Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning to Detect Onsets of Acoustic Piano Tones

In the context of a project analysing expression in musical performance, we investigate techniques for estimating the onset times of piano tones from audio signals containing polyphonic music. We aim to show that automatic extraction of timing in audio signals is sufﬁciently accurate to be useful in musical expression research. A computer program is described which uses a combination of time domain and frequency domain features of the signal to estimate onset times. The relative weights of the features are learnt using a genetic algorithm trained on a large database of piano music performed on a B¨osendorfer SE290 computer-monitored grand piano. The alignment of features in time is achieved by correlation with known hammer-string impact times from the same data set. The resulting algorithm detects approximately 90% of onsets with an average resolution around 10ms, a sufﬁciently good starting point for studies of tempo and timing, for example using an interactive beat tracking system. We discuss the limitations of the current approach, and propose a score-directed system as the next step towards a fully automatic expression extraction system.
Measuring the Effect of Discourse Relations on Blog Summarization

The work presented in this paper attempts to evaluate and quantify the use of discourse relations in the context of blog summarization and compare their use to more traditional and factual texts. Specifically, we measured the usefulness of 6 discourse relations - namely comparison, contingency, illustration, attribution, topic-opinion, and attributive for the task of text summarization from blogs. We have evaluated the effect of each relation using the TAC 2008 opinion summarization dataset and compared them with the results with the DUC 2007 dataset. The results show that in both textual genres, contingency, comparison, and illustration relations provide a significant improvement on summarization content; while attribution, topic-opinion, and attributive relations do not provide a consistent and significant improvement. These results indicate that, at least for summarization, discourse relations are just as useful for informal and affective texts as for more traditional news articles.
Bone Mineral Density in Patients on Maintenance Hemodialysis and Effect of Chronic Hepatitis C Virus Infection

Objective: To determine the prevalence of osteopenia and osteoporosis in HD patients at our center; to investigate whether HCV infection affects BMD in hemodialysis patients; to test for correlations between bone mineral density (BMD) and clinical and laboratory parameters in this population. Subjects and Methods: The study involved 76 end‐stage renal disease patients. Forty‐three (56.6%) patients were tested negative for anti‐HCV antibodies and HCV‐RNA. Thirty‐three (43.4%) of them had positivity of anti‐HCV antibodies and permanent or intermittent HCV‐RNA positivity at least for two years. Mean HD duration was 86.4 months. Patients completed a standard questionnaire that listed age, sex, occupation, education level; cause of renal failure, smoking history, dialysis duration, and sports activities engaged in during life, and pathologic bone fractures. The women answered additional items about age at menarche, number of pregnancies and menopausal status. Each subject underwent a baseline physical examination, including measurement of body weight and height for calculation of body mass index. The results of laboratory tests that had been done at monthly visits in the previous year were retrospectively evaluated, and mean levels for the year were used for correlation testing. Bone mineral density was measured in the spine, femoral neck and forearm. Relationships between BMD values and chronic HCV infection, laboratory results and clinical parameters were analyzed. Results: In the 43 patients who were negative for anti‐HCV antibodies and HCV‐RNA, spine BMD testing showed osteopenia in 16 (37.2%) cases and osteoporosis in 7 (16.3%) cases. The corresponding values for the neck of the femur were 14 (32.6%) and 6 (14.0%), and for the forearm were 19 (44.2%) and 15 (34.9%). In the 33 anti‐HCV antibodies and HCV‐RNA positive patients; spine BMD testing showed osteopenia in 10 (30.3%) cases and osteoporosis in 7 (21.2%) cases. The corresponding values for the neck of the femur were 17 (51.5%) and 4 (12.1%), and for the forearm were 4 (12.1%) and 25 (75.8%). Bone mineral density decreased as dialysis duration increased (p < 0.05). There was no statistical difference between BMD measurements of chronic HCV infection positive and negative group. Conclusion: However the mean BMD values for all three sites in the 76 HD patients were low HCV infection may not be a risk factor for low BMD in this population.
Resectability of large focal liver lesions

