Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computational Models of Facial Attractiveness Judgments

We designed two computational models to replicate human facial attractiveness ratings. The primary model used partial least squares (PLS) to identify image factors associated with facial attractiveness from facial images and attractiveness ratings of those images. For comparison we also made a model similar to previous models of facial attractiveness, in that it used manually derived measurements between features as inputs, though we took the additional step of dimensionality reduction via principal component analysis (PCA) and weighting of PCA dimensions via a perceptron. Strikingly, both models produced estimates of facial attractiveness that were indistinguishable from human ratings. Because PLS extracts a small number of image factors from the facial images that covary with attractiveness ratings of the images, it is possible to determine the information used by the model. The image factors that the model discovered correspond to two of the main contemporary hypotheses of averageness judgments: facial attractiveness and sexual dimorphism. In contrast, facial symmetry was not important to the model, and an explicit feature-based measurement of symmetry was not correlated with human judgments of facial attractiveness. This provides novel evidence for the importance of averageness and sexual dimorphism, but not symmetry, in human judgments of facial attractiveness.
The Influence of Visual Appearance of User's Avatar on the Manipulation of Objects in Virtual Environments

This paper describes an experiment conducted to study the influence of visual appearance of user's avatar (or 3D cursor) on the manipulation of virtual objects in virtual environments (VE). Participants were asked to pick up a virtual cube and place it at a random location in a VE. We found that one visual property of the avatar (the presence or absence of a directional cue) could influence the way participants picked up the cube in the VE. When using an avatar or a 3D cursor with a strong directional cue (e.g., arrows pointing to the left or right), participants generally picked up the cube by a specific side (e.g., right or left side). When using 3D cursors with no main directional cue, participants more frequently picked up the virtual cube by its front or top
Estimating a Taylor Rule for New Zealand with a Time-Varying Neutral Real Rate

Many critics of the Taylor rule claim that it is inferior to inflation forecast based (IFB) rules because it is not forward-looking, is not aggressive enough, and because of uncertainty surrounding the output gap. Nevertheless, the Taylor rule serves a constructive purpose because it abstracts from the Bank's macroeconomic model, FPS, and its performance is robust across various economic models. The Taylor rule thus provides a useful cross-check to the IFB rule, whose recommendations necessarily rely on a particular model structure, its dynamics and specific judgements over the forecast horizon. Additionally, this paper contends that any interest rate rule or model must account for the fall in the ex-ante real interest rate and the non-stationarity of short-term rates in New Zealand. We show how the neutral real interest rate (NRR) in the Taylor rule drifts downward since the second quarter of 1988, and explain why this presents additional real-time difficulties for the Taylor rule.
Identifying Risk Factors for Severe Childhood Malnutrition by Boosting Additive Quantile Regression

We investigated the risk factors for childhood malnutrition in India based on the 2005/2006 Demographic and Health Survey by applying a novel estimation technique for additive quantile regression. Ordinary linear and generalized linear regression models relate the mean of a response variable to a linear combination of covariate effects, and, as a consequence, focus on average properties of the response. The use of such a regression model for analyzing childhood malnutrition in developing or transition countries implies that the estimated effects describe the average nutritional status. However, it is of even greater interest to analyze quantiles of the response distribution, such as the 5% or 10% quantile, which relate to the risk of extreme malnutrition. Our investigation is based on a semiparametric extension of quantile regression models where different types of nonlinear effects are included in the model equation, leading to additive quantile regression. We addressed the variable selection and model choice problems associated with estimating such an additive quantile regression model using a novel boosting approach. Our proposal allows for data-driven determination of the amount of smoothness required for the nonlinear effects and combines model choice with an automatic variable selection property. In an empirical evaluation, we compared our boosting approach with state-of-the-art methods for additive quantile regression. The results suggest that boosting is an appropriate tool for estimation and variable selection in additive quantile regression models and helps to identify yet unknown risk factors for childhood malnutrition. This article has supplementary material online.
A web-based management system design for wireless sensor network monitoring

In this paper, we formalize the main features of web-based management system for wireless sensor network monitoring. We design our web management framework using MVC (Model-View-Control) architecture, which encourages developers to partition the applications in the design phase. Our system design is scalable, flexible and reusable for wireless sensor network monitoring applications. We implemented and tested our web-based management system with two wireless sensor network applications, which are power monitoring and temperature/humidity monitoring. Based on our framework design, we can extend our web-based management system to support other sensor network applications in the future.
Comparing methods for automatic acquisition of Topic Signatures

