Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Comparison of Generative Approaches : XVCL and GenVoca

We report one of the first comparative studies on two mature approaches to generative programming: XVCL and GenVoca. XVCL is the latest incarnation of Bassett’s frames; GenVoca melds feature modularity with compositional programming. Both approaches explicitly rest on a pair of ideas: (1) parameterized functions return source code and (2) composing such functions synthesizes applications. Although their foundations are identical, XVCL and GenVoca have very different design philosophies. These differences raise an interesting debate on what design methodologies and programming constructs should be used in writing generative programs.
Reference plane definition and reproducibility in optic nerve head images.

PURPOSE To describe and evaluate a new experimental reference plane for measuring rim area in scanning laser tomography. METHODS The experimental reference plane was positioned so that (1) it always lay entirely below the margin of the optic nerve head (ONH), (2) it remained at a set z-axis distance below the ONH in images of each eye, and (3) it was at a level where variability in rim area is least. Twenty normal control subjects and 20 patients with glaucoma underwent test-retest scanning laser tomographic imaging by same and different operators during same and separate visits. Control subjects had image series spanning at least 3 years. The effect of the positioning of the reference plane on global and regional rim area variability was assessed in intra- and intervisit test-retest images and longitudinal image series and compared with the standard and 320- microm reference planes. RESULTS Variability in the experimental reference plane was less in test-retest images and longitudinal data (P < 0.05) and more uniform around the ONH than with other reference planes. Variability in the former was not appreciably affected by testing involving different operators and visits, or by the presence of glaucoma. CONCLUSIONS Variability in rim area by the experimental reference plane was significantly less, more uniform around the ONH, not affected by different operators and visits, and less affected by glaucomatous morphology than other reference planes. This difference was pronounced in sequential data and has implications for detecting progression of glaucoma.
Newton optimization based Congealing for facial image alignment

Congealing is an unsupervised image alignment method for a set of images, and the transformation parameters are obtained by minimizing a sum-of-entropies function. In this paper, we provide a solution to improve the estimation of transformation parameters using a Newton optimization method, under the premise of maintaining the compatibility with feature descriptors. Besides, instead of SIFT descriptor in canonical Congealing, we combine Congealing with POEM (Patterns of Oriented Edge Magnitudes) which catches both edge information and the relation between pixels at a neighboring region. The experiment results show that our alignment method has better ability for the removal of unwanted displacements, and also improves the performance of face recognition.
Real-Time Adaptive Control of a Flexible Manipulator Using Reinforcement Learning

This paper exploits reinforcement learning (RL) for developing real-time adaptive control of tip trajectory and deflection of a two-link flexible manipulator handling variable payloads. This proposed adaptive controller consists of a proportional derivative (PD) tracking loop and an actor-critic-based RL loop that adapts the actor and critic weights in response to payload variations while suppressing the tip deflection and tracking the desired trajectory. The actor-critic-based RL loop uses a recursive least square (RLS)-based temporal difference (TD) learning with eligibility trace and an adaptive memory to estimate the critic weights and a gradient-based estimator for estimating actor weights. Tip trajectory tracking and suppression of tip deflection performances of the proposed RL-based adaptive controller (RLAC) are compared with that of a nonlinear regression-based direct adaptive controller (DAC) and a fuzzy learning-based adaptive controller (FLAC). Simulation and experimental results envisage that the RLAC outperforms both the DAC and FLAC.
Wetland Degradation and Ecological Restoration

Wetlands are among the most important ecosystems on earth and functioned as the “kidneys” of the earth, which play an important role in maintaining ecological service functions. However, with the rapid growth in human populations, wetlands worldwide are suffering from serious degradation or loss as affected by wetland pollution, wetland reclamation, civilization and land use changes, and so forth. Wetland degradation has potential influences on human health, biodiversity, regional climate, and regional ecological security. Therefore, it is an urgent task to recover these degraded wetlands. In recent years, wetland protection, restoration, and its reasonable exploitation have been paid much more attention to by most governments and researchers. Moreover, wetland restoration has become the frontier fields of wetlands science, which has been listed as one of important themes in these recent international wetlands and ecological conferences. Understanding wetland degradation processes can contribute to better effective wetland restoration. Therefore, we organized this special issue on “wetland degradation and ecological restoration. ” The objective of this special issue is to emphasize the effects of human activities on wetland ecosystems, the relationships between soil, water, and plant in wetlands, and wetland restoration issues and applications.
Inhibition of JNK Mitochondrial Localization and Signaling Is Protective against Ischemia/Reperfusion Injury in Rats*

