Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Constraint-driven clustering

Clustering methods can be either data-driven or need-driven. Data-driven methods intend to discover the true structure of the underlying data while need-driven methods aims at organizing the true structure to meet certain application requirements. Thus, need-driven (e.g. constrained) clustering is able to find more useful and actionable clusters in applications such as energy aware sensor networks, privacy preservation, and market segmentation. However, the existing methods of constrained clustering require users to provide the number of clusters, which is often unknown in advance, but has a crucial impact on the clustering result. In this paper, we argue that a more natural way to generate actionable clusters is to let the application-specific constraints decide the number of clusters. For this purpose, we introduce a novel cluster model, Constraint-Driven Clustering (CDC), which finds an a priori unspecified number of compact clusters that satisfy all user-provided constraints. Two general types of constraints are considered, i.e. minimum significance constraints and minimum variance constraints, as well as combinations of these two types. We prove the NP-hardness of the CDC problem with different constraints. We propose a novel dynamic data structure, the CD-Tree, which organizes data points in leaf nodes such that each leaf node approximately satisfies the CDC constraints and minimizes the objective function. Based on CD-Trees, we develop an efficient algorithm to solve the new clustering problem. Our experimental evaluation on synthetic and real datasets demonstrates the quality of the generated clusters and the scalability of the algorithm.
Sky-ground representation for local scene description

This paper proposes a new representation, called a sky-ground representation, for describing scenes of environment at a local place. A sky-ground representation is a spherical image with full field of view, combined with a vertical reference which is determined by sensing the direction of gravity. The scene of environment at a local place is observed by a spherical image sensor. The acquired spherical image is divided into two parts, sky part and ground part, along the horizon according to their positions, above or below the horizon. The horizon is determined by sensing the gravity from an acceleration sensor.
Predictors of Periprocedural (Type IVa) Myocardial Infarction, as Assessed by Frequency-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

Background— Frequency-domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) is easily able to define both pre- and post-stenting features of the atherosclerotic plaque that can potentially be related to periprocedural complications. We sought to examine which FD-OCT-defined characteristics, assessed both before and after stent deployment, predicted periprocedural (type IVa) myocardial infarction (MI). Methods and Results— FD-OCT was performed before and after coronary stenting in 50 patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for either non-ST segment elevation MI (NSTEMI) or stable angina. All patients underwent single-vessel stenting, and only drug-eluting stents were implanted. Troponin T was analyzed on admission, before PCI, and at 12 and 24 hours after PCI, and type IVa MI was defined in stable angina as a rise of at least 3× upper reference limit and in NSTEMI as a pre-PCI troponin T fall, followed by post-PCI troponin T rise >20%. Type IVa MI was diagnosed in 21 patients, while the remaining 29 represented the control group. FD-OCT analysis showed that thin-cap fibroatheroma (76.2% versus 41.4%; P=0.017) prior to PCI, intrastent thrombus (61.9% versus 20.7%; P=0.04), and intrastent dissection (61.9% versus 31%; P=0.03) after PCI were significantly more frequent in type IVa MI than in the control group. Multivariate logistic regression analysis confirmed thin-cap fibroatheroma (OR 29.7, 95% CI 1.4 to 32.1), intrastent thrombus (OR 5.5, CI 1.2 to 24.9) and intrastent dissection (OR 5.3, CI 1.2 to 24.3) as independent predictors of type IVa MI. Conclusions— In conclusion, presence of thin-cap fibroatheroma at pre-PCI FD-OCT and of intrastent thrombus and intrastent dissection at post-PCI FD-OCT predict type IVa MI in a contemporary sample of patients treated with second-generation drug-eluting stents. Interestingly, 2 of the 3 predictors of type IVa MI were not apparent at pre-PCI FD-OCT.
Managing Communication Latency-Hiding at Runtime for Parallel Programming Languages and Libraries

