Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-Term Image Boundary Extrapolation

Boundary prediction in images and videos has been a very active topic of research and organizing visual information into boundaries and segments is believed to be a corner stone of visual perception. While prior work has focused on predicting boundaries for observed frames, our work aims at predicting boundaries of future unobserved frames. This requires our model to learn about the fate of boundaries and extrapolate motion patterns. We experiment on established real-world video segmentation dataset, which provides a testbed for this new task. We show for the first time spatio-temporal boundary extrapolation, that in contrast to prior work on RGB extrapolation maintains a crisp result. Furthermore, we show long-term prediction of boundaries in situations where the motion is governed by the laws of physics. We argue that our model has with minimalistic model assumptions derived a notion of"intuitive physics".
Change detection by new DSmT decision rule and ICM with constraints: Application to Argan land cover

The objective of this work is, in the first place, the integration in a fusion process using hybrid DSmT model, both, the contextual information obtained from a supervised ICM classification with constraints and the temporal information with the use of two images taken at two different dates. Secondly, we have proposed a new decision rule based on the DSmP transformation to overcome the inherent limitations of the decision rules thus use the maximum of generalized belief functions. The approach is evaluated on two LANDSAT ETM+ images, the results are promising.
Optimal receiver for Space Time Spreading across a Time Hopping PPM over Ultra Wideband Saleh-Valenzuela MIMO Channel

This paper outlines a technique which can use multiple transmit antennas to send more than one binary bit using the same number of transmit antennas over a single transmission. It uses Ultra Wideband orthogonal pulse position modulation to achieve this, with the receiver employing a Rake receiver and a Maximum Ratio Combiner optimal detector. This is done over a Space Time Spreading Time Hopping Ultra Wideband Pulse Position Modulation system assuming a rich multipath Saleh-Valenzuela MIMO channel model. Simulation results indicate that a significant gain can be achieved compared with other proposed schemes utilising multiple transmit antennas for Ultra Wide Band Pulse Position communications. The gain is both in terms of transmission rate and the signal to noise ratio required for the simulator bit error rates.
Direction of arrival estimation using modified orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is a sparse reconstruction problem. However, conventional orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) may fail to identify the correct atoms since the redundant dictionary composed of the direction vectors is highly coherent. To mitigate the coherence problem, in this paper, we propose a modified OMP by constructing data dependent sensing dictionary for sparse reconstruction in the noisy case. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm for DOA estimation. Key words: Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation, orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), sparse reconstruction, redundant dictionary, sensing dictionary.
ESTIMATION OF MISS DISTANCE PARAMETERS BASED ON DOPPLERLET TRANSFORM AND MATCHING PURSUITALGORITHM

Based on the theory of linear transformations, a novel time-frequency representation is presented for the echoes of targets with rectilinear trajectories and constant accelerations in the scoring system. First, time-frequency atoms called Dopplerlets are constructed based on the characteristics of Doppler frequency of echoes. Second, the continuous and discrete Dopplerlet transform is derived and the matching pursuit algorithm is presented. Third, the miss distance parameters are estimated based on the Dopplerlet transform and matching pursuit algorithm. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method
Molecular Diagnosis of Atlantic Forest Mammals Using Mitochondrial DNA Sequences: Didelphid Marsupials

Most living species of New World marsupials are classified in the family Didelphidae, with 98 species and 18 genera currently recognized. We sequenced fragments of two mitochondrial genes of didelphid marsupials from the At- lantic Forest of eastern South America, a biodiversity hotspot. We evaluated sequence divergences within and among spe- cies and contrasted the efficiency of cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) with cytochrome b (CytB) in species-level di- agnosis. The average intraspecific genetic divergence of COI and CytB was 2.0% and 1.9%, respectively; which was about five times lower than the comparison among species of the same genus (11.2 and 10.8%). In both genes, divergence levels among closely related species are usually higher than within species. The barcoding gap is similar in COI and CytB, indicating that either gene can be used in molecular diagnoses of didelphid species. DNA barcodes are a welcome addition to traditional taxonomic methods when viewed as additional diagnostic characters in the context of integrative taxonomy.
Attrition in the Long Run: The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study 1

