Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Composer-Centered Computer-Aided Soundtrack Composition

For as long as computers have been around, people have looked for ways to involve them in music. Research in computer music progresses in many varied areas: algorithmic composition, music representation, music synthesis, and performance analysis to name a few. However, computer music research, especially relating to music composition, does very little toward making the computer useful for artists in practical situations. This lack of consideration for the user has led to the containment of computer music, with a few exceptions, to academia. In this thesis, I propose a system that enables a computer to aide users composing music in a specific setting: soundtracks. In the process of composing a soundtrack, a composer is faced with solving non-musical problems that are beyond the experience of composers of standalone music. The system I propose utilizes the processing power of computers to address the non-musical problems thus preventing users from having to deal with them. Therefore, users can focus on the creative aspect of composing soundtrack music. The guiding principal of the system is to help the composer while not assuming any creative power and while leaving the user in full control of the music. This principal is a major step toward helping users solve problems while not introducing new ones. I present some carefully chosen tasks that a computer can perform with guidance from the user that follow this principal. For example, the system performs calculations to help users compose music that matches the visual presentation and allows users to specify music, using the idea of timed regular expressions, so that a computer can fill arbitrary amounts of time with music in a controlled manner. A prototype application, called EMuse, was designed and implemented to illustrate the use and benefits of the proposed system. To demonstrate that the system is capable of serving as a tool to create music, two soundtracks were created for two sample animations. It is beyond the scope of the work presented here to evaluate if the system achieves the goal of being a practical tool for composers. However, the innovations herein discussed are analyzed and found to be useful for soundtrack composition and for future user-centered computer-music research.
Matrix Metalloproteinases Contribute to Neuronal Dysfunction in Animal Models of Drug Dependence, Alzheimer's Disease, and Epilepsy

Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) remodel the pericellular environment by regulating the cleavage of extracellular matrix proteins, cell surface components, neurotransmitter receptors, and growth factors that mediate cell adhesion, synaptogenesis, synaptic plasticity, and long-term potentiation. Interestingly, increased MMP activity and dysregulation of the balance between MMPs and TIMPs have also been implicated in various pathologic conditions. In this paper, we discuss various animal models that suggest that the activation of the gelatinases MMP-2 and MMP-9 is involved in pathogenesis of drug dependence, Alzheimer's disease, and epilepsy.
Multi-document summarization using sentence fusion for Indonesian news articles

This paper describes work on summarizing several input documents into one coherent and readable document. The steps that are discussed in this report are tokenization, POS-Tagging, building clusters of similar sentences, joining sentence by sentence fusion with word graph, extracting the result from a word graph, and in the end, sentence selection using the algorithm integer linear programming. Testing of the created system will be done manually and involves anonymous questionnaire regarding the readablility and credibility of the resulting document.
Genetic Analysis of the Mobilization and Leading Regions of the IncN plasmids pKM101 and pCU1

ABSTRACT The conjugative IncN plasmids pKM101 and pCU1 have previously been shown to contain identical oriT sequences as well as conserved restriction endonuclease cleavage patterns within theirtra regions. Complementation analysis and sequence data presented here indicate that these two plasmids encode essentially identical conjugal DNA-processing proteins. This region contains three genes, traI, traJ, and traK, transcribed in the same orientation from a promoter that probably lies within or near the conjugal transfer origin (oriT). Three corresponding proteins were visualized by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, and complementation analysis confirmed that this region contains three tracomplementation groups. All three proteins resemble proteins of the IncW plasmid R388 and other plasmids thought to have roles in processing of plasmid DNA during conjugation. The hydropathy profile of TraJ suggests a transmembrane topology similar to that of several homologous proteins. Both traK and traI were required for efficient interplasmid site-specific recombination atoriT, while traJ was not required. The leading region of pKM101 contains three genes (stbA,stbB, and stbC), null mutations in which cause elevated levels of plasmid instability. Plasmid instability was observed only in hosts that are proficient in interplasmid recombination, suggesting that this recombination can potentially lead to plasmid loss and that Stb proteins somehow overcome this, possibly via site-specific multimer resolution.
Placebo 5 mg / kg 10 mg / kg Infliximab Infliximab

