Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Syntax-based Preordering for Statistical Machine Translation

This thesis focuses on a major yet unsolved machine translation difficulty called a word ordering problem. Since every language has its own word order, machine translation systems have to translate one’s word order into another, in addition to translation of words. However, practical machine translation systems do not translate most of word orders due to computational complexity of the word ordering problem. This makes machine translation between distant language pairs, such as English and Japanese, inaccurate, because they have exceptionally dissimilar word orders as their nature. It is therefore the final goal of this study to establish a machine translation system for distant language pairs, using a practical reordering model that can handle accurate word ordering. Our challenge primarily involves two types of obstacles we need to overcome. One obstacle is the computational complexity of the word ordering problem that has given limits to practical machine translation systems. Another obstacle is the problem of exceptionally dissimilar word orders in distant language pairs, such as English and Japanese, which has reduced machine translation accuracy to date. In order to tackle our challenges, we make use of a promising approach called syntax-based preordering for statistical machine translation. In this approach, we use syntactic parsers that automatically parse input texts and output parse trees. We then modify the parse trees so that they represent much similar word orders to translation output than before. After that, the modified parse trees are used as input to a statistical machine translation system, which automatically learns a machine translation model from large data sets as similar to real world applications.
TempoSpring: A new immersive hands-free prototype for visualizing social networks: Demonstration paper

This paper presents a new hands-free prototype TempoSpring for exploring complex social networks. Based on the Microsoft Kinect, our system lets the user rotate, zoom and filter the graph, and aggregate nodes to highlight structural properties. TempoSpring provides complementary visual restitutions (monoscopy, passive and active stereoscopy) to a user standing in front of the wall/screen on which the graph is displayed. To overcome screen limitations or information mixtures when details are required on graph components we propose a multimodal approach which displays subgraphs on a secondary screen (e.g mobile device) to analyze details at a lower scale.
Recognizing and addressing child neglect in affluent families

This paper explores how social workers intervene with affluent parents when there are child protection concerns about neglect. Based on data gathered from a small-scale exploratory qualitative study with 30 practitioners from 12 local authorities across England, this study examined three overarching questions: (1) How do social workers identify risk factors for vulnerable children in affluent circumstances? (2) Which factors inhibit or enable social workers’ engagement with resistant affluent parents when there are child protection concerns? (3) What kind of skills, knowledge and experience is necessary for social workers to effectively assert their professional authority with affluent parents when there are concerns about abuse and neglect? The findings revealed that indicators of neglect can be difficult to identify and challenging to respond to when parents are affluent. Results indicate that social workers have to navigate complex power relationships with parents who are able to use their class privileges to resist their interventions. The paper concludes with a discussion of social workers’ skills and capacities for engaging highly-resistant affluent parents in the child protection system.
Sentenced to Debt: Explaining Student Mobilization in Chile

In 2011, Chilean students mobilized in the largest demonstrations since the country’s return to democracy. Students in some other Latin American countries have also carried out mass demonstrations in recent years. What explains students’ participation in mobilizations in Latin America? This article argues that financial grievances generated by neoliberal education policies and the massification of higher education are major causes of student protest participation. In addition, it shows how weak organizational linkages with ruling political parties increase the likelihood of mobilization. The theory is explored through a case study of higher education policy, student-party linkages, and student mobilization in Chile from 1990 to 2011. A statistical analysis of a survey of Chilean students demonstrates that a working-class background, using debt to finance education, and weak programmatic connections to parties in power are associated with higher levels of protest participation. En el ano 2011, los estudiantes chilenos se movilizaron en las protestas mas grandes del pais desde el retorno a la democracia. Los estudiantes en otros paises latinoamericanos tambien han realizado movilizaciones masivas en los ultimos anos ? Que explica la participacion de los estudiantes en protestas en America Latina? Este articulo sostiene que los malestares financieros generados por politicas educativas neoliberales y la masificacion de la educacion superior son causas importantes de la participacion estudiantil en protestas. Asimismo, el articulo demuestra como las conexiones debiles con los partidos politicos oficialistas aumentan la probabilidad de movilizacion. La teoria es explorada a traves de un estudio de caso de politicas de educacion superior, conexiones entre estudiantes y partidos, y movilizacion estudiantil en Chile entre 1990 y 2011. Un analisis estadistico de una encuesta de estudiantes chilenos demuestra que un origen de clase trabajadora, el uso de creditos para financiar la educacion, y las conexiones programaticas debiles con los partidos en el poder estan asociados con mayores niveles de participacion en protestas.
Inflammation, mineral metabolism and progressive coronary artery calcification in patients on haemodialysis.

