Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increasing Behavioral Complexity for Evolved Virtual Creatures with the ESP Method

Since their introduction in 1994 (Sims), evolved virtual creatures (EVCs) have employed the coevolution of morphology and control to produce high-impact work in multiple fields, including graphics, evolutionary computation, robotics, and artificial life. However, in contrast to fixed-morphology creatures, there has been no clear increase in the behavioral complexity of EVCs in those two decades. This paper describes a method for moving beyond this limit, making use of high-level human input in the form of a syllabus of intermediate learning tasks--along with mechanisms for preservation, reuse, and combination of previously learned tasks. This method--named ESP for its three components: encapsulation, syllabus, and pandemonium--is presented in two complementary versions: Fast ESP, which constrains later morphological changes to achieve linear growth in computation time as behavioral complexity is added, and General ESP, which allows this restriction to be removed when sufficient computational resources are available. Experiments demonstrate that the ESP method allows evolved virtual creatures to reach new levels of behavioral complexity in the co-evolution of morphology and control, approximately doubling the previous state of the art.
Peptide Antagonists That Inhibit Sin Nombre Virus and Hantaan Virus Entry through the β3-Integrin Receptor

ABSTRACT Specific therapy is not available for the treatment of hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome caused by Sin Nombre virus (SNV). The entry of pathogenic hantaviruses into susceptible human cells is dependent upon expression of the αvβ3 integrin, and transfection of human β3 integrin is sufficient to confer infectibility onto CHO (Chinese hamster ovary) cells. Furthermore, pretreatment of susceptible cells with anti-β3 antibodies such as c7E3 or its Fab fragment ReoPro prevents hantavirus entry. By using repeated selection of a cyclic nonamer peptide phage display library on purified αvβ3, we identified 70 peptides that were competitively eluted with ReoPro. Each of these peptides was examined for its ability to reduce the number of foci of SNV strain SN77734 in a fluorescence-based focus reduction assay according to the method of Gavrilovskaya et al. (I. N. Gavrilovskaya, M. Shepley, R. Shaw, M. H. Ginsberg, and E. R. Mackow, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 95:7074-7079, 1998). We found that 11 peptides reduced the number of foci to a greater extent than did 80 μg/ml ReoPro when preincubated with Vero E6 cells. In addition, 8 of the 70 peptides had sequence similarity to SNV glycoproteins. We compared all 18 peptide sequences (10 most potent, 7 peptides with sequence similarity to hantavirus glycoproteins, and 1 peptide that was in the group that displayed the greatest potency and had significant sequence similarity) for their abilities to inhibit SNV, Hantaan virus (HTNV), and Prospect Hill virus (PHV) infection. There was a marked trend for the peptides to inhibit SNV and HTNV to a greater extent than they inhibited PHV, a finding that supports the contention that SNV and HTNV use β3 integrins and PHV uses a different receptor, β1 integrin. We then chemically synthesized the four peptides that showed the greatest ability to neutralize SNV. These peptides inhibited viral entry in vitro as free peptides outside of the context of a phage. Some combinations of peptides proved more inhibitory than did individual peptides. In all, we have identified novel peptides that inhibit entry by SNV and HTNV via β3 integrins and that can be used as lead compounds for further structural optimization and consequent enhancement of activity.
Trust and Reputation in Social Internetworking Systems

A Social Internetworking System (SIS) is the scenario arising when Web users decide to affiliate to multiple social networks. Recent studies show an increasing user tendency of creating multiple identities on different social systems and exposing, in each of them, different traits of their personalities and tastes. This information provides a better picture of user needs and enhances the quality of services they can use. In the next years a large growth of SIS phenomenon is foreseeable. In order to boost the level of user participation in a SIS, suitable mechanisms capable of discerning reliable users must be designed. We propose a model to represent a SIS, a software architecture to gather real data and analyze the structural properties of a SIS. In concrete use cases with different contexts and different levels of protection of data, we introduce an ontology-based model to compute trust and reputation in a SIS. This research is collaborative effort between the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of Reggio Calabria in the context of a Marie Curie Fellowship.
Adjustment to Chronic Diseases and Terminal Illness Health Psychology : Psychological Adjustment to Chronic Disease

Experiences of emotion are content-rich events that emerge at the level of psychological description, but must be causally constituted by neurobiological processes. This chapter outlines an emerging scientific agenda for understanding what these experiences feel like and how they arise. We review the available answers to what is felt (i.e., the content that makes up an experience of emotion) and how neurobiological processes instantiate these properties of experience. These answers are then integrated into a broad framework that describes, in psychological terms, how the experience of emotion emerges from more basic processes. We then discuss the role of such experiences in the economy of the mind and behavior. 373 A nn u. R ev . P sy ch ol . 2 00 7. 58 :3 73 -4 03 . D ow nl oa de d fr om a rj ou rn al s. an nu al re vi ew s. or g by D r L is a Fe ld m an B ar re tt on 1 2/ 10 /0 6. F or p er so na l u se o nl y. ANRV296-PS58-15 ARI 21 November 2006 17:58
Comparision and analysis of photo image forgery detection techniques

