Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activity monitoring using topic models

Activity monitoring is the task of continual observation, which in many cases, needs to verify a window of data that is captured from a data stream. For some types of categorical data, such as zip codes and phone numbers, hundreds of unique attribute values exist and the frequency vector of a window will be high-dimensional and sparse. This vector is then hard to be compared to the frequency vector of the training set that was collected from a much longer period of time. In this paper, using topic models, we present a method for dimensionality reduction which can detect anomalous windows with low false positive and false negative rates. We also address the problem of the variable nature of normal data by updating the model parameters along with the gradual changes of the data. Our experiments on several real life datasets show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods for categorical data with large domains of unique attribute values.
Formal partitioning analysis and verification of extended algebraic automata

Algebraic automata is getting much importance in theoretical computer science because of its various applications, for example, in optimization of programs, verification of protocols, cryptography and modeling biological phenomena. Design of a complex system not only requires functionality but it also needs to capture its control behaviour. This paper is a part of our ongoing research on integration of algebraic automata and formal methods. Algebraic automaton is a powerful tool in modeling behaviour while Z is an ideal specification language used for describing statics of a system. Consequently, an integration of algebraic automata and Z will be a useful tool for modeling of complex systems. In this paper, we have described formal partitioning analysis of extended algebraic automata because of its use in components based modeling. At first, formal specification of constructing sub-automata for given automata is presented. Then equality of two given automata is verified. In next, cycles are identified and finally formal partitioning analysis of extended algebraic automata is provided. The formal specification is checked, analyzed and validated using Z/Eves tool. Key words: Algebraic automata, partitioning automata, component based modeling, Z notation, validation.
Reference climate dataset for the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra river basins

This work was carried out by the Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience (HI-AWARE) consortium under the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA) with financial support from the UK Government’s Department for International Development and the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.
Chapter 4 Identifying and Investigating Evolution Type Decomposition Weaknesses

The way a software system is decomposed into a set of decomposition elements greatly affects the amount of effort spent on the development and maintenance of that system. Changes that are not limited to single decomposition element are likely to require more communication between developers, delays in development and increased amount of test cases. Therefore, one of the most challenging tasks of software architects is to decompose the software system such that the resulting decomposition elements can evolve as independent as possible. In most cases, software systems are already decomposed in some way and the task of the architect then is to assess the state of the decomposition, find the decomposition weaknesses and improve the decomposition if necessary. How to identify and investigate those decomposition weaknesses which hinder the sound evolution of the software system is described in this chapter.
Incentives and Problem Uncertainty in Innovation Contests: An Empirical Analysis

Contests are a historically important and increasingly popular mechanism for encouraging innovation. A central concern in designing innovation contests is how many competitors to admit. Using a unique data set of 9,661 software contests, we provide evidence of two coexisting and opposing forces that operate when the number of competitors increases. Greater rivalry reduces the incentives of all competitors in a contest to exert effort and make investments. At the same time, adding competitors increases the likelihood that at least one competitor will find an extreme-value solution. We show that the effort-reducing effect of greater rivalry dominates for less uncertain problems, whereas the effect on the extreme value prevails for more uncertain problems. Adding competitors thus systematically increases overall contest performance for high-uncertainty problems. We also find that higher uncertainty reduces the negative effect of added competitors on incentives. Thus, uncertainty and the nature of the problem should be explicitly considered in the design of innovation tournaments. We explore the implications of our findings for the theory and practice of innovation contests. This paper was accepted by Christian Terwiesch, operations management.
Analysis and Optimization of Thermal Effect on STT-RAM Based 3-D Stacked Cache Design

Spin-Transfer Torque Random Access Memory (STT-RAM) has been proved a promising emerging nonvolatile memory technology suitable for many applications such as cache memory of CPU. Simulation results show that the switching time of Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ), which is the core element of the STT-RAM cell, varies when the temperature changes. In this paper, we study the thermal effect on switching time of STT-RAM cell, and it is showed that when temperature changes from 300K to 375K, the required write pulse period to achieve 10-8 bit error rate (BER) increases from 10.02ns to 15.04ns under 45nm technology. When STT-RAM is used as 3-D stacked L3 cache, the required write pulse period ranges from 11.42ns to 14.68ns due to temperature variation caused by the CPU core layer. If the thermal effect is not considered, the BER of the hottest region will significantly increase to 10-4. Based on these observations, an optimization design with Dynamic Temperature Aware Write Access is proposed, to increase the efficiency of accessing a 3-D stacked STT-RAM cache, as well as achieve the target BER. Compared to a conventional design, the proposed scheme can improve the CPU performance by 3.8% and reduce the write energy consumption of the STT-RAM cache by 4.8%.
EXTRACTION OF ROBUST FEATURES BY COMBINING NOISE REDUCTION AND FDLP FOR THE RECOGNITION OF NOISY SPEECH SIGNALS IN HANDS-FREE MODE

