Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computing probabilistic viable sets for partially observable systems using truncated gaussians and adaptive gridding

We consider the problem of probabilistic safety verification and controller synthesis for linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with noisy state measurements. Almost no numerical results are available for safety verification of partially observable systems. We model the problem as an equivalent optimal control problem over a belief state that is a modified conditional probability density of the current state of the system. The belief state is shown to be a truncated Gaussian density in the case of LTI systems with Gaussian measurement noise, and a novel algorithm is proposed that extends existing point-based solvers to include the truncated Gaussian belief state, and continuous observation space that is adaptively gridded to reduce estimation error and increase speed of computation. Preliminary results show the method to be promising in terms of computation time as compared to other approaches.
Adjustable properties of visual representations: Improving the quality of human‐information interaction

Complex cognitive activities, such as analytical reasoning, problem solving, and sense making, are often performed through the mediation of interactive computational tools. Examples include visual analytics, decision support, and educational tools. Through interaction with visual representations of information at the visual interface of these tools, a joint, coordinated cognitive system is formed. This partnership results in a number of relational properties—those depending on both humans and tools—that researchers and designers must be aware of if such tools are to effectively support the performance of complex cognitive activities. This article presents 10 properties of interactive visual representations that are essential and relational and whose values can be adjusted through interaction. By adjusting the values of these properties, better coordination between humans and tools can be effected, leading to higher quality performance of complex cognitive activities. This article examines how the values of these properties affect cognitive processing and visual reasoning and demonstrates the necessity of making their values adjustable—all of which is situated within a broader theoretical framework concerned with human‐information interaction in complex cognitive activities. This framework can facilitate systematic research, design, and evaluation in numerous fields including information visualization, health informatics, visual analytics, and educational technology.
The Association of Raynaud Syndrome With Thromboangiitis Obliterans—A Meta-Analysis

Thromboangiitis obliterans (TAO) has traditionally been included among the diseases associated with Raynaud syndrome (RS). The prevalence of RS in patients with TAO is not well defined. The objective of this meta-analysis is to assess the prevalence of RS in patients with TAO. A literature search was performed for the studies dealing with RS and TAO. The studies provided sufficient data to estimate the prevalence of RS in patients with TAO. A total of 8 eligible studies, contributing data on 851 patients, were included in this meta-analysis. For TAO, a pooled prevalence of 28.1% and 95% confidence interval ([CI] = 0.158, 0.423) were obtained. Statistically publication bias was not present (P = .232). Despite some heterogeneity, there is a possible indication of an association between RS and patients with TAO.
Short‐term control of capsaicin on blood and oxidative stress of rats in vivo

Capsaicin (8‐methyl‐n‐vanillyl‐6‐nonenamide), a pungent component found in red pepper can induce body heat and possibly enhance blood ﬂow as well as increase energy expenditure, and prevent oxidative stress. Male Wistar rats were divided into vehicle, 1 mg/kg body weight capsaicin and 3 mg/kg body weight capsaicin groups. Samples were taken from the animals on day 1 of i.p. treatment with capsaicin and on 3 consecutive days of i.p. treatment with capsaicin. Our investigation demonstrated that blood ﬂow measurements in rats was negatively correlated with LDL after treatment with capsaicin. Although capsaicin did not show a noticeable effect on the serum total cholesterol level, LDL decreased while HDL and triglyceride increased in rats treated with 3 mg/kg capsaicin for 3 days. The antioxidant effect of capsaicin was not shown when the rats were treated with 1 mg/kg body weight capsaicin. However, rats treated with 3 mg/kg body weight capsaicin for 3 days showed a reduction of oxidative stress measured as malondialdehyde in the liver, lung, kidney and muscle. Liver glycogen was found to decrease after 3 days treatment with 3 mg/kg body weight capsaicin. From this study, it is hypothesized that capsaicin can be a potent antioxidant and aid in lowering LDL even when consumed for a short period. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Draft Genome Sequence of Quorum-Sensing and Quorum-Quenching Pseudomonas aeruginosa Strain MW3a

