Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rule Mining for Semantifying Wikilinks

Wikipedia-centric Knowledge Bases (KBs) such as YAGO and DBpedia store the hyperlinks between articles in Wikipedia using wikilink relations. While wikilinks are signals of semantic connection between entities, the meaning of such connection is most of the times unknown to KBs, e.g., for 89% of wikilinks in DBpedia no other relation between the entities is known. The task of discovering the exact relations that hold between the endpoints of a wikilink is called wikilink semantication . In this paper, we apply rule mining techniques on the already semantied wikilinks to propose relations for the unsemantied wikilinks in a subset of DBpedia. By mining highly supported and condent logical rules from KBs, we can semantify wikilinks with very high precision.
Image-Derived Input Function Derived from a Supervised Clustering Algorithm: Methodology and Validation in a Clinical Protocol Using [11C](R)-Rolipram

Image-derived input function (IDIF) obtained by manually drawing carotid arteries (manual-IDIF) can be reliably used in [11C](R)-rolipram positron emission tomography (PET) scans. However, manual-IDIF is time consuming and subject to inter- and intra-operator variability. To overcome this limitation, we developed a fully automated technique for deriving IDIF with a supervised clustering algorithm (SVCA). To validate this technique, 25 healthy controls and 26 patients with moderate to severe major depressive disorder (MDD) underwent T1-weighted brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a 90-minute [11C](R)-rolipram PET scan. For each subject, metabolite-corrected input function was measured from the radial artery. SVCA templates were obtained from 10 additional healthy subjects who underwent the same MRI and PET procedures. Cluster-IDIF was obtained as follows: 1) template mask images were created for carotid and surrounding tissue; 2) parametric image of weights for blood were created using SVCA; 3) mask images to the individual PET image were inversely normalized; 4) carotid and surrounding tissue time activity curves (TACs) were obtained from weighted and unweighted averages of each voxel activity in each mask, respectively; 5) partial volume effects and radiometabolites were corrected using individual arterial data at four points. Logan-distribution volume (V T/f P) values obtained by cluster-IDIF were similar to reference results obtained using arterial data, as well as those obtained using manual-IDIF; 39 of 51 subjects had a V T/f P error of <5%, and only one had error >10%. With automatic voxel selection, cluster-IDIF curves were less noisy than manual-IDIF and free of operator-related variability. Cluster-IDIF showed widespread decrease of about 20% [11C](R)-rolipram binding in the MDD group. Taken together, the results suggest that cluster-IDIF is a good alternative to full arterial input function for estimating Logan-V T/f P in [11C](R)-rolipram PET clinical scans. This technique enables fully automated extraction of IDIF and can be applied to other radiotracers with similar kinetics.
The serene student: Evaluating a group-based mindfulness training program for MSW students

ABSTRACT Social work educators are exploring the benefits of mindfulness training for social work pedagogy. The authors evaluate the outcomes of a mindfulness program for MSW students. The authors assessed changes in mindfulness, self-compassion, affect, mood, and impairment due to emotional distress before and after the program, and at 4-month follow-up. The authors examine how the group process may facilitate the development of mindfulness and consider how mindfulness practices can support group development and student learning. Results demonstrate that mindfulness training supports student self-regulation and well-being and suggest that the active ingredients of the group process may play a role in mindfulness training outcomes.
Why Are Two Different Cross-linkers Necessary for Actin Bundle Formation In Vivo and What Does Each Cross-link Contribute?

