Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accurate Closed-form Estimation of Local Affine Transformations Consistent with the Epipolar Geometry

For a pair of images satisfying the epipolar constraint, a method for accurate estimation of local affine transformations is proposed. The method returns the local affine transformation consistent with the epipolar geometry that is closest in the least squares sense to the initial estimate provided by an affine-covariant detector. The minimized L2 norm of the affine matrix elements is found in closed-form. We show that the used norm has an intuitive geometric interpretation. The method, with negligible computational requirements, is validated on publicly available benchmarking datasets and on synthetic data. The accuracy of the local affine transformations is improved for all detectors and all image pairs. Implicitly, precision of the tested feature detectors was compared. The Hessian-Affine detector combined with ASIFT view synthesis was the most accurate.
Selection-Driven Accumulation of Suppressor Mutants in Bacillus subtilis: The Apparent High Mutation Frequency of the Cryptic gudB Gene and the Rapid Clonal Expansion of gudB+ Suppressors Are Due to Growth under Selection

Soil bacteria like Bacillus subtilis can cope with many growth conditions by adjusting gene expression and metabolic pathways. Alternatively, bacteria can spontaneously accumulate beneficial mutations or shape their genomes in response to stress. Recently, it has been observed that a B. subtilis mutant lacking the catabolically active glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH), RocG, mutates the cryptic gudBCR gene at a high frequency. The suppressor mutants express the active GDH GudB, which can fully replace the function of RocG. Interestingly, the cryptic gudBCR allele is stably inherited as long as the bacteria synthesize the functional GDH RocG. Competition experiments revealed that the presence of the cryptic gudBCR allele provides the bacteria with a selective growth advantage when glutamate is scarce. Moreover, the lack of exogenous glutamate is the driving force for the selection of mutants that have inactivated the active gudB gene. In contrast, two functional GDHs are beneficial for the cells when glutamate was available. Thus, the amount of GDH activity strongly affects fitness of the bacteria depending on the availability of exogenous glutamate. At a first glance the high mutation frequency of the cryptic gudBCR allele might be attributed to stress-induced adaptive mutagenesis. However, other loci on the chromosome that could be potentially mutated during growth under the selective pressure that is exerted on a GDH-deficient mutant remained unaffected. Moreover, we show that a GDH-proficient B. subtilis strain has a strong selective growth advantage in a glutamate-dependent manner. Thus, the emergence and rapid clonal expansion of the active gudB allele can be in fact explained by spontaneous mutation and growth under selection without an increase of the mutation rate. Moreover, this study shows that the selective pressure that is exerted on a maladapted bacterium strongly affects the apparent mutation frequency of mutational hot spots.
CIRCULARIZATION OF AN ELLIPTICAL GAUSSIAN BEAM BY OFF-AXIS ELLIPSOID

Abstract—Off-axis ellipsoid reflector based off-focus configuration for deastigmatism and circularization of an elliptical Gaussian beam is proposed. Mostly used off-axis ellipsoid reflector based conventional configuration is constructed by aligning the incident direction directed to one focus of the ellipsoid, which reflect the output beam to the another focus of the ellipsoid. However, such configuration is unavailable to deastigmatize and circularize an elliptical Gaussian beam. Therefore, the coupling efficiency between the reflected beam and an essentially circular beam is not well satisfied. In this case, an off-axis ellipsoid reflector based off-focus configuration is proposed to obtain better coupling efficiency. Different from the conventional configuration, in the proposed off-focus configuration, the incident beam direction is diverged from one focus of the ellipsoid. As a result, the coupling efficiency of no less than 99.9% (as compared with coupling efficiency of about 94.2% based on conventional configuration) can be obtained, which is verified with numerical calculations.
DYRK 1 A controls the transition from proliferation to quiescence during lymphoid development by destabilizing Cyclin D 3

