Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cooking activities recognition in egocentric videos using combining 2DCNN and 3DCNN

Recently activities recognition in egocentric videos using wearable camera is one of the hot topic in computer vision. We mainly focus on the problem of cooking activities recognition in egocentric videos. An accurate cooking activities recognition enable us to realize cooking assistance service. In this paper, for the first step to realize cooking assistance service, we make a new dataset which consists of 8 cooking activities which are depending on different hand motions and utensils. Then we propose a new cooking activities recognition method in egocentric videos. Our proposed method has three characteristic points; 1) hand regions are detected in egocentric videos including cluttered background, 2) the region around hand is extracted based on detected hand region to reduce the effects of cluttered background, 3) cooking activities recognition by combining appearance-based approach using 2D convolutional neural networks (2DCNN) and motion-based approach using 3D convolutional neural networks (3DCNN). From experimental results, we have confirmed that our proposed method allows us to recognize cooking activities with 97.5% accuracy on our new dataset and the performance of activities recognition is improved by combined appearance-based 2DCNN and motion-based 3DCNN. We also investigate the environmental robustness of our proposed method.
IntroVAE: Introspective Variational Autoencoders for Photographic Image Synthesis

We present a novel introspective variational autoencoder (IntroVAE) model for synthesizing high-resolution photographic images. IntroVAE is capable of self-evaluating the quality of its generated samples and improving itself accordingly. Its inference and generator models are jointly trained in an introspective way. On one hand, the generator is required to reconstruct the input images from the noisy outputs of the inference model as normal VAEs. On the other hand, the inference model is encouraged to classify between the generated and real samples while the generator tries to fool it as GANs. These two famous generative frameworks are integrated in a simple yet efficient single-stream architecture that can be trained in a single stage. IntroVAE preserves the advantages of VAEs, such as stable training and nice latent manifold. Unlike most other hybrid models of VAEs and GANs, IntroVAE requires no extra discriminators, because the inference model itself serves as a discriminator to distinguish between the generated and real samples. Experiments demonstrate that our method produces high-resolution photo-realistic images (e.g., CELEBA images at \(1024^{2}\)), which are comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art GANs.
Molecular mechanism of viscoelastic polymer enhanced oil recovery in nanopores

Polymer flooding is a promising chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method, which realizes more efficient extraction in porous formations characterized with nanoscale porosity and complicated interfaces. Understanding the molecular mechanism of viscoelastic polymer EOR in nanopores is of great significance for the advancement of oil exploitation. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we investigated the detailed process of a viscoelastic polymer displacing oil at the atomic scale. We found that the interactions between polymer chains and oil provide an additional pulling effect on extracting the residual oil trapped in dead-end nanopores, which plays a key role in increasing the oil displacement efficiency. Our results also demonstrate that the oil displacement ability of polymer can be reinforced with the increasing chain length and viscoelasticity. In particular, a polymer with longer chain length exhibits stronger elastic property, which enhances the foregoing pulling effect. These findings can help to enrich our understanding on the molecular mechanism of polymer enhanced oil recovery and provide guidance for oil extraction engineering.
Location-aware energy efficient virtual network embedding in software-defined optical data center networks

To overcome the Internet ossification, network virtualization has been proposed as a promising method because of its advantages (e.g., on-demand and efficient resource allocation). Virtual network embedding (VNE) is one of the main challenges for network virtualization. Energy costs of servers in data centers (DCs) aremajor contributions to the power consumption in information and communication technology. Therefore, VNE should consider both acceptance ratio and power consumption. In this paper, a mixed integer linear programming model is proposed with the objective of minimizing the total power consumption in software- defined optical data center networks by reducing the active data centers and power-consuming network components. In addition, the coordinates of nodes and delay of links are considered for a more realistic scenario. Compared with the existing node ranking method, the proposed global topology resource (GTR) can effectively evaluate the possibility of each DC node to host virtual nodes. Based on the GTR method, we propose a location-aware energy efficient VNE algorithm, namely GTR-VNE. Simulation results show that GTR-VNE can obtain up to 9.3% and 5% improvement of power consumption and acceptance ratio compared with benchmarks. Furthermore, based on GTR and artificial intelligence ant colony optimization (ACO), another energy efficient algorithm, ACO-VNE, is proposed.ACO-VNE can obtain up to 28.7% improvement in power consumption compared with GTR-VNE. In addition, ACO-VNE has better performance in terms of revenue cost ratio and acceptance ratio.
High-port and low-latency optical switches for disaggregated data centers: the Hipoλaos switch architecture