A processing scheme is presented to create robust acoustic features for the recognition of noisy speech signals at a hands-free speech input in reverberant environments. The robustness is achieved by extending a Mel cepstral analysis scheme by the additional processing steps of a noise reduction and a frequency domain linear prediction (FDLP). FDLP is a signal processing technique to modify the energy contours of subband signals. We analyze the effects of FDLP and show its ability to create robust features by looking at the energy contours of clean and reverberant speech signals. This technique is combined with a noise reduction approach that is based on an adaptive filtering in the spectral domain. We analyze the effectiveness of our approach by running several different recognition experiments and evaluating the achieved recognition results. The experiments contain recognition tasks with different complexity and with a different modeling of speech by applying whole-word or phoneme based reference models. Besides the recognition of reverberant versions of the TIDigits we focus on the experiments as defined by the Reverb Challenge task where the focus is put on the effects of a hands-free speech input without a lot of noise in the background. Furthermore, we created two further versions of the development test data to include the effects of typical noise scenarios at a realistic signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in room environments.
Modeling Autumn Sceneries

This paper presents a system for modeling autumn leaves covering vegetation and monuments. We simulate the coloring and aging process by a stochastic model that represents the probability of evolution of a leaf according to the characteristics of the environment. We distribute leaves over the ground by approximating their complex movement by trajectory templates such as fluttering, rolling and tumbling. Leaves stack onto the ground in successive layers so as to improve the collision detection step.
Salt-Restriction-Spoon Improved the Salt Intake among Residents in China

Objective To evaluate the effect of an improved salt-restriction spoon on the attitude of salt-restriction, the using rate of salt-restriction-spoon, the actual salt intake, and 24-hour urinary sodium excretion (24HUNa). Design A community intervention study. Setting Two villages in Beijing. Participants 403 local adult residents being responsible for home cooking. Intervention Participants were randomly assigned to the intervention group or the control group. Those in the intervention group were provided with an improved salt-restriction-spoon and health education, and were informed of their actual salt intake and 24HUNa. Not any intervention was given to those in the control group. Main Outcome Measures The scores on the variables of Health Belief Model, the using rate of salt-restriction-spoon, the actual salt intake, and 24HUNa. Analysis Covariance analyses, Chi-square tests, Student’s t tests, and repeated measures analyses of variance. Results After 6 months of intervention, the intervention group felt significantly less objective barriers, and got access to significantly more cues to action as compared to the control group. The using rate and the correctly using rate of salt-restriction-spoon were significantly higher in the intervention group. The daily salt intake decreased by 1.42 g in the intervention group and by 0.28 g in the control group, and repeated measures analysis of variance showed significant change over time (F = 7.044, P<0.001) and significant difference between groups by time (F = 2.589, P = 0.041). The 24HUNa decreased by 34.84 mmol in the intervention group and by 33.65 mmol in the control group, and repeated measures analysis of variance showed significant change over time (F = 14.648, P<0.001) without significant difference between groups by time (F = 0.222, P = 0.870). Conclusions The intervention effect was acceptable, therefore, the improved salt-restriction-spoon and corresponding health education could be considered as an alternative for salt reduction strategy in China and other countries where salt intake comes mainly from home cooking.
A long term, non-tumorigenic rat hepatocyte cell line and its malignant counterpart, as tools to study hepatocarcinogenesis

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most common cancer worldwide and the second cause of cancer-related death. Search for genes/proteins whose expression can discriminate between normal and neoplastic liver is fundamental for diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic purposes. Currently, the most used in vitro hepatocyte models to study molecular alterations underlying transformation include primary hepatocytes and transformed cell lines. However, each of these models presents limitations. Here we describe the isolation and characterization of two rat hepatocyte cell lines as tools to study liver carcinogenesis. Long-term stable cell lines were obtained from a HCC-bearing rat exposed to the Resistant-Hepatocyte protocol (RH cells) and from a rat subjected to the same model in the absence of carcinogenic treatment, thus not developing HCCs (RNT cells). The presence of several markers identified the hepatocytic origin of both cell lines and confirmed their purity. Although morphologically similar to normal primary hepatocytes, RNT cells were able to survive and grow in monolayer culture for months and were not tumorigenic in vivo. On the contrary, RH cells displayed tumor-initiating cell markers, formed numerous colonies in soft agar and spheroids when grown in 3D and were highly tumorigenic and metastatic after injection into syngeneic rats and immunocompromised mice. Moreover, RNT gene expression profile was similar to normal liver, while that of RH resembled HCC. In conclusion, the two cell lines here described represent a useful tool to investigate the molecular changes underlying hepatocyte transformation and to experimentally demonstrate their role in HCC development.
Two Phase Based Spammer Detection in Weibo

