Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
User Modeling Combining Access Logs, Page Content and Semantics

The paper proposes an approach to modeling users of large Web sites based on combining different data sources: access logs and content of the accessed pages are combined with semantic information about the Web pages, the users and the accesses of the users to the Web site. The assumption is that we are dealing with a large Web site providing content to a large number of users accessing the site. The proposed approach represents each user by a set of features derived from the different data sources, where some feature values may be missing for some users. It further enables user modeling based on the provided characteristics of the targeted user subset. The approach is evaluated on real-world data where we compare performance of the automatic assignment of a user to a predefined user segment when different data sources are used to represent the users.
Nitrous oxide net exchange in a beech dominated mixed forest in Switzerland measured with a quantum cascade laser spectrometer

Nitrous oxide fluxes were measured at the L¨ ageren CarboEurope IP flux site over the multi-species mixed forest dominated by European beech and Norway spruce. Measurements were carried out during a four-week period in October‐November 2005 during leaf senescence. Fluxes were measured with a standard ultrasonic anemometer 5 in combination with a quantum cascade laser absorption spectrometer that measured N2O, CO2, and H2O mixing ratios simultaneously at 5Hz time resolution. To distinguish insignificant fluxes from significant ones it is proposed to use a new approach based on the significance of the correlation coe cient between vertical wind speed and mixing ratio fluctuations. This procedure eliminated roughly 56% of our half-hourly 10
The Potential of Antimicrobials to Induce Thrombocytopenia in Critically Ill Patients: Data from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background Antimicrobial-induced thrombocytopenia is frequently described in the literature among critically ill patients. Several antimicrobials have been implicated, although experimental evidence to demonstrate causality is limited. We report, using a randomized trial, the potential of antimicrobials to induce thrombocytopenia. Methods Randomized trial allocated patients to antimicrobial treatment according to standard- of-care (SOC group) or drug-escalation in case of procalcitonin increases (high-exposure group). Patients were followed until death or day 28. Thrombocytopenia defined as absolute (platelet count ≤100x109/L) or relative (≥20% decrease in platelet count). Analyses were performed in the two randomized groups and as a merged cohort. Results Of the 1147 patients with platelet data available, 18% had absolute thrombocytopenia within the first 24 hours after admission to intensive care unit and additional 17% developed this complication during follow-up; 57% developed relative thrombocytopenia during follow-up. Absolute and relative thrombocytopenia day 1-4 was associated with increased mortality (HR: 1.67 [95% CI: 1.30 to 2.14]; 1.71 [95% CI: 1.30 to 2.30], P<0.0001, respectively). Patients in the high-exposure group received more antimicrobials including piperacillin/tazobactam, meropenem and ciprofloxacin compared with the SOC group, whereas cefuroxime was used more frequently in the SOC group (p<0.05). Risk of absolute and relative thrombocytopenia (RR: 0.9 [0.7-1.3], p=0.7439; 1.2 [1.0-1.4], p=0.06; respectively), as well as absolute platelet count (daily difference, high-exposure vs. SOC -1.7 [-3.8-0.5], p=0.14) was comparable between groups. In observational analyses, use of ciprofloxacin and piperacillin/tazobactam predicted risk of relative thrombocytopenia (vs. cefuroxime, RR: 2.08 [1.48-2.92]; 1.44 [1.10-1.89], respectively), however only ciprofloxacin were associated with a reduction in absolute platelet count (p=0.0005). Conclusion High exposure to broad-spectrum antimicrobials does not result in a reduction in thrombocytopenia in critically ill patients. However, single use of ciprofloxacin, and less so piperacillin/tazobactam, may contribute to a lower platelet count. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00271752 http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00271752
Directly selected cytomegalovirus-reactive donor T cells confer rapid and safe systemic reconstitution of virus-specific immunity following stem cell transplantation.

BACKGROUND Adoptive transfer of virus-specific T cells may accelerate reconstitution of antigen-specific immunity and limit the morbidity and mortality of viral infections following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. The logistics of producing virus-specific T cells has, however, limited the application of cellular therapies, particularly following the introduction of more-recent regulatory stipulations. METHODS We investigated the ability of cytomegalovirus-specific T cells, directly isolated from donor leucapheresates on the basis of interferon γ secretion, to restore antiviral immunity in a group of 25 patients following related-donor transplantation in a single-arm phase I-II study. Selected cells were administered early following transplantation, either after the detection of cytomegalovirus DNA by polymerase chain reaction-based surveillance or prophylactically between day 40 and day 50. RESULTS Cell selection was successful in all cases, yielding a product biased towards CD4(+) over CD8(+) T cells. The target cell dose of 1 × 10(4) CD3(+) T cells/kg of recipient weight contained a median of 2840 cytomegalovirus-specific CD4(+) cells/kg and 630 cytomegalovirus-specific CD8(+) cells/kg, with a median purity of 43.9% interferon γ-secreting cells. Expansions of both CD4(+) and CD8(+) cytomegalovirus-specific T cells were observed in vivo within days of adoptive transfer. These cells were predominantly terminally differentiated effector-memory cells and showed the same T cell receptor variable β chain (TCRBV) -restriction as the infused cells. They offered protection from reinfection in the majority of patients. CONCLUSIONS These data indicate that application of cytomegalovirus-specific T cells generated by direct selection using γ-capture is both feasible and effective in a clinical environment. These simple in vitro methodologies should allow more widespread application of virus-specific T cell immunotherapies.
Discourse elements in English academic discourse

