Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sequencing in SLA

This paper provides an overview of sequencing in SLA. It contends that much of language acquisition is in fact sequence learning (for vocabulary, the phonological units of language and their phonotactic sequences: for discourse, the lexical units of language and their sequences in clauses and collocations). It argues that the resultant long-term knowledge base of language sequences serves as the database for the acquisition of language grammar. It next demonstrates that SLA of lexis, idiom, collocation, and grammar are all determined by individual differences in learners' ability to remember simple verbal strings in order. It outlines how interactions between short-term and long-term phonological memory systems allow chunking and the tuning of language systems better to represent structural information for particular languages. It proposes mechanisms for the analysis of sequence information that result in knowledge of underlying grammar. Finally, it considers the relations between this empiricist approach and that of generative grammar.
Links between genetics and pathophysiology in the autism spectrum disorders

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are important neuropsychiatric disorders, currently estimated to affect approximately 1% of children, with considerable emotional and financial costs. Significant collaborative effort has been made over the last 15 years in an attempt to unravel the genetic mechanisms underlying these conditions. This has led to important discoveries, both of the roles of specific genes, as well as larger scale chromosomal copy number changes. Here, we summarize some of the latest genetic findings in the field of ASD and attempt to link them with the results of pathophysiological studies to provide an overall picture of at least one of the mechanisms by which ASD may develop.
A dynamic femto cell architecture using TV Whitespace improving user experience of urban Crowds

For several years, works on cognitive radio have been published allowing to reuse TV Whitespaces. On another hand, many new results appear on user and crowd mobility due to big data recent developments, especially from cellular traces. We propose here a method for cellular resource planning taking into account user mobility. Since users move, the bandwidth resource should also move accordingly. We design a score based method using TV Whitespace, and user experience, to determine from which cell it should be removed and to which one it should be added. Combined with traffic history it calculates scores for each cell. Bandwidth is reallocated on a half day basis. Before that, real traces of cellular networks in urban districts are presented which confirm that static network planning is no longer optimal. A dynamic femtocell architecture is then presented. It is based on mesh interconnected elements and designed to serve the score based bandwidth allocation algorithm. The score method along with the architecture are simulated and results are presented. They confirm the expected improvement in bandwidth and delay per user while maintaining a low operation cost at the operator side.
The broad-spectrum activity and efficacy of catheters coated with minocycline and rifampin.

The in vitro and in vivo activities of catheters coated with minocycline and rifampin and with chlorhexidine gluconate and silver sulfadiazine were evaluated. When incubated in serum at 37 degrees C, the half-life of the inhibitory activity of catheters coated with minocycline and rifampin was 25 days compared with 3 days for catheters coated with chlorhexidine gluconate and silver sulfadiazine. In a rabbit model, catheters coated with minocycline and rifampin were significantly more efficacious than catheters coated with chlorhexidine and silver sulfadiazine in preventing colonization and infection with Staphylococcus aureus (P < .05). Catheters coated with minocycline and rifampin demonstrated broad-spectrum in vitro inhibitory activity against gram-positive bacteria, gram-negative bacteria, and Candida albicans that was significantly superior to the inhibitory activity of catheters coated with chlorhexidine gluconate and silver sulfadiazine (P < .01). Minocycline and rifampin were also highly efficacious in preventing colonization and infection in vivo.
Statistics of natural images using hash fractal image compression

Natural images form very small subset of all images. In spite of the fact, the direct computation of their block densities is not possible. On the other hand, the existence of various successful image compression methods, in particularly, the fractal compression, indicates that the compression somehow is able to capture and use at least part of the natural image statistics. In this work we show how hash based fractal image compression can be used to derive quite precise the entropies of 4 × 4 patches of the natural images. We state that the probability density in first order factorize to the probability densities of the contrast, the brightness and the index of the codebook blocks.
The biochemical effects of physiologic amounts of dietary boron in animal nutrition models.

