Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning to Coordinate Behaviors in Soft Behavior-Based Systems Using Reinforcement Learning

Behavior-based systems have been successfully used in control and robotics applications. In traditional behavior-based systems, only a single behavior controls the agent in any time step. However, this behavior arbitration is not appropriate for many complex tasks. In this paper, we propose Hierarchical Soft Behavior-based Architecture that uses the concept of soft suppression to coordinate flexibly between behaviors. In our method, we use reinforcement learning to find an appropriate amount of suppression for each behavior in the architecture, in addition to learn the internal mechanism of each behavior. Several experiments are provided to show the effectiveness of our method in the mobile robot navigation task.
The Influence of Cognitive Heuristics and Stereotypes About Greek Letter Organizations on Jury Decisions

51 COPYRIGHT 2018 BY PSI CHI, THE INTERNATIONAL HONOR SOCIETY IN PSYCHOLOGY (VOL. 23, NO. 1/ISSN 2325-7342) When people hear the words fraternity or sorority, what are the first words that come to mind: drinking, partying, hazing? Due to how Greek life (i.e., activities performed by members of a fraternity or sorority) has been portrayed by the media, people might have begun to associate fraternities and sororities with problem behaviors such as binge drinking or hazing pledges. The overall belief about the perception of Greek letter organizations is often negative (Tollini & Wilson, 2010). This negative stereotype about the organizations and those affiliated with the organizations may have harmful implications both on and off campus. These stereotypes may not only contribute to distrust among member and nonmember students (Warber, Taylor, & Makstaller, 2011), but also have the potential to impact decisions made in a court of law. The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America declares that every citizen has the right to a fair trial. However, jurors often succumb to implicit biases which can influence their decision-making processes (Colwell, 2005). Understanding the different factors that can lead to these biases is the first step in overcoming them. It is important to investigate these factors in order to ensure that the court system is upholding its duty to ensure fair and unbiased trials. The purpose of the current study was to understand the potential influence that stereotypes about Greek letter organizations have on jury decisions. More specifically, the study sought to determine whether disclosure of a Greek life affiliation of a defendant, accused of driving under the influence, would affect jurors’ perceptions of the defendant.
In vitro comparative study of white and dark polycaprolactone trifumarate in situ cross-linkable scaffolds seeded with rat bone marrow stromal cells

OBJECTIVE: Dark poly(caprolactone) trifumarate is a successful candidate for use as a bone tissue engineering scaffold. Recently, a white polymeric scaffold was developed that shows a shorter synthesis time and is more convenient for tissue-staining work. This is an in vitro comparative study of both the white and dark scaffolds. METHODS: Both white and dark poly(caprolactone) trifumarate macromers were characterized via Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy before being chemically cross-linked and molded into disc-shaped scaffolds. Biodegradability was assessed by percentage weight loss on days 7, 14, 28, 42 and 56 (n = 5) after immersion in 10% serum-supplemented medium or distilled water. Static cell seeding was employed in which isolated and characterized rat bone marrow stromal cells were seeded directly onto the scaffold surface. Seeded scaffolds were subjected to a series of biochemical assays and scanning electron microscopy at specified time intervals for up to 28 days of incubation. RESULTS: The degradation of the white scaffold was significantly lower compared with the dark scaffold but was within the acceptable time range for bone-healing processes. The deoxyribonucleic acid and collagen contents increased up to day 28 with no significant difference between the two scaffolds, but the glycosaminoglycan content was slightly higher in the white scaffold throughout 14 days of incubation. Scanning electron microscopy at day 1 revealed cellular growth and attachment. CONCLUSIONS: There was no cell growth advantage between the two forms, but the white scaffold had a slower biodegradability rate, suggesting that the newly synthesized poly(caprolactone) trifumarate is more suitable for use as a bone tissue engineering scaffold.
Anthropogenic emissions of NOx over China: Reconciling the difference of inverse modeling results using GOME‐2 and OMI measurements

