Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Interaction of Bayesian Priors and Sensory Data and Its Neural Circuit Implementation in Visually Guided Movement

Sensory-motor behavior results from a complex interaction of noisy sensory data with priors based on recent experience. By varying the stimulus form and contrast for the initiation of smooth pursuit eye movements in monkeys, we show that visual motion inputs compete with two independent priors: one prior biases eye speed toward zero; the other prior attracts eye direction according to the past several days' history of target directions. The priors bias the speed and direction of the initiation of pursuit for the weak sensory data provided by the motion of a low-contrast sine wave grating. However, the priors have relatively little effect on pursuit speed and direction when the visual stimulus arises from the coherent motion of a high-contrast patch of dots. For any given stimulus form, the mean and variance of eye speed covary in the initiation of pursuit, as expected for signal-dependent noise. This relationship suggests that pursuit implements a trade-off between movement accuracy and variation, reducing both when the sensory signals are noisy. The tradeoff is implemented as a competition of sensory data and priors that follows the rules of Bayesian estimation. Computer simulations show that the priors can be understood as direction-specific control of the strength of visual-motor transmission, and can be implemented in a neural-network model that makes testable predictions about the population response in the smooth eye movement region of the frontal eye fields.
Taking Multiple-Choise Quiz by SMS on Mobile Phones Including Analyzing Property

Recently Mobile Learning (M-Learning) has attracted much attention. Due to advantages of SMS (Short Messaging Service) on mobile phones we present a safe and protected method for taking multiple-choice quizzes by using the SMS on mobile phones in this paper. In this method questions of quiz are sent to students along with their answers through some SMS messages. The students will receive their grades immediately after answering the questions and this grade is also sent to the instructor or professor along with the student's answers through an SMS Picture Message. Answers of questions and the student's grade are hidden in SMS picture message through stenography and then they are sent. The concerned data will be destroyed within the image after they are extracted from image in order to improve security and to eliminate the possibility of cheating. The instructor of lessons can improve his next quizzes through studying and investigating students' grades and their given answers. This method has been implemented using J2ME programming language on a Nokia 6230i mobile phone.
EDDIE In Financial Decision Making

This paper gives an overview of the EDDIE project. It describes the principles and applications of EDDIE in making financial decisions, including applications to share prices and indices forecasting and arbitrage. EDDIE is designed as an interactive decision tool, not a replacement of expert knowledge. Experts channel their knowledge into the system through (a) selection and preparation of data and (b) providing feedback to EDDIE. EDDIE’s main role is to explore interactions between variables and to find thresholds for the variables. Performance of EDDIE depends on both the quality of the users’ input and the efficiency of its genetic programming based search engine.
Comparative analysis of suspension systems using adaptive fuzzy control

The suspension system aims to support vehicle body. It provides passenger comfort and vehicle stability by isolating road disturbances. Passive suspension systems can't handle the tradeoff between passenger safety and vehicle stability. Active control has the ability to handle this tradeoff and provide both vehicle stability and passenger safety. Different active controllers based on adaptive Takagi Sugeno Kang (TSK) are developed for active suspension system and are simulated on full-car's model suspension in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The adaptive fuzzy controller's inference consists of different Degree of Fulfillment (DOF), differentiating control strategies compared to others, also showing importance of choosing proper DOF for selection of proper rules. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed scheme based active suspension system is compared with passive and active suspension system.
Development and Application of an ELISA Assay Using Excretion/Secretion Proteins from Epimastigote Forms of T. cruzi (ESEA Antigens) for the Diagnosis of Chagas Disease

An indirect enzyme-linked immunoabsorbent assay (ELISA) for Trypanosoma cruzi was developed using epimastigote secretion/excretion proteins (ESEA antigens) obtained from axenic culture supernatants. A panel of 120 serum samples from subjects with confirmed Chagas disease (n = 50), healthy controls (n = 50), and patients with other parasitic diseases (n = 20) was used to evaluate the new ESEA-based ELISA (ELISAESEA). This new test had excellent sensitivity (98%) and acceptable specificity (88%). Cross-reactivity was observed largely in sera from subjects with Leishmania and Ascaris infections. Using Western blotting and epimastigotes from two distinct T. cruzi isolates, several polypeptide bands with molecular masses ranging from 50 to 220 kDa were detected in pooled chagasic sera. However, the band pattern for each isolate was different. These data suggest that an inexpensive and technically simple ELISA based on ESEA antigens is a promising new tool for the diagnosis of Chagas disease.
Discovering Cyclic and Acyclic Causal Models by Independent Components Analysis

