Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Data Imputation for Regional Traffic Index Based on GSO-NN

The incomplete traffic data in urban road networks greatly affect the quality and performance of traffic information platform. The importance of effectively imputing the missing values emerges. The paper introduces a three-layer feed-forward neural network to missing traffic index prediction, where the group search optimization (GSO) is proposed to optimize the connection weights and thresholds to solve the problem of falling into the local optima. It is the first time to apply the technique to missing data imputation. Simulations are presented to demonstrate the accuracies and effectiveness of the proposed methodologies. This reveals that it is a promising approach in missing data prediction.
Large-Scale Feature Learning With Spike-and-Slab Sparse Coding

We consider the problem of object recognition with a large number of classes. In order to overcome the low amount of labeled examples available in this setting, we introduce a new feature learning and extraction procedure based on a factor model we call spike-and-slab sparse coding (S3C). Prior work on S3C has not prioritized the ability to exploit parallel architectures and scale S3C to the enormous problem sizes needed for object recognition. We present a novel inference procedure for appropriate for use with GPUs which allows us to dramatically increase both the training set size and the amount of latent factors that S3C may be trained with. We demonstrate that this approach improves upon the supervised learning capabilities of both sparse coding and the spike-and-slab Restricted Boltzmann Machine (ssRBM) on the CIFAR-10 dataset. We use the CIFAR-100 dataset to demonstrate that our method scales to large numbers of classes better than previous methods. Finally, we use our method to win the NIPS 2011 Workshop on Challenges In Learning Hierarchical Models' Transfer Learning Challenge.
A comprehensive user interactive simulation tool for smart home application

With the development of the smart grid combined with the fluctuating nature of electricity market, demand-side management with controllable loads has grown. This paper presents a comprehensive user interactive simulation tool based on previously proposed hardware designs of a smart home energy management system (SHEMS). The simulation focuses on implementing optimal control strategies onto predominant loads including electrical water heater (EWH), electric vehicle (EV) charging station, etc. Most importantly, this simulation provides an easy and user-friendly user interface, which allows users to customize the simulation as the situation in their daily lives. This way, the simulation results will not only show the significant amount electricity payment reduced by SHEMS, but also increase the awareness of SHEMS to the public.
Understanding Kin Relationships in a Photo

There is an urgent need to organize and manage images of people automatically due to the recent explosion of such data on the Web in general and in social media in particular. Beyond face detection and face recognition, which have been extensively studied over the past decade, perhaps the most interesting aspect related to human-centered images is the relationship of people in the image. In this work, we focus on a novel solution to the latter problem, in particular the kin relationships. To this end, we constructed two databases: the first one named UB KinFace Ver2.0, which consists of images of children, their young parents and old parents, and the second one named FamilyFace. Next, we develop a transfer subspace learning based algorithm in order to reduce the significant differences in the appearance distributions between children and old parents facial images. Moreover, by exploring the semantic relevance of the associated metadata, we propose an algorithm to predict the most likely kin relationships embedded in an image. In addition, human subjects are used in a baseline study on both databases. Experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithms can effectively annotate the kin relationships among people in an image and semantic context can further improve the accuracy.
Impaired Hepatic Ketogenesis in Moderately Obese Men With Hypertriglyceridemia

