Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evidence that certain retinal bipolar cells use both glutamate and GABA

Retinal bipolar neurons release the excitatory transmitter, glutamate. However, certain bipolar cells contain GABA, raising the question whether a neuron might release both transmitters and, if so, what function might the inhibitory transmitter play in a particular circuit? Here we identify a subset of cone bipolar cells in cat retina that contain glutamate, plus its vesicular transporter (VGLUT1), and GABA, plus its synthetic enzyme (GAD65) and its vesicular transporter (VGAT). These cells are negative for a marker of ON bipolar cells and restrict their axons to the OFF strata of the inner synaptic layer. They do not colocalize with the neurokinin 3 receptor that stains a type (or two) of OFF bipolar cells. By “targeted injection,” we identified two types of OFF bipolar cell with the machinery to make and package both transmitters. One of these types costratifies with a dopamine plexus. J. Comp. Neurol. 478:207–218, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Interconnect delay and slew metrics using the beta distribution

Integrated circuit process technology is entering the ultra deep submicron era. At this level, interconnect structure becomes very stiff and the metal resistance shielding effects problem is more serious. Although several delay metrics have been proposed, they are inefficient and difficult to implement. Hence, we propose a new delay and slew metric for interconnect based on Beta distribution and which does not require a look-up table to be built. Our metrics are efficient and easy to implement; the overall standard deviation and error mean are smaller than in previous works.
Temporal planning in dynamic environments for mobile agents

In this thesis we intend to propose and implement a planning based enhancement of the agent oriented programming language CLAIM, in which an agent is an intelligent and mobile entity. This new language which is called P-CLAIM, should have the following characteristics. Firstly, temporal planning capability for the agents. Secondly, the agents should be able to work in a stable manner in the changing environment. Thirdly, a balance should exist between reactivity and proactivity. Fourthly, the agents' actions should not conflict with the actions of other agents in the same environment and the agents should avail the cooperative oppurtunities offered by other agents and they themselves should be able to help other agents where possible.
Probabilistic Parsing Action Models for Multi-Lingual Dependency Parsing

Deterministic dependency parsers use parsing actions to construct dependencies. These parsers do not compute the probability of the whole dependency tree. They only determine parsing actions stepwisely by a trained classifier. To globally model parsing actions of all steps that are taken on the input sentence, we propose two kinds of probabilistic parsing action models that can compute the probability of the whole dependency tree. The tree with the maximal probability is outputted. The experiments are carried on 10 languages, and the results show that our probabilistic parsing action models outperform the original deterministic dependency parser.
Top Management Team Attention and International Strategy: A Case Study

In this paper, we investigate how top management team (TMT) attention distribution affects firm's international expansion strategy choice by a case study. With the help of automated text analysis method, we analyze CEO's public speeches and annual reports of Huawei, and measure TMT attention by counting sentences relating to technology seeking, global brand building, and target market positioning, which have important influence on firm's international strategy choice. The results show that firms tend to choose organic international expansion strategy more likely, if TMT allocate more attention to independent research and development, self-brand building and mature market. This study provides a different view on firm's internationalization strategy choice.
Influence of transformational leadership components on job satisfaction and organizational commitment

Leadership, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and trust have become important processes for an organization in recent years. One of the contemporary human resource management functions in the organizations involves engaging in leadership development, improving organizational trust and organizational commitment and increasing job satisfaction. This research is conducted with an intention to investigate the impact of components pertains to transformational leadership (TL) by exercising dilemmas as employee (satisfaction & commitment), being engaged in Islamic banking sector; whereas TL components like; idealized influence (II), inspiration motivation (IM), intellectual stimulation (IS) and individualized consideration (IC) were taken into consideration. A two stage cluster sampling design is used for the selection of sample from 5 Islamic banks of Pakistan from Gujranwala division having 56 branches. 319 employees of 25 branches are used and information is collected through structured questionnaire having 26 items on likert scale of 5 point. The factor analysis, structural equation modeling, group mean comparison and discriminant analysis is used for the data analysis. Findings of study reveal that TL components have significant influence with respect to job satisfaction along with organizational commitment of employees. Contribution of this study is towards both administrative and managerial scenarios’, yet senior management need to focus on core components of TL while designing the policies for the strategic implementation. Furthermore, this investigation was conducted in only one country having unstable economic and political affairs that effect individuals’ moods, added inquiries needs to be conducted in better economic conditions for research exploration perspectives.
Application of Image SIFT Features to the Context of CBIR

