Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Studying Memory Decay and Spacing within Knowledge Tracing

Knowledge Tracing estimates a student’s knowledge on a set of skills and predicts whether the student will answer correctly if given a question linked to subsets of such skills. We conduct an in-depth analysis on capturing cognitive science principles such as memory decay and spacing and measure their effects within knowledge tracing. To do this, we propose a new algorithm called MemDec which incorporates memory decay theory into knowledge estimation. This model is further expanded to consider the spacing effect, another pivotal cognitive science concept. We explore different methods of modeling the rate and weight of decay, with and without the spacing effect, and analyze the role they play in predicting student performance within real-world data. Variations of the model are compared between each other as well as against other existing algorithms.
CARBON EMISSION TRADING ON THE BLOCKCHAIN: A GAME-THEORETIC FRAMEWORK

Imposing a price on carbon emissions is likely an effective approach to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from many sectors. There are primarily two ways to assess a price for carbon emissions, namely carbon tax and emission trading system (ETS). The traditional ETS has several obstacles in carbon credit allocation, determining purchase quantities, and trading in a fair manner. In addition, it lacks effective participant willingness for emission amount verification, transparent monitoring/reporting, identifying a realistic cap limit for each sector, and in accounting the actual cost of emission reduction efforts (such as the costs associated with carbon c apture technology). Blockchain’s underpinning characteristics such as anonymity, decentralized integrity, immutability, latency, security, traceability, and transparency makes this emerging technology as an ideal candidate for solving the bottlenecks of current ETS. In this work, a game theoretic framework is used to find a mutually benefited way for peer-to-peer carbon management within the industrial ecosystem. This is performed on the blockchain using smart contracts to enable strategic planning for carbon trading leveraging the shared data. A conceptual framework and game-theory-based ETS formulation have been proposed to obtain an optimal ETS framework for completely transparent automated trading and CO 2 control measures.
Systematic Website Review of Diversity Embeddedness in U.S.-Based Graduate Health Professions Education Programs

Purpose: The value of a diverse healthcare workforce and the need for all healthcare providers to be educated to provide culturally competent care is widely acknowledged. In part, educating diverse and culturally competent providers is a responsibility of higher education institutions. This study investigated health professions education (HPE) institution-level and program-level websites for evidence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content to address the recruitment and the preparedness of future health profession educators using the diversity and inclusion engaged marketing (DIEM) framework. The study was guided by two research questions: What is the relationship between institution-level and HPE program-level website diversity content? , andWhat evidence of diversity embeddedness exists on HPE program-level websites? Method: Systematic website review methods were used in this non-experimental study design to examine the relationship of graduate HPE program-level websites and institution-level websites for DEI embeddedness. Two data extractors independently and collaboratively extracted and recorded data from 43 institution-level and program-level websites, coding 15 DEI elements. Results: A small but significant amount of variance in program-level website diversity content scores was explained by institution-level website diversity content scores (R 1⁄4 .093, p 1⁄4 .046). In addition, program-level websites did not present evidence of embedding diversity within the curriculum with only eight programs (19%) offering HPE students a course with keyword terms (“diversity,” “equity,” “DEI,” “health disparity,” “social justice,” or “cultural competence”) incorporated in the title or course description. Only one of the 43 programs (2%) offered a formal track, concentration, or certificate dedicated to diversity-related topics within the HPE context. Discussion: Findings demonstrate institution-level evidence of diversity commitment through textual statements, links to academic and financial resources, and use of gender and race diverse images. However, program-level websites infrequently displayed gender and race diverse images of faculty, students, and student life, nor offered textual evidence such as program-level diversity statements, or diversity curriculum embeddedness. The findings suggest DIEM strategies have not trickled down from the institution to the program-level. The program-level diversity website content gaps may be attributable to a lack of awareness or lack of technical capabilities, and although some issues may be easily resolved, others, such as diversifying faculty bodies or revising the curriculum, may require more sustainable change approaches beyond a surface-level website update.
Ozone and , DNA active UV radiation and cloud changes 1 for the near global mean and at high latitudes due to 2 enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations 3

This study analyses the variability and trends of ultraviolet-B (UV-B, wavelength 280–320 nm) 33 radiation that can cause DNA damage, which are caused by climate change due to enhanced greenhouse 34 gas (GHG) concentrations. The analysis is based on DNA active irradiance, total ozone, total cloud cover, 35 and surface albedo calculations with the EMAC Chemistry-Climate Model (CCM) free running simulations 36 following the RCP-6.0 climate scenario for the period 1960–2100. The model output is evaluated with 37 DNA active irradiance ground-based measurements, satellite SBUV (v8.7) total ozone measurements and 38 satellite MODIS/Terra cloud cover data. The results show that the model reproduces the observed 39 variability and change of total ozone, DNA active irradiance, and cloud cover for the period 2000-2018 40 quite well according to the statistical comparisons. Between 50 N–50 S, the DNA-damaging UV radiation 41 is expected to decrease until 2050 and to increase thereafter, as it was shown previously by Eleftheratos et 42
ESSLLI 2022 Proceedings of the 3rd Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning

Chains of transitions by finite automata originally conceived to analyze neural events are described at different granularities by strings. The granularities are refined, and transformed into increasingly elaborate structures, against which to understand the events recorded in the strings. Choosing the correct structure is a problem of induction and learning. The events and strings studied arise in natural language semantics.
NERDS: A G ENERAL F RAMEWORK TO T RAIN C AM - ERA D ENOISERS FROM R AW -RGB N OISY I MAGE P ARIS

We aim to train accurate denoising networks for smartphone/digital cameras from raw-RGB noisy image pairs. Downscaling is commonly used as a practical de-noiser for low-resolution images. Based on this processing, we found that the pixel variance of natural images is more robust to downscaling than the pixel variance of camera noise. Intuitively, downscaling removes high-frequency noise more easily than natural textures. To utilize this property, we can adopt noisy/clean image synthesis at low-resolution to train camera denoisers. On this basis, we propose a new solution pipeline – NERDS that estimates camera noise and synthesizes noisy-clean image pairs from only noisy images. In particular, it first models the noise in raw-sensor images as Poisson-Gaussian distributions, then estimates noise parameters using the difference of pixel variances by downscaling. We formulate the noise estimation as a gradient-descent-based optimization problem through a reparametrization trick. We further introduce a new Image Signal Processor (ISP) estimation method that enables denoiser training in a human-readable RGB space by transforming the downscaled raw images to the style of a given RGB noisy image. The noise and ISP estimations utilize rich augmentation to synthesize image pairs for denoiser training. Experiments show that NERDS can accurately train CNN-based denoisers ( e.g. , DnCNN, ResNet-style network) outperforming previous noise-synthesis-based and self-supervision-based denoisers in real datasets.
Camera Alignment and Weighted Contrastive Learning for Domain Adaptation in Video Person ReID

Table 1 analyses the impact on performance of growing the number of frames per tracklet (fpt). A CNN backbone has been trained with the supervised contrastive loss function. Each tracklet is cut into equal size to maintain scalability across a dataset. We can observe that the temporal information remains stable from 4 frames per tracklets, and performances does not differ significantly beyond that point. In this context, setting the number of fpt to the minimal value that provides the best accuracy (4 in our case) is suitable parameter setting for real-time video-based ReID applications. It is less costly than longer tracklets in term of memory consumption.
How buses alleviate unemployment and poverty: Lessons from a natural experiment in Clayton County, GA

Many studies have documented the linkage between public transportation and economic outcomes, though there is relatively little empirical evidence on the consequences of losing existing transit services, especially bus services, which disproportionately serve low-income populations. We investigate the impacts of bus access on poverty and employment using a natural experiment in Clayton County, GA, where the local bus transit was terminated between 2010 and 2015. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find substantial increases in poverty and unemployment rates in affected neighbourhoods during the five-year period. Our findings suggest both the spatial mismatch hypothesis, which predicts the reduction in transit access can lead to reductions in job accessibility and employment, and the residential sorting hypothesis, which states that poor households gravitate towards neighbourhoods with better transit access, could be at play. Overall, we find strong evidence that disruptions in bus transit could have significant adverse impacts on neighbourhood economic outcomes. Our findings underscore the need for federal and local public transportation funding to help improve job access, alleviate poverty, and maintain neighbourhood stability.
On some random variables involving Bernoulli random variable

Motivated by the recent investigations given in [25] and the fact that Bernoulli probability-type models were often used in the study on some problems in theory of compressive sensing, here we define and study the complex-valued discrete random variables $\widetilde{X}_l(m,N)$ ($0\le l\le N-1$, $1\le m\le N$). Each of these random variables is defined as a linear combination of $N$ independent identically distributed $0-1$ Bernoulli random variables. We prove that for $l\not=0$, $\widetilde{X}_l(m,N)$ is the zero-mean random variable, and we also determine the variance of $\widetilde{X}_l(m,N)$ and its real and imaginary parts. Notice that $\widetilde{X}_l(m,N)$ belongs to the class of sub-Gaussian random variables that are significant in some areas of theory of compressive sensing. In particular, we prove some probability estimates for the mentioned random variables. These estimates are used to establish the upper bounds of the sub-Gaussian norm of their real and imaginary parts. We believe that our results should be implemented in certain applications of sub-Gaussian random variables for solving some problems in compressive sensing of sparse signals.
A note on the necessity of filtering mechanism for polynomial observability of time-discrete wave equation

