Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Semi-Coupled Dictionary Learning With Relaxation Label Space Transformation for Video-Based Person Re-Identification

Video-based person reidentification (re-id) is a challenging problem due to much discrepancy between different videos by person pose, illumination, viewpoint change, background clutter, and occlusion within each camera and across different cameras. However, most existing video-based person re-id methods usually focus on dealing with the discrepancy between different cameras and do not fully consider the correlation between different cameras. In this paper, we propose a semicoupled dictionary learning with relaxation label space transformation approach to capture the intrinsic relationship of the same person under different cameras. First, to reduce the discrepancy between different views, we transform the original feature spaces into the common feature space by local Fisher discriminant analysis. Two dictionaries are learned from this common feature space. Second, a relaxation label space is introduced to associate the same person under different views. In this label space, the distance between different persons can be enlarged as much as possible, such that label information has stronger discriminative capability. A single dictionary is learned from the relaxation label space. Finally, in order to further enhance the correlation of the same person between different cameras, we use a pair of transformation matrices which map the coding coefficients learned from the common feature space to the coding coefficients learned from the relaxation label space, respectively. Extensive experimental results on two public iLIDS Video re-IDentification and Person Re-ID 2011 video-based person re-id datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Design and implementation of Pharyngeal electrical Stimulation for early de-cannulation in TRACheotomized (PHAST-TRAC) stroke patients with neurogenic dysphagia: a prospective randomized single-blinded interventional study

Rationale Ongoing dysphagia in stroke patients weaned from mechanical ventilation often requires long-term tracheotomy to protect the airway from aspiration. In a recently reported single-centre pilot study, a significantly larger proportion (75%) of tracheotomized dysphagic stroke patients regained sufficient control of airway management allowing tracheotomy tube removal (decannulation) 24–72 h after pharyngeal electrical stimulation (PES) compared to controls who received standard therapy over the same time period (20%). Aim To assess the safety and efficacy of PES in accelerating dysphagia rehabilitation and enabling decannulation of tracheotomized stroke patients. Design International multi-centre prospective randomized controlled single-blind trial in approximately 126 ICU patients (the 90th percentile of the calculated maximum sample size). Study outcomes Primary outcome: proportion of stroke patients considered safe for decannulation 24–72 h after PES compared to control patients who do not receive PES. Key secondary outcomes focus on: dysphagia severity, decannulation rates, decannulation rate after a repeat PES treatment in patients persistently dysphagic after an initial PES treatment, stroke severity, duration of ICU-stay, occurrence of adverse events including pneumonia and need for recannulation over 30 days or until hospital discharge (if earlier). Discussion Dysphagia and related airway complications are reported as one of the main reasons for stroke patients remaining tracheotomized once successfully weaned from ventilation. This study will evaluate if PES can improve airway safety sufficiently enough to allow earlier tracheotomy tube removal.
SAC-1 ensures epithelial endocytic recycling by restricting ARF-6 activity

Arf6/ARF-6 is a crucial regulator of the endosomal phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PI(4,5)P2) pool in endocytic recycling. To further characterize ARF-6 regulation, we performed an ARF-6 interactor screen in Caenorhabditis elegans and identified SAC-1, the homologue of the phosphoinositide phosphatase Sac1p in yeast, as a novel ARF-6 partner. In the absence of ARF-6, basolateral endosomes show a loss of SAC-1 staining in epithelial cells. Steady-state cargo distribution assays revealed that loss of SAC-1 specifically affected apical secretory delivery and basolateral recycling. PI(4,5)P2 levels and the endosomal labeling of the ARF-6 effector UNC-16 were significantly elevated in sac-1 mutants, suggesting that SAC-1 functions as a negative regulator of ARF-6. Further analyses revealed an interaction between SAC-1 and the ARF-6-GEF BRIS-1. This interaction outcompeted ARF-6(guanosine diphosphate [GDP]) for binding to BRIS-1 in a concentration-dependent manner. Consequently, loss of SAC-1 promotes the intracellular overlap between ARF-6 and BRIS-1. BRIS-1 knockdown resulted in a significant reduction in PI(4,5)P2 levels in SAC-1-depleted cells. Interestingly, the action of SAC-1 in sequestering BRIS-1 is independent of SAC-1’s catalytic activity. Our results suggest that the interaction of SAC-1 with ARF-6 curbs ARF-6 activity by limiting the access of ARF-6(GDP) to its guanine nucleotide exchange factor, BRIS-1.
Effects of tree species diversity and genotypic diversity on leafminers and parasitoids in a tropical forest plantation

