Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Joint Acne Image Grading and Counting via Label Distribution Learning

Accurate grading of skin disease severity plays a crucial role in precise treatment for patients. Acne vulgaris, the most common skin disease in adolescence, can be graded by evidence-based lesion counting as well as experience-based global estimation in the medical field. However, due to the appearance similarity of acne with close severity, it is challenging to count and grade acne accurately. In this paper, we address the problem of acne image analysis via Label Distribution Learning (LDL) considering the ambiguous information among acne severity. Based on the professional grading criterion, we generate two acne label distributions considering the relationship between the similar number of lesions and severity of acne, respectively. We also propose a unified framework for joint acne image grading and counting, which is optimized by the multi-task learning loss. In addition, we further build the ACNE04 dataset with annotations of acne severity and lesion number of each image for evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods. We make the code and dataset publicly available at https://github.com/xpwu95/ldl.
Thirsty for Work: The Impact of Early Life Rainfall Shocks on Employment Outcomes in Ethiopia

Human capital formation plays an important role in economic growth and development. However, developing economies are regularly subjected to a variety of natural disasters that can have prolonged adverse effects on this process. This paper estimates the effects of rainfall shocks exposure during childhood on both educational attainment and employment outcomes in Ethiopia. Using a panel dataset from Ethiopia, I explore two separate questions – how rainfall shocks impact human capital investment in childhood (measured by education) and how these same shocks affect eventual labour market outcomes. I find that positive rainfall shocks at different life stages all result in greater educational attainment. Additionally, I find that increased human capital accumulation reduces the probability that an individual is involved in work in late adolescence, but has no discernible effect on the probability of selfemployment. This points towards a premium being placed on greater human capital in the labour market. I also verify whether other factors associated with varied rainfall might be driving the results and find that the primary results remain robust. Finally, I find evidence of non-linear effects when controlling for heterogeneity in shock severity, indicating the need for additional research to be conducted. Based on a model of human capital accumulation, these results suggest that parents in Ethiopia prefer to reinforce the effect of a shock, implying that there is low substitutability between investments across periods. This points to the need to ensure that policies are designed so as to insulate vulnerable communities from the effects of shocks and leave the process of human capital formation unfettered.
Solving Large-Scale AC Optimal Power Flow Problems Including Energy Storage, Renewable Generation, and Forecast Uncertainty

Renewable generation and energy storage are playing an ever increasing role in power systems. Hence, there is a growing need for integrating these resources into the optimal power flow (OPF) problem. While storage devices are important for mitigating renewable variability, they introduce temporal coupling in the OPF constraints, resulting in a multiperiod OPF formulation. This work explores a solution method for multiperiod AC OPF problems that combines a successive quadratic programming approach (AC-QP) with a second-order cone programming (SOCP) relaxation of the OPF problem. The solution of the SOCP relaxation is used to initialize the AC-QP OPF algorithm. Additionally, the lower bound on the objective value obtained from the SOCP relaxation provides a measure of solution quality. Compared to other initialization schemes, the SOCP-based approach offers improved convergence rate, execution time and solution quality. A reformulation of the the AC-QP OPF method that includes wind generation uncertainty is then presented. The resulting stochastic optimization problem is solved using a scenario based algorithm that is based on randomized methods that provide probabilistic guarantees of the solution. This approach produces an AC-feasible solution while satisfying reasonable reliability criteria. The proposed algorithm improves on techniques in prior work, as it does not rely upon model approximations and maintains scalability with respect to the number of scenarios considered in the OPF problem. The optimality of the proposed method is assessed using the lower bound from the solution of an SOCP relaxation and is shown to be sufficiently close to the globally optimal solution. Moreover, the reliability of the OPF solution is validated via Monte Carlo simulation and is demonstrated to fall within acceptable violation levels. Timing results are provided to emphasize the scalability of the method with respect to the number of scenarios considered and demonstrate its utility for real-time applications. Several extensions of this stochastic OPF are then developed for both operational and planning purposes. The first is to include the cost of generator reserve capacity in the objective of the stochastic OPF problem. The need for the increased accuracy provided by the AC OPF is highlighted by a case study that compares the reliability levels achieved by the AC-QP algorithm to those from the solution of a stochastic DC OPF. Next, the problem is extended to a planning
3 0 O ct 2 01 7 Fast Linear Model for Knowledge Graph Embeddings

This paper shows that a simple baseline based on a Bag-of-Words (BoW) representation learns surprisingly good knowledge graph embeddings. By casting knowledge base completion and question answering as supervised classification problems, we observe that modeling co-occurences of entities and relations leads to state-of-the-art performance with a training time of a few minutes using the open sourced library fastText1.
Information Security Compliance : A Complete Values View Emergent Research Forum ( ERF )

