Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive auctions: Learning to adjust to bidders

Auction mechanism design has traditionally been a largely analytic process, relying on assumptions such as fully rational bidders. In practice, however, bidders behave unpredictably, making them difficult to model and complicating the design process. To address this challenge, we present an adaptive auction mechanism: one that learns to adjust its parameters in response to past empirical bidder behavior so as to maximize an objective function such as auctioneer revenue. In this paper, we give an overview of our general approach and then present an instantiation in a specific auction scenario. The algorithm is fully implemented and tested. Results indicate that the adaptive mechanism is able to outperform any single fixed mechanism.
Requirement for Parp-1 and DNA ligases 1 or 3 but not of Xrcc1 in chromosomal translocation formation by backup end joining

In mammalian cells, ionizing radiation (IR)-induced DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) are repaired in all phases of the cell cycle predominantly by classical, DNA-PK-dependent nonhomologous end joining (D-NHEJ). Homologous recombination repair (HRR) is functional during the S- and G2-phases, when a sister chromatid becomes available. An error-prone, alternative form of end joining, operating as backup (B-NHEJ) functions robustly throughout the cell cycle and particularly in the G2-phase and is thought to backup predominantly D-NHEJ. Parp-1, DNA-ligases 1 (Lig1) and 3 (Lig3), and Xrcc1 are implicated in B-NHEJ. Chromosome and chromatid translocations are manifestations of erroneous DSB repair and are crucial culprits in malignant transformation and IR-induced cell lethality. We analyzed shifts in translocation formation deriving from defects in D-NHEJ or HRR in cells irradiated in the G2-phase and identify B-NHEJ as the main DSB repair pathway backing up both of these defects at the cost of a large increase in translocation formation. Our results identify Parp-1 and Lig1 and 3 as factors involved in translocation formation and show that Xrcc1 reinforces the function of Lig3 in the process without being required for it. Finally, we demonstrate intriguing connections between B-NHEJ and DNA end resection in translocation formation and show that, as for D-NHEJ and HRR, the function of B-NHEJ facilitates the recovery from the G2-checkpoint. These observations advance our understanding of chromosome aberration formation and have implications for the mechanism of action of Parp inhibitors.
Therapeutic Vaccines: Hope Therapy and Its Effects on Psychiatric Symptoms among Infertile Women

Infertility is a life crisis which leads to serious psychological problems. The present study aims to investigate the effects of hope therapy as a psychological intervention on psychological distresses among infertile women. The present study was an experimental one. The study population included infertile women referring to gynecology clinics. Women who lived in Jahrom and could take part in psychotherapy sessions, had no chronic physical or mental disorders, suffered from primary infertility, had infertility unknown causes and had no history of miscarriage and stillbirth were selected through convenience sampling method and were divided into control and intervention groups (n=61). Women in the intervention group participated in eight 2-hour sessions for a period of 2 months. Study results revealed that there was a significant difference between the two groups after the intervention. Besides, there was a significant difference between the two groups through paired T-test (p<0.05). Furthermore, results of ANCOVA showed that after eliminating demographic variables, the intervention was effective in the total mean difference of the study groups. It means that the difference between the two groups was resulted from intervention. Hope therapy as a positive psychological approach can improve infertile women’s general health and subsequently improve family’s health. Therefore, in addition to assisted reproductive techniques, hope therapy is recommended to be presented to infertile people in order to improve the quality of their life and help them adapt with their problems.
A subclass supported convolutional neural network for object detection and localization in remote-sensing images

