Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Information Extraction in Images and Video : A Survey

Text data present in images and video contain useful information for automatic annotation, indexing, and structuring of images. Extraction of this information involves detection, localization, tracking, extraction, enhancement, and recognition of the text from a given image. However, variations of text due to differences in size, style, orientation, and alignment, as well as low image contrast and complex background make the problem of automatic text extraction extremely challenging. While comprehensive surveys of related problems such as face detection, document analysis, and image & video indexing can be found, the problem of text information extraction is not well surveyed. A large number of techniques have been proposed to address this problem, and the purpose of this paper is to classify and review these algorithms, discuss benchmark data and performance evaluation, and to point out promising directions for future research.
Design of IIR Digital Differentiators Using Constrained Optimization

A new optimization method for the design of fullband and lowpass IIR digital differentiators is proposed. In the new method, the passband phase-response error is minimized under the constraint that the maximum passband amplitude-response relative error is below a prescribed level. For lowpass IIR differentiators, an additional constraint is introduced to limit the average squared amplitude response in the stopband so as to minimize any high-frequency noise that may be present. Extensive experimental results are included, which show that the differentiators designed using the proposed method have much smaller maximum phase-response error for the same passband amplitude-response error and stopband constraints when compared with several differentiators designed using state-of-the-art competing methods.
Cardioprotection Resulting from Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Administration Involves Shifting Metabolic Substrate Utilization to Increase Energy Efficiency in the Rat Heart

Previous studies have shown that glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) provides cardiovascular benefits independent of its role on peripheral glycemic control. However, the precise mechanism(s) by which GLP-1 treatment renders cardioprotection during myocardial ischemia remain unresolved. Here we examined the role for GLP-1 treatment on glucose and fatty acid metabolism in normal and ischemic rat hearts following a 30 min ischemia and 24 h reperfusion injury, and in isolated cardiomyocytes (CM). Relative carbohydrate and fat oxidation levels were measured in both normal and ischemic hearts using a 1-13C glucose clamp coupled with NMR-based isotopomer analysis, as well as in adult rat CMs by monitoring pH and O2 consumption in the presence of glucose or palmitate. In normal heart, GLP-1 increased glucose uptake (↑64%, p<0.05) without affecting glycogen levels. In ischemic hearts, GLP-1 induced metabolic substrate switching by increasing the ratio of carbohydrate versus fat oxidation (↑14%, p<0.01) in the LV area not at risk, without affecting cAMP levels. Interestingly, no substrate switching occurred in the LV area at risk, despite an increase in cAMP (↑106%, p<0.05) and lactate (↑121%, p<0.01) levels. Furthermore, in isolated CMs GLP-1 treatment increased glucose utilization (↑14%, p<0.05) and decreased fatty acid oxidation (↓15%, p<0.05) consistent with in vivo finding. Our results show that this benefit may derive from distinct and complementary roles of GLP-1 treatment on metabolism in myocardial sub-regions in response to this injury. In particular, a switch to anaerobic glycolysis in the ischemic area provides a compensatory substrate switch to overcome the energetic deficit in this region in the face of reduced tissue oxygenation, whereas a switch to more energetically favorable carbohydrate oxidation in more highly oxygenated remote regions supports maintaining cardiac contractility in a complementary manner.
A Programmatic Approach to WWW Authoring using Functional Programming

A programmatic approach to authoring of static WWW documents is introduced. The main conclusion of the paper is that functional programming ts well with the needs of in the area of static WWW authoring. At the more detailed level it is concluded that the exibility of a Lisp programming language is a good basis for a programmatic WWW author. The paper describes the interaction between programming and markup in the creation of static WWW pages. It is illustrated how the Scheme-based software package, LAML, can be used to support a exible programmatic authoring process. As a key idea, LAML mirrors every element in HTML as a Scheme function. On top of the mirror, LAML o ers a variety of document styles, tools, and other kinds of support.
High-Breakdown Robust Multivariate Methods

When applying a statistical method in practice it often occurs that some observations deviate from the usual assumptions. However, many classical methods are sensitive to outliers. The goal of robust statistics is to develop methods that are robust against the possibility that one or several unannounced outliers may occur anywhere in the data. These methods then allow to detect outlying observations by their residuals from a robust fit. We focus on high-breakdown methods, which can deal with a substantial fraction of outliers in the data. We give an overview of recent high-breakdown robust methods for multivariate settings such as covariance estimation, multiple and multivariate regression, discriminant analysis, principal components and multivariate calibration.
Identification and Characterization of Cor33p, a Novel Protein Implicated in Tolerance towards Oxidative Stress in Candida albicans