In developing Drosophila bristles two species of cross-linker, the forked proteins and fascin, connect adjacent actin filaments into bundles. Bundles form in three phases: (a) tiny bundles appear; (b) these bundles aggregate into larger bundles; and (c) the filaments become maximally cross-linked by fascin. In mutants that completely lack forked, aggregation of the bundles does not occur so that the mature bundles consist of <50 filaments versus ∼700 for wild type. If the forked concentration is genetically reduced to half the wild type, aggregation of the tiny bundles occurs but the filaments are poorly ordered albeit with small patches of fascin cross-linked filaments. In mutants containing an excess of forked, all the bundles tend to aggregate and the filaments are maximally crossbridged by fascin. Alternatively, if fascin is absent, phases 1 and 2 occur normally but the resultant bundles are twisted and the filaments within them are poorly ordered. By extracting fully elongated bristles with potassium iodide which removes fascin but leaves forked, the bundles change from being straight to twisted and the filaments within them become poorly ordered. From these observations we conclude that (a) forked is used early in development to aggregate the tiny bundles into larger bundles; and (b) forked facilitates fascin entry into the bundles to maximally cross-link the actin filaments into straight, compact, rigid bundles. Thus, forked aligns the filaments and then directs fascin binding so that inappropriate cross-linking does not occur.
Performance Evaluation of Trust-Based Collaborative Sanctioning in MANETs

Collaborative sanctioning (CS) is necessary in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), as cooperation in packet forwarding of network members is crucial. CS provides incentives for good behaviour, hence, it induces nodes with self regarding preferences to act cooperatively. CS requires nodes to use mechanisms that will evaluate how cooperative are peers requesting forwarding service. In this article we investigate the conditions where the most simple and reliable mechanism based on a trust system is sufficient for CS, from the conditions where it needs to be extended with a reputation system. Using a simple model of MANETs we demonstrate that the basic approach -- a trust system that uses personal evidence -- if applied by the majority of nodes -- results in poor network performance. However, if general evidence is used in addition to the personal one, the performance of the network is relatively good as long as the number of non-cooperative nodes is low. We show that extension of a trust system with a reputation system always improves performance of the network. Nevertheless, the need for a reputation system is strongest when the majority of nodes uses personal evidence.
FEUP at SemEval-2017 Task 5: Predicting Sentiment Polarity and Intensity with Financial Word Embeddings

This paper presents the approach developed at the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto, to participate in SemEval 2017, Task 5: Fine-grained Sentiment Analysis on Financial Microblogs and News. The task consisted in predicting a real continuous variable from -1.0 to +1.0 representing the polarity and intensity of sentiment concerning companies/stocks mentioned in short texts. We modeled the task as a regression analysis problem and combined traditional techniques such as pre-processing short texts, bag-of-words representations and lexical-based features with enhanced financial specific bag-of-embeddings. We used an external collection of tweets and news headlines mentioning companies/stocks from S&P 500 to create financial word embeddings which are able to capture domain-specific syntactic and semantic similarities. The resulting approach obtained a cosine similarity score of 0.69 in sub-task 5.1 - Microblogs and 0.68 in sub-task 5.2 - News Headlines.
Emulating a Wide Area Network for Testing Dependable Distributed Systems

Wide Area Networks have different performance characteristics compared with Local Area Networks. Their throughput is usually lower and there is a greater chance of information being dropped, damaged or delayed. Furthermore software that is developed for dependable applications over wide area networks may frequently be tested in a LAN environment where it is difficult to reproduce the characteristics of a WAN. In this paper we consider the problem of emulating a wide area network using Corba to implement clients and servers. Any dependable system implemented using Corba over a LAN can then be realistically tested in a WAN context. We propose two models: Non Interceptor Redirection Model (NIRM) and Interceptor Redirection Model (IRM). Figures 1 and 2 show the architecture of these two models. Figure 1. Non Interceptor Redirection Model Figure 2. Interceptor Redirection Model Client Traffic Generator Emulator Server
An empirical analysis of sustainability of Fiji¿s trade deficits

This paper investigates the sustainability of Fiji’s trade deficits in the context of recent, unprecedented fiscal expansion and private sector credit. Employing various tests for determining structural break in the time series and cointegration test, the study results support the existence of a long run equilibrium relationship between exports and imports in Fiji implying that trade deficits are only a short-term phenomena and hence, sustainable in the long run.
Modeling the Effects of Harvest Alternatives on Mitigating Oak Decline in a Central Hardwood Forest Landscape

