Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing a Reaching Behaviour in an simulated Anthropomorphic Robotic Arm Through an Evolutionary Technique

In this article we present an evolutionary technique for developing a neural network based controller for an anthropomorphic robotic arm with 4 DOF able to exhibit a reaching behaviour. Evolved neural controllers display an ability to reach targets accurately and generalize their ability to moving targets. This study demonstrates that it is possible to obtain solutions that are extremely parsimonious from the point of view of the control system. Evolutionary training techniques allow us to evolve parameters of the control system on the basis of the global effects that they produce on the dynamics arising from the interaction between the control system, the robot’s body and the environment.
Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry Identification of Mycobacteria in Routine Clinical Practice

Background Non-tuberculous mycobacteria recovered from respiratory tract specimens are emerging confounder organisms for the laboratory diagnosis of tuberculosis worldwide. There is an urgent need for new techniques to rapidly identify mycobacteria isolated in clinical practice. Matrix-assisted laser desorption time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) has previously been proven to effectively identify mycobacteria grown in high-concentration inocula from collections. However, a thorough evaluation of its use in routine laboratory practice has not been performed. Methodology We set up an original protocol for the MALDI-TOF MS identification of heat-inactivated mycobacteria after dissociation in Tween-20, mechanical breaking of the cell wall and protein extraction with formic acid and acetonitrile. By applying this protocol to as few as 105 colony-forming units of reference isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Mycobacterium avium, and 20 other Mycobacterium species, we obtained species-specific mass spectra for the creation of a local database. Using this database, our protocol enabled the identification by MALDI-TOF MS of 87 M. tuberculosis, 25 M. avium and 12 non-tuberculosis clinical isolates with identification scores ≥2 within 2.5 hours. Conclusions Our data indicate that MALDI-TOF MS can be used as a first-line method for the routine identification of heat-inactivated mycobacteria. MALDI-TOF MS is an attractive method for implementation in clinical microbiology laboratories in both developed and developing countries.
Communicating about Undocumented Immigration Issues: Is Your Target Audience Bilingual?

Due to the large number of undocumented immigrants working in the agricultural and natural resources industry, and recent discussions regarding immigration reform in the United States, agricultural communicators need to understand public opinion of undocumented immigrants and the factors that influence public opinion surrounding immigration issues in order to provide effective information to target audiences. Immigration has often been associated with linguistic diversity since the majority of immigrants speak a language other than English. To understand how linguistic differences impact public opinion, and how to communicate with audiences expressing diverse linguistic preferences, this study used an online survey design to examine the differences in attitudes toward immigration issues and information channel preferences between individuals who are bilingual and those who are not bilingual. Results from 503 Florida residents, representative of the population, indicated that non-bilingual respondents had a significantly more negative attitude toward immigration issues than bilingual respondents. In addition, bilingual respondents preferred to receive information through a website significantly more than non-bilingual respondents. The results imply agricultural communicators should recognize their target audiences’ language ability and create messages about immigration specifically for bilingual and non-bilingual audiences. Bilingual websites should be created to disseminate immigration messages to engage bilingual audiences.
Applying evolutionary algorithms to discover knowledge from medical databases

Data mining has become an important research topic. The increasing use of computers results in an explosion of information. These data can be best used if the knowledge hidden can be uncovered. Thus there is a need for a way to automatically discover knowledge from data. New approaches for knowledge discovery from two medical databases are investigated. Two different kinds of knowledge, namely rules and causal structures, are learned. Rules capture interesting patterns and regularities in the databases. Causal structures represented by Bayesian networks capture the causality relationships among the attributes. We employ advanced evolutionary algorithms for these discovery tasks. In particular, generic genetic programming is employed as a rule learning algorithm. Our approach for discovering causality relationships is based on evolutionary programming which learns Bayesian network structures.
IMPORTANCE SAMPLING : APPROACHES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Additional author information --J.R. G. : Also Ph.D. Candidate at the Electrical Engineering Department, School of Engineering and Applied Science, The George Washington University, Ashburn, VA, USA 20147. ABSTRACT A brief introduction to the widely spread theory of Importance Sampling is given. Several approaches to the optimization of the twisted density function are described, such as: i) using the ideal (zero-variance) estimator as a guideline, ii ) increasing the probability of the event to be analyzed, iii ) splitting the random process trajectory,iv) sequentially adapting the twisted density, and v) using uniformly bounded likelihood ratios. A brief description of the regenerative approach to simulations is given as well. Some details that should be taken into consideration when applying these techniques, in order to avoid a poor performance of the estimator, are also explained.
Spectroscopic investigation of a FRET molecular beacon containing two fluorophores for probing DNA/RNA sequences†

