Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gradient projection approaches for optimization problems in image deblurring and denoising

Gradient type methods are widely used approaches for nonlinear programming in image processing, due to their simplicity, low memory requirement and ability to provide medium-accurate solutions without excessive computational costs. In this work we discuss some improved gradient projection-methods for constrained optimization problems in image deblurring and denoising. Crucial feature of these approaches is the combination of special steplength rules and scaled gradient directions, appropriately designed to achieve a better convergence rate. Convergence results are given by exploiting monotone or nonmonotone line-search strategies along the feasible direction. The effectiveness of the algorithms is evaluated on the problems arising from the maximum likelihood approach to the deconvolution of images and from the edge-preserving removal of Poisson noise. Numerical results obtained by facing large scale problems involving images of several mega-pixels on graphics processors are also reported.
Liveness verifications for citizen journalism videos

Citizen journalism videos increasingly complement or even replace the professional news coverage through direct reporting by event witnesses. This raises questions of the integrity and credibility of such videos. We introduce Vamos, the first user transparent video "liveness" verification solution based on video motion, that can be integrated into any mobile video capture application without requiring special user training. Vamos' algorithm not only accommodates the full range of camera movements, but also supports videos of arbitrary length. We develop strong attacks both by utilizing fully automated attackers and by employing trained human experts for creating fraudulent videos to thwart mobile video verification systems. We introduce the concept of video motion categories to annotate the camera and user motion characteristics of arbitrary videos. We share motion annotations of YouTube citizen journalism videos and of free-form video samples that we collected through a user study. We observe that the performance of Vamos differs across video motion categories. We report the expected performance of Vamos on the real citizen journalism video chunks, by projecting on the distribution of categories. Even though Vamos is based on motion, we observe a surprising and seemingly counter-intuitive resilience against attacks performed on relatively "static" video chunks, which turn out to contain hard-to-imitate involuntary movements. We show that the accuracy of Vamos on the task of verifying whole length videos exceeds 93% against the new attacks.
A comparison of the effect of two doses of oral melatonin with oral midazolam and placebo on pre-operative anxiety, cognition and psychomotor function in children: A randomised double-blind study

Background and Aims: Melatonin (MT), a naturally occurring pituitary hormone has a sleep promoting effect. There are very few studies on pre-operative oral MT (0.2-0.5 mg/kg) in children. We planned a study to assess the efficacy of oral MT in two doses and compare it with oral midazolam and placebo for pre-operative anxiolysis, sedation, maintenance of cognition and psychomotor skills, parental separation behaviour and venepuncture compliance. Methods: This prospective double-blind randomised study was conducted after ethical committee approval on 100 children aged 5-15 years, American Society of Anaesthesiologists physical status I and II undergoing elective surgery at our hospital from January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2014. Mentally disordered children were excluded from the study. They were randomised into four groups of 25 each (A, B, C, D) to receive either oral MT 0.5 mg/kg or 0.75 mg/kg or oral midazolam 0.5 mg/kg or placebo 45-60 min, respectively, before induction. The child′s anxiety, cognition and psychomotor function before and after pre-medication, behaviour during the parental separation and venepuncture were appropriately scored. Kruskal-Wallis analysis of variance for intergroup and Wilcoxon matched pairs tests for intragroup comparisons of data were applied. Results: The four groups were comparable regarding mean age, weight and sex. The anxiety score reductions in the three groups when compared to placebo were statistically significant. Children receiving MT 0.75 mg/kg had maximum anxiolysis and venepuncture compliance (P < 0.05). Cognition was decreased with maximum sedation, successful parental separation and psychomotor impairment in the midazolam group (P < 0.05). Conclusion: Oral MT (0.5 mg/kg and 0.75 mg/kg) in children decreases pre-operative anxiety without impairing cognitive and psychomotor functions, the 0.75 mg/kg dose being most effective.
On Interval Routing Schemes and Treewidth

In this paper, we investigate which processor networks allow k-label Interval Routing Schemes, under the assumption that costs of edges may vary. We show that for each fixed k≥1, the class of graphs allowing such routing schemes is closed under minor-taking in the domain of connected graphs, and hence has a linear time recognition algorithm. This result connects the theory of compact routing with the theory of graph minors and treewidth.
The free-energy changes for the reduction of diphosphopyridine nucleotide and the dehydrogenation of L-malate and L-glycerol 1-phosphate.

free energy of reduction of diphosphopyridine free-energy with 0-5 ml. of a solution containing 0-25m-NagP.07 and 0-Sm-ethanol. Under these conditions all the DPN present became reduced by the action of the ethanol and the dehydrogenase. free-energy individual fermentation
Menopausal Hormone Therapy: What We Know Now

