Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combinatorial optimization and metaheuristics

Today, combinatorial optimization is one of the youngest and most active areas of discrete mathematics. It is a branch of optimization in applied mathematics and computer science, related to operational research, algorithm theory and computational complexity theory. It sits at the intersection of several fields, including artificial intelligence, mathematics and software engineering. Its increasing interest arises for the fact that a large number of scientific and industrial problems can be formulated as abstract combinatorial optimization problems, through graphs and/or (integer) linear programs. Some of these problems have polynomial-time (" efficient ") algorithms, while most of them are NP-hard, i.e. it is not proved that they can be solved in polynomial-time. Mainly, it means that it is not possible to guarantee that an exact solution to the problem can be found and one has to settle for an approximate solution with known performance guarantees. Indeed, the goal of approximate methods is to find " quickly " (reasonable run-times), with " high " probability, provable " good " solutions (low error from the real optimal solution). In the last 20 years, a new kind of algorithm commonly called metaheuristics have emerged in this class, which basically try to combine heuristics in high level frameworks aimed at efficiently and effectively exploring the search space. This report briefly outlines the components, concepts, advantages and disadvantages of different metaheuristic approaches from a conceptual point of view, in order to analyze their similarities and differences. The two very significant forces of intensification and diversification, that mainly determine the behavior of a metaheuristic, will be pointed out. The report concludes by exploring the importance of hybridization and integration methods.
How Comprehensive and Efficient Are Patient-Reported Outcomes for Rotator Cuff Tears?

Background: Increasing emphasis is placed on patient-reported outcomes (PROs) after common orthopaedic procedures as a measure of quality. When considering PRO utilization in patients with rotator cuff tears, several different PROs exist with varying levels of accuracy and utilization. Hypothesis/Purpose: Understanding which disease-specific PRO may be most efficiently administered in patients after rotator cuff repair may assist in promoting increased patient and physician adoption of these useful scores. Using a novel assessment criterion, this study assessed all commonly used rotator cuff PROs. We hypothesize that surveys with fewer numbers of questions may remain comparable (with regard to comprehensiveness) to longer surveys. Study Design: Systematic review. Methods: Commonly utilized rotator cuff PROs were analyzed with regard to number of survey components, comprehensiveness, and efficiency. Comprehensiveness (maximum score, 11) was scored as the total number of pain (at rest/baseline, night/sleep, activities of daily living [ADLs], sport, and work) and functional (strength, motion/stiffness, and ability to perform ADLs, sport, and work) metrics included, along with inclusion of quality of life/satisfaction metrics. Efficiency was calculated as comprehensiveness divided by the number of survey components. Results: Sixteen different PROs were studied. Number of components ranged from 5 (University of California at Los Angeles score [UCLA]) to 36 (Short Form–36 [SF-36], Japanese Orthopaedic Association score [JOA]). The Quality of Life Outcome Measure for Rotator Cuff Disease (RC-QoL) included all 5 pain components, while 7 PROs contained all 5 functional components. Ten PROs included a quality of life/satisfaction component. The most comprehensive scores were the RC-QoL (score, 11) and Penn (score, 10), and the least comprehensive score was the Marx (score, 3). The most efficient PROs were the UCLA, the Quick Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder, and Hand score (QuickDASH), and Constant scores. The least efficient scores were the JOA and SF-36 scores. Conclusion: Many commonly utilized PROs for rotator cuff tears are lacking in comprehensiveness and efficiency. Continued critical assessment of PRO quality may help practitioners identify the most comprehensive and efficient PRO to incorporate into daily clinical practice.
Translation-invariant motion perception for multiple objects using grid partitioning representation

An HMM-based motion perception system capable of identifying individual motion of multiple objects present in a scene has been developed. By introducing a new grid-partitioning scheme representing the characteristic motions in the scene, translation invariant perception has been established. An autonomous time indexing scheme has also been developed and implemented in the system. Recognition experiments were carried out for simple arm moving patterns in a variety of environments including translation and scaling of object images as well as the mixture of different patterns in a single scene. The average recognition accuracy of above 81% has been achieved in each experiments.
Design and Development of a Flexure-Based Dual-Stage Nanopositioning System With Minimum Interference Behavior

