Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling respiration from snags and coarse woody debris before and after an invasive gypsy moth disturbance

Although snags and coarse woody debris are a small component of ecosystem respiration, disturbances can significantly increase the mass and respiration from these carbon (C) pools. The objectives of this study were to (1) measure respiration rates of snags and coarse woody debris throughout the year in a forest previously defoliated by gypsy moths, (2) develop models for dead stem respiration rates, (3) model stand‐level respiration rates of dead stems using forest inventory and analysis data sets and environmental variables predisturbance and postdisturbance, and (4) compare total dead stem respiration rates with total ecosystem respiration and net ecosystem exchange. Respiration rates were measured on selected Pinus and Quercus snags and coarse woody debris each month for 1 year in a northeastern U.S. temperate forest. Multiple linear regression using environmental and biometric variables including wood temperature, diameter, density, species, and decay class was used to model respiration rates of dead stems. The mass of snags and coarse woody debris increased more than fivefold after disturbance and respiration rates increased more than threefold. The contribution of dead stems to total ecosystem respiration more than tripled from 0.85% to almost 3% and respiration from dead stems alone was approximately equal to the net ecosystem exchange of the forest in 2011 (fourth year postdisturbance). This study highlights the importance of dead stem C pools and fluxes particularly during disturbance and recovery cycles. With climate change increasing the ranges of many forest pests and pathogens, these data become particularly important for accurately modeling future C cycling.
Rising on the Tasman Tide: Income Inequality in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s

Throughout the 1980s, tax and transfer policies in Australia and New Zealand have followed broadly similar paths. Reductions in personal tax rates have benefited those on highest incomes, while increased targeting of transfers have affected those on low to middle incomes. This paper explores how the distributions of income in both countries have responded to these and other changes. The approach adopted is to replicate the methods utilised in a recent study for New Zealand undertaken within the Department of Social Welfare so as to produce comparable results for Australia. Comparisons of disposable incomes (both unadjusted and adjusted for needs using an equivalence scale) allow the incomes and living standards of different household types in each country to be compared. This is followed by a comparison of the two income distributions, which reveals a clear trend towards increased inequality in both countries since the mid-1980s. The change in inequality in New Zealand after 1985-86 was such that by 1989-90 its distribution was no longer unambiguously more equal than that in Australia, as it had been earlier in the decade. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the role of some of the measurement issues in explaining the differences observed in the analysis.
Latent Class Growth Modelling: A Tutorial

The present work is an introduction to Latent Class Growth Modelling (LCGM). LCGM is a semi‐parametric statistical technique used to analyze longitudinal data. It is used when the data follows a pattern of change in which both the strength and the direction of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables differ across cases. The analysis identifies distinct subgroups of individuals following a distinct pattern of change over age or time on a variable of interest. The aim of the present tutorial is to introduce readers to LCGM and provide a concrete example of how the analysis can be performed using a real‐world data set and the SAS software package with accompanying PROC TRAJ application. The advantages and limitations of this technique are also discussed.
Computer vision and multimedia information systems

An image database system with content capturing and fast image indexing abilities " , Proc. Srinivasan, " On-line images from the history of medicine (OLI): Creating a large searchable image database for distribution via WorldWide Web " , First [48] A. Rosenfeld, " Recognizing unexpected objects: a proposed approach " , Int. A construction of a new image database system which realizes fully automated keyword extraction, IEICE Trans. 8 In the context of MIS, the relevance and attentional concepts can be used for images archival, images retrieval , and for human-media interaction. For images ar-chival, these concepts allow to select important features, to rank them according to their pertinence, and to locate items of interest in the images. It is then possible to use these most important items as indexing keys for access-ing pictures. Regarding images retrieval, relevance and attentional mechanisms appear as general paradigms for exploratory data mining, that provide a framework for qualitative indexing and matching which can be used for QVE and possibly for QSD. Finally, regarding human media interaction, relevance could be used in two ways. First, at the input of complex conjunctive queries, users could be asked to provide a relevance factor together with each component of their request. Second, for presenting results to the user, relevance could be used to rank the images retrieved from the database with respect to the query. The results of the proposed technique have been described in the context of an artificial, still complex image database. Our current work consists of the integration of these concepts into an images archiving and retrieval system, applied to news photographs and to textile samples. We are also investigating learning techniques for automatic construction of object descriptions, aiming at precompiling appropriate indexing keys for efficient image retrieval. To conclude, computer vision offers a number of techniques that can be used in the context of pictorial information systems. More specifically, queries by means of visual examples need to heavily rely on pattern recognition and object matching methods. Future challenges are in the domain of automated determination of indexing keys from large data sets, and in the development of new interaction models that integrate computer vision methods.
Robust receive beamforming with interference and channel uncertainty

