Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
One-shot Face Recognition by Promoting Underrepresented Classes

In this paper, we study the problem of training large-scale face identification model with imbalanced training data. This problem naturally exists in many real scenarios including large-scale celebrity recognition, movie actor annotation, etc. Our solution contains two components. First, we build a face feature extraction model, and improve its performance, especially for the persons with very limited training samples, by introducing a regularizer to the cross entropy loss for the multi-nomial logistic regression (MLR) learning. This regularizer encourages the directions of the face features from the same class to be close to the direction of their corresponding classification weight vector in the logistic regression. Second, we build a multi-class classifier using MLR on top of the learned face feature extraction model. Since the standard MLR has poor generalization capability for the one-shot classes even if these classes have been oversampled, we propose a novel supervision signal called underrepresented-classes promotion loss, which aligns the norms of the weight vectors of the one-shot classes (a.k.a. underrepresented-classes) to those of the normal classes. In addition to the original cross entropy loss, this new loss term effectively promotes the underrepresented classes in the learned model and leads to a remarkable improvement in face recognition performance. We test our solution on the MS-Celeb-1M low-shot learning benchmark task. Our solution recognizes 94.89% of the test images at the precision of 99\% for the one-shot classes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the best performance among all the published methods using this benchmark task with the same setup, including all the participants in the recent MS-Celeb-1M challenge at ICCV 2017.
Physical properties, structure analysis, and enzymatic degradation of poly[(R)-3-hydroxybutyrate-co-(R)-3-hydroxyvalerate] films and fibers

High tensile strength films and fibers of poly[(R)-3-hydroxybutyrate-co-8mol%-(R)-3 -hydroxyvalerate] were prepared by cold-drawing from amorphous preforms at a temperature near the glass transition temperature (Tg). High tensile strength fibers of over 1 GPa were processed by onestep-drawing with small crystal nuclei grown near Tg. Meltquenched films in a rubber state could be stretched reproducibly to a draw ratio of 16, and subsequent annealing under tension led to the improvement of the tensile strength and Young's modulus. The highly-ordered structure of films and fibers was investigated by wide- and small-angle X-ray diffractions in synchrotron radiation of SPring-8. The mechanical properties remained unchanged after storing for 6 months at room temperature, suggesting that a high crystallnity of the stretched-annealed films avoids a process of secondary crystallization. Cold-drawn films were enzymatically degraded with an extracellular PHB depolymerase purified from Ralstonia pickettii Tl, and it was revealed that the stretched films had the shish-kebab structure.
Heterogeneous mixture-of-experts for fusion of locally valid knowledge-based submodels

Real-world applications often require the joint use of datadriven and knowledge-based models. While data-driven models are learned from available process data, knowledge-based models are able to provide additional information not contained in the data. In this contribution, we propose a method to divide the input space on the basis of the validity ranges of the knowledge-based models. By doing so they are only active in those domains they are designed for. The data-driven models complete the coverage of the input space. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on a real-world application for the energy management of a hybrid electric vehicle.
Plastin increases cortical connectivity to facilitate robust polarization and timely cytokinesis

The cell cortex is essential to maintain animal cell shape, and contractile forces generated within it by nonmuscle myosin II (NMY-2) drive cellular morphogenetic processes such as cytokinesis. The role of actin cross-linking proteins in cortical dynamics is still incompletely understood. Here, we show that the evolutionarily conserved actin bundling/cross-linking protein plastin is instrumental for the generation of potent cortical actomyosin contractility in the Caenorhabditis elegans zygote. PLST-1 was enriched in contractile structures and was required for effective coalescence of NMY-2 filaments into large contractile foci and for long-range coordinated contractility in the cortex. In the absence of PLST-1, polarization was compromised, cytokinesis was delayed or failed, and 50% of embryos died during development. Moreover, mathematical modeling showed that an optimal amount of bundling agents enhanced the ability of a network to contract. We propose that by increasing the connectivity of the F-actin meshwork, plastin enables the cortex to generate stronger and more coordinated forces to accomplish cellular morphogenesis.
Emotional Suppression During Personal Goal Pursuit Impedes Goal Strivings and Achievement

