Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genomic analysis in Pennisetum purpureum x P. glaucum hybrids

Abstract The objective of this study was to evaluate chromosome pairing and the degree of genetic relationship between elephantgrass (P. purpureum) and pearl millet (P. glaucum). Alonso and Kimber’s mathematical model (1981) revised by Chapman and Kimber (1992) was applied to three triploid interspecific hybrids. The genomic relative affinities were calculated based on the evaluations of chromosome pairing of 50 cells in diakinesis, in which univalent, ring and rod (open) bivalent and trivalent figures were quantified. The pairing relationships estimate showed that pearl millet M24 and elephantgrass BAG 75 accessions, progenitors of F94-60-01, presented the major genetic proximity among their chromosome complement.
New interstitial species of the family thaumastodermatidae (Gastrotricha Macrodasyoidea)

Abstract Studies of the marine mesopsammon in an area of the Norwegian west coast southwest of Bergen and a two months stay at Stazione Zoologica, Naples, in the spring of 1965 yielded five new species of the macrodasyoid gastrotrich family Thaumastodermatidae. One of these, Tetranchyroderma tribolosum Clausen, 1965 has already been described, and the present paper deals with the remaining four, Thaumastoderma ramuliferum sp. n. , Platydasys mastigurus sp. n. , Platydasys phacellatus sp. n. and Platydasys ocellatus sp. n. T. ramuliferum systematically bridges the gap between T. swedmarki Levi and T. cantacuzeni Levi. P. mastigurus and P. phacellatus both possess strong, composite posterior cirri, while P. ocellatus is distinguished by a pair of eye-spots and long dorsolateral and dorsal adhesory tubules. All the three new Platydasys species have dimorphous sperm, and a modified endpiece of the vas deferens is interpreted as a penis.
Shifting agriculture supports more tropical forest birds than oil palm or teak plantations in Mizoram, northeast India

ABSTRACT Conversion of tropical forests and diverse multicrop agricultural land to commercial monocultures is a conservation concern worldwide. In northeast India, landscapes under shifting agriculture (or jhum) practiced by tribal communities are increasingly being replaced by monoculture plantations (e.g., teak, oil palm). We compared oil palm and teak plantations, shifting agricultural fields, and forest fallows (0–8 yr regeneration) with tropical rainforest edge and interior sites in Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram, India. Twenty replicate transects were surveyed in each of the 5 study strata for vegetation structure, bird species richness and density, bird abundance, and species composition. Tree density and canopy and vertical structure were lowest in oil palm plantations, intermediate in teak plantations and jhum, and highest in rainforest sites. Tree density in jhum (4.3 stems per 100 m2) was much higher than in oil palm plantations (0.5 stems per 100 m2), but lower than in rainforest (6.8–8.2 stems per 100 m2), with bamboo absent in oil palm plantations and most abundant in regenerating jhum (25 culms per 50 m2). We recorded 107 bird species (94 forest species, 13 open-country species). Oil palm plantations had the lowest forest bird species richness (10 species), followed by teak plantations (38), while jhum (50) had only slightly lower species richness than the rainforest edge (58) and interior (70). Forest bird abundance in the jhum landscape was similar to that in rainforest, on average 304% higher than in oil palm plantations, and 87% higher than in teak plantations. Jhum sites were more similar in bird community composition to rainforest than were monocultures. Rapid recovery of dense and diverse secondary bamboo forests during fallow periods makes the shifting agricultural landscape mosaic a better form of land use for bird conservation than monocultures. Land use policy and conservation plans should provide greater support for shifting agriculture, while mandating better land use practices such as retention of forest remnants, native trees, and riparian vegetation in monoculture plantations.
Detection of Adeno-Associated Virus (AAV) Viremia in Hematopoietic Cell Transplant (HCT) Recipients

Adeno-associated virus (AAV) is widely considered to be nonpathogenic, but the clinical epidemiology of this virus is limited. By use of polymerase chain reaction assays, we investigated the incidence and clinical significance of AAV viremia in a population of consecutive recipients of a hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT). Four (2.8%) of 145 patients developed AAV viremia after HCT. Viremia was low level and transient in all patients. Two patients were admitted to the hospital and died in proximity to AAV viremia (,7 weeks between diagnosis and death); however, AAV was not detected in tissue specimens obtained at autopsy. Thus, AAV does not appear to play a pathogenic role in organ-specific illness, even in a highly immunocompromised population.
Two Cheers for the Virtual Office