BACKGROUND Coronary artery calcification (CAC) is an extensive and common complication in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). The aim of this study was to assess prospectively the change in CAC over a 2-year period and to identify the factors that may be associated with CAC progression in ESRD patients. METHODS The final analysis was performed on 40 of 43 stable haemodialysis patients who initially entered into the study. The study population underwent multirow spiral computed tomography to derive CAC scores at baseline and after a minimum of 12 months (24 months in 30 patients, 18 months in four, and 12 months in the remaining six patients). To provide a stable estimate that was unbiased with respect to the baseline CAC, square root-transformed CAC scores were used for the analyses of the changes in CAC. RESULTS The median CAC score was 191 (range, 0-2403) mm3 at baseline and increased to 253 (range, 0-2745) mm3 at follow-up (P < 0.001) and the median annualized change in square root-transformed CAC score was 1.48 (range, -0.95-8.64) mm3/year. The annualized change of the square root-transformed CAC score positively correlated with the time-integrated levels of C-reactive protein (R = 0.521, P = 0.001), phosphorus (R = 0.433, P = 0.005) and calcium x phosphorus product (R = 0.394, P = 0.012), but did not correlate with the levels of fetuin-A or lipid parameters. Even after adjusting for age, gender and baseline CAC score, C-reactive protein levels were independently associated with CAC progression. CONCLUSION These data suggest that chronic inflammation as well as altered mineral metabolism contributes to a rapid progression of CAC in ESRD patients. Additional, larger scale studies are required to confirm our findings.
A new vital stain for visualizing vacuolar membrane dynamics and endocytosis in yeast

We have used a lipophilic styryl dye, N-(3-triethylammoniumpropyl)-4- (p-diethylaminophenyl-hexatrienyl) pyridinium dibromide (FM 4-64), as a vital stain to follow bulk membrane-internalization and transport to the vacuole in yeast. After treatment for 60 min at 30 degrees C, FM 4- 64 stained the vacuole membrane (ring staining pattern). FM 4-64 did not appear to reach the vacuole by passive diffusion because at 0 degree C it exclusively stained the plasma membrane (PM). The PM staining decreased after warming cells to 25 degrees C and small punctate structures became apparent in the cytoplasm within 5-10 min. After an additional 20-40 min, the PM and cytoplasmic punctate staining disappeared concomitant with staining of the vacuolar membrane. Under steady state conditions, FM 4-64 staining was specific for vacuolar membranes; other membrane structures were not stained. The dye served as a sensitive reporter of vacuolar dynamics, detecting such events as segregation structure formation during mitosis, vacuole fission/fusion events, and vacuolar morphology in different classes of vacuolar protein sorting (vps) mutants. A particularly striking pattern was observed in class E mutants (e.g., vps27) where 500-700 nm organelles (presumptive prevacuolar compartments) were intensely stained with FM 4- 64 while the vacuole membrane was weakly fluorescent. Internalization of FM 4-64 at 15 degrees C delayed vacuolar labeling and trapped FM 4- 64 in cytoplasmic intermediates between the PM and the vacuole. The intermediate structures in the cytoplasm are likely to be endosomes as their staining was temperature, time, and energy dependent. Interestingly, unlike Lucifer yellow uptake, vacuolar labeling by FM 4- 64 was not blocked in sec18, sec14, end3, and end4 mutants, but was blocked in sec1 mutant cells. Finally, using permeabilized yeast spheroplasts to reconstitute FM 4-64 transport, we found that delivery of FM 4-64 from the endosome-like intermediate compartment (labeled at 15 degrees C) to the vacuole was ATP and cytosol dependent. Thus, we show that FM 4-64 is a new vital stain for the vacuolar membrane, a marker for endocytic intermediates, and a fluor for detecting endosome to vacuole membrane transport in vitro.
Generation of synthetic training data for an HMM-based handwriting recognition system