Background Several studies suggest that increased nonesterified fatty acid flux and increased de novo lipogenesis may contribute to hypertriglyceridemia, but few studies have examined fatty acid oxidation as a factor. Rationale Endogenous hypertriglyceridemia (increased very low density lipoprotein triglyceride) could result from (a) re-esterification of excess nonesterified fatty acids entering the liver, (b) activation of hepatic lipogenesis, and/or (c) defective oxidation of hepatic fatty acids leading to greater triglyceride synthesis. Therefore, this study used plasma levels of 3-hydroxybutyrate as a marker for fatty acid oxidation. The study was carried out in hypertriglyceridemic and normotriglyceridemic subjects under 3 conditions: (a) in the fasting state, (b) after a fatty meal that should enhance fatty acid oxidation, and (c) after an oxandrolone challenge, which we recently showed increases fatty acid oxidation. Results In the fasting state, 3-hydroxybutyrate concentrations in hypertriglyceridemic patients were only 53% of levels in normotriglyceridemic subjects. After a fatty meal, moderate increases in 3-hydroxybutyrate were observed, but values for patients with hypertriglceridemia remained 62% of the levels in the normotriglyceridemic group. A similar pattern of response was observed with oxandrolone challenge. There were no significant changes in fasting or postprandial levels of nonesterfified fatty acids, glycerol, or triglycerides before and during the oxandrolone challenge. Conclusion Patients with endogenous hypertriglyceridemia seem to have a defect in fatty acid oxidation as indicated by reduced levels of 3-hydroxybutyrate. This defect was observed during fasting, postprandially, and during oxandrolone challenge. We propose that this defect contributes to the development of hypertriglyceridemia.
Acoustic sensor arrays for understanding bird communication. Identifying Cassin's Vireos using SVMs and HMMs

In this paper, we present a series of experiments on the automated classification of Cassin’s Vireo individuals from song phrases using support vector machines and from sequences of song phrases using hidden Markov models. Experimental results show that accurate classification of bird individuals can be achieved using these two different levels of description of bird songs.
Cultured skin substitutes reduce requirements for harvesting of skin autograft for closure of excised, full-thickness burns.

BACKGROUND Rapid and effective closure of full-thickness burn wounds remains a limiting factor in burns of greater than 50% of the total body surface area (TBSA). Hypothetically, cultured skin substitutes (CSS) consisting of autologous cultured keratinocytes and fibroblasts attached to collagen-based sponges may reduce requirements for donor skin, and morbidity from autograft harvesting and widely-meshed skin grafts. METHODS To test this hypothesis, CSS were prepared from split-thickness skin biopsies collected after enrollment of 40 burn patients by informed consent into a study protocol approved by the local Institutional Review Boards of three participating hospitals. CSS and split-thickness skin autograft (AG) were applied in a matched-pair design to patients with full-thickness burns involving a mean value of 73.4% of the TBSA. Data collection consisted of photographs, area measurements of donor skin and healed wounds after grafting, qualitative outcome by the Vancouver Scale for burn scar, and biopsies of healed skin. RESULTS Engraftment at postoperative day (POD) 14 was 81.5 +/- 2.1% for CSS and 94.7 +/- 2.0 for AG. Percentage TBSA closed at POD 28 was 20.5 +/- 2.5% for CSS, and 52.1 +/- 2.0 for AG. The ratio of closed to donor areas at POD 28 was 66.2 +/- 8.4 for CSS, and 4.0 +/- 0.0 for each harvest of AG. Each of these values was significantly different between the graft types. Correlation of percent TBSA closed with CSS at POD 28 with percent TBSA full-thickness burn generated an r value of 0.37 (p < 0.0001). Vancouver Scale scores at 1 year after were not different for erythema, pliability, or scar height, but pigmentation remained deficient in CSS. CONCLUSIONS These results demonstrate that CSS reduce requirements for donor skin harvesting for grafting of excised, full-thickness burns of greater than 50% TBSA with qualitative outcome that is comparable to meshed AG. Availability of CSS for treatment of extensive, deep burns may reduce time to wound closure, morbidity, and mortality in this patient population.
An Extended Frank-Wolfe Method with "In-Face" Directions, and Its Application to Low-Rank Matrix Completion

