Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pollinators on the polar edge of the Ecumene: taxonomy, phylogeography, and ecology of bumble bees from Novaya Zemlya

Abstract The High Arctic bumble bee fauna is rather poorly known, while a growing body of recent molecular research indicates that several Arctic species may represent endemic lineages with restricted ranges. Such local endemics are in need of special conservation efforts because of the increasing anthropogenic pressure and climate changes. Here, we re-examine the taxonomic and biogeographic affinities of bumble bees from Novaya Zemlya using historical samples and recently collected materials (1895–1925 vs. 2015–2017). Three bumble bee species inhabit the Yuzhny (Southern) Island and the southern edge of Severny (Northern) Island of this archipelago: Bombusglacialis Friese, 1902, B.hyperboreus Schönherr, 1809, and B.pyrrhopygus Friese, 1902. Bombusglacialis shares three unique COI haplotypes that may indicate its long-term (pre-glacial) persistence on Novaya Zemlya. In contrast, Bombushyperboreus and B.pyrrhopygus share a rather low molecular divergence from mainland populations, with the same or closely related haplotypes as those from Arctic Siberia and Norway. A brief re-description of Bombuspyrrhopygus based on the newly collected topotypes is presented. Habitats, foraging plants and life cycles of bumble bees on Novaya Zemlya are characterized, and possible causes of extremely low bumble bee abundance on the archipelago are discussed. The species-poor bumble bee fauna of Novaya Zemlya is compared with those in other areas throughout the Arctic. The mean bumble bee species richness on the Arctic Ocean islands is three times lower than that in the mainland Arctic areas (3.1 vs. 8.6 species per local fauna, respectively). General linear models (GLMs) indicate that this difference can be explained by specific environmental conditions of insular areas. Our findings highlight that the insularity is a significant factor sharply decreasing species richness in bumble bee assemblages on the Arctic Ocean archipelagoes through colder climate (lower summer temperatures), prevalence of harsh Arctic tundra landscapes with poor foraging resources, and in isolation from the mainland.
Relationship Between the Parameters of Corneal and Fundus Pulse Signals Acquired With a Combined Ultrasound and Laser Interferometry Technique

Purpose To estimate the relationship between the characteristics of the corneal pulse (CP) signal and those of the fundus pulse (FP) signal measured with a combined noncontact ultrasonic and laser interferometry technique in healthy subjects. Methods Twenty-two healthy subjects participated in experiments that included measurements of intraocular pressure, ocular pulse amplitude, ocular biometry, blood pressure, and heart rate. Additionally, simultaneous recordings of CP and FP signals were acquired with a noncontact ultrasonic device combined with laser interferometry. Subsequently, ocular perfusion pressure (OPP) and the time and spectral parameters of CP and FP signals were computed. A system model was proposed to relate the FP signal to the CP signal. Results The system model revealed that the eye globe transfers information between signals of the posterior and anterior eye, relatively amplifying higher spectral harmonics. The amplitude of the second CP harmonic is predicted by FPRMS and OPP (R2 = 0.468, P = 0.002). Partial correlation analysis showed that the CP signal parameters are statistically significantly correlated with those of the FP signal and OPP, after correcting for age and sex. Conclusions The eye globe can be viewed as a high pass filter, in which the CP characteristic changes in relation to the fundus pulsation. The FP signal and OPP have an impact on the variations of the CP signal morphology. Translational Relevance Investigation of differences between the characteristics of the anterior and posterior tissue movements is a promising method for evaluating the role of circulatory and biomechanical components in the pathophysiology of ocular diseases.
An Empirical Study of Home IoT Services in South Korea: The Moderating Effect of the Usage Experience

ABSTRACT This article examines the responses of users to home Internet of Things (IoT) services in South Korea, which is taking progressive steps in the field of IoT. It is important to investigate the user’s response because home IoT users are the core users of the IoT business. To this end, the research model includes two trust constructs — “trust in the service provider” and “institutional trust”; two risk constructs — “perceived security risk” and “perceived privacy risk”; and “perceived benefit” construct. This study has two main objectives: (1) to establish the functional relationship among the five constructs listed above; (2) to examine the moderating role of home IoT usage experience in these relationships. The study first reviews the literature on home IoT services and describes the Korean situation. Data were collected from residents living in a smart apartment complex. They were made aware of not only the benefits of home IoT but also the security and privacy risks before they moved into their new homes. The research model was empirically analyzed with structural equation modeling (SEM) using Amos 22.0. The results show that (1) “trust in the service provider” negatively influences “perceived security risk” and “perceived privacy risk” while “institutional trust” does not have a significant influence on them, (2) “perceived security risk” and “perceived privacy risk” negatively influence “perceived benefit,” and (3) “trust in service provider” does not directly influence “perceived benefit” while “institutional trust” has a positive and direct influence on it. In addition, there is a significant moderating effect of home IoT usage experience on some paths. Finally, the study’s findings and limitations are discussed, and potential avenues for future research are suggested.
Overview of HAHA at IberLEF 2019: Humor Analysis based on Human Annotation

