Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Credit Expansion and Aggregate Stock Returns

We provide empirical evidence that credit expansions have a strong prediction power for aggregate stock returns, and suggest possible explanations for the predictability of credit expansions. Credit expansion predicts lower aggregate market returns in subsequent three-month to three-year. We find that credit expansion outperforms popular return predictors both in and out of sample. The information content of credit expansions is economically important and credit expansion can generate utility gains for a mean-variance investor. Moreover, we investigate three potential sources that explain the predictive power of credit expansion: investment-based explanations, misevaluation exploitation explanations and health of financial intermediary explanations. We show that each of the three potential sources plays a distinct role in explaining the return predictability of credit expansions. Classification codes: G10, G12, G14, G21
Music Visualization Using Audio Features and Tags

Two methods for clustering and visualizing a collection of music are implemented. The first method utilized audio feature sets while the second method was based on user-defined tags from last.fm. The focus of this paper is to find under what conditions the latter method can best match the result of the former. The Sammon Stress function was used to compare the two visualizations. A good correspondence was observed between the two schemes provided certain conditions are met: (i) selection of distinct musical genres and (ii) removal of spurious tags.
Sequences Dimensionality-Reduction by K-mer Substring Space Sampling Enables Effective Resemblance- and Containment-Analysis for Large-Scale omics-data

We proposed a new sequence sketching technique named k-mer substring space decomposition (kssd), which sketches sequences via k-mer substring space sampling instead of local-sensitive hashing. Kssd is more accurate and faster for resemblance estimation than other sketching methods developed so far. Notably, kssd is robust even when two sequences are of very different sizes. For containment analysis, kssd slightly outperformed mash screen—its closest competitor—in accuracy, while took testing datasets of 110,535 times less space occupation and consumed 2,523 times less CPU time than mash screen—suggesting kssd is suite for quick containment analysis for almost the entire omics datasets deposited in NCBI. We detailed the kssd algorithm, provided proofs of its statistical properties and discussed the roots of its superiority, limitations and future directions. Kssd is freely available under an Apache License, Version 2.0 (https://github.com/yhg926/public_kssd)
Assessment of soil quality index under coffee land use system of hilly zone of Karnataka, India

Soil quality degradation is a major problem in recent times. Coffee is the major plantation crop in the majority of the areas of Chikkamagaluru and Kodagu districts which falls under hilly zone of Karnataka where it is mostly grown on slope terrains. To determine the sustainability of soil and land management practices prevalent in this region, a study on soil quality assessment was done through minimum data set. About 150 soil samples at 0-30 cm depth were collected from different locations of coffee growing plantations of Chikkamagaluru and Kodagu districts. Soil quality index (SQI) was assessed through identifying minimum data set (MDS) by employing principal component analysis. Twenty four soil attributes were subjected to principal component analysis (PCA) which yielded seven principal components with Eigen value >1 and explaining at least 5 % of total variance in the entire data set. The seven PCs together explained 77.86 per cent of total variance. Based on the rotated factor loadings, the selected MDS were exchangeable Mg from PC-1, maximum water holding capacity (MWHC) from PC-2, pH from PC-3, earthworm population density (EWPD) from PC-4, sand from PC-5, available P2O5 from PC-6, and available boron (B) from PC-7.The selected indicators were transformed into scores (linear scoring method) to calculate the SQI. The assessed SQI was 0.44forChikkamagaluru and the0.43 for Kodagu district under coffee land use system of hilly zone of Karnataka and showed non-significant difference between them. The overall contribution of different PCs in the determination of SQI was in the order of Mg – 22.15%, MWHC – 18.63%, pH – 17.45%, EWPD – 16.81%, sand – 11.37%, P2O5 – 7.72% and B – 5.88%.
Section editor: Dr. M. Segal Synaptic organization in CaV1.3 Ca channel deficient cochlear hair cells

