene into layers that are consistent in space and time. Yet, such methods still suffers from other limitations such as the requirement of point trajectories to span the entire frame sequence. On a different aspect, recent years have witnessed a large increase in the proportion of videos coming from streaming sources such as TV Broadcast, Internet video streaming, and streaming from mobile devices. Unfortunately, most methods that process videos are mainly offline and with a high computational complexity. Thus rendering them ineffective for processing videos from streaming sources. This highlights the need for novel techniques that are online and efficient at the same time. In this dissertation, we first generalize motion segmentation by showing that under a general perspective camera trajectories belonging to one moving object form a low-dimensional manifold. Based on this, we devise two methods for online nonrigid motion segmentation. The first method tries to explicitly reconstruct the
Salt Intake and the Association with Blood Pressure in Young Iranian Children: First Report From the Middle East and North Africa

Background: This study aimed to assess the salt intake of Iranian children, and to assess the correlation of urinary electrolytes excretion with blood pressure. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2011-2012 among 3-10-year-old children, selected by multi-stage cluster sampling from urban and rural areas of Isfahan, Iran. The sodium (Na), potassium (K), and creatinine (Cr) were measured in a random sample of the children's first morning fasting urine. Three-day averages of dietary intakes were analyzed by the Nutritionist-4 software. Results: The mean (SD) of urinary Na was 177.17 (28.68) mEq/day without significant difference according to gender and living area. The mean (SD) dietary intakes of Na and K were 2017.76 (117.94) and 1119.06 (76.03) mg/day, respectively. Children of urban and rural areas consumed similar sources of salty foods (bread, cheese, and snacks) and had low intake of vegetables. No significant association was documented between urinary electrolytes excretions and blood pressure. Conclusions: This study, which to the best of our knowledge is the first of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa region, revealed that Iranian young children consume a large amount of sodium and small amount of potassium. The non-significant associations of electrolyte excretions with blood pressure may be because of the very young age group of participants. Given the development of preference to salt taste from early childhood, and the tracking of risk factors of chronic diseases from this age, reducing salt intake of young children should be emphasized.
Robust Estimation for Ordinary Differential Equation Models

Summary Applied scientists often like to use ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to model complex dynamic processes that arise in biology, engineering, medicine, and many other areas. It is interesting but challenging to estimate ODE parameters from noisy data, especially when the data have some outliers. We propose a robust method to address this problem. The dynamic process is represented with a nonparametric function, which is a linear combination of basis functions. The nonparametric function is estimated by a robust penalized smoothing method. The penalty term is defined with the parametric ODE model, which controls the roughness of the nonparametric function and maintains the fidelity of the nonparametric function to the ODE model. The basis coefficients and ODE parameters are estimated in two nested levels of optimization. The coefficient estimates are treated as an implicit function of ODE parameters, which enables one to derive the analytic gradients for optimization using the implicit function theorem. Simulation studies show that the robust method gives satisfactory estimates for the ODE parameters from noisy data with outliers. The robust method is demonstrated by estimating a predator–prey ODE model from real ecological data.
Accumulation of polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in liver of control laboratory rats.

Polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), dibenzofurans (PCDFs), and biphenyls belong to a class of compounds, the polyhalogenated aromatic hydrocarbons (PHAHs), which are ubiquitous environmental contaminants. Due to the existence of a common mechanism of action, i.e., binding to the Ah receptor, the activity of members of this class of compounds is generally expressed relative to the prototypical 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) as toxic equivalency factors (TEFs). In the present studies we examined the presence of liver of untreated PCDFs in standard laboratory feed and in the liver of untreated rats at three different ages (60, 140, and 200 days) in terms of concentration and in toxic equivalents (TEQs, TEF x concentration). Feed was shown to contain trace amounts of PCDDs and PCDFs and control rat liver was shown to contain several PCDD and PCDF congeners in terms of concentration of congener and concentration of TEQs contributed by that congener. The total concentration of TEQs increased with increasing age in rat liver, going from 20 ppt TEQ at 60 days to 78 ppt TEQ at 200 days of age. This accumulation in dioxin-like activity was due primarily to PCDFs. In particular the congener 2,3,4,7,8-pentachlorodibenzofuran accrued in untreated rat liver accounting for approximately 80% of the total TEQ at 200 days of age. These studies affirm the pervasive presence of PHAHs and suggest prudence in evaluating chronic rat studies in which interference from background levels of PCDDs and PCDFs may be a factor.
Trust and tacit knowledge sharing and use

Purpose – This study aims to explore the impact of affect‐based and cognition‐based trust of co‐workers on the willingness of professionals to share and use tacit knowledge.Design/methodology/approach – The relationships were examined through data provided by a sample of 202 professionals and managers in world headquarters of an international organization.Findings – The levels of both types of trust influence the extent to which staff members are willing to share and use tacit knowledge. Affect‐based trust has a significantly greater effect on the willingness to share tacit knowledge, while cognition‐based trust plays a greater role in willingness to use tacit knowledge.Research limitations/implications – The data are cross‐sectional and were also collected in one organization. Future studies should consider longitudinal designs across multiple organizations. Alternatively, archival information could be used to measure actual tacit knowledge sharing and use among co‐workers.Practical implications – The re.
[Immunohistochemical analysis of P14ARF protein expression in non-small cell lung cancer: its prognostic significance].

