Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genome-Wide Analysis of NBS-LRR–Encoding Genes in Arabidopsis Online version contains Web-only data. Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at www.plantcell.org/cgi/doi/10.1105/tpc.009308.

The Arabidopsis genome contains ∼200 genes that encode proteins with similarity to the nucleotide binding site and other domains characteristic of plant resistance proteins. Through a reiterative process of sequence analysis and reannotation, we identified 149 NBS-LRR–encoding genes in the Arabidopsis (ecotype Columbia) genomic sequence. Fifty-six of these genes were corrected from earlier annotations. At least 12 are predicted to be pseudogenes. As described previously, two distinct groups of sequences were identified: those that encoded an N-terminal domain with Toll/Interleukin-1 Receptor homology (TIR-NBS-LRR, or TNL), and those that encoded an N-terminal coiled-coil motif (CC-NBS-LRR, or CNL). The encoded proteins are distinct from the 58 predicted adapter proteins in the previously described TIR-X, TIR-NBS, and CC-NBS groups. Classification based on protein domains, intron positions, sequence conservation, and genome distribution defined four subgroups of CNL proteins, eight subgroups of TNL proteins, and a pair of divergent NL proteins that lack a defined N-terminal motif. CNL proteins generally were encoded in single exons, although two subclasses were identified that contained introns in unique positions. TNL proteins were encoded in modular exons, with conserved intron positions separating distinct protein domains. Conserved motifs were identified in the LRRs of both CNL and TNL proteins. In contrast to CNL proteins, TNL proteins contained large and variable C-terminal domains. The extant distribution and diversity of the NBS-LRR sequences has been generated by extensive duplication and ectopic rearrangements that involved segmental duplications as well as microscale events. The observed diversity of these NBS-LRR proteins indicates the variety of recognition molecules available in an individual genotype to detect diverse biotic challenges.
Evaluation automatique de la satisfaction client à partir de conversations de type “chat” par réseaux de neurones récurrents avec mécanisme d’attention (Customer satisfaction prediction with attention-based RNNs from a chat contact center corpus)

Cet article présente des méthodes permettant l’évaluation de la satisfaction client à partir de très vastes corpus de conversation de type “chat” entre des clients et des opérateurs. Extraire des connaissances dans ce contexte demeure un défi pour les méthodes de traitement automatique des langues de par la dimension interactive et les propriétés de ce nouveau type de langage à l’intersection du langage écrit et parlé. Nous présentons une étude utilisant des réponses à des sondages utilisateurs comme supervision faible permettant de prédire la satisfaction des usagers d’un service en ligne d’assistance technique et commerciale.
An Algorithm for LBS-based Schedule Recommendation with Time Constraint

Recently, Point of Interest Recommendation is widely used in LBS navigation systems. It makes use of the real-time GPS locations of users as well as their preferences to recommend POIs that mostly match these preferences and the paths leading to the POIs. Previous studies are focused on the following two issues: (1) Similarity measurement between POIs and the user preferences, and (2) Optimum path selection from the user location to the recommended POIs. However in most scenarios, users need not only some isolated POIs, but a combination of several POIs that covers the user preferences as well as the paths connecting them. Essentially, it is the schedule planning problem. Schedule planning is usually with strict time limits, and equivalent to Generalized Traveling Sales Man Problem (GTSP) which was proved a NP-hard problem. This imposes great challenge to its solution. In this paper, we formalize the problem of Schedule Planning with strict Time Constraint (SPwTC). Especially, we wrap the static paths between POIs into route activities, thus a globally unified model of user activity can be defined. Based on Genetic Algorithm, we propose the schedule recommendation algorithm to generate candidate route plans. Subsequently, we propose the recommendation function for sorting the recommended schedule plans so as to make the recommended result more in line with user expectation. At the end of this paper, we verify the efficiency of the algorithm as well as its rationality of the recommended result with real road network data.
Nearly 5000 Distant Early-Type Galaxies in COMBO-17: A Red Sequence and Its Evolution since z ~ 1

