Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning the structure of Factored Markov Decision Processes in reinforcement learning problems

Recent decision-theoric planning algorithms are able to find optimal solutions in large problems, using Factored Markov Decision Processes (FMDPs). However, these algorithms need a perfect knowledge of the structure of the problem. In this paper, we propose SDYNA, a general framework for addressing large reinforcement learning problems by trial-and-error and with no initial knowledge of their structure. SDYNA integrates incremental planning algorithms based on FMDPs with supervised learning techniques building structured representations of the problem. We describe SPITI, an instantiation of SDYNA, that uses incremental decision tree induction to learn the structure of a problem combined with an incremental version of the Structured Value Iteration algorithm. We show that SPITI can build a factored representation of a reinforcement learning problem and may improve the policy faster than tabular reinforcement learning algorithms by exploiting the generalization property of decision tree induction algorithms.
The Identification of a Speaker's Sex from Synthesized Vowels

This experiment assessed whether fundamental frequency or formant frequencies have more perceptual salience in the identification of the sex of the speaker from synthesized vowels. Four sets of ten vowels were synthesized by combining fundamental frequencies and formant frequencies with different permutations 50 listeners took part in a listening test. Analysis of the listening test scores suggested that for 36 vowels, the fundamental frequency (F0) was probably the most salient perceptual cue. For the remaining four vowels, however, this was not the case as either the formant frequencies or the onset-offset patterns of the F0 appeared to have some perceptual salience.
Fault accommodation of an experimental three tank system using fuzzy predictive control

This paper proposes the application of fault-tolerant control (FTC) using weighted fuzzy predictive control. The FTC approach is based on two steps, fault detection and isolation (FDI) and fault accommodation. Fault detection is performed by a model-based approach using fuzzy modeling. Fault isolation uses a fuzzy decision making approach. The model of the isolated fault is used in fault accommodation with a model predictive control (MPC) scheme. This paper uses a weighted fuzzy predictive control scheme, where fuzzy goals and fuzzy constraints are described in a fuzzy objective function. Each criterion (goal or constraint) has an associated weight factor, which is chosen by the decision-maker. Two faults were considered in an experimental three tanks process and the respective fuzzy models were identified. The fuzzy FTC scheme was able to accommodate the faults of the experimental process.
Social support on Weibo for people living with HIV/AIDS in China: a quantitative content analysis

The Internet has recently become an important source of social support. People living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in China created an online support group (the HIV/AIDS Weibo Group) on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, in January 2011. To investigate social support in the HIV/AIDS Weibo Group, the content of all 7215 messages posted in this Weibo group since its launch on 18 January 2011, was analyzed. The analysis demonstrates that the majority of messages fell into the category of social support. Moreover, social support provisions were far more frequent than social support requests. The results also show that informational support, compared with emotional and instrumental support, was the most frequently requested and provided type of support in this Weibo group.
Atomoxetine Treatment of ADHD in Children With Comorbid Tourette Syndrome

Objective: This study examines changes in severity of tics and ADHD during atomoxetine treatment in ADHD patients with Tourette syndrome (TS). Method: Subjects (7-17 years old) with ADHD (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV) and TS were randomly assigned to double-blind treatment with placebo (n = 56) or atomoxetine (0.5-1.5 mg/kg/day, n = 61) for approximately 18 weeks. Results: Atomoxetine subjects showed significantly greater improvement on ADHD symptom measures. Treatment was also associated with significantly greater reduction of tic severity on two of three measures. Significant increases were seen in mean pulse rate and rates of treatment-emergent nausea, decreased appetite, and decreased body weight. No other clinically relevant treatment differences were observed in any other vital sign, adverse event, laboratory parameter, or electrocardiographic measure. Conclusion: Atomoxetine is efficacious for treatment of ADHD and its use appears well tolerated in ADHD patients with comorbid TS. (J. of Att. Dis. 2008; 11(4) 470-481)
The Lack of Negative Affects as an Indicator for Identity Disturbance in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Preliminary Report

Background: Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) suffer from instability of their relationships, their affectivity and their identity. The purpose of the study was to investigate negative affects and identity disturbance in patients with BPD and in patients without personality disorder using questionnaire data and interview data. Sampling and Methods: Twelve patients with BPD and 12 patients with major depressive disorder without any personality disorder were assessed with the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO) and questionnaires (Inventory of Personality Organization, Beck Depression Inventory, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). They were compared with respect to the frequency of negative affective verbal expressions using computerized content analysis methods. Results: BPD patients showed higher levels of anxiety, depression and identity diffusion in the questionnaires than major depressive disorder patients without personality disorder. However, they did not report more negative affective expressions in the interview. Patients with identity disturbance of both groups showed higher values of negative mood in the questionnaires, but less anger, less anxiety and less affective intensity in the interview. Conclusion: The preliminary findings indicate that patients with identity disturbance show high levels of negative affects in questionnaires but only few negative affects in the interview situation. More studies are needed to enhance the understanding of negative affects and identity disturbance in BPD.
Noise reduction in oversampled filter banks using predictive quantization

