Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gestalten of Today: Early Processing of Visual Contours and Surfaces

Extra-receptive eld contextual modulation in primate striate cortex, J. Neurosci. in press. Anatomical binding of intrinsic connections in striate cortex of tree shrews (Tupaia Glis), J. Comp. 91] B. Zenger and D. Sagi, Isolating excitatory and inhibitory non-linear spatial interactions involved in contrast detection, Vision Res. in press. A model for the neural implementation of selective visual attention based on temporal correlation among neurons, J. Comp. 65] R. L. Ogniewicz, Automatic medial axis pruning by mapping characteristics of boundaries evolving under the Eucliedean geometric heat ow onto Voronoi skeletons, Relationship between intrinsic connections and functional architecture revealed by optical imaging and in vivo targeted biocytin injections in primate striate cortex, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Contextual innuences on visual discrimination in humans and on RF properties of cells in striate cortex of alert monkeys, Soc. A quantitative measure for short-term cortical plasticity in human vision, Coherent oscillations: a mechanism of feature linking in the visual cortex? multiple electrode and correlation analyses in the cat, Biol. Cybern. 60 coding in the visual cortex: new vistas on integration in the nervous system, Contour integration by the human visual system: Evidence for a local \association eld", Vision Res. Spatial organization and connections of iso-orientation domains in tree shrew striate cortex, Soc. Neurosci. Oscillatory responses in cat visual cortex exhibit inter-columnar synchronization which reeects global stimulus properties, Nature 338 (1989) 334{337. A transformation for extracting new descriptors of shape. in: Symposium on models for the perception of speech and visual form (ed) W. Physiological correlates of anisotropy in horizontal connections: length summation properties of neurons in layers 2 and 3 of tree shrew striate cortex, Soc. 14] J. G. Daugman, Uncertainty relation for resolution in space, spatial frequency, and orientation optimized by two-dimensional visual cortical lters, J. Opt. Soc. Receptive eld structure in the visual cortex: Does selective stimulation induce plasticity? Proc. Natl. 18 Acknowledgements I thank Akos Feh er for providing his inventive method to compute the medial axis transformation, Harry Schick for bringing into my view long forgotten facts of cell biology, Karl Zipser and Tai Sing Lee for facilitating discussions on the neurophysiology of the primary visual cortex, Thomas V. Papathomas, Eileen Kowler, Bela Julesz, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript. 17 strategy is to provide the right conditions for the formation of`shape' and observe our capability to generate (or ruin) coherent patterns in any domain. 16 …
Welfare Effects of Commodity Price and Exchange Rate Volatilities in a Multi-Sector Small Open Economy Model

This paper develops a multi-sector New Keynesian model of a small open economy that includes commodity, manufacturing, non-tradable, and import sectors. Price and wage rigidities are sector specific, modelled a la Calvo-Yun style contracts. Labour and capital are imperfectly mobile across sectors. Commodities, whose prices are exogenously set in world markets and denominated in a foreign currency, are divided between exports and home uses as direct inputs in production of manufactured and non-tradable goods. Structural parameters of monetary policy, wage and price rigidities, capital adjustment costs, and exogenous process shocks are econometrically estimated using Canadian and U.S. data for the period 1981–2005 and a maximum likelihood procedure. The estimates indicate significant heterogeneity across sectors. The model is then simulated to evaluate the effects of commodity price shocks on real exchange rate variability and to measure their welfare implications, by conducting welfare analysis employing a second-order solution method. The main results show that commodity price shocks, which are shocks to the terms of trade, significantly contribute to exchange rate fluctuations and business cycles in the small open economy. Moreover, because of different non-linearities in the model, fluctuating commodity prices lead to welfare gains when adopting a flexible exchange rate regime. This regime is also required to improve welfare gains and to offset negative effects of other domestic and foreign shocks.
Marker-free kinematic skeleton estimation from sequences of volume data

