Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Challenges with Image Event Processing: Poster

There has been substantial research in the area of event processing where systems are focused on event processing of structured data. However, in the context of smart cities, significant number of realtime applications for event-driven systems consist of image data, rather than structured events. Therefore, there is a need for a system that can process multimedia events such as images. This paper discusses challenges with processing images within event-based systems.
Getting a Handle on Learning Anatomy with Interactive Three-Dimensional Graphics

In 2 experiments, participants learned bone anatomy by using a handheld controller to rotate an on-screen 3-dimensional bone model. The on-screen bone either included orientation references, which consisted of visible lines marking its axes (orientation reference condition), or did not include such references (no-orientation reference condition). The learning task involved rotating the on-screen bone to match target orientations. Learning outcomes were assessed by asking participants to identify anatomical features from different orientations. On the learning task, the orientation reference group performed more accurately, directly, and quickly than did the control group, and high-spatial-ability individuals outperformed low-spatial-ability individuals. Assessments of anatomy learning indicated that under more challenging conditions, orientation references elevated learning by low-spatial-ability individuals to a level near that of high-spatial-ability individuals. The authors propose that orientation references assist this learning process by defining the object's main axes or providing distinguishable features.
Implicit embedding of prior probabilities in optimally efficient neural populations

We examine how the prior probability distribution of a sensory variable in the environment influences the optimal allocation of neurons and spikes in a population that represents that variable. We start with a conventional response model, in which the spikes of each neuron are drawn from a Poisson distribution with a mean rate governed by an associated tuning curve. For this model, we approximate the Fisher information in terms of the density and amplitude of the tuning curves, under the assumption that tuning width varies inversely with cell density. We consider a family of objective functions based on the expected value, over the sensory prior, of a functional of the Fisher information. This family includes lower bounds on mutual information and perceptual discriminability as special cases. For all cases, we obtain a closed form expression for the optimum, in which the density and gain of the cells in the population are power law functions of the stimulus prior. Thus, the allocation of these resources is uniquely specified by the prior. Since perceptual discriminability may be expressed directly in terms of the Fisher information, it too will be a power law function of the prior. We show that these results hold for tuning curves of arbitrary shape and correlated neuronal variability. This framework thus provides direct and experimentally testable predictions regarding the relationship between sensory priors, tuning properties of neural representations, and perceptual discriminability.
Age-Related Changes in Heritability of Behavioral Phenotypes Over Adolescence and Young Adulthood: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract The relative proportions of genetic and environmental variance in behavioral measures have been studied extensively. A growing body of literature has examined changes in heritability measures over time, but we are unaware of any prior efforts to assess developmental heritability changes for multiple behavioral phenotypes using multiple data sources. We have chosen to explore the proportional genetic influences on a variety of behaviors during the genetically and environmentally labile adolescent and young adult years. This meta-analysis examined 8 behavioral domains and incorporated only primary research articles reporting two or more heritability time points in order to minimize the age-to-age error variability. Linear regression analyses revealed significant cross-time heritability increases for externalizing behaviors, anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, IQ, and social attitudes and nonsignificant increases for alcohol consumption, and nicotine initiation, but no evidence of heritability changes for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. A variety of mechanisms may underlie these findings including the rising importance of active genotype-environment correlation, an increase in gene expression, or proportional reductions in environmental variance. Additional longitudinal studies and the inclusion of measures of total variance in primary research reports will aid in distinguishing between these possibilities. Further studies exploring heritability changes beyond young adulthood would also benefit our understanding of factors influencing heritability of behavioral traits over the lifespan.
Effects of hardness and alkalinity in culture and test waters on reproduction of Ceriodaphnia dubia

Ceriodaphnia dubia were cultured in four reconstituted water s with hardness and alkalinity concentrations ranging from soft to the moderately hard water that is required by whole‐effluent toxicity (WET) testing methods for culturing test organisms. The effects of these culture formulations alone and in combination with two levels of Cl−,SO2−4, and HCO−3 on reproduction of C. dubia were evaluated with the standard three‐brood test. Reproduction was significantly reduced when test waters had lower hardness than culture waters. However, reproduction was not significantly different when animals cultured in low‐hardness waters were exposed to moderately hard waters. The hardness of the culture water did not significantly affect the sensitivity of C. dubia to the three anions. Conversely, increased hardness in test waters significantly reduced the toxicities of Cl− and SO2−4, with HCO−3 toxicity following the same pattern. Alkalinity exhibited no consistent effect on Cl− and SO2−4 toxicity. The physiological stress of placing animals cultured in moderately hard water into softer test waters might contribute to marginal failures of otherwise nontoxic effluents. The standard WET protocol should be revised to allow the culture of C. dubia under lower hardness conditions to better represent local surface water chemistries.
Cascaded Regular Grammars over XML Documents

