Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Further Results about Calibration of Longevity Risk for the Insurance Business

In life insurance business, longevity risk, i.e. the risk that the insured population lives longer than the expected, represents the heart of the risk assessment, having significant impact in terms of solvency capital requirements (SCRs) needed to front the firm obligations. The credit crisis has shown that systemic risk as longevity risk is relevant and that for many insurers it is actually the dominant risk. With the adoption of the Solvency II directive, a new area for insurance in terms of solvency regulation has been opened up. The international guidelines prescribe a market consistent valuation of balance sheets, where the solvency capital requirements to be set aside are calculated according to a modular structure. By mapping the main risk affecting the insurance portfolio, the capital amount able to cover the liabilities corresponds to each measured risk. In Solvency II, the longevity risk is included into underwriting risk module. In particular, the rules propose that companies use a standard model for measuring the SCRs. Nevertheless, the legislation under consideration allows designing tailor-made internal models. As regards the longevity risk assessment, the regulatory standard model leads to noteworthy inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose a stochastic volatility model combined with a so-called coherent risk measure as the expected shortfall for measuring the SCRs according to more realistic assumptions on future evolution of longevity trend. Finally empirical evidence is provided.
Literature Review of Functional Electrical Stimulation Systems

Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is a technique used to reproduce the activation patterns of functional muscles, in order to create muscular contractions, through electrical stimulation of the muscles’ nervous tissue. Even though FES has been used since 1961, most of the recently developed systems still use pre-programmed movements. Thus, given the global trend for personalized and wearable rehabilitation methods, this paper focuses on a literature review of FES systems’ components and the control strategies that aim to provide a personalized experience for the user, with the purpose of finding the best approach for a FES drop foot correction system.
A quantum mechanical open system as a model of a heat engine

A quantum model of a heat engine is analyzed. This engine is constructed from two coupled oscillators in interaction with a warm and cold reservoir. Power is extracted by an external periodic driving force. As a function of control parameters a maximum in power is obtained, and a decline of thermodynamic efficiency below the ideal Carnot value. This irreversibility is a consequence of the mechanism devised to extract power in its perturbing the energy level structure of the engine. In the limit of weak coupling to the driving force the efficiency at maximum power obtains the value of η=1−((Ta/Tb))1/2.
Race and Apolipoprotein E-e4 Allele Status Differences in the Association Between Loneliness and Cognitive Decline

ABSTRACT Objective This study aimed to examine race and apolipoprotein E-e4 allele (APOE-e4) status differences in the longitudinal associations between loneliness and cognitive decline. Methods The study sample is composed of participants (N = 7696, 64% Black participants and 36% White participants) from the Chicago Health and Aging Project, a population-based cohort study. Mixed-effects regression models were conducted to examine the longitudinal associations between loneliness on global cognitive function and individual tests of cognitive function. Models were also stratified by race and APOE-e4. Results A greater percentage of Black participants (17%) reported loneliness at baseline visit compared with White participants (12%). Black and White participants who were lonely individuals had a similar rate of decline in global cognitive function at 0.075 (95% confidence interval [CI] = −0.082 to −0.068) standard deviation unit (SDU) per year for Black participants and at 0.075 (95% CI = −0.086 to −0.063) SDU per year for White participants. Lonely participants with APOE-e4 had a higher rate of global cognitive decline at −0.102 (95% CI = −0.115 to −0.088) SDU per year than for lonely participants without APOE-e4 at −0.052 (95% CI = −0.059 to −0.045) SDU per year. Conclusions The burden of loneliness and its relation to cognitive decline is higher among participants with APOE-e4 compared with those without APOE-e4. Loneliness is associated with cognitive decline in both Black and White participants.
Molecular architecture and oligomerization of Candida glabrata Cdc13 underpin its telomeric DNA-binding and unfolding activity