Background: Little is known about the role of JNK mitochondrial signaling in cardiomyocyte cell death. Results: Global and mitochondrial inhibition of JNK protects against I/R injury thus reducing infarct volume. Conclusion: Blocking JNK mitochondrial translocation or JNK inhibition may be an effective treatment for I/R-induced cardiomyocyte death. Significance: These findings suggest a new molecular target for JNK inhibition. To build upon recent findings that mitochondrial JNK signaling is inhibited by selectively blocking the interaction between JNK and Sab, we utilized a cell-permeable peptide to demonstrate that ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury could be protected in vivo and that JNK mitochondrial signaling was the mechanism by which reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and cardiomyocyte cell death occur. We also demonstrated that 5 mg/kg SR-3306 (a selective JNK inhibitor) was able to protect against I/R injury, reducing infarct volume by 34% (p < 0.05) while also decreasing I/R-induced increases in the activity of creatine phosphokinase and creatine kinase-MB. TUNEL staining showed that the percent TUNEL positive nuclei in rat hearts increased 10-fold after I/R injury and that this was reduced 4-fold (p < 0.01) by SR-3306. These data suggest that blocking JNK mitochondrial translocation or JNK inhibition prevents ROS increases and mitochondrial dysfunction and may be an effective treatment for I/R-induced cardiomyocyte death.
Recovering face shape and reflectance properties from single images

In this paper we show how to estimate facial surface reflectance properties (a slice of the BRDF and the albedo) in conjunction with facial shape from a single image. We show how an estimate of the surface reflectance function can be made by fitting a curve to the scattered and noisy reflectance samples provided by the estimated shape. We present a novel statistical face shape constraint which we term dasiamodel-based integrabilitypsila which we enforce on the field of surface normals. We iteratively interleave the two processes of estimating reflectance properties based on the current shape estimate and updating the shape estimate based on the current estimate of the reflectance function. We show that the method is capable of recovering accurate shape and reflectance information from single images using both synthetic and real world imagery.
Are Language learning websites special? Towards a research agenda for discipline-specific usability

With the intention of defining an initial research agenda for discipline-specific factors in the usability of e-learning websites, this paper focuses on the example of foreign language learning. First, general notions and concepts of usability are analyzed, and the term 'pedagogical usability' is proposed as a means of focusing on the close relationship between usability and pedagogical design. Then, to address the key issue of whether there are aspects of pedagogical usability that are discipline-specific, the paper examines how language learning and teaching, in particular Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL), has approached usability when developing technology-enhanced learning materials. Three elements of a research agenda are identified: pedagogical usability, intercultural usability and website evaluation. In conclusion, it is suggested that just as language learning websites may require a discipline-specific approach, so in other disciplines pedagogical usability may also need to be considered in relation to the specific requirements of the discipline, and that a debate around these issues is timely.
Role of intestinal excretion in the effect of subcutaneously administered sedecamycin on cecal infection caused by Treponema hyodysenteriae in mice

The therapeutic effects of subcutaneously administered sedecamycin on experimental Treponema hyodysenteriae infection in mice were evaluated. Sedecamycin was more active than tiamulin and lincomycin. The efficacy of sedecamycin upon subcutaneous administration was similar to that upon oral administration. Sedecamycin given subcutaneously provided similar degrees of protection in bile duct-ligated and intact mice. Pharmacokinetic studies utilizing a liquid chromatographic technique were carried out to determine the concentration of sedecamycin in the cecum, the site of T. hyodysenteriae infection in mice. Little sedecamycin was found; however, lankacidinol, a major metabolite of sedecamycin, was found in the cecal contents of intact mice after subcutaneous or oral administration of sedecamycin. Lankacidinol was also found in the cecal contents of bile duct-ligated mice, although the concentration found after subcutaneous administration of sedecamycin was much lower than that found after subcutaneous or oral administration to intact mice. These results indicate that sedecamycin is excreted directly into the intestinal tract as an active metabolite by a route other than the bile duct. It is suggested that this intestinal excretion plays an important role in the efficacy of subcutaneously administered sedecamycin against cecal infection of mice by T. hyodysenteriae.
DIST: direct imputation of summary statistics for unmeasured SNPs

