Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generating Referring Expressions in Open Domains

We present an algorithm for generating referring expressions in open domains. Existing algorithms work at the semantic level and assume the availability of a classification for attributes, which is only feasible for restricted domains. Our alternative works at the realisation level, relies on Word-Net synonym and antonym sets, and gives equivalent results on the examples cited in the literature and improved results for examples that prior approaches cannot handle. We believe that ours is also the first algorithm that allows for the incremental incorporation of relations. We present a novel corpus-evaluation using referring expressions from the Penn Wall Street Journal Treebank.
Sorting Mechanisms Regulating Membrane Protein Traffic in the Apical Transcytotic Pathway of Polarized MDCK Cells

The transcytotic pathway followed by the polymeric IgA receptor (pIgR) carrying its bound ligand (dIgA) from the basolateral to the apical surface of polarized MDCK cells has been mapped using morphological tracers. At 20°C dIgA-pIgR internalize to interconnected groups of vacuoles and tubules that comprise the endosomal compartment and in which they codistribute with internalized transferrin receptors (TR) and epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFR). Upon transfer to 37°C the endosome vacuoles develop long tubules that give rise to a distinctive population of 100-nm-diam cup-shaped vesicles containing pIgR. At the same time, the endosome gives rise to multivesicular endosomes (MVB) enriched in EGFR and to 60-nm-diam basolateral vesicles. The cup-shaped vesicles carry the dIgA/pIgR complexes to the apical surface where they exocytose. Using video microscopy and correlative electron microscopy to study cells grown thin and flat we show that endosome vacuoles tubulate in response to dIgA/pIgR but that the tubules contain TR as well as pIgR. However, we show that TR are removed from these dIgA-induced tubules via clathrin-coated buds and, as a result, the cup-shaped vesicles to which the tubules give rise become enriched in dIgA/pIgR. Taken together with the published information available on pIgR trafficking signals, our observations suggest that the steady-state concentrations of TR and unoccupied pIgR on the basolateral surface of polarized MDCK cells are maintained by a signal-dependent, clathrin-based sorting mechanism that operates along the length of the transcytotic pathway. We propose that the differential sorting of occupied receptors within the MDCK endosome is achieved by this clathrin-based mechanism continuously retrieving receptors like TR from the pathways that deliver pIgR to the apical surface and EGFR to the lysosome.
Removing Singularities

Big bang/crunch curvature singularities in exact CFT string backgrounds can be removed by turning on gauge ﬁelds. This is described within a family of SL (2) × SU (2) × U (1) x U (1) × U (1) quotient CFTs. Uncharged incoming wavefunctions from the “whiskers” of the extended universe can be fully reﬂected if and only if a big bang/crunch curvature singularity, from which they are scattered, exists. Extended BTZ-like singularities remain as long as U (1) x is compact.
Star Formation in the Bok Globule CB54

We present mid-infrared (10.4, 11.7, and 18.3 μm) imaging intended to locate and characterize the suspected protostellar components within the Bok globule CB54. We detect and confirm the protostellar status for the near-infrared source CB54YC1-II. The mid-infrared luminosity for CB54YC1-II was found to be Lmidir ≈ 8 L☉, and we estimate a central source mass of M* ≈ 0.8 M☉ (for a mass accretion rate of Ṁ = 10-6 M☉ yr-1). CB54 harbors another near-infrared source (CB54YC1-I), which was not detected by our observations. The nondetection is consistent with CB54YC1-I being a highly extinguished embedded young A or B star or a background G or F giant. An alternative explanation for CB54YC1-I is that the source is an embedded protostar viewed at an extremely high inclination angle, and the near-infrared detections are not of the central protostar, but of light scattered by the accretion disk into our line of sight. In addition, we have discovered three new mid-infrared sources, which are spatially coincident with the previously known dense core in CB54. The source temperatures (~100 K) and association of the mid-infrared sources with the dense core suggests that these mid-infrared objects may be embedded class 0 protostars.
Analytical Integrate-and-Fire Neuron Models with Conductance-Based Dynamics for Event-Driven Simulation Strategies

