Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CRC-Assisted Error Correction in a Convolutionally Coded System

In communication systems employing a serially concatenated cyclic redundancy check (CRC) code along with a convolutional code (CC), erroneous packets after CC decoding are usually discarded. The list Viterbi algorithm (LVA) and the iterative Viterbi algorithm (IVA) are two existing approaches capable of recovering erroneously decoded packets. We first propose an iterative log-MAP (ILM) algorithm improves error performance by iteratively updating the extrinsic information based on the CRC parity check matrix. We further derive a soft-decision syndrome decoding (SDSD) algorithm, which identifies error patterns from a set of binary linear equations derived from CRC syndrome equations. Being non-iterative, SDSD is able to estimate error patterns directly from the decoder output. The packet error rate (PER) performance of SDSD is analyzed following the union bound approach on pairwise errors. Simulations indicate that SDSD outperforms both ILM and LVA with weak CC and strong CRC. Applicable to AWGN and flat fading channels, our algorithms can also be extended to turbo coded systems.
Title : The moral legitimacy of entrepreneurs : An analysis of early-stage entrepreneurship across 26 countries Year : 2014 Version : Post print

This article will develop our socio-cultural understanding of entrepreneurship by examining the influence of the moral legitimacy of entrepreneurs in society on an individual’s engagement in early-stage entrepreneurship. A multilevel analysis conducted across 26 countries shows that the higher the perceived degree of moral legitimacy, the more likely an individual is to think about starting a business compared to not thinking about it; to start preparing a business as against just considering it; or to found and run a business as compared to just engaging in preparation activities. We conclude that moral norms in society play an important role in early-stage entrepreneurship and that makes it important to legitimize the understanding of entrepreneurs as moral and beneficial for society as a whole.
Face super-resolution reconstruction and recognition from low-resolution image sequences

Normal face recognition algorithms could result in very low recognition rates when the resolution of input faces is very low. In this paper, a new hybrid face recognition algorithm was proposed to tackle the problem of face recognition from low-resolution image sequences. The proposed approach first constructs a high-resolution face image by fully utilizing the sub-pixel information provided in the low-resolution sequences, and then performs Gabor feature based recognition. Experimental results showed that, with respect to applying face recognition to low-resolution face directly, the proposed approach improves recognition rate significantly.
Mitochondrial dysfunction leads to telomere attrition and genomic instability

Mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress have been implicated in cellular senescence, apoptosis, aging and aging‐associated pathologies. Telomere shortening and genomic instability have also been associated with replicative senescence, aging and cancer. Here we show that mitochondrial dysfunction leads to telomere attrition, telomere loss, and chromosome fusion and breakage, accompanied by apoptosis. An antioxidant prevented telomere loss and genomic instability in cells with dysfunctional mitochondria, suggesting that reactive oxygen species are mediators linking mitochondrial dysfunction and genomic instability. Further, nuclear transfer protected genomes from telomere dysfunction and promoted cell survival by reconstitution with functional mitochondria. This work links mitochondrial dysfunction and genomic instability and may provide new therapeutic strategies to combat certain mitochondrial and aging‐associated pathologies.
Vibrotactile Compliance Feedback for Tangential Force Interaction

This paper presents a method to generate a haptic illusion of compliance using a vibrotactile actuator when a tangential force is applied to a rigid surface. The novel method builds on a conceptual compliance model where a physical object moves on a textured surface in response to a tangential force. The method plays vibration patterns simulating friction-induced vibrations as an applied tangential force changes. We built a prototype consisting of a two-dimensional tangential force sensor and a surface transducer to test the effectiveness of the model. Participants in user experiments with the prototype perceived the rigid surface of the prototype as a moving, rubber-like plate. The main findings of the experiments are: 1) the perceived stiffness of a simulated material can be controlled by controlling the force-playback transfer function, 2) its perceptual properties such as softness and pleasantness can be controlled by changing friction grain parameters, and 3) the use of the vibrotactile compliance feedback reduces participants’ workload including physical demand and frustration while performing a force repetition task.
Statistical Machine Translation Between New Language Pairs Using Multiple Intermediaries

Acknowledgements I want to thank Dr. Andreas Eisele who first introduced me to the topic of statistical machine translation and who supported me throughout with excellent ideas, useful advice, and a very pleasant sense of humour. Further, I would like to thank Jan Strunk who provided me with his sentence boundary detector Punkt and who invested quite some time in order to get the program working with my data. Last but not least, a huge thank you to Katja Filippova and Torsten Marek for proofreading the script late at night and for being very honest.
A Study of User's Online Decision Making Behavior

