Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hand Recognition Using Depth Cameras

Hand position and gesture recognition from a series of images is a topic of relevance for the development of human-machine interaction. The advent of low-cost consumer devices, such as Microsoft Kinect, leaves open the possibility of creating recognition applications that are not affected by low-light conditions. This paper is a survey of the literature on hand position and gesture recognition with the use of depth cameras. Most studies noticeably focus on the recognition of one-handed gestures and their classification within a pre-established set of gestures. Only in research from recent years does one see significant advances in the identification of unconstrained hand poses, that is, inference from the skeleton with the use of depth and color information. Nevertheless, the lack of a standardized set of tests and the diversity of hardware leaves unclear the extent to which these would prove effective with low-cost hardware.
Late fusion of individual engines for improved recognition of negative emotion in speech - learning vs. democratic vote

The fusion of multiple recognition engines is known to be able to outperform individual ones, given sufficient independence of methods, models, and knowledge sources. We therefore investigate late fusion of different speech-based recognizers of emotion. Two generally different streams of information are considered: acoustics and linguistics fed by state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition. A total of five emotion recognition engines from different sites that provide heterogeneous output information are integrated by either simple democratic vote or learning `which predictor to trust when'. We are able to significantly outperform the best individual engine by fusion, and the so far best reported result on the recently introduced Emotion Challenge task.
A Novel Protein Complex Identification Algorithm Based on Connected Affinity Clique Extension (CACE)

A novel algorithm based on Connected Affinity Clique Extension (CACE) for mining overlapping functional modules in protein interaction network is proposed in this paper. In this approach, the value of protein connected affinity which is inferred from protein complexes is interpreted as the reliability and possibility of interaction. The protein interaction network is constructed as a weighted graph, and the weight is dependent on the connected affinity coefficient. The experimental results of our CACE in two test data sets show that the CACE can detect the functional modules much more effectively and accurately when compared with other state-of-art algorithms CPM and IPC-MCE.
Modeling N400 amplitude using vector space models of word representation

We use vector space models (VSMs) as explicit models of word relations that influence the N400, and use this connection to predict N400 amplitude in an ERP study by Federmeier and Kutas (1999). We find that the VSM-based model is able to capture key elements of the authors’ manipulations and results, accounting for aspects of the results that are unexplained by cloze probability. This demonstration provides a proof of concept for use of VSMs in modeling the particular context representations and corresponding facilitation processes that seem to influence non-cloze-like behavior in the N400.
Acute Toxicity Study Of Datura Stramonium Seed Extract On Lesser Bandicoot Rat

Rodents are one of the most significant non insect's pests of agricultural crops, particularly rice, sugar cane and wheat crops. More than 90% of the world, rice is produced and eaten in Asia, with rice producing 35–60% of the total food energy of the three billion people living in the region (Khush 1993). The Lesser Bandicoot rat, B. bengalensis is the major rodent pest of South Asia inflicts heavy losses on agricultural crops. The global annual crop loss due to rodents has been estimated to be approximately US$30, 000 million (Dubock, 1982). In India, they are responsible for 10-15% loss to total national produce (Malhi and Sheikher, 1989). According to estimation, each year, rodents cause damage to agricultural produce to the tune of U.S. $ 30 billion (Anon. 1999). The estimated losses due to an attack of this pest have ranged from 7-11 and 12 % in sugar cane and wheat crops, respectively (Bach et al., 1982). The rodent has also been accounted as a serious pest of stored commodities. Numerous investigations have shown that B. bengalensis is widely distributed throughout the world. It has been reported as an indigenous pest in India, Vietnam, Penang Island, Western Malaysia, Thailand, Srilanka, Java, Sumatra, Assam, Sikkim, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia (Wagle, 1927; Chesemore, 1970; Abe, 1979; Harrison and Bate, 1991; Parshad, 1999; Musser and Carleton 2005; IUCN, 2010). Responsible for causing heavy losses to field crops (Greaves et al., 1977; Beg et al., 1980; Fulk et al., 1981; Neena and Parshad, 2010). Rodents are important pests of public health and have a consequence of the agricultural production in many just beginning tropical countries, capable of transmitting diseases to humans and plague, Endemic rickettsiosis, Leishmaniasis, Spirochetosis, Tularemia, Leptospirosis, Tickborne encephalitis, and Listeriosis. Rodent occasionally bites people. Finally, rodents do a variety of other damage, mainly by gnawing. (Alain and Pelfrene, 2010). Rodents are extremely adjustable, productive breeders and can stay alive up with new environments, new foods and adjust to new connect ship with a striking swiftness, and hence, it is difficult to check down their population for longer periods either by any cultural methods or natural enemies or synthetic chemical agents. In recent years there has been concern about the use of bio-pesticides in controlling pests. Plant substances were traditionally used as a rodenticide or repellent, but have now been almost completely replaced by chemicals. (Saravanan, et al., 2003). The” Jimson weed “Scientific name: Datura stramonium. This weed is toxic. Its roots, stems and leaves all contain trace amount of natural poisons, including several 2321-7871
Influence of multidrug resistance on tuberculosis treatment outcomes with standardized regimens.