This paper presents a study of discourse elements in spoken academic discourse – a lecture – and identifies their specificities. The study seeks to identify discourse elements in a wide body of research material; to study structural, functional and pragmatic features of discourse elements in terms of the implementation of the intentions of the speaker; to identify from the auditory analysis any prosodic features of discourse elements. Discourse elements are specifically defined from the point of view of their pragmatics: the intention of the speaker influences the language of the lecture and the way in which ideas are connected with words. The study on discourse elements included several stages. Research material consisted of audio recordings of Philology lectures to students studying English as a foreign language by three native speakers of English (General American standard of pronunciation), all of whom are professors at American colleges and universities. In total, 6 lectures were recorded; they formed a wide body of research material lasting 7 hours 33 minutes. This wide body of research material consisted of 2 306 linguistic facts, i.e. discourse elements in context. From these, 150 fragments containing various discourse elements were then chosen to form a narrow body of research material lasting 40 minutes. The phonetic research consisted of auditory analysis: dividing the fragments of discourses into syntagms; defining the boundaries of syntagms; specifying pitch movement, tone level and type of scale; using perceptual gradations of each prosodic feature, etc. Prosodic marking was carried out in accordance with the method of notation adopted at the Department of English Phonetics at Moscow State Teacher Training University (1997). Scaling enabled the classification and sorting of all the studied elements (discourse elements). The authors used the following types of scales: nominative, ordinal and interval. Structural analysis proved that discourse elements have different structure and may be one-word elements and predicative phrases S+P incorporated into the structure of the academic discourse. All discourse elements can be divided into two large groups – connecting elements (connectors) and pragmatic elements. The results of the research show that the studied elements differ structurally and can perform various functions. The functions of the discourse elements, their structure, intentions of the speaker and also their position in the phrase determine their prosodic features This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rapid porting of DUSTer to Hindi

The frequent occurrence of divergences—structural differences between languages---presents a great challenge for statistical word-level alignment and machine translation. This paper describes the adaptation of DUSTer, a divergence unraveling package, to Hindi during the DARPA TIDES-2003 Surprise Language Exercise. We show that it is possible to port DUSTer to Hindi in under 3 days.
Chinese-English quasi-equivalent noun phrase definition and automatic identification

After an examination of a Chinese-English bilingual corpus with 2239 sentence pairs, a new definition of Chinese noun phrase (NP), quasi-equivalent noun phrase (equNP), is proposed with a goal of translation from Chinese NPs to English NPs. Firstly, all the equNPs in the corpus are tagged manually according to the definition in this paper. A set of part of speech (POS) templates for equNP is automatically acquired. Secondly, all the possible equNPs in a sentence are identified using the templates. These equNPs are the candidates for equNP identification. Finally, a classification process and a chunking process are carried out. In classification process, the correct equNPs are chosen from the candidates set using a maximum entropy classifier which combined POS, syntactic and semantic information. In chunking process, the equNPs in the sentence are finally chosen. On open test set, the precision is 83.75% and recall is 86.50%.
Comparison of belief propagation and iterative threshold decoding based on dynamical systems

For a special class of convolutional codes, iterative threshold decoding (ITD) has been shown by simulations to achieve the same error rate performance as belief propagation (BP). In order to get a better understanding of these iterative decoding algorithms, we describe ITD and BP as discrete-time dynamical systems. Based on the theory of dynamical systems, we compare the dynamical behavior of ITD and BP. For the special case of a linear dynamical system, the behavior can be completely characterized. In this case we show that the fixed points of both ITD and BP are globally stable but they do not coincide. The analysis is extended to the case of a continuous-time dynamical system, which represents an important step for modeling analog iterative decoders.
SMD segmentation for automated PCB recycling

