Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A General Framework of Multipopulation Methods With Clustering in Undetectable Dynamic Environments

To solve dynamic optimization problems, multiple population methods are used to enhance the population diversity for an algorithm with the aim of maintaining multiple populations in different subareas in the fitness landscape. Many experimental studies have shown that locating and tracking multiple relatively good optima rather than a single global optimum is an effective idea in dynamic environments. However, several challenges need to be addressed when multipopulation methods are applied, e.g., how to create multiple populations, how to maintain them in different subareas, and how to deal with the situation where changes cannot be detected or predicted. To address these issues, this paper investigates a hierarchical clustering method to locate and track multiple optima for dynamic optimization problems. To deal with undetectable dynamic environments, this paper applies the random immigrants method without change detection based on a mechanism that can automatically reduce redundant individuals in the search space throughout the run. These methods are implemented into several research areas, including particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm, and differential evolution. An experimental study is conducted based on the moving peaks benchmark to test the performance with several other algorithms from the literature. The experimental results show the efficiency of the clustering method for locating and tracking multiple optima in comparison with other algorithms based on multipopulation methods on the moving peaks benchmark.
Embodied movement strategies for development of a core-located actuation walker

This paper presents a novel strategy for bipedal locomotion that is inspired from human movement strategy. The paper describes a novel prototype that uses an actuation scheme to shifts the center of gravity of the platform to acheive forward progress. This design is inspired by key movement primitives discussed in studies of human locomotion. In particular, the paper takes inspiration from Bartenieff Fundamentals and the Basic Six exercises and presents corresponding parameters for an actuated core structure. The paper reports on the design process of a particular platform and presents an initial simulation to verify that the design causes the desired change in center of gravity of the platform, resulting in forward movement. This design allows bipedal machine movement to be better aligned to parameters that human movement experts have used to describe locomotion and, thus, could one day better recreate human gait along multiple objectives.
Semi-supervised Learning for Automatic Image Annotation Based on Bayesian Framework

In this paper, we present a new method for automatic image annotation by applying semisupervised learning based on the Bayesian framework. On the one hand, we employ the semisupervised learning, i.e., transductive support vector machine (TSVM) to enhance the quality of training image data, which is a promising way to find out the underlying relevant data from the unlabeled ones. On the other hand, a simple yet very efficient Bayesian model is built to implement image annotation by the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion. The novelty of our method mainly lies in two aspects: exploiting TSVM to improve the quality of training image dataset and utilizing the Bayesian model to predict the candidate annotations for the unseen images. Experimental results on the standard Corel dataset demonstrate that the proposed method is superior or highly competitive to several state-of-the-art approaches.
Standardized Prototyping and Development of Virtual Agents Technical Report

Research efforts that require the use of virtual agents face significant challenges in prototyping and developing virtual agents. Not only do virtual agents require significant technical and artistic skills, but they also must frequently be modernized as the underlying operating systems, rendering libraries and system hardware become more advanced. In order to mitigate these challenges, we are cooperating with an international effort to standardize the development of virtual agents. Some recent products of this effort are a standard for behavior realization called the Behavior Markup Language and systems designed to implement it. We have taken one such system, a combination of the SmartBody realizer and the Panda3D rendering engine, and modified it to meet the needs of a research agenda that includes significant interactions between agents and their surroundings. These modifications include the addition of viseme support and the development of new language tags for grasping objects and executing other more abstract actions in the virtual world. Our resulting system allows us to realize agents that move their lips to either pre-recorded or text-to-speech utterances and that manipulate objects such as Lego blocks in the virtual world. These behaviors can be applied to any of our agent character models and easily prototyped through behavior markup scripts. While the current system is limited to using key-framed gestures, we have some short-term strategies that will allow agents to place objects at arbitrary locations. Our long-term plan is to incorporate procedural controllers into the SmartBody realizer to facilitate referential gestures such as grasping or pointing at objects located arbitrarily in the virtual world.
Ranking the Authority of Name Aliases for Email Users

Identifying information telling real identity of users from emails is an important topic in email mining. This paper focuses on the problem to identify the most authoritative aliases of email users. Based on the facts that different aliases of the same user take different positions in the user's email communication relation and that af final aliases of the same user have similar morphology in linguistics, a novel method to rank alias authority and obtain the authoritative aliases of an email user by email communication relation analysis and morphologically similar alias clustering is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can efficiently find the authoritative aliases of a user and can be applied to many applications on emails such as identity identifying, social relation discovering, important people finding and so on.
A voting scheme to detect semantic underspecification

