Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SVD-SIFT for web near-duplicate image detection

Stable and high distinctive image features are the basis for web near-duplicate image detection. SIFT (scale invariant feature transform) not only has good scale and brightness invariance, also has a certain robustness to affine distortion, perspective change, and additive noise. However, to extract SIFT features to represent an image, hundreds or even thousands of SIFT key points need to be selected. And each key point needs to be described by using a 128-dimensional feature vector. Thus, the matching cost of detection method based on SIFT features is high. In this paper, we propose to apply the singular value decomposition (SVD) method for feature matching and extract the new features from the set of SIFT feature points. The extracted feature is termed as SVD-SIFT. Experimental results demonstrate that the method can obtain a better tradeoff between effectiveness and efficiency for detection.
Complete mitochondrial genome of the sixblotch hind Cephalopholis sexmaculata (Pisces: Perciformes)

Abstract The complete mitogenome of the sixblotch hind, Cephalopholis sexmaculata was presented in this study. This mitochondrial genome consists of 16,589 bp, with 13 protein-coding genes, two ribosomal RNA genes, 22 transfer RNA genes, and a noncoding control region (CR), and its gene arrangement is identical to most vertebrates. The overall base composition of the heavy strand is A, 29.35%; G, 16.08%; C, 28.56%; and T, 26.01%. The COI gene started with GTG codon and the ATP6 gene started with CTG codon. The complete mitogenomic data may provide informative for further phylogenetic approach of species of Cephalopholis and related genera belong to the Epinephelidae groupers.
Potential for the use of mHealth in the management of cardiovascular disease in Kerala: a qualitative study

Objectives To assess the potential for using mHealth in cardiovascular disease (CVD) management in Kerala by exploring: (1) experiences and challenges of current CVD management; (2) current mobile phone use; (3) expectations of and barriers to mobile phone use in CVD management. Design Qualitative, semistructured, individual interviews. Setting 5 primary health centres in Ernakulam district, Kerala, India. Participants 15 participants in total from 3 stakeholder groups: 5 patients with CVD and/or its risk factors, 5 physicians treating CVD and 5 Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs). Patients were sampled for maximum variation on the basis of age, sex, CVD diagnoses and risk factors. All participants had access to a mobile phone. Results The main themes identified relating to the current challenges of CVD were poor patient disease knowledge, difficulties in implementing primary prevention and poor patient lifestyles. Participants noted phone calls as the main function of current mobile phone use. The expectations of mHealth use are to: improve accessibility to healthcare knowledge; provide reminders of appointments, medication and lifestyle changes; save time, money and travel; and improve ASHA job efficacy. All perceived barriers to mHealth were noted within physician interviews. These included fears of mobile phones negatively affecting physicians’ roles, the usability of mobile phones, radiation and the need for physical consultations. Conclusions There are three main potential uses of mHealth in this population: (1) as an educational tool, to improve health education and lifestyle behaviours; (2) to optimise the use of limited resources, by overcoming geographical barriers and financial constraints; (3) to improve use of healthcare, by providing appointment and treatment reminders in order to improve disease prevention and management. Successful mHealth design, which takes barriers into account, may complement current practice and optimise use of limited resources.
A hardware-in-the-loop test rig for aerial manipulation

A hardware-in-the-loop test rig is presented to bridge the gap between basic aerial manipulation research and the ability of flying robots to perform tasks such as door opening, bridge repair, agriculture care, and other applications requiring interaction with the environment. Unmanned aerial vehicles have speed and mobility advantages over ground vehicles and can operate in 3-dimensional workspaces. In particular, the usefulness of these capabilities is highlighted in areas where ground robots cannot reach or terrains they are unable to navigate. However, most UAVs operating in nearearth or indoor environments still do not have the payload capabilities to support multi-degree of freedom manipulators. We present a rotorcraft emulation environment using a 7 degree of freedom manipulator. Since UAVs require significant setup time and to avoid potential crashes, our test and evaluation environment provides repeatable experiments and captures reactionary forces experienced during ground interaction. Our preliminary results indicate that we can accurately model, emulate, and control our aircraft-manipulator system during both arm actuation and interacting with target objects.
Prognostic Factors and Secondary Malignancies in Childhood Medulloblastoma

