Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Title An integrative Bayesian Dirichlet-multinomial regression model for the analysis of taxonomic abundances in microbiome data Permalink

Background: The Human Microbiome has been variously associated with the immune-regulatory mechanisms involved in the prevention or development of many non-infectious human diseases such as autoimmunity, allergy and cancer. Integrative approaches which aim at associating the composition of the human microbiome with other available information, such as clinical covariates and environmental predictors, are paramount to develop a more complete understanding of the role of microbiome in disease development. Results: In this manuscript, we propose a Bayesian Dirichlet-Multinomial regression model which uses spike-and-slab priors for the selection of significant associations between a set of available covariates and taxa from a microbiome abundance table. The approach allows straightforward incorporation of the covariates through a log-linear regression parametrization of the parameters of the Dirichlet-Multinomial likelihood. Inference is conducted through a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, and selection of the significant covariates is based upon the assessment of posterior probabilities of inclusions and the thresholding of the Bayesian false discovery rate. We design a simulation study to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, and then apply our model on a publicly available dataset obtained from the Human Microbiome Project which associates taxa abundances with KEGG orthology pathways. The method is implemented in specifically developed R code, which has been made publicly available. Conclusions: Our method compares favorably in simulations to several recently proposed approaches for similarly structured data, in terms of increased accuracy and reduced false positive as well as false negative rates. In the application to the data from the Human Microbiome Project, a close evaluation of the biological significance of our findings confirms existing associations in the literature.
A Study on the Effect of the Contact Point and the Contact Force of a Glass Fiber under End-Face Polishing Process

The offset between the center lines of the polished end-face and the fiber core has a significant effect on coupling efficiency. The initial contact point and the contact force are two of the most important parameters that induce the offset. This study proposes an image assistant method to find the initial contact point and a mathematical model to estimate the contact force when fabricating the double-variable-curvature end-face of single mode glass fiber. The repeatability of finding the initial contact point via the vision assistant program is 0.3 μm. Based on the assumption of a large deflection, a mathematical model is developed to study the relationship between the contact force and the displacement of the lapping film. In order to verify the feasibility of the mathematical model, experiments, as well as DEFORM simulations, are carried out. The results show that the contact forces are alomst linearly proportional to the feed amounts of the lapping film and the errors are less than 9%. By using the method developed in this study, the offset between the grinding end-face and the center line of the fiber core is within 0.15 to 0.35 μm.
Summer Residential Program Experiences as Perceived by Gifted Diné Youth

Abstract:University-based, summer-residential enrichment programs may provide academic and social benefits for high-potential, underserved students from low-income families, but Native American students from low-income families often lack access to such programs and receive fewer opportunities for academic enrichment than students from other ethnic and higher income groups. This qualitative study examined the experiences and perceptions of 10 gifted Diné students from low-income families who received full scholarships to attend a university-based summer residential program. Interviews revealed five themes: (1) affirming social interactions with teachers and peers; (2) life-changing experience; (3) positive academic experiences; (4) excitement and motivation; and (5) challenges met. When provided with opportunities in advanced classes that interest them, gifted Diné youth from low-income families had positive academic, social, and emotional experiences.
Understanding Control Frames in Multi-Camera Robot Telemanipulation

In telemanipulation, showing the user multiple views of the remote environment can offer many benefits, although such different views can also create a problem for control. Systems must either choose a single fixed control frame, aligned with at most one of the views or switch between view-aligned control frames, enabling view-aligned control at the expense of switching costs. In this paper, we explore the trade-off between these options. We study the feasibility, benefits, and drawbacks of switching the user's control frame to align with the actively used view during telemanipulation. We additionally explore the effectiveness of explicit and implicit methods for switching control frames. Our results show that switching between multiple view-specific control frames offers significant performance gains compared to a fixed control frame. We also find personal preferences for explicit or implicit switching based on how participants planned their movements. Our findings offer concrete design guidelines for future multi-camera interfaces.
Design Implications for Effective Robot Gaze Behaviors in Multiparty Interactions

Human-robot non-verbal communication has been a growing focus of research, as we realize its importance to achieve interaction goals (e.g. modulating turn-taking) and manage human perception of the interaction. Consequently, the development of models for robot non-verbal behavior, such as gaze, should be informed by studies of human reaction and perception to that behavior. Here, we look at data from two studies where two humans interact describing words to a robot. The robot tries to balance participation of the two players through a combination of gaze aversion, looking at the listener and looking at the speaker. We analyze how momentary gaze patterns reflect in the participant's turn length and perception of the robot, as well as in the participation imbalance. Our findings may be used as recommendations towards crafting robot gaze behaviors in multiparty interactions.
Emotion-oriented AOM: A case study

