Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
protANIL: a Fast and Simple Meta-Learning Algorithm

A broad recognition of important practical beneﬁts inherent to meta-learning paradigm has recently elevated the few-shot learning problem into the spotlight of machine learning research. While the optimization-based model-agnostic meta-learning algorithms offer a variety of appealing properties, such as model architecture ﬂexibility and generalization capabilities, they come at a cost of high computational complexity. On the other hand, the metric-based meta-learning algorithms, that are built on a simple inductive bias mechanism, have proven their high efﬁciency in the limit of very few training examples. We propose an al-gorithm that combines the complementary strengths of these two approaches, and, at the same time, signiﬁcantly lowers the computational cost. We benchmark the execution times of the proposed protANIL algorithm to demonstrate its computational ben-eﬁts during both training and inference. We also analyze its few-shot classiﬁcation performance and ﬁnd that the results are on par with the original MAML algorithm.
Investigating Strain as a Biomarker for Atrial Fibrosis Quantified by Patient Cine MRI Data

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is responsible for deterioration of left atrial (LA) mechanical function. Sinus rhythm (SR) can be restored by terminating AF using catheter ablation (CA) therapy. CA often targets fibrotic tissue by creating scar tissue which is similar to fibrosis. We propose the use of myocardial strain to identify regions of fibrosis and understand its role in atrial mechanics. Patient-specific LA models were reconstructed from Cine and Late Gadolinium Enhanced (LGE) MRI data for two groups of patients: AF and SR pre-CA. LGE intensities represented atrial fibrosis and feature-tracking was applied on the Cine images to produce a series of 3D deforming LA meshes. The myocardial area strain (MAS) was calculated as a measure of regional contractile ability. 24 regions of clinical interest were assigned for inter- and intra-patient comparisons on the effects of CA and fibrosis on LA mechanical function. Correlation was found between low strain and dense fibrosis in the LA posterior wall for both patient groups (rs = −0.74). MAS increased (8.9%) after CA in the AF group but decreased (10%) in the SR group. This study suggests that myocardial strain can be used as a biomarker for atrial fibrosis and also identifies the detrimental effect of intentional CA-induced damage to the LA on its mechanical function.
A STUDY OF SELF-MEDICATION PRACTICES AND ITS DETERMINANTS

Self-medication is a very important concern for health authorities at international level. Due to a concern of the authorities, the definition of the self-medication thus has been classified as the effective medication without prescription. It may also be violated by the resubmission of the prescription. This intends to lead the unnecessary circulation of the effective medication for example to the relatives or the social circle. In developing countries like Asian nation, self-medication could be a common follow because it provides a low price to various folks therefore; the aim of our study was to analyze the self-medication practices and its determinants among rural areas mainly in the youth population near the establishment of Chitkara University, Rajpura, India. To investigate the self-medication practices and its determinants by short team of the students among rural areas in the youth population near the establishment of Chitkara University, Rajpura, India. A cross sectional study was conducted by pharmacy practice professionals using a questionnaire, which consists of 17 open and closed ended questions among 400 participants from the rural areas near by Chitkara University in between March 2018-April 2018, small teams were also divided as to justify motive for the survey in near areas of the Chitkara University, Rajpura, India. Our study demonstrates that frequency of self-medication among rural areas is approx. 3/4th. The most common factors that caused self medication among youth were value convenience (26.2%), urgency (21.8%), cost saving (20.3%) and less time consuming (17.1%). Drugs typically used for self-medication capsulatepain killers (26.25%), anti-pyretics (17.75%), antibiotics (17.00%), decongestants (13.75%), antidiarrheoal (9.50%), anti–emetic (8.50%) and anti-allergic (7.25%). The awareness regarding the ending date and ADR were 59% and 76% respectively. Among the key supply of medication for self medication 58.75% most popular native pharmacy, 25% most well-liked from doctors from previous sickness and 16.25% from relatives and friends.
Interaction identification through tactile sensing during cloth manipulation using a 3-axis touch sensor

