Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An exploratory Study of IR Interaction for User Interface Design

Information seeking is an dynamic and interactive process. Factors like users'' information needs, individual differences, goals and tasks, knowledge and cognitive abilities etc. influence the information seeking process, and need to be identified and supported in the user interface design. We adopt a user-centered approach to establish a link between research within the IR interaction perspective and the methods in HCI on how to evaluate information seeking interaction in a hypertext IR system (Dienst). Our purpose with this exploratory study is to identify, describe and acquire knowledge of characteristics of the user population, and finally, to make suggestions for supporting users in user interface design. For the evaluation task, we have applied HCI evaluation techniques to our IR evaluation to make a connection between the traditional IR evaluation and HCI evaluation, combining different qualitative and quantitative data collection and analyzing methods, implemented in an experimental real-world online WWW setting. This methodology combined online (WWW-based) questionnaires and database log statistics. Preliminary results revealed several "hidden" realities: a mismatch between what people said they wanted to do as opposed to what they actually did. We also observed that people initially expected a specific function, but when using the system, they did not use it. Finally, we established some group differences concerning variables like previous experience searching information in hypertext systems, IR knowledge and browsing/searching strategies.
The goldilocks placebo effect: Placebo effects are stronger when people select a treatment from an optimal number of choices

This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article published in final form as Hafner, RJ, White, MP & Handley, SJ 2018, 'The goldilocks placebo effect: Placebo effects are stronger when people select a treatment from an optimal number of choices', American Journal of Psychology, vol. 131, no. 2, pp. 175-184 and available online via: https://www.jstor. org/stable/10.5406/amerjpsyc.131. 2.0175? seq=1
Inferring topic-dependent influence roles of Twitter users

Twitter, as one of the most popular social media platforms, provides a convenient way for people to communicate and interact with each other. It has been well recognized that influence exists during users' interactions. Some pioneer studies on finding influential users have been reported in the literature, but they do not distinguish different influence roles, which are of great value for various marketing purposes. In this paper, we move a step forward trying to further distinguish influence roles of Twitter users in a certain topic. By defining three views of features relating to topic, sentiment and popularity respectively, we propose a Multi-view Influence Role Clustering (MIRC) algorithm to group Twitter users into five categories. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in inferring influence roles.
Interoperability of Geographical Information Systems

There are many Geographical Information System (GIS) applications in use today, unfortunately we are also used to various problems regarding the spatial data. An important aspect of every system is interoperability—the ability of GIS software to use the spatial data, provided by other systems. It is also important not to overlook the quality of the data, i.e. whether the accuracy, structure and content of the exchanged set of data conform to our requirements. The purpose of this thesis is to give an overview of two prominent methods for providing interoperability in Geographical Information Systems—data files and geospatial data services. At first the reader is got acquainted with basic concepts of Geographical Information Systems. In the next chapter the properties of several file formats are described and compared for fitness for practical tasks. Data files have been the traditional method for exchanging data among applications for a long time but different services are getting more and more attention as spatial data sources nowadays. This thesis focuses mainly to web services, developed by the Open GIS Consortium (OGC). The Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Server (WFS) service standards are getting closer examination. A comparative view of two covered interoperability methods (files and services) is also provided. The following chapters concentrate to the implementations of the OGC Web Map Service. Three different WMS servers are compared in regard of building various spatial data exchange services. A detailed look to the architecture and functioning of one server application is also provided. Another chapter is dedicated to WMS client applications, where four programs are compared and analyzed for suitability for practical situations. The thesis contains also descriptions of three projects that are using the Open GIS Consortium Web Map Service specification for solving practical problems in the field of GIS interoperability. Andmevahetus geoinfosüsteemides
A Method for Re ning Automatically-Discovered Lexical Relations: Combining Weak Techniques for Stronger Results

Knowledge-poor corpus-based approaches to natural language processing are attractive in that they do not incur the diiculties associated with complex knowledge bases and real-world inferences. However, these kinds of language processing techniques in isolation often do not suuce for a particular task; for this reason we are interested in nding ways to combine various techniques and improve their results. Accordingly, we conducted experiments to reene the results of an automatic lexical discovery technique by making use of a statistically-based syntactic similarity measure. The discovery program uses lexico-syntactic patterns to nd instances of the hyponymy relation in large text bases. Once relations of this sort are found, they should be inserted into an existing lexicon or thesaurus. However, the terms in the relation may have multiple senses, thus hampering automatic placement. In order to address this problem we tried to make a term-similarity determination technique choose where, in an existing thesaurus, to install a lexical relation. The union of these two corpus-based methods is promising , although only partially successful in the experiments run so far. Here we report some preliminary results, and make suggestions for how to improve the technique in future.
Studying on the Crisis Management Based on the Control Theory

