Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using a Multiple Classifier System for Improving the Performance of Asynchronous Brain Interface Systems

To improve the performance of asynchronous brain interface (ABI) systems, a new classifier design is proposed. The spatial information of multiple EEG channels data is first used to create independent classifiers for different channels. A subset of these classifiers is then selected by a genetic algorithm to form a multiple classifier system (MCS) to decide whether a trial is an intended control or a no control signal. The analysis of the data from 4 subjects shows the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving the performance of an ABI system compared to the results obtained using only the best performing channel
Page segment recommendation using N-gram for sensemaking tasks based on note taking

Internet has become an increasingly important tool for everyone on the planet. The large amount of information accessible from the internet makes web searching a common activity. Yet, such a common activity could take a long time to achieve desired results. Services such as information retrieval, interpretation management and sharing could greatly enhance efficiency of a search. However, such supports are not usually included in common search engines. Sensemaking support tools, on the other hand, can be used to tackle this challenge. Most sensemaking tools highlight on providing some kinds of structured decision support information for individuals and collaborated groups through history, annotation and document analysis rather than aiding users to find what they need. NorCost is, therefore, proposed to fulfill such overlooked objectives of searching.
Sex steroid and thyroid hormone receptor expressions in the thyroid of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) during different life stages

The expression of estrogen receptors, ESR1 (ERα) and ESR2 (ERβ), and androgen receptors (AR) in the thyroid gland has been reported in few vertebrate species other than a few mammals. This study reports the presence of sex steroid hormone receptors and thyroid receptors (ERα, ERβ, AR, TRα, and TRβ) in the thyroid gland of the American alligator at several life stages. It provides a semiquantification and distribution of ERα in the thyroid follicle cells using an immunohistochemical approach as well as reports quantitative differences in mRNA expression of ERα, ERβ, TRα, TRβ, and AR in the same tissue using quantitative real time‐PCR (Q‐PCR) with primers designed specifically for alligators. The thyroid tissue of the American alligator expresses ERα, ERβ, and AR at all of the life stages examined here although no statistically significant differences were observed between male and female in thyroid mRNA expression for any of the genes analyzed. No sexual dimorphism was observed in ERα immunostaining. No statistical analysis across life stages were performed due to confounding factor of season. J. Morphol. 2011. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
An analytical study on optimizing the lookup performance of distributed hash table systems under churn

The phenomenon of system churn degrades the lookup performance of distributed hash table (DHT) systems greatly. To handle the churn, a number of approaches have been proposed to date. However, there is a lack of theoretical analysis to direct how to make design choices under different churn rates and how to configure their parameters optimally. In this paper, we analytically study three important aspects on optimizing DHT lookup performance under churn, i.e. lookup strategy, lookup parallelism and lookup key replication. Our objective is to build a theoretical basis for designers to make better design choices in the future. We first compare the performance of two representative lookup strategies—recursive routing and iterative routing—and explore the existence of better alternatives. Then we study the effectiveness of lookup parallelism in systems with different churn rates and show how to select the optimal degree of parallelism. Owing to the importance of key replication on lookup performance, we also analyze the reliability of the replicated key under two different replication policies, and show how to perform proper configuration. Besides the analytical study, our results are also validated by simulation, and Kad is taken as a case to show the meaningfulness of our analysis. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Evolutionary versus instrumental goals: How evolutionary psychology misconceives human rationality

An important research tradition in the cognitive psychology of reasoning-called the heuristics and biases approach-has firmly established that people's responses often deviate from the performance considered normative on many reasoning tasks. For example, people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of utility theory, they do not properly calibrate degrees of belief, they overproject their own opinions onto others, they display illogical framing effects, they uneconomically honor sunk costs, they allow prior knowledge to become implicated in deductive reasoning, and they display numerous other information processing biases (for summaries of the large literature, see It has been common for these empirical demonstrations of a gap between descriptive and normative models of reasoning and decision making to be taken as indications that systematic irrationalities characterize human cognition. However, over the last decade, an alternative interpretation of these findings has been championed by various evolutionary psychologists, They have reinterpreted the modal response in most of the classic heuristics and biases experiments as indicating an optimal information processing adaptation on the part of the subjects. It is argued by these investigators that the research in the heuristics and biases tradition has not demonstrated human irrationality at all and that a Panglossian position (see Stanovich & West, 2000) which assumes perfect human rationality is the proper default position to take. It will be argued in this chapter that although the work of the evolutionary psychologists has uncovered some fundamentally important things about human cognition, these theorists have misconstrued the nature of human rationality and have conflated important distinctions in this domain. What these theorists have missed (or failed to sufficiently emphasize) is that definitions of rationality must coincide with the level of the entity whose optimization is at issue. This admonition plays out most directly in the distinction between evolutionary rationality and instrumental
Statistical quality estimation for general crowdsourcing tasks