Prior research indicates that emotional suppression exacerbates distress and reduces cognitive performance and self-control. We extend this prior work in the current studies by examining whether emotional suppression in specific goal-relevant contexts impedes people’s goal strivings and progress. In Study 1, participants (N = 146) provided reports every 2 weeks across a 2-month period reporting the degree to which they engaged in emotional suppression during goal pursuit and reported important goal-related outcomes, including depressed mood, perceived support/closeness, goal effort, goal-related competence, and goal success. In Study 2, participants reported on the degree to which they engaged in emotional suppression while discussing a personal goal with their romantic partner (N = 100 heterosexual couples) and reported on the same outcomes as in Study 1 prior to, immediately following, and then 1 month after couples’ discussions. In both studies, greater use of emotional suppression predicted increased depressed mood, reduced perceived support/closeness, and reduced goal effort, competence, and success across time. Corroborating individuals’ self-reports, participants who engaged in emotional suppression were also perceived by their partners to experience greater depressed mood and lower feelings of support and closeness, and be less competent with regard to their goal (Study 2). The effects of emotional suppression were robust when controlling for a range of alternative explanations. These goal hindering effects are likely one important reason emotional suppression is linked with poorer psychological and health outcomes and extend our understanding of the detrimental impact that emotional suppression can have in people’s everyday lives.
Virtual Keyboard for Wearable Wristbands

The wearable devices are small and easy to carry but typically with poor interaction experience. For example, Apple iWatch does not support instant text message input feature because of the lack of keyboard availability on the tiny touch screen. To address this problem, we develop a novel system, termed iKey, which enables users to use the back of one of their hands as virtual keyboard for wearable wristbands. iKey recognizes keystrokes based on a location-based training model via body vibration. We will demonstrate a real time functional prototype of iKey in this demo.
Roles of Nuclear Pores and Nucleo-cytoplasmic Trafficking in Plant Stress Responses

The nuclear pore complex (NPC) is a large protein complex that controls the exchange of components between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. In plants, the NPC family components play critical roles not only in essential growth and developmental processes, but also in plant responses to various environmental stress conditions. The involvement of NPC components in plant stress responses is mainly attributed to different mechanisms including control of mRNA/protein nucleo-cytoplasmic trafficking and transcriptional gene regulation. This mini review summarizes current knowledge of the NPC-mediated plant stress responses and provides an overview of the underlying molecular mechanisms.
Weakly Supervised Object Localization on grocery shelves using simple FCN and Synthetic Dataset

We propose a weakly supervised method using two algo- rithms to predict object bounding boxes given only an im- age classification dataset. First algorithm is a simple Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) trained to classify object in- stances. We use the property of FCN to return a mask for images larger than training images to get a primary out- put segmentation mask during test time by passing an im- age pyramid to it. We enhance the FCN output mask into final output bounding boxes by a Convolutional Encoder- Decoder (ConvAE) viz. the second algorithm. ConvAE is trained to localize objects on an artificially generated dataset of output segmentation masks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in localizing objects in grocery shelves where annotating data for object detection is hard due to variety of objects. This method can be extended to any problem domain where collecting images of objects is easy and annotating their coordinates is hard.
TwistBlocks: Pluggable and Twistable Modular TUI for Armature Interaction in 3D Design

