Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On Optimum Conventional Quantization for Source Coding with Side Information at the Decoder

Let X and Y denote two jointly memoryless sources with finite alphabets. Suppose that X is to be encoded in a lossy manner with Y as the side information available only at the decoder. A common approach to this lossy source coding problem is to apply conventional vector quantization followed by Slepian-Wolf coding. In this paper we are interested in the rate-distortion performance achievable asymptotically by this approach. Given an arbitrary single letter distortion measure d, it is shown that the best rate achievable asymptotically under the constraint that X is recovered with distortion level no greater than D ges 0 is Rwz(D) = mintimes[I(X;X) -I(Y; X)], where the minimum is taken over all auxiliary random variables X such that Ed(X, X) les D and X rarr X rarr Y is a Markov chain. An extended Blahut-Arimoto algorithm is then proposed to calculate Rwz(D) for any (X,Y) and any distortion measure, and the convergence of the algorithm is also proved. Interestingly, it is observed that the random variable X achieving Rwz(D) is, in general, different from the random variable X' achieving the classical rate-distortion function R(D) of X at distortion D. In particular, it is shown that in the case of binary sources and Hamming distortion measure, the random variable X achieving Rwz (D) is the same as the random variable X' achieving R(D) if and only if the channel pYItimes from X to Y is symmetric. Thus, the design of conventional quantization in the case of side information at the decoder should be different from the case of no side information.
Evolving Dynamical Systems of the Yeast Cell Cycle

Since Charles Darwin formulated his theory of the evolution of species, it has been of interest in biology to identify how species have diverged by evolutionary changes. Initially this was done through morphological characters—like fins changing to limbs for the first creatures crawling up from the water—where only the large scale net result of a vast number of minute changes was taken into consideration. With the increasingly easy access to biomolecular data, in particular sequential data like DNA and protein sequences, this focus has shifted to the fundamental unit of evolution, namely the instantaneous mutation in genomic material. A vast research effort has gone into defining and refining models of sequence evolution. Larger scale biochemical data is now starting to become accessible in quantities comparable to the early days of DNA sequencing, and this growth can only be expected to continue along a similar trajectory. A fundamental goal in biology is to understand the mapping from genotype, i.e. the DNA of a species, to phenotype, i.e. the actual living individuals of a species. It is thus both timely and highly relevant to start expanding our repertoire of evolutionary models from biosequences towards higher levels of organisation. We will pursue this objective for the key concept of how genes interact in regulatory networks, with initial application to the yeast cell cycle where sufficiently detailed knowledge is already available to allow sensible measures of evolutionary space and fitness to be defined.
Animal signals and emotion in music: coordinating affect across groups

Researchers studying the emotional impact of music have not traditionally been concerned with the principled relationship between form and function in evolved animal signals. The acoustic structure of musical forms is related in important ways to emotion perception, and thus research on non-human animal vocalizations is relevant for understanding emotion in music. Musical behavior occurs in cultural contexts that include many other coordinated activities which mark group identity, and can allow people to communicate within and between social alliances. The emotional impact of music might be best understood as a proximate mechanism serving an ultimately social function. Recent work reveals intimate connections between properties of certain animal signals and evocative aspects of human music, including (1) examinations of the role of nonlinearities (e.g., broadband noise) in non-human animal vocalizations, and the analogous production and perception of these features in human music, and (2) an analysis of group musical performances and possible relationships to non-human animal chorusing and emotional contagion effects. Communicative features in music are likely due primarily to evolutionary by-products of phylogenetically older, but still intact communication systems. But in some cases, such as the coordinated rhythmic sounds produced by groups of musicians, our appreciation and emotional engagement might be driven by an adaptive social signaling system. Future empirical work should examine human musical behavior through the comparative lens of behavioral ecology and an adaptationist cognitive science. By this view, particular coordinated sound combinations generated by musicians exploit evolved perceptual response biases – many shared across species – and proliferate through cultural evolutionary processes.
Location of partial discharges in power transformers using computer-aided acoustic techniques

In this paper, the recent development of a computer-aided partial discharge (PD) acoustic location system is briefly introduced. The paper presents the characteristics of this system with emphasis on the acoustic locating technique and interference countermeasures. Signal recognition, ascertainment of time delay and the location algorithms are discussed. A novel method for identifying multiple PD sources is proposed. By using fuzzy sets and fuzzy subsets as well as their relation equation, one can classify and identify the multiple PD sources. On-site testing results are also included in the paper. The results confirm that the acoustic emission techniques for partial discharge location are feasible and effective.
Contributions of PBP 5 anddd-Carboxypeptidase Penicillin Binding Proteins to Maintenance of Cell Shape in Escherichia coli