Motivated principally by the low-rank matrix completion problem, we present an extension of the Frank-Wolfe method that is designed to induce near-optimal solutions on low-dimensional faces of the feasible region. This is accomplished by a new approach to generating ``in-face" directions at each iteration, as well as through new choice rules for selecting between in-face and ``regular" Frank-Wolfe steps. Our framework for generating in-face directions generalizes the notion of away-steps introduced by Wolfe. In particular, the in-face directions always keep the next iterate within the minimal face containing the current iterate. We present computational guarantees for the new method that trade off efficiency in computing near-optimal solutions with upper bounds on the dimension of minimal faces of iterates. We apply the new method to the matrix completion problem, where low-dimensional faces correspond to low-rank matrices. We present computational results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodological approach at producing nearly-optimal solutions of very low rank. On both artificial and real datasets, we demonstrate significant speed-ups in computing very low-rank nearly-optimal solutions as compared to either the Frank-Wolfe method or its traditional away-step variant.
A co-Gaussian Process based framework for remote sensing image change detection

Inspired by the idea of co-training algorithm, in this paper we propose a novel semi-supervised learning algorithm, co-Gaussian Process (co-GP), under a Bayesian framework. Image data are characterized in two distinct views, i.e. two disjoint feature sets. A latent function with a GP prior is employed for each view. In learning process of co-GP, knowledge acquired in each view is transferred by probabilistic labels to the other in turns to enhance learning effect. In this manner, proper parameters are estimated in a bootstrap mode and a satisfying performance can be maintained with only small amount of labeled data. The experiments carried out on multitemporal images validate the proposed algorithm.
The tribological behavior of glass fiber-reinforced polyetheretherketone composite under dry sliding and water lubrication

The tribological behaviors of polyetheretherketone reinforced by short glass fibers have been investigated using the ball-on-disc configuration at different applied loads under dry sliding and water lubrication. The effects of water and GF on the wear properties of the hybrid composite have been discussed. It was found that the glass fiber/polyetheretherketone composite showed excellent tribological performance in water lubrication. High wear resistance and low friction coefficient were achieved under a wide range of applied load. The glass fibers bore the main load between the contact surfaces and protected the matrix from further severe abrasion of the counterpart. At the same time, the cooling and boundary lubricating effects of water hindered the melting of glass fiber/polyetheretherketone surface layer which caused a great improvement in the trobological characteristic. Moreover, the transfer between the counterpart materials and the worn surface of the glass fiber/polyetheretherketone was inhibited accounting for the lower specific wear rate under water lubrication. The glass fiber/polyetheretherketone composite was characterized by mild scuffing and fiber protruding under water lubrication, while the plastic deformation and adhesion were significantly abated compared with those under dry sliding.
Semantic Judgement of Medical Concepts: Combining Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Information with the Tensor Encoding Model

This paper outlines a novel approach for modelling semantic relationships within medical documents. Medical terminologies contain a rich source of semantic information critical to a number of techniques in medical informatics, including medical information retrieval. Recent research suggests that corpus-driven approaches are effective at automatically capturing semantic similarities between medical concepts, thus making them an attractive option for accessing semantic information. Most previous corpus-driven methods only considered syntagmatic associations. In this paper, we adapt a recent approach that explicitly models both syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations. We show that the implicit similarity between certain medical concepts can only be modelled using paradigmatic associations. In addition, the inclusion of both types of associations overcomes the sensitivity to the training corpus experienced by previous approaches, making our method both more effective and more robust. This finding may have implications for researchers in the area of medical information retrieval.
High IGF-IR Activity in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Cell Lines and Tumorgrafts Correlates with Sensitivity to Anti–IGF-IR Therapy

