Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Probabilistic Relational Models for Collaborative Filtering

Recentprojectsin collaborativefiltering andinformationfiltering addressthetaskof inferring userpreferencerelationshipsfor productsor information.Thedataon which theseinferencesarebasedtypically consistsof pairsof peopleanditems.Theitemsmaybeinformationsources(suchaswebpagesor newspaper articles)or products(suchasbooks,software,movies or CDs). We areinterestedin makingrecommendationsor predictions.Traditionalapproachesto theproblemderive from classicalalgorithmsin statistical patternrecognitionandmachinelearning. The majority of theseapproachesassumea ”flat” datarepresentationfor eachobject,andfocuson a singledyadicrelationshipbetweentheobjects. In this paper , we examinea richermodelthatallows us to reasonaboutmany differentrelationsat thesametime. We build ontherecentwork onprobabilisticrelationalmodels(PRMs), anddescribehow PRMscanbeappliedto the taskof collaborati vefiltering. PRMsallow usto represent uncertaintyabouttheexistenceof relationshipsin themodelandallow thepropertiesof anobjectto dependprobabilisticallybothon otherpropertiesof that objectandon propertiesof relatedobjects.
Evaluating Texture Compression Masking Effects Using Objective Image Quality Assessment Metrics

Texture compression is widely used in real-time rendering to reduce storage and bandwidth requirements. Recent research in compression algorithms has explored both reduced fixed bit rate and variable bit rate algorithms. The results are evaluated at the individual texture level using mean square error, peak signal-to-noise ratio, or visual image inspection. We argue this is the wrong evaluation approach. Compression artifacts in individual textures are likely visually masked in final rendered images and this masking is not accounted for when evaluating individual textures. This masking comes from both geometric mapping of textures onto models and the effects of combining different textures on the same model such as diffuse, gloss, and bump maps. We evaluate final rendered images using rigorous perceptual error metrics. Our method samples the space of viewpoints in a scene, renders the scene from each viewpoint using variations of compressed textures, and then compares each to a ground truth using uncompressed textures from the same viewpoint. We show that masking has a significant effect on final rendered image quality, masking effects and perceptual sensitivity to masking varies by the type of texture, graphics hardware compression algorithms are too conservative, and reduced bit rates are possible while maintaining final rendered image quality.
Student perspectives on mental health support and services in the UK

ABSTRACT Student mental health is an issue of growing concern. Past research indicates that many students are not accessing the support they require, which may in part be due to issues surrounding the standards of the available services. Using a participatory framework, the current study utilised a mixed-methods design to examine student experiences of National Health Service (NHS) mental health services and perspectives of peer support. An online survey was completed by 376 UK students to examine their experiences of NHS mental health services, as well as their attitudes towards peer support. Several improvements were identified for future NHS mental health services regarding reduced waiting times, better access to alternative treatments and facilitating more patient-centred communication. Benefits of peer support services were also noted, including the potential to normalise experiences and promote belonging. These findings have implications for understanding how we can best support students experiencing mental health difficulties.
Semantic composition of AT-LOCATION relation with other relations

Abstract This paper presents a method for the composition of at-location with other semantic relations. The method is based on inference axioms that combine two semantic relations yielding another relation that otherwise is not expressed. An experimental study conducted on PropBank, WordNet, and eXtended WordNet shows that inferences have high accuracy. The method is applicable to combining other semantic relations and it is beneficial to many semantically intense applications.
Blueberry Husks and Probiotics Attenuate Colorectal Inflammation and Oncogenesis, and Liver Injuries in Rats Exposed to Cycling DSS-Treatment

Long-term colonic inflammation promotes carcinogenesis and histological abnormalities of the liver, and colorectal tumours frequently arise in a background of dysplasia, a precursor of adenomas. Altered colonic microbiota with an increased proportion of bacteria with pro-inflammatory characteristics, have been implicated in neoplastic progression. The composition of the microbiota can be modified by dietary components such as probiotics, polyphenols and dietary fibres. In the present study, the influence of probiotics in combination with blueberry husks on colorectal carcinogenesis and subsequent liver damage was evaluated. Colorectal tumours were induced in rats by cyclic treatment with dextran sulphate sodium (DSS). Blueberry husks and a mixture of three probiotic strains (Bifidobacterium infantis DSM 15159, Lactobacillus gasseri, DSM 16737 and Lactobacillus plantarum DSM 15313) supplemented a basic diet fortified with oats. The condition of the rats was monitored using a disease activity index (DAI). A qualitative and quantitative histological judgement was performed on segments of distal colon and rectum and the caudate lobe of the liver. The formation of short-chain fatty acids, bacterial translocation, the inflammatory reaction and viable count of lactobacilli and Enterobaceriaceae were addressed. Blueberry husks with or without probiotics significantly decreased DAI, and significantly reduced the number of colonic ulcers and dysplastic lesions. With a decreased proportion of blueberry husk in the diet, the probiotic supplement was needed to achieve a significant decrease in numbers of dysplastic lesions. Probiotics decreased faecal viable count of Enterobacteriaceae and increased that of lactobacilli. Blueberry husks with or without probiotics lowered the proportion of butyric acid in distal colon, and decreased the haptoglobin levels. Probiotics mitigated hepatic injuries by decreasing parenchymal infiltration and the incidence of stasis and translocation. The results demonstrate a dietary option for use of blueberry husks and probiotics to delay colonic carcinogenesis and hepatic injuries in the rat model.
Base specific fractionation of double stranded DNA: affinity chromatography on a novel type of adsorbant.