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas aeruginosa has a broad range of habitation, from aquatic environments to human lungs. The coexistence of quorum-sensing and quorum-quenching activities occurs in P. aeruginosa strain MW3a. In this work, we present the draft genome sequence of P. aeruginosa MW3a, an interesting bacterium isolated from a marine environment.
Pricing a Shared Access Link for Fair and Efficient Operation with Variable User Data Rates

The literature on pricing implicitly assumes an "infinite data" model, in which sources can sustain any data rate indefinitely. We assume a more realistic "finite data" model, in which sources occasionally run out of data; this leads to variable user data rates. Further, we assume that users have contracts with the service provider, specifying the rates at which they can inject traffic into the network. Our objective is to study how prices can be set such that a single link can be shared efficiently and fairly among users in a dynamically changing scenario where a subset of users occasionally has little data to send. User preferences are modelled by concave increasing utility functions. Further, we introduce two additional elements: a convex increasing disutility function and a convex increasing multiplicative congestion-penalty function. The disutility function takes the shortfall (contracted rate minus present rate) as its argument, and essentially encourages users to send traffic at their contracted rates, while the congestion-penalty function discourages heavy users from sending excess data when the link is congested. We obtain simple necessary and sufficient conditions on prices for fair and efficient link sharing; moreover, we show that a single price for all users achieves this. We illustrate the ideas using a simple experiment.
Bacterioplankton features and its relations with doc characteristics and other limnological variables in Paraná river floodplain environments (PR/MS-Brazil)

Since the introduction of the Microbial Loop concept, many studies aimed to explain the role of bacterioplankton and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in aquatic ecosystems. Paraná River floodplain system is a very complex environment where these subjects were little explored. The aim of this work was to characterize bacterial community in terms of density, biomass and biovolume in some water bodies of this floodplain and to verify its temporal variation and its relation with some limnological variables, including some indicators of DOC quality, obtained through Ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) and fluorescence spectroscopic analysis. Bacterial density, biomass and biovolume are similar to those from other freshwater environments and both density and biomass were higher in the period with less rain. The limnological and spectroscopic features that showed any relation with bacterioplankton were the concentrations of N-NH4 and P-PO4, water transparency, and some indicators of DOC quality and origin. The analysis of these relations showed a possible competition between bacterioplankton and phytoplankton for inorganic nutrients and that the DOC used by bacterioplankton is labile and probably from aquatic macrophytes.
REPENSER L'INTERCULTUREL EN COMMUNICATION Performance culturelle et construction des identités au sein d'une association européenne

Cette these examine l'influence sur les micro-interactions sociales, des multiples cultures et identites que les acteurs sociaux sont susceptibles de mobiliser pendant une rencontre. D'un point de vue interactionniste symbolique, elle focalise sur le processus intersubjectif de negociation de reperes de signification, pendant une interaction multiculturelle (approche semiopragmatique). A travers son analyse d'un corpus d'interactions observees au sein d'une association etudiante europeenne, la these souligne l'importance de la dimension interculturelle dans la communication interpersonnelle. A partir d'une conception processuelle de la culture, definie et actualisee dans les interactions, elle etudie la maniere dont les individus fondent leur previsibilite intersubjective sur la mise en avant de diverses appartenances sociales. L'activation de multiples identites, associees a des reperes culturels differents, permet aux membres de l'association, dans certains contextes, d'instaurer des conditions de previsibilite mutuelle qui ne reposent qu'en partie sur leurs identites nationales differentes. Enfin, la these s'interesse a la maniere dont les reperes de signification sont performes pendant l'interaction. Trois contextes interpretatifs sont distingues : celui de la culture (significations prefigurees), celui de la situation sociale (significations configurees) et celui de l'interaction particuliere (significations performees dans la figuration). Ensemble, les trois niveaux composent le contexte figuratif, contexte actualise au fil des echanges, et auquel les acteurs sociaux se referent pour formuler et pour interpreter leurs actes symboliques respectifs.
Microphone array processing for distant speech recognition: Spherical arrays