Understanding user’s online decision making behavior is a crucial issue in developing consumer supportive e-commerce systems because if we can model user’s online decision behavior precisely, the ecommerce system can be designed and developed readily satisfying endusers’ various requirements and the time and the expense for developing the system can be greatly saved. The target of a consumer decision support system is to help users find high accurate choices within a low level of interaction effort and cognitive effort. In this report we study a group of subjects’ decision behavior based on the FlatFinder application. We analyze user’s online decision behavior in several aspects such as the preferences input, interaction cycles, and the frequency of stating preferences on each attribute. The results provide evidences to show that users have bounded rationality in stating preferences and have adaptive decision behavior during the interaction process. keywords:online decision behavior, example-critiquing interaction, decision theory
A SHORT COURSE ON MULTIPLIER IDEALS

These notes are the write-up of my 2008 PCMI lectures on multiplier ideals. They aim to give an introduction to the algebro-geometric side of the theory, with an emphasis on its global aspects. The focus is on concrete examples and applications. The lectures take into account a number of recent perspectives, including adjoint ideals and the resulting simplifications in Siu's theorem on plurigenera in the general type case. While the notes refer to my book [PAG] and other sources for some technical points, the conscientious reader should arrive at a reasonable grasp of the machinery after working through these lectures.
Text-To-Speech Engine with Austrian German Corpus

This paper deals with developing a unit selection speech corpus for the Austrian variety of German by (re)using the resources for German and adapt them to Austrian German. This means adaptation on different levels such as lexicon level, phone level, or speech data level, whereas a compromise between reusing the given resource and an exact time-consuming phonetic transcription has to be found. In experiments our Austrian German voice was evaluated by speech experts against the correctness of pronunciation while using an adapted Austrian lexicon.
Ignoring the Controversies: Newspaper Reports on Alzheimer's Disease Treatments

To the Editor: Multiple studies have demonstrated the adverse consequences of negative emotions on health outcomes. Depression has been consistently associated with disability and mortality in older persons. Much less is known about the relationship between positive emotions, such as happiness or personal mastery, and health outcomes. In 1998, Penninx et al. defined emotional vitality (EV) as an overall high level of emotional functioning and showed that EVreduces the risk for progression of disability and mortality in older disabled women. Recently, it has been demonstrated that EV is associated with the likelihood of recovering functional ability 1 year after a major medical event. The aim of this pilot study was to investigate the association between EV and changes in lower extremity function after an acute medical illness in a sample of hospitalized older (Z65) subjects.
Time for More Languages

Most of the research on temporal tagging so far is done for processing English text documents. There are hardly any multilingual temporal taggers supporting more than two languages. Recently, the temporal tagger HeidelTime has been made publicly available, supporting the integration of new languages by developing language-dependent resources without modifying the source code. In this article, we describe our work on developing such resources for two Asian and two Romance languages: Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Italian. While temporal tagging of the two Romance languages has been addressed before, there has been almost no research on Arabic and Vietnamese temporal tagging so far. Furthermore, we analyze language-dependent challenges for temporal tagging and explain the strategies we followed to address them. Our evaluation results on publicly available and newly annotated corpora demonstrate the high quality of our new resources for the four languages, which we make publicly available to the research community.
Scale-Adaptive Regression Position Prediction Tracking

Traditional kernelized correlation filter tracking methods use the target position in the current frame to estimate the moving target initial position in the next frame. For fast moving target, these methods lose the target easily. To cope with this problem, a novel scale-adaptive regression position prediction tracking approach is proposed. This algorithm employs regression prediction method to predict the initial position in the next frame. Then the kernelized correlation filter method is utilized to obtain the final target position. For further improving the accuracy and robustness, we exploit a scale pyramid model to estimate the target scale. Experimental results over 10 benchmark sequences demonstrate the proposed approach performs favorably against the state-of-the-art tracking methods.
Regulation of PD-1/PD-L1 pathway and resistance to PD-1/PD-L1 blockade

Immune checkpoint blockades, such as inhibitors against programmed death 1 (PD-1) and its ligand (PD-L1), have received extensive attention in the past decade because of their dramatic clinical outcomes in advanced malignancies. However, both primary and acquired resistance becomes one of the major obstacles, which greatly limits the long-lasting effects and wide application of PD-1/PD-L1 blockade therapy. PD-1/PD-L1 both regulates and is regulated by cellular signaling pathways and epigenetic modification, thus inhibiting the proliferation and effector function of T and B cells. The lack of tumor antigens and effective antigen presentation, aberrant activation of oncogenic pathways, mutations in IFN-γ signaling, immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment such as regulatory T cells, myeloid-derived suppressor cells, M2 macrophages, and immunoinhibitory cytokines can lead to resistance to PD-1/PD-L1 blockade. In this review, we describe PD-1 related signaling pathways, essential factors contributing to the resistance of PD-1 blockade, and discuss strategies to increase the efficacy of immunotherapy. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility of combined epigenetic therapy with PD-1 blockade as a potential promising approach for cancer treatment.
Increased prevalence of insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in Asian-Indian men

