Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anatomical organization of retinotopic motion‐sensitive pathways in the optic lobes of flies

Anatomical methods have identified conserved neuronal morphologies and synaptic relationships among small‐field retinotopic neurons in insect optic lobes. These conserved cell shapes occur across many species of dipteran insects and are also shared by Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera. The suggestion that such conserved neurons should participate in motion computing circuits finds support from intracellular recordings as well as older studies that used radioactive deoxyglucose labeling to reveal strata with motion‐specific activity in an achromatic neuropil called the lobula plate. While intracellular recordings provide detailed information about the motion‐sensitive or motion‐selective responses of identified neurons, a full understanding of how arrangements of identified neurons compute and integrate information about visual motion will come from a multidisciplinary approach that includes morphological circuit analysis, the use of genetic mutants that exhibit specific deficits in motion processing, and biomimetic models. The latter must be based on the organization and connections of real neurons, yet provide output properties similar to those of more traditional theoretical models based on behavioral observations that date from the 1950s. Microsc. Res. Tech. 62:132–150, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Multi-Agent Resource Sensitive Communication

In order for a model of rational agency to be used for multi-agent social interaction, the model must be extended to account for communicative behaviors that are ine(cid:14)cient for one agent, but which increase the e(cid:14)ciency of the interaction of two agents in a dialogue. In this paper, we argue that naturally occurring communicative behaviors are often directed at the resource limits of the other agent and that communicative behaviors that are e(cid:11)ective for resource unbounded agents are not suited for resource limited agents. We describe a set of experiments on communicative behaviors in a multi-agent simulation testbed and explore the e(cid:14)cacy of various information sources on which agents can base their decisions about what and when to communicate with other agents. In particular we argue that a model of what the other agent is attending to makes a signi(cid:12)cant contribution to communicative e(cid:14)ciency.
Modified Active Appearance Models Features for Facial Expression Recognition

The six basic facial expressions (anger, disgust, fears, happy, sadness, surprise) which have been recognized in psychology are commonly used for facial expressions recognition research. In this work, we propose intuitive and effective facial features to recognize the six facial expressions by modifying the original facial feature points used by the original Active Appearance Model (AAM). The Support Vector Machine (SVM) is employed as the base classifier for facial expression classification. The original facial features are two dimensional vertex point position represented by the xand ycoordinates. However, we observe that every facial expression is just a deviation from the original neutral facial expression, so we try to exploit the differences between any facial expression and the neutral expression for facial expression recognition. The experiment results by applying the proposed differential facial feature, the recognition accuracy is higher than by applying the original facial features for all facial expressions.
Cost-aware pareto optimal test suite minimisation for service-centric systems

Runtime testing cost caused by service invocations is considered as one of the major limitations in Service-centric System Testing (ScST). Unfortunately, most of the existing work cannot achieve cost reduction at runtime as they perform offline testing. In this paper, we introduce a novel cost-aware pareto optimal test suite minimisation approach for ScST aimed at reducing runtime testing cost. In experimental analysis, the proposed approach achieved reductions between 69% and 98.6% in monetary cost of service invocations while retaining test suite coverage. The results also provided evidence for the effectiveness of the selected algorithm HNSGA-II over the two commonly used algorithms: Greedy and NSGA-II.
Thermoprotection of Bacillus subtilis by Exogenously Provided Glycine Betaine and Structurally Related Compatible Solutes: Involvement of Opu Transporters

ABSTRACT Bacillus subtilis possesses five osmotically regulated transporters (Opu) for the uptake of various compatible solutes for osmoprotective purposes. We have now found that compatible solutes also function as thermoprotectants for B. subtilis. Low concentrations of glycine betaine enhanced the growth of the B. subtilis wild-type strain JH642 at its maximal growth temperature (52°C) but did not allow an extension of the upper growth limit. A similar enhancement in the growth of B. subtilis was also observed by the addition of several other compatible solutes that are structurally related to glycine betaine or by the addition of proline. Each of these compatible solutes was taken up under heat stress by the cell through the same Opu transporters that are used for their acquisition under osmostress conditions. Northern blot analysis revealed a moderate increase in transcription of the structural genes for each of the Opu transport systems in cells that were propagated at 52°C. In contrast, the uptake level of radiolabeled glycine betaine was very low under high-temperature growth conditions but nevertheless allowed the buildup of an intracellular glycine betaine pool comparable to that found in cells grown at 37°C in the absence of salt stress. Although exogenously added glutamate has only a limited osmoprotective potential for B. subtilis, it was found to be a very effective thermoprotectant. Collectively, our data demonstrate thermoprotection by a variety of compatible solutes in B. subtilis, thus ascribing a new physiological function for this class of compounds in this microorganism and broadening the physiological role of the known osmoprotectant uptake systems (Opu).
An equilibrium trading volume model in presence of heterogeneous biased estimations and information acquisition costs