Oak decline is a process induced by complex interactions of predisposing factors, inciting factors, and contributing factors operating at tree, stand, and landscape scales. It has greatly altered species composition and stand structure in affected areas. Thinning, clearcutting, and group selection are widely adopted harvest alternatives for reducing forest vulnerability to oak decline by removing susceptible species and declining trees. However, the long-term, landscape-scale effects of these different harvest alternatives are not well studied because of the limited availability of experimental data. In this study, we applied a forest landscape model in combination with field studies to evaluate the effects of the three harvest alternatives on mitigating oak decline in a Central Hardwood Forest landscape. Results showed that the potential oak decline in high risk sites decreased strongly in the next five decades irrespective of harvest alternatives. This is because oak decline is a natural process and forest succession (e.g., high tree mortality resulting from intense competition) would eventually lead to the decrease in oak decline in this area. However, forest harvesting did play a role in mitigating oak decline and the effectiveness varied among the three harvest alternatives. The group selection and clearcutting alternatives were most effective in mitigating oak decline in the short and medium terms, respectively. The long-term effects of the three harvest alternatives on mitigating oak decline became less discernible as the role of succession increased. The thinning alternative had the highest biomass retention over time, followed by the group selection and clearcutting alternatives. The group selection alternative that balanced treatment effects and retaining biomass was the most viable alternative for managing oak decline. Insights from this study may be useful in developing effective and informed forest harvesting plans for managing oak decline.
Dre - Cre Sequential Recombination Provides New Tools for Retinal Ganglion Cell Labeling and Manipulation in Mice

Background Genetic targeting methods have greatly advanced our understanding of many of the 20 Retinal Ganglion Cell (RGC) types conveying visual information from the eyes to the brain. However, the complexity and partial overlap of gene expression patterns in RGCs call for genetic intersectional or sparse labeling strategies. Loci carrying the Cre recombinase in conjunction with conditional knock-out, reporter or other genetic tools can be used for targeted cell type ablation and functional manipulation of specific cell populations. The three members of the Pou4f family of transcription factors, Brn3a, Brn3b and Brn3c, expressed early during RGC development and in combinatorial pattern amongst RGC types are excellent candidates for such gene manipulations. Methods and Findings We generated conditional Cre knock-in alleles at the Brn3a and Brn3b loci, Brn3aCKOCre and Brn3bCKOCre. When crossed to mice expressing the Dre recombinase, the endogenous Brn3 gene expressed by Brn3aCKOCre or Brn3bCKOCre is removed and replaced with a Cre recombinase, generating Brn3aCre and Brn3bCre knock-in alleles. Surprisingly both Brn3aCre and Brn3bCre knock-in alleles induce early ubiquitous recombination, consistent with germline expression. However in later stages of development, their expression is limited to the expected endogenous pattern of the Brn3a and Brn3b genes. We use the Brn3aCre and Brn3bCre alleles to target a Cre dependent Adeno Associated Virus (AAV) reporter to RGCs and demonstrate its use in morphological characterization, early postnatal gene delivery and tracing the expression of Brn3 genes in RGCs. Conclusions Dre recombinase effectively recombines the Brn3aCKOCre and Brn3bCKOCre alleles containing its roxP target sites. Sequential Dre to Cre recombination reveals Brn3a and Brn3b expression in early mouse development. The generated Brn3aCre and Brn3bCre alleles are useful tools that can target exogenously delivered Cre dependent reagents to RGCs in early postnatal development, opening up a large range of potential applications.
A New Immunoassay for Detecting All Subtypes of Shiga Toxins Produced by Shiga Toxin-Producing E. coli in Ground Beef

