Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Information retrieval using local linear PCA

Efficient and accurate information retrieval (IR) is one of the main issues in multimedia databases. Clustering can help to generate the efficient indexing structures and provide the comparison between data types. The Most Expressive Feature (MEF) extraction can improve comparison accuracy between two data which belong to a same data type since it discards redundant features. The authors introduce a local linear principal component analysis (LLPCA) to design an optimal scheme for IR. The LLPCA realizes the clustering and local MEF extraction at the same time. Using these clusters and local MEFs, an IR scheme can be divided into two steps from coarse to fine. We apply the scheme to a trademark retrieval system to evaluate its performance based on the accuracy and efficiency measurements. The experimental results indicate this retrieval scheme is superior the other schemes using the original features or global MEFs extracted by a Global Linear PCA (GLPCA).
Young motherhood, maternal psychopathology and children's cognitive, behavioural and emotional development.

The corpus of research contained in this thesis is concerned with the psychological correlates and consequences of an early transition to parenthood for mothers and children. In light of the recent demographic shifts in the postponement of marriage and parenthood, particular attention was given to women who entered motherhood in their early twenties, as well as to teenage mothers. Using data from two prospective longitudinal cohorts in the United Kingdom, three interlocking studies were conducted to chart the course of mental health problems in young mothers and the risks for mental health problems and cognitive deficits in their children. Study 1 found that women who entered parenthood in their teenage and early twenties years are at an increased risk of experiencing a depressive episode during pregnancy and, in the 11 year period that followed their child's birth, most went on to experience subsequent episodes. Study 2 demonstrated that the increased prevalence of antenatal depression among the women who became mothers at young ages, along with the sub-optimal antenatal and postnatal environments they provided, partly accounted for the elevated rates of emotional disorder and cognitive deficits in their offspring. Study 3 replicated the finding of high rates of antenatal depression in a new sample of young mothers and identified four core predictors of their psychopathology: housing dissatisfaction, serious relationship difficulties, a personal history of affective disorder and a family history of psychiatric illness. Across both samples, high rates of antenatal substance use by both groups of young mothers were also observed. These findings call for intervention programmes for adolescent mothers to focus on the antenatal as well the postnatal period, and the expansion of such initiatives to address the needs of early twenties mothers and their offspring.
De novo production of the plant-derived alkaloid strictosidine in yeast

Significance Plants make a wide variety of complex molecules with potent biological activities including several anticancer therapeutics. Unfortunately, plants often produce these molecules in low amounts, making them expensive to obtain. Engineering simpler organisms, such as yeast, to produce these plant-derived compounds provides one solution to production challenges. One group of plant-derived molecules, the monoterpene indole alkaloids, is synthesized from a common intermediate, strictosidine. Here, we report how we developed a yeast strain that produces strictosidine. This required introducing 21 new genes and three gene deletions into the yeast genome. This yeast strain provides an important resource for the production of expensive, complex molecules that plants normally produce in small amounts. The monoterpene indole alkaloids are a large group of plant-derived specialized metabolites, many of which have valuable pharmaceutical or biological activity. There are ∼3,000 monoterpene indole alkaloids produced by thousands of plant species in numerous families. The diverse chemical structures found in this metabolite class originate from strictosidine, which is the last common biosynthetic intermediate for all monoterpene indole alkaloid enzymatic pathways. Reconstitution of biosynthetic pathways in a heterologous host is a promising strategy for rapid and inexpensive production of complex molecules that are found in plants. Here, we demonstrate how strictosidine can be produced de novo in a Saccharomyces cerevisiae host from 14 known monoterpene indole alkaloid pathway genes, along with an additional seven genes and three gene deletions that enhance secondary metabolism. This system provides an important resource for developing the production of more complex plant-derived alkaloids, engineering of nonnatural derivatives, identification of bottlenecks in monoterpene indole alkaloid biosynthesis, and discovery of new pathway genes in a convenient yeast host.
Comparing Frequency- and Style-Based Features for Twitter Author Identification

Author identification is a subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that uses machine learning techniques to identify the author of a text. Most previous research focused on long texts with the assumption that a minimum text length threshold exists under which author identification would no longer be effective. This paper examines author identification in short texts far below this threshold, focusing on messages retrieved from Twitter (maximum length: 140 characters) to determine the most effective feature set for author identification. Both Bag-of-Words (BOW) and Style Marker feature sets were extracted and evaluated through a series of 15 experiments involving up to 12 authors with large and small dataset sizes. Support Vector Machines (SVM) were used for all experiments. Our results achieve classification accuracies approaching that of longer texts, even for small dataset sizes of 60 training instances per author. Style Marker feature sets were found to be significantly more useful than BOW feature sets as well as orders of magnitude faster, and are therefore suggested for potential applications in future research.
High Morbidity during Treatment and Residual Pulmonary Disability in Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Under-Recognised Phenomena