The basic mechanism of CLaRK for linguistic processing of text corpora is the cascade regular grammar processor. The main challenge to the grammars in question is how to apply them on XML encoding of the linguistic information. The system offers a solution using an XPath language for constructing the input word to the grammar and an XML encoding of the categories of the recognized words.
An Application of the NTCIR-WEB Raw-data Archive Dataset for User Experiments

This paper presents a simple approach to utilize past test collections as a material for user experiments. We have built a Web-based user interface for NTCIR-5 WEB run results, and conducted a user experiment with 29 subjects to investigate whether performance evaluation metrics of information retrieval systems used in test collections such as TREC and NTCIR comparable to user performance. In this experiment, we selected three types of systems from among systems that participated in NTCIR-5 WEB, and then selected three topics with roughly the same values from among several search topics. The results of the experiment showed no significant differences among these systems and topics in the time for search. While, in general, the user experiment itself have been successfully conducted and shown similar trends with prior study, the approach seems to have some limitations mainly on interactivity and cached page display.
APE1/Ref-1 Interacts with NPM1 within Nucleoli and Plays a Role in the rRNA Quality Control Process

ABSTRACT APE1/Ref-1 (hereafter, APE1), a DNA repair enzyme and a transcriptional coactivator, is a vital protein in mammals. Its role in controlling cell growth and the molecular mechanisms that fine-tune its different cellular functions are still not known. By an unbiased proteomic approach, we have identified and characterized several novel APE1 partners which, unexpectedly, include a number of proteins involved in ribosome biogenesis and RNA processing. In particular, a novel interaction between nucleophosmin (NPM1) and APE1 was characterized. We observed that the 33 N-terminal residues of APE1 are required for stable interaction with the NPM1 oligomerization domain. As a consequence of the interaction with NPM1 and RNA, APE1 is localized within the nucleolus and this localization depends on cell cycle and active rRNA transcription. NPM1 stimulates APE1 endonuclease activity on abasic double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) but decreases APE1 endonuclease activity on abasic single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) by masking the N-terminal region of APE1 required for stable RNA binding. In APE1-knocked-down cells, pre-rRNA synthesis and rRNA processing were not affected but inability to remove 8-hydroxyguanine-containing rRNA upon oxidative stress, impaired translation, lower intracellular protein content, and decreased cell growth rate were found. Our data demonstrate that APE1 affects cell growth by directly acting on RNA quality control mechanisms, thus affecting gene expression through posttranscriptional mechanisms.
Using words as lexical basis functions for automatically indexing face images in a manner that correlates with human perception of similarity

To facilitate collaboration between computers and people, computers should be able to perceive the world in a manner that correlates well with human perception. A good example of this is face image retrieval. Mathematically-based face indexing methods that are not based primarily on how humans perceive faces can produce retrievals that are disappointing to human users. This raises the question "Can human faces be automatically indexed in a manner that correlates well with human perception of similarity? " Humans use words to describe faces - words such as braided, graybearded, bearded, bespectacled, bald, blondish, blond, freckled, blue eyed, mustached, pale, Caucasian, brown eyed, dark skinned, or black eyed. Such words represent dimensions that span a shared concept space for faces. Therefore they might provide a useful guide to indexing faces in an intuitive manner. This paper describes research that uses descriptive words such as these to index faces. Each word guides the design of one feature detector that produces a scalar coefficient, and those coefficients collectively define a feature vector for each face. Given these feature vectors, it is possible to compute a similarity measure between pairs of faces, and to compare that computed similarity to the similarity, as perceived by humans.
An Exploratory Study of Task Order in Computer Test Batteries

Two of four possible tasks requiring judgments of Same or Different and which previously were administered in a between-subjects design were presented in a balanced incomplete block design to 48 undergraduate women. The relative difficulty among the four tasks was similar; however, task orders, i.e., subjects being administered one RT task before or after another, produced dissimilar decision strategies by subjects for the four tasks. Results suggest differential effects of task order in computer tests.
Drift and ownership toward a distant virtual body

