Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Grasp type revisited: A modern perspective on a classical feature for vision

The grasp type provides crucial information about human action. However, recognizing the grasp type from unconstrained scenes is challenging because of the large variations in appearance, occlusions and geometric distortions. In this paper, first we present a convolutional neural network to classify functional hand grasp types. Experiments on a public static scene hand data set validate good performance of the presented method. Then we present two applications utilizing grasp type classification: (a) inference of human action intention and (b) fine level manipulation action segmentation. Experiments on both tasks demonstrate the usefulness of grasp type as a cognitive feature for computer vision. This study shows that the grasp type is a powerful symbolic representation for action understanding, and thus opens new avenues for future research.
Formalization for natural language fuzzy queries and crisp multi-criteria queries

It is common in real life to find fuzzy information that comes from subjective judgments or the imprecision in measured data. Fuzzy approaches have been used to extend database systems in storing and updating imprecise information (data) and in processing imprecise queries. Consider a fuzzy query: find name, grade of quite good students and just tall students where age > 15. This query includes two fuzzy concepts: good student and tall student and one crisp query criteria (i.e. age > 15). In this paper we present a formalization to process natural language fuzzy (expressive) queries and to return fuzzy results for crisp query criteria. Our formalization is general that can be particularized for implementation in variety of database platforms i.e. fuzzy web search, information systems supporting fuzzy data etc. Our approach only makes the fuzzy query writing much simpler and easier than conventional query writing but also close to human like thinking due to its true fuzzy nature. We also provide an operational semantics for fuzzy query processing which can be followed for multiple data types i.e. numeric, text, graphics etc. Our approach supports fuzzy querying for not only fuzzy data but also for missing data; hence enabling us to get query results closer to human thinking and expectations. It is an expressive model that let to make human-like (i.e. fuzzy) consults.
Single-track asynchronous pipeline templates using 1-of-N encoding

This paper presents a new fast and templatized family of fine-grain asynchronous pipeline stages based on the single-track protocol. No explicit control wires are required outside of the datapath and the data is 1-of-N encoded. With a forward latency of 2 transitions and a cycle time of 6 for most configurations, the new family can run at 1.6 GHz using MOSIS TSMC 0.25 /spl mu/m process. This is significantly faster than all known quasi-delay-insensitive templates and has less timing assumptions than the recently proposed ultra-high-speed GasP bundled-data circuits.
Catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation in the elderly

Background Atrial fibrillation (AF) catheter ablation has emerged as a promising treatment strategy for AF, but has not been widely adopted in the elderly population. The present study aimed to determine the safety and efficacy of AF catheter ablation in the elderly population. Methods and Results The study population consisted of 316 patients with paroxysmal AF who underwent left atrial ablation. Ninety-five patients were ≥ 65 years (48 males, mean age 68.9 ± 3.0 years old) and 221 patients were < 65 years old (130 males, mean age 52.5 ± 10.4 years old). After a mean follow-up period of 34.0 ± 15.1 months, 55 (57.9%) patients in the elderly group were free from arrhythmia recurrence compared with 149 (67.4%) patients in the younger group (P = 0.169). Procedural complications were uncommon in both study groups. In logistic regression analysis, left atrial diameter (P = 0.003), hypertension (P = 0.001), dyslipidemia (P = 0.039), and coronary artery disease (P = 0.018) were independent predictors of AF recurrence in the elderly population. Conclusions Catheter ablation of AF is safe and effective in older patients. Invasive strategies should be considered as an alternative choice in symptomatic elderly patients with AF.
Hypertonic stress increases the Na+ conductance of rat hepatocytes in primary culture

