Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Excluding the best and worst individuals from parent selection

Any crossover operator has both beneficial and detrimental effects: it can bring building blocks together or it can tear them apart. In this paper, we provide evidence that the recombination can be biased towards its more beneficial aspects by modifying the parent selection process. A crude motivation is that the worst individuals do not have valuable building blocks to contribute, and it is too risky to subject the best individuals to crossover and have their building blocks separated. This idea is tested on both the hierarchical if and only if (HIFF) and the one dimensional Ising spin glass (SPIN) fitness functions. Four different parent selection schemes are compared and simulations are shown for both generational and steady state implementations. The results indicate this is a promising direction for future research.
Ranking Lyrics for Online Search

When someone wishes to find the lyrics for a song they typically go online and use a search engine. There are a large number of lyrics available on the internet as the effort required to transcribe and post lyrics is minimal. These lyrics are promptly returned to the user with customary search engine page ranking formula deciding the ordering of these results based on links, views, clicks, etc. However the content, and specifically, the accuracy of the lyrics in question are not analysed or used in any way to determine the rank of the lyrics, despite this being of concern to the searcher. In this work, we show that online lyrics are often inaccurate and the ranking methods used by search engines do not distinguish the more accurate annotations. We present an alternative method for ranking lyrics based purely on the collection of lyrics themselves using the Lyrics Concurrence.
Epidemiologic classification of human papillomavirus types associated with cervical cancer.

BACKGROUND Infection with human papilloma virus (HPV) is the main cause of cervical cancer, but the risk associated with the various HPV types has not been adequately assessed. METHODS We pooled data from 11 case-control studies from nine countries involving 1918 women with histologically confirmed squamous-cell cervical cancer and 1928 control women. A common protocol and questionnaire were used. Information on risk factors was obtained by personal interviews, and cervical cells were collected for detection of HPV DNA and typing in a central laboratory by polymerase-chain-reaction-based assays (with MY09/MY11 and GP5+/6+ primers). RESULTS HPV DNA was detected in 1739 of the 1918 patients with cervical cancer (90.7 percent) and in 259 of the 1928 control women (13.4 percent). With the GP5+/6+ primer, HPV DNA was detected in 96.6 percent of the patients and 15.6 percent of the controls. The most common HPV types in patients, in descending order of frequency, were types 16, 18, 45, 31, 33, 52, 58, and 35. Among control women, types 16, 18, 45, 31, 6, 58, 35, and 33 were the most common. For studies using the GP5+/6+ primer, the pooled odds ratio for cervical cancer associated with the presence of any HPV was 158.2 (95 percent confidence interval, 113.4 to 220.6). The odds ratios were over 45 for the most common and least common HPV types. Fifteen HPV types were classified as high-risk types (16, 18, 31, 33, 35, 39, 45, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 68, 73, and 82); 3 were classified as probable high-risk types (26, 53, and 66); and 12 were classified as low-risk types (6, 11, 40, 42, 43, 44, 54, 61, 70, 72, 81, and CP6108). There was good agreement between our epidemiologic classification and the classification based on phylogenetic grouping. CONCLUSIONS In addition to HPV types 16 and 18, types 31, 33, 35, 39, 45, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 68, 73, and 82 should be considered carcinogenic, or high-risk, types, and types 26, 53, and 66 should be considered probably carcinogenic.
Cinnamaldehyde Ameliorates Cadmium-Inhibited Root Elongation in Tobacco Seedlings via Decreasing Endogenous Hydrogen Sulfide Production

