Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
From pixels to physics: Probabilistic color de-rendering

Consumer digital cameras use tone-mapping to produce compact, narrow-gamut images that are nonetheless visually pleasing. In doing so, they discard or distort substantial radiometric signal that could otherwise be used for computer vision. Existing methods attempt to undo these effects through deterministic maps that de-render the reported narrow-gamut colors back to their original wide-gamut sensor measurements. Deterministic approaches are unreliable, however, because the reverse narrow-to-wide mapping is one-to-many and has inherent uncertainty. Our solution is to use probabilistic maps, providing uncertainty estimates useful to many applications. We use a non-parametric Bayesian regression technique - local Gaussian process regression - to learn for each pixel's narrow-gamut color a probability distribution over the scene colors that could have created it. Using a variety of consumer cameras we show that these distributions, once learned from training data, are effective in simple probabilistic adaptations of two popular applications: multi-exposure imaging and photometric stereo. Our results on these applications are better than those of corresponding deterministic approaches, especially for saturated and out-of-gamut colors.
Moral Hazard versus Liquidity and Optimal Unemployment Insurance

This paper presents new evidence on why unemployment insurance (UI) benefits affect search behavior and develops a simple method of calculating the welfare gains from UI using this evidence. I show that 60 percent of the increase in unemployment durations caused by UI benefits is due to a “liquidity effect” rather than distortions on marginal incentives to search (“moral hazard”) by combining two empirical strategies. First, I find that increases in benefits have much larger effects on durations for liquidity‐constrained households. Second, lump‐sum severance payments increase durations substantially among constrained households. I derive a formula for the optimal benefit level that depends only on the reduced‐form liquidity and moral hazard elasticities. The formula implies that the optimal UI benefit level exceeds 50 percent of the wage. The “exact identification” approach to welfare analysis proposed here yields robust optimal policy results because it does not require structural estimation of primitives.
Success factors of communites of patients

This paper presents results of an empirical study regarding success factors of virtual communities of patients. These success factors capture what is important to members of virtual communities of patients and the interconnections between these aspects. We analyze the possible impact of success factors that we identify to the design and implementation of e-services as part of the business model for virtual communities of patients. We analyze what is of major interest to members of virtual communities of patients and the expectations of consumers of health related content on the Internet. This paper focuses on virtual communities of patients. Recommendations for new e-services are being discussed.
Cooperative spectrum sensing based on matrix rank minimization

In cognitive radio (CR) networks, multi-CR cooperation typically takes place during spectrum sensing, to cope with wireless fading effects and the hidden terminal problem. The user cooperation gain not only offers channel diversity against fading, but also allows for reduced sampling costs per CR, which is particularly relevant when the monitored spectrum has very wide bandwidth. To attain a desired tradeoff between channel diversity and sampling costs, this paper develops a new cooperative spectrum sensing technique based on matrix rank minimization. In the absence of channel knowledge, CRs individually collect digital measurements from a region of the wide spectrum via selective filtering, with optional compressive sampling to further reduce sampling rates. The solutions representing all the measurements are modeled to possess a low rank property, with the rank order being the same as the size of the nonzero support of the monitored wide spectrum. Accordingly, a nuclear norm minimization problem is formulated to jointly identify the nonzero support and hence the overall spectrum occupancy. Simulations show that the proposed technique outperforms traditional averaging-based cooperative schemes, given the same sampling costs.
Utilization of thermal properties for understanding baking and staling processes.

The baking of bread starts with mixing, a process in which wheat flour (and/ or some other cereal flour), water, yeast and other ingredients are transformed into a dough during mechanical treatment. The mixing results in a foam, i.e., a gas phase dispersed into an aqueous matrix, and the volume of this foam increases during fermentation. The final step is the application of heat in the oven; when the final volume is reached, the crumb structure is fixed and the crust gets its color. For other baked products the recipe, the mixing, and fermentation differ, but there is always a step involving the application of heat. This can be in order to dry the product, as in pasta making, or it can be to bring about the transformation from dough to bread, as in baking. For an understanding of cereal processing it is thus necessary to understand the thermal transitions that cereal components can undergo as a result of a change in temperature. The present chapter deals with transitions like glass transitions, starch gelatinization and retrogradation, protein denaturation, and crystallization. Chemical reactions are also of importance for bread making—just think of the chemical reactions resulting in the production of carbon dioxide and ethanol, or the aroma components in the crust. However, the structure of the baked product and sensorial attributes related to ‘‘texture’’ or ‘‘consistency’’ are to a great extent related to the physical changes and phase transitions occurring in the cereal components.
Glutamatergic Afferents of the Ventral Tegmental Area in the Rat

