Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sources of Variability in Large-scale Machine Learning Systems

We investigate sources of variability of a state-of-the-art distributed machine learning system for learning click and conversion prediction models for display advertising. We focus on three main sources of variability: asynchronous updates in the learning algorithm, downsampling of the data, and the non-deterministic order of examples received by each learning instance. We observe that some sources of variability can lead to significant differences between the models obtained and cause issues for, e.g., regression testing, debugging, and offline evaluation. We present effective solutions to stabilize the system and remove these sources of variability, thus fully solving the issues related to regression testing and to debugging. Moreover, we discuss potential limitations of this stabilization for drawing conclusions, in which case we may want to take the variability produced by the machine learning system into account in confidence intervals.
Tropospheric vertical distribution of tropical Atlantic ozone observed by TES during the northern African biomass burning season

We present vertical distributions of ozone from the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) over the tropical Atlantic Ocean during January 2005. Between 10N and 20S, TES ozone retrievals have Degrees of Freedom for signal (DOF) around 0.7–0.8 each for tropospheric altitudes above and below 500 hPa. As a result, TES is able to capture for the first time from space a distribution characterized by two maxima: one in the lower troposphere north of the ITCZ and one in the middle and upper troposphere south of the ITCZ. We focus our analysis on the north tropical Atlantic Ocean, where most of previous satellite observations showed discrepancies with in‐situ ozone observations and models. Trajectory analyses and a sensitivity study using the GEOS‐Chem model confirm the influence of northern Africa biomass burning on the elevated ozone mixing ratios observed by TES over this region.
TIME-DEPENDENT DEMIXING OF TASK-RELEVANT EEG SOURCES

Given a spatial filtering algorithm that has allowed us to identify task-relevant EEG sources, we present a simple approach for monitoring the activity of these sources while remaining relatively robust to changes in other (task-irrelevant) brain activity. The idea is to keep spatial patterns fixed rather than spatial filters, when transferring from training to test sessions or from one time window to another. We show that a fixed spatial pattern (FSP) approach, using a moving-window estimate of signal covariances, can be more robust to non-stationarity than a fixed spatial filter (FSF) approach.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Teach For America and the Making of Educational Leaders

This article reports findings from a study that explores how Teach For America (TFA) alumni interpret the causes of and interventions for educational inequality, the leadership pathways for remedying inequality, and the career opportunities available to them as TFA affiliates. Analyzing data from 117 alumni interviews, we find that the majority of participants attribute the roots of educational inequality to perceived managerial shortcomings of the public school system. We also demonstrate how TFA alumni embrace largely managerial, technocratic responses to inequality. Finally, we reveal how the majority of alumni who work in education do so in privatized settings that emphasize management, entrepreneurship, and accountability. These findings contribute to the literature on school reform, the politics of educational policy and leadership, and the discourse and policy environment in which the organization is embedded.
Recognition and reproduction of gestures using a probabilistic framework combining PCA, ICA and HMM

This paper explores the issue of recognizing, generalizing and reproducing arbitrary gestures. We aim at extracting a representation that encapsulates only the key aspects of the gesture and discards the variability intrinsic to each person's motion. We compare a decomposition into principal components (PCA) and independent components (ICA) as a first step of preprocessing in order to decorrelate and denoise the data, as well as to reduce the dimensionality of the dataset to make this one tractable. In a second stage of processing, we explore the use of a probabilistic encoding through continuous Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), as a way to encapsulate the sequential nature and intrinsic variability of the motions in stochastic finite state automata. Finally, the method is validated in a humanoid robot to reproduce a variety of gestures performed by a human demonstrator.
Comparison of segmentation techniques for histopathological images

Image segmentation is a widely used in medical imaging applications by detecting anatomical structures and regions of interest. This paper concerns a survey of numerous segmentation model used in biomedical field. We organized segmentation techniques by four approaches, namely, thresholding, edge-based, region-based and snake. These techniques have been compared with simulation results and demonstrated the feasibility of medical image segmentation. Snake was demonstrated a capability with a high performance metrics to detect irregular shape as carcinoma cell type. This study showed the advantage of the deformable segmentation technique to segment abnormal cells with Dice similarity value over 83%.
Effect of Treatment with Interferon Beta-1a on Changes in Voxel-Wise Magnetization Transfer Ratio in Normal Appearing Brain Tissue and Lesions of Patients with Relapsing–Remitting Multiple Sclerosis: A 24-Week, Controlled Pilot Study