—A successful application requires the software engineer to take into account the users feeling in the modeling process. For example, how to elicitate the emotion of “ interest”? How to transform the emotion of “ interest into design and implementation? Previous research claims that there was existing gap to fulfilling user emotional requirement throughout the software development life cycle. By adding emotion thinking, it is possible to avoid application failure and rejection. From the study, the emerging of Agent Oriented Modeling (AOM) is to design the modeling emotion expression since user emotions are critical in determining whether or not an application will be accepted. AOM is agent-oriented methodology that is compliance with model driven architecture and uses the concept of agent in all stages of its process through modeling steps. Unlike Unified Modeling Language (UML), which is more suitable for modeling functional requirements but not for dealing with the new emotional requirement. Thus, AOM is a better approach for dealing with human emotions. While AOM has been extended with emotion models, it still lacks the ability to systematically elicit, analyse, develop, and implement emotion-oriented applications. This study extends the AOM with emotion element across nearly all AOM models. Thus, by having a systematically set of models for emotion-oriented application, it can serve as a guide to design, redesign, and discuss the emotion elements among the software development team in emotion-oriented application.
Chapter 12 Carcass and Meat Quality in Goat

Goat is a worldwide spread species with different specialities and aptitudes, among the meat production. Its consumption varies widely depending on the region of the world considered. However, a common factor is the presence of few studies in comparison with ovine, especially those that characterize the quality of its products (related to carcass and meat). Generation, availability, and diffusion of characteristics of the species and its production, generated from scientific studies, could help breeders and society on their education and raising global awareness of its importance, conservation, and productive possibilities. Goat has its own specific characteristics related to quality with a presumed good acceptability of its products by consumers. On the current chapter, the effects of the main factors that modify carcass and meat quality in goat are compiled. Both, intrinsic factors (breed or breed type, age, weight at slaughter or gender) and some extrinsic factors (as production system, type of suckling, and aging) are discussed.
MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION AND PROKARYOTIC EXPRESSION OF ORF 507 STERILITY-ASSOCIATED GENE IN CHILLI PEPPER ( CAPSICUM ANNUM L . ) CYTOPLASMIC MALE STERILITY

9704A is a cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) of chilli pepper (Capsicum annuum L) that has been commercially used in chilli pepper hybrid production in China. However, little is known about the CMS-associated gene in chilli pepper 9704A.In this study, according to the sequence of relative references, a fragment of 593 bp including a 507-bp single-coding exon, Orf507 (GenBank accession No. GU357841) was cloned from leaves of chilli pepper CMS-9704A. Results revealed that the orf456-2 had one nucleotide deleted in codon 150 (nt450delC) and consists of a 507-bp single-coding exon which encodes 168 amino acid compared with the original sequence data of orf456. RT-PCR results showed that the Orf507 was transcribed in buds and leaves at all developmental stages of CMS-9704A and a hybrid F1, while no band was detected in the maintainer line. The nuclear restorer gene may restore fertility by post-transcriptional processing or translational/posttranslational modification, but did not interfere with transcription of Orf507 directly. The entire coding region of the Orf507 was inserted into an expression vector pET32α(+) and transformed into Escherichia coli Rosetta. Expression of the fusion protein was successfully induced by isopropyl-β-D-thiogalactopyranoside. This study could establish a basis for understanding the molecular mechanism of chilli pepper CMS.
What Impacts Backers' Behavior to Fund Reward-Based Crowdfunding Projects? A Systematic Review Study

Background: With Covid-19 spreading across the world, many economic issues have raised. Effort is continued to support vulnerable individuals and start-ups to survive during this pandemic. Reward-based crowdfunding (RBCF) is seen as alternative sustainable finance in the Fintech industry. It allows fund-seekers to pledge an investment through RBCF platforms such as Kickstarter for funding their projects. Backers will get a reward in return. Research has shown that factors impacting the backers' behavior are crucial in determining the success of RBCF campaigns. However, there is a literature gap in providing a holistic view of these factors. Therefore, this paper aims to review and identify factors impacting backers' behavior by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Method: This paper employs the three stages in conducting the SLR. It starts with identifying the review strategy where a search string is developed. A total of 323 papers from 2012 up to 2019 from two main academic databases, i.e. IEEE Xplore and ScienceDirect were retrieved. After applying the quality assessment criteria, 33 papers were qualified for the analysis. Thematic analysis was then applied to thematically categories the identified factors. Results: A large set of factors was identified in the literature. Identified factors were classified under nine main themes. These themes are Team Characteristics, Project Characteristics, Social Influence, User Generated Content, Risk, Distrust, Upfront Marketing, Environment Readiness, and Backers Motivation. Conclusions: This paper contributes theoretically by comprehensively identify factors impacting backers’ behavior toward using RBCF. The findings also contribute empirically, particularly to the fund-seekers, to help them understand what factors might impact the backer’s behavior and enhance their chances of designing a successful campaign.
Empowering Robots for Object Handovers