Background In pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB), morbidity during treatment and residual pulmonary disability can be under-estimated. Methods Among adults with smear-positive PTB at an outpatient clinic in Papua, Indonesia, we assessed morbidity at baseline and during treatment, and 6-month residual disability, by measuring functional capacity (six-minute walk test [6MWT] and pulmonary function), quality of life (St George’s Respiratory Questionnaire [SGRQ]) and Adverse Events ([AE]: new symptoms not present at outset). Results were compared with findings in locally-recruited volunteers. Results 200 PTB patients and 40 volunteers were enrolled. 6WMT was 497m (interquartile range 460-529) in controls versus 408m (IQR 346-450) in PTB patients at baseline (p<0.0001) and 470m (IQR 418-515) in PTB patients after 6 months (p=0.02 versus controls). SGRQ total score was 0 units (IQR 0-2.9) in controls, versus 36.9 (27.4-52.8) in PTB patients at baseline (p<0.0001) and 4.3 (1.7-8.8) by 6 months (p<0.0001). Mean percentage of predicted FEV1 was 92% (standard deviation 19.9) in controls, versus 63% (19.4) in PTB patients at baseline (p<0.0001) and 71% (17.5) by 6 months (p<0.0001). After 6 months, 27% of TB patients still had at least moderate-severe pulmonary function impairment, and 57% still had respiratory symptoms, despite most achieving ‘successful’ treatment outcomes, and reporting good quality of life. More-advanced disease at baseline (longer illness duration, worse baseline X-ray) and HIV positivity predicted residual disability. AE at any time during treatment were common: itch 59%, arthralgia 58%, headache 40%, nausea 33%, vomiting 16%. Conclusion We found high 6-month residual pulmonary disability and high AE rates. Although PTB treatment is highly successful, the extent of morbidity during treatment and residual impairment could be overlooked if not specifically sought. Calculations of PTB-related burden of disease should acknowledge that TB-related morbidity does not stop at 6 months. Early case detection and treatment are key in minimising residual impairment.
Individual Differences in Vagal Regulation Moderate Associations Between Daily Affect and Daily Couple Interactions

Previous research suggests that cardiac vagal regulation (indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia, or RSA) provides a physiological substrate for affect regulation, which presumably underlies adaptive interpersonal functioning.The authors tested these associations in the context of daily interactions between 68 cohabiting couples. Participants underwent a laboratory assessment of RSA during rest and also during a series of psychological stressors. Subsequently, they kept daily measures of affect and interaction quality for 21 days. Individual differences in baseline and stress levels of RSA moderated within-person associations between daily affect and the quality of couple interactions. The pattern of results differed for women versus men. Men with lower vagal tone or higher vagal reactivity had stronger associations between daily negative affect and daily negative interactions, and men with higher vagal tone had more positive daily interactions overall. Women with higher vagal tone had stronger associations between daily positive affect and daily positive interactions.
Gaussian mixture optimization for HMM based on efficient cross-validation

A Gaussian mixture optimization method is explored using cross-validation likelihood as an objective function instead of the conventional training set likelihood. The optimization is based on reducing the number of mixture components by selecting and merging a pair of Gaussians step by step base on the objective function so as to remove redundant components and improve the generality of the model. Cross-validation likelihood is more appropriate for avoiding over-fitting than the conventional likelihood and can be efficiently computed using sufficient statistics. It results in a better Gaussian pair selection and provides a termination criterion that does not rely on empirical thresholds. Large-vocabulary speech recognition experiments on oral presentations show that the cross-validation method gives a smaller word error rate with an automatically determined model size than a baseline training procedure that does not perform the optimization. Index Terms: speech recognition, HMM, Gaussian mixture, cross-validation, sufficient statistics
Non-intrusive DVFS emulation in gem5 with application to self-aware architectures

The emergence of multi-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoC), the close interaction between the hardware architecture and the operating system, and the increasing requirements for energy efficiency are exacerbating the need for full-system architecture simulators such as gem5. A commonly-used technique for power optimizations is dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). Native gem5 does not support DVFS. This work presents an efficient approach for prototyping and emulating DVFS in gem5. The approach is non-intrusive, easily modifiable and flexible. Several experimental results are provided to assess the efficiency of the method. Finally a test-case related to self-aware systems is presented to highlight the flexibility of the approach.
Aalborg Universitet Centralized Control Architecture for Coordination of Distributed Renewable Generation and Energy Storage in Islanded AC