Panel Data” to be held 26th –28th March 2003 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, MA 02138. The research reported herein was supported by the National Institute on Aging (R01 AG-9775 and P01-AG21079), by the William Vilas Estate Trust, and by the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Computation was carried out using facilities of the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which are supported by a P30 Center Grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. I thank Jeremy Freese and Ricardo Godoy for helpful advice. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author. Address correspondence to Robert M. Hauser, Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706 or e-mail to Hauser@ssc.wisc. edu. Attrition in the Long Run: The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study
The entropy of the rotating charged black threebrane from a brane-antibrane system

We show that a model based on a D3-brane–anti-D3-brane system at finite temperature, proposed previously as a microscopic description of the non-rotating black threebrane of type IIB supergravity arbitrarily far from extremality, can also successfully reproduce the entropy of the rotating threebrane with arbitrary charge (including the neutral case, which corresponds to the Kerr black hole in seven dimensions). Our results appear to confirm in particular the need for a peculiar condition on the energy of the two gases involved in the model, whose physical interpretation remains to be elucidated.
Time-frequency analysis of cardiovascular variability during two types of continuous and linearly increasing isometric exercise

To characterize the effect of isometric exercise (IE) intensity on the cardiovascular autonomic variables (CVAV), we assessed the continuous relationships between force and the high frequency power of RR intervals (HFRR), low to high frequency ratio (LFRR/HFRR) and low frequency power of systolic pressure (LFSP), estimated by a time-frequency distribution (TFD). Thirty five healthy subjects performed continuously increasing static handgrip (HG) and static leg extension (LE) until maximal force (MF). Main findings were: 1) strong correlations between %MF and lnHFRR; 2) threshold phenomena around 65%MF in %MF vs. LFSP and LFRR/HFRR relations; and 3) greater effects on CVAV of LE than HG (p<0.001). Combining continuously increasing IE intensity with a TFD allows to obtain continuous relations between CVAV and intensity in the widest range, which show strong correlations, threshold phenomena and greater autonomic responses in LE.
A truncated peptide from p35, a Cdk5 activator, prevents Alzheimer's disease phenotypes in model mice

Alzheimer's disease (AD), one of the leading neurodegenerative disorders of older adults, which causes major socioeconomic burdens globally, lacks effective therapeutics without significant side effects. Besides the hallmark pathology of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs), it has been reported that cyclin‐dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5), a critical neuronal kinase, is hyperactivated in AD brains and is, in part, responsible for the above pathology. Here we show that a modified truncated 24‐aa peptide (TFP5), derived from the Cdk5 activator p35, penetrates the blood‐brain barrier after intraperitoneal injections, inhibits abnormal Cdk5 hyperactivity, and significantly rescues AD pathology (up to 70–80%) in 5XFAD AD model mice. The mutant mice, injected with TFP5 exhibit behavioral rescue, whereas no rescue was observed in mutant mice injected with either saline or scrambled peptide. However, TFP5 does not inhibit cell cycle Cdks or normal Cdk5/p35 activity, and thereby has no toxic side effects (even at 200 mg/kg), a common problem in most current therapeutics for AD. In addition, treated mice displayed decreased inflammation, amyloid plaques, NFTs, cell death, and an extended life by 2 mo. These results suggest TFP5 as a potential therapeutic, toxicity‐free candidate for AD. —Shukla, V. , Zheng, Y. ‐L. , Mishra, S. K. , Amin, N. D. , Steiner, J., Grant, P., Kesavapany, S. , Pant, H. C. A truncated peptide from p35, a Cdk5 activator, prevents Alzheimer's disease phenotypes in model mice. FASEB J. 27, 174–186 (2013). www.fasebj. org
Effective Resistances, Statistical Leverage, and Applications to Linear Equation Solving

