Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multilingual Information Retrieval with Asian Languages

There has been increasing interest in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages on the Web and the first objective of this paper is to compare the retrieval performances of nine vector-space and two probabilistic models when carrying out a monolingual search using these three Asian languages. Based on the latest NTCIR-3 test collection, our second goal is to analyze the relative merit of using various automated tools to translate English-language topics into Chinese, Japanese or Korean, and then submitting a search based on texts written in these languages. Moreover, we will show how to improve bilingual searches by using both a combined translation strategy and a data fusion approach. Finally, we will address the underling problems of multilingual searches when an English topic is used to search documents written in the English, Chinese and Japanese languages.
Diagnostic Performance of 18F-FDG PET and PET/CT for the Detection of Recurrent Esophageal Cancer After Treatment with Curative Intent: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

The aim of this study was to assess the diagnostic performance of 18F-FDG PET and integrated 18F-FDG PET/CT for diagnosing recurrent esophageal cancer after initial treatment with curative intent. Methods: The PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane library were systematically searched for all relevant literature using the key words “18F-FDG PET” and “esophageal cancer” and synonyms. Studies examining the diagnostic value of 18F-FDG PET or integrated 18F-FDG PET/CT, either in routine clinical follow-up or in symptomatic patients in whom recurrence of esophageal cancer was suspected, were deemed eligible for inclusion. The primary outcome was the presence of recurrent esophageal cancer as determined by histopathologic biopsy or clinical follow-up. Risk of bias and applicability concerns were assessed using the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies (QUADAS-2) tool. Sensitivities and specificities of individual studies were meta-analyzed using bivariate random-effects models. Results: Eight eligible studies were included for meta-analysis, comprising 486 patients with esophageal cancer who underwent 18F-FDG PET or PET/CT after previous treatment with curative intent. The quality of the included studies assessed by the QUADAS-2 tool was considered reasonable; there were few concerns with regard to the risk of bias and applicability. Integrated 18F-FDG PET/CT and standalone 18F-FDG PET were used in 4 and 3 studies, respectively. One other study analyzed both modalities separately. In 4 studies, 18F-FDG PET or PET/CT was performed as part of routine follow-up, whereas in 4 other studies the diagnostic test was performed on indication during clinical follow-up. Pooled estimates of sensitivity and specificity for 18F-FDG PET and PET/CT in diagnosing recurrent esophageal cancer were 96% (95% confidence interval, 93%–97%) and 78% (95% confidence interval, 66%–86%), respectively. Subgroup analysis revealed no statistically significant difference in diagnostic accuracy according to type of PET scanner (standalone PET vs. integrated PET/CT) or indication of scanning (routine follow-up vs. on indication). Conclusion: 18F-FDG PET and PET/CT are reliable imaging modalities with a high sensitivity and moderate specificity for detecting recurrent esophageal cancer after treatment with curative intent. The use of 18F-FDG PET or PET/CT particularly allows for a minimal false-negative rate. However, histopathologic confirmation of 18F-FDG PET– or PET/CT-suspected lesions remains required, because a considerable false-positive rate is noticed.
Osterix is a key target for mechanical signals in human thoracic ligament flavum cells

Mechanical stress is considered to be an important factor in the progression of thoracic ossification of the ligament flavum (TOLF). To elucidate the mechanism underlying mechanical stress‐induced TOLF, we investigated the effect of stretching on cultured flavum ligament cells derived from TOLF and non‐TOLF patients. We found that the mRNA expression of alkaline phosphatase (ALP), osteocalcin, Runx2, and osterix, but not that of Dlx5 and Msx2, was significantly increased by stretching in TOLF cells. In addition, the effect seems to be finely tuned by stretching‐triggered activation of distinct mitogen‐activated protein kinase cascades. Specifically, a p38 specific inhibitor, SB203580, significantly inhibited stretching‐induced osterix expression as well as ALP activity, whereas a specific inhibitor of ERK1/2, U0126, prevented stretching‐induced Runx2 expression. We showed that overexpression of osterix resulted in a significant increase of ALP activity in TOLF cells, and osterix‐specific RNAi completely abrogated the stretching‐induced ALP activity, indicating that osterix plays a key role in stretching‐stimulated osteogenic effect in TOLF cells. These results suggest that mechanical stress plays important roles in the progression of TOLF through induction of osteogenic differentiation of TOLF cells, and our findings support that osterix functions as a molecular link between mechanostressing and osteogenic differentiation. J. Cell. Physiol. 211: 577–584, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
USING THE BRAINPORT FOR INDEPENDENT TRAVEL AND OBSTACLE AVOIDANCE

