Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Content-adaptive pyramid representation for 3D object classification

In this paper we introduce a novel representation for the classification of 3D images. Unlike most current approaches, our representation is not based on a fixed pyramid but adapts to image content and uses image regions instead of rectangular pyramid scales. Image characteristics, such as depth and color, are used for defining regions within images. Multiple region scales are formed in order to construct the proposed pyramid image representation. The proposed method achieves excellent results in comparison to conventional representations.
Whole-grain consumption and the risk of all-cause, CVD and cancer mortality: a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies

Abstract Results of the relationships between dietary whole-grain consumption and the risk of all-cause, CVD and cancer-specific mortality are mixed. We summarised the evidence based on a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. Pertinent studies were identified by searching articles in the MEDLINE and EMBASE databases up to 20 January 2016 and by reviewing the reference lists of the retrieved articles. Random-effects models were used to calculate summary relative risks (SRR) and 95 % CI. In all, eleven prospective studies (ten publications) were included in the meta-analysis. There were a total of 816 599 subjects and 89 251 cases of all-cause mortality. On the basis of the highest v. the lowest categories of intake, whole grains may be associated with a lower risk of mortality from all causes (SRR 0·87; 95 % CI 0·84, 0·90), CVD (SRR 0·81; 95 % CI 0·75, 0·89) and all cancers (SRR 0·89; 95 % CI 0·82, 0·96). For each 3 servings/d increase in whole-grain intake, there was a 19 % reduction in the risk of all-cause mortality (SRR 0·81; 95 % CI 0·76, 0·85), a 26 % reduction in CVD mortality (SRR 0·74; 95 % CI 0·66, 0·83) and a 9 % reduction in cancer mortality (SRR 0·91; 95 % CI 0·84, 0·98). The current meta-analysis provides some evidence that high intake of whole grains was inversely associated with the risk of all-cause, CVD and cancer-specific mortality. Further well-designed studies, including clinical trials and in different populations, are required to confirm our findings.
Online mass flow prediction in CFB boilers with explicit detection of sudden concept drift

Fuel feeding and inhomogeneity of fuel typically cause fluctuations in the circulating fluidized bed (CFB) process. If control systems fail to compensate the fluctuations, the whole plant will suffer from dynamics that is reinforced by the closed-loop controls. This phenomenon causes reducing efficiency and the lifetime of process components. In this paper we address the problem of online mass flow prediction, which is a part of control. Particularly, we consider the problem of learning an accurate predictor with explicit detection of abrupt concept drift and noise handling mechanisms. We emphasize the importance of having domain knowledge concerning the considered case and constructing the ground truth for facilitating the quantitative evaluation of different approaches. We demonstrate the performance of change detection methods and show their effect on the accuracy of the online mass flow prediction with real datasets collected from the experimental laboratory-scale CFB boiler.
Consciously Feeling the Pain of Others Reflects Atypical Functional Connectivity between the Pain Matrix and Frontal-Parietal Regions

Around a quarter of the population report “mirror pain” experiences in which bodily sensations of pain are elicited in response to viewing another person in pain. We have shown that this population of responders further fractionates into two distinct subsets (Sensory/localized and Affective/General), which presents an important opportunity to investigate the neural underpinnings of individual differences in empathic responses. Our study uses fMRI to determine how regions involved in the perception of pain interact with regions implicated in empathic regulation in these two groups, relative to controls. When observing pain in others (minor injuries to the hands and feet), the two responder groups show activation in both the sensory/discriminative and affective/motivational components of the pain matrix. The control group only showed activation in the latter. The two responder groups showed clear differences in functional connectivity. Notably, Sensory/Localized responders manifest significant coupling between the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) and bilateral anterior insula. We conclude that conscious experiences of vicarious pain is supported by specific patterns of functional connectivity between pain-related and regulatory regions, and not merely increased activity within the pain matrix itself.
Segment specific enhancement of speech characteristics for improving speech intelligibility under adverse listening conditions

