Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE ICSI/SRI/UW RT04 STRUCTURAL METADATA EXTRACTION SYSTEM

Both human and automatic processing of speech require recognizing more than just the words. We describe the ICSISRI-UW metadata detection system in both broadcast news and spontaneous telephone conversations, developed as part of the DARPA EARS Rich Transcription program. System tasks include sentence boundary detection, filler word detection, and detection/correction of disfluencies. To achieve best performance, we combine information from different types of textual knowledge sources (based on words, partof-speech classes, and automatically induced classes) with information from a prosodic classifier. The prosodic classifier employs bagging and ensemble approaches to better estimate posterior probabilities. In addition to our previous HMM approach, we investigate using a maximum entropy (Maxent) and a conditional random field (CRF) approach for various tasks. Results using these techniques are presented for the 2004 NIST Rich Transcription metadata tasks.
Lowpass filter for increasing class separability

In remote sensing, the number of training samples is often limited. For hyperspectral data, it becomes more difficult to obtain accurate estimates of class statistics because of the small ratio of the training sample size to dimensionality. Generally speaking, classification performance depends on four factors: class separability, the training sample size, dimensionality, and classifier type (or discriminant function). To improve classification performance, attention is often focused on seeking improvements on the factors other than class separability because class separability is usually considered inherent and predetermined. The objective of this paper is to call attention to the fact that class separability can be increased. The lowpass filter is proposed as a means for increasing class separability if a data set consists of multipixel objects. In addition, an analysis procedure is proposed in the following order: the lowpass filter, the EM algorithm, feature extraction, and a maximum likelihood classifier. Experiments with hyperspectral data show that increasing class separability compensates for the loss of the classification accuracy caused by the poor statistics estimation due to the small ratio of the training sample size to dimensionality.
A comparison of Simplified Acute Physiology Score II, Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II and Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation III scoring system in predicting mortality and length of stay at surgical intensive care unit

Background: In critically ill patients, several scoring systems have been developed over the last three decades. The Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) and the Simplified Acute Physiology Score (SAPS) are the most widely used scoring systems in the intensive care unit (ICU). The aim of this study was to assess the prognostic accuracy of SAPS II and APACHE II and APACHE III scoring systems in predicting short-term hospital mortality of surgical ICU patients. Materials and Methods: Prospectively collected data from 202 patients admitted to Mashhad University Hospital postoperative ICU were analyzed. Calibration was estimated using the Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test. Discrimination was evaluated by using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area under a ROC curve (AUC). Result: Two hundred and two patients admitted on post-surgical ICU were evaluated. The mean SAPS II, APACHE II, and APACHE III scores for survivors were found to be significantly lower than of non-survivors. The calibration was best for APACHE II score. Discrimination was excellent for APACHE II (AUC: 0.828) score and acceptable for APACHE III (AUC: 0.782) and SAPS II (AUC: 0.778) scores. Conclusion: APACHE II provided better discrimination than APACHE III and SAPS II calibration was good at APACHE II and poor at APACHE III and SAPS II. Use of APACHE II was excellent in this post-surgical ICU.
A Role for Arabidopsis miR399f in Salt, Drought, and ABA Signaling

MiR399f plays a crucial role in maintaining phosphate homeostasis in Arabidopsis thaliana. Under phosphate starvation conditions, AtMYB2, which plays a role in plant salt and drought stress responses, directly regulates the expression of miR399f. In this study, we found that miR399f also participates in plant responses to abscisic acid (ABA), and to abiotic stresses including salt and drought. Salt and ABA treatment induced the expression of miR399f, as confirmed by histochemical analysis of promoter-GUS fusions. Transgenic Arabidopsis plants overexpressing miR399f (miR399f-OE) exhibited enhanced tolerance to salt stress and exogenous ABA, but hypersensitivity to drought. Our in silico analysis identified ABF3 and CSP41b as putative target genes of miR399f, and expression analysis revealed that mRNA levels of ABF3 and CSP41b decreased remarkably in miR399f-OE plants under salt stress and in response to treatment with ABA. Moreover, we showed that activation of stress-responsive gene expression in response to salt stress and ABA treatment was impaired in miR399f-OE plants. Thus, these results suggested that in addition to phosphate starvation signaling, miR399f might also modulates plant responses to salt, ABA, and drought, by regulating the expression of newly discovered target genes such as ABF3 and CSP41b.
Verifying multi-threaded software using smt-based context-bounded model checking

