Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Communication efficient distributed learning with feature partitioned data

One major bottleneck in the design of large scale distributed machine learning algorithms is the communication cost. In this paper, we propose and analyze a distributed learning scheme for reducing the amount of communication in distributed learning problems under the feature partition scenario. The motivating observation of our scheme is that, in the existing schemes for the feature partition scenario, large amount of data exchange is needed for calculating gradients. In our proposed scheme, instead of calculating the exact gradient at each iteration, we only calculate the exact gradient sporadically. We provide precise conditions to determine when to perform the exact update, and characterize the convergence rate and bounds for total iterations and communication iterations. We further test our algorithm on real data sets and show that the proposed scheme can substantially reduce the amount of data transferred between distributed nodes.
Association between Body Mass Index and Migraine: A Survey of Adult Population in China

Both migraine and obesity are prevalent disorders in the general population, which are characterized by disability and impaired quality of life. Although so many researches had studied the association between migraine and obesity, there are still no full knowledge of the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and migraine, especially chronic migraine (CM). In this study, we analyzed a previous epidemiological survey data of primary headache patients in Chongqing, which surveyed consecutive neurological outpatients through face-to-face interview with physicians using a headache questionnaire. 166 episodic migraine (EM) patients and 134 chronic migraine (CM) patients were included in the study out of 1327 primary headache patients. And 200 healthy adults from the physical examination center were included as a control group. Finally, we found that the patients with migraine (EM and CM) were more likely to be overweight, obese, or morbidly obese compared to those in the healthy group. Significant difference was found between BMI and frequency of migraine attacks but not severity or duration of headache onset. And no significant difference was found in severity and duration of headache onset between episodic and chronic migraine among different BMI classifications. Such may update our knowledge about the clinical features of migraine and BMI, revealing that the frequency of attacks may be associated with being overweight, obese, or morbidly obese in patients with migraine and that the extent of being overweight, obese, or morbidly obese in CM patients was lower than that in EM patients.
The Effect of Electroacupuncture versus Manual Acupuncture through the Expression of TrkB/NF-κB in the Subgranular Zone of the Dentate Gyrus of Telomerase-Deficient Mice

Our previous study showed that the acupuncture stimulation on the acupoint (ST-36) could activate the brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) signaling pathways in telomerase-deficient mice. Recently, we set out to investigate whether the manual acupuncture (MA) or electroacupuncture (EA) displays a therapeutic advantage on age-related deterioration of learning and memory. Both telomerase-deficient mice (Terc−/− group, n = 24) and wild-type mice (WT group, n = 24) were randomly assigned to 3 subgroups (CON, controls with no treatment; MA, mice receiving manual acupuncture; EA, mice receiving electric acupuncture). The mice were subjected to behavior test, and EA/MA were applied at bilateral acupoints (ST36) 30 min daily for 7 successive days. The brain tissues were collected after the last Morris water maze (MWM) test and were subjected to the immunohistochemistry and western blot analysis. The MWM test showed that EA can significantly increase the time in target quadrant (P ≤ 0.01) and frequency of locating platform for Terc−/− mice (P ≤ 0.05), while nothing changed in WT mice. Furthermore, western blotting and immunohistochemistry suggested that EA could also specifically increase the expression of TrkB and NF-κB in Terc−/− mice but not in wild-type mice (P ≤ 0.05). Meanwhile, the expression level and ratio of ERK/p-ERK did not exhibit significant changes in each subgroup. These results indicated that, compared with MA, the application of EA could specifically ameliorate the spatial learning and memory capability for telomerase-deficient mice through the activation of TrkB and NF-κB.
AVALIAÇÃO DA PRESENÇA DE NITRATO EM POÇOS DE MONITORAMENTO DISPOSTOS EM ÁREA DE REÚSO AGRÍCOLA.