This work investigates the collaborative task of object handovers between a human and a robot, a central aspect of human-robot collaboration. Our research contributes along three directions: first, designing robot controllers for previously unexplored human-robot handover scenarios; second, investigating gaze behaviors of a receiver in human-to-human and human-to-robot handovers; and third, investigating human behavior in bimanual and multiple sequential human-to-human handovers. Our contributions could help enable robots perform the complex but essential tasks of handing over objects to and receiving objects from humans.
Association Analysis between Mechanical Symmetry and Requirements

This paper focuses on obtaining the association rules between the symmetry of different mechanical structure layers and requirements through data mining, then suggests the selection of symmetry schemes under different requirement conditions, based on the mined association rules and their strength. Firstly, a thousand symmetry structure cases, namely text data, are transformed into binary data. Then, the data analysis software RapidMiner is used to build an association rule mining model to obtain the association rules from symmetry to symmetry, from symmetry to requirements, from requirements to requirements and from requirements to symmetry. Among them, this paper focuses on the association rules with requirements as the premise and symmetry as the conclusion. Finally, according to the support and confidence of the association rules, the selection of symmetry under a single requirement, multiple requirements and decomposable requirements is discussed and summarized.
Demonstration of a Robo- Barista for In the Wild Interactions

We present a demonstration of a Robo-Barista: a social robot that takes hot beverage orders through verbal interaction and completes them via a Bluetooth enabled coffee machine. The demonstration is highly robust and it is the intention that this could be installed as a permanent feature, enabling “In the Wild” experimentation and long term studies. In the demonstration video, we show a user interacting with a Furhat robot to order a coffee. The robot has a novel architecture that allows it to exhibit both verbal and non-verbal cues, such as shared attention and chitchat. Furthermore, it is enabled with a unique tiredness detector based on visual facial features.
Demonstration of a Robot Receptionist with Multi-party Situated Interaction

We present a demonstration of a Robot Receptionist: a situated interactive robot that can coordinate turn-taking and handle multi-party engagement and dialogue in dynamic environments, where users might enter or leave the scene at any time. We use a Furhat robot, which is highly expressive and can use verbal communication as well as non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions. The system demonstrated and described here is composed of several modules, including scene analysis, engagement policies, and a dialogue manager.
Low pay, higher pay and job quality: empirical evidence for Portugal

This paper examines to what extent low pay jobs can be considered of low quality. For this purpose, we use three waves (1997–1999) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for Portugal. The results indicate that low pay workers report a lower level of job satisfaction when compared with their higher paid counterparts. Moreover, some of the determinants of job satisfaction differ between these two types of workers. This supports the idea that low wage employment mainly comprises low quality jobs and is consistent with the segmented labour market theory, which claims the existence of good and bad jobs. This is, however, at odds with some empirical evidence recently reported for the British labour market where low pay individuals report a higher level of satisfaction, which is more in line with the notion that these workers obtain compensating differences in the form of non-pecuniary benefits.
Molecular Cloning and Characterization of a cDNA Encoding Caltractin from Dunaliella salina

We cloned a cDNA encoding caltractin, a 20 kDa cal-cium-binding protein, from Dunaliella salina (DSCALT). The Ca 2+ -bound mobility shift detected in Chlamydomonas caltractin was hardly detectable in DSCALT. Also, some differences were found in the electrophoretic mobility between the native DSCALT and the bacterial-expressed DSCALT. This difference may have resulted from the posttranslational modification. Immunoblot analysis rev-ealed that this protein might be localized mainly in the basal body complex, the major microtubule organizing center (MTOC) in D. salina and the functional homolo-gue of the centrosome in the animal cell.
Protein Biomarkers for Screening , Detection , and / or Management of Prostate Cancer Effective : January 1 , 2019

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Bandwidth Utilization and Efficiency in MACA and MACA-BI: A Study