Event-driven simulation strategies were proposed recently to simulate integrate-and-fire (IF) type neuronal models. These strategies can lead to computationally efficient algorithms for simulating large-scale networks of neurons; most important, such approaches are more precise than traditional clock-driven numerical integration approaches because the timing of spikes is treated exactly. The drawback of such event-driven methods is that in order to be efficient, the membrane equations must be solvable analytically, or at least provide simple analytic approximations for the state variables describing the system. This requirement prevents, in general, the use of conductance-based synaptic interactions within the framework of event-driven simulations and, thus, the investigation of network paradigms where synaptic conductances are important. We propose here a number of extensions of the classical leaky IF neuron model involving approximations of the membrane equation with conductancebased synaptic current, which lead to simple analytic expressions for the membrane state, and therefore can be used in the event-driven framework. These conductance-based IF (gIF) models are compared to commonly used models, such as the leaky IF model or biophysical models in which conductances are explicitly integrated. All models are compared with respect to various spiking response properties in the presence of synaptic activity, such as the spontaneous discharge statistics, the temporal precision in resolving synaptic inputs, and gain modulation under in vivolike synaptic bombardment. Being based on the passive membrane equation with fixed-threshold spike generation, the proposed gIF models are situated in between leaky IF and biophysical models but are much closer to the latter with respect to their dynamic behavior and response characteristics, while still being nearly as computationally efficient as simple IF neuron models. gIF models should therefore provide a useful tool for efficient and precise simulation of large-scale neuronal networks with realistic, conductance-based synaptic interactions.
Chemical analysis of essential oils from different parts of Ferula communis L. growing in central Italy

Abstract Ferula communis is a showy herbaceous plant typical of the Mediterranean area where it is used as a traditional medicine. The plant is a source of bioactive compounds such as daucane sesquiterpenes and prenylated coumarins. In Italy, most of phytochemical studies focused on Sardinian populations where poisonous and nonpoisonous chemotypes were found, while investigations on peninsular populations are scarce. In this work, we report the chemical characterisation of the essential oils obtained from different parts of F. communis growing in central Italy. The chemical profiles of the plant parts, as detected by GC-FID and GC-MS, were different from each other and from those reported in insular populations. Notably, α-pinene (10.5%), γ-terpinene (7.6%) and hedycariol (8.4%) were the major volatile constituents in flowers; α-pinene (55.9%), β-pinene (16.8%) and myrcene (5.9%) in fruits; β-eudesmol (12.1%), α-eudesmol (12.1%) and hedycariol (10.3%) in leaves; (E)-β-farnesene (9.5%), β-cubebene (8.2%) and (E)-caryophyllene (7.2%) in roots. The volatile profiles detected did not allow to classify the investigated central Italy population into the poisonous and nonpoisonous chemotypes previously described in Sardinia. Graphical abstract
Emticicia aquatica sp. nov., a species of the family Cytophagaceae isolated from fresh water.

A Gram-staining-negative, non-gliding, orange-pigmented bacterial strain, designated HMF2925T, was isolated from fresh water in Korea. The phylogenetic tree based on 16S rRNA gene sequences showed that strain HMF2925T formed a distinct lineage within the genus Emticicia. Strain HMF2925T was closely related to Emticicia oligotrophica DSM 17448T (95.5 %) and Emticicia ginsengisoli Gsoil 085T (94.1 %). The major fatty acids of strain HMF2925T were summed feature 3 (C16 : 1ω6c and/or C16 : 1ω7c), iso-C15 : 0, C16 : 1ω5c and C16 : 0.The major polar lipids of strain HMF2925T were phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylinositol, diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylglycerol, an unidentified glycolipid, two unidentified amino lipids and three unidentified polar lipids. The DNA G+C content of strain HMF2925T was 36.5 mol%. On the basis of the evidence presented in this study, strain HMF2925T represents a novel species of the genus Emticicia, for which the name Emticicia aquatica sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is HMF2925T ( = KCTC 42574T = CECT 8858T).
Vav proteins are necessary for correct differentiation of mouse cecal and colonic enterocytes