The coordinated operation of distributed energy resources such as storage and generation units and also loads is required for the reliable operation of an islanded microgrid. Since in islanded microgrids the storage units are commonly responsible for regulating the voltage amplitude and frequency in the local power system, the coordination should consider safe operating limits for the stored energy, which prevents fast degradation or damage to the storage units. This paper proposes a centralized control architecture, applicable for local area power systems such as a small-scale microgrid. The centralized architecture is based on three supervisory control tasks which consider: active power curtailment of generation for avoiding overcharge of the storage units, load shedding actions for preventing deep discharge of the storage units, and equalization of the state of charge among distributed storage systems for avoiding uneven degradation. The proposed equalization method has proved to be effective for equalizing the state of charge of distributed energy storage systems and for ensuring uniform charge/discharge ratios regardless of differences in the capacity of the storage units. Additionally, the strategy is complemented with an optimal scheduling of load connection, which minimizes the connection and disconnection cycles of the loads within a time horizon of 24 hours. The proposed architecture is verified experimentally in a lab-scale prototype of a microgrid, which has real communication between the microgrid and the central controller.
Dynamic Investment in Electricity Markets and Its Impact on System Reliability

In this paper we view the problem of adequate electricity supply and demand as a dynamic process affected by several fundamental factors. By incorporating the effect of the available price signals on investment decisions we model the investment dynamics for (i) a system comprising both spot and futures (forward) markets, and for (ii) a system comprising a spot and an installed capacity (ICAP) market. In particular, we analyze the effect of timing of price information available on the dynamics of longterm supply/demand and price evolution. It is shown how by having a futures market, investment decisions to add new capacity could be executed without much delay while the investors are guaranteed revenues through long-term futures (forward) contracts. The modeling and simulations are performed using aggregate long-term price models.
Stable adaptive channel estimation method under impulsive noise environments

Channel estimation is one of the key technologies for ensuring reliable wireless communications under impulsive noise environments. This paper studies robust adaptive channel estimation methods for mitigating harmful impulsive noises, which are described as alpha‐stable (α‐stable) distribution models. Traditional adaptive channel estimation using the second‐order statistics based least mean square (SOS‐LMS) algorithm does not perform well under α‐stable noise environments, even though it was considered one of attractive approaches for estimating channels in the case of Gaussian noises. Unlike the traditional SOS‐LMS algorithm, in this research, we propose a stable sign‐function‐based LMS algorithm, which can mitigate the impulsive noises. Specifically, we first construct the cost function with minimum ℓ1‐norm error criterion and then derive the updating equation of the proposed algorithm. Compared with the traditional SOS‐LMS, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated via Monte Carlo simulations in various α‐stable noise scenarios. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Rationally designed small compounds inhibit pilus biogenesis in uropathogenic bacteria

A chemical synthesis platform with broad applications and flexibility was rationally designed to inhibit biogenesis of adhesive pili assembled by the chaperone–usher pathway in Gram-negative pathogens. The activity of a family of bicyclic 2-pyridones, termed pilicides, was evaluated in two different pilus biogenesis systems in uropathogenic Escherichia coli. Hemagglutination mediated by either type 1 or P pili, adherence to bladder cells, and biofilm formation mediated by type 1 pili were all reduced by ≈90% in laboratory and clinical E. coli strains. The structure of the pilicide bound to the P pilus chaperone PapD revealed that the pilicide bound to the surface of the chaperone known to interact with the usher, the outer-membrane assembly platform where pili are assembled. Point mutations in the pilicide-binding site dramatically reduced pilus formation but did not block the ability of PapD to bind subunits and mediate their folding. Surface plasmon resonance experiments confirmed that the pilicide interfered with the binding of chaperone–subunit complexes to the usher. These pilicides thus target key virulence factors in pathogenic bacteria and represent a promising proof of concept for developing drugs that function by targeting virulence factors.
Keyword Optimization in Sponsored Search via Feature Selection

Sponsored search is a new application domain for the feature selection area of research. When a user searches for products or services using the Internet, most of the major search engines would return two sets of results: regular web pages and paid advertisements. An advertising company provides a set of keywords associated with an ad. If one of these keywords is present in a user's query, the ad is displayed, but the company is charged only if the user actually clicks on the ad. Ultimately, a company would like to advertise on the most effective keywords to attract only prospective customers. A set of keywords can be optimized based on historic performance. We propose to optimize advertising keywords with feature selection techniques applied to the set of all possible word combinations comprising past users' queries. Unlike previous work in this area, our approach not only recognizes the most profitable keywords, but also discovers more specific combinations of keywords and other relevant words.
Effects and Mediation of Child-centered Play Therapy on Young Children Who Are Anxious