The main goal of this work is to compare two methods for building Topic Signatures, which are vectors of weighted words acquired from large corpora. We used two different software tools, ExRetriever and Infomap, for acquiring Topic Signatures from corpus. Using these tools, we retrieve sense examples from large text collections. Both systems construct a query for each word sense using WordNet. The quality of the acquired Topic Signatures is indirectly evaluated on the Word Sense Disambiguation English Lexical Task of Senseval-2. keywords: Topic Signatures, acquisition, Latent Semantic Indexing, Word Sense Disambiguation, Multilingual Central Repository, WordNet.
Key Problems in Conversion from Simplified to Traditional Chinese Characters Topic Models for Translation Quality Estimation for Gisting Purposes

This paper addresses the problem of predicting how adequate a machine translation is for gisting purposes. It focuses on the contribution of lexicalised features based on different types of topic models, as we believe these features are more robust than those used in previous work, which depend on linguistic processors that are often unreliable on automatic translations. Experiments with a number of datasets show promising results: the use of topic models outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin in all datasets annotated for adequacy.
Thermal emission from finite photonic crystals

We present a microscopic theory of thermal emission from truncated photonic crystals and show that spectral emissivity and related quantities can be evaluated via standard bandstructure computations without any approximation. We then analyze the origin of thermal radiation enhancement and suppression inside photonic crystals and demonstrate that the central quantity that determines the thermal radiation characteristics such as intensity and emissive power is the area of the iso-frequency surfaces and not the density of states as is generally assumed. We also identify the physical mechanisms through which interfaces modify the potentially super-Planckian radiation flow inside infinite photonic crystals, such that thermal emission from finite-sized samples is consistent with the fundamental limits set by Planck's law. As an application, we further demonstrate that a judicious choice of a photonic crystal's surface termination facilitates considerable control over both the spectral and angular thermal emission properties. Finally, we outline design principles that allow the maximization of the radiation flux, including effects associated with the isotropy of the effective Brillouin zone, photonic band gap size and flatness of the band structure in the spectral range of interest.
Privacy Preserving Data Mining Using Secure Multiparty Computation

We provide here an overview of the new and rapidly emerging research area of privacy preserving data mining. We also propose a classification hierarchy that sets the basis for analyzing the work which has been performed in this context. A detailed review of the work accomplished in this area is also given, along with the coordinates of each work to the classification hierarchy. This paper include secure multiparty computation problem also. By studying and analyzing privacy preserving data mining methods, the present problems and directions for future research are discussed.
Evaluating Control Schemes for the Third Arm of an Avatar

Recent research on immersive virtual environments has shown that users can not only inhabit and identify with novel avatars with novel body extensions, but also learn to control novel appendages in ways beneficial to the task at hand. But how different control schemas might affect task performance and body ownership with novel avatar appendages has yet to be explored. In this article, we discuss the design of control schemas based on the theory and practice of 3D interactions applied to novel avatar bodies. Using a within-subjects design, we compare the effects of controlling a third arm with three different control schemas (bimanual, unimanual, and head-control) on task performance, simulator sickness, presence, and user preference. Both the unimanual and the head-control were significantly faster, elicited significantly higher body ownership, and were preferred over the bimanual control schema. Participants felt that the bimanual control was significantly more difficult than the unimanual control, and elicited less appendage agency than the head-control. There were no differences in reported simulator sickness. We discuss the implications of these results for interface design.
Characterization of Nucleotide Misincorporation Patterns in the Iceman's Mitochondrial DNA

Background The degradation of DNA represents one of the main issues in the genetic analysis of archeological specimens. In the recent years, a particular kind of post-mortem DNA modification giving rise to nucleotide misincorporation (“miscoding lesions”) has been the object of extensive investigations. Methodology/Principal Findings To improve our knowledge regarding the nature and incidence of ancient DNA nucleotide misincorporations, we have utilized 6,859 (629,975 bp) mitochondrial (mt) DNA sequences obtained from the 5,350–5,100-years-old, freeze-desiccated human mummy popularly known as the Tyrolean Iceman or Ötzi. To generate the sequences, we have applied a mixed PCR/pyrosequencing procedure allowing one to obtain a particularly high sequence coverage. As a control, we have produced further 8,982 (805,155 bp) mtDNA sequences from a contemporary specimen using the same system and starting from the same template copy number of the ancient sample. From the analysis of the nucleotide misincorporation rate in ancient, modern, and putative contaminant sequences, we observed that the rate of misincorporation is significantly lower in modern and putative contaminant sequence datasets than in ancient sequences. In contrast, type 2 transitions represent the vast majority (85%) of the observed nucleotide misincorporations in ancient sequences. Conclusions/Significance This study provides a further contribution to the knowledge of nucleotide misincorporation patterns in DNA sequences obtained from freeze-preserved archeological specimens. In the Iceman system, ancient sequences can be clearly distinguished from contaminants on the basis of nucleotide misincorporation rates. This observation confirms a previous identification of the ancient mummy sequences made on a purely phylogenetical basis. The present investigation provides further indication that the majority of ancient DNA damage is reflected by type 2 (cytosine→thymine/guanine→adenine) transitions and that type 1 transitions are essentially PCR artifacts.
Serially Concatenated Coded Continuous Phase Modulation for Aeronautical Telemetry

