Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved Rao-Blackwellized Mapping by Adaptive Sampling and Active Loop-Closure

Recently Rao-Blackwellized particle filters have been introduced as an effective means to solve the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. In such a particle filter each particle carries an individual map of the environment. Accordingly, a key question is how to reduce the number of particles. Additionally, the approach leaves open how to move the robot in order to improve the accuracy of the learned maps. In this paper we present novel solutions to both problems. First we present an efficient way to compute improved proposal distributions in the prediction step which drastically reduces the uncertainty about the robot’s pose. Furthermore, we present an approach to effectively reduce the number of re-sampling steps which seriously reduces the particle depletion problem. Finally, we describe a technique allowing the robot to actively close loops during exploration. By re-entering already visited areas our algorithm reduces the localization error and this way produces more accurate maps. Experimental results carried out with mobile robots in large-scale indoor and outdoor environments illustrate the advantages of our methods over previous approaches.
First-in-humans trial of an RNA interference therapeutic targeting VEGF and KSP in cancer patients with liver involvement.

UNLABELLED RNA interference (RNAi) is a potent and specific mechanism for regulating gene expression. Harnessing RNAi to silence genes involved in disease holds promise for the development of a new class of therapeutics. Delivery is key to realizing the potential of RNAi, and lipid nanoparticles (LNP) have proved effective in delivery of siRNAs to the liver and to tumors in animals. To examine the activity and safety of LNP-formulated siRNAs in humans, we initiated a trial of ALN-VSP, an LNP formulation of siRNAs targeting VEGF and kinesin spindle protein (KSP), in patients with cancer. Here, we show detection of drug in tumor biopsies, siRNA-mediated mRNA cleavage in the liver, pharmacodynamics suggestive of target downregulation, and antitumor activity, including complete regression of liver metastases in endometrial cancer. In addition, we show that biweekly intravenous administration of ALN-VSP was safe and well tolerated. These data provide proof-of-concept for RNAi therapeutics in humans and form the basis for further development in cancer. SIGNIFICANCE The fi ndings in this report show safety, pharmacokinetics, RNAi mechanism of action, and clinical activity with a novel fi rst-in-class LNP-formulated RNAi therapeutic in patients with cancer. The ability to harness RNAi to facilitate specifi c multitargeting, as well as increase the number of druggable targets, has important implications for future drug development in oncology.
Estimating software fault-proneness for tuning testing activities

The article investigates whether a correlation exists between the fault-proneness of software and the measurable attributes of the code (i.e. the static metrics) and of the testing (i.e. the dynamic metrics). The article also studies how to use such data for tuning the testing process. The goal is not to find a general solution to the problem (a solution may not even exist), but to investigate the scope of specific solutions, i.e., to what extent homogeneity of the development process, organization, environment and application domain allows data computed on past projects to be projected onto new projects. A suitable variety of case studies is selected to investigate a methodology applicable to classes of homogeneous products, rather than investigating if a specific solution exists for few cases.
Reduced-Delay Interference-Aware Opportunistic Relaying

In this work, we extend low-complexity, slow-fading opportunistic relaying in both noise and interference-limited setups in order to harvest cooperation benefits without sacrificing overall delay. In particular, we show that information can be reliably relayed without delay, at the presence of interference, while harvesting benefits of cooperative diversity due to the opportunistic protocol nature. Under interference-aware opportunistic relaying, relays become useful provided that they offer strong paths towards source and destination, while at the same time they are as "isolated" as possible from each other (e.g. when directive antennas are utilized). This work could potentially assist reduced-delay, cooperative relaying applications (e.g. wireless access) with low-complexity receivers.
A Study of Acoustic Features for Emotional Speaker Recognition in I-Vector Representation

Recently recognition of emotions became very important in the field of speech and/or speaker recognition. This paper is dedicated to experimental investigation of best acoustic features obtained for purpose of gender-dependent speaker recognition from emotional speech. Four feature sets LPC (Linear Prediction Coefficients), LPCC (Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficients), MFCC (Melfrequency Cepstral Coefficients) and PLP (Perceptual linear prediction) coefficients were compared in an experimental setup of speaker recognition system, based on i-vector representation. For evaluation of the system emotional speech recordings from newly created Slovak emotional database and Mahalanobis distance metric as scoring method were used. The results of the experiment showed the MFCC representation as the best fitted for speaker verification from Slovak emotional speech with recognition rate higher than 80%.
Effect of menopause on femoral and vertebral bone loss

