Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Smartphone-based paroxysmal atrial fibrillation monitoring with robust generalization

Atrial fibrillation is increasingly prevalent, especially in the elderly, and challenging to detect due paroxysmal nature. Here, we propose novel computational methods based on heart beat intervals to facilitate rapid and robust discrimination between atrial fibrillation and sinus rhythm. We used low-cost Android smartphones, and recorded short, 30 second waveform data from 194 participants. In addition, we evaluated our approach on 8528 hand-held ECG recordings to show generalization. Our approach achieves a sensitivity of 93% and specificity of 94% on 30 second waveforms, significantly outperforming previously proposed heart rate variability features and smartphone-based AFib detection methods, and substantiates the feasibility of real-world application on low-cost hardware.
Assessing the values structure among United Arab Emirates university students

The purpose of this study is to clarify the values structure among United Arab Emirates University students in general and in terms of gender and citizenship. The study sample size was 242 males and 353 females. Results indicated that religious and cognitive values came first in the structure, while social and economic values came in last. This structure was a little different in terms of citizenship and gender. These results are discussed on the basis of the literature.
Enabling power distribution network analysis flows for 3D ICs

This paper concentrates on some of these new challenges that designers must face in power delivery. We will discuss QUALCOMM's effort with EDA vendors to develop power distribution network (PDN) analysis flows in order to address the power delivery issues in 3DICs, and emphasize the necessity of a standard reduced power model (SRPM) to enable the 3D PDN analysis flows.
A heuristic rate smoothing procedure for maximum likelihood estimation of species divergence times

Estimation of species divergence times is well2known to be sensitive to violation of the molecular clock assump2 tion (rate constancy over time) . However , the molecular clock is almost always violated in comparisons of distantly related species , such as different orders of mammals. Thus it is important to take into account different rates among lineages when divergence times are estimated. The maximum likelihood method provides a framework for accommodating rate variation and can naturally accommodate heterogeneous datasets from multiple loci and fossil calibrations at multiple nodes. Previous implementations of the likelihood method require the researcher to assign branches to different rate classes. In this paper , I implement a heuristic rate2smoothing algorithm ( the AHRS algorithm) to automate the assignment of branches to rate groups. The method combines features of previous likelihood , Bayesian and rate2smoothing methods. The likelihood algorithm is also improved to accommodate missing sequences at some loci in the combined analysis. The new al2 gorithms are applied to estimate the divergence times of Malagasy mouse lemurs using a dataset of mammalian mitochon2 drial genes and compared with previous likelihood and Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo analyses [ Acta Zoologica S ini2 ca 50 (4) : 645 656 , 2004 ] .
Causality and the categorisation of objects and events

Abstract Two series of experiments investigating the nature of category structure are presented. The studies focused on object categories and event categories. It was found that, for both objects and events, property centrality (a rating of how important the property is to the category) is not entirely predicted by property typicality (how frequently the object or event possesses that property). By contrasting conditions in which adult subjects rank-ordered properties according to various criteria, it was found that causal theories about the role of the properties in the categories strongly predicted property centrality, although recognitional and definitional factors did play some role. This relationship held for both familiar and newly acquired categories. Recent empirical work on the attribution of causal relationships to sequences of events is reviewed. The evidence from both the past work and the current studies indicates that humans do indeed have causal theories which they use to categorise objects.
Differential Protein Stability and ALK Inhibitor Sensitivity of EML4-ALK Fusion Variants

Purpose: ALK rearrangement–positive lung cancers can be effectively treated with ALK inhibitors. However, the magnitude and duration of response is heterogeneous. In addition, acquired resistance limits the efficacy of ALK inhibitors, with most upfront resistance mechanisms being unknown. Experimental Design: By making use of the Ba/F3 cell line model, we analyzed the cytotoxic efficacy of ALK kinase inhibitors as a function of different EML4-ALK fusion variants v1, v2, v3a, and v3b as well as of three artificially designed EML4-ALK deletion constructs and the ALK fusion genes KIF5b-ALK and NPM1-ALK. In addition, the intracellular localization, the sensitivity to HSP90 inhibition and the protein stability of ALK fusion proteins were studied. Results: Different ALK fusion genes and EML4-ALK variants exhibited differential sensitivity to the structurally diverse ALK kinase inhibitors crizotinib and TAE684. In addition, differential sensitivity correlated with differences in protein stability in EML4-ALK–expressing cells. Furthermore, the sensitivity to HSP90 inhibition also varied depending on the ALK fusion partner but differed from ALK inhibitor sensitivity patterns. Finally, combining inhibitors of ALK and HSP90 resulted in synergistic cytotoxicity. Conclusions: Our results might explain some of the heterogeneous responses of ALK-positive tumors to ALK kinase inhibition observed in the clinic. Thus, targeted therapy of ALK-positive lung cancer should take into account the precise ALK genotype. Furthermore, combining ALK and HSP90 inhibitors might enhance tumor shrinkage in EML4-ALK–driven tumors. Clin Cancer Res; 18(17); 4682–90. ©2012 AACR.
Combining psychological and engineering approaches to utilizing social robots with children with Autism

