Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Calibration and Cross-Validation of the ActiGraph wGT3X+ Accelerometer for the Estimation of Physical Activity Intensity in Children with Intellectual Disabilities

Background Valid objective measurement is integral to increasing our understanding of physical activity and sedentary behaviours. However, no population-specific cut points have been calibrated for children with intellectual disabilities. Therefore, this study aimed to calibrate and cross-validate the first population-specific accelerometer intensity cut points for children with intellectual disabilities. Methods Fifty children with intellectual disabilities were randomly assigned to the calibration (n = 36; boys = 28, 9.53±1.08yrs) or cross-validation (n = 14; boys = 9, 9.57±1.16yrs) group. Participants completed a semi-structured school-based activity session, which included various activities ranging from sedentary to vigorous intensity. Direct observation (SOFIT tool) was used to calibrate the ActiGraph wGT3X+, which participants wore on the right hip. Receiver Operating Characteristic curve analyses determined the optimal cut points for sedentary, moderate, and vigorous intensity activity for the vertical axis and vector magnitude. Classification agreement was investigated using sensitivity, specificity, total agreement, and Cohen’s kappa scores against the criterion measure of SOFIT. Results The optimal (AUC = .87−.94) vertical axis cut points (cpm) were ≤507 (sedentary), 1008−2300 (moderate), and ≥2301 (vigorous), which demonstrated high sensitivity (81−88%) and specificity (81−85%). The optimal (AUC = .86−.92) vector magnitude cut points (cpm) of ≤1863 (sedentary), 2610−4214 (moderate), and ≥4215 (vigorous) demonstrated comparable, albeit marginally lower, accuracy than the vertical axis cut points (sensitivity = 80−86%; specificity = 77−82%). Classification agreement ranged from moderate to almost perfect (κ = .51−.85) with high sensitivity and specificity, and confirmed the trend that accuracy increased with intensity, and vertical axis cut points provide higher classification agreement than vector magnitude cut points. Conclusions This study provides the first valid methods of interpreting accelerometer output in children with intellectual disabilities. The calibrated physical activity cut points are notably higher than existing cut points, thus raising questions on the validity of previous low physical activity estimates in children with intellectual disabilities that were based on typically developing cut points.
Comparative study of Wireless Sensor Network standards for application in Electrical Substations

Power utilities around the world are modernizing their grid by adding layers of communication capabilities to allow for more advanced control, monitoring and preventive maintenance. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), due to their ease of deployment, low cost and flexibility, are considered as a solution to provide diagnostics information about the health of the connected devices and equipment in the electrical grid. However, in specific environments such as high voltage substations, the equipment in the grid produces a strong and specific radio noise, which is impulsive in nature. The robustness of off-the-shelf equipment to this type of noise is not guaranteed; it is therefore important to analyze the characteristics of devices, algorithms and protocols to understand whether they are suited to such harsh environments. In this paper, we review several WSN standards: 6LoWPAN, Zigbee, WirelessHART, ISA100.11a and OCARI. Physical layer specifications (IEEE 802.15.4) are similar for all standards, with considerable architectural differences present in the higher layers. The purpose of this paper is to determine the appropriate WSN standard that could support reliable communication in the impulsive noise environment, in electrical substations. Our review concludes that the WirelessHART sensor network is one of the most suitable to be implemented in a harsh impulsive noise environment.
Potentiation of the antireactive, antiasthmatic effect of inhaled furosemide by inhaled lysine acetylsalicylate

Nonsteroid antiinflammatory drugs interfere with the diuretic activity of furosemide, implying that this effect is at least partially dependent on renal prostaglandin synthesis. To investigate whether prostaglandin production could also modulate the bronchial antireactive activity of this diuretic drug, we investigated the effect of inhaled Iysine acetylsalicylate (162 mg) and of furosemide (18 mg), alone and in combination, on the bronchial obstructive response to ultrasonically nebulized water in asthmatic patients. The study was also prompted by the conflicting results obtained in previous studies of oral nonsteroid antiinflammatory drugs. Fifteen asthmatic patients underwent bronchial challenge with a mist of ultrasonically nebulized distilled water at the same time of day on four occasions, 2–4 days apart, 15 min after premedication according to a double‐blind, randomized protocol. After placebo, mean PD15 to water mist did not differ from a preliminary test (2.1 ± 0.2 and 2.5 ± 0.4 ml, M ± SE, respectively). After lysine acetylsalicylate, mean PD. , rose to 5.0 ± 0.7 ml (2.8 ± 0.6 times higher than placebo); after furosemide, to 9.0± 1.5 ml (4.4 ± 0.9 times over placebo); and after the two drugs in combination, to 32.2 ± 5.6 ml (16.3 ± 3.0 times higher than placebo). Similar results were obtained with inhaled indomethacin, whereas sodium salicylate had no effect. These data indicate that the bronchial antireactive activity of inhaled furosemide is greatly enhanced by inhaled lysine acetylsalicylate through a mechanism which probably involves inhibition of the local synthesis of prostaglandins, and could have therapeutic implications.
Discriminative dimensionality reduction for regression problems using the Fisher metric

