Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deciphering Normal Blood Gene Expression Variation—The NOWAC Postgenome Study

There is growing evidence that gene expression profiling of peripheral blood cells is a valuable tool for assessing gene signatures related to exposure, drug-response, or disease. However, the true promise of this approach can not be estimated until the scientific community has robust baseline data describing variation in gene expression patterns in normal individuals. Using a large representative sample set of postmenopausal women (N = 286) in the Norwegian Women and Cancer (NOWAC) postgenome study, we investigated variability of whole blood gene expression in the general population. In particular, we examined changes in blood gene expression caused by technical variability, normal inter-individual differences, and exposure variables at proportions and levels relevant to real-life situations. We observe that the overall changes in gene expression are subtle, implying the need for careful analytic approaches of the data. In particular, technical variability may not be ignored and subsequent adjustments must be considered in any analysis. Many new candidate genes were identified that are differentially expressed according to inter-individual (i.e. fasting, BMI) and exposure (i.e. smoking) factors, thus establishing that these effects are mirrored in blood. By focusing on the biological implications instead of directly comparing gene lists from several related studies in the literature, our analytic approach was able to identify significant similarities and effects consistent across these reports. This establishes the feasibility of blood gene expression profiling, if they are predicated upon careful experimental design and analysis in order to minimize confounding signals, artifacts of sample preparation and processing, and inter-individual differences.
Thermal Image Sensing Model for Robotic Planning and Search

This work presents a search planning system for a rolling robot to find a source of infra-red (IR) radiation at an unknown location. Heat emissions are observed by a low-cost home-made IR passive visual sensor. The sensor capability for detection of radiation spectra was experimentally characterized. The sensor data were modeled by an exponential model to estimate the distance as a function of the IR image’s intensity, and, a polynomial model to estimate temperature as a function of IR intensities. Both theoretical models are combined to deduce a subtle nonlinear exact solution via distance-temperature. A planning system obtains feed back from the IR camera (position, intensity, and temperature) to lead the robot to find the heat source. The planner is a system of nonlinear equations recursively solved by a Newton-based approach to estimate the IR-source in global coordinates. The planning system assists an autonomous navigation control in order to reach the goal and avoid collisions. Trigonometric partial differential equations were established to control the robot’s course towards the heat emission. A sine function produces attractive accelerations toward the IR source. A cosine function produces repulsive accelerations against the obstacles observed by an RGB-D sensor. Simulations and real experiments of complex indoor are presented to illustrate the convenience and efficacy of the proposed approach.
Triangulating topological spaces

Given a subspace<inline-equation><f><blkbd>X⊆R</blkbd><sup>d</sup></f></inline-equation> and a finite set <inline-equation><f>S⊆<blkbd>R</blkbd><sup>d</sup></f></inline-equation>, we introduce the Delaunay simplicial complex, <inline-equation><f><sc>D</sc><inf><blkbd>X</blkbd></inf></f></inline-equation>, restricted by <inline-equation><f><blkbd>X</blkbd></f></inline-equation>. Its simplices are spanned by subsets<inline-equation><f>T⊆S</f></inline-equation> for which the common intersection of Voronoi cells meets <inline-equation><f><blkbd>X</blkbd></f></inline-equation> in a non-empty set. By the nerve theorem,<inline-equation><f><lim align="c"><op>⋃</op></lim><sc>D</sc><inf><blkbd>X</blkbd></inf></f></inline-equation> and <inline-equation><f><blkbd>X</blkbd></f></inline-equation> are homotopy equivalent if all such sets are contractible. This paper shows that <inline-equation><f><lim align="c"><op>⋃</op></lim><sc>D</sc><inf><blkbd>X</blkbd></inf></f></inline-equation> and <inline-equation><f><blkbd>X</blkbd></f></inline-equation> <? Pub Caret1>are homeomorphic if the sets can be further subdivided in a certain way so they form a regular CW complex.
Lipophilic Optical Supramolecular Nano Devices in the Aqueous Phase

