Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Flexible Views: Annotating and finding context-tagged mobile content

We present the results of three studies on the use of contextual metadata tags to find personal photographs. Specifically we address the use of time, event, and location tags to allow users to find media from their collections. We found that users need to be provided with flexible ways to browse their content and that they remember quite different attributes of each piece of content. Finally, we discuss the need for flexible photo search to support photo sharing and photo talk, two key uses of photographs.
Discrimination in measures of knowledge monitoring accuracy

Knowledge monitoring predicts academic outcomes in many contexts. However, measures of knowledge monitoring accuracy are often incomplete. In the current study, a measure of students’ ability to discriminate known from unknown information as a component of knowledge monitoring was considered. Undergraduate students’ knowledge monitoring accuracy was assessed and used to predict final exam scores in a specific course. It was found that gamma, a measure commonly used as the measure of knowledge monitoring accuracy, accounted for a small, but significant amount of variance in academic performance whereas the discrimination and bias indexes combined to account for a greater amount of variance in academic performance.
Herpesviral Protein Networks and Their Interaction with the Human Proteome

The comprehensive yeast two-hybrid analysis of intraviral protein interactions in two members of the herpesvirus family, Kaposi sarcoma–associated herpesvirus (KSHV) and varicella-zoster virus (VZV), revealed 123 and 173 interactions, respectively. Viral protein interaction networks resemble single, highly coupled modules, whereas cellular networks are organized in separate functional submodules. Predicted and experimentally verified interactions between KSHV and human proteins were used to connect the viral interactome into a prototypical human interactome and to simulate infection. The analysis of the combined system showed that the viral network adopts cellular network features and that protein networks of herpesviruses and possibly other intracellular pathogens have distinguishing topologies.
ECG-derived markers to identify patients prone to atrial fibrillation

This study was undertaken to determine the ability of different markers extracted from single lead ECG recorded in sinus rhythm to identify patients prone to atrial fibrillation (AF). For this purpose, 5-minute ECGs recorded in sinus rhythm from two populations were compared: patients with a history of AF and healthy subjects without any history of AF. Several features based on P-waves and RR-intervals were extracted from the ECG. Among the extracted features, the most discriminative ones to identify the AF susceptibility were the P-wave duration, the standard deviation of the beat-to-beat Euclidean distance between successive P-waves and the sample entropy of the RR-intervals. The discriminative power of the aforementioned features was assessed using a classification tree approach. The results showed that the combination of P-wave duration, beat-to-beat Euclidean distance between P-waves and sample entropy could efficiently separate the two populations and therefore be used as an effective detection tool of patients at risk to develop AF.
Effects of the depth to coral height ratio on drag coefficients for unidirectional flow over coral

We investigated the effects of the ratio of water depth (H) to coral height (h) on the drag coefficient (Cd) for unidirectional flow over the coral species Porites compressa. Cd, measured in a laboratory flume at several different flow rates and depths over a coral canopy, varied from 0 to 1.68 with a clear dependence on H: h. At higher Reynolds numbers Cd was inversely proportional to H: h and showed signs of becoming Re‐independent. Cd was dependent on both Re and H: h at lower Reynolds numbers, indicating laminar or transitional flow within the coral canopy. The relationship between Cd and H: h at the highest available Re for each depth ratio is described by the power law: Cd = 1.01(H: h)‐2.77 + 0.01. This result should be applied with caution, however, as different coral species and bottom roughness may cause a deviation from this relationship.
Power quality enhanced operation and control of a microgrid based custom power park

This paper describes the operation of a microgrid that contains a custom power park (CPP). The park may contain an unbalanced and/or nonlinear load and the microgrid may contain many distributed generators (DGs). One of the DGs in the microgrid is used as a compensator to achieve load compensation. A new method is proposed for current reference generation for load compensation, which takes into account the real and reactive power to be supplied by the DG connected to the compensator. The real and reactive power from the DGs and the utility source is tightly regulated assuming that dedicated communication channels are available. Therefore this scheme is most suitable in cases where the loads in CPP and DGs are physically located close to each other. The proposal is validated through extensive simulation studies using EMTDC/PSCAD software package (version 4.2).
The HPV E2-Host Protein-Protein Interactions: A Complex Hijacking of the Cellular Network

