Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Personalized access to multi-version XML documents in an eGovernment scenario

In this paper, we present some results of an ongoing research involving the design and implementation, in an eGovernment scenario, of a multiversion repository of norm texts supporting efficient and personalized access. In particular we defined a multi-version XML data model supporting both temporal versioning –essential in normative systems– and semantic versioning. Semantic versioning is based on the applicability of different norm parts to different classes of citizens and allows users to retrieve personalized norm versions only containing provisions which are applicable to their personal case. We describe the organization and present preliminary performance figures of a prototype system we developed.
Rho GTPases Mediate the Mechanosensitive Lineage Commitment of Neural Stem Cells

Adult neural stem cells (NSCs) play important roles in learning and memory and are negatively impacted by neurological disease. It is known that biochemical and genetic factors regulate self‐renewal and differentiation, and it has recently been suggested that mechanical and solid‐state cues, such as extracellular matrix (ECM) stiffness, can also regulate the functions of NSCs and other stem cell types. However, relatively little is known of the molecular mechanisms through which stem cells transduce mechanical inputs into fate decisions, the extent to which mechanical inputs instruct fate decisions versus select for or against lineage‐committed blast populations, or the in vivo relevance of mechanotransductive signaling molecules in native stem cell niches. Here we demonstrate that ECM‐derived mechanical signals act through Rho GTPases to activate the cellular contractility machinery in a key early window during differentiation to regulate NSC lineage commitment. Furthermore, culturing NSCs on increasingly stiff ECMs enhances RhoA and Cdc42 activation, increases NSC stiffness, and suppresses neurogenesis. Likewise, inhibiting RhoA and Cdc42 or downstream regulators of cellular contractility rescues NSCs from stiff matrix‐ and Rho GTPase‐induced neurosuppression. Importantly, Rho GTPase expression and ECM stiffness do not alter proliferation or apoptosis rates indicating that an instructive rather than selective mechanism modulates lineage distributions. Finally, in the adult brain, RhoA activation in hippocampal progenitors suppresses neurogenesis, analogous to its effect in vitro. These results establish Rho GTPase‐based mechanotransduction and cellular stiffness as biophysical regulators of NSC fate in vitro and RhoA as an important regulatory protein in the hippocampal stem cell niche. STEM CELLS 2011;29:1886–1897
Micropatterning of silk proteins for soft bioactive diffractive optical elements

We present a method of making green, bioactive, low cost diffractive optical elements (DOEs) using silk fibroin proteins. DOEs usually permit a reduction in the number of optical elements in a design, reducing costs and lens weight. Compared with conventional DOEs made of glass or other transparent materials, silk protein based DOE structures are usually more flexible, thinner, lighter, and more importantly biocompatible and bioactive. The "green" silk protein films can be used to "lock" and "unlock" the information stored in DOE made on silica with only water being used. The whole process is simple, inexpensive, and environment-friendly.
Information Sharing in a Supply Chain Under ARMA Demand

In this paper we study how the time-series structure of the demand process affects the value of information sharing in a supply chain. We consider a two-stage supply chain model in which a retailer serves autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) demand and a manufacturer fills the retailer's orders. We characterize three types of situations based on the parameters of the demand process: (i) the manufacturer benefits from inferring demand information from the retailer's orders; (ii) the manufacturer cannot infer demand, but benefits from sharing demand information; and (iii) the manufacturer is better off neither inferring nor sharing, but instead uses only the most recent orders in its production planning. Using the example of ARMA(1,1) demand, we find that sharing or inferring retail demand leads to a 16.0% average reduction in the manufacturer's safety-stock requirement in cases (i) and (ii), but leads to an increase in the manufacturer's safety-stock requirement in (iii). Our results apply not only to two-stage but also to multistage supply chains.
Evaluation of a mobile AAC application for Filipino language

This paper discusses the testing of TumpAAC, an AAC word suggestion tool for mobile devices, targeted primarily at Filipino patients. The main objectives of the test is to gauge the application's usability and potential as an AAC tool. The testing procedure is outlined, and results are discussed in full. Ten speech pathologists were tapped for testing, as they are the domain experts when it comes to speech and language therapy. Initial testing shows that TumpAAC fulfills the goals of an AAC tool and is reported to be a better fit for Filipino patients than other AAC tools of its kind. It has scored 76 in the SUS scale, meaning its usability is above average. Possible target demographic and feature recommendations for the next version are also specified. Overall results show that the app shows promise in terms of research in AAC technology and has sparked the interest of local speech pathologists.
Eliminating Spammers and Ranking Annotators for Crowdsourced Labeling Tasks

