Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Designing for the future: a cognitive adaptive man-machine-interface

The forecasts of the International Civil Aviation Organization envisage a growth in world air travel of 5% per annum until 2020. The air traffic in Europe is therefore expected to more than double by 2020. In order to deal with the growth, the European Air Traffic Management (ATM) system will undergo major changes. The envisaged next generation ATM will require new technologies to meet future collaborative decision making, self separation, precision 4D path following, and closer aircraft spacing. The CAMMI (Cognitive Adaptive Man Machine Interface) program addresses human factors priorities in various domains by developing concepts that balance operator workload, support added future operator roles and responsibilities and resulting new task and information requirements, while allowing operators to focus on the most safety critical tasks. In the aviation domain current pilot interface applications are inadequate to support pilot performance under increased workload and responsibility. The envisioned ATM capabilities will only be realized with increased automation, therefore the development of adaptive information management, display management, and task management aids is a necessity. The paper discusses the CAMMI project and presents concepts to address the challenges presented by future flight operations.
3D Time-Resolved MR Angiography (MRA) of the Carotid Arteries with Time-Resolved Imaging with Stochastic Trajectories: Comparison with 3D Contrast-Enhanced Bolus-Chase MRA and 3D Time-Of-Flight MRA

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Time-resolved MR angiography (MRA) offers the combined advantage of large anatomic coverage and hemodynamic flow information. We applied parallel imaging and time-resolved imaging with stochastic trajectories (TWIST), which uses a spiral trajectory to undersample k-space, to perform time-resolved MRA of the extracranial internal carotid arteries and compare it to time-of-flight (TOF) and high-resolution contrast-enhanced (HR) MRA. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A retrospective review of 31 patients who underwent carotid MRA at 1.5T using TOF, time-resolved and HR MRA was performed. Images were evaluated for the presence and degree of ICA stenosis, reader confidence, and number of pure arterial frames attained with the TWIST technique. RESULTS: With a consensus interpretation of all sequences as the reference standard, accuracy for identifying stenosis was 90.3% for TWIST MRA, compared with 96.0% and 88.7% for HR MRA and TOF MRA, respectively. HR MRA was significantly more accurate than the other techniques (P < .05). TWIST MRA yielded datasets with high in-plane spatial resolution and distinct arterial and venous phases. It provided dynamic information not otherwise available. Mean diagnostic confidence was satisfactory or greater for TWIST in all patients. CONCLUSION: The TWIST technique consistently obtained pure arterial phase images while providing dynamic information. It is rapid, uses a low dose of contrast, and may be useful in specific circumstances, such as in the acute stroke setting. However, it does not yet have spatial resolution comparable with standard contrast-enhanced MRA.
Soil Fertility Status in Relation to Farmers’ Practices Under Maize Based Systems in Western Region of Kenya: Yield Gap Analysis

