Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A design tool for camera-based interaction

Cameras provide an appealing new input medium for interaction. The creation of camera-based interfaces is outside the skill-set of most programmers and completely beyond the skills of most interface designers. Image Processing with Crayons is a tool for creating new camera-based interfaces using a simple painting metaphor. A transparent layers model is used to present the designer with all of the necessary information. Traditional machine learning algorithms have been modified to accommodate the rapid response time required of an interactive design tool.
Convergent Domestication of Cereal Crops by Independent Mutations at Corresponding Genetic Loci

Independent domestication of sorghum, rice, and maize involved convergent selection for large seeds, reduced disarticulation of the mature inflorescence, and daylength-insensitive flowering. These similar phenotypes are largely determined by a small number of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) that correspond closely in the three taxa. The correspondence of these QTLs transcends 65 million years of reproductive isolation. This finding supports models of quantitative inheritance that invoke relatively few genes, obviates difficulties in map-based cloning of QTLs, and impels the comparative mapping of complex pheno-types across large evolutionary distances, such as those that separate humans from rodents and domesticated mammals.
The results of ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration biopsy for evaluation of nodular thyroid disease.

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to determine whether ultrasonography (US) improves the accuracy and reduces the rate of nondiagnostic fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) of thyroid nodules. METHODS A review of 536 consecutive patients evaluated for nodular thyroid disease from 1990 to 2001 was completed to determine the results for US vs palpation-guided FNAB. RESULTS FNAB was used to evaluate 458 patients. US-guided FNAB was performed in 66 (12%) patients: 48 with a nonpalpable nodule, 14 with nondiagnostic standard FNAB, and 4 with a palpable nodule. US-guided FNAB was nondiagnostic in 15 (23%) patients. There were no false-positive or false-negative results. Standard FNAB was performed in 407 patients, 57 (14%) of whom had a nondiagnostic result. There were 2 (3%) false-positive and 3 (1.6%) false-negative results. In 14 patients with a nondiagnostic standard FNAB, US-guided FNAB yielded an adequate specimen in 7 (50%). Nodules evaluated by standard FNAB were 4.1 +/- 0.1 cm (mean +/- SEM) in size compared with 2.5 +/- 0.1 cm for nodules evaluated by US-guided FNAB (P <.05). CONCLUSIONS US improves the diagnostic yield in selected patients with nondiagnostic standard FNAB. The higher frequency of nondiagnostic US-guided FNAB was related to its selective use in patients with smaller nodules.
Leukocyte-reduced red blood cell transfusions in patients with anemia and human immunodeficiency virus infection: the Viral Activation Transfusion Study: a randomized controlled trial.

CONTEXT Allogeneic blood transfusions have immunomodulatory effects and have been associated with activation of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and cytomegalovirus (CMV) in vitro and of HIV in small pilot studies. Retrospective studies suggest that transfusions adversely affect the clinical course of HIV. Data in selected non-HIV-infected patients requiring blood transfusion have suggested clinical benefit with leukocyte-reduced red blood cells (RBCs). OBJECTIVE To compare the effects of leukoreduced and unmodified RBC transfusions on survival, complications of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, and relevant laboratory markers in HIV-infected patients. DESIGN AND SETTING Double-blind randomized controlled trial conducted in 11 US academic medical centers from July 1995 through June 1999, with a median follow-up of 12 months (24 months in survivors). PATIENTS A total of 531 persons infected with HIV and CMV, aged 14 years or older, who required transfusions for anemia; 259 received leukoreduced transfusions and 262 received unmodified transfusions (10 did not receive the planned transfusion). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Survival and change in plasma HIV RNA level 7 days after transfusion, compared by type of transfusion. RESULTS At entry, the groups were similar in demographic, clinical, and relevant laboratory characteristics. A total of 3864 RBC units were transfused. Two hundred eighty-nine deaths occurred (151 with leukoreduced transfusion; 138 with unmodified transfusion); median survival was 13.0 and 20.5 months, respectively (relative hazard [RH], 1.20; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.95-1.51; log-rank P =.12). Analyses adjusted for prognostic factors suggested possible worse survival with leukoreduction (RH, 1.35; 95% CI, 1.06-1.72). There was no difference in time to new opportunistic event/death or frequency of transfusion reactions. No changes in plasma HIV RNA level were seen in either group at days 7, 14, 21, or 28, even in patients not taking antiretroviral drugs. There were no differences in trends between groups in CMV DNA, CD4 cell counts, activated (CD38% or human leukocyte antigen-DR) CD8 cell counts, or plasma cytokine levels. CONCLUSIONS We found no evidence of HIV, CMV, or cytokine activation following blood transfusion in patients with advanced HIV infection. Leukoreduction provided no clinical benefit in these patients. These data demonstrate the importance of conducting controlled studies of effects of leukoreduction in different patient populations, since smaller studies in other patient populations have suggested leukoreduction may be beneficial.
Characterization of Endogenous Neuropeptide Y in Rat Hippocampus and Its Metabolism by Nanospray Mass Spectrometry*

