Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial Distribution of Taenia solium Porcine Cysticercosis within a Rural Area of Mexico

Cysticercosis is caused by Taenia solium, a parasitic disease that affects humans and rurally bred pigs in developing countries. The cysticercus may localize in the central nervous system of the human, causing neurocysticercosis, the most severe and frequent form of the disease. There appears to be an association between the prevalence of porcine cysticercosis and domestic pigs that wander freely and have access to human feces. In order to assess whether the risk of cysticercosis infection is clustered or widely dispersed in a limited rural area, a spatial analysis of rural porcine cysticercosis was applied to 13 villages of the Sierra de Huautla in Central Mexico. Clustering of cases in specific households would indicate tapeworm carriers in the vicinity, whereas their dispersal would suggest that the ambulatory habits of both humans and pigs contribute to the spread of cysticercosis. A total of 562 pigs were included in this study (August–December 2003). A global positioning system was employed in order to plot the geographic distribution of both cysticercotic pigs and risk factors for infection within the villages. Prevalence of pig tongue cysticercosis varied significantly in sampled villages (p = 0.003), ranging from 0% to 33.3% and averaging 13.3%. Pigs were clustered in households, but no differences in the clustering of cysticercotic and healthy pigs were found. In contrast, the presence of pigs roaming freely and drinking stagnant water correlated significantly with porcine cysticercosis (p = 0.07), as did the absence of latrines (p = 0.0008). High prevalence of porcine cysticercosis proves that transmission is still quite common in rural Mexico. The lack of significant differentiation in the geographical clustering of healthy and cysticercotic pigs weakens the argument that focal factors (e.g., household location of putative tapeworm carriers) play an important role in increasing the risk of cysticercosis transmission in pigs. Instead, it would appear that other wide-ranging biological, physical, and cultural factors determine the geographic spread of the disease. Extensive geographic dispersal of the risk of cysticercosis makes it imperative that control measures be applied indiscriminately to all pigs and humans living in this endemic area.
G2 Beta-spline: An ideal surface representation of multi-slice medical images

This paper focuses on multi-slice image reconstruction for CT images using Beta-spline. In reconstructing multi-slice images especially from living image, issues like continuity and accuracy contours arise. Commonly, high continuity is hard to be achieved because of the accuracy requirement and vice versa. Thus the image reconstruction process is prolonged to fulfill these constraints. This paper used cubic Beta-spline as the fitted surface in the image reconstruction process. Beta-spline is already has G2 continuity which is unaffected by the changes in data points position. Surface fitting using Beta-spline has also simplified the branching surface case with the preserved continuity. This study shows the whole image reconstruction process using cubic Beta-spline, and the data used are CT images of human head, Stanford bunny and human pelvic. The produced images show that Beta-spline has capability to produce necessary images within the required continuity and accuracy.
Audio Surveillance of Roads: A System for Detecting Anomalous Sounds

In the last decades, several systems based on video analysis have been proposed for automatically detecting accidents on roads to ensure a quick intervention of emergency teams. However, in some situations, the visual information is not sufficient or sufficiently reliable, whereas the use of microphones and audio event detectors can significantly improve the overall reliability of surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method for detecting road accidents by analyzing audio streams to identify hazardous situations such as tire skidding and car crashes. Our method is based on a two-layer representation of an audio stream: at a low level, the system extracts a set of features that is able to capture the discriminant properties of the events of interest, and at a high level, a representation based on a bag-of-words approach is then exploited in order to detect both short and sustained events. The deployment architecture for using the system in real environments is discussed, together with an experimental analysis carried out on a data set made publicly available for benchmarking purposes. The obtained results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
IBM Research and Columbia University TRECVID-2013 Multimedia Event Detection (MED), Multimedia Event Recounting (MER), Surveillance Event Detection (SED), and Semantic Indexing (SIN) Systems