For realistic animation of an artificial character a body model that represents the character's kinematic structure is required. Hierarchical skeleton models are widely used which represent bodies as chains of bones with interconnecting joints. In video motion capture, animation parameters are derived from the performance of a subject in the real world. For this acquisition procedure too, a kinematic body model is required. Typically, the generation of such a model for tracking and animation is, at best, a semi-automatic process. We present a novel approach that estimates a hierarchical skeleton model of an arbitrary moving subject from sequences of voxel data that were reconstructed from multi-view video footage. Our method does not require a-priori information about the body structure. We demonstrate its performance using synthetic and real data.
Protein kinase C shifts the voltage dependence of KCNQ/M channels expressed in Xenopus oocytes

It is well established that stimulation of Gq‐coupled receptors such as the M1 muscarinic acetylcholine receptor inhibits KCNQ/M currents. While it is generally accepted that this muscarinic inhibition is mainly caused by the breakdown of PIP2, the role of the subsequent activation of protein kinase C (PKC) is not well understood. By reconstituting M currents in Xenopus oocytes, we observed that stimulation of coexpressed M1 receptors with 10 μm oxotremorine M (oxo‐M) induces a positive shift (4–30 mV, depending on which KCNQ channels are expressed) in the conductance–voltage relationship (G–V) of KCNQ channels. When we applied phorbol 12‐myristate 13‐acetate (PMA), a potent PKC activator, we observed a large positive shift (17.8 ± 1.6 mV) in the G–V curve for KCNQ2, while chelerythrine, a PKC inhibitor, attenuated the shift caused by the stimulation of M1 receptors. By contrast, reducing PIP2 had little effect on the G–V curve for KCNQ2 channels; although pretreating cells with 10 μm wortmannin for 30 min reduced KCNQ2 current amplitude by 80%, the G–V curve was shifted only slightly (5 mV). Apparently, the shift induced by muscarinic stimulation in Xenopus oocytes was mainly caused by PKC activation. When KCNQ2/3 channels were expressed in HEK 293T cells, the G–V curve seemed already to be shifted in a positive direction, even before activation of PKC, and PMA failed to shift the curve any further. That alkaline phosphatase in the patch pipette shifted the G–V curve in a negative direction suggests KCNQ2/3 channels are constitutively phosphorylated in HEK 293T cells.
Affective Salience Can Reverse the Effects of Stimulus-Driven Salience on Eye Movements in Complex Scenes

In natural vision both stimulus features and cognitive/affective factors influence an observer’s attention. However, the relationship between stimulus-driven (“bottom-up”) and cognitive/affective (“top-down”) factors remains controversial: Can affective salience counteract strong visual stimulus signals and shift attention allocation irrespective of bottom-up features? Is there any difference between negative and positive scenes in terms of their influence on attention deployment? Here we examined the impact of affective factors on eye movement behavior, to understand the competition between visual stimulus-driven salience and affective salience and how they affect gaze allocation in complex scene viewing. Building on our previous research, we compared predictions generated by a visual salience model with measures indexing participant-identified emotionally meaningful regions of each image. To examine how eye movement behavior differs for negative, positive, and neutral scenes, we examined the influence of affective salience in capturing attention according to emotional valence. Taken together, our results show that affective salience can override stimulus-driven salience and overall emotional valence can determine attention allocation in complex scenes. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive/affective factors play a dominant role in active gaze control.
Familial cortical dysplasia type IIA caused by a germline mutation in DEPDC5

Whole‐exome sequencing of two brothers with drug‐resistant, early‐onset, focal epilepsy secondary to extensive type IIA focal cortical dysplasia identified a paternally inherited, nonsense variant of DEPDC5 (c.C1663T, p.Arg555*). This variant has previously been reported to cause familial focal epilepsy with variable foci in patients with normal brain imaging. Immunostaining of resected brain tissue from both brothers demonstrated mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) activation. This report shows the histopathological features of cortical dysplasia associated with a DEPDC5 mutation, confirms mTOR dysregulation in the malformed tissue and expands the spectrum of neurological manifestations of DEPDC5 mutations to include severe phenotypes with large areas of cortical malformation.
Optical characteristics of ordinary and tunable 1D Si photonic crystals in the mid-infrared range