Degradation of speech intelligibility in the presence of noise is a serious problem in speech communication devices. We propose an offline speech enhancement technique based on speech recognition and segment-specific modification of speech characteristics. Hidden Markov model based speech recognition is used for locating fricative segments in vowel-consonant-vowel utterances. Speech characteristic modification involved increasing the intensity of the fricative segment with respect to the nearby vowel segment by 12 dB. Intelligibility of modified speech was evaluated by conducting listening tests using 6 normal hearing subjects with speech-spectrum shaped noise as masker. The results of listening tests indicated statistically significant improvements in fricative recognition scores by 4%, 5%, 6%, and 14%, at SNRs of 12, 6, 0, and -6 dB, respectively.
Inactivation of the Type IV Secretion System Reduces the Th1 Polarization of the Immune Response to Brucella abortus Infection

ABSTRACT The Brucella abortus type IV secretion system (T4SS), encoded by the virB operon, is essential for establishing persistent infection in the murine reticuloendothelial system. To gain insight into the in vivo interactions mediated by the T4SS, we compared host responses elicited by B. abortus with those of an isogenic mutant in the virB operon. Mice infected with the B. abortus virB mutant elicited smaller increases in serum levels of immunoglobulin G2a, gamma interferon (IFN-γ), and interleukin-12p40 than did mice infected with wild-type B. abortus. Despite equal bacterial loads in the spleen, at 3 to 4 days postinfection, levels of IFN-γ were higher in mice infected with wild-type B. abortus than in mice infected with the virB mutant, as shown by real-time PCR, intracellular cytokine staining, and cytokine levels. IFN-γ-producing CD4+ T cells were more abundant in spleens of mice infected with wild-type B. abortus than in virB mutant-infected mice. Similar numbers of IFN-γ-secreting CD8+ T cells were observed in the spleens of mice infected with B. abortus 2308 or a virB mutant. These results suggest that early differences in cytokine responses contribute to a stronger Th1 polarization of the immune response in mice infected with wild-type B. abortus than in mice infected with the virB mutant.
Propagation of facial identities in a social network

We address the problem of automated face recognition on a social network using a loopy belief propagation framework. The proposed approach propagates the identities of faces in photos across social graphs. We characterize performance in terms of structural properties of a social network. This is accomplished by conducting extensive simulations on synthetic networks. We propose a distance metric defined using face recognition results for detecting hidden connections. The result demonstrates that the constraints imposed by the social network have the potential to improve the performance of face recognition methods. The result also shows it is possible to discover hidden connections in a social network based on face recognition.
Class-dependant resampling for medical applications

Bagging, AdaBoost and Arc-x4 are among the most popular methods for classifier ensembles. All these methods rely on resampling techniques to generate different training subsamples for each of the base classifiers that constitute the ensemble. In the present work, the classical implementations of these algorithms are modified in such a way that resampling is performed separately over the training instances of each class, thus obtaining the same class distribution in each subsample as that of the original training set. Moreover, we also introduce other modifications related to the size of the subsamples and also to the voting strategy. Experimental results for medical and nonmedical databases are here presented and potential benefits of the proposed methods for diagnosis are suggested.
Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum TP0136 Protein Is Heterogeneous among Isolates and Binds Cellular and Plasma Fibronectin via its NH2-Terminal End

