Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross Entropy Algorithms for Data Association in Multi-Target Tracking

Multiple-target tracking (MTT) poses difficult computational challenges related to the measurement-to-track data association problem, especially in the presence of spurious and missing measurements. Different approaches have been proposed to tackle this problem, including various approximations and heuristic optimization tools. The cross entropy (CE) method and the related parametric MinxEnt (PME) method are recent optimization heuristics that have proved useful in many combinatorial optimization problems. They are akin to evolutionary algorithms in that a population of solutions is evolved, however generation of new solutions is based on statistical methods of sampling and parameter estimation. In this work we apply the CE method and its recent MinxEnt variant to the multi-scan version of the data association problem in the presence of misdetections, false alarms, and unknown number of targets. We formulate the algorithms, explore via simulation their efficiency and performance compared with other recently proposed techniques, and show that they obtain state-of-the-art performance in challenging scenarios.
Expression of the PRC II avian sarcoma virus genome

We found that the genomic RNA of the replication-defective avian sarcoma virus PRC II was 4.0 kilobases long. A Northern blot analysis of the viral RNAs present in PRC II-transformed cells showed that the PRC II genome was expressed as a single 4.0 kilobase mRNA species. In vitro translation of polyadenylic acid-containing 70S virion RNA yielded two highly related proteins of 110,000 and 105,000 daltons (P110 and P105), which were synthesized from messenger activity that sedimented as expected for the 4.0 kilobase PRC II genome (at 25 to 27S). P110 and P105 were identified as in vitro translation products of the PRC II genome by immunoprecipitation and tryptic peptide mapping and were the only PRC II-specific polypeptides detected by in vitro synthesis. In addition, we found that immune complexes prepared from PRC II 70S virion RNA in vitro translation products contained a tyrosine-specific protein kinase activity. A comparison of the in vitro- and in vivo-synthesized proteins revealed that PRC II-transformed cells also contained 110,000- and 105,000-dalton proteins, which were indistinguishable from in vitro-synthesized P110 and P105 by electrophoretic mobility and tryptic peptide analysis. Both P110 and P105 were present in producer cells and in seven individual nonproducer clones. A pulse-chase analysis showed that P105 was the primary translation product of the PRC II genome and that P110 was derived from P105 by post-translational modification. Under conditions of long-term labeling with [35S]methionine, P110 and P105 were present in a molar ratio of approximately 1:1. These results indicated that the transformation-specific product of the PRC II genome, previously referred to as a single component (P105), actually consists of two polypeptides related by post-translational modification.
A Probabilistic Mechanism Design for Online Auctions

Recently, there has been a rapid growth of the online auctions in e-commerce platforms, in which small and/or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) heavily depend on the advertising systems. In this paper, we design flexible mechanisms to reduce the competition of SMEs without affecting competitive large companies in order to maximize the profit of e-commerce platform and to keep the ecosystem healthy. A probabilistic pricing mechanism design approach is investigated for online auctions. Utilizing this approach, we introduce the notation of simple mechanisms as a tool for designing new mechanisms. Based on a simple and a classical, the proposed mechanism probabilistic mechanisms are designed and their properties are analyzed. Furthermore, we devise two mechanism design algorithms for different application scenarios. Experiments are presented to demonstrate the flexibility and the effectiveness of the proposed probabilistic mechanism design approach.
Proposed Switching Losses Model for Integrated Point-of-Load Synchronous Buck Converters

Nowadays, point-of-load (POL) converters' investments are counted as a main part in power management markets; especially the synchronous buck converters. Today's products forces designers to highly integrate POL converters by increasing the switching frequency; so the latest technology has used megahertz range to obtain this target. On the other hand, increasing switching frequency means increasing the switching losses. Therefore, it is very important to optimize the operating switching frequency tradeoff, which requires an accurate model taking in consideration the converter operating conditions. This paper presents an accurate mathematical loss model taking in consideration the physical behavior of the MOSFET switch in addition to the converter operating conditions. This model introduces accurate equations for every switching intervals and so accurate loss calculations. An integrated POL synchronous buck converter of 5 MHz, 5-1.8 V/3 A prototype is fabricated. The results of the proposed model are compared with simulation and experimental results under variable operating conditions. Good matching between the mathematical, experimental, and simulation results are obtained.
Gene transfer with modified polyethylenimines

Branched and linear polyethylenimines (PEIs) have proven to be efficient and versatile agents for gene delivery in vitro. In addition, systemic administration of positively charged DNA/PEI complexes results in significant reporter gene expression in lungs. However, re‐targeting of complexes to organs other than the lung is hampered by non‐specific interactions of polyplexes with blood components and non‐target cells. Thus, despite considerable transfectional activity, the properties of PEIs need to be further improved. Therefore, various modifications of PEIs have been explored in recent years. For example, to increase the circulation half‐life of the DNA complexes, the surface charge of the particles was shielded by grafting hydrophilic polymers such as polyethylene glycols (PEGs) onto their surface. Alternatively, incorporation of certain ligands into the DNA complexes also resulted in charge shielding even without PEGylation. Herein, I review the most recent PEI derivatives, with a special focus on PEGylated and targeted polymers. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Cognitive underpinnings of narrative attachment assessment.