Anxiety is one of the most pervasive childhood disorders, with a poor prognosis if left untreated. Traditional methods of treating anxiety have been less effective with young children. Based on theoretical assumptions regarding the potential effectiveness of child-centered play therapy (CCPT) as a treatment approach, I sought to explore the effects and mediating factors of CCPT on young children with symptoms of anxiety. Fifty-three participants between the ages of 6 to 8 years old were recruited from four elementary schools, including 36 males and 17 females. Of participants, 11 were African American, 24 were Caucasian, 10 were Hispanic/Latino, one was Asian, and seven were biracial. Twenty-five participants were randomly assigned to an experimental group receiving a mean of 15 sessions of individual CCPT, and 28 participants were assigned to an 8-session active control group. Five factorial analyses of variance (ANOVA) were conducted applying an alpha level of . 05 for interpretation of statistical significance and Cohen’s d to assess practical significance. ANOVA results indicated a statistically significant interaction with a large effect size on Total Anxiety score of the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale-2nd edition (p = .013, d = .715). Subscale ANOVA results indicated a statistically significant interaction effect with large effect size on the Worry subscale (p = .006, d = .795), no statistically significant interaction on the Defensiveness subscale (p = .710, d = .110), no statistically significant interaction but moderate effect size on the Physiological subscale (p = .076, d = .506), and no statistically significant interaction but moderate effect size on the Social Anxiety subscale (p = .162, d = .398). Statistically significant differences with large practical effects were found in total anxiety and worry, suggesting that children who received CCPT decreased their overall levels of anxiety and worry whereas children who were in the active control group increased their levels of anxiety and worry. When examining differences in relationships between groups, the CCPT group relationship scores were significantly higher than the control group relationship scores, as reported by counselors. Although the groups were different in their relationships, the relationship was not considered a statistical mediator of anxiety due to the lack of correlation between relationship scores and outcome. Overall, children seemed to benefit from CCPT, and it may be considered a viable treatment for children who are anxious. Due to the lack of mediation of relationship found in this study, further research is encouraged to consider other mediating and/or moderating effects when attempting to investigate the therapeutic relationship as a mediator.
FPGA based real-time visual servoing

Real-time image processing tasks not only require high computing power but also high data bandwidth. Though current processors excel in computing power, memory throughput is still the bottleneck for stream-oriented applications such as low-level image processing tasks. The alternative of special-purpose systems lacks flexibility at a high design effort and long development time. This effort often becomes void by the rapid advance of mainstream computing technology. FPGA technology promises flexibility and the necessary computing performance at affordable design costs. In this paper, we describe our approach for a prototype image processing system for robot vision applications, based on FPGA technology. We use a commercially available PCl-board to implement a typical application based on the experimental servicing satellite (ESS) scenario.
Phospholipase C, Protein Kinase C, Ca2+/Calmodulin‐Dependent
 
Protein Kinase II, and Tyrosine Phosphorylation Are Involved in
 
Carbachol‐Induced Phospholipase D Activation in Chinese Hamster Ovary Cells
 
Expressing Muscarinic Acetylcholine Receptor of Caenorhabditis
 
elegans

Abstract : Recently, we have isolated a cDNA encoding a muscarinic acetylcholine receptor (mAChR) from Caenorhabditis elegans. To investigate the regulation of phospholipase D (PLD) signaling via a muscarinic receptor, we generated stable transfected Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells that overexpress the mAChR of C. elegans (CHO‐GAR‐3). Carbachol (CCh) induced inositol phosphate formation and a significantly higher Ca2+ elevation and stimulated PLD activity through the mAChR ; this was insensitive to pertussis toxin, but its activity was abolished by the phospholipase C (PLC) inhibitor U73122. Western blot analysis revealed several apparent tyrosine‐phosphorylated protein bands after CCh treatment. The CCh‐induced PLD activation and tyrosine phosphorylation were significantly reduced by the protein kinase C (PKC) inhibitor calphostin C and down‐regulation of PKC and the tyrosine kinase inhibitor genistein. Moreover, the Ca2+‐calmodulin‐dependent protein kinase II (CaM kinase II) inhibitor KN62, in addition to chelation of extracellular or intracellular Ca2+ by EGTA and BAPTA/AM, abolished CCh‐induced PLD activation and protein tyrosine phosphorylation. Taken together, these results suggest that the PLC/PKC‐PLD pathway and the CaM kinase II/tyrosine kinase‐PLD pathway are involved in the activation of PLD through mAChRs of C. elegans.