Discriminative dimensionality reduction refers to the goal of visualizing given high-dimensional data in the plane such that the structure relevant for a specified aspect is displayed. While this framework has been successfully applied to visualize data with auxiliary label information, its extension to real-valued information is lacking. In this contribution, we propose a general way to shape data distances based on auxiliary real-valued information with the Fisher metric which is derived from a Gaussian process model of the data. This can directly be integrated into high quality non-linear dimensionality reduction methods such as t-SNE, as we will demonstrate in artificial as well as real life benchmarks.
Similar Fragment Retrieval of Animations by a Bag-of-Features Approach

Serial animated cartoons, also called animations, is a kind of popular video documents that describe narratives by videos of cartoons. By using digital techniques, illegal users can divide animations into fragments and distribute them without any copyright permissions. In this paper we focus on the copyright problem of animations and try to retrieve copyright infringement fragments based on key frames. Because of the huge volumes and rapid release of animations, it is impossible to store all the episodes into the database. We propose applying bag-of-features model to retrieve similar fragments based on the visual words extracted from a limited data set. In the experiments, 12 titles of animations are employed and the similar fragments outside database are applied as queries. Our method has achieved above 98% precision at 80% recall for fragments whose durations are over 140 seconds. From the results, we show that a latest release can be retrieved based on the features of the former ones from the same title.
SOD2 gene polymorphisms in neovascular age-related macular degeneration and polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy

Purpose A nonsynonymous coding variant in the manganese superoxide dismutase (SOD2) gene (V16A, rs4880) has been implicated in neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD). However, the findings have been inconsistent. Two studies in Japanese populations reported an opposite direction of association of the same allele at the V16A variant, whereas one study in a Northern Irish population found no effect of the variant on the risk of developing neovascular AMD. To address these apparently contradictory reports, we validated the association in a Japanese population. Methods In a Japanese population, we genotyped the V16A variant in 116 neovascular AMD patients, 140 polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy (PCV) patients, and 189 control participants. This association was also tested in a population of PCV participants to avoid variable findings across studies due to underlying sample heterogeneity and because disease phenotype was not well described in previous studies. We analyzed a tagging single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in addition to the V16A variant to capture all common SOD2 variations verified by the HapMap project. Genotyping was conducted using TaqMan technology. Associations were tested using single-SNP and haplotype analyses as well as a meta-analysis of the published literature. Population stratification was also evaluated in our study population. Results We found no detectable association of the V16A variant or any other common SOD2 variation with either neovascular AMD or PCV, as demonstrated by both single-SNP and haplotype analyses. Population structure analyses precluded stratification artifacts in our study cohort. A meta-analysis of the association between the V16A variant and neovascular AMD also failed to detect a significant association. Conclusions We found no evidence to support the role of any common SOD2 variations including the V16A variant in the susceptibility to neovascular AMD or PCV. Our study highlights the importance and difficulty in replicating genetic association studies of complex human diseases.
Grid-Based Indexing and Search Algorithms for Large-Scale and High-Dimensional Data

The rapid development of Internet has resulted in massive information overloading recently. These information is usually represented by high-dimensional feature vectors in many related applications such as recognition, classification and retrieval. These applications usually need efficient indexing and search methods for such large-scale and high-dimensional database, which typically is a challenging task. Some efforts have been made and solved this problem to some extent. However, most of them are implemented in a single machine, which is not suitable to handle large-scale database.In this paper, we present a novel data index structure and nearest neighbor search algorithm implemented on Apache Spark. We impose a grid on the database and index data by non-empty grid cells. This grid-based index structure is simple and easy to be implemented in parallel. Moreover, we propose to build a scalable KNN graph on the grids, which increase the efficiency of this index structure by a low cost in parallel implementation. Finally, experiments are conducted in both public databases and synthetic databases, showing that the proposed methods achieve overall high performance in both efficiency and accuracy.
Predicting Faulty Classes Using Design Metrics with Discriminant Analysis