Abstract The CST complex is a key player in telomere replication and stability, which in yeast comprises Cdc13, Stn1 and Ten1. While Stn1 and Ten1 are very well conserved across species, Cdc13 does not resemble its mammalian counterpart CTC1 either in sequence or domain organization, and Cdc13 but not CTC1 displays functions independently of the rest of CST. Whereas the structures of human CTC1 and CST have been determined, the molecular organization of Cdc13 remains poorly understood. Here, we dissect the molecular architecture of Candida glabrata Cdc13 and show how it regulates binding to telomeric sequences. Cdc13 forms dimers through the interaction between OB-fold 2 (OB2) domains. Dimerization stimulates binding of OB3 to telomeric sequences, resulting in the unfolding of ssDNA secondary structure. Once bound to DNA, Cdc13 prevents the refolding of ssDNA by mechanisms involving all domains. OB1 also oligomerizes, inducing higher-order complexes of Cdc13 in vitro. OB1 truncation disrupts these complexes, affects ssDNA unfolding and reduces telomere length in C. glabrata. Together, our results reveal the molecular organization of C. glabrata Cdc13 and how this regulates the binding and the structure of DNA, and suggest that yeast species evolved distinct architectures of Cdc13 that share some common principles.
The formation of HuR/YB1 complex is required for the stabilization of target mRNA to promote myogenesis

Abstract mRNA stability is the mechanism by which cells protect transcripts allowing their expression to execute various functions that affect cell metabolism and fate. It is well-established that RNA binding proteins (RBPs) such as HuR use their ability to stabilize mRNA targets to modulate vital processes such as muscle fiber formation (myogenesis). However, the machinery and the mechanisms regulating mRNA stabilization are still elusive. Here, we identified Y-Box binding protein 1 (YB1) as an indispensable HuR binding partner for mRNA stabilization and promotion of myogenesis. Both HuR and YB1 bind to 409 common mRNA targets, 147 of which contain a U-rich consensus motif in their 3′ untranslated region (3′UTR) that can also be found in mRNA targets in other cell systems. YB1 and HuR form a heterodimer that associates with the U-rich consensus motif to stabilize key promyogenic mRNAs. The formation of this complex involves a small domain in HuR (227–234) that if mutated prevents HuR from reestablishing myogenesis in siHuR-treated muscle cells. Together our data uncover that YB1 is a key player in HuR-mediated stabilization of pro-myogenic mRNAs and provide the first indication that the mRNA stability mechanism is as complex as other key cellular processes such as mRNA decay and translation.
Therapist-guided internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy versus face-to-face CBT for depression/anxiety symptoms in infertile women with adjustment disorders: A randomized controlled trial

ABSTRACT Objective: The present study compared the effectiveness of ICBT to face-to-face CBT on the improvement of adjustment disorder symptoms in infertile women. Method: In a pragmatic, multi-center (public or private), single-blinded, non-inferior randomized controlled trial (RCT), 152 patients with AD (100 women in public center and 52 women in private canter) were assigned to ICBT and CBT. Primary outcomes were Adjustment Disorder New Module-20 (ADNM-20) and Hospital Anxiety and Depression (HADS). Secondary outcomes were the Fertility Problem Inventory (FPI) and Fertility Adjustment Scale (FAS). Results: “Peaceful mind” ICBT was feasible and accessible for delivering the treatment to infertile women with AD. At end-of-treatment, improvements in ICBT were non-inferior to CBT for symptoms of AD, anxiety, and depression. Additionally, the non-inferiority of ICBT to CBT was maintained at a three-month follow-up. Conclusions: ICBT was non-inferior to CBT in improving mental symptoms in infertile women with AD.
HDX-MS study on garadacimab binding to activated FXII reveals potential binding interfaces through differential solvent exposure

ABSTRACT Hageman factor (FXII) is an essential component in the intrinsic coagulation cascade and a therapeutic target for the prophylactic treatment of hereditary angioedema (HAE). CSL312 (garadacimab) is a novel high-affinity human antibody capable of blocking activated FXII activity that is currently undergoing Phase 3 clinical trials in HAE. Structural studies using hydrogen/deuterium exchange coupled to mass spectrometry revealed evidence of interaction between the antibody and regions surrounding the S1 specificity pocket of FXII, including the 99-loop, 140-loop, 180-loop, and neighboring regions. We propose complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) in heavy-chain CDR2 and CDR3 as potential paratopes on garadacimab, and the 99-loop, 140-loop, 180-loop, and 220-loop as binding sites on the beta chain of activated FXII (β-FXIIa).
Localized Kinetic Structures in Magnetized Plasmas

