Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A robust Evidential Fisher Discriminant for multi-temporal hyperspectral images classification

This paper develops a noise-robust processing method which can be used to enhance the classification of remotely sensed hyperspectral images. The method first illustrates the benefit of boosting the classical classifiers by exploiting the capability of belief functions. The evidential approach is adopted to produce a map which is approximately insensitive to the noise accompanying the original hyperspectral data-set. Then, a new Evidential Kernel Fisher Discriminant is proposed by using a modified version of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. An experimental comparison of the proposed approach with other classical methods is conducted using both synthetic and real hyperspectral data collected by the HYPERION sensor. Our experiments reveal that both classification and unmixing process can benefit from the proposed aggregated approach, remarkably, when the noise level present in the original hyperspectral series is propositionally high.
Acid Profile in Carious Dentin

Organic acids in carious dentin from 69 permanent teeth were analyzed by gas chromatography. Lactate, acetate, propionate, and butyrate were detected in most samples, and limited amounts of isobutyrate, valerate, isovalerate, caproate, and isocaproate were occasionally detected. Lactate, acetate, and propionate were major acids and altogether accounted for about 90% of total acid in most samples of carious dentin. However, the proportion of these three acids varied among the samples. Some samples contained over 85% lactate, while others contained mainly acetate and propionate. A high percentage of acetate was usually accompanied by an appreciable amount of propionate. All seven samples in carious dentin under fillings or restorations had little lactate, but a high percentage of acetate plus propionate. The differences in acid profiles of carious dentin may reflect differences in the microbial ecology of carious dentin, and a stage of progress of dentin caries or a type of dentin caries.
Dual Chamber Rate Responsive Pacing System Driven by Contractility: Final Assessment After 1‐Year Follow‐up

The aim of this study was to assess the long‐term performance of a new dual chamber rate responsive pacing system based on the dynamic measurement of the peak endocardial acceleration (PEA) index of cardiac contractility. Seventy patients who participated in the Multicenter European Clinical Evaluation were studied 1 year after implantation by continuously recording the PEA and the heart rate (HR) during exercise stress testing and during 24 hours of usual activities. A complete examination of standard parameters was also performed to assess the pacing/sensing lead characteristics. Statistical comparisons were performed with the data recorded with the same protocol at 1 month after implant for each patient. A linear correlation coefficient was calculated between PEA and sinus rate when the patient showed predominant atrial tracked rhythm. There were no significant differences between PEA values measured at 1 month and 1 year (PEA = 0.41 ± 0.26 g vs 0.45 ± 0.29 g at rest and PEA = 1.63 ± 0.77 g vs 1.72 ± 0.83 g during peak exercise). The correlation coefficient remained stable (0.67 ± 0.15 vs 0.65 ± 0.14 during daily life and 0.74 ± 0.14 vs 0.77 ± 0.11 during exercise). The PEA signal detected by the sensor was reliable and stable. No long‐term complications or adverse effects were observed, and the lead performance was comparable to that of a standard lead.
FOLFOX-4 + cetuximab in untreated patients with advanced colorectal cancer. A phase II study of the Gruppo Oncologico dell'Italia Meridionale (prot. GOIM 2402).