The emergence of disaggregation in data center (DC) architectures as a way to increase resource utilization introduces significant challenges to the DC switching infrastructure, which has to ensure high bandwidth and low-latency communication along with high-radix connectivity. This paper examines the network requirements in disaggregated systems and reviews the credentials of state-of-the-art high-radix optical switch architectures. We also demonstrate a novel optical packet switch design, called Hipoλaos, that satisfies these requirements by combining N-port broadcast-and-select and N × N arrayed waveguide grating router-based forwarding schemes in N2-port connectivity configurations. The Hipoλaos switch provides sub-μs latency and high throughput performance by utilizing distributed control and optical feed-forward buffering in a modified Spanke architecture. Feasibility of a 256 port Hipoλaos layout with a four-packet buffering stage is experimentally demonstrated at 10 Gb/s, revealing error-free performance with a mean power penalty value of 2.19 dB. Simulation analysis is carried out for a 256 node system and eight traffic profiles; this analysis reveals a low latency value of only 605 ns, with throughput reaching 85% even when employing only two-packet buffers. Finally, the architecture’s scalability up to 1024 × 1024 designs is discussed, along with a power consumption analysis and a roadmap toward an integrated version of the switch.
Airline Passenger Name Record Generation using Generative Adversarial Networks

Passenger Name Records (PNRs) are at the heart of the travel industry. Created when an itinerary is booked, they contain travel and passenger information. It is usual for airlines and other actors in the industry to inter-exchange and access each other's PNR, creating the challenge of using them without infringing data ownership laws. To address this difficulty, we propose a method to generate realistic synthetic PNRs using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Unlike other GAN applications, PNRs consist of categorical and numerical features with missing/NaN values, which makes the use of GANs challenging. We propose a solution based on Cramer GANs, categorical feature embedding and a Cross-Net architecture. The method was tested on a real PNR dataset, and evaluated in terms of distribution matching, memorization, and performance of predictive models for two real business problems: client segmentation and passenger nationality prediction. Results show that the generated data matches well with the real PNRs without memorizing them, and that it can be used to train models for real business applications.
Gradual and Acute Temperature Rise Induces Crossing Endocrine, Metabolic, and Immunological Pathways in Maraena Whitefish (Coregonus maraena)

The complex and still poorly understood nature of thermoregulation in various fish species complicates the determination of the physiological status on the basis of diagnostic marker genes and indicative molecular pathways. The present study aimed to compare the physiological impacts of both gradual and acute temperature rise from 18 to 24°C on maraena whitefish in aquaculture. Microarray-based transcriptome profiles in the liver, spleen and kidney of heat-stressed maraena whitefish revealed the modulation of a significantly higher number of genes in those groups exposed to gradually rising temperatures compared with the acutely stressed groups, which might reflect early adaptation mechanisms. Moreover, we suggest a common set of 11 differentially expressed genes that indicate thermal stress induced by gradual or acute temperature rise in the three selected tissues. Besides the two pathways regulated in both data sets unfolded protein response and aldosterone signaling in epithelial cells, we identified unique tissue- and stress type-specific pathways reflecting the crossroads between signal transduction, metabolic and immunologic pathways to cope with thermal stress. In addition, comparing lists of differentially regulated genes with meta-analyzed published data sets revealed that “acute temperature rise”-responding genes that encode members of the HSP70, HSP90, and HSP40 families; their functional homologs; co-chaperones and stress-signal transducers are well-conserved across different species, tissues and/or cell types and experimental approaches.
Pedigree-ing Your Big Data: Data-Driven Big Data Privacy in Distributed Environments

This paper introduces a general framework for supporting data-driven privacy-preserving big data management in distributed environments, such as emerging Cloud settings. The proposed framework can be viewed as an alternative to classical approaches where the privacy of big data is ensured via security-inspired protocols that check several (protocol) layers in order to achieve the desired privacy. Unfortunately, this injects considerable computational overheads in the overall process, thus introducing relevant challenges to be considered. Our approach instead tries to recognize the "pedigree" of suitable summary data representatives computed on top of the target big data repositories, hence avoiding computational overheads due to protocol checking. We also provide a relevant realization of the framework above, the so-called Data-dRIven aggregate-PROvenance privacypreserving big Multidimensional data (DRIPROM) framework, which specifically considers multidimensional data as the case of interest.
Secure and Dynamic Core and Cache Partitioning for Safe and Efficient Server Consolidation