Despite modern imaging techniques evaluation of the resectability of large focal liver lesions is often difficult or impossible until the time of operation. Based on experience with 54 primary or secondary focal liver tumours, a simple morphological classification has been found to be reasonably predictive of resectability. All tumours were classified before operation using computed tomography, ultrasound and angiography; 38 patients underwent laparotomy. Dependent, ‘hanging’ tumours (n=7) were resected in six cases, expansively growing ‘pushing’ tumours (n=19) were resected in 18 cases, and infiltrating, ‘invasive’ tumours (n=17) were not resected because of involvement with major vascular structures. Eleven small tumours (<5 cm) were not classifiable by this system. This simple classification may be a useful clinical concept in preoperative assessment of resectability of focal liver lesions. Hanging tumours should always be resected, and large expansile tumours are generally resectable despite their size. Invasive tumours can only be resected in exceptional cases.
Derivatives Performance Attribution

This paper shows how to decompose the dollar profit earned from an option into two basic components: ¶ mispricing of the option relative to the asset at the time of purchase, and · profit from subsequent fortuitous changes or mispricing of the underlying asset. This separation hinges on measuring the “true relative value” of the option from its realized payoff. The payoff from any one option has a huge standard error about this value which can be reduced by averaging the payoff from several independent option positions. It appears from simulations that 95% reductions in standard errors can be further achieved by using the payoff of a dynamic replicating portfolio as a Monte Carlo control variate. In addition, it is shown that these low standard errors are robust to discrete rather than continuous dynamic replication and to the likely degree of misspecification of the benchmark formula used to implement the replication. The first basic component, the option mispricing profit, can be further decomposed into profit due to superior estimation of the volatility (volatility profit) and profit from using a superior option valuation formula (formula profit). In order to make this decomposition reliably, the benchmark formula used for the attribution needs to be similar to the formula implicitly used by the market to price options. If so, then simulation indicates that this further decomposition can be achieved with low standard errors. The second basic component can be further decomposed into profit from a forward contract on the underlying asset (asset profit) and what I term pure option profit. The asset profit indicates whether or not the investor was skillful by buying or selling options on mispriced underlying assets. However, asset profit could also simply be just compensation for bearing risk -a distinction beyond the scope of this paper. Although simulation indicates that the attribution procedure gives an unbiased allocation of the option profit to this source, its standard error is large -a feature common with attempts by others to measure performance of assets. May 3, 1998 Mark Rubinstein is the Paul Stephens Professor of Applied Investment Analysis at the University of California at Berkeley. The author would like to thank Barra, Inc. for encouraging this research. 2 Derivatives Performance Attribution 2
DKPro-UGD: A Flexible Data-Cleansing Approach to Processing User-Generated Discourse

User-generated discourse from Web 2.0 poses particular challenges to natural language processing (NLP) due to its noise and error proneness. A data cleansing step preceding the analysis steps in an NLP pipeline can reduce the problems. While recent efforts provide general-purpose collections of UIMA-based analysis components, data cleansing seems not yet to be covered. The five-stage data cleansing approach proposed here offers a maximum of flexibility in identifying problematic artifacts, deciding how to deal with them and analysing cleansed data. Simultaneously, it allowed us to create reusable UIMA-based components for the actual data cleansing and for mapping annotations created on the clean data back to the original representation. These components are released as part of the Darmstadt Knowledge Processing Software Repository (DKPro) under the name of DKPro-UGD.
Approximation of Glossy Reflection with Prefiltered Environment Maps

A method is presented that can render glossy reflections with arbitrary isotropic bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) at interactive rates using texture mapping. This method is based on the well-known environment map technique for specular reflections. Our approach uses a singleor multilobe representation of bidirectional reflectance distribution functions, where the shape of each radially symmetric lobe is also a function of view elevation. This approximate representation can be computed efficiently using local greedy fitting techniques. Each lobe is used to filter specular environment maps during a preprocessing step, resulting in a three-dimensional environment map. For many BRDFs, simplifications using lower-dimensional approximations, coarse sampling with respect to view elevation, and small numbers of lobes can still result in a convincing approximation to the true surface reflectance.
Paraquat Modulates Alternative Pre-mRNA Splicing by Modifying the Intracellular Distribution of SRPK2

