Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic Loci Associated with Plasma Phospholipid n-3 Fatty Acids: A Meta-Analysis of Genome-Wide Association Studies from the CHARGE Consortium

Long-chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) can derive from diet or from α-linolenic acid (ALA) by elongation and desaturation. We investigated the association of common genetic variation with plasma phospholipid levels of the four major n-3 PUFAs by performing genome-wide association studies in five population-based cohorts comprising 8,866 subjects of European ancestry. Minor alleles of SNPs in FADS1 and FADS2 (desaturases) were associated with higher levels of ALA (p = 3×10−64) and lower levels of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA, p = 5×10−58) and docosapentaenoic acid (DPA, p = 4×10−154). Minor alleles of SNPs in ELOVL2 (elongase) were associated with higher EPA (p = 2×10−12) and DPA (p = 1×10−43) and lower docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, p = 1×10−15). In addition to genes in the n-3 pathway, we identified a novel association of DPA with several SNPs in GCKR (glucokinase regulator, p = 1×10−8). We observed a weaker association between ALA and EPA among carriers of the minor allele of a representative SNP in FADS2 (rs1535), suggesting a lower rate of ALA-to-EPA conversion in these subjects. In samples of African, Chinese, and Hispanic ancestry, associations of n-3 PUFAs were similar with a representative SNP in FADS1 but less consistent with a representative SNP in ELOVL2. Our findings show that common variation in n-3 metabolic pathway genes and in GCKR influences plasma phospholipid levels of n-3 PUFAs in populations of European ancestry and, for FADS1, in other ancestries.
A Decision-Theoretic Framework to Select Effective Observation Locations in Robotic Search and Rescue Scenarios

In some applications, like mapping and search and rescue, robots are autonomous when they are able to decide where to move next, according to the data collected so far. For this purpose, navigation strategies are used to drive the robots around environments. Most of the navigation strategies proposed in literature are based on the idea of evaluating a number of candidate locations according to an utility function and selecting the best one. Usually, ad hoc utility functions are used to provide a global evaluation of candidates by combinig a number of criteria. In this paper, we propose to use a more theoretically-grounded approach, based on Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), to define exploration strategies for robots employed in search and rescue applications. We implemented our MCDM-based exploration strategies within an existing robot controller and we experimentally evaluat ed their performance in environments used in the RoboCup Rescu e Virtual Robots Competition.
Social Security for the Internet

Recent times have seen several intriguing proposals to combat denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, where malicious users flood a limited resource preventing legitimate users from accessing that resource. All of these proposals reconcile themselves to the following common fate: if B bad users attack a limited resource being accessed by G good users, then good users suffer an O( B B+G ) degradation in performance. Unfortunately, a common case of B G makes this an unacceptable state of affairs. In this paper, we present SSN, a “social security network”, as a building block for a secure Internet architecture with the following properties. First, B bad users can degrade the performance of good users by at most O( B N ) where N is the total number of users in the network, and by O(1) in the common case. Second, our proposal is readily implementable with today’s technology and expects only minimal router support in the form of capabilities, a mechanism widely believed to be necessary to address DoS.
Implicitly Incorporating Morphological Information into Word Embedding

In this paper, we implicitly incorporate morpheme information into word embedding. Based on the strategy we utilize the morpheme information, three models are proposed. To test the performances of our models, we conduct the word similarity and syntactic analogy. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Our models beat the comparative baselines on both tasks to a great extent. On the golden standard Wordsim-353 and RG-65, our models approximately outperform CBOW for 5 and 7 percent, respectively. In addition, 7 percent advantage is also achieved by our models on syntactic analysis. According to parameter analysis, our models can increase the semantic information in the corpus and our performances on the smallest corpus are similar to the performance of CBOW on the corpus which is five times ours. This property of our methods may have some positive effects on NLP researches about the corpus-limited languages.
Toward compliant, fast, high-precision, and low-cost manipulator with hydraulic hybrid servo booster

We propose a novel hydraulic hybrid servo drive for robotic applications. This method embeds a small servo-controlled pump into a hydraulic metering circuit. The circuit is compactly integrated into a servo-unit, then replicated for each joint, and connected to one common low-pressure line. Thanks to the boosting effect, one can simultaneously achieve high-load and high-precision servo control performance with low-cost components. The paper describes the principle of the new circuit and two realizations: one for a slider testbed with a single-rod cylinder, the other for a three-joint manipulator prototype. The slider experiments show that the proposed circuit can not only achieve the high piston velocity, but also exclusively generate large piston force with a small positional error up to the resolution of the servo-pump. Moreover, experiments on the manipulator demonstrate that the robot can compliantly respond to external perturbations, thanks to the high backdrivability of the servo-pump.
Human Neuroscience

suggested that, based on the implicit physiological measure of skin conductance, patients with schizophrenia demonstrated abnormal aversive learning patterns, and could not reliably distinguish between neutral stimuli and stimuli linked to aversive outcomes. Accompanying these behavioral deficits, patients with schizophrenia also exhibited increased blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) activity in the ven-in response to non-reinforced stimuli. In the present fMRI study, we investigated reward learning and group differences in effective connectivity employing an appeti-tive conditioning paradigm in which visual stimuli were associated with rewards and, as a consequence, became imbued with motiva-tional salience. Galvanic skin recordings (GSR) were acquired as
Random sampling LDA for face recognition

