Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structural analysis of social behavior: application to a study of interpersonal process in differential psychotherapeutic outcome.

Research strategies employing Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB) were demonstrated in a study comparing 4 therapists, each of whom saw a good and a poor outcome case (N = 8), on interpersonal process variables in the third session. SASB represents complex interactive processes in a manner that is both theoretically cogent and empirically sound. Good versus poor therapeutic outcome was differentiated on the basis of the following interpersonal process variables: greater levels of "helping and protecting" and "affirming and understanding*' and significantly lower levels of "blaming and belittling" were associated with high-change cases. Patient behaviors of "disclosing and expressing" were significantly more frequent in high-change cases, whereas "walling off and avoiding" and "trusting and relying" were significantly more frequent in low-change cases. Additionally, negative complementarity was greater in poor outcome cases. Implications for research methodology and interpersonal theory are discussed.
Optimizing the Channel Selection and Classification Accuracy in EEG-Based BCI

Multichannel EEG is generally used in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), whereby performing EEG channel selection 1) improves BCI performance by removing irrelevant or noisy channels and 2) enhances user convenience from the use of lesser channels. This paper proposes a novel sparse common spatial pattern (SCSP) algorithm for EEG channel selection. The proposed SCSP algorithm is formulated as an optimization problem to select the least number of channels within a constraint of classification accuracy. As such, the proposed approach can be customized to yield the best classification accuracy by removing the noisy and irrelevant channels, or retain the least number of channels without compromising the classification accuracy obtained by using all the channels. The proposed SCSP algorithm is evaluated using two motor imagery datasets, one with a moderate number of channels and another with a large number of channels. In both datasets, the proposed SCSP channel selection significantly reduced the number of channels, and outperformed existing channel selection methods based on Fisher criterion, mutual information, support vector machine, common spatial pattern, and regularized common spatial pattern in classification accuracy. The proposed SCSP algorithm also yielded an average improvement of 10% in classification accuracy compared to the use of three channels (C3, C4, and Cz).
Online Visual Vocabularies

The idea of an online visual vocabulary is proposed. In contrast to the accepted strategy of generating vocabularies offline, using the k-means clustering over all the features extracted form all the images in a dataset, an online vocabulary is dynamic and evolves iteratively over time as new observations are made. Hence, it is much more suitable for online robotic applications, such as exploration, landmark detection, and SLAM, where the future is unknown. We present two different strategies for building online vocabularies. The first strategy produces a vocabulary, which optimizes the k-centres objective of minimizing the maximum distance of a a feature from the closest vocabulary word. The second strategy produces a vocabulary by randomly sampling from the current vocabulary and the features in the current observation. We show that both the algorithms are able to produce distance matrices which have positive rank correlation with distance matrices computed using an offline k-means vocabulary. We discover that the online random vocabulary is consistently effective at approximating the behaviour of the offline k-means vocabulary, at least for the moderate sized datasets we examine.
Integrating Business Processes and Business Rules

Integration between business processes and business rules is necessary for some applications which not only hold numerous business knowledge or policies but also need the intercommunication among some distributed and heterogeneous components. This paper proposes a main process and multiple bypass process to focus the integration occurring between a bypass process and a rule set. In order to hold the context of some external services decided by business rules, we design a special scope activity in the bypass process. Moreover, an architecture and an algorithm are provided to illustrate the interaction between a BPEL engine and a rule engine for the integrating BPEL processes and business rules.
Evolutionary Morphology, Platyrrhine Evolution, and Systematics

This special volume of the Anatomical Record focuses on the evolutionary morphology of New World monkeys. The studies range from three‐dimensional surface geometry of teeth to enamel ultrastructure; from cranioskeletal adaptations for eating leaves and seeds to the histology of taste bud proxies; from the architecture of its bones to the mechanoreceptors of the tail's skin; from the physical properties of wild foods to the feeding biomechanics of jaws and skull; from the shapes of claws and fingertips, and of elbows, to the diversity and morphology of positional behavior; from the vomeronasal organ and its biological roles to links between brains, guts, sociality, and feeding; from the gum‐eating adaptations of the smallest platyrrhines to the methods used to infer how big the largest fossil platyrrhines were. They demonstrate the power of combining functional morphology, behavior, and phylogenetic thinking as an approach toward reconstructing the evolutionary history of platyrrhine primates. While contributing new findings pertaining to all the major clades and ecological guilds, these articles reinforce the view that platyrrhines are a coherent ecophylogenetic array that differentiated along niche dimensions definable principally by body size, positional behavior, and feeding strategies. In underlining the value of character analysis and derived morphological and behavioral patterns as tools for deciphering phylogenetic and adaptational history, doubts are raised about a competing small‐bore morphological method, parsimony‐based cladistic studies. Intentionally designed not to enlist the rich reservoir of platyrrhine evolutionary morphology, an empirical assessment of the costs incurred by this research stratagem reveals inconsistent, nonrepeatable, and often conflicting results. Anat Rec, 2011. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Is asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease associated with walking endurance in patients with COPD?