This paper presents the results of the HAHA task at IberLEF 2019, the second edition of the challenge on automatic humor recognition and analysis in Spanish. The challenge consists of two subtasks related to humor in language: automatic detection and automatic rating of humor in Spanish tweets. This year we used a corpus of 30,000 annotated Spanish tweets labeled as humorous or non-humorous and the humorous ones contain a funniness score. A total of 18 participants submitted their systems obtaining good results overall, we present a summary of their systems and the general results for both subtasks.
Metric Learning for Value Alignment

Preference are central to decision making by both machines and humans. Representing, learning, and reasoning with preferences is an important area of study both within computer science and across the social sciences. When we give our preferences to an AI system we expect the system to make decisions or recommendations that are consistent with our preferences but the decisions should also adhere to certain norms, guidelines, and ethical principles. Hence, when working with preferences it is necessary to understand and compute a metric (distance) between preferences – especially if we encode both the user preferences and ethical systems in the same formalism. In this paper we investigate the use of CP-nets as a formalism for representing orderings over actions for AI systems. We leverage a recently proposed metric for CP-nets and a neural network architecture, CPMETRIC, for computing this metric. Using these two tools we look at the how one can build a fast and flexible value alignment system.
ATC at IroSvA 2019: Shallow Syntactic Dependency-based Features for Irony Detection in Spanish Variants

In the present paper we describe the participation of the ATC team at the IroSvA 2019 shared task at IberLEF 2019, which is focused on Irony Detection in Spanish Variants, addressing its identification as a classical binary classification task. The approach is mainly oriented in performing a preliminary test of the importance of morphosyntactic information in the task of irony detection. For this reason, we exploited a straightforward methodology: a Support Vector Classifier with a linear kernel, combined with shallow features based on morphology and dependency syntax. For the representation of such kind of knowledge we relied on the application on the data of the well-known Universal Dependencies format.
Overview of FACT at IberLEF 2019: Factuality Analysis and Classification Task

In this paper we describe the FACT shared task (Factuality Annotation and Classification Task), included in the First Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF). Factuality is understood, following [6], as the category that determines the factual status of events, that is, whether events are presented or not as certain. In order to analyze event references in texts, it is crucial to determine whether they are presented as having taken place or as potential or not accomplished events. This information can be used for different applications like Question Answering, Information Extraction, or Incremental Timeline Construction. Despite its centrality for Natural Language Understanding, this task has been underresearched, with the work by [7] as a reference for English and [8] for Spanish. For Italian, a task similar to FACT has been proposed in the past [4]. The bottleneck to advance on this task has usually been the lack of annotated resources, together with its inherent difficulty. Currently PLN-InCo and GRIAL both have ongoing research projects on this topic, which are producing and will produce such annotated resources. This makes the proposal of this task even more interesting. The main objective of this task is to advance in the study of the factuality of the events mentioned in texts, seeking to contrast different approaches. To accomplish this task a corpus annotated with factuality information is available allowing experimentation with supervised machine learning techniques.
Adapting NER (CRF+LG) for Many Textual Genres

Named Entity Recognition is the task of automatically identifying named entities and classifying them into predefined categories such as person, place, organization, among other categories considered relevant in specific domains. This task is important and challenging, especially when the system must be able to recognize named entities in many textual genres, including genres that differ from those for which it was trained. CRF+LG is a hybrid system for Named Entity Recognition in Portuguese texts that combines a labeling obtained by a Conditional Random Fields with a term classification obtained by a Local Grammar as an additional informed feature. This paper aims to report the initial efforts made to adapt CRF+LG system for many textual genres in accordance with the proposed Portuguese Named Entity Recognition task in IberLEF 2019. We adapted the LG to capture rules of textual genres that do not appear in the examples of the training corpus and thus assist the Named Entity Recognition, even when there is no training set of an available textual genre. CRF+LG was also trained in an augmented training corpus.
Earning and Utility Limits in Fisher Markets