ABSTRACT Escherichia coli has 12 recognized penicillin binding proteins (PBPs), four of which (PBPs 4, 5, and 6 and DacD) havedd-carboxypeptidase activity. Although the enzymology of the dd-carboxypeptidases has been studied extensively, the in vivo functions of these proteins are poorly understood. To explain why E. coli maintains four independent loci encoding enzymes of considerable sequence identity and comparable in vitro activity, it has been proposed that thedd-carboxypeptidases may substitute for one another in vivo. We tested the validity of this equivalent substitution hypothesis by investigating the effects of these proteins on the aberrant morphology of ΔdacA mutants, which produce no PBP 5. Although cloned PBP 5 complemented the morphological phenotype of a ΔdacA mutant lacking a total of seven PBPs, controlled expression of PBP 4, PBP 6, or DacD did not. Also, a truncated PBP 5 protein lacking its amphipathic C-terminal membrane binding sequence did not reverse the morphological defects and was lethal at low levels of expression, implying that membrane anchoring is essential for the proper functioning of PBP 5. By examining a set of mutants from which multiple PBP genes were deleted, we found that significant morphological aberrations required the absence of at least three different PBPs. The greatest defects were observed in cells lacking, at minimum, PBPs 5 and 6 and one of the endopeptidases (either PBP 4 or PBP 7). The results further differentiate the roles of the low-molecular-weight PBPs, suggest a functional significance for the amphipathic membrane anchor of PBP 5 and, when combined with the recently determined crystal structure of PBP 5, suggest possible mechanisms by which these PBPs may contribute to maintenance of a uniform cell shape in E. coli.
Spatial and Temporal Control of Hyperthermia Using Real Time Ultrasonic Thermal Strain Imaging with Motion Compensation, Phantom Study

Mild hyperthermia has been successfully employed to induce reversible physiological changes that can directly treat cancer and enhance local drug delivery. In this approach, temperature monitoring is essential to avoid undesirable biological effects that result from thermal damage. For thermal therapies, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been employed to control real-time Focused Ultrasound (FUS) therapies. However, combined ultrasound imaging and therapy systems offer the benefits of simple, low-cost devices that can be broadly applied. To facilitate such technology, ultrasound thermometry has potential to reliably monitor temperature. Control of mild hyperthermia was previously achieved using a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller based on thermocouple measurements. Despite accurate temporal control of heating, this method is limited by the single position at which the temperature is measured. Ultrasound thermometry techniques based on exploiting the thermal dependence of acoustic parameters (such as longitudinal velocity) can be extended to create thermal maps and allow an accurate monitoring of temperature with good spatial resolution. However, in vivo applications of this technique have not been fully developed due to the high sensitivity to tissue motion. Here, we propose a motion compensation method based on the acquisition of multiple reference frames prior to treatment. The technique was tested in the presence of 2-D and 3-D physiological-scale motion and was found to provide effective real-time temperature monitoring. PID control of mild hyperthermia in presence of motion was then tested with ultrasound thermometry as feedback and temperature was maintained within 0.3°C of the requested value.
Investigating key functions of hand movements by individuals with visual impairment: Improving teaching practices in special education through research

Abstract Research is still ongoing with regard to types of exploratory movement by active touch and its key functions in individuals with visual impairment. The aim of the present study was to describe and identify different types of exploratory movement performed by individuals with visual impairment in their exploration of geometric shapes. A total of twelve participants were asked to explore a number of simple and complex geometric shapes. The research design consisted of two research phases. In the first phase, the participants were asked to describe and, if possible, to identify the properties of each shape. In the second phase, the participants were asked to describe their hand movements during active exploration. The findings indicated that the participants utilized different movements to extract the featural and global properties of the shapes. It was also observed that some patterns of exploratory movement were present in all of the participants’ strategies, which indicated issues of laterality. Finally, the research highlighted that by observing patterns of exploratory movement, educators of students with visual impairment can determine which strategies may be worth exploring with a view to their adoption in teaching practices and instruction. Keywords: visual impairment, active touch, geometric shapes, think -aloud protocols, laterality, teaching practices
Predicting the perceived quality of web forum posts

Assessing the quality of user generated content is an important problem of Web 2.0. Currently, most web sites need their users to rate content manually, which is labour intensive and thus happens rarely. The automatic systems in the literature are limited to one kind or domain of discourse. We propose a system to assess the quality of user generated discourse automatically. Our system learns from human ratings by applying SVM classification based on features such as Surface, Lexical, Syntactic, Forum specific and Similarity features. Our system has also shown to be adaptable to different domains of discourse in our experiments on three different web forum data sets. The system outperformed the majority class baseline for all three data sets. Our best performing system configuration achieves an accuracy of 89.1%, which is significantly higher than the baseline of 61.82%.
Dynamics and Adaptive Benefits of Protein Domain Emergence and Arrangements during Plant Genome Evolution

