Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Color Adjacency Loss

Large amount of training data is essential for deep learning-based computer vision tasks. However, in semantic segmentation, annotating pixel-wise labels for large-scale image data is laborious and time-consuming. To handle this problem, we propose a training framework for a CNN-based network using sparse labels. We propagate the sparse labels to produce the same performance as training on dense labels in the segmentation network. For effective label propagation, we take advantage of the observation that adjacent pixels sharing similar colors would be in the same class. Based on this insight, the label is propagated by our adjacency loss depending on the color similarity between the adjacent pixels. We perform on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset using scribbles annotations as sparse labels. The proposed algorithm achieves superior performance compared to the previous method in weakly supervised semantic segmentation task.
Peer Teaching Increases Knowledge and Changes Perceptions about Genetically Modified Crops in Non–Science Major Undergraduates

We analyzed effects of peer teaching on non–science major undergraduates’ knowledge, perceptions, and opinions about genetically modified (GM) crops and their use in agriculture. Undergraduates enrolled in an introductory nonmajors biology course participated in a service-learning program (SLP) in which they acted as cross-age peer teachers to high school students, teaching about the role of genetics in crop improvement through traditional breeding and GM approaches. Using pre/postassessments, we found that undergraduates’ opinions shifted to favor the use of GM organisms (GMOs) in agriculture after SLP participation, rising from 46 to 97%. Perceptions about risks and benefits of GMOs also shifted from 43% stating that GMOs are harmful or suspect to no students describing GMOs in that way. Knowledge about GMOs became more accurate after SLP participation. There were significant correlations between students who had negative perceptions of GMOs and negative opinions or inaccurate knowledge about them. Students recognized the effect of peer teaching on their knowledge and perceptions, identifying the repeated peer teaching as an important factor in knowledge gain. Our results suggest students developed an informed opinion about the use of GMOs through first learning the science of genetic engineering and then teaching this information to younger students.
Emotion Recognition Using Multimodal Approach

Currently the internet along with being a source of vast information is also transforming into a diary for individuals. Various apps like instagram, twitter, facebook etc allow people to post their thoughts, pictures and videos on both private and public subjects. These platforms offer users to post via multiple mediums such as video, audio, text, emoticons etc. Mining this data in the correct context to recognize the current emotion of user has many applications. As this data gives an insight into the users emotions, temperament, personality and motivation. It can be used for better advertisement targeting, product recommendations, product feedback, tackling cyberbullying etc. The main concern of analysing this data to determine the emotions of the user is that this data is unstructured. To correctly gauge the mood it is cardinal choose a suitable format as the data source. As a single format may not be capable of providing complete context by multimodal approach provides the full picture. We have attempted to discern the mood of a user by designing a system that uses text and image data to corroborate this. Public tweets of a user are scrapped from their timeline and self uploaded images of a user are first classified individual and then fused in a score based level to determine whether user is happy, sad or neutral.
Hierarchical Localization in Topological Models Under Varying Illumination Using Holistic Visual Descriptors

In this paper, a hierarchical localization framework within indoor environments is proposed and evaluated, considering severe variations of the illumination conditions. The only source of information both to build a model of the environment and to solve the localization problem is a catadioptric vision system, which is mounted on the mobile robot. The images captured by this system are processed globally to obtain holistic descriptors. The position of the robot is estimated by comparing these descriptors with the information contained in a topological visual model, which is previously created using a clustering approach and is composed of a hierarchy of layers. Compacting the information via clustering proves to be an efficient alternative to estimate the position of the robot hierarchically and with robustness. The proposed localization strategy is tested with some sets of panoramic images, captured in large indoor environments under real operating conditions, including illumination changes that change substantially the appearance of the scenes. The results show a reasonable tradeoff computation time-accuracy when the localization is addressed in a hierarchical way.
Characterization of EIAV env Quasispecies during Long-Term Passage In Vitro: Gradual Loss of Pathogenicity

As the only widely used live lentiviral vaccine, the equine infectious anima virus (EIAV) attenuated vaccine was developed by in vitro passaging of a virulent strain for 121 generations. In our previous study, we observed that the attenuated vaccine was gradually selected under increased environmental pressure at the population level (termed a quasispecies). To further elucidate the potential correlation between viral quasispecies evolution and pathogenesis, a systematic study was performed by sequencing env using several methods. Some key mutations were identified within Env, and we observed that increased percentages of these mutations were accompanied by an increased passage number and attenuated virulence. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that env mutations related to the loss of virulence might have occurred evolutionarily. Among these mutations, deletion of amino acid 236 in the V4 region of Env resulted in the loss of one N-glycosylation site that was crucial for virulence. Notably, the 236-deleted sequence represented a “vaccine-specific” mutation that was also found in wild EIAVLN40 strains based on single genome amplification (SGA) analysis. Therefore, our results suggest that the EIAV attenuated vaccine may originate from a branch of quasispecies of EIAVLN40. Generally, the presented results may increase our understanding of the attenuation mechanism of the EIAV vaccine and provide more information about the evolution of other lentiviruses.
A Comparison of Firm-Level Innovation Cooperation in Five European Countries

