Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Shape of Plane Images

This paper studies set patterns in $\mathbb{R}^2 $ and gives a definition of shape in terms of transformation groups, where the transformations need not be rigid and linear, but more structured than arbitrary homeomorphisms. The resulting concept of shape classes and shape groups is studied analytically. On such shape classes, prior measures intended for Bayesian image processing are introduced. The priors are given as Markov processes of the Gibbs type on certain graphs and where the generators are simple geometric objects in $\mathbb{R}^2 $, for example, line segments or other arcs. These continuum-based models differ from earlier, lattice-based ones in that they incorporate more shape information in the prior measures. This leads to algorithms for pattern synthesis and image processing, which have been implemented by APL code and applied in an extensive series of computer experiments. Since the algorithms are computer intensive, a limit theorem for the prior measures is presented that is intended to sp.
Role of Biasing and Device Size on Phonon Scattering in Graphene Nanoribbon Transistors

We study the noncoherent transport due to electron–phonon (e-ph) interaction in graphene nanoribbon (GNR) field-effect transistors (GNRFETs) using nonequilibrium Green’s function method in mode space. Phonon dispersion calculations in conjunction with the e-ph interaction computations show that in an armchair GNR, only a small number of phonon modes are coupled to the carriers. Our simulation shows that under a threshold gate voltage, the drain–source current is diminished by the low-energy phonons such as acoustic phonon modes and radial-breathing-like phonon modes, while at great biases of the gate, the current drop is essentially due to high-energy optical phonon modes. The effect of drain voltage on scattering process is discussed, which shows that at higher drain voltages, the ballisticity decreases. We also explore the phonon scattering dependence on the dimensions of GNRFET channel. In larger width ribbon, the impact of phonon scattering decreases. The channel with a length of 30 nm is ballistic up to 90%, and only when its length is increased to approximately 180 nm, transport becomes semiballistic, which infers to an effective mean free path of ~200 nm.
Intraspecific variation in indirect plant-soil feedbacks influences a wetland plant invasion.

Plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) influence plant competition via direct interactions with pathogens and mutualists or indirectly via apparent competition/mutualisms (i.e., spillover to co-occurring plants) and soil legacy effects. It is currently unknown how intraspecific variation in PSFs interacts with the environment (e.g., nutrient availability) to influence competition between native and invasive plants. We conducted a fully crossed multi-factor greenhouse experiment to determine the effects of Phragmites australis rhizosphere soil biota, interspecific competition, and nutrient availability on biomass of replicate populations from one native and two invasive lineages of common reed (P. australis) and a single lineage of native smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora). Harmful soil biota consistently dominated PSFs involving all three P. australis lineages, reducing biomass by 10%. Indirect PSFs (i.e., soil biota spillover) from the two invasive P. australis lineages reduced S. alterniflora biomass by 7%, whereas PSFs from the native P. australis lineage increased S. alterniflora biomass by 6%. Interestingly, interspecific competition and PSFs interacted to weaken their respective impacts on S. alterniflora, whereas they exerted synergistic negative effects on P. australis. Phragmites australis soil biota decreased S. alterniflora biomass when grown alone (i.e., a soil legacy), but increased S. alterniflora biomass when grown with P. australis, suggesting that P. australis recruits harmful generalist soil biota or facilitates S. alterniflora via spillover (i.e., apparent mutualism). Soil biota also reduced interspecific competition impacts on S. alterniflora, although it remained competitively inferior to P. australis across all treatments. Competitive interactions and responses to nutrients did not differ among P. australis lineages, indicating that interspecific competition and nutrient deposition may not be key drivers of P. australis invasion in North America. Although soil biota, interspecific competition, and nutrient availability appear to have no direct impact on the success of invasive P. australis lineages in North America, intraspecific lineage variation in indirect spillover and soil legacies from P. australis occur and may have important implications for co-occurring native species and restoration of invaded habitats. Our study integrates multiple factors linked to plant invasions, highlighting that indirect interactions are likely commonplace in influencing plant community dynamics and invasion success and impacts.
Multi-View Point based Similarity Measure for Hierarchical Clustering

Clustering is a fundamental operation used in unsupervised document organization and information retrieval. It aims to find intrinsic structures in data, and organize them into meaningful subgroups. It groups data instances that are similar to each other in one cluster and data instances that are very different from each other into different clusters. Hierarchical clustering is used to find the cluster relationship between data objects in the data set. A novel multi-viewpoint based similarity measure and two related clustering methods are proposed. The main difference of the novel method from the existing one is that it uses only single view point for clustering and where as in Multi-Viewpoint Based Similarity Measure uses many different viewpoints, which are objects and are assumed to not be in the same cluster with two objects being measured. Using multiple viewpoints, more informative assessment of similarity could be achieved. The two objects to be measured must be in the same cluster, while the points from where to establish this measurement must be outside of the cluster. This is called as Multiviewpoint-based Similarity, or MVS. Based on this novel method two criterion functions are proposed for document clustering. We compared this clustering algorithm with other measures in order to verify the performance of multiviewpoint clustering.
Extension of shelf life of fish mince under modified atmosphere packaging at refrigeration temperature (4±1°C).