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of menopause on bone loss in the proximal femur and the lumbar spine. The rates of change in bone mineral density (BMD) were measured longitudinally by dual X‐ray absorptiometry (DXA) at the femoral neck (FN), Ward's triangle (WT), and trochanter (TR) together with the lumbar spine in 81 healthy postmenopausal women (45‐65 years of age) who had passed a natural menopause, 6 months to 12 years before. A significant correlation between the rate of change and interval since menopause was evidenced. The best fit of the data was a binomial function of interval since menopause at the spine, FN, and WT and a simple linear regression at TR level. At each skeletal site, the rate of bone loss (mean ± SD) was significantly different (p < 0.05) and twice as high in women who were between 6 months and 2 years postmenopausal at enrollment (FN, ‐1.82 ± 1.1.%; WT, ‐2.43 ± 1.7%; TR, ‐1.12 ± 1.7%) than in those who were beyond 5 years of menopause (FN, ‐0.48 ± 0.8%; WT, ‐0.68 ± 2.1%; TR, 0.41 ± 1.2%). A poor correlation (r = 0.39 ‐ 0.42, p < 0.001) was found between the rate of vertebral and that of femoral postmenopausal bone loss. This study demonstrates that menopause is associated with a rapid and transient bone loss in BMD of the proximal femur, which declines with time after 3 years. These data suggest that therapy should be initiated as early as possible after menopause to prevent bone loss.
A differential evolutionary architecture for artificial neural trees with applications to medical data mining

This paper presents an evolutionary structure for neural trees by differential evolution. For a neural tree a structure tree and weights tree are defined. A partial ordering based multi-dimensional fitness function is applied to measure the energy of the system. Different to traditional evolution method of genetic programming, a new evolution technique based on differential evolution is proposed. A numbering scheme is designed for basic operations of tree structure. Finally we present an experimental framework for the tree evolution. Application frameworks are given in medical data mining and analysis.
Static Code Analysis to Detect Software Security Vulnerabilities - Does Experience Matter?

Code reviews with static analysis tools are today recommended by several security development processes. Developers are expected to use the tools' output to detect the security threats they themselves have introduced in the source code. This approach assumes that all developers can correctly identify a warning from a static analysis tool (SAT) as a security threat that needs to be corrected. We have conducted an industry experiment with a state of the art static analysis tool and real vulnerabilities. We have found that average developers do not correctly identify the security warnings and only developers with specific experiences are better than chance in detecting the security vulnerabilities. Specific SAT experience more than doubled the number of correct answers and a combination of security experience and SAT experience almost tripled the number of correct security answers.
The duration of disgusted and fearful faces is judged longer and shorter than that of neutral faces: the attention-related time distortions as revealed by behavioral and electrophysiological measurements

Time perception has been shown to be altered by emotions. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the effects of two threat-related emotions on the judgment of time intervals in the range of 490–910 ms. We demonstrated that disgust and fear have distinct influences on time perception. At the behavioral level, disgusted faces were estimated longer and fearful faces were estimated shorter (i.e., the generalization gradient for the disgusted faces was shifted left while the generalization gradient for the fearful faces was shifted right) when compared with neutral faces. Accordingly, the contingent negative variation, an online ERP index of timing, displayed larger area in disgust and smaller area in fear conditions when compared with neutral condition (disgust = 1.94 ± 2.35 μV•s, neutral = 1.40 ± 2.5 μV•s, and fear = 1.00 ± 2.26 μV•s). These findings indicated that specific neural mechanisms may underlie the attention effects of different subtypes of threat-related emotions on timing; compared with neutral faces, fearful faces are likely to attract more attentional resources while disgusted faces may attract less attentional resources for emotional processing. The major contribution of the current study is to provide neural correlates of fear vs. disgust divergence in the aspect of time perception and to demonstrate beyond the behavioral level that the categorization of threat-related emotions should be refined so to highlight the adaptability of the human defense system.
Performance evaluation of cognitive multi-relay networks with multi-receiver scheduling

In this paper, we investigate the performance of cognitive multiple decode-and-forward relay networks under the interference power constraint of the primary receiver wherein the cognitive downlink channel is shared among multiple secondary relays and secondary receivers. In particular, only one relay and one secondary receiver which offers the highest instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio is scheduled to transmit signals. Accordingly, only one transmission route that offers the best end-to-end quality is selected for communication at a particular time instant. To quantify the system performance, we derive expressions for outage probability and symbol error rate over Nakagami-m fading with integer values of fading severity parameter m. Finally, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effect of system parameters such as fading conditions, the number of secondary relays and secondary receivers on the secondary system performance.
TEMP: Thread batch enabled memory partitioning for GPU

As massive multi-threading in GPU imposes tremendous pressure on memory subsystems, efficient bandwidth utilization becomes a key factor affecting the GPU throughput. In this work, we propose thread batch enabled memory partitioning (TEMP), to improve GPU performance through the improvement of memory bandwidth utilization. In particular, TEMP clusters multiple thread blocks sharing the same set of pages into a thread batch and dispatches the entire thread batch to a stream multiprocessor. TEMP separates the memory access streams of different thread batches by OS memory management, preserving the intrinsic locality of thread batches and increasing the memory access parallelism. Experimental results show that TEMP can obtain up to 10.3% performance improvement and 14.6% DRAM energy reduction compared to a state-of-the-art scheduler without any memory-side optimizations.
Impact of a national campaign on GP education: an evaluation of the Defeat Depression Campaign.

