Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Polar Operators for Structured Sparse Estimation

Structured sparse estimation has become an important technique in many areas of data analysis. Unfortunately, these estimators normally create computational difficulties that entail sophisticated algorithms. Our first contribution is to uncover a rich class of structured sparse regularizers whose polar operator can be evaluated efficiently. With such an operator, a simple conditional gradient method can then be developed that, when combined with smoothing and local optimization, significantly reduces training time vs. the state of the art. We also demonstrate a new reduction of polar to proximal maps that enables more efficient latent fused lasso.
Hotel Recommendation System based on Review and Context Information: a Collaborative filtering Appro

Due to the increment of different formats of online expressions such as reviews, ratings, and recommendation, it is getting more difficult to identify users’ preferences toward the products. A large number of reviews can be generated and diffused by online users in travel booking websites. A set of Recommendation Systems (RSs) has emerged to help consumers to filter items based on their preferences. The Collaborative Filtering (CF) based approach is one of the most popular techniques of the RS; however, it also suffers from several fundamental problems such as data sparsity, cold start, shortage, and rating bias. This study proposes a context-aware hotel recommendation (CAPH) approach; using the context-aware information to provide personalized hotel recommendation system. This research considers recommending hotels based on the hotel features and traveler’s type. Experimental data is collected from Tripadvior.com during the period of 2015 to 2016. The evaluations of system accuracy will be conducted and then compared with the user-based / item-based CF model.
Multi-level K-means text clustering technique for topic identification for competitor intelligence

Proliferation of web as an easily accessible information resource has led many corporations to gather competitor intelligence from the internet. While collection of such information is easy from internet, the collation and structuring of them for perusal of business decision makers, is a real trouble. Text clustering based topic identification techniques are expected to be very useful for such application. Using appropriate clustering technologies, the competitor intelligence corpus, gathered from the web, can be divided into topical groups and henceforth the analysis of this information becomes comparatively easier for the managers. This paper presents a study on the effectiveness of standard K-means text clustering algorithm applied at multiple levels, in a top-down, divide-and-conquer fashion, on competitor intelligence corpus, created from publicly available sources on the web, such as news, blogs, research papers etc. The paper also demonstrates the capability of Multi-level K-means (ML-KM) clustering technique to determine the optimal number of clusters as part of clustering process. The cluster validity metric used to determine cluster quality has also been explained along with other user-controlled configuration parameters. It is empirically found that ML-KM technique also addresses one problem of stand-alone standard K-means (S-KM), which is its bias towards convex, spherical clusters, resulting in bigger clusters subsuming smaller ones. This specific advantage of ML-KM over stand-alone S-KM to detect smaller clusters, makes it more suitable for clustering competitor intelligence related text corpus where niche, smaller clusters can actually lead to important findings. The experimental results are presented for both ML-KM and stand-alone S-KM clustering techniques based on competitor intelligence corpus as well as the standard Reuters corpus.
Trop-2 is up-regulated in invasive prostate cancer and displaces FAK from focal contacts

In this study, we show that the transmembrane glycoprotein Trop-2 is up-regulated in human prostate cancer (PCa) with extracapsular extension (stages pT3/pT4) as compared to organ-confined (stage pT2) PCa. Consistent with this evidence, Trop-2 expression is found to be increased in metastatic prostate tumors of Transgenic Adenocarcinoma of Mouse Prostate mice and to strongly correlate with α5β1 integrin levels. Using PCa cells, we show that Trop-2 specifically associates with the α5 integrin subunit, as binding to α3 is not observed, and that Trop-2 displaces focal adhesion kinase from focal contacts. In support of the role of Trop-2 as a promoter of PCa metastatic phenotype, we observe high expression of this molecule in exosomes purified from Trop-2-positive PCa cells. These vesicles are then found to promote migration of Trop-2-negative PCa cells on fibronectin, an α5β1 integrin/focal adhesion kinase substrate, thus suggesting that the biological function of Trop-2 may be propagated to recipient cells. In summary, our findings show that Trop-2 promotes an α5β1 integrin-dependent pro-metastatic signaling pathway in PCa cells and that the altered expression of Trop-2 may be utilized for early identification of capsule-invading PCa.
Structural Atomic Representation for Classification