Glutamatergic inputs to the ventral tegmental area (VTA), thought crucial to the capacity of the VTA to detect and signal stimulus salience, have been reported to arise in but a few structures. However, the afferent system of the VTA comprises very abundant neurons within a large formation extending from the prefrontal cortex to the caudal brainstem. Neurons in nearly all parts of this continuum may be glutamatergic and equivalently important to VTA function. Thus, we sought to identify the full range of glutamatergic inputs to the VTA by combining retrograde transport of wheat germ agglutinin-bound gold after injections into the VTA with nonisotopic in situ hybridization of the vesicular glutamate transporters (VGLUTs) 1, 2, and 3. We found glutamatergic neurons innervating the VTA in almost all structures projecting there and that a majority of these are subcortical and VGLUT2 mRNA positive. The tremendous convergence of glutamatergic afferents from many brain areas in the VTA suggests that (1) the function of the VTA requires integration of manifold and diverse bits of information and (2) the activity of the VTA reflects the ongoing activities of various combinations of its afferents.
Interventions for the management of oral lichen planus: a review of the conventional and novel therapies.

OBJECTIVE This narrative review focuses on the rationale and role of conventional and newer therapies in the management of oral lichen planus (OLP) with emphasis on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reported over two decades. MATERIALS AND METHODS Literature search was conducted to identify RCTs for the management of OLP from 1 January 1995 to 31 December 2015; Medline and Cochrane databases complemented with manual search were used. Primary outcome as resolution of pain was evaluated with the analysis of clinical resolution of erythema and ulceration as secondary outcome. RESULTS The search provided 260 abstracts, of which 70 full-text articles were included. Majority of trials used topical steroids with very few trials on newer therapies. It was found that topical steroids are effective for symptomatic management of OLP with equal efficacy shown by topical calcineurin inhibitors and retinoids. However, the side effect of transient burning sensation with relapse was more with calcineurin inhibitors. CONCLUSION Although the newer therapies offer advantage over steroids for the management of OLP in recalcitrant cases, extensive lesions, and cases unresponsive to steroids, but sufficient clinical data on their use are still lacking. Hence, more RCTs with large sample size, adequate treatment duration, and long-term follow-up are required for clinical utility.
Early Detection and Quantification of Almond Red Leaf Blotch Using High-Resolution Hyperspectral and Thermal Imagery

Red leaf blotch is one of the major fungal foliar diseases affecting almond orchards. High-resolution thermal and hyperspectral airborne imagery was acquired from two flights and compared with concurrent field visual evaluations for disease incidence and severity. Canopy temperature and vegetation indices were calculated from thermal and hyperspectral imagery and analyzed for their ability to detect the disease at early stages. The classification methods linear discriminant analysis and support vector machine, using linear and radial basis kernels, were applied to a combination of these vegetation indices in order to quantify and discriminate between red leaf blotch severity levels. Chlorophyll and carotenoid indices and chlorophyll fluorescence were effective in detecting red leaf blotch at the early stages of disease development. Linear models showed higher power to separate between asymptomatic trees and those affected by advanced stages of disease development while the non-linear model was better in discriminating asymptomatic plants from those at early stages of red leaf blotch development. Leaf-level measurements of stomatal conductance, chlorophyll content, chlorophyll fluorescence, photochemical reflectance index, and spectral reflectance showed no significant differences between healthy leaves and the green areas of symptomatic leaves. This study demonstrated the feasibility of early detecting and quantifying red leaf blotch using high-resolution hyperspectral imagery.
Thermal Characterization and Optimization in Platform FPGAs

Increasing power densities in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have made them susceptible to thermal problems. The advent of platform FPGAs has further exacerbated the problems by increasing the power density variations on the FPGA fabric. Therefore, we need to characterize the die temperature of platform FPGAs. In this paper, we first estimate the temperature distribution within a Virtex-4 FPGA by feeding the block power numbers in an architecture-level temperature simulator calibrated to reflect a real FPGA package. We analyze the impact of different hard-wired blocks on the temperature profile, and observe that they introduce intra-die variation in temperature of up to 20degC. Next, we evaluate the influence of placement on temperature. Our experiments indicate a decrease in peak temperature by changing the placement of hard blocks, especially the high-speed transceivers. We further propose an iterative placement technique to reduce the peak temperature, and apply it on real designs. Finally, we propose alternate organizations of the hard blocks in the FPGA fabric to reduce temperature
Multiplexed Genotyping of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Isolates by Use of Padlock Probes and Tag Microarrays