A study was carried out in Kenya Cereal Enhancement Project site in Western region of Kenya to examine the soil fertility status in relation to the current blanket fertilizer recommendations and farmers’ practices across the four wards, namely: Motosiet, Keiyo, Cherangani and Kwanza. The baseline fertility status in different soil mapping units was assessed in terms of soil productivity index with a view of analyzing the levels of nutrients and yield gaps. Using the standard soil survey procedures, six soil mapping units were identified as UUr1, UUr2, UUr3, RUd, RUrb, and BU1. The results showed that the highest productivity index was in unit BU1, followed by UUr1, UUr2, UUr3, and RUrb with values of 40.5, 29.4, 25.0, 16.0 and 8.9% respectively. Keiyo Ward had the highest level of nitrogen, being 125.82, followed by Motosiet, Cherangani and Kwanza with values of 99.92, 97.12, and 81.12 kg/ha respectively. Phosphorous level was highest in Kwanza (136.41 kg/ha), followed by Cherangani (106.82 kg/ha) and Keiyo Ward (76.08 kg/ha). The lowest level was recorded in Motosiet with the value of 72.56 kg/ha. Potassium was found to be adequate in all the four Wards with values ranging between 347.67 and 410.34 kg/ha. The maximum maize production recorded in the project sites was 9,000 kg/ha, with a yield gap of 1,000 kg/ha. This was achieved through application of 100 and 50 kg/ha of DAP and CAN respectively. This was followed by 6,750 kg/ha obtained through application of 50 kg/ha of DAP and CAN. The yields from the rest of the sites ranged between 1,800 and 4,500 kg/ha with yield gaps varying from 3,250 to 8,650 kg/ha. The lowest yields were obtained in Keiyo, followed by Kwanza Ward despite the relatively high macro- nutrient levels in the soils of the two Wards. This was attributed to soil-related constraints caused by the increased soil structural degradation and loss of soil tilth. Therefore, it is recommended that the envisaged climate smart technologies be geared towards enhancement of nutrient and water use efficiency through improved soil structure and tilth.
Mycobacterium ulcerans Ecological Dynamics and Its Association with Freshwater Ecosystems and Aquatic Communities: Results from a 12-Month Environmental Survey in Cameroon

Background Mycobacterium ulcerans (MU) is the agent responsible for Buruli Ulcer (BU), an emerging skin disease with dramatic socioeconomic and health outcomes, especially in rural settings. BU emergence and distribution is linked to aquatic ecosystems in tropical and subtropical countries, especially to swampy and flooded areas. Aquatic animal organisms are likely to play a role either as host reservoirs or vectors of the bacilli. However, information on MU ecological dynamics, both in space and time, is dramatically lacking. As a result, the ecology of the disease agent, and consequently its mode of transmission, remains largely unknown, which jeopardizes public health attempts for its control. The objective of this study was to gain insight on MU environmental distribution and colonization of aquatic organisms through time. Methodology/Principal Findings Longitudinal sampling of 32 communities of aquatic macro-invertebrates and vertebrates was conducted from different environments in two BU endemic regions in Cameroon during 12 months. As a result, 238,496 individuals were classified and MU presence was assessed by qPCR in 3,084 sample-pools containing these aquatic organisms. Our study showed a broad distribution of MU in all ecosystems and taxonomic groups, with important regional differences in its occurrence. Colonization dynamics fluctuated along the year, with the highest peaks in August and October. The large variations observed in the colonization dynamics of different taxonomic groups and aquatic ecosystems suggest that the trends shown here are the result of complex ecological processes that need further investigation. Conclusion/Perspectives This is the largest field study on MU ecology to date, providing the first detailed description of its spatio-temporal dynamics in different aquatic ecosystems within BU endemic regions. We argue that coupling this data with fine-scale epidemiological data through statistical and mathematical models will provide a major step forward in the understanding of MU ecology and mode of transmission.
Plasma cystatin C is a predictor of renal dysfunction, acute‐on‐chronic liver failure, and mortality in patients with acutely decompensated liver cirrhosis

The development of acute‐on‐chronic liver failure (ACLF) in patients with liver cirrhosis is associated with high mortality rates. Renal failure is the most significant organ dysfunction that occurs in ACLF. So far there are no biomarkers predicting ACLF. We investigated whether cystatin C (CysC) and neutrophil gelatinase‐associated lipocalin (NGAL) can predict development of renal dysfunction (RD), hepatorenal syndrome (HRS), ACLF, and mortality. We determined the plasma levels of CysC and NGAL in 429 patients hospitalized for acute decompensation of cirrhosis in the EASL‐CLIF Acute‐on‐Chronic Liver Failure in Cirrhosis (CANONIC) study. The patients were followed for 90 days. Patients without RD or ACLF at inclusion but with development of either had significantly higher baseline concentrations of CysC and NGAL compared to patients without. CysC, but not NGAL, was found to be predictive of RD (odds ratio, 9.4; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.8‐49.7), HRS (odds ratio, 4.2; 95% CI, 1.2‐14.8), and ACLF (odds ratio, 5.9; 95% CI, 1.3‐25.9). CysC at day 3 was not found to be a better predictor than baseline CysC. CysC and NGAL were both predictive of 90‐day mortality, with hazard ratios for CysC of 3.1 (95% CI, 2.1‐4.7) and for NGAL of 1.9 (95% CI, 1.5‐2.4). Conclusion: Baseline CysC is a biomarker of RD, HRS, and ACLF and an independent predictor of mortality in patients with acutely decompensated liver cirrhosis, though determining CysC at day 3 did not provide any benefit; while NGAL is also associated with short‐term mortality, it fails to predict development of RD, HRS, and ACLF. Baseline CysC may help to identify patients at risk earlier and improve clinical management. (Hepatology 2017;66:1232‐1241)
Pedestrian network information extraction based on VGI