Background Shiga toxin (Stx) is a common virulence factor of all Shiga toxin producing E. coli (STEC) that cause a wide spectrum of disease, including hemorrhagic colitis and hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). Although several commercial kits are available for detection of Stx produced by STEC, none of them are capable of recognizing all subtypes of Stxs, which include three subtypes of Stx1 and seven subtypes of Stx2. Methods and Findings New monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies against Stx1 and Stx2 were developed. A universal sandwich ELISA capable of detecting all known subtypes of Stx1 and Stx2 was established using a pool of newly developed antibodies. To precisely monitor the sensitivity of the assay for each subtype of Stxs, recombinant toxoids were created and used as standards in ELISAs. Because of the high affinity of the antibodies incorporated, the ELISA assay is highly sensitive with a limit of detection for the different subtypes of Stx1a and Stx2a between 10 and 50 pg/mL in phosphate buffered saline (PBS). The assay was also able to identify STEC based on the production of Stxs using the supernatants of culture fluids or even single colonies on agar plates without lengthy enrichment in liquid medium. When applied to ground beef samples, this newly developed ELISA was capable of distinguishing beef samples spiked with a single bacterial cell. Conclusions A highly sensitive and universal assay for all subtypes of Stx1 and Stx2 was developed. It has significantly improved upon the current technologies by avoiding false negative results due to the narrow detection range of the assay. The assay developed in this study can be useful for prompt detection of new and emerging serotypes and screening ground beef samples for contamination of STEC at an early stage in the food supply chain, thus avoiding the need for possible recall.
5. Summary 3.2 Efficiency 4. the Solution Side 4.1 Architecture 4.2 Perception 2. the Basic Animat Strategy 3. the Problem Side 3.1 Environments

A new approach to unsupervised learning in deterministic environments. 6 The Animat Path to AI simulates natural light reflected from the objects. Stimuli could be as profuse as desired depending on the variety of the objects, the resolution and spectral sensitivity of the light detectors, and the range of vision. In such environments, the experimental procedure should be alert to the possibility that the system might form effective percepts quite different from, e.g., " tree 90 degrees to the right " , (as stimuli are often directly given in Standard AI). Among other things, the per-cepts would reflect the bias of the animat's needs. Besides top-down/bottom-up methods, there is another class of techniques for dealing with stimulus profusion. Since the animat has effectors that can change the sensory input (as when the animat moves), he can learn ways of doing so that select information contingently. This ability becomes useful in cooperation with detectors that condense stimuli to different degrees in different parts of the sensory field. Then the animat can move so as always to place the highest-resolution detectors at the point of greatest interest, leaving the rest of the field relatively diffuse. The focal-peripheral vision of some animals is an example of stimulus condensation and coordinated action that should be investigated using animats. In primates, for instance, the environment is seen in detail in a central region but with falling definition toward the visual periphery [see, e.g., Wilson (1983)]. This permits vast reduction of stimulus detail over most of the visual field, a primitive form of generalization, but the reduction can always be reversed by moving the eyes. Such a move would be triggered by current needs and internal state in combination with a stimulus cue sufficient to get through the peripheral generalization (Wilson, 1985b). Perception is one of the hardest human abilities to understand. Progress in machine perception has been slow. The animat approach offers a fresh perspective because well-defined experimental mechanisms can be investigated in contexts that retain essential characteristics of real organisms and environments. This paper has outlined " the animat path to AI " , a strategy for progressively understanding intelligence or the relation of mind to brain that differs significantly from Standard AI, and from the natural science approaches to the same problem. The approach is not new, in that examples of prior work exist and are somewhat known. This paper however attempts to …
A New Framework for Analysis and Optimization of Shared Memory Parallel Programs