This work introduces a runtime model for managing communication with support for latency-hiding. The model enables non-computer science researchers to exploit communication latency-hiding techniques seamlessly. For compiled languages, it is often possible to create efficient schedules for communication, but this is not the case for interpreted languages. By maintaining data dependencies between scheduled operations, it is possible to aggressively initiate communication and lazily evaluate tasks to allow maximal time for the communication to finish before entering a wait state. We implement a heuristic of this model in DistNumPy, an auto-parallelizing version of numerical Python that allows sequential NumPy programs to run on distributed memory architectures. Furthermore, we present performance comparisons for six benchmarks with and without automatic latency-hiding. The results shows that our model reduces the time spent on waiting for communication as much as 27 times, from a maximum of 54% to only 2% of the total execution time, in a stencil application.
Network-coded multihop multicast: Topology and encoding complexity

In this paper, some novel results on the encoding complexity of network coding and its relation with the network topology are reported. The encoding complexity in network coding is defined as the number of nodes which have to perform coding operations in order to achieve the multicast capacity. These nodes are referred to as coding points. Known results state that the number of coding points is cubic in the mincut and quadratic in the number of receivers. In this paper, we show, through extensive simulations and through analysis of these results, that the number of coding points tends to increase linearly in the min-cut and the number of receivers in random graphs. We show that this is correlated to the length of path from the source to the receivers. To verify this, we also analyze pseudo-random graphs with a larger path length.
Data-and Model-driven Attention Mechanism for Autonomous Visual Landmark Acquisition

This paper presents a visual attention mechanism for the acquisition of landmarks in an arbitrary scene. The proposed mechanism consists of two consecutive selection stages. The first one employs classical preattentive saliency computa tions to select a reduced set of interest regions from the whole input image (data-driven stage). The second stage selects from the output of the first selection stage the region that can be considered as a potential landmark (model-driven stage). This potential landmark is the input of the attentive stage, that must characterize it and finally determine if this object is a real landmark. The used imaging sensor is a stereo vision system which is capable of providing depth data as well as color images. This stereo vision system is mounted on an autonomous mobile robot and serves map-building and localisation purposes. We present results achieved by applying the proposed visual attention scheme to on-line acquired stereo pairs of indoor and outdoor scenes.
Global Perception, Meaning, and Aesthetic Appreciation

Studies show meaningfulness overshadows collative variables in determining aesthetic preferences, and this meaning effect can occur very quickly, requiring only very brief visual information. Observers can understand the gist of a natural scene in a glance, even when the images are blurred. By manipulating spatial frequencies, we varied the image resolution of Realist, Impressionist, Cubist, and Abstract Expressionist paintings, and asked participants with no artistic training to rate them on Meaning, Preference, Complexity, Unity and Variety (each subject saw one level of blur/clarity). No matter how blurred the images, Realist and Impressionist paintings were judged more preferable and meaningful than Cubist and Abstract Expressionist art, and within the former styles meaning was the best predictor of preferences. Results support Martindale's theory of cognitive hedonics, which ascribes aesthetic preference to the net activation of semantic modules.
RAProp: ranking tweets by exploiting the tweet/user/web ecosystem and inter-tweet agreement

The increasing popularity of Twitter renders improved trust- worthiness and relevance assessment of tweets much more important for search. However, given the limitations on the size of tweets, it is hard to extract measures for ranking from the tweets? content alone. We present a novel ranking method called RAProp, which combines two orthogonal measures of relevance and trustworthiness of a tweet. The first, called Feature Score, measures the trustworthiness of the source of the tweet by extracting features from a 3-layer Twitter ecosystem consisting of users, tweets and webpages. The second measure, called agreement analysis, estimates the trustworthiness of the content of a tweet by analyzing whether the content is independently corroborated by other tweets. We view the candidate result set of tweets as the vertices of a graph, with the edges measuring the estimated agreement between each pair of tweets. The feature score is propagated over this agreement graph to compute the top-k tweets that have both trustworthy sources and independent corroboration. The evaluation of our method on 16 million tweets from the TREC 2011 Microblog Dataset shows that for top-30 precision, we achieve 53% better precision than the current best performing method on the data set, and an improvement of 300% over current Twitter Search.
Application of fuzzy enhancement in moving object detection and tracking