BACKGROUND To investigate immunoexpression of P14ARF protein in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and to evaluate the prognostic significance. METHODS Thirty-nine tumor specimens were immunohistochemically examined with FL-132 antibody against P14ARF protein. RESULTS P14 nuclei immunoexpression was found in 25 tumor specimens (64.1%). The patients in stage I and II had a much higher P14 expression rate than the patients in stage III and IV [78.0%(18/23) vs 43.8%(7/16) P =0.043]. The P14 expression rate in patients with and without metastasis was 78.3%(18/23) and 43.8%(7/16) respectively (P=0.043). The mean survival time of patients without P14-immunopositive staining was significantly shorter than that of patients with P14-immunopositive staining (17 months vs 45 months, P=0.023 5). CONCLUSIONS Patients with the expression of P14ARF protein have a better prognosis. Detection of P14ARF protein in lung cancer tissues may be helpful to predict the prognosis of NSCLC.
Outcomes in patients on home haemodialysis in England and Wales , 1997 – 2005 : a comparative cohort analysis

Background. The UK national policy promotes expansion of home haemodialysis, but there are no recent data on characteristics and outcomes of a national home haemodialysis population. Methods. We compared incident home haemodialysis patients in England and Wales (n = 225, 1997–2005) with ageand sex-matched incident peritoneal dialysis, hospital haemodialysis and satellite haemodialysis patients with follow-up until 31 December 2006. Cox regression analyses included time-dependent changes of wait-listing for transplantation (a proxy for health status), start of home haemodialysis and transplantation. Results. There was a median delay of 12 months between starting renal replacement therapy (RRT) and home haemodialysis. During that first year of RRT, >50% of home haemodialysis patients were wait-listed for kidney transplantation; hospital haemodialysis patients had a lower rate of wait-listing over time [hazard ratio (HR) 0.56, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.44–0.70; P < 0.001]. In crude analyses, there was a marked survival advantage of home haemodialysis patients compared with other modalities (log-rank P-value < 0.001). In adjusted analyses, being on home haemodialysis yielded a long-term survival benefit compared with peritoneal dialysis (HR 0.61, 95% CI 0.40–0.93), and a borderline advantage compared with hospital haemodialysis (HR 0.68, 95% CI 0.44–1.03). There was no evidence of an advantage compared with satellite haemodialysis (HR 0.94, 95% CI 0.65–1.37). Conclusions. Home haemodialysis patients have better survival compared with other dialysis modalities. Some of this crude survival advantage is due to selection of a healthier patient cohort as evidenced by higher transplant wait-listing rates. The advantage over peritoneal dialysis persisted after adjustment for wait-listing and transplantation over time.
Acid Ceramidase Expression Modulates the Sensitivity of A375 Melanoma Cells to Dacarbazine*

Dacarbazine (DTIC) is the treatment of choice for metastatic melanoma, but its response in patients remains very poor. Ceramide has been shown to be a death effector and to play an important role in regulating cancer cell growth upon chemotherapy. Among ceramidases, the enzymes that catabolize ceramide, acid ceramidase (aCDase) has been implicated in cancer progression. Here we show that DTIC elicits a time- and dose-dependent decrease of aCDase activity and an increase of intracellular ceramide levels in human A375 melanoma cells. The loss of enzyme activity occurred as a consequence of reactive oxygen species-dependent activation of cathepsin B-mediated degradation of aCDase. These events preceded autophagic features and loss of cell viability. Down-regulation of acid but not neutral or alkaline ceramidase 2 resulted in elevated levels of ceramide and sensitization to the toxic effects of DTIC. Conversely, inducible overexpression of acid but not neutral ceramidase reduced ceramide levels and conferred resistance to DTIC. In conclusion, we report that increased levels of ceramide, due to enhanced degradation of aCDase, are in part responsible for the cell death effects of DTIC. These results suggest that down-regulation of aCDase alone or in combination with DTIC may represent a useful tool in the treatment of metastatic melanoma.
Clinical Outcomes for Low-Income Adults With Hypertension and Diabetes