In body ownership illusions participants feel that a mannequin or virtual body (VB) is their own. Earlier results suggest that body ownership over a body seen from behind in extra personal space is possible when the surrogate body is visually stroked and tapped on its back, while spatially and temporal synchronous tactile stimulation is applied to the participant's back. This result has been disputed with the claim that the results can be explained by self-recognition rather than somatic body ownership. We carried out an experiment with 30 participants in a between-groups design. They all saw the back of a VB 1.2 m in front, that moved in real-time determined by upper body motion capture. All felt tactile stimulation on their back, and for 15 of them this was spatially and temporally synchronous with stimulation that they saw on the back of the VB, but asynchronous for the other 15. After 3 min a revolving fan above the VB descended and stopped at the position of the VB neck. A questionnaire assessed referral of touch to the VB, body ownership, the illusion of drifting forwards toward the VB, and the VB drifting backwards. Heart rate deceleration (HRD) and the amount of head movement during the threat period were used to assess the response to the threat from the fan. Results showed that although referral of touch was significantly greater in the synchronous condition than the asynchronous, there were no other differences between the conditions. However, a further multivariate analysis revealed that in the visuotactile synchronous condition HRD and head movement increased with the illusion of forward drift and decreased with backwards drift. Body ownership contributed positively to these drift sensations. Our conclusion is that the setup results in a contradiction—somatic feelings associated with a distant body—that the brain attempts to resolve by generating drift illusions that would make the two bodies coincide.
Paraphrastic recurrent neural network language models

Recurrent neural network language models (RNNLM) have become an increasingly popular choice for state-of-the-art speech recognition systems. Linguistic factors in? uencing the realization of surface word sequences, for example, expressive richness, are only implicitly learned by RNNLMs. Observed sentences and their associated alternative paraphrases representing the same meaning are not explicitly related during training. In order to improve context coverage and generalization, paraphrastic RNNLMs are investigated in this paper. Multiple paraphrase variants were automatically generated and used in paraphrastic RNNLM training. Using a paraphrastic multi-level RNNLM modelling both word and phrase sequences, signi? cant error rate reductions of 0.6% absolute and perplexity reduction of 10% relative were obtained over the baseline RNNLM on a large vocabulary conversational telephone speech recognition system trained on 2000 hours of audio and 545 million words of texts. The overall improvement over the baseline n-gram LM was increased from 8.4% to 11.6% relative.
Unlocking neural population non-stationarities using hierarchical dynamics models

Neural population activity often exhibits rich variability. This variability is thought to arise from single-neuron stochasticity, neural dynamics on short time-scales, as well as from modulations of neural firing properties on long time-scales, often referred to as non-stationarity. To better understand the nature of co-variability in neural circuits and their impact on cortical information processing, we introduce a hierarchical dynamics model that is able to capture inter-trial modulations in firing rates, as well as neural population dynamics. We derive an algorithm for Bayesian Laplace propagation for fast posterior inference, and demonstrate that our model provides a better account of the structure of neural firing than existing stationary dynamics models, when applied to neural population recordings from primary visual cortex.
The performance enhancement approach for parameterized queries

All database systems must be able to respond to requests for information from the user - i.e. execute user's queries and obtain the required information from a database system in a expected and reliable fashion. Database queries are usually define in declarative manner and the database system has to choose an appropriate execution plan for the query. There are two basic ways to write a query first is to explicitly specify the values for each parameter in the WHERE clause and second way is to replace the values in the WHERE clause with variable placeholders i.e. known as Parametric query. A query optimizer in a database system is responsible for transforming an SQL query into an execution plan. All query optimizers are cost-based in that they decide between alternative execution plans by comparing their estimated execution costs. The cost of a query plan depends on many parameters such as predicate selectivity, available memory, and presence of access paths, whose values may not be known at optimization time. PQO optimizes a query into a number of candidate plans and when the actual parameter values are known, the candidate plan corresponding to the actual parameter values is select and use. Parametric query optimization attempts to recognize at compile time several execution plans, each one of which is optimal for a subset of all possible values of the run-time parameters. The objective of this paper is to define a technique when the actual parameter values are known the appropriate plan should be express with fundamentally no overhead.
Improving Author Coreference by Resource-Bounded Information Gathering from the Web

Accurate entity resolution is sometimes impossible simply due to insufficient information. For example, in research paper author name resolution, even clever use of venue, title and coauthorship relations are often not enough to make a confident coreference decision. This paper presents several methods for increasing accuracy by gathering and integrating additional evidence from the web. We formulate the coreference problem as one of graph partitioning with discriminatively-trained edge weights, and then incorporate web information either as additional features or as additional nodes in the graph. Since the web is too large to incorporate all its data, we need an efficient procedure for selecting a subset of web queries and data. We formally describe the problem of resource bounded information gathering in each of these contexts, and show significant accuracy improvement with low cost.
Lurasidone for major depressive disorder with mixed features and anxiety: a post-hoc analysis of a randomized, placebo-controlled study

