Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Verification of Relational Multiagent Systems with Data Types

We study the extension of relational multiagent systems (RMASs), where agents manipulate full-fledged relational databases, with data types and facets equipped with domain-specific, rigid relations (such as total orders). Specifically, we focus on design-time verification of RMASs against rich first-order temporal properties expressed in a variant of first-order mu-calculus with quantification across states. We build on previous decidability results under the state-bounded assumption, i.e., in each single state only a bounded number of data objects is stored in the agent databases, while unboundedly many can be encountered over time. We recast this condition, showing decidability in presence of dense, linear orders, and facets defined on top of them. Our approach is based on the construction of a finite-state, sound and complete abstraction of the original system, in which dense linear orders are reformulated as non-rigid relations working on the active domain of the system only. We also show undecidability when including a data type equipped with the successor relation.
All That Glitters is not Gold: Apical Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Mimicking Acute Coronary Syndrome

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is characterized by the idiopathic hypertrophy of the left ventricle (and occasionally right ventricle). HCM is an autosomal dominant disease, with variable penetration. In Asian population, apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is relatively common (25%). However, this is relatively rare in Caucasian population (0.2%). Patients with HCM, often presents with typical exertional chest pain and shortness of breath. Apical HCM patients tend to have milder symptoms. However, the clinical presentation and electrocardiographic features of Apical HCM often mimic acute coronary syndrome and high index of suspicion is warranted in differentiating this condition. Patients with apical HCM have relatively better prognosis when compare to the other varieties. Here, we are presenting a patient who presented with typical exertional chest pain whose electrocardiographic changes are concerning for acute ischemic changes.
On Hyper-Parameter Estimation In Empirical Bayes: A Revisit of The MacKay Algorithm

An iterative procedure introduced in MacKay's evidence framework is often used for estimating the hyper-parameter in empirical Bayes. Despite its effectiveness, the procedure has stayed primarily as a heuristic to date. This paper formally investigates the mathematical nature of this procedure and justifies it as a well-principled algorithm framework. This framework, which we call the MacKay algorithm, is shown to be closely related to the EM algorithm under certain Gaussian assumption.
Optimal SAT-based scheduler for time-triggered networks-on-a-chip

Many embedded systems are deployed with multi-core platforms where processor cores are interconnected by networks-on-a-chip. Time-triggered networks-on-a-chip are ideal for safety-critical systems due to the inherent fault isolation and temporal predictability. However, a communication schedule is required that determines for each message the points in time for the injection of messages at the network interface as well as conflict-free paths through the network-on-a-chip. The schedule ensures that at a given point in time only one flit traverses the physical link between two router ports, thereby avoiding the need for dynamic arbitration and improving temporal predictability. This paper introduces an optimal scheduler based on a Boolean SAT solver for a time-triggered network-on-a-chip. By adopting this solver technique from the area of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) we have observed a significant reduction of the computation time for optimal schedules in several example scenarios. The evaluation was performed by comparing the SAT-based scheduler with an optimal scheduler using Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). Due to the low computational time, we expect that the scheduling algorithm can replace heuristics in many applications.
Lane departure estimation by side fisheye camera

In this paper we propose a method of lane departure estimation by a fisheye camera mounted on the side of the vehicle, called a side fisheye camera. The side fisheye camera with hemispherical field of view can observe the side boundary of the vehicle and the lane markings existing at the side simultaneously. The algorithm of estimating the distance and the relative orientation between the vehicle and the nearest lane marking is proposed. The experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
A novel emitter localization method using an interferometer on a spin-stabilized satellite

The conventional line-of-sight (LOS) geo-location method using two-dimension interferometer on a satellite leads to heavy payloads and it is always affected by amplitude-phase inconsistencies among receiving channels. A novel passive localization method is proposed, which only needs two receiving channels to form an interferometer on a spin-stabilized satellite. The rate of phase difference change is measured for emitter localization in this method. The equipments mounted on the satellite can be cut down greatly and localization performance is not sensitive to amplitude-phase inconsistency between the two receiving channels as well as the localization is fast and accurate by this method. The Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is presented. Numerical results indicated that the localization performance will be better if the rotating plane of the interferometer is perpendicular to the satellite position vector at the initial moment and it can be improved by increasing rotating speed of the interferometer. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) was introduced as a location algorithm. Simulation results under typical scenario indicated that localization accuracy of PSO algorithm can approach CRLB.
The Relationship between Body Composition and Sexual Satisfaction in Heterosexual, Caucasian Young Adults