We report the design, synthesis, and characterization of a molecular beacon (MB) consisting of two fluorescent dyes (Alexa 488 and RedX) for DNA and RNA analysis. In the absence of the target DNA or RNA the MB is in its stem-closed form and shows efficient energy transfer from the donor (Alexa) to the acceptor (RedX), generating mostly fluorescence from RedX. In the presence of the complementary target DNA the MB opened efficiently, hybridizes with the target DNA, and energy transfer is blocked in the stem-open form. This attachment to the target generates a fluorescence signature, which is clearly distinguishable from the fluorescence signature of the stem-closed form, allowing for ratiometric analysis of the fluorescence signal. In addition to steady-state fluorescence analysis, time resolved fluorescence (ps time range) and fluorescence depolarization studies were performed. We show that fluorescence lifetime and fluorescence depolarization measurements are useful analytical tools to optimize the MB design.
Development of a fuel cell hybrid-powered unmanned aerial vehicle

This paper describes the design and development of a hybrid fuel cell/battery propulsion system for a long endurance small UAV. The high level system architecture is presented, followed by the hardware-in-the-loop testing and performance analysis. A high fidelity 6-DoF simulation model of the complete system was developed and used to test the system under different battery state-of-charge. The simulation model included the power manager for the hybrid propulsion system configuration, which is based on rule-based control. The simulation results are compared with the experimental results obtained from the Hardware-in-the-Loop testing.
Cooperative thermal denaturation of proteins designed by binary patterning of polar and nonpolar amino acids.

We previously reported a combinatorial strategy for designing alpha-helical proteins by assigning only the binary patterning of polar or nonpolar residues [Kamtekar, S. , Schiffer, J. M. , Xiong, H. Y. , Babik, J. M. , and Hecht, M. H. (1993) Science 262, 1680-1685]. Here we describe the finding that approximately half of the proteins in the original collection display some level of cooperativity in their thermal denaturation profiles. Many are monomeric in solution, demonstrating that the observed cooperativity is not merely a consequence of oligomerization. These findings demonstrate that although the combinatorial nature of the design strategy precludes explicit design of side-chain packing, binary patterning incorporates sufficient sequence information to generate de novo proteins with cooperatively folded structures. As binary partitioning of polar and nonpolar amino acids is an intrinsic part of the genetic code, these findings may bear on the early evolution of native proteins.
Automatic Analysis of Neurobiological Signals Based on Expert Knowledge

Nowadays, automatic analysis of neuro-biological signals plays more and more important roles in both clinical diagnosis and laboratory research. However, neuro-biological signals are inevitably contaminated by various artifacts. The analysis without considering the artifacts would lead to misinterpretation results. Therefore, an available signal selection technique is necessary to be developed for obtaining accurate and reliable results. In this paper, a model of real-time data classification system for accurate analysis of neuro-biological signals was proposed. The proposed model can be utilized for various research purposes. As an example, a physical system to analyze the relationship between characteristics of electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) was developed. The results indicated that the real-time system was effective for available signals selection. With the developed real-time system, the quality of signals can be monitored during the recording process. Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological diseases. Automatic EEG spike detection provides valuable information for epilepsy diagnosis. In the past 30 years, a number of algorithms were proposed. However, the basic idea of most algorithms is to identify spike activities. Most automatic spike detection systems in the scalp EEG focused on the characteristics of " spike ". However, the characteristics of " false positives " (FPs) have not been fully studied. In this paper, we proposed a system contains a series of algorithms to eliminate FPs and a template method to confirm spikes. The system used large area context available on 49 channels from two common montages. The impact of slow-waves after spikes was taken into consideration, as well as the information from single channel, multi-channel, and whole recording. Two types of FPs were identified in this paper. The ones from typical artifacts were identified by analysis of background EEG activities, and the ones from other EEG activities were declared by spatial and temporal characteristics of spike activities. Finally, a multi-channel template method was used to assess the performance of proposed system. The system was evaluated using 17 routine EEG recordings. Spike activities were observed in 6 of them. Effective multi-channel templates were extracted from 4 recordings containing frequent spikes. The least selectivity was 92.6% and the most false positive rate was 0.26 per minute. Proposed algorithms for elimination of FPs are also suitable for other algorithms to enhance performance since most FPs can be identified while few true spikes are eliminated. In practice application, real-time spike detection system is more useful. The algorithm based …
OpenMP 3 . 0 Tasking Implementation in OpenUH ∗

As multicore technology dominates the processor market, new methodologies are being explored to exploit the parallelism inherent to these architectures and shared memory programming models are gaining in popularity. The ratification of the OpenMP 3.0 API has provided compiler developers with another challenge as the multicore revolution reshapes the landscape in scientific computing. The introduction of explicit tasking in this latest revision of the de facto standard for shared memory programming introduces new capabilities for parallel programming. Tasking abilities in OpenMP now allow irregular applications with pointer based data and recursive algorithms to be executed in parallel, as well as providing alternative parallelization techniques for traditional loop-centric codes. This paper outlines the implementation of OpenMP 3.0 tasking features in OpenUH, a branch of Open64 compiler suite.
Heterosexual risk of HIV transmission per sexual act under combined antiretroviral therapy: systematic review and bayesian modeling.

