Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combining shape regression model and isophotes curvature information for eye center localization

The localization of eye centers technique is used in several applications. In this paper, we combine the face shape model to eye center location method to obtaining robustness in eye center localization from a low-resolution image. We make use of shape regression approach and combine it to the eye-center localization using isophote curvature features which has shown its advantage from previous work. In the experiments, we use BioID datasets to test our approach for accurate eye center location and robustness to changes in illumination and pose. We demonstrate that our approach can achieve an improvement of the robustness of eye center localization while the accuracy at eye center localization e≤0.1 and e≤0.15 have achieve 0.918 and 0.977 respectively.
Results of Microfracture in the Osteoarthritic Knee with Focal Full-Thickness Articular Cartilage Defects and Concomitant Medial Meniscal Tears

Purpose To evaluate the efficacy of arthroscopic microfracture in patients with focal full-thickness cartilage defects in the osteoarthritic knee. Materials and Methods Seventy-six patients were enrolled in this study. They were divided into group I (n=38) who underwent microfracture plus meniscectomy and group II (n=38) who underwent only meniscectomy. Clinical and radiological evaluations were performed. Results At the time of the three-year follow-up, a total of five failures (6.6%) were reported: four patients in group I and one in group II. The two groups showed no significant difference in the Lysholm score, the Tegner activity score and the visual analog pain scale score at three years after surgery. However, at the time of the three-month follow-up, group II showed significantly more improvement in the Tegner activity and the visual analog pain score compared with group I. Conclusions In the osteoarthritic knee, additional microfracture did not confer any additional benefit to meniscectomy.
Using Selectional Profile Distance to Detect Verb Alternations

We propose a new method for detecting verb alternations, by comparing the probability distributions over WordNet classes occurring in two potentially alternating argument positions. Existing distance measures compute only the distributional distance, and do not take into account the semantic similarity between WordNet senses across the distributions. Our method compares two probability distributions over WordNet by measuring the semantic distance of the component nodes, weighted by their probability. To incorporate semantic similarity, we calculate the (dis)similarity between two probability distributions as a weighted distance "travelled" from one to the other through the WordNet hierarchy. We evaluate the measure on the causative alternation, and find that overall it outperforms existing distance measures.
New technique of sample preparation for 3DIC micro_bumps observation

Two new preparation methods of silicon substrates in the observation of micro-joint and micro-bumps failure mode were proposed in this study. One method is to use tilted grinding on 3DIC substrate to navigate the failed micro-joints. The other method can provide wider cross-section range by using ion polishing system studied in iST.
Mixing of the Glauber dynamics for the ferromagnetic Potts model

We present several results on the mixing time of the Glauber dynamics for sampling from the Gibbs distribution in the ferromagnetic Potts model. At a fixed temperature and interaction strength, we study the interplay between the maximum degree (Δ) of the underlying graph and the number of colours or spins (q) in determining whether the dynamics mixes rapidly or not. We find a lower bound L on the number of colours such that Glauber dynamics is rapidly mixing if at least L colours are used. We give a closely‐matching upper bound U on the number of colours such that with probability that tends to 1, the Glauber dynamics mixes slowly on random Δ‐regular graphs when at most U colours are used. We show that our bounds can be improved if we restrict attention to certain types of graphs of maximum degree Δ, e.g. toroidal grids for Δ = 4. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg. , 48, 21–52, 2016
Antiallodynic effects of alpha lipoic acid in an optimized RR-EAE mouse model of MS-neuropathic pain are accompanied by attenuation of upregulated BDNF-TrkB-ERK signaling in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord

Neuropathic pain may affect patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) even in early disease. In an experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE)‐mouse model of MS, chronic alpha lipoic acid (ALA) treatment reduced clinical disease severity, but MS‐neuropathic pain was not assessed. Hence, we investigated the pain‐relieving efficacy and mode of action of ALA using our optimized relapsing‐remitting (RR)‐EAE mouse model of MS‐associated neuropathic pain. C57BL/6 mice were immunized with MOG35‐55 and adjuvants (Quil A and pertussis toxin) to induce RR‐EAE; sham‐mice received adjuvants only. RR‐EAE mice received subcutaneous ALA (3 or 10 mg kg−1 day−1) or vehicle for 21 days (15–35 d.p.i.; [days postimmunization]); sham‐mice received vehicle. Hindpaw hypersensitivity was assessed blinded using von Frey filaments. Following euthanasia (day 35 d.p.i.), lumbar spinal cords were removed for immunohistochemical and molecular biological assessments. Fully developed mechanical allodynia in the bilateral hindpaws of vehicle‐treated RR‐EAE mice was accompanied by marked CD3+ T‐cell infiltration, microglia activation, and increased brain‐derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)‐tyrosine kinase B (TrkB) signaling in the dorsal horn of the lumbar spinal cord. Consequently, phospho‐ERK, a marker of central sensitization in neuropathic pain, was upregulated in the spinal dorsal horn. Importantly, hindpaw hypersensitivity was completely attenuated in RR‐EAE mice administered ALA at 10 mg kg−1 day−1 but not 3 mg kg−1 day−1. The antiallodynic effect of ALA (10 mg kg−1 day−1) was associated with a marked reduction in the aforementioned spinal dorsal horn markers to match their respective levels in the vehicle‐treated sham‐mice. Our findings suggest that ALA at 10 mg kg−1 day−1 produced its antiallodynic effects in RR‐EAE mice by reducing augmented CD3+ T‐cell infiltration and BDNF‐TrkB‐ERK signaling in the spinal dorsal horn.
Underwater Acoustic Wireless Sensor Networks: Advances and Future Trends in Physical, MAC and Routing Layers

This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research on underwater wireless sensor networks, focusing on the lower layers of the communication stack, and envisions future trends and challenges. It analyzes the current state-of-the-art on the physical, medium access control and routing layers. It summarizes their security threads and surveys the currently proposed studies. Current envisioned niches for further advances in underwater networks research range from efficient, low-power algorithms and modulations to intelligent, energy-aware routing and medium access control protocols.
Conditional random pattern algorithm for LOH inference and segmentation

MOTIVATION Loss of heterozygosity (LOH) is one of the most important mechanisms in the tumor evolution. LOH can be detected from the genotypes of the tumor samples with or without paired normal samples. In paired sample cases, LOH detection for informative single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) is straightforward if there is no genotyping error. But genotyping errors are always unavoidable, and there are about 70% non-informative SNPs whose LOH status can only be inferred from the neighboring informative SNPs. RESULTS This article presents a novel LOH inference and segmentation algorithm based on the conditional random pattern (CRP) model. The new model explicitly considers the distance between two neighboring SNPs, as well as the genotyping error rate and the heterozygous rate. This new method is tested on the simulated and real data of the Affymetrix Human Mapping 500K SNP arrays. The experimental results show that the CRP method outperforms the conventional methods based on the hidden Markov model (HMM). AVAILABILITY Software is available upon request.
Contourlet Retrieval System Using Absolute Mean and Kurtosis Features

To improve the retrieval rate of contourlet transform retrieval system,a new contourlet retrieval system was proposed.The feature vectors were constructed by cascading the absolute mean energy and kurtosis of each sub-band contourlet coefficients and the similarity measure used here is Canberra distance. Experimental results on 109 brodatz texture images show that using the features cascaded by absolute mean and kurtosis can lead to a higher retrieval rate than the combination of standard deviation and absolute mean which is most commonly used today under same dimension of feature vectors.
PhD subject : Supporting automatic change integration Laboratory

