Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CNV analysis in a large schizophrenia sample implicates deletions at 16p12.1 and SLC1A1 and duplications at 1p36.33 and CGNL1

Large and rare copy number variants (CNVs) at several loci have been shown to increase risk for schizophrenia. Aiming to discover novel susceptibility CNV loci, we analyzed 6882 cases and 11 255 controls genotyped on Illumina arrays, most of which have not been used for this purpose before. We identified genes enriched for rare exonic CNVs among cases, and then attempted to replicate the findings in additional 14 568 cases and 15 274 controls. In a combined analysis of all samples, 12 distinct loci were enriched among cases with nominal levels of significance (P < 0.05); however, none would survive correction for multiple testing. These loci include recurrent deletions at 16p12.1, a locus previously associated with neurodevelopmental disorders (P = 0.0084 in the discovery sample and P = 0.023 in the replication sample). Other plausible candidates include non-recurrent deletions at the glutamate transporter gene SLC1A1, a CNV locus recently suggested to be involved in schizophrenia through linkage analysis, and duplications at 1p36.33 and CGNL1. A burden analysis of large (>500 kb), rare CNVs showed a 1.2% excess in cases after excluding known schizophrenia-associated loci, suggesting that additional susceptibility loci exist. However, even larger samples are required for their discovery.
Expression and significance of lysyl oxidase-like 1 and fibulin-5 in the cardinal ligament tissue of patients with pelvic floor dysfunction

Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a disabling disorder in women characterized by a loss of pelvic floor support, leading to the herniation of the uterus into or through the vagina. POP is a complex problem that likely involves multiple mechanisms with limited therapies available, and is associated with defects in connective tissue including elastic fibers. This study was designed to investigate the expression of fibulin-5 and lysyl oxidase-like 1 (LOXL1) in the cardinal ligament in samples taken from the POP group compared to the non-POP group. Specimens were obtained during abdominal hysterectomy from the cardinal ligament of 53 women with POP and 25 age- and parity- matched women with non-POP among post-menopausal women with benign gynecologic pathology. Protein expression was evaluated using the immunohistochemical staining method. For statistical analyses, chi-square test and Spearman's correlation were used with the statistical package SPSS13.0 system. Our results showed that both fibulin-5 and LOXL1 expressions were decreased in the cardinal ligament in the POP group compared to the non-POP group (P < 0.05). The expression of fibulin-5 and LOXL1 were correlated closely with the stage of POP, accompanied by stress urinary incontinence and frequency of vaginal delivery (P < 0.05), but had no relationship with post-menopausal state (P > 0.05). The expression of fibulin-5 was positively associated with LOXL1 in POP (P < 0.05). We conclude that changes in fibulin-5 and LOXL1 expression may play a role in the development of POP.
Psychosocial responses of parents to their infant’s diagnosis of hypoplastic left heart syndrome

Abstract Objective: To evaluate the psychosocial status of mothers and fathers in response to their infant’s diagnosis of hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Design: A study on interviews with parents whose children had survived staged surgery. Setting: Tertiary hospital paediatric ICU. Subjects: A total of 29 parents (16 mothers and 13 fathers) of surviving children. Intervention: A semi-structured face-to-face interview was conducted to explore experiences of parents in response to their infant’s diagnosis, their interaction with the doctor delivering the diagnosis, their deliberation about staged surgery, and their reasons for this choice. Measurement and Main Results: All parents were devastated about their infant’s diagnosis, and most (83%) of them said that the time of the diagnosis and the aftermath was the worst time of their lives. Parents reported helpful and unhelpful communication at this time. Although all parents in this study chose surgery for their infant, when faced with the choice, 17 of them made an immediate decision “to protect their infant’s life”, 8 were initially unsure when their infant was diagnosed in utero, and 4 were unsure when the infant was diagnosed after birth. Parents also experienced loss and other stressors. Conclusions: All parents of the infants diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome experienced intense loss and stressors. Physicians need to be sensitive to the needs and thinking of the parents when discussing treatment options before surgery. The nature of the relationship with the doctor at this time can support parents or be a further source of stress.
MIThril 2003: applications and architecture

In this paper we describe the MIThril 2003 wearablecomputing research platform. MIThril 2003 is a proven,accessible architecture that combines inexpensive,commodity hardware, a flexible sensor/peripheralinterconnection bus, and a powerful, light-weightdistributed sensing, classification, and inter-processcommunications software layer to facilitate thedevelopment of distributed real-time multimodal andcontext-aware applications.MIThril 2003 extends the previous MIThril modulararchitecture into the domain of large-scale wirelessgroup applications by leveraging the availability ofinexpensive Linux-based PDA hardware combined withinnovative open-source software and custom sensorhardware. We demonstrate the power and functionalityof MIThril 2003 by describing compelling real-worldwearable research applications created using MIThril2003 technology.
A Quantum Inspired Particle Swarm Algorithm for Solving the Maximum Satisfiability Problem

