Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sentence Modality Recognition in French based on Prosody

This paper deals with automatic sentence modality recognition in French. In this work, only prosodic features are considered. The sentences are recognized according to the three following modalities: declarative, interrogative and exclamatory sentences. This information will be used to animate a talking head for deaf and hearing-impaired children. We first statistically study a real radio corpus in order to assess the feasibility of the automatic modeling of sentence types. Then, we test two sets of prosodic features as well as two different classifiers and their combination. We further focus our attention on questions recognition, as this modality is certainly the most important one for the target application.
The Effect of Naturally Occurring Chronic Kidney Disease on the Micro-Structural and Mechanical Properties of Bone

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a growing public health concern worldwide, and is associated with marked increase of bone fragility. Previous studies assessing the effect of CKD on bone quality were based on biopsies from human patients or on laboratory animal models. Such studies provide information of limited relevance due to the small size of the samples (biopsies) or the non-physiologic CKD syndrome studied (rodent models with artificially induced CKD). Furthermore, the type, architecture, structure and biology of the bone of rodents are remarkably different from human bones; therefore similar clinicopathologic circumstances may affect their bones differently. We describe the effects of naturally occurring CKD with features resembling human CKD on the skeleton of cats, whose bone biology, structure and composition are remarkably similar to those of humans. We show that CKD causes significant increase of resorption cavity density compared with healthy controls, as well as significantly lower cortical mineral density, cortical cross-sectional area and cortical cross-sectional thickness. Young's modulus, yield stress, and ultimate stress of the cortical bone material were all significantly decreased in the skeleton of CKD cats. Cancellous bone was also affected, having significantly lower trabecular thickness and bone volume over total volume in CKD cats compared with controls. This study shows that naturally occurring CKD has deleterious effects on bone quality and strength. Since many similarities exist between human and feline CKD patients, including the clinicopathologic features of the syndrome and bone microarchitecture and biology, these results contribute to better understanding of bone abnormalities associated with CKD.
ENTEROVIRUS INFECTIONS: ETIOLOGIC, EPIDEMIOLOGIC AND CLINICAL ASPECTS.

The term enteroviruses was introduced in 1957 to bring together in one large family the polioviruses, Coxsackie A and B and echoviruses, all agents for which the human alimentary tract is the natural habitat. At present more than 60 distinct members are recognized: three polioviruses, 24 Coxsackie A, six Coxsackie B and 30 echoviruses. The list of new members, particularly in the echo-group, grows regularly. The viruses are frequently widely disseminated in the summer and fall of the year, circulating chiefly among young children, causing both apparent and inapparent infection. The enteroviruses are responsible for a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations, including non-specific febrile illness, sometimes with rash, aseptic meningitis, paralytic disease, respiratory infections, pericarditis and myocarditis. There is considerable overlap in biologic behavior, and the same syndrome can be induced by many different agents. In a few instances the clinical pattern is distinct enough to suggest the group of agents involved. Thus, herpangina is associated with the Coxsackie A viruses and epidemic myalgia (devil's grip) with the Coxsackie B group. Paralytic disease is caused primarily by the polioviruses, but recently it has been found that other members, particularly the Coxsackie B viruses and Coxsackie A7 can also cause "paralytic poliomyelitis. "The ultimate potential of enteroviruses in terms of central nervous system disease and other manifestations is unpredictable. Great variety in terms of clinical and epidemiologic behavior of known and "new" viruses has been the pattern in the past, and is likely to continue.
[Juvenile glaucoma in Cameroon].

AIM To determine the prevalence and the visual morbidity of juvenile glaucoma in an urban black population. MATERIAL AND METHODS A retrospective analysis of 1343 files of glaucomatous patients was carried out from January 1991 to December 2001 at the Douala General Hospital in Cameroon (Central Africa). Ninety four of them had juvenile glaucoma. Of the patients, 54 (57.4%) were males and 40 (42.6%) were females. Each subject underwent the following investigations: visual acuity, visual field testing, slit lamp examination, applanation tonometry, gonioscopy, and optic disc examination and photographies after mydriasis. RESULTS The prevalence of juvenile glaucoma in our population was 0.4%. The mean patients age at diagnosis was 26 +/- 6.8 years (range, 10 to 35 years). Among them, 88.3% had a positive family history of glaucoma. The mean intraocular pressure at diagnosis was 28.2 +/- 9.3 mmHg (range: 14 to 56 mmHg). It was lower than 21 mmHg in 5.3% of the cases. The mean recorded cup/disc ratio at diagnosis was 0.7 +/- 0.3. It was equal to 1.0 in 25.6% of the cases. Gonioscopy showed that the angles were open, with no abnormal pigmentation, iris processes, or embryonic tissue. The prevalence of monocular and bilateral blindness was 3.2% and 33% respectively at the first examination. The affected eye was blind in 50% (6/12) of patients with unilateral juvenile glaucoma. The mean IOP of the treated 166 eyes with topical medications decreased from 28 +/- 8.7 mmHg (range: 15 to 56 mmHg) to 19.1 +/- 8 mmHg (range: 8 to 48 mmHg) after a follow-up period average 1.6 +/- 2.3 years (range: one month to 11 years). Trabeculectomy was required in 10 eyes. Follow-up period of surgery ranged from 1 to 8 years (mean 3.8 +/- 3.3 years). The mean IOP decreased from 30.8 +/- 14 mmHg (range: 17 to 54 mmHg) preoperatively to 15.7 +/- 4.6 mmHg (from 10 to 25 mmHg) postoperatively. CONCLUSION This study confirms the high prevalence of juvenile glaucoma among black Cameroonian population. The screening, the treatment as well as the genetic studies of this glaucoma bump into strong economic contingencies in our regions. In the cases where topical medications were ineffective in controlling IOP, surgery was needed to obtain long-term pressure control.
Chemical composition and anti-inflammatory effects of essential oil from Hallabong flower

