Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Data Fusion for Japanese Term and Character N-gram Search

Term segmentation plays a vital role in building effective information retrieval systems. In particular, languages such as Japanese and Chinese require a morphological analyzer or a word segmenter to identify potential terms. The alternative approach to indexing a segmented collection is n-gram search, where every n-length sequence of symbols is indexed. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses when applied to non-English collections. In this study, we explore data fusion techniques to answer the following question: if there are multiple ranked lists of documents from both word and n-gram indexes, can we improve overall effectiveness by combining them? We consider three empirical methods for combining search results using eight different search indexes and twenty-one different search models with and without automatic query expansion. Our approach is language independent; however, we focus on Japanese test collections -- NTCIR IR4QA -- as our testbed for the current experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate that the combination of the two different segmentation approaches has the potential to significantly outperform the best word-segmented search methods.
Population Size and Rates of Language Change

Previous empirical studies of population size and language change have produced equivocal results. We therefore address the question with a new set of lexical data from nearly one-half of the world’s languages. We first show that relative population sizes of modern languages can be extrapolated to ancestral languages, albeit with diminishing accuracy, up to several thousand years into the past. We then test for an effect of population against the null hypothesis that the ultrametric inequality is satisfied by lexical distance among triples of related languages. The test shows mainly negligible effects of population, the exception being an apparently faster rate of change in the larger of two closely related variants. A possible explanation for the exception may be the influence on emerging standard (or cross-regional) variants from speakers who shift from different dialects to the standard. Our results strongly indicate that the sizes of speaker populations do not in and of themselves determine rates of language change. Comparison of this empirical finding with previously published computer simulations suggests that the most plausible model for language change is one in which changes propagate on a local level in a type of network in which the individuals have different degrees of connectivity.
Stream Processing for Embedded Domain Specific Languages

We present a library for expressing digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms using a deeply embedded domain-specific language (EDSL) in Haskell. The library supports definitions in functional programming style, reducing the gap between the mathematical description of streaming algorithms and their implementation. The deep embedding makes it possible to generate efficient C code. The signal processing library is intended to be an extension of the Feldspar EDSL which, until now, has had a rather low-level interface for dealing with synchronous streams. However, the presented library is independent of the underlying expression language, and can be used to extend any pure EDSL for which a C code generator exists with efficient stream processing capabilities. The library is evaluated using example implementations of common DSP algorithms and the generated code is compared to its handwritten counterpart.
Efficient packet classification using spatial cutting

To provide a more discriminating form of packet forwarding, a router has to determine how to forward a packet not only based on the destination address, but also other fields of the packet header, such as the source address, TCP and UDP port numbers. Since a router may contain a larger number of filters, it is a challenging work to design a packet classification algorithm with fast lookup speed and efficient memory usage. In this paper, we propose a spatial cutting scheme, which divides the filters into different groups from the viewpoint of space. For example, a two-dimensional filter can be seen as a rectangle in the space. The proposed scheme generates squares according to the filters. Each filter is covered by at least one square. Classifying a packet only requires two steps: locating the smallest square covering the packet and finding the matching filter in the square. Since the proposed scheme effectively divides the filters, it is able to provide fast lookup speed and reduce the required storage significantly.
Shaping Organization Form Communication Connection And Community

Shaping Organization Form considers the role of new communication technologies in shaping organizations today and in the future. Four key themes are considered in depth: changes in technology, changes in organizational form, and their mutual influence on one another; evolutionary processes in organizations and the ways in which technology can influence these processes; the development of organizational communities and inter-organizational relationships that are mediated by electronic communication systems; and major controversies surrounding electronically mediated organizations and directions for future research that flow out of these controversies. Download ebook, read file pdf Communication, Connection, and Community
Incidence of Caries Lesions in Approximal Surfaces: A Radiographic Study of a General Adult Danish Population

The aim was to describe the incidence of caries lesions in a randomly selected adult population, and to identify risk factors related to the incidence of caries lesions in approximal surfaces. In 1997, 616 adults participated in a study including a radiographic survey. In 2003 these individuals were contacted again and offered a second radiographic survey; 473 consented and attended this examination. In approximal surfaces, presence/absence of caries lesions and presence and type of coronal fillings were recorded. The incidence of caries lesions in surfaces with no caries lesions in 1997 was studied. Potential risk factors included information at three levels: (1) person, (2) tooth, and (3) surface. The analysis was carried out by multilevel logistic regression. For the analyses 23,701 approximal surfaces were eligible. In 23,243 approximal surfaces no caries lesions were detected in 1997, 17,007 of these were surfaces without fillings, and 6,236 were filled surfaces. In unfilled surfaces several factors affected the risk for development of a caries lesion: young age, high number of fillings, number of teeth and status of the adjacent surface. In filled surfaces few factors affected the incidence of caries lesions: status of the adjacent surface, smoking and distal surfaces. Differences in risk factor patterns for the incidence of caries lesions were found for unfilled and filled surfaces. The study emphasizes the importance of assessing factors related to the incidence of caries lesions in adults. Further it underlines the need to analyse the fate of filled surfaces separately, because once a surface has received a filling it needs continuous attendance.
Murine Oatp1a/1b Uptake Transporters Control Rosuvastatin Systemic Exposure Without Affecting Its Apparent Liver Exposure