Fish and fishery products are recognized as a source of nutrition but these are highly perishable. The present study was envisaged to evaluate the extension of shelf life of fish mince under modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) conditions (30% CO 2 + 70% N 2 ) in comparison to aerobic packaging under refrigerated temperature (4±1C). The fish meat pH was significantly (P<0.05) lower in MAP than aerobic. The rate of increase in TBARS, peroxide value and free fatty acids content during storage was significantly (P<0.05) lower in MAP than aerobic packaging. The microbiological quality (standard plate count, coliforms, yeast and molds, psychrophiles) attributes of MAP product were considerably lower than the threshold value even on 12 day of storage. Results indicated that the fish mince can be successfully stored under MAP conditions at refrigeration temperature for 12 to 15 days.
Multidrug Resistance Pattern in Confirmed Cases of Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infection in a Tertiary Care Hospital: A Prospective Study

Health-care associated infections (HAIs) have become a global patient safety concern (Mathur et al., 2015). Device-associated infections (DAIs) account for the majority of these infections. DAIs have tremendous implications in terms of associated mortality, morbidity, increased cost of treatment, adverse patient outcomes and social impact. Apart from the escalating rates, HAIs are now increasingly being caused by multi-drugresistant organisms, which are difficult to treat due to paucity of new antimicrobials.
A New Model-Based Method for Multi-View Human Body Tracking and Its Application to View Transfer in Image-Based Rendering

This paper proposes a new multi-view human body tracking and model-based rendering system with a textured deformable human body model and explores its practical application to view transfer in image-based rendering (IBR). The proposed approach first reconstructs an initial 3-D model of the human subject offline using Kinect depth cameras or from a general 3-D model if such information is unavailable in the original data. The human pose of the subject is then tracked with multi-view videos using an annealed particle filter (APF)-based tracker with a new color-based likelihood function and a Bayesian–Kalman filter smoother. The previous captured model can then be deformed to the new position for model-based rendering. An immediate application of the proposed approach is to support fly-over effects for view transfer in IBR systems with limited cameras. It avoids the reconstruction of the complete dynamic 3-D model where a large number of cameras may be required. Moreover, for static background, the background can be rendered using IBR with precaptured depth maps to further enhance the user's experience. To reduce the artifacts during fly-over caused by tracking errors and model deformation, a novel morphing technique utilizing a new free-form deformation-based artifacts suppression (FFD-AS) method and other user interface design techniques are also proposed. It allows smooth transition between the original view and the model-rendered views. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using the publicly available HumanEva dataset and our captured RGB-D multi-view dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed APF-based tracker offered improved tracking performance compared with the conventional bidirectional silhouette likelihood criterion. The proposed morphing approach is also shown to be effective in mitigating the rendering artifacts during view transfer.
Innovation, Imitation and Intellectual Property Rights in Developing Countries

This paper sets up a vertically related market model in which imitation and innovation are endogenously determined to study the impact of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on less‐developed countries. It shows how a less‐developed country switches from imitation to innovation as it develops. It is also found that the relationship between IPR protection and economic development is ‐shaped. The IPR protection tends to go down and then go up as income rises. This finding also conforms with that in the empirical literature on IPR protection.
Mesh deformation strategies in shape optimization. Application to forensic facial reconstruction. (Méthodes de déformation de maillage en optimisation de forme. Application à la reconstruction faciale pour la médecine légale)

This thesis is devoted to the conception, the development and the analysis of mesh deformation strategies for shape modeling, processing and comparison -as shape matching and surface reconstruction- and, in a rather independent concern, for devising a robust computational method for facial reconstruction. Facial reconstruction is about the estimation of a facial shape from the sole datum of the underlying skull and is a challenging problem in anthropology and forensic science. The main contribution of the thesis is the design of a novel method for shape matching, borrowing techniques from the shape optimization context. Under the sole assumption that the two shapes share the same topology, the desired mapping is achieved as a sequence of elastic displacements by minimizing an energy functional based on a signed distance function. Several numerical examples are presented to show the efficiency of the method.Also, a novel method for generating a closed surface mesh model of an initially non-closed source mesh model is developed. The method relies on an original PDE-based mesh evolution technique. A template shape is iteratively deformed, producing a sequence of shapes that get 'closer and closer' to the source triangulation.The second part of the manuscript deals with the development of a landmark-free, fully automated method for digital facial reconstruction. Based on techniques of continuous deformation as 'morphing' and 'warping', the proposed approach is integrated with anthropological assumptions and mechanical models.
Threshold Voltage Instability in p-GaN Gate AlGaN/GaN HFETs