It is estimated that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects 1 in 68 children. Early identification of an ASD is exceedingly important to the introduction of an intervention. We are developing a robot-assisted approach that will serve as an improved diagnostic and early intervention tool for children with autism. The robot, named PABI® (Penguin for Autism Behavioral Interventions), is a compact humanoid robot taking on an expressive cartoon-like embodiment. The robot is affordable, durable, and portable so that it can be used in various settings including schools, clinics, and the home. Thus enabling significantly enhanced and more readily available diagnosis and continuation of care. Through facial expressions, body motion, verbal cues, stereo vision-based tracking, and a tablet computer, the robot is capable of interacting meaningfully with an autistic child. Initial implementations of the robot, as part of a comprehensive treatment model (CTM), include Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) therapy where the child interacts with a tablet computer wirelessly interfaced with the robot. At the same time, the robot makes meaningful expressions and utterances and uses stereo cameras in eyes to track the child, maintain eye contact, and collect data such as affect and gaze direction for charting of progress. In this paper we present the clinical justification, anticipated usage with corresponding requirements, prototype development of the robotic system, and demonstration of a sample application for robot-assisted ABA therapy.
Dynamic Relation of Changes in Weight and Indices of Fat Distribution With Cardiac Structure and Function: The Dallas Heart Study

Background Obesity may increase heart failure risk through cardiac remodeling. Cross‐sectional associations between adiposity and cardiac structure and function have been elucidated, but the impact of longitudinal changes in adiposity on cardiac remodeling is less well understood. Methods and Results Participants in the Dallas Heart Study without cardiovascular disease or left ventricular dysfunction underwent assessment of body weight, anthropometrics, and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging at baseline and 7 years later. Associations between changes in indices of generalized and central adiposity with changes in left ventricular mass, volume, mass/volume ratio (concentricity), wall thickness, and ejection fraction were assessed using multivariable linear regression. The study cohort (n=1262) mean age was 44 years with 57% women, 44% black, and 36% obese participants. At follow‐up, 41% had ≥5% weight gain, and 15% had ≥5% weight loss. Greater weight gain was associated with younger age, lower risk factor burden, and lower body mass index at baseline. In multivariable models adjusting for age, sex, race, comorbid conditions at baseline and follow‐up, baseline adiposity, and cardiac measurement, increasing weight was associated with increases in left ventricular mass (β=0.10, P<0.0001), wall thickness (β=0.10, P<0.0001), and concentricity (β=0.06, P=0.002), with modest effects on end‐diastolic volume (β=0.04, P=0.044) and ejection fraction (β=0.05, P=0.046). Similar results were seen with other adiposity indices. Conclusions Concentric left ventricular remodeling is the predominant phenotype linked to increasing adiposity in middle age. Our findings support the importance of weight management to prevent secular changes in adiposity, concentric remodeling, and eventual heart failure over time.
Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements

Resource mobilization theory has recently presented an alternative interpretation of social movements. The review traces the emergence and recent controversies generated by this new perspective. A multifactored model of social movement formation is advanced, emphasizing resources, organization, and political opportunities in addition to traditional discontent hypotheses. The McCarthy-Zald (1973) theory of entrepreneurial mobilization is critically assessed as an interpretation of the social movements of the 1960s-1970s, and the relevance of the Olson (1968) theory of collective action is specified. Group organization is argued to be the major determinant of mobilization potential and patterns. The debate between the Gerlach-Hine (1970) and entrepreneurial theories of social movement organization is traced in terms of historical changes in the social movement sector and the persistence of organizational diversity. A model of social movement politics is outlined, building on Gamson’s (1975) theory of strate.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LISTENING AND READING COMPREHENSION OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF TEXT AT INCREASING GRADE LEVELS

This study examined the hypotheses that (a) the relationship between listening and reading comprehension becomes stronger after decoding mastery; (b) the difference between listening and reading decreases with increasing grade level; and (c) similar patterns of relationship and difference are obtained with narrative and expository texts. The sample included 612 students in Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8. Students read and listened to two narratives and two expository texts and completed corresponding comprehension tests that were in the form of sentence verification tasks. The findings confirmed the first two hypotheses but not the third one. In the case of expository text, the relationship between listening and reading comprehension was weaker than the corresponding one with narrative text, and performance levels were comparable across all elementary grades. Moreover, reading comprehension levels were higher than listening comprehension levels in Grade 8, regardless of text type. The implications of these findings with respect to the dominant unitary process model and the assessment and instruction of oral and written language comprehension are discussed.
Emergent semantics and cooperation in multi-knowledge environments: The ESTEEM architecture

