Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Weakly Supervised Model for Sentence-Level Semantic Orientation Analysis with Multiple Experts

We propose the weakly supervised Multi-Experts Model (MEM) for analyzing the semantic orientation of opinions expressed in natural language reviews. In contrast to most prior work, MEM predicts both opinion polarity and opinion strength at the level of individual sentences; such fine-grained analysis helps to understand better why users like or dislike the entity under review. A key challenge in this setting is that it is hard to obtain sentence-level training data for both polarity and strength. For this reason, MEM is weakly supervised: It starts with potentially noisy indicators obtained from coarse-grained training data (i.e., document-level ratings), a small set of diverse base predictors, and, if available, small amounts of fine-grained training data. We integrate these noisy indicators into a unified probabilistic framework using ideas from ensemble learning and graph-based semi-supervised learning. Our experiments indicate that MEM outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin.
From a Distance: Using Cross-lingual Word Alignments for Noun Compound Bracketing

We present a cross-lingual method for determining NP structures. More specifically, we try to determine whether the semantics of tripartite noun compounds in context requires a left or right branching interpretation. The system exploits the difference in word position between languages as found in parallel corpora. We achieve a bracketing accuracy of 94.6%, significantly outperforming all systems in comparison and comparable to human performance. Our system generates large amounts of high-quality bracketed NPs in a multilingual context that can be used to train supervised learners.
Bipedal Locomotion Primitive Learning, Control and Prediction from Human Data

Abstract At the current stage bipedal robot locomotion is quite different from human walking. Imitation learning framework from human demonstrations is an efficient approach to lead towards human-like behaviors. This paper addresses a framework for real-time whole-body human motion imitation by a humanoid robot. The framework is a structured mixture of whole body motion control, learning and prediction. Human movements are mapped to robot's kinematics in combination with a balancing algorithm in order to ensure the dynamic constraints during different stance phases. Once locomotion primitives are learned from human demonstrations using hidden Markov models, the robot can recognize human's current locomotion state and predict future trajectories using Gaussian regression. The proposed concepts are implemented and evaluated with a small humanoid robot NAO.
Quality Control of Sugar Beet Seeds With THz Time-Domain Spectroscopy

Sugar beet seeds have a comparably high rate of defective seeds of about 35%-40% which are discarded before dissemination in the field. The separation of proper and defective seeds is a complex and labor-intensive process. We show how THz time-domain spectroscopy can be used for the examination of the seeds including an algorithm for automated classification of the seeds.
Host–parasite coevolution: comparative evidence for covariation of life history traits in primates and oxyurid parasites

The environmental factors that drive the evolution of parasite life histories are mostly unknown. Given that hosts provide the principal environmental features parasites have to deal with, and given that these features (such as resource availability and immune responses) are well characterized by the life history of the host, we may expect natural selection to result in covariation between parasite and host life histories. Moreover, some parasites show a high degree of host specificity, and cladistic analyses have shown that host and parasite phylogenies can be highly congruent. These considerations suggest that parasite and host life histories may covary. The central argument in the theory of life history evolution concerns the existence of trade–offs between traits. For parasitic nematodes it has been shown that larger body sizes induce higher fecundity, but this is achieved at the expense of delayed maturity. As high adult mortality would select for reduced age at maturity, the selective benefit of increased fecundity is expressed only if adult mortality is low. Parasite adult mortality may depend on a number of factors, including host longevity. Here we tested the hypothesis concerning the positive covariation between parasite body size (which reflects parasite longevity) and host longevity. To achieve this goal, we used the association between the pinworms (Oxyuridae, Nematoda) and their primate hosts. Oxyurids are highly host specific and are supposed to be involved in a coevolutionary process with their hosts. We found that female parasite body length was positively correlated with host longevity after correcting for phylogeny and host body mass. Conversely, male parasite body length and host longevity were not correlated. These results confirm that host longevity may represent a constraint on the evolution of body size in oxyurids, at least in females. The discrepancy between female and male oxyurids is likely to depend on the particular mode of reproduction of this taxon (haplodiploidy), which should result in weak (or even null) selection pressures to an increase of body size in males.
Bubbling surface operators and S-duality

We construct smooth asymptotically \ads solutions of Type IIB supergravity corresponding to all the half-BPS surface operators in = 4 SYM. All the parameters labeling a half-BPS surface operator are identified in the corresponding bubbling geometry. We use the supergravity description of surface operators to study the action of the SL(2,Z) duality group of = 4 SYM on the parameters of the surface operator, and find that it coincides with the recent proposal by Gukov and Witten in the framework of the gauge theory approach to the geometrical Langlands with ramification. We also show that whenever a bubbling geometry becomes singular that the path integral description of the corresponding surface operator also becomes singular.
The versatile biopolymer chitosan: potential sources, evaluation of extraction methods and applications

