Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Global Linking of Cell Tracks Using the Viterbi Algorithm

Automated tracking of living cells in microscopy image sequences is an important and challenging problem. With this application in mind, we propose a global track linking algorithm, which links cell outlines generated by a segmentation algorithm into tracks. The algorithm adds tracks to the image sequence one at a time, in a way which uses information from the complete image sequence in every linking decision. This is achieved by finding the tracks which give the largest possible increases to a probabilistically motivated scoring function, using the Viterbi algorithm. We also present a novel way to alter previously created tracks when new tracks are created, thus mitigating the effects of error propagation. The algorithm can handle mitosis, apoptosis, and migration in and out of the imaged area, and can also deal with false positives, missed detections, and clusters of jointly segmented cells. The algorithm performance is demonstrated on two challenging datasets acquired using bright-field microscopy, but in principle, the algorithm can be used with any cell type and any imaging technique, presuming there is a suitable segmentation algorithm.
Decision-making dynamics between Spanish mothers, fathers and children

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the roles of mothers, fathers and children in family decision-making (FDM) processes in families with different characteristics in terms of household structure, parents’ resources and family communication styles. As several structural changes regarding families have taken place within the last decades, there is a need to update the theories around FDM – in particular, regarding to the role of women and children. Design/methodology/approach A survey was distributed to 520 individuals in 183 families, where mothers, fathers and children above nine years living at home completed the survey. Findings The study demonstrates that the product category largely influences FDM dynamics, as well as housework division, parental characteristics and communication style. The study also reveals that structural changes may put more pressure on mothers. This pressure can partly be relieved if the family encourages children to become independent consumers rather than trying to control their consumption. Moreover, when fathers take a larger part in the housework, traditional gender roles become more fluid. Social implications For policymakers concerned with equality within the family, it may be a better approach to enable fathers to more actively participate in household chores than to try to change behaviour through information about equality. Originality/value This study extends the understanding of FDM in contemporary households by taking into account the views of all family members and produces a more complete picture of the decision-making dynamics within families.
Combining tandem and hybrid systems for improved speech recognition and keyword spotting on low resource languages

Copyright © 2014 ISCA. In recent years there has been significant interest in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and KeyWord Spotting (KWS) systems for low resource languages. One of the driving forces for this research direction is the IARPA Babel project. This paper examines the performance gains that can be obtained by combining two forms of deep neural network ASR systems, Tandem and Hybrid, for both ASR and KWS using data released under the Babel project. Baseline systems are described for the five option period 1 languages: Assamese; Bengali; Haitian Creole; Lao; and Zulu. All the ASR systems share common attributes, for example deep neural network configurations, and decision trees based on rich phonetic questions and state-position root nodes. The baseline ASR and KWS performance of Hybrid and Tandem systems are compared for both the "full", approximately 80 hours of training data, and limited, approximately 10 hours of training data, language packs. By combining the two systems together consistent performance gains can be obtained for KWS in all configurations.
Employing Source Code Information to Improve Question-Answering in Stack Overflow

Nowadays, software development has been greatly influenced by question-answering communities, such as Stack Overflow. A new problem-solving paradigm has emerged, as developers post problems they encounter that are then answered by the community. In this paper, we propose a methodology that allows searching for solutions in Stack Overflow, using the main elements of a question post, including not only its title, tags, and body, but also its source code snippets. We describe a similarity scheme for these elements and demonstrate how structural information can be extracted from source code snippets and compared to further improve the retrieval of questions. The results of our evaluation indicate that our methodology is effective on recommending similar question posts allowing community members to search without fully forming a question.
Normative data for the Animal, Profession and Letter M Naming verbal fluency tests for Dutch speaking participants and the effects of age, education, and sex

Previous research has indicated that performance on verbal fluency tests (VFTs) is influenced by language and/or culture. Consequently, normative VFT data for English-speaking people cannot be used for people for whom English is not their first language. The aim of the present study was to provide normative data for the Animal Naming, Profession Naming, and Letter M Naming (four-letter words beginning with the letter M) VFTs for Dutch-speaking populations, based on a large sample (N = 1856) of healthy men and women aged 24–81 years of different educational levels. The results showed that age affected the performance of all VFTs profoundly, but the age effect was not uniform: in the Profession and Letter M Naming VFTs, performance was stable in young adulthood but declined strongly after age 50. In contrast, in the Animal Naming VFT, performance appeared to decline linearly, starting early in life. Furthermore, males had higher scores than females on the Profession Naming VFT, and higher educated participants outperformed their lower educated counterparts on all three VFTs. Regression-based normative data were prepared for the 3 VFTs, and the advantages of using a regression-based normative approach instead of a traditional normative approach are discussed. (JINS, 2006, 12, 80–89.)
Internationalization within higher education and its influence on faculty: experiences of Turkish academic staff

