Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Vehicle Positioning and Visual Feature Estimates through Mutual Constraint

An argument is presented that a two-way relationship between position and visual information can be utilized to improve estimates of vehicle position as well as the interpretation of the surrounding environment. Simulation results for a formulation based on dynamic Bayesian networks illustrate that the belief in vehicle position is influenced by the measured visual features, while the belief in the value of said visual features is in turn influenced by GPS measurements of vehicle position. The weight of these influences, as well as the uncertainty of the resulting state estimates, depends directly upon the rate-of-change of the observed features. This information sharing approach represents a successful integration of these two technologies that leads to more plausible vehicle positioning and visual feature estimation that will be useful for purposes of automated driving and navigation systems.
What factors determine cyclic amplitude in the snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) cycle

Snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus Erxleben, 1777) fluctuate in 9-10 year cycles throughout much of their North American range. These cycles show large variations in cyclic amplitude and we ask what factors could cause amplitude variation. We gathered data from 1976 to 2012 on hare numbers in the boreal forest of Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and northern British Columbia to describe the amplitude of hare fluctuations and to evaluate four possible causes. First, weather could cause variation in amplitude via hare reproduction or survival, but this mechanism does not fit our data. Second, bottom-up processes involving forest succession could explain amplitude variation through changes in winter forage availability, but succession is too slow a variable in our study areas. Third, plant defenses entrained by hare over-browsing in one cycle can produce variation in plant quality and quantity in subsequent cycles. A mathematical model suggests this is a possible explanation. Fourth, predator recovery following the cyclic low is inversely related to hare cyclic amplitude, and the existing data are consistent with this mechanism. A standardized regional monitoring program is needed to improve our understanding of cyclic amplitude variation in hares and the possible role of predators and winter foods in affecting amplitude.
Probabilistic Analysis of Two Heuristics for the 3-Satisfiability Problem

An algorithm for the 3-Satisfiability problem is presented and a probabilistic analysis is performed. The analysis is based on an instance distribution which is parameterized to simulate a variety of sample characteristics. The algorithm assigns values to variables appearing in a given instance of 3-Satisfiability, one at a time, using the unit clause heuristic and a maximum occurring literal selection heuristic; at each step a variable is chosen randomly from a subset of variables which is usually large. The algorithm runs in polynomial time and it is shown that the algorithm finds a solution to a random instance of 3-Satisfiability with probability bounded from below by a constant greater than zero for a range of parameter values. The heuristics studied here can be used to select variables in a Backtrack algorithm for 3-Satisfiability. Experiments have shown that for about the same range of parameters as above the Backtrack algorithm using the heuristics finds a solution in polynomial average time.
Ultraviolet radiation blocks the organic carbon exchange between the dissolved phase and the gel phase in the ocean

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is one of the major reservoirs of active organic carbon on Earth. Although the bulk of the marine DOC pool is largely composed of small refractory polymeric material, new evidence suggests that ;10% of the DOC pool (1016 g C) can enter the microbial loop by forming microscopic gels that can eventually be colonized and degraded by bacteria. Marine microgels result from a spontaneous and reversible assembly/ dispersion equilibrium of DOC polymers forming hydrated Ca‐bonded tangled polymer networks. Here we test the hypothesis that ultraviolet (UV) photocleavage should strongly inhibit the formation of microgels, because the stability of tangled networks decreases exponentially with polymer length. Because of the loss of ozone shielding, the UV‐B spectral component of solar radiation (λ = 280–320 nm) has undergone a dramatic increase in the past few decades, particularly in the polar regions. We used dynamic laser‐scattering spectroscopy and flow cytometry to investigate UV‐induced DOC polymer cracking and the effect of UV on DOC assembly/dispersion equilibrium in 0.2 µm filtered seawater. Results indicate that exposure of seawater to UV‐B fluxes equivalent to those found in Antarctica during summer solstice can cleave DOC polymers, inhibit their spontaneous assembly, and/or disperse assembled microgels. Our results agree with previous observations that indicated that fragmentation produced by UV photolysis increases exponentially with exposure time and suggested that UV could limit the supply of microbial substrate by hindering microgel formation. UV cleavage yields short‐chain polymers that do not assemble and could eventually account for the old refractory DOC pool found in seawater.
Exploiting Convolutional Neural Network for Risk Prediction with Medical Feature Embedding

The widespread availability of electronic health records (EHRs) promises to usher in the era of personalized medicine. However, the problem of extracting useful clinical representations from longitudinal EHR data remains challenging. In this paper, we explore deep neural network models with learned medical feature embedding to deal with the problems of high dimensionality and temporality. Specifically, we use a multi-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) to parameterize the model and is thus able to capture complex non-linear longitudinal evolution of EHRs. Our model can effectively capture local/short temporal dependency in EHRs, which is beneficial for risk prediction. To account for high dimensionality, we use the embedding medical features in the CNN model which hold the natural medical concepts. Our initial experiments produce promising results and demonstrate the effectiveness of both the medical feature embedding and the proposed convolutional neural network in risk prediction on cohorts of congestive heart failure and diabetes patients compared with several strong baselines.
Effectively Integrating Information Content and Structural Relationship to Improve the GO-based Similarity Measure Between Proteins