Recently, a large family of representation-based classification methods have been proposed and attracted great interest in pattern recognition and computer vision. This paper presents a general framework, termed as atomic representation-based classifier (ARC), to systematically unify many of them. By defining different atomic sets, most popular representation-based classifiers (RCs) follow ARC as special cases. Despite good performance, most RCs treat test samples separately and fail to consider the correlation between the test samples. In this paper, we develop a structural ARC (SARC) based on Bayesian analysis and generalizing a Markov random field-based multilevel logistic prior. The proposed SARC can utilize the structural information among the test data to further improve the performance of every RC belonging to the ARC framework. The experimental results on both synthetic and real-database demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Speech feature extraction method representing periodicity and aperiodicity in sub bands for robust speech recognition

This paper proposes a feature extraction method that represents both the periodicity and aperiodicity of speech for robust speech recognition. The development of this feature extraction method was motivated by findings in speech perception research. With this method, the speech sound is filtered by Gammatone filter banks, and then the output of each filter is comb filtered. Individual comb filters designed for each output signal of the Gammatone filter are used to divide the output of each filter into its periodic and aperiodic features in the sub band. The power suppressed by comb filtering is considered to be a periodic feature, whereas the power of the residue after comb filtering is considered to be an aperiodic feature. This method uses both features as the feature parameters for automatic speech recognition. A preliminary experiment using a five vowel recognition task designed to compare the proposed approach with the conventional MFCC-based feature extraction method shows that the proposed method improves vowel recognition rates by as much as 14.7 % in the presence of pink noise or a harmonic complex tone interferer. An evaluation experiment undertaken using the Aurora-2J database (Japanese noisy digit recognition database) to compare the proposed approach with the MFCC-based conventional (baseline) feature extraction method shows that the proposed method reduces the word error rate by as much as 59.62 %, with an average value of 18.21 %.
Crystal structure of a c-kit promoter quadruplex reveals the structural role of metal ions and water molecules in maintaining loop conformation

We report here the 1.62 Å crystal structure of an intramolecular quadruplex DNA formed from a sequence in the promoter region of the c-kit gene. This is the first reported crystal structure of a promoter quadruplex and the first observation of localized magnesium ions in a quadruplex structure. The structure reveals that potassium and magnesium ions have an unexpected yet significant structural role in stabilizing particular quadruplex loops and grooves that is distinct from but in addition to the role of potassium ions in the ion channel at the centre of all quadruplex structures. The analysis also shows how ions cluster together with structured water molecules to stabilize the quadruplex arrangement. This particular quadruplex has been previously studied by NMR methods, and the present X-ray structure is in accord with the earlier topology assignment. However, as well as the observations of potassium and magnesium ions, the crystal structure has revealed a highly significant difference in the dimensions of the large cleft in the structure, which is a plausible target for small molecules. This difference can be understood by the stabilizing role of structured water networks.
ACTION INTEGRALS AND ENERGY SURFACES OF THE KOVALEVSKAYA TOP

The different types of energy surfaces are identified for the Kovalevskaya problem of rigid body dynamics, on the basis of a bifurcation analysis of Poincare surfaces of section. The organization of their foliation by invariant tori is qualitatively described in terms of Poincare-Fomenko stacks. The individual tori are then analyzed for sets of independent closed paths, using a new algorithm based on Arnold’s proof of the Liouville theorem. Once these paths are found, the action integrals can be calculated. Energy surfaces are constructed in the space of action variables, for six characteristic values of energy. The data are presented in terms of color graphs that give an intuitive access to this highly complex integrable system.
Coarse-Grained Online Monitoring of BTI Aging by Reusing Power-Gating Infrastructure

In this paper, we present a novel coarse-grained technique for monitoring online the bias temperature instability (BTI) aging of circuits by exploiting their power gating infrastructure. The proposed technique relies on monitoring the discharge time of the virtual-power-network during standby operations, the value of which depends on the threshold voltage of the CMOS devices in a power-gated design (PGD). It does not require any distributed sensors, because the virtual-power-network is already distributed in a PGD. It consists of a hardware block for measuring the discharge time concurrently with normal standby operations and a processing block for estimating the BTI aging status of the PGD according to collected measurements. Through SPICE simulation, we demonstrate that the BTI aging estimation error of the proposed technique is less than 1% and 6.2% for PGDs with static operating frequency and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, respectively. Its area cost is also found negligible. The power gating minimum idle time (MIT) cost induced by the energy consumed for monitoring the discharge time is evaluated on two scalar machine models using either x86 or ARM instruction sets. It is found less than $1.3\times $ and $1.45\times $ the original power gating MIT, respectively. We validate the proposed technique through accelerated aging experiments conducted with five actual chips that contain an ARM cortex M0 processor, manufactured with a 65 nm CMOS technology.
Characterization of lead zirconate titanate piezoceramic using high frequency ultrasonic spectroscopy

