Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Semantic characterization, indexing and universal customized access to audiovisual content under controlled environments TIN2004-07860-C02

The main objective of this project is to research in the design of algorithms and the development of tools both oriented to automatic feature extraction in image sequences of controlled environments, additionally the further indexing, storage and customized access to the previously extracted and properly coded information out of those sequences. The project consists of to main stages: Information acquisition and Management of that information to offer services to the final user. The information acquisition out of images from several cameras performs the automatic extraction of features of people present in those images, segmenting in real time the individual persons out of the background, while building a 3D model of the scene thanks to self-calibration techniques. Finally, this information is described according to the MPEG-7 standard to allow for efficient access and storage. The second stage is mainly concerned with the management of the obtained information for its use in the development of applications. Its design is based on the user and terminal/network profiles (MPEG-21 DIA) and on the management of alert levels/options for the delivery of information relevant to each user. According to these profiles, the available coders with the proper parameters are run for the purpose of adaptation and customization of the information during each session.
Polyploidy Did Not Predate the Evolution of Nodulation in All Legumes

Background Several lines of evidence indicate that polyploidy occurred by around 54 million years ago, early in the history of legume evolution, but it has not been known whether this event was confined to the papilionoid subfamily (Papilionoideae; e.g. beans, medics, lupins) or occurred earlier. Determining the timing of the polyploidy event is important for understanding whether polyploidy might have contributed to rapid diversification and radiation of the legumes near the origin of the family; and whether polyploidy might have provided genetic material that enabled the evolution of a novel organ, the nitrogen-fixing nodule. Although symbioses with nitrogen-fixing partners have evolved in several lineages in the rosid I clade, nodules are widespread only in legume taxa, being nearly universal in the papilionoids and in the mimosoid subfamily (e.g., mimosas, acacias) – which diverged from the papilionoid legumes around 58 million years ago, soon after the origin of the legumes. Methodology/Principal Findings Using transcriptome sequence data from Chamaecrista fasciculata, a nodulating member of the mimosoid clade, we tested whether this species underwent polyploidy within the timeframe of legume diversification. Analysis of gene family branching orders and synonymous-site divergence data from C. fasciculata, Glycine max (soybean), Medicago truncatula, and Vitis vinifera (grape; an outgroup to the rosid taxa) establish that the polyploidy event known from soybean and Medicago occurred after the separation of the mimosoid and papilionoid clades, and at or shortly before the Papilionoideae radiation. Conclusions The ancestral legume genome was not fundamentally polyploid. Moreover, because there has not been an independent instance of polyploidy in the Chamaecrista lineage there is no necessary connection between polyploidy and nodulation in legumes. Chamaecrista may serve as a useful model in the legumes that lacks a paleopolyploid history, at least relative to the widely studied papilionoid models.
Influenza Vaccination and Mortality: Differentiating Vaccine Effects From Bias

It is widely believed that influenza (flu) vaccination of the elderly reduces all-cause mortality, yet randomized trials for assessing vaccine effectiveness are not feasible and the observational research has been controversial. Efforts to differentiate vaccine effectiveness from selection bias have been problematic. The authors examined mortality before, during, and after 9 flu seasons in relation to time-varying vaccination status in an elderly California population in which 115,823 deaths occurred from 1996 to 2005, including 20,484 deaths during laboratory-defined flu seasons. Vaccine coverage averaged 63%; excess mortality when the flu virus was circulating averaged 7.8%. In analyses that omitted weeks when flu circulated, the odds ratio measuring the vaccination-mortality association increased monotonically from 0.34 early in November to 0.56 in January, 0.67 in April, and 0.76 in August. This reflects the trajectory of selection effects in the absence of flu. In analyses that included weeks with flu and adjustment for selection effects, flu season multiplied the odds ratio by 0.954. The corresponding vaccine effectiveness estimate was 4.6% (95% confidence interval: 0.7, 8.3). To differentiate vaccine effects from selection bias, the authors used logistic regression with a novel case-centered specification that may be useful in other population-based studies when the exposure-outcome association varies markedly over time.
Newly formed excitatory pathways provide a substrate for hyperexcitability in experimental temporal lobe epilepsy

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) in humans and animals is associated with axonal sprouting of glutamatergic neurons and neosynaptogenesis in the hippocampal formation. We examined whether this plasticity of excitatory pathways contributes to an increased level of glutamatergic excitation in the CA1 region of rats experiencing chronic spontaneous limbic seizures following kainic acid or pilocarpine treatment. In chronic cases, we report an extensive axonal sprouting of CA1 pyramidal neurons, with many axonal branches entering the pyramidal cell layer and stratum radiatum, regions that are not innervated by axonal collaterals of CA1 pyramidal neurons in control animals. Concurrently with this anatomical reorganization, a large increase of the spontaneous glutamatergic drive is observed in the dendrites and somata of CA1 pyramidal cells. Furthermore, electrical activation of the reorganized CA1 associational pathway evokes epileptiform bursts in CA1 pyramidal cells. These findings suggest that reactive plasticity could contribute to the hyperexcitability of CA1 pyramidal neurons and to the propagation of seizures in these two models of TLE. J. Comp. Neurol. 408:449–460, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Exploitative and Hierarchical Antagonism in a Cooperative Bacterium