Objective Symptomatic peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is associated with impaired walking endurance in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, it is unknown whether asymptomatic PAD is associated with impaired walking endurance in patients with COPD. Methods This prospective cross-sectional study enrolled 200 COPD patients (mean age: 70.9 years) who volunteered to perform ankle-brachial index (ABI) and 6-minute walk test (6MWT) consecutively. Demographic data, lung function, dyspnea scales, and cardiovascular risk factors were recorded. The ABI was used to detect PAD (ABI <0.90). All patients were free of PAD symptoms at enrollment. Results Of the 200 COPD patients, 17 (8.5%) were diagnosed with asymptomatic PAD. The COPD patients without asymptomatic PAD did not walk significantly further on the 6MWT than the COPD patients with asymptomatic PAD (439±86 m vs 408±74 m, P=0.159). The strongest correlation with the distance walked on the 6MWT was Medical Research Council dyspnea scale (r2=−0.667, P<0.001), followed by oxygen-cost diagram (r2=0.582, P<0.001) and forced expiratory volume in 1 second (r2=0.532, P<0.001). In multivariate linear regression analysis, only age, forced expiratory volume in 1 second, and baseline pulse oximetry were independently correlated with the distance covered on the 6MWT (P<0.05). However, body mass index, baseline heart rate, and ABI were not correlated with the distance covered on the 6MWT. Conclusion Asymptomatic PAD is not associated with walking endurance in patients with COPD. Therefore, it is important to detect and treat asymptomatic PAD early so that COPD patients do not progress to become exercise intolerant. Limited by the small sample size and predominantly male (99%) population in the study, further large-scale prospective studies are needed to verify the results.
Failure-awareness and dynamic adaptation in data scheduling

Over the years, scientific applications have become more complex and more data intensive. Especially large scale simulations and scientific experiments in areas such as physics, biology, astronomy and earth sciences demand highly distributed resources to satisfy excessive computational requirements. Increasing data requirements and the distributed nature of the resources made I/O the major bottleneck for end-to-end application performance. Existing systems fail to address issues such as reliability, scalability, and efficiency in dealing with wide area data access, retrieval and processing. We explore data-intensive distributed computing and study challenges in data placement in distributed environments. After analyzing different application scenarios, we develop new data scheduling methodologies and the key attributes for reliability, adaptability and performance optimization of distributed data placement tasks.
A Rapid Mesh Fusion Method to Create 3D Virtual Characters in Games

With an increasing growth of games and animations, animators pay attention to design sophisticated 3D models with vast imagination, while 3D model constructions are a labor-extensive and time-consuming task. In this paper, we aim to reuse existing mesh models to reproduce a virtual character by means of the proposed mesh fusion method. In comparison with the conventional fusion methods, we tend to develop a rapid method instead of devising an off-line technology. The proposed method first selects two fragmented models that have been cut in advance by users, and integrates the mesh fragments into a complete model with little user interference. In order to associate the two mesh fragments with each other, a unit circle is used to project two open cutting boundaries on it; in addition, we take advantage of mesh morphing to generate a mesh patch in between the two open cutting boundaries and smooth the patch by using the Bezier interpolation. The experimental results show that the proposed method will be able to create a virtual character with an even in-between patch and a low time complexity.
IVEE: an environment for automatic creation of dynamic queries applications

The Information Visualization & Exploration Environment (IVEE) is a system for automatic creation of dynamic queries applications. IVEE can take a database relation and create an environment holding visualizations and query widgets. IVEE offers multiple visualizations such as maps, scatterplots, and cluster visualizations, and multiple query widgets, such as sliders, alphasliders, and toggles.
Small Group Experiments in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Presence in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can be classified into personal presence and co-presence. Personal presence is having a feeling of “being there” in the CVE yourself. Co-presence is having a feeling that one is in the same place as the other participants, and that one is collaborating with real people. In this paper we present two experiments designed to investigate some of the factors affecting personal presence and co-presence in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). The first experiment investigates the effects of group collaboration and interaction on presence and copresence in a CVE. The second experiment investigates the effects of avatar appearance and functionality (in terms of simple gestures and facial expressions) on co-presence in the CVE.
Executive mentoring: what makes it work?

