Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Empirical Study on E-learning Note-Taking Platform Using Multimodal Metaphors

—This paper introduces an empirical study to investigate the effect of including multimodal metaphors such as text, graphic and speech in e-learning application. The aim of the experiment was to measure and compare the level of usability of textual and multimodal interfaces. The usability parameters which are efficiency, effectiveness, and users " satisfaction were considered in the study. In order to carry out comparative investigation, two independent groups were involved to evaluate two different interfaces of an experiment e-learning platform. First group (control) was consisted 22 participants using textual interface platform based on textual modal only. This platform used Microsoft Word 2007 and its " adding comments " feature as the modal. The second platform was based on a multimodal interface used by the experimental group and consisted of three multimodality tools to improve efficiency of e-learning. The modalities used by this experimental group were text, speech and graphics. The results obtained from this investigation have shown that the multimodal e-learning interface group increased the level of usability by taken lower time to complete the experimental tasks and performed successfully higher number of tasks, and more satisfied than the textual interface group. However, the error rate in the experimental group was found to be greater than that of the control group. The results also suggested that other multimedia metaphors could be used for enhancement and improvement the performance of e-learning system. These metaphors could include the use of combinations of graphic, recorded speech and earcons.
The Design and Evaluation of a Group Research Experience During Psychiatric Residency Training

A weekly, year-long research seminar, led by two clinical research faculty members, provides psychiatric residents with an opportunity to integrate clinical and research experience and “hands-on” familiarity with clinical research. The functional goal is production of an IRB-approved clinical research project design. The group approach is less intimidating for the residents, allows for individual flexibility while maintaining the project’s momentum, is congruent with other seminars and courses, and encourages a cooperative approach to research. Evaluations indicate that the residents value the experience and that they increase their knowledge of the requirements and techniques of clinical research.
A Real Time Index Model for Big Data Based on DC-Tree

Due to the low efficiency and poor real-time performance of actual query in big data, this paper puts forward a new multidimensional big data real-time query mode which is based on a dynamic indexing structure and the corresponding real-time query and dynamic insertion algorithm. It utilizes the Z curve to reduce dimension of multidimensional data, adopt Bloom Filter realize discrete storage and parallel computing, Meanwhile it enhances the real-time performance of data by using dynamic indexing structure DC-Tree. The results of experimental show that the model not only improves the query efficiency of big data, but also improve the real-time effect of data.
Invariant Subject Retrieval via Soft Clothing Biometrics

As much information as possible should be used when identifying subjects in surveillance video due to the poor quality and resolution. So far, little attention has been paid to exploiting clothing as it has been considered unlikely to be a potential cue to identity. Clothing analysis could not only potentially improve recognition, but could also aid in subject re-identification. Further, we show here how clothing can aid recognition when there is a large change in viewpoint. Our study offers some important insights into the capability of clothing information in more realistic scenarios. We show how recognition can benefit from clothing analysis when the viewpoint changes with partial occlusion, unlike other approaches addressing soft biometrics from single viewpoint data images. This research presents how soft clothing biometrics can be used to achieve viewpoint invariant subject retrieval, given a verbal query description of the subject observed from a different viewpoint. We investigate the influence of the most correlated clothing traits when extracted from multiple viewpoints, and how they can lead to increased performance.
Implications of the Use of Eukaryotic Translation Initiation Factor 5A (eIF5A) for Prognosis and Treatment of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a primary liver malignancy and accounts for most of the total liver cancer cases. Lack of treatment options and late diagnosis contribute to high mortality rate of HCC. In eukaryotes, translation of messenger RNA (mRNA) to protein is a key process in protein biosynthesis in which initiation of translation involves interaction of different eukaryotic translation initiation factors (eIFs), ribosome subunits and mRNAs. Eukaryotic translation initiation factor 5A (eIF5A) is one of the eIFs involved in translation initiation and eIF5A2, one of its isoforms, is upregulated in various cancers including HCC as a result of chromosomal instability, where it resides. In HCC, eIF5A2 expression is associated with adverse prognosis such as presence of tumor metastasis and venous infiltration. Based on eIF5A2 functional studies, suppressing eIF5A2 expression by short interfering RNA alleviates the tumorigenic properties of HCC cells in vitro while ectopic expression of eIF5A2 enhances the aggressiveness of HCC cells in vivo and in vitro by inducing epithelial-mesenchymal transition. In conclusion, eIF5A2 is a potential prognostic marker as well as a therapeutic target for HCC.
Distinct Global Brain Dynamics and Spatiotemporal Organization of the Salience Network