ABSTRACT This article proposes a novel subclass-based classifier based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for detecting objects more accurately on remote-sensing images. The proposed classifier, called subclass supported CNN (SSCNN), is used to separate the representation of the objects into subclasses such as nearcentre, centre, and border depending on the distance of the object centre to obtain more effective feature extractor. A three-stage object recognition framework is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed classifier. In the first of these stages, the Selective Search algorithm generates object proposals from the image. Then, the proposed SSCNN classifies the proposals. Finally, subclass-based localization evaluation function has been proposed to calculate the localization of the object with classification results. Due to the limited number of satellite image samples, pretrained AlexNet is used by transfer learning approach to build effective feature extractor. The proposed method has been compared with region-based CNN (R-CNN) on a four-class remote-sensing test dataset consisting of 411 airplanes, 240 baseball diamonds, 468 storage tanks, and 83 ground track fields. In addition, Faster R-CNN has been trained with SSCNN features and the performances of the trained Faster R-CNNs are comparatively evaluated on 10-class remote-sensing image dataset. Experiment results have shown that the proposed framework can locate the objects precisely.
A Method for Verifying Privacy-Type Properties: The Unbounded Case

In this paper, we consider the problem of verifying anonymity and unlinkability in the symbolic model, where protocols are represented as processes in a variant of the applied pi calculus notably used in the ProVerif tool. Existing tools and techniques do not allow one to verify directly these properties, expressed as behavioral equivalences. We propose a different approach: we design two conditions on protocols which are sufficient to ensure anonymity and unlinkability, and which can then be effectively checked automatically using ProVerif. Our two conditions correspond to two broad classes of attacks on unlinkability, corresponding to data and control-flow leaks. This theoretical result is general enough to apply to a wide class of protocols. In particular, we apply our techniques to provide the first formal security proof of the BAC protocol (e-passport). Our work has also lead to the discovery of new attacks, including one on the LAK protocol (RFID authentication) which was previously claimed to be unlinkable (in a weak sense) and one on the PACE protocol (e-passport).
Spectrum Sharing for Device-to-Device Communication in Cellular Networks

This paper addresses two fundamental and interrelated issues in device-to-device (D2D) enhanced cellular networks. The first issue is how D2D users should access spectrum, and we consider two choices: overlay (orthogonal spectrum between D2D and cellular UEs) and underlay (non-orthogonal). The second issue is how D2D users should choose between communicating directly or via the base station, a choice that depends on distance between the potential D2D transmitter and receiver. We propose a tractable hybrid network model where the positions of mobiles are modeled by random spatial Poisson point process, with which we present a general analytical approach that allows a unified performance evaluation for these questions. Then, we derive analytical rate expressions and apply them to optimize the two D2D spectrum sharing scenarios under a weighted proportional fair utility function. We find that as the proportion of potential D2D mobiles increases, the optimal spectrum partition in the overlay is almost invariant (when D2D mode selection threshold is large) while the optimal spectrum access factor in the underlay decreases. Further, from a coverage perspective, we reveal a tradeoff between the spectrum access factor and the D2D mode selection threshold in the underlay: as more D2D links are allowed (due to a more relaxed mode selection threshold), the network should actually make less spectrum available to them to limit their interference.
Word-boundary and rate effects on upper and lower lip movements in the articulation of the bilabial stop /p/ in Korean

In this study, we examined how the upper and lower lips articulate to produce labial /p/. Using electromagnetic midsagittal articulography, we collected flesh-point tracking movement data from eight native speakers of Seoul Korean (five females and three males). Individual articulatory movements in /p/ were examined in terms of minimum vertical upper lip position, maximum vertical lower lip position, and corresponding vertical upper lip position aligned with maximum vertical lower lip position. Using linear mixed-effect models, we tested two factors (word boundary [across-word vs. within-word] and speech rate [comfortable vs. fast]) and their interaction, considering subjects as random effects. The results are summarized as follows. First, maximum lower lip position varied with different word boundaries and speech rates, but no interaction was detected. In particular, maximum lower lip position was lower (e.g., less constricted or more reduced) in fast rate condition and across-word boundary condition. Second, minimum lower lip position, as well as lower lip position, measured at the time of maximum lower lip position only varied with different word boundaries, showing that they were consistently lower in across-word condition. We provide further empirical evidence of lower lip movement sensitive to both different word boundaries (e.g., linguistic factor) and speech rates (e.g., paralinguistic factor); this supports the traditional idea that the lower lip is an actively moving articulator. The sensitivity of upper lip movement is also observed with different word boundaries; this counters the traditional idea that the upper lip is the target area, which presupposes immobility. Taken together, the lip aperture gesture is a good indicator that takes into account upper and lower lip vertical movements, compared to the traditional approach that distinguishes a movable articulator from target place. Respective of different speech rates, the results of the present study patterned with cross-linguistic lenition-related allophonic variation, which is known to be more sensitive to fast rate.
A simple approach to rotor flux estimation without integration for a DSP based speed sensorless vector control of induction motor

