Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Face to virtual face

The first virtual humans appeared in the early 1980s in such films as Dreamflight (1982) and The Juggler (1982). Pioneering work in the ensuing period focused on realistic appearance in the simulation of virtual humans. In the 1990s, the emphasis has shifted to real-time animation and interaction in virtual worlds. Virtual humans have begun to inhabit virtual worlds and so have we. To prepare our place in the virtual world we first develop techniques for the automatic representation of a human face capable of being animated in real time using both video and audio input. The objective is for one's representative to look, talk, and behave like oneself in the virtual world. Furthermore, the virtual inhabitants of this world should be able to see our avatars and to react to what we say and to the emotions we convey. We sketch an overview of the problems related to the analysis and synthesis of face-to-virtual-face communication in a virtual world. We describe different components of our system for real-time interaction and communication between a cloned face representing a real person and an autonomous virtual face. It provides an insight into the various problems and gives particular solutions adopted in reconstructing a virtual clone capable of reproducing the shape and movements of the real person's face. It includes the analysis of the facial expression and speech of the cloned face, which can be used to elicit a response from the autonomous virtual human with both verbal and nonverbal facial movements synchronized with the audio voice.
The Pale Shades of Emotion: A Signal Detection Theory Analysis of the Emotional Stroop Task

th , 2012; revised May 1 st , 2012; accepted May 29 th , 2012 In the emotional Stroop effect (ESE), people are slower to name the ink color of negative, emotion-laden words than that of neutral words. Two accounts have been suggested for the ESE, relating it to either deficient attention to color or to temporary disruption of action in the face of threat. Is the ESE driven by a threat-produced change in perception, or is it a strategic bias in responding? In a pioneer import of Signal Detection Theory to this realm, threat was found to diminish the psychological distance (d') between the ink colors, but it did not impact response bias (). The results indicate that the ESE derives from a deep perceptual change engendered by the negative stimuli and not from changes in the criterion for responding. These results constrain future theorizing in the domain of emotion-produced changes in behavior, and provide some support for the threat account of attention under emotion.
Pyocin R1 inhibits active transport in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and depolarizes membrane potential

Pyocin R1, a bacteriocin of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, inhibited active transport of proline in the presence of high concentrations of malate and magnesium salt. Pyocin R1 did not affect the respiration of sensitive cells nor induce cell lysis, but it caused a decrease in the intracellular ATP level. In addition, a passive inflow of [14C]thiocyanate anion, a probe of membrane potential, was induced by pyocin R1, showing a depolarization of the cytoplasmic membrane. It is considered that membrane depolarization is a primary action of pyocin R1.
Economic Trends and Cycles in Crime: A Study for England and Wales

Summary This paper models cyclical behaviour in property crime series (burglary and theft) in relation to the macroeconomic activity indicators in England and Wales in the period from 1955 to 2001. Using unobserved components (UC) time series models, univariate time series analysis suggests that recorded burglary (theft) data is subject to stochastic cycle processes with typical business cycle frequencies of approximately 5 and 10 years. In the multivariate UC time series framework, recorded burglary (theft) is simultaneously modelled in a trivariate model, together with unemployment and real GDP time series. We also estimate a five-variate model, where we simultaneously model burglary, theft, unemployment, real GDP, and police variables. Some interesting findings in these analyses are: (i) observed cyclical behaviour in recorded property crime is almost fully determined by the economic business cycles; (ii) explanatory variables such as sentence length, imprisonment and conviction rates affect the short-term dynamics more than the long-term dynamics; (iii) motivational and opportunity effects between macroeconomic and crime time series can be distinguished in our modelling framework.
Identification of short-form RON as a novel intrinsic resistance mechanism for anti-MET therapy in MET-positive gastric cancer

Despite the promising results from initial studies, there are significant limitations in the application of MET-targeted therapy in gastric cancer. Intrinsic resistance is one of the major obstacles. The aim of this study is to identify the responsible receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) that determine the unresponsiveness of MET inhibitor in MET-positive gastric cancer. through an RNA-interference-based functional screen targeting most human RTKs, we identified that activation of the fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 (FGFR2) and recepteur d'origine nantais (RON) pathways attenuated MET inhibitor-induced suppression of cell proliferation and migration. Notably, in the two forms of RON pathway activation, only upregulation of short-form RON (sf-RON), but not stimulation of full length RON with macrophage stimulating protein, conferred MET inhibitor resistance in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, the profile of the gastric cancer samples observed that sf-RON was frequently upregulated in MET-positive gastric cancer. Our findings indicate that activation of the sf-RON signaling pathway represents a novel mechanism underlying MET inhibitor unresponsiveness. A combination strategy with drugs targeting both RON and MET pathways is believed to improve the efficacy of MET-targeted therapy.
FIVA: Functional Information Viewer and Analyzer extracting biological knowledge from transcriptome data of prokaryotes