The effects of tree diversity on herbivore–enemy interactions have received relatively little attention and even fewer studies have compared the relative influence of tree intra‐ versus interspecific diversity on such dynamics. We evaluated the effects of mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) genotypic diversity and tree species diversity on parasitoid attack and species richness associated with Phyllocnistis meliacella, a specialist herbivore on mahogany, in a forest diversity experiment consisting of 74 plots (21 × 21 m2; 64 plants/plot). We sampled 34 of such plots classified as: mahogany monocultures of one maternal family (i.e. genotype), mahogany monocultures of four families and polycultures of four species (including mahogany). We surveyed leafminer abundance and collected mined leaves to estimate parasitism and parasitoid species richness. Leafminer abundance was not influenced by either type of diversity. Similarly, there were no effects of genotypic diversity or species diversity on parasitism or parasitoid species richness. Plant diversity effects on parasitoids were probably absent because the species attacking P. meliacella are dietary generalists that likely recruited to multiple host species (in addition to P. meliacella) and their responses to diversity could have cancelled each other out. Future work should explicitly investigate how predator and parasitoid traits mediate the effects of plant diversity on tritrophic interactions.
Illusion and Illusoriness of Color and Coloration

In this work, through a phenomenological analysis, we studied the perception of the chromatic illusion and illusoriness. The necessary condition for an illusion to occur is the discovery of a mismatch/disagreement between the geometrical/physical domain and the phenomenal one. The illusoriness is instead a phenomenal attribute related to a sense of strangeness, deception, singularity, mendacity, and oddity. The main purpose of this work is to study the phenomenology of chromatic illusion vs. illusoriness, which is useful for shedding new light on the no-man’s land between “sensory” and “cognitive” processes that have not been fully explored. Some basic psychological and biological implications for living organisms are deduced.
300‐nm Imperceptible, Ultraflexible, and Biocompatible e‐Skin Fit with Tactile Sensors and Organic Transistors

DOI: 10.1002/aelm.201500452 between a human touch, a touch of a metallic object, and no touch, while being immune to noise. Finally, ultralight, at 0.7 g m −2 , it allows for a multitude of applications where the weight of the electronics is of uttermost importance. A fully functioning e-skin, laminated on human subject’s hands, is shown in Figure 1 a, with the e-skin device layout depicted in Figure 1 b. It incorporates simple resistive tactile sensors and organic fi eld effect transistors (OFET) used to actively control the sensor information. OFET devices were electrically characterized with recorded average mobility of 0.34 cm 2 Vs −1 , and the ON/OFF ratio of ≈10 5 . Also, the threshold voltage V T , was measured to be approximately −1.72 V. The yield, calculated on 44 devices, was recorded as ≈98%, with only a single faulty device. Figure 1 c demonstrates a transconductance curve of a typical OFET, measured for V DS = −5 V, with V T marginally higher than negative one volt. Figure 1 d shows an example of an output characteristic curve for V G in the range of 0 to −5 volts. Following the fabrication process on a rigid glass slide, the devices were manually delaminated and subjected to physical/ mechanical fl exibility tests. The H 2 O-delaminated fi lm was deposited onto a 60% prestretched elastomer that was subsequently relaxed. This resulted in a highly irregular surface, with multiple wrinkles for the fi lm to adhere to. The elastomer was subsequently stretched 100 times to demonstrate good adhesion and physical durability of the devices. The devices were electrically characterized following the physical fl exibility test, with a typical preand post-stretched transconductance curves shown in Figure 2 a. It can be seen that the device ON current underwent a marginal increase, with the poststretched average mobility increasing to 0.39 cm 2 Vs −1 , while the OFF and leakage ( I G ) currents, as well as the ON/OFF ratios, remained largely unchanged. The V T also experienced a shift to −1.03 V. Figure 2 b depicts SEM image of an OFET fi lm, placed directly atop of a relaxed elastomer, after the device was electrically characterized. Because the fragile nature of the fi lm did not allow for a direct cross-sectional analysis, angled top view was analyzed instead. The shown image reveals extremely folded and compliant nature of the fi lm. Detailed analysis of the inset reveals a folded edge of the fi lm (top right corner), allowing for extrapolation of a bending radius to being less than 2 μm. This, we believe, is the primary reason why our fi lm can undergo such extreme bending, folding and elastomer stretching, while preserving its good electrical performance. The CVD-deposited biocompatible Parylene serves as the top and bottom (substrate) encapsulation layers, making it an ideal candidate for external and internal medical applications. [ 27–30 ]
Subversion of NK-cell and TNFα Immune Surveillance Drives Tumor Recurrence

