Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A user activity-based measurement study characterizing and classifying Stack Exchange communities across multiple domains

In recent times, Question-Answer communities have engaged much user attention and have become a major platform for knowledge sharing and discussion. Stack Exchange (SE) is one such successful community which is a collection of various domain-specific forums, each acting as an independent community in itself. In this paper, we undertake a comparative measurement study across a large number of these domain-specific forums within Stack Exchange. We analyse a number of user activity-based features of each forum and try to cluster different forums based on their similarities on this feature set. For our study, we model Stack Exchange as an Across "Forum Graph" based on inter-forum similarity, and its individual forums as: (a) A user-to-user graph (question asker-answerer) (b) A bipartite graph between questions and answerers, and (c) A bipartite graph between questions and answers. Through these graphs we present a measurement study of Stack Exchange which focuses on the similarities and differences between various forums based on the patterns of user activity on them. The clusters obtained give a high level idea of similar forums based on common users and content. We observe that communities can be classified as "discussion-based" and "fact-based" and further we classify forums on the basis of question answering patterns.
Spatial summation in the receptive fields of simple cells in the cat's striate cortex.

1. We have examined the responses of simple cells in the cat's atriate cortex to visual patterns that were designed to reveal the extent to which these cells may be considered to sum light‐evoked influences linearly across their receptive fields. We used one‐dimensional luminance‐modulated bars and grating as stimuli; their orientation was always the same as the preferred orientation of the neurone under study. The stimuli were presented on an oscilloscope screen by a digital computer, which also accumulated neuronal responses and controlled a randomized sequence of stimulus presentations. 2. The majority of simple cells respond to sinusoidal gratings that are moving or whose contrast is modulated in time in a manner consistent with the hypothesis that they have linear spatial summation. Their responses to moving gratings of all spatial frequencies are modulated in synchrony with the passage of the gratings' bars across their receptive fields, and they do not produce unmodulated responses even at the highest spatial frequencies. Many of these cells respond to temporally modulated stationary gratings simply by changing their response amplitude sinusoidally as the spatial phase of the grating the grating is varied. Nonetheless, their behavior appears to indicate linear spatial summation, since we show in an Appendix that the absence of a 'null' phase in a visual neurone need not indicate non‐linear spatial summation, and further that a linear neurone lacking a 'null' phase should give responses of the form that we have observed in this type of simple cell. 3. A minority of simple cells appears to have significant non‐linearities of spatial summation. These neurones respond to moving gratings of high spatial frequency with a partially or totally unmodulated elevation of firing rate. They have no 'null' phases when tested with stationary gratings, and reveal their non‐linearity by giving responses to gratings of some spatial phases that are composed partly or wholly of even harmonics of the stimulus frequency ('on‐off' responses). 4. We compared simple receptive fields with their sensitivity to sinusoidal gratings of different spatial frequencies. Qualitatively, the most sensitive subregions of simple cells' receptive fields are roughly the same width as the individual bars of the gratings to which they are most sensitive. Quantitatively, their receptive field profiles measured with thin stationary lines, agree well with predicted profiles derived by Fourier synthesis of their spatial frequency tuning curves.
Extracellular stimuli specifically regulate localized levels of individual neuronal mRNAs

Subcellular regulation of protein synthesis requires the correct localization of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) within the cell. In this study, we investigate whether the axonal localization of neuronal mRNAs is regulated by extracellular stimuli. By profiling axonal levels of 50 mRNAs detected in regenerating adult sensory axons, we show that neurotrophins can increase and decrease levels of axonal mRNAs. Neurotrophins (nerve growth factor, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and neurotrophin-3) regulate axonal mRNA levels and use distinct downstream signals to localize individual mRNAs. However, myelin-associated glycoprotein and semaphorin 3A regulate axonal levels of different mRNAs and elicit the opposite effect on axonal mRNA levels from those observed with neurotrophins. The axonal mRNAs accumulate at or are depleted from points of ligand stimulation along the axons. The translation product of a chimeric green fluorescent protein–β-actin mRNA showed similar accumulation or depletion adjacent to stimuli that increase or decrease axonal levels of endogenous β-actin mRNA. Thus, extracellular ligands can regulate protein generation within subcellular regions by specifically altering the localized levels of particular mRNAs.
OPTICAL AND γ-RAY EMISSIONS FROM INTERNAL FORWARD–REVERSE SHOCKS: APPLICATION TO GRB 080319B?

