Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Closest class measure based subspace detection for hyperspectral image classification

The objective of this study is to develop a hybrid nonlinear subspace detection technique in which Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) is combined with a Closest Class Pair (CCP) measure for the task of hyperspectral image classification. In the proposed approach, KPCA is applied first to generate the new features from original dataset then the CCP is applied to rank the features that are able to separate the complex or overlapping classes. Finally, the two ranked scores such as KPCA and CCP are combined to select a subset of features which is relevant and able to provide better discrimination among the input classes of interest. Experiments are performed on a real hyperspectral image acquired by the NASA Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) sensor and it can be seen that the proposed approach obtained the best classification accuracy 84.58%.
The Gut Microbiota and Developmental Programming of the Testis in Mice

Nutrients and environmental chemicals, including endocrine disruptors, have been incriminated in the current increase in male reproductive dysfunction, but the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The gastrointestinal tract represents the largest surface area exposed to our environment and thereby plays a key role in connection with exposure of internal organs to exogenous factors. In this context the gut microbiome (all bacteria and their metabolites) have been shown to be important contributors to body physiology including metabolism, cognitive functions and immunity. Pivotal to male reproduction is a proper development of the testis, including the formation of the blood-testis barrier (BTB) that encapsulates and protects germ cells from stress induced environmental cues, e.g. pathogenic organisms and xenobiotics. Here we used specific pathogen free (SPF) mice and germ-free (GF) mice to explore whether gut microbiota and/or their metabolites can influence testis development and regulation of BTB. Lumen formation in the seminiferous tubules, which coincides with the development of the BTB was delayed in the testes of GF mice at 16 days postpartum. In addition, perfusion experiments (Evans blue) demonstrated increased BTB permeability in these same mice. Reduced expressions of occludin, ZO-2 and E-cadherin in GF testis suggested that the microbiota modulated BTB permeability by regulation of cell-cell adhesion. Interestingly, exposure of GF mice to Clostridium Tyrobutyricum (CBUT), which secrete high levels of butyrate, restored the integrity of the BTB and normalized the levels of cell adhesion proteins. Moreover, the GF mice exhibited lower serum levels of gonadotropins (LH and FSH) than the SPF group. In addition, the intratesticular content of testosterone was lower in GF compared to SPF or CBUT animals. Thus, the gut microbiome can modulate the permeability of the BTB and might play a role in the regulation of endocrine functions of the testis.
Novel Method for Mining Semantic Relationships for Entities in WIS

Extracting semantic relationships for entities in Web Integration Systems (WIS) is an important step for further analysis and decision-making tasks. For example, for a search query in WIS that contains a company name, we can not only return the descriptions of the company, but list companies that compete with it and also ones that cooperate with it. It is not rare that an entity pair has more than one semantic relationship. However, existing researches on relation extraction assume that one entity pair has only one semantic relationship. We propose a novel method to mine multi-semantic relationships for a giving entity in WIS. We first extract related entities and corresponding contexts from web texts, then propose a clustering algorithm to cluster the related entities into different subsets, where each subset represents a semantic relationship to the entity. We evaluate our method by comparing it with the state-of-theart approach using real-world dataset generated by search engine. The results show that the proposed approach is efficient in mining multi-semantic relationships for the giving entity from WIS.
Modeling SRAM Failure Rates to Enable Fast , Dense , Low-Power Caches 1 Architecture Technology Group

The embedded memory hierarchy of microprocessors and systems-on-a-chip plays a critical role in the overall system performance, area, power, resilience, and yield. However, as process technologies scale down, the design of the embedded memory system is becoming increasingly difficult due to a number of exacerbating factors. Consequently, it is critical to provide accurate modeling tools for estimation of bit error rates in SRAM. In this paper, we describe a modeling infrastructure which takes into account error-correcting codes (ECC) and redundancy to provide feedback on the resilience of a particular variability tolerance technique. We show that with the combination of inline multi-bit ECC for hard errors and a small amount of redundancy, performance, power consumption, stability, and yield can all be improved.
(To appear in Probus.) Spanish Rhotics and Dominican Hypercorrect /s / 1

