Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bus Lines Explorer: Interactive Exploration of Public Transportation Data

Public transportation movement data provide a wealth of information and insights into many aspects of urban life and human behavior. However, huge amounts of raw data, coupled with incomplete or inconsistent records, may turn into an obstacle for the effective use of the available information. The need for effective movement data analysis has resulted in a large number of visual analytics tools and specialized views. There are still many challenges in public transportation and other kinds of cyclic movement data analysis. In this paper we address some of those challenges by presenting an improvement of the standard map view. This improved view is specifically designed to simplify and make the visual analysis of complex movement data easier to perform, especially when integrated in a coordinated multiple views tool and articulated together with other techniques. We illustrate the effectiveness of the view on public transportation data from Bahía Blanca, Argentina.
It’s a Process: Reactions to HIV Diagnosis and Engagement in HIV Care among High-Risk Heterosexuals

After HIV diagnosis, heterosexuals in high-poverty urban areas evidence delays in linkage to care and antiretroviral therapy initiation compared to other groups. Yet barriers to/facilitators of HIV care among these high-risk heterosexuals are understudied. Under the theory of triadic influence, putative barriers to HIV care engagement include individual/attitudinal-level (e.g., fear, medical distrust), social-level (e.g., stigma), and structural-level influences (e.g., poor access). Participants were African-American/Black and Hispanic adults found newly diagnosed with HIV (N = 25) as part of a community-based HIV testing study with heterosexuals in a high-poverty, high-HIV-incidence urban area. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was used. We described linkage to HIV care and clinical outcomes [CD4 counts, viral load (VL) levels] over 1 year, and then addressed qualitative research questions about the experience of receiving a new HIV diagnosis, its effects on timely engagement in HIV care, and other barriers and facilitators. Participants were assessed five times, receiving a structured interview battery, laboratory tests, data extraction from the medical record, a post-test counseling session, and in-person/phone contacts to foster linkage to care. Participants were randomly selected for qualitative interviews (N = 15/25) that were recorded and transcribed, then analyzed using systematic content analysis. Participants were 50 years old, on average (SD = 7.2 years), mostly male (80%), primarily African-American/Black (88%), and low socioeconomic status. At the first follow-up, rates of engagement in care were high (78%), but viral suppression was modest (39%). Rates improved by the final follow-up (96% engaged, 62% virally suppressed). Two-thirds (69%) were adequately retained in care over 1 year. Qualitative results revealed multi-faceted responses to receiving an HIV diagnosis. Problems accepting and internalizing one’s HIV status were common. Reaching acceptance of one’s HIV-infected status was frequently a protracted and circuitous process, but acceptance is vital for engagement in HIV care. Fear of stigma and loss of important relationships were potent barriers to acceptance. Thus, partially as a result of difficulties accepting HIV status, delays in achieving an undetectable VL are common in this population, with serious potential negative consequences for individual and public health. Interventions to foster acceptance of HIV status are needed.
Development of 50kW traction induction motor for electric vehicle (EV)

This paper summarizes the development processes of 50kW induction motor for electric vehicle. The main goal of the motor development was to produce the motor satisfying the provided design and performance requirements. In this paper, motor design and performance requirements will be presented and electromagnetic, thermal, mechanical design and analysis results will be also introduced. And finally performance characteristics of the manufactured motors will be checked from various test results.
Adaptive beamforming methods for dynamically steered microphone array systems

This paper introduces two methods for the integration of a dynamically steered beamforming filter with acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) and adaptive generalized sidelobe canceler (GSC) based beamforming methods. We evaluate the performance of a beamforming system with moving and changing source positions. Individual contributions of adaptive beamforming and steering independent AEC processing methods are evaluated for high level echo cancellation in a typical office environment. The results show that the proposed adaptive beamforming method increases the overall AEC performance even if GSC adaptation would be disturbed by dynamic beam steering.
Towards Playlist Generation Algorithms Using RNNs Trained on Within-Track Transitions

We introduce a novel playlist generation algorithm that focuses on the quality of transitions using a recurrent neural network (RNN). The proposed model assumes that optimal transitions between tracks can be modelled and predicted by internal transitions within music tracks. We introduce modelling sequences of high-level music descriptors using RNNs and discuss an experiment involving different similarity functions, where the sequences are provided by a musical structural analysis algorithm. Qualitative observations show that the proposed approach can effectively model transitions of music tracks in playlists.
Too much of a good thing?

