Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evolution of user dependent model to predict future usability of a search engine

Search Engines are always making efforts to better understand their user's need and improve user satisfaction. This research examines the important issue of user dependency (effectively a combination of loyalty and satisfaction) on web search engines, first studying existing dependency and then modeling that dependency. An algorithm developed to find a quantitative value of “user dependency” on Search Engine is presented. Here, the term ‘user dependency’ implies the psychological satisfaction of a user with the search results presented for a search session. It's an indicative measure of user's trust on Search Engine and impacts the user's choice to use the same Search Engine in future. This paper investigates factors that influence a search session and uses a fuzzy based approach to determine the dependency and overall trust the user places on the Search Engine. The proposed algorithm accepts ‘user rating for the search session’ as input and based on the ‘user satisfaction with search’ generates a value for user dependency. The findings have implications for search engines in improving their ranking algorithms based on explicit user feedback on the search experience. The algorithm has been implemented and tested using Visual Basic environment developed for this study. The validity of algorithm and correctness of its result is evaluated using a survey conducted with a sample of users. Results have been validated for accuracy and their conformance to sampled user's satisfaction.
A new approach for pain event detection in video

A new approach for pain event detection in video is presented in this paper. Different from some previous works which focused on frame-based detection, we target in detecting pain events at video level. In this work, we explore the spatial information of video frames and dynamic textures of video sequences, and propose two different types of features. HOG of fiducial points (P-HOG) is employed to extract spatial features from video frames and HOG from Three Orthogonal Planes (HOG-TOP) is used to represent dynamic textures of video subsequences. After that, we apply max pooling to represent a video sequence as a global feature vector. Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) is utilized to find an optimal fusion of the two types of features. And an SVM with multiple kernels is trained to perform the final classification. We conduct our experiments on the UNBC-McMaster Shoulder Pain dataset and achieve promising results, showing the effectiveness of our approach.
Copula Mixture Model for Dependency-seeking Clustering

We introduce a copula mixture model to perform dependency-seeking clustering when cooccurring samples from different data sources are available. The model takes advantage of the great flexibility offered by the copulas framework to extend mixtures of Canonical Correlation Analysis to multivariate data with arbitrary continuous marginal densities. We formulate our model as a non-parametric Bayesian mixture, while providing efficient MCMC inference. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate that the increased flexibility of the copula mixture significantly improves the clustering and the interpretability of the results.
Limitations of principal component analysis as a method to detect neuronal assemblies

The anatomical and functional characterization of neuronal assemblies (NAs) is a major challenge in neuroscience. Principal component analysis (PCA) is a widely used method for feature detection, however, when dealing with neuronal data analysis, its limitations have not yet been fully understood. Our work complements previous PCA studies which, in general, characterise NAs based solely on excitatory neuronal interactions. We analysed the performance of PCA in two neglected scenarios: assemblies containing patterns of neural interactions (1) with inhibition and (2) with delays. The analyses considered two types of artificially generated data, one drawn from a traditional Poissonian model, and the other drawn from a latent multivariate Gaussian model; in both models, data from a behaving Wistar rat was used for parameter tuning. Our results highlight scenarios in which neglecting complex interactions between neurons can lead to false conclusions when using PCA to detect NAs. Also, we reinforce the importance of more realistic simulations in the evaluation of neuronal signal processing algorithms.
Acid-etching effects in hypomineralized amelogenesis imperfecta. A microscopic and microanalytical study.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to use quantitative x-ray microprobe analysis with scanning electron microscopy to define the morphostructural and calcification patterns in the enamel of teeth with the hypomineralized variant of amelogenesis imperfecta. STUDY DESIGN We compared 5 fragments of permanent human canines from patients with clinically diagnosed hypomineralized amelogenesis imperfecta and 5 normal permanent canines from subjects without amelogenesis imperfecta. All specimens were etched with phosphoric acid for morphological and microanalytical examination. RESULTS Two types of etching patterns were found; in addition, islets of pattern I were seen within areas of pattern II. Microanalysis detected no significant differences in calcium concentration between specimens with amelogenesis imperfecta and normal control specimens after acid etching. Pattern III was not observed. CONCLUSIONS The changes and their distribution in the enamel structure after 30 s of acid etching are described in teeth with this rare disorder. Although these data seem to coincide with alterations in prism development, no alterations in calcium concentration were found.
Digital Watermarking: Digital Data Hiding techniques for BMP Images

