Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Affect-based information retrieval

One of the main challenges Information Retrieval (IR) systems face nowadays originates from the semantic gap problem: the semantic difference between a user’s query representation and the internal representation of an information item in a collection. The gap is further widened when the user is driven by an ill-defined information need, often the result of an anomaly in his/her current state of knowledge. The formulated search queries, which are submitted to the retrieval systems to locate relevant items, produce poor results that do not address the users’ information needs. To deal with information need uncertainty IR systems have employed in the past a range of feedback techniques, which vary from explicit to implicit. The first category of feedback techniques necessitates the communication of explicit relevance judgments, in return for better query reformulations and recommendations of relevant results. However, the latter happens at the expense of users’ cognitive resources and, furthermore, introduces an additional layer of complexity to the search process. On the other hand, implicit feedback techniques make inferences on what is relevant based on observations of user search behaviour. By doing so, they disengage users from the cognitive burden of document rating and relevance assessments. However, both categories of RF techniques determine topical relevance with respect to the cognitive and situational levels of interaction, failing to acknowledge the importance of emotions in cognition and decision making. In this thesis I investigate the role of emotions in the information seeking process and develop affective feedback techniques for interactive IR. This novel feedback framework aims to aid the search process and facilitate a more natural and meaningful interaction. I develop affective models that determine topical relevance based on information gathered from various sensory channels, and enhance their performance using personalisation techniques. Furthermore, I present an operational video retrieval system that employs affective feedback to enrich user profiles and offers meaningful recommendations of unseen videos. The use of affective feedback as a surrogate for the information need is formalised as the Affective Model of Browsing. This is a cognitive model that motivates the use of evidence extracted from the psycho-somatic mobilisation that occurs during cognitive appraisal. Finally, I address some of the ethical and privacy issues that arise from the social-emotional interaction between users and computer systems. This study involves questionnaire data gathered over three user studies, from 74 participants of different educational background, ethnicity and search experience. The results show that affective feedback is a promising area of research and it can improve many aspects of the information seeking process, such as indexing, ranking and recommendation. Eventually, it may be that relevance inferences obtained from affective models will provide a more robust and personalised form of feedback, which will allow us to deal more effectively with issues such as the semantic gap.
Economic evaluation of aclidinium bromide in the management of moderate to severe COPD: an analysis over 5 years

Purpose Aclidinium bromide is a long-acting muscarinic antagonistic used in maintenance treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). A model-based health economic study evaluated the cost-effectiveness of aclidinium 400 μg bid as an alternative to tiotropium 18 μg od for this indication in the US. Patients and methods Patient characteristics in this model reflect those in the aclidinium clinical studies: age >40 years, stable moderate-to-severe COPD, current or ex-smokers (>10 pack-years), post-salbutamol forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) ≥30% and <80% of predicted normal value, and FEV1/forced vital capacity <70%. The model consists of five main health states indicating severity of COPD and the level of utility, resource use, and costs. Treatment efficacy over 5 years was modeled using FEV1% predicted; a network meta-analysis comparing aclidinium and tiotropium was used to estimate disease progression during the first 24 weeks, and results from the UPLIFT trial were used for time points after 24 weeks. Quality of life was assessed using utility scores in US patients from the UPLIFT trial. Cost-effectiveness was assessed as the incremental cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gained. Results Over 5 years, QALYs were 3.50 for aclidinium versus 3.49 for tiotropium; life years accumulated were 4.52 for both. In this economic model, aclidinium versus tiotropium showed marginally fewer exacerbations (3.364 versus 3.390, respectively) and mean total health care costs (US$126,274 versus US$128,591, respectively). In all scenario analyses performed (discount factors of 0% and 6% for benefits and costs; time horizon of 1 year; mapping St George’s Respiratory Questionnaire to European Quality of Life–5 Dimensions; excluding pharmacy costs, COPD-related cost only; cost of exacerbations; including ACCORD II trial in the network meta-analysis), aclidinium was associated with lower costs and marginally greater QALYs versus tiotropium. Conclusion Aclidinium is potentially cost-effective compared with tiotropium for maintenance treatment of moderate-to-severe COPD.
Epidermal Langerhans Cells Maturing the Formation of Dendritic Processes in The Actin-Bundling Protein Fascin Is Involved in