Adherence-mediated colonization plays an important role in pathogenesis of microbial infections, particularly those caused by extracellular pathogens responsible for systemic diseases, such as Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum (T. pallidum), the agent of syphilis. Among T. pallidum adhesins, TP0136 is known to bind fibronectin (Fn), an important constituent of the host extracellular matrix. To deepen our understanding of the TP0136-Fn interaction dynamics, we used two naturally-occurring sequence variants of the TP0136 protein to investigate which region of the protein is responsible for Fn binding, and whether TP0136 would adhere to human cellular Fn in addition to plasma Fn and super Fn as previously reported. Fn binding assays were performed with recombinant proteins representing the two full-length TP0136 variants and their discrete regions. As a complementary approach, we tested inhibition of T. pallidum binding to Fn by recombinant full-length TP0136 proteins and fragments, as well as by anti-TP0136 immune sera. Our results show that TP0136 adheres more efficiently to cellular Fn than to plasma Fn, that the TP0136 NH2-terminal conserved region of the protein is primarily responsible for binding to plasma Fn but that binding sites for cellular Fn are also present in the protein’s central and COOH-terminal regions. Additionally, message quantification studies show that tp0136 is highly transcribed during experimental infection, and that its message level increases in parallel to the host immune pressure on the pathogen, which suggests a possible role for this protein in T. pallidum persistence. In a time where syphilis incidence is high, our data will help in the quest to identify suitable targets for development of a much needed vaccine against this important disease.
Tendency to breast reconstruction after breast mastectomy among Iranian women with breast cancer

Background: Women with the medical history of breast cancer constitute the biggest group of patients who survived cancer. Despite the high rate of mastectomy after breast cancer in Iran; only limited patients elect reconstruction surgery. The aim of our study was to evaluate the rate of tendency to breast reconstruction (BR) surgery among women with breast cancer who had mastectomy but not undergone reconstruction. Methods: This cross sectional study was conducted in Mashhad, north east of Iran during 2013. A total of 108 patients with mastectomy due to breast cancer were selected through convenience sampling and completed the questionnaire. Demographic data collected and 21 items of questionnaire were compared between patients with and without tendency to BR. Data were analyzed using Chi square, t tests and logistic regression. Results: In this study 62 (57.4%) patients had a tendency to BR and 46 (42.6%) had not. The mean (±SD) age of patients in first group was 43.3±8.03 and 49.6±9.9 in the second group (p<0.001). Frequency of agreement about impact of BR on appearance and beauty, mood, family living conditions and their opinion (p<0.001), lack of sufficient information (p=0.01), physician's opinion (p<0.001) and priority of cancer breast treatment (p=0.02) were significantly different between the two groups. Conclusion: More than half of the patients had a tendency to BR although they did not go under the surgery yet. Identification of factors that can increase the tendency and factors that help to change the intention to action are important and should be investigate in future research.
Electrolytes in lacrimal gland fluid and in tears at various flow rates in the rabbit.

Physiol. 225(3) : 606-609. 1973. -Electrolyte concentrations in Auid collected from the lacrimal gland excretory duct (LGF) were compared to those in plasma and conjunctival fluid (tears) at various flow rates. LGF flow rate was 10 b/;, of tear flow rate with basal and 51 y0 of tear flow rate with stimulated flows, indicating that the lacrimal gland does contribute to tears during basal flow and, when stimu . lated, its contribution is not disproportionately large. Na+ and C1’were higher and K+ was the same in LGF as in tears in the unstimulated gland. In the stimulated gland, KIwas higher but Na+ and Clwere the same in LGF as in tears. Thus, hypotheses about how individual orbital glands secrete electrolytes should not be based on analvses of tea rs. In the unsti mulated gland, Na+, Cl-, and KS were higher in LGF than in plasma, indicating that water may be reabsorbed. In the stimulated gland, Na+ and Clwere the same and K+ was higher in LGI: than in plasma, indicating that K+ may be secreted.
On the Maximum Diversity Order of Wireless Relay Networks: Common Codebook Generation

This paper derives bounds on the maximum achievable diversity order of wireless relay networks that employ common codebook generation. When all terminals must correctly decode it is shown that the maximum achievable diversity order is constrained by the terminal with the minimum number of immediately preceding terminals. When only the destination terminal must correctly decode it is shown that the maximum achievable diversity order is constrained by the cut set with the minimum number of inter-terminal links.
The segregation of spatialised speech in interference by optimal mapping of diverse cues

