Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Supervised Feature Discretization with a Dynamic Bit-allocation Strategy

The use of feature discretization (FD) is useful in several machine learning and pattern recognition tasks. By attaining adequate and compact data representations, FD may improve the performance of many methods. It is often the case that learning with discrete data representations yields both lower training time and better accuracy, as compared to the use of the original features. Moreover, FD may also allow for a better human understanding/interpretation of the data. However, many FD techniques are sub-optimal, in the sense that they do not take into account feature interdependencies, as discretization is carried out. In this paper, we propose a dynamic supervised FD technique, addressing feature interdependencies. Our method selects the discretization cut-points by simultaneously maximizing two criteria: the dependency between the discretized features and the class label; the independence among these features. The method performs an incremental bit allocation scheme, using mutual information (MI) as the dependency/independence measure. Experimental results on low and medium-dimensional datasets show that the proposed method often achieves better accuracy than other well-known supervised FD approaches.
Identification and characterization of bovine herpesvirus type 5 glycoprotein H gene and gene products.

Bovine herpesvirus type 5 (BHV-5) is the causative agent of a fatal meningo-encephalitis in calves and is closely related to BHV-1 which causes infectious bovine rhinotracheitis. The gene encoding BHV-5 glycoprotein gH was sequenced. A high degree of conservation was found between BHV-1 and BHV-5 deduced gH amino acid sequences (86. 4%), which is also observed for all alphaherpesvirus gH sequences. Transcriptional analysis revealed a 3.1 kb mRNA as the specific gH transcript which was detected 2 h post-infection (p.i.). Twelve out of twenty-one MAbs directed against BHV-1 gH immunoprecipitated a 108-110 kDa glycoprotein, which was then designated BHV-5 gH. Synthesis and intracellular processing of BHV- 5 gH was analysed in infected MDBK cells using gH cross-reacting MAbs. Glycoprotein gH was expressed as a beta-gamma protein, detected by radioimmunoprecipitation as early as 3 h p.i. Glycosylation studies indicated that BHV-5 gH contains N-linked carbohydrates which are essential for the recognition of the protein by the MAbs. This suggests that N-linked glycans are involved in protein folding or are targets for the gH cross-reacting MAbs. Plaque- reduction neutralization assays showed that at least one BHV-1 gH antigenic domain is lacking in BHV-5 which may possibly relate to in vivo differences in virus tropism.
Stem cells in reproductive medicine: ready for the patient?

STUDY QUESTION Are there effective and clinically validated stem cell-based therapies for reproductive diseases? SUMMARY ANSWER At the moment, clinically validated stem cell treatments for reproductive diseases and alterations are not available. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY Research in stem cells and regenerative medicine is growing in scope, and its translation to the clinic is heralded by the recent initiation of controlled clinical trials with pluripotent derived cells. Unfortunately, stem cell 'treatments' are currently offered to patients outside of the controlled framework of scientifically sound research and regulated clinical trials. Both physicians and patients in reproductive medicine are often unsure about stem cells therapeutic options. STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION An international working group was assembled to review critically the available scientific literature in both the human species and animal models. PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS This review includes work published in English until December 2014, and available through Pubmed. MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE A few areas of research in stem cell and reproductive medicine were identified: in vitro gamete production, endometrial regeneration, erectile dysfunction amelioration, vaginal reconstruction. The stem cells studied range from pluripotent (embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells) to monopotent stem cells, such as spermatogonial stem cells or mesenchymal stem cells. The vast majority of studies have been carried out in animal models, with data that are preliminary at best. LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION This review was not conducted in a systematic fashion, and reports in publications not indexed in Pubmed were not analyzed. WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS A much broader clinical knowledge will have to be acquired before translation to the clinic of stem cell therapies in reproductive medicine; patients and physicians should be wary of unfounded claims of improvement of existing medical conditions; at the moment, effective stem cell treatment for reproductive diseases and alterations is not available. STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTERESTS None. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER NA.
Arabidopsis SCARs Function Interchangeably to Meet Actin-Related Protein 2/3 Activation Thresholds during Morphogenesis[W]