The use of armatures is a convenient way of deforming and animating 3D digital models. However, interact with an armature is usually time-consuming, and often requires professional skills. Tangible interfaces, such as building blocks, while having improved the accessibility of digital construction, are still lacking in flexibility and present difficulties in dealing with curved armatures. This paper introduces TwistBlocks, a pluggable and twistable modular TUI that improves the accessibility of 3D modeling and animating by physical armature interaction. TwistBlocks is capable of creating complex armatures with dense branches, and supports a high DOF (Degree of Freedom) in physical manipulation. In addition, a set of software tools are provided for novice users to easily create, rig, and animate models. The global-posture sensing network sensing scheme can also measure the rotation and movement of the physical armature, and enables interaction between multiple models.
PrivacyGuide: Towards an Implementation of the EU GDPR on Internet Privacy Policy Evaluation

Nowadays Internet services have dramatically changed the way people interact with each other and many of our daily activities are supported by those services. Statistical indicators show that more than half of the world's population uses the Internet generating about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data on daily basis. While such a huge amount of data is useful in a number of fields, such as in medical and transportation systems, it also poses unprecedented threats for user's privacy. This is aggravated by the excessive data collection and user profiling activities of service providers. Yet, regulation require service providers to inform users about their data collection and processing practices. The de facto way of informing users about these practices is through the use of privacy policies. Unfortunately, privacy policies suffer from bad readability and other complexities which make them unusable for the intended purpose. To address this issue, we introduce PrivacyGuide, a privacy policy summarization tool inspired by the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and based on machine learning and natural language processing techniques. Our results show that PrivacyGuide is able to classify privacy policy content into eleven privacy aspects with a weighted average accuracy of 74% and further shed light on the associated risk level with an accuracy of 90%.
Comperative analysis of unilateral cleft lip closure using absorbable and nonabsorbable sutures: a randomised clinical study

Aim: Patients with cleft lip usually undergo multiple procedures that require hospitalization resulting in emotional stress to their family members. Young patients often require sedation or general anesthesia (GA) for suture removal on a sensitive area to prevent disruption of the repair. In this study, we compared absorbable and nonabsorbable sutures for primary cleft lip repair. Methods: Patients with cleft lip who presented to Smile Train Unit, Child Hospital and Research Institute, Nagpur, India, were randomly assigned to two groups and underwent surgical repair using either Vicryl Rapid suture (Group 1) or Prolene suture (Group 2). Patients were followed up at 1 month, 6 months, and 1 year. Photographs of the patients were obtained at these visits and rated using a validated 100-mm cosmesis visual analogue scale (VAS) by three people (social worker, surgeon, and patient's mother). A VAS score of 15 mm or greater was considered as clinically important difference. Results: A total of 60 patients were enrolled in this study, and they were equally divided into two groups. There was no difference in age, race, sex, wound length, number of sutures, and layered repair rates between the groups. The average age of the patient was 3 months. There was no significant difference in the rates of infection which was 6% in this study, wound dehiscence, and hypertrophic scar formation. No significant difference was found in cosmetic outcome in both the mean VAS score of 90.3 in Group 1 and 91.7 in Group 2. Conclusion: Absorbable sutures are a viable alternative to nonabsorbable sutures in the repair of primary cleft lip repair. We prefer absorbable sutures because they do not require removal under GA or sedation.
Assessing query privileges via safe and efficient permission composition

We propose an approach for the selective enforcement of access control restrictions in, possibly distributed, large data collections based on two basic concepts: i) flexible authorizations identify, in a declarative way, the data that can be released, and ii) queries are checked for execution not with respect to individual authorizations but rather evaluating whether the information release they (directly or indirectly) entail is allowed by the authorizations. Our solution is based on the definition of query profiles capturing the information content of a query and builds on a graph-based modeling of database schema, authorizations, and queries. Access control is then effectively modeled and efficiently executed in terms of graph coloring and composition and on traversal of graph paths. We then provide a polynomial composition algorithm for determining if a query is authorized.
Hypercapnic Conditions After Experimental Blunt Chest Trauma Increase Efferocytosis of Alveolar Macrophages and Reduce Local Inflammation

