Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Altruist: Argumentative Explanations through Local Interpretations of Predictive Models

Explainable AI is an emerging field providing solutions for acquiring insights into automated systems’ rationale. It has been put on the AI map by suggesting ways to tackle key ethical and societal issues. Existing explanation techniques are often not comprehensible to the end user. Lack of evaluation and selection criteria also makes it difficult for the end user to choose the most suitable technique. In this study, we combine logic-based argumentation with Interpretable Machine Learning, introducing a preliminary meta-explanation methodology that identifies the truthful parts of feature importance oriented interpretations. This approach, in addition to being used as a meta-explanation technique, can be used as an evaluation or selection tool for multiple feature importance techniques. Experimentation strongly indicates that an ensemble of multiple interpretation techniques yields considerably more truthful explanations.
High performance integrated polarizers achieved by incorporating 2D layered graphene oxide films.

Polarizers and polarization selective resonant cavities (e.g., ring resonators, gratings), are key components for applications to photography, coherent optical detection, polarization-division-multiplexing, optical sensing and liquid crystal displays. We demonstrate waveguide polarizers and polarization discriminating micro-ring resonators (MRRs) by integrating them with 2D graphene oxide (GO) layered thin films. We achieve precise control of the thickness, placement, and size of the films integrated onto photonic devices with a solution based, layer-by-layer transfer-free coating method combined with photolithography and lift-off. This overcomes limitations of layer transfer methods for 2D materials and is a significant advance to manufacturing integrated photonic devices incorporated with 2D materials. We measure the waveguide polarizer for different film thicknesses and lengths versus wavelength, polarization, and power, measuring a high polarization dependent loss (PDL) of ~ 53.8 dB. For GO-coated MRRs, we achieve an extinction ratio difference for TE/TM polarizations of 8.3-dB. We also present measurements of the linear optical properties of 2D layered GO films that yield the material loss anisotropy of the GO films and relative contribution of film loss anisotropy versus polarization-dependent mode overlap. Our results offer interesting physical insights into the transition of the layered GO films from 2D behaviour to quasi bulk like behavior and confirm the high performance of GO based integrated polarization selective devices.
Wasserstein Distance Regularized Sequence Representation for Text Matching in Asymmetrical Domains

One approach to matching texts from asymmetrical domains is projecting the input sequences into a common semantic space as feature vectors upon which the matching function can be readily defined and learned. In real-world matching practices, it is often observed that with the training goes on, the feature vectors projected from different domains tend to be indistinguishable. The phenomenon, however, is often overlooked in existing matching models. As a result, the feature vectors are constructed without any regularization, which inevitably increases the difficulty of learning the downstream matching functions. In this paper, we propose a novel match method tailored for text matching in asymmetrical domains, called WD-Match. In WD-Match, a Wasserstein distance-based regularizer is defined to regularize the features vectors projected from different domains. As a result, the method enforces the feature projection function to generate vectors such that those correspond to different domains cannot be easily discriminated. The training process of WD-Match amounts to a game that minimizes the matching loss regularized by the Wasserstein distance. WD-Match can be used to improve different text matching methods, by using the method as its underlying matching model. Four popular text matching methods have been exploited in the paper. Experimental results based on four publicly available benchmarks showed that WD-Match consistently outperformed the underlying methods and the baselines.
Cosmic censorship hypothesis and entropy bound on black holes in a canonical ensemble

This paper argues that the weak cosmic censorship hypothesis implies that the Schwarzschild black hole has maximal entropy in all stationary black holes of fixing temperature, or equivalently, to store a same amount of information the Schwarzschild black hole has highest temperature. It then gives the independent mathematical proofs for 4-dimensional general static black holes and stationary-axisymmetric black holes which have ``$t\text{\ensuremath{-}}\ensuremath{\phi}$'' reflection isometry. This result does not only provide a new universal bound between temperature and entropy of black holes but also offers us new evidence to support the weak cosmic censorship hypothesis.
Strongly Shortcut Spaces