Digital Photo images are everywhere, on the covers of magazines, in newspapers, in courtrooms, and all over the Internet. We are exposed to them throughout the day and most of the time. Ease with which images can be manipulated; we need to be aware that seeing does not always imply believing. We propose methodologies to identify such unbelievable photo images and succeeded to identify forged region by given only the forged image. Formats are additive tag for every file system and contents are relatively expressed with extension based on most popular digital camera uses JPEG and Other image formats like png, bmp etc. We have designed algorithm running behind with the concept of abnormal anomalies and identify the forgery regions.
SwiftFile: An Intelligent Assistant for Organizing E-Mail

While most e-mail clients allow users to file messages into folders, the process they must go through to file each message is often tedious and slow. For each message, the user must first decide which folder is most appropriate. Then, the user must inform the e-mall reader of that choice by selecting the appropriate icon or menu item from among what is typically a set of several dozen choices. The combined effort of choosing a folder and conveying that choice to the application often discourages users from filing their mall, resulting in unmanageable inboxes that contain hundreds or even thousands of unfiled messages. SwiftFile encourages users to file their mall by simplifying the task. Using an adaptive classifier, it predicts the three folders that are most likely to be appropriate for a given message and provides shortcut buttons that permit the user to effortlessly file it into a predicted folder. For typical users, SwiftFile’s predictions are accurate over 80% to 90% of the time, resulting in a substantial reduction in the time and cognitive burden required to file messages.
Towards a Time-based Approach for Author Co-citation Analysis

The Author co-Citation Analysis (ACA) is a widely used statistical technique for mining information about those authors who publish in related research domains. The existing ACA technique generates author clusters by initially defining the co-citation count. Co-citation count between authors of two different research papers is defined as the number of times these authors are cited together by a set of source papers. The technique used to determine the co-citation count needs to be effective as it greatly influences the obtained author clusters. This paper presents an enhanced ACA that utilizes a novel co-citation counting technique. The enhanced ACA technique takes into consideration the research papers referred to in the source paper, the papers that have cited the source paper, and their publication year. Experimental results obtained indicate that the author clusters produced, comprise primarily of active researchers having published in the recent time period, specified in years. In this study, we have assumed that active researchers are those who have published in or after the year 2000. The proposed Time based ACA (TACA) technique uses a real time data set consisting of papers collected from ACM’s Transaction on Database Systems (TODS) journal from the year 2006-2009. The average precision of the proposed technique is found to be around 93%, when evaluated against the benchmark ACM Computing Classification System (CCS).
Out of sight – out of mind? Information acquisition patterns in risky choice framing

: We investigate whether risky choice framing, i.e., the preference of a sure over an equivalent risky option when choosing among gains, and the reverse when choosing among losses, depends on redundancy and density of information available in a task. Redundancy, the saliency of missing information, and density, the description of options in one or multiple chunks, was manipulated in a matrix setup presented in MouselabWeb. On the choice level we found a framing effect only in setups with non-redundant information. On the process level outcomes attracted more acquisitions than probabilities, irrespective of redundancy. A dissociation between acquisition behavior and choice calls for a critical discussion of the limits of process-tracing measures for understanding and predicting choices in decision making tasks.
Approximation of Empowerment in the continuous Domain

The empowerment formalism offers a goal-independent utility function fully derived from an agent's embodiment. It produces intrinsic motivations which can be used to generate self-organizing behaviors in agents. One obstacle to the application of empowerment in more demanding (esp. continuous) domains is that previous ways of calculating empowerment have been very time consuming and only provided a proof-of-concept. In this paper we present a new approach to efficiently approximate empowerment as a parallel, linear, Gaussian channel capacity problem. We use pendulum balancing to demonstrate this new method, and compare it to earlier approximation methods.
Effects of Technology Enhancements and Type of Teacher Support on Assessing Spanish-Speaking Children’s Oral Reading Fluency in Second Grade

We examined student-, classroom-, and school-level effects in predicting second-grade Spanish-speaking children’s oral reading fluency in Spanish. Teachers in 67 randomly selected urban schools administered the Tejas LEE to 1,537 first- and second-grade students. Oral reading fluency was measured in the passages students read for comprehension. Covariates were mean fluency in Grade 1, variability in fluency in Grade 1, degree of grouping in the school, and the proportion of second-grade students in the classroom and/or the school taking the Tejas LEE. Treatment effects were administration format (paper, desktop, handheld) and type of teacher support (no mentoring, web mentoring, and on-site plus web mentoring). Second-grade teachers positively affected students’ reading fluency when (a) they administered the Tejas LEE on paper with the associated paper reports in classrooms of bilingual students, and (b) they either received web mentoring and had relatively homogeneous classrooms or received on-site or no mentoring and had ability-grouped classes. Implications for interpreting assessment results are discussed in the context of the type of support provided to teachers and the grouping of bilingual students by language and/or by ability.
Expression in Escherichia coli and function of Pseudomonas aeruginosa outer membrane porin protein F