Nowadays risk assessment is one of software engineering processes that plays important role in software development life cycle. Applying risk assessment to software the earlier is the better. Developers should detect defects of software early at design phase so the improvement action such as refactoring can be taken. Constructing fault prediction model using design metrics is one approach that can help developers to identify the faulty classes at early phase. This paper collects object-oriented design metrics and introduces some new metrics that tend to affect the existing of faults in classes, then construct the fault prediction model with discriminant analysis technique. The prediction model was trained by data collected from sale system and was validated using data from CD-selection system. The result indicates that 12 of 14 design metrics are associated with fault-proneness and the model can be used to classify faulty level of new classes.
Coding of envelopes by correlated but not single-neuron activity requires neural variability

Significance We provide the first experimental evidence (to our knowledge) that correlated population activity can serve as an extra channel to encode second-order features of sensory input in both the electrosensory and vestibular systems. Through further experiments and mathematical modeling, we show that such coding not only requires but is also optimally tuned to a nonzero level of variability. Finally, we demonstrate that only physiologically realistic decoding circuits that explicitly include the contributions of pairwise neural activity can reliably be used to reconstruct the envelope. Our results reveal new functional roles for correlated activity and neural variability that are generally applicable across systems and species. Understanding how the brain processes sensory information is often complicated by the fact that neurons exhibit trial-to-trial variability in their responses to stimuli. Indeed, the role of variability in sensory coding is still highly debated. Here, we examined how variability influences neural responses to naturalistic stimuli consisting of a fast time-varying waveform (i.e., carrier or first order) whose amplitude (i.e., envelope or second order) varies more slowly. Recordings were made from fish electrosensory and monkey vestibular sensory neurons. In both systems, we show that correlated but not single-neuron activity can provide detailed information about second-order stimulus features. Using a simple mathematical model, we made the strong prediction that such correlation-based coding of envelopes requires neural variability. Strikingly, the performance of correlated activity at predicting the envelope was similarly optimally tuned to a nonzero level of variability in both systems, thereby confirming this prediction. Finally, we show that second-order sensory information can only be decoded if one takes into account joint statistics when combining neural activities. Our results thus show that correlated but not single-neural activity can transmit information about the envelope, that such transmission requires neural variability, and that this information can be decoded. We suggest that envelope coding by correlated activity is a general feature of sensory processing that will be found across species and systems.
A systematic review on scheduling types, methods and simulators in cloud computing system

The cloud phenomenon is a vital service in internet computing. The three service models SaaS, PaaS & IaaS provides all the facilities & functionalities over the internet. Cloud service providers provide services on pay-per-use basis. The main aim of cloud service providers is to use resources efficiently and gain maximum profit using efficient scheduling algorithms which remains an issue in cloud computing. Many task scheduling algorithms are proposed but they are improvement on only one scheduling algorithm. There is no combined study of scheduling types, methods and simulators undertaken which gives unique platform for comparing such types, methods & simulators. This paper focuses on various scheduling types, methods and simulators in cloud computing system. It brings out comparisons for various scheduling methods and cloud simulators using different parameters.
ROUGE-C: A fully automated evaluation method for multi-document summarization

This paper presents how to use ROUGE to evaluate summaries without human reference summaries. ROUGE is a widely used evaluation tool for multi-document summarization and has great advantages in the areas of summarization evaluation. However, manual reference summaries written beforehand by assessors are indispensable for a ROUGE test. There was still no research on ROUGEpsilas abilities of evaluating summaries without manual reference summaries. By considering summary as consensus speaker for the original input information, we discovered and developed ROUGE-C. ROUGE-C applies the ROUGE method alternatively by replacing the reference summaries with source document as well as query-focused information (if any), and therefore it enables a fully manual-independent way of evaluating multi-document summarization. Experiments conducted on the 2001 to 2005 DUC data showed that, with restraint of appropriate condition and some acceptable decreased efficiency, ROUGE-C correlated well with methods that depend on reference summaries, including human judgments.
Fiber link design considerations for cloud-Radio Access Networks

Analog radio over fiber (RoF) links may offer advantages for cloud-Radio Access Networks in terms of component cost, but the behavior of the distortion with large numbers of subcarriers needs to be understood. In this paper, this is presented in terms of the variation between subcarriers. Memory polynomial predistortion is also shown to compensate for RoF and wireless path distortion. Whether for digitized or analog links, it is shown that appropriate framing structure parameters must be used to assure performance, especially of time-division duplex systems.
Towards a Multiple Ontology Framework for Requirements Elicitation and Reuse