Social organisms that cooperate with some members of their own species, such as close relatives, may fail to cooperate with other genotypes of the same species. Such noncooperation may take the form of outright antagonism or social exploitation. Myxococcus xanthus is a highly social prokaryote that cooperatively develops into spore-bearing, multicellular fruiting bodies in response to starvation. Here we have characterized the nature of social interactions among nine developmentally proficient strains of M. xanthus isolated from spatially distant locations. Strains were competed against one another in all possible pairwise combinations during starvation-induced development. In most pairings, at least one competitor exhibited strong antagonism toward its partner and a majority of mixes showed bidirectional antagonism that decreased total spore production, even to the point of driving whole populations to extinction. Differential response to mixing was the primary determinant of competitive superiority rather than the sporulation efficiencies of unmixed populations. In some competitive pairings, the dominant partner sporulated more efficiently in mixed populations than in clonal isolation. This finding represents a novel form of exploitation in bacteria carried out by socially competent genotypes and is the first documentation of social exploitation among natural bacterial isolates. Patterns of antagonistic superiority among these strains form a highly linear dominance hierarchy. At least some competition pairs construct chimeric, rather than segregated, fruiting bodies. The cooperative prokaryote M. xanthus has diverged into a large number of distinct social types that cooperate with clone-mates but exhibit intense antagonism toward distinct social types of the same species. Most lengthy migration events in nature may thus result in strong antagonism between migratory and resident populations, and this antagonism may have large effects on local population sizes and dynamics. Intense mutual antagonism appears to be more prevalent in this prokaryotic social species than has been observed in the eukaryotic social slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, which also exhibits multicellular development. The finding of several cases of facultative social exploitation among these natural isolates suggests that such exploitation may occur frequently in nature in many prokaryotes with cooperative traits.
Gene Expression Dynamics Inspector (GEDI): for integrative analysis of expression profiles

UNLABELLED Genome-wide expression profiles contain global patterns that evade visual detection in current gene clustering analysis. Here, a Gene Expression Dynamics Inspector (GEDI) is described that uses self-organizing maps to translate high-dimensional expression profiles of time courses or sample classes into animated, coherent and robust mosaics images. GEDI facilitates identification of interesting patterns of molecular activity simultaneously across gene, time and sample space without prior assumption of any structure in the data, and then permits the user to retrieve genes of interest. Important changes in genome-wide activities may be quickly identified based on 'Gestalt' recognition and hence, GEDI may be especially useful for non-specialist end users, such as physicians. AVAILABILITY GEDI v1.0 is written in Matlab, and binary Matlab.dll files which require Matlab to run can be downloaded for free by academic institutions at http://www.chip. org/~ge/gedihome.html SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION http://www.chip. org/~ge/gedihome.html
A Tightly-Coupled GPS/INS/UWB Cooperative Positioning Sensors System Supported by V2I Communication

This paper investigates a tightly-coupled Global Position System (GPS)/Ultra-Wideband (UWB)/Inertial Navigation System (INS) cooperative positioning scheme using a Robust Kalman Filter (RKF) supported by V2I communication. The scheme proposes a method that uses range measurements of UWB units transmitted among the terminals as augmentation inputs of the observations. The UWB range inputs are used to reform the GPS observation equations that consist of pseudo-range and Doppler measurements and the updated observation equation is processed in a tightly-coupled GPS/UWB/INS integrated positioning equation using an adaptive Robust Kalman Filter. The result of the trial conducted on the roof of the Nottingham Geospatial Institute (NGI) at the University of Nottingham shows that the integrated solution provides better accuracy and improves the availability of the system in GPS denied environments. RKF can eliminate the effects of gross errors. Additionally, the internal and external reliabilities of the system are enhanced when the UWB observables received from the moving terminals are involved in the positioning algorithm.
Scene image classification with biased spatial block and pLSA

Scene image classification is a fundamental problem in the fields of computer vision and image understanding. A novel scene image classification method based on biased spatial block information and an improved coding approach in bag-of-visual-words (BOW) model is proposed. The spatial constraints biased to central object regions are employed to achieve better discrimination power for image classification. Locality-constrained linear coding approach instead of traditional vector quantization is adopted. And then, we apply probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) to a BOW representation for each image to obtain more compact and semantic features. Finally, scene images are classified by support vector machine with these features. Experimental results show that our method has satisfactory classification performances on a popular dataset.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Cc by Bit Depth Optimization in Dct-iv for Extended Jpeg