In the popular internal shock model for the prompt emission of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), collisions between a series of relativistic shells generate lots of paired forward and reverse shocks. We show that the synchrotron emission produced by the forward and reverse shocks respectively could peak at two quite different energy bands if the Lorentz factors of these two types of shocks are significantly different from each other (e.g., one shock is relativistic and the other is Newtonian). We then investigate whether this scenario is applicable to the case of GRB 080319B and find that a bimodal distribution of the shell Lorentz factors, peaking at ∼400 and ∼105, is required. In addition, this scenario predicts an accompanying inverse-Compton (IC) GeV emission with a luminosity comparable to (not much higher than) that of the synchrotron MeV emission, which can be tested with future Fermi observations.
Use of oscillometric devices in atrial fibrillation: a comparison of three devices and invasive blood pressure measurement

Abstract Background: The use of automated (oscillometric) blood pressure (BP) devices is not validated in atrial fibrillation (AF) patients. Objectives: To assess the reliability of three oscillometric BP devices, and the agreement with invasive arterial blood pressure(IBP) in AF patients. Methods: 48 AF patients with randomized sequences of 10 consecutive BP measurements with two pairs of devices: (1) OmronR7™(wrist) and OmronHEM907™(arm); (2) OmronR7™ and Microlife WatchBPhome(arm). Reliability and agreement of each device were assessed by the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) for the continuous BP measurements and Bland & Altman methodology, respectively. In 10 additional AF patients, 10 consecutive measurements with IBP and OmronHEM907™, and IBP and Microlife WatchBPhome were performed. Results: The OmronR7™ was not able to obtain any BP Readings. Arm devices presented better ICC for systolicBP(SBP) than for diastolicBP(DBP) (Omron HEM907™:0.94 [0.90; 0.97] vs. 0.77 [0.67; 0.89]; Microlife WatchBPhome:0.92 [0.88; 0.96] vs.0.79 [0.69; 0.89]). The correlation coefficient between Microlife WatchBPhome and IBP computed using the average of repeated measurements from two to ten measurements improved up to the third and remained stable afterwards. The agreement between IBP and SBP, and IBP and DBP, was moderate as illustrated by a wide limit of agreement [−24; 26](SBP) and [−15;17](DBP) for Microlife WatchBPHome, respectively and [−30; 13](SBP) and [−7; 15](DBP) for OmronHEM907. Conclusions: BP measurement using the two arm oscillometric devices achieved a high reliability for SBP. The agreement between IBP and arm devices was low but using the average of three consecutive measurements improved the results substantially.
Exploiting the large-scale German Broadcast Corpus to boost the Fraunhofer IAIS Speech Recognition System

In this paper we describe the large-scale German broadcast corpus (GER-TV1000h) containing more than 1,000 hours of transcribed speech data. This corpus is unique in the German language corpora domain and enables significant progress in tuning the acoustic modelling of German large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) systems. The exploitation of this huge broadcast corpus is demonstrated by optimizing and improving the Fraunhofer IAIS speech recognition system. Due to the availability of huge amount of acoustic training data new training strategies are investigated. The performance of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is evaluated on several datasets and compared to previously published results. It can be shown that the word error rate (WER) using a larger corpus can be reduced by up to 9.1 \% relative. By using both larger corpus and recent training paradigms the WER was reduced by up to 35.8 \% relative and below 40 \% absolute even for spontaneous dialectal speech in noisy conditions, making the ASR output a useful resource for subsequent tasks like named entity recognition also in difficult acoustic situations.
Swendsen-Wang Is Faster than Single-Bond Dynamics

We prove that the spectral gap of the Swendsen-Wang dynamics for the random-cluster model is larger than the spectral gap of a single-bond dynamics, that updates only a single edge per step. For this we give a representation of the algorithms on the joint (Potts/random-cluster) model. Furthermore we obtain upper and lower bounds on the mixing time of the single-bond dynamics on the discrete $d$-dimensional torus of side length $L$ at the Potts transition temperature for $q$ large enough that are exponential in $L^{d-1}$, complementing a result of Borgs, Chayes and Tetali.
"Towards higher relevance and serendipity in scholarly paper recommendation" by Kazunari Sugiyama and Min-Yen Kan with Martin Vesely as coordinator

Finding relevant scholarly papers is an important task for researchers. Such a literature search involves identifying drawbacks in existing works and proposing new approaches that address them. However, the growing number of scientific published papers results in information overload even for simple searches, such that researchers have difficulty in finding papers relevant to their interests. Recommendation systems can help address this problem to find relevant papers efficiently. In this article, we summarize our work on scholarly paper recommendation from both relevance and serendipitous perspectives. Experimental results on a publicly-available scholarly paper recommendation dataset show that our proposed approaches provides promising recommendations for researchers, outperforming the state-of-the-art with statistical significance.
Supervised monaural source separation based on autoencoders

