Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning to Map Social Network Users by Unified Manifold Alignment on Hypergraph

Nowadays, a lot of people possess accounts on multiple online social networks, e.g., Facebook and Twitter. These networks are overlapped, but the correspondences between their users are not explicitly given. Mapping common users across these social networks will be beneficial for applications such as cross-network recommendation. In recent years, a lot of mapping algorithms have been proposed which exploited social and/or profile relations between users from different networks. However, there is still a lack of unified mapping framework which can well exploit high-order relational information in both social structures and profiles. In this paper, we propose a unified hypergraph learning framework named unified manifold alignment on hypergraph (UMAH) for this task. UMAH models social structures and user profile relations in a unified hypergraph where the relative weights of profile hyperedges are determined automatically. Given a set of training user correspondences, a common subspace is learned by preserving the hypergraph structure as well as the correspondence relations of labeled users. UMAH intrinsically performs semisupervised manifold alignment with profile information for calibration. For a target user in one network, UMAH ranks all the users in the other network by their probabilities of being the corresponding user (measured by similarity in the subspace). In experiments, we evaluate UMAH on three real world data sets and compare it to state-of-art baseline methods. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of UMAH in mapping users across networks.
The Overactive Bladder Symptom Score, International Prostate Symptom Score–Storage Subscore, and Urgency Severity Score in Patients With Overactive Bladder and Hypersensitive Bladder: Which Scoring System is Best?

Purpose To evaluate the correlations among the Overactive Bladder Symptom Score (OABSS), International Prostate Symptom Score–Storage Subscore (IPSS-S), and the modified Urgency Severity Scale (USS) in patients with overactive bladder (OAB) and hypersensitive bladder (HSB) and to identify the most useful diagnostic tool for classifying the severity of OAB. Methods We retrospectively reviewed the charts of consecutive patients with OAB who visited our urologic clinics for treatment. All patients underwent a detailed history, physical examination, urinalysis, uroflowmetry, and postvoid residual volume measurement, and completed a 3-day voiding diary. All patients answered the Chinese versions of the IPSS, OABSS, and USS, according to which they were classified as having wet or dry OAB based on whether their chief complaint was urgency urinary incontinence or urgency without incontinence. HSB was defined as a functional bladder capacity <350 mL and a USS of 0 or 1. Results The records of 325 OAB patients (99 women and 226 men) were reviewed. The OAB subgroups included HSB (n=31), OAB-dry (n=74), and OAB-wet (n=220). One-way analysis of variance showed significant differences among the OAB subgroups evaluated using each scoring system. Each scoring system was significantly correlated with the OAB subgroups. The Spearman rho was 0.983 for the USS, 0.651 for the OABSS, and 0.428 for the IPSS-S. Conclusions The IPSS-S, OABSS, and USS showed good correlations with the OAB subgroups. Their ranking in terms of discriminant ability for classifying OAB severity as HSB, OAB-dry, and OAB-wet was USS>OABSS>IPSS-S. The simplest survey, the USS, with a single item scored from 0 to 4, had the strongest correlation with the OAB severity subgroups.
Dry-Contact Electrode Ear-EEG

Objective: Ear-EEG is a recording method in which EEG signals are acquired from electrodes placed on an earpiece inserted into the ear. Thereby, ear-EEG provides a noninvasive and discreet way of recording EEG, and has the potential to be used for long-term brain monitoring in real-life environments. Whereas previously reported ear-EEG recordings have been performed with wet electrodes, the objective of this study was to develop and evaluate dry-contact electrode ear-EEG. Methods: To achieve a well-functioning dry-contact interface, a new ear-EEG platform was developed. The platform comprised actively shielded and nanostructured electrodes embedded in an individualized soft-earpiece. The platform was evaluated in a study of 12 subjects and four EEG paradigms: auditory steady-state response, steady-state visual evoked potential, mismatch negativity, and alpha-band modulation. Results: Recordings from the prototyped dry-contact ear-EEG platform were compared to conventional scalp EEG recordings. When all electrodes were referenced to a common scalp electrode (Cz), the performance was on par with scalp EEG measured close to the ear. With both the measuring electrode and the reference electrode located within the ear, statistically significant (p < 0.05) responses were measured for all paradigms, although for mismatch negativity, it was necessary to use a reference located in the opposite ear, to obtain a statistically significant response. Conclusion: The study demonstrated that dry-contact electrode ear-EEG is a feasible technology for EEG recording. Significance: The prototyped dry-contact ear-EEG platform represents an important technological advancement of the method in terms of user-friendliness, because it eliminates the need for gel in the electrode-skin interface.
Computer-Aided Theragnosis Based on Tumor Volumetric Information in Breast Cancer

