Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Local Structure Discovery in Bayesian Networks

Learning a Bayesian network structure from data is an NP-hard problem and thus exact algorithms are feasible only for small data sets. Therefore, network structures for larger networks are usually learned with various heuristics. Another approach to scaling up the structure learning is local learning. In local learning, the modeler has one or more target variables that are of special interest; he wants to learn the structure near the target variables and is not interested in the rest of the variables. In this paper, we present a score-based local learning algorithm called SLL. We conjecture that our algorithm is theoretically sound in the sense that it is optimal in the limit of large sample size. Empirical results suggest that SLL is competitive when compared to the constraint-based HITON algorithm. We also study the prospects of constructing the network structure for the whole node set based on local results by presenting two algorithms and comparing them to several heuristics.
Five-branes in heterotic brane-world theories

The effective action for five-dimensional heterotic M theory in the presence of five-branes is systematically derived from Ho\ifmmode \check{r}\else \v{r}\fi{}ava-Witten theory coupled to an M5-brane world-volume theory. This leads to a five-dimensional $N=1$ gauged supergravity theory on ${S}^{1}/{Z}_{2}$ coupled to four-dimensional $N=1$ theories residing on the two orbifold fixed planes and an additional bulk three-brane. We analyze the properties of this action, particularly the four-dimensional effective theory associated with the domain-wall vacuum state. The moduli K\"ahler potential and the gauge-kinetic functions are determined along with the explicit relations between four-dimensional superfields and five-dimensional component fields.
Modeling and Nonlinear Adaptive Control for Autonomous Vehicle Overtaking

In this paper, we present a mathematical model and adaptive controller for an autonomous vehicle overtaking maneuver. We consider the problem of an autonomous three-phase overtaking without the use of any roadway marking scheme or intervehicle communication. The developed feedback controller requires information for the current relative intervehicle position and orientation, which are assumed to be available from onboard sensors. We apply standard robotic nomenclature for translational and rotational displacements and velocities and propose a general kinematic model of the vehicles and the relative intervehicle kinematics during the overtaking maneuver. The overtaking maneuver is investigated as a tracking problem with respect to desired polynomial virtual trajectories for every phase, which are generated in real time. An update control law for the automated overtaking vehicle is designed that allows tracking the desired trajectories in the presence of unknown velocity of the overtaken vehicle. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed controller.
Neural Network Control of a Laboratory Magnetic Levitator

Magnetic levitation (maglev) systems are nowadays employed in applications ranging from non-contact bearings and vibration isolation of sensitive machinery to high-speed passenger trains. In this chapter a mathematical model of a laboratory maglev system was derived using the Lagrangian approach. A linear pole-placement controller was designed on the basis of specifications on peak overshoot and settling time. A 3-layer feed-forward Artificial Neural Network (ANN) controller comprising 3-input nodes, a 5-neuron hidden layer, and 1-neuron output layer was trained using the linear state feedback controller with a random reference signal. Simulations to investigate the robustness of the ANN control scheme with respect to parameter variations, reference step input magnitude variations, and sinusoidal input tracking were carried out using SIMULINK. The obtained simulation results show that the ANN controller is robust with respect to good positioning accuracy.
Working up a lather: the rise (and fall?) of hand hygiene in Canadian newspapers, 1986–2015

Abstract Hand hygiene is a long-standing concern in the health sciences literature, but its emergence as a public health issue in the news is a more recent development. Drawing on Alan Hunt’s work on moral regulation and responsibilization, this article analyses 30 years of Canadian newspaper coverage of hand hygiene. Concerns associated with hand hygiene and trends in coverage were identified in a sample of 518 articles, published between 1986 and 2015. Although the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and H1N1 influenza epidemics emerged as important triggers, healthcare-associated infection (HAI) was the dominant trigger for hand hygiene coverage. The articles tend to present hand hygiene as a unidimensional approach to infection control. They tend to responsibilize individuals–first members of the general public, then healthcare providers and increasingly patients–for managing the risk of infection, rather than focus upon social, cultural, political and economic factors that would promote a more broad-based and structural response to HAI.
Nonorthogonal DCT implementation for JPEG forensics

