Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification and Validation of a New Set of Five Genes for Prediction of Risk in Early Breast Cancer

Molecular tests predicting the outcome of breast cancer patients based on gene expression levels can be used to assist in making treatment decisions after consideration of conventional markers. In this study we identified a subset of 20 mRNA differentially regulated in breast cancer analyzing several publicly available array gene expression data using R/Bioconductor package. Using RTqPCR we evaluate 261 consecutive invasive breast cancer cases not selected for age, adjuvant treatment, nodal and estrogen receptor status from paraffin embedded sections. The biological samples dataset was split into a training (137 cases) and a validation set (124 cases). The gene signature was developed on the training set and a multivariate stepwise Cox analysis selected five genes independently associated with DFS: FGF18 (HR = 1.13, p = 0.05), BCL2 (HR = 0.57, p = 0.001), PRC1 (HR = 1.51, p = 0.001), MMP9 (HR = 1.11, p = 0.08), SERF1a (HR = 0.83, p = 0.007). These five genes were combined into a linear score (signature) weighted according to the coefficients of the Cox model, as: 0.125FGF18 − 0.560BCL2 + 0.409PRC1 + 0.104MMP9 − 0.188SERF1A (HR = 2.7, 95% CI = 1.9–4.0, p < 0.001). The signature was then evaluated on the validation set assessing the discrimination ability by a Kaplan Meier analysis, using the same cut offs classifying patients at low, intermediate or high risk of disease relapse as defined on the training set (p < 0.001). Our signature, after a further clinical validation, could be proposed as prognostic signature for disease free survival in breast cancer patients where the indication for adjuvant chemotherapy added to endocrine treatment is uncertain.
LEARNING FINITELY ADDITIVE PROBABILITIES: AN IMPOSSIBILITY THEOREM

If (X,X ) is a measure space and F◦ ⊂ X is a field generated either by a countable class of sets or by a Vapnik-Červonenkis class, then if μ is purely finitely additive, there exist uncountably many μ′ agreeing with μ on F◦ and having |μ(A) − μ′(A)| = 1 for uncountably many A. If μ is also non-atomic, then for any r ∈ (0, 1], |μ(Ar)− μ(Ar)| = r for uncountably many Ar. Al-Najjar’s [1] unlearnability result is: if (X,X ) belongs to a class of measure spaces not supporting countably additive nonatomic distributions and C is a Vapnik-Červonenkis class, then there exist purely finitely additive nonatomic probabilities, μ and μ′, agreeing on C and having |μ(Aα)− μ(Aα)| = α for any α ∈ (0, 12 ] for uncountably many Aα. Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one ca’n’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for halfan-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)
Interaction Facilities and High-Level-Support for the Exploration of 3D-Models: System Architecture

We describe the design and architecture of an interactive system to illustrate spatial phenomena. Our system, the Z OOM I LLUSTRATOR , focuses on the combination of rendered images with different levels of textual descriptions for educational purposes. Fisheye Techniques are employed to present detailed information while maintaining the global context of the overall available information. The design of our system was guided by the object-oriented approach. To encourage comparison, it is furthermore described in terms of the reference model for intelligent multimedia presentations. The feasibility of this approach encourages the use of the reference model for the design of interactive systems. Our system targets at interactive manipulation by an end-user, however, it offers automatic support to enhance its usability. Automatic support is needed for the coordination between images and text, for the annotation of a 3D-model and for the synthesis of a layout.
SOCIAL RETURNS TO COMMUTING IN THE BALTIC STATES

To what extent does commuting reduce regional wage disparities? This question is addressed by estimating two sets of earnings functions (based on 2000 LFS data for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania): with geographical variables (like capital city, rural etc.) measured at the working place and at the place of residence. The main finding is that commuting has narrowed the ceteris paribus wage gap between capital city and rural areas by impressive 16 percentage points in Estonia and by 11 percentage points in Latvia, while the gap between capital and other cities has been reduced by 9 percentage points in both countries. In Lithuania gains from commuting are modest (3 percentage points) and go exclusively to residents of small cities. In the case of Latvia data allowed to estimate also effect of the distance between capital city and working place on wages, as well as individual returns to commuting in terms of the distance between living place and working place.
A Performance Comparison of Open-Source Erasure Coding Libraries for Storage Applications

Erasure coding is a fundemental technique to prevent data loss in storage systems composed of multiple disks. Recently, there have been multiple open-source implementations of a variety of erasure codes. In this work, we present a comparison of the performance of various codes and implementations, concentrating on encoding and decoding. It is hard to draw overarching conclusions from a single performance study. However, performance data is important to gain an understanding of the real-life performance ramifications of code properties and implementation decisions. The significance of this paper is to guide those who use and design codes, so that they may be able to predict what performance to expect when using an erasure code. One important, although obvious, conclusion is that reducing cache misses is more important than reducing XOR operations.
A Novel Georeferenced Dataset for Stereo Visual Odometry