We introduce two methods for quantization noise reduction in oversampled filter banks. These methods are based on predictive quantization (noise shaping or linear prediction). It is demonstrated that oversampled noise shaping or linear predictive subband coders are well suited for subband coding applications where, for technological or other reasons, low-resolution quantizers have to be used. In this case, oversampling combined with noise shaping or linear prediction improves the effective resolution of the subband coder at the expense of increased rate. Simulation results are provided to assess the achievable quantization noise reduction and resolution enhancement, and to investigate the rate-distortion properties of the proposed methods.
The use of role playing as a technique in the psychotherapy of children.

Play therapy involves interpreting the play activities of children to promote abreaction, insight, and/or corrective emotional experience. Because much of a child's “play” involves repetition, it seems logical that some forms of child psychotherapy might incorporate techniques involving repetition. Psychotherapy that includes role playing allows the child patient to gain mastery over difficult events and disturbing thought and affects. Role playing, including role reversal, gives the child psychotherapist an opportunity to view how a child construes the world, how the child is treated by others, and insight into the quality of those interactions.
Optimized size design of integrated magnetic components using area product approach

Substantial reductions in size and costs of magnetic components and power supplies can be achieved by an integration of magnetic components on one core. So far, no adequate method is known for computerized design of integrated magnetics. In this contribution, an optimized size design approach of integrated magnetic components using area product formulation is presented. In a first step, optimal flux density and area product values are determined for discrete multiple-winding inductors and transformers. Using these results in a second step, optimal area products are calculated for integrated magnetic components, consisting of e.g. transformer and either resonant or filter inductor
Cross-Layer Optimization for Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Radio Access Networks

In this paper, we propose a framework for cross-layer optimization to ensure ultra-high reliability and ultra-low latency in radio access networks, where both transmission delay and queueing delay are considered. With short transmission time, the blocklength of channel codes is finite, and the Shannon capacity cannot be used to characterize the maximal achievable rate with given transmission error probability. With randomly arrived packets, some packets may violate the queueing delay. Moreover, since the queueing delay is shorter than the channel coherence time in typical scenarios, the required transmit power to guarantee the queueing delay and transmission error probability will become unbounded even with spatial diversity. To ensure the required quality-of-service (QoS) with finite transmit power, a proactive packet dropping mechanism is introduced. Then, the overall packet loss probability includes transmission error probability, queueing delay violation probability, and packet dropping probability. We optimize the packet dropping policy, power allocation policy, and bandwidth allocation policy to minimize the transmit power under the QoS constraint. The optimal solution is obtained, which depends on both channel and queue state information. Simulation and numerical results validate our analysis, and show that setting the three packet loss probabilities as equal causes marginal power loss.
Facilitating Teachers' Participation in School‐Based Health Promotion—A Qualitative Study

The focus of this article is on examining Norwegian teachers' perception of what factors at the school's organisational level have facilitated their participation in a school‐based health promotion project. The study is based on 12 semistructured interviews with teachers from two of the pilot schools participating in the European Network of Health Promoting Schools. The findings indicate that there are a number of conditions at the organisational level facilitating the implementation process and the teachers' participation in the project. These conditions are common goals, good leadership, sufficient and available resources, competence and cooperation inside the school and with the local community. The results from this study also indicate that working with the Health Promoting Schools Project helped the teachers in fulfilling many of the goals of the new Norwegian National Curriculum (L97), and in the longer term, also contributed to the implementation of the new reform.
Telecom customer churn prediction based on imbalanced data re-sampling method

Customer is a very unstable group. Enterprises, of course, are happy to retain customers. While for enterprises, customer churn is always a rare event, but it is necessary to be paid attention. So the imbalanced data problem will arise in the field of telecom customer churn prediction. In this article, we utilize imbalanced data re-sampling method combines Support Vector Machine (SVM) to solve the imbalanced data problem, poor classification performance. Using the appropriate metrics which are more suitable for imbalanced data sets to evaluate the performance, the datasets are obtained from France telecom operator, Orange Telecom, and UCI. The experimental result proves that our prediction model performs satisfactorily, and it can be effective to predict the telecom customer churn.
Use of the Pyrithiamine-Induced Thiamine Deficient Animal Model of Korsakoff’s Syndrome for Exploratory Research Activities in Undergraduate Physiological Psychology

