Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of psycholinguistic processes and topics in online autism communities

Current growth of individuals on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) requires continuous support and care. With the popularity of social media, online communities of people affected by ASD emerge. This paper presents an analysis of these online communities through understanding aspects that differentiate such communities. In this paper, the aspects given are not expressed in terms of friendship, exchange of information, social support or recreation, but rather with regard to the topics and linguistic styles that people express in their on-line writing. Using data collected unobtrusively from LiveJournal, we analyze posts made by ten autism communities in conjunction with those made by a control group of standard communities. Significant differences have been found between autism and control communities when characterized by latent topics of discussion and psycholinguistic features. Latent topics are found to have greater predictive power than linguistic features when classifying blog posts as either autism or control community. This study suggests that data mining of online blogs has the potential to detect clinically meaningful data. It opens the door to possibilities including sentinel risk surveillance and harnessing the power in diverse large datasets.
The ESHRE PGD Consortium: 10 years of data collection.

BACKGROUND Since it was established in 1997, the ESHRE PGD Consortium has been collecting data from international preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) centres. Ten papers have been published, including data from January 1997 to December 2007. METHODS The data collection originally used a hard-copy format, then an excel database and finally a FileMaker Pro database. The indications are divided into five categories: PGD for chromosome abnormalities, sexing for X-linked disease, PGD for single gene defects, preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) and PGD for social sexing. The main end-points are pregnancy outcome and follow-up of deliveries. RESULTS In data collection I, 16 centres contributed data, which increased to 57 centres by data X (average of 39 centres per data collection). These centres contributed data on over 27 000 cycles that reached oocyte retrieval. Of these cycles, 61% were for aneuploidy screening, 17% for single gene disorders, 16% for chromosomal abnormalities, 4% for sexing of X-linked disease and 2% for social sexing. Cumulatively, 5187 clinical pregnancies gave rise to 4140 deliveries and 5135 newborns (singletons: 3182, twins: 921, triplets: 37). CONCLUSIONS In this paper, we present an overview of the first 10 years of PGD data, highlighting trends. These include the introduction of laser-assisted biopsy, an increase in polar body and trophectoderm biopsy, new strategies, methodologies and technologies for diagnosis, including recently arrays, and the more frequent use of freezing biopsied embryos. The Consortium data reports represent a valuable resource for information about the practice of PGD.
Flex-N-Feel: The Design and Evaluation of Emotive Gloves for Couples to Support Touch Over Distance

Many couples live apart due to work, educational situations, or frequent travel. While technology can help mediate these relationships, there is a lack of designs that allow couples to share a sense of touch over distance. We present a design case study of a tangible communication system called Flex- N-Feel--a pair of gloves that allows distance-separated couples to feel the flexing of their remote partners' fingers through vibrotactile sensations on their skin. We evaluated our design with nine couples where the system was augmented with either a Skype audio call or a video connection. Our study showed that participants enjoyed their conversation more with the gloves, felt more emotionally connected, and experienced intimate moments together. Couples used the glove for shared actions, playful episodes, intimate touches, and to simply feel each other's presence. Video was important to aid couples in understanding each other's actions. Our results illustrate that designs focusing on physical touch over distance should be open to appropriation such that they can augment existing communication routines and technologies.
Discriminating between Similar Languages and Arabic Dialect Identification: A Report on the Third DSL Shared Task

We present the results of the third edition of the Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) shared task, which was organized as part of the VarDial’2016 workshop at COLING’2016. The challenge offered two subtasks: subtask 1 focused on the identification of very similar languages and language varieties in newswire texts, whereas subtask 2 dealt with Arabic dialect identification in speech transcripts. A total of 37 teams registered to participate in the task, 24 teams submitted test results, and 20 teams also wrote system description papers. High-order character n-grams were the most successful feature, and the best classification approaches included traditional supervised learning methods such as SVM, logistic regression, and language models, while deep learning approaches did not perform very well.
pathWave: Combined estimation of network link capacity and available bandwidth using statistical signal processing

Network link capacity (lc) and available bandwidth (av-bw) are recently considered as importance for various network domains. Consequently, several lc and av-bw measurement techniques and tools have been proposed, where empirical experience, performance comparison and foundational understanding of lc/av-bw measurement have been focused. Many heuristic or non-probabilistic statistical algorithms have been used to estimate lc/av-bw in this literature. However, stochastic analysis indicates that improved understanding of the fundaments of bandwidth estimation could lead to more accurate and effective methods. In this paper, we model network lc/av-bw measurement as a stochastic signal state detection and signal parameter estimation problem. We present a novel approach to measure network lc/av-bw, using packet-pair dispersion technique and our extended self-induced congestion principle based on statistical signal processing theory. We validate the affectivity of our lc/av-bw measurement tool, pathWave in NS-2 simulation environment and evaluate its performance in test bed by comparing with other representative tools. According to the analytical, simulative, and experimental result, we can demonstrate that our statistical signal processing is a more efficient approach for lc/av-bw measurement.
Human-Centered Analysis and Visualization Tools for the Blogosphere

