Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Object Recognition Using Flexible Groups of Local Features

We propose a new object recognition system based on local features and their flexible spatial configuration within a probabilistic framework. Although the training set consists of only 1 image of the object, the system is able to recognize that same object under large rigid and/or non-rigid deformations. This is possible due to the robustness of the local features and of the pairwise geometric constraints between them that we introduce in this paper. These pairwise constraints are also used for grouping features during hypothesis generation. The new grouping method generally produces fewer groups, where each group has more inliers, than the commonly used alternative method. Furthermore, we also propose a novel filtering procedure to select the local features that have high distinctiveness, detectability and robustness to image deformations. As a result, we decrease the ambiguity of matching and, consequently, improve the scalability of the recognition process with respect to the size of the database. We show the viability of this system using a database of 15 objects, and several challenging test images containing rigid/non-rigid deformations, illumination changes, clutter, and partial occlusion. Moreover, we also show the system working in a long range motion problem using a challenging sequence of images.
Identification of a Plant Viral RNA Genome in the Nucleus

Viruses contain either DNA or RNA as genomes. DNA viruses replicate within nucleus, while most RNA viruses, especially (+)-sense single-stranded RNA, replicate and are present within cytoplasm. We proposed a new thought that is contrary to the common notion that (+)-sense single-stranded RNA viruses are present only in the cytoplasm. In this study, we question whether the genome of a plant RNA virus (non-retroviral) is present in the nucleus of infected cells? Hibiscus chlorotic ringspot virus (HCRSV) RNA was detected in the nucleus of infected cells, as shown by fluorescent in situ hybridization. Western blot using anti-histone 3 and anti-phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase showed that nuclei were highly purified from mock and HCRSV-infected kenaf (Hibiscus cannabilis L.) leaves, respectively. The p23 and HCRSV coat protein (CP) coding regions were both amplified from total RNA extracted from isolated nuclei. Viral RNA in the nucleus may be used to generate viral microRNAs (vir-miRNAs), as five putative vir-miRNAs were predicted from HCRSV using the vir-miRNAs prediction database. The vir-miRNA (hcrsv-miR-H1-5p) was detected using TaqMan® stem-loop real-time PCR, and by northern blot using DIG-end labeled probe in HCRSV-infected kenaf leaves. Finally, a novel nuclear localization signal (NLS) was discovered in p23 of HCRSV. The NLS interacts with importin α and facilitates viral RNA genome to enter nucleus. We demonstrate the presence of a (+)-sense single-stranded viral RNA within nucleus.
Invariant construction of solutions to Einstein's field equations - LRS perfect fluids II

The properties of LRS class II perfect fluid spacetimes are analysed using the description of geometries in terms of the Riemann tensor and a finite number of its covariant derivatives. In this manner it is straightforward to obtain the plane and hyperbolic analogues to the spherical symmetric case. For spherically symmetric static models the set of equations is reduced to the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation only. Some new non-stationary and inhomogeneous solutions with shear, expansion and acceleration of the fluid are presented. Among these are some of temporally self-similar solutions with equation of state given by p = ( - 1)µ, 1 < < 2 and a class of solutions characterized by = -(1/6). We give an example of a geometry where the Riemann tensor and the Ricci rotation coefficients are not sufficient to give a complete description of the geometry. Using an extension of the method, we find the full metric in terms of curvature quantities.
Institutional Shareholders, Private Equity, and Antitakeover Protection at the IPO Stage

Institutional investors have been slow to respond to the widespread presence of takeover defenses in the charters of firms whose shares they hold through private equity funds, and their response to date has been tepid compared to their efforts in the proxy context. Institutions' hesitancy may reflect a rational unwillingness among private equity funds, as well as the institutions' own investment staff, to require portfolio companies to go public with takeover-friendly charters. This article develops a hypothesis to explain the common presence of defenses in the charters of firms that go public with private equity investment and the half-hearted response of institutional investors to this situation. Under this hypothesis - based on private equity funds' need to maintain a reputation for dealing well with successful managers of portfolio companies - it is privately rational but socially inefficient for private equity funds to have their portfolio companies adopt takeover defenses. The implication of the hypothesis is that institutional investors may face at least as difficult a challenge in ridding IPO charters of takeover defenses as they face in urging managers of already-public firms to eliminate defenses from their charters.
THE IMPACT OF INTRA- AND INTERFIRM COLLABORATION ON SERVICE INNOVATION IN B2B FIRMS

