Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning and Inference in Latent Variable Graphical Models

Author(s): Ping, Wei | Advisor(s): Ihler, Alexander | Abstract: Probabilistic graphical models such as Markov random fields provide a powerful framework and tools for machine learning, especially for structured output learning. Latent variables naturally exist in many applications of these models; they may arise from partially labeled data, or be introduced to enrich model flexibility. However, the presence of latent variables presents challenges for learning and inference.For example, the standard approach of using maximum a posteriori (MAP) prediction is complicated by the fact that, in latent variable models (LVMs), we typically want to first marginalize out the latent variables, leading to an inference task called marginal MAP. Unfortunately, marginal MAP prediction can be NP-hard even on relatively simple models such as trees, and few methods have been developed in the literature. This thesis presents a class of variational bounds for marginal MAP that generalizes the popular dual-decomposition method for MAP inference, and enables an efficient block coordinate descent algorithm to solve the corresponding optimization. Similarly, when learning LVMs for structured prediction, it is critically important to maintain the effect of uncertainty over latent variables by marginalization. We propose the marginal structured SVM, which uses marginal MAP inference to properly handle that uncertainty inside the framework of max-margin learning.We then turn our attention to an important subclass of latent variable models, restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs). RBMs are two-layer latent variable models that are widely used to capture complex distributions of observed data, including as building block for deep probabilistic models. One practical problem in RBMs is model selection: we need to determine the hidden (latent) layer size before performing learning. We propose an infinite RBM model and apply the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve the resulting learning problem. The resulting algorithm can be interpreted as inserting a hidden variable into a RBM model at each iteration, to easily and efficiently perform model selection during learning. We also study the role of approximate inference in RBMs and conditional RBMs. In particular, there is a common assumption that belief propagation methods do not work well on RBM-based models, especially for learning. In contrast, we demonstrate that for conditional models and structured prediction, learning RBM-based models with belief propagation and its variants can provide much better results than the state-of-the-art contrastive divergence methods.
30 GHz Linear High-Resolution and Rapid Millimeter Wave Imaging System for NDE

High-resolution millimeter-wave imaging for nondestructive testing applications offers certain unique and practical advantages. Traditionally, imaging for this purpose is performed by raster scanning a single probe/antenna across a two-dimensional (2D) grid. Raster scanning requires bulky, slow and expensive scanning platforms, in addition to being a slow process. Utilizing an array of probes significantly reduces these limitations. This paper presents the design of a linear one-dimensional millimeter wave imaging array operating at 30 GHz and capable of rapid image production. The imaging array is 150 mm long, operates in quasi-mono-static reflection mode, and provides coherent vector reflection coefficient data for generating high spatial resolution synthetic aperture radar images. This imaging array performs fast electronic scan along one dimension and may be readily moved along the other direction to produce 2D images, greatly reducing the required scan time compared to raster scanning. The design and utility of this imaging array along with several imaging examples are presented in this paper.
Women, Elections, and Representation

Авторы данной книги стремятся ответить на вопрос, почему женщины остаются одной из самой недопредставленной группой в политической сфере. Объяснительные концепции выстраивались исследователями по двум направлениям: с одной стороны, возможно женщины не конкурентоспособны в предвыборной борьбе, с другой стороны, вероятно, среди потенциальных политиков мало женщин. В книге дан последовательный анализ возможных причин недопредставленности женщин в политической сфере: отношение к женщинам-политикам партийных лидеров и других представителей политической элиты, влияние социализации и избирательной системы, влияние инкумбенства. В мире ситуация с вовлечением женщин в политический процесс несколько изменилась. На уровне региональных политических структур число женщин значительно увеличилось практически повсеместно. При этом сохраняется тенденция сокращения числа женщин на более значимых позициях политической иерархии, исключение составляют лишь скандинавские страны. В ходе проведенного исследования было выявлено, что серьезным препятствием на пути женщин во власть является ресурс инкумбенства. Кроме того, потенциальные активистки боятся дискриминации со стороны электората и партийных структур. В заключении авторы предлагают свои рекомендации по изменению ситуации представительства женщин в политической сфере.
Impulsive Noise Removal by Nonlocal Fuzzy Diffusion