This work receives funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 Pro-gram under grant agreement no. 741930 (CLOTHILDE), by the HuMoURproject TIN2017-90086-R (AEI/FEDER, EU) and by AEI through the Mariade Maeztu Seal of Excellence to IRI (MDM-2016-0656).
Extraction and Characterization of Vegetable Oils from Legume and Palmae; Using African Oil Bean (Pentaclethra macrophylla) and “Akwu Ojukwu” (Elais guineensis) Respectively

The extraction and characterization of vegetable oils from the seed of Pentaclethra macrophylla (oil bean) and Elaeis guineensis (akwu Ojukwu) was done. Extraction was carried out by solvent extraction method using petroleum spirit as the solvent for “akwu Ojukwu” fibre and petroleum ether for oil bean kernel. There was a significant increase (P≤0.05) in the oil yield of “akwu Ojukwu” fibre (48%) when compared to oil bean seed (32%). Some Physico-chemical, vitamin and mineral parameters of both oils were analyzed. Results of the physico-chemical analysis showed no significant difference (P≤0.05) in the relative density, peroxide value and thiobarbituric acid value of both oils. The melting point and acid value (250C and 7.35mg respectively) of “akwu Ojukwu” oil increased significantly (P≤0.05) when compared with that of oil bean seed oil (220C and 3.62mg respectively). On the other hand, the moisture content (0.40%), iodine value (53.25mg) and saponification value (196.38mg) of ”akwu Ojukwu” oil decreased significantly to that of oil bean oil (8.80%, 121.80mg and 213.10mg respectively). “Akwu Ojukwu” oil was red while oil bean oil had a light-yellow colour. The vitamin and mineral determination showed that P, Fe and vitamin C content increased significantly (P≤0.05) in oil bean seed oil. The general result shows that “akwu Ojukwu” oil is a non-drying oil, while oil bean oil is a semi-drying oil. Both oils could be used for edible (when processed), medicinal and industrial purposes.
EVALUATION OF Aloe vera EXTRACT EFFICIENCY TO CONTROL SITOTROGA CEREALELLA (LEPIDOPTERA : GELECHIIDAE)

In the store there are problems to control of insects, which cause great economic losses and that the use of pesticides affects human health, so the goal of this research to evaluate the effectiveness extract of Aloe vera gel plant As an alternative to pesticides against one example of stores insect: Sitotroga cerealella, with three concentrations ( 5, 10, 15 %) under laboratory conditions. the research included the following some stages: egg, larva and adults at age 24 it. Results of the study showed the highest percentage mortality rate of eggs 72.8% at concentration 15 % and gave 68.2 at concentration 10%. While gave 56.45 % at concentration 5% which to decline to 0 at control treatment. Also, the highest percentage killing of the first larval stage was 65.2% at concentration 15 % treatment and decline to 59.3% % at concentration 10% and gave 44.5 % at concentration 5% while the control treatment did not record any mortality rate. For the treatment of adults reached the highest percentage mortality was 63.3 at concentration 15% and the lowest percentage mortality was 39.2 at concentration 5 % compared with control treatment that did not record any mortality. Key word: Sitotroga cerealella , Aloe vera
Running head: FEMALE PSYCHOPATHY AND CHILD ABUSE Is female psychopathy linked with child abuse? An empirical investigation using a person-centered approach

Childhood abuse is associated with increased psychopathic features among girls, but most prior research is based on data from correctional samples of female delinquents and less is known about how specific forms of childhood abuse affect specific features of psychopathy. Using a school-based community sample of 696 girls aged 9-17 years from Barbados and Grenada, the current study examined latent profiles of psychopathic personality traits and their associations with physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Latent profile analysis (LPA) revealed four distinct psychopathy groups among girls, including a ‘low psychopathy’ group (41.9% of girls), ‘high psychopathy’ group (4.8%), ‘high interpersonal manipulation and egocentricity’ group (37.4%), and a ‘moderate psychopathy’ group (16%). There was considerable evidence of physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse among participants. Sexual abuse was associated with a 116% increased likelihood of membership in the high psychopathy group and a 57% increased likelihood of membership in the high interpersonal manipulation and egocentricity group. These results indicate that sexual abuse is a powerful distal factor in the development of psychopathic personality functioning, especially more severe variants.
Empiricist Learning Rules on Social Networks: Convergence and Quality of Information Aggregation