In this paper, we propose an improved fuzzy enhancement algorithm for the moving object detection and tracking. A new membership function is proposed based on the theory of fuzzy sets, which improves the traditional Pal-King fuzzy enhancement algorithm and overcomes the loss of gray information after the processing of enhancement. Since a gray image with multiple targets need more than one crossover point (threshold) for image segmentation, a method for multi-threshold segmentation based on Otsu algorithm is proposed. This method can get multiple thresholds of the image accurately in a short time. After the processing of fuzzy enhancement the moving object is detected and tracked according to the image centroid. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve moving object detection and tracking accurately and quickly.
Viewpoint-Based Ambient Occlusion

We've developed a new ambient occlusion technique based on an information-theoretic framework. Essentially, our method computes a weighted visibility from each object polygon to all viewpoints; we then use these visibility values to obtain the information associated with each polygon. So, just as a viewpoint has information about the model's polygons, the polygons gather information on the viewpoints. We therefore have two measures associated with an information channel defined by the set of viewpoints as input and the object's polygons as output, or vice versa. From this polygonal information, we obtain an occlusion map that serves as a classic ambient occlusion technique. Our approach also offers additional applications, including an importance-based viewpoint-selection guide, and a means of enhancing object features and producing nonphotorealistic object visualizations.
Neural correlates of training-related memory improvement in adulthood and aging

Cognitive studies show that both younger and older adults can increase their memory performance after training in using a visuospatial mnemonic, although age-related memory deficits tend to be magnified rather than reduced after training. Little is known about the changes in functional brain activity that accompany training-induced memory enhancement, and whether age-related activity changes are associated with the size of training-related gains. Here, we demonstrate that younger adults show increased activity during memory encoding in occipito-parietal and frontal brain regions after learning the mnemonic. Older adults did not show increased frontal activity, and only those elderly persons who benefited from the mnemonic showed increased occipito-parietal activity. These findings suggest that age-related differences in cognitive reserve capacity may reflect both a frontal processing deficiency and a posterior production deficiency.
Jns Journal of Nutritional Science

Hydrolysis of phytate and formation of inositol phosphate isomers without or with supplemented phytases in different segments of the digestive tract of broilers Abstract The objective was to characterise degradation of myo-inositol 1,2,3,4,5,6-hexakis (dihydrogen phosphate) (InsP 6) and formation of inositol phosphate (InsP) isomers in different segments of the broiler digestive tract. Influence of an Aspergillus niger (PhyA) and two Escherichia coli-derived (PhyE1 and PhyE2) phy-tases was also investigated. A total of 600 16-d-old broilers were allocated to forty floor pens (ten pens per treatment). Low-P (5·2 g/kg DM) maize– soyabean meal-based diets were fed without (basal diet; BD) or with a phytase added. On day 25, digesta from different digestive tract segments were pooled per segment on a pen-basis, freeze-dried and analysed for P, InsP isomers and the marker TiO 2. InsP 6 degradation until the lower ileum (74 %) in BD-fed birds showed a high potential of broilers and their gut microbiota to hydrolyse InsP 6 in low-P diets. Different InsP patterns in different gut segments suggested the involvement of phosphatases of different origin. Supplemented phytases increased InsP 6 hydrolysis in the crop (P < 0·01) but not in the lower ileum. Measurements in the crop and proventriculus/gizzard confirmed published in vitro degradation pathways of 3-and 6-phytases for the first time. In the intestinal segments, specifically formed InsP 4–5 isomers of supplemented phytases were still present, indicating further activity of these enzymes. Myo-inositol tetrakisphosphate (InsP 4) accumulation differed between PhyE1 and PhyE2 compared with PhyA in the anterior segments of the gut (P < 0·01). Thus, the hydrolytic cleavage of the first phosphate group is not the only limiting step in phytate degradation in broilers. Phytate represents the primary storage form of P in plant seeds. It is defined as any salt of phytic acid (myo-inositol 1,2,3,4,5,6-hexakis (dihydrogen phosphate) or InsP 6). The util-isation of InsP 6-P depends on InsP 6 hydrolysis because P absorption occurs mainly as orthophosphate (1). InsP 6-hydrolysing enzymes such as phytases (myo-inositol hexaki-sphosphate phosphohydrolases) catalyse the hydrolytic cleav-age of InsP 6 and its salts via several phosphorylated intermediary products (myo-inositol pentakis-, tetrakis-, tris-, bis-and monophosphate) down to myo-inositol. a classification that refers to the initiating position on the inositol ring during in vitro InsP 6 dephosphorylation. The 6-phytases usually originate from plants and initiate hydrolysis at the D-4 (L-6) position of InsP 6 (2) ; 3-phytases are usually of microbial origin (starting hydrolysis …
Cell Shrinkage Triggers the Activation of Mitogen-activated Protein Kinases by Hypertonicity in the Rat Kidney Medullary Thick Ascending Limb of the Henle's Loop

