Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pilot Control Modeling With Stochastic Periodical Discrete Movement

This paper proposes a novel pilot control model which reflects the following three characteristics of the pilot control behavior: stochastic, periodical, and discrete movement. The focus is on the final descent phase when the pilot controls the aircraft manually based on the flight director commands. The proposed model is developed based on an existing model as well as highly experienced pilot's comments. A flight simulator experiment is conducted and three pilots’ landing data are obtained. The parameters of the pilot model are tuned via a genetic algorithm. The simulation result reveals that the proposed model captures well the characteristics of the data obtained in the simulator experiment and shows a good accordance with actual command tracking capability. The obtained parameters also identify the difference of control strategies between the pilots.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Insider Trading on the Stock Market

We study the behavior of a large trader with private information about the mean of an asset with a risky return. We argue that if the variability of the return is not too great, typically the trader will find it desirable to ensure that the market price does not reveal his information, that is, that a "pooling" equilibrium arises. Such an equilibrium has the advantage of avoiding the incentive constraints that arise in "separating" equilibria, where information can be inferred from prices. Thus the efficient market hypothesis may well fail if there is imperfect competition. Despite the uniformativeness of prices, the other (competitive) traders are also better off in the pooling equilibrium than in any separating equilibrium, again if one assumes limited variability.
Neural processing of food and erotic cues in bulimia nervosa.

OBJECTIVE Event-related brain potential (ERP) studies have shown that bulimia nervosa (BN) is associated with facilitated processing of disorder-specific stimuli, visible in altered early components during presentation of food cues and bodies varying in size. Less is known about BN and late ERPs, typically less influenced by perceptual features and regarded as more reliable indices of motivational relevance. The purpose of this study was to use the late positive potential (LPP) to investigate the motivational significance of BN-relevant stimuli. METHODS Highly salient stimuli such as pictures of personal binge foods and pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant (human attacks) images were presented to 24 women with bulimia and 24 healthy women (19.7±2.1 and 20.5±2.6 years, respectively). Pictures of erotic couples, previously shown to prompt the greatest appetitive reactions in healthy women, were used as pleasant cues. Based on BN aversion to body cues, we hypothesized that the motivational significance of erotic cues could be increased in bulimic women. RESULTS Consistent with the literature, the LPP was modulated by the salience of the pictures (F2.8,130.7=24.6, p<0.001). An additional interaction with diagnostic group (F2.8,130.7=2.8, p=0.047) indicated that bulimic women showed a larger LPP than healthy controls during pictures displaying binge foods (p=0.037) and erotic couples (p=0.031). CONCLUSIONS The findings provide objective evidence that bulimia nervosa is characterized by dysregulated emotional processing that is not limited to food cues. The implications are discussed within a transdiagnostic perspective on food-related disorders.
Male Medical Students’ Gender-Role Conflict Is Associated With Their Discomfort With Dealing With Patients’ Sexual Health Issues

Recommendations suggest that more sexuality education be implemented in medical school curricula to increase students’ comfort with regard to dealing with sexual health issues. For male medical students the adherence to masculine gender-role norms may also contribute to discomfort regarding dealing with this intimate topic. The current study analyzed whether male medical students’ knowledge or masculine gender-role conflict (GRC) was associated with their comfort with regard to asking future patients about sexual health issues. A total of 164 male medical students (Mage = 24.4, SD = 2.4) participated. A questionnaire assessed students’ self-perceived knowledge of sexual health, how prepared they felt with regard to this topic, and their comfort with regard to asking future patients about sexual health issues. The Gender Role Conflict Scale—Short Form (GRCS-SF) was used to assess GRC. Knowledge was positively associated with comfort. Male students who indicated difficulty expressing affection toward men or expressing emotions were likely to report being uncomfortable asking patients about sexual health issues. Students should be made aware of gender-role norms. Alongside knowledge transfer, the discussion of strategies for overcoming the barriers set by gender-role norms should be part of sexuality education.
Telomere Shortening in Formerly Abused and Never Abused Women

