Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inverse Reinforcement Learning from Failure

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) allows autonomous agents to learn to solve complex tasks from successful demonstrations. However, in many settings, e.g., when a human learns the task by trial and error, failed demonstrations are also readily available. In addition, in some tasks, purposely generating failed demonstrations may be easier than generating successful ones. Since existing IRL methods cannot make use of failed demonstrations, in this paper we propose inverse reinforcement learning from failure (IRLF) which exploits both successful and failed demonstrations. Starting from the state-of-the-art maximum causal entropy IRL method, we propose a new constrained optimisation formulation that accommodates both types of demonstrations while remaining convex. We then derive update rules for learning reward functions and policies. Experiments on both simulated and real-robot data demonstrate that IRLF converges faster and generalises better than maximum causal entropy IRL, especially when few successful demonstrations are available.
Activities of Fluconazole, Caspofungin, Anidulafungin, and Amphotericin B on Planktonic and Biofilm Candida Species Determined by Microcalorimetry

ABSTRACT We investigated the activities of fluconazole, caspofungin, anidulafungin, and amphotericin B against Candida species in planktonic form and biofilms using a highly sensitive assay measuring growth-related heat production (microcalorimetry). C. albicans, C. glabrata, C. krusei, and C. parapsilosis were tested, and MICs were determined by the broth microdilution method. The antifungal activities were determined by isothermal microcalorimetry at 37°C in RPMI 1640. For planktonic Candida, heat flow was measured in the presence of antifungal dilutions for 24 h. Candida biofilm was formed on porous glass beads for 24 h and exposed to serial dilutions of antifungals for 24 h, and heat flow was measured for 48 h. The minimum heat inhibitory concentration (MHIC) was defined as the lowest antifungal concentration reducing the heat flow peak by ≥50% (≥90% for amphotericin B) at 24 h for planktonic Candida and at 48 h for Candida biofilms (measured also at 24 h). Fluconazole (planktonic MHICs, 0.25 to >512 μg/ml) and amphotericin B (planktonic MHICs, 0.25 to 1 μg/ml) showed higher MHICs than anidulafungin (planktonic MHICs, 0.015 to 0.5 μg/ml) and caspofungin (planktonic MHICs, 0.125 to 0.5 μg/ml). Against Candida species in biofilms, fluconazole's activity was reduced by >1,000-fold compared to its activity against the planktonic counterparts, whereas echinocandins and amphotericin B mainly preserved their activities. Fluconazole induced growth of planktonic C. krusei at sub-MICs. At high concentrations of caspofungin (>4 μg/ml), paradoxical growth of planktonic C. albicans and C. glabrata was observed. Microcalorimetry enabled real-time evaluation of antifungal activities against planktonic and biofilm Candida organisms. It can be used in the future to evaluate new antifungals and antifungal combinations and to study resistant strains.
Role of dexmedetomidine in early extubation of the intensive care unit patients

Background and Aims: Patients on ventilatory support in intensive care unit (ICU) require sedation and analgesia to facilitate mechanical ventilation and endotracheal tube tolerance. The selection of the agent should be such that it does not interfere with the early extubation of the patients. We compared the efficacy of dexmedetomidine with midazolam to facilitate extubation of patients from mechanical ventilation in terms of the sedative properties, cardiovascular responses, ventilation, and extubation characteristics and safety profile. Materials and Methods: A total of 40 adult, mechanically ventilated patients of either sex, aged 18-60 years, meeting the standard criteria for weaning, randomized into 2 groups of 20 patients each, received intravenous infusion of dexmedetomidine (0.2-0.7 mcg/kg/h) or midazolam (0.04-0.2 mg/kg/h) as needed for Ramsay sedation scale 2-4. Extubation following standard extubation protocol was done. Time for extubation and vital parameters were regularly recorded. Results: The time to extubation in the dexmedetomidine group was significantly lower than in the midazolam group. Heart rate and blood pressure was significantly lower in dexmedetomidine group than the midazolam group at most of the times. Conclusions: Dexmedetomidine has clinically relevant benefits compared with midazolam in facilitating extubation due to its shorter time to extubation, more hemodynamic stability, easy arousability, and lack of respiratory depression.
Optimizing the preparation conditions of amphoteric polyacrylamide as a strength additive for recycled paper