Dual-servo systems (DSSs) are highly desirable in micro-/nanomanipulation when high positioning accuracy, long stroke motion, and high servo bandwidth are required simultaneously. This paper presents the design and development of a new flexure-based dual-stage nanopositioning system. A coarse voice coil motor (VCM) and a fine piezoelectric stack actuator (PSA) are adopted to provide long stroke and quick response, respectively. A new decoupling design is carried out to minimize the interference behavior between the coarse and fine stages by taking into account actuation schemes as well as guiding mechanism implementations. Both analytical results and finite-element model (FEM) results show that the system is capable of over 10 mm traveling, while possessing a compact structure. To verify the decoupling property, a single-input-single-output (SISO) control scheme is realized on a prototype to demonstrate the performance of the DSS without considering the interference behavior. Experimental results not only confirm the superiority of the dual-servo stage over the standalone coarse stage but reveal the effectiveness of the proposed idea of decoupling design.
Application of self-organizing maps to the stock exchange data analysis

In this paper the application of Self-Organizing Maps to analyze the stock market data is presented. The impact of this type of the neural network on the performance of investment strategies is discussed. The considered characteristics include the size of the network based on the average number of learning patterns per neuron, conscience mechanism, method of weights update and learning coefficient. Performance of each network configuration is verified against the simple investment strategy, which on the basis of average Rate of Return (RoR) generates “buy” and “sell” signals. Results show that SOMs with the conscience mechanism performs better than the counterpart without it.
The Roles of Glycated Albumin as Intermediate Glycation Index and Pathogenic Protein

The conventional glycemic indices used in management of diabetic patients includes A1c, fructosamine, 1,5-anhydroglucitol, and glycated albumin (GA). Among these indices, A1c is currently used as the gold standard. However, A1c cannot reflect the glycemic change over a relatively short period of time, and its accuracy is known to decrease when abnormalities in hemoglobin metabolism, such as anemia, coexist. When considering these weaknesses, there have been needs for finding a novel glycemic index for diagnosing and managing diabetes, as well as for predicting diabetic complications properly. Recently, several studies have suggested the potential of GA as an intermediate-term glycation index in covering the short-term effect of treatment. Furthermore, its role as a pathogenic protein affecting the worsening of diabetes and occurrence of diabetic complications is receiving attention as well. Therefore, in this article, we wanted to review the recent status of GA as a glycemic index and as a pathogenic protein.
Chapter 8 A Perceptual Learning Theory of theInformation in FacesAlice

The study of human face processing has advanced considerably in recent years, from consisting of a collection of isolated empirical facts and anecdotal observations, to a relatively coherent view of the complexity and diversity of the problems tackled by a human observer when confronted with a face. This rapid progress can be traced to the proposal of comprehensive theories of face processing (cf. which have provided a theoretical framework for investigating human face processing within functional subsystems. These models have had much to say about the kinds of tasks subserved by the human face processing system (e.g., naming faces, extracting visual categorical information such as sex and age, etc.), and about the coordination of processing among these tasks (e.g., Young, McWeeny, Hay, & Ellis, 1986). They have also provided important constraints for making sense of neuropsychological data on patients with various face processing deecits (e.g., Bruyer, 1986). Despite the success of these models in guiding research eeorts into many aspects of human face processing, they have provided somewhat less guidance in understanding the immensely complicated problems solved by the perceptual system in extracting and representing the richness of the perceptual information 159
How Does Labour Market Structure Affect the Response of Economies to Shocks?

The recent crisis in the Eurozone has led to much discussion about the structure of labour markets in different Eurozone economies. In particular, there has been much talk of the need for structural labour market reform in the Eurozone periphery. But, there are many aspects of labour market structure – eg, wage flexibility, flexibility in hiring and firing, benefits, etc – and it is not clear a priori which aspects really matter. In this paper, we analyse how cross-country differences in labour market characteristics – in particular, wage and employment rigidities – shape the response of different countries to a variety of macroeconomic shocks. To address this question, we use a calibrated small open economy model in which we set the parameters governing the structural characteristics of the labour market based on three European countries: Estonia, Finland and Spain. We found that, given our labour market calibrations, we would expect output and unemployment to be much more adversely affected by the shocks associated with the financial crisis in countries with high unemployment benefit replacement ratios and high job turnover rates.
Java annotation-aware just-in-time (AJIT) complilation system

