Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activity Sensor

While on the go, people are using their phones as a personal concierge discovering what is around and deciding what to do. Mobile phone has become a recommendation terminal customized for individuals—capable of recommending activities and simplifying the accomplishment of related tasks. In this article, we conduct usage mining on the check-in data, with summarized statistics identifying the local recommendation challenges of huge solution space, sparse available data, and complicated user intent, and discovered observations to motivate the hierarchical, contextual, and sequential solution. We present a point-of-interest (POI) category-transition--based approach, with a goal of estimating the visiting probability of a series of successive POIs conditioned on current user context and sensor context. A mobile local recommendation demo application is deployed. The objective and subjective evaluations validate the effectiveness in providing mobile users both accurate recommendation and favorable user experience.
The Relation between Analysts' Forecasts of Long-Term Earnings Growth and Stock Price Performance Following Equity Offerings

We evaluate the role of sell-side analysts' long-term earnings growth forecasts in the pricing of common equity offerings. We find that, in general, sell-side analysts' long-term growth forecasts are systematically overly optimistic around equity offerings and that analysts employed by the lead managers of the offerings make the most optimistic growth forecasts. Additionally, we find a positive relation between the fees paid to the affiliated analysts' employers and the level of the affiliated analysts' growth forecasts. We also document that the post-offering under performance is most pronounced for firms with the highest growth forecasts made by affiliated analysts. Finally, we demonstrate that the post-offering under performance disappears once we control for the over optimism in earnings growth expectations. Thus, the evidence presented in this paper is consistent with the 'equity issue puzzle' arising from overly optimistic earnings growth expectations held at the time of the offerings.
Building an information retrieval test collection for spontaneous conversational speech

Test collections model use cases in ways that facilitate evaluation of information retrieval systems. This paper describes the use of search-guided relevance assessment to create a test collection for retrieval of spontaneous conversational speech. Approximately 10,000 thematically coherent segments were manually identified in 625 hours of oral history interviews with 246 individuals. Automatic speech recognition results, manually prepared summaries, controlled vocabulary indexing, and name authority control are available for every segment. Those features were leveraged by a team of four relevance assessors to identify topically relevant segments for 28 topics developed from actual user requests. Search-guided assessment yielded sufficient inter-annotator agreement to support formative evaluation during system development. Baseline results for ranked retrieval are presented to illustrate use of the collection.
Evaluation of Antibacterial Activity of Ethanolic Extract of Lawsonia Inermis

Lawsonia inermis(Henna Plant) has been used as herbal medicine for ages. In this study the antibacterial effect of ethanolic extract of Lawsonia inermis root against bacterial cultures of Vibrio cholera 156, Salmonella typhi 102, Shigella dysenteriae 2, Staphylococcus aureus ML 281, Escherichia coli Row, Shigella Flexneri 6430 Bcy, Bacillus polymyxa NCTC 4747, Vibrio cholera 2080, Salmonella typhi 642. The alcoholic extract was found to be more effective according to NCCLS agar dilution method.
Peering through the iframe

Drive-by-download attacks have become the method of choice for cyber-criminals to infect machines with malware. Previous research has focused on developing techniques to detect web sites involved in drive-by-download attacks, and on measuring their prevalence by crawling large portions of the Internet. In this paper, we take a different approach at analyzing and understanding drive-by-download attacks. Instead of horizontally searching the Internet for malicious pages, we examine in depth one drive-by-download campaign, that is, the coordinated efforts used to spread malware. In particular, we focus on the Mebroot campaign, which we periodically monitored and infiltrated over several months, by hijacking parts of its infrastructure and obtaining network traces at an exploit server. By studying the Mebroot drive-by-download campaign from the inside, we could obtain an in-depth and comprehensive view into the entire life-cycle of this campaign and the involved parties. More precisely, we could study the security posture of the victims of drive-by attacks (e.g., by measuring the prevalence of vulnerable software components and the effectiveness of software updating mechanisms), the characteristics of legitimate web sites infected during the campaign (e.g., the infection duration), and the modus operandi of the miscreants controlling the campaign.
Protein complex compositions predicted by structural similarity

Proteins function through interactions with other molecules. Thus, the network of physical interactions among proteins is of great interest to both experimental and computational biologists. Here we present structure-based predictions of 3387 binary and 1234 higher order protein complexes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae involving 924 and 195 proteins, respectively. To generate candidate complexes, comparative models of individual proteins were built and combined together using complexes of known structure as templates. These candidate complexes were then assessed using a statistical potential, derived from binary domain interfaces in PIBASE (). The statistical potential discriminated a benchmark set of 100 interface structures from a set of sequence-randomized negative examples with a false positive rate of 3% and a true positive rate of 97%. Moreover, the predicted complexes were also filtered using functional annotation and sub-cellular localization data. The ability of the method to select the correct binding mode among alternates is demonstrated for three camelid VHH domain—porcine α–amylase interactions. We also highlight the prediction of co-complexed domain superfamilies that are not present in template complexes. Through integration with MODBASE, the application of the method to proteomes that are less well characterized than that of S.cerevisiae will contribute to expansion of the structural and functional coverage of protein interaction space. The predicted complexes are deposited in MODBASE ().
Segmentation Mask Refinement Using Image Transformations

