Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stochastic and deterministic drivers of spatial and temporal turnover in breeding bird communities

Aim A long-standing challenge in ecology is to identify the suite of factors that lead to turnover in species composition in both space and time.These factors might be stochastic (e.g. sampling and priority effects) or deterministic (e.g. competition and environmental filtering). While numerous studies have examined the relationship between turnover and individual drivers of interest (e.g.primary productivity, habitat heterogeneity,or regional ‐‘gamma’‐ diversity),few studies have disentangled the simultaneous influences of multiple stochastic and deterministic processes on both temporal and spatial turnover. If turnover is governed primarily by stochastic sampling processes, removing the sampling effects of gamma diversity should result in non-significant relationships between turnover and environmental variables.Conversely,if deterministicprocessesgovernturnoverpatterns,removing sampling effects will have little influence on turnover gradients. Here, we test these predictions. Location The United States. Methods Continental-scale,multidecadal data were used to quantify spatial and temporal turnover in avian community composition within 295 survey routes. A series of regression and structural equation models were coupled with a null model to construct statistical models describing turnover patterns. Results Examining explanatory variables alone or in combination showed that spatial and temporal turnover increased together, decreased with primary productivity and increased with habitat heterogeneity.The relationships between turnover and all variables became weaker when sampling effects were removed,but relationships with primary productivity and habitat heterogeneity remained relatively strong. In addition, spatial turnover increased strongly with spatial gamma diversity after sampling effects were removed.
On effective and efficient in-field TSV repair for stacked 3D ICs

Three-dimensional (3D) integration based on through-silicon-vias (TSVs) is rapidly gaining traction for industry adoption. However, manufacturing processes for TSVs have been shown to introduce new failure mechanisms. In particular, thermo-mechanical stress and electromigration introduce reliability threats for TSVs, e.g., voids and interfacial cracks, which can lead to hard-to-predict timing errors on critical paths with TSVs, thereby resulting in accelerated chip failure in the field. Burn-in for screening latent defects during manufacturing is expensive and its effectiveness for new TSV defect types has yet to be thoroughly characterized. We describe a reconfigurable in-field repair solution that is able to effectively tolerate latent TSV defects through the judicious use of spares. The proposed solution includes a reconfigurable repair architecture that enables spare TSV sharing between TSV grids, and the corresponding in-field repair algorithms. The effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed solution is evaluated using 3D benchmark designs.
Effectiveness of a Universal Parental Support Programme to Promote Healthy Dietary Habits and Physical Activity and to Prevent Overweight and Obesity in 6-Year-Old Children: The Healthy School Start Study, a Cluster-Randomised Controlled Trial

Objective To develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a parental support programme to promote healthy dietary and physical activity habits and to prevent overweight and obesity in Swedish children. Methods A cluster-randomised controlled trial was carried out in areas with low to medium socio-economic status. Participants were six-year-old children (n = 243) and their parents. Fourteen pre-school classes were randomly assigned to intervention (n = 7) and control groups (n = 7). The intervention lasted for 6 months and included: 1) Health information for parents, 2) Motivational Interviewing with parents and 3) Teacher-led classroom activities with children. Physical activity was measured by accelerometry, dietary and physical activity habits and parental self-efficacy through a questionnaire. Body weight and height were measured and BMI standard deviation score was calculated. Measurements were conducted at baseline, post-intervention and at 6-months follow-up. Group differences were examined using analysis of covariance and Poisson regression, adjusted for gender and baseline values. Results There was no significant intervention effect in the primary outcome physical activity. Sub-group analyses showed a significant gender-group interaction in total physical activity (TPA), with girls in the intervention group demonstrating higher TPA during weekends (p = 0.04), as well as in sedentary time, with boys showing more sedentary time in the intervention group (p = 0.03). There was a significantly higher vegetable intake (0.26 servings) in the intervention group compared to the control group (p = 0.003). At follow-up, sub-group analyses showed a sustained effect for boys. The intervention did not affect the prevalence of overweight or obesity. Conclusions It is possible to influence vegetable intake in children and girls’ physical activity through a parental support programme. The programme needs to be intensified in order to increase effectiveness and sustain the effects long-term. These findings are an important contribution to the further development of evidence-based parental support programmes to prevent overweight and obesity in children. Trial Registration Controlled-trials.com ISRCTN32750699
A Novel SVM Decision Tree and its application to Face Detection

