Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of VITEK Mass Spectrometry (MS), a Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Time-of-Flight MS System for Identification of Anaerobic Bacteria

Background By conventional methods, the identification of anaerobic bacteria is more time consuming and requires more expertise than the identification of aerobic bacteria. Although the matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) systems are relatively less studied, they have been reported to be a promising method for the identification of anaerobes. We evaluated the performance of the VITEK MS in vitro diagnostic (IVD; 1.1 database; bioMérieux, France) in the identification of anaerobes. Methods We used 274 anaerobic bacteria isolated from various clinical specimens. The results for the identification of the bacteria by VITEK MS were compared to those obtained by phenotypic methods and 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Results Among the 249 isolates included in the IVD database, the VITEK MS correctly identified 209 (83.9%) isolates to the species level and an additional 18 (7.2%) at the genus level. In particular, the VITEK MS correctly identified clinically relevant and frequently isolated anaerobic bacteria to the species level. The remaining 22 isolates (8.8%) were either not identified or misidentified. The VITEK MS could not identify the 25 isolates absent from the IVD database to the species level. Conclusions The VITEK MS showed reliable identifications for clinically relevant anaerobic bacteria.
Temporal Features and Consumer Evaluations of Group-Buying: The Effects of Product Image Zooming

Group-buying sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial offer daily deals at large discounts of typically 50% or more. Such deals are also characterized by two temporal features. First, these deals involve lead time before they are available for redemption. Second, such deals are available for a limited time only. This study examines how the two temporal features (lead time and deal time) of group-buying deals affect consumer evaluations by drawing on construal level theory (CLT). This research also determines how such effects can be moderated by the level of zooming on product images. In two experiments, we show that (1) increasing product image zooming mitigates the negative effects of lead time on consumer evaluations, thus limiting the unattractiveness of deals with long lead time; and (2) increasing product image zooming as deal time decreases improves consumer evaluations, thereby enhancing the attractiveness of such deals as the expiration date nears. These findings can be explained by the psychological distance that is associated with the temporal features of group-buying and with product image zooming. These findings also provide practical implications for group-buying websites regarding the effective use of product images to present deals.
Supervised Learning Methods for Vision Based Road Detection

One of the most important problems in the development of autonomous driving systems is the detection of navigable road. This paper explores a formulation of this issue as a supervised learning problem. Given highway video taken by a frontal camera, a naive method for generating positive and negative test images is proposed in order to implement binary classification. Two promising classification systems are implemented and compared. The first uses a linear SVM to classify image sections featurized by Segment-Based Fractal Texture Analysis (SFTA). This approach is compared to supervised learning via a multilayer convolutional neural network (CNN). Both methods achieve very high accuracy but the CNN is shown to perform slightly better due to higher specificity.
TYCOON: Theoretical Framework and Software Tools for Multimodal Interfaces

W e define a modality as a process analyzing and producing chunks of information. For instance, a speech recognition modality analyses speech signals and produces the labels of recognized words. Several multimodal interfaces combining such modalities have already been developed (IMMI'95, CMC'95). To take benefit out of them so as to advance research and implementation of multimodal interfaces, coherent theoretical and software tools are needed. From the " theoretical " point of view, the development of multimodal interfaces addresses several issues (Maybury 91, Dowell 95): content selection (" what to say "), modality allocation (" which modality to say it "), modality realization (" how to say it in that modality ") and modality combination. This paper deals with the " modality combination " issue. A multimodal interface developer has to know how to combine modalities and why this combination may improve the interaction. Yet existing frameworks for human-computer interfaces do not answer these two questions. Instead, they deal with the relation between the modes (language or action), the channels (audio, visual or haptic), the media (speech, text or gesture) and the styles of interaction (command language, selection in a menu) (Frohlich 91). Other frameworks describe the specificities of each modality regarding information content (Bernsen 95) or the temporal and semantic relations between events detected on several modalities (Nigay & Coutaz 93, Kara-giannidis 95). From the " software tools " points of view, existing authoring tools enable only the multimedia developer to combine modalities on temporal and spatial dimensions. A common deficiency of these tools is the lack of support mechanisms for the design and implementation tasks (Väänänen 95). This paper describes our approach named TYCOON, which is based on the notion of TYpes and goals of COOperatioN between modalities. It covers both the theoretical and the software points of view. It is composed of a theoretical framework for studying multimodal interfaces, a specification language and a multimodal module integrating events detected by several modalities.
Protecting Cryptographic Secrets and Processes