OverviewThis article describes the findings and limitations of the major research thus far on hormone therapy, particularly that of the Women's Health Initiative; examines practice recommendations; clarifies common terminology related to menopause and hormone therapy; and provides the implications for nurses. This is part one of a four-part series on postmenopausal health. Keywordsbioidentical hormones, combined estrogen and progestogen therapy, estrogen, estrogen therapy, hormone therapy, menopause, menopausal transition, postmenopause, progestin, progestogen, women's health, Women's Health Initiative
Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching

I don't know in what fit of pique George Bernard Shaw wrote that infamous aphorism, words that have plagued members of the teaching profession for nearly a century. They are found in "Maxims for Revolutionists," an appendix to his play Man and Superman. "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches" is a calamitous insult to our profession, yet one readily repeated even by teachers. More worrisome, its philosophy often appears to underlie the policies concerning the occupation and activities of teaching. Where did such a demeaning image of the teacher's capacities originate? How long have we been burdened by assumptions of ignorance and ineptitude within the teaching corps? Is Shaw to be treated as the last word on what teachers know and don't know, or do and can't do?
Optical properties of rare-earth doped fluorozirconate glass-ceramics for x-ray detector applications

For high-resolution X-ray imaging scintillator applications, we have prepared and optically characterized divalent samarium doped fluorochlorozirconate (FCZ:Sm) glasses and glass-ceramics. Sm doped FCZ glasses were obtained by adding a reducing agent, NaBH4 into the initial melt to convert some of the Sm 3+ to Sm. However, the Sm concentration at most was estimated to be only ∼ 0.003 %. The as-prepared glass samples were further heat treated to obtain glass-ceramics; the nucleation and growth of BaCl2 nanocrystals were confirmed by powdered Xray diffraction (XRD) experiments. Depending on the heat treatment conditions (temperature and time), the average nanocrystal size varies from 8 to 170 nm, and the sample contains BaCl2 nanocrystals with the orthorhombic and/or hexagonal structure. The optical absorption spectra for our glass-ceramic samples suggested the substitution of Sm ions into the BaCl2 lattice site. The FCZ:Sm 2+ glass-ceramics samples showed strong fluorescence in the red region of spectrum (∼ 8 times that of an as-prepared glass), and the transparency can be very high (transmittance > 80 % for samples with thickness ∼ 0.5 mm) and can be equivalent to that of an as-prepared glass . These two results promise potential as a high-resolution X-ray scintillator due to the emission wavelength range and high transparency. Extensive studies of photoluminescence (PL) spectra at low temperatures (12 – 200 K) for FCZ:Sm glass-ceramics suggested useful indicators of the crystal structure and average size of embedded BaCl2 nanocrystals. A detailed analysis of the optical spectra has lead to the identification of the origin of the emission peaks and the location of Sm ions at specific crystallographic sites. X-ray induced luminescence (XL) studies have suggested a strong dependence of the fluorescence intensity on the concentration of Sm ions. In addition, for more efficient fluorescence, a sample should be heat treated in a hydrogen containing atmosphere (e.g. H2 + Ar gas), and the heat treatment conditions should be such that the nanocrystals grow in the hexagonal structure.
Photothermal determination of optical coefficients of tissue phantoms using an optical fibre probe

The absorption and reduced scattering coefficients of turbid tissue phantoms have been determined from photothermal measurements made using an optical fibre probe. The thermal sensor was a thin polymer film positioned at the end of a multimode optical fibre. The film was illuminated by the output of a continuous-wave diode laser and formed the cavity of a low-finesse Fabry–Perot interferometer. Low energy laser pulses, launched into the fibre and passed through the film, produced an abrupt temperature rise in the target tissue, which was placed in contact with the film. The subsequent conduction of heat into the film caused a change in its optical thickness and hence the reflected intensity. The absorption and reduced scattering coefficients of gelatine tissue phantoms of known optical properties were determined from the measurements using a numerical model of photothermal signal generation and maximum a posteriori estimation. The determined optical coefficients were in good agreement with the known values. The results showed that the probe can be used for the determination of optical coefficients provided the thermal coefficients of the target tissue are known with low uncertainty.
Learning from Domain Complexity

Sentiment analysis is genre and domain dependent, i.e. the same method performs differently when applied to text that originates from different genres and domains. Intuitively, this is due to different language use in different genres and domains. We measure such differences in a sentiment analysis gold standard dataset that contains texts from 1 genre and 10 domains. Differences in language use are quantified using certain language statistics, viz. domain complexity measures. We investigate 4 domain complexity measures: percentage of rare words, word richness, relative entropy and corpus homogeneity. We relate domain complexity measurements to performance of a standard machine learning-based classifier and find strong correlations. We show that we can accurately estimate its performance based on domain complexity using linear regression models fitted using robust loss functions. Moreover, we illustrate how domain complexity may guide us in model selection, viz. in deciding what word n-gram order to employ in a discriminative model and whether to employ aggressive or conservative word n-gram feature selection.
A Data Mart Approach for Monitoring Web Services Usage and Evaluating Quality of Services