One of the most fundamental features of the human brain is its ability to detect and attend to salient goal-relevant events in a flexible manner. The salience network (SN), anchored in the anterior insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, plays a crucial role in this process through rapid detection of goal-relevant events and facilitation of access to appropriate cognitive resources. Here, we leverage the subsecond resolution of large multisession fMRI datasets from the Human Connectome Project and apply novel graph-theoretical techniques to investigate the dynamic spatiotemporal organization of the SN. We show that the large-scale brain dynamics of the SN are characterized by several distinctive and robust properties. First, the SN demonstrated the highest levels of flexibility in time-varying connectivity with other brain networks, including the frontoparietal network (FPN), the cingulate–opercular network (CON), and the ventral and dorsal attention networks (VAN and DAN). Second, dynamic functional interactions of the SN were among the most spatially varied in the brain. Third, SN nodes maintained a consistently high level of network centrality over time, indicating that this network is a hub for facilitating flexible cross-network interactions. Fourth, time-varying connectivity profiles of the SN were distinct from all other prefrontal control systems. Fifth, temporal flexibility of the SN uniquely predicted individual differences in cognitive flexibility. Importantly, each of these results was also observed in a second retest dataset, demonstrating the robustness of our findings. Our study provides fundamental new insights into the distinct dynamic functional architecture of the SN and demonstrates how this network is uniquely positioned to facilitate interactions with multiple functional systems and thereby support a wide range of cognitive processes in the human brain.
Influence of Acupuncture Stimulation on Cerebral Network in Functional Diarrhea

Acupuncture is a commonly used therapy for treating functional diarrhea (FD), although there is limited knowledge on the mechanism. The objectives of this study were to investigate the differences in brain activities elicited by acupuncture between FD patients and healthy controls (HC) so as to explore the possible mechanism. Eighteen FD patients and eighteen HC received 10 sessions of acupuncture treatment at ST25 acupoints. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans were, respectively, performed before and after acupuncture. The defecation frequency, Bristol stool form scale (SBFS), and MOS 36-item Short Healthy Survey (SF-36) were employed to evaluate the clinical efficacy. After acupuncture, the FD patients showed a significant decrease in defecation frequency and BSFS score. The regional homogeneity (ReHo) map showed a decrease in the paracentral lobule and postcentral gyrus, and an increase in the angular gyrus, insula, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and precuneus in the FD group. Moreover, the changes in ReHo values in the ACC were correlated with the reduction in defecation frequency. Decreasing functional connectivity among the ACC, insula, thalamus, and orbital frontal cortex only existed in the FD group. Conclusively, acupuncture alleviated defecation frequency and improved stool formation in FD patients. The efficacy might result from the regulation of the homeostasis afferent processing network.
The association of ABO blood groups with extent of coronary atherosclerosis in Croatian patients suffering from chronic coronary artery disease

Aim: The aim of study was to: 1) examine the relationship between ABO blood groups and extent of coronary atherosclerosis in patients with chronic coronary artery disease (CAD), 2) compare ABO blood groups distribution in CAD patients and general population, 3) examine possible differences in traditional risk factors frequency in CAD patients with different ABO blood groups. Materials and methods: In the 646 chronic CAD patients (72.4% males) coronary angiograms were scored by quantitative assessment using multiple angiographic scoring system, Traditional risk factors were self reported or measured by standard methods. ABO blood distribution of patients was compared with group of 651 healthy blood donors (74.6% males). Results: Among all ABO blood group patients there was no significant difference between the extent of coronary atherosclerosis with regard to all the three scoring systems: number of affected coronary arteries (P = 0.857), Gensini score (P = 0.818), and number of segments narrowed > 50% (P = 0.781). There was no significant difference in ABO blood group distribution between CAD patients and healthy blood donors. Among CAD patients, men with blood group AB were significantly younger than their pairs with non-AB blood groups (P = 0.008). Among CAD patients with AB blood group, males < 50 yrs were significantly overrepresented when compared with the non-AB groups (P = 0.003). Conclusions: No association between ABO blood groups and the extent of coronary atherosclerosis in Croatian CAD patients is observed. Observation that AB blood group might possibly identify Croatian males at risk to develop the premature CAD has to be tested in larger cohort of patients.
Eye of the Dragon: Exploring Discriminatively Minimalist Sketch-based Abstractions for Object Categories

As a form of visual representation, freehand line sketches are typically studied as an end product of the sketching process. However, from a recognition point of view, one can also study various orderings and properties of the primitive strokes that compose the sketch. Studying sketches in this manner has enabled us to create novel sparse yet discriminative sketch-based representations for object categories which we term category-epitomes. Concurrently, the epitome construction provides a natural measure for quantifying the sparseness underlying the original sketch, which we term epitome-score. We analyze category-epitomes and epitome-scores for hand-drawn sketches from a sketch dataset of 160 object categories commonly encountered in daily life. Our analysis provides a novel viewpoint for examining the complexity of representation for visual object categories.
Health-related quality of life in patients with colorectal cancer who receive oral uracil and tegafur plus leucovorin.

