Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neural bases of image and language interactions

Mental visual imagery and language are the two main types of representation used by humans. These two modes of mental representations are not exclusive from each other. In fact, the importance of mental imagery in human cognition comes in part from the interactions between mental image and language. Several cognitive neuroimaging studies have attempted to unravel the neural bases of these interactions. A consistent result from these studies is that mental images generated from verbal description elicit activations in both visual and language cortices. Visual cortex regions include occipital areas of the so-called dorsal and ventral routes, whereas language areas concern both the temporal and frontal cortices, e.g., both the comprehension and production poles of language. Interestingly, it was also found that language areas are more likely to address a representation when language is the only source of information than when imagery and language are used in conjunction, which demonstrates a modulation of th.
In silico analysis of promoter regions from cold-induced genes in rice (Oryza sativa L.) and Arabidopsis thaliana reveals the importance of combinatorial control

Motivation:Cold acclimation involves a number of different cellular processes that together increase the freezing tolerance of an organism. The DREB1/CBFs are transcription factors (TFs) that are prominent in the regulation of cold responses in Arabidopsis thaliana, rice and many other crops. We investigated if the expression of DREB1/CBFs and co-expressed genes relies on combinatorial control by several TFs. Our results support this notion and indicate that methods for studying the regulation of complex cellular processes should include identification of combinations of motifs, in addition to searching for individual overrepresented binding sites. Contact:angelica.lindlof@his.se Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Predicting Yelp Star Reviews Based on Network Structure with Deep Learning

In this paper, we tackle the real-world problem of predicting Yelp star-review rating based on business features (such as images, descriptions), user features (average previous ratings), and, of particular interest, network properties (which businesses has a user rated before). We compare multiple models on different sets of features -- from simple linear regression on network features only to deep learning models on network and item features. In recent years, breakthroughs in deep learning have led to increased accuracy in common supervised learning tasks, such as image classification, captioning, and language understanding. However, the idea of combining deep learning with network feature and structure appears to be novel. While the problem of predicting future interactions in a network has been studied at length, these approaches have often ignored either node-specific data or global structure. We demonstrate that taking a mixed approach combining both node-level features and network information can effectively be used to predict Yelp-review star ratings. We evaluate on the Yelp dataset by splitting our data along the time dimension (as would naturally occur in the real-world) and comparing our model against others which do no take advantage of the network structure and/or deep learning.
Unexpected Companions

Empirical research suggests that the existence of territorial disputes makes armed conflict more likely to occur. Yet, there are many states that have engaged in militarized interstate disputes that not only maintain normalized bilateral relations, but cooperate with one another on an increasing number of bilateral issues. How can disputing states like Argentina and the UK so frequently cooperate with each other on bilateral issues when there remains a significant amount of tension regarding their territorial dispute over the Falklands/Malvinas Islands? Our theory suggests that challengers involved in territorial disputes are willing to engage in bilateral cooperation with their adversaries in order to influence upcoming territorial settlement attempts. Bilateral cooperation is purposively and strategically used by the challengers as a form of confidence building measure (CBM) with the goal of reducing the negative impact of the territorial dispute. Empirical analyses of monthly data (1978—2003) on Argentina—UK relations, as well as qualitative evidence from the case, support our theoretical expectations by showing that challengers deliberately link cooperation on bilateral issues to territorial dispute settlement attempts as a form of bargaining incentive to increase the likelihood of peaceful resolution.
Vitamin D Endocrine Physiology

Quantitative aspects of vitamin D3 endocrine physiology are briefly reviewed, together with the supporting evidence. Net calcium absorption of at least 200 mg/d is required to offset typical obligatory losses and thereby to protect the skeleton. The ability of the body to regulate intestinal calcium absorption is optimal at serum 25‐hydroxyvitamin D3 concentrations >80 nM. Vitamin D3 inputs from all sources required to sustain such a level amount to 3600–4200 IU/d. Daily oral intakes as high as 10,000 IU are safe.
Effects of Volatile Anesthetics on Store-operated Ca2+ Influx in Airway Smooth Muscle