3559 Background: Cetuximab is an IgG monoclonal antibody targeting the EGFR showing to be effective both as single agent or in combination with Irinotecan (CPT-11) or Irinotecan/FU/FA in patients (pts) with EGFR-expressing metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC) in the first and second/subsequent-line setting. The current trial was designed to evaluate the efficacy and the safety of Cetuximab plus Folfox-4 as first -line treatment. The main objective was the percentage of confirmed objective response rate. METHODS Chemonaivepts with non-resectable metastatic CRC and expressing EGFR were treated with Cetuximab (400 mg/m2 week 1 and 250 mg/m2 weekly thereafter) plus Folfox-4 (every 2 weeks: Oxaliplatin 85 mg/m2, day 1; FA 100 mg/m2 2h, simultaneously with OH-P, and FU 400 mg/m2 iv bolus followed by 600 mg/m2 iv for 22h on days 1 and 2). The first evaluation of disease status (Recist criteria) was performed after the first 4 cycles and confirmed after one month. The treatment was continued until a maximum of 12 cycles of chemotherapy; the maintenaice with Cetuximab was permitted. Preliminary results: On the 65 screened pts, 47 (72%) had EGFR-expressing metastatic disease and were enrolled. Their main characteristics were: median Ecog PS 0; median age 66 yrs (range 43-74); main sites of disease: liver 31, lung 12, lymph-nodes 3, others 8. To date twenty-two pts are evaluable for activity and 27 for toxicity; 2 pts are not evaluable and 25 are too early. We observed 16 PR (72.7%), 5 NC (22.7%) and 1 PD (4.6%) for an ORR of 72.7% and a TGCR of 95.4%; the confirmed PR were 15 (68%). To date 2 pts undergone surgery of their metastases both for lung. The main adverse events grade 3/4 (NCI criteria) were: acne-like rush 18.5%, diarrea 7%, nausea/vomiting 4% and anemia 4%. CONCLUSIONS Our preliminary results confirm that the combination of Cetuximab plus Folfox-4 has an high activity and a good safety profile in advanced CRC pts. The study is ongoing. No significant financial relationships to disclose.
Chromosomal location of the genetic determinants for bacteriocins produced by Lactobacillus gasseri K7

The production of similar or even identical bacteriocins by different lactic acid bacteria is not a rare event. To take advantage of this finding, genetic determinants of the Lactobacillus K7 bacteriocins were tested for putative homologies with previously described bacteriocins of the Lactobacillus acidophilus group through polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Among specific primer pairs of seven known bacteriocins, derived from their respective sequences, only acidocin LF221 A and B primers amplified fragments in chromosomal DNA of K7 strain that revealed strong similarity over small regions of LF221 bacteriocins. Treatment of Lactobacillus K7 with ethidium bromide and mitomycin C was ineffective in generating non-bacteriocinogenic derivatives and had no impact on plasmid loss either. Classification studies elucidated Lactobacillus K7 as a member of the Lactobacillus gasseri species.
Accounting for Uncertainty in Willingness to Pay for Environmental Benefits

Previous literature on the distribution of willingness to pay has focused on its heterogeneity distribution without addressing exact interval estimation. In this paper we derive and analyze Bayesian confidence sets for quantifying uncertainty in the determination of willingness to pay for carbon dioxide abatement. We use two empirical case studies: household decisions of energy-efficient heating versus insulation, and purchase decisions of ultra-low-emission vehicles. We first show that deriving credible sets using the posterior distribution of the willingness to pay is straightforward in the case of deterministic consumer heterogeneity. However, when using individual estimates, which is the case for the random parameters of the mixed logit model, it is complex to define the distribution of interest for the interval estimation problem. This latter problem is actually more involved than determining the moments of the heterogeneity distribution of the willingness to pay using frequentist econometrics. A solution that we propose is to derive and then summarize the distribution of point estimates of the individual willingness to pay under different loss functions.
Characterization of Collagenase Blend Enzymes for Human Islet Transplantation

Background. Efficient islet isolation represents a necessary requirement for successful islet transplantation as a treatment for type 1 diabetes. The choice of collagenase for pancreas digestion is critical for the isolation outcome, and Liberase™ is the most widely used enzyme, although large intra-batched variability in activity and efficiency has been observed. Methods. The aim of this study was to characterize Liberase™ components and their relative role in pancreas digestion. Liberase batches were characterized by microelectrophoresis. Results. By means of microelectrophoresis, we identified three main proteins each with different prevalences between batches. Two proteins were found to correspond to class I (CI) and one to class II (CII) collagenase. In a series of 163 islet isolations, we observed that the CII correlated with islet yield (P<0.001) and digestion time (P<0.001); additionally, CI directly correlated with purity (P=0.028). Finally, when CII and one of the CI isoforms were >50 percentile, 15 of 36 preparations were transplanted, with 27 of 127 transplanted in the other cases (P=0.013). Conclusion. These results represent an important step toward the characterization of enzymes, with the final aim of identifying key components for a standardized product.
Joint Estimation of States and Parameters of a Reentry Ballistic Target Using Adaptive UKF