Cybersecurity threats and Information Security Policy Compliance is an important IS research stream. This paper extends the Unified Model of Information Security Policy Compliance – UMISPC by drawing on Schwartz’s universal theory of personal value types. In particular, we consider the values construct as a more precise representation of the person’s motivations to information security policy compliance than the factor 1 “role values” posited in the model. We also hypothesize the values – intention to comply relation being moderated by social factors as per recent theoretical developments.
Submissions Method of Injection of OnabotulinumtoxinA for Chronic Migraine : A Safe , Well-Tolerated , and Effective Treatment Paradigm Based on the PREEMPT Clinical

Chronic migraine (CM) is a prevalent and disabling neurological disorder. Few prophylactic treatments for CM have been investigated. OnabotulinumtoxinA, which inhibits the release of nociceptive mediators, such as glutamate, substance P, and calcitonin gene-related peptide, has been evaluated in randomized, placebo-controlled studies for the preventive treatment of a variety of headache disorders, including CM. These studies have yielded insight into appropriate patient selection, injection sites, dosages, and technique. Initial approaches used a set of fixed sites for the pericranial injections. However, the treatment approach evolved to include other sites that corresponded to the location of pain and tenderness in the individual patient in addition to the fixed sites. The Phase III REsearch Evaluating Migraine Prophylaxis Therapy (PREEMPT) injection paradigm uses both fixed and follow-the-pain sites, with additional specific follow-the-pain sites considered depending on individual symptoms. The PREEMPT paradigm for injecting onabotulinumtoxinA has been shown to be safe, well-tolerated, and effective in well-designed, controlled clinical trials and is the evidence-based approach recommended to optimize clinical outcomes for patients with CM.
Chronic Pancreatitis and Extrapancreatic Cancer A Retrospective Study Among 181 Patients with Chronic Pancreatitis

The relationship between chronic pancreatitis (CP) and extrapancreatic cancer has been debated in the recent years. In prospective studies, it has been found that pancreatic cancer develops in 0-5% of patients with chronic pancreatitis. Many papers describe an increased relative risk for developing extrapancreatic cancer in patients suffering from chronic pancreatitis. In this study including 181 patients with CP, we found 14 patients with extrapancreatic cancer (three of these had two different types of cancer). No patient had pancreatic cancer. It was found that the respiratory airways and upper gastrointestinal tract were the dominating locations (five and four cases, respectively), but also genital and hemolymphopoietic cancers were represented (four and two cases, respectively). Two patients had metastatic cancer with unknown primary tumor. The patients with cancer tended to be older than those without cancer. The patients with CP had a 2.43 times greater risk of developing cancer than the general Danish population (age and sex standardized comparison). The relatively large number of cancers in the upper gastrointestinal tract and respiratory airways suggest that tobacco and alcohol may be responsible, as these organs have the highest exposure to these compounds, which are well known carcinogens.
Effect of Moisture Content on the Physical Properties of Coffee Beans (Robusta)

The effect of moisture content on the physical properties of robusta coffee beans was determined for moisture content levels of 6.0, 12.0, 18.0, 24.0 and 30.0 %( wb). For these moisture content levels, the length, width, thickness and geometric diameter increased linearly with increasing moisture content from 8.493mm to 10.223mm, 5.831mm to 7.163mm, 3.732mm to 4.715 and 5.696mm to 7.015mm for length, width, thickness and geometric mean respectively. Bean mass and 1000-bean mass increased linearly with increased moisture content from 0.1045grams to 0.1678 grams and 108.59 grams to 146.63 grams for bean and 1000-bean masses respectively. Both bulk and particle densities decreased with increasing moisture content of beans from 0.92 g/cm to 0.788 g/cm and from 1.187 g/cm to 0.960 g/cm for bulky and particle densities respectively. Porosity of the beans decreased with increasing moisture content from 33.61% to 21.92% whereas surface area of the beans increased with increase in moisture content of coffee beans. Sphericity was not significantly affected by changes in moisture content but angles of repose increased significantly with increase in moisture content from 29.8 to 45.44 degrees for filling angle of repose and from 24.00 to 40.54 degrees for emptying angle of repose. The co-efficient of static friction of coffee beans increased with increasing moisture content from 0.25 to 0.43, 0.21 to 0.37 and 0.12 to 0.34 for plywood, galvanized steel and rubber respectively. The effect of moisture content on the physical properties of the coffee beans like length, width, thickness, bean mass, 100bean mass, 1000-bean mass, bulk density, surface area and co-efficient of static friction was significant (P<0.05) whereas the effect of moisture content on sphericity was not significant (P>0.05) as the change in sphericity with moisture content was very minimal.
DECOMPOSITION OF LOCALLY ASSOCIATIVE Γ-AG-GROUPOIDS