Abstract Acrylamide, itaconic acid and methacryloyloxyethyl trimethylammonium chloride were used to synthesize a series of amphoteric polyacrylamides (AmPAM) by aqueous solution polymerization through varying the pH, the reaction time, the temperature and the composition. The polymers were characterized by molecular weight and added in a recycled pulp furnish to make sheets. Paper strength was highest with the polymer made at pH 7 and 70 °C for 6 h with a monomer ratio of 2:0.3:0.3 (AM:IA:DMC) with 0.6 % initiator (based on the total mass of monomers). The optimized polymer was characterized by thermal gravity analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and was then added at various pH and dosage level to the pulp alone or in combination with PAC, to determine the optimum addition conditions. Strength increased significantly with AmPAM addition level and PAC dosage but pH had little effect. The treated fibers were characterized by Zeta potential and drainage measurements. SEM showed the presence of a polymer film that is believed to reinforce inter-fiber bonds in the paper.
Immunity Versus Immunopathology in West Nile Virus Induced Encephalitis

West Nile virus (WNV), a mosquito-borne neurotropic pathogen, belongs to the family of Flaviviridae, the genus Flavivirus, a group of plus-sense, single-stranded RNA viruses (Anderson et al., 1999; Lanciotti et al., 1999). WNV genome is a single-stranded, positivesense RNA molecule, approximately 11,000 nucleotides in length that is translated into a single polypeptide, which is coand post-translationally processed into ten proteins – three structural proteins (envelope (E), membrane and nucleocapsid) and seven nonstructural (NS) proteins (NS1, NS2A, NS2B, NS3, NS4A, NS4B and NS5) (Anderson et al., 1999; Lanciotti et al., 1999). The virus was originally isolated in Africa, and later caused epidemics with mainly a febrile illness in humans in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. In 1999, a more virulent WNV strain was detected in New York City. Since then, it has rapidly spread throughout the continental United States, southern Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caribbean and to several countries in South America. It has become a public health concern in North America over the past decade (Campbell et al., 2002). The virus is maintained in an enzootic cycle that involves mosquitoes and birds. Human infection results primarily from mosquito bites; blood transfusion, organ transplantation, breast feeding and in utero or occupational exposure have all been associated with viral infection (2002a; 2002b; Alpert et al., 2003; Charatan, 2002). Although most WNV infections in humans are asymptomatic, severe neurological disease (including encephalitis) and death have been observed with a higher frequency in the elderly and immunocompromised (Campbell et al., 2002; Pletnev et al., 2006). Recent evidence also suggests that WNV can persist for years in humans and animals convalescing from infection (Appler et al., 2010; Murray et al., 2010; Tesh et al., 2005). Currently, licensed vaccines are not yet ready to use in humans. Treatment is currently nonspecific and supportive (Campbell et al., 2002). WNV has been studied in various animal models, including mice, hamsters, monkeys and horses (Davis et al., 2001; Kramer & Bernard, 2001; Ratterree et al., 2004; Xiao et al.,
Towards Linear Algebra over Normalized Data

Providing machine learning (ML) over relational data is a mainstream requirement for data analytics systems. While almost all ML tools require the input data to be presented as a single table, many datasets are multi-table. This forces data scientists to join those tables first, which often leads to data redundancy and runtime waste. Recent works on "factorized" ML mitigate this issue for a few specific ML algorithms by pushing ML through joins. But their approaches require a manual rewrite of ML implementations. Such piecemeal methods create a massive development overhead when extending such ideas to other ML algorithms. In this paper, we show that it is possible to mitigate this overhead by leveraging a popular formal algebra to represent the computations of many ML algorithms: linear algebra. We introduce a new logical data type to represent normalized data and devise a framework of algebraic rewrite rules to convert a large set of linear algebra operations over denormalized data into operations over normalized data. We show how this enables us to automatically "factorize" several popular ML algorithms, thus unifying and generalizing several prior works. We prototype our framework in the popular ML environment R and an industrial R-over-RDBMS tool. Experiments with both synthetic and real normalized data show that our framework also yields significant speed-ups, up to 36x on real data.
Concurrent Haskell