Recent work in theoretical computer science and scientific computing has focused on nearly-linear-time algorithms for solving systems of linear equations. While introducing several novel theoretical perspectives, this work has yet to lead to practical algorithms. In an effort to bridge this gap, we describe in this paper two related results. Our first and main result is a simple algorithm to approximate the solution to a set of linear equations defined by a Laplacian (for a graph $G$ with $n$ nodes and $m \le n^2$ edges) constraint matrix. The algorithm is a non-recursive algorithm; even though it runs in $O(n^2 \cdot \polylog(n))$ time rather than $O(m \cdot polylog(n))$ time (given an oracle for the so-called statistical leverage scores), it is extremely simple; and it can be used to compute an approximate solution with a direct solver. In light of this result, our second result is a straightforward connection between the concept of graph resistance (which has proven useful in recent algorithms for linear equation solvers) and the concept of statistical leverage (which has proven useful in numerically-implementable randomized algorithms for large matrix problems and which has a natural data-analytic interpretation).
Poly-L-lactic Acid (PLLA)-Chitosan-Collagen Electrospun Tube for Vascular Graft Application

Poly-L-Lactic acid (PLLA) blended with chitosan and collagen was used to fabricate a conduit for blood vessel engineering through an electrospinning process. Various concentrations of chitosan were used in the blend in order to study its effect on the morphology, chemical bond, tensile strength, burst pressure, hemocompatibility, and cell viability (cytotoxicity) of the tube.In vitro assessments indicated that addition of chitosan-collagen could improve cell viability and hemocompatibility. Best results were demonstrated by the conduit with 10% PLLA, 0.5% chitosan, and 1% collagen. Tensile strength reached 2.13 MPa and burst pressure reached 2593 mmHg, both values that are within the range value of native blood vessel. A hemolysis percentage of 1.04% and a cell viability of 86.2% were obtained, meeting the standards of high hemocompatibility and low cytotoxicity for vascular graft material. The results are promising for further development toward vascular graft application.
Accounting Information Free of Selection Bias: A New UK Database 1953-1999

Accounting information is indispensable in empirical finance. Unfortunately, existing databases, particularly for non-US markets, suffer from selection bias. I construct a new UK data set by supplementing existing databases with handcollected balance sheets. It contains about 100,000 firm-years of data, covers virtually all UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange between 1953 and 1999, is fully cross-referenced to the London Share Price Database and free of selection bias. Use of previously existing UK databases is shown to introduce biases against small and high book-to-market stocks, and downward biases in sample moments of returns, a symptom of truncation of extreme observations. The new data set is particularly useful in contexts where inference is sensitive to selection bias or repeated mining of the US data is detrimental, and for any study that needs accounting measures such as book-to-market ratios for UK firms.
Unifying Ideas for Non-Parametric Linkage Analysis

Objectives: Non-parametric linkage analysis (NPL) exploits marker allele sharing among affected relatives to map genes influencing complex traits. Computational barriers force approximate analysis on large pedigrees and the adoption of a questionable perfect data assumption (PDA) in assigning p values. To improve NPL significance testing on large pedigrees, we examine the adverse consequences of missing data and PDA. We also introduce a novel statistic, Q-NPL, appropriate for NPL analysis of quantitative traits. Methods: Using simulated and real data sets with qualitative traits, we compare NPL analysis results for four testing procedures and various degrees of missing data. The simulated data sets vary from all nuclear families, to all large pedigrees, to a mix of pedigrees of different sizes. We implemented the Kong and Cox linear adjustment of p values in the software packages Mendel and SimWalk. We perform similar analysis with Q-NPL on quantitative traits of various heritabilities. Results: The Kong and Cox extension for significance testing is robust to realistic missing data patterns, greatly improves p values in approximate analyses, and works equally well for qualitative and quantitative traits and small and large pedigrees. The Q-NPL statistic is robust to missing data and shows good power to detect linkage for quantitative traits with a wide spectrum of heritabilities. Conclusions: The Kong and Cox extension should be a standard tool for calculating NPL p values. It allows the combination of exact and estimated analyses into a single significance score. Q-NPL should be a standard statistic for NPL analysis of quantitative traits. The new statistics are implemented in Mendel and SimWalk.
ChitChat: An Effective Message Delivery Method in Sparse Pocket-Switched Networks