Cinnamaldehyde (CA) is natural plant-derived compound that has been highly appreciated for its medicinal properties. However, little information is known about the regulation of plant intrinsic physiology by CA. To address these gaps, physiological, histochemical, and biochemical approaches were applied to investigate CA-facilitated cadmium (Cd) tolerance in the roots of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) seedlings. Treatment with CdCl2 at 20 μM for 72 h resulted in the significant decrease in root elongation by 40.39% as compared to control. CA alleviated Cd-inhibited root elongation in dose- and time-dependent manners. The addition of CA at 20 μM induced significant increase in root elongation by 42.58% as compared to Cd treatment alone. CA abolished Cd-induced ROS (reactive oxygen species) accumulation, lipid peroxidation, loss of membrane integrity, cell death, and free Cd2+ accumulation in roots. CA blocked the Cd-induced increase in the endogenous H2S level through the down-regulation of d-cysteine desulfhydrase (DCD) expression. H2S scavenger hypotaurine (HT) or potent H2S-biosynthetic inhibitor dl-propargylglicine (PAG) were able mimic the action of CA on the blockade of Cd-induced H2S accumulation, cell death, and growth inhibition. Enhancement of the endogenous H2S level with NaHS (H2S donor) abrogated all the beneficial capabilities of CA, HT, and PAG. Collectively, these results suggest that CA has great potential to confer plant tolerance against Cd stress, which is closely associated with its capability to inhibit Cd-induced H2S production. This study not only provides evidences for the regulation of plant physiology by CA but also sheds new light on the cross-talk between CA and H2S in physiological modulations.
Birth weight and other risk factors for acute leukemia in the Jerusalem Perinatal Study cohort.

OBJECTIVES To assess the effect of birth weight of children and their siblings and other perinatal/parental factors on the risk of acute leukemia. METHODS We linked data from the Jerusalem Perinatal Study, a population-based research cohort (n = 88,829) of offspring born 1964 to 1976, with Israel's Cancer Registry. Risk factors for acute leukemia were assessed using univariate and multivariate proportional hazards models. RESULTS Leukemias developed in 65 individuals [24 acute myeloid leukemias (AML) and 41 acute lymphoblastic leukemias (ALL)]. A positive linear relation was found between gender-adjusted birth weight and all leukemias [hazard ratio (HR) 1.85, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.1-3.0] and AML (HR 2.9, 95% CI 1.3-6.4). The association between birth weight and AML was especially notable among infants (HR 8.14, 95% CI 1.8-38.9 for age 0 to 1 year) but was also observed among subjects ages >14 years at diagnosis. The relation was particularly strong among females (P = 0.001). Other risk factors for AML risk on univariate analysis were maternal origin, socioeconomic status, birth weight of sibling > 3,500 g, and family size. On multivariate analysis, only birth weight retained borderline significance (adjusted HR 2.38 per kg, 95% CI 1.0-5.7). Significant predictors for ALL in both univariate and multivariate analyses were male sex (adjusted HR 1.92, 95% CI 1.0-3.7) and birth weight categories > or = 3,000 g introduced into the model as nonlinear terms. CONCLUSION Birth weight is associated with an increased risk of acute leukemia in infants, children, and young adults. Perinatal factors play a role in the development of childhood leukemias, but the patterns of association vary by leukemia type.
Simple Yet Effective Methods for Large-Scale Scholarly Publication Ranking

With the growing amount of published research, automatic evaluation of scholarly publications is becoming an important task. In this paper we address this problem and present a simple and transparent approach for evaluating the importance of scholarly publications. Our method has been ranked among the top performers in the WSDM Cup 2016 Challenge. The first part of this paper describes our method. In the second part we present potential improvements to the method and analyse the evaluation setup which was provided during the challenge. Finally, we discuss future challenges in automatic evaluation of papers including the use of full-texts based evaluation methods.
EventMedia: A LOD dataset of events illustrated with media

An ever increasing amount of event-centric generated knowledge is spread over multiple social services, either materi- alized as calendar of past and upcoming events or illustrated by cross-media items. This opens an opportunity to create an infras- tructure unifying event-centered information derived from event directories, media platforms and social networks using the RDF data model. EventMedia aims at creating such an infrastructure that requires seamless aggregation and integration of disparate data sources, some of which overlap in their coverage. In this paper, we present the EventMedia knowledge base composed of events descriptions together with media descriptions associated with these events and interlinked with the larger Linked Open Data cloud. We describe how the data has been extracted, converted, interlinked and published following the best practices of the Semantic Web community.
Enforcing object protocols by combining static and runtime analysis