Background This pilot study investigated changes in remyelinating and demyelinating activity in normal appearing brain tissue (NABT) and lesions, by using voxel-wise magnetization transfer ratio (VW-MTR), in patients with relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) receiving interferon beta-1a 44 mcg subcutaneously (IFN β-1a SC) three times weekly versus healthy controls (HCs) (NCT01085318). Methods Increasing (suggestive of remyelination) and decreasing (suggestive of demyelination) VW-MTR changes in NABT and in T2, T1 and gadolinium (Gd)-enhancing lesion volume were measured over 24 weeks in 23 patients treated with IFN β-1a SC and in 15 HCs (where applicable). VW-MTR changes were tested using the Wilcoxon signed–rank or Wilcoxon rank–sum test. Results A trend for greater volume of NABT with increasing VW-MTR at 24 weeks was observed for patients versus HCs (median [range] 1206 [0–15278]; 342 [0–951] mm3; p = 0.061). NABT volume with increasing VW-MTR at 12 weeks was significantly greater in patients than in HCs (852 [6–11577]; 360 [0–1755] mm3; p = 0.028). Similar findings were detected for lesion volumes. Two patients with notably high numbers of Gd-enhancing lesions at baseline had a markedly greater volume of tissue with increasing VW-MTR compared with other patients. Volume of NABT tissue with decreasing VW-MTR was significantly greater in patients versus HCs at 24 weeks (942 [0–6141]; 297 [0–852] mm3; p<0.001). Conclusions The significant change in NABT volume with increasing VW-MTR at 12 weeks suggests that active remyelination in patients with RRMS may occur during treatment with IFN β-1a SC. Findings from two patients with the highest number of Gd-enhancing lesions at baseline suggest that extensive remyelination in NABT may occur in patients with high disease activity. Tissue volume with decreasing VW-MTR was greater in patients than in HCs, despite treatment, validating the sensitivity of this technique for detecting MS disease activity. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01085318.
Pinscreen: 3D avatar from a single image

The age of social media and immersive technologies has created a growing need for processing detailed visual representations of ourselves as virtual and augmented reality is growing into the next generation platform for online communication, connecting hundreds of millions of users. A realistic simulation of our presence in a mixed reality environment is unthinkable without a compelling and directable 3D digitization of ourselves. With the wide availability of mobile cameras and internet images, we introduce a technology that can build a realistic 3D avatar from a single photograph. This textured 3D face model includes hair and can be instantly animated by anyone in real-time through natural facial performances captured from a regular RGB camera. Immediate applications include personalized gaming and VR-enabled social networks using automatically digitized 3D avatars, as well as mobile apps such as video messengers (e.g., Snapchat) with face-swapping capabilities. As opposed to existing solutions, our technology enables the automatic generation of a complete head model from a fully unconstrained image.
Labelwalking nonnegative matrix factorization

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) utilizes plenty of unlabeled examples to boost the performance of learning from limited labeled examples. Due to its great discriminant power, SSL has been widely applied to various real-world tasks such as information retrieval, pattern recognition, and speech separa- tion. Label propagation (LP) is a popular SSL method which propagates labels through the dataset along high density areas defined by unlabeled examples, LP assumes nearby examples should share the same label, thus, it unavoidably pushes the labels to the wrong examples, especially when different la- beled examples are not strictly separated. Seed K-means uses labeled examples to initialize class centers, and avoid getting stuck in poor local optima comparing to traditional K-means, however the hard constraint of each example's membership makes Seed K-means failed in many real world applications. This paper proposes a novel label walking nonnegative matrix factorization method (LWNMF) to handle labeled examples in SSL based on the framework of NMF. LWNMF decomposes the whole dataset into the product of a basis matrix and a coefficient matrix, and to travel labels to unlabeled examples, LWNMF regards the class indicators of labeled examples as their coefficients and iteratively updates both basis matrix and coefficients of unlabeled examples. Since LWNMF learns comprehensive class centroids, labels iteratively walk to unlabeled examples through these significant centroids.
Investigation of Different Language Models for Turkish Speech Recognition

Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition can be performed with high accuracy for languages like English that do not have a rich morphological structure. However, the performance of these systems for agglutinative languages is very low. The major reason for that is, the language models that are built on the words do not perform well for agglutinative languages. In this study, three different language models that consider the structure of the agglutinative languages are investigated. Two of the models consider the subword units as the units of language modeling. The first one uses only the stem of the words as units, and the other one uses stems and endings of the words separately as the units. The third model, firstly, places the words into certain classes by using the co-occurrences of the words, and then uses these classes as the units of the language model. The performance of the models are tested by using two stage decoding; in the first stage, lattices are formed by using bi-gram models and then tri-gram models are used for recognition over these lattices. In this study, it is shown that the vocabulary coverage of the system seriously affects the recognition performance. For this reason, models that use stems and endings as the modeling unit perform better since their coverage of the vocabulary is higher. In addition to that, a single-pass decoder that can perform single pass decoding over these models is believed to increase the recognition performance
TRECVID 2005-An Introduction