Over 100 genotypes of human papillomaviruses (HPVs) have been identified as being responsible for unapparent infections or for lesions ranging from benign skin or genital warts to cancer. The pathogenesis of HPV results from complex relationships between viral and host factors, driven in particular by the interplay between the host proteome and the early viral proteins. The E2 protein regulates the transcription, the replication as well as the mitotic segregation of the viral genome through the recruitment of host cell factors to the HPV regulatory region. It is thereby a pivotal factor for the productive viral life cycle and for viral persistence, a major risk factor for cancer development. In addition, the E2 proteins have been shown to engage numerous interactions through which they play important roles in modulating the host cell. Such E2 activities are probably contributing to create cell conditions appropriate for the successive stages of the viral life cycle, and some of these activities have been demonstrated only for the oncogenic high-risk HPV. The recent mapping of E2-host protein-protein interactions with 12 genotypes representative of HPV diversity has shed some light on the large complexity of the host cell hijacking and on its diversity according to viral genotypes. This article reviews the functions of E2 as they emerge from the E2/host proteome interplay, taking into account the large-scale comparative interactomic study.
Control Architecture Concepts and Properties of an Ontology Devoted to Exchanges in Mobile Robotics

A specific ontology is proposed in the scope of the development of a platform devoted to exchanges between academics and industrials of the robotic domain. This paper presents the tools used for knowledge elicitation, the concepts and properties linked with control architecture, the use of the resulting ontology for description of some scenarios and the tracks for the development of a domain specific language grounded on the ontology. Knowledge elicitation is performed in web ontology language thanks to Protege ontology editor. The ontology is structured as a set of modules organized around a kernel. Modules addressing systems, information, robot and mission include concepts and properties for control architecture description. The expressivity of the ontology is demonstrated describing architectures for a set of scenarios; urban robotic scenario, air-ground scenario, landmark search scenario and military unmanned aerial vehicles scenario. Finally some tracks for the use of the ontology for developing a domain specific language are given.
A novel reconfigurable multiband patch antenna

This paper presents the simulation study of novel frequency reconfigurable microstrip antenna that uses switched connections. The antenna structure comprises a center patch antenna known as driven patch and six adjacent microstrip patches defined as sub-patches. The reconfiguration ability of the antenna is obtained by inserting small switches from sub-patches to main patch. Different switch configurations were investigated and different functionalities of the antenna were obtained. The antenna has many practical applications (in C band), like in wireless LAN, WiMAX and many other systems. The antenna application area is changed according to which set of switches is activated.
A study of mobile agent routes algorithm based on body-centered cubic lattice

A large number of data transmission in the wireless sensor network can be adopt in the mobile agent model, in which the mobile agent routing algorithm mainly concentrated in the two-dimensional environment. However, there are large number of applications of three-dimensional sensor network in the real world. This paper proposes a mobile agent routing algorithm based on body-centered cubic lattice in three-dimensional space. In the algorithm, the target three-dimensional space is covered by the body-centered cubic lattice and every grid access point is used as mobile agent space points, and the ant colony algorithm is used to optimize the order of mobile agent access points. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a great deal of data transmission in three-dimensional environment, and furthermore, be superior to the traditional ones both on the globaliz ation and on the convergence rate.
Stability of miniature electromagnetic tracking systems

This study aims at a comparative evaluation of two recently introduced electromagnetic tracking systems under reproducible simulated operating-room (OR) conditions: the recently launched Medtronic StealthStation™ Treon-EM™ and the NDI Aurora™. We investigate if and to what extent these systems provide improved performance and stability in the presence of surgical instruments as possible sources of distortions compared with earlier reports on electromagnetic tracking technology. To investigate possible distortions under pseudo-realistic OR conditions, a large Langenbeck hook, a dental drill with its handle and an ultrasonic (US) scanhead are fixed on a special measurement rack at variable distances from the navigation sensor. The position measurements made by the Treon-EM™ were least affected by the presence of the instruments. The lengths of the mean deviation vectors were 0.21 mm for the Langenbeck hook, 0.23 mm for the drill with handle and 0.56 mm for the US scanhead. The Aurora™ was influenced by the three sources of distortion to a higher degree. A mean deviation vector of 1.44 mm length was observed in the vicinity of the Langenbeck hook, 0.53 mm length with the drill and 2.37 mm due to the US scanhead. The maximum of the root mean squared error (RMSE) for all coordinates in the presence of the Langenbeck hook was 0.3 mm for the Treon™ and 2.1 mm for the Aurora™; the drill caused a maximum RMSE of 0.2 mm with the Treon™ and 1.2 mm with the Aurora™. In the presence of the US scanhead, the maximum RMSE was 1.4 mm for the Treon™ and 5.1 mm for the Aurora™. The new generation of electromagnetic tracking systems has significantly improved compared to common systems that were available in the middle of the 1990s and has reached a high level of technical development. We conclude that, in general, both systems are suitable for routine clinical application.
Surgical Management of Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) syndrome is a common disorder that has recently received much attention by the medical community due to its potentially serious physiological consequences. The clinical significance of OSA results from hypoxemia and sleep fragmentation caused by collapse of the airway, which leads to apnea or hypopnea during sleep. This paper reviews common surgical techniques used for clinical management of OSA patients, with emphasis on jaw advancement surgical procedures.
A Patient Support System based on Crosslingual IR and Semi-supervised Learning