The following work describes a voting system to automatically classify the sense selection of the complex types Location/Organization and Container/Content, which depend on regular polysemy, as described by the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1995) . This kind of sense alternations very often presents semantic underspecificacion between its two possible selected senses. This kind of underspecification is not traditionally contemplated in word sense disambiguation systems, as disambiguation systems are still coping with the need of a representation and recognition of underspecification (Pustejovsky, 2009) The data are characterized by the morphosyntactic and lexical enviroment of the headwords and provided as input for a classifier. The baseline decision tree classifier is compared against an eight-member voting scheme obtained from variants of the training data generated by modifications on the class representation and from two different classification algorithms, namely decision trees and k-nearest neighbors. The voting system improves the accuracy for the non-underspecified senses, but the underspecified sense remains difficult to identify
SQL's revoke with a view on privacy

Protecting access to data that can be linked to an individual (or personal identifiable information (PII)), thereby seeking to protect the individual's privacy can be accomplished through legislation, organisational safeguards, and technology. Of particular interest and the focus of this paper is the technological means by which data is protected, in particular we are considering the mechanisms of purpose binding and limitation which facilitate the organisational safeguards. Purpose binding allows an enterprise to specify their purpose with collected data, and purpose limitation controls access to information based on these purpose bindings. Technologies that implement the aforementioned safeguards of PII forms a subset of a set of technologies commonly referred to as Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). Many legacy systems do not employ these safeguards, even though it can be accomplished by providing "wrapper" technologies which reside on top of these legacy systems. This article continues work done by the authors in which extensions to SQL was proposed in order to integrate PETs with structured databases. The extensions showed that access to data through SQL can be controlled non-intrusively, and that the general discretionary access control model provided by many database management systems can still be enforced. In our previous work the extensions were limited to the SQL grant and select statements. In this article we propose a model for revoking privileges from database users, and thus consider the SQL revoke statement. We also show that the general principles of revoking privileges remain true for our proposed model. We also briefly consider extensions to the commands from the Data Manipulation Language (DML) that was not considered, being insert, delete, and update.
Self-Reorientation Following Colorectal Cancer Treatment – A Grounded Theory Study

After colorectal cancer (CRC) treatment, people reorganize life in ways that are consistent with their understanding of the illness and their expectations for recovery. Incapacities and abilities that have been lost can initiate a need to reorient the self. To the best of our knowledge, no studies have explicitly focused on the concept of self-reorientation after CRC treatment. The aim of the present study was therefore to explore self-reorientation in the early recovery phase after CRC surgery. Grounded theory analysis was undertaken, using the method presented by Charmaz. The present results explained self-reorientation as the individual attempting to achieve congruence in self-perception. A congruent self-perception meant bringing together the perceived self and the self that was mirrored in the near environs. The results showed that societal beliefs and personal explanations are essential elements of self-reorientation, and that it is therefore important to make them visible.
A stoichiometric complex of neurexins and dystroglycan in brain

In nonneuronal cells, the cell surface protein dystroglycan links the intracellular cytoskeleton (via dystrophin or utrophin) to the extracellular matrix (via laminin, agrin, or perlecan). Impairment of this linkage is instrumental in the pathogenesis of muscular dystrophies. In brain, dystroglycan and dystrophin are expressed on neurons and astrocytes, and some muscular dystrophies cause cognitive dysfunction; however, no extracellular binding partner for neuronal dystroglycan is known. Regular components of the extracellular matrix, such as laminin, agrin, and perlecan, are not abundant in brain except in the perivascular space that is contacted by astrocytes but not by neurons, suggesting that other ligands for neuronal dystroglycan must exist. We have now identified α- and β-neurexins, polymorphic neuron-specific cell surface proteins, as neuronal dystroglycan receptors. The extracellular sequences of α- and β-neurexins are largely composed of laminin-neurexin–sex hormone–binding globulin (LNS)/laminin G domains, which are also found in laminin, agrin, and perlecan, that are dystroglycan ligands. Dystroglycan binds specifically to a subset of the LNS domains of neurexins in a tight interaction that requires glycosylation of dystroglycan and is regulated by alternative splicing of neurexins. Neurexins are receptors for the excitatory neurotoxin α-latrotoxin; this toxin competes with dystroglycan for binding, suggesting overlapping binding sites on neurexins for dystroglycan and α-latrotoxin. Our data indicate that dystroglycan is a physiological ligand for neurexins and that neurexins' tightly regulated interaction could mediate cell adhesion between brain cells.
Task Design, Team Context, and Psychological Safety: An Empirical Analysis of R&D Projects in High Technology Organizations