Patients with minimal residual disease are at high risk for relapse. The authors now show how innate immune surveillance mechanisms that normally control infection and the growth of primary tumors are subverted by residual disease to promote recurrence. Understanding how incompletely cleared primary tumors transition from minimal residual disease (MRD) into treatment-resistant, immune-invisible recurrences has major clinical significance. We show here that this transition is mediated through the subversion of two key elements of innate immunosurveillance. In the first, the role of TNFα changes from an antitumor effector against primary tumors into a growth promoter for MRD. Second, whereas primary tumors induced a natural killer (NK)–mediated cytokine response characterized by low IL6 and elevated IFNγ, PD-L1hi MRD cells promoted the secretion of IL6 but minimal IFNγ, inhibiting both NK-cell and T-cell surveillance. Tumor recurrence was promoted by trauma- or infection-like stimuli inducing VEGF and TNFα, which stimulated the growth of MRD tumors. Finally, therapies that blocked PD-1, TNFα, or NK cells delayed or prevented recurrence. These data show how innate immunosurveillance mechanisms, which control infection and growth of primary tumors, are exploited by recurrent, competent tumors and identify therapeutic targets in patients with MRD known to be at high risk of relapse. Cancer Immunol Res; 5(11); 1029–45. ©2017 AACR.
Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Antennas for Ultra Wideband Communications

La radio Ultra Large Bande (ULB) promet de nouveaux marches dans les domaines des reseaux personnels hauts debits et de capteurs. De sorte a ameliorer la robustesse du lien radio et le debit, l’association des techniques MIMO a l’ULB a ete envisagee. En vue d’une realisation pratique, un challenge fondamental reste la conception des antennes qui doivent repondre aux contraintes de l’ULB et des systemes multi-antennaires, et aux contraintes physiques et economiques. Dans ce contexte, plusieurs nouveaux designs d’antennes MIMO ULB sont proposes. Leur caracterisation s’appuie sur les parame��tres conventionnels utilises en conception d’antennes ainsi que des parametres specifiques a l’ULB et au MIMO. En particulier, un nouveau design compact presentant une forte isolation grâce a l’insertion d’un stub sur le plan de masse est propose. Une nouvelle methode de modelisation du couplage mutuel, qui presente l’avantage d’offrir de nouvelles approches pour le compenser, est egalement introduite.
Monitoring Cytotoxicity by Oridonin in U-2 OS Cells in Real Time Using the Agilent BioTek BioSpa 8 automated incubator to manage kinetic image-based analysis of live cells