We consider a two period model in which a continuum of agents trade in a context of costly information acquisition and systematic heterogeneous expectations biases. We show that under very weak technical assumptions a market equilibrium exists and the supply and demand functions are strictly monotonic with respect to the price. The equilibrium price is also shown to be the price that maximizes the trading volume. We prove additional properties such as the anti-monotony of the trading volume with respect to the marginal information price.
Glucocorticoid Treatment Prevents Progressive Myocardial Dysfunction Resulting From Experimental Coronary Microembolization

Background—The frequency and importance of microembolization in patients with acute coronary syndromes and during coronary interventions have recently been appreciated. Experimental microembolization induces immediate ischemic dysfunction, which recovers within minutes. Subsequently, progressive contractile dysfunction develops over several hours and is not associated with reduced regional myocardial blood flow (perfusion-contraction mismatch) but rather with a local inflammatory reaction. We have now studied the effect of antiinflammatory glucocorticoid treatment on this progressive contractile dysfunction. Methods and Results—Microembolization was induced by injecting microspheres (42-μm diameter) into the left circumflex coronary artery. Anesthetized dogs were followed up for 8 hours and received placebo (n = 7) or methylprednisolone 30 mg/kg IV either 30 minutes before (n = 7) or 30 minutes after (n = 5) microembolization. In addition, chronically instrumented dogs received either placebo (n = 4) or methylprednisolone (n = 4) 30 minutes after microembolization and were followed up for 1 week. In acute placebo dogs, posterior systolic wall thickening was decreased from 20.0±2.1% (mean±SEM) at baseline to 5.8±0.6% at 8 hours after microembolization. Methylprednisolone prevented the progressive myocardial dysfunction. Increased leukocyte infiltration in the embolized myocardium was prevented only when methylprednisolone was given before microembolization. In chronic placebo dogs, progressive dysfunction recovered from 5.0±0.7% at 4 to 6 hours after microembolization back to baseline (19.1±1.6%) within 5 days. Again, methylprednisolone prevented the progressive myocardial dysfunction. Conclusions—Methylprednisolone, even when given after microembolization, prevents progressive contractile dysfunction.
The malware detection challenge of accuracy

Real time Malware detection is still a big challenge; although considerable research showed advances of design and build systems that can automatically predicate the maliciousness of specific file, program, or website, Malware is continuously growing in terms of numbers and maliciousness. Web-based Malware detection is also growing with the expansion of the Internet and the availability of higher speeds and bandwidths. In this paper, we design, develop and evaluate an application that able to determine whether targeted website is malicious or not by utilizing available detection APIs. These APIs are able to communicate with several public scanners and Malware repositories. While the availability of many public scanners can help utilize those public services, however due to the fact that in most cases, they produce conflicting decisions, the process to make a final detection inference is not a trivial task. We conducted experiments to evaluate the different decision outcomes that come from the different scanners that utilized machine learning, data mining and other techniques. We also evaluated the issue of “unrated” decision based on the different Malware scanners.
UNED-UV @ Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task

This paper details the participation of the UNED-UV group at the 2015 Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task. This year, our proposal is based on a multi-modal approach that firstly applies a textual algorithm based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) to detect the latent topics addressed by the images to diversify them according to these topics. Secondly, a Local Logistic Regression model, which uses the low level features and some relevant and non-relevant samples, is adjusted and estimates the relevance probability for all the images in the database.
Reducible Complexity in DNS

DNS is one of the most important components of the Internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, it is known to be difficult to implement, and available implementations are difficult to configure correctly. DNS performance and availability often suffer from poor configuration which leads to unavailability or erroneous behavior of distributed systems that depend on DNS. The data structures of DNS are historically grown. Some are no longer needed, some have changed their semantics. However, they have to be maintained by implementations. We measure the extent and configuration issues in DNS data and propose simplifications to DNS data types and semantics that would allow building more dependable implementations. New DNS implementations could also reduce complexity by ignoring certain functionality of DNS that are not needed or that can be implemented in other ways.
Vowel Imagery Decoding toward Silent Speech BCI Using Extreme Learning Machine with Electroencephalogram