The problem of joint estimation of states and parameters of a reentry ballistic target in the situation where the measurement noise covariance is unknown or incorrectly known has been addressed here and towards that end an Adaptive Unscented Kalman Filter (AUKF) based joint estimation technique has been presented. The presented AUKF algorithm has utilized (i) residual sequences for the adaptation of measurement noise covariance matrix (R) to guarantee positive definiteness and (ii) an iterative measurement update step to further improve the estimation performance. Simulation results demonstrate that adapted measurement noise covariance converges to its truth value and can also successfully track the truth value when it is time varying. From Monte Carlo studies it is assessed that the joint estimation performance of the presented adaptive estimator is superior compared to its non adaptive counter part.
Accurate Chinese Text Classification via Multiple Strategies

Text classification is one of means to understand text content. It is widely used in information retrieving, filtering spam, monitoring ill gossips, and blocking pornographic and evil messages. kN N is widely used in text categorization, but it suffers from biased training data set. In developing Prototype of Internet Information Security for Shanghai Council of Information and Security, we detect that when training data set is biased, almost all test documents of some rare (smaller) categories are classified into common (larger) ones by traditional kN N classifier. The performance of text classification can not satisfy the user's requirement in this case. To alleviate such a misfortune, we adopt 2 measures to boost kN N classifier. Firstly, we optimize features by removing some candidate features. Secondly, we modify traditional decision rules by integrating number of training samples of each category with them. Exhaustive experiments illustrate that the adapted kN N achieves significant classification performance improvement on biased corpora.
Leucine-rich glioma inactivated 3 is involved in amyloid &bgr; peptide uptake by astrocytes and endocytosis itself

We earlier showed that leucine-rich glioma inactivated 3 (LGI3) colocalizes with amyloid &bgr; peptide (A&bgr;) taken up by astrocytes both in vitro and in vivo, and that LGI3 accumulated with endocytosis-associated proteins in aged monkey brains. In this study, we confirmed that LGI3 localizes to the endocytic pathway and found that its accumulation is caused by endocytic perturbation. Most notably, RNA interference experiments demonstrated that the downregulation of LGI3 clearly inhibited A&bgr; uptake by cultured rat astrocytes, moreover, transferrin uptake by both astrocytes and neuronal cells. Together with our earlier findings, our results suggest that LGI3 is involved in A&bgr; uptake by astrocytes and even endocytosis itself.
Les technologies de la parole et du TALN pour l’assistance à domicile des personnes âgées : un rapide tour d’horizon (Quick tour of NLP and speech technologies for ambient assisted living) [in French]

Pour relever le defi du maintien a domicile de la population vieillissante, une des solutions retenues par les pays industrialises est le developpement massif des Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication (TIC). Les TIC representent une opportunite importante pour ameliorer la vie quotidienne des personnes âgees afin qu'elles soient toujours maitresses de leurs choix et qu'elles utilisent la technologie pour continuer a vivre de maniere autonome, a apprendre et a s'investir dans la vie sociale. Les technologies du traitement du langage naturelle et de la parole qui se trouvent au cœur de la communication humaine, ont donc un role significatif a jouer. Dans cet article nous dressons un tour d'horizon des technologies du TALN et du traitement de la parole actuellement developpees dans ce cadre et des verrous ou ecueils techniques ou ethiques qui peuvent limiter leur impact.
Proposed SMART Traffic Control Signal in Brunei Darussalam