OBJECTIVE Adjuvant chemotherapy with oral uracil/tegafur plus leucovorin has been acknowledged to be a standard treatment for Stage II or III cancer of the colon. The objective of the study was to examine the health-related quality of life during treatment in patients with colorectal cancer who receive oral uracil/tegafur plus leucovorin. METHODS Health-related quality of life was assessed at baseline (pre-treatment) and at 5-week intervals during treatment, using the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer QLQ-C30 questionnaires. Health-related quality of life data for five courses of treatment were then analyzed longitudinally. RESULTS Ninety-four patients completed the baseline and post-treatment health-related quality of life assessments. The post-treatment assessments changed significantly from the baseline values and favored post-treatment for all the scales except cognitive function, dyspnea, insomnia, constipation and diarrhea. Role function and social function changed by 10 or more points considered clinically significant. Most of the scales in patients with Grade 0-1 toxicities were better than those with Grade 2-3 toxicities, but Grade 2-3 toxicities were not associated with post-treatment deteriorations in health-related quality of life. The development of Grade 3 toxicities negatively affected on the four scales at the next assessment, compared with Grade 1-2 toxicities. CONCLUSIONS Overall health-related quality of life did not deteriorate during adjuvant chemotherapy with oral uracil/tegafur plus leucovorin in patients with colorectal cancer, despite the effect from surgical damage, whereas the development of Grade 3 toxicities negatively affected on short-term health-related quality of life. Further comparative studies are needed.
Record Linkage: Current Practice and Future Directions

Record linkage is the task of quickly and accurately identifying records corresponding to the same entity from one or more data sources. Record linkage is also known as data cleaning, entity reconciliation or identification and the merge/purge problem. This paper presents the “standard” probabilistic record linkage model and the associated algorithm. Recent work in information retrieval, federated database systems and data mining have proposed alternatives to key components of the standard algorithm. The impact of these alternatives on the standard approach are assessed. The key question is whether and how these new alternatives are better in terms of time, accuracy and degree of automation for a particular record linkage application.
Speech unit category based short utterance speaker recognition

Information of speech units like vowels, consonants and syllables can be a kind of knowledge used in text-independent Short Utterance Speaker Recognition (SUSR) in a similar way as in text-dependent speaker recognition. In such tasks, data for each speech unit, especially at the time of recognition, is often not enough. Hence, it is not practical to use the full set of speech units because some of the units might not be well trained. To solve this problem, a method of using speech unit categories rather than individual phones is proposed for SUSR, wherein similar speech units are put together, hence solving the problem of sparse data. We define Vowel, Consonant, and Syllable Categories (VC, CC and SC) with Standard Chinese (Putonghua) as a reference. A speech utterance is recognized into VC, CC ad SC sequences which are used to train Universal Background Models (UBM) for each speech unit category in the training procedure, and to perform speech unit category dependent speaker recognition, respectively. Experimental results in Gaussian Mixture Model-Universal Background Model (GMM-UBM) based system give a relative equal error rate (EER) reduction of 54.50% and 40.95% from minimum EERs of VCs and SCs, respectively, for 2 seconds of test utterance compared with the existing SUSR systems.
Design and analysis of 8 bit fully segmented digital to analog converter

This paper presents design of an 8-bit 1.8V fully segmented digital to analog converter (DAC) using 180nm CMOS technology. DAC is an essential part of digital signal processor. Digital to analog converter is employed in processing of digital signals and providing analog output in the form of current or voltage for corresponding binary input. The differential non linearity of a DAC shows variation in output corresponding to 1LSB change at input that is accuracy of data conversion. To achieve low non linearity or more accurate data conversion a DAC is designed with unary coding or a fully segmented digital to analog converter with current steering technique. The INL and DNL achieved in this research work are 0.145LSB and 0.013LSB respectively. The power consumption is simulated as 99.67mW.
Mu Opioid Receptors on Primary Afferent Nav1.8 Neurons Contribute to Opiate-Induced Analgesia: Insight from Conditional Knockout Mice