ABSTRACT We applied two-dimensional gel electrophoresis to identify downstream effectors of CPH1 and EFG1 under hypha-inducing conditions in Candida albicans. Among the proteins that were expressed in wild-type cells but were strongly downregulated in a cph1Δ/efg1Δ double mutant in α-minimal essential medium at 37°C, we could identify not-yet-characterized proteins, including Cor33-1p and Cor33-2p. The two proteins are almost identical (97% identity) and represent products of allelic isoforms of the same gene. Cor33p is highly similar to Cip1p from Candida sp. but lacks any significant homology to proteins from Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Strikingly, both proteins share homology with phenylcoumaran benzylic ether reductases and isoflavone reductases from plants. For other hypha-inducing media, like yeast-peptone-dextrose (YPD) plus serum at 37°C, we could not detect any transcription for COR33 in wild-type cells, indicating that Cor33p is not hypha specific. In contrast, we found a strong induction for COR33 when cells were treated with 5 mM hydrogen peroxide. However, under oxidative conditions, transcription of COR33 was not dependent on EFG1, indicating that other regulatory factors are involved. In fact, upregulation depends on CAP1 at least, as transcript levels were clearly reduced in a Δcap1 mutant strain under oxidative conditions. Unlike in wild-type cells, transcription of COR33 in a tsa1Δ mutant can be induced by treatment with 0.1 mM hydrogen peroxide. This suggests a functional link between COR33 and thiol-specific antioxidant-like proteins that are important in the oxidative-stress response in yeasts. Concordantly, cor33Δ deletion mutants show retarded growth on YPD plates supplemented with hydrogen peroxide, indicating that COR33 in general is implicated in conferring tolerance toward oxidative stress on Candida albicans.
MRI in ocular drug delivery

Conventional pharmacokinetic methods for studying ocular drug delivery are invasive and cannot be conveniently applied to humans. The advancement of MRI technology has provided new opportunities in ocular drug‐delivery research. MRI provides a means to non‐invasively and continuously monitor ocular drug‐delivery systems with a contrast agent or compound labeled with a contrast agent. It is a useful technique in pharmacokinetic studies, evaluation of drug‐delivery methods, and drug‐delivery device testing. Although the current status of the technology presents some major challenges to pharmaceutical research using MRI, it has a lot of potential. In the past decade, MRI has been used to examine ocular drug delivery via the subconjunctival route, intravitreal injection, intrascleral injection to the suprachoroidal space, episcleral and intravitreal implants, periocular injections, and ocular iontophoresis. In this review, the advantages and limitations of MRI in the study of ocular drug delivery are discussed. Different MR contrast agents and MRI techniques for ocular drug‐delivery research are compared. Ocular drug‐delivery studies using MRI are reviewed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Association Between Parental Occupation and Childhood Malignancy

A case control study was conducted to test Fabia and Thuy's observation that there was an excess of fathers in hydrocarbon-related occupations among children who died of childhood cancer compared to their controls. The study comprised 692 children who were born and died in Massachusetts for the years 1947–1957, and 1963–1967 and a control group of 1,384. No significant association was found between the four major groups of childhood cancer and the three hydrocarbon-related occupations: (1) mechanics and gas station attendants; (2) machinists; and (3) painters, cleaners, and dyers. However, there were two significant associations: (a) paternal employment as a paper or pulp mill worker was associated with tumors of the brain and other parts of the nervous system (relative odds of 2.8); and (b) paternal employment as a mechanic or machinist was associated with tumors of the urinary tract (relative odds of 2.5). Without strong supporting evidence from other studies, the authors are reluctant to conclude that these associations are causal. A weak association between childhood leukemia-lymphoma and parents' ages was observed.
Transform coding of audio signals using perceptual noise criteria

A 4-b/sample transform coder is designed using a psychoacoustically derived noise-making threshold that is based on the short-term spectrum of the signal. The coder has been tested in a formal subjective test involving a wide selection of monophonic audio inputs. The signals used in the test were of 15-kHz bandwidth, sampled at 32 kHz. The bit rate of the resulting coder was 128 kb/s. The subjective test shows that the coded signal could not be distinguished from the original at that bit rate. Subsequent informal work suggests that a bit rate of 96 kb/s may maintain transparency for the set of inputs used in the test. >
Concerted proton-coupled electron transfers in aquo/hydroxo/oxo metal complexes: Electrochemistry of [OsII(bpy)2py(OH2)]2+ in water