Background:In airway smooth muscle (ASM), volatile anesthetics deplete sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) Ca2+ stores by increasing Ca2+ “leak. ” Accordingly, SR replenishment becomes dependent on Ca2+ influx. Depletion of SR Ca2+ stores triggers Ca2+ influx via specific plasma membrane channels, store-operated Ca2+ channels (SOCC). We hypothesized that anesthetics inhibit SOCC triggered by increased SR Ca2+ “leak,” preventing SR replenishment and enhancing ASM relaxation. Methods:In porcine ASM cells, SR Ca2+ was depleted by cyclopiazonic acid or caffeine in 0 extracellular Ca2+, nifedipine and KCl (preventing Ca2+ influx through L-type and SOCC channels). Extracellular Ca2+ was rapidly introduced to selectively activate SOCC. After SOCC activation, SR was replenished and the protocol repeated in the presence of 1 or 2 minimum alveolar concentration halothane, isoflurane, or sevoflurane. In other cells, characteristics of SOCC and interactions between acetylcholine (Ach) and volatile anesthetics were examined. Results:Cyclopiazonic acid produced slow SR leak, whereas the caffeine response was transient in ASM cells. Reintroduction of extracellular Ca2+ rapidly increased [Ca2+]i. This influx was insensitive to nifedipine, SKF-96365, and KBR-7943, inhibited by Ni2+ and blockade of inositol 1,4,5-triphosphate-induced SR Ca2+ release, and enhanced by ACh. Preexposure to 1 or 2 minimum alveolar concentration halothane completely inhibited Ca2+ influx when extracellular Ca2+ was reintroduced, whereas isoflurane and sevoflurane produced less inhibition. Only halothane and isoflurane inhibited ACh-induced augmentation of Ca2+ influx. Conclusion:Volatile anesthetics inhibit a Ni2+/La3+-sensitive store-operated Ca2+ influx mechanism in porcine ASM cells, which likely helps maintain anesthetic-induced bronchodilation.
Describing Visual Scene through EigenMaps

—We propose a novel approach to describe and recognize visual scene categories. Inspired by the success of Bag of Words approach, we represent a scene image using a collection of EigenMaps, which incorporate both appearance and spatial information for scene analysis. Each EigenMap captures the location likelihood of a visual word through the kernel density estimation method. By collecting EigenMaps of all visual words, our approach can effectively integrate both local features and their global correspondences. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvement as compared with the standard Bag of Words approach and the Latent Dirichelet Allocation model, which also utilizes a codebook of visual words, over each type of features including both region features and interest point features. The proposed method achieves the state of the art performance on both the UIUC Sport Scene database and the Natural Scene database.
A psychoeducational model for Hispanic Alzheimer's disease caregivers.

PURPOSE More than 14 million persons are projected to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) by the year 2020; therefore, it is not surprising that the literature contains numerous caregiver intervention studies. What is surprising is that although minority elders represent one of the fastest growing segments of the older population, they are seldom discussed in the intervention literature. DESIGN AND METHODS A purposive sample of Hispanic caregivers participated in a 5-day, 20-hr psychoeducational program to increase the caregivers' understanding and acceptance of AD, repertoire of coping skills, knowledge of resources, and expression of concerns and emotions of caregiving. Pre- and posttests were administered to determine if participation in the program improved caregivers' knowledge of the progression and management of AD, as well as knowledge of appropriate community-based services. RESULTS Caregivers demonstrated a significant improvement on the Caregiver Knowledge Survey, an increased awareness of community-based services, increased willingness to attend support groups, and overall satisfaction with the program. IMPLICATIONS Culturally sensitive intervention research with minority AD caregivers provides the opportunity to increase understanding and improve coping skills.
Hosting queryable and highly available Linked Data for free

