Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recognizing facial expressions of emotion using action unit specific decision thresholds

Automatic analysis of facial expressions of emotion has been an active research topic of computer vision and machine learning communities. Building person and culture independent models is the main challenge for both communities. We need effective, yet adaptive methods to cope with this challenge. In this study, we present a novel method for recognizing facial expressions of emotion based on the developed facial action unit (AU) detector and using rule-based reasoning. Our AU detector, also referred to as Adaptive Decision Thresholding based AU detector (ADT-AU) performs decision threshold analysis for each AU using a fitness function to learn the optimum decision threshold of the binary learning method. We choose the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm as the binary method and utilize Active Appearance Model (AAM) features. Using ADT-AU detector we detect 17 AUs occurring alone or in combination and recognize six facial expressions of emotion (e.g., surprise, fear, happiness, etc.) using the prototypic and major variants of AUs by our rule-based emotion classifier. Our experiments on Extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) dataset show that the proposed method outperforms baseline method that uses standard decision threshold and provides significant improvements on most of the facial expressions with an average F1-score of 5.59%.
AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON FATIGUE BEHAVIOR AND LIFE PREDICTION MODEL OF COUPLING BOLT FOR THE STEAM TURBINE

In order to get the axial low-cycle fatigue (ALCF) and torsional low-cycle fatigue (TLCF) of 40CrNiMoA steel, which usually used for the coupling bolts in a power plant, two of such experiments are performed on both shapes of the specimens: solid cylindrical and thin-walled tubular respectively and result in getting both performance parameters with 95% believability and 5% error limit. Several multiaxial fatigue life models including von Mises equivalent strain range, Manson-Halford, Fatemi, Prediction Model based on torsional mode are used to correlate the TLCF and the ALCF. The data set is used to evaluate the precision for each model. And the best life model for the material is gained at room temperature. Experiment shows that the material of 40CrNiMoA steel exhibits considerable cyclic softening in fully reversed loading in air at room temperature in both the axial and torsional fatigue tests. Moreover, the Prediction Model has high precision and shows itself as a useful method for testing fatigue life for the 40CrNiMoA steel used as the coupling bolt material a troom temperature.
Extraperitoneal Radical Trachelectomy With Pelvic Lymphadenectomy: A Novel Fertility-Preserving Option for Early Stage Cervical Cancer Patients

Objective Radical trachelectomy combined with pelvic lymphadenectomy has been used to treat early stage cervical cancer patients who wish to preserve their fertility. Although vaginal, abdominal, laparoscopic, and robotic approaches have been used during this procedure, all of these approaches cause peritoneal damage, which could result in periadnexal adhesion. The aim of the present study was to introduce and discuss a novel fertility-preserving option, extraperitoneal radical trachelectomy with pelvic lymphadenectomy. Methods To minimize peritoneal damage, we developed a new surgical approach for radical trachelectomy combined with pelvic lymphadenectomy. All surgical procedures associated with radical trachelectomy and pelvic lymphadenectomy were performed via an extraperitoneal approach. During this procedure, the uterine arteries, inferior hypogastric nerve, and pelvic splanchnic nerve were preserved. Results Extraperitoneal nerve-sparing radical trachelectomy with pelvic lymphadenectomy was performed in 3 Japanese women with International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics stage IA2 and IB1 cervical cancers. In all patients, complete resection of the disease was achieved without causing any intraoperative complications. Although an infected lymphocele developed in a patient that was managed conservatively, no severe postoperative complications were noted. No adjuvant treatments were given, and the patients are currently free of disease. Conclusions To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report about extraperitoneal radical trachelectomy in patients with early stage cervical cancer. Extraperitoneal radical trachelectomy combined with pelvic lymphadenectomy can be safely performed. Because peritoneal damages, which can cause periadnexal adhesion, could be avoided, we consider that this surgical approach may be an ideal treatment option for women with early stage cervical cancer who wish to preserve their fertility.
Source Coding and Channel Coding for Mobile Multimedia Communication