Nano micelles of sodium dodecyl sulphate in water were prepared as local lipophilic media for the organisation of interacting chromophores. Such arrangements were controlled by peripheric substituents to operate either as isolated chromophores or as skew oriented pairs where H-type transitions cause hysochromic absorption and J-type transitions bathochromic fluorescence. As a consequence, large Stokes' shift could be obtained.
Internal Preload Control of Redundantly Actuated Parallel Manipulators&#8212;Its Application to Backlash Avoiding Control

Redundant actuation of parallel manipulators can lead to internal forces without generating end-effector forces (preload). Preload can be controlled in order to prevent backlash during the manipulator motion. Such control is based on the inverse dynamics. The general solution of the inverse dynamics of redundantly actuated parallel manipulators is given. For the special case of simple overactuation an explicit solution is derived in terms of a single preload parameter. With this formulation a computational efficient open-loop preload control is developed and applied to the elimination of backlash. Its simplicity makes it applicable in real-time applications. Results are given for a planar 4RRR manipulator and a spatial heptapod.
Emotion recognition method based on normalization of prosodic features

Emotion recognition from speech signals is one of the most important technologies for natural conversation between humans and robots. Most emotion recognizers extract prosodic features from an input speech in order to use emotion recognition. However, prosodic features changes drastically depending on the uttered text. In order to solve this problem, we have proposed the normalization method of prosodic features by using the synthesized speech, which has the same word sequence but uttered with a “neutral” emotion. In this method, all prosodic features (pitch, power, etc.) are normalized. However, nobody knows which kind of prosodic features should be normalized. In this paper, all combinations of with/without normalization were examined, and the most appropriate normalization method was found. When both “RMS Energy” (root mean square frame energy) and “VoiceProb” (power of harmonics divided by the total power) were normalized, emotion recognition accuracy became 5.98% higher than the recognition accuracy without normalization.
Computational approaches for rational design of proteins with novel functionalities

Proteins are the most multifaceted macromolecules in living systems and have various important functions, including structural, catalytic, sensory, and regulatory functions. Rational design of enzymes is a great challenge to our understanding of protein structure and physical chemistry and has numerous potential applications. Protein design algorithms have been applied to design or engineer proteins that fold, fold faster, catalyze, catalyze faster, signal, and adopt preferred conformational states. The field of de novo protein design, although only a few decades old, is beginning to produce exciting results. Developments in this field are already having a significant impact on biotechnology and chemical biology. The application of powerful computational methods for functional protein designing has recently succeeded at engineering target activities. Here, we review recently reported de novo functional proteins that were developed using various protein design approaches, including rational design, computational optimization, and selection from combinatorial libraries, highlighting recent advances and successes.
Individual and Social-Contextual Factors Affecting the Learning and Use of ESL: A Case Study of a Visiting Korean Physician

This case study examined factors that affected a Korean physician's learning and use of ESL in an English-speaking country, using data from interviews, observations, notebook memos and e-mails. The findings indicated that individual factors- personality (perfectionism and extroversion), occupation, beliefs, and motivation-and social-contextual factors-lack of contact with native speakers and insecurity about speaking English in the presence of other Koreans-influenced the participant's learning and use of ESL. The findings also revealed that the participant's motivation and extroversion played a role in overcoming the social-contextual obstacles limiting learning opportunities, which illustrates interactions between individual and social-contextual factors.
Participant Perception of Recovery as Criterion to Establish Importance of Improvement for Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy Outcome Measures: Results From a Preliminary Study