SPARQL endpoints suffer from low availability, and require to buy and configure complex servers to host them. With the advent of Linked Data Fragments, and more specifically Triple Pattern Fragments (TPFs), we can now perform complex queries on low-cost servers. Online file repositories and cloud hosting services, such as GitHub, Google Code, Google App Engine or Dropbox can be exploited to host this type of linked data for free. For this purpose we have developed two different proof-of-concept tools that can be used to publish TPFs on GitHub and Google App Engine. A generic TPF client can then be used to perform SPARQL queries on the freely hosted TPF servers.
The Potential Contribution of the Field of Organizational Development to Crisis Management

This paper explores the possibilities of cross-disciplinarity between organization development and crisis management. The departure point of our reflection is that crisis management as a field currently faces two limitations. First, two major trends have characterized this field to date: the sociological analysis of organizational contingencies which focus on disasters as social events and the crisis management planning which emphasizes the development of techniques to master hazards. Despite what we have learned from these approaches, neither seems to lead to a crisis management learning model that fosters organizational resilience in coping with crises. Second, researchers have studied a number of events as single case studies but have not synthesized these case studies. Consequently, each crisis seems idiosyncratic and administrators tend to repeat the same inefficient patterns when a crisis occurs. The research proposal presented in this paper aims to remove these limitations by bringing together two apparently opposing fields of study, that of crisis management, characterized by what are perceived as specific events, and that of organizational development, characterized by the strengthening of organizations' capacities to cope with lasting changes. This paper proposes to explore their potential to work together theoretically and empirically through a research design. We conclude on how this proposal meets the challenges of a new research agenda in the 21st century.
ETCH: Efficient Channel Hopping for communication rendezvous in dynamic spectrum access networks

In a dynamic spectrum access (DSA) network, communication rendezvous is the first step for two secondary users to be able to communicate with each other. In this step, the pair of secondary users meet on the same channel, over which they negotiate on the communication parameters, to establish the communication link. This paper presents ETCH, Efficient Channel Hopping based MAC-layer protocols for communication rendezvous in DSA networks. We propose two protocols, SYNC-ETCH and ASYNC-ETCH. Both protocols achieve better time-to-rendezvous and throughput compared to previous work.
Introducing Hierarchy-awareness in replacement and bypass algorithms for last-level caches

The replacement policies for the last-level caches (LLCs) are usually designed based on the access information available locally at the LLC. These policies are inherently sub-optimal due to lack of information about the activities in the inner-levels of the hierarchy. This paper introduces cache hierarchy-aware replacement (CHAR) algorithms for inclusive LLCs (or L3 caches) and applies the same algorithms to implement efficient bypass techniques for exclusive LLCs in a three-level hierarchy. In a hierarchy with an inclusive LLC, these algorithms mine the L2 cache eviction stream and decide if a block evicted from the L2 cache should be made a victim candidate in the LLC based on the access pattern of the evicted block. Ours is the first proposal that explores the possibility of using a subset of L2 cache eviction hints to improve the replacement algorithms of an inclusive LLC. The CHAR algorithm classifies the blocks residing in the L2 cache based on their reuse patterns and dynamically estimates the reuse probability of each class of blocks to generate selective replacement hints to the LLC. Compared to the static re-reference interval prediction (SRRIP) policy, our proposal offers an average reduction of 10.9% in LLC misses and an average improvement of 3.8% in instructions retired per cycle (IPC) for twelve single-threaded applications. The corresponding reduction in LLC misses for one hundred 4-way multi-programmed workloads is 6.8% leading to an average improvement of 3.9% in through-put. Finally, our proposal achieves an 11.1% reduction in LLC misses and a 4.2% reduction in parallel execution cycles for six 8-way threaded shared memory applications compared to the SRRIP policy. In a cache hierarchy with an exclusive LLC, our CHAR proposal offers an effective algorithm for selecting the subset of blocks (clean or dirty) evicted from the L2 cache that need not be written to the LLC and can be bypassed. Compared to the TC-AGE policy (analogue of SRRIP for exclusive LLC), our best exclusive LLC proposal improves average throughput by 3.2% while saving an average of 66.6% of data transactions from the L2 cache to the on-die interconnect for one hundred 4-way multi-programmed workloads. Compared to an inclusive LLC design with an identical hierarchy, this corresponds to an average throughput improvement of 8.2% with only 17% more data write transactions originating from the L2 cache.
Assisted Viewpoint Control for Tele-Robotic Search