A discrete cosine transform (DCT) expresses a finite sequence of data points in terms of a sum of cosine functions oscillating at different frequencies. DCTs are vital to varied applications in science and engineering, from lossy compression of audio (e.g. MP3) and images (e.g. JPEG) (where small high-frequency components can be discarded to spectral ways for the numerical answer of partial differential equations. The modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) is a lapped transform based on the type-IV discrete cosine transform (DCT-IV), with the additional property of being lapped: it is designed to be performed on consecutive blocks of a larger dataset, wherever later blocks are unit overlapped so that the last half of one block coincides with the first half of the next block. Energy crisis in multimedia devices has resulted in poor quality of image/video resolution. These devices use compression standard, having Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) as core computation intensive component. This work presents a novel approach to have an effective computation based on behavior of pixels, pixel approximation, and multiplicand value decision. We propose an energy aware computation driven approximate DCT architecture/compression. Reducing the simulation time by sacrificing the quality of an image with a new concept of error resilient. Further we introspect the computational time of matrix multiplications and coefficients scaling based on pixel behaviors. At last compare the results with new parameters like FSIM, SSIM etc.
Commitment management through constraint reification

In a virtual organisation (VO), a group of cooperating agents may offer resources (or services) consisting of all, or part, of the sum of their individual contributions. Some of these resources may already be in use for certain time periods (existing commitments), and these existing commitments may vary in value to the VO. Using constraint reification and cumulative scheduling methods, we investigate ways in which agents may manage their resources and existing commitments when faced with a decision to take on new commitments. We describe a technique that allows an agent to intelligently construct satisfiable permutations consisting of existing and new commitments, and use preference and quality information to choose between these permutations. We show how constraint reification is used to model whether commitments are breakable/re-negotiable and how this influences the permutations available to the agents.
Affine 3-D reconstruction from two projective images of independently translating planes

Consider two views of a multi-body scene consisting of k planar bodies moving in pure translation one relative to the other. We show that the fundamental matrices, one per body, live in a 3-dimensional subspace, which when represented as a step-3 extensor is the common transversal on the collection of extensors defined by the homograph matrices H/sub 1/,. ,H/sub k/ of the moving planes. We show that as much as five bodies are necessary for recovering the common transversal from the homograph matrices, from which we show how to recover the fundamental matrices and the affine calibration between the two cameras.
Simple, low EMI-noise input-filter design for DC/DC power regulators

Input filters of DC/DC converters used in consumer and industrial electronics are studied and analyzed with an intention of developing a low-noise design. Noise attenuation is targeted by developing lumped-circuit-based noise model for EMI in input filters of Buck, Boost and Buck-Boost DC/DC converters. The models are applied to a basic buck converter and simulated to validate the attenuation techniques.
Combined modelling of TCP and multi-RED in DiffServ networks

This paper presents a new numerical method to analyse steady-state TCP throughputs in DiffServ networks. Different TCP models are briefly reviewed, and a Markov chain is used to capture the behaviour of a multi-random early detection (RED) queue. The established closed network model couples models for TCP, marking device and multi-RED queue. We assess accuracy and limits of the technique, and apply it for a discusion of parameter settings for marking devices.
Liquid chromatography of glycated hemobglobins with the Daiichi HA-8110 automated analyzer.

Our results show a good discrimination among the patient groups studied. Most thyrotoxic patients had TSH values below 0.2 milli-int. unitlL. Of the four patients whose values exceeded this, two were receiving anti-thyroid drugs, one was originally hypothyroid andovertreated, and the fourth was a previously thyrotoxic patient who had relapsed after withdrawal of drug therapy. All newly presenting thyrotoxic patients had values below 0.2 milli-int. uniL. This assay clearly distinguished hypothyroid patients from the euthyroid group, values for the latter being within the range 0.3 to 7 milli-int. units/L andthose for the hypothyroids exceeding 10 milli-int. units/L. Three patients initially diagnosed as having hypothyroidism fell into the thyrotoxic group as a result of overtreatment with thyroxin; two of these patients had TSH values below 0.2 milli-int. unit/L. The assay we currently use for serum TSH (Nuclear Medical Laboratories), although very satisfactory for the detection of hypothyroidism, cannot detect a TSH of less than 2 millimt. units/L and thus is unsuitable for the investigation of thyrotoxicosis. The IRMA, however, appears potentially useful as the initial screening test for thyroid disease. More work is required, in whichthis assay is used to measure TSH in patients being treated for thyrotoxicosis and in patients who have relapsed after withdrawal of drug therapy for this condition. For monitoring hypothyroidism the IRMA clearly identified two patients who were overtreated with thyroxin; this would not havebeen possible with a conventional radioimmunoassay for thyrotropin.
Unsupervized Word Segmentation: the Case for Mandarin Chinese