Plant genomes are generally very large, mostly paleopolyploid, and have numerous gene duplicates and complex genomic features such as repeats and transposable elements. Many of these features have been hypothesized to enable plants, which cannot easily escape environmental challenges, to rapidly adapt. Another mechanism, which has recently been well described as a major facilitator of rapid adaptation in bacteria, animals, and fungi but not yet for plants, is modular rearrangement of protein-coding genes. Due to the high precision of profile-based methods, rearrangements can be well captured at the protein level by characterizing the emergence, loss, and rearrangements of protein domains, their structural, functional, and evolutionary building blocks. Here, we study the dynamics of domain rearrangements and explore their adaptive benefit in 27 plant and 3 algal genomes. We use a phylogenomic approach by which we can explain the formation of 88% of all arrangements by single-step events, such as fusion, fission, and terminal loss of domains. We find many domains are lost along every lineage, but at least 500 domains are novel, that is, they are unique to green plants and emerged more or less recently. These novel domains duplicate and rearrange more readily within their genomes than ancient domains and are overproportionally involved in stress response and developmental innovations. Novel domains more often affect regulatory proteins and show a higher degree of structural disorder than ancient domains. Whereas a relatively large and well-conserved core set of single-domain proteins exists, long multi-domain arrangements tend to be species-specific. We find that duplicated genes are more often involved in rearrangements. Although fission events typically impact metabolic proteins, fusion events often create new signaling proteins essential for environmental sensing. Taken together, the high volatility of single domains and complex arrangements in plant genomes demonstrate the importance of modularity for environmental adaptability of plants.
The effect of zero-rate encoders in the multi-terminal source coding problem

This work focuses on the multi-terminal source coding problem and presents conditions when a rate point achievable with asymptotically zero-rate messages over a subset of network links, is also achievable with no communication over links in that subset. We show that when there exist block codes that are robust to small changes in the source distribution, zero-rate encoders can be ignored, i.e., their outgoing links can be assumed to be absent. Additionally, we show that when the decoder is given access to the strictly causal past realizations of the sources, zero-rate encoders can always be ignored.
A new multicarrier multicode DS-CDMA scheme for time and frequency selective fading channels

In this paper, a new multicarrier, direct sequence code division multiple access (MC-DS-CDMA) system is proposed. Our new signal construction is based on convolutional encoding of the transmitted data, serial-to-parallel (S/P) conversion of the encoded data, Walsh-Hadamard-transformation (WHT), a second S/P conversion of the WHT outputs, spread spectrum (SS) modulation with a common pseudo-noise (PN) sequence, and then multicarrier transmission. The system bit error rate (BER) performance in frequency selective fading channel in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and a jamming tone is analyzed and simulated. The numerical results are compared with those from an orthogonal MC-DS-CDMA system of Sourour and Nakagawa [7]. It is shown that the two systems have almost the same BER performance, but the proposed scheme has better anti-jamming ability.
Learning the Nonlinear Multivariate Dynamics of Motion of Robotic Manipulators

Motion imitation requires reproduction of a dynamical signature of a movement, i.e. a robot should be able to encode and reproduce a particular path together with a specific velocity and/or an acceleration profile. Furthermore, a human provides only few demonstrations, that cannot cover all possible contexts in which the robot will need to reproduce the motion autonomously. Therefore, the encoding should be able to efficiently generalize knowledge by generating similar motions in unseen context. This work follows a recent trend in Programming by Demonstration in which the dynamics of the motion is learned. We present an algorithm to estimate multivariate robot motions through a Mixture of Gaussians. The strengths of the proposed encoding are three-fold: i) it allows to generalize a motion to unseen context; ii) it provides fast on-line replanning of the motion in the face of spatio-temporal perturbations; iii) it may embed different types of dynamics, governed by different attractors. The generality of the method to estimate arbitrary nonlinear motion dynamics is demonstrated by accurately estimating a set of known non-linear dynamical systems. The platformindependency and real-time performance of the method are further validated to learn the non-linear dynamics of motion in an industrial six degree of freedom robotic arm and in a four degree of freedom humanoid arm.
Extreme Maximal Weighted Frequent Itemset Mining for Cognitive Frequency Decision Making

Cognitive Frequency Decision Making (CFDM) is a new application in cognitive radio ad hoc network with limited communication capability, and once solved by our algorithm Extreme Maximal Biclique Searcher (EMBS). In this paper, we extend the CFDM from one subnet to the whole network, and propose Common Frequency Searcher (CFS) to find the solution. CFS uses the result of a novel algorithm Maximal Weighted Frequent Itemset Mining (MWFIM) which is mainly discussed in this paper and also proposed by us to mine all maximal weighted frequent itemsets from transaction database of weighted items. We solve the extended CFDM problem by using the weight of item in a new fashion in which weight is independent of support and by traveling weighted itemset enumeration tree in a depth-first manner. When visiting nodes of the tree, we use two pruning conditions to speed up traveling and reduce computational time. Experimental results show that our algorithm can satisfy the CFDM application in real world at most times.
Miniaturized Coupled-Line Couplers Using Uniplanar Synthesized Coplanar Waveguides