Mixed-Initiative robotic systems have been successful with providing assistance for maneuvering a robot's position through a hazardous environment. However, providing assistance to resolve viewing parameters such as camera orientation have met with mixed results. Previous attempts, while effective at increasing the likelihood that key viewpoints are utilized, have met with strong dissatisfaction and struggles for control, overriding the some of the potential benefits of the automation. This study evaluates the effects of offloading the assistance to a separate, co-located video feed. The findings suggest that it is possible to provide assistance to viewpoint control without encroaching on the operator's threshold for desired control.
A comparison of distance measures for learning nonparametric motor skill libraries

Autonomous robots that interact with the environment to learn new motor skills need to continuously memorize and compare fresh knowledge with past experience. Traditional approaches assume that experts label skills. In this paper, we introduce a new framework for autonomously learning a nonparametric skill library. Crucial design choices are the space in which the motor skills are represented, a distance measure to evaluate the similarity between known skills and new observations and a clustering policy. These aspects determine the structure and amount of skills learned by the library. In this paper, we use a probabilistic skill representation to support a large variety of measures as well as useful library features. Clustering is done via a decision tree. We evaluated the learning process with respect to 19 distance measures used to separate four manipulation skills on a KUKA LWR arm. The results suggest comparisons of trajectories in the end effector space, and that the use of measures for distributions depends on the amount of available data.
Moving Ahead or Just Moving?

Prior research has shown that employees learn by coping with new experiences. However, we examined gender differences in job moves described in 952 Wall Street Journal announcements of senior management appointments and found that women’s new positions were more similar to their previous positions than was true for their male counterparts. Women were less likely than men to be promoted to the management level or move to new organizations, and a greater proportion of women than men were appointed to line positions with prior female incumbents. Among managers in staff positions, women were less likely than were men to move to line positions or different organizational functions. Taken together, these findings raise questions about whether women’s job moves offered career benefits that were comparable to those received by men.
Adaptation effects in facial expression recognition

The effect of adaptation on facial expression recognition was investigated by measuring how identification performance of test stimuli falling along a particular expression continuum was affected after adapting to various prototype emotional faces or a control pattern. The results showed that for recognition of fear, happiness, and sadness, inhibition effects were observed on recognition of test expressions following 5 s adaptation to the same emotion, suggesting different neural populations tuned for the encoding of fearful, happy, and sad expressions. Facilitation of recognition of test stimuli differing in emotion to the adapting stimulus was also sometimes observed. The nature of these adaptation effects was investigated by introducing a size transformation or a delay between adapting and test stimuli and was found to survive these changes. The results of a further experiment argued against a criterion effect being the major source by demonstrating the importance of adapting time in generating the effects. Overall, the present study demonstrates the utility of adaptation effects for revealing functional characteristics of facial expression processing.
Cells Lacking NF-κB or in Which NF-κB Is Not Activated Vary with Respect to Ability To Sustain Herpes Simplex Virus 1 Replication and Are Not Susceptible to Apoptosis Induced by a Replication-Incompetent Mutant Virus