Some applications are most easily expressed in a programming language that supports concurrency, notably interactive and distributed systems. We propose extensions to the purely-functional language Haskell that allow it to express explicitly concurrent applications; we call the resulting language Concurrent Haskell. The resulting system appears to be both expressive and efficient, and we give a number of examples of useful abstractions that can be built from our primitives. We have developed a freely-available implementation of Concurrent Haskell, and are now using it as a substrate for a graphical user interface toolkit.
Does Anticipation of Pain Affect Cortical Nociceptive Systems?

Anticipation of pain is a complex state that may influence the perception of subsequent noxious stimuli. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study changes of activity of cortical nociceptive networks in healthy volunteers while they expected the somatosensory stimulation of one foot, which might be painful (subcutaneous injection of ascorbic acid) or not. Subjects had no previous experience of the noxious stimulus. Mean fMRI signal intensity increased over baseline values during anticipation and during actual stimulation in the putative foot representation area of the contralateral primary somatosensory cortex (SI). Mean fMRI signals decreased during anticipation in other portions of the contralateral and ipsilateral SI, as well as in the anteroventral cingulate cortex. The activity of cortical clusters whose signal time courses showed positive or negative correlations with the individual psychophysical pain intensity curve was also significantly affected during the waiting period. Positively correlated clusters were found in the contralateral SI and bilaterally in the anterior cingulate, anterior insula, and medial prefrontal cortex. Negatively correlated clusters were found in the anteroventral cingulate bilaterally. In all of these areas, changes during anticipation were of the same sign as those observed during pain but less intense (∼30–40% as large as peak changes during actual noxious stimulation). These results provide evidence for top-down mechanisms, triggered by anticipation, modulating cortical systems involved in sensory and affective components of pain even in the absence of actual noxious input and suggest that the activity of cortical nociceptive networks may be directly influenced by cognitive factors.
An authenticated group key distribution protocol based on the generalized Chinese remainder theorem

The group key distribution protocol is a mechanism for distributing a group key that is used to encrypt the communication data transmitted in an open group. Recently, a novel group key distribution protocol based on secret sharing was proposed. In their protocol, the group key information is broadcast in an open network environment, and only authorized group members can obtain the group key. However, their protocol requires each group member to broadcast a random challenge to the rest of the group members in the construction of the group key, and this may increase communication cost and cause network traffic congestion. In this paper, we propose an authenticated group key distribution protocol based on the generalized Chinese remainder theorem that drastically reduces communication costs while maintaining at least the same degree of security. Our protocol is built on the secret sharing scheme based on Chinese remainder theorem, which requires fewer computation operations than the previous work. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Estimation of Spatial-Temporal Gait Parameters Using a Low-Cost Ultrasonic Motion Analysis System

In this paper, a low-cost motion analysis system using a wireless ultrasonic sensor network is proposed and investigated. A methodology has been developed to extract spatial-temporal gait parameters including stride length, stride duration, stride velocity, stride cadence, and stride symmetry from 3D foot displacements estimated by the combination of spherical positioning technique and unscented Kalman filter. The performance of this system is validated against a camera-based system in the laboratory with 10 healthy volunteers. Numerical results show the feasibility of the proposed system with average error of 2.7% for all the estimated gait parameters. The influence of walking speed on the measurement accuracy of proposed system is also evaluated. Statistical analysis demonstrates its capability of being used as a gait assessment tool for some medical applications.
Non-Retroviral Fossils in Vertebrate Genomes

