Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards effective eye pointing for gaze-enhanced human-computer interaction

In this paper we present some solutions we have devised to improve eye pointing in ordinary PC use. While eye tracking technology has advanced considerably in the last years, several limitations prevent gaze-based interaction from becoming as comfortable and effective as traditional mouse or touchpad input. The proposed approach combines both automatic and manual error correction techniques (namely eye data filtering, virtual magnetization, magnifying glass and cursor manual shift) to allow enhanced exploitation of gaze as an alternative or additional communication channel. Experiments have shown that the approach can provide better performance than touchpad pointing and compares fairly with the mouse.
Effect of Testosterone on Cisplatin-Induced Nephrotoxicity in Surgically Castrated Rats

Background: Cisplatin (CP) is an important antitumor drug with serious side effects such as nephrotoxicity. Estrogens can affect CP-induced nephrotoxicity; however, the role of testosterone (TS), the main male sex hormone, is not clear. Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the effect of TS on CP-induced nephrotoxicity in castrated male rats. Materials and Methods: A total of 54 male Wistar rats were castrated and allocated into eight groups. Groups 1 through 3 respectively received 10, 50, and 100 mg/kg/wk of TS and group 4 received sesame oil for four weeks; then all four groups received 2.5 mg/kg/d CP for one week. Groups 5 through 8 received the same treatment regimen as groups 1 through 4 during first four weeks but instead of CP, they received saline for one week. Then the animals were sacrificed for biochemical and histopathologic studies. Results: CP increased the serum levels of blood urea nitrogen (BUN), creatinine (Cr), and malondialdehyde (SMDA) as well as kidney weight (KW), bodyweight (BW) loss, and kidney tissue damage score (KTDS). It significantly decreased the serum and kidney levels of nitrite and serum level of TS in comparison with the control group (P < 0.05). However, coadministration of CP and low dose of TS significantly decreased the serum levels of BUN as well as Cr and KTDS (P < 0.05). Administration of high-dose TS alone increased the SMDA level, KTDS, and KW while decreased the BW significantly (P < 0.05). Conclusions: It seems that testosterone in low dose, i.e. physiologic dose, protects kidneys against CP-induced nephrotoxicity; however, special care is needed in CP therapy of patients with high levels of TS.
Discussion on Future Research

Our results provide partial support for Basu's rational expectations explanation of 99-cent price endings. No doubt augmenting subjects' between-round feedback would facilitate even more complete convergence to the 99-cent equilibrium. In this section, we will focus on two directions for future research aimed at testing the external validity and robustness of Basu's model. Having shown that the vast majority of sellers arrive at 99-cent price endings with repetition and the appropriate kind of feedback, the remaining question concerns the realism of the hypothesized consumer behavior compared to the more common assumption that consumers simply ignore the cent component altogether. Recently, an analogous debate has emerged in the cognitive psychology literature on the perception and representation of multiple items in a set. Given the visual system's limited capacity for information processing, when the individual views many items at a time, the traditional approach suggests that low-resolution information about each item is encoded; namely, the visual system represents each item with to the psychological models of price endings in which consumers select a lower resolution of each item's price when faced with a large number of items; namely, they accurately encode the dollar component of the price and ignore the cent component. Ariely (2001) has recently formulated an alternative approach to visual processing when confronted with a large number of items and limited processing capacity. He proposes that the visual system decides how to allocate its resources between recording certain properties of the set as a whole and retaining specific features of individual set members. The outcome of this tradeoff may be that the visual system chooses to register accurately certain set properties and to forego the identification of its members. This approach can be likened to Basu's model in which consumers substitute the retention of specific price endings for the mean price ending for all goods under consideration.
Understanding the Impact of Male Circumcision Interventions on the Spread of HIV in Southern Africa

Background Three randomised controlled trials have clearly shown that circumcision of adult men reduces the chance that they acquire HIV infection. However, the potential impact of circumcision programmes – either alone or in combination with other established approaches – is not known and no further field trials are planned. We have used a mathematical model, parameterised using existing trial findings, to understand and predict the impact of circumcision programmes at the population level. Findings Our results indicate that circumcision will lead to reductions in incidence for women and uncircumcised men, as well as those circumcised, but that even the most effective intervention is unlikely to completely stem the spread of the virus. Without additional interventions, HIV incidence could eventually be reduced by 25–35%, depending on the level of coverage achieved and whether onward transmission from circumcised men is also reduced. However, circumcision interventions can act synergistically with other types of prevention programmes, and if efforts to change behaviour are increased in parallel with the scale-up of circumcision services, then dramatic reductions in HIV incidence could be achieved. In the long-term, this could lead to reduced AIDS deaths and less need for anti-retroviral therapy. Any increases in risk behaviours following circumcision , i.e. ‘risk compensation’, could offset some of the potential benefit of the intervention, especially for women, but only very large increases would lead to more infections overall. Conclusions Circumcision will not be the silver bullet to prevent HIV transmission, but interventions could help to substantially protect men and women from infection, especially in combination with other approaches.
Compliant ankles and flat feet for improved self-stabilization and passive dynamics of the biped robot “RunBot”