Traditional story completion methods used to examine attachment representations in childhood draw heavily on socially significant content and clinical judgment. Using these methods with 37-month-olds, Bretherton, Ridgeway, and Cassidy (1990) found that attachment security scored from story completions were related to a wide range of secure base, personality, intellectual, and family variables. We examined story completions from 24 of Bretherton et al. 's (1990) subjects who had also produced story completions at 54 months, but scored passage length (idea units) and scriptedness. Results captured much of the attachment-related variance associated with the traditional scoring, but had better discriminant validity vis-à-vis general developmental level. These results indicate that analysis of cognitive variables underlying conventional scoring can advance understanding of attachment representations and their relations to the organization and content of attachment-related narratives.
Circulating sex hormones in relation to anthropometric, sociodemographic and behavioural factors in an international dataset of 12,300 men

Introduction Sex hormones have been implicated in the etiology of a number of diseases. To better understand disease etiology and the mechanisms of disease-risk factor associations, this analysis aimed to investigate the associations of anthropometric, sociodemographic and behavioural factors with a range of circulating sex hormones and sex hormone-binding globulin. Methods Statistical analyses of individual participant data from 12,330 male controls aged 25–85 years from 25 studies involved in the Endogenous Hormones Nutritional Biomarkers and Prostate Cancer Collaborative Group. Analysis of variance was used to estimate geometric means adjusted for study and relevant covariates. Results Older age was associated with higher concentrations of sex hormone-binding globulin and dihydrotestosterone and lower concentrations of dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, free testosterone, androstenedione, androstanediol glucuronide and free estradiol. Higher body mass index was associated with higher concentrations of free estradiol, androstanediol glucuronide, estradiol and estrone and lower concentrations of dihydrotestosterone, testosterone, sex hormone-binding globulin, free testosterone, androstenedione and dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate. Taller height was associated with lower concentrations of androstenedione, testosterone, free testosterone and sex hormone-binding globulin and higher concentrations of androstanediol glucuronide. Current smoking was associated with higher concentrations of androstenedione, sex hormone-binding globulin and testosterone. Alcohol consumption was associated with higher concentrations of dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, androstenedione and androstanediol glucuronide. East Asians had lower concentrations of androstanediol glucuronide and African Americans had higher concentrations of estrogens. Education and marital status were modestly associated with a small number of hormones. Conclusion Circulating sex hormones in men are strongly associated with age and body mass index, and to a lesser extent with smoking status and alcohol consumption.
Mineralization of Lipid A-Phosphates in Three- and Two-Dimensional Colloidal Dispersions

© 2012 Paradies et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Mineralization of Lipid A-Phosphates in Threeand Two-Dimensional Colloidal Dispersions
CBER: An Effective Classification Approach Based on Enrichment Representation for Short Text Documents

Abstract In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Classification Based on Enrichment Representation (CBER) of short text documents. The proposed approach extracts concepts occurring in short text documents and uses them to calculate the weight of the synonyms of each concept. Concepts with the same meanings will increase the weights of their synonyms. However, the text document is short and concepts are rarely repeated; therefore, we capture the semantic relationships among concepts and solve the disambiguation problem. The experimental results show that the proposed CBER is valuable in annotating short text documents to their best labels (classes). We used precision and recall measures to evaluate the proposed approach. CBER performance reached 93% and 94% in precision and recall, respectively.
Improving sneaky-sex in a low oxygen environment: reproductive and physiological responses of male mosquito fish to chronic hypoxia

