Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Humanoidly Speaking -How the Nao humanoid robot can learn the name of objects and interact with them through common speech

This video shows a friendly human-robot interaction using humanoid Nao robots. The speaker teaches the robot some names of objects using speech. This work shows the successful integration of three different projects mainly using Artificial Neural Networks: (1) object recognition with RGB-D (color and depth) sensor, (2) speech to text using an approach that post-processes Google's speech recognition hypotheses, and (3) syntactic interpretation of sentences. The robot is able to identify surfaces in the environment (tables, floor, walls) and establish a relation between these surfaces and the clusters (objects). Multiple viewpoints are easily obtained from the segmented clusters and used for training a Convolutional Neural Network. The features obtained allow the robot to recognise objects and to generalise to unknown viewpoints and scales. The speech recognition system maps the results from Google to expectable sentences in the given scenario using phonemic matching. The syntactic interpretation of the sentence is done with a Recurrent Neural Network (namely an Echo State Network). It maps each semantic word in a sentence to its thematic role. In the end, all roles form predicates which indicate what should be performed (e.g. learning a new object or performing motor actions). At the start, the robot does not know any objects. During the learning of new objects, increasingly complex sentences are used to describe the position of new objects. Motor commands (e.g. pointing) are also provided in order to check the knowledge of the robot. It can be noted that the human user produces natural complex sentences, and thus any human could interact with the robot, not only robot programmers. Furthermore, complex sentences containing multiple commands can be correctly interpreted as a temporal action sequence (e.g. "Before doing 'B' do 'A'") without adding any complementary mechanism. In addition to teaching objects and relationships to the robot, in the future this kind of interaction scheme could also be used by children to learn (e.g. new objects) while interacting with the robot. In other words, by teaching the robot, the child is learning. It could be used also to teach new instructions or even new languages to the robot (with only few changes in modules (2) and (3)). Conversely, if the robot already knows about the environment in one language and a child would not, this child could learn this new language while interacting with the robot.
Characterizing Different Strategies for Resolving Approach-Avoidance Conflict

The ability of animals to maximize benefits and minimize costs during approach-avoidance conflicts is an important evolutionary tool, but little is known about the emergence of specific strategies for conflict resolution. Accordingly, we developed a simple approach-avoidance conflict task in rats that pits the motivation to press a lever for sucrose against the motivation to step onto a distant platform to avoid a footshock delivered at the end of a 30 s tone (sucrose is available only during the tone). Rats received conflict training for 16 days to give them a chance to optimize their strategy by learning to properly time the expression of both behaviors across the tone. Rats unexpectedly separated into three distinct subgroups: those pressing early in the tone and avoiding later (Timers, 49%); those avoiding throughout the tone (Avoidance-preferring, 32%); and those pressing throughout the tone (Approach-preferring, 19%). The immediate early gene cFos revealed that Timers showed increased activity in the ventral striatum and midline thalamus relative to the other two subgroups, Avoidance-preferring rats showed increased activity in the amygdala, and Approach-preferring rats showed decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. This pattern is consistent with low fear and high behavioral flexibility in Timers, suggesting the potential of this task to reveal the neural mechanisms of conflict resolution.
Therapeutic mechanism of baicalein in peritoneal dialysis-associated peritoneal fibrosis based on network pharmacology and experimental validation

Baicalein (5,6,7-trihydroxyflavone) is a traditional Chinese medicine with multiple pharmacological and biological activities including anti-inflammatory and anti-fibrotic effects. However, whether baicalein has a therapeutic impact on peritoneal fibrosis has not been reported yet. In the present study, network pharmacology and molecular docking approaches were performed to evaluate the role and the potential mechanisms of baicalein in attenuating peritoneal dialysis-associated peritoneal fibrosis. The results were validated in both animal models and the cultured human mesothelial cell line. Nine intersection genes among baicalein targets and the human peritoneum RNA-seq dataset including four encapsulating peritoneal sclerosis samples and four controls were predicted by network analysis. Among them, MMP2, BAX, ADORA3, HIF1A, PIM1, CA12, and ALOX5 exhibited higher expression in the peritoneum with encapsulating peritoneal sclerosis compared with those in the control, which might be crucial targets of baicalein against peritoneal fibrosis. Furthermore, KEGG and GO enrichment analyses suggested that baicalein played an anti-peritoneal fibrosis role through the regulating cell proliferation, inflammatory response, and AGE-RAGE signaling pathway. Moreover, molecular docking analysis revealed a strong potential binding between baicalein and MMP2, which was consistent with the predictive results. Importantly, using a mouse model of peritoneal fibrosis by intraperitoneally injecting 4.25% glucose dialysate, we found that baicalein treatment significantly attenuated peritoneal fibrosis, as evident by decreased collagen deposition, protein expression of α-SMA and fibronectin, and peritoneal thickness, at least, by reducing the expression of MMP2, suggesting that baicalein may have therapeutic potential in suppressing peritoneal dialysis-related fibrosis.
ANTIOXIDANT ACTIVITY OF PATHYASHADANGAM KASHAYAM : A CLASSICAL AYURVEDIC FORMULATION AND ITS INGREDIENTS