Reflection spectra and photonic band gaps (PBGs) for periodic structures consisting of grooved Si infiltrated with nematic liquid crystals (LCs) E7 have been obtained experimentally and by simulation. Periodically grooved Si matrixes, with lattice periods ranging from 2 to 6 μm, were fabricated using wet anisotropic etching of (110) Si in an alkaline solution. It is shown theoretically that a substantial shift of PBGs can be obtained when there is a homogeneous alignment of the liquid crystal molecules with respect to the Si walls and, therefore, a change in the LC's refractive index from no to ne during elctro-tuning can be expected. This effect is smaller during thermo-tuning effect when refractive index changed from no to, ni (isotropic LC phase). The simulated reflection spectra are in good agreement with experimental data obtained with a Digilab FTS 6000 FTIR spectrometer in conjunction with a UMA 500 infrared microscope. A shift of the PBG's edges by a factor Δλ/λ=7% was predicted as a result of a thermo-tuning effect and ~10% as a results of electro-tuning effect.
Inflammatory Marker sTREM-1 Reflects the Clinical Stage and Respiratory Tract Obstruction in Allergic Asthma Bronchiale Patients and Correlates with Number of Neutrophils

The knowledge that asthma is an inflammatory disorder has prompted us to investigate the plasma levels of a new inflammatory marker sTREM-1 that is released from the surfaces of activated neutrophils and monocytes. The plasma levels of sTREM-1 were analysed by a sandwich ELISA test in the cohort of 76 patients with allergic asthma bronchiale and 39 healthy controls. Our results revealed more than 3.5 times higher levels of sTREM-1 in AB patients (92.3 pg/mL ± 125.6) compared with healthy subjects (25.7 pg/mL ± 9.2; P = 0.0001). Higher levels of sTREM-1 were found also in patients with exacerbated AB (170.5 pg/mL ± 78.2) compared with nonexacerbated AB patients (59.1 ± 78.2; P < 0.0001), patients with respiratory tract obstruction (176.4 pg/mL ± 177.8), than those without obstruction (51.99 pg/mL ± 64.0; P < 0.0001) and patients with anti-IgE therapy (P < 0.0001). Levels of sTREM-1 correlated with number of leucocytes (P = 0.002), and absolute number of neutrophils (P = 0.001). Elevated plasma levels of sTREM-1 reflect the severity, state of exacerbation, presence of respiratory tract obstruction in AB patients and together with increased number of neutrophils point to the role of neutrophils in inflammation accompanying AB.
Augmented care: An alternative model of care for people with chronic disease

This opinion piece challenges the concept of ‘patient’ and discusses an alternative aspect to delivering health care for those with chronic disease. Chronic conditions are defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO), as illnesses requiring ongoing management over a long period of time and may address a wide range of health issues. Success is highly dependent upon optimised patient empowerment. I argue that it is not health care that really matters but opportunities to build upon optimising wellness. This leads to the idea where I suggest that current health system rigidities inadvertently promote illness.
Multilevel Modeling and Inference of Transcription Regulation

The understanding of transcription regulation is a major goal of today's biology. The challenge is to utilize diverse high-throughput data in order to infer mechanistic models of transcription control. We propose a new model which integrates transcription factor-gene affinity, protein abundance, and gene expression profiles. The model provides a detailed, yet computationally tractable description of the relations between transcription factors, their binding sites at gene promoters, and the combinatorial regulation of transcription. At the core, our model manipulates dose-affinity-response functions that associate transcription factor concentrations and transcription factor-DNA affinities to determine the rate of transcription factor-DNA reactions. We study computational problems that arise in optimizing such models and develop polynomial algorithms for certain problems. We show how to assess missing values (notably protein abundance) and describe a novel framework to infer models from currently available data. On budding yeast carbohydrate metabolism data, our results demonstrate the sensitivity and specificity of the approach. They also suggest new active binding sites and a regulation model for the transcription program of the galactose system.
Participatory design in emergency medical service: designing for future practice

