Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A walking intervention for postmenopausal women using mobile phones and interactive voice response

We conducted a feasibility study of a 12-week walking intervention administered through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system and mobile phones. We also examined the added benefit of a human coach. Post-menopausal women (n = 71) were given a daily-steps goal, which they monitored using a pedometer. Each day, they answered an automated call from the IVR system to their mobile phone and provided assessments of walking goals and mood. Every evening, they called the IVR system to report their steps, answered a brief questionnaire and received a message with a helpful hint. Participants took less time to complete a one-mile walk after the intervention, compared to baseline (0.77 min, SE = 0.22, P < 0.001). In addition, a significant loss in body weight (0.93 kg, SE = 0.31) and body-mass index (0.28 kg/m2, SE = 0.11) were observed. The key psychometric measures of exercise goal setting (0.67 units, SE = 0.12) and exercise planning (0.48 units, SE = 0.09) also improved from baseline (both P < 0.001). However, results in the coach and no-coach conditions were not significantly different. The study suggests that mobile phones can be used to deliver an effective, low-cost walking intervention, irrespective of the addition of a human coach.
Flicking technique for microencapsulation of cells in calcium alginate leading to the microtissue formation

Microbeads have wide applications in biomedical engineering field that include drug delivery, encapsulation of biomolecules, tissue padding and tissue regeneration. In this paper, we report a simple, yet efficient, flicking technique to produce microcapsules of calcium alginate at a narrow distribution of size. The system consists of an infusion pump and a customised flicker that taps the syringe needle for dispersing microcapsules of sodium alginate that polymerised in the calcium chloride solution. The flow rate of the syringe pump and the velocity of the flicker were studied to achieve a well controlled and tunable size distribution of microbeads ranging from 200 to 400 μm. At a flow rate of 4 μl/min and flicking rate of 80 rpm, a narrow size distribution of microbeads were produced. Via this technique, HaCaT cells were encapsulated in calcium alginate microbeads that grown into microtissues with a size ranging from 100 to 300 μm after two weeks of culture. These microtissues could be potentially useful for pharmacological application.
Demystifying magic: high-level low-level programming

The power of high-level languages lies in their abstraction over hardware and software complexity, leading to greater security, better reliability, and lower development costs. However, opaque abstractions are often show-stoppers for systems programmers, forcing them to either break the abstraction, or more often, simply give up and use a different language. This paper addresses the challenge of opening up a high-level language to allow practical low-level programming without forsaking integrity or performance. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: 1) we draw together common threads in a diverse literature, 2) we identify a framework for extending high-level languages for low-level programming, and 3) we show the power of this approach through concrete case studies. Our framework leverages just three core ideas: extending semantics via intrinsic methods, extending types via unboxing and architectural-width primitives, and controlling semantics via scoped semantic regimes. We develop these ideas through the context of a rich literature and substantial practical experience. We show that they provide the power necessary to implement substantial artifacts such as a high-performance virtual machine, while preserving the software engineering benefits of the host language. The time has come for high-level low-level programming to be taken more seriously: 1) more projects now use high-level languages for systems programming, 2) increasing architectural heterogeneity and parallelism heighten the need for abstraction, and 3) a new generation of high-level languages are under development and ripe to be influenced.
Construction of decision tree from data driven clustering

In the acoustic modeling for large vocabulary speech recognition, context-dependent (CD) modeling is essential for realizing both improved recognition performance and rapid search. However, sparse data problem caused by huge number of CD models usually leads the estimated models unreliable. To cope with that, two major context-clustering methods, data-driven and rule-based, have been investigated vigorously. In this paper, we briefly review the two methods and develop a new clustering method based on ID3 decision tree learning algorithm that effectively captures the CD modeling. The proposed scheme essentially constructs a decision rule of pre-clustered triphones using ID3 algorithm. In particular, the data-driven method is used as a clustering algorithm while its result is used as the learning target of ID3 algorithm. The proposed scheme is shown effective over the database of low unknown-context ratio in terms of recognition performance. For speaker-independent, task-independent continuous speech recognition task, the proposed method reduced percent accuracy WER by 1.16% comparing to that of the existing rule-based method alone.
Experiences with a Virtual Swimming Interface Exhibit

