Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Displaying chemical structural formulae in ePub format

We describe one tool designed to enhance the visualization of chemical structural formulae in E-book readers. When dealing with small formulae, to avoid the pixelation effect with zoomed images, the formula is converted to a vectoral representation and then enlarged. On the opposite, large formulae are split in sub-images by cutting the image in suitable locations attempting to reduce the parts of the formula that are broken. In both cases the formulae are embedded in one ePub document that allows users to browse the chemical structure on most reading devices.
Dietary Agents in the Chemoprevention of Prostate Cancer

Abstract: Nutritional factors have been estimated to contribute 20-60% of cancers around the globe, and almost one-third of deaths are being reported in Western countries. According to estimates by the American Cancer Society, during the year 2005 about 232,090 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed alone in the United States and 30,350 men will die of this disease. The high incidence and long latency period of prostate cancer offer plenty of time to pursue strategies toward prevention and/or treatment to suppress or revert this disease. Epidemiological evidence suggests that plant-based dietary agents decrease the risk of some types of human cancer, including prostate cancer. Intake of 400-600 g/day of fruits and vegetables is associated with reduced risk of several cancers. The use of micronutrients and/or other phenolic agents in the diet or synthetic exogenous supplements to prevent neoplastic transformation of normal cells or to slow the progression of established malignant changes in cancer cells is termed "chemoprevention. " Considerable attention has been devoted to identify plant-based dietary agents that may serve as natural inhibitors of prostate carcinogenesis. Much progress has been made in the last decade in this area of investigation through identification of pathways that play important roles in prostate tumorigenesis. This article summarizes epidemiological, clinical, and mechanistic studies and the significance of plant-derived dietary agents such as flavonoids, indoles, isothiocyanates, phenolics, monoterpenes, and complementary and alternative agents in the management of prostate cancer with recommendations for future studies to advance this area of research.
Do code smells reflect important maintainability aspects?

Code smells are manifestations of design flaws that can degrade code maintainability. As such, the existence of code smells seems an ideal indicator for maintainability assessments. However, to achieve comprehensive and accurate evaluations based on code smells, we need to know how well they reflect factors affecting maintainability. After identifying which maintainability factors are reflected by code smells and which not, we can use complementary means to assess the factors that are not addressed by smells. This paper reports on an empirical study that investigates the extent to which code smells reflect factors affecting maintainability that have been identified as important by programmers. We consider two sources for our analysis: (1) expert-based maintainability assessments of four Java systems before they entered a maintenance project, and (2) observations and interviews with professional developers who maintained these systems during 14 working days and implemented a number of change requests.
Expression of vascular endothelial growth factor and its receptors in inflamed and vascularized human corneas.

PURPOSE To help further define the possible role of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in the pathogenesis of corneal neovascularization, the expression of VEGF and of its receptors Flt-1 and Flk-1 was investigated in various inflammatory corneal diseases. METHODS Polyclonal antibodies to VEGF and its receptors were used for immunohistochemical staining of frozen sections of 38 human corneas with various degrees of neovascularization and inflammation. In addition, a panel of monoclonal antibodies was used to characterize the composition of the inflammatory infiltrates and to confirm the presence of neovascularization. Furthermore, VEGF concentrations were determined in vascularized corneas using a sensitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. RESULTS VEGF was expressed by epithelial cells, by corneal endothelial cells, by vascular endothelial cells of limbal vessels and of newly formed vessels in the stroma, and weakly by keratocytes. Furthermore, VEGF expression was often markedly increased in inflamed corneas on epithelial cells and on vascular endothelial cells, particularly in the vicinity of macrophage infiltrates, and on fibroblasts in scar tissue. Correspondingly, VEGF concentrations were significantly higher in vascularized corneas compared with normal control corneas (P < 0.001). Expression of both VEGF receptors, Flt-1 and Flk-1, was increased on endothelial cells of newly formed vessels in the stroma of inflamed corneas compared with limbal vessels of normal control corneas. In addition, Flt-1 was also expressed by corneal endothelial cells and by macrophages, whereas Flk-1 expression was lacking. CONCLUSIONS These results demonstrate that VEGF, Flt-1, and Flk-1 are strongly expressed in inflamed and vascularized human corneas and, thus, may play an important role in corneal neovascularization.
Serum Golgi Protein 73 (GP73) is a Diagnostic and Prognostic Marker of Chronic HBV Liver Disease

