Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Augmenting Bag-of-Words: Data-Driven Discovery of Temporal and Structural Information for Activity Recognition

We present data-driven techniques to augment Bag of Words (BoW) models, which allow for more robust modeling and recognition of complex long-term activities, especially when the structure and topology of the activities are not known a priori. Our approach specifically addresses the limitations of standard BoW approaches, which fail to represent the underlying temporal and causal information that is inherent in activity streams. In addition, we also propose the use of randomly sampled regular expressions to discover and encode patterns in activities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in experimental evaluations where we successfully recognize activities and detect anomalies in four complex datasets.
The Gaussian two-way diamond channel

We consider two-way relaying in a Gaussian diamond channel, where two terminal nodes wish to exchange information using two relays. A simple baseline protocol is obtained by time-sharing between two one-way protocols. To improve upon the baseline performance, we propose two compute-and-forward (CF) protocols - Compute-and-forward-Compound multiple access channel (CF-CMAC) and Compute-and-forward-Broadcast (CF-BC). These protocols mix the two flows through the two relays and achieve rates better than the simple time-sharing protocol. We derive an outer bound to the capacity region that is satisfied by any relaying protocol, and observe that the proposed protocols provide rates close to the outer bound in certain channel conditions. Both the CF-CMAC and CF-BC protocols use nested lattice codes in the compute phases. In the CF-CMAC protocol, both relays simultaneously forward to the destinations over a Compound Multiple Access Channel (CMAC). In the simpler CF-BC protocol's forward phase, one relay is selected at a time for Broadcast Channel (BC) transmission depending on the rate-pair to be achieved. We also consider the diamond channel with direct source-destination link and the diamond channel with interfering relays. Outer bounds and achievable rate regions are compared for these two channels as well. Mixing of flows using the CF-CMAC protocol is shown to be good for symmetric two-way rates.
On‐target ultrasonic digestion of proteins

In the present work, we report a novel on‐target protein cleavage method. The method utilizes ultrasonic energy and allows up to 20 samples to be cleaved in 5 min for protein identification and one sample in 30 s for on‐tissue digestion. The standard proteins were spotted on a conductive glass slide in a volume of 0.5 μL followed by 5 min of ultrasonication after trypsin addition. Controls (5 min, 37°C no ultrasonication) were also assayed. After trypsin addition, digestion of the tissues was enhanced by 30 s of ultrasonication. The samples were analyzed and compared to those obtained by using conventional 3 h heating proteolysis. The low sample volume needed for the digestion and reduction in sample‐handling steps and time are the features that make this method appealing to the many laboratories working with high‐throughput sample treatment.
Visualizing Natural Language Descriptions

A natural language interface exploits the conceptual simplicity and naturalness of the language to create a high-level user-friendly communication channel between humans and machines. One of the promising applications of such interfaces is generating visual interpretations of semantic content of a given natural language that can be then visualized either as a static scene or a dynamic animation. This survey discusses requirements and challenges of developing such systems and reports 26 graphical systems that exploit natural language interfaces and addresses both artificial intelligence and visualization aspects. This work serves as a frame of reference to researchers and to enable further advances in the field.
Eating from the Bin: Salmon Heads, Waste and the Markets That Make Them

Recent scholarship in the social sciences has begun to question the cultural contingencies that demarcate waste from ‘stuff worth keeping’ (Watson and Meah, this volume). This scholarship has problematized linear discourses of production, consumption and disposal, and interrogated the relationships between objects, commodities and value but has yet to investigate the ways in which place and place-making are complicit in constituting these relationships. This paper explores where and how the lines between foodstuff and food waste are drawn, as well as the role of place and processes of place-making in contesting and reproducing them. Focusing on salmon heads and salmon, this paper examines not only how food becomes waste, but also on the issue of how waste becomes food. Specifically, we analyse the geographical processes through which salmon heads are valued as foodstuffs in some places but waste in others. We argue further that these valuations extend beyond the place of one market to encompass an assembled geography of markets. Further, we suggest that by tracing out the geographies of salmon heads and salmon – and the markets where each can be found – we can better articulate where as well as how it is that waste can become food. Ultimately, we argue that questions of food and waste are not just questions of materiality, but questions of the ways in which the material intersects relations of place, place-making and geography. Salmon heads, we argue, become a matter of geography.
Towards energy efficient smart phone applications: Energy models for offloading tasks into the cloud