A number of essential oils derived from plants are claimed to have several medicinal functions, including anti-cancer and anti-inflammation effects. However, the chemical composition and biological activities of flower-derived components have not been sufficiently characterized. Therefore, we investigated the composition of essential oils from Hallabong flower [(Citrus unshiu Marcov × Citrus sinensis Osbeck) × Citrus reticulata Blanco] and their anti-inflammatory effects. Hydro-distilled essential oils (HEOs) were analyzed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). In total, 21 components were identified, representing more than 98 % of the oils, with sabinene (34.75 %), linalool (14.77 %), β-ocimene (11.07 %), 4-terpineol (9.63 %), l-limonene (5.88 %), and γ-terpinene (4.67 %) as the main components. In the present study, we also investigated the anti-inflammatory effects of HEOs on lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated RAW 264.7 macrophage cells. HEOs were found to inhibit nitric oxide (NO) and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) production and to suppress the LPS-induced expression of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) protein. In addition, HEOs downregulated the production of the inflammatory cytokines, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-6, and IL-1β (IC50 values are 0.05 %, 0.02 %, and 0.01 %, respectively). On the basis of these results, we suggest that HEOs can be considered potential anti-inflammatory candidates for therapeutic use in humans.
Self‐Assembled Bifunctional Peptide as Effective Drug Delivery Vector with Powerful Antitumor Activity

E‐cadherin/catenin complex is crucial for cancer cell migration and invasion. The histidine‐alanine‐valine (HAV) sequence has been shown to inhibit a variety of cadherin‐based functions. In this study, by fusing HAV and the classical tumor‐targeting Arg‐Gly‐Asp (RGD) motif and Asn‐Gly‐Arg (NGR) motif to the apoptosis‐inducing peptide sequence‐AVPIAQK, a bifunctional peptide has been constructed with enhanced tumor targeting and apoptosis effects. This peptide is further processed as a nanoscale vector to encapsulate the hydrophobic drug docetaxel (DOC). Bioimaging analysis shows that peptide nanoparticles can penetrate into xenograft tumor cells with a significantly long retention in tumors and high tumor targeting specificity. In vivo, DOC/peptide NPs are substantially more effective at inhibiting tumor growth and prolonging survival compared with DOC control. Together, the findings of this study suggest that DOC/peptide NPs may have promising applications in pulmonary carcinoma therapy.
Optimizing yield in global routing

We present the first efficient approach to global routing that takes spacing-dependent costs into account and provably finds a near-optimum solution including these costs. We show that this algorithm can be used to optimize manufacturing yield. The core routine is a parallelized fully polynomial approximation scheme, scaling very well with the number of processors. We present results showing that our algorithm reduces the expected number of defects in wiring by more than 10 percent on state-of-the-art industrial chips.
Cardiovascular effects of the 3 phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors approved for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.