A novel slow-wave synthesized coplanar waveguide (CPW), namely, the uniplanar synthesized CPW, is investigated in this paper. Quasi-lumped CPW inductors and capacitors are used in synthesizing the new slow-wave structure. The synthesis method, lumped equivalent-circuit model, and simulated and experimental results are discussed. The synthesized line, featuring excellent miniaturization capabilities, has a moderate quality factor. The slow wave factor is 7.5, while the unloaded quality factor is 30-60. By utilizing the synthesized CPW, three novel miniaturized coupled-line directional couplers are proposed and experimentally verified. With the help of even/odd-mode analysis, design charts are summarized for understanding of the developed miniaturized couplers. When compared with previous designs, the miniaturized couplers show comparable performance, but significantly reduced sizes. Additionally, they have quasi-square appearances, which are suitable for circuit integration in cascade connection.
Day care in infancy and risk of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia: findings from UK case-control study

Abstract Objective To test the hypothesis that reduced exposure to common infections in the first year of life increases the risk of developing acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Design and setting The United Kingdom childhood cancer study (UKCCS) is a large population based case-control study of childhood cancer across 10 regions of the UK. Participants 6305 children (aged 2-14 years) without cancer; 3140 children with cancer (diagnosed 1991-6), of whom 1286 had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). Main outcome measure Day care and social activity during the first year of life were used as proxies for potential exposure to infection in infancy. Results Increasing levels of social activity were associated with consistent reductions in risk of ALL; a dose-response trend was seen. When children whose mothers reported no regular activity outside the family were used as the reference group, odds ratios for increasing levels of activity were 0.73 (95% confidence interval 0.62 to 0.87) for any social activity, 0.62 (0.51 to 0.75) for regular day care outside the home, and 0.48 (0.37 to 0.62) for formal day care (attendance at facility with at least four children at least twice a week) (P value for trend < 0.001). Although not as striking, results for non-ALL malignancies showed a similar pattern (P value for trend < 0.001). When children with non-ALL malignancies were taken as the reference group, a significant protective effect for ALL was seen only for formal day care (odds ratio = 0.69, 0.51 to 0.93; P = 0.02). Similar results were obtained for B cell precursor common ALL and other subgroups, as well as for cases diagnosed above and below age 5 years. Conclusion These results support the hypothesis that reduced exposure to infection in the first few months of life increases the risk of developing acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.
Access Characteristic Guided Read and Write Cost Regulation for Performance Improvement on Flash Memory

The relatively high cost of write operations has become the performance bottleneck of flash memory. Write cost refers to the time needed to program a flash page using incremental-step pulse programming (ISPP), while read cost refers to the time needed to sense and transfer a page from the storage. If a flash page is written with a higher cost by using a finer step size during the ISPP process, it can be read with a relatively low cost due to the time saved in sensing and transferring, and vice versa. We introduce AGCR, an access characteristic guided cost regulation scheme that exploits this tradeoff to improve flash performance. Based on workload characteristics, logical pages receiving more reads will be written using a finer step size so that their read cost is reduced. Similarly, logical pages receiving more writes will be written using a coarser step size so that their write cost is reduced. Our evaluation shows that AGCR incurs negligible overhead, while improving performance by 15% on average, compared to previous approaches.
GENERATION USING DISCRIMINATIVE MACHINE LEARNING MODELS

Headline or short summary generation is an important problem in Text Summarization and has several practical applications. We present a discriminative learning framework and a rich feature set for the headline generation task. Secondly, we present a novel Bleu measure based scheme for evaluation of headline generation models, which does not require human produced references. We achieve this by building a test corpus using the Google news service. We propose two stacked log-linear models for both headline word selection (Content Selection) and for ordering words into a grammatical and coherent headline (Headline Synthesis). For decoding a beam search algorithm is used that combines the two log-linear models to produce a list of k-best human readable headlines from a news story. Systematic training and experimental results on the Google-news test dataset demonstrate the success and effectiveness of our approach.
Regularized Minimum Volume Ellipsoid Metric for Query-Based Learning

We are interested in learning an adaptive local metric on a lower dimensional manifold for query--based operations.We combine the concept underlying manifold learning algorithms and the minimum volume ellipsoid metric to find the nearest neighbouring points to a query point on the manifold on which the query point is lying. Extensive experiments on various standard benchmark data sets in the context of classification showed very promising results when compared to state of the art metric learning algorithms.