This paper is mainly concerned with the application of a kind of distinctive local invariant feature i.e. Lowe's SIFT feature for the purpose of CBIR, instead of the usually used global feature and local statistical feature based on image segmentation. In our CBIR system, the visual contents of the query image and the database images are extracted and described by the 128-dimensional SIFT feature vectors. The KD-tree with the best bin first(BBF), an approximate nearest neighbors(ANN) search algorithm, is used to index and match those SIFT features. As our contribution, a modified voting scheme called nearest neighbor distance ratio scoring (NNDRS) is put forward to calculate the aggregate scores of the corresponding candidate images in the database respectively. By sorting the database images according to their aggregate scores in descending order, the top few similar images are shown to users as the retrieval results. Additionally, RANSAC can be adopted as a geometry verification method to re-check the results and remove the false matches. Experiments show that our approach can obtain high recall and high precision in the context of CBIR on the famous image databases ZuBud.
Time-frequency localization from sparsity constraints

In the case of multicomponent AM-FM signals, the idealized representation which consists of weighted trajectories on the time-frequency (TF) plane, is intrinsically sparse. Recent advances in optimal recovery from sparsity constraints thus suggest to revisit the issue of TF localization by exploiting sparsity, as adapted to the specific context of (quadratic) TF distributions. Based on classical results in TF analysis, it is argued that the relevant information is mostly concentrated in a restricted subset of Fourier coefficients of the Wigner-Ville distribution neighbouring the origin of the ambiguity plane. Using this incomplete information as the primary constraint, the desired distribution follows as the minimum l1-norm solution in the transformed TF domain. Possibilities and limitations of the approach are demonstrated via controlled numerical experiments, its performance is assessed in various configurations and the results are compared with standard techniques. It is shown that improved representations can be obtained, though at a computational cost which is significantly increased.
Authentication For Fragments

Recently there’s been renewed interest in authenticating fragments, especially for mobile wireless networks and delay tolerant networks. In this paper we review the issues in authenticating fragments and show how painfully hard that process is. We then suggest a few new ideas for reducing the authentication data that must be transmitted, which may make authenticating fragments a little less painful.
SPARSE 2 D ARRAYS FOR REAL-TIME 3 D ULTRASOUND

Existing 3D ultrasound systems are based on mechanically moving 1D arrays for data collection and post-processing of data to achieve 3D images. To be able to both collect and process 3D data in real-time, a scaling of the ultra-sound system from 1D to 2D arrays is necessary. A typical 2D-system uses 1D arrays with about 100 receive and transmit channels. Scaling of this system to get a 3D-system with as good performance as the 2D-system implies a squaring of the number of channels, i.e. a 10.000 channel system. To reduce cost and complexity of such a system, removal of array elements or equally channels is possible. Arrays with removed elements are known as sparse arrays. At the University of Oslo, there are two ongoing projects which aim to find optimal 2D sparse layouts through optimization and simulation. The goal is to minimize the number of channels without compromising image quality. To verify this work and to critically test system performances , an extensive evaluation program is to be carried out. This includes collection of experimental data from a 3D prototype array by using a state-of-the-art digital 2D ultrasound scanner and massive post processing on a cluster of workstations. To simplify future integration of electronics into the probe, the sparse transmit and receive layouts should be chosen to be non-overlapping. This means that some elements should be dedicated to transmit while others should be used to receive. To increase system performance, future 2D-arrays should possibly include pre-amplifiers directly connected to the receive elements. The problem of finding the optimal sparse layout is enormous. If the array consists of 50×50 elements, and 80% of the elements should be removed, then there are more than 10 541 ways to choose the 500 out of the 2500 elements. A 50 × 50 element array usually has a quadratic footprint. If one limits the number of elements by introducing a circular footprint, and takes into account that both transmit and receive layout have to be chosen, and these should be non-overlapping, the number of combinations equals 1964 500 × 1464 500 ≈ 10 888. As a comparison, there are believed to be 10 80 electrons in the universe. The layouts should have optimal pulse-echo performance , i.e. the pulse-echo radiation pattern should have as low sidelobe level as possible for a specified main lobe width for all angles and depths of interest. To compute the …
Design of Gesture Vocabularies through Analysis of Recognizer Performance in Gesture Space

