Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ego-net digger: a new way to study ego networks in online social networks

The vast proliferation of Online Social Networks (OSN) is generating many new ways to interact and create social relationships with others. While substantial results have been obtained in anthropology literature describing the properties of human social networks, a clear understanding of the properties of social networks built using OSN is still to be achieved. The presence of a huge amount of records containing users' communication history, provided by OSN, represents a new opportunity to analyse and better understand the human social behaviour. In this paper we present ego-net digger, a novel Facebook application for the analysis of ego networks in OSN. Ego-net digger collects users' social data and gives a representation of their personal social networks according to the Dunbar's circles model. To show the potential of our application we analyse a sample data set collected during a data acquisition campaign, finding interesting similarities between the structure of Facebook ego networks and the properties found in the anthropology literature. Specifically, we find that, in our sample, there is a clear evidence of the presence of the same ego network structure - i.e., the Dunbar's circles - as found in human social networks formed offline.
An Online Health Prevention Intervention for Youth with Addicted or Mentally Ill Parents: Experiences and Perspectives of Participants and Providers from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background Mental illnesses affect many people around the world, either directly or indirectly. Families of persons suffering from mental illness or addiction suffer too, especially their children. In the Netherlands, 864,000 parents meet the diagnostic criteria for a mental illness or addiction. Evidence shows that offspring of mentally ill or addicted parents are at risk for developing mental disorders or illnesses themselves. The Kopstoring course is an online 8-week group course with supervision by 2 trained psychologists or social workers, aimed to prevent behavioral and psychological problems for children (aged 16 to 25 years) of parents with mental health problems or addictions. The course addresses themes such as roles in the family and mastery skills. An online randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the Kopstoring course. Objective The aim was to gain knowledge about expectations, experiences, and perspectives of participants and providers of the online Kopstoring course. Methods A process evaluation was performed to evaluate the online delivery of Kopstoring and the experiences and perspectives of participants and providers of Kopstoring. Interviews were performed with members from both groups. Participants were drawn from a sample from the Kopstoring RCT. Results Thirteen participants and 4 providers were interviewed. Five main themes emerged from these interviews: background, the requirements for the intervention, experience with the intervention, technical aspects, and research aspects. Overall, participants and providers found the intervention to be valuable because it was online; therefore, protecting their anonymity was considered a key component. Most barriers existed in the technical sphere. Additional barriers existed with conducting the RCT, namely gathering informed consent and gathering parental consent in the case of minors. Conclusions This study provides valuable insight into participants’ and providers’ experiences and expectations with the online preventive intervention Kopstoring. It also sheds light on the process of the online provision of Kopstoring and the accompanying RCT. The findings of this study may partly explain dropout rates when delivering online interventions. The change in the (financial) structure of the youth mental health care system in the Netherlands has financial implications for the delivery of prevention programs for youth. Lastly, there are few RCTs that assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of online prevention programs in the field of (youth) mental health care and not many process evaluations of these programs exist. This hampers a good comparison between online interventions and the expectations and experiences of the participants and providers. Trial Registration Nederlands Trial Register: NTR1982; http://www.trialregister. nl/trialreg/admin/rctview.asp? TC=1982 (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6d8xYDQbB)
Three Patterns of Cytochrome P450 Gene Expression during Liver Maturation in Mice

The neonatal period of liver development is an often overlooked phase of development. For instance, ontogeny of xenobiotic-metabolizing enzymes can markedly affect biotransformation as the liver matures. To systematically examine the ontogenic gene expression patterns of cytochrome P450 genes (P450) in mice, the gene expression profiles of 19 xenobiotic-metabolizing P450 in Cyp1 to 4 families were determined. The mRNA levels in C57BL/6 mouse livers were quantified using branched DNA technology at the following ages: gestational day 17 (2 days before birth) and postnatal days 0, 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, and 45. Among the 13 P450 genes expressed in mouse livers, three distinct ontogenic expression patterns were identified by cluster analysis. Genes in group 1 (Cyp3a16 as well as 3a41b in male) were expressed in the perinatal period, but they were essentially nondetectable by 30 days of age. Genes in group 2 (Cyp2e1, 3a11, and 4a10 as well as 3a41b in female) quickly increased after birth and reached maximal expression levels by day 5. Genes in group 3 (Cyp1a2, 2a4, 2b10, 2c29, 2d22, 2f2, 3a13, and 3a25) were expressed at low levels until days 10 to 15, but they markedly increased at day 20 to a high and stable level. In conclusion, the developmental expression of P450 in mouse liver can be divided into three patterns, suggesting that different mechanisms are responsible for the expression of P450 during liver maturation.
The Distance to SN 1999em from the Expanding Photosphere Method