BackgroundLong-term management of hypertension and diabetes, which are more prevalent in minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, presents challenges for healthcare providers in community health centers. ObjectivesThe purpose of the study was twofold: to examine health outcomes for persons with hypertension and diabetes and to compare these outcomes for disparities in patients who were Black, Hispanic, or White. MethodsMedical records (N = 280) from an urban community health center that serves predominantly uninsured adults were reviewed for selected clinical outcomes of primary care. Measures included outcomes of hypertension and diabetes control, lifestyle behaviors, preventive care, and patient status. Chi-square tests, t tests, and one-way analysis of covariance were used to analyze racial/ethnic group differences. ResultsData revealed significant differences in smoking status, influenza immunization, and blood pressure. Racial/ethnic group differences were minimal compared with the overall high prevalence of risk factors such as smoking and obesity. Regular access to primary care did not result in improved clinical outcomes. ConclusionThe findings support the need for more effective interventions that promote healthy lifestyle if health disparities in low-income populations with chronic conditions are to be reduced.
Inhibition of phagosome-lysosome fusion in ovine polymorphonuclear leucocytes by Ehrlichia (Cytoecetes) phagocytophila.

Ehrlichia (Cytoecetes) phagocytophila, the causative agent of tick-borne fever, is an intracellular bacterium that survives and multiplies within granulocytes and monocytes. In the present study, the possible fusion of lysosomes with phagosomes containing E. phagocytophila was investigated in poly-morphonuclear (PMN) cells of sheep infected with the agent, acid phosphatase cytochemistry and cationized ferritin being used as markers of primary and secondary lysosomal enzymes. Latex beads or Candida albicans were incubated with infected and uninfected PMN cells and labelled with the same lysosomal markers. Lysosomal enzymes labelled with the markers were commonly found in phagosomes containing latex beads or C. albicans, but there was no evidence of phagosome-lysosome (P-L) fusion in phagosomes containing E. phagocytophila. It was significant that in cells that contained E. phagocytophila, latex beads and C. albicans, P-L fusion occurred only in phagosomes containing latex beads or C. albicans. However, evidence of P-L fusion with phagosomes containing E. phagocytophila was obtained when PMN cells were incubated with oxytetracycline, which is known to inhibit synthesis of bacterial proteins. These findings indicate that E. phagocytophila is capable of inhibiting P-L fusion and that oxytetracycline depresses this capability.
Seasonal In fl uenza Can Poise Hosts for CD 4 T-Cell Immunity to H 7 N 9 Avian In fl uenza

Katherine A. Richards, Jennifer Nayak, Francisco A. Chaves, Anthony DiPiazza, Zackery A. G. Knowlden, Shabnam Alam, John J. Treanor, and Andrea J. Sant David H. Smith Center for Vaccine Biology and Immunology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Department of Medicine, Infectious Disease Unit, and Department of Pediatrics, and David H. Smith Center for Vaccine Biology and Immunology, University of Rochester Medical Center, New York
Title HIV-1 Tat Protein Induces PD-L 1 ( B 7-H 1 ) Expression on Dendritic Cells through Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha-and Toll-Like Receptor 4-Mediated Mechanisms Permalink

Chronic human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection is associated with induction of T-cell coinhibitory pathways. However, the mechanisms by which HIV-1 induces upregulation of coinhibitory molecules remain to be fully elucidated. The aim of the present study was to determine whether and how HIV-1 Tat protein, an immunosuppressive viral factor, induces the PD-1/PD-L1 coinhibitory pathway on human dendritic cells (DCs). We found that treatment of DCs with whole HIV-1 Tat protein significantly upregulated the level of expression of PD-L1. This PD-L1 upregulation was observed in monocyte-derived dendritic cells (MoDCs) obtained from either uninfected or HIV-1-infected patients as well as in primary myeloid DCs from HIVnegative donors. In contrast, no effect on the expression of PD-L2 or PD-1 molecules was detected. The induction of PD-L1 on MoDCs by HIV-1 Tat (i) occurred in doseand time-dependent manners, (ii) was mediated by the N-terminal 1– 45 fragment of Tat, (iii) did not require direct cell-cell contact but appeared rather to be mediated by soluble factor(s), (iv) was abrogated following neutralization of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF) or blocking of Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), (v) was absent in TLR4knockoout (KO) mice but could be restored following incubation with Tat-conditioned medium from wild-type DCs, (vi) impaired the capacity of MoDCs to functionally stimulate T cells, and (vii) was not reversed functionally following PD-1/PD-L1 pathway blockade, suggesting the implication of other Tat-mediated coinhibitory pathways. Our results demonstrate that HIV-1 Tat protein upregulates PD-L1 expression on MoDCs through TNFand TLR4-mediated mechanisms, functionally compromising the ability of DCs to stimulate T cells. The findings offer a novel potential molecular target for the development of an an-
Text Generation with Deep Variational GAN