Kinetic analysis of the successive oxidative cyclic voltammetric responses of [OsII(bpy)2py(OH2)]2+ in buffered water, together with determination of H/D isotope effects, has allowed the determination of the mechanisms of the successive proton-coupled electron transfers that convert the OsII-aquo complex into the OsIII-hydroxo complex and the later into the OsIV-oxo complex. The stepwise pathways prevail over the concerted pathway in the first case. However, very large concentrations of a base, such as acetate, trigger the beginning of a concerted reaction. The same trend appears, but to a much larger extent, when high local concentration of carboxylates are attached close to the Os complex. The OsIII-hydroxo/OsIV-oxo couple is globally much slower and concerted pathways predominate over the stepwise pathways. Water is, however, not an appropriate proton acceptor in this respect. Other bases, such as citrate or phosphate, are instead quite effective for triggering concerted pathways. Here, we suggest factors causing these contrasting behaviors, providing a practical illustration of the prediction that concerted processes are an efficient way of avoiding high-energy intermediates. Observation of a strong decelerating effect of inactive ions together with the positive role of high local concentrations of carboxylates to initiate a concerted route underscores the variety of structural and medium factors that may operate to modulate and control the occurrence of concerted pathways. These demonstrations and analyses of the occurrence of concerted pathways in an aquo–hydroxo–oxo series are expected to serve as guidelines for studies in term of methodology and factor analysis.
Holistic data cleaning: Putting violations into context

Data cleaning is an important problem and data quality rules are the most promising way to face it with a declarative approach. Previous work has focused on specific formalisms, such as functional dependencies (FDs), conditional functional dependencies (CFDs), and matching dependencies (MDs), and those have always been studied in isolation. Moreover, such techniques are usually applied in a pipeline or interleaved. In this work we tackle the problem in a novel, unified framework. First, we let users specify quality rules using denial constraints with ad-hoc predicates. This language subsumes existing formalisms and can express rules involving numerical values, with predicates such as “greater than” and “less than”. More importantly, we exploit the interaction of the heterogeneous constraints by encoding them in a conflict hypergraph. Such holistic view of the conflicts is the starting point for a novel definition of repair context which allows us to compute automatically repairs of better quality w.r. t. previous approaches in the literature. Experimental results on real datasets show that the holistic approach outperforms previous algorithms in terms of quality and efficiency of the repair.
Moments of the frequency spectrum of a splitting tree with neutral Poissonian mutations

We consider a branching population where individuals live and reproduce independently. Their lifetimes are i.i. d. and they give birth at a constant rate b. The genealogical tree spanned by this process is called a splitting tree, and the population counting process is a homogeneous, binary Crump-Mode-Jagers process. We suppose that mutations affect individuals independently at a constant rate $\\theta$ during their lifetimes, under the infinite-alleles assumption: each new mutation gives a new type, called allele, to his carrier. We study the allele frequency spectrum which is the numbers A(k, t) of types represented by k alive individuals in the population at time t. Thanks to a new construction of the coalescent point process describing the genealogy of individuals in the splitting tree, we are able to compute recursively all joint factorial moments of (A(k, t)) k$\ge$1. These moments allow us to give an elementary proof of the almost sure convergence of the frequency spectrum in a supercritical splitting tree.
Sheehan's syndrome: differential diagnosis in the acute phase

Dejager S, Gerber S, Foubert L&Turpin G (La Pitié Salpétrière, Paris, France). Sheehan's syndrome: differential diagnosis in the acute phase (Case Report). J Intern Med 1998; 244: 261–66.
Method for Isolation and Purification of Cyanobacteria

A method employing nutrient saturated glass fiber filters allowed the isolation of the same numbers of cyanobacteria from freshwater as were obtained with medium solidified with agar, while providing a 2- to 15-fold reduction in the number of accompanying heterotrophic bacteria. Imipenem, a broad-spectrum β-lactam antibiotic which inhibits peptidoglycan biosynthesis, was superior to some other β-lactam antibiotics for reducing the numbers of heterotrophic bacterial contaminants associated with freshly isolated cyanobacteria to a level which facilitated the production of axenic cyanobacterial cultures.
Long-Term Medical Conditions and Major Depression: Strength of Association for Specific Conditions in the General Population

Background: The prevalence of major depression (MD) in persons with nonpsychiatric medical conditions is an indicator of clinical need in those groups, an indicator of the feasibility of screening and case-finding efforts, and a source of etiologic hypotheses. This analysis explores the prevalence of MD in the general population in relation to various long-term medical conditions. Methods: We used a dataset from a large-scale Canadian national health survey, the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS). The sample consisted of 115 071 subjects aged 18 years and over, randomly sampled from the Canadian population. The survey interview recorded self-reported diagnoses of various long-term medical conditions and employed a brief predictive interview for MD, the Composite International Diagnostic Interview Short Form for Major Depression. Logistic regression was used to adjust estimates of association for age and sex. Results: The conditions most strongly associated with MD were chronic fatigue syndrome (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 7.2) and fibromyalgia (AOR 3.4). The conditions least strongly associated were hypertension (AOR 1.2), diabetes, heart disease, and thyroid disease (AOR 1.4 in each case). We found associations with various gastrointestinal, neurologic, and respiratory conditions. Conclusions: A diverse set of long-term medical conditions are associated with MD, although previous studies might have lacked power to detect some of these associations. The strength of association in prevalence data, however, varies across specific conditions.
A consistency based approach of action model learning in a community of agents