We present optical and infrared spectroscopy of the first 2 months of evolution of the Type II supernova SN 1999em. We combine these data with high-quality optical/infrared photometry beginning only 3 days after shock breakout, in order to study the performance of the "expanding photosphere method" (EPM) in the determination of distances. With this purpose, we develop a technique to measure accurate photospheric velocities by cross-correlating observed and model spectra. The application of this technique to SN 1999em shows that we can reach an average uncertainty of 11% in velocity from an individual spectrum. Our analysis shows that EPM is quite robust to the effects of dust. In particular, the distances derived from the VI filters change by only 7% when the adopted visual extinction in the host galaxy is varied by 0.45 mag. The superb time sampling of the BVIZJHK light curves of SN 1999em permits us to study the internal consistency of EPM and test the dilution factors computed from atmosphere models for Type II plateau supernovae. We find that, in the first week since explosion, the EPM distances are up to 50% lower than the average, possibly because of the presence of circumstellar material. Over the following 65 days, on the other hand, our tests lend strong credence to the atmosphere models, and confirm previous claims that EPM can produce consistent distances without having to craft specific models to each supernova. This is particularly true for the VI filters, which yield distances with an internal consistency of 4%. From the whole set of BVIZJHK photometry, we obtain an average distance of 7.5 ± 0.5 Mpc, where the quoted uncertainty (7%) is a conservative estimate of the internal precision of the method obtained from the analysis of the first 70 days of the supernova evolution.
Sulfur-doped graphene/transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructured hybrids with electrocatalytic activity toward the hydrogen evolution reaction

A facile route for the preparation of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) and tungsten disulfide (WS2), uniformly deposited onto sulfur-doped graphene (SG), is reported. The realization of the SG/MoS2 and SG/WS2 heterostructured hybrids was accomplished by employing microwave irradiation for the thermal decomposition of ammonium tetrathiomolybdate and tetrathiotungstate, respectively, in the presence of SG. Two different weight ratios between SG and the inorganic species were used, namely 3 : 1 and 1 : 1, yielding SG/MoS2 (3 : 1), SG/MoS2 (1 : 1), SG/WS2 (3 : 1) and SG/WS2 (1 : 1). SG and all newly developed hybrid materials were characterized by ATR-IR and Raman spectroscopy, TGA, HR-TEM and EELS. The electrocatalytic activity of the SG/MoS2 and SG/WS2 heterostructured hybrids was examined against the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and it was found that the presence of SG not only significantly improved the catalytic activity of MoS2 and WS2 but also made it comparable to that of commercial Pt/C. Specifically, hybrids containing higher amounts of SG, namely SG/MoS2 (3 : 1) and SG/WS2 (3 : 1), exhibited extremely low onset overpotentials of 26 and 140 mV vs. RHE, respectively. The latter results highlighted the beneficial role of SG as a substrate for immobilizing MoS2 and WS2 and stressed its significance for achieving optimum electrocatalytic performance toward the HER. Finally, examination of the Tafel slopes as extracted from the electrocatalytic polarization curves, manifested the adsorption of hydrogen as the rate-limiting step for SG/MoS2 (3 : 1), while for SG/WS2 (3 : 1) the electrochemical desorption of adsorbed hydrogen atoms to generate hydrogen was revealed to be the rate-limiting step.
Optimizing Cauchy Reed-Solomon Codes for Fault-Tolerant Network Storage Applications

In the past few years, all manner of storage applications, ranging from disk array systems to distributed and wide-area systems, have started to grapple with the reality of tolerating multiple simultaneous failures of storage nodes. Unlike the single failure case, which is optimally handled with RAID level-5 parity, the multiple failure case is more difficult because optimal general purpose strategies are not yet known. Erasure coding is the field of research that deals with these strategies, and this field has blossomed in recent years. Despite this research, the decades-old Reed-Solomon erasure code remains the only space-optimal (MDS) code for all but the smallest storage systems. The best performing implementations of Reed-Solomon coding employ a variant called Cauchy Reed-Solomon coding, developed in the mid 1990's. In this paper, we present an improvement to Cauchy Reed-Solomon coding that is based on optimizing the Cauchy distribution matrix. We detail an algorithm for generating good matrices and then evaluate the performance of encoding using all implementations Reed-Solomon codes, plus the best MDS codes from the literature. The improvements over the original Cauchy Reed-Solomon codes are as much as 83% in realistic scenarios, and average roughly 10% over all cases that we tested
Binding and Uptake of 125Iodine-Labelled, Oxidized Low Density Lipoprotein by Macrophages: Comparism of the Effects of a-Tocopherol, Probucol, Pyridoxal-5'-phosphate and Magnesium-pyridoxal-5'-phosphate-glutamate