BACKGROUND The Defeat Depression Campaign, which was run by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) from 1992 to 1996, aimed to educate general practitioners (GPs) to recognize and manage depression. AIM To measure the educational impact on GPs of the Defeat Depression Campaign. METHOD A postal survey using a structured questionnaire was distributed to 2046 GPs obtained by systematically sampling 1 in 14 GPs from alphabetical lists from family health services authorities (FHSAs) in England and Wales. The questionnaire covered awareness of the campaign, awareness and use of campaign materials, and ratings of the usefulness of the campaign in relation to other educational activities. RESULTS Two-thirds of GPs were aware of the campaign and 40% had definitely or possibly made changes in practice as a result of it. Impact of materials was highest for a consensus statement on the recognition and management of depression in general practice and for guidelines derived from it, each of which had been read in detail by about one quarter of responders and was known of by an additional one third. Impact was low for the other materials. The campaign had the highest impact among younger GPs, members of the RCGP, and (less strongly) among those who had undertaken a six-month post in psychiatry, those who were working in larger practices and fundholding practices, and women; 56% of GPs had attended a teaching session on depression in the past three years. CONCLUSION A national campaign of this kind can have a useful impact, but it needs to be supplemented by local and practice-based teaching activities.
Book Reviews: Advances in Automatic Text Summarization

It has been said for decades (if not centuries) that more and more information is becoming available and that tools are needed to handle it. Only recently, however, does it seem that a sufficient quantity of this information is electronically available to produce a widespread need for automatic summarization. Consequently, this research area has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the past few years, as illustrated by a 1997 ACL Workshop, a 1998 AAAI Spring Symposium and in the same year SUMMAC: a TREC-like TIPSTER-funded summarization evaluation conference. Not unexpectedly, there is now a book to add to this list: Advances in Automatic Summarization, a collection of papers edited by Inderjeet Mani and Mark T. Maybury and published by The MIT Press. Half of it is a historical record: thirteen previously published papers, including classics such as Luhn's 1958 word-counting sentence-extraction paper, Edmundson's 1969 use of cue words and phrases, and Kupiec, Pedersen, and Chen's 1995 trained summarizer. The other half of the book holds new papers, which attempt to cover current issues and point to future trends. It starts with a paper by Karen Sp~irck Jones, which acts as an overall introduction. In it, the summarization process and the uses of summaries are broken down into their constituent parts and each of these is discussed (it reminded me of a much earlier Sp~rck Jones paper on categorization [1970]). Despite its comprehensiveness and authority, I must confess to finding this opener heavy going at times. The rest of the papers are grouped into six sections, each of which is prefaced with two or three well-written pages from the editors. These introductions contain valuable commentary on the coming papers--even pointing out a possible flaw in the evaluation part of one. The opening section holds three papers on so-called classical approaches. Here one finds the oft-cited papers of Luhn, Edmundson, and Pollock and Zamora. As a package, these papers provide a novice with a good idea of how basic summarization works. My only quibble was in their reproduction. In Luhn's paper, an article from Scientific American is summarized and it would have been beneficial to have this included in the book as well. Some of the figures in another paper contained very small fonts and were hard to read; fixing this for a future print run is probably worth thinking about. The next section holds papers on corpus-based approaches to summarization, starting with Kupiec et al.'s paper about a summarizer trained on an existing corpus of manually abstracted documents. Two new papers building upon the Kupiec et al. work follow this. Exploiting the discourse structure of a document is the topic of the next section. Of the five papers here, I thought Daniel Marcu's was the best, nicely describing summarization work so far and then clearly explaining his system, which is based on Rhetorical Structure Theory. The following section on knowledge-rich approaches to summarization covers such things as Wendy Lehnert's work on breaking
Effect of Scale Response Format on Psychometric Properties in Teaching Self-Efficacy