The Java Bytecode language lacks expressiveness for traditional compiler optimizations,making this portable, secure software distribution format ine cient as a program representation for high performance. This ine ciency results from the underlying stack model, as well as the fact that many bytecode operations intrinsically include sub-operations (e.g., iaload includes the address computation, array bounds checks and the actual load of the array element). The stack model, with no operand registers and limiting access to the top of the stack, prevents the reuse of values and bytecode reordering. In addition, the bytecodes have no mechanism to indicate which sub-operations in the bytecode stream are redundant or subsumed by previous ones. As a consequence, the Java Bytecode language inhibits the expression of important compiler optimizations, including common sub-expression elimination, register allocation and instruction scheduling. The bytecode stream generated by the Java frontend is a signi cantly under-optimized program representation. The most common solution to overcome this aspect of the language is the use of a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler to not only generate native code, but perform optimization as well. However, the latter is a time consuming operation in an already time-constrained translation process. In this paper we present an alternative to an optimizing JIT compiler that makes use of code annotations generated by the Java front-end. These annotations carry information concerning compiler optimization. During the translation process, an annotationaware JIT (AJIT) system then uses this information to produce high-performance native code without perThis work supported in part by CAPES. forming much of the necessary analyses or transformations. We describe the implementation of the rst prototype of our annotation-aware JIT system and show performance results comparing our system with other Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) running on SPARC architecture.
A Trainable Arabic Bayesian Extractive Generic Text Summarizer

Summarization is the process of producing shorter presentation of the most important information from a source or multiple sources of information according to particular needs. Summarization is not applied only on text documents but also on any multimedia facility. This paper introduces Bayesian method for Arabic extractive text summarization. We developed a trainable summarization program that based on manually labeled corpus and Bayesian classification. System is evaluated in terms of recall, precision and F-measure.
Silence after suicide: A phenomenological study of young men's experience of losing a close male friend

Losing a close friend to suicide can significantly increase the risk of dysfunction, depression and suicide in young people. Previous studies of suicide bereavement have focused on parents, parentally-bereaved children, young adolescents’ experiences of peer suicide and female college-students. A paucity of qualitative research exists that examines young men’s experiences of suicide bereavement. This lack of research has meant that their grief may go unnoticed, be minimized, or even misunderstood. The purpose of this research was to explore the experiences of eight young New Zealand men (aged 17-25 years) who lost a close male friend to suicide. Repeated in-depth phenomenological interviews were used to gain new insights into the conceptualisation of this event in the young men’s lives through an exploration of their experiences. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed for analysis. The inductive, descriptive approach of the phenomenological method was used to explore and describe the essence of their lived experience and led to seven themes: Being gutted, stoicism, grieving in silence, being silenced, breaking the silence, being in silence and analytic silence. The overarching essence of their experience and the phenomenon was silence. The silence the men experienced after suicide was ubiquitous. The findings suggest losing a close male friend to suicide implicates men to suffer, grieve, live through and transform in silence. Participants experienced four types of silence: personal, private, public and analytic silence. The men were gutted and personally unable to talk about their experience. They chose to keep quiet, be stoical, suppress their emotions and keep their grief private. They grieved in silence and were silenced by others. They broke their silence with people they could trust and who provided presence support and care. They sought quiet spaces where they could reconnect, reflect on their experience. Their navigation of silence fostered new values, priorities and identities, acceptance of their loss and helped them move on with their lives. This study has brought new understandings of men’s experiences of suicide bereavement and silence. Their experience suggests that health professionals, families/whānau and friends need to learn to see, listen to and interpret the silence of men in order to better understand their experience and needs for care and support. Recommendations are made for intervention, health care practice and future research.
A structural alphabet for local protein structures: Improved prediction methods

Three‐dimensional protein structures can be described with a library of 3D fragments that define a structural alphabet. We have previously proposed such an alphabet, composed of 16 patterns of five consecutive amino acids, called Protein Blocks (PBs). These PBs have been used to describe protein backbones and to predict local structures from protein sequences. The Q16 prediction rate reaches 40.7% with an optimization procedure. This article examines two aspects of PBs. First, we determine the effect of the enlargement of databanks on their definition. The results show that the geometrical features of the different PBs are preserved (local RMSD value equal to 0.41 Å on average) and sequence–structure specificities reinforced when databanks are enlarged. Second, we improve the methods for optimizing PB predictions from sequences, revisiting the optimization procedure and exploring different local prediction strategies. Use of a statistical optimization procedure for the sequence–local structure relation improves prediction accuracy by 8% (Q16 = 48.7%). Better recognition of repetitive structures occurs without losing the prediction efficiency of the other local folds. Adding secondary structure prediction improved the accuracy of Q16 by only 1%. An entropy index (Neq), strongly related to the RMSD value of the difference between predicted PBs and true local structures, is proposed to estimate prediction quality. The Neq is linearly correlated with the Q16 prediction rate distributions, computed for a large set of proteins. An “expected” prediction rate QE16 is deduced with a mean error of 5%. Proteins 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Robotic Organisms-Artificial Homeostatic Hormone System and Virtual Embryogenesis as Examples for Adaptive Reaction-Diffusion Controllers

