Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploiting Latent Information to Predict Diffusions of Novel Topics on Social Networks

This paper brings a marriage of two seemly unrelated topics, natural language processing (NLP) and social network analysis (SNA). We propose a new task in SNA which is to predict the diffusion of a new topic, and design a learning-based framework to solve this problem. We exploit the latent semantic information among users, topics, and social connections as features for prediction. Our framework is evaluated on real data collected from public domain. The experiments show 16% AUC improvement over baseline methods. The source code and dataset are available at http://www.csie. ntu.edu. tw/~d97944007/diffusion/
An EMG-Controlled Hand Exoskeleton for Natural Pinching

Spinal cord and other lo cal injuries ofte n lea d to partial paralysis while the brain stays fully functional. When this partial paralysis occurs in the hand, these individuals are not able to execute daily activities on their own even if their a rms are func tional. To remedy this problem, a lightweight, low-profile orthotic exoskeleton has been designed to restore dexterity to paralyzed hands. The exoskeleton’s movements are controlled by the user’s available electromyography (EMG) signals. The device has two actuators controlling the index finger flexion that can be used to perform a pinching motion against a fixed thumb. Using this orthotic device, a new control technique was developed to allow for a natur al reaching and pinching sequence by utilizing the natural residual muscle activation patterns. To design this controller, two actuator control algorithms were explored with a qua driplegic (C5/ C6) subject and it was determined that a simple bina ry c ontrol algorithm allowed for faster interaction with objects over a variabl e cont rol algorithm. The binary algorithm was then used as an enabling algorithm to activate the exoskeleton movements when the natural sequence of muscle activities found a pattern related to a pinch. This natural pinching technique has shown significant promise toward realistic neural control of wearable robotic devices to assist paralyzed individuals.
Feature-preserving 3D fluorescence image sequence denoising

In this paper feature-preserving denoising scheme for fluorescence video microscopy is presented. Fluorescence image sequences comprise of edges and fine structures with fast moving objects. Improving signal to noise ratio (SNR) while preserving structural details is a difficult task for these image sequences. Few existing denoising techniques result in over-smoothing these image sequences while others fail due to inappropriate implementation of motion estimation and compensation steps. In this paper we use nonlocal means (NLM) video denoising algorithm as to avoid motion estimation and compensation steps. The proposed shot boundary detection technique pre-processes the sequence systematically and accurately to form different shots with content-wise similar frames. To preserve the edges and fine structural details in the image sequences we modify the weighing term of NLM filter. Further, to accelerate the denoising process, separable non-local means filter is implemented for video sequences. We compare the results with existing fluorescence video de-noising techniques and show that the proposed method not only preserves the edges and small structural details more efficiently, also reduces the computational time. Efficacy of the proposed algorithm is evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively with PSNR and vision perception.
Deciding equivalences among conjunctive aggregate queries

Equivalence of aggregate queries is investigated for the class of conjunctive queries with comparisons and the aggregate operators count, count-distinct, min, max, and sum. Essentially, this class contains unnested SQL queries with the above aggregate operators, with a where clause consisting of a conjunction of comparisons, and without a having clause. The comparisons are either interpreted over a domain with a dense order (like the rationals) or with a discrete order (like the integers). Characterizations of equivalence differ for the two cases. For queries with either max or min, equivalence is characterized in terms of dominance mappings, which can be viewed as a generalization of containment mappings. For queries with the count-distinct operator, a sufficient condition for equivalence is given in terms of equivalence of conjunctive queries under set semantics. For some special cases, it is shown that this condition is also necessary. For conjunctive queries with comparisons but without aggregation, equivalence under bag-set semantics is characterized in terms of isomorphism. This characterization essentially remains the same also for queries with the count operator. Moreover, this characterization also applies to queries with the sum operator if the queries have either constants or comparisons, but not both. In the general case (i.e., both comparisons and constants), the characterization of the equivalence of queries with the sum operator is more elaborate. All the characterizations given in the paper are decidable in polynomial space.
A Study of the Application of Sectorized Antennas in RF-Based Indoor Localization Systems

In recent years, technologies that find the location of mobile sources inside buildings are becoming an attractive area of research and development. A significant application of such technologies is in emergency situations where it is important to be able to track the movements of the first responders inside closed environments. More commercial and public safety applications are also emerging every day.
Taillessness in a Cloned Cow is Not Genetically Transmitted

