Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Evaluation of Visualization Techniques to Illustrate Statistical Deformation Models

As collections of 2D/3D images continue to grow, interest in effective ways to visualize and explore the statistical morphological properties of a group of images has surged. Recently, deformation models have emerged as simple methods to capture the variability and statistical properties of a collection of images. Such models have proven to be effective in tasks such as image classification, generation, registration, segmentation, and analysis of modes of variation. A crucial element missing from most statistical models has been an effective way to summarize and visualize the statistical morphological properties of a group of images. This paper evaluates different visualization techniques that can be extended and used to illustrate the information captured by such statistical models. First, four illustration techniques are described as methods to summarize the statistical morphological properties as captured by deformation models. Second, results of a user study conducted to compare the effectiveness of each visualization technique are presented. After comparing the performance of 40 subjects, we found that statistical annotation techniques present significant benefits when analyzing the structural properties of a group of images.
Dispersal Patterns of Coastal Fish: Implications for Designing Networks of Marine Protected Areas

Information about dispersal scales of fish at various life history stages is critical for successful design of networks of marine protected areas, but is lacking for most species and regions. Otolith chemistry provides an opportunity to investigate dispersal patterns at a number of life history stages. Our aim was to assess patterns of larval and post-settlement (i.e. between settlement and recruitment) dispersal at two different spatial scales in a Mediterranean coastal fish (i.e. white sea bream, Diplodus sargus sargus) using otolith chemistry. At a large spatial scale (∼200 km) we investigated natal origin of fish and at a smaller scale (∼30 km) we assessed “site fidelity” (i.e. post-settlement dispersal until recruitment). Larvae dispersed from three spawning areas, and a single spawning area supplied post-settlers (proxy of larval supply) to sites spread from 100 to 200 km of coastline. Post-settlement dispersal occurred within the scale examined of ∼30 km, although about a third of post-settlers were recruits in the same sites where they settled. Connectivity was recorded both from a MPA to unprotected areas and vice versa. The approach adopted in the present study provides some of the first quantitative evidence of dispersal at both larval and post-settlement stages of a key species in Mediterranean rocky reefs. Similar data taken from a number of species are needed to effectively design both single marine protected areas and networks of marine protected areas.
Designing Wearable Performance Support : Insights from the Early Literature

INTRODUCTION According to Gery (1991), an electronic performance support system (EPSS) is an electronic environment available to and easily accessible by employees that is structured to provide online access to all information to permit them to do their jobs with minimal intervention by others. Why do we assume that this support must be provided on a computer? If effective performance support must be “available” and “easily accessible,” how can designers provide support to people whose jobs require mobility? Such jobs include (but certainly are not limited to) supervising a manufacturing operation, inspecting foods, and repairing equipment. A designer for any EPSS being developed to support jobs such as these would have to take the employees’ mobility into account. There are several ways to incorporate mobility into an EPSS. But doing so requires that designers take the concern that Gery expressed in her article in this issue to heart, when she advises designers to avoid the trap of the familiar—that is, designing performance support that looks suspiciously like traditional documentation and training. One seemingly obvious way to avoid this trap may be developing an EPSS for a handheld device; users could carry their EPSS in their pockets. A handheld EPSS, however, would not be appropriate for workers such as automotive or aircraft mechanics because they need to use their hands to perform their jobs. Enter the wearable EPSS. Much research has been conducted over the past several years to assess the feasibility, effectiveness, and technical concerns of such systems. This article describes developments in this unique area of EPSS design. It first explores the feasibility of wearable EPSSs. Next, it explores human factors considerations in designing wearable EPSSs. Last, it discusses collaborative uses of these systems. Note that the concept of wearable EPSSs is not a particularly new one; it was first proposed and tested in the mid-1990s. However, because this is a unique design strategy that is outside the norm of everyday work in technical communication and performance technology, because it offers a unique perspective on design, and because it offers early insights into some of the challenges faced by designers of EPSSs, it is appropriate to revisit the idea in the context of this special issue exploring the design of EPSSs.
Parallel Processing Using the Silicon Graphics / Cray Origin 2000