http://ptjournal.apta. org/content/early/2007/01/23/ptj.20060101 found online at: The online version of this article, along with updated information and services, can be Collections Therapeutic Exercise Tests and Measurements Stroke (Neurology) Stroke (Geriatrics) Adaptive/Assistive Devices in the following collection(s): This article, along with others on similar topics, appears E-mail alerts to receive free e-mail alerts here Sign up corrections and replace the original author manuscript. : edited and typeset versions of articles that incorporate any author Page proofs readers almost immediate access to accepted papers. PTJ accepted for publication but have not yet been copyedited or typeset. This allows : PDF versions of manuscripts that have been peer-reviewed and Author manuscripts publishes 2 types of Online First articles: PTJ ). PTJ ( Physical Therapy Online First articles are published online before they appear in a regular issue of
Macro diversity combining techniques for multimedia broadcast/multicast services in UMTS networks

The transmission of multimedia broadcast and multicast services are expected to be transmitted to all users or groups of users within the cell range. UMTS 3GPP Release 6 standards envisage the support of these types of services over a common channel, thus not clogging up the air interface with multiple dedicated transmissions of the same data. The transmission of services over a single common channel reaching down the cell edge requires a large amount of power in order to satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements and the planned coverage. These power requirements can be reduced by the use of well known macro diversity combining techniques such as selective combining (SC) and maximum ratio combining (MRC) which allow a significant signal improvement at the receiver side and a more efficient usage of the available radio resources
Prevalence of High X-Ray Obscuring Columns among AGNs that Host H2O Masers

Of 104 AGNs known to exhibit H2O maser emission, X-ray data that enable estimation of column densities, or lower limits, are available for 42. Contributing to this, we report analysis of new and archival X-ray data for eight galaxies and collation of values for three more. Maser emission is indicative of large columns of cold gas, and in five of the eight new cases, maser spectra point toward origins in accretion disks viewed close to edge-on (a.k.a. “disk maser” systems). In these, we detect hard continuum and Fe Kα emission with equivalent widths on the order of 1 keV, which is consistent with Compton reflection, fluorescence by cold material, and obscuring columns ≳1024 cm−2. Reviewing the full sample of 42, 95% exhibit NH > 1023 cm−2 and 60% exhibit NH > 1024 cm−2. Half of these are now recognized to be disk masers (up from 13); in this subsample, which is likely to be more homogeneous vis-á-vis the origin of maser emission, 76% exhibit NH > 1024 cm−2. The probability of a common parent distribution of columns for disk masers and other AGN masers is ≲3%. Because ground-based surveys of AGNs to detect new disk masers are relatively unbiased with respect to X-ray brightness and comparatively inexpensive, they may also be efficient guides for the sensitive pointed X-ray observations required to identify Compton-thick objects outside of shallow surveys.
Elite Strategies in a Unified System of Higher Education. The Case of Sweden

L’absence de filieres d’excellence elitaire distingue la Suede de presque tous les autres pays. Il n’y a, dans l’enseignement superieur, quasi aucune institution qui se distingue des autres par un recrutement d’etudiants d’origine sociale exceptionnellement elevee ou ayant des references scolaires brillantes. Aucun frais de scolarite n’est percu a quelque niveau que ce soit du systeme educatif, et des bourses d’etudes et des prets sont alloues a tous les etudiants suedois – ce qui creuserait une ligne de partage fondee sur l’economie. Pratiquement toutes les institutions d’enseignement superieur etant publiques, l’opposition entre prive et public est non pertinente. De plus, aux niveaux inferieurs du systeme suedois il n’existe que tres peu d’ecoles ou de voies institutionnelles ou l’on puisse percevoir facilement la preeminence des enfants des actuelles elites ou qui soient consacrees a la selection et a la formation des elites futures. Ainsi, pour comprendre le role de l’enseignement dans la reproduction et la production des elites suedoises, n’est-il pas possible de differencier un secteur specifique d’institutions elitaires. Il faut, au contraire, prendre en compte l’ensemble du systeme. Cet article propose d’analyser l’education de l’elite comme un sous-espace de l’espace de l’enseignement superieur suedois dans son entier, caracterise par une distribution inegale de differents types de capitaux. Cette perspective tient compte de la distinction entre elites et membres de la classe sociale superieure, aussi bien que des distinctions entre les differents types de capitaux – herites et acquis – qu’ils soient economiques, sociaux, culturels ou educatifs. Nous tenons pour centrale la distribution de ces capitaux entre hommes et femmes, puisque ces dernieres ont tendance a surclasser de plus en plus les premiers. Il est egalement notable que dans un pays peripherique comme la Suede les investissements educatifs dans des ressources transnationales soient d’une importance cruciale et croissante, tant pour les etudiants que pour les institutions. Une des principales conclusions est que le systeme educatif suedois est en cours de differenciation et n’est ainsi plus autant une singularite par rapport au reste du monde.
Something Old , Something New : A Computational Morphological Description of Old Swedish

