Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bmc Microbiology

Longitudinal analysis of the vaginal microflora in pregnancy suggests that L. crispatus promotes the stability of the normal vaginal microflora and that L. gasseri and/or L. iners are more conducive to the occurrence of abnormal vaginal microflora Abstract Background: Despite their antimicrobial potential, vaginal lactobacilli often fail to retain dominance, resulting in overgrowth of the vagina by other bacteria, as observed with bacterial vaginosis. It remains elusive however to what extent interindividual differences in vaginal Lactobacillus community composition determine the stability of this microflora. In a prospective cohort of pregnant women we studied the stability of the normal vaginal microflora (assessed on Gram stain) as a function of the presence of the vaginal Lactobacillus index species (determined through culture and molecular analysis with tRFLP).
Description and execution of humanoid's object manipulation based on object-environment-robot contact states

In the case of object manipulation by a humanoid robot, it is important to deal with contact states between objects, a robot, and an environment both to avoid falling down and to achieve objective manipulations. We propose a method to describe and uniformly execute various object manipulations by a humanoid robot. In description, we focus on the contact states and define manipulation phases according to the contact states. In execution, the humanoid's controller autonomously switches manipulation phases and substantiates the contact-force controller. According to switching of the manipulation phases, the humanoid's manipulation system switches the inputs for the contact-force controller, which includes the estimation of object's information and motion generation. We evaluated our proposed system through experiments in which the HRP-2 robot manipulates four objects without information about the objects' masses and necessary operational forces.
Mapping the Antigenic and Genetic Evolution of Influenza Virus

The antigenic evolution of influenza A (H3N2) virus was quantified and visualized from its introduction into humans in 1968 to 2003. Although there was remarkable correspondence between antigenic and genetic evolution, significant differences were observed: Antigenic evolution was more punctuated than genetic evolution, and genetic change sometimes had a disproportionately large antigenic effect. The method readily allows monitoring of antigenic differences among vaccine and circulating strains and thus estimation of the effects of vaccination. Further, this approach offers a route to predicting the relative success of emerging strains, which could be achieved by quantifying the combined effects of population level immune escape and viral fitness on strain evolution.
Designing a Million-Qubit Quantum Computer Using a Resource Performance Simulator

The optimal design of a fault-tolerant quantum computer involves finding an appropriate balance between the burden of large-scale integration of noisy components and the load of improving the reliability of hardware technology. This balance can be evaluated by quantitatively modeling the execution of quantum logic operations on a realistic quantum hardware containing limited computational resources. In this work, we report a complete performance simulation software tool capable of (1) searching the hardware design space by varying resource architecture and technology parameters, (2) synthesizing and scheduling a fault-tolerant quantum algorithm within the hardware constraints, (3) quantifying the performance metrics such as the execution time and the failure probability of the algorithm, and (4) analyzing the breakdown of these metrics to highlight the performance bottlenecks and visualizing resource utilization to evaluate the adequacy of the chosen design. Using this tool, we investigate a vast design space for implementing key building blocks of Shor’s algorithm to factor a 1,024-bit number with a baseline budget of 1.5 million qubits. We show that a trapped-ion quantum computer designed with twice as many qubits and one-tenth of the baseline infidelity of the communication channel can factor a 2,048-bit integer in less than 5 months.
Adaptive quad patches: an adaptive regular structure for web distribution and adaptive rendering of 3D models

We introduce an approach for efficient distribution and adaptive rendering of 3D mesh models supporting a simple quad parameterization. Our method extends and combines recent results in geometric processing, real-time rendering, and web programming. In particular: we exploit recent results on surface reconstruction and isometric parametrization to transform point clouds into two-manifold meshes whose parametrization domain is a small collection of 2D square regions; we encode the resulting parameterized meshes into a very compact multiresolution structures composed of variable resolution quad patches whose geometry and texture is stored in a tightly packed texture atlas; we adaptively stream and render variable resolution shape representations using a GPU-accelerated adaptive tessellation algorithm with negligible CPU overhead. Real-time performance is achieved on portable GPU platforms using OpenGL, as well as on exploiting emerging web-based environments based on WebGL. Promising applications of the technology range from the automatic creation of rapidly renderable objects for games to the set-up of browsable 3D models repositories in the web that will be accessible by upcoming generation of WebGL-enabled web browers.
Round-robin overlapping generations coding for fast content download