Many people use smart phones on a daily basis, yet, their energy consumption is pretty high and the battery power lasts typically only for a single day. In the scope of the EnAct project, we investigate potential energy savings on smart phones by offloading computationally expensive tasks into the cloud. Obviously, also the wireless communication for uploading tasks requires energy. For that reason, it is crucial to understand the trade-off between energy consumption for wireless communication and local computation in order to assert that the overall power consumption is decreased. In this paper, we investigate the communications part of that trade-off. We conducted an extensive set of measurement experiments using typical smart phones. This is the first step towards the development of accurate energy models allowing to predict the energy required for offloading a given task. Our measurements include WiFi, 2G, and 3G networks as well as a set of two different devices. According to our findings, WiFi consumes by far the least energy per time unit, yet, this advantage seems to be due to its higher throughput and the implied shorter download time and not due to lower power consumption over time.
ALOPECIA AREATA AND AUTOIMMUNITY: A CLINICAL STUDY

Alopecia areata (AA) frequently occur in association with other autoimmune diseases such as thyroid disorders, anemias and other skin disorders with autoimmune etiology. Despite numerous studies related to individual disease associations in alopecia areata, there is paucity of literature regarding comprehensive studies on concomitant cutaneous and systemic diseases. The present study has been designed to determine if there is a significant association between alopecia areata and other autoimmune diseases. This study covers 71 patients with the diagnosis of alopecia areata as the case group and 71 patients with no evidence of alopecia areata as the control group. Among the cutaneous diseases associated with AA, atopic dermatitis (AD) showed maximum frequency with an O/E ratio of 2.5, which indicates that it is two to three times more common in patients with alopecia areata. In our study, thyroid disorders showed the highest frequency with on O/E ratio of 3.2 and a P value of 0.01, which is statistically highly significant. Among the thyroid disorders, hypothyroidism was the most frequent association (14.1%) in our study. Since systemic involvement is not infrequent in patients with alopecia areata, it is imperative to screen these patients for associated disorders, particularly atopy, thyroid diseases, anemias and other autoimmune disorders, especially if alopecia areata is chronic, recurrent and extensive.
Prevalence of Shiga toxin genes and intimin genes in uropathogenic Escherichia coli

Objective: To identify stx1, stx2 and eaeA genes in Escherichia coli (E. coli) strains isolated from urine samples in Shahrekord, Iran. Methods: In this cross study a total of 147 middle urine samples from patients with symptoms of urinary tract infection (UTI), referred to clinical laboratories of Shahrekord were studied. Taken samples were cultured to detect Shigatoxin-producing strains and finally 76 E. coli isolates were identified using the standard biochemical tests as well as the selective and differential media. The multiplex PCR method was used to evaluate the presence of stx1, stx2 and eaeA genes. DNA bacteria extraction was performed by boiling and then PCR was performed in the presence of specific primers. Results: A total of 147 urine samples were collected from patients with suspected UTI, and 76 samples (51.70%) were diagnosed with E. coli. Among 76 studied isolations of E. coli, 3 (3.94%) had a positive reaction to lactose and negative reaction to sorbitol. In the female gender, stx1 gene that shown in the samples was related to 30–39 age group. In the other sample related to 20–29 age group, stx1 and eaeA gene were shown. But in male gender stx1 gene was reported in the sample related to 40–49 age group. stx1, stx2 and eaeA genes were not observed together in any samples. Conclusions: Isolation of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli strains has great importance because of the possibility of clinical complications such as hemolytic-uremic syndrome.
Speech Enhancement Employing Variational Noise Model Composition for Robust Speech Recognition in Time-Varying Noisy Environments

This study proposes an effective noise estimation method for robust speech recognition in time-varying noise conditions. The proposed noise estimation scheme employs the Variation Model Composition (VMC) method, where multiple noise models are generated by selectively applying perturbation factors to the mean parameters of a basis noise model. The noise estimate is obtained by using the posterior probability of the multiple environmental models. The proposed noise estimation method is employed for the Spectral Subtraction (SS). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective at increasing speech recognition performance in speech babble noise conditions.
Temporal Trends in Pulse Pressure and Mean Arterial Pressure During the Rise of Pediatric Obesity in US Children