Angelika B. Reske-KunzRalf Ross, Xiao-Lan Ross, Jens Schwing, Tina Langin andhttp://www.jimmunol.org/content/160/8/3776J Immunol€1998; 160:3776-3782; ;Referenceshttp://www.jimmunol.org/content/160/8/3776.full#ref-list-1This article cites 38 articles, 16 of which you can access for free at: Subscriptionshttp://jimmunol.org/subscriptionsInformation about subscribing to The Journal of Immunology is online at: Permissionshttp://www.aai. org/ji/copyright.htmlSubmit copyright permission requests at: Email Alertshttp://jimmunol.org/cgi/alerts/etocReceive free email-alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up at:
Segmentation of range and intensity image sequences by clustering

Presents a method for segmenting temporal sequences of range and intensity images. The paper addresses two problems: fusion of intensity and range data for image segmentation, and visual tracking of segments over time. Our method is based on clustering in a 4D feature space which contains intensity and geometric features. The problem of tracking segments over time is solved by adaptive image sequence clustering. The main idea is to use the cluster centers of the previous image to initialize clustering for the current image. This link between consecutive clustering steps allows one to track clusters over time without explicit correspondence analysis. First experiments show that our method can successfully segment and track objects independent of their shapes and motions.
Block‐adaptive quantum mechanics: An adaptive divide‐and‐conquer approach to interactive quantum chemistry

We present a novel Block‐Adaptive Quantum Mechanics (BAQM) approach to interactive quantum chemistry. Although quantum chemistry models are known to be computationally demanding, we achieve interactive rates by focusing computational resources on the most active parts of the system. BAQM is based on a divide‐and‐conquer technique and constrains some nucleus positions and some electronic degrees of freedom on the fly to simplify the simulation. As a result, each time step may be performed significantly faster, which in turn may accelerate attraction to the neighboring local minima. By applying our approach to the nonself‐consistent Atom Superposition and Electron Delocalization Molecular Orbital theory, we demonstrate interactive rates and efficient virtual prototyping for systems containing more than a thousand of atoms on a standard desktop computer. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Wavefunction methods for noncovalent interactions

Noncovalent interactions remain poorly understood despite their importance to supramolecular chemistry, biochemistry, and materials science. They are an ideal target for theoretical study, where interactions of interest can be probed directly, free from competing secondary interactions. However, the most popular tools of computational chemistry are not particularly reliable for noncovalent interactions. Here we review recent works in wavefunction‐based quantum chemistry techniques aimed at greater accuracy and faster computations for these systems. We describe recent developments in high‐accuracy benchmarks, a variety of recent wavefunction methods with promise for noncovalent interactions, various approximations to speed up these methods, and recent advances in wavefunction‐based symmetry‐adapted perturbation theory, which provides not only interaction energies but also their decomposition into physically meaningful components. Together, these advances are currently extending robust, accurate computations of noncovalent interactions from systems with around one dozen heavy atoms up to systems with several dozens of heavy atoms. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
CONFIDENCE METRICS FOR ASSOCIATION RULE MINING

We propose a simple, novel, and yet effective confidence metric for measuring the interestingness of association rules. Distinguishing from existing confidence measures, our metrics really indicate the positively companionate correlations between frequent itemsets. Furthermore, some desired properties are derived for examining the goodness of confidence measures in terms of probabilistic significance. We systematically analyze our metrics and traditional ones, and demonstrate that our new algorithm significantly captures the mainstream properties. Our approach will be useful to many association analysis tasks where one must provide actionable association rules and assist users to make quality decisions.
Gender differences in Wikipedia editing