With the advent of crowdsourcing services it has become quite cheap and reasonably effective to get a data set labeled by multiple annotators in a short amount of time. Various methods have been proposed to estimate the consensus labels by correcting for the bias of annotators with different kinds of expertise. Since we do not have control over the quality of the annotators, very often the annotations can be dominated by spammers, defined as annotators who assign labels randomly without actually looking at the instance. Spammers can make the cost of acquiring labels very expensive and can potentially degrade the quality of the final consensus labels. In this paper we propose an empirical Bayesian algorithm called SpEMthat iteratively eliminates the spammers and estimates the consensus labels based only on the good annotators. The algorithm is motivated by defining a spammer score that can be used to rank the annotators. Experiments on simulated and real data show that the proposed approach is better than (or as good as) the earlier approaches in terms of the accuracy and uses a significantly smaller number of annotators.
Concordance with DASH diet and blood pressure change: results from the Framingham Offspring Study (1991–2008)

Background: Concordance with the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet has been shown to reduce blood pressure (BP) in short-term intervention studies, but long-term effects are unclear. We evaluated the association of DASH diet concordance with BP trajectories and incidence of hypertension, in 2187 men and women (mean age 52.5 years at baseline) participating in the Framingham Offspring cohort. Method: Diet and BP were assessed from 1991 to 2008, with a median follow-up time of 13.4 years. DASH scores (ranging from 0 for worst to 10 for best concordance with DASH diet) were calculated by summing 10 food components that comprise the DASH diet pattern, including fruits and vegetables, low-fat dairy products, lean meat, and plant-based protein. Mixed-effect and Cox regression models were applied, to assess the association of DASH diet concordance with BP longitudinal change and with incidence of hypertension, respectively. All analyses were adjusted for age, sex, smoking status, history of diabetes, BMI, and physical activity. Result: Overall, SBP increased by 0.34 mmHg and DBP by 0.10 mmHg annually, in the Framingham Offspring cohort. Every unit increase in the DASH score resulted in a modest increase in SBP of 0.054 mmHg/year (P = 0.028). No associations were observed between DASH diet concordance and DBP or incidence of hypertension. Conclusion: Long-term concordance with the DASH diet was not associated with a decreasing BP trajectory over time, or with decreased incidence of hypertension, in this population of middle-aged adults.
Generalizing Translation Models in the Probabilistic Relevance Framework

A recurring question in information retrieval is whether term associations can be properly integrated in traditional information retrieval models while preserving their robustness and effectiveness. In this paper, we revisit a wide spectrum of existing models (Pivoted Document Normalization, BM25, BM25 Verboseness Aware, Multi-Aspect TF, and Language Modelling) by introducing a generalisation of the idea of the translation model. This generalisation is a de facto transformation of the translation models from Language Modelling to the probabilistic models. In doing so, we observe a potential limitation of these generalised translation models: they only affect the term frequency based components of all the models, ignoring changes in document and collection statistics. We correct this limitation by extending the translation models with the 15 statistics of term associations and provide extensive experimental results to demonstrate the benefit of the newly proposed methods. Additionally, we compare the translation models with query expansion methods based on the same term association resources, as well as based on Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF). We observe that translation models always outperform the first, but provide complementary information with the second, such that by using PRF and our translation models together we observe results better than the current state of the art.
Energy Efficient Cooperative MIMO Systems

In this paper we propose an energy efficient cooperative MIMO system. Space-time block codes (STBC) and code combining techniques are applied to utilize the inherent spatial diversity in wireless cooperative MIMO systems. We form a group of senders and receivers to provide higher order MIMO diversity and implement our STBC scheme in a distributed manner. In the receiving group, code combining is used with error control coding techniques to utilize receiver diversity. With the distributed implementation of STBC and code combining, MIMO diversity can be obtained in cooperative MIMO systems. We present analysis and simulation results for reliability (BER vs SNR curves) and energy efficiency. Our reliability curves are significantly better than SISO achieving MIMO-like diversity gains. Additionally, we examine energy consumption and show that the data transmission power can be low as 0.7 mW for 4-node send/receive group size in our cooperative MIMO system, compared to a point-to-point SISO system that consumes 30 mW. However, the cooperative MIMO introduces overhead and sacrifices system capacity. With the same number of sending nodes/antennas, the system capacity of 4×4 cooperative MIMO system is less than conventional 4×4 MIMO system due to cooperation overheads [1]. Thus there is tradeoff between energy consumption and system capacity in proposed system. In summary, our proposed system provides reliable and energy-efficient transmission by leveraging MIMO diversity gains through cooperation between nodes.
Does duration of untreated psychosis bias study samples of first‐episode psychosis?

