Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EVALUATION OF CLASSIFIERS FOR AN UNEVEN CLASS DISTRIBUTION PROBLEM

Classification problems with uneven class distributions present several difficulties during the training as well as during the evaluation process of classifiers. A classification problem with such characteristics has resulted from a data mining project where the objective was to predict customer insolvency. Using the data set from the customer insolvency problem, we study several alternative methodologies, which have been reported to better suit the specific characteristics of this type of problem. Three different but equally important directions are examined: (a) the performance measures that should be used for problems in this domain; (b) the class distributions that should be used for the training data sets; and (c) the classification algorithms to be used. The final evaluation of the resulting classifiers is based on a study of the economic impact of classification results. This study concludes to a framework that provides the “best” classifiers, identifies the performance measures that should be used as the decision criterion, and suggests the “best” class distribution based on the value of the relative gain from correct classification in the positive class. This framework has been applied in the customer insolvency problem, but it is claimed that it can be applied to many similar problems with uneven class distributions that almost always require a multi-objective evaluation process.
Pyroelectric infrared sensor-based thermometer for monitoring indoor objects

This article describes a system for measuring temperature by monitoring an object’s radiation in the infrared spectrum. Using a measuring device by passing through a data acquisition interface, a long-term observation of the temperature variance of objects on a personal computer by the LabVIEW software is conducted. A special mechanism joined with a pyroelectric infrared (PIR) sensor, optical chopper, and Fresnel lens is presented in this system. This separable architecture makes the lens easily replaceable and portable. In this study, the PIR sensor into a quantitative measurement for long-term and long-distance applications with calibration equipment based on a blackbody and some electrometers was successfully applied. Experimental results show that the measuring device only has an average error rate of 1.21% in the overall range from 40 to 200 °C, and field of view is 4.58°. The results confirm that noncontacted temperature measurement using a PIR sensor is feasible.
Health-Related Quality of Life in Obese Presurgery Patients with and without Binge Eating Disorder, and Subdiagnostic Binge Eating Disorders

Objective. To study health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in obese presurgery patients with binge eating disorder (BED) and with subdiagnostic binge eating disorder (SBED) compared to patients without eating disorders or SBED. Method. Participants were patients referred to St. Olavs University Hospital, Norway, for bariatric surgery. Eating Disorders in Obesity (EDO) questionnaire was used to diagnose BED and SBED. Short-Form Health Survey (SF-12) assessed health-related quality of life. Questionnaires were returned by 160 of 209 patients. The present study sample consisted of 143 patients (103 women and 40 men) as 17 patients did not complete the SF-12. Results. Patients with BED and patients with SBED both had significantly lower mental HRQoL, but not physical HRQoL, compared to patients without eating disorders. Discussion. The findings indicate that obese presurgery patients with BED, and also SBED, may have special treatment needs in regard to their mental health.
Blocking Autophagic Flux Enhances Matrine-Induced Apoptosis in Human Hepatoma Cells

Autophagy, a self-defense mechanism, has been found to be associated with drug resistance in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Our study was designed to investigate the role and related mechanisms of autophagy in matrine-induced apoptosis in hepatoma cells of HepG2 and Bel7402. Cell apoptosis was detected by flow cytometry analysis (Annexin V–FITC/PI double-staining assay), the activity and activating cleavages of caspase-3, -8, and -9. MTT assay and colony forming assay were used to assess the effect of matrine on growth and proliferation of HCC cells. Autophagic flux in HCC cells was analyzed using the expression of LC3BI/II and p62/SQSTM1, GFP-LC3 transfection, and transmission electron microscopy. Moreover, regarding to the associated mechanisms, the effects of matrine on the phosphoinositide 3-kinase/AKT/mTOR pathway and beclin-1 were studied. Our results showed that: (1) both autophagy and apoptosis could be induced by treatment with matrine; (2) using the autophagic inhibitor chloroquine and beclin-1 small-interfering RNA, cell apoptosis induced by matrine could be enhanced in a caspase-dependent manner; and (3) autophagy was induced via inhibition of PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway and up-regulation of beclin-1. In conclusion, inhibition of autophagy could enhance matrine-induced apoptosis in human hepatoma cells.
Extracting terms and their relations from German texts: NLP tools for the preparation of raw material for specialized e-dictionaries