With server consolidation, latency-critical and batch workloads are collocated on the same physical servers. The resource manager dynamically allocates the hardware resources to the workloads to maximize the overall throughput while providing the service-level objective (SLO) guarantees for the latency-critical workloads. As the hardware resources are dynamically allocated across the workloads on the same physical server, information leakage can be established, making them vulnerable to micro-architectural side-channel attacks. Despite extensive prior works, it remains unexplored to investigate the efficient design and implementation of the dynamic resource management system that maximizes resource efficiency without compromising the SLO and security guarantees. To bridge this gap, this work proposes SDCP, secure and dynamic core and cache partitioning for safe and efficient server consolidation. In line with the state-of-the-art dynamic server consolidation techniques, SDCP dynamically allocates the hardware resources (i.e., cores and caches) to maximize the resource utilization with the SLO guarantees. In contrast to the existing techniques, however, SDCP dynamically sanitizes the hardware resources to ensure that no micro-architectural side channel is established between different security domains. Our experimental results demonstrate that SDCP provides high resource sanitization quality, incurs small performance overheads, and achieves high resource efficiency with the SLO and security guarantees.
Effect of temperature and humidity on dielectric properties of thermally sprayed alumina coatings

Breakdown strength, DC resistivity, permittivity and loss of thermally sprayed alumina coatings were studied at various temperatures and relative humidities. The studied coatings were sprayed by utilizing three different spray techniques: flame, high-velocity oxygen fuel (HVOF) and plasma spraying. Breakdown behavior of HVOF sprayed alumina were studied up to very high temperatures (800 °C). At 20–180°C, no significant trend could be seen in the breakdown strength of HVOF and plasma sprayed alumina coatings. The breakdown strength of alumina coatings decreased gradually from 300 to 800 °C reaching a value which was only 14% of the breakdown strength measured at 20 °C/RH 20%. Increasing humidity (from 20 to 90%) decreased the DC resistivity of the alumina coatings five orders of magnitude. Correspondingly, permittivity and losses increased with the humidity; in most cases with a notable contribution due to DC conduction. The material behavior may be linked to the microstructure of coatings consisting of amorphous and crystalline regions with interfaces in between. Moreover, the alumina coatings exhibited notable amount of highly hygroscopic γ-phase which also affected the moisture sensitivity of the coatings.
Relationship between attention and balance: a dual-task condition study in children

This study explored the relationship between motor functions and attention in children aged 4–5 years. A sample of 85 children was collected from a primary school (44 boys and 41 girls). We applied a standardized continuous attention performance test, the Kiddie Continuous Performance Test, under two conditions (sitting and balancing). Data were collected from two standardized balance tests, the Battelle and Pediatric Balance Scale. There was a significant relationship between attention and balance and gender differences that may condition the way to address balance issues in boys and girls. Gender should be considered when addressing balance problems to get efficient interventions. Balance skill may be a contributing factor in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Prevalence and Associated Factors of Perinatal Depression in Ethiopia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background There is no pooled evidence regarding the prevalence and potential associated factors of perinatal depression in Ethiopian community. Hence, the current review aimed to examine the prevalence and associated factors of perinatal depression in Ethiopia. Method A computerized systematic literature search was made in MEDLINE, Scopus, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar. Each database was searched from its start date to January 2018. All included articles were published in English, which evaluated prevalence and associated factors of perinatal depression in Ethiopia. Pooled estimations with 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated with DerSimonian-Laird (DL) random-effects model. Publication bias was evaluated by using inspection of funnel plots and statistical tests. Result Eight observational studies with an overall sample size of 4624 mothers were included in the review. The pooled prevalence of perinatal depression from these studies reported that the prevalence of perinatal depression in Ethiopia is 25.8% [95% CI, 24.6%-27.1%]. A pervious history of depression [RR: 3.78 (95% CI, 2.18-6.57), I2 = 41.6%], poor socioeconomic status [RR: 4.67 (95% CI, 2.89-7.53), I2 = 0%], not living with spouse [RR: 3.76 (95% CI, 1.96-7.38), I2 = 36.4%], having obstetric complications in previous and/or this pregnancy [RR: 2.74 (95% CI, 1.48-5.06), I2 = 67.7%], and having unplanned pregnancy [RR: 2.73 (95% CI, 2.11-3.53), I2 = 0%] were the major factors associated with perinatal depression. Conclusion The pooled prevalence of perinatal depression in Ethiopia is far above most developed as well as developing countries. Hence, to realize the sustainable development goals (SDGs) outlined by united nation, much attention should be given to improve maternal mental health through reduction of identified modifiable factors. Maternal health programs, polices, and activities should incorporate maternal mental health as a core component.
Correlation between Serum Ferritin Level and Histopathological Disease Severity in Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

BACKGROUND Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the most common causes of chronic liver disease worldwide. Recently several parameters, such as serum ferritin, have emerged as possible predictors for the severity of NAFLD and insulin sensitivity. We aimed to investigate the value of serum ferritin level as a useful biomarker for the prediction of histopathological disease severity in non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), the necro-inflammatory form of NAFLD. METHODS This was a prospective cross sectional study in which demographic, clinical, histological, laboratory, and anthropometric data of 30 adult patients with biopsy-proven NAFLD/NASH were analyzed. RESULTS In our patients population with mean age of 37.9 years and mean BMI of 26.5, statistical analysis did not show a significant difference between the three grades of steatosis in the mean ferritin levels (p = 0.559). It was also observed that ferritin level did not have a significant correlation with the stage of fibrosis (p = 0.228). The mean transferrin saturation did not show significant difference in different stages and grades of NASH (p = 0.260 and 0.944, respectively), either. CONCLUSION Serum ferritin level may not be useful as a single marker for the prediction of histopathological severity of disease in young patients with NASH who are not morbidly obese.
Similarities and Differences in the Peripheral Actions of Thyroid Hormones and Their Metabolites