Inverse modeling using satellite observations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) columns has been extensively used to estimate nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions in China. Recently, the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment‐2 (GOME‐2) and Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) provide independent global NO2 column measurements on a nearly daily basis at around 9:30 and 13:30 local time across the equator, respectively. Anthropogenic NOx emission estimates by applying previously developed monthly inversion (MI) or daily inversion (DI) methods to these two sets of measurements show substantial differences. We improve the DI method by conducting model simulation, satellite retrieval, and inverse modeling sequentially on a daily basis. After each inversion, we update anthropogenic NOx emissions in the model simulation with the newly obtained a posteriori results. Consequently, the inversion‐optimized emissions are used to compute the a priori NO2 profiles for satellite retrievals. As such, the a priori profiles used in satellite retrievals are now coupled to inverse modeling results. The improved procedure was applied to GOME‐2 and OMI NO2 measurements in 2011. The new daily retrieval‐inversion (DRI) method estimates an average NOx emission of 6.9 Tg N/yr over China, and the difference between using GOME‐2 and OMI measurements is 0.4 Tg N/yr, which is significantly smaller than the difference of 1.3 Tg N/yr using the previous DI method. Using the more consistent DRI inversion results, we find that anthropogenic NOx emissions tend to be higher in winter and summer than spring (and possibly fall) and the weekday‐to‐weekend emission ratio tends to increase with NOx emission in China.
Automatic Detection of the Optic Disc, Fovea and Vacular Arch in Digital Color Photographs of the Retina

We present a novel method that determines whether a macula centered retinal image is from the left or right eye and automatically detects the optic disc, the fovea and the vascular arch by inferring the location of a set of landmarks placed on these structures. The algorithm relies on a specific energy function that combines global and local cues. The global cues are derived from vascular atlases of the vessel orientation and thickness on the retina as well as a vascular distance map. A fourth component models the local appearance around each of the landmarks in the model and is able to estimate the distance between a position in the image and the target position of a landmark. For the minimization of the energy function a combination of optimization methods is used. We compare the results of several different system setups and combinations of energy function components with the performance of a second human observer. The best performing system localizes the OD in 91% of all cases, the fovea in 94% of all cases and correctly positions 74% of all vessel landmarks. The results show that a combination of global and local energy function components is required to obtain optimal results.
Automatic heart localization from a 4D MRI data set

The purpose of the presented work is the automatic localization of the heart from 4D multi-slice magnetic resonance images (MRI). Well known active contour extraction techniques such as 'snakes' or 'balloons' require precise initialization which is mostly done interactively by the user in existing systems. A new method for the automatic initialization of such models is presented here for application on 4D MRI dataset acquired from the human heart. The method consists of two main steps: a global localization of the heart and a coarse initialization of the contours. Furthermore, it is shown how this initialization can be used for an automatic fine segmentation by an active contour model. The temporal analysis of the heart beat cycle is well suited for localization purposes. A 'temporal variance image' is thus first computed at each spatial slice location. These variance images consistently highlight the heart due to its wall movement and the heavy blood flow. By thresholding the variance images, projecting them into a single image, thresholding again and selecting the largest resulting object, a 'binary confidence mask' is computed for the heart region. This mask allow us to extract one binary image of the heart for each spatial slice location, regardless of temporal location. In the initialization stage, an 'initial contour' is matched to each of these masked images by affine transform, adapting size, location, aspect ratio and orientation. Initial contours may be acquired from a predefined model. In absence of such a model, ellipses were successfully applied as generic initial contours. For this stage, 2D contours were used; however, extensions to 3D are straightforward. The affine adapted contours are then considered as initialization for a multi- step active contour model for the accurate extraction of the heart walls: the contours are deformed according to the masked binary images, further refined on the temporal mean images for each spatial slice location, and finally the outer heart walls are tracked over time on the actual images at each spatial slice location. This approach, making use of existing active contour models yields an efficient and robust method for an exact extraction of the heart contours.
Research on an orthogonal and model based multi-objective genetic algorithm

Against low efficiency of traditional multi-objective evolutionary algorithms and poor utilization of Pareto-optimal solutions distribution regularity etc, in this paper, a new approach OMEA is proposed. It uses that distribution regularity to obtain good solutions, we also apply the orthogonal design to initialize population. Compared with SPEA2, NSGA-II and PAES, Pareto solutions by OMEA are closer to Pareto-optimal Front. The result of experiments shows a group of Pareto solutions with better convergence and diversity can be achieved, which gives strong supports to actual applications.
Reperfusion Times for Radial Versus Femoral Access in Patients With ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction Undergoing Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: Observations From the Cardiac Care Network Provincial Primary PCI Registry