We define the strong shortcut property for rough geodesic metric spaces, generalizing the notion of strongly shortcut graphs. We show that the strong shortcut property is a rough similarity invariant. We give several new characterizations of the strong shortcut property, including an asymptotic cone characterization. We use this characterization to prove that asymptotically CAT(0) spaces are strongly shortcut. We prove that if a group acts metrically properly and coboundedly on a strongly shortcut rough geodesic metric space then it has a strongly shortcut Cayley graph and so is a strongly shortcut group. Thus we show that CAT(0) groups are strongly shortcut. To prove these results, we use several intermediate results which we believe may be of independent interest, including what we call the Circle Tightening Lemma and the Fine Milnor-Schwarz Lemma. The Circle Tightening Lemma describes how one may obtain a quasi-isometric embedding of a circle by performing surgery on a rough Lipschitz map from a circle that sends antipodal pairs of points far enough apart. The Fine Milnor-Schwarz Lemma is a refinement of the Milnor-Schwarz Lemma that gives finer control on the multiplicative constant of the quasi-isometry from a group to a space it acts on.
The Benefit of Distraction: Denoising Remote Vitals Measurements using Inverse Attention

Attention is a powerful concept in computer vision. End-to-end networks that learn to focus selectively on regions of an image or video often perform strongly. However, other image regions, while not necessarily containing the signal of interest, may contain useful context. We present an approach that exploits the idea that statistics of noise may be shared between the regions that contain the signal of interest and those that do not. Our technique uses the inverse of an attention mask to generate a noise estimate that is then used to denoise temporal observations. We apply this to the task of camera-based physiological measurement. A convolutional attention network is used to learn which regions of a video contain the physiological signal and generate a preliminary estimate. A noise estimate is obtained by using the pixel intensities in the inverse regions of the learned attention mask, this in turn is used to refine the estimate of the physiological signal. We perform experiments on two large benchmark datasets and show that this approach produces state-of-the-art results, increasing the signal-to-noise ratio by up to 5.8 dB, reducing heart rate and breathing rate estimation error by as much as 30%, recovering subtle pulse waveform dynamics, and generalizing from RGB to NIR videos without retraining.
SUPER III. Broad Line Region properties of AGN at z$\sim$2

The SINFONI survey for Unveiling the Physics and Effect of Radiative feedback (SUPER) was designed to conduct a blind search for AGN-driven outflows on X-ray selected AGN at redshift z$\sim$2 with high ($\sim$2 kpc) spatial resolution, and correlate them to the properties of the host galaxy and central black hole. The main aims of this paper are: a) to derive reliable estimates for the BH mass and accretion rates for the Type-1 AGN in this survey; b) to characterize the properties of the AGN driven winds in the BLR. We analyzed rest-frame optical and UV spectra of 21 Type-1 AGN. We found that the BH masses estimated from H$\alpha$ and H$\beta$ lines are in agreement. We estimate BH masses in the range Log(M$\rm_{BH}/M_{\odot}$)=8.4-10.8 and Eddington ratios $\rm\lambda_{Edd}$ =0.04-1.3. We confirm that the CIV line width does not correlate with the Balmer lines and the peak of the line profile is blue-shifted with respect to the [OIII]-based systemic redshift. These findings support the idea that the CIV line is tracing outflowing gas in the BLR, with velocities up to $\sim$4700 km/s. We confirm the strong dependence of the BLR wind velocity with the UV-to-Xray continuum slope, L$\rm_{Bol}$ and $\rm\lambda_{Edd}$. We inferred BLR mass outflow rates in the range 0.005-3 M$_{\odot}$/yr, showing a correlation with the bolometric luminosity consistent with that observed for ionized winds in the NLR and X-ray winds detected in local AGN, and kinetic power $\sim$10$^{[-7:-4]}\times$ L$\rm_{Bol}$. Finally, we found an anti-correlation between the equivalent width of the [OIII] line with respect to the CIV shift, and a positive correlation with [OIII] outflow velocity. These findings, for the first time in an unbiased sample of AGN at z$\sim$2, support a scenario where BLR winds are connected to galaxy scale detected outflows, and are capable of affecting the gas in the NLR located at kpc scale.
More bounds on the expectation of a convex function of a random variable

