Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SMOKE DETECTION USING SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ANALYSES

Video-based fire detection is currently a fairly common application with the growth in the number of installed surveillance video systems. Moreover, the related pro- cessing units are becoming more powerful. Smoke is an early sign of most fires; therefore, selecting an appropriate smoke-detection method is essential. However, detecting smoke without creating a false alarm remains a challenging problem for open or large spaces with the disturbances of common moving objects, such as pedestrians and vehicles. This study proposes a novel video-based smoke-detection method that can be incorporated into a surveillance system to provide early alerts. In this study, the process of extracting smoke features from candidate regions was accomplished by analyzing the spatial and tempo- ral characteristics of video sequences for three important features: edge blurring, grad- ual energy changes, and gradual chromatic configuration changes. The proposed spatial- temporal analysis technique improves the feature extraction of gradual energy changes. In order to make the video smoke-detection results more reliable, these three features were combined using a support vector machine (SVM) technique and a temporal-based alarm decision unit (ADU) was also introduced. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was evaluated on a PC with an Intel R Core TM 2 Duo CPU (2.2 GHz) and 2 GB RAM. The average processing time was 32.27 ms per frame; i.e., the proposed algorithm can process 30.98 frames per second. Experimental results showed that the proposed system can detect smoke effectively with a low false-alarm rate and a short reaction time in many real-world scenarios. Keywords: Alarm decision unit (ADU), Support vector machine (SVM), Surveillance system, Video smoke detection (VSD), Wavelet transform
Speech Enhancement Based on Laplacian Speech Modeling and Unscented Kalman Filtering

Considering nonlinear and non-Gaussian speech signals, a novel speech enhancement algorithm is proposed based on Laplacian speech modeling and unscented Kalman filtering (UKF) using a single microphone. The probability density function (PDF) of speech signals in the time domain is better modeled by a Laplacian rather than a Gaussian density by analyzing statistical property for clean speech signals. So in this paper the PDF of clean speech signals is assumed to Laplacian density and the PDF of noise are modeled by Gaussian distributions. Speech enhancement algorithm based on UKF is used to solve non-linear property for speech signals. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm possesses good performance both in objective and subjective tests with colored noise and white noise presenting.
Malarial Anaemia and Anaemia Severity in Apparently Healthy Primary School Children in Urban and Rural Settings in the Mount Cameroon Area: Cross Sectional Survey

Background This study examines the relative importance of living in an urban versus rural setting and malaria in contributing to the public health problem of malarial anaemia (MA) and anaemia respectively in apparently healthy primary school children. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted among 727 school children aged between four and 15 years living in an urban (302) and rural (425) settings in the Mount Cameroon area. Blood sample collected from each child was used for the preparation of blood films for detection of malaria parasites and assessment of malaria parasite density as well as full blood count determination using an automated haematology analyzer. Based on haemoglobin (Hb) measurements, children with malaria parasitaemia were stratified into MA (Hb<11g/dL); mild MA (Hb of 8–10.9g/dL); moderate MA (Hb of 6.1–7.9g/dL) and severe MA (Hb≤6g/dL). Evaluation of potential determinants of MA and anaemia was performed by multinomial logistic-regression analysis and odds ratios used to evaluate risk factors. Results Out of the 727 children examined, 72 (9.9%) had MA. The prevalence of MA and anaemia were significantly higher (χ2 = 36.5, P <0.001; χ2 = 16.19, P <0.001 respectively) in children in the urban (17.9%; 26.8% respectively) than in the rural area (4.2%; 14.8% respectively). Majority of the MA cases were mild (88.9%), with moderate (5.6%) and severe MA (5.6%) occurring in the urban area only. The age group ≤6years was significantly (P <0.05) associated with both MA and anaemia. In addition, low parasite density was associated with MA while malaria parasite negative and microcytosis were associated with anaemia. Conclusions Malarial anaemia and anaemia display heterogeneity and complexity that differ with the type of settlement. The presence of severe MA and the contributions of the age group ≤6 years, low parasite density and microcytosis to the public health problem of MA and anaemia are noteworthy.
Total elbow arthroplasty in rheumatoid arthritis

