Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Constrained D- and D1-optimal designs for polynomial regression

In the common polynomial regression model of degree m we consider the problem of determining the D- and D1-optimal designs subject to certain constraints for the D- efficiencies in the models of degree m – j,m + j , … m + k (m > j > 0 k > 0 given). We present a complete solution of these problems, which on the one hand allow a fast computation of the constrained optimal designs and on the other hand give an answer to the question of the existence of a design satisfying all constraints. Our approach is based on a combination of general equivalence theory with the theory of canonical moments. In the case of equal bounds for the D1-efficiencies the constrained optimal designs can be found explicitly by an application of recent results for associated orthogonal polynomials.
Essential iris atrophy, pigment dispersion, and glaucoma in DBA/2J mice.

PURPOSE To characterize ocular abnormalities associated with iris atrophy in DBA/2J mice and to determine whether mice of this strain develop elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) and glaucoma. METHODS Different approaches, including slit-lamp biomicroscopy, ophthalmoscopic examination, ultrasound backscatter microscopy, and histology were used to examine the eyes of DBA/2J mice ranging from 2 to 30 months old. IOP was measured in DBA/2J mice of different ages. RESULTS DBA/2J mice were found to develop pigment dispersion, iris transillumination, iris atrophy, anterior synechias, and elevated IOP. IOP was elevated in most mice by the age of 9 months. These changes were followed by the death of retinal ganglion cells, optic nerve atrophy, and optic nerve cupping. The prevalence and severity of these lesions increased with age. Optic nerve atrophy and optic nerve cupping was present in the majority of mice by the age of 22 months. CONCLUSIONS DBA/2J mice develop a progressive form of secondary angle-closure glaucoma that appears to be initiated by iris atrophy and the associated formation of synechias. This mouse strain represents a useful model to evaluate mechanisms of pressure-related ganglion cell death and optic nerve atrophy, and to evaluate strategies for neuroprotection.
Dependency Analysis of Scrambled References for Better Evaluation of Japanese Translation

In English-to-Japanese translation, BLEU (Papineni et al., 2002), the de facto standard evaluation metric for machine translation (MT), has very weak correlation with human judgments (Goto et al., 2011; Goto et al., 2013). Therefore, RIBES (Isozaki et al., 2010; Hirao et al., 2014) was proposed. RIBES measures similarity of the word order of a machine-translated sentence and that of a corresponding human-translated reference sentence. RIBES has much stronger correlation than BLEU but most Japanese sentences have alternative word orders (scrambling), and one reference sentence is not sufficient for fair evaluation. Isozaki et al. (2014) proposed a solution to this problem. This solution generates semantically equivalent word orders of reference sentences. Automatically generated word orders are sometimes incomprehensible or misleading, and they introduced a heuristic rule that filters out such bad sentences. However, their rule is too conservative and generated alternative word orders for only 30% of reference sentences. In this paper, we present a rule-free method that uses a dependency parser to check scrambled sentences and generated alternatives for 80% of sentences. The experimental results show that our method improves sentence-level correlation with human judgments. In addition, strong system-level correlation of single reference RIBES is not damaged very much. We expect this method can be applied to other languages such as German, Korean,
Mapping Volumetric Meshes to Point-based Motion Models

Particle-based models produce various, flexible and optimized animations. Intrinsically, they are neither based on a boundary representation nor on volumetric objet meshed representations. Thus, they raise rendering issues since they do not contain enough geometrical information and do not even provide an underlying spatial topology. Consequently, various geometrical shapes can be used to render a motion produced by a meshless model, leading to different visual interpretations. To our knowledge, there is no generic methods to associate any set of points in motion with a topology-based geometric model. In this paper, we propose a framework to map arbitrary volumetric meshes to arbitrary point-based motions and to control the topological changes. Therefore, from only one motion description, different visual results can be obtained. This framework breaks down into three distinct processes: a particles to vertices mapping, the definition of a motion function and the definition of topological modifications and events triggering them. We show how the manipulation of these parameters allows to experiment different mappings for a particular motion and that our framework includes most of previous known mappings.
Parallel Optimization of Large Join Queries with Set Operators and Aggregates in a Parallel Environment Supporting Pipeline