ABSTRACT Blunt chest trauma induces severe local and systemic inflammatory alterations and an accumulation of apoptotic polymorphonuclear granulocytes (aPMN) in the lungs, frequently followed by bacterial infection. Alveolar macrophages (AM) represent one of the main actors for their clearance. However, little is known regarding regulatory and influencing factors of AM efferocytic and phagocytic activities. In this context, we investigated the influence of impaired gas exchange on AM activity. Male rats underwent blunt chest trauma or sham procedure and aPMN or Escherichia coli (E. coli) were instilled. Subsequently, the efferocytic and phagocytic activities were assessed by analyzing AM obtained from bronchoalveolar lavage fluids at three time points. To determine whether efferocytic and phagocytic activities of AM are affected by shifting gas concentrations, AM were subjected in vitro to hypoxic and hypercapnic conditions. Trauma significantly upregulated the capacity of AM to ingest E. coli starting 24 h after trauma, whereas the aPMN uptake rate remained virtually unchanged. In vitro, AM reacted to hypercapnic conditions by enhanced efferocytosis associated with increased release of anti-inflammatory cytokines. Additionally, phagocytosis and the pro-inflammatory reaction of AM after trauma appeared to be impaired. In contrast, hypoxic conditions displayed no regulatory effect on AM. In conclusion, blunt chest trauma enhances phagocytic activity of AM. On the other hand, hypercapnic conditions in the lungs may significantly contribute to the clearance of aPMN. The application of CO2 in clinical settings must be properly assessed, with the benefits of CO2 balanced against the detrimental effects of impaired bacterial clearance.
Regulatory Role of MicroRNAs in Muscle Atrophy during Exercise Intervention

Skeletal muscle comprising approximately 40% of body weight is highly important for locomotion and metabolic homeostasis. The growth and regeneration of skeletal muscle are highly organized processes; thus, it is not surprising to reveal certain complexity during these regulatory processes. Recently, a large number of evidence indicate that microRNAs can result in obvious impacts on growth, regeneration and metabolism of skeletal muscle. In this review, recent research achievements of microRNAs in regulating myogenesis, atrophy and aging during exercise intervention are discussed, which will provide the guidance for developing potential applications of microRNAs in health promotion and rehabilitation of sports injuries.
The effectiveness of agri‐environment schemes for the conservation of farmland moths: assessing the importance of a landscape‐scale management approach

1. Agricultural intensification and expansion are regarded as major causes of worldwide declines in biodiversity during the last century. Agri-environment schemes (AES) have been introduced in many countries as an attempt to counteract the negative effects of intensive agriculture by providing financial incentives for farmers to adopt environmentally-sensitive agricultural practices. 2. We surveyed 18 pairs of AES and conventionally-managed farms in central Scotland (United Kingdom) to evaluate the effects of specific AES management prescriptions (field margins, hedgerows, species-rich grasslands and water margins) on farmland moths. We also measured the influence of the surrounding landscape on moth populations at three spatial scales (250 m, 500 m and 1 km radii from each trapping site) to assess at which scale management was most important for the conservation of farmland moths. 3. In general, percentage cover of rough grassland and scrub within 250 m of the trapping site was the most important landscape predictor for both micro- and macromoth abundance and macromoth species richness, although negative effects of urbanization were found at wider scales (within 1 km), particularly for macromoth species richness. 4. The abundance and species richness of micromoths was significantly higher within field margins and species-rich grasslands under AES management in comparison to their conventional counterparts, whereas AES water margins increased micromoth abundance, but not species richness. AES species-rich grasslands and water margins were associated with an increased macromoth abundance and species richness, and macromoths considered 'widespread but rapidly declining' also gained some benefits from these two AES prescriptions. In contrast, hedgerows under AES management enhanced neither micromoth nor macromoth populations. 5. Synthesis and applications. Our findings indicate that increasing the percentage cover of semi-natural environment at a local scale (e.g. within 250 m) benefits both micro- and macromoth populations, and that the implementation of simple AES management prescriptions applied to relatively small areas can increase the species richness and abundance of moth populations in agricultural environments. © 2010 The Authors. Journal of Applied Ecology © 2010 British Ecological Society.
STUDY THE EFFECTS OF SECONDARY POLYMERS ON THE PROPERTIES OF BUCCOADHESIVE POLYVINYL ALCOHOL PATCHES OF 5-FLOUROURACIL