One of the biggest challenges for requesters and platform providers of crowdsourcing is quality control, which is to expect high-quality results from crowd workers who are neither necessarily very capable nor motivated. A common approach to tackle this problem is to introduce redundancy, that is, to request multiple workers to work on the same tasks. For simple multiple-choice tasks, several statistical methods to aggregate the multiple answers have been proposed. However, these methods cannot always be applied to more general tasks with unstructured response formats such as article writing, program coding, and logo designing, which occupy the majority on most crowdsourcing marketplaces. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised statistical quality estimation method for such general crowdsourcing tasks. Our method is based on the two-stage procedure; multiple workers are first requested to work on the same tasks in the creation stage, and then another set of workers review and grade each artifact in the review stage. We model the ability of each author and the bias of each reviewer, and propose a two-stage probabilistic generative model using the graded response model in the item response theory. Experiments using several general crowdsourcing tasks show that our method outperforms popular vote aggregation methods, which implies that our method can deliver high quality results with lower costs.
Cultural Perspectives on Ingroups versus Outgroups and Shame Experiences

The concept of self varies across cultures: in some cultures, individuals tend to see themselves as interdependent on others, and clear distinction is made between in-groups and out-groups because in-group members are seen as part of the “BIG SELF”. In other cultures individuals see themselves as independent and autonomous and have a less salient boundary between in-groups and out-groups. Little empirical work has been done on how such different cultural perspectives on in-groups, versus out-groups, shape emotional experiences. Although emotions are always internally experienced, these experiences often involve interpersonal and social interactions, and therefore how we think of ourselves in relation to others might influence our emotional reactions to interpersonal problems. The current study examines how such cultural differences based on the ‘in-groups versus out-groups’ distinction influences the attribution of shame experiences between Mainland Chinese and Americans. We examined self-reported descriptions and ratings of shame experiences. Results showed that Mainland Chinese and Americans differ in their attribution of shame antecedents: Mainland Chinese are less inclined to attribute the shame antecedents to close others, and they are more reluctant to ascribe negative traits/qualities to close others; no such bias towards in-groups is seen among Americans in the ascription of disagreeable acts or traits. The methodological implications of the current research are also discussed.
Research on Privacy-Preserving Cloud Storage Framework Supporting Ciphertext Retrieval

Privacy security is a key issue for cloud storage. Encryption is a well established technology for protecting sensitive data. But it gives some new problems: how data owner and storage service provider to operate on encrypted data? How to reduce data owner's workload of data management and support data sharing at the same time? If they can't be easy to resolved, encryption will bring a lot of troubles to people. In this paper, we design a privacy-preserving cloud storage framework to solve those problems. We design an interaction protocol among participants, adopt key derivation algorithm to generate and manage keys, use the combination of symmetric and asymmetric encryption to hide the sensitive data of users, and apply Bloom filter to realize cipher text retrieval. A system based on the framework is realized. The paper analyzes the feasibility of the framework from the performance of Bloom filter, the running overhead of the system and the privacy security of the framework. Finally, we summarize our work and introduce the directions of future research.
DEVELOPMENT OF AN IOS APP USING SITUATED LEARNING, COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE, AND AUGMENTED REALITY FOR AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

This paper presents the development process and framework used to construct a transportation app that uses situated learning, augmented reality, and communities of practice. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that can cause social impairments as well as the limit the potential for the individual to achieve independence (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013). The use of technology to support learning in individuals with ASD has been well documented, however gaps exist in the pedagogical approaches that are being used. Future research opportunities into the pedagogical implications of this app are highlighted.
Laboratory Surveillance of Dengue in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, from 2007 to 2013