Paraquat (PQ) is a neurotoxic herbicide that induces superoxide formation. Although it is known that its toxic properties are linked to ROS production, the cellular response to PQ is still poorly understood. We reported previously that treatment with PQ induced genome-wide changes in pre-mRNA splicing. Here, we investigated the molecular mechanism underlying PQ-induced pre-mRNA splicing alterations. We show that PQ treatment leads to the phosphorylation and nuclear accumulation of SRPK2, a member of the family of serine/arginine (SR) protein-specific kinases. Concomitantly, we observed increased phosphorylation of SR proteins. Site-specific mutagenesis identified a single serine residue that is necessary and sufficient for nuclear localization of SRPK2. Transfection of a phosphomimetic mutant modified splice site selection of the E1A minigene splicing reporter similar to PQ-treatment. Finally, we found that PQ induces DNA damage and vice versa that genotoxic treatments are also able to promote SRPK2 phosphorylation and nuclear localization. Consistent with these observations, treatment with PQ, cisplatin or γ-radiation promote changes in the splicing pattern of genes involved in DNA repair, cell cycle control, and apoptosis. Altogether, our findings reveal a novel regulatory mechanism that connects PQ to the DNA damage response and to the modulation of alternative splicing via SRPK2 phosphorylation.
Review of Design of Speech Recognition and Text Analytics based Digital Banking Customer Interface and Future Directions of Technology Adoption

Banking is one of the most significant adopters of cutting-edge information technologies. Since its modern era beginning in the form of paper based accounting maintained in the branch, adoption of computerized system made it possible to centralize the processing in data centre and improve customer experience by making a more available and efficient system. The latest twist in this evolution is adoption of natural language processing and speech recognition in the user interface between the human and the system and use of machine learning and advanced analytics, in general, for backend processing as well. The paper reviews the progress of technology adoption in the field and comments on the maturity level of solutions involving less studied or low-resource languages like Hindi and also other Indian, regional languages. Furthermore, it also provides an analysis from a prototype built by us. The future directions of this area are also highlighted.
Two new theories of autism: hyper-systemising and assortative mating

Commentary on the papers by Williams et al (see page 8) and Harrison et al (see page 16) The autistic spectrum comprises four subgroups: Asperger’s syndrome (AS),1,2 and high, medium, and low functioning autism.3 They all share the phenotype of social difficulties and obsessional interests.4 In AS, the individual has normal or above average IQ and no language delay. In the three autism subgroups there is invariably some degree of language delay, and the level of functioning is indexed by overall IQ. * These four subgroups are known as autism spectrum conditions (ASC). Williams and colleagues5 searched electronic databases and bibliographies to carry out a meta-analysis of 42 studies of prevalence of autism spectrum conditions (ASC). From this, their most generous estimate was 20 per 10 000, or 0.2%. Harrison and colleagues6 used the “capture–recapture” technique in Lothian, Scotland, and their prevalence estimate was 44.2 per 10 000, or 0.44%. This corresponds to 1 child in 225. These estimates are clearly much higher than was the case in the past, where prevalence was traditionally estimated to be 4 in 10 000. Now we know that ASC are common. How should we understand their causes? Harrison and colleagues6 find that the 13–15 year old age group who would have received their MMR during the data collection phase were actually less numerous than the 4–10 year old age group, suggesting this high rate cannot be due to the MMR vaccine (since both age groups were exposed to the MMR). Instead they argue that these data suggest better recognition, better recording of cases, and growth of services. In terms of causes, the consensus is that ASC have a genetic aetiology,7 which leads to altered brain development,8,9,10,11 affecting social and communication …
Shared feature extraction for semi-supervised image classification