AbstractAlanine aminotransferase (ALT) is the most commonly used marker of liver injury, but normal ALT levels are seen in a proportion of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV)-infected patients with severe liver injury. Golgi protein 73 (GP73) is a promising alternative marker of liver injury. This study assessed the relation between GP73 levels and liver disease severity, monitored the kinetic changes in GP73 levels in chronic HBV patients receiving entecavir (ETV) therapy, and investigated the potential diagnostic and prognostic values of serum GP73 as a new liver injury biomarker in chronic HBV infections.This study enrolled 1150 patients with chronic HBV infections, 200 of whom were retrospectively enrolled in this study after receiving 1 year of ETV treatment. GP73 expression in liver tissue was detected by immunohistochemistry. GP73 levels in single or serial serum samples were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.Immunohistochemical analysis indicated that GP73 protein expression in the liver increased progressively with pathologic progression from nonexistent or mild hepatitis to severe hepatitis and cirrhosis during chronic HBV infection. Serum GP73 levels were positively correlated with the disease severity of chronic HBV infections (r = 0.58, P < 0.001). In patients with normal ALT levels, serum GP73 concentrations were significantly higher in patients with prominent hepatic inflammatory injury and fibrosis than in patients without hepatic inflammatory injury or fibrosis. Serum GP73 concentrations and GP73 protein expression were decreased in the liver tissues of patients whose ALT levels normalized after 1 year of ETV antiviral therapy.Changes in serum GP73 levels were closely associated with changes in liver injury severity, and, therefore, GP73 may be an effective new liver inflammatory injury biomarker, and could be useful for monitoring the prognosis of chronic HBV infectious patients with normal ALT levels.
Vocabulary optimization based on perplexity

We suggest a method to optimize the vocabulary for a given task using the perplexity criterion. The optimization allows us to reduce the size of the vocabulary at the same perplexity of the original word based vocabulary or to reduce perplexity at the same vocabulary size. This new approach is an alternative to phoneme n-gram language model in the speech recognition search stage. We show the convergence of our approach on the Korean training corpus. This method may provide an optimized speech recognizer for a given task. We used phonemes, syllables, morphemes as the basic units for the optimization and reduced the size of the vocabulary to the half of the original word vocabulary size for the morpheme case.
DELAY‐DEPENDENT ROBUST CONTROL OF DESCRIPTOR SYSTEMS WITH TIME DELAY

This paper deals with the problem of stability and robust control for both certain and uncertain continuous‐time singular systems with state delay. Systems with norm‐bounded parameter uncertainties are considered. Robust delay‐dependent stability criteria and linear memoryless state feedback controllers based on linear matrix inequality are obtained. By choosing some Lyapunov‐Krasovskii functionals, neither model transformation nor bounding for cross terms is required in the derivation of our delay‐dependent results. Finally, numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Neuro-Evolution in Multi-Player Pente

Pente is a derivative of the Japanese game Go-moku, both of which are normally played with only two players. We extend the game of Pente to three players and study the ability of neuro-evolution via the Enforced Sub-Populations (ESP) algorithm to evolve Pente players for 7 by 7 boards capable of beating pairs of opponents taken from a set of five simple handcoded opponents. We also compare the performance of feed forward networks to that of simple recurrent networks and simple recurrent networks that pay attentionto the board by reading inputs from it on every player’s turn, not just their own. Evolving networks that beat all pairs of opponents in threeplayer games proves difficult, and we also find that against the given opponents feed forward networks are superior to either type of simple recurrent network.
Vectored DSLs with DSM : The road to Ubiquitous Gigabit

This paper investigates the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) data-rate increases possible with the Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) methods known as Level 3 Vectoring and Level 2 Band Preference. A suggested sequence of increasingly binder-adaptive DSM steps appears herein to assist and motivate DSL service providers and equipment vendors to progress in use of DSM. In particular, studies of bounds of spectral balancing find Band Preference as a practical method that provides the highest possible Level 2 performance in bundled or unbundled DSL environments. Investigations of vectoring begin with differential vectoring and show very high DSL data rates. These data rates increase further through the use of full-binder vectoring, leading to projections of feasible DSM vectored implementations of multi-100Mbps DSLs.
Web Appendix: Early Childhood Education