Modern commodity operating systems are increasingly used to perform cryptographic operations such as digital signatures and to store cryptographic keys and data which the user considers private. Even when this data is encrypted, as is the recommended best practice, the encryption keys themselves are not wellprotected. We examine the problem of protecting cryptographic secrets and cryptographic operations on commodity hardware and operating systems, with optional use of the TPM security hardware, and propose and evaluate some solutions. Our solutions are aimed primarily at attacks committed by malware and are generally applicable to maintaining the confidentiality and security of non-cryptographic secrets and processes.
Molecular techniques for pathogen identification and fungus detection in the environment

Many species of fungi can cause disease in plants, animals and humans. Accurate and robust detection and quantification of fungi is essential for diagnosis, modeling and surveillance. Also direct detection of fungi enables a deeper understanding of natural microbial communities, particularly as a great many fungi are difficult or impossible to cultivate. In the last decade, effective amplification platforms, probe development and various quantitative PCR technologies have revolutionized research on fungal detection and identification. Examples of the latest technology in fungal detection and differentiation are discussed here.
Affective issues in Semantic Educational Recommender Systems

Addressing affective issues in the recommendation process has shown their ability to increase the performance of recommender systems in non-educational scenarios. In turn, affective states have been considered for many years in developing intelligent tutoring systems. Currently, there are some works that combine both research lines. In this paper we discuss the benefits of considering affective issues in educational recommender systems and describe the extension of the Semantic Educational Recommender Systems (SERS) approach, which is characterized by its interoperability with e-learning services, to deal with learners’ affective traits in educational scenarios.
Searching publications on software testing

This note concerns a search for publications in which the pragmatic concept of a test as conducted in the practice of software testing is formalized, a theory about software testing based on such a formalization is presented or it is demonstrated on the basis of such a theory that there are solid grounds to test software in cases where in principle other forms of analysis could be used. This note reports on the way in which the search has been carried out and the main outcomes of the search. The message of the note is that the fundamentals of software testing are not yet complete in some respects.
Some Experiments with Undeenedness

We distinguish two kinds of undeenedness: undeenedness in existence versus undeenedness in information. We give several applications of the rst kind: a rst order formulation of the untyped lambda calculus and a Zermelo-Fraenkel style theory for partial functions which is equally powerful as ZF-Set Theory. We add the rst kind of unde-nedness to a typed lambda calculus, and show that identifying it to the second kind gives inconsistency. Finally, we use it to give an alternative approach to exception handling. A main goal of this paper is to argue that undeenedness is not a single concept which can be approached in diierent ways, but that there are diierent kinds of undeenedness, each having its speciic properties. Some of these kinds can be fruitfully used, and diierent kinds can be combined inside one formalism.
Supergravity modification of D-term hybrid inflation: Solving the cosmic string and spectral index problems via a right-handed sneutrino

Supergravity corrections due to the energy density of a right-handed sneutrino can generate a negative mass squared for the inflaton, flattening the inflaton potential and reducing the spectral index and inflaton energy density. For the case of D-term hybrid inflation, we show that the spectral index can be lowered from the conventional value n=0.98 to a value within the range favored by the latest WMAP analysis, n=0.951-0.019+0.015. The modified energy density is consistent with nonobservation of cosmic strings in the CMB if n<0.946. The WMAP lower bound on the spectral index implies that the D-term cosmic string contribution may be very close present CMB limits, contributing at least 5% to the CMB multipoles.
A comparison of three methods to estimate baseline creatinine for RIFLE classification.