RATIONALE Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) poses a major challenge to global TB control. We analyzed the association between estimated prevalence of initial or acquired MDR-TB, and treatment outcomes reported nationally. OBJECTIVES We analyzed the estimated prevalence of initial or acquired MDR-TB and treatment outcomes reported nationally. METHODS Countries were analyzed if multidrug resistance prevalence estimates were available, and if they reported outcomes for more than 250 cases treated using standardized regimens in 2003 and/or 2004. Data sources were the World Health Organization for treatment regimens, prevalence of initial multidrug resistance, and reported cases and treatment outcomes in 2003 and 2004; the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS for HIV seroprevalence; and the World Bank for income per capita. The adjusted impact of initial multidrug resistance on initial and retreatment outcomes was estimated with weighted multivariate linear regression. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Among countries using one of two standardized initial regimens, failure rates averaged 5.0%, and relapse rates averaged 12.8% in the 20 countries where prevalence of initial multidrug resistance exceeded 3%, compared with an average of 1.6% (P < 0.0001) and 8.1% (P = 0.0002), respectively, in 83 countries where initial multidrug resistance prevalence was less than 3%. In 92 countries using one standardized retreatment regimen, failure rates were 2.7%, 3.8%, 6.2%, and 8.1% in quartiles of increasing prevalence of acquired multidrug resistance (P < 0.0001). When stratified by initial multidrug resistance prevalence, initial and retreatment outcomes in the 79 countries using the 6-month rifampin initial regimen were not significantly different from the 24 countries using the 2-month rifampin initial regimen. CONCLUSIONS Currently recommended standardized TB initial and retreatment regimens should be reevaluated in countries where prevalence of initial multidrug resistance exceeds 3%, in view of poor treatment outcomes.
Architecting HBM as a high bandwidth, high capacity, self-managed last-level cache

Due to the recent growth in the number of on-chip cores available in today's multi-core processors, there is an increased demand for memory bandwidth and capacity. However, off-chip DRAM is not scaling at the rate necessary for the growth in number of on-chip cores. Stacked DRAM last-level caches have been proposed to alleviate these bandwidth constraints, however, many of these ideas are not practical for real systems, or may not take advantage of the features available in today's stacked DRAM variants. In this paper, we design a last-level, stacked DRAM cache that is practical for real-world systems and takes advantage of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) [1]. Our HBM cache only requires one minor change to existing memory controllers to support communication. It uses HBM's built-in logic die to handle tag storage and lookups. We also introduce novel tag/data storage that enables faster lookups, associativity, and more capacity than previous designs.
Associative Memory Model-Based Linear Filtering and Its Application to Tandem Connectionist Blind Source Separation

We propose a blind source separation method that yields high-quality speech with low distortion. Time-frequency (TF) masking can effectively reduce interference, but it produces nonlinear distortion. By contrast, linear filtering using a separation matrix such as independent vector analysis (IVA) can avoid nonlinear distortion, but the separation performance is reduced under reverberant conditions. The tandem connectionist approach combines several separation methods and it has been used frequently to compensate for the disadvantages of these methods. In this study, we propose associative memory model (AMM)-based linear filtering and a tandem connectionist framework, which applies TF masking followed by linear filtering. By using AMM trained with speech spectra to optimize the separation matrix, the proposed linear filtering method considers the properties of speech that are not considered explicitly in IVA, such as the harmonic components of spectra. TF masking is applied in the proposed tandem connectionist framework to reduce unwanted components that hinder the optimization of the separation matrix, and it is approximated by using a linear separation matrix to reduce nonlinear distortion. The results obtained in simultaneous speech separation experiments demonstrate that although the proposed linear filtering method can increase the signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) and signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) compared with IVA, the proposed tandem connectionist framework can obtain greater increases in SDR and SIR, and it reduces the phoneme error rate more than the proposed linear filtering method.
The BLLAST field experiment: Boundary-Layer Late Afternoon and Sunset Turbulence

