Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reliability of cortical lesion detection on double inversion recovery MRI applying the MAGNIMS-Criteria in multiple sclerosis patients within a 16-months period

Purpose In patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), Double Inversion Recovery (DIR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be used to identify cortical lesions (CL). We sought to evaluate the reliability of CL detection on DIR longitudinally at multiple subsequent time-points applying the MAGNIMs scoring criteria for CLs. Methods 26 MS patients received a 3T-MRI (Siemens, Skyra) with DIR at 12 time-points (TP) within a 16 months period. Scans were assessed in random order by two different raters. Both raters separately marked all CLs on each scan and total lesion numbers were obtained for each scan-TP and patient. After a retrospective re-evaluation, the number of consensus CLs (conL) was defined as the total number of CLs, which both raters finally agreed on. CLs volumes, relative signal intensities and CLs localizations were determined. Both ratings (conL vs. non-consensus scoring) were compared for further analysis. Results A total number of n = 334 CLs were identified by both raters in 26 MS patients with a first agreement of both raters on 160 out of 334 of the CLs found (κ = 0.48). After the retrospective re-evaluation, consensus agreement increased to 233 out of 334 CL (κ = 0.69). 93.8% of conL were visible in at least 2 consecutive TP. 74.7% of the conL were visible in all 12 consecutive TP. ConL had greater mean lesion volumes and higher mean signal intensities compared to lesions that were only detected by one of the raters (p<0.05). A higher number of CLs in the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobe were identified by both raters than the number of those only identified by one of the raters (p<0.05). Conclusions After a first assessment, slightly less than a half of the CL were considered as reliably detectable on longitudinal DIR images. A retrospective re-evaluation notably increased the consensus agreement. However, this finding is narrowed, considering the fact that retrospective evaluation steps might not be practicable in clinical routine. Lesions that were not reliably identifiable by both raters seem to be characterized by lower signal intensity and smaller size, or located in distinct anatomical brain regions.
Type synthesis of 2R-T parallel mechanisms based on the screw theory for haptic applications

Recently haptic devices are increasingly used in industry and research. As their applications become widespread, their design is needed to be more efficient. At design stage, determinant features of haptic devices such as rigidity, force bandwidth, accuracy etc. must be considered and improved. Structurally, parallel mechanisms (PMs) are appropriate candidates for haptic devices. Due to multi legged structure of PMs and their grounded motors, inertia and stiffness feautures of them are desirable and it also made them popular for applications that require high mechanical transparency. Spherical kinematics (two rotational and one translational motion, 2R-T) is a very common type of motion in haptic devices that is also capable of general rendering. In this paper, several 3-DOF 2R-T PMs are synthesized for haptic applications by means of the screw theory. All of these mechanisms have center of motion (CM) which is a key property in variety of applications such as surgery. These mechanisms are compared qualitatively and their applications as haptic devices are discussed.
On a geometric derivation of Witten's identity for Chern-Simons theory

We present a formal but simple calculational scheme to relate the expectation value of Wilson loops in Chern-Simons theory to the Jones polynomial. We consider the exponential of the generator of homotopy transformations which produces the finite loop deformations that define the crossing change formulas of knot polynomials. Applying this operator to the expectation value of Wilson loops for an unspecified measure we find a set of conditions on the measure and the regularization such that the Jones polynomial is obtained.
Innovation height, spillovers and TFP growth at the firm level: Evidence from French manufacturing

We examine the contribution of incremental and radical innovations to total factor productivity (TFP) growth at the firm level. The first part of our analysis is dedicated to the determinants of innovation and reveals two different innovation regimes. On the one hand, radical innovations rely strongly on firm-level spillovers, including property rights, and formal internal research while, on the other hand, incremental innovations rely mostly on the adoption of equipment goods accompanied by informal research. We find that radical innovations are the only significant contributors to TFP growth so that innovation height matters. We also find evidence that TFP growth is better represented by an upward shift of the production function than by a continuous innovation measure. Overall, the growth gains that we find are comparable to the ones of the previous studies.
Granulocytes Affect Double-Strand Break Repair Assays in Primary Human Lymphocytes