In the early era of communications engineering, the emphasis was on establishing links and providing connectivity. With the advent of new bandwidth hungry applications, the desire to fulfill the user’s need became the main focus of research in the area of data communications. It took about half a century to achieve near channel capacity limit in the year 1993, as predicted by Shannon (Shannon, 1948). However, with the advancement in multimedia technology, the increase in the volume of information by the order of magnitude further pushed the scientists to incorporate data compression techniques in order to fulfill the ever increasing bandwidth requirements. According to Cover (Cover & Thomas, 2006), the separation theorem stated by Shannon implies that it is possible for the source and channel coding to be accomplished on separate and sequential basis while still maintaining optimization. In the context of multimedia communication, the former represents the compression while the latter, the error protection. A major restriction, however, with this theorem is that it is applicable only to asymptotically lengthy blocks of data and in most situations cannot be a good approximation. So, these shortcomings have tacitly led to devising new strategies for joint-source channel coding.
The association of antidepressant and statin use with death and incident cardiovascular disease varies by depression severity

Abstract Depression has been reported to be associated with a greater risk of death and cardiovascular disease (CVD); however, the impact of antidepressants (ADM) on CVD risk remains controversial. Statin use is known to decrease CVD risk. Whether the use of these medications together affects CVD risk has not been studied. Patients (N = 26,828) completing the patient health questionnaire (PHQ-9), ≥40 years of age, without prior CVD, and no prior ADM use were studied. Depressive severity was categorized as none-mild (PHQ-9 score ≤14, n = 21,517) and moderate-severe (PHQ-9 score ≥15, n = 5311). Cox hazard regression was used to evaluate the association of no ADM/no statin use (n = 23,104 [86.1%]), ADM/no statin use (n = 877 [3.3%]), no ADM/statin use (n = 2627 [9.8%]), and ADM/statin use (n = 220 [.8%]) with major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE: death, CAD, stroke). Patients averaged 56 ± 12 years; 61% female. There were 1182 (4.4%) 3 year MACE events. The association of ADM and statin use with MACE varied by depressive symptom severity, with statin therapy associated with a decreased risk in the none-mild group (HR = .78, p = .007) and ADM in the moderate-high group (HR = 0.58, p = 0.02). Concomitant use of ADMs and statins did not appear to provide additive benefit.
Primary intraosseous mucoepidermoid carcinoma of the jaw: Reappraisal of The MD Anderson Cancer Center experience

Mucoepidermoid carcinoma arises from major or minor salivary glands, making up 10% of salivary gland tumors. Intraosseous mucoepidermoid carcinomas are rare, and make up only 2% to 3% of all mucoepidermoid carcinomas. The t(11;19) and its CRTC1‐MAML2 fusion gene transcript have been identified in mucoepidermoid carcinoma and are associated with a subset of mucoepidermoid carcinomas. The extent to which the transcript influences disease features and patient survival is unclear.
The Effect of Noise on Relationships Between Speech Intelligibility and Self-Reported Communication Measures in Tracheoesophageal Speakers.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine how sentence intelligibility relates to self-reported communication in tracheoesophageal speakers when speech intelligibility is measured in quiet and noise. METHOD Twenty-four tracheoesophageal speakers who were at least 1 year postlaryngectomy provided audio recordings of 5 sentences from the Sentence Intelligibility Test. Speakers also completed self-reported measures of communication-the Voice Handicap Index-10 and the Communicative Participation Item Bank short form. Speech recordings were presented to 2 groups of inexperienced listeners who heard sentences in quiet or noise. Listeners transcribed the sentences to yield speech intelligibility scores. RESULTS Very weak relationships were found between intelligibility in quiet and measures of voice handicap and communicative participation. Slightly stronger, but still weak and nonsignificant, relationships were observed between measures of intelligibility in noise and both self-reported measures. However, 12 speakers who were more than 65% intelligible in noise showed strong and statistically significant relationships with both self-reported measures (R2 = .76-.79). CONCLUSIONS Speech intelligibility in quiet is a weak predictor of self-reported communication measures in tracheoesophageal speakers. Speech intelligibility in noise may be a better metric of self-reported communicative function for speakers who demonstrate higher speech intelligibility in noise.
Distributed Space-Time-Frequency Cooperative Transmission Scheme for Bidirectional Multi-Relay Communication Networks