Background According to official records, dengue was introduced in Brazil in the 80's; since then several epidemics have occurred. Meanwhile, in Rio Grande do Sul (RS, Southern Brazil) the first autochthonous case occurred only in 2007. Methodology and Principal Findings In this study we report laboratory surveillance of dengue cases and seasonality of positive cases, describe serotypes and characterize the epidemiological pattern of dengue in RS from 2007 to 2013. A total of 9,779 serum samples from patients with suspected dengue fever were collected and submitted to molecular and/or serological analyses for dengue virus identification and serotyping, based on viral isolation, NS1 antigen detection and qRT-PCR, or Dengue IgM capture ELISA and MAC-ELISA. The first autochthonous dengue case in RS was confirmed in 2007 (DENV-3). While in 2008 and 2009 only imported cases were registered, autochthonous infection waves have been occurring since 2010. The highest number of dengue infections occurred in 2010, with DENV-1 and DENV-2 outbreaks in Northwestern RS. In 2011, another DENV-1 and DENV-2 outbreak occurred in the Northwestern region; moreover, DENV-4 was detected in travelers. In 2012, DENV-1 and DENV-4 co-circulated. DENV-2 circulation was only detected again in 2013, in high frequency (56.7%), co-circulating with DENV-4 (35%). Most infections occur in adults during summer. Differences in prevalence between genders were observed in 2007 (60% females), 2008 (60.8% males) and 2009 (77.5% males). Conclusions According to results of dengue surveillance, there was an increase in the number of dengue cases in RS and of cities infested with Aedes aegypti, possibly as a consequence of introduction of new serotypes and the difficulty of health programs to control the vector.
An Evaluation of the Formal Concept Analysis-Based Document Vector on Document Clustering

In conventional approaches, documents are represented by the vector whose dimensionalities are equivalent to the terms extracted from a document set. These approaches, called bag-of-term approaches, ignore the conceptual relationships between terms such as synonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms. In the past, researches have applied thesauri such as Word Net to solve this problem. However, thesauri such as Word Net are developed more for general purposes and are limited in specific domain. Therefore, an automatically built ontology for terms is desired. In our previous study, we proposed a method which applies formal concept analysis (FCA), an automatic ontology building method, to extract the term relationships from a document set, and then apply the extracted information as the ontology of terms to represent the documents as concept vectors. In order to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of the proposed method for information retrieval related applications, we employed the concept vectors generated for the documents to the document clustering. In this study, we apply bisecting k-means clustering and hierarchical agglomerative clustering as the platforms with which to evaluate our method.
A scalable video coding dataset and toolchain for dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP

With video streaming becoming more and more popular, the number of devices that are capable of streaming videos over the Internet is growing. This leads to a heterogeneous device landscape with varying demands. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) offers an elegant solution to these demands. Smart adaptation logics are able to adjust the clients' streaming quality according to several (local) parameters. Recent research indicated benefits of blending Scalable Video Coding (SVC) with DASH, especially considering Future Internet architectures. However, except for a DASH dataset with a single SVC encoded video, no other datasets are publicly available. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, a DASH/SVC dataset, containing multiple videos at varying bitrates and spatial resolutions including 1080p, is presented. Second, a toolchain for multiplexing SVC encoded videos is provided, therefore making our results reproducible and allowing researchers to generate their own datasets.
A Novel Multi-Touch Human-Computer-Interface Based on Binocular Stereo Vision

This paper presents a novel multi-touch interface based on binocular stereo vision, which achieves natural interactions through moving and clicking several fingers on an interface. The technology uses two cameras at different viewpoints to capture video images covering the interface in real time. We integrate skin-color information to track finger’s motions. The clicking actions on the interface are detected with the obtained disparity of the fingertip position of two images. Thus a normal CRT/LCD display interface can be used as a multi-point touch-sensitive device. Experimental results demonstrate that the technology can realize robust tracking of finger motion, as well as the instant detection of finger clicking and moving actions. This technology achieves robust and natural human-computer interaction, and can be widely used in many applications, such as intelligent interaction, digital entertainment and wearable computing, etc.
Intra-Trackway Morphological Variations Due to Substrate Consistency: The El Frontal Dinosaur Tracksite (Lower Cretaceous, Spain)

An ichnological and sedimentological study of the El Frontal dinosaur tracksite (Early Cretaceous, Cameros basin, Soria, Spain) highlights the pronounced intra-trackway variation found in track morphologies of four theropod trackways. Photogrammetric 3D digital models revealed various and distinct intra-trackway morphotypes, which reflect changes in footprint parameters such as the pace length, the track length, depth, and height of displacement rims. Sedimentological analyses suggest that the original substrate was non-homogenous due to lateral changes in adjoining microfacies. Multidata analyses indicate that morphological differences in these deep and shallow tracks represent a part of a continuum of track morphologies and geometries produced by a gradient of substrate consistencies across the site. This implies that the large range of track morphologies at this site resulted from similar trackmakers crossing variable facies. The trackways at the El Frontal site present an exemplary case of how track morphology, and consequently potential ichnotaxa, can vary, even when produced by a single trackmaker.
Metaphors in Wordnets: From Theory to Practice