We present a computational morphological description of Old Swedish imp lemented in Functional Morphology. The objective of the work is concrete – connecting word forms in real text to entries in electron i dictionaries, for use in an online reading aid for students learning Old Swedish. The challenge we face is to find an appropriate mode l of Old Swedish able to deal with the rich linguistic variation in real texts, so that word forms appearing in real texts can be connecte d to the idealized citation forms of the dictionaries.
Massively-Parallel Computing on Cog ex Machina

Cog ex Machina is a software framework for building massively-parallel applications on commodity, multicore hardware. Complex models may be expressed in a simple, abstract programming model, while hiding the complexities (threads, locks, synchronization, communication) of the underlying hardware platform. External Posting Date: August 7, 2012 [Fulltext] Approved for External Publication Internal Posting Date: August 7, 2012 [Fulltext]  Copyright 2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. 1 Massively-Parallel Computing on Cog ex Machina Greg Snider Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Multicore Future The last decade has seen the number of processing cores per chip explode while clock rates have increased only modestly. From an application perspective, this is not a particularly welcome development: programming multiple cores executing in parallel is currently trickier and more labor intensive than a single core. But limitations of physics and current technology do not allow economical multi-terahertz processors, so we must adapt to what the market can provide. Graphics processing units, GPUs, are now ubiquitous and cheap, providing more than 1000 cores on a chip at very low cost. They are not ideal platforms for building high performance applications. A GPU typically has a streaming memory model, SIMD-like execution structure, limited on-chip memory, limited I/O bandwidth, and a high launch time overhead. Memory caching must, to a large extent, be done in software. One must do some clever programming to use them efficiently. But GPUs are evolving away from their graphics legacy to more general platforms. On-chip GPU hardware caches are increasing in size, and some newer designs include much more on-chip memory per core, much higher memory bandwidth, and the potential for MIMD processing (for example, one start-up claims an architecture that supports up to 64K cores per chip, up to 1 MByte per core, with a memory bandwidth of 4 bytes per FLOP). The CUDA and OpenCL software toolkits allow programmers to write applications which run directly on GPUs while interfacing with conventional software on a CPU. Learning to repair video streams. The video stream on the left has a permanent occlusion simulating the way retinal veins block images in human eyes. A short Cog program learns the location of the veins and dynamically paints in the missing information in real time.
Metric Suffix Array For Large-Scale Similarity Search

We propose the Metric Suffix Array (MSA), as a novel and efficie nt data structure for permutation-based indexing. The Metric Suffix Array follows the same principles as the suffix array. The suf fix array is mainly used for text indexing. Here, we build the MSA as an alternative for large-scale content based information r etrieval. We also show how the MSA is scalable for parallel and distribu ed architectures. We study the performance and efficiency of ou r algorithms in a large-scale context. Experimental results sh ow fast response time with high efficiency and effectiveness.
Measuring the Remnant Mass Function of the Galactic Bulge