Abstract Among the biopolymers, chitin and its derivative chitosan (CTS) have been receiving increasing attention. Both are composed of randomly distributed β-(1-4)-linked d-glucosamine and N-acetyl glucosamine units. On commercial scale, CTS is mainly obtained from the crustacean shells. The chemical methods employed for extraction of CTS from crustacean shells are laden with many disadvantages. Waste fungal biomass represents a potential biological source of CTS, in fact with superior physico-chemical properties, such as high degree of deacetylation, low molecular weight, devoid of protein contamination and high bioactivity. Researchers around the globe are attempting to commercialize CTS production and extraction from fungal sources. Fungi are promising and environmentally benign source of CTS and they have the potential to completely replace crustacean-derived CTS. Waste fungal biomass resulting from various pharmaceutical and biotechnological industries is grown on inexpensive agro-industrial wastes and its by-products are a rich and inexpensive source of CTS. CTS is emerging as an important natural polymer having broad range of applications in different fields. In this context, the present review discusses the potential sources of CTS and their advantages and disadvantages. This review also deals with potential applications of CTS in different fields. Finally, the various attributes of CTS sought in different applications are discussed.
Dynamics of Orientation Tuning in Cat V1 Neurons Depend on Location Within Layers and Orientation Maps

Analysis of the timecourse of the orientation tuning of responses in primary visual cortex (V1) can provide insight into the circuitry underlying tuning. Several studies have examined the temporal evolution of orientation selectivity in V1 neurons, but there is no consensus regarding the stability of orientation tuning properties over the timecourse of the response. We have used reverse-correlation analysis of the responses to dynamic grating stimuli to re-examine this issue in cat V1 neurons. We find that the preferred orientation and tuning curve shape are stable in the majority of neurons; however, more than forty percent of cells show a significant change in either preferred orientation or tuning width between early and late portions of the response. To examine the influence of the local cortical circuit connectivity, we analyzed the timecourse of responses as a function of receptive field type, laminar position, and orientation map position. Simple cells are more selective, and reach peak selectivity earlier, than complex cells. There are pronounced laminar differences in the timing of responses: middle layer cells respond faster, deep layer cells have prolonged response decay, and superficial cells are intermediate in timing. The average timing of neurons near and far from pinwheel centers is similar, but there is more variability in the timecourse of responses near pinwheel centers. This result was reproduced in an established network model of V1 operating in a regime of balanced excitatory and inhibitory recurrent connections, confirming previous results. Thus, response dynamics of cortical neurons reflect circuitry based on both vertical and horizontal location within cortical networks.
War and the Socialization of Children

This article presents two evolutionary models that may explain relationships between war, socialization, and other kinds of violence. One model derives from the perspective suggesting that reproductive strategy is contingent on environmental variation; the other model derives from a number of studies conducted by Carol and Melvin Ember. In this article, the authors focus particularly on the causes and consequences of low father salience. They spell out the assumptions of the two models and describe some new cross-cultural evidence on presumed causal connections not previously evaluated cross-culturally. Their findings largely question the assumption that low father salience, as measured by father sleeping distance, will be associated with wider mating efforts. They also find some inconsistencies in their own model that suggest how it needs to be revised.
Crime Prevention and Exclusion: from Walls to Opera Music

This article is about Scandinavian crime‐preventing urban planning. At the beginning of the 1970s, a new urban planning movement called Crime Prevention trough Environmental Design emerged (CPTED). The basic idea behind CPTED as well as Scandinavian crime prevention is to prevent crime with inclusive measures. Instead of building walls and fences one should rather mark territories with symbolic measures. This article questions whether physical (hard) delineation of territory is really different from symbolic (soft) delineation. It discusses the ideas informing crime prevention planning and argues that both soft and hard measures share a similar objective: to protect us against someone or prevent someone from accessing an area.
A Density Grid-Based Clustering Algorithm for Uncertain Data Streams

This paper proposes a grid-based clustering algorithm Clu-US which is competent to find clusters of non-convex shapes on uncertain data stream. Clu-US maps the uncertain data tuples to the grid space which could store and update the summary information of stream. The uncertainty of data is taken into account for calculating the probability center of a grid. Then, the distance between the probability centers of two adjacent grids is adopted for measuring whether they are "close enough" in grids merging process. Furthermore, a dynamic outlier deletion mechanism is developed to improve clustering performance. The experimental results show that Clu-US outperforms other algorithms in terms of clustering quality and speed.
Ethical Implications of Career Assessment With Women