As Wikipedia has become an indispensable source of online information, concerns about who writes, edits, and maintains it have come to the forefront. In particular, the 2010 UNU-MERIT survey found evidence of a significant gender skew: fewer than 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women. However, the number of contributors is just one way to examine gender differences in contribution. In this paper we take a more fine-grained perspective by examining how much and what types of Wiki-work men and women tend to do. First, we find that the so-called "Gender Gap" in number of editors may not be as wide as prior studies have suggested. Second, although more than 80% of editors in our sample were men, among the bottom 75% of editors by activity-level, we find that men and women made similar numbers of revisions. However, among the most active Wikipedians men tended to make many more revisions than women. Finally, we find that the most active women in our sample tended to make larger revisions than the most active men. We conclude by discussing directions for future research.
Globally Convergent Parallel MAP LP Relaxation Solver using the Frank-Wolfe Algorithm

Estimating the most likely configuration (MAP) is one of the fundamental tasks in probabilistic models. While MAP inference is typically intractable for many real-world applications, linear programming relaxations have been proven very effective. Dual block-coordinate descent methods are among the most efficient solvers, however, they are prone to get stuck in sub-optimal points. Although subgradient approaches achieve global convergence, they are typically slower in practice. To improve convergence speed, algorithms which compute the steepest e-descent direction by solving a quadratic program have been proposed. In this paper we suggest to decouple the quadratic program based on the Frank-Wolfe approach. This allows us to obtain an efficient and easy to parallelize algorithm while retaining the global convergence properties. Our method proves superior when compared to existing algorithms on a set of spin-glass models and protein design tasks.
The cooperative effects of TNF‐α and IFN‐γ are determining factors in the ability of IL‐10 to protect mice from lethal endotoxemia

Recent studies have demonstrated that interleukin‐10 (IL‐10) has the capacity to protect mice from the lethal effects of endotoxin. In this investigation, we have examined the ability of IL‐10 to protect both normal mice and Corynebacterium parvum‐primed mice against endotoxin lethality. In the overwhelming majority of experiments, recombinant murine IL‐10 (rMuIL‐10) and recombinant human IL‐10 (rHuIL‐10) did not protect normal BALB/cJ mice from lipopolysaccharide (LPS)‐induced lethality at doses up to 10 μg/mouse. Despite their inability to protect, both IL‐10 preparations were highly effective in preventing the increase in serum tumor necrosis factor α (TNF‐α) that occurred in response to the lethal dose of LPS. Moreover, a neutralizing antibody against TNF‐α gave only partial protection when administered alone to BALB/cJ mice. Treatment with a combination of neutralizing antibodies against TNF‐α and interferon‐7 (IFN‐γ) resulted in complete protection. In contrast to BALB/cJ mice, normal BDF1 mice were protected from lethal endotoxemia by treatment with both rMuIL‐10 and rHuIL‐10. However, IL‐10 did not protect C. parvum‐primed BDF1 against LPS lethality even though it caused a reduction in the LPS‐induced serum TNF‐α response in C. parvum‐primed mice as well as in normal BDF1 mice. Neutralizing antibodies against TNF‐α and IFN‐γ were protective when administered alone to normal BDF1 mice, as previously demonstrated in C. parvum‐primed mice. These findings suggest that lethal endotoxemia is a result of the cooperative activities of TNF‐α and IFN‐γ in normal mice of the BALB/cJ and BDF1 strains as well as in C. parvum‐primed BDF1 mice. IL‐10 appears to be less effective in protecting mice from lethal endotoxemia when cooperation between IFN‐γ and TNF‐α is facilitated by high‐level production of the cytokines as in C. parvum–primed mice or when there is evidence of strong synergy between them as in normal BALB/cJ mice. J. Leukoc. Biol. 55: 711–718; 1994.
Diagnosing the dangerous demography of manta rays using life history theory