Purpose Little is known of the outcome of long-term survivors of childhood medulloblastoma, one of the most common pediatric malignancies. To determine the potential for secondary malignancies, a retrospective outcome evaluation in 88 consecutive cases of childhood medulloblastoma was performed. Patients and Methods The records of all patients with childhood medulloblastoma diagnosed at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC from 1969 through 1997 were reviewed. Results The median follow-up time was 92 months (range 6–257 months). Overall survival was 59% at 5 years and 52% at 10 years. Univariate analysis showed that age at diagnosis, extent of surgical resection, presence of metastatic disease (M stage), ventriculoperitoneal shunt placement within 30 days from diagnosis, posterior fossa radiation therapy dose, and adjuvant chemotherapy significantly affected survival. Although based on small numbers, the risk of second neoplasms was significantly increased in this cohort. Multiple basal cell carcinomas developed in the areas of radiation therapy in two patients; these patients also had nevoid basal cell carcinoma syndrome (NBCCS) diagnosed. One other patient died of glioblastoma multiforme 8 years after treatment of medulloblastoma. A meningioma developed in another patient 10 years after radiation therapy. Conclusion As survival of medulloblastoma patients improves, increased surveillance regarding secondary malignancies is required, especially because radiation-induced tumors may occur many years after treatment. These two cases of NBCCS also illustrate the importance of considering the concomitant diagnosis of NBCCS in young patients with medulloblastoma. In those patients, alternative therapy should be considered to minimize radiation therapy-related sequelae.
Towards the Ontology-based Classification of Lymphoma Patients using Semantic Image Annotations

Today, clinicians rely on medical images for screening, diagnosis, treatment planning and follow up, but still a generic and flexible medical image understanding is missing. Although, there exist several approaches for semantic image annotation, those approaches do not make use of practical clinical knowledge, such as best practice solutions or clinical guidelines. Our final goal is to enhance medical image annotations by integrating clinical knowledge, such as lymphoma staging systems. The contribution of this paper is to introduce a formal approach to the classification of patients in well-defined categories. As first step, we have developed an OWL DL ontology representing the Ann-Arbor Lymphoma staging system that is suitable for performing automatic patient classification. Our aim for the ontology design was to establish means for automatic staging that maps each patient to one staging degree.
Discrete-time adaptive windowing for velocity estimation

We present methods for velocity estimation from discrete and quantized position samples using adaptive windowing. Previous methods necessitate trade-offs between noise reduction, control delay, estimate accuracy, reliability, computational load, transient preservation, and difficulties with tuning. In contrast, a first-order adaptive windowing method is shown to be optimal in the sense that it minimizes the velocity error variance while maximizes the accuracy of the estimates, requiring no tradeoff. Variants of this method are also discussed. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is verified in simulation and by experiments on the control of a haptic device.
Simulation of Service Model System Based on Scale-free Network