‘Oxygenation’ failure is both a common cause and a consequence of critical illness, and the optimisation of oxygen delivery is a key and central tenet of intensive care medicine. However, the best strategy for achieving this goal has proved remarkably difficult to define. Transfusion and supra-normalisation of cardiac index have both been associated with unexpected harm in some categories of critically ill patient.1–3 However, perhaps the most fundamental weakness in the supportive care evidence base is our inability to recommend an optimal PaO2/FiO2 ratio to best balance the risks and benefits of supplemental oxygen therapy. This is because too much and too little oxygen can both result in host injury in the setting of critical illness. Efforts to avoid injurious ventilator settings, unopposed atelectasis, vasoconstriction, loss of hypoxic ventilatory drive and free radical injury are offset by the known benefits of enhanced oxygen delivery and the discovery that ‘permissive’ hypoxia may have long term neurocognitive sequelae.4–7 The presence of traumatic brain injury (TBI) raises the stakes and the complexity of this risk-benefit equation. It is unsurprising that evidence surrounding optimal oxygenation of brain-injured patients is inconsistent. While some individual institutions have reported a benefit from brain …
High-Performance Liquid Chromatographic Determination of Fluvoxamine and Fluvoxamino Acid in Human Plasma

A high-performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method has been developed for the simultaneous determination of fluvoxamine and its major metabolite fluvoxamino acid in plasma. Fluvoxamine and fluvoxamino acid in plasma were extracted using a C_18 bonded-solid phase cartridge, followed by C_4 reversed-phase HPLC separation. Fluvoxamine, fluvoxamino acid and moperone as an internal standard were detected by ultraviolet absorbance at 254 nm. It was possible to determine both fluvoxamine and fluvoxamino acid in the concentration range of 25.0–200.0 ng/mL, respectively. The detection limits of both fluvoxamine and fluvoxamino acid were 10.0 ng/mL, respectively. The mean recoveries of fluvoxamine and fluvoxamino acid added to plasma were more than 94.0% and 96.5%, with a coefficient of variation of less than 7.6% and 8.2%, respectively. This method has been used for the simultaneous determination of steady-state plasma concentration (Css) of fluvoxamine and fluvoxamino acid in depressive patients treated with 200 mg of oral fluvoxamine dosed as 100 mg twice-daily. The Css values of fluvoxamine and fluvoxamino acid in twelve Japanese patients were showed individual variations, which were in the range of 48.3–532.9 ng/ml and 35.6–307.1 ng/ml, respectively.
Implicit Imitation in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

Imitation is actively being studied as an effective means of learning in multi-agent environments. It allows an agent to learn how to act well (perhaps optimally) by passively observing the actions of cooperative teachers or other more experienced agents its environment. We propose a straightforward imitation mechanism called model extraction that can be integrated easily into standard model-based reinforcement learning algorithms. Roughly, by observing a mentor with similar capabilities, an agent can extract information about its own capabilities in unvisited parts of state space. The extracted information can accelerate learning dramatically. We illustrate the benefits of model extraction by integrating it with prioritized sweeping, and demonstrating improved performance and convergence through observation of single and multiple mentors. Though we make some stringent assumptions regarding observability, possible interactions and common abilities, we briefly comment on extensions of the model that relax these.
A Behavior-based Adaptive Access-mode for Low-power Set-associative Caches in Embedded Systems