SUMMARY Few studies have examined the adaptive significance of reversible acclimation responses. The aerobic performance and mating behaviour of the sexually coercive male eastern mosquito fish (Gambusia holbrooki) offers an excellent model system for testing the benefits of reversible acclimation responses to mating success. We exposed male mosquito fish to normoxic or hypoxic conditions for 4 weeks and tested their maximum sustained swimming performance and their ability to obtain coercive matings under both normoxic and hypoxic conditions. We predicted that hypoxia-acclimated males would possess greater swimming and mating performance in hypoxic conditions than normoxic-acclimated males, and vice versa when tested in normoxia. Supporting our predictions, we found the sustained swimming performance of male mosquito fish was greater in a hypoxic environment following long-term exposure to low partial pressures of oxygen. However, the benefits of acclimation responses to mating performance were dependent on whether they were tested in the presence or absence of male-male competition. In a non-competitive environment, male mosquito fish acclimated to hypoxic conditions spent a greater amount of time following females and obtained more copulations than normoxic-acclimated males when tested in low partial pressures of oxygen. When males were competed against each other for copulations, we found no influence of long-term exposure to different partial pressures of oxygen on mating behaviour. Thus, despite improvements in the aerobic capacity of male mosquito fish following long-term acclimation to hypoxic conditions, these benefits did not always manifest themselves in improved mating performance. This study represents one of the first experimental tests of the benefits of reversible acclimation responses, and indicates that the ecological significance of physiological plasticity may be more complicated than previously imagined.
Examining the promise of HIV elimination by ‘test and treat’ in hyperendemic settings

Background:It has been suggested that a new strategy for HIV prevention, ‘Universal Test and Treat’, whereby everyone is tested for HIV once a year and treated immediately with antiretroviral therapy (ART) if they are infected, could ‘eliminate’ the epidemic and reduce ART costs in the long term. Methods:We investigated the impact of test-and-treat interventions under a variety of assumptions about the epidemic using a deterministic mathematical model. Results:Our model shows that such an intervention can substantially reduce HIV transmission, but that impact depends crucially on the epidemiological context; in some situations, less aggressive interventions achieve the same results, whereas in others, the proposed intervention reduces HIV by much less. It follows that testing every year and treating immediately is not necessarily the most cost-efficient strategy. We also show that a test-and-treat intervention that does not reach full implementation or coverage could, perversely, increase long-term ART costs. Conclusion:Interventions that prevent new infections through ART scale-up may hold substantial promise. However, as plans move forward, careful consideration should be given to the nature of the epidemic and the potential for perverse outcomes.
Synapse loss from chronically elevated glucocorticoids: Relationship to neuropil volume and cell number in hippocampal area CA3

Individuals with clinical disorders associated with elevated plasma glucocorticoids, such as major depressive disorder and Cushing's syndrome, are reported to have smaller hippocampal volume. To understand how the hippocampus responds at the cellular and subcellular levels to glucocorticoids and how such changes are related to volume measures, we have undertaken a comprehensive study of glucocorticoid effects on hippocampal CA3 volume and identified elements in the neuropil including astrocytic volume and cell and synapse number and size. Male Sprague‐Dawley rats were injected with corticosterone (40 mg/kg), the primary glucocorticoid in rodents, or vehicle for 60 days. The CA3 was further subdivided so that the two‐thirds of CA3 (nearest the dentate gyrus) previously shown to be vulnerable to corticosterone could be analyzed as two separate subfields. Corticosterone had no effect on neuropil volume or glial volume in the proximal subfield but caused a strong tendency for astrocytic processes to make up a larger proportion of the tissue and for volume of tissue made of constituents other than glial cells (primarily neuronal processes) to be smaller in the middle subfield. Within the neuropil, there were no cellular or subcellular profiles that indicated degeneration, suggesting that corticosterone does not cause prolonged damage. Corticosterone did not reduce cell number or cell or nonperforated synapse size but did cause a pronounced loss of synapses. This loss occurred in both subfields and, therefore, was independent of volume loss. Together, the findings suggest that volume measures can underestimate corticosterone effects on neural structure. J. Comp. Neurol. 498:363–374, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Feature Extraction via Recurrent Random Deep Ensembles and its Application in Gruop-level Happiness Estimation

This paper presents a novel ensemble framework to extract highly discriminative feature representation of image and its application for group-level happpiness intensity prediction in wild. In order to generate enough diversity of decisions, n convolutional neural networks are trained by bootstrapping the training set and extract n features for each image from them. A recurrent neural network (RNN) is then used to remember which network extracts better feature and generate the final feature representation for one individual image. Several group emotion models (GEM) are used to aggregate face fea- tures in a group and use parameter-optimized support vector regressor (SVR) to get the final results. Through extensive experiments, the great effectiveness of the proposed recurrent random deep ensembles (RRDE) is demonstrated in both structural and decisional ways. The best result yields a 0.55 root-mean-square error (RMSE) on validation set of HAPPEI dataset, significantly better than the baseline of 0.78.
A robust two-equation model for transient-mixed flows