Cochlear inner hair cells (IHCs) release neurotransmitter onto afferent auditory nerve fibers in response to sound stimulation. Normal development and function of inner hair cells require the expression of CaV1.3 channels. Here, we used immunohistochemistry and RT-PCR to study the synaptic organization and expression of large conductance Ca-activated potassium channels in IHCs of mice lacking the CaV1.3 Ca channel (CaV1.3). Despite the near complete block of evoked afferent synaptic transmission, hair cell ribbon synapses were formed and remained preserved for at least 4 weeks after birth. Moreover, these “silent” afferent synapses held major components of the synaptic machinery such as Bassoon, Piccolo, and CSP. Hence, the block of exocytosis might be solely attributed to the lack of Ca influx through CaV1.3 channels. Later on, CaV1.3 deficient IHCs subsequently lost their afferent synapses. This was probably due to a secondary degeneration of the postsynaptic spiral ganglion neurons. In line with a prolonged efferent synaptic transmission onto CaV1.3 deficient IHCs, which normally ceases around onset of hearing, we found juxtaposed immunoreactive spots of efferent presynaptic synaptophysin and postsynaptic (IHCs) small conductance Ca-activated potassium channels (SK channels) up to six weeks after birth. Finally, we show a substantial reduction of messenger RNA for the α subunit of the large conductance Ca-activated potassium channel (BK) in the apical cochlea, suggesting a reduced transcription of the Kcnma1 gene in CaV1.3 deficient IHCs. CaV1.3 deficient IHCs lacked the apical spot-like immunoreactivity of clustered BK channels,
Evaluation of Biogas Production and Energy Recovery Potential in 5 Full-Scale WWTPs with UASB Reactors

The energy recovery of biogas is way of minimizing the greenhouse gas emissions such as methane and explore a renewable energy source. The use of the biogas generated by wastewater anaerobic treatment in UASB reactors integrates in this proposal of good practices in WWTP. The energy efficiency improvement and the recovery of biogas in WWTPs with UASB reactors depend of a better knowledge of the biogas production behavior and of constructional and operational measurements. In this context, the main aim of this study was to evaluate the biogas production potential for energy recovery in full-scale UASB reactors. The specific aims of this study were: to establish unitary yields of specific biogas production for each WWTP and to estimate the energy potential of each WWTP analyzed. In order to achieve this goals, five wastewater treatment plants with UASB reactors were monitored during 11 months by online measurements of COD, wastewater and biogas flow, and biogas quality. The results showed that in general, the specific biogas production yields were lower than expected, indicating biogas losses. The values obtained ranged from 81 to 142 NL of CH4/kgCODremoved and the COD removal efficiencies from 63 to 88%. The well sealed reactors achieved biogas production yields of 17 L/inhab.day, 89 L/m3 wastewater e 179 l/kg CODremoved. In this case, the unitary electrical energy potential was 17,8 kWhel/inhab.year. The other WWTPs presented lower values due to higher biogas losses, but with optimization potential in case operational and constructive improvements would be implemented.
Stream Databases

One of the most important issues in contemporary database application became processing of the large amount of data. Second problem is different characteristic of the data that are processed by the system. Those data are perceived as large continuous streams of elements rather than finite sets of elements. This thesis presents new class of database systems that handles data stream processing, issues and benefits form using these systems in the context of telecommunication systems. Streszczenie Jednym z najistotniejszych problemów dzisiejszych aplikacji bazodanowych staje się przetwarzanie olbrzymiej ilości danych. Kolejnym problemem staje się nowa charakterystyka danych, które są przetwarzane przez systemy. Dane te są postrzegane raczej jako duŜe i ciągłe strumienie danych niŜ zbiory elementów. Praca ta prezentuje nową klasę systemów bazodanowych, które są zdolne do przetwarzania strumieni danych, problemy oraz korzyści płynące z wykorzystania tego typu baz w kontekście systemów telekomunikacyjnych. Strumieniowe Bazy Danych – Stream Databases 4 Acknowledgments This thesis is accomplished with the help of several people form Blekinge Institute of Technology, Wroclaw University of Technology and Ericsson AB. In particular I would like to thank supervisors Prof. Lars Lundberg and Prof. Zygmunt Mazur for their help, support and guidelines. I am also grateful to Dr. Ludwik Kuzniarz, Double Diploma coordinator, for help, support and kindness especially during my stay in Sweden. I would thank also to Piotr Tomaszewski from BTH and Jim Håkansson from Ericsson for help and inspiration. I would like to thank to my friends Iwona, Kate and Radek for support and fruitful discussions, which helped me to discover new issues and solutions. Podziękowania Praca ta powstała przy pomocy kilku osób z Blekinge Institute of Technology, Politechniki Wrocławskiej oraz Ericsson AB. W szczególności kieruję moje podziękowania w stronę promotorów prof. Larsa Lundberg oraz prof. Zygmunta Mazura za ich pomoc, wsparcie oraz rady. Jestem takŜe wdzięczny dr. Ludwikowi Kuźniarzowi, koordynatorowi programu Double Diploma, za jego pomoc, wsparcie i uprzejmość, szczególnie w czasie mojego pobytu w Szwecji. Chciałbym takŜe podziękować Piotrowi Tomaszewskiemu z BTH oraz Jimowi Håkansson z Ericsson za pomoc i inspirację. Dziękuję moim przyjaciołom Iwonie, Kasi i Radkowi za wsparcie oraz owocne dyskusje, które pozwoliły mi odkryć nowe zagadnienia i rozwiązania w pracy dyplomowej. Strumieniowe Bazy Danych – Stream Databases 5
Laughing, Crying, Sneezing and Yawning: Automatic Voice Driven Animation of Non-Speech Articulations ∗