We report on ongoing experiments in data extraction from German texts in the domain of do-it-yourself (DIY) instructions, where the objective is (i) to extract nominal term candidates with high quality; (ii) to extract predicate-argument structures involving the term candidates, and (iii) to relate German word formation products with syntactic paraphrases: we focus on the analysis of compounds and on relating them with their syntactic paraphrases, in order to provide evidence for the (semantic) relationship between compound heads and non-heads (Holzbohrer (wood drill) HolzObject bohren ([to] drill wood)). The extracted material is collected in order to provide structured data input for the creation of specialized dictionaries that are richer than standard terminological glossaries. For the creation of taxonomic knowledge (Bandsage -is-a -> Sage (bandsaw -> saw)), we analyze subtypes of compounds.
The average cerebral perfusion in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) using MRI

Flow and structural related studies of the vasculature of the head and neck have indicated that venous outflow may be obstructed in MS patients, with postulation that this leads to the development or exacerbation of the disease. The current work presented in the following is to determine if there is correlation between abnormal internal jugular vein (IJV) flow and average cerebral blood flow in MS patients. 140 MS patients, 117 of known MS type, and 26 healthy controls were imaged by 3-T MRI. 3D contrast-enhanced MR angiography was assessed for structural abnormalities of the IJV, and the MS group was subdivided into two groups; those with stenosis and those without. Velocity encoded phase contrast MR data was processed to quantify flow through major arteries and veins of the neck. The average cerebral blood flow (CBF) was calculated by normalizing the total arterial blood flow to the brain, taken by adding the flow of the internal carotid arteries and vertebral arteries at the C2 vertebral level, by the total brain volume quantified from 3D FLAIR data. The average CBF as a function of total IJV flow at the C6 vertebral level was presented. The MS patients without stenosis show a linear trend in average CBF vs total IJV flow, indicating a potential relationship between arterial flow to the brain and effective drainage in the supine position through the IJV. Future research may indicate potential flow related biomarkers which further separate healthy controls and MS patients.
A frequency up-conversion and two-step channel selection embedded CMOS D/A interface

A multi-functional D/A interface for a novel two-step-up wireless transmitter architecture is described. A current-mode analog-double-quadrature sampling (A-DQS) technique is proposed in a two-channel 10-bit 120-MSample/s current steering D/A converter (DAC) to realize not only D/A conversion, but also baseband-to-IF image-reject upconversion, and IF channel selection for simplifying the radio front-end channel selection complexity. Realized with 0.35-/spl mu/m CMOS in Cadence/spl trade/, the active die area is 2.55 mm/sup 2/. The integral (INL) and differential (DNL) nonlinearities are better than /spl plusmn/0.42 LSB and /spl plusmn/0.38 LSB, respectively. The spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) is >56 dB. The power dissipation is 163 mW from 2.5-V analog/1.8-V digital supplies.
Context as a drug: some consequences of placebo research for primary care

Abstract Objective: On the basis of emerging research evidence, this review aims to discuss the importance of the context surrounding the doctor–patient encounter for the success of treatment. Design and setting: Discussion paper based on placebo–nocebo and pain studies conducted in the western world. Main outcome measures: Literature-based theory about impact of communication elements on seriousness of symptoms in clinical practice. Results: The therapeutic outcome seems to be impacted by rituals around a clinical encounter and by the doctor patient communication and relation. A warm, friendly and empathic attitude is crucial in the first contact with the practice and during the consultation as it influences the patient’s perceived outcome. It is important to raise positive expectations when discussing the prognosis, conducting treatment and prescribing medications as the effect may be reduced if the physician expresses doubt about the effectiveness of the medication. Additionally, overly focus on side effects in the doctor–patient conversation about proposed treatments seems to influence the magnitude of perceived side effects in the patient. Thus, shared decision-making might be a desirable tool for ensuring better expectations in the patient and successful symptom relief. Conclusions: The context of the doctor–patient interplay matters. Placebo–nocebo research provides strong evidence for this link. The therapeutic context induces biomedical processes in the patient’s brain that may enhance or reduce the effects of chosen interventions. The context thus works as a drug, with real effects and side effects. KEY POINTS Increased awareness of the context drug may help GPs alleviate symptoms and better motivate patients for treatment. Treatment is affected by multiple types of context, as also confirmed by placebo–nocebo research. The therapeutic context influences the biomedical processes, which may enhance or reduce intervention effects on symptoms. The impact of context should be considered in daily general practice as it may serve as a drug, with real effects and side effects.
Delay-Dependent Robust Stability and Stabilization of Neutral Systems

Complete results for the delay-dependent robust stability and feedback stabilization of linear neutral systems with unknown-but-bounded uncertainties are developed. New linear matrix inequalities-based delay-dependent stability criteria are derived in a systematic way using a new expanded state-space representation and a new Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional. The results are established without relying on overbounding. Solution to delay-dependent statefeedback stabilization and H∞ synthesis are then obtained. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the theory.
Parameter sensitivity in the probabilistic model for ad-hoc retrieval

The term frequency normalisation parameter sensitivity is an important issue in the probabilistic model for Information Retrieval. A high parameter sensitivity indicates that a slight change of the parameter value may considerably affect the retrieval performance. Therefore, a weighting model with a high parameter sensitivity is not robust enough to provide a consistent retrieval performance across different collections and queries. In this paper, we suggest that the parameter sensitivity is due to the fact that the query term weights are not adequate enough to allow informative query terms to differ from non-informative ones. We show that query term reweighing, which is part of the relevance feedback process, can be successfully used to reduce the parameter sensitivity. Experiments on five Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) collections show that the parameter sensitivity does remarkably decrease when query terms are reweighed.
Teachers' Senses of Obligation to Curricular Messages.