We developed and tested a ligase-based assay for simultaneous probing of core genome diversity and typing of methicillin resistance determinants in Staphylococcus aureus isolates. This assay uses oligonucleotide padlock probes whose two ends are joined through ligation when they hybridize to matching target DNA. Circularized probes are subsequently amplified by PCR with common primers and analyzed by using a microarray equipped with universal tag probes. Our set of padlock probes includes oligonucleotides targeting diagnostic regions in the mecA, ccrB, and ccrC genes of the SCCmec cassette in methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). These probes determine the presence and type of SCCmec cassettes (i.e., SCCmec types I to VI). Additional oligonucleotides interrogate a number of highly informative single nucleotide polymorphisms retrieved from a multilocus sequence typing (MLST) database. These latter probes enable the exploration of isolates' phylogenetic affiliation with clonal lineages of MRSA as revealed by MLST. The described assay enables multiplexed genotyping of MRSA based on a single-tube reaction. With a set of clinical isolates of MRSA and methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (n = 66), 100% typeability and 100% accuracy were achieved. The assay described here provides valuable genotypic information that may usefully complement existing genotyping procedures. Moreover, the assay is easily extendable by incorporating additional padlock probes and will be valuable for the quick and cost-effective probing of large numbers of polymorphisms at different genomic locations, such as those ascertained through currently ongoing mutation discovery and genome resequencing projects.
Layout techniques for minimizing on-chip interconnect self-inductance

Because magnetic effects have a much longer spatial range than electrostatic effects, an interconnect line with large inductance will be sensitive to distant variations in interconnect topology. This long range sensitivity makes it difficult to balance delays in nets like clock trees, so for such nets inductance must be minimized. In this paper we use two- and three-dimensional electromagnetic field solvers to compare dedicated ground planes to a less area-consuming approach, interdigitating the signal line with ground lines. The surprising conclusion is that with very little area penalty, interdigitated ground lines are more effective at minimizing self-inductance than ground planes.
Uncertainty Detection in Natural Language Texts

Uncertainty is an important linguistic phenomenon that is relevant in many fields of language processing. In its most general sense, it can be interpreted as lack of information: the hearer or the reader cannot be certain about some pieces of information. Thus, uncertain propositions are those whose truth value or reliability cannot be determined due to lack of information. Distinguishing between factual (i.e. true or false) and uncertain propositions is of primary importance both in linguistics and natural language processing applications. For instance, in information extraction an uncertain piece of information might be of some interest for an end-user as well, but such information must not be confused with factual textual evidence (reliable information) and the two should be kept separated. The main objective of this thesis is to detect uncertainty in English and Hungarian natural language texts. As opposed to earlier studies that focused on specific domains and were English-oriented, we will offer here a comprehensive approach to uncertainty detection, which can be easily adapted to the specific needs of many domains and languages. In our investigations, we will pay attention to create linguistically plausible models of uncertainty that will be exploited in creating manually annotated corpora that will serve as the base for the implementation of our uncertainty detectors for several domains, with the help of supervised machine learning techniques. Furthermore, we will also demonstrate that uncertainty detection can be fruitfully applied in a real-world application, namely, information extraction from clinical discharge summaries.
Policy Gradient Planning for Environmental Decision Making with Existing Simulators

In environmental and natural resource planning domains actions are taken at a large number of locations over multiple time periods. These problems have enormous state and action spaces, spatial correlation between actions, uncertainty and complex utility models. We present an approach for modeling these planning problems as factored Markov decision processes. The reward model can contain local and global components as well as spatial constraints between locations. The transition dynamics can be provided by existing simulators developed by domain experts. We propose a landscape policy defined as the equilibrium distribution of a Markov chain built from many locally-parameterized policies. This policy is optimized using a policy gradient algorithm. Experiments using a forestry simulator demonstrate the algorithm's ability to devise policies for sustainable harvest planning of a forest.
Fecundability and parental exposure to ambient sulfur dioxide.

Recently it has been observed that birth rates in Teplice, a highly polluted district in Northern Bohemia, have been reduced during periods when sulfur dioxide levels were high. This study, which is based on data from 2,585 parental pairs in the same region, describes an analysis of the impact of SO(2) on fecundability in the first unprotected menstrual cycle (FUMC). We obtained detailed personal data, including time-to-pregnancy information, via maternal questionnaires at delivery. We estimated individual exposures to SO(2) in each of the 4 months before conception on the basis of continual central monitoring. Three concentration intervals were introduced: < 40 microg/m(3 )(reference level); 40-80 microg/m(3); and [greater than or equal to] 80 microg/m(3). We estimated adjusted odds ratios (AORs) of conception in the FUMC using logistic regression models. Many variables were screened for confounding. AORs for conception in the FUMC were consistently reduced only for couples exposed in the second month before conception to SO(2) levels as follows: 40-80 microg/m(3), AOR 0.57 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.37-0.88; p < 0.011]; [greater than or equal to] 80 microg/m(3), AOR 0.49 (CI, 0.29-0.81; p < 0.006). The association was weaker in the second 2 years of the study, probably due to the gradual decrease of SO(2) levels in the region. The relationship between SO(2) and fecundability was greater in couples living close to the central monitoring station (within 3.5 km). The timing of these effects is consistent with the period of sperm maturation. This is in agreement with recent findings; sperm abnormalities originating during spermatid maturation were found in young men from Teplice region who were exposed to the increased levels of ambient SO(2). Alternative explanations of our results are also possible. ImagesFigure 1Figure 2
Forced Flow Percolation for Modeling of Liquid Penetration of Barrier Materials