Web servers log data constitute an important resource to track users’ activity within a Web site, especially when organized and integrated with other sources of data on the so called clickstream data marts. These data marts support flexible and complex analyses, which are the basis to obtain great understanding of customer behavior and achieve efficient operation of electronic business initiatives. With the proliferation of Web services as a new trend to enterprise application integration and interoperability, it seems natural to use a similar approach to monitor services usage and to evaluate quality of services. This paper presents a data mart proposition generated from Web services log data that can reveal usage patterns on Web services giving a highly improved understanding of behavior and service provider performance.
A decentralized content-based communication framework for supporting decoupled grid interactions

OF THE THESIS A Decentralized Content-based Communication Framework for Supporting Decoupled Grid Interactions by ANDRES QUIROZ HERNANDEZ Thesis Director: Professor Manish Parashar This work presents a decentralized and content-based communication framework based on Web Services Notification (WSN) to enable monitoring and loosely-coupled interactions in distributed and particularly Grid systems. Web services have emerged as one of the key enabling technologies for Grid systems, providing platform-independent interactions between distributed applications and resources. The WSN specification is a set of web service standards that define protocols for realizing the publish/subscribe communication pattern. Existing implementations of WSN fail to address key issues particular to large-scale Grid systems, such as the dynamic participation of distributed computing nodes, the heterogeneous services provided by nodes across physical and organizational domains, and the need for efficient messaging mechanisms. The specific contributions of this work are as follows: 1) Design and development of a notification service implementing the WSN specifications based on a decentralized content-based addressing and messaging infrastructure; 2) Design and evaluation of self-optimization mechanisms for message exchanges within the notification system; 3) Design and analysis of a novel two-level overlay structure that extends the messaging infrastructure for efficiently interconnecting separate individual physical or organizational groups of computation nodes without resorting to designated nodes that can become bottlenecks or single points of failure; 4) Development of a mechanism for selfmonitoring of peer-to-peer systems that is able to detect anomalies and/or trends in
CORDEX - An international climate downscaling initiative

The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) is backing an international initiative called the COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX). The goal of the initiative is to provide regionally downscaled climate projections for most land regions of the globe, as a compliment to the global climate model projections performed within the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). CORDEX includes data from both dynamical and statistical downscaling. It is anticipated that the CORDEX dataset will provide a link to the impacts and adaptation community through its better resolution and regional focus. Participation in CORDEX is open and any researchers performing climate downscaling are encourage to engage with the initiative. The model evaluation framework consists of RCM simulations performed using the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA-Interim re-analysis (Uppala et al., 2008) as "perfect boundary conditions". These simulations will be evaluated through a set of regional benchmark statistics, against regional datasets, that are designed and assembled by regional diagnostic teams. The climate projection framework within CORDEX is based on the set of new GCM simulations currently underway in support of the IPCC fifth Assessment Report, referred to as CMIP5. CORDEX will focus on the GCM experiments using emission scenarios known as RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 which represent a mid and a high-level emission scenario. Ideally CORDEX simulations will span 1951 to 2100 though given the computational demand of such long transient runs a series of 30 year time slices is also possible. Each RCM should perform these simulations for multiple GCMs. While CORDEX is focused on using CMIP5 simulations for boundary conditions, which are still being created by the GCM groups, NARCliM uses the same AustralAsia and south-east Australia domains to downscale CMIP3 simulations. One of the unique aspects of both the CORDEX and NARCliM databases will be the presence of many three hourly fields. This will allow investigations of the simulation of diurnal cycles in RCM ensembles that have not been previously possible.
Supernovae, Jets, and Collapsars