Due to the complex structure and the great variability of printed circuit boards (PCBs), an accurate analysis of their material composition and consequently an efficient recycling is currently hardly possible. Facing these problems, we proposed an automated PCB recycling system with a core component for the information retrieval. As a first step towards automated recycling based on a comprehensive analysis of PCBs, the segmentation of surface-mounted devices (SMDs) was presented in this paper. Inspired by the technical background of SMDs, they were divided into two main groups: 1. small devices, such as resistors, capacitors, and 2. integrated circuits (ICs). Then assembly print-based segmentation and color distribution-based segmentation were carried out for the two groups respectively. In comparison to device template-based and solder joint-based approaches, our approach is more flexible and more reliable with respect to the variability of devices and the erosion or soiling of solder joints. As confirmed by the evaluation, satisfying results were obtained. The approach was also evaluated for different imaging conditions so that improved performance can be achieved using appropriate imaging settings.
Research perspective on supporting software engineering via physical 3D models

Building architects, but also civil or mechanical engineers often build from their designs physical 3D models for a better presentation, comprehension, and communication among stakeholders. Software engineers usually create visualizations of their software designs as digital objects to be presented on a screen only. 3D software visualization metaphors, such as the software city metaphor, provide a basis for exporting those on-screen software visualizations into physical models. This can be achieved by 3D-printers to transfer the advantages of real, physical, tangible architecture models from traditional engineering disciplines to software engineering. We present a new research perspective of using physical models to support software engineering. Furthermore, we describe four envisioned usage scenarios for physical models which provide a plethora of new research topics. To examine the benefits of our concept, we investigate the first usage scenario by evaluating the impact of using physical models on program comprehension in teams through a first controlled experiment. Since the usage of physical models had a diverging influence for our chosen task set, we report on the qualitative results in this paper. We observed that the physical models improved the team-based program comprehension process for specific tasks by initiating gesture-based interaction.
Frame semantics , metaphtonymy and compound verbs in English

As composites, compound verbs (CVs) in English raise interesting questions concerning the correlation between lexical items and frames in terms of profiling and construal. The semantic configuring of the constituency of CVs presents a specific case of special profiling of frames. It is argued here that CVs in English display three distinct patterns of frame modification: i) by constituent foregrounding (e.g. deepfry, tumble-dry, spoon-feed, etc.); ii) by spatial scenario embedding (e.g. outnumber, underscore, overindulge, etc.); and iii) by engendering an emergent blended frame (e.g. ring-fence, pussyfoot, fasttalk, etc.). The patterns are associated with metaphtonymy operating in two distinct ways: i) and ii) are metonymy-based (e.g. outperform, job-hunt) while in iii) blending actualizing a metaphoric complex is the primary mechanism (e.g. gate-crash). This property of the conceptual constituency of CVs puts them in a special position vis a vis the profiling of event schemas in “conceptual cores” (Radden and Dirven 2007). Since “[p]rofiling amounts to nothing more than the relative prominence of substructures within a conceptualization, and is inherently a matter of degree” (Langacker 1990, p. 208), compound verbs seem to occupy a fuzzy area between relational concepts and “conceptual cores”.
Characterization Results for Time-Varying Codes

Time-varying codes associate variable length code words to letters being encoded depending on their positions in the input string. These codes have been introduced in [8] as a proper extension of L codes. This paper is devoted to a further study of time-varying codes. First, we show that adaptive Huffman encodings are special cases of encodings by time-varying codes. Then, we focus on three kinds of characterization results: characterization results based on decompositions over families of sets of words, a Schutzenberger like criterion, and a Sardinas-Patterson like characterization theorem. All of them extend the corresponding characterization results known for classical variable length codes.
On Web Browsing Privacy in Anonymized NetFlows

Anonymization of network traces is widely viewed as a necessary condition for releasing such data for research purposes. For obvious privacy reasons, an important goal of trace anonymization is to suppress the recovery of web browsing activities. While several studies have examined the possibility of reconstructing web browsing activities from anonymized packet-level traces, we argue that these approaches fail to account for a number of challenges inherent in real-world network traffic, and more so, are unlikely to be successful on coarser Net-Flow logs. By contrast, we develop new approaches that identify target web pages within anonymized NetFlow data, and address many real-world challenges, such as browser caching and session parsing. We evaluate the effectiveness of our techniques in identifying front pages from the 50 most popular web sites on the Internet (as ranked by alexa.com), in both a closed-world experiment similar to that of earlier work and in tests with real network flow logs. Our results show that certain types of web pages with unique and complex structure remain identifiable despite the use of state-of-the-art anonymization techniques. The concerns raised herein pose a threat to web browsing privacy insofar as the attacker can approximate the web browsing conditions represented in the flow logs.
Peripheral Amitriptyline Suppresses Formalin-Induced Fos Expression in the Rat Spinal Cord