A material suitable for base-pair-specific "affinity chromatography" of double stranded DNA is described. The synthesis of this material involves two successive polymerization reactions yielding solid particles of cross-linked bisacrylamide to which base-pair-specific dyes are covalently attached by spacers of polyacrylamide chains of different length. Materials with immobilized A.T-specific malachite green or G.C-specific phenyl neutral red were used for base-pair-specific fractionation of sheared DNA from bacterial sources, as well as of higher molecular weight Calf thymus DNA or defined fragments of coliphage lambda DNA. The excellent resolving power of this method of "affinity chromatography" of nucleic acids is comparable only to DNA fractionation in buoyant density gradients in the presence of base-pair-specific ligands. A great advantage of this material is its simple handling and its chemical stability, which allows repeated re-use of the same column.
On the adjustment coefficient, drawdowns and Lundberg-type bounds for random walk.

Consider a random walk whose (light-tailed) increments have positive mean. Lower and upper bounds are provided for the expected maximal value of the random walk until it experiences a given drawdown d. These bounds, related to the Calmar ratio in Finance, are of the form (exp{αd} 1)/α and (K exp{αd} 1)/α for some K > 1, in terms of the adjustment coefficientα (E[exp{ αX}] = 1) of the insurance risk literature. Its inverse 1 � has been recently derived by Aumann & Serrano as an index of riskiness of the random variable X. This article also complements the Lundberg exponential stochastic upper bound and
Evidential Value That Exercise Improves BMI z-Score in Overweight and Obese Children and Adolescents

Background. Given the cardiovascular disease (CVD) related importance of understanding the true effects of exercise on adiposity in overweight and obese children and adolescents, this study examined whether there is evidential value to rule out excessive and inappropriate reporting of statistically significant results, a major problem in the published literature, with respect to exercise-induced improvements in BMI z-score among overweight and obese children and adolescents. Methods. Using data from a previous meta-analysis of 10 published studies that included 835 overweight and obese children and adolescents, a novel, recently developed approach (p-curve) was used to test for evidential value and rule out selective reporting of findings. Chi-squared tests (χ 2) were used to test for statistical significance with alpha (p) values <0.05 considered statistically significant. Results. Six of 10 findings (60%) were statistically significant. Statistically significant right-skew to rule out selective reporting was found (χ 2 = 38.8, p = 0.0001). Conversely, studies neither lacked evidential value (χ 2 = 6.8, p = 0.87) nor lacked evidential value and were intensely p-hacked (χ 2 = 4.3, p = 0.98). Conclusion. Evidential value results confirm that exercise reduces BMI z-score in overweight and obese children and adolescents, an important therapeutic strategy for treating and preventing CVD.
Characterization of Kbot21 Reveals Novel Side Chain Interactions of Scorpion Toxins Inhibiting Voltage-Gated Potassium Channels

Scorpion toxins are important pharmacological tools for probing the physiological roles of ion channels which are involved in many physiological processes and as such have significant therapeutic potential. The discovery of new scorpion toxins with different specificities and affinities is needed to further characterize the physiology of ion channels. In this regard, a new short polypeptide called Kbot21 has been purified to homogeneity from the venom of Buthus occitanus tunetanus scorpion. Kbot21 is structurally related to BmBKTx1 from the venom of the Asian scorpion Buthus martensii Karsch. These two toxins differ by only two residues at position 13 (R /V) and 24 (D/N). Despite their very similar sequences, Kbot21 and BmBKTx1 differ in their electrophysiological activities. Kbot21 targets KV channel subtypes whereas BmBKTx1 is active on both big conductance (BK) and small conductance (SK) Ca2+-activated K+ channel subtypes, but has no effects on Kv channel subtypes. The docking model of Kbot21 with the Kv1.2 channel shows that the D24 and R13 side-chain of Kbot21 are critical for its interaction with KV channels.
An improved speech analysis-synthesis algorithm based on the autoregressive with exogenous input speech production model