We studied the ionic mechanisms underlying the regulatory volume increase of rat hepatocytes in primary culture by use of confocal laser scanning microscopy, conventional and ion-sensitive microelectrodes, cable analysis, microfluorometry, and measurements of 86Rb+ uptake. Increasing osmolarity from 300 to 400 mosm/liter by addition of sucrose decreased cell volumes to 88.6% within 1 min; thereafter, cell volumes increased to 94.1% of control within 10 min, equivalent to a regulatory volume increase (RVI) by 44.5%. This RVI was paralleled by a decrease in cell input resistance and in specific cell membrane resistance to 88 and 60%, respectively. Ion substitution experiments (high K+, low Na+, low Cl-) revealed that these membrane effects are due to an increase in hepatocyte Na+ conductance. During RVI, ouabain-sensitive 86Rb+ uptake was augmented to 141% of control, and cell Na+ and cell K+ increased to 148 and 180%, respectively. The RVI, the increases in Na+ conductance and cell Na+, as well as the activation of Na+/K(+)-ATPase were completely blocked by 10(-5) mol/liter amiloride. At this concentration, amiloride had no effect on osmotically induced cell alkalinization via Na+/H+ exchange. When osmolarity was increased from 220 to 300 mosm/liter (by readdition of sucrose after a preperiod of 15 min in which the cells underwent a regulatory volume decrease, RVD) cell volumes initially decreased to 81.5%; thereafter cell volumes increased to 90.8% of control. This post-RVD-RVI of 55.0% is also mediated by an increase in Na+ conductance. We conclude that rat hepatocytes in confluent primary culture are capable of RVI as well as of post-RVD-RVI. In this system, hypertonic stress leads to a considerable increase in cell membrane Na+ conductance. In concert with conductive Na+ influx, cell K+ is then increased via activation of Na+/K(+)-ATPase. An additional role of Na+/H+ exchange in the volume regulation of rat hepatocytes remains to be defined.
Multinational Internet-based survey of patient preference for newer oral or injectable Type 2 diabetes medication

Background: The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes mellitus continues to rise. Although glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) analog and dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitor medications are effective, there are differences between these products, including method of administration (injectable versus oral). The objective of this study was to examine patient preferences (and predictors of preferences) for two different medication profiles, one similar to a GLP-1 analog (liraglutide) and another similar to a DPP-4 inhibitor (sitagliptin). Methods: Internet survey data were collected in two waves (wave 1, n = 2402; wave 2, n = 1340) using patients from the US and Europe. Patients were presented with two hypothetical medication profiles (“drug A” and “drug B”, resembling sitagliptin and liraglutide, respectively) and asked to report their preferences. Results: Most patients in wave 1 and wave 2 reported that overall they would prefer a drug with the sitagliptin-like profile (81.9% and 84.4%, respectively) over a drug with the liraglutide-like profile (18.1% and 15.6%, respectively), and >80% of patients reported that they would be able to take a drug with the sitagliptin-like profile as directed by their physician for a longer period. The likelihood of preferring the sitagliptin-like profile significantly increased as age (odds ratio [OR] = 1.02) and importance placed on method of administration (OR = 1.32) increased (P < 0.05). Although the sitagliptin-like profile was preferred by the majority of patients in all subgroups, a lower proportion of patients with obesity, with weight gain, with A1C values above target, and who exercised preferred the sitagliptin-like profile compared with those without obesity (77.0% versus 87.9%), without weight gain (77.8% versus 86.7%), with A1C values at or below target (79.0% versus 86.5%), and who did not exercise (81.6% versus 86.4%), respectively (P < 0.05). Conclusions: This research suggests that patients (across geographies) prefer an oral medication with a profile resembling sitagliptin to an injectable medication with a profile resembling liraglutide.
Dynamic Measurement of Complex Impedance in Real-Time for Smart Handset Applications

The evolution of the mobile handset in support of fourth-generation and beyond technology requirements continues to introduce significant challenges. Tunable systems promise improvements in performance and flexibility with the significant potential to relax limitations currently imposed on traditional RF components and systems. This paper introduces novel techniques based on tunable systems that enable the handset to learn the complex impedance at any stage of its RF front-end in real-time. The proposed approaches are based on utilizing readily available information from the receiver or can be easily obtained with simple perturbations of the system. The added flexibility of this previously unavailable information enables the implementation of new smart handset applications including improved handset performance. The methods are presented through simulations and measurements.
BK channels play a counter-adaptive role in drug tolerance and dependence