Service innovation is recognized as a fundamental source of competitive advantage in B2B settings, with positive effects on customers, business partners, employees, and society. Scholars have pointed out that innovation does not result from a single economic actor but from a complex process in which a range of actors interact. Previous studies on service innovation in B2B highlight the integration of multiple actors in the service innovation process and suggest that it improves performance. However the knowledge on the performance effect of intraand inter-firm collaboration is nevertheless not conclusive. The aim of this study is to provide new perspectives in explaining how intraand interfirm collaboration in B2B can improve service innovation performance. Specifically, we examine the effect of involving employees, customers and partners in the service innovation process for incremental and radical innovation. In order to pursue our aim, an empirical study was conducted on a sample of 404 B2B firms in five European countries (Finland, Austria, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland). The results of the study show that actors have different roles in service innovation: intra-firm collaboration and customer collaboration have an effect for both incremental and radical service innovation, while business partner involvement has an effect on radical service innovation.
Detecting genetic variations in hereditary retinal dystrophies with next-generation sequencing technology

Purpose To identify pathogenic mutations responsible for retinal dystrophies (RDs) in three unrelated Chinese families. Methods Three probands from unrelated families with RDs were recruited. Genomic DNA prepared from leukocytes was analyzed using gene chip–based next-generation sequencing (NGS) to capture and sequence all of the exons of 100 known RD-associated genes. Candidate variants were validated with PCR and Sanger sequencing in the respective families. Thorough ophthalmic examinations including best-corrected visual acuity, funduscopic examination, and full-field electroretinograms were performed in the affected individuals. Results We successfully identified causative mutations in patients from the Chinese families with RDs: the known mutation IMPDH1 c. 942_944delGAA in a family with retinitis pigmentosa, the novel mutation ABCA4 c.1924T>A in a family with Stargardt disease, and the novel mutation NMNAT1 c.272A>G and known mutation NMNAT1 c.196C>T in a family with Leber congenital amaurosis. All variations segregated with the disease phenotypes in the respective families and were absent from ethnically matched control chromosomes. Prediction analysis demonstrated the two novel missense mutations might be damaging. Conclusions The results strongly suggested these mutations were responsible for different RD phenotypes in the Chinese families. NGS technology provides an accurate and economic method for identifying causative genes for RDs.
Computers in Support of Musical Expression

Music creation and performance are basic and distinctive forms of human creativity which constitute an important application domain for computer systems. In this paper we review recent developments in the use of computers to support musical expression in terms of two characteristics: level of intervention in the music produced, and level of support for collaboration between musicians. These characteristics provide a mechanism to lay out the space of current research, to identify trends, and to speculate on future research directions. Key areas for future research are identified, in particular, the need for design guidelines to inform instrument development, development of instruments which are easy to learn yet provide depth of expression, and increased support for collaboration within shared instruments.
The Externalities/Governmental Influence Theories of the Corporate Entity and Financial Distress

This article presents new theories of the corporate entity, and theories of bankruptcy and financial distress, and shows the relationships between the two types of theories. The articles discusses the growing relationships between the government and the private sector, and the sociological, psychological/behavioral, public policy, financial, governmental and legal issues that influence the creation and evolution of corporate entities and sometime result in financial distress.
Increasing data reuse of sparse algebra codes on simultaneous multithreading architectures

In this paper the problem of the locality of sparse algebra codes on simultaneous multithreading (SMT) architectures is studied. In these kind of architectures many hardware structures are dynamically shared among the running threads. This puts a lot of stress on the memory hierarchy, and a poor locality, both inter‐thread and intra‐thread, may become a major bottleneck in the performance of a code. This behavior is even more pronounced when the code is irregular, which is the case of sparse matrix ones. Therefore, techniques that increase the locality of irregular codes on SMT architectures are important to achieve high performance. This paper proposes a data reordering technique specially tuned for these kind of architectures and codes. It is based on a locality model developed by the authors in previous works. The technique has been tested, first, using a simulator of a SMT architecture, and subsequently, on a real architecture as Intel's Hyper‐Threading. Important reductions in the number of cache misses have been achieved, even when the number of running threads grows. When applying the locality improvement technique, we also decrease the total execution time and improve the scalability of the code. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Development of a Threshold Model to Predict Germination of Populus tomentosa Seeds after Harvest and Storage under Ambient Condition