A perturbation model for generating synthetic text lines from existing cursively handwritten lines of text produced by human writers is presented. Our purpose is to improve the performance of an HMM-based off-line cursive handwriting recognition system by providing it with additional synthetic training data. Two kinds of perturbations are applied, geometrical transformations and thinning/thickening operations. The proposed perturbation model is evaluated under different experimental conditions.
Programming Hierarchical Task Networks in the Situation Calculus

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning (Sacerdoti 1974) is an approach to planning where problem-specific knowledge is used to remedy the computational intractability of classical planning. This knowledge is in the form of task decomposition directives, i.e. the planner is given a set of methods that tell it how a high-level task can be decomposed into lower-level tasks. The HTN planning problem consists in computing a sequence of primitive tasks that corresponds to performing the initial set of high-level tasks. Our purpose in this paper is 1) to give an account of HTNplanning as high-level programming in the situation calculus (McCarthy 1963) based languages Golog/ConGolog (Levesque et al. 1997; Giacomo, Lesperance, & Levesque 2000) and 2) to illustrate our approach with a ConGolog encoding of a logistics domain HTN-planning problem. The Golog/ConGolog languages have been extended to deal with explicit time, sensing actions, exogenous events, execution monitoring, incomplete knowledge of the initial state, stochastic actions and others. Thus the range of problems that can be tackled with this approach is potentially much larger. As an example, we modified the logistics domain encoding to execute on-line and deal with run-time exogenous delivery requests.
FAST TRIGONOMETRIC FUNCTIONS USING INTEL ’ S SSE 2 INSTRUCTIONS

The goal of this work was to answer one simple question: given that the trigonometric functions take hundreds of clock cycles to execute on a Pentium IV, can they be computed faster, especially given that all Intel processors now have fast floating-point hardware? The streaming SIMD extensions (SSE/SSE2) in every Pentium III and IV provide both scalar and vector modes of computation, so it has been our goal to use the vector hardware to compute the cosine and other trigonometric functions. The cosine function was chosen, as it has significant use in our research as well as in image construction with the discrete cosine transform.
IDENTIFICATION OF FACTORS RELATED TO URBAN AND RURAL HIGHWAY CRASHES

This paper presents the details of an investigation aimed at identifying critical factors contributing towards higher crash severity in rural and urban highway crashes. Ordered probit models were used to analyze the crash data from KARS (Kansas Accident Reporting System) database. Both urban and rural crashes were considered separately in this analysis and five categories of contributory factors, driver, vehicular, roadway, environmental and crash related, were included in the models. The results of this study showed that most of the contributory factors, which contribute towards crashes resulting in higher severities, are common for urban and rural crashes. Many driver related factors such as alcohol involvement, lack of seat belt usage, excessive speed, and driver ejection or being trapped due to the crash are more critical in resulting more severe crashes. It also showed that roadway geometry related parameters such as curbed and graded roads are more contributory towards higher crash severity. In two vehicle crashes, when the collision type is head-on, angle or rear-ended, the propensity of resulting in a more severe crash is high in both rural and urban highways. In rural areas, single vehicle crashes are significant towards higher severities compared to two vehicle crashes and animal vehicle crashes, but in urban areas both single and two vehicle crashes are significant. In contrast, under wet road surface conditions the probability of having a more severe crash is low in rural areas. The reason might be the reduced speeds due to driver cautiousness under such conditions.
SEMANTIC OBJECT EXTRACTION IN STEREO VIDEO SEQUENCES