Modern embedded processors commonly use a set-associative scheme to reduce cache misses. However, a conventional set-associative cache has its drawbacks in terms of power consumption because it has to probe all ways to reduce the access time, although only the matched way is used. The energy spent in accessing the other ways is wasted, and the percentage of such energy will increase as cache associativity increases. Previous research, such as phased caches, way prediction caches and partial tag comparison, have been proposed to reduce the power consumption of set-associative caches by optimizing the cache access mode. However, these methods are not adaptable according to the program behavior because of using a single access mode throughout the program execution. In this paper, we propose a behavior-based adaptive access-mode for set-associative caches in embedded systems, which can dynamically adjust the access modes during the program execution. First, a program is divided into several phases based on the principle of program behavior repetition. Then, an off-system pre-analysis is used to exploit the optimal access mode for each phase so that each phase employs the different optimal access mode to meet the application's demand during the program execution. Our proposed approach requires little hardware overhead and commits most workload to the software, so it is very effective for embedded processors. Simulation by using Spec 2000 shows that our proposed approach can reduce roughly 76.95% and 64.67% of power for an instruction cache and a data cache, respectively. At the same time, the performance degradation is less than 1%.
Voice source localization for automatic camera pointing system in videoconferencing

This paper describes the voice source localization algorithm used in the PictureTel automatic camera pointing system (LimeLight/sup TM/, dynamic speech locating technology). The system uses an array of 46 cm wide and 30 cm high, which contains 4 microphones, and is mounted on top of the monitor. The three dimensional position of a sound source is calculated from the time delays of 4 pairs of microphones. In time delay estimation, the averaging of signal onsets of each frequency band is combined with phase correlation to reduce the influence of noise and reverberation. With this approach, it is possible to provide reliable three dimensional voice source localization by a small microphone array. Post processing based on a priori knowledge is also introduced to eliminate the influences of reflections from furniture such as tables. Results of speech source localization under real conference room conditions are given. Some system related issues are also discussed.
Random-Facet and Random-Bland require subexponential time even for shortest paths

The Random-Facet algorithm of Kalai and of Matousek, Sharir and Welzl is an elegant randomized algorithm for solving linear programs and more general LP-type problems. Its expected subexponential time of $2^{\tilde{O}(\sqrt{m})}$, where $m$ is the number of inequalities, makes it the fastest known combinatorial algorithm for solving linear programs. We previously showed that Random-Facet performs an expected number of $2^{\tilde{\Omega}(\sqrt[3]{m})}$ pivoting steps on some LPs with $m$ inequalities that correspond to $m$-action Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We also showed that Random-Facet-1P, a one permutation variant of Random-Facet, performs an expected number of $2^{\tilde{O}(\sqrt{m})}$ pivoting steps on these examples. Here we show that the same results can be obtained using LPs that correspond to instances of the classical shortest paths problem. This shows that the stochasticity of the MDPs, which is essential for obtaining lower bounds for Random-Edge, is not needed in order to obtain lower bounds for Random-Facet. We also show that our new $2^{\tilde{\Omega}(\sqrt{m})}$ lower bound applies to Random-Bland, a randomized variant of the classical anti-cycling rule suggested by Bland.
Monocular Human Motion Capture with a Mixture of Regressors

We address 3D human motion capture from monocular images, taking a learning based approach to construct a probabilistic pose estimation model from a set of labelled human silhouettes. To compensate for ambiguities in the pose reconstruction problem, our model explicitly calculates several possible pose hypotheses. It uses locality on a manifold in the input space and connectivity in the output space to identify regions of multi-valuedness in the mapping from silhouette to 3D pose. This information is used to fit a mixture of regressors on the input manifold, giving us a global model capable of predicting the possible poses with corresponding probabilities. These are then used in a dynamicalmodel based tracker that automatically detects tracking failures and re-initializes in a probabilistically correct manner. The system is trained on conventional motion capture data, using both the corresponding real human silhouettes and silhouettes synthesized artificially from several different models for improved robustness to inter-person variations. Static pose estimation is illustrated on a variety of silhouettes. The robustness of the method is demonstrated by tracking on a real image sequence requiring multiple automatic re-initializations.
Nonanalytic corrections to the Fermi-liquid behavior

