Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Airborne spectranomics: mapping canopy chemical and taxonomic diversity in tropical forests

Tree canopies play an enormous role in the maintenance of tropical forest diversity and ecosystem function, and are therefore central to conservation, management, and resource policy development in tropical regions. However, high-resolution mapping of tropical forest canopies is very difficult, because traditional field, airborne, and satellite measurements cannot resolve the number of canopy species, or particular species of interest, over the large regional scales commensurate with conservation goals and strategies. Newer technologies, such as imaging spectroscopy and light detection and ranging (lidar), are just now reaching performance levels that will allow monitoring of tropical forest diversity from the air, but the methods for applying these technologies are not yet ready. Here, we present concepts that combine chemical and spectral remote sensing perspectives to facilitate canopy diversity mapping. Using examples from our ongoing work in the Hawaiian Islands, we demonstrate how a new “airborne sp.
Of Wines and Reviews: Measuring and Modeling the Vivino Wine Social Network

This paper presents an analysis of social experiences around wine consumption through the lens of Vivino, a social network for wine enthusiasts with over 26 million users worldwide. We compare users' perceptions of various wine types and regional styles across both New and Old World wines, examining them across price ranges, vintages, regions, varietals, and blends. We find that ratings provided by Vivino users are not biased by cost; then, we study how wine characteristics, language in wine reviews, and the distribution of wine ratings can be combined to develop prediction models. More specifically, we model user behavior to develop a regression model for predicting wine ratings, and a classifier for determining user review preferences.
Estimating changes in soil organic carbon storage due to land use changes using a modified calculation method

Carbon sources and sinks have been widely scrutinized over the last ten years as a result of the Kyoto Protocol. In this paper we added a new concept (standardized reference depth, D-SR) to the current calculation method in order to assess and compare the soil organic carbon (SOC) storage changes due to three major land use changes with a certain historical relationship (from primary rain forest to fallow land to natural secondary forest and finally to rubber plantations -Hevea brasiliensis) in a northern tropical ecosystem in southwest China. Over 30 years, the soil organic carbon storage did not decrease significantly with a land use change from primary rain forest to fallow land (approximately 10.3%). However, it did increase significantly (approximately 49.3%) due to conversions to natural secondary forest and rubber plantations (approximately 41.6%). In this region, the soil carbon sequestration at rubber plantations is similar to that of natural secondary forests. Compared with the modified method, the current method overestimated carbon storage on fallow land by 8.8% more than the actual storage (calculated reference depth of 13.9 cm, D-r - D-SR = 13.9, without the reference depth standardization process), overestimated carbon storage at rubber plantations by 3.6% (calculated reference depth of 4.9 cm), and underestimated the natural secondary forest carbon storage by 6.4% (calculated reference depth of 9.7 cm). Thus, the modified process using the standardized reference depth for the current method is necessary for the evolution and comparison of soil carbon or other nutrient storage changes.
Concomitant sensing and actuation for piezoelectric microrobots

Sensor fabrication for microrobots is challenging due to their small size and low mass. As a potential solution, we present a technique for estimating the velocity of piezoelectric bending bimorph actuators, a popular choice for driving such microscale devices, that requires simple electronics and no additional mechanical components. Our approach relies on the insight that motion of the actuators causes varying strains on the surface on the piezoelectric material, which via the direct piezoelectric effect, results in a current proportional to the actuator velocity. We propose that the actuator be electrically approximated as a parallel combination of a frequency and voltage dependent resistor and capacitor, and a velocity proportional current source. We develop an experimental procedure to measure these quantities, and are able to experimentally determine the actuator tip velocity to within 10% accuracy over a range of voltages (25–200 V) and frequencies (1–2000 Hz, well beyond actuator resonance). We successfully apply this sensing methodology to two microrobots, the RoboBee and the Harvard Ambulatory MicroRobot (HAMR), to estimate the wing and limb motion respectively. We further use sensor feedback to close the loop on HAMR’s leg phase and obtain desired leg trajectories near transmission resonance. The proposed sensor methodology is generic and can be applied to piezoelectric actuators of different geometries and configurations for uses in microrobotic applications.
Identification of factors associated with blind users' help‐seeking situations in interacting with digital libraries

