Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Filtering Out Unfair Ratings in Bayesian Reputation Systems

The quality of a reputation system depends on the integrity of the ratings it receives as input. A fundamental problem is that a rater can rate an agent more positively or more negatively than the real experience with the agent would dictate. When ratings are provided by agents outside the control of the relying party, it is a priori impossible to know when a rater provides such unfair ratings. However, it is often the case that unfair ratings have a different statistical pattern than fair ratings. This paper uses that idea, and describes a statistical ltering technique for excluding unfair ratings, and illustrates its effectiveness through simulations.
Multisensor data to derive peatland vegetation communities using a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle

ABSTRACT The restoration of drained peatlands to re-establish biodiverse peat-forming plant communities and typical habitats is a long-term process. To document this process, monitoring concepts must be found that are as operational, cost-effective and non-invasive as possible for the new sensitive ecosystems. The monitoring of the developing plant communities using multisensory Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) data has great potential. We investigated two fen sites in north-eastern Germany that were rewetted in the late 1990s. The areas were flown with a Fixed-Wing UAV and three sensors (RGB, multispectral, thermal). A multisensor dataset consisting of the sensor data, plant height and five spectral indices was classified with a random forest algorithm. The classification accuracies were 87.1 and 89.0% for 10 and 11 classes for the respective sites. Furthermore, the band importance was analyzed using the Gini index. Plant height in combination with the multispectral information were the most important variables. This study underlines the suitability of UAVs for monitoring spectrally similar vegetation because of their capability to generate 3D surface models using structure-from-motion methods and to carry different sensor systems. In addition, they can be used on a regional scale and mostly independent of cloud cover. Secondary results of the study are that the band importance can be determined by Random Forest algorithms even with few trees (e.g. 10 trees), because the order remains very stable independently of the number of trees.
An Ant Colony Optimization and Tabu List Approach to the Detection of Gene-Gene Interactions in Genome-Wide Association Studies [Research Frontier]

In this paper, a novel ant colony optimization and tabu list approach for the discovery of gene-gene interactions in genome-wide association study data is proposed. The method is tested on a number of diseases drawn from the large established database, the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium which contains hundreds of thousands of small DNA changes known as single nucleotide polymorphisms. To analyze full scale genome-wide association study data, the standard ant colony optimization algorithm has been adapted, with tournament path selection, a subset based approach, and tabu list included in the algorithm. These modifications, in addition to the use of a statistical test of significance of single nucleotide polymorphism interactions as a fitness function, greatly increase execution speeds and permit the discovery of combinations of single nucleotide polymorphisms that can discriminate cases and controls. The methodology is applied to several large-scale genome-wide association study disease datasets namely, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, type I diabetes and type II diabetes patients to discover putative gene-gene interactions in reasonable time on modest hardware.
Multiwavelets in watermarking spectral images

A watermarking method for spectral images is proposed in this study. Multiwavelets are used in computing the transform domain of a spectral image. The visual, gray-scale watermark is transformed with the scalar wavelet transform and the transformed watermark is embedded in the three-dimensional transform domain of the spectral image. The strength of the watermark in embedding is controlled by perceptual constraints and the reconstruction quality. The experiments indicate, that the robustness of the proposed method against attacks like PCA/wavelet compression is better than in embedding in the transform domain obtained with the scalar wavelets
Relationship of lower uterine segment cancer with Lynch syndrome: A novel case with an hMLH1 germline mutation

Lynch syndrome is a genetic disease that often develops in patients with endometrial cancer and is caused by abnormal DNA mismatch repair (MMR) genes. In the United States, it was recently reported that the prevalence of Lynch syndrome with an hMSH2 mutation in patients with endometrial cancer in the lower uterine segment (LUS) is much greater than that in patients with endometrial cancer, although no such reports have been published in Asia. In this study, we examined the correlation between endometrial cancer in LUS and abnormalities in MMR genes. We examined 625 patients, who were diagnosed with endometrial cancer and underwent a hysterectomy. Nine patients (1.4%) had cancer based on pathological confirmation of a tumor in the lower part of the uterus and no cancer in the upper part. These cases were compared with 27 cases of sporadic endometrial (non-LUS) cancer. The age and BMI of the patients with LUS cancer were significantly lower than those of the patients with non-LUS cancer. No differences were observed in the pathological characteristics. The microsatellite instability (MSI)-positive rates were similar. Immunohistochemistry showed a decreased expression of hMLH1 and hMSH6 in patients with LUS cancer. In contrast with earlier reports from the United States, hMSH2 was expressed in all the cases. Of the 2 patients with LUS cancer who exhibited high MSI, 1 patient showed abnormal methylation of hMLH1, while the other patient was diagnosed with Lynch syndrome with a mutation in the hMLH1 gene. This is the second report on the relationship of LUS cancer and Lynch syndrome, and the first to describe an Asian patient with LUS cancer with Lynch syndrome induced by an hMLH1 mutation.
On the use of decentralization to enable privacy in web-scale recommendation services

