Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recursive linear hashing

A modification of linear hashing is proposed for which the conventional use of overflow records is avoided. Furthermore, an implementation of linear hashing is presented for which the amount of physical storage claimed is only fractionally more than the minimum required. This implementation uses a fixed amount of in-core space. Simulation results are given which indicate that even for storage utilizations approaching 95 percent, the average successful search cost for this method is close to one disk access.
Empirical Research on the Interaction Between Oil Price Shock and World Economic Activity

Although the research on the relation between oil price shock and economic growth have emerged in a large amount since the 1970s, there has been little empirical research on the interaction between oil price shock and world economic activity. In this paper, the unit roots test with two structural breaks and VAR model are used to study the interaction from the first quarter of 1970 to the fourth quarter of 2007. The empirical results indicate: the oil price and world GDP series are both nonstationary with two structural breaks and their interaction is remarkably different in different phases. The response of oil price to world economy is stronger than the opposite one and there is no cointegration relationship. There exists significantly bidirectional causal relationship in the first and fourth phases. The contribution of oil price to the variance decomposition of world economy occupies only a small proportion in all phases. But the contribution of world economy to the variance decomposition of oil price surpasses its own after periods in the second and fourth phases. Overall, the interaction between oil price and world economy changes along with different phases.
A Geo-Clustering Approach for the Detection of Areas-of-Interest and Their Underlying Semantics

Living in the “era of social networking”, we are experiencing a data revolution, generating an astonishing amount of digital information every single day. Due to this proliferation of data volume, there has been an explosion of new application domains for information mined from social networks. In this paper, we leverage this “socially-generated knowledge” (i.e., user-generated content derived from social networks) towards the detection of areas-of-interest within an urban region. These large and homogeneous areas contain multiple points-of-interest which are of special interest to particular groups of people (e.g., tourists and/or consumers). In order to identify them, we exploit two types of metadata, namely location-based information included within geo-tagged photos that we collect from Flickr, along with plain simple textual information from user-generated tags. We propose an algorithm that divides a predefined geographical area (i.e., the center of Athens, Greece) into “tile”-shaped sub-regions and based on an iterative merging procedure, it aims to detect larger, cohesive areas. We examine the performance of the algorithm both in a qualitative and quantitative manner. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed geo-clustering algorithm is able to correctly detect regions that contain popular tourist attractions within them with very promising results.
3D facial analysis: unaffected parents of individuals with cleft lip/palate

Part of the Orthodontics and Orthodontology Commons Recommended Citation Defay, David Kay. "3D facial analysis: unaffected parents of individuals with cleft lip/palate. research, his vast knowledge and ingenuity, and the many hours he put into this project. Also, thank you to Dr. Andrew Lidral for his time, knowledge, support and willingness to participate in this thesis. I would also like to express my appreciation to Dr. George Wehby and his staff on the Iowa Cleft Study for allowing me access to the 3D images used in this thesis and the hours of dedication required in collecting and organizing the images. I would also like to thank Chika Takeuchi for the many hours spent on data formatting and other tasks related to this thesis. I would like to express much appreciation to Dr. Tom Southard for his participation on my thesis committee and, more importantly, the incredible amount of time and effort he has spent in mentoring and encouraging me to be the best Orthodontist I can be. I would also like to express the same appreciation to the rest of faculty at the University of Iowa Department of Orthodontics for giving me the instruction, support, and opportunity necessary to accomplish my dream of practicing Orthodontics. I would like to thank my family for their unbelievable support. Thank you to my parents, Leonard and Kathy, for your instruction, care, and love. Lastly, and most importantly, thank you to my wife and sweetheart Ariel. Thank you for your patience and support, none of this would be possible without you.
The Clinical Characteristics of Normoalbuminuric Renal Insufficiency in Korean Type 2 Diabetic Patients: A Possible Early Stage Renal Complication

It has been recently reported that a considerable portion of diabetic patients with renal insufficiency show normoalbuminuria. As little is known about normoalbuminuric renal insufficiency in the Asian population, we examined its prevalence and clinical characteristics in Korean type 2 diabetic patients. We studied 562 patients with type 2 diabetes from Seoul National University Hospital. The estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) was calculated by the Modification of Diet in Renal Disease formula and the degree of albuminuria was evaluated by spot urine albumin-creatinine ratio. Of 562 patients, 151 (26.9%) patients had renal insufficiency (eGFR <60 mL/min/1.73m2). Among them, 44 (29.1%) patients had normoalbuminuria. After excluding the patients using renin-angiotensin system (RAS) inhibitors, the prevalence of normoalbuminuric renal insufficiency was 35.3% (18 of 51 patients). Compared with micro- and macroalbuminuric renal insufficiency, normoalbuminuric renal insufficiency was associated with the female predominance, shorter duration of diabetes, lower prevalence of diabetic retinopathy, and lower prevalence of using antihypertensive drugs except RAS inhibitors. The prevalence decreased progressively with an increase in the duration of diabetes and an increase in the severity of retinopathy. Normoalbuminuric renal insufficiency was prevalent in Korean type 2 diabetic patients. The association with a shorter duration of the diabetes and a lower prevalence of retinopathy suggests that it might be an early stage renal complication.
Color Image Compression Using 2-Dimensional Principal Component Analysis ( 2 DPCA )

