Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Principled Induction of Phrasal Bilexica

We aim to replace the long and complicated, pipeline employed to produce probabilistic phrasal bilexica with a theoretically principled, grammar based, approach. To this end, we introduce a learning regime to learn a phrasal grammar equivalent to linear transduction grammars. The stochastic version of this new grammar type also has the property that the set of biterminals constitute a natural probability distribution, making it similar to a probabilistic translation lexicon. Since we learn a phrasal grammar, we are, in effect, learning a probabilistic phrasal bilexicon. As a proof of concept, we show that phrasal bilexica, induced in this manner, can be used to improve the performance of a traditional phrase-based SMT system.
Enhancing Action Recognition by Cross-Domain Dictionary Learning

We present a novel cross-dataset action recognition framework that utilizes relevant actions from other visual domains as auxiliary knowledge for enhancing the learning system in the target domain. The data distribution of relevant actions from a source dataset is adapted to match the data distribution of actions in the target dataset via a cross-domain discriminative dictionary learning method, through which a reconstructive, discriminative and domain-adaptive dictionary-pair can be learned. Using selected categories from the HMDB51 dataset as the source domain actions, the proposed framework achieves outstanding performance on the UCF YouTube dataset.
Perceptual and objective detection of discontinuities in concatenative speech synthesis

Concatenative speech synthesis systems attempt to minimize audible signal discontinuities between two successive concatenated units. An objective distance measure which is able to predict audible discontinuities is therefore very important, particularly in unit selection synthesis, for which units are selected from among a large inventory at run time. In this paper, we describe a perceptual test to measure the detection rate of concatenation discontinuity by humans, and then we evaluate 13 different objective distance measures based on their ability to predict the human results. Criteria used to classify these distances include the detection rate, the Bhattacharyya measure of separability of two distributions, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Results show that the Kullback-Leibler distance on power spectra has the higher detection rate followed by the Euclidean distance on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC).
Human capital development: what can South Africa learn from Botswana?

South Africa and Botswana share a number of commonalities, although the two countries are distinctly different in terms of economic performance, population size, and human capital development. This paper provides analysis of human capital development factors that contribute to differences in the human capital index score of the two countries. In 2013, the World Economic Forum published the first edition of the Human Capital Report which measures human capital using an index based on four pillars: (1) education; (2) health and wellness; (3) workforce employment; and (4) enabling environment. Botswana’s human capital index score is higher than that of South Africa even though both countries have negative human capital index scores. The indicators that show the fundamental differences between South Africa and Botswana are education, health and wellness as well as workforce employment. The differences are discussed in terms of their implications to policy formulation.
Direct Estimation of the Minimum RSS Value for Training Bayesian Knowledge Tracing Parameters

Student modeling can help guide the behavior of a cognitive tutor system and provide insight to researchers on understanding how students learn. In this context, Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) is one of the most popular knowledge inference models due to its predictive accuracy, interpretability and ability to infer student knowledge. However, the most popular methods for training the parameters of BKT have some problems, such as identifiability, local minima, degenerate parameters and computational cost during fitting. In this paper we address some of the issues of one of these training models, BKT Brute Force. Instead of finding the parameter values that provide the lowest Residual Sum of Squares (RSS), we estimate this minimum RSS value from some a priori known values of the skill. From there we perform some preliminary analysis to improve our knowledge of the relationship between the RSS, from BKT-BF, and the four BKT parameters.
Contracts and Performance in Private Equity Investments ∗

Exploiting a unique opportunity offered by the Italian private equity (PE) market, we uncover a positive relationship between the presence of covenants and several measures of performance of PE investments at the deal level. We conjecture that covenants contain private information available to the contracting parties involved in the deal, and set up a structural model in which the inclusion of covenants depends on the expected increase in returns to these parties when the covenant is present. The structural model allows us to conclude that (i) deals with a poor governance structure have a lower performance, (ii) PE investors have a large bargaining power, and (iii) covenants and pricing of PE deals are used by PE investors as complements. JEL Classifications: G11, G23, G24
Hieroglyph

Despite their widespread adoption, large-scale graph processing systems do not fully decouple computation and communication, often yielding suboptimal performance. Locally-sufficient computation-computation that relies only on the graph state local to a computing host-can mitigate the effects of this coupling. In this paper, we present Compute-Sync-Merge (CSM), a new programming abstraction that achieves efficient locally-sufficient computation. CSM enforces local sufficiency at the programming abstraction level and enables the activation of vertex-centric computation on all vertex replicas, thus supporting vertex-cut partitioning. We demonstrate the simplicity of expressing several fundamental graph algorithms in CSM. Hieroglyph-our implementation of a graph processing system with CSM support-outperforms state of the art by up to 53x, with a median speedup of 3.5x and an average speedup of 6x across a wide range of datasets.
Clinical and Electrophysiological Assessment of Peripheral Neurotoxicity in Cancer Patients Treated with Paclitaxel Chemotherapy