On social platforms like Facebook or Twitter, individuals are part of rich networks and they interact frequently on multiple, relatively short-lived topics. Could they rely on past interactions with their neighbors to aggregate information from them better in future periods, despite having limited knowledge of these neighbors’ information sources and connections? I propose a novel learning model on social networks that captures such settings. Each period features a new draw of nature and multiple rounds for information to arrive, get aggregated and diffuse through network links. In contrast to most models of learning on networks, the repetitive nature of interactions across periods in my model allows for a separation between learning about the environment and aggregating information about the current state. I show that the class of empiricist learning rules, which focus on relevant elements of the underlying environment, achieve convergence of learning on all networks. In the long run, individuals play as well as if they know the underlying environment perfectly. On clique trees, these rules further achieve strong efficiency of information aggregation. Various challenges to efficiency in general circumstances are explored.
Multilingual lyrics-to-audio alignment

Lyrics-to-audio alignment methods have recently reported impressive results, opening the door to practical applications such as karaoke and within song navigation. However , most studies focus on a single language-usually En-glish-for which annotated data are abundant. The question of their ability to generalize to other languages, especially in low (or even zero) training resource scenarios has been so far left unexplored. In this paper, we address the lyrics-to-audio alignment task in a generalized multilingual setup. More precisely, this investigation presents the first (to the best of our knowledge) attempt to create a language-independent lyrics-to-audio alignment system. Building on a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model trained with a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) algorithm, we study the relevance of different intermediate representations, either character or phoneme, along with several strategies to design a training set. The evaluation is conducted on multiple languages with a varying amount of data available, from plenty to zero. Results show that learning from diverse data and using a universal phoneme set as an intermediate representation yield the best generalization performances.
Multi-Projective Camera-Calibration, Modeling, and Integration in Mobile-Mapping Systems

Optical systems are vital parts of most modern systems such as mobile mapping systems, autonomous cars, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and game consoles. Multi-camera systems (MCS) are commonly employed for precise mapping including aerial and close-range applications. Aerial photogrammetry has been recently progressed in many directions including real-time applications, and classification. In the first part of this thesis a simple and practical calibration model and a calibration scheme for multi-projective cameras (MPC) is presented. The calibration scheme is enabled by implementing a camera test field equipped with a customized coded target as FGI’s camera calibration room. The first hypothesis was that a test field is necessary to calibrate an MPC. Two commercially available MPCs with 6 and 36 cameras were successfully calibrated in FGI’s calibration room. The calibration results suggest that the proposed model is able to estimate parameters of the MPCs with high geometric accuracy, and reveals the internal structure of the MPCs. The first hypothesis was proven by a concise assessment of results. In the second part, the applicability of an MPC calibrated by the proposed approach was investigated in a mobile mapping system (MMS). The second hypothesis was that a system calibration is necessary to achieve high geometric accuracies in a multi-camera MMS. The MPC model was updated
CAML: C ATASTROPHICALLY -A WARE M ETA -L EARNING

The ability to build reliable AI agents for real-world applications is contingent on the development of algorithms that allow agents to incrementally learn from new experiences without forgetting knowledge from previous experiences. Catastrophic forgetting is a significant problem that hinders a model’s ability to perform well in a continual multi-task learning setting. We propose a novel algorithm, Catastrophically-Aware Meta-Learning (CAML), that combines the usage of a metaexperience replay buffer with prioritized replay in order to learn how to learn without forgetting in a sample efficient manner. CAML learns parameters such that gradient transfer is maximized and gradient interference is minimized. We perform experiments on the MNIST Rotations dataset and show that CAML outperforms common continual learning baselines. Moreover, we qualitatively inspect our model’s performance through inter-task, intra-task, and saliency map analysis.
Understanding Worldwide Private Information Collection on Android