The detection of JPEG prior compression has become an essential task in the detection of forgery in image forensics. In this paper we propose a novel DCT implementation technique that can be utilized in the detection of any hacking or tampering of JPEG/DCT compressed images. The proposed approach is based upon recent literature ideas of recompressing JPEG image blocks and detecting if this block has been compressed before or not and how many times. In this paper we proposed a DCT implementation that has a onetime signature on processed coefficients or pixels and can be used as a tool to detect if this block has been compressed before using the proposed implementation or not. Any further processing can be easily detected and identified. The proposed DCT transformation is nonorthogonal and results in a minor amount of error due to this nonorthogonality, however it maintains an excellent tradeoff between compression performance, and transform error. Illustrative examples on several processed images are presented with complexity analysis.
A Generalized Cost Malmquist Index to the Productivities of Units with Negative Data in DEA

In some data envelopment analysis (DEA) applications, some inputs of DMUs have negative values with positive cost. This paper generalizes the global cost Malmquist productivity index to compare the productivity of different DMUs with negative inputs in any two periods of times under variable returns to scale (VRS) technology, and then the generalized index is decomposed to several components. The obtained components are computed using nonparametric linear programming models, known as DEA. To illustrate the generalized index and its components, a numerical example at three successive periods of time is given.
Comments and Replies Comments on 'the Foster Reactance Theorem for Antennas and Radiation '

In [1], the authors present a proof that Foster's theorem [2] is valid in general for antennas, which is a surprising result. Foster's theorem, as it is generally understood, expresses that the gradient of reactance and susceptance with frequency is always positive for a lossless network. That this should be valid for any antenna with radiation losses is intuitively wrong and goes against numerous experimental and numerical results, as well as other theoretical derivations [3], [4]. The purpose of this comment is to show that the proof in [1] is erroneous. First a brief look at Foster's theorem [5], [6], for which it is often forgotten that it must be valid for both reactance and susceptance. In the original Foster's theorem [2] there is no mentioning of reactance gradients , except that this part was proven and published earlier by Zobel [7], so " Zobel's reactance theorem " would be a more appropriate name. Foster [2] showed that for a lossless circuit there is an alternating series of poles and zeros on the real frequency axis, and a zero for reactance corresponds to a pole for susceptance. Foster's theorem says that the gradient of both quantities versus frequency always is positive. This is illustrated in Fig. 1 which shows the case of a pole at zero frequency and a zero at ! = 1 for the reactance, and vice versa for the susceptance, a series connection of a unit capacitor, a unit inductor, and a resistor Z = r + j! + 1 j! : (1) For the resistance equal to zero there are positive gradients everywhere for both reactance and susceptance. For a series resistance of r = 0:2, the reactance is of course unaffected, but a dramatic shift in susceptance which is now zero at the resonance and a negative gradient. It is easy to show that at resonance the slopes of reactance and susceptance have different signs. Thus, it is already clear at this stage that Foster's theorem in general cannot be valid for a circuit with loss, which is what an antenna is. Adler et al. [8] do show that a function like (1) is analytic in s in the complex frequency plane Z(s) = r + s + 1 s (2) and apply Cauchy-Riemann to show that the reactance gradient is positive , but this is too simple a model to cover all antenna cases. …
Discovering Relations among Named Entities by Detecting Community Structure

This paper proposes a networked data mining method for relations discovery from large corpus. The key idea is representing the named entities pairs and their contexts as the network structure and detecting the communities from the network. Then each community relates to a relation the named entities pairs in the same community have the same relation. Finally, we labeled the relations. Our experiment using the corpus of People's Daily reveals not only that the relations among named entities could be detected with high precision, but also that appropriate labels could be automatically provided for the relations.
SIMULATION OF CORRELATION ACTIVITY PRUNING METHODS TO ENHANCE TRANSPARENCY OF ANNS