We analyze the download time of a large file, divided into chunks called generations, and transmitted over an erasure channel without feedback. For non-overlapping generations, we derive how the download time scales with the number of generations, for the round-robin and random scheduling policies. We then analyze coding with overlapping generations and show that the optimal overlap size is small compared to the number of generations, which implies that the download time can be reduced with only a small increase in computational complexity. Further, for a given overlap size, we propose overlap structures that have low complexity and are easy to implement, but still give file download as fast as the best previously proposed structures.
Pre-Conference Proceedings of the Focus Symposium on Collaborative Decision-Support Systems

This paper addresses the expectations, organizational implications, and information processing requirements, of the emerging knowledge management paradigm. A brief discussion of the enablement of the individual through the wide-spread availability of computer and communication facilities, is followed by a description of the structural evolution of organizations, and the architecture of a computer-based knowledge management system. The author discusses two trends that are driven by the treatment of information and knowledge as a commodity: increased concern for the management and exploitation of knowledge within organizations; and, the creation of an organizational environment that facilitates the acquisition, sharing and application of knowledge. Tracing the evolution of the structure of organizations, the author concludes that the web-like features of the Network Model are most conducive to the promotion of knowledge management principles, even though this model does have liabilities that require careful monitoring. The paper further discusses in some detail the architecture of a knowledge management system that consists of a lower integrated data layer and an upper information layer. Attention is drawn to the need of the data layer to include not only archived summary data as found in Data Warehouses and Data Marts, but also near real-time operational data with convenient access provided by Data Portals. An important distinction is drawn between data-centric and information-centric software environments in terms of software with an internal information model capable of supporting agents with automatic reasoning capabilities. The paper concludes with a brief description of the mechanisms through which a Web-Services environment provides access to distributed data sources, as well as heterogeneous data-centric and information-centric software applications.
Direct minutiae extraction from gray-level fingerprint image by relationship examination

A new method to extract the minutiae from a gray-level fingerprint image is presented in this paper. The proposed method determines the minutiae by examining the relationship between the ridges and furrows. The minutiae change the relationship between the ridges and furrows, so the minutiae can be detected by finding the relationship change. By following the ridges and furrows along the local direction, the relationship change can be extracted. Experimental results demonstrate that the method developed based on the new approach is insensitive to noise and hence extracts minutiae better.
Self-Learning for Player Localization in Sports Video

This paper introduces a novel self-learning framework that automates the label acquisition process for improving models for detecting players in broadcast footage of sports games. Unlike most previous self-learning approaches for improving appearance-based object detectors from videos, we allow an unknown, unconstrained number of target objects in a more generalized video sequence with non-static camera views. Our self-learning approach uses a latent SVM learning algorithm and deformable part models to represent the shape and colour information of players, constraining their motions, and learns the colour of the playing field by a gentle Adaboost algorithm. We combine those image cues and discover additional labels automatically from unlabelled data. In our experiments, our approach exploits both labelled and unlabelled data in sparsely labelled videos of sports games, providing a mean performance improvement of over 20% in the average precision for detecting sports players and improved tracking, when videos contain very few labelled images.
LOFAR imaging of Cygnus A - direct detection of a turnover in the hotspot radio spectra

The low-frequency radio spectra of the hotspots within powerful radio galaxies can provide valuable information about the physical processes operating at the site of the jet termination. These processes are responsible for the dissipation of jet kinetic energy, particle acceleration, and magnetic-field generation. Here, we report new observations of the powerful radio galaxy Cygnus A using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) between 109 and 183 MHz, at an angular resolution of ∼3.5 arcsec. The radio emission of the lobes is found to have a complex spectral index distribution, with a spectral steepening found towards the centre of the source. For the first time, a turnover in the radio spectrum of the two main hotspots of Cygnus A has been directly observed. By combining our LOFAR imaging with data from the Very Large Array at higher frequencies, we show that the very rapid turnover in the hotspot spectra cannot be explained by a low-energy cutoff in the electron energy distribution, as has been previously suggested. Thermal (free–free) absorption or synchrotron self-absorption models are able to describe the low-frequency spectral shape of the hotspots; however, as with previous studies, we find that the implied model parameters are unlikely, and interpreting the spectra of the hotspots remains problematic.
DIRECTION-BASED SPATIAL-TEXTUAL SKYLINE