Individuals with visual impairments often have difficulty acquiring environmental and spatial information critical for independent travel. Orientation and mobility (O&M) is the body of knowledge and skills used by individuals with visual impairments for safe and independent travel. To aid this independence, there are a variety of mobility tools and devices to assist individuals traveling in various environments. A review of the relevant literature indicates that individuals may improve both spatial-perception and mobility through the sensory information provided by auditory and haptic sensory substitution systems. These systems provide useful sensory information about the environment and spatial relationships. The research remains limited and the versatility of these sensory substitution systems for real-world applications is still in question. The purpose of this study was to examine the capabilities of the BrainPort sensory substitution system to assist individuals with visual impairments to travel independently and avoid obstacles in a novel outdoor naturalistic environment.
MDLFace: Memorability augmented deep learning for video face recognition

Videos have ample amount of information in the form of frames that can be utilized for feature extraction and matching. However, face images in not all of the frames are “memorable” and useful. Therefore, utilizing all the frames available in a video for recognition does not necessarily improve the performance but significantly increases the computation time. In this research, we present a memorability based frame selection algorithm that enables automatic selection of memorable frames for facial feature extraction and matching. A deep learning algorithm is then proposed that utilizes a stack of denoising autoencoders and deep Boltzmann machines to perform face recognition using the most memorable frames. The proposed algorithm, termed as MDLFace, is evaluated on two publicly available video face databases, Youtube Faces and Point and Shoot Challenge. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance at low false accept rates.
Effective Connectivity Analysis in Brain Networks: A GPU-Accelerated Implementation of the Cox Method

The observation of interactions between neurons of a network can reveal important information about how information is processed within that network. Such observation can be established with the analysis of causality between the activities of the different neurons in the network. This analysis is called effective connectivity analysis. However, methods for such analysis are either computationally heavy for daily use or too inaccurate for making reliable analyses. Cox method produces reliable analysis, but the computation takes hours on CPUs, making it slow to use on research. In this paper, two algorithms are presented that speed up analysis of Cox method by parallelizing the computation on a graphical processing unit (GPU) with the help of a Compute Unified Device Architecture platform. Both algorithms are evaluated according to the network size and recording duration. The interest of proposing GPU implementations is in gaining the computation time but another important interest is that such implementation requires rethinking the algorithm in different ways than as the sequential implementation. This rethinking itself brings new optimization possibilities, e.g. by employing OpenCL. Utilizing this accelerated implementation, the Cox method is then applied on an experimental dataset from CRCNS in a personal computer. This should facilitate observations of biological neural network organizations that can provide new insights to improve understanding of memory, learning and intelligence.
Online Mixed Packing and Covering

Recent work has shown that the classical framework of solving optimization problems by obtaining a fractional solution to a linear program (LP) and rounding it to an integer solution can be extended to the online setting using primal-dual techniques. The success of this new framework for online optimization can be gauged from the fact that it has led to progress in several longstanding open questions. However, to the best of our knowledge, this framework has previously been applied to LPs containing only packing or only covering constraints, or minor variants of these. We extend this framework in a fundamental way by demonstrating that it can be used to solve mixed packing and covering LPs online, where packing constraints are given offline and covering constraints are received online. The objective is to minimize the maximum multiplicative factor by which any packing constraint is violated, while satisfying the covering constraints. Our results represent the first algorithm that obtains a polylogarithmic competitive ratio for solving mixed LPs online. We then consider two canonical examples of mixed LPs: unrelated machine scheduling with startup costs, and capacity constrained facility location. We use ideas generated from our result for mixed packing and covering to obtain polylogarithmic-competitive algorithms for these problems. We also give lower bounds to show that the competitive ratios of our algorithms are nearly tight.
Comprehensive system for the evaluation of the attention level of a driver

Nowadays, monitoring the attention level of a driver is a useful tool for assuring a better degree of safety aboard motor vehicles. Recent literature reports different technologies that have been explored for evaluating various critical physical parameters of drivers. This paper presents an attempt to integrate different non-intrusive monitoring systems which include an eye-blink detection system which works by means of a camera and head-position monitoring system based on an ultrasonic transmitter/receiver network. The information retrieved by the comprehensive system will be of help either for the evaluation of the driver's condition or for boosting other devices often placed in the car such as an alcohol detection system which can pick up dangerous head positions. Two separate algorithms have been implemented and the experiment will be presented in order to validate the proposed systems and algorithms.
High Order Three Part Split Symplectic Integration Schemes

Symplectic integration methods based on operator splitting are well established in many branches of science. For Hamiltonian systems which split in more than two parts, symplectic methods of higher order have been studied in detail only for a few special cases. In this work, we present and compare different ways to construct high order symplectic schemes for general Hamiltonian systems that can be split in three integrable parts. We use these techniques to numerically solve the equations of motion for a simple toy model, as well as the disordered discrete nonlinear Schr¨ odinger equation. We thereby compare the efficiency of symplectic and non-symplectic integration methods. Our results show that the new symplectic schemes are superior to the other tested methods, with respect to both long term energy conservation and computational time requirements.
Heuristics Based on Unit Propagation for Satisfiability Problems