Jensen gave a lower bound to Eρ(T), where ρ is a convex function of the random vector T. Madansky has obtained an upper bound via the theory of moment spaces of multivariate distributions. In particular, Madansky's upper bound is given explicitly when the components of T are independent random variables. For this case, lower and upper bounds are obtained in the paper, which uses additional information on T rather than its mean (mainly its expected absolute deviation about the mean) and hence gets closer to Eρ(T). The importance of having improved bounds is illustrated through a nonlinear programming problem with stochastic objective function, known as the “wait and see” problem.
The Global Media Monitoring Project

The 1995, 2000 and 2005 studies revealed that women are grossly underrepresented in news coverage in contrast to men. The outcome of underrepresentation is an imbalanced picture of the world, one in which women are largely absent. The studies equally showed a paucity of women’s voices in news media content in contrast to men’s perspectives, resulting in news that presents a male-centred view of the world.
Modeling long-term fire-caused mortality of Douglas fir

Mortality was determined in a stand of Douglas-fir 8 years after 20 plots were treated with light surface fires. Logistic regression was used to model long-term mortality as functions of morphological variables measured shortly after burning. Independent variables were diameter at breast height, height of needle scorch, percentage of the prefire crown volume scorched, season of burn, and the number of quadrants with dead cambium at 1.4 m bole height. Mortality increased with increasing scorch height, percent crown scorch, and dead cambium. It decreased with larger diameter. The best predictor of mortality was the number of quadrants with dead cambium. Percentage of crown volume scorched was a better predictor than lethal scorch height. For a given level of damage, mortality following fall season fires was slightly higher than following spring fires. Models may be used in planning prescribed fires and for salvaging fire-damaged Douglas-fir.
National Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting System at the Ministry of Health, Saudi Arabia

Yousef Ahmed Alomi, The Former General Manager of General Administration of Pharmaceutical Care, The Former Head, National Clinical pharmacy and pharmacy practice, The Former Head, Pharmacy R and D Administration, Ministry of Health, Riyadh, SAUDI ARABIA. Saeed Jamaan Alghamdi, General Administration of Pharmaceutical Care, Ministry of Health, Riyadh, SAUDI ARABIA. Radi Abdullah Alattyh, General Administration of Pharmaceutical Care, Ministry of Health, Riyadh, SAUDI ARABIA.
Survive the Schema Changes: Integration of Unmanaged Data Using Deep Learning

Data is the king in the age of AI. However data integration is often a laborious task that is hard to automate. Schema change is one significant obstacle to the automation of the end-to-end data integration process. Although there exist mechanisms such as query discovery and schema modification language to handle the problem, these approaches can only work with the assumption that the schema is maintained by a database. However, we observe diversified schema changes in heterogeneous data and open data, most of which has no schema defined. In this work, we propose to use deep learning to automatically deal with schema changes through a super cell representation and automatic injection of perturbations to the training data to make the model robust to schema changes. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective for two real-world data integration scenarios: coronavirus data integration, and machine log integration.
Evaluating possible cap and trade legislation on cellulosic feedstock availability

An integrated, socioeconomic–biogeophysical model is used to analyze the interactions of cap‐and‐trade legislation and the Renewable Fuels Standard. Five alternative policy scenarios were considered with the purpose of identifying policies that act in a synergistic manner to reduce carbon emissions, increase economic returns to agriculture, and adequately meet ethanol mandates. We conclude that climate and energy policies can best be implemented together by offering carbon offset payments to conservation tillage, herbaceous grasses for biomass, and by constraining crop residue removal for ethanol feedstocks to carbon neutral level. When comparing this scenario to the Baseline scenario, the agricultural sector realizes an economic benefit of US$156 billion by 2030 and emissions are reduced by 135 Tg C‐equivalent (Eq) yr−1. Results also indicate that geographic location of cellulosic feedstocks could shift significantly depending on the final policies implemented in cap and trade legislation. Placement of cellulosic ethanol facilities should consider these possible shifts when determining site location.
Determinación de la frecuencia de piaras infectadas con Lawsonia intracellularis en México mediante la técnica de PCR PCR Determination of Lawsonia intracellularis-infected herds in Mexico