The kidney medulla is exposed to very high interstitial osmolarity leading to the activation of mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPK). However, the respective roles of increased intracellular osmolality and of cell shrinkage in MAPK activation are not known. Similarly, the participation of MAPK in the regulatory volume increase (RVI) following cell shrinkage remains to be investigated. In the rat medullary thick ascending limb of Henle (MTAL), extracellular hypertonicity produced by addition of NaCl or sucrose increased the phosphorylation level of extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) and p38 kinase and to a lesser extent c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase with sucrose only. Both hypertonic solutions decreased the MTAL cellular volume in a dose- and time-dependent manner. In contrast, hypertonic urea had no effect. The extent of MAPK activation was correlated with the extent of MTAL cellular volume decrease. Increasing intracellular osmolality without modifying cellular volume did not activate MAPK, whereas cell shrinkage without variation in osmolality activated both ERK and p38. In the presence of 600 mosmol/liter NaCl, the maximal cell shrinkage was observed after 10 min at 37 °C and the MTAL cellular volume was reduced to 70% of its initial value. Then, RVI occurred and the cellular volume progressively recovered to reach about 90% of its initial value after 30 min. SB203580, a specific inhibitor of p38, almost completely inhibited the cellular volume recovery, whereas inhibition of ERK did not alter RVI. In conclusion, in rat MTAL: 1) cell shrinkage, but not intracellular hyperosmolality, triggers the activation of both ERK and p38 kinase in response to extracellular hypertonicity; and 2) RVI is dependent on p38 kinase activation.
A novel technique for digital image watermarking in spatial domain

Information technology has eased the duplication, manipulation and distribution of digital data in recent times which has resulted in the demand for safe ownership of digital images. A very crucial concern for the content owners and distributors is copyright protection and content authentication. The solution to these problems is Digital Watermarking. The watermarking is the process of embedding a signal in to other signal robustly and invisibly at the same time, the embedded signal is called watermark and the other signal is called cover or host signal. In this paper we presents a brief overview of digital image watermarking techniques in spatial and frequency domain, proposed a watermarking algorithm in spatial domain by using the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method. Every technique has some advantages and disadvantages but the LSB method is to very good compromise between performance, robustness, computational cost and quality of embedding.
Quantum chemical insights into the aggregation induced emission phenomena: A QM/MM study for pyrazine derivatives