Recent studies suggest that chronic psychological stress may accelerate aging at the cellular level. Telomeres are protective components that stabilize the ends of chromosomes and modulate cellular aging. Women exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV) experience chronic stress and report worse health. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine telomeric DNA length in women who have experienced chronic stress related to IPV. We hypothesized that IPV exposure would be associated with shorter telomere length. The investigation used a cross-sectional design to study telomere length in women with a history of IPV exposure and control women who reported no prior exposure to IPV. Advertisements and public notices were used to recruit a convenience sample of healthy women. Mean leukocyte telomere length was measured in DNA samples from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) by a quantitative polymerase chain reaction assay (qPCR). Telomere length was significantly shorter in the 61 formerly abused women compared to the 41 controls (t = 2.4, p = .02). Length of time in the abusive relationship and having children were associated with telomere length after controlling for age and body mass index (BMI) (F(2, 99) = 10.23, p < . 001). Numerous studies suggest that women who experience IPV have poorer overall health. It is often presumed that the stress of IPV may be causing greater morbidity. Findings from this descriptive study suggest a link between IPV exposure, duration of IPV-related stress, and telomere length molecular mechanisms that regulate cellular aging.
Covalent functionalization of SWCNT with combretastatin A4 for cancer therapy

Single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) are currently under intensive investigation by many labs all over the world for being promising candidates for cancer chemotherapy delivery. On the other hand, combretastatin A4 (CA4) is an anticancer drug that induces cell apoptosis by inhibiting tubulin polymerization. However, it has the disadvantage of low water solubility and the non-selective targeting. Therefore, we aim to create nano-drug from the functionalization of SWCNT covalently with CA4 through click reaction in the presence of tetraethylene glycol linker in order to improve its dispersibility. Scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy showed good dispersibility of the functionalized SWCNT with diameters of 5–15 nm. Moreover, thermogravometric analysis showed that the efficiency of SWCNT functionalization was around 45%. The in vitro release profile of CA4 at physiological conditions showed that approximately 90% of the loaded drug was released over 50 h. After that MTS test was used to determine the suitable concentration range for the in vitro investigation of the SWCNT-CA4. After that the cytotoxic activity of the SWCNT-CA4 was evaluated by flow cytometry using annexin V/propidium iodide (PI) test. In comparison with free CA4, SWCNT-CA4 treatment demonstrated a significant increase in necrotic cells (around 50%) at the expense of the proportion of the apoptotic cells. Moreover, cell cycle PI test demonstrated that free CA4 and SWCNT-CA4 caused G2/M arrest. However with CA4 treatment higher proportion of cells were in the S-phase while with SWCNT-CA4 treatment greater proportion of cells appeared to be in the G1-phase. Taken together, the provided data suggest that the novel SWCNT-CA4 has a significant anticancer activity that might be superior to that of free CA4.
Information theory related learning

This is the introduction paper to a special session held on ESANN conference 2011. It reviews and highlights recent developments and new direction in information related learning, which is af astly de- veloping research area. These algorithms are based on the fundamental principles of information theory and relate them implicitly or explicitly to learning algoithms and strategies.
Basal Autophagy Is Altered in Lagotto Romagnolo Dogs with an ATG4D Mutation

A missense variant in the autophagy-related ATG4D-gene has been associated with a progressive degenerative neurological disease in Lagotto Romagnolo (LR) dogs. In addition to neural lesions, affected dogs show an extraneural histopathological phenotype characterized by severe cytoplasmic vacuolization, a finding not previously linked with disturbed autophagy in animals. Here we aimed at testing the hypothesis that autophagy is altered in the affected dogs, at reporting the histopathology of extraneural tissues and at excluding lysosomal storage diseases. Basal and starvation-induced autophagy were monitored by Western blotting and immunofluorescence of microtubule associated protein 1A/B light chain3 (LC3) in fibroblasts from 2 affected dogs. The extraneural findings of 9 euthanized LRs and skin biopsies from 4 living affected LRs were examined by light microscopy, electron microscopy, and immunohistochemistry (IHC), using antibodies against autophagosomal membranes (LC3), autophagic cargo (p62), and lysosomal membranes (LAMP2). Biochemical screening of urine and fibroblasts of 2 affected dogs was performed. Under basal conditions, the affected fibroblasts contained significantly more LC3-II and LC3-positive vesicles than did the controls. Morphologically, several cells, including serous secretory epithelium, endothelial cells, pericytes, plasma cells, and macrophages, contained cytoplasmic vacuoles with an ultrastructure resembling enlarged amphisomes, endosomes, or multivesicular bodies. IHC showed strong membranous LAMP2 positivity only in sweat glands. The results show that basal but not induced autophagy is altered in affected fibroblasts. The ultrastructure of affected cells is compatible with altered autophagic and endo-lysosomal vesicular traffic. The findings in this spontaneous disease provide insight into possible tissue-specific roles of basal autophagy.
Multizone Soundfield Reproduction With Privacy- and Quality-Based Speech Masking Filters