Branching, in software development, is the process of creating a copy of a code base for the purpose of modifying it in some way. Branching inevitably raises the issue of merging. Changes made in one branch may need to be propagated to the others. Merging, however, poses substantial challenges. A common issue, particularly relevant to systems software, such as Linux, is that within a single branch, developers often create new code by copying existing code that is expected to have a similar intent, and possibly modifying it slightly according to its new context. A change that applies to the original code is likely to be relevant to the clones as well, even when the original code has been deleted in the current branch. The objective of this thesis is to provide a methodology to identify such code clones in the di erent branches between which changes have to be propagated and integrated. This thesis will provide analyses and tools for identifying code clones and supporting automatic change integration.
Mining context-related sequential patterns for recommendation systems

A typical recommendation system answers such questions as what are the interesting items for the current user. Most traditional recommendation systems have not taken the situational information into account when making recommendations, which seriously limits their effectiveness in the ubiquitous computing application environment, where a user's request is generally related to, and a system's response should be dependent on, a specified context (e.g., a specific place, time slot, noise level, or temperature range). In this paper we propose a context-aware recommendation approach to enhance the performance of recommenders. This approach is characterized by a novel sequential pattern mining algorithm that can efficiently mine and group patterns by context.
Biofilms and Planktonic Cells of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Have Similar Resistance to Killing by Antimicrobials

ABSTRACT Biofilms are considered to be highly resistant to antimicrobial agents. Strictly speaking, this is not the case—biofilms do not grow in the presence of antimicrobials any better than do planktonic cells. Biofilms are indeed highly resistant to killing by bactericidal antimicrobials, compared to logarithmic-phase planktonic cells, and therefore exhibit tolerance. It is assumed that biofilms are also significantly more tolerant than stationary-phase planktonic cells. A detailed comparative examination of tolerance of biofilms versus stationary- and logarithmic-phase planktonic cells with four different antimicrobial agents was performed in this study. Carbenicillin appeared to be completely ineffective against both stationary-phase cells and biofilms. Killing by this β-lactam antibiotic depends on rapid growth, and this result confirms the notion of slow-growing biofilms resembling the stationary state. Ofloxacin is a fluoroquinolone antibiotic that kills nongrowing cells, and biofilms and stationary-phase cells were comparably tolerant to this antibiotic. The majority of cells in both populations were eradicated at low levels of ofloxacin, leaving a fraction of essentially invulnerable persisters. The bulk of the population in both biofilm and stationary-phase cultures was tolerant to tobramycin. At very high tobramycin concentrations, a fraction of persister cells became apparent in stationary-phase culture. Stationary-phase cells were more tolerant to the biocide peracetic acid than were biofilms. In general, stationary-phase cells were somewhat more tolerant than biofilms in all of the cases examined. We concluded that, at least forPseudomonas aeruginosa, one of the model organisms for biofilm studies, the notion that biofilms have greater resistance than do planktonic cells is unwarranted. We further suggest that tolerance to antibiotics in stationary-phase or biofilm cultures is largely dependent on the presence of persister cells.
The Effects of Multiple Social Categories on