Biomechanical studies of human walking reveal that compliance plays an important role at least in natural and smooth motions as well as for self-stabilization. Inspired by this, we present here the development of a new lower leg segment of the dynamic biped robot “RunBot”. This new lower leg segment features a compliant ankle connected to a flat foot. It is mainly employed to realize robust self-stabilization in a passive manner. In general, such self-stabilization is achieved through mechanical feedback due to elasticity. Using real-time walking experiments, this study shows that the new lower leg segment improves dynamic walking behavior of the robot in two main respects compared to an old lower leg segment consisting of rigid ankle and curved foot: 1) it provides better self-stabilization after stumbling and 2) it increases passive dynamics during some stages of the gait cycle of the robot; i.e., when the whole robot moves unactuated. As a consequence, a combination of compliance (i.e., the new lower leg segment) and active components (i.e., actuated hip and knee joints) driven by a neural mechanism (i.e., reflexive neural control) enables RunBot to perform robust self-stabilization and at the same time natural, smooth, and energy-efficient walking behavior without high control effort.
Ethanol-Responsive Brain Region Expression Networks: Implications for Behavioral Responses to Acute Ethanol in DBA/2J versus C57BL/6J Mice

Activation of the mesolimbic dopamine reward pathway by acute ethanol produces reinforcement and changes in gene expression that appear to be crucial to the molecular basis for adaptive behaviors and addiction. The inbred mouse strains DBA/2J and C57BL/6J exhibit contrasting acute behavioral responses to ethanol. We used oligonucleotide microarrays and bioinformatics methods to characterize patterns of gene expression in three brain regions of the mesolimbic reward pathway of these strains. Expression profiling included examination of both differences in gene expression 4 h after saline injection or acute ethanol (2 g/kg). Using a rigorous stepwise method for microarray analysis, we identified 788 genes differentially expressed in control DBA/2J versus C57BL/6J mice and 307 ethanol-regulated genes in the nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, and ventral tegmental area. There were strikingly divergent patterns of ethanol-responsive gene expression in the two strains. Ethanol-responsive genes also showed clustering at discrete chromosomal regions, suggesting local chromatin effects in regulation. Ethanol-regulated genes were generally related to neuroplasticity, but regulation of discrete functional groups and pathways was brain region specific: glucocorticoid signaling, neurogenesis, and myelination in the prefrontal cortex; neuropeptide signaling and developmental genes, including factor Bdnf, in the nucleus accumbens; and retinoic acid signaling in the ventral tegmental area. Bioinformatics analysis identified several potential candidate genes for quantitative trait loci linked to ethanol behaviors, further supporting a role for expression profiling in identifying genes for complex traits. Brain region-specific changes in signaling and neuronal plasticity may be critical components in development of lasting ethanol behavioral phenotypes such as dependence, sensitization, and craving.
Comparing selected PSO modifications on CEC 15 benchmark set

In this paper we choose to compare three popular modifications of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) using the recent CEC'15 benchmark set. Three different approaches for PSO modification are compared: the heterogeneous swarm, diversity-guided swarm and orthogonal learning based approach. The goal is to provide up-to date comparison of the performance of these methods on a state-of-art benchmark set and highlight the differences in performance on different types of fitness functions. The experiments were carried out according to CEC benchmark rules and statistically evaluated.
A Method to Detect Accurately Falling Asleep and Awakening Time

So far, approximately 30 kinds of sleep disorders have been raised, and irregular sleep rhythm caused by disturbance of sleep induction and nocturnal awakening is one important factor in lifestyle-related diseases. Therefore, evaluating quality of sleep on a daily basis has a great significance for healthcare. On the other hand, in late years smart phone applications came to be able to record life activity log, mostly physical activity monitoring, and sleep length. However, the method used are mainly based on motion analysis, such sleep length cannot be measured accurately enough. This paper presents a newly proposed method to detect accurately falling asleep and awakening times, towards its application for a new smart clock alarm. Proposed method relies on using a wearable heart rate sensor to extract activity indices of autonomic nervous system calculated from heart rate variability in addition to body motion, and on algorithms that dynamically mine into the sequences of heterogeneous data to identify accurately sleep start and end times.
Incremental increases in economic burden parallels cardiometabolic risk factors in the US