Ethical assessment practices require practitioners to examine assessments in terms of their appropriateness for male and female clients. This article explores gender differences on career assessments in the areas of individual differences and career choice process with a focus on ethical implications for gender-sensitive career assessments. Although the focus of this discussion is on career assessment with women, the suggestions also apply to male clients. Recommendations for gendersensitive career assessment and interpretation are provided.
Holobiont–Holobiont Interactions: Redefining Host–Parasite Interactions

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Holobiont–Holobiont Interactions: Redefining Host–Parasite Interactions Nolwenn Marie Dheilly
Prefetching the means for document transfer: a new approach for reducing Web latency

User-perceived latency is recognized as the central performance problem in the Web. We systematically measure factors contributing to this latency, across several locations. Our study reveals that DNS query times, TCP connection establishment, and start-of-session delays at HTTP servers, more so than transmission time, are major causes of long waits. Wait due to these factors also afflicts high-bandwidth users and has detrimental effect on perceived performance. We propose simple techniques that address these factors: (i) pre-resolving host-names (pre-performing DNS lookup); (ii) pre-connecting (prefetching TCP connections prior to issuance of HTTP request); and (iii) pre-warming (sending a "dummy" HTTP HEAD request to Web servers). Trace-based simulations demonstrate a potential to reduce perceived latency dramatically. Our techniques surpass document prefetching in performance improvement per bandwidth used and can be used with non-prefetchable URL. Deployment of these techniques at Web browsers or proxies does not require protocol modifications or the cooperation of other entities. Applicable servers can be identified, for example, by analyzing hyperlinks. Bandwidth overhead is minimal, and so is processing overhead at the user's browser. We propose scalable deployment solutions to control the potential overhead to proxies and particularly to Web servers.
Spatial Attention Effects of Disgusted and Fearful Faces

Effective processing of threat-related stimuli is of significant evolutionary advantage. Given the intricate relationship between attention and the neural processing of threat-related emotions, this study manipulated attention allocation and emotional categories of threat-related stimuli as independent factors and investigated the time course of spatial-attention-modulated processing of disgusting and fearful stimuli. The participants were instructed to direct their attention either to the two vertical or to the two horizontal locations, where two faces and two houses would be presented. The task was to respond regarding the physical identity of the two stimuli at cued locations. Event-related potentials (ERP) evidences were found to support a two-stage model of attention-modulated processing of threat-related emotions. In the early processing stage, disgusted faces evoked larger P1 component at right occipital region despite the attention allocation while larger N170 component was elicited by fearful faces at right occipito-temporal region only when participants attended to houses. In the late processing stage, the amplitudes of the parietal P3 component enhanced for both disgusted and fearful facial expressions only when the attention was focused on faces. According to the results, we propose that the temporal dynamics of the emotion-by-attention interaction consist of two stages. The early stage is characterized by quick and specialized neural encoding of disgusting and fearful stimuli irrespective of voluntary attention allocation, indicating an automatic detection and perception of threat-related emotions. The late stage is represented by attention-gated separation between threat-related stimuli and neutral stimuli; the similar ERP pattern evoked by disgusted and fearful faces suggests a more generalized processing of threat-related emotions via top-down attentional modulation, based on which the defensive behavior in response to threat events is largely facilitated.
Fighting Spam by Encapsulating Policy in Email Addresses

Everyday network interactions require users to give out their email address, yet no guarantees can be made about how this address will be used. Sometimes the address is given to a human (e.g., on a business card), but many times it is entered in a web form as part of a web transaction. Unfortunately, that email address frequently finds itself in spammers’ lists, never to be removed again. We propose the concept of the Single-Purpose Address (SPA); SPAs are generated by a program, and then cut-andpasted into the web page (or other application) requesting an email address. In its more general form an SPA encodes a security policy that describes the acceptable use of the address; since senders cannot be trusted to abide by it, this policy is enforced by the receiver, who generated the policy in the first place. SPAs are cryptographically protected to shield them from tampering. Since SPAs are not meant to be typed by humans, but rather processed by computer only, they do not have to be short, memorable, or even pronounceable. We present ways to construct such addresses, and we show the implementation of an opti-
An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Controller Based on a Learning Fuzzy Classifier System an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Controller Based on a Learning Fuzzy Classifier System All Rights Reserved Iii an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Controller Based on a Learning Fuzzy Classifier System