This paper discusses object proposal generation, which is a crucial step of instance-level semantic segmentation (instance segmentation). Known as a challenging computer vision task, the instance segmentation requires jointly detecting and segmenting individual instances of objects in an image. A common approach to this task is first to propose a set of class-agnostic object candidates in the forms of segmentation masks, which represent both object locations and boundaries, and then to perform classification on each object candidate. In this paper, we propose an effective refinement process that employs image transformations and mask matching to increase the accuracy of object segmentation masks. The proposed refinement process is applied to three state-of-the-art object proposal methods (DeepMask, SharpMask, and FastMask), and is evaluated on two standard benchmarks (Microsoft COCO and PASCAL VOC). Both the quantitative and qualitative results show the effectiveness of the process across various experimental settings.
Social Sensor Placement in Large Scale Networks: A Graph Sampling Perspective

Sensor placement for the purpose of detecting/tracking news outbreak and preventing rumor spreading is a challenging problem in a large scale online social network (OSN). This problem is a kind of subset selection problem: choosing a small set of items from a large population so to maximize some prespecified set function. However, it is known to be NP-complete. Existing heuristics are very costly especially for modern OSNs which usually contain hundreds of millions of users. This paper aims to design methods to find \emph{good solutions} that can well trade off efficiency and accuracy. We first show that it is possible to obtain a high quality solution with a probabilistic guarantee from a "{\em candidate set}" of the underlying social network. By exploring this candidate set, one can increase the efficiency of placing social sensors. We also present how this candidate set can be obtained using "{\em graph sampling}", which has an advantage over previous methods of not requiring the prior knowledge of the complete network topology. Experiments carried out on two real datasets demonstrate not only the accuracy and efficiency of our approach, but also effectiveness in detecting and predicting news outbreak.
INAOE at QA@CLEF 2008: Evaluating Answer Validation in Spanish Question Answering

This paper introduces the new INAOE’s answer validation method. This method is based on supervised learning approach that uses a set of attributes that capture some lexical-syntactic relations among the question, the answer and the given support text. In addition, the paper describes the evaluation of the proposed method at both the Spanish Answer validation Exercise (AVE 2008) and the Spanish Question Answering Main Task (QA 2008). The evaluation objectives were twofold. One the one hand, evaluate the ability of our answer validation method to discriminate correct from incorrect answers, and on the other hand, measure the impact of including an answer validation module in our QA system. The evaluation results were encouraging; the proposed method achieved a 0.39 F-measure in the detection of correct answers, outperforming the baseline result of the AVE 2008 task by more than 100%. It also enhanced the performance of our QA system, showing a gain in accuracy of 22% for answering factoid questions. Furthermore, when there were evaluated three candidate answers per question, the answer validation method allowed increasing the MRR of our QA system by 40%, reaching a MRR of 0.28.
Weak Existence for the Semigeostrophic Equations Formulated as a Coupled Monge-Ampère/Transport Problem

Hoskins's semigeostrophic equations are reformulated as a coupled Monge--Ampere/ transport problem [B. J. Hoskins, Quart. J. Royal Met. Soc. , 97 (1971), pp. 139--153]. Existence of global weak solutions is obtained for this formulation.
Anaemia in Kavaratti Island , Lakshadweep : Perspectives from a Hospital Based Study

IntroductionAnaemia is a major public health problem in developing countries like India. Kavaratti Island, Lakshadweep is a remote island located in Arabian sea. There is no data on anaemia available from here. Objectives of this study are to examine status of anaemia and compare the data with Indian, Kerala and Maldives figures. Materials & MethodsA total of 2000 patients were studied. Data from the anaemic individuals was collected and analyzed. The study group was subsequently divided into smaller subgroups on the basis of age and sex for analysis. The anaemia was also correlated with other haematological parameters like TLC, DLC, platelet count and ESR. ResultsThe prevalence of anaemia in adult males was 21.5% and in females 37.8%. In pregnant females anaemia was still more common (47.5%). Among children 24.6% were anaemic with female children showing higher percentage (27.4%) than males (22.9%). Anaemia was quite common in the elderly (36.6%) and even higher in elderly females (43.5%). Elderly males showed alterations in TLC and DLC while alteration in platelet count was most common in male children. DiscussionThe present study is the first study to examine anaemia at Kavaratti Island, Lakshadweep. On comparison the anaemia indicators were found to be vastly superior than those from India, Kerala and Maldives. However, in adult females and elderly females the situation demands urgent public health intervention. Conclusion – Anaemia is significantly less common in Kavaratti island, Lakshadweep. The important lessons learnt can be implemented in other places to bring down the prevalence of anaemia.
Incremental semi-supervised clustering ensemble for high dimensional data clustering