We describe optimal cue mapping (OCM), a potentially eal-time binaural signal processing method for segregating sound source in the presence of multiple interfering 3D ound sources. Spatial cues are extracted from a multisource inaural mixture and used to train artificial neural etworks (ANNs) to estimate the spectral energy fraction of wanted speech source in the mixture. Once trained, the NN outputs form a spectral ratio mask which is applied rame-by-frame to the mixture to approximate the agnitude spectrum of the wanted speech. The speech ntelligibility performance of the OCM algorithm for nechoic sound sources is evaluated on previously unseen peech mixtures using the STOI automated measures, and ompared with an established reference method. The ptimized integration of multiple cues offers clear erformance benefits and the ability to quantify the relative mportance of each cue will facilitate computationally fficient implementations.
Energy-Efficient Multiobjective Thermal Control for Liquid-Cooled 3-D Stacked Architectures

3-D stacked systems reduce communication delay in multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) and enable heterogeneous integration of cores, memories, sensors, and RF devices. However, vertical integration of layers exacerbates temperature-induced problems such as reliability degradation. Liquid cooling is a highly efficient solution to overcome the accelerated thermal problems in 3-D architectures; however, it brings new challenges in modeling and run-time management for such 3-D MPSoCs with multitier liquid cooling. This paper proposes a novel design-time/run-time thermal management strategy. The design-time phase involves a rigorous thermal impact analysis of various thermal control variables. We then utilize this analysis to design a run-time fuzzy controller for improving energy efficiency in 3-D MPSoCs through liquid cooling management and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). The fuzzy controller adjusts the liquid flow rate dynamically to match the cooling demand of the chip for preventing overcooling and for maintaining a stable thermal profile. The DVFS decisions increase chip-level energy savings and help balance the temperature across the system. Our controller is used in conjunction with temperature-aware load balancing and dynamic power management strategies. Experimental results on 2-tier and 4-tier 3-D MPSoCs show that our strategy prevents the system from exceeding the given threshold temperature. At the same time, we reduce cooling energy by up to 63% and system-level energy by up to 21% in comparison to statically setting a flow rate setting to handle worst-case temperatures.
Prospective Familial Assessment in Dilated Cardiomyopathy: Cardiac Autoantibodies Predict Disease Development in Asymptomatic Relatives

Background— In autoimmune disorders, circulating autoantibodies identify healthy relatives at risk years before clinical presentation. Healthy relatives of patients with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) who have echocardiographic changes, including left ventricular enlargement or depressed fractional shortening at baseline, have increased medium-term risk for DCM development. Approximately one third of relatives have serum anti-heart autoantibodies (AHAs) at baseline; we intended to assess their potential role in predicting DCM development. Methods and Results— Baseline evaluation, including electrocardiography, echocardiography, and AHA, was performed in 592 asymptomatic relatives of 169 consecutive DCM patients (291 males and 301 females; mean age 36±16 years). Relatives were classified in accordance with published echocardiographic criteria; those who did not have DCM were followed up (median of 58 months). DCM among relatives was diagnosed by echocardiography at follow-up. Of the 592 individuals evaluated, 77% were assessed as normal, 4.4% as having DCM, and 19% as possibly affected on the basis of depressed fractional shortening without ventricular dilatation in 17 and left ventricular enlargement without systolic dysfunction in 94. Five-year follow-up of 311 relatives revealed that 26 had progressed (13 to DCM, 11 to left ventricular enlargement, and 2 to depressed fractional shortening). Relatives who developed DCM were more frequently AHA-positive than those who did not (69% versus 37%, P=0.02). Five-year probability of progression to DCM, among normal or possibly affected relatives, was higher in AHA-positive cases (P=0.03). By Cox regression, positive AHAs at baseline were independent predictors of progression (RR 2.26, CI 1 to 5.1, P=0.03). Conclusions— Among healthy relatives of DCM patients, AHAs are independent predictors of disease development within 5 years.
Knowledge based expert systems in organization of higher learning

