Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Human Gut Chip “HuGChip”, an Explorative Phylogenetic Microarray for Determining Gut Microbiome Diversity at Family Level

Evaluating the composition of the human gut microbiota greatly facilitates studies on its role in human pathophysiology, and is heavily reliant on culture-independent molecular methods. A microarray designated the Human Gut Chip (HuGChip) was developed to analyze and compare human gut microbiota samples. The PhylArray software was used to design specific and sensitive probes. The DNA chip was composed of 4,441 probes (2,442 specific and 1,919 explorative probes) targeting 66 bacterial families. A mock community composed of 16S rRNA gene sequences from intestinal species was used to define the threshold criteria to be used to analyze complex samples. This was then experimentally verified with three human faecal samples and results were compared (i) with pyrosequencing of the V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene, (ii) metagenomic data, and (iii) qPCR analysis of three phyla. When compared at both the phylum and the family level, high Pearson's correlation coefficients were obtained between data from all methods. The HuGChip development and validation showed that it is not only able to assess the known human gut microbiota but could also detect unknown species with the explorative probes to reveal the large number of bacterial sequences not yet described in the human gut microbiota, overcoming the main inconvenience encountered when developing microarrays.
Universality of Wolfram's 2, 3 Turing Machine

(This is known as “system 0” in the proof below.) The proof I intend to give demonstrates that this Turing machine can emulate any twocolor cyclic tag system for an infinite number of steps; in order to do this, I first show that this Turing machine can emulate any two-color cyclic tag system for an arbitrary finite number of steps (with the number of steps encoded in the initial condition), and then use this result as a basis for proving the more general result that this Turing machine can carry on such an emulation indefinitely. One main problem is to ensure that it is the system itself that is doing the calculation, and not the case that the universal part of the calculation is complete before the initial condition is even constructed. The construction I will give to show that system 0 can emulate any two-color cyclic tag system for an arbitrary number of steps is quite complex, and it is not immediately obvious that it does not itself do the calculation rather than leaving system 0 to do the calculation. However, the proofs below leave many options open in the initial conditions (there is more than one initial condition that emulates a cyclic tag system), and after the rest of the proof I show that at least one of these initial conditions can be constructed by a process that is clearly not universal itself.
Computer Vision Segmentation of Brain Structures from MRI Based on Deformable Contour Models

Based on a discrete dynamic contour model, a method for segmentation of brain structures like thalamus from magnetic resonance images (MRI) is developed. A new method for solving common problems in extracting the discontinuous boundary of a structure from a low contrast image is presented. External and internal forces deform the dynamic contour model. Internal forces are obtained from local geometry of the contour, which consist of vertices and edges, connecting adjacent vertices. The image data and desired image features such as image energy are utilized to obtain external forces. The problem of low contrast image data and unclear edges in the image energy is overcome by a new algorithm that uses several methods like thresholding, unsupervised clustering methods such as fuzzy C-means (FCM), edge-finding filters like Prewitt, and morphological operations. We also present a method for generating an initial contour for the model from the image data automatically. Evaluation and validation of the methods are conducted by comparing automatic and radiologist segmentation results, which confirms good performance of the new method.
Evaluating the Performance of Resource Overcommitted Virtualized Systems

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and benefits of resource overcommitment for compute intensive HPC applications in virtualized systems. We focus on overcommitting the CPU resource of a virtualized system for shared memory multi-threaded applications. We first study the behavior of HPC applications in a dedicated configuration where the resources are not overcommitted and not shared with other applications. Second, we evaluate the performance of the applications in a resource overcommitted configuration where the resources are overcommitted and shared with other applications. At last, we discuss issues toward modeling the performance of a resource overcommitted system. The performance modeling will help us utilize the system efficiently.
A speedy pixon image reconstruction algorithm