Tumor Necrosis Factor alpha (TNF) as proinflammatory cytokine plays in the pathogenesis of many diseases an important role. In psoriasis and in psori-atic arthritis TNF is up-regulated in the skin lesion and in the synovitis. Recent trials showed that the blockade of TNF with the chimeric antibody infliximab is able to improve both, the skin lesions and the synovitis of the joints. In psori-asis in 82 % of patients treated with in-fl i x i m ab ach i eved an over 75% response in the PASI index. In Psoriatic arthritis the skin improvement was correlating with the reduction of synovitis and in a small MRI controlled study all patients achieved an ACR 20 response within 10 weeks. Patients with psoriatic a rt h ri t i s , who have been included in spondylarthopathy trials showed similar improvement rates. In all tri a l s u n expected safety pro blems have not been reported, but the trials have been small in population and short in duration. Infl i x i m ab was used between 5 and 10 mg/kg at week 0, 2, 6 and every 8 week. It some trials the retreatment periods varied. In contrast to the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis with in-fliximab methotrexate was not always used as comedication. In some cases infliximab has been used in combination with other DMARDs but no trial did evaluate the combination treatment vs. the monotherapy. Introduction TNF blockade with infliximab in rheu-matoid arthritis, has been the first bio-logic therapy, which proved to be effective in rheumatoid arthritis. The unexpected grade of success the therapy showed, lead to further investigation of the treatment principle in diseases with similar pathogenesis like psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. In psoriasis epider-mal hy p e rp ro l i fe rat i o n , i n fl a m m at o ry infiltration are driven by activated T-cells or antigen-presenting cells, from which proinflammatory cytokines are released. TNF plays a major role within these cytokines. In psori atic art h ri t i s
UMCC_DLSI_SemSim: Multilingual System for Measuring Semantic Textual Similarity

In this paper we describe the specifications and results of UMCC_DLSI system, which was involved in Semeval-2014 addressing two subtasks of Semantic Textual Similarity (STS, Task 10, for English and Spanish), and one subtask of Cross-Level Semantic Similarity (Task 3). As a supervised system, it was provided by different types of lexical and semantic features to train a classifier which was used to decide the correct answers for distinct subtasks. These features were obtained applying the Hungarian algorithm over a semantic network to create semantic alignments among words. Regarding the Spanish subtask of Task 10 two runs were submitted, where our Run2 was the best ranked with a general correlation of 0.807. However, for English subtask our best run (Run1 of our 3 runs) reached 16 th place of 38 of the official ranking, obtaining a general correlation of 0.682. In terms of Task 3, only addressing Paragraph to Sentence subtask, our best run (Run1 of 2 runs) obtained a correlation value of 0.760 reaching 3 rd place of 34.
PRIVACY PRESERVING REPUTATION TECHNIQUES IN LOCATION BASED QUERIES

A solution for the location-based query problems is presented. Here a major enhancement introduced into two stage approach, where the first stage is based on Oblivious Transfer and the second stage is based on Private Information Retrieval (PIR), to achieve a secure solution for both parties. Here an algorithm used in PIR, that is not better than Private Circular Query Protocol (PCQP). So Here introduce a successful privacypreserving Location Based Services (LBS) must be secure and provide accurate query results. PCQP is deal with the privacy and the accuracy issues of privacy-preserving LBS. The protocol consists of a space filling curve and a public-key homomorphism cryptosystem. The protocol can resist correlation attack and support a multiuser scenario as long as the predescribed secret circular shift is performed before each query; in other words, the robustness of the proposed protocol is the same as that of a one-time pad encryption scheme. As a result, the security level of the proposed protocol is close to perfect secrecy without the aid of a trusted third party.
Sensitivity Analysis of Left Ventricle with Dilated Cardiomyopathy in Fluid Structure Simulation

Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is the most common myocardial disease. It not only leads to systolic dysfunction but also diastolic deficiency. We sought to investigate the effect of idiopathic and ischemic DCM on the intraventricular fluid dynamics and myocardial wall mechanics using a 2D axisymmetrical fluid structure interaction model. In addition, we also studied the individual effect of parameters related to DCM, i.e. peak E-wave velocity, end systolic volume, wall compliance and sphericity index on several important fluid dynamics and myocardial wall mechanics variables during ventricular filling. Intraventricular fluid dynamics and myocardial wall deformation are significantly impaired under DCM conditions, being demonstrated by low vortex intensity, low flow propagation velocity, low intraventricular pressure difference (IVPD) and strain rates, and high-end diastolic pressure and wall stress. Our sensitivity analysis results showed that flow propagation velocity substantially decreases with an increase in wall stiffness, and is relatively independent of preload at low-peak E-wave velocity. Early IVPD is mainly affected by the rate of change of the early filling velocity and end systolic volume which changes the ventriculo:annular ratio. Regional strain rate, on the other hand, is significantly correlated with regional stiffness, and therefore forms a useful indicator for myocardial regional ischemia. The sensitivity analysis results enhance our understanding of the mechanisms leading to clinically observable changes in patients with DCM.
An approach for building an intelligent parking support system

