Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Augmented reality instruction for object assembly based on markerless tracking

Conventional object assembly instructions are usually written or illustrated in a paper manual. Users have to associate these static instructions with real objects in 3D space. In this paper, a novel augmented reality system is presented for a user to interact with objects and instructions. While most related methods pasted obvious markers onto objects for tracking and constrained their orientations or shapes, we adopt a markerless strategy for more intuitive interaction. Based on live information from an off-the-shelf RGB-D camera, the proposed tracking procedure identifies components in a scene, tracks their 3D positions and orientations, and evaluates whether there are combinations of components. According to the detected events and poses, our indication procedure then dynamically displays indication lines, circular arrows and other hints to guide a user to manipulate the components into correct poses. The experiment shows that the proposed system can robustly track the components and respond intuitive instructions at an interactive rate. Most of users in evaluation are interested and willing to use this novel technique for object assembly.
A Parrinello – Rahman approach to vortex lattices

We present a framework for studying vortex lattice patterns and their structural transitions, using the Parrinello–Rahm method for molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations. Assuming an interaction between vortices derived from a Ginzburg– field-theoretic context, we extract the ground-state of a “vortex gas” using the PR-MD technique and find it to be a tr pattern. Other patterns are also obtained for special initial conditions. Generalizations of the technique, such as the in external potentials or excitation of quadrupolar modes, are also commented upon.  2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Primary Malignant Teratoma with a Primitive Neuroectodermal Tumor Component in Thyroid Gland : A Case Report

Teratomas comprise the most common extragonadal germ cell tumors in childhood. Most teratomas involving the thyroid are benign and occur in children. However, the adult cases reported are mostly malignant and commonly arise in the thyroid. We report a case of a 31-yr-old female with a huge neck mass. Pathologic examination revealed it to be malignant teratoma composed of primitive neuroepithelial tissue with primitive neural tubes and loose myxoid to fibrous immature mesenchymal stroma. The patient underwent extensive evaluation of the thyroid gland with computed tomography (CT) scan and positron emission tomography (PET) scan, which revealed no evidence of metastatic disease. She underwent total thyroidectomy with bilateral modified radical neck dissection, intensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy. At 22-months of follow-up, the patient has remained euthyroid and showed no evidence of recurrence. This is the first case, to our knowledge, of malignant thyroid teratoma with a exuberant primitive neuroectodermal tumor component in Korea.
NOX4-Dependent Hydrogen Peroxide Overproduction in Human Atrial Fibrillation and HL-1 Atrial Cells: Relationship to Hypertension

Background/Objectives: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common type of cardiac arrhythmia with patients dying frequently of stroke. In view of the unclear etiologies of AF and a potential role of oxidative stress, the present study examined cardiac reactive oxygen species production and NADPH oxidase (NOX) expression in AF patients. Methods and Results: Patients with AF were older than those without (58.8 ± 11.7 vs. 47.8 ± 19.2, p = 0.047). Whereas total O2∙- production (determined by electron spin resonance) was similar in patients with and without AF, H2O2 production was more than doubled in AF patients (149.8 ± 26.28 vs. 66.9 ± 7.14 pmol/mg/min, p = 0.0055), which correlated well with a doubling in NOX isoform 4 (NOX4) expression. AF patients with co-existing hypertension had three-fold higher H2O2 production compared to those without (239.0 ± 125.1 vs. 83.6 ± 51.3 pmol/mg/min, p = 0.003). Treatment of HL-1 atrial cells with angiotensin II, a known modulator of atrial structural remodeling, resulted in upregulation of NOX4 and H2O2 production, further implicating a potential role of NOX4 in atrial remodeling. Conclusion: Our data represent the first implication that NOX4-derived H2O2 may play an important role in the etiologies of AF.
Factors Influencing Engagement, Perceived Usefulness and Behavioral Mechanisms Associated with a Text Message Support Program

Introduction Many studies have now demonstrated the efficacy of text messaging in positively changing behaviours. We aimed to identify features and factors that explain the effectiveness of a successful text messaging program in terms of user engagement, perceived usefulness, behavior change and program delivery preferences. Methods Mixed methods qualitative design combining four data sources; (i) analytic data extracted directly from the software system, (ii) participant survey, (iii) focus groups to identify barriers and enablers to implementation and mechanisms of effect and (iv) recruitment screening logs and text message responses to examine engagement. This evaluation was conducted within the TEXT ME trial—a parallel design, single-blind randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 710 patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). Qualitative data were interpreted using inductive thematic analysis. Results 307/352 (87% response rate) of recruited patients with CHD completed the program evaluation survey at six months and 25 participated in a focus group. Factors increasing engagement included (i) ability to save and share messages, (ii) having the support of providers and family, (iii) a feeling of support through participation in the program, (iv) the program being initiated close to the time of a cardiovascular event, (v) personalization of the messages, (vi) opportunity for initial face-to-face contact with a provider and (vii) that program and content was perceived to be from a credible source. Clear themes relating to program delivery were that diet and physical activity messages were most valued, four messages per week was ideal and most participants felt program duration should be provided for at least for six months or longer. Conclusions This study provides context and insight into the factors influencing consumer engagement with a text message program aimed at improving health-related behavior. The study suggests program components that may enhance potential success but will require integration at the development stage to optimize up-scaling. Trial Registration Australia and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12611000161921.
Leveraging Affect for Narrative-Centered Guided Discovery Learning Environments