A speedy pixon algorithm for image reconstruction is described. Two applications of the method to simulated astronomical data sets are also reported. In one case, galaxy clusters are extracted from multiwavelength microwave sky maps using the spectral dependence of the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect to distinguish them from the microwave background fluctuations and the instrumental noise. The second example involves the recovery of a sharply peaked emission profile, such as might be produced by a galaxy cluster observed in X-rays. These simulations show the ability of the technique both to detect sources in low signal-to-noise ratio data and to deconvolve a telescope beam in order to recover the internal structure of a source.
Activity Level Estimator on a Commercial Mobile Phone: A Feasibility Study

On a growing scale, we use mobile phones for diverse activities in our daily life, for example for entertainment, information or education purposes. In our present research, we assess the feasibility of using a mobile phone to unobtrusively track its user physical activity and the resulting energy expenditure; without of use of any dedicated external device. Activity Level Estimator (ALE) is an application developed for Android mobile phone which uses the built-in sensors. ALE analyzes and calculates how much time the user spends per activity level and gives estimation of his or her energy expenditure. ALE is designed to be operational as an unobtrusive, continuous real-time background application for a long-terms trend and behavioral studies in elderly care. ALE was tested with a set of users wearing the mobile phone in their pocket. Via an extensive user tests, we assessed the accuracy of ALE against a dedicated BodyMedia Sensewear device. We conclude that ALE is accurate on average 86% for different levels of walking, and it underestimates user’s energy expenditure of 23% during a period of 24 hours.
Optimal Reduction of Rule Length in Linear Context-Free Rewriting Systems

Linear Context-free Rewriting Systems (LCFRS) is an expressive grammar formalism with applications in syntax-based machine translation. The parsing complexity of an LCFRS is exponential in both the rank of a production, defined as the number of nonterminals on its right-hand side, and a measure for the discontinuity of a phrase, called fan-out. In this paper, we present an algorithm that transforms an LCFRS into a strongly equivalent form in which all productions have rank at most 2, and has minimal fan-out. Our results generalize previous work on Synchronous Context-Free Grammar, and are particularly relevant for machine translation from or to languages that require syntactic analyses with discontinuous constituents.
The Sheffield Learning Disabilities Outcome Measure: a factor analysis

BACKGROUND The Sheffield Learning Disabilities Outcome Measure (SLDOM) is routinely used across clinical services in the UK, despite not yet showing evidence of psychometric reliability or validity. However, it is reported that the SLDOM demonstrates good face validity, and represents a valuable tool for providing useful information around the parent-child relationship in the context of having a child with a Learning Disability (LD). METHOD This study involved 263 parents or carers of a child with LD who completed the SLDOM. Data from this study were subjected to factor analysis. RESULTS These findings suggest that the SLDOM could be viewed as a tool that measures two concepts: (1) internal factors central to the parent/carer in relation to having a child with LD and (2) external factors in terms of the context and environment surrounding a child with LD. To our knowledge, this study is one of the first to investigate the psychometric properties of the SLDOM. CONCLUSIONS This has implications in terms of building evidence to support the clinical and research use of this tool; to provide evidence-based clinical services, and overall, to gain a better understanding of patients and their families, which will allow for optimum service provision.
TICI and Age: What's the Score?