In this paper a technique is presented for learning audio-visual correlations in non-speech related articulations such as laughs, cries, sneezes and yawns, such that accurate new visual motions may be created given just audio. Our underlying model is data-driven and provides reliable performance given voices the system is familiar with as well as new voices. We demonstrate how performance accuracy in voice driven animation can be related to maximizing the models likelihood, and that new voices with similar temporal and spatial audio distributions to that of the model will consistently provide animation results with the lowest ground truth error. By exploiting this fact we signiﬁcantly improve performance given voices unfamiliar to the system.
HIV Infection among Children aged two years to less than eighteen years admitted to the Emergency Pediatric Unit in a Tertiary Health facility in Lafia North-Central Nigeria

BACKGROUND: Human Immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that impairs the immune system by attacking the body’s natural defense from infections and diseases. Pediatric HIV continue to be a major public health problem despite the global decline in its seroprevalence rates. The decline in the incidence of new HIV infections is particularly lower in children with a 52% reduction in the last ten years. This is attributed to a wider coverage in the use of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and the prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) programs. Several programs designed at curtailing mother to child transmission of HIV are yielding positive result. This is not unexpected since most of the HIV infections among children were acquired via maternal to child transmission. With this, the study sets out to determine the prevalence of new HIV infection among patients admitted to the Emergency Pediatrics Unit (EPU) using the provider-initiated testing and counseling approach. METHODS: A prospective cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted at the mini laboratory attached to the EPU of the Dalhatu Araf Specialist Hospital Lafia Nasarawa State between 1st August 2017 to 31st July 2018. Using non-probability sampling, categorical variables were analyzed as frequencies and percentages. The association between categorical variables were analyzed using chi square. RESULTS: A total of 964 children ranging in age from two to less than eighteen years were screened. The total number of males was 550 (57.1%) while females was 414 (42.9%) with a male to female ratio of 1.3:1. Five (0.5%) children were newly diagnosed with HIV of the 964 children tested for the infection. CONCLUSION: The incidence of HIV infection among children admitted into our Emergency Pediatric Unit was 0.5%, comparable to some earlier reports.
MONITORING EVOLUTION IN HEALTHCARE DOMAIN

Healthcare is a highly evolving domain, which attracts the interest of both researchers and practitioners. In such an evolving area, new trends appear daily and older standards become out of fashion very fast. The paper presents a methodology for seizing knowledge from rich information sources of the healthcare domain and processing it in order to improve the domain understanding for organizations and individuals. To achieve that, we suggest the development of technologies for systematically & automatically updating, dynamic knowledge maps of healthcare domain. These maps will act as advanced business intelligence support for market, products & technology watch and will represent a novel knowledge management practice (technology evolution assessment). The methodology may lead to a knowledge management platform for the intelligent monitoring, planning, forecasting of technological evolution in highly dynamic domains. Doctors, researchers and healthcare organizations that utilise the platform will achieve state-of-the-art awareness in research and development and will increase competitiveness in their domain.
Implementation and Performance Evaluation of TCP Extensions in FreeBSD

