Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Step-by-step Erasion, One-by-one Collection: A Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Detector

Weakly supervised temporal action detection is a Herculean task in understanding untrimmed videos, since no supervisory signal except the video-level category label is available on training data. Under the supervision of category labels, weakly supervised detectors are usually built upon classifiers. However, there is an inherent contradiction between classifier and detector; i.e., a classifier in pursuit of high classification performance prefers top-level discriminative video clips that are extremely fragmentary, whereas a detector is obliged to discover the whole action instance without missing any relevant snippet. To reconcile this contradiction, we train a detector by driving a series of classifiers to find new actionness clips progressively, via step-by-step erasion from a complete video. During the test phase, all we need to do is to collect detection results from the one-by-one trained classifiers at various erasing steps. To assist in the collection process, a fully connected conditional random field is established to refine the temporal localization outputs. We evaluate our approach on two prevailing datasets, THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet. The experiments show that our detector advances state-of-the-art weakly supervised temporal action detection results, and even compares with quite a few strongly supervised methods.
External polyhedral estimates of reachable sets of linear and bilinear discrete-time systems with integral bounds on additive terms

The paper concerns the reachability problem for linear and bilinear discrete-time systems for the case when additive input terms are restricted by integral non-quadratic con-straints and initial states are restricted by parallelepiped-valued ones. The bilinearity is caused by the fact that interval bounds on the coefficients of the system are imposed. Algorithms for constructing external parallelepiped-valued (shorter, polyhedral) estimates of reachable sets are presented.
Online provisioning for virtual clusters in multi-tenant cloud data center network

The rapid development of cloud computing and high demands from network operators require strong support from the underlying data centers. Therefore, the effectiveness of using physical resources has become a target for operators and researchers. This paper discusses the online virtual cluster provision problem with multi-tenant in DCNs, which aims to determine when and where the virtual clusters are placed in the DCN. To address this problem, we formulate it into two parts: online multi-tenant scheduling and virtual cluster placement. Online multi-tenant scheduling aims to determine the execution order for the multi-tenant, and the virtual cluster placement determines the position where virtual machines (VMs) are placed. Our objective is to maximize the revenue for the DCN under the resource constraints. Due to the problem complexity, an efficient heuristic algorithm OMS (Online Resource Scheduling) is proposed to solve the online multi-tenant scheduling problem. We further explore the virtual cluster placement problem based on the OMS, and propose a novel algorithm VMP-VC. We evaluate our proposals through a series of simulations, and the simulation results demonstrate that OMS and VMP-VC can greatly increase the total revenue for the DCN.
Does fragile co-adaptation occur in small datasets?

Recent study using AlexNet architecture and ImageNet dataset has shown that the transferability of each layer in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can be quantified. One interesting finding from this study is that performance degradation when performing transfer learning without finetuning is not only caused by the specificity of the features, but also due to fragile co-adapted neurons between neighboring layers. This raises a question whether this phenomenon also occurs on smaller datasets and simpler network architectures. Using CIFAR-10 and three different CNN architectures, we reported that we have not seen this effect. The drop in performance is solely due to the specificity of the features learned for the source task.
Concerted Metabolic Shifts Give New Insights Into the Syntrophic Mechanism Between Propionate-Fermenting Pelotomaculum thermopropionicum and Hydrogenotrophic Methanocella conradii

Microbial syntrophy is a thermodynamically-based cooperation between microbial partners that share the small amounts of free energy for anaerobic growth. To gain insights into the mechanism by which syntrophic microorganisms coordinate their metabolism, we constructed cocultures of propionate-oxidizing Pelotomaculum thermopropionicum and hydrogenotrophic Methanocella conradii and compared them to monocultures. Transcriptome analysis was performed on these cultures using strand-specific mRNA sequencing (RNA-Seq). The results showed that in coculture both P. thermopropionicum and M. conradii significantly upregulated the expression of genes involved in catabolism but downregulated those for anabolic biosynthesis. Specifically, genes coding for the methylmalonyl-CoA pathway in P. thermopropionicum and key genes for methanogenesis in M. conradii were substantially upregulated in coculture compared to monoculture. The putative flavin-based electron bifurcation/confurcation systems in both organisms were also upregulated in coculture. Formate dehydrogenase encoding genes in both organisms were markedly upregulated, indicating that formate was produced and utilized by P. thermopropionicum and M. conradii, respectively. The inhibition of syntrophic activity by formate and 2-bromoethanesulphonate (2-BES) but not H2/CO2 also suggested that formate production was used by P. thermopropionicum for the recycling of intracellular redox mediators. Finally, flagellum-induced signal transduction and amino acids exchange was upregulated for syntrophic interactions. Together, our study suggests that syntrophic organisms employ multiple strategies including global metabolic shift, utilization of electron bifurcation/confurcation and employing formate as an alternate electron carrier to optimize their metabolisms for syntrophic growth.
Fingerprinting encrypted network traffic types using machine learning