The Rockefeller University Press $30.00 J. Exp. Med. 2015 www.jem. org/cgi/doi/10.1084/jem.20150002 Cite by DOI: 10.1084/jem.20150002 of 8 Band T-lymphocyte precursors follow analogous paths as they differentiate in the bone marrow and thymus, respectively: both progress through a defined sequence of developmental stages, during which entry into and exit from the cell cycle must be tightly and dynamically regulated (Rothenberg, 2014). A critical step in both pre–B and pre–T cell development is a clonal proliferative expansion after transient surface expression of a pre–B cell receptor (pre–BCR) or pre–T cell receptor (pre–TCR), indicating successful gene rearrangements at  heavy chain or TCR- loci, respectively (Muljo and Schlissel, 2000). After this burst of proliferation, pre–B and pre–T cells must then exit the cell cycle to allow further differentiation, namely the rearrangement of  light or TCR- chains en route to expressing a functional antigen receptor (Michie and Zuñiga-Pflucker, 2002; Clark et al., 2014). One of the primary effectors of these processes is Cyclin D3, which plays essential and nonredundant roles in the proliferation of both pre–B and pre–T cells (Sicinska et al., 2003; Cooper et al., 2006; Sawai et al., 2012). The precise molecular mechanisms by which these cells transition from a proliferative state to a quiescent one are still being dissected. Transcriptional repression of Cyclin D3 (Mandal et al., 2009) and other cell cycle–associated genes (Hoffmann et al., 2002) occurs; however, little is known about the regulation of Cyclin D3 protein stability during this transition. The ubiquitin–proteasome system allows cells to rapidly diminish the quantity of certain proteins available for cell cycle progression. To initiate this mechanism, proteins must first be phosphorylated at specific residues within phosphodegrons CORRESPONDENCE John D. Crispino: j-crispino@northwestern.edu
Pupils in Lower Secondary Schools in Central Vietnam Improve their Empathy towards Local People and Perception of Traditional Craft Village Preservation through Project-based Learning

“Project-based learning (PBL) is a model that organizes learning around projects”(Thomas p.1, 2000). Projects are authentic tasks closely linked to learners' daily lives. By being engaged in projects, learners not only develop the 21st century skills but also promote their awareness of and care about surrounding environment and people. This research examines how the pupils in two lower secondary schools in Quang Nam, a province in Central Vietnam, develop their empathy towards the local people and improve their perception of preserving three traditional craft villages (sedge mat making, blacksmith and noodle making) when they participate in the UNESCO-funded project-based learning project.
Deconvolution and model-based restoration of clipped ultrasonic signals

This paper presents a simple and general approach for deconvolving ultrasonic signals for which some of the samples have been clipped at the maximum and minimum saturation levels of the analog-to-digital converter. Furthermore, it shows how the deconvolution results can be used to restore the clipped amplitudes. By using the presented methods, the artifacts that typically arise when applying standard deconvolution methods on clipped data can be avoided. The deconvolution problem is stated as maximum a posteriori estimation of the reflection sequence under an assumption of uncorrelated Gaussian measurement noise and with the signal clipping explicitly taken into account in the signal generation model. Apart from the exact solution, two simplified approximate solutions are considered. The first approximation leads to solving a quadratic programming problem with inequality constraints and the second yields a simple closed form linear solution. A comparison under varying noise and clipping distortion conditions shows that the exact solution consistently yields the best performance, but the accuracies of both the approximative solutions are almost as good as the exact solution for low clipping distortion levels. At larger distortion levels, only the first approximative solution can compete in accuracy with the exact solution. Signal restoration results using real ultrasonic data further verify the above conclusions.
Joint WMT Submission of the QUAERO Project

This paper describes the joint QUAERO submission to the WMT 2011 machine translation evaluation. Four groups (RWTH Aachen University, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, LIMSI-CNRS, and SYSTRAN) of the QUAERO project submitted a joint translation for the WMT German→English task. Each group translated the data sets with their own systems. Then RWTH system combination combines these translations to a better one. In this paper, we describe the single systems of each group. Before we present the results of the system combination, we give a short description of the RWTH Aachen system combination approach.
Weight Loss, Glycemic Control, and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors in Response to Differential Diet Composition in a Weight Loss Program in Type 2 Diabetes: A Randomized Controlled Trial

OBJECTIVE To test whether a weight loss program promotes greater weight loss, glycemic control, and improved cardiovascular disease risk factors compared with control conditions and whether there is a differential response to higher versus lower carbohydrate intake. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This randomized controlled trial at two university medical centers enrolled 227 overweight or obese adults with type 2 diabetes and assigned them to parallel in-person diet and exercise counseling, with prepackaged foods in a planned menu during the initial phase, or to usual care (UC; two weight loss counseling sessions and monthly contacts). RESULTS Relative weight loss was 7.4% (95% CI 5.7–9.2%), 9.0% (7.1–10.9%), and 2.5% (1.3–3.8%) for the lower fat, lower carbohydrate, and UC groups (P < 0.001 intervention effect). Glycemic control markers and triglyceride levels were lower in the intervention groups compared with UC group at 1 year (fasting glucose 141 [95% CI 133–149] vs. 159 [144–174] mg/dL, P = 0.023; hemoglobin A1c 6.9% [6.6–7.1%] vs. 7.5% [7.1–7.9%] or 52 [49–54] vs. 58 [54–63] mmol/mol, P = 0.001; triglycerides 148 [134–163] vs. 204 [173–234] mg/dL, P < 0.001). The lower versus higher carbohydrate groups maintained lower hemoglobin A1c (6.6% [95% CI 6.3–6.8%] vs. 7.2% [6.8–7.5%] or 49 [45–51] vs. 55 [51–58] mmol/mol) at 1 year (P = 0.008). CONCLUSIONS The weight loss program resulted in greater weight loss and improved glycemic control in type 2 diabetes.
An Integrated Assessment of the Ecological Health Status of Coastal Aquatic Ecosystems of Ada in Ghana