In this paper, we model a community of autonomous agents in which each agent acts in the environment following some relational action model [4] describing the effect to be expected when applying a given action in a given state. At some given moment, the underlying action model is only imperfectly known by agents and may have to be revised according to the unexpected effect of the current action. In a Multi Agent context, this revision process can and should benefit of interactions between the agents. For that purpose, we consider the general multi agent learning protocol SMILE [2] together with the relational action model learner IRALE [5] in order to model the interactions between agents.
File Sharing: Creative Destruction or Just Plain Destruction?*

The sharing of sound recordings over the Internet is the newest controversy in a long-running battle between copyright owners and copying technologies. In order to provide some context, perspective, and background, this paper examines the short history of file sharing, the longer history of record sales, various explanations for the change in record sales, and some analysis of the economics of copying. Although file sharing has been imperfectly and inconsistently measured, it nevertheless appears to reveal a fairly close linkage between changes in file sharing and changes in record sales. Explanations, other than file sharing, for the recent decline in record sales seem to have little or no support. Because economic theories of the impacts of copying hold out little hope for a benign impact of file sharing, these results should not be surprising. These findings reinforce the econometric results from most of an expanding literature.
Subversion of Cell-Autonomous Immunity and Cell Migration by Legionella pneumophila Effectors

Bacteria trigger host defense and inflammatory processes, such as cytokine production, pyroptosis, and the chemotactic migration of immune cells toward the source of infection. However, a number of pathogens interfere with these immune functions by producing specific so-called “effector” proteins, which are delivered to host cells via dedicated secretion systems. Air-borne Legionella pneumophila bacteria trigger an acute and potential fatal inflammation in the lung termed Legionnaires’ disease. The opportunistic pathogen L. pneumophila is a natural parasite of free-living amoebae, but also replicates in alveolar macrophages and accidentally infects humans. The bacteria employ the intracellular multiplication/defective for organelle trafficking (Icm/Dot) type IV secretion system and as many as 300 different effector proteins to govern host–cell interactions and establish in phagocytes an intracellular replication niche, the Legionella-containing vacuole. Some Icm/Dot-translocated effector proteins target cell-autonomous immunity or cell migration, i.e., they interfere with (i) endocytic, secretory, or retrograde vesicle trafficking pathways, (ii) organelle or cell motility, (iii) the inflammasome and programed cell death, or (iv) the transcription factor NF-κB. Here, we review recent mechanistic insights into the subversion of cellular immune functions by L. pneumophila.
Detection of Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) in Merkel cell carcinoma cell lines: Cell morphology and growth phenotype do not reflect presence of the virus

The recently discovered human polyomavirus (MCPyV) is frequently found in Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) tissue and is believed to be causally linked to MCC pathogenesis. While cell lines established from MCC represent a valuable tool to study the contribution of MCPyV to MCC pathogenesis, hitherto only 1 MCPyV‐positive line has been described. We have analyzed 7 MCC cell lines for the presence, integration pattern and copy number of MCPyV. In 5 cell lines, MCPyV specific sequences were detected. In 3 of these lines, multiple copies of viral genomes per cell were detected, and sequencing of PCR amplificates identified distinct mutations predicted to lead to the expression of a truncated large T‐Antigen (LT‐Ag). In 1 cell line, clonal integration of concatamerized viral genomes was confirmed by Southern Blotting. MCC cell lines are conventionally categorized as “classic” or “variant” and further divided into 4 subtypes, based on expression of neuroendocrine markers and morphology. While it has been suggested that the presence of MCPyV might promote a classic phenotype, such a notion is not supported by our data. Instead, we find MCPyV‐positive as well as ‐negative lines of the classic variety, indicating that the distinguishing features are either inherently independent of viral infection or have become so in the course of tumorigenesis and/or cell line establishment. We therefore suggest a novel classification scheme based on MCPyV presence, integration patterns and T‐Ag mutations. The cell lines described here extend the repertoire of available MCPyV‐positive MCC‐lines and should aid in the elucidation of the role of MCPyV in the pathogenesis of MCC.