The issue of nonanalytic corrections to the Fermi-liquid behavior is revisited. Previous studies have indicated that the corrections to the Fermi-liquid forms of the specific heat and the static spin susceptibility (C F L T, X F L s=const) are nonanalytic in D≤3 and scale as δC(T)T D , Χ s (T)T D - 1 , and Χ s (Q)Q D - 1 , with extra logarithms in D=3 and 1. It is shown that these nonanalytic corrections originate from the universal singularities in the dynamical bosonic response functions of a generic Fermi liquid. In contrast to the leading, Fermi-liquid forms which depend on the interaction averaged over the Fermi surface, the nonanalytic corrections are parametrized by only two coupling constants, which are the components of the interaction potential at momentum transfers q=0 and q=2p F . For three-dimensional (3D) systems, a recent result of Belitz, Kirkpatrick, and Vojta for the spin susceptibility is reproduced and the issue why a nonanalytic momentum dependence, Χ s (Q,T=0)-Χ F L s Q 2 log Q, is not paralleled by a nonanalyticity in the T dependence [Χ s (0,T)-Χ F L s ]T 2 is clarified. For 2D systems, explicit forms of C(T)-C F L T 2 , Χ(Q,T=0)-Χ F L ‖Q‖. and Χ(0,T)-Χ F L T are obtained. It is shown that earlier calculations of the temperature dependences in two dimensions are incomplete.
Fabrication of high-efficiency ultraviolet blazed gratings by use of direct Ar2-CHF3 ion-beam etching through a rectangular photoresist mask

In ultraviolet spectroscopy, there is a constant need to improve the diffraction efficiency. A blazed grating can concentrate most of the light intensity into a desired diffraction order, so it is the optimum choice among gratings of different kinds of profile. As the operating wavelength of most UV spectral applications is less than 200 nm, the required blaze angle is small; groove irregularity and surface roughness of nanometer magnitude can cause a significant loss of diffraction efficiency. Therefore, it is important to control the groove shape precisely , especially the blaze angle and the apical angle. We have presented a direct shaping method to fabricate EUV blazed gratings by using an ion-beam mixture of Ar+ and CHF2+to etch K9 glass with a rectangular photoresist mask. With this method, we have succeeded in fabricating well-shaped UV blazed gratings with a 1200 line/mm groove density and 8.54° blaze angles and 1200 line/mm groove density and 11.68° blaze angles, and the metrical efficiency is about 81% and 78%. The good performance of the gratings was verified by diffraction efficiency measurements. When one uses the etching model, the conditions on the ion-beam grazing incident angle and the CHF3partial pressure should be noted. Besides, since the etched groove shape depends on the aspect ratio of the photoresist mask ridge, if we wish to fabricate larger gratings with this method, we must improve the uniformity of the photoresist mask before ion-beam etching.
The European Consumers’ Understanding and Perceptions of Organic Salmon Production

Rising consumer concern over intensive food production issues has resulted in an increase in demand for organic alternatives to a wide variety of foods including fruit and vegetables, meat and poultry. More r ecently, there has also been considerable interest in the marketing of more environmentally-friendly supplies of fish, including those from farmed production systems. 'Organic' salmon has featured in the forefront of this market innovation, although it is arguably more problematic to apply traditional organic principles to salmon production. The term 'organic salmon' contains at least three different components - animal welfare, chemical use and sustainability, the most controversial issue being animal welfare. Of fundamental importance is the extent to which this term can usefully be applied to salmon and, more importantly the extent to which consumers perceive animal welfare to be an important issue in salmon farming. This paper reports on some results based upon consumer focus groups in 5 countries (France, Germany, Norway, Spain and UK) and considers a number of issues relating to fish welfare and organic salmon production more generally. As the food market continues its seemingly relentless march to greener pastures it is suggested that this study may help identify some implications for future aquatic food product development decisions.
To Share or Not to Share: Malaysian Healthcare Professionals' Views on Localized Prostate Cancer Treatment Decision Making Roles

