Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhancing travel experience with the combination of information visualization, situation awareness, and distributed cognition

Lei, Weiran. M.F. A. , Purdue University, May 2016. Enhancing Travel Experience with the Combination of Information Visualization, Situation Awareness, and Distributed Cognition. Major Professor: Zhenyu Cheryl Qian. With the new forms of travel introduced by new technologies of transportation and communication, a satisfied travel experience could be affected by various factors before and during a trip. Especially for road trips, traveling by car provides freedom on time control while leading to more possibilities of rescheduling initial plans made under time constraints. When overwhelmed with the need for changed travel context to avoid unexpected events that will require a serious change of initial plans, travelers need to find and access helpful contextual information quickly. This is a context-related decisionmaking process that requires amplifying human situation awareness and supporting distributed cognition, since travel information offers multiple choices. To solve this problem, I applied information visualization as the main design solution. When comparing it with a traditional representation of lists, information visualization displays the advantages of visual representation of abstract data to clarify and depict the information and amplify cognition while improving travel experience intuitively in the domain of user experience design. Therefore in this thesis I will address the approach of implementing recontextualized situation awareness, distributed cognition, and
Color Based Image Segmentation

This article addresses color image segmentation in hue-saturation space. A model for circular data is provided by the vM-Gauss distribution, which is a joint distribution of von-Mises and Gaussian distribution. The mixture of vM-Gauss distribution is used to model hue-saturation data. A cluster merging process is applied to separate such identifiable objects in the image. The results are shown on Berkeley segmentation dataset. A cluster association methodology is developed for comparison.
Analysis of a high-speed solid rotor induction motor using coupled analytical method and reluctance networks

It is shown that a 2D analytical method can be coupled with reluctance networks for analysis of high-speed solid rotor induction machines. Combination the advantages of both methods while avoiding their drawbacks, this coupling yield both an accurate and time-efficient computation. Analytical method is used in solid iron rotor region and for obtaining the electromagnetic fields in the stator core; the reluctance networks method is applied. In the air-gap, both method is applied and coupled together through the related boundary conditions. The results of proposed method are compared with finite element ones. It is shown that the method has high accuracy in electromagnetic computations.
Double-Hamming based QC LDPC codes with large minimum distance

A new method using Hamming codes to construct base matrices of (J,K)-regular LDPC convolutional codes with large free distance is presented. By proper labeling the corresponding base matrices and tailbiting these parent convolutional codes to given lengths, a large set of quasi-cyclic (QC) (J,K)-regular LDPC block codes with large minimum distance is obtained. The corresponding Tanner graphs have girth up to 14. This new construction is compared with two previously known constructions of QC (J,K)-regular LDPC block codes with large minimum distance exceeding (J + 1)! Applying all three constructions, new QC (J,K)-regular block LDPC codes with J = 3 or 4, shorter codeword lengths and/or better distance properties than those of previously known codes are presented.
A Dynamic Data Storage Architecture for SaaS

Abstract: In the implementation of Software as a Service (SaaS), Universal Table and Column Store have become the two most typical data storage architecture. However, they both have obvious drawbacks. Microsoft proposed the schema based on Basic-Table combined with Extension-Table (BT & ET) ,in which some of the tenants’ common fields are stored into the basic table to improve the processing efficiency. But the structure of the basic table is irreversible for it’s defined by the service provider in their development stage. Thus none of the extension fields can be stored into the basic table, even if they are accessed much more frequently than the common columns they still need tuple reconstruction. In the paper we improve the BT & ET schema and based on the improved schema we propose a dynamic self-adaptive algorithm. Based on the tenants’ constantly need on data access, we can store some tenant’s frequently accessed extension fields into the basic table by our algorithm.
Hsp27 binding to the 3′UTR of bim mRNA prevents neuronal death during oxidative stress–induced injury: a novel cytoprotective mechanism

Bim protein mediates neuronal apoptosis under certain stress conditions. In neurons exposed to oxidative stress, Hsp27 prevents neuronal death, repressing bim mRNA translation through its binding to the 3′-untranslated region. This neuroprotective mechanism may provide novel therapeutic approaches in diverse neurodegenerative conditions.
Longitudinal and multi-group modeling with missing data

Missing data are almost always a problem in longitudinal research. Item non-response, differential attrition, failure to obtain measurements at equal time intervals, and unbalanced panel designs used to be difficult to analyze at best and remain a threat to the validity of a study. A related technical problem, customarily given little importance but nevertheless strongly related to validity threats, is that most multivariate methods require complete data.
On the observability of path and cycle graphs