A sight‐centered digital library (DL) design with complex structures and multimedia formats poses significant challenges for blind users. This study is the first attempt to investigate the top three help‐seeking situations as well as associated factors in blind users' DL interactions. A mixed‐method approach was adopted for this study. Multiple methods were applied to collect data from 30 blind subjects: questionnaires, presearch interviews, think aloud protocols, transaction logs, and postsearch interviews. The paper identifies the top three help‐seeking situations, and associated factors in relation to user, system, task, and interaction. Moreover, different types of main‐level factors were tested to investigate if they are correlated to each type of top situation, and qualitative data of sublevel factors offer insight into how these factors are associated with various situations. Without a clear understanding of these situations and factors, the objective of universal access to information in DLs cannot be achieved. DL design implications are further discussed with the goal of providing system design recommendations for reducing blind users' help‐seeking situations.
Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery (VATS) Systematic Mediastinal Nodal Dissection

VATS lobectomy and other major pulmonary resections (VMPR) are growing in popularity. One of the main criticisms against minimal access in lung cancer surgery is that mediastinal nodes could be difficult to assess. It was shown by different authorities that VATS complete nodal dissection is feasible and does not differ from that performed by an open thoracotomy [1]. Despite conflicting reports, there is an international agreement that nodal dissection does not influence the disease free or the overall survival in lung cancer. However; proper staging of Non Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) enables standardization of decision on treatment and evaluation of such treatment comparing it to different centres around the world. Recent publications have shown a significant statistical gain in 5 year survival if stage IIa and higher were treated by adjuvant chemotherapy [2, 3]. It is therefore absolutely mandatory to get the staging right in early lung cancer; otherwise patients would be denied a significant chance of cure. In a pressurised service where commissioning is governed by patients waiting times, targets and cost effectiveness, surgeons might feel reluctant to extend the operating time to perform Systematic Nodal Dissection (SND). The risk of improper mediastinal staging in our view is by far greater than extending the duration of the operation. The long-term results of stage migration lead to faulty comparison, and might dictate the wrong management, ending in completely erroneous survival statistics. Oncological randomised controlled trials rely on final histological staging, and therefore it is mandatory to obtain correct staging to avoid erroneous survival statistics in such trials. In our view the only contraindication to SND would be technical difficulty with dissection in the presence of severe adhesions The way we stage lung cancer has changed over the years. The TNM6 classification [4] is now superseded by the IASLC new TNM7 classification [5]. Fortunately the naming and significance of nodal stations has not changed substantially. Precarinal nodes #3 for a left sided tumour is now considered an N3 stage. Precarinal nodes for a right sided tumour are designated as #4 (there are no #3R), and these are regarded as N2 disease.
What Mental Skills Ironman Triathletes Need and Want

Ultra endurance triathlon is a very demanding sport that is increasingly popular among amateur athletes. With the help of an online tool, the author surveyed several triathletes in the Ottawa region, known for its large community of multi-sport athletes. This article presents the sport of Ironman triathlon and discusses what triathletes' motivations to train and to compete are, as well as the challenges, fears and needs they are facing. Although two thirds of the respondents reported that their knowledge of sport psychology was limited or inexistent, 97% of triathletes said they believed strongly or very strongly that mental skills were key to success. Moreover, the survey revealed two deep-rooted myths with respect to the use of sport psychology. Ironman triathletes' issues clearly reflect what a lot of performers want and what sport psychology consultants should be providing—practical and effective guidelines that work in the real world of performance.
GALAXY HITCHHIKER : 3 D WEB MUSIC NAVIGATION THROUGH AUDIO SPACE TRAINED WITH TAG AND ARTIST LABELS

MUSIC GALAXY HITCHHIKER is an interactive web application that presents 3D-navigable visualization of audio feature space. The feature space was computed via two deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN), each supervised by semantic music tags and artist labels. The application recommends music with two different search modes: SEARCH BY TAG and SEARCH BY SONG. It enhances user experiences with the recommendation results by showing not only the list of songs but also visual similarity in the feature space.
Sparse Group Inductive Matrix Completion

We consider the problem of matrix completion with side information (\textit{inductive matrix completion}). In real-world applications many side-channel features are typically non-informative making feature selection an important part of the problem. We incorporate feature selection into inductive matrix completion by proposing a matrix factorization framework with group-lasso regularization on side feature parameter matrices. We demonstrate, that the theoretical sample complexity for the proposed method is much lower compared to its competitors in sparse problems, and propose an efficient optimization algorithm for the resulting low-rank matrix completion problem with sparsifying regularizers. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms other methods.
Cardiovascular effects of edible oils: a comparison between four popular edible oils