In this work, we present a novel dataset for assessing the accuracy of stereo visual odometry. The dataset has been acquired by a small-baseline stereo rig mounted on the top of a moving car. The groundtruth is supplied by a consumer grade GPS device without IMU. Synchronization and alignment between GPS readings and stereo frames are recovered after the acquisition. We show that the attained groundtruth accuracy allows to draw useful conclusions in practice. The presented experiments address influence of camera calibration, baseline distance and zero-disparity features to the achieved reconstruction performance.
The Rabbit as a New Reservoir Host of Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli

We investigated the prevalence of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) in rabbits acquired from two commercial vendors and a local petting zoo. Fecal samples from 34 Dutch Belted (DB) and 15 New Zealand White (NZW) rabbits were cultured; and isolates were biotyped, serotyped, tested by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and genotyped by repetitive-element sequence–based PCR (Rep-PCR). Seven (25%) of 28 DB rabbits acquired from one commercial source were positive for EHEC, including O153:H- and O153:H7. One (9%) of 11 NZW rabbits from the same source was positive for eae-, stx1+ O153 strains. In contrast, six DB rabbits from another commercial source and four rabbits from a petting zoo were negative for EHEC. Rep-PCR demonstrated that the O153 EHEC and O145 enteropathogenic E. coli were two distinct clones. Our study indicates that rabbits are a new reservoir host of EHEC that may pose a zoonotic risk for humans.
How, what, and why of sleep apnea. Perspectives for primary care physicians.

OBJECTIVE To review the need for primary care physicians to screen for patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). QUALITY OF EVIDENCE Literature was reviewed via MEDLINE from 1993 to 2000, inclusive, using the search term "sleep apnea" combined with "epidemiology," "outcome," and "diagnosis and treatment. " Citations in this review favour more recent, well controlled and randomized studies, but findings of pilot studies are included where other research is unavailable. MAIN MESSAGE Obstructive sleep apnea is a disorder with serious medical, socioeconomic, and psychological morbidity, yet most patients with OSA remain undetected. Primary care physicians have a vital role in screening for these patients because diagnosis can be made only through overnight (polysomnographic) studies at sleep clinics. Physicians should consider symptoms of excessive or loud snoring, complaints of daytime sleepiness or fatigue, complaints of unrefreshing sleep, and an excess of weight or body fat distribution in the neck or upper chest area as possible indications of untreated OSA. CONCLUSION Current research findings indicate that treating OSA patients substantially lowers morbidity and mortality rates and reduces health care costs. Primary care physicians need more information about screening for patients with OSA to ensure proper diagnosis and treatment of those with the condition.
Mining taxi data for describing city in the context of mobility, sociality, and environment: Lessons learned

Taxi is an important way of transportation. With the equipped location sensors, it becomes a probe sensing urban dynamics. In this work, we review and improve three approaches that use taxi data to explore the city dynamics of Lisbon, Portugal. We develop a naïve Bayesian classifier to estimate taxi demand; analyze the correlation between taxi volume and mobile phone activity; and compare ANN and linear regression models to estimate NO2 concentrations, using taxi activity information and meteorological conditions.
J an 2 01 3 Statistical measurements of quantum emitters coupled to Anderson-localized modes in disordered photonic-crystal waveguides

Statistical measurements of quantum emitters coupled to Anderson-localized modes in disordered photonic-crystal waveguides. Abstract. Optical nanostructures have proven to be meritorious for tailoring the emission properties of quantum emitters. However, unavoidable fabrication imperfections may represent a nuisance. Quite remarkably, disorder offers new opportunities since light can be efficiently confined by random multiple scattering leading to Anderson localization. Here we investigate the effect of such disorder-induced cavities on the emission dynamics of single quantum dots embedded in disordered photonic-crystal waveguides. We present time-resolved measurements of both the total emission from Anderson-localized cavities and from single emitters that are coupled to the cavities. We observe both strongly inhibited and enhanced decay rates relative to the rate of spontaneous emission in a homogeneous medium. From a statistical analysis, we report an average Purcell factor of 2 in without any control on the quantum dot-cavity detuning. By spectrally tuning individual quantum dots into resonance with Anderson-localized modes, a maximum Purcell factor of 23.8 is recorded, which lies at the onset of the strong coupling regime. The presented data quantify the potential of naturally occurring Anderson-localized cavities for controlling and enhancing the light-matter interaction strength, which is of relevance not only for cavity quantum-electrodynamics experiments but potentially also for efficient energy harvesting and controllable random lasing.
Lightweight Multipriority Framework Classes for Bandwidth Differentiation Service