Two dimensional principal component analyses (2DPCA) is recently proposed technique for face representation and recognition. The standard PCA works on 1-dimensional vectors which has inherent problem of dealing with high dimensional vector space data such as images, whereas 2DPCA directly works on matrices i.e. in 2DPCA, PCA technique is applied directly on original image without transforming into 1 dimensional vector. This feature of 2DPCA has advantage over standard PCA in terms of dealing with high dimensional vector space data. In this paper a working principle is proposed for color image compression using 2DPCA. Several other variants of 2DPCA are also applied and the proposed method effectively combines several 2DPCA based techniques. Method is tested on several standard test images and found that the quality of reconstructed image is better than standard PCA based image compression. The other performance measures, such as computational time, compression ratio are ameliorated. A comparative study is made for color image compression using 2DPCA.
Performance enhancement in shared-memory multiprocessors using dynamically classified sharing information

Advances in process technology has enabled the integration of many cores on a single die. The advent of many core systems has led to a commensurate increase in cache coherence complexity. As a solution to this problem, researches have proposed directory based protocols, which are scalable alternatives to snoop-based protocols. Although write-invalidation based directory protocols enhance the performance of large-scale multiprocessors, coherence misses are intrinsic impediments in such systems. Write-update protocols were proposed as a means to reduce these coherence misses. However, previous researches have shown that pure write-update protocol is highly undesirable because of the heavy traffic caused by the aggressive updates. In order to remedy these limitations, we propose a performance-aware mechanism which dynamically classifies the sharers of each cache block, either as a weak-sharing-group or an efficient-sharing-group and exploit this dynamic classification as a metric for seamless dynamic adaptation between write-invalidate and write-update strategy on a per block basis. Exploitation of the dynamic adaptation of the protocol, based on the sharing-group speculation, reduces unnecessary accesses to the shared last level cache and hence reduces the traffic caused by coherence misses and directory accesses. Simulation results on a 64-core CMP show that our proposed method can achieve 15 % (average) speedup over the baseline directory-based MOESI cache coherence protocol with PARSEC workloads. Our proposed work also reduces the L1 cache miss rate by 17 %(average). The network traffic caused by directory accesses and L1 read misses are also reduced by 16% and 17% respectively.
Humoral and contact interactions in astroglia/stem cell co‐cultures in the course of glia‐induced neurogenesis

Astroglial cells support or restrict the migration and differentiation of neural stem cells depending on the developmental stage of the progenitors and the physiological state of the astrocytes. In the present study, we show that astroglial cells instruct noncommitted, immortalized neuroectodermal stem cells to adopt a neuronal fate, while they fail to induce neuronal differentiation of embryonic stem cells under similar culture conditions. Astrocytes induce neuron formation by neuroectodermal progenitors both through direct cell‐to‐cell contacts and via short‐range acting humoral factors. Neuron formation takes place inside compact stem cell assemblies formed 30– 60 h after the onset of glial induction. Statistical analyses of time‐lapse microscopic recordings show that direct contacts with astrocytes hinder the migration of neuroectodermal progenitors, while astroglia‐derived humoral factors increase their motility. In non‐contact co‐cultures with astrocytes, altered adhesiveness prevents the separation of frequently colliding neural stem cells. By contrast, in contact co‐cultures with astrocytes, the restricted migration on glial surfaces keeps the cell progenies together, resulting in the formation of clonally proliferating stem cell aggregates. The data indicate that in vitro maintained parenchymal astrocytes (1) secrete factors, which initiate neuronal differentiation of neuroectodermal stem cells; and (2) provide a cellular microenvironment where stem cell/stem cell interactions can develop and the sorting out of the future neurons can proceed. In contrast to noncommitted progenitors, postmitotic neuronal precursors leave the stem cell clusters, indicating that astroglial cells selectively support the migration of maturing neurons as well as the elongation of neurites. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Cohesion based personalized community recommendation system