The imaging and analysis of fluorescently stained live cells has traditionally been accomplished using complete manual microscopic methods with exceptionally low numbers of samples. The analysis of higher sample numbers required the use of expensive dedicated microscopes. This application note describes the use of the Agilent BioTek BioSpa 8 automated incubator to automate the assay workflow of a kinetic live cell assay using fluorescent probes to monitor cytotoxicity with an automated digital fluorescence microscope.
Combined Message Passing Based SBL With Dirichlet Process Prior for Sparse Signal Recovery With Multiple Measurement Vectors

This paper concerns the problem of sparse signal recovery with multiple measurement vectors, where the sparse signal vectors share multiple supports (i.e., the signal vectors can be clustered and the vectors in a cluster share a common support) and the prior knowledge on the supports of the vectors is unknown. This problem can be solved using sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) with Dirichlet process (DP) as hyper-prior, which is named DP-SBL in this paper. This paper aims to design efficient inference algorithms. The variational inference for DP mixtures, in particular mean field (MF) inference, has been studied, and applying it to the problem in this paper leads to an MF-DP-SBL algorithm. In this paper, we propose a combined message passing (CMP) approach, where a factor graph representation is designed to enable a more efficient implementation with both the MF and approximate message passing (AMP), leading to a CMP-DP-SBL algorithm. It is shown that, compared with MF-DP-SBL and CMP-DP-SBL delivers the same or even better performance with significantly lower complexity. As an example, we apply it to massive MIMO channel estimation where, due to the large number of antennas deployed at the base station, the channel impulse responses measured at receive antennas can share multiple supports. It is shown that CMP-DP-SBL delivers considerably better performance than existing algorithms.
Agroecology: The Ecology of Food Systems

ABSTRACT We present a compelling rationale for defining agroecology as the ecology of food systems. Our purpose is to provide a framework that will guide research, education, and action in the multiple and interacting facets of an increasingly complex global agriculture and food system. To accomplish such goals, it is essential to build bridges and connections among and beyond our disciplines in production agriculture, as well as beyond the farm gate into the rural landscape and community. Fields of sociology, anthropology, environmental sciences, ethics, and economics are crucial to the mix. They provide additional vantage points from which we can view the food system anew, as well as insights on how to establish valuation criteria beyond neoclassical economics. Examples from Mexico, California, and the Nordic Region are used to illustrate the successful implementation of this educational strategy in universities. Design of individual farms using principles of ecology is expanded to the levels of landscape, community, and bioregion, with emphasis on uniqueness of place and the people and other species that inhabit that place. We conclude that defining agroecology as the ecology of food systems will foster the development of broader interdisciplinary research teams and attractive systems-based courses for tomorrow's best students. In contrast to the narrow focus on crop-soil interactions, this definition will help us raise higher-level research questions whose solutions will advance the development of a sustainable agriculture and food system.
Constraint Co-Projections for Semi-Supervised Co-Clustering

Co-clustering aims to simultaneously cluster the objects and features to explore intercorrelated patterns. However, it is usually difficult to obtain good co-clustering results by just analyzing the object-feature correlation data due to the sparsity of the data and the noise. Meanwhile, most co-clustering algorithms cannot take the prior information into consideration and may produce unmeaningful results. Semi-supervised co-clustering aims to incorporate the known prior knowledge into the co-clustering algorithm. In this paper, a new technique named constraint co-projections for semi-supervised co-clustering (CPSSCC) is presented. Constraint co-projections can not only make use of two popular techniques including pairwise constraints and constraint projections, but also simultaneously perform the object constraint projections and feature constraint projections. The two popular techniques are illustrated for semi-supervised co-clustering when some objects and features are believed to be in the same cluster a priori. Furthermore, we also prove that the co-clustering problem can be formulated as a typical eigen-problem and can be efficiently solved with the selected eigenvectors. To the best of our knowledge, constraint co-projections is first stated in this paper and this is the first work on using CPSSCC. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. This paper also shows that CPSSCC has some favorable features compared with previous related co-clustering algorithms.
Diving seabirds share foraging space and time within and among species