Effects of temperature, storage time and their combination on germination of aspen (Populus tomentosa) seeds were investigated. Aspen seeds were germinated at 5 to 30°C at 5°C intervals after storage for a period of time under 28°C and 75% relative humidity. The effect of temperature on aspen seed germination could not be effectively described by the thermal time (TT) model, which underestimated the germination rate at 5°C and poorly predicted the time courses of germination at 10, 20, 25 and 30°C. A modified TT model (MTT) which assumed a two-phased linear relationship between germination rate and temperature was more accurate in predicting the germination rate and percentage and had a higher likelihood of being correct than the TT model. The maximum lifetime threshold (MLT) model accurately described the effect of storage time on seed germination across all the germination temperatures. An aging thermal time (ATT) model combining both the TT and MLT models was developed to describe the effect of both temperature and storage time on seed germination. When the ATT model was applied to germination data across all the temperatures and storage times, it produced a relatively poor fit. Adjusting the ATT model to separately fit germination data at low and high temperatures in the suboptimal range increased the models accuracy for predicting seed germination. Both the MLT and ATT models indicate that germination of aspen seeds have distinct physiological responses to temperature within a suboptimal range.
AN EVALUATION OF FEATURE EXTRACTION ALGORITHMS FOR AUTOMATIC LANGUAGE TRANSCRIPTION SYSTEM FOR ANCIENT HANDWRITING JAVANESE MANUSCRIPTS

In order to preserve and extract the implicit knowledge of ancient Javanese manuscript, a system is required to scan and translate these manuscripts. The problem faced is the fact that most of these manuscripts are written over a very brittle medium. The best way to solve the problem is by digitalizing them to digital images, then being processed to extract the content. Optical Character Recognition is an effort to extract the content of such invaluable documents that will be followed by language translation process. Optical Character Recognition System consists of preprocessing, feature extraction, character recognition and post processing. Feature extraction works to extract distinctive features of the character that will be fed to the next step: character recognition. In this study, we evaluated several feature extraction algorithms including Local Line Direction, mesh and other different approaches in term of classification rate obtained by Support Vector Machine (SVM).
Immune Microenvironment in Colorectal Cancer: A New Hallmark to Change Old Paradigms

Impact of immune microenvironment in prognosis of solid tumors has been extensively studied in the last few years. Specifically in colorectal carcinoma, increased knowledge of the immune events around these tumors and their relation with clinical outcomes have led to consider immune microenvironment as one of the most important prognostic factors in this disease. In this review we will summarize and update the current knowledge with respect to this intriguing and complex new hallmark of cancer, paying special attention to infiltration by T-infiltrating lymphocytes and their subtypes in colorectal cancer, as well as its eventual clinical translation in terms of long-term prognosis. Finally, we suggest some possible investigational approaches based on combinatorial strategies to trigger and boost immune reaction against tumor cells.
Developmentally regulated and evolutionarily conserved expression of SLITRK1 in brain circuits implicated in Tourette syndrome

Tourette syndrome (TS) is an inherited developmental neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by vocal and motor tics. Multiple lines of neurophysiological evidence implicate dysfunction in the corticostriatal‐thalamocortical circuits in the etiology of TS. We recently identified rare sequence variants in the Slit and Trk‐like family member 1 (SLITRK1) gene associated with TS. SLITRK1, a single‐pass transmembrane protein, displays similarities to the SLIT family of secreted ligands, which have roles in axonal repulsion and dendritic patterning, but its function and developmental expression remain largely unknown. Here we provide evidence that SLITRK1 has a developmentally regulated expression pattern in projection neurons of the corticostriatal‐thalamocortical circuits. SLITRK1 is further enriched in the somatodendritic compartment and cytoplasmic vesicles of cortical pyramidal neurons in mouse, monkey, and human brain, observations suggestive of an evolutionarily conserved function in mammals. SLITRK1 is transiently expressed in the striosomal/patch compartment of the mammalian striatum and moreover is associated with the direct output pathway; adult striatal expression is confined to cholinergic interneurons. These analyses demonstrate that the expression of SLITRK1 is dynamic and specifically associated with the circuits most commonly implicated in TS and related disorders, suggesting that SLITRK1 contributes to the development of corticostriatal‐thalamocortical circuits. J. Comp. Neurol. 513:21–37, 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Serializing C intermediate representations for e cient and portable parsing ( preprint )

C static analysis tools often use intermediate representations (IRs) that organize program data in a simple, well-structured manner. However, the C parsers that create IRs are slow, and because they are di cult to write, only a few implementations exist, limiting the languages in which a C static analysis can be written. To solve these problems, we investigate two language-independent, on-disk representations of C IRs: one using XML, and the other using an Internet standard binary encoding called XDR. We benchmark the parsing speeds of both options, nding the XML to be about a factor of two slower than parsing C and the XDR over six times faster. Furthermore, we show that the XML les are far too large at 19 times the size of C source code, while XDR is only 2.2 times the C size. We also demonstrate the portability of our XDR system by presenting a C source code querying tool in Ruby. Our solution and the insights we gained from building it will be useful to analysis authors and other clients of C IRs. We have made our software freely available for download at http://www.cs. umd.edu/projects/PL/scil/.
Target identification based on the simulation of infrared thermal image