Objective: While findings are contradictory, many studies report that long Duration of Untreated Psychosis (DUP) correlates with poorer outcome in first episode psychosis. In an outcome study of first‐episode psychosis, we compared the patients who refused to participate in a follow‐along with those who consented to estimate the importance of this factor in sample recruitment bias. Our questions were: (i) What is the percentage of refusers? (ii) Are there systematic differences between refusers and consenters on DUP and/or other admission variables? (iii) What is the risk of refusal for different values of DUP?
Aggregated channels network for real-time pedestrian detection

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated their superiority in numerous computer vision tasks, yet their computational cost results prohibitive for many real-time applications such as pedestrian detection which is usually performed on low-consumption hardware. In order to alleviate this drawback, most strategies focus on using a two-stage cascade approach. Essentially, in the first stage a fast method generates a significant but reduced amount of high quality proposals that later, in the second stage, are evaluated by the CNN. In this work, we propose a novel detection pipeline that further benefits from the two-stage cascade strategy. More concretely, the enriched and subsequently compressed features used in the first stage are reused as the CNN input. As a consequence, a simpler network architecture, adapted for such small input sizes, allows to achieve real-time performance and obtain results close to the state-of-the-art while running significantly faster without the use of GPU. In particular, considering that the proposed pipeline runs in frame rate, the achieved performance is highly competitive. We furthermore demonstrate that the proposed pipeline on itself can serve as an effective proposal generator.
Verification of loop transformations for complex data dominated applications

¢. This paper presents new results for formal verification of loop transformations applied on complex applications in the area of speech, image and video processing, front-end telecom and numerical computing systems. The verification method is based on a polyhedral domain based modeling for each statement in the original and optimized description. Experiments on several realistic examples shows that the method is suited for arbitrary loop nests and can be successfully applied on verification of complex loop transformations .
Expression of a Functional Recombinant Human Basic Fibroblast Growth Factor from Transgenic Rice Seeds

Basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF-2) is an important member of the FGF gene family. It is widely used in clinical applications for scald and wound healing in order to stimulate cell proliferation. Further it is applied for inhibiting stem cell differentiation in cultures. Due to a shortage of plasma and low expression levels of recombinant rbFGF in conventional gene expression systems, we explored the production of recombinant rbFGF in rice grains (Oryza sativa bFGF, OsrbFGF). An expression level of up to 185.66 mg/kg in brown rice was obtained. A simple purification protocol was established with final recovery of 4.49% and resulting in a yield of OsrbFGF reaching up to 8.33 mg/kg OsrbFGF. The functional assay of OsrbFGF indicated that the stimulating cell proliferation activity on NIH/3T3 was the same as with commercialized rbFGF. Wound healing in vivo of OsrbFGF is equivalent to commercialized rbFGF. Our results indicate that rice endosperm is capable of expressing small molecular mass proteins, such as bFGF. This again demonstrates that rice endosperm is a promising system to express various biopharmaceutical proteins.
A new fingertip detection and tracking algorithm and its application on writing-in-the-air system

Writing-in-the-air (WIA) system provides a novel input experience using the fingertip as a virtual pen based on the color and depth information from only one Kinect camera. We present a new fingertip detection and tracking framework for the robust and realtime fingertip position estimation and further improve the air-writing character recognition accuracy. Firstly, we propose a new physical constraint and an adaptive threshold with the mode temporal consistency in order to classify various hand poses into two modes, i.e., the side-mode and frontal-mode. In the side-mode, a new choose-to-trust algorithm (CTTA) is proposed for the hand segmentation. The final segmentation result is generated by selecting a more trustable color or depth model-based segmentation result according to the fingertip-palm relationship. In the frontal-mode, we propose to estimate the fingertip position by a joint detection-tracking algorithm that successfully incorporates the temporal and physical constraints. By using three new features defined by the joint detection-tracking algorithm, the fingertip position is determined by a multi-objective optimization strategy. We have collected two large fingertip writing data set with different difficulties. According to our experiments in both data sets, our proposed framework has the best accuracy on the fingertip position estimation by comparing with four popular methods. More importantly, the final character recognition rate increases significantly and reaches 100% in the first five candidates for all types of characters.
Validation and Decomposition of Partially Occluded Images with Holes