Existing location-based services mostly recommend nearest objects to the user by considering their spatial distance and textual relevance. However, an object not only has a spatial distance to the user, but also has a direction from it to the user. In this paper, we study the direction-based fuzzy preference spatial-textual skyline query. Given a user location, a threshold theta and multiple keywords, skyline and p-skyline objects located at different directions are returned to user. Identifying of the results depends on three aspects: spatial distance, textual similarity and direction. Two functions are introduced to compute the textual relevance and spatial proximity, respectively. A query algorithm is proposed, in which an effective pruning strategy is put forward to improve the query efficiency. In the end, empirical results show that our proposed method is effective and efficient.
Enhanced Grid Resource Selection Mechanism

Resources in grid systems are heterogeneous, geographically distributed, belong to different administrative domains and apply different management policies. To manage resources in grid computing, efficient resource selection mechanism is required. In traditional non-reserved resource selection mechanisms, there is no guarantee that the job completion time will be as expected. On the other hand, in the reserved bidding process, conventional resource selection mechanisms waste providers resources and hence affect the overall grid system performance. We propose a new grid resource selection mechanism to achieve performance enhancement in the resource allocation process.
Near Duplicate Image Detecting Algorithm based on Bag of Visual Word Model

In recent years, near duplicate image detecting becomes one of the most important problems in image retrieval, and it is widely used in many application fields, such as copyright violations and detecting forged images. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatically detect near duplicate images based on visual word model. SIFT descriptors are utilized to represent image visual content which is an effective method in computer vision research field to detect local features of images. Afterwards, we cluster the SIFT features of a given image into several clusters by the K-means algorithm. The centroid of each cluster is regarded as a visual word, and all the centroids are used to construct the visual word vocabulary. To reduce the time cost of near duplicate image detecting process, locality sensitive hashing is utilized to map high-dimensional visual features into low-dimensional hash bucket space, and then the image visual features are converted to a histogram. Next, for a pair of images, we present a local feature based image similarity estimating method by computing histogram distance, and then near duplicate images can be detected. Finally, a series of experiments are constructed to make performance evaluation, and related analyses about experimental results are also given
N ov 2 01 5 Decay B → K ∗ ( → Kπ ) l + l − in covariant quark model

X iv :1 51 1. 04 88 7v 2 [ he pph ] 2 4 N ov 2 01 5 Decay B → K∗(→ Kπ)l+l− in covariant quark model S. Dubnička, A.Z. Dubničková, N. Habyl, ∗ M.A. Ivanov, † A. Liptaj, ‡ and G.S. Nurbakova § Institute of Physics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Kazakhstan 4 Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia Abstract Our article is devoted to the study of the rare B → K∗l+l− decay where l = e, μ, τ . We compute
Fail-Aware Untrusted Storage

We consider a set of clients collaborating through an online service provider that is subject to attacks, and hence not fully trusted by the clients. We introduce the abstraction of a fail-aware untrusted service, with meaningful semantics even when the provider is faulty. In the common case, when the provider is correct, such a service guarantees consistency (linearizability) and liveness (wait-freedom) of all operations. In addition, the service always provides accurate and complete consistency and failure detection. We illustrate our new abstraction by presenting a Fail-Aware Untrusted STorage service (FAUST). Existing storage protocols in this model guarantee so-called forking semantics. We observe, however, that none of the previously suggested protocols suffice for implementing fail-aware untrusted storage with the desired liveness and consistency properties (at least wait-freedom and linearizability when the server is correct). We present a new storage protocol, which does not suffer from this limitation, and implements a new consistency notion, called weak fork-linearizability. We show how to extend this protocol to provide eventual consistency and failure awareness in FAUST.
Testing the Order of Fractional Integration in Panel Data Models