We present a kinetic description of localized potential structures in a magnetized plasma. It is shown that the Vlasov equation admits solutions in the form of non-Maxwellian particle distributions. The general form of these particle distributions is derived, and some special solutions are employed into Poisson's equation to obtain numerical solutions comprising localized potential humps and electron and ion density holes. The relevance of our investigation to magnetized space and laboratory plasmas is discussed.
The impact of small lot ordering on traffic congestion in a physical distribution system

In recent years, some managers and researchers have advocated reducing lot sizes by decreasing setup costs, arguing that smaller lot sizes improve quality while reducing inventory levels and associated holding costs. However, smaller lot sizes result in an increased number of shipments which, in turn, exacerbates traffic congestion. This results in longer delivery times and, thereby, higher inventory levels. In this paper we study the relation between lot sizes and traffic congestion by constructing a model with numerous retailers who share a common congested delivery road. Using a numerical example, we illustrate the model's managerial implications with respect to several factors, including lot sizes, traffic congestion, and inventory levels. Our findings suggest that in a physical distribution system, if there are a relatively large number of retailers, no single retailer has an incentive to increase batch sizes because one retailer's effect on reducing traffic congestion will be negligible. If all retailers increase their lotsizes, however, traffic congestion will be reduced and all retailers will experience lower costs.
The mismatch response in normal hearing adults: a performance comparison with stimuli relevant for objective validation of hearing aid fittings

Abstract Objective A long-standing observation is that the Mismatch Response (MMR) has the potential to offer a clinically feasible index of sound discrimination. However, findings that positively identify MMRs at the individual level have been mixed, even for those who are normally hearing and who can discriminate sounds behaviourally. This complicates interpretation when an MMR is not observed. The objective of this study was to determine the reliability of the MMR using an optimised paradigm and a range of stimuli relevant to audiological applications in relation to objective verification of hearing aid fittings. Design MMRs were measured using an optimised 3-deviant paradigm in response to a range of sounds designed for aided and unaided sound field assessments, including complex tones (CTs) and speech-like signals. Study sample Seventeen normally hearing adults (18–56 years). Results The most robust MMRs were recorded in response to CTs; responses were positively identified in 50 out of 51 instances (98%), assessed via objective Hotelling’s T 2 bias-free statistical analyses. Conclusions The results indicate that CTs in conjunction with optimised recording and analysis parameters offer the potential to elicit robust MMRs, supporting future utilisation of MMRs for clinical audiological applications.
A Graphical Approach to Yield and Boundary Surfaces of Selected Hypoplastic Constitutive Equations

Abstract The article describes how to identify the boundary and yield surface for hypoplastic constitutive equations proposed by Wu, Gudehus and Bauer. It is shown how to identify and plot the surfaces for any equation in this class. Calculation errors are analyzed characteristic for applied set of numerical formulas. In the paper there are computer links to the source code prepared in the MATLAB system, based on instructions in the article. A sample consitutive domains are shown, plotted using the attached computer program. Streszczenie W artykule przedstawiono sposób wyznaczania powierzchni płyniecia oraz powierzchni granicznej dla przykładowych równan konstytutywnych w ramach teorii hypoplastycznosci zaproponowanych przez Wu, Gudehus’a oraz Bauer’a. Pokazano jak wyznaczac i wykreslac obie powierzchnie dynamicznie dla dowolnych równan tej klasy. Przeanalizowano błedy obliczeniowe charakterystyczne dla uzytych formuł numerycznych. W pracy podano linki do komputerowych kodów zródłowych przygotowanych w komercyjnym systemie MATLAB, stosujacych instrukcje przedstawione w niniejszym artykule. Przedstawiono przykładowe dziedziny równan konstytutywnych narysowanych przy pomocy załaczonego programu komputerowego.
A Personalized Utterance Style (PUS) based Dialogue Strategy for Efficient Service Requirement Elicitation