We created an exhibit based on a new locomotion interface for swimming in a virtual reality ocean environment as part of our Swimming Across the Pacific art project. In our exhibit we suspend the swimmer using a hand gliding and leg harness with pulleys and ropes in an 8ft-cubic swimming apparatus. The virtual reality ocean world has sky, sea waves, splashes, ocean floor and an avatar representing the swimmer. The swimmer wears a tracked head-mounted display so he can watch himself swim. The audience sees the swimmer hanging in the apparatus overlaid on a video projection of his ocean swimming avatar. The avatar mimics the real swimmer’s movements sensed by eight magnetic position trackers attached to the swimmer. Over 400 people tried swimming and thousands watched during a five-day exhibition. Our observations of swimmers and audiences engaged in and enjoying the experience lead us to identify design strategies for interactive exhibitions. Elements of the interface design of the whole system impacted the following four distinct user groups: individual swimmer, swimmer as a group of swimmers, attendants and audience, providing valuable insight to create new interactive installation experiences. Author
The sensorimotor foundations of phonology: a computational model of early childhood articulatory and phonetic development

HABLAR is a computational model of the sensorimotor foundations of early childhood phonological development. It is intended to explain key characteristics of normal phonological development including the phonetic characteristics of babble, systematic and context sensitive patterns of sound substitutions and deletions, and overgeneralization of pronunciation patterns. HABLAR ("Hierarchical Articulatory Based Language Acquisition by Reinforcement learning") features an auditory system which categorizes and recognizes speech sounds using only acoustic cues, an articulatory system with a realistic vocal tract model, and a cognitive architecture which bridges the two. The environment in which the model resides is also simulated. The principal hypothesis guiding the model is that phonological development emerges from the interaction of auditory perception and hierarchical motor control. The model's auditory perception is specialized to segment and categorize speech into discrete phonetic events which closely correspond to discrete sets of functionally coordinated gestures learned by the vocal tract's articulatory apparatus. To imitate words, HABLAR need not solve the hard problem of relating continuous speech sound and continuous vocal tract motion. It learns the correspondence between one discrete sequence of events and another. To address both relative articulatory difficulty of different sounds and recombination of already mastered sounds into unique utterances, HABLAR views speech as a hierarchical control problem. An abstract phonological control level composes each utterance out of one or more elemental sounds, choosing which of many lower level articulatory controllers is most likely to generate each sound. With continuous proprioceptive feedback as a guide, the articulatory control level choreographs the fine-grained timing of vocal tract and pulmonary motions necessary to produce each elemental sound. Simulations of the model's auditory perception mimic categorical perception which develops in infancy. Motor control simulations demonstrate the feasibility of shaping multi-dimensional articulatory control with phonetic feedback. HABLAR and its properties qualitatively explain the phenomena of normal phonological development. It provides a computational testbed and a new framework with which to formulate and evaluate hypotheses about phonological development.
Pharmacodynamic modeling of time‐dependent transduction systems