The gene encoding porin protein F of Pseudomonas aeruginosa was cloned onto a cosmid vector into Escherichia coli. Protein F was expressed as the predominant outer membrane protein in a porin-deficient E. coli background and was clearly visible on one-dimensional sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gels in a porin-sufficient background. The identity of the protein F from the E. coli clone and native P. aeruginosa protein F was demonstrated by their identical mobilities on sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoretograms, 2-mercaptoethanol modifiabilities, and reactivities with monoclonal antibodies specific of two separate epitopes of protein F. In the course of gene subcloning, a 2-kilobase DNA fragment was isolated, with an apparent truncation of the part of the gene encoding the carboxy terminus of protein F. This subclone produced a 24,000-molecular-weight, outer membrane-associated, truncated protein F derivative which was not 2-mercaptoethanol modifiable and which reacted with only one of the two classes of protein F-specific monoclonal antibodies. The 2-kilobase fragment was used in Southern blot hybridizations to construct a restriction map of the cloned and subcloned fragments and to demonstrate with restriction digests of whole P. aeruginosa DNA that only one copy of the protein F gene was present in the P. aeruginosa chromosome. The protein F produced by the original cosmid clone in a porin-deficient E. coli background was purified. To demonstrate retention of porin function after cloning, the protein F from the E. coli clone was incorporated into black lipid bilayer membranes. Two major classes of channels were revealed. The predominant class of channels had an average conductance of 0.36 nS in 1 M KCl, whereas larger channels (4 to 7 nS) were seen at a lower frequency. Similar channel sizes were observed for porin protein F purified by the same method from P. aeruginosa outer membranes.
Assignment1 of TRA1 encoding ppk98 to pig chromosome 5 by fluorescent in situ hybridization and confirmation by somatic cell hybrid analysis

Porcine protein kinase 98 (ppk98) is a stress-inducible glycoprotein that is known to be constitutively and ubiquitously expressed in the endoplasmic reticulum of mammalian cells (Dechert et al., 1994). The genomic DNA sequence of the ppk98 gene has been determined by Konig et al. (1997). Sequence analyses revealed domains that are highly conserved with the human tumor rejection antigen (TRA1) or glucose-regulated protein (GRP94) genes. These findings suggest that these proteins are either identical or represent a family of closely related proteins (Konig et al., 1997). The human and mouse TRA1 genes have been located to human (HSA) chromosome 12 and mouse (MMU) chromosome 10, but, as yet, the porcine ppk98 gene (TRA1) has not been mapped. We report the localization of the pig ppk98 gene (TRA1) to porcine chromosome 5 by fluorescent in situ hybridization and somatic cell hybrid panel. This assignment supports the hypothesis that the ppk98 gene is the porcine homologue of the human TRA1 gene. Materials and methods
Fundamental Concepts and Methods in Developmental Science: A Relational Perspective

The articles in this issue represent an advance towards the goal of articulating a coherent contemporary Developmental Science. Our commentary reflects on and elaborates each contribution. The articles demonstrate a commitment to the principles of the meta-theory of a scientific paradigm termed “Relationism. ” After describing the ontological-epistemological assumptions of the relational model, we describe how these categories lead directly to a characterization of the organism and development that defines “relational developmental systems. ” The categories and characterizations result in a relational vocabulary; we discuss features of each of the articles in the context of this vocabulary.
Effective reranking for extracting protein-protein interactions from biomedical literature

A semantic parser based on the hidden vector state (HVS) model has been proposed for extracting protein-protein interactions. The HVS model is an extension of the basic discrete hidden Markov model, in which context is encoded as a stack-oriented state vector and state transitions are factored into a stack shift operation followed by the push of a new preterminal category label. In this paper, we investigate three different models, log-linear regression (LLR), neural networks (NNs) and support vector machines (SVMs), to rerank parses generated by the HVS model for protein-protein interactions extraction. Features used for reranking are manually deﬁned which include the parse information, the structure information, and the complexity information. The experimental results show that reranking can indeed improve the performance of protein-protein interactions extraction, and reranking based on SVM gives more stable performance than LLR and NN.
Automatic Reductions from PH into STRIPS or How to Generate Short Problems with Very Long Solutions