In this paper, we consider object protocols that constrain interactions between objects in a program. Several such protocols have been proposed in the literature. For many APIs (such as JDOM, JDBC), API designers constrain how API clients interact with API objects. In practice, API clients violate such constraints, as evidenced by postings in discussion forums for these APIs. Thus, it is important that API designers specify constraints using appropriate object protocols and enforce them. The goal of an object protocol is expressed as a protocol invariant. Fundamental properties such as ownership can be expressed as protocol invariants. We present a language, PROLANG, to specify object protocols along with their protocol invariants, and a tool, INVCOP++, to check if a program satisfies a protocol invariant. INVCOP++ separates the problem of checking if a protocol satisfies its protocol invariant (called protocol correctness), from the problem of checking if a program conforms to a protocol (called program conformance). The former is solved using static analysis, and the latter using runtime analysis. Due to this separation (1) errors made in protocol design are detected at a higher level of abstraction, independent of the program's source code, and (2) performance of conformance checking is improved as protocol correctness has been verified statically. We present theoretical guarantees about the way we combine static and runtime analysis, and empirical evidence that our tool INVCOP++ finds usage errors in widely used APIs. We also show that statically checking protocol correctness greatly optimizes the overhead of checking program conformance, thus enabling API clients to test whether their programs use the API as intended by the API designer.
Deep Quantization Network for Efficient Image Retrieval

Hashing has been widely applied to approximate nearest neighbor search for large-scale multimedia retrieval. Supervised hashing improves the quality of hash coding by exploiting the semantic similarity on data pairs and has received increasing attention recently. For most existing supervised hashing methods for image retrieval, an image is first represented as a vector of hand-crafted or machine-learned features, then quantized by a separate quantization step that generates binary codes. However, suboptimal hash coding may be produced, since the quantization error is not statistically minimized and the feature representation is not optimally compatible with the hash coding. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Quantization Network (DQN) architecture for supervised hashing, which learns image representation for hash coding and formally control the quantization error. The DQN model constitutes four key components: (1) a sub-network with multiple convolution-pooling layers to capture deep image representations; (2) a fully connected bottleneck layer to generate dimension-reduced representation optimal for hash coding; (3) a pairwise cosine loss layer for similarity-preserving learning; and (4) a product quantization loss for controlling hashing quality and the quantizability of bottleneck representation. Extensive experiments on standard image retrieval datasets show the proposed DQN model yields substantial boosts over latest state-of-the-art hashing methods.
Dynamic Plan Evaluation for Military Logistics

The defense personnel engaged in logistics planning need tools that allow them to evaluate a plan and efficiently update this information as the situation evolves. This paper reports on the work that IET performed as part of DARPA's Ultra*Log project to design a probabilistic reasoning algorithm for dynamic plan evaluation that conforms to the stringent performance requirements of Ultra*Log's multiagent planning architecture called Cougaar. Introduction & Background The ability to dynamically evaluate the effects of changes in the world situation on the quality of a logistics plan is crucial for military commanders who have to decide if a plan is feasible in a given situation. Furthermore, when multiple courses of action are feasible, they have to decide on the best choice for execution in a situation. The decision makers involved in military logistics planning need tools that can quickly evaluate a logistics plan given uncertain and incomplete information about a situation. Previously, we have reported on the facility that we developed to generate and manage multiple courses of action in Cougaar−a hierarchical planning, execution monitoring, and replanning system developed to solve military logistics planning problems (Upal). Cougaar (Cognitive Agent Architecture) (BBN 2002) is a multi- agent system developed under DARPA's Advanced Logistics Project (ALP) and its successor Ultra*Log. This paper reports on the work that IET performed as part of Ultra*Log to add the ability to efficiently evaluate the effects of changes on the quality and feasibility of a course of action and choose the best course of action in an uncertain situation when multiple plans are available. Cougaar society closely mirrors the organizational structure of the military units engaged in real-world
Collective migration under hydrodynamic interactions: a computational approach