BACKGROUND A pre-morbid 'baseline' creatinine is required in order to diagnose and stage acute kidney injury (AKI) using the RIFLE classification. Estimation of baseline creatinine by solving the Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) equation assuming a glomerular filtration rate of 75 ml/min/1.73 m(2) has been widely used but never validated. METHODS We analysed four cohorts of intensive care unit (ICU) patients from three centres (two from Pittsburgh and one from Mayo and Austin). Three cohorts consisted of preselected patients without AKI (Pittsburgh 1 n = 1048, Mayo n = 737, Austin n = 333), and measured creatinine values in these cohorts were taken to represent baseline creatinine values. The last cohort (Pittsburgh 2 n = 468) consisted of unselected ICU patients with baseline creatinine values recorded within 1 year before ICU admission. Using the Pittsburgh 1 cohort, we derived an equation using the same anthropometric variables as the MDRD equation: baseline creatinine = 0.74 - 0.2 (if female) + 0.08 (if black) + 0.003 × age (in years). We then compared measured creatinine in the Mayo and Austin cohorts and recorded creatinine in the Pittsburgh 2 cohort to the estimated creatinine from: (i) the MDRD equation; (ii) our new equation; (iii) a gender-fixed creatinine of 0.8 mg/dl for females and 1.0 mg/dl for males. RESULTS Using any of the three methods, the median absolute error of the estimates was of the order of 0.1-0.2 mg/dl, and overall accuracy was similar. When the definition of AKI was limited to the severity grades of Injury and Failure, all three methods were able to generate 78-90% reliable results for preselected normal range cohorts, and 63-70% for the unselected cohort of ICU patients. CONCLUSIONS Estimates of incidence of AKI in the critically ill using RIFLE classification can be affected by the bias and limited accuracy of methods to estimate baseline creatinine. Whenever possible, recorded creatinine values should be used as a reference of baseline. The use of the MDRD equation to estimate baseline creatinine when it is unknown may over- or underestimate some mild (Risk) AKI cases but is unlikely to misclassify patients in Injury and Failure.
Channel capacity achieving space-time block codes for MIMO systems with two, three and four transmit antennas

In this paper, three new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel capacity achieving, full and partial diversity, space-time block codes with reduced decoder complexities are proposed for MIMO systems having two, three and four transmit antennas. It is shown that the proposed codes have the same transmission rates as those of spatial multiplexing schemes while, moreover, offer second order transmit diversity. Computer simulations illustrate that the proposed code for two transmit antennas achieves the same performance as that of the best known code in the literature, the Golden code, with a lower decoding complexity while the proposed codes for three and four transmit antennas achieve better error performances than the corresponding spatial multiplexing schemes.
Implications for Generating Clarification Requests in Task-Oriented Dialogues

Clarification requests (CRs) in conversation ensure and maintain mutual understanding and thus play a crucial role in robust dialogue interaction. In this paper, we describe a corpus study of CRs in task-oriented dialogue and compare our findings to those reported in two prior studies. We find that CR behavior in task-oriented dialogue differs significantly from that in everyday conversation in a number of ways. Moreover, the dialogue type, the modality and the channel quality all influence the decision of when to clarify and at which level of the grounding process. Finally we identify form-function correlations which can inform the generation of CRs.
Working beyond technical aspects: an approach for driving the usability inspection adding the perspective of user experience

The proposal approach was applied in an experimental study in the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems domain, in which five competing applications were inspected through heuristic evaluation in the evaluation phase. This paper describes an approach used to encompass both technical and user experience aspects in usability inspections using a methodology of two steps: (1) the usability aspects are set out according to the domain and the set of guidelines selected to guide usability inspection; and then (2) a survey with typical users is carried out to verify the degree of importance of each usability aspects selected in the previous step. The results of the second step are used along with the usability inspection results to calculate the usability index that was set out aiming to measuring and comparing the relative usability of competing products. After the inspection, the usability index was calculated, which allowed us to verify the usability degree of the applications that had been developed using two different methodologies.
Dual Degree Dissertation On Scheduling Transmissions under QoS based Constraints