Ding et al. have explored a novel pitch-synchronous speech analysis-synthesis method[1] based on an auto-regressive with exogenous input (ARX) speech production model. This method makes an automatic estimation of the vocal tract (formant) and voice source parameters from a speech utterance. This method, however, has suffered deﬁciencies in the analysis of a high-pitch voice and the introduction of click sounds in the transition between vocalic and weak voiced consonantal segments. This paper proposes an improved ARX method in order to solve the problems mentioned above. Perceptual comparison experiments have shown that quality of re-synthesized speech by the proposed method is higher than that by a well-known cepstral method.
2 Fundamentals of AntiPatterns 2 . 1 Design Patterns and AntiPatterns

Software projects of today fail to same mistakes over and over again, even in the cases where the problems have been publicly known for a long time. Software industry has lacked a way to describe the typically encountered problems in a generally accepted form. AntiPatterns give software project managers and developers the means to define the chronic problems of software projects formally and discuss them with a common vocabulary. There are numerous AntiPattern-related resources available on-line, allowing developers to share their knowledge and viewpoints in a common medium. As the software problems and their general solutions are public information, anyone can write new AntiPatterns. To be denoted as a real AntiPattern, the problematic solution must be encountered and solved in several different occasions. We discuss two new AntiPattern proposals and a variation to an existing AntiPattern that we have encountered in software projects.
Speech repains, intonational phrases, and discourse markers: modeling speakers’ utterances in spoken dialogue

Interactive spoken dialogue provides many new challenges for natural language understanding systems. One of the most critical challenges is simply determining the speaker's intended utterances: both segmenting a speaker's turn into utterances and determining the intended words in each utterance. Even assuming perfect word recognition, the latter problem is complicated by the occurrence of speech repairs, which occur where speakers go back and change (or repeat) something they just said. The words that are replaced or repeated are no longer part of the intended utterance, and so need to be identified. Segmenting turns and resolving repairs are strongly interwined with a third task: identifying discourse markers. Because of the interactions, and interactions with POS tagging and speech recognition, we need to address these tasks together and early on in the processing stream. This paper presents a statistical language model in which we redefine the speech recognition problem so that it includes the identification of POS tags, discourse markers, speech repairs, and intonational phrases. By solving these simultaneously, we obtain better results on each task than addressing them separately. Our model is able to identify 72% of turn-internal intonational boundaries with a precision of 71%, 97% of discourse markers with 96% precision, and detect and correct 66% of repairs with 74% precision.
Computational fluid dynamics in a traditional animation environment

This paper presents a system that uses computational fluid dynamics to produce smoke, water, and other effects for traditionallyanimated films. The system was used in over twenty scenes in the animated feature film The Prince of Egypt. Animators use images and animation sequences to drive two-dimensional numerical simulations of the time-dependent compressible Navier-Stokes equations. For instance, images can be used to initialize temperature fields which cause dynamic buoyancy-driven vortices to evolve. In addition to being image-driven, the system is unique in allowing for compressibility of the fluid, and in its use of partial differential equations for texture mapping.
Implementation of skin manipulation in a haptic interface of needle intervention simulation

The skin around an inserted needle can be sometimes moved to adjust the insertion angle of the needle in the needle-based intervention. This technique can resolve a difficulty in the targeting and should be implemented in a training simulation. This paper proposes the required haptic rendering algorithm to implement the skin manipulation for a specially developed haptic interface for the training simulation.
Synergistic Effects of Danshen (Salvia Miltiorrhiza Radix et Rhizoma) and Sanqi (Notoginseng Radix et Rhizoma) Combination in Inhibiting Inflammation Mediators in RAW264.7 Cells