At present, the network topology in the field of cooperative communication, which is used to realize the data transmission, is becoming more and more perfect. However, the existing relay communication system is a half-duplex communication mode and works in the oneway transmission mode, although it improves the system's wireless performance, but at the expense of the spectral efficiency. In order to improve the spectrum utilization, Shannon had proposed two-way cooperative relay transmission mechanism in the 1960s. This mechanism needs only two slots to complete the bidirectional communication, which can improve the system spectrum utilization and network throughput in a large extent. Wireless bidirectional cooperative relay technology provides efficient data communication for the cellular mobile networks and wireless sensor networks
News, Real-Time Forecasts, and the Price Puzzle

This paper revisits the effects of news shocks in the context of an otherwise standard New Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We use the U.S. real-time forecasts from the Federal Reserve's Green Book to model agents' and the central bank's expectations of future macroeconomic outcomes. We show that unlike with the ex post data where the identification of news shocks is driven by the modeling assumptions, the identification strategy that relies on the Greenbook forecasts ascribes a larger role to news shocks in explaining variation in the model's endogenous variables. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the presence of sizable news shocks explains the emergence of the price puzzle in the structural vector autoregressive framework.
PreTIS: A Tool to Predict Non-canonical 5’ UTR Translational Initiation Sites in Human and Mouse

Translation of mRNA sequences into proteins typically starts at an AUG triplet. In rare cases, translation may also start at alternative non–AUG codons located in the annotated 5’ UTR which leads to an increased regulatory complexity. Since ribosome profiling detects translational start sites at the nucleotide level, the properties of these start sites can then be used for the statistical evaluation of functional open reading frames. We developed a linear regression approach to predict in–frame and out–of–frame translational start sites within the 5’ UTR from mRNA sequence information together with their translation initiation confidence. Predicted start codons comprise AUG as well as near–cognate codons. The underlying datasets are based on published translational start sites for human HEK293 and mouse embryonic stem cells that were derived by the original authors from ribosome profiling data. The average prediction accuracy of true vs. false start sites for HEK293 cells was 80%. When applied to mouse mRNA sequences, the same model predicted translation initiation sites observed in mouse ES cells with an accuracy of 76%. Moreover, we illustrate the effect of in silico mutations in the flanking sequence context of a start site on the predicted initiation confidence. Our new webservice PreTIS visualizes alternative start sites and their respective ORFs and predicts their ability to initiate translation. Solely, the mRNA sequence is required as input. PreTIS is accessible at http://service.bioinformatik. uni-saarland.de/pretis.
Upgrade of NSLS-II Active Interlock System

The NSLS-II Storage Ring is protected from possible damage from synchrotron radiation by a dedicated active interlock system (AIS). The AIS monitors electron beam position and angle and triggers beam drop if beam orbit exceeds the boundaries of pre-calculated active interlock envelope. The one year worth of the AIS operation showed that there is a number of erroneous machine trips associated with the AIS. In this paper we describe an upgrade of the AIS that allowed us to get rid of the Storage Ring faults and improved the overall NSLS-II reliability.
Recovering loss to followup information using denoising autoencoders