Pathyashadangam kashayam is a classical Ayurvedic formulation which finds therapeutic application in the treatment of diseases of eye, ear and tooth, migraine and cluster head ache. It is also prescribed by Ayurveda physicians for diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases. Since antioxidant potential of the kashayam might contribute to its therapeutic efficacy, an attempt has been made to evaluate the same. The correlation between antioxidant potential of the kashayam and its total phenol and flavonoid contents was also analyzed. To evaluate the antioxidant potential of Pathyashadangam kashayam and its ingredients. The total phenol content of the kashayam was analyzed by Folin-Ciocalteau assay and the total flavonoid content by Aluminium chloride colorimetric assay. The antioxidant potential of the kashayam and its ingredients was evaluated by DPPH assay. Reducing power assay, total antioxidant capacity assay and NO radical scavenging assay were also employed for evaluation of antioxidant capacity of the kashayam. The correlation between the antioxidant potential and total phenol and flavonoid contents of the kashayam was analyzed using CORREL function of Microsoft Excel. The experimental data indicated that Pathyashadangam kashayam had remarkable potential to scavenge DPPH radicals comparable to standards Ascorbic acid and Trolox. Among the ingredients, Terminalia chebula, Terminalia bellirica and Phyllanthus emblica were found to be better scavengers of DPPH radicals than the kashayam, but all other ingredients exhibited decreased activity. The NO radical scavenging activity of the kashayam was also comparable to standard Ascorbic acid. Antioxidant potential of the kashayam was also confirmed from the reducing power and total antioxidant capacity assays. The kashayam had ample quantity of phenols and trivial quantity of flavonoids conferring it antioxidant potential. Pathyashadangam kashayam has significant antioxidant potential which contributes to its therapeutic ability. The total phenol and flavonoid contents of the kashayam were positively correlated to its antioxidant potential.
A Survey for Fusing Structured Knowledge Priors for NER CSCI 699 Intro2IE

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the most fundamental task in information extraction (IE). However, in many domains like social media text e.g., tweets) and online user-generated content (e.g., web forum, reviews), only a limited amount of labeled data are available for training neural models (and are expensive and slow to create). Such neural models require a significant amount of training examples to learn simple rules and facts about real world (e.g., actor is artist and artist is person), which is cost-inefficient in consuming human annotation efforts. Moreover, the existing approaches can hardly deal with cases that need deep understanding of hidden semantics. Our goal is thus to explicitly impose the simple rules and patterns from domain experts as a part of model architecture, and construct neural networks for fusing model structures with prior structures. In this way, simple domain-specific rules and patterns need no data to learn from data, and massive knowledge facts can directly provide additional signals for hidden semantics. Thus, the data can be used more efficiently and tracking the priors in the model can interpret predictions. In the following sections, we will present some previous related works.
Crystal structure of thermostable catechol 2,3-dioxygenase determined by multiwavelength anomalous dispersion method

The selenomethionyl derivative of the thermostable catechol 2,3-dioxygenase (SeMet-TC23O) is expressed, purified and crystallized. By using multiwave length anomalous dispersion (MAD) phasing techniques, the crystal structure of TC23O at 0.3 nm resolutions is determined. TC23O is a homotetramer. Each monomer is composed of N-terminal and C-terminal domains (residues 1∼153 and 153∼319, respectively). The two domains are proximately symmetric by a non-crystallographic axis. Each domain contains two characteristic motifs which are found in almost all of extradial dioxygenases.
Molecular arrangement of rhodamine 6G cations in the films of layered silicates: the effect of the layer charge

Montmorillonite nanocor saturated with Li+ cations was used for the synthesis of reduced charge montmorillonites (RCMs). The films of RCMs with intercalated rhodamine 6G (R6G) were prepared by adsorption of the dye on montmorillonite film deposited on a quartz slide. Penetration of the dye into the interlayer spaces of silicates was monitored by elemental analysis and X-ray diffraction measurements of the prepared R6G/silicate films. Polarized UV-Vis spectroscopy was used for the characterization of the molecular orientation of dye cations on silicate surface. There were several species of R6G cations in the interlayer spaces of the inorganic host, which was easily resolvable by the polarized spectra. The cations forming H-aggregates and absorbing light at low wavelengths were oriented in nearly perpendicular fashion, which was observed as a strongly positive dichroism, i.e., the increase of the dichroic ratio with film tilting. Adsorbed isolated dye cations were inclined at low angles with respect to the plane of the silicate surface. The layer charge of the inorganic host affected only partially the orientation of dye cations in the H-aggregates, but rather it controlled the extent of aggregation and in this way the number of nearly perpendicularly oriented cations.
Classification of 12-lead ECGs Using Gradient Boosting on Features Acquired With Domain-Specific and Domain-Agnostic Methods