<italic>Objective:</italic> A computer-assisted technology has recently been proposed for the assessment of therapeutic responses to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with locally advanced breast cancer (LABC). The system, however, extracted features from individual scans in a tumor irrespective of its relation to the other scans of the same patient, ignoring the volumetric information. This study addresses this problem by introducing a novel engineered texton-based method in order to account for volumetric information in the design of textural descriptors to represent tumor scans. <italic>Methods:</italic> A noninvasive computer-aided-theragnosis (CAT) system was developed by employing multiparametric QUS spectral and backscatter coefficient maps. The proceeding was composed of two subdictionaries: one built on the “pretreatment” and another on “week <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${N}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>” scans, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${N}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> was 1, 4, or 8. The learned dictionary of each patient was subsequently used to compute the model (histogram of textons) for each scan of the patient. Advanced machine learning techniques including a kernel-based dissimilarity measure to estimate the distances between “pretreatment” and “mid-treatment” scans as an indication of treatment effectiveness, learning from imbalanced data, and supervised learning were subsequently employed on the texton-based features. <italic>Results:</italic> The performance of the CAT system was tested using statistical tests of significance and leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) classification on 56 LABC patients. The proposed texton-based CAT system indicated significant differences in changes between the responding and nonresponding patient populations and achieved high accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity in discriminating between the two patient groups early after the start of treatment, i.e., on weeks 1 and 4 of several months of treatment. Specifically, the CAT system achieved the area under curve of 0.81, 0.83, and 0.85 on weeks 1, 4, and 8, respectively. <italic>Conclusion:</italic> The proposed texton-based CAT system accounted for the volumetric information in “pretreatment” and “mid-treatment” scans of each patient. It was demonstrated that this attribute of the CAT system could boost its performance compared to the cases that the features were extracted from solely individual scans.
Silk structure rather than tensile mechanics explains web performance in the moth‐specialized spider, Cyrtarachne

Orb webs intercept and retain prey so spiders may subdue them. Orb webs are composed of sticky, compliant spirals of capture silk spun across strong, stiff major ampullate silk threads. Interplay between differences in the mechanical properties of these silks is crucial for prey capture. Most orb webs depend upon insects contacting several radial and capture threads for successful retention. Moths, however, escape quickly from most orb webs due to the sacrificial scales covering their bodies. Cyrtarachne orb webs are unusual as they contain a reduced number of capture threads and moths stick unusually well to single threads. We aimed to determine how the tensile properties of the capture spiral and radial threads spun by Cyrtarachne operate in retention of moth prey. A NanoBionix UTM was used to quantify the material properties of flagelliform and major ampullate threads to test if Cyrtarachne's reduced web architecture is accompanied by improvements in tensile performance of its silk. Silk threads showed tensile properties typical of less-specialized orb-weavers, with the exception of high extensibility in radial threads. Radial thread diameters were 62.5% smaller than flagelliform threads, where commonly the two are roughly similar. We utilized our tensile data to create a finite element model of Cyrtarachne's web to investigate energy dissipation during prey impact. Large cross-sectional area of the flagelliform threads played a key role in enabling single capture threads to withstand prey impact. Rather than extraordinary silk, Cyrtarachne utilizes structural changes in the size and attachment of silk threads to facilitate web function.
Ordinal Constraint Binary Coding for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Binary code learning, <italic>a.k. a. </italic> hashing, has been successfully applied to the approximate nearest neighbor search in large-scale image collections. The key challenge lies in reducing the quantization error from the original real-valued feature space to a discrete Hamming space. Recent advances in unsupervised hashing advocate the preservation of ranking information, which is achieved by constraining the binary code learning to be correlated with pairwise similarity. However, few unsupervised methods consider the preservation of <italic>ordinal relations</italic> in the learning process, which serves as a more basic cue to learn optimal binary codes. In this paper, we propose a novel hashing scheme, termed Ordinal Constraint Hashing (OCH), which embeds the ordinal relation among data points to preserve ranking into binary codes. The core idea is to construct an ordinal graph via tensor product, and then train the hash function over this graph to preserve the permutation relations among data points in the Hamming space. Subsequently, an in-depth acceleration scheme, termed Ordinal Constraint Projection (OCP), is introduced, which approximates the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="ji-ieq1-2819978.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-pair ordinal graph by <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="ji-ieq2-2819978.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-pair anchor-based ordinal graph, and reduce the corresponding complexity from <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n^4)$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="ji-ieq3-2819978.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(L^3)$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="ji-ieq4-2819978.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L\ll n$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="ji-ieq5-2819978.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>). Finally, to make the optimization tractable, we further relax the discrete constrains and design a customized stochastic gradient decent algorithm on the Stiefel manifold. Experimental results on serval large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed OCH method can achieve superior performance over the state-of-the-art approaches.
Shadow Accrual Maps: Efficient Accumulation of City-Scale Shadows Over Time