We describe our research-its approach, results and products-on Danish emergency medical service (EMS) field or "pre-hospital" work in minor and major incidents. We discuss how commitments to participatory design and attention to the qualitative differences between minor and major incidents address challenges identified by disaster sociolo-gists when designing for major incidents. Through qualitative research and participatory design, we have examined the features of EMS work and technology use in different emergency situations from the perspective of multiple actors. We conceptualize victims in incidents-and particularly in major incidents, where on-site medical as-sessments is highly incomplete-as boundary objects over which the complex and imperfect work of coordination is done. As an outcome of our participatory design approach, we describe a set of designs in support of future EMS work.
Visualization of neural networks using Java applets

During the last decade, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have reached maturity and established themselves as a useful tool for information processing, especially for complex data, where prior knowledge and models are limited. Unfortunately, ANNs are themselves also complex, usually consisting of many interconnected non-linear processing units (neurons), what makes them hard to inspect and analyze. As a part of Baden-Württemberg state project VirtuGrade, we have developed a number of interactive visualization tools for educational purposes. They help users to gain insight of what is happening inside a neural network and improve their understanding of the subject. As a platform, we use Java applets, embedded in an on-line book covering the topic.
Inhibitory effect of granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor therapy on the generation of natural killer cells.

We investigated the effects of recombinant human granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (rhGM-CSF) and recombinant human granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (rhG-CSF) therapy on the natural killer (NK) cell lineage in patients with aplastic anemia and myelodysplastic syndrome. Selected bone marrow (BM) cells were prepared by the elimination of nylon wool-adherent cells and mature T and NK cells from BM cells. The frequency of BM NK progenitors relative to BM cells selected was significantly decreased 4 weeks after the start of rhGM-CSF therapy (P less than .01), while the peripheral blood NK cell count and NK activity were also significantly decreased (P less than .05). A return to the pretreatment levels was seen 4 weeks after the cessation of treatment in all cases. No suppressive effect was noted in the patients who received rhG-CSF therapy. These results suggest that rhGM-CSF therapy suppresses the generation of NK cells from human BM NK progenitors.
An overview of deterministic functional RAM chip testing

This paper presents an overview of deterministic functional RAM chip testing. Instead of the traditional ad-hoc approach toward developing memory test algorithms, a hierarchy of functional faults and tests is presented, which is shown to cover all likely functional memory faults. This is done by presenting a novel way of categorizing the faults. All (possible) fault combinations are discussed. Requirements are put forward under which conditions a fault combination can be detected. Finally, memory test algorithms that satisfy the given requirements are presented.
Automated customer segmentation based on smart meter data with temperature and daylight sensitivity

Utilities increasingly leverage knowledge on their customer's household characteristics in their energy efficiency programs. Examples of such characteristics include the number of persons per household, their employment status, or the type of dwelling they live in. This information allows utilities to personalize energy efficiency campaigns, which increases participation rates and in turn leads to larger energy savings and higher customer retention. However, gathering this information through surveys is costly and cumbersome. We therefore investigate the possibility to automatically infer household characteristics from electricity consumption data measured by an off-the-shelf smart meter. In this paper, we develop a method to determine the sensitivity of a household to outdoor temperature and the times of sunset/sunrise, and use this information to improve the performance of our household classification system. We further investigate the relevance of different features for such a system. Our evaluation is based on smart meter data collected at a 30-minute granularity in more than 4000 Irish households over a period of 75 weeks. The results show that we can improve accuracy by up to 2.3 percentage points using temperature and daylight coefficients. The characteristics floor area, type of dwelling, and percentage of installed energy-efficient light bulbs particularly benefit from temperature and daylight coefficients. Finally, we investigate the impact of the data granularity on the classification performance and show that semi-hourly or hourly data is required, as it performs on average 6.6 percentage points better than using daily consumption averages.
Bell inequalities with Orbital Angular Momentum of Light