Ab stract - Purpose: Th is research evaluates the digital watermarking technology further for hide/retrieved data into the BMP file by manipulating the contents their pixel value using least significant bits (LSB) approach. Methodology: Various experiments have been applied on the pixel value of the BMP file to hide/store the maximum data. With a condition the size and the quality of the BMP file will not change. The trail and error methods have been used or applied to check the various sizes with various qualities. Findings: The study finds that the any digital data can be hiding into the BMP file by manipulating the contents of the Red Green Blue (RGB) value by applying least significant approach. Or iginality/Value: Du e to the growing usage of multimedia content on the internet, serious issues have emerged. Counterfeiting, forgery fraud and pirating of this content are rising. The research is a mechanism which can help resolve the ownership issues for digital data. Ke ywords : Digital watermarking, Digital Data, 24 bit BMP Image, Red Green Blue (RGB) pixel Value, Least Significant Bit (LSB), lower order bits, Copy right, Tracking,
Head-mounted Displays in Ultrasound Scanning

Ultrasound imaging, which is also called ultrasound scanning or sonography, is conducted by exposing part of the body to high-frequency sound waves to produce a visualization of the inside of the body. Ultrasound scanning is non-invasive, so it is usually painless. It is also widely available, easy-to-use and less expensive than other imaging methods. Because ultrasound imaging uses no ionizing radiation it is safer for the patients and medical staff.
HIV and placental infection modulate the appearance of drug-resistant Plasmodium falciparum in pregnant women who receive intermittent preventive treatment.

BACKGROUND Factors involved in the development of resistance to sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) by Plasmodium falciparum, particularly in the context of intermittent preventive treatment during pregnancy (IPTp), are not well known. We aimed to determine the impact of IPTp and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection on molecular markers of SP resistance and the clinical relevance of resistant infections. METHODS SP resistance alleles were determined in peripheral (n = 125) and placental (n = 145) P. falciparum isolates obtained from pregnant women enrolled in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial of IPTp in Manhiça, Mozambique. RESULTS Prevalence of quintuple mutant infections was 12% (23 of 185 isolates) in pregnant women who received placebo and 24% (20 of 85 isolates) in those who received SP (P = .031). When the last IPTp dose was administered at late pregnancy, mutant infections at delivery were more prevalent in placental samples (7 [23%] of 30, samples) than in peripheral blood samples (2 [7%] of 30 samples; P = .025), more prevalent in women who received IPTp-SP than in those who received placebo (odds ratio [OR], 8.13; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.69-39.08), and more prevalent in HIV-positive women than in HIV-negative women (OR, 5.17; 95% CI, 1.23-21.66). No association was found between mutant infections and increased parasite density or malaria-related morbidity in mothers and children. CONCLUSIONS IPTp with SP increases the prevalence of resistance markers in the placenta and in HIV-infected women at delivery, which suggests that host immunity is key for the clearance of drug-resistant infections. However, this effect of IPTp is limited to the period when blood levels of SP are likely to be significant and does not translate into more-severe infections or adverse clinical outcomes.
A CSMA/CA-Based MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks

The long propagation delay, limited bandwidth and high bit error rate pose great challenges in Media Access Control (MAC) protocol design for underwater acoustic networks. In this paper, we proposed an underwater MAC protocol based on Carrier Sensing Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA), which is called UW-CSMA/CA (CSMA/CA for underwater). Three areas of improvement are investigated, namely, the control rules, the deferral rules, and the backoff slot time. The simulations in ns2 demonstrate that the throughput performance of UW-CSMA/CA is clearly higher than that of original CSMA/CA protocol. We also conclude some regulations between throughput and network parameters, which provide basis of network optimization.
LTP: A Chinese Language Technology Platform

LTP (Language Technology Platform) is an integrated Chinese processing platform which includes a suite of high performance natural language processing (NLP) modules and relevant corpora. Especially for the syntactic and semantic parsing modules, we achieved good results in some relevant evaluations, such as CoNLL and SemEval. Based on XML internal data representation, users can easily use these modules and corpora by invoking DLL (Dynamic Link Library) or Web service APIs (Application Program Interface), and view the processing results directly by the visualization tool.
Equipment for monitoring and analysis of transient electrical events in power system

Many power quality problems are generated by various electrical events (faults, disturbances, etc.). This paper presents the PC-08/104 equipment for monitoring and analysis of transient electrical events in power systems. It is a programmable electronic module which runs according to the signals provided by the transducers that take over the process parameters. PC-08/104 performs the acquisition of analog and digital inputs, local data storage, monitoring and processing, data transfer to an IBM-PC compatible computer and communication with the process server in a distributed data acquisition system. The program which runs on an IBM-PC compatible computer contains three sections: Monitoring (configuring all settable parameters of the equipment), Analysis (visualization of the input signals waveforms and the computation of several characteristic values) and Manager (management of records and archives). PC-08/104 provides an excellent tool to analyse the performance of the power system before, during and after a network disturbance situation. Some experimental results obtained using this equipment in energetic system are also presented in the paper.
Power analysis of high throughput pipelined carry-propagation adders