With the flourish of services on the Internet, a prerequisite for service providers to precisely deliver services to their customers is to capture user requirements comprehensively, accurately, and efficiently. This is called the ``Service Requirement Elicitation (SRE)'' task. Considering the amount of customers is huge, it is an inefficient way for service providers to interact with each user by face-to-face dialog. Therefore, to elicit user requirements with the assistance of virtual intelligent assistants has become a mainstream way. Since user requirements generally consist of different levels of details and need to be satisfied by services from multiple domains, there is a huge potential requirement space for SRE to explore to elicit complete requirements. Considering that traditional dialogue system with static slots cannot be directly applied to the SRE task, it is a challenge to design an efficient dialogue strategy to guide users to express their complete and accurate requirements in such a huge potential requirement space. Based on the phenomenon that users tend to express requirements subjectively in a sequential manner, we propose a Personalized Utterance Style (PUS) module to perceive the personalized requirement expression habits, and then apply PUS to an dialogue strategy to efficiently complete the SRE task. Specifically, the dialogue strategy chooses suitable response actions for dynamically updating the dialogue state. With the assistance of PUS extracted from dialogue history, the system can shrink the search scope of potential requirement space. Experiment results show that the dialogue strategy with PUS can elicit more accurate user requirements with fewer dialogue rounds.
Fast Kinodynamic Planning on the Constraint Manifold With Deep Neural Networks

Motion planning is a mature area of research in robotics with many well-established methods based on optimization or sampling the state space, suitable for solving kinematic motion planning. However, when dynamic motions under constraints are needed and computation time is limited, fast kinodynamic planning on the constraint manifold is indispensable. In recent years, learning-based solutions have become alternatives to classical approaches, but they still lack comprehensive handling of complex constraints, such as planning on a lower dimensional manifold of the task space while considering the robot's dynamics. This article introduces a novel learning-to-plan framework that exploits the concept of constraint manifold, including dynamics, and neural planning methods. Our approach generates plans satisfying an arbitrary set of constraints and computes them in a short constant time, namely the inference time of a neural network. This allows the robot to plan and replan reactively, making our approach suitable for dynamic environments. We validate our approach on two simulated tasks and in a demanding real-world scenario, where we use a Kuka LBR Iiwa 14 robotic arm to perform the hitting movement in robotic air hockey.
Hilbert space of Quantum Field Theory in de Sitter spacetime

We study the decomposition of the Hilbert space of quantum field theory in $(d+1)$ dimensional de Sitter spacetime into Unitary Irreducible Representations (UIRs) of its isometry group \SO$(1,d+1)$. Firstly, we consider multi-particle states in free theories starting from the tensor product of single-particle UIRs. Secondly, we study conformal multiplets of a bulk Conformal Field Theory with symmetry group \SO$(2,d+1)$. Our main tools are the Harish-Chandra characters and the numerical diagonalization of the (truncated) quadratic Casimir of \SO$(1,d+1)$. We introduce a continuous density that encodes the spectrum of irreducible representations contained in a reducible one of $\SO(1,d+1)$. Our results are complete for $d=1$ and $d=2$. In higher dimensions, we rederive and extend several results previously known in the literature. Our work provides the foundation for future nonperturbative bootstrap studies of Quantum Field Theory in de Sitter spacetime.
HAWC Detection of a TeV Halo Candidate Surrounding a Radio-quiet Pulsar