In this paper, we introduce a general convex framework for robust beamforming, which is valid for both deterministic and stochastic uncertainty models, and provides robustness against errors both in the channel and in the interference co-variance matrix estimations. Furthermore, we extend our design to a multiple-state interference model and show the performance gains obtained by exploiting the interference structure.
Selection and Peer-review under Responsibility of the 2nd International Conference on Integrated Information Evaluation of the E-class Platform of the Lis Dept., Tei of Athens

The Department of Library Science and Information Systems of the TEI of Athens is using a Moodle installation as its e-class platform for the past four semesters. Moodle is a freely distributed open source software, and has been one of the most popular Course Management Systems. The faculty has invested a significant amount of time and effort and has created 50 online courses, which provide students with all the necessary course material (multiple bibliographies, presentations, e-books and other text and multimedia resources). The online resources also include activity modules, assignments and quizzes that utilize the interactive and collaborative environment of Moodle. This study presents the evaluation of the department's e-class, which has been based on two online questionnaires, one addressed to the faculty and the other to the students. The questionnaires attempted to collect data concerning the users' attitudes and profiles (visiting frequency, favorite activities) and their opinions about the functionality and usefulness of the e-class in enhancing the teaching and learning experience. The results fully confirm the faculty's view that the e-class is an indispensable addition to the departments teaching tools and demonstrate that it is extensively used and highly appreciated by both faculty and students.
Defense against SYN-Flood Denial of Service Attacks Based on Learning Automata

SYN-flooding attack uses the weakness available in TCP's three-way handshake process to keep it from handling legitimate requests. This attack causes the victim host to populate its backlog queue with forged TCP connections. In other words it increases Ploss (probability of loss) and Pa (buffer occupancy percentage of attack requests) and decreases Pr (buffer occupancy percentage of regular requests) in the victim host and results to decreased performance of the host. This paper proposes a self-managing approach, in which the host defends against SYN-flooding attack by dynamically tuning of its own two parameters, that is, m (maximum number of half-open connections) and h (hold time for each half-open connection). In this way, it formulates the defense problem to an optimization problem and then employs the learning automata (LA) algorithm to solve it. The simulation results show that the proposed defense strategy improves performance of the under attack system in terms of Ploss, Pa and Pr.
Protein kinase C activation and protooncogene expression in differentiation/retrodifferentiation of human U-937 leukemia cells.

Human U-937 leukemia cells differentiate along the monocytic lineage following 3-day exposures to 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA). This induction of differentiation is accompanied by adherence and loss of proliferation, as well as expression/repression of differentiation-associated genes. Long term culture of TPA-differentiated U-937 cells in the absence of phorbol ester for 32-36 days resulted in a process of retrodifferentiation. The retrodifferentiated cells detached from the substrate and reinitiated proliferation. Other cellular parameters, such as glycosidase activities, cytokine release, and filament expression, returned to levels similar to that observed in uninduced cells. Treatment of U-937 cells with TPA resulted in a rapid translocation of protein kinase C (PKC) from the cytosol to cell membrane fractions within 2-8 min. Increased levels of membrane-associated PKC activity persisted until 17-29 days. However, longer periods of incubation were associated with a return to the distribution of PKC in control cells. Activation of PKC has been implicated in the regulation of certain immediate early response genes, and in the present studies, TPA rapidly induced c-fos and c-jun gene expression. Levels of c-fos and c-jun transcripts remained elevated during periods of PKC activation and also returned to levels observed in control cells by 30-36 days, when the cells entered retrodifferentiation. Staurosporine, a nonspecific inhibitor of PKC, partially blocked TPA-induced adherence and growth inhibition and concomitantly prevented TPA-induced c-fos and c-jun gene expression. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Planar Bones for MPEG-4 facial animation

This paper proposes a deformation technique called Planar Bones, derived from surface-oriented free form deformations, and explores its application to the context of facial animation. The warping method proposed uses as the control input a polygonal mesh, which is built as a triangulation of the feature points defined by MPEG-4 (Motion Picture Experts Group). A strong correspondence between the facial geometry and this control structure is maintained throughout the animation, overcoming the issues of many of the current systems defined using this standard.
An acoustic driven media watch system