Standard image deconvolution methods perform well with the Gaussian noise model based on the piecewise smooth assumption. But the performance on impulsive noise is poor because the noised image is far away from assumption of piecewise smooth. The challenge is how to handle the discontinuities and at the same time remove the impulsive noise. Median-based approaches are inadequate, because at high noise levels they induce nonlinear distortion that hampers the denoising process. Here an improved nonlocal diffusion method based on fuzzy metric is proposed. The experiments results indicate that the new method is suitable for impulsive noise.
Is it time to reconsider combination lipid therapy in high-risk diabetic patients?

DOI:10.1097/MOL.0000000000000306 Diabetic patients are among the highest risk populations for atherosclerosis-related cardiovascular events [1] and LDL cholesterol (LDL-C) remains, the most effective target for pharmacological intervention in these patients. The American Diabetic Association recommends moderate-intensity statin therapy in addition to lifestyle modification for diabetic patients aged at least 40 or those less than 40 with additional cardiac risk factors, and high-intensity statin therapy for diabetic patients aged at least 40 with additional cardiac risk factors [2]. These guidelines do not currently recommend combination therapy due to the failures of prior trials examining add-on therapy, including the Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD) lipid trial [3]. Furthermore, clinicians are generally reluctant to prescribe multidrug regimens due to concerns about drug–drug interactions and the potential negative impact on patient compliance. Despite the accepted benefits of lifestyle modification and statin therapy, the yearly cardiovascular event rate in diabetic patients remains upward of 3% [4]. Although statins effectively lower LDL-C, they also upregulate proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) concentrations, which may lessen the extent of therapeutic benefit [5,6,7 & ]. Circulating PCSK9 levels closely correlate with atherogenic dyslipidemia analyzed by NMR in diabetic patients [8 & ]. This provides further impetus to reconsider combination therapy in diabetic patients, particularly those at highest risk for clinical events, such as following an acute coronary syndrome. Recent studies have shown that adding ezetimibe improves LDL-C levels in diabetic patients compared with simply increasing statin dose alone. Ezetimibe also improves lipoprotein subclass profile and lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 levels more than statin therapy alone [9 & ], as well as potentially offsetting statin-related elevation in plasma PCSK9 levels [10]. The recently published Improved Reduction of Outcomes: Vytorin Efficacy International Trial (IMPROVE-IT) demonstrated that ezetimibe and simvastatin were more successful
Hellfest: The thing that should not be? Local perceptions and Catholic discourses on metal culture in France

This article is an account of how one metal festival—the Hellfest organized in western France—struggled with legitimacy under pressure of condemnation from representatives of the Catholic Church, but managed to win the hearts of the local community despite initial reservations. The authors use the case to discuss how the ‘controversiality’ of metal is dependent on the social and cultural context and the interpretations that that context allows and enables.
Localized transposon Tn5 mutagenesis of the photosynthetic gene cluster of Rhodobacter sphaeroides

Four genes essential for bacteriochlorophyll biosynthesis were known to be encoded within a 45 kb region of the Rhodobacter sphaeroides genome, the boundaries of which are defined by puh and puf genes for reaction‐centre and light‐harvesting LH1 complexes. The cluster is represented by eight overlapping inserts cloned in the mobilizable vector pSUP202. We have used localized transposon Tn5 mutagenesis to characterize this cluster further; a total of 87 independent insertions were generated which identify nine genes for bacteriochlorophyll biosynthesis, six for carotenoid biosynthesis, and puhA encoding the reaction‐centre H subunit. This work provides an essential framework for a detailed study of the structure and expression of genes for photosynthesis in this bacterium.
Domain analysis in information science Eleven approaches traditional as well as innovative

