Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recurrent Neural Feedback Model for Automated Image Annotation

Despite the recent advances in automatically describing image contents, their applications have been mostly limited to image caption datasets containing natural images (e.g., Flickr 30k, MSCOCO). In this paper, we present a deep learning model to efficiently detect a disease from an image and annotate its contexts (e.g., location, severity and the affected organs). We employ a publicly available radiology dataset of chest x-rays and their reports, and use its image annotations to mine disease names to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In doing so, we examine whether and to what extent we can make use of ImageNet-trained CNN features, and adopt various regularization techniques to circumvent the large normal-vs-diseased cases bias. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are then trained to describe the contexts of a detected disease, based on the deep CNN features. Moreover, we introduce a novel approach to get feedback from an already trained pair of CNN/RNN on the domain-specific image/text dataset, to infer the joint image/text contexts for composite image labeling. Significantly improved image annotation results are demonstrated using the recurrent neural feedback model by taking the joint image/text contexts into account.
Learning Word Meta-Embeddings by Autoencoding

Distributed word embeddings have shown superior performances in numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, their performances vary significantly across different tasks, implying that the word embeddings learnt by those methods capture complementary aspects of lexical semantics. Therefore, we believe that it is important to combine the existing word embeddings to produce more accurate and complete meta-embeddings of words. We model the meta-embedding learning problem as an autoencoding problem, where we would like to learn a meta-embedding space that can accurately reconstruct all source embeddings simultaneously. Thereby, the meta-embedding space is enforced to capture complementary information in different source embeddings via a coherent common embedding space. We propose three flavours of autoencoded meta-embeddings motivated by different requirements that must be satisfied by a meta-embedding. Our experimental results on a series of benchmark evaluations show that the proposed autoencoded meta-embeddings outperform the existing state-of-the-art meta-embeddings in multiple tasks.
Euclidean-Norm Error Bounds for SYMMLQ and CG

For positive definite and semidefinite consistent $Ax_\star=b$, we use the Gauss--Radau approach of Golub and Meurant (1997) to obtain an upper bound on the error $\|x_\star-x_k^L\|_2$ for SYMMLQ i.
Microstructure and Chemical Composition of Diesel and Biodiesel Particle Exhaust

The complexity and large variability of transport-emitted aerosols leads to necessity of comprehensive characterization of their physico-chemical and toxicological properties, remaining great uncertainties in health effect assessments. Particles produced by combustion of fossil diesel (B0), 20% rapeseed methyl ester in fossil diesel (B20), and pure rapeseed methyl ester (B100) were sampled from exhaust of an Opel Astra diesel engine using sulfated ash, phosphorous and sulfur (SAPS) lube oil with low and high ash content. Microscopic and chemical characterization is performed to quantify the common and specific properties of diesel/biodiesel exhausts. Hydrophobic saturated aliphatic dominate diesel particle chemistry. Oxygen and nitrogen-containing functionalities are specific for more hydrophilic biodiesel particles. A full range of chemical species for individual particles is grouped by clustering technique combined with water-soluble ion measurements. Analysis of group abundance shows carbonaceous particles (soot externally mixed with inorganic salts) and inorganic fly ash (metal oxides) in a structure of exhaust, in correlation with inorganic contaminations in fuel and lube oil. Quantification of particle types in terms of physicochemical relevance supports the identification of groups which may act as biomicromarkers discriminating between diesel and biofuel exhaust and micromarkers of using high ash lube oil, thus providing a basis for correlative toxicological assessment of diesel/biofuel engine emissions.
Orbital Pseudotumor: A Mimic of Orbital Cellulitis

Orbital pseudotumor (OP) also referred to as Non-specific orbital inflammatory syndrome (NOIS) has been associated with a wide range of inflammatory and autoimmune disorders and the exact etiology of this syndrome remains unknown. The differentiation of orbital cellulitis (OC) from OP is often complex leading to delays in appropriate treatment. Timely decision is crucial as both conditions are associated with intracranial complications and result in loss of vision. As compared to the few cases reported in literature, our case is unusual due to a history of mild chronic, relapsing-remitting course for over a year, without a clear diagnosis. Diagnosis is by exclusion, based on a thorough history, clinical presentation, and rapid response to corticosteroid treatment. It mimics orbital cellulitis or malignant lymphoma of the orbit because of the overlapping clinical manifestations. Our case emphasizes the importance of including this entity in the differential diagnosis of orbital cellulitis and the need for timely diagnosis and treatment to halt the progression of disease. This article provides a brief overview of OP, critical nature of the condition, clinical clues to diagnosis, and novel treatment options (steroid sparing agents) currently available for this condition. OP and NOIS are used interchangeably in this document.
Evaluation of Split Doses of Nitrogen at Different Growth Stages of Tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa L.) for Improving Flowering and Vase-life