In the mammalian cecum and colon, a single layer of absorptive, mature enterocytes are a crucial element of the physical barrier to the contents of the lumen. Enterocytic differentiation involves expansion of cytoplasmic cytoskeletal networks, which have been proposed to maintain structural integrity of individual cells and thus the entire epithelial barrier. We sought molecular tools to test this hypothesis in vivo, because in vitro systems displaying full intestinal epithelial differentiation have not yet been developed. Vav proteins are RhoGEFs that modulate cytoskeletal networks in immune cells. We found that Vav proteins were preferentially expressed in terminally differentiating cecal and colonic enterocytes. Loss of Vav protein expression in triple-knockout mice (Vav1–/–;Vav2–/–;Vav3–/–) resulted in defective expansion of microtubule cytoskeletons, a significant decrease in cell height and diminished expression of differentiation markers. Despite these changes, enterocytes in the triple-mutant mice did not contain measurable alterations in actin cytoskeleton, apical cell-cell junctions, nuclear position or global polarized delivery of proteins involved in terminal differentiation. Aged triple-mutant mice spontaneously developed ulcerative lesions that were, in part, a result of defective wound repair. These studies show that Vav proteins are required for enterocytic differentiation and colonic epithelial barrier integrity.
Fluorescent T7 display phages obtained by translational frameshift

Lytic phages form a powerful platform for the display of large cDNA libraries and offer the possibility to screen for interactions with almost any substrate. To visualize these interactions directly by fluorescence microscopy, we constructed fluorescent T7 phages by exploiting the flexibility of phages to incorporate modified versions of its capsid protein. By applying translational frameshift sequences, helper plasmids were constructed that expressed a fixed ratio of both wild-type capsid protein (gp10) and capsid protein fused to enhanced yellow fluorescent protein (EYFP). The frameshift sequences were inserted between the 3′ end of the capsid gene and the sequence encoding EYFP. Fluorescent fusion proteins are only formed when the ribosome makes a −1 shift in reading frame during translation. Using standard fluorescence microscopy, we could sensitively monitor the enrichment of specific binders in a cDNA library displayed on fluorescent T7 phages. The perspectives of fluorescent display phages in the fast emerging field of single molecule detection and sorting technologies are discussed.
Incorporating frequency warping into sparse component analysis

Frequency warping using short-time Laguerre transform (STLT) has been employed here as an effective tool in increasing the efficiency of the sparse component analysis (SCA) for underdetermined blind source separation systems. An attempt has been made to maximise a measure of sparseness. There are three major advantages for such an application; 1. The psycho-acoustic features such as fundamental harmonics are well separated in frequency domain, 2. The permutation problem as the most troublesome effect in frequency domain blind source separation (FDBSS), is mitigated, and 3. In SCA the sparseness measured based on l0-norm, increases and hence the performance of the SCA methods is improved.
HoloScope: Topology-and-Spike Aware Fraud Detection

As online fraudsters invest more resources, including purchasing large pools of fake user accounts and dedicated IPs, fraudulent attacks become less obvious and their detection becomes increasingly challenging. Existing approaches such as average degree maximization suffer from the bias of including more nodes than necessary, resulting in lower accuracy and increased need for manual verification. Hence, we propose HoloScope, which introduces a novel metric "contrast suspiciousness" integrating information from graph topology and spikes to more accurately detect fraudulent users and objects. Contrast suspiciousness dynamically emphasizes the contrast patterns between fraudsters and normal users, making HoloScope capable of distinguishing the synchronized and anomalous behaviors of fraudsters on topology, bursts and drops, and rating scores. In addition, we provide theoretical bounds for how much this increases the time cost needed for fraudsters to conduct adversarial attacks. Moreover, HoloScope has a concise framework and sub-quadratic time complexity, making the algorithm reproducible and scalable. Extensive experiments showed that HoloScope achieved significant accuracy improvements on synthetic and real data, compared with state-of-the-art fraud detection methods.
Analysis of strategies for improving and estimating the effectiveness of heuristic evaluation