In this paper we investigate the use of quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO) principles to resolve the satisfiability problem. We describe QPSOSAT, a new iterative approach for solving the well known Maximum Satisfiability problem (MAX-SAT). This latter has been shown to be NP-hard if the number of variables per clause is greater than 3. The basic idea is to harness the optimization capabilities of QPSO algorithm to achieve good quality solutions for Max Sat problem. To enhance the efficiency of the QPSO algorithm, a local search has been used. The obtained results are very promising and show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed hybrid approach.
The Maintenance of Heritable Variation Through Social Competition

Abstract The paradoxical persistence of heritable variation for fitness-related traits is an evolutionary conundrum that remains a preeminent problem in evolutionary biology. Here we describe a simple mechanism in which social competition results in the evolutionary maintenance of heritable variation for fitness related traits. We demonstrate this mechanism using a genetic model with two primary assumptions: the expression of a trait depends upon success in social competition for limited resources; and competitive success of a genotype depends on the genotypes that it competes against. We find that such social competition generates heritable (additive) genetic variation for “competition-dependent” traits. This heritable variation is not eroded by continuous directional selection because, rather than leading to fixation of favored alleles, selection leads instead to allele frequency cycling due to the concerted coevolution of the social environment with the effects of alleles. Our results provide a mechanism for the maintenance of heritable variation in natural populations and suggest an area for research into the importance of competition in the genetic architecture of fitness related traits.
Ubiquitous data collection for mobile users in wireless sensor networks

We study the ubiquitous data collection for mobile users in wireless sensor networks. People with handheld devices can easily interact with the network and collect data. We propose a novel approach for mobile users to collect the network-wide data. The routing structure of data collection is additively updated with the movement of the mobile user. With this approach, we only perform a local modification to update the routing structure while the routing performance is bounded and controlled compared to the optimal performance. The proposed protocol is easy to implement. Our analysis shows that the proposed approach is scalable in maintenance overheads, performs efficiently in the routing performance, and provides continuous data delivery during the user movement. We implement the proposed protocol in a prototype system and test its feasibility and applicability by a 49-node testbed. We further conduct extensive simulations to examine the efficiency and scalability of our protocol with varied network settings.
DKS(N, k, f): a family of low communication, scalable and fault-tolerant infrastructures for P2P applications

In this paper, we present DKS(N, k, f), a family of infrastructures for building Peer-To-Peer applications. Each instance of DKS(N, k, f) is a fully decentralized overlay network characterized by three parameters: N the maximum number of nodes that can be in the network; k the search arity within the network and f the degree of fault-tolerance. Once these parameters are instantiated, the resulting network has several desirable properties. The first property, which is the main contribution of this paper, is that there is no separate procedure for maintaining routing tables; instead, any out-of-date or erroneous routing entry is eventually corrected on-the-fly thereby, eliminating unnecessary bandwidth consumption. The second property is that each lookup request is resolved in at most log/sub k/(N) overlay hops under normal operations. Third, each node maintains only (k-1) log/sub k/(N) + 1 addresses of other nodes for routing purposes. Fourth, new nodes can join and existing nodes can leave at will with a negligible disturbance to the ability to resolve lookups in logk(N) hops in average. Fifth, any pair key/value that is inserted into the system is guaranteed to be located even in the presence of concurrent joins. Sixth, even if f consecutive nodes fail simultaneously, correct lookup is still guaranteed.
An Efficient Solution to Factor Drifting Problem in the pLSA Model

Probabilistic latent semantic analysis (pLSA) is a powerful statistical technique to analyze relation between factors in dyadic data. Although various pLSA-based applications, ranging from information retrieval, information filtering, to text-mining and visualization, have been successfully conducted, they can not afford dynamic revising of model when one of the factors changes constantly. In this paper, we take the advantage of decoupling ability of pLSA thoroughly, and propose a more elegant approach based on maximum likelihood estimation to gain an incremental learning with the drift of a factor. We demonstrate our method in the context of collaborative filtering where single user interests change fast, but the community interests remain almost constant. Experiments against the MovieLens and EachMovie data sets reveal that the proposed method improves the recommending accuracy 10% further beyond the original pLSA at a less computation cost
Chua’s Circuit Regulation Using a Nonlinear Adaptive Feedback Technique