High technology organizations need to develop new products or processes that address the dual goals of exploration and exploitation. The competing viewpoints and the asymmetric nature of market returns associated with these goals in R&D projects can heighten stress levels among project team members and reduce their psychological safety. While current research calls for greater focus on task design for improving psychological safety, we know little about how team contextual factors affect this relationship. This study develops and tests a conceptual framework that examines the moderating role of R&D team contextual factors, namely, relative exploration and project-organization metric alignment on the relationship between a key task design variable, namely, team autonomy, and psychological safety. Relative exploration captures the extent to which exploration goals are emphasized over exploitation goals in an R&D project, while project-organization metric alignment measures the extent to which project metrics are aligned with broader organizational metrics. Furthermore, we examine the performance consequences of psychological safety in R&D projects. The empirical analysis is conducted using primary data collected from multiple informants across 110 R&D projects in 34 high technology business units. Our results indicate that relative exploration and project-organization metric alignment have contrasting moderating effects. Furthermore, the effect of psychological safety on project performance is found to be indirect and mediated through team turnover. Implications of the study findings, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.
MathLingBudapest: Concept Networks for Semantic Similarity

We present our approach to measuring semantic similarity of sentence pairs used in Semeval 2015 tasks 1 and 2. We adopt the sentence alignment framework of (Han et al., 2013) and experiment with several measures of word similarity. We hybridize the common vector-based models with definition graphs from the 4lang concept dictionary and devise a measure of graph similarity that yields good results on training data. We did not address the specific challenges posed by Twitter data, and this is reflected in placing 11th from 30 in Task 1, but our systems perform fairly well on the generic datasets of Task 2, with the hybrid approach placing 11th among 78 runs.
SV2A and SV2C are not vesicular Ca2+ transporters but control glucose-evoked granule recruitment

Synaptic vesicle protein 2 (SV2) is expressed in neuroendocrine cells as three homologous isoforms, SV2A, SV2B and SV2C. Ca2+-dependent function in exocytosis has been attributed to SV2A and SV2B, without elucidation of the mechanism. The role of SV2C has not yet been addressed. Here we characterize the three SV2 isoforms and define their involvement in regulated insulin secretion. SV2A and SV2C are associated with insulin-containing granules and synaptic-like-microvesicles (SLM) in INS-1E insulinoma and primary β-cells, whereas SV2B is only present on SLM. Neither overexpression nor isoform-specific silencing of SV2A or SV2C by RNA interference modifies depolarization-triggered cytosolic [Ca2+] rises or secretory granule [Ca2+], measured with a VAMP-2 aequorin chimera. This strongly argues against any Ca2+ transport function of SV2. Moreover, up- or downregulation of these isoforms has no influence on K+-induced insulin release suggesting that SV2 does not affect the Ca2+-dependent step(s) of exocytosis. By contrast, glucose-elicited secretion is inhibited during the sustained rather than the early phase, placing the action of SV2 on the recruitment of granules from the reserve pool to the plasma membrane. This conclusion is reinforced by capacitance measurements in glucose-stimulated SV2C-deficient cells. Like capacitance, evoked and basal hormone release are attenuated more by silencing of SV2C compared with SV2A. This indicates only partial redundancy and highlights a key role for SV2C in the secretory process.
Signal processing in magnetoencephalography.

The subject of this article is detection of brain magnetic fields, or magnetoencephalography (MEG). The brain fields are many orders of magnitude smaller than the environmental magnetic noise and their measurement represent a significant metrological challenge. The only detectors capable of resolving such small fields and at the same time handling the large dynamic range of the environmental noise are superconducting quantum interference devices (or SQUIDs). The SQUIDs are coupled to the brain magnetic fields using combinations of superconducting coils called flux transformers (primary sensors). The environmental noise is attenuated by a combination of shielding, primary sensor geometry, and synthetic methods. One of the most successful synthetic methods for noise elimination is synthetic higher-order gradiometers. How the gradiometers can be synthesized is shown and examples of their noise cancellation effectiveness are given. The MEG signals measured on the scalp surface must be interpreted and converted into information about the distribution of currents within the brain. This task is complicated by the fact that such inversion is nonunique. Additional mathematical simplifications, constraints, or assumptions must be employed to obtain useful source images. Methods for the interpretation of the MEG signals include the popular point current dipole, minimum norm methods, spatial filtering, beamformers, MUSIC, and Bayesian techniques. The use of synthetic aperture magnetometry (a class of beamformers) is illustrated in examples of interictal epileptic spiking and voluntary hand-motor activity.
Finding a Middle Ground: Advancing the Feminist Pathways Paradigm Through Intergration with "What Works" with Adolescent Offenders