Undergraduate neuroscience laboratory activities frequently focus on exercises that build student’s wet/dry laboratory skills, foster critical thinking, and provide opportunities for hands-on experiences. Such activities are, without a doubt, extremely important, but sometimes fall short of modeling actual research and often lack the ‘unknown’ hypothetical nature accompanying empirical studies. In this article we report a series of research activities using an animal model of Korsakoff’s syndrome in a Physiological Psychology course. The activities involve testing hypotheses regarding performance of animals with experimentally-induced Korsakoff’s syndrome and the effectiveness of glucose as a memory-enhancer in this model. Students were given a set of 24 articles for use in answering a series of laboratory report questions regarding the activities. At the conclusion of the course, students were asked to complete a questionnaire designed to assess the effectiveness of the laboratory activities. Results of the laboratory exercises indicated that locomotor activity, environmental habituation, and anxiety were unaffected in the Korsakoff condition, and glucose had no effect. Results of performance in the T-maze indicated that Korsakoff animals had significantly fewer spontaneous alternations than controls, but Korsakoff animals given glucose did not reveal this difference. Results of the student assessments indicated that the activities were considered educational, challenging, and more interesting than standard laboratory activities designed to reproduce reliable phenomena.
DIAGNOSIS AND MANAGEMENT OF PROSTATITIS

Prostatitis is a common syndrome characterized by infection, pain and/or inflammation of the prostate or surrounding tissues. The diagnosis requires a careful history, physical exam, and localization of inflammation and/or infection to the prostate. Bacterial prostatitis is uncommon and characterized by acute or recurrent infection of the bladder, which usually responds to antimicrobial therapy. Chronic pelvic pain syndrome is common and characterized by pelvic pain, no infection and varying degrees of prostate inflammation. Because the etiology is unknown, empiric therapy is utilized and only moderately successful. Asymptomatic prostatitis is detected in the course of evaluation for BPH, prostate cancer or infertility and should only be treated if the underlying condition warrants therapy.
Learning Task Experiments in the TREC 2010 Legal Track

The Learning Task of the TREC 2010 Legal Track investigated the effectiveness of e-Discovery search techniques at learning from examples to estimate the probability of relevance of every document in a collection. The task specified 8 test topics, each of which included a one-sentence request for documents to produce and several examples of relevant and non-relevant items from a new target collection of 685,592 e-mail messages and attachments. For our participation, we produced three retrieval sets to compare experimental feedback-based, topic-based and Booleanbased techniques. In this paper, we describe the experimental approaches and report the scores that each achieved on various set-based and rank-based measures. We report not just the mean scores of the experimental approaches but also the scores on each of the 8 individual test topics and the largest per-topic impacts of the techniques for several measures. Of the three experimental approaches compared, the experimental feedback-based approach had the highest score in the rank-based F1@R measure and set-based F1@K measure for a majority of the test topics.
On Marching Cubes

A characterization and classification of the isosurfaces of trilinear functions is presented. Based upon these results, a new algorithm for computing a triangular mesh approximation to isosurfaces for data given on a 3D rectilinear grid is presented. The original marching cubes algorithm is based upon linear interpolation along edges of the voxels. The asymptotic decider method is based upon bilinear interpolation on faces of the voxels. The algorithm of this paper carries this theme forward to using trilinear interpolation on the interior of voxels. The algorithm described here will produce a triangular mesh surface approximation to an isosurface which preserves the same connectivity/separation of vertices as given by the isosurface of trilinear interpolation.
Administration Time Estimates for WAIS-III Subtests, Scales, and Short Forms in a Clinical Sample

Administration times were recorded for the WAIS-III subtests, IQs, and Indexes for 62 VA patients. Also calculated were the administration times for a select group of short forms. The 11 subtests that yield the Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQs averaged approximately 91 minutes. The 11 subtests that yield the Organization, Working Memory, and Processing Speed Indexes averaged approximately 77 minutes. The administration time estimates in the standardization sample of 75 minutes for the Full Scale IQ and 60 minutes for the Indexes do not generalize to a clinical population. Ten of 11 short forms reduced testing time by at least 50%. The least time-consuming consisted Verbal Comprehension, suming was the Ward (1990) seven-subtest short form.
A robust optimization approach to supply chains and revenue management

