Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intercultural Collaborative Learning in Virtual Worlds

This chapter evaluates the potential of virtual worlds for intercultural collaborative learning. A case study of a global lecture series is presented that used a virtual world as a platform for intercultural student collaboration. Students' subjective reports served as a basis for exploring cross-cultural differences in the perceived usefulness of virtual worlds for intercultural collaboration, and to examine what they have learned from working in an intercultural virtual team, what problems occurred, and how they resolved them. Based on the evaluation results, suggestions are provided for a culture-aware design of virtual worlds to facilitate intercultural collaborative learning and the development of intercultural literacy.
Involvement of hepatocyte growth factor/scatter factor and Met receptor signaling in hair follicle morphogenesis and cycling

HGF/SF and its receptor (Met) are principal mediators of mesenchymal‐epithelial interactions in several different systems and have recently been implicated in the control of hair follicle (HF) growth. We have studied their expression patterns during HF morphogenesis and cycling in C57BL/6 mice, whereas functional hair growth effects of HGF/SF were assessed in vivo by analysis of transgenic mice and in skin organ culture. In normal mouse skin, follicular expression of HGF/SF and Met was strikingly localized: HGF/SF was found only in the HF mesenchyme (dermal papilla fibroblasts) and Met in the neighboring hair bulb keratinocytes. Both HGF/SF and Met expression peaked during the initial phases of HF morphogenesis, the stage of active hair growth (early and mid anagen), and during the apoptosis‐driven HF regression (cata‐gen). Met+ cells in the regressing epithelial strand appeared to be protected from undergoing apoptosis. Compared to wild‐type controls, transgenic mice overexpressing HGF/SF under the control of the MT‐1 promoter had twice as many developing HF and displayed accelerated HF development on postnatal day 3. They also showed significant catagen retardation on P17. In organ culture and in vivo, HGF/SF i.c. resulted in a significant catagen retardation. These results demonstrate an important role of HGF/SF and Met in murine hair growth control and suggest that Met‐mediated signaling might be exploited for therapeutic manipulation of human hair growth disorders. —Lindner, G. , Menrad, A. , Gherardi, E. , Merlino, G. , Welker, P., Handjiski, B. , Roloff, B. , Paus, R. Involvement of hepatocyte growth factor/scatter factor and Met receptor signaling in hair follicle morphogenesis and cycling. FASEB J. 14, 319–332 (2000)
Restricted concentration models - graphical Gaussian models with concentration parameters restricted to being equal

In this paper we introduce restricted concentration models (RCMs) as a class of graphical models for the multivariate Gaussian distribution in which some elements of the concentration matrix are restricted to being identical is introduced. An estimation algorithm for RCMs, which is guaranteed to converge to the maximum likelihood estimate, is presented. Model selection is briefly discussed and a practical example is given.
Observations reveal external driver for Arctic sea‐ice retreat

The very low summer extent of Arctic sea ice that has been observed in recent years is often casually interpreted as an early‐warning sign of anthropogenic global warming. For examining the validity of this claim, previously IPCC model simulations have been used. Here, we focus on the available observational record to examine if this record allows us to identify either internal variability, self‐acceleration, or a specific external forcing as the main driver for the observed sea‐ice retreat. We find that the available observations are sufficient to virtually exclude internal variability and self‐acceleration as an explanation for the observed long‐term trend, clustering, and magnitude of recent sea‐ice minima. Instead, the recent retreat is well described by the superposition of an externally forced linear trend and internal variability. For the externally forced trend, we find a physically plausible strong correlation only with increasing atmospheric CO2concentration. Our results hence show that the observed evolution of Arctic sea‐ice extent is consistent with the claim that virtually certainly the impact of an anthropogenic climate change is observable in Arctic sea ice already today.
Réappropriation de la distribution par les consommateurs. Etudes de cas de formes renouvelées d’intermédiation

Cette etude est consacree a l’analyse du processus de reappropriation de la distribution par des consommateurs engages dans des projets de construction de reseaux de distribution alternatifs. Le role actif des consommateurs vis-a-vis de la distribution a ete revele par l’emploi du concept d’appropriation mentale, indispensable, mais aussi confine, au vecu d’une experience co-construite de consommation immersive des lieux de ventes. Adopter la perspective plus large de l’appropriation symbolique permet d’introduire la notion de reappropriation comme reponse entrepreneuriale a la frustration que des consommateurs eprouvent face aux modeles de distribution existants et a leur offre. Nous nous appuyons sur l’analyse de deux cas : une plateforme electronique biface supportant des initiatives de mise en relation de communautes de consommateurs et de producteurs, et un supermarche collaboratif. Cette analyse permet de comprendre comment, en s’engageant dans un processus de reappropriation, des consommateurs proposent des alternatives d’approvisionnement emancipatoires car symboliquement renouvelees. Cela necessite un travail de reinterpretation personnelle et partagee du sens de l’intermediation, le developpement d’un sentiment de possession a l’egard du reseau de distribution co-construit, ainsi que l’etablissement d’une identite et de liens communautaires.
Emerging Techniques in Vision-based Indoor Localization