I show that by observing microlensing events both astrometrically and photometrically, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) can measure the mass function of stellar remnants in the Galactic bulge, including white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. Neutron stars and black holes can be identified individually, while white dwarfs are detected statistically from the sharp peak in their mass function near M ~ 0.6 M☉. This peak is expected to be more than twice as high as the "background" of main-sequence microlenses. I estimate that of order 20% of the ~ 400 bulge microlensing events detected to date are due to remnants, but show that these are completely unrecognizable from their timescale distribution (the only observable that "normal" microlensing observations produce). To resolve the white dwarf peak, the SIM mass measurements must be accurate to ~ 5%, substantially better than is required to measure the mass function of the more smoothly distributed main sequence. Nevertheless, SIM could measure the masses of about 20 bulge remnants in 500 hours of observing time.
Visual attention pooling and understanding the structural similarity index in multi-scale analysis

We present a novel spatial pooling strategy and the results of an extensive multi-scale analysis of the well-known structural similarity index metric (SSIM) for objective image quality evaluation. We show, in contrast with some previous studies, that even relatively simple perceptual importance pooling strategies can significantly improve objective metric performance evaluated as the correlation with subjective quality assessment. In particular, we define an attention and quality driven pooling mechanism that focuses structural comparisons within the SSIM model to only those pixels exhibiting significant structural degradations. We show that optimal objective metric performance is achieved over very sparse spatial domains indeed that ignore most of the signal data. We also investigate an explicit breakdown of the structural models within SSIM and show that in combination with the proposed attention and quality driven pooling some of these models represent well performing metrics in their own right, when applied at appropriate scale for which there may not be a single optimal value. Our experiments demonstrate that the augmented SSIM metric using the proposed pooling model provides performance advantage on an extensive LIVE dataset covering hundreds of degraded images and 5 different distortion types compared to both conventional SSIM and state-of-the-art objective quality metrics.
A compact volume rendering accelerator

We describe the architecture of a hardware accelerator for volume rendering. The system basically consists of four VLSI chips and the volume memory and represents a singleboard solution to the computational challenges of volume visualization. It generates arbitrary perspective projections, so that walk-through examinations are possible. The classification of structures of interest is an integral part of the rendering pipeline. Image quality is enhanced by providing Phong shading, depth-cueing and support for translucency. Despite its compactness and algorithmic complexity, the system is able to render 2563 data sets at a sustained frame generation rate of about 2.5Hz. CR
Implementation of HEVC decoder on x86 processors with SIMD optimization

High Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) is the next generation video coding standard in progress. Based on the traditional hybrid coding framework, HEVC implements enhanced tools to improve compression efficiency at the cost of far more computational payload than the capacity of real-time video applications. In this paper, we focus on the software implementation of a real-time HEVC decoder over modern Intel x86 processors. First, we identify the most time-consuming modules of HM 4.0 decoder, represented by motion compensation, adaptive loopfilter, deblocking filter and integer transform. Then the single-execution-multiple-data (SIMD) methods are proposed to optimize the computational performance of these modules. Experimental results show that the optimized decoder is more than 4 times faster than the HM 4.0 decoder, with decoding speed of over 40 frames per second for 1920×1080 resolution videos on Intel i5-2400 processor.
Semi-supervised Based Training Set Construction for Outlier Detection

Outliers are sparse and few. It's costly to obtain a training set with enough outliers so that existing approaches to the problem of outlier detection seldom processed with supervised manner. However, given a training set with sufficient outliers, supervised outlier detection perform better than other methods. Traditional training set need to label each sample, but we can only label out the outliers and the other unlabeled ones can be directly marked as inliers to construct training set. In most cases, the number of samples we can label is limited and a large number of samples can be easily obtained without labeling. Semi-Supervised learning methods have a nature advantage in utilizing information of little labeled samples and large unlabeled samples to predict unlabeled instances. Based on this idea, we propose a algorithm CRLC constructing training set combining semi-supervised outlier detection. Our experiments show that our algorithm achieves better performance compared to other methods with the same cost.