Pedestrian network information plays an important role in pedestrian location based service (LBS), and its completeness determines the quality of a pedestrian LBS. This study used volunteered data and BaiduMap to research how to extract pedestrian network information on the basis of pedestrian GPS trajectories. The method extracts human road information by three steps: cleaning track data, extracting the road network, and detecting and analysing the recognised pedestrian road facilities. Once the road network information is extracted, the information regarding road facilities can be obtained, e.g., pedestrian crossings, overpasses, and underground passages. This paper describes a new method for incrementally updating electronic maps.
Feeding behaviour of artificially reared Romane lambs

A consequence of increasing litter size in sheep is that a portion of the lambs have to be reared artificially. Detailed information about the pattern of milk consumption of artificially reared lambs would help improve their management. The purpose of this study is to describe the individual and group feeding behaviour of 94 Romane artificially reared lambs from 5 to 28 days of age using an electronic automatic lamb feeder. Animals were located in four pens of 8 to 15 lambs of similar age with one teat per pen. They were fed ad libitum. In our experimental situation (group rearing, continuous lightning) on average a lamb made 1.4±0.7 visits to the teat per meal and 9.5±3 meals per day. Mean meal duration was 247±158 s and the mean daily time spent feeding was 38±25 min. The mean quantity of milk intake was 176±132 ml per meal and 1.68±0.8 l per day. With age, the number of daily meals and their duration decreased while the quantity of milk consumed per meal and per day increased. Females tended to make more visits to the teat per meal and perform more meals per day but their milk consumption per meal was lower. The feed conversion ratio was 1.36±0.2. Synchrony in feeding (group meal) was estimated as the percentage of lambs that wanted to access the teat within the same short period (relative group meal size). On average 65% of lambs in the pen wanted to access the teat within the same period, but for 35% of group meals the relative group meal size was >90%. There was no consistency in the order in which lambs accessed the teat during a group meal. Our evaluation suggested that electronic automatic lamb feeders are tools that can provide, on a large scale, data describing the feeding behaviour of artificially reared lambs. It is then possible to study factors influencing these traits in order to improve the outcome of artificially reared lambs.
The upstream factor-binding site is not essential for activation of transcription from the adenovirus major late promoter

An adenovirus major late promoter (MLP) has been constructed with a 4-bp alteration in the sequence which binds the transcription factor known as USF or MLTF. This upstream element has often been considered necessary and sufficient for maximal transcription of the MLP. A duplex oligonucleotide containing the mutant sequence was not capable of binding specific proteins in a band shift assay, nor was it capable of inhibiting such binding by the wild-type sequence. In an in vitro assay, the mutant sequence was incapable of inhibiting transcription from a duplex sequence containing the MLP, whereas the wild-type sequence could. These two pieces of evidence suggest that the sequence is functionally impaired. Surprisingly, a virus containing the mutant MLP had a normal replication phenotype. On more detailed examination however, we show that the mutant viral MLP was deficient in transcription at 9 h postinfection but that the rate of transcription was close to normal by 20 h postinfection. An inverted CAAT box located immediately upstream of the USF-binding element was not previously thought to be of importance to the functioning of the MLP. However, a single point mutation in the CAAT box, placed in the USF mutant background, had a marked effect upon transcription from the MLP. This result suggests that the MLP may exhibit functional redundancy in which either the USF-binding site or the CAAT box can serve as an upstream promoter element. Neither of the mutant viruses displayed any change in the levels of the divergent IVa2 transcription unit, suggesting that the levels of divergent transcription are not determined by competition for limiting transcription factors.
Linking landscapes : Exploring the relationships between World Heritage cultural landscapes and IUCN protected areas