Internet applications rely on strong encryption techniques to protect the content of all communications between client and server. These encryption algorithms ensure that third parties are unable to obtain the plain text data but also make it hard for the network administrator to enforce restrictions on the types of traffic that are allowed. In this paper we show that we can train accurate machine learning models which can predict the type of traffic going through an IPsec or TOR tunnel based on features extracted from the encrypted streams. We use small, fast to execute machine learning models that work on small windows of data. This makes it possible to use our approach in real-time, for example as part of a Quality of Service (QoS) system.
Sleep Quality on Maintenance Hemodialysis Patients in Douala General Hospital in Cameroon

Background: Poor sleep quality is reported to be common in hemodialysis patients. However, limited data are available about its prevalence in sub-Saha-ran region. The aim of this study was to assessed sleep quality and its predictors among hemodialysis patients. Methods: We conducted a cross sectional study of 2 weeks in the Douala General Hospital hemodialysis center of Cameroon involving 46 chronic hemodialyzed patients for at least six months with arteriovenous fistula. Quality of sleep was measured using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and laboratory data were collected in patients’’ fields. Result: Thirty-five (76.1%) subjects reported poor sleep quality. The most frequent abnormal sleep components were subjective sleep quality, sleep disturbances and sleep latency (87%, 85% and 76% respectively). In univariate linear regression, hemoglobin level, sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep duration, habitual sleep efficiency and sleep disturbance were associated with poor sleep quality. In multivariate linear regression only hemoglobin level (p = 0.004) and sleep latency (p = 0.002) were associated with poor sleep quality. Conclusion: Poor sleep quality is frequent in our hemodialysis patients and hemoglobin seems to be a good predictor of sleep quality in these patients.
An Overview of Enzyme Immunoassay: The Test Generation Assay in HIV/AIDS Testing

In Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) routine surveillance system, it is required to identify the persons infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) recently or showing the clinical stages of AIDS. The sensitive and specific of the assay is essential to detect the HIV infections in early period. Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) screening assay is a type of enzyme immunoassay (EIA) has gone through improvement in several generations effectively narrow the window period. The HIV specific antibodies, viral antigens are produced up to detectable level. The time is variable in different individuals to produce the HIV antibodies in the presence of the host’s immune pressure. This assay was developed from first generation to fifth generation based on its sensitivity and specificity. Due to the false positive reactivity, the accurate sensitive assay is required in field validations and routine testing of HIV infected samples. This EIA is generally used as a screening assay for blood donors and individuals those are at a risk in Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndromes (AIDS). At present, the several types of EIA are the most widely used in serological test for HIV antibodies detection.
Towards custom tailored SLA in IaaS environment through negotiation model: An overview

There exist many reasons in using Cloud computing resources, mainly, because larger tech companies have possibility to provide on-demand unlimited space of resources for an unlimited time of execution, while carrying out all the investment risks on their own, and consequently charge you in pay-per-use mode. Among others, the cloud computing services are also offered as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where the cloud service provider delivers a virtualized computing infrastructure, as a service. In this type of service most of the management and monitoring responsibilities are a provider's concern. Nevertheless, yet there is a gap in formalizing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between the cloud provider and user. In addition, the industry and academia communities have not placed a boundary through a formal model or formula which advices a certain business whether to opt for a cloud IaaS facilities or not. We believe that the above mentioned overview of this research topic will try to fulfill this gap, by formalizing the SLAs between the cloud provider and cloud user, particularly through presenting formal models in an IaaS case study.
Turkish text-dependent speaker verification using i-vector/PLDA approach

i-vector feature extraction is the state-of-the-art technique for text-independent speaker recognition. There exist studies in literature utilizing i-vector approach for text-dependent speaker verification. However, its performance for Turkish speaker recognition remains unknown. In this study, the performance of i-vector approach is analysed on Turkish text-dependent speaker recognition database consisting of 59 speakers. Experimental results show that, traditional Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients modelled with Gaussian mixture model — universal background model (GMM-UBM) outperforms i-vector system. It is also observed that probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) classifier using i-vector features does not bring any performance improvement over the standard cosine distance scoring (CDS) for Turkish text-dependent speaker verification.
Improving the Accuracy of UK Regulatory Cost Estimates