A pesquisa e baseada na avaliacao de amostras de agua subterrânea, pela irrigacao com efluente de estacao de tratamento de esgoto, em area experimental situada ao lado da Estacao de Tratamento de Esgotos Graminha, operada pela empresa Aguas de Limeira S.A. , na cidade de Limeira. O objetivo deste trabalho e verificar a possivel presenca de nitrato em pocos de monitoramento, compara-los e discuti-los em relacao ao regimento da Portaria 518 do Ministerio da Saude. A coleta da agua subterrânea foi realizada, nos meses de nov/dez de 2003, e jan/fev de 2004 (periodo chuvoso), durante o ciclo da cultura, em seus diferentes estagios (inicial, desenvolvimento, intermediario e final), de acordo com a irrigacao. O esgotamento e a coleta foram realizados com o auxilio de uma bomba centrifuga modificada (com dispositivo de seguranca contra a entrada de ar). As taxas hidraulicas determinadas sao aplicadas na cultura do milho e de acordo com os tratamentos correspondentes a tres lâminas hidricas de aplicacao para efluente de lagoa anaerobica, efluente desinfetado e fertilizacao mineral. Os valores encontrados para nitrato excederam o limite permitido pela Portaria 518/MS, de 10 mg/L, nos pocos 8 e 9. Estes resultados foram encontrados durante o periodo intermediario de desenvolvimento da planta. Os maiores valores encontrados para nitrato conferem com os pocos dispostos nas situacoes mais criticas, recebendo maiores quantidades de efluente sem desinfeccao.
Genetic Polymorphisms Associated with Risk of Developing Age-Related Macular Degeneration in Patients with Chronic Aspirin Usage

Citation: Adams N, Iqbal O, De Alba F, Kuffel G, Zilliox MJ, et al. (2018) Genetic Polymorphisms Associated with Risk of Developing Age-Related Macular Degeneration in Patients with Chronic Aspirin Usage. J Ophthalmol Eye Care 1(1): 101 Volume 1 | Issue 1 Journal of Ophthalmology & Eye Care Received Date: April 8, 2018 Accepted Date: May 9, 2018 Published Date: May 11, 2018 1Loyola Stritch School of Medicine, Maywood, Illinois, USA 2Department of Ophthalmology, Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, Illinois, USA 3Loyola Genomics Facility, Department of Public Health Sciences, Loyola University Chicago, Maywood, Illinois, USA 4Clinical Research Office Biostatistics Core, Loyola University Chicago, Maywood, Illinois, USA 5Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA 6Department of Ophthalmology, University of Southern California, Roski Eye Institute, Los Angeles, California, USA
NEUROSENT-PDI at SemEval-2018 Task 1: Leveraging a Multi-Domain Sentiment Model for Inferring Polarity in Micro-blog Text

This paper describes the NeuroSent system that participated in SemEval 2018 Task 1. Our system takes a supervised approach that builds on neural networks and word embeddings. Word embeddings were built by starting from a repository of user generated reviews. Thus, they are specific for sentiment analysis tasks. Then, tweets are converted in the corresponding vector representation and given as input to the neural network with the aim of learning the different semantics contained in each emotion taken into account by the SemEval task. The output layer has been adapted based on the characteristics of each subtask. Preliminary results obtained on the provided training set are encouraging for pursuing the investigation into this direction.
Addressing the Side Effects of Contemporary Antidepressant Drugs: A Comprehensive Review

Randomized trials have shown that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) have better safety profiles than classical tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs). However, an increasing number of studies, including meta-analyses, naturalistic studies, and longer-term studies suggested that SSRIs and SNRIs are no less safe than TCAs. We focused on comparing the common side effects of TCAs with those of newer generation antidepressants including SSRIs, SNRIs, mirtazapine, and bupropion. The main purpose was to investigate safety profile differences among drug classes rather than the individual antidepressants, so studies containing comparison data on drug groups were prioritized. In terms of safety after overdose, the common belief on newer generation antidepressants having fewer side effects than TCAs appears to be true. TCAs were also associated with higher drop-out rates, lower tolerability, and higher cardiac side-effects. However, evidence regarding side effects including dry mouth, gastrointestinal side effects, hepatotoxicity, seizure, and weight has been inconsistent, some studies demonstrated the superiority of SSRIs and SNRIs over TCAs, while others found the opposite. Some other side effects such as sexual dysfunction, bleeding, and hyponatremia were more prominent with either SSRIs or SNRIs.
Uhrengene und ihre Bedeutung für Schlafen und Wachen