One method for the diagnosis of swine ileitis caused by Lawsonia intracellularis is polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The objective of this research was to determine the frequency of herds infected with L. intracellularis using the PCR technique. For this purpose, fecal samples were obtained from an average of ten 12-wk-old pigs per herd, for a total of 282 herds. L. intracellularis was detected by PCR in 37 % (105/282) of the herds, and in 21 % (231/1098) of the sera from such herds. In order to determine the production period in which pigs shed the bacterium, fecal samples were obtained from animals of different ages among 148 herds. Nine point three percent (9.3 %) of the pigs were found to shed L. intracellularis in the nursery, and up to 22 % during the grow-finish period. In addition, L. intracellularis was found in 12.6 % of the fecal samples from farms with continuous flow production systems, as compared with 2.5% in farms with all-in/all-out systems. It was concluded that the frequency of L. intracellularis-positive herds was related with the production system, similar to what has been reported in other countries.
Effects of cultivar and ripening stage of Iranian olive fruit on bioactive compounds and antioxidant activity of its virgin oil.

The effects of different cultivars and ripening stages of Iranian olive fruits (Olea europaea L.) on fatty acid composition, ΔECN 42 value, total phenol, chlorophyll and carotenoid contents and antioxidant activity of olive oil were evaluated. In first stage of ripening stage, for all cultivars, oleic acid was major fatty acid. The ratio of monounsaturated to polyunsaturated, unsaturated to saturated fatty acids and ΔECN 42 were affected by cultivar and ripening stage. However, in all cases, ΔECN 42 was lower than 0.2. Total phenolic, chlorophyll and carotenoid contents were significantly different (p<0.05) for all cultivars whereas these variables were decreased during fruit ripening stages.
Application of CHD1 Gene and EE0.6 Sequences to Identify Sexes of Several Protected Bird Species in Taiwan

Many bird species, for example Crested Serpent Eagle (Spilornis cheela hoya), Collared Scops Owl (Otus bakkamoena), Tawny Fish Owl (Ketupa flavipes), Crested Goshawk (Accipiter trivirgatus), Grass Owl (Tyto longimembris), etc., are monomorphic, which is difficult to identify their sex simply by their outward appearance. Especially for those monomorphic endangered species, finding an effective tool to identify their sex beside outward appearance is needed for further captive breeding programs or other conservation plans. In this study, we collected samples of Crested Serpent Eagle, Collared Scops Owl, Tawny Fish Owl, Crested Goshawk, and Grass Owl, five protected monomorphic species in Taiwan, as well as Black Swan (Cygmus atratus) and Nicobar Pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica), two aviary introduced monomorphic species served as a control group. We used sex-specific primers of avian CHD1 (chromo-helicase-DNA-binding) gene and EE0.6 (EcoRI 0.6-kb fragment) sequences to identify the sex of these birds. The results showed that CHD1 gene primers could be used to correctly identify the sex of Black Swans, Nicobar Pigeons and Crested Serpent Eagles, but it could not be used to correctly identify sex in Collared Scops Owls, Tawny Fish Owls, and Crested Goshawks. In the sex identification using EE0.6 sequence fragments, A, C, D and E primer sets could be used for sexing Black Swans; A, B, C, and D primer sets could be used for sexing Crested Serpent Eagles; and E primer set could be used for sexing Nicobar Pigeons and the two owl species. Correct determination of sex is the first step if a captive breeding measure is required. We have demonstrated that several of the existing primer sets can be used for sex determination of several captive breeding and indigenous bird species.
Biological Applications of the Carbon Rod Atomizer in Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy. 2. Determination of Copper in Small Samples of Tissue

