Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conserved Patterns of Trigeminal Somatosensory System Organization in Mammals

brainstem, there are 3 separate and complete somatotopic barrelette representations, the principal sensory nucleus, the spinal trigeminal subnucleus interpolaris, and the spinal trigeminal subnucleus caudalis. Broadly, the principal trigeminal sensory nucleus is vital to the sense of discriminative touch, whereas the subnucleus caudalis is important for pain sensation, and the subnucleus interpolaris may be related to discounting the role of movement during active touch behavior [Diamond et al., 2008]. Clear somatotopic maps make it easy for researchers to identify the disruption of normal somatosensory function, which is one reason why the rodent trigeminal system continues to be used in developmental studies, particularly in investigations of the neocortex. Previous researchers investigating comparative aspects of the trigeminal somatosensory areas have noted that the presence or absence of cortical barrels across species does not correlate well with whisking behavior or phylogeny [Woolsey et al., 1975; Horton and Adams, 2005]. In my own work, I used anatomical and electrophysiological methods to delineate vibrissal representations in the brainstem trigeminal pathway. I suspected that the brainstem relays would have fewer higherlevel integrative functions than the neocortical stations, and would therefore exhibit less interspecific variation than the neocorAlmost all mammals have distinct tactile hairs that they can use to explore their environment. In particular, laboratory rodents possess about 60 thick, densely innervated facial vibrissae that they sweep in a characteristically rhythmic “whisking” motion with which they gauge the location, shape, texture, and orientation of objects [Fox, 2008]. This mechanosensory information is transmitted to the central nervous system via the trigeminal pathway ( Fig. 1 a). Much of our current understanding of mammalian tactile senses has been gleaned from the body of literature on the rodent whisker system. Given that research efforts focusing on mice and rats are typically justified by the assumption that these animals are representative of all mammals, including humans, I adopted a comparative neuroanatomical approach in order to test how broadly applicable our knowledge of the rodent trigeminal system is to the trigeminal system of other mammals. In laboratory rodents, the punctate array of facial vibrissae is represented in a one-to-one fashion in anatomically distinct units in 3 stations of the ascending somatosensory pathway: the brainstem, thalamus, and neocortex. These discrete circular modules are termed barrelettes, barreloids, and barrels, respectively [Woolsey and Van der Loos, 1970; Van der Loos, 1976, Belford and Killackey, 1979; Ma, 1991] ( Fig. 1 b). Furthermore, within the Published online: March 28, 2017
Elucidating the Wavelength Dependence of Phonon Scattering in Nanoparticle-Matrix Composites using Phonon Spectroscopy

Abstract : This project examined thermal transport and phonon transport in three types of nanoparticle-matrix composites: (i) semiconductor nanoparticles randomly distributed within a semiconductor matrix, (ii) semiconductor nanoparticles embedded in molecular matrices of varying composition, and (iii) nanoparticles periodically-arranged inside of a molecular matrix. This project specifically focused on colloidal nanocrystals (NCs), which are a type of nanoparticle that consists of an inorganic crystalline core with ligands bound to the surface. Solution-phase syntheses enable the precision control of size, shape, and composition of these colloidal NCs. Nanoparticle-in-matrix composites are a common motif among many nanoscience applications and are of particular interest to the thermal sciences community. To explore this morphological theme, we created crystalline inorganic composites with nanoparticle volume fractions ranging from 0 to approximately 100%. We synthesized these composites by mixing colloidal CdSe NCs and In2Se3 metal chalcogenide complex (MCC) precursor in the solution-phase, and then thermally transforming the MCC precursor into a crystalline In2Se3 matrix.
Hepatic Gene Expression Profiles Are Altered by Dietary Unsalted Korean Fermented Soybean (Chongkukjang) Consumption in Mice with Diet-Induced Obesity