Even though patients are now using the Web to get useful information, the latest medical information is not available in most languages, except English. Even if patients want to learn about current treatments, they do not want to read English documents filled with technical terms. To mitigate this situation, we are building a patient support system that combines crosslingual information retrieval, machine translation, and technical term extraction to provide up-to-date medical information.
Dynamic modelling of high biomass density cultivation and biohydrogen production in different scales of flat plate photobioreactors

This paper investigates the scaling‐up of cyanobacterial biomass cultivation and biohydrogen production from laboratory to industrial scale. Two main aspects are investigated and presented, which to the best of our knowledge have never been addressed, namely the construction of an accurate dynamic model to simulate cyanobacterial photo‐heterotrophic growth and biohydrogen production and the prediction of the maximum biomass and hydrogen production in different scales of photobioreactors. To achieve the current goals, experimental data obtained from a laboratory experimental setup are fitted by a dynamic model. Based on the current model, two key original findings are made in this work. First, it is found that selecting low‐chlorophyll mutants is an efficient way to increase both biomass concentration and hydrogen production particularly in a large scale photobioreactor. Second, the current work proposes that the width of industrial scale photobioreactors should not exceed 0.20 m for biomass cultivation and 0.05 m for biohydrogen production, as severe light attenuation can be induced in the reactor beyond this threshold. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2015;112: 2429–2438. © 2015 The Authors. Biotechnology and Bioengineering Published by Wiley Peiodicals, Inc.
Motion Level-of-Detail: A Simplification Method on Crowd Scene

Recent technological improvement in character animation has increased the number of characters that can appear in a virtual scene. Besides, skeletal and mesh structures are expected to be more complex in the future. Therefore, simulating massive characters' joints in a real-time crowd environment without any preprocessing is unaffordable. We propose a preprocessing method called 'motion level-of-detail' to overcome this limitation. Our 'motion level-of-detail' framework not only minimizes the simulation cost of the joints, but also maintains the similarity between the original and the simplified motion. 'Joint posture clustering (JPC)', which is the skeletal simplification method of our framework, reduces skeletal node by the clusters of similar postures. A cluster is a set of continuous frames, where each frame has similar posture. Because our approach depends on motion trajectory, simplified result preserves the quality of the motion. We also applied a geometric simplification on deformable character mesh, to increase performance. Our approach was particularly useful for the complex skeletal motions that have a monotonous trajectory.
Vertical Caching : Web Caching for Challenged Networks

Many network links in developing regions are low-bandwidth or intermittent. In addition to the inherent connection constraints, web browsing over these networks is an extremely painful experience due to inappropriate cache design. A single cache miss during browsing may cause a stall on the order of minutes or even hours. To improve web cache performance, we propose a new model of web caching particularly tailored for low-bandwidth and intermittent environments called vertical caching. Vertical caching extends existing caching mechanisms based on URLs to aggregates of cached pages across topics. We show that vertical caching has the potential to dramatically improve performance in these settings.
Simple models, complex models, useful models: can we tell them from the flap of a butterfly's wings?

The strategy of scientific model building is the strategy of abstraction. An abstraction is devised to explain the workings of certain mechanistic principles and, as subjective constructs they are neither right nor wrong. Rather, abstractions obscure or enlighten the process under study, yielding useless or useful models (Levins, 2006). Two opposing approaches are usually followed in the process of ecological model construction as a route to understanding (Evans et al., 2013). In the first one, a model is worked out from theoretical principles and a set of testable predictions are then confronted with data from real systems. In the second approach, it is the detailed knowledge of the natural history of a particular system what drives the level of complexity of a mechanistic model used to fit empirical data, and this model is further used to reproduce the dynamics of the original system and, ideally, of other systems. Given the current challenges in the study of population dynamics (Oro, 2013), which abstraction is more useful? The paper by Harrison et al. (2011) is a salient example of the second approach. Using 17-year time series data from a metapopulation of the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia Figure 1) inhabiting 72 meadows in Finland, they fit a mechanistic Individual-Based Model (IBM) to spatial biannual counts of larval groups. With the aim of assessing the desirability of complex models with respect to simpler ones in explaining the observed metapopulation dynamics, they also derived a simpler, Stochastic Patch Occupancy Model (SPOM), and fit it to the presence or absence of local populations across time and space. Interestingly, the overall fitting of both models was rather similar, and the bold result is the same with either model: variation in habitat quality influenced patch occupancy mainly through the effects on movement behavior at patch edges. The question immediately arises: does it pay to have expensive, individual-based
Immunization of Mastomys coucha with Brugia malayi Recombinant Trehalose-6-Phosphate Phosphatase Results in Significant Protection against Homologous Challenge Infection