In several previous papers the area, delay, and power consumption for various carry-propagation adders have been compared. However, for high throughput applications it may be necessary to introduce pipelining into the adder. The number of stages to be inserted and the width of the pipelining registers differs between different adders structure. In this work we focus on the power consumption far adder structures when pipelining is used to increase the throughput. Four adder structures with varying wordlengths and pipeline levels are implemented using standard cells and the power consumption is compared. The results show that the Kogge-Stone parallel Prefix adder gives the lowest power consumption given the throughput most of the time.
An ontology-based integration of Web query interfaces for house search

With the rapid development of Web, there are more and more Web databases available for users to access. At the same time, searchers often have difficulties in first finding the right sources and then querying over them. It becomes imperative to provide an integrated search system over Web databases, and integrating query interfaces is the first and the most important step. In this paper, using house domain of Chinese environment as an example, we propose a more effective technique to perform this task. Our frame is called IQIBO. In this frame, we get a UQI, which is based on domain ontology and need not change when query interfaces of Web databases are changed. Through banding a pre-query and a post-query approach together, we judge if a link got by an improved crawler has a query interface. After we get query interfaces for deep Web databases, we can get the mapping of query interfaces and the UQI easily and accurately. Our experimental results show that the proposed technique does its work accurately and efficiently.
Putative pre- and postsynaptic ATP-sensitive potassium channels in the rat substantia nigra in vitro

Pre- and postsynaptic adenosine 5′-triphosphate-sensitive potassium (ATP-K+) currents were studied using whole-cell recordings from substantia nigra zona compacta “principal” neurons in midbrain slices. The GABAA and GABAB receptor-mediated synaptic potentials were unaffected by the ATP-K+ channel inhibitor glibenclamide (30 microM) or by the opener diazoxide (500 microM), indicating that ATP-K+ channels on GABA-ergic terminals are not active, nor can they be activated pharmacologically, under control conditions. However, application of a glucose-free solution to reduce intracellular ATP levels caused a reduction of the GABAB IPSP in all neurons. This was substantially reversed by the sulfonylurea inhibitor tolbutamide (300 microM) in 50% of the neurons tested. The reduction of the GABAB IPSP was a presynaptic effect since postsynaptic hyperpolarizations induced by the GABAB receptor agonist baclofen (10 microM) were unaffected by glucose- free solutions. Diazoxide (500 microM) induced a slowly developing hyperpolarization or outward current in 64% of principal neurons, which was tolbutamide- (100–300 microM) or glibenclamide- (30 microM) sensitive. In contrast, the GABAB receptor agonist baclofen (30 microM) induced a rapid hyperpolarization or outward current in all neurons tested that was unaffected by tolbutamide (300 microM). Although both the diazoxide-induced current and the baclofen-induced current were inhibited by Ba2+ (300 microM), the currents elicited by diazoxide and baclofen summated. The reversal potential for the diazoxide-induced current was also less negative than that for baclofen, which was close to EK. In the presence of intracellular cesium, diazoxide induced a tolbutamide-sensitive inward current in a proportion of neurons, indicating that it has other actions in addition to activating a potassium current. Our results suggest that functional ATP-K+ channels exist both pre- and postsynaptically in the SN, where they modulate the activity of principal neurons. They are different to the potassium channels activated by the GABAB receptor agonist baclofen.
Peri- and Postanalgesic Properties of Lidokain, Lornoxicam, and Nitroglycerine Combination at Intravenous Regional Anesthesia

Background. This study was conducted to compare and evaluate the effect of adding lornoxicam or nitroglycerine as adjuncts to lidocaine in intravenous regional anesthesia (IVRA). Methods. 60 patients were randomly separated into three groups, lidocaine group (group L), lidocaine + lornoxicam group (group LL), and lidocaine + lornoxicam + transdermal nitroglycerine group (group LL-N). Hemodynamic parameters, sensory and motor blocks onset, and recovery times were recorded. Analgesic consumption for tourniquet pain and postoperative period were recorded. Results. Sensory block onset times and motor block onset times were shorter in the LL-N and LL groups compared with L group. Sensory block recovery time and motor block recovery time were prolonged in the LL and LL-N groups compared with group L. The amount of fentanyl required for tourniquet pain was less in group LL and group LL-N when compared with group L. VAS scores of tourniquet pain were higher in group L compared with the other study groups. Postoperative VAS scores were higher for the first 4 hours in group L compared with the other study groups. Conclusion. The adjuvant drugs (lornoxicam or TNG) when added to lidocaine in IVRA were effective in improving the overall quality of anesthesia, reducing tourniquet pain, increasing tourniquet tolerance, and improving the postoperative analgesia.
Anecdote Recognition and Recommendation