We generalize Shimizu et al’s (2006) ICA-based approach for discovering linear non-Gaussian acyclic (LiNGAM) Structural Equation Models (SEMs) from causally sufficient, continuous-valued observational data. By relaxing the assumption that the generating SEM’s graph is acyclic, we solve the more general problem of linear non-Gaussian (LiNG) SEM discovery. In the large sample limit, LiNG discovery algorithms output the set of distribution-equivalent SEMs that represent the population distribution. We also give sufficient conditions under which only one of the distribution-equivalent output SEMs is “stable”, and apply a LiNG discovery algorithm to simulated data.
EMANTIC INTEGRATION OF I NFORMATION S YSTEMS

In the previous years Information System manage only information inside the company, today a company may search and manage information of the other companies. In this scenario the problem of communication between Information Systems is of the highest importance. Up to the present moment, several types of integration have been used but all were founded on the agreement (about data to share and the exchange format) between the interested Information Systems. Today, thanks to the new technologies, it is possible that an Information System uses data of another Information System without a previous agreement. The problem is that, often, the Information System may refer to the same data but with different names. In this paper we present a methodology that, using ontology, and thus the intrinsic semantic of each data of the Information System, allow to create a global ontology useful to enable a semantic communication between Information Systems.
The HiBall Tracker: high-performance wide-area tracking for virtual and augmented environments

Our HiBall Tracking System generates over 2000 head-pose estimates per second with less than one millisecond of latency, and less than 0.5 millimeters and 0.02 degrees of position and orientation noise, everywhere in a 4.5 by 8.5 meter room. The system is remarkably responsive and robust, enabling VR applications and experiments that previously would have been difficult or even impossible. Previously we published descriptions of only the Kalman filter-based software approach that we call Single-Constraint-at-a-Time tracking. In this paper we describe the complete tracking system, including the novel optical, mechanical, electrical, and algorithmic aspects that enable the unparalleled performance.
Visualization as Seen through its Research Paper Keywords

We present the results of a comprehensive multi-pass analysis of visualization paper keywords supplied by authors for their papers published in the IEEE Visualization conference series (now called IEEE VIS) between 1990-2015. From this analysis we derived a set of visualization topics that we discuss in the context of the current taxonomy that is used to categorize papers and assign reviewers in the IEEE VIS reviewing process. We point out missing and overemphasized topics in the current taxonomy and start a discussion on the importance of establishing common visualization terminology. Our analysis of research topics in visualization can, thus, serve as a starting point to (a) help create a common vocabulary to improve communication among different visualization sub-groups, (b) facilitate the process of understanding differences and commonalities of the various research sub-fields in visualization, (c) provide an understanding of emerging new research trends, (d) facilitate the crucial step of finding the right reviewers for research submissions, and (e) it can eventually lead to a comprehensive taxonomy of visualization research. One additional tangible outcome of our work is an online query tool (http://keyvis.org/) that allows visualization researchers to easily browse the 3952 keywords used for IEEE VIS papers since 1990 to find related work or make informed keyword choices.
Math and science outcomes for students of teachers from standard and alternative pathways in Texas

Texas provides a unique opportunity to examine teachers without standard university preparation, for it prepares more teachers through alternative pathways than any other state. We find two advantages for mathematics and science teachers prepared in the standard way. First, since 2008 they have been staying in the classroom longer than those who pursued alternative routes. Second, we analyze student performance on Algebra 1 and Biology exams over the period 2012-2018. Algebra I students with experienced teachers from standard programs gain . 03 to . 05 in standard deviation units compared to students whose teachers were alternatively prepared. For Biology students there are fewer statistically significant differences, although when differences exist they almost all favor standard programs. These effects are difficult to measure in part because teachers are not assigned to teach courses with high-stakes exams at random. Nevertheless, we find strong evidence in Algebra I that students learn more when their teachers have standard preparation. In Biology there is also evidence but less compelling. Thus, we recommend that all states bolster traditional university-based teacher certification, that Texas not take drastic action to curtail alternative certification, and that other states not allow it to grow too quickly.
Temperature-aware binding for clock skew reduction based on switching activity balancing

Recently, various physical level issues are considered in advance at the stage of high-level synthesis to save cost and get better performance or lower power. Among the issues, temperature variation is widely studied, but to the best of our knowledge, the bus binding method in high-level synthesis to consider clock skew distortion due to non-uniform distribution of temperature has not been proposed. In this paper, we propose binding method to aim at reducing clock skew by balancing switching activity of bus binding, and hence, by making the distribution of temperature uniform. Experimental result shows that the proposed method obtains binding solutions having 36.5–63.5% lower variance of switching activities among all bus groups in comparison to the existing binding method that does not consider the effect of temperature variation. Consequently, our heuristic binding method effectively reduces clock skew by 19.6–46.0% for seven benchmark circuits.
Limited Feedback MU Massive MISO Systems with Differential TCQ in Temporally Correlated Channels