Aiming at the phenomenon that peers provide various data services to each other in the real network, a service model system consisting of three sub-models is constructed. In order to encourage a peer to provide more services to other peers, a new reciprocator incentive policy is proposed, which improves the robustness of the service model system. The experiment results and analysis show that this model system can simulate the phenomenon of interconnect peers providing services to each other, and can be used for reference to improve the service level. Introduction In the real network, peers have various requirements of data services from other peers, such as requesting data transmission, data storage, file sharing and so on. If the peers are willing to provide services to each other, the network has good robustness. If the peers are unwilling to provide services for other peers, the number of times that the network peers provide services to each other will be reduced, which will affect the robustness of the network and even lead to the termination of network service. In view of the above problems, some scholars have carried out researches, and have drawn some useful conclusions. For example, the micropayment method is proposed in reference [1-2] that peers can obtain revenue through providing services, so as to motivate the peers to continuously provide services. The incentives based on reputation is proposed in reference [3-5] that peers calculate the reputation value according to the historical behavior of neighbors, and then decide their behavior towards neighbors. Reference [6-7] models peers and their interactions based on evolutionary game theory, and analyzes the robustness of the system with incentive policy. This paper proposes a service model system based on scale-free network. The model system is composed of three parts: network sub model, service sub model and learning sub model. On this basis, a new reciprocator incentive policy is proposed. Simulation experiment and analysis show that compared with the existing model system, our model system is closer to the real situation, and can simulate the real network peers serving each other and transforming each other. The new reciprocator incentive policy based on the model system can guarantee the continuous service between network peers. Even when there are many defectors at the beginning, the robustness of the network system can still be achieved. Service Model System On the basis of reference [8], we construct a service model system closer to the real environment. The model consists of three parts: network sub model, service sub model and learning sub model (see Table.1). Table 1. Service model system based on scale-free network. Learning sub model Current-best Learning Model Service sub model Matrix Model Based on Game Theory Network sub model Scale-free Network Model
A social interaction approach to managing the "invisibles" of virtual teams

This paper uses social interaction theory and Tuckman's team development model to report and interpret the findings of a case‐based research into the forming and performance of eight internationally situated virtual project teams operating in the information technology industry. Its objective is to highlight the need to bridge the “gap” between the structural and process orientations of management and virtual team members' situational perceptions and psychological drivers (the “invisibles”). For organizations contemplating the adoption of these new organizational forms, its findings will provide a holistic framework to guide their transformation from conventional to virtual teams. Some of the issues identified here are also likely to be salient to those who are already using virtual teams.
TASS Mark IV Photometric Survey of the Northern Sky

The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS) is a loose confederation of amateur and professional astronomers. We describe the design and construction of our Mark IV systems, a set of wide‐field telescopes with CCD cameras that take simultaneous images in the V and IC passbands. We explain our observational procedures and the pipeline that processes and reduces the images into lists of stellar positions and magnitudes. We have compiled a large database of measurements for stars in the northern celestial hemisphere with V‐band magnitudes in the range 7<V<13. This paper describes data taken over the 4 year period beginning in 2001 November. One of our results is a catalog of repeated measurements on the Johnson‐Cousins system for over 4.3 million stars.
Automatic Kernel Weighting for Multikernel Adaptive Filtering: Multiscale Aspects

This paper presents an automatic kernel weighting technique for multikernel adaptive filtering. The full potential of the multikernel adaptive filtering approach can only be achieved when the kernels are weighted appropriately. The proposed technique balances the dominance of the kernels by making the mean eigenvalues of their associated autocorrelation matrices be equal to each other. The overall complexity of the proposed approach is low because the mean eigenvalues can be computed efficiently. The numerical results verify that the proposed technique balances the coefficient updates and yields reasonable performance.
Immunoreactivity Analysis of Toxoplasma gondii Recombinant Antigen rSAG3 in Sera from Immunized BALB/c Mice and Toxoplasmosis Patients

Background: The coccidian protozoa Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular parasite of humans and other warm-blooded animals. Diagnosis of toxoplasmosis is of considerable medical importance for human, especially pregnant women and immunocompromised individuals. The apply of an Escherichia coli recombinant antigen(s) would be significantly useful in developing standardization of the diagnostic tests and reducing their costs. In this study, immunoreactivity of recombinant SAG3 against sera from immunized mice and human anti-T. gondii IgG positive patients was evaluated by western-blotting and enzyme immunoassay (EIA) in Department of Parasitology and Mycology, School of Medicine, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in 2013. Methods: Three inbreed BALB/c female mice were obtained. Two mice were injected with rSAG3 and one was remained untreated, as control. Sera from immunized mice and also pooled sera from IgG positive toxoplasmosis cases were evaluated with western-blotting. IgG antibody responses to recombinant SAG3 was measured by indirect ELISA against the negative control group. Results: The rSAG3 protein reacted with sera of immunized mice and sera from patients with anti-Toxoplasma IgG antibodies in western-blot analysis. The result of ELISA showed that, there was marked differences in the absorbance values between the recombinant SAG3 immunized mice and control group. Conclusion: The rSAG3 showed IgG reactivity with sera from immunized mice and anti-Toxoplasma IgG patients.
An ensemble method for identifying regulatory circuits with special reference to the qa gene cluster of Neurospora crassa