During polarized growth and tissue morphogenesis, cells must reorganize their cytoplasm and change shape in response to growth signals. Dynamic polymerization of actin filaments is one cellular component of polarized growth, and the actin-related protein 2/3 (ARP2/3) complex is an important actin filament nucleator in plants. ARP2/3 alone is inactive, and the Arabidopsis thaliana WAVE complex translates Rho-family small GTPase signals into an ARP2/3 activation response. The SCAR subunit of the WAVE complex is the primary activator of ARP2/3, and plant and vertebrate SCARs are encoded by a small gene family. However, it is unclear if SCAR isoforms function interchangeably or if they have unique properties that customize WAVE complex functions. We used the Arabidopsis distorted group mutants and an integrated analysis of SCAR gene and protein functions to address this question directly. Genetic results indicate that each of the four SCARs functions in the context of the WAVE-ARP2/3 pathway and together they define the lone mechanism for ARP2/3 activation. Genetic interactions among the scar mutants and transgene complementation studies show that the activators function interchangeably to meet the threshold for ARP2/3 activation in the cell. Interestingly, double, triple, and quadruple mutant analyses indicate that individual SCAR genes vary in their relative importance depending on the cell type, tissue, or organ that is analyzed. Differences among SCARs in mRNA levels and the biochemical efficiency of ARP2/3 activation may explain the functional contributions of individual genes.
An Introduction to Crisp Set QCA, with a Comparison to Binary Logistic Regression

The authors focus on the dichotomous crisp set form of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The authors review basic set theoretic QCA methodology, including truth tables, solution formulas, and coverage and consistency measures and discuss how QCA (a) displays relations between variables, (b) highlights descriptive or complex causal accounts for specific (groups of) cases, and (c) expresses the degree of fit. To help readers determine when QCA’s configurational approach might be appropriate, the authors compare and contrast QCA to mainstream statistical methodologies such as binary logistic regressions done on the same data set.
Generation of Decomposition Hierarchies for Efficient Occlusion Culling of Large Polygonal Models

Efficient handling of large polygonal scenes has always been a challenging task and in recent years, view-frustum and occlusion culling have drawn a lot of attention for accomplishing this goal. The problem of how to efficiently organize such scenes for fast image synthesis is widely neglected, although the answer heavily affects the overall performance. In this paper, we present three adapted algorithms for efficient scene decomposition and compare those with another already available algorithm for decomposing general polygonal models into a hierarchy of sub-models for an occlusion culling application. While the latter is available as a commercial product, the three other approaches introduce new algorithms for scene decomposition which achieve significant better results.
Effect of Shared Competences in Industrial Districts on Knowledge Creation and Absorptive Capacity

The literature has argued that firms based in industrial districts enjoy advantages for creating internal knowledge and absorbing external knowledge as a consequence of to the knowledge flows and spillovers that exist in the district. However, empirical evidence to show how belonging to an industrial district affects the business processes of creation and absorption of knowledge is scarce and, moreover, empirical research has not taken into account the influence of variations in the flows of knowledge circulating in each cluster. This study aims to extend empirical evidence on the effect that the stock of shared competencies in industrial districts has on the business processes of creation and absorption of knowledge, through data from an initial study on 952 firms and 35 industrial districts in Spain. Keywords—Absorptive capacity, industrial district; knowledge creation; organisational learning
Transport of expiratory droplets in an aircraft cabin.

UNLABELLED The droplets exhaled by an index patient with infectious disease such as influenza or tuberculosis may be the carriers of contagious agents. Indoor environments such as the airliner cabins may be susceptible to infection from such airborne contagious agents. The present investigation computed the transport of the droplets exhaled by the index patient seated in the middle of a seven-row, twin-aisle, fully occupied cabin using the CFD simulations. The droplets exhaled were from a single cough, a single breath, and a 15-s talk of the index patient. The expiratory droplets were tracked by using Lagrangian method, and their evaporation was modeled. It was found that the bulk airflow pattern in the cabin played the most important role on the droplet transport. The droplets were contained in the row before, at, and after the index patient within 30 s and dispersed uniformly to all the seven rows in 4 minutes. The total airborne droplet fraction reduced to 48, 32, 20, and 12% after they entered the cabin for 1, 2, 3, and 4 min, respectively, because of the ventilation from the environmental control system. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS It is critical to predict the risk of airborne infection to take appropriate measures to control and mitigate the risk. Most of the studies in past either assume a homogenous distribution of contaminants or use steady-state conditions. The present study instead provides information on the transient movement of the droplets exhaled by an index passenger in an aircraft cabin. These droplets may contain active contagious agents and can be potent enough to cause infection. The findings can be used by medical professionals to estimate the spatial and temporal distribution of risk of infection to various passengers in the cabin.
Development of a Technique for Increasing Efficiency of Speckle Noise from Images