Faced with the evolution of the economic environment, some environmental factors which were easily mastered by enterprises are disintegrating, and the business environment of enterprises are transforming from relatively steady statistic one to more and more complex dynamic one. Today crises have become practically the norm in an environment that is both unstable and unpredictable. Crises have thus proved to be almost an unavoidable parameter for corporate strategy. Firstly, the article reviews the characters of crises, and illustrates the fourth phases of crisis evolution. Then, we attempt to construct a conceptual framework model relating to these phases to show how a firm can succeed in managing crisis through control mechanism. The model will be illustrated through an in-depth study of crisis management from three control dimensionalities: feed-forward control, concurrent control and feed-back control. Finally, the article brings forward that if it is linked with a proper organizational learning process, a crisis can sometimes be at the origin of a competitive advantage.
Two-dimensional compressible flow simulation on emulated digital CNN-UM

In the area of mechanical, aerospace, chemical and civil engineering the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) has been one of the most important problems of mathematics for a long time. In this field, one of the most exciting areas is the simulation of fluid flow, which involves for example problems of air, sea and land vehicle motion. In this paper a CNN-UM based solver of 2D inviscid, adiabatic, compressible fluids will be presented. The governing equations are solved by using first- and second-order numerical methods. Unfortunately the necessity the coupled multi-layered computational structure with non-linear, space-variant templates does not make it possible to utilize the huge computing power of the analog CNN-UM chips. To improve the performance of our solution emulated digital CNN-UM implemented on FPGA has been used. Properties of the implemented specialized architecture is examined in terms of area, speed and accuracy.
Online knapsack problem and budgeted truthful bipartite matching

Two related online problems: knapsack and truthful bipartite matching are considered. For these two problems, the common theme is how to ‘match’ an arriving left vertex in an online fashion with any of the available right vertices, if at all, so as to maximize the sum of the value of the matched edges, subject to satisfying a sum-weight constraint on the matched left vertices. Assuming that the left vertices arrive in an uniformly random order (secretary model), two almost similar algorithms are proposed for the two problems, that are 2e competitive and 24 competitive, respectively. The proposed online bipartite matching algorithm is also shown to be truthful: there is no incentive for any left vertex to misreport its bid/weight. Direct applications of these problems include job allocation with load balancing, generalized adwords, crowdsourcing auctions, and matching wireless users to cooperative relays in device-to-device communication enabled cellular network.
Belief in God: Why People Believe, and Why They Don’t

Belief in a god or gods is a central feature in the lives of billions of people and a topic of perennial interest within psychology. However, research over the past half decade has achieved a new level of understanding regarding both the ultimate and proximate causes of belief in God. Ultimate causes—the evolutionary influences on a trait—shed light on the adaptive value of belief in God and the reasons why a tendency toward this belief exists in humans. Proximate causes—the immediate influences on the expression of a trait—explain variation and changes in belief. We review this research and discuss remaining barriers to a fuller understanding of belief in God.
CHANGE DETECTION FOR URBAN AREAS IN HIGH RESOLUTION SAR IAMGES USING SECOND KIND STATISTICS BASED G 0 DISTRIBUTION

It is very popular to monitor the changes of urban areas via synthetic aperture radar data, which is rarely influenced by weather conditions or imaging time. However, change detection using multi-temporal SAR data may confront with difficulties, due to the highly speckled noise generated by the coherent imaging mechanism. Thus SAR images change detection algorithms mainly contains three steps: (i)modeling the SAR image RCS as well as clutters by some proper statistical methods; (ii)generating a change map by computing a certain similarity measure based on the former model; (iii)masking the change map via proper thresholding techniques to obtain the final change areas. Quite a few researches have been carried out for SAR images change detection. Considering the multiplicative speckle noise of SAR images, the most common change detection algorithm is the ratio or log ratio method [1]. The Kullback-Leibler divergence based algorithm [2], using the Pearson Distribution Family to approximate the SAR clutter within the neighborhood of each pixel in the image, distinguishes a volcano influenced areas between two 10 m resolution Radarsat images acquired before and after the eruption of the volcano. A generalized Gaussian model based change detection algorithm is performed after a noise reduction preprocessing step between chips from two multi-temporal ERS2 images of a city area via a reformed version of Kittler-Illingworth threshold selection criterion [3]. Before proposing a change detection method, one has to carefully examine the statistical models and choose the most appropriate one for the problem at hand. The well known Gaussian model [4] of fully developed speckle and many models derived from it are on the basis of a large amount of random reflectors per resolution cell hypothesis. However, with the increasing of the image resolution, the RCS and clutter of urban areas may deviate from the Gaussian model, especially when the area is man made or the resolution cell is about the size of the objects. Many non-Gaussian models(K, Weibull, Log-normal, Nakagami-Rice etc) are proposed to fit with the scattering statistics, but none of them is flexible enough to model the surface of urban
New Injection Points of Onabotulinum Toxin A for Spastic Paralysis of the Fingers: Eight Cases of Report