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is strongly associated with obesity in most, but not all, ethnic groups, suggesting important ethnic differences in disease susceptibility. Although it is clear that insulin resistance plays a major role in the pathogenesis of T2DM and that insulin resistance is strongly associated with increases in hepatic (HTG) and/or intramyocellular lipid content, little is known about the prevalence of insulin resistance and potential differences in intracellular lipid distribution among healthy, young, lean individuals of different ethnic groups. To examine this question, 482 young, lean, healthy, sedentary, nonsmoking Eastern Asians (n = 49), Asian-Indians (n = 59), Blacks (n = 48), Caucasians (n = 292), and Hispanics (n = 34) underwent an oral glucose tolerance test to assess whole-body insulin sensitivity by an insulin sensitivity index. In addition, intramyocellular lipid and HTG contents were measured by using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The prevalence of insulin resistance, defined as the lower quartile of insulin sensitivity index, was ≈2- to 3-fold higher in the Asian-Indians compared with all other ethnic groups, and this could entirely be attributed to a 3- to 4-fold increased prevalence of insulin resistance in Asian-Indian men. This increased prevalence of insulin resistance in the Asian-Indian men was associated with an ≈2-fold increase in HTG content and plasma IL-6 concentrations compared with Caucasian men. These data demonstrate important ethnic and gender differences in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance in Asian-Indian men and have important therapeutic implications for treatment of T2DM and for the development of steatosis-related liver disease in this ethnic group.
Imaging human intra‐cerebral connectivity by PET during TMS

NON-INVASIVE imaging of human inter-regional neural connectivity by positron emission tomography (PET) during transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was performed. The hand area of primary motor cortex (M1) in the left cerebral hemisphere was stimulated with TMS while local and remote effects were recorded with PET. At the stimulated site, TMS increased blood flow (12–20%) in a highly focal manner, without an inhibitory surround. Remote covariances, an index of connectivity with M1, were also focal. Connectivity patterns established in non-human species were generally confirmed. Excitatory connectivity (positive covariance) was observed in ipsilateral primary and secondary somatosensory areas (S1 and S2), in ipsilateral ventral, lateral premotor cortex (M2) and in contralateral supplementary motor area (SMA). Inhibitory connectivity (negative covariance) was observed in contralateral M1.
Wide-Band Information Transmission at the Calyx of Held

We use a mathematical model of the calyx of Held to explore information transmission at this giant glutamatergic synapse. The significant depression of the postsynaptic response to repeated stimulation in vitro is a result of various activity-dependent processes in multiple timescales, which can be reproduced by multiexponential functions in this model. When the postsynaptic current is stimulated by Poisson-distributed spike trains, its amplitude varies considerably with the preceding interspike intervals. Here we quantify the information contained in the postsynaptic current amplitude about preceding interspike intervals and determine the impact of different pre- and postsynaptic factors on information transmission. The mutual information between presynaptic spike times and the amplitude of the postsynaptic response in general decreases as the mean stimulation rate increases, but remains high even at frequencies greater than 100 Hz, unlike at many neocortical synapses. The maintenance of information transmission is attributable largely to vesicle recycling rates at low frequencies of stimulation, shifting to vesicle release probability at high frequencies. Also, at higher frequencies, the synapse operates largely in a release-ready mode in which most release sites contain a release-ready vesicle and release probabilities are low.
Visual Affect Around the World: A Large-scale Multilingual Visual Sentiment Ontology

Every culture and language is unique. Our work expressly focuses on the uniqueness of culture and language in relation to human affect, specifically sentiment and emotion semantics, and how they manifest in social multimedia. We develop sets of sentiment- and emotion-polarized visual concepts by adapting semantic structures called adjective-noun pairs, originally introduced by Borth et al. (2013), but in a multilingual context. We propose a new language-dependent method for automatic discovery of these adjective-noun constructs. We show how this pipeline can be applied on a social multimedia platform for the creation of a large-scale multilingual visual sentiment concept ontology (MVSO). Unlike the flat structure in Borth et al. (2013), our unified ontology is organized hierarchically by multilingual clusters of visually detectable nouns and subclusters of emotionally biased versions of these nouns. In addition, we present an image-based prediction task to show how generalizable language-specific models are in a multilingual context. A new, publicly available dataset of >15.6K sentiment-biased visual concepts across 12 languages with language-specific detector banks, >7.36M images and their metadata is also released.
Knowledge-free Verb Detection through Tag Sequence Alignment