-Internet deploy new applications, such as voice over IP, video conference, video streaming, audio streaming, mission-critical financial data, employ the user datagram protocol (UDP) and have different requirements on the bandwidth from those of existing applications using transmission control protocol (TCP). TCP-friendliness and multimedia-friendliness “contradict” with each other. The possible approaches to address these problems are enhance the Internet with resource reservation, admission control and adopt source adaptation schemes such that the sending rate of an application is adjusted According to the current network condition. The source adaptation scheme, better preferred has two drawbacks i.e., it is more moderately responsive to transient changes in congestion, including a slower response to an abrupt change in the available bandwidth and the requirement of multimedia applications cannot be satisfied by equation-based source adaptation when a large number of flows share a link. The proposed system, develop a framework which extend the concepts of fairness, TCP-friendliness and TCP-compatibility, by designing TCP and UDP friendly source adaptation schemes and develop a less Conservative framework to provide bandwidth differentiation service without any change to the router of the existing Internet.The proposed scheme is extended towards the handling of multiple bottleneck links available in the real time networks. In addition the scheme combines with TCP slow-start, timeout to provide a relatively differentiated bandwidth service in the existing Internet, without any change to the router. The newly developed source adaptation scheme is improved to work with multiple priority classes.
Reciprocal Regulation of Epileptiform Neuronal Oscillations and Electrical Synapses in the Rat Hippocampus

Gap junction (GJ) channels have been recognized as an important mechanism for synchronizing neuronal networks. Herein, we investigated the participation of GJ channels in the pilocarpine-induced status epilepticus (SE) by analyzing electrophysiological activity following the blockade of connexins (Cx)-mediated communication. In addition, we examined the regulation of gene expression, protein levels, phosphorylation profile and distribution of neuronal Cx36, Cx45 and glial Cx43 in the rat hippocampus during the acute and latent periods. Electrophysiological recordings revealed that the GJ blockade anticipates the occurrence of low voltage oscillations and promotes a marked reduction of power in all analyzed frequencies.Cx36 gene expression and protein levels remained stable in acute and latent periods, whereas upregulation of Cx45 gene expression and protein redistribution were detected in the latent period. We also observed upregulation of Cx43 mRNA levels followed by changes in the phosphorylation profile and protein accumulation. Taken together, our results indisputably revealed that GJ communication participates in the epileptiform activity induced by pilocarpine. Moreover, considering that specific Cxs undergo alterations through acute and latent periods, this study indicates that the control of GJ communication may represent a focus in reliable anti-epileptogenic strategies.
INTERACTIVE VIDEO AND CAMERA POSITION FOR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

In this work we address the extended interaction with video in virtual walkthrough. We present an algorithm for automatic extraction of camera positions during the video recording. The algorithm creates a b-spline curve, which represents the camera movement. We propose using this curve as an interactive element. The user can with help of this element change his position in video file according to his position in the virtual walkthrough and not only according to time. With this element we extend the standard interaction with video and also the user has additional information about his position during the presentation. We also present an algorithm for object tracking inside video and creation of object representative. We are using this representatives as an information for the users about additional information for selected object. We extended the interaction within the video and the user can view other information on demand.
Automatic Detection of Social Signals in Digital Playgrounds

Play is a vital activity in which children observe the world, learn new concepts and experiment with them. Even though the social aspect of play is very important, the computer science community has struggled to address it. Digital playgrounds have been built in which children can play in technologically enhanced installations, but the detailed study of the social component of play within these installations has been overlooked. The research proposed here aims to fill in the gap between the human sciences and computer sciences in this context. The emerging field of research called Social Signal Processing (SSP) tasks itself with a goal similar to ours, design systems that are able to detect, interpret and/or reproduce social signals. We plan on using concepts and practices from both the SSP and the Computer Vision fields to analyze the social behavior of children during play in digital playgrounds. We aim to design playgrounds that are able to automatically interpret social interactions and change their dynamics depending on the behavior being exhibited by the children within.
Chromosome breakage following G2 checkpoint release

The invention relates to a process to make (com)pressed products of salt comprising iron ammonium hydroxypolycarboxylic acid complexes as anti-caking additive, as well as to the obtained pressed products and the use of these pressed products, for example as salt licks and/or water softener salt products.
METATOOL: for studying metabolic networks