This paper aims at assessing the ecological health status of aquatic ecosystems in the coastal area of Ada in Ghana. Healthy aquatic ecosystems are characterized by high species diversity, good water and habitat quality among others. An ecological assessment was conducted to describe the landuse pattern, water quality and habitat quality of critical aquatic ecosystems. Physicochemical parameters of water were monitored for three months each in the dry and wet seasons. Biological components which composed of macroinvertebrate and aquatic macrophyte were studied to determine the biodiversity status. The results revealed that 70% of the sampled aquatic ecosystems have concentrations of water parameters within the limits of natural background levels. However, the concentrations of nitrates and phosphates were significantly higher than the recommended World Health Organization (WHO) standards for healthy aquatic ecosystems. With regards to landuse and habitat quality, seventy percent (70%) of the sampled ecosystems were found to be in poor condition. Increasing effort on awareness programmes is needed to improve community participation to ensure proper disposal of domestic and industrial waste.
Robustly optimal filter design for nonlinear systems

A relevant issue in filter design is that, in most practical situations, the system whose variables have to be estimated is not known, and a two-step procedure is adopted, based on model identification from data and filter design from the identified model. However, only approximate models can be identified from real data, and this approximation may lead to large estimation errors. In this paper, a new approach to filter design overcoming this important issue is considered, allowing the design of filters for nonlinear systems with suitable optimality and robustness properties. In particular, it is shown that the approach is intrinsically robust, since based on the direct design of the filter from a set of data generated by the system, avoiding the need of any (approximate) model. A result is also provided, allowing us to evaluate the trade-off between the estimation accuracy and the number of data required for filter design.
Declassification: transforming Java programs to remove intermediate classes

This paper presents an optimisation technique which automatically inlines certain classes within their enclosing class. Inlining a class involves inserting the fields and methods of this class into the body of its enclosing class. The enclosing class is the class which declared an instance of the class. The declaration of the inlined class can then be removed from the program. This technique transforms Java programs into an equivalent form, which may be less readable, but is more efficient. The results of the empirical study showed that few classes were found suitable for inlining and that the declassification was not overly successful when optimizing the test programs. One of the advantages of declassification is that it does not result in code bloating. It is thought that further extensions to the declassification technique and an intrinsically object-oriented set of test programs could greatly improve its effectiveness.
Language Differences in the Brain Network for Reading in Naturalistic Story Reading and Lexical Decision

Differences in how writing systems represent language raise important questions about whether there could be a universal functional architecture for reading across languages. In order to study potential language differences in the neural networks that support reading skill, we collected fMRI data from readers of alphabetic (English) and morpho-syllabic (Chinese) writing systems during two reading tasks. In one, participants read short stories under conditions that approximate natural reading, and in the other, participants decided whether individual stimuli were real words or not. Prior work comparing these two writing systems has overwhelmingly used meta-linguistic tasks, generally supporting the conclusion that the reading system is organized differently for skilled readers of Chinese and English. We observed that language differences in the reading network were greatly dependent on task. In lexical decision, a pattern consistent with prior research was observed in which the Middle Frontal Gyrus (MFG) and right Fusiform Gyrus (rFFG) were more active for Chinese than for English, whereas the posterior temporal sulcus was more active for English than for Chinese. We found a very different pattern of language effects in a naturalistic reading paradigm, during which significant differences were only observed in visual regions not typically considered specific to the reading network, and the middle temporal gyrus, which is thought to be important for direct mapping of orthography to semantics. Indeed, in areas that are often discussed as supporting distinct cognitive or linguistic functions between the two languages, we observed interaction. Specifically, language differences were most pronounced in MFG and rFFG during the lexical decision task, whereas no language differences were observed in these areas during silent reading of text for comprehension.
Do Investors Care About Director Tenure? Insights from Executive Cognition and Social Capital Theories

Governance scholars debate the value of directors as an effective governance mechanism. We suggest that this value varies with director tenure. We study both how shareholder assessments of the value of individual directors vary with director tenure and whether director tenure actually makes a practical difference to governance effectiveness. Using data from abnormal stock price reactions to the sudden deaths of 274 outside directors, and integrating executive cognition and social capital perspectives applied to the dual roles of director monitoring and advising, our results confirm a curvilinear relationship between the assessed value of directors and tenure. We find that directors are more highly valued by investors over a tenure period between 7 and 18 years, moderated by director involvement on key committees. Further, in examining the S&P 1,500, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the percentage of outside directors in this prime tenure period strengthens the CEO pay-performance linkage .
HMM-based pseudo-clean speech synthesis for splice algorithm