Affective reasoning holds significant potential for intelligent tutoring systems. Incorporating affective reasoning into pedagogical decision-making capabilities could enable learning environments to create customized experiences that are dynamically tailored to individual students' ever changing levels of engagement, interest, motivation, and self-efficacy. Because physiological responses are directly triggered by changes in affect, biofeedback data such as heart rate and galvanic skin response can be used to infer affective changes in conjunction with the situational context. However, biofeedback hardware is intrusive and cumbersome in deployed applications. This paper explores the importance of self-efficacy in ITSs, motivation in discovery learning approaches, and describes CRYSTAL ISLAND, a prototype narrative-centered guided discovery learning environment. CRYSTAL ISLAND served as a testbed for several studies that suggest it is possible to build models of affective constructs from observations of situational context and student physiological response.
An Architecture for Guaranteeing Real-Time Databases Available Ceaselessly

Real-time databases are widely applied in time-critical applications, such as autopilot systems, robot navigation, real-time monitoring, programmed stock trading, etc. These applications usually require real-time databases can provide 7times24times60times60s' ceaseless service weekly. However, real-time databases cannot completely avoid all kinds of failures. The traditional recovery-processing scheme cannot already satisfy the requirement for the above applications. In this paper, we present a fault tolerant architecture based on self-perceptive, self-diagnosing and self-adaptive recovery mechanisms. This architecture can prevent or delay failures effectively. On the basis of this architecture, we propose a novel prediction recovery scheme. The prediction recovery scheme allows the execution of transactions during recovery by providing predictive values of damaged data items to these transactions that need immediate access to those data items.
Coordination as Resource in Collaborative Telelearning

In this paper we present our findings from a field trial of collaborative telelearning with participants from three educational institutions in Norway. The goal of the study was to investigate how students use coordination mechanisms to coordinate their activities. Our starting point has been collaborative telelearning (Bourdeau & Wasson, 1997) and coordination mechanisms (Schmidt & Simone, 1996). We identify some difficulties that arise when geographically distributed teams organize joint activities by groupware tools, and we look at how various forms of coordination mechanisms address these issues. Our findings indicate that students coordinate many of their activities by informal, locally adopted resources instead of fully developed coordination mechanisms. To explain this form of behaviour we see coordination as an aspect of inter-subjectivity, and we define inter-subjectivity as a reciprocal relationship of coordination, collaboration and interaction. We discuss intersubjectivity in terms of the subject-object-subject epistemology developed by Raeithel (1983) and Fichtner (1984).
Optimization of Discrete‐Continuous Dynamic Systems Based on Disjunctive Programming

In this contribution, a novel approach for the modeling and optimization of discrete‐continuous dynamic systems based on a disjunctive problem formulation is proposed. It will be shown that a disjunctive model representation, which constitutes an alternative to mixed‐integer model formulations, provides a very flexible and intuitive way to formulate discrete‐continuous dynamic optimization problems. Moreover, the structure and properties of the disjunctive process models can be exploited for an efficient and robust numerical solution by applying generalized disjunctive programming techniques. The proposed modeling and optimization approach will be illustrated by means of an optimal control problem that embeds a linear discretecontinuous dynamic system. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Online Impulse Buying Behavior Amongst Undergraduate Students in Tianjin, The People’s Republic of China

The aim of this study is to understand online business, regarding impulse buying behavior amongst undergraduate students in Tianjin, China. This study concentrated on the Taobao.com platform, and considered variables of website quality (security, navigability, and visual appeal), hedonic shopping value (product novelty, fun and escapism), and product knowledge (word of mouth and social norms), to learn how online shop owners increase their profits by encouraging impulse buying behavior. The results suggest that Taobao.com online shop owners manage their websites to be physically attractive; consider changing their products; and even improve shopping through word of mouth regarding the products they offer.
Interorganizational systems and trust in strategic alliances