A chemical reaction network for the regulation of the quinic acid (qa) gene cluster of Neurospora crassa is proposed. An efficient Monte Carlo method for walking through the parameter space of possible chemical reaction networks is developed to identify an ensemble of deterministic kinetics models with rate constants consistent with RNA and protein profiling data. This method was successful in identifying a model ensemble fitting available RNA profiling data on the qa gene cluster.
Heat Acclimation-Mediated Cross-Tolerance: Origins in within-Life Epigenetics?

The primary outcome of heat acclimation is increased thermotolerance, which stems from enhancement of innate cytoprotective pathways. These pathways produce “ON CALL” molecules that can combat stressors to which the body has never been exposed, via cross-tolerance mechanisms (heat acclimation-mediated cross-tolerance—HACT). The foundation of HACT lies in the sharing of generic stress signaling, combined with tissue/organ- specific protective responses. HACT becomes apparent when acclimatory homeostasis is achieved, lasts for several weeks, and has a memory. HACT differs from other forms of temporal protective mechanisms activated by exposure to lower “doses” of the stressor, which induce adaptation to higher “doses” of the same/different stressor; e.g., preconditioning, hormesis. These terms have been adopted by biochemists, toxicologists, and physiologists to describe the rapid cellular strategies ensuring homeostasis. HACT employs two major protective avenues: constitutive injury attenuation and abrupt post-insult release of help signals enhanced by acclimation. To date, the injury-attenuating features seen in all organs studied include fast-responding, enlarged cytoprotective reserves with HSPs, anti-oxidative, anti-apoptotic molecules, and HIF-1α nuclear and mitochondrial target gene products. Using cardiac ischemia and brain hypoxia models as a guide to the broader framework of phenotypic plasticity, HACT is enabled by a metabolic shift induced by HIF-1α and there are less injuries caused by Ca+2 overload, via channel or complex-protein remodeling, or decreased channel abundance. Epigenetic markers such as post-translational histone modification and altered levels of chromatin modifiers during acclimation and its decline suggest that dynamic epigenetic mechanisms controlling gene expression induce HACT and acclimation memory, to enable the rapid return of the protected phenotype. In this review the link between in vivo physiological evidence and the associated cellular and molecular mechanisms leading to HACT and its difference from short-acting cross-tolerance strategies will be discussed.
PatMaN: rapid alignment of short sequences to large databases

