Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Three-Dimensional Contrast-Enhanced Multidetector CT for Anatomic, Dynamic, and Perfusion Characterization of Abnormal Myocardium To Guide Ventricular Tachycardia Ablations

Background—Advances in contrast-enhanced multidetector CT enable detailed characterization of the left ventricular myocardium. Myocardial scar and border zone (BZ), as the target of ventricular tachycardia ablations, displays abnormal anatomic, dynamic, and perfusion characteristics during first-pass CT. This study assessed how contrast-enhanced CT can predict voltage-defined scar and BZ and integrate its scar reconstructions into clinical mapping systems to guide ventricular tachycardia ablations. Methods and Results—Eleven patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy underwent contrast-enhanced CT before ventricular tachycardia ablation. Segmental anatomic (end-systolic and end-diastolic wall thickness), dynamic (wall thickening, wall motion), and perfusion (hypoenhancement) characteristics were evaluated. Receiver operating characteristic curves assessed the ability of CT to determine voltage-defined scar and BZ segments. Three-dimensional epi- and endocardial surfaces and scar borders were reconstructed, coregistered, and compared to voltages using a 17-segment model. Abnormal anatomic, dynamic, and perfusion data correlated well with abnormal (<1.5 mV) endocardial voltages (r=0.77). Three-dimensional reconstruction integrated into the clinical mapping system (registration accuracy, 3.31±0.52 mm) allowed prediction of homogenous abnormal voltage (<1.5 mV) in 81.7% of analyzed segments and correctly displayed transmural extent and intramural scar location. CT hypoperfusion correlated best with scar and BZ areas and encompassed curative ablations in 82% cases. Conclusions—Anatomic, dynamic, and perfusion imaging using contrast-enhanced CT allows characterization of left ventricular anatomy and 3D scar and BZ substrate. Integration of reconstructed 3D data sets into clinical mapping systems supplements information of voltage mapping and may enable new image approaches for substrate-guided ventricular tachycardia ablation.
Influence of Licensed Characters on Children's Taste and Snack Preferences

OBJECTIVE: The goal was to study how popular licensed cartoon characters appearing on food packaging affect young children's taste and snack preferences. METHODS: Forty 4- to 6-year-old children tasted 3 pairs of identical foods (graham crackers, gummy fruit snacks, and carrots) presented in packages either with or without a popular cartoon character. Children tasted both food items in each pair and indicated whether the 2 foods tasted the same or one tasted better. Children then selected which of the food items they would prefer to eat for a snack. RESULTS: Children significantly preferred the taste of foods that had popular cartoon characters on the packaging, compared with the same foods without characters. The majority of children selected the food sample with a licensed character on it for their snack, but the effects were weaker for carrots than for gummy fruit snacks and graham crackers. CONCLUSIONS: Branding food packages with licensed characters substantially influences young children's taste preferences and snack selection and does so most strongly for energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods. These findings suggest that the use of licensed characters to advertise junk food to children should be restricted.
Rapid triage of diverse media devices: Boston marathon bombings: An operational case study of time critical response

The Boston marathon bombings of April 2013 in which three spectators were killed and more than 200 individuals were injured, resulted in an overwhelming influx of publicly available multimedia data that could be used to identify suspects, motives or both. Unfortunately, it is very difficult if not impossible for any number of analysts to review all the multimedia data in a timely manner. To complicate matters, many audio and video clips available online are duplicates, near duplicates or rebroadcasts of the original footage. This article describes the efforts to evaluate the efficiency of the Pixel Forensics, Inc. data triage system called TREX in a time of national crisis, when a rapid triage of the publicly available media of an event is necessary.
Canonical circuits of the cerebral cortex as enablers of neuroprosthetics

“. each technical advance over the past century has reaffirmed that repeated patterns of structure and function are seen at every level, from molecule to cell to circuit, and that many of these patterns are common across cortical areas and species. In this context, the concept of a canonical circuit, like the concept of hierarchies of processing, offers a powerful unifying principle that links structural and functional levels of analysis across species and different areas of the cortex” (Douglas and Martin, 2010, p. 20).
Cancer stem cells are the cause of drug resistance in multiple myeloma: fact or fiction?