The paper studies new unit propagation based heuristics for Davis-Putnam-Loveland (DPL) procedure. These are the novel combinations of unit propagation and the usual "Maximum Occurrences in clauses of Minimum Size" heuristics. Based on the experimental evaluations of different alternatives a new simple unit propagation based heuristic is put forward. This compares favorably with the heuristics employed in the current state-of-the-art DPL implementations (C-SAT, Tableau, POSIT).
Price setting in General Equilibrium: Alternative Specifications

This paper compares a number of alternative specifications for price setting in the context of the Smets-Wouters (2003) Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model. We compare the Calvo model with a standard Taylor contracting model and show that by allowing for sector-specific capital the Taylor contracting model with relative short contract length is performing as well as the Calvo model
Color Difference Evaluation Model on Partly Changed Complex Images

Since there has been a strong demand from industry to have an efficient way of managing color image quality presented in different media, by specifically investigating partly changed complex images, this article proposed a revision to existing CIE color difference model which cannot give a proper color difference assessment on partly changed complex images. The key method applied is to find out weight coefficients of color attributes such as lightness, hue and chroma in color difference prediction.
Response Surface Learning for Face Misalignment Correction

Face recognition is an important technique for Natural User Interface (NUI) and Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and many of the current state-of-the-art face recognition techniques are based on the local features which are extracted from a face alignment method like Constrained Local Model (CLM). But, in a real world environment, face alignment methods often fail to correctly localize the features because of extreme variations in pose and illumination. In this paper, we propose a learning-based misalinment detection and correction method. From the experiment, it is shown that the accuracy of the existing face alignment methods can be improved using the proposed method which re-aligns a misaligned result with a corrected parameter.
Improving Planner Performance in Grid Worlds with Macro Actions

In this paper we explore a class of grid world planning domains that models high-level multi-robot navigation in conﬁned spaces, and that gives rise to certain problem instances over which some modern planning techniques perform surprisingly poorly. We show that the inclusion of macro actions, inspired by techniques that humans use to solve similar problems, allows planners to ﬁnd solutions in some cases where they would otherwise fail. We then show that the pattern exploited to create the macro actions could potentially be exploited in the majority of planning domains used in the International Planning Competition.
Development and Stem Cells Research Article 3711 ) or ~25% (rosa26

INTRODUCTION The development of multicellular organisms is governed by complex signaling cascades, which lead to defined gene expression patterns to balance the proliferation, migration and differentiation of embryonic cells. The highly conserved canonical Wnt signaling pathway and cadherin-mediated cell adhesion at adherens junctions provide two examples of major importance throughout embryogenesis (Nelson and Nusse, 2004). Vital to both of these processes is -catenin, encoded by Ctnnb1. In cells expressing classical cadherins (i.e. E-cadherin or N-cadherin), -catenin binds to the intracellular part of these transmembrane proteins and interacts with -catenin, forming a chain of proteins connecting the cell membrane with the actin filament network of the cell (Kemler, 1993). Extracellularly, cadherins of the same isotype connect neighboring cells, and these homophilic interactions are the basis for the cell sorting processes that take place in embryogenesis (Takeichi, 1988). Interrupting adherens junctions at any point in this chain of proteins severely weakens the adhesive bond among cells, leading to incorrect cell sorting and migration, compromising development. Canonical Wnt signaling is important for patterning the early embryo, organogenesis and maintenance of tissue-specific stem cells (Reya and Clevers, 2005). The molecular mechanisms that lead to the activation of the canonical Wnt signaling pathway are complex, involving the interplay of a multitude of inhibitors, activators and their co-factors at the cell membrane, in the cytoplasm and in the nucleus. Briefly, in the absence of canonical Wnt signals, the so-called destruction complex sequentially phosphorylates serine/threonine residues at the N-terminus of -catenin, priming the protein for subsequent polyubiquitylation and proteasomal degradation (Aberle et al., 1997). Upon binding of a canonical Wnt ligand to receptors of the Frizzled and LRP family, the destruction complex is sequestered to the cell membrane and disintegrated (Zeng et al., 2008). Consequently, -catenin accumulates in the cytoplasm, translocates to the nucleus and, in cooperation with LEF/TCF transcription factors, controls the transcription of canonical Wnt target genes (Daniels and Weis, 2005). Embryos lacking -catenin (Haegel et al., 1995; Huelsken et al., 2000) or expressing a canonical Wnt signaling-incompetent protein (Valenta et al., 2011) have gastrulation defects and are lethal in early postimplantation development. An arrest in development is also seen upon expression of a dominant-active form of -catenin that is missing the phosphorylation sites important for degradation. This results in accumulating amounts of -catenin protein, which leads to precocious activation of Wnt target genes and the uncoordinated premature generation of mesodermal cells (Kemler et al., …
An analytical model for current, delay, and power analysis of submicron CMOS logic circuits