It is well known that power associativity and congruences play an important role in the decomposition of semigroups and Γ-semigroups. In this study, we discuss these notions for a non-associative and non-commutative algebraic structure, known as Γ-AG-groupoids. Specifically, we show that for a locally associative Γ-AG-groupoid S with a left identity, S/ρ is the maximal weakly separative homomorphic image of S, where ρ is a relation on S defined by: aρb if and only if aγb = b and bγa = a for some positive integer n and for all γ ∈ Γ, where a, b ∈ S. AMS Mathematics Subject Classification (2010): 20M10, 20M99, 20N99
Exploration of Woody Wall Flora on the Banaras Hindu University Main Campus , India

An observational study was conducted to explore the woody wall flora of urbanized and about a century old Banaras Hindu University main campus, spreading over 1,350 acres of land area. Twenty three woody plants belonging to 17 genera and 12 families were recorded from the walls of the university campus represented exclusively by the dicotyledonous angiosperms. Moraceae, Apocynaceae and Fabaceae were the dominant families constituting more than half of the woody wall plants of the Banaras Hindu University main campus. The representation by native species was about three times greater than the non-native species on the walls of the university campus.
Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi and Biochar Improved Early Growth of Neem ( Melia azedarach Linn . ) Seedling Under Greenhouse Conditions

The objective of this research was to determine the effect of biochar on the seedling quality index and growth of neem tree seedlings and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) development grown on ultisol soil medium. Two factors in completely randomised experimental design was conducted under green house conditions and Duncan Multiple Range Test was used to analyse the data. The results showed that neem seedling quality index was improved by interaction of AMF fungi and biochar amandment. The growth of neem seedling was significantly increased by interactions of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and biochar. The combination treatment of Glomus etunicatum and biochar 10% gave best results of height and diameter, and significantly increased by 712% and 303% respectively, as compared to control plant, while the combination treatment of Gigaspora margarita and biochar 10% gave the best result of shoot dry weight, and root dry weight and significantly increase by 4,547% and 6,957% as compared to control plant. The mycorrhizal root colonization was increased with increasing biochar added, but decreases when 15% of biochar was applied. N, P, and K uptake of 12 weeks neem seedling old was higher and significantly increased as compared to control plant.
Financial reward and motivation toward employee job performance in the hospitality industry in Klang Valley

The basic aim of this report is to identify how financial reward affects the job performance of employees. The report not only discusses the effect of financial reward towards job performance but also discusses the importance of job motivation towards job performance in the hospitality industry in Klang Valley. Quantitative research methodology was adopted in this research. The findings showed that different factors affect the job performance of employees which can be classified into two categories, financial reward, and job motivation. Apart from that, findings showed that the respondents identified financial reward and job motivation as important competencies to improve their job performance. Financial reward and job motivation are also found important not only to improve the job performance of employees, but is also considered an effective way for organizations to enhance their productivity and get more motivated to the work. It is a good contributor for human resource management to explore the knowledge world to find out which factors affect job performance and provide a better solution to the problems faced by employees at their job.
Interlinking Product and Insurance Markets : Experimental Evidence from Contract Farming in Kenya ∗

By requiring the upfront payment of the premium, standard agricultural insurance products introduce a transfer of income across periods. Enforcement limitations typically prevent insurers from offering contracts that only feature transfers across states. Using an RCT implemented in a contract farming scheme in Kenya, we test a novel interlinked product in which the buyer of the crop offers insurance and deducts the premium from farmer revenues at harvest time. Take-up rates at actuarially fair levels are 71.6%, 67 percentage points higher than the equivalent standard contract. We argue that the insurance product jointly addresses multiple potential intertemporal distortions and behavioral biases. Evidence from a second experiment and survey data show that, by removing liquidity constraint concerns, the interlinked insurance achieves better targeting of poorer farmers. ∗ Lorenzo Casaburi, casaburi@stanford.edu. Jack Willis, jackwillis@fas.harvard. edu. We wish to thanks Michael Carter, Pascaline Dupas, Oliver Hart, Michael Kremer, Craig McIntosh, Mushfiq Mubarak, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer, Tavneet Suri, Chris Udry and seminar audiences at the Columbia, GWU (Basis Technical Meeting), Harvard, IGC International Growth Week, and Stanford for useful comments. We are grateful to Noah Mambo, Mayara Silva and Rachel Steinacher for excellent research assistance and to the management of the contract farming company for their continued partnership. The project is funded by USAID BASIS and by anonymous donor, to whom we are very grateful. All errors are our own.
Determinants of Customer Retention in Commercial Banks in Tanzania