Objective Estimate the economic burden associated with incremental increases in the number of cardiometabolic risk factors (CMRFs) in the US. Methods We used the nationally representative Medical Expenditure Panel Survey from 2010 to 2012 to create a retrospective cohort of people based on the number of CMRFs (one, two, and three or four), and a comparison cohort of people with zero CMRFs. CMRFs included abdominal obesity, elevated blood pressure, elevated triglycerides, and elevated glucose and were defined using diagnostic codes, prescribed medications, and survey responses. Adjusted regression analysis was developed to compare health expenditures, utilization, and lost-productivity differences between the cohorts. Generalized linear regression was used for health care expenditures, and negative binomial regression was used for utilization and productivity, controlling for individual characteristics. Results The number of CMRFs was associated with significantly more annual utilization, health care expenditures, and reduced productivity. As compared with people with zero CMRFs, people with one, two, and three or four CMRFs had 1.15 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.06, 1.24), 1.37 (95% CI: 1.25, 1.51), and 1.39 (95% CI: 1.22, 1.57) times higher expected rate of emergency room visits, respectively. Compared with people with zero CMRFs, people with one, two, and three or four CMRFs had increased incremental health care expenditures of US$417 (95% CI: $70, $763), US$2,326 (95% CI: $1,864, $2,788), and US$4,117 (95% CI: $3,428, $4,807), respectively. Those with three or four CMRFs reported employment of 60%, compared with 80% in patients with zero CMRFs. People with three or four CMFRs had 1.75 (95% CI: 1.42, 2.17) times higher expected rate of days missed at work due to illness, compared with people with zero CMRFs. Conclusion Our findings demonstrate a direct association between economic burden and number of CMRFs. Although this was expected, the increase in burden that was independent from the cost of cardiovascular disease was surprising.
The Design and Implementation of Ontology and Rules Based Knowledge Base for Transportation

The traditional transportation information inquiry mainly uses key words based on texts, and the service the inquiry system provided is one fold and only aims at one transporting means. In addition, the inquiry system lacks the comprehensive transportation inquiry combining water, land and air traffic information; also it lacks semantic level inquiry, bringing users lots of inconvenience. In view of the above questions, we proposed establishing a knowledge base of transportation information based on the OWL ontologies and SWRL rules, which can express the rich semantic knowledge of three dimension transporting means (water, land and air) in formalization. Using the ontologies through kinds, properties, instances and classifications ontologies can express structure knowledge, support knowledge automatic sorting and the instance recognition, so as to provide formal semantics for the description of many concepts involved in the transportation domain and relations between these concepts. Using the SWRL rules can solve problem of insufficient expressivity of ontologies in properties association and operation to provide support for spatial relationships reasoning. In order to make use of these knowledge effectively, we have designed a reasoning system based on the ontologies and rules with the help of Protege and its plug-ins. The system can eliminate ambiguity of the concepts and discover hidden information by reasoning, realizing knowledge and semantic level transportation information inquiry.
Paraphrase for Open Question Answering: New Dataset and Methods

We propose a new open question answering framework for question answering over a knowledge base (KB). Our system uses both a curated KB, Freebase, and one that is extracted automatically by an open information extraction model, IE KB. Our system consists of only one layer of paraphrase, compared to the three layers used in a previous open question answering system (Fader et al., 2014). However, because of the more accurately extracted relation triples in IE KB, combined with linked entities from IE KB to Freebase, our system achieves a 7% absolute gain in F1 score over the previous system.
A language modeling approach to entity recognition and disambiguation for search queries

The Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (ERD) problem refers to the task of recognizing mentions of entities in a given query string, disambiguating them, and mapping them to entities in a given Knowledge Base(KB). If there are multiple ways to interpret the query, then an ERD system is supposed to group candidate entity annotations into consistent interpretations. In this paper, we propose a four step solution to this problem. First, we generate candidate entity strings by segmenting queries in different ways. Second, we retrieve candidate entities by searching for these candidate entity stringsin Freebase. Third, we rank the candidate entities using language model based query likelihood scores. Finally, we group the entity annotations into interpretations. We also present both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our methods based on 91 training, 500 validation and 1000 test queries. Our system achieved an F1 score of 0.42 on the set of validation queries, whereas the NULL baseline which returns no annotations for any query achieved an F1 score of 0.3. Similarly, on the test queries, our method achieved an F1 score of 0.36 and outperformed the NULL baseline which achieved an F1 score of 0.2.
Development of Perception of Weight from Human or Robot Lifting Observation