The literature on interorganizational systems (IOSs) has paid limited attention to non-buyer-supplier relationships and to the way IOSs relate to trust. Empirical evidence on trust is also limited. In this paper, we report on a qualitative empirical study of the relationship between trust and IOSs in strategic alliances (SAs). The results support a bi-directional relationship between trust and IOS development and use, but also indicate that, paradoxically, trust in the partner may not always be considered relevant. There is also evidence that power, information systems-enabled controls, and monitoring can enhance trust, reduce trust, or even act as substitutes to trust in the partner as a means of reducing risk. A number of aspects of the relationship between IOSs and trust seem to be related to phenomena specific to, or more prevalent in, SAs compared to buyersupplier relationships, indicating that the type of relationship in which IOSs and trust are studied matters.
DeepVGI: Deep Learning with Volunteered Geographic Information

Recently, deep learning has been widely studied to recognize ground objects with satellite imageries. However, finding ground truths especially for developing and rural areas is quite hard and manually labeling a large set of training data is costly. In this work, we propose an ongoing research named DeepVGI which aims at deeply learning from satellite imageries with the supervision of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). VGI data from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and a crowdsourcing mobile application named MapSwipe which allows volunteers to label images with buildings or roads for humanitarian aids are utilized. Meanwhile, an active learning framework with deep neural networks is developed by incorporating both VGI data with more complete supervision knowledge. Our experiments show that DeepVGI can achieve high building detection performance for humanitarian mapping in rural African areas.
Computation of Solid-Liquid Phase Fronts in the Sharp Interface Limit on Fixed Grids

A finite-difference formulation is applied to track solid? liquid boundaries on a fixed underlying grid. The interface is not of finite thickness but is treated as a discontinuity and is explicitly tracked. The imposition of boundary conditions exactly on a sharp interface that passes through the Cartesian grid is performed using simple stencil readjustments in the vicinity of the interface. Attention is paid to formulating difference schemes that are globally second-order accurate in x and t. Error analysis and grid refinement studies are performed for test problems involving the diffusion and convection? diffusion equations, and for stable solidification problems. Issues concerned with stability and change of phase of grid points in the evolution of solid? liquid phase fronts are also addressed. It is demonstrated that the field calculation is second-order accurate while the position of the phase front is calculated to first-order accuracy. Furthermore, the accuracy estimates hold for the cases where there is a property jump across the interface. Unstable solidification phenomena are simulated and an attempt is made to compare results with previously published work. The results indicate the need to begin an effort to benchmark computations of instability phenomena.
An Efficient and Provably Correct Algorithm for the Multiscale Estimation of Image Contours by Means of Polygonal Lines

A large portion of image contours is characterized by local properties such as sharp variations of the image intensity across the contour. The integration of local image descriptors estimated by using these local properties into curvilinear descriptors is a difficult problem from a theoretical viewpoint because of the combinatorially large number of possible curvilinear descriptors. To deal with this difficulty, the notion of compressible graphs is introduced and a contour data model is defined leading to an efficient linear-time algorithm which provably recovers contours with an upper bound on the approximation error.
Do Spin-Offs Really Create Value? The European Case

We study wealth effects for a sample of 161 spin-offs from 15 different European countries that were announced between January 1987 and September 2000. The cumulative average abnormal return over the three-day event window is 2.35%. The mean abnormal return is 2.89% for companies that increase their industrial focus and only 1.20% for non-focus increasing companies.These results are in line with previous studies for the United States.The long-run returns in excess of the market return are significantly negative for both parent and pro-forma combined firms.However, if we control for the size and book-to-market effects by creating a matching portfolio, we find mostly insignificant long-run excess returns both for focus-increasing and non-focus increasing parents, subsidiaries and pro-forma combined firms.This result suggests that, unlike U.S. spin-offs, European spin-offs are not associated with long-run outperformance.
Changes in the levels of cerebral and extracerebral sterols in the brain of patients with Alzheimer's disease Published, JLR Papers in Press, October 1, 2003. DOI 10.1194/jlr.M300320-JLR200

24S-hydroxycholesterol is a side-chain oxidized oxysterol formed in the brain that is continuously crossing the blood-brain barrier to reach the circulation. There may be an opposite flux of 27-hydroxycholesterol, which is formed to a lower extent in the brain than in most other organs. Here we measured cholesterol, lathosterol, 24S- and 27-hydroxycholesterol, and plant sterols in four different brain areas of deceased Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and controls. 24S-hydroxycholesterol was decreased and 27-hydroxycholesterol increased in all the brain samples from the AD patients. The difference was statistically significant in four of the eight comparisons. The ratio of 27-hydroxycholesterol to 24S-hydroxycholesterol was significantly increased in all brain areas of the AD patients and also in the brains of aged mice expressing the Swedish Alzheimer mutation APP751. Cholesterol 24S-hydroxylase and 27-hydroxylase protein was not significantly different between AD patients and controls. A high correlation was observed between the levels of 24S-hydroxycholesterol and lathosterol in the frontal cortex of the AD patients but not in the controls. Most probably the high levels of 27-hydroxycholesterol are due to increased influx of this steroid over the blood-brain barrier and the lower levels of 24S-hydroxycholesterol to decreased production. The high correlation between lathosterol and 24-hydroxycholesterol is consistent with a close coupling between synthesis and metabolism of cholesterol in the frontal cortex of the AD brain.
OCA: Opinion corpus for Arabic