UK Government departments are required to undertake a Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) when introducing any policy change that places a burden on businesses, charities, the voluntary sector or individuals. Part of this assessment involves the appraisal of the costs (and benefits) associated with complying with all the available options, as well as the wider economic costs. Recent evidence has suggested that the compliance costs, when assessed ex post, tend to be lower than the ex ante assessment made beforehand (see e.g. Harrington et al 1999). Accurate cost estimates are important as errors can lead to under or over regulation. This, in turn, can result in growth and innovation being hindered or, in the case of under regulation, growth being achieved at the expense of the natural resource base (including human health and well being). In order to shed more light on the validity of RIA cost estimates and identify ways of improving their accuracy, Defra decided to commission a study comparing the ex ante and ex post costs of complying with regulatory changes. A total of eight case studies were carried out for this study, covering a range of recent environmental, agricultural and food-related regulations in the UK. Preliminary findings of this study indicate that while ex ante costs are often overestimated, there can also be significant underestimates. Reasons for errors in cost estimation are discussed and strategies for improving their accuracy suggested.
Female Urethral Diverticulum: Diagnosis, Treatment and Outcome

Objectives: To share our experience regarding the handling of symptomatic or asymptomatic female urethral diverticula. Clinical presentation, diagnostic methods, and therapeutic strategies are reviewed. Methods: This was a retrospective analysis involving eight female patients with urethral diverticula who were followed up in our urology department between 2007 and 2015. Preoperative assessment included clinical examination and cystoscopy, voiding cystourethrogram, or magnetic resonance imaging. Postoperative follow-up visits were scheduled at 3, 6, and 12 months. Results: Diagnosis was based on anamnesis and physical examination, and then confirmed by complimentary exams such as voiding cystourethrogram and magnetic resonance imaging. All patients experienced symptomatic relief and improved esthetic outcome after surgery. Magnetic resonance imaging was instrumental in confirming the diagnosis and in planning the surgical approach. Surgical excision of the diverticulum and reconstruction resulted in good aesthetic and functional outcomes. There were no major postoperative complications. Conclusions: Previously unrecognized female urethral diverticula can now be more easily detected using magnetic resonance imaging. In our small series, surgical excision and reconstruction was associated with good clinical outcome.
cacy and safety of oxitropiumbromide , theophylline and their combination in COPD patients : a double-blind , randomized , multicentre study ( BREATHTrial )

We compare the efficacy including spirometry, peakexpiratory flow (PEFR) and qualityof life and safetyof an 8-week treatmentwithinhaledoxitropium, theophylline or theircombinationinpatientswithmild-to-severs chronic obstructivepulmonarydisease (COPD). We conducted amulticentre, double-blind, double-dummy, randomized, parallel-group studyat 29 Italianoutpatients clinics.Agroup of 236 patientswithmild-to-severe COPD (baseline FEV1, r70% of predicted value) were recruited.Treatments were as follows: Inhaled oxitropium bromide 200 mg (N=75), sustainedrelease oraltheophylline 300 mg (N=81) or theircombination (N=80), takentwice daily.Spirometry (FEV1and FVC) was evaluatedevery 4 weeks, andmorningandevening PEFR (before and 2--4 h afterdrugintake) wasmeasureddaily. Symptoms, cough and dysponea, were recorded daily.Health status was evaluated at baseline and week 8 using the disease specific St George’s Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ). Any adverse eventoccurring during the treatment periodwas recorded on a diary card.FEV1and FVC improved in all the groups at 4 and 8 weeks, but the difference between treatmentgroups did not reach statistically significant levels.Differences between groups in pre-dosingmorning and evening PEFRwere not significant. Post-dosing morning and evening PEFRwere increased and the largest increase was seen in patients treatedwithbothdrugs.However, differencesbetweengroupswas significantonly foreveningvalues (P=0.008). The proportion of patients who experienced a decrease in symptoms was high in all groups but no differences among groupswereobserved.SGRQ totalscoresdecreasedin alltreatmentgroups after 8weeks, particularlyintheoxitropium and combination groups.Clinically, significant change ( 4 units) was only observed in patients treated with oxitropium bromide whether with or withouttheophylline. Adverse events related to treatmentswere higher in the group treated with theophylline alone (Po0.02). We conclude that inhaled oxitropiumbromide alone was associated with an improvement in FEV1,PEFR and symptomsinpatientswith COPD that wasnot statisticallydifferent fromthatoforaltheophylline alone or of the combination of both drugs.Oxitropium bromide in combination with theophylline provided a greater improvement in evening post-dosing PEFR.Oxitropium bromide alone or in combination with theophylline improved the qualityof life better thantheophylline alone.r2002 Elsevier Science Ltd.Allrights reserved Available online athttp://www.sciencedirect. com
Query-focused Scientific Paper Summarization with Localized Sentence Representation