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BODY COMPOSITION AND SEXUAL SATISFACTION IN HETEROSEXUAL, CAUCASIAN YOUNG ADULTS Emily Annie Opperman University of Guelph, 2011 Advisors: Dr. Andrea C Buchholz Dr. Robin R Milhausen Background: Sexual satisfaction is a multidimensional construct encompassing the positive and negative aspects of a sexual relationship and is influenced by many factors. Objectives: To investigate the relationship between body composition (weight (kg), total fat (kg, %) and trunk fat (kg, %)) and sexual satisfaction in young adults while controlling for age, body image, relationship satisfaction, sexual function and sexual frequency. Methods: A cross-sectional sample of 157 young adults completed a series of questionnaires and underwent body composition testing (DXA). Stepwise logistic regression models were tested. Results: For both women and men, trunk fat (kg) but no other body composition variable predicted sexual satisfaction. For women, sexual function had the greatest impact followed by relationship satisfaction, trunk fat (kg) and sexual frequency. For men, relationship satisfaction had the greatest impact followed by sexual frequency, age and trunk fat (kg). Conclusions: Other variables better predict sexual satisfaction than body composition.
Faster-than-SIFT Object Detection

As computers become more powerful and video processing schemes improve, the problem of efficiently organizing and searching through videos becomes increasingly important. While the question of searching for objects in preprocessed or indexed videos is an important one, so is the problem of searching for objects in realtime video that has not been indexed. This question of searching realtime video has many applications, especially in the field of robotics and autonomous vehicle navigation. It can be further broken down into problems of searching for known objects (e.g. the backs of cars or pedestrians), or searching for new objects on the fly (e.g. returning to a specific location). In the former case, an expensive training phase for the object recognizer is not particularly bad, as the training can happen offline. However, in the latter phase, online training and subsequent search (classification) must be fast. One standard way to do object search is using SIFT descriptors to identify and match parts of query images and candidate images. However, this approach can be slow for classification, and could also be faster at training. Other methods optimize for classification, but at the detriment of training time. We propose the use of generic trees for realtime object search, and improve on the classification time taken by SIFT approximately by a factor of 5. Our approach also supports very fast training, taking no longer than it takes to search for an object in one candidate image. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides the background and an overview of the previous related work. Section 3 explains in detail our proposed scheme, before going into the analysis and results in section 4. Finally, section 5 reviews the main features of our method and gives some possible directions for future work.
Serial progression of cortical and medullary thymic epithelial microenvironments

Thymic epithelial cells (TECs) provide key instructive signals for T‐cell differentiation. Thymic cortical (cTECs) and medullary (mTECs) epithelial cells constitute two functionally distinct microenvironments for T‐cell development, which derive from a common bipotent TEC progenitor. While seminal studies have partially elucidated events downstream of bipotent TECs in relation to the emergence of mTECs and their progenitors, the control and timing of the emergence of the cTEC lineage, particularly in relation to that of mTEC progenitors, has remained elusive. In this review, we describe distinct models that explain cTEC/mTEC lineage divergence from common bipotent progenitors. In particular, we summarize recent studies in mice providing evidence that mTECs, including the auto‐immune regulator+ subset, derive from progenitors initially endowed with phenotypic properties typically associated with the cTEC lineage. These observations support a novel “serial progression” model of TEC development, in which progenitors serially acquire cTEC lineage markers, prior to their commitment to the mTEC differentiation pathway. Gaining a better understanding of the phenotypic properties of early stages in TEC progenitor development should help in determining the mechanisms regulating cTEC/mTEC lineage development, and in strategies aimed at thymus reconstitution involving TEC therapy.
Comparing inertia weights and constriction factors in particle swarm optimization

The performance of particle swarm optimization using an inertia weight is compared with performance using a constriction factor. Five benchmark functions are used for the comparison. It is concluded that the best approach is to use the constriction factor while limiting the maximum velocity Vmax to the dynamic range of the variable Xmax on each dimension. This approach provides performance on the benchmark functions superior to any other published results known by the authors.
Hedge Scope Detection in Biomedical Texts: An Effective Dependency-Based Method

Hedge detection is used to distinguish uncertain information from facts, which is of essential importance in biomedical information extraction. The task of hedge detection is often divided into two subtasks: detecting uncertain cues and their linguistic scope. Hedge scope is a sequence of tokens including the hedge cue in a sentence. Previous hedge scope detection methods usually take all tokens in a sentence as candidate boundaries, which inevitably generate a large number of negatives for classifiers. The imbalanced instances seriously mislead classifiers and result in lower performance. This paper proposes a dependency-based candidate boundary selection method (DCBS), which selects the most likely tokens as candidate boundaries and removes the exceptional tokens which have less potential to improve the performance based on dependency tree. In addition, we employ the composite kernel to integrate lexical and syntactic information and demonstrate the effectiveness of structured syntactic features for hedge scope detection. Experiments on the CoNLL-2010 Shared Task corpus show that our method achieves 71.92% F1-score on the golden standard cues, which is 4.11% higher than the system without using DCBS. Although the candidate boundary selection method is only evaluated on hedge scope detection here, it can be popularized to other kinds of scope learning tasks.
Audiovisual speech enhancement experiments for mouth segmentation evaluation