In order to speed up support vector classification, a novel algorithm by the names of SVM Decision Tree is proposed in this paper. In the decision tree, several linear SVM are constructed which can achieve the highest detection rate on the negative samples, the negative samples which can be correctly classified by the hyperplane are removed from the original samples, and train one nonlinear SVM using the rest samples. In the test step, the root of tree is used as the first classification. We apply this algorithm to face detection, experiment results show that the speed up factor is large and with no loss in generalization performance.
Music Emotion Recognition by Multi-label Multi-layer Multi-instance Multi-view Learning

Music emotion recognition, which aims to automatically recognize the affective content of a piece of music, has become one of the key components of music searching, exploring, and social networking applications. Although researchers have given more and more attention to music emotion recognition studies, the recognition performance has come to a bottleneck in recent years. One major reason is that experts' labels for music emotion are mostly song-level, while music emotion usually varies within a song. Traditional methods have considered each song as a single instance and have built models based on song-level features. However, they ignored the dynamics of music emotion and failed to capture accurate emotion-feature correlations. In this paper, we model music emotion recognition as a novel multi-label multi-layer multi-instance multi-view learning problem: music is formulated as a hierarchical multi-instance structure (e.g., song-segment-sentence) where multiple emotion labels correspond to at least one of the instances with multiple views of each layer. We propose a Hierarchical Music Emotion Recognition model (HMER) -- a novel hierarchical Bayesian model using sentence-level music and lyrics features. It captures music emotion dynamics with a song-segment-sentence hierarchical structure. HMER also considers emotion correlations between both music segments and sentences. Experimental results show that HMER outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of $F_1$ score and mean average precision.
Behavioral determinants for vaccine acceptability among rurally located college students

ABSTRACT Background: College-aged adults in a rural and medically-underserved area often struggle to receive proper vaccinations due to lower socioeconomic status coupled with life demands. Objectives: The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was used as the theoretical basis to explore behavioral determinants associated with vaccination uptake in the population. Methods: This study used a questionnaire distributed to college students (n = 208) located in a rural area to assess the effects of social and behavioral factors on vaccination uptake. Results: Attitudes and normative beliefs towards vaccination uptake were positive but were largely impacted by work demands. Perceived behavioral control did not contribute towards the intent to receive necessary vaccines. Conclusions: Researchers conducting vaccination interventions, along with physician-patient communication, need to target attitudes and subjective norms in rural and medically underserved communities to increase vaccines, particularly HPV. In addition, results showed that promoting vaccine uptake among minorities is necessary to aid in vaccine acceptability in these communities.
ABC diffusion in the age of digital economy: the UK experience

Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been a call for further research to trace the effects of the speedy changes in business environment on management accounting practices. This study assesses the impact of different information technologies on ABC adoption and implementation. It uses a cross-sectional survey of financial directors and controllers in the UK firms. Postal and electronic questionnaires have been used in order to collect the empirical data. The findings revealed that the rate of ABC adoption has shown a number of changes between 1999 and 2005. The proportions of ABC users and those currently assessing it have dramatically fallen. The percentage of firms rejecting ABC has slightly fallen as well. However, there has been a considerable increase in the number of firms that abandoned ABC implementation and those firms that gave no consideration for its implementation. These results indicate a decrease in the popularity of ABC. ERP systems seem to have a slightly low significant impact on the initial decision of ABC adoption in those firms that do not have any consideration for ABC and firms that have an ERP system before ABC adoption. Furthermore, the results indicate that firms use different information technologies in the ABC assessment and implementation. For ABC assessment, general software applications are the most preferable software packages while a mix of different ABC software packages is the most popular in the case of ABC implementation. Finally, the findings of this study provide an indication on the nature of the possible effect of general IT-related problems on ABC implementation.
Quantum Manipulations of Small Josephson Junctions

Low-capacitance Josephson junction arrays in the parameter range where single charges can be controlled are suggested as possible physical realizations of the elements which have been considered in the context of quantum computers. We discuss single and multiple quantum-bit systems. The systems are controlled by applied gate voltages, which also allow the necessary manipulation of the quantum states. We estimate that the phase-coherence time is sufficiently long for experimental demonstration of the principles of quantum computation.
Realization of prosodic focuses in corpus-based generation of fundamental frequency contours of Japanese based on the generation process model