Abstract Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), commonly referred to as cloning, results in the generation of offspring that, except for mitochondrial DNA, are genetically identical to the nuclear donor. We previously used a genetically modified bovine cell line as the donor for SCNT and obtained a calf, named Daisy, that was born without a tail. To determine whether the missing tail was a result of the genetic modification, we performed recloning experiments by using either cells from a sacrificed pregnancy of a second clone (Daisy's “twin” clone) or cells from tailless Daisy as donors for SCNT. Cloned fetuses from aborted pregnancies and a cloned live calf that died shortly after birth were examined and confirmed to all possess tails. Hence, the observed phenotype of Daisy's lacking tail is not due to the introduced transgene or a mutation present in the cell that was used for her production. Rather, the missing tail has most likely arisen from an epigenetic reprogramming error during development.
Asymmetric Hysteresis of Néel Caps in Flux-Closure Magnetic Dots

We investigated with XMCD-PEEM magnetic imaging the magnetization reversal processes of Neel caps inside Bloch walls in self-assembled, micron-sized Fe(110) dots with flux-closure magnetic state. In most cases these magnetic processes are symmetric in field, as expected. However, some dots show pronounced asymmetric behaviors. Micromagnetic simulations suggest that the geometrical features (and their asymmetry) of the dots strongly affect the switching mechanism of the Neel caps.
CRUMPET: creation of user-friendly mobile services personalised for tourism

More and more people combine several purposes with travelling, such as business, leisure, entertainment, and education. Such people may not have time to pre-plan a travel schedule in detail. They need location-aware information about the destination domain and expect individualised information and services. The EU funded research project CRUMPET addresses these factors and will provide new information delivery services for a far more heterogeneous tourist population. The services proposed by CRUMPET take advantage of integrating four key emerging technology domains and applying them to the tourism domain: location-aware services, personalised user interaction, seamlessly accessible multimedia mobile communication, and smart component-based middleware or "smartware" that uses multi-agent technology.
The influence of hatching order on the thermoregulatory behaviour of barn owl Tyto alba nestlings

Adult birds maintain high body temperature in cold environments by the insulating properties of their plumage, particular behaviours such as huddling and communal roosting (Ancel et al. 1997), and a high capacity for thermogenesis. In nestlings, the capacity for thermoregulation is limited by constraints specific to young organisms. For example, compared to adults, chicks have a less favourable surface-to-volume ratio (Visser 1998) and their immature and underdeveloped muscles contribute little to thermogenesis (Hohtola & Visser 1998). In altricial birds, newborn chicks are poikilothermic, physically helpless and therefore dependent on parental care for heat, food, and protection. Normal development, shown by age at fledging and body mass, is achieved when these three factors are optimal. Heat transferred by brooding adults is necessary during incubation and the initial period of post-hatching growth, until homeothermy is achieved. Thereafter, homeothermy is maintained by thermogenesis and thus is dependent on parental food provisioning. However, heat transfer by brooding parents may alleviate the energetic costs of chick homeothermy. Chicks from large broods can benefit from the thermal inertia of their siblings (Westerterp et al. 1982), which decreases the amount of food required for thermoregulation, permitting parents to forage for longer periods (Clark 1982). The energetics of altricial chicks are difficult to characterise and such studies have therefore been done mainly in the laboratory. Hatching asynchrony complicates the issue by creating a size hierarchy amongst siblings (Newton 1979). A size hierarchy often results in The influence of hatching order on the thermoregulatory behaviour of barn owl Tyto alba nestlings
Cancer risk after cessation of asbestos exposure: a cohort study of Italian asbestos cement workers

Objectives: We aimed to study mortality for asbestos related diseases and the incidence of mesothelioma in a cohort of Italian asbestos cement workers after cessation of asbestos exposure. Methods: The Eternit factory operated from 1907 to 1986. The cohort included 3434 subjects active in 1950 or hired in 1950–86, ascertained from company records, without selections. Local reference rates were used for both mortality and mesothelioma incidence. Results: Mortality was increased in both sexes for all causes (overall 1809 observed (obs) vs 1312.3 expected (exp); p<0.01), pleural (135 obs vs 3.6 exp; p<0.01) and peritoneal (52 vs 1.9; p<0.01) malignancies and lung cancer (249 vs 103.1; p<0.01). In women, ovarian (9 vs 4.0; p<0.05) and uterine (15 vs 5.8; p<0.01) malignancies were also in excess. No statistically significant increase was found for laryngeal cancer (16 obs vs 12.2 exp). In Poisson regression analyses, the RR of death from pleural neoplasm linearly increased with duration of exposure, while it showed a curvilinear increase with latency and time since cessation of exposure. RR for peritoneal neoplasm continued to increase by latency, duration and time since cessation of exposure. RR for lung cancer showed a reduction after 15 years since cessation of exposure and levelled off after 40 years of latency. Conclusion: This study of a cohort of asbestos exposed workers with very long follow-up confirmed the reduction in risk of death from lung cancer after the end of exposure. It also suggested a reduction in risk for pleural mesothelioma with over 40 years of latency, while risk for peritoneal mesothelioma showed a continuing increase.
Advances in Cooperative Multi-Sensor Video Surveillance