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is a 36-residue-long neuropeptide which has been implicated in the regulation of feeding behavior and modulation of the circadian rhythm. We identified the primary structure of the endogenous NPY-immunoreactive material in the rat hippocampus using a combination of chromatographic techniques and nanospray mass spectrometry. The major component in the brain tissue corresponded to the authentic amidated form of NPY(1-36). The fate of NPY in the central nervous system was studied by subjecting pure peptide to the protease(s) present in hippocampal synaptosomes to reveal potential cleavage site(s). NPY was efficiently metabolized with a single cleavage between Leu30-Ile31. Thus, processing of NPY resulted in formation of the C-terminally truncated fragment NPY(1-30) and its counterpart NPY(31-36). The enzyme revealed properties of aspartic protease, being blocked by pepstatin and having a pH optimum between 4 and 5. The data clarify the structure of NPY and its inactivation pathway in the brain, which is different from that found in the periphery, and may have important consequences in vivo.
A Mechanistic Interpretation for Charge Storage in Conducting Polymers

This research focuses on the characterization of active redox sites in p-doped conducting polymers (CP) and applies this knowledge to develop a mechanistic interpretation for charge storage in CPs. The scientific goal of this thesis is to develop a novel understanding of ion transport and associated mechanics in CPs and leverage this knowledge to design electrodes with templating techniques that can produce polypyrrole-based membranes with charge storage capacity near its theoretical limit and yet undergo minimal mechanical strain during charging and discharging cycles. The specific translation of ion transport into mechanical deformation is analyzed using static and dynamic characterization techniques. The polypyrrole (PPy) membranes from this research can be fabricated into a flexible supercapacitor to demonstrate its advantages in energy storage applications. The hypothesis of this research is that polypyrrole membranes fabricated using phospholipid vesicles as soft-templates have higher specific surface area/volume (SA:V) ratio and decreased density, resulting in reduced mechanical strain. Additionally it is proposed that morphology effects ion ingress/egress and distribution throughout the polymer matrix. The higher SA:V ratio and improved ion transport kinetics is expected to lead to higher storage capacity, smaller strain during
Navigating the chemical space of dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors

This study represents the first large-scale study on the chemical space of inhibitors of dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP4), which is a potential therapeutic protein target for the treatment of diabetes mellitus. Herein, a large set of 2,937 compounds evaluated for their ability to inhibit DPP4 was compiled from the literature. Molecular descriptors were generated from the geometrically optimized low-energy conformers of these compounds at the semiempirical AM1 level. The origins of DPP4 inhibitory activity were elucidated from computed molecular descriptors that accounted for the unique physicochemical properties inherently present in the active and inactive sets of compounds as defined by their respective half maximal inhibitory concentration values of less than 1 μM and greater than 10 μM, respectively. Decision tree analysis revealed the importance of molecular weight, total energy of a molecule, topological polar surface area, lowest unoccupied molecular orbital, and number of hydrogen-bond donors, which correspond to molecular size, energy, surface polarity, electron acceptors, and hydrogen bond donors, respectively. The prediction model was subjected to rigorous independent testing via three external sets. Scaffold and chemical fragment analysis was also performed on these active and inactive sets of compounds to shed light on the distinguishing features of the functional moieties. Docking of representative active DPP4 inhibitors was also performed to unravel key interacting residues. The results of this study are anticipated to be useful in guiding the rational design of novel and robust DPP4 inhibitors for the treatment of diabetes.
Two-Dimensional Stable Blind Grasping under the Gravity Effect

This paper is aiming at showing a sensory-motor coordination control scheme that realizes stable pinching of rigid objects with parallel or non-parallel flat surfaces movable in 2-dimensional vertical plane by a pair of robot fingers with hemispherical ends. The proposed control signal is composed of gravity compensation for fingers, damping shaping, exertion of forces to the object from opposite directions, generation of moments for rotational moment balancing, and regressors for estimating unknown steady-state terms, all of which neither need the knowledge of object parameters nor use any object sensing data. In other words, stable grasping can be realized by using only finger joint sensing in a blind manner without using force sensors and tactile sensing. Stability of pinching motion with convergence to the state of force/torque balance is shown through computer simulations and is also proved theoretically.
Genetic Programming for the Automatic Inference of Graph Models for Complex Networks