Recently, it has been shown how to automatically translate any problem in NP, expressed in the language of second-order logic, into a STRIPS planning problem. In this work, we extend this translation by considering decision problems in the polynomial-time hierarchy (PH) and not just NP. Since decision problems in PH require in general exponentially-long “certificates”, the plans (if any) for the resulting STRIPS problems may have exponential length. Besides explaining the novel translations, we present experimental results and discuss the challenges that such problems pose.
Food patterns defined by cluster analysis and their utility as dietary exposure variables: a report from the Malmö Diet and Cancer Study

Abstract Objective To explore the utility of cluster analysis in defining complex dietary exposures, separately with two types of variables. Design A modified diet history method, combining a 7-day menu book and a 168-item questionnaire, assessed dietary habits. A standardized questionnaire collected information on sociodemographics, lifestyle and health history. Anthropometric information was obtained through direct measurements. The dietary information was collapsed into 43 generic food groups, and converted into variables indicating the per cent contribution of specific food groups to total energy intake. Food patterns were identified by the QUICK CLUSTER procedure in SPSS, in two separate analytical steps using unstandardized and standardized (Z-scores) clustering variables. Setting The Malmö Diet and Cancer (MDC) Study, a prospective study in the third largest city of Sweden, with baseline examinations from March 1991 to October 1996. Subjects A random sample of 2206 men and 3151 women from the MDC cohort (n=28098). Results Both variable types produced conceptually well separated clusters, confirmed with discriminant analysis. ‘Healthy’ and ‘less healthy’ food patterns were also identified with both types of variables. However, nutrient intake differences across clusters were greater, and the distribution of the number of individuals more even, with the unstandardized variables. Logistic regression indicated higher risks of past food habit change, underreporting of energy and higher body mass index (BMI) for individuals falling into ‘healthy’ food pattern clusters. Conclusions The utility in discriminating dietary exposures appears greater for unstandardized food group variables. Future studies on diet and cancer need to recognize the confounding factors associated with ‘healthy’ food patterns.
A new species of Trachymyrmex (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) fungus-growing ant from the Sierra Madre Oriental of northeastern Mexico

Abstract Here we describe a new species of Trachymyrmex, T. pakawa sp. n. , from the Gran Sierra Plegada range of the Sierra Madre Oriental, in the states of Coahuila and Nuevo Leon, northeastern Mexico. Trachymyrmex pakawa is a large-sized species compared to other North American Trachymyrmex. Its geographic distribution includes the piedmont of the Gran Sierra Plegada at La Estanzuela, Monterrey, as well as peripheral mountains segregated from the Sierra Madre Oriental (Cerro de las Mitras, Sierra de Zapalinamé, Cañon de San Lorenzo, Cerro de las Letras). The preferred habitats of T. pakawa include oak-pine forest at La Estanzuela, xeric oak forest at Zapalinamé and mesic Chihuahuan desert scrub with sotol (Dasylirion) at other sites. All localities are on slopes, on very rocky, shallow lithosols overlaying large boulders. This species nests under and between large boulders and rocks. It has not been observed on alluvial or better developed, deeper soils, and it is absent from sites with human activity (urban, disturbed, and landscaped areas). It is closely related to and morphologically similar to Trachymyrmex smithi. The known distribution ranges of T. pakawa and T. smithi almost overlap in Saltillo, Coahuila state. The main character that distinguishes the new species from T. smithi is longer antennal scapes in T. pakawa; also, different nesting habits (rocky slopes vs. alluvial sites or deep sand in T. smithi), and geographic distribution. Phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequences from the mitochondrial marker cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) and the first intron of the F1 copy of the nuclear protein-coding gene Elongation Factor 1- α (EF1-α-F1) confirm a sister-species relationship between T. pakawa and T. smithi. Bayesian coalescent analyses indicate a divergence time of about 8.00 million years before present (95% confidence interval: 4.8–11.5 mya) between T. pakawa and T. smithi. The divergence of the lineages of T. pakawa and T. smithi could have been driven by the Pliocene-Holocene desertification of southwestern North America. This process resulted in isolated mesic refugia and forests in the Madrean ranges and piedmonts of northeastern Mexico (the current habitat of T. pakawa) while T. smithi adapted to the deeper, often sandy soils on the drier desert plains of Coahuila and Chihuahua states in Mexico, and New Mexico and Texas in the USA. Within the Nearctic species of the Trachymyrmex septentrionalis species group, T. pakawa is the species that is closest (by geographical distribution) to Neotropical species of Trachymyrmex like T. saussurei.
Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: the case of dislocation

Citation for published version (APA): Notley, A. , van der Linden, E. H. , & Hulk, A. C. J. (2007). Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: the case of dislocation. In S. Baauw, F. Drijkoningen, & M. Pinto (Eds.), Romance Language and Linguistic Theory 2005, Selected papers from 'Going Romance', Utrecht, 8-10 dec. 2005 (pp. 229-259). (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory; No. 291). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.