Aims. This study aims to investigate the possible synergistic interactions of the Danshen-Sanqi combination on vascular disease via their anti-inflammatory activities. Methods. Nine combination ratios of Danshen-Sanqi extracts were screened in the RAW264.7 cell line and their anti-inflammatory effects were examined in lipopolysaccharide- (LPS-) induced nitric oxide (NO), tumor necrosis factor (TNF), and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) generation pathways. The interaction between Danshen and Sanqi on each target was analysed using combination index (CI) and isobologram models. Additionally, the anti-inflammatory activities of key bioactive compounds from Danshen and Sanqi were tested using the same models. The compounds from each herb that exerted the most potent activity were combined to evaluate their possible synergistic/antagonistic interactions. Results. Danshen-Sanqi 8 : 2 was found to be the optimal ratio and exerted a synergistic effect in inhibiting NO, TNF, and MCP-1 when the concentrations were higher than 1.24, 1.89, and 2.17 mg/mL, respectively. Although dihydrotanshinone I (DT) and ginsenoside Rd (Rd) from Danshen and Sanqi, respectively, exhibited the greatest individual bioactivity in the assays, antagonistic effects were observed for the DT-Rd combination 7 : 3. Conclusion. This study provided scientific evidence to support the traditional use of the Danshen-Sanqi combination for vascular disease through their synergistic interactions on anti-inflammatory pathways.
Uncovering and Characterizing Internet Water Army in Online Forums

Online forum provides a popular platform for users to communicate and share experiences. Comparing to the social networks which require users to register with their real identities, online forum has no such requirement which makes its users more willing to speak the truth. Unfortunately, the anonymity makes online forum more likely to be abused by malicious users. Internet water army is a typical bad phenomenon which is not only harmful to the benefits of ordinary Internet users, normal companies, but also detrimental to the social stability and the national security. Timely find out and clean up Internet water army in online forum has important significance for boosting the user experience, improving the credibility of network information and maintaining the network space security. In this paper, we propose a novel divide-and-conquer online forum Internet water army detection algorithm according to the fact that Internet water army always appear in groups, echo each other and work in collusion. The major innovations of this paper could be summarized as the following 4 points. Firstly, we propose a new measure of online forum user behavior similarity which compares the behaviors of user pairs from 3 aspects. Secondly, we put forward an interesting social network model in which edges between two users are built if they have similar behaviors. Then we prune the network by deleting the edges whose similarity is below a certain threshold and adopt a hierarchical clustering algorithm on the pruned network to find user groups who work highly cooperatively. Thirdly, we divide the whole dataset into a great many small subsets according to the discussion thread IDs and process all the subsets in parallel, reducing the time complexity greatly. We evaluate our method using the real dataset of Sina Forum and the experimental results show that our algorithm can detect Internet water army in online forums effectively and the accuracy of our algorithm is high. We conduct empirical analysis to the Internet water army we detected and find that their behavior patterns are very different from normal users'. The findings verify the correctness of our algorithm and lay the foundation for characteristic-based Internet water army detection.
Vision-mediated interaction with the Nottingham caves

The English city of Nottingham is widely known for its rich history and compelling folklore. A key attraction is the extensive system of caves to be found beneath Nottingham Castle. Regular guided tours are made of the Nottingham caves, during which castle staff tell stories and explain historical events to small groups of visitors while pointing out relevant cave locations and features. The work reported here is part of a project aimed at enhancing the experience of cave visitors, and providing flexible storytelling tools to their guides, by developing machine vision systems capable of identifying specific actions of guides and/or visitors and triggering audio and/or video presentations as a result. Attention is currently focused on triggering audio material by directing the beam of a standard domestic flashlight towards features of interest on the cave wall. Cameras attached to the walls or roof provide image sequences within which torch light and cave features are detected and their relative positions estimated. When a target feature is illuminated the corresponding audio response is generated. We describe the architecture of the system, its implementation within the caves and the results of initial evaluations carried out with castle guides and members of the public.
Severity detection of traffic accidents at intersections based on vehicle motion analysis and multiphase linear regression

This paper proposes a new approach to describe traffic scene including vehicle collisions and vehicle anomalies at intersections by video processing and motion statistic techniques. The research mainly targets on extracting abnormal event characteristics at intersections and learning normal traffic flow by trajectory clustering techniques. Detecting and analyzing accident events are done by observing partial vehicle trajectories and motion characteristics. The model implements video preprocessing, vehicle detection and tracking in order to extract motion characteristics through vehicle existence on road lanes. Activity patterns are determined by trajectory clustering analysis. Normal and abnormal traffic events are segregated by using log-likelihood thresholds. Abnormal traffic events and collisions are characterized using linear multiphase regression analysis technique, which apply semantic information extraction about traffic incidents.
Symplectic Calabi-Yau manifolds, minimal surfaces and the hyperbolic geometry of the conifold

Given an SO(3)-bundle with connection, the associated two- sphere bundle carries a natural closed 2-form. Asking that this be symplectic gives a curvature inequality first considered by Rezn- ikov [34]. We study this inequality in the case when the base has dimension four, with three main aims. Firstly, we use this approach to construct symplectic six-manifolds with c 1 =0 which are never Kahler; e.g., we produce such manifolds with b 1 = 0 = b 3 and also with c 2 [w]