The problem of uniform polynomial observability was recently analyzed. It is shown that, when the continuous model is uniformly polynomially observable, it is sufficient to filter initial data to derive uniform polynomial observability inequalities for suitable time-discretization schemes. In this note, we prove that a filtering mechanism of high frequency modes is necessary to obtain uniform polynomial observability. More precisely, we give a counterexample which proves that this latter fails without filtering the initial data for time semi-discrete approximations of the wave equation.
Shared Learning Spaces: Peer and Faculty Mentors Develop Skills While Supporting Minoritized Health Sciences Students

Purpose: To explore the effect of virtual mentoring on (1) the development of cross-cultural psychological capital among a group of mostly White health sciences faculty mentors and (2) the effect of perceived competence in mentoring for second-year peer mentors from minoritized backgrounds enrolled in health sciences programs. Method: This mixed-methods study leveraged an explanatory sequential design with quantitative (survey) data collected before qualitative data (focus group interviews). Four first-year physical therapy students and four first-year nursing students were each matched with a faculty mentor and a peer mentor from a minoritized background. Seven peer mentors and eight faculty mentors completed professional development and formed professional learning communities before guided e-mentoring interactions with mentees over six months. Eighteen faculty formed a comparison
Hunting induced defaunation gradient in a Gabonese tropical forest

1. Anthropocene defaunation is the global phenomenon of human‐induced animal biodiversity loss. Understanding the patterns and process of defaunation is critical to predict outcomes for wildlife populations and cascading consequences for ecosystem function and human welfare. 2. We investigated a defaunation gradient in north‐eastern Gabon by establishing 24 transects at varying distances (2–30 km) to rural villages and surveying the abundance and composition of vertebrate communities. Distance from village was positively correlated with observations of hunting (shotgun shells, campfires, hunters), making it a good proxy for hunting pressure. 3. Species diversity declined significantly with proximity to village, with mammal richness increasing by roughly 1·5 species every 10 km travelled away from a village. Compared to forest far from villages, the wildlife community near villages consisted of higher abundances of large birds and rodents and lower abundances of large mammals like monkeys and ungulates. 4. Distance to nearest village emerged as a key driver of the relative abundance of five of the six taxonomic guilds, indicating that the top‐down force of hunting strongly influences large vertebrate community composition and structure. Several measures of vegetation structure also explained animal abundance, but these varied across taxonomic guilds. Forest elephants were the exception: no measured variable or combination of variables explained variation in elephant abundances. 5. Synthesis and applications. Hunting is concentrated within 10 km around villages, creating a hunting halo characterized by heavily altered animal communities composed of relatively small‐bodied species. Although the strongest anthropogenic effects are relatively distance‐ limited, the linear increase in species richness shown here even at distances 30 km from villages suggests that hunting may have altered vertebrate abundances across the entire landscape. Central African forests store >25% of the carbon in tropical forests and are home to 3000 endemic species, but roughly 53% of the region lies within the village hunting halo. Resource management strategies should take into account this hunting‐induced spatial variation in animal communities. Near villages, resource management should focus on sustainable community‐led hunting programmes that provide long‐term supplies of wild meat to rural people. Resource management far from villages should focus on law enforcement and promoting industry practices that maintain remote tracts of land to preserve ecosystem services like carbon storage and biodiversity.
Passive Monitoring of Crowd-Level Cough Counts in Waiting Areas produces Reliable Syndromic Indicator for Total COVID-19 Burden in a Hospital Emergency Clinic

Syndromic surveillance is an effective tool for enabling the timely detection of infectious disease outbreaks and facilitating the implementation of effective mitigation strategies by public health authorities. While various information sources are currently utilized to collect syndromic signal data for analysis, the aggregated measurement of cough, an important symptom for many illnesses, is not widely employed as a syndromic signal. With recent advancements in ubiquitous sensing technologies, it becomes feasible to continuously measure population-level cough incidence in a contactless, unobtrusive, and automated manner. In this work, we demonstrate the utility of monitoring aggregated cough count as a syndromic indicator to estimate COVID-19 cases. In our study, we deployed a sensor-based platform (Syndromic Logger) in the emergency room of a large hospital. The platform captured syndromic signals from audio, thermal imaging, and radar, while the ground truth data were collected from the hospital’s electronic health record. Our analysis revealed a significant correlation between the aggregated cough count and positive COVID-19 cases in the hospital (Pearson correlation of 0.40, p-value < 0.001). Notably, this correlation was higher than that observed with the number of individuals presenting with fever (ρ = 0.22, p = 0.04), a widely used syndromic signal and screening tool for such diseases. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the data obtained from our Syndromic Logger platform could be leveraged to estimate various COVID-19-related statistics using multiple modeling approaches. Our findings highlight the efficacy of aggregated cough count as a valuable syndromic indicator associated with the occurrence of COVID-19 cases. Incorporating this signal into syndromic surveillance systems for such diseases can significantly enhance overall resilience against future public health challenges, such as emerging disease outbreaks or pandemics.
Surface Dipole Strength Generated by Cylindrical Struts

