Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rapid development of cortical auditory evoked potentials after early cochlear implantation

The aim of our research was to estimate the time course of development and plasticity of the human central auditory pathways following cochlear implantation. We recorded cortical auditory-evoked potentials in 3-year-old congenitally deaf children after they were fitted with cochlear implants. Immediately after implantation cortical response latencies resembled those of normal-hearing newborns. Over the next few months, the cortical evoked responses showed rapid changes in morphology and latency that resulted in age-appropriate latencies by 8 months after implantation. Overall, the development of cortical response latencies for the implanted children was more rapid than for their normal-hearing age-matched peers. Our results demonstrate a high degree of central auditory system plasticity during early human development.
Review on Classification of Genes and Biomarker Identification

Recent advances in the DNA microarray technology have provided the ability to examine and measure the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously in an organism. In this technology each gene is recorded under different conditions or each gene is evaluated under a single environment but in different types of tissues. In the first case it is used in identification of functionally related genes where asthe second type of technology is helpful in classification of different types of tissues and identification of those genes whose expression levels are good diagnostic indicators. Different approaches have been applied to classify different datasets. However, the main challenges in this task is the availability of a smaller number of samples compared to huge number of genes and the noisy nature of biological data. This paper review on different techniques used to classify the genes and improved efficiency of biomarker identification due to these classifications.
Vanishing of L-functions of elliptic curves over number fields

Let $E$ be an elliptic curve over $\mathbb{Q}$, with L-function $L_E(s)$. For any primitive Dirichlet character $\chi$, let $L_E(s, \chi)$ be the L-function of $E$ twisted by $\chi$. In this paper, we use random matrix theory to study vanishing of the twisted L-functions $L_E(s, \chi)$ at the central value $s=1$. In particular, random matrix theory predicts that there are infinitely many characters of order 3 and 5 such that $L_E(1, \chi)=0$, but that for any fixed prime $k \geq 7$, there are only finitely many character of order $k$ such that $L_E(1, \chi)$ vanishes. With the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, those conjectures can be restated to predict the number of cyclic extensions $K/\mathbb{Q}$ of prime degree such that $E$ acquires new rank over $K$.
Infância, trabalho e saúde: reflexões sobre o discurso oficial de proibição do trabalho infantil

RESUMO Este texto apresenta alguns resultados e hipoteses levantados em pesquisa sobre a relacao entre infância, trabalho e saude que analisou o processo historico de construcao do discurso oficial (leis e politicas) da proibicao do trabalho infantil, utilizando os procedimentos da Analise de Discurso. Verificou-se a presenca de elementos indicativos de funcionamento ideologico que sustentam a 'invisibilidade do trabalho infantil' e 'demarcacao do trabalho enquanto atividade inerentemente prejudicial a saude'. Aponta para a necessidade de estudos e pesquisas que considerem a complexidade da tematica do trabalho infantil e suas relacoes com a saude publica.
Has the impact of heat waves on mortality changed in France since the European heat wave of summer 2003? A study of the 2006 heat wave.

BACKGROUND In July 2006, a lasting and severe heat wave occurred in Western Europe. Since the 2003 heat wave, several preventive measures and an alert system aiming at reducing the risks related to high temperatures have been set up in France by the health authorities and institutions. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of those measures, the observed excess mortality during the 2006 heat wave was compared to the expected excess mortality. METHODS A Poisson regression model relating the daily fluctuations in summer temperature and mortality in France from 1975 to 2003 was used to estimate the daily expected number of deaths over the period 2004-2006 as a function of the observed temperatures. RESULTS During the 2006 heat wave (from 11 to 28 July), about 2065 excess deaths occurred in France. Considering the observed temperatures and with the hypothesis that heat-related mortality had not changed since 2003, 6452 excess deaths were predicted for the period. The observed mortality during the 2006 heat wave was thus markedly less than the expected mortality (approximately 4400 less deaths). CONCLUSIONS The excess mortality during the 2006 heat wave, which was markedly lower than that predicted by the model, may be interpreted as a decrease in the population's vulnerability to heat, together with, since 2003, increased awareness of the risk related to extreme temperatures, preventive measures and the set-up of the warning system.
Applications of Evolutionary Neural Networks for Sales Forecasting of Fashionable Products