Disturbance of neural activity by sedative drugs has been proposed to trigger a homeostatic response that resists unfavorable changes in net cellular excitability, leading to tolerance and dependence. The Drosophila slo gene encodes a BK-type Ca2+-activated K+ channel implicated in functional tolerance to alcohol and volatile anesthetics. We hypothesized that increased expression of BK channels induced by these drugs constitutes the homeostatic adaptation conferring resistance to sedative drugs. In contrast to the dogmatic view that BK channels act as neural depressants, we show that drug-induced slo expression enhances excitability by reducing the neuronal refractory period. Although this neuroadaptation directly counters some effects of anesthetics, it also causes long-lasting enhancement of seizure susceptibility, a common symptom of drug withdrawal. These data provide a possible mechanism for the long-standing counter-adaptive theory for drug tolerance in which homeostatic adaptations triggered by drug exposure to produce drug tolerance become counter-adaptive after drug clearance and result in symptoms of dependence.
Do Hot Hands Exist among Hedge Fund Managers?

We examine whether hot hands exist among hedge fund managers. In measuring performance, we use hedge fund style benchmarks. This allows us to control for option-like features inherent in returns from hedge fund strategies. We take into account the possibility that reported asset values may be based on stale prices. We develop a statistical model that relates a hedge fund's performance to its decision to liquidate or close in order to infer the performance of a hedge fund that left the database. While we find significant performance persistence among superior funds we find little evidence of persistence among inferior funds. York University for their helpful discussions and suggestions. We are grateful to HFR Asset Management for providing us with the data. Any views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the institutions they represent.
Contextual processing of locative prepositional phrases

This paper deals with contextual aspects of locative preposition processing. Firstly, accordingly to a study on the referential behavior of the pronominal adverb "y" in its locative uses, we show that static locative prepositions are functions, not only at the conceptual level (as shown in previous studies), but also from a contextual point of view. Such functions introduce new objects in the discourse context, that have to be taken into account in classical contextual processing tasks, such as reference resolution or question answering. Then, we show how these phenomena can fit into contextual formalisms like DRT and DPL.
H-PFSP: Efficient Hybrid Parallel PFSP Protected Scheduling for MapReduce System

MapReduce provides a data-parallel computing framework, and has emerged as a popular processing model due to the simplicity of operations for big data application developers. Data processing applications from many different domains such as search and data mining are usually developed using open-source Hadoop implementation of MapReduce or self-developed MapReduce-like implementations like Dryad [1] and Ciel [2]. In cloud environments, products like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) [3] provide MapReduce services as third-party multi-tenant service. Even within a company, a number of products may share the MapReduce cluster. Therefore, a fair and efficient scheduler is crucial to improve performance of submitted jobs and guarantee multi-user fairness. However, in practice, it is hard to guarantee both fairness and per-job performance, especially when jobs are scheduled without accurate estimation. We show that processor sharing (PS) type of schedulers like Fair Scheduling degrade the per-job performance in a multi-user environment. We present a new scheduling policy, Hybrid Parallel pessimistic Fair Schedule Protocol (H-PFSP), that can finish every job no later than Fair scheduler does. Unlike Fair scheduler, however, it can improve the per-job performance of MapReduce systems with relatively accurate job progress estimation.
Inapproximability of pure nash equilibria