∗This research was supported in part by the American Bar Foundation, the Pritzker Children’s Initiative, the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, NIH grants NICHD R37HD065072, NICHD R01HD54702, and NIA R24AG048081, an anonymous funder, Successful Pathways from School to Work, an initiative of the University of Chicago’s Committee on Education funded by the Hymen Milgrom Supporting Organization, a grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) supporting the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO)—an initiative of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD) and Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics (BFI). We are very grateful to Joshua Ka Chun Shea, Matthew C. Tauzer, and Anna Ziff for research assistance and useful comments. We thank Robert Moffitt, David Blau, the other authors of this volume, and Raquel Bernal, Avi Feller, Marianne Haramoto, Fernando Hoces, Micheal Keane, Patrick Kline, Sylvi Kuperman, and Rich Neimand for valuable comments. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders or persons named here or the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Generating Responses and Explanations from RDF/XML and DAML+OIL

The paper describes on-going work on generating dialogue responses on two levels: first, generation of factual responses from RDF/XML information; second, generation of meta-level explanations of an ontology’s structure from DAML+OIL domain ontologies. We also discuss ways to use an ontology to improve a current dialogue system’s responses, for example by identifying misconceptions.
A Geometric probabilistic framework for data fusion in information retrieval

Data fusion in information retrieval has been investigated by many researchers and quite a few data fusion methods have been proposed, but why data fusion can bring improvement in effectiveness is still not very clear. In this paper, we use a geometric probabilistic framework to formally describe data fusion, in which each component result returned from an information retrieval system for a given query is represented as a point in a multiple dimensional space. Then all the component results and data fusion results can be explained using geometrical principles. In such a framework, it becomes clear why quite often data fusion can bring improvement in effectiveness and accordingly what the favourable conditions are for data fusion algorithms to achieve better results. The framework can be used as a guideline to make data fusion techniques be used more effectively.
Parameters of User Interface Design for Cultural Information Systems : An Interdisciplinary Approach

This article presents a case study of a cultural promotion strategy, based on practices from the Exhibition Design field, in combination with the use of Customizable User Interfaces. It concerns a multimedia exhibition under the title: «Ermou Street: Symbolic, Historical, Economical and Social Centre of Mytilene», presented in the city of Mytilene, Lesvos, for two years. The project was the result of academic and research procedures of the department of Cultural Technology and Communication, of the University of the Aegean, Greece. The presentation of Ermou street, aimed at a systematic approach of economical, social and symbolic centre of diachronic public life at the city of Mytilene, as case study of promotion of the broader cultural assets of the island of Lesvos, using mixed interaction environments which consisted of traditional and contemporary technologically enhanced forms of communication media and in particular, forms of customizable user interfaces according to each given design problem / strategy. The exhibition design was focused on the design of interactive exhibits with a sensorial emphasis on tangibility, proposing in that way novel forms of cultural representation practices.
Human brain-teleoperated robot between remote places

This paper describes an EEG-based human brain-actuated robotic system, which allows performing navigation and visual exploration tasks between remote places via internet, using only brain activity. In operation, two teleoperation modes can be combined: robot navigation and camera exploration. In both modes, the user faces a real-time video captured by the robot camera merged with augmented reality items. In this representation, the user concentrates on a target area to navigate to or visually explore; then, a visual stimulation process elicits the neurological phenomenon that enables the brain-computer system to decode the intentions of the user. In the navigation mode, the target destination is transferred to the autonomous navigation system, which drives the robot to the desired place while avoiding collisions with the obstacles detected by the laser scanner. In the camera mode, the camera is aligned with the target area to perform an active visual exploration of the remote scenario. In June 2008, within the framework of the experimental methodology, five healthy subjects performed pre-established navigation and visual exploration tasks for one week between two cities separated by 260km. On the basis of the results, a technical evaluation of the device and its main functionalities is reported. The overall result is that all the subjects were able to successfully solve all the tasks reporting no failures, showing a high robustness of the system.
Resistin Is an Inflammatory Marker of Atherosclerosis in Humans