The goal of the media watch system described in this paper is to continuously monitor a TV channel, searching inside its news programs for stories that match the profile of a given user. The system may be tuned to automatically detect the start and end of a news program. Once the start is detected, the system automatically records, transcribes, indexes, summarizes and stores the program. The system then searches in all the user profiles for the ones that fit into the detected topics. If any topic matches the user preferences, an email is send indicating the occurrence of stories on that topic, enabling the user to follow the links to the corresponding video clips. This paper describes the three main blocks of the system: the Capture block, responsible for capturing the monitored programs, the Processing block, responsible for generating all the relevant markup information, and the Service block, responsible for the user and database management interface. We shall particularly emphasize the different stages of the acoustic driven Processing block (acoustic segmentation, speech recognition, story segmentation and indexing). The know-how gained in this project enabled us to deal with related topics, such as meeting and lecture transcription.
Partitioned scheduling for real-time tasks on multiprocessor embedded systems with programmable shared srams

This work is motivated by the advance of multiprocessor system architecture, in which the allocation of tasks over heterogeneous memory modules has a significant impact on the task execution. By considering two different types of memory modules with different access latencies, this paper explores joint considerations of memory allocation and real-time task scheduling to minimize the maximum utilization of processors of the system. For implicit-deadline sporadic tasks, a two-phase algorithm is developed, where the first phase determines memory allocation to derive a lower bound of the maximum utilization, and the second phase adopts worst-fit partitioning to assign tasks. It is shown that the proposed algorithm leads to a tight (2-⁄2M+1)-approximation bound where M is the number of processors. The proposed algorithm is then evaluated with 82 realistic benchmarks from MRTC, MediaBench, UTDSP, NetBench and DSPstone, and extensive simulations are further conducted to analyze the proposed algorithm.
Tissue Engineered Skin Substitutes Created by Laser-Assisted Bioprinting Form Skin-Like Structures in the Dorsal Skin Fold Chamber in Mice

Tissue engineering plays an important role in the production of skin equivalents for the therapy of chronic and especially burn wounds. Actually, there exists no (cellularized) skin equivalent which might be able to satisfactorily mimic native skin. Here, we utilized a laser-assisted bioprinting (LaBP) technique to create a fully cellularized skin substitute. The unique feature of LaBP is the possibility to position different cell types in an exact three-dimensional (3D) spatial pattern. For the creation of the skin substitutes, we positioned fibroblasts and keratinocytes on top of a stabilizing matrix (Matriderm®). These skin constructs were subsequently tested in vivo, employing the dorsal skin fold chamber in nude mice. The transplants were placed into full-thickness skin wounds and were fully connected to the surrounding tissue when explanted after 11 days. The printed keratinocytes formed a multi-layered epidermis with beginning differentiation and stratum corneum. Proliferation of the keratinocytes was mainly detected in the suprabasal layers. In vitro controls, which were cultivated at the air-liquid-interface, also exhibited proliferative cells, but they were rather located in the whole epidermis. E-cadherin as a hint for adherens junctions and therefore tissue formation could be found in the epidermis in vivo as well as in vitro. In both conditions, the printed fibroblasts partly stayed on top of the underlying Matriderm® where they produced collagen, while part of them migrated into the Matriderm®. In the mice, some blood vessels could be found to grow from the wound bed and the wound edges in direction of the printed cells. In conclusion, we could show the successful 3D printing of a cell construct via LaBP and the subsequent tissue formation in vivo. These findings represent the prerequisite for the creation of a complex tissue like skin, consisting of different cell types in an intricate 3D pattern.
An augmented Lagrangian method for locally injective mapping

The generation of piecewise linear maps has received a lot of attention from the scientiﬁc community. In particular, locally injective maps are very important in many ﬁelds, from geometry processing and shape modelling to computer games and movies. We propose a mesh-based method for computing positionally constrained piece-wise linear maps which are locally injective and have low distortion. The main advantage of our approach is that it can recover both from violations of positional constraints as well as from violations of the injectivity constraints. This ﬂexibility makes it suitable for difﬁcult problems where other state-of-the-art methods fail. Our method is very general and can be used to augment any existing mapping algorithm to enforce local injectivity.
Cross-Domain Recommendation via Tag Matrix Transfer