Abstract. Due to the major role of the sun in heating the earth's surface, the atmospheric planetary boundary layer over land is inherently marked by a diurnal cycle. The afternoon transition, the period of the day that connects the daytime dry convective boundary layer to the night-time stable boundary layer, still has a number of unanswered scientific questions. This phase of the diurnal cycle is challenging from both modelling and observational perspectives: it is transitory, most of the forcings are small or null and the turbulence regime changes from fully convective, close to homogeneous and isotropic, toward a more heterogeneous and intermittent state. These issues motivated the BLLAST (Boundary-Layer Late Afternoon and Sunset Turbulence) field campaign that was conducted from 14 June to 8 July 2011 in southern France, in an area of complex and heterogeneous terrain. A wide range of instrumented platforms including full-size aircraft, remotely piloted aircraft systems, remote-sensing instruments, radiosoundings, tethered balloons, surface flux stations and various meteorological towers were deployed over different surface types. The boundary layer, from the earth's surface to the free troposphere, was probed during the entire day, with a focus and intense observation periods that were conducted from midday until sunset. The BLLAST field campaign also provided an opportunity to test innovative measurement systems, such as new miniaturized sensors, and a new technique for frequent radiosoundings of the low troposphere. Twelve fair weather days displaying various meteorological conditions were extensively documented during the field experiment. The boundary-layer growth varied from one day to another depending on many contributions including stability, advection, subsidence, the state of the previous day's residual layer, as well as local, meso- or synoptic scale conditions. Ground-based measurements combined with tethered-balloon and airborne observations captured the turbulence decay from the surface throughout the whole boundary layer and documented the evolution of the turbulence characteristic length scales during the transition period. Closely integrated with the field experiment, numerical studies are now underway with a complete hierarchy of models to support the data interpretation and improve the model representations.
Topology discovery in heterogeneous IP networks

Knowledge of the up-to-date physical topology of an IP network is crucial to a number of critical network management tasks, including reactive and proactive resource management, event correlation, and root-cause analysis. Given the dynamic nature of today's IP networks, keeping track of topology information manually is a daunting (if not impossible) task. Thus, effective algorithms for automatically discovering physical network topology are necessary. Earlier work has typically concentrated on either: (a) discovering logical (i.e., layer-3) topology, which implies that the connectivity of all layer-2 elements (e.g., switches and bridges) is ignored; or (b) proprietary solutions targeting specific product families. In this paper, we present novel algorithms for discovering physical topology in heterogeneous (i.e., multi-vendor) IP networks. Our algorithms rely on standard SNMP MIB information that is widely supported by modern IP network elements and require no modifications to the operating system software running on elements or hosts. We have implemented the algorithms presented in this paper in the context of a topology discovery tool that has been tested on Lucent's own research network. The experimental results clearly validate our approach, demonstrating that our tool can consistently discover the accurate physical network topology in time that is roughly quadratic in the number of network elements.
Progress in the Identification of Dengue Virus Entry/Fusion Inhibitors

Dengue fever, a reemerging disease, is putting nearly 2.5 billion people at risk worldwide. The number of infections and the geographic extension of dengue fever infection have increased in the past decade. The disease is caused by the dengue virus, a flavivirus that uses mosquitos Aedes sp. as vectors. The disease has several clinical manifestations, from the mild cold-like illness to the more serious hemorrhagic dengue fever and dengue shock syndrome. Currently, there is no approved drug for the treatment of dengue disease or an effective vaccine to fight the virus. Therefore, the search for antivirals against dengue virus is an active field of research. As new possible receptors and biological pathways of the virus biology are discovered, new strategies are being undertaken to identify possible antiviral molecules. Several groups of researchers have targeted the initial step in the infection as a potential approach to interfere with the virus. The viral entry process is mediated by viral proteins and cellular receptor molecules that end up in the endocytosis of the virion, the fusion of both membranes, and the release of viral RNA in the cytoplasm. This review provides an overview of the targets and progress that has been made in the quest for dengue virus entry inhibitors.
Forward Kinematics and Workspace Analysis for a 7-DOF Cable-Driven Humanoid Arm

Cable-driven mechanisms have high load capacity. Motivating from the latest research results of humanoid-arm bionics and parallel manipulators, a novel design of cable-driven humanoid-arm, which combines the merits of cable-driven and parallel mechanism, is proposed. This paper introduces the specific structure of cable-driven humanoid-arm. The modes of cables distribution and the coupling among joints are also studied. With analysis of the four-cable approach to drive 3-DOF parallel mechanism, the relationships between cable lengths and joint angles is analyzed, the motion ranges of joint angles are also discussed. Based on the analysis above, forward kinematics and workspace of the manipulator are analyzed, the pose of end-effector relating to base frame is deduced. At last, according to three groups of kinematic solutions, a simulation by ADAMS is carried out to verify the effectiveness of proposed algorithms.
Dragonfly: linking conceptual and implementation architectures of multiuser interactive systems