We introduce a novel task Anecdote Recognition and Recommendation. An anecdote is a story with a point revealing account of an individual person. Recommending proper anecdotes can be used as evidence to support argumentative writing or as a clue for further reading. We represent an anecdote as a structured tuple — < person, story, implication >. Anecdote recognition runs on archived argumentative essays. We extract narratives containing events of a person as the anecdote story. More importantly, we uncover the anecdote implication, which reveals the meaning and topic of an anecdote. Our approach depends on discourse role identification. Discourse roles such as thesis, main ideas and support help us locate stories and their implications in essays. The experiments show that informative and interpretable anecdotes can be recognized. These anecdotes are used for anecdote recommendation. The anecdote recommender can recommend proper anecdotes in response to given topics. The anecdote implication contributes most for bridging user interested topics and relevant anecdotes.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the older adult: what defines abnormal lung function?

Background: The Global Initiative on Obstructive Lung Disease stages for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) uses a fixed ratio of the post-bronchodilator forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1)/forced vital capacity (FVC) of 0.70 as a threshold. Since the FEV1/FVC ratio declines with age, using the fixed ratio to define COPD may “overdiagnose” COPD in older populations. Objective: To determine morbidity and mortality among older adults whose FEV1/FVC is less than 0.70 but more than the lower limit of normal (LLN). Methods: The severity of COPD was classified in 4965 participants aged ⩾65 years in the Cardiovascular Health Study using these two methods and the age-adjusted proportion of the population who had died or had a COPD-related hospitalisation in up to 11 years of follow-up was determined. Results: 1621 (32.6%) subjects died and 935 (18.8%) had at least one COPD-related hospitalisation during the follow-up period. Subjects (n = 1134) whose FEV1/FVC fell between the LLN and the fixed ratio had an increased adjusted risk of death (hazard ratio (HR) 1.3, 95% CI 1.1 to 1.5) and COPD-related hospitalisation (HR 2.6, 95% CI 2.0 to 3.3) during follow-up compared with asymptomatic individuals with normal lung function. Conclusion: In this cohort, subjects classified as “normal” using the LLN but abnormal using the fixed ratio were more likely to die and to have a COPD-related hospitalisation during follow-up. This suggests that a fixed FEV1/FVC ratio of <0.70 may identify at-risk patients, even among older adults.
Evaluating privacy threats in released database views by symmetric indistinguishability

A privacy violation occurs when the association between an individual identity and data considered private by that individual is obtained by an unauthorized party. Uncertainty and indistinguishability are two independent aspects that characterize the degree of this association being revealed. Indistinguishability refers to the property that the attacker cannot see the difference among a group of individuals, while uncertainty refers to the property that the attacker cannot tell which private value, among a group of values, an individual actually has. This paper investigates the notion of indistinguishability as a general form of anonymity, applicable, for example, not only to generalized private tables, but to relational views and to sets of views obtained by multiple queries over a private database table. It is shown how indistinguishability is highly influenced by certain symmetries among individuals, in the released data, with respect to their private values. The paper provides both theoretical results and practical algorithms for checking if a specific set of views over a private table provide sufficient indistinguishability.
Identity based threshold cryptography and blind signatures for electronic voting

Recently, there has been an increasing interest to improve the efficiency in election processes which has brought as a consequence a wide range of proposals for electronic voting. Electronic voting protocols are a reasonable alternative to conventional elections. Nevertheless, they are facing an evolution due to its requirements, especially the ones needed to provide full security considered to represent a democratic electronic vote. In the literature, different protocols based on public key schemes have been proposed to meet such security requirements. In this paper, we propose the use of bilinear pairings in order to provide the security requirements that an electronic voting protocol must meet, without requiring the entire infrastructure needed in a public key scheme. Proposed protocol considers two cryptographic primitives as main building blocks: threshold and blind signature schemes. It is divided in four main stages: set-up, authentication, voting and counting. Moreover, it meets privacy, accuracy and robustness by using bilinear pairings. We make a comparative analysis, which is based on its performance and the key pairs, Trust and Certification Authorities it requires.
Cooperation in delay tolerant networks

In delay tolerant networks (DTNs), all the networking functions rely on the contribution of the participants to fulfill the store-and-forward fashion. Since wireless nodes are buffer and energy constrained, it may not be in the best interest of a node to always accept relay request. In recent years, incentive mechanisms have been proposed to stimulate nodes to cooperate in packet forwarding. However, the lack of end-to-end paths, high variation and long feedback delay in DTNs imply that existing solutions for mobile ad-hoc networks do not apply to DTNs. In this paper, we address the problem assuming that nodes are rational to optimize self interest. We propose a model, named Pay-for-Gain (PFG), based on game theory and loan-credit theory, to investigate equilibrium point that maximizes their own interest. For comparison, the strategy tit-for-tat (TFT) and PFG are tested in existing routing protocols in DTNs.