Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal Exploration-Exploitation in a Multi-Armed-Bandit Problem with Non-Stationary Rewards

In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem a gambler needs to choose at each round of play one of K arms, each characterized by an unknown reward distribution. Reward realizations are only observed when an arm is selected, and the gambler's objective is to maximize his cumulative expected earnings over some given horizon of play T. To do this, the gambler needs to acquire information about arms (exploration) while simultaneously optimizing immediate rewards (exploitation); the price paid due to this trade off is often referred to as the regret, and the main question is how small can this price be as a function of the horizon length T. This problem has been studied extensively when the reward distributions do not change over time; an assumption that supports a sharp characterization of the regret, yet is often violated in practical settings. In this paper, we focus on a MAB formulation which allows for a broad range of temporal uncertainties in the rewards, while still maintaining mathematical tractability. We fully characterize the (regret) complexity of this class of MAB problems by establishing a direct link between the extent of allowable reward "variation" and the minimal achievable regret. Our analysis draws some connections between two rather disparate strands of literature: the adversarial and the stochastic MAB frameworks.
Using a swarm of self-propelled natural microrobots in the form of flagellated bacteria to perform complex micro-assembly tasks

Many science fiction novels have envisioned swarms of artificial microrobots capable of performing complex collective tasks. Unfortunately, today's technological constraints have prevented such powerful concept to be a reality when considering artificial microrobots. In this paper, we show that a swarm of computer-controlled flagellated Magnetotactic Bacteria (MTB) acting as natural microrobots of approximately 1 to 2 micrometers in diameter can perform many of the same complex collective tasks envisioned with these futuristic self-propelled artificial microrobots. To prove the concept, magnetotaxis-based control has been used to coordinate a swarm made of thousands of these self-propelled natural microrobots to build in a collective effort, a miniature version of an ancient Egyptian pyramid.
The Coincidence of Schizophrenia and Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease: Successful Treatment with a Combination of Antiparkinsonian Drugs and Atypical Antipsychotic Drugs

It is rare for schizophrenia and idiopathic Parkinson's disease to occur in the same patient. This report describes a case in which a chronic schizophrenic patient later developed idiopathic Parkinson's disease. Both the psychotic and the parkinsonian symptoms of the patient were well controlled with the combination of antiparkinson drugs (bromocriptine and L‐threo‐DOPS) and atypical antipsychotic drugs (sulpiride and thioridazine). It is suggested that excessive dopaminergic activity in the mesolimbic system may coexist with dopaminergic deficiency in the nigrostriatal system in this patient. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
From ‘Rambo’ to ‘sitting ducks’ and back again: the Israeli soldier in the media

The image of the Israeli soldier has transmuted over time. This is particularly true when examining this image in Israeli media. As media reflects social changes, understanding the development of the image of the Israeli soldier in Israeli media may be indicative of wider transformations. During the 1982 Lebanon War the Israeli soldier was identified chiefly as a tough, masculine figure; a warrior. In the 1990s, there was a gradual transformation into a more vulnerable image: a scared, fragile survivor, who wants to return home in one piece. Conversely, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the framing of the Israeli soldier becomes more complex, with both images present in the media. However, despite the fact both images appear, during this final period the ‘warrior’ image receives more visibility. Using theoretical literature from the fields of communications and civil–military–media relations, and covering two major Israeli news publications – Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz – this article traces the image of the Israeli soldier from the 1982 Lebanon War (1982) to Operation Cast Lead (2008–9).
Temporal reasoning: an application to normative systems

We propose a first-order model as a possible formal basis for normative agent systems (NAS). The model allows us to describe the execution of actions in time and the use of dynamic norms. We also present its operational aspect which is based on the reduction of the deontic constraints to temporal ones. In order to show the applicability of the model we briefly describe a logic programming implementation and we present two types of applications: the detection of the violation cases and the prototype of a scheduler with deontic and temporal constraints.
Current practice in the management of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus in Saudi Arabia.

OBJECTIVE To gather data on current practices in the management of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in Saudi Arabia and to evaluate the degree of compliance with international guidelines. METHODS This paper represents the results of the Saudi Arabia T2DM data collected at the cross-sectional part of Wave 2006 of the International Diabetes Management Practices Study (IDMPS). Data were collected on a case report form from 28 health centers all over the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in the period between 01/12/2006 and 30/12/2006. It included demographic and socioeconomic profile in addition to diabetes management and metabolic control. RESULTS Three hundred and fifty-three Saudi T2DM diabetic patients were studied. The mean age was 51.61+/-10.84 years; average duration of diabetes was 8.25+/-6.49 years; 63-86% had never been screened for diabetes complications or cardiovascular risk factors during the previous year. Of all patients with T2DM, 7% were treated with insulin alone, 28% with oral glucose lowering drug (OGLD) + insulin and 64% with OGLD alone. The average last hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) was 8.20+/-1.89% and among all patients, only 27% had reached the target HbA1c of <7% while 42% of patients had been considered as reached glycemic control by physicians. Sixteen percent attained the target blood pressure of <130/80, and 65% had lipid profile above the optimal level. CONCLUSION The majority of patients did not attain the recommended target glycemic level. This indicates the presence of a gap between recommendations of the international guidelines and the actual practices.
Emerging drugs for the treatment of hepatitis B