The ubiquitous adoption of portable smart devices has enabled a new way of communication via Pocket Switched Networks (PSN), whereby messages are routed by personal devices inside the pockets of ever-moving people. PSNs provide opportunities for various interesting applications such as location based social networking, geolocal advertising, and military missions in active battlefields where the central communication tower is unavailable. One key challenge of the successful roll-out of PSN applications is the difficulty of achieving high message delivery ratio due to the dynamic nature of moving people and spatial-temporal sparsity in such networks. In this paper, we propose a novel message routing approach, called ChitChat, which exploits users' direct and transient social interests via discriminatory gossiping to penetrate messages deeper into the network. Our approach enables message carriers to make opportunistic and distributed routing decisions based on the likelihood a potential message receiver will meet individuals that have a high chance to forward the message to the destination. Our experimental results have demonstrated that our approach achieves higher delivery ratios against the two more recent state-of-the-art algorithms, while maintaining a lower communication overhead against flooding and reducing the amount of time messages remain idlein buffers.
Enhancer of Zeste Homolog 2 as an Independent Prognostic Marker for Cancer: A Meta-Analysis

Background Novel biomarkers are of particular interest for predicting cancer prognosis. This study aimed to explore the associations between enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (EZH2) and patient survival in various cancers. Methods Relevant literature was retrieved from PubMed and Web of Science databases. Pooled hazard ratios (HRs), odds ratios (ORs), and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated. Results Forty-nine studies (8,050 patients) were included. High EZH2 expression was significantly associated with shorter overall (hazard ratio [HR] 1.74, 95% CI: 1.46–2.07), disease-free (HR 1.59, 95% CI: 1.27–1.99), metastasis-free (HR 2.19, 95% CI: 1.38–3.47), progression-free (HR 2.53, 95% CI: 1.52–4.21), cancer-specific (HR 3.13, 95% CI: 1.70–5.74), and disease-specific (HR 2.29, 95% CI: 1.56–3.35) survival, but not recurrence-free survival (HR 1.38, 95% CI: 0.93–2.06). Moreover, EZH2 expression significantly correlated with distant metastasis (OR 3.25, 95% CI: 1.07–9.87) in esophageal carcinoma; differentiation (OR 3.00, 95% CI: 1.37–6.55) in non-small cell lung cancer; TNM stage (OR 3.18, 95% CI: 2.49–4.08) in renal cell carcinoma; and histological grade (OR 4.50, 95% CI: 3.33–6.09), estrogen receptor status (OR 0.15, 95% CI: 0.11–0.20) and progesterone receptor status (OR 0.30, 95% CI: 0.23–0.39) in breast cancer. Conclusions Our results suggested that EZH2 might be an independent prognostic factor for multiple survival measures in different cancers.
Enhancing Morphological Alignment for Translating Highly Inflected Languages

We propose an unsupervised approach utilizing only raw corpora to enhance morphological alignment involving highly inflected languages. Our method focuses on closed-class morphemes, modeling their influence on nearby words. Our language-independent model recovers important links missing in the IBM Model 4 alignment and demonstrates improved end-to-end translations for English-Finnish and English-Hungarian.
Heterogeneity of Viscoelastic Properties of Myocardial Muscle Fiber: Mathematical Model

