Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An update on the status of Fishing Cat Prionailurus viverrinus Bennett, 1833 (Carnivora: Felidae) in Thailand

Fishing Cat Prionailurus viverrinus is threatened throughout its range by habitat loss, persecution, and non-targeted hunting; it is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Even basic distribution data are still lacking in many parts of its range, particularly in southeastern Asia where most wildlife surveys focus on large charismatic carnivores in protected habitats, typically inland blocks of evergreen or semi-evergreen and deciduous forests. This report aims to update on distribution and status of Fishing Cat in Thailand. Historic (the 1980s) and current (2007–2017) records from Thailand were compiled based on personal communications, local news agencies, social media pages, and publications. The current Thai Fishing Cat distribution seems to be highly fragmented and mostly in coastal wetlands of the Inner Gulf of Thailand and the Thai-Malay Peninsula with one confirmed record from a riverine habitat in central Thailand. No confirmed records came from protected forested areas—perhaps these are marginal habitat for Fishing Cat. Nevertheless, there were no targeted surveys in those areas. Fishing Cat was so far not detected from on-going otters’ targeted camera trap surveys along Thailand’s Andaman coast. Future surveys should focus on coastal and inland wetlands to expedite the discovery of remaining populations before these are extirpated.
Face verification using LBP feature and clustering

In this paper, we present a mechanism to extract certain special faces—LBP-Faces, which are designed to represent different kinds of faces around the world, and utilize them as the basis to verify other faces. In particular, we show how our idea can integrate with Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and improve its performance. Other than most of the previous LBP-variant approaches, which, no matter try to improve coding mechanism or optimize the neighbourhood sizes, first divide a face into patch-level regions (e.g. 7×7 patches), concatenating histograms calculated in each patch to derive a rather long dimension vector, and then apply PCA to implement dimension reduction, our work use original LBP histograms, trying to retain the major properties such as discriminability and invariance, but in a much bigger component-level region (we divide faces into 7 components). In each component, we cluster LBP descriptors—in the form of histograms to derive N clustering centroids, which we define as LBP-Faces. Then, to any input face, we calculate its similarities with all these N LBP-Faces and use the similarities as final features to verify the face. It looks like we project the faces image into a new feature space—LBP-Faces space. The intuition within it is that when we depict an unknown face, we are prone to use description such as how likely the face's eye or nose is to an known one. Result of our experiment on the Labeled Face in Wild (LFW) database shows that our method outperforms LBP in face verification.
Co-activator independent differences in how the metaphase and anaphase APC/C recognise the same substrate

ABSTRACT The Anaphase Promoting Complex or Cyclosome (APC/C) is critical to the control of mitosis. The APC/C is an ubiquitin ligase that targets specific mitotic regulators for proteolysis at distinct times in mitosis, but how this is achieved is not well understood. We have addressed this question by determining whether the same substrate, cyclin B1, is recognised in the same way by the APC/C at different times in mitosis. Unexpectedly, we find that distinct but overlapping motifs in cyclin B1 are recognised by the APC/C in metaphase compared with anaphase, and this does not depend on the exchange of Cdc20 for Cdh1. Thus, changes in APC/C substrate specificity in mitosis can potentially be conferred by altering interaction sites in addition to exchanging Cdc20 for Cdh1.
CircSMARCA5 Inhibits Migration of Glioblastoma Multiforme Cells by Regulating a Molecular Axis Involving Splicing Factors SRSF1/SRSF3/PTB

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) have recently emerged as a new class of RNAs, highly enriched in the brain and very stable within cells, exosomes and body fluids. To analyze their involvement in glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) pathogenesis, we assayed the expression of twelve circRNAs, physiologically enriched in several regions of the brain, through real-time PCR in a cohort of fifty-six GBM patient biopsies and seven normal brain parenchymas. We focused on hsa_circ_0001445 (circSMARCA5): it was significantly downregulated in GBM biopsies as compared to normal brain tissues (p-value < 0.00001, student’s t-test), contrary to its linear isoform counterpart that did not show any differential expression (p-value = 0.694, student’s t-test). Analysis of a public dataset revealed a negative correlation between the expression of circSMARCA5 and glioma’s histological grade, suggesting its potential negative role in the progression to malignancy. Overexpressing circSMARCA5 in U87MG cells significantly decreased their migration, but not their proliferation rate. In silico scanning of circSMARCA5 sequence revealed an enrichment in binding motifs for several RNA binding proteins (RBPs), specifically involved in splicing. Among them, serine and arginine rich splicing factor 1 (SRSF1), a splicing factor known to be a positive controller of cell migration and known to be overexpressed in GBM, was predicted to bind circSMARCA5 by three different prediction tools. Direct interaction between circSMARCA5 and SRSF1 is supported by enhanced UV crosslinking and immunoprecipitation (eCLIP) data for SRSF1 in K562 cells from Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE). Consistently, U87MG overexpressing circSMARCA5 showed an increased expression of serine and arginine rich splicing factor 3 (SRSF3) RNA isoform containing exon 4, normally skipped in a SRSF1-dependent manner, resulting in a non-productive non-sense mediated decay (NMD) substrate. Interestingly, SRSF3 is known to interplay with two other splicing factors, polypyrimidine tract binding protein 1 (PTBP1) and polypyrimidine tract binding protein 2 (PTBP2), that positively regulate glioma cells migration. Collectively, our data show circSMARCA5 as a promising druggable tumor suppressor in GBM and suggest that it may exert its function by tethering the RBP SRSF1.
Analytical modeling and evaluation of On-Chip Interconnects using Network Calculus

Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been proposed as an alternative to bus-based schemes to achieve high performance and scalability in System-on-Chip (SoC) design. Performance evaluation of On-Chip Interconnect (OCI) architectures is widely based on simulation which becomes computationally expensive, especially for large-scale NoCs. In this paper, a performance analysis model using Network Calculus is presented to characterize and evaluate the performance of NoC-based applications. The 2D Mesh on-chip interconnect is analyzed and main performance metrics such as end-to-end delay and buffer size requirements are computed and compared against the results produced by a discrete event simulator. The results shed more light on the potential of this analytical technique as a useful tool for NoC design and performance analysis.
Spatial Attention can Bias Search in Visual Short-Term Memory

Whereas top-down attentional control is known to bias perceptual functions at many levels of stimulus analysis, its possible influence over memory-related functions remains uncharted. Our experiment combined behavioral measures and event-related potentials (ERPs) to test the ability of spatial orienting to bias functions associated with visual short-term memory (VSTM), and to shed light on the neural mechanisms involved. In particular, we investigated whether orienting attention to a spatial location within an array maintained in VSTM could facilitate the search for a specific remembered item. Participants viewed arrays of one, two or four differently colored items, followed by an informative spatial (100% valid) or uninformative neutral retro-cue (1500–2500 ms after the array), and later by a probe stimulus (500–1000 ms after the retro-cue). The task was to decide whether the probe stimulus had been present in the array. Behavioral results showed that spatial retro-cues improved both accuracy and response times for making decisions about the presence of the probe item in VSTM, and significantly attenuated performance decrements caused by increasing VSTM load. We also identified a novel ERP component (N3RS) specifically associated with searching for an item within VSTM. Paralleling the behavioral results, the amplitude and duration of the N3RS systematically increased with VSTM load in neutral retro-cue trials. When spatial retro-cues were provided, this “retro-search” component was absent. Our findings clearly show that the influence of top-down attentional biases extends to mnemonic functions, and, specifically, that searching for items within VSTM can be under flexible voluntary control.
Research on the Error Characteristics of a 110 kV Optical Voltage Transformer under Three Conditions: In the Laboratory, Off-Line in the Field and During On-Line Operation

Optical voltage transformers (OVTs) have been applied in power systems. When performing accuracy performance tests of OVTs large differences exist between the electromagnetic environment and the temperature variation in the laboratory and on-site. Therefore, OVTs may display different error characteristics under different conditions. In this paper, OVT prototypes with typical structures were selected to be tested for the error characteristics with the same testing equipment and testing method. The basic accuracy, the additional error caused by temperature and the adjacent phase in the laboratory, the accuracy in the field off-line, and the real-time monitoring error during on-line operation were tested. The error characteristics under the three conditions—laboratory, in the field off-line and during on-site operation—were compared and analyzed. The results showed that the effect of the transportation process, electromagnetic environment and the adjacent phase on the accuracy of OVTs could be ignored for level 0.2, but the error characteristics of OVTs are dependent on the environmental temperature and are sensitive to the temperature gradient. The temperature characteristics during on-line operation were significantly superior to those observed in the laboratory.
A Novel Approach for Coarse-to-Fine Windthrown Tree Extraction Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Images

Surveys of windthrown trees, resulting from hurricanes and other types of natural disasters, are an important component of agricultural insurance, forestry statistics, and ecological monitoring. Aerial images are commonly used to determine the total area or number of downed trees, but conventional methods suffer from two primary issues: misclassification of windthrown trees due to the interference from other objects or artifacts, and poor extraction resolution when trunk diameters are small. The objective of this study is to develop a coarse-to-fine extraction technique for individual windthrown trees that reduces the effects of these common flaws. The developed method was tested using UAV imagery collected over rubber plantations on Hainan Island after the Nesat typhoon in China on 19 October 2011. First, a coarse extraction of the affected area was performed by analyzing the image spectrum and textural characteristics. A thinning algorithm was then used to simplify downed trees into skeletal structures. Finally, fine extraction of individual trees was achieved using a line detection algorithm. The completeness of windthrown trees in the study area was 75.7% and the correctness was 92.5%. While similar values have been reported in other studies, they often include constraints, such as tree height. This technique is proposed to be a more feasible extraction algorithm as it is capable of achieving low commission errors across a broad range of tree heights and sizes. As such, it is a viable option for extraction of windthrown trees with a small trunk diameter.
Quantifying cultural ecosystem services: Disentangling the effects of management from landscape features