Background—Radial access is associated with less bleeding and vascular complications. However, it may delay reperfusion during primary percutaneous coronary intervention for ST-segment–elevation myocardial infarction. Methods and Results—A provincial database prospectively collected clinical and procedural characteristics for all urgent percutaneous coronary intervention procedures performed between June 2010 and September 2011 in Ontario for ST-segment–elevation myocardial infarction, including time of arrival in the catheterization laboratory and time of first balloon inflation. After excluding patients with cardiogenic shock, with previous bypass surgery, or who received fibrinolysis, 2947 patients were included in the analysis. Propensity score matching was used to minimize difference in clinical characteristics between radial and femoral access procedures. Predictors of radial access included younger age and male sex. After propensity score matching, the median time from arrival in the cardiac catheterization laboratory to first balloon was 27 minutes (25th%–75th%, 21–34) for the femoral group and 30 minutes (25th%–75th %, 24–39) for the radial group (P<0.001). When hospitals were stratified based on the proportion of primary percutaneous coronary intervention cases that were performed using radial access, there was no difference in treatment times between radial and femoral access in the tercile of hospitals that used radial access most frequently. There were no significant differences in the rates of death or myocardial infarction at 30 days. Conclusions—This contemporary multicenter registry demonstrates that the time to first balloon inflation is slightly longer with radial access than with femoral access, although the 3 minute difference is unlikely to be clinically relevant. There is no difference in treatment times at hospitals that frequently use radial access for primary percutaneous coronary intervention. Short-term mortality and reinfarction rates are similar with radial and femoral access.
Applying Probabilistic Model Checking to Service Discovery Framework

The complex requirements of E-commerce application call for selecting a set of Web services to reuse theirs business logics, where Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a promising solution to the problem of cross-platform services integration. To this purpose, how to discovery services is a key to support the quick services composition, which has been a challenging task in Web application engineering. However, the traditional approaches have limitations in recall ratio and precision ratio because the keyword and semantic annotation query modes are hard to verify the target Web service, such as interaction behaviors and control flows of composite service. In this paper, it proposes a probabilistic model checking based service discovery method. First, it focuses on service reliability and time constraints to formalize the probabilistic behaviors of service process. Second, the quantitative verification properties of user requirements are specified in the form of temporal logic formulae. Third, the service discovery is to verify service process model against expected properties for identifying candidate services. Finally, in order to reduce model checking tasks, the correlation based service recommendation is introduced to explore more suitable services for user. Our framework improves the efficiency of service discovery without changing any existing service infrastructures.
Interactional synchrony between mother and toddler during book reading

Interactional synchrony refers to the degree to which two interactive partners synchronize their behaviors over time. Interactional synchrony between mother and infant is linked to infant socio-emotional development. However, very little is known about interactional synchrony beyond infancy. The present study was an attempt to investigate the interpersonal synchrony between mothers and their 2 1⁄2-year-old toddlers (n=49) during book reading. The goals of this study were to explore individual differences in mother-toddler interactional synchrony and to examine the contributions of child (i.e., sex and temperament) and maternal (i.e., negative affect) characteristics as well as their joint effect to interactional synchrony. Results revealed that the majority of the mother-toddler dyads were moderately synchronized and highly positively matched. Toddler’s sex and temperament (effortful control and surgency) as well as maternal negative affect made separate and joint contributions to interactional synchrony indexed by gaze coordination as well as negative and positive affect matching.
Assessing the significance of chromosomal aberrations in cancer: Methodology and application to glioma

Comprehensive knowledge of the genomic alterations that underlie cancer is a critical foundation for diagnostics, prognostics, and targeted therapeutics. Systematic efforts to analyze cancer genomes are underway, but the analysis is hampered by the lack of a statistical framework to distinguish meaningful events from random background aberrations. Here we describe a systematic method, called Genomic Identification of Significant Targets in Cancer (GISTIC), designed for analyzing chromosomal aberrations in cancer. We use it to study chromosomal aberrations in 141 gliomas and compare the results with two prior studies. Traditional methods highlight hundreds of altered regions with little concordance between studies. The new approach reveals a highly concordant picture involving ≈35 significant events, including 16–18 broad events near chromosome-arm size and 16–21 focal events. Approximately half of these events correspond to known cancer-related genes, only some of which have been previously tied to glioma. We also show that superimposed broad and focal events may have different biological consequences. Specifically, gliomas with broad amplification of chromosome 7 have properties different from those with overlapping focalEGFR amplification: the broad events act in part through effects on MET and its ligand HGF and correlate with MET dependence in vitro. Our results support the feasibility and utility of systematic characterization of the cancer genome.
GASOLINE: a Greedy And Stochastic algorithm for Optimal Local multiple alignment of Interaction NEtworks