Opiates are powerful drugs to treat severe pain, and act via mu opioid receptors distributed throughout the nervous system. Their clinical use is hampered by centrally-mediated adverse effects, including nausea or respiratory depression. Here we used a genetic approach to investigate the potential of peripheral mu opioid receptors as targets for pain treatment. We generated conditional knockout (cKO) mice in which mu opioid receptors are deleted specifically in primary afferent Nav1.8-positive neurons. Mutant animals were compared to controls for acute nociception, inflammatory pain, opiate-induced analgesia and constipation. There was a 76% decrease of mu receptor-positive neurons and a 60% reduction of mu-receptor mRNA in dorsal root ganglia of cKO mice. Mutant mice showed normal responses to heat, mechanical, visceral and chemical stimuli, as well as unchanged morphine antinociception and tolerance to antinociception in models of acute pain. Inflammatory pain developed similarly in cKO and controls mice after Complete Freund’s Adjuvant. In the inflammation model, however, opiate-induced (morphine, fentanyl and loperamide) analgesia was reduced in mutant mice as compared to controls, and abolished at low doses. Morphine-induced constipation remained intact in cKO mice. We therefore genetically demonstrate for the first time that mu opioid receptors partly mediate opiate analgesia at the level of Nav1.8-positive sensory neurons. In our study, this mechanism operates under conditions of inflammatory pain, but not nociception. Previous pharmacology suggests that peripheral opiates may be clinically useful, and our data further demonstrate that Nav1.8 neuron-associated mu opioid receptors are feasible targets to alleviate some forms of persistent pain.
Small Ball Probabilities for Linear Images of High-Dimensional Distributions

Author(s): Rudelson, Mark; Vershynin, Roman | Abstract: We study concentration properties of random vectors of the form $AX$, where $X = (X_1, ., X_n)$ has independent coordinates and $A$ is a given matrix. We show that the distribution of $AX$ is well spread in space whenever the distributions of $X_i$ are well spread on the line. Specifically, assume that the probability that $X_i$ falls in any given interval of length $T$ is at most $p$. Then the probability that $AX$ falls in any given ball of radius $T \|A\|_{HS}$ is at most $(Cp)^{0.9 r(A)}$, where $r(A)$ denotes the stable rank of $A$ and $C$ is an absolute constant.
Design of Irregular Repeat-Accumulate Coded Physical-Layer Network Coding for Gaussian Two-Way Relay Channels

This paper addresses the design of irregular repeat accumulate (IRA) codes for coded physical-layer network coding (PNC) for the binary-input Gaussian two-way relay channel, assuming perfect synchronization and equal received power at the relay. The design is based on a nontrivial extension of EXIT-chart based design. Specifically, we analyze the components of the IRA-PNC scheme and propose an approach to model the soft information exchanged between these components. Then, we develop upper and lower bounds on the extrinsic information transfer functions to characterize the iterative process of computing the network-coded information. Based on that, we construct optimized IRA codes to minimize the computation error at the relay. The optimized IRA-PNC has considerable performance improvement over the existing regular RA coded PNC. For a rate 3/4 code, as an example, we observed improvements of 2.6 dB, and the optimized IRA-PNC scheme is only about 1.7 dB away from the capacity upper bound of the Gaussian two-way relay channel.
A 94GHz 3D-image radar engine with 4TX/4RX beamforming scan technique in 65nm CMOS

Millimeter-Wave and sub-THz imaging sensors have been demonstrated in CMOS technology recently. Mechanical scanners are still required to capture the whole image, making the systems bulky and costly. The limited resolution of the third-dimension (z-direction) also leads to a vague 3D picture. Other 2D solutions need not only focal lens, but large chip area to accommodate more pixels. This paper presents a 94GHz 3D image radar with electronic scanning. Using a 4TX/4RX beamforming technique and a modulated time-of-flight (ToF) algorithm, this prototype achieves ±28° scanning range, 2m maximum distance, and 1mm depth resolution with 960mW of power.
Augmented reality during angiography: Integration of a virtual mirror for improved 2D/3D visualization

Visualizing 2D and 3D anatomical information simultaneously within an X-ray image is challenging. Multiple monitors are required in the operating room to enable visualization of anatomical data by the surgeon. Consequently, this results in an interruption during the operation for proper assessment of information. In this paper, we introduce an interactive visualization of the 3D data from new perspectives including visualizing a virtual mirror from the same viewpoint as the X-ray source. The main contribution is our development of a complete angiographic visualization system that displays simultaneous 2D X-ray and 3D anatomical information in a common monitor for the surgeon in the operating room. No previous works have conceived the integration of the virtual mirror into the projection geometry of a C-arm fluoroscope. In total, 24 participants were asked to assess the benefits of the angiographic virtual mirror with different colour-depth encodings. The results of our feasibility study show a clear improvement when deciphering the true positions of aneurysms in X-ray. Lastly, color depth encoding improves correspondence between the 3D vasculature displayed in the virtual mirror to their projection images in X-ray.