Suggested Citation: Kan, A. (2009). Effect of scale response format on psychometric properties in teaching self-efficacy. Egitim Arastirmalari-Eurasian Journal of Educational Research, 34, 215-228. Abstract Problem Statement: Many studies in educational and psychological literature revealed that measurement of self-efficacy is important in the field of education because of its key role and relationships with many other variables, which have great influences on education. For this reason, selfefficacy measurements and the development of an effective measurement tool with respect to psychometric properties have become an important issue and major concern. Purpose of Study: This study was conducted to determine which type of selfefficacy scale response format most appropriately assessed self-efficacy in teaching. At the same time, the use of generalizability theory was proposed as a framework for examining the effect of item response format on performance measures. Methods: Participants in this study were 307 preservice teachers graduated from various department of education faculty as teacher candidates. Of these preservice teachers, 123 were male and 184 were female. Utilizing factor analysis, forced-entry hierarchial regression, reliability and generalizability analysis, the effect of item response format on the psychometric properties of teaching self-efficacy scales was evaluated. Findings and Results: The study revealed that scales with response formats ranging from 0 to 100 were stronger than the others regarding psychometric properties. Factor loadings of items on a 0-100 scale were changed between . 61 and . 83, while factor loadings of likert scales varied from . 53 to . 74, and the metric scale ranged from . 59 to . 78. At the same time, proportion of variance and Cronbach alpha of the 0-100 scale was higher than both the metric and traditional likert scale. Study results also showed that the strong discrimination of the 0-100 scale provided an assessment that was not only strongly correlated with performance index, but also predictive of performance in a regression model. Conclusion and Recommendations: This study suggests that Bandura’s guidelines for self efficacy assessment are well grounded and should be considered by the researcher while developing teaching self-efficacy
Poisson Vector Graphics (PVG) and Its Closed-Form Solver

This paper presents Poisson vector graphics, an extension of the popular first-order diffusion curves, for generating smooth-shaded images. Armed with two new types of primitives, namely Poisson curves and Poisson regions, PVG can easily produce photorealistic effects such as specular highlights, core shadows, translucency and halos. Within the PVG framework, users specify color as the Dirichlet boundary condition of diffusion curves and control tone by offsetting the Laplacian, where both controls are simply done by mouse click and slider dragging. The separation of color and tone not only follows the basic drawing principle that is widely adopted by professional artists, but also brings three unique features to PVG, i.e., local hue change, ease of extrema control, and permit of intersection among geometric primitives, making PVG an ideal authoring tool. To render PVG, we develop an efficient method to solve 2D Poisson's equations with piecewise constant Laplacians. In contrast to the conventional finite element method that computes numerical solutions only, our method expresses the solution using harmonic B-spline, whose basis functions can be constructed locally and the control coefficients are obtained by solving a small sparse linear system. Our closed-form solver is numerically stable and it supports random access evaluation, zooming-in of arbitrary resolution and anti-aliasing. Although the harmonic B-spline based solutions are approximate, computational results show that the relative mean error is less than 0.3%, which cannot be distinguished by naked eyes.
Preclinical Evaluation of Synthetic −2 RANTES as a Candidate Vaginal Microbicide To Target CCR5

ABSTRACT A potential strategy that can be used to combat the worldwide AIDS epidemic is the development of a vaginal microbicide that prevents the sexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). Certain CC chemokines, including RANTES, MIP-1α, and MIP-1β, might facilitate the development of such microbicides since they potently suppress HIV-1 infection by binding to CCR5, the viral coreceptor used by most sexually transmitted strains of HIV-1 to enter host cells. In this study, we evaluated whether a CCR5-specific fragment of RANTES that lacks two N-terminal residues (−2 RANTES) and possesses especially potent HIV-1 suppressive activity has toxicity profiles conducive to the advancement of testing in candidate microbicide formulations. Analyses were carried out with a synthetic version of the chemokine, which was formulated with either Novasomes 7474, a nonphospholipid liposome, or methylcellulose gel. Dialysis studies demonstrated that the formulated −2 RANTES was released from both vehicles and retained anti-HIV-1 activity. Preclinical toxicity studies carried out with Swiss Webster mouse and New Zealand White rabbit vaginal irritation models demonstrated minimal inflammation and minimal adverse changes in cervicovaginal tissue integrity after short-term (10 min) and long-term (24 h) exposure to formulations containing up to 1 mg/ml of −2 RANTES. Similarly, no toxicity was observed with formulations of bioactive murine RANTES in the Swiss Webster mouse vaginal irritation model. Overall, these preclinical studies suggest that −2 RANTES is suitable for further testing as a candidate anti-HIV-1 microbicide.
Anti-Structure Problems

The recent success of structured solutions for a class of information-theoretic network problems, calls for exploring their limits. We show that sum-product channels resist a solution by structured (as well as random) codes. We conclude that the structured approach fails whenever the channel operations do not commute (or for general functional channels, when the channel function is non decomposable).