Multiple myeloma (MM) remains a largely incurable, genetically heterogeneous plasma-cell malignancy that contains – just like many other cancers – a small fraction of clonogenic stem cell-like cells that exhibit pronounced self-renewal and differentiation capacities, but also pronounced drug resistance. These MM stem cells (MMSCs) are a controversial but highly significant issue in myeloma research because, in our opinion, they are at the root of the failure of anti-neoplastic chemotherapies to transform myeloma to a manageable chronic disease. Several markers including CD138−, ALDH1+ and SP have been used to identify MMSCs; however, no single marker is reliable for the isolation of MMSC. Nonetheless, it is now known that MMSCs depend on self-renewal and pro-survival pathways, such as AKT, Wnt/β-catenin, Notch and Hedgehog, which can be targeted with novel drugs that have shown promise in pre-clinical and clinical trials. Here, we review the pathways of myeloma “stemness”, the interactions with the bone marrow microenvironment that promote drug resistance, and the obstacles that must be overcome to eradicate MMSCs and make myeloma a curable disease.
A Representation and Learning Mechanisms for

We want to build an agent that plans by imagining sequences of future states. Subjectively, these states seem very rich and detailed. Providing an agent with suuciently rich knowledge about its world is an impediment to studying this kind of planning, so we have developed mechanisms for an agent to learn about its world. One mechanism learns dependencies between synchronous \snapshots" of the world; the other learns about processes and their relationships. Imagine an old kitchen cabinet, recently removed from a kitchen wall, six feet long, with doors but no back, nails sticking out of odd places, splintered where the crowbar did its work. This cabinet rests on the basement oor, but you want to attach it to the basement wall. It weighs about 50 lbs and it's very cumbersome. Your rst thought is to attach a batten to the back of the cabinet along its length, then drill screw holes in the basement wall, then drill through the batten at locations that correspond to the holes in the wall. You intend to lift the cabinet four feet oo the ground, register the batten holes with the screw holes, and screw the cabinet to the wall. Running through this plan in your mind, you realize it won't work, because you cannot hold a 50 lb. , six-foot, structurally unsound cabinet four feet oo the ground with one hand, while you screw it to the wall with the other. You need another person to help you, or you must build some sort of scaaolding to hold the cabinet in place. Suppose neither option is feasible. After thinking about it for a while, you suddenly come up with a new plan: Attach three or four L-brackets to the basement wall, hoist the cabinet onto the L-brackets, and then secure it to the wall. As you run through this plan mentally you recognize several hazards: the doors will swing and get in the way; the nails are dangerous and must be removed; you must not grasp the cabinet where the wood is splintered. Subjectively, each hazard seems to be \read" from a mental movie of sorts: You imagine hoisting the cabinet , having it lean slightly toward you, and a door swinging open and knocking your spectacles oo your nose. You imagine holding the cabinet against the wall with your shoulder (now that its weight is supported by the L-brackets) leaving two hands free …
Restoration and Storage of Film and Video Archive Material

Many unique records of archived motion pictures are in a fragile state and contain many artifacts. Preservation of these pictures can be achieved by copying them onto new digital media in compressed format, using, for instance, the MPEG standard. Restoration of the old film sequences prior to renewed storage is often beneficial both in terms of visual quality and in terms of coding efficiency. Restoring old image sequences manually is a tedious and costly process and therefore the use of an automated system for image restoration capable of dealing with common and less common artifacts is desirable. This chapter presents the AURORA project, whose goal it is to create such an automated system. Three algorithms developed within the AURORA project, for dealing with noise, blotches and intensity flicker, are described here. The success of these algorithms is demonstrated using both common measures of performance and using a new objective measure based on coding efficiency.
The Hydra: A Layered, Redundant Configuration Management Approach for Cloud-Agnostic Disaster Recovery