Background Somatic growth in childhood is accompanied by substantial remodeling of the aorta. Obesity is associated with increased aortic stiffness and flow and may interfere with aortic remodeling during growth. Wide pulse pressure (PP) indicates mismatch between aortic impedance and pulsatile flow and increases risk for future systolic hypertension and cardiovascular disease (CVD). We hypothesized that the rise of pediatric obesity would be associated with a temporal trend to higher PP. Methods and Results We analyzed demographic, anthropometric, and blood pressure (BP) data for 8‐ to 17‐year‐old children (N=16 457) from the cross‐sectional National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) for 1976 through 2008. Multivariable adjusted survey regression was used to examine temporal trends in PP and mean arterial pressure (MAP) and the relation to obesity. Across this period, unadjusted PP was higher (0.29 mm Hg/y, 95% CI 0.26 to 0.33 mm Hg/y; P<0.0001), while MAP was lower (−0.24 mm Hg/y, 95% CI −0.27 to −0.20 mm Hg/y; P<0.0001) across examinations. Adjusting for body mass index partially attenuated the temporal trend for PP by 32% (P<0.0001). Obesity amplified the relation between taller height and higher PP (from 0.23 [95% CI 0.19 to 0.28] to 0.27 [95% CI 0.21 to 0.34] mm Hg/cm height in boys and from 0.08 [95% CI 0.04 to 0.13] to 0.22 [95% CI 0.13 to 0.31] mm Hg/cm height in girls; P<0.01 for both). Conclusions PP has increased during the rise of pediatric obesity. Higher PP may indicate mismatch between aortic diameter, wall stiffness, and flow in obese children during a period of rapid somatic growth when the aorta is already under considerable remodeling stress.
Domain Adaptation of CNN Based Acoustic Models Under Limited Resource Settings

Adaptation of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to a new domain (channel, speaker, topic, etc.) remains a significant challenge, as often, only a limited amount of target domain data for adaptation of Acoustic Models (AMs) is available. However, unlike GMMs, to date, there has not been an established, efficient method for adapting current state-of-theart Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based AMs. In this paper, we explore various training algorithms for domain adaptation of CNN based speech recognition systems with limited acoustic training data resources. Our investigations illustrate the following three main contributions. First, introducing a weight decay based regularizer along with the standard cross entropy criteria can significantly improve recognition performances with as little as one hour of adaptation data. Second, the observed gains can be improved further with the state-level Minimum Bayes Risk (sMBR) based sequence training technique. In addition to supervised training with limited amounts of data, we also study the effect of introducing unsupervised data at both the initial cross-entropy and subsequent sequence training stages. Our experiments show that unsupervised data helps with cross-entropy and sequence training criteria. Third, the effect of speaker diversity in the adaptation data is also investigated where our experiments show that although there can be large variance in final performance depending on the speakers selected, regularization is required to obtain significant gains. Overall, we demonstrate that with adaptation of neural network based acoustic models, we can obtain performance improvements of up to 24.8% relative.
The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, And Cultural Theory

Introduction - connections/intersections, Cathy Schwichtenberg. Part 1 Out of bounds - reading race and Madonna's audiences: a sacred monster in her prime - audience construction of Madonna as low-other, Laurie Schulze et al Madonna T/races - music videos through the prism of colour, Thomas K. Nakayama and Lisa N. Penaloza images of race and religion in Madonna's video "Like a Prayer" - prayer and praise, Ronald B. Scott. Part 2 The sapphic insurgent - Madonna and gay culture: embodying subaltern memory - kinesthesia and the problematics of race and gender, Cindy Patton justify our love - Madonna and the politics of queer sex, Lisa Henderson Madonna's postmodern feminism - bringing the margins back to the centre, C. Schwichtenberg. Part 3 Gender trouble - Madonna poses the feminist question: Madonna politics - perversion, repression or subversion? or masks and/as mastery/master-y, E. Ann Kaplan feminist politics and postmodern seductions - Madonna and the struggle for political articulation, Roseann M. Mandzuik seduction, control and the search for authenticity - Madonna's truth or dare, E. Deidre Pribram don't go for second sex, baby! , Melanie Morton. Part 4 The political economy of postmodernism - Madonna as star-commodity: metatextual girl - patriarchy-postmodernism-power-money-Madonna, David Tezlaff "Material Girl" - the effacements of postmodern culture, Susan Bordo the distance between me and you - Madonna and celestial navigation or ("You Can be My LUCKY STAR"), Greg Seigworth.
Genome-wide identification of aquaporin encoding genes in Brassica oleracea and their phylogenetic sequence comparison to Brassica crops and Arabidopsis

Aquaporins (AQPs) are essential channel proteins that regulate plant water homeostasis and the uptake and distribution of uncharged solutes such as metalloids, urea, ammonia, and carbon dioxide. Despite their importance as crop plants, little is known about AQP gene and protein function in cabbage (Brassica oleracea) and other Brassica species. The recent releases of the genome sequences of B. oleracea and Brassica rapa allow comparative genomic studies in these species to investigate the evolution and features of Brassica genes and proteins. In this study, we identified all AQP genes in B. oleracea by a genome-wide survey. In total, 67 genes of four plant AQP subfamilies were identified. Their full-length gene sequences and locations on chromosomes and scaffolds were manually curated. The identification of six additional full-length AQP sequences in the B. rapa genome added to the recently published AQP protein family of this species. A phylogenetic analysis of AQPs of Arabidopsis thaliana, B. oleracea, B. rapa allowed us to follow AQP evolution in closely related species and to systematically classify and (re-) name these isoforms. Thirty-three groups of AQP-orthologous genes were identified between B. oleracea and Arabidopsis and their expression was analyzed in different organs. The two selectivity filters, gene structure and coding sequences were highly conserved within each AQP subfamily while sequence variations in some introns and untranslated regions were frequent. These data suggest a similar substrate selectivity and function of Brassica AQPs compared to Arabidopsis orthologs. The comparative analyses of all AQP subfamilies in three Brassicaceae species give initial insights into AQP evolution in these taxa. Based on the genome-wide AQP identification in B. oleracea and the sequence analysis and reprocessing of Brassica AQP information, our dataset provides a sequence resource for further investigations of the physiological and molecular functions of Brassica crop AQPs.
Effects of Land Use on Threatened Species

