Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An efficient and user-friendly tool for machine translation quality estimation

We present a new version of QUEST ― an open source framework for machine translation quality estimation ― which brings a number of improvements: (i) it provides a Web interface and functionalities such that non-expert users, e.g. translators or lay-users of machine translations, can get quality predictions (or internal features of the framework) for translations without having to install the toolkit, obtain resources or build prediction models; (ii) it significantly improves over the previous runtime performance by keeping resources (such as language models) in memory; (iii) it provides an option for users to submit the source text only and automatically obtain translations from Bing Translator; (iv) it provides a ranking of multiple translations submitted by users for each source text according to their estimated quality. We exemplify the use of this new version through some experiments with the framework.
Simulation of Diffraction in Periodic Media with a Coupled Finite Element and Plane Wave Approach

The aim of this paper is to discuss simulation methods of diffraction of electromagnetic waves on biperiodic structures. The region with complicated structures is discretized by Nedelec finite elements. In the unbounded homogeneous regions above and below, a plane wave expansion containing the exact far-field pattern is applied. A consistent coupling is achieved by the method of Nitsche. By numerical experiments we investigate the speed of convergence depending on the mesh refinement, the element order, and the number of evanescent waves.
Historical Mammal Extinction on Christmas Island (Indian Ocean) Correlates with Introduced Infectious Disease

It is now widely accepted that novel infectious disease can be a leading cause of serious population decline and even outright extinction in some invertebrate and vertebrate groups (e.g., amphibians). In the case of mammals, however, there are still no well-corroborated instances of such diseases having caused or significantly contributed to the complete collapse of species. A case in point is the extinction of the endemic Christmas Island rat (Rattus macleari): although it has been argued that its disappearance ca. AD 1900 may have been partly or wholly caused by a pathogenic trypanosome carried by fleas hosted on recently-introduced black rats (Rattus rattus), no decisive evidence for this scenario has ever been adduced. Using ancient DNA methods on samples from museum specimens of these rodents collected during the extinction window (AD 1888–1908), we were able to resolve unambiguously sequence evidence of murid trypanosomes in both endemic and invasive rats. Importantly, endemic rats collected prior to the introduction of black rats were devoid of trypanosome signal. Hybridization between endemic and black rats was also previously hypothesized, but we found no evidence of this in examined specimens, and conclude that hybridization cannot account for the disappearance of the endemic species. This is the first molecular evidence for a pathogen emerging in a naïve mammal species immediately prior to its final collapse.
Building Fuel Powered Supercomputing Data Center at Low Cost

Distributed power generations that fed with various economical clean fuels are emerging as promising power supplies for extremescale computing systems. Recent years have witnessed a growing adoption of these non-conventional power supplies in data center designs due to the heightening demand for reducing IT carbon footprint and server energy cost. However, the benefits of such a fuel powered data center are often severely compromised by its high initial capital cost (CapEx). This is because most pilot designs today either rely on expensive advanced generators or employ low-performance generators with costly standby power backup. In this study we exploit heterogeneous generation to reduce the cost of data center powered by fuel. We show that different types of power supplies, if used together, can greatly improve the cost-effectiveness of self-generation but introduce a new layer of design complexity and raise an important question of how to dispatch computing tasks on heterogeneous power supplies. Specifically, due to the non-ideal output power response speed of heterogeneous generators, servers may incur serious power budget deficiencies when dispatching large amount of jobs. We refer to this phenomenon as power lagging, which jeopardizes system reliability and are not economical to be handled by costly power backup systems. To overcome this barrier, we propose Batch, an agile load dispatching scheme that eliminate power lagging at the system/software level. Other than dispatch computing tasks in bulk without considering power system behaviors, Batch intelligently splits job queue into small sets and incrementally schedule jobs based on the power ramping rate constraints and total power budget constraints. Using realistic HPC datacenter load traces, we demonstrate that Batch enables supercomputers to smoothly operate on heterogeneous power. Our design helps data center operators save over 80% cost while maintaining the desired workload performance.
Social anxiety level in acne vulgaris patients and its relationship to clinical variables