Blogging has become a new and disruptive communication medium. Blogs have changed the way people and organizations express, interact, and—quite unforeseen—exercise influence. The digital nature of the blog media provides access to an always-expanding corpus of information. It would take more than a lifetime to read all the available blogs necessary to answer questions such as what were the more relevant plots suggested or what key concepts were managed by bloggers in their ideas. However, human-centered analysis and visualization techniques may help users navigate such enormous corpus. This paper presents human-centered analysis and visualization techniques for supporting innovation and creativity can help to identify relevant post portions and to visualize concept relations in the blogosphere.
Factors Affecting Timing of Breeding in the Tawny Owl Strix aluco

Relevant variables characterising factors suspected to affect timing of breeding in birds may be difficult to measure. Then, easily available proxies, i.e. variables that are expected to vary consistently with some affecting factors, may be used instead. In the present study on tawny owls, I used besides individual characteristics of parent birds both de- tailed measurements of the prey base of territories, local and general indices of vole abundance as well as local and gen- eral weather conditions as explanatory variables. Owls tended to breed the earlier the older and the heavier they were. Breeding was the earlier the higher the abundance of water voles and the proportion of field voles in the territorial prey samples. Owls bred earlier when the local abundance of small voles in the preceding autumn was high. Regional vole in- dices showed no associations with timing of owls' breeding. Single winter weather variables did not show any significant associations neither. In combination with the advancing effect of water vole abundance, however, the delaying effect of the depth of the snow cover in March was significant. Models based on different data sets showed different kinds of asso- ciations between the abundance of small voles and timing of breeding in owls. The best models in which both intrinsic and extrinsic explanatory variables (characteristics of parent birds and environmental factors, respectively) were included did not differ considerably from each other. The occurrence of water voles in prey samples governed the best models. The results suggest, that without detailed knowledge on the prey base of territory, misleading results may emerge and the im- portance of small voles in governing breeding of owls may be overemphasised.
First person shooters on the road: Leveraging on APs and VANETs for a quality gaming experience

This work studies the feasibility of using on the road 802.11 Access Points (APs) for the support of First Person Shooter (FPS) games, which are among the online services that exhibit the tightest real-time requirements nowadays. After demonstrating that an acceptable quality of service can be guaranteed, we propose and assess the extension of the AP coverage area by means of vehicular ad-hoc (VANET) communications. The time for which a game can be played in a satisfactory manner can be, in fact, increased exploiting neighboring vehicles, thus improving the general gaming experience. To this aim, we adopted a subjective quality estimator, which reveals whether a game could, or could not, be properly run in a given scenario. Our simulation results show that the AP coverage area can be significantly increased when using other cars as packet forwarders, while maintaining the subjective quality at acceptable levels. All this is performed assessing the feasibility of FPSs on realistic vehicular traffic traces, obtained recording over 100 traversals of an urban road under varying traffic conditions.
Hybrid Molecular and Spin Dynamics Simulations for Ensembles of Magnetic Nanoparticles for Magnetoresistive Systems

The development of magnetoresistive sensors based on magnetic nanoparticles which are immersed in conductive gel matrices requires detailed information about the corresponding magnetoresistive properties in order to obtain optimal sensor sensitivities. Here, crucial parameters are the particle concentration, the viscosity of the gel matrix and the particle structure. Experimentally, it is not possible to obtain detailed information about the magnetic microstructure, i.e., orientations of the magnetic moments of the particles that define the magnetoresistive properties, however, by using numerical simulations one can study the magnetic microstructure theoretically, although this requires performing classical spin dynamics and molecular dynamics simulations simultaneously. Here, we present such an approach which allows us to calculate the orientation and the trajectory of every single magnetic nanoparticle. This enables us to study not only the static magnetic microstructure, but also the dynamics of the structuring process in the gel matrix itself. With our hybrid approach, arbitrary sensor configurations can be investigated and their magnetoresistive properties can be optimized.
An Efficient Group Key Management Scheme: Link Tree Protocol