Abstract: There is widespread agreement that biodiversity loss must be reduced, yet to alleviate threats to plant and animal species, the forces driving these losses need to be better understood. We searched for explanatory variables for threatened‐species data at the country level through land‐use information instead of previously used socioeconomic and demographic variables. To explain the number of threatened species in one country, we used information on land‐use patterns in all neighboring countries and on the extent of the country's sea border. We carried out multiple regressions of the numbers of threatened species as a function of land‐use patterns, and we tested various specifications of this function, including spatial autocorrelation. Most cross‐border land‐use patterns had a significant influence on the number of threatened species, and land‐use patterns explained the number of threatened species better than less proximate socioeconomic variables. More specifically, our overall results showed a highly adverse influence of plantations and permanent cropland, a weaker negative influence of permanent pasture, and, for the most part, a beneficial influence of nonarable lands and natural forest. Surprisingly, built‐up land also showed a conserving influence on threatened species. The adverse influences extended to distances between about 250 km (plants) and 2000 km (birds and mammals) away from where the species threat was recorded, depending on the species. Our results highlight that legislation affecting biodiversity should look beyond national boundaries.
Changes preceding interictal epileptic EEG abnormalities: Comparison between EEG/fMRI and intracerebral EEG

Purpose: In simultaneous scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) changes occurring before the spike have been sometimes described but could not be explained. To characterize the origin of this prespike BOLD signal change, we looked for electrographic changes in stereo‐EEG (SEEG) possibly preceding the scalp spike in patients that showed early BOLD response in EEG/fMRI.
Heuristics in real user interfaces

It is the conventional wisdom in user interface design that direct manipulation is best and that interfaces should be predictable. This tends to argue against having a system “guess” or use heuristics or other AI approaches. However, an increasing number of today's successful software products do use heuristics in their interfaces. The heuristics are used to help guide the user and to perform tasks that would be too difficult to specify by conventional direct manipulation approaches. We believe that user interface designers will increasingly need to consider using heuristic techniques in their interfaces. This panel discusses a number of today's successful products using heuristics and the important HCI design issues such as feedback.
Parallelization and Characterization of Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis

Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) is one of the most popular statistical techniques for the analysis of two-model and co-occurrence data. It has applications in information retrieval and filtering, nature language processing, machine learning from text, and other related areas. However, PLSA is rarely applied to large datasets due to its high computational complexity.This paper presents an optimized and parallelized implementation of PLSA which is capable of processing datasets with 10000 documents in seconds. Compared to the baseline program, our parallelized program can achieve speedup of more than six on an eight-processor machine. The characterization of the parallel program is also presented. The performance analysis of the parallel program indicates that this program is memory intensive and the limited memory bandwidth is the bottleneck for better speedup.
Homogeneous codes for energy-efficient illumination and imaging

Programmable coding of light between a source and a sensor has led to several important results in computational illumination, imaging and display. Little is known, however, about how to utilize energy most effectively, especially for applications in live imaging. In this paper, we derive a novel framework to maximize energy efficiency by "homogeneous matrix factorization" that respects the physical constraints of many coding mechanisms (DMDs/LCDs, lasers, etc.). We demonstrate energy-efficient imaging using two prototypes based on DMD and laser illumination. For our DMD-based prototype, we use fast local optimization to derive codes that yield brighter images with fewer artifacts in many transport probing tasks. Our second prototype uses a novel combination of a low-power laser projector and a rolling shutter camera. We use this prototype to demonstrate never-seen-before capabilities such as (1) capturing live structured-light video of very bright scenes---even a light bulb that has been turned on; (2) capturing epipolar-only and indirect-only live video with optimal energy efficiency; (3) using a low-power projector to reconstruct 3D objects in challenging conditions such as strong indirect light, strong ambient light, and smoke; and (4) recording live video from a projector's---rather than the camera's---point of view.