Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An ecoinformatics tool for microbial community studies : Supervised classification of Amplicon Length Heterogeneity ( ALH ) profiles of 16 S rRNA

Support vector machines (SVM) and K-nearest neighbors (KNN) are two computational machine learning tools that perform supervised classification. This paper presents a novel application of such supervised analytical tools for microbial community profiling and to distinguish patterning among ecosystems. Amplicon length heterogeneity (ALH) profiles from several hypervariable regions of 16S rRNA gene of eubacterial communities from Idaho agricultural soil samples and from Chesapeake Bay marsh sediments were separately analyzed. The profiles from all available hypervariable regions were concatenated to obtain a combined profile, which was then provided to the SVM and KNN classifiers. Each profile was labeled with information about the location or time of its sampling. We hypothesized that after a learning phase using feature vectors from labeled ALH profiles, both these classifiers would have the capacity to predict the labels of previously unseen samples. The resulting classifiers were able to predict the labels of the Idaho soil samples with high accuracy. The classifiers were less accurate for the classification of the Chesapeake Bay sediments suggesting greater similarity within the Bay’s microbial community patterns in the sampled sites. The profiles obtained from the V1+V2 region were more informative than that obtained from any other single region. However, combining them with profiles from the V1 region (with or without the profiles from the V3 region) resulted in the most accurate classification of the samples. The addition
Query Rewriting for Semantic Web Information Integration

Though significant research has been done in the realm of information integration, continuously increasing amounts and complexity of data demand more advanced techniques for its access. Semantic Web technologies such as OWL and SWRL provide the capacity for rich definitions of data sources, global views, and the mappings between them. An information integration system based on these technologies is thus very attractive; however, OWL and SWRL would appear to introduce significant complexity to query reformulation. We motivate our work via a distributed query system architecture based on Semantic Web technologies, and discuss the application of Global as View and Local as View approaches to this scenario. Finally, we introduce modifications to the Global as View approach for this system and analyze their effects.
Trajectory prediction of a lane changing vehicle based on driver behavior estimation and classification

Accurate trajectory prediction of a lane changing vehicle is a key issue for risk assessment and early danger warning in advanced driver assistance systems(ADAS). This paper proposes a trajectory prediction approach for a lane changing vehicle considering high-level driver status. A driving behavior estimation and classification model is developed based on Hidden Markov Models(HMMs). The lane change behavior is estimated by observing the vehicle state emissions in the beginning stage of a lane change procedure, and then classified by the classifier before the vehicle crosses the lane mark. Furthermore, the future trajectory of the lane changing vehicle is predicted in a statistical way combining the driver status estimated by the classifier. The classifier is trained and tested using naturalistic driving data, which shows satisfactory performance in classifying driver status. The trajectory prediction method generates different trajectories based on the classification results, which is important for the design of both autonomous driving controller and early danger warning systems.
Selected mechanical and physical properties of Chinese tallow tree juvenile wood

Chinese tallow tree is a noxious, invasive plant in the Southeastern United States. It is generally considered a nuisance and has no current commercial use. The objective of this research was to determine the moduli of rupture (MOR) and elasticity (MOE) of the stem wood of this species at different vertical sampling locations. Three Chinese tallow trees were felled and cut into bolts before sampling along the east and west radial directions. It was found that Chinese tallow tree has sufficient bending strength for low to medium structural uses. Tree, bolt, and sampling direction were all found to be significant sources of variation for the MOR and MOE data.
Language learning from stochastic input

Language learning from positive data in the Gold model of inductive inference is investigated in a setting where the data can be modeled as a stochastic process. Specifically, the input strings are assumed to form a sequence of identically distributed, independent random variables, where the distribution depends on the language being presented. A scheme is developed which can be tuned to learn, with probability one, any family of recursive languages, given a recursive enumeration of total indices for the languages in the family and a procedure to compute a lower bound to the probability of occurrence of a given string in a given language. Variations of the scheme work under other assumptions, e.g., if the probabilities of the strings form a monotone sequence with respect to a given enumeration. The learning algorithm is rather simple and appears psychologically plausible. A more sophisticated version of the learner is also developed, based on a probabilistic version of the notion of tell-tale subset. This version yields, as a special case, Angluin's learner for the families of languages that are learnable from all texts (and not just from a set of texts of probability one).
Dual connected Bi-Copter with new wall trace locomotion feasibility that can fly at arbitrary tilt angle