Whether they are acknowledged or not, resources such as textbooks, curriculum guides, assessments, and professional development programs present messages about what is most important for students to learn and how students can best learn this. At times teachers feel obligated to enact these messages, but at other times they feel free to ignore these messages. When do teachers feel obligated to follow messages that they interpret from resources and when do they feel that they can ignore these messages? Through survey, observation, and interview this qualitative study explored this question. The messages that five experienced, elementary certified, middle school mathematics teachers interpreted and the ways in which these messages related to their beliefs and practices were studied. When the teachers were in agreement with their interpretations of the messages, they usually followed through with these messages in their practices. Surprisingly, when the teachers disagreed with the messages, their practices were still sometimes reflective of these messages. It seemed that this was because the teachers felt obligated to enact these messages. This sense of obligation was most apparent when there were clear and consistent messages both within and across resources. Teachers felt that they could use their discretion and ignore vague, inconsistent, and controversial messages.
Extracting Product Features from Reviews Using Feature Ontology Tree Applied on LDA Topic Clusters

Online product reviews provide data about the users perspective on the features that were experienced by them. Product features and corresponding opinions form a major part in analyzing the online product reviews. Extracting features from a huge number of reviews is categorized into three main categories such as utilizing language rules, sequence labeling and the topic modeling. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is one such topic model which clusters the document words into unsupervised learned topics using Dirichlet priors. The words so clustered are the features and opinion words in the product reviews domain. These clusters contain words which are non features of the product. To identify appropriate product features from these clusters a hierarchical, domain independent Feature Ontology Tree (FOT) is applied to LDA clusters. This improves the accuracy of the features using extracted LDA topic clusters.
Design and Evaluation of Multimodal System for the Non-visual Exploration of Digital Pictures

This paper reports on the design and the evaluation of an audio-haptic tool that enables blind computer users to explore digital pictures using the hearing and feeling modalities. The tool is divided in two entities: a description tool and an exploration tool. The description tool allows moderators (sighted persons) to describe a scene. Firstly, the scene is manually segmented into a set of objects (car, tree, house, etc.). For each object, the moderator can define a behavior, which corresponds either to an auditory rendering (i.e., using speech or non-speech sounds) and/or to a kinesthetic one. The blind person uses the exploration tool in order to obtain an audio-haptic rendering of the segmented image, as previously defined by the moderator. This interactive exploration is obtained by means of a planar force feedback device. The system was experimented by a group of ten blind participants. Results revealed that the audio encoding of visual objects combined with an active kinesthetic exploration enables blind people to obtain a fairly good mental image of the explored scene.
Automatic Generation of a Grounding Framework for Information Extraction

The research described in this paper presents an approach to automatically generating a framework, called the Grounding Framework, which is applicable to any existing domain ontology and positions that ontology to be used as a model for information extraction. This approach allows a domain ontology to accurately reflect the domain while not compromising its structure and style in efforts to prepare it for use in information extraction. It also promotes the reuse and extension of existing ontologies for the purpose of information extraction without costly manual intervention. The research in this paper builds on existing research we have conducted for our Ontology Generation and Evolution Processor (OGEP) and Lexicalizing an Ontology.
Stimulus-Evoked Calcium Transients in Somatosensory Cortex Are Temporarily Inhibited by a Nearby Microhemorrhage