Motivation: Genotype imputation methods are used to enhance the resolution of genome-wide association studies, and thus increase the detection rate for genetic signals. Although most studies report all univariate summary statistics, many of them limit the access to subject-level genotypes. Because such an access is required by all genotype imputation methods, it is helpful to develop methods that impute summary statistics without going through the interim step of imputing genotypes. Even when subject-level genotypes are available, due to the substantial computational cost of the typical genotype imputation, there is a need for faster imputation methods. Results: Direct Imputation of summary STatistics (DIST) imputes the summary statistics of untyped variants without first imputing their subject-level genotypes. This is achieved by (i) using the conditional expectation formula for multivariate normal variates and (ii) using the correlation structure from a relevant reference population. When compared with genotype imputation methods, DIST (i) requires only a fraction of their computational resources, (ii) has comparable imputation accuracy for independent subjects and (iii) is readily applicable to the imputation of association statistics coming from large pedigree data. Thus, the proposed application is useful for a fast imputation of summary results for (i) studies of unrelated subjects, which (a) do not provide subject-level genotypes or (b) have a large size and (ii) family association studies. Availability and implementation: Pre-compiled executables built under commonly used operating systems are publicly available at http://code.google. com/p/dist/. Contact: dlee4@vcu.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Distributed robotics approach to chemical plume tracing

This paper presents an application of a physics-based framework for distributed control of autonomous vehicles. The autonomous swarm uses local information to self-organize into dynamic sensing and computation grids during localization of the source of a toxic plume. Using physics of fluid flow, we develop a new plume-tracing algorithm, and then use computational fluid dynamics simulations to show that the new approach outperforms the leading biomimetic competitors for this task.
APT: A Practical Tunneling Architecture for Routing Scalability

The routing table has seen a rapid increase in size and dynamics in recent years, mostly driven by the growth of edge networks. This growth reflects two major limitations in the current architecture: (a) the conflict between provider-based addressing and edge networks’ need for multihoming, and (b) flat routing’s inability to provide isolation from edge dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose A Practical Tunneling Architecture (APT), a new routing architecture that enables the Internet routing system to scale independently from edge growth. APT partitions the Internet address space in two, one for the transit core and one for edge networks, allowing edge addresses to be removed from the routing table in the transit core. In order to tunnel packets between edge networks, APT provides an efficient mapping service between edge addresses and the addresses of their transit-core attachment points. We conducted an extensive performance evaluation of APT using trace data collected from routers at two major service providers. Our results show that APT can tunnel packets through the transit core by imposing a minimal delay on no more than 0.8% of all packets at the cost of introducing only one or a few new or repurposed devices per AS.
Distributed Functional Compression through Graph Coloring

We consider the distributed computation of a function of random sources with minimal communication. Specifically, given two discrete memoryless sources, X and Y, a receiver wishes to compute f(X, Y) based on (encoded) information sent from X and Y in a distributed manner. A special case, f(X, Y) = (X, Y), is the classical question of distributed source coding considered by Slepian and Wolf (1973). Orlitsky and Roche (2001) considered a somewhat restricted setup when Y is available as side information at the receiver. They characterized the minimal rate at which X needs to transmit data to the receiver as the conditional graph entropy of the characteristic graph of X based on f. In our recent work (2006), we further established that this minimal rate can be achieved by means of graph coloring and distributed source coding (e.g. Slepian-Wolf coding). This characterization allows for the separation between "function coding" and "correlation coding. " In this paper, we consider a more general setup where X and Y are both encoded (separately). This is a significantly harder setup for which to give a single-letter characterization for the complete rate region. We find that under a certain condition on the support set of X and Y (called the zigzag condition), it is possible to characterize the rate region based on graph colorings at X and Y separately. That is, any achievable pair of rates can be realized by means of first coloring graphs at X and Y separately (function coding) and then using Slepian-Wolf coding for these colors (correlation coding). We also obtain a single-letter characterization of the minimal joint rate. Finally, we provide simulation results based on graph coloring to establish the rate gains on real sequences
ABO Blood Group and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Two Prospective Cohort Studies

Objective—Epidemiological data regarding the association between ABO blood groups and risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) have been inconsistent. We sought to investigate the associations between ABO blood group and CHD risk in prospective cohort studies. Methods and Results—Two large, prospective cohort studies (the Nurses’ Health Study [NHS] including 62 073 women and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study [HPFS] including 27 428 men) were conducted with more than 20 years of follow-up (26 years in NHS and 24 years in HPFS). A meta-analysis was performed to summarize the associations from the present study and previous studies. In NHS, during 1 567 144 person-years of follow-up, 2055 participants developed CHD; in HPFS, 2015 participants developed CHD during 517 312 person-years of follow-up. ABO blood group was significantly associated with the risk of developing CHD in both women and men (log-rank test; P=0.0048 and 0.0002, respectively). In the combined analysis adjusted for cardiovascular risk factors, compared with participants with blood group O, those with blood groups A, B, or AB were more likely to develop CHD (adjusted hazard ratios [95% CI] for incident CHD were 1.06 [0.99–1.15], 1.15 [1.04–1.26], and 1.23 [1.11–1.36], respectively). Overall, 6.27% of the CHD cases were attributable to inheriting a non-O blood group. Meta-analysis indicated that non-O blood group had higher risk of CHD (relative risk =1.11; 95% CI, 1.05–1.18; P=0.001) compared with O blood group. Conclusion—These data suggest that ABO blood group is significantly associated with CHD risk. Compared with other blood groups, those with the blood type O have moderately lower risk of developing CHD.
The L 2 F Language Verification Systems for Albayzin-2010 Evaluation