This thesis treats the development of bandwidth-efficient serially concatenated coded (SCC) continuous phase modulation (CPM) techniques for aeronautical telemetry. The concatenated code consists of an inner and an outer code, separated by an interleaver in most configurations, and is decoded using relatively simple near-optimum iterative decoding algorithms. CPM waveforms such as shaped-offset quadrature phase shift keying (SOQPSK) and pulse code modulation/frequency modulation (PCM/FM), which are currently used in military satellite and aeronautical telemetry standards, can be viewed as inner codes due to their recursive nature. For the outer codes, this thesis applies serially concatenated convolutional codes (SCCC), turbo-product codes (TPC) and repeat-accumulate codes (RAC) because of their large coding gains, high code rates, and because their decoding algorithms are readily implemented. High-rate codes are of special interest in aeronautical telemetry applications due to recent reductions in available spectrum and ever-increasing demands on data rates. This thesis evaluates the proposed coding schemes with a large set of numerical simulation results and makes a number of recommendations based on these results.
THE X-Y-Z SCHEME OF IMMUNOCYTE MATURATION

A concentration of 5 mg/ml bovine serum albumin (BSA) prevents the in vitro elicitation of a secondary response in primed rabbit popliteal lymph nodes, if it is left in contact with the node fragments for the first 6 days of culture. No antibody formation can be detected at any time during the culture period in most cases, although occasional fragments are resistant to inhibition. Reducing the exposure time to the first 3 days of culture delays the peak of the antibody response. The inhibition is antigen specific. Reconstruction experiments demonstrate that the inhibition is not due to antigen masking of the antibody. Even shortly after optimal stimulation, the addition of 5 mg/ml BSA to the fragments was not able to prevent a normal antibody response. The implications of these findings are that (a) a high antigen concentration suspends the memory cell in a reversibly paralyzed state, (b) memory cells have a heterogeneous susceptibility to inhibition, (c) once induced, the antibody response cannot be inhibited by antigen overloading, (d) unresponsiveness in a primed animal can be due to either exhaustion of the memory cell population or paralysis of the memory cell.
Automatic Recovery from Disk Failure in Continuous-Media Servers

Continuous-media (CM) servers have been around for some years. Apart from server capacity, another important issue in the deployment of CM servers is reliability. This study investigates rebuild algorithms for automatically rebuilding data stored in a failed disk into a spare disk. Specifically, a block-based rebuild algorithm is studied with the rebuild time and buffer requirement modeled. A buffer-sharing scheme is then proposed to eliminate the additional buffers needed by the rebuild process. To further improve rebuild performance, a track-based rebuild algorithm that rebuilds lost data in tracks is proposed and analyzed. Results show that track-based rebuild, while it substantially outperforms block-based rebuild, requires significantly more buffers (17-135 percent more) even with buffer sharing. To tackle this problem, a novel pipelined rebuild algorithm is proposed to take advantage of the sequential property of track retrievals to pipeline the reading and writing processes. This pipelined rebuild algorithm achieves the same rebuild performance as track-based rebuild, but reduces the extra buffer requirement to insignificant levels (0.7-1.9 percent). Numerical results computed using models of five commercial disk drives demonstrate that automatic rebuild of a failed disk can be done in a reasonable amount of time, even at relatively high server utilization (e.g., less than 1.5 hours at 90 percent utilization).
Domain-enhanced analysis of microarray data using GO annotations