This study identifies the relationships that exist between World Heritage cultural landscapes and protected areas, and documents the practical management and governance associations that occur between them. It looks at i) the conceptual similarities and differences between these two systems of conservation designations; ii) the spatial overlap between them; and iii) the practical interrelation and integration that occurs ‘on the ground’. The Hungarian Hortobagy National Park and Thingvellir National Park in Iceland are used as examples.
NMTPY: A Flexible Toolkit for Advanced Neural Machine Translation Systems

Abstract In this paper, we present nmtpy, a flexible Python toolkit based on Theano for training Neural Machine Translation and other neural sequence-to-sequence architectures. nmtpy decouples the specification of a network from the training and inference utilities to simplify the addition of a new architecture and reduce the amount of boilerplate code to be written. nmtpy has been used for LIUM’s top-ranked submissions to WMT Multimodal Machine Translation and News Translation tasks in 2016 and 2017.
Optimal Decomposition Strategy For Tree Edit Distance

An ordered labeled tree is a tree where the left-to-right order among siblings is significant. Given two ordered labeled trees, the edit distance between them is the minimum cost edit operations that convert one tree to the other. In this thesis, we present an algorithm for the tree edit distance problem by using the optimal tree decomposition strategy. By combining the vertical compression of trees with optimal decomposition we can significantly reduce the running time of the algorithm. We compare our method with other methods both theoretically and experimentally. The test results show that our strategies on compressed trees are by far the best decomposition strategy, creating the least number of relevant sub-problems.
Cerebellar Disorganization Characteristic of Reeler in Scrambler Mutant Mice Despite Presence of Reelin

Analysis of the molecular basis of neuronal migration in the mammalian CNS relies critically on the discovery and identification of genetic mutations that affect this process. Here, we report the detailed cerebellar phenotype caused by a new autosomal recessive neurological mouse mutation, scrambler (gene symbolscm). The scrambler mutation results in ataxic mice that exhibit several neuroanatomic defects reminiscent of reeler. The most obvious of these lies in the cerebellum, which is small and lacks foliation. Granule cells, although normally placed in an internal granule cell layer, are greatly reduced in number (∼20% of normal). Purkinje cells are also reduced in number, and the majority are located ectopically in deep cerebellar masses. There is a small population of Purkinje cells (∼5% of the total) that occupy a Purkinje cell layer between the molecular and granule cell layers. Despite this apparent disorganization of Purkinje cells, zebrin-positive and zebrin-negative parasagittal zones can be delineated. The ectopic masses of Purkinje cells are bordered by the extracellular matrix protein tenascin and by processes containing glial fibrillary acidic protein. Antibodies specific for these proteins also identify a novel midline raphe structure in both scrambler and reeler cerebellum that is not present in wild-type mice. Thus, in many respects, the scrambler cerebellum is identical to that of reeler. However, the scrambler locus has been mapped to a site distinct from that of reelin (Reln), the gene responsible for the reeler defect. Here we find that there are normal levels of Reln mRNA in scrambler brain and that reelin protein is secreted normally by scrambler cerebellar cells. These findings imply that the scrambler gene product may function in a molecular pathway critical for neuronal migration that is tightly linked to, but downstream of, reelin.
Approximation-Tolerant Model-Based Compressive Sensing

