Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cost sensitive GPS-based activity recognition

GPS-based activity recognition is extremely important for high-level analysis and location based services. Trajectories of people are highly imbalanced from spatial and temporal perspectives. Many existing researches achieve good results on recognizing activities with lots of GPS logs, such as working and staying at home. However, these approaches usually fail at activities with few trajectory records. In this paper, we propose a cost sensitive GPS-based activity recognition model to improve accuracy of minority activities which could imply users' personal preferences. The approach aims at providing more balanced results. We first propose a cost function to measure spatial and temporal regularities of each activity on a stay point. Then we incorporate cost function into activity recognition algorithm. We take hidden Markov model as an example in this study. Experiments show good performance of our approach in several evaluation metrics. It could provide more balanced and valuable activity recognition results from GPS trajectories.
A Numerical-Integration Perspective on Gaussian Filters

This paper proposes a numerical-integration perspective on the Gaussian filters. A Gaussian filter is approximation of the Bayesian inference with the Gaussian posterior probability density assumption being valid. There exists a variation of Gaussian filters in the literature that derived themselves from very different backgrounds. From the numerical-integration viewpoint, various versions of Gaussian filters are only distinctive from each other in their specific treatments of approximating the multiple statistical integrations. A common base is provided for the first time to analyze and compare Gaussian filters with respect to accuracy, efficiency and stability factor. This study is expected to facilitate the selection of appropriate Gaussian filters in practice and to help design more efficient filters by employing better numerical integration methods
Popularity and findability through log analysis of search terms and queries: the case of a multilingual public service website

SHIL on the Web is the website of the Israeli Citizens' Advice Bureau. It provides information about rights, social benefits, government and public services and civil obligations. Activity on the site approaches 10,000 pages visited per day. It has interfaces in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. Logfile analysis of the SHIL website revealed to our surprise that about 60.7% of the requests reaching SHIL from external sites (excluding requests from robots) are from general search engines (e.g. Google and MSN), and users reach a specific page on the site linked from the search results page. This finding seems to indicate that the site is not known well enough to the public. On the other hand the site is very active, thus it seems to serve Israeli citizens well, even without being a well known brand. In this paper we analyzed the external requests coming from search engines. The analysis is based on the 266,295 queries from search engines that reached SHIL during March—October 2005. Studying queries submitted to search engines is a novel technique for analyzing the access patterns to the site and provides a better understanding of the user needs and intentions than analyzing the distribution of the visited pages only. We are not aware of any previous study that analyzed the relation between the query submitted to the search engine and the webpage the user clicked on the search results page. Since search engines provide snippets, when the user clicks on a specific page he already has some information on what is to be found on the page and the user makes a conscious decision to click on the specific result. Thus, this type of analysis provides additional information about the users' actual information needs.
Computed tomography of the coronary arteries: An alternative?

Multislice Computed Tomography Coronary Angiography (CTCA) has emerged as a promising non-invasive modality for the detection of coronary artery stenosis. Image quality is still limited when compared to conventional coronary angiography. However, CTCA has been demonstrated to be highly reliable to rule out coronary artery stenosis. Technological improvements and the combination of CTCA with other non-invasive modalities are expected to further increase diagnostic accuracy. Although CTCA has clearly left the research environment, the precise role of CTCA in the diagnostic work-up of coronary artery disease needs further research.
A METHODOLOGY BASED IN CASE-BASED REASONING TO BUILD A KNOWLEDGEBASE APPLIED TO FAILURE DIAGNOSIS SYSTEM OF HIDROGENERATORS MACHINERY

This paper proposes the application of the approach of Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) to build a knowledgebase of an intelligent system for maintenance predictive of hydropower equipment. The CBR approach is an important area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve problems from the previously accumulated knowledge of known scenarios that can provide a solution to new problems arise. The CBR cycle is characterized by have four stages known as 4R: recovery, reuse, revision and retention. Each of these steps involving the knowledge-base, which is know how casebase. The case-base contains the information on abnormal situations presented in the equipments encoded in format of cases according to a structure standard for each case: problem-solution. The architecture and development for obtain the relational model of the knowledge-base according to the CBR approach can be summarized in the following 4 stages: first, identification and classification of hidrogenerators machinery, according to the type or the family for each equipment; second, search and collection of information related to situations of failure or abnormal events occurred in the equipment of the hydroelectric power plant: historical fault records, abnormal events, work orders and others informations as: preventive maintenance, FMEA (Failure Modes and Effect Analyses) tables, experience of operators, supervision on-line and off-line; third, definition of the structure of the cases focused to the diagnosis of equipment failures and support in taking decision. The final step is the coding of cases and their implementation in a relational database, constituting the knowledge-base of the intelligent system. The results obtained, are related in obtain a format and structure of cases for a intelligent system according to the approach CBR, that can be applied to any equipment or system, whose objective of intelligent reasoning is the fault diagnosis and support decision making. The model of the relational database to implement the knowledge-base of the intelligent system is obtained from the information of the case study.
Vdismodel: A Display Latency Performance Model in Virtualization Environment