The complexity of computing pure Nash equilibria in congestion games was recently shown to be PLS-complete. In this paper, we therefore study the complexity of computing approximate equilibria in congestion games. An alpha-approximate equilibrium, for α > 1, is a state of the game in which none of the players can make an α-greedy step, i.e., an unilateral strategy change that decreases the player's cost by a factor of at least α. Our main result shows that finding an α-approximate equilibrium of a given congestion game is sc PLS-complete, for any polynomial-time computable α > 1. Our analysis is based on a gap introducing PLS-reduction from FLIP, i.e., the problem of finding a local optimum of a function encoded by an arbitrary circuit. As this reduction is tight it additionally implies that computing an α-approximate equilibrium reachable from a given initial state by a sequence of α-greedy steps is PSPACE-complete. Our results are in sharp contrast to a recent result showing that every local search problem in PLS admits a fully polynomial time approximation scheme. In addition, we show that there exist congestion games with states such that any sequence of α-greedy steps leading from one of these states to an α-approximate Nash equilibrium has exponential length, even if the delay functions satisfy a bounded-jump condition. This result shows that a recent result about polynomial time convergence for α-greedy steps in congestion games satisfying the bounded-jump condition is restricted to symmetric games only.
Multilingual Robust Anaphora Resolution

Most traditional approaches to anaphora resolution rely heavily on linguistic and domain knowledge. One of the disadvantages of developing a knowledge-based system, however, is that it is a very labour-intensive and timehconsuming task. This paper presents a robust, knowledge-poor approach to resolving pronouns in technical manuals. This approach is a modification of the practical approach (Mitkov 1998a) and operates on texts pre-processed by a part-of-speech taggcr. Input is checked against agreement and a nlonhber of antecedent indicators. Candidates are assigried scores by each indicator and the candidate with the highest ag~ gregate score is returned as the antecedent. We pro~ pose this approach as a platform for multilingual pronoun resolution. The robust approach was initially de~ veloped and tested for English, but we have also adapted and tested it for Polish and Arabic. For both languages, we found that adaptation required minimum modification and that further, even if used un~ modified, the approach delivers acceptable success rates. Preliminary evaluation reports high success rates in the range of and over 90%
The ACM multimedia 2013 art exhibition

The Art Exhibition of ACM Multimedia 2013 has attracted significant work from a variety of digital artists collaborating with research institutions. We have endeavored to select exhibits that achieved an interesting balance between technology and artistic intent. The techniques underpinning these artworks are relevant to several technical tracks of the conference, in particular those dealing with human-centered and interactive media. We briefly review how the various installations revisit current topics in Multimedia research, focusing more specifically on their approach to dynamic content generation, user experience, multimodality, and affective interfaces. Once again, the unique blend of technology and user experience does not limit itself to showcasing recent advances in interactive media, and should be of interest to all conference participants as well as the general public the exhibition space will be open to.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Cc by a Survey on Event Recognition and Summarization in Football Videos

There are large number of sports videos are available over the World Wide Web (www). But using these complete videos to get information is a hectic and time consuming job. So, the need of extraction on events from the videos aroused. Semantic analysis of videos and automatic event extraction plays a vital role in several applications; using content-based search engines, video indexing, and video summarization. As a powerful tool for learning complex patterns is the Bayesian network, this paper proposes a novel Bayesian network (BN) based method automatic event recognition and summarization in Football videos. This method includes efficient shot boundary detection algorithms, shot view classification, and the related Bayesian network construction. There are three main stages: The shot boundaries are detected in first stage. Using some model, the video is segmented into the play-break sequences, large but meaningful semantic units. Within the next stage, theses play-break sequences are used to extract several key events. Lastly, in the final stage, the Bayesian network is used to get the high level semantic events. Constructing the Bayesian network is the basic part of the method. By applying family of Copula, the joint distributions of arbitrary variables of the network are modeled. Some of events that can be recognized by this method in Football videos are goal, card, corner, shots on goal, foul, offside, missed shots and non highlights. The users are more likely to be interested in these events and not in complete and large videos.
Long-term aspirin and clopidogrel response evaluated by light transmission aggregometry, VerifyNow, and thrombelastography in patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention.