This dataset contains the points collected as part of a participatory GIS survey investigating the cultural values of Thetford Forest. Data were collected using the online spraycan tool 'Map-Me' (http://map-me.org/). Participants were asked to mark maps with the areas that they valued for four cultural ecosystem services. Further details of the method are available in Tew et al. "Quantifying cultural ecosystem services: disentangling the effects of management from landscape features". People and Nature (accepted).
Combining Deduction and Model Checking into Tableaux and Algorithms for Converse-PDL

This paper presents a prefixed tableaux calculus for Propositional Dynamic Logic with Converse based on a combination of different techniques such as prefixed tableaux for modal logics and model checkers for μ-calculus. We prove the correctness and completeness of the calculus and illustrate its features. We also discuss the transformation of the tableaux method (naively NEXPTIME) into an EXPTIME algorithm.
Multimodal Co-located Collaboration

People naturally perform multimodal interactions in everyday real world settings, as they collaborate over large visual surfaces such as paper maps on walls and tables. While a new generation of research technologies now supports co-located collaboration, they do not yet directly leverage such rich multimodal interaction. Even though a rich behavioural foundation is emerging that informs the design of co-located collaborative technologies, most systems still typically limit input to a single finger or pointer. This problem is partly caused by the fact that single point interaction is the only input easily accessible to researchers through existing toolkits and input APIs. In this research, I distil existing theories, models and ethnographic studies on co-present collaboration into behavioural foundations that describe the individual and group benefits for using gesture and speech multimodal input in a co-located large display setting. Next, I will develop a toolkit that facilitates rapid prototyping of multimodal co-located applications over large digital displays. Finally, using these applications, I will conduct a number of studies exploring design in a multimodal setting.
Authoring adaptive educational hypermedia on the semantic desktop

Personalisation of information is a desired feature, but authoring and creation of adaptive hypermedia is a difficult endeavour. Especially, manual annotation is the bottleneck of such authoring. Thus it is vital to support the authoring process by reusing automatically generated metadata. Here, we show the integration of the generic AH authoring environment MOT into a semantic desktop environment, as well as its first small-scale evaluation. In this set-up, the semantic desktop environment provides the rich source of automatically generated metadata, while MOT allows enhancing this metadata manually, as needed for the authoring of an adaptive environment here, an adaptive course.
Activation of Expressed KCNQ Potassium Currents and Native Neuronal M-Type Potassium Currents by the Anti-Convulsant Drug Retigabine

Retigabine [D-23129;N-(2-amino-4-(4-fluorobenzylamino)-phenyl) carbamic acid ethyl ester] is a novel anticonvulsant compound that is now in clinical phase II development. It has previously been shown to enhance currents generated by KCNQ2/3 K+ channels when expressed in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells (Main et al., 2000;Wickenden et al., 2000). In the present study, we have compared the actions of retigabine on KCNQ2/3 currents with those on currents generated by other members of the KCNQ family (homomeric KCNQ1, KCNQ2, KCNQ3, and KCNQ4 channels) expressed in CHO cells and on the native M current in rat sympathetic neurons [thought to be generated by KCNQ2/3 channels (Wang et al., 1998)]. Retigabine produced a hyperpolarizing shift of the activation curves for KCNQ2/3, KCNQ2, KCNQ3, and KCNQ4 currents with differential potencies in the following order: KCNQ3 > KCNQ2/3 > KCNQ2 > KCNQ4, as measured either by the maximum hyperpolarizing shift in the activation curves or by the EC50 values. In contrast, retigabine did not enhance cardiac KCNQ1 currents. Retigabine also produced a hyperpolarizing shift in the activation curve for native M channels in rat sympathetic neurons. The retigabine-induced current was inhibited by muscarinic receptor stimulation, with similar agonist potency but 25% reduced maximum effect. In unclamped neurons, retigabine produced a hyperpolarization and reduced the number of action potentials produced by depolarizing current injections, without change in action potential configuration.
LIMSI@WMT’15 : Translation Task

This paper describes LIMSI’s submissions to the shared WMT’15 translation task. We report results for French-English, Russian-English in both directions, as well as for Finnish-into-English. Our submissions use NCODE and MOSES along with continuous space translation models in a post-processing step. The main novelties of this year’s participation are the following: for Russian-English, we investigate a tailored normalization of Russian to translate into English, and a two-step process to translate first into simplified Russian, followed by a conversion into inflected Russian. For French-English, the challenge is domain adaptation, for which only monolingual corpora are available. Finally, for the Finnish-to-English task, we explore unsupervised morphological segmentation to reduce the sparsity of data induced by the rich morphology on the Finnish side.
Dynamics of land use pattern and agricultural production scenario in India with particular reference to Punjab