In this paper a simple field orientation control scheme for induction motor is described. The principle is based on the idea of a simplified equivalent circuit of the machine and the orientation of the fluxes, currents and voltage vectors. Here the determination of stator flux avoids integration, which is increasingly difficult when the speed reference becomes lower down to almost zero. In order to estimate the stator flux, a simple algorithm based on the principle of orthogonality of stator flux and stator induced e.m. f. vectors is used. The proposed control technique is validated by some simulation results and also experiments were conducted which showed conformity to the theoretical basis and simulation results.
Dwarf: shrinking the PetaCube

Dwarf is a highly compressed structure for computing, storing, and querying data cubes. Dwarf identifies prefix and suffix structural redundancies and factors them out by coalescing their store. Prefix redundancy is high on dense areas of cubes but suffix redundancy is significantly higher for sparse areas. Putting the two together fuses the exponential sizes of high dimensional full cubes into a dramatically condensed data structure. The elimination of suffix redundancy has an equally dramatic reduction in the computation of the cube because recomputation of the redundant suffixes is avoided. This effect is multiplied in the presence of correlation amongst attributes in the cube. A Petabyte 25-dimensional cube was shrunk this way to a 2.3GB Dwarf Cube, in less than 20 minutes, a 1:400000 storage reduction ratio. Still, Dwarf provides 100% precision on cube queries and is a self-sufficient structure which requires no access to the fact table. What makes Dwarf practical is the automatic discovery,in a single pass over the fact table, of the prefix and suffix redundancies without user involvement or knowledge of the value distributions.This paper describes the Dwarf structure and the Dwarf cube construction algorithm. Further optimizations are then introduced for improving clustering and query performance. Experiments with the current implementation include comparisons on detailed measurements with real and synthetic datasets against previously published techniques. The comparisons show that Dwarfs by far out-perform these techniques on all counts: storage space, creation time, query response time, and updates of cubes.
Refined Vertex Sparsifiers of Planar Graphs

We study the following version of cut sparsification. Given a large edge-weighted network $G$ with $k$ terminal vertices, compress it into a smaller network $H$ with the same terminals, such that every minimum terminal cut in $H$ approximates the corresponding one in $G$, up to a factor $q\geq 1$ that is called the quality. (The case $q=1$ is known also as a mimicking network). We provide new insights about the structure of minimum terminal cuts, leading to new results for cut sparsifiers of planar graphs. Our first contribution identifies a subset of the minimum terminal cuts, which we call elementary, that generates all the others. Consequently, $H$ is a cut sparsifier if and only if it preserves all the elementary terminal cuts (up to this factor $q$). This structural characterization lead to improved bounds on the size of $H$. For example, it improve the bound of mimicking-network size for planar graphs into a near-optimal one. Our second and main contribution is to refine the known bounds in terms of $\gamma=\gamma(G)$, which is defined as the minimum number of faces that are incident to all the terminals in a planar graph $G$. We prove that the number of elementary terminal cuts is $O((2k/\gamma)^{2\gamma})$ (compared to $O(2^k)$ terminal cuts), and furthermore obtain a mimicking-network of size $O(\gamma 2^{2\gamma} k^4)$, which is near-optimal as a function of $\gamma$. In the analysis we break the elementary terminal cuts into fragments, and count them carefully. Our third contribution is a duality between cut sparsification and distance sparsification for certain planar graphs, when the sparsifier $H$ is required to be a minor of $G$. This duality connects problems that were previously studied separately, implying new results, new proofs of known results, and equivalences between open gaps.
Designing a ZigBee-ready IEEE 802.15.4- compliant radio transceiver