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a decentralized framework for enabling privacy in Web-scale recommendation services. Our framework, which comprises of a decentralized middleware that is hosted and run by federated entities, is designed to support collaborative-filtering and content-based recommendations. We design a novel distributed protocol that clusters users into interest groups comprised of like-minded members and ensures a desired minimum size (k-anonymity parameter), while keeping user profiles on client-side only. In order to aggregate users' consumption for the purpose of generating recommendations, we design a novel decentralized aggregation mechanism that protects against auxiliary information attacks that have crippled conventional k-anonymity based systems. Our prototype system ensures that the desired k-anonymity level is met, and can prevent auxiliary information attacks using a middleware of modest size, and is empirically shown to be resistant to moderate degree of collusion. While preserving privacy, our system enables effective clustering of like-minded users, and offers good quality of recommendations. Also, the prototype's decentralized design and lightweight protocols enable almost linear-scaling with increased size of the middleware.
EPA is Mandating the Normal Distribution

Abstract The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) is responsible for overseeing the cleanup of sites that fall within the jurisdiction of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA; also known as “Superfund”). This process almost always involves a remedial investigation/feasibility (RI/FS) study, including deriving upper confidence, prediction, and/or tolerance limits based on concentrations from a designated “background” area which are subsequently used to determine whether a remediated site has achieved compliance. Past USEPA guidance states outlying observations in the background data should not be removed based solely on statistical tests, but rather on some scientific or quality assurance basis. However, recent USEPA guidance states “extreme” outliers, based on tests that assume a normal (Gaussian) distribution, should always be removed from background data, and because “extreme” is not defined, USEPA has interpreted this to mean all outliers identified by a test should be removed. This article discusses problems with current USEPA guidance and how it contradicts past guidance, and illustrates USEPA’s current policy via a case study of the Portland, Oregon Harbor Superfund site. Additional materials, including R code, data, and documentation of correspondence are available in the online supplement.
Capturing strain localization in dense sands with random density

This paper presents a three‐invariant constitutive framework suitable for the numerical analyses of localization instabilities in granular materials exhibiting unstructured random density. A recently proposed elastoplastic model for sands based on critical state plasticity is enhanced with the third stress invariant to capture the difference in the compressive and extensional yield strengths commonly observed in geomaterials undergoing plastic deformation. The new three‐invariant constitutive model, similar to its two‐invariant predecessor, is capable of accounting for meso‐scale inhomogeneities as well as material and geometric nonlinearities. Details regarding the numerical implementation of the model into a fully nonlinear finite element framework are presented and a closed‐form expression for the consistent tangent operator, whose spectral form is used in the strain localization analyses, is derived. An algorithm based on the spectral form of the so‐called acoustic tensor is proposed to search for the necessary conditions for deformation bands to develop. The aforementioned framework is utilized in a series of boundary‐value problems on dense sand specimens whose density fields are modelled as exponentially distributed unstructured random fields to account for the effect of inhomogeneities at the meso‐scale and the intrinsic uncertainty associated with them. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Supporting classroom information management with SCOUT

The classroom of the new millennium will not look like the pencil-and-paper versions that we remember growing up. New technology promises to capture the information exchanged in a class and to make it accessible at later times. Blackboards and whiteboards will be replaced with liveboards and smartboards, cameras will be placed in the classroom, and students will use laptops and hand-held computers to ask questions and take notes. However, collecting the information is only a small part of the problem. Somehow, students and faculty must be able to manage this information and stay abreast of updates and changes.
A Game-based Evaluation Method for Subjective Tasks Involving Text Content Analysis

Standard test collections have remarkably supported the growth of research fields by allowing direct comparisons among algorithms. However test collections only exist in popular research areas. Moreover constructing a test collection needs huge amount of time, cost and human labor. On that account, many research fields including newly emerging areas are evaluating their result by manually constructed test sets. However test sets are unreliable because they often use small number of raters. It is even more unreliable when the task is subjective. We define subjective task as a task where the judgment may differ from individuals due to various aspects such as preference and interest but still preserving a sense of commonality. We address the problem of evaluating subjective task using a computer game. Playing the game, as a side effect, performs subjective task and utilizing the piles of game result lead to an objective evaluation. Our result outperforms the baseline significantly in terms of efficiency and show that evaluating through our approach is nearly the same evaluating with a gold standard.
Biclustering models for structured microarray data