Recently, cluster ensemble approaches have gained more and more attention [1]–[2], due to useful applications in the areas of pattern recognition, data mining, bioinformatics, and so on. When compared with traditional single clustering algorithms, cluster ensemble approaches are able to integrate multiple clustering solutions obtained from different data sources into a unified solution, and provide a more robust, stable and accurate final result.
Resuscitative hypothermia.

Resuscitative (postinsult) hypothermia is less well studied than protective-preservative (pre- and intra-arrest) hypothermia. The latter is in wide clinical use, particularly for protecting the brain during cardiac surgery. Resuscitative hypothermia was explored in the 1950s and then lay dormant until the 1980s when it was revived. This change occurred through the discoveries of brain damage mitigating effects after cardiac arrest in dogs, and after forebrain ischemia in rats, of mild (34 degrees C) hypothermia (which is safe), and of benefits derived from moderate hypothermia (30 degrees C) after traumatic brain injury or focal brain ischemia in various species. The idea that protection-preservation or resuscitation by hypothermia is mainly explained by its ability to reduce cerebral oxygen demand has been replaced by an increasingly documented synergism of many beneficial mechanisms. Deleterious chemical cascades during and after these insults are suppressed even by mild hypothermia. Prolonged moderate hypothermia carries some risks, e.g., arrhythmias, infection and coagulopathies. These side effects need further study. In global brain ischemia, protective-preservative mild hypothermia provides lasting mitigation of brain damage. Resuscitative mild hypothermia, however, may be beneficial in terms of long-term outcome or may merely delay the inevitable loss of selectively vulnerable neurons. Even if the latter is true, mild hypothermia may extend the therapeutic window for other interventions. This extension of the therapeutic window requires further documentation. After normothermic cardiac arrest of 11 mins in dogs, mild resuscitative hypothermia from 15 mins to 12 hours after reperfusion plus cerebral blood flow promotion normalized functional recovery with the least histologic damage seen thus far. Optimal duration of, and rewarming methods from, resuscitative hypothermia need clarification. The earliest possible induction of mild hypothermia after cardiac arrest seems desirable. Head-neck surface cooling alone is too slow. Among many clinically feasible rapid cooling methods, carotid cold flush and peritoneal cooling look promising. After traumatic brain injury or focal brain ischemia, which seem to still benefit from even later cooling, surface cooling methods may be adequate. Resuscitative hypothermia after cardiac arrest, traumatic brain injury, or focal brain ischemia should be considered for clinical trials.
Long-Term Spinal Opioid Therapy in Terminally Ill Cancer Pain Patients.

In terminally ill cancer patients with refractory pain, long-term spinal opioid therapy may provide a profound analgesia with minimal side effects. The reversibility of the technique and its efficacy throughout the body and for different types of pain are important advantages. For epidural administration, it is preferable to use lipid soluble opioids (sufentanil). For intrathecal administration, morphine is the best choice. The advantages of intrathecal administration over epidural administration are the need for lower doses because of a more direct administration at the receptor site, the easy positioning of the catheter, and less risk for migration of the catheter. In severe refractory pain which does not respond to spinal opioids, the use of non-opioids (e.g., a local anesthetic or an alpha-2 adrenoreceptor agonist) as coanalgesics may be recommended for improving pain relief. Long-term spinal opioid therapy at home has been made possible by technical and organizational development. In home care, only one physician should be the manager for the patient. Coordination should be optimized among patient, family, general practitioner, oncologist, anesthesiologist, home nurse, technician, and pharmacist.
Investigating a Socially Inspired Heterogeneous System of Problem Solving Agents

Social interactions have recently been used as an inspiration for novel agent-based problem-solving models. Particle Swarm Optimization and Memetic Networks are two such algorithms. Although they draw inspiration from different real-world social systems, they both rely on the concept of a social network to regulate the internal information flow in a structured way. In this paper, we systematically investigate how a heterogeneous population composed of individuals from these two models behave as the system seeks the solution to the benchmark problems. We report on extensive numerical simulations, showing that this heterogeneous model is able to converge faster in two highly multimodal scenarios while being otherwise statistically equivalent to the original homogeneous models. Our results provide supportive evidence for the hypothesis that higher diversity in populations of problem-solvers can be beneficial and also adds a new dimension to previous heterogeneous problem-solving models.
Enhanced number and activity of mitochondria in multiple sclerosis lesions