With the rapid development of virtualization technology as well as the good performance of computer hardware, virtual machine is beginning to gradually increase the performance of display to meet the needs of desktop users. However, there is a difference between the display mechanism in the virtual environment and the traditional environment. At present, more is focused on how to effectively and pertinently measure and assess the performance of display in virtualization environment. Taking consideration of the characteristics of display in the virtual environment, the virtual machine display performance evaluation system has following advantages: it can select a representative workload running on the VM in Domain U, make use of Tracing and Instrumentation to insert the record in the kernel of VM, log the relevant information, and then finally draw the performance-related parameters by the analysis of the recorder. This paper mainly depicts the underlying implementation details of the virtual display system in Xen and analyzes the display principle of Xen-based virtual machine. It also proposes a display latency performance model in Xen environment, which is named Vdismodel by verifying the reasonableness of the Vdismodel through a series of experiments and comparing the theoretical data and the measured data which are accessed by the virtual machine system performance evaluation.
pH-independent retrograde targeting of glycolipids to the Golgi complex

Schapiro, Florencia B. , Clifford Lingwood, Wendy Furuya, and Sergio Grinstein. pH-independent retrograde targeting of glycolipids to the Golgi complex. Am. J. Physiol. 274 (Cell Physiol. 43): C319–C332, 1998. —A small fraction of the molecules internalized by endocytosis reaches the Golgi complex through a retrograde pathway that is poorly understood. In the present work, we used bacterial toxins to study the retrograde pathway in Vero cells. The recombinant B subunit of verotoxin 1B (VT1B) was labeled with fluorescein to monitor its progress within the cell by confocal microscopy. This toxin, which binds specifically to the glycolipid globotriaosyl ceramide, entered endosomes by both clathrin-dependent and -independent pathways, reaching the Golgi complex. Once internalized, the toxin-receptor complex did not recycle back to the plasma membrane. The kinetics of internalization and the subcellular distribution of VT1B were virtually identical to those of another glycolipid-binding toxin, the B subunit of cholera toxin (CTB). Retrograde transport of VT1B and CTB was unaffected by addition of weak bases in combination with concanamycin, a vacuolartype ATPase inhibitor. Ratio imaging confirmed that these agents neutralized the luminal pH of the compartments where the toxin was located. Therefore, the retrograde transport of glycolipids differs from that of proteins like furin and TGN38, which require an acidic luminal pH. Additional experiments indicated that the glycolipid receptors of VT1B and CTB are internalized independently and not as part of lipid ‘‘rafts’’ and that internalization is cytochalasin insensitive. We conclude that glycolipids utilize a unique, pHindependent retrograde pathway to reach compartments of the secretory system and that assembly of F-actin is not required for this process.
A robust system of face detection and precise face organ location

Human face detection and face organ feature location are both important steps in automatic visual interpretation and human face recognition systems. In this paper, a robust system which focuses on human face detection and face organ location is introduced. We improve the cascade-structured classifier of the human face detector, and integrate human face super-resolution algorithm into our system to help processing low-resolution faces. Template matching, feature space analysis method (PCA) combined with AdaBoost algorithm are used to get the precise location of eye feature, and the locations of other face organs are incorporated in the similar framework. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system has good performance on actual images.
An approach to preprocess data in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease

The number of people surviving in older age is more. This is mainly due to the developments that have taken place in the field of medicine. Theseold people are prone to many age related diseases. There are numerous neuro degenerative brain related diseases. Dementia is one among them. The people affected by Dementia will have lapse of memory. Alzheimer's disease is one of the types of dementia. Diagnosis of the disease is a time consuming task. To reduce the time needed for diagnosis the medical practitioners use system based approach. To help the practitioners researchers have developed various tools and techniques. In this paper the authors focus on classifications of subjects as diseased or not. Before doing classification the data has to be preprocessed. Preprocessing of data is done by applying techniques such as preparation of data, selection of attributes, balancing data, model evaluation and feature selection etc.The authors have collected the data of 466 subjects. The preprocessing techniques are applied on the data set. The subjects are classified using Naïve bayes and J48. The accuracy of the classifications are compared and Naïve bayes is found better.
CORTICOLIMBIC FUNCTIONING, NICOTINE DEPENDENCE CHARACTERISTICS, AND SMOKING LAPSE HISTORY: AN FMRI STUDY