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a popular feature extraction technique for face recognition. However, It often suffers from the small sample size problem when dealing with the high dimensional face data. Fisherface and null space LDA (N-LDA) are two conventional approaches to address this problem. But in many cases, these LDA classifiers are overfitted to the training set and discard some useful discriminative information. In this paper, by analyzing different overfitting problems for the two kinds of LDA classifiers, we propose an approach using random subspace and bagging to improve them respectively. By random sampling on feature vector and training samples, multiple stabilized Fisherface and N-LDA classifiers are constructed. The two kinds of complementary classifiers are integrated using a fusion rule, so nearly all the discriminative information is preserved. We also apply this approach to the integration of multiple features. A robust face recognition system integrating shape, texture and Gabor responses is finally developed.
Collaborative Review in Writing Analytics: N-Gram Analysis of Instructor and Student Comments

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of n-gram analysis to analyze instructor and student comments elicited within My Reviewers, a web-based learning environment. Shown to be informative in a wide variety of applications, n-gram analysis is of interest in determining concept proliferation in topics, purposes, terminologies, and rubrics used in writing courses. As the present study demonstrates, unigram, bigram, digram, trigram, fourgram, and fivegram analytic methods reveal important information about instructor and student use of concepts; in turn, such analysis holds the potential to lead to precise and actionable revision behaviors.
General Solution to Standard H&#8734;Control Problems for a Class of Infinite-dimensional Systems

This paper considers H∞-control of infinite-dimensional systems whose transfer functions are expressible as the cascade connection of a rational transfer matrix and a scalar (possibly irrational) inner function. This class of systems is very suitable for describing many control problems in practice, when weighting functions are rational and plants have at most finitely many unstable modes. We show that this problem can be reduced to two (matrix-valued) Riccati equations and additional rank conditions. Furthermore, the obtained controller structure is completely characterized by the inner function and controllers for the finite-dimensional part. A numerical example is given to illustrate the result.
iGuard: A real-time anti-theft system for smartphones

Smartphone theft is a non-negligible problem that causes serious concerns on personal property, privacy, and public security. The existing solutions to this problem either provide only functions like retrieving a phone, or require dedicated hardware to detect thefts. How to protect smartphones from being stolen at all times is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose iGuard, a real-time anti-theft system for smartphones. iGuard utilizes only the inertial sensing data from the smartphone. The basic idea behind iGuard is to distinguish different people holding a smartphone, by identifying the order of the motions during the ‘take-out’ behavior and how each motion is performed. For this purpose, we design a motion segmentation algorithm to detect the transition between two motions from the noisy sensing data. We then leverage the distinct feature contained in each sub-segment of a motion, instead of the entire motion, to estimate the probability that the motion is performed by the smartphone owner himself/herself. Based on such pre-processed data, we propose a Markov Chain based model to track the behavior of a smartphone user. According to this model, iGuard instantly alarms once the tracked data deviate from the smartphone owner's usual habit. We implement iGuard on Android and evaluate its performance in real environments. The experimental results show that iGuard is accurate and robust in various scenarios.
Induction of Renal Cytochrome P450 Arachidonic Acid Epoxygenase Activity by Dietary γ-Linolenic Acid

Dietary γ-linolenic acid (GLA), a ω-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid found in borage oil (BOR), lowers systolic blood pressure in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHRs). GLA is converted into arachidonic acid (AA) by elongation and desaturation steps. Epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs) and 20-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid (20-HETE) are cytochrome P450 (P450)-derived AA eicosanoids with important roles in regulating blood pressure. This study tested the hypothesis that the blood pressure-lowering effect of a GLA-enriched diet involves alteration of P450-catalyzed AA metabolism. Microsomes and RNA were isolated from the renal cortex of male SHRs fed a basal fat-free diet for 5 weeks to which 11% by weight of sesame oil (SES) or BOR was added. There was a 2.6- to 3.5-fold increase in P450 epoxygenase activity in renal microsomes isolated from the BOR-fed SHRs compared with the SES-fed rats. Epoxygenase activity accounted for 58% of the total AA metabolism in the BOR-treated kidney microsomes compared with 33% in the SES-treated rats. More importantly, renal 14,15- and 8,9-EET levels increased 1.6- to 2.5-fold after dietary BOR treatment. The increase in EET formation is consistent with increases in CYP2C23, CYP2C11, and CYP2J protein levels. There were no differences in the level of renal P450 epoxygenase mRNA between the SES- and BOR-treated rats. Enhanced synthesis of the vasodilatory EETs and decreased formation of the vasoconstrictive 20-HETE suggests that changes in P450-mediated AA metabolism may contribute, at least in part, to the blood pressure-lowering effect of a BOR-enriched diet.
TimedTextRank: adding the temporal dimension to multi-document summarization