The use of ANNs as predictors of natural phenomena is an important application but equally important is any resulting explanation of the heuristics a network uses to achieve this prediction. The novel methods of equation synthesis and correlated activation pruning (CAPing) are introduced and used to extract meaning from a trained ANN. Equation synthesis involves the incremental increase in the number of connections of the trained ANN used until satisfactory prediction is achieved. CAPing involves the identification of nodes that have similar effects on the desired output. Comparison of the inputs to these nodes can lead to useful dependency relationships. Several useful generalizations have been made in this project by using these methods. Generalizations have been made using ANNs, equation synthesis and CAPing. These techniques are applied to neural nets trained to simulate the pollutant/crop damage cause/effect relationship.
Rett syndrome and MeCP2: linking epigenetics and neuronal function.

Rett syndrome (RTT [MIM #312750]) was discovered when two girls who exhibited the same unusual behaviors happened to be seated next to each other in the waiting room of Andreas Rett, a Viennese pediatrician. It took >30 years after this discovery to determine the genetic basis of RTT, largely because the disease is primarily sporadic in nature and because familial cases are scarce. The discovery that mutations in methyl-CpG–binding protein 2 (MECP2) cause RTT and other neurodevelopmental disorders has called attention to the importance of epigenetic modifications in neuronal function.
Alterations in Peripheral and Central Components of the Auditory Brainstem Response: A Neural Assay of Tinnitus

Chronic tinnitus, or “ringing of the ears”, affects upwards of 15% of the adult population. Identifying a cost-effective and objective measure of tinnitus is needed due to legal concerns and disability issues, as well as for facilitating the effort to assess neural biomarkers. We developed a modified gap-in-noise (GIN) paradigm to assess tinnitus in mice using the auditory brainstem response (ABR). We then compared the commonly used acoustic startle reflex gap-prepulse inhibition (gap-PPI) and the ABR GIN paradigm in young adult CBA/CaJ mice before and after administrating sodium salicylate (SS), which is known to reliably induce a 16 kHz tinnitus percept in rodents. Post-SS, gap-PPI was significantly reduced at 12 and 16 kHz, consistent with previous studies demonstrating a tinnitus-induced gap-PPI reduction in this frequency range. ABR audiograms indicated thresholds were significantly elevated post-SS, also consistent with previous studies. There was a significant increase in the peak 2 (P2) to peak 1 (P1) and peak 4 (P4) to P1 amplitude ratios in the mid-frequency range, along with decreased latency of P4 at higher intensities. For the ABR GIN, peak amplitudes of the response to the second noise burst were calculated as a percentage of the first noise burst response amplitudes to quantify neural gap processing. A significant decrease in this ratio (i.e. recovery) was seen only at 16 kHz for P1, indicating the presence of tinnitus near this frequency. Thus, this study demonstrates that GIN ABRs can be used as an efficient, non-invasive, and objective method of identifying the approximate pitch and presence of tinnitus in a mouse model. This technique has the potential for application in human subjects and also indicates significant, albeit different, deficits in temporal processing in peripheral and brainstem circuits following drug induced tinnitus.
Loss of Venous Integrity in Cerebral Small Vessel Disease: A 7-T MRI Study in Cerebral Autosomal-Dominant Arteriopathy With Subcortical Infarcts and Leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL)

Background and Purpose— Previous pathological studies in humans or in animal models have shown alterations of small arteries and veins within white matter lesions in cerebral small vessel disease. We aimed to evaluate in vivo, the integrity of the cerebral venous network using high-resolution MRI both within and outside white matter hyperintensities in cerebral autosomal-dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL). Methods— High-resolution T2*-weighted images were obtained at 7-T in 13 CADASIL patients with no or only mild symptoms and 13 age- and sex-matched controls. Macroscopic veins were automatically counted in the centrum semiovale and compared between patients and controls. In addition, T2* was compared between groups in the normal-appearing white matter. Results— Vein density was found lower in CADASIL patients compared with that in controls (−14.6% in patients, P<0.001). This was detected both within and outside white matter hyperintensities. Mean T2*, that is presumably inversely related to the venous density, was also found increased in normal-appearing white matter of patients (+7.2%, P=0.006). All results were independent from the extent of white matter hyperintensities. Conclusions— A significant reduction in the number of visible veins was observed in the centrum semiovale of CADASIL patients both within and outside white matter hyperintensities, together with an increase of T2* in the normal-appearing white matter. Additional studies are needed to decipher the exact implication of such vasculature changes in the appearance of white matter lesions.
Inhibition of EGFR / PI 3 K / AKT cell survival pathway promotes TSA ' s effect on cell death and migration in human ovarian cancer cells