Edible oils form an essential part of the modern diet. These oils play a role as an energy source, and provide the diet with many beneficial micronutrients. Although a popular conception may be that fat should be avoided, certain edible oils as a dietary supplement may play an important role in the improvement of cardiovascular health. CVD has become one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Dietary supplementation with different oils may have beneficial effects on cardiovascular health. While olive oil and sunflower-seed oil are known to reduce serum cholesterol, fish oil has become well known for reducing potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias. Recently, red palm oil research has shown beneficial effects on cardiac recovery from ischaemia–reperfusion injury. It is clear that dietary supplementation with edible oils may play a vital role in reducing the mortality rate due to heart disease. The specific benefits and disadvantages of these oils should, however, be explored in greater depth. The present review will attempt to identify the benefits and shortcomings of four popular edible oils, namely olive oil, sunflower-seed oil, fish oil and palm oil. Additionally the present review will aim to reveal potential areas of research which could further enhance our understanding of the effects of edible oils on cardiovascular health.
Cross‐presentation: underlying mechanisms and role in immune surveillance

Summary: It was originally thought that a cell's major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules presented peptides derived exclusively from proteins synthesized by the cell itself. However, in some circumstances, antigens from the extracellular environment can be presented on MHC class I molecules and stimulate CD8+ T‐cell immunity, a process termed cross‐presentation. Cross‐presentation was originally discovered as an obscure phenomenon in transplantation immunity. However, it is now clear that it is a major mechanism by which the immune system monitors tissues and phagocytes for the presence of foreign antigen. Cross‐presentation is the only pathway by which the immune system can detect and respond to viral infections or mutations that exclusively occur in parenchymal cells rather than in bone marrow‐derived antigen‐presenting cells (APCs). Professional APCs, such as dendritic cells, are the principal cells endowed with the capacity to cross‐present antigens. In this process, the APCs acquire proteins from other tissue cells through endocytic mechanisms, especially phagocytosis or macropinocytosis. The internalized antigen can then be processed through at least two different mechanisms. In one pathway, the antigen is transferred from the phagosome into the cytosol, where it is hydrolyzed by proteasomes into oligopeptides that are then transported by the transporter associated with antigen processing to MHC class I molecules in the endoplasmic reticulum or phagosomes. In a second pathway, the antigen is cleaved into peptides by endosomal proteases, particularly cathepsin S, and bound by class I molecules probably in the endocytic compartment itself. Depending on the nature of the antigen, one or both of these pathways can contribute to cross‐presentation in vivo. The outcome of cross‐presentation can be either tolerance or immunity. Which of these outcomes occurs is thought to depend on whether antigens are acquired by themselves alone, leading to tolerance, or with immunostimulatory signals, leading to immunity. One source of such signals is from dying cells that release immunostimulatory ‘danger’ signals that promote the generation of immunity to their cellular antigens. In addition to the critical role of cross‐presentation in normal immune physiology, this pathway has considerable potential for being exploited for developing subunit vaccines that elicit both CD4+ and CD8+ T‐cell immunity.
Author-topic profiles for academic search

We implemented and evaluated a two-stage retrieval method for personalized academic search in which the initial search results are re-ranked using an author-topic profile. In academic search tasks, the user's own data can help optimizing the ranking of search results to match the searcher's specific individual needs. The author-topic profile consists of topic-specific terms, stored in a graph. We re-rank the top-1000 retrieved documents using ten features that represent the similarity between the document and the author-topic graph. We found that the re-ranking gives a small but significant improvement over the reproduced best method from the literature. Storing the profile as a graph has a number of advantages: it is flexible with respect to node and relation types; it is a visualization of knowledge that is interpretable by the user, and it offers the possibility to view relational characteristics of individual nodes.
On the Feasibility of Real-Time 3D Hand Tracking using Edge GPGPU Acceleration

This paper presents the case study of a non-intrusive porting of a monolithic C++ library for real-time 3D hand tracking, to the domain of edge-based computation. Towards a proof of concept, the case study considers a pair of workstations, a computationally powerful and a computationally weak one. By wrapping the C++ library in Java container and by capitalizing on a Java-based offloading infrastructure that supports both CPU and GPGPU computations, we are able to establish automatically the required server-client workflow that best addresses the resource allocation problem in the effort to execute from the weak workstation. As a result, the weak workstation can perform well at the task, despite lacking the sufficient hardware to do the required computations locally. This is achieved by offloading computations which rely on GPGPU, to the powerful workstation, across the network that connects them. We show the edge-based computation challenges associated with the information flow of the ported algorithm, demonstrate how we cope with them, and identify what needs to be improved for achieving even better performance.
Instruments for assessing Person Centered Care in Gerontology.