AbstractThis study examined some of the cognitive processes underlying stereotyping,as well as the effects of multiple social categories in impression formation.Phase 1 of the study assessed stereotypes (if males, females, 20 year olds, 70year olds, French Canadians and English Canadians in a sample of 60 under-graduates. The results demonstrated that stereotype judgements were relativelyautomatic in that they were made more quickly than non-stereotype judge-ments. Phase 2 of the study examined the impressions formed of "individuals"who were simultaneously identified in terms of gender, age and ethnicity.These individuals tended to be perceived in terms of their gender and age;moreover, this effect was more pronounced on stereotype traits thannon-stereotype traits. Phase 3 examined subjects' memory for the individuals,and it was found that memory was better for age and gender than forethnicity, and that speed for making such judgements followed the samepattern. While the results support the view that individuals are perceived interms of stereotypes, they suggest that certain salient categories will be moreinfluential in a particular context.ResumeCette etude se penche sur certains processus cognitifs qui sous-tendent lesstereotypes ainsi que sur les effets de categories sociales multiples dans laformation des impressions. Dans une premiere etape, l'etude a evalue lesstereotypes chez des sujets masculins et feminins, ages de 20 et de 70 ans,Canadicns et Canadiennes francophones et anglophones dans un echantillonde 60 etudiants de premier cycle. Les resultats reVelent que les jugements parstereotypes sont relativement automatiques en ce sens qu'ils se forment plusrapidement que les jugements non fondes sur les stereotypes. Dans uneseconde etape, on a etudie les impressions formees sur des «individus»identifies simultanement en fonction de leur sexe, de leur age et de leurappartenance ethnique. Ces individus etaient surtout percus en fonction deleur sexe et de leur age; de plus, cet effet 6tait davantage prononce pour lestraits psychologiques stereotypes que pour les traits non stereotypes. Unetroisieme etape a consiste a examiner le souvenir que conservaient les sujetsdes individus. On a constate que le souvenir etait plus marque pour lesCanadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 1995, 27:4, 466-483
Canaloplasty in Open-Angle Glaucoma Surgery: A Four-Year Follow-Up

Canaloplasty is a new nonperforating surgical technique for open-angle glaucoma, in which a microcatheter is inserted within Schlemm's canal for the entire 360 degrees. A 10-0 prolene suture, which is tied to the distal tip of the microcatheter, is then positioned and left tensioned in Schlemm's canal, thus facilitating aqueous outflow through natural pathways. A small amount of viscoelastic agent is delivered in Schlemm's canal while the catheter is withdrawn. The mid-term results are very promising. Based on our cohort of 214 patients, the percentages of eyes that obtained postoperative IOP ≤ 21 mmHg, ≤18 mmHg, and ≤16 mmHg with or without medical therapy after 2 and 3 years were 88.7%, 73.7%, and 46.2% (2 years); 86.2%, 58.6%, and 37.9% (3 years), respectively. The most frequent complications observed included hyphema; descemet membrane detachment; IOP spikes; and hypotony. The advantages of canaloplasty over trabeculectomy include (1) no subconjunctival bleb; (2) no need for antimetabolites; (3) fewer postoperative complications; and (4) a simplified follow-up. The disadvantages include the following: (1) a long and rather steep surgical learning curve; (2) the need of specific instruments; (3) average postoperative IOP levels tend not to be very low; and (4) impossibility to perform the entire procedure in some cases.
Embedded implementation of modular closed-loop control of diabetes and in silico validation

Modular closed-loop control has been demonstrated to be a very promising way to treat diabetes disease: PC-based systems running this type of algorithm have been successfully tested in clinical trials [1]. In order to allow the introduction of this kind of approach for the control of diabetes in the so called “Artificial Pancreas” wearable devices, an embedded implementation of the algorithm must respect specific and strict constraints in terms of computational power and memory footprint. In this paper we introduce the architecture of an embedded solution for closed-loop control of diabetes. In addition, we provide details about the implementation, memory requirements and needed computational power. We also validate the embedded algorithm via in silico pre-clinical trials demonstrating the feasibility of using modular closed-loop control of diabetes in a wearable system.
Dok1 and Dok2 proteins regulate natural killer cell development and function

Natural killer (NK) cells are involved in immune responses against tumors and microbes. NK‐cell activation is regulated by intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms that ensure NK tolerance and efficacy. Here, we show that the cytoplasmic signaling molecules Dok1 and Dok2 are tyrosine phosphorylated upon NK‐cell activation. Overexpression of Dok proteins in human NK cells reduces cell activation induced by NK‐cell‐activating receptors. Dok1 and Dok2 gene ablation in mice induces an NK‐cell maturation defect and leads to increased IFN‐γ production induced by activating receptors. Taken together, these results reveal that Dok1 and Dok2 proteins are involved in an intrinsic negative feedback loop downstream of NK‐cell‐activating receptors in mouse and human.
Fault tolerant synchronization of a general complex network with random delay against network coupling faults