The purpose of this study is to classify EEG data on imagined speech in a single trial. We recorded EEG data while five subjects imagined different vowels, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. We divided each single trial dataset into thirty segments and extracted features (mean, variance, standard deviation, and skewness) from all segments. To reduce the dimension of the feature vector, we applied a feature selection algorithm based on the sparse regression model. These features were classified using a support vector machine with a radial basis function kernel, an extreme learning machine, and two variants of an extreme learning machine with different kernels. Because each single trial consisted of thirty segments, our algorithm decided the label of the single trial by selecting the most frequent output among the outputs of the thirty segments. As a result, we observed that the extreme learning machine and its variants achieved better classification rates than the support vector machine with a radial basis function kernel and linear discrimination analysis. Thus, our results suggested that EEG responses to imagined speech could be successfully classified in a single trial using an extreme learning machine with a radial basis function and linear kernel. This study with classification of imagined speech might contribute to the development of silent speech BCI systems.
Presence of the Gpr179nob5 allele in a C3H-derived transgenic mouse

Purpose To identify the mutation responsible for an abnormal electroretinogram (ERG) in a transgenic mouse line (tg21) overexpressing erythropoietin (Epo). The tg21 line was generated on a mixed (C3H; C57BL/6) background and lacked the b-wave component of the ERG. This no-b-wave (nob) ERG is seen in other mouse models with depolarizing bipolar cell (DBC) dysfunction and in patients with the complete form of congenital stationary night blindness (cCSNB). We determined the basis for the nob ERG phenotype and screened C3H mice for the mutation to evaluate whether this finding is important for the vision research community. Methods ERGs were used to examine retinal function. The retinal structure of the transgenic mice was investigated using histology and immunohistochemistry. Inverse PCR was performed to identify the insertion site of the Epo transgene in the mouse genome. Affected mice were backcrossed to follow the inheritance pattern of the nob ERG phenotype. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT PCR), Sanger sequencing, and immunohistochemistry were used to identify the mutation causing the defect. Additional C3H sublines were screened for the detected mutation. Results Retinal histology and blood vessel structure were not disturbed, and no loss of DBCs was observed in the tg21 nob mice. The mutation causing the nob ERG phenotype is inherited independently of the tg21 transgene. The qRT PCR experiments revealed that the nob ERG phenotype reflected a mutation in Gpr179, a gene involved in DBC signal transduction. PCR analysis confirmed the presence of the Gpr179nob5 insertional mutation in intron 1 of Gpr179. Screening for mutations in other C3H-derived lines revealed that C3H.Pde6b+ mice carry the Gpr179nob5 allele whereas C3H/HeH mice do not. Conclusions We identified the presence of the Gpr179nob5 mutation causing DBC dysfunction in a C3H-derived transgenic mouse line. The nob phenotype is not related to the presence of the transgene. The Gpr179nob5 allele can be added to the list of background alleles that impact retinal function in commonly used mouse lines. By providing primers to distinguish between Gpr179 mutant and wild-type alleles, this study allows investigators to monitor for the presence of the Gpr179nob5 mutation in other mouse lines derived from C3H.
On Sequential Estimation and Prediction for Discrete Time Series

The problem of extracting as much information as possible from a sequence of observations of a stationary stochastic process X0,X1,…,Xn has been considered by many authors from different points of view. It has long been known through the work of D. Bailey that no universal estimator for P(Xn+1|X0,X1, .Xn) can be found which converges to the true estimator almost surely. Despite this result, for restricted classes of processes, or for sequences of estimators along stopping times, universal estimators can be found. We present here a survey of some of the recent work that has been done along these lines.
Replacing Network Coordinate System with Internet Delay Matrix Service (IDMS): A Case Study in Chinese Internet

Network distance (Round Trip Time, RTT) is an important parameter for many Internet distributed systems to optimize their performances. Network Coordinate System (NCS) is assumed as a lightweight and scalable mechanism to predict network distance between any two Internet hosts without explicit measurements. Though many NCSes have been proposed in the literatures, they are not satisfactory in terms of accuracy. In this paper, we propose to use delay matrix to replace the NCS. This paper makes three contributions. First, we show that not all the hosts need an independent network coordinate (NC). On the contrary, most hosts can be represented as one or several nodes in NCS. Second, we present an Internet Delay Matrix Service (IDMS) for representing network distances without explicit measurements in Internet. Third, we describe two delay matrices up to date delay matrix (UDM) and previous delay matrices (PDM) for representing the network distances. Extensive simulations on our collected Chinese Internet data sets show that IDMS is an accurate, efficient, scalable and practical method for Chinese Internet. The performance of IDMS is better than other existing approaches.
PARALLEL LFG GRAMMARS ON PARALLEL CORPORA : A BASE FOR PRACTICAL TRIANGULATION

