Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Classification with Unsupervised Artificial Neural Networks

Text collections may be regarded as an almost perfect application arena for unsupervised neural networks. This is because many operations computers have to perform on text documents are classification tasks based on noisy patterns. In particular we rely on self-organizing maps which produce a map of the document space after their training process. From geography, however, it is known that maps are not always the best way to represent information spaces. For most applications it is better to provide a hierarchical view of the underlying data collection in form of an atlas where, starting from a map representing the complete data collection, different regions are shown at finer levels of granularity. Using an atlas, the user can easily “zoom” into regions of particular interest while still having general maps for overall orientation. We show that a similar display can be obtained by using hierarchical feature maps to represent the contents of a document archive. These neural networks have a layered architecture where each layer consists of a number of individual self-organizing maps. By this, the contents of the text archive may be represented at arbitrary detail while still having the general maps available for global orientation.
Germline deletion of Cetn1 causes infertility in male mice

Summary Centrins are calmodulin-like Ca2+-binding proteins that can be found in all ciliated eukaryotic cells from yeast to mammals. Expressed in male germ cells and photoreceptors, centrin 1 (CETN1) resides in the photoreceptor transition zone and connecting cilium. To identify its function in mammals, we deleted Cetn1 by homologous recombination. Cetn1−/− mice were viable and showed no sign of retina degeneration suggesting that CETN1 is nonessential for photoreceptor ciliogenesis or structural maintenance. Phototransduction components localized normally to the Cetn1−/− photoreceptor outer segments, and loss of CETN1 had no effect on light-induced translocation of transducin to the inner segment. Although Cetn1−/− females and Cetn1+/− males had normal fertility, Cetn1−/− males were infertile. The Cetn1−/− testes size was normal, and spermatogonia as well as spermatocytes developed normally. However, spermatids lacked tails suggesting severe defects at the late maturation phase of spermiogenesis. Viable sperm cells were absent and the few surviving spermatozoa were malformed. Light and electron microscopy analyses of Cetn1−/− spermatids revealed failures in centriole rearrangement during basal body maturation and in the basal-body–nucleus connection. These results confirm an essential role for CETN1 in late steps of spermiogenesis and spermatid maturation.
Assessment of Eating Habits and Physical Activity among Spanish Adolescents. The "Cooking and Active Leisure" TAS Program

Worldwide obesity has more than doubled in the last forty years. Even more worrying is the fact that the number of overweight and obese children and adolescents has considerably increased. Socioeconomic development, as well as educational, agricultural and marketing policies have significantly changed dietary and physical activity habits among the youngest, who are thus susceptible to develop chronic and disabling diseases such as diabetes, some cancers and cardiovascular disorders. Adolescence is a critical age, in which the adoption of healthy habits may have dramatic effects on the health state in adulthood. For this reason, prompt interventions are urgently required to prevent the onset of obesity in this time of life. In this regard, the CAL-TAS program from Alicia Foundation was born to combat obesity and promote healthy lifestyles in Spanish adolescents. A total of 2519 students, aged 13–14 years, from 79 schools distributed all over the 17 autonomous communities in Spain were asked to report through the CAL-TAS platform their food intake and physical activity over one week. The body mass index, the consumption of food and beverages, the intake of macronutrients and micronutrients, and the values obtained from the PAQ-A questionnaire, which evaluated physical activity, were analyzed. Twenty percent of the participants were overweight or obese. In general, adolescents did not or poorly respected the recommendations provided by the Spanish Society of Community Nutrition. For example, in more than half of the subjects, the ingestion of fruits and beverages was less than recommended, whereas the consumption of meat, baked goods and fried foods was excessive. Moreover, adolescents with higher body mass index also presented worse eating habits and more inactivity. In conclusion, Spanish adolescents present low adherence to recommendations provided by the Spanish Society of Community Nutrition (SENC) and by the World Health Organization. In order to prevent obesity-related disorders, effective educational programmes have to be designed. Indeed, adolescents and their families should be aware that the early adoption of healthy dietary habits and of a correct physical activity may strongly improve their future quality of life.
Musculoskeletal morbidity: the growing burden of shoulder pain and disability and poor quality of life in diabetic outpatients.