Software architecture styles for developing multiuser applications are usually defined at a conceptual level, abstracting such low-level issues of distributed implementation as code replication, caching strategies and concurrency control policies. Ultimately, such conceptual architectures must be cast into code. The iterative design inherent in interactive systems implies that significant evolution will take place at the conceptual level. Equally, however, evolution occurs at the implementation level in order to tune performance. This paper introduces Dragonfly, a software architecture style that maintains a tight, bidirectional link between conceptual and implementation software architectures, allowing evolution to be performed at either level. Dragonfly has been implemented in the Java-based TeleComputing Developer (TCD) toolkit.
Rethinking the Effects of Fiscal Policy on Macroeconomic Aggregates: A Disaggregated SVAR Analysis

This paper characterizes the dynamic effects of net tax and government spending shocks on prices, interest rate, GDP and its private components in four OECD countries using a structural VAR approach. For the first time in this literature, I propose a structural decomposition of total net taxes into four components: corporate income taxes, income taxes, indirect taxes and social insurance taxes. The paper provides estimates of the responses of macroeconomic aggregates to innovations in these net tax components. The main conclusions of the analysis can be summarized as follows: 1) decompositions of total net tax innovations show that net tax components have different impacts on economic variables; 2) the size and persistence of these effects vary across countries depending upon the strength of wealth, substitution, and income effects reflecting the structure of the economies; 3) positive tax multipliers reported in previous studies are found only for the corporate income tax in the US, Canada, and France and for the social security tax in the US; 4) while we find that private investment is crowded out both by taxation and government spending in the UK and the US as consistent with the neo-classical model, our results for France and partially for Canada, indicate that there are opposite effects of tax and spending increases on private investment in line with Keynesian theory; and 5) private consumption is crowded in by government spending for all countries except the UK and crowded out by taxation in all countries except France. While the former result is consistent with a Keynesian model, the latter is in line with neo-classical theory.
In vitro activity of A-56619 (difloxacin), A-56620, and other new quinolone antimicrobial agents against genital pathogens

The in vitro activities of two new carboxyquinolones, A-56619 (difloxacin) and A-56620, were compared with those of ciprofloxacin, norfloxacin, and ofloxacin against genital tract pathogens. All the quinolones were highly active against Neisseria gonorrhoeae. A-56619 had the lowest MICs against Chlamydia trachomatis (MIC range, 0.125 to 0.25 micrograms/ml) and Haemophilus ducreyi (MIC for 90% of isolates tested, 0.1 micrograms/ml).
Gravel Bars Can Be Critical for Biodiversity Conservation: A Case Study on Scaly-Sided Merganser in South China

Gravel bars are characteristic components of river landscapes and are increasingly recognized as key sites for many waterbirds, though detailed studies on the ecological function of gravel bars for waterbirds are rare. In this study, we surveyed the endangered Scaly-sided Merganser Mergus squamatus along a 40 km river section of Yuan River, in Central China, for three consecutive winters. We derived the landscape metrics of river gravel bars from geo-rectified fine resolution (0.6 m) aerial image data. We then built habitat suitability models (Generalized Linear Models—GLMs) to study the effects of landscape metrics and human disturbance on Scaly-sided Merganser presence probability. We found that 1) the Scaly-sided Merganser tended to congregate at river segments with more gravel patches; 2) the Scaly-sided Merganser preferred areas with larger and more contiguous gravel patches; and 3) the number of houses along the river bank (a proxy for anthropogenic disturbance) had significantly negative impacts on the occurrence of the Scaly-sided Merganser. Our results suggest that gravel bars are vital to the Scaly-sided Merganser as shelters from disturbance, as well as sites for feeding and roosting. Therefore, maintaining the exposure of gravel bars in regulated rivers during the low water period in winter might be the key for the conservation of the endangered species. These findings have important implications for understanding behavioral evolution and distribution of the species and for delineating between habitats of different quality for conservation and management.
Novel C8orf37 mutations cause retinitis pigmentosa in consanguineous families of Pakistani origin

Purpose To investigate the molecular basis of retinitis pigmentosa in two consanguineous families of Pakistani origin with multiple affected members. Methods Homozygosity mapping and Sanger sequencing of candidate genes were performed in one family while the other was analyzed with whole exome next-generation sequencing. A minigene splicing assay was used to confirm the splicing defects. Results In family MA48, a novel homozygous nucleotide substitution in C8orf37, c.244–2A>C, that disrupted the consensus splice acceptor site of exon 3 was found. The minigene splicing assay revealed that this mutation activated a cryptic splice site within exon 3, causing a 22 bp deletion in the transcript that is predicted to lead to a frameshift followed by premature protein truncation. In family MA13, a novel homozygous null mutation in C8orf37, c.555G>A, p.W185*, was identified. Both mutations segregated with the disease phenotype as expected in a recessive manner and were absent in 8,244 unrelated individuals of South Asian origin. Conclusions In this report, we describe C8orf37 mutations that cause retinal dystrophy in two families of Pakistani origin, contributing further data on the phenotype and the spectrum of mutations in this form of retinitis pigmentosa.