We have developed a robot with a new control mechanism in order to collect information on flying robots in multiple fields. We aimed for a function that could rotate the tilt angle continuously and without limit and a function for flying maintaining any desired tilt angle with a structure that could efficiently use the thrust generated by the propellers. We devised a mechanism that connected two bicopter modules, each of which combines two of the four propellers into one set and named this mechanism the “Bi2 Copter”. This mechanism provided movements including landing, take-off, and flying with any desired tilt angle. This ability of this mechanism to fly walls with continuously changing surface angles and full 360° spherical coverage makes possible applications in investigation, measurement, etc. This report covers the design concepts of this flying robot, the structure design, basic control and operations verification.
ROBUST AND SIMPLE ALGORITHMS FOR MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION OF MULTIVARIABLE SYSTEMS

Abstract This paper presents novel algorithms for the estimation of dynamic systems. These new methods offer several advantages of being parameterisation free, numerically robust, convergent to statistically optimal estimates, and applicable in a simple fashion to a wide range of multivariable, non-linear and time varying problems. The key tool underlying the new techniques presented here is the 'Expectation-Maximisation' (EM) algorithm.
Volcanic earthquake timing using wireless sensor networks

Recent years have witnessed pilot deployments of inexpensive wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for active volcano monitoring. This paper studies the problem of picking arrival times of primary waves (i.e., P-phases) received by seismic sensors, one of the most critical tasks in volcano monitoring. Two fundamental challenges must be addressed. First, it is virtually impossible to download the real-time high-frequency seismic data to a central station for P-phase picking due to limited wireless network bandwidth. Second, accurate P-phase picking is inherently computation-intensive, and is thus prohibitive for many low-power sensor platforms. To address these challenges, we propose a new P-phase picking approach for hierarchical volcano monitoring WSNs where a large number of inexpensive sensors are used to collect fine-grained, real-time seismic signals while a small number of powerful coordinator nodes process collected data and pick accurate P-phases. We develop a suite of new in-network signal processing algorithms for accurate P-phase picking, including lightweight signal pre-processing at sensors, sensor selection at coordinators as well as signal compression and reconstruction algorithms. Testbed experiments and extensive simulations based on real data collected from a volcano show that our approach achieves accurate P-phase picking while only 16% of the sensor data are transmitted.
An Analysis of Generational Differences among Active Duty Members

Abstract : There seems to be a widely held belief that different generations have different attitudes toward work, organizations, and co-workers. Clearly, these observed differences have implications for managers and leaders. Actions taken by leaders might be misunderstood by junior organizational members, leading to undesirable outcomes. Considering that many generational groups are represented within the Air Force, there is a need to analyze and understand potential generational differences. With the exception of the Smola and Sutton (2002) study, little empirical research has explored the extent to which these differences actually exist and whether differences exist among Air Force members. This research explores the extent to which differences exist among three generations of Air Force members, and the affects these potential differences have on leadership strategies. The generational groups studied were Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Generation X (1965-1978), and Millennials (1979-1994). Hypotheses were developed based on generational characteristics and tested using a questionnaire that includes 77 items to assess general work attitudes, attitudes towards job and organization, and individual preferences toward work processes. The results of the study indicate that while generational differences were shown to exist, significant differences among the groups accounted for a small proportion of the variables tested. Knowing these findings, if a leader or manager relies on generational stereotypes to establish human resource management policies and practices, they will be incorrectly applying leadership at least half of the time. Instead of focusing on generational stereotypes, leaders should focus on an individual's current stage of life. An individual's stage of life will more accurately reflect his/her attitudes towards work, loyalty to the organization, and job satisfaction. (5 tables, 1 figure, 33 refs.)
Segmenting spoken language utterances into clauses for semantic classification