We found that Chongkukjang, traditional unsalted fermented soybean, has an antiobesity effect in mice with diet-induced obesity and examined the changes in hepatic transcriptional profiles using cDNA microarray. High-fat diet-induced obese C57BL/6J mice were divided into three groups: normal-diet control group (NDcon, 10% of total energy from fat), high-fat diet control group (HDcon, 45% of total energy from fat), and HDcon plus 40% Chongkukjang (HDC) and were fed for 9 weeks. The HDC group mice were pair-fed (isocalorie) with mice in the HDcon group. Final body weight, epididymal fat accumulation, serum total cholesterol, and LDL-cholesterol were improved in HDC group. The cDNA microarray analyses revealed marked alterations in the expression of about 800 genes. Several genes involved in fatty acid catabolism (Acaa2, Mgll, Phyh, Slc27a2, and Slc27a5) were normalized by Chongkukjang consumption. This study showed beneficial effects of Chongkukjang consumption in preventing diet-induced obesity and related metabolic abnormalities.
Precoded distributed space-time block codes in cooperative diversity-based downlink

Cooperative diversity is a rapidly emerging topic for wireless communications, with ad hoc and hybrid/relay networks as two main applications so far. In this paper, we investigate the cooperative diversity concept for MIMO multicell networks, where the processing must be optimized to account for the variability of the channel conditions across the cooperative devices. This can be done via distributed preceding and is realistically based on channel statistics (average gains, correlations, etc.). We give a new approach to the previously coined equal diversity spread principle, through minimization of an approximated SER expression. Next, we focus on a low-complexity approach to minimizing a PEP-based performance measure. Gains are evaluated in a multicell scenario with collaborating base stations.
Notes for the first lecture in a course on Property Testing

This is the first lecture in an introductory course on property testing. In this lecture, we introduce and illustrate the basic notions of property testing, emphasizing the themes of approximate decision and sub-linear complexity. In particular, we discuss the key role of representation, point out the focus on properties that are not fully symmetric, present the definitions of (standard) testers and of proximity-oblivious testers (POTs), and make some general observations regarding POTs, testing, and learning. All is preceded by a discussion of the potential benefits of testing.
Pattern electroretinogram in glaucoma suspects: new findings from a longitudinal study.

PURPOSE Early detection of glaucoma remains a challenging problem and needs long-term, prospective studies. The pattern electroretinogram (PERG) directly reflects retinal ganglion cell function. The PERG was evaluated by extending a prospective study of patients with ocular hypertension and evaluated amplitude, PERG ratio, peak time, and trends thereof. METHODS One hundred twenty eyes of 64 patients with intraocular pressure greater than 25 mm Hg (or ≥ 23 mm Hg with additional risk factors), normal visual fields, normal optic disc appearance, and visual acuity ≥ 0.8 were included in the study. Mean follow-up time was 10.3 years. The per-visit measures of amplitude at 15 reversals/s to 0.8° check size, PERG ratio (0.8°/16°), peak time, visual field, and their trends were analyzed. RESULTS Over the course of the study 13 eyes converted to glaucoma according to a visual field definition. Amplitude to 0.8° check size, PERG ratio, and peak time were significantly lower in converters. Amplitude and PERG ratio predicted conversion 4 years ahead with a sensitivity/specificity of 67%/64% and 75%/76%, respectively. At this time, the ROC area was already significantly above chance for the PERG ratio. Comparison of the trends of converters and nonconverters revealed significant differences in the PERG ratio; however, trends did not predict conversion as successfully as single-visit measures. CONCLUSIONS The PERG, especially the PERG ratio, detected glaucoma patients 4 years before visual field changes occurred, with a sensitivity/specificity of 75%/76%. Slope analysis required multiple visits, but provided little additional information in detecting converters.
Computer-Assisted Categorization of Patent Documents in the International Patent Classification