A study was carried out to standardize nitrogen application at different stages of tuberose ( Polianthes tuberosa L.) (cv. Double) for improving growth, flowering and vase life in a farmer’s field at Gunjanagar VDC, Chitwan, Nepal, during May to September, 2012. The experiment was laid out in randomized complete block design with 10 treatments of nitrogen in split doses and replicating thrice. The cut flower and vase life characteristics of tuberose were studied and the economics of production was also analysed. Significant difference was found between treatments of split doses of nitrogen in flowering and post-harvest characteristics of this flower. Three equal split doses of nitrogen, 33% N basal + 33% N at 30 days after planting + 33% N at 50 days after planting resulted in the earliest spike initiation (60 days) and the first flower opening (95.17 days). The same treatments recorded longest vase life (16.47 days). The longest (91.69 cm), heaviest (87.97g) and thickest (0.89 cm) spikes with longest rachis (38.77 cm) were produced by three equal split doses of nitrogen, 33% N basal + 33% N at 50 days after planting + 33% N at 70 days after planting. The same treatments produced maximum net income (NRs. 214,250/-) and benefit-cost (B:C) ratio (1.29) per hectare. Thus, three equal split doses of nitrogen, 33% N basal + 33% N at 50 days after planting + 33% N at 70 days after planting are appropriate for commercial cultivation of tuberose in Nepal. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3126/njst.v15i1. 12006 Nepal Journal of Science and Technology Vol. 15, No.1 (2014) 23-30
The Effect of Information and Communication Technologies Investments and Strategic Alignment on Greek Firms'Performance

Firms all over the world make significant investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) aiming to increase their efficiency and effectiveness. It is of critical importance to investigate the impact of these investments on firms’ performance in various contexts, and also identify ‘soft factors’ that can increase this impact. This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of the effect of ICT investments on Greek firms’ business performance, measured through value added and labor productivity. It also examines for first time in Greece whether and to what extent this effect can be increased if ICT investments are aligned with business strategy. The study is based on a unique research dataset, including data from 237 Greek firms about business performance, usage of ICT, adoption of modern organization forms and innovation, which has been collected through a questionnaire-based survey among Greek firms conducted in cooperation with ICAP, one of the largest business information and consulting companies of Greece. Using these data econometric models of output and labor productivity have been estimated based on the Cobb-Douglas production function. It has been concluded that ICT investments in Greece make a positive and statistically significant contribution to both firm output and labor productivity, so there is no ‘ICT Productivity Paradox’ in Greece. Additionally, it has been found that this contribution can be increased considerably, in the firms for which a very high degree of bilateral relationship between the ICT Plan and the Overall Business/Strategy Plan exists.
Regulation of Neutrophils by Interferon-\(\gamma\) Limits Lung Inflammation During Tuberculosis Infection

Resistance to Mycobacterium tuberculosis requires the host to restrict bacterial replication while preventing an over-exuberant inflammatory response. Interferon (IFN)  is crucial for activating macrophages and also regulates tissue inflammation. We dissociate these two functions and show that IFN-   /  memory CD4 + T cells retain their antimicrobial activity but are unable to suppress inflammation. IFN-  inhibits CD4 + T cell production of IL-17, which regulates neutrophil recruitment. In addition, IFN-  directly inhibits pathogenic neutrophil accumulation in the infected lung and impairs neutrophil survival. Regulation of neutrophils is important because their accumulation is detrimental to the host. We suggest that neutrophilia during tuberculosis indicates failed Th1 immunity or loss of IFN-  responsiveness. These results establish an important antiinflammatory role for IFN-  in host protection against tuberculosis.
Happiness and Quality of City Life: The Case of Milan, the Richest Italian City

In this paper we made use of an ad hoc survey on different aspects of city life conducted in 2006 in ten metropolitan areas of the developed word. We investigate the relationship between eight indicators of quality of urban life and subjective well-being expressed by the interviewed citizens, showing that the subjective well-being is strongly correlated with the opportunity of personal relationships, which are given both by the town physical structure (availability of meeting places, accessibility of local shops, mobility) and by the existing social organisation of life (local meeting opportunities, volunteering).
Availability of Essential Medicines and Inventory Management Practice in Primary Public Health Facilities of Gondar Town, North West Ethiopia