As to the human computer interface for the visually impaired people, there are two models a vision-based indoor navigation system can be used. First, if a visually impaired person wants to know the current location, it calls the application of a smartphone or wearable device and finds out the current location. Second, the system automatically sends notification to the users if they reach a specific location even though the users havent realize they have arrived this zone. Indoor localization is to use one or more sensors such as cameras, magnetic sensors, IMUs, RGBD sensors, etc., to automatically determine the location of a robot or a person in real time in an indoor environment. This literature review mainly focuses on the indoor localization solutions with visual sensors, including omnidirectional cameras and RGB-D sensors, for assisting visually impaired people with performing indoor navigation tasks. Some of the papers surveyed may be originally for other applications (such as robot navigation), some even on localization in urban environments, but as long as the methods can be readily used for portable visual navigation, they will be included. The review includes the following four parts. Part 1 discusses the general approaches to achieving indoor localization, and in particular, a special attention is given to omnidirectional vision based localization. Part 2 discusses 2D-based localization solutions with omnidirectional vision as well as regular cameras. In particular, image-retrieval-based approaches are discussed. Part 3 discusses emerging solutions with 3D approaches. Special attention is paid to localization with images from the Web, with omnidirectional images, and with RGB-D images. Part 4 discusses the challenges in achieving accurate, robust and real time navigation using portable devices, and then introduces a few emerging technologies to solve the problems: mobile/cloud computing and GPU acceleration.
Breast cancer staging using Natural Language Processing

Medical diagnostic reports archived as electronic forms are valuable resources for processing to understand retrospectively, the severity of the disease among patients and to verify the correctness of the diagnosis. In this work, Breast Cancer Pathology reports are processed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Extraction (IE) techniques in order to extract the parameters required for cancer staging namely Tumour (T), Lymph nodes (N) and Metastases (M). An automated system is developed to process the `Impression' section of the report, classify T and N using pTNM classification protocol of American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) and derive the stage S of cancer of patients. T and N are classified using numerical parameters and non-numeric medical conditions given in the natural language text. Metastases M which is not evident from Pathology reports is given a default value of M0 for staging. The dataset consisting of 150 de-identified reports were reviewed by the Pathologists to obtain the Gold standard for evaluation. The TNM classification and the cancer stage derived by the system were evaluated against the Gold standard and discrepancy reports were generated. The extraction process was then fine-tuned based on the recommendations of the domain experts. The automatic staging process had an average percentage of 73 for Precision, 82 for Recall, 59 for Specificity and 72 for Accuracy. The lack of high performance is due to presence of certain vital information in other sections of the report that are not processed. Processing these sections in future would improve the performance.
Optimizing Hybrid de Novo Transcriptome Assembly and Extending Genomic Resources for Giant Freshwater Prawns (Macrobrachium rosenbergii): The Identification of Genes and Markers Associated with Reproduction

The giant freshwater prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii, a sexually dimorphic decapod crustacean is currently the world’s most economically important cultured freshwater crustacean species. Despite its economic importance, there is currently a lack of genomic resources available for this species, and this has limited exploration of the molecular mechanisms that control the M. rosenbergii sex-differentiation system more widely in freshwater prawns. Here, we present the first hybrid transcriptome from M. rosenbergii applying RNA-Seq technologies directed at identifying genes that have potential functional roles in reproductive-related traits. A total of 13,733,210 combined raw reads (1720 Mbp) were obtained from Ion-Torrent PGM and 454 FLX. Bioinformatic analyses based on three state-of-the-art assemblers, the CLC Genomic Workbench, Trans-ABySS, and Trinity, that use single and multiple k-mer methods respectively, were used to analyse the data. The influence of multiple k-mers on assembly performance was assessed to gain insight into transcriptome assembly from short reads. After optimisation, de novo assembly resulted in 44,407 contigs with a mean length of 437 bp, and the assembled transcripts were further functionally annotated to detect single nucleotide polymorphisms and simple sequence repeat motifs. Gene expression analysis was also used to compare expression patterns from ovary and testis tissue libraries to identify genes with potential roles in reproduction and sex differentiation. The large transcript set assembled here represents the most comprehensive set of transcriptomic resources ever developed for reproduction traits in M. rosenbergii, and the large number of genetic markers predicted should constitute an invaluable resource for future genetic research studies on M. rosenbergii and can be applied more widely on other freshwater prawn species in the genus Macrobrachium.
Conceptualising contemporary retail divestment: Tesco's departure from South Korea