MOTIVATION To reconstruct metabolic pathways from biochemical and/or genome sequence data, the stoichiometric and thermodynamic feasibility of the pathways has to be tested. This is achieved by characterizing the admissible region of flux distributions in steady state. This region is spanned by what can be called a convex basis. The concept of 'elementary flux modes' provides a mathematical tool to define all metabolic routes that are feasible in a given metabolic network. In addition, we define 'enzyme subsets' to be groups of enzymes that operate together in fixed flux proportions in all steady states of the system. RESULTS Algorithms for computing the convex basis and elementary modes developed earlier are briefly reviewed. A newly developed algorithm for detecting all enzyme subsets in a given network is presented. All of these algorithms have been implemented in a novel computer program named METATOOL, whose features are outlined here. The algorithms are illustrated by an example taken from sugar metabolism. AVAILABILITY METATOOL is available from ftp://bmsdarwin.brookes. ac. uk/pub/software/ibmpc/metatool. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION http://www. biologie.hu-berlin.de/biophysics/Theory/tpfeiffer/metatoo l.html
Literature Review: Model Free Human Gait Recognition

Human gait recognition is a distance based second generation biometrics, which is unobtrusive. Human gait recognition is nothing but identifying a person from its walking style. Human Cooperation is not required in this biometric system. There are two approaches of gait recognition, which are model based and model free approaches. This paper provides a recent comprehensive survey of only model free gait recognition approach. This survey focuses on motion free gait image representation, dimensionality reduction of extracted feature and classification. Publicly available gait dataset are also discussed. The paper is concluded by listing the research challenges and by giving future direction in model free gait recognition approach.
Distributed Detection over Random Networks: Large Deviations Performance Analysis

We study the large deviations performance, i.e., the exponential decay rate of the error probability, of distributed detection algorithms over random networks. At each time step $k$ each sensor: 1) averages its decision variable with the neighbors' decision variables; and 2) accounts on-the-fly for its new observation. We show that distributed detection exhibits a "phase change" behavior. When the rate of network information flow (the speed of averaging) is above a threshold, then distributed detection is asymptotically equivalent to the optimal centralized detection, i.e., the exponential decay rate of the error probability for distributed detection equals the Chernoff information. When the rate of information flow is below a threshold, distributed detection achieves only a fraction of the Chernoff information rate; we quantify this achievable rate as a function of the network rate of information flow. Simulation examples demonstrate our theoretical findings on the behavior of distributed detection over random networks.
Comparison of Deghosting Algorithms for Multi-exposure High Dynamic Range Imaging

High dynamic range (HDR) images can be generated by capturing a sequence of low dynamic range (LDR) images of the same scene with different exposures and then merging those images to create an HDR image. During capturing of LDR images, any changes in the scene or slightest camera movement results in ghost artifacts in the resultant HDR image. Over the past few years many algorithms have been proposed to produce ghost free HDR images of dynamic scenes. In this study we performed subjective psychophysical experiments to evaluate four algorithms for removing ghost artifacts in the final HDR image. To our best knowledge, no evaluation of deghosting algorithms for HDR imaging has been published. Thus, the aim of this paper is not only to evaluate different ghost removal algorithms but also to introduce a methodology to evaluate such algorithms and to present some of the challenges that exist in evaluating ghost removal algorithms in HDR images. Optical flow algorithms have been shown to produce successful results in aligning input images before merging them into an HDR image. As a result one of the state-of-the-art deghosting algorithm for HDR image alignment is based on optical flow. To test the limits of the evaluated deghosting algorithms the scenes used in our experiments were selected following the criteria proposed by Baker et al. [2011], which is considered as de facto standard for evaluating optical flow methodologies. The scenes used in the experiments serve to provide challenges that need to be dealt with by not only algorithms based on optical flow methodologies but also by other ghost removal algorithms for HDR imaging. The results reveal the scenes for which the evaluated algorithms fail and may serve as a guide for future research in this area.
Nutritional Status and Tuberculosis Risk in Adult and Pediatric Household Contacts

Background Studies show obesity decreases risk of tuberculosis (TB) disease. There is limited evidence on whether high body mass index also protects against TB infection; how very high body mass indices influence TB risk; or whether nutritional status predicts this risk in children. We assessed the impact of body mass index on incident TB infection and disease among adults and children. Methods and Findings We conducted a prospective cohort study among household contacts of pulmonary TB cases in Lima, Peru. We determined body mass index at baseline and followed participants for one year for TB infection and disease. We used Cox proportional regression analyses to estimate hazard ratios for incident TB infection and disease. We enrolled 14,044 household contacts, and among 6853 negative for TB infection and disease at baseline, 1787 (26.1%) became infected. A total of 406 contacts developed secondary TB disease during follow-up. Body mass index did not predict risk of TB infection but overweight household contacts had significantly decreased risk of TB disease (HR 0.48; 95% CI 0.37–0.64; p <0.001) compared to those with normal weight. Among adults, body mass index ≥ 35 kg/m2 continued to predict a lower risk of TB disease (HR 0.30; 95% CI 0.12–0.74; p 0.009). We found no association between high body mass index and TB infection or disease among children under 12 years of age. Conclusions High body mass index protects adults against TB disease even at levels ≥ 35 kg/m2. This protective effect does not extend to TB infection and is not seen in children.