Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards Plane Spanners of Degree 3

Let $S$ be a finite set of points in the plane that are in convex position. We present an algorithm that constructs a plane $\frac{3+4\pi}{3}$-spanner of $S$ whose vertex degree is at most 3. Let $\Lambda$ be the vertex set of a finite non-uniform rectangular lattice in the plane. We present an algorithm that constructs a plane $3\sqrt{2}$-spanner for $\Lambda$ whose vertex degree is at most 3. For points that are in the plane and in general position, we show how to compute plane degree-3 spanners with a linear number of Steiner points.
A polylogarithmic approximation algorithm for the group Steiner tree problem

Given a weighted graph with some subsets of vertices called groups, the group Steiner tree problem is to find a minimum-weight subgraph which contains at least one vertex from each group. We give a randomized algorithm with a polylogarithmic approximation guarantee for the group Steiner tree problem. The previous best approximation guarantee was O(i 2 k 1/i ) in time O(n i k 2i ) (Charikar, Chekuri, Goel, and Guha). Our algorithm also improves existing approximation results for network design problems with location-based constraints and for the symmetric generalized traveling salesman problem.
Imagery rehearsal therapy for chronic nightmares in sexual assault survivors with posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled trial.

CONTEXT Chronic nightmares occur frequently in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but are not usually a primary target of treatment. OBJECTIVE To determine if treating chronic nightmares with imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT) reduces the frequency of disturbing dreams, improves sleep quality, and decreases PTSD symptom severity. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Randomized controlled trial conducted from 1995 to 1999 among 168 women in New Mexico; 95% had moderate-to-severe PTSD, 97% had experienced rape or other sexual assault, 77% reported life-threatening sexual assault, and 58% reported repeated exposure to sexual abuse in childhood or adolescence. INTERVENTION Participants were randomized to receive treatment (n = 88) or to the wait-list control group (n = 80). The treatment group received IRT in 3 sessions; controls received no additional intervention, but continued any ongoing treatment. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Scores on the Nightmare Frequency Questionnaire (NFQ), Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), PTSD Symptom Scale (PSS), and Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) at 3- and 6-month follow-up. RESULTS A total of 114 participants completed follow-up at 3 and/or 6 months. Comparing baseline to follow-up (n = 97-114), treatment significantly reduced nights per week with nightmares (Cohen d = 1.24; P<.001) and number of nightmares per week (Cohen d = 0.85; P<.001) on the NFQ and improved sleep (on the PSQI, Cohen d = 0.67; P<.001) and PTSD symptoms (on the PSS, Cohen d = 1.00; P<.001 and on the CAPS, Cohen d = 1.53; P<.001). Control participants showed small, nonsignificant improvements for the same measures (mean Cohen d = 0.21). In a 3-point analysis (n = 66-77), improvements occurred in the treatment group at 3-month follow-up (treatment vs control group, Cohen d = 1.15 vs 0.07 for nights per week with nightmares; 0.95 vs -0.06 for nightmares per week; 0.77 vs 0.31 on the PSQI, and 1.06 vs 0.31 on the PSS) and were sustained without further intervention or contact between 3 and 6 months. An intent-to-treat analysis (n = 168) confirmed significant differences between treatment and control groups for nightmares, sleep, and PTSD (all P<.02) with moderate effect sizes for treatment (mean Cohen d = 0.60) and small effect sizes for controls (mean Cohen d = 0.14). Posttraumatic stress symptoms decreased by at least 1 level of clinical severity in 65% of the treatment group compared with symptoms worsening or not changing in 69% of controls (chi(2)(1) = 12.80; P<. 001). CONCLUSIONS Imagery rehearsal therapy is a brief, well-tolerated treatment that appears to decrease chronic nightmares, improve sleep quality, and decrease PTSD symptom severity.
Designing for Prolonged Mastery. On involving old people in Participatory Design

In this paper, we report on a participatory design (PD) process with old users. We discuss how we organized and carried out the process so that our users could participate in the mutual learning and co-construction activities on their own terms. When organizing the process we had to take into account the limited capacity for design participation of our users but also build on the capacities they have. The paper describes our PD approach and what we did to facilitate participation from our old users, emphasizing recruiting, timing, continuity, representativity, and immediacy. The paper also discusses which design decisions the users participated in and how they influenced the design result. We analyse how they brought in design possibilities (choices), selected, concretized and evaluated them, and also how the final design result bears traces of their participation.
CORREGION BY SIDE-SHIFT : AN ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT FOR EARLY IDIOPATHIC SCOLIOSIS

In adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, prevention of major deformity is possible by the early detection and control of minor curves. The two available methods of control are bracing and electrospinal stimu­ lation. Each has certain disadvantages. A brace is required to be worn continuously for the major part of the day and at night through the growing years until skeletal maturity is reached. The duration of treatment could be as long as three years or more. Although the Milwaukee brace (1) has largely been replaced by the cosmetically less obtrusive braces constructed on the Boston pattern (2), the prospect of long-term brace-wearing to an otherwise healthy adoles­ cent is bleak. Nightly electrospinal stimulation by surface electrodes with freedom dUring the day is a more attractive alternative. However, problems such as skin irritation in some cases, frequent monitoring of electrode placements, and regular maintenance of the equipment have not encouraged its wider acceptance. Braces remain the main­ stay of conservative treatment. In view of the drawbacks associated with these methods, an alternative form of treatment is needed that should impose no ex­ I I ternal constraint by day or night, be minimally inconvenient, and yet be capable of obtaining results at least as good as those obtained I by the existing methods. These requirements are met by the method 1 I of active autocorrection by side-shift. It has been tried for four years, and this is a preliminary report on its application to 35 chil ­ I
Fast Hamiltonicity Checking Via Bases of Perfect Matchings

For an even integer t ≥ 2, the Matching Connectivity matrix Ht is a matrix that has rows and columns both labeled by all perfect matchings of the complete graph on t vertices; an entry Ht[M1, M2] is 1 if M1 and M2 form a Hamiltonian cycle and 0 otherwise. Motivated by applications for the Hamiltonicity problem, we show that Ht has rank exactly 2t/2−1 over GF(2). The upper bound is established by an explicit factorization of Ht as the product of two submatrices; the matchings labeling columns and rows, respectively, of the submatrices therefore form a basis Xt of Ht. The lower bound follows because the 2t/2−1 × 2t/2−1 submatrix with rows and columns labeled by Xt can be seen to have full rank. We obtain several algorithmic results based on the rank of Ht and the particular structure of the matchings in Xt. First, we present a 1.888n nO(1) time Monte Carlo algorithm that solves the Hamiltonicity problem in directed bipartite graphs. Second, we give a Monte Carlo algorithm that solves the problem in (2 + √ 2)pwnO(1) time when provided with a path decomposition of width pw for the input graph. Moreover, we show that this algorithm is best possible under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis, in the sense that an algorithm with running time (2 + √2 − ε)pwnO(1), for any ε > 0, would imply the breakthrough result of a (2 − ε′)n-time algorithm for CNF-Sat for some ε′ > 0.
Molecular level crossing and the geometric phase effect from the optical Hanle perspective

Level-crossing spectroscopy involves lifting the degeneracy of an excited state and using the interference of two nearly degenerate levels to measure the excited state lifetime. Here we use the idea of interference between different pathways to study the momentum-dependent wave packet lifetime due an excited state level-crossing (conical intersection) in a molecule. Changes in population from the wave packet propagation are reflected in the detected fluorescence. We use a chirped pulse to control the wave packet momentum. Changing the chirp rate affects the transition to the lower state through the conical intersection. It also affects the interference of different pathways in the upper electronic state, due to the geometric phase acquired. Increasing the chirp rate decreases the coherence of the wave packet in the upper electronic state. This suggests that there is a finite momentum dependent lifetime of the wave packet through the level-crossing as function of chirp. We dub this lifetime the wave packet momentum lifetime.
3 Joint Training for Pivot-based NMT 3 . 1 Training Objective

While recent neural machine translation approaches have delivered state-of-the-art performance for resource-rich language pairs, they suffer from the data scarcity problem for resource-scarce language pairs. Although this problem can be alleviated by exploiting a pivot language to bridge the source and target languages, the source-to-pivot and pivot-to-target translation models are usually independently trained. In this work, we introduce a joint training algorithm for pivot-based neural machine translation. We propose three methods to connect the two models and enable them to interact with each other during training. Experiments on Europarl and WMT corpora show that joint training of source-to-pivot and pivot-to-target models leads to significant improvements over independent training across various languages.
Detachment of Chain-Forming Neuroblasts by Fyn-Mediated Control of cell–cell Adhesion in the Postnatal Brain