A partially occluded image consists of a set of objects where some may be partially occluded by others. Validating occluded images distinguishes whether a given image can be covered by the members of a finite set of objects, where both the image and the object range over identical alphabet. The algorithm presented here validates a one-dimensional image x of length n, over a given set of objects all of equal length and each composed of two parts separated by a transparent hole.
Discovering the Structure of a Planar Mirror System from Multiple Observations of a Single Point

We investigate the problem of identifying the position of a viewer inside a room of planar mirrors with unknown geometry in conjunction with the room's shape parameters. We consider the observations to consist of angularly resolved depth measurements of a single scene point that is being observed via many multi-bounce interactions with the specular room geometry. Applications of this problem statement include areas such as calibration, acoustic echo cancelation and time-of-flight imaging. We theoretically analyze the problem and derive sufficient conditions for a combination of convex room geometry, observer, and scene point to be reconstruct able. The resulting constructive algorithm is exponential in nature and, therefore, not directly applicable to practical scenarios. To counter the situation, we propose theoretically devised geometric constraints that enable an efficient pruning of the solution space and develop a heuristic randomized search algorithm that uses these constraints to obtain an effective solution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on extensive simulations as well as in a challenging real-world calibration scenario.
Effect of Traditional Chinese Exercise on Gait and Balance for Stroke: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Objective A systematic review is conducted to determine the effect of traditional Chinese exercise for patients with stroke. Methods Studies are obtained from PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, EBSCO, Web of Science, and CNKI. Only randomized controlled trials were left to evaluate the effects of traditional Chinese exercise for patients with stroke, and with no limits on study data or language. The primary outcome was the Berg balance score (BBS), Functional walking scale. And a random-effects model was used to calculate the pooled mean difference (MD) with 95% confidence interval (CI). Results A total of 9 studies on 820 participants conform to the inclusion criteria, whereas eight studies on 704 participants are used as data sources for the meta-analysis, all trials were published between 2004 and 2013. The BBS indicates that the efficacy of traditional Chinese exercise on balance of patients with stroke is better than that of other training or no training in short term [MD (95%CI) = 11.85 [5.41, 18.30], P < 0.00001]. And the short physical performance battery, Functional walking scale, limit of stability were observed significant differences on balance (p<0.05) and gait (p<0.05) between traditional Chinese exercise and other exercises or no exercise. In addition, there is an article showed that some other form (physiotherapy exercises focused on balance) significantly improved balance ability for stroke patients compared to tai chi chuan practice (Berg test = 0.01, Romberg, and standing on one leg). Conclusion In our meta analysis, the positive findings of this study suggest traditional Chinese exercise has beneficial effects on the balance ability in short term. However, we drew the conclusion according to the extreme heterogeneity, and evidence of better quality and from a larger sample size is required. Because of the inconsistent outcomes, there are short of enough good evidence for patients with stroke to prove the effects of traditional Chinese exercise on gait. Systematic Review Registration http://www.crd. york.ac. uk/PROSPERO PROSPERO registration number: CRD42013006474.
Instrumental Variable Analysis to Compare Effectiveness of Stents in the Extremely Elderly

Background—Evaluating novel therapies is challenging in the extremely elderly. Instrumental variable methods identify variables associated with treatment allocation to perform adjusted comparisons that may overcome limitations of more traditional approaches. Methods and Results—Among all patients aged ≥85 years undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention in nonfederal hospitals in Massachusetts between 2003 and 2009 (n=2690), we identified quarterly drug-eluting stent (DES) use rates as an instrumental variable. We estimated risk-adjusted differences in outcomes for DES versus bare metal stents using a 2-stage least squares instrumental variable analysis method. Quarterly DES use ranged from 15% to 88%. Unadjusted 1-year mortality rates were 14.5% for DES versus 23.0% for bare metal stents (risk difference, −8.5%; P<0.001), an implausible finding compared with randomized trial results. Using instrumental variable analysis, DES were associated with no difference in 1-year mortality (risk difference, −0.8%; P=0.76) or bleeding (risk difference, 2.3%; P=0.33) and with significant reduction in target vessel revascularization (risk difference, −8.3%; P<0.0001). Conclusions—Using an instrumental variable analysis, DES were associated with similar mortality and bleeding and a significant reduction in target vessel revascularization compared with bare metal stents in the extremely elderly. Variation in use rates may be useful as an instrumental variable to facilitate comparative effectiveness in groups underrepresented in randomized trials.