This paper proposes a different paradigm for the design of gesture vocabularies that could be used, for instance, in a pen-gesture interface. In contrast to the usual approach in which a classifier is trained with multiple sketches drawn by an end-user who has a tentative set of sketch templates provided by the system designer, we intend to explore the gesture space to automate the design of the gesture vocabulary. Instead of training, a model of the gesture space of the recognizer is analyzed and a self- organized set of gestures with improved recognition rate is suggested for the designer or the end-user which then is able to filter and brush up the resulting vocabulary. As a result, simpler recognizers can be derived, vocabularies can be personalized by users without specialist knowledge of the behavior of the recognizer and a quasi-optimal vocabulary can be obtained regarding recognizer performance.
G SOFT THRESHOLDI G WITH DCT-EMD BASED HYBRID ALGORITHM

This paper introduces a new speech enhancement method using soft thresholding with a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) based hybrid algorithm. Soft thresholding for DCT-enhancement is a powerful method for enhancing the noisy speech signal in a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios (S Rs). However, due to the thresholding criteria a significant amount of noise is left in the enhanced signal. EMD is applied here to remove the remaining noise components. Due to the frequency characteristics of the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), the noise components are mainly centered in the lower order IMFs. Therefore, it is possible to successfully identify and remove the remaining noise. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid method is significantly more effective in removing the noise components from the noisy speech signal; thus giving better results in output S R and quality compared to recently reported techniques.
Transfer of Neuroplasticity from Nucleus Accumbens Core to Shell Is Required for Cocaine Reward

It is well established that cocaine induces an increase of dendritic spines density in some brain regions. However, few studies have addressed the role of this neuroplastic changes in cocaine rewarding effects and have often led to contradictory results. So, we hypothesized that using a rigorous time- and subject-matched protocol would demonstrate the role of this spine increase in cocaine reward. We designed our experiments such as the same animals (rats) were used for spine analysis and behavioral studies. Cocaine rewarding effects were assessed with the conditioned place preference paradigm. Spines densities were measured in the two subdivisions of the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), core and shell. We showed a correlation between the increase of spine density in NAcc core and shell and cocaine rewarding effects. Interestingly, when cocaine was administered in home cages, spine density was increase in NAcc core only. With anisomycin, a protein synthesis inhibitor, injected in the core we blocked spine increase in core and shell and also cocaine rewarding effects. Strikingly, whereas injection of this inhibitor in the shell immediately after conditioning had no effect on neuroplasticity or behavior, its injection 4 hours after conditioning was able to block neuroplasticity in shell only and cocaine-induced place preference. Thus, it clearly appears that the neuronal plasticity in the NAcc core is essential to induce plasticity in the shell, necessary for cocaine reward. Altogether, our data revealed a new mechanism in the NAcc functioning where a neuroplasticity transfer occurred from core to shell.
Using the Web to Resolve Coreferent Bridging in German Newspaper Text

We adopt Markert and Nissim (2005)’s approach of using the World Wide Web to resolve cases of coreferent bridging for German and discuss the strength and weaknesses of this approach. As the general approach of using surface patterns to get information on ontological relations between lexical items has only been tried on English, it is also interesting to see whether the approach works for German as well as it does for English and what differences between these languages need to
Analysis and Control of Aircraft Longitudinal Dynamics subject to Steady Aerodynamic Forces

The paper contributes towards the development of a unified control approach for longitudinal aircraft dynamics. Prior to the control design, we analyze the existence and the uniqueness of the equilibrium orientation along a desired reference velocity. We show that shape symmetries and aerodynamic stall phenomena imply the existence of the equilibrium orientation irrespective of the reference velocity. The equilibrium orientation, however, is not in general unique, and this may trigger an aircraft loss-of-control for specific reference velocities. Conditions that ensure the local and the global uniqueness of the equilibrium orientation are stated. We show that the uniqueness of the equilibrium orientation is intimately related to the possibility of applying the spherical equivalency, i.e. a thrust change of variable rendering the direction of the transformed external force independent of the vehicle's orientation, as in the case of spherical shapes. Once this transformation is applied, control laws for reference velocities can be designed. We show that these laws extend the thrust direction control paradigm developed for systems with orientation-independent external forces, e.g. spherical shapes, to orientation-dependent external forces, e.g. generic shapes.
Algorithm for Rician noise removing in magnetic resonance images by stationary wavelets transform and application of the Bilateral Filter

Methods in wavelet domain are widely used in various scientific areas as an essential tool in the implementation of filters for satellite, microscopic, telescopic, photographic and medical images, among others. Many of the proposed filters for gray level images are not applicable in MRI, because their implementations do not realize the Rician noise which is the more relevant for this kind of images. This paper describes a wavelet domain filter to remove Rician noise in MRI. The proposed filter uses the Bilateral Filter, the stationary wavelet transform and it is an improvement of those proposed originally by Kazubek. The algorithm is implemented in Matlab and its performance is examined quantitatively by brain images available in Matlab and qualitatively by brain magnetic resonance images of patients with some kind of abnormality.
Evaluation of a perceptually optimized room-in-room reproduction method for playback room compensation