Organic anion–transporting polypeptides (OATPs) mediate the liver uptake and hence plasma clearance of a broad range of drugs. For rosuvastatin, a cholesterol-lowering drug and OATP1A/1B substrate, the liver represents both its main therapeutic target and its primary clearance organ. Here we studied the impact of Oatp1a/1b uptake transporters on the pharmacokinetics of rosuvastatin using wild-type and Oatp1a/1b-null mice. After oral administration (15 mg/kg), intestinal absorption of rosuvastatin was not impaired in Oatp1a/1b-null mice, but systemic exposure (area under the curve) was 8-fold higher in these mice compared with wild-type. Although liver exposure was comparable between the two mouse strains (despite the increased blood exposure), the liver-to-blood ratios were markedly decreased (>10-fold) in the absence of Oatp1a/1b transporters. After intravenous administration (5 mg/kg), systemic exposure was 3-fold higher in Oatp1a/1b-null mice than in the wild-type mice. Liver, small intestinal, and kidney exposure were slightly, but not significantly, increased in Oatp1a/1b-null mice. The biliary excretion of rosuvastatin was very fast, with 60% of the dose eliminated within 15 minutes after intravenous administration, and also not significantly altered in Oatp1a/1b-null mice. Rosuvastatin renal clearance, although still minor, was increased ∼15-fold in Oatp1a/1b-null males, suggesting a role of Oatp1a1 in the renal reabsorption of rosuvastatin. Absence of Oatp1a/1b uptake transporters increases the systemic exposure of rosuvastatin by reducing its hepatic extraction ratio. However, liver concentrations are not significantly affected, most likely due to the compensatory activity of high-capacity, low-affinity alternative uptake transporters at higher systemic rosuvastatin levels and the absence of efficient alternative rosuvastatin clearance mechanisms.
Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender, and the Rural-Urban Divide

Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender, and the Rural-Urban Divide explores the ways in which fantasies about returning to, or revitalising, rural life helped to define Western modernity in the early twentieth century. Scholarship addressing responses to modernity has focused on urban space and fears about the effects of city life; few studies have considered the 'rural' to be as critical as the 'urban' in understanding modernity. This book argues that the rural is just as significant a reference point as the urban in discourses about modernity. Using a rich Australian case study to illuminate broader international themes, it focuses on the role of gender in ideas about the rural-urban divide, showing how the country was held up against the 'unnatural' city as a space in which men were more 'masculine' and women more 'feminine'. Fears and Fantasies is an innovative and important contribution to scholarship in the fields of history and gender studies.
Flow diagram : Variable features in sequential segmental analysis

It might reasonably be thought that those who diagnose and treat patients with congenitally malformed hearts would, by now, have reached consensus concerning the most appropriate way of describing the malformations with which they are confronted. It is certainly the case that nomenclature is far less contentious now than was the case a decade ago. It would be a brave person, nonetheless, who stated that the field of description and categorization was now fully resolved. There are still major differences of opinion as how best to cope with certain topics, such as those patients who have socalled visceral heterotaxy. In this review, we outline a system for description that accounts well for such topics. Indeed, it provides a means of cataloguing and describing all congenital cardiac malformations, even if the combination of lesions has never previously been encountered. In reality, there is no right or wrong way of describing the hearts, simply different ways. [1,2] Even these different ways have been mitigated to considerable extent by the cross-mapping of existing systems. [3] The success of crossmapping, nonetheless, should not detract from the need to resolve ongoing differences according to the nature of the abnormal anatomy as it is observed. In this review, we provide such accounts of the phenotypic features of the socalled cardiac segments. We show how this approach then provides the template for categorising the arrangements in all patients with congenitally malformed hearts.
Energy-Efficient Long-term Continuous Personal Health Monitoring