Proposes a parallel optimizer for queries containing a large number of joins, as well as set operators and aggregate functions. The platform for the execution is a shared-disk multiprocessor machine supporting bushy parallelism and pipeline processing. Our model partitions the query into almost independent subtrees that can be optimized simultaneously, and it applies an enhanced variation of the iterative improvement technique on those subtrees which contain a large number of joins; this technique is parallelized, too. In order to estimate the cost of the states constructed during the optimization of join subtrees, cost formulae are developed that estimate the cost of relational algebra operators when executed across coalescing pipes.
Dependency tree matching with extended Tree edit distance with subtrees for textual entailment

A lot of natural language processing (NLP) applications require the computation of similarities between pairs of syntactic or semantic trees. Tree edit distance (TED), in this context, is considered to be one of the most effective techniques. However, its main drawback is that it deals with single node operations only. We therefore extended TED to deal with subtree transformation operations as well as single nodes. This makes the extended TED with subtree operations more effective and flexible than the standard TED, especially for applications that pay attention to relations among nodes (e.g. in linguistic trees, deleting a modifier subtree should be cheaper than the sum of deleting its components individually). The preliminary results of extended TED with subtree operations were encouraging compared with the standard one when tested on different examples of dependency trees.
Phosphorylation of Human Pro-Urokinase on Ser138/303 Impairs Its Receptor-dependent Ability to Promote Myelomonocytic Adherence and Motility

Serine phosphorylation of human pro-urokinase (pro-uPA) by A431 human carcinoma cells results in a catalytically active molecule with reduced sensitivity to plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1. We mapped the phosphorylated seryl residues by analyzing the in vivo phosphorylation state of engineered prouPA variants carrying a COOH-terminal poly-histidine tag. Stably transfected A431 cells do not incorporate radioactive phosphate into tagged pro-uPA in which the serines 138 and 303 have been replaced with glutamic residues, although endogenous nontagged pro-uPA is 32P-labeled on A and B chains. Moreover, the catalyticindependent ability of the mono- and di-substituted “phosphorylation-like” variants to bind to the GPIanchored urokinase receptor (uPAR) and promote adherence of differentiating U937, HL-60, and THP-1 myelomonocytic cells was examined. We found that glutamic residues as well as the naturally occurring phosphoserines at positions 138 and 303 abolish proadhesive ability, although they do not interfere with receptor binding. In addition, pro-uPA carrying Glu138/303 lacks the capability to induce a chemotactic response of THP-1 cells. The exclusive presence of Glu138 reduces pro-uPA proadhesive and chemotactic ability by 70– 80%, indicating that a phosphoserine residue at the same position plays a major inhibitory role of myeloid cell response to pro-urokinase. The di-substitution does not affect pro-uPA ability to interact with vitronectin or to enhance binding of urea-denatured vitronectin to uPAR. However, unlike wild-type tagged pro-uPA, the di-substituted variant does not induce receptor polarization in pre-adherent U937 cells. Taken together, the data support the possibility that pro-uPA phosphorylation on Ser138/303 can modulate uPAR transducing ability.
Automated left ventricle segmentation in 2-D LGE-MRI

For electrophysiology procedures, obtaining the information of scar within the left ventricle is very important for diagnosis, therapy planning and patient prognosis. The clinical gold standard to visualize scar is late-gadolinium-enhanced-MRI (LGE-MRI). The viability assessment of the myocardium often requires the prior segmentation of the left ventricle (LV). To overcome this problem, we propose an approach for fully automatic LV segmentation in 2-D LGE-MRI. First, the LV is automatically detected using circular Hough transforms. Second, the blood pool is approximated by applying a morphological active contours approach. The refinement of the endo- and epicardial contours is performed in polar space, considering the edge information and scar distribution. The proposed method was evaluated on 26 clinical LGE-MRI data sets. This comparison resulted in a Dice coefficient of 0.85 ± 0.06 for the endocardium and 0.84 ± 0.06 for the epicardium.
Fabrication and characterisation of a nanocrystal activated Schottky barrier solar cell