OBJECTIVE To investigate shoulder pain and disability and quality of life (QoL) over 12 months in patients with diabetes and in a non-diabetic control group. METHODS Cross-sectional study with 12-month follow-up in diabetic (n=189) and medical (n=99) outpatients employing the Shoulder Pain and Disability Index (SPADI) and SF-36 version 2. The results were analysed using restricted maximum likelihood (REML). RESULTS The prevalence of current shoulder symptoms was 35% in diabetics and 17% in controls. Shoulder pain and disability as calculated by the SPADI were independently associated with diabetes (vs controls) and current shoulder symptoms, and worsened over 12 months. Disability scores worsened with age in diabetics, and pain scores were higher in diabetics than controls among patients reporting current shoulder symptoms. Poor physical QoL worsened over time in patients with diabetes and was worse in patients with current shoulder symptoms, whether they had diabetes or not. Mental QoL was worse only in patients with current shoulder symptoms. CONCLUSION Shoulder symptoms are common, affecting 1 in every 3 diabetic patients and 1 in every 6 control patients. In this study shoulder pain, disability and physical QoL were poorer among diabetics and patients reporting current shoulder symptoms, and worsened over time. Mental QoL was worse in patients reporting current shoulder symptoms and was independent of diabetes. Therefore, shoulder symptoms are common, are associated with poor physical and mental QoL in addition to shoulder pain and disability, and are worse in patients with diabetes, even in a population with relatively moderate shoulder pain and disability.
Automatically generating text to accompany information graphics

Automatically generating text to accompany information graphics Mary Ellen Foster Master of Science Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 1999 Generally, when quantitative information is to be presented, some form of graphical presentation is used, often with a textual caption to ensure that the audience notices particular aspects of the data. This thesis presents the principles that should be followed by a system aiming to produce such captions automatically. The process of caption generation is examined in the context of the standard tasks in text generation. Most previous systems in this area produce textual summaries intended to stand alone; the issues involved in producing a caption differ, as the text must be coordinated with the graphic it is to accompany. The thesis also presents C APUT, a prototype caption-generation system which follows these principles to generate single-sentence captions for information graphics of the type that might appear in a newspaper article. Finally, extensions to CAPUT that would bring it from a prototype to a full-fledged caption generation system are proposed.
The Blizzard Challenge 2008

The Blizzard Challenge 2008 was the fourth annual Blizzard Challenge. This year, participants were asked to build two voices from a UK English corpus and one voice from a Man- darin Chinese corpus. This is the first time that a language other than English has been included and also the first time that a large UK English corpus has been available. In addi- tion, the English corpus contained somewhat more expressive speech than that found in corpora used in previous Blizzard Challenges. To assist participants with limited resources or limited ex- perience in UK-accented English or Mandarin, unaligned la- bels were provided for both corpora and for the test sentences. Participants could use the provided labels or create their own. An accent-specific pronunciation dictionary was also available for the English speaker. A set of test sentences was released to participants, who were given a limited time in which to synthesise them and submit the synthetic speech. An online listening test was con- ducted, to evaluate naturalness, intelligibility and degree of similarity to the original speaker Index Terms: Blizzard Challenge, speech synthesis, evalua- tion, listening test
Real-time Rendering of Stack-based Terrains

Usually, terrain rendering relies on a 2D regular grid of height values, the so called height field. Height fields describe 2.5D surfaces and are not able to present complex 3D terrain features. In contrast, a 3D data representation quickly exceeds the available memory resources. To overcome this problem we apply material stacks. Material stacks combine the simplicity of 2D height fields and the extended modeling capabilities of 3D volumetric data. However, this approach requires expensive rendering and is difficult to realize in real-time. In this paper we present an innovative real-time rendering approach of terrains relying on material stacks. Our approach is based on two major steps: First, a LoD hierarchy for material-stacks is generated. Second, during rendering a multi-staged quadrangulation pipeline extracts terrain surface from the material stacks. As a result, we achieve real-time frame rates at high resolutions.
From Model-based to Natural Development

Model-based approaches aim to support development through the use of meaningful abstractions in order to avoid dealing with low-level details. Despite this potential benefit, their adoption has mainly been limited to professional designers. This paper discusses how they should be extended in order to obtain environments able to support real end-user development, by which designers can develop or modify interactive applications still using conceptual models but with a continuous support that facilitates their development, analysis, and use.
Characterization of chemoautotrophic bacterial symbionts in a gutless marine worm Oligochaeta, Annelida) by phylogenetic 16S rRNA sequence analysis and in situ hybridization

The phylogenetic relationships of chemoautotrophic endosymbionts in the gutless marine oligochaete Inanidrilus leukodermatus to chemoautotrophic ecto- and endosymbionts from other host phyla and to free-living bacteria were determined by comparative 16S rRNA sequence analysis. Fluorescent in situ hybridization confirmed that the 16S rRNA sequence obtained from these worms originated from the symbionts. The symbiont sequence is unique to I. leukodermatus. In phylogenetic trees inferred by both distance and parsimony methods, the oligochaete symbiont is peripherally associated with one of two clusters of chemoautotrophic symbionts that belong to the gamma subdivision of the Proteobacteria. The endosymbionts of this oligochaete form a monophyletic group with chemoautotrophic ectosymbionts of a marine nematode. The oligochaete and nematode symbionts are very closely related, although their hosts belong to separate, unrelated animal phyla. Thus, cospeciation between the nematode and oligochaete hosts and their symbionts could not have occurred. Instead, the similar geographic locations and habitats of the hosts may have influenced the establishment of these symbioses.
Genetic Variant at the GLUL Locus Predicts All-Cause Mortality in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes

Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs10911021 at the glutamate-ammonia ligase (GLUL) locus has been associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease in individuals with type 2 diabetes. The effect of this SNP on mortality was investigated among 1,242 white subjects with type 2 diabetes from the Joslin Kidney Study (JKS) (n = 416) and the Gargano Mortality Study (GMS) (n = 826). During a mean follow-up of 12.8 ± 5.8 and 7.5 ± 2.2 years, respectively, a total of 215 and 164 deaths were observed in the two studies. In both cohorts, the all-cause mortality rate significantly increased with the number of rs10911021 risk alleles, with allelic hazard ratios (HRs) of 1.32 (95% CI 1.07–1.64, P = 0.01), 1.30 (1.10–1.69, P = 0.04), and 1.32 (1.12–1.55, P = 0.0011), respectively, in the JKS, the GMS, and the two studies combined. These associations were not affected by adjustment for possible confounders. In the JKS, for which data on causes of death were available, the HR for cardiovascular mortality was 1.51 (1.12–2.04, P = 0.0077) as opposed to 1.15 (0.84–1.55, P = 0.39) for mortality from noncardiovascular causes. These findings point to SNP rs10911021 as an independent modulator of mortality in patients with type 2 diabetes and, together with the previous observation, suggest that this results from an effect of this variant on cardiovascular risk.
Advantages of using cognition when solving impairment-aware virtual topology design problems

In this paper, the advantages of using cognition when solving the impairment-aware virtual topology design problem are demonstrated. To this end, an algorithm to design the virtual topology, GAPDELT, previously proposed by the University of Valladolid, has been extended to ensure that all the lightpaths of the virtual topology comply with quality of transmission constraints. The new version, called IA-GAPDELT, is a multiobjective genetic algorithm which uses Pareto optimality to reduce both the network congestion and the number of transmitters in operation, and so the energy consumption. By means of simulation, we show that when the algorithm is enhanced with a simple cognitive technique, it obtains a higher number of feasible solutions (virtual topologies) and, moreover, they are generally better in terms of the optimization parameters, than those obtained without cognition.
Does Stock Liquidity Explain the Premium for Stock Price Momentum

The empirically documented positive relationship between price momentum and subsequent stock returns constitutes a puzzle that evades a compelling theoretical explanation. This study analyzes one of the proposed explanations, namely that momentum is correlated with stock liquidity, which is the underlying factor affecting stock returns. We empirically test this proposition using the pre-crisis data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange covering the period between 1979 and 2005. The results from the Fama-MacBeth (1973) regressions provide some evidence that liquidity proxies are negatively correlated with average stock returns. However, contrary to the common prediction the inclusion of liquidity proxies does not significantly impact the explanatory power of momentum. This implies that stock liquidity is not a likely driver of short-term persistence in stock returns.
ImagEval task 1 : Retrieving transformed images with new local descriptors based on dissociated dipoles

This paper describes new local photometric descriptors based on dissociated dipoles for transformed images or rigid objects retrieval. Dissociated dipoles are non local differential operators proposed by Balas et al. [1] which have been proved to be more stable than purely local standard differential operators. In this paper, we define and compute specific oriented dissociated dipoles around multi-resolution color Harris points and we form 20-dimensional normalized features, invariant to rotation, affine luminance transformations, negative or flip. In a comparison with extensively used SIFT descriptors, we show that such descriptors are more efficient while containing 6 times less information. This allows the complete retrieval to be both more efficient and faster. This strategy ranked first in ImagEval benchmark, which, as far as we know, is the only competition including a transformed image recognition task (or content-based copy retrieval task).
Ecological study of effect of breast feeding on infant mortality in Latin America