Doped piezoceramic lead zircanate titanate has been characterized in the frequency range of 20–60 MHz using ultrasonic spectroscopy. Theoretical analyses were performed for the reflection and refraction of acoustic waves at the interface of water-piezoelectric ceramic. The incident directions of the wave were chosen to be appropriate for ultrasonic spectroscopy measurements. Shear wave spectrum was obtained through mode conversion using a pair of longitudinal transducers submerged in water. The phase velocity shows linear dependence on frequency while the attenuation may be described by a second order polynomial of frequency in the frequency range investigated. The Kramers–Kronig relation between ultrasonic phase velocity and attenuation was compared to measured results.
Automated allocation and configuration of dual stack IP networks

The manual configuration and management of a modern network infrastructure is an increasingly complex task. This complexity is caused by factors including heterogeneity, a high degree of change and dependencies between configuration parameters. Due to increasing complexity, manual configuration has become time consuming and error prone. This paper proposes an automatic configuration tool for dual stack IP networks that addresses these issues by using high level abstractions to model the network topology and key parameters. From this high level configuration model, low level configuration files can be generated and deployed. A key parameter specified in the high level model is the network prefix of the entire network. When translating a configuration model to configuration files, IPv4 and IPv6 subnets need to be allocated. We provide an allocation algorithm to do this allocation in the most efficient way. Evaluation of our approach shows that there is a significant increase in efficiency compared to manual configuration.
Anticaries and antiadhesive properties of food constituents and plant extracts and implications for oral health.

Abstract The aim of this chapter is to review the knowledge acquired on those food constituents and plant extracts that exert anticaries and/or antiplaque activity by inhibition of cell growth, adhesion and virulence factors of either mutans streptococci or periodontopathogenic bacteria. The role of the phenolic components is emphasized. The potentially important implications of these studies for human oral health are then discussed together with the possible mode of administration of the compounds.
Liquid metal biomaterials: a newly emerging area to tackle modern biomedical challenges

Conventional biomaterials, such as metals, polymers, composites and ceramics, may not work well when facing certain tough medical challenges. As an alternative, body-temperature liquid metals, such as gallium, or its alloys are recently emerging as new generation functional materials which display many unconventional properties superior to traditional biomaterials, i.e. high fluidity, excellent electrical and thermal conductivities, good biocompatibility, sufficient radiopacity, controllable behaviour, easy manufacture and low cost. This article aims to outline a new biomedical category: liquid metal biomaterials. Representative applications enabled by liquid metal biomaterials from both therapeutic and diagnostic aspects were reviewed. Furthermore, related efforts and perspective for future development of employing liquid metals to resolve modern biomedical tough issues were discussed. With continuous technical progresses and fundamental discoveries, liquid metals are expected to offer more and more outstanding merits as a new class of biomaterials which are promising a generalised way towards resolving biomedical challenges.
Total Flavone of Rhododendron Improves Cerebral Ischemia Injury by Activating Vascular TRPV4 to Induce Endothelium-Derived Hyperpolarizing Factor-Mediated Responses

Background Total flavonoids of Rhododendron (TFR) is extracted from Rhododendron, a herbal medicine widely used in China. The main components are flavone compounds such as warfarin, rutin, quercetin, and hyperoside. We investigated the role of TRPV4 channel in the TFR induced endothelium-dependent hyperpolarizing factor- (EDHF-) mediated responses against ischemia/reperfusion injury (IR) in cerebral IR (CIR) rats. Methods The morphological changes of cerebral cortex, the relaxation of cerebral basal artery (CBA), and cell membrane potential recording were studied in CIR rats. The outward potassium current in smooth muscle cell was recorded by whole-cell patch clamp recording. The protein expression of TRPV4, SKca, and IKca was determined. Confocal laser was used to measure the Ca2+ fluorescence intensity. Results After treatment with TFR, the number of pyramidal cells in brain tissue increased and the number of empty or lightly stained cells decreased and these effects were eliminated by using HC-067047, Apamin, or TRAM-34. TFR induced and EDHF-mediated dilatation and hyperpolarization in CBA were also attenuated by using these inhibitors. The increased outward current density elicited by TFR in acutely isolated CBA smooth muscle cells was abolished by using TRAM-34 and Apamin. TFR upregulated the protein expression of TRPV4, SKca, and IKca that was also eliminated by these inhibitors. Laser scanning showed that the increased mean fluorescence intensity of Ca2+ by CIR was decreased by using TFR and that this effect was again eliminated by the above inhibitors. Conclusions We conclude that in the CBA of the CIR rats the protective effect of TFR on ischemic cerebrovascular injury may be related to the activation of the TRPV4 in both endothelium and smooth muscle by increasing its expression and activity. The activation of TRPV4 channel in the endothelium may be linked to the opening of endothelial IKca/SKca channels that induces EDHF-mediated relaxation and hyperpolarization in the smooth muscle cell. In addition, the activation of TRPV4 in the smooth muscle cell in CBA may be linked with the activation of BKCa channel through a TRPV4-dependent pathway, reduce Ca2+ concentration in the cell, and relaxes the vessel. These findings may form a new therapeutic target for protection of ischemic brain injury and facilitate the use of Chinese medicine in brain protection.
On a source-coding problem with two channels and three receivers