In this paper we investigate the observability properties of a network system, running a Laplacian based average consensus algorithm, when the communication graph is a path or a cycle. More in detail, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions, based on simple algebraic rules from number theory, to characterize all and only the nodes from which the network system is observable. Interesting immediate corollaries of our results are: (i) a path graph is observable from any single node if and only if the number of nodes of the graph is a power of two, n = 2i; i ∈ ℕ, and (ii) a cycle is observable from any pair of observation nodes if and only if n is a prime number. For any set of observation nodes, we provide a closed form expression for the unobservable eigenvalues and for the eigenvectors of the unobservable subspace.
Greedily Improving Our Own Closeness Centrality in a Network

The closeness centrality is a well-known measure of importance of a vertex within a given complex network. Having high closeness centrality can have positive impact on the vertex itself: hence, in this paper we consider the optimization problem of determining how much a vertex can increase its centrality by creating a limited amount of new edges incident to it. We will consider both the undirected and the directed graph cases. In both cases, we first prove that the optimization problem does not admit a polynomial-time approximation scheme (unless P = NP), and then propose a greedy approximation algorithm (with an almost tight approximation ratio), whose performance is then tested on synthetic graphs and real-world networks.
Bmovo-1 Regulates Ovary Size in the Silkworm, Bombyx mori

The regulation of antagonistic OVO isoforms is critical for germline formation and differentiation in Drosophila. However, little is known about genes related to ovary development. In this study, we cloned the Bombyx mori ovo gene and investigated its four alternatively spliced isoforms. BmOVO-1, BmOVO-2 and BmOVO-3 all had four C2H2 type zinc fingers, but differed at the N-terminal ends, while BmOVO-4 had a single zinc finger. Bmovo-1, Bmovo-2 and Bmovo-4 showed the highest levels of mRNA in ovaries, while Bmovo-3 was primarily expressed in testes. The mRNA expression pattern suggested that Bmovo expression was related to ovary development. RNAi and transgenic techniques were used to analyze the biological function of Bmovo. The results showed that when the Bmovo gene was downregulated, oviposition number decreased. Upregulation of Bmovo-1 in the gonads of transgenic silkworms increased oviposition number and elevated the trehalose contents of hemolymph and ovaries. We concluded that Bmovo-1 was involved in protein synthesis, contributing to the development of ovaries and oviposition number in silkworms.
Challenges and Solutions in Electronic Patient Records Management Using Wireless Sensor Networks

As technology advances continuously, mobile devices become more powerful and provide new capabilities for different sectors of everyday life. Among these notable are the applications in the medical domain, Patient Records on the other hand shift from traditional paper based to electronic forms. The use of mobile technologies to continuously update Electronic Patient Records is a great challenge. However it is subject to a number of restrictions of security and privacy mainly concern. In this paper we address the benefits and gains from the deployment of wireless architectures for Electronic patient records management and also discuss the threats and countermeasures.
MicroRNA-20a Constrains p300-Driven Myocardial Angiogenic Transcription by Direct Targeting of p300

Objective To characterize downstream effectors of p300 acetyltransferase in the myocardium. Background Acetyltransferase p300 is a central driver of the hypertrophic response to increased workload, but its biological targets and downstream effectors are incompletely known. Methods and Results Mice expressing a myocyte-restricted transgene encoding acetyltransferase p300, previously shown to develop spontaneous hypertrophy, were observed to undergo robust compensatory blood vessel growth together with increased angiogenic gene expression. Chromatin immunoprecipitation demonstrated binding of p300 to the enhancers of the angiogenic regulators Angpt1 and Egln3. Interestingly, p300 overexpression in vivo was also associated with relative upregulation of several members of the anti-angiogenic miR-17∼92 cluster in vivo. Confirming this finding, both miR-17-3p and miR-20a were upregulated in neonatal rat ventricular myocytes following adenoviral transduction of p300. Relative expression of most members of the 17∼92 cluster was similar in all 4 cardiac chambers and in other organs, however, significant downregulation of miR-17-3p and miR-20a occurred between 1 and 8 months of age in both wt and tg mice. The decline in expression of these microRNAs was associated with increased expression of VEGFA, a validated miR-20a target. In addition, miR-20a was demonstrated to directly repress p300 expression through a consensus binding site in the p300 3′UTR. In vivo transduction of p300 resulted in repression both of p300 and of p300-induced angiogenic transcripts. Conclusion p300 drives an angiogenic transcription program during hypertrophy that is fine-tuned in part through direct repression of p300 by miR-20a.
An analysis of co-occurrence texture statistics as a function of grey level quantization