ABSTRACT Introduction: Nucleos(t)ide analogs and interferon-based compounds are currently approved for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B (CHB). Although these treatments are effective in suppressing viral replication, it is unable to completely eradicate the virus from the host. Therefore, CHB patients are at a life-long risk of developing complications, including hepatocellular carcinoma. Areas covered: Drugs targeting novel sites of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) replication cycle and the host immune response in development are discussed. As current available drugs only target a small segment of the HBV life cycle, the development of new agents targeting different sites is an important step in eradicating HBV. The host immunological response is also vital in viral clearance. Newer agents in development include immunomodulatory agents and therapeutic vaccines. Expert opinion: For any chance of eradication, a combination of drugs targeting both the host factors and different sites of the viral life cycle will be required. Two key components to achieving this goal include the removal of covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA) together with restoration of the immune control against HBV.
Explizite Lebensziele von Patientinnen mit Anorexia und Bulimia nervosa

Hintergrund: Die Identifizierung und Förderung expliziter Ziele hat sich in der Forschung für die Behandlung verschiedener Patientengruppen als hilfreich erwiesen. Hierbei sind insbesondere potenzielle Auswirkungen von Lebenszielen auf die Psychopathologie bzw. psychische Gesundheit sowie auf die Therapiemotivation zu nennen. Die Rolle individueller Lebensziele ist für Frauen mit Essstörungen bisher allerdings nicht untersucht worden, weshalb die vorliegende Studie diese Forschungslücke schließen möchte und Lebensziele bei Frauen mit Anorexia nervosa (AN) und Bulimia nervosa (BN) untersucht. Methoden: Patientinnen mit AN (n = 27) und BN (n = 20) sowie gesunde Kontrollprobandinnen (n = 56) bearbeiteten eine idiographisch orientierte Frage bezüglich ihrer expliziten Lebensziele. Die Striving Instrumentality Matrix wurde zur Messung von Zielkonflikten bzw. der Instrumentalität eigener Ziele eingesetzt. Mit einer Kurzversion des Inkongruenzfragebogens wurde das Ausmaß der Zielumsetzung erfasst. Ergebnisse: Patientinnen mit AN und BN verfolgen im Wesentlichen die gleichen Ziele wie gesunde Kontrollprobandinnen. Obwohl Frauen mit Essstörungen ihren Zielen eine höhere Instrumentalität zuschrieben als gesunde Frauen (p < 0,001), wiesen sie deutliche Defizite in der Umsetzung motivationaler Ziele auf (p < 0,001). Schlussfolgerungen: Mögliche Ursachen dafür, dass Patientinnen mit AN und BN den Einfluss ihrer Ziele untereinander förderlicher beurteilten als gesunde Frauen, werden diskutiert. Da Patientinnen mit Essstörungen deutliche Defizite in der Umsetzung ihrer Ziele aufwiesen, sollte insbesondere die Realisierung persönlicher Ziele in der Behandlung von Essstörungen stärker gefördert werden.
Regression of Fibrosis and Reversal of Cirrhosis in Rats by Galectin Inhibitors in Thioacetamide-Induced Liver Disease

Galectin-3 protein is critical to the development of liver fibrosis because galectin-3 null mice have attenuated fibrosis after liver injury. Therefore, we examined the ability of novel complex carbohydrate galectin inhibitors to treat toxin-induced fibrosis and cirrhosis. Fibrosis was induced in rats by intraperitoneal injections with thioacetamide (TAA) and groups were treated with vehicle, GR-MD-02 (galactoarabino-rhamnogalaturonan) or GM-CT-01 (galactomannan). In initial experiments, 4 weeks of treatment with GR-MD-02 following completion of 8 weeks of TAA significantly reduced collagen content by almost 50% based on Sirius red staining. Rats were then exposed to more intense and longer TAA treatment, which included either GR-MD-02 or GM-CT-01 during weeks 8 through 11. TAA rats treated with vehicle developed extensive fibrosis and pathological stage 6 Ishak fibrosis, or cirrhosis. Treatment with either GR-MD-02 (90 mg/kg ip) or GM-CT-01 (180 mg/kg ip) given once weekly during weeks 8–11 led to marked reduction in fibrosis with reduction in portal and septal galectin-3 positive macrophages and reduction in portal pressure. Vehicle-treated animals had cirrhosis whereas in the treated animals the fibrosis stage was significantly reduced, with evidence of resolved or resolving cirrhosis and reduced portal inflammation and ballooning. In this model of toxin-induced liver fibrosis, treatment with two galectin protein inhibitors with different chemical compositions significantly reduced fibrosis, reversed cirrhosis, reduced galectin-3 expressing portal and septal macrophages, and reduced portal pressure. These findings suggest a potential role of these drugs in human liver fibrosis and cirrhosis.
Empirical Measurement of Travelers’ Value of Reliability