Sentiment analysis is a challenging new task related to text mining and natural language processing. Although there are, at present, several studies related to this theme, most of these focus mainly on English texts. The resources available for opinion mining (OM) in other languages are still limited. In this article, we present a new Arabic corpus for the OM task that has been made available to the scientific community for research purposes. The corpus contains 500 movie reviews collected from different web pages and blogs in Arabic, 250 of them considered as positive reviews, and the other 250 as negative opinions. Furthermore, different experiments have been carried out on this corpus, using machine learning algorithms such as support vector machines and Nave Bayes. The results obtained are very promising and we are encouraged to continue this line of research.
TIME EFFICIENT SPAM E-MAIL FILTERING FOR TURKISH

TIME EFFICIENT SPAM E-MAIL FILTERING FOR TURKISH In the present thesis, we propose spam e-mail filtering methods having high accuracies and low time complexities. The methods are based on the n-gram approach and a heuristics which is referred to as the first n-words heuristics. Though the main concern of the research is studying the applicability of these methods on Turkish e-mails, they were also applied to English e-mails. A data set for both languages was compiled. Tests were performed with different parameters. Success rates above 95% for Turkish e-mails and around 98% for English e-mails were obtained. In addition, it has been shown that the time complexities can be reduced significantly without sacrificing from success. We also propose a combined perception refinement (CPR) which improves baseline success rates around 2%, where development set is used in the first step of the CPR to find out the parameters used in the second step. Free word order is another characteristic of Turkish language; we will make an attempt to implement free word order aspect of Turkish.
The Impact of Macroeconomic News on US Interest Rates and Stock Indices Conditional on Their Volatility

This paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic news on the dynamics of interest rates and stock returns during "low" and "high" volatility periods. These periods are determined by estimating asset dynamics using a SWARCH process. Our results suggest that securities volatility is higher during periods of financial or economic instability. We use these results to evaluate the impact of news during "low" and "high" volatility periods using a GARCH model. News effects, especially “good” and “large” news, on interest rates are amplified during "high" uncertainty periods. The effect on stock returns is moderate. GARCH parameters differ strongly during both periods.
Keeping track of objects while exploring a spatial layout with partial cues: Location-based and deictic direction-based strategies

A growing interdisciplinary literature has been concerned with object cognition and its relation to deictic/indexical reference mechanisms. This literature postulates that explanation of many phenomena in perception requires appeal to interactions between agent and environment, and to the ways that sensory-motor information connects to cognition through deictic (or demonstrative) reference. In this paper we report a study of the ability to keep track of distal targets in informationally impoverished situations – in particular when only the direction of these objects is known and not their locations. This study introduces a new experimental paradigm called the Modified Traveling Salesman Problem. This task requires subjects to visit once and only once n invisible targets in a 2D display, using a virtual vehicle controlled by the subject. Subjects can only see the directions of the targets from the current location of the vehicle, displayed by a set of directional segments that can be viewed inside a circular window surrounding the vehicle. Two conditions were compared. In the “allocentric” condition, subjects see the vehicle move across the screen and change orientation under their command. The “egocentric” condition is similar except for how the information is provided: the position and orientation of the vehicle icon remains fixed at the center of the screen and only target directions, as indicated by the directional segments, change as the subject “moves” the vehicle and changes its orientation relative to the objects (but not relative to the screen). The unexpected finding is that this task can be performed, in either condition, for up to 10 targets. We consider two types of strategies that might be used, “location-based” strategies and “deictic direction-based” strategies. Location-based strategies rely on spatial memory and attempt to infer the locations of all the targets. Direction-based strategies rely on a deictic frame of reference and focus on the directional segments themselves, keeping track of the ones that represent already-visited or to-be-visited targets. A number of observations suggest that the direction-based strategy was used, at least for larger numbers of targets, which is consistent with the deictic approach. According to our hypothesis, keeping track of the directional segments requires the use of deictic strategies for tracking segments and associating them with their status in the task – given by current status predicates Visited(x) or Not-visited(x) – perhaps using visual indexes (Pylyshyn, 2001), deictic pointers (Ballard et al., 1997), or object files (Kahneman et al, 1992).