The purpose of this work was to further establish the viability of the Causality Correlation Technique as a diagnostic tool for the treatment of noise problems. Acoustical dipole radiation can be generated by obstructing a subsonic flow with a rigid strut, if the strut exerts fluctuating forces on the fluid. Such forces would be the forces of reaction arising from the unsteadiness in the local flow and would form a distribution of acoustical dipole sources over the surface of the strut. For the experiments reported herein, a subsonic flow issues from a circular nozzle which is 3.8×10 -2 m in diameter. The ‘quiet’ air jet operates at an exit Mach number of . 217. The exit velocity is 72 m/s and is approximately uniform over the exit plane. The cylinder model is stationed at the potential core of the jet the Reynolds number is 6.3×10 4 (based on cylinder diameter and exit velocity). The ‘Dipole Radiation Intensity (DRI)’ is a uniquely defined and measurable quantity that is intimately related to the classical dipole. The ‘spatial distribution’ of the DRI can be constructed on a surface using the Causality Correlation Technique (see Siddon). The ‘DRI distribution’ is constructed on the surface of the rigid cylindrical strut. A diagnosis is made of the aerodynamic noise generation mechanisms using the said distribution. The far field SPL originating from the surface exclusively is predicted from the integrated DRI distribution. For laminar incident flow the predicted SPL is (69.3 ± 2.3 dB). This may be compared with an overall SPL of (70.1±.5 dB) which was directly measured.
Contribution of macrophages to intracochlear tissue remodeling responses following cochlear implantation and neural survival

Abstract Introduction: Cochlear implants (CIs) restore hearing to deafened patients. The foreign body response (FBR) following cochlear implantation (post-CI) comprises an infiltration of macrophages, other immune and non-immune cells, and fibrosis into the scala tympani; a space that is normally devoid of cells. This FBR is associated with negative effects on CI outcomes including increased electrode impedances and loss of residual acoustic hearing. This study investigates the extent to which macrophage depletion by an orally administered CSF-1R specific kinase (c-FMS) inhibitor, PLX-5622, modulates the tissue response to CI and neural health. Materials and methods: 10-12-week-old CX3CR1+/GFP Thy1+/YFP mice on C57Bl6 background with normal hearing were fed chow containing 1200 mg/kg PLX5622 or control chow for the duration of the study. 7-days after starting the diet, 3-channel cochlear implants were implanted ear via the round window. Serial impedance and neural response telemetry (NRT) measurements were acquired throughout the study. Electric stimulation began 7 days post-CI until 28- days post-CI for 5 hrs/day, 5 days/week, with programming guided by NRT and behavioral responses. Cochleae harvested at 10-, 28- or 56-days post-CI were cryosectioned and labeled with antibody against α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA) to identify myofibroblasts and quantify the fibrotic response. Using IMARIS image analysis software, the outlines of scala tympani, Rosenthal canal, modiolus and lateral wall for each turn were traced manually to measure region volume. Density of nuclei, CX3CR1+ macrophages, Thy1+ spiral ganglion neuron (SGN) numbers and ratio of volume of α-SMA+ space/volume of scala tympani were calculated. Results: Cochlear implantation in control diet subjects caused infiltration of cells, including macrophages, into the cochlea: this response was initially diffuse throughout the cochlea and later localized to the scala tympani of the basal turn by 56-days post-CI. Fibrosis was evident in the scala tympani adjacent to the electrode array. Mice fed PLX5622 chow showed reduced macrophage infiltration throughout the implanted cochleae across all timepoints. However, scala tympani fibrosis was not reduced relative to control diet subjects. Further, mice treated with PLX5622 showed increased electrode impedances compared to controls. Finally, treatment with PLX5622 decreased SGN survival in implanted and contralateral cochleae. Discussion: The data suggest that macrophages play an important role in modulating the intracochlear tissue response following CI and neural survival.