We examined the effects of systemically, spinally, and peripherally administered amitriptyline on formalin-induced Fos immunoreactivity in the lumbar spinal cord. Formalin (2.5%), injected subcutaneously into the rat hindpaw, increased Fos immunoreactivity in laminae I–II, III–IV, and V–VI of the dorsal L5 spinal cord. Amitriptyline, administered both systemically and spinally before formalin, increased flinching and concurrently decreased biting/licking behaviors, but neither route of administration produced any statistically significant change in Fos immunoreactivity. Amitriptyline coadministered with the formalin reduced both flinching and biting/licking behaviors, and significantly reduced Fos immunoreactivity, particularly in laminae I–II. These immunohistochemical changes reflect the net behavioral effects observed after the different routes of drug administration. The profile of amitriptyline action after peripheral administration may be of clinical importance because of the potential use of antidepressants as topical analgesics.
LDPC Coding for Non-Uniform Power-Line Channels

Irregular low-density parity-check coding is studied for frequency selective channels and discreet multi-tone (DMT) systems that are used for power-line channels. To let a long block-length code with a practical buffer delay, we protect all the symbols that are transmitted in a DMT symbol with one code. The main challenge, therefore, is the varying signal to noise ratio in different frequency tones, which normally necessitates using different codes for different frequency tones (according to their signal to noise ratios). We show that if this non-uniformity is considered in the code design process, low-density parity-check codes that approach the capacity of such frequency selective channels can he found. Compared to codes that are designed for uniform channels, our codes have a significantly smaller gap from the capacity. As an extreme case, we focus on systems that - for reducing signalling and detection complexity - use only one non-binary modulation in all frequency tones. Therefore, the soft information at the receiver experiences a dramatic non-uniform quality from bit to bit. Surprisingly, even in this case, very close-to-capacity performance can be obtained
A Redundancy-Free Approach to Schema Evolution

Changes in relational database schemas are part of the continuous improvement process of information systems. In general, iterative and incremental approaches for software development produce frequent releases in order to improve the operational environment and also attend to business or legal requirements. As an effect, such dynamic produces significant amounts of work to database administrators when applying those changes in production. The risk also increases as cumulative changes need to be manually executed in the environment. Having those issues in mind we propose an approach to automate the schema evolution, using a redundancy-free algorithm to merge cumulative changes, reducing downtimes and improving the software availability. When executed in a production environment, the proof-of-concept demonstrated a significant reduction of the amount of time to process the update, resulting in the same schema as applied by known tools.
Curbing the misuse of discretionary power in public service: Case of building plan approvals using simple checklists

Much of the misused discretionary power vested with public office bearers emanate from complicated business rules that govern the provision of public services. Without simplifying the administrative rules there is a limit to which reform of public services can be attained. E-Government, as many have noted boils down to mere replication of existing services. In this paper we discuss how public services using ICT was significantly reformed by implementing the same business rules but in a very simple way by the use of check list. Specifically we examine the process of building plan approval adopted by a large municipal body in India and discuss the transformation that resulted when the same rule was implemented using checklists. The study is useful in the way that is shows that even without taking a difficult and risky route of process and rule changes, there are viable options that have the potential to improve public services significantly.
EE 367 Project Proposal : Evaluation of Temporal Coding Motion Deblurring Against Varying Noise Statistics

Motion in scenes can cause blur artifacts that are often undesirable in images. Temporal coding of the motion in a scene can allow us to more accurately deconvolve a motion blurred image. By ”fluttering” the camera shutter open and closed during the exposure time, we change the camera’s blur kernel from a box filter to a broad-band filter. This preserves high spatial frequencies that are often lost due to motion and provides for more accurate estimation of the point spread function (PSF), improving deconvolution [6]. Moreover, utilizing multiple PSFs derived from sequential frames in the deconvolution process can result in deconvolution that is more robust to noise [2]. Considering noise during blind deconvolution can help modify the update rule of iterative deconvolution schemes [7], [3]. By applying a Gaussian or Poisson total variation prior, we can converge to a deconvolution result that is often better than with no priors. This project aims to implement a flutter shutter camera and deconvolution algorithms based on the temporal coding of motion in one or many frames, with Gaussian and Poisson total variation priors. Furthermore, it will evaluate the performance of these deconvolution schemes against varying Gaussian and Poisson noise.
Success Chances in Argument Games: A Probabilistic Approach to Legal Disputes

The outcome of a legal dispute, namely, the decision of its adjudicator, is uncertain, and both parties develop their strategies on the basis of their appreciation of the probability that the adjudicator will accept their arguments or the arguments of their adversary. Costs and gains have to be balanced in light of this uncertainty in order to identify the most convenient strategies. This paper provides a probabilistic approach embedded into an argumentation framework to capture this uncertainty and its use to determine the expected utility to engage in a legal dispute.