Patients who develop therapy-related myelodysplasia/acute myeloid leukemia after autologous-hematopoietic stem cell (aHCT) transplant show lower expression levels of DNA repair genes in their pre-aHCT CD34+ cells. To investigate whether this leads to functional differences in DNA repair abilities measurable in patients, we adapted two plasmid-based host-cell reactivation assays for use in primary lymphocytes. Prior to applying these assays to patients who underwent aHCT, we wanted first to verify whether sample preparation affected repair measurements, as patient samples were simply depleted of erythrocytes (with hetastarch) prior to freezing, which is not the classical way to prepare lymphocytes prior to DNA repair experiments (with a density gradient). We show here that lymphocytes from healthy donors freshly prepared with hetastarch show systematically a higher level of double-strand break repair as compared to when prepared with a density gradient, but that most of this difference disappears after samples were frozen. Several observations points to granulocytes as the source for this effect of sample preparation on repair: 1) removal of granulocytes makes the effect disappear, 2) DSB repair measurements for the same individual correlate to the percentage of granulocytes in the sample and 3) nucleofection in presence of granulocytes increases the level of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in neighboring lymphocytes in a dose-dependent manner (R2 of 0.95). These results indicate that co-purified granulocytes, possibly through the release of ROS at time of transfection, can lead to an enhanced repair in lymphocytes that obfuscates any evaluation of inter individual differences in repair as measured by host-cell reactivation. As a result, hetastarch-prepared samples are likely unsuitable for the assessment of DSB repair in primary cells with that type of assay. Granulocyte contamination that exists after a density gradient preparation, although much more limited, could have similar effects, but might be circumvented by freezing cells prior to analysis.
ESTIMATION OF FALSE DISCOVERY RATE IN MICROARRAY DATA ANALYSIS : A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Topic area of the submission: Recent developments in transcriptome-oriented biotechnologies have made possible the comparative analysis of thousands of genes expression changes in parallel. These data usually consist in the measurement of gene expression under various biological conditions that can potentially provide information on the complex transcriptional activity for the biological system [1]. In such conditions, questions raised by research scientists relate to class comparison, class prediction and class discovery problems. Concerning class comparison, the aim is to select relevant genes the transcriptional changes of which are related to a clinical or biological outcome. In such a case, a major multiplicity problem arises that leads to a renewed interest for multiple comparison procedures taking into account false positives. Until now, statistical procedures have mostly relied on the multiple testing framework in order to control false positive conclusions. In this framework, two quantities have been considered: the Family Wise Error Rate (FWER) and the False Discovery Rate (FDR). The FWER, which is the oldest criterion considered in multiple comparisons, is defined as the probability of at least one false positive conclusion over all the true null hypotheses (a null hypothesis corresponds to the lack of relationship between gene expression measurement and a response variable). The most commonly used methods are the Bonferroni and Sidãk methods [2]. Extension of these two methods are based on step-down [3] or step-up principles where null hypotheses are tested sequentially [2]. In complement to the previous methods, resampling (or permutation based) procedures that make no distributional hypothesis but incorporate correlation structures and distributional characteristics (for a review see [4]) have been developed and applied to microarray gene expression study [5][6][7].
Enhancing Speedups for FPGA Accelerated SPICE through Frequency Scaling and Precision Reduction

Frequency scaling and precision reduction optimization of an FPGA accelerated SPICE circuit simulator can enhance performance by 1.5x while lowering implementation cost by 15 -- 20%. This is possible due the inherent fault tolerant capabilities of SPICE that can naturally drive simulator convergence even in presence of arithmetic errors due to frequency scaling and precision reduction. We quantify the impact of these transformations on SPICE by analyzing the resulting convergence residue and runtime. To explain the impact of our optimizations, we develop an empirical error model derived from in-situ frequency scaling experiments and build analytical models of rounding and truncation errors using Gappa-based numerical analysis. Across a range of benchmark SPICE circuits, we are able to tolerate to bit-level fault rates of 10--4 (frequency scaling) and manage up to 8-bit loss in least-significant digits (precision reduction) without compromising SPICE convergence quality while delivering speedups.
Binary Agents for the Control of Autonomous Vehicles

Behavioural based systems are commonly used in robotic research. Arguably, the main area of activity has been in the area of integrating behavioural or reactive systems with deliberative systems in the form of hierarchical systems and in the area of action selection. This paper presents a novel architecture that is intended to lend itself to the action selection problem. The architecture centres around the use of binary agents. A binary agent is one that can only accept an ‘on’ or an ‘off’ signal as its input. Once on it then cycles through a set of states turning other agents on or off. A sub-class of binary agent is also used which uses an additional threshold value for activation. An example application is presented in the form of an autonomous mobile platform and a description of its use in experimentation is given. The architecture is then discussed before future work is presented.
How does appearance of agents affect how people interpret the agents’ attitudes - Experimental investigation on expressing the same information from agents having different appearance