Effectiveness of Heuristic Evaluation (HE) has severely been challenged. The present study investigated two strategies for improving the effectiveness of HE: Selection of usability guidelines (Gerhardt-Powals' cognitive engineering principles vs. Nielsen's heuristics); Provision of support and training. We also examined various strategies for estimating the effectiveness of HE. An empirical study with a balanced within- and between subject 2x2 factorial design involving 18 novice evaluators was conducted. 290 <i>non-consolidated</i> usability problems (UPs) identified in 35 HE test sessions were evaluated against 88 <i>actual</i> UPs found in the user tests (n = 17) performed earlier. Nielsen's heuristics were proved to be more effective in enabling the evaluators to uncover significantly more UPs, though in general the effectiveness of HE was low. Implications for future work are drawn.
Preparation of silver particles by spray pyrolysis of silver-diammine complex solutions

A novel precursor solution system, containing NH_3 as a complexing agent, was used for the production of Ag powders by spray pyrolysis. Solutions of Ag_2CO_3, Ag_2O, and AgNO_3 with NH_4HCO_3 were used in this study. Ag powders were obtained at unexpectedly low temperatures, i.e., 400 °C or less. The Ag powders with a shell-like morphology were obtained from Ag_2CO_3 and Ag_2O solutions, whereas dense Ag particles of about 1 μm diameter were obtained from AgNO_3–NH_4HCO_3 solution. These morphologies are explained in terms of NH_3 release during spray pyrolysis.
Redundancy-Based Delivery Mechanism for Error-Prone Wireless Networks

Network coding has attracted much attention in recent years due to the capability of transmission reduction and throughput improvement. In this paper, a redundancy-based delivery mechanism is proposed. This delivery mechanism utilizes network coding and linear combination on original packets to regenerate packets, which are called coded packets. Upon receiving a minimum number of coded packets, the destination can decode and get all original packets. Through theoretical analysis on delivery rate and overhead, we further propose an utility function to determine a proper redundancy degree and observe the suitable range of packet error rates to implement our delivery mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed delivery mechanism is applied to link adaptation. The simulation results show that by utilizing our proposed delivery, the operating SNR range of each PHY mode is lowered. In other words, when channel condition gets worse, one mobile device can still operate in the same PHY mode by utilizing the proposed delivery mechanism.
Coordination vs . information in multi-agent decision processes

Agent coordination and communication are important issues in designing decentralised agent systems, which are often modelled as flavours of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Because communication incurs an overhead, various scenarios for sparse agent communication have been developed. In these treatments, coordination is usually considered more important than making use of local information. We argue that this is not always the best thing to do and provide alternative approximate algorithms based on local inference. We show that such algorithms can outperform the guaranteed coordinated approach in a benchmark scenario.
DDRprog: A CLEVR Differentiable Dynamic Reasoning Programmer

We present a generic dynamic architecture that employs a problem specific differentiable forking mechanism to leverage discrete logical information about the problem data structure. We adapt and apply our model to CLEVR Visual Question Answering, giving rise to the DDRprog architecture; compared to previous approaches, our model achieves higher accuracy in half as many epochs with five times fewer learnable parameters. Our model directly models underlying question logic using a recurrent controller that jointly predicts and executes functional neural modules; it explicitly forks subprocesses to handle logical branching. While FiLM and other competitive models are static architectures with less supervision, we argue that inclusion of program labels enables learning of higher level logical operations -- our architecture achieves particularly high performance on questions requiring counting and integer comparison. We further demonstrate the generality of our approach though DDRstack -- an application of our method to reverse Polish notation expression evaluation in which the inclusion of a stack assumption allows our approach to generalize to long expressions, significantly outperforming an LSTM with ten times as many learnable parameters.
Accuracy of Physician Reporting in Routine Public Health Surveillance for Hepatitis C Virus Infection