Reproducing zones of personal sound is a challenging signal processing problem that has garnered considerable research interest in recent years. We introduce in this work an extended method to multizone soundfield reproduction that overcomes issues with speech privacy and quality. Measures of speech intelligibility contrast (SIC) and speech quality are used as cost functions in an optimization of speech privacy and quality. Novel spatial and (temporal) frequency domain speech masker filter designs are proposed to accompany the optimization process. Spatial masking filters are designed using multizone soundfield algorithms that are dependent on the target speech multizone reproduction. Combinations of estimates of acoustic contrast and long term average speech spectra are proposed to provide equal masking influence on speech privacy and quality. Spatial aliasing specific to multizone soundfield reproduction geometry is further considered in analytically derived low-pass filters. Simulated and real-world experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed method using semi-circular and linear loudspeaker arrays. Simulated implementations of the proposed method show that significant SIC and speech quality is achievable between zones. A range of perceptual evaluation of speech quality mean opinion scores that indicate good quality are obtained while at the same time providing confidential privacy as indicated by SIC. The simulations also show that the method is robust to variations in the speech, virtual source location, array geometry, and number of loudspeakers. Real-world experiments confirm the practicality of the proposed methods by showing that good quality and confidential privacy are achievable.
Circulating levels of the anti-oxidant indoleproprionic acid are associated with higher gut microbiome diversity

ABSTRACT The gut microbiome has recently emerged as an important regulator of insulin resistance and abdominal obesity. The tryptophan metabolite generated by the gut microbiome, indoleproprionic acid (IPA) has been shown to predict the onset of type 2 diabetes. IPA is a metabolite produced by gut microbes from dietary tryptophan that exhibits a high degree of inter-individual variation. The microbiome composition parameters that are associated with circulating levels of this potent anti-oxidant have however not been investigated to date in human populations. In 1018 middle-aged women from the TwinsUK cohort, we assessed the relationship between serum IPA levels and gut microbiome composition targeting the 16S rRNA gene. Microbiome alpha-diversity was positively correlated with serum indoleproprionic acid levels (Shannon Diversity: Beta[95%CI] = 0.19[0.13;0.25], P = 6.41 × 10−10) after adjustment for covariates. Sixteen taxa and 12 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) associated with IPA serum levels. Among these are positive correlations with the butyrate-producing Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, the class Mollicutes and the order RF39 of the Tenericutes, and Coprococcus Negative correlations instead were observed with Eubacterium dolichum previously shown to correlate with visceral fat mass and several genera in the Lachnospiraceae family such as Blautia and Ruminococcus previously shown to correlate with obesity. Microbiome composition parameters explained ~20% of the variation in circulating levels of IPA, whereas nutritional and host genetic parameters explained only ~4%. Our data confirm an association between IPA circulating levels and metabolic syndrome parameters and indicate that gut microbiome composition influences IPA levels.
A new method of brain stimulation at ultra-high frequency

Nerve stimulation via micro-electrode implants is one of the neurostimulation approaches which is used frequently in the medical treatment of some brain disorders, neural prosthetics, brain-machine interfaces and also in the cyborg. In this method, the electrical stimulation signal can be categorized by the frequency band: low frequency, high frequency, and ultra-high frequency. The stimulation should be less destructive, more smooth, and controllable. In this article, we present a brief description of the mechanism underlying the ultra-high frequency stimulation. In the flowing, from an informatics perspective, we propose a state-of-the-art, low destructive, and highly efficient stimulation method at the low amplitude ultra-high frequency signal. In this method, we have tried to reduce the adaptation of the nerve system by modulating the stimulation signal via a low frequency rectangular random wave. By this method, we could reach the “almost zero discharge” with minimum destructive effect in the experimental test on the fish nervous system.
Towards Recognizing Phrase Translation Processes: Experiments on English-French

When translating phrases (words or group of words), human translators, consciously or not, resort to different translation processes apart from the literal translation, such as Idiom Equivalence, Generalization, Particularization, Semantic Modulation, etc. Translators and linguists (such as Vinay and Darbelnet, Newmark, etc.) have proposed several typologies to characterize the different translation processes. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been effort to automatically classify these fine-grained translation processes. Recently, an English-French parallel corpus of TED Talks has been manually annotated with translation process categories, along with established annotation guidelines. Based on these annotated examples, we propose an automatic classification of translation processes at subsentential level. Experimental results show that we can distinguish non-literal translation from literal translation with an accuracy of 87.09%, and 55.20% for classifying among five non-literal translation processes. This work demonstrates that it is possible to automatically classify translation processes. Even with a small amount of annotated examples, our experiments show the directions that we can follow in future work. One of our long term objectives is leveraging this automatic classification to better control paraphrase extraction from bilingual parallel corpora.
Natural Domain Decomposition Algorithms for the Solution of Time-Harmonic Elastic Waves