Large scale shadows from buildings in a city play an important role in determining the environmental quality of public spaces. They can be both beneficial, such as for pedestrians during summer, and detrimental, by impacting vegetation and by blocking direct sunlight. Determining the effects of shadows requires the accumulation of shadows over time across different periods in a year. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient class of approach that uses the properties of sun movement to track the changing position of shadows within a fixed time interval. We use this approach to extend two commonly used shadow techniques, shadow maps and ray tracing, and demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. Our technique is used to develop an interactive visual analysis system, Shadow Profiler, targeted at city planners and architects that allows them to test the impact of shadows for different development scenarios. We validate the usefulness of this system through case studies set in Manhattan, a dense borough of New York City.
Roles of PIP2 in the membrane binding of MIM I‐BAR: insights from molecular dynamics simulations

In order to probe the roles of PIP2 in the interactions between MIM I‐BAR and model membranes, we performed a series of 10 μs‐scale coarse‐grained molecular dynamics simulations. Our results indicate that PIP2 plays predominant roles in the membrane binding of MIM I‐BAR in a concentration‐dependent manner and via electrostatic interactions. Besides, we find that the occurrence of the membrane curvature may induce the re‐distribution of lipids in the membrane and result in the local enrichment of PIP2 at negatively curved membrane areas. Combining these roles of PIP2 in the membrane binding of MIM I‐BAR helps explain how MIM I‐BAR senses negative curvature and, thus, contributes to maintaining membrane protrusions.
Antifungal stilbene impregnation: transport and distribution on the micron-level

Abstract The transition from the living water-transporting sapwood to heartwood involves in many tree species impregnation with extractives. These differ in amount and composition, and enhance resistance against bacteria, insects or fungi. To understand the synthesis, transport and impregnation processes new insights into the biochemical processes are needed by in-situ methods. Here we show the extractive distribution in pine (Pinus sylvestris) microsections with a high lateral resolution sampled in a non-destructive manner using Confocal Raman Microscopy. Integrating marker bands of stilbenes and lipids enables to clearly track the rapid change from sapwood to heartwood within one tree ring. The higher impregnation of the cell corner, compound middle lamella, the S3 layer and pits reveals the optimization of decay resistance on the micron-level. Furthermore, deposits with changing chemical composition are elucidated in the rays and lumen of the tracheids. The spectral signature of these deposits shows the co-location of lipids and pinosylvins with changing ratios from the living to the dead tissue. The results demonstrate that the extractive impregnation on the micro- and nano-level is optimized by a symbiotic relationship of lipids and pinosylvins to enhance the tree’s resistance and lifetime.
Aggregation characteristics of protein during wheat flour maturation.

BACKGROUND The protein aggregation characteristics of three types of freshly milled wheat flour with high, medium or low gluten were investigated during 90 days of maturation. Changes in the content and particle size of the glutenin macropolymer (GMP), contents of sulfhydryl groups and disulfide bonds (SS), and secondary structure and molecular weight distribution of the protein were determined. RESULTS For high, medium and low gluten flour, GMP content increased to 22.25, 13.72 and 10.32 g kg-1 ; free sulfhydryl group content decreased by 5.5%, 4.1% and 4.4%; and SS content increased by 1.6%, 1.8% and 2%, respectively. The proportion of β-sheet and random coil increased, and the proportion of α-helix and β-turns decreased. The polymeric protein content increased, whereas that of gliadin decreased. CONCLUSION Protein aggregation mediated by SS cross-linking helped develop a stronger gluten network. The findings provide theoretical support for the changes in protein structure during flour maturation and also help to predict the quality of wheat flour and its products. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry.
Reset Controller Design Based on Error Minimization for a Lane Change Maneuver

An intelligent vehicle must face a wide variety of situations ranging from safe and comfortable to more aggressive ones. Smooth maneuvers are adequately addressed by means of linear control, whereas more aggressive maneuvers are tackled by nonlinear techniques. Likewise, there exist intermediate scenarios where the required responses are smooth but constrained in some way (rise time, settling time, overshoot). Due to the existence of the fundamental linear limitations, which impose restrictions on the attainable time-domain and frequency-domain performance, linear systems cannot provide smoothness while operating in compliance with the previous restrictions. For this reason, this article aims to explore the effects of reset control on the alleviation of these limitations for a lane change maneuver under a set of demanding design conditions to guarantee a suitable ride quality and a swift response. To this end, several reset strategies are considered, determining the best reset condition to apply as well as the magnitude thereto. Concerning the reset condition that triggers the reset action, three strategies are considered: zero crossing of the controller input, fixed reset band and variable reset band. As far as the magnitude of the reset action is concerned, a full-reset technique is compared to a Lyapunov-based error minimization method to calculate the optimal reset percentage. The base linear controller subject to the reset action is searched via genetic algorithms. The proposed controllers are validated by means of CarSim.
Event-Driven Stereo Visual Tracking Algorithm to Solve Object Occlusion