Loss to followup is a significant issue in healthcare and has serious consequences for a study's validity and cost. Methods available at present for recovering loss to followup information are restricted by their expressive capabilities and struggle to model highly non-linear relations and complex interactions. In this paper we propose a model based on overcomplete denoising autoencoders to recover loss to followup information. Designed to work with high volume data, results on various simulated and real life datasets show our model is appropriate under varying dataset and loss to followup conditions and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a wide margin (≥ 20% in some scenarios) while preserving the dataset utility for final analysis.
Characterization of defects in carbon fiber-reinforced plastics by inverse heat conduction analysis using transfer matrix between layers

In this study, inverse analyses of the defects in carbon fiber-reinforced plastics (CFRPs) are performed using the transfer matrix approach. The material properties used in the calculation were obtained on the basis of mixture laws for epoxy resin and carbon fibers. The accuracy of the inverse analysis was confirmed by calculations employing numerical models of CFRP plates with PAN-based and pitch-based carbon fibers containing defects. The inverse analysis was conducted based on the temperature distribution of CFRP laminates with PAN-based carbon fibers, which was obtained by infrared measurements. The analyses successfully estimated the positions of defects, and the effectiveness of the transfer matrix method for CFRPs was demonstrated through the inverse analysis.
Cortical cholinergic function is more severely affected in parkinsonian dementia than in Alzheimer disease: an in vivo positron emission tomographic study.

BACKGROUND Pathology reports have shown that cholinergic forebrain neuronal losses in parkinsonian dementia (PDem) are equal to or greater than those in Alzheimer disease (AD). We hypothesized that patients with PDem would have cholinergic deficits that were similar to or greater than those of patients with AD. OBJECTIVE To determine in vivo cortical acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity in healthy control subjects and in patients with mild AD, PDem, and Parkinson disease without dementia using AChE positron emission tomography. SETTING University and Veterans' Administration medical center. Design and Patients Group comparison design of patients with AD (n = 12), PDem (n = 14), and Parkinson disease without dementia (n = 11), and controls (n = 10) who underwent AChE imaging between July 1, 2000, and January 31, 2003. Patients with AD and PDem had approximately equal dementia severity. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Cerebral AChE activity. RESULTS Compared with controls, mean cortical AChE activity was lowest in patients with PDem (-20.0%), followed by patients with Parkinson disease without dementia (-12.9%; P<.001). Mean cortical AChE activity was relatively preserved in patients with AD (-9.1%), except for regionally selective involvement of the lateral temporal cortex (-15%; P<.001). CONCLUSION Reduced cortical AChE activity is more characteristic of patients with PDem than of patients with mild AD.
ARGoS: A modular, multi-engine simulator for heterogeneous swarm robotics

We present ARGoS, a novel open source multi-robot simulator. The main design focus of ARGoS is the real-time simulation of large heterogeneous swarms of robots. Existing robot simulators obtain scalability by imposing limitations on their extensibility and on the accuracy of the robot models. By contrast, in ARGoS we pursue a deeply modular approach that allows the user both to easily add custom features and to allocate computational resources where needed by the experiment. A unique feature of ARGoS is the possibility to use multiple physics engines of different types and to assign them to different parts of the environment. Robots can migrate from one engine to another transparently. This feature enables entirely novel classes of optimizations to improve scalability and paves the way for a new approach to parallelism in robotics simulation. Results show that ARGoS can simulate about 10,000 simple wheeled robots 40% faster than real-time.
Into the theory of the partial‐filling affinity capillary electrophoresis and the determination of apparent stability constants of analyte‐ligand complexes

The partial‐filling affinity capillary electrophoresis (pf‐ACE) works with a ligand present in a background electrolyte that forms a weak complex with an analyte. In contrast to a more popular mobility‐shift affinity capillary electrophoresis, only a short plug of the ligand is introduced into a capillary in the pf‐ACE. Both methods can serve for determining apparent stability constants of the formed complexes but this task is hindered in the pf‐ACE by the fact that the analyte spends only a part of its migration time in a contact with the ligand. In 1998, Amini and Westerlund published a linearization strategy that allows for extracting an effective mobility of an analyte in the presence of a neutral ligand out of the pf‐ACE data. The main purpose of this paper is to show that the original formula is only approximate. We derive a new formula and demonstrate its applicability by means of computer simulations. We further inspect several strategies of data processing in the pf‐ACE regarding a risk of an error propagation. This establishes a good practice of determining apparent stability constants of analyte‐ligand complexes by means of the pf‐ACE.
Resource allocation and test scheduling for concurrent test of core-based SOC design