Distant speech recognition (DSR) holds out the promise of the most natural human computer interface because it enables man-machine interactions through speech, without the necessity of donning intrusive body- or head-mounted microphones. With the advent of the Microsoft Kinect, the application of non-uniform linear arrays to the DSR problem has become commonplace. Performance analysis of such arrays is well-represented in the literature. Recently, spherical arrays have become the subject of intense research interest in the acoustic array processing community. Such arrays have heretofore been analyzed solely with theoretical metrics under idealized conditions. In this work, we analyze such arrays under realistic conditions. Moreover, we compare a linear array with 64-channel arrays and a total length of 126 cm to a spherical array with 32 channels and a radius of 4.2 cm; we found that these provided word error rates of 9.3% and 10.2%, respectively, on a DSR task. For a speaker positioned at an oblique angle with respect to the linear array, we recorded error rates of 12.8% and 9.7%, respectively, for the linear and spherical arrays. The compact size and outstanding performance of the spherical array recommends itself well to space-limited and mobile applications such as homegaming consoles and humanoid robots.
A Trainable Message Understanding System

The Message Understanding Conferences (MUCs) have given a great impetus to research in information extraction (IE). The systems which have participated in the MUCs have been quite successful at extracting information from the domains that they have been trained on (MUC-4, 1992), (MUC5, 1993), (MUC-6, 1995). The precision and recall statistics were around 60% and 50% respectively for MUC-6. However, these systems are domain dependent and customizing them to a new domain is a long and tedious process. For example, porting BBN's PLUM system from the Joint Ventures (MUC-5) domain to the Microelectronics (MUC-5) domain took approximately 3 person weeks (Weischedel, 1993). Moreover, training and adapting these systems to a particular domain is done by a group of computational linguists. These linguists determine all the ways in which the target information is expressed in a given corpus and then think of all the plausible variants of these ways, so that appropriate regular patterns can be written. The explosion in the amount of free text material on the Internet, and the use of this information by people from all walks of life, has made the issue of generalized information extraction a central one in Natural Language Processing. Many systems, including ones from NYU (Grishman, 1995), BBN (Weischedel, 1995), SRI (Appelt, 1995), SRA (Krupka, 1995), MITRE (Aberdeen, 1995), and the University of Massachusetts (Fisher, 1995), have taken steps to make the process of customizing a system for a particular domain an easy one. Appelt et al. write, "If information extraction systems are going to be used in a wide variety of applications, it will ultimately be necessary for the end users to be able to customize the systems themselves in a relatively short time. " (Appelt, 1995) We have built a system that at tempts to provide
Leptin treatment prevents type I diabetic marrow adiposity but not bone loss in mice

Leptin is a hormone secreted by adipocytes that is implicated in the regulation of bone density. Serum leptin levels are decreased in rodent models of type 1 (T1‐) diabetes and in diabetic patients. Whether leptin mediates diabetic bone changes is unclear. Therefore, we treated control and T1‐diabetic mice with chronic (28 days) subcutaneous infusion of leptin or saline to elucidate the therapeutic potential of leptin for diabetic osteoporosis. Leptin prevented the increase of marrow adipocytes and the increased aP2 expression that we observed in vehicle‐treated diabetic mice. However, leptin did not prevent T1‐diabetic decreases in trabecular bone volume fraction or bone mineral density in tibia or vertebrae. Consistent with this finding, markers of bone formation (osteocalcin RNA and serum levels) in diabetic mice were not restored to normal levels with leptin treatment. Interestingly, markers of bone resorption (TRAP5 RNA and serum levels) were decreased in diabetic mice by leptin treatment. In summary, we have demonstrated a link between low leptin levels in T1‐diabetes and marrow adiposity. However, leptin treatment alone was not successful in preventing bone loss. J. Cell. Physiol. 218: 376–384, 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Population Responses to Perturbations: The Importance of Trait-Based Analysis Illustrated through a Microcosm Experiment

