Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Precise motion control of concentric-tube robot based on visual servoing

Composed of multi-section precurved tubes, continuous concentric-tube robot(CTR) has the potential of reaching surgical target during minimally invasive surgeries. Since concentric tubes are made of super-elastic nickel-titanium alloy, they can present different shapes when they extend and rotate with respect to each other. Compared to traditional surgical robots, CTR is superior in small size and flexible bending so that it can work in tiny space and adapt well to non-structural environment with multiple obstacles. In this paper, we proposed a CTR with 38cm in length and 1.85kg in weight which is assembled on a two-freedom platform to enable surgeons to perform various surgeries. Structure design of CTR and an image-guided algorithm are described in detail. For the propose of controlling robot to reach the target more precisely, a single camera is mounted at the tip of concentric tubes which can estimate the mapping between image plane and robotic joint space. This paper presents a model-less method based on Kalman filter to online estimate image Jacobian matrix, therefore robot is capable of capturing the target accurately accompanied by position changes on image plane. Experimental demonstration is also presented in this paper to verify the proposed method.
Memory for complex visual objects but not for allocentric locations during the first year of life

Although human infants demonstrate early competence to retain visual information, memory capacities during infancy remain largely undocumented. In three experiments, we used a Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task to examine abilities to encode identity (Experiment 1) and spatial properties (Experiments 2a and 2b) of unfamiliar complex visual patterns during the first year of life. In the first experiment, 6- and 9-month-old infants were familiarized with visual arrays composed of four abstract patterns arranged in a square configuration. Recognition memory was evaluated by presenting infants with the familiarized array paired with a novel array composed of four new patterns. The second couple of experiments aimed to examine infant ability to encode the spatial relationships between each pattern of the array (e.g., where is A in the square configuration). The 6-, 9- and 12-month-old infants were tested on a spatial version of the VPC task, in which the novel array was composed of the same patterns than the familiarized array but arranged differently within the square configuration. Results indicated that infants retained the identity of the patterns but not their specific spatial relationships within the square configuration (i.e., allocentric location of the patterns), suggesting either an immaturity of the processes involved in object-to-location binding, or the inappropriateness of unfamiliar complex objects to reveal such early allocentric abilities.
Dissociation of the Visual Placing Response into Elicited and Guided Components

Kittens reared without sight of their limbs extended their forelimbs when carried down toward the edge of a horizontal surface. However, unlike normally reared kittens, they were not capable of guiding their paws accurately to the solid parts of an interrupted surface. This fractionation of the visually controlled placing response reveals that the guided reach requires an integration of sensorimotor systems not necessary for development of the elicited extension response.
ISSUES IN COMMUNITY BASED QUESTION ANSWERING

Community based Question Answering (CQA) services are defined as dedicated platforms for users to respond to other users’ questions, resulting in the building of a community where users share and interactively give ratings to questions and answers (Liu et al., 2008). CQA services are emerging as a valuable information resource that is rich not only in the expertise of the user community but also their interactions and insights. However, scholarly inquiries have yet to dovetail into a composite research stream where techniques gleaned from various research domains could be exploited for harnessing the information richness in CQA services. This paper explores the CQA domain by first understanding the service and its modules and then exploring previous studies that was conducted in this domain. This paper then compares a CQA service with traditional question answering (QA) systems to identify possible research challenges that need to be focused. This paper also identifies two nontrivial research issues that are prominent in this domain and proposes various recommendations for addressing them in future.
The Diagnosis and Treatment of Dangerousness

Dangerousness in criminal offenders can be reliably diagnosed and effectively treated with a recidivism rate of 6.1 per cent. We define dangerousness as a potential for inflicting serious bodily harm on another. This is a report of a ten-year study involving 592 male convict ed offenders. Most of the crimes that brought these offenders to our notice were sex offenses. Several were compounded by ex treme violence including murder, manslaughier, assault with intent to kill, and assault with a dangerous weapon. The staff's initial diagnosis indicated that 304 of these persons were not dangerous, and they were released into the community after completing their sentences. Twenty-six (8.6 per cent) subse quently committed serious assaultive (dangerous) crimes. The courts concurred in our diagnosis of dangerous in 226 cases and committed these offenders to our special "treatment" facility for an indeterminate period of one day to life. Following treatment for an average period of forty-three months, eighty- two patients were discharged on recommendation of the clinical staff. Of these, five (6.1 per cent) subsequently committed serious assaultive crimes, including one murder. Forty-nine of the originally committed patients were released by court order against the advice of the clinical staff. Of these, seventeen (34.7 per cent) subsequently committed serious assaul tive crimes, including two murders. Criteria of dangerousness and guidelines for its prediction were elaborated. No tests or psychiatric examinations can depend ably predict a probability of dangerous behavior in the absence of an actual history of a seriously violent assault on another person. The potential for dangerous behavior is relative and covers a wide spectrum, from the mildly dangerous to the ex tremely dangerous. We postulate that those elements of the personality which cause dangerous behavior are common to all classes of assaultive behavior and that there is no basic difference between the man who kills to rape and the one who kills to rob. Treatment is primarily psychiatric. We consider claims for the efficacy of pharmacological and physiological measures to be unproven and even specious. Treatment involves individualiza tion and socialization: the identification and dissipation of an tisocial predatory elements of the personality and the mobiliza tion and reinforcement of socially conformative elements of the personality.
Quantification of ISA Impact on Superscalar Processing