Objectives: The aim of this study is to formulate and evaluate buccoadhesive patch of 5-Fluoruuracil (5-FU) for local treatment of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) Methods: The buccoadhesive patches were prepared using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as patch forming polymer with hydrophilic or hydrophobic polymers as secondary polymer include Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP K30), Na CMC, sodium alginate, HPMC, chitosan, or Eudragit E100. The patches were prepared by solvent casting method and evaluated for weight variation, surface pH, mucoadhesive strength, mechanical properties, content uniformity, mucoadhesive residence time, and drug release study. Results: The measured surface pH values of all prepared patches were close to the saliva pH in range of (5.9-7.3), the folding endurances were found to be within the recommended value (>300). Incorporation of hydrophilic polymer with PVA increases the swelling index and the maximum was observed for PVA: Na CMC (4:1) patch. There is a decrease in elongation percent (EB %) and tensile strength (TS) with using of secondary polymers except Eudragit E 100 that increase the TS. Although PVA: SALG (4:1) patches show the highest mucoadhesive strength, the PVA: Eudragit E100 (4:1) patches show longest adhesion time and release over 4hrs. Conclusion: It can be concluded that the incorporation of secondary polymer to PVA patches of 5-FU improves the properties of patches regarding the mucoadhesion, mechanical properties, and release profile which make the patch as a mucoadhesive system good candidate for local treatment of OSCC.
The development and validation of the Interpersonal Support in Physical Activity Consultations Observational Tool

Abstract This study describes the development and psychometric characteristics of an observational instrument that examines four aspects of interpersonal support (or lack of) provided during physical activity (PA) promotion consultations (i.e., Autonomy Support, Involvement, Structure and Interpersonal Control), as identified by Self-determination Theory (SDT). The reliability and validity of the Interpersonal Support in Physical Activity Consultations Observational Tool (ISPACOT) were examined within an exploratory randomised control trial. Recorded consultations (N = 42) conducted by qualified PA advisors (N = 14) at 13 leisure centres across the West Midlands (UK) were rated. Intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) indicated moderate to high inter-rater reliability for overall interpersonal support (0.80), and the Autonomy Support (0.74), Involvement (0.73) and Structure (0.91) dimensions, but low reliability for Interpersonal Control (0.35). The advisors, who conducted PA promotion consultations that were rated as low in their interpersonally supportive features, were perceived by their clients as being less supportive (F(1,10) = 5.0, p <. 05). Ratings on the ISPACOT differentiated advisors who were trained in SDT principles and those who were not. Overall, the findings provided preliminary evidence for the reliability and convergent validity of the ISPACOT.
What Doubling Tricks Can and Can't Do for Multi-Armed Bandits

An online reinforcement learning algorithm is anytime if it does not need to know in advance the horizon T of the experiment. A well-known technique to obtain an anytime algorithm from any non-anytime algorithm is the "Doubling Trick". In the context of adversarial or stochastic multi-armed bandits, the performance of an algorithm is measured by its regret, and we study two families of sequences of growing horizons (geometric and exponential) to generalize previously known results that certain doubling tricks can be used to conserve certain regret bounds. In a broad setting, we prove that a geometric doubling trick can be used to conserve (minimax) bounds in $R_T = O(\sqrt{T})$ but cannot conserve (distribution-dependent) bounds in $R_T = O(\log T)$. We give insights as to why exponential doubling tricks may be better, as they conserve bounds in $R_T = O(\log T)$, and are close to conserving bounds in $R_T = O(\sqrt{T})$.