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes communicating through wireless channels without any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. We start with the Multiple Access Collision Avoidance (MACA) protocol first which uses an RTS-CTS-DATA packet exchange and invokes binary exponential backoff procedure upon hearing a collision or whenever the channel is not idle. Based on the packet-level simulations and various performances and design issues in MACA protocols, a new protocol Multiple Access Collision Avoidance By Invitation (MACA-BI) was designed. Many medium-access control (MAC) protocols for wireless networks proposed or implemented to date are based on collision avoidance handshakes between sender and receiver. In this paper a study on the bandwidth utilization and efficiency between MACA and MACA-BI medium access protocol has been studied in order to determine their performance and behavior. MACA is a sender-initiated protocol while MACA-BI is the receiver initiated protocol. MACA-BI is more robust than MACA to problems such as protocol failures (control packet collision and corruption) and finite turn-around time.
Robust fabric substrates for photonic textile applications

A fabric substrate is described for electronic textile with robust interwoven connections between the conductive yarns in it. The fabric's robustness, as a function of the electrical reliability of its conductive yarn connections, is shown to hold over large deformations.This fabric is then used to create an LED based photonic textile display. Finally, we show an example of an application that could make use of such a photonic textile system.
TRANSGENIC ANIMALS AS NEW APPROACHES IN PHARMACOLOGICAL STUDIES

Transgenic animals are becoming useful tools for pharmacological studies. The use of transgenic technology raises two types of questions, “How are transgenic animals made? ” and “What types of pharmacological questions can be answered using transgenic technologies? ” Answers to these questions are discussed in this review. The production of animals with specific genetic alteration can be achieved by two strategies. The first involves the simple addition of DNA sequences to the chromosomes. The second strategy is to select particular genetic loci for sitespecific changes. There are two well-established procedures for simple introduction of DNA into an animal genome, pronuclear DNA injection and transduction using a retrovirus. In contrast, methods for targeting specific DNA sequences to definite sites in the chromosomes are evolving rapidly. Some of these procedures can be used in combination to make a different variety of gene alterations in animals. Pharmacological studies where transgenic technology has been extensively used are discussed, including studies in the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, the endocrine system, cancer, and toxicology.
The relations between land surface morphometry and spectral characteristics of ecosystems in the Ukrainian Carpathians

Abstract Spatial planning in mountainous areas requires careful consideration of relationships between abiotic conditions and various ecosystem properties. While detailed spatial databases of these and also detailed ecological databases built on field data are still lacking for many regions, satellite data are an indispensable source of spatially distributed detailed ecological information. Digital elevation models and multi-spectral images are especially useful for the acquisition of detailed, up-to-date and cheap spatial data. In this study, principal component analysis and canonical correlation analysis were used to reveal the structure of the relationships between the land surface reflectance values in different wavelength ranges and to investigate relationships between the principal components and the set of topographic characteristics and indexes for the study area in the Ukrainian Carpathians. The most important factor that influences the land and vegetation cover structure was found to be elevation, while other factors included a set of topographic characteristics and indices.
An empirical study of consumers' willingness to pay for traceable food in Beijing, Shanghai and Jinan of China

There have been more and more food safety incidents since 1990s in China. Implementation of traceability system is an important way to improve food safety in China. The food traceability system is still in an initial stage and implemented only in limited products and companies in China. Contingent valuation method (CVM) was used to investigate the Chinese consumers’ willingness to pay for traceable vegetables and beef. The research was based on 600 face-to-face survey conducted in Beijing, Shanghai and Jinan in China. It shows that: (1) Price of traceable bean sprouts, leccute and beef (BBS), place of purchase (PLACE), consumer perception of food risk (RISK), gender (GENDER), consumer health (HEALTH) and per capita monthly income (LANINCOME) have significant effects on consumers’ WTP for traceable food. (2) The respondents’ willingness to pay for traceable bean sprouts, leccute and beef are 91.7, 99.2 and 18.4% higher than normal bean sprouts, leccute and beef respectively. (3) Consumers show greater willingness to pay for the traceable food with other quality certification. Key words: Food traceability system, consumers’ willingness to pay, contingent valuation method.
A New Approach for Speech Enhancement Based On Eigenvalue Spectral Subtraction

In this paper, a phase space reconstruction-based method is proposed for speech enhancement. The method embeds the noisy signal into a high dimensional reconstructed phase space and uses Spectral Subtraction idea. The advantages of the proposed method are fast performance, high SNR and good MOS. In order to evaluate the proposed method, ten signals of TIMIT database mixed with the white additive Gaussian noise and then the method was implemented. The efficiency of the proposed method was evaluated by using qualitative and quantitative criteria.