Robust spoken language understanding in large-scale conversational dialog applications is usually performed by classification of the user utterances into one or many semantic classes. The features used for classification are sensitive to variations caused by artifacts of spoken language, such as edits, repairs and other dysfluencies. Furthermore, the performance of these classifiers typically degrades when the user's utterance contains multiple semantic classes. In this paper, we present a semantic classification technique that first automatically removes dysfluencies and segments the user's utterance into clauses and then classifies the utterance based on the classification of the clauses. We show that this preprocessing improves the semantic classification accuracy for utterances and significantly decreases the amount of training data needed for a given classification accuracy level.
Thermodynamic properties of moisture sorption in cassava flour

Se determinaron propiedades termodinamicas de adsorcion (entalpia y entropia diferencial, presion de superficie, entalpia y entropia integral neta) en harina de yuca a 25, 30 y 35°C, para proporcionar informacion sobre requerimientos de agua y de energia en el proceso de sorcion. Los modelos de GAB, Peleg y Halsey fueron los que mejor describieron las caracteristicas de sorcion, siendo el de Peleg el de mejor ajuste. Los diferenciales de entalpia y entropia disminuyeron con el incremento del contenido de humedad de equilibrio. La presion de superficie se incremento con el aumento de la actividad de agua pero disminuyo con el incremento de temperatura. La entalpia integral neta decrecio con el aumento de la humedad con una tendencia asintotica hasta 0.2920 kJ/mol para una humedad de 33.4 % (b.s); mientras que los valores de la entropia integral neta fueron negativos y se incrementaron hasta 0.1687 kJ/mol para una humedad de 29.2 % (b.s)
A Low-Cost Pedestrian-Detection System With a Single Optical Camera

The ultimate purpose of a pedestrian-detection system (PDS) is to reduce pedestrian-vehicle-related injury. Most such systems tend to adopt expensive sensors, such as infrared devices, in expectation of better performance. In comparison, a low-cost optical-camera-based system has much potential practical value, including a greater detection range, and can easily be trained to detect other objects. However, such low-cost systems are difficult to design (e.g., little original information can be collected, and the scene is very complex). To address these problems, an effective and reliable classifier is needed. The classifier should have a proper structure, its features need to be well selected, and a large number of high-quality samples are necessary for training. In this paper, we present a low-cost PDS which only uses a single optical camera. We design a cascade classifier to achieve an effective and reliable detection. First, our system scans two sequential frames at each zoom scale with a sliding window. Second, with each window, both appearance and motion features are extracted. A well-trained cascade classifier, combining statistical learning with a decomposed support-vector-machine classifier, then determines whether the window contains a human body. At the same time, to provide as much information as possible about the pedestrian, a small-scale weighted template tree trained by a coevolutionary algorithm is adopted to identify each pedestrian's direction, and the distance of each from the vehicle is also provided using an estimation algorithm. During the training procedure, we select key features by using the AdaBoost algorithm and a large number of high-quality samples. Experimental results demonstrate that the system is suitable for pedestrian detection in city traffic: The detection speed is more than 10 ft/s, the detection rate reaches 80%, and the false positive rate is no more than 0.30/00.
Declarative Camera Control for Automatic Cinematography

Animations generated by interactive 3D computer graphics applications are typically portrayed either from a particular character's point of view or from a small set of strategically-placed viewpoints. By ignoring camera placement, such applications fail to realize important storytelling capabilities that have been explored by cinematographers for many years. In this paper, we describe several of the principles of cinematography and show how they can be formalized into a declarative language, called the Declarative Camera Control Language (OCCL). We describe the application of OCCL within the context of a simple interactive video game and argue that OCCL represents cinematic knowledge at the same level of abstraction as expert directors by encoding 16 idioms from a film textbook. These idioms produce compelling animations, as demonstrated on the accompanying videotape.
Altered Antibody Profiles against Common Infectious Agents in Chronic Disease