Purpose: We previously reported an insulin-like growth factor (IGF) gene expression signature, based on genes induced or repressed by IGF-I, which correlated with poor prognosis in breast cancer. We tested whether the IGF signature was affected by anti–IGF-I receptor (IGF-IR) inhibitors and whether the IGF signature correlated with response to a dual anti–IGF-IR/insulin receptor (InsR) inhibitor, BMS-754807. Experimental Design: An IGF gene expression signature was examined in human breast tumors and cell lines and changes were noted following treatment of cell lines or xenografts with anti–IGF-IR antibodies or tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Sensitivity of cells to BMS-754807 was correlated with levels of the IGF signature. Human primary tumorgrafts were analyzed for the IGF signature and IGF-IR levels and activity, and MC1 tumorgrafts were treated with BMS-754807 and chemotherapy. Results: The IGF gene expression signature was reversed in three different models (cancer cell lines or xenografts) treated with three different anti–IGF-IR therapies. The IGF signature was present in triple-negative breast cancers (TNBC) and TNBC cell lines, which were especially sensitive to BMS-754807, and sensitivity was significantly correlated to the expression of the IGF gene signature. The TNBC primary human tumorgraft MC1 showed high levels of both expression and activity of IGF-IR and IGF gene signature score. Treatment of MC1 with BMS-754807 showed growth inhibition and, in combination with docetaxel, tumor regression occurred until no tumor was palpable. Regression was associated with reduced proliferation, increased apoptosis, and mitotic catastrophe. Conclusions: These studies provide a clear biological rationale to test anti–IGF-IR/InsR therapy in combination with chemotherapy in patients with TNBC. Clin Cancer Res; 17(8); 2314–27. ©2011 AACR.
Abundance estimation of spectrally similar minerals

This paper evaluates a spectral unmixing method for estimating the partial abundance of spectrally similar minerals in complex mixtures. The method requires formulation of a linear function of individual spectra of individual minerals. The first and second derivatives of each of the different sets of mixed spectra and the individual spectra are determined, at signal-to-noise ratios of 50:1, 200:1 and 500:1. The error is minimized by means of simulated annealing. Experiments were made on several different mixtures of selected end-members, which could plausibly occur in real situations. We conclude that in the method proposed, the use of the original and first order derivatives provides a valuable contribution to unmixing procedures provided the signal-to-noise ratio is between 50:1 and 200:1. When the signal-to-noise ratio increases, the second derivative of the observed spectrum and the second derivatives of the end-member spectra give most precise estimates for the partial abundance of each end-member. This can often be seen when the signal-to-noise ratio is of the order 500:1.
Evaluation of LC-KSVD on UCF 101 Action Dataset

The evaluation of action recognition algorithms on datasets with a large number of action classes taken under uncontrolled conditions reveals the insights and shortcomings of the algorithms, enabling fair comparisons across them. In this paper, we evaluate label consistent K-SVD (LC-KSVD), a discriminative dictionary learning algorithm for sparse representation of input signals, on the UCF101 action dataset. LC-KSVD incorporates a new label consistency constraint in addition to the reconstruction error and classification error in the objective function, so as to enforce discriminability during the dictionary learning process. UCF101 is currently the largest and most challenging action dataset, consisting of 101 action classes with 13320 clips. We obtained 66.1% overall classification accuracy of LC-KSVD1 and 66.3% of LC-KSVD2 on three standard UCF101 train/test partitions, which outperform the baseline result (43.9%) obtained using a naïve Bag-of-Words approach. Furthermore, we analyze the LC-KSVD classifier, learned jointly in the dictionary learning process, by comparison with an SVM classifier, and observe marginally better performance than the SVM classifier.
Nonionic detergent phase extraction for the proteomic analysis of heart membrane proteins using label‐free LC‐MS

Heart diseases resulting in heart failure are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the Western world and can result from either systemic disease (e.g., hypertensive heart disease, ischemic heart disease) or specific heart muscle disease (e.g., dilated cardiomyopathy/DCM). Subproteome analysis of such disease subsets affords a reduction in sample complexity, potentially revealing biomarkers of cardiac failure that would otherwise remain undiscovered in proteome wide studies. Label‐free nanoscale LC‐MS has been applied in this study to validate a Triton X‐114‐based phase enrichment method for cardiac membrane proteins. Annotation of the subcellular location combined with GRAVY score analysis indicates a clear separation between soluble and membrane‐bound proteins with an enrichment of over 62% for this protein subset. LC‐MS allowed confident identification and annotation of hydrophobic proteins in this control sample pilot study and demonstrates the power of the proposed technique to extract integral membrane‐bound proteins. This approach should be applicable to a wider scale study of disease‐associated changes in the cardiac membrane subproteome.
The interaction between Mycobacterium and the macrophage analyzed by two‐dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis

The intramacrophage pathogen Mycobacterium avium resides in a vacuole which displays unusual fusion characteristics, expressed as both a failure to mature into phagolysosomes and a continued access to the early recycling pathway. In contrast, compartments containing inert IgG‐opsonized latex beads mature to phagolysosomes. Techniques were developed for the isolation of these particle‐containing phagosomes from macrophages to facilitate analysis of phagosomal constituents by electrophoresis and autoradiography. Metabolic labeling of macrophages followed by phagosome isolation and two‐dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis revealed only minor differences in the protein profiles between the M. avium and IgG‐bead phagosomes despite the marked differences in the fusigenicity of the respective vacuoles. Pulse‐chase labeling experiments revealed greater differences in the accessibility of Mycobacterium avium and IgG‐bead phagosomes to newly synthesized proteins. These phagosome isolation techniques were extended to analyze the protein synthesis profile of intracellular M. avium for comparison with bacteria that were metabolically labeled in broth culture. Not surprisingly, the majority of polypeptides in the bacilli were common to both growth conditions. However, despite these similarities, intracellular M. avium express several unique proteins, most notably one abundant protein with a molecular weight of 51 kDa. In addition, the bacteria manifest a restricted set of proteins expressed while in stasis shortly after infection.
Preparation and Characterization of Polystyrene/Organolaponite Nanocomposites

PS/laponite nanocomposites were prepared by a solution blending method. Laponite used was organically modified by octadecyltrimethylammonium bromide (OCTA), octyltrimethylammonium bromide (OCTYL) and di(hydrogenated tallow) dimethylammonium chloride (2HT) at various surfactant loadings. Exfoliated nanocomposite structure was probably obtained when 2HT was used as laponite modifier, yet conventional composites were received in cases using OCTA and OCTYL, as shown by X-ray diffraction measurements. Thermal stability and mechanical properties were evaluated and correlated to the obtained composite's structure. Enhancement in water barrier properties was observed for exfoliated PS-nanocomposites compared to that of pristine polymer.
A Phase II study of weekly irinotecan and capecitabine in patients with previously treated non-small cell lung cancer.

PURPOSE Irinotecan and capecitabine have synergistic antitumor activity with distinct mechanisms of action but without overlapping major toxicity. We conducted a Phase II study to evaluate the efficacy of weekly irinotecan plus capecitabine in patients with previously treated non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Eligible patients had received at least one prior chemotherapy regimen. The treatment consisted of irinotecan (90-100 mg/m2 i.v.) on days 1 and 8 plus capecitabine (1000 mg/m2 p.o. b.i.d.) on days 1-14 of a 21-day cycle. Treatment was given until disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. RESULTS Thirty-seven patients with median age of 59 years were enrolled. Eighteen (49%) patients had received one prior regimen, and 19 (51%) patients had received two or more prior regimens. The Initial 5 patients received 100 mg/m2 irinotecan with grade 3 diarrhea seen in 3 of 5 patients, and subsequent 32 patients received 90 mg/m2 irinotecan. Four (11.4%) of 35 evaluable patients had partial response and 12 (34.3%) had stable disease. There was no complete response. All responses were noted in patients who had received one prior regimen (4 of 18, 22%), but there was no response among the patients who had received two or more regimens. Median duration of response was 5.6 months (range, 5-8.7 months). At a median follow-up of 6 months, median survival was 7.4 months (95% confidence interval, 3.6-9.0). Grade 3 or 4 toxicities were neutropenia (12%), anemia (13%), and diarrhea (12%) at the dose level of 90 mg/m2. CONCLUSIONS Weekly irinotecan plus capecitabine had favorable antitumor activity and toxicity profile as a second-line treatment for recurrent NSCLC. This regimen may provide an additional treatment option for patients with advanced NSCLC.