UNLABELLED FIVA (Function Information Viewer and Analyzer) aids researchers in the prokaryotic community to quickly identify relevant biological processes following transcriptome analysis. Our software assists in functional profiling of large sets of genes and generates a comprehensive overview of affected biological processes. AVAILABILITY http://bioinformatics.biol.rug.nl/standalone/fiva/
Performance Analysis of Multi User MIMO System with Block-Diagonalization Precoding Scheme

As the demand of high quality service in next generation wireless communication systems, a high performance of data transmission requires an increase of spectrum efficiency and an improvement of error performance in wireless communication systems. In this paper, we propose a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system with cyclic delay diversity and block diagonalization precoding method to improve system capacity with maintaining good error performance for 802.11n WLAN system. The results of mathlab simulation show the improvement of system capacity in 802.11n wireless indoor channel environment.
A Semantic model for building integrated Ontology databases

Ontology database is a most comprehensive data base application that collects the related information from multiple data sources about any topic. Allowing multiple data sources into the database involves collection of irrelevant and redundant data. It leads to high memory utilization and more processing time. The user may be able to access the relevant data using appropriate software tools. In this paper a new Semantic model ontology Database Architectural framework is proposed to implement the Ontology databases efficiently. The proposed work actually concentrates on RDF-ization for converting the XML Records to RDF Records, so that the entire data can be stored into a triple store database. For efficient storage, triple store uses vertical partitioning algorithm for storing data in searchable format. It converts the entire data into indexes and keywords. Meta Search Engine Algorithm is used to retrieve the required result. It separates the fake data and original data and enables the user to access the data effectively.
Bilingual Education In Indonesia: Between Idealism and the Reality

Today English plays an important role in the development of education. In response to advances and develops the education in this globalization era, English bridges communication among people around the world. The ability to communicate in English becomes crucial. The development in education as an impact of globalization significantly influence the process of teaching and learning concept. Bilingual education becomes necessary, it can stimulate the cognitive ability especially on cognitive function, it can also motivate the bilingual program. Education as a conscious effort to build and develop the quality of human resources and one popular education system promote bilingual education becomes a choice by parents. Using bilingual education become popular and be needed. Indonesian educational policies see this phenomenon as a new modern solution to be practiced in Indonesia's education system for many years. For these reasons, the purpose of writing this library research article paper is to elaborate and give understanding about bilingual eduacation in Indonesia for certain time. The article start with the differences between bilingual and bilingualism, the relation of the bilingual process with executive function, the practice of bilingual education in Indonesia compared by the national standardized school, the challenges and solutions concerning the policy and practices in language teaching and learning focused on bilingual education in Indonesia. The present article employ a descriptive qualitative approach from reputable references which is relevant to the topics.
Combining LVCSR and vocabulary-independent ranked utterance retrieval for robust speech search

Well tuned Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) has been shown to generally be more effective than vocabulary-independent techniques for ranked retrieval of spoken content when one or the other approach is used alone. Tuning LVCSR systems to a topic domain can be costly, however, and the experiments in this paper show that Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) query terms can significantly reduce retrieval effectiveness when that tuning is not performed. Further experiments demonstrate, however, that retrieval effectiveness for queries with OOV terms can be substantially improved by combining evidence from LVCSR with additional evidence from vocabulary-independent Ranked Utterance Retrieval (RUR). The combination is performed by using relevance judgments from held-out topics to learn generic (i.e., topic-independent), smooth, non-decreasing transformations from LVCSR and RUR system scores to probabilities of topical relevance. Evaluated using a CLEF collection that includes topics, spontaneous conversational speech audio, and relevance judgments, the system recovers 57% of the mean uninterpolated average precision that could have been obtained through LVCSR domain tuning for very short queries (or 41% for longer queries).
A least square approach for the detection and removal of outliers for fuzzy linear regressions

Fuzzy linear analysis may lead to an incorrect interpretation of data in case of being incapable of dealing with outliers. Both basic probabilistic and least squares approaches are sensitive to outliers. In order to detect the outliers in data, we propose a two stage least squares approach which in contrast to the other proposed methods in the literature does not have any user defined variables. In the first stage of this approach, the outliers are detected and the clean dataset is prepared and then in the second stage a model is sought to fit the clean dataset. In both the first and second phases, the minimization of the model fitting measurement is achieved with hybrid optimization which gives us the flexibility of using any type of a model fitting measure regardless of being continuous or differentiable.
Shallow vs. Deep Techniques for Handling Linguistic Constraints and Optimisations