Background and purpose Although total elbow arthroplasty (TEA) is a recognized procedure for the treatment of the painful arthritic elbow, the choice of implant is still obscure. We evaluated the survival of different TEA designs and factors associated with survival using data from a nationwide arthroplasty register. Methods 1,457 primary TEAs for rheumatoid elbow destruction were performed during 1982 to 2006 in one hospital specialized in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (n = 776) and in 19 other hospitals (n = 681). The mean age of the patients was 59 years and 87% of the TEAs were performed in women. We selected different contemporary TEA designs, each used in more than 40 operations including the Souter-Strathclyde (n = 912), i.B. P./Kudo (n = 218), Coonrad-Morrey (n = 164), and NESimplavit/Norway (n = 63) to assess their individual survival rates. Kaplan-Meier analysis and the Cox regression model were used for survival analysis. Results The most frequent reason for revision was aseptic loosening (47%). We found no differences in survival rates between different TEA designs. We did, however, find a 1.5-fold (95% CI: 1.1–2.1) elevated risk of revision in unspecialized hospitals as compared to the one hospital specialized in treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. In the Souter-Strathclyde subgroup, there was a reduced risk of revision (RR 0.6, p = 0.001) in TEAs implanted over 1994–2006 as compared to those implanted earlier (1982–1993). The 10-year survivorship for the whole TEA cohort was 83% (95% CI: 81–86), which agrees with earlier reports. Interpretation The influence of implant choice on the survival of TEA is minor compared to hip and knee arthroplasties. Inferior survival rates of the TEAs performed in the unspecialized hospitals demonstrates the importance of proper indications, surgical technique, and postoperative follow-up, and endorses the need for centralization of these operations at specialized units.
2nd International workshop on the twin peaks of requirements and architecture (TwinPeaks 2013)

The disciplines of requirements engineering (RE) and software architecture (SA) are fundamental to the success of software projects. Even though RE and SA are often considered separately, it has been argued that drawing a line between RE and SA is neither feasible nor reasonable as requirements and architectural design processes impact each other. Requirements are constrained by what is feasible technically and also by time and budget restrictions. On the other hand, feedback from the architecture leads to renegotiating architecturally significant requirements with stakeholders. The topic of bridging RE and SA has been discussed in both the RE and SA communities, but mostly independently. Therefore, the motivation for this ICSE workshop is to bring both communities together in order to identify key issues, explore the state of the art in research and practice, identify emerging trends, and define challenges related to the transition and the relationship between RE and SA.
Do Search-Based Approaches Improve the Design of Self-Adaptive Systems? A Controlled Experiment

Endowing software systems with self-adaptation capabilities has shown to be quite effective in coping with uncertain and dynamic operational environments as well as managing the complexity generated by non-functional requirements. Nowadays, a large number of approaches tackle the issue of enabling self-adaptive behavior from different perspectives and under diverse assumptions, making it harder for architects to make judicious decisions about design alternatives and quality attributes tradeoffs. It has currently been claimed that search-based software design approaches may improve the quality of resulting artifacts and the productivity of design processes, as a consequence of promoting a more comprehensive and systematic representation of design knowledge and preventing design bias and false intuition. To the best of our knowledge, no controlled experiments have been performed to provide sound evidence of such claim in the self-adaptive systems domain. In this paper, we report the results of a quasi-experiment performed with 24 students of a graduate program in Distributed and Ubiquitous Computing. The experiment evaluated the design of self-adaptive systems using a search-based approach, in contrast to the use of a style-based non-automated approach. The results show that search-based approaches can improve the effectiveness of resulting architectures and reduce design complexity. We found no evidence regarding the method's potential for leveraging the acquisition of distilled design knowledge by novice software architects.
Complexity in Employment Life Courses in Europe in the Twentieth Century—Large Cross-National Differences but Little Change across Birth Cohorts

Whether employment life courses have become more unstable and complex across the twentieth century has been a prominent topic in academic and public debate. Yet, empirical evidence on longer-term employment trajectories and how they changed across cohorts beyond single-country analyses is sparse. In this paper, we propose a new methodological approach that includes measures developed in sequence analysis to summarize complexity in employment trajectories in a cross-classified multilevel model by cohort and country. This allows us to quantify and describe change in the complexity of employment trajectories across cohorts relative to variation across fourteen European countries. We use SHARELIFE data to analyze employment trajectories from age 15 to 45 for men and women born between 1918 and 1963. For these birth cohorts, findings show that change across cohorts is negligibly small, compared with a sizeable variation of complexity in employment trajectories across countries. Further, based on theoretical assumptions derived from the varieties of capitalism literature, we demonstrate that the cross-national variation in employment complexity can, in part, be accounted for by employment protection legislation and unemployment protection measured as wage replacement rates. We conclude that in accordance with other studies, our findings contradict the commonly held belief that employment trajectories have become much more unstable across the second half of the twentieth century. More generally, the proposed methodological approach is also promising to analyze complexity in life course trajectories in other areas of application.
Dynamic Models of Portfolio Credit Risk