BACKGROUND The assessment of Person Centered Care (PCC) is internationally recognised as an approach of great interest for improving the quality of care of the elderly. The aim of this research is to review the procedures and instruments used in the assessment of services using this approach. METHOD The measurement instruments designed to assess elderly care services from PCC were reviewed, particularly residential services, day centers and home help. The main databases, research articles, and specialized websites were consulted. RESULTS Four observational instruments for the assessment of Person Centered Care are described; five for the assessment of physical space; six aimed at discovering users’ opinions; one which records family opinions, and five aimed at professionals, as well as several qualitative tools for self-assessment of centers. CONCLUSIONS Due to the diversity of instruments available for assessing PCC, and in order to avoid partial evaluations of attention, a combined strategy of assessment is recommended as well as integrating these measures into a broader service evaluation which includes the different strands related to care quality.
A Cultural-semantic Analysis of"Head"in Russian and Chinese

Since 1980s studies of metaphor mostly concentrate on spatial metaphors and emotional metaphors. In consequence, there has been little research on metaphors structured by the body parts of human beings. This paper analyses metaphors constructed by the category"head"in Russian and Chinese, illustrating the similarities as well as differences between these two languages in the metaphorical meanings of"head". It demonstrates the crucial role of metaphor in our understanding of everyday concepts and categories in human languages.
Unified Sparse Formats for Tensor Algebra Compilers

This paper shows how to build a sparse tensor algebra compiler that is agnostic to tensor formats (data layouts). We develop an interface that describes formats in terms of their capabilities and properties, and show how to build a modular code generator where new formats can be added as plugins. We then describe six implementations of the interface that compose to form the dense, CSR/CSF, COO, DIA, ELL, and HASH tensor formats and countless variants thereof. With these implementations at hand, our code generator can generate code for any tensor algebra expression on any combination of the aforementioned formats. To demonstrate our modular code generator design, we have implemented it in the open-source taco tensor algebra compiler. Our evaluation shows that we get better performance by supporting more formats specialized to different tensor structures, and our plugins makes it easy to add new formats. For example, when data is provided in the COO format, computing a single matrix-vector multiplication with COO is up to 3.6× faster than with CSR. Furthermore, DIA is specialized to tensor convolutions and stencil operations and therefore performs up to 22% faster than CSR for such operations. To further demonstrate the importance of support for many formats, we show that the best vector format for matrix-vector multiplication varies with input sparsities, from hash maps to sparse vectors to dense vectors. Finally, we show that the performance of generated code for these formats is competitive with hand-optimized implementations.
Sociodemographic and geographical inequalities in under- and overnutrition among children and mothers in Bangladesh: a spatial modelling approach to a nationally representative survey

Abstract Objective To investigate the sociodemographic and geographical variation in under- and overnutrition prevalence among children and mothers. Design Data from the 2014 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey were analysed. Stunting and wasting for children and BMI<18·5 kg/m2 for mothers were considered as undernutrition; overweight was considered as overnutrition for both children and mothers. We estimated the prevalence and performed simple logistic regression analyses to assess the associations between outcome variables and predictors. Bayesian spatial models were applied to estimate region-level prevalence to identify the regions (districts) prone to under- and overnutrition. Settings/Subjects Children aged<5 years and their mothers aged 15–49 years in Bangladesh. Results A significant difference (P<0·001) was observed in both under- and overnutrition prevalence between poor and rich. A notable regional variation was also observed in under- and overnutrition prevalence. Stunting prevalence ranged from 20·3 % in Jessore to 56·2 % in Sunamgonj, wasting from 10·6 % in Dhaka to 19·2 % in Bhola, and overweight from 0·8 % in Shariatpur to 2·6 % in Dhaka. Of the sixty-four districts, twelve had prevalence of stunting and thirty-two districts had prevalence of wasting higher than the WHO critical threshold levels. Similarly, fifty-three districts had prevalence of maternal underweight higher than the national level. In contrast, the prevalence of overweight was comparatively high in the industrially equipped metropolitan districts. Conclusions Observed sociodemographic and geographical inequalities imply slow progress in the overall improvement of both under- and overnutrition. Therefore, effective intervention programmes and policies need to be designed urgently targeting the grass-roots level of such regions.
Deep Image Features in Music Information Retrieval

Applications of Convolutional Neural Networks ( CNNs ) to various problems have been the subject of a number of recent studiesranging from image classification and object detection to scene parsing, segmentation 3D volumetric images and action recognition in videos. In this study, the CNNs were applied to a Music Information Retrieval (MIR), in particular to musical genre recognition. The model was trained on ILSVRC-2012 (more than 1 million natural images) to perform image classification and was reused to perform genre classification using spectrograms images. Harmonic and percussion separation was applied, because it is characteristic formusical genre. At final stage, the evaluation of various strategies of merging Support Vector Machines (SVMs) was performed on well known in MIR community - GTZAN dataset. Even though, the model was trained on natural images, the results achieved in this studywere close to the state-of-the-art.