In this paper, we present an unsupervized segmentation system tested on Mandarin Chinese. Following Harris's Hypothesis in Kempe (1999) and Tanaka-Ishii's (2005) reformulation, we base our work on the Variation of Branching Entropy. We improve on (Jin and Tanaka-Ishii, 2006) by adding normalization and viterbi-decoding. This enable us to remove most of the thresholds and parameters from their model and to reach near state-of-the-art results (Wang et al., 2011) with a simpler system. We provide evaluation on different corpora available from the Segmentation bake-off II (Emerson, 2005) and define a more precise topline for the task using cross-trained supervized system available off-the-shelf (Zhang and Clark, 2010; Zhao and Kit, 2008; Huang and Zhao, 2007)
Crosslingual Annotation and Analysis of Implicit Discourse Connectives for Machine Translation

Usage of discourse connectives (DCs) differs across languages, thus addition and omission of connectives are common in translation. We investigate how implicit (omitted) DCs in the source text impacts various machine translation (MT) systems, and whether a discourse parser is needed as a preprocessor to explicitate implicit DCs. Based on the manual annotation and alignment of 7266 pairs of discourse relations in a Chinese-English translation corpus, we evaluate whether a preprocessing step that inserts explicit DCs at positions of implicit relations can improve MT. Results show that, without modifying the translation model, explicitating implicit relations in the input source text has limited effect on MT evaluation scores. In addition, translation spotting analysis shows that it is crucial to identify DCs that should be explicitly translated in order to improve implicit-to-explicit DC translation. On the other hand, further analysis reveals that the disambiguation as well as explicitation of implicit relations are subject to a certain level of optionality, suggesting the limitation to learn and evaluate this linguistic phenomenon using standard parallel corpora.
A Survey on Human Action Recognition Using Depth Sensors

The recent advent of depth sensors opens up new opportunities to advance human action recognition by providing depth information. Many different approaches have been proposed for human action recognition using depth sensors. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive study and an updated review on human action recognition using depth sensors. We give an overview of recent works in this field from the viewpoints of data modalities, feature extraction and classification. In terms of data modalities from depth sensors, recent approaches can be roughly categorized into depth map based and skeleton based approaches. Since depth maps encode 3D shape and appearance information, approaches based on depth maps are suitable for short simple actions and can achieve high performance. In contrast, due to the discriminative power and more concise form of skeletal joints, skeleton based approaches can model more complex actions, even in real time. This paper further provides a summary of the results obtained in the last couple of years on the public datasets. Moreover, we discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline promising directions of research in this area. The review assists in guiding both researchers and practitioners in the selection and development of approaches for human action recognition using depth sensors.
Satanic subcultures? A discourse analysis of the self-perceptions of young goths and pagans

In recent years, several youth subcultures have become the focus of concerns about ‘evil’ and ‘Satanism’. This paper considers two such groups: Pagans and Goths. It uses discourse analysis to explore how young Goths and Pagans construct their subcultures, how they feel others perceive them, and how they respond to these perceptions.
Abelian Gauge Theory on M2-brane and Toric Duality

We write down the abelian gauge theory on a single M2-brane probing toric Calabi-Yau four-fold singularity, based on the recently proposed M-theory crystal model of AdS4/CFT3 dual pairs. The charges of the matter fields are given by the intersection numbers between loops and faces in the crystal. The moduli space of vacua of the gauge theory coincides precisely with the Calabi-Yau singularity. Toric duality, partial resolution, and a possibility of new RG flows are also discussed.
Photogrammetric Texture Mapping using Casual Images

Texturing 3D models using casual images has gained importance in the last decade, with the advent of huge databases of images. We present a novel approach for performing this task, which manages to account for the 3D geometry of the photographed object. Our method overcomes the limitation of both the constrained-parameterization approach, which does not account for the photography effects, and the photogrammetric approach, which cannot handle arbitrary images. The key idea of our algorithm is to formulate the mapping estimation as a Moving-Least-Squares problem for recovering local camera parameters at each vertex. The algorithm is realized in a FlexiStickers application, which enables fast interactive texture mapping using a small number of constraints.
Evaluation of transrectal real-time ultrasound for use in identifying sources of reproductive failure in weaned sows

Real-time ultrasound (RTU) may aid in identifying sources of reproductive failure. In the month prior to observation, a commercial 2500-sow unit experienced an increase in the wean-to-estrus interval and reduced conception rates. A subpopulation of 52 sows was examined using RTU once daily on days 4, 5, and 6 postweaning. Transrectal RTU of the ovaries and uterus, performed following estrus detection, re-