Zirkadiane Uhren regulieren Tagesrhythmen in Physiologie und Verhalten. Ein zentraler Schrittmacher im Hypothalamus koordiniert ein Netzwerk von Uhren untereinander und mit der externen Zeit. Dieses Uhrennetzwerk bestimmt die Zeit von Ruhe- und Wachphasen und reguliert das Müdigkeitsempfinden nach längerem Wachen. Neue Studien zeigen zudem, dass die Kommunikation zwischen Uhren und Schlaf in beide Richtungen erfolgt – mit Konsequenzen insbesondere für den Energiestoffwechsel.
Dipeptidyl Peptidase-4 Inhibitors and the Risk of Pancreatitis in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Population-Based Cohort Study

Background Information on the risk of acute pancreatitis in patients receiving dipeptidyl-peptidase IV inhibitors (DPP-4i) is limited and controversial. One study suggested that the differences in findings between these meta-analyses were attributed to whether they included large randomized control trials with cardiovascular outcomes or not. The aim of our study was to determine whether the use of DPP-4i increases the risk of acute pancreatitis compared with sulfonylurea (SU) and whether the risk is higher in patients with underlying cardiovascular disease (CVD). Methods A population-based cohort study was performed using Korean National Health Insurance Service-National Sample Cohort data. We included 33,395 new users of SU and DPP-4i from 1 January 2008 to 31 December 2015. SU-treated patients and DPP-4i-treated patients were matched by 1 : 1 propensity score matching. We used Kaplan–Meier curves and Cox proportional hazards regression analysis to calculate the risk of acute pancreatitis. Results The hazard ratio (HR) of hospitalization for acute pancreatitis was 0.642 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.535–0.771) in DPP-4i-treated patients compared with SU-treated patients. The HR of DPP-4i use was also lower than that of SU use in patients without underlying CVD (HR: 0.591; 95% CI: 0.476–0.735) but not in patients with underlying CVD (HR: 0.727; 95% CI: 0.527–1.003). Conclusion Our findings suggest that DPP-4i is less likely to cause drug-induced pancreatitis than SU. This finding was not evident in patients with CVD, but DPP-4i was not more likely to induce pancreatitis in these patients than SU was.
CMM-Based Volumetric Assessment Methodology for Polyethylene Tibial Knee Inserts in Total Knee Replacement

Total knee replacement is a common surgical procedure in orthopaedics. Accurate volumetric wear assessment of the polyethylene knee inserts has been an essential subject for improving the longevity. A new CMM-based methodology was presented to determine volumetric material loss based on curve surface fitting without prewear data, CAD model, or original design of drawings. Both computational and experimental simulated volume removal tests were run to validate the methodology by comparing with the gravimetric measurements. The volume and linear wear of the tibial inserts were calculated using the presented method based on the coordinates acquired by the CMM. The results indicate that the methodology is adequate for clinically retrieved tibial inserts where no prewear data are provided. This technique can also be used for biotribological study of other polyethylene components, since wear and damage can be assessed visually and volumetrically.
Sequential Attacks on Agents for Long-Term Adversarial Goals

Reinforcement learning (RL) has advanced greatly in the past few years with the employment of effective deep neural networks (DNNs) on the policy networks. With the great effectiveness came serious vulnerability issues with DNNs that small adversarial perturbations on the input can change the output of the network. Several works have pointed out that learned agents with a DNN policy network can be manipulated against achieving the original task through a sequence of small perturbations on the input states. In this paper, we demonstrate furthermore that it is also possible to impose an arbitrary adversarial reward on the victim policy network through a sequence of attacks. Our method involves the latest adversarial attack technique, Adversarial Transformer Network (ATN), that learns to generate the attack and is easy to integrate into the policy network. As a result of our attack, the victim agent is misguided to optimise for the adversarial reward over time. Our results expose serious security