In the rodent olfactory system, neuroblasts produced in the ventricular-subventricular zone of the postnatal brain migrate tangentially in chain-like cell aggregates toward the olfactory bulb (OB) through the rostral migratory stream (RMS). After reaching the OB, the chains are dissociated and the neuroblasts migrate individually and radially toward their final destination. The cellular and molecular mechanisms controlling cell–cell adhesion during this detachment remain unclear. Here we report that Fyn, a nonreceptor tyrosine kinase, regulates the detachment of neuroblasts from chains in the male and female mouse OB. By performing chemical screening and in vivo loss-of-function and gain-of-function experiments, we found that Fyn promotes somal disengagement from the chains and is involved in neuronal migration from the RMS into the granule cell layer of the OB. Fyn knockdown or Dab1 (disabled-1) deficiency caused p120-catenin to accumulate and adherens junction-like structures to be sustained at the contact sites between neuroblasts. Moreover, a Fyn and N-cadherin double-knockdown experiment indicated that Fyn regulates the N-cadherin-mediated cell adhesion between neuroblasts. These results suggest that the Fyn-mediated control of cell–cell adhesion is critical for the detachment of chain-forming neuroblasts in the postnatal OB. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT In the postnatal brain, newly born neurons (neuroblasts) migrate in chain-like cell aggregates toward their destination, where they are dissociated into individual cells and mature. The cellular and molecular mechanisms controlling the detachment of neuroblasts from chains are not understood. Here we show that Fyn, a nonreceptor tyrosine kinase, promotes the somal detachment of neuroblasts from chains, and that this regulation is critical for the efficient migration of neuroblasts to their destination. We further show that Fyn and Dab1 (disabled-1) decrease the cell–cell adhesion between chain-forming neuroblasts, which involves adherens junction-like structures. Our results suggest that Fyn-mediated regulation of the cell–cell adhesion of neuroblasts is critical for their detachment from chains in the postnatal brain.
Comparing ranking-based collaborative filtering algorithms to a rating-based alternative in recommender systems context

Koskela, Pentti Comparing ranking-based collaborative filtering algorithms to a rating-based alternative in recommender systems context Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2017, 51 p. Information Systems, Master’s Thesis Supervisor: Rönkkö, Mikko The vast amount of content on internet services, such as e-commerce sites, can cause information overflow, which leads to a bad user experience. Recommender system is technique to support the user’s decision-making by providing predicted suggestions. It is common that user is provided a list of items in user’s preference, e.g. top-10 list of movies. Traditionally, these ranked lists are generated by using rating-based approaches, where ratings are predicted to unknown items which are then calculated to ranked list. Rankingbased approach calculates similarities between users and predicts a ranked list without the middle-step of predicting the ratings first. There is a number of different collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms for different use cases. In a context of CF, ranking-based approaches are becoming more popular as the importance of ranked list accuracy has increased. However, there are several hybrid implementations where two or more different kind of recommender systems are combined, which performance cannot be compared to the algorithms in this thesis due to implementation differences. This thesis will compare three different ranking-based CF algorithms to each other and compare the results with the rating-based CF paradigm. The results will show the prediction accuracy improvement when using rankingbased approaches compared to a rating-based one. In addition, results will also show how much the performance have been improved in ranking-based CF algorithms in the past years. Excluding the research papers where the selected algorithms were introduced, I did not find any research publications where the selected algorithms were compared to each other. I evaluated the results using two different evaluation methods, of which Mean Average Precision is less common in this field of study.
Good fonts for dyslexia

Around 10% of the people have dyslexia, a neurological disability that impairs a person's ability to read and write. There is evidence that the presentation of the text has a significant effect on a text's accessibility for people with dyslexia. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no experiments that objectively measure the impact of the font type on reading performance. In this paper, we present the first experiment that uses eye-tracking to measure the effect of font type on reading speed. Using a within-subject design, 48 subjects with dyslexia read 12 texts with 12 different fonts. Sans serif, monospaced and roman font styles significantly improved the reading performance over serif, proportional and italic fonts. On the basis of our results, we present a set of more accessible fonts for people with dyslexia.
Automatic Construction of Parallel Portfolios via Explicit Instance Grouping

Exploiting parallelism is becoming more and more important in designing efficient solvers for computationally hard problems. However, manually building parallel solvers typically requires considerable domain knowledge and plenty of human effort. As an alternative, automatic construction of parallel portfolios (ACPP) aims at automatically building effective parallel portfolios based on a given problem instance set and a given rich configuration space. One promising way to solve the ACPP problem is to explicitly group the instances into different subsets and promote a component solver to handle each of them. This paper investigates solving ACPP from this perspective, and especially studies how to obtain a good instance grouping. The experimental results on two widely studied problem domains, the boolean satisfiability problems (SAT) and the traveling salesman problems (TSP), showed that the parallel portfolios constructed by the proposed method could achieve consistently superior performances to the ones constructed by the state-of-the-art ACPP methods, and could even rival sophisticated hand-designed parallel solvers.
Long-term Outcome of the Readjustable Sling Procedure for Female Stress Urinary Incontinence With Intrinsic Sphincter Deficiency or Recurrence