Title of Document: CORTICOLIMBIC FUNCTIONING, NICOTINE DEPENDENCE CHARACTERISTICS, AND SMOKING LAPSE HISTORY: AN FMRI STUDY Jessica M. Richards, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professor Carl W. Lejuez, Department of Psychology Nicotine dependence is a prevalent and costly disorder characterized by notoriously high relapse rates. Extant research implicates stress as a key mechanism driving smoking across the stages of addiction, and neurobiological models of stress and addiction emphasize the role of overlapping corticolimbic circuits in both emotion dysregulation and compulsive drug seeking. However, neuroimaging research examining the neural correlates of stress processing in human smokers is limited and lacking in some areas, leaving key questions unanswered. Specifically, it is unclear how neural responses to stress may explain individual differences in nicotine dependence severity and cessation attempt outcomes. Moreover, more recent theoretical and empirical work has highlighted the importance of looking beyond functioning in discreet neural regions and has emphasized the importance of examining how brain functioning at a network level, through the use of resting state functional connectivity, might explain addictive behavior. However, research examining the relationship between functional connectivity and clinically-relevant smoking measures is also limited. As a first step toward addressing these gaps in the literature, the current study utilized a novel fMRI-compatible psychological stress induction task to examine the relationships between stress-induced neural activation, as well as resting state functional connectivity within stress-related corticolimbic circuits, and clinically-relevant smoking characteristics among a sample of adult cigarette smokers. Analysis of the fMRI data collected during administration of the novel stress induction task revealed significant stress-induced activation in the right insula, a region previously implicated in the interoceptive experience of negative affective states, as well as visceral symptoms of nicotine withdrawal and craving. Contrary to expectations, there were no significant relationships identified between stress-induced neural functioning, or functional connectivity within stress-related circuits, and the clinically-relevant smoking measures that were assessed. Findings are discussed in light of several study limitations and directions for future research are enumerated. CORTICOLIMBIC FUNCTIONING, NICOTINE DEPENDENCE CHARACTERISTICS, AND SMOKING LAPSE HISTORY: AN FMRI STUDY
Chronic Fine and Coarse Particulate Exposure, Mortality, and Coronary Heart Disease in the Nurses’ Health Study

Background The relationship of fine particulate matter < 2.5 μm in diameter (PM2.5) air pollution with mortality and cardiovascular disease is well established, with more recent long-term studies reporting larger effect sizes than earlier long-term studies. Some studies have suggested the coarse fraction, particles between 2.5 and 10 μm (PM10–2.5), may also be important. With respect to mortality and cardiovascular events, questions remain regarding the relative strength of effect sizes for chronic exposure to fine and coarse particles. Objectives We examined the relationship of chronic PM2.5 and PM10–2.5 exposures with all-cause mortality and fatal and nonfatal incident coronary heart disease (CHD), adjusting for time-varying covariates. Methods The current study included women from the Nurses’ Health Study living in metropolitan areas of the northeastern and midwestern United States. Follow-up was from 1992 to 2002. We used geographic information systems–based spatial smoothing models to estimate monthly exposures at each participant’s residence. Results We found increased risk of all-cause mortality [hazard ratio (HR), 1.26; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.02–1.54] and fatal CHD (HR = 2.02; 95% CI, 1.07–3.78) associated with each 10-μg/m3 increase in annual PM2.5 exposure. The association between fatal CHD and PM10–2.5 was weaker. Conclusions Our findings contribute to growing evidence that chronic PM2.5 exposure is associated with risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality.
Active Contour Model Using Wavelet Modulus for Object Segmentation and Tracking in Video Sequences