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Sarno Corporation (Sarno ) are performing an integrated feasibility demonstration of Video Surveillance and Monitoring (VSAM). The objective is to develop a cooperative, multi-sensor video surveillance system that provides continuous coverage over battle eld areas. Signi cant achievements have been demonstrated during VSAM Demo I in November 1997, and in the intervening year leading up to Demo II in October 1998.
Thermal-aware steiner routing for 3D stacked ICs

In this paper, we present the first work on the Steiner routing for 3D stacked ICs. In the 3D Steiner routing problem, the pins are located in multiple device layers, which makes it more general than its 2D counterpart. Our algorithm consists of two steps: tree construction and tree refinement. Our tree construction algorithm builds a delay-oriented Steiner tree under a given thermal profile. We show that thermal-aware 3D tree construction involves the minimization of two-variable Elmore delay function. In our tree refinement algorithm, we reposition the through-vias while preserving the original routing topology for further thermal optimization under performance constraint. We employ a novel scheme to relax the initial NLP formulation to ILP and consider all through-vias from all nets simultaneously. Our related experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.
GRAPHENE: A NANOSCALE QUANTUM PLAYING FIELD

T. Chakraborty , Canada Research Chair Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 2N2 Graphite, despite being a rather common material, whose properties are well established for many decades and has a wide range of industrial applications, is still capable of creating quite a sensation in the physics community [1-4] with recent reports that single layers of graphite, called graphene, have been isolated for the first time [5,6] and ‘unusual’ quantum properties were found in such systems [7-9].
Parametric Alignment of Multiple Biological Sequences

The alignment problem of DNA or protein sequences is very applicable and important in various elds of molecular biology. In this problem, the obtained optimal solution with xed parameters (gap penalties, weights for weighted multiple alignment problems, and so on) is not always the biologically best alignment. Thus, it is required to vary parameters and check the varying optimal alignments. The way to vary parameters has been studied well on the problem of only two sequences [6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15], but not in the multiple alignment problem because of the di culty of computing the optimal solution. This paper presents techniques for parametric multiple alignment problem, and examines the features of obtained alignments by parametric analysis on gap penalty and weight matrix through experiments. These experiments reveal the importance of adopting appropriate parameter values to obtain meaningful multiple alignments.
Lines of action and stabilizing potential of the shoulder musculature

The objective of the present study was to measure the lines of action of 18 major muscles and muscle sub‐regions crossing the glenohumeral joint of the human shoulder, and to compute the potential contribution of these muscles to joint shear and compression during scapular‐plane abduction and sagittal‐plane flexion. The stabilizing potential of a muscle was found by assessing its contribution to superior/inferior and anterior/posterior joint shear in the scapular and transverse planes, respectively. A muscle with stabilizing potential was oriented to apply more compression than shear at the glenohumeral joint, whereas a muscle with destabilizing potential was oriented to apply more shear. Significant differences in lines of action and stabilizing capacities were measured across sub‐regions of the deltoid and rotator cuff in both planes of elevation (P < 0.05), and substantial differences were observed in the pectoralis major and latissimus dorsi. The results showed that, during abduction and flexion, the rotator cuff muscle sub‐regions were more favourably aligned to stabilize the glenohumeral joint in the transverse plane than in the scapular plane and that, overall, the anterior supraspinatus was most favourably oriented to apply glenohumeral joint compression. The superior pectoralis major and inferior latissimus dorsi were the chief potential scapular‐plane destabilizers, demonstrating the most significant capacity to impart superior and inferior shear to the glenohumeral joint, respectively. The middle and anterior deltoid were also significant potential contributors to superior shear, opposing the combined destabilizing inferior shear potential of the latissimus dorsi and inferior subscapularis. As potential stabilizers, the posterior deltoid and subscapularis had posteriorly‐directed muscle lines of action, whereas the teres minor and infraspinatus had anteriorly‐directed lines of action. Knowledge of the lines of action and stabilizing potential of individual sub‐regions of the shoulder musculature may assist clinicians in identifying muscle‐related joint instabilities, assist surgeons in planning tendon reconstructive surgery, aid in the development of rehabilitation procedures designed to improve joint stability, and facilitate development and validation of biomechanical computer models of the shoulder complex.
Efficacy of digital radiography for the detection of pneumothorax: comparison with conventional chest radiography.