Although microhemorrhages are common in the brain of the elderly, the direct impact of these lesions on neural function remains unclear. In this work, we used femtosecond laser irradiation to rupture the wall of single arterioles in the brain of anesthetized rodents, producing a hematoma of ∼100-µm diameter. Our objective was to study the impact of these microhemorrhages on cortical activity using cell-resolved two-photon imaging of bulk-loaded calcium-sensitive dye. We monitored peripheral sensory stimulus-induced calcium transients from individual neuronal cell bodies, regions of neuropil, and astrocytes at different distances from the microhemorrhage before and 0.5, 2, and 4 hours after the creation of the lesion. We found that immediately after the hemorrhage the average amplitude of the stimulus-induced calcium response was reduced to about half within 150 µm from the hematoma. Beyond 300 µm, there was little effect on cell response, with a smooth increase in response amplitude from 150 µm to 300 µm from the lesion. Cortical function gradually improved with time and by four hours after the lesion the response from neurons and astrocytes had recovered to baseline everywhere but within 150 µm from the hematoma. To assess whether the cells closest to the microhemorrhage recovered over a longer timeframe, we developed a re-openable chronic cranial window preparation that allowed reinjection of calcium-sensitive fluorescent dye. We found that the response largely recovered by one day after the microhemorrhage even within 150 µm from the hematoma. This work suggests that neuronal and astrocyte function is transiently lost near a microhemorrhage, but recovers within one day after the lesion.
Tuning and Topography in an Odor Map on the Rat Olfactory Bulb

The sense of smell originates in a diverse array of receptor neurons, comprising up to 1000 different types. To understand how these parallel channels encode chemical stimuli, we recorded the responses of glomeruli in the olfactory bulbs of the anesthetized rat, by optical imaging of intrinsic signals. Odor stimulation produced two kinds of optical responses at the surface of the bulb: a broad diffuse component superposed by discrete small spots. Histology showed that the spots correspond to individual glomeruli, and that ∼400 of them can be monitored in this way. Based on its wavelength-dependence, this optical signal appears to derive from changes in light scattering during neural activity. Pure odorants generally activated several glomeruli in a bilaterally symmetric pattern, whose extent varied greatly with concentration. A simple formalism for ligand binding accounts quantitatively for this concentration dependence and yields the effective affinity with which a glomerulus responds to an odorant. When tested with aliphatic molecules of increasing carbon chain length, many glomeruli were sharply tuned for one or two adjacent chain lengths. Glomeruli with similar tuning properties were located near each other, producing a systematic map of molecular chain length on the surface of the olfactory bulb. Given local inhibitory circuits within the olfactory bulb, this can account for the observed functional inhibition between related odors. We explore several parallels to the function and architecture of the visual system that help interpret the neural representation of odors.
Real-Color Image Denoised and Enhanced Synchronously Based on Wavelet Transform

Real color images are images with noise. The application of gray-scale image enhancement methods in the three-channel of images (R,G,B), on the one hand, increased noise, on the other hand, tended to have a color deviation, which impacted the effect of enhancement. Therefore in view of the difference of human visual system sensitivity of the hue, saturation, luminance and image noise affecting differently on the hue, saturation, and luminance, it proposed a method of image denoised and enhanced in HSV space. In this paper, according to the result of influence of V and S by noise, we transform a real color image from RGB space to HSV space at first, then maintain hue channel unchanged, decompose v channel into high frequency and low frequency information using wavelet transform. And then it directly compresses dynamic range of the j-scale low frequency information based on a new Illumination—Reflectance Model, uses Byes-estimation threshold to denoise in all scale high frequency information. Saturation channel is denoised by some formula from the relationship of S, V and R, G, B. At last, it transforms into a real color images from HSV space to RGB space. Experiments show that image has a good dynamic compression range and slight color deviation, which improve the visual effects and the true effects of color.
Debt Revolvers for Self Control

By 1998, about two-thirds of U.S. households held a bank-type credit card. Despite high interest rates, most revolve credit card debt. The majority of debt revolvers have substantial liquid assets, apparently violating arbitrage. We propose an "accountant-shopper" model that could provide an explanation for this puzzle. In our model, the "accountant self" (or spouse) of the household can control the expenditures of the "shopper self" (or spouse) by limiting the purchases the shopper can make before encountering the credit limit. Since the card balance is used for control purposes, the accountant self may also find it optimal to save in lower-return riskless assets. Using attitudinal responses and demographic data from the pooled 1995 and 1998 Surveys of Consumer Finances, we estimate a bivariate probit model of the decisions to have a credit card and to revolve debt on it, allowing for sample selection. The pattern of estimated coefficients is consistent with debt revolvers being motivated primarily by self-control considerations rather than intertemporal consumption smoothing.
Learning and Inference via Maximum Inner Product Search

A large class of commonly used probabilistic models known as log-linear models are defined up to a normalization constant. Typical learning algorithms for such models require solving a sequence of probabilistic inference queries. These inferences are typically intractable, and are a major bottleneck for learning models with large output spaces. In this paper, we provide a new approach for amortizing the cost of a sequence of related inference queries, such as the ones arising during learning. Our technique relies on a surprising connection with algorithms developed in the past two decades for similarity search in large data bases. Our approach achieves improved running times with provable approximation guarantees. We show that it performs well both on synthetic data and neural language models with large output spaces.