In this article, findings are reported from a phenomenology-oriented study on prolonged international mobility and the effects of internationalization on the professional lives of six academic faculty at a Turkish research university. Drawing on research on international mobility of faculty and the present context of Turkish higher education, this investigation identifies three distinct phases of the sojourn abroad – motivation to go abroad, being abroad, repatriating to Turkey – being framed by the supportive and demanding culture of the specific institution. For the participants, ambivalently perceived effects at the individual, institutional and national level include networks gained, the imperative to publish in English, and the lack of a comprehensive national policy for internationalization.
Spatially-Aware Access Control Model: A Step towards Secure and Energy-Efficient Mobile Applications

Role Based Access Control (RBAC) Model has been found to be quite useful and has drawn a lot of research interest over the last fifteen years. It was recently defined as NIST/ANSI Standard. Traditional RBAC considers user to role as well as role to permission assignments to be static in nature with respect to space and time. However it was observed that in the context of mobile applications, spatial context plays an increasingly important role both in defining and enforcing more elaborated security policies since in many applications locations of participants should directly influence access control decisions. Recent years many extensions of RBAC to deal with spatial context have being proposed. However another benefit of location awareness (not considered yet in existing extensions of RBAC) is an ability to provide more energy-efficient (more “green”) solutions. In this paper we consider extensions of RBAC and propose to use location both as a security and an energy-related parameter. We discuss some applications and directions of future research.
Faulty Gallager-B decoding with optimal message repetition

We consider the decoding of regular low density parity-check codes with a Gallager-B message-passing algorithm built exclusively from faulty computing devices. We propose an extension of the Gallager-B algorithm where messages can be repeated to provide increased fault tolerance, and use EXIT functions to derive its average performance. Thresholds are obtained both for the channel quality and the faultiness of the decoder. We argue that decoding complexity is central to the analysis of faulty decoding and compare the complexity of decoding with a faulty decoder instead of a reliable decoder, for a fixed channel condition and residual error rate. Finally, we show that when the message repetitions in the extended Gallager-B algorithm are scheduled optimally, a small complexity overhead with respect to a reliable decoder provides large gains in fault tolerance.
An Energy and Cost Efficient WDM/OFDMA PON System: Design and Demonstration

In this paper, we propose an energy and cost efficient WDM/OFDMA PON system, referred to as NEWOPS. Based on a new two-tiered semi-tree architecture, NEWOPS allows a large number of ONUs to be connected to OLT using only a handful of colorless transceivers. Due to the architecture, NEWOPS not only facilitates high spectral efficiency and flexible sub-channel bandwidth allocation, but also reduces the Rayleigh backscattering (RB) problem and achieves high energy and cost efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that, taking only 5-GHz bandwidth for each wavelength, NEWOPS successfully achieves 20-Gb/s downstream and 10-Gb/s upstream OFDM-xQAM transmissions via the same fiber trunk. We depict that, to support 40 ONUs for example, NEWOPS achieves energy efficiency that is three to six times higher than that of a typical 10-Gb/s WDM/OFDM PON.
Bisimulation Metrics are Optimal Value Functions

Bisimulation is a notion of behavioural equivalence on the states of a transition system. Its definition has been extended to Markov decision processes, where it can be used to aggregate states. A bisimulation metric is a quantitative analog of bisimulation that measures how similar states are from a the perspective of long-term behavior. Bisimulation metrics have been used to establish approximation bounds for state aggregation and other forms of value function approximation. In this paper, we prove that a bisimulation metric defined on the state space of a Markov decision process is the optimal value function of an optimal coupling of two copies of the original model. We prove the result in the general case of continuous state spaces. This result has important implications in understanding the complexity of computing such metrics, and opens up the possibility of more efficient computational methods.
On the definition of role mining

There have been many approaches proposed for role mining. However, the problems solved often differ due to a lack of consensus on the formal definition of the role mining problem. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of the requirements for role mining, the existing definitions of role mining, and the methods used to assess role mining results. Given basic assumptions on how access-control configurations are generated, we propose a novel definition of the role mining problem that fulfills the requirements that real-world enterprises typically have. In this way, we recast role mining as a prediction problem.
Algorithms for Graph Partitioning and Fill Reducing Ordering for Domain Decomposition Methods ∗