Besides highlighting the overall characteristics of the physical (PHY) and MAC layers of the IEEE 802.15. 4 standard, and the network, security and application layers of the ZigBee wireless technology, this article focuses on efficient implementation of IEEE 802.15. 4-compliant radio-on-a-chip by identifying potential low-power features in the standard, suitable transceiver architectures and considering standard CMOS design issues. In addition, it also presents system-level considerations and implementation choices for a commercially available low-cost, low-power Zigbee-ready CMOS RF transceiver compliant to the IEEE 802.15. 4 standard.
Flexible, Efficient and Interactive Retrieval for Supporting In-silico Studies of Endobacteria

Studying the interactions between arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMFs) and their symbiotic endo bacteria has potentially strong impacts on the development of new biotechnology applications. The analysis of genomic data and syntenies is a key technique for acquiring information about phylogenetic relationships and metabolic functions of such organisms. In this paper we describe a case-based retrieval tool, which supports customized comparative genomics searches, and which is part of a modular architecture meant to support in-silico genome sequence analysis, being developed within the project BIOBITS. From a methodological viewpoint, the tool takes advantage of an abstraction technique similar to Temporal Abstractions, thus allowing to neglect un-relevant details. Retrieval is made flexible by the use of such multi-level abstractions, and efficient by the use of proper taxonomical index structures. Moreover, end-users are allowed to progressively relax or refine their queries, in an interactive way. A case study taken from the application domain is used to illustrate the approach.
Synthetic aerosols from fine carbon nanotubes of 10 nanometres diameter

Aerosol generation, sampling and analysis for fine carbon nanotubes (CNT) of 10nm diameter is demonstrated and compared to structures formed by coarse CNT. Aggregate structures formed in an aerosol are coil-shaped for fine CNT and bundles for coarse CNT. These structures could be an expression of differences in their physical properties, such as the bending stiffness.
Banding and polarity of actin filaments in interphase and cleaving cells

Heavy meromyosin (HMM) decoration of actin filaments was used to detect the polarity of microfilaments in interphase and cleaving rat kangaroo (PtK2) cells. Ethanol at -20 degrees C was used to make the cells permeable to HMM followed by tannic acid-glutaraldehyde fixation for electron microscopy. Uniform polarity of actin filaments was observed at cell junctions and central attachment plaques with the HMM arrowheads always pointing away from the junction or plaque. Stress fibers were banded in appearance with their component microfilaments exhibiting both parallel and antiparallel orientation with respect to one another. Identical banding of microfilament bundles was also seen in cleavage furrows with the same variation in filament polarity as found in stress fibers. Similarly banded fibers were not seen outside the cleavage furrow in mitotic cells. By the time that a mid-body was present, the actin filaments in the cleavage furrow were no longer in banded fibers. The alternating dark and light bands of both the stress fibers and cleavage furrow fibers are approximately equal in length, each measuring approximately 0.16 micrometer. Actin filaments were present in both bands, and individual decorated filaments could sometimes be traced through four band lengths. Undecorated filaments, 10 nm in diameter, could often be seen within the light bands. A model is proposed to explain the arrangement of filaments in stress fibers and cleavage furrows based on the striations observed with tannic acid and the polarity of the actin filaments.
Image Retrieval for Image-Based Localization Revisited