Query-focused summarization enables the extraction of information on a specific “aspect” such as a “proposed approach” or “dataset used. ” Accordingly, it can be a powerful tool for reviewing scientific literature. In this paper, we present a method for unsupervised extractive query-focused summarization. In our approach, we first calculate word importance scores for each target document using a word-level random walk. Next, we optimize sentence embedding vectors using a Siamese neural network. Here, we utilize localized sentence representations obtained as the weighted average of word embeddings where the weights are determined by the word importance scores. Then, we conduct a sentence-level query-biased random walk to select a sentence to be used as a summary. In our experiments, we constructed a new evaluation dataset for query-focused summarization of scientific papers and showed that our method achieves competitive performance compared to other sentence embeddings.
CLSciSumm Shared Task: On the Contribution of Similarity measure and Natural Language Processing Features for Citing Problem

​This paper introduces our system submitted to the CLSciSumm 2018 Shared Task at the BIRNDL 2018 Workshop. Our model is trained on a corpus of 40 articles of training set and a corpus of 20 articles from CL-SciSumm 2018. For the purpose of model training, we use random sampling from the articles. We build an ensemble classifier to predict sentences in the reference articles. Also, a multilabel classifier is built to predict the discourse facet of each citation instance. We evaluate the performance of our models using 10-fold cross validation.
Neural Constraints Affect the Ability to Generate Hip Abduction Torques When Combined With Hip Extension or Ankle Plantarflexion in Chronic Hemiparetic Stroke

Stroke lesions interrupt descending corticofugal fibers that provide the volitional control of the upper and lower extremities. Despite the evident manifestation of movement impairments post-stroke during standing and gait, neural constraints in the ability to generate joint torque combinations in the lower extremities are not yet well determined. Twelve chronic hemiparetic participants and 8 age-matched control individuals participated in the present study. In an isometric setup, participants were instructed to combine submaximal hip extension or ankle plantarflexion torques with maximal hip abduction torques. Statistical analyses were run using linear mixed effects models. Results for the protocol combining hip extension and abduction indicate that participants post-stroke have severe limitations in the amount of hip abduction torque they can generate, dependent upon hip extension torque magnitude. These effects are manifested in the paretic extremity by the appearance of hip adduction torques instead of hip abduction at higher levels of hip extension. In the non-paretic extremity, significant reductions of hip abduction were also observed. In contrast, healthy control individuals were capable of combining varied levels of hip extension with maximal hip abduction. When combining ankle plantarflexion and hip abduction, only the paretic extremity showed reductions in the ability to generate hip abduction torques at increased levels of ankle plantarflexion. Our results provide insight into the neural mechanisms controlling the lower extremity post-stroke, supporting previously hypothesized increased reliance on postural brainstem motor pathways. These pathways have a greater dominance in the control of proximal joints (hip) compared to distal joints (ankle) and lead to synergistic activation of musculature due to their diffuse, bilateral connections at multiple spinal cord levels. We measured, for the first time, bilateral constraints in hip extension/abduction coupling in hemiparetic stroke, again in agreement with the expected increased reliance on bilateral brainstem motor pathways. Understanding of these neural constraints in the post-stroke lower extremities is key in the development of more effective rehabilitation interventions that target abnormal joint torque coupling patterns.
F1F0-ATP Synthase Inhibitory Factor 1 in the Normal Pancreas and in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma: Effects on Bioenergetics, Invasion and Proliferation

F1F0-ATP synthase inhibitory factor 1 (IF1) inhibits the reverse mode of F1F0-ATP synthase, and therefore protects cellular ATP content at the expense of accelerated loss of mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm). There is considerable variability in IF1 expression and its influence on bioenergetics between different cell types. High levels of IF1 in a number of cancers have been linked to increased glycolysis, resistance to cell death, increased migration and proliferation. However, neither the expression nor role of IF1 in the normal pancreas or in pancreatic cancer has been characterized. In this study, we found that pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) patients express higher levels of IF1 in cancerous cells than in pancreatic acinar cells (PACs). PDAC cell lines have a higher IF1 content and IF1/ATP synthase ratio than PACs. The observed differences are consistent with the ability of the respective cell types to maintain ΔΨm and ATP levels in conditions of chemical hypoxia. Acinar cells and PDAC cells preferentially express different IF1 isoforms. Both knockdown and knockout of IF1 in the PANC-1 pancreatic cancer cell line modified cellular bioenergetics and decreased migration, invasion and proliferation suggesting the putative importance of IF1 for PDAC growth and metastasis.