A method to solve the resource allocation and test scheduling problems together in order to achieve concurrent test for core-based system-on-chip (SOC) designs is presented in this paper. The primary objective for concurrent SOC test is to reduce test application time. The methodology used in this paper is not limited to any specific test access mechanism (TAM). Additionally, it can also be applied for test budgeting during the design phase to obtain a tradeoff between test application time and SOC pins needed. In this paper, the above problem is formulated as a well-known 2-dimensional bin-packing problem. A best fit heuristic algorithm is employed to obtain satisfactory results.
A Secured Health Care Application Architecture for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) can be viewed as a new generation of systems with integrated control, communication and computational capabilities. Like the internet transformed how humans interact with one another, cyber-physical systems will transform how people interact with the physical world. Currently, the study of CPS is still in its infancy and there exist many research issues and challenges ranging from electricity power, health care, transportation and smart building etc. In this paper, an introduction of CPeSC3 (cyber physical enhanced secured wireless sensor networks (WSNs) integrated cloud computing for u-life care) architecture and its application to the health care monitoring and decision support systems is given. The proposed CPeSC3 architecture is composed of three main components, namely 1) communication core, 2) computation core, and 3) resource scheduling and management core. Detailed analysis and explanation are given for relevant models such as cloud computing, real time scheduling and security models. Finally, a medical health care application scenario is presented based on our practical test-bed which has been built for 3 years.
Predictive Place-Cell Sequences for Goal-Finding Emerge from Goal Memory and the Cognitive Map: A Computational Model

Hippocampal place-cell sequences observed during awake immobility often represent previous experience, suggesting a role in memory processes. However, recent reports of goals being overrepresented in sequential activity suggest a role in short-term planning, although a detailed understanding of the origins of hippocampal sequential activity and of its functional role is still lacking. In particular, it is unknown which mechanism could support efficient planning by generating place-cell sequences biased toward known goal locations, in an adaptive and constructive fashion. To address these questions, we propose a model of spatial learning and sequence generation as interdependent processes, integrating cortical contextual coding, synaptic plasticity and neuromodulatory mechanisms into a map-based approach. Following goal learning, sequential activity emerges from continuous attractor network dynamics biased by goal memory inputs. We apply Bayesian decoding on the resulting spike trains, allowing a direct comparison with experimental data. Simulations show that this model (1) explains the generation of never-experienced sequence trajectories in familiar environments, without requiring virtual self-motion signals, (2) accounts for the bias in place-cell sequences toward goal locations, (3) highlights their utility in flexible route planning, and (4) provides specific testable predictions.
Practical Multi-party Private Set Intersection from Symmetric-Key Techniques

We present a new paradigm for multi-party private set intersection (PSI) that allows $n$ parties to compute the intersection of their datasets without revealing any additional information. We explore a variety of instantiations of this paradigm. Our protocols avoid computationally expensive public-key operations and are secure in the presence of any number of semi-honest participants (i.e., without an honest majority). We demonstrate the practicality of our protocols with an implementation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation of a multi-party PSI protocol. For 5 parties with data-sets of 220 items each, our protocol requires only 72 seconds. In an optimization achieving a slightly weaker variant of security (augmented semi-honest model), the same task requires only 22 seconds. The technical core of our protocol is oblivious evaluation of a programmable pseudorandom function (OPPRF), which we instantiate in three different ways. We believe our new OPPRF abstraction and constructions may be of independent interest.