To reliably determine the camera pose of an image relative to a 3D point cloud of a scene, correspondences between 2D features and 3D points are needed. Recent work has demonstrated that directly matching the features against the points outperforms methods that take an intermediate image retrieval step in terms of the number of images that can be localized successfully. Yet, direct matching is inherently less scalable than retrievalbased approaches. In this paper, we therefore analyze the algorithmic factors that cause the performance gap and identify false positive votes as the main source of the gap. Based on a detailed experimental evaluation, we show that retrieval methods using a selective voting scheme are able to outperform state-of-the-art direct matching methods. We explore how both selective voting and correspondence computation can be accelerated by using a Hamming embedding of feature descriptors. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset with challenging query images for the evaluation of image-based localization.
Activity Recognition from RGB-D Camera with 3D Local Spatio-temporal Features

Kinect, as a 3D digital capturing device, can collect the RGB and depth information of human activities rapidly. We study fusing the depth and RGB information for activity recognition. We introduce histogram color-based image thresholding to detect skin on human body, and use a GMM model to segment human hand areas. We design a new local descriptor, called a 3D Motion Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (3D MoSIFT), which can effectively detect interesting points based on both RGB and depth information, and consequently encode the visual and motion information from both to describe the interesting points. Experiments, based on a video dataset collected by a Kinect camera, show that adding depth information in the descriptor can distinctly improve the accuracy of human activity recognition. We introduce the F1-score measurement to evaluate and compare our performance with the other algorithms.
Pars plana vitrectomy for malignant glaucoma in nonglaucomatous and in filtered glaucomatous eyes

Purpose To assess the outcomes of pars plana vitrectomy for the treatment of malignant glaucoma in patients with and without previous filtration surgery. Patients and methods Data of 15 patients developing malignant glaucoma after trabeculectomy (60%) or following ophthalmic interventions other than filtration surgery (40%) were recorded retrospectively. Pars plana vitrectomy was performed in case of failed medical or laser treatment recreating the normal pathway of aqueous humor. The main outcome measures were the postoperative intraocular pressure (IOP), the frequency of complications, and success rate based on the following criteria: IOP reduction by ≥20% and to ≤21 mmHg (definition one) or an IOP < 18 mmHg (definition two) with (qualified success) and without (complete success) glaucoma medication. Results Vitrectomy reduced IOP from baseline in eyes with and without previous trabeculectomy during a median follow-up of 16.4 months (range 7 days to 58 months); although the majority of patients required glaucoma medication to reach desired IOP. The complete success rates were 11% (both definitions) for patients with filtering blebs and none of the patients without previous trabeculectomy had complete success at the 12-month visit. Complications were few and included transient shallowing of the anterior chamber, choroidal detachment, corneal decompensation, filtering bleb failure, and need for further IOP-lowering procedures. Conclusion Pars plana vitrectomy is equally effective for malignant glaucoma caused by trabeculectomy or interventions other than filtration surgery, although IOP-lowering medication is necessary in nearly all cases to maintain target IOP.
A New Perspective of Statistical Modeling by PRISM

PRISM was born in 1997 as a symbolic statistical modeling language to facilitate modeling complex systems governed by rules and probabilities [Sato and Kameya, 1997]. It was the first programming language with EM learning ability and has been shown to be able to cover popular symbolic statistical models such as Bayesian networks, HMMs (hidden Markov models) and PCFGs (probabilistic context free grammars) [Sato and Kameya, 2001]. Last year, we entirely reimplemented PRISM based on a new tabling mechanism of B-Prolog [Zhou and Sato, 2002]. As a result, we can now deal with much larger data sets and more complex models. In this paper, we focus on this recent development and report two modeling examples in statistical natural language processing. One is a declarative PDCG (probabilistic definite clause grammar) program which simulates top-down parsing. The other is a left-corner parsing program which describes a bottom-up parsing that manipulates a stack. The fact that these rather different types of modeling and their EM learning are uniformly possible through PRISM programming shows the versatility of PRISM.1