Continuous health monitoring using wireless body area networks of implantable and wearable medical devices (IWMDs) is envisioned as a transformative approach to healthcare. Rapid advances in biomedical sensors, low-power electronics, and wireless communications have brought this vision to the verge of reality. However, key challenges still remain to be addressed. The constrained sizes of IWMDs imply that they are designed with very limited processing, storage, and battery capacities. Therefore, there is a very strong need for efficiency in data collection, analysis, storage, and communication. In this paper, we first quantify the energy and storage requirements of a continuous personal health monitoring system that uses eight biomedical sensors: (1) heart rate, (2) blood pressure, (3) oxygen saturation, (4) body temperature, (5) blood glucose, (6) accelerometer, (7) electrocardiogram (ECG), and (8) electroencephalogram (EEG). Our analysis suggests that there exists a significant gap between the energy and storage requirements for long-term continuous monitoring and the capabilities of current devices. To enable energy-efficient continuous health monitoring, we propose schemes for sample aggregation, anomaly-driven transmission, and compressive sensing to reduce the overheads of wirelessly transmitting, storing, and encrypting/authenticating the data. We evaluate these techniques and demonstrate that they result in two to three orders-of-magnitude improvements in energy and storage requirements, and can help realize the potential of long-term continuous health monitoring.
How context helps: A discriminative codeword selection method for object detection

We first propose in this paper to localize objects in images based on the models learned from the weakly labeled images. This task is termed as region of interest (ROI) detection. Local features such as SIFT or HOG are extracted and the discriminative words from clustered codewords based on SIFT and HOG are selected to model the objects. Then how to find the discriminative words to model the object is important. Existing ROI detection methods consider the information from the foreground objects by selecting the words appearing more in the images belonging to one specific image class. Considering the information from background/context is also helpful for object detection and classification, we propose to select the discriminative words which appear more in the foreground/object and less in the background/context. Second, another task is to give the class label (object in this setting) for a given image and also give the position of the object appearing in the image. This task is termed as objection detection. A normal way for this task after ROI is to extract features from the detected regions and not from the whole image. Since the discriminative words extracted during ROI detection has good discriminative ability, we propose to use these words for object detection. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC 2006 dataset and a larger dataset containing 29 classes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Unresponsiveness to Glucantime Treatment in Iranian Cutaneous Leishmaniasis due to Drug-Resistant Leishmania tropica Parasites

Background Recent circumstantial evidence suggests that an increasing number of Iranian patients with cutaneous leishmaniasis are unresponsive to meglumine antimoniate (Glucantime), the first line of treatment in Iran. This study was designed to determine whether the clinical responses (healing, or non-healing) were correlated with the susceptibility of Leishmania parasites to Glucantime. Methods and Findings In vitro susceptibility testing was first performed on 185 isolated parasites in the intracellular mouse peritoneal macrophage model. A strong correlation between the clinical outcome and the in vitro effective concentration 50% (EC 50) values was observed. Parasites derived from patients with non-healing lesions had EC 50 values at least 4-fold higher than parasites derived from lesions of healing patients. A selection of these strains was typed at the molecular level by pulsed-field gels and by sequencing the pteridine reductase 1 (PTR1) gene. These techniques indicated that 28 out of 31 selected strains were Leishmania tropica and that three were Leishmania major. The L. major isolates were part of a distinct pulsed-field group, and the L. tropica isolates could be classified in three related additional pulsed-field groups. For each pulsed-field karyotype, we selected sensitive and resistant parasites in which we transfected the firefly luciferase marker to assess further the in vitro susceptibility of field isolates in the monocyte cell line THP1. These determinations confirmed unequivocally that patients with non-healing lesions were infected with L. tropica parasites resistant to Glucantime. Additional characterization of the resistant isolates showed that resistance is stable and can be reversed by buthionine sulfoximine, an inhibitor of glutathione biosynthesis. Conclusions To the authors' knowledge, this is the first report of proven resistant parasites contributing to treatment failure for cutaneous leishmaniasis and shows that primary Glucantime-resistant L. tropica field isolates are now frequent in Iran.
Extending Global Optimizations in the OpenUH Compiler for OpenMP

This paper presents our design and implementation of a framework for analyzing and optimizing OpenMP programs within the OpenUH compiler, which is based on Open64. The paper describes the existing analyses and optimizations in OpenUH, and explains why the compiler may not apply classical optimizations to OpenMP programs directly. It then presents an enhanced compiler framework including Parallel Control Flow Graph and Concurrent SSA that represent both intra-thread and inter-thread data flow. With this framework, the compiler is able to perform traditional compiler optimizations on OpenMP programs, and it further increases the opportunities for more aggressive optimizations for OpenMP. We describe our current implementation in the OpenUH compiler and use a code example to demonstrate the optimizations enabled by the new framework. This framework may lead to a significant improvement in the performance of the translated code.
Enhancing Multi-user Interaction with Multi-touch Tabletop Displays Using Hand Tracking