TCP is the most widely used transport layer protocol and is used in a big range of applications. Understanding its behavior, is critical in order to properly engineer, operate, and evaluate the performance of the Internet, as well as to properly design and implement future networks. It aims into providing fast and reliable communication over an unreliable network such as the modern Internet. In order to achieve that, it is equipped with a number of mechanisms that allow it to recover from losses etc. How fast a transmission is done, meaning how fast all bytes available for transmission from a sender to a receiver are sent is very important. This thesis explores two extensions of standard TCP that aim into decreasing the time needed for data transmission. The first one is the Proportional Rate Reduction (PRR) [DMCG11], an algorithm proposed as an alternative to the standard Fast Recovery algorithm of TCP, used for loss recovery. PRR addresses all the weaknesses that the standard algorithm has. The second extension that is explored is New Congestion Window Validation [FSS13], a method that improves TCP performance for rate-limited traffic. This traffic is produced by applications, which do not use the entire bandwidth available to them by TCP. An implementation for each extension was done in the TCP/IP stack of the FreeBSD kernel. Their performance was evaluated. The results show that the transmission time is lowered for all the scenarios that have been evaluated. The results for each extension are presented at the respective section of each chapter.
Lecture Notes Probabilistic Circuits: Representation and Inference

These lecture notes accompany the AAAI 2020 tutorial on probabilistic circuits, by Antonio Vergari, Robert Peharz, YooJung Choi, and Guy Van den Broeck. They cover the first half of the tutorial, that is, the motivation of tractable models, the probabilistic circuit representation, and its inference algorithms. This is a working document; updates will be made available at starai.cs.ucla.edu/ papers/LecNoAAAI20.pdf. The tutorial slides covering additional topics such as learning of probabilistic circuits and a survey of their applications are available at starai.cs.ucla. edu/slides/AAAI20.pdf. Kindly send corrections and feedback to yjchoi@cs.ucla.edu. 1. Probabilistic Inference: Models, Queries and Tractability In the following, we will formalize the idea of performing probabilistic inference as computing quantities of interest of a probability distribution by querying probabilistic models, here playing the role of compact representations of probability distributions. We will then categorize these queries into families of functions to characterize the complexity of different probabilistic inference tasks. We will later discuss what makes a family of probabilistic model tractable w.r. t. a class of queries. We assume the readers to be familiar with the basic concepts and rules of probability calculus while referring them to (Koller and Friedman, 2009; Feller, 2008; Rosenthal, 2006) for background. Notation. We use uppercase letters for random variables (RVs), e.g., X,Y , and lowercase ones for their corresponding assignments e.g., x, y. Analogously, indexed sets of RVs are denoted by bold uppercase letters, e.g., X, Y, and their joint values by the corresponding lowercase ones, e.g., x, y. A specific RV in a set, and a value in a joint assignment, is indexed by a subscript, e.g., Xi and xi, respectively. Concatenation XY denotes the union of disjoint sets. Let val(X) define the set of possible values that RV X can assume, i.e., its domain. Analogously, val(X) indicates the cartesian product val(X1)×val(X2)×. ×val(Xk) for X = {Xi}i=1. Let p(X) be a probability distribution of RV X and let supp(X) be the support of p(X), i.e., {x ∈ val(X) | p(x) > 0}. For example, a Boolean variable X has supp(X) = {0, 1}; we adopt the shorthand X and ¬X for the indicator functions JX = 1K and JX = 0K, respectively.
Boosting Domestic Energy Efficiency Through Accurate Consumption Data Collection

Domestic user behavior shapes overall power consumption, necessitating the development of systems that analyze and help foster energy efficient behavior. The most important step in the process is the collection and management of comprehensive data on end-user power consumption behavior. This paper presents an appliance-based energy data collection system for domestic households. It revolves around the concept of micro-moments, which are short-timed and energy-based events that form the overall energy behavior of the end-user. The system comprises sensing modules for recording energy consumption, occupancy, temperature, humidity, and luminosity storing recordings on a database server. Sensing parameters were tested in terms of connection stability and measurement accuracy. High stability and accuracy benchmarks have been reached with future work focused on deploying the system for multi-users in addition to enhancing overall data security and integrity.
Too Many Ways to Make an Error