We describe and evaluate three approaches to model check multi-threaded software with shared variables and locks using bounded model checking based on Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) and our modelling of the synchronization primitives of the Pthread library. In the lazy approach, we generate all possible interleavings and call the SMT solver on each of them individually, until we either find a bug, or have systematically explored all interleavings. In the schedule recording approach, we encode all possible interleavings into one single formula and then exploit the high speed of the SMT solvers. In the underapproximation and widening approach, we reduce the state space by abstracting the number of interleavings from the proofs of unsatisfiability generated by the SMT solvers. In all three approaches, we bound the number of context switches allowed among threads in order to reduce the number of interleavings explored. We implemented these approaches in ESBMC, our SMT-based bounded model checker for ANSI-C programs. Our experiments show that ESBMC can analyze larger problems and substantially reduce the verification time compared to state-of-the-art techniques that use iterative context-bounding algorithms or counter-example guided abstraction refinement.
Performance Comparison of Executing Fast Transactions in Bitcoin Network Using Verifiable Code Execution

In this paper, we study Bit coin network for electronic cash transactions, and compare the extension to the BTCs network which inculcates provision of executing fast transactions with greater security and assurance with the former method of Proof-Of-Work for executing transactions. Above milestones are achieved by introducing the concepts of mutual trust and verifiable code execution between the payer and the payee in the network. Our work proposes a significant modification of the Pioneer model to provide a two-party trust framework for Bit coin transactions, considerably faster compared to the generic trust platform of Bit coin networks based on slow proof-of-work. The scheme proposed can promote the use of Bit coin transactions in real life scenarios, where fast transactions are desirable due time constraints between the payment and the service.
Infundibular protein and RNA microarray analyses from affected and clinically non‐affected scalp in male androgenetic alopecia patients

Non‐invasive sample collection methods could facilitate clinical research on hair diseases. In an exploratory experimental study on six male volunteers with untreated androgenetic alopecia (AGA), Hamilton‐Norwood stage IIIv‐IV, skin surface and infundibular protein as well as RNA extracts from plucked hair follicles were analyzed from frontal skin, vertex and clinically unaffected occiput. Slightly increased levels of inflammatory markers were only found in AGA‐affected scalp skin and infundibulum, not in RNA from plucked hair follicles. RNA expression profiles point towards differential expression of genes involved in hair cycle regulation, hair keratin production, but also RNA methylation and ion channel regulation.
Variation in movement: multiple locomotor gaits in Neotropical harvestmen

Author(s): Escalante, I; Badger, MA; Elias, DO | Abstract: © 2019 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. Navigation of complex environments is crucial for animals to find food, mates and/or shelter and to escape enemies. In order to move successfully in variable conditions, many animals have evolved the ability to switch between several patterns of locomotion or gaits. Here, we describe and differentiate between putative locomotor gaits in the harvestman, an arachnid that uses a hexapod-like alternate tripod gait. We recorded Neotropical harvestmen of the genus Prionostemma moving across a flat surface using high-speed video. We reconstructed three-dimensional trajectories and associated kinematics and found four different locomotor gaits: running, stotting, bobbing and walking. Gaits differed in their performance and postural kinematics, body trajectory, gait diagrams and/or kinetic and potential energy exchange. Our approach points out the importance of using multiple kinematic features to differentiate gaits. The use of a specific gait was not predicted by leg length, body area or sex. We propose testable hypotheses regarding the function of each gait and the factors that drive the evolution of different gaits. Ultimately, the diversity of locomotory gaits can allow animals to respond to different environmental challenges and contexts.
Evaluating the error probability in lightwave systems with chromatic dispersion, arbitrary pulse shape and pre- and postdetection filtering

A novel approach to analytically evaluate the bit error probability in optically preamplified direct-detection systems is presented, which can take into account the effects of pulse shaping, chirping, filtering at the transmitter and the receiver, both pre- and postdetection, chromatic dispersion, and ASE noise. The method is computationally very fast in that the saddle point integration method for solving the resulting line integral of a particular moment generating function is adopted. A closed-form approximation for the bit error probability is also provided, which is within 0.01 dB from the exact numerical results.
Short-Term Adaptation of Joint Position Sense Occurs during and after Sustained Vibration of Antagonistic Muscle Pairs