Chua’s circuit is one of the most important electronic devices that are used for Chaos and Bifurcation studies. A central role of secure communication is devoted to it. Since the adaptive control is used vastly in the linear systems control, here we introduce a new trend of application of adaptive method in the chaos controlling field. In this paper, we try to derive a new adaptive control scheme for Chua’s circuit controlling because control of chaos is often very important in practical operations. The novelty of this approach is for sake of its robustness against the external perturbations which is simulated as an additive noise in all measured states and can be generalized to other chaotic systems. Our approach is based on Lyapunov analysis and the adaptation law is considered for the feedback gain. Because of this, we have named it NAFT (Nonlinear Adaptive Feedback Technique). At last, simulations show the capability of the presented technique for Chua’s circuit. Keywords—Chaos, Adaptive control, Nonlinear control, Chua's circuit.
SpeeD @ MediaEval 2015: Multilingual Phone Recognition Approach to Query by Example STD

this paper, we attempt to solve the Spoken Term Detection (STD) problem for under-resourced languages by a phone recognition approach within the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) paradigm, with multilingual acoustic models from six languages (Albanian, Czech, English, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian). The Power Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC) features are used for improved robustness to noise, along with Phone Posteriorgrams in order to obtain content-aware acoustic features as independent as possible from speaker and acoustic environment.
Second-order constrained parametric proposals and sequential search-based structured prediction for semantic segmentation in RGB-D images

We focus on the problem of semantic segmentation based on RGB-D data, with emphasis on analyzing cluttered indoor scenes containing many visual categories and instances. Our approach is based on a parametric figureground intensity and depth-constrained proposal process that generates spatial layout hypotheses at multiple locations and scales in the image followed by a sequential inference algorithm that produces a complete scene estimate. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) a generalization of parametric max flow figure-ground proposal methodology to take advantage of intensity and depth information, in order to systematically and efficiently generate the breakpoints of an underlying spatial model in polynomial time, (2) new region description methods based on second-order pooling over multiple features constructed using both intensity and depth channels, (3) a principled search-based structured prediction inference and learning process that resolves conflicts in overlapping spatial partitions and selects regions sequentially towards complete scene estimates, and (4) extensive evaluation of the impact of depth, as well as the effectiveness of a large number of descriptors, both pre-designed and automatically obtained using deep learning, in a difficult RGB-D semantic segmentation problem with 92 classes. We report state of the art results in the challenging NYU Depth Dataset V2 [44], extended for the RMRC 2013 and RMRC 2014 Indoor Segmentation Challenges, where currently the proposed model ranks first. Moreover, we show that by combining second-order and deep learning features, over 15% relative accuracy improvements can be additionally achieved. In a scene classification benchmark, our methodology further improves the state of the art by 24%.
A Method of Synthesizing Handwritten Chinese Images for Data Augmentation

The performance of printed document recognition has been significantly improved by generating synthetic images to augment the training data, particularly by providing more variability in the linguistic contents. Handwriting recognition benefits less from this data augmentation and the only variability that is usually added is via artificially generated combinations of skew, slant and noise. Generating handwritten text is complex due to variations in form, scale and spatial placement of the characters, and can be further complicated by the cursive aspects of the script. We propose a novel strategy, in the particular case of Chinese characters, to generate synthetic lines of text, given samples of the isolated characters. The well-known CASIA database is used to train MDLSTM-RNN models and also in the creation of synthetic line images. On an independent set of real-world images, a model trained only on synthetic images achieved a small relative reduction of 4.4% in the character error rate with respect to a baseline model trained exclusively on real images, while training on a combination of real and synthetic images resulted in a appreciable reduction of 10.4%.
LATE ONSET SCHIZOPHRENIA VERSUS EARLY ONSET SCHIZOPHRENIA : A COMPARISON OF CLINICAL FEATURES

Patients of late onset schizophrenia (LOS) (13 subjects), early onset schizophrenia (EOS) current age above 40 years (15 subjects) and early onset schizophrenia (EOS)- current age at or below 40 years (15 subjects) were compared. The LOS group differed from the two EOS groups only in having higher score on the item ‘persecutory delusions’. The findings do not support the diagnostic validity of LOS.
Vision Based Games for Upper-Limb Stroke Rehabilitation

Recent studies have shown the potential benefits of applying technology to stroke rehabilitation. Traditional rehabilitation tasks are often mundane, and can lead to a lack of patient motivation, resulting in little or no independent patient exercise taking place. We describe a low-cost visual tracking system suitable for upper limb stroke rehabilitation in the home which does not require expensive or special equipment and which can be operated entirely independently by the patient. We look at past applications of imaging to stroke rehabilitation, and also game design theory and how it can be applied to stroke rehabilitation. We then describe two small prototype games which implement colour/object segmentation and motion detection to form the basis of our home rehabilitation system.
Context based citation summary of research articles: A step towards qualitative citation index