The evolutionary neural network (ENN), which is the hybrid combination of evolutionary computation and neural network, is a suitable candidate for topology design, and is widely adopted. An ENN approach with a direct binary representation to every single neural network connection is proposed in this chapter for sales forecasting of fashionable products. In this chapter, the authors will first explore the details on how an evolutionary computation approach can be applied in searching for a desirable network structure for establishing the appropriate sales forecasting system. The optimized ENN structure for sales forecasting is then developed. With the use of real sales data, the authors compare the performances of the proposed ENN forecasting scheme with several traditional methods which include artificial neural network (ANN) and SARIMA. The authors obtain the conditions in which their proposed ENN outperforms other methods. Insights regarding the applications of ENN for forecasting sales of fashionable products are generated. Finally, future research directions are outlined. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-766-9.ch018
Speeding Up Semi-Supervised On-line Boosting for Tracking* Speeding Up Semi Supervised On line Boosting for Tracking

Recently, object tracking by detection using adaptive on-line classifiers has been investigated. In this case, the tracking problem is reduced to the discrimination of the current object view from the local background. However, on-line learning may introduce errors, which causes drifting and let the tracker fail. This can be avoided by using semi-supervised on-line learning (i.e., the use of labeled and unlabeled training samples), which allows to limit the drifting problem while still staying adaptive to appearance changes, in order to stabilize tracking. In particular, this paper extends semi-supervised on-line boosting by a particle filter to achieve a higher frame-rate. Furthermore, a more sophisticated search-space sampling, and an improved update sample selection have been added. In addition, a review of the semi-supervised on-line boosting algorithm is given and further experiments have been accomplished.
A Nonlinear Model Predictive Control System Based on Wiener Model

In this paper, application of a modified nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) method with simplified optimization problem has been studied. The NMPC scheme used here is based on Wiener model which requires only little more effort in development than a standard linear step-response model, yet offers superior characterization of systems with highly nonlinear gains. In this work, Wiener model has been incorporated into model predictive control scheme in a way that effectively removes the nonlinearity from the control problem. This scheme is based on identification of inverse nonlinear part of the Wiener model. The presented method results in an optimization problem with the implementation and computation levels of difficulty, that are nearly equivalent to the case where the plant and constraints are linear. A standard quadratic programming (QP) algorithm is enough to solve the optimization problem. PH neutralization, as a highly nonlinear plant, is used in simulations to demonstrate the efficiency of the presented method
Research on multi-objective optimization of BIW modal

BIW modal optimization with traditional FEM method was inefficiency and usually with much mass increase. FEM analysis combined with Multi-objective Optimization method was used to improve the first order frequency of BIW. Mathematic model was built by response surface method to replace FEM model and NSGA-II was used to get non-dominated solutions. During the optimization plates with high relative sensitivity was used as design variables. The first natural frequency was optimized with the mass of BIW was under control. The method in this paper is useful in big complex structures when do some optimization.
Ischemia-Modified Albumin Levels in Children with Chronic Liver Disease

Background/Aims Ischemia-modified albumin (IMA) levels have been shown to correlate with the severity of liver failure in adults. However, the role of IMA levels has not been evaluated in children with chronic liver disease (CLD). We analyzed the clinical significance of IMA levels in children with CLD. Methods Thirty-three children with CLD and 33 healthy children were included in the study. Blood was collected to analyze biochemical parameters, oxidant status, and IMA. Liver biopsies were re-evaluated for liver fibrosis; severe fibrosis (SF) was defined as fibrosis stage ≥4. Results The IMA and and IMA to albumin ratios (IMARs) were significantly higher in children with CLD than in those without (IMA: 0.545±0.095 vs 0.481±0.062, p=0.003; IMAR: 0.152±0.046 vs 0.126±0.018, p=0.04). The IMAR was positively correlated with the pediatric end-stage liver disease score (p=0.03, r=0.503) and fibrosis score (p=0.021, r=0.400). Patients with SF had higher IMARs compared to patients with mild fibrosis (0.181±0.056 vs 0.134±0.025, p=0.003). The area under the receiver operation curve (AUROC) for predicting SF was 0.78 (p=0.006). Using a cutoff ratio value of 0.140, the sensitivity and specificity were 84% and 70%, respectively. The AUROC for predicting the need for liver transplantation and/or death was 0.82 (p=0.013). With a cutoff value of 0.156, the sensitivity and specificity was 83% and 82%, respectively. Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed increased morbidity and/or mortality in the group with an IMAR>0.156 (50% vs 4.3%, p=0.005). Conclusions IMARs have been shown to provide important clues in predicting the fibrosis stage of the disease and determining the outcome in children with CLD.
Malicious users' circle detection in social network based on spatio-temporal co-occurrence