Extended very-high-energy (VHE; 0.1–100 TeV) γ-ray emission has been observed around several middle-aged pulsars and referred to as “TeV halos. ” Their formation mechanism remains under debate. It is also unknown whether they are ubiquitous or related to a certain subgroup of pulsars. With 2321 days of observation, the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-Ray Observatory detected VHE γ-ray emission at the location of the radio-quiet pulsar PSR J0359+5414 with >6σ significance. By performing likelihood tests with different spectral and spatial models and comparing the TeV spectrum with multiwavelength observations of nearby sources, we show that this excess is consistent with a TeV halo associated with PSR J0359+5414, though future observation of HAWC and multiwavelength follow-ups are needed to confirm this nature. This new halo candidate is located in a noncrowded region in the outer galaxy. It shares similar properties to the other halos but its pulsar is younger and radio-quiet. Our observation implies that TeV halos could commonly exist around pulsars and their formation does not depend on the configuration of the pulsar magnetosphere.
Adaptive Data Path Selection for Durable Transaction in GPU Persistent Memory

—The new non-volatile memory technology relies on data recoverability to achieve the promise of byte-addressable persistence in computer applications. The durable transaction (e.g. logging) is one of the major persistency programming models to provide recoverable data structures. To achieve performant failure-atomic transactional updates to PM, multi-data-path architectures that separate the data paths for persists are recently explored for CPUs. Considering the importance of GPU as a key computing platform for many application domains, we investigate the multi-data-path architecture for durable transactions to PM in GPU. Our solution, AGPM, exploits an adaptative data-path- selection strategy for the log updates to PM. AGPM reduces the GPU kernels’ execution time by at least 24.37% (at most 66.44%) compared to the state-of-the-art designs.
Estimation, Filtering, and Smoothing in State Space Models with Incompletely Specified Initial Conditions

On definit la vraisemblance pour un modele d'espace d'etats avec des conditions initiales incompletement specifiees, par transformation des donnees pour eliminer la dependance sur des conditions non specifiees. On etend cette approche pour obtenir des estimations sur les vecteurs d'etat, les predicteurs et les interpolateurs pour des observations manquantes
A Meta Path-based Approach for Rumor Detection on Social Media

The prominent role of social media in people's daily lives has made them more inclined to receive news through social networks than traditional sources. This shift in public behavior has opened doors for some to diffuse fake news on social media; and subsequently cause negative economic, political, and social consequences as well as distrust among the public. There are many proposed methods to solve the rumor detection problem, most of which do not take full advantage of the heterogeneous nature of news propagation networks. With this intention, we considered a previously proposed architecture as our baseline and performed the idea of structural feature extraction from the heterogeneous rumor propagation over its architecture using the concept of meta path-based embeddings. We named our model Meta Path-based Global Local Attention Network (MGLAN). Extensive experimental analysis on three state-of-the-art datasets has demonstrated that MGLAN outperforms other models by capturing node-level discrimination to different node types.
Analyzing And Improving Neural Speaker Embeddings for ASR

Neural speaker embeddings encode the speaker's speech characteristics through a DNN model and are prevalent for speaker verification tasks. However, few studies have investigated the usage of neural speaker embeddings for an ASR system. In this work, we present our efforts w.r. t integrating neural speaker embeddings into a conformer based hybrid HMM ASR system. For ASR, our improved embedding extraction pipeline in combination with the Weighted-Simple-Add integration method results in x-vector and c-vector reaching on par performance with i-vectors. We further compare and analyze different speaker embeddings. We present our acoustic model improvements obtained by switching from newbob learning rate schedule to one cycle learning schedule resulting in a ~3% relative WER reduction on Switchboard, additionally reducing the overall training time by 17%. By further adding neural speaker embeddings, we gain additional ~3% relative WER improvement on Hub5'00. Our best Conformer-based hybrid ASR system with speaker embeddings achieves 9.0% WER on Hub5'00 and Hub5'01 with training on SWB 300h.
A Characterization of the ALMA Phasing System at 345 GHz

The development of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) phasing system (APS) has allowed ALMA to function as an extraordinarily sensitive station for very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) at frequencies of up to 230 GHz (λ ≈ 1.3 mm). Efforts are now underway to extend the use of the APS to 345 GHz (λ ≈ 0.87 mm). Here we report a characterization of APS performance at 345 GHz based on a series of tests carried out between 2015 and 2021, including a successful global VLBI test campaign conducted in 2018 October in collaboration with the Event Horizon Telescope.