An important aspect of many nlg systems is ensuring that all generated texts obey linguistic constraints and are (near-)optimal under linguistic quality measures. Where they are possible, deep techniques can automate the enforcement of linguistic constraints and optimisations. In contrast, shallow techniques require developers to explicitly enforce constraints and optimisations. Deep techniques therefore ooer the potential of improving system robustness and decreasing development time. Unfortunately, deep techniques cannot be used for many types of optimisations and constraints because of gaps in our understanding of linguistic phenomena, or because the necessary software would be very expensive to create. This discussion is illustrated by examining where deep and shallow techniques are used in the stop system, which produces personalised smoking cessation leaaets.
Essays in networks and applied microeconomic theory

This thesis contains three papers which examine the role of networks and social structure in different modes of socio-economic interactions. The first chapter focuses on purely competitive strategic bilateral interactions contests. I analyse situations in which agents, embedded in a network, simultaneously play interrelated bilateral contest games with their neighbours. The network structure uniquely determines the behaviour of agents in the equilibrium. I also study the formation of such networks, finding that the complete k-partite network is the unique stable network topology. This implies that agents will endogenously sort themselves in partitions of friends, competing with members of other partitions. The model provides a micro-foundation for the structural balance concept in social psychology, and the main results go in line with theoretical and empirical findings from other disciplines, including international relations, sociology and biology. The second chapter is joint work with my supervisor Fernando Vega-Redondo. We study a competitive equilibrium model on a production network of firms, identifying the measure of centrality in the network that determines the profit of a firm, and network structures that maximize social welfare. The significant part of this chapter focuses on how the network mediates the effects of revenue distortions on profits of firms and social welfare. The results are that the effects of distortions propagate both upstream and downstream through the network. The centrality of the affected firm determines the magnitude of the downstream effect, and the upstream effect is determined by the intercentralities of suppliers of the affected firm. Increasing the density of the network by adding links has a non-monotonic effect on welfare. Adopting a more complex production technology can increase but also decrease the profit of a firm, depending on the network structure; while finding a new buyer will always increase the profit of a firm. In the third paper I analyse the interaction between formal legal enforcement of cooperation and the role of reputation in a heterogeneous population. By choosing to cooperate, even when the quality of the formal institution is not high, an agent signals that he has high work ethics, thereby earning reputation as a better match for future interactions. When there is reputation benefit, the welfare-maximizing quality of the enforcement institution is generally not the one that maximizes cooperation. Depending on the distribution of types in society, the effect of the increase in quality of enforcement on cooperation can be crowded in or crowded out by reputation concerns. When the institutional quality is determined endogenously, the equilibrium quality of the institution will generically be higher than the optimal quality.
Motion prediction of human upper body by tracking reflective markers on a moving body

Measurement of human motion is widely required for various applications, and a significant part of this task is to identify motion in the process of human motion recognition. There are several application purposes of doing this research such as in surveillance, entertainment, medical treatment and traffic applications as user interfaces that require the recognition of different parts of human body to identify an action or a motion. The most challenging task in human motion recognition is the ability and reliability of the motion capture system to track and recognize dynamic movements because human body structure has many degree of freedom. This paper introduces the 3D motion analysis of human upper body using an optical motions capture system for the purpose of gesture recognition.
Examining the Evolving Ethical Environment within the House of Representatives

OF THE THESIS EXAMINING THE EVOLVING ETHICAL ENVIRONMENT WITHIN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES By Christopher Bruce Ehle American Public University System, April 27, 2014 Charles Town, West Virginia Professor Christi Bartman, Thesis Professor This study compares and contrasts ethics cases in the House of Representatives in two different time periods: 1798-1966 and 1967-2004. The purpose of this is to establish whether or not the formation of a permanent Ethics Committee in the House in 1967 and the following Congressional reform movement are acting as mediating variables causing a sharp increase in conduct cases being brought before the House since 1967. To do this, the exact number and types of ethics cases in the House will be taken from a historical summary prepared by the House, which lists all ethics cases officially recorded for the time periods listed. Findings suggest that there is indeed a strong correlation between the formation of the Ethics Committee and the Congressional reform movement, and a dramatic increase in ethics cases brought before the House. Additionally, there is evidence that media exposure and the purely political aspects of the ethics process are further contributing to an increase in ethics cases in the House after 1967.
Easing the Smart Home: Semi-automatic Adaptation in Perceptive Environments