An experimental investigation of how the appearance of agents affects interpretations people make of the agentspsila attitudes is described. We conducted a psychological experiment where participants were presented artificial sounds that can make people estimate specific agentspsila primitive attitudes from three kinds of agents, e.g., Mindstorms robot, AIBO robot, and a normal laptop PC. Specifically, the participants were asked to select the appropriate attitude based on the sounds expressed by these three agents. The results showed that the participants had higher correct interpretation rates when a PC presented the sounds, while they had lower rates when Mindstorms and AIBO robots presented the sounds, even though these agents expressed information that was completely the same.
Integrating Variable Renewable Energy in Electric Power Markets. Best Practices from International Experience

Many countries -- reflecting very different geographies, markets, and power systems -- are successfully managing high levels of variable renewable energy on the electric grid, including that from wind and solar energy. This study documents the diverse approaches to effective integration of variable renewable energy among six countries -- Australia (South Australia), Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Spain, and the United States (Western region-Colorado and Texas)-- and summarizes policy best practices that energy ministers and other stakeholders can pursue to ensure that electricity markets and power systems can effectively coevolve with increasing penetrations of variable renewable energy. Each country has crafted its own combination of policies, market designs, and system operations to achieve the system reliability and flexibility needed to successfully integrate renewables. Notwithstanding this diversity, the approaches taken by the countries studied all coalesce around five strategic areas: lead public engagement, particularly for new transmission; coordinate and integrate planning; develop rules for market evolution that enable system flexibility; expand access to diverse resources and geographic footprint of operations; and improve system operations. The ability to maintain a broad ecosystem perspective, to organize and make available the wealth of experiences, and to ensure a clear path from analysis to enactment should bemore » the primary focus going forward. « less
Food packaging: the medium is the message

In considering the marketing of food products to children, the role of packaging warrants closer attention. The use of packaging as a marketing vehicle is evidently increasing. Marketing analysts suggest two reasons for this. First, many food choices are made at the point of sale, so ‘the package becomes a critical factor in [the] consumer decision-making process, because it communicates to consumers at the time they are actually deciding in the store’. Second, the nature of the food advertising market is changing. Estimates from the USA suggest that expenditure on food advertising is declining, and that other methods of marketing such as packaging now have greater weight in the marketing mix. Food packaging has two basic functions. The first is practical. Packaging extends the shelf-life of the product, and makes it easier to transport and display. Second is its marketing function. Packaging is now an essential component of the integrated marketing strategies of the food industry. It combines all the ‘Ps’ of marketing: the package contains the product, packages convey messages about product attributes to consumers as part of public relations, and often its price, while also carrying promotions. By combining all these different aspects, packaging has become an integral part of the product.
Visual representation of the workflows by using Sugiyama Algorithm

The whole states and transitions, which are occurred or are possible to be occurred are named as Workflow during a process at any work. The transitions between the states are occurred after related conditions are satisfied. On many companies, these workflows belonging to work processes are stored in database. The tracking of these processes are getting more difficult as the number of the states and the transitions have rose. In order to get this issue solved, the states and the transitions are presented visually in an optimal manner by implementing Sugiyama Algorithm into systems.
Performance evaluation of subspace methods to tackle small sample size problem in face recognition

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) has been one of the popular subspace methods for face recognition. But this method suffers from the small sample size (SSS) problem, also known as 'curse of dimensionality'. Various techniques have been proposed in literature to overcome this limitation. But it is still unclear which method provides the best solution to SSS problem. In this paper, we have investigated the performance of some popular subspace methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), PCA + LDA, LDA via QR decomposition, Null-space LDA, Exponential Discriminant Analysis (EDA), PCA+EDA etc. Extensive experiments have been performed on five publically available face datasets viz. AR, CMU-PIE, PIX, Yale and YaleB. The performance is measured in terms of average classification accuracy. Experimental results show that the performance increases with the increase in the number of images per person in training set irrespective of the datasets. There is no clear winner among the subspace methods under investigation. But, the performance of PCA+LDA and PCA+EDA is consistent in tackling SSS problem irrespective of the dataset and can also handle the illumination variation in face recognition.
An Enhanced Collaborative Filtering Algorithm Based on Time Weight