The Origin 2000 is a high performance computing platform produced jointly by Silico Graphics / Cray. This scalable shared memory processor (SSMP) may be configured with 128 processors in a single system image. The Origin is a scalable, cache coherent, non-un memory access (CC-NUMA), distributed shared memory (DSM) architecture based on a hypercube interconnection topology. Effectively exploiting the parallel processing capabiliti this computer, as well as other similar computers, is very much an emerging technology. T objective of this paper is to demonstrate how this parallelism may be employed on practica computing problems, using the C programming language. This paper is targeted towards so engineers who are moving from traditional single processor computers to a high performan parallel computing platform. Section 1 Background in Parallel Processing Parallel processing is a computing technique designed to improve the execution time application by distributing the computational work among a number of processing elements definition of parallel processing is sufficiently broad to encompass concurrent processing, distributed computing, as well as parallel computing with tightly coupled multiprocessors. T paper is designed to provide a general framework for how to employ multiple processing elements to work cooperatively on a computing task, using the Silicon Graphics / Cray Orig 2000 computer. Ideally, parallel processing applications and architectures would exhibit “linear speedup. ” In other words, if the number of processors applied towards a computing problem were dou then the execution time should be cut in half. Unfortunately, only a small set of parallel computing applications can achieve linear speedup. Figure 1 illustrates one limitation of pa processing for a fixed size calculation. Note four processors give a speedup of 2.3 over a s processing element. However, the structure of the problem limits speedup. Therefore, the u additional processors will not improve execution time.
Substitution or Complement: An Empirical Analysis on the Impact of Collaborative Tagging on Web Search

Recently collaborative tagging has received great attention as a public effort to create and share annotations on the Web pages. In this paper, we conducted an empirical study on how this user added descriptions associated with Web resources can be used to enhance the existing Web search paradigm. Comprehensive experiments have been performed on data collected from delicious, one of the most popular collaborative tagging Web site. Some useful conclusions on the usage of different tags have been drawn from our data analysis. Based on these insights, we proposed an innovative tag enhanced exploratory Web search framework
Autonomic multi-policy optimization in pervasive systems: Overview and evaluation

This article describes Distributed W-Learning (DWL), a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for collaborative agent-based optimization of pervasive systems. DWL supports optimization towards multiple heterogeneous policies and addresses the challenges arising from the heterogeneity of the agents that are charged with implementing them. DWL learns and exploits the dependencies between agents and between policies to improve overall system performance. Instead of always executing the locally-best action, agents learn how their actions affect their immediate neighbors and execute actions suggested by neighboring agents if their importance exceeds the local action's importance when scaled using a predefined or learned collaboration coefficient. We have evaluated DWL in a simulation of an Urban Traffic Control (UTC) system, a canonical example of the large-scale pervasive systems that we are addressing. We show that DWL outperforms widely deployed fixed-time and simple adaptive UTC controllers under a variety of traffic loads and patterns. Our results also confirm that enabling collaboration between agents is beneficial as is the ability for agents to learn the degree to which it is appropriate for them to collaborate. These results suggest that DWL is a suitable basis for optimization in other large-scale systems with similar characteristics.
Higher prevalence and gene amplification of HPV16 in oropharynx as compared to oral cavity

ABSTRACT Objective The objective of this study was to clarify differences regarding HPV16 infection and gene amplification between the oral cavity and oropharynx in healthy individuals. Material and Methods The subjects were 94 healthy asymptomatic individuals (41 males, 53 females; mean age 58.6 years, range 16-97 years) who visited the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Reconstructive Surgery of the Hiroshima University Hospital from 2014 to 2015. Oral epithelial cells were collected from oral rinse and pharynx gargle samples and placed in saline. The human endogenous retrovirus gene ERV3-1 was used as a reference to estimate the number of human cells in each sample. DNA samples were extracted from approximately 10,000 human cells and tested for HPV16 DNA by PCR using a type-specific primer. Similarly, we analyzed the HPV16 viral copy number in HPV16-positive cases using real-time PCR to examine genomic amplification. Results The percentage of HPV16-positive cases was higher in the gargle (28.7%) as compared to the rinse (16.0%) samples. In the oral rinse samples, males (26.8%) showed a significantly higher rate of HPV16 than females (7.5%) (P=0.021). Importantly, in older subjects (aged 60-89 years), gargle samples showed a significantly higher rate of HPV16 (33.3%) than oral rinse samples (13.7%) (P=0.034). The average number of viral copies was approximately 8 times higher in the gargle than in the oral rinse samples (0.16±0.27 vs. 1.35±1.26 copy numbers per cell), a significant difference (P<0.001). Conclusion Our findings suggest that the oropharynx is more susceptible to HPV16 infection as compared to the oral cavity, while HPV16 gene amplification is also more commonly found in the oropharynx.
An Analysis of the Equity and Revenue Effects of the Elimination or Reduction of Homeowner Preferences

One perceived deficiency in the tax system is its unfairness (inequity). One area in which unfairness has been alleged is the favoritism shown toward homeowners. The focus of this study was on the effects of homeowner preferences on the Federal tax system. The overall impact of homeowner preferences can be said to produce three major results—loss of revenue, reduction in horizontal equity, and reduction in vertical equity.
The relationship between knowledge management and innovation level in Mexican SMEs: empirical evidence