Mobile phones enable the collection of a wealth of private information, from unique identifiers (e.g., email addresses), to a user's location, to their text messages. This information can be harvested by apps and sent to third parties, which can use it for a variety of purposes. In this paper we perform the largest study of private information collection (PIC) on Android to date. Leveraging an anonymized dataset collected from the customers of a popular mobile security product, we analyze the flows of sensitive information generated by 2.1M unique apps installed by 17.3M users over a period of 21 months between 2018 and 2019. We find that 87.2% of all devices send private information to at least five different domains, and that actors active in different regions (e.g., Asia compared to Europe) are interested in collecting different types of information. The United States (62% of the total) and China (7% of total flows) are the countries that collect most private information. Our findings raise issues regarding data regulation, and would encourage policymakers to further regulate how private information is used by and shared among the companies and how accountability can be truly guaranteed.
Effect of automated intermittent wetting and forced ventilation on the physiological parameters and milk production of Murrah buffaloes in humid tropics

A study was conducted to compare the effect of automated intermittent wetting and forced ventilation on the physiological parameters of Murrah buffaloes in humid tropics. Twelve lactating Murrah buffaloes were randomly selected from University Livestock Farm and Fodder Research Development Scheme, Mannuthy and grouped into two treatments with six animals each namely, T1 as control, T2 was provided with automated wetting and forced ventilation and were studied under two seasons with different THIs (low – 76.93 ± 0.53 and high – 82.55 ± 0.35). The mean rectal temperature (°F) was 102.04 ± 0.02 and 100.89 ± 0.02 in T1 and T2 respectively during high THI season. The mean pulse rate (beats per minute) was 57.92 and 55.23 ± 0.15 in T1 and T2 respectively during high THI season. The mean respiratory rate (breaths per minute) was 17.92 ± 0.15 and 15.28 ± 0.15 in T1 and T2 respectively during high THI season. The respiratory rate, pulse rate and rectal temperature were found to be significantly lower in T2 when compared to control group in both the seasons. Even though there was no significant difference, a substantial increase in milk yield was found in T2 when compared to control group in both the seasons. It may be concluded that animals in T2 experienced relatively mild heat stress compared to control group which was evident by the lower values in physiological parameters and a relatively higher milk yield. So, it could be suggested that in tropical humid climate, automated wetting and forced ventilation with respect to the relative humidity may be preferred when compared to the other thermal stress alleviating measures.
FOLIAR-APPLIED CALCIUM INDUCES DROUGHT STRESS TOLERANCE IN MAIZE BY MANIPULATING OSMOLYTE ACCUMULATION AND ANTIOXIDATIVE RESPONSES

Influence of drought stress and foliar applied calcium (Ca) on growth, water status, osmolyte accumulation and antioxidative defense system were evaluated in two maize hybrids, i.e. drought-tolerant Dekalb-6525 (DK-6525) and drought-sensitive Yousafwala Hybrid (YH). Drought stress caused substantial reduction in shoot dry matter (DM) production through disturbance in relative water content (RWC), protein metabolism and accelerating malondialdehyde (MDA) accumulation and disproportioning antioxidant system. However, the accumulation of total free amino acids (TFA), glycinebetaine (GB) and activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), peroxidase (POD) and ascorbate peroxidase (APX) were significantly increased by drought treatment. Foliar treatment of Ca led to increase DM (49%), RWC (18%), accumulation of TFA (15%) and GB (25%) as well as the activities of SOD (37%), CAT (24%) and APX (49%) along with a decrease in MDA content (24%) in both hybrids under water-deficit conditions. Cultivar DK-6525 maintained relatively higher growth rate, water status, and osmolyte content and antioxidant activities than YH, irrespective of calcium supply and watering regimes. The results of the study suggested that optimal supply of Ca is effective to make plants vigorous to thrive under moisture-deficit conditions.
Influence of retained node number on Sauvignon Blanc grapevine vegetative growth and yield