Objective. From January 2007 to December 2008, the Montréal Public Health Department sent postal questionnaires to physicians and conducted patient interviews for all those newly diagnosed with hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. We evaluated physician responses to risk factor questions for non-acute HCV cases. Methods. We compared physician and patient responses with each of nine risk factor questions, determined the sensitivity and specificity of physician responses compared with patient responses, and evaluated agreement using Gwet's agreement coefficient (AC1). We ranked risk factors and compared the distributions by principal exposure category according to physician reporting vs. patient interview using the Chi-square test. Results. The completeness of physicians' responses (yes, no, or unknown) varied by risk factor question from 90.8% to 96.7%. For risk factors present among more than 5% of cases, sensitivity of physician responses ranged from 26.9% to 87.7% and specificity ranged from 93.0% to 98.6%. The AC1 coefficients for agreement between physician and patient responses to lifetime risk factors considered most important in HCV acquisition were 0.80 for injection drug use, 0.95 for blood transfusion before 1990, and 0.86 for birth in a country with high HCV prevalence. Risk distributions by principal exposure category according to physician reporting vs. patient interview were not statistically different (χ2[4] = 2.17, p=0.704). Conclusion. Postal questionnaires completed by physicians appear valid for determining the principal exposure category among non-acute HCV cases. Physician reporting can be a useful and low-cost component of routine HCV surveillance.
Data Mining: A Clustering Application

Developing a good clustering technique is a challenging task in data mining. Several models, such as artificial neural network approaches and genetic algorithms, represent a promising approach to address this challenge. This paper presents an experiment comparing a map-based training method used for clustering with a traditional clustering method. We test the effectiveness of both methods in helping decision makers in the information systems domain. Our analysis shows that the experimental group outperformed the controllable group. Statistical evidence shows that both training approaches are effective and present good results. Recommendations are made to researchers and practitioners to improve the efficacy of the map-based training approach.
Weight status and body image perception in Italian children.

BACKGROUND Previous research suggests there is a tendency in overweight subjects to underestimate their weight status. This study investigated the perception of body image in Italian children, with particular regard to overweight children. METHODS Primary school children (n = 866) were recruited for this cross-sectional nutritional survey in northern Italy. Anthropometric measurements were performed to determine body mass index (BMI). Body image perception was assessed with the Body Silhouette Chart for preadolescent children shown to the children and to their mothers (n = 778) during an interview. A new scheme to identify wrong (F.1, F.2) or inappropriate (F.3) self figure responses in overweight subjects was used. RESULTS More than one-third of the Italian children examined were above the normal BMI range (prevalence of overweight: 35.8%, girls; 37.2%, boys). A higher degree of dissatisfaction was expressed by girls than by boys, and the percentage increased in overweight/obese children. A discrepancy between the self figure perception and the real nutritional status of the subject occurred in 6-9% of the overweight/obese children. CONCLUSION The comparison of body image perception and anthropometric assessment of nutritional status could play an important role in future programs of nutritional surveillance as they provide indications of dissatisfaction and body image disturbances.
Patterning of poly(3‐octylthiophene) conducting polymer films by electron beam exposure

It is shown that it is possible to directly pattern conducting poly(3-octylthiophene) by electron beam lithography with a resolution down to 50 nm line widths. The conductivity of the doped polymer after processing was found to be comparable to that of the unpatterned polymer in the doped state
COMPARISON OF MAMDANI AND SUGENO FUZZY INFERENCE SYSTEM MODELS FOR RESONANT FREQUENCY CALCULATION OF RECTANGULAR MICROSTRIP ANTENNAS

Models based on fuzzy inference systems (FISs) for calculating the resonant frequency of rectangular microstrip antennas (MSAs) with thin and thick substrates are presented. Two types of FIS models, Mamdani FIS model and Sugeno FIS model, are used to compute the resonant frequency. The parameters of FIS models are determined by using various optimization algorithms. The resonant frequency results predicted by FIS models are in very good agreement with the experimental results available in the literature. When the performances of FIS models are compared with each other, the best result is obtained from the Sugeno FIS model trained by the least- squares algorithm.