AN UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE CONTROLLER BASED ON A LEARNING FUZZY CLASSIFIER SYSTEM by YAN QU (Under the Direction of Walter D. Potter) ABSTRACT Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) have been increasingly employed by researchers, commercial organizations and the military to perform a variety of missions. This thesis discusses the design of an autonomous controller using a Learning Fuzzy Classifier System (LFCS) to store and evolve fuzzy rules and fuzzy membership functions. The controller executes the fuzzy inference process and assigns credit to the population during a flight simulation. This framework is useful in evolving a sophisticated set of rules for the controller of a UAV, which deals with uncertainty in both its internal state and external environment. A flight simulation is implemented in Matlab/Simulink providing the opportunity to assess the accuracy of the control rules. The simulation results show that this approach is able to develop a controller that achieves high effectiveness in both lateral and longitudinal control.
Edge detection and image restoration with anisotropic topological gradient

Topological asymptotic analysis provides tools to detect edges and their orientation. The purpose of this article is to show the possibilities of anisotropic topological gradient in image restoration. Previous methods based on the topological gradient used isotropic diffusion to restore images. These methods are improved here by using anisotropic diffusion and differentiating between principal and secondary edges. A texture detector is also used to increase the diffusion outside textured regions. Numerical results are presented, including a comparison with the Non-Local Means method. The algorithms presented here lead to results similar to the Non-Local Means (in terms of quality), and shorter processing times.
Teachers’ sense of self amid adaptation to educational reform

Abstract Education has been subject to a process of continuous educational reforms. The aim of this study was to explore teachers’ abilities to adapt to these reforms and to find out how this process of continual reform related to their identities as teachers. The study used a narrative research approach. The data for this research were based on the narratives of practising teachers registered for a postgraduate teacher education programme, and on interviews. Since change was a key concept, the theory of adaptive expertise was used to interpret the data. The study proposed a conceptual model that explained the relationship between teaching and the learning context, adaptive expertise and teacher identity in an ever-changing educational environment. The research pointed to some of the implications of a lack of consultation with teachers in the formulation of new policies, and recommended interventions with a view to developing adaptive expertise.
Evaluating the Importance of Concurrent Packet Communication in Wireless Networks

Nearly all wireless media-access (MAC) protocols are designed today with the very conservative assumption that concurrent transmissions should be prevented, because senderreceiver pairs within radio range sending on the same channel will corrupt each other’s communication. While recent work has suggested that channel capture effects can be significant in reality, this paper presents the first systematic study to quantify the impact of these effects on the ability to have concurrent communications among two senderreceiver pairs that are within range of each other. We first derive a simple decision rule to determine when such concurrent communication is possible while minimizing transmission power. Through a comprehensive set of realistic simulations, we then systematically quantify the feasibility of concurrent communication with and without transmission power control as many radio and environmental parameters vary, including node position, mean and variance of path loss, signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio threshold (SINRθ) for packet reception, granularity and range of transmission power control. Our simulations show that often, 40– 75% of the time depending primarily on distance and location, two pairs of nodes can communicate concurrently without loss even if both transmitters are within the radio sensing range of both receivers. We can observe large CTXable region with fixed transmit power, but dynamic power control significantly improves concurrent communications. Finally, at least one transmitter can almost always capture the channel in the event of concurrent transmissions, so the cost of failed attempts to CTX are minimal. We validate our simulations with testbed experiments using MicaZ motes, confirming that concurrent communication is possible to a very significant extent in real systems. These results suggest that This research is supported partially by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the following grants: CNS-0435505, CNS-0347621, CCF-0430061, CNS-0325875, NeTS-NOSS-0435517 (SNUSE), CNS-0626702 (SISS), and in part by funding from Bosch Research and by a hardware donation from Intel Corporation. Contributions Section CTXable link and optimal Tx power decision rule 4 New metric for CTXability (concurrent communication) 5.2 Quantification of CTXability: User Controllable parameters Higher Tx power increases CTXability for fixed power 5.3 Shorter link distance increases CTXability 5.4. 1 Lower SINR threshold increases CTXability 5.4. 2 Tx Power control increases CTXablity 5.4. 3 Quantification of CTXability: Uncontrollable parameters Effect of Path loss exponent on CTXability is dependent 5.5. 1 on location and power flexibility CTXable links are prevalent in real-world 5.5.2 Concurrent transmission is at least capturable in general 5.6 Experiments with MicaZ motes validate simulation results 6 Table 1. Contributions of this paper CSMA with RTS/CTS is overly conservative and there are often gains to be realized by abandoning it.