Objective: Onabotulinum toxin A (botulinum A toxin) is utilized to extend flexed extremities in spastic hemiparesis. Injection points are important to obtain a better effect. Injecting botulinum A toxin into the forearm muscles is a standard method for flexed wrist and fingers; however, we developed new injection points in the intrinsic muscles of the hand to acquire more reliable effect. Methods: The authors injected botulinum A toxin into the palmar side of the proximal and middle phalanx of each finger and thenar muscles. Eight patients with poststroke flexed wrist and fingers were treated by this method. Results: In all patients, the spasticity improved to 0 or 1 from 3 or 4 in Modified Modified Ashworth Scale 1 month after the treatment. They were satisfied with our treatment because they could keep their affected fingers hygienic by washing fingers cleanly after the treatment. Conclusions: Our botulinum A toxin injection points for finger spastic paralysis are accurate spots producing great effect to flexed fingers.
Bayes and empirical-Bayes multiplicity adjustment in the variable-selection problem

This paper studies the multiplicity-correction effect of standard Bayesian variable-selection priors in linear regression. Our first goal is to clarify when, and how, multiplicity correction happens automatically in Bayesian analysis, and to distinguish this correction from the Bayesian Ockham's-razor effect. Our second goal is to contrast empirical-Bayes and fully Bayesian approaches to variable selection through examples, theoretical results and simulations. Considerable differences between the two approaches are found. In particular, we prove a theorem that characterizes a surprising aymptotic discrepancy between fully Bayes and empirical Bayes. This discrepancy arises from a different source than the failure to account for hyperparameter uncertainty in the empirical-Bayes estimate. Indeed, even at the extreme, when the empirical-Bayes estimate converges asymptotically to the true variable-inclusion probability, the potential for a serious difference remains.
The diversity and conservation of mammals in the Dodo Coastal Forest in southwestern Côte d’Ivoire, western Africa: a preliminary study

To improve the knowledge of non-volant mammal diversity and conservation prospects in the Dodo Coastal Forest (DCF) in southwestern Côte d’Ivoire, we conducted reconnaissance surveys and interviews, and deployed remote cameras. We calculated visual encounter rates (vER) and sign ER (sER) of mammalian taxa and hunting signs, mapped their locations and tested the hypothesis that sightings and signs of primates occurred closer to the river Dodo in and near the gallery forest. We sighted nine taxa, including threatened King Colobus (Endangered, EN), Olive Colobus (Vulnerable, VU), Lowe’s Monkey (VU), the Eastern Lesser Spot-nosed Monkey (VU), and White-bellied Pangolin (VU), with vER of 0.04, 0.12, 0.04, 0.12, 0.04, respectively. We confirmed 14 other taxa with signs including threatened Western Chimpanzee (CR), Pygmy Hippopotamus (Endangered, EN), Bosman’s Potto (VU), and Black-bellied Pangolin (VU), with sER of 0.51, 0.04, 0.08, 0.04, respectively. The most frequently encountered signs were of the Red River Hog at 1.73 signs/km, and the Bushbuck at 0.63 signs/km. Remote cameras captured images of these two taxa at image capture rates (ICR) of 0.044 and 0.022, respectively. Images of the African Buffalo were captured at ICR of 0.044. The 23 confirmed taxa include seven primates, four rodents, three carnivores, six even-toed ungulates, two pangolins and a Tree Hyrax. The mean distance from the river Dodo to the sightings and the signs of the primates was significantly shorter than that of other taxa. This supports our hypothesis. There was a high level of hunting signs (sER = 0.63) indicating that intensive hunting pressure is menacing the fauna. We recommend that authorities take actions against poaching, install a surveillance program, and curtail charcoal-making to ensure the conservation of the threatened mammals of the DCF.
Effect of running speed on lower limb joint kinetics.

PURPOSE Knowledge regarding the biomechanical function of the lower limb muscle groups across a range of running speeds is important in improving the existing understanding of human high performance as well as in aiding in the identification of factors that might be related to injury. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of running speed on lower limb joint kinetics. METHODS Kinematic and ground reaction force data were collected from eight participants (five males and three females) during steady-state running on an indoor synthetic track at four discrete speeds: 3.50±0.04, 5.02±0.10, 6.97±0.09, and 8.95±0.70 m·s. A standard inverse-dynamics approach was used to compute three-dimensional torques at the hip, knee, and ankle joints, from which net powers and work were also calculated. A total of 33 torque, power, and work variables were extracted from the data set, and their magnitudes were statistically analyzed for significant speed effects. RESULTS The torques developed about the lower limb joints during running displayed identifiable profiles in all three anatomical planes. The sagittal-plane torques, net powers, and work done at the hip and knee during terminal swing demonstrated the largest increases in absolute magnitude with faster running. In contrast, the work done at the knee joint during stance was unaffected by increasing running speed, whereas the work done at the ankle joint during stance increased when running speed changed from 3.50 to 5.02 m·s, but it appeared to plateau thereafter. CONCLUSIONS Of all the major lower limb muscle groups, the hip extensor and knee flexor muscles during terminal swing demonstrated the most dramatic increase in biomechanical load when running speed progressed toward maximal sprinting.
Directional memory arises from long-lived cytoskeletal asymmetries in polarized chemotactic cells