The differences found between the superscalar performance in x86 and non-x86 processors and the peculiar characteristics of the x86 ISA recommend to carry out a thorough analysis of the available parallelism at the machine language layer. However, computer architecture evaluation requires new tools that complement the customary simulations and, in this sense, the traditional graph theory can help to create a new frame for fine-grain parallelism analysis. We construct the matrix representation associated to the data dependence graph of execution traces. In this paper, we explain how this matrix characterizes the corresponding code in a mathematical manner, fulfills a number of properties and restrictions, and provides information about the ability of the code to be processed concurrently. Besides, we also show how different data dependence sources can be composed, thus providing a mechanism to explore their final influence on the parallelism degree. These techniques are applied to an example from which some conclusions are derived
Classical Conditioning in Borderline Personality Disorder With and Without Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Conditioning studies in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) revealed intact acquisition and within-session extinction for patients with low acute dissociation and impaired acquisition for patients with high acute dissociation. In Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) delayed short-term extinction as well as reduced discrimination learning was found. Controlling for acute dissociation, with a subgroup analysis of BPD patients with and without comorbid PTSD we aimed to further understand the influence of both disorders on altered conditioning processes. Aversive differential conditioning was assessed in 33 non-medicated female patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for BPD (15 with and 18 without co-occurring PTSD). An aversive sound served as unconditioned stimulus (US), and two neutral pictures as conditioned stimuli (CS+, CS−). Conditioning was assessed by skin conductance responses (SCRs) and ratings of valence and arousal. BPD patients without PTSD revealed a significant differentiation between CS+ and CS− .
Tweester at SemEval-2016 Task 4: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter Using Semantic-Affective Model Adaptation

We describe our submission to SemEval2016 Task 4: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter. The proposed system ranked first for the subtask B. Our system comprises of multiple independent models such as neural networks, semantic-affective models and topic modeling that are combined in a probabilistic way. The novelty of the system is the employment of a topic modeling approach in order to adapt the semantic-affective space for each tweet. In addition, significant enhancements were made in the main system dealing with the data preprocessing and feature extraction including the employment of word embeddings. Each model is used to predict a tweet’s sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) and a late fusion scheme is adopted for the final decision.
Connectivity in inter-vehicle ad hoc networks

A two-stage simulation model is developed to investigate the effects of free flow traffic on connectivity in inter-vehicle ad hoc networks. A traffic microsimulator generates vehicle movement in a multi-lane, unidirectional highway, and a simple network model maintains connectivity graphs between the moving vehicles. The free flow conditions allow vehicles to travel at their maximum velocities, virtually unobstructed by other vehicles because of low vehicle density. We examine some factors that determine the network's ability to maintain an active communication session between a pair of vehicles. Vehicle density, relative velocity, and number of lanes are found to have a key influence on connectivity. The effect of distance, however, depends on the communication range. We also find that the probability distribution of connection lifetime resembles a power law function.
Evaluation of Phenotypic and Genotypic Methods for Subtyping Campylobacter jejuni Isolates from Humans, Poultry, and Cattle

ABSTRACT Six methods for subtyping of Campylobacter jejuni were compared and evaluated with a collection of 90 isolates from poultry, cattle, and sporadic human clinical cases as well as from a waterborne outbreak. The applied methods were Penner heat-stable serotyping; automated ribotyping (RiboPrinting); random amplified polymorphic DNA typing (RAPD); pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE); restriction fragment length polymorphisms of the flagellin gene, flaA(fla-RFLP); and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis offlaA (fla-DGGE). The methods were evaluated and compared on the basis of their abilities to identify isolates from one outbreak and discriminate between unrelated isolates and the agreement between methods in identifying clonal lines. All methods identified the outbreak strain. For a collection of 80 supposedly unrelated isolates, RAPD and PFGE were the most discriminatory methods, followed byfla-RFLP and RiboPrinting. fla-DGGE and serotyping were the least discriminative. All isolates included in this study were found to be typeable by each of the methods. Thirteen groups of potentially related isolates could be identified using a criterion that at least four of the methods agreed on clustering of isolates. None of the subtypes could be related to only one source; rather, these groups represented isolates from different sources. Furthermore, in two cases isolates from cattle and human patients were found to be identical according to all six methods.
Macrophage-specific NOX2 contributes to the development of lung emphysema through modulation of SIRT1/MMP-9 pathways