This paper demonstrates a bottom-up approach to developing autonomic fault tolerance and disaster recovery on cloud-based deployments. We avoid lock-in to specific recovery features provided by the cloud itself, and instead show that tools used in system administration today can provide the foundation for recovery processes with few additions. The resulting system, Hydra, is capable of detecting failures in instances and can redeploy any instance at a new location without human intervention. The layered design of configuration management tools enables separation of recovery processes and the actual service, making the Hydra applicable to a wide range of scenarios. The implementation was tested and an analysis of the recovery time is provided, demonstrating that the Hydra is capable of completely rebuilding a new site in 15 minutes.
AOBA: Recognizing Object Behavior in Pervasive Urban Management

Accurately recognizing the object's behavior from the uncertain sensor data is a key issue of Internet of Things application. For example, in urban management monitoring system, it is necessary to have an autonomous analyzing module that can online monitor object's behavior based on environmental monitoring information in order to prevent an emergent situation in advance. In this work, we present an approximate object's behavior analysis method, called AOBA, which can recognize behavioral patterns of the hybrid objects which include patrolman, watering cart, street lamp etc. In intelligent urban management. AOBA consists of two phases: filtering phase and recognizing phase. In the filtering phase, a -approximate pre-matching algorithm based on q-grams distance is introduced to select possible pattern rapidly, which can discard huge amount insignificant or dirty data; in the recognizing phase, aiming to the temporal and the spatial characteristics of sensor data, an improved bit-parallel string matching algorithm is proposed to recognize the k-approximate multiple patterns over event sequences selected by the filtering phase. Experiments on real urban monitoring data and synthetic data show that the proposed method can efficiently discriminate object's behavior. Compared with the existing method, the proposed method provides a fault-tolerant approximate pattern recognition solution.
Phase transition in the family of p-resistances

We study the family of p-resistances on graphs for p ≥ 1. This family generalizes the standard resistance distance. We prove that for any fixed graph, for p =1 the p-resistance coincides with the shortest path distance, for p = 2 it coincides with the standard resistance distance, and for p → ∞ it converges to the inverse of the minimal s-t-cut in the graph. Secondly, we consider the special case of random geometric graphs (such as k-nearest neighbor graphs) when the number n of vertices in the graph tends to infinity. We prove that an interesting phase transition takes place. There exist two critical thresholds p* and p** such that if p p**, it only depends on trivial local quantities and does not convey any useful information. We can explicitly compute the critical values: p* = 1 + 1/(d − 1) and p** = 1 + 1/(d − 2) where d is the dimension of the underlying space (we believe that the fact that there is a small gap between p* and p** is an artifact of our proofs). We also relate our findings to Laplacian regularization and suggest to use q-Laplacians as regularizers, where q satisfies 1/p* + 1/q =1.
Designing Behaviour-rich Interactive Virtual Museum Exhibitions

In this paper a new method of modelling and dynamic composition of behaviour-rich interactive 3D virtual museum exhibitions is described. The method enables museum experts, without advanced knowledge in computer programming, to create 3D virtual exhibitions accessible both locally inside the museums and remotely over the Internet. The method uses a novel Beh-VR modelling approach, which is compatible with standards such as X3D and VRML. The method has been successfully applied in several museums. Examples of interactive 3D exhibitions are provided.
Robust Distant Speech Recognition by Combining Multiple Microphone-Array Processing with Position-Dependent CMN