We consider a generic model for cell motility. Even if a comprehensive understanding of cell motility remains elusive, progress has been achieved in its modelling using a whole-cell physical model. The model takes into account the main mechanisms of cell motility, actin polymerization, actin–myosin dynamics and substrate mediated adhesion (if applicable), and combines them with steric cell–cell and hydrodynamic interactions. The model predicts the onset of collective cell migration, which emerges spontaneously as a result of inelastic collisions of neighbouring cells. Each cell here modelled as an active polar gel is accomplished with two vortices if it moves. Upon collision of two cells, the two vortices which come close to each other annihilate. This leads to a rotation of the cells and together with the deformation and the reorientation of the actin filaments in each cell induces alignment of these cells and leads to persistent translational collective migration. The effect for low Reynolds numbers is as strong as in the non-hydrodynamic model, but it decreases with increasing Reynolds number.
Recognising and Interpreting Named Temporal Expressions

This paper introduces a new class of temporal expression ‐ named temporal expressions ‐ and methods for recognising and interpreting its members. The commonest temporal expressions typically contain date and time words, like April or hours. Research into recognising and interpreting these typical expressions is mature in many languages. However, there is a class of expressions that are less typical, very varied, and difficult to automatically interpret. These indicate dates and times, but are harder to detect because they often do not contain time words and are not used frequently enough to appear in conventional temporally-annotated corpora ‐ for example Michaelmas or Vasant Panchami. Using Wikipedia and linked data, we automatically construct a resource of English named temporal expressions, and use it to extract training examples from a large corpus. These examples are then used to train and evaluate a named temporal expression recogniser. We also introduce and evaluate rules for automatically interpreting these expressions, and we observe that use of the rules improves temporal annotation performance over existing corpora.
CVS : a framework architecture for D2D-based cellular vehicular services in 4G networks and beyond. (CVS : un framework d'architecture pour le déploiement de services véhiculaires basés sur les communications LTE-D2D dans les réseaux 4G/5G)

The traffic explosion in today’s mobile networks is one of the major concerns of mobile operators. This explosion is mostly widening the gap between networks’ capacities and users’ growing needs in terms of bandwidth and QoS (Quality of Service), which directly impacts operators’ business profitability. In this context, Device-to-Device (D2D) communications offer mobile operators business and technical opportunities by allowing the network traffic offload with D2D direct communications between mobile devices. The recent standardization of D2D-based services as Proximity Services (ProSe) by the 3GPP provides already a set of enhancements to the current LTE/4G architecture to support these services. However, still in its infancy, the proposed solutions are envisioned for short-term market deployments and for a limited set of service categories (i.e public safety services). As a first contribution of this thesis, the proposed Distributed ProSe Architecture enhances the current ProSe architecture for a longer term deployment perspective of D2D-based services. On the basis of this enhanced architecture, vehicular communications and related services are further investigated as a specific implementation of ProSe as well as a new market opportunity for mobile operators. The CVS (Cellular Vehicular Services) solution is then introduced as an architecture framework that enables the integration of vehicular networks into mobile operators’ network infrastructure. A mobile network clustering algorithm and D2D relay-based communication mechanisms are used in the solution design in order to optimize the use of both core and radio network resources. Performance evaluation through analytical modeling and simulations are also carried out to validate the proposed contributions
Structurally adaptive modular networks for nonstationary environments