This study examined determinants of customer retention in commercial banks in Tanzania. Four specific objectives were developed related to latent variables: customer service, quality of the products provided by banks, pricing of bank products as well as services and customer satisfaction. The variables’ relationships were established through explanatory studies under positivism paradigm. The study adopted convenience sampling technique to select a sample of 200 bank customers. Primary data were collected using questionnaires and all 200 bank customers responded positively. The Chi-square and multiple regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses. Each latent variable was found to be effective in determining customers’ retention. The study discovered that academics need to incorporate quality of products provided by the banks together with pricing of banks products in customer retention models. For Bank of Tanzania, there is a need to expand monitoring and include quality of the products provided by banks to determine the sustainability of banking industry. Moreover, for the banks, there is an opportunity to customize their services as well as increase revenue and at the same time improve service quality by employing more Customer Relationship Managers to serve customers better and enhance their retention.
Perception of Cancer Risk and Its Associated Risk Factors among Young Iraqis living in Baghdad

Cancer is responsible for substantial burden on communities and more specifically on less developed countries. The incidence of cancer is on the rise due to population growth and aging, also due to increment of the risk factors such as smoking, increasing weight, low physical activity associated with adoption of western lifestyle. Around 14 million cases of new cancer and 8 million deaths from cancer is estimated to occur by 2012. This cross-sectional study was conducted in Baghdad from June 2016 to October 2016. Participants were selected according to our inclusion criteria, namely aged between 18 to 40 years and not being diagnosed with any chronic diseases. Those who fulfilled the inclusion criteria were 700 participants who completed the questionnaire. Results showed that most of our participants had low perceived susceptibility to cancer risk (62.4%), low perceived severity (59.8%), but good perceived benefits of screening (56.6%). Hierarchal linear regression analysis showed that sociodemographic factors of gender, marital status, and education level were statistically significant. Moreover, factors of health behaviour such as practice towards health and preventive behaviour were associated with the outcome. Finally, treatment control and emotional factors were mostly predicting the outcome. Perceived susceptibility to cancer along with its psychological factors and behaviour were important contributors to self-perceived health in this study. Hence there is association between perception and future morbidity and mortality, thus it is crucial for public health policy. Comprehensive health programs that include health promotion campaigns and proper health care services that deals with secondary prevention.
Hypertext Navigation with an Eye Gaze Tracker

Gaze tracking is considered to be a promising component of future user interfaces. It is faster than other pointing methods and represents our thoughts and intentions in a natural manner. Gaze tracking equipment is also becoming more affordable whilst improving in tracking performance and usability. However, there are inherent difficulties in using gaze tracking as an input device. The first difficulty is the lack of accuracy due to the involuntary eye movements, limited pointing resolution of eyes and gaze tracker equipment error. The second difficulty is the inability to differentiate between intentional and unintentional gaze. As eyes are primarily sensory organs, even the intentional gaze may be for perception only and not for performing any action. The different techniques developed to perform actions by gaze attempt to avoid unintended actions (aka inadvertent clicks). Compensating for the inaccuracy and inadvertent clicks introduces complexity in the interaction, making it slow and tiring. Consequently, existing techniques of performing actions with gaze are only considered feasible for users with limited accessibility. This thesis investigates the potential of universal gaze controlled applications by designing and evaluating gaze control techniques that are fast, easy to use and natural, while also avoiding inadvertent clicks. The behavior of gaze is quite task-specific, therefore we focus on a single popular task: hypertext navigation. First, we evaluated design parameters of buttons activated by dwell. Our main findings indicate that placing the content outside the buttons, completely avoids inadvertent clicks, and that longer dwell time results in less accuracy. Second, we designed and evaluated four techniques for performing actions by gaze in the context of hypertext navigation. Their performances were compared to the mouse using quantitative and qualitative measures. The Multiple Confirm turned out to be the best gaze based alternative, being as accurate as the mouse but much slower. Finally, the TouchEye technique of performing actions by gaze was developed as a significant improvement over Multiple Confirm. TouchEye associates hyperlinks on a web page with confirm buttons in the margin using color. Two variants of this technique, Static Coloring and Dynamic Coloring, were evaluated and compared with the mouse. Dynamic Coloring was found to be the best, with click times much faster than those of other gaze based techniques, and number of incorrect clicks
Universal Barrier is n-Self-Concordant Yin Tat

This paper shows that the self-concordance parameter of the universal barrier on any ndimensional proper convex domain is upper bounded by n. This bound is tight and improves the previous O(n) bound by Nesterov and Nemirovski. The key to our main result is a pair of new, sharp moment inequalities for s-concave distributions, which could be of independent interest.