The World Intellectual Property Organization is currently developing a system for assisting users in categorizing patent documents in the International Patent Classification (IPC). The system should support the classification of documents in several languages and aims to assist users in locating relevant IPC symbols by providing them with a convenient web-based service. The approach taken for developing such a system relies on powerful machine learning algorithms that are trained on manually classified documents to recognize IPC topics. We detail in-house results of applying a custom-built state-of-the-art computer-assisted categorizer to English, French, Russian, and Germanlanguage patent documents. We find that reliable computer-assisted categorization at IPC subclass level is an achievable goal for the statistical methods employed here. A categorization system suggesting three IPC symbols for each document can predict the main IPC class correctly for around 90% of documents, and the main IPC subclass for about 85% of documents. The accuracy of the system at main group level is enhanced if the user first validates the correct IPC class.
Variance based product recommendation using clustering and sentiment analysis

With the growth of technology, new products are introduced in the market everyday. This rise in products has initiated competition among different manufacturers. Industries use different strategies to make their products more appealing to the customers and survive in the market. As a result, when launching any new product, it is necessary to analyze the reason behind the success of top competing products in the market having similar properties. This information can be useful for the success of the newly launched product. In view of this challenge, a variance-based product recommendation (VPR) approach is proposed, which aims to find top competitors for any newly launched product having similar description. VPR is based on ratings of a product. Thus, rating by a user is found by combining the user-given rating and the rating predicted from the corresponding review text using lexicon-based sentiment analysis. To implement the approach, the available products are firstly divided into clusters based on description. VPR is then applied on one of the clusters to which the new product belongs to get the top competitors for that product. The approach is verified by conducting tests on a product data set of Amazon reviews obtained from SNAP web data, mashup data from ProgrammableWeb as well as product data from Flipkart.
Frequency-domain analysis for pulsating combustion of gaseous fuel

Pulsating combustion is among combustion control methods used to suppress formation of NOx. Past experiments showed that the dependency of NOx content from pulsation rate has a minimum. A measuring unit was set up to study torch behavior in infrared band. To study pulsating combustion of gaseous fuel a thermographic camera was used. Thermographic sequences were recorded using the instrument FLIR 7700M with the resolution of 320×240 pixels at the frame rate of 412 Hz. The experiments resulted in obtaining thermographic sequences radiation intensity fields in the longitudinal section of the torch at different pulsation rates. The obtained raw data was preprocessed to obtain distributions of quantities of pixels corresponding to temperatures in each frame, as well as time-domain series for changes of the torch core longitudinal section area. Frequency-domain analysis was run for each time-domain series using Fast Fourier transform (FFT). The results demonstrate that the first maximum of spectral density coincides with the control action rate. The spectrum also contains pronounced second and third harmonics. For each spectrum of the time-domain series signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was calculated. Comparison of different SNR shows that maximum impact of pulsation control on torch radiation intensity takes place at the on/off valve opening rate of 4 Hz. This method of torch diagnostics can be helpful for future studies and development of pulsating combustion control systems.Pulsating combustion is among combustion control methods used to suppress formation of NOx. Past experiments showed that the dependency of NOx content from pulsation rate has a minimum. A measuring unit was set up to study torch behavior in infrared band. To study pulsating combustion of gaseous fuel a thermographic camera was used. Thermographic sequences were recorded using the instrument FLIR 7700M with the resolution of 320×240 pixels at the frame rate of 412 Hz. The experiments resulted in obtaining thermographic sequences radiation intensity fields in the longitudinal section of the torch at different pulsation rates. The obtained raw data was preprocessed to obtain distributions of quantities of pixels corresponding to temperatures in each frame, as well as time-domain series for changes of the torch core longitudinal section area. Frequency-domain analysis was run for each time-domain series using Fast Fourier transform (FFT). The results demonstrate that the first maximum of spectral density coin.
Modelling a Noisy-channel for Voice Conversion Using Articulatory Features