What kind of knowledge is needed by information specialists working in a specific subject field like medicine, sociology or music? What approaches have been used in information science to produce kinds of domain-specific knowledge? This article presents 11 approaches to domain analysis. Together these approaches make a unique competence for information specialists. The approaches are: producing literature guides and subject gateways; producing special classifications and thesauri; research on indexing and retrieving specialities; empirical user studies; bibliometrical studies; historical studies; document and genre studies; epistemological and critical studies; terminological studies, LSP (languages for special purposes), discourse studies; studies of structures and institutions in scientific communication; and domain analysis in professional cognition and artificial intelligence. Specific examples and selective reviews of literature are provided, and the strengths and drawbacks of each of these approaches are discussed.
SPLITS: A New Program for Predicting Split and Intron-Containing tRNA Genes at the Genome Level

In the archaea, some tRNA precursors contain intron(s) not only in the anticodon loop region but also in diverse sites of the gene (intron-containing tRNA or cis-spliced tRNA). The parasite Nanoarchaeum equitans, a member of the Nanoarchaeota kingdom, creates functional tRNA from separate genes, one encoding the 5'-half and the other the 3'-half (split tRNA or trans-spliced tRNA). Although recent genome projects have revealed a huge amount of nucleotide sequence data in the archaea, a comprehensive methodology for intron-containing and split tRNA searching is yet to be established. We therefore developed SPLITS, which is aimed at searching for any type of tRNA gene and is especially focused on intron-containing tRNAs or split tRNAs at the genome level. SPLITS initially predicts the bulge-helix-bulge splicing motif (a well-known, required structure in archaeal pre-tRNA introns) to determine and remove the intronic regions of tRNA genes. The intron-removed DNA sequences are automatically queried to tRNAscan-SE. SPLITS can predict known tRNAs with single introns located at unconventional sites on the genes (100%), tRNAs with double introns (85.7%), and known split tRNAs (100%). Our program will be very useful for identifying novel tRNA genes after completion of genome projects. The SPLITS source code is freely downloadable at http://splits.iab. keio.ac. jp/.
Feasibility Study on Detection of Transportation Information Exploiting Twitter as a Sensor

The concept of a smart community has recently been attracting great attention as a means of utilizing energy effectively. One of the modules constituting the smart community is an intelligent transportation system, in which various sensors track movements of people and vehicles in real time to optimize migration pathways or means. Social media have the potential to serve as sensors, since people often post transportation information on such media. This paper presents a feasibility study on detecting information, focusing on train status information, by exploiting Twitter as a sensor. We dealt with two issues: (1) for the ambiguity of textual information expressed in tweets, we utilized heuristic rules in text manipulation, and (2) for the differences in the numbers of tweets among train lines, we optimized parameter values in statistical analysis for each train line. The experimental results show that the F-measure of detecting the information was more than 0.85 and the time taken to detect the information was less than 4 minutes. As a result we confirmed the high potential of detecting transportation information through Twitter.
An Eecient Solution to the Cache Thrashing Problem

When parallel programs are executed on multiprocessors with private caches, a set of data may be repeatedly used and modiied by diierent threads. Such data sharing can often result in cache thrashing which degrades the memory performance. This paper presents and evaluates a method to eliminate or reduce such cache thrashing due to true data sharing in nested parallel loops. With this method, the staggering relation and compacting relation are determined and accordingly the nested loop are restructured at compile time. Due to its simplicity, the method can be eeciently implemented in any parallel compiler. Experimental results show quite signiicant performance improvement over existing static and dynamic scheduling methods.
Socially just pedagogies in changing times