We continue our study of the possible production of supernovae and a variety of high-energy transients by black hole formation in massive stars endowed with rotation: the "collapsar model. " The black hole may form either promptly, since a successful outgoing shock fails to be launched by the collapsed iron core (collapsar Type I), or, in a mild explosion, by fallback (collapsar Type II). In the latter case, the inner layers of the star initially move outward but lack adequate momentum to eject all the matter exterior to the young neutron star. Over a period of minutes to hours, ~0.1-5 M☉ falls back onto the collapsed remnant, turning it into a black hole and establishing an accretion disk. The accretion rate, ~0.001-0.01 M☉ s-1, is inadequate to produce a jet mediated by neutrino annihilation but is similar to what has been invoked in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). This fallback is modeled in detail for two 25 M☉ progenitors using two different one-dimensional hydrodynamics codes, one Lagrangian and one Eulerian. The production and consequences of jets are then explored in both sorts of collapsars. Justification is given for assuming that the jet power is a constant times the mass accretion rate, ϵc2, and the consequences of ϵ = 0.001 and 0.01 are explored. Adopting an initial collimation half-angle of 10°, the opening of the jet as it propagates through the exploding star is strongly influenced not only by the jet's kinetic energy but also by its initial pressure and the stellar structure. Cold jets tend to stay collimated and become even more so, sometimes having an angle of only a few degrees when they reach the surface. Jets having higher internal pressure than the stellar material through which they pass, or less initial collimation, spread out and tend to make energetic, asymmetric supernovae accompanied, in helium stars, by weak GRBs. SN 1998bw may have been such an event, and other events having energies between that of ordinary GRBs and GRB 980425 await discovery. In supergiant stars, shock breakout also produces bright X-ray transients that might be a diagnostic of the model, but even the most powerful jets (equivalent isotropic energy 1054 ergs) will not produce a GRB in a red supergiant. For such Type II supernovae the limiting Lorentz factor is Γ ≈ 2. Type II collapsars should be more frequent than Type I and may power the most common form of gamma-ray transient in the universe. However, the GRBs seen by BATSE are, for the most part, too brief to be Type II collapsars. Those are still attributed to prompt black hole formation. Even there though, the diverse energies and time structure reflect chiefly the viewing angle and the variable collimation of the jet inside the star, not a highly variable "central engine. " Indeed, collapsar-induced transients may all have a common total energy in the range 1051-1052 ergs.
Linear and incremental acquisition of invariant shape models from image sequences

The authors show how to automatically acquire similarity-invariant shape representations of objects from noisy image sequences under a weak perspective. The incremental nature of the method makes it possible to process images one at a time, moving away from the storage-intensive batch methods of the past. It is based on the observation that the trajectories that points on the object form in weak-perspective image sequences are linear combinations of three of the trajectories themselves, and that the coefficients of the linear combinations represent shape in an affine-invariant basis. A nonlinear but numerically sound preprocessing state is added to improve the accuracy of the results even further. Experiments showed that attention to noise and computational techniques improved the shape results substantially with respect to previous methods. <<ETX>>
Throughput Analysis of Massive MIMO Uplink With Low-Resolution ADCs

We investigate the uplink throughput achievable by a multiple-user (MU) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, in which the base station is equipped with a large number of low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Our focus is on the case where neither the transmitter nor the receiver have any a priori channel state information. This implies that the fading realizations have to be learned through pilot transmission followed by channel estimation at the receiver, based on coarsely quantized observations. We propose a novel channel estimator, based on Bussgang’s decomposition, and a novel approximation to the rate achievable with finite-resolution ADCs, both for the case of finite-cardinality constellations and of Gaussian inputs, that is accurate for a broad range of system parameters. Through numerical results, we illustrate that, for the 1-bit quantized case, pilot-based channel estimation together with maximal-ratio combing, or zero-forcing detection enables reliable multi-user communication with high-order constellations, in spite of the severe nonlinearity introduced by the ADCs. Furthermore, we show that the rate achievable in the infinite-resolution (no quantization) case can be approached using ADCs with only a few bits of resolution. We finally investigate the robustness of low-ADC-resolution MU-MIMO uplink against receive power imbalances between the different users, caused for example by imperfect power control.
Phage Lytic Enzyme Cpl-1 as a Novel Antimicrobial for Pneumococcal Bacteremia

ABSTRACT Streptococcus pneumoniae is becoming increasingly antibiotic resistant worldwide, and thus new antimicrobials are badly needed. We report the use of Cpl-1, the lytic enzyme of a pneumococcal bacteriophage, as an intravenous therapy for pneumococcal bacteremia in a mouse model. A 2,000-μg dose of Cpl-1 reduced pneumococcal titers from a median of log10 4.70 CFU/ml to undetectable levels (<log10 2.00 CFU/ml) within 15 min. This dose given 1 h after intravenous infection led to 100% survival at 48 h, compared to the 20% survival of buffer-treated controls. In advanced bacteremia, treatment with two doses at 5 and 10 h still resulted in significantly longer survival (P < 0.0001) and a hazard ratio of 0.29 (95% confidence interval, 0.04 to 0.35). The enzyme is immunogenic, but the treatment efficacy was not significantly diminished after previous intravenous exposure of mice and hyperimmune rabbit serum did not neutralize the activity. Cpl-1 is also very effective as a topical nasal treatment against colonization by S. pneumoniae. In vitro, the enzyme is active against many serotypes of S. pneumoniae, independent of their penicillin resistance, and it is very specific for this species. Bacteriophage enzymes are unusual but extremely effective antimicrobials and represent a new weapon against infections with resistant bacteria.