Background and Aims The potential yield of grapevines is often inexpensively manipulated by altering the number of nodes retained per vine after pruning. In the context of Sauvignon Blanc in Marlborough New Zealand the influence of node number on grapevine performance is not well documented. To address this void a multi-year field study examined the effect of node number on Sauvignon Blanc grapevine growth and yield. Methods and Results A replicated field experiment was established by winter pruning the same grapevines to 24–72 nodes per vine (two, three, four, five or six 12-node canes per vine) over a 4-year period. Increasing the number of nodes resulted in a linear increase in vine yield in 2007. In subsequent years, the yield response decreased and from 2009 onwards, increasing the number of nodes beyond 36 per vine did not increase yield. Fewer nodes per vine were associated with greater vegetative growth and cane vigour. Pre-flowering shoot length, leaf number and shoot diameter along with end of season mean cane mass were greatest in vines with fewer nodes. Conclusions The dynamic interseasonal yield responses were caused by a combination of changes in bunches per vine and bunch mass, although the contribution of each yield component altered during the course of the experiment. Changes in cane vigour and bunches per shoot (fruitfulness) suggest that they are part of the mechanisms by which vines moderate yield over time in response to altered node number. Significance of the Study Increasing or reducing node number per vine does not result in sustained yield increases or reductions respectively. Grapegrowers should expect the level of yield compensation to change after the first year of a change in node number. Therefore, adjustment of nodes per vine and the selection of appropriate cane vigour at pruning should be considered carefully when setting the annual yield potential of Sauvignon Blanc grapevines.
PHYSICOCHEMICAL ASSESSMENT OF SOIL IN KYUNJA GAD WATERSHED, DISTRICT RUDRAPRAYAG, UTTRAKHAND, INDIA

Physicochemical analysis of soil provides information about the current environmental status of the regions. In this present study we focus on agricultural soils with physical and chemical properties. Soil samples were collected from three different depth viz., 0-10, 10-20 and 20-30 cm from agriculture land and also from six different locations covering Kyunja Gad Watershed, district Rudraprayag (Uttrakhand) India during the month of January to December 2016. Part of analysis contain in soil texture (sand 83.70% to 99.61%, silt 1.89 % to 13.74 % and clay 0.11–2.93%), water holding capacity (23.8% to 33.04%), pH (6.6 to 7.4), Carbon (0.56% to 0.82%), potassium (112-190.4 kg-ha). phosphorous (27.3 Kg/hectare to 41.7 Kg/hectare) and Sulfur ranged from 14.58 ppm to 18.38 ppm. Physiochemical results showed that agriculture soil of study area had nutrient rich.
The Breakdown of Mott Physics at VO$_2$ Surfaces.

Transition metal oxides such as vanadium dioxide (VO$_2$), niobium dioxide (NbO$_2$), and titanium sesquioxide (Ti$_2$O$_3$) are known to undergo a temperature-dependent metal-insulator transition (MIT) in conjunction with a structural transition within their bulk. However, it is not typically discussed how breaking crystal symmetry via surface termination affects the complicated MIT physics. Using synchrotron-based x-ray spectroscopy, low energy electron diffraction (LEED), low energy electron microscopy (LEEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and several other experimental techniques, we show that suppression of the bulk structural transition is a common feature at VO$_2$ surfaces. Our density functional theory (DFT) calculations further suggest that this is due to inherent reconstructions necessary to stabilize the surface, which deviate the electronic structure away from the bulk d$^1$ configuration. Our findings have broader ramifications not only for the characterization of other "Mott-like" MITs, but also for any potential device applications of such materials.