A fault tolerant synchronization strategy is proposed to synchronize a complex network with random time delays and coupling faults in this paper. Random time delays over the network transmission are described by using Markov chains. The coupling fault occurs when a sensor is disabled. Based on the Lyapunov stability theory and stochastic analysis, a novel passive fault tolerant synchronization strategy is derived when some sensors are out of work. The criterion of fault tolerant synchronization is described in the form of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, a numerical simulation is carried out and the results show the validity of the proposed fault tolerant synchronization controller.
Emergence of Proto-Object Representations via Fixations in Low-Resolution

One prominent feature of our visual system is that the fovea - the highest-resolution portion of the retina - only occupies two visual degrees, while the remaining portion of the retina (parafovea and periphery) are mainly in low-resolution. Therefore, before we make a saccadic eye movement, the potential fixation target is usually located in parafovea or periphery and is perceived in low-resolution. In this work, we present a computational framework based on convolutional neural network (CNN) to model this selective visual attention mechanism. By training the network with low-resolution inputs on potential fixation targets and non-salient locations, we find that proto-object representations emerge as a natural outcome for saliency prediction. These proto-object representations, which usually encode object gists and high-order statistics of a local region, demonstrate outstanding performance in predicting real eye fixation locations over other state-of-the-art saliency models. The component analysis also provides, good insight into the validity of our approaches in improving the performance of the model.
Some implications of the short-term synaptic plasticity for neuronal computation: a model study

Spikes arriving at the synaptic connection produce short-term plastic changes of the synaptic efficacy. Model experiments have shown that paired-pulse facilitation attaining its maximum after a specific interval between a pair of arriving spikes might turn a “weak” plastic synapse attached to an integrate-and-fire neuron to a frequency-tuned device. Resulting computational capabilities create biologically plausible mechanisms of information processing relating to: (i) real-time identification of temporal patterns in a stream of random spiking activity (a recognition problem); and (ii) codetermination of the specific activity routing among neurons (an addressing problem) resulting in definite spatio-temporal patterns of the output activity (an input-output pattern problem).
Empirical evaluation of uni- and bimodal pen and touch interaction properties on digital tabletops

Combined bimanual pen and touch input on digital tabletops is an appealing interaction paradigm enjoying growing popularity among many HCI researchers. Due to its relative novelty, its properties are still relatively unexplored and many hypotheses emerging from intuition and extrapolations from studies about touch and other pointing devices remain to be verified. We present an empirical evaluation consisting of three experiments aimed at investigating a few important issues of pen and touch interaction on horizontal surfaces. Specifically, we examine the compromise between speed and accuracy for the two input modalities in positioning and tracing contexts, the influence of palm-resting on pen precision and bimanual coordination for pen mode-switching via postures. We report on quantitative and qualitative results obtained from these trials and discuss their potential impact on the design of pen and touch systems.
Tactile Graphics Rendering Using Three Laterotactile Drawing Primitives

This paper presents preliminary work towards the development and evaluation of a practical refreshable tactile graphics system for the display of tactile maps, diagrams and graphs for people with visual impairments. Refreshable tactile graphics were dynamically produced by laterally deforming the skin of a finger using the STReSS2 tactile display. Tactile features were displayed over an 11x6 cm virtual surface by controlling the tactile sensations produced by the fingerpad-sized tactile display as it was moved on a planar carrier. Three tactile rendering methods were used to respectively produce virtual gratings, dots and vibrating patterns. These tactile features were used alone or in combination to display shapes and textures. The ability of the system to produce tactile graphics elements was evaluated in five experiments, each conducted with 10 sighted subjects. The first four evaluated the perception of simple shapes, grating orientations, and grating spatial frequencies. The fifth experiment combined these elements and showed that tactile icons composed of both vibrating contours and grated textures can be identified. The fifth experiment was repeated with 6 visually impaired subjects with results suggesting that similar performance should be expected from that user group.