The importance of social networking sites (SNS) in our life is increasing day by day as they are attracting millions of users by their interesting features and activities. Joining different communities is one of the most common activities of users in social network. However, information overloading has troubled many users as thousands of communities are being created each day. To solve this problem, we have introduced a cohesion based community recommendation system where cohesion means high degree of connection among SNS users. Our proposed framework consists of the steps like, extracting sub-network (e.g. Facebook), measuring the friendship factors (both offline and online), measuring user preference factor, calculating threshold from present communities of any user, and finally recommending community based on automatically derived threshold.
Improved construction of vertical decompositions of three-dimensional arrangements

We present new results concerning the refinement of three-dimensional arrangements by vertical decompositions. First, we describe a new output-sensitive algorithm for computing the vertical decomposition of arrangements of n triangles in O(nlog2 n+Vlog n) time, where V is the complexity of the decomposition. This improves significantly over the best previously known algorithms. Next, we propose an alternative sparser refinement, which we call the partial vertical decomposition and has the advantages that it produces fewer cells and requires lower degree constructors. We adapt the output-sensitive algorithm to efficiently compute the partial decomposition as well. We implemented algorithms that construct the full and the partial decompositions and we compare the two types theoretically and experimentally. The improved output-sensitive construction extends to the case of arrangements of n well-behaved surfaces with the same asymptotic running time. We also extended the implementation to the case of polyhedral surfaces---this can serve as the basis for robust implementation of approximations of arrangements of general surfaces.
THE EMERGENCE OF COMPOSITIONALITY, HIERARCHY AND RECURSION IN PEER-TO-PEER INTERACTIONS

It is argued that compositionality, hierarchy and recursion , generally acknowledged to be universal features of human languages, can be explained as being emer ent p operties of the complex dynamics governing the establishment and evolution of a langu ge in a population of language users, mainly on an intra-generational time scale, rather tha n being the result of a genetic selection process leading to a specialized language faculty that imposes those features upon language or than being mainly a cross-generational cultural phenomeno n. This claim is supported with results from a computational language game experiment in which a number of autonomous software agents bootstrap a common compositional and recursiv e language.
Muscle activity during flight in some large Lepidoptera.

1. The names and functions of the main mesothoracic flight muscles in Lepidoptera are reviewed. 2. The wingbeat period in saturniid moths and monarch butterflies is long and variable. The three parameters, wingbeat period, burst length (number of times a motor unit is activated per wingstroke) and stroke amplitude are interdependent and positively correlated. 3. Partial amputation of the wings in saturniids decreases wingbeat period. Cutting the sensory nerves from the wings increases the period. These results indicate that the influence of wing movement on wingbeat period is mediated by receptors near the base of the wing. 4. The central nervous mechanisms which generate motor patterns during flight in Lepidoptera are discussed and compared with those in locusts. It is proposed that both mechanisms can be described by a single model, with minor differences in the mechanism of burst production.
The Causal Status of Social Capital in Labor Markets

There is a rich tradition of research on how social capital operates in the labor market. Much of this research adopts a supply-side perspective, and examines how network factors influence job seekers’ success in the labor market. Recent research by Mouw (2003, 2006), however, has called into question whether the observed effects of social capital are causal in nature, or are spuriously due to the influence of social homophily between job seekers and their network ties. What has been missing in this discussion is the demand-side perspective of organizations that hire job-seekers. This essay considers the causal status of social capital from the organization’s perspective. While the organizational approach we discuss here offers its own challenges to causal inference, they are not the same ones confronting supply-side approaches. Far from being a feature which confounds causal inference, we argue that social homophily is instead a key mechanism by which organizations derive social capital. Seen through this lens, homophily is a tool that organizations can use to derive value. We develop an approach which can be used to bolster inferences about the causal status of social capital. We illustrate these ideas using data from a retail bank.
Digital Biology, Fall 2014 Project Suggestions and Reading List

The course will explore a solvent-centric view of dehydrons as opposed to the accepted structure-centric view that has been the primary view of dehydrons in the past. The initial phase of the class will cover the basics of protein biophysics and present the ideas behind dehydrons and their role in structural interactions. The material will include basic bioinformatics techniques for examining protein structure. After this introductory period, the class will be based primarily on student presentations. The dehydron is a structural defect in gene products (especially proteins) and represents a key concept in the understanding of biological interfaces. Its unique physico-chemical properties have inspired a multi-scale theory of biological water while making the dehydron a pivotal factor in protein associations. In this course, we intend to examine dehydrons from a solvent-centric perspective, rather than adopting the structure-centric view that most people are familiar with. This shift in view point entails several advantages as one strives to understand the functional properties of dehydrons. In particular, a solvent-centric view leads to the striking conjecture that dehydrons may behave as catalytic elements, often stimulating, enabling and even promoting enzyme function. We want to study the involvement of dehydrons in biochemical events after we have already delineated its involvement in protein associations, the hallmarks of biological activity. The new solvent-centric view of dehydrons also yields an interesting interpretation of solvent-as-material in biological associations, with dehydrons playing a significant role in causing material defects. This could have significant implications for materials engineering involving solvents in other bio-materials and beyond. These ideas and projects have been developed in collaboration with Ariel Fernández Stigliano.
A High-Throughput Auditory P300 Interface for Everyone

Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) might be the only communication resort for patients with Locked In Syndrome (LIS). Auditory-P300-based interfaces provide an communication alternative to such patients. In this study we evaluate in an on-line setting the Emotiv’s Epoc performance for capturing auditory P300s. Five healthy subjects (3 male, 2 female) participated in an on-line multi-class auditory oddball paradigm. The stimuli set consisted of six musical instruments sounds, different in pitch and stereo spatialization. Two different conditions of 300 ms and 175 ms Inter Stimuli Interval (ISI) were tested. In each condition, the training data consisted of 10 sub-trial recordings, each sub-trial consisting of 25 repetitions in the 175 ms condition and of 15 repetitions in the 300 ms condition. At the beginning of each sub-trial a target sound was presented for the subjects to focus on. Each repetition consisted of a randomized sequence of 6 stimuli appearing once each. After training a spatial filter using xDawn unsupervised algorithm and a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classifier on a window from 250 ms to 750 ms after the stimuli presentation, the average on-line performance was 96% in the 175 ms condition and 86% in the 300 ms condition. After considering the minimum number of repetitions in order to achieve 70% on-line accuracy, the average ITR is found to be 13.21 bits/min in the 175 ms ISI condition.
Shipborne Dual-Doppler Operations during TOGA COARE: Integrated Observations of Storm Kinematics and Electrification

Abstract Shipborne Doppler radar operations were conducted over the western Pacific warm pool during TOGA COARE using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NOAA TOGA C-band Doppler radars. Occasionally the ships carrying these radars were brought to within 50 km of each other to conduct coordinated dual-Doppler scanning. The dual-Doppler operations were considered a test of the logistical and engineering constraints associated with establishing a seagoing dual-Doppler configuration. A very successful dual-Doppler data collection period took place on 9 February 1993 when an oceanic squall line developed, intensified, and propagated through the shipborne dual-Doppler lobes. Later on the same day, NOAA P-3 aircraft sampled a more intense squall line located approximately 400 km to the southeast of the shipborne operations. This study provides an overview of the shipborne dual-Doppler operations, followed by a comparison of the kinematic and precipitation structures of the convective systems sampled b.
Hot spots—A review of the protein–protein interface determinant amino‐acid residues

Proteins tendency to bind to one another in a highly specific manner forming stable complexes is fundamental to all biological processes. A better understanding of complex formation has many practical applications, which include the rational design of new therapeutic agents, and the analysis of metabolic and signal transduction networks. Alanine‐scanning mutagenesis made possible the detection of the functional epitopes, and demonstrated that most of the protein–protein binding energy is related only to a group of few amino acids at intermolecular protein interfaces: the hot spots. The scope of this review is to summarize all the available information regarding hot spots for a better atomic understanding of their structure and function. The ultimate objective is to improve the rational design of complexes of high affinity and specificity as well as that of small molecules, which can mimic the functional epitopes of the proteic complexes. Proteins 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Robust Tracking of Athletes Using Multiple Features of Multiple Views

This paper presents a robust and reconfigurable object tracker that integrates multiple visual features from multiple views. The tandem modular architecture stepwise refines the estimate of trajectories of the objects in the world coordinates using many plug-ins that observe various features such as texture, color, region and motion in 2D images acquired by the cameras. One of the most important features of our proposed method is that each plug-in innovates the trajectories not only by back-projecting 2D observations of the features, but also by weighting them adaptively to their self-evaluated reliability. In the paper, the architecture of the system and that of the plug-ins are formulated. The behavior and robustness against occlusion are also shown through experiments with football-game sequences.
NP Subject Detection in Verb-initial Arabic Clauses

Phrase re-ordering is a well-known obstacle to robust machine translation for language pairs with signiﬁcantly different word orderings. For Arabic-English, two languages that usually differ in the ordering of subject and verb, the subject and its modiﬁers must be accurately moved to produce a grammatical translation. This operation requires more than base phrase chunking and often deﬁes current phrase-based statistical decoders. We present a conditional random ﬁeld sequence classi-ﬁer that detects the full scope of Arabic noun phrase subjects in verb-initial clauses at the F β =1 61.3% level, a 5.0% absolute improvement over a statistical parser baseline. We suggest methods for integrating the classiﬁer output with a statistical decoder and present preliminary machine translation results.