The past decade has seen a marked expansion of the development and application of mechanism-based pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) models for quantitating the time course of drug responses. A general conceptual scheme that depicts the major processes controlling drug effects is depicted in Fig 1.1 The potential for drug distribution into a biophase as a rate-limiting step controlling some effects was pointed out by Furchgott2 and Segre,3 and the application of a linking compartment in pharmacodynamics was popularized by Sheiner et al.4 The biosensor process represents the mechanism of action of the drug whereby either receptor binding or turnover of endogenous mediators may be altered. The former can be quantitated with an array of equations reflecting reversible binding of agonist or antagonist to receptors,5 whereas the latter may require use of indirect response models.6,7 Some mechanisms involve irreversible inactivation of cells or enzymes such as those used for chemotherapeutic agents8 or drugs such as aspirin9 or omeprazole.10 Bound receptors or endogenous mediators often activate additional biochemical or physiologic steps with such transduction processes leading to the observed response.11 Further, there may occur diverse counterregulation, depletion, or tolerance mechanisms that can modify the observed response.12 A highly mechanistic characterization of pharmacologic responses in relation to dose, time, and other factors requires direct measurement of the diverse steps controlling the action of the drug. This may be feasible with invasive animal studies such as our receptor and gene-mediated models for corticosteroids13; however, the modeling of clinical drug responses has severe limitations. Most typically it is desirable and often feasible to capture a capacity constant such as the maximum induced response (Emax), a sensitivity constant such as the equilibrium dissociation constant (KD) or related biophase concentration (EC50), the Hill coefficient (γ) if necessary, and perhaps a time constant (τ) that may reflect a major rate-limiting step causing a delay in responses separate from the pharmacokinetics of the drug. Either the rate constant for biophase distribution (keo) or the constant for loss of the response variable in indirect response models (kout) is thus the fourth parameter often generally sought where relevant from clinical data. General expectations in quantitating pharmacodynamic data are that the model applied will be as mechanistically relevant as possible, it will capture the major rate-limiting step or steps in control of drug responses, and it will reflect as many doses, routes, or regimens as possible to allow maximal interpretive and predictive capability. The purpose of this report is to point out the need and feasibility of considering transduction processes and a simplified nonlinear transduction model as the third major class of PK/PD models for characterizing various drug responses with time delays.
Closed loop control of walking motions with adaptive choice of directions for the iCub humanoid robot

The widely spread iCub humanoid robot has proved to be able to walk straight forward by means of an offline pattern generator, which did not allow for online adjustments and interactions. In this paper, we present a closed-loop control framework based on a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control pattern generator with feedback at the Center of Mass (CoM) position. This framework allows us to extend the walking capabilities of iCub to different walking directions, such as curved, sideways and backward walking. When compared to existing methods, the walking speed of iCub is increased by approximately 75% and the step period decreased by 45%. It was successfully tested with a reduced version of the iCub (HeiCub), but it was also shown to be applicable to the full iCub in simulation. The measured outcomes of the experiments are the walking velocity, the cost of transport, tracking precision of the Zero-Moment Point (ZMP), CoM and joint trajectories. The online feedback was shown to improve the walking stability by means of an improvement of the CoM tracking precision by 30% and the ZMP tracking precision by 60% compared to the same method without CoM position feedback control.
Determination of the 3 D Trajectory and Velocity of Coronal Mass Ejections using

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are powerful eruptions that can blow up to ten billion tons of the Sun's atmosphere into interplanetary space. Major CMEs which impact the Earth are capable of creating major disturbances in the outer atmosphere, causing geomagnetic storms and interruptions to communications systems. Identifying those CMEs that will hit the Earth, which appears as “Halo events” in coronagraph images, enables us to significantly reduce the potential damages caused by CMEs. NASA’s two-spacecraft STEREO mission, to be launch in the summer of 2006, will take time series stereoscopic image pairs of CME. We developed and implemented a time efficient algorithm that intelligently detects and tracks the CMEs on the stereo images taken by STEREO. We have then tested our software on six synthetic stereo image sets created by our collaborator. By applying the implemented program to data received by STEREO, Halo events will be predicted early enough to take necessary actions in order to reduce CMEs’ severe damages.
Cataloging GitHub Repositories