Mouth segmentation is an important issue which applies in many multimedia applications as speech reading, face synthesis, recognition or audiovisual communication. Our goal is to have a robust and efficient detection of lips contour in order to restore as faithfully as possible the speech movement. We present a methodology which focused on the detection of the inner and outer mouth contours which is a difficult task due to the non-linear appearance variations. Our method is based on a statistical model of shape with local appearance gaussian descriptors whose theoretical responses were predicted by a non-linear neural network. From our automatic segmentation of the mouth, we can generate a clone of a speaker mouth whose lips movements will be as close as possible of the original ones. In this paper, results obtained by this methodology are evaluated qualitatively by testing the relevance of this clone. We carried out an experience which quantified the effective enhancement in comprehension brought by our analysis-resynthesis scheme in a telephone enquiry task.
A Novel Approach to Active Noise Control Based on Wave Domain Adaptive Filtering

Wave Field Analysis and Synthesis are methods which permit 3D sound field recording and reproduction. They are based on the precise extrapolation and reconstruction of the desired wave field by using arrays of microphones and loudspeakers. In order to utilize these techniques in real world applications (e.g. cinema, home theatre, teleconferencing) it is necessary to apply multi-channel Digital Signal Processing algorithms, already developed for traditional systems. In this paper we approach the problem of Active Noise Control (ANC) from the mentioned point of view: we will present two cancellation schemes depending on whether the noise sources are localized in the recording room or in the reproduction environment. The two algorithms make use of the spatio-temporal transforms, on which Wave Domain Adaptive Filtering (WDAF) is based, in order to reduce the computational complexity. It will be shown through numerical simulations that it is possible to suppress noise sources localized either inside or outside the recording/reproduction area.
Using Word-Pair Identifier to Improve Chinese Input System

This paper presents a word-pair (WP) identifier that can be used to resolve homonym/segmentation ambiguities and perform syllable-to-word (STW) conversion effectively for improving Chinese input systems. The experiment results show the following: (1) the WP identifier is able to achieve to-nal (syllables with four tones) and toneless (syllables without four tones) STW accuracies of 98.5% and 90.7%, respectively, among the identified word-pairs; (2) while applying the WP identifier, together with the Microsoft input method editor 2003 and an optimized bigram model, the tonal and toneless STW improvements of the two input systems are 27.5%/18.9% and 22.1%/18.8%, respectively.
Extremum mean empirical mode decomposition

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is a data driven processing algorithm, which applies no predetermined filter. It is able to perfectly analyze the nonlinear and nonstationary signals. In EMD decomposition processing, the envelopes are computed by spline interpolation, which is time-consuming. In this work, based on the straight line method, we proposed using the extrema points to improve the interpolation result, which is Extrema Mean Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMEMD). The EMEMD approach can decompose the IMFs fast and more meaningful. The IMFs of EMEMD detect clearer and more time-frequency information than EMD.
Evolutionary Expansion, Gene Structure, and Expression of the Rice Wall-Associated Kinase Gene Family1[w]

The wall-associated kinase (WAK) gene family, one of the receptor-like kinase (RLK) gene families in plants, plays important roles in cell expansion, pathogen resistance, and heavy-metal stress tolerance in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). Through a reiterative database search and manual reannotation, we identified 125 OsWAK gene family members from rice (Oryza sativa) japonica cv Nipponbare; 37 (approximately 30%) OsWAKs were corrected/reannotated from earlier automated annotations. Of the 125 OsWAKs, 67 are receptor-like kinases, 28 receptor-like cytoplasmic kinases, 13 receptor-like proteins, 12 short genes, and five pseudogenes. The two-intron gene structure of the Arabidopsis WAK/WAK-Likes is generally conserved in OsWAKs; however, extra/missed introns were observed in some OsWAKs either in extracellular regions or in protein kinase domains. In addition to the 38 OsWAKs with full-length cDNA sequences and the 11 with rice expressed sequence tag sequences, gene expression analyses, using tiling-microarray analysis of the 20 OsWAKs on chromosome 10 and reverse transcription-PCR analysis for five OsWAKs, indicate that the majority of identified OsWAKs are likely expressed in rice. Phylogenetic analyses of OsWAKs, Arabidopsis WAK/WAK-Likes, and barley (Hordeum vulgare) HvWAKs show that the OsWAK gene family expanded in the rice genome due to lineage-specific expansion of the family in monocots. Localized gene duplications appear to be the primary genetic event in OsWAK gene family expansion and the 125 OsWAKs, present on all 12 chromosomes, are mostly clustered.
Quinidine, but Not Eicosanoid Antagonists or Dexamethasone, Protect the Gut from Platelet Activating Factor-Induced Vasoconstriction, Edema and Paralysis