In this paper, we propose a new supervised monaural source separation based on autoencoders. We employ the autoencoder for the dictionary training such that the nonlinear network can encode the target source with high expressiveness. The dictionary is trained by each target source without the mixture signal, which makes the system independent from the context where the dictionaries will be used. In separation process, the decoder portions of the trained autoencoders are used as dictionaries to find the activations in a iterative manner such that a summation of the decoder outputs approximates the original mixture. The results of the instruments source separation experiments revealed that the separation performance of the proposed method was superior to that of the NMF.
A pipe-assisted mobility management in named data networking networks

A new non-IP networking technology, called as named data networking (NDN), is an emerging research topic for the future Internet. In this paper, we propose a pipe-assisted mobility protocol in NDN networks. The proposed mobility protocol is constructed based on a new proposed name-based routing scheme by utilizing a pipe technique. A new name-based routing protocol is developed by constructing a pipe from a consumer to a producer in NDN networks. With the assistance of the constructed pipe, a pipe-assisted producer mobility protocol is proposed. When a mobile producer enters a new domain, a pipe-based pre-route with the maximum popular levels is built to increase the successful probability of discovering a new path from the producer to the consumer. Extensive simulations illustrate that the proposed pipe-assisted mobility protocol significantly reduces the packet loss rate.
Circular Fourier-HOG features for rotation invariant object detection in biomedical images

In this paper we present a new system for generic rotation invariant 2D object detection based on circular Fourier HOG features. Our system combines the advantages of a dense voting scheme as it is used in the Holomorphic Filter framework with features based on local orientation statistics. Experiments on two different biological datasets show superior detection performance over four state-of-the-art reference approaches.
An Adaptive Fusion using SVM based Audio Reliability Estimation for Biometric Systems

superb in clean noise-free conditions but the reliability of the systems drop severely in noisy environments. Fusion of audio and visual information is one of the solutions to this limitation. However, this approach requires appropriate weighting for each biometric trait when the systems are implemented under inconsistent conditions. In this study, we propose a novel approach by introducing Support Vector Machine (SVM) as indicator system for audio reliability estimation. This approach directly validate the quality of the incoming (claimant) speech signal so as to adaptively change the weighting factor for fusion of both subsystems scores. It is important to priory check the speech signal quality because unreliable speech data give incorrect scores hence affect the accuracy of the total scores of the fusion systems. The effectiveness of this approach has been experimented to a multibiometric verification system that employs lipreading images as visual features. This verification system uses SVM as a classifier for both subsystems. Principle Component Analysis (PCA) technique is executed for visual features extraction while for the audio feature extraction; Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) technique has been utilized. In this study, we found that the SVM indicator system is able to determine the quality of the speech signal up to 99.66%. We then observed that by using the proposed adaptive fusion system, EER percentage in noisy condition (10dB) has been decreased to 0.27% compared to 9.3% for non-adaptive fusion system and 51.13% for audio only system.
mGluR5 Ablation in Cortical Glutamatergic Neurons Increases Novelty-Induced Locomotion

The group I metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5) has been implicated in the pathology of various neurological disorders including schizophrenia, ADHD, and autism. mGluR5-dependent synaptic plasticity has been described at a variety of neural connections and its signaling has been implicated in several behaviors. These behaviors include locomotor reactivity to novel environment, sensorimotor gating, anxiety, and cognition. mGluR5 is expressed in glutamatergic neurons, inhibitory neurons, and glia in various brain regions. In this study, we show that deleting mGluR5 expression only in principal cortical neurons leads to defective cannabinoid receptor 1 (CB1R) dependent synaptic plasticity in the prefrontal cortex. These cortical glutamatergic mGluR5 knockout mice exhibit increased novelty-induced locomotion, and their locomotion can be further enhanced by treatment with the psychostimulant methylphenidate. Despite a modest reduction in repetitive behaviors, cortical glutamatergic mGluR5 knockout mice are normal in sensorimotor gating, anxiety, motor balance/learning and fear conditioning behaviors. These results show that mGluR5 signaling in cortical glutamatergic neurons is required for precisely modulating locomotor reactivity to a novel environment but not for sensorimotor gating, anxiety, motor coordination, several forms of learning or social interactions.
MagPairing: Exploiting magnetometers for pairing smartphones in close proximity