We propose robust distant speech recognition by combining multiple microphone-array processing with position-dependent cepstral mean normalization (CMN). In the recognition stage, the system estimates the speaker position and adopts compensation parameters estimated a priori corresponding to the estimated position. Then the system applies CMN to the speech (i.e., position-dependent CMN) and performs speech recognition for each channel. The features obtained from the multiple channels are integrated with the following two types of processings. The first method is to use the maximum vote or the maximum summation likelihood of recognition results from multiple channels to obtain the final result, which is called multiple-decoder processing. The second method is to calculate the output probability of each input at frame level, and a single decoder using these output probabilities is used to perform speech recognition. This is called single-decoder processing, resulting in lower computational cost. We combine the delay-and-sum beamforming with multiple-decoder processing or single-decoder processing, which is termed multiple microphone-array processing. We conducted the experiments of our proposed method using a limited vocabulary (100 words) distant isolated word recognition in a real environment. The proposed multiple microphone-array processing using multiple decoders with position-dependent CMN achieved a 3.2% improvement (50% relative error reduction rate) over the delay-and-sum beamforming with conventional CMN (i.e., the conventional method). The multiple microphone-array processing using a single decoder needs about one-third the computational time of that using multiple decoders without degrading speech recognition performance.
Combining software interrelationship data across heterogeneous software repositories

Software interrelationships have an impact on the quality and evolution of software projects and are therefore important to development and maintenance. Package management and build systems result in software ecosystems that usually are syntactically and semantically incompatible with each other, although the described software can overlap. There is currently no general way for querying software interrelationships across these different ecosystems. In this paper, we present our approach to combine and consequently query information about software interrelationships across different ecosystems. We propose an ontology for the semantic modeling of the relationships as linked data. Furthermore, we introduce a temporal storage and query model to handle inconsistencies between different data sources. By providing a scalable and extensible architecture to retrieve and process data from multiple repositories, we establish a foundation for ongoing research activities. We evaluated our approach by integrating the data of several ecosystems and demonstrated its usefulness by creating tools for vulnerability notification and license violation detection.
Managing the judgmental probability elicitation process: a case study of analyst/manager interaction

This paper presents an annotated transcript of an interview where a decision analyst elicited a judgmental probability distribution from a senior executive of a technology-based corporation. This case study illustrates the issues involved in interactions between analysts and managers. Judgmentally assessed probabilities are often used in situations with uncertainty where historical data does not provide a direct basis for determining probabilities. Thus, the interview is of direct interest to analysts and managers who must address situations with significant uncertainty. The paper also presents a new way of capturing information about how experts practice their expertise. A procedure involving videotaping and post-production processing was used by the decision analyst to reconstruct his thought processes during the interview. This approach shows promise of providing an effective way of capturing expertise for the development of computer-based expert systems. >
A GAME-THEORETIC METHODOLOGY INTEGRATING WEAPON AND C2 CONTRIBUTION TO FORCE EFFECTIVENESS

The effect of C2 on force effectiveness is given substantial attention over the last decades. However, analysts are still struggling to reflect this effect. This paper presents a methodology that reflects the contribution of decision-making in an analytically well-founded way, thus contributing to the understanding of the area. Battle is modelled as a hierarchy of two-player zero-sum games that reflects the hierarchic decision-making in a hierarchic organisation. In each game, operational concepts and battle capabilities determine each side's alternative actions, and C2 capabilities determine the order in which decisions and sub-decisions are to be made. The strength of game theory is used to define the game value as the measure of effectiveness. Finally, a data gathering procedure is suggested, exploiting the rigidity of organisational knowledge. The presented methodology accounts for all actions and strategies that can be planned, whereas a second step will account for situations that can not be planned for.
Using Virtual Nodes to Coordinate the Motion of Mobile Nodes