Mathematical model describing the processes of mechanical stress development in response to strain of heterogeneous muscle fiber is created. The numerical algorithm to calculate viscoelastic properties of muscle fiber of arbitrary length is developed. In numerical experiments by the model it is shown that the local heterogeneity of geometrical and mechanical parameters of structural units of the model significantly influences in resulting mechanical response of whole fiber. Also it is established the close connection between parameters of mechanical and geometrical heterogeneity compensating each other. It is supposed that the mechanism may modulate the myocardial remodeling under changing load.
Semantic multi-criteria decision making in autonomous embedded systems

The increasing complexity of modern computer systems emerges as a real challenge for both the users and the designers. According to the innovative vision of Organic Computing systems, the system components will profit from their autonomy to perform a self-organization, and subsequently, to reach a high degree of adaptivity. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the vision of Organic Computing and its realization in embedded computer systems. An interdisciplinary methodology called " Semantic Multi-Criteria Decision Making " (SeMCDM), has been suggested and evaluated regarding different aspects. The new methodology adopts a marketplace-oriented behavior pattern for the autonomous system components. The shift of the design decisions from the human designer to the autonomous system components implies a balancing knowledge transfer in the same direction. From this central idea two issues emerge: The first issue addresses the form of the knowledge to be transferred, while the second issue deals with the appropriate mechanisms for autonomous decision making. Similar to the Semantic Web, the necessity for a common, machine processable, understanding of the world has been recognized. An ontology-based description of the world offers an optimal solution to represent the knowledge of several human designers, to transfer the knowledge to the autonomous system components, and to build a communication language between the autonomous system components. While processing the ontological knowledge, the autonomous units share also the same semantic with the human designers and users. This thesis defines the autonomous decision making as a selection problem, which is strongly affected by the existence of multiple, conflicting, criteria. Methods for making decision under multiple criteria, which are known from the research field of " Operations Research " , have been categorized and analyzed to proof their adequacy for the purposes of autonomous system components. In the light of the adopted MCDM-Methods, development tools have been designed and actually embedded within an ontology development environment. A specially developed MCDM-ontology builds a bridge between two worlds: Ontologies and MCDM. A set of inference rules enhances a conventional inference engine to be a MCDM-capable inference engine. Through the merge of both technologies, this thesis presents not only a new concept of Semantic Multi-Criteria Decision Making SeMCDM, but also a complete platform for the design and deployment of autonomous system components in self-organizing systems. The investigation of current automotive communication systems, together with the creation of a catalog of requirements, targets at the identification of possible applications …
Modeling the Dynamics of Network Technology Adoption and the Role of Converters

New network technologies constantly seek to displace incumbents. Their success depends on technological superiority, the size of the incumbent's installed base, users' adoption behaviors, and various other factors. The goal of this paper is to develop an understanding of competition between network technologies and identify the extent to which different factors, in particular converters (a.k.a. gateways), affect the outcome. Converters can help entrants overcome the influence of the incumbent's installed base by enabling cross-technology interoperability. However, they have development, deployment, and operations costs and can introduce performance degradations and functionality limitations, so that if, when, why, and how they help is often unclear. To this end, the paper proposes and solves a model for adoption of competing network technologies by individual users. The model incorporates a simple utility function that captures key aspects of users' adoption decisions. Its solution reveals a number of interesting and at times unexpected behaviors, including the possibility for converters to reduce overall market penetration of the technologies and to prevent convergence to a stable state, something that never arises in their absence. The findings were tested for robustness, e.g., different utility functions and adoption models, and found to remain valid across a broad range of scenarios.
PLEXQ: Towards a Playful Experiences Questionnaire

Playfulness is an important, but often neglected, design quality for interactive products. This paper presents a first step towards a validated questionnaire called PLEXQ, which measures 17 different facets of playful user experiences. We describe the development and validation of the questionnaire, from the generation of 231 items, to the current questionnaire consisting of 17 constructs of playfulness, each measured through three items. Using PLEXQ we discuss the nature of playfulness by looking at the role of age, gender, and product type in one's proclivity to experience playfulness differently. Finally, we reveal a four-factor structure of playfulness and discuss the implications for further theory development.