In sound reproduction it is usually desired to reproduce a sound source as accurate as possible to achieve a natural and realistic sound representation of the sound source. A perceptually motivated sound reproduction approach was suggested by [Grosse, van de Par, IEEE, 2015] where only the perceptually most relevant cues of a sound eld in the recording room are considered. These perceptually relevant cues are the coloration of the sound source, the interaural cross correlation (IACC), which is linked to the listener envelopment, and the reverberation time. Based on this the direct and reverberant sound are rendered over spatially distributed loudspeakers in the playback room while optimizing the direct and reverberant sound eld such that the considered cues of the recording room coincide with the reproduced cues in the playback room. A MUSHRA-test showed rather good results for the proposed optimization (listening room compensation, sweet-spot robustness) compared to a simple room-in-room or multichannel reproduction in terms of the overall sound quality. This follow-up study considers several important perceptual aspects and general problems which will occur when a sound source is rendered in a playback room. A subjective listening test is presented where the focus is on perceptual attributes like the perceived timbre, realism and plausibility of various alternative approaches to sound reproduction compared to the perceptually optimized room-in-room reproduction.
Working Paper Series Time Varying Prediction of UK Asset Returns

working papers are produced by the Bradford University School of Management and are to be circulated for discussion purposes only. Their contents should be considered to be preliminary. The papers are expected to be published in due course, in a revised form and should not be quoted without the author's permission. ABSTRACT This paper studies the economic significance of stock and bond return predictability in UK market over period February 1991 to May 2002, based on a real-time investment simulation with only publicly available information. We use ten macroeconomic and financial variables as the predicting variables. At each month, one predicting model for stock return and one for bond return are selected according to predefined criterion. Based on the selected forecasting models, the Sharpe ratio strategy and the Tactical Asset Allocation strategy are used to construct an optimal portfolio. These two active strategies are compared with the passive buy-and-hold stock index strategy, taking into account the transaction costs. The results are really encouraging. In the scenarios of zero and low transaction costs, both active strategies generate substantially higher mean returns with much lower standard deviation than the passive buy-and-hold strategy. Moreover, even with high transaction costs, the active strategies are still superior to passive strategy in terms of Sharpe ratio on the portfolios. This study strongly support that the real-time prediction of UK stock and bond returns is economically significant.
Using topic models for Twitter hashtag recommendation

Since the introduction of microblogging services, there has been a continuous growth of short-text social networking on the Internet. With the generation of large amounts of microposts, there is a need for effective categorization and search of the data. Twitter, one of the largest microblogging sites, allows users to make use of hashtags to categorize their posts. However, the majority of tweets do not contain tags, which hinders the quality of the search results. In this paper, we propose a novel method for unsupervised and content-based hashtag recommendation for tweets. Our approach relies on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to model the underlying topic assignment of language classified tweets. The advantage of our approach is the use of a topic distribution to recommend general hashtags.
A General Framework and Case Study for Information Quality Management in Cooperative Information Systems

The problem of measuring and improving the quality of information resources is of particular interest in the area of Cooperative Information Systems, or CIS. In this deliverable, we first present a general methodological framework for the analysis of Information Quality issues in a CIS, and then focus on additional research topics within the framework. Specifically, we propose a model for describing both the structure of a cooperative system and its Information Quality Profiles (IQP), and introduce the idea of improving the overall quality of information exchanged by CIS organizations by balancing quality offer and quality demand. Additionally, we assume that information has a cost, and that different suppliers may offer the same information flow with different quality levels and at different cost. Accordingly, we formally introduce a data quality monitoring service, and show how it can be used to optimize the overall cost associated to obtaining data items of a This service is based on a multidimensional data model into which quality metadata, obtained by gathering observations about exchanged data items, can be accommodated. Using this service, we then formulate and provide an algorithm to solve the following optimization problem: given a set of quality requirements and a cost associated to each data item obtained by organization O from organization O′, and assuming that each o has a choice of producer organizations from which part or all of its required data can be obtained, find the cost-optimal matching of data producers and suppliers that satisfies the quality requirements. We call this the minimum cost supplying problem, or MCS for short. Finally, we demonstrate and validate the data and quality models through an extended and detailed example case study.