We describe how a virtual node abstraction layer could be used to coordinate the motion of real mobile nodes in a region of 2-space. In particular, we consider how nodes in a mobile ad hoc network can arrange themselves along a predetermined closed curve in the plane, and can maintain themselves in such a configuration in the presence of changes in the underlying mobile ad hoc network, specifically, when nodes may join or leave the system or may fail. Our strategy is to allow the mobile nodes to implement a virtual layer consisting of mobile client nodes, stationary virtual nodes (VNs) at predetermined locations in the plane, and local broadcast communication. The VNs coordinate among themselves to distribute the client nodes relatively evenly among the VNs’ regions, and each VN directs its local client nodes to form themselves into the local portion of the target curve.
05 10 08 3 v 1 1 1 O ct 2 00 5 NUT-Charged Black Holes in Gauss-Bonnet Gravity

We investigate the existence of Taub-NUT/bolt solutions in Gauss-Bonnet gravity and obtain the general form of these solutions in d dimensions. We find that for all nonextremal NUT solutions of Einstein gravity having no curvature singularity at r = N , there exist NUT solutions in Gauss-Bonnet gravity that contain these solutions in the limit that the Gauss-Bonnet parameter α goes to zero. Furthermore there are no NUT solutions in Gauss-Bonnet gravity that yield non-extremal NUT solutions to Einstein gravity having a curvature singularity at r = N in the limit α → 0. Indeed, we have non-extreme NUT solutions in 2 + 2k dimensions with non-trivial fibration only when the 2k-dimensional base space is chosen to be CP. We also find that the GaussBonnet gravity has extremal NUT solutions whenever the base space is a product of 2-torii with at most a 2-dimensional factor space of positive curvature. Indeed, when the base space has at most one positively curved two dimensional space as one of its factor spaces, then Gauss-Bonnet gravity admits extreme NUT solutions, even though there a curvature singularity exists at r = N . We also find that one can have bolt solutions in Gauss-Bonnet gravity with any base space with factor spaces of zero or positive constant curvature. The only case for which one does not have bolt solutions is in the absence of a cosmological term with zero curvature base space.
The First Detection of Coherent Emission from Radio Pulsars

The statistical properties of the radio emission from the pulsars B0823+26, B0950+08, B1133+16, and B1937+21 are studied using high time resolution observations taken at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Temporally coherent non-Gaussian emission has been detected in three of the four observed objects. This is the first time such a phenomenon has been observed. The results have been interpreted using a generalized shot noise model, and various basic physical quantities pertaining to the magnetospheric plasma have been estimated.
Coping with Spoofed PS-Poll Based DoS Attack in IEEE 802.11 Networks

IEEE 802.11 networks are particularly vulnerable to DoS (Denial of Service) attacks targeting the network availability. In this paper, we focus on the PS-Poll based DoS attack, where the attacker spoofs the polling frame on behalf of the client in order to discard the client’s buffered packets at the access point level. To cope with this attack, we propose a security solution called APSP (Authenticated Power Save Poll) and based on the integer prime factorization to authenticate PS-Poll frames. Our solution is both detective and preventive one and generates low communication, computing and storage overheads. It did not require any additional hardware and can be implemented via ﬁrmware upgrade. Simulation results show that the proposed solution is effective and robust to defend against the considered attack.
Internal modifications to reduce pollutant emissions from marine engines. A numerical approach

ABSTRACT Taking into account the increasingly stringent legislation on emissions from marine engines, this work aims to analyze several internal engine modifications to reduce NOx (nitrogen oxides) and other pollutants. To this end, a numerical model was employed to simulate the operation cycle and characterize the exhaust gas composition. After a preliminary validation process was carried out using experimental data from a four-stroke, medium-speed marine engine, the numerical model was employed to study the influence of several internal modifications, such as water addition from 0 to 100% water to fuel ratios, exhaust gas recirculation from 0 to 100% EGR rates, modification of the overlap timing from 60 to 120°, modification of the intake valve closing from 510 to 570°, and modification of the cooling water temperature from 70 to 90 oC. NOx was reduced by nearly 100%. As expected, it was found that, by lowering the combustion temperature, there is a notable reduction in NOx, but an increase in CO (carbon monoxide), HC (hydrocarbons) and consumption.