This paper introduces a neural network capable of dynamically adapting its architecture to realize time variant nonlinear input-output maps. This network has its roots in the mixture of experts framework but uses a localized model for the gating network. Modules or experts are grown or pruned depending on the complexity of the modeling problem. The structural adaptation procedure addresses the model selection problem and typically leads to much better parameter estimation. Batch mode learning equations are extended to obtain on-line update rules enabling the network to model time varying environments. Simulation results are presented throughout the paper to support the proposed techniques.
Research on obstacle negotiation capability of tracked robot based on terramechanics

A great majority of current researches on obstacle negotiation focus on the critical state where CG position get over the obstacle using kinematics model. However, the models assume that the sinkage of the robot can be ignored and do not take into account whether the terrain can provide enough drawbar pull to keep the robot moving. While, when robots running on the soft terrain, the sinkage of the robot is very big that it can be ignore and it is very easy for the robots to slip. In order to solve that problem, this paper focuses on the effects of terrain physical parameters in the process of obstacle negotiation. Based on this point, the interaction models of wheel-terrain and track-terrain are built according to terramechanics. Using these models, two key postures of climbing obstacles are discussed, and the relationship between maximum surmountable obstacle-height and geometry parameters of the robot are obtained. Then maximum draw pull tests of wheel-track model and wheels model are designed to compare experimental results with theoretical results. Finally, experiments on surmounting obstacle performance of tracked robot are carried out, and the results show that our model is more exact than the CG kinematic model.
Structural Dynamics of Human Telomeric G-Quadruplex Loops Studied by Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Loops which are linkers connecting G-strands and supporting the G-tetrad core in G-quadruplex are important for biological roles of G-quadruplexes. TTA loop is a common sequence which mainly resides in human telomeric DNA (hTel) G-quadruplex. A series of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were carried out to investigate the structural dynamics of TTA loops. We found that (1) the TA base pair formed in TTA loops are very stable, the occupied of all hydrogen bonds are more than 0.95. (2) The TA base pair makes the adjacent G-quartet more stable than others. (3) For the edgewise loop and the diagonal loop, most loop bases are stacking with others, only few bases have considerable freedom. (4) The stabilities of these stacking structures are distinct. Part of the loops, especially TA base pairs, and bases stacking with the G-quartet, maintain certain stable conformations in the simulation, but other parts, like TT and TA stacking structures, are not stable enough. For the first time, spontaneous conformational switches of TTA edgewise loops were observed in our long time MD simulations. (5) For double chain reversal loop, it is really hard to maintain a stable conformation in the long time simulation under present force fields (parm99 and parmbsc0), as it has multiple conformations with similar free energies.
Laser welding of corneal tissue: preliminary experiences using 810-nm and 1950-nm diode lasers

Laser welding of corneal incisions was performed using two different diode laser wavelengths. Tissue fusion was attempted both with direct absorption of radiation at 1950 nm radiation and with ICG dye-enhanced technique at 810 nm. Thirty deep (not full thickness) corneal incisions of 15 fresh-enucleated porcine eyes were treated. Semiconductor diode lasers emitting in continuous wave at 1950 nm and at 810 nm were used. Both were coupled to an optic fiber handpiece. Wound samples were explanted on day 0 after treatment for histological evaluation. The group of corneal wounds treated with the ICG-enhanced technique revealed tissue welding in 70% of treated wounds. Using 1950 nm tissue fusion was observed in 50% of treated wounds. Macroscopic evaluation revealed a pronounced thermal damage of the epithelium in the samples treated with 1950 nm radiation. Wound closures obtained using 1950 nm were characterized by superficial welding of corneal layers. (Abstract truncated.)
High viral frequency in children with gastroesophageal reflux‐related chronic respiratory disorders

In the pediatric population chronic respiratory disorders (CRDs) include many pathological entities in which gastroesophageal reflux (GER) may play a role in the induction or persistence of clinical symptoms. It is not well established whether infective agents may be present in lung aspiration. The aim of the work was to investigate whether different infective agents could be found in children with GER‐related CRDs.