The transformation of the current society from an industry-based economy to a knowledge management and innovation-based economy is changing the design and implementation of business strategies and the nature of the competition among the organizations which are mainly small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). They struggle to survive in a market which is more demanding and competitive, so they see knowledge management as one of the most effective strategies that may help to enable the innovation activities into the businesses. For these reasons, this research paper has as a main goal to analyze the relationship between knowledge management and innovation in Mexican SMEs. The empirical analysis used 125 manufacturing SMEs (each SME having from 20 to 250 employees) as a sample to be carried out. The obtained results indicate that knowledge management has a positive impact in products, process, and management systems innovation.
Context-aware social media recommendation based on potential group

Data recommendation as a kind of active mode is more meaningful and important than traditional passive search mode in social media environment. The importance of contextual information has also been recognized by researchers and practitioners in many disciplines, including recommendation system, e-commerce, information retrieval, mobile computing and so on. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for context-aware social media recommendation via mining different granularities of potential groups, called Common Preference Group (CPG). Intuitively, CPG mining is to cluster those users who are interested in any topic set with certain context and have similar affection degree for each topic in the set. It means each user could belong to multiple CPG corresponding to different topic sets. The approach absorbs the characteristic of Collaborative Filtering (CF) technique but overcomes its defects, such as cold-start, data sparseness. Moreover, we build the Tag-Feature Semantic-pairs (TFS) to represent the semantic topics implied in media object to improve the accuracy of CPG mining. To evaluate the efficiency and the accuracy of our approach, we use two datasets: De is a simulated dataset and Dp is a real-life corpus collected from Flickr. The experimental results show the superiority of our approach for social media recommendation.
Networked Mechanism Design Incentive Engineering in Service Value Networks as Exemplified by the Co-Opetition Mechanism

The software industry is currently experiencing a fundamental transition from selling proprietary applications towards the provision of networked services ‐ i.e. modularized and specialized services composed in a plug-and-play fashion in networked service systems. In such service systems, participants’ interests need to be aligned with the network’s global objectives in an incentive engineering approach. In more detail, this paper seeks to tackle the challenge of coordinating self-interested service providers in a co-opetitive environment by designing adequate mechanisms. However, “classic” mechanism design focuses on design goals such as efficiency, incentive compatibility and budget balance whose mere consideration does not always hit the target in service networks. Incorporating the requirements that are imposed by newly arising networked scenarios where a set of agents must cooperate to create value resulting in a complex service, we propose a novel variation of mechanism design: networked mechanism design. Following this approach, we present the co-opetition mechanism as a possible instantiation of networked mechanism design which pursues network-related goals such as network growth, a high degree of interconnectedness, readiness to deliver, and fairness.
The Elimination of Meaning in Computational Theories of Mind

According to the traditional conception of the mind, semantical content is perhaps the most important feature distinguishing mental from non-mental systems. And this traditional conception has been incorporated into the foundations of contemporary scientific approaches to the mind, insofar as the notion of ‘mental representation’ is adopted as a primary theoretical device. Symbolic representations are posited as the internal structures that carry the information utilized by intelligent systems, and they also comprise the formal elements over which cognitive computations are performed. But a fundamental tension is built into the picture - to the extent that symbolic ‘representations’ are formal elements of computation, their alleged content is completely gratuitous. I argue that the computational paradigm is thematically inconsistent with the search for content or its supposed ‘vehicles’. Instead, the concern of computational models of cognition should be with the processing structures that yield the right kinds of input/output profiles, and with how these structures can be implemented in the brain.
Raising up Annotations In Pedagogical Resources by Human-Computer Collaboration

Huge repositories of pedagogical resources such as the French initiative of digital thematic libraries are now accessible by both students and professors. This high quantity of data makes their access difficult to the students, as they cannot get easily pertinent pedagogical resources that fit their needs. One way to make this access easier is to add annotations to these resources and to exploit these annotations to find pertinent answers. Of course, these annotations can be semantic. Semantic wikis are a new approach that automatically processes semantic annotations and that can be used to find the adequate resources given the requests of students. However, annotating semantically resources is not an easy task for human. Despite of their high potential, semantic wikis suffer from a lack of human provided semantic annotations, resulting in a loss of their efficiency. We propose a system (called HCA) that suggests automatically computed annotations to users in semantic wikis. In this paper users are students and professors. Users only have to validate, complete, modify, refuse or ignore these suggested annotations. Therefore, the annotation task becomes easier, and we assume that more users will provide annotations, leading to an improvement of the system and a facilitated access to pertinent pedagogical resources. The HCA system is based on collaborative filtering recommender systems, it does not exploit the content of the pages but the usage made on these pages by the students and the professors. The resulting semantic wikis contain several kinds of annotations, with different status: human, computer or human- computed provided annotations.
Depletion of Alveolar Macrophages Decreases the Dissemination of a Glucosylceramide-Deficient Mutant of Cryptococcus neoformans in Immunodeficient Mice