A digital image is a two-dimensional image with a finite set of digital values, called picture elements or pixels. Due to certain factors like physical nature of the system, image acquisition devices etc, noise is introduced in image. Among all the types, speckle noise which is a type of multiplicative noise, is quite tough to remove. Several tools to remove speckled noise from the images have been developed. In order to despeckle the image, various parameters are taken into consideration, which indicate the amount of speckled noise being removed from the image. This paper describes speckle noise, various techniques used in despeckling an image and flaws in image despeckling models which lead to problem formulation.
Rapid Flow Cytometric Method for Measuring Mitochondrial Membrane Potential, Respiratory Burst Activity, and Intracellular Thiols of Human Whole Blood Leukocytes

Identifying key perturbations of redox regulatory mechanisms may help to understand stress-related disease processes. Currently, flow cytometry allows the functional characterisation of redox changes that occur in different cellu- lar compartments: changes in mitochondrial membrane potential, respiratory burst activity, and intracellular thiol levels are measurable in live white blood cells. However, flow cytometric techniques generally require leukocyte fraction isola- tion, followed by re-suspension and counting. The purpose of the study was to develop a rapid cytofluorimetric assay to measure the redox triplet in peripheral leukocytes without preliminary isolation.
Medical Reasoning with Fuzzy and Uncertain Symptoms

An ungelled polymeric reaction product having a number average molecular weight of up to about 3000 and having a polydispersity of within 1.2 to 2.5 is prepared by a process involving the vinyl addition polymerization of a vinyl monomer component. At least 30 percent by weight of the vinyl monomer component is an active hydrogen-containing vinyl monomer, and the polymerization is conducted in the presence of an active hydrogen-containing polymer having a number average molecular weight of less than 3000.
Obstacle avoidance using haptics and a laser rangefinder

In its current form, the white cane has been used by visually impaired people for almost a century. It is one of the most basic yet useful navigation aids, mainly because of its simplicity and intuitive usage. For people who have a motion impairment in addition to a visual one, requiring a wheelchair or a walker, the white cane is impractical, leading to human assistance being a necessity. This paper presents the prototype of a virtual white cane using a laser rangefinder to scan the environment and a haptic interface to present this information to the user. Using the virtual white cane, the user is able to “poke” at obstacles several meters ahead and without physical contact with the obstacle. By using a haptic interface, the interaction is very similar to how a regular white cane is used. This paper also presents the results from an initial field trial conducted with six people with a visual impairment.
A stochastic bandit algorithm for scratch games

Stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithms are used to solve the exploration and exploitation dilemma in sequential optimization problems. The algorithms based on upper condence bounds oer strong theoretical guarantees, they are easy to implement and ecient in practice. We considers a new bandit setting, called \scratch-games", where arm budgets are limited and reward are drawn without replacement. Using Sering inequality, we propose an upper condence bound algorithm adapted to this setting. We show that the bound of expectation to play a suboptimal arm is lower than the one of UCB1 policy. We illustrate this result on both synthetic problems and realistic problems (ad-serving and emailing campaigns optimization).
Abstract—the Study of the Interaction between Humans And

computers has been emerging during the last few years. This interaction will be more powerful if computers are able to perceive and respond to human nonverbal communication such as emotions. In this study, we present the image-based approach to emotion classification through lower facial expression. We employ a set of feature points in the lower face image according to the particular face model used and consider their motion across each emotive expression of images. The vector of displacements of all feature points input to the Adaptive Support Vector Machines (A-SVMs) classifier that classify it into seven basic emotions scheme, namely neutral, angry, disgust, fear, happy, sad and surprise. The system was tested on the Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) dataset of frontal view facial expressions [7]. Our experiments on emotion classification through lower facial expressions demonstrate the robustness of Adaptive SVM classifier and verify the high efficiency of our approach.
On edge states in semi-infinite quantum Hall systems

We consider an electron in two dimensions submitted to a magnetic field and to the potential of impurities. We show that when the electron is confined to a half-space by a planar wall described by a smooth increasing potential, the total Hamiltonian necessarily has a continuous spectrum in some intervals in between the Landau levels provided that both the amplitude and spatial variation of the impurity potential are sufficiently weak. The spatial decay of the impurity potential is not needed. In particular, this proves the occurrence of edge states in semi-infinite quantum Hall systems.
Comparative Analysis of Multipath Routing Techniques and Design of Secure Energy Aware Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network

Due to the constrained communication range and high density of sensor nodes in wireless sensor network, forwarding packets in sensor networks is a important field of research over the past decade. At present, multipath routing approach is widely used in wireless sensor networks to improve network performance through efficient utilization of available network resources. Accordingly, the main aim of the survey is to present the concept of the existing multipath routing approach and summarizing the state-of-the-art multipath routing techniques from the network application point of view and proposing a secure energy efficient multipath routing approach for wireless sensor network
Quasi-Gray Labelling for Grassmannian Constellations