The Dual Degree Dissertation titled 'On Scheduling Transmissions under QoS based Constraints' submitted by Premal Shah (Roll no. 98D07020) may be accepted. i Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude towards Prof. Abhay Karandikar for his constant guidance and encouragement throughout the course of this one and a half year long project, without him this work would have been but an exercise in futility. I am also thankful to Prof. V. S. Borkar and Prof. S. D. Agashe for their useful inputs. I would also like to thank Neerav B. Mehta and Mukul Agarwal-working with them has been rewarding in terms of both, my understanding as well as my enthusiasm for the project. I am also thankful to Siddharth Verma for carefully reading this dissertation; it now has fewer errors. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Information Networks Lab and the Spann Lab for providing a wonderful work environment. ii Synopsis Modern-day communication networks seek to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to traffic flows. QoS guarantees are typically in the form of (average or absolute) delays and losses that a flow would experience. A QoS framework places constraints on the traffic inflow, as it would be required to adhere to a pre-negotiated regulating profile. It also constrains the scheduling or servicing manner, as it must deliver the performance metrics as required by the end application and promised by the network. In this work, three different problems that broadly fall within this framework of scheduling or choosing a transmission strategy that meets the imposed constraints while optimizing on a suitable cost function are separately dealt with. The first is that of delay-bounded streaming of video under traffic constraints that are specified in terms of a generalized token bucket regulator. The objective is to optimize the distortion and the distortion jitter in the resulting stream. A simple but effective way to capture this objective function is also presented. The second problem considered is also related to token bucket regulator constrained transmission; the objective function to be optimized here is the entropy of the resultant flow. Such a flow has an additional source of information in terms of the variable sizes of the chunks of transmission. Finally, the problem of power efficient transmission in wireless networks subject to a constraint on average delay is considered. The property that power increases with the …
Probabilistic Path Selection in Opportunistic Cognitive Radio Networks

We present a novel routing approach for multichannel cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Our approach is based on probabilistically estimating the available capacity of every channel over every CR-to-CR link, while taking into account primary radio (PR). Our routing design consists of two main phases. In the first phase, the source node attempts to compute the most probable path (MPP) to the destination (including the channel assignment along that path) whose bandwidth has the highest probability of satisfying a required demand D. In the second phase, we verify whether the capacity of the MPP is indeed sufficient to meet the demand at confidence level delta. If that is not the case, we judiciously add channels to the links of the MPP such that the augmented MPP satisfies the demand D at the confidence level delta. We show through simulations that our protocol always finds the best path to the destination, achieving in some cases up to 200% improvement in connection acceptance rate compared to the traditional Dijkstra.
Stability of p-Cycles under Dynamic Traffic

p-Cycles offer a protection that corresponds to an efficient pre-configured and pre-cross-connected protection scheme. Thereafter, we study the stability and the efficient reconfiguration of p-cycles in the context of dynamic asymmetric traffic. The literature acknowledges it as a difficult problem, but which is of paramount importance in the selection of p-cycles as a protection scheme in Intelligent Optical Networks (IONs). We investigate two p-cycle updating models which differ mainly by their objective criteria. The first objective is the classical one, aiming at minimizing the spare capacity. The second one is new and corresponds to the number of pre-cross-connections that needs to be set/reset after each traffic variation, while attempting to maximize the re-use of previously established pre-cross-connection settings in spite of the modifications of the p-cycles. Note that the second model needs to explicitly include wavelength continuity constraints and is therefore slightly more complex. Results show that: (i) The proposed ILP tools are scalable, and (ii) While p-cycles appear not to be very stable with the first criterion, they emerge as highly stable with the second criterion.
Shear viscosity and diffusion in liquid MgSiO3: Transport properties and implications for terrestrial planet magma oceans