We propose a differential trellis coded quantization (TCQ) scheme for limited feedback massive multiple-input single-output (MISO) frequency division duplexed systems in temporally correlated channels. We consider the multi-user (MU) scenario and derive an approximation to the expected signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) with random vector quantization (RVQ) based codebook channel direction information (CDI) and a matched-filter (MF) precoding scheme at the base station (BS). Using the expected SINR approximation, we show that the number of bits required by the RVQ codebook to match even a small fraction of the perfect CDI SINR performance is very large. With such large numbers of bits, the exhaustive search required by conventional codebook approaches makes them impractical for massive MISO systems. This motivates the proposed differential TCQ scheme that uses a conventional TCQ approach to quantize the channel vector at each user with QPSK as a source constellation. Utilizing temporal correlation present in the channel, we transform the QPSK constellation at each stage in a trellis using 2D translation and scaling techniques, such that the QPSK constellation centers around the previously selected constellation point. We derive a scaling parameter for the QPSK constellation as a function of the temporal correlation and the number of BS antennas. Simulation results show that the proposed differential TCQ scheme outperforms the existing differential noncoherent TCQ (NTCQ) method, by improving the sum rate and reducing the feedback overhead of the system in temporally correlated channels.
English to Chinese Translation: How Chinese Character Matters

Word segmentation is helpful in Chinese natural language processing in many aspects. However it is showed that different word segmentation strategies do not affect the performance of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) from English to Chinese significantly. In addition, it will cause some confusions in the evaluation of English to Chinese SMT. So we make an empirical attempt to translation English to Chinese in the character level, in both the alignment model and language model. A series of empirical comparison experiments have been conducted to show how different factors affect the performance of character-level English to Chinese SMT. We also apply the recent popular continuous space language model into English to Chinese SMT. The best performance is obtained with the BLEU score 41.56, which improve baseline system (40.31) by around 1.2 BLEU score. ∗Correspondence author. †Thank all the reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions on our paper. This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61170114, and No. 61272248), the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB329401), the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (No. 13511500200), the European Union Seventh Framework Program (No. 247619), the Cai Yuanpei Program (CSC fund 201304490199 and 201304490171), and the art and science interdiscipline funds of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 14X190040031, and the Key Project of National Society Science Foundation of China, No. 15-ZDA041.
Activity based models for countrywide electric vehicle power demand calculation

Smart grid design depends on the availability of realistic data. In the near future, energy demand by electric vehicles will be a substantial component of the overall demand and peaks of required power could become critical in some regions. Transportation research has been using micro-simulation based activity-based models for traffic forecasting. The resulting trip length distribution allows to estimate to what extent internal combustion engine vehicles can be substituted by electric vehicles. Second, combining the results emerging from activity based models with assumptions on electric vehicles market share, allows to predict energy and power demand in time and space. Furthermore, smart grid management effects can be investigated using activity based models because generated schedules determine how charging periods can float in time. This paper presents results calculated for the Flanders region.
Functional Characterization of the Receiver Domain for Phosphorelay Control in Hybrid Sensor Kinases

Hybrid sensor kinase, which contains a histidine kinase (HK) domain, a receiver domain, and a histidine-containing phosphotransmitter (HPt) domain, conveys signals to its cognate response regulator by means of a His-Asp-His-Asp phosphorelay. We examined the multistep phosphorelay of a recombinant EvgAS system in Escherichia coli and performed in vitro quantitative analyses of phosphorylation by using Phos-tag SDS-PAGE. Replacement of Asp in the receiver domain of EvgS by Ala markedly promoted phosphorylation at His in the HK domain compared with that in wild-type EvgS. Similar Ala-substituted mutants of other hybrid sensor kinases BarA and ArcB showed similar characteristics. In the presence of sufficient ATP, autophosphorylation of the HK domain in the mutant progressed efficiently with nearly pseudo-first-order kinetics until the phosphorylation ratio reached a plateau value of more than 95% within 60 min, and the value was maintained until 180 min. However, both wild-type EvgS and the Ala-substituted mutant of His in the HPt domain showed a phosphorylation ratio of less than 25%, which gradually decreased after 10 min. These results showed that the phosphorylation level is regulated negatively by the receiver domain. The receiver domain therefore plays a crucial role in controlling the phosphorelay to the response regulator. Furthermore, our in vitro assays confirmed the existence of a similar hyperphosphorylation reaction in the HK domain of the EvgS mutant in which the Asp residue was replaced with Ala, confirming the validity of the control mechanism proposed from profiling of phosphorylation in vitro.
Personalized Medicine in Ocular Fibrosis: Myth or Future Biomarkers