This paper presents two polynomial-complexity techniques for assigning Gray-like binary labels to arbitrary Grassmannian constellations. In the first technique, the constellation of interest, C, is matched directly to an auxiliary constellation that can be readily Gray labelled. The optimal matching in this technique can be obtained efficiently, but its application is limited to cases in which an auxiliary constellation with a geometric structure that resembles that of C can be identified. In the second technique no auxiliary constellation is required and the labels are generated by matching the distance spectrum of C with that of a hypothetical constellation that is assumed to be perfectly Gray labelled. Optimal matching in this case is computationally prohibitive. Instead, an efficient suboptimal matching algorithm is proposed. When compared with several existing schemes, the proposed labellings provide better performance in both uncoded and BICM-based non-coherent MIMO systems with iterative demapping and decoding (IDD). Furthermore, with the proposed labels, the Grassmannian-based BICM-IDD scheme performs better than a training-based counterpart that employs the Golden code and optimal demapping.
The Gaze Tracking System with Natural Head Motion Compensation

In this paper the gaze tracking system based on the adaptively changing threshold value of the gray level, which automatically detects the pupil position in two dimensional data is proposed. The system detects closed eye using normalized accumulative luminosity function. The detection of closed eye allows the confirmation of voluntary selected command in a more natural way. The presented technique allows recalibration without intervention or help of other assistive persons. Natural head motion is evaluated, employing signals, generated by orientation sensor. Within two experiments, the proposed system is tested at different behavior modes in respect of speed and accuracy of the system.
A GPU Algorithm for Comparing Nucleotide Histograms

We designed and implemented an algorithm for conducting bioinformatic sequence comparisons with GPU processing. The input is a set of short “test” sequences and a set of longer “reference” sequences. The algorithm determines where along any of the reference sequences the test sequences may align. We compared run-times of the GPU implementation with a CPU implementation on a large, real dataset and gained a 5.5-6x speedup.
Spatiotemporal Impacts of Climate, Land Cover Change and Direct Human Activities on Runoff Variations in the Wei River Basin, China

Previous studies that quantified variations in runoff have mainly focused on the combined impacts of climate and human activities or climate and land cover change. Few have separated land cover change from human activities, which is critical for effective management of water resources. This study aims to investigate the impact of changing environmental conditions on runoff using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model; we examined three categories: climate, land cover change and direct human activities. The study area was the Wei River Basin, a typical arid to semi-arid basin that was divided into five sub-zones (UZ, MZ, DZ, JZ and BZ). Our results showed the following: (1) the calibrated SWAT model produced satisfactory monthly flow processes over the baseline period from 1978 to 1986; (2) compared to the baseline period, the impact of climatic variations decreased and the impact of direct human activities increased from the 1990s to the 2000s, while the impact of land cover change was generally stable; and (3) climatic variations were the main cause of runoff declines over the entire basin during the 1990s and in the UZ, MZ and JZ areas during the 2000s, while direct human activities were most important in the DZ and BZ areas during the 2000s.
Process/sup NFL/: a language for describing non-functional properties

Nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) are rarely taken in account in software development. There are reasons that help us to understand why these requirements are not explicitly dealt with: their complexity NFRs are usually stated only informally, their high abstraction level, and the rare support of languages, methodologies and tools. In this scenario, we concentrate on defining a language, namely Process/sup NFL/, that expresses NFRs during software development. This language has been designed to consider specific characteristics of NFRs like their correlations and conflicts. In order to illustrate our language, we describe NFRs of software radios and the NFRs performance and security, which are usually present in software requirements specifications.
Analysis of a fast LZ-based entropy estimator for mobility data

Randomness in people's movements might serve to detect behavior anomalies. The concept of entropy can be used for this purpose, but its estimation is computational intensive, particularly when processing long movement histories. Moreover, disclosing such histories to third parties may violate user privacy. With a goal to keep the mobility data in the mobile device itself yet being able to measure randomness, we propose three fast entropy estimators based on Lempel-Ziv (LZ) prediction algorithms. We evaluated them with 95 movement histories of real users tracked during 9 months using GSM-based mobility data. The results show that the entropy tendencies of the approaches proposed in this work and those in the literature are the same as time evolves. Therefore, our proposed approach could potentially detect variations in the mobility patterns of the user with a lower computational cost. This allows to unveil shifts in the users mobility behavior without disclosing their sensible location data.