Objective The purpose of this study was to determine the level of social anxiety in acne vulgaris patients and to examine its relationship to the sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of acne, as well as to depression, self-esteem, and negative automatic thoughts. Method The study included 83 acne vulgaris patients from the dermatology outpatient unit of a university hospital and 58 healthy controls. Sociodemographic and clinical questionnaires, and the Global Acne Grading System (GAGS), Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS), Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), and Automatic Thoughts Scale (ATS) were administered to both groups. Results The degree of social anxiety, social avoidance/withdrawal, general anxiety, depression, and negative automatic thoughts were significantly higher, and self-esteem was significantly lower in the acne patients. Among the 83 patients, scoring above the scales' cut-off points was as follows: 25.6% on the LSAS, 32.9% on the LSAS-Anxiety Subscale, 27.7% on the LSAS-Avoidance Subscale, 36.1% on HADS, 30.1% on the HADS-Depression Subscale, and 50.6% on the HADS-Anxiety Subscale. Psychological symptoms were negatively correlated with age and level of education in the patient group; however no relationship was observed between the psychological symptoms, and gender, the severity of acne, or acne localization. The patients rated their symptoms more severely than did the clinicians; however, the subjective ratings of the patients were not correlated to their psychological symptoms. Conclusion Acne vulgaris must be considered as an illness with the potential to negatively affect the psychological and emotional functioning of patients; therefore, routine psychiatric evaluation and psychological support should be part of the routine acne treatment plan.
Eliminating annotations by automatic flow analysis of real-time programs

There is an increasing demand for methods that calculate the worst case execution time (WCET) of real time programs. The calculations are typically based on path information for the program, such as the maximum number of iterations in loops and identification of infeasible paths. Most often, this information is given as manual annotations by the programmer. Our method calculates path information automatically for real time programs, thereby relieving the programmer from tedious and error-prone work. The method, based on abstract interpretation, generates a safe approximation of the path information. A trade-off between quality and calculation cost is made, since finding the exact information is a complex, often intractable problem for nontrivial programs. We describe the method by a simple, worked example. We show that our prototype tool is capable of analyzing a number of program examples from the WCET literature, without using any extra information or consideration of special cases needed in other approaches.
Sequential change detection/isolation with stochastic energy constraints

This paper deals with the performance analysis of sensors that are employed to detect and isolate changes in an observation sequence and are powered by renewable energy sources. The nature of energy arrival process is stochastic and the available energy needs to be utilized efficiently. The model we consider is an extension of the one by Geng and Lai [1] in which they study optimal power allocation policies for detecting a change in an observation sequence. For this we will first derive an asymptotic lower bound on worst mean detection delay for any detection/isolation algorithm and an arbitrary power allocation scheme. Then we will show that Matrix CUSUM algorithm combined with an immediate power allocation scheme achieves this lower bound and hence is asymptotically optimal. We also provide numerical simulations to augment the theoretical results.
Curvature: A signature for Action Recognition in Video Sequences

In this paper, a novel signature of human action recognition, namely the curvature of a video sequence, is introduced. In this way, the distribution of sequential data is modeled, which enables few-shot learning. Instead of depending on recognizing features within images, our algorithm views actions as sequences on the universal time scale across a whole sequence of images. The video sequence, viewed as a curve in pixel space, is aligned by reparameterization using the arclength of the curve in pixel space. Once such curvatures are obtained, statistical indexes are extracted and fed into a learning-based classifier. Overall, our method is simple but powerful. Preliminary experimental results show that our method is effective and achieves state-of-the-art performance in video-based human action recognition.
Prospects for Vaccine Prevention of Meningococcal Infection

SUMMARY Neisseria meningitidis is the leading cause of bacterial meningitis in the United States and worldwide. A serogroup A/C/W-135/Y polysaccharide meningococcal vaccine has been licensed in the United States since 1981 but has not been used universally outside of the military. On 14 January 2005, a polysaccharide conjugate vaccine that covers meningococcal serogroups A, C, W-135, and Y was licensed in the United States for 11- to 55-year-olds and is now recommended for the routine immunization of adolescents and other high-risk groups. This review covers the changing epidemiology of meningococcal disease in the United States, issues related to vaccine prevention, and recommendations on the use of the new vaccine.
Examination of Alzheimer's disease by a combination of electrostatic force and mechanical measurement

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common dementia and neurodegenerative disorder disease in central nervous system, and threatens the people's health seriously. But till now there are no effective ways to diagnose and treat AD. Herein, the differences between charge propagation, surface morphology, and Young's modulus of the hippocampus, in healthy and AD mice have been investigated using advanced modes of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). The ability of charge transfer in AD samples has decreased compared with healthy samples. There are compact layered structures in hippocampus from healthy sample, whereas there are no obvious layered structures in hippocampus from AD sample. The Young's modulus of hippocampus from AD sample is about half of that from healthy sample. The results demonstrate that AFM will be helpful in the further study of the functions of hippocampus and pathogeny of AD.
Iris liveness detection using texture segmentation