Trichostatin A (TSA), a hydroxamate-type inhibitor of mammalian histone deacetylases, is emerging as one of a potentially new class of anticancer agents. TSA is known to act by promoting the acetylation of histones, leading to uncoiling of chromatin and activation of a variety of genes implicated in the regulation of cell survival, proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis. In addition, there is an increasing appreciation of the fact that TSA may act through mechanisms other than induction of histone acetylation. Accumulated experimental data indicate that TSA activates phosphatidyl inositol-3-kinase (PI3K)/AKT signaling. Using human ovarian cancer cell line Caov3 cells, we observed that TSA induced cell death in a timeand dose-dependent manner and also inhibited cell migration. TSA transiently activated EGFR tyrosine phosphorylation and AKT activation in a timeand dose-dependent manner, which had been inhibited by EGFR inhibitor PD153035 and PI3 kinase inhibitor LY294002. We also observed that TSA transiently induced survivin expression that had been inhibited by PD153035 and LY294002, suggesting that TSA-induced survivin expression is mediated by EGFR/PI3 kinase pathway. Combination of EGFR inhibitor 153035 or PI3 kinase inhibitor LY294002 with TSA enhanced TSA-induced cell death and TSA reduction of cell migration. Collectively, our data demonstrate that TSA transiently activated EGFR/PI3K/AKT cell survival pathway, leading to expression of survivin. Inhibition of this pathway enhanced TSA-induced cell death and inhibited cell migration. Our data suggest that combination of EGFR/PI3K/AKT cell survival pathway inhibitors with TSA be a better approach to ovarian cancer treatment.
An Improved Method of Access Control Based on BLP Model in MILS

MILS (Multiple Independent Levels of Security) is a high-assurance architecture that protect different security levels information sharing. In order to provide guarantee for a variety of information sharing security, MILS allow software components that have multiple security levels or multiple data domain to run on a single processor. But in specific applications, in order to achieve multiple information interaction and sharing between partitions, the problem of which illegal authorization, unauthorized access and malicious disclosure of sensitive information between different levels of applications will be introduced. From the point of information flow control, the paper put forward a model and method of information flow security control strictly between MILS partitions based on trusted computing. We designed a model based on BLP and access control model of state transition strategy, the policies break the traditional BLP model rules " read down, write up", which meet the needs of the security level for subjects and objects according to the changes of task requirements in MILS. After analyzing, the model can efficaciously protect confidentiality and integrity of the sensitive information, and improve the dependability of the whole system.
Spoken language processing in a conversational system for child-robot interaction

We describe a conversational system for child-robot interaction built with an event-based integration approach using the Nao robot platform with the Urbi middleware within the ALIZE project. Our integrated system includes components for the recognition, interpretation and generation of speech and gestures, dialogue management and user modeling. We describe our approach to processing spoken input and output and highlight some practical implementation issues. We also present preliminary results from experiments where young Italian users interacted with the system.
Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder: investigation into best practice intervention.