GitHub is one of the largest and most popular repository hosting service today, having about 14 million users and more than 54 million repositories as of March 2017. This makes it an excellent platform to find projects that developers are interested in exploring. GitHub showcases its most popular projects by cataloging them manually into categories such as DevOps tools, web application frameworks, and game engines. We propose that such cataloging should not be limited only to popular projects. We explore the possibility of developing such cataloging system by automatically extracting functionality descriptive text segments from readme files of GitHub repositories. These descriptions are then input to LDA-GA, a state-of-the-art topic modeling algorithm, to identify categories. Our preliminary experiments demonstrate that additional meaningful categories which complement existing GitHub categories can be inferred. Moreover, for inferred categories that match GitHub categories, our approach can identify additional projects belonging to them. Our experimental results establish a promising direction in realizing automatic cataloging system for GitHub.
Changes of retinal functions following the induction of ocular hypertension in rats using argon laser photocoagulation

Background: Electroretinography (ERG) provides a longitudinal monitoring of pathological changes in retina. Scotopic threshold response (STR) of ERG was shown to reflect inner retinal activity and is particularly useful in the evaluation of inner retinal changes in ocular hypertension models. Recently, STR was demonstrated to be attenuated after the induction of ocular hypertension using injection of hypertonic saline into episcleral veins which indicates an impairment of retinal function. However, little is known on the changes of retinal function in an ocular hypertension model induced by laser photocoagulation at episcleral veins and limbal veins.
The Two Dimensions of Housing Inequality in Europe Are High Home Ownership Rates an Indicator of Low Housing Values

Untersuchungen von Ungleichheiten im Wohneigentum – als zentralem Element des Haushaltsvermogens – liefern Erkenntnisse uber die soziale Stratifikation moderner Gesellschaften. Wir argumentieren, dass sich Ungleichheiten im Wohnen nicht nur durch unterschiedlichen Zugang zu Wohneigentum, sondern auch durch Unterschiede im Wert der Immobilien manifestieren – ein Aspekt, der in der Forschung bisher eher vernachlassigt wurde. Unter Verwendung der Daten des Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) fuhren wir einen Vergleich der Wohneigentumsquoten und -werte zwischen 13 europaischen Landern durch. Unsere Ergebnisse lassen darauf schliesen, dass die Ungleichheit im Bereich Wohnen tatsachlich ein zweidimensionales Phanomen darstellt. Uberraschend ist das Ergebnis, dass sich ein Migrationshintergrund in den europaischen Landern zwar negativ auf die Wahrscheinlichkeit des Besitzes von Wohneigentum auswirkt, nicht aber auf den durchschnittlichen Wert des Wohneigentums. Abschliesend fuhren wir eine explorative Untersuchung des Zusammenhangs zwischen diesen beiden Dimensionen der Wohneigentumsungleichheit durch. Unsere Analysen zeigen einen negativen, wenngleich nicht signifikanten Zusammenhang zwischen Wohneigentumsquoten und Wohneigentumswerten.
Reduction of EGF is associated with the delay of ulcer healing by cigarette smoking.

Cigarette smoking is associated with peptic ulcer diseases. Smokers have lower levels of salivary epidermal growth factor (EGF) than nonsmokers. We investigated whether reduction of EGF is involved in the delay of gastric ulcer healing by cigarette smoking. Rats with acetic acid-induced ulcers were exposed to cigarette smoke (0, 2, or 4% vol/vol) 1 day after ulcer induction. EGF level was elevated 1 day after ulcer induction in salivary glands and serum, and 4 days after ulcer induction in the gastric mucosa. However, cigarette smoke depressed these beneficial effects and EGF mRNA expression in salivary glands and gastric mucosa. Cigarette smoke delayed gastric ulcer healing and reduced cell proliferation, angiogenesis, and mucus synthesis. Exogenous EGF (10 and 20 microg/kg i.v.) before smoke exposure reversed the adverse effects of cigarette smoke, whereas vascular endothelial growth factor level and nitric oxide synthase activity were unaffected. It is concluded that the detrimental effect of cigarette smoke on ulcer healing is a consequence of reduction of angiogenesis, cell proliferation, and mucus secretion through the depressive action on EGF biosynthesis and its mRNA expression in salivary glands and gastric mucosa.
A Divide-and-Conquer Method for Scalable Low-Rank Latent Matrix Pursuit