In order to chisel an iris recognition system and pass in the iris liveness test, an attacker can create semitransparent contact lens spoofing. Such a contact lens is transparent around the iris center and has fake iris texture of another person printed around the outer region. In this paper, such fake iris images are synthetically created which can obviate sleuthing even after using pupillary light reflex technique. Thereafter, new liveness detection is proposed to determine the perceptually invisible boundary between the fake and original iris textures. Response of Gaussian derivative filters with multiple scales and orientations at each pixel location is clustered using K-means to ascertain regions with different textures. To give robustness to the algorithm, it is iterated a certain number of times and a threshold mechanism is imposed to find the correct boundary. The proposed method is shown to achieve high liveness performance by generating a set of 600 fake iris images from the UPOL iris database.
Adaptive Codebook Selection for Limited Feedback MIMO Beamforming Systems

A combined codebook for limited feedback Multi-input Multi-output (MIMO) beamforming system is proposed, where two grassmannian codebooks are combined together to make a set of new codebooks, and from which to choose the codebook for quantification. The codebook selection information is implied in the feedback codeword indexes, thus we can to switch the codebook adaptively. Simulation results show that this method can be used to any channel models, and at the same BER, this method can reduce the feedback rate compare to grassmannian codebooks in correlated channels.
Effects of TAK-044, a nonselective endothelin receptor antagonist, on the spontaneous and indomethacin- or methylene blue-induced constriction of the ductus arteriosus in rats.

We studied the effects of TAK-044, a nonselective endothelin (ET) receptor antagonist, on the indomethacin- or methylene blue-induced constriction of the ductus arteriosus (DA) in rats and compared them with the effects on spontaneous DA constriction. Injection of TAK-044 into 21-day-old fetuses in utero was performed through the uterine wall of laparotomized mother rats under light ether anesthesia. The fetuses were autopsied 3 hr after treatment with TAK-044 (10 mg/kg) in utero and simultaneous administration to the laparotomized mother rats of indomethacin (3 mg/kg, p.o.) or methylene blue (100 mg/kg, i.p.). In the second experiment, pregnant rats were decapitated on day 21 of gestation to obtain newborn rats by cesarean delivery. Newborn rats which were given TAK-044 (2, 10 mg/kg) immediately after or 1 hr before cesarean delivery were autopsied at various times after birth. In both experiments, pups were rapidly frozen in an acetone-dry ice mixture at autopsy to evaluate the DA constriction by the whole-body freezing and shaving method. TAK-044 injection into the fetus 3 hr before autopsy completely inhibited the DA constriction induced by maternal treatment with indomethacin or methylene blue. TAK-044 caused dose-dependent inhibition of the spontaneous closure of the DA after birth. The inhibitory effect was more pronounced in pups which were given TAK-044 in utero 1 hr before birth; however, the inhibitory effect was incomplete in newborn pups. These results, together with the previous finding that BQ-123, an ETA-specific receptor antagonist, inhibits the ductal constriction induced by oxygen in vitro [Coceani et al., 1992], indicate that the ETA receptor plays a significant role in the indomethacin- or methylene blue-induced DA constriction as well as in the spontaneous DA constriction after birth, and also indicate that the inhibition of ETA receptor by TAK-044 was more easily achieved in fetuses than in neonates.
Short echo time proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging of macromolecule and metabolite signal intensities in the human brain

A novel approach is presented for imaging macromolecule and metabolite signals in brain by proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging. The method differentiates between metabolites and macromolecules by T1 weighting using an inversion pulse followed by a variable inversion recovery time before localization and spectroscopic imaging. In healthy subjects, the major macromolecule resonances at 2.05 and 0.9 ppm were mapped at a nominal spatial resolution of 1 × 1 × 1.5 cm3 and were demonstrated to be highly reproducible between subjects. In subacute stroke patients, a highly elevated macromolecule resonance at 1.3 ppm was mapped to infarcted brain regions, suggesting potential applications for studying pathological conditions.
Clinical Implications of Intracoronary Imaging in Cardiac Allograft Vasculopathy