A simple technique is presented for the analysis for copper in small fragments of tissue. Dissolution of the tissue in concentrated nitric acid is the only preparative step required. Copper content is then determined by comparison with standards, by using the carbon rod atomizer previously described. Sample volumes of less than 2 µl are used for each measurement. The method gives results that compare well with both colorimetric and flame atomic absorption methods, and also with neutron activation analysis, and appears to be applicable to the analysis of other metals in tissue.
Study of Central Corneal Thickness (CCT) in diabetics in Euglycemic and hyperglycemic states

BACKGROUND: There are lack of studies on variation of central corneal thickness (CCT) with acute changes in blood sugars in diabetic individuals. We did a study to assess change in CCT with change in blood sugar levels from hyperglycemic state to euglycemic state over a period of 1 month duration in the same individual. METHODS: 89 eyes of diabetic individuals who were hyperglycemic and achieved euglycemia over a period of 1 month were included in the study. Post prandial blood sugars (PPBS) and CCT were taken in hyperglycemic state and then repeated the same at 1 month review if they achieved euglycemia. The primary outcome was central corneal thickness in hyperglycemic state and euglycemic state in the same subjects. RESULTS: The mean CCT of the eighty nine patients in hyperglycemic state was 501.38 ± 25.28 microns and 502.20 ± 25.05 microns in the euglycemic state There was no significant difference in the central corneal thickness in hyperglycemic state in comparison to euglycemic state (p=0.167). We also found that there was no significant change in CCT with the amount of blood sugar reduction and duration of diabetes. CONCLUSION: There was no difference in CCT in diabetics in hyperglycemic and euglycemic state achieved at 1 month. There was no correlation between change in blood sugar and change in CCT. Short term fluctuations (1 month) in blood sugars did not cause any change in CCT in diabetics.
The Eye Muscle of Calliphora Vomitoria L : I. Spontaneous Activity and the Effects of Light and Dark Adaptation

1. Changes in the intensity of the illumination falling on the compound eye produce transient changes in the interspike interval of the tonic potentials generated by the eye muscle of Calliphora vomitoria . These changes are distinct and frequently different in direction from changes in resting activity produced by light and dark adaptation which have been described previously. 2. The effect of ‘light-on’ at high stimulus intensities is to produce a transient increase in the interspike intervals of the eye-muscle potentials. At lower intensities the result is a transient decrease in the interspike intervals. 3. ‘Light-off’ consistently evokes a decrease in the interspike interval, and the magnitude of the decrease is graded with the logarithm of the preceding light intensity. 4. With high-intensity stimuli changes in the interspike intervals occur within 200 msec of a change in illumination and continue to develop for at least 2 sec. The interspike intervals have returned to near to the pre-stimulus values within 30 sec to 2 min of the onset of the stimulus. 5. The behaviour of the eye-muscle system is described for ‘near-threshold’ stimuli and response ‘threshold’ is found to vary with adapting intensity in a way which illustrates a Weber-Fechner relationship.
Production of Renomedullary Prostaglandins by Renomedullary Interstitial Cells Grown in Tissue Culture

The lipid-laden renomedullary interstitial cells of the rabbit were grown in tissue culture as monolayers. The cultured cells were derived from autotransplants of renal medulla which prevented malignant renovascular and salt-loaded renoprival types of hypertension. These autotransplants contained interstitial cells in clusters suggestive of hyperplasia of these elements, while the hypertension was prevented. The cultured ceUs reproduced all the morphological characteristics of the normal cells in their natural habitat as demonstrated by light and electron microscopy and semithin sections. After 25 passages the cells maintained the karyotype of the rabbit and had normal-appearing cytoplasmic organelles. Extracts of this cell line yielded the three prostaglandins of the renal medulla: PGE2, PGA2, and PGF2α. Identification of these prostaglandins was determined by thin-layer and partition chromatography, gas-liquid chromatography, and by comparing mass spectra of fractions of extracts of the tissue culture with those of authentic standard prostaglandins. The study indicates directly that the renomedullary interstitial cells synthesize the renomedullary prostaglandins.