In the present global society, information has to be exchangeable in open and dynamic environments, where interacting peers do not necessarily share a common understanding of the world at hand, and do not have a complete picture of the context where the interaction occurs. In this paper, we present the Esteem approach and the related peer architecture for emergent semantics in dynamic and multi-knowledge environments. In Esteem, semantic communities are built around declared interests in the form of manifesto ontologies, and their autonomous nature is preserved by allowing a shared semantics to naturally emerge from peer interactions.
Unsupervised Spectral Mesh Segmentation Driven by Heterogeneous Graphs

A fully automatic mesh segmentation scheme using heterogeneous graphs is presented. We introduce a spectral framework where local geometry affinities are coupled with surface patch affinities. A heterogeneous graph is constructed combining two distinct graphs: a weighted graph based on adjacency of patches of an initial over-segmentation, and the weighted dual mesh graph. The partitioning relies on processing each eigenvector of the heterogeneous graph Laplacian individually, taking into account the nodal set and nodal domain theory. Experiments on standard datasets show that the proposed unsupervised approach outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised methodologies and is comparable to the best supervised approaches.
Word Sense Induction Using Lexical Chain based Hypergraph Model

Word Sense Induction is a task of automatically finding word senses from large scale texts. It is generally considered as an unsupervised clustering problem. This paper introduces a hypergraph model in which nodes represent instances of contexts where a target word occurs and hyperedges represent higher-order semantic relatedness among instances. A lexical chain based method is used for discovering the hyperedges, and hypergraph clustering methods are used for finding word senses among the context instances. Experiments show that this model outperforms other methods in supervised evaluation and achieves comparable performance with other methods in unsupervised evaluation.
Ethical and Epistemological Tensions in Applying A Postmodern Perspective to Feminist Research

We examine tensions that arise in applying postmodernism to feminist research. First, we consider epistemological tensions generated in the process of deconstructing existing knowledge and constructing new knowledge that benefits women. Second, we examine six ethical issues that reflect the tensions in feminist practice as we attempt to justify the dialectic between knowledge and power. In keeping with a postmodernist perspective, we pose these six issues as questions: Is feminist postmodernism “postfeminist”? Does postmodernist language mystify feminist practice and goals? Are qualitative methods more feminist than quantitative ones? Must feminists have a liberatory purpose in their research? Is the personal too personal? Whose aims are served, feminists or their collaborators? We conclude that by adopting a postmodern feminist perspective, we can embrace the struggle between knowledge and practice rather than privilege one over the other.
Online Reviews as a Measure of Service Quality

The proliferation of socialized data offers an unprecedented opportunity for designing customer service measurement systems. In this paper we address the problem of adequately measuring service quality using socialized data. The theoretical basis for the study is the widely used SERVQUAL model. The analysis is based on a database of online reviews generated on the website of the leading price comparison engine in Italy. We use a weakly supervised topic model to extract relevant dimensions of service quality from the user-generated content. Despite its exploratory nature the study offers two contributions. First, it demonstrated that socialized textual data, not just quantitative ratings, provide a wealth of customer service information that can be used to measure the quality offered by service providers. Second, it shows that the distribution of topics in opinions differs significantly between positive and negative reviews. Specifically, we find that concerns about merchant responsiveness dominate negative reviews.
Defining Phonological Rules over Lexical Neighbourhoods: Evidence from Canadian Raising

Recent years have seen a heightened interest in incorporating a wide range of nonphonological factors, including phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic, social, and usage factors, into explaining phonological phenomena (see, for example, Beddor et al., 1986; Browman & Goldstein, 1989; Keating, 1990; Ohala, 1990, 1993; Flemming, 2001; Hume & Johnson, 2001; Pierrehumbert et al., 2001; Gordon, 2002; Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 2003; Bod et al., 2003; Bybee, 2003; Guy, 2003; Padgett, 2003; Hall et al., 2004, among others). This interest seems to stem from the idea that “phonology” involves the study of linguistic sound systems and whatever factors affect these systems, regardless of more traditional notions of modular grammar. One aspect of this trend has been an interest in lexically based accounts of grammar in general and phonology in particular (e.g., Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; MacDonald et al., 1994; Goldinger, 1997; Bybee, 2000; Pallier et al., 2001; Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 2003; Hay et al., 2003). This paper provides further evidence for the idea that the understanding of phonological patterns can be usefully informed by looking at phonological neighbourhoods in the lexicon; that is, by considering word similarity. The focus of investigation is “Canadian raising,” a cover term for the distribution of the vowels [ai] and [i] in certain dialects of English, including many spoken in Canada. It will be shown that the traditional phonological accounts of Canadian raising as a categorical process, governed by the voicing of the following segment and stress patterns, are not in fact sufficient to account for the actual patterns of Canadian raising for at least some speakers. In addition to these factors, phonological neighbourhoods also play a role in shaping the distribution of [ai] and [i]. Section 2 gives a brief overview of Canadian raising and its role in the phonological literature, and outlines an elicitation study carried out to look at the modern pattern of Canadian raising in a particular Ontario community. Section 3 then describes the results of this study, and section 4 discusses how the results can be modelled making reference to phonological neighbourhoods. Finally, section 5 presents conclusions.
A cavity-backed aperture antenna on LTCC for 5G mobile communications