The analysis of structure and dynamics of biological networks plays a central role in understanding the intrinsic complexity of biological systems. Biological networks have been considered a suitable formalism to extend evolutionary and comparative biology. In this paper we present GASOLINE, an algorithm for multiple local network alignment based on statistical iterative sampling in connection to a greedy strategy. GASOLINE overcomes the limits of current approaches by producing biologically significant alignments within a feasible running time, even for very large input instances. The method has been extensively tested on a database of real and synthetic biological networks. A comprehensive comparison with state-of-the art algorithms clearly shows that GASOLINE yields the best results in terms of both reliability of alignments and running time on real biological networks and results comparable in terms of quality of alignments on synthetic networks. GASOLINE has been developed in Java, and is available, along with all the computed alignments, at the following URL: http://ferrolab.dmi. unict.it/gasoline/gasoline.html.
Rcpp: Seamless R and C++ Integration

The Rcpp package simplifies integrating C++ code with R. It provides a consistent C++ class hierarchy that maps various types of R objects (vectors, matrices, functions, environments, . . . ) to dedicated C++ classes. Object interchange between R and C++ is managed by simple, flexible and extensible concepts which include broad support for C++ Standard Template Library idioms. C++ code can both be compiled, linked and loaded on the fly, or added via packages. Flexible error and exception code handling is provided. Rcpp substantially lowers the barrier for programmers wanting to combine C++ code with R.
Monitoring community mobilisation and organisational capacity among high-risk groups in a large-scale HIV prevention programme in India: selected findings using a Community Ownership and Preparedness Index

Background In a participatory approach to health and development interventions, defining and measuring community mobilisation is important, but it is challenging to do this effectively, especially at scale. Methods A cross-sectional, participatory monitoring tool was administered in 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 across a representative sample of 25 community-based groups (CBGs) formed under the Avahan India AIDS Initiative, to assess their progress in mobilisation, and to inform efforts to strengthen the groups and make them sustainable. The survey used a weighted index to capture both qualitative and quantitative data in numeric form. The index permitted broad, as well as highly detailed, analysis of community mobilisation, relevant at the level of individual groups, as well as state-wide and across the whole programme. Results The survey demonstrated that leadership and programme management were the strongest areas among the CBGs, confirming the programme's investment in these areas. Discussion of the Round 1 results led to efforts to strengthen governance and democratic decision making in the groups, and progress was reflected in the Round 2 survey results. CBG engagement with state authorities to gain rights and entitlements and securing the long-term financial stability of groups remain a challenge. Conclusion The survey has proven useful for informing the managers of programmes about what is happening on the ground, and it has opened spaces for discussion within community groups about the nature of leadership, decision making and their goals, which is leading to accelerated progress. The tool provided useful data to manage community mobilisation in Avahan.
Overview and Preliminary Results for a Opinions Summarizarion Method

Web resources contain many reviews that can be used by both individuals and companies. The growing volume of these reviews becomes a problem for consumers who should read a number of reviews of other consumers to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the product. Opinion summarization is necessary to help consumers understand, in a simplified way, the large amount of reviews or present them summaries of opinion for the competing entities. In this article we present a graph-based summarization algorithm that simplifies the opinions messages graph taking into account three criteria: the graph filtering in order to remove the messages with opinions that do not refer to the target entity and the aggregation of the nodes that include opinions of the same polarity.
Estimating Uncertain Flow and Transport Parameters Using a Sequential Uncertainty Fitting Procedure

Inversely obtained hydrologic parameters are always uncertain (nonunique) because of errors associated with the measurements and the invoked conceptual model, among other factors. Quantification of this uncertainty in multidimensional parameter space is often difficult because of complexities in the structure of the objective function. In this study we describe parameter uncertainties using uniform distributions and fit these distributions iteratively within larger absolute intervals such that two criteria are met: (i) bracketing most of the measured data (>90%) within the 95% prediction uncertainty (95PPU) and (ii) obtaining a small ratio (<1) of the average difference between the upper and lower 95PPU and the standard deviation of the measured data. We define a model as calibrated if, upon reaching these two criteria, a significant R2 exists between the observed and simulated results. A program, SUFI‐2, was developed and tested for the calibration of two bottom ash landfills. SUFI‐2 performs a combined optimization and uncertainty analysis using a global search procedure and can deal with a large number of parameters through Latin hypercube sampling. We explain the above concepts using an example in which two municipal solid waste incinerator bottom ash monofills were successfully calibrated and tested for flow, and one monofill also for transport. Because of high levels of heavy metals in the leachate, monitoring and modeling of such landfills is critical from environmental points of view.