For this year’s TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection task [11], our team studied a semantic approach to video retrieval. We constructed a faceted taxonomy of 1313 visual concepts (including attributes and dynamic action concepts) and 85 audio concepts. Event search was performed via keyword search with a human user in-the-loop. Our submitted runs included PreSpecified and Ad-Hoc event collections. For each collection, we submitted 3 exemplar conditions: 0, 10, and 100 exemplars. For each exemplar condition, we also submitted 3 types of semantic modality retrieval results: visual only, audio only, and combined. The current IBM-Columbia MER system exploits nine observations about human cognition, language, and visual perception in order to produce an effective video recounting of an event. It designed and tuned algorithms that both locate a minimal persuasive video segment, and script a minimal verbal collection of concepts, in order to convince an analyst that the MED decision was correct. With little loss of descriptive clarity. the system achieved the highest speed-up ratio amongst the ten teams competing in the NIST MER evaluation. For SED, we seek to explore temporal dependencies between events for enhancing both evaluation tasks, i.e automatic event detection (retrospective) and interactive event detection with human in the loop (interactive). Our retrospective system is based on a joint-segmentation-detection framework integrated with temporal event modeling while the interactive system per∗Columbia University, Dept. of Electrical Engineering †IBM T. J. Watson Research Center ‡Columbia University, Dept. of Computer Science §Supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Department of Interior National Business Center contract number D11PC20070. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. Disclaimer: The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of IARPA, DoI/NBC, or the U.S. Government. forms risk analysis to guide the end user for effective verification. We achieve better results on the retrospective and interactive tasks than last year. For SIN, we submitted 4 full concept detection runs, and 2 concept pair runs. In the first 3 concept detection runs, we changed our data sampling strategy between using balanced bags via majority undersampling for ensemble fusion learning, balanced bags via minority oversampling, and unbalanced bags. For the 4th run we used a rank normalized fusion of the first 3 runs. Concept pair runs consisted of the sum of individual concept classifiers with and without sigmoid normalization of the dataset. 1 Multimedia Event Detection (MED)
ASSOCIATION BETWEEN THE ORGANIZATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS AND WORK INJURIES AMONG HOME HEALTH CARE NURSES

Work-related injuries have an adverse impact on health and safety of the employees, patients, and health care organization. Nurses’ exposure to work injuries is one of the highest rates in home and community care institutions. Nurses working in home health care (HHC) encounter multidimensional risk factors, including the organizational and environmental hazards associated with HHC. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine the relationship between the organization and environmental factors and the work injuries (WIs) as experienced by HHC nurses (HHCNs). A prediction of the significant factors related to work injuries was explored. A self-reported data was obtained from 74 nurses working in nine HHC units in the Makkah Region, KS, using the Safety Home Care Nursing (SHCN) questionnaire. The results showed that the supervisory support (SS) (β = -0.36, p = .009) and the access to a client's home (AC) (β = -0.25, p= 0.05) were negatively affecting the WIs as experience by HHCNs. This implies that the training of Front-line supervisors and HHC providers in safety management and safety communication would improve competence in effective implementation of safety practices. This study suggests to ensure a safe HHC through the execution of an integrative approach involving managers, nurses, and other practitioners, as well as the patients’ and their informal caregivers. Article DOI: https://dx.doi. org/10.20319/lijhls.2018. 41.6581 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.
CoDe — An collaborative detection algorithm for DDoS attacks

Security threats for the network services have been constantly increasing day by day. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is one such kind of security threat which involves multiple systems generating a large amount of traffic towards a target machine and thereby making any service from that target machine or server unavailable to its clients. This threat by nature needs no control over the target system. Traditional methods of detecting DDoS attacks are mostly centralized in nature and highly disadvantageous. To overcome the disadvantages of those schemes, we propose a distributed methodology which involves installing the attack detectors at various parts of the network. Each router in the network will monitor the traffic flowing through it and if any anomaly in the traffic pattern is detected, it will raise an alarm to the nearby routers. The alarm propagates to all the routers through which the attack flows. By this way a tree like construct is made, which will have information about number of alarms raised and the path of the attack flow. If the construct shows any converging pattern then it is declared as DDoS attack.
2-distance 4-colorability of Planar Subcubic Graphs with Girth at Least 22