This paper treats the problem of communicating a memoryless unit-variance Gaussian source to three receivers. Two channels are available, each with a separate receiver. A third receiver has the outputs of both channels available. We obtain an expression for the simultaneously achievable distortions (mean-squared error). This problem applies to the following situation: Assume that high-quality reproduction of a source is desired at a single receiver which is connected to the source over a pair of links operating in parallel. Further assume that the links are unreliable in that either may fail, and that the source encoder is unaware of the failures. One can then ask how “robust” a system designed for this situation can be. That is, what are the limits on the fidelity achievable when both links are functioning if graceful degradation is required during the failure of either link? An inverse relation between performance in the two modes is obtained in the sense that, as performance in the presence of both links approaches its theoretical optimum, average distortion during failures becomes large. Conversely, if near-ideal performance during link failures is desired, then the distortion achieved when both links operate is far from its optimum value.
Fast procedure calls

A mechanism for control transfers should handle a variety of applications (e.g., procedure calls and returns, coroutine transfers, exceptions, process switches) in a uniform way. It should also allow an implementation in which the common cases of procedure call and return are extremely fast, preferably as fast as unconditional jumps in the normal case. This paper describes such a mechanism and methods for its efficient implementation.
Appetite control: methodological aspects of the evaluation of foods

This report describes a set of scientific procedures used to assess the impact of foods and food ingredients on the expression of appetite (psychological and behavioural). An overarching priority has been to enable potential evaluators of health claims about foods to identify justified claims and to exclude claims that are not supported by scientific evidence for the effect cited. This priority follows precisely from the principles set down in the PASSCLAIM report. The report allows the evaluation of the strength of health claims, about the effects of foods on appetite, which can be sustained on the basis of the commonly used scientific designs and experimental procedures. The report includes different designs for assessing effects on satiation as opposed to satiety, detailed coverage of the extent to which a change in hunger can stand alone as a measure of appetite control and an extensive discussion of the statistical procedures appropriate for handling data in this field of research. Because research in this area is continually evolving, new improved methodologies may emerge over time and will need to be incorporated into the framework. One main objective of the report has been to produce guidance on good practice in carrying out appetite research, and not to set down a series of commandments that must be followed.
Learning Science through Collaborative Visualization over the Internet

Ten years ago, we launched the Learning through Collaborative Visualization, or CoVis Project. "Collaborative visualization" refers to development of scientific knowledge that is mediated by scientific visualization tools in a collaborative learning context. Funded by the National Science Foundation as an advanced networking testbed, our partnership of Northwestern University, Bellcore, Ameritech, the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Atmospheric Sciences Department/National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) sought to design, implement and research the promises and problems of a distributed multimedia science learning environment that used broadband desktop videoconferencing and screen sharing, scientific visualization tools and distributed datasets, virtual field trips, scientist telementoring, and a Collaboratory Notebook for enabling project-based learning of science in the high school using these distributed human and technical resources. Our project vision was to establish collaborative technology learning environments, or "collaboratories" that would enable projectenhanced science learning among remote project partners using advanced telecommunication networks. For example, our collaboration with NCSA scientists provided learners with access to subject-matter experts, visualization tools and vast databases in the field of atmospheric sciences. Virtual visits using wireless video over the Internet to Exploratorium exhibits helped motivate student questions about central scientific phenomena. At its peak of use, the CoVis network was in use by thousands of teachers throughout the United States. The project developments were transitioned in 1997 as a set of resources that continue to be elaborated in the LeTUS Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools based at Northwestern and University of Michigan, which is investigating in partnership with the Chicago and Detroit public school systems how to support urban school teachers in using project-based inquiry as their core approach to teaching earth and environmental sciences at the middle and high school level. In this chapter, after providing a pedagogical background that lays out the rationale for bringing together developments in the sciences of learning with advances in high performance computing and communications in the CoVis Project, I will highlight our design research methodologies for making the powerful features of professional scientific visualization tools usable to students and teachers in WorldWatcher.