A rear-projection multi-touch tabletop display was augmented with hand tracking utilizing computer vision techniques. Touch detection by frustrated total internal reflection is useful for achieving interaction with tabletop displays, but the technique is not always reliable when multiple users in close proximity simultaneously interact with the display. To solve this problem, we combine touch detection and hand tracking techniques in order to allow multiple users to simultaneously interact with the display without interference. Our hope is that by considering activities occurring on and above a tabletop display, multiuser interaction will become more natural and useful, which should ultimately support collaborative work.
Forensic Dental Age Estimation by Measuring Root Dentin Translucency Area Using a New Digital Technique

Dentin translucency measurement is an easy yet relatively accurate approach to postmortem age estimation. Translucency area represents a two‐dimensional change and may reflect age variations better than length. Manually measuring area is challenging and this paper proposes a new digital method using commercially available computer hardware and software. Area and length were measured on 100 tooth sections (age range, 19–82 years) of 250 μm thickness. Regression analysis revealed lower standard error of estimate and higher correlation with age for length than for area (R = 0.62 vs. 0.60). However, test of regression formulae on a control sample (n = 33, 21–85 years) showed smaller mean absolute difference (8.3 vs. 8.8 years) and greater frequency of smaller errors (73% vs. 67% age estimates ≤ ±10 years) for area than for length. These suggest that digital area measurements of root translucency may be used as an alternative to length in forensic age estimation.
What is the likely future of real-time transient stability?

Despite very intensive research efforts in the field of transient stability during the last five decades, the large majority of the derived techniques have hardly moved from the research laboratories to the industrial world and, as a matter of fact, the very large majority of today's control centers do not make use of any real-time transient stability software. On the other hand, along all these years the techniques developed for real-time transient stability have mainly focused on the definition of stability margins and speeding-up techniques rather than on preventive or emergency control strategies. In the light of the above observations, this paper attempts to explain the reasons for lack of industrial interest in real-time transient stability, and also to examine an even more fundamental question, namely: is transient stability, as has been stated many decades ago, still the relevant issue in the context of the new power systems morphology towards more dispersed generation, higher penetration of power electronics, larger and more complex structures, and, in addition, of economic and environmental constraints? Or, maybe, there is a need for techniques different from those developed so far?
Computer Immunology

Present day computer systems are fragile and unreliable. Human beings are involved in the care and repair of computer systems at every stage in their operation. This level of human involvement will be impossible to maintain in future. Biological and social systems of comparable and greater complexity have self-healing processes which are crucial to their survival. It will be necessary to mimic such systems if our future computer systems are to prosper in a complex and hostile environment. This paper describes strategies for future research and summarizes concrete measures for the present, building upon existing software systems.
Hiding traces of median filtering in digital images

Detection of median filtering is an important task in image forensics, since this operator is frequently used both for benign and malicious processing. In this paper we introduce a counter-forensic technique that allows to conceal traces left by median filtering while preserving the quality of the processed image. The work aims to hide traces searched by state-of-the-art tools, and does not require JPEG compression of the image to hide traces.
Greed Is Good: Near-Optimal Submodular Maximization via Greedy Optimization

It is known that greedy methods perform well for maximizing monotone submodular functions. At the same time, such methods perform poorly in the face of non-monotonicity. In this paper, we show - arguably, surprisingly - that invoking the classical greedy algorithm $O(\sqrt{k})$-times leads to the (currently) fastest deterministic algorithm, called Repeated Greedy, for maximizing a general submodular function subject to $k$-independent system constraints. Repeated Greedy achieves $(1 + O(1/\sqrt{k}))k$ approximation using $O(nr\sqrt{k})$ function evaluations (here, $n$ and $r$ denote the size of the ground set and the maximum size of a feasible solution, respectively). We then show that by a careful sampling procedure, we can run the greedy algorithm only once and obtain the (currently) fastest randomized algorithm, called Sample Greedy, for maximizing a submodular function subject to $k$-extendible system constraints (a subclass of $k$-independent system constrains). Sample Greedy achieves $(k + 3)$-approximation with only $O(nr/k)$ function evaluations. Finally, we derive an almost matching lower bound, and show that no polynomial time algorithm can have an approximation ratio smaller than $ k + 1/2 - \varepsilon$. To further support our theoretical results, we compare the performance of Repeated Greedy and Sample Greedy with prior art in a concrete application (movie recommendation). We consistently observe that while Sample Greedy achieves practically the same utility as the best baseline, it performs at least two orders of magnitude faster.