Abstract Objective: To estimate the effect of exclusive breast feeding and partial breast feeding on infant mortality from diarrhoeal disease and acute respiratory infections in Latin America. Design: Attributable fraction analysis of national data on infant mortality and breast feeding. Setting: Latin America and the Caribbean. Main outcome measures: Mortality from diarrhoeal disease and acute respiratory infections and nationally representative breastfeeding rates. Results: 55% of infant deaths from diarrhoeal disease and acute respiratory infections in Latin America are preventable by exclusive breast feeding among infants aged 0-3 months and partial breast feeding throughout the remainder of infancy. Among infants aged 0-3 months, 66% of deaths from these causes are preventable by exclusive breast feeding; among infants aged 4-11 months, 32% of such deaths are preventable by partial breast feeding. 13.9% of infant deaths from all causes are preventable by these breastfeeding patterns. The annual number of preventable deaths is about 52 000 for the region. Conclusions: Exclusive breast feeding of infants aged 0-3 months and partial breast feeding throughout the remainder of infancy could substantially reduce infant mortality in Latin America. Interventions to promote breast feeding should target younger infants. What is already known on this topic Infant mortality is lower among breast fed than non-breast fed infants The reductions are greatest for deaths from diarrhoeal disease and acute respiratory infections What this study adds Exclusive breast feeding of infants aged 0-3 months and partial breast feeding for the remainder of the first year would prevent about 52 000 infant deaths a year in Latin America This corresponds to 13.9% of infant deaths from all causes Promotion of breast feeding has an important role in increasing survival of infants
Discovering the Most Adaptive Students of One Course by Data Mining

In the paper, we discover the most adaptive students of one course by association rule and classification analysis. First, we improve the performance of the previous Apriori to reduce some unnecessary steps, as a result, we can get more efficient association rules to mine the course, and then discover the most adaptive student according to the characteristic displayed by the association rule; secondly, we discover the students’ attribute characteristic of one course through classification analysis, the students with the attribute characteristic are the most adaptive students of the course and should be recommended. We can create the behavior mode of course-select through above methods and take it as useful reference to students and schools.
Interactive Proof: Applications to Semantics

Building on a previous lecture in the summer school, the introduction to interactive proof, this lecture demonstrates a specific application of interactive proof assistants: the semantics of programming languages. In particular, I show how to formalise a small imperative programming language in the theorem prover Isabelle/HOL, how to define its semantics in different variations, and how to prove properties about the language in the theorem prover. The emphasis of the lecture is not on formalising a complex language deeply, but to teach formalisation techniques and proof strategies using simple examples. To this purpose, we cover bigand small step semantics, typing and type safety, as well as a small machine language with compiler and compiler correctness proof.
Constrained Synthesis of Textural Motion for Animation

Obtaining high quality, realistic motions of articulated characters is both timeconsuming and expensive, necessitating the development of effective and easy-touse tools for motion editing and reuse. We propose a new simple technique for generating constrained variations of different lengths from an existing captured or otherwise animated motion. Our technique is applicable to textural motions, such as walking or dancing, where the motion sequence can be decomposed into shorter motion segments without an obvious temporal ordering among them. Inspired by previous work on texture synthesis and video textures, our method essentially produces a re-ordering of these shorter segments. Discontinuities are eliminated by carefully choosing the transition points and applying local adaptive smoothing in their vicinity, if necessary. The user is able to control the synthesis process by specifying a small number of simple constraints.
LAOTSE, an approach for foreign object detection by multimodal netted 2D / 3D sensors

Globalization enforces increasing airplane traffic and thus a growing turnover frequency. This requires a sophisticated and time-efficient searching for sources of danger imposed by debris, executing strong risks for airplane take-off and landings. The project introduced in this paper facilitates and enhances the landing strip observation effectiveness. This fully automatically controlled system enables a faster control avoiding sources of error induced by human observers under all weather conditions. This system assists an increased turnover airplane frequency and makes a cost saving airport management possible. The paper focuses on the techniques used for the runway surveillance, especially the radar part for stand-off object detection of debris and a real-time 2D and 3D time-of-flight (ToF) camera system for close-up surveillance.
Consistent Model Combination for SVR via Regularization Path ⋆

It is well-known that model combination can improve prediction performance of regression model. We investigate the model combination of Support Vector Regression (SVR) with regularization path in this paper. We first define Lε-risk of SVR, and prove that SVR regularization path leads to at least one Lε-risk consistent fitted model. Then we establish the Lε-risk consistency for convex combination of SVR base fitted model, which gives the mathematical justification for model combination of SVR on regularization path. With the inherent piecewise linearity of SVR regularization path, we propose an effective method for Beyesian model combination. Theoretical analysis and experimental results suggest the feasibility of the proposed method.
On Controllability and Observability of Fuzzy Dynamical Matrix Lyapunov Systems

We provide a way to combine matrix Lyapunov systems with fuzzy rules to form a new fuzzy system called fuzzy dynamical matrix Lyapunov system, which can be regarded as a new approach to intelligent control. First, we study the controllability property of the fuzzy dynamical matrix Lyapunov system and provide a sufficient condition for its controllability with the use of fuzzy rule base. The significance of our result is that given a deterministic system and a fuzzy state with rule base, we can determine the rule base for the control. Further, we discuss the concept of observability and give a sufficient condition for the system to be observable. The advantage of our result is that we can determine the rule base for the initial value without solving the system.