Time and reliability are two fundamental factors influencing travel behavior and demand. The concept of the value of time (VOT) has been extensively studied, and estimates of VOT have been obtained from surveys and empirical data. On the other hand, although the importance of value of reliability (VOR) is appreciated, research related to VOR is still in its early stages. The VOR has been estimated using surveys but has almost never been estimated using empirical data. This research used empirical data to take an initial step toward understanding the importance of travel time reliability. Katy Freeway travelers face a daily choice between reliable tolled lanes and less reliable but untolled lanes. An extensive dataset of Katy Freeway travel was used to examine the influence of time, reliability, and toll on lane-choice behavior. Lane choice was estimated using multinomial logit models. Basic models, including only travel time and toll, yielded reasonable results. Models included VOTs of $2.60/hour, $8.63/hour, and $10.71/hour for off-peak, shoulder, and peak-period travelers, respectively. However, adding a managed-lane (ML) alternative specific coefficient to these models resulted in positive coefficients for the toll variable and negative VOTs. Similarly, adding reliability to the models resulted in counter-intuitive results. Researchers concluded that additional research on how travelers perceive the reliability and time savings on MLs is needed because modeling real-world choices of MLs using the standard definitions of reliability and time savings led to counter-intuitive results.
A Flexible Macroblock Scheme for Unequal Error Protection

This paper proposes an enhanced error protection scheme using flexible macroblock ordering in H.264/AVC. The algorithm uses a two-phase system. In the first phase, the importance of every macroblock is calculated based on its influence on the current frame and future frames. In the second phase, the macroblocks with the highest impact factor are grouped together in a separate slice group using the flexible macroblock ordering feature of H.264/AVC. By using an unequal error protection scheme, the slice group containing the most important macroblocks can be better protected than the other slice group. The proposed algorithm offers better concealment opportunities than the algorithms which are predefined for flexible macroblock ordering in H.264/AVC.
Who Do You Think You Are? Personal Home Pages and Self-Presentation on the World Wide Web

Personal home pages on the World Wide Web make it possible for anyone to be a mass communicator. They represent an unprecedented chance to study the audience as producers of mass communication content rather than as consumers. The current study content analyzed 319 personal home pages and identified their most popular features. In addition, personal home pages were examined as new channels of self-presentation, a topic that has received much research attention from psychologists. Findings indicated that most personal web pages did not contain much personal information. The typical page had a brief biography, a counter or guest book, and links to other pages. The same strategies of self-presentation were employed on personal pages with the same frequency as they were in the interpersonal setting. There were also gender differences in self-presentation that were consistent with research findings from social psychology.
Distinguishing Language from Thought: Experimental Evidence That Syntax Is Lexically Rather Than Conceptually Represented

It is generally assumed that syntax is represented linguistically rather than conceptually, consistent with the more general view that language and thought are coded separately. This claim is widely defended on logical grounds, but it has received little experimental support. In the present study, we asked Spanish and English speakers to make semantic and syntactic categorizations for pictures and their corresponding names. Consistent with past results, latencies to semantically categorize pictures and words were similar. The new finding is that participants were faster to make syntactic decisions for words compared with pictures, suggesting that syntactic features such as grammatical gender and the count-mass distinction are more closely linked to lexical than conceptual representations.
RELIEF: combining expressiveness and rapidity into a single system

This paper constitutes a proposal for an efficient and effective logical information retrieval system. Following a relational indexing approach, which is in our opinion a necessity to cope with the emerging applications such as those based on multimedia, we use the conceptual graphs formalism as our indexing language. This choice allows for relational indexing support and captures all the useful properties of the logical information retrieval model, in a workable system. First order logic and standard information retrieval techniques are combined together, to the same effect: obtaining an expressive system, able to accurately handle complex documents, improve retrieval effectiveness, and achieve good time performance. Experimentations on an image test collection, within a system available on the Web, provide an illustration of the role that logic may have in the future development of information retrieval systems.
But Emotions Are Sometimes Irrational