Background: Taxane-induced peripheral neuropathy (TIPN) is a dose-limiting side effect and can lead to severe disability. Objective: To study the clinical and electrophysiological findings of paclitaxel (taxane) induced peripheral neurotoxicity in cancer patients. Methods: The study included 34 patients scheduled to be treated with paclitaxel and paclitaxel-cisplatin based regimens according to cancer type. Patients were divided into 2 groups: The first included patients treated by paclitaxel as single agent and the second included patients treated with paclitaxel and cisplatin. Patients were clinically and electrophysiologically monitored during and 3 months after discontinuing the chemotherapy; via the Modified Peripheral Neuropathy (PNP) score. Results: Evidence of Polyneuropathy (PN) was disclosed in 25 patients of the 34 patients (73.5%) treated with paclitaxel –based chemotherapy. The mean score of PNP was significantly higher in patients of group II than in patients of group I. Moreover, it was significantly increased from the 3 rd to 6 th cycles of chemotherapy. Significant deterioration in the amplitude of sensory action potentials (a-SAPs) of both ulnar and sural nerves was seen from the 3 rd to 6 th cycles of treatment. Further progression of neuropathy after discontinuation of chemotherapy, as particularly demonstrated by the sensory conduction abnormalities, was evident in group II. Conclusion: Our results indicated that patients treated with either paclitaxel alone or in combination with cisplatin based regimens would manifest an axonal predominately sensory PN. Combination of taxane and cisplatin increase the severity of PN than taxane alone. Persistence of PN for at least 3 months after the discontinuation of paclitaxel-cisplatin based chemotherapy also should be expected. [Egypt J Neurol Psychiat Neurosurg. 2010; 47(3): 433-440]
The role of reputation in the organizational sciences: A multilevel review, construct assessment, and research directions

Abstract Scholarship on reputation in and of organizations has been going on for decades, and it always has separated along level of analysis issues, whereby the separate literatures on individual, group/team/unit, and organization reputation fail to acknowledge each other. This sends the implicit message that reputation is a fundamentally different phenomenon at the three different levels of analysis. We tested the validity of this implicit assumption by conducting a multilevel review of the reputation literature, and drawing conclusions about the “level-specific” or “level-generic” nature of the reputation construct. The review results permitted the conclusion that reputation phenomena are essentially the same at all levels of analysis. Based on this, we frame a future agenda for theory and research on reputation.
A Flexible Agent-Based Framework to Control Virtual Characters

We present a generic platform, called IViHumans, for materializing a system of multiple intelligent agents into virtual humans. It is intended to be flexible and applicable to diverse realistic simulation environments. The platform is composed of two layers: the Graphical Layer, and the Artificial Intelligence Layer, that can run autonomously. The architecture of our platform was conceived in order to allow the two layers to control the virtual agents at different detail levels.
GABAA Receptors in Central Nervous System Disease: Anxiety, Epilepsy, and Insomnia

Brain function is based on an exquisite balance between excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission. GABAergic neurons provide the major inhibitory control. By controlling spike timing and sculpting neuronal rhythms they play a key role in regulating behavior. GABAergic neurons are highly diverse and operate with a corresponding diversity of GABAA receptor subtypes. In this article, the contribution of GABAA receptor deficits to central nervous system disorders, in particular anxiety disorders, epilepsy, schizophrenia and insomnia, is reviewed.
Where is that pixel in the oblique-view video?

We investigated the problem of deducing the geographical coordinates of pixels in an oblique view video. Our goal is to register the oblique-view video of an urban scene with its cadastral map. The oblique-view videos were taken from a very low flying camera whereas the cadastral map contained only the top-down outline of buildings without any photographic content and without other objects such as trees, cars, people, or any street feature. Our registration comprises a two-step process that uses structure from motion and a matched-filter class of technique. The structure from motion step takes the video as input and outputs a 3D point cloud of the scene. As this point cloud contains objects that are not represented in the cadastral map, our algorithm was designed to emphasize automatically the scene points that are likely to be from building façade so that effects of mismatch in content between the cadastral map and the oblique video can be minimized. For the registration step, we used a coarse-to-fine iterative implementation of matched filter to get a globally optimum solution, with built in tolerance to some scale and rotation invariance. We had implemented the entire system and had tested with real world data. Good results were obtained.
Dietary Lipoic Acid Influences Antioxidant Capability and Oxidative Status of Broilers