We investigate the impact of the gate contact on the threshold voltage stability in p-GaN gate AlGaN/GaN heterojunction field-effect transistors with double pulse measurements on the p-GaN gate devices and device simulations. We find that, under gate stress, in the case of high-leakage Schottky contact, a negative threshold voltage shift results from hole accumulation in the p-GaN region. Conversely, in the case of low-leakage Schottky contact, hole depletion in the p-GaN region gives rise to a positive threshold voltage shift. More generally, we show that an imbalance between the hole tunneling current through the Schottky barrier and the thermionic current across the AlGaN barrier results in a variation of the total charge stored in the p-GaN region, which in turn is responsible for the observed threshold voltage shift. Finally, we present a simplified equivalent circuit model for the p-GaN gate module.
A Financial Comparison Between Mexican and U.S. Firms: A Cross-Balance Sheet Canonical Correlation Analysis

AbstractCanonical correlation analysis is used to investigate the cross-balance sheet relationships for a sample of Mexican firms. The results are compared to a similar analysis of large and small United States firms. Like US companies, Mexican firms tend to match the maturities of short- and long-term assets with their liability/equity accounts. Unlike their US counterparts, however, Mexican firms appear to employ short-term debt, primarily accounts payable, to manage risk. Also, in the 1982 through 1988 period, the use of accounts payable to finance current assets declines, as does the importance of accounts receivable. It is suggested that these changes were the result of the hyperinflation in Mexico in the 1980s and, to a lesser degree, the Stabilization Plan implemented in the early part of the decade.
Hydrochemical Characteristics of Groundwater in Siwa Oasis, Egypt. Part I. Significance of the Situation Groundwater Resources and Future Outlook

This research, carried out with the objective of developing water management strategies in Siwa Oasis to ensure its sustainable development. Siwa Oasis (1000 km) is today suffering an excessive rise in the subsoil water levels. The rate of groundwater rises from 1.33 to 4.6 cm/ year. Consequently, the fertile soils are subjected to deterioration and salinization. This is proposing and testing chain water management scenarios that makes use of suitable water (multiple reuses) before it reaches the last disposal point to increase the cultivated area (17000 feddans). So, this paper carried out the hydrogeochemical groundwater study based on the results of the chemical analysis of groundwater samples collected. To determine the evolution of groundwater resources through different analysis of water, such as total dissolved salts (TDS) and total hardness in two aquifers, Nubian sandstone and fractured dolomite limestone. The results show, the salinity of groundwater representing the area changed from fresh to saline groundwater, 168.8 to 7472.8 mg/l and total hardness from soft to hard, 30.7 to 1829.7mg/l as CaCO3.
Factors associated with survival of patients with breast cancer

Breast cancer is the most common cancer and the second leading cause of death due to cancer in women after lung cancer.Breast cancer is a major public health problem all around the world. In cancer, patient's survival has been accepted as the main criteria for cancer control and measuring the treatment impact. There are different methods for survival estimation. Cox model is the most known statistical applied model for evaluating the relationship between survival time and other variables. In this historical cohort study, studied individuals in this group include breast cancer patients who their data exist in American Cancer registration system during the 1973to 2010. Totally 679967 patients were studied.The relationship between age, job, race, marital status and grade with the survival was evaluatedat the time of diagnosis and Cox model has been used for checking these variables with the individual survival. The variables including race, marital status, age in time of diagnosis, grade, and job were factors related to the patient's survival. (P<0.05) The initial training for timely detection of disease in first stages of disease increases the individuals` life length. Necessity ofexistingcancer registry system exists in Iran is inalienable.
SoMeWeTa: A Part-of-Speech Tagger for German Social Media and Web Texts

Off-the-shelf part-of-speech taggers typically perform relatively poorly on web and social media texts since those domains are quite different from the newspaper articles on which most tagger models are trained. In this paper, we describe SoMeWeTa, a part-of-speech tagger based on the averaged structured perceptron that is capable of domain adaptation and that can use various external resources. We train the tagger on the German web and social media data of the EmpiriST 2015 shared task. Using the TIGER corpus as background data and adding external information about word classes and Brown clusters, we substantially improve on the state of the art for both the web and the social media data sets. The tagger is available as free software.
Self-Determination and Personal Identity in University Students: The Mediating Role of Future Orientation