The trivial lower bound for the 2-distance chromatic number χ2(G) of any graph G with maximum degree ∆ is ∆+1. It is known that χ2 = ∆+1 if the girth g of G is at least 7 and ∆ is large enough. There are graphs with arbitrarily large ∆ and g ≤ 6 having χ2(G) ≥ ∆ + 2. We prove the 2-distance 4-colorability of planar subcubic graphs with g ≥ 22.
Vitamin D deficiency is associated with sudden cardiac death, combined cardiovascular events, and mortality in haemodialysis patients

Aims Dialysis patients experience an excess mortality, predominantly of sudden cardiac death (SCD). Accumulating evidence suggests a role of vitamin D for myocardial and overall health. This study investigated the impact of vitamin D status on cardiovascular outcomes and fatal infections in haemodialysis patients. Methods and results 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] was measured in 1108 diabetic haemodialysis patients who participated in the German Diabetes and Dialysis Study and were followed up for a median of 4 years. By Cox regression analyses, we determined hazard ratios (HR) for pre-specified, adjudicated endpoints according to baseline 25(OH)D levels: SCD (n = 146), myocardial infarction (MI, n = 174), stroke (n = 89), cardiovascular events (CVE, n = 414), death due to heart failure (n = 37), fatal infection (n = 111), and all-cause mortality (n = 545). Patients had a mean age of 66 ± 8 years (54% male) and median 25(OH)D of 39 nmol/L (interquartile range: 28–55). Patients with severe vitamin D deficiency [25(OH)D of≤ 25 nmol/L] had a 3-fold higher risk of SCD compared with those with sufficient 25(OH)D levels >75 nmol/L [HR: 2.99, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.39–6.40]. Furthermore, CVE and all-cause mortality were strongly increased (HR: 1.78, 95% CI: 1.18–2.69, and HR: 1.74, 95% CI: 1.22–2.47, respectively), all persisting in multivariate models. There were borderline non-significant associations with stroke and fatal infection while MI and deaths due to heart failure were not meaningfully affected. Conclusion Severe vitamin D deficiency was strongly associated with SCD, CVE, and mortality, and there were borderline associations with stroke and fatal infection. Whether vitamin D supplementation decreases adverse outcomes requires further evaluation.
Industrial-Strength Model-Based Testing - State of the Art and Current Challenges

As of today, model-based testing (MBT) is considered as leading-edge technology in industry. We sketch the different MBT variants that - according to our experience - are currently applied in practice, with special emphasis on the avionic, railway and automotive domains. The key factors for successful industrial-scale application of MBT are described, both from a scientific and a managerial point of view. With respect to the former view, we describe the techniques for automated test case, test data and test procedure generation for concurrent reactive real-time systems which are considered as the most important enablers for MBT in practice. With respect to the latter view, our experience with introducing MBT approaches in testing teams are sketched. Finally, the most challenging open scientific problems whose solutions are bound to improve the acceptance and effectiveness of MBT in industry are discussed.
Network structure mining: locating and isolating core members in covert terrorist networks

Knowing patterns of relationship in covert (illegal) networks is very useful for law enforcement agencies and intelligence analysts to investigate collaborations among criminals. Previous studies in network analysis have mostly dealt with overt (legal) networks with transparent structures. Unlike conventional data mining that extracts patterns based on individual data objects, network structure mining is especially suitable for mining a large volume of association data to discover hidden structural patterns in criminal networks. Covert networks share some features with conventional (real world) networks, but they are harder to identify because they mostly hide their illicit activities. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, social network analysis (SNA) has increasingly been used to study criminal networks. However, Finding out who is related to whom on a large scale in a covert network is a complex problem. In this paper we will discuss how network structure mining is applied in the domain of terrorist networks using structural (indices) measures or properties from social network analysis (SNA) and web structural mining research and proposed an algorithm for network disruption. Structural properties are determined by the graph structure of the network. These structural properties are used for locating and isolating core members by using importance ranking score and thereby analyzing the effect to remove these members in terrorist networks. The discussion is supported with a case study of Jemma Islamiah (JI) terrorist network.
Combined watermarking for image authentication and protection