This year, the objective of the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology challenge was the classification of 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECG). The approach presented in this paper consists of two parts, feature extraction and classification. The extracted features can be separated into domain-specific and domain-agnostic features, where domain-specific features are based on known ECG processing methods such as QRS-detectors. Domain-agnostic features are generated by wavelet transforms that take the raw 12-lead ECG as input. Additionally, a novel beat-to-beat correlation analysis is proposed to identify arrhythmia occurring among other healthy beats. These features are then combined and classified by gradient-boosted trees implemented in Python. To account for the complexity of the multi-label and multi-class problem definition, a One-vs-Rest scheme is utilized, where distinct classifiers for each class determine whether a sample belongs to said class. The resulting imbalance in training sets for each classifier was compensated for by giving the positive samples a higher weight. The classifiers were trained using the XGBoost gradient boosting system. The proposed classification scheme of the team “desafinado” received a score of 0.576 on the validation dataset and a score of 0.233 on the test set of the challenge (rank 19 of 41).
Effect of Micronutrients Application on the Growth Traits and Yield of Soybean [ glycine Max (l.) Merill.] under Rainfed Condition in vertisol

Field experiments were conducted to asses the effect of different micronutrients on growth trait and yield of soybean under rainfed condition in vertisol at the farm of Agricultural Research Station during 2012. It was observed that application of micronutrients significantly affected the growth traits of soybean, whereas, branching, nodulation and chlorophyll content of soybean were significantly increased by the application of micronutrient over the control. The average number of branches, number of nodules and chlorophyll content of soybean were maximized by application of Zn, Fe and Mo. Furthermore, data revealed that the Zn (0.5 %) and Fe (0.5 %) combined application increased all growth traits and yield in comparison to their separate application of Zn, Fe and seed fortification of Mo.
A NEW SPECIES OF Rhinogobius FROM CHINA(Perciformes:Gobioidae)

A new species of Rhinogobius collected in the brooklet of Ling Jiang River system (Hengxi town,Zhejiang Province) in 1997 was described in this paper.It is very similar to the Rhinogobius davidi (Sauvage et Dabry) in the external form,but defers in many characters.The description of the present species is as follows.
Cellules solaires à base de couches minces de Cu(In,Ga)Se2submicrométrique : optimisation des performances par ingénierie optique et électronique

La reduction de l’epaisseur de la couche absorbante dans la technologie des cellules solaires a base de Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGSe) constitue un sujet d’importance en permettant de reduire l’utilisation des materiaux et le temps de depot. Ce travail s’interesse plus particulierement aux couches de CIGSe deposees par procede de coevaporation en 3 etapes et montre que la reduction de l’epaisseur de la couche de CIGSe de 1,5 μm a 0,5 μm entraine la degradation significative des performances des cellules solaires. Une premiere cause semble liee a la presence de phenomenes de recombinaison qui deviennent significatifs pour les cellules solaires a base de CIGSe submicrometrique. L’etude des mecanismes de recombinaison nous a permis de proposer des solutions permettant de reduire fortement les pertes d’origine electronique et atteindre des rendements de 12,7 % pour une epaisseur de CIGSe de 0,5 μm. La degradation des performances est egalement liee a la reduction de l’epaisseur de la couche de CIGSe qui induit une reduction de la quantite de photons absorbes. Afin de compenser ce defaut de capacite d’absorption, une approche basee sur un reflecteur arriere a ete developpee a partir de l’introduction d’une couche de ZnO:Al entre la couche de molybdene et la couche de CIGSe. Les difficultes rencontrees pour realiser des cellules solaires a reflecteur sans degradation des proprietes electriques, nous ont pousses a proposer une approche basee sur la realisation de contacts electriques ponctuels entre le CIGSe et le molybdene. Les premiers resultats soulignent la pertinence de cette approche qui permet, dans certaines conditions, de realiser un gain optique tout en conservant des proprietes electriques satisfaisantes.
Nitrate and Perchlorate removal from groundwater by ion exchange