A method was developed for generating sentence F0 contours of Japanese, when a focus is placed in one of the “bunsetsu” of an utterance. It controls F0 based on the F0 model; not frame-byframe F0 prediction as in the case of HMM-based speech synthesis. The method first predicts differences in the F0 model commands between utterances with and without focus, and then applies them to the F0 model commands predicted beforehand by the baseline method without focus assignment. The baseline method is trained using a large corpus, while corpus for training command differences can be small and not necessarily be uttered by the same speaker of the large corpus. The validity of the method was proved by the experiment on F0 contour generation and speech synthesis, including interpolation/extrapolation of the F0 model commands for focus level control.
DTI based structural damage characterization for Disorders of Consciousness

MRI Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) has been recently proposed as a highly discriminative measurement to detect structural damages in Disorders of Consciousness patients (Vegetative State/Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome (VS/UWS) and Minimally Consciousness State (MCS)). In the DTI analysis, certain tensor features are often used as simplified scalar indices to represent these alterations. Those characteristics are mathematically and statistically more tractable than the full tensors. Nevertheless, most of these quantities are based on a tensor diffusivity estimation, the arithmetic average among the different strengths of the tensor orthogonal directions, which is supported on a symmetric linear relationship among the three directions, an unrealistic assumption for severely damaged brains. In this paper, we propose a new family of scalar quantities based on Generalized Ordered Weighted Aggregations (GOWA) to characterize morphological brain damages. The main idea is to perform a water diffusivity estimation in the damaged tissue by weighting and combining differently each tensor orthogonal strength. Using these new scalar quantities we constructed an affine invariant DTI tensor feature based on regional tissue histograms that outperforms state-of-the-art tensor based scalar representations for discrimination problems.
Use of whole genome sequences to develop a molecular phylogenetic framework for Rhodococcus fascians and the Rhodococcus genus

The accurate diagnosis of diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria requires a stable species classification. Rhodococcus fascians is the only documented member of its ill-defined genus that is capable of causing disease on a wide range of agriculturally important plants. Comparisons of genome sequences generated from isolates of Rhodococcus associated with diseased plants revealed a level of genetic diversity consistent with them representing multiple species. To test this, we generated a tree based on more than 1700 homologous sequences from plant-associated isolates of Rhodococcus, and obtained support from additional approaches that measure and cluster based on genome similarities. Results were consistent in supporting the definition of new Rhodococcus species within clades containing phytopathogenic members. We also used the genome sequences, along with other rhodococcal genome sequences to construct a molecular phylogenetic tree as a framework for resolving the Rhodococcus genus. Results indicated that Rhodococcus has the potential for having 20 species and also confirmed a need to revisit the taxonomic groupings within Rhodococcus.
Intranasal Immunization with an Archaeal Lipid Mucosal Vaccine Adjuvant and Delivery Formulation Protects against a Respiratory Pathogen Challenge

Archaeal lipid mucosal vaccine adjuvant and delivery (AMVAD) is a safe mucosal adjuvant that elicits long lasting and memory boostable mucosal and systemic immune responses to model antigens such as ovalbumin. In this study, we evaluated the potential of the AMVAD system for eliciting protective immunity against mucosal bacterial infections, using a mouse model of intranasal Francisella tularensis LVS (LVS) challenge. Intranasal immunization of mice with cell free extract of LVS (LVSCE) adjuvanted with the AMVAD system (LVSCE/AMVAD) induced F. tularensis-specific antibody responses in sera and bronchoalveolar lavage fluids, as well as antigen-specific splenocyte proliferation and IL-17 production. More importantly, the AMVAD vaccine partially protected the mice against a lethal intranasal challenge with LVS. Compared to LVSCE immunized and naïve mice, the LVSCE/AMVAD immunized mice showed substantial to significant reduction in pathogen burdens in the lungs and spleens, reduced serum and pulmonary levels of proinflammatory cytokines/chemokines, and longer mean time to death as well as significantly higher survival rates (p<0.05). These results suggest that the AMVAD system is a promising mucosal adjuvant and vaccine delivery technology, and should be explored further for its applications in combating mucosal infectious diseases.
A PC-based real-time stereo vision system

This paper describes a stereo vision system that enables real-time dense depth measurements on a personal computer. The system relies on a very efficient stereo matching engine that, unlike many other approaches which use two distinct matching phases in order to detect unreliable matches, uses a single matching phase. Our matching engine allows for rejecting most unreliable matches by exploiting violations of the uniqueness constraint as well as analysing behaviour of correlation scores. Real-time capability has been achieved by deploying very efficient incremental calculation schemes aimed at avoiding redundant calculations and parallelising the computationally expensive portion of the code with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) parallel instructions, available nowadays on almost any state-of-the-art general purpose microprocessors. Experimental results on real stereo sequences and preliminary results concerning a 3D people tracking/counting application show the effectiveness of the proposed PC-based stereo vision system for real-time applications.
Can a surgeon drill accurately at a specified angle?