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Previous studies have suggested that advanced age predicts worse outcome following mechanical thrombectomy. We assessed outcomes from 2 recent large prospective studies to determine the association among TICI, age, and outcome. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data from the Solitaire FR Thrombectomy for Acute Revascularization (STAR) trial, an international multicenter prospective single-arm thrombectomy study and the Solitaire arm of the Solitaire FR With the Intention For Thrombectomy (SWIFT) trial were pooled. TICI was determined by core laboratory review. Good outcome was defined as an mRS score of 0–2 at 90 days. We analyzed the association among clinical outcome, successful-versus-unsuccessful reperfusion (TICI 2b–3 versus TICI 0–2a), and age (dichotomized across the median). RESULTS: Two hundred sixty-nine of 291 patients treated with Solitaire in the STAR and SWIFT data bases for whom TICI and 90-day outcome data were available were included. The median age was 70 years (interquartile range, 60–76 years) with an age range of 25–88 years. The mean age of patients 70 years of age or younger was 59 years, and it was 77 years for patients older than 70 years. There was no significant difference between baseline NIHSS scores or procedure time metrics. Hemorrhage and device-related complications were more common in the younger age group but did not reach statistical significance. In absolute terms, the rate of good outcome was higher in the younger population (64% versus 44%, P < .001). However, the magnitude of benefit from successful reperfusion was higher in the 70 years of age and older group (OR, 4.82; 95% CI, 1.32–17.63 versus OR 7.32; 95% CI, 1.73–30.99). CONCLUSIONS: Successful reperfusion is the strongest predictor of good outcome following mechanical thrombectomy, and the magnitude of benefit is highest in the patient population older than 70 years of age.
Side-channels and eVoting machine security: Identifying vulnerabilities and defining requirements

Election systems making use of eVoting machines are becoming more prevalent. However, security issues do exist within current products and proposed systems. One of these issues is the occurrence of implementation-specific information leakage, otherwise known as side-channel leakage. These have serious implications for voter secrecy. An attack based on electromagnetic leakage from Nedap voting machines has demonstrated that this type of leakage is a relevant issue within eVoting. Therefore, in this paper we present an analysis showing how common components of eVoting machines may be vulnerable to side-channel attacks. As side-channel leakage is also not sufficiently addressed in the many available requirement documents for eVoting systems, we also define requirements for side-channels within the scope of eVoting machine security. Our proposal involves the application of the Common Criteria method. These requirements can be integrated into existing or future Protection Profiles and Security Targets for eVoting systems.
Nonlinear unsharp masking methods for image contrast enhancement

In the unsharp masking approach for image enhancement, a fraction of the highpass filtered version of the image is added to the original image to form the enhanced version. The method is simple, but it suffers from two serious drawbacks. First, it enhances the contrast in the darker areas perceptually much more strongly than that in the lighter areas. Second, it enhances the noise and/or digitization effects, particularly in the darker regions, resulting in visually less pleasing enhanced images. In general, noise can be suppressed with lowpass filters, which are associated with the blurring of the edges. On the other hand, contrast can be enhanced with highpass filters, which are associated with noise amplification. A reasonable solution, therefore, is to use suitable nonlinear filters which combine the features of both highpass and lowpass filters. This paper outlines several new methods of unsharp masking based on the use of such nonlinear filters. Computer simulations have verified the superior results obtained using these filters. In addition, a new measure of contrast enhancement is introduced which quantitatively supports the improvement obtained using the proposed methods.
I Saw You in the News: Mediated and Direct Intergroup Contact Improve Outgroup Attitudes

This study extends the boundary conditions of mediated contact theory by (a) differentiating between mediated contact quantity and quality, (b) examining whether mediated contact exerts effects above and beyond direct contact, and (c) offering causal and generalizable evidence on the effects of exposure to numerous individual outgroup members in news media. We match individual-level data from a representative panel survey with data on the amount of coverage about members from two outgroups and with the results from validated sentiment analysis. Mediated contact, and especially its quantity, improved outgroup attitudes independently of direct contact. These findings emerged for both outgroups and across two outcome measures.
An FPGA-based Real-time Background Identification Circuit for 1080p Video

The paper proposes an improved hardware implementation of the OpenCV version of the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) algorithm. Truncated binary multipliers and a ROM compression technique are employed to reduce hardware complexity while increasing circuit processing capability. The OpenCV GMM algorithm is adapted to allow the FPGA implementation while providing a minimal impact on the quality of the processed videos. When implemented on Virtex5 FPGA the proposed circuit is able to process High Definition (HD) video sequences at 30 frame per second (fps) improving the performances with respect to previously proposed implementations (-7.6% in area and +12.6% in speed).
Do authoritarians vote for authoritarians? Evidence from Latin America