This study was conducted to evaluate the performance of a small scale ion exchange unit (Krudico, Inc of Auborn, IA) for removal of nitrate and perchlorate from groundwater at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Site 300. The unit was able to treat 3,600 gallons of Site 300 groundwater, at an average influent concentration of 100 mg/L NO{sub 3}{sup -} before breakthrough occurred. The unit contained 2.5 ft{sup 3} of Sybron SR-7 resin. Seventy gallons of regeneration waste were generated (water treated to waste ratio of 51:1). The effluent concentration was about 20 mg/L NO{sub 3}{sup -}, which is equivalent to a treatment efficiency of at least 80%. There are several options for implementing this technology at Site 300. A target well, in the 817 area, has been selected. It has a 3 to 4 gpm flow rate, and concentrations of 90 mg/L NO{sub 3}{sup -} and 40 {micro}g/L perchlorate. The different treatment options include ion exchange treatment of nitrate only, nitrate and perchlorate, or perchlorate only. Option 1: For the treatment of nitrate only, this unit will be able to treat 3,700 gallons of water before regeneration is required. If both columns of the ion exchange unit are used, 7,400 gallons could be treated before the columns will need to be regenerated (producing 140 gallons of waste, per cycle or every 1.5 days). The effluent nitrate concentration is expected to be about 17 mg/L. Annual operation and maintenance costs are estimated to be $0.14 per gallon of water treated. Option 2: If only perchlorate is to be removed with ion exchange at the 817 area, a smaller unit should be considered. A 55 gallon canister filled with ion exchange resin should be able to reduce perchlorate concentrations in the groundwater from 40 {micro}g/L to non-detect levels for three years before the resin would need to be replaced. The contaminant-laden resin would be disposed of as hazardous waste. It is not practical to regenerate the resin because of the extreme difficulty of removing perchlorate from the resin. Due to the selectivity of the ion exchange resin, it will also be possible to selectively remove perchlorate from nitrate-contaminated water. Annual operation and maintenance costs are estimated to be $0.02 per gallon of water treated. Option 3: Another alternative is to treat both perchlorate and nitrate. A three column unit would be built. The first column would capture perchlorate and the resin would be replaced rather than regenerated. The second and third column would be operated as under Option 1 to treat nitrate. Annual operation and maintenance costs are estimated to be $0.14 per gallon of water treated.
Spectrophotometric Determination of Trace Cetyltrimethyl Ammonium Bromide by Nanosilver

The decolored reaction between cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTMAB) and nanosilver was studied, and a simple, rapid spectrophotometric method was established to determine CTMAB. In pH 7.8 Na2HPO4-NaH2PO4 buffer solution, nanosilver exhibited a maximum absorption peak at 395 nm, and it reacted with CTMAB to form larger particles that resulted in the absorption decreasing. Under the chosen conditions, the decreased absorbance was linear to the CTMAB concentration in the range of 2.5×10-7-1.0×10-5mol/L, with the regression equation of ΔA395 = 0.0431C CTMAB + 0.0182, the correlation coefficient of 0.9968 and the detection limit of 0. 21μmol/L CTMAB. The proposed method was applied to detect CTMAB in water samples, with simplicity, rapidity and accuracy.
Magnetic-Field Induced Efficient Alignment of Carbon Nanotubes in Aqueous Solutions

Efficient alignment of aqueous carboxyl-functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes having remanent iron catalyst particles are carried out in relatively low external magnetic fields (B ≤ 1017 mT). The nanotubes were grown by catalytic chemical vapor deposition and then functionalized in a multistep oxidation process using nitric acid and potassium permanganate. In the field-induced ordering, the ferromagnetic property of iron nanoparticles entrapped in the inner-tubular cavity of nanotubes is exploited. Considerable dichroism of nanotube solutions (up to 3.02) is measured and deposition of aligned CNT networks from the solutions on silicon substrates is demonstrated.
Financial Contagion and the Real Economy

This paper studies the spread of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 from the financial sector to the real economy by examining ten sectors in 25 major developed and emerging stock markets. The analysis tests different channels of financial contagion across countries and sectors and finds that the crisis led to an increased co-movement of returns among financial sector stocks across countries and between financial sector stocks and real economy stocks. The results demonstrate that no country and sector was immune to the adverse effects of the crisis limiting the effectiveness of portfolio diversification. However, there is clear evidence that some sectors in particular Healthcare, Telecommunications and Technology were less severely affected by the crisis.
Resonant Raman scattering and photoluminescent properties of nonpolar a-plane ZnO thin film on LiGaO2 substrate

Nonpolar a-plane ZnO thin films are grown on LiGaO2 substrates and their optical and vibronic characteristics are investigated. Raman spectroscopy under nonresonant and resonant excitations shows the phase purity and resonant multiphonon process. From multiphonon Raman peaks up to the 6th order in the resonant spectra, the LO phonon frequencies for wave vectors away from the Γ point are estimated using the cascade model. Polar LO phonons with E1 symmetry play an important role in the indirect transitions of hot excitons. The optical anisotropy has been studied on the basis of polarization-dependent photoluminescence. The origin of photoluminescence is studied and a donor binding energy of 74.6 meV is found.