Purpose We evaluated the long-term outcome of a readjustable midurethral sling system (Remeex) in the treatment of recurrence of stress urinary incontinence (SUI) after surgical treatment or SUI with intrinsic sphincter deficiency (ISD). Materials and Methods This study included 19 patients who underwent the Remeex procedure with a mean of 45.6 months of follow-up. The patients had responded to a telephone questionnaire. Thirteen patients had ISD, four patients had SUI recurrence, and two patients had both. The questionnaire included subjective cure and satisfaction surveys and also recommended surgery to some patients. Results The mean patient age was 69.1 years (range, 50-85 years), the mean parity was 2.79 times (range, 2-5 times), and the mean follow-up period was 45.6 months (range, 21-72 months). The long-term follow-up cure rate was 79%, the improvement rate was 21%, and the fail rate was 0%. The long-term follow-up "very satisfactory" rate was 26.3%, the "satisfactory" rate was 73.7%, and the "usual" and "unsatisfactory" rates were both 0%. In addition to these results, 16 patients (84.2%) would recommend the Remeex procedure to other patients with SUI recurrence or ISD. After the procedure, four patients had urinary retention, three patients had difficulty emptying, and one patient had SUI recurrence. Furthermore, all of the patients subsequently endured sling readjustments. Conclusions After long-term follow-up, the Remeex system showed good cure rates and subjective satisfaction rates that were similar to the results found at the 1-year follow-up, and minimal complications were reported. Therefore, the Remeex system is effective in treating patients with SUI recurrence or ISD.
Engineered Smart Textiles and Janus Microparticles for Diverse Functional Industrial Applications

ABSTRACT Janus materials are biomimetically inspired systems with two or more functional properties arising as paramount materials for utilization in different fields like Medical, Protective clothing etc. Janus particles can be in different forms like capsule, fiber, nano cage, disc, nano film etc. which are amalgamated with fabric by different processes. Based on the fabrication and constituent elements, Janus materials can be fabricated by incorporating multiple properties like fire-retardancy, catalytic property, thermal regulation etc. This review article enumerates the numerous industrial applications of the Janus fabrics and simultaneously outlines the extensive methodologies utilized for engineering of the Janus fabrics. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Robust Kalman filter-based decentralised target search and prediction with topology maps

A novel distributed approach for searching and tracking of targets is presented for sensor network environments in which physical distance measurement using techniques such as signal strength is not feasible. The solution consists of a robust Kalman filter combined with a non-linear least-square method, and maximum likelihood topology maps. The primary input for estimating target location and direction of motion is provided by time stamps recorded by the sensor nodes when the target is detected within their sensing range. An autonomous robot following the target collects this information from sensors in its neighbourhood to determine its own path in search of the target. While the maximum likelihood topology coordinate space is a robust alternative to physical coordinates, it contains significant non-linear distortions when compared with physical distances between nodes. The authors overcome this using time stamps corresponding to target detection by nodes instead of relying on distances. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with recently proposed pseudo gradient algorithm based on hop count and received signal strength. Even though the proposed algorithm does not depend on distance measurements, the results show that it is able to track the target effectively even when the target changes its moving pattern frequently.
Stress and Heart Rate Variability: A Meta-Analysis and Review of the Literature

Objective Physical or mental imbalance caused by harmful stimuli can induce stress to maintain homeostasis. During chronic stress, the sympathetic nervous system is hyperactivated, causing physical, psychological, and behavioral abnormalities. At present, there is no accepted standard for stress evaluation. This review aimed to survey studies providing a rationale for selecting heart rate variability (HRV) as a psychological stress indicator. Methods Term searches in the Web of Science®, National Library of Medicine (PubMed), and Google Scholar databases yielded 37 publications meeting our criteria. The inclusion criteria were involvement of human participants, HRV as an objective psychological stress measure, and measured HRV reactivity. Results In most studies, HRV variables changed in response to stress induced by various methods. The most frequently reported factor associated with variation in HRV variables was low parasympathetic activity, which is characterized by a decrease in the high-frequency band and an increase in the low-frequency band. Neuroimaging studies suggested that HRV may be linked to cortical regions (e.g., the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) that are involved in stressful situation appraisal. Conclusion In conclusion, the current neurobiological evidence suggests that HRV is impacted by stress and supports its use for the objective assessment of psychological health and stress.
Volur: Concurrent Edge/Core Route Control in Data Center Networks

A perennial question in computer networks is where to place functionality among components of a distributed computer system. In data centers, one option is to move all intelligence to the edge, essentially relegating switches and middleboxes, regardless of their programmability, to simple static routing policies. Another is to add more intelligence to the middle of the network in the hopes that it can handle any issue that arises. This paper presents an architecture, called Volur, that provides a third option by facilitating the co-existence of an intelligent network with an intelligent edge. The key architectural principle of Volur is predictability of the network. We describe the key design requirements, and show through case studies how our approach facilitates more democratic innovation of all parts of the network. We also demonstrate the practicality of our architecture by describing how to implement the architecture on top of existing hardware and by deploying a prototype on top of a large production data center.