In this study, we propose a solution for building an Intelligent Parking Support System. This system not only has characteristics as other information systems but also acts as an intelligent system which integrates three recognition techniques, including automatic recognition for motorcycle license plate (using Cascade of Boosting with Haar-like features and Support Vector Machines - SVM), barcode recognition, and semiautomatic recognition via surveillance cameras. Experimental results show that the proposed system is robust and the models work well in three recognition stages. In the license plate area recognition stage, the model gets 99% of accuracy when using 750 images for training and 243 images for testing. In the letter area recognition stage, the model achieves 95.88% of accuracy when using 11,866 and 4,755 images for training and testing, respectively. In the classification stage, we train the SVM model using 2,603 records and test it using 1,550 records to reach the accuracy of 98.99%. The proposed system has full features and can be deployed in practice.
Size and cohesion metrics as indicators of the long method bad smell: An empirical study

Source code bad smells are usually resolved through the application of well-defined solutions, i.e., refactorings. In the literature, software metrics are used as indicators of the existence and prioritization of resolving bad smells. In this paper, we focus on the long method smell (i.e. one of the most frequent and persistent bad smells) that can be resolved by the extract method refactoring. Until now, the identification of long methods or extract method opportunities has been performed based on cohesion, size or complexity metrics. However, the empirical validation of these metrics has exhibited relatively low accuracy with regard to their capacity to indicate the existence of long methods or extract method opportunities. Thus, we empirically explore the ability of size and cohesion metrics to predict the existence and the refactoring urgency of long method occurrences, through a case study on java open-source methods. The results of the study suggest that one size and four cohesion metrics are capable of characterizing the need and urgency for resolving the long method bad smell, with a higher accuracy compared to the previous studies. The obtained results are discussed by providing possible interpretations and implications to practitioners and researchers.
HDBSCAN: Density based Clustering over Location Based Services

Location Based Services (LBS) have become extremely popular and used by millions of users. Popular LBS run the entire gamut from mapping services (such as Google Maps) to restaurants (such as Yelp) and real-estate (such as Redfin). The public query interfaces of LBS can be abstractly modeled as a kNN interface over a database of two dimensional points: given an arbitrary query point, the system returns the k points in the database that are nearest to the query point. Often, k is set to a small value such as 20 or 50. In this paper, we consider the novel problem of enabling density based clustering over an LBS with only a limited, kNN query interface. Due to the query rate limits imposed by LBS, even retrieving every tuple once is infeasible. Hence, we seek to construct a cluster assignment function f(.) by issuing a small number of kNN queries, such that for any given tuple t in the database which may or may not have been accessed, f(.) outputs the cluster assignment of t with high accuracy. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments over benchmark datasets and popular real-world LBS such as Yahoo! Flickr, Zillow, Redfin and Google Maps.
Roles of thrombospondin-1 and -2 in regulating corneal and iris angiogenesis.

PURPOSE Thrombospondin (TSP)-1 and -2 are important antiangiogenic factors thought to be involved in maintaining corneal avascularity (angiogenic privilege). This study was undertaken to investigate whether deficiencies of these factors altered developmental and inflammation-induced angiogenesis in the cornea and developmental angiogenesis of the iris of mice. METHODS Expression of TSP-1 and -2 mRNA and protein was assayed in cornea and iris stroma by RT-PCR and Western blot. Corneas and irides of TSP-1(-/-), TSP-2(-/-), and TSP-1,2(-/-) mice aged 2, 3, and 6 months, and wild-type control mice, were analyzed for spontaneous angiogenesis biomicroscopically, histologically, and with CD31 immunohistochemistry. The mouse model of suture-induced, inflammatory corneal neovascularization was used to evaluate the lack of TSP-1,2 and both TSPs on induced-corneal angiogenesis. Seven days after intrastromal placement of three 11-0 sutures, vascularized areas were analyzed morphometrically on CD31-stained corneal flatmounts. RESULTS Corneas and irises from normal mouse eyes constitutively expressed TSP-1 and -2 mRNAs and proteins. Corneas of TSP-1(-/-), -2(-/-), and -1,2(-/-) mice displayed no evidence of spontaneous developmental-postnatal angiogenesis, although irises of these mice contained significantly increased iris vessel density compared with wild-type animals (P < 0.01). One week after suturing, corneas of all TSP(-/-) mice had significantly greater corneal angiogenesis than those of control mice (P < 0.05). TSP-1(-/-) had a significantly greater effect on induced corneal neovascularization than did TSP-2(-/-), with the opposite being the case in developmental iris angiogenesis (P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS Corneal avascularity during development is redundantly regulated, shown by the fact that lack of the antiangiogenic factors TSP-1 and/or -2 resulted in no spontaneous corneal angiogenesis. By contrast, TSP-1, more than TSP-2, helps to suppress inflammation-induced corneal angiogenesis postnatally, implying that angiogenic privilege in the cornea is actively maintained.
Implementation and outcomes of an online English-Portuguese tandem language exchange program delivered jointly across a U.S.-Brazilian university partnership: A case study