Received May 17, 2004; revision received June 22, 2004; accepted June 22, 2004. Within the last year, 2 new phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE5) inhibitors have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of erectile dysfunction (ED). Currently, sildenafil (Viagra), vardenafil (Levitra), and tadalafil (Cialis) are on the market. These agents have been shown to be effective in a broad population of men with ED, including patients with vascular disease, coronary artery disease, hypertension, and diabetes.1–5 Because the enzyme that they inhibit, PDE-5, is found in smooth muscle cells of the systemic arteries and veins throughout the body, these agents have mild vasodilator effects and thus, have the potential to impact the cardiovascular system.6 This fact is especially important for the patient with ED, because risk factors for ED include many of the same risk factors that are associated with coronary artery disease: lipid abnormalities, hypertension, smoking, diabetes, and lack of physical exercise.7,8 Because erection is a vascular event, endothelial dysfunction may inhibit it.9 Endothelial dysfunction, an early component of atherosclerosis, is rarely confined to the arteries supplying blood to the penis but more likely occurs throughout the vascular bed. Kaiser et al10 studied 30 men with ED and observed that brachial artery flow–mediated vasodilation and nitroglycerin-mediated vasodilation were reduced in these patients compared with men without ED. Thus, ED may be an early marker of vascular disease.10 Patients with frank coronary artery disease, known to be associated with endothelial dysfunction, and frank atherosclerosis often have ED, as we recently observed in 1 study, in which three fourths of the men with chronic stable angina also reported some degree of ED.11 Hence, the vasodilator effect of these PDE5 agents should be taken into consideration for the cardiac patient, both as …
A functional microcircuit for cat visual cortex.

1. We have studied in vivo the intracellular responses of neurones in cat visual cortex to electrical pulse stimulation of the cortical afferents and have developed a microcircuit that simulates much of the experimental data. 2. Inhibition and excitation are not separable events, because individual neurones are embedded in microcircuits that contribute strong population effects. Synchronous electrical activation of the cortex inevitably set in motion a sequence of excitation and inhibition in every neurone we recorded. The temporal form of this response depends on the cortical layer in which the neurone is located. Superficial layer (layers 2+3) pyramidal neurones show a more marked polysynaptic excitatory phase than the pyramids of the deep layers (layers 5+6). 3. Excitatory effects on pyramidal neurones, particularly the superficial layer pyramids, are in general not due to monosynaptic input from thalamus, but polysynaptic input from cortical pyramids. Since the thalamic input is transient it does not provide the major, sustained excitation arriving at any cortical neurone. Instead the intracortical excitatory connections provide the major component of the excitation. 4. The polysynaptic excitatory response would be sustained well after the stimulus, were it not for the suppressive effect of intracortical inhibition induced by the pulse stimulation. 5. Intracellular recording combined with ionophoresis of gamma‐aminobutyric acid (GABA) agonists and antagonists showed that intracortical inhibition is mediated by GABAA and GABAB receptors. The GABAA component occurs in the early phase of the impulse response. It is reflected in the strong hyperpolarization that follows the excitatory response and lasts about 50 ms. The GABAB component occurs in the late phase of the response, and is reflected in a sustained hyperpolarization that lasts some 200‐300 ms. Both components are seen in all cortical pyramidal neurones. However, the GABAA component appears more powerful in deep layer pyramids than superficial layer pyramids. 6. The microcircuit simulates with good fidelity the above data from experiments in vivo and provides a novel explantation for the apparent lack of significant inhibition during visual stimulation. The basic circuit may be common to all cortical areas studied and thus the microcircuit may be a ‘canonical’ microcircuit for neocortex.
Preventing Information Leakage in Mobile Applications with Object-Oriented Access Control Lists and Security Monitor Encapsulation

We propose a model and associated algorithms for information flow control to prevent information leakage in mobile computing environments. The model employs access control lists and encapsulated security monitors under a fully object-oriented framework. We show that our model prevents unauthorized direct access to sensitive information from a mobile user to the server, as well as any attempt on indirect access through intermediate entities. To understand the feasibility of our model, we suggest an event-driven approach and efficient implementation for the realization of the model. A Java-based preliminary implementation and performance evaluation results demonstrate that our model can successfully prevent information leakage with very low overhead.
No-Reference Video Quality Assessment Based on Artifact Measurement and Statistical Analysis

A discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based no-reference video quality prediction model is proposed that measures artifacts and analyzes the statistics of compressed natural videos. The model has two stages: 1) distortion measurement and 2) nonlinear mapping. In the first stage, an unsigned ac band, three frequency bands, and two orientation bands are generated from the DCT coefficients of each decoded frame in a video sequence. Six efficient frame-level features are then extracted to quantify the distortion of natural scenes. In the second stage, each frame-level feature of all frames is transformed to a corresponding video-level feature via a temporal pooling, then a trained multilayer neural network takes all video-level features as inputs and outputs, a score as the predicted quality of the video sequence. The proposed method was tested on videos with various compression types, content, and resolution in four databases. We compared our model with a linear model, a support-vector-regression-based model, a state-of-the-art training-based model, and a four popular full-reference metrics. Detailed experimental results demonstrate that the results of the proposed method are highly correlated with the subjective assessments.
Perspectives Perspectives Perspectives Perspectives Perspectives Amphibian Population Declines Emerging Infectious Diseases and Amphibian Population Declines