This paper presents proposed SMART (Systematic Monitoring of Arterial Road Traffic Signals) traffic control signal in Brunei Darussalam. Traffic congestion due to stops and delays at traffic light signals has much been complained about in Brunei Darussalam as well as across the world during the recent years. There are primarily two types of traffic signal controls in Brunei Darussalam. The most common one is the fixed or pre-timed signal operation traffic light and the other one is the actuated signal operation traffic light. Although the actuated signal control is more efficient than the fixed or pre-fixed signal control in the sense that it provides fewer stops and delays to traffic on the major arteries, the best option for Brunei Darussalam would be to introduce smart traffic control signal. This type of traffic signal uses artificial intelligence to take the appropriate action by adjusting the times in real time to minimise the delay in the intersection while also coordinating with intersections in the neighbourhood. SMART Signal simultaneously collects event-based high-resolution traffic data from multiple intersections and generates real-time signal performance measures, including arterial travel time, number of stops, queue length, intersection delay, and level of service. In Brunei Darussalam, where we have numerous intersections where several arterial roads are linked to one another, The SMART signal traffic control method should be implemented.
Deep Stance and Gender Detection in Tweets on Catalan Independence@Ibereval 2017

This paper discusses deepyCybErNet submission methodology to the task on Stance and Gender Detection in Tweets on Catalan Independence@Ibereval 2017. The goal of the task is to detect the stance and gender of the user in tweets on the subject ”independence of Catalonia”. Tweets are available in two languages: Spanish and Catalan. In task 1 and 2, the system has to determine whether the tweet is in favor of, against or neutral to the tweets on the subject pertaining to the task in Spanish and Catalan languages respectively. In task 3 and 4, the system has to decide whether the person who tweets is a male or female. We submitted three systems for this task a Bag-of-Words (BOW) representation for tweets with logistic regression classifier, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based approach, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) based approach and gated recurrent based approach. These methods are highly language independent and can be used for the declarations of stance of tweets and identifying the gender of twitter user in any language. These methods have performed better in detecting stance and gender in tweets of Catalan language than in those of Spanish.
Unified role assignment framework for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are made possible by the continuing improvements in embedded sensor, VLSI, and wireless radio technologies. Currently, one of the important challenges in sensor networks is the design of a systematic network management framework that allows localized and collaborative resource control uniformly across all application services such as sensing, monitoring, tracking, data aggregation, and routing. The research in wireless sensor networks is currently oriented toward a cross-layer network abstraction that supports appropriate fine or course grained resource controls for energy efficiency. In that regard, we have designed a unified role-based service paradigm for wireless sensor networks. We pursue this by first developing a Role-based Hierarchical Self-Organization (RBSHO) protocol that organizes a connected dominating set (CDS) of nodes called dominators. This is done by hierarchically selecting nodes that possess cumulatively high energy, connectivity, and sensing capabilities in their local neighborhood. The RBHSO protocol then assigns specific tasks such as sensing, coordination, and routing to appropriate dominators that end up playing a certain ‘role’ in the network. Roles, though abstract and implicit, expose role-specific resource controls by way of role assignment and scheduling. Based on this concept, we have designed a Unified Role-Assignment Framework (URAF) to model application services as roles played by local in-network sensor nodes with sensor capabilities used as rules for role identification. The URAF abstracts domain specific role attributes by three models: the role energy model, the role execution time model, and the role service utility model. The framework then generalizes resource management for services by providing abstractions for controlling the composition of a service in terms of roles, its assignment, reassignment, and scheduling. To the best of our knowledge, a generic role-based framework that provides a simple and unified network management solution for wireless sensor networks has not been proposed previously. Keywords: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensing metrics, roles, rules, network organization, role assignment, role scheduling, and generic control interfaces or abstractions.
EFFECT OF DIFFERENT BIOFERTILIZER TYPES AND NITROGEN FERTILIZER LEVELS ON GROWTH , YIELD AND CHEMICAL CONTENTS OF PEA PLANTS ( PISUM SATIVUM L . )