In this paper, the effect of grey level quantization on the ability of co-occurrence probability statistics to classify natural textures is studied. Generally, as a function of increasing grey levels, many of the statistics demonstrate a decrease in classification ability while a few maintain constant classification accuracy. None of the individual statistics show increasing classification accuracy throughout all grey levels. Correlation analysis is used to rationalize a preferred subset of statistics. The preferred statistics set (contrast, correlation, and entropy) is demonstrated to be an improvement over using single statistics or using the entire set of statistics. If the feature space dimension only allows for a single statistic, one of contrast, dissimilarity, inverse difference normalized, or inverse difference moment normalized, is recommended. Testing that compares (using all orientations separately), the average of all orientations and look direction averaging, when determining the co-occurrence features, indicates that the look direction or all orientations is preferred. The Fisher linear discriminant method is used for all classification testing. The Fisher criterion is used as a separability index to provide insight into the classification results. Testing is performed on Brodatz imagery as well as two separate SAR sea-ice data sets.
Concepts for an Ontology-centric Technology Risk Management Architecture in the Banking Industry

Due to the increasing impact of technology on the banking industry, the resulting risks play a vital role in bank-wide risk management. Additional gain in attention can be ascribed to the recent Basel II regulatory framework covering operational risk. To deliver adequate support for the process of technology risk management, flexible and seamlessly integrated software architectures are required. Based upon ontology-driven information systems the concept of an ontology-centric technology risk management architecture is explored. As a basis, the conceptual role of ontologies in information systems is portrayed and the technology risk environment in the banking domain summarized. The proposed architecture then is constructed around two essential concepts: The modeling of domain knowledge within an ontology as well as the integration of multiple, special-purpose software components into one architecture.
The Refinement Paradigm: The Interaction of Coding and Efficiency Knowledge in Program Synthesis

A refinement paradigm for implementing a high-level specification in a low-level target language is discussed. In this paradigm, coding and analysis knowledge work together to produce an efficient program in the target language. Since there are many possible implementations for a given specification of a program, searching knowledge is applied to increase the efficiency of the process of finding a good implementation. For example, analysis knowledge is applied to determine upper and lower cost bounds on alternate implementations, and these bounds are used to measure the potential impact of different design decisions and to decide which alternatives should be pursued. In this paper we also describe a particular implementation of this program synthesis paradigm, called PSI/SYN, that has automatically implemented a number of programs in the domain of symbolic processing.
Sensitivity and Specificity of the Coma Recovery Scaleerevised Total Score in Detection of Conscious Awareness Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Objective: To describe the sensitivity and specificity of Coma Recovery ScaleeRevised (CRS-R) total scores in detecting conscious awareness. Design: Data were retrospectively extracted from the medical records of patients enrolled in a specialized disorders of consciousness (DOC) program. Sensitivity and specificity analyses were completed using CRS-Rederived diagnoses of minimally conscious state (MCS) or emerged from minimally conscious state (EMCS) as the reference standard for conscious awareness and the total CRS-R score as the test criterion. A receiver operating characteristic curve was constructed to demonstrate the optimal CRS-R total cutoff score for maximizing sensitivity and specificity. Main Outcome Measures: Sensitivity and specificity of CRS-R total scores in detecting conscious awareness. Results: A CRS-R total score of 10 or higher yielded a sensitivity of . 78 for correct identification of patients in MCS or EMCS, and a specificity of 1.00 for correct identification of patients who did not meet criteria for either of these diagnoses (ie, were diagnosed with vegetative state or coma). The area under the curve in the receiver operating characteristic curve analysis is . 98. Conclusions: A total CRS-R score of 10 or higher provides strong evidence of conscious awareness but resulted in a false-negative diagnostic error in 22% of patients who demonstrated conscious awareness based on CRS-R diagnostic criteria. A cutoff score of 8 provides the best balance between sensitivity and specificity, accurately classifying 93% of cases. The optimal total score cutoff will vary depending on the user's objective. Patients emerging from coma after severe brain injury often transition through states of altered consciousness, including the vegetative state (VS) and the minimally conscious state (MCS). In VS, there is recovery of eye opening but no behavioral evidence of self or environmental awareness. 1 MCS is characterized by clearly discernible but inconsistent behavioral signs of conscious awareness. 2 Distinguishing MCS from VS during the early stages of recovery is critically important because there is strong evidence that functional outcome is significantly more favorable for patients in MCS relative to those in VS, particularly after traumatic brain injury. 3 Prior research suggests that when the diagnosis is made based on clinical consensus of the medical team, approximately 40% of patients with diagnosed VS actually retain conscious awareness. 4 These findings point to the need for more accurate diagnostic procedures. The Coma Recovery ScaleeRevised (CRS-R) is a standardized neurobehavioral assessment measure composed of 6 subscales designed to assess arousal level, audition, language comprehension, …
Chinese Natural Language Processing Based on Semantic Structure Tree