This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, (project TIN2004-03140) and by U.A. M-Grupo Santander (project Itech Calli), and is part of the UAM-SOLUZIONA AmI Laboratory research program. Special thanks to Eran Eden and Manuel Freire for their recommendations.
Estimating deformations of isotropic Gaussian random fields on the plane

This paper presents a new approach to the estimation of the deformation of an isotropic Gaussian random field on R 2 based on dense observations of a single realization of the deformed random field. Under this framework we investigate the identification and estimation of deformations. We then present a complete methodological package-from model assumptions to algorithmic recovery of the deformation-for the class of nonstationary processes obtained by deforming isotropic Gaussian random fields.
Influences on the Design and Purification of Soluble, Recombinant Native-Like HIV-1 Envelope Glycoprotein Trimers

ABSTRACT We have investigated factors that influence the production of native-like soluble, recombinant trimers based on the env genes of two isolates of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), specifically 92UG037.8 (clade A) and CZA97.012 (clade C). When the recombinant trimers based on the env genes of isolates 92UG037.8 and CZA97.012 were made according to the SOSIP.664 design and purified by affinity chromatography using broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) against quaternary epitopes (PGT145 and PGT151, respectively), the resulting trimers are highly stable and they are fully native-like when visualized by negative-stain electron microscopy. They also have a native-like (i.e., abundant) oligomannose glycan composition and display multiple bNAb epitopes while occluding those for nonneutralizing antibodies. In contrast, uncleaved, histidine-tagged Foldon (Fd) domain-containing gp140 proteins (gp140UNC-Fd-His), based on the same env genes, very rarely form native-like trimers, a finding that is consistent with their antigenic and biophysical properties and glycan composition. The addition of a 20-residue flexible linker (FL20) between the gp120 and gp41 ectodomain (gp41ECTO) subunits to make the uncleaved 92UG037.8 gp140-FL20 construct is not sufficient to create a native-like trimer, but a small percentage of native-like trimers were produced when an I559P substitution in gp41ECTO was also present. The further addition of a disulfide bond (SOS) to link the gp120 and gp41 subunits in the uncleaved gp140-FL20-SOSIP protein increases native-like trimer formation to ∼20 to 30%. Analysis of the disulfide bond content shows that misfolded gp120 subunits are abundant in uncleaved CZA97.012 gp140UNC-Fd-His proteins but very rare in native-like trimer populations. The design and stabilization method and the purification strategy are, therefore, all important influences on the quality of trimeric Env proteins and hence their suitability as vaccine components. IMPORTANCE Soluble, recombinant multimeric proteins based on the HIV-1 env gene are current candidate immunogens for vaccine trials in humans. These proteins are generally designed to mimic the native trimeric envelope glycoprotein (Env) that is the target of virus-neutralizing antibodies on the surfaces of virions. The underlying hypothesis is that an Env-mimetic protein may be able to induce antibodies that can neutralize the virus broadly and potently enough for a vaccine to be protective. Multiple different designs for Env-mimetic trimers have been put forth. Here, we used the CZA97.012 and 92UG037.8 env genes to compare some of these designs and determine which ones best mimic virus-associated Env trimers. We conclude that the most widely used versions of CZA97.012 and 92UG037.8 oligomeric Env proteins do not resemble the trimeric Env glycoprotein on HIV-1 viruses, which has implications for the design and interpretation of ongoing or proposed clinical trials of these proteins.
Donors, Rights-Based Approaches And Implications For Global Citizenship: A Case Study From Peru

How far can foreign governments go in supporting the realization of the rights of citizens of other countries? The country programmes of most bilateral aid agencies are hesitating to move from declaration to implementation of rights-based approaches. Nevertheless, innovation and enterprise flourish on the margins of the mainstream. It is here we must look for efforts to put declarations into practice. This chapter explores the challenges and risks facing a foreign aid agency when it seeks to do so. Based on interviews with the staff concerned, and illustrated with four examples from a broader range of efforts, this is the story of a small country office on the periphery of a large bilateral international aid programme: the Peru office of the UK Department for International Development (DFID). In each and every aspect of their work, the Peru team consistently takes a rights-based approach to an extent that I have not met anywhere else in DFID. The team’s effort reveals difficult issues concerning the legitimacy of action: the practice of power and lines of accountability. Illuminating these dilemmas and challenges may help development agencies contribute to an inclusive world order based on transnational notions of rights and social justice.