Proprioception is critical for the control of many goal-directed activities of daily living. While contributions from skin and joint receptors exist, the muscle spindle is thought to play an important role in allowing accurate judgments of limb position and movement to occur. The discharges elicited from muscle spindles can be degraded by simultaneous agonist-antagonist tendon vibration, causing proprioception to be distorted. Despite this, changes in limb perception that may result from sensory adaptation to this stimulus remain misunderstood. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to investigate short-term proprioceptive adaptation resulting from vibration of antagonistic muscle pairs. We measured elbow joint position sense in 21 healthy young adults while 80 Hz vibration was applied simultaneously to the distal tendons of the elbow flexor and extensor muscles. Matching errors were then analyzed during early and late adaptation phases to assess short-term adaptation to the vibration stimuli. Participants committed significant undershoot errors during the early adaptation phase, but were comparable to baseline measurements during the late adaptation phase. When we removed the vibration stimuli and conducted a second joint position matching task, matching variability increased significantly, and participants committed overshoot errors. These results bring into question the efficacy of simultaneous agonist-antagonist tendon vibration to degrade proprioceptive acuity.
A Generalized Metaphor of Chinese Restaurant Franchise to Fusing Both Panchromatic and Multispectral Images for Unsupervised Classification

Two-step ways are often used for fusing both panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) images for classification, e.g., classifying MS images sharpened by PAN images or directly pouring fine spatial details of PAN images into a classification result of MS images. In this paper, we present a unified Bayesian framework to iteratively discovering semantic segments from PAN images and allocating cluster labels for the segments using MS images. Specifically, the probabilistic generative process of both PAN and MS images is explained with a generalized metaphor of the Chinese restaurant franchise (CRF) (gCRF), in which the two iterative random processes, i.e., table selection and dish selection, are adapted to discovering semantic segments in PAN images and inferring cluster labels for the discovered segments using MS images, respectively. Our major contributions are twofold: 1) The CRF is generalized into an image fusion framework by elegantly decomposing its two random processes, and 2) the random process of table selection in the CRF is transformed into stochastic image segmentation by enforcing spatial constraints over adjacent pixels. The qualitative analysis of experimental results shows that the gCRF can effectively utilize both the spatial details of the PAN images and the spectral information of the MS images. In terms of quantitative evaluation, the gCRF is comparable with support vector machine-based supervised classification methods.
A Factorization Approach to Inertial Affine Structure from Motion

We consider the problem of reconstructing a 3-D scene from a moving camera with high frame rate using the affine projection model. This problem is traditionally known as Affine Structure from Motion (Affine SfM), and can be solved using an elegant low-rank factorization formulation. In this paper, we assume that an accelerometer and gyro are rigidly mounted with the camera, so that synchronized linear acceleration and angular velocity measurements are available together with the image measurements. We extend the standard Affine SfM algorithm to integrate these measurements through the use of image derivatives.
Segmentation by minimal description

The authors formulate the segmentation task as a search for a set of descriptions which minimally encodes a scene. A novel framework for cooperative robust estimation is used to estimate descriptions that locally provide the most savings in encoding an image. A modified Hopfield-Tank networks finds the subset of these descriptions which best describes an entire scene, accounting for occlusion and transparent overlap among individual descriptions. Using a part-based 3-D shape model the authors have implemented a system that is able to successfully segment images into their constituent structure. <<ETX>>
Scheduler-based Defenses against Cross-VM Side-channels

Public infrastructure-as-a-service clouds, such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure allow arbitrary clients to run virtual machines (VMs) on shared physical infrastructure. This practice of multi-tenancy brings economies of scale, but also introduces the threat of malicious VMs abusing the scheduling of shared resources. Recent works have shown how to mount cross-VM side-channel attacks to steal cryptographic secrets. The straightforward solution is hard isolation that dedicates hardware to each VM. However, this comes at the cost of reduced efficiency. We investigate the principle of soft isolation: reduce the risk of sharing through better scheduling. With experimental measurements, we show that a minimum run time (MRT) guarantee for VM virtual CPUs that limits the frequency of preemptions can effectively prevent existing Prime+Probe cache-based side-channel attacks. Through experimental measurements, we find that the performance impact of MRT guarantees can be very low, particularly in multi-core settings. Finally, we integrate a simple per-core CPU state cleansing mechanism, a form of hard isolation, into Xen. It provides further protection against side-channel attacks at little cost when used in conjunction with an MRT guarantee.
Developmentally regulated initiation of DNA synthesis by telomerase: evidence for factor‐assisted de novo telomere formation