Valuing portfolio credit derivatives, such as CDO tranches based on a broad portfolio of credits, like the CDX.NA. IG index portfolio with 125 investment grade names, remains a very difficult problem. Only approximate and imperfect solutions are available so far. The industry standard Gaussian copula model has several known shortcomings, including the fact that it is a static model which does not offer a clear way to tie together valuation for CDO tranches with different maturities, and it doesn't generate wide enough spreads to match market prices for the supersenior tranches. Efforts to make the default hazard rate dynamic by modeling it as a diffusion run into the second difficulty when the models are calibrated to market prices. This article introduces a dynamic process for the cumulative hazard rate for a credit portfolio, that allows discrete jumps with jump size increasing in the number of jumps. This approach ties together the market quotes for CDO tranches of different maturities into a unified valuation framework. It also can generate large enough default intensity once several defaults have occurred to produce default risk on the senior and supersenior tranches of the magnitude that the market seems to be incorporating into their prices.
Predicting species responses to climate change: demography and climate microrefugia in California valley oak (Quercus lobata)

Anticipating species movement under climate change is a major focus in conservation. Bioclimate models are one of the few predictive tools for adaptation planning, but are limited in accounting for (i) climatic tolerances in preadult life stages that are potentially more vulnerable to warming; and (ii) local‐scale movement and use of climatic refugia as an alternative or complement to large‐scale changes in distribution. To assess whether these shortfalls can be addressed with field demographic data, we used California valley oak (Quercus lobata Nee), a long‐lived species with juvenile life stages known to be sensitive to climate. We hypothesized that the valley oak bioclimate model, based on adults, would overpredict the species' ability to remain in the projected persisting area, due to higher climate vulnerability of young life stages; and underpredict the potential for the species to remain in the projected contracting area in local‐scale refugia. We assessed the bioclimate model projections against actual demographic patterns in natural populations. We found that saplings were more constricted around surface water than adults in the projected contracting area. We also found that the climate envelope for saplings is narrower than that for adults. Saplings disappeared at a summer maximum temperature 3 °C below that associated with adults. Our findings indicate that rather than a complete shift northward and upward, as predicted by the species bioclimate model, valley oaks are more likely to experience constriction around water bodies, and eventual disappearance from areas exceeding a threshold of maximum temperature. Ours is the first study we know of to examine the importance of discrete life stage climate sensitivities in determining bioclimate modeling inputs, and to identify current climate change‐related constriction of a species around microrefugia. Our findings illustrate that targeted biological fieldwork can be central to understanding climate change‐related movement for long‐lived, sessile species.
In vitro -Experimente zur Entwicklung topografischer neuronaler Karten

Zusammenfassung Topografische axonale Projektionen sind ein weit verbreitetes Muster der neuronalen Konnektivität. Das am besten untersuchte Modellsystem für diese Verbindungen ist die retinotektale Projektion. Ihre Entstehung wird im Allgemeinen erklärt durch eine Interaktion gradiert verteilter Marker des ephrin-A/EphA-Systems, welche sowohl auf den Wachstumskegeln retinaler Ganglienzellen als auch auf dem tektalen Zielgebiet exprimiert sind. Die wichtigsten Einsichten in die Entstehung der retinotektalen Projektion lieferten bemerkenswerterweise in vitro- und nicht in vivo-Experimente. So ermöglichten funktionelle in vitro-Assays nicht nur die biochemische Identifikation der postulierten Lenkungsmoleküle, sondern halfen auch, die von ihnen übermittelten Signale zu verstehen. So zeigte sich, dass sowohl forward (ephrin-A -> EphA) als auch reverse signalling (EphA -> ephrin-A) für eine topografiegemäße Lenkung retinaler Axone benötigt werden. Trotz allem existiert im Moment kein Assay, welcher die Topografieentstehung in vitro vollständig reproduzieren kann. Neue in vitro-Techniken wie micro-contact printing oder micro-fluidic networks können dabei helfen, vorhandene Assays weiterzuentwickeln und so ein hinreichendes Set von funktionellen Komponenten der Entstehung topografischer Projektionen zu identifizieren.
Policy Brief

Biomarker tests have many uses in cancer care. They can be used for prognosis and risk assessment, screening, diagnosis, and treatment/post-treatment monitoring. These tests are also often used to select optimal treatment plans by predicting response to molecularly targeted therapies, which is the context explored in this brief. Historic examples of this approach include the biomarker BCR-ABL which directs use of imatinib for chronic myeloid leukemia, or the use of HER-2 status and trastuzumab treatment in breast cancer. Such personalized cancer treatments hold great promise, so long as accurate and reliable biomarker tests exist which enable clinicians to discern the most effective therapy for a specific patient. POLICY BRIEF Biomarker Tests
Serum Levels of Interleukin-8 and Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha in Coal Workers' Pneumoconiosis: One-year Follow-up Study