With the prevalence of mobile computing, lots of wireless devices need to establish secure communication on the fly without pre-shared secrets. Device pairing is critical for bootstrapping secure communication between two previously unassociated devices over the wireless channel. Using auxiliary out-of-band channels involving visual, acoustic, tactile or vibrational sensors has been proposed as a feasible option to facilitate device pairing. However, these methods usually require users to perform additional tasks such as copying, comparing, and shaking. It is preferable to have a natural and intuitive pairing method with minimal user tasks. In this paper, we introduce a new method, called MagPairing, for pairing smartphones in close proximity by exploiting correlated magnetometer readings. In MagPairing, users only need to naturally tap the smartphones together for a few seconds without performing any additional operations in authentication and key establishment. Our method exploits the fact that smartphones are equipped with tiny magnets. Highly correlated magnetic field patterns are produced when two smartphones are close to each other. We design MagPairing protocol and implement it on Android smartphones. We conduct extensive simulation and experiments to evaluate MagPairing. Experimental results show that MagPairing can successfully pair two smartphones with 4.5 seconds on average. It is immune to man-in-the-middle attack even when the attacker is a few centimeters away from the pairing devices.
Visualizing conserved gene location across microbe genomes

This paper introduces an analysis-based zoomable visualization technique for displaying the location of genes across many related species of microbes. The purpose of this visualizatiuon is to enable a biologist to examine the layout of genes in the organism of interest with respect to the gene organization of related organisms. During the genomic annotation process, the ability to observe gene organization in common with previously annotated genomes can help a biologist better confirm the structure and function of newly analyzed microbe DNA sequences. We have developed a visualization and analysis tool that enables the biologist to observe and examine gene organization among genomes, in the context of the primary sequence of interest. This paper describes the visualization and analysis steps, and presents a case study using a number of Rickettsia genomes.
BALT & CAST: Middleware for Cognitive Robotics

In this paper we present a toolkit for implementing architectures for intelligent robotic systems. This toolkit is based on an architecture schema (a set of architecture design rules). The purpose of both the schema and toolkit is to facilitate research into information-processing architectures for state-of-the- art intelligent robots, whilst providing engineering solutions for the development of such systems. A robotic system implemented using the toolkit is presented to demonstrate its key features.
Using Passive Input to Adapt Visualization Systems to the Individual

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI’13, April 27 – May 2, 2013, Paris, France. ACM 978-1-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/XX. Abstract Personalizing the design of an interface to the individual has emerged as a difficult problem. People are composed of long-term personality traits and short-term cognitive states that can both positively and negatively influence interaction with an interface. In this paper, we propose the use of performance metrics and physiological measures to evaluate the user’s interaction with an interface and adaptively calibrate its design to the individual. We then identify three types of visual display systems that could benefit from this adaptation.
Doctor, Should I Use Computer Games to Prevent Dementia?

ABSTRACT Commercial advertising of computerized “brain games” may result in clinicians being asked whether brain games prevent dementia. To address this question, we conducted a review of computerized cognitive training (CCT) interventions in older adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Studies were identified using a PubMed and PSYCinfo search for review articles. Within 11 review articles we identified 15 unique studies. Nine of these studies used commercially available “brain games” as their primary CCT intervention. Nine of 12 studies that examined the effect of CCT on episodic memory performance showed significant improvements in this domain. Furthermore, four of six studies that examined mood and or anxiety showed improvements in these domains following a CCT intervention. While more than double the amount of time was spent on the training that used commercially available “brain games” versus those designed by investigators, there were no differences in outcomes. Overall, it appears that “brain games” may modestly benefit aspects of cognition and aspects of mood in patients presenting with MCI. However, there is no direct evidence from the studies presented here that “brain games”/CCT can prevent dementia. We present recommendations to consider when discussing “brain games” with persons with MCI.
Bayesian Hidden Markov Modeling of Array CGH Data

Genomic alterations have been linked to the development and progression of cancer. The technique of comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) yields data consisting of fluorescence intensity ratios of test and reference DNA samples. The intensity ratios provide information about the number of copies in DNA. Practical issues such as the contamination of tumor cells in tissue specimens and normalization errors necessitate the use of statistics for learning about the genomic alterations from array CGH data. As increasing amounts of array CGH data become available, there is a growing need for automated algorithms for characterizing genomic profiles. Specifically, there is a need for algorithms that can identify gains and losses in the number of copies based on statistical considerations, rather than merely detect trends in the data. We adopt a Bayesian approach, relying on the hidden Markov model to account for the inherent dependence in the intensity ratios. Posterior inferences are made about gains and losses in copy number. Localized amplifications (associated with oncogene mutations) and deletions (associated with mutations of tumor suppressors) are identified using posterior probabilities. Global trends such as extended regions of altered copy number are detected. Because the posterior distribution is analytically intractable, we implement a Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm for efficient simulation-based inference. Publicly available data on pancreatic adenocarcinoma, glioblastoma multiforme, and breast cancer are analyzed, and comparisons are made with some widely used algorithms to illustrate the reliability and success of the technique.