BACKGROUND A reduced response to aspirin and clopidogrel predicts ischemic events, but reliable tests are needed to identify low responders. We compared 3 platelet-function tests during long-term dual treatment with aspirin and clopidogrel. METHODS Patients who underwent a percutaneous coronary intervention and were receiving a combination of 325 mg/day aspirin and 75 mg/day clopidogrel were followed for 1 year. Blood was sampled 5 times during this period for 3 tests: light transmission aggregometry (LTA) assay, with 5.0 micromol/L ADP or 1.0 mmol/L arachidonic acid (AA) used as an agonist; VerifyNow assay, with the P2Y(12) or aspirin cartridge (Accumetrics); and thrombelastography (TEG), stimulated by 2.0 micromol/L ADP or 1.0 mmol/L AA. RESULTS Twenty-six of 33 patients completed all scheduled visits. A low response to clopidogrel was found in a few patients at variable frequencies and at different visits, depending on the method and criteria used. We found a moderate correlation between the LTA (ADP) and VerifyNow (P2Y(12) cartridge) results, but the TEG (ADP) results correlated poorly with the LTA and VerifyNow results. A low response to aspirin was found with the VerifyNow (aspirin cartridge) and TEG (AA) methods on 6 and 2 occasions, respectively, but not with the LTA (AA) method, except for 1 occasion caused by probable noncompliance. CONCLUSIONS Detecting a low response to clopidogrel depends largely on the method used. Which method best predicts ischemic events remains uncertain. A low response to aspirin is rare with AA-dependent methods used at the chosen cutoffs. In some patients, the response to clopidogrel or aspirin may be classified differently at different times, even with the same method.
Drawing down Retirement Wealth: Interactions between Social Security Wealth and Private Retirement Savings

Individual financial planning for retirement in the US is increasingly important, given the trend away from employer-provided defined benefit (DB) plans, the rising Social Security (SS) Full Retirement Age (FRA), and retiring baby boomers. A key financial decision that Americans make is how to draw on their retirement wealth across various sources, including both privately saved retirement funds and SS benefits. For SS retirement benefits, the main decision is at what age to claim, with claiming before the FRA resulting in lower monthly benefits, and claiming later leading to higher benefits. The terms of this tradeoff have changed in recent years: since 2003, the FRA has risen from 65 and will gradually increase to 67 by 2027, representing a drop in the present value of SS benefits. Meanwhile, defined contribution (DC) plans have gained in popularity, presenting retirees with more control over their private retirement wealth. The changing dynamics of both SS wealth and the private retirement decision space underscore the need for examining how individuals make decisions across their entire portfolio of retirement wealth. We use HRS survey data matched to SS administrative data to study how households integrate SS benefits into their general retirement income plans. We find starkly different non-SS retirement asset decumulation patterns across individuals who claim at different ages, with those claiming before the FRA drawing down pension and IRA wealth faster than those who claim at or after the FRA. However, the earliest claimants, those who claim SS retirement benefits exactly at age 62, are a highly heterogeneous group, consisting of both low-income, high expected mortality individuals as well as individuals with high pension holdings. We further find that this earliest claimant group is more likely to have retired and begun decumulating non-SS retirement assets even before age 62; however, this group's median and average assets are not substantially lower than later claimants. An analysis of claiming behavior by non-SS retirement wealth holdings shows that individuals with more retirement savings were overwhelmingly likely to claim between the ages of 62 and the FRA. On the other hand, those with the least retirement savings are more likely to either claim SS benefits as early as possible, either in the form of disability benefits or retirement benefits, or they would delay claiming SS retirement benefits until after the FRA. Moreover, birth cohorts facing higher FRAs tend to delay claiming SS retirement benefits on average; however, those most affected by this reduction in SS wealth -- those with few other retirement assets -- are the least reactive. Finally, households that do delay claiming as the FRA rises also tend to delay retirement and drawing down their non-SS retirement assets, indicating complementarity between SS and non-SS decumulation decisions and strong spillovers from changes in both SS and private retirement policy.