Human interaction is based, among other factors, on non verbal and implicit communication. By observing the action of someone else we can automatically infer several non obvious details of what's happening, as the goal of the agent, his mood and even some features of the object he is using, e.g., if it is heavy or light. This action reading skill is developed very early in life and constitutes a fundamental basis for the development of collaboration. A similar capacity to implicitly communicate weight would be desirable also in a humanoid robot, to allow for a natural preparation for hand-over between the robot and the human partner. Here we have investigated how the ability to infer weight from human action observation develops during childhood and whether such ability generalizes to the observation of a humanoid robot. In particular, the robot was not programmed to perform human-like lifting actions, but just to replicate a property of human lifting deemed as determinant for weight reading: exhibiting a velocity proportional to object weight. Our results suggest that although 6-year-olds can already judge weight from the observation of a lifting action, they cannot generalize this skill to simplified robotic actions as the ones proposed here.
A HYBRID INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM FOR FACIAL EXPRESSION RECOGNITION

This paper presents an experimental study dealing with facial expression recognition which examines the appropriateness of a hybrid intelligence architecture for subsymbolic to symbolic mapping. The facial expression recognition enhances interactivity and assists human-computer interaction issues, letting the system become accustomed to the current needs and feelings of the user. Actual application of this technology is expected in educational environments, 3D video conferencing and collaborative workplaces, online shopping and gaming, virtual communities and interactive entertainment.
Resilient Extended True-Copy Token Scheme for a Distributed Database System

A new resiliency scheme for a distributed database system with replicated data is presented. One salient feature of the scheme is that it does not employ a log subsystem; hence, it can be used for a highly reliable system that must tolerate a total crash of a site. In addition, the scheme supports system partitioning without any consistency problem. The new scheme is based on a precise treatment of logical data; in particular, a precise definition of resilient system operation is given in terms of logical data.
Embedding SPARQL into XQuery/XSLT

The tree-based languages XQuery and XSLT for XML are widely supported. Many tools do not yet support the new RDF graph query language SPARQL. We propose to embed SPARQL subqueries into XQuery/XSLT, such that XQuery and XSLT benefit from the graph query language constructs of SPARQL, and SPARQL benefits from features of XQuery/XSLT, which SPARQL does not support. The embedding enables XQuery/XSLT tools to handle at the same time XML queries and SPARQL subqueries, and XML and RDF data.
PSCAN: A Parallel Structural Clustering Algorithm for Big Networks in MapReduce

Big data such as complex networks with over millions of vertices and edges is infeasible to process using conventional computation. MapReduce is a programming model that empowers us to analyze big data in a cluster of computers. In this paper we propose a Parallel Structural Clustering Algorithm for big Networks (PSCAN) in MapReduce for the detection of clusters or community structures in big networks such as Twitter. PSCAN is based on the structural clustering algorithm of SCAN, which not only finds cluster accurately, but also identifies vertices playing special roles such as hubs and outliers. An empirical evaluation of PSCAN using both real and synthetic networks demonstrated an outstanding performance in terms of accuracy and running time. We analyzed a Twitter network with over 40 million users and 1.4 billion follower/following relationships by using PSCAN on a Hadoop cluster with 15 computers. The result shows that PSCAN successfully detected interesting communities of people who share common interests.
International Conference on Information Systems ( ICIS ) 2009 IT and Eco-sustainability : Developing and Validating a Green IT Readiness Model

Green Information Technology (IT) is emerging as an increasingly important issue as organizations come under pressure to address environmental sustainability concerns. Despite increased attention from business, government and more recently, Information Systems (IS) researchers, a measure to determine the capability of organizations to Green their IT remains elusive. The purpose of this paper is to develop a Green IT Readiness (G-readiness) model, identify its key dimensions and develop a reliable and valid instrument to operationalize it. The validity of the proposed model is tested using structural equation modeling based on data collected from a cross-sectional and cross-country survey of Chief Information Officers and other IT managers. The study makes an original contribution to the IS literature in an area that is attracting increasing managerial attention yet lacking in research, that is, the interaction between IT and eco-
Probabilistic outlier removal for robust landmark identification in stereo vision based SLAM

We consider the problem of performing simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) with a stereo vision sensor, where image features are matched and triangulated for use as 3D landmarks. We explain how we obtain 3D landmark measurements and derive a Gaussian noise model for these measurements. We then argue that the classic way of removing outliers from stereo image features, by estimating fundamental matrices, has limitations. We propose instead the use of a probabilistic measure in determining consensus sets of hypotheses generated in a RANSAC framework. In order to test the performance of this approach we incorporate it into an EKF SLAM system, which is notorious for its sensitivity to landmark mismatches. We measure the accuracy achieved on outdoor datasets, using DGPS as ground truth, and compare it to two other standard SLAM algorithms. We find that the proposed system outperforms the others significantly.