During the 2016 presidential election campaign in the United States, scholars argued that authoritarian visions of the family are associated with support for Donald Trump, a candidate also noted to exhibit authoritarian or illiberal tendencies. Though it is plausible that “authoritarian” citizens (defined by parenting attitudes) vote for “authoritarian” candidates (defined by disrespect for democratic institutions), past research provides relatively little guide regarding this relationship. One reason is that few US candidates announce overtly authoritarian views. Latin America, by contrast, has had many such candidates. We take advantage of this variation using the 2012 AmericasBarometer, which applied a battery of authoritarian parenting attitudes. We first describe mass authoritarianism across Latin America, showing it is associated with many social attitudes. We then examine authoritarians’ voting behavior, distinguishing between support for “mano dura” (“strong arm”) candidates, who are usually rightists, and for candidates threatening violations of general civil liberties, who are often leftists in Latin America. We find that authoritarians tend to vote for right-wing authoritarian candidates, while authoritarianism boosts support for candidates threatening civil liberty violations only among citizens identifying on the ideological right. Education is the most consistent determinant reducing support for both leftist and rightist authoritarian candidates.
Efficient 3D terrain mapping based on normal distribution transform grid

Researches about semantic terrain mapping using data acquired from range sensors have been widely studied. And this semantic map can be used for navigation, exploration and path planning. Among the various information `traversability' is important before everything. Because only if traversability information is provided in advance, various high-level robot's tasks are possible. The proposed efficient 3d terrain mapping method use NDT grid. And by using NDT grid's covariance matrix, we define traversability using three different factors `slope', `flatness', `reliability'. Experimental results show by our proposed method traversability can be analyzed efficiently, and accurately.
Stem boundary and stress effects on syllabification in Spanish

Spanish stress shows a uniform pattern in verbal forms. For stressed roots in particular, the unmarked position is the last vowel. Nevertheless, first conjugation roots ending in a high vowel display two opposite behaviours: while one group follows the unmarked pattern (e.g. envío ‘I send’), the other group keeps the high vowel unstressed, thus always becoming a glide (e.g. cambio ‘I change’). While nominals related to the latter group exhibit the same stress position as the first conjugation (e.g. cambio [kámbjo] ‘change’, cambio [kámbjo] ‘I change’), this is not true of nominals related to the former group, since we find some cases with stress shift (e.g. amplio [ámpljo] ‘large’, amplío [amplío] ‘I enlarge’) and other cases without this change (e.g. envío [embío] ‘shipment’, envío [embío] ‘I send’). The goal of this paper is to account for these facts (including the lack of pairs such as *amplío [amplío] ‘large’ and *amplio [ámpljo] ‘I enlarge’) and analyze the prosodic and morphological factors determining glide formation.
The Impact of Ethical Leadership on Employee Attitudes in Manufacturing Companies

This paper examines the impact of ethical leadership on employee attitudes. This study proposes that ethical leadership has an effect on overall job satisfaction. It also suggests that ethical leadership and overall job satisfaction influence normative and continuance commitment. The relationships between variables were evaluated using factor analysis, reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations, and regression in this study. The results based on a sample of 158 employees from one public and nine private manufacturing companies in Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina support the hypotheses. This study shows that ethical leadership has an effect on overall job satisfaction, normative, and continuance commitment. Overall job satisfaction affects employees’ normative commitment but it does not have any effect on continuance commitment.
Pharmacokinetics and antitumor activity of a bivalent disulfide-stabilized Fv immunotoxin with improved antigen binding to erbB2.