Accessing affordable essential medicines is an important factor to address patients' satisfaction and increase their health seeking behavior. The objective of the present study was to assess the essential medicines availability and inventory management practices in public primary health facilities of Gondar town, Ethiopia. Twenty six essential medicines were selected as tracer medicines based on the top ten diseases of the study area. Availability of the tracer essential medicines at the time of the survey was assessed. The six months essential medicines availability, stock out period and inventory management practice of the pharmacy units of the health facilities was also reviewed. The overall average availability of essential medicines was 91%. The mean duration of stock out of tracer medicines of the health facilities in the six months period was 30.5 days. The average frequency of stock out was 0.8 over the six months period. The discrepancy between physical count and stock record count of essential medicines among the surveyed health facilities ranged from 0% to about 60%. The total loss of money due to medicines expiry over six month's period was 1337.6 USD from the six health facilities. Over all, availability of tracer essential medicines at data collection period was good. However, stock out of essential medicines in the six months period was high, and inventory management problems were observed in most of the health facilities surveyed.
NAACL HLT 2018 Generalization in the Age of Deep Learning Proceedings of the Workshop

In this paper, we investigate the tendency of end-to-end neural Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models to match shallow patterns rather than perform inference-oriented reasoning on RC benchmarks. We aim to test the ability of these systems to answer questions which focus on referential inference. We propose ParallelQA, a strategy to formulate such questions using parallel passages. We also demonstrate that existing neural models fail to generalize well to this setting.
A regional peaks‐over‐threshold model in a nonstationary climate

Regional frequency analysis is often used to reduce the uncertainty in the estimation of distribution parameters and quantiles. In this paper a regional peaks‐over‐threshold model is introduced that can be used to analyze precipitation extremes in a changing climate. We use a temporally varying threshold, which is determined by quantile regression for each site separately. The marginal distributions of the excesses are described by generalized Pareto distributions (GPD). The parameters of these distributions may vary over time and their spatial variation is modeled by the index flood (IF) approach. We consider different models for the temporal dependence of the GPD parameters. Parameter estimation is based on the framework of composite likelihood. Composite likelihood ratio tests that account for spatial dependence are used to test the significance of temporal trends in the model parameters and to test the IF assumption. We apply the method to gridded, observed daily precipitation data from the Netherlands for the winter season. A general increase of the threshold is observed, especially along the west coast and northern parts of the country. Moreover, there is no indication that the ratio between the GPD scale parameter and the threshold has changed over time, which implies that the scale parameter increases by the same percentage as the threshold. These positive trends lead to an increase of rare extremes of on average 22% over the country during the observed period.
Ultrasonographic features of the reticulum in normal and hardware diseased buffaloes.

Article history Received: 29 Mar, 2015 Revised: 12 Apr, 2015 Accepted: 14 Apr, 2015 Abstract The aim of this study was to investigate the ultrasonographic reticular features in normal and hardware diseased buffaloes. The study was conducted on 20 apparently normal and 85 hardware diseased buffaloes. Transcutaneous ultrasonography was performed in standing buffaloes without sedation. The area from 6 to 8 intercostal space was examined with a 3.5-5 MHz convex transducer. The ventral aspect of the thorax on the left and right of the sternum as well as the left and right lateral thorax up to the level of elbow were examined. Buffaloes with local peritonitis, abdominal and thoracic abscesses, traumatic pericarditis and pleuropnemonia exhibited significantly lower frequency of reticular contractions than the control. There was a significant increase of reticular thickness between buffaloes with traumatic pericarditis, local peritonitis, abdominal and thoracic abscesses and normal buffaloes. The distance between reticulum and abdominal wall was significantly higher in hardware diseased than normal buffaloes. There was a significant difference in the durations of 1, 2 and total reticular contractions and the relaxation period were significantly longer in buffaloes with traumatic pericarditis (except the 1 contraction), local peritonitis, abdominal and thoracic abscesses than healthy buffaloes. Buffaloes with traumatic pericarditis, local peritonitis, abdominal and thoracic abscesses had significantly lower amplitude of 1 reticular contraction than the normal buffaloes. Buffaloes with all recorded complications of hardware disease had significantly lower amplitude of 2 reticular contraction than healthy buffaloes. In conclusion, ultrasonography provides exact information concerning the reticular features in the various complications of hardware disease in buffaloes.
A Robust Transform-Domain Deep Convolutional Network for Voltage Dip Classification

This paper proposes a novel method for voltage dip classification using deep convolutional neural networks. The main contributions of this paper include: 1) to propose a new effective deep convolutional neural network architecture for automatically learning voltage dip features, rather than extracting hand-crafted features; 2) to employ the deep learning in an effective two-dimensional (2-D) transform domain, under space-phasor model (SPM), for efficient learning of dip features; 3) to characterize voltage dips by 2-D SPM-based deep learning, which leads to voltage dip features independent of the duration and sampling frequency of dip recordings; and 4) to develop robust automatically-extracted features that are insensitive to training and test datasets measured from different countries/regions. Experiments were conducted on datasets containing about 6000 measured voltage dips spread over seven classes measured from several different countries. Results have shown good performance of the proposed method: average classification rate is about 97% and false alarm rate is about 0.50%. The test results from the proposed method are compared with the results from two existing dip classification methods. The proposed method is shown to outperform these existing methods.
An improved method for retrieving nighttime aerosol optical thickness from the VIIRS Day/Night Band