Online social networks have witnessed massive increase from the point of view of users during last decade. However, it is also becoming center of attraction for spammers. It is a complex problem to trace spammers on a large scale. Since spammers communicate covertly so by analyzing simple graph of social network, they cannot be identified. In order to find the circle of people involved in the malicious messaging, we associate people on the basis of their spatio-temporal co-occurrence i.e. people frequently communicating with each other. In this paper, we associate people on the basis of their spatio-temporal co-occurrence and find the users involved in malicious communications.
E-commerce adoption in Malaysian Small and Medium Enterprises Practitioner Firms: A revisit on Rogers' model

The current climate of business necessitates competitions that are often tough and unpredictable. All organizations, regardless their size and scope of operation, are facing severe competitive challenges. In order to cope with this phenomenon, managers are turning to e-commerce in their respective organizations. The present study hinges upon exploring and explaining the different dimensions of the adoption of e-commerce among Small and medium enterprises, based on the Five Factors of Diffusion of Innovation Model derived by Rogers. In this study, however, we employed the survey methods. A questionnaire was distributed to 1,200 managers and employees in the manufacturing, service and agricultural sectors by email; with a response rate of 10%. The results gleamed from this study posits that relative advantage is influential vis-a-vis e-commerce adoption. Trialability and Observability factors affect the level of confidence of management, which in turn, influences e-commerce adoption. Meanwhile, the existing culture of a company affects the resistance of employees, which in turn negatively effects the e-commerce adoption, while complexity does not significantly influence the e-commerce adoption.
Optimal Control of Controllable Switched Systems

Many of the existing techniques for controlling switched systems either require the solution to a complex optimization problem or significant sacrifices to either stability or performance to offer practical controllers. In [13], it is shown that stabilizing, practical controllers with meaningful performance guarantees can be constructed for a specific class of hybrid systems by parameterizing the controller actions by a finite set. We extend this approach to the control of controllable switched systems by constraining the switching portion of the control input and fixing the feedback controller for each subsystem. We show that, under reasonable assumptions, the resulting system is guaranteed to converge to the target while providing meaningful performance. We apply our approach to the direct-injection stratified charge (DISC) engine and compare the results to that of a model predictive controller designed for the same application. Thesis Supervisor: Munther A. Dahleh Title: Professor of Electrical Engineering Computer Sciences
Toward unsupervised model-based spoken term detection with spoken queries without annotated data

We present a two-stage model-based approach for unsupervised query-by-example spoken term detection (STD) without any annotated data. Compared to the prevailing DTW approaches for the unsupervised STD task, HMMs used by model-based approaches can better capture the signal distributions and time trajectories of speech with a more global view of the spoken archive; matching with model states also significantly reduces the computational load. The utterances in the spoken archive are first offline decoded into acoustic patterns automatically discovered in an unsupervised way from the spoken archive. In the first stage, we propose a document state matching (DSM) approach, where query frames are matched to the HMM state sequences for the spoken documents. In this process, a novel duration-constrained Viterbi (DC-Vite) algorithm is proposed to avoid unrealistic speaking rate distortion. In the second stage, pseudo relevant/irrelevant examples retrieved from the first stage are respectively used to construct query/anti-query HMMs. Each spoken term hypothesis is then rescored with the likelihood ratio to these two HMMs. Experimental results show an absolute 11.8% of mean average precision improvement with a more than 50% reduction in computation time compared to the segmental DTW approach on a Mandarin broadcast news corpus.
Pattern Selection for Support Vector Regression based on Sparseness and Variability

Support Vector Machine has been well received in machine learning community with its theoretical as well as practical value. However, since its training time complexity is cubic, its use is limited in data mining involving problems with a huge pattern set with a cubic time complexity of its training time. In this paper, we propose a pattern selection method for support vector regression (SVR), using notions of sparseness, variability and uniqueness. Two versions of algorithms, deterministic and stochastic, are presented, which are then applied to an artificial data set and two well known real world data sets. Preliminary results justify further investigation. The proposed method should work well with non-SVM function approximators such as neural networks.
Topology Analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I. Scale and Luminosity Dependence