(iv) ACKNOWLEDGEMENT . (vi) CHAPTER 1: Introduction . 1 CHAPTER 2: Description of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) . 7 2.1 ASD as a neurodevelopmental disorder . 9 2.1. 1. Possible biological underpinnings for ASD . 9 2.1. 2. Evolution of diagnostic criteria for ASD in the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) . 11 2.2 Current conceptualisation of autism-related conditions . 14 2.3 Factors leading to variation in ASD symptom presentation and daily functioning. 18 2.4 Comorbid Disorders . 24 CHAPTER 3: Challenges Faced by Parents of Children with ASD Compared to Parents of Typically Developing Children . 32 3.1 Mental health impacts associated with parenting children with ASD . 36 3.2 Physical impacts associated with parenting children with ASD . 39 3.3 Social/Familial impacts associated with raising children with ASD . 43 3.4 Limitations from previous research findings . 53
Non‐motor behavioural impairments in parkin‐deficient mice

Mutations in the parkin gene are the major cause of early‐onset familial Parkinson's disease (PD). We previously reported the generation and analysis of a knockout mouse carrying a deletion of exon 3 in the parkin gene. F1 hybrid pa+/– mice were backcrossed to wild‐type C57Bl/6 for three more generations to establish a pa–/–(F4) mouse line. The appearance of tyrosine hydroxylase‐positive neurons was normal in young and aged pa–/– (F4) animals. Loss of parkin function in mice did not enhance vulnerability of dopaminergic neurons to 1‐methyl‐4‐phenyl‐1,2,3,6‐tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) toxicity. However, the pa–/– (F4) mice displayed impaired exploration and habituation to a new environment and exhibited thigmotaxis behaviour in the open field and Morris water maze. Abnormal anxiety‐related behaviour of pa–/– (F4) mice was also observed in the light/dark exploration test paradigm. Dopamine metabolism was enhanced in the striatum of pa–/– (F4) mice, as revealed by increased homovanillic acid (HVA) content and a reduced ratio of dihydroxyphenylacetic acid (DOPAC)/HVA. The alterations found in the dopaminergic system could be responsible for the behavioural impairments of pa–/– (F4) mice. Consistent with a recent observation of cognitive dysfunction in parkin‐linked patients with PD, our findings provide evidence of a physiological role of parkin in non‐motor behaviour, possibly representing a disease stage that precedes dopaminergic neuron loss.
PECAM-1 is a critical mediator of atherosclerosis

Atherosclerotic lesions form at specific sites on blood vessels subject to disturbed blood flow, such as in the vicinity of branch points, the outer wall of bifurcations, and the inner wall of curvatures (DeBakey et al. Chatzizisis et al., 2007). Endothelial cells play a critical role in sensing shear stress, the dragging frictional force created by flow, being ideally situated on the blood vessel lumen, and dysfunction of their mechanosensors is suggested to play a central role in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis (Ross, 1993; Chatzizisis et al., 2007). There is growing clinical evidence to suggest that the platelet endothelial cell adhesion molecule (PECAM-1/CD31), a 130kD glycoprotein expressed on the cell surface of monocytes, neutrophils, platelets, subsets of T cells and endothelial cells, plays a role in atherogenesis. A link has been established between certain PECAM-1 polymorphisms and increased risk for severe coronary heart disease and myocardial infarction (Wenzel et al., 1999; Sasaoka et al., 2001). Using knockout (KO) mice, we have previously shown that PECAM-1, localized to the cell-cell junction in vessel endothelium, is necessary for endothelial cells to sense increases in fluid shear stress and couple them with reactive dilatation of the vessel wall (Bagi et al., 2005). In addition, we have demonstrated that PECAM-1 is also complexed with nitric oxide synthase 3 (NOS 3/eNOS) and that this complex abruptly dissociates in response to changes in shear stress (Dusserre et al., 2004). In addition, PECAM-1 also undergoes phosphorylation in response to changes in shear stress (Fujiwara, 2006; Harada et al., 1995). These changes in shear stress are known to upregulate proinflammatory transcriptional activators such as nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-κB) and early growth response 1 (Egr-1) (Bao et al., 1999). In contrast, PECAM-1 deficient cells are reported to have impaired activation of NF-κB and specific kinases involved in cell signaling (Fleming et al., 2005; Tzima et al., 2005). Taken together,