BACKGROUND Although essential for patient counseling and quality of life of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected individuals, the risk of HIV transmission during 1 unprotected sex act with an HIV-infected person under combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) remains unknown. METHODS We reviewed systematically the literature for studies on HIV transmission among heterosexual HIV-serodiscordant couples, where the infected partner was on cART, with regular virological monitoring, reporting on condom use and sexual activity. We used Bayesian statistics to combine data from selected studies, to investigate the per-act risk of HIV transmission through unprotected sex with an HIV-infected person on cART for >6 months. RESULTS At most, 1 HIV transmission, over an estimated 113 480 sex acts, of which 17% were not condom protected, was reported within 1672 HIV-serodiscordant couples where the index partner had been treated for >6 months. Data were insufficient to determine whether the reported transmission occurred before or after 6 months of cART. We estimated the upper-bound per-act risk of HIV transmission at either 8.7 or 13:100 000, depending on whether the transmission occurred before or after 6 months of cART. These estimates applied whether or not index partners were virally suppressed. Estimating an upper-bound risk <1:100 000 would require observing no HIV transmission while collecting >12 times the available amount of data. CONCLUSIONS Available data do not support zero risk of HIV transmission under cART. The per-act risk of HIV transmission through unprotected sex with HIV-infected individuals on cART in comprehensive care for >6 months (whether or not virally suppressed) is <13:100 000. Estimating a 10-fold lower upper-bound risk may be unfeasible due to high condom use among HIV-serodiscordant couples in most research studies.
Estimation of spontaneous respiratory rate from photoplethysmography by cross time-frequency analysis

In this paper, a methodology to indirectly estimate the respiratory rate from the photoplethysmography (PPG) signal is presented. The possibility to reliably estimate respiratory rate from the PPG signal is particularly appealing since PPG is simple, comfortable and cheap. The underlying hypothesis of this methodology is that respiration provokes simultaneous changes in the pulse interval, amplitude and width of the PPG signal. These respiratory related changes are combined together by cross time-frequency analysis, performed by smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution, in order to obtain indirect estimates of respiratory rate. The algorithm is designed to yield estimates only when the estimation is robust. In 17 spontaneous breathing subjects, among which 7 were characterized by a respiratory rate lower than 0.15 Hz, this methodology provided accurate estimates, being the median error 0.00 ±1.95 mHz (0.00 ± 0.75%) and the interquartile range error 7.81 ± 6.10 mHz (3.00 ± 4.03%).
A Novel Coupling Matrix Synthesis Technique for Generalized Chebyshev Filters With Resonant Source–Load Connection

This paper reports a novel synthesis method for microwave bandpass filters with resonant source-load connection. In effect, a network realizing N+1 transmission zeros (where N is the number of reflection zeros) is obtained. The method is based on a prototype transversal coupling matrix (N+2, N+2) with source and load connected by a resonant circuit formed by a capacitor in parallel with a frequency-invariant susceptance. To complement the proposed synthesis technique, a method of reconfiguring the transversal coupling matrix as a more practical cross-coupled circuit is outlined. The technique is based on quickly converging gradient optimization with a cost function involving generalized eigenvalues of the transversal coupling matrix and its principal upper and lower submatrices. To illustrate and validate the proposed synthesis procedure, numerical tests have been carried out. Moreover, some aspects of implementation of the resonant connection between source and load were investigated, and experimental verification was performed. A third-order generalized Chebyshev filter with four transmission zeros was designed, fabricated, and tested. The measured results validate the proposed synthesis method.
English-German Cross-Language Retrieval for the GIRT Collection - Exploiting a Multilingual Thesaurus

Abstract : For TREC-8, the Berkeley experiments concentrated on the special GIRT collection. We utilized the GIRT thesaurus in multiple ways in working on English-German Cross-Language IR. Since the GIRT collection is truly multilingual (documents contain both German and English text), one would expect multilingual queries to achieve the best performance. This proved not to be the case.
BnO at the NTCIR-11 English Fact Validation Task