The current study was carried out to investigate the effects of seed inoculation with five different biofertilizer types (Azotobacter, Azospirillum, Rhizobium, a mixture of the previous types of the biofertilizers and uninoculated control) and four different fertilization levels of mineral nitrogen (0, 30, 60 and 90 Kg N fed 1 . ) as well as their interactions on the vegetative growth characters, flowering traits , green pods yield and its components and some chemical contents of pea plants (Pisum sativum L.) cv. "Victory Freezer ". Two field experiments were carried out during the winter seasons of 2003 and 2004 at ELMahmodia region, Behera Governorate, Egypt. A factorial experiment in a randomized complete blocks design was used, with three replications. The obtained results indicated that inoculation of pea seeds with any utilized biofertilizer type significantly, increased all studied vegetative growth characters and yield components ( plant height, number of leaves, number of branches, plant fresh weight , plant dry weigh , green pods yield fed -1 , number of pods plant -1 , number of seeds pod -1 , and shelling % ). Also leaves contents of N, K and chlorophyll were increased compared to the uninoculated control, in both seasons. The mixed biofertilizer was the most effective one on all studied vegetative growth characters and yield components. The application of mineral nitrogen at the rates of 30, 60 and 90 Kg N fed -1 to the growing pea plants, significantly, increased J.Agric. &Env.Sci.Alex.Univ.,Egypt Vol.6 (2)2007 291 plant height, number of leaves and branches plant -1 , plant fresh weight, plant dry weight, yield of green pods fed -1 , number of green pods plant -1 , number of seed pod -1 . Also leaves N, K and chlorophyll contents were increased over the control treatment, in both seasons. The highest two nitrogen levels (60 and 90 Kg N fed-1.) were remarkable and associated with the highest mean values in this concern. The interaction effects of biofertilizer types and nitrogen levels on most studied characters were found significant in both seasons. The combined treatment of mixed biofertilizer and 60 or 90 Kg N fed -1 together, were considered the best treatment combinations, as they gave the highest mean values of most studied characters.
Mouse Rankl Expression Is Regulated in T Cells by c-Fos through a Cluster of Distal Regulatory Enhancers Designated the T Cell Control Region*

Receptor activator of NF-κB ligand (Rankl) is a TNF-like factor that induces the formation of osteoclasts responsible for bone resorption. Although T cell activation up-regulates this gene, the molecular mechanism of its transcriptional control remains unknown. We used ChIP-chip analysis in mouse primary T cells and a T cell hybridoma to define the regulatory enhancers responsible for this up-regulation and to characterize their properties. Elevated H3/H4 acetylation and increased RNA polymerase II density were evident at mRL-D5, a known enhancer located 76 kb upstream of the TSS, as well as at a cluster of regulatory sites located even further upstream between −123 to −156 kb, termed the T cell control region (TCCR). Based upon the ability of calcium signaling and MAPK inhibitors to block Rankl expression, we conducted further ChIP-chip analysis of the transcriptional mediators c-Fos, NF-κB, and Nfat. T cell activation induced c-Fos binding at the mRL-D5 enhancer and within the TCCR. The interaction of NF-κB was observed at the transcriptional start site and at mRL-D5. Both mRL-D5 and segments of the TCCR exhibited robust transcriptional activity in reporter assays, and site-specific mutagenesis of c-Fos and Nfat elements abrogated reporter activity, suggesting a role for both factors in the control of enhancer-mediated Rankl transcription. Finally, chromosome conformation capture analysis confirmed that mRL-D5 and segments of the TCCR were located in proximity to the Rankl gene promoter and thus potentially able to influence directly Rankl gene promoter activity. We conclude that both mRL-D5 and the TCCR represent control segments that play an integral role in Rankl expression in T cells.