The effects of lipoic acid (LA) on the antioxidant status of broilers were investigated. Birds (1 day old) were randomly assigned to four groups and fed corn-soybean diets supplemented with 0, 100, 200, 300 mg/kg LA, respectively. The feeding program included a starter diet from 1 to 21 days of age and a grower diet from 22 to 42 days of age. Serum, liver and muscle samples were collected at 42 days of age. For antioxidant enzymes, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) activity in serum, liver and breast muscle significantly increased in chickens fed with LA. The concentration of malondiadehyde (MDA), an indicator of lipid peroxidation, was significantly lower in serum, liver and leg muscle in birds that received LA than in the control group. Treatments with LA significantly increased glutathione (GSH) content in liver and increased α-tocopherol content in leg muscle as compared to the control. These results indicate that dietary supplementation with 300 mg/kg LA may enhance antioxidant capability and depress oxidative stress in broilers.
Spicing Up Open Source Development with a Touch of Crowdsourcing

Leveraging the work and innovation of third party developers has risen as a viable business model for software companies. Most obviously, open source software has become an opportune ecosystem for creating innovative products with minimum number of paid developers. Then, having a company core where most of the development is done in-house by developers employed by the company can lead to a situation where the community contributions are not smoothly integrated into the code base of the open source product. Similarly, during the last decade, the use of the specialized workforce available online -- so-called crowd sourcing -- has received a lot of attention. While tapping into the unknown group of experts differs from the open source community-driven approach, they share certain similarities as well. In this paper, we present results of an initial study on how adopting and utilizing elements from crowd sourcing can help to boost community contributions in company lead development of an open source software product. We further discuss how such activity can be supported by an in-house development model where all contributions whether done by the developers of the company or community participants enter a common, automated integration pipeline.
Striatal and extrastriatal dopamine release measured with PET and [18F] fallypride

The amphetamine challenge, in which positron emission tomography (PET) or single photon emission computed tomography radioligand binding following administration of amphetamine is compared to baseline values, has been successfully used in a number of brain imaging studies as an indicator of dopaminergic function, particularly in the striatum. [18F] fallypride is the first PET radioligand that allows measurement of the effects of amphetamine on D2/D3 ligand binding in striatum and extra‐striatal brain regions in a single scanning session following amphetamine. We scanned 15 healthy volunteer subjects with [18F] fallypride at baseline and following amphetamine (0.3 mg/kg) using arterial plasma input‐based modeling as well as reference region methods. We found that amphetamine effect was robustly detected in ventral striatum, globus pallidus, and posterior putamen, and with slightly higher variability in other striatal subregions. However, the observed effect sizes in striatum were less than those observed in previous studies in our laboratory using [11C] raclopride. Robust effect was also detected in limbic extra‐striatal regions (hippocampus, amygdala) and substantia nigra, but the signal‐to‐noise ratio was too low to allow accurate measurement in cortical regions. We conclude that [18F] fallypride is a suitable ligand for measuring amphetamine effect in striatum and limbic regions, but it is not suitable for measuring the effect in cortical regions and may not provide the most powerful way to measure the effect in striatum. Synapse 64:350–362, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Delays of multiple reflections from Bragg layered structures

The time delays of pulses reflected from periodic and non-periodic Bragg layered structures have been investigated. The specific structures such as Bragg reflectors and structures with chirp variation of thickness of the “period” have been considered. The calculation has been carried out under the conditions that carrier frequency is in the vicinity of the Bragg resonance values. The parameters of interpolating models have been found by methods Prony and continued fractions.
Ki67/SATB1 ratio is an independent prognostic factor of overall survival in patients with early hormone receptor-positive invasive ductal breast carcinoma