Technology has made it possible to redefine where work is done. The "virtual office" offers companies and their workers many benefits: lower real estate costs, higher productivity, and increased flexibility. At the same time, organizations forfeit the benefits of the traditional office: a shared understanding of the corporate culture; a sense of loyalty; informal communication; access to people, information, and materials; and managerial control. Drawing on the results of field research, the authors discuss how firms can maximize the benefits while minimizing the losses of these alternative work arrangements. The authors identify five common arrangements: "telecommuting" refers to situations in which workers with fixed offices occasionally work at home; "hotel"-based workers come into the office frequently, reserving a cubicle where they can use the telephone and link their laptop computers to the network; the "tethered worker" has some mobility but reports to the office on a regular basis; "home" workers work entirely from a room in their homes; and "fully mobile" workers are on the road or at customer sites during the workday. Companies considering adopting virtual work must be clear about the type of virtual office that best addresses their needs and its advantages and disadvantages. If virtual work is to pay off, managers must adopt new approaches in five key areas: managing people, managing information, managing teams, managing processes, and managing facilities. Companies need to institute new information flows to replace those that are lost; educate workers on how to be more effective providers and consumers of information; provide training in virtual worker management skills and personal work strategies; and create dialogue on how to deal with changed family relationships. Effective management of alternative work arrangements means mixing virtual and nonvirtual offices. Companies should analyze the variety of approaches possible and their particular circumstances to determine just how much virtuality is appropriate.
Detection of embryonic mortality using progesterone and bovine pregnancy associated glycoprotein assays following artificial insemination of Gobra Zebu cattle in Senegal

Senegal has embarked in artificial insemination (AI) to improve the productivity of small traditional dairy farms. However the success rate of the overall AI programmes remained low. This study aimed at assessing the incidence of embryonic mortality occurring in cows inseminated artificially by using progesterone and pregnancy associated glycoprotein (PAGs) assays. For this purpose, 90 cows of local breed Gobra were sampled in 28 farms in the regions of Dakar and Thies. Blood samples were collected from the cows on the day of insemination (D0), then 21 days (D21), 35 days (D35) and 60 days (D60) successively. Analyzes were performed by using by radioimmunological assays to determine plasma progesterone and PAGs levels. The pregnancy rate was 73.3% at D21 according to progesterone assays, and then, it dropped at 60% at D35 by using PAGs assays and finally, it was 47.8% at D60 with trans- rectal palpation. Non-pregnant (NP) and Early Embryonic Mortality (EEM) was estimated at 26.7% at day D21 and the Late Embryonic Mortality (LEM) was 25.5%. This study showed that the success of AI in Senegal is heavily influenced by embryonic mortality. Indeed, the high rate of LEM hampered the fertility of local cows breed and therefore, it might cause significant economic losses in small dairy farmers.
Implicit and Explicit Mental Processes

Contents: Part I:Introduction. K. Kirsner, C. Speelman, Introduction and Overview. K. Kirsner, Implicit Memory. A. O'Brien-Malone, M. Maybery, Implicit Learning. C. MacLeod, Implicit Perception: Perceptual Processing Without Awareness. C. Speelman, M. Maybery, Automaticity and Skill Acquisition. J. Dunn, Implicit Memory and Amnesia. P. Roberts, Implicit Knowledge and Connectionism: What Is the Connection? Part II:Theory. C. Speelman, Implicit Expertise: Do We Expect Too Much From Our Experts? M. Maybery, A. O'Brien-Malone, Implicit and Automatic Processes in Cognitive Development. M. Anderson, Individual Differences in Intelligence. C. Speelman, The Automaticity of Discourse Comprehension. K. Hird, K. Kirsner, Control Processes in Prosody. D. Nesdale, K. Durkin, Stereotypes and Attitudes: Implicit and Explicit Processes. C. MacLeod, E.M. Rutherford, Automatic and Strategic Cognitive Biases in Anxiety and Depression. C.D.L. Wynne, A Natural History of Explicit Learning and Memory. Part III:Application. K. Durkin, Implicit Content and Implicit Processes in Mass Media Use. D. Milech, M. Finucane, Decision Support and Behavioral Decision Theory. D.L. Morrison, P. Lee, Mixed Processes in Process Control. T. Griffin, S. Schwartz, K. Sofronoff, Implicit Processes in Medical Diagnosis. J. Fletcher, C. Roberts, Intellectual Disabilities. W.E. Tunmer, J.W. Chapman, Implicit and Explicit Processes in Reading Acquisition. Part IV:Synthesis. S. Lewandowsky, Implicit Learning and Memory: Science, Fiction, and a Prospectus.
Phytochemicals in Cancer with Special Emphasis on Ovarian Cancer