Background. The directed harvest and global trade in the gill plates of mantas, and devil rays, has led to increased fishing pressure and steep population declines in some locations. The slow life history, particularly of the manta rays, is cited as a key reason why such species have little capacity to withstand directed fisheries. Here, we place their life history and demography within the context of other sharks and rays. Methods. Despite the limited availability of data, we use life history theory and comparative analysis to estimate the intrinsic risk of extinction (as indexed by the maximum intrinsic rate of population increase rmax) for a typical generic manta ray using a variant of the classic Euler–Lotka demographic model. This model requires only three traits to calculate the maximum intrinsic population growth rate rmax: von Bertalanffy growth rate, annual pup production and age at maturity. To account for the uncertainty in life history parameters, we created plausible parameter ranges and propagate these uncertainties through the model to calculate a distribution of the plausible range of rmax values. Results. The maximum population growth rate rmax of manta ray is most sensitive to the length of the reproductive cycle, and the median rmax of 0.116 year−1 95th percentile [0.089–0.139] is one of the lowest known of the 106 sharks and rays for which we have comparable demographic information. Discussion. In common with other unprotected, unmanaged, high-value large-bodied sharks and rays the combination of very low population growth rates of manta rays, combined with the high value of their gill rakers and the international nature of trade, is highly likely to lead to rapid depletion and potential local extinction unless a rapid conservation management response occurs worldwide. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to derive important insights into the demography extinction risk of data-poor species using well-established life history theory.
Non-polynomial Worst-Case Analysis of Recursive Programs

We study the problem of developing efficient approaches for proving worst-case bounds of non-deterministic recursive programs. Ranking functions are sound and complete for proving termination and worst-case bounds of non-recursive programs. First, we apply ranking functions to recursion, resulting in measure functions. We show that measure functions provide a sound and complete approach to prove worst-case bounds of non-deterministic recursive programs. Our second contribution is the synthesis of measure functions in non-polynomial forms. We show that non-polynomial measure functions with logarithm and exponentiation can be synthesized through abstraction of logarithmic or exponentiation terms, Farkas Lemma, and Handelman’s Theorem using linear programming. While previous methods obtain polynomial worst-case bounds, our approach can synthesize bounds of various forms including O(n log n) and O(nr), where r is not an integer. We present experimental results to demonstrate that our approach can efficiently obtain worst-case bounds of classical recursive algorithms such as (i) Merge sort, Heap sort, and the divide-and-conquer algorithm for the Closest Pair problem, where we obtain O(n log n) worst-case bound, and (ii) Karatsuba’s algorithm for polynomial multiplication and Strassen’s algorithm for matrix multiplication, for which we obtain O(nr) bounds such that r is not an integer and is close to the best-known bound for the respective algorithm. Besides the ability to synthesize non-polynomial bounds, we also show that our approach is equally capable of obtaining polynomial worst-case bounds for classical programs such as Quick sort and the dynamic programming algorithm for computing Fibonacci numbers.
Microwave Dielectric Properties of Scheelite Structured PbMoO4 Ceramic with Ultralow Sintering Temperature

In this work, a low-firing microwave dielectric ceramic PbMoO4 with tetragonal structure was prepared via a solid-state reaction method. The sintering temperature ranges from 570°C to 670°C. Ceramic samples with relative densities above 97% were obtained when sintering temperature was around 600°C. The best microwave dielectric properties were obtained in the ceramic sintered at 650°C for 2 h with a permittivity ~26.7, a Q × f value about 42 830 GHz (at 6.2 GHz) and a temperature coefficient value of 6.2 ppm/°C. From the X-ray diffraction, backscattered electron imaging results of the cofired sample with 30 wt% silver and aluminum additive, the PbMoO4 ceramic was found not to react with Ag and Al at 630°C. The microwave dielectric properties and low sintering temperature of PbMoO4 ceramic make it a candidate for low-temperature cofired ceramic applications.
An inverse-quantile function approach for modeling electricity price