Based on the principle of the simulation of the infrared thermal image, the static car in the background of concrete surface, at 2:00,11:00,14:00, are simulated under the remote sensors with spatial resolution of 5m and 10m. The evaluation is based on the radiance of target and the background extracted from the simulation image. The results indicate that the method in this paper can reflect the difference of radiance between the static target and the background which is useful in the target identification.
DCT-based watermarking for video

An MPEG-based technique for embedding digital "watermarks" into digital video is proposed. The watermarking technique has been proposed as a method to hide secret information in the signals so as to discourage unauthorized copying or attest the origin of the media. In the proposed method, we take advantage of prediction types of MPEG bitstreams to embed watermarks into both intraframe and non-intraframe with different residual masks. The experimental results show that the proposed watermarking technique results in an almost invisible difference between the watermarked frames and the original frames, and is also robust to cropping operations and MPEG compression.
A Test of Fama and French Three Factor Model in Pakistan Equity Market

here is a view that investor who want to make investment in stock exchange should make a decision maximize their wealth. For this purpose the investor not only want to know which factor will impact the return but also want to understand the relative weight of various factors level, and which sub factor will impact more for giving factors. So they analyze all relevant factors while making decision that affect the return from investment in future. Variation in stock market return was determined by various theories. It was started with Sharp (1964), Linter (1965), Black (1972) who present Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) which shows how to be related between the average return of stock and market risk factor. Other researcher did not agree because there is other factor more than one factor. Many anomalies have been identified in CAPM. Base (1977) finds high earning to price (E/P) ratio companies having higher return than low earning to price ratio. Bans (1981) told small stock outperform than large stock. Stuntman (1980) argued that company with high book to market value outperforms companies with low book to market value.
Improved Grade-of-Service in Random Access Schemes with Frequency Binning

In random access schemes with no power control, such as the RTS/CTS method used in IEEE 802.11 for channel reservation, users with better channels have an advantage over those with bad channels. We propose the use of frequency binning in which a user randomly chooses one of M frequency bins to transmit the RTS. Such frequency binning has two competing effects: a) it reduces the chances of collision for the RTS, which increases the cell radius, b) it increases the signal power required for successful RTS reception due to higher spectral efficiency, which decreases the cell radius. We show that a) dominates in cases of interest and this leads to several advantages: i) it tends to provide equal grade-of-service to competing users in the presence of fading, shadowing, and propagation loss, which increases the cell radius, ii) it reduces access latency, and iii) it enables reception of multiple RTSs (with hardly any increase in transceiver complexity), which can be utilized for further improving the grade-of-service.
The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity

In October 2006, Nicholas Stern, one of the greatest economists and public intellectuals of our day, made headlines around the world with his report, which reviewed the costs and benefits of dealing with global warming. The worlds community has learned that it must act to mitigate global climate change, but until the Stern Review, no one knew how much it would cost, and how to do it. Now, Stern has transformed his report into a powerful narrative book for general readers. The Global Deal evaluates the economic future, and the essential steps we must take to protect growth and reduce poverty while managing climate change. The future Stern outlines is optimistic and pragmatic; he believes we have the capacity and creativity to change. But we need the will to inspire our political leaders to drive a new global strategy.
Saboteur game modelling using means-ends analysis

Saboteur game is a board game that uses cards. The game is done by a number of players divided into two groups, gold-miner group and saboteur group who prevents gold-miners to seek gold. Each player knows his role, but they do not know exactly which ones are their friends. Gold searching process is started from a single point of reference followed by making a path of seven cards horizontally from the reference to the gold card's position. This paper is done to propose a model of this game and applying the role of artificial intelligence so that it can be implemented as a computer program.
Modeling longitudinal periodontal data : A spatially-adaptive model with tools for specifying priors and checking fit

Attachment loss (AL), the distance down a tooth’s root that is no longer attached to surrounding bone by periodontal ligament, is a common measure of periodontal disease. In this paper, we develop a spatiotemporal model to monitor progression of AL. Our model is an extension of the conditionally autoregressive (CAR) prior, which spatially smooths estimates towards their neighbors. However, since AL often exhibits burst of large values in space and time, we develop a non-stationary spatiotemporal CAR model that allows the degree of spatial and temporal smoothing to vary in different regions of the mouth. To do this, we assign each AL measurement site its own set of variance parameters and spatially smooth the variances with spatial priors. We propose a heuristic to measure the complexity of the site-specific variances, and use it to select priors that ensure parameters in the model will be well-identified. In data from a clinical trial, this model improves the fit compared to the usual dynamic CAR model for 90 of 99 patients’ AL measurements.