Abstract Specific and unspecific binding and uptake (internalization) by macrophages of 125iodine -labelled, copper-oxidized human low density lipoprotein is differently influenced by the anti oxidants α-tocopherol (α-Toc), probucol (Prob), pyridoxal-5'-phosphate (PP) and the magnesium-pyridoxal-5'-phosphate glutamate complex (MPPG). Binding as well as internalization, mediated by the so-called "scavenger receptor" is lower in the presence of MPPG whereas both specific binding and internalization are enhanced. The comparison of the effects in vitro allows a rating of the potentially anti-atherogenic and thus protective effects of the tested substances as follows: MPPG > PP > α-Toc > Prob.
Learning from neighborhood for classification with local distribution characteristics

The k-nearest neighbor method generates predictions for a particular instance from its neighborhood. It is a simple but effective supervised method for classification. However, the traditional k-nearest neighbor algorithm using the majority voting rule for the class label usually loses a part of useful information in the neighborhood. This paper tries to learn from the neighborhood for more useful information for classification and proposes an improved version of k-nearest neighbor method by heuristically organizing the local distribution characteristics. Different from the traditional methods, the proposed method considers the neighborhood of a query sample from the perspective of local distribution and learns from the neighborhood for local distribution characteristics for classification. We analyze the impact of local distribution characteristics on classification and heuristically develop a formulation to estimate the membership degree, which indicates the level of membership of a query sample to each class; then the query sample is classified to the class which has the highest membership degree with respect to the query sample. Experiments have been conducted on several real data sets; the results support the conclusion that the proposed method is superior to the traditional voting k-nearest neighbor method and comparable with or better than several state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification performance and robustness.
Facial expression recognition using 2-D DCT of binarized edge images and constructive feedforward neural networks

Computer-based automatic human facial expression recognition (FER) is fundamental and indispensable in realizing truly intelligent human-machine interfaces. In this paper, a new FER technique is proposed, which uses lower-frequency 2D DCT coefficients of binarized edge images and constructive one-hidden-layer (OHL) feedforward neural networks (NNs). The 2D DCT is thereby used to compress the binarized edge images to capture the important features for recognition. Constructive OHL NNs are then used to realize the mapping from the feature space to facial expression space. Facial expression ldquoneutralrdquo is regarded as a subject of recognition in addition to two other expressions, ldquosmilerdquo and ldquosurpriserdquo. The proposed recognition technique is applied to two databases which contain 2-D front face images of 60 men (database (a)) and 60 women (database (b)), respectively. Experimental results reveal that our proposed technique provides in general improved performance when compared to two other recognition methods that use vector matching and fixed-size BP-based NNs. Our method yields testing recognition rates as high as 100% and 95% for databases (a) and (b), respectively, which clearly demonstrates its promising capabilities.
Explanation in OLAP Data Cubes

OLAP is an important technology that offers a fast and interactive data navigation, it also provides tools to explore data cubes in order to extract interesting information from a multidimensional data structures. However, the OLAP exploration is done manually, without tools that could automatically extract relevant information from the cube. In addition OLAP is not capable of explaining relationships that could exist within data. This paper presents a new approach to coupling between data mining and online analytical processing. Its approach provides the explanation in OLAP data cubes by using the association rules between the inter-dimensional predicates. The mining process could be done by one of the two algorithms, Apriori and Fp-Growth, in which aggregate measures to calculate support and confidence are exploited. It also evaluates the interestingness of mined association rules according to the Lift criteria.
Statistical Characteristics and Capacity Evaluation of Deterministic Downlink MIMO Channel Model Under Non-isotropic Scattering Environment

Most of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel simulation models are established with the assumption of typical “Clarke” model, namely, isotropic scattering is adopted around receiver. And most of modeling methods is too complex, or need much more measured data. In this paper, one simple deterministic modeling method for downlink MIMO channel with non-isotropic scattering around mobile station (MS) is presented. The proposed MIMO channel simulation model has a general structure for both space-time coding and downlink beam-forming scenarios. The channel simulation model is setup by utilizing the “von Mises” function, which characterizes accurately the distribution of non-isotropic scattering. Implementation structure and required parameters is also described in details. Finally, statistical fading characteristics of the simulated MIMO channel are investigated by level-crossing rate, average duration of fades and cross-correlation factor. And numerical results show the impact of non-isotropic scattering on capacity evaluation of the MIMO channel. It’s verified that channel capacity degraded as amounts of nonisotropic components increase.
Issues in evaluation of stream learning algorithms