We study for the first time Schwarz domain decomposition methods for the solution of the Navier equations modeling the propagation of elastic waves. These equations in the time harmonic regime are difficult to solve by iterative methods, even more so than the Helmholtz equation. We first prove that the classical Schwarz method is not convergent when applied to the Navier equations, and can thus not be used as an iterative solver, only as a preconditioner for a Krylov method. We then introduce more natural transmission conditions between the subdomains, and show that if the overlap is not too small, this new Schwarz method is convergent. We illustrate our results with numerical experiments, both for situations covered by our technical two subdomain analysis, and situations that go far beyond, including many subdomains, cross points, heterogeneous materials in a transmission problem, and Krylov acceleration. Our numerical results show that the Schwarz method with adapted transmission conditions leads systematically to a better solver for the Navier equations than the classical Schwarz method.
Sandpile monomorphisms and harmonic functions

The abelian sandpile model is a cellular automaton defined on a finite convex domain Γ ⊂ Z of the standard square lattice Z. Its recurrent configurations form an abelian group, the sandpile group. Little is known about the structure of this group, or the relationships between sandpile groups defined on different domains. In this article, we show that the sandpile group is isomorphic to the rational-valued discrete harmonic functions which take integer-values on the boundary ∂(Z \Γ) of the complement of the domain, modulo the integer-valued harmonic functions on the same domain. We use this isomorphism to derive unique coordinates for every recurrent sandpile configuration as well as an alternative formula for the order of the sandpile group. Furthermore, we derive several lemmata on the existence of cyclic subgroups for sandpile groups on N × N square domains. Finally, we show that there exist families of monomorphisms from each sandpile group on an N ×M domain to all sandpile groups on ψ(N + 1) − 1 × ψ(M + 1) − 1 domains, with ψ ∈ N. The latter result can likely be extended to sandpile groups defined on certain other, nonrectangular domains of Z, or on domains of higher dimensional lattices Z, k ∈ N. Our work proposes that injective limits of the sandpile group with respect to domains of certain shapes might exist.
Privacy-Preserving Patient Similarity Learning in a Federated Environment: Development and Analysis

Background There is an urgent need for the development of global analytic frameworks that can perform analyses in a privacy-preserving federated environment across multiple institutions without privacy leakage. A few studies on the topic of federated medical analysis have been conducted recently with the focus on several algorithms. However, none of them have solved similar patient matching, which is useful for applications such as cohort construction for cross-institution observational studies, disease surveillance, and clinical trials recruitment. Objective The aim of this study was to present a privacy-preserving platform in a federated setting for patient similarity learning across institutions. Without sharing patient-level information, our model can find similar patients from one hospital to another. Methods We proposed a federated patient hashing framework and developed a novel algorithm to learn context-specific hash codes to represent patients across institutions. The similarities between patients can be efficiently computed using the resulting hash codes of corresponding patients. To avoid security attack from reverse engineering on the model, we applied homomorphic encryption to patient similarity search in a federated setting. Results We used sequential medical events extracted from the Multiparameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care-III database to evaluate the proposed algorithm in predicting the incidence of five diseases independently. Our algorithm achieved averaged area under the curves of 0.9154 and 0.8012 with balanced and imbalanced data, respectively, in κ-nearest neighbor with κ=3. We also confirmed privacy preservation in similarity search by using homomorphic encryption. Conclusions The proposed algorithm can help search similar patients across institutions effectively to support federated data analysis in a privacy-preserving manner.
Synthetic Data Generation and Adaption for Object Detection in Smart Vending Machines

This paper presents an improved scheme for the generation and adaption of synthetic images for the training of deep Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) to perform the object detection task in smart vending machines. While generating synthetic data has proved to be effective for complementing the training data in supervised learning methods, challenges still exist for generating virtual images which are similar to those of the complex real scenes and minimizing redundant training data. To solve these problems, we consider the simulation of cluttered objects placed in a virtual scene and the wide-angle camera with distortions used to capture the whole scene in the data generation process, and post-processed the generated images with a elaborately-designed generative network to make them more similar to the real images. Various experiments have been conducted to prove the efficiency of using the generated virtual images to enhance the detection precision on existing datasets with limited real training data and the generalization ability of applying the trained network to datasets collected in new environment.