We present an algorithm for verb detection of a language in question in a completely unsupervised manner. First, a shallow parser is applied to identify – amongst others – noun and prepositional phrases. Afterwards, a tag alignment algorithm will reveal ﬁxed points within the structures which turn out to be verbs. Results of corresponding experiments are given for English and German corpora employing both supervised and unsupervised algorithms for part-of-speech tagging and syntactic parsing.
Design and analysis of hash functions

A function that compresses an arbitrarily large message into a fixed small size ‘message digest’ is known as a hash function. For the last two decades, many types of hash functions have been defined but, the most widely used in many of the cryptographic applications currently are hash functions based on block ciphers and the dedicated hash functions. Almost all the dedicated hash functions are generated using the Merkle-Damgard construction which is developed independently by Merkle and Damgard in 1989 [6, 7]. A hash function is said to be broken if an attacker is able to show that the design of the hash function violates at least one of its claimed security property. There are various types of attacking strategies found on hash functions, such as attacks based on the block ciphers, attacks depending on the algorithm, attacks independent of the algorithm, attacks based on signature schemes, and high level attacks. Besides this, in recent years, many structural weaknesses have been found in the Merkle-Damgard construction [51-54], which indirectly effects the hash functions developed based on this construction. MD5, SHA-0 and SHA-1 are currently the most widely deployed hash functions. However, they were all broken by Wang using a differential collision attack in 2004 [55-60], which increased the urgency of replacement for these widely used hash functions. Since then, many replacements and modifications have been proposed for the existing hash functions. The first alternative proposed is the replacement of the effected hash function with the SHA-2 group of hash functions. This thesis presents a survey on different types of the hash functions, different types of attacks on the hash functions and structural weaknesses of the hash functions. Besides that, a new type of classification based on the number of inputs to the hash function and based on the streamability and non-streamability of the design is presented. This classification consists of explanation of the working process of the already existing hash functions and their security analysis. Also, compression of the Merkle-Damgard construction with its related constructions is presented. Moreover, three major methods of strengthening hash functions so as to avoid the recent threats on hash functions are presented. The three methods dealt are: 1) Generating a collision resistant hash function using a new message preprocessing method called reverse interleaving. 2) Enhancement of hash functions such as MD-5 and SHA-1 using a different message expansion coding, and 3) Proposal of a new hash function called 3-branch. The first two methods can be considered as modifications and the third method can be seen as a replacement to the already existing hash functions which are effected by recent differential collision attacks. The security analysis of each proposal is also presented against the known generic attacks, along with some of the applications of the dedicated hash function.
Modeling Corneal Metabolism and Oxygen Transport During Contact Lens Wear

Purpose. A metabolic model is developed for cornea-contact-lens system to elucidate the role of glucose metabolism in oxygenation of the cornea and to gauge the role that contact lens oxygen transmissibility plays in avoiding hypoxia-induced corneal abnormalities for extended wear applications. Methods. Oxygen transport through the cornea and contact lens system is typically described by oxygen diffusion with reactive loss. Oxygen in the cornea, however, interacts with other metabolic species, specifically glucose, lactate ion, bicarbonate ion, hydrogen ion, and carbon dioxide via aerobic glycolysis (Krebs or tricarboxylic acid cycle) and anaerobic glycolysis. Here, corneal aerobic and anaerobic metabolic reactions are incorporated into a six-layer (endothelium, stroma, epithelium, postlens tear film, contact lens, and prelens tear film) steady-state continuum reaction-diffusion model to quantify oxygen transport. We also define a new index, the oxygen deficiency factor (ODF), for gauging corneal oxygenation. As opposed to other current gauges of hypoxia, ODF is a local and sensitive measure of both the extent and severity of corneal oxygen deprivation. Results. We calculate not only oxygenation of the cornea but also its coupled glucose, lactate, and acidosis behavior. For the first time, the metabolic shift from aerobic to anaerobic glycolysis is explicitly incorporated into the transport and consumption of oxygen in the cornea on closed-eye contact lens wear. Adoption of enzymatic Monod kinetics for the metabolic reactions permits realistic assessment of local species concentrations throughout the cornea. We find that anerobic-produced lactate transports out of the cornea into the anterior chamber, whereas buffering bicarbonate ion transports into the comea from the anterior chamber. Conclusions. The coupling of oxygen with other reactive species in corneal metabolism provides useful insight into the transport of oxygen in cornea-contact-lens system. Specifically, we find that in addition to oxygen depletion and acidosis in the cornea, lactate concentration increases while glucose and bicarbonate concentrations decrease from the endothelium toward the epithelium. Unlike other indices of corneal oxygenation, ODF is sensitive specifically to regions of cornea with local oxygen deficiency. Accordingly, ODF is a useful physiologic index to assess the extent and severity of hypoxia in the cornea.