omen and minorities continue undrrrrprcscnted XITISS the several computer science disci-plirres, despite a host 01 efrirts to attract and kcrp thrm in computing. For example, the Taulbrr snwey of computer sci-/ence graduates indicates onlv 10% to 14% of those who crad-'1 uatr from rompntcr scirncr doctoral programs are w&en and minorities. That graduation rate has been relatively sta-blr over thr last 20 years. Rut once women mwe into careers in computing, they have a difficult time moving up the career ladder-. Furthcmmorr, advancement of women in academia has been disappointing: 7.8% of the computer science farul-ty in the U.S. are female, but only 2.8Yo are tenured [3,4]. Similar figures arc reported for women in industry, as they hit what ha been termed " the glass ceiling " [6]. And the Commission on ProS~ssion;rls in Srirncr and TrchnoloLy reports that '? wmrn engineers with 1.5 to 30 years experirnrr can only 83Yo to 91% [of their malr counterparts salaries], and the differcrrccs widened as the years rolled by " [Z].
Road Reduction Filtering for GPS‐GIS Navigation

A novel method of map matching using the Global Positioning System (GPS) has been developed for civilian use, which uses digital mapping data to infer the systematic position errors of less than 100m which result largely from ‘selective availability’ (S/A) imposed by the US military. Selective availability was switched off on the 2nd of May 2000, and is to be replaced with ‘regional denial capabilities in lieu of global degradation’. The system tracks a vehicle on all possible roads (road centre‐lines) in a computed error region, then uses a method of rapidly detecting inappropriate road centre‐lines from the set of all those possible. This is called the Road Reduction Filter (RRF) algorithm. Point positioning is computed using C/A code pseudorange measurements direct from a GPS receiver. The least squares estimation is performed in the software developed for the experiment described in this paper. Virtual differential GPS (VDGPS) corrections are computed and used from a vehicle's previous positions, thus providing an autonomous alternative to DGPS for in‐car navigation and fleet management. Height aiding is used to augment the solution and reduce the number of satellites required for a position solution. Ordnance Survey (OS) digital map data was used for the experiment, i.e. OSCAR 1 m resolution road centre‐line geometry and Land Form PANORAMA 1:50,000, 50 m‐grid digital terrain model (DTM). Testing of the algorithm is reported and results are analysed. Vehicle positions provided by RRF are compared with the ‘true’ position determined using high precision (cm) GPS carrier phase techniques. It is shown that height aiding using a DTM and the RRF significantly improve the accuracy of position provided by inexpensive single frequency GPS receivers.
Risk Factor Values and the Ability of the Multivariable Risk Score to Predict Coronary Heart Disease

1 Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 2 Division of Clinical Epidemiology, Montreal General Hospital, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 3 Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 4 Division of Clinical Epidemiology, Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 5 Division of Internal Medicine, Montreal General Hospital, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Extremely Increased Serum Carbohydrate Antigen 19-9 Levels Caused by New or Resistant Infections to Previous Antibiotics in Chronic Lung Diseases

In this paper, we describe 72-year-old female patient without evidence of malignant disease presented with significantly elevated serum carbohydrate antigen (CA) 19-9 levels by respiratory infections. She was diagnosed with respiratory infections due to Mycobacterium avium complex and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The serum CA 19-9 levels remarkably increased (1,453-5,300 U/mL; reference range, <37 U/mL) by respiratory infection and abruptly decreased (357-534 U/mL) whenever infection was controlled by specific treatments. This case suggests that serum CA 19-9 levels may be used as a diagnostic marker to indicate new or resistant infections to previous antibiotics in chronic lung diseases without significant changes in chest X-ray findings.
Counting List H-Colorings and Variants ∗ Josep Dı́az †

We study the counting versions of several variants of the H-coloring problem. The complexity of the #H-coloring problem is described by a dichotomy theorem that classifies the problem according to the the topology of H as #P-complete or polynomial time solvable [6]. We first prove that the same dichotomy criterion holds also for its “list” extension, the list #H-coloring problem. We further investigate these problems by examining a parameterization imposing restrictions on the number of preimages of certain vertices in H. We prove a nearly dichotomy theorem on the complexity of counting such restricted homomorphisms, as well as a dichotomy theorem on the complexity of its “list” version. Finally, we give a condition that makes the parameterizedd problems solvable in linear time.
Detection of spatial events in CommonSens

The aim of our complex event processing system, CommonSens, is to simplify the application programmers' tasks by abstracting away from any particular sensor installation. Queries only need to refer to capabilities and locations of interest. In order to detect spatial events, CommonSens identifies the sensors that cover the specific locations where the spatial events should occur. This requires calculating how the coverage areas of sensors are affected by the environment. CommonSens promotes the use of heterogeneous multimodal sensors to reduce the probability of errors. It calculates the probability of false positives related to locations of interest and assists the application programmer with placing sensors in the environment effectively. We demonstrate through a series of experiments the functional properties of CommonSens related to these spatial issues. Furthermore, our experiments show that our non-optimised prototype is able to process all sensor readings and detect complex events in real-time.
An Application of Ant Colony Optimization to Decision Making on Affective Virtual Entities