Earning limits and utility limits are novel aspects in the classic Fisher market model. Sellers with earning limits have bounds on their income and lower the supply they bring to the market if income exceeds the limit. Buyers with utility limits have an upper bound on the amount of utility that they want to derive and lower the budget they bring to the market if utility exceeds the limit. Markets with these properties can have multiple equilibria with different characteristics. We analyze earning limits and utility limits in markets with linear and spending-constraint utilities. For markets with earning limits and spending-constraint utilities, we show that equilibrium price vectors form a lattice and the spending of buyers is unique in non-degenerate markets. We provide a scaling-based algorithm to compute an equilibrium in time O(n3ℓ log (ℓ + nU)), where n is the number of agents, ℓ ≥ n a bound on the segments in the utility functions, and U the largest integer in the market representation. We show how to refine any equilibrium in polynomial time to one with minimal prices or one with maximal prices (if it exists). Moreover, our algorithm can be used to obtain in polynomial time a 2-approximation for maximizing Nash social welfare in multi-unit markets with indivisible items that come in multiple copies. For markets with utility limits and linear utilities, we show similar results—lattice structure of price vectors, uniqueness of allocation in non-degenerate markets, and polynomial-time refinement procedures to obtain equilibria with minimal and maximal prices. We complement these positive results with hardness results for related computational questions. We prove that it is NP-hard to compute a market equilibrium that maximizes social welfare, and it is PPAD-hard to find any market equilibrium with utility functions with separate satiation points for each buyer and each good.
Neural Network based Handwritten Character Recognition system

Handwritten character recognition has been one of the active and challenging research areas in the field of image processing and pattern recognition. It has numerous applications which include, reading aid for blind, bank cheques and conversion of any hand written document into structural text form. In this paper an attempt is made to recognize handwritten characters for English alphabets without feature extraction using multilayer Feed Forward neural network. Each character data set contains 26 alphabets. Fifty different character data sets are used for training the neural network. The trained network is used for classification and recognition. In the proposed system, each character is resized into 30x20 pixels, which is directly subjected to training. That is, each resized character has 600 pixels and these pixels are taken as features for training the neural network. The results show that the proposed system yields good recognition rates which are comparable to that of feature extraction based schemes for handwritten character recognition
Aggressiveness Detection through Deep Learning Approaches

This paper presents a description of our participation in task “MEX-A3T: Authorship and aggressiveness analysis in Twitter: case study in Mexican Spanish” at Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF) 2019. This work is focused on studying the detection of aggressiveness on Spanish tweets. For a finer-grained study of the task, we analyzed three different approaches: the first two approaches consider the design of architectures using convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Meanwhile, the third approach is focused on pay attention to certain important parts of a sentence using self-attention networks.
Determinants of Choice of Place of Delivery among Women Attending Two Referral Hospitals in Kano North-West Nigeria

Background: Women are often unable to choose for themselves when, where, and from whom to seek care. This study was undertaken to determine factors that influence a woman's choice of place of delivery among women attending immunization clinics in two referral hospitals in Kano, Nigeria. Materials and Methods: A hospital-based cross-sectional descriptive study conducted among 314 women who delivered in Kano, Nigeria. Stratified random sampling was done. Pretested, interviewer-administered questionnaires were used to obtain responses about sociodemographic characteristics, choice of place of delivery, and factors that influenced their choice of place of delivery. Ethical approval was obtained from an ethical committee. Women who gave birth within the past 12 months and gave informed consent were recruited. The data were analyzed using SPSS statistical software version 22. Results: About 218 (69.4%) women had their previous delivery in the health facility, whereas 96 (30.6%) had theirs outside the health facilities. The level of satisfaction in health facility care was also high. For those who had their deliveries outside the health facility, 37 (38.5%) of the deliveries were monitored by a nurse/midwife. The respondents level of education (P ≤ 0.001), spouse level of education (P < 0.001), spouse occupation (P ≤ 0.015), human influence (P = 0.025), and total cost of each visit (P = 0.010) were associated with the choice of place of delivery; however, at multivariate logistic regression, only human influence and respondents level of education were determinants of the choice of place of delivery. Conclusion: Most of the respondents had their previous deliveries in the health facilities and had a high level of satisfaction with the health facilities where they delivered compared to other studies. Utilization of the health facilities for childbirth may increase if there is involvement of relations, especially husbands and mothers and if the clients' level of education is improved.
Awareness of Interventional Radiology Among Clinical-Years Medical Students and Medical Interns at University of Hail