IMPLEMENTATION AND OUTCOMES OF AN ONLINE ENGLISH-PORTUGUESE TANDEM LANGUAGE EXCHANGE PROGRAM DELIVERED JOINTLY ACROSS A U.S.-BRAZILIAN UNIVERSITY PARTNERSHIP: A CASE STUDY By Anton T. Brinckwirth, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2012 Dissertation Director: Jonathan Becker, J.D. , Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Leadership School of Education The purpose of this study was to investigate a class-to-class online English-Portuguese “Teletandem” program that was conceived, negotiated, and implemented cross-collaboratively between the foreign language faculty and language resource center (LRC) staff at two large state universities—one in the United States and the other in Brazil. Ten English language students in Brazil were paired with 10 Portuguese language students in the U.S. for a 10-week Skype®based tandem language exchange (TLE) project that was jointly delivered online across an international university partnership. A qualitative case study design was used to examine the attitudes, perceptions, views, and behaviors of the teachers, students, and LRC staff who participated in the project. The objective of the study was to shed light on the factors that facilitated and hindered teletandem design, implementation and sustainability. Participant feedback was interpreted and contextualized by the researcher to provide rich descriptions of how Teletandem was optimized and how it impacted student learning. The findings suggest that Teletandem is an innovative, low-cost, high-impact language learning activity with vast pedagogical implications. As a lab supplement to traditional instruction, it enabled students at both sites to accelerate L2 development through authentic immersion and practice while making social connections with native speakers abroad. In addition, the results showed that—for many students—Teletandem heightened intercultural awareness, boosted confidence in the L2, and strengthened fluency skills while rendering a transformational learning experience.
Social Game Design: Monetization Methods and Mechanics

Introduction. A Brief History of Online Game Monetization. Industry Terms. Game Type vs Monetization Strategy. What Can You Do in Design to Help a One-Time Purchase Game? Design Tactics for Advergames. Designing for Episodic Content and Paid Unlocks. Design Tactics for a Purely Subscription Game. How to Design for a Free-to-Play Game with a Subscription Option. How to Design Virtual Goods for Your Game. Currencies. Game Economy. Design Considerations for Combination Systems. Why Free-to-Play Is the Present and Future of Online Gaming. Review/Summary.
Antigenic Cross-Reactivity Anti-Birtoxin Antibody against Androctonus crassicauda Venom

Background: Antivenom is still widely used in the treatment of envenomation as there are no vaccines or other effective agents available against animal venoms. Recently, neurotoxins named birtoxin family have been described from Parabuthus transvaalicus and Androctonus crassicauda. The aim of the present study was to test the anti-birtoxin antibodies for their ability to neutralize the lethal effects of A. crassicauda scorpion venom. Methods: SDS-PAGE and Western blotting used the presence of components from A. crassicauda and P. transvaalicus scorpion venoms and to determine the degree of cross-reactivity. The Minimum Lethal Dose (MLD) of venom was assessed by subcutaneously (sc) injections in mice. Results: The MLD of the A. crassicauda venom was 35 μg/ 20g mouse by sc injection route. Western blotting showed the presence of components from A. crassicauda and P. transvaalicus scorpion venoms strongly cross react with the A. crassicauda antivenom. However, Western blotting of the A. crassicauda scorpion venom using the Refik Saydam Public Health Agency (RSPHA) generated antibody showed that not all the venom components cross reacted with the anti-birtoxin antibody. The antibodies only cross reacted with components falling under the 19 kDa protein size of A. crassicauda venom. Conclusion: The bioassays and Western blotting of A. crassicauda venom with the anti-birtoxin antibodies produced against a synthetic peptide showed that these antibodies cross reacted but did not neutralize the venom of A. crassicauda.
Blood vessels segmentation in retina via wavelet transforms using steerable filters

This paper presents an efficient method for automatic segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images. A set of directional basis filters based on dyadic wavelet transform is designed to enhance blood vessels. It attempts to utilize the linear combination of the wavelet transforms to fix on the blood vessels directional information in retinal images. The directional maps are processed by thresholding scheme in order to segment blood vessels from the background. The proposed thresholding approach evaluates 2-D entropies based on the gray level-gradient co-occurrence matrix. The 2-D thresholding vector that maximizes the edge class entropies is selected. The thresholding method utilizes the gray level and gradient information in the enhanced image. The new method promises the simpleness and flexibility in many image enhancement and segmentation applications.
Arabic Handwritten Text Line Extraction by Applying an Adaptive Mask to Morphological Dilation

This paper presents a robust method for handwritten text line extraction. We use morphological dilation with a dynamic adaptive mask for line extraction. Line separation occurs because of the repulsion and attraction between connected components. The characteristics of the Arabic script are considered to ensure a high performance of the algorithm. Our method is evaluated on the CENPARMI Arabic handwritten documents database which contains multi-skewed and touching lines. With a matching score of 0.95, our method achieved precision and recall rates of 96:3% and 96:7% respectively, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.