The contribution of this thesis is to provide a tractable framework for supply chains and revenue management problems subject to uncertainty that gives insight into the structure of the optimal policy and requires little knowledge of the underlying probability distributions. Instead, we build upon recent advances in the field of robust optimization to develop models of uncertainty that make few probabilistic assumptions and have an adjustable level of conservatism to ensure performance. Specifically, we consider two classes of robust optimization approaches. First, we model the random variables as uncertain parameters belonging to a polyhedral uncertainty set, and optimize the system against the worst-case value of the uncertainty in the set. The polyhedron is affected by budgets of uncertainty, which reflect a trade-off between robustness and optimality. We apply this framework to supply chain management, show that the robust problem is equivalent to a deterministic problem with modified parameters, and derive the main properties of the optimal policy. We also explore a second approach, which builds directly on the historical realizations of uncertainty, without requiring any estimation. In that model, a fraction of the best cases are removed to ensure robustness, and the system is optimized over the sample average of the remaining data. This leads to tractable mathematical programming problems. We apply this framework to revenue management problems, and show that in many cases, the optimal policy simply involves an appropriate ranking of the historical data. Robust optimization emerges as a promising methodology to address a wide range of management problems subject to uncertainty, in particular in a dynamic setting, as it leads to representations of randomness that make few assumptions on the underlying probabilities, remain numerically tractable, incorporate the decision-maker’s risk aversion, and provides theoretical insights into the structure of the optimal policy. Thesis Supervisor: Dimitris J. Bertsimas Title: Boeing Professor of Operations Research
HIV-1 Vpu Interference with Innate Cell-mediated Immune Mechanisms

The HIV-1 accessory protein Vpu is emerging as a viral factor with a range of activities devoted to counteracting host innate immunity. Here, we review recent findings concerning the role of Vpu in hampering activation of cellular immune responses mediated by CD1d-restricted invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells and natural killer (NK) cells. The two key findings are that Vpu interferes with CD1d expression and antigen presentation, and also with expression of the NK cell activation ligand NK-T and B cell antigen (NTB-A). Both these activities are mechanistically distinct from CD4 and Tetherin (BST-2) down-modulation. We summarize the mechanistic insights gained into Vpu interference with CD1d and NTB-A, as well as important challenges going forward, and discuss these mechanisms in the context of the role that iNKT and NK cells play in HIV-1 immunity and immunopathogenesis.
Response bias and the process-dissociation procedure

Two different approaches for treating response bias in the process-dissociation procedure were assessed: a multinomial approach proposed by A. Buchner, E. Erdfelder, and B. Vaterrodt-Pliinnecke (1995) and a dual-process, signal-detection approach proposed by A. P. Yonelinas, G. Regehr, and L. L. Jacoby (1995). The authors examined data presented by Buchner et al. and found that, although the signal-detection-based model worked slightly better than the multinomial model, the data did not provide a strong test of either model. However, an examination of other recognition data showed that the multinomial model produced distorted estimates of recollection and familiarity, and it was unable to account for observed receiver operating characteristics (ROCs). In contrast, the dual-process, signaldetection model produced unbiased estimates and was able to account for the observed ROCs. The authors also provide an overview of the general controversy surrounding the processdissociation approach. Buchner, Erdfelder, and Vaterrodt-Pliinnecke (1995) proposed a modification of the process-dissociation procedure that incorporates response bias. We begin this article by describing the process-dissociation procedure and then describe the multinomial model that Buchner et al. proposed, contrasting their model with a dual-process, signaldetection method that we (e.g., Yonelinas, 1994; Yonelinas, Regehr, & Jacoby, 1995) have developed to take differences in response bias into account. Next, we examine the data that Buchner et al. used as evidence to support their model and show that our model deals with those data slightly better than does their model. We argue, however, that the manipulations used in their experiments may have influenced both response bias and recollection, and thus their data may not provide a strong test of models. We assess the models further by examining changes in response criterion associated with differences in response confidence and show that the multinomial model, but not the dual-process, signaldetection model, produces distorted estimates of recollection and familiarity. Finally, we examine receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) and find that the model that underlies the multinomial approach is in conflict with the ROC data. In contrast, we show that our signal-detection model accounts well for observed ROCs. While considering models of response bias, we provide a "road map" for contro
A goal-centric framework for behaviour programming in autonomous robotic systems

This paper describes an abstract framework for autonomous robot programming called GOLEM. The aim is to let a developer design the behaviour of a robot in accordance with a rational model, with the objective of mimicking human behaviour. GOLEM organises a robot's activities into goals and sub-goals, linked to one another through specific relationships. Execution of goals does not obey a pre-fixed sequence. Rather, the next goal to achieve is selected, each time, on the basis of an evaluation of its opportunity. This characteristic gives the robot a full awareness of the decision of which goal it should try to achieve, stressing and improving the concept of autonomy.