Generating realistic sequences is a central task in many machine learning applications. There has been considerable recent progress on building deep generative models for sequence generation tasks. However, the issue of mode-collapsing remains a main issue for the current models. In this paper we propose a GAN-based generic framework to address the problem of mode-collapse in a principled approach. We change the standard GAN objective to maximize a variational lower-bound of the log-likelihood while minimizing the Jensen-Shanon divergence between data and model distributions. We experiment our model with text generation task and show that it can generate realistic text with high diversity.
LCSTS: A Large Scale Chinese Short Text Summarization Dataset

Automatic text summarization is widely regarded as the highly difficult problem, partially because of the lack of large text summarization data set. Due to the great challenge of constructing the large scale summaries for full text, in this paper, we introduce a large corpus of Chinese short text summarization dataset constructed from the Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo, which is released to the public {this http URL}. This corpus consists of over 2 million real Chinese short texts with short summaries given by the author of each text. We also manually tagged the relevance of 10,666 short summaries with their corresponding short texts. Based on the corpus, we introduce recurrent neural network for the summary generation and achieve promising results, which not only shows the usefulness of the proposed corpus for short text summarization research, but also provides a baseline for further research on this topic.
An Empirical Study of Cohesion and Coupling : Balancing Optimisation and Disruption Journal Item

Search based software engineering has been extensively applied to the problem of finding improved modular structures that maximise cohesion and minimise coupling. However, there has, hitherto, been no longitudinal study of developers’ implementations, over a series of sequential releases. Moreover, results validating whether developers respect the fitness functions are scarce, and the potentially disruptive effect of search-based re-modularisation is usually overlooked. We present an empirical study of 233 sequential releases of 10 different systems; the largest empirical study reported in the literature so far, and the first longitudinal study. Our results provide evidence that developers do, indeed, respect the fitness functions used to optimise cohesion/coupling (they are statistically significantly better than arbitrary choices with p << 0.01), yet they also leave considerable room for further improvement (cohesion/coupling can be improved by 25% on average). However, we also report that optimising the structure is highly disruptive (on average more than 57% of the structure must change), while our results reveal that developers tend to avoid such disruption. Therefore, we introduce and evaluate a multiobjective evolutionary approach that minimises disruption while maximising cohesion/coupling improvement. This allows developers to balance reticence to disrupt existing modular structure, against their competing need to improve cohesion and coupling. The multiobjective approach is able to find modular structures that improve the cohesion of developers’ implementations by 22.52%, while causing an acceptably low level of disruption (within that already tolerated by developers).
Real-Time Adaptive Control of Multiple Colocated Acoustic Sensors for an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle

In this paper, a novel approach to provide full autonomy in the control and synchronization of multiple payload sonar systems is described, facilitating the close-proximity integration and concurrent operation of multiple high-frequency acoustic sensors on an unmanned underwater vehicle. Recent advances in computational technology and real-time programming techniques afford the ability to process bathymetric data in situ to react to real-time environment data. The novel approach presented interrogates real-time bathymetric data to predict the transmission-reception timing of payload sensor acoustic pulses, thus permitting the ability to synchronize the trigger of the instruments such that neighboring return signals of other sonar are not saturated by sensor crosstalk.
Influence of Financial Education on Retirement Preparation in Malaysia

This paper examined the influence of financial learning on retirees’ retirement financial planning preparation. 750 questionnaires were distributed with a 53.9% return rate. Three hypotheses were analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis. The results revealed that some mediating effect existed between financial learning and behavioural assessment of personal finance, and that the older age groups had mediating effect on the relationship between financial learning and subjective perception of satisfaction with personal finance. Within this context, respondents were satisfied with their financial situation from the behavioural assessment of personal finances, subjective perception and perceived financial well-being perspective. The study also indicated that some mediating effect existed between financial learning and behavioural assessment of personal finance, and that the older age groups (above 50 years) had mediating effect on the relationship between financial learning and subjective perception of satisfaction with personal finance.
Restoring wholeness: Women’s embodied experiences in considering post-mastectomy delayed breast reconstruction

Abstract This qualitative inquiry reports on the embodied experience of women with breast cancer considering post-mastectomy delayed breast reconstruction (DBR). In a pilot randomized controlled trial evaluating an educational workshop on decision-making about DBR, a purposeful sample of eight women participated in telephone semi-structured interviews. The concept of embodiment guided thematic analysis. The decision whether to undergo DBR involved four embodiment-related themes: living with an altered body, losing a sense of self, taking charge to reclaim the body and self, and rebuilding the body and self. Embodiment thus played a significant role in women’s decision-making. Other psychosocial factors, however, may compete with embodiment motivations. Healthcare providers can help support women to see breast reconstruction as a legitimate means to restore their body and sense of self.