Data sparseness is one of the most challenging problems in collaborative filtering(CF) based recommendation systems. Exploiting social tag information is becoming a popular way to alleviate the problem and improve the performance. To this end, in recent recommendation methods the relationships between users/items and tags are often taken into consideration, however, the correlations among tags from different itemdomains are always ignored. For that, in this paper we propose a novel way to exploit the rating patterns across multiple domains by transferring the tag co-occurrence matrix information, which could be used for revealing common user pattern. With extensive experiments we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for the cross-domain information recommendation.
Optimal cooperative sensing and resource allocation in cognitive radio networks

In this paper, the problem of jointly designing sensing parameters (sensing time and sensing threshold) and resource allocation (spectrum and power) is investigated. A cognitive radio network (CRN) with multiple secondary users (SUs) and one potential frequency band is considered. SUs perform cooperative spectrum sensing and report their decisions to the fusion center. Then the fusion center determines the final decision of the status of frequency band. If the frequency band is idle, each SU is assigned a portion of the frequency band to transmit data. Taking the maximization of the CRN's overall throughput as the design objective, the optimization problem is formulated subject to the total power constraint of the CRN and the average interference power to the primary network. An iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain a locally optimal solution. With the consideration of SUs' fairness, we formulate another optimization problem which is to maximize the minimum throughput of SUs. Numerical results show that significant throughput gain is achieved through the joint optimization.
Calories and sugars in boba milk tea: implications for obesity risk in Asian Pacific Islanders

Abstract In the last several decades, obesity rates have reached epidemic proportions, and increases the risk for a host of comorbidities, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain kinds of cancers. Boba milk tea, first became popular in the 1990s throughout Asia, and has gained more popularity in the United States and in Europe since 2000. Currently, available nutrition data from online sites suggest this beverage contains high amounts of sugar and fat. One published nutrition study suggests that boba tea drinks are part of the larger group of sugar‐sweetened beverages (SSB) because these beverages are usually sweetened with high‐fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This study experimentally determined the sugar composition (sucrose, fructose, glucose, and melezitose) and calorific values of boba milk tea drinks and their components. Results suggested that boba drinks fit the US Dietary Guidelines definition of a SSB. One 16‐ounce boba drink exceeds the upper limit of added sugar intake recommended by the 2015 US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. The high caloric and sugar content of boba beverages pose public health concerns as they have the potential to further exacerbate the childhood obesity epidemic. Nutrition education targeting Asian populations should give special attention to boba tea as a SSB. Also, prudent public health recommendations should be suggested for moderate consumption of these beverages. With the growing popularity of boba beverages in the United States, the findings from this study provide public health practitioners with valuable data on how boba beverages compare with other SSBs.
A Posterior-Based Multistream Formulation for G2P Conversion

In the literature, a number of approaches have been proposed for learning grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) relationship and inferring pronunciations. In this letter, we present a novel multistream framework for G2P conversion, where various machine learning techniques providing different estimates of probability of phonemes given graphemes can be effectively combined during pronunciation inference. More precisely, analogous to multistream automatic speech recognition, the framework involves obtaining different streams of estimates of probability of phonemes given graphemes, combining them based on probability combination rules, and inferring pronunciations by decoding the probabilities resulting after combination. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach by combining probabilities estimated by the state-of-the-art conditional random field-based G2P conversion approach and acoustic data-driven G2P conversion approach in the Kullback–Leibler-divergence-based hidden Markov model framework on the PhoneBook 600-word task.
Multi-layered Adaptive Monitoring in Service Robots

Service failure in a service robot is an event that occurs when the delivered service deviates from the correct original service specified by the developers. The cause of failures is due to faults in the robot system, which can be detected based on a model. However, the monitoring task that compares the model and system's behavior is overload. In this study, we propose a multi-layered adaptive monitoring method that complements model-based fault detection. When the target component can be monitored according to their priority adaptively, it results in keeping the efficiency of fault detection, while the overload is reduced.
Message Control: How News Is Made on the Presidential Campaign Trail

Chapter 1 1 Media Coverage of Modern Campaigns Chapter 2 2 The Big Picture Chapter 3 3 The Reporter's Role Chapter 4 4 The Goals of the Campaign Managers Chapter 5 5 Life "In the Bubble" of the Campaign Chapter 6 6 A Battle for Access Chapter 7 7 Deciding What's Newsworthy Chapter 8 8 A Prescription for Improving Campaign Coverage Chapter 9 References