A novel combined watermarking scheme for image authentication and protection is proposed in this paper. By utilizing the publicly available wavelet-based just noticeable distortion (JND) values, the hidden watermark is designed to carry the host image's information such that blind watermark detection becomes possible. The watermarks are embedded using the previously proposed cocktail watermarking technique and are extracted by a quantization process. According to the polarities and the differences of the hidden and the extracted watermarks, the fragility and robustness of a watermark can be measured, respectively, such that both content authentication and copyright protection are achieved simultaneously.
Recognize , Categorize , and Retrieve

A successful text categorization experiment divides a textual collection into pre-defined classes. A true representative for each class is generally obtained during training of the categorizer. In this paper, we report on our experiments on training and categorization of optically recognized documents. In particular, we will address the issues regarding the effects OCR errors may have on training, dimensionality reduction, and categorization. We further report on ways that categorization may help error correction and retrieval effectiveness.
Resculptors: layered curve-based deformers

© DreamWorks Animation, L.L. C. 2014. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in SIGGRAPH 2014 Talks, https://doi.org/10.1145/2614106.2614152. accumulated curvatures are measured geodesically, and are attenuated using Gaussian functions, producing a deformation falloff that feels elastic, coherent, and ”fleshy”.
Analysis of rare variants in the complement component 2 (C2) and factor B (BF) genes refine association for age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

PURPOSE Several single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the C2 and BF genes have been associated with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in Caucasian populations from the United States. The study was conducted to evaluate whether these SNPs are also associated with AMD in persons of Anglo-Celtic ethnicity in an Australian population. METHODS Included in the study were 565 persons with AMD and 204 ethnically matched control subjects. All participants completed a standard health questionnaire, were given a fundus examination, and provided a blood sample for DNA extraction. Alleles were determined by a matrix-assisted desorption ionization-time of flight (MALDI-TOF)-based approach followed by statistical analysis. RESULTS The C2 and BF genes indicated significant association with AMD of only two SNPs; rs547154 (IVS10) in the C2 gene (P=9.1 x 10(-5)) and rs641153 (R32Q) in the BF gene (P=7.0 x 10(-5)). No association with AMD was found for SNP rs9332739 (E318D) in the C2 gene or for rs4151667 (L9H), rs1048709 (R150R), rs4151659 (K565E), or rs2072633 (IVS17) in the BF gene. A protective haplotype of variants IVS10 and R32Q was associated with AMD (OR 0.29, 95% CI 0.20-0.42). CONCLUSIONS In this study, the association of the IVS10 and R32Q variants in the C2 and BF genes in AMD was replicated. Haplotype analysis indicated association of these variants with AMD in an Australian population. Both IVS10 and R32Q variants were in strong linkage disequilibrium with each other (r(2)=0.96). Although the E318D and L9H variants have shown association with AMD in previous studies, the findings were not in agreement. This demonstrates a refined pattern of association of these rare variants with AMD.
Redox Dynamics and Oxygen Reduction Rates of Inﬁltrating Urban Stormwater beneath Low Impact Development (LID)