Although no physical fossils of viruses have been found, retroviruses are known to leave their molecular fossils in the genomes of their hosts, the so-called endogenous retroviral elements. These have provided us with important information about retroviruses in the past and their co-evolution with their hosts. On the other hand, because non-retroviral viruses were considered not to leave such fossils, even the existence of prehistoric non-retroviral viruses has been enigmatic. Recently, we discovered that elements derived from ancient bornaviruses, non-segmented, negative strand RNA viruses, are found in the genomes of several mammalian species, including humans. In addition, at approximately the same time, several endogenous elements of RNA viruses, DNA viruses and reverse-transcribing DNA viruses have been independently reported, which revealed that non-retroviral viruses have played significant roles in the evolution of their hosts and provided novel insights into virology and cell biology. Here we review non-retroviral virus-like elements in vertebrate genomes, non-retroviral integration and the knowledge obtained from these endogenous non-retroviral virus-like elements.
Expressing and exploiting concurrency in networked applications with aspen

This paper presents Aspen, a high-level programming language thattargets both high-productivity programming and runtime support formanaging resources needed by a computation. Programs in Aspen arerepresented as directed graphs, where the edges are well-definedunidirectional communication channels and the nodes are instances of computational modules that process the incoming data. The resulting representation of a program closely resembles a flow chart describing the flow of computation in a server application and exposing the communicationat a high level of abstraction. This strategy for program composition naturally allows parallelism and data sharing to be factored out of the core computational logic of a program, facilitating a division of labor between parallelism expertsand application experts and also easing code development and maintenance. Aspen automatically and transparently supports task-level parallelism among module instancesand data-level parallelism across different flows in an application or, in some cases, across different work items within a flow. Aspen automatically and adaptively allocates threads to modules according to the dynamic workload seen at those modules. Aspen is tested using a web server and a video-on-demand (VoD)server. Both servers are compared to serverapplications coded in other languages (such as C, C++, and Java). The Aspen programs achieve the same functionality despiteusing 54--96% fewer lines of user code. Nevertheless, the Aspen version always performs competitively, with performance that is always similar to or better than previous web server implementations and that sees never more than a 10% performance degradation in the VoD server. On the other hand, some work loads see superior performance with Aspen: Aspen's runtime thread allocation strategy allows the video-on-demand server to support up to 36% more simultaneous 1 Mbps video streams than a hand-tuned C++ version.
Avalanche Characteristic of Vertical Impact Ionization MOSFET ( IMOS ) Equivalent Circuit Model

Snapback breakdown is the second order effect of avalanche breakdown in a device. Snapback occur when the excess supply voltage and high currents created flow through the device and become unstable. These two breakdowns are used to explain the concept of Vertical Impact Ionization MOSFET (IMOS) in its Equivalent Circuit Model. The equivalent circuit model design consists of MOS transistors that represent the avalanche characteristic, while the Bipolar Junction Transistor represents the snapback characteristics with a generated-hole-dependent base resistance. The part models for parasitic bipolar or BJT is combined with a MOS transistor model to represent the both avalanche and snapback breakdown. The results show that 90% of the analysis of the subthreshold slope value of the circuit simulations is similar to the reference experimental value. Therefore, the equivalent circuit model can be used to represents the behavior of vertical IMOS in circuit environment in terms of simulations. Keywords—Impact Ionization, Vertical IMOS, Planar IMOS, Equivalent Circuit Model, Snapback, Avalanche Characteristic
Do Cultural Differences Matter in Mergers and Acquisitions? A Tentative Model and Examination