Because traditional collaborative filtering algorithm does not consider the influence of time on user’s interests, taking equal consideration with different user’s interests in different time leads to the neighbors may not be the similar neighbors set. For solving the problem, the enhanced algorithm endows each score with a time weight which declines gradually as time going, and uses the weighted score to search the nearest neighbors. Experiments of Movielens dataset show that the enhanced algorithm added time weight improves quality of recommendation system.
WEIGHT FILTRATION AND MIXED TATE MOTIVES

This talk reported on a slight improvement of a result of Marc Levine on the existence of a weight filtration on a suitable category of mixed Tate motives [10], by Annette Huber and the author. The reader will realise that this text is little more than a survey summarising the main results of [10], that he is warmly encouraged to consult for details and proofs. According to [10], a Q-linear tensor triangulated category T is of Tate type if it is generated by objects Q(n), n ∈ Z, together with isomorphisms
Computation of Semantic Equivalence for Question Answering

There are vast amounts of text data on World Wide Web and in encyclopedias and newspapers. For efficient information access to such text data, Question Answering is an option. Question Answering which this thesis uses is defined that a technique to find an answer from a large amount of text data for a given question written in natural language. Evaluation workshops for Question Answering started in 1999 have motivated many researchers to improve techniques for the task. We take an approach to Question Answering task based on the semantic equivalence, regarding the problem of Question Answering as a computation of semantic equivalence between a question and text. We proposed evaluate methods of semantic equivalence in three levels, (1) approximation of semantic equivalence by structural information of text, (2) evaluation of semantic equivalence using lexico-structural transformation, (3) evaluation of semantic equivalence by extracted semantic relations. At the first level, we conducted structural matching as an approximation of semantic equivalence instead of bag-of-words matching which is utilized for Question Answering mainly in previous works. The proposed method, an extension of Collins’ Tree Kernel, provides three options for similarity measurement and relaxes the constraints of matching with the time complexity O(|T1||T2|). For the second level, we developed a Japanese lexico-structural paraphrasing engine called Kura. We also proposed an answer seeking algorithm for Question ∗Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Information Processing, Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, NAIST-IS-DD0261015, February 3, 2005.
Ownership redirection trends in franchising: A cross‐sectoral investigation

Franchising has long been seen as an avenue into small business. For some, it offers opportunities to build up franchise systems, as franchisors, by cloning small business success in exchange for a royalty. For many others, as franchisees, it offers opportunities for self‐employment, combining elements of the independence normally associated with self‐employment allied with the security derived from association with a tried‐and‐tested business system. However, there is an ongoing debate, the ownership redirection thesis, which suggests that franchise systems will only characteristically seek to involve franchisees in their business growth strategies during the early phases of business development. Thereafter, when finance, human capital and local market intelligence resources are no longer at a premium, the thesis predicts, franchisors will reduce their dependence on franchising with franchisees the prime casualties. Assesses the available evidence on the ownership redirection thesis and offers some fresh data on the issue.
Education, Demographics and the Irish Economic Miracle

This paper considers how changes in the educational and age composition of the Irish population between 1994 and 2003 have affected employment, unemployment and the supply potential of the economy. The impact of demographic change on the labour market is estimated to have been relatively small. In contrast, up to a quarter of the decline in the unemployment rate, and two thirds of the increase in the employment rate, could reflect the rise in educational attainment. This rise is also largely responsible for estimated labour quality increasing by 1.4 per cent per year. Together, labour quality and employment growth can account for 2.1 percentage points of the 4.7 per cent average annual growth of GNP per adult over the past decade — leaving relatively little room for an economic miracle.
Class inheritance metrics-an analytical and empirical approach

-Inheritance is a powerful mechanism in Object-Oriented (OO) programming. This mechanism supports the class hierarchy design and captures the IS-A relationship between a super class and its subclass. Several OO metrics have been proposed and their reviews are available in the literature. Among the various measurements of OO characteristics, this paper focuses on the metrics of class inheritance hierarchies. In this paper first a class inheritance metric DITC (Depth of Inheritance Tree of a Class) metric based on finding the depth of inheritance tree of a class (DITC) metric for class inheritance hierarchy in terms of sum of the attributes (private, protected, public and inherited) and methods (private, protected, public and inherited) at each level is proposed, then an analytical evaluation of DITC metric against Weyuker’s axioms [18] is given in discussion part and then attempt has been made to define an empirical relation between development time with respect to its dependence on classes in class inheritance hierarchy at each level. Attempt has also been made to analyze the various dependencies of development time of class in class inheritance hierarchy at each level upon its different class inheritance metric values. Data for several class inheritance hierarchies has been collected from various resources [23].