Abstract. Using Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) data, a method, dubbed the "variance method", is developed for retrieving nighttime aerosol optical thickness (τ) values through the examination of the dispersion of radiance values above an artificial light source. Based on the improvement of a previous algorithm, this updated method derives a semi-quantitative indicator of nighttime τ using artificial light sources. Nighttime τ retrievals from the newly developed method are inter-compared with an interpolated value from late afternoon and early morning ground observations from four AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) sites as well as column-integrated τ from one High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL) site at Huntsville, AL, during the NASA Studies of Emissions and Atmospheric Composition, Clouds and Climate Coupling by Regional Surveys (SEAC4RS) campaign, providing full diel coverage. Sensitivity studies are performed to examine the effects of lunar illumination on VIIRS τ retrievals made via the variance method, revealing that lunar contamination may have a smaller impact than previously thought; however, the small sample size of this study limits the conclusiveness thus far. VIIRS τ retrievals yield a coefficient of determination (r2) of 0.60 and a root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 0.18 when compared against straddling daytime-averaged AERONET τ values. Preliminary results suggest that artificial light sources can be used for estimating regional and global nighttime aerosol distributions in the future.
Evaluation of preliminary screening strategies for human immunodeficiency virus: a single center experience

Background: To compare and evaluate the available screening tests for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antibody screening test. Methods: A retrospective analysis of 331,968 screening specimens for HIV antibody test from the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University between January 2010 and April 2014 was performed. Three hundred and thirty-two cases were screened positive with the third-generation enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (3G ELISA) and colloidal gold-immunochromatography assay (GICA) and these samples were repeat-tested by the fourth-generation ELISA (4G ELISA). Repeat tested positive samples were again confirmed by western blot (WB) analysis. Comparative study was used to analyze the effectiveness of the 3G ELISA, 4G ELISA and/or combined with GICA, respectively for screening of presence of HIV antibody. Results: Of the 332 positive 3G ELISA screening samples, 189 samples were confirmed to be positive for HIV by WB. The confirmed positive coincidence rate of 3G ELISA with WB was 57.27% and with 4G ELISA was 89.15%. The difference between the 3G and 4G ELISA in HIV antibody detection was statistically significant (P Conclusions: The 4G ELISA is a better HIV antibody screening test than 3G ELISA, especially when combined with GICA. The 4G ELISA combined with GICA appears to be a more suitable strategy for HIV antibody screening test in clinical practice.
Life history of Japanese Stypocaulon durum (Sphacelariales, Phaeophyceae)

Phenology, morphology, life history and responses to different temperature and photoperiod conditions were studied in Japanese Stypocaulon durum (Ruprecht) Okamura. Erect thalli of the species were collected year‐round, but the mature thalli forming either uniloc‐ular sporangia or two different types of plurilocular structures (evidently gametangia) on separate thalli were found only in winter. ln culture, an isomorphic life history is suggested for the species, alternating between a sporophyte forming unilocular sporangia and gam‐etophytes forming plurilocular macro‐ (female) and micro‐ (male) gametangia. Contents of unilocular sporangia were not released, but germinated in situ, developing into erect thalli forming plurilocular gametangia. Macrogametangia released aplanogametes (oospores), but male gametangia appeared to be non‐functional, although flagellated cells were once formed in the loc‐uli. This is the first report of plurilocular gametangia in the species. Although the species grew well and matured under considerably lower temperature conditions than European Stypocaulon scoparium (L.) Sauvageau, its temperature requirements showed similarity to northwestern Atlantic Stypocaulon species. This supports the notion that northwestern Atlantic Stypocaulon is conspecific with S. durum.
Quality Partnership as a Contextual Prerequisite of Successful Learning of Young and Preschool-Aged Children

The paper discusses quality partnership as a prerequisite for the functioning of the institutions of early and pre-school education and for the child’s overall development and learning. Considering that child’s development and learning take place in different contexts (family, educational institutions, clubs, local and wider communities), the efforts of individuals and institutions should be coordinated in order to be more effective. The influences of various factors can be aligned only when all the stakeholders are familiar with and follow the same principles in education and operate synchronously, which can be achieved by building a quality partnership. Its prerequisite is professionalism and high level of competence of all of its stakeholders needed to ensure optimal conditions for child’s overall development, learning and education. The imperatives of thus understood partnership (at all levels) are improving the quality and interest of the child.