We present the rest-frame colors and luminosities of ~25,000 mR ≲ 24 galaxies in the redshift range 0.2 < z ≤ 1.1 drawn from 0.78 deg2 of the COMBO-17 survey (Classifying Objects by Medium-Band Observations in 17 Filters). We find that the rest-frame color distribution of these galaxies is bimodal at all redshifts out to z ~ 1. This bimodality permits a model-independent definition of red early-type galaxies and blue late-type galaxies at any given redshift. The colors of the blue peak become redder toward the present day, and the number density of blue luminous galaxies has dropped strongly since z ~ 1. Focusing on the red galaxies, we find that they populate a color-magnitude relation. Such red sequences have been identified in galaxy cluster environments, but our data show that such a sequence exists over this redshift range even when averaging over all environments. The mean color of the red galaxy sequence evolves with redshift in a way that is consistent with the aging of an ancient stellar population. The rest-frame B-band luminosity density in red galaxies evolves only mildly with redshift in a Λ-dominated cold dark matter universe. When we account for the change in stellar mass-to-light ratio implied by the redshift evolution in red galaxy colors, the COMBO-17 data indicate an increase in stellar mass on the red sequence by a factor of 2 since z ~ 1. The largest source of uncertainty is large-scale structure, implying that considerably larger surveys are necessary to further refine this result. We explore mechanisms that may drive this evolution in the red galaxy population, finding that both galaxy merging and truncation of star formation in some fraction of the blue star-forming population are required to fully explain the properties of these galaxies.
Quasi-invariant and super-coinvariant polynomials for the generalized symmetric group

The aim of this work is to extend the study of super-coinvariant polynomials, to the case of the generalized symmetric group $G_{n,m}$, defined as the wreath product $C_m\wr\S_n$ of the symmetric group by the cyclic group. We define a quasi-symmetrizing action of $G_{n,m}$ on $\Q[x_1,. ,x_n]$, analogous to those defined by Hivert in the case of $\S_n$. The polynomials invariant under this action are called quasi-invariant, and we define super-coinvariant polynomials as polynomials orthogonal, with respect to a given scalar product, to the quasi-invariant polynomials with no constant term. Our main result is the description of a Gr\"obner basis for the ideal generated by quasi-invariant polynomials, from which we dedece that the dimension of the space of super-coinvariant polynomials is equal to $m^n C_n$ where $C_n$ is the $n$-th Catalan number.
A Low-Noise Fluttering Shutter Camera Handling Accelerated Motion

We address the problem of motion blur removal using a computational camera with a fluttering shutter. While there are several prototype flutter shutter cameras, and many scenarios in which motion blur is problematic, there are few real-world uses of flutter shutter cameras due to two important limitations. The first is that the shutter mechanisms used to date - primarily Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) elements or electronic shutters - increase noise due to reduced light efficiency or multiple readouts, respectively. Secondly, the class of motions to which the flutter shutter is applicable has been limited to linear, constant velocity motion. We address the first limitation by developing a prototype flutter shutter camera with a reflective element providing high light efficiency and a single-read imaging system. In addition to improved noise performance, this method of exposure modulation imposes fewer limitations on the shutter sequence, allowing us to extend the flutter shutter technique to cases with constant (non-zero) acceleration. We demonstrate both the noise reduction and improved reconstructions in the case of an accelerating camera.
First Impressions Count! The Role of the Human's Emotional State on Rapport Established with an Empathic versus Neutral Virtual Therapist

Intelligent virtual agents are being endowed with empathic behaviours to perform roles such as virtual therapists. Studies often evaluate the level of rapport established, but do not measure the therapeutic benefit and the relative advantage of empathic versus neutral behaviours. We have created two virtual (empathic/neutral) therapists. Our experiment with 63 participants consisted of one within-subjects (empathic/neutral) and one between-subjects (order) factors. Regardless of the virtual therapist used, improvements in baseline emotion were reported after the first interaction (time one) and further improvement after the second interaction (time two). Our study reveals that if the human initially expresses strong emotional feeling for a problem they are facing, rapport will be higher for the empathic therapist and the level of rapport established at the first meeting will persist regardless of whether the second encounter used empathic or neutral dialogue. Conversely, participants experiencing low emotional feeling reported greater rapport with the neutral therapist, and that level of rapport persisted in the second encounter with the alternative therapist. This study shows that an empathic agent will not necessarily build more rapport or deliver better emotional outcomes than a neutral agent. Further studies are needed to determine when tailoring and complex behaviours are justified.
Location of human face‐selective cortex with respect to retinotopic areas

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used to identify a small area in the human posterior fusiform gyrus that responds selectively to faces (PF). In the same subjects, phase‐encoded rotating and expanding checkerboards were used with fMRI to identify the retinotopic visual areas V1, V2, V3, V3A, VP and V4v. PF was found to lie anterior to area V4v, with a small gap present between them. Further recordings in some of the same subjects used moving low‐contrast rings to identify the visual motion area MT. PF was found to lie ventral to MT. In addition, preliminary evidence was found using fMRI for a small area that responded to inanimate objects but not to faces in the collateral sulcus medial to PF. The retinotopic visual areas and MT responded equally to faces, control randomized stimuli, and objects. Weakly face‐selective responses were also found in ventrolateral occipitotemporal cortex anterior to V4v, as well as in the middle temporal gyrus anterior to MT. We conclude that the fusiform face area in humans lies in non‐retinotopic visual association cortex of the ventral form‐processing stream, in an area that may be roughly homologous in location to area TF or CITv in monkeys. Hum. Brain Mapping 7:29–37, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Explaining structural policy use by farmers with discrete choice models: an evaluation of structural policies supported by the EAGGF