ABSTRACT Earlier we reported that NF-κB is activated by protein kinase R (PKR) in herpes simplex virus 1-infected cells. Here we report that in PKR−/− cells the yields of wild-type virus are 10-fold higher than in PKR+/+ cells. In cells lacking NF-κB p50 (nfkb1), p65 (relA), or both p50 and p65, the yields of virus were reduced 10-fold. Neither wild-type nor mutant cells undergo apoptosis following infection with wild-type virus. Whereas PKR+/+ and NF-κB+/+ control cell lines undergo apoptosis induced by the d120 (Δα4) mutant of HSV-1, the mutant PKR−/− and NF-κB−/− cell lines were resistant. The evidence suggests that the stress-induced apoptosis resulting from d120 infection requires activation of NF-κB and that this proapoptotic pathway is blocked in cells in which NF-κB is not activated or absent. Activation of NF-κB in the course of viral infection may have dual roles of attempting to curtain viral replication by rendering the cell susceptible to apoptosis induced by the virus and by inducing the synthesis of proteins that enhance viral replication.
Virtual Caregiver: A System for Supporting Collaboration in Elderly Monitoring

This paper presents the Virtual Caregiver system, a collaborative ubiquitous computing application. The application scenario is the monitoring of an 86 years old patient diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and cardiac arrhythmia. The system consolidates data obtained from sensors in a wearable device to enable collaborative monitoring of elderly patients by relatives and health professionals using smart phones and social networks. From the classifier developed for this study, it was found 99.4% overall accuracy in a 10-fold cross validation test. We also obtained feedback from patients and relatives that have been useful to guide the development of a new version of the wearable, unobtrusive and adapted to the patient needs.
The growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance in the South-East Asia Region - Are we losing the battle?

The discovery of antibiotics in the early part of 20th century and their spectacular success in combating infections and deaths created a complacency during the 1960s and 1970s. Over the past six decades, these ‘wonder drugs’ have played a critical role in reducing the global burden of communicable diseases. This success was however, overshadowed by the rapid backlash by the microbes resulting in a “relentless and dizzying rise of antimicrobial resistance”1. We seem to have come a full circle from the pre-antibiotic phase through a stage of euphoria to a seemingly frightening era of patients infected with multidrug resistant bacteria desperate for the elusive magic bullet2. In the recent past, especially, the emergence and spread of resistance in several microorganisms have rendered the management of many infectious diseases difficult.
Antimicrobial and immune modulatory effects of lactic acid and short chain fatty acids produced by vaginal microbiota associated with eubiosis and bacterial vaginosis

Lactic acid and short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) produced by vaginal microbiota have reported antimicrobial and immune modulatory activities indicating their potential as biomarkers of disease and/or disease susceptibility. In asymptomatic women of reproductive-age the vaginal microbiota is comprised of lactic acid-producing bacteria that are primarily responsible for the production of lactic acid present at ~110 mM and acidifying the vaginal milieu to pH ~3.5. In contrast, bacterial vaginosis (BV), a dysbiosis of the vaginal microbiota, is characterized by decreased lactic acid-producing microbiota and increased diverse anaerobic bacteria accompanied by an elevated pH>4.5. BV is also characterized by a dramatic loss of lactic acid and greater concentrations of mixed SCFAs including acetate, propionate, butyrate, and succinate. Notably women with lactic acid-producing microbiota have more favorable reproductive and sexual health outcomes compared to women with BV. Regarding the latter, BV is associated with increased susceptibility to sexually transmitted infections (STIs) including HIV. In vitro studies demonstrate that lactic acid produced by vaginal microbiota has microbicidal and virucidal activities that may protect against STIs and endogenous opportunistic bacteria as well as immune modulatory properties that require further characterization with regard to their effects on the vaginal mucosa. In contrast, BV-associated SCFAs have far less antimicrobial activity with the potential to contribute to a pro-inflammatory vaginal environment. Here we review the composition of lactic acid and SCFAs in respective states of eubiosis (non-BV) or dysbiosis (BV), their effects on susceptibility to bacterial/viral STIs and whether they have inherent microbicidal/virucidal and immune modulatory properties. We also explore their potential as biomarkers for the presence and/or increased susceptibility to STIs.