Objective The aim of this post-hoc analysis was to evaluate the efficacy of lurasidone in treating patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) with mixed features who present with mild and moderate-to-severe levels of anxiety. Methods The data in this analysis were derived from a study of patients meeting the DSM–IV–TR criteria for unipolar MDD, with a Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) total score ≥26, presenting with two or three protocol-defined manic symptoms, who were randomized to 6 weeks of double-blind treatment with either lurasidone 20–60 mg/day (n=109) or placebo (n=100). Anxiety severity was evaluated using the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAM–A). To evaluate the effect of baseline anxiety on response to lurasidone, the following two anxiety groups were defined: mild anxiety (HAM–A≤14) and moderate-to-severe anxiety (HAM–A≥15). Change from baseline in MADRS total score was analyzed for each group using a mixed model for repeated measures. Results Treatment with lurasidone was associated with a significant week 6 change versus placebo in MADRS total score for patients with both mild anxiety (–18.4 vs. –12.8, p<0.01, effect size [ES]=0.59) and moderate-to-severe anxiety (–22.0 vs. –13.0, p<0.001, ES=0.95). Treatment with lurasidone was associated with a significant week 6 change versus placebo in HAM–A total score for patients with both mild anxiety (–7.6 vs. –4.0, p<0.01, ES=0.62), and moderate-to-severe anxiety (–11.4 vs. –6.1, p<0.0001, ES=0.91). Conclusions In this post-hoc analysis of an MDD with mixed features and anxiety population, treatment with lurasidone was associated with significant improvement in both depressive and anxiety symptoms in subgroups with mild and moderate-to-severe levels of anxiety at baseline.
Theory and practice of teaching discourse intonation

Discourse intonation attempts to explain how intonation patterns in English affect the communicative value of speech, through the use of falling and rising tones along with changes in pitch. The teaching of intonation seems to sit naturally with communicative language learning, but it is not an easy aspect of English to incorporate into the EFL classroom. Discourse intonation, with its emphasis on communicative value, is appealing theoretically for instructors and for practical reasons (aiding in understanding naturally spoken English) for learners. This paper reports on a study conducted at a language school in Japan, which aimed to establish a balance between the aspects of discourse intonation that could survive in the classroom and those that would help students to better understand spoken English. The study finds support for the teaching of some features of discourse intonation but also suggests that some features are too subtle to survive in practical teaching.
Self-image and burnout in psychiatric

Burnout was tested for in 754 mental health workers and related to self-image as assessed with Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB, Benjamin 1974). A positive relation was found between burnout and negative self-image, and between the experience of personal accomplishment and positive self-image. Compared to self-image, gender, age and work setting did not explain any variance in burnout. Highly burned-out persons had a significantly more negative self-image than staff who had rated themselves as low burnout. Finally, the relation between self-image and burnout was studied in 210 subjects who had completed their self-image ratings one year before burnout was measured, with the same results: a negative self-image was related to higher burnout one year later. One general conclusion is that a tendency in staff to treat themselves in negative ways may function as a negative filter for coping with difficulties at work and thus be a risk factor for burnout.
Text line segmentation in handwritten document using a production system

We present in this paper a digitization project of cultural heritage manuscripts and we discuss the underlying problems, particularly those relative to document analysis. Considering the drawbacks of traditional methods for text line extraction in handwritten documents, we propose to adopt a new approach for handwritten page segmentation, based on a traditional problem solving framework used in artificial intelligence.
Wood Properties and Their Variations Within the Tree Stem of Lesser-Used Species of Tropical Hardwood from Ghana

Due to increasing demand for traditional market species of timber, which are dwindling in quantities and quality within the Ghanaian forest, there is the need to introduce lesser-used species (LUS) to serve as substitutes. The success of LUS in the marketplace requires technical information that relates to utilization about the species. This paper examines physical and mechanical properties of wood and their variations within the tree stem of Petersianthus macrocarpus , a potential LUS from Ghana. There was an overall increase of wood's physical and mechanical properties from the breast height to the top of the tree. Specific gravity correlates positively with all the wood's properties, making it a good indicator for selection of the wood for use. The wood of Petersianthus macrocarpus is dense (specific gravity of 0.69) with moderately high shrinkage values (radial shrinkage of 4.0% and tangential shrinkage of 6.9%).