For the problem of limited rule bases and inaccurate matching of Chinese Natural Language Processing (NLP), this paper presents a new NLP method based on Semantic Structure Tree (SST). Through establishing SST, this paper calculates the evaluation index to find out the most suitable semantic combination from all possible SST. In order to improve the semantic recognition recall and precision, this paper carries out the semantic recognition and the word segmentation synchronously. Application indicates that the proposed method can guarantee high recall and precision in Chinese natural language semantic recognition.
Extrinsic calibration of a camera and a lidar based on decoupling the rotation from the translation

In this paper, we propose a novel robust algorithm for the extrinsic calibration of a camera and a lidar. This algorithm utilizes checkerboard as a calibration object. Since the interaction between the estimation errors of the plane parameters obtained from checkerboard images downgrades the quality of extrinsic calibration results, a new geometric constraint is presented to decouple the rotation from the translation so as to reduce the effect of such an interaction. Weights that represent uncertainty of the unit normal vector to the checkerboard plane are introduced to totally evaluate the quality of each pair of image and lidar scan. Furthermore, we analyze the configuration of checkerboard pose and give a formula that is used to assess the configuration. We compare the proposed algorithm with the previous ones. Simulation and experimental results show that our algorithm is able to achieve more accurate extrinsic parameters than the existing algorithms. Meanwhile, we also design experiments to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the presented weight and the assessment formula.
Capacity analysis for dimmable visible light communications

This paper aims to derive the upper and lower bounds for the channel capacity of dimmable visible light communications (VLC) systems. Because the information is modulated into the instantaneous optical intensity of light emitting diodes (LEDs), the transmitted optical intensity signal is represented by a nonnegative input, which is corrupted by an additive white Gaussian noise. Considering the illumination support and LED device ability in VLC systems, the transmitted optical intensity signal must satisfy the illumination and the allowed peak optical intensity constraints. With these constraints, a lower bound on the channel capacity is derived through the maximum mutual information between the channel input and output, which is determined by the source entropy maximization. By applying the dual expression of capacity, an upper bound on channel capacity is derived. Both the upper and lower bounds are presented as the closed forms. The numerical results show that the presented bounds are very tight. Moreover, the peak optical intensity constraints will result in the loss of channel capacity. However, such capacity loss is so small that it can be negligible when the allowed peak optical intensity is twice of the nominal optical intensity of LED devices.
Not all water mazes are created equal: cyclin D2 knockout mice with constitutively suppressed adult hippocampal neurogenesis do show specific spatial learning deficits

Studies using the Morris water maze to assess hippocampal function in animals, in which adult hippocampal neurogenesis had been suppressed, have yielded seemingly contradictory results. Cyclin D2 knockout (Ccnd2−/−) mice, for example, have constitutively suppressed adult hippocampal neurogenesis but had no overt phenotype in the water maze. In other paradigms, however, ablation of adult neurogenesis was associated with specific deficits in the water maze. Therefore, we hypothesized that the neurogenesis‐related phenotype might also become detectable in Ccnd2−/− mice, if we used the exact setup and protocol that in our previous study had revealed deficits in mice with suppressed adult neurogenesis. Ccnd2−/− mice indeed learned the task and developed a normal preference for the goal quadrant, but were significantly less precise for the exact goal position and were slower in acquiring efficient and spatially more precise search strategies. Upon goal reversal (when the hidden platform was moved to a new position) Ccnd2−/− mice showed increased perseverance at the former platform location, implying that they were less flexible in updating the previously learned information. Both with respect to adult neurogenesis and behavioral performance, Ccnd2+/− mice ranged between wild types and knockouts. Importantly, hippocampus‐dependent learning was not generally impaired by the mutation, but specifically functional aspects relying on precise and flexible encoding were affected. Whether ablation of adult neurogenesis causes a specific behavioral phenotype thus also depends on the actual task demands. The test parameters appear to be important variables influencing whether a task can pick up a contribution of adult neurogenesis to test performance.