Over the last decade, new unintended adverse consequences (UACs) related to all aspects of electronic health record (EHR) design, development, implementation and use have emerged. This requires re-focusing our research, development, and evaluation efforts to address these UACs to facilitate a safe, effective and efficient EHR infrastructure.
Optimal Donor Management in a Public Stool Bank

Motivated by the recent opening of a public stool bank that enables fecal microbiota transplantation for the treatment of Clostridium difficile infection, we develop and optimize a mathematical model that tracks the flow of stools from donation to sales. To prevent the spread of infectious diseases, donors are periodically tested and donated stools are not released for sale until a donor passes a subsequent test; donors and their recently donated stools are permanently ejected from the system after a failed test. We choose the testing frequency and a policy for introducing new donors into the system to minimize the long-run expected average costs due to paying donors, processing and testing stools, and holding and backordering finished goods inventory. This problem is a variant of a continuous review inventory problem where items (i.e., donors) are continuously producing product and are failure-prone, and lead times are controllable. Instead of using approximate dynamic programming to deal with the unwieldy size of the state space, we apply heavy traffic results for multiclass infinite-server queues to approximately optimize within a specified class of base-stock policies, which maintains the expected inventory position at a constant level. This policy outperforms a policy that maintains a constant number of donors. Key Words— stochastic inventory theory; heavy traffic approximations, controllable lead times, fecal microbiota transplantation
Immunogenicity of a new, inactivated canine adenovirus type 2 vaccine for dogs

Purpose We constructed a new canine adenovirus type 2 (CAV-2) vaccine candidate using the recently isolated Korean CAV-2 strain; we termed the vaccine APQA1701-40P and evaluated its safety and immunogenicity in dogs. Materials and Methods To generate the anti-CAV-2 vaccine, APQA1701 was passaged 40 times in MDCK cells growing in medium containing 5 mM urea and the virus was inactivated using 0.05% (volume per volume) formaldehyde. Two vaccines were prepared by blending inactivated APQA1701-40P with two different adjuvants; both were intramuscularly injected (twice) into guinea pigs. The safety and immunogenicity of the Cabopol-adjuvanted vaccine were evaluated in seronegative dogs. The humoral responses elicited were measured using an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (I-ELISA), and via a virus neutralization assay (VNA). Results The new, inactivated CAV-2 vaccine strain, APQA1701-40P, lacked six amino acids of the E1b-19K protein. In guinea pigs, the Cabopol-adjuvanted vaccine afforded a slightly higher VNA titer and I-ELISA absorbance than an IMS gel-adjuvanted vaccine 4 weeks post-vaccination (p>0.05). Dogs inoculated with the former vaccine developed a significantly higher immune titer than non-vaccinated dogs. Conclusion The Cabopol-adjuvanted, inactivated CAV-2 vaccine was safe and induced a high VNA titer in dogs.
The Significance of Noise in the Evolution of Negative and Positive Cooperativity in Protein Complexes

Evolution, tends to build complex structures out of protein molecules which ha s adv ntages for protein function. Few reasons have been proposed to explain this event. Some protein multimers show cooperativity in which binding of a ligand to a chain affect on the b inding of other ligands. But it has remained unclear why cooperativity arises in positive or n gative forms and what is the advantage of each of these forms. Our analysis, using determinist ic and stochastic approaches, shows that the average and the standard deviation of ligand bindi ng capacity indeed differ between positive and negative cooperativity. Considering standard devi ation as a measure of noise in the system, our results demonstrate that the transition from negative to positive cooperativity is accompanied by an increase in the level of noise in th system. This source of noise enables the system to adapt in a fluctuating environment and coul d be subject to selection during evolution. MATCH Communications in Mathematical and in Computer Chemistry MATCH Commun. Math. Comput. Chem. 81 (2019) 177-192 ISSN 0340 6253