In this paper, we present a novel approach to relax the constraint of stereo-data which is needed in a series of algorithms for noise-robust speech recognition. As a demonstration in SPLICE algorithm, we generate the pseudo-clean features to replace the ideal clean features from one of the stereo channels, by using HMM-based speech synthesis. Experimental results on aurora2 database show that the performance of our approach is comparable with that of SPLICE. Further improvements are achieved by concatenating a bias adaptation algorithm to handle unknown environments. Relative word error rate reductions of 66% and 24% are achieved over the baseline systems in the clean-training and multi-training conditions, respectively.
GPII: A Benchmark for Generic Purpose Image Information

The growing number of different models and approaches for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) brings high complexity when we want to develop new approaches and compare a new GIS algorithm. In order to test and compare different processing models and approaches, in a simple way, we identified the need of defining uniform testing methods, able to compare processing algorithms in terms of performance and accuracy regarding large image processing, algorithms for GIS pattern-detection. Taking into account, for instance, images collected during a done flight or a satellite, it is important to know the processing cost to extract data when applying different processing models and approaches, as well as their accuracy (compare execution time vs. extracted data quality). In this work, we propose a GIS Benchmark (GPII), a benchmark that allows evaluating different approaches to detect/extract selected features from a GIS dataset. Considering a given dataset (or two data-sets, from different years, of the same region), it provides linear methods to compare different performance parameters regarding GIS information, making possible to access the most relevant information in terms of features and processing efficiency. Moreover, our approach to test algorithms makes possible to change the data-set in order to support different purpose algorithms.
Classification of Interviews - A Case Study on Cancer Patients

With the rapid expansion of Web 2.0, a variety of documents abound online. Thus, it is important to find methods that can annotate and organize documents in meaningful ways to expedite the search process. A considerable amount of research on document classification has been conducted. However, this paper introduces the classification of interviews of cancer patients into several cancer diseases based on the features collected from the corpus. We have developed a corpus of 727 interviews collected from a web archive of medical articles. The TF-IDF features of unigram, bigram, trigram and emotion words as well as the SentiWordNet and Cosine similarity features have been used in training and testing of the classification systems. We have employed three different classifiers like k-NN, Decision Tree and Naive Bayes for classifying the documents into different classes of cancer. The experimental results obtain maximum accuracy of 99.31% tested on 73 documents of the test data.
Optimizing the reactive power balance between a distribution and transmission grid through iteratively updated grid equivalents

This paper focuses on a scenario with a high amount of renewable generators (DGs) in the distribution grid; a local grid operator (DSO) utilizes reactive power provision by the DGs, to improve the reactive power balance at the connection points to the transmission grid. At the same time, the transmission grid operator (TSO) aims to optimize his voltage, by computing reactive power setpoints for the DSO. This is a decentralized optimization problem, where two optimizers ("DSO" and "TSO") balance the reactive power flow between their grid areas. No optimizer has detailed information about the neighbouring grid area and uses a very simple equivalent model for it. In case these equivalents are updated iteratively, we find that both optimizers mostly converge within only a few iterations for a realistic Danish grid topology. However, it is also found that the accuracy of the result highly depends on the built-in component models that each optimizer uses, within its own grid area.
Identification of critical residues for transport activity of Acr3p, the Saccharomyces cerevisiae As(III)/H+ antiporter

Acr3p is an As(III)/H+ antiporter from Saccharomyces cerevisiae belonging to the bile/arsenite/riboflavin transporter superfamily. We have previously found that Cys151 located in the middle of the fourth transmembrane segment (TM4) is critical for antiport activity, suggesting that As(III) might interact with a thiol group during the translocation process. In order to identify functionally important residues involved in As(III)/H+ exchange, we performed a systematic alanine‐replacement analysis of charged/polar and aromatic residues that are conserved in the Acr3 family and located in putative transmembrane segments. Nine residues (Asn117, Trp130, Arg150, Trp158, Asn176, Arg230, Tyr290, Phe345, Asn351) were found to be critical for proper folding and trafficking of Acr3p to the plasma membrane. In addition, we found that replacement of highly conserved Phe266 (TM7), Phe352 (TM9), Glu353 (TM9) and Glu380 (TM10) with Ala abolished transport activity of Acr3p, while mutation of Ser349 (TM9) to Ala significantly reduced the As(III)/H+ exchange, suggesting an important role of these residues in the transport mechanism. Detailed mutational analysis of Glu353 and Glu380 revealed that the negatively charged residues located in the middle of transmembrane segments TM9 and TM10 are crucial for antiport activity. We also discuss a hypothetical model of the Acr3p transport mechanism.