We measure the topology of volume-limited galaxy samples selected from a parent sample of 314,050 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which is now complete enough to describe the fully three-dimensional topology and its dependence on galaxy properties. We compare the observed genus statistic G(νf) to predictions for a Gaussian random field and to the genus measured for mock surveys constructed from new large-volume simulations of the ΛCDM cosmology. In this analysis we carefully examine the dependence of the observed genus statistic on the Gaussian smoothing scale RG from 3.5 to 11 h-1 Mpc and on the luminosity of galaxies over the range -22.50 < Mr < -18.5. The void multiplicity AV is less than unity at all smoothing scales. Because AV cannot become less than 1 through gravitational evolution, this result provides strong evidence for biased galaxy formation in low-density environments. We also find clear evidence of luminosity bias of topology within the volume-limited subsamples. The shift parameter Δν indicates that the genus of brighter galaxies shows a negative shift toward a "meatball" (i.e., cluster dominated) topology, while faint galaxies show a positive shift toward a "bubble" (i.e., void dominated) topology. The transition from negative to positive shift occurs approximately at the characteristic absolute magnitude Mr* = -20.4. Even in this analysis of the largest galaxy sample to date, we detect the influence of individual large-scale structures, as the shift parameter Δν and cluster multiplicity AC reflect (at ~3 σ) the presence of the Sloan Great Wall and an X-shaped structure that runs for several hundred megaparsecs across the survey volume.
Towards a cosmic no hair theorem for higher‐order gravity

We use gravitational Lagrangians R□k √− g and linear combinations of them motivated from trials how to overcome the non- renormalizability of Einstein' s theory. We ask under which circumstances the de Sitter space- time represents an attractor solution in the set of spatially flat Friedman models. This property ensures the inflationary model to be a typical solution; nowadays, this property is called cosmic no hair theorem because it is analogous to the no hair theorem for black holes. Results are: for arbitrary k, i.e., for arbitrarily large order 2k + 4 of the field equation, one can always find examples where the attractor property takes place. Such examples necessarily need a non- vanishing R2- term. The main formulas do not depend on the dimension, so one gets similar results also for 1+1- dimensional gravity and for Kaluza- Klein cosmology.
Dynamic channel filtering method for multi-mode & multi-service software radio communication systems

This paper proposes a dynamic digital channel filtering method based on wavelet packet algorithm to realize a simplified and efficient multi-mode & multi-service software radio receiver which can provide the functions of several systems as well as several services simultaneously via one handset. The method can extract several different bandwidth signals adaptively, for the change of service being offered, by a filtering processing without preparing a set of filters. By applying for the concept of multiple service wireless communications based on Common Frequency Band Radio On Fiber (CFB-ROF) transmission scheme [1], it would be possible to be shared the demodulation processing part from an antenna to a channel selection processing for several different service signals.
EEG Study of the Disgust and Pleasant Stimuli Perception in 5-6 Years Children and Adults

The perception of visual emotional stimuli develops during the human ontogeny. The purpose of this study is to find developmental electrophysiological changes in human emotional perception. We compared EEG power spectrum density recorded in 5- to 6-year-old children (N=27) and adults (N=28) in response to different pleasant, disgust and neutral visual stimulation, including severely damaged human faces, food, insects, snakes, kids, animal cubs and neutral stimuli. Brain electrical activity was recorded using a 19-channel EEG recording device, "Encephalan", with the recording of polygraph channels. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was used to analyze the frequency spectrum (2-3 Hz, 3-4 Hz, etc., 19-20 Hz). The beta-and theta-rhythm power was higher compared to background in children and lower in adults during presentation of images of damaged human faces, insects, and snakes. The ECG heart rate was significantly higher during damaged faces presentation compared to the background only in children. Our findings indicate that the perception of damaged human faces excludes empathy component of perception in children.
Learning Relations from Biomedical Corpora Using Dependency Tree Levels

In this paper we address the problem of learning relations in the biomedical domain. We propose a representation which takes into account the syntactic information and allows for using different machine learning methods. The results we have obtained are comparable to the performance of relation learning systems in the biomedical domain and in some cases out-perform them. In addition, we have studied the impact of ensemble methods on learning relations using the representation we proposed. Given that recall is very important for relation learning, we have studied how it can be improved. It has been shown that ensemble methods techniques provide recall of 76,2% (with precision of 69,4%).
Acute uncomplicated cystitis in an era of increasing antibiotic resistance: a proposed approach to empirical therapy.

Received 9 January 2004; accepted 20 April 2004; electronically published 14 June 2004. This report is based on a meeting organized by the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) in Boston, Massachusetts, on 10 June 2003. Conference participants are listed at the end of the text. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the APUA. Reprints or correspondence: Dr. Thomas M. Hooton, Harborview Medical Center, 325 Ninth Ave., Box 359930, Seattle, WA 98104-2499 (hooton@u.washington.edu). Clinical Infectious Diseases 2004; 39:75–8