Complex networks are becoming an integral tool for our understanding of an enormous variety of natural and artificial systems. A number of human-designed network generation procedures have been proposed that reasonably model specific real-life phenomena in structure and dynamics. Consequently, breakthroughs in genetics, medicine, epidemiology, neuroscience, telecommunications, and the social sciences have recently resulted. A graph model is an algorithm capable of constructing arbitrarily sized networks, whose end structure will exhibit certain statistical and structural properties. The process of deriving an accurate graph model is very time intensive and challenging and may only yield highly accurate models for very specific phenomena. An automated approach based on genetic programming was recently proposed by the authors. However, this initial system suffered from a number of drawbacks, including an under-emphasis on creating hub vertices, the requirement of user intervention to determine objective weights, and the arbitrary approach toward selecting the most representative model from a population of candidate models. In this paper, we propose solutions to these problems and show experimentally that the new system represents a significant improvement and is very capable of reproducing existing common graph models from even a single small initial network.
Object discovery in 3D scenes via shape analysis

We present a method for discovering object models from 3D meshes of indoor environments. Our algorithm first decomposes the scene into a set of candidate mesh segments and then ranks each segment according to its “objectness” - a quality that distinguishes objects from clutter. To do so, we propose five intrinsic shape measures: compactness, symmetry, smoothness, and local and global convexity. We additionally propose a recurrence measure, codifying the intuition that frequently occurring geometries are more likely to correspond to complete objects. We evaluate our method in both supervised and unsupervised regimes on a dataset of 58 indoor scenes collected using an Open Source implementation of Kinect Fusion [1]. We show that our approach can reliably and efficiently distinguish objects from clutter, with Average Precision score of . 92. We make our dataset available to the public.
Probabilistic Supervisory Control of Probabilistic Discrete Event Systems

This paper considers supervisory control of probabilistic discrete event systems (PDESs). PDESs are modeled as generators of probabilistic languages. The supervisory control problem considered is to find, if possible, a supervisor under whose control the behavior of a plant is identical to a given probabilistic specification. The probabilistic supervisors we employ are a generalization of the deterministic ones previously employed in the literature. At any state, the supervisor enables/disables events with certain probabilities. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such a supervisor, and an algorithm for its computation are presented.
Novel hazard-free majority voter for n-modular redundancy-based fault tolerance in asynchronous circuits

N -modular redundancy (NMR) is the simplest and most effective fault-tolerant design method for integrated circuits, where N copies of a circuit are employed and a majority voter produces the voted output. Asynchronous circuits, however, exhibit various characteristics that limit the applicability of NMR. Specifically, the hazard-free property of the output in these circuits must be preserved when hardware providing fault tolerance, such as a majority voter, is added. In this work, we first demonstrate that a typical majority voter design would fail to preserve the hazard-free property of its response. We then propose a hazard-free majority voter design for the triple-modular redundancy fault-tolerance design paradigm, which enters an output-holding state to preserve the output value when transient errors may be sensitised to its inputs. By exploring various conditions to exit from the output-holding state, we describe several extensions of the voter into an NMR one, each yielding a distinct implementation with different tolerance characteristics and area cost. We generalise this extension based on the exit condition and analyse the associated tolerance capability of the extended NMR voter. Finally, the proposed hazard-free voter is simulated using HSPICE, and detailed area cost formulations are derived for the proposed voter designs.
A Nonparametric Clustering Algorithm with a Quantile-Based Likelihood Estimator

Clustering is a representative of unsupervised learning and one of the important approaches in exploratory data analysis. By its very nature, clustering without strong assumption on data distribution is desirable. Information-theoretic clustering is a class of clustering methods that optimize information-theoretic quantities such as entropy and mutual information. These quantities can be estimated in a nonparametric manner, and information-theoretic clustering algorithms are capable of capturing various intrinsic data structures. It is also possible to estimate information-theoretic quantities using a data set with sampling weight for each datum. Assuming the data set is sampled from a certain cluster and assigning different sampling weights depending on the clusters, the cluster-conditional information-theoretic quantities are estimated. In this letter, a simple iterative clustering algorithm is proposed based on a nonparametric estimator of the log likelihood for weighted data sets. The clustering algorithm is also derived from the principle of conditional entropy minimization with maximum entropy regularization. The proposed algorithm does not contain a tuning parameter. The algorithm is experimentally shown to be comparable to or outperform conventional nonparametric clustering methods.
At least five regions of imbalance on 6q in breast tumors, combining losses and gains