In this paper, we propose modeling a noisy-channel for the task of voice conversion (VC). We have used the artificial neural networks (ANN) to capture speaker-specific characteristics of a target speaker which avoid the need for any training utterance from a source speaker. We use articulatory features (AFs) as a canonical form or speaker-independent representation of a speech signal. Our studies show that AFs contain a significant amount of speaker information in their trajectories. Suitable techniques are proposed to normalize the speaker-specific information in AF trajectories and the resultant AFs are used in voice conversion. The results of voice conversion evaluated using objective and subjective measures confirm that AFs can be used as a canonical form in nosiy-channel to capture speakerspecific characteristics of a target speaker.
Inclusion measure and its use in measuring similarity and distance measure between hesitant fuzzy sets

In this paper, we propose a variety of inclusion measures for hesitant fuzzy sets (HFSs), based on which the corresponding similarity and distance measures can be obtained. First, we investigate the hybrid monotonic inclusion measures between two hesitant fuzzy elements (HFEs) and present their properties. Second, the hybrid monotonic inclusion measure between two HFSs are proposed. Furthermore, similarity measures and distance are postulated by inclusion measures. Last, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the inclusion measures, similarity measures and distance.
Automatic annotation of incomplete and scattered bibliographical references in Digital Humanities papers

In this paper, we deal with the problem of extracting and processing useful informa- tion from bibliographic references in Digital Humanities (DH) data. We present our ongoing project BILBO, supported by Google Grant for Digital Humanities that includes the constitu- tion of proper reference corpora and construction of efficient annotation model using several appropriate machine learning techniques. Conditional Random Field is used as a basic ap- proach to automatic annotation of reference fields and Support Vector Machine with a set of newly proposed features is applied for sequence classification. A number of experiments are conducted to find one of the best feature settings for CRF model on these corpora. RESUME.L'extraction d'informations bibliographiques depuis un texte non structure demeure un probleme ouvert que nous abordons, via des approches d'apprentissage automatique, dans le domaine des Humanites Numeriques. Nous presentons dans cet article le projet BILBO,soutenu par un Google Digital Humanities Award avec le soutien du projet ANR CAAS : constitution de 3 corpus de reference correspondant a trois localisations des references, elaboration d'un modele d'annotation puis evaluation. Les champs aleatoires conditionnels (CRFs) sont utilises pour l'annotation des references bibliographiques et des machines a vecteurs supports (SVMs) pour l'identification des references au sein du texte. De nombreuses experiences sont conduites afin de determiner les meilleures proprietes devant etre exploitees par les modeles numeriques.
Multi-source data clustering

In this paper, we consider a special multi-source data clustering problem for which the data-points from the same source cannot be grouped into the same cluster, namely cannot link (CL) constraint, and the sizes of the generated clusters are subject to maximum thresholds. No prior information is given about the level of clutter (namely noisy data) or the number of clusters. Particularly, the clusters might be closely distributed in the space (overlapping clusters) with one another and have to be carefully partitioned to meet the CL constraint. This particular CL constrained data mining problem corresponds to a significant problem of multi-sensor data fusion (MSDF) raised in the multi-target detection context. A novel clustering method as well as the online parameter learning procedure is proposed for this particular dataset model. Clustering results are provided to demonstrate the validity of the present approach.
GENETIC AND MORPHOMETRIC DIVERGENCE IN ANCESTRAL EUROPEAN AND DESCENDENT NEW ZEALAND POPULATIONS OF CHAFFINCHES (FRINGILLA COELEBS)