This paper compares the determinants and the effects of innovation cooperation on innovation performance at firm level in five European countries: Belgium, Germany, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland. In a first step we analyse cooperation agreements with national and international partners and in a second step cooperation with enterprises and research institutions. In a third step we investigate the impact of all four categories of cooperation on innovation performance.
Non-contact Heart Rate Monitoring for Intensive Exercise Based on Singular Spectrum Analysis

Video based heart rate detection performs well for monitoring human in still or small motion case, such as patients. When targets are in intensive exercise, strong motion of heads will result in strong variation of light intensities reflection on faces. The strong variation introduced by motion are much stronger than the hidden weak heart rate signal in video. In this work, a framework is proposed to monitor the heart rate of human in intensive exercise with video camera. The Photoplethysmography (PPG) signal extracted from video is decomposed by singular spectrum analysis (SSA). And the motion information calculated from video is utilized to eliminate the frequency components caused by motion. Experimental results show that the proposed method could monitor human's heart rate in exercises accurately.
A Approach

IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management. ABSTRACT: The qualitative and granular nature of most structural indicators and the variety in data sources poses difficulties for consistent cross-country assessments and empirical analysis. We overcome these issues by using a machine learning approach (the partial least squares method) to combine a broad set of cross-country structural indicators into a small number of synthetic scores which correspond to key structural areas, and which are suitable for consistent quantitative comparisons across countries and time. With this newly constructed dataset of synthetic structural scores in 126 countries between 2000-2019, we establish stylized facts about structural gaps and reforms, and analyze the impact of reforms targeting different structural areas on economic growth. Our findings suggest that structural reforms in the area of product, labor and financial markets as well as the legal system have a significant impact on economic growth in a 5-year horizon, with one standard deviation improvement in one of these reform areas raising cumulative 5-year growth by 2 to 6 percent. We also find synergies between different structural areas, in particular between product and labor market reforms.
Phy-PMRFI: Phylogeny-Aware Prediction of Metagenomic Functions Using Random Forest Feature Importance

High-throughput sequencing techniques have accelerated functional metagenomics studies through the generation of large volumes of omics data. The integration of these data using computational approaches is potentially useful for predicting metagenomic functions. Machine learning (ML) models can be trained using microbial features which are then used to classify microbial data into different functional classes. For example, ML analyses over the human microbiome data has been linked to the prediction of important biological states. For analysing omics data, integrating abundance count of taxonomical features with their biological relationships is important. These relationships can potentially be uncovered from the phylogenetic tree of microbial taxa. In this paper, we propose a novel integrative framework Phy-PMRFI. This framework is driven by the phylogeny-based modeling of omics data to predict metagenomic functions using important features selected by a random forest importance (RFI) strategy. The proposed framework integrates the underlying phylogenetic tree information with abundance measures of microbial species (features) by creating a novel phylogeny and abundance aware matrix structure (PAAM). Phy-PMRFI progresses by ranking the microbial features using an RFI measure. This is then used as input for microbiome classification. The resultant feature set enhances the performance of the state-of-art methods such as support vector machines. Our proposed integrative framework also outperforms the state-of-the-art pipeline of phylogenetic isometric log-ratio transform (PhILR) and MetaPhyl. Prediction accuracy of 90 % is obtained with Phy-PMRFI over human throat microbiome in comparison to other approaches of PhILR with 53% and MetaPhyl with 71% accuracy.
Independent and Combined Effects of Antioxidant Supplementation and Circuit Resistance Training on Selected Adipokines in Postmenopausal Women