The long arm of chromosome 6 is frequently rearranged in human cancer. In breast cancer, allelotyping studies have indicated the existence of three to four distinct regions of allelic imbalance. Chromosome transfer studies have shown the presence of several growth inhibiting or senescence promoting genes in the segment between 6q13 and 6q27. Moreover, results from comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) analyses have indicated that 6q was indeed a site of chromosomal losses, but that it was also involved in a substantial number of gains. In the present work, we allelotyped 178 pairs of breast tumor and normal tissue DNAs using 30 CA repeat markers from the Genethon collection. Seventy‐six percent of the tumors in our panel displayed allelic imbalance (AI) of at least one locus, but patterns of AI could be complex. Whereas 11 tumors showed AI at all markers tested, 57 presented zebra profiles, and 28 showed AI at one site only. We characterized five distinct domains of AI defined, from centromere to telomere, by D6S300 (domain 1), D6S434 (domain 2), D6S261 (domain 3), D6S314‐D6S409 (domain 4), and D6S441‐D6S415 (domain 5). Some of the domains could be narrowed down to intervals of 1cM or less. We performed CGH analysis on a subset of 34 tumors presenting AI of variable extent at 6q. In 10/34 tumors, CGH did not reveal any anomaly on 6q. Most of these presented AI on short intervals, thus being below the detection threshold by CGH. Of the remaining 24 tumors presenting anomalies by CGH, 11 presented gains involving all or portions of 6q and 15 losses (2 presented combined losses and gains). By CGH, the 6q21–22 region was most commonly involved in gains, whereas 6q13–14 and 6q25–27 were frequently lost. Thus, allelic imbalances on 6q can either represent a gain or a loss depending on the region involved. Genes Chromosomes Cancer 27:76–84, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Prevalence of Helicobacter pylori infection among preschool children in Latvia: no significant decrease in prevalence during a ten year period

Aims: Published data show a trend of decreasing prevalence of Helicobacter pylori in Eastern European countries due to socioeconomic changes. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of H. pylori infection among children in Latvia and to compare these results with previous studies in the same population. The risk factors associated with infection were also analysed. Methods: Preschool children in kindergartens and primary health care centres were investigated using a stool antigen test. Their parents were asked to fill out a questionnaire about possible risk factors. Statistical analysis included Pearson’s χ2 test and linear regression analysis. Results: The prevalence of H. pylori infection determined by the monoclonal stool antigen test in children aged 1–6 years (median 5 years) was 15.5% (15/101) (95% confidence interval 8.67–23.48%). In the regression analysis, H. pylori positivity was significantly negatively associated with the consumption of imported fruit at least once per week (p=0.02). Conclusions: The prevalence of H. pylori in the studied population has not decreased significantly during the last decade and is still associated with socioeconomic factors. The role of some dietary factors (e.g. the consumption of fruit) in the spread of infection should be studied further.
QUANTITATIVE ELECTROMYOGRAPHIC CHANGES ASSOCIATED WITH MUSCULAR WEAKNESS

It has been shown that when a human muscle contracts the mean voltage of the electromyogram recorded from its surface increases with the force of the contraction (Bayer and Flechtenmacher, 1950; Inman, Ralston, Saunders, Feinstein, and Wright, 1952; Lippold, 1952). The relationship between tension and mean voltage is linear provided the contraction is isometric (Lippold, 1952). With an isotonic contraction the voltage depends also on the velocity of shortening of the muscle (Bigland and Lippold, 1954) so that the relationship only remains linear if that is held constant. If a muscle is fatigued by a prolonged isometric contraction the relationship between voltage and tension remains linear but is of a different slope. More electrical activity is associated with a given tension in the fatigued state (Edwards and Lippold, 1956). This is also true if the fatigue results from isotonic exercise (Scherrer, Samson, and Paleologue, 1954). Under standardized conditions it is possible to record similar voltage/tension curves from the same subject on different occasions (Lenman, 1959). The experiments described here were carried out to determine the range of slope for the curves relating mean voltage and tension in the upper limb muscles of healthy subjects and of patients with weak muscles resulting from neurological or muscular disease.
Improving Melt Strength of Polylactic Acid

Abstract Melt strength of polylactic acid (PLA) was improved through various modifications including grafting, crosslinking, chain extension, blending, plasticizing and nucleation. The results showed that melt strength was increased, to varying degrees, by crosslinking, chain extension and blending. In addition, melt strain (detected by velocity) was increased by chain extension, blending with elastomer, and plasticizing, but was decreased by crosslinking. The molecular weights, thermal properties and viscosity of the modified PLAs were also studied to investigate the causes of the observed variations in melt strength. Viscosity results generally corresponded with that of melt strength, but not with that of melt strain. With the exception of plasticizing and nucleation, the modifications had no significant effect on the thermal properties of PLA. The molecular weight (in particular the extremely large molecules representing by Mz) and the polydispersity of PLA were significantly increased after crosslinking and chain extension, which accounts for the observed increase in melt strength.