A magnetic field, such as produced by a surrounding coil, lowers the breakdown voltage of a gas discharge device in series with a spark plug so that the ignition voltage will preferentially go to that spark plug rather than to others in series with gas discharge devices having no magnetic field. The switching of the field-producing coils of the gas discharge devices in accordance with the firing cycle of an engine may be produced by a transistor switching circuit excited by a simple rotary electric timing device that also times the spark pulses. A gas discharge device for this system is shown having an elongated cup-shaped anode and rodlike cathode, which can also be made to serve as the sealing tube, centered within the anode. Gas discharge devices for this system are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,951,144 to the same assignee.
k-connected network partitioning under shared risk link groups

Partitioning a large network into a connected hierarchy is a proven technique for scalability and manageability. Although a significant body of work is devoted to this area of interest, a reference to survivable hierarchical networks where each partition remains k-connected is missing (k ≥ 2). A k-connected partition ensures functional network organization even after any k - 1 failures occur. In optical networks, a failure of a physical component (e.g., a cable or line-card) disrupts multiple logical links that share the component. Such a shared risk link group (SRLG) failure is more common than a single link or node failure in the logical topology. Hence, we study the significance of a k-SRLG-connected (kSC) partitioning problem for optical networks. For a given network, we show that finding 2-SRLG-connected (2SC) partitioning, the simplest case, is NP-complete. We provide mathematical formulations and propose a distributed-scalable heuristic solution. We also solve 2SC partitioning with flexible mapping onto the physical topology, where lightpaths can be added to guarantee a solution. Simulation results verify that the kSC partitioning scheme performs better than traditional 1-connected partitioning schemes with regard to system survivability, stability, and repartitioning overhead.
Strategies for Implementing a Multithreaded Shared Pipeline Processor 1

Themanagement of parallelism, the simultaneous management of multiple environments, and the synchronization of cooperating threads are some of the fundamental issues that need to be solved in a multithreaded pipelined architecture. In this paper, we present several di erent solutions to these problems which are currently implemented in a cycle-accurate software simulator of a multithreaded architecture called the SAM architecture. The simulator is a software prototype of a chip we expect to design and build within the coming year. The architecture contains two special instructions that allow parallelism to vary with time, and a two-level thread queue that allows the degree of parallelism to expand, theoretically, without limit, while still allowing for e cient dispatching of instructions. A concept called the short memory is introduced to support multiple environments. Because we intend to implement the SAM architecture as a real, functioning, generalpurpose machine, we have also addressed such mundane issues as interrupts, traps, system calls, and process synchronization.
Tissue factor: a mediator of inflammatory cell recruitment, tissue injury, and thrombus formation in experimental colitis

There is growing evidence for an interplay between inflammatory and coagulation pathways in acute and chronic inflammatory diseases. However, it remains unclear whether components of the coagulation pathway, such as tissue factor (TF), contribute to intestinal inflammation, and whether targeting TF will blunt the inflammatory cell recruitment, tissue injury, and enhanced thrombus formation that occur in experimental colitis. Mice were fed 3% dextran sodium sulfate (DSS) to induce colonic inflammation, with some mice receiving a mouse TF-blocking antibody (muTF-Ab). The adhesion of leukocytes and platelets in colonic venules, light/dye-induced thrombus formation in cremaster muscle microvessels, as well as disease activity index, thrombin–antithrombin (TAT) complexes in plasma, and histopathologic changes in the colonic mucosa were monitored in untreated and muTF-Ab–treated colitic mice. In untreated mice, DSS elicited the recruitment of adherent leukocytes and platelets in colonic venules, caused gross and histologic injury, increased plasma TAT complexes, and enhanced thrombus formation in muscle arterioles. muTF-Ab prevented elevation in TAT complexes, reduced blood cell recruitment and tissue injury, and blunted thrombus formation in DSS colitic mice. These findings implicate TF in intestinal inflammation and support an interaction between inflammation and coagulation in experimental colitis.
Chemosensitization in non-small cell lung cancer cells by IKK inhibitor occurs via NF-κB and mitochondrial cytochrome c cascade

In this study, we demonstrated with mechanistic evidence that parthenolide, a sesquiterpene lactone, could antagonize paclitaxel‐mediated NF‐κB nuclear translocation and activation by selectively targeting I‐κB kinase (IKK) activity. We also found that parthenolide could target IKK activity and then inhibit NF‐κB; this promoted cytochrome c release and activation of caspases 3 and 9. Inhibition of caspase activity blocked the activation of caspase cascade, implying that the observed synergy was related to caspases 3 and 9 activation of parthenolide. In contrast, paclitaxel individually induced apoptosis via a pathway independent of the mitochondrial cytochrome c cascade. Finally, exposure to parthenolide resulted in the inhibition of several NF‐κB transcript anti‐apoptotic proteins such as c‐IAP1 and Bcl‐xl. These data strengthen the rationale for using parthenolide to decrease the apoptotic threshold via caspase‐dependent processes for treatment of non‐small cell lung cancer with paclitaxel chemoresistance.
The homotopy coniveau tower