Graph-ranking based algorithms (e.g. TextRank) have been proposed for multi-document summarization in recent years. However, these algorithms miss an important dimension, the temporal dimension, for summarizing evolving topics. For an evolving topic, recent documents are usually more important than earlier documents because recent documents contain much more novel information than earlier documents and a novelty-oriented summary should be more appropriate to reflect the changing topic. We propose the TimedTextRank algorithm to make use of the temporal information of documents based on the graph-ranking based algorithm. A preliminary study is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TimedTextRank algorithm for dynamic multi-document summarization.
System-level hardware-based protection of memories against soft-errors

We present a hardware-based approach to improve the resilience of a computer system against the errors occurred in the main memory with the help of error detecting and correcting (EDAC) codes. Checksums are placed in the same type of memory locations and addressed in the same way as normal data. Consequently, the checksums are accessible from the exterior of the main memory just as normal data and this enables implicit fault-tolerance for interconnection and solid-state secondary storage sub-systems. A small hardware module is used to manage the sequential retrieval of checksums each time the integrity of the data accessed by the processor sub-system needs to be verified. The proposed approach has the following properties: (a) it is cost efficient since it can be used with simple storage and interconnection sub-systems that do not possess any inherent EDAC mechanism, (b) it allows on-line modifications of the memory protection levels, and (c) no modification of the application software is required.
SuperCut: Superpixel Based Foreground Extraction With Loose Bounding Boxes in One Cutting

Interactive image segmentation that uses a bounding box containing the foreground has gained great popularity because of its convenience. However, its performance is often degraded when the bounding box is not tight enough or covers large background regions. To solve this problem, this letter proposes a novel segmentation algorithm called “SuperCut”. This algorithm provides robust segmentation in one cut even with loose bounding boxes. In the proposed SuperCut, superpixels of the whole image are first computed, and then a background similarity map for the superpixels inside the bounding box is created based on Haar-Wavelet feature and pixel intensities. Finally, a max-flow cut is made based on the map. The background similarity map reduces the influence from possible background regions inside the bounding box, which leads to the efficient segmentation of SuperCut. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed SuperCut, we compared it with some recent published interactive image segmentation techniques. The experimental results show that the proposed SuperCut outperforms other compared methods especially when using loose bounding boxes.
Genotype-environment correlations and interactions in the etiology of substance abuse and related behaviors.

Although the relevant behavioral genetic literature on substance abuse is limited, findings from this research, as well as from other behavioral genetic studies, strongly suggest that genetic factors exert some influence on substance abuse behavior. Consequently, although there is a need to carefully document the existence and strength of genetic influences, behavioral genetic research in this area needs to address how, rather than just whether, genetic factors influence substance abuse behavior.
Comparison and combination of RASTA-PLP and FF features in a hybrid HMM/MLP speech recognition system

Recently, the advantages of the spectral parameters obtained by frequency filtering (FF) of the logarithmic filter bank energies (logFBEs) have been reported. These parameters, which are frequency derivatives of the logFBEs, lie in the frequency domain, and have shown good recognition performance with respect to the conventional mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) for HMM systems. In this paper, the FF features are compared with the MFCCs and the Rasta-PLP features in the framework of a hybrid HMM/MLP recognition system, for both clean and noisy speech. Taking advantage of the ability of the hybrid system to deal with correlated features, the inclusion of the second derivatives and the FBEs as additional features is proposed. Furthermore, in order to enhance the robustness of these features in noisy conditions, they are combined with the Rasta temporal filtering approach. Finally, a study of the FF in the framework of multistream processing is presented. From the experimental tests, it appears that the new spectral parameters and the tested combinations yield an enhanced recognition performance.
DRD2/CHRNA5 Interaction on Prefrontal Biology and Physiology during Working Memory