Multi-task learning (MTL) plays an important role in image analysis applications, e.g. image classification, face recognition and image annotation. That is because MTL can estimate the latent shared subspace to represent the common features given a set of images from different tasks. However, the geometry of the data probability distribution is always supported on an intrinsic image sub-manifold that is embedded in a high dimensional Euclidean space. Therefore, it is improper to directly apply MTL to multiclass image classification. In this paper, we propose a manifold regularized MTL (MRMTL) algorithm to discover the latent shared subspace by treating the high-dimensional image space as a sub-manifold embedded in an ambient space. We conduct experiments on the PASCAL VOC'07 dataset with 20 classes and the MIR dataset with 38 classes by comparing MRMTL with conventional MTL and several representative image classification algorithms. The results suggest that MRMTL can properly extract the common features for image representation and thus improve the generalization performance of the image classification models.
The Efficacy of Edaravone (Radicut), a Free Radical Scavenger, for Cardiovascular Disease

Edaravone was originally developed as a potent free radical scavenger, and has been widely used to treat acute ischemic stroke in Japan since 2001. Free radicals play an important role in the pathogenesis of a variety of diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases and stroke. Therefore, free radicals may be targets for therapeutic intervention in these diseases. Edaravone shows protective effects on ischemic insults and inflammation in the heart, vessel, and brain in experimental studies. As well as scavenging free radicals, edaravone has anti-apoptotic, anti-necrotic, and anti-cytokine effects in cardiovascular diseases and stroke. Edaravone has preventive effects on myocardial injury following ischemia and reperfusion in patients with acute myocardial infarction. Edaravone may represent a new therapeutic intervention for endothelial dysfunction in the setting of atherosclerosis, heart failure, diabetes, or hypertension, because these diseases result from oxidative stress and/or cytokine-induced apoptosis. This review evaluates the potential of edaravone for treatment of cardiovascular disease, and covers clinical and experimental studies conducted between 1984 and 2013. We propose that edaravone, which scavenges free radicals, may offer a novel option for treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, additional clinical studies are necessary to verify the efficacy of edaravone.
Design and operation of MinIAQ: An untethered foldable miniature quadruped with individually actuated legs

This paper presents the design, development, and basic operation of MinIAQ, an origami-inspired, foldable, untethered, miniature quadruped robot. Instead of employing multilayer composite structures similar to most microrobotic fabrication techniques, MinIAQ is fabricated from a single sheet of thin A4-sized PET film. Its legs are designed based on a simple four-bar locomotion mechanism that is embedded within its planar design. Each leg is actuated and controlled individually by separate DC motors enabling gait modification and higher degree of freedom on controlling the motion. The origami-inspired fabrication technique is a fast and inexpensive method to make complex 3D robotic structures through successive-folding of laser-machined sheets. However, there is still a need for improvement in modulating and extending the design standards of origami robots. In an effort to addressing this need, the primitive foldable design patterns of MinIAQ for higher structural integrity and rigidity are presented in detail. The current robot takes less than two hours to be cut and assembled and weighs about 23 grams where 3.5 grams is the weight of its body, 7.5 grams is its motors and encoders, 5 grams is its battery, and about 7 grams is its current on-board electronics and sensors. The robot is capable of running about 30 minutes on a single fully charged 150mAh single cell LiPo battery. Using the feedback signals from the custom encoders, MinIAQ can perform a trot gait with a speed of approximately 0.65 Bodylengths/sec, or equivalently 7.5 cm/s.
Enhanced anti-inflammatory effect of resveratrol and EPA in treated endotoxin-activated RAW 264.7 macrophages