1. Introduction Spanish dialects may be broadly characterized as either conservative or radical with respect to the realization of syllable-final consonants (Guitart 1978, Zamora and Guitart 1982). In the radical Caribbean variety of Dominican Spanish, consonantal reduction in the syllable rhyme is so pervasive that /s/ is systematically absent from this position. Given the social stigma associated with rampant /s/-deletion, some speakers often attempt to emulate more conservative styles by reinserting /s/ in the syllable rhyme. The result is frequently hypercorrect in that the fricative either fails to match the position of etymological /s/, e.g., dipusta < disputa 'dispute', or altogether lacks a corresponding /s/ in the conservative lexical item, e.g., asbogado < abogado 'lawyer'. One of the restrictions on hypercorrect /s/ is that it is never inserted before an intervocalic tap or trill: *casro 'expensive', *casrreta 'cart'. /s/-epenthesis is structure-preserving and that these restrictions lend support to the analysis of Spanish rhotics proposed by Harris (1983). In this analysis, the tap /ɾ/ is the only underlying rhotic phoneme, and the intervocalic surface trill [r] is derived by rule from an underlying gemi-nate /ɾɾ/. Epenthesis is blocked from applying in the context of a geminate tap because the result would violate a principle of autosegmental well-formedness, whereby association lines may not be crossed. Furthermore, epenthesis is blocked before intervocalic taps because the [s] would trigger an independent rule of postconsonantal strengthening, thereby altering the underlying specification of /ɾ/. On the assumption that epenthesis cannot produce illicit structures or alter phonological features of adjacent segments, the patterning of Dominican hypercorrect /s/ offers a compelling argument in favor of the trill-as-geminate analysis. The present study revisits the issue of rhotic representation in light of the Dominican facts. First, I show that the trill-as-geminate analysis requires three separate rules to derive syllable initial surface trills, which belies the simple generalization that syllable-initial rhotics are trills except after a vowel, where trills and taps appear contrastively. Second, I review Padgett's (2003c) analysis of Catalan and Spanish rhotics, cast within a recent version of Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995, 2002), and demonstrate how the account better captures the syllable-initial trill generalization without requiring the geminate representation. Third, I show that hypercorrec-tive consonantal epenthesis can be accounted for in an Optimality-theoretic grammar by a high-ranking output-output correspondence constraint. By temporarily promoting this constraint, Do-minican speakers attempt to reestablish in their own outputs a phonotactic generalization about the …
Modeling primary and secondary emotions for a believable communication agent

The integration of emotion and cognition in cognitive architectures for embodied agents is a problem of increasing importance. In this paper, we describe how two separate modules for these tasks, as we employ them in our virtual human Max, can give rise to secondary emotions such as frustration and relief. The BDI-based cognitive module is responsible for appraisal as well as reappraisal of elicited emotions that our conversational agent Max becomes aware of. The emotion dynamics simulation system is driven by the valence information of every emotion and assures a general consistency of the simulated emotions over time by dynamically providing an awareness likelihood for every emotion.
COFTA : Hardware-Software Co-Synthesis of Heterogeneous Distributed Embedded Systems for Low Overhead Fault Tolerance

Embedded systems employed in critical applications demand high reliability and availability in addition to high performance. Hardware-software co-synthesis of an embedded system is the process of partitioning, mapping, and scheduling its specification into hardware and software modules to meet performance, cost, reliability, and availability goals. In this paper, we address the problem of hardware-software co-synthesis of fault-tolerant real-time heterogeneous distributed embedded systems. Fault detection capability is imparted to the embedded system by adding assertion and duplicate-and-compare tasks to the task graph specification prior to co-synthesis. The dependability (reliability and availability) of the architecture is evaluated during cosynthesis. Our algorithm, called COFTA (Co-synthesis Of Fault-Tolerant Architectures), allows the user to specify multiple types of assertions for each task. It uses the assertion or combination of assertions which achieves the required fault coverage without incurring too much overhead. We propose new methods to: 1) Perform fault tolerance based task clustering, which determines the best placement of assertion and duplicate-and-compare tasks, 2) Derive the best error recovery topology using a small number of extra processing elements, 3) Exploit multidimensional assertions, and 4) Share assertions to reduce the fault tolerance overhead. Our algorithm can tackle multirate systems commonly found in multimedia applications. Application of the proposed algorithm to a large number of real-life telecom transport system examples (the largest example consisting of 2,172 tasks) shows its efficacy. For faultsecure architectures, which just have fault detection capabilities, COFTA is able to achieve up to 48.8 percent and 25.6 percent savings in embedded system cost over architectures employing duplication and task-based fault tolerance techniques, respectively. The average cost overhead of COFTA fault-secure architectures over simplex architectures is only 7.3 percent. In case of fault-tolerant architectures, which cannot only detect but also tolerate faults, COFTA is able to achieve up to 63.1 percent and 23.8 percent savings in embedded system cost over architectures employing triple-modular redundancy, and task-based fault tolerance techniques, respectively. The average cost overhead of COFTA fault-tolerant architectures over simplex architectures is only 55.4 percent.
Two Low Coverage Bird Genomes and a Comparison of Reference-Guided versus De Novo Genome Assemblies