In this article, we critically analyse the September 2015 decision of the UK retailer Tesco to sell its highly profitable South Korean subsidiary Homeplus to private investors. For over a decade since market entry in 1999, Homeplus had grown steadily to achieve a market-leading position through a process of strategic localization in which Tesco's global business practices were selectively adapted to meet the specific needs of the South Korean market. Against this backdrop, we explain the exit decision through theorising the dynamic intersection of home and host market factors that developed contemporaneously from 2010 onwards. On the one hand, worsening market conditions and financial pressures in a post-crisis UK domestic market drove Tesco to refocus on its home operations and, ultimately, identify saleable assets to offset mounting debts. On the other hand, steadily growing resistance within the South Korean market from competitors, regulators, labour and consumers caused sales growth to stall and then start to decline. Our analysis contributes to the economic geography literature on retail divestment by conceptualising the relational process of divestment decision-making that encompasses the intersection of home and host market pressures as well as conditions across the wider portfolio of subsidiaries. The research is particularly distinctive in its profiling of this coevolution of drivers, and in distilling the different ‘domains’ of host market contestation. The analysis also has wider significance in the context of the broader literatures on economic globalization that have tended to focus heavily on processes of expansion and market entry and far less on the instances of failure and exit that are an integral and inevitable part of these wider dynamics.
InAs Planar Nanowire Gate-All-Around MOSFETs on GaAs Substrates by Selective Lateral Epitaxy

High indium content III-V materials are one of the most promising candidates for beyond Si CMOS technologies. We present InAs planar nanowire (NW) MOSFETs grown directly on a semi-insulating GaAs (100) substrate by the selective lateral epitaxy (SLE) method via the metal-seeded planar vapor-liquid-solid mechanism. Despite a ~7% lattice mismatch, in-plane and self-aligned single-crystal InAs NWs are grown epitaxially on GaAs. Such heterogeneous SLE provides a potential solution for the integration of different channel materials on one substrate. Gate-all-around MOSFET devices are fabricated by releasing the NW channel from the substrate through a combination of digital etching and selective etching processes. The device with a NW width of 30 nm and gate length of 350 nm shows an ION/IOFF ratio of 104 and a peak transconductance of 220 mS/mm at Vds = 0.5 V.
Correlation Between Virulence Genotype and Fluoroquinolone Resistance in Carbapenem-Resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Background Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a clinically important pathogen that causes opportunistic infections and nosocomial outbreaks. Recently, the type III secretion system (TTSS) has been shown to play an important role in the virulence of P. aeruginosa. ExoU, in particular, has the greatest impact on disease severity. We examined the relationship among the TTSS effector genotype (exoS and exoU), fluoroquinolone resistance, and target site mutations in 66 carbapenem-resistant P. aeruginosa strains. Methods Sixty-six carbapenem-resistant P. aeruginosa strains were collected from patients in a university hospital in Daejeon, Korea, from January 2008 to May 2012. Minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of fluoroquinolones (ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin) were determined by using the agar dilution method. We used PCR and sequencing to determine the TTSS effector genotype and quinolone resistance-determining regions (QRDRs) of the respective target genes gyrA, gyrB, parC, and parE. Results A higher proportion of exoU+ strains were fluoroquinolone-resistant than exoS+ strains (93.2%, 41/44 vs. 45.0%, 9/20; P≤0.0001). Additionally, exoU+ strains were more likely to carry combined mutations than exoS+ strains (97.6%, 40/41 vs. 70%, 7/10; P=0.021), and MIC increased as the number of active mutations increased. Conclusions The recent overuse of fluoroquinolone has led to both increased resistance and enhanced virulence of carbapenem-resistant P. aeruginosa. These data indicate a specific relationship among exoU genotype, fluoroquinolone resistance, and resistance-conferring mutations.
Predicting Alloreactivity in Transplantation

Human leukocyte Antigen (HLA) mismatching leads to severe complications after solid-organ transplantation and hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation. The alloreactive responses underlying the posttransplantation complications include both direct recognition of allogeneic HLA by HLA-specific alloantibodies and T cells and indirect T-cell recognition. However, the immunogenicity of HLA mismatches is highly variable; some HLA mismatches lead to severe clinical B-cell- and T-cell-mediated alloreactivity, whereas others are well tolerated. Definition of the permissibility of HLA mismatches prior to transplantation allows selection of donor-recipient combinations that will have a reduced chance to develop deleterious host-versus-graft responses after solid-organ transplantation and graft-versus-host responses after hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation. Therefore, several methods have been developed to predict permissible HLA-mismatch combinations. In this review we aim to give a comprehensive overview about the current knowledge regarding HLA-directed alloreactivity and several developed in vitro and in silico tools that aim to predict direct and indirect alloreactivity.
Abstractive Summarization of Spoken and Written Conversations Based on Phrasal Queries