Background—Resistin, a plasma protein, induces insulin resistance in rodents. Recent reports suggest that circulating levels of resistin are elevated in obese and insulin-resistant rodents and humans. Whereas rodent resistin is made in adipocytes, macrophages are a major source of human resistin. Given the convergence of adipocyte and macrophage function, resistin may provide unique insight into links between obesity, inflammation, and atherosclerosis in humans. Methods and Results—We examined whether plasma resistin levels were associated with metabolic and inflammatory markers, as well as with coronary artery calcification (CAC), a quantitative index of atherosclerosis, in 879 asymptomatic subjects in the Study of Inherited Risk of Coronary Atherosclerosis. Resistin levels were positively associated with levels of inflammatory markers, including soluble tumor necrosis factor-&agr; receptor-2 (P<0.001), interleukin-6 (P=0.04), and lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (P=0.002), but not measures of insulin resistance in multivariable analysis. Resistin levels also were associated (odds ratio and 95% confidence interval in ordinal regression) with increasing CAC after adjustment for age, sex, and established risk factors (OR, 1.23 [CI, 1.03 to 1.52], P=0.03) and further control for metabolic syndrome and plasma C-reactive protein (CRP) levels (OR, 1.25 [CI, 1.04 to 1.50], P=0.01). In subjects with metabolic syndrome, resistin levels further predicted CAC, whereas CRP levels did not. Conclusions—Plasma resistin levels are correlated with markers of inflammation and are predictive of coronary atherosclerosis in humans, independent of CRP. Resistin may represent a novel link between metabolic signals, inflammation, and atherosclerosis. Further studies are needed to define the relationship of resistin to clinical cardiovascular disease.
Symbol i c Treatment of Geometr i c Degenerac ies

Many descriptions of algorithms in computational geometry exclude degeneracies by fiat. Practitioners are left to their own devices for dealing with degeneracies when implementing such algorithms. Since degeneracies tend to be numerous and hard to enumerate exhaustively, this is often a reason against implementing such algorithms. This paper proposes a symbolic scheme for treating degeneracies. Our method is simple to use, and is applicable to a variety of problems in computational geometry. Implementation, limitations and wider issues are discussed.
A new motion control method for omnidirectional intelligent wheelchair based on improved Fuzzy Support Vector Machine

This paper proposed the FSVM (Fuzzy Support Vector Machine) based on affinity to achieve the intelligent wheelchair motion control. The gravity center, which can be computed by calculating the weights of four force sensors under the wheelchair seat, is the key factor to determine the intention of movement of the user. The improved fuzzy membership function of FSVM can reduce the effect of clustering gravity center caused by abnormal clustering gravity center data generated from malfunction. Comparing with the traditional SVM (Support Vector Machine), the improved FSVM algorithm has lower error rate. This paper further validates the practical feasibility and validity of the proposed control algorithm. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the precision of omnidirectional intelligent wheelchair motion control.
Aspects: extending objects to support multiple, independent roles

The type systems of most object-orientecl database syst ems ( 00 DBSS) descend from traditional object-oriented programming lan gna,ges. While these systems can capture many interesting relationships among entities, such as classification ancf snbtyping, they do not typically allow an object, to change type, and they only partially support the mode]ling of objects that have many types. However, such characteristics are particularly common among the very entities (e. g., people) that these systems are intended to model. We introduce aspects, a new mechanism designecf to meet, these modelling requirements within the framework of a strongly-typed 00DBS. An aspect extends an existing object with new state and new behavior while maintaining the same object identity. In addition to the modelling of roles, aspects have other interesting applications, such as encapsulating the result, of a query.
Frequency discrimination at 1200 high-frequency masking noise Hz in the presence of

To evaluate the possible contribution of high-frequency hearing to frequency discrimination at lower frequencies, pure-tone frequency discrimination tasks at 1200 Hz, with and without high-frequency masking noise, were performed by two highly practiced normal-hearing listeners. Signal evels ranged from 10 to 80 dB SPL. Spectra of the three high-frequency masking noises ranged from 1.8 to 2.1 kHz, from 2.8 to 3.1 kHz, and from 4 to 8 kHz. The frequency difference limen (DLF) intensity functions, describing DLFs as a function of signal evel which were obtained in the presence of high-frequency masking noise, were essentially the same as the DLF intensity functions obtained without masking noise. These results indicate that high-frequency hearing is not necessary for acute frequency discrimination at low and at middle frequencies.
SAFER under vehicle inspection through video mosaic building

The current threats to US security, both military and civilian, have led to an increased interest in the development of technologies to safeguard national facilities such as military bases, federal buildings, nuclear power plants, and national laboratories. As a result, the imaging, robotics, and intelligent systems (IRIS) laboratory at the University of Tennessee has established a research consortium, known as security automation and future electromotive robotics (SAFER), to develop, test, and deploy sensing and imaging systems. In this paper, we describe efforts made to build multi‐perspective mosaics of infrared and color video data for the purpose of under vehicle inspection. It is desired to create a large, high‐resolution mosaic that may be used to quickly visualize the entire scene shot by a camera making a single pass underneath the vehicle. Several constraints are placed on the video data in order to facilitate the assumption that the entire scene in the sequence exists on a single plane. Therefore, a single mosaic is used to represent a single video sequence.