Many group key management schemes such as those proposed by Wallner et al, Wong et al are based on a multilevel, logical hierarchy (or tree) of keyencrypting keys. But LKH is based on the hypothesis that the tree is maintained in a balanced manner. This paper proposes a multi-link tree protocol based on LKH. LTP keeps the structure balanced and has a better performance. We analyze multi-LTP and multi- LKH’s performance in detail. We prove that 3-degree LTP is the best structure among all the LTP structures, which is also better than LKH.
A Google approach for computational intelligence in big data

With the advent of the emerging field of big data, it is becoming increasingly important to equip machine learning algorithms to cope with volume, variety, and velocity of data. In this work, we employ the MapRe-duce paradigm to address these issues as an enabling technology for the well-known support vector machine to perform distributed classification of skin segmentation. An open source implementation of MapReduce called Hadoop offers a streaming facility, which allows us to focus on the computational intelligence problem at hand, instead of focusing on the implementation of the learning algorithm. This is the first time that support vector machine has been proposed to operate in a distributed fashion as it is, circumventing the need for long and tedious mathematical derivations. This highlights the main advantages of MapReduce - its generality and distributed computation for machine learning with minimum effort. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of MapReduce when distributed classification is performed even when only two machines are involved, and we highlight some of the intricacies of MapReduce in the context of big data.
Video Segmentation : A Critical Survey

With recent advances in multimedia technologies, digital TV and information highways, more and more video data is being captured, produced and stored. However, without appropriate techniques that can make the video content more accessible, all these data are hardly usable. Content Based Video Retrieval (CBVR) becomes a proper solution to handling the video databases. The essential first step in CBVR is Video Segmentation. This paper is a critical survey of current trends/ methods for video segmentation. This work has been done with an aim to assist the upcoming researchers in the field of video retrieval to know about the technology and methods available for video segmentation. Keywords-video segmentation; content-based video retrieval; video indexing;key frame; histogram
A service integrity assurance framework for cloud computing based on MapReduce

MapReduce is a highly efficient parallel large data sets (greater than 1TB) processing model, widely used in cloud computing environment. The current mainstream cloud computing service providers have adopted Hadoop, the open source MapReduce implementation, to build their cloud computing platform. However, like all open distributed computing frameworks, MapReduce suffers from the service integrity assurance vulnerability: it takes merely one malicious worker to render the overall computation result useless. It is very important to efficiently detect the malicious workers in cloud computing environment. Existing solutions are not effective enough in defeating the malicious behaviour of non-collusive and collusive workers. In this paper, we focus on the mappers, which typically constitute the majority of workers. On the basis of the existing frameworks, we make the master manage the computing workers based on the security levels, and introduce the trusted verifier worker and caching mechanism. According to the system analysis, the service integrity assurance framework suggested in this paper is more efficient and accurate to detect the malicious workers in the cloud computing environment based on MapReduce.
Atmospheric turbulence and wind profiles monitoring with generalized scidar

We present a method for simultaneous measurement of the vertical distribution of the optical turbulence strength C N(h) and wind velocity V (h) in the Earth’s atmosphere, based on an analysis of spatio-temporal correlations of stellar scintillation images obtained with generalized scidar. A statistical comparison of V (h) obtained with this method and instrumented balloons supports the use of this method. The algorithm used allows for the identification of dome seeing, which can be subtracted from C N(h), to obtain a turbulence profile free of dome contribution. Examples of simultaneous C N(h) and V (h) monitorings are presented.
Matrix optimization for poisson compressed sensing

For compressed sensing of Poissonian measurements, there is a need for nonnegative measurement matrices. We seek an optimal measurement matrix that conserves energy. Moreover, the signals pass a known but uncontrolled mixing matrix, before being multiplexed and measured. This situation is relevant to various optical applications. We optimize the measurement matrix by mutual coherence minimization, under nonnegativity and energy conservation constraints. Nonnegativity excludes the known approach of seeking an equiangular tight frame as the optimal matrix. We thus seek a quasi-equiangular frame, which is approximated by a tight frame. Simulation results demonstrate superior reconstruction using our optimized matrices, compared to random nonnegative matrices.
Selection and Validation of Reference Genes for Real-Time Quantitative PCR in Hyperaccumulating Ecotype of Sedum alfredii under Different Heavy Metals Stresses