We propose a novel abstractive querybased summarization system for conversations, where queries are defined as phrases reflecting a user information needs. We rank and extract the utterances in a conversation based on the overall content and the phrasal query information. We cluster the selected sentences based on their lexical similarity and aggregate the sentences in each cluster by means of a word graph model. We propose a ranking strategy to select the best path in the constructed graph as a query-based abstract sentence for each cluster. A resulting summary consists of abstractive sentences representing the phrasal query information and the overall content of the conversation. Automatic and manual evaluation results over meeting, chat and email conversations show that our approach significantly outperforms baselines and previous extractive models.
Stochastic Maximum Likelihood Estimation Under Misspecified Numbersof Signals

The maximum likelihood (ML) approach for estimating direction of arrival (DOA) plays an important role in array processing. Its consistency and efficiency have been well established in the literature. A common assumption is that the number of signals is known. In many applications, this information is not available and needs to be estimated. However, the estimated number of signals does not always coincide with the true number of signals. Thus, it is crucial to know whether the ML estimator provides any relevant information about DOA parameters under a misspecified number of signals. In a previous study by this author ["ML estimation under misspecified number of signals," presented at the Thirty-Ninth Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Pacific Grove, CA, November 2005], he focused on the deterministic signal model and showed that the ML estimator under a misspecified number of signals converges to a well defined limit. Under mild conditions, the ML estimator converges to the true parameters. In the current correspondence, we extend those results to the stochastic signal model and validate our analysis by simulations.
Projective Relations for 3D Space: Computational Model, Application, and Psychological Evaluation

We propose a 3D computational model for projective relations which is used in an integrated image and speech understanding system. The image and speech understanding system is being developed within a joint research project focusing on both technical and cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction. Psychological experiments have been carried out to evaluate our computational model as an approximation of the meaning of projective prepositions used by humans in spoken instructions. These experiments investigate the acceptance of the model by subjects as well as the regularities regarding human usage of projective relations. Results of the computational model, the overall system, and the psychological experiments are presented.
On Selecting a Clinical Trial Management System for Large Scale, Multi-Centre, Multi-Modal Clinical Research Study

Clinical research studies offer many challenges for their supporting information systems. AIBL assembled 1112 participants who volunteered crucial information for a comprehensive study on neurodegenerative diseases. This paper discusses the shortcomings of the clinical trial management system chosen to record the results of the study. A set of guidelines was devised and a critique of five systems ensued. OpenClinica was selected as the most appropriate option. The main contribution of this paper is: (i) proposing a set of guidelines to determine the appropriateness of Clinical Trial Management Systems (CTMS) solution; (ii) providing a brief critique of existing commercial and open-sourced CTMS; and (iii) alluding to some data migration issues and providing cues on how to address them. We conclude that open-source CTMS are viable alternatives to the more expensive commercial systems to conduct, record and manage clinical studies.
Enhancement of a 3D Sound Using Psychoacoustics

Generally, in order to create 3D sound using binaural systems, we use head related transfer functions (HRTF) including the information of sounds which is arrived to our ears. But it can decline some three-dimensional effects in the area of a cone of confusion between front and back directions, because of the characteristics of HRTF. In this paper, we propose a new method to use psychoacoustics theory that reduces the confusion of sound image localization. In the method, HRTF spectrum characteristic is enhanced by using the energy ratio of the bark band. Informal listening tests show that the proposed method improves the front-back sound localization characteristics much better than the conventional methods Keywords—HRTF, 3D sound, Psychoacoustics, Localization
On the characteristics of MIMO mutual information at high SNR

We consider a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication system where the transmitted vector has a Gaussian distribution with (scaled) identity correlation matrix; this is the capacity-achieving channel input distribution for a block fading Rayleigh iid MIMO channel when the transmitter has no channel knowledge and the receiver knows the channel perfectly. We decompose a high-SNR approximation of the mutual information as a sum of three terms involving: i) a supremum capacity; ii) the effect of fluctuation of SNR about its mean; iii) the effect of eigenvalue dispersion of the channel. The decomposition provides some insight on the mechanisms that affect the MIMO mutual information at high SNR. Further, we analyze the first and second order statistics of the terms in the decomposition under the assumption of frequency-flat Rayleigh iid fading. I. INTRODUCTION