This review summarizes evidence that supports working hypotheses for the roles of boron in animal model systems. It is well established that vascular plants, diatoms, and some species of marine algal flagellates have acquired an absolute requirement for boron, although the primary role of boron in plants remains unknown. Recent research findings suggest that physiologic amounts of supplemental dietary boron (PSB) affect a wide range of metabolic parameters in the chick and rat model systems. Much of the current interest in boron animal nutrition began with the initial finding that PSB stimulates growth in cholecalciferol (vitamin D3)-deficient chicks, but does not markedly affect growth in chicks receiving adequate vitamin D3 nutriture. The finding suggests that boron affects some aspect of vitamin D3 metabolism or is synergistic with vitamin D3 in influencing growth. Vitamin D3 regulates energy substrate utilization, and current research findings indicate that dietary boron modifies that regulatory function. The concentration of circulating glucose, the most thoroughly investigated metabolite to date, responds to PSB, especially during concomitant vitamin D3 deficiency. In chicks, PSB substantially alleviated or corrected vitamin D3 deficiency-induced elevations in plasma glucose concentrations. The influence of vitamin D3 on cartilage and bone mineralization is mediated in part through its role as a regulator of energy substrate utilization; calcification is an energy-intensive process. There is considerable evidence that dietary boron alleviates perturbations in mineral metabolism that are characteristic of vitamin D3 deficiency. In rachitic chicks, PSB alleviated distortion of the marrow sprouts of the proximal tibial epiphysial plate, a distortion characteristic of vitamin D3 deficiency. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
The Addenbrooke's cognitive examination (ACE) in the differential diagnosis of early dementias versus affective disorder.

OBJECTIVE The authors describe the profile of performance of patients whose cognitive complaint is due to dementia, affective disorder, or combinations thereof on the Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination (ACE) test battery. METHODS Authors tested 90 subjects with dementia (63 Alzheimer disease [AD]; 27 fronto-temporal dementia [FTD]), 60 subjects with "pure" affective disorder (23 major depression [MDD], 37 whose affective symptoms did not meet criteria for major depression [Affective]); 22 patients with symptoms of affective disorder and organic dementia (Mixed); and 127 healthy volunteers (NC). RESULTS The total ACE scores for the AD, FTD, and Mixed groups were significantly lower than for the NC group. Likewise, on total score, the AD and FTD groups scored significantly lower than either of the "pure" affective-disorder groups. Within the dementia group, the AD group scored significantly lower than the fronto-temporal group. CONCLUSIONS The profile of performance on the ACE of patients with dementia is different from that of patients suffering from affective illness. Mild impairment in the total ACE score, along with a low score on the memory domain tasks and letter fluency (in contrast to normal category fluency), are strongly indicative of an affective, as opposed to organic, pathology. A total score of <88 in suspected dementia patients with affective symptoms appears strongly predictive of an underlying organic disorder.
Performance Enhancement of Network Devices with Multi-Core Processors

In network based applications, packet capture is the main area that attracts many researchers in developing traffic monitoring systems. Along with the packet capture, many other functions such as security are incorporated in network applications. Specialized hardware and software have been developed and used in order to meet the real-time performance requirements for these functions. Recently, with the prevalence of multi-core processors, researchers are deploying multi-core processor based parallel processing approach to the multi-function network applications. However, parallelizing multiple operations of a network device in an integrated way is difficult because of asynchronous characteristics of coordinating these functions. In this paper, we propose a pipelined parallel execution approach using the producer-consumer model applicable to an environment where a stream of packets passes through two successive processes, each of which performs some tasks on packets. We also implement a packet capture process and an encryption process inside the parallel model, and show the effectiveness of our approach.
Joint modeling of survival and longitudinal data measured with error, with application to assessing immune correlates of protection in vaccine efficacy trials

Joint Modeling of Survival and Longitudinal Data Measured with Error, with Application to Assessing Immune Correlates of Protection in Vaccine Efficacy Trials Rong Fu Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Peter B. Gilbert Department of Biostatistics Assessing immune correlates of protection, the immune responses that reliably predict the vaccine efficacy on the clinical endpoint, has always been an important objective in vaccine efficacy trials. In this dissertation, we study the continuous and dichotomized trajectory of time-varying immune response as the immune correlate of protection in two-phase sampling design cohort studies. We adopt the joint modeling framework that models the immune response data measured longitudinally and with error and the time-to-event clinical endpoint simultaneously. The inherent evolution of the time-varying immune response is characterized by a random effects model, and its relationship with the instantaneous risk of the clinical event is modeled by the Cox proportional hazards regression. This regression model allows for direct assessment of immune correlates of protection in Prentice’s framework. This evaluation is different from the traditional work that is based on measured values of biomarkers. Instead, by studying the underlying trajectory, the application is to generate hypotheses about the biological mechanisms of protection. The main objective of the dissertation is to develop statistical methods to make inference on the regression model accounting for the missing immune response data due to two-phase sampling. For the inference on the continuous immune response trajectory, we extend the existing conditional score method to the two-phase sampling design cohort studies by using the technique of weighting the complete cases by the inverse probabilities of observing the immune response data, and the augmented inverse probability weighting. For the dichotomized immune response trajectory, we propose estimating equations based on regression calibration method. We also generalize it to two-phase samples by the inverse probability weighting method. We finally apply the proposed methods to the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) 175 dataset, a randomized clinical trial comparing monotherapy with combination therapy among HIV-1-infected subjects.
Collective Media Annotation using Random Field Models