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) participate in the pathogenesis of emphysema. Among ROS‐producing enzymes, NOX NADPH oxidases are thought to be responsible for tissue injury associated with several lung pathologies. To determine whether NOX2 and/or NOX1 participate in the development of emphysema, their expression patterns were first studied by immunohistochemistry in the lungs of emphysematous patients. Subsequently, we investigated their contribution to elastase‐induced emphysema using NOX2‐ and NOX1‐deficient mice. In human lung, NOX2 was mainly detected in macrophages of control and emphysematous lungs, while NOX1 was expressed in alveolar epithelium and bronchial cells. We observed an elevated number of NOX2‐positive cells in human emphysematous lungs, as well as increased NOX2 and NOX1 mRNA expression in mouse lungs following elastase exposure. Elastase‐induced alveolar airspace enlargement and elastin degradation were prevented in NOX2‐deficient mice, but not in NOX1‐deficient mice. This protection was independent of inflammation and correlated with reduced ROS production. Concomitantly, an elevation of sirtuin 1 (SIRT1) level and a decrease of matrix metalloproteinase‐9 (MMP‐9) expression and activity were observed in alveolar macrophages and neutrophils. We addressed the specific role of macrophage‐restricted functional NOX2 in elastase‐induced lung emphysema using Ncf1 mutant mice and Ncf1 macrophage rescue mice (Ncf1 mutant mice with transgenic expression of Ncf1 only in CD68‐positive mononuclear phagocytes; the MN mouse). Compared to WT mice, the lack of functional NOX2 led to decreased elastase‐induced ROS production and protected against emphysema. In contrast, ROS production was restored specifically in macrophages from Ncf1 rescue mice and contributes to emphysema. Taken together, our results demonstrate that NOX2 is involved in the pathogenesis of human emphysema and macrophage‐specific NOX2 participates in elastase‐induced emphysema through the involvement of SIRT1/MMP‐9 pathways in mice. © 2014 The Authors. The Journal of Pathology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
A Robust Front-End Processor combining Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient and Sub-band Spectral Centroid Histogram methods for Automatic Speech Recognition

Environmental robustness is an important area of research in speech recognition. Mismatch between trained speech models and actual speech to be recognized is due to factors like background noise. It can cause severe degradation in the accuracy of recognizers which are based on commonly used features like mel-frequency cepstral co-efficient (MFCC) and linear predictive coding (LPC). It is well understood that all previous auditory based feature extraction methods perform extremely well in terms of robustness due to the dominantfrequency information present in them. But these methods suffer from high computational cost. Another method called sub-band spectral centroid histograms (SSCH) integrates dominant-frequency information with sub-band power information. This method is based on sub-band spectral centroids (SSC) which are closely related to spectral peaks for both clean and noisy speech. Since SSC can be computed efficiently from short-term speech power spectrum estimate, SSCH method is quite robust to background additive noise at a lower computational cost. It has been noted that MFCC method outperforms SSCH method in the case of clean speech. However in the case of speech with additive noise, MFCC method degrades substantially. In this paper, both MFCC and SSCH feature extraction have been implemented in Carnegie Melon University (CMU) Sphinx 4.0 and trained and tested on AN4 database for clean and noisy speech. Finally, a robust speech recognizer which automatically employs either MFCC or SSCH feature extraction methods based on the variance of shortterm power of the input utterance is suggested.
1, 2, 3-Triazoles: scaffold with medicinal significance

Despite a significant work on 1,2,3-triazoles, continuous efforts are still being made to identify novel heterocyclic compounds with potent bioactivities. This review may help the medicinal chemists to develop new leads possessing 1,2,3-triazoles nucleus with higher efficacy. This review throws light on the detailed synthetic approaches which have been used for the synthesis of triazoles since the early development in the area of triazole chemistry. This has been followed by the in depth analysis of the triazoles with respect to their medicinal significance.
What do you have to Say about That? Performance Events and Narratives’ Positive and Negative Emotional Content