This paper presents an efficient technique for unsupervised content-based segmentation in stereoscopic video sequences by appropriately combined different content descriptors in a hierarchical framework. Three main modules are involved in the proposed scheme; extraction of reliable depth information, image partition into color and depth regions and a constrained fusion algorithm of color segments using information derived from the depth map. In the first module, each stereo pair is analyzed and the disparity field and depth map are estimated. In the following phase, color and depth regions are created using a novel complexity-reducing multiresolution implementation of the Recursive Shortest Spanning Tree algorithm (M-RSST). While depth segments provide a coarse representation of the image content, color regions describe very accurately object boundaries. For this reason, in the final phase, a new segmentation fusion algorithm is employed which projects color segments onto depth segments.
Gap analysis of intrusion detection in smart grids

Given the recent emergence of the smart grid and smart grid related technologies, their security is a prime concern. Intrusion detection provides a second line of defense. However, conventional intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are unable to adequately address the unique requirements of the smart grid. This paper presents a gap analysis of contemporary IDSs from a smart grid perspective. This paper highlights the lack of adequate intrusion detection within the smart grid and discusses the limitations of current IDSs approaches. The gap analysis identifies current IDSs as being unsuited to smart grid application without significant changes to address smart grid specific requirements.
Discourse Forms and Processes in Indigenous Lowland South America: An Areal-Typological Perspective

▪ Abstract In indigenous lowland South America there are several discourse forms and processes that are shared by groups of people of distinct genetic linguistic affiliations; this leads us to posit this large region, which we label greater Amazonia, as a discourse area, a concept that parallels the notion of linguistic area. The discourse forms and processes we examine are ceremonial dialogue, dialogical performance, templatic ratifying, echo speech, ceremonial greeting, ritual wailing, evidentiality, speech reporting practices, parallelism, special languages, and shamanistic language use. We hypothesize that in lowland South America, discourse is the matrix for linguistic diffusion, i.e., that linguistic areas emerge within discourse areas. What we propose then is a discourse-centered approach to language change and history, parallel to a discourse-centered approach to language structure and use. Our survey includes a plea for a careful archiving of recorded and written materials dealing with lowland So.
PHOTORECEPTOR PHYTOCHROME REGULATES THE CYCLIC GUANOSINE 3',5' '-MONOPHOSPHATE SYNTHESIS IN AVENA SATIVA L. CELLS

Summary. The activity of guanylyl cyclase (GC) responsible for cGMP synthesis was found to be predominantly located in a fraction of plasma membranes in cells of Avena sativa seedlings. The GC activity was shown to depend on light conditions of plant cultivation and seedlings age. The reversible regulation of the GC activity in etiolated seedlings by red/far red light was found. This suggests that photoregulation of GC activity is mediated by phytochrome in cells of oat seedlings.
An Algorithm for Quantum Template Matching

Quantum circuits are often generated by decomposing gates from networks with classical reversible gates. Only in rare cases, the results are minimal. Post-optimization methods, such as template matching, are employed to reduce the quantum costs of circuits. Quantum templates are derived from identity circuits. All minimal realizations, within certain limitations, can be embedded into templates. Due to this property, templates matching has the potential to reduce quantum costs of circuits. However, one of the difficulties in finding templates matches is due to the mobility of the gates within the circuit. Thus far, template matching procedures have employed heuristics to reduce the search space. This article presents an in-depth study of exact template matching with a set of algorithms. A graph structure with the corresponding circuits facilitates the discovery of potential sequences of templates to be matched, and how exact minimization of circuits can be accomplished. The significance of the proposed method is verified in benchmarks optimization.
Multiplex Real-Time PCR-shortTUB Assay for Detection of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex in Smear-Negative Clinical Samples with Low Mycobacterial Loads