We propose an integrated wavelet-based framework of the active contour model (snake) for segmentation and motion tracking of deformable objects in video sequences. The input image frame is represented by means of wavelet transform. First, the moduli of wavelet transform coefficients are used in a multi-resolution motion estimation process to find the initial snake contour in the current frame. The presented multi-resolution motion estimation methods allow a larger movement of the tracked object than does traditional image-based motion estimation. Secondly, the wavelet transform modulus at each scale is considered in the energy function of the snake model. The snake computation is based on a coarse-to-fine scale continuation method. Application of the proposed methods to biological cell tracking is demonstrated in experiments.
Effect of an Educational Video on the Accuracy of Surrogate Decisions: The Case of Electroconvulsive Therapy

Background: Under the amended Mental Health Act 2007, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can only be authorized in an incapacitated patient providing it is not in conflict with the decision of the donee of lasting power of attorney. Objectives: To assess the ability of surrogates to correctly predict a subject's preference for treatment with ECT both before and after viewing an educational video. The effect of the educational video on attitudes to ECT was also examined. Methods: Twenty-five subject-surrogate pairs were recruited from relatives of psychiatric patients. The subjects' treatment preferences regarding the ECT and the surrogates' predictions of these preferences were assessed by means of 2 hypothetical scenarios before and after viewing an educational video. An attitude to ECT questionnaire (Questionnaire on Attitudes and Knowledge of ECT) was completed by all participants before and after the video. Results: Subject-surrogate concordance was high, 84% for scenario 1 (treatment-resistant depression) before and after the video. In scenario 2 (life-threatening depression), concordance rose from 80% before the video to 96% after the video. The greatest increase in concordance occurred in pairs in which neither subject nor surrogate had previous experience of ECT. Attitude scores were significantly more positive after the video. Conclusions: Surrogates were able to predict the subjects' preference for ECT with high levels of accuracy. This finding is contrary to similar studies involving end-of-life treatment. Providing surrogates with clear, detailed, and accurate information about the proposed treatment may improve surrogate accuracy particularly in treatments such as ECT where widespread misperceptions prevail.
Perpetual loss and pervasive grief

Abstract The impact on daughters of the death of their mother in childhood has been little researched. This article reports a qualitative study of the experiences of women in Ireland who were bereaved of their mother in early life, and the lifelong impact of this loss. The death of their mothers had a profound impact throughout these women's childhoods and adult lives. The women described the silence surrounding the death, their hunger for information about their mother, their coping strategies, their yearning for a mother figure, particularly in adolescence and when they married and gave birth themselves, and the effects on their own parenting capacity. A strong theme was their wish to speak publicly about their experiences, in the hope that they could help other women bereaved of a mother in childhood, and inform and enlighten those in a position to make a difference to bereaved children's lives.
Assessment of hearing aid algorithms using a master hearing aid: the influence of hearing aid experience on the relationship between speech recognition and cognitive capacity

Abstract Objectives: Model-based hearing aid development considers the assessment of speech recognition using a master hearing aid (MHA). It is known that aided speech recognition in noise is related to cognitive factors such as working memory capacity (WMC). This relationship might be mediated by hearing aid experience (HAE). The aim of this study was to examine the relationship of WMC and speech recognition with a MHA for listeners with different HAE. Design: Using the MHA, unaided and aided 80% speech recognition thresholds in noise were determined. Individual WMC capacity was assed using the Verbal Learning and Memory Test (VLMT) and the Reading Span Test (RST). Study sample: Forty-nine hearing aid users with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss divided into three groups differing in HAE. Results: Whereas unaided speech recognition did not show a significant relationship with WMC, a significant correlation could be observed between WMC and aided speech recognition. However, this only applied to listeners with HAE of up to approximately three years, and a consistent weakening of the correlation could be observed with more experience. Conclusions: Speech recognition scores obtained in acute experiments with an MHA are less influenced by individual cognitive capacity when experienced HA users are taken into account.
Molecular cloning of infectious ecotropic murine leukemia virus AK7 from an emv-14-positive AKXL-5 mouse and the resistance of AK7 to recognition by cytotoxic T lymphocytes

The AKXL-5 recombinant inbred mouse strain is positive for the endogenous ecotropic murine leukemia virus emv-14, the only emv present in its germ line. emv-14 is of particular interest because spleen cells expressing emv-14 virus escape recognition by anti-AKR/Gross virus-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes. We report here the isolation and characterization of a replication-competent emv clone, pAK7, derived from an AKXL-5 mouse. This clone is novel in that it encodes a variant ecotropic murine leukemia virus that, when expressed in SC.Kb target cells, fails to be recognized efficiently by anti-AKR/Gross virus cytotoxic T lymphocytes. The pAK7 clone can therefore be used to further probe mechanisms of escape from cell-mediated immunity.