Recent years, with the growth of social network users, the social network have become a more and more important platform for sharing information. The growth of social network users inevitably leads to the appearance of spammers, who usually spread spam information, post reduplicate messages to mess up legitimate users' reading timeline or affect their operation feeling on social networks. As one of the largest online social networks in China, although Weibo system has already adopted certain kinds of spammer detection approaches, there are still many spammers existing in Weibo. Hence, in this paper, we propose a two phase based spammer detection approach. In this approach, firstly we take the existing works about the user feature as the first phase. In addition, we introduce content mining as the second phase in spammer detection. Technically, LDA is introduced to analyze the topics of a user in Weibo. More specifically, if his/her topics are usually spammed, we can claim that the user is a spammer. Experimental results show that our proposed approach is better than the existing approaches on spammer detection.
Differential role of intravenous anesthetics in colorectal cancer progression: implications for clinical application

Anesthetics are unavoidable to colorectal cancer (CRC) patients who underwent surgical treatment. Thus, the molecular mechanisms underlying the role of the intravenous anesthetics in CRC metastasis are still unclear. In this study, the effects of intravenous anesthetics, such as propofol, etomidate and dexmedetomidine, on cell migration were determined. The migration of CRC cells was inhibited by propofol in vitro, but not in vivo. Etomidate, however, promoted the migration of CRC cells both in vitro and in vivo. Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) mediated the promotive effect of propofol and etomidate on the migration of CRC cells through PI3K/AKT signaling pathway. Dexmedetomidine alone or in combination with propofol or etomidate had minor effect on the migration of CRC cells. These findings indicate that propofol inhibites CRC cell migration in vitro. Etomidate playes a role for prompting CRC metastasis progression by activating (PI3K)/AKT signaling and inducing EMT. It provides an important hint for the clinical application of these anesthetics.
Are Individual and Community Acceptance and Witnessing of Intimate Partner Violence Related to Its Occurrence? Multilevel Structural Equation Model

Background Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is a serious and widespread problem worldwide. Much of the research on IPVAW focused on individual-level factors and attention has been paid to the contextual factors. The aim of this study was to develop and test a model of individual- and community-level factors associated with IPVAW. Methods and Findings We conducted a (multivariate) multilevel structural equation analysis on 8731 couples nested within 883 communities in Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey 2008. Variables included in the model were derived from respondents' answers to the experience of IPVAW, attitudes towards wife beating and witnessing physical violence in childhood. We found that women that witnessed physical violence were more likely to have tolerant attitudes towards IPVAW and women with tolerant attitudes were more likely to have reported spousal IPVAW abuse. Women with husbands with tolerant attitudes towards IPVAW were more likely to have reported spousal abuse. We found that an increasing proportion of women in the community with tolerant attitudes was significantly positively associated with spousal sexual and emotional abuse, but not significantly associated with spousal physical abuse. In addition, we found that an increasing proportion of men in the community with tolerant attitudes and an increasing proportion of women who had witnessed physical violence in the community was significantly positively associated with spousal physical abuse, but not significantly associated with spousal sexual and emotional abuse. There was a positive correlation between all three types of IPVAW at individual- and community-level. Conclusions We found that community tolerant attitudes context in which people live is associated with exposure to IPVAW even after taking into account individual tolerant attitudes. Public health interventions designed to reduce IPVAW must address people and the communities in which they live in order to be successful.
Treatment outcomes of patients with FIGO Stage I/II uterine cervical cancer treated with definitive radiotherapy: a multi-institutional retrospective research study