We shall present a theoretical description of paraxial beams, showing the propagation modes that arise from the solution of the paraxial equation in free space. We then discuss the angular momentum carried by light beams, with its decomposition in spin and orbital angular momentum and its quantization. We present the polarization and transverse modes of a beam as potential degrees of freedom to encode information. We define the Spin-Orbit modes and explain the experimental methods to produce such modes. We then apply the Spin-Orbit modes to perform a BB84 quantum key distribution protocol without a shared reference frame.We propose a Bell-like inequality criterion as a sufficient condition for the spin-orbit non-separability of a classical laser beam. We show that the notion of separable and non-separable spin-orbit modes in classical optics builds a useful analogy with entangled quantum states, allowing for the study of some of their important mathematical properties. We present a detailed quantum optical description of the experiment in which a comprehensive range of quantum states are considered.Following the study of Bell's inequalities we consider bipartite quantum systems characterized by a continuous angular variable θ. We show how to reveal non-locality on this type of system using inequalities similar to CHSH ones, originally derived for bipartite spin 1/2 like systems. Such inequalities involve correlated measurement of continuous angular functions and are equivalent to the continuous superposition of CHSH inequalities acting on two-dimensional subspaces of the infinite dimensional Hilbert space. As an example, we discuss in detail one application of our results, which consists in measuring orientation correlations on the transverse profile of entangled photons.
Changes in attractor dynamics predict altered perceptual decision making with dorsolateral prefrontal tDCS

The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) has been linked to the accumulation and comparison of perceptual evidence for decision making independent of sensory and response modalities. We investigated the possible neural dynamics underlying the role of dlPFC in perceptual decision making, through a combination of noninvasive neurostimulation in humans and computational modeling. First, we used an established and biophysically realistic model of a decision making network that employs competition between neural populations. Simulation of depolarizing noninvasive brain stimulation in this model decreased decision time, while hyperpolarizing stimulation increased it. This behavioral effect was caused by an increase in the rate of neural activity integration via recurrent connections, as well as changes in the susceptibility of the network to noisy background inputs which modulated population firing rate differences prior to the onset of the stimulus. These pre-stimulus differences biased the response to one or the other option, thus speeding or slowing decisions. We then tested these model predictions in healthy participants performing a perceptual decision making task while receiving transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left dlPFC, analogous to our simulated network stimulation. We found a striking match between model predictions and experimental results: depolarizing (inward) currents reduced and hyperpolarizing (outward) currents increased response times, but accuracy remained unaffected. Our results provide interventional evidence for the role of left dlPFC in perceptual decision making, and suggest that this region integrates and compares sensory evidence through competitive interactions between pyramidal cell populations which are selective for each response option. Mechanistically, our model suggests that stimulation of this region changes the rate at which evidence can be accumulated through recurrent activity and its susceptibility to background noise. More generally, our approach demonstrates that a linkage between computational modeling and noninvasive brain stimulation allows mechanistic accounts of brain function to be causally tested.
Body, culture and cognition: avoiding reductionist temptations / Cuerpo, cultura y cognición: sorteando las tentaciones reduccionistas

Abstract The article considers two postulates of Piaget’s epistemology (anti-reductionism and developmental perspective) to analyse three influential perspectives on cognition: nativist, sociocultural and situated cognition. Based on this analysis, we propose two cognitive processes (explicitation and implicitation) that can explain cognitive change from the most elementary and embodied knowledge to more sophisticated and cultural ones. Some empirical examples concerning external representations that support this proposal are discussed.