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major health problem worldwide. Control of TB requires rapid, accurate diagnosis of active disease. However, extrapulmonary TB is very difficult to diagnose because the clinical specimens have very low bacterial loads. Several molecular methods involving direct detection of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) have emerged in recent years. ABSTRACT Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major health problem worldwide. Control of TB requires rapid, accurate diagnosis of active disease. However, extrapulmonary TB is very difficult to diagnose because the clinical specimens have very low bacterial loads. Several molecular methods involving direct detection of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) have emerged in recent years. Real-time PCR amplification simultaneously combines the amplification and detection of candidate sequences by using fluorescent probes (mainly TaqMan or Molecular Beacons) in automated systems. The multiplex real-time PCR-short assay is performed using locked nucleic acid (LNA) probes (length, 8 to 9 nucleotides) in combination with CodUNG to detect multiple pathogens in clinical samples. In this study, we evaluated the performance of this novel multiplex assay for detecting the MTBC in comparison with that of the conventional culture-based method. The multiplex real-time PCR-shortTUB assay targets two genes, whiB3 (redox-responsive transcriptional regulator) and pstS1 (phosphate-specific transporter), yielding limits of detection (LOD) of 10 copies and 100 copies, respectively, and amplification efficiencies of 92% and 99.7%, respectively. A total of 94 extrapulmonary samples and pulmonary samples with low mycobacterial loads (all smear negative; 75 MTBC culture positive) were analyzed using the test, yielding an overall sensitivity of 88% and a specificity of 95%. For pleural fluid and tissues/biopsy specimens, the sensitivity was 83% and 85%, respectively. In summary, this technique could be implemented in routine clinical microbiology testing to reduce the overall turnaround time for MTBC detection and may therefore be a useful tool for the diagnosis of extrapulmonary tuberculosis and diagnosis using pulmonary samples with low mycobacterial loads.
Cumulative Effect of Amino Acid Replacements Results in Enhanced Thermostability of Potato Type L α-Glucan Phosphorylase

ABSTRACT The thermostability of potato type L α-glucan phosphorylase (EC 2.4.1.1) was enhanced by random and site-directed mutagenesis. We obtained three single-residue mutations—Phe39→Leu (F39L), Asn135→Ser (N135S), and Thr706→Ile (T706I)—by random mutagenesis. Although the wild-type enzyme was completely inactivated, these mutant enzymes retained their activity even after heat treatment at 60°C for 2 h. Combinations of these mutations were introduced by site-directed mutagenesis. The simultaneous mutation of two (F39L/N135S, F39L/T706I, and N135S/T706I) or three (F39L/N135S/T706I) residues further increased the thermostability of the enzyme, indicating that the effect of the replacement of the residues was cumulative. The triple-mutant enzyme, F39L/N135S/T706I, retained 50% of its original activity after heat treatment at 65°C for 20 min. Further analysis indicated that enzymes with a F39L or T706I mutation were resistant to possible proteolytic degradation.
Low-power high-performance double-gate fully depleted SOI circuit design

Double-gate fully depleted (DGFD) SOI circuits are regarded as the next generation VLSI circuits. This paper investigates the impact of scaling on the demand and challenges of DGFD SOI circuit design for low power and high performance. We study how the added back-gate capacitance affects circuit power and performance; how to tradeoff the enhanced short-channel effect immunity with the added back-channel leakage; and how the coupling between the front- and back-gates affects circuit reliability. Our analyses over different technology generations using the MEDICI device simulator show that DGFD SOI circuits have significant advantages in driving high output load. DGFD SOI circuits also show excellent ability in controlling leakage current. However, for low output load, no gain is obtained for DGFD SOI circuits. Also, it is necessary to optimize the back-gate oxide thickness for best leakage control. Moreover, threshold variation may cause reliability problems for thin back-gate oxide DGFD SOI circuits operated at low supply voltage.