The goal of sparse recovery is to recover a k-sparse signal x e Rn from (possibly noisy) linear measurements of the form y = Ax, where A e Rmxn describes the measurement process. Standard results in compressive sensing show that it is possible to recover the signal x from m = O(k log(n/k)) measurements, and that this bound is tight. The framework of model-based compressive sensing [BCDH10] overcomes the lower bound and reduces the number of measurements further to O(k) by limiting the supports of x to a subset M of the (nk) possible supports. This has led to many measurement-efficient algorithms for a wide variety of signal models, including block-sparsity and tree-sparsity. Unfortunately, extending the framework to other, more general models has been stymied by the following obstacle: for the framework to apply, one needs an algorithm that, given a signal x, solves the following optimization problem exactly: [EQUATION] (here x[n]\Ω denotes the projection of x on coordinates not in Ω). However, an approximation algorithm for this optimization task is not sufficient. Since many problems of this form are not known to have exact polynomial-time algorithms, this requirement poses an obstacle for extending the framework to a richer class of models. In this paper, we remove this obstacle and show how to extend the model-based compressive sensing framework so that it requires only approximate solutions to the aforementioned optimization problems. Interestingly, our extension requires the existence of approximation algorithms for both the maximization and the minimization variants of the optimization problem. Further, we apply our framework to the Constrained Earth Mover's Distance (CEMD) model introduced in [SHI13], obtaining a sparse recovery scheme that uses significantly less than O(k log(n/k)) measurements. This is the first non-trivial theoretical bound for this model, since the validation of the approach presented in [SHI13] was purely empirical. The result is obtained by designing a novel approximation algorithm for the maximization version of the problem and proving approximation guarantees for the minimization algorithm described in [SHI13].
Using agent models and data farming to explore network centric operations

Network centric operations are difficult to quantify in many respects with models or other methods. Data farming is a methodology and capability that makes use of high performance computing to run models many times. In the case of agent-based models that are relatively small, many runs can be performed in a short period of time. This capability gives modelers and their clients the enhanced ability to discover trends and outliers in results in a variety of areas. In this paper the authors discuss some notional efforts to begin to explore questions in the area of network centric operations using the agent model MANA and data farming. By observing the network behaviors and the output for traditional and information age warfare, we have created comparisons that illustrate when networked forces outfight non-networked forces
High Area-Efficient DC-DC Converter With High Reliability Using Time-Mode Miller Compensation (TMMC)

This paper presents a novel on-chip compensation scheme, the Time-Mode Miller Compensation (TMMC), for DC-DC converter in which the compensation components are integrated on-chip. Using this proposed scheme, the DC-DC converter is stably compensated and insensitive to process variations, with significantly small compensation components ( 1 pF and 80 kΩ in this work) consuming very small silicon area owing to the characteristic of the TMMC. The small compensation components make the chip size small, with 0.12 mm2 of core area (w/o power transistors) using 0.18 μm I/O process. This core size is as small as that of the digital DC-DC converters implemented with less than sub-50 nm process. The measurement result shows that the maximum power efficiency of 90.6% is obtained at the load current of 220 mA with the switching frequency of 1.15 MHz when the input and the output voltages are 3.3 V and 2 V, respectively.
SVD-Based Screening for the Graphical Lasso

The graphical lasso is the most popular approach to estimating the inverse covariance matrix of highdimension data. It iteratively estimates each row and column of the matrix in a round-robin style until convergence. However, the graphical lasso is infeasible due to its high computation cost for large size of datasets. This paper proposes Sting, a fast approach to the graphical lasso. In order to reduce the computation cost, it efficiently identifies blocks in the estimated matrix that have nonzero elements before entering the iterations by exploiting the singular value decomposition of data matrix. In addition, it selectively updates elements of the estimated matrix expected to have nonzero values. Theoretically, it guarantees to converge to the same result as the original algorithm of the graphical lasso. Experiments show that our approach is faster than existing approaches.