Abstract In this study, we sought to extend the research on self-determination, future orientation, and personal identity construction by integrating the theories on self-determination and future orientation to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the relations between personal identity and the following individual characteristics: Hope, optimism, awareness of self, and perceived choice. 191 university students in China responded surveys in hardcopies on an individual basis. Our SEM results revealed that proximal future orientation influenced the mechanisms through which distal psychological traits affected identity construction. Specifically, hope mediated the effects of self-awareness on the participants’ personal identity ratings (b = .45, p < .05). Although optimism was related to both awareness of self and perceived choice, it was not significantly related to personal identity. This study suggested an extended framework through which we could understand how the interaction between future orientation and self-determination can predict personal identity. The findings have significant implications for interventions in educational settings.
Prediction of Borderzone Infarction by CTA in Patients Undergoing Carotid Embolization for Carotid Blowout

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Permanent common carotid artery and/or ICA occlusion is an effective treatment for carotid blowout syndrome. Besides postoperative thromboembolic infarction, permanent common carotid artery and/or ICA occlusion may cause borderzone infarction when the collateral flow to the deprived brain territory is inadequate. In this study, we aimed to test the predictive value of CTA for post–permanent common carotid artery and/or ICA occlusion borderzone infarction in patients with carotid blowout syndrome. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this retrospective study, we included 31 patients undergoing unilateral permanent common carotid artery and/or ICA occlusion for carotid blowout syndrome between May 2009 and December 2016. The vascular diameter of the circle of Willis was evaluated using preprocedural CTA, and the risk of borderzone infarction was graded as very high risk, high risk, intermediate risk, low risk, and very low risk. RESULTS: The performance of readers' consensus on CTA for predicting borderzone infarction was excellent, with an area under receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.938 (95% confidence interval, 0.85–1.00). We defined very high risk, high risk, and intermediate risk as positive for borderzone infarction, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of CTA for borderzone infarction were 100% (7/7), 62.5% (15/24), 43.8% (7/16), and 100% (15/15), respectively. The interobserver reliability was excellent (κ = 0.807). No significant difference in the receiver operating characteristic curves was found between the 2 readers (P = .114). CONCLUSIONS: CTA can be used to predict borderzone infarction after permanent common carotid artery and/or ICA occlusion by measuring the collateral vessels of the circle of Willis.
BioRo: The Biomedical Corpus for the Romanian Language

The biomedical domain provides a large amount of linguistic resources usable for biomedical text mining. While most of the resources used in biomedical Natural Language Processing are available for English, for other languages including Romanian the access to language resources is not straight-forward. In this paper, we present the biomedical corpus of the Romanian language, which is a valuable linguistic asset for biomedical text mining. This corpus was collected in the contexts of CoRoLa project, the reference corpus for the contemporary Romanian language. We also provide informative statistics about the corpus, a description of the data-composition. The annotation process of the corpus is also presented. Furthermore, we present the fraction of the corpus which will be made publicly available to the community without copyright restrictions.
Phenolic constituents of pomegranate peels (Punica granatum L.) cultivated in Oman.

Aims: This study was undertaken to analyze total phenolics and total flavonoids contents; and total antioxidant capacity of pomegranate peel extract and to identify the major functional components in the extract. Study Design: The extract was subjected to ESI-MS/MS. Place and Duration of Study: Department of Food Science and Nutrition, Sultan Qaboos University and DARIS Research Center, University of Nizwa, between December 2011 and August 2012. Methodology: Pomegranate peel extract was analyzed using a Waters Quattro Premier XE tandem quadrupole mass spectrometer (Waters Corporation, Manchester, UK) Original Research Article European Journal of Medicinal Plants, 4(3): 315-331, 2014 316 equipped with electro-spray ionization (ESI) source. Instrument control and data acquisition were performed using Mass Lynx ver. 4.1 software. The instrument was calibrated for nominal resolution for MS1 and MS2 up to 1200 m/z using the sodium caesium iodide standard calibration solution. Results: Results revealed high contents of total phenolics (64.2 mg Gallic acid equivalent/ g dry solids) and total flavonoids (1.4 mg Catechin equivalent/ g dry solids) respectively. Total antioxidant capacity ranged from 42.3 – 461.2 μmolTrolox equivalent/ g dry solids. The analysis revealed the presence of 61 different polyphenols in the extract among which 12 hydroxycinnamic acids, 14 hydrolysable tannins, 9 hydroxybenzoic acids, 5 hydroxybutanedioic acids, 11 hydroxy-cyclohexanecarboxylic acids and 8 hydroxyphenyls. Major compounds were tannins and flavonoids such as; illogic acid, gallic acids, punicalin, and punicalagin. Conclusion: A wide variety of phytochemicals present in pomegranate peel extract were identified. These functional compounds in pomegranate peels could be utilized by the food industry and pharma/nutraceutical’s industry. Further work should be done to isolate and quantify major functional compounds of pomegranate peels such as ellagic acid.