We examined the effects of the independent and combined effects of Zataria Multiflora supplementation and circuit resistance training (CRT) on selected adipokines among postmenopausal women. Forty-eight postmenopausal women were divided into four groups: Exercise (EG, n = 12), Zataria Multiflora (ZMG, n = 12), exercise and Zataria Multiflora (ZMEG, n = 12), and control (CG, n = 12). Participants in experimental groups either performed CRT (3 sessions per week with intensity at 55% of one-repetition maximum) or supplemented with Zataria Multiflora (500 mg every day after breakfast with 100 ml of water), or their combination, for 8 weeks. Blood samples were collected at pre- and post-intervention for measuring selected adipokines, including visfatin, omentin-1, vaspin, FGF-21, adiponectin, leptin, and ghrelin. Our findings demonstrated that visfatin, vaspin, and leptin levels significantly decreased over the intervention period (all p < 0.05), with these values were lower in EG and ZMEG in comparison to CG at post-intervention (all p < 0.05). Visfatin and vaspin levels were also lower in ZMEG in comparison to EG at post-intervention (both p < 0.05). In contrast, omentin-1, ghrelin, adiponectin, and FGF21 significantly increased in EG and EMG (all p < 0.05) after CRT. These findings suggest that Zataria Multiflora supplementation by itself has little effect on measured adipokines; however, its combination with CRT produced noticeable effects on circulating levels of these adipokines, even more than CRT alone. Consequently, a combination of CRT and Zataria Multiflora supplementation may represent a potentially beneficial non-pharmacologic intervention on some selected adipokines in postmenopausal women.
Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage

We -- the users turned creators and distributors of content -- are TIME's Person of the Year 2006, and AdAge's Advertising Agency of the Year 2007. We form a new Generation C. We have MySpace, YouTube, and OurMedia; we run social software, and drive the development of Web 2.0. But beyond the hype, what's really going on? In this groundbreaking exploration of our developing participatory online culture, Axel Bruns establishes the core principles which drive the rise of collaborative content creation in environments, from open source through blogs and Wikipedia to Second Life. This book shows that what's emerging here is no longer just a new form of content production, but a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collaborative communities: produsage. The implications of the gradual shift from production to produsage are profound, and will affect the very core of our culture, economy, society, and democracy.
Left Ventricular Remodeling Results in Homogenization of Myocardial Work Distribution.

BACKGROUND The interaction between regional left ventricular (LV) myocardial work and metabolism in remodeled hearts has not yet been well established. Our aim was to investigate the effect of inhomogeneous LV work distribution on regional metabolism and remodeling in our animal model with reversible dyssynchrony due to pacing. METHODS In 12 sheep, 8 weeks of right atrial and right ventricular free wall (DDD) pacing lead to LV dilatation, a thinned septum, and thickened lateral wall. Left bundle branch block-like dyssynchrony caused by DDD pacing could be acutely reverted by right atrial pacing (AAI) only. Invasive hemodynamics and echocardiography were used to assess regional work by stress-strain loop area and compared with regional glucose metabolism measured by 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography with and without improved spatial resolution by motion and anatomy correction on gated reconstructions. RESULTS Glucose metabolism by positron emission tomography with anatomic correction on gated positron emission tomography reconstruction showed a different regional distribution than with clinical reconstructions and correlated best and significantly with regional myocardial work. At baseline, work was homogeneously distributed with normal conduction (AAI pacing), whereas during dyssynchrony (DDD pacing), the lateral wall was more loaded, and the septum was unloaded. After 8 weeks of remodeling under DDD pacing, however, an almost homogeneous work distribution was found with DDD pacing, whereas with AAI pacing, the thin septum showed exaggerated loading and the lateral walls a low load. Our experimental observations were confirmed in 5 patient responders to cardiac resynchronization therapy. CONCLUSIONS Regional LV glucose metabolism closely correlates with regional work. Our data indicate that regionally different LV remodeling after exposure to inhomogeneous loading conditions, such as during LV dyssynchrony, is an adaptive process that helps to equilibrate work distribution. Correction of the inhomogeneous loading conditions, such as during cardiac resynchronization therapy, then triggers a reverse LV remodeling through the same mechanism.
Biotin Is Required for the Zinc Homeostasis in the Skin

Patients with biotin deficiency present symptoms that are similar to those in patients with acrodermatitis enteropathica (inherent zinc deficiency). However, the association between biotin and zinc deficiency remains unknown. We have previously shown that epidermal keratinocytes of mice fed zinc-deficient (ZD) diets secreted more adenosine triphosphate (ATP) than those of mice fed zinc-adequate (ZA) diets and that epidermal Langerhans cells are absent in ZD mice. Langerhans cells highly express CD39, which potently hydrolyzes ATP into adenosine monophosphate (AMP). Thus, a lack of Langerhans cells in ZD mice leads to non-hydrolysis of ATP, thereby leading to the development of ATP-mediated irritant contact dermatitis. In this study, we examined if biotin-deficient (BD) mice showed the same underlying mechanisms as those in ZD mice. BD mice showed reduced serum zinc levels, disappearance of epidermal Langerhans cells, and enhanced ATP production in the skin. Consequently, irritant contact dermatitis was significantly enhanced and prolonged in BD mice. In conclusion, the findings of our study showed that biotin deficiency leads to zinc deficiency because of which patients with biotin deficiency show similar symptoms as those with acrodermatitis enteropathica.
Comparison of anterior cervical foraminotomy and posterior cervical foraminotomy for treating single level unilateral cervical radiculopathy.