This article reports on Australian research that developed the concept of 'productive pedagogies', a model that is deemed to be socially just and appropriate for the contemporary post-modern globalised world. The model extends the modernist one of 'authentic pedagogy' developed in the USA and sits as a counter to the inauthentic post-modernist model of pedagogy framed by neo-liberal and new public management forms of accountability in some educational systems. The article begins from the assumption that the quality of pedagogies is a social justice issue and documents the lack of intellectual demand, connectedness and working with difference in the pedagogies mapped in the 1000 classrooms observed, while also noting the high degree of social support teachers offered students. These lacks can be seen to reproduce inequalities through schooling, rather than challenge them. Teacher care and support are necessary, but not sufficient for socially just pedagogies, which also need to be backed by redistributive socially just policies and some professional trust of teachers.
Pentoxifylline Prevents Autoimmune Mediated Inflammation in Low Dose Streptozotocin Induced Diabetes

Xanthine derivative, pentoxifylline (PTX), has been recently shown to exert a protective effects in certain animal models of autoimmunity, including diabetes in NOD mice. In the present study, the immunomodulatory potential of PTX was investigated in autoimmune diabetes induced by multiple low doses of streptozotocin (MLD-SZ) in genetically susceptible CBA/H mice (tested with 40 mg SZ/kg b.w. for 5 days) and DA rats (tested with 20 mg/kg b.w. for 5 days). In both species, 2 – 3 weeks following the MLD-SZ treatment, sustained hyperglycemia developed, as an outcome of inflammatory reaction with endothelial cell activation and accumulation of mononuclear cells. Although there was no evidence of typical insulitis in early disease development (day 10), in both rats and mice, macrophages, CD4+ and CD8+ cells were present in the islets of Langerhans as diffuse mononuclear infiltrates with the expression of IFN-γ and inducible NO synthase (iNOS). Administration of PTX (200 mg/kg/day for 10 days) in combination with MLD-SZ reduced insulitis and the production of mediators tested, and prevented the development of hyperglycemia. These results suggest that beneficial effects of PTX involve down-regulation of local proinflammatory cytokine-mediated NO synthase pathway. They also demonstrate that in addition to ameliorating spontaneous autoimmunity in NOD mice, PTX may be effective in downregulating an inflammatory autoimmune process triggered in susceptible host by an external agents, such as streptozotocin.
Image-Based Reconstruction of Spatially Varying Materials

The measurement of accurate material properties is an important step towards photorealistic rendering. Many real-world objects are composed of a number of materials that often show subtle changes even within a single material. Thus, for photorealistic rendering both the general surface properties as well as the spatially varying effects of the object are needed. We present an image-based measuring method that robustly detects the different materials of real objects and fits an average bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) to each of them. In order to model the local changes as well, we project the measured data for each surface point into a basis formed by the recovered BRDFs leading to a truly spatially varying BRDF representation. A high quality model of a real object can be generated with relatively few input data. The generated model allows for rendering under arbitrary viewing and lighting conditions and realistically reproduces the appearance of the original object.
Cloning and expression of Trypanosoma cruzi ribosomal protein P0 and epitope analysis of anti-P0 autoantibodies in Chagas' disease patients

Chagas' disease, caused by the intracellular protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, is a major cause of heart failure in endemic areas. Antigenic mimicry by T. cruzi antigens sharing epitopes with host macromolecules has been implicated in the pathogenesis which is thought to have a significant autoimmune component. We report herein on the cloning and characterization of a full-length cDNA from a T. cruzi expression library encoding a protein, TcP0, that is homologous to the human 38-kD ribosomal phosphoprotein HuP0. The T. cruzi P0 protein shows a clustering of residues that are evolutionarily conserved in higher eukaryotes. This includes an alanine- and glycine-rich region adjacent to a highly charged COOH terminus. This "hallmark" domain is the basis of the crossreactivity of the highly immunogenic eukaryotic P protein family. We found that T. cruzi-infected individuals have antibodies reacting with host (self) P proteins, as well as with recombinant TcP0. Deletion of the six carboxy-terminal amino acids abolished the reactivity of the T. cruzi infection sera with TcP0. This is similar to the specificity of anti-P autoantibodies described for a subset of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) (Elkon, K., E. Bonfa, R. Llovet, W. Danho, H. Weissbach, and N. Brot. 1988. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 85:5186). These results suggest that T. cruzi P proteins may contribute to the development of autoreactive antibodies in Chagas' disease, and that the underlying mechanisms of anti-P autoantibody may be similar in Chagas' and SLE patients. This study represents the first definitive report of the cloning of a full-length T. cruzi antigen that mimics a characterized host homologue in structure, function, and shared antigenicity.
Improving the effect of ISI from optical Communication System by Using Equalizers