Organization's value depends on the organization's ability to create and manage knowledge. Knowledge management enables organizations to organize stored knowledge and garner knowledge from vast amount of unstructured data. Knowledge management is the combination of activities involved in gathering, organizing and sharing, analyzing and disseminating knowledge to improve an organizations performance. Expert systems are an intelligent technique for capturing tacit knowledge in a very specific and limited domain of human expertise. This article outlines the basic concepts of knowledge management and expert systems as it is applied in the corporate world, considers how it might be applied in education for enhancing the academic performance of the organization. Paper emphasizes that expert systems need to be an integral part of knowledge repository if knowledge management has to succeed. This paper proposes a framework for knowledge based expert systems in higher education.
Bone Marrow-Derived Cells Expressing Green Fluorescent Protein under the Control of the Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein Promoter Do Not Differentiate into Astrocytes In Vitro and In Vivo

Differentiation of bone marrow (BM) cells into astroglia expressing the glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) has been reported in vitro and after intracerebral or systemic BM transplantation. In contrast, recent data suggest that astrocytic differentiation does not occur from BM-derived cells in vivo. Using transgenic mice that express the enhanced green fluorescent protein (GFP) under the control of the human glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) promoter, we investigated the potential of adult murine BM-derived cells to differentiate into macroglia. In the brains of GFAP–GFP transgenic mice, astrocytes were brightly fluorescent from the expression of GFP. When BM from these animals was transplanted into lethally irradiated wild-type animals, the transgene was detected in the reconstituted hematopoietic system, but no GFP expression was found in the nervous system. In contrast, GFAP–GFP neuroectodermal anlage grafted into adult wild-type striatum gave rise to GFP-expressing astrocytes. Because cerebral ischemia has been suggested to promote the differentiation of BM-derived cells into astrocytes, BM chimeric mice were subjected to focal cerebral ischemia. No GFP-positive cells were found in the ischemic or contralateral hemispheres of these brains. Even after direct injection of GFAP–GFP transgenic BM cells into wild-type striatum, no GFP-expressing astroglia were detected. To test the hypothesis that the in vitro environment might be more permissible for astroglial differentiation, we cultured BM from mice that constitutively express GFP, BM cells expressing GFP from a retroviral vector, and BM from GFAP–GFP transgenic mice on astrocytes and on organotypic hippocampal slices. In all experimental paradigms, BM-derived cells were found to differentiate into ramified microglia but not into GFAP-expressing astrocytes.
Truncated differential cryptanalysis of five rounds of Salsa20

We present an attack on Salsa20 reduced to five of its twenty rounds. This attack uses many clusters of truncated differentials and requires 2 work and 2 plaintexts. 1 Definition of Salsa20 Salsa20 [1] is a candidate in the eSTREAM project to identify new stream ciphers that might be suitable for widespread adoption. For convenience, we recap here the parameterized family of variants Salsa20-w/r, with w the word size and r the number of rounds; Salsa20 itself is Salsa20-32/20. A word is an element of Z/2wZ. We omit the precise definitions of word-oriented operations here for brevity; addition (+), XOR (⊕) and rotation (≪) are defined in the usual way, and where words are mapped to bytes, a little-endian mapping is used. We define a bijective map S on four-element column vectors of words: Sa(( y0 y1 y2 y3 ) ) = ( y1 ⊕ ((y0 + y3) ≪ a) y2 y3 y0 ) and compose it four times to build this bijective map on the same: Q = S18 ◦ S13 ◦ S9 ◦ S7 (note that the constants given in the subscripts are appropriate for w = 32; different constants might be used for a different w) and compose it with a row and column rotate to get this bijective map on matrices: Q′(m) =  m1,1 m1,2 m1,3 q1 m2,1 m2,2 m2,3 q2 m3,1 m3,2 m3,3 q3 m0,1 m0,2 m0,3 q0  ∗paul@ciphergoth.org. Work sponsored by LShift Ltd, www.lshift. net