Descendent populations of chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs) introduced to New Zealand about 120 years ago were compared with “ancestral” populations in northern Europe and with those in a broader region of Europe (including Iberia) using protein electrophoresis at 42 loci and 12 skeletal measurements. The New Zealand populations exhibit very small scale differentiation in genetics (Fst = 0.040) and morphometrics, and the haphazard pattern of among‐population variation does not align with environmental variation nor is it predicted by the geographic proximity of populations. Thus random drift is implicated in the differentiation among the descendent populations. The New Zealand chaffinches have diverged only slightly in morphometrics from an extant population in southern England, and constant heritability rate tests suggest that random drift alone could account for this small shift. In sharp contrast, the European populations are subdivided genetically (Fst = 0.222) and morphometrically, and this subdivision coincides with the Pyrenees mountains between Iberia and northern Europe which act as a barrier to gene flow between these regions. Iberian populations have smaller skulls and longer wings on average than northern European populations and are characterized by high frequencies of alternative common alleles at Ada and Np. Within both the Iberian and northern European regions, however, populations are effectively panmictic in protein‐encoding genes, indicating that homogenizing gene flow is apparently extensive enough to prevent among‐population differentiation in allozymes by drift. Variation in body size as represented by PC I is related to environmental productivity across Europe, unlike in New Zealand. These observations jointly suggest that longer term adaptive differentiation via selection for optimal body size has evolved in Europe. Because multilocus evolution is expected to proceed slowly in populations subject to the opposing forces of selection and homogenizing gene flow, I argue that local adaptation within “ancestral” populations in northern Europe may still be evolving.
Accelerated cone beam CT reconstruction based on OpenCL

Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is a fundamental technology for cross-platform parallel programming. The emerging of OpenCL provides portable and efficient access to the power of modern processors. This revolutionary new technology is applied to accelerate the reconstruction of cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in this paper. An OpenCL-based implementation of the Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) algorithm is presented. The required transformations to parallelize the algorithm for the OpenCL architecture are also explained. Comparing to the conventional CPU-based implementation, the proposed method reaches an over 57 times speedup. Experimental results show a great performance boost, which can pave the way for widespread application and new conceptual innovation of CBCT. Besides, the feasibility and potential of OpenCL-based implementation are also indicated.
You shall not pass: detecting malicious users at registration time

Spam is a widespread problem for many online services. The use case in this paper is the social bookmarking system Bib-Sonomy, which received over 150 times more registrations from spam users than from normal users over the last ten years. A common approach to fight spam is to use machine learning to classify the users into good or malicious users. Based on information the users provide to the service in form of profile information or posts, features are created from which a classifier can make its decision. However, this often means that the accounts of the spam users are already active and can post their spam. In this work we propose an approach for deciding at registration time whether a user is malicious or not. In order to achieve this goal, we extracted 177 features from the information the users provide during the registration process, their IP address, and registration time. With these features we used state-of-the-art classifiers to identify users as spammers or regular users. With the best classifier, we could reach an AUC of 0.912.
Seamless Wireless Connectivity for Multimedia Services in High Speed Trains

The recent advent of high speed trains introduces new mobility patterns in wireless environments. The LTE-A (Long Term Evolution of 3GPP - Advanced) networks have largely tackled the Doppler effect problem in the physical layer and are able to keep wireless service with 100Mpbs throughput within a cell in speeds up to 350 km/h. Yet the much more frequent handovers across cells greatly increases the possibility of service interruptions, and the problem is prominent for multimedia communications that demand both high-throughput and continuous connections. In this paper, we present a novel LTE-based solution to support high throughput and continuous multimedia services for high speed train passengers. Our solution is based on a Cell Array that smartly organizes the cells along a railway, together with a femto cell service that aggregates traffic demands within individual train cabins. Given that the movement direction and speed of a high-speed train are generally known, our Cell Array effectively predicts the upcoming LTE cells in service, and enables a seamless handover that will not interrupt multimedia streams. To accommodate the extreme channel variations, we further propose a scheduling and resource allocation mechanism to maximize the service rate based on periodical signal quality changes. Our simulation under diverse network and railway/train configurations demonstrates that the proposed solution achieves much lower handover latency and higher data throughput, as compared to existing solutions. It also well resists to network and traffic dynamics, thus enabling uninterrupted quality multimedia services for passengers in high speed trains.