Asubstantive body of theory and research on the role of culture in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) suggests that cultural differences can create major obstacles to achieving integration benefits. However, the opposite view---that differences in culture between merging firms can be a source of value creation and learning---has also been advanced and empirically supported. In an attempt to reconcile these conflicting perspectives and findings, we present a model that synthesizes our current understanding of the role of culture in M&A, and we develop a set of hypotheses regarding mechanisms through which cultural differences affect M&A performance. The results of a meta-analysis of 46 studies, with a combined sample size of 10,710 M&A, suggest that cultural differences affect sociocultural integration, synergy realization, and shareholder value in different, and sometimes opposing, ways. Moderator analyses reveal that the effects of cultural differences vary depending on the degree of relatedness and the dimensions of cultural differences separating the merging firms, as well as on research design and sample characteristics. The implications for M&A research and practice are discussed.
Arabidopsis circadian clock protein, TOC1, is a DNA-binding transcription factor

The first described feedback loop of the Arabidopsis circadian clock is based on reciprocal regulation between TIMING OF CAB EXPRESSION 1 (TOC1) and CIRCADIAN CLOCK-ASSOCIATED 1 (CCA1)/LATE ELONGATED HYPOCOTYL (LHY). CCA1 and LHY are Myb transcription factors that bind directly to the TOC1 promoter to negatively regulate its expression. Conversely, the activity of TOC1 has remained less well characterized. Genetic data support that TOC1 is necessary for the reactivation of CCA1/LHY, but there is little description of its biochemical function. Here we show that TOC1 occupies specific genomic regions in the CCA1 and LHY promoters. Purified TOC1 binds directly to DNA through its CCT domain, which is similar to known DNA-binding domains. Chemical induction and transient overexpression of TOC1 in Arabidopsis seedlings cause repression of CCA1/LHY expression, demonstrating that TOC1 can repress direct targets, and mutation or deletion of the CCT domain prevents this repression showing that DNA-binding is necessary for TOC1 action. Furthermore, we use the Gal4/UAS system in Arabidopsis to show that TOC1 acts as a general transcriptional repressor, and that repression activity is in the pseudoreceiver domain of the protein. To identify the genes regulated by TOC1 on a genomic scale, we couple TOC1 chemical induction with microarray analysis and identify previously unexplored potential TOC1 targets and output pathways. Taken together, these results define a biochemical action for the core clock protein TOC1 and refine our perspective on how plant clocks function.
Mass Production of Microalgae at Optimal Photosynthetic Rates

Microalgae have been studied in the laboratory and in mass outdoor cultures for more than a century and our initial understanding of photosynthesis became unravelled in the laboratories of Otto Warburg. The breakthrough in his laboratories came when he started using Chlorella as model organism [1]. As Grobbelaar [2] pointed out, applied phycology and the mass production of microalgae, became a reality in the 1940’s. Since then, microalgae have been grown for a variety of potential applications, such as the production of lipids for energy using flue-gasses, anti-microbial substances, cheap proteins for human nutrition and the production of various bio-chemicals. At present the focus is on bioenergy [3], however, their only real success has been in wastewater treatment. A major frustration for microalgal biotechnologists has been the realization of much lower yields than what is potentially possible from laboratory measurements. The inability to operate photo-bioreactors including raceway ponds, at maximal photosynthetic efficiencies, impacts directly on the economies of scale. Because of this many large-scale projects have not delivered what was predicted and many investors have lost their investments. Richmond’s [4] observation that “Microalga culture however is yet very far from supplying any basic human needs. ” is as true today as then and he concluded that “the major reason for this stems from the failure to develop production systems which utilize solar energy efficiently”. A consequence of low yields is high production costs rendering this technology only suited for exclusive high-priced products.
All‐Inorganic Colloidal Perovskite Quantum Dots: A New Class of Lasing Materials with Favorable Characteristics

All-inorganic colloidal cesium lead halide perovskite quantum dots (CsPbX3 , X = Cl, Br, I) are revealed to be a new class of favorable optical-gain materials, which show -combined merits of both colloidal quantum dots and halide perovskites. Low-threshold and -ultrastable stimulated emission is -demonstrated under atmospheric conditions with wavelength tunability across the whole -visible spectrum via either size or composition control.