Thyroxine (T4) and 3,5,3'-triiodothyronine (T3) are secreted by the thyroid gland, while T3 is also generated from the peripheral metabolism of T4 by iodothyronine deiodinases types I and II. Several conditions like stress, diseases, and physical exercise can promote changes in local TH metabolism, leading to different target tissue effects that depend on the presence of tissue-specific enzymatic activities. The newly discovered physiological and pharmacological actions of T4 and T3 metabolites, such as 3,5-diiodothyronine (3,5-T2), and 3-iodothyronamine (T1AM) are of great interest. A classical thyroid hormone effect is the ability of T3 to increase oxygen consumption in almost all cell types studied. Approximately 30 years ago, a seminal report has shown that 3,5-T2 increased oxygen consumption more rapidly than T3 in hepatocytes. Other studies demonstrated that exogenous 3,5-T2 administration was able to increase whole body energy expenditure in rodents and humans. In fact, 3,5-T2 treatment prevents diabetic nephropathy, hepatic steatosis induced by high fat diet, insulin resistance, and weight gain during aging in Wistar male rats. The regulation of mitochondria is likely one of the most important actions of T3 and its metabolite 3,5-T2, which was able to restore the thermogenic program of brown adipose tissue (BAT) in hypothyroid rats, just as T3 does, while T1AM administration induced rapid hypothermia. T3 increases heart rate and cardiac contractility, which are hallmark effects of hyperthyroidism involved in cardiac arrhythmia. These deleterious cardiac effects were not observed with the use of 3,5-T2 pharmacological doses, and in contrast T1AM was shown to promote a negative inotropic and chronotropic action at micromolar concentrations in isolated hearts. Furthermore, T1AM has a cardioprotective effect in a model of ischemic/reperfusion injury in isolated hearts, such as occurs with T3 administration. Despite the encouraging possible therapeutic use of TH metabolites, further studies are needed to better understand their peripheral effects, when compared to T3 itself, in order to establish their risk and benefit. On this basis, the main peripheral effects of thyroid hormones and their metabolites in tissues, such as heart, liver, skeletal muscle, and BAT are discussed herein.
Inhibitory Effects of Apium graveolens on Xanthine Oxidase Activity and Serum Uric Acid Levels in Hyperuricemic Mice

Celery (Apium graveolens) is traditionally used to treat rheumatism and cardiovascular disorders. Hyperuricemia is considered as a predisposing factor for gout and is also suggested to be associated with coronary artery disease. In the present study, the effect of hydroalcoholic extracts from A. graveolens (AGE) against potassium oxonate (PO)-induced hyperuricemia was investigated in mice. AGE (250, 500, and 1,000 mg/kg) or allopurinol (5 mg/kg, as positive control) were orally administrated 1 h after PO injection (250 mg/kg, ip) for two weeks. After that, the serum uric acid level and hepatic xanthine dehydrogenase (XDH) and xanthine oxidase (XO) activities were measured. In addition, the antioxidant activity of AGE was determined by assessment of hepatic lipid peroxidation, in vivo and the ferric reducing/antioxidant power assay, in vitro. The extract exhibited good capacity to reduce ferric ion to ferrous ion with mean value of 63.8±8.5 μmol/g. The data also showed that oxonate treatment produced a significant increase in serum uric acid level (4.6 vs. 2.3 mg/ dL, P<0.001), liver XO/XDH activities (P<0.01 and P<0.001, respectively), and hepatic lipid peroxides levels (about two fold, P<0.01), compared to the healthy mice. AGE significantly decreased the serum uric acid level, hepatic XO/XDH activities, and lipid peroxidation, in a dose-dependent manner. Oral administration of 1,000 mg/kg AGE for two weeks reversed the elevated serum uric acid level (2.7 vs. 4.6 mg/dL, P<0.001) and significantly inhibited liver XO/XDH activities (P<0.001) and diminished hepatic lipid peroxidation (0.45 vs. 0.82 nmol/mg protein, P<0.05), compared with hyperuricemic mice. AGE (1,000 mg/kg) per se did not significantly modify these parameters. Our results demonstrated that AGE could reduce the serum uric acid level via inhibition of hepatic XDH/XO and indicated its potential utility as an effective hypouricemic bioactive agent or functional food.