Learning is a never ending activity for humans; it takes place everywhere and even when we do not realize. However, current learning environments make students deal with lectures, mostly associated with low control of the situation and implicit motivation. In contrast, previous researches have shown that sports, games or hobbies are activities that make people reach optimal experiences where self-motivation, control of the situation, high level of concentration and enjoyment are present. Some current efforts to design next generation of learning environments make use of ubiquitous systems to encourage students to perform learning activities everywhere and at anytime. However, those approaches lack the affective factor related to optimal experiences. To address that problem we present eCoology, an edutainment application that creates a ubiquitous learning environment with emotional features, and discuss some experimental results obtained from users that tested eCoology.
MIMO-OFDM non-regenerative relay channel estimation using compressed sensing

In this paper, a compressed sensing (CS)-based channel estimation technique is developed for MIMO-OFDM networks with Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relaying method. The impacts of multiple antennas as well as existing a direct link between source and destination are studied. The proposed CS-based method utilizes the inherent sparse characteristic of wireless channel and improves the bandwidth efficiency as it requires a few measurement units for channel estimation. The simulation results show that the proposed CS-based method outperforms the Least Squares (LS)-based channel estimation.
Online Learning for URL classification

This work consists of a review of online algorithms for URL classification followed by some extensions and tweaking of these methods to make them efficient in terms of computational time and memory. We found out that the trade-off in error for these extensions are fairly comparable for some of these algorithms. We also applied two more kernel based methods namely Forgetron and Projectron.
A complete and efficient algorithm for searching 3-D form-closure grasps in the discrete domain

A complete and efficient algorithm is proposed for searching form-closure grasps of n hard fingers on the surface of a three-dimensional object represented by discrete points. Both frictional and frictionless cases are considered. This algorithm starts to search a form-closure grasp from a randomly selected grasp using an efficient local search procedure until encountering a local minimum. The local search procedure employs the powerful ray-shooting technique to search in the direction of reducing the distance between the convex hull corresponding to the grasp and the origin of the wrench space. When the distance reaches a local minimum in the local search procedure, the algorithm decomposes the problem into a few subproblems in subsets of the points according to the existence conditions of form-closure grasps. A search tree whose root represents the original problem is employed to perform the searching process. The subproblems are represented as children of the root node and the same procedure is recursively applied to the children. It is proved that the search tree generates O(KlnK/n) nodes in case a from-closure grasp exists, where K is the number of the local minimum points of the distance in the grasp space and n is the number of fingers. Compared to the exhaustive search, this algorithm is more efficient, and, compared to other heuristic algorithms, the proposed algorithm is complete in the discrete domain. The efficiency of this algorithm is demonstrated by numerical examples.
Resistance to Pentamidine in Leishmania mexicana Involves Exclusion of the Drug from the Mitochondrion

ABSTRACT The uptake of [3H]pentamidine into wild-type and drug-resistant strains of Leishmania mexicana was compared. Uptake was carrier mediated. Pentamidine-resistant parasites showed cross-resistance to other toxic diamidine derivatives. A substantial decrease in accumulation of the drug accompanied the resistance phenotype, although the apparent affinity for pentamidine by its carrier was not altered when initial uptake velocity was measured. The apparent Vmax, however, was reduced. An efflux of pentamidine could be measured in both wild-type and resistant cells. Only a relatively small proportion of the total accumulated pentamidine was available for efflux in wild-type cells, while in resistant cells the majority of loaded pentamidine was available for release. Pharmacological reagents which diminish the mitochondrial membrane potential reduced pentamidine uptake in wild-type parasites, and the mitochondrial membrane potential was shown to be reduced in resistant cells. A fluorescent analogue of pentamidine, 4′,6′-diamidino-2-phenylindole, accumulated in the kinetoplast of wild-type but not resistant parasites. These data together indicate that diamidine drugs accumulate in the Leishmania mitochondrion and that the development of the resistance phenotype is accompanied by lack of mitochondrial accumulation of the drug and its exclusion from the parasites.
Fast computation of GCDs

An integer greatest common divisor (GCD) algorithm due to Schönhage is generalized to hold in all euclidean domains which possess a fast multiplication algorithm. It is shown that if two N precision elements can be multiplied in O(N loga N), then their GCD can be computed in O(N loga+1 N). As a consequence, a new faster algorithm for multivariate polynomial GCD's can be derived and with that new bounds for rational function manipulation.