WordNet-like resources enhanced with a more systematic, consistent and efficient way of encoding data related to metaphors should improve the performance of a number of applications. As for the methodology to be followed, we stress two basic points: 1) the necessity of adding corpora as data sources and 2) the necessity of adopting a well-established and generally accepted theoretical framework like the one proposed by Lakoff and Johnson. The main part of this paper discusses how the practical work of adding information on metaphors to wordnets should be carried out. We propose a detailed analysis of one conceptual metaphor and its actual and possible representation within EWN. We also provide examples of how the results obtained could enhance the performance of applications using wordnets containing such information.
MicroRNA‐98 regulates osteogenic differentiation of human bone mesenchymal stromal cells by targeting BMP2

To study the effects of microRNA‐98 (miR‐98) on human bone mesenchymal stromal cells (hBMSCs). The patients undergoing hip arthroplasty were selected by inclusion/exclusion criteria for this study. The extracted hBMSCs were detected of osteogenic differentiation by alizarin red S staining, and of cell phenotype by flow cytometry. Bioinformatics, dual luciferase report, western blotting, RT‐PCR and immunoblotting were used in our study. The hBMSCs were divided into miR‐98 mimics, miR‐98 negative control (NC), miR‐98 inhibitors, Mock and miR‐98 inhibitors + siBMP2 groups. Human bone mesenchymal stromal cells were extracted and purified in vitro and had specific cytological morphology, surface markers and abilities of self‐renewal and differentiation. Compared with the NC group and Mock group, the miR‐98 mimics group showed increased miR‐98 level while the miR‐98 inhibitors group decreased miR‐98 level (both P < 0.01). Dual luciferase reporter showed BMP2 was the target gene of miR‐98. The levels of mRNA and protein expression of BMP2, protein expression of RUNX2, alkaline phosphatase activity and osteocalcin content significantly decreased in the miR‐98 mimics group while increased in the miR‐98 inhibitors group and showed no changes in the NC group and Mock group (all P < 0.05). The miR‐98 mimics group showed obviously declined stained red particles and the miR‐98 inhibitors group showed opposite result. After lowering the expression of miR‐98, osteogenic differentiation ability of hBMSCs rose, which was weakened by the transfection with siBMP2. miR‐98 may regulate osteogenic differentiation of hBMSCs by targeting BMP2.
Strong Propagations of Chaos in Moran's Type Particle Interpretations of Feynman–Kac Measures

Abstract This article is concerned with strong propagations of chaos properties in Moran's type particle interpretations of continuous time Feynman–Kac formulae. These particle schemes can also be seen as approximating models of simple generalized spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equations. We provide a simple and original semigroup analysis based on empirical tensor measures combinatorics properties, martingales techniques, and coupling arguments. We also design a general and abstract framework without any topological assumption on the state space. This yields a natural way to analyze the propagations of chaos properties for interacting particle models on path space. Applications to genealogical type particle algorithms for the nonlinear filtering and smoothing problem are also discussed.
Cost Estimation of Spatial k-Nearest-Neighbor Operators

Advances in geo-sensing technology have led to an unprecedented spread of location-aware devices. In turn, this has resulted into a plethora of location-based services in which huge amounts of spa- tial data need to be efficiently consumed by spatial query proces- sors. For a spatial query processor to properly choose among the various query processing strategies, the cost of the spatial operators has to be estimated. In this paper, we study the problem of estimat- ing the cost of the spatialk-nearest-neighbor (k-NN, for short) op- erators, namely,k-NN-Select andk-NN-Join. Given a query that has ak-NN operator, the objective is to estimate the number of blocks that are going to be scanned during the processing of this operator. Estimating the cost of ak-NN operator is challenging for several reasons. For instance, the cost of ak-NN-Select operator is directly affected by the value ofk, the location of the query focal point, and the distribution of the data. Hence, a cost model that captures these factors is relatively hard to realize. This paper in- troduces cost estimation techniques that maintain a compact set of cataloginformation that can be kept in main-memory to enable fast estimation via lookups. A detailed study of the performance and accuracy trade-off of each proposed technique is presented. Ex- perimental results using real spatial datasets from OpenStreetMap demonstrate the robustness of the proposed estimation techniques.
Working towards Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Speech Assessments for South African Children: A Xhosa Case Study

Abstract There is a lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate tools for assessing the speech and language development of South African infants and toddlers, particularly those who speak southern African Bantu languages. This article sets out to describe our experiences of the pre-pilot phase of the Xhosa adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs). To this end, a background to the CDIs is provided, as well as discussion on biases in assessments. Data informing this discussion is drawn from observations of the spontaneous speech and gestures of Xhosa-speaking toddlers in the 16–30 month age group in both rural and urban areas, as well as focus groups and individual interviews with mothers and professional caregivers of Xhosa-speaking toddlers.