ABSTRACT In previous studies we showed that a Cryptococcus neoformans mutant lacking glucosylceramide (Δgcs1) is avirulent and unable to reach the brain when it is administered intranasally into an immunocompetent mouse and is contained in a lung granuloma. To determine whether granuloma formation is key for containment of C. neoformans Δgcs1, we studied the role of C. neoformans glucosylceramide in a T- and NK-cell-immunodeficient mouse model (Tgε26) in which alveolar macrophages (AMs) are not activated and granuloma formation is not expected. The results show that Tgε26 mice infected with Δgcs1 do not produce a lung granuloma and that the Δgcs1 mutant proliferates in the lungs and does disseminate to the brain, although its virulence phenotype is dramatically reduced. Since Δgcs1 can grow only in acidic niches, such as the phagolysosome of AMs, and not in neutral or alkaline environments, such as the extracellular spaces, we hypothesize that in immunodeficient mice Δgcs1 proliferates inside AMs. Indeed, we found that depletion of AMs significantly improved Tgε26 mouse survival and decreased the dissemination of Δgcs1 cells to the central nervous system. Thus, these results suggest that the growth of Δgcs1 in immunodeficient mice is maintained within AMs. This study highlights the hypothesis that AMs may exacerbate C. neoformans infection in conditions in which there is severe host immunodeficiency.
Autologous Transplantation of Oral Mucosal Epithelial Cell Sheets Cultured on an Amniotic Membrane Substrate for Intraoral Mucosal Defects

The human amniotic membrane (AM) is a thin intrauterine placental membrane that is highly biocompatible and possesses anti-inflammatory and anti-scarring properties. Using AM, we developed a novel method for cultivating oral mucosal epithelial cell sheets. We investigated the autologous transplantation of oral mucosal epithelial cells cultured on AM in patients undergoing oral surgeries. We obtained specimens of AM from women undergoing cesarean sections. This study included five patients without any history of a medical disorder who underwent autologous cultured oral epithelial transplantation following oral surgical procedures. Using oral mucosal biopsy specimens obtained from these patients, we cultured oral epithelial cells on an AM carrier. We transplanted the resultant cell sheets onto the oral mucosal defects. Patients were followed-up for at least 12 months after transplantation. After 2–3 weeks of being cultured on AM, epithelial cells were well differentiated and had stratified into five to seven layers. Immunohistochemistry revealed that the cultured cells expressed highly specific mucosal epithelial cell markers and basement membrane proteins. After the surgical procedures, no infection, bleeding, rejection, or sheet detachment occurred at the reconstructed sites, at which new oral mucous membranes were evident. No recurrence was observed in the long-term follow-up, and the postoperative course was excellent. Our results suggest that AM-cultured oral mucosal epithelial cell sheets represent a useful biomaterial and feasible method for oral mucosal reconstruction. However, our primary clinical study only evaluated their effects on a limited number of small oral mucosal defects.
Near ML treatment of n interferers with linear complexity

In this paper, we focus on the performance of interference-limited cell-edge users in cellular networks. We propose a transmission strategy where interference alignment carried out at interfering base stations (BSs) is exploited with a low complexity receiver structure. For the general case, maximum likelihood (ML) detection would require a complexity of O (|χ|n+1) in the presence of n interferers where |χ| is the size of the alphabet. We show that with the proposed scheme and simplified receiver structure, the complexity of detection reduces to O (|χ|) with ML comparable performance.
Swimming Using Surface Acoustic Waves

Microactuation of free standing objects in fluids is currently dominated by the rotary propeller, giving rise to a range of potential applications in the military, aeronautic and biomedical fields. Previously, surface acoustic waves (SAWs) have been shown to be of increasing interest in the field of microfluidics, where the refraction of a SAW into a drop of fluid creates a convective flow, a phenomenon generally known as SAW streaming. We now show how SAWs, generated at microelectronic devices, can be used as an efficient method of propulsion actuated by localised fluid streaming. The direction of the force arising from such streaming is optimal when the devices are maintained at the Rayleigh angle. The technique provides propulsion without any moving parts, and, due to the inherent design of the SAW transducer, enables simple control of the direction of travel.