Despite the important diagnostic value of evaluating antibody responses to individual human pathogens, antibody profiles against multiple infectious agents have not been used to explore health and disease mainly for technical reasons. We hypothesized that the interplay between infection and chronic disease might be revealed by profiling antibodies against multiple agents. Here, the levels of antibodies against a panel of 13 common infectious agents were evaluated with the quantitative Luciferase Immunoprecipitation Systems (LIPS) in patients from three disease cohorts including those with pathogenic anti-interferon-γ autoantibodies (IFN-γ AAB), HIV and Sjögren’s syndrome (SjS) to determine if their antibody profiles differed from control subjects. The IFN-γ AAB patients compared to controls demonstrated statistically higher levels of antibodies against VZV (p=0.0003), EBV (p=0.002), CMV (p=0.003), and C. albicans (p=0.03), but lower antibody levels against poliovirus (p=0.04). Comparison of HIV patients with blood donor controls revealed that the patients had higher levels of antibodies against CMV (p=0.0008), HSV-2 (p=0.0008), EBV (p=0.001), and C. albicans (p=0.01), but showed decreased levels of antibodies against coxsackievirus B4 (p=0.0008), poliovirus (p=0.0005), and HHV-6B (p=0.002). Lastly, SjS patients had higher levels of anti-EBV antibodies (p=0.03), but lower antibody levels against several enteroviruses including a newly identified picornavirus, HCoSV-A (p=0.004), coxsackievirus B4 (p=0.04), and poliovirus (p=0.02). For the IFN-γ AAB and HIV cohorts, principal component analysis revealed unique antibody clusters that showed the potential to discriminate patients from controls. The results suggest that antibody profiles against these and likely other common infectious agents may yield insight into the interplay between exposure to infectious agents, dysbiosis, adaptive immunity and disease activity.
Until which age should women be vaccinated against HPV infection? Recommendation based on cost-effectiveness analyses.

INTRODUCTION Cervical cancer is caused by infection with human papillomavirus (HPV). Several countries have implemented vaccination programs against HPV for teenage girls before sexual debut. However, recent clinical trials have demonstrated that vaccination of older women is highly effective as well. Accordingly, it has been suggested that these older women should also be offered vaccination. Here, the cost-effectiveness of HPV vaccination for older women was assessed. METHODS A Markov model was used to estimate age-specific health benefits and cost savings of HPV vaccination for women 12-50 years of age, in the Netherlands. Sensitivity analyses were performed to test the robustness of the outcomes. State-of-the-art health-economic methods were used, and international health-economic guidelines were followed. RESULTS HPV vaccination is highly cost-effective for girls aged 12-16 years. Remarkably, cost-effectiveness only slowly declines with increasing age of the vaccinees up to 25 years. Indeed, substantial health benefits can be obtained by vaccinating women in this age group at acceptable costs. Beyond this age, cost-effectiveness of HPV-vaccination rapidly declines. CONCLUSIONS Not only HPV vaccination of girls before sexual debut is a highly effective and cost-effective strategy for prevention of cervical cancer, but also vaccination of women until the age of 25 years is generally cost-effective.
Max-Log-MAP and Log-MAP Decoding Algorithms for UST Symbol Based Turbo Code

An intrinsic pitfall of unitary space-time modulation is that its performance is unsatisfactory at low signal-to-noise ratio. Concatenating it with turbo code is a possible solution, however, bit wise processing results in unacceptable calculation mount. A novel scheme employing unitary space-time symbol base turbo code can greatly reduce the time delay but its MAP decoding algorithm may lead to system instability. We propose two feasible simplified versions for MAP algorithm, using the idea of Max- Log-MAP and Log-MAP. These algorithms can significantly reduce the calculations while keep almost the same error rate performance compared with MAP algorithm.
Magnetic controlled navigating system for a micro-robot through the blood vessels

In this paper, a magnetic navigation system for a micro-robot flowing in the circulatory system is considered. The suggested system consist of three orthogonal pairs of coils surrounding the region of interest. The current injected in each coil applies force and torque on a magnetic dipole in a capsule to track a predefined path in the circulatory system. The coil system utilizes a combined Helmholtz and Maxwell coil pairs to produce a magnetic field with uniform amplitude and gradient. The navigation system is designed as an open loop system using SIMULINK. The system results are demonstrated considering a steady and uniform blood velocity.
A quantitative analysis of the glomerular charge barrier in the rat.