We have generated a stable bivalent Fv molecule [(dsFv)2] of the anti-erbB2 monoclonal antibody e23 in which the V(H) and V(L) domains of the Fv are linked to each other by a disulfide bond and the two Fvs are connected by a 15-amino acid linker (T. K. Bera et al., J. Mol. Biol., 281: 475-483, 1998). The e23 (dsFv)2 molecule is linked to a truncated form of Pseudomonas exotoxin (PE38) to generate a bivalent disulfide-stabilized immunotoxin e23 (dsFv)2-PE38. Compared to the monovalent immunotoxin, the (dsFv)2 immunotoxin showed greatly increased cytotoxicity to four cancer cell lines expressing low levels of erbB2 but not to four other cell lines with high erbB2 expression. e23 (dsFv)2-PE38 was administered i.v. to mice, and its half-life was determined. The t(1/2)alpha and t(1/2)beta were 20 and 325 min, respectively, whereas the corresponding values for the monovalent dsFv immunotoxin were shorter, 6 and 52 min. The antitumor activities of the monovalent and bivalent immunotoxin were compared using mice bearing A431 tumors. Despite the fact that e23 (dsFv)2-PE38 was 13-fold more active than e23 dsFv-PE38 on A431 cells in cell culture, its antitumor activity in mice was <2-fold that of the monovalent immunotoxin. These data show that a large increase in avidity does not always lead to an increase in cytotoxic activity. Furthermore, in one of the cases in which cytotoxic activity in vitro was greatly enhanced, there was only a small increase in antitumor activity.
Evaluation of white matter integrity, cortical thickness and volume of subcortical structures in patients with typical absence epilepsy

Poster: "ECR 2011 / C-2261 / Evaluation of white matter integrity, cortical thickness and volume of subcortical structures in patients with typical absence epilepsy" by: "T. M. Doring1, T. T. Almodovar Kubo1, N. Ventura1, P. A. N. Daltro1, E. L. Gasparetto2; 1Rio de Janeiro/BR, 2RIO DE JANEIRO, RI/BR"
Estimation of bus travel time incorporating dwell time for APTS applications

Congestion has become a serious problem in the context of urban transport around the world. As more and more vehicles are being introduced into the urban streets every year, the mode share of the public transportation sector is declining at an alarming rate. Particularly in developing countries, more people have moved to personalized mode since it is becoming easily affordable and the quality of service offered by the public transit is not improving. To attract more people, the public transit should provide a high level of quality service to the passengers. One way of achieving this is by using Advanced Public Transport Systems (APTS) applications such as providing accurate real-time bus arrival information to the passengers which will improve the service reliability of the public transit. Travel time prediction has been a well-renowned topic of research for years. However, studies which were model based and incorporating dwell times at bus stops explicitly for heterogeneous traffic conditions are limited. The present study tries to explicitly incorporate the bus stop delays associated with the total travel times of the buses under heterogeneous traffic conditions. This will help in obtaining a reliable algorithm which can be adopted for bus arrival time prediction under Indian conditions.
SIMD OPTIMIZATION OF EUCLIDEAN DISTANCE TRANSFORMS FOR PATTERN RECOGNITION

This paper describes a SIMD optimization method for computing different Euclidean distance algorithms. Distance transforms have been widely applied to image analysis and pattern recognition problems. The proposed approach is based on the inherent fine and medium-grain parallelism of considered distance algorithms and has been implemented using Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE), intrinsics and VTune Analyzer. Experimental results show that optimized prefetched SIMD algorithms improve by four the number of execution cycles in comparison with the initial SISD solutions.
Synaptic input changes to spinal cord motoneurons correlate with motor control impairments in a type 1 diabetes mellitus model

Hyperglycemia is the main cause of diabetic complications, contributing to a widespread degeneration of the nervous system. Nevertheless, the main focus has been the sensory neurons because of neuropathic pain, while the impairments associated with the spinal cord and motor deficits, mostly of those initiated at early stages of the disease, have been poorly investigated. In this way, the present study used the nonobese diabetic mouse model to evaluate the microenvironment around motoneurons at ventral horn of the spinal cord, following prolonged hyperglycemia.