Environmental change continually perturbs populations from a stable state, leading to transient dynamics that can last multiple generations. Several long-term studies have reported changes in trait distributions along with demographic response to environmental change. Here we conducted an experimental study on soil mites and investigated the interaction between demography and an individual trait over a period of nonstationary dynamics. By following individual fates and body sizes at each life-history stage, we investigated how body size and population density influenced demographic rates. By comparing the ability of two alternative approaches, a matrix projection model and an integral projection model, we investigated whether consideration of trait-based demography enhances our ability to predict transient dynamics. By utilizing a prospective perturbation analysis, we addressed which stage-specific demographic or trait-transition rate had the greatest influence on population dynamics. Both body size and population density had important effects on most rates; however, these effects differed substantially among life-history stages. Considering the observed trait-demography relationships resulted in better predictions of a population’s response to perturbations, which highlights the role of phenotypic plasticity in transient dynamics. Although the perturbation analyses provided comparable predictions of stage-specific elasticities between the matrix and integral projection models, the order of importance of the life-history stages differed between the two analyses. In conclusion, we demonstrate how a trait-based demographic approach provides further insight into transient population dynamics.
Sex Differences of Uncinate Fasciculus Structural Connectivity in Individuals with Conduct Disorder

Conduct disorder (CD) is one of the most common behavior disorders in adolescents, such as impulsivity, aggression, and running from school. Males are more likely to develop CD than females, and two previous diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies have demonstrated abnormal microstructural integrity in the uncinate fasciculus (UF) in boys with CD compared to a healthy control group. However, little is known about changes in the UF in females with CD. In this study, the UF was illustrated by tractography; then, the fractional anisotropy (FA), axial diffusivity, mean diffusion, radial diffusivity (RD), and the length and number of the UF fiber bundles were compared between male and female patients with CD and between female patients with CD and female healthy controls, as well as between males with CD and healthy males. We found that males with CD showed significantly higher FA of the bilateral UF and significantly lower RD of the left UF when comparing with females with CD. Meanwhile, significantly higher FA and lower RD of the bilateral UF were also found in boys with CD relative to the male healthy controls. Our results replicated previous reports that the microstructural integrity of the UF was abnormal in boys with CD. Additionally, our results demonstrated significant gender effects on the UF of patients with CD, which may indicate why boys have higher rates of conduct problems than girls.
Extremal pseudocompact Abelian groups: A unified treatment

The authors have shown [Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 135 (2007), 4039– 4044] that every nonmetrizable, pseudocompact abelian group has both a proper dense pseudocompact subgroup and a strictly finer pseudocompact group topology. Here they give a comprehensive, direct and self-contained proof of this result.
Can cystatin C become an easy and reliable tool for anesthesiologists to calculate glomerular filtration rate?