We present methods for semantic annotation of multimedia data. The goal is to detect semantic attributes (also referred to as concepts) in clips of video via analysis of a single keyframe or set of frames. The proposed methods integrate high performance discriminative single concept detectors in a random field model for collective multiple concept detection. Furthermore, we describe a generic framework for semantic media classification capable of capturing arbitrary complex dependencies between the semantic concepts. Finally, we present initial experimental results comparing the proposed approach to existing methods.
Ultrasound Reference Chart Based on IVF Dates to Estimate Gestational Age at 6–9 weeks' Gestation

Accurate determination of gestational age underpins good obstetric care. We assessed the performance of six existing ultrasound reference charts to determine gestational age in 1268 singleton IVF pregnancies, where “true” gestational age could be precisely calculated from date of fertilisation. All charts generated dates significantly different to IVF dates (P < 0.0001 all comparisons). Thus we generated a new reference chart, The Monash Chart, based on a line of best fit describing crown-rump length across 6 + 1 to 9 + 0 weeks of gestation (true gestational age) in the IVF singleton cohort. The Monash Chart, but none of the existing charts, accurately determined gestational age among an independent IVF twin cohort (185 twin pairs). When applied to 3052 naturally-conceived singletons scans, The Monash Chart generated estimated due dates that were different to all existing charts (P ≤ 0.004 all comparisons). We conclude that commonly used ultrasound reference charts have inaccuracies. We have generated a CRL reference chart based on true gestational age in an IVF cohort that can accurately determine gestational age at 6–9 weeks of gestation.
Influence of Martian regolith analogs on the activity and growth of methanogenic archaea, with special regard to long-term desiccation

Methanogenic archaea have been studied as model organisms for possible life on Mars for several reasons: they can grow lithoautotrophically by using hydrogen and carbon dioxide as energy and carbon sources, respectively; they are anaerobes; and they evolved at a time when conditions on early Earth are believed to have looked similar to those of early Mars. As Mars is currently dry and cold and as water might be available only at certain time intervals, any organism living on this planet would need to cope with desiccation. On Earth there are several regions with low water availability as well, e.g., permafrost environments, desert soils, and salt pans. Here, we present the results of a set of experiments investigating the influence of different Martian regolith analogs (MRAs) on the metabolic activity and growth of three methanogenic strains exposed to culture conditions as well as long-term desiccation. In most cases, concentrations below 1 wt% of regolith in the media resulted in an increase of methane production rates, whereas higher concentrations decreased the rates, thus prolonging the lag phase. Further experiments showed that methanogenic archaea are capable of producing methane when incubated on a water-saturated sedimentary matrix of regolith lacking nutrients. Survival of methanogens under these conditions was analyzed with a 400 day desiccation experiment in the presence of regolith analogs. All tested strains of methanogens survived the desiccation period as it was determined through reincubation on fresh medium and via qPCR following propidium monoazide treatment to identify viable cells. The survival of long-term desiccation and the ability of active metabolism on water-saturated MRAs strengthens the possibility of methanogenic archaea or physiologically similar organisms to exist in environmental niches on Mars. The best results were achieved in presence of a phyllosilicate, which provides insights of possible positive effects in habitats on Earth as well.
Dialogue Graphical User Interfaces Gestural Interaction Multimodal Dialogue System Facial ExpressionsBiometrics Physical Action

Multimodal dialogue systems exploit one of the major characteristics of humanhuman interaction: the coordinated use of different modalities. Allowing all of the modalities to refer to and depend upon each other is a key to the richness of multimodal communication. We introduce the notion of symmetric multimodality for dialogue systems in which all input modes (e.g., speech, gesture, facial expression) are also available for output, and vice versa. A dialogue system with symmetric multimodality must not only understand and represent the user’s multimodal input, but also its own multimodal output. We present an overview of the SMARTKOM system that provides full symmetric multimodality in a mixed-initiative dialogue system with an embodied conversational agent. SMARTKOM represents a new generation of multimodal dialogue systems that deal not only with simple modality integration and synchronization but cover the full spectrum of dialogue phenomena that are associated with symmetric multimodality (including crossmodal references, one-anaphora, and backchannelling). We show that SMARTKOM’s plug-and-play architecture supports multiple recognizers for a single modality, e.g., the user’s speech signal can be processed by three unimodal recognizers in parallel (speech recognition, emotional prosody, boundary prosody). We detail SMARTKOM’s three-tiered representation of multimodal discourse, consisting of a domain layer, a discourse layer, and a modality layer. We discuss the limitations of SMARTKOM and how they are overcome in the follow-up project SmartWeb. In addition, we present the research roadmap for multimodality addressing the key open research questions in this young field. To conclude, we discuss the economic and scientific impact of the SMARTKOM project, which has led to more than 50 patents and 29 spin-off products.
Distributed function computation over a tree network