This paper focuses on domain decomposition-based numerical simulations whose subproblems corresponding to the various subdomains are solved using sparse direct factorization methods (e.g., FETI). Effective load-balancing of such computations requires that the resulting partitioning simultaneously balances the amount of time required to factor the local subproblem using direct factorization and the number of elements assigned to each processor. Unfortunately, existing graph-partitioning algorithms cannot be used to load-balance this type of computations as they can only compute partitionings that simultaneously balance numerous constraints defined a priori on the vertices and optimize different objectives defined locally on the edges. To address this problem, we developed an algorithm that follows a predictorcorrector approach that first computes a high-quality partitioning of the underlying graph, and then modifies it to achieve the desired balancing constraints. During the corrector step we compute a fill reducing ordering for each partition, and then we modify the initial partitioning and ordering so that our objectives are satisfied. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to reduce the fill-in of the overweight sub-domains and achieve a considerably better balance. This work was supported in part by NSF CCR-9972519, EIA-9986042, ACI-9982274, ACI-0133464, and ACI0312828; the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota; and by the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC) under the auspices of the Department of the Army, Army Research Laboratory (ARL) under Cooperative Agreement number DAAD19-01-2-0014. The content of which does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. Access to research and computing facilities was provided by the Digital Technology Center and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.
Interaction between early life stress and alcohol dependence on neural stress reactivity

Stress response biologic systems are altered in alcohol‐dependent individuals. Early life stress (ELS) is associated with a heightened risk of alcohol dependence, presumably because of stress‐induced neuroplastic changes. This study was designed to assess the contribution of ELS to a stress‐induced neural response in alcohol‐dependent participants. Fifteen alcohol‐dependent men abstinent for 3–5 weeks and 15 age‐ and race‐matched healthy controls were studied. Anticipatory anxiety was induced by a conditioned stimulus paired with an uncertain physically painful unconditioned stressor. Neural response was assessed with functional magnetic resonance imaging. ELS was assessed with the Childhood Adversity Interview. There was a significant interaction between ELS and group on blood‐oxygen‐level‐dependent (BOLD) amplitude during anticipatory anxiety in the right amygdala and bilateral orbitofrontal cortex, posterior putamen and insula. Higher ELS scores were associated with decreased BOLD amplitude during anticipatory anxiety in alcohol‐dependent, but not control, participants. These findings suggest that ELS interacts with alcohol dependence to induce a muted cortico‐striatal response to high threat stimuli. Allostatic changes due to both ELS and excessive alcohol use may jointly induce persistent changes in the neural response to acute stressors.
Designing a Designers' Decision Aiding System (DDAS)

ABSTRACT An approach for designing and developing decision aiding systems is presented through the design and definition of the architecture of a system, corresponding to a real problem: that of providing aid to designers. The purpose of the decision aid is to provide assistance to computer system designers tackling interface usability problems and needing to know which modelling techniques out of an array would be more appropriate to apply. Different aspects of the design problem may call for different modelling techniques to be recruited. The design of the DDAS accommodates that reality. The architecture of DDAS is based on principles of systems thinking, in particular soft systems methodology, for eliciting and structuring knowledge relevant to a generic design space, and on fuzzy sets through test score semantics for representing and evaluating the meaning of relationships between components of the design problem and the modelling techniques. The advantage of this architecture is that it could be used.
Temporal Integration for Audio Classification With Application to Musical Instrument Classification

Nowadays, it appears essential to design automatic indexing tools which provide meaningful and efficient means to describe the musical audio content. There is in fact a growing interest for music information retrieval (MIR) applications amongst which the most popular are related to music similarity retrieval, artist identification, musical genre or instrument recognition. Current MIR-related classification systems usually do not take into account the mid-term temporal properties of the signal (over several frames) and lie on the assumption that the observations of the features in different frames are statistically independent. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the information carried by the evolution of these characteristics over time. To that purpose, we propose a number of methods for early and late temporal integration and provide an in-depth experimental study on their interest for the task of musical instrument recognition on solo musical phrases. In particular, the impact of the time horizon over which the temporal integration is performed will be assessed both for fixed and variable frame length analysis. Also, a number of proposed alignment kernels will be used for late temporal integration. For all experiments, the results are compared to a state of the art musical instrument recognition system.
Gut Bacteria Are Not Required for the Insecticidal Activity of Bacillus thuringiensis toward the Tobacco Hornworm, Manduca sexta