As part of our continuing evaluation of the clinical applicability of digital radiography, we compared the abilities of radiologists to detect pneumothoraces on conventional chest radiographs with their performances when using three formats of digitally obtained images. Twenty-three frontal-view chest radiographs with pneumothoraces and 22 other chest radiographs, either normal or showing miscellaneous abnormalities, were interpreted by five experienced radiologists in each of four formats: conventional film-screen chest radiographs, small-format (17.8 x 21.6 cm) computed radiographs, large-format (35.6 x 43.1 cm) computed radiographs, and digital images viewed on an interactive electronic workstation. The receiver-operating-characteristic curve areas for each observer for the four types of images were compared by a z test on a critical ratio, and the mean sensitivity and specificity values were compared by the sign rank test. The mean areas under the receiver-operating-characteristic curves ranged from 0.869 for the digital workstation to 0.915 for film-screen images. The differences observed among formats were not statistically significant. Mean specificities also were not significantly different, ranging from 0.90 for large-format computed radiographs to 0.96 for the digital workstation. Mean sensitivity ranged from 0.65 for the digital workstation to 0.82 for film-screen images. Radiologists interpreting digital workstation images were significantly less sensitive in detecting pneumothoraces than with film-screen and small-format computed images (p = .06). In this study, radiologists detected pneumothoraces equally well on conventional film-screen radiographs and digital images printed on film; however, they detected pneumothoraces less well on electronic viewing consoles. This latter finding reflects an important practical difference in the working behavior of radiologists interacting with a digital workstation.
Long-Term Adaptation to Neck/Shoulder Pain and Perceptual Performance in a Hand Laterality Motor Imagery Test

The effect of neck/shoulder pain on the performance in a hand laterality motor imagery test was studied. Responses to the Cooper and Shepard (1975, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 104 48–56) hand laterality test were explored in twenty-four individuals with chronic non-specific neck pain and twenty-one subjects with chronic neck pain of traumatic origin (whiplash-associated disorder). Twenty-two controls were also included in the study. Digitalised right- or left-hand stimuli were presented at five different stimulus angles (0°, 45° laterally, 90° laterally, 135° laterally, and 180°). The experimental task was to decide the laterality as fast and accurately as possible. The performance, both reaction time (RT) and accuracy, of the two experimental groups was contrasted with that of the control group. The main results revealed that the subjects afflicted with whiplash injury on the average exhibited a faster response pattern than symptom-free healthy controls. Despite their musculoskeletal deficits and experience of pain these volunteers also exhibited a preserved speed–accuracy tradeoff. Longer duration of time with symptoms of neck pain was, moreover, associated with progressively faster RTs. These results point to perceptual learning and may reflect different stages of adaptation to neck pain.
Mutual Fund Holdings of Credit Default Swaps: Liquidity, Yield, and Risk

Using mutual funds quarterly holdings of credit default swap (CDS) contracts from pre- to post-financial crisis, we analyze the motives for and consequences of funds' CDS investment. Funds resort to CDS selling when facing unpredictable liquidity needs and when the CDS security is liquid relative to the underlying bond, and to CDS buying as part of a "negative basis trade" when the bond is illiquid. Funds CDS strategies tilt toward yield enhancement, and smaller funds follow leading funds in risk taking. The reference entities that attracted the highest selling interest from the large funds were disproportionately large financial institutions.
Enhancing Protein Domain Detection Using Domain Co-occurrence and Domain Exclusion

Among the relevant annotations that can be attributed to a protein, domains occupy a key position. Protein domains are sequential and structural motifs that are found independently in different proteins and in different combinations. One of the most widely used domain scheme is the Pfam database which is a collection of protein domain and families. Each family in Pfam is represented by a multiple sequence alignment and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). When analyzing a new protein sequence, each Pfam HMM is used to compute a score measuring the similarity between the sequence and the domain. If the score is above a given threshold provided by Pfam, the presence of the domain can be asserted in the protein. However, when applied to proteins of organisms with high evolutionary distance from classical model organisms, this strategy may miss several domains. We recently proposed a method, the Co-Occurrence Domain Detection approach (CODD), that improves the sensitivity of Pfam domain detection by exploiting the tendency of domains to appear preferentially with a few other favorite domains in a protein. Here, we propose to integrate domain exclusion information to prune false positive domains that are in conflict with other domains of the protein. Applied to P. falciparum and L. major proteins, we show that this strategy allows to substantially reduce the proportion of false positives among the new domains predicted by CODD, while preserving as much as possible the sensitivity of the approach.
Methods for Field and Laboratory Measurement of Flowability and Setting Time of Controlled Low-Strength Materials

Flow consistency and setting time are two important properties of controlled low-strength materials (CLSM). This paper describes and evaluates several standard and non-standard methods to measure these properties. Several mixtures with a range of water-to-binder ratios were investigated through a series of field and laboratory experiments. A linear relationship was observed between the flowability measured by the flow cylinder method (ASTM D 6103) and the inverted slump cone method. Pocket penetrometer and Torvane measurements were compared to the Kelly Ball method (ASTM D 6024) for estimating sufficient bearing capacity. Pocket penetrometer resistance correlates well, but its capacity was often exceeded. Volume stability should be controlled to avoid softening of the surface and subsequent delays in measured hardening time.