Ovarian cancer is one of the most prevalent malignancies and is the deadliest among all gynecologic cancers. Although tremendous progress has been made on cancer biology and tumour treatment, knowledge on the mechanisms of cancer development including that for ovarian cancer remains incomplete. Thus, in addition to cancer prevention it is urgent to develop effective therapeutic modalities even for the advanced stage and drug-resistant forms of the disease with ovarian cancer being no exception. Multistep tumourigenesis is activated by various environmental carcinogens, inflammatory agents and tumour promoters. Carcinogens modulate the transcription factors, anti-apoptotic and pro-apoptotic proteins, protein kinases, cell cycle proteins, cell adhesion molecules and growth factor signaling pathways and thus produce malignancies. Phytochemicals exert their antitumour effects by numerous signaling pathways which in turn affect multiple steps in the various cellular pathways leading to tumourigenesis. Antitumour active phytochemicals have cytotoxic action in all ovarian cancer cell lines with comparable or greater activity in the resistant cell lines than in the parent cell line. As phytochemicals have been a part of human diet without toxic effects, they are likely to protect normal cells and tissues caused by the direct and bystander effects of platinum drugs. Therefore, it is quite logical to assume that phytochemicals possessing both cancer preventive and therapeutic attributes, can be ideal candidates in cancer prevention and synergistic outcomes from their combination with targeted therapy.
Continuous Compliance

Vendors who wish to provide software or services to large corporations and governments must often obtain numerous certificates of compliance. Each certificate asserts that the software satisfies a compliance regime, like SOC or the PCI DSS, to protect the privacy and security of sensitive data. The industry standard for obtaining a compliance certificate is an auditor manually auditing source code. This approach is expensive, error-prone, partial, and prone to regressions. We propose continuous compliance to guarantee that the codebase stays compliant on each code change using lightweight verification tools. Continuous compliance increases assurance and reduces costs. Continuous compliance is applicable to any source-code compliance requirement. To illustrate our approach, we built verification tools for five common audit controls related to data security: cryptographically unsafe algorithms must not be used, keys must be at least 256 bits long, credentials must not be hard-coded into program text, HTTPS must always be used instead of HTTP, and cloud data stores must not be world-readable. We evaluated our approach in three ways. (1) We applied our tools to over 5 million lines of open-source software. (2) We compared our tools to other publicly-available tools for detecting misuses of encryption on a previously-published benchmark, finding that only ours are suitable for continuous compliance. (3) We deployed a continuous compliance process at AWS, a large cloud-services company: we integrated verification tools into the compliance process (including auditors accepting their output as evidence) and ran them on over 68 million lines of code. Our tools and the data for the former two evaluations are publicly available.
Speaker Diarization Using Stereo Audio Channels: Preliminary Study on Utterance Clustering

Speaker diarization is one of the actively researched topics in audio signal processing and machine learning. Utterance clustering is a critical part of a speaker diarization task. In this study, we aim to improve the performance of utterance clustering by processing multichannel (stereo) audio signals. We generated processed audio signals by combining left- and right-channel audio signals in a few different ways and then extracted embedded features (also called d-vectors) from those processed audio signals. We applied the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) for supervised utterance clustering. In the training phase, we used a parameter sharing GMM to train the model for each speaker. In the testing phase, we selected the speaker with the maximum likelihood as the detected speaker. Results of experiments with real audio recordings of multi-person discussion sessions showed that our proposed method that used multichannel audio signals achieved significantly better performance than a conventional method with mono audio signals.
Probing the cosmic ray energy spectrum at $10^{12}$--$10^{16}$ eV with two HiSPARC scintillators

The high school project on astrophysics research with cosmics (HiSPARC) employs a large number of small detection stations that sample the footprint of extensive cosmic ray air showers. The majority of these stations has two 0.5 \si{\meter\squared} scintillation detectors. A new method is presented which enables probing the cosmic ray flux with a single two-scintillator station in five energy decades at $10^{12}$, $10^{13}$, $10^{14}$, $10^{15}$ and $10^{16}$ eV. The method is based on the energy dependence of the distribution of the number of particles passing through a single detector. A relatively short data taking period of approximately one month is sufficient to probe this energy range. The flux values agree well with measurements by other experiments. For the first time, the cosmic ray flux at $10^{12}$ and $10^{13}$ eV is derived at sea level.
Accelerating 2PC-based ML with Limited Trusted Hardware

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of Otak, a system that allows two non-colluding cloud providers to run machine learning (ML) inference without knowing the inputs to inference. Prior work for this problem mostly relies on advanced cryptography such as two-party secure computation (2PC) protocols that provide rigorous guarantees but suffer from high resource overhead. Otak improves efficiency via a new 2PC protocol that (i) tailors recent primitives such as function and homomorphic secret sharing to ML inference, and (ii) uses trusted hardware in a limited capacity to bootstrap the protocol. At the same time, Otak reduces trust assumptions on trusted hardware by running a small code inside the hardware, restricting its use to a preprocessing step, and distributing trust over heterogeneous trusted hardware platforms from different vendors. An implementation and evaluation of Otak demonstrates that its CPU and network overhead converted to a dollar amount is 5.4$-$385$\times$ lower than state-of-the-art 2PC-based works. Besides, Otak's trusted computing base (code inside trusted hardware) is only 1,300 lines of code, which is 14.6$-$29.2$\times$ lower than the code-size in prior trusted hardware-based works.
CHIMPS2: survey description and 12CO emission in the Galactic Centre