Real-time Quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) has become an effective method for accurate analysis of gene expression in several biological systems as well as under different experimental conditions. Although with high sensitivity, specificity and broad dynamic range, this method requires suitable reference genes for transcript normalization in order to guarantee reproducible and meaningful results. In the present study, we evaluated five traditional housekeeping genes and five novel reference genes in Hyperaccumulating ecotype of Sedum alfredii, a well known hyperaccumulator for heavy metals phytoremediation, under Cd, Pb, Zn and Cu stresses of seven different durations. The expression stability of these ten candidates were determined with three programs - geNorm, NormFinder and BestKeeper. The results showed that all the selected reference genes except for SAND could be used for RT-qPCR normalization. Among them UBC9 and TUB were ranked as the most stable candidates across all samples by three programs together. For the least stable reference genes, however, BestKeeper produced different results compared with geNorm and NormFinder. Meanwhile, the expression profiles of PCS under Cd, Pb, Zn and Cu stresses were assessed using UBC9 and TUB respectively, and similar trends were obtained from the results of the two groups. The distinct expression patterns of PCS indicated that various strategies could be taken by plants in adaption to different heavy metals stresses. This study will provide appropriate reference genes for further gene expression quantification using RT-qPCR in Hyperaccumulator S. alfredii.
Automatic construction of English/Chinese parallel corpora

As the demand for global information increases significantly, multilingual corpora has become a valuable linguistic resource for applications to cross-lingual information retrieval and natural language processing. In order to cross the boundaries that exist between different languages, dictionaries are the most typical tools. However, the general-purpose dictionary is less sensitive in both genre and domain. It is also impractical to manually construct tailored bilingual dictionaries or sophisticated multilingual thesauri for large applications. Corpus-based approaches, which do not have the limitation of dictionaries, provide a statistical translation model with which to cross the language boundary. There are many domain-specific parallel or comparable corpora that are employed in machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval. Most of these are corpora between Indo-European languages, such as English/French and English/Spanish. The Asian/Indo-European corpus, especially English/Chinese corpus, is relatively sparse. The objective of the present research is to construct English/ Chinese parallel corpus automatically from the World Wide Web. In this paper, an alignment method is presented which is based on dynamic programming to identify the one-to-one Chinese and English title pairs. The method includes alignment at title level, word level and character level. The longest common subsequence (LCS) is applied to find the most reliable Chinese translation of an English word. As one word for a language may translate into two or more words repetitively in another language, the edit operation, deletion, is used to resolve redundancy. A score function is then proposed to determine the optimal title pairs. Experiments have been conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed method using the daily press release articles by the Hong Kong SAR government as the test bed. The precision of the result is 0.998 while the recall is 0.806. The release articles and speech articles, published by Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited, are also used to test our method, the precision is 1.00, and the recall is 0.948.
Acceleration of MELP Algorithm Using DSP Coprocessor with Extended Registers

Configurable coprocessors have been an active area for some time. The limitation of word length of instruction set and the number of operands in a single instruction have become a potential performance bottleneck for traditional SIMD extension. In this paper, we use LEON-2 as the host platform and present a novel low-cost architecture with extended shadow_f registers. In each extended instruction, some shadow_f registers are introduced to provide a copy of results received in the writeback stage, which can efficiently reduce the time of data transfer between LEON-2 and the coprocessor. Analysis of our proposed architecture shows that only partial replication of the whole register file is needed to mitigate the bandwidth limitation. At the same time, the proposed vector arithmetic unit is proved to be highly compatible to the required calculation patterns in the integer version of MELP algorithm. The application of our approach implemented on Stratix II FPGA show a promising speedup (up to 3.85X to some dominant kernels) with only 16% area increment. Keywords-Shadow_f Register, LEON-2, MELP, Coprocessor, Parallel
Association of HMGCR polymorphism with late-onset Alzheimer's disease in Han Chinese

The 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-CoA reductase (HMGCR) acts as a potential genetic modifier for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Previous reports identified that HMGCR rs3846662 polymorphism is associated with biosynthesis of cholesterol in AD pathology. In order to assess the involvement of the HMGCR polymorphism in the risk of late-onset AD (LOAD) in northern Han Chinese, we performed a case–control study of 2334 unrelated subjects (984 cases and 1350 age- and gender-matched controls) to evaluate the genotype and allele distributions of the HMGCR rs3846662 with LOAD. The genotype distribution (GG, AG, AA) of rs3846662 was significantly different between LOAD patients and controls (P = 0.003), but the allele distribution did not reach a significant difference (P = 0.614). After adjusting for age, gender and the APOE ε4 status, the minor A allele of rs3846662 was validated as a protective factor for LOAD in dominant model (OR = 0.796, P = 0.02, 95% CI = 0.657–0.965). Interestingly, we observed rs3846662 polymorphism was only significantly associated with LOAD in APOE ε4 non-carriers (OR = 0.735, P = 0.005, 95% CI = [0.593, 0.912]). In conclusion, our study demonstrates A allele of HMGCR rs3846662 acts as a protective factor for LOAD in northern Han Chinese.