Object tracking is a major problem for many computer vision applications, but it continues to be computationally expensive. The use of bio-inspired neuromorphic event-driven dynamic vision sensors (DVSs) has heralded new methods for vision processing, exploiting reduced amount of data and very precise timing resolutions. Previous studies have shown these neural spiking sensors to be well suited to implementing single-sensor object tracking systems, although they experience difficulties when solving ambiguities caused by object occlusion. DVSs have also performed well in 3-D reconstruction in which event matching techniques are applied in stereo setups. In this paper, we propose a new event-driven stereo object tracking algorithm that simultaneously integrates 3-D reconstruction and cluster tracking, introducing feedback information in both tasks to improve their respective performances. This algorithm, inspired by human vision, identifies objects and learns their position and size in order to solve ambiguities. This strategy has been validated in four different experiments where the 3-D positions of two objects were tracked in a stereo setup even when occlusion occurred. The objects studied in the experiments were: 1) two swinging pens, the distance between which during movement was measured with an error of less than 0.5%; 2) a pen and a box, to confirm the correctness of the results obtained with a more complex object; 3) two straws attached to a fan and rotating at 6 revolutions per second, to demonstrate the high-speed capabilities of this approach; and 4) two people walking in a real-world environment.
Dose-response of Cotton Dust Exposure with Lung Function among Textile Workers: MultiTex Study in Karachi, Pakistan

Background: Cotton dust exposure among textile mill workers lead to impaired lung function. However, only few studies have investigated the dose-response relationship between cotton dust and lung function. Objective: To determine the dose-response relationship between cotton dust exposure and lung function among textile workers. Methods: This cross-sectional survey was conducted from January to March 2016 and included 303 adult male textile workers from spinning and weaving sections of 5 mills in Karachi, Pakistan. We collected data through a translated version of the American Thoracic Society respiratory questionnaire (ATS-DLD-78A) and using spirometry. Mill-level airborne cotton dust was measured over an 8–12-hour shift through UCB-PATS (University of California, Berkeley-Particle, and Temperature Monitoring System). Multiple linear regression was used to determine the association between cotton dust exposure and lung function assessed through the 3 indices: forced expiratory volume in the first second (FEV1), forced vital capacity (FVC), and their ratio (FEV1/FVC). Results: The mean age of the workers was 32.5 (SD 10.5) years. The mean spirometry indices expressed in percent predicted values were FEV1 82.6 (SD 14.0); FVC 90.3 (14.7), and FEV1/FVC 94.9 (10.5). The median cotton dust concentration was 0.61 (IQR 0.2 to 1.3) mg/m3. The frequency of respiratory symptoms was 15% for cough, 20% for phlegm, and 20% for wheezing. After adjustment for covariates, every mg/m3 increase in dust concentration was associated with 5.4% decline in FEV1. Conclusion: This study quantifies the exposure-dependent relationship between cotton dust and lung function; which has implications for regulations and standards in the textile industry in Pakistan and similar cotton-processing countries.
Comparison of the efficacy of 0.03% tacrolimus eye drops diluted in olive oil and linseed oil for the treatment of keratoconjunctivitis sicca in dogs.

OBJECTIVE To compare the efficacy of 0.03% tacrolimus eye drops diluted in two different vehicles (linseed oil and olive oil) for the treatment of keratoconjunctivitis sicca (KCS) in dogs. METHODS This study included 60 dogs. Of this group, 20 were healthy and allocated to the control group, and 40 were diagnosed with bilateral KCS and randomly allocated to either the TO (tacrolimus in olive oil) or the TL (tacrolimus in linseed oil) groups. Ophthalmic examinations, Schirmer Tear Test-1 (STT-1), Tear Film Break-up Time (TBUT) and Fluorescein Test (FT) were carried out monthly, along with cytological and histopathological examinations at the beginning and end of the study. RESULTS The clinical signs, corneal ulcers, Schirmer Tear Test-1 values, and Tear Film Break-up Time values improved in both groups after one month of treatment. Cytological examination at the end of the study showed decreased lymphocytes, neutrophil, metaplastic, and squamous cell counts in both groups, while the histopathological analysis showed decreases in lymphocytes and neutrophils and an increase in goblet cell density (cells/mm2). The decreases in neutrophil count were more significant (p<0.05) in the TL group for both types of examination. CONCLUSION In sum, 0.03% tacrolimus eye drops diluted in olive oil and linseed oil were effective in the treatment of keratoconjunctivitis sicca. None of the evaluated parameters differed significantly between the two groups, except for neutrophil count which was significantly lower in the TL group. Thus, linseed oil may be considered as an alternative diluent for tacrolimus eye drops.