In order to elicit system requirements correctly and unambiguously, researchers in the requirements engineering community have been studying and developing a number of ontology based approaches. Many of them adopt the single ontology schema, which utilizes a global ontology to describe static knowledge for all domains. However, such ontologies lack dynamic conceptual description and they are difficult to reuse. Based on KADS knowledge modeling, this paper proposes a multiple ontology framework for requirements elicitation and reuse. Besides encapsulating the ontology of domain knowledge, it also includes the top level ontology, task ontology and application ontology. The framework provides a more powerful knowledge base for requirements elicitation and definitely defines the responsibilities of all stakeholders. The process of using the framework is discussed at last.
Numerical Methods and Volatility Models for Valuing Cliquet Options

Several numerical issues for valuing cliquet options using PDE methods are investigated. The use of a running sum of returns formulation is compared to an average return formulation. Methods for grid construction, interpolation of jump conditions, and application of boundary conditions are compared. The effect of various volatility modelling assumptions on the value of cliquet options is also studied. Numerical results are reported for jump diffusion models, calibrated volatility surface models, and uncertain volatility models.
Extracting and Ranking Question-Focused Terms Using the Titles of Wikipedia Articles

At the NTCIR-6 CLQA (Cross-Language Question Answering) task, we participated in the Chinese-Chinese (C-C) and English-Chinese (E-C) QA (Question Answering) subtasks. Without employing question type classification, we proposed a new resource, Wikipedia, to assist in extracting and ranking Question-Focused terms. We regarded the titles of Wikipedia articles as a multilingual noun-phrase corpus which is useful in QA systems. Experimental results showed that better performance was achieved for questions with type PERSON or LOCATION. Besides, we used an online MT (Machine Translation) system to deal with question translation in our CLQA task.
On the Design of a Multi-Perspective Visualization Environment to Enhance Software Comprehension Activities

In spite of all views available in Modern Integrated Development Environments (IDE), programmers still struggle to obtain all the information they need from the source code. Software visualization tools have been proposed to solve this problem. However, most of them focus on a single visual metaphor that represents the software from a specific perspective and therefore addresses a specific software comprehension issue. Real problems frequently require looking at the software from many different perspectives to address a certain maintenance task. These perspectives cannot be fully provided by only one view. It is thus desirable that an IDE provides several resources to explore the software and to configure them to the task at hand. This paper describes steps followed to design an extensible multi-perspective Eclipse plug-in for static software visualization. It offers an initial set of three perspectives and their respective views that are intended to provide a fairly broad set of software visualization resources to the IDE user.
CALL FOR PAPERS Integrative and Translational Physiology: Integrative Aspects of Energy Homeostasis and Metabolic Diseases Involvement of the extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 signaling pathway in amylin’s eating inhibitory effect

Potes CS, Boyle CN, Wookey PJ, Riediger T, Lutz TA. Involvement of the extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 signaling pathway in amylin’s eating inhibitory effect. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 302: R340–R351, 2012. First published November 30, 2011; doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00380. 2011. —Peripheral amylin inhibits eating via the area postrema (AP). Because amylin activates the extracellular-signal regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK) pathway in some tissues, and because ERK1/2 phosphorylation (pERK) leads to acute neuronal responses, we postulated that it may be involved in amylin’s eating inhibitory effect. Amylin-induced ERK phosphorylation (pERK) was investigated by immunohistochemistry in brain sections containing the AP. pERK-positive AP neurons were double-stained for the calcitonin 1a/b receptor, which is part of the functional amylin-receptor. AP sections were also phenotyped using dopamine-hydroxylase (DBH) as a marker of noradrenergic neurons. The effect of fourth ventricular administration of the ERK cascade blocker U0126 on amylin’s eating inhibitory action was tested in feeding trials. The number of pERK-positive neurons in the AP was highest 10–15 min after amylin treatment; the effect appeared to be dosedependent (5–20 g/kg amylin). A portion of pERK-positive neurons in the AP carried the amylin-receptor and 22% of the pERK-positive neurons were noradrenergic. Pretreatment of rats with U0126 decreased the number of pERK-positive neurons in the AP after amylin injection. U0126 also attenuated the ability of amylin to reduce eating, at least when the animals had been fasted 24 h prior to the feeding trial. Overall, our results suggest that amylin directly stimulates pERK in AP neurons in a timeand dose-dependent manner. Part of the AP neurons displaying pERK were noradrenergic. At least under fasting conditions, pERK was shown to be a necessary part in the signaling cascade mediating amylin’s anorectic effect.