Design of a microstrip-fed aperture antenna fabricated on LTCC is presented. Operating at 38GHz, the antenna provides 16% bandwidth of 10dB return loss. With cavity back, the antenna provide uni-direction radiation to broadside with a gain over 5dB. A 4 by 1 array is also proposed with an element isolation better than 15dB. This antenna is suitable for being integrated with a Bulter matrix for beam-forming purpose in 5G communication.
Cryptographically Verified Implementations for TLS Karthikeyan

We intend to narrow the gap between concrete implementations of cryptographic protocols and their verified models. We develop and verify a small functional implementation of the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS 1.0). We make use of the same executable code for interoperability testing against mainstream implementations, for automated symbolic cryptographic verification, and for automated computational cryptographic verification. We rely on a combination of recent tools, and we also develop a new tool for extracting computational models from executable code. We obtain strong security guarantees for TLS as used in typical deployments.
BIOTECHNOLOGICALLY RELEVANT ENZYMES AND PROTEINS 4,6-α-Glucanotransferase activity occurs more widespread in Lactobacillus strains and constitutes a separate GH70 subfamily

Family 70 glycoside hydrolase glucansucrase enzymes exclusively occur in lactic acid bacteria and synthesize a wide range of α-D-glucan (abbreviated as αglucan) oligoand polysaccharides. Of the 47 characterized GH70 enzymes, 46 use sucrose as glucose donor. A single GH70 enzyme was recently found to be inactive with sucrose and to utilize maltooligosaccharides [(1→4)-α-D-glucooligosaccharides] as glucose donor substrates for αglucan synthesis, acting as a 4,6-α-glucanotransferase (4,6-αGT) enzyme. Here, we report the characterization of two further GH70 4,6-αGT enzymes, i.e., from Lactobacillus reuteri strains DSM 20016 and ML1, which use maltooligosaccharides as glucose donor. Both enzymes cleave α1→4 glycosidic linkages and add the released glucose moieties one by one to the non-reducing end of growing linear α-glucan chains via α1→6 glycosidic linkages (α1→4 to α1→6 transfer activity). In this way, they convert pure maltooligosaccharide substrates into linear α-glucan product mixtures with about 50% α1→6 glycosidic bonds (isomalto/maltooligosaccharides). These new α-glucan products may provide an exciting type of carbohydrate for the food industry. The results show that 4,6-αGTs occur more widespread in family GH70 and can be considered as a GH70 subfamily. Sequence analysis allowed identification of amino acid residues in acceptor substrate binding subsites +1 and +2, differing between GH70 GTF and 4,6αGT enzymes.
DNA Replication Fidelity*

DNA replication fidelity is a key determinant of genome stability and is central to the evolution of species and to the origins of human diseases. Here we review our current understanding of replication fidelity, with emphasis on structural and biochemical studies of DNA polymerases that provide new insights into the importance of hydrogen bonding, base pair geometry, and substrate-induced conformational changes to fidelity. These studies also reveal polymerase interactions with the DNA minor groove at and upstream of the active site that influence nucleotide selectivity, the efficiency of exonucleolytic proofreading, and the rate of forming errors via strand misalignments. We highlight common features that are relevant to the fidelity of any DNA synthesis reaction, and consider why fidelity varies depending on the enzymes, the error, and the local sequence environment.
Estimation of Glottal Closure Instants in Voiced Speech Using the DYPSA Algorithm

We present the Dynamic Programming Projected Phase-Slope Algorithm (DYPSA) for automatic estimation of glottal closure instants (GCIs) in voiced speech. Accurate estimation of GCIs is an important tool that can be applied to a wide range of speech processing tasks including speech analysis, synthesis and coding. DYPSA is automatic and operates using the speech signal alone without the need for an EGG signal. The algorithm employs the phase-slope function and a novel phase-slope projection technique for estimating GCI candidates from the speech signal. The most likely candidates are then selected using a dynamic programming technique to minimize a cost function that we define. We review and evaluate three existing methods of GCI estimation and compare the new DYPSA algorithm to them. Results are presented for the APLAWD and SAM databases for which 95.7% and 93.1% of GCIs are correctly identified