In this paper we propose a method for producing a citation summary of research articles that concentrates on the context of articles which cite the given article. Parameters for citation summary are selected in such a way that, this citation summary can be used to evaluate a qualitative citation index for the research articles. Considering some factors such as, semantic similarity between the citing article and cited article, sentiment analysis of text surrounding the citation and the weighted self-citations, the method produces a citation summary. We also present a PageRank based algorithm that uses these parameters to calculate the qualitative citation index for research articles. The output of this citation summary and citation index system gives users an overview of a research article.
Social Presence as a Multi-Dimensional Group Construct in 3D Virtual Environments

One of the key challenges of distributed teams is the lack of social presence resulting from multiple work locations. Virtual environments (VEs) have been viewed as a collaboration tool for distributed teams that can enhance social presence via shared collaboration space and avatars. We observed, recorded, and analyzed the VE meetings of a globally distributed team. Data were analyzed through quantitative and qualitative content analysis. Our findings show that in the meetings, social presence was a situational phenomenon that constantly varied in strength. Social presence occurred as either a subgroup or group phenomenon, which at times coexisted at both levels. In particular, 2 of the 3 subdimensions of social presence, psychological involvement and behavioral engagement, were observable in team interaction.
Development of a 10 MHz oscillator working with an LGT crystal resonator: Preliminary results

Presently, to our knowledge, measurement of the noise of langatate (LGT) crystal oscillators has not previously been reported. First results of such a measurement are given in this paper. They have been obtained from 10 MHz resonator prototypes tested with a dedicated electronics. The main steps of the resonator manufacturing are described in this paper. Good quality factors, close to 1.4 106, have already been achieved on the 5th overtone of the thickness shear mode of LGT Y cuts, even if the energy trapping should still be optimized. The motional parameters of these resonator prototypes are quite different from those of usual quartz crystal resonators. As a consequence, dedicated sustaining electronics have been designed. The explored options are reported to justify the implemented one. Moreover, the high thermal sensitivity of LGT crystal resonators (parabolic f-T curve) requires that particular attention be paid to the oven thermal stability. This important feature is also pointed out in the paper. The preliminary version of the resulting system exhibits a relative frequency stability of 6 10-2.
Performance Analysis of Image Watermarking Using Contourlet Transform and Extraction Using Independent Component Analysis

In this paper, performance analysis of digital image watermarking using contourlet transform is proposed. The ease of digital media modification and dissemination necessitates content protection beyond encryption.So information's are hidden as digital watermarks in multimedia enables protection mechanism in decrypted contents. Among emergent applications of digital watermarking, owner identification, proof of ownership and transaction tracking are applications that protect data by embedding the owner's information in it.The main challenge in exploring geometry in images comes from the discrete nature of the data. Thus, unlike other approaches, our approach starts with a discrete-domain construction and then studies its convergence to an expansion in the continuous domain. Many literature have reported about Discrete Wavelet Transform watermarking techniques for data security. However, DWT based watermarking schemes are found to be less robust against image processing attacks and the shift variance of Wavelet Packet Transform causes inaccurate extraction. In Contourlet transformation, original image is decomposed to two level using contourlet and the watermark is embedded in the resultant sub-bands. Sub-band selection is based on the value of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) that is calculated between watermarked and original image.In DWT-SVD watermarking technique, firstly original image is decomposed according to DWT and then watermark is embedded in singular values obtained by applying SVD.To extract the watermark, ICA-ML is used, it has a novel characteristic is that it does not require the transformation process to extract the watermark. Simulation results show that contourlet based watermarking scheme is robust against attacks such as Salt and Pepper noise, Median filtering and rotation. The performance measures like PSNR and Similarity measure are evaluated and compared with SVD algorithm to prove the robustness of the scheme. Simulations are carried out using Matlab Software.
Multi-objective Optimization of Condensation Heat Transfer inside Horizontal Tube using Particle Swarm Optimization Technique

-In this paper, heat transfer coefficient and frictional pressure drop during condensation of refrigerant inside a smooth tube are formulated as a multi optimization problem and solved using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The objective of this work is to predict the optimum values of refrigerant mass flux and vapor quality for which there is a maximum condensation heat transfer and minimum flow frictional pressure gradient inside tube. The PSO algorithm was run for mass flux and vapor quality range from 100 kg/m-s to 250 kg/m-s and 0.1 to 0.8 respectively. The optimum refrigerant mass flux and vapor quality predicted by particle swarm optimization algorithm are 134.85 kg/m-s and 0.79 respectively. KeywordCondensation, Frictional pressure gradient, Heat transfer coefficient, Particle swarm optimization