Macrophages play an important role in immunogenic challenges by producing reactive oxygen species, NO and proinflammatory cytokines that can aggravate and propagate local inflammation. Multiple mechanisms regulate these inflammatory processes. NF-κB and activator protein 1 pathways are crucial in the expression of proinflammatory genes, such as TNF-α, IL-1 (α or β) and -6. Some polyphenols, which are present in beverages, vegetables and fruits, and PUFA, which are present in marine oils and fish food, possess anti-inflammatory effects in vivo and in vitro. Our aim in the present study was to assess whether polyphenols and PUFA have synergistic anti-inflammatory effects in murine macrophages in vitro. Inflammation in RAW 264.7 macrophages was induced by lipopolysaccharide at 100 ng/ml. The treatments with molecules were performed by co-incubation for 19 h. A NO production assay by Griess reaction, a phosphoprotein assay by Pathscan ELISA kit and gene expression analysis using the TaqMan® Low-density Array for ninety-one genes related to inflammation, oxidative stress and metabolism were performed to assess the synergistic anti-inflammatory effects of polyphenols, epigallocatechin gallate and resveratrol (Res; 2·5 μg/ml), and the PUFA, DHA and EPA (30 μm). Adding Res+EPA had an enhanced anti-inflammatory effect, in comparison with EPA and Res alone, leading to decreased NO levels; modulating the phospho-stress activated protein kinase/Jun N-terminal kinase (P-SAPK/JNK) level; down-regulating proinflammatory genes, such as IL, chemokines, transcription factors; and up-regulating several antioxidant genes. Therefore, this combination has a stronger anti-inflammatory effect than either of these molecules separately in RAW macrophages.
PRSEUS Structural Concept Development

A lighter, more robust airframe is one of the key technological advancements necessary for the successful launch of any large next-generation transport aircraft. Such a premise dictates that considerable improvements beyond current state-of-the-art aluminum structures is needed, and that improvements of this magnitude will require an extensive use of composite materials that are not only lightweight, but also economical to produce. To address this challenge, researchers at NASA and The Boeing Company are developing a novel structural concept called the Pultruded Rod Stitched Efficient Unitized Structure (PRSEUS) under the Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) Project. It is an integrally stiffened panel concept that is stitched together and designed to maintain residual load-carrying capabilities under a variety of damage scenarios. In addition to improved structural performance, an important facet of this unique arrangement of stitched carbon fibers is its innovative manufacturing method that has the potential to lower fabrication costs by eliminating fasteners and autoclave cures. The rationale and development status for this new approach forms the basis of the work described in this paper. The test specimens described herein were fabricated, or are currently being fabricated, by The Boeing Company, while the structural analyses and testing tasks are being performed by NASA and Boeing personnel.
Raman scattering utilization for distributed temperature measurement in optical fibres

Concept of fibre spontaneous Raman scattering utilizing for distributed temperature sensing is presented. Chosen approach uses both backscattered Stokes as reference and anti-Stokes as detection signals. The analysis is carried out towards Stokes and anti-Stokes bands temperature dependence. In order to achieve best measurement accuracy influence of maximum modulation frequency on spatial resolution is verified. Analysed technique allows to calculate temperature along the fibre with 5 m space precision and 1°C temperature precision. Simulations involve 200 m standard single mode fibre in temperatures in range < -5°C , 60 °C> with 2x1100 m reference fibre maintained in 22°C.
An Intriguing X-Ray Arc Surrounding the X-Ray Source RX J053335−6854.9 toward the Large Magellanic Cloud

ROSAT observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud have revealed a large diffuse X-ray arc around the point source RX J053335-6854.9. The relative locations of the diffuse and point sources suggest that they might originate from a common supernova explosion. We have analyzed the physical properties of the diffuse X-ray emission and determined that it is most likely a supernova remnant in a low-density medium in the LMC. We have also analyzed the X-ray and optical observations of RX J053335-6854.9 and concluded that it is a foreground dMe star in the solar neighborhood. Therefore, despite their positional coincidence, these two X-ray sources are physically unrelated.
Fabrication of E-mode InGaN/AlGaN/GaN HEMT using FIB based lithography

In this paper, growth and fabrication of enhancement mode InGaN (5nm)/AlGaN (35nm)/ GaN (1.8 μm) HEMT is presented through focused ion beam (FIB) lithography technique for different alloy material as a source/drain contact. The X-TEM, AES, AFM has been done of the metal deposited surfaces and DC characterization reveals threshold voltage of 1.2 V.