Objectives To investigate whether a surgeon can drill accurately a specified angle and whether surgeon experience, task repetition, drill bit size and perceived difficulty influence drilling angle accuracy. Methods The sample population consisted of final-year students (n=25), non-specialist veterinarians (n=22) and board-certified orthopaedic surgeons (n=8). Each participant drilled a hole twice in a horizontal oak plank at 30°, 45°, 60°, 80°, 85° and 90° angles with either a 2.5 or a 3.5 mm drill bit. Participants then rated the perceived difficulty to drill each angle. The true angle of each hole was measured using a digital goniometer. Results Greater drilling accuracy was achieved at angles closer to 90°. An error of ≤±4° was achieved by 84.5 per cent of participants drilling a 90° angle compared with approximately 20 per cent of participants drilling a 30–45° angle. There was no effect of surgeon experience, task repetition or drill bit size on the mean error for intended versus achieved angle. Increased perception of difficulty was associated with the more acute angles and decreased accuracy, but not experience level. Clinical significance This study shows that surgeon ability to drill accurately (within ±4° error) is limited, particularly at angles ≤60°. In situations where drill angle is critical, use of computer-assisted navigation or custom-made drill guides may be preferable.
Estimating species trees: methods of phylogenetic analysis when there is incongruence across genes.

Discord among the gene trees of multilocus data has motivated the development of phylogenetic approaches that account for gene-tree heterogeneity in the estimation procedure. Rather than equating a gene tree with the phylogenetic history, the new approaches explicitly consider the relationships between gene trees and the underlying history of species divergence, providing direct estimates of species trees (Fig. 1). The inherent appeal of these approaches is 2-fold. Incorporating information contained in the distribution of gene trees not only extracts phylogenetic signal, but modeling the relationship between the gene trees embedded in a species tree also reveals the biological processes that have influenced the diversification history and shaped organismal genomes. In contrast, ignoring the variance in genealogical histories (e.g., concatenating loci into a single supermatrix) disregards an inescapable biological reality—gene trees differ for a variety of reasons (reviewed in Maddison 1997; Degnan and Rosenberg 2009). As such, when the natural variation in gene trees is not taken into account during phylogenetic estimation, the reliability of inferences from such approaches is drawn into question (Degnan and Rosenberg 2006; Kubatko and Degnan 2007; Huang and Knowles 2009), historical scenarios with recently diverged taxa that have not reached reciprocal monophyly has become intractable (Carstens and Knowles 2007), and interpretation of the support for bipartitions across taxa is problematic (Mossel and Vigoda 2005).
Robust non-rigid 3D tracking for face recognition in real-world videos

In this paper, we propose a framework for face recognition in real-world noisy videos. The difficulty of video face recognition task lies in the challenging appearance variations in real-world videos due to motion blur, large head rotation, occlusion, illumination change and significant image noise. We utilize a non-rigid face tracking approach to address these problems, which makes good use of 3D face shape priors, local appearance model of major facial features, face silhouette and online feature matches across video frames. The benefits are twofold. Firstly, the 3D tracking algorithm can achieve accurate registration of faces in videos. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches which rely on discriminative appearance models to classify face images into different views, we directly estimate face pose for a view-based face recognition algorithm. Secondly, since the 3D tracking algorithm has a probabilistic form and can provide confidence measure on the tracking result, it can be used to improve the robustness of face recognition. With the precisely localized faces, the recognition process is performed with different feature descriptors. The experiments performed on the real world noisy videos from YouTube demonstrate a significant improvement achieved even with the usage of simple descriptors: the rank-1 recognition rate reaches 79.8%, while the best reported results from other works is 71.24% on the same dataset.
Design a scalable ethernet Network Interface supporting the Large Receive Offload

The Ethernet speed has increased to 40-100 Gbps since the release of IEEE P802.3ba. In this paper, we have enhanced the Intel's Large Receive Offload Linux software driver function to manage the out-of-order packets and designed a scalable Network Interface based RISC core to support this function in the Network Interface. The RISC's performance and data movements for high communication rates up to 100 Gbps have been measured, and the results presented herein show that a cost-effective embedded RISC core can provide the required efficiency of the network interface to support a wide range of transmission line speeds, up to 100 Gbps. Furthermore, we have found several techniques that can contribute to packet processing and work with fewer headers and less data copying in a host memory.