Data fusion, which effectively fuses multiple prediction lists from different kinds of features to obtain an accurate model, is a crucial component in various computer vision applications. Robust late fusion (RLF) is a recent proposed method that fuses multiple output score lists from different models via pursuing a shared low-rank latent matrix. Despite showing promising performance, the repeated full Singular Value Decomposition operations in RLF's optimization algorithm limits its scalability in real world vision datasets which usually have large number of test examples. To address this issue, we provide a scalable solution for large-scale low-rank latent matrix pursuit by a divide-and-conquer method. The proposed method divides the original low-rank latent matrix learning problem into two size-reduced sub problems, which may be solved via any base algorithm, and combines the results from the sub problems to obtain the final solution. Our theoretical analysis shows that with fixed probability, the proposed divide-and-conquer method has recovery guarantees comparable to those of its base algorithm. Moreover, we develop an efficient base algorithm for the corresponding sub problems by factorizing a large matrix into the product of two size-reduced matrices. We also provide high probability recovery guarantees of the base algorithm. The proposed method is evaluated on various fusion problems in object categorization and video event detection. Under comparable accuracy, the proposed method performs more than $180$ times faster than the state-of-the-art baselines on the CCV dataset with about 4,500 test examples for video event detection.
La investigación en comunicación y periodismo ambiental en España: Estado de la cuestión y revisión bibliométrica de las principales revistas académicas en comunicación (2005-2013)

El siguiente estudio propone un acercamiento exploratorio a la produccion academica espanola en el campo de la comunicacion y el periodismo ambiental con el objeto de delimitar cuales son sus principales rasgos, potencialidades y limitaciones. A partir de tecnicas de analisis bibliometrico, se analizan los articulos sobre la tematica publicados en las principales revistas academicas espanolas recogidas en el Indice H de Google Scholar Metrics durante el periodo comprendido entre 2005 y 2013. De los resultados se infiere el predominio de topicos como la representacion del cambio climatico, el riesgo y las catastrofes ambientales a partir de tecnicas como el analisis de contenido.
Social signal processing: detecting human interactions using wireless sensor networks

In this paper we address the problem of capturing and processing certain spatiotemporal, social characteristics of human interactions with the use of Wireless Sensor Networks. Using TelosB motes, we basically monitor the binary proximity within a group of people. The collected data give an insight of how people interact with each other (how often, for how much time, in which room) and provide a novel tool (which can be further enhanced) to study (quantitatively, in an automated manner) human social networks.
Disruption of a Plasmodium falciparum cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase gene causes aberrant gametogenesis

Phosphodiesterase (PDE) and guanylyl cyclase (GC) enzymes are key components of the cGMP signalling pathway and are encoded in the genome of Plasmodium falciparum. Here we investigate the role of specific GC and PDE isoforms in gamete formation – a process that is essential for malaria transmission and occurs in the Anopheles mosquito midgut following feeding on an infected individual. Details of the intracellular signalling events controlling development of the male and female gametes from their precursors (gametocytes) remain sparse in P. falciparum. Previous work involving the addition of pharmacological agents to gametocytes implicated cGMP in exflagellation – the emergence of highly motile, flagellated male gametes from the host red blood cell. In this study we show that decreased GC activity in parasites having undergone disruption of the PfGCβ gene had no significant effect on gametogenesis. By contrast, decreased cGMP‐PDE activity during gametocyte development owing to disruption of the PfPDEδ gene, led to a severely reduced ability to undergo gametogenesis. This suggests that the concentration of cGMP must be maintained below a threshold in the developing gametocyte to allow subsequent differentiation to proceed normally. The data indicate that PfPDEδ plays a crucial role in regulating cGMP levels during sexual development.