Significance Cells orient their motility along chemical gradients using sensitive measurements of the external environment, a process termed chemotaxis. How cells sense, respond to, and remember varying environmental stimuli is only just beginning to be understood. Here, we identify a directional memory in chemotactic neutrophil-like cells. This memory allows cells to orient in low signal gradients and even uniform environments. This memory can be modeled by distinct time scales of chemical sensing and cytoskeletal dynamics, pointing to a general strategy of separating time scales for robust behavioral dynamics in cellular systems. Disrupting specific long-lived molecular assemblies erases directional memory. These studies reveal a novel directional memory resulting from distinct molecular time scales and contributing to chemotactic robustness in migrating cells. Chemotaxis, the directional migration of cells in a chemical gradient, is robust to fluctuations associated with low chemical concentrations and dynamically changing gradients as well as high saturating chemical concentrations. Although a number of reports have identified cellular behavior consistent with a directional memory that could account for behavior in these complex environments, the quantitative and molecular details of such a memory process remain unknown. Using microfluidics to confine cellular motion to a 1D channel and control chemoattractant exposure, we observed directional memory in chemotactic neutrophil-like cells. We modeled this directional memory as a long-lived intracellular asymmetry that decays slower than observed membrane phospholipid signaling. Measurements of intracellular dynamics revealed that moesin at the cell rear is a long-lived element that when inhibited, results in a reduction of memory. Inhibition of ROCK (Rho-associated protein kinase), downstream of RhoA (Ras homolog gene family, member A), stabilized moesin and directional memory while depolymerization of microtubules (MTs) disoriented moesin deposition and also reduced directional memory. Our study reveals that long-lived polarized cytoskeletal structures, specifically moesin, actomyosin, and MTs, provide a directional memory in neutrophil-like cells even as they respond on short time scales to external chemical cues.
A new approach for face recognition under makeup changes

In this paper, we target a recent challenging problem raised in image processing area: face verification in the presence of facial makeup. To the best of our knowledge, very few works have been proposed to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel face verification scheme. Random subspace is applied to get multiple correlation spaces. Similarity measures among face images are calculated based on correlation subspaces. In addition, performance on different facial parts is evaluated. Experiments on an unconstrained dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
A Correlated Topic Modeling Approach for Facial Expression Recognition

Topic Models has been applied to many Computer Vision problems, and in particular, facial expression recognition, with good results. However, the topic found by the topic models may be correlated, and hence the independent assumption may not hold. Correlated Topic Models (CTM) has be developed to tackle this problem. In this paper, we attempted to use Correlated Topic Models (CTM) for facial expression recognition, and preliminary results are reported.
TGF-β1 induces epigenetic silence of TIP30 to promote tumor metastasis in esophageal carcinoma

TGF-β1, a potent EMT (epithelial-mesenchymal transition) inducer present in the tumor microenvironment, is involved in the metastasis and progression of various carcinomas, including esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). TIP30 (30kDa HIV-1 Tat interacting protein) is a putative tumor metastasis suppressor. Here, we found TIP30 was decreased in cells undergoing EMT induced by TGF-β1, an occurrence that was related to promoter hypermethylation. TGF-β1 induced TIP30 hypermethylation via increasing DNMT1 and DNMT3A expression, which could be restored by TGF-β antibodies. In our in vitro and in vivo studies, we showed that silence of TIP30 led to EMT, enhanced migrative and invasive abilities of ESCC cells, promoted tumor metastasis in xenografted mice; alternatively, overexpression of TIP30inhibited TGF-β1-induced EMT, and metastatic abilities of ESCC cells. Mechanically, TIP30 silencing induced the nuclear translocation and transcriptional activation of β-catenin in an AKT-dependent manner, which further resulted in the initiation of EMT. Consistently, TIP30 was frequently methylated and downregulated in ESCC patients. Loss of TIP30 correlated with nuclear β-catenin and aberrant E-cadherin expression. TIP30 was a powerful marker in predicting the prognosis of ESCC. Taken together, our results suggest a novel and critical role of TIP30 involved in TGF-β1-induced activation of AKT/β-catenin signaling and ESCC metastasis.