A farmer’s choice to make an on-farm investment programme can be modelled as a discrete choice amongst finite alternatives. The idea of this paper is to test the possibility of using discrete choice models in the field of the evaluation of structural policies. Farmers choose to take part into agricultural programmes according to their preferences, and farm structural and economic characteristics. Adhesion to a voluntary scheme or policy can be cast as a discrete choice problem. Hence, discrete choice models are adequate to describe probability of choice using a utility maximization framework. First, we want to explore if the choice of investing depends on farms’ characteristics, such as Used Agricultural Area, Standard Gross Margin, Farm type, Possession of lands, Form of Farm Management, Standard Work Unit, class of European Size Unit, Fixed costs, etc. We use the binomial logit model to explain the probability of making an on-farm investment in 1999 with regards to Italian Northern and Central Regions. The estimation of this model allows us to identify the determinants of such a decision.
Efficient Euler-Number Thresholding

Euler thresholding is a non-parametric dynamic thresholding method, useful for many computer vision tasks. It requires the calculation of a graph relating thresholds to Euler numbers and performing a Rosin unimodal threshold calculation on the graph. This report details how this can be done in time complexity O(N + T ) where N is the number of pixels in the image and T is the number of thresholds used.
Sensing order dispersion for autonomous cognitive radios

When autonomous cognitive radios (CRs) have to search multiple potential channels for spectrum opportunities, they face competition from one another to access the channel. The end result of this competition is reduced CR throughput due to collisions among CRs that transmit in the same channel. In this context, the channel sensing order, i.e., the order in which CRs competing for the channels visit those channels, will affect their probability of successful access. This paper presents an investigation into the sensing order dispersion problem, where two or more autonomous CRs attempt to avoid one another by selecting those sensing orders that reduce the likelihood of collisions among one another. We present adaptive strategies that enable the CRs to achieve sensing order dispersion. We evaluate the performance of the presented adaptive strategies in terms of expected time for the autonomous CRs to reach collision-free sensing orders and also in terms of average number of successful transmissions in the network.
Targeted product promotion using firefly algorithm on social networks

This thesis presented an online product promotion strategy that dynamically captures the user interest towards product features and exploits the social connectedness among users to identify the best initial seeds for product promotion. The performance of various modules of strategy is improved by nature inspired firefly algorithm. This chapter highlights the contribution and presents future direction of the work.
Deriving India's Potential growth from theory and structure

Estimates suggest that Indian aggregate supply is elastic but subject to upward shocks. If supply shocksmake a high persistent contribution to inflation, it implies second round pass through is occurring, implying growth has reached its potential. This measure of potential growth draws on both theory and the structure of the Indian economy. It turns out supply shocks largely explain inflation. Output reached potential only in the years 2007-08 when growth rates exceeded 9 percent. In the period 2010-11 there was no sustained excess of growth over potential. Inflation was due to multiple supply shocks, rather than second round effects. Estimated linear and Markov switching policy rules suggest there wasovercorrection in 2011.They show a two percent underestimate of potential output leads to a 50 basis point rise in policy rates.
Number field lattices achieve Gaussian and Rayleigh channel capacity within a constant gap

This paper shows that a family of number field lattice codes simultaneously achieves a constant gap to capacity in Rayleigh fast fading and Gaussian channels. The key property in the proof is the existence of infinite towers of Hilbert class fields with bounded root discriminant. The gap to capacity of the proposed lattice codes is determined by the root discriminant. The comparison between the Gaussian and fading case reveals that in Rayleigh fading channels the normalized minimum product distance plays an analogous role to the Hermite invariant in Gaussian channels.
ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION, INFORMAL SECTOR, PUBLIC EXPENDITURE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

The impact of environmental pollution on productivity is analyzed in a dynamic two commodity model consisting of a formal sector and an informal sector. Environmental quality and public infrastructural expenditure affect productivity of private inputs in both sectors. Both the sectors pollute environment and receive the benefits of public expenditure on abatement and infrastructure but the burden of tax is imposed only on the formal sector. Properties of the steady-state growth equilibrium and of the second-best optimum fiscal policy are analyzed. The socially optimal relative size of the informal sector is less than its second-best optimal relative size in the decentralized competitive equilibrium.
Retrieval of criminal trajectories with an FCA-based approach