STUDY DESIGN Retrospective study OBJECTIVE. : To compare clinical and radiological outcomes after two surgical procedures. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion is the gold standard treatment for cervical radiculopathy. Cervical foraminotomy is an alternative decompressive treatment option to preserve segmental motion and avoid fusion-related complications. Anterior cervical foraminotomy (ACF) and posterior cervical foraminotmy (PCF) has been introduced to achieve foraminal decompression. The objective of this study was to compare long-term clinical and radiological outcomes after two surgical procedures for the treatment of single-level cervical radiculopathy. METHODS A retrospective review of patients undergoing ACF or PCF for the treatment of single-level unilateral cervical radiculopathy from 2010 to 2012 was performed. Demographic, perioperative, and clinical outcomes of 40 patients for each group were collected from the electronic medical records. Clinical outcomes were assessed by visual analog scores, while disc height (DH), cervical lordosis (CL), and C2-7 sagittal vertical axis (C2-7 SVA) data were obtained from pre- and postoperative radiography data. RESULTS Both groups showed similar clinical improvements after surgery. Radiographically, the ACF groups showed profound decrease in DH only at the first month after surgery, and there was no significant change in DH after 1 year. The PCF group showed no significant changes in DH at follow-up. With respect to CL, ACF showed a significant decrease. There was no statistically significant change in C2-7 SVA before or after surgery in both groups. CONCLUSIONS Both ACF and PCF showed significant clinical improvement of radiculopathy. In the ACF group, the DH decreased, and CL decreased during the early postoperative period. Radiological parameters were preserved in the PCF group after surgery. However, this group showed greater intraoperative bleeding and revision rates. Care should be taken to manage complications according to the specific surgical treatment. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE 3.
Clinical and molecular epidemiology of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in Oman

Background Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a serious disease with a high fatality rate reported in many countries. The first case of CCHF in Oman was detected in 1995 and serosurveys have suggested widespread infection of humans and livestock throughout the country. Methodology Cases of CCHF reported to the Ministry of Health (MoH) of Oman between 1995 and 2017 were retrospectively reviewed. Diagnosis was confirmed by serology and/or molecular tests in Oman. Stored RNA from recent cases was studied by sequencing the complete open reading frame (ORF) of the viral S segment at Public Health England, enabling phylogenetic comparisons to be made with other S segments of strains obtained from the region. Findings Of 88 cases of CCHF, 4 were sporadic in 1995 and 1996, then none were detected until 2011. From 2011–2017, incidence has steadily increased and 19 (23.8%) of 80 cases clustered around Eid Al Adha. The median (range) age was 33 (15–68) years and 79 (90%) were male. The major risk for infection was contact with animals and/or butchering in 73/88 (83%) and only one case was related to tick bites alone. Severe cases were over-represented: 64 (72.7%) had a platelet count < 50 x 109/L and 32 (36.4%) died. There was no intrafamilial spread or healthcare-associated infection. The viral S segments from 11 patients presenting in 2013 and 2014 were all grouped in Asia 1 (IV) lineage. Conclusions CCHF is well-established throughout Oman, with a single strain of virus present for at least 20 years. Most patients are men involved in animal husbandry and butchery. The high mortality suggests that there is substantial under-diagnosis of milder cases. Preventive measures have been introduced to reduce risks of transmission to animal handlers and butchers and to maintain safety in healthcare settings.
Characterization and Differentiation of Circulating Blood Mesenchymal Stem Cells and the Role of Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinase in Modulating the Adhesion

Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BM MSCs) can differentiate into multi-lineage tissues. However, obtaining BM MSCs by aspiration is difficult and can be painful; therefore peripheral blood (PB) MSCs might provide an easier alternative for clinical applications. Here, we show that circulating PB MSCs proliferate as efficiently as BM MSCs in the presence of extracellular matrix (ECM) and that differentiation potential into osteoblast in vitro and in vivo. Both BM MSCs and PB MSCs developed into new bone when subcutaneously transplanted into immune-compromised mice using hydroxyapatite/tricalcium phosphate as a carrier. Furthermore, LY294002 and Wortmannin blocked mesenchymal stem cell attachment in a dose-dependent manner, suggesting a role of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase in MSC attachment. Our data showed that the growth of PB MSCs could be regulated by interaction with the ECM and that these cells could differentiate into osteoblasts, suggesting their potential for clinical applications.