Microarrays have become a standard tool for investigating gene function and more complex microarray experiments are increasingly being conducted. For example, an experiment may involve samples from several groups or may investigate changes in gene expression over time for several subjects, leading to large three-way data sets. In response to this increase in data complexity, we propose some extensions to the plaid model, a biclustering method developed for the analysis of gene expression data. This model-based method lends itself to the incorporation of any additional structure such as external grouping or repeated measures. We describe how the extended models may be fitted and illustrate their use on real data.
Human blindsight is mediated by an intact geniculo-extrastriate pathway

Although damage to the primary visual cortex (V1) causes hemianopia, many patients retain some residual vision; known as blindsight. We show that blindsight may be facilitated by an intact white-matter pathway between the lateral geniculate nucleus and motion area hMT+. Visual psychophysics, diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and fibre tractography were applied in 17 patients with V1 damage acquired during adulthood and 9 age-matched controls. Individuals with V1 damage were subdivided into blindsight positive (preserved residual vision) and negative (no residual vision) according to psychophysical performance. All blindsight positive individuals showed intact geniculo-hMT+ pathways, while this pathway was significantly impaired or not measurable in blindsight negative individuals. Two white matter pathways previously implicated in blindsight: (i) superior colliculus to hMT+ and (ii) between hMT+ in each hemisphere were not consistently present in blindsight positive cases. Understanding the visual pathways crucial for residual vision may direct future rehabilitation strategies for hemianopia patients. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.08935. 001
Forensic Anthropology and the Most Probable Cause of Death in Cases of Violations Against International Humanitarian Law: An Example from Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT: This study presents the results of the analysis of at least 298 predominantly male individuals, between 15 and 75 years, who were recovered from an open cast mine in Bosnia–Herzegovina. Particular attention is paid to identifying the mechanisms of injury and determination of the most probable cause of death based on the assessment of lethal or lethal‐if‐untreated injuries recorded in the skeleton. It was calculated that at least 38.9% (155/398) of individuals sustained gunshot wounds (GSWs) (plus one shrapnel wound) and may have died as consequence of these injuries. Among individuals who died from GSWs, there were 142 males (91.60%), eight females (5.1%) and five cases that were (3.2%) undetermined. One male individual sustained shrapnel injuries. This study presents an example of the multidisciplinary approach to the effective forensic investigation of violation against International Humanitarian Law, as well as an example of how it is possible to obtain meaningful results to assist the needs of the prosecution in these kind of cases despite the large number of cases and technological constraints.
Evaluating the impact of interdisciplinary research: A multilayer network approach

Abstract Nowadays, scientific challenges usually require approaches that cross traditional boundaries between academic disciplines, driving many researchers towards interdisciplinarity. Despite its obvious importance, there is a lack of studies on how to quantify the influence of interdisciplinarity on the research impact, posing uncertainty in a proper evaluation for hiring and funding purposes. Here, we propose a method based on the analysis of bipartite interconnected multilayer networks of citations and disciplines, to assess scholars, institutions, and countries interdisciplinary importance. Using data about physics publications and US patents, we show that our method allows to reward, using a quantitative approach, scholars and institutions that have carried out interdisciplinary work and have had an impact in different scientific areas. The proposed method could be used by funding agencies, universities and scientific policy decision makers for hiring and funding purposes, and to complement existing methods to rank universities and countries.
Interoperability of Context Based System Policies Using O2O Contract

The evolution of today's markets and the high volatility of business requirements put an increasing emphasis on the ability for systems to accommodate the changes required by new organizational needs while maintaining security objectives satisfiability. This is even more true in case of collaboration and interoperability between different organizations and thus between their information systems.Usual solutions do not anticipate interoperability security requirements or do it in a non satisfactory way. In this paper, we propose contract and compatibility principles to achieve a secure interoperation. Contracts are used to explicitly represent the rules that determine the way interaction between organizations must be controlled to satisfy secure accesses to resources. Compatibility relations make it possible to derive interoperability security policies.
Challenges in Evaluating Summaries of Short Stories

This paper presents experiments with the evaluation of automatically produced summaries of literary short stories. The summaries are tailored to a particular purpose of helping a reader decide whether she wants to read the story. The evaluation procedure includes extrinsic and intrinsic measures, as well as subjective and factual judgments about the summaries pronounced by human subjects. The experiments confirm the experience of summarizing more conventional genres: sentence overlap between human- and machine-made summaries is not a complete picture of the quality of a summary. In fact, in our case, sentence overlap does not correlate well with human judgment. We explain the evaluation procedures and discuss several challenges of evaluating summaries of works of fiction.
Association between Subcortical Vascular Lesion Location and Cognition: A Voxel-Based and Tract-Based Lesion-Symptom Mapping Study. The SMART-MR Study