This paper investigates a distributed function computation setting where the underlying network is a rooted directed tree and where the root wants to compute a function of the sources of information available at the nodes of the network. The main result provides the rate region for an arbitrary function under the assumption that the sources satisfy a general criterion. This criterion is satisfied, in particular, when the sources are independent.
Physical Activity Recommendations for Children With Specific Chronic Health Conditions: Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis, Hemophilia, Asthma, and Cystic Fibrosis

As a group, children with a chronic disease or disability are less active than their healthy peers. There are many reasons for suboptimal physical activity, including biological, psychological, and social factors. Furthermore, the lack of specific guidelines for ‘safe’ physical activity participation poses a barrier to increasing activity. Physical activity provides significant general health benefits and may improve disease outcomes. Each child with a chronic illness should be evaluated by an experienced physician for activity counselling and for identifying any contraindications to participation. The present statement reviews the benefits and risks of participation in sport and exercise for children with juvenile arthritis, hemophilia, asthma, and cystic fibrosis. Guidelines for participation are included.
Affective Contextual Mobile Recommender System

Exponential growth of media consumption in online social networks demands effective recommendation to improve the quality of experience especially for on-the-go mobile users. By means of large-scale trace-driven measurements over mobile Twitter traces from users, we reveal the significance of affective features in shaping users' social media behaviors. Existing recommender systems however, rarely support this psychological effect in real-life. To capture this effect, in this paper we propose Kaleido, a real mobile system to achieve an affect-aware learning-based social media recommendation.Specifically, we design a machine learning mechanism to infer the affective feature within media contents. Furthermore, a cluster-based latent bias model is provided for jointly training the affect, behavior and social contexts. Our comprehensive experiments on Android prototype expose a superior prediction accuracy of 82%, with more than 20% accuracy improvement over existing mobile recommender systems. Moreover, by enabling users to offload their machine learning procedures to the deployed edge-cloud testbed, our system achieves speed-up of a factor of 1,000 against the local data training execution on smartphones.
Vast-scale Outdoor Navigation Using Adaptive Relative Bundle Adjustment

In this paper we describe a relative approach to simultaneous localization and mapping, based on the insight that a continuous relative representation can make the problem tractable at large scales. First, it is well known that bundle adjustment is the optimal non-linear least-squares formulation for this problem, in that its maximum-likelihood form matches the definition of the Cramer—Rao lower bound. Unfortunately, computing the maximum-likelihood solution is often prohibitively expensive: this is especially true during loop closures, which often necessitate adjusting all parameters in a loop. In this paper we note that it is precisely the choice of a single privileged coordinate frame that makes bundle adjustment costly, and that this expense can be avoided by adopting a completely relative approach. We derive a new relative bundle adjustment which, instead of optimizing in a single Euclidean space, works in a metric space defined by a manifold. Using an adaptive optimization strategy, we show experimentally that it is possible to solve for the full maximum-likelihood solution incrementally in constant time, even at loop closure. Our approach is, by definition, everywhere locally Euclidean, and we show that the local Euclidean estimate matches that of traditional bundle adjustment. Our system operates online in realtime using stereo data, with fast appearance-based loop closure detection. We show results on over 850,000 images that indicate the accuracy and scalability of the approach, and process over 330 GB of image data into a relative map covering 142 km of Southern England. To demonstrate a baseline sufficiency for navigation, we show that it is possible to find shortest paths in the relative maps we build, in terms of both time and distance. Query images from the web of popular landmarks around London, such as the London Eye or Trafalgar Square, are matched to the relative map to provide route planning goals.
Co-Development of Educational Aspirations and Academic Burnout from Adolescence to Adulthood in Finland

The study followed 871 participants from age 17 to 25. Resources were related to lower cynical attitude towards studying and feelings of inadequacy, whereas demands were related to all three components of academic burnout. Family resources predicted higher educational aspirations. Co-development between educational aspirations and academic burnout showed that among those on the vocational track, the more exhaustion they felt, the higher their aspirations, which again increased their exhaustion. Among those on the academic track, the less cynicism they felt, the higher their aspirations which again decreased their cynicism. High aspirations positively and cynicism negatively predicted educational attainment.