Modifying the ionic strength (I) is a gentle way to alter charge interactions, but it cannot be done for studies of the glomerular sieving of proteins in vivo. We therefore perfused 18 isolated rat kidneys with albumin solutions of different ionic strengths at a low temperature (cIPK) to inhibit tubular uptake and protease activity. Four anionic proteins were studied, namely albumin (Alb), orosomucoid (Oro), ovalbumin (Ova), and anionic horseradish peroxidase (aHRP), together with the neutral polymer Ficoll. With normal ionic strength of the perfusate (152 mM), the fractional clearance (theta) was 0.0018 +/- 0.0003 for Alb, 0.0033 +/- 0.0003 for Oro, 0.090 +/- 0.008 for Ova, and 0.062 +/- 0.002 for aHRP. These theta values were all lower than for Ficoll of similar hydrodynamic size; e.g., theta(Ficoll 36 A) was >20 times higher than theta for albumin. Low ionic strength (34 mM) increased size selectivity as theta for anionic proteins and Ficoll fell, suggesting a reduction in small-pore radius from 44 +/- 0.4 to 41 +/- 0.5 A, P < 0.01. In contrast, low I reduced the charge density of the membrane, omega, to one-quarter of the 20--50 meq/l estimated at normal I. These dynamic changes in omega seem to be due to volume alterations of the charged gel, fluid shifts that easily are accounted for by the changes in electroosmotic pressures. The finding that low ionic strength induces inverse effects on size selectivity and charge density strongly suggests that separate structures of the glomerular wall are responsible for the two properties.
Cyclosporin A Upmodulates Bleomycin-Induced Pulmonary Fibrosis in BALB/c Mice

Background: Intratracheal instillation of bleomycin (Bleo) into rodents serves as a model for human lung fibrosis. Various mouse strains respond differently to Bleo, and BALB/c mice are relatively resistant. Objective: Since T lymphocytes have been shown to play a major role in this model, the effect of the immunomodulator cyclosporin A (CyA) on lung fibrosis was studied in Bleo-‘resistant’ BALB/c mice. Methods: Pulmonary fibrosis was induced by a single intratracheal (IT) instillation of Bleo. One of the four following treatments was given to one of four groups of female BALB/c mice: (1) Bleo-CyA: IT Bleo and daily intraperitoneal (IP) injections of CyA 100 mg/day starting 1 day before IT instillation of Bleo; (2) Bleo-Sal: IT Bleo and IP injections of saline; (3) Sal-CyA: IT saline and IP CyA 100 mg/kg; (4) Sal-Sal: IT and IP saline. The animals were killed on day 14. Fibrosis was evaluated by analysis of hydroxyproline and by quantitative image analysis of the fibrosis fraction. Ex vivo IFN-γ, IL-4, IL-13 and IL-5 secretion by peribronchial lymphatic tissue lymphocytes was measured. Results: Pretreatment with CyA upmodulated Bleo-induced lung fibrosis in the Bleo-‘resistant’ BALB/c mice; hydroxyproline was higher in Bleo-CyA compared to Bleo-Sal animals and both hydroxyproline and fibrosis fraction measurements were higher in Bleo-CyA compared to Sal-Sal. Cytokine secretion by lymphocytes demonstrated increased IFN-γ/IL-4 and IFN-γ/IL-13 mean secretion ratios in the Bleo-CyA animals compared to the Bleo-Sal animals. Conclusions: These results indicate that CyA upmodulates Bleo-induced lung fibrosis in Bleo-‘resistant’ BALB/c mice by allowing the emergence of a Th1 inflammatory response.