Biological diversity of breast cancer presents challenges for personalized therapy and necessitates multiparametric approaches to understand and manage the disease. Multiple protein biomarkers tested by immunohistochemistry (IHC), followed by digital image analysis and multivariate statistics of the data, have been shown to be effective in exploring latent profiles of tumor tissue immunophenotype. In this study, based on tissue microarrays of 107 patients with hormone receptor (HR) positive invasive ductal breast carcinoma, we investigated the prognostic value of the integrated immunophenotype to predict overall survival (OS) of the patients. A set of 10 IHC markers (ER, PR, HER2, Ki67, AR, BCL2, HIF-1α, SATB1, p53, and p16) was used. The main factor of the variance was characterized by opposite loadings of ER/PR/AR/BCL2 and Ki67/HIF-1α; it was associated with histological grade but did not predict OS. The second factor was driven by SATB1 expression along with moderate positive HIF-1α and weak negative Ki67 loadings. Importantly, this factor did not correlate with any clinicopathologic parameters, but was an independent predictor of better OS. Ki67 and SATB1 did not reach statistical significance as single predictors; however, high Ki67/SATB1 ratio was an independent predictor of worse OS. In addition, our data indicate potential double prognostic meaning of HIF-1α expression in breast cancer and necessitate focused studies, taking into account the immunophenotype interactions and tissue heterogeneity aspects.
Solving combinatorial optimisation problems in transport multi-agent systems using Hopfield-neural network

The tasks planning in the transport domain is a difficult problem which requires the use of analytical techniques and modelling methods resulting from the operational research, the distributed Artificial Intelligence (multiagents systems), the decision analysis, and many other disciplines. Our contribution to this problem consists on one hand of proposing a modelling of the transport system by a multi-agents system (MAS) based on a classification model of agents to manage our different agent Subsystems (supervision subsystem, planning subsystem, ergonomic subsystem) at the same time, while keeping a global structure; and on the other hand of deploying a Fuzzy Hopfield-Neural Network model to solve the routing and scheduling problems within our planning subsystem. The computational experiments were carried out on an extended set of 300 Routing problems with 21 customers. The results demonstrate that the connexionist approach is highly competitive in term of computing time, providing the best solutions to 56% of all test instances within reasonable computing times. The power of our algorithm is confirmed by the results obtained on 21 customer problems from the literature.
Learning shape priors for single view reconstruction

In this paper, we aim to reconstruct free-from 3D models from a single view by learning the prior knowledge of a specific class of objects. Instead of heuristically proposing specific regularities and defining parametric models as previous research, our shape prior is learned directly from existing 3D models under a framework based on the Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (GPLVM). The major contributions of the paper include: 1) a probabilistic framework for prior-based reconstruction we propose, which requires no heuristic of the object, and can be easily generalized to handle various categories of 3D objects, and 2) an attempt at automatic reconstruction of more complex 3D shapes, like human bodies, from 2D silhouettes only. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the efficacy of our new approach.
Real-time image-based animation using morphing with human skeletal tracking

We propose a real-time image-based animation technique for virtual fitting applications. Our method uses key image finding from a database which uses skeletal data as a search key, and then create in-between images by using image morphing. Comparing to conventional method using 3DCG rendering, our method achieves higher frame rate and realistic textile representation. Unlike [1], data size and search time are reduced with database optimization.
Does The IMF Constrain Health Spending in Poor Countries ?

Preface It is hardly a secret that the International Monetary Fund has won few friends among the many organizations and individuals who work in global health. Those who have worked hard in the past decade to mobilize unprecedented levels of funding and attention for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other health programs in low-income countries have contended that the IMF's approach to macroeconomic management has constrained effective use of the donor funds now on offer and has thereby weakened efforts to improve health conditions in countries that are most heavily burdened by disease. The IMF, for its part, has consistently responded to criticism by noting its circumscribed role, which does not include venturing into sector-level decision making, and reminded critics that health priorities must fit within a broader set of social choices that have to take account of an overall budget constraint. In the ongoing argument, we have seen an opportunity to put some new information on the table and to gain a clear-eyed understanding of the impact of IMF programs on health, generating new thinking about whether and how IMF and other organizations' practices should change. Toward that end, in the summer of 2006 Center for Global Development we invited Visiting Fellow David Goldsbrough, who has a deep understanding of the IMF's strengths and limitations, to lead a new Working Group of 15 individuals with a diverse range of experience on health sector and macroeconomic issues. This report is the result of that effort, making a major contribution with dispassionate analysis and clear recommendations – for the IMF, the World Bank, the governments of countries working within IMF programs, and civil society organizations. The messages are clear but not simple-minded, and the analysis should be welcomed by all those who have struggled to sort out what the debate is really about. The group explored, for example, what assumptions about aid flows enter into IMF projections of available resources, whether those assumptions are well founded, and whether the Fund's characteristically conservative view on fiscal management prevents governments from considering viable options for increasing health spending. It looked at whether and how caps on the overall public sector wage bill used in many IMF programs, especially in Africa, constrain the ability of health sector leaders to recruit and retain health workers. And it looked at whether the IMF's mode of operations keeps the conversation limited to only a few of the stakeholders …