Summary: We present a tool suited for searching for many short nucleotide sequences in large databases, allowing for a predefined number of gaps and mismatches. The commandline-driven program implements a non-deterministic automata matching algorithm on a keyword tree of the search strings. Both queries with and without ambiguity codes can be searched. Search time is short for perfect matches, and retrieval time rises exponentially with the number of edits allowed. Availability: The C++ source code for PatMaN is distributed under the GNU General Public License and has been tested on the GNU/Linux operating system. It is available from http://bioinf.eva.mpg.de/patman. Contact: pruefer@eva.mpg.de Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Effect of alkylphospholipids on Candida albicans biofilm formation and maturation.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to evaluate miltefosine and four synthetic compounds (TCAN26, TC19, TC106 and TC117) for their in vitro inhibitory activity against Candida albicans planktonic and biofilm cells and investigate whether these compounds are able to inhibit the biofilm formation and to reduce the viability of mature C. albicans biofilm cells. METHODS The XTT reduction assay and transmission and scanning electron microscopy were employed to determine the inhibitory effects of the test compounds in comparison with amphotericin B and fluconazole against both planktonic cells and sessile cells in biofilms. RESULTS C. albicans planktonic cells were susceptible to miltefosine, TCAN26 and TC19, all alkylphospholipid compounds. Miltefosine and TCAN26 present a fungicidal activity with similar values of MIC and minimum fungicidal concentration (MFC), ranging from 2 to 8 mg/L. Cell treatment with sub-inhibitory concentrations of alkylphospholipids induced several ultrastructural alterations. In relation to biofilms, miltefosine reduced formation (38%-71%) and mature biofilms viability (32%-44%), at concentrations of 64 mg/L. TCAN26 also reduced biofilm formation (24%-30%) and mature biofilm viability (15%-20%), at concentrations of 64 mg/L. Although amphotericin B reduced biofilm formation similarly to miltefosine (51%-74%), its activity was lower on mature biofilms (24%-30%). Miltefosine antibiofilm activity was significantly higher than amphotericin B, on both formation and mature biofilms (P<0.05 and P<0.0001, respectively). Fluconazole was the least effective compound tested. CONCLUSION Promising antibiofilm activity was displayed by miltefosine and other alkylphosphocholine compounds, which could be considered a putative option for future treatment of candidaemia associated with biofilm formation, although further evaluation in in vivo systems is required.
Unexpected Diversity of Bacteria Capable of Carbon Monoxide Oxidation in a Coastal Marine Environment, and Contribution of the Roseobacter-Associated Clade to Total CO Oxidation

ABSTRACT The species diversity, phylogenetic affiliations, and physiological activity rates of carbon monoxide-oxidizing microorganisms were investigated, using new isolates from surface waters collected from the coast of New England and type strains from established collections. A direct isolation method allowed the simultaneous recovery of organisms with different growth rates and nutritional requirements and the identification of marine microorganisms that oxidize CO at an environmentally relevant concentration (42 nM CO). Isolates that oxidized CO at environmentally relevant rates (>4.5 × 10−11 nmol CO oxidized cell−1 h−1) were taxonomically diverse, with representatives in the alpha and gamma subclasses of the Proteobacteria and the phylum Bacteroidetes, and represent a hitherto unreported metabolic function for several diverse microbial types. Isolates and type strains having the greatest specific rates of CO metabolism (1.1 × 10−10 to 2.3 × 10−10 nmol CO oxidized cell−1 h−1) belonged to the Roseobacter-associated clade (RAC) of the alpha subclass of the Proteobacteria. By using triple-labeled slide preparations, differential counts of active CO-oxidizing RAC cells, total RAC cells, and total bacterial cell counts in environmental samples were obtained. RAC organisms were a major component of total cell numbers (36%). Based on the density of active CO-oxidizing RAC cells in natural samples and RAC-specific metabolic activities determined for pure cultures, active CO-oxidizing RAC cells may contribute up to 15% of the total CO oxidation occurring in coastal waters.
Significance of Force-Feedback in Controlling Artificial Locomotion-Manipulation Systems

In the paper two aspects of force-feedback implementation in controlling artificial locomotion-manipulation systems are considered: 1) as a global control, for reducing the influence of coupling among subsystems when decentralized control is applied, and (b) for solving dynamic control tasks often encountered when the aforementioned systems are considered. In order to illustrate the implementation of force-feedback, four examples are presented, two for a biped system and two for an anthropomorphic manipulator.
Fully-abstract concurrent games for π

We define a semantics for Milner’s pi-calculus, with three main novelties. First, it provides a fully-abstract model for fair testing equivalence, whereas previous semantics covered variants of bisimilarity and the may and must testing equivalences. Second, it is based on reduction semantics, whereas previous semantics were based on labelled transition systems. Finally, it has a strong game semantical flavor in the sense of Hyland-Ong and Nickau. Indeed, our model may both be viewed as an innocent presheaf semantics and as a concurrent game semantics.