We examine the ‘homotopy coniveau tower’ for a general cohomology theory on smooth k‐schemes and give a new proof that the layers of this tower for K‐theory agree with motivic cohomology. In addition, we show that the homotopy coniveau tower agrees with Voevodsky's slice tower for S1‐spectra, giving a proof of a connectedness conjecture of Voevodsky. The homotopy coniveau tower construction extends to a tower of functors on the Morel–Voevodsky stable homotopy category, and we identify this ℙ1‐stable homotopy coniveau tower with Voevodsky's slice tower for ℙ1‐spectra. We also show that the zeroth layer for the motivic sphere spectrum is the motivic cohomology spectrum, which gives the layers for a general ℙ1‐spectrum the structure of a module over motivic cohomology. This recovers and extends results of Voevodsky on the zeroth layer of the slice filtration, and yields a spectral sequence that is reminiscent of the classical Atiyah–Hirzebruch spectral sequence.
Gender Differences in Victimization and the Relation to Personality Disorders in Forensic Psychiatry

ABSTRACT Gender differences in victimization were retrospectively examined in 218 male and 218 female patients who have been admitted to one of four Dutch forensic psychiatric hospitals between 1984 and 2014. Case files were studied and variables relating to victimization and psychopathology were coded. It was found that the prevalence rates of victimization were higher among female patients than among male patients, both during childhood and adulthood. Childhood sexual abuse was found to be more prevalent among women than men, however, no differences were found for emotional and physical abuse or neglect during childhood. Women with a history of emotional or sexual abuse were significantly more often diagnosed with borderline personality disorder than women without childhood victimization. Men with a history of physical abuse were significantly more often diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder than men without childhood victimization. Clinical and policy implications of this study for forensic practice are discussed.
Nonlinear rheology of glass-forming colloidal dispersions: transient stress–strain relations from anisotropic mode coupling theory and thermosensitive microgels

Transient stress–strain relations close to the colloidal glass transition are obtained within the integration through transients framework generalizing mode coupling theory to flow driven systems. Results from large-scale numerical calculations are quantitatively compared to experiments on thermosensitive microgels, which reveals that theory captures the magnitudes of stresses semi-quantitatively even in the nonlinear regime, but overestimates the characteristic strain where plastic events set in. The former conclusion can also be drawn from flow curves, while the latter conclusion is supported by a comparison to single particle motion measured by confocal microscopy. The qualitative picture, as previously obtained from simplifications of the theory in schematic models, is recovered by the quantitative solutions of the theory for Brownian hard spheres.
Inspiration Is the Major Regulator of Human CSF Flow

The mechanisms behind CSF flow in humans are still not fully known. CSF circulates from its primary production sites at the choroid plexus through the brain ventricles to reach the outer surface of the brain in the subarachnoid spaces from where it drains into venous bloodstream and cervical lymphatics. According to a recent concept of brain fluid transport, established in rodents, CSF from the brain surface also enters the brain tissue along para-arterial routes and exits through paravenous spaces again into subarachnoid compartments. This unidirectional flow is mainly driven by arterial pulsation. To investigate how CSF flow is regulated in humans, we applied a novel real-time magnetic resonance imaging technique at high spatial (0.75 mm) and temporal (50 ms) resolution in healthy human subjects. We observed significant CSF flow exclusively with inspiration. In particular, during forced breathing, high CSF flow was elicited during every inspiration, whereas breath holding suppressed it. Only a minor flow component could be ascribed to cardiac pulsation. The present results unambiguously identify inspiration as the most important driving force for CSF flow in humans. Inspiratory thoracic pressure reduction is expected to directly modulate the hydrostatic pressure conditions for the low-resistance paravenous, venous, and lymphatic clearance routes of CSF. Furthermore, the experimental approach opens new clinical opportunities to study the pathophysiology of various forms of hydrocephalus and to design therapeutic strategies in relation to CSF flow alterations.
Population genetics and substitution models of adaptive evolution

The ratio of non-synonymous to synonymous substitutions $\omega(=d_{N}/d_{S})$ has been widely used as a measure of adaptive evolution in protein coding genes. Omega can be defined in terms of population genetics parameters as the fixation ratio of selected vs. neutral mutants. Here it is argued that approaches based on the infinite sites model are not appropriate to define $\omega$ for single codon locations. Simple models of amino acid substitution with reversible mutation and selection are analysed, and used to define $\omega$ under several evolutionary scenarios. In most practical cases $\omega 1$ can be sometimes expected for single locations at equilibrium. An example with influenza data is discussed.