In this paper, a modified model of invasion percolation is presented which gives a fuller description of fluid penetration of a hydrophobic porous material by incorporating contributions of both flow rate and pore filling to resistance to invasion. Three different materials with random pore distributions were simulated and tested. The effects of flow rate as well as material properties were tested. The forced flow percolation model was shown to be consistent with experimental results.
EmoReSp: an online emotion recognizer based on speech

The paper describes the development of an online real-time system able to recognize emotions from speech. A prosodic feature set was extracted from four databases of emotional speech (three with acted emotions and one with spontaneous ones). Two models were trained using support vector machines (SVM) or merged databases, for the purpose of providing a larger range of examples to the classifier and making it more general. The system outputs probabilities of a closed set of emotions and provides a time track of the emotions recognized in the valence and arousal continuum.
Bat Rabies, Texas, 1996–2000

Bats submitted to the Texas Department of Health (1996–2000) were speciated and tested for rabies virus antigen by direct immunofluorescence microscopy. Antigenic analysis of rabies virus–positive specimens was performed with monoclonal antibodies against the nucleoprotein of the virus; atypical or unexpected results were confirmed by genetic analysis of nucleoprotein sequence.
Effects of O2/Ar ratio and UV illumination on the properties of radio frequency sputtered TeOx thin films

Tellurium oxide (TeOx) thin films have been prepared by rf reactively sputtering deposition by using a tellurium target under Ar-O2 gas mixture. The effect of O2/Ar ratio on the structure and optical properties was investigated by XRD, FTIR and optical transmission measurement. With increasing the O2/Ar ratio the optical band gap of thin films increased from 0.59eV to 0.87eV, but the Urbach energy firstly decreased, then increased. After UV illumination, the blue and red shifts of absorption edge were observed. And the annealing of as-deposited films also was done. It was proposed that the blue and red shifts may be related with the Urbach energy. All the results can be attributed to the rearrangement of bonding network with the variation of stoichiometry of tellurium oxide films.
Pedestrian-movement prediction based on mixed Markov-chain model

A method for predicting pedestrian movement on the basis of a mixed Markov-chain model (MMM) is proposed. MMM takes into account a pedestrian's personality as an unobservable parameter. It also takes into account the effects of the pedestrian's previous status. A promotional experiment in a major shopping mall demonstrated that the highest prediction accuracy of the MMM method is 74.4%. In comparison with methods based on a Markov-chain model (MM) and a hidden-Markov model (HMM) (i.e., prediction rates of about 45% and 2%, respectively), the proposed MMM-based prediction method is substantially more accurate. This pedestrian-movement prediction based on MMM using tracking data will make it possible to provide so-called "adaptive mobile services" with proactive functions.
Solving #SAT and Bayesian Inference with Backtracking Search

Inference in Bayes Nets (BAYES) is an important problem with numerous applications in probabilistic reasoning. Counting the number of satisfying assignments of a propositional formula (#SAT) is a closely related problem of fundamental theoretical importance. Both these problems, and others, are members of the class of sum-of-products (SUMPROD) problems. In this paper we show that standard backtracking search when augmented with a simple memoization scheme (caching) can solve any sum-of-products problem with time complexity that is at least as good any other state-of-the-art exact algorithm, and that it can also achieve the best known time-space tradeoff. Furthermore, backtracking's ability to utilize more flexible variable orderings allows us to prove that it can achieve an exponential speedup over other standard algorithms for SUMPROD on some instances. The ideas presented here have been utilized in a number of solvers that have been applied to various types of sum-of-product problem's. These system's have exploited the fact that backtracking can naturally exploit more of the problem's structure to achieve improved performance on a range of problem instances. Empirical evidence of this performance gain has appeared in published works describing these solvers, and we provide references to these works.
Computing the controllability function for nonlinear descriptor systems

The computation of the controllability function for nonlinear descriptor systems is considered. Three different methods are derived. The first method is based on the necessary conditions for optimality from the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theory for descriptor systems. The second method uses completion of squares to find the solution. The third method gives a series expansion solution, which with a finite number of terms can serve as an approximate solution