An analytical model for computing the supply current, delay, and power of a submicron CMOS inverter is presented. A modified version of the nth power law MOSFET model is proposed and used to relate the terminal voltages to the drain current in submicron transistors. By first computing definable reference points on the output voltage waveform, and then using linear approximations through these points to find the actual points of interest, the desired speed and accuracy of the inverter model are achieved. The most important part of the analysis is a three-step approach for computing the time and output voltage when the short-circuit transistor changes its mode of operation. The time and output voltage when the charging/discharging current reaches its maximum are also calculated and then used to evaluate the propagation delay and characterize the output voltage waveform. The model has been validated for both 0.8 /spl mu/m (5 V) and 0.25 /spl mu/m (2.5 V) CMOS technologies, for a wide range of inverter sizes, input transition times, and capacitive loads. It predicts the delay, peak supply current, and power dissipation to within a few percent of HSPICE or ELDO simulations based on accurate physically based MOSFET models, while offering about two orders of magnitude gain in CPU time based on a MATLAB implementation.
Some Psycholinguistic Aspects of Metaphor

AUTHOR Ortony, Andrew TITLE Some Psycholinguistic Aspects of Metaphor. Technical Report No. 112. INSTITUTION Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., Cambridge, Mass. ; Illinois Univ., Urbana. Center for the Study of Reading. SPONS AGENCY National Acadeue"Of Education, Washington, D.C.; National Inst. of Education (DHEW), Wlashington, D.C. PUB DATE Jan 79 CONTRACT 400-76-0116 GRANT HEW-NIE-C-74-0007 NOTE 38p.
Moving Beyond Mirroring - a Social Affordance Model of Sensorimotor Integration During Action Perception

ion above the constraints of the actual present relationship between monkey and object. Accordingly, one might suggest therefore that some of these neurons monitor the affordances of the objects in the present environment for longer term pragmatic purposes, than simply for immediate action choice. With different canonical neurons possibly responding in a distributed way to respectively peri-personal and extra-personal objects we would be told not only something about the lasting affordances of objects and what actions are immediately afforded but also something about the broader affordance structure of the surrounding environment. Thus one could say that in the case of extra-personal canonical neurons a teleological relation is signaled without determining the interaction, in other words the object could afford a similar action both over time and to other agents in the shared affordance space. As I shall develop in detail later, this leaves an opening for not only mirror neurons but also canonical neurons as playing a role in social cognition that is normally not mentioned in the literature. The visual response of canonical neurons occurs at the time of object presentation prior to any action, and this should be seen in contrast to the so-called ‘motor’ neuronal response during action or just prior to action initiation and the ‘somatosensory’ responses that mostly seem to fall at the time of hand-object impact. Canonical neurons appear to integrate visual object perception with potential actions as opposed to simply following or initiating the actual action. But, moreover, they might also via their visualsomatosensory-motor integration be understood as alerting to the likely outcomes of possible actions. The motor properties of canonical neurons are reported to be distributed similarly to other F5 neurons such that canonical neurons respond to various types and segments of objectdirected actions. Some of the canonical neurons respond to very specific motor acts, effectors or temporal sequences whereas others respond to multiple different kinds of acts towards the same goal. So, it seems that clusters of canonical neurons like other F5 populations have a distributed array of motor properties that span and integrate various goal levels and temporal segments of actions. In the case of action production such a 45 As we shall later see, Gallese and his team often talk about how action mirroring leads to a broader action knowledge including for example sensory consequences. This integration of the potential and actual over different modalities could provide a basic example of how such knowledge can be had without the need to postulate elaborate forward and inverse internal models.
Protocol Interference Between UP-and Downlink Channels in HSDPA

The introduction of high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) in conventional WCDMA systems according to the UMTS standard will enable packet-switched broadband services with data rates of several Mbps. Until the deployment of high speed uplink packet access (HSUPA), the uplink traffic will be handled by conventional dedicated channels (DCHs). While the HSDPA downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH) is accompanied by fast feedback signaling channels, all feedback signals related to the uplink DCH, such as ARQ status messages, have to be transmitted via the downlink HS-DSCH. In this paper, we argue that the downlink HS-DSCH is subject to unpredictable delays, causing malicious interference with uplink protocol mechanisms, such as the ARQ. Eventually, we show how this degrades the overall end-to-end performance, and we propose and evaluate mechanisms how to alleviate this problem