The current study explores how the failure of innovative projects and positive organizational performance influence specific content within narratives. Building on theoretical perspectives regarding the sensemaking of failure events and emotions, we develop and test a performance event model of narratives. Using computer–aided text analysis of annual reports, we found that project failure rates have a positive relationship with narratives’ negative emotional content. Additionally, narratives’ positive emotional content is associated with reduced negative emotional content. Finally, positive organizational performance magnifies the negative association between narratives’ positive and negative emotional content. We discuss the implications for these results on the literatures regarding the failure of entrepreneurial projects, narratives, and emotions.
Motivational influence on the quality of memories: recall of general autobiographical memories related to desired attributes

This article concerns recall of general autobiographical memories in motivated self-perception. General memories, comprising abstraction of repeated or similar behaviours, have more impact on how one defines oneself than do specific memories. In a study, participants were first induced to believe that either extraversion or introversion leads to success. In the recall task that followed, introversion-success participants recalled more general memories related to introversion than did extraversion-success participants. In contrast, extraversion-success participants recalled more general extraverted memories than did introversion-success participants. Thus, to preserve a positive self-image as characterized by desirable attributes, recall may be directed towards generation of general memories related to the attributes. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Developing a Conceptual Understanding of Consumer-based League Brand Associations

Existing research has primarily focused on sport teams as brands, overlooking the branding of professional sport leagues. Professional sport leagues are required to build and leverage their brand associations to be sustainable and to help affiliated teams. This study integrated existing team brand association research with brand architecture literature to examine league brand associations from a consumer perspective. A freethought listing pilot test (N = 22) was followed by semistructured interviews (N = 26) to uncover 17 brand associations linked with professional sport leagues. Online questionnaires among consumers of four sport leagues in Australia (N = 1182) were used to support 17 distinct identified league brand associations. One sample t tests and correlation analyses empirically revealed that 17 league brand associations were linked with attitudinal and behavioral outcomes related to sport leagues. Finally, ANOVAs identified that some league brand associations differed between four leagues as perc.
Compliance of Publicly Available Mammographic Databases with Established Case Selection and Annotation Requirements

Mammographic databases play an important role in the development of algorithms aiming to improve Computer-Aided Detection and Diagnosis systems (CAD). However, these often do not take into consideration all the requirements needed for a proper study, previously discussed at the Biomedical Image Processing Meeting in 1993. Case selection and annotation requirements are the most commonly referenced in literature, when describing a database used for the development of such algorithms. This work aims to assess the compliance and suitability of case selection and annotation requirements in the publicly available mammographic databases for development and optimization of CADs. A literature review has been made, applying proper selection criteria related to the research question. In the literature, we found citations to 3 publicly available mammographic databases and ten having restricted access. Through the analysis of the results attained, we noticed that none of the two requirements previously described is on its way to be fully complied in mammographic databases. We can conclude that researchers need a database that fulfils all the mentioned requirements in order to develop efficacious and effective CAD systems. We also believe that the requirements, discussed in 1993, need to be reviewed and updated. New paradigms and ideas to increase algorithms' performance are needed in order to improve CAD schemes.
Microarray Gene Analysis and Expression Profiles of Dupuytren’s Contracture

Dupuytren’s disease, although not altogether uncommon, has eluded scientists who have sought to explain the cause of this palmar fibroproliferative disorder. It can lead to severe limitations of hand function if left untreated. This study is the first broad genetic survey using microarray technology to find gene products that are overexpressed or underexpressed in diseased tissues. The authors found 23 genes with levels that differ consistently from control levels. Nine were selected for further verification using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. These genes hold potential promise in explaining some of the demographic trends seen with disease, such as correlation with alcoholism and the striking predisposition for the male gender.
A Method to Optimize the Voltage Control Structure of Power Systems Taking into Ac count Control Performance and Fatigue Life of Control Equipment

A method is proposed which clarifies the most effective input data and their appropriate process for power systems voltage control, or in short, voltage control structure. Dynamic characteristics of system elements are taken into account. The evaluating function considering voltage control error and fatigue life of controllers are optimized via so called Riccati matrix equation in the sense of conventional linear optimal regulator theory. The voltage control structure is identified by choosing significant elements in the resultant matrix. Furthermore, non-square feedback matrix can be treated, which corresponds to the case when the measurement and control are not always done at the same location. Although the proposed method disregards the discrete operation nature of the controllers such as shunt capacitors, the overall performance of voltage control is optimized in a stochastic sense. It would be expected to tell how we should install communication infrastructure in the most effective way