The Gene Ontology (GO) provides a knowledge base to effectively describe proteins. However, measuring similarity between proteins based on GO remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a new similarity measure, information coefficient similarity measure (SimIC), to effectively integrate both the information content (IC) of GO terms and the structural information of GO hierarchy to determine the similarity between proteins. Testing on yeast proteins, our results show that SimIC efficiently addresses the shallow annotation issue in GO, thus improves the correlations between GO similarities of yeast proteins and their expression similarities as well as between GO similarities of yeast proteins and their sequence similarities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed SimIC is superior in predicting yeast protein interactions. We predict 20484 yeast protein-protein interactions (PPIs) between 2462 proteins based on the high SimIC values of biological process (BP) and cellular component (CC). Examining the 214 MIPS complexes in our predicted PPIs shows that all members of 159 MIPS complexes can be found in our PPI predictions, which is more than those (120/214) found in PPIs predicted by relative specificity similarity (RSS). Integrating IC and structural information of GO hierarchy can improve the effectiveness of the semantic similarity measure of GO terms. The new SimIC can effectively correct the effect of shallow annotation, and then provide an effective way to measure similarity between proteins based on Gene Ontology.
Changes in skin conductance as a tool to monitor nociceptive stimulation and pain

Purpose of review The skin conductance algesimeter (SCA) reflects the sympathetic nervous system influenced by changes in emotions, which releases the acetylcholine that acts on muscarine receptors, causing a subsequent burst of sweat and increased skin conductance. The SCA reacts immediately and is not influenced by hemodynamic variability or neuromuscular blockade. The use of SCA for pain and nociceptive assessment is outlined in this review. Recent findings When pain was monitored by verbal reporting in postoperative patients, the SCA had a sensitivity of about 90% and specificity up to 74% to identify the pain, better than heart rate and blood pressure. In general anesthetized patients, both the sensitivity and specificity were about 90% to detect responses to noxious stimulation when compared with clinical stress variables. The SCA reflects changes in norepeinephrine levels induced by nociception better than heart rate, blood pressure, and electroencephalograph (EEG) monitors. Unlike EEG monitors, the SCA response is sensitive to experimental noxious stimuli during general anesthesia, and the measured response was attenuated by analgesic medication. This SCA response is significantly associated with genetically modulated pain sensitivity. Moreover, noxious stimuli in artificially ventilated patients and in preterm infants increase the SCA index, and the increase correlates to the clinical discomfort. Summary The SCA detects nociceptive pain fast and continuously, specific to the individual, with higher sensitivity and specificity than other available objective methods.
Extending the potential fields approach to avoid trapping situations

Reactive mobile robot navigation based on potential field methods has shown to be a good solution for dealing with unknown and dynamic environments, where timely responses are required. Unfortunately, the complexity of the tasks which can successfully be carried out is restricted by the inherent shortcomings of the approach such as trapping situations due to local minima, difficulties passing among closely spaced obstacles, oscillations in narrow corridors, etc. This paper proposes a novel strategy which overcomes totally the first limitation and partially the others by computing an adaptive navigation function on the basis of such artificial potential fields. As a result, navigation is achieved in very difficult scenarios such as maze-like environments. A comparative study on the path length performance of our proposal with regard to other algorithms from the related literature is also presented. Both simulation and real tests are performed.
Refractive Status of Chinese with Laser-Treated Retinopathy of Prematurity

Purpose To analyze changes in myopia, astigmatism, and anisometropia after laser treatment of retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), including aggressive posterior retinopathy of prematurity (APROP), in Mainland Chinese children. Methods This was a retrospective study of children who had laser treatment for threshold or type 1 prethreshold ROP between January 2004 and October 2012 and age-matched control subjects with spontaneously regressed type 2 prethreshold ROP. One hundred fifteen eyes of 60 patients were included as the laser-treated group, which were further subdivided into APROP and non-APROP groups. Thirty-seven eyes of 20 patients who were diagnosed during the same period were included as the control group. Between 12 and 36 months postnatal age (PA) (mean [±SD], 22.9 [±8.1] months), cycloplegic retinoscopy was performed to measure refractive outcomes. A general linear model was used to analyze refractive changes among different groups at each PA. Results After adjusting for PA and the correlation between right and left eyes, the magnitude and proportion of astigmatism (p = 0.04 and p = 0.004, respectively) and myopia (p < 0.0001 and p = 0.006, respectively) were greater in the laser-treated group than in the control group. The differences in myopia were even greater in children with APROP than those with non-APROP, whereas the differences in astigmatism were not. Eyes with APROP had higher prevalence of high myopia and spherical anisometropia than the control (p = 0.002 and p = 0.02, respectively) and the non-APROP groups (p < 0.0001 and p = 0.04, respectively). Conclusions Children with laser treatment for ROP, including APROP, tended to have higher myopia, astigmatism, and anisometropia, which may progress to amblyopia. These findings highlight the need for regular refractive screening after laser treatment of ROP.
Arabic Speaker Recognition: Babylon Levantine Subset Case Study