ABSTRACT It was recently proposed that gut bacteria are required for the insecticidal activity of the Bacillus thuringiensis-based insecticide, DiPel, toward the lepidopterans Manduca sexta, Pieris rapae, Vanessa cardui, and Lymantria dispar. Using a similar methodology, it was found that gut bacteria were not required for the toxicity of DiPel or Cry1Ac or for the synergism of an otherwise sublethal concentration of Cry1Ac toward M. sexta. The toxicities of DiPel and of B. thuringiensis HD73 Cry− spore/Cry1Ac synergism were attenuated by continuously exposing larvae to antibiotics before bioassays. Attenuation could be eliminated by exposing larvae to antibiotics only during the first instar without altering larval sterility. Prior antibiotic exposure did not attenuate Cry1Ac toxicity. The presence of enterococci in larval guts slowed mortality resulting from DiPel exposure and halved Cry1Ac toxicity but had little effect on B. thuringiensis HD73 Cry− spore/Cry1Ac synergism. B. thuringiensis Cry− cells killed larvae after intrahemocoelic inoculation of M. sexta, Galleria mellonella, and Spodoptera litura and grew rapidly in plasma from M. sexta, S. litura, and Tenebrio molitor. These findings suggest that gut bacteria are not required for B. thuringiensis insecticidal activity toward M. sexta but that B. thuringiensis lethality is reduced in larvae that are continuously exposed to antibiotics before bioassay.
Approximate comparison of distance automata

Distance automata are automata weighted over the semiring (N∪ {∞}, min,+) (the tropical semiring). Such automata compute functions from words to N ∪{∞} such as the number of occurrences of a given letter. It is known that testing f 0 and two functions f,g computed by distance automata, answers "yes" if f <= (1-e ) g, "no" if f \not\leq g, and may answer "yes" or "no" in all other cases. This result highly refines previously known decidability results of the same type. The core argument behind this quasi-decision procedure is an algorithm which is able to provide an approximated finite presentation to the closure under products of sets of matrices over the tropical semiring. We also provide another theorem, of affine domination, which shows that previously known decision procedures for cost-automata have an improved precision when used over distance automata.
An inexpensive, temporally integrated system for monitoring occurrence and biological effects of aquatic contaminants in the field

Assessment of potential risks of complex contaminant mixtures in the environment requires integrated chemical and biological approaches. In support of the US Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, the US Environmental Protection Agency lab in Duluth, MN, is developing these types of methods for assessing possible risks of aquatic contaminants in near‐shore Great Lakes (USA) sites. One component involves an exposure system for caged fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) adults suitable for the wide range of habitat and deployment situations encountered in and around the Great Lakes. To complement the fish exposure system, the authors developed an automated device for collection of composite water samples that could be simultaneously deployed with the cages and reflect a temporally integrated exposure of the animals. The present study describes methodological details of the design, construction, and deployment of a flexible yet comparatively inexpensive (<600 USD) caged‐fish/autosampler system. The utility and performance of the system were demonstrated with data collected from deployments at several Great Lakes sites. For example, over 3 field seasons, only 2 of 130 deployed cages were lost, and approximately 99% of successfully deployed adult fish were recovered after exposures of 4 d or longer. A number of molecular, biochemical, and apical endpoints were successfully measured in recovered animals, changes in which reflected known characteristics of the study sites (e.g., upregulation of hepatic genes involved in xenobiotic metabolism in fish held in the vicinity of wastewater treatment plants). The automated composite samplers proved robust with regard to successful water collection (>95% of deployed units in the latest field season), and low within‐ and among‐unit variations were found relative to programmed collection volumes. Overall, the test system has excellent potential for integrated chemical–biological monitoring of contaminants in a variety of field settings. Environ Toxicol Chem 2014;33:1584–1595. © 2014 SETAC
Pursuing a Moving Target: Iterative Use of Benchmarking of a Task to Understand the Task

Individual tasks carried out within benchmarking initiatives, or campaigns, enable direct comparison of alternative approaches to tackling shared research challenges and ideally promote new research ideas and foster communities of researchers interested in common or related scientific topics. When a task has a clear predefined use case, it might straightforwardly adopt a well established framework and methodology. For example, an ad hoc information retrieval task adopting the standard Cranfield paradigm. On the other hand, in cases of new and emerging tasks which pose more complex challenges in terms of use scenarios or dataset design, the development of a new task is far from a straightforward process. This letter summarises our reections on our experiences as task organisers of the Search and Hyperlinking task from its origins as a Brave New Task at the MediaEval benchmarking campaign (2011-2014) to its current instantiation as a task at the NIST TRECVid benchmark (since 2015). We highlight the challenges encountered in the development of the task over a number of annual iterations, the solutions found so far, and our process for maintaining a vision for the ongoing advancement of the task's ambition.