Telomerase serves a dual role at telomeres, maintaining tracts of telomere repeats and forming telomeres de novo on broken chromosomes in a process called chromosome healing. In ciliates, both mechanisms are readily observed. Vegetatively growing cells maintain pre‐existing telomeres, while cells undergoing macronuclear development fragment their chromosomes and form telomeres de novo. Here we provide the first evidence for developmentally regulated initiation of DNA synthesis by telomerase. In vitro assays were conducted with telomerase from vegetative and developing Euplotes macronuclei using chimeric primers that contained non‐telomeric 3′ ends and an upstream stretch of telomeric DNA. In developing macronuclei, chimeric primers had two fates: nucleotides were either polymerized directly onto the 3′ terminus or residues were removed from the 3′ end by endonucleolytic cleavage before polymerization began. In contrast, telomerase from vegetative macronuclei used only the cleavage pathway. Telomere repeat addition onto non‐telomeric 3′ ends was lost when developing macronuclei were lysed and the contents purified on glycerol gradients. However, when fractions from the glycerol gradient were added back to partially purified telomerase, telomere synthesis was restored. The data indicate that a dissociable chromosome healing factor (CHF) collaborates with telomerase to initiate developmentally programmed de novo telomere formation.
Marginal adaptation of direct class II composite restorations with different cavity liners.

UNLABELLED The aim of this study was to evaluate how cavity linings with different elastic modulus can influence the marginal adaptation (MA) of Class II composite restorations before and after thermo-mechanical loading. MATERIALS AND METHODS Forty Class II cavities with margins extending 1 mm below the cement-enamel junction were prepared in extracted human third molars. In each group except the control group, a lining material of 1-mm thickness was applied to the bottom of the cavity and polymerized before placing the resin composite Herculite XRV Ultra (group A: control; group B: Premise Flowable lining; group C: Herculite XRV Ultra lining; and group D: Optibond FL lining). MA was evaluated (with a scanning electron microscope) before and after loading (200,000 loading cycles). Statistical analysis was done using the Shapiro-Wilks test, the analysis of variance test, and Duncan post hoc test at p<0.05. RESULTS Before loading, the percentages of continuous margins in dentin were superior (p<0.05) for groups C and D (71.1% and 87.2%, respectively) compared to groups A and B (55.7% and 48.3%, respectively). After loading, group D (79.8%) was statistically superior in dentin compared to all of the other groups (43.6%, 35.9%, and 54.4%, respectively). In occlusal enamel, no significant difference was found between groups. The percentage of enamel fractures and the percentage of noncontinuous margins in proximal enamel were high, with no significant difference between liners. It can be concluded that for the materials used in this study, a 1-mm-thick lining with an extremely low elastic modulus (2-3 GPa) could redistribute shrinkage stress. The use of a flowable composite did not significantly improve MA.
Periodontopathogens and human β-defensin-2 expression in gingival crevicular fluid from patients with periodontal disease in Guangxi, China.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Periodontal diseases are often induced by periodontopathogens, which are always exposed to certain innate immune factors in gingival crevicular fluid, including human β-defensin-2 (hBD-2). This study aims to investigate the relationship among periodontopathogens, clinical parameters and hBD-2 expression. MATERIAL AND METHODS Thirty-two healthy controls, 42 patients with chronic gingivitis and 95 patients with chronic periodontitis were recruited in Guangxi, China. Bleeding index, probing depth and clinical attachment level were measured for all teeth including mesiobuccal, buccal, disobuccal, mesiolingual, lingual, disolingual six sites of all patient. Gingival crevicular fluid samples were collected from the study sites. The prevalence and copy numbers (CN) of Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, Porphyromonas gingivalis, Prevotella intermedia, Treponema denticola, Tannerella forsythia and total bacteria in gingival crevicular fluid were quantified by real-time PCR. The hBD-2 concentration in gingival crevicular fluid was measured by ELISA. RESULTS Both the prevalence and the CN of A. actinomycetemcomitans, P. gingivalis, T. denticola and T. forsythia were higher in patients with chronic periodontitis than in healthy controls and patients with chronic gingivitis; however, there was no significant difference in the prevalence of P. intermedia among the three study groups, and the highest CN was found in patients with chronic gingivitis, rather than in patients with chronic periodontitis. The loads of P. gingivalis, P. intermedia, T. denticola and total bacteria were positively related to probing depth, bleeding index and clinical attachment level. The concentration of hBD-2 in gingival crevicular fluid was higher in patients with chronic gingivitis and in patients with chronic periodontitis than in healthy controls. In addition, the hBD-2 concentration was positively related to the CN of P. gingivalis, T. forsythia and total bacteria, as well as to bleeding index and probing depth. CONCLUSION The prevalence, composition and CN of periodontopathogens were closely related to the severity of periodontal disease, and the red complex was related to the severity of clinical symptoms of periodontal diseases. The concentration of hBD-2 in gingival crevicular fluid from periodontal disease sites was higher than that in gingival crevicular fluid from healthy sites, which suggests that hBD-2 expression might be up-regulated by periodontopathogens.