The present study, based on secondary data, was conducted to bring forth the over time changes in land use pattern of India with particular reference to Punjab. An attempt was also made to carry out the comparative evaluation of performance of agriculture and to enumerate the potential correlates of land use pattern and agricultural performance parameters in 15 major agricultural states of India for the time frame, 1980-81 to the latest available. India has geographical area of 328.7 million hectares. A close scrutiny of its land use matrix, consisting of three sub-sectors namely ecological sector, agriculture sector and non-agricultural sector, revealed that three states (Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh) have predominance of agriculture sector (more than three fourth of the reporting area). The net sown area of Punjab (2.96 % of the country‟s cropped area) accounted for 97.1 per cent of the state‟s agricultural land, whereas only 57.7 per cent of Tamil Nadu‟s agricultural land was under plough indicating divergent patterns followed by states in the land use matrix. The cropping intensity of India increased from 123.1 per cent in 1980-81 to 138.9 per cent in 2012-13, which was far below the level attained by Punjab (189.6 %) connoting inter-state differentials in the utilization of land potential. The agricultural production performance assessed from production profile of crops crucial for food security, employment potential of agriculture, value of output and Net State Domestic Product from agriculture and allied on net area sown basis also highlighted widespread inter-state differentials. The application of Kendall‟s coefficient of concordance testified that the state rankings with respect to selected land use and agricultural production parameters were in conformity (p<0.05) indicating strong association between the land use and agricultural performance parameters. The convergence analysis of agricultural performance proxied by Net State Domestic Product from agriculture and allied activities per hectare of net area sown was carried out for the four time periods:1980-81 to 1989-90, 1990-91 to 1999-00, 2000-01 to 2012-13 and overall study period. The results provided strong evidence of convergence as indicated by estimated statistically significant coefficient for the period 2000-01 to 2012-13 implying that the states have started giving the signs of convergence post 2000 at the rate 2.7 per cent per year. The analysis has very well established that poor performing states have started catching up with the states, well known for their agricultural advancement and this would in its own right lead to food secure and prosperous India.
Enhanced Delivery of Exogenous Peptides into the Class I Antigen Processing and Presentation Pathway

ABSTRACT Current immunization strategies, using peptide or protein antigens, generally fail to elicit cytotoxic-T-lymphocyte responses, since these antigens are unable to access intracellular compartments where loading of major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC-I) molecules occurs. In an attempt to circumvent this, we investigated whether the GM1 receptor-binding B subunit of Escherichia coli heat-labile toxin (EtxB) could be used to deliver class I epitopes. When a class I epitope was conjugated to EtxB, it was delivered into the MHC-I presentation pathway in a GM1-binding-dependent fashion and resulted in the appearance of MHC-I-epitope complexes at the cell surface. Importantly, we show that the efficiency of EtxB-mediated epitope delivery could be strikingly enhanced by incorporating, adjacent to the class I epitope, a 10-amino-acid segment from the C terminus of the DNA polymerase (Pol) of herpes simplex virus. The replacement of this 10-amino-acid segment by a heterologous sequence or the introduction of specific amino acid substitutions within this segment either abolished or markedly reduced the efficiency of class I epitope delivery. If the epitope was extended at its C terminus, EtxB-mediated delivery into the class I presentation pathway was found to be completely dependent on proteasome activity. Thus, by combining the GM1-targeting function of EtxB with the 10-amino-acid Pol segment, highly efficient delivery of exogenous epitopes into the endogenous pathway of class I antigen processing and presentation can be achieved.
A Virtual Presence Counter

This paper describes a new measure for presence in immersive virtual environments (VEs) that is based on data that can be unobtrusively obtained during the course of a VE experience. At different times during an experience, a participant will occasionally switch between interpreting the totality of sensory inputs as forming the VE or the real world. The number of transitions from virtual to real is counted, and, using some simplifying assumptions, a probabilistic Markov chain model can be constructed to model these transitions. This model can be used to estimate the equilibrium probability of being present in the VE. This technique was applied in the context of an experiment to assess the relationship between presence and body movement in an immersive VE. The movement was that required by subjects to reach out and touch successive pieces on a three-dimensional chess board. The experiment included twenty subjects, ten of whom had to reach out to touch the chess pieces (the active group) and ten of whom only had to click a handheld mouse button (the control group). The results revealed a significant positive association in the active group between body movement and presence. The results lend support to interaction paradigms that are based on maximizing the match between sensory data and proprioception.