Mitochondrial dysfunction has been implicated in the development and progression of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions. Mitochondrial alterations might occur as a response to demyelination and inflammation, since demyelination leads to an increased energy demand in axons and could thereby affect the number, distribution and activity of mitochondria. We have studied the expression of mitochondrial proteins and mitochondrial enzyme activity in active demyelinating and chronic inactive MS lesions. Mitochondrial protein expression and enzyme activity in active and chronic inactive MS lesions was investigated using (immuno)histochemical and biochemical techniques. The number of mitochondria and their co‐localization with axons and astrocytes within MS lesions and adjacent normal‐appearing white matter (NAWM) was quantitatively assessed. In both active and inactive lesions we observed an increase in mitochondrial protein expression as well as a significant increase in the number of mitochondria. Mitochondrial density in axons and astrocytes was significantly enhanced in active lesions compared to adjacent NAWM, whereas a trend was observed in inactive lesions. Complex IV activity was strikingly up‐regulated in MS lesions compared to control white matter and, to a lesser extent, NAWM. Finally, we demonstrated increased immunoreactivity of the mitochondrial stress protein mtHSP70 in MS lesions, particularly in astrocytes and axons. Our data indicate the occurrence of severe mitochondrial alterations in MS lesions, which coincides with enhanced mitochondrial oxidative stress. Together, these findings support a mechanism whereby enhanced density of mitochondria in MS lesions might contribute to the formation of free radicals and subsequent tissue damage. Copyright © 2009 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Adherence to inhaled therapy, mortality and hospital admission in COPD

Background: Little is known about adherence to inhaled medication in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and the impact on mortality and morbidity. Methods: Data on drug adherence from a randomised double-blind trial comparing inhaled salmeterol 50 μg + fluticasone propionate 500 μg twice daily with placebo and each drug individually in 6112 patients with moderate to severe COPD over 3 years in the TORCH study were used. All-cause mortality and exacerbations leading to hospital admission were primary and secondary end points. The study of adherence was not specified a priori as an ancillary study. Results: Of the 4880 patients (79.8%) with good adherence defined as >80% use of study medication, 11.3% died compared with 26.4% of the 1232 patients (20.2%) with poor adherence. The annual rates of hospital admission for exacerbations were 0.15 and 0.27, respectively. The association between adherence and mortality remained unchanged and statistically significant after adjusting for other factors related to prognosis (hazard ratio 0.40 (95% CI 0.35 to 0.46), p<0.001). The association was even stronger when analysing on-treatment deaths only. Similarly, the association between adherence and hospital admission remained unchanged and significant in a multivariate analysis (rate ratio 0.58 (95% CI 0.44 to 0.73, p<0.001). The association between increased adherence and improved mortality and reduction in hospital admission was independent of study treatment. The effect of treatment was more pronounced in patients with good adherence than in those with poor adherence. Conclusion: Adherence to inhaled medication is significantly associated with reduced risk of death and admission to hospital due to exacerbations in COPD. Further research is needed to understand these strong associations.
Dual Linkage of a Locus to Left Ventricular Mass and a Cardiac Gene Co-Expression Network Driven by a Chromosome Domain

We have previously reported Lvm1 as a quantitative trait locus (QTL) on chromosome 13 that links to cardiac left ventricular mass (LVM) in a panel of AxB/BxA mouse recombinant inbred strains (RIS). When performing a gene expression QTL (eQTL) analysis, we detected 33 cis-eQTLs that correlated with LVM. Among the latter, a group of eight cis-eQTLs clustered in a genomic region smaller than 6 Mb and surrounding the Lvm1 peak on chr13. Co-variant analysis indicated that all eight genes correlated with the phenotype in a causal rather than a reactive fashion, a finding that (despite its functional interest) did not provide grounds to prioritize any of these candidate genes. As a complementary approach, we performed weighted gene co-expression network analysis, which allowed us to detect 49 modules of highly connected genes. The module that correlated best with LVM: (1) showed linkage to a module QTL whose boundaries matched closely those of the phenotypic Lvm1 QTL on chr13; (2) harbored a disproportionately high proportion of genes originating from a small genomic region on chromosome 13 (including the 8 previously detected cis-eQTL genes); (3) contained genes that, beyond their individual level of expression, correlated with LVM as a function of their inter-connectivity; and (4) showed increased abundance of polymorphic insertion–deletion elements in the same region. Taken together, these data suggest that a domain on chromosome 13 constitutes the biologic principle responsible for the organization and linkage of the gene co-expression module, and indicate a mechanism whereby genetic variants within chromosome domains may associate to phenotypic changes via coordinate changes in the expression of several genes. One other possible implication of these findings is that candidate genes to consider as contributors to a particular phenotype should extend further than those that are closest to the QTL peak.