Development of a vaccine to prevent or reduce parasite development in lymphatic filariasis would be a complementary approach to existing chemotherapeutic tools. Trehalose-6-phosphate phosphatase of Brugia malayi (Bm-TPP) represents an attractive vaccine target due to its absence in mammals, prevalence in the major life stages of the parasite and immunoreactivity with human bancroftian antibodies, especially from endemic normal subjects. We have recently reported on the cloning, expression, purification and biochemical characterization of this vital enzyme of B. malayi. In the present study, immunoprophylactic evaluation of Bm-TPP was carried out against B. malayi larval challenge in a susceptible host Mastomys coucha and the protective ability of the recombinant protein was evaluated by observing the adverse effects on microfilarial density and adult worm establishment. Immunization caused 78.4% decrease in microfilaremia and 71.04% reduction in the adult worm establishment along with sterilization of 70.06% of the recovered live females. The recombinant protein elicited a mixed Th1/Th2 type of protective immune response as evidenced by the generation of both pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines IL-2, IFN-γ, TNF-α, IL-4 and an increased production of antibody isotypes IgG1, IgG2a, IgG2b and IgA. Thus immunization with Bm-TPP conferred considerable protection against B. malayi establishment by engendering a long-lasting effective immune response and therefore emerges as a potential vaccine candidate against lymphatic filariasis (LF).
When a Fly Ball Is Out of Reach: Catchability Judgments Are Not Based on Optical Acceleration Cancelation

The optical acceleration cancelation (OAC) strategy, based on Chapman’s (1968) analysis of the outfielder problem, has been the dominant account for the control of running to intercept fly balls approaching head on. According to the OAC strategy, outfielders will arrive at the interception location just in time to catch the ball when they keep optical acceleration zero. However, the affordance aspect of this task, that is, whether or not an approaching fly ball is catchable, is not part of this account. The present contribution examines whether the scope of the OAC strategy can be extended to also include the affordance aspect of running to catch a fly ball. This is done by considering a fielder’s action boundaries (i.e., maximum running velocity and –acceleration) in the context of the OAC strategy. From this, only when running velocity is maximal and optical acceleration is non-zero, a fielder would use OAC to perceive a fly ball as uncatchable. The present contribution puts this hypothesis to the test. Participants were required to try to intercept fly balls projected along their sagittal plane. Some fly balls were catchable whereas others were not. Participants were required to catch as many fly balls as possible and to call ‘no’ when they perceived a fly ball to be uncatchable. Participants’ running velocity and –acceleration at the moment of calling ‘no’ were examined. Results showed that participants’ running velocity was submaximal before or while calling ‘no’. Also running acceleration was often submaximal. These results cannot be explained by the use of OAC in judging catchability and ultimately call for a new strategy of locomotor control in running to catch a fly ball.
Supervised Learning for Automatic Classification of Documents using Self-Organizing Maps

Automatic Document Classification that corresponds with user-predefined classes is a challenging and widely researched area. Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) are unsupervised Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) which are mathematically characterized by transforming high-dimensional data into two-dimension representation, enabling automatic clustering of the input, while preserving higher order topology. A closely related algorithm is the Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ), which uses supervised learning to maximize correct data classification. This study presents the application of SOM and LVQ to automatic document classification, based on predefined set of clusters. A set of documents, manually clustered by domain expert was used. Experimental results show considerable success of automatic document clustering that matches manual clustering, with a slight preference for the LVQ.
Risk Assessment of a Biometric Continuous Authentication Protocol for Internet Services

Distributed internet services involve multiple heterogeneous applications that communicate with each other. Guaranteeing their security is in general both mandatory and complex. Amongst the many security requirements that have to be guaranteed, secure user authentication is one of the most fundamental. Authentication is traditionally executed only at login phase, based on username and password. However, a single authentication point may not always guarantee a sufficient degree of security, especially in the context of critical systems. In a previous work we proposed a continuous authentication protocol that applies multiple biometric traits to continuously compute its trust in the user. This paper analyzes the security provided by such solution through a qualitative risk assessment, focusing on both threats related to transmission and specific of the biometric system level. Applying a NIST-compliant threat analysis, we identify the main threats and we assess their impact. Finally, we define the required countermeasures which allow us improving the security of our authentication solution.