tial payoff, especially if considerable thought is given to the nature of stimuli and where and how the research process itself occurs. Let me offer here something across Lazarus's arguments that poses a larger problem than any of Lazarus's single problems-the interrelationships among all the issues. I have little doubt that work can be done on each of these issues in isolation. This is not the real challenge before us. The real challenge is to deal with these problems all at once, studying appraisals and emotion within and between people across cultures as a single, unitary, well-run and well-integrated machine. It is not the single problems that prevent us from breaking through to a better understanding of people; it is our inability to see, think about, and study the interrelationships among all the components, and all their problems, all at once as a unit in and of itself that stands as our largest challenge. Lazarus has done us a favor by fleshing out individual problems and their possible solutions. But the real challenge underlying his target article lies in all five points as a collective whole across all the people of the world.
Altered expression of secreted frizzled-related protein-2 in retinitis pigmentosa retinas.

PURPOSE Inherited retinal degenerations such as retinitis pigmentosa (RP) are characterized by progressive death of the photoreceptors due to apoptosis. To identify changes in gene expression associated with the degenerative state in RP retinas, expression profiling of apoptosis-related genes was performed using a gridded array technique. METHODS Total RNAs from RP and control retinas were used to generate radiolabeled cDNA probes to screen gridded membrane arrays of 205 apoptosis-related genes. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction was used to generate probes corresponding to differentially expressed genes for Northern blot analysis and for mRNA in situ hybridization studies of retinal cryosections. Fluorescence immunocytochemistry was performed on retinal sections using available antibodies. RESULTS By expression profiling, we identified upregulated expression of the mRNA for secreted Frizzled-related protein-2 (SFRP2) in RP retina in comparison with control. By Northern blot analysis, SFRP2 mRNA levels were 2- to 20-fold higher in RP samples than in controls. The localization of SFRP2 mRNA by in situ hybridization varied according to the degree of degeneration, from stratified in relatively well-preserved retinas to diffuse in the highly degenerative state. By immunofluorescence, SFRP2 protein in RP retinas was found mainly to colocalize with the cell adhesion and signal transducing protein beta-catenin. CONCLUSIONS SFRPs can regulate apoptosis in vitro and appear to interact with the Wnt/Frizzled signaling pathway, which includes routes to apoptotic activation. Increased SFRP2 expression in RP retinas suggests that an altered pattern of Wnt signal transduction may be a step in the degenerative process linking causal mutations with eventual photoreceptor demise.
Performance improvement of multiprocessor simulation by optimizing synchronization and communication

This paper presents fast co-simulation techniques aimed at multiprocessor-based system-on-chip (SoC) design. Unlike existing co-simulation tools that use a centralized server, which manages clocks for all processor models and inter-processor communication, the proposed techniques separate the synchronization and communication and distribute the large portion of the tasks to each processor model. The amount of synchronization is reduced, and the message passing among the processor models through time-consuming inter-process communication (IPC) is removed. Fast processor model through automatically annotated native code execution is also introduced. We implemented these solutions in STIMUL, a co-simulation framework for multiprocessor system and achieved faster simulation speed by at least a factor of 10 over existing simulators.
Optimal Medical Equipment Maintenance Service Proposal Decision Support System combining Activity Based Costing (ABC) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

This study describes a framework to support the choice of the maintenance service (in-house or third party contract) for each category of medical equipment based on: a) the real medical equipment maintenance management system currently used by the biomedical engineering group of the public health system of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas located in Brazil to control the medical equipment maintenance service, b) the activity based costing (ABC) method, and c) the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. Results show the cost and performance related to each type of maintenance service. Decision-makers can use these results to evaluate possible strategies for the categories of equipment
Interactive Multi-task Relationship Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) is a learning paradigm that provides a principled way to improve the generalization performance of a set of related machine learning tasks by transferring knowledge among the tasks. The past decade has witnessed many successful applications of MTL in different domains. In the center of MTL algorithms is how the relatedness of tasks are modeled and encoded in learning formulations to facilitate knowledge transfer. Among the MTL algorithms, the multi-task relationship learning (MTRL) attracted much attention in the community because it learns task relationship from data to guide knowledge transfer, instead of imposing a prior task relatedness assumption. However, this method heavily depends on the quality of training data. When there is insufficient training data or the data is too noisy, the algorithm could learn an inaccurate task relationship that misleads the learning towards suboptimal models. To address the aforementioned challenge, in this paper we propose a novel interactive multi-task relationship learning (iMTRL) framework that efficiently solicits partial order knowledge of task relationship from human experts, effectively incorporates the knowledge in a proposed knowledge-aware MTRL formulation. We propose an efficient optimization algorithm for kMTRL and comprehensively study query strategies that identify the critical pairs that are most influential to the learning. We present extensive empirical studies on both synthetic and real datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed framework.