Emerging infectious diseases have been reported increasingly as causes of death in free-living wild animals (1). These diseases are a particular threat to wildlife species whose population, habitat, or range has been diminished or artificially manipulated to promote species survival (e.g., captive breeding, translo-cation, and release programs) (2-4). An early example of an emerging disease panzootic was the introduction of rinderpest in African domestic cattle in 1889 (5). More recently, epizootics and panzootics of wildlife have been increasingly reported in terrestrial (1) and marine (6) habitats and are probably underreported (1,4,7-9). Recent advances in theoretical and experimental host-parasite ecology have demonstrated a major role for infectious agents in the population biology of wild animals (10,11). We discuss recent data on two newly emerging infectious diseases of amphibians and, by reference to host-parasite ecology, propose hypotheses to explain their origin and impact. Global declines in amphibian population are perhaps one of the most pressing and enigmatic environmental problems of the late 20th century (12-19). While some declines are clearly due to habitat destruction, others are not associated with obvious environmental factors. Causal hypotheses include the introduction of predators or competitors, increased ultraviolet (UV-B) irradiation, acid precipitation, adverse weather patterns, environmental pollution, infectious disease, or a combination of these. Transdermal water uptake and gaseous exchange and a biphasic life cycle are important aspects of amphibian biology. These factors led to the hypothesis that amphibians act as sentinels for global environmental degradation (12,18). However , this role has yet to be demonstrated, and many causal factors may be present (12,19,20). Of particular concern are population declines in ecologically pristine areas, such as the montane tropical rain forests of Australia and Central America, where human impact from agriculture, deforestation, or pollution is thought to be negligible. Here, long-term data demonstrate recent and catastrophic amphibian population declines, often resulting in the complete loss of amphibian species (local extinction of multiple species) from large swaths of habitat (20-25). These declines include the disappearance and presumed extinction of the recently discovered golden toad (Bufo periglenes) of Costa Rica (23) and as many as seven Australian amphibian species, including two species of gastric-brooding We review recent research on the pathology, ecology, and biogeography of two emerging infectious wildlife diseases, chytridiomycosis and ranaviral disease, in the context of host-parasite population biology. We examine the role of these diseases in the global decline of amphibian populations and propose hypotheses for …
Formal models for cognitive systems

A robotic system is an integration of various systems such as perception, navigation, planner, controller, etc. The adaptation of the robotic system to the dynamic environments is embedded in the functionality of the constituent systems. This severely limits the configuration space of such systems. The modeling of the variability in the solution space can expand this design space, help finding the best possible solution, and perform run-time adaptation of the system. In this paper, a formal specification using primitive compositional elements is proposed to analyze the solution space and to streamline the decision making using non-functional properties of the system. The relevancy of the model is demonstrated using a case study on a vehicle tracking problem.
Uptake of Glycine into Synaptic Vesicles Isolated from Rat Spinal Cord

Glycine was taken up by a synaptic vesicle fraction from spinal cord in a Mg‐ATP‐dependent manner. The accumulation of glycine was inhibited by carbonyl cyanide‐m‐chlorophenylhydrazone (CCCP) and nigericin, agents known to destroy the proton gradient across the vesicle membrane. Vesicular uptake of glycine was clearly different from synaptosomal uptake, with respect to both the affinity constant and the effect of Na+, ATP, CCCP, and temperature. Oligomycin and strychnine did not inhibit the vesicular uptake, showing that neither mitochondrial H+‐ATPase nor binding to strychnine‐sensitive glycine receptors was involved. It is suggested that the vesicular uptake of glycine is driven by a proton gradient generated by a Mg2+‐ATPase. A low concentration of Cl‐ had little effect on the uptake of glycine, whereas the uptake of glutamate in the same experiment was highly stimulated. High concentrations of γ‐amino‐n‐butyric acid and β‐alanine inhibited vesicular glycine uptake, but glutamate did not. Accumulation of glycine was found to be fourfold higher in a spinal cord synaptic vesicle fraction than in a vesicle fraction from cerebral cortex.
Reduction-based Control of Three-dimensional Bipedal Walking Robots

In this paper we develop the concept of reduction-based control, which is founded on a controlled form of geometric reduction known as functional Routhian reduction. We prove a geometric property of general serial-chain robots termed recursive cyclicity, identifying the inherent robot symmetries that we exploit with the Subrobot Theorem. This shows that any serial-chain robot can be decomposed for arbitrarily lower-dimensional analysis and control. We apply this method to construct stable directional three-dimensional walking gaits for a four-degree-of-freedom hipped bipedal robot. The controlled reduction decouples the biped’s sagittal-plane motion from the yaw and lean modes, and on the sagittal subsystem we use passivity-based control to produce known planar limit cycles on flat ground. The unstable yaw and lean modes are separately controlled to 2-periodic orbits through their shaped momenta. We numerically verify the existence of stable 2-periodic straight-walking limit cycles and demonstrate turning capabilities for the controlled biped.