Ecological theory predicts that animals with similar foraging strategies should not be able to co-exist without segregating either in space, time or diet. In communities, intra-specific competition is thought to be more intense than the competition among species, because of the lack of niche partitioning between conspecifics. Hence, while different seabird species can overlap in their foraging distribution, intra-specific competition can drive the neighboring populations of the same species to spatial segregation of foraging areas. To investigate ecological segregation within and among species of diving seabirds, we used a multi-species GPS-tracking approach of seabirds of four species on a small island in the Southwest Atlantic. The present study goes beyond previous work by analyzing simultaneous effects of species and colonies. We observed strikingly strong spatial foraging segregation among birds of the same species, breeding in colonies as close as 2 km from each other. Conspecifics from neighboring colonies used foraging places adjacent to their own colony, and there was little or no overlap with birds from the other colony. A zone with increased predator concentration was completely avoided during foraging trips, likely contributing to the spatial segregation. In addition to spatial segregation, we also observed intra-specific differences in other components of foraging behavior, such as time of day, dive depth and diet. These were most likely caused by optimal foraging of individuals in relation to habitat differences on a local scale, leading to a complex pattern of interactions with environmental covariates, in particular foraging daytime, foraging water layer temperature and depth, distance to coast and bathymetric depth of foraging areas. As mechanisms leading to the spatial segregation we propose a combination of optimal foraging and avoidance of predation.
Cannabinoids for Treatment of Dystonia in Huntington's Disease.

BACKGROUND Motor symptoms in Huntington's disease (HD) are heterogeneous with dystonia being described as a symptom with a very high prevalence not only in juvenile cases. OBJECTIVE Treatment options for dystonia are limited. Cannabinoids have been described as a potential treatment for patients with dystonia of a different origin. Here, we present early onset HD patients with a marked improvement of motor symptoms mainly due to alleviation of dystonia due to treatment with cannabinoids. In addition we review the current literature concerning the use of cannabinoids in HD. METHOD The Unified Huntington's Disease Rating Scale (UHDRS) motor score, including a chorea and dystonia subscore, was conducted before and after the start of cannabinoids in seven patients without any other changes in medication. RESULTS The UHDRS motor score and the dystonia subscore (±SD) improved from 70.9 (25.5) to 60.6 (26.9) with a mean change of 10.3 [95% CI 6.0-14.6] and from 12.3 (4.0) to 8.0 (3.6) with a mean change of 4.3 [95% CI 2.3-6.3], respectively (both p = 0.018). CONCLUSION Improvement of motor symptoms, mainly dystonia, led to several relevant improvements from a global clinical perspective such as improvement of care, gait and fine motor skills and weight gain. Moreover, we observed changes in behavior with less irritability and apathy, as well as less hypersalivation in some cases.
A first study of fuzzy cognitive maps learning using particle swarm optimization

We introduce a new algorithm for fuzzy cognitive maps learning. The proposed approach is based on the particle swarm optimization method and it is used for the detection of proper weight matrices that lead the fuzzy cognitive map to desired steady states. For this purpose a properly defined objective function that incorporates experts' knowledge is constructed and minimized. The application of the proposed methodology to an industrial control problem supports the claim that the proposed technique is efficient and robust.
A First Look at Firefox OS Security

With Firefox OS, Mozilla is making a serious push for an HTML5-based mobile platform. In order to assuage security concerns over providing hardware access to web applications, Mozilla has introduced a number of mechanisms that make the security landscape of Firefox OS distinct from both the desktop web and other mobile operating systems. From an application security perspective, the two most significant of these mechanisms are the the introduction of a default Content Security Policy and code review in the market. This paper describes how lightweight static analysis can augment these mechanisms to find vulnerabilities which have otherwise been missed. We provide examples of privileged applications in the market that contain vulnerabilities that can be automatically detected. In addition to these findings, we show some of the challenges that occur when desktop software is repurposed for a mobile operating system. In particular, we argue that the caching of certificate overrides across applications--a known problem in Firefox OS--generates a counter-intuitive user experience that detracts from the security of the system.