Problem statement: Researchers on Arabic speaker recognition have used local data bases unavailable to the public. In this study we would like to investigate Arabic speaker recognition using a publically available database, namely Babylon Levantine available from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). Approach: Among the different methods for speaker recognition we focus on Hidden Markov Models (HMM). We studied the effect of both the parameters of the HMM models and the size of the speech features on the recognition rate. Results: To accomplish this study, we divided the database into small and medium size datasets. For each subset, we found the effect of the system parameters on the recognition rate. The parameters we varied the number of HMM states, the number of Gaussian mixtures per state, and the number of speech features coefficients. From the results, we found that in general, the recognition rate increases with the increase in the number of mixtures, till it reaches a saturation level which depends on the data size and the number of HMM states. Conclusion/Recommendations: The effect of the number of state depends on the data size. For small data, low number of states has higher recognition rate. For larger data, the number of states has very small effect at low number of mixtures and negligible effect at high number of mixtures.
Backward-compatible constant-time exception-protected memory

We present a novel, table-free technique for detecting all temporal and spatial memory access errors (e.g. dangling pointers, out-of-bounds check, etc.) in programs supporting general pointers. Our approach is the first technique to provide such error checking using only constant-time operations. The scheme relies on fat pointers, whose size is contained within standard scalar sizes (up to two words) so that atomic hardware support for operations upon the pointers is obtained along with meaningful casts in-between pointers and other scalars. Optimized compilation of code becomes possible since the scalarized-for-free encoded pointers get register allocated and manipulated. Backward compatibility is enabled by the scalar pointer sizes, with novel automatic support provided for encoding and decoding of fat pointers in place for interaction with unprotected code (e.g. library binaries). Implementation and benchmarks of the technique over several applications of the memory-intensive Olden suite indicate that the average time overhead of our method is about half the time cost of an unprotected application's execution (< 55%). This performance is over twice faster than the nearest prior work.
Subclinical Myocardial Dysfunction and Cardiac Autonomic Dysregulation Are Closely Associated in Obese Children and Adolescents: The Potential Role of Insulin Resistance

Background The prevalence of obesity is increasing among children/adolescents. Subtle cardiovascular abnormalities, responsible for a higher mortality later in life, have been reported in obese children/adolescents. The aims of the study were to evaluate cardiovascular autonomic regulation, by means of spectrum analysis of R-R interval variability, and myocardial function, by means of standard and tissue Doppler echocardiography, in a group of non-hypertensive asymptomatic obese children and adolescents; furthermore, the influence of insulin resistance was tested. Subjects and Methods R-R interval variability was analyzed during both the 70° head-up tilt and 24-hour electrocardiographic holter monitoring. Spectrum analysis of R-R interval variability provided the indices of sympathetic (low frequency [LFRR]) and vagal (high frequency [HFRR]) modulation of the sinoatrial node. Homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) was used to classify obese children/adolescents (n=72) as insulin resistant (n=37) and non-insulin resistant (n=35). Results In obese subjects: a) left ventricular mass was significantly (p<0.05) increased, whereas both the e/a ratio and the e'/a' ratio were decreased; b) at rest, HFRR was lower, and the LFRR/HFRR ratio was higher; c) during tilting, magnitude of tilt-induced inhibition of HFRR was lower; d) during 24-hour electrocardiographic holter monitoring, LFRR and the LFRR/HFRR ratio were higher, whereas HFRR was lower; e) HOMA-IR inversely correlated with both the e'/a' ratio (r=-0.655; p<0.001) and the tilt-induced LFRR/HFRR ratio (r=-0.933; p<0.001); and, f) the e'/a' ratio correlated with the tilt-induced LFRR/HFRR ratio (r=0.501; p<0.001). Moreover, HFRR at rest, magnitude of tilt-induced HFRR reduction, and the e'/a' ratio in insulin resistant obese children/adolescents were markedly lower when compared with the remaining subjects. Conclusions Subclinical abnormalities of myocardial function and of cardiac autonomic regulation were closely associated in obese children/adolescents and both correlated with the degree of insulin resistance.
Detection and classification of bright lesions in color fundus images