Intestinal circulatory disturbances, atony, edema and swelling are of great clinical relevance, but the related mechanisms and possible therapeutic options are poorly characterized, in part because of the difficulties to comprehensively analyze these conditions. To overcome these limitations we have developed a model of the isolated perfused rat small intestine where all of these symptoms can be studied simultaneously. Here we used this model to study the role of eicosanoids, steroids and quinidine in platelet-activating factor (PAF)-induced intestinal disorders. A vascular bolus of PAF (0.5 nmol) triggered release of thromboxane and peptidoleukotrienes into the vascular bed (peak concentration 35 nM and 0.8 nM) and reproduced all symptoms of intestinal failure: mesenteric vasoconstriction, translocation of fluid and macromolecules from the vasculature to the lumen and lymphatics, intestinal edema formation, loss of intestinal peristalsis and decreased galactose uptake. All effects of PAF were abolished by the PAF-receptor antagonist ABT491 (2.5 μM). The COX and LOX inhibitors ASA and AA861 (500 μM, 10 μM) did not exhibit barrier-protective effects and the eicosanoid antagonists SQ29548 and MK571 (10 μM, each) only moderately attenuated the loss of vascular fluid, the redistribution to the lumen and the transfer of FITC dextran to the lumen. The steroid dexamethasone (10 μM) showed no barrier-protective properties and failed to prevent edema formation. Quinidine (100 μM) inhibited the increase in arterial pressure, stabilized all the intestinal barriers, and reduced lymph production and the transfer of FITC dextran to the lymph. While quinidine by itself reduced peristalsis, it also obviated paralysis, preserved intestinal functions and prevented edema formation. We conclude that quinidine exerts multiple protective effects against vasoconstriction, edema formation and paralysis in the intestine. The therapeutic use of quinidine for intestinal ailments deserves further study.
A Web Mining Based Measurement and Monitoring Model of Urban Mass Panic in Emergency Management

It is very important to discover the mass panic when city is in emergency. A traditional approach is to do a survey among urban mass, which would cost much time and money. In our opinion, a more suitable and effective approach is to do Web-based investigation which includes discovery, measurement, and monitoring. A framework including information retrieval, data mining, and area knowledge analysis is presented. Great efforts have been put to the urban mass panic measurement model in terms of over 10 indicators which have covered most relevant Web sites, consisting of portal, forums, BBS and other interactive Web sites. Experimental results are discussed at the end of the article.
Early human papillomavirus testing predicts residual/recurrent disease after LEEP

Objective The purpose of this study was to determine the predictive factors for residual/recurrent disease and to analyze the timing for Pap smears and human papillomavirus (HPV) testing during follow-up after loop electrosurgical excision procedure (LEEP) for cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) 2 or worse. Methods We retrospectively analyzed 183 patients (mean age, 39.3 years) with CIN 2/3 who were treated with LEEP. Post-LEEP follow-up was performed by Pap smear and HPV hybrid capture2 (HC2) testing. The definition of persistent/recurrent disease was biopsy-proven CIN 2 or worse. Results Among 183 patients, punch biopsies were CIN 2 in 31 (16.9%) and CIN 3 in 152 (83.1%). HPV HC2 tests before LEEP were positive in 170 (95.5%) of 178 patients. During follow-up, 12 patients (6.6%) had residual/recurrent CIN 2+. LEEP margin status was a significant predictive factor for persistent/recurrent disease. Other factors such as age, HPV HC2 viral load (≥100 relative light units), and HPV typing (type 16/18 vs. other types) did not predict recurrence. Early HPV HC2 testing at 3 months after LEEP detected all cases of residual/recurrent disease. The sensitivity and negative predictive value of the HPV HC2 test for residual/recurrent disease were both 100% at 3 and 6 months. Conclusion Margin involvement in conization specimens was a significant factor predicting residual/recurrent disease after LEEP. HPV test results at 3 and 6 months after treatment were comparable. Early 3-month follow-up testing after LEEP can offer timely information about residual/recurrent disease and alleviate patient anxiety early about treatment failure.
TDMA-based MAC transmission schedules in multihop grid Ad Hoc underwater acoustic networks

Development and deployment of underwater acoustic (UWA) sensor networks have emerged as an efficient solution for many applications related to marine environment e.g., scientific, industrial, and military operations. The main tasks to execute are remote sensing and monitoring. Grid topology with multihop relaying is very useful, since it allows a wide area coverage as well as long distance data transmission. In this paper, we investigate architectures where sensing and monitoring data are forwarded over multiple lines independently. We are interested in transmission schedules which maximize network throughput. We prove that an optimal schedule is necessarily per-node fair. We also derive the upper bound. Furthermore, we present a low-complexity algorithm to find schedules achieving the upper bound, regardless of the size of the network.