Generating artificial organisms from robotic modules (cells) is a challenging and fascinating task. In this a rticle, we discuss the most important challenges that such systems pose to the engineer and how these challenges are met by introducing bio-inspired mechanisms into the core functionality of such robotic systems. We develop a list of key functionali ties that allow such a system to overcome the limitations of ‘monolithic’ single robotics. In addition, we elaborate on the similarities and differences of two bio-inspired control software architectures that support the unfolding of potential in multimodular reconfigurable robotics. We focus especially on iss ues like robustness and scalability and emphasize the power tha t arises from exploiting bio-inspired control mechanisms that show self-organization and evolutionary adaptation in suc h artificial ‘robotic organisms’.
NCS-1 dependent learning bonus and behavior outputs of self-directed exploration

Animals explore a new environment and learn about their surroundings. “Exploration” refers to all activities that increase the information obtained by an animal. For this study, I determined a molecule that mediates self-directed exploration, with a particular focus on rearing behavior and vocalization. Rearing can be either self-directed exploration or escape-oriented exploration. Selfdirected exploration can be driven by the desire to gather information about environments, while escape-oriented exploration can be driven by fear or anxiety. To differentiate between these two concepts, I compared rearing and other behaviors in three different conditions 1) novel dim (safe environment), which induces exploration based rearing; 2) novel bright (fearful environment), which elicits fear driven rearing; and 3) familiar environment as a control. First, I characterized the effects on two distinct types of environment in exploratory behavior, and its effect on learning. From this, I determined that self-directed exploration enhances spatial learning, while escape-oriented exploration does not produce a learning bonus. Second, I found that NCS-1 is involved in exploration, as well as learning and memory, by testing mice with reduced levels of Ncs-1 by point mutation and also siRNA injection. Finally, I elucidated other behavior outputs and neural substrate activities, which co-occurred during either self-directed or escape-oriented exploration. I found that high-frequency ultrasonic vocalizations occurred during self-directed
An Analysis of PCA-Based Vocal Entrainment Measures in Married Couples' Affective Spoken Interactions

Entrainment has played a crucial role in analyzing marital couples interactions. In this work, we introduce a novel technique for quantifying vocal entrainment based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The entrainment measure, as we define in this work, is the amount of preserved variability of one interlocutor’s speaking characteristic when projected onto representing space of the other’s speaking characteristics. Our analysis on real couples interactions shows that when a spouse is rated as having positive emotion, he/she has a higher value of vocal entrainment compared when rated as having negative emotion. We further performed various statistical analyses on the strength and the directionality of vocal entrainment under different affective interaction conditions to bring quantitative insights into the entrainment phenomenon. These analyses along with a baseline prediction model demonstrate the validity and utility of the proposed PCA-based vocal entrainment measure. Index Terms: vocal entrainment, couples therapy, behavioral signal processing, principal component analysis
The Clinical Feasibility of Newly Developed Thin Flat-Type Bioresorbable Osteosynthesis Devices for the Internal Fixation of Zygomatic Fractures: Is There a Difference in Healing Between Bioresorbable Materials and Titanium Osteosynthesis?

Introduction:In recent years, bioresorbable plates have undergone remarkable development. However, there has been no attendant improvement in their strength, because strength requires thickness, and complications such as palpability are related to the thickness of bioresorbable plate systems. In this clinical study, we compared the surgical management of zygomatic fractures using newly developed thinner bioresorbable materials or conventional titanium miniplates. Methods:Twelve patients with zygomatic fractures were randomly divided equally into 2 groups (6 with new bioresorbable osteosynthesis materials and 6 with standard titanium miniplates). Using computed tomography, we evaluated the thickness of the soft tissue and plate at the zygomaticofrontal sutures in each patient with the help of detailed radiographic computed tomography data at 6 months postoperatively. We compared the amount of soft-tissue volume increase between the uninjured healthy and injured operated sides in each patient. Results:Both groups eventually achieved satisfactory healing, with a favorable restoration of form and function and without any complications, including palpability. The amount of soft-tissue volume increase at the operated side relative to the uninjured healthy side using new thin bioresorbable plates was 131.1% (range: 101.5–165.8). On the other hand, that of titanium miniplates was 126.4% (range: 102.2–167.6). There was no statistically significant difference (P > 0.05). Conclusion:This newly developed thinner flat-type bioresorbable plate system could be considered clinically useful in the treatment of zygomatic fractures even in easily palpated areas, such as the infraorbital rim or zygomaticofrontal sutures, without any healing differences in skeleton as compared with conventional titanium miniplates.