Significance: Fibrosis-related events play a part in the pathogenesis or failure of treatment of virtually all the blinding diseases around the world, and also account for over 40% of all deaths. It is well established that the eye and other tissues of some group of patients, for example Afro-Caribbean people, scar worse than others. However, there is a current lack of reliable biomarkers to stratify the risk of scarring and postsurgical fibrosis in the eye. Recent Advances: Recent studies using genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, clinical phenotyping, and high-resolution in vivo imaging techniques have revealed potential novel biomarkers to identify and stratify patients at risk of scarring in different fibrotic eye diseases. Critical Issues: Most of the studies, to date, have been done in animals or small cohorts of patients and future research is needed to validate these results in large longitudinal human studies. Detailed clinical phenotyping and effective biobanking of patient tissues will also be critical for future biomarker research in ocular fibrosis. Future Directions: The ability to predict the risk of scarring and to tailor the antifibrotic treatment regimen to each individual patient will be an extremely useful tool clinically to prevent undertreating, or exposing patients to unnecessary treatments with potential side effects. An exciting future prospect will be to use new advances in genotyping, namely next-generation whole genome sequencing like RNA-Seq, to develop a customized gene chip in ocular fibrosis. Successful translation of future biomarkers to benefit patient care will also ultimately require a strong collaboration between academics, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies.
The impact of preadmission oral bisphosphonate use on 30-day mortality following stroke: a population-based cohort study of 100,043 patients

Purpose Bisphosphonate use has been associated with increased risk of fatal stroke. We examined the association between preadmission use of oral bisphosphonates and 30-day mortality following hospitalization for stroke. Patients and methods We conducted a nationwide population-based cohort study using medical databases and identified all patients in Denmark with a first-time hospitalization for stroke between 1 July 2004 and 31 December 2012 (N=100,043). Cox regression was used to compute adjusted hazard ratios as a measure of 30-day mortality rate ratios (MRRs) associated with bisphosphonate current use (prescription filled within 90 days prior to the stroke) or recent use (prescription filled in the 90–180 days prior to the stroke). Current use was further classified as new or long-term use. Results We found 51,982 patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS), 11,779 with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), 4,528 with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), and 31,754 with unspecified stroke. Absolute 30-day mortality risks were increased among current vs nonusers of bisphosphonates for AIS (11.9% vs 8.5%), ICH (43.2% vs 34.5%), SAH (40.3% vs 23.2%), and unspecified strokes (18.8% vs 14.0%). However, in adjusted analyses, current bisphosphonate use did not increase 30-day mortality from AIS (MRR, 0.87; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.75, 1.01); ICH (MRR, 1.05; 95% CI: 0.90, 1.23); SAH (MRR, 1.15; 95% CI: 0.83, 1.61); or unspecified stroke (MRR, 0.94; 95% CI: 0.81, 1.09). Likewise, no association with mortality was found for recent use. Adjusted analyses by type of bisphosphonate showed increased mortality following stroke among new users of etidronate (MRR, 1.40; 95% CI: 1.01, 1.93) and reduced mortality after AIS among current users of alendronate (MRR, 0.87; 95% CI: 0.74, 1.02). Conclusion We found no overall evidence that preadmission bisphosphonate use increases 30-day mortality following stroke.
A modular notation for monitoring network systems

Design of next generation network systems with predictable behavior in all situations poses a significant challenge. Monitoring of events happening at different points in a distributed environment can detect the occurrence of events that indicates significant error conditions. We use Modular Timing Diagrams (MTD) as a specification language to describe these error conditions. MTDs are a component-oriented and compositional notation. We take advantage of these features of MTDs and point out that, in many cases, a global MTD specification describing behaviors of several system components can be efficiently decomposed into a set of sub-specifications. Each of the sub-specifications describes a local monitor that is specific to the component on which the monitor is intended to run. We illustrate the compositional nature of MTDs in describing several network monitoring conditions related to network security.
Time-parameterized sensing task model for real-time tracking

This paper proposes a novel task model in which its physical and temporal parameters are specified as time-parameterized functions and their values are finally determined at the actual dispatch time. This model is clearly differentiated from the classical task model where parameters are fixed at the job release time. The new model better suits sensing tasks in tracking applications, since the sensor parameters such as field-of-view and measurement duration can be properly adjusted at the actual sensing time. The new model, however, creates the cyclic dependency between task parameters and scheduling behavior, that is, the task parameters depend on scheduling behavior and the latter in turn depends on the former. This cyclic dependency makes the schedulability check even more difficult. We handle this difficulty by iterative convergence and probabilistic schedulability envelope, which provides an efficient online schedulability check. The experimental study shows that the new model significantly improves the effective capacity of tracking systems without losing track accuracy