This paper presents an approach to annotation projection in a multi-parallel corpus, that is, a collection of translated texts in more than two languages. Existing analysis tools, like the LFG grammars from the ParGram project, are applied to two of the languages in the corpus and the resulting annotation is projected to a third language, taking advantage of the largely parallel character of f-structure. The third language can be a low-resource language. The technique can thus be particularly beneficial for corpus-based (cross-) linguistic research. We discuss a number of ways to realize automatic corpus annotation based on multi-source projection, including direct projection and approaches with an additional generalization step that employs machine learning techniques. We present a series of detailed experiments for a sample annotation task, verb argument identification, using the German and English ParGram grammars for projection to Dutch and maximum entropy models for learning generalizations.
Performance of Lincoded Optical Heterodyne CPFSK Transmission System Affected by Polarization Mode Dispersion in a Single Mode Fiber

A theoretical analysis for evaluating the performance of a lincoded continuous phase optical frequency shift keying (CPFSK) optical transmission system with delay line demodulation receiver is presented. It accounts for the combined effects of signal phase distortion due to polarization mode dispersion (PMD) and group velocity dispersion (GVD) in a single mode fiber. The analysis is carried out for three different linecoding schemes, i.e., alternate mark inversion, order-1 and delay modulation coding, to investigate the efficacy of the linecoding in counteracting the effect of PMD in CPFSK optical transmission system. The average bit error rate (BER) performance results are evaluated with line codes and compared with NRZ-CPFSK system at a bit rate of 10 Gb/s considering Maxwellian probability distribution for the mean differential group delay (DGD) due to PMD. The results show that the penalty improvement of line coded systems is within 0.5 dB to 1.95 dB with respect to NRZ data at a BER of 10-9.
General-Purpose Lexical Acquisition: Procedures, Questions and Results

We discuss a range of in vitro and in vivo approaches to deep lexical acquisition, and evaluate a representative sample of each in learning lexical items for a precision grammar. Evaluation focuses particularly on determining the effectiveness of each method at the token and type level, and over the four basic word classes of English. Each method is shown to have particular strengths and weaknesses but to have some part to play in the overall task of word learning.
Oscillopsia and tolerance to retinal image movement in congenital nystagmus.

PURPOSE To determine the relationship between retinal image movement (RIM) and oscillopsia in subjects with idiopathic congenital nystagmus (CN). METHODS Eye movements were recorded using an IRIS infrared system. The eye movement signal was fed back to move an otherwise stationary target on a screen and thereby modify the RIM experienced by each of the five CN subjects. The target was present with either no background (the absolute condition) or a textured background (the relative condition). Feedback gains were varied from -1.0 (i.e., 100% retinal image increase) to +1.0 (i.e., 100% retinal image decrease or complete stabilization), with 0 representing the zero feedback or stationary target condition. In the first experiment, RIM thresholds were determined for a range of feedback values. Using zero feedback, a second experiment measured the detection threshold for absolute and relative motions to a ramp-generated target movement for five CN and five control subjects. RESULTS Under feedback control spatial constancy broke down for both increased and reduced RIM. The range of spatial constancy was greater for absolute (-0.56 to +0.44) compared with relative (-0.18 to +0.18) RIM. Motion detection thresholds for the CN group were 8 times less sensitive to the absolute and 17 times less sensitive to the relative motion of the target compared with the control group. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that in CN subjects perceptual stability is achieved primarily by extraretinal signals.
A One-Class SVM Based Tool for Machine Learning Novelty Detection in HVAC Chiller Systems

Abstract Faulty operations of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) chiller systems can lead to discomfort for the occupants, energy wastage, unreliability and shorter equipment life. Such faults need to be detected early to prevent further escalation and energy losses. Commonly, data regarding unforeseen phenomena and abnormalities are rare or are not available at the moment for HVAC installations: for this reason in this paper an unsupervised One-Class SVM classifier employed as a novelty detection system to identify unknown status and possible faults is presented. The approach, that exploits Principal Component Analysis to accent novelties w.r. t. normal operations variability, has been tested on a HVAC literature dataset.