The technique of compensating the effect of ISI i n optical communication system described here is equalization . This technique of equalization is use d for compensating the effect of ISI in the channel which causes disturbance in the signal, which is transmitted. Th ere are various types of equalizers are used depend ing upon the application used and the kind of system in which it is used. The most important purpose of the equaliz ation technique is to correct the channel frequency respo n e. They not only correct the frequency response o f the channel but also cancel the effects of multipath signal com p nent present in the system. This paper aims at st udying and simulation of equalization techniques; here two typ es of equalization techniques are stimulated, they are Zero Forcing Equalization and MMSE Equalization. Here in these techniques filters are used at the receiving end to cancel the effects of ISI in the received signal in troduced by channel impulse response. As Inter Symb ol Interference is considered to be one of the most challenging pro blems encountered in fiber optical communication sy stem so as to remove the effect we can apply equalizer at the rec iver to undo the effect of the channel by apply ing an inverse filter. The First technique used is zero forcing (Z F) equalizer to reduce the effect of inter symbol i nterference (ISI) introduced by the channel impulse response. The sec ond method used Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalizer to reduce the effect of inter symbol inte rference (ISI) introduced by the channel impulse re sponse. Simulation result shows that the Minimum Mean Squar e E ror (MMSE) equalizer reduce the effect of inter symbol interference (ISI) better as compare to that of zer o fo cing (ZF) equalizer.
Speech Act of Buginese Housewives in Character-building of Pre-school Children

This research aims to find out and thus explain the form, function, strategy, as well as implication of speech act behavior of Buginese housewives in character-building of pre-school children. The research done using qualitatif method with description design. Data gathered are in terms of act and speech of Buginese housewives in Wajo District. The form of speech act behavior is performed to say the written form of the word, or called performative speech act, to enable the children to understand. The function is described when the teacher converse by observing or asking matters related to the child condition while at school. The function of speech act is illustrated through the communication between teacher and student, by observing or inquiring about the observed condition of the student within the school environment. Additional of particles such as mi, ki and ta at the end of words are used in the conversation, by both teacher and student. The strategy of speech act behavior is meant to have better communication, and thus the simultaneous use of verbal and nonverbal language. The implication of verbal speech act behavior must be done at the same time with the non-verbal speech act. The nonverbal speech act, which is the hand-kissing gesture, is performed directly to his/her mother immediately before leaving for school. Such solemn parting gesture is hoped to contribute to the character-building process of the child.
Fully source-coupled logic based multiple-valued VLSI

A novel source-coupled logic (SCL) style using multiple-valued signals, called multiple-valued source-coupled logic (MVSCL), which operates with an input voltage swing of about 0.3 V is proposed for high-speed and low-power VLSI systems. A multiple-valued comparator which is a key component, is realized by using differential-pair circuits (DPCs), so that its power dissipation can be greatly reduced while maintaining high-speed switching. Moreover, the current-source control allows steady current flow to cut off when the circuit is not active, thereby saving power dissipation. A 54/spl times/54-bit signed-digit multiplier based on MVSCL is designed in a 0.35 /spl mu/m CMOS technology, and its performance is superior to both corresponding binary static CMOS and multiple-valued current-mode (MVCM) implementation.