We propose a class of alternative stochastic volatility models for electricity prices using the quantile function modeling approach. Specifically, we fit marginal distributions of power prices to two special classes of distributions by matching the quantile of an empirical distribution to that of a theoretical distribution. The distributions from the first class have closed form formulas for probability densities, probability distribution functions, and quantile functions, while the distributions from the second class may have extremely unbalanced tails. Having rich tail behaviors, both classes allow realistic modeling of the power price dynamics. The appealing features of this approach are that it can effectively model the heavy tail behavior of electricity prices caused by jumps and stochastic volatility and that the resulting distributions are easy to simulate. This latter feature enables us to perform both parameter estimation and derivative pricing tasks based on price data directly observed from real markets.
Molecular Typing of IberoAmerican Cryptococcus neoformans Isolates

A network was established to acquire basic knowledge of Cryptococcus neoformans in IberoAmerican countries. To this effect, 340 clinical, veterinary, and environmental isolates from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Spain were typed by using M13 polymerase chain reaction-fingerprinting and orotidine monophosphate pyrophosphorylase (URA5) gene restriction fragment length polymorphsm analysis with HhaI and Sau96I in a double digest. Both techniques grouped all isolates into eight previously established molecular types. The majority of the isolates, 68.2% (n=232), were VNI (var. grubii, serotype A), which accords with the fact that this variety causes most human cryptococcal infections worldwide. A smaller proportion, 5.6% (n=19), were VNII (var. grubii, serotype A); 4.1% (n=14), VNIII (AD hybrid), with 9 isolates having a polymorphism in the URA5 gene; 1.8% (n=6), VNIV (var. neoformans, serotype D); 3.5% (n=12), VGI; 6.2% (n=21), VGII; 9.1% (n=31), VGIII, and 1.5% (n=5) VGIV, with all four VG types containing var. gattii serotypes B and C isolates.
Computations with one and two real algebraic numbers

We present algorithmic and complexity results concerning computations with one and two real algebraic numbers, as well as real solving of univariate polynomials and bivariate polynomial systems with integer coefficients using Sturm-Habicht sequences. Our main results, in the univariate case, concern the problems of real root isolation (Th. 19) and simultaneous inequalities (Cor.26) and in the bivariate, the problems of system real solving (Th.42), sign evaluation (Th. 37) and simultaneous inequalities (Cor. 43).
A logic-level model for /spl alpha/-particle hits in CMOS circuits

Systems designed for reliability must be validated through simulations. However, traditional SPICE like simulators or even mixed-mode simulators are too slow for the task of simulating the effects of /spl alpha/-particle hits on relatively large circuits. Gate-level simulators offer tremendous speedup over these electrical level simulators, but they are only as good as the model which captures the /spl alpha/-particle effect at the logic level. The goal of this research is to develop a computationally efficient model which captures the behavior of the /spl alpha/-particle at the logic level. This model can then be used in a gate-level timing simulator to propagate the /spl alpha/-particle effects to the latches and the outputs of the circuit under simulation. We have developed a closed form solution to approximate the logic pulse waveform resulting from /spl alpha/-particle hits. As is presented in the paper, the model tracks the data from SPICE simulations remarkably well. <<ETX>>
HMM training based on CV-EM and CV Gaussian mixture optimization

A combination of the cross-validation EM (CV-EM) algorithm and the cross-validation (CV) Gaussian mixture optimization method is explored. CV-EM and CV Gaussian mixture optimization are our previously proposed training algorithms that use CV likelihood instead of the conventional training set likelihood for robust model estimation. Since CV-EM is a parameter optimization method and CV Gaussian mixture optimization is a structure optimization algorithm, these methods can be combined. Large vocabulary speech recognition experiments are performed on oral presentations. It is shown that both CV-EM and CV Gaussian mixture optimization give lower word error rates than the conventional EM, and their combination is effective to further reduce the word error rate.