Despite improvements in survival and outcomes, cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV), a unique form of coronary artery disease, continues to remains the leading cause of late morbidity and mortality in heart transplantation (HTx) recipients and accounts for ≈30% of all-cause mortality in this group.1 CAV can develop at any stage after HTx with an incidence of ≈7% within the first year of transplantation and 30% within 5 years.2 CAV is clinically silent and asymptomatic in its initial stages, making early diagnosis particularly challenging. Annual coronary angiography is currently the imaging modality of choice for screening and surveillance of graft coronary arteries for signs of CAV.3 However, low sensitivity of coronary angiography for detecting early-stage CAV necessitates the use of more advanced intracoronary imaging to diagnose the disease in its initial stages. Recent advances in invasive coronary imaging such as intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) have shown promising results in detecting subangiographic CAV, predicting prognosis and guiding therapy.4–6 The current article reviews the present state and future directions for the use of intracoronary imaging in the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of CAV. Several invasive and noninvasive imaging tools have been used to screen and diagnose CAV. Some of the noninvasive tests such as dobutamine stress echocardiography, myocardial perfusion imaging (exercise and pharmacological), cardiac MRI, and coronary computed tomography angiography have been studied extensively for this purpose.7–9 Although these noninvasive tests are highly specific for angiographic CAV, they lack sensitivity in detecting subangiographic CAV.7 The diffuse nature of CAV may result in inability to identify differences in radionuclide uptake in myocardial scintigraphy testing. A 2014 meta-analysis by Wever-Pinzon et al9 demonstrated that compared with coronary angiography, coronary computed tomography angiography was 97% sensitive for detecting any CAV. However, when …
Impact of Extrinsic and Intrinsic Hypoxia on Catecholamine Biosynthesis in Absence or Presence of Hif2α in Pheochromocytoma Cells

Pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas (PPGLs) with activated pseudohypoxic pathways are associated with an immature catecholamine phenotype and carry a higher risk for metastasis. For improved understanding of the underlying mechanisms we investigated the impact of hypoxia and pseudohypoxia on catecholamine biosynthesis in pheochromocytoma cells naturally lacking Hif2α (MPC and MTT) or expressing both Hif1α and Hif2α (PC12). Cultivation under extrinsic hypoxia or in spheroid culture (intrinsic hypoxia) increased cellular dopamine and norepinephrine contents in all cell lines. To distinguish further between Hif1α- and Hif2α-driven effects we expressed Hif2α in MTT and MPC-mCherry cells (naturally lacking Hif2α). Presence of Hif2α resulted in similarly increased cellular dopamine and norepinephrine under hypoxia as in the control cells. Furthermore, hypoxia resulted in enhanced phosphorylation of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH). A specific knockdown of Hif1α in PC12 diminished these effects. Pseudohypoxic conditions, simulated by expression of Hif2α under normoxia resulted in increased TH phosphorylation, further stimulated by extrinsic hypoxia. Correlations with PPGL tissue data led us to conclude that catecholamine biosynthesis under hypoxia is mainly mediated through increased phosphorylation of TH, regulated as a short-term response (24–48 h) by HIF1α. Continuous activation of hypoxia-related genes under pseudohypoxia leads to a HIF2α-mediated phosphorylation of TH (permanent status).
Identification of proteins of Neisseria meningitidis induced under iron‐limiting conditions using the isobaric tandem mass tag (TMT) labeling approach

Isobaric labeling reagents such as Tandem Mass Tags (TMT®) enable the genome‐wide quantification of protein expression levels under different conditions using a gel‐free MS/MS‐based approach. Here, we applied a TMTduplex approach with two isobaric tags to study the response of the human pathogen Neisseria meningitidis to deprivation of iron, a condition met in the human body. In total, 609 proteins were identified in samples of three independent growth experiments, in which we compared cultures grown in the presence and absence of iron. Expression of 35 proteins was found to be induced or repressed under iron‐limiting conditions, including 11 proteins whose ORFs were not previously identified in DNA array studies as being regulated by iron availability at the transcriptional level. These 11 proteins include proteins likely involved in iron metabolism.
Fuzzy Connectedness and Object Definition: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications in Image Segmentation

Images are by nature fuzzy. Approaches to object information extraction from images should attempt to use this fact and retain fuzziness as realistically as possible. In past image segmentation research, the notion of “hanging togetherness” of image elements specified by their fuzzy connectedness has been lacking. We present a theory of fuzzy objects forn-dimensional digital spaces based on a notion of fuzzy connectedness of image elements. Although our definitions lead to problems of enormous combinatorial complexity, the theoretical results allow us to reduce this dramatically, leading us to practical algorithms for fuzzy object extraction. We present algorithms for extracting a specified fuzzy object and for identifying all fuzzy objects present in the image data. We demonstrate the utility of the theory and algorithms in image segmentation based on several practical examples all drawn from medical imaging.