There have been intensive studies on the newly discovered phenomena called aggregation induced emission (AIE), in contrast to the conventional aggregation quenching. Through combined quantum mechanics and molecular mechanics computations, we have investigated the aggregation effects on the excited state decays, both via radiative and nonradiative routes, for pyrazine derivatives 2,3‐dicyano‐5,6‐diphenylpyrazine (DCDPP) and 2,3‐dicyanopyrazino phenanthrene (DCPP) in condensed phase. We show that for DCDPP there appear AIE for all the temperature, because the phenyl ring torsional motions in gas phase can efficiently dissipate the electronic excited state energy, and get hindered in aggregate; while for its “locked”‐phenyl counterpart, DCPP, theoretical calculation can only give the normal aggregation quenching. These first‐principles based findings are consistent with recent experiment. The primary origin of the exotic AIE phenomena is due to the nonradiative decay effects. This is the first time that AIE is understood based on theoretical chemistry calculations for aggregates, which helps to resolve the present disputes over the mechanism. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Variables Influencing the Gender Composition of Boards: The Spanish Evidence

This article studies the determining factors of gender composition of the boards of large Spanish companies and presents a method to predict it. For this purpose, a multivariate analysis is run to identify the differences in the characteristics between firms without female directors and firms with two or more female directors or one female director if she is the chief executive officer (CEO) or chair. This research analyzes women's participation on Spanish boards in a period prior to the introduction of voluntary measures to boost female participation, so its results are not influenced by that development.
College Knowledge of 9th and 11th Grade Students: Variation by School and State Context

Drawing on a multi-level model of college enrollment (Perna, 2006a), this study examines the knowledge that 9th and 11th grade students have about college and financial aid within the context of different types of school settings and different higher education and state college-going policy environments. Data for the study are drawn from multiple descriptive case studies of 15 high schools, 3 in each of 5 states.
A Transformational Approach to Resource Analysis with Typed-norms Inference

Abstract In order to automatically infer the resource consumption of programs, analyzers track how data sizes change along program’s execution. Typically, analyzers measure the sizes of data by applying norms which are mappings from data to natural numbers that represent the sizes of the corresponding data. When norms are defined by taking type information into account, they are named typed-norms. This article presents a transformational approach to resource analysis with typed-norms that are inferred by a data-flow analysis. The analysis is based on a transformation of the program into an intermediate abstract program in which each variable is abstracted with respect to all considered norms which are valid for its type. We also present the data-flow analysis to automatically infer the required, useful, typed-norms from programs. Our analysis is formalized on a simple rule-based representation to which programs written in different programming paradigms (e.g., functional, logic, and imperative) can be automatically translated. Experimental results on standard benchmarks used by other type-based analyzers show that our approach is both efficient and accurate in practice.
La mémoire de travail: structure, fonctionnement, capacité

Resume ; Les recherches visant a caracteriser les processus qui regissent les activites cognitives complexes postulent toutes l'existence d'une memoire de travail. Celle-ci est definie comme un systeme, de capacite limitee, qui assure une double fonction de traitement et de stockage temporaire de l'information. L'objectif de cet article est de faire une revue des travaux realises au cours des quinze dernieres annees, en privilegiant les recherches centrees sur le fonctionnement de la memoire de travail dans la lecture et la comprehension. Dans la premiere partie, nous presentons les donnees qui permettent de distinguer memoire a court terme et memoire de travail ; la seconde partie est consacree au modele de Baddeley et la troisieme traite de la capacite de la memoire de travail, en accordant une large place a l'approche de Daneman. ; La memoire de travail n'est pas une entite conceptuellement univoque. Dans la conclusion, nous tentons de clarifier l'evolution que traduisent les recherches des toutes dernieres annees, evolution qui conduit les auteurs a considerer la memoire de travail non pas comme un systeme « generaliste », mais comme constituee de plusieurs systemes specialises impliques dans des tâches specifiques. Dans cette perspective l'etude de la memoire de travail doit etre etroitement associee a celle des processus qui regissent les activites cognitives particulieres. ; Mots cles : memoire de travail, lecture, comprehension de textes.