The purpose of this study was to analyze the patterns of care and outcomes of patients with FIGO Stage I/II cervical cancer who underwent definitive radiotherapy (RT) at multiple Japanese institutions. The Japanese Radiation Oncology Study Group (JROSG) performed a questionnaire-based survey of their cervical cancer patients who were treated with definitive RT between January 2000 and December 2005. A total of 667 patients were entered in this study. Although half of the patients were considered suitable for definitive RT based on the clinical features of the tumor, about one-third of the patients were prescribed RT instead of surgery because of poor medical status. The RT schedule most frequently utilized was whole-pelvic field irradiation (WP) of 30 Gy/15 fractions followed by WP with midline block of 20 Gy/10 fractions, and high-dose-rate intracavitary brachytherapy (HDR-ICBT) of 24 Gy/4 fractions prescribed at point A. Chemotherapy was administered to 306 patients (46%). The most frequent regimen contained cisplatin (CDDP). The median follow-up time for all patients was 65 months (range, 2–135 months). The 5-year overall survival (OS), pelvic control (PC) and disease-free survival (DFS) rates for all patients were 78%, 90% and 69%, respectively. Tumor diameter and nodal status were significant prognostic indicators for OS, PC and DFS. Chemotherapy has potential for improving the OS and DFS of patients with bulky tumors, but not for non-bulky tumors. This study found that definitive RT for patients with Stage I/II cervical cancer achieved good survival outcomes.
The Motility of a Human Parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, Is Regulated by a Novel Lysine Methyltransferase

Protozoa in the phylum Apicomplexa are a large group of obligate intracellular parasites. Toxoplasma gondii and other apicomplexan parasites, such as Plasmodium falciparum, cause diseases by reiterating their lytic cycle, comprising host cell invasion, parasite replication, and parasite egress. The successful completion of the lytic cycle requires that the parasite senses changes in its environment and switches between the non-motile (for intracellular replication) and motile (for invasion and egress) states appropriately. Although the signaling pathway that regulates the motile state switch is critical to the pathogenesis of the diseases caused by these parasites, it is not well understood. Here we report a previously unknown mechanism of regulating the motility activation in Toxoplasma, mediated by a protein lysine methyltransferase, AKMT (for Apical complex lysine (K) methyltransferase). AKMT depletion greatly inhibits activation of motility, compromises parasite invasion and egress, and thus severely impairs the lytic cycle. Interestingly, AKMT redistributes from the apical complex to the parasite body rapidly in the presence of egress-stimulating signals that increase [Ca2+] in the parasite cytoplasm, suggesting that AKMT regulation of parasite motility might be accomplished by the precise temporal control of its localization in response to environmental changes.
Non-image Forming Light Detection by Melanopsin, Rhodopsin, and Long-Middlewave (L/W) Cone Opsin in the Subterranean Blind Mole Rat, Spalax Ehrenbergi: Immunohistochemical Characterization, Distribution, and Connectivity

The blind mole rat, Spalax ehrenbergi, can, despite severely degenerated eyes covered by fur, entrain to the daily light/dark cycle and adapt to seasonal changes due to an intact circadian timing system. The present study demonstrates that the Spalax retina contains a photoreceptor layer, an outer nuclear layer (ONL), an outer plexiform layer (OPL), an inner nuclear layer (INL), an inner plexiform layer (IPL), and a ganglion cell layer (GCL). By immunohistochemistry, the number of melanopsin (mRGCs) and non-melanopsin bearing retinal ganglion cells was analyzed in detail. Using the ganglion cell marker RNA-binding protein with multiple splicing (RBPMS) it was shown that the Spalax eye contains 890 ± 62 RGCs. Of these, 87% (752 ± 40) contain melanopsin (cell density 788 melanopsin RGCs/mm2). The remaining RGCs were shown to co-store Brn3a and calretinin. The melanopsin cells were located mainly in the GCL with projections forming two dendritic plexuses located in the inner part of the IPL and in the OPL. Few melanopsin dendrites were also found in the ONL. The Spalax retina is rich in rhodopsin and long/middle wave (L/M) cone opsin bearing photoreceptor cells. By using Ctbp2 as a marker for ribbon synapses, both rods and L/M cone ribbons containing pedicles in the OPL were found in close apposition with melanopsin dendrites in the outer plexus suggesting direct synaptic contact. A subset of cone bipolar cells and all photoreceptor cells contain recoverin while a subset of bipolar and amacrine cells contain calretinin. The calretinin expressing amacrine cells seemed to form synaptic contacts with rhodopsin containing photoreceptor cells in the OPL and contacts with melanopsin cell bodies and dendrites in the IPL. The study demonstrates the complex retinal circuitry used by the Spalax to detect light, and provides evidence for both melanopsin and non-melanopsin projecting pathways to the brain.