The purpose of this dissertation was to advance the feminist pathways paradigm by integrating theory and methods from a mainstream correctional perspective to enhance our understanding of serious adolescent offenders. This dissertation used archival data provided by the Pathways to Desistance project (Mulvey, 2012), a longitudinal study of 1354 serious adjudicated adolescent offenders (1170 male, 184 female), recruited from Philadelphia and Phoenix, designed to examine persistence and desistance from criminal behaviour over time. Study 1 generated a theoretically-integrated typology and tested the stability of this typology over time using a series of latent profile analyses (LPA) generated at baseline, and at 12, 24, and 36-month follow-ups. Subsequently, using latent difference score (LDS) modeling within a structural equation modelling (SEM) framework, Study 2 examined the relationship between victimization and offending across three time-points, and further examined whether changes in internalizing mental health deficits and substance abuse mediated this relationship. Results of Study 1 suggest that youth can be classified into three groups: a minimal-needs class with negligible needs in all domains, a comprehensive-needs class with high-needs in all domains with the exception of internalizing mental health deficits, and a complex-comprehensive-needs class scoring high on all domains in addition to elevated internalizing mental health disorders. Similar profiles emerged at each time-point examined. However, an additional class, characterized by elevated alcohol use and moderate antisocial personality, emerged at the 36-month follow-up. Overall, results of Study 1 suggest that the heterogeneity of the treatment profiles of adolescent offenders increases over time, and there are more similarities than differences between males and females in their treatment profiles. Results of Study 2 revealed a significant relationship between victimization and subsequent offending; however, neither changes in substance abuse nor changes in internalizing mental health deficits mediated this relationship. As such, these results suggest that this causal sequence of events detailed by feminist pathways proponents may not hold up with longitudinal data. In light of these findings, it is recommended that future research continues to leverage the feminist pathways paradigm with “what works” to gain a better understanding of gender similarities and differences in adolescents’ pathways to crime.
A brief review of document image retrieval methods: Recent advances

Due to the rapid increase of different digitized documents, the development of a system to automatically retrieve document images from a large collection of structured and unstructured document images is in high demand. Many techniques have been developed to provide an efficient and effective way for retrieving and organizing these document images in the literature. This paper provides an overview of the methods which have been applied for document image retrieval over recent years. It has been found that from a textual perspective, more attention has been paid to the feature extraction methods without using OCR.
Bilgisayarlı tomografilerde hastanın aldığı efektif radyasyon dozunun belirlenmesi

Son yillarda bilgisayarli tomografi (BT) kullanimi hastalara tani koyabilme acisindan vazgecilmez bir goruntuleme teknolojisi oldugu tum otoritelerce kabul edilmekle birlikte BT kullaniminin asiriya kactigi da kabul edilmektedir. Cok hizli olan cok kesitli BT cihazlarinin kullanima girmesi ile cocuk hastalarda anestezi uygulamasina gerek kalmadan tetkikleri yapilabilmistir. Bu durum da cocuk hastalarda BT kullaniminda asiri artisa sebep olmustur. Yetiskinlerde ise asiri artisin buyuk bir bolumunu asemptomatik hastalarda BT kolonoskopi, kardiyak anjiyo ve tum vucut tarama gibi tetkikler olusturmaktadir. BT kullaniminin bu kadar asiri olmasi da beraberinde radyasyona maruz kalma riskini artirmaktadir. Bu calismada, BT tetkiklerinde hastanin maruz kaldigi gercek radyasyon dozunun ortaya konmasi amaciyla BT cihazindan okunan deger ile gercekte hastanin aldigi radyasyon dozunun karsilastirilmasi yapilmistir. Bunun icin 25 hasta uzerine termoluminesans (TLD) detektorleri yerlestirilmistir. BT cihazindan okunan radyasyon dozu ile TLD kristallerinden okunan radyasyon dozu arasinda %4 farklilik oldugu bulunmustur.