Objectives Various cytokines induced by inhalation of coal dust may mediate inflammation and lead to tissue damage or fibrosis, such as coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP). Methods To investigate the relevance of serum cytokines in CWP, the levels of serum interleukin-8 (IL-8) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) as CWP biomarkers in 110 retired coal miners (22 controls and 88 CWP subjects) were related to cross sectional findings and 1-year progressive changes of the pneumoconiosis. Progressive changes of CWP were evaluated by paired comparison of chest radiographs. Analysis by a receiver operating characteristic curve assessed the biomarker potential of each cytokine. Results The mean serum IL-8 level was significantly higher in CWP compared to controls and IL-8 levels correlated with the degree of CWP. The median serum TNF-α level was significantly higher in subjects with progressive CWP compared to subjects without CWP progression. The area under the ROC curve for IL-8 (0.70) and TNF-α (0.72) for CWP identification and progression, respectively, indicated the biomarker potential of the two cytokines. Serum cutoff values of IL-8 and TNF-α were 11.63 pg/mL (sensitivity, 69%; specificity, 64%) and 4.52 pg/mL (sensitivity, 67%; specificity, 79%), respectively. Conclusion The results suggest that high levels of serum IL-8 are associated with the presence of CWP and those of serum TNF-α are associated with the progression of CWP.
Invariant properties in coevolutionary networks of plant-animal interactions

Plant–animal mutualistic networks are interaction webs consisting of two sets of entities, plant and animal species, whose evolutionary dynamics are deeply influenced by the outcomes of the interactions, yielding a diverse array of coevolutionary processes. These networks are two-mode networks sharing many common properties with others such as food webs, social, and abiotic networks. Here we describe generalized patterns in the topology of 29 plant–pollinator and 24 plant–frugivore networks in natural communities. Scale-free properties have been described for a number of biological, social, and abiotic networks; in contrast, most of the plant–animal mutualistic networks (65.6%) show species connectivity distributions (number of links per species) with a power-law regime but decaying as a marked cut-off, i.e. truncated power-law or broad-scale networks and few (22.2%) show scale-invariance. We hypothesize that plant–animal mutualistic networks follow a build-up process similar to complex abiotic nets, based on the preferential attachment of species. However, constraints in the addition of links such as morphological mismatching or phenological uncoupling between mutualistic partners, restrict the number of interactions established, causing deviations from scale-invariance. This reveals generalized topological patterns characteristic of self-organized complex systems. Relative to scale-invariant networks, such constraints may confer higher robustness to the loss of keystone species that are the backbone of these webs.
Identifying the challenges for optimizing the process to achieve reproducible results in e-science applications

One of the major requirements for e-science applications handling sensor data, is reproducibility of results. Several optimization and scalability problems exist where the reproducibility of results remains guaranteed. Firstly, various data streams need to be coordinated to optimize the accuracy and processing of the results. Secondly, because of the high volume of streaming data and a series of processing steps to be performed on that data, demand for disk space may grow unacceptably high. Lastly, reproducibility in a decentralized scenario may be difficult to achieve because of data replication. This paper introduces and addresses these challenges which arise for optimizing the process of achieving reproducibility of results.
MechanismProduction Via Cyclosporin A-Sensitive Patients: IL-15 Triggers In Vitro IL-17 High Levels of IL-17 in Rheumatoid Arthritis

Recent data suggest that IL-15 plays an important role in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis. In the present study, we hypothesized that elevated in the joints of rheumatoid arthritis, but not osteoarthritis, patients, IL-15 may exert its proinﬂammatory properties via the induction of IL-17, a cytokine known to stimulate synoviocytes to release several mediators of inﬂammation including IL-6, IL-8, GM-CSF and PGE 2 . To test this hypothesis, we ﬁrst measured the levels of IL-17 and IL-15 using speciﬁc ELISA and found that synovial ﬂuids of patients with rheumatoid arthritis, but not with osteoarthritis, contain high levels of these cytokines. A strong correlation between IL-15 and IL-17 levels in synovial ﬂuids was observed. Among tested factors, LPS and TNF- a failed, IL-15 and IL-2 were equipotent, and PMA 1 ionomycin was far more efﬁcient in the induction of IL-17 secretion by PBMCs isolated from healthy blood donors. Interestingly, synovial ﬂuid cells, in contrast to PBMCs isolated from patients with rheumatoid arthritis, but not osteoarthritis, respond to PMA 1 ionomycin with much lower, comparable to IL-15-triggered IL-17 secretion. Moreover, PMA 1 ionomycin-triggered IL-17 secretion is completely or partially blocked in the presence of low doses of cyclosporin A or high doses of methylprednisolone, respectively. IL-15-triggered IL-17 secretion by PBMCs was completely inhibited by these drugs. Thus, our results suggest for the ﬁrst time that IL-15 may represent a physiological trigger that via cyclosporin A and steroid sensitive pathways leads to the overproduction of IL-17 in the joints of rheumatoid arthritis patients. our selection of IL-15-responsive cells into the synovial ﬂuid.