Low impact development (LID) best management practices (BMPs) collect, inﬁltrate, and treat stormwater runoff, and increase recharge to aquifers. Understanding the controls on reduction/oxidation (redox) conditions within LID BMPs is important for groundwater management because outﬂow from some LID BMPs can recharge aquifers and affect groundwater quality. Here we evaluate redox conditions of urban stormwater runoff in a LID inﬁltration trench in San Francisco, California, and quantify the relation between water saturation (%) and temperature (◦C) and resulting dissolved oxygen (DO) concentrations, redox dynamics, and O2 reduction rates. The DO ﬂuctuations ha ve an inverse response to the duration of saturation of the trench. Anoxic (<0.5 mg/L) conditions often occurred within hours of stormwater events and persisted from a few hours to two days, which indicate that microbial respiration can be a limiting factor for DO. Temperature of stormwater runoff was not a statistically signiﬁcant control on DO. The estimated O2 reduction rate is 0.003mg·L-1·min-1, which is two to ﬁve orders of magnitude higher than in groundwater from previous studies. Higher rates of O2 reduction are a function of the more toxic and organic-rich stormwater runoff that drives faster microbial O2 reduction. Our ﬁndings have important implications for the design of inﬁltration trenches and other LID BMPs to achieve desired redox conditions for inﬁltrating stormwater toward minimizing groundwater contamination.
Large scale experiments on correction of confused words

The paper describes a new approach to automatically learn contextual knowledge for spelling and grammar correction; we aim particularly to deal with cases where the words are all in the dictionary and so it is not obvious that there is an error. Traditional approaches are dictionary based, or use elementary tagging or partial parsing of the sentence to obtain context knowledge. Our approach uses affix information and only the most frequent words to reduce the complexity in terms of training time and running time for context-sensitive spelling correction. We build large scale confused word sets based on keyboard adjacency and apply our new approach to learn the contextual knowledge to detect and correct them. We explore the performance of auto-correction under conditions where significance and probability are set by the user.
Compact Models for Signal Transient and Crosstalk Noise of Coupled RLC Interconnect Lines with Ramp Inputs

Analytical compact form models for the signal transient and crosstalk noise of two-coupled RLC lines are developed. Capacitive and inductive coupling effects are investigated and formulated in terms with eigen modes (i.e., even mode and odd mode). The signal transients and crosstalk noise expressions of two coupled lines are derived by using a wave-form approximation technique for the modal signals. It is shown that the models have excellent agreement with SPICE simulation.
Small, dense HDL 3 particles attenuate apoptosis in endothelial cells: pivotal role of apolipoprotein A-I

Plasma high‐density lipoproteins (HDLs) protect endothelial cells against apoptosis induced by oxidized low‐density lipoprotein (oxLDL). The specific component(s) of HDLs implicated in such cytoprotection remain(s) to be identified. Human microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC‐1) were incubated with mildly oxLDL in the presence or absence of each of five physicochemically distinct HDL subpopulations fractionated from normolipidemic human plasma (n= 7) by isopycnic density gradient ultracentrifugation. All HDL subfractions protected HMEC‐1 against oxLDL‐induced primary apoptosis as revealed by nucleic acid staining, annexin V binding, quantitative DNA fragmentation, inhibition of caspase‐3 activity and reduction of cytoplasmic release of cytochrome c and apoptosis‐inducing factor. Small, dense HDL 3c displayed twofold superior intrinsic cytoprotective activity (as determined by mitochondrial dehydrogenase activity) relative to large, light HDL 2b on a per particle basis (P < 0.05). Equally, all HDL subfractions attenuated intracellular generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS); such anti‐oxidative activity diminished from HDL 3c to HDL 2b. The HDL protein moiety, in which apolipoprotein A‐I (apoA‐I) predominated, accounted for ∼70% of HDL anti‐apoptotic activity. Furthermore, HDL reconstituted with apoA‐I, cholesterol and phospholipid potently protected HMEC‐1 from apoptosis. By contrast, modification of the content of sphingosine‐1‐phosphate in HDL did not significantly alter cytoprotection. We conclude that small, dense, lipid‐poor HDL 3 potently protects endothelial cells from primary apoptosis and intracellular ROS generation induced by mildly oxLDL, and that apoA‐I is pivotal to such protection.