A finite-volume model was built upon earlier work with the aim of simulating free surface flows, pressurized flows and their simultaneous occurrence (mixed flows) in single-liquid and two-phase flow conditions (entrapment and release of air pockets). The model presented herein is based on a two-governing equation model. Three main contributions are presented herein, namely (1) the ability of the proposed model to simulate mixed flows without restriction of the flow type in the free surface region (e.g. supercritical flow), (2) extension of our single-phase flow model for simulating the entrapment and release of air pockets and (3) formulation of an approach for handling numerical instabilities that may occur during numerical pressurization of the flow. The model presented herein is robust and simulates any transient-mixed flow condition for realistic pressure wave celerities.
Empirical model optimization using Nelder-Mead algorithm for mobile communication in suburban and rural area

In mobile radio systems, path loss models are necessary for proper planning, interference estimations, frequencies assignments and cell parameters which are basic for network planning process. Empirical models are the most adjustable models that can be suited to different types of environments. In this paper, data collected in Batna, Algeria is used to calculate the path loss for GSM (908–957 MHz). The measured path loss is compared with theoretical path loss estimated by the most widely empirical models «Cost123», «Hata», «SUI» and «Egli». The best model to estimate the measured path loss is optimized using Nelder-Mead algorithm to predict path loss for suburban and rural area. The RMSE between the actual and predicted data is calculated for various path loss models. It turned out that the adjusted COST 231 model outperforms the other studied models. The investigated results can help telecommunication engineers improve their planning and design of microcellular system.
Merging Nodes in Search Trees: an Exact Exponential Algorithm for the Single Machine Total Tardiness Scheduling Problem

This paper proposes an exact exponential algorithm for the problem of minimizing the total tardiness of jobs on a single machine. It exploits the structure of a basic branch-and-reduce framework based on the well known Lawler's decomposition property. The proposed algorithm, called branch-and-merge, is an improvement of the branch-and-reduce technique with the embedding of a node merging operation. Its time complexity is O*(2.247^n) keeping the space complexity polynomial. The branch-and-merge technique is likely to be generalized to other sequencing problems with similar decomposition properties.
Null Mutations in Drosophila N-Acetylglucosaminyltransferase I Produce Defects in Locomotion and a Reduced Life Span*

UDP-GlcNAc:α3-d-mannoside β1,2-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase I (encoded by Mgat1) controls the synthesis of hybrid, complex, and paucimannose N-glycans. Mice make hybrid and complex N-glycans but little or no paucimannose N-glycans. In contrast, Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans make paucimannose N-glycans but little or no hybrid or complex N-glycans. To determine the functional requirement for β1,2-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase I in Drosophila, we generated null mutations by imprecise excision of a nearby transposable element. Extracts from Mgat11/Mgat11 null mutants showed no β1,2-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase I enzyme activity. Moreover, mass spectrometric analysis of these extracts showed dramatic changes in N-glycans compatible with lack of β1,2-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase I activity. Interestingly, Mgat11/Mgat11 null mutants are viable but exhibit pronounced defects in adult locomotory activity when compared with Mgat11/CyO-GFP heterozygotes or wild type flies. In addition, in null mutants males are sterile and have a severely reduced mean and maximum life span. Microscopic examination of mutant adult fly brains showed the presence of fused β lobes. The removal of both maternal and zygotic Mgat1 also gave rise to embryos that no longer express the horseradish peroxidase antigen within the central nervous system. Taken together, the data indicate that β1,2-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase I-dependent N-glycans are required for locomotory activity, life span, and brain development in Drosophila.
A MRI and Polarized Gases Compatible Respirator and Gas Administrator for the Study of the Small Animal Lung: Volume Measurement and Control

We have developed over the past years an experimental magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and polarized gases compatible mechanical respirator for the study of the small experimental animal. The respirator has been successfully used for experiments both in the MRI setting for polarized 3He, 19F, and proton imaging as well as for functional measurements of the lungs. The new main pneumatic valve with the two integrated sensors for simultaneous lung pressure and volume measurements and the proportional valve to set the tidal volume of the respiration are described. It is shown how the device measures and controls the tidal volume of the lungs.
A free viewpoint 3DTV system based on parameterized variety model

This paper presents a novel parameterized variety based architecture for interactive 3DTV and Free viewpoint TV (FTV) applications. The proposed signal representation scheme allows to render free viewpoint images, taking only few sample images of the scene acquired by arbitrary, uncalibrated cameras. We extend the Parameterized Image Variety approach for rendering proposed earlier by Genc and Ponce [1] to handle full perspective cameras. A fast and efficient algebraic framework is proposed for the parameterized representation of 3D scene, in terms of image pixel positions corresponding to only three reference scene points. The key aspects of the novel FTV architecture based on this variety model are i) interactive stereoscopic view synthesis from arbitrary viewpoint ii) intuitive interface for content based virtual view specification iii) facilitation to add special effects like 3D scene augmentation.