In this paper we present a new framework for analysis and optimization of shared memory parallel programs. Our framework is based on two key concepts: (1) concurrency relation and (2) isolation semantics. Two statements are said to be concurrent if there is an execution in which two threads can execute the two statements simultaneously. Isolation semantics essentially treats critical sections as being isolated or atomic. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: • We present a simple algorithm for computing concurrency relation among two or more statements in a parallel program that includes cobegin/coend, parallel for, barrier, post/wait, and critical sections. • We propose a new framework for solving data flow problems by reifying two key concepts: concurrency relation and isolation semantics for critical sections. As an example we solve the pointer analysis problem using our framework To the best of our knowledge ours is the first work that directly incorporates isolation semantics for solving data flow analysis. • We formulate the lock assignment problem for assigning locks to critical sections. For a special class of non-interfering critical sections, we will show that the optimal lock assignment problem can be reduced to a graph coloring problem. In general, we conjecture that the optimal lock assignment problem is NP-hard. We present a simple algorithm that tries to assign the minimal set of locks to critical sections without reducing the fine-grained parallelism. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work that formulates and solves the problem of lock assignment for critical sections. • To study the feasibility and validity of our approach we implemented lock assignment and pointer analysis using the Omni [33] OpenMP Compiler. We present some preliminary experimental results of our implementation.
A framework to support survivable Web services

Web services have gained high popularity in the development of distributed application systems. Some critical applications also consider using Web services paradigm due to the benefits of interoperability, reusability, and adaptability. To support critical applications, existing Web service model needs to be extended to assure survivability. In this paper, we introduce the design of a novel survivable Web service (SWS) framework that supports continuous operation even in the presence of failures and security attacks. The replication scheme and n-modular redundancy (NMR) concept are used as the basis for achieving survivability. Due to replication, communication among multiple Web services becomes costly. We develop protocols, including the inter-group communication (SWS-IGC) and message ordering (SWS-MO) protocols, to guarantee efficient and correct communication. Preliminary performance studies show that the SWS framework only incurs a moderate overhead due to the incorporation of survivability assurance.
A trade-off between oxidative stress resistance and DNA repair plays a role in the evolution of elevated mutation rates in bacteria

The dominant paradigm for the evolution of mutator alleles in bacterial populations is that they spread by indirect selection for linked beneficial mutations when bacteria are poorly adapted. In this paper, we challenge the ubiquity of this paradigm by demonstrating that a clinically important stressor, hydrogen peroxide, generates direct selection for an elevated mutation rate in the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa as a consequence of a trade-off between the fidelity of DNA repair and hydrogen peroxide resistance. We demonstrate that the biochemical mechanism underlying this trade-off in the case of mutS is the elevated secretion of catalase by the mutator strain. Our results provide, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence that direct selection can favour mutator alleles in bacterial populations, and pave the way for future studies to understand how mutation and DNA repair are linked to stress responses and how this affects the evolution of bacterial mutation rates.
INDEPENDENT AUTOMATIC SEGMENTATION OF SPEECH BY PRONUNCIATION MODELING

In this paper we present an iterative automatic segmentation system which does not require any domain dependent training data. Input to the system is the canonical pronunciation and the speech signal of an utterance to be segmented, as well as a set of phonological pronunciation rules. The output is a string of phonetic labels (SAM−PA[1]) and the corresponding segment boundaries of the speech signal. The system consists of three main parts: In a first stage a set of general phonological rules is applied to the canonical pronunciation of an utterance yielding a graph that contains the canonic form and presumed variations. In a second HMM−based stage the speech signal of the concerning utterance is time−aligned to this graph using a Viterbi search. The outcome of this stage is the time−aligned transcription of the input utterance. Using this "raw" application of the phonological rules as the baseline in a third stage, a new set of statistically weighted rules is derived. The procedure is repeated iteratively until the segmentation is not changed anymore.
Receptor sites for concanavalin A on human peripheral lymphocytes and on lymphoblasts grown in long-term culture.

Human lymphoblasts in long-term culture are specifically agglutinated by concentrations of concanavalin A that do not agglutinate normal human lymphocytes. The agglutination is inhibited by α-d-methyl mannoside. Lymphoblast lines kept in long-term culture bound 2 to 3 times more concanavalin A per cell than did normal lymphocytes. Normal lymphocytes and lymphoblasts bound approximately equivalent amounts of concanavalin A per unit surface area.