This paper describes the submission of BnO team to the RITE-VAL Fact Validation task [11] for English in NTCIR11. In this submission, the BnO team formulated the fact validation as a textual entailment task, where the objective is to nd a piece of text from a corpus such that it entails the stated fact. For that purpose, BnO team made use of search results retrieved by the search engine TSUBAKI as text T side of textual entailment pairs. Then, we used a logical algebraic inference system developed in [18] to test whether or not an entailment relation exists between the sentences retrieved by TSUBAKI and the hypotheses. We also tested a classier based on Random Forests that used the output from the inference engine and other features related to TSUBAKI search results.
Software extension and integration with type classes

The abilities to extend a software module and to integrate a software module into an existing software system without changing existing source code are fundamental challenges in software engineering and programming-language design. We reconsider these challenges at the level of language expressiveness, by using the language concept of type classes, as it is available in the functional programming language Haskell. A detailed comparison with related work shows that type classes provide a powerful framework in which solutions to known software extension and integration problems can be provided. We also pinpoint several limitations of type classes in this context.
Adaptive sparse channel estimation for time-variant MIMO-OFDM systems

Accurate channel state information (CSI) is required for coherent detection in time-variant multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. One of low-complexity and stable adaptive channel estimation (ACE) approaches is the normalized least mean square (NLMS)-based ACE. However, it cannot exploit the inherent sparsity of MIMO channel which is characterized by a few dominant channel taps. In this paper, we propose two adaptive sparse channel estimation (ASCE) methods to take advantage of such sparse structure information for time-variant MIMO-OFDM systems. Unlike traditional NLMS-based method, two proposed methods are implemented by introducing sparse penalties to the cost function of NLMS algorithm. Computer simulations confirm obvious performance advantages of the proposed ASCEs over the traditional ACE.
A Bag of Words approach for recognition of Greek folk dances

In this paper we explore the problem of distinguishing Greek folk dances from other kinds of activities, as well as from other dance genres, using video recordings. For this purpose, we adopt dense trajectories descriptors along with a Bag of Words (BoW) model to represent the motion depicted in the videos. Subsequently, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is used for classification. In order to evaluate the performance and the adequacy of the aforementioned framework for the dance recognition task, we performed experiments for three different classification setups: 1) Greek folk dances vs other activities (including different dance genres), 2) six different dance genres and 3) Greek vs Balkan folk dances. The aforementioned experiments exhibited satisfactory results, with successful recognition rates higher than 89.74%.
Image inpainting via sparse representation

This paper proposes a novel patch-wise image inpainting algorithm using the image signal sparse representation over a redundant dictionary, which merits in both capabilities to deal with large holes and to preserve image details while taking less risk. Different from all existing works, we consider the problem of image inpainting from the view point of sequential incomplete signal recovery under the assumption that the every image patch admits a sparse representation over a redundant dictionary. To ensure the visually plausibility and consistency constraints between the filled hole and the surroundings, we propose to construct a redundant signal dictionary by directly sampling from the intact source region of current image. Then we sequentially compute the sparse representation for each incomplete patch at the boundary of the hole and recover it until the whole hole is filled. Experimental results show that this approach can efficiently fill in the hole with visually plausible information, and take less risk to introduce unwanted objects or artifacts.
Evolution, Terror Management Theory, and Humans’ Relationship with Nature

This study investigated the savannah hypothesis, an evolutionary explanation for human environmental preference. It aimed to address some of the methodological shortcomings of prior research while simultaneously investigating the role of non-evolutionary influences, such as existential anxiety and individual differences. Ninety-eight undergraduate participants were shown photos of Natural, Mixed, and Built settings and rated the visual attractiveness of each photo. Results showed that Built scenes were preferred over Natural and Mixed scenes, in contradiction to the savannah hypothesis. Existential anxiety, however, did not appear to influence photo ratings. Individual differences, such as ethnicity and the quality participants‟ previous outdoor experiences were significantly related to photo ratings. Caucasian participants and participants with a history of pleasurable outdoor experiences rated natural photos as more attractive than minority participants and participants who reported having more unpleasant outdoor experiences. The results undermine the savannah hypothesis‟ adaptationist claims regarding the human preference for natural scenes.
The exocyst is an effector for Sec4p, targeting secretory vesicles to sites of exocytosis

Polarized secretion requires proper targeting of secretory vesicles to specific sites on the plasma membrane. Here we report that the exocyst complex plays a key role in vesicle targeting. Sec15p, an exocyst component, can associate with secretory vesicles and interact specifically with the rab GTPase, Sec4p, in its GTP‐bound form. A chain of protein–protein interactions leads from Sec4p and Sec15p on the vesicle, through various subunits of the exocyst, to Sec3p, which marks the sites of exocytosis on the plasma membrane. Sec4p may control the assembly of the exocyst. The exocyst may therefore function as a rab effector system for targeted secretion.