Introduction Lacunar lesions (LLs) and white matter lesions (WMLs) affect cognition. We assessed whether lesions located in specific white matter tracts were associated with cognitive performance taking into account total lesion burden. Methods Within the Second Manifestations of ARTerial disease Magnetic Resonance (SMART-MR) study, cross-sectional analyses were performed on 516 patients with manifest arterial disease. We applied an assumption-free voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping approach to investigate the relation between LL and WML locations on 1.5 Tesla brain MRI and compound scores of executive functioning, memory and processing speed. Secondly, a multivariable linear regression model was used to relate the regional volume of LLs and WMLs within specific white matter tracts to cognitive functioning. Results Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping identified several clusters of voxels with a significant correlation between WMLs and executive functioning, mostly located within the superior longitudinal fasciculus and anterior thalamic radiation. In the multivariable linear regression model, a statistically significant association was found between regional LL volume within the superior longitudinal fasciculus and anterior thalamic radiation and executive functioning after adjustment for total LL and WML burden. Conclusion These findings identify the superior longitudinal fasciculus and anterior thalamic radiation as key anatomical structures in executive functioning and emphasize the role of strategically located vascular lesions in vascular cognitive impairment.
Enterovirus 71‐induced autophagy detected in vitro and in vivo promotes viral replication

Enterovirus 71 (EV71) is an important pathogen causing death in children under 5 years old worldwide. However, the underlying pathogenesis remains unclear. This study reveals that EV71 infection in rhabdomyosarcoma (RD) and neuroblastoma (SK‐N‐SH) cells stimulated the autophagic process, which was demonstrated by an increase of punctate GFP‐microtubule‐associated protein 1 light chain 3 (GFP‐LC3), the level of autophagosome‐bound LC3‐II protein and double‐membrane autophagosome formation. EV71‐induced autophagy benefited EV71 replication, which was confirmed by the autophagic inducer rapamycin and the inhibitor 3‐methyladenine. Signaling pathway investigation revealed that the decreased expression of phosphorylated mTOR and phosphorylated p70S6K is involved in EV71‐induced autophagy in a cell‐specific manner. The expression of phosphorylated extracellular signal‐regulated kinase (Erk) was suppressed consistently in EV71‐infected cells. However it did not participate in the autophagic response of the cell. Other signaling pathway molecules, such as Erk, PI3K/Akt, Bcl‐2, BNIP3, and Beclin‐1 were not affected by infection with EV71. Electron microscopy showed co‐localization of autophagosome‐like vesicles with either EV71‐VP1 or LC3 protein in neurons of the cervical spinal cord in ICR mice infected with EV71. In conclusion, EV71 infection triggered autophagic flux and induced autophagosome formation both in vitro and in vivo. Autophagy induced by EV71 is beneficial for viral replication. Understanding the role of autophagy induced by EV71 in vitro and the formation of autophagosome‐like vesicle in vivo provide new insights into the pathogenesis of EV71 infection. J. Med. Virol. 81:1241–1252, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
In situ study of Fermi-level pinning on n- and p-type GaAs (001) grown by molecular-beam epitaxy using photoreflectance.

We have conducted an in situ study of the Fermi-level pinning behavior of nand p-type GaAs (001) surfaces in the ultrahigh-vacuum environment of a molecular-beam-epitaxy chamber using photoreflectance. As-grown surfaces as well as the effects of a few monolayers of arsenic deposition/desorption were investigated. The measured barrier heights of the as-grown n ( Vz „)-and p ( V& p )-type samples (relative to their respective band edges) were 0.61 V (midgap pinning taking into account the photovoltaic effect) and 0.33 V, respectively The in situ deposition of a few monolayers of arsenic had no effect on V& „but caused V& p to increase to 0.60 V, i.e., midgap pinning. The desorption of the arsenic layers brought V& p close to its as-grown value but had no effect on V& „. These observations, together with earlier studies on similar but air-stabilized samples, provides evidence that As plays a crucial role in the formation of the surface Fermi levels.
Dynamique spatio-temporelle des populations de canards barboteurs et de leur habitat

v Table of content . vii List of tables . xi List of figures . xiii List of appendices . xvii Remerciements . xix Avant-propos . xxi General Introduction . 1 Dabbling duck ecology . 1 Waterfowl management . 2 Population dynamics . 4 Spatial hierarchical models . 5 Methodological approach . 7 Chapter 1 Unbiasing estimates of density dependence in time series data: a case for the use of informative priors . 11 Abstract . 12. 12 Résumé . 13 Introduction . 14 Methods . 16 Population data. 16 Climatic data . 17 Model . 18 Process-model . 18 Spatial Population Model . 19 Informative priors . 20 Model fitting . 21 Results . 21 Mean effects . 21 Spatial process . 23 Spatial coefficients . 24 Discussion . 28