As a greater number and diversity of high-quality vertebrate reference genomes become available, it is increasingly feasible to use these references to guide new draft assemblies for related species. Reference-guided assembly approaches may substantially increase the contiguity and completeness of a new genome using only low levels of genome coverage that might otherwise be insufficient for de novo genome assembly. We used low-coverage (∼3.5–5.5x) Illumina paired-end sequencing to assemble draft genomes of two bird species (the Gunnison Sage-Grouse, Centrocercus minimus, and the Clark's Nutcracker, Nucifraga columbiana). We used these data to estimate de novo genome assemblies and reference-guided assemblies, and compared the information content and completeness of these assemblies by comparing CEGMA gene set representation, repeat element content, simple sequence repeat content, and GC isochore structure among assemblies. Our results demonstrate that even lower-coverage genome sequencing projects are capable of producing informative and useful genomic resources, particularly through the use of reference-guided assemblies.
Detection of Double Compression in MPEG-4 Videos Based on Markov Statistics

With the spread of powerful and easy-to-use video editing software, digital videos are exposed to various forms of tampering. Nowadays, a considerable proportion of surveillance systems and video cameras have built-in MPEG-4 codec. Therefore, the detection of double compression in MPEG-4 videos as a first step in video forensics research is of significance. In this paper, Markov based features are adopted to detect double compression artifacts, which imply that the original video may have been interpolated. The advantages and limitations of double MPEG-4 compression detection are analyzed. Experimental results have demonstrated that our scheme outperforms most existing methods.
Feature set reduction for image matching in large scale environments

Image matching in large scale environments is challenging due to the large number of features used in typical representations. In this paper we investigate methods for reducing the number of SIFT (Scale invariant feature transform) features in an image based localization application. We find that reductions of up to 59% in the number of features can result in improved performance of a naive matching algorithm for highly redundant data sets. However, those improvements do not carry over to visual bag of words, where a more moderate feature reduction (up to 16%) is often needed to maintain performance similar to the non-reduced set. Our reduced features have performed better than other robust feature descriptors namely HoG, GIST and ORB on all data sets with naive matching. The main contribution of this paper is the compact feature representation of a large scale environment for robust 2D image matching.
Osteology of Pseudochampsa ischigualastensis gen. et comb. nov. (Archosauriformes: Proterochampsidae) from the Early Late Triassic Ischigualasto Formation of Northwestern Argentina

Proterochampsids are crocodile-like, probably semi-aquatic, quadrupedal archosauriforms characterized by an elongated and dorsoventrally low skull. The group is endemic from the Middle-Late Triassic of South America. The most recently erected proterochampsid species is “Chanaresuchus ischigualastensis”, based on a single, fairly complete skeleton from the early Late Triassic Ischigualasto Formation of northwestern Argentina. We describe here in detail the non-braincase cranial and postcranial anatomy of this species and revisit its taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships. The phylogenetic analysis recovered ‘Chanaresuchus ischigualastensis’ as part of a trichotomy together with Gualosuchus reigi and Chanaresuchus bonapartei. Accordingly, “Chanaresuchus ischigualastensis” can be potentially more closely related to Gualosuchus reigi, or even Rhadinosuchus gracilis, than to Chanaresuchus bonapartei. In addition, after discussing previously claimed synapomorphies of Chanaresuchus, we could not find unambiguous support for the monophyly of the genus. As a result, we propose here the erection of the new genus Pseudochampsa for ‘Chanaresuchus ischigualastensis’, which results in the new combination Pseudochampsa ischigualastensis. The information provided here about the anatomy and taxonomy of Pseudochampsa ischiguaslastensis will be useful for future quantitative analyses focused on the biogeography and macroevolutionary history of proterochampsids.
Coping strategies used by poorly adherent patients for self-managing bipolar disorder