Abstract Molecular dynamics simulations using a pair-wise additive potential are implemented to investigate self-diffusion (Mg, Si, and O) and shear viscosity of liquid MgSiO3 in the density-temperaturepressure range 2350-5300 kg/m3, 2500-5000 K, and 0-140 GPa, respectively. Self-diffusivity and shear viscosity are described by modified Arrhenian expressions, which feature a pressure-dependent activation volume. Activation energies for self-diffusion (Mg, Si, and O) and viscous flow are 99.6, 109.3, 97.4, and 95.3 kJ/mol, respectively; evidently oxygen mobility dominates liquid dynamics. Activation volumes for self-diffusion and shear viscosity at low (2-5 GPa) pressure are ~1 cm3/mol with self-diffusion decreasing and shear viscosity increasing as pressure increases although there is a small interval near zero pressure within which diffusivity increases slightly with increasing pressure. Shear viscosity increases by a factor of 75 along the 3000 K isotherm from the top of the mantle to the core-mantle boundary. Along the 3000 K isentrope relevant to terrestrial magma ocean convection, shear viscosity increases by about a factor of three. The equivalence conditions between the Stokes- Einstein and Eyring transport models are derived. The Eyring model provides information on the size of the activated complex associated with viscous flow across the range in pressures relevant to the Earth’s mantle and suggests that the number of atoms in the activated complex associated with shear flow decreases from ~8 atoms at low pressure to ~4 atoms at high pressure at 4500 K.
Benlik Saygısı ve Akılcı Olmayan İnançlar Bakımından Üniversite Öğrencilerinin Stresle Başaçıkma Yaklaşımlarının Analizi

Bu ampirik calismada, bireyin sahip oldugu benlik saygisi ve akilci olmayan inanclari ile stresle basa cikma yaklasimlari arasindaki iliskinin arastirilmasi amaclanmistir. Metodolojik baglamda iliskisel tarama modeline uygun olarak yapilan bu gorgul calismadaki olcek uygulamasi, universite ogrencileri orneklemi ozelligi tasiyan 330'u kiz ve 271'i erkek olmak uzere toplam 601 denek uzerinde yapilmistir. Arastirma verilerinin toplanmasinda ise (a) Stresle Basa cikma Olcegi, (b)Rosenberg Benlik Saygisi Olcegi ve (c)Akilci Olmayan Inanc Olcegi olmak uzere toplam uc adet olcme araci kullanilmistir. Ote yandan Arastirmanin istatistiksel analizlerinde i. Pearson Momentler Carpim Korelâsyonu ve ii. asamali regresyon analizi teknikleri kullanilmistir. Arastirma sonucunda; (a) problem odakli basa cikma ile benlik saygisi arasinda pozitif bir iliski; (b) problem odakli basa cikma ile akilci olmayan inanclar arasinda ise negatif bir iliski oldugu, (c) stresle basa cikmada kacinma ile akilci olmayan inanclar arasinda pozitif bir iliski oldugu, (d) stresle basa cikmada sosyal destek arama ile benlik saygisi arasindaki iliskinin pozitif yonde anlamli oldugu, bulunmustur. Ayrica (e) benlik saygisinin problem odakli basa cikma ve sosyal destek aramayi, (f) akilci olmayan inanclarin problem odakli basa cikma ve kacinmanin onemli yordayicilari oldugu bulunmustur.Bu ampirik veriler ogrencilerin benlik saygisi duzeyleri arttikca, problem odakli basa cikma davranislarinin arttigini; akilci olmayan inanc duzeyleri dustukce problem odakli basa cikma davranisinin da arttigini ortaya koymaktadir. Bu sonuclar, ogrencilerin karsilastigi stres durumlari ile basa cikmada sahip olduklari akilci olmayan inanclarin olumsuz; benlik saygilarinin da olumlu bir etkiye sahip oldugunu gostermektedir.