Learning from data streams is a research area of increasing importance. Nowadays, several stream learning algorithms have been developed. Most of them learn decision models that continuously evolve over time, run in resource-aware environments, detect and react to changes in the environment generating data. One important issue, not yet conveniently addressed, is the design of experimental work to evaluate and compare decision models that evolve over time. There are no golden standards for assessing performance in non-stationary environments. This paper proposes a general framework for assessing predictive stream learning algorithms. We defend the use of Predictive Sequential methods for error estimate - the prequential error. The prequential error allows us to monitor the evolution of the performance of models that evolve over time. Nevertheless, it is known to be a pessimistic estimator in comparison to holdout estimates. To obtain more reliable estimators we need some forgetting mechanism. Two viable alternatives are: sliding windows and fading factors. We observe that the prequential error converges to an holdout estimator when estimated over a sliding window or using fading factors. We present illustrative examples of the use of prequential error estimators, using fading factors, for the tasks of: i) assessing performance of a learning algorithm; ii) comparing learning algorithms; iii) hypothesis testing using McNemar test; and iv) change detection using Page-Hinkley test. In these tasks, the prequential error estimated using fading factors provide reliable estimators. In comparison to sliding windows, fading factors are faster and memory-less, a requirement for streaming applications. This paper is a contribution to a discussion in the good-practices on performance assessment when learning dynamic models that evolve over time.
The TALP-UPC Approach to System Selection: Asiya Features and Pairwise Classification Using Random Forests

This paper describes the TALP-UPC participation in the WMT’13 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE). Our participation is reduced to task 1.2 on System Selection. We used a broad set of features (86 for German-to-English and 97 for English-to-Spanish) ranging from standard QE features to features based on pseudo-references and semantic similarity. We approached system selection by means of pairwise ranking decisions. For that, we learned Random Forest classifiers especially tailored for the problem. Evaluation at development time showed considerably good results in a cross-validation experiment, with Kendall’s values around 0.30. The results on the test set dropped significantly, raising different discussions to be taken into account.
Disruption of a cystine transporter downregulates expression of genes involved in sulfur regulation and cellular respiration

ABSTRACT Cystine and cysteine are important molecules for pathways such as redox signaling and regulation, and thus identifying cellular deficits upon deletion of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae cystine transporter Ers1p allows for a further understanding of cystine homeostasis. Previous complementation studies using the human ortholog suggest yeast Ers1p is a cystine transporter. Human CTNS encodes the protein Cystinosin, a cystine transporter that is embedded in the lysosomal membrane and facilitates the export of cystine from the lysosome. When CTNS is mutated, cystine transport is disrupted, leading to cystine accumulation, the diagnostic hallmark of the lysosomal storage disorder cystinosis. Here, we provide biochemical evidence for Ers1p-dependent cystine transport. However, the accumulation of intracellular cystine is not observed when the ERS1 gene is deleted from ers1-Δ yeast, supporting the existence of modifier genes that provide a mechanism in ers1-Δ yeast that prevents or corrects cystine accumulation. Upon comparison of the transcriptomes of isogenic ERS1+ and ers1-Δ strains of S. cerevisiae by DNA microarray followed by targeted qPCR, sixteen genes were identified as being differentially expressed between the two genotypes. Genes that encode proteins functioning in sulfur regulation, cellular respiration, and general transport were enriched in our screen, demonstrating pleiotropic effects of ers1-Δ. These results give insight into yeast cystine regulation and the multiple, seemingly distal, pathways that involve proper cystine recycling. Summary: We identify genes that are differentially expressed in yeast lacking vacuolar cystine transporter Ers1p in order to find pathways, such as respiration and sulfur regulation, that are associated with cystine homeostasis.
Passive acoustic monitoring, development of disturbance calls and differentiation of disturbance and advertisement calls in the Argentine croaker Umbrina canosai (Sciaenidae).

Disturbance and advertisement calls of the Argentine croaker Umbrina canosai were recorded from coastal Uruguayan waters. Dissections indicate typical sciaenid extrinsic swimbladder muscles present exclusively in males. Disturbance calls were produced when captive U. canosai were startled, chased with a net or grabbed by the tail. Calls were unusual for sciaenids because each pulse consisted of multiple cycles. The number of cycles per pulse and dominant frequency did not change with U. canosai size, but pulse duration and interpulse interval increased. Advertisement calls were recorded from unseen choruses in the field and confirmed with captive individuals in a large tank. Advertisement calls were recorded throughout the known range of the species in Uruguay indicating a continuous belt of spawning populations. Tank recordings of the same individuals permitted explicit comparisons between the two calls. Advertisement call pulses averaged 2·4 more cycles (11·0-8·6) although pulses of both calls were basically similar as were durations and dominant frequencies. Pulse number, however, differed markedly, averaging 13·6 and 3·4 pulses for disturbance and advertisement calls respectively. Furthermore, disturbance calls were produced as a rapid series with an interpulse interval of 26-31 ms whereas advertisement call patterns were less stereotyped and ranged from <100 to 450 ms. Multicycle pulses distinguished U. canosai from other sympatric sciaenids.