Bright lesions, including exudates and cotton wool spots, are the main symptoms in diabetic retinopathy. Early detection and classification of such evidence is essential for an effective treatment. A three-stage approach is applied to detect and classify bright lesions. After a local contrast enhancement preprocessing stage, two-step improved fuzzy C-means is applied in Luv color space to segment candidate bright-lesion areas. The results are shown to be effective in dealing with the inhomogeneous illumination of the fundus images while reducing the influence of noise. Finally, a hierarchical support vector machine (SVM) classification structure is successfully applied to classify bright non-lesion areas, exudates and cotton wool spots.
Multi- stakeholder assessment of critical success factors: insights from the world's fastest SAP R/3 implementation

Organizations invest substantial resources in Enterprise Systems (ES) expecting positive outcomes for the organization and its functions. Implementing an ES is a lengthy and costly undertaking, with general upheaval for many of the organizations. Many organizations therefore are seriously considering rapid ES-implementations to reduce cost and other related resources. This paper presents findings of a study conducted to understand critical success factors of rapid ES-implementations gathering data from the world’s fastest SAP implementation, completed in a record time of three weeks. Using a two-phased case study design, gathering data from four distinct stakeholders, this study recognized the relevance of critical success factors identified through the literature to the context of rapid ES-implementations. Moreover, the study identified three new critical success factors that are specific to rapid ES-implementations. The study also demonstrated differentiating views of multiple stakeholders on each of the critical success factors.
Theory of deferred action: Agent-based simulation model for designing complex adaptive systems

Descriptions of organized action as ‘complex’, ‘problematical’, or ‘difficult’ are reasons for breaking ranks from intellectual traditions to seek further and deeper. They contribute peripherally to knowledge and understanding of design. Theorists should develop theoretical knowledge of the act of design to inform invention of formalism and practice of design, predict or anticipate designed artefacts in social action and detail appropriate epistemology. They should explain formalism, its representational capacity, how it works in actuality, and how it can cater for organization and systems designs for actuality.
Translation, conflict and the politics of memory: Jan Karski's Story of a Secret State

ABSTRACT This article examines the interaction of translations and retranslations of historical texts and political narratives of the past. Focusing on English-Polish translation and the portrayal of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II in Jan Karski's Story of a Secret State, the article argues that textual and paratextual revisions in subsequent editions of the book are embedded in larger dominant narratives of the past. Examining the role played by translations in the debates on the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish wartime relations, the article suggests that translated texts can influence memory politics and national identity formation. Thus, translators and publishers of translated texts can be viewed as political and historical agents whose work simultaneously shapes and is shaped by cultural memory of the past in various national and historical contexts.
AIM: Another Itemset Miner

We present a new algorithm for mining frequent itemsets. Past studies have proposed various algorithms and techniques for improving the efficiency of the mining task. We integrate a combination of these techniques into an algorithm which utilize those techniques dynamically according to the input dataset. The algorithm main features include depth first search with vertical compressed database, diffset, parent equivalence pruning, dynamic reordering and projection. Experimental testing suggests that our algorithm and implementation significantly outperform existing algorithms/implementations.
E-Commerce Trend in Developing Countries: A Case Study of Tanzania

As the World Wide Web (www) has grown so is the number of eCommerce merchants has also grown. As there are some very well-known and high profile eCommerce success stories so are many, many failures. The Internet has become an important channel for business success, and as such it is becoming the channel for communications and transactions. This has led to growth in eCommerce; and as this has grown so has the concerns about security. Often said security and trust are main reasons for consumers not purchasing from internet. Unlike traditional commerce absence of physical clues and physical interaction in the online environment make it more difficulties to establish trust with the consumers. Hence it more important for online venders to learn how to manage customer‟s trust in eCommerce. Although creating a customer‟s trust on online is a challenge for most eCommerce companies. This paper presents the results of the initial work of the study on A Novel framework for Assuring Secure eCommerce Transactions in developing countries with Tanzania as a case study.
2.4-GHz Low-Noise Direct-Conversion Receiver With Deep N-Well Vertical-NPN BJT Operating Near Cutoff Frequency

A 2.4-GHz low-power low-noise direct-conversion receiver is demonstrated using parasitic vertical-NPN bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) in a standard 0.18-μm CMOS process. The current switching operation of a Gilbert mixer with finite transistor cutoff frequency (fT) is thoroughly analyzed and discussed in this paper. When the mixer operates near or higher than the transistor f T, the loss of the polyphase filter due to the capacitive loading of the mixer is a main issue. Thus, BJT devices with smaller base resistance and an inductive peaking technique with symmetric 3-D realization are employed in this paper to reduce local oscillator power by 4.5 dB. At 2.4 GHz, the demonstrated receiver has conversion gain of 51 dB and noise figure of 3.2 dB with 70-kHz 1/f noise corner, while the current consumption is 4.5 mA at a 1.8-V supply.