In this paper we briefly discuss the possibilities of Formal Concept Analysis for gaining insight in large amounts of unstructured police reports. We present a generic human centred knowledge discovery approach and showcase promising results obtained during empirical validation. The first case study focusses on distilling indicators for identifying domestic violence from 4814 reports with the aim of better recognizing new incoming cases. In the second case study we used FCA in combination with Temporal Concept Analysis to identify and investigate human trafficking suspects extracted from 266157 short observational reports. The third case study we present in this paper describes our application of FCA for identifying radicalising subjects from 166577 observational police reports. Finally, we conclude our paper with the case study on pedophile chat conversation analysis and the CORDIET data mining system.
High-performance Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection on the SWS 2013 evaluation

In the last years, the task of Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection (QbE-STD), which aims to find occurrences of a spoken query in a set of audio documents, has gained the interest of the research community for its versatility in settings where untranscribed, multilingual and acoustically unconstrained spoken resources, or spoken resources in low-resource languages, must be searched. This paper describes and reports experimental results for a QbE-STD system that achieved the best performance in the recent Spoken Web Search (SWS) evaluation, held as part of MediaEval 2013. Though not optimized for speed, the system operates faster than real-time. The system exploits high-performance phone decoders to extract frame-level phone posteriors (a common representation in QbE-STD tasks). Then, given a query and a audio document, a distance matrix is computed between their phone posterior representations, followed by a newly introduced distance normalization technique and an iterative Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) matching procedure with some heuristic prunings. Results show that remarkable performance improvements can be achieved by using multiple examples per query and, specially, through the late (score-level) fusion of different subsystems, each based on a different set of phone posteriors.
Performance analysis on mobility of ad-hoc network for inter-vehicle communication

This paper presents the feasibility of using an ad-hoc network as an infrastructure for a small group of inter-vehicle communication network. Mobile ad-hoc networking with wireless LAN infrastructure can be employed to build inter-vehicle communication based network. The irregular driving environment pose a challenge to the performance of a wireless LAN. We have measured transmission characteristics for sending and receiving high data volumes using TCP and UDP in vehicles moving on IEEE 802.11b. Our framework aims to evaluate the effect of our proposed mobility models on the performance of dynamic source routing (DSR) based on measured data. Proposed mobility models are varied by conducting the experiments under different driving environment, driving conditions, and vehicular patterns. Our result shows that the routing protocol mechanism, such as route discovery and route maintenance, does not interrupt the data transmission seriously.
Development of a decision aid to address racial disparities in utilization of knee replacement surgery.

OBJECTIVE Previous studies suggest that poorer knowledge and expectations about surgical outcomes may be responsible for low rates of total knee replacement (TKR) among African American males. The goal of this study was to pilot test the scope, acceptability, and efficacy of an educational videotape and tailored TKR decision aid designed to reduce disparities in TKR knowledge and expectations. METHODS African American and Caucasian male veteran volunteers ages 55-85 years with moderate to severe knee osteoarthritis (OA) were recruited. During group meetings, patients viewed a video about knee OA treatments and were provided a personalized arthritis report that presented predicted patient outcomes should they decide to undergo TKR. Patients completed baseline and postintervention questionnaires that included an adapted Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) instrument to measure post-TKR expectations (0-100 scale with higher scores reflecting poorer outcomes). RESULTS A total of 102 patients (54 African American, 48 Caucasian) completed the baseline survey and 64 patients attended the intervention. There were no significant differences by race between patients completing and those dropping out of the study. At baseline (n = 102), African American patients expressed lower expectations about post-TKR outcomes than did Caucasian patients for both pain (WOMAC score 41 versus 34; P = 0.18) and physical function expectations (WOMAC score 38 versus 30; P = 0.13). Among African Americans who underwent the intervention, expected pain and physical function improved to 31 (P = 0.04 versus baseline) and 30 (P = 0.09 versus baseline), respectively. Caucasian patients' expectations changed little. CONCLUSION Disparities in baseline knowledge and expectations about TKR may be improved with the combined educational video and tailored decision aid.
Where lies the Peak of the Brown Dwarf Binary Separation Distribution

Searches for companions of brown dwarfs by direct imaging probe mainly orbital separations greater than 3–10 AU. On the other hand, previous radial velocity surveys of brown dwarfs are mainly sensitive to separations smaller than 0.6 AU. It has been speculated if the peak of the separation distribution of brown dwarf binaries lies right in the unprobed range. Very recent work for the first time extends high‐precision radial velocity surveys of brown dwarfs out to 3 AU (Joergens 2008). Based on more than six years UVES/VLT spectroscopy the binary frequency of brown dwarfs and (very) low‐mass stars (M4.25–M8) in Chamaeleon I was determined: it is 18−12+20% for the whole sample and 10−8+18% for the subsample often brown dwarfs and very low‐mass stars (M⩽0.1 M⊙). Two spectroscopic binaries were confirmed, these are the brown dwarf candidate ChaHα8, and the low‐mass star CHXR74. Since their orbital separations appear to be 1 AU or greater, the binary frequency at <1 AU might be less than 10%. Now for the first.