Background Prefrontal behavior and activity in humans are heritable. Studies in animals demonstrate an interaction between dopamine D2 receptors and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on prefrontal behavior but evidence in humans is weak. Therefore, we hypothesize that genetic variation regulating dopamine D2 and nicotinic acetylcholine receptor signaling impact prefrontal cortex activity and related cognition. To test this hypothesis in humans, we explored the interaction between functional genetic variants in the D2 receptor gene (DRD2, rs1076560) and in the nicotinic receptor α5 gene (CHRNA5, rs16969968) on both dorsolateral prefrontal cortex mediated behavior and physiology during working memory and on prefrontal gray matter volume. Methods A large sample of healthy subjects was compared for genotypic differences for DRD2 rs1076560 (G>T) and CHNRA5 rs16969968 (G>A) on prefrontal phenotypes, including cognitive performance at the N-Back task, prefrontal physiology with BOLD fMRI during performance of the 2-Back working memory task, and prefrontal morphometry with structural MRI. Results We found that DRD2 rs1076560 and CHNRA5 rs16969968 interact to modulate cognitive function, prefrontal physiology during working memory, and prefrontal gray matter volume. More specifically, CHRNA5-AA/DRD2-GT subjects had greater behavioral performance, more efficient prefrontal cortex activity at 2Back working memory task, and greater prefrontal gray matter volume than the other genotype groups. Conclusions The present data extend previous studies in animals and enhance our understanding of dopamine and acetylcholine signaling in the human prefrontal cortex, demonstrating interactions elicited by working memory that are modulated by genetic variants in DRD2 and CHRNA5.
A Tryptophan 6‐Halogenase and an Amidotransferase Are Involved in Thienodolin Biosynthesis

The biosynthetic gene cluster for the plant growth‐regulating compound thienodolin was identified in and cloned from the producer organism Streptomyces albogriseolus MJ286‐76F7. Sequence analysis of a 27 kb DNA region revealed the presence of 21 ORFs, 14 of which are involved in thienodolin biosynthesis. Three insertional inactivation mutants were generated in the sequenced region to analyze their involvement in thienodolin biosynthesis and to functionally characterize specific genes. The gene inactivation experiments together with enzyme assays with enzymes obtained by heterologous expression and feeding studies showed that the first step in thienodolin biosynthesis is catalyzed by a tryptophan 6‐halogenase and that the last step is the formation of a carboxylic amide group catalyzed by an amidotransferase. The results led to a hypothetical model for thienodolin biosynthesis.
A tight Karp-Lipton collapse result in bounded arithmetic

Cook and Krajíček have recently obtained the following Karp-Lipton collapse result in bounded arithmetic: if the theory PV proves NP⊆ P/poly, then the polynomial hierarchy collapses to the Boolean hierarchy, and this collapse is provable in PV. Here we show the converse implication, thus answering an open question posed by Cook and Krajíček. We obtain this result by formalizing in PV a hard/easy argument of Buhrman et al. [2003]. In addition, we continue the investigation of propositional proof systems using advice, initiated by Cook and Krajíček. In particular, we obtain several optimality results for proof systems using advice. We further show that these optimal systems are equivalent to natural extensions of Frege systems.
Optimal mode selection for cognitive radio sensor networks with RF energy harvesting

This paper investigates an optimal mode selection policy for cognitive radio sensor networks powered by RF energy harvesting. The RF energy harvesting enables the sensor node to operate with a potentially perpetual lifetime. We assume that the sensor node harvests RF energy received from the primary network and it cannot carry out RF energy harvesting and opportunistic spectrum access at the same time. Therefore, the sensor node should decide whether to access the spectrum or to harvest RF energy in each time slot to maximize an expected total throughput. We develop the optimal mode selection policy by casting this decision making problem in the framework of partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Numerical results show that the developed optimal policy finds a balance between obtaining the immediate throughput and harvesting the RF energy for future use.
Analysis and Experimental Verification of a Fourth Order Plant Model for Manipulator Force Control

**. *. *. The analysis and experimental verification of a fourth order model of the arm/sensor/environment system plant, to be used in evaluation of force control strategies are presented. Both the undamped and underdamped cases are investigated. Approximations and qualifications, based on the reality of our experimental system, help reduce the solution to just a few dominant terms. Comparing these terms with experimental data of the system undergoing small oscillations yields approximate values for all of the parameters in the model. To justify the obtained values and thereby the approximations used, two measures are taken. First, a simulation of the fourth order model is performed, and compared against experimental data obtained from the CMU DD Arm I1 system. Second, a stability analysis of several force control schemes acting on the modelled plant is reviewed and compared against experimental tests of the controllers. In both cases, the simulation and analysis match closely with the experimental results, confirming the validity of the plant model.
A Further Comment on Measurement of Thyrotropin

procedure and cannot be attributed to spectrophotometric insensitivity. (The major drawback of the Isomune-CK procedure is that it requires a sensitive spectrophotometer for the CK measurements.) Good precision is probably not mandatory for CK-MB quantitation when monitoring patients who have had acute myocardial infarcts, but we believe that it is essential when following patients who have undergone open-heart surgery. At our hospital, open-heart surgery patients are discharged from the intensive-care unit as soon as their CK-MB values drop below 15 UIL. In our hands, the Isomune-CK procedure provides adequate precision to make this decision, whereas the TANDEM procedure does not.