Background and Aims: The aim was to evaluate the role of cystatin C as a noninvasive and easy marker of glomerular filtration rate (GFR) estimation in voluntary kidney donors. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively evaluated 40 voluntary kidney donors. They underwent complete biochemical and nuclear tests as a part of transplant workup. Serum cystatin C, serum creatinine, and Tc-99m diethylene-triamine-penta-acetic acid (DTPA) were used in our study. We calculated GFR using the chronic kidney disease epidemiology collaboration (CKD-EPI) formula based on creatinine only (GFR-CKD-EPI-creat), CKD-EPI formula using creatinine and cystatin C (GFR-CKD-EPI-cyst-creat), and modification of diet in renal disease (MDRD) and CKD-EPI cystatin C equation (2012) (GFR-cyst). Data was evaluated using the SPSS software (version 11.5). The correlation analysis and analysis of variance was used for statistical computation. Agreement was determined using analyze-it version 2.30 for MS-Excel 12+. Results: The mean age of the donors in our study was 49.83 ± 13.06. The mean cystatin C in females was 0.72 ± 0.12, the mean cystain C in males was 0.87 ± 0.23. On correlating GFR-cyst with GFR-DTPA the Pearson correlation coefficient (ρ) was found to be 0.388 this correlation was significant with P < 0.05. While comparing with DTPA the correlation coefficient of GFR-CKD-EPI-creat group was 0.587 which was significant with P < 0.01. The correlation coefficient of GFR-CKD-EPI-cyst-creat group compared with GFR-DTPA group was 0.543 which was also significant at P < 0.001. GFR-CKD-EPI-creat gave the highest correlation with DTPA in our study. The correlation coefficient of GFR-MDRD group with DTPA group was 0.576 this correlation was also significant with P < 0.01. The results obtained were further statistically analyzed by Bland-Altman analysis the percentage error for GFR-DTPA versus GFR-cyst-creat is 29.72%; for GFR-DTPA versus GFR-EPI-creat is 30.73%; or GFR-DTPA versus MDRD is 31.63% and for GFR-DTPA versus GFR-cyst is 34.37%. Conclusion: Cystatin C is a good endogenous marker for calculating GFR as it correlates very well with DTPA and CKD-EPI equation based GFR.
Breast Segmentation and Density Estimation in Breast MRI: A Fully Automatic Framework

Breast density measurement is an important aspect in breast cancer diagnosis as dense tissue has been related to the risk of breast cancer development. The purpose of this study is to develop a method to automatically compute breast density in breast MRI. The framework is a combination of image processing techniques to segment breast and fibroglandular tissue. Intra- and interpatient signal intensity variability is initially corrected. The breast is segmented by automatically detecting body-breast and air-breast surfaces. Subsequently, fibroglandular tissue is segmented in the breast area using expectation-maximization. A dataset of 50 cases with manual segmentations was used for evaluation. Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), total overlap, false negative fraction (FNF), and false positive fraction (FPF) are used to report similarity between automatic and manual segmentations. For breast segmentation, the proposed approach obtained DSC, total overlap, FNF, and FPF values of 0.94, 0.96, 0.04, and 0.07, respectively. For fibroglandular tissue segmentation, we obtained DSC, total overlap, FNF, and FPF values of 0.80, 0.85, 0.15, and 0.22, respectively. The method is relevant for researchers investigating breast density as a risk factor for breast cancer and all the described steps can be also applied in computer aided diagnosis systems.
Outils numériques pour le relevé architectural et la restitution archéologique

Cette these s'integre dans le processus qui conduit de l'acquisition numerique 3D a la realisation de maquettes virtuelles destinees a l'architecture et a l'archeologie. Elle debute par l'etude des techniques d'acquisition 3D utilisees, la lasergrammetrie et la photogrammetrie architecturale, et se poursuit par une analyse comparative detaillee de ces dispositifs, basee sur de multiples experimentations realisees sur le terrain lors de la collaboration entre le Map-Crai et le Map-Page. Ensuite une reflexion sur la morphologie architecturale est abordee autour de ses variantes typologiques et architectoniques, suivie par les questions theoriques soulevees par la modelisation 3D et plus specifiquement la modelisation architecturale. Diverses experimentations sont ensuite presentees, elles constituent le support d'une reflexion sur le developpement d'outils numeriques destines a faciliter la modelisation geometrique architecturale. La principale contribution de cette these correspond a l'association de cette reflexion empirique a une approche analytique fondee sur nos connaissances theoriques en architecture, qui aboutit a l'identification de primitives geometriques contraintes, les moulures. Les outils numeriques ainsi developpes dans un logiciel de CAO definissent ces primitives geometriques ajustables dont le champ d'application initial, specifique a l'architecture classique, sera etendu a l'architecture khmere. Enfin une proposition plus evoluee correspondant a la teleologie de cette these, obtenir de facon efficace un resultat conforme au cahier des charges de la modelisation architecturale et archeologique, est integree dans un logiciel de synthese d'image.