The latest generation of Galactic Plane surveys is enhancing our ability to study the effects of galactic environment upon the process of star formation. We present the first data from CO Heterodyne Inner Milky Way Plane Survey 2 (CHIMPS2). CHIMPS2 is a survey that will observe the Inner Galaxy, the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), and a section of the Outer Galaxy in 12CO, 13CO, and C18O $(J = 3\rightarrow 2)$ emission with the Heterodyne Array Receiver Program on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). The first CHIMPS2 data presented here are a first look towards the CMZ in 12CO J = 3 → 2 and cover ${-}3^{\circ }\, \le \, \ell \, \le \, 5^{\circ }$ and $\mid {b} \mid \, \le \, 0{_{. }^{\circ}} 5$ with angular resolution of 15 arcsec, velocity resolution of 1 km s−1, and rms $\Delta \, T_A ^\ast =$ 0.58 K at these resolutions. Such high-resolution observations of the CMZ will be a valuable data set for future studies, whilst complementing the existing Galactic Plane surveys, such as SEDIGISM, the ${Herschel}$ infrared Galactic Plane Survey, and ATLASGAL. In this paper, we discuss the survey plan, the current observations and data, as well as presenting position–position maps of the region. The position–velocity maps detect foreground spiral arms in both absorption and emission.
Accelerating Real-Time Question Answering via Question Generation

Existing approaches to real-time question answering (RTQA) rely on learning the representations of only key phrases in the documents, then matching them with the question representation to derive answer. However, such approach is bottlenecked by the encoding time of real-time questions, thus suffering from detectable latency in deployment for large-volume traffic. To accelerate RTQA for practical use, we present Ocean-Q (an Ocean of Questions), a novel approach that leverages question generation (QG) for RTQA. Ocean-Q introduces a QG model to generate a large pool of question-answer (QA) pairs offline, then in real time matches an input question with the candidate QA pool to predict the answer without question encoding. To further improve QG quality, we propose a new data augmentation method and leverage multi-task learning and diverse beam search to boost RTQA performance. Experiments on SQuAD(-open) and HotpotQA benchmarks demonstrate that Ocean-Q is able to accelerate the fastest state-of-the-art RTQA system by 4X times, with only a 3+% accuracy drop.
SWP-Leaf NET: a novel multistage approach for plant leaf identification based on deep learning

Modern scientific and technological advances are allowing botanists to use computer vision-based approaches for plant identification tasks. These approaches have their own challenges. Leaf classification is a computer-vision task performed for the automated identification of plant species, a serious challenge due to variations in leaf morphology, including its size, texture, shape, and venation. Researchers have recently become more inclined toward deep learning-based methods rather than conventional feature-based methods due to the popularity and successful implementation of deep learning methods in image analysis, object recognition, and speech recognition. In this paper, a botanist's behavior was modeled in leaf identification by proposing a highly-efficient method of maximum behavioral resemblance developed through three deep learning-based models. Different layers of the three models were visualized to ensure that the botanist's behavior was modeled accurately. The first and second models were designed from scratch.Regarding the third model, the pre-trained architecture MobileNetV2 was employed along with the transfer-learning technique. The proposed method was evaluated on two well-known datasets: Flavia and MalayaKew. According to a comparative analysis, the suggested approach was more accurate than hand-crafted feature extraction methods and other deep learning techniques in terms of 99.67% and 99.81% accuracy. Unlike conventional techniques that have their own specific complexities and depend on datasets, the proposed method required no hand-crafted feature extraction, and also increased accuracy and distributability as compared with other deep learning techniques. It was further considerably faster than other methods because it used shallower networks with fewer parameters and did not use all three models recurrently.
Attribute-Conditioned Layout GAN for Automatic Graphic Design

Modeling layout is an important first step for graphic design. Recently, methods for generating graphic layouts have progressed, particularly with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, the problem of specifying the locations and sizes of design elements usually involves constraints with respect to element attributes, such as area, aspect ratio and reading-order. Automating attribute conditional graphic layouts remains a complex and unsolved problem. In this article, we introduce Attribute-conditioned Layout GAN to incorporate the attributes of design elements for graphic layout generation by forcing both the generator and the discriminator to meet attribute conditions. Due to the complexity of graphic designs, we further propose an element dropout method to make the discriminator look at partial lists of elements and learn their local patterns. In addition, we introduce various loss designs following different design principles for layout optimization. We demonstrate that the proposed method can synthesize graphic layouts conditioned on different element attributes. It can also adjust well-designed layouts to new sizes while retaining elements’ original reading-orders. The effectiveness of our method is validated through a user study.