This paper presents a description of INESC-ID’s Spoken Language Systems Laboratory (L 2 F) Language Verification systems submitted to the ALBAYZIN-2010 evaluation. The primary submission consists of the fusion of six individual subsystems: one Gaussian supervector approach with support vector machines that relies on the acoustic characteristics extracted by a front-end of shifted deltas, and five individual Phone Recognition and Language Modeling detectors based on five different phone tokenizers. Additionally, two contrastive systems have been developed. Language detection results have been submitted for all the evaluation conditions for every system. The main particularity of the systems developed for this evaluation is that individual language models for clean and noisy conditions have been trained for each target language. Results for the different systems and evaluation conditions are reported.
A Robust Warping Method for Fingerprint Matching

This paper presents a robust warping method for minutiae based fingerprint matching approaches. In this method, a deformable fingerprint surface is described using a triangular mesh model. For given two extracted minutiae sets and their correspondences, the proposed method constructs an energy function using a robust correspondence energy estimator and smoothness measuring of the mesh model. We obtain a convergent deformation pattern using an efficient gradient based energy optimization method. This energy optimization approach deals successfully with deformation errors caused by outliers, which are more difficult problems for the thin-plate spline (TPS) model. The proposed method is fast and the run-time performance is comparable with the method based on the TPS model. In the experiments, we provide a visual inspection of warping results on given correspondences and quantitative results using database.
Detecting and Classifying Intruders in Image Sequences

This paper describes a knowledge-based vision system for automating the interpretation of alarm events resulting from a perimeter intrusion detection system (PIDS). Moving blobs extracted over a sequence of digitised images are analysed to identify the cause of alarm. Alarm causes are modelled by a network of frames, and models are maintained for the scene. Due to poor spatial resolution, non-visual contextual information is required to supplement the image data. Probabilities are combined and propagated through the network by Subjective Bayesian Updating.
The effects of tumour necrosis factor inhibitors, methotrexate, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and corticosteroids on cardiovascular events in rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis: a systematic review and meta-analysis

The objective of this systematic literature review was to determine the association between cardiovascular events (CVEs) and antirheumatic drugs in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA)/psoriasis (Pso). Systematic searches were performed of MEDLINE, EMBASE and Cochrane databases (1960 to December 2012) and proceedings from major relevant congresses (2010-2012) for controlled studies and randomised trials reporting confirmed CVEs in patients with RA or PsA/Pso treated with antirheumatic drugs. Random-effects meta-analyses were performed on extracted data. Out of 2630 references screened, 34 studies were included: 28 in RA and 6 in PsA/Pso. In RA, a reduced risk of all CVEs was reported with tumour necrosis factor inhibitors (relative risk (RR), 0.70; 95% CI 0.54 to 0.90; p=0.005) and methotrexate (RR, 0.72; 95% CI 0.57 to 0.91; p=0.007). Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) increased the risk of all CVEs (RR, 1.18; 95% CI 1.01 to 1.38; p=0.04), which may have been specifically related to the effects of rofecoxib. Corticosteroids increased the risk of all CVEs (RR, 1.47; 95% CI 1.34 to 1.60; p<0.001). In PsA/Pso, systemic therapy decreased the risk of all CVEs (RR, 0.75; 95% CI 0.63 to 0.91; p=0.003). In RA, tumour necrosis factor inhibitors and methotrexate are associated with a decreased risk of all CVEs while corticosteroids and NSAIDs are associated with an increased risk. Targeting inflammation with tumour necrosis factor inhibitors or methotrexate may have positive cardiovascular effects in RA. In PsA/Pso, limited evidence suggests that systemic therapies are associated with a decrease in all CVE risk.
Mobile cloud computing with voltage scaling and data compression

Mobile cloud computing provides a cloud-based platform for executing mobile tasks remotely in the cloud. It becomes a promising way for extending the limited mobile resource as well as reducing the expensive mobile cost. In this paper, we consider a mobile application with multiple tasks, each with a certain amount of work and input/output data. Our objective is to minimize the mobile cost due to both energy and time usage for servicing all the tasks. First, we adopt voltage scaling to optimize the mobile computation cost. Then, we use data compression to reduce the amount of data to transmit, to minimize the wireless transmission cost. Moreover, we propose an optimal algorithm to make the decision on which tasks to offload from mobile to cloud. We conduct numerical analysis and experimental study to verify the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.