MOTIVATION New biological systems technologies give scientists the ability to measure thousands of bio-molecules including genes, proteins, lipids and metabolites. We use domain knowledge, e.g. the Gene Ontology, to guide analysis of such data. By focusing on domain-aggregated results at, say the molecular function level, increased interpretability is available to biological scientists beyond what is possible if results are presented at the gene level. RESULTS We use a 'top-down' approach to perform domain aggregation by first combining gene expressions before testing for differentially expressed patterns. This is in contrast to the more standard 'bottom-up' approach, where genes are first tested individually then aggregated by domain knowledge. The benefits are greater sensitivity for detecting signals. Our method, domain-enhanced analysis (DEA) is assessed and compared to other methods using simulation studies and analysis of two publicly available leukemia data sets. AVAILABILITY Our DEA method uses functions available in R (http://www.r-project.org/) and SAS (http://www.sas.com/). The two experimental data sets used in our analysis are available in R as Bioconductor packages, 'ALL' and 'golubEsets' (http://www.bioconductor.org/). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Wir im Kiez: Multimodal App for Mutual Help Among Elderly Neighbours

Elderly people often need support in everyday situations -- e.g. common daily life activities like taking care of house and garden, or caring for an animal are often not possible without a larger support circle. However, especially in larger western cities, local social networks may not be very tight, friends may have moved away or died, and the traditional support structures found in so-called multi-generational families do not exist anymore. As a result, the quality of life for elderly people suffers crucially. On the other hand, people from the broader neighborhood would often gladly help and respond quickly. With the project Wir im Kiez we developed and tested a multimodal social network app equipped with a conversational interface that addresses these issues. In the demonstration, we especially focus on the needs and restrictions of seniors, both in their physical and psychological limitations.
Development and evaluation of Polish speech corpus for unit selection speech synthesis systems

This paper presents the results of a set of experiments assessing the perceived quality of the Polish version of the BOSS unit selection synthesis system. The experiments aimed to evaluate the potential improvement of synthesis quality by three factors pertaining to corpus structure and coverage as well as levels of corpus annotation. The three factors affecting synthesis quality were (i) manual vs. automatic corpus annotation, (ii) coverage of CVC triphones in rich intonational patterns, and (iii) coverage of complex consonant clusters. Results indicate that a manual correction of automatic annotations enhances synthesis quality. Increased coverage of CVC sequences and consonant clusters also improved the perceived synthesis quality, but the effect was smaller than anticipated.
A TEST OF THE CONJECTURE THAT G‐MATRICES ARE MORE STABLE THAN B‐MATRICES

The G‐matrix occupies an important position in evolutionary biology both as a summary of the inheritance of quantitative traits and as an ingredient in predicting how those traits will respond to selection and drift. Consequently, the stability of G has an important bearing on the accuracy of predicted evolutionary trajectories. Furthermore, G should evolve in response to stable features of the adaptive landscape and their trajectories through time. Although the stability and evolution of G might be predicted from knowledge of selection in natural populations, most empirical comparisons of G‐matrices have been made in the absence of such a priori predictions. We present a theoretical argument that within‐sex G‐matrices should be more stable than between‐sex B‐matrices because they are more powerfully exposed to multivariate stabilizing selection. We tested this conjecture by comparing estimates of B‐ and within‐sex G‐matrices among three populations of the garter snake Thamnophis elegans. Matrix comparisons using Flury's hierarchical approach revealed that within‐sex G‐matrices had four principal components in common (full CPC), whereas B‐matrices had only a single principal component in common and eigenvalues that were more variable among populations. These results suggest that within‐sex G is more stable than B, as predicted by our theoretical argument.
Assessing the quality of auction Web sites

WebQual is an instrument for assessing the quality of Internet sites from the perspective of the customer. Earlier versions of WebQual focused on information and interaction quality. This paper reports on a new version of WebQual that incorporates three quality dimensions: information quality, interaction quality and Web site design quality. WebQual is applied in the domain of Internet auctions and the results are used to assess the reliability of the instrument for assessing the quality of Web sites. Three auction sites (Amazon, eBay and QXL) are evaluated through an intervention that involves buying and selling at auction. The results of the intervention are analyzed quantitatively to assess the validity of the WebQual instrument and supplemented by qualitative data that is used to consider the relative merits of the three sites evaluated.
Filtering Out Deep Brain Stimulation Artifacts Using a Nonlinear Oscillatory Model

Abstract This letter is devoted to the suppression of spurious signals (artifacts) in records of neural activity during deep brain stimulation. An approach based on nonlinear adaptive model with self-oscillations is proposed. We developed an algorithm of adaptive filtering based on this approach. The proposed algorithm was tested using recordings collected from patients during the stimulation. This was then compared to existing methods and showed the best performance.