Maddala and Wu (1999) proposed a simple panel unit test using a Fisher type test. We propose using Percival and Walden (2006) approximate maximum likelihood estimator of the fractional integration order with a Fisher type test to create a simple panel fractional integration order test. By combining the estimator and the test with a wavestrap method to obtain critical values, we allow for cross-sectional dependence. Monte Carlo simulations in the paper show that the test has the correct size and strong power over the alternative.
Obstetric outcomes after treatment of periodontal disease during pregnancy: systematic review and meta-analysis

Objective To examine whether treatment of periodontal disease with scaling and root planing during pregnancy is associated with a reduction in the preterm birth rate. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Data sources Cochrane Central Trials Registry, ISI Web of Science, Medline, and reference lists of relevant studies to July 2010; hand searches in key journals. Study selection Randomised controlled trials including pregnant women with documented periodontal disease randomised to either treatment with scaling and root planing or no treatment. Data extraction Data were extracted by two independent investigators, and a consensus was reached with the involvement a third. Methodological quality of the studies was assessed with the Cochrane’s risk of bias tool, and trials were considered either high or low quality. The primary outcome was preterm birth (<37 weeks). Secondary outcomes were low birthweight infants (<2500 g), spontaneous abortions/stillbirths, and overall adverse pregnancy outcome (preterm birth <37 weeks and spontaneous abortions/stillbirths). Results 11 trials (with 6558 women) were included. Five trials were considered to be of high methodological quality (low risk of bias), whereas the rest were low quality (high or unclear risk of bias). Results among low and high quality trials were consistently diverse; low quality trials supported a beneficial effect of treatment, and high quality trials provided clear evidence that no such effect exists. Among high quality studies, treatment had no significant effect on the overall rate of preterm birth (odds ratio 1.15, 95% confidence interval 0.95 to 1.40; P=0.15). Furthermore, treatment did not reduce the rate of low birthweight infants (odds ratio 1.07, 0.85 to 1.36; P=0.55), spontaneous abortions/stillbirths (0.79, 0.51 to 1.22; P=0.28), or overall adverse pregnancy outcome (preterm births <37 weeks and spontaneous abortions/stillbirths) (1.09, 0.91 to 1.30; P=0.34). Conclusion Treatment of periodontal disease with scaling and root planing cannot be considered to be an efficient way of reducing the incidence of preterm birth. Women may be advised to have periodical dental examinations during pregnancy to test their dental status and may have treatment for periodontal disease. However, they should be told that such treatment during pregnancy is unlikely to reduce the risk of preterm birth or low birthweight infants.
Effects of Optimism and Gratitude on Physical Activity, Biomarkers, and Readmissions After an Acute Coronary Syndrome: The Gratitude Research in Acute Coronary Events Study

Background—Positive psychological constructs, such as optimism, are associated with beneficial health outcomes. However, no study has separately examined the effects of multiple positive psychological constructs on behavioral, biological, and clinical outcomes after an acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Accordingly, we aimed to investigate associations of baseline optimism and gratitude with subsequent physical activity, prognostic biomarkers, and cardiac rehospitalizations in post-ACS patients. Methods and Results—Participants were enrolled during admission for ACS and underwent assessments at baseline (2 weeks post-ACS) and follow-up (6 months later). Associations between baseline positive psychological constructs and subsequent physical activity/biomarkers were analyzed using multivariable linear regression. Associations between baseline positive constructs and 6-month rehospitalizations were assessed via multivariable Cox regression. Overall, 164 participants enrolled and completed the baseline 2-week assessments. Baseline optimism was significantly associated with greater physical activity at 6 months (n=153; &bgr;=102.5; 95% confidence interval, 13.6–191.5; P=0.024), controlling for baseline activity and sociodemographic, medical, and negative psychological covariates. Baseline optimism was also associated with lower rates of cardiac readmissions at 6 months (n=164), controlling for age, sex, and medical comorbidity (hazard ratio, 0.92; 95% confidence interval, [0.86–0.98]; P=0.006). There were no significant relationships between optimism and biomarkers. Gratitude was minimally associated with post-ACS outcomes. Conclusions—Post-ACS optimism, but not gratitude, was prospectively and independently associated with superior physical activity and fewer cardiac readmissions. Whether interventions that target optimism can successfully increase optimism or improve cardiovascular outcomes in post-ACS patients is not yet known, but can be tested in future studies. Clinical Trial Registration—URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT01709669.