Background Bipolar disorder (BD) is a chronic mental illness associated with reduced quality of life, high rates of suicide, and high financial costs. Evidence indicates that psychosocial stress might play an important role in the onset and course of BD. Objective The objective of this study was to address the gap between coping theory and the clinical use of coping strategies used to self-manage BD. Methods In-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of 21 poorly adherent patients with BD. All interviews were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using content analysis with an emphasis on dominant themes. Results Transcript-based analysis generated two major domains of coping strategies used to self-manage BD: 1) problem focused (altering eating habits, managing mood-stabilizing medications, keeping psychiatric appointments, seeking knowledge, self-monitoring, and socializing) and 2) emotion focused (distracting activities, denial, isolation, modifying/avoiding, helping others, and seeking social support). Participants used both types of coping strategies to deal with stressful situations brought about by the internal and external demands associated with self-management of BD. Conclusion This qualitative study provided a first step in evaluating coping strategies as a possible mediator in the self-management of BD and has implications for health care providers. Being able to characterize an individual’s coping behaviors can help patients modify or replace more maladaptive coping with better coping strategies in the self-management of this chronic mental illness.
The local trace function of shift invariant subspaces

We define the local trace function for subspaces of $\ltworn$ which are invariant under integer translation. Our trace function contains the dimension function and the spectral function defined by Bownik and Rzeszotnik and completely characterizes the given translation invariant subspace. It has properties such as positivity, additivity, monotony and some form of continuity. It behaves nicely under dilations and modulations. We use the local trace function to deduce, using short and simple arguments, some fundamental facts about wavelets such as the characterizing equations, the equality between the dimension function and the multiplicity function and some new relations between scaling functions and wavelets.
ROUTE SELECTION IN PUBLIC TRANSPORT NETWORK USING GA

Most transportation-related applications are developed for privately-owned cars. Some recent ones are devoted to public transportation, they show limitations in dealing with the following aspects: (i) people who use public transportation may change transportation means not only within the same type but also among different modes such as between buses and subways and (ii) the system should take into account the practical time taken in transfer from one mode to the other. This study suggests the framework for developing a public transportation guidance system that generates optimized paths and transfer modes in the transport network of mixed means including buses, subways and other connection buses. The system developed in the study focuses on the following aspects: (i) it uses the GA(Genetic Algorithm), and (ii) thus, it generates multiple routes from which the user can select his or her preferred choice.
Priority Weighted Fitness Model in Complex Networks

Systems as diverse as genetic networks or the World Wide Web are best described as networks with complex topology. A common property of many large networks is that the vertex connectivities follow a scale-free power-law distribution. This feature was found to be a consequence of three generic mechanisms: (i) networks expand continuously by the addition of new vertices, (ii) new vertex with priority selected different edges of weighted selected that connected to different vertices in the system, and (iii) by the fitness probability that a new vertices attach preferentially to sites that are already well connected. A model based on these ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena. Uncovering this fitter-gets-richer phenomenon can help us understand in quantitative terms the evolution of many competitive systems in nature and society and Internet.
The Natural Gradient by Analogy to Signal Whitening, and Recipes and Tricks for its Use

The natural gradient allows for more efficient gradient descent by removing dependencies and biases inherent in a function's parameterization. Several papers present the topic thoroughly and precisely. It remains a very difficult idea to get your head around however. The intent of this note is to provide simple intuition for the natural gradient and its use. We review how an ill conditioned parameter space can undermine learning, introduce the natural gradient by analogy to the more widely understood concept of signal whitening, and present tricks and specific prescriptions for applying the natural gradient to learning problems.
Left invertibility of piecewise smooth system: The Alpazur case

The paper deals with left invertibility problem for nonsmooth systems, the illustrative case is a data secure transmission, but this problem occurs also in fault detection, parameters estimation and control design from a desired output behaviour. Here the left invertibility problem is treated on the basis of a nonsmooth chaotic system, the well known Alpazur circuit. It is associated to its dynamic input (the message). Two possibilities of implementing such a data secure transmission are given and treated independently, taking into account the particularities of each one. A high order sliding mode observer is used in one scenario, while a step-by-step observer is implemented in the other. Detailed simulation information is presented in order to emphasize the premises stated at the beginning.