Context: One of the most important challenges facing the evolution of modern interventional radiology is its lack of awareness among medical students. Aims: This study aimed to determine the knowledge, perception, and views of the University of Hail clinical year medical students and medical interns regarding various interventional radiology topics. Settings and Design: A cross-sectional study on 244 clinical years' medical students and 87 medical interns from the University of Hail. Materials and Methods: A validated anonymous electronic questionnaire regarding awareness of various interventional radiology topics was sent to all clinical years' students and medical interns, and the results were analyzed. Statistical Analysis Used: The sample size was calculated through the Raosoft sample size calculator website. Data analysis was performed using SPSS statistics. Results: We received 200 responses. Majority of the participants (45%) agreed that their knowledge and information regarding interventional radiology was poor. Few participants (17%) were interested in considering a career in diagnostic radiology or interventional radiology. The most common reported reason for not considering radiology as a career option was lack of adequate knowledge about the subject (27.5%). Majority of participants (72.5%) had not been exposed to interventional radiology. Only 36.5% of participants were interested in doing a 2-week interventional radiology elective during their internship year. Conclusions: This study demonstrated that the majority of undergraduates and interns lack basic knowledge of interventional radiology. About one-third of the respondents were interested in doing their elective term in interventional radiology, and more than half of the participants were not interested or were unsure.
Acitretin

Background: Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a chronic, recurrent inflammatory disease of the pilosebaceous follicle that severely affects patients’ quality of life and can be challenging for clinicians to manage. A few case series have reported on the efficacy of acitretin monotherapy in the treatment of intractable HS. Objective: To assess the efficacy of acitretin for the treatment of intractable HS. Methods: A retrospective review was conducted involving all patients with HS who received acitretin between January 2011 and January 2015 in a tertiary academic medical center. All patients with HS who received acitretin, either as a monotherapy or as an adjuvant to other systemic medications, were included, and clinical response was assessed using the physician global scale. Results: Fourteen patients with HS (mean age 48 years [range 32-64 years]; 9 [64%] were men) received acitretin. Most patients (86%) had Hurley stage II or III disease. All patients had failed other standard systemic medications prior to initiating acitretin. Six patients (43%) received acitretin monotherapy, and 8 patients (57%) received acitretin as an adjuvant to other standard systemic medications. None of the patients who received acitretin monotherapy exhibited clinical improvements. Clinical improvements were observed in 7 of the 8 (87.5%) patients who received acitretin as an adjuvant to other systemic medications, with 3 patients (37.5%) exhibiting partial response and 4 patients (50%) exhibiting good response. Conclusions and Relevance: Acitretin monotherapy was ineffective for the treatment of intractable HS. Acitretin may be effective when used as an adjuvant to other systemic medications.
Knowledge, attitude and practice towards malaria among symptomatic patients attending Tumbi Referral Hospital: A cross-sectional study

Background Despite significant improvement in prevention and control over the past decades malaria remains a significant public health concern in Tanzania with 93% of the population being at risk. To prevent malaria infection and promote malaria free zones, understanding the community’s knowledge, attitudes, and practices toward malaria control are essential. This study therefore aimed at determining the levels of understanding, and attitudes, as well as socio-cultural aspects of malaria prevention and treatment-seeking behaviours among suspected malaria patients. Methods This study was a hospital based cross-sectional study, in which patients attending Tumbi Referral Hospital with symptoms and signs that warrant inclusion of suspicion of malaria, were recruited. We used a pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire to collect participants’ demographic characteristics, as well as information on their knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards malaria infection. Data were analysed using Stata Version 12.1. Results We enrolled a total of 295 respondents of which 179 (60.68%) were females. Participants’ ages ranged from 1–91 years, with a mean of 31.4 years. Seventy-nine (26.8%) patients reported having malaria in the previous 28 days, with 57 (72.2%) being laboratory confirmed. Only 52 (65.8%) individuals reported taking prescribed medications for malaria. A total of 277 (93.90%) were aware of malaria, and 264 (95.31%) knew that it is transmitted by mosquito. Nearly all participants (263, 94.95%), identified sleeping under bed nets to be protective against malaria. About half of the respondents either agreed 63 (22.74%) or strongly agreed 62 (22.38%) that malaria can be transmitted like the common cold. Self-reported mosquito net use was 88.09% (244). Conclusion Despite the endemicity of malaria in our study site, patients had adequate knowledge, encouraging attitudes, and good practices related to malaria prevention and control.