Aim To explore the views of Malaysian healthcare professionals (HCPs) on stakeholders’ decision making roles in localized prostate cancer (PCa) treatment. Methods Qualitative interviews and focus groups were conducted with HCPs treating PCa. Data was analysed using a thematic approach. Four in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions were conducted between December 2012 and March 2013 using a topic guide. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed thematically. Findings The participants comprised private urologists (n = 4), government urologists (n = 6), urology trainees (n = 6), government policy maker (n = 1) and oncologists (n = 3). HCP perceptions of the roles of the three parties involved (HCPs, patients, family) included: HCP as the main decision maker, HCP as a guide to patients’ decision making, HCP as a facilitator to family involvement, patients as main decision maker and patient prefers HCP to decide. HCPs preferred to share the decision with patients due to equipoise between prostate treatment options. Family culture was important as family members often decided on the patient’s treatment due to Malaysia’s close-knit family culture. Conclusions A range of decision making roles were reported by HCPs. It is thus important that stakeholder roles are clarified during PCa treatment decisions. HCPs need to cultivate an awareness of sociocultural norms and family dynamics when supporting non-Western patients in making decisions about PCa.
Local recurrence in head and neck cancer: relationship to radiation resistance and signal transduction.

PURPOSE Locoregional recurrence is the dominant form of treatment failure in head and neck (H&N) cancer. The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is frequently amplified in this disease (<or=80%) and can lead to activation of phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K), both directly and indirectly through Ras. We have shown previously that radioresistance could be conferred via the Ras-PI3K pathway. Here we investigate the contribution of EGFR to this pathway and its impact on treatment outcome. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN In a series of 38 H&N cancer patients, overexpression of EGFR by immunohistochemical staining was assessed. PI3K signaling was evaluated by staining for phosphorylated Akt (P-Akt), a downstream target of PI3K. Both EGFR and P-Akt were then related to outcome. Radiation survival was determined in the SQ20B cell line, a radioresistant squamous cell line derived from a recurrent laryngeal cancer, after pharmacological blockade of EGFR with Iressa, of Ras by the FTI L744,832, or of PI3K by LY294002. RESULTS A significant association was found between P-Akt staining and local control in the patient series. Two-year local control was 100% for patients staining 0-1+ for P-Akt as compared with 70.6% for patients staining 2-3+ (P = 0.04). In our series of 38 H&N cancers, 30 (78.9%) of the specimens were strongly (3+) positive for EGFR, whereas 25 (65.8%) were moderately to strongly (2-3+) positive for P-Akt. Pharmacologically inhibiting EGFR, Ras, and PI3K led to radiosensitization of SQ20B cells. CONCLUSIONS Evaluation of PI3K activation by Akt phosphorylation might be a prognostic marker for response to therapy, and PI3K could be a useful target for therapy. These results also suggest that signaling from EGFR to PI3K can lead to radioresistance.
Workflow matching using semantic metadata

Workflows are becoming an increasingly more common paradigm to manage scientific analyses. As workflow repositories start to emerge, workflow retrieval and discovery becomes a challenge. Studies have shown that scientists wish to discover workflows given properties of workflow data inputs, intermediate data products, and data results. However, workflows typically lack this information when contributed to a repository. Our work addresses this issue by augmenting workflow descriptions with constraints derived from properties about the workflow components used to process data as well as the data itself. An important feature of our approach is that it assumes that component and data properties are obtained from catalogs that are external to the workflow system, consistent with current architectures for computational science.