Climate change is a reality and a move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy technologies is an essential part of mitigation efforts. Photovoltaics (PV) provide a way to generate clean and renewable energy from a ubiquitous source. Despite this,fossil fuels are still deeply entrenched in the global energy system, in part due to their low cost. Silicon solar cells currently dominate the PV market,however, their levelised cost is relatively high compared to other energy technologies. Therefore, if PV is to achieve its full potential, there is a need to develop low cost solar cells to enable global uptake of this promising technology. The aim of this research was to demonstrate a nanocrystal (NC) activated Schottky barrier solar cell fabricated using relatively ambient processes. Ti film was anodised or thermally oxidised and the Schottky barrier was subsequently formed at the interface between TiO2 and the noble metal, Au, Ag, or Pt, which were sputtered, evaporated or dropcast in nanowire (NW) form. In the absence of activating nanocrystals, the Schottky barrier functions as an efficient cell but only for UV light due to the wide band gap of TiO2. Nanocrystals with a narrower band gap were deposited on the Schottky barrier to extend the response into the visible region. The cells fabricated with Ag NWs and Pt provided the largest Schottky barrier heights of 1.02 eV and 1 eV respectively. The Pt device obtained the largest UV photoresponse of 390 μAcm-2 and 721 mV at 330 nm, and external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 18% at 330 nm. The Pt and AgNW cells were subsequently activated with CdS, CdSe, CuO, CuInS2 and CdTe NCs. The CdS-NC/Pt, CdS-NC/Ag-NW, and CuInS2-NC/Ag-NW devices, in particular, provided proof-of-concept, generating a UV photoresponse from the TiO2 and a visible photoresponse from the NCs consistent with the respective band gaps. The optimum EQE measured for the CdS-NC/Pt device was 0.04% at 470 nm. Hence, this work demonstrates the NC activated Schottky barrier solar cell and provides a possible low cost fabrication route for future development.
Life-Course Partnership Status and Biomarkers in Midlife: Evidence From the 1958 British Birth Cohort.

OBJECTIVES We examined the association between trajectories of partnership status over the life course and objectively measured health indicators in midlife. METHODS We used data from 4 waves (1981, 1991, 2000, and 2002-2004) of the British National Child Development Study (NCDS), a prospective cohort study that includes all people born in Britain during 1 week in March 1958 (n = 18 558). RESULTS After controlling for selection attributable to early-life and early-adulthood characteristics, we found that life-course trajectories of partnership status were associated with hemostatic and inflammatory markers, the prevalence of metabolic syndrome and respiratory function in midlife. Never marrying or cohabiting was negatively associated with health in midlife for both genders, but the effect was more pronounced in men. Women who had married in their late 20s or early 30s and remained married had the best health in midlife. Men and women in cohabiting unions had midlife health outcomes similar to those in formal marriages. CONCLUSIONS Partnership status over the life course has a cumulative effect on a wide range of objectively measured health indicators in midlife.
Quaternary Structure of Azospirillum brasilense NADPH-dependent Glutamate Synthase in Solution as Revealed by Synchrotron Radiation X-ray Scattering*

Azospirillum brasilense glutamate synthase (GltS) is the prototype of bacterial NADPH-dependent enzymes, a class of complex iron-sulfur flavoproteins essential in ammonia assimilation processes. The catalytically active GltS αβ holoenzyme and its isolated α and β subunits (162 and 52 kDa, respectively) were analyzed using synchrotron radiation x-ray solution scattering. The GltS α subunit and αβ holoenzyme were found to be tetrameric in solution, whereas the β subunit was a mixture of monomers and dimers. Ab initio low resolution shapes restored from the scattering data suggested that the arrangement of α subunits in the (αβ)4 holoenzyme is similar to that in the tetrameric α4 complex and that β subunits occupy the periphery of the holoenzyme. The structure of α4 was further modeled using the available crystallographic coordinates of the monomeric α subunit assuming P222 symmetry. To model the entire αβ holoenzyme, a putative αβ protomer was constructed from the coordinates of the α subunit and those of the N-terminal region of porcine dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase, which is similar to the β subunit. Rigid body refinement yielded a model of GltS with an arrangement of α subunits similar to that in α4, but displaying contacts also between β subunits belonging to adjacent protomers. The holoenzyme model allows for independent catalytic activity of the αβ protomers, which is consistent with the available biochemical evidence.
Control of Liquid-Drop Surface Shape in Melt

The carbon steel samples of great quality can not be melted using a high-temperature confocal scanning laser microscopy(HTCSLM). On account of only arc surface of the tiny liquid-drop top is observed, it is difficult to obtain distinct images. The shape variation of the tiny liquid-drop is studied experimentally in this article. The results show that the shape of the liquid-drop will be changed at 1600°C, when the carbon steel sample of 0.5g is laid on the Al2O3 sloping of 15 degrees. Though the radius of curvature of the liquid-drop top surface is obviously enlarged, the impact of improving the surface shape of liquid-drop through the gravity flow of tiny liquid-drop is finite. For the carbon steel sample of less than 0.8g, the hanging drop is automatically formed in the melting process under the condition that the gap between the solid sample and Al2O3 single crystal plate is 0.3mm, and the shape retains invariant when it is hold for 20 min at 1600°C. The contact surface between the sample and Al2O3 single crystal plate is 24mm2.
Lessons from the use of vignettes in the study of mental health service disparities.

OBJECTIVE To examine the development, feasibility, and use of a vignette approach as an important tool in health services disparities research. DATA SOURCE Interviews with vignette developers and qualitative data from a novel mental health services disparities study that used vignettes in two samples: (1) predominantly low-income parents of children attending mental health specialty care who were Latino or non-Latino White and (2) Latino and non-Latino mental health clinicians who treat children in their practice. STUDY DESIGN We conduct a content analysis of qualitative data from patients and providers in the Ethnic Differences Study to explore the feasibility of vignette methodology in health services disparities research, and we identify lessons learned that may guide future vignette development. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Vignettes provide a valuable approach that is acceptable to participants, elicits important insight on participant experience and services, and sheds light on factors that can help optimize study design for exploring health disparities questions. CONCLUSIONS Researchers, clinicians, and others should consider a set of factors that help determine when a vignette approach is warranted in research, training, or for other uses, including how best to address identified weaknesses.
Serious gaming for sustainable manufacturing: A requirements analysis

In corporate environments, there is a growing interest in deploying serious games to support training and more specifically competence development. The goal is the acquisition of soft-skills (e.g. negotiation, leadership, and identification of weak signals) and complex competences which are needed in emerging fields such as Sustainable Global Manufacturing. Sustainability combines environmental, economic, and social dimensions and is considered to be a complex and hard to learn subject needing a lot of experience to create competence. Therefore, the construction of a serious game to support the generation of such competences is not trivial and must be founded on a sound requirements analysis. The aim of this paper is to present relevant findings from the requirements analysis phase for developing a serious game scenario for a technology-enhanced learning platform called TARGET. The target audience is composed of master grade students of business administration and young professionals employed in medium level management positions. The methodology for requirements elicitation is based on the Volere template combined with subject matter experts' interviews.
Iterative padding subtraction of the PN sequence for the TDS-OFDM over broadcast channels

PN-sequence padding (PNP) TDS-OFDM transmission scheme has recently been proposed as an appealing alternative to the traditional cyclic prefix (CP) OFDM technology as it can provide significant improvement in the spectrum efficiency. In this paper, an iterative method is introduced to subtract the PN sequence padding for the TDS-OFDM systems to mitigate the residual inter symbol interference (ISI) from the imperfect channel estimation, and the inherent channel estimation techniques are also performed to track the channel changes. Results show that this iterative algorithm can effectively remove the impact from the residual ISI on the slow-fading broadcast channels, even in the presence of very large channel delays in the single-frequency simulcast networks (SFN).
Learning reconfigurable hashing for diverse semantics

In recent years, locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) has gained plenty of attention from both the multimedia and computer vision communities due to its empirical success and theoretic guarantee in large-scale visual indexing and retrieval. Conventional LSH algorithms are designated either for generic metrics such as Cosine similarity, ℓ2-norm and Jaccard index, or for the metrics learned from user-supplied supervision information. The common drawbacks of existing algorithms are their incapability to be adapted to metric changes, along with the inefficacy when handling diverse semantics (e. g., more than 1K different categories in the well-known ImageNet database). For the metrics underlying the hashing structure, even tiny changes tend to nullify previous indexing efforts, which motivates our proposed framework towards "reconfigurable hashing". The basic idea is to maintain a large pool of over-complete hashing functions embedded in the ambient feature space, which serves as the common infrastructure of high-level diverse semantics. At the runtime, the algorithm dynamically selects relevant hashing bits by maximizing the consistency to specific semantics-induced metric, thereby achieving reusability of the pre-computed hashing bits. Such a reusable scheme especially benefits the indexing and retrieval of large-scale dataset, since it facilitates one-off indexing rather than continuous computation-intensive maintenance towards metric adaptation. We propose a sequential bit-selection algorithm based on local consistency and global regularization. Extensive studies are conducted on large-scale image benchmarks to comparatively investigate the performance of different strategies on reconfigurable hashing. Despite the vast literature on hashing, to our best knowledge rare endeavors have been spent toward the reusability of hashing structures in large-scale datasets.
Double Smoothing Technique for Large-Scale Linearly Constrained Convex Optimization

In this paper, we propose an efficient approach for solving a class of large-scale convex optimization problems. The problem we consider is the minimization of a convex function over a simple (possibly infinite-dimensional) convex set, under the additional constraint $\mathcal{A}u \in T$, where $\mathcal{A}$ is a linear operator and $T$ is a convex set whose dimension is small compared to the dimension of the feasible region. In our approach, we dualize the linear constraints, solve the resulting dual problem with a purely dual gradient-type method and show how to reconstruct an approximate primal solution. Because the linear constraints have been dualized, the dual objective function typically becomes separable, and therefore easy to compute. In order to accelerate our scheme, we introduce a novel double smoothing technique that involves regularization of the dual problem to allow the use of a fast gradient method. As a result, we obtain a method with complexity $O({1 \over \epsilon} \ln {1 \over \epsilo.
New developments in fused deposition modeling of ceramics

Purpose – To shift from rapid prototyping (RP) to agile fabrication by broadening the material selection, e.g. using ceramics, hence improving the properties (e.g. mechanical properties) of fused deposition modeling (FDM) products.Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents the development of a novel extrusion system, based on the FDM technology. The new set‐up, consisting of a mini‐extruder mounted on a high‐precision positioning system, is fed with bulk material in granulated form, instead that with the more common filament.Findings – Previous research showed that the applications of new materials with specific characteristics in a commercial FDM system are limited by the use of intermediate precursors, i.e. a filament. The new design described in this paper overcomes the problem thanks to the new feeding system.Research limitations/implications – The work presented in this paper is only the starting point for further development. The new system design was tested and encouraging improvements of th.
Random hypergraph coloring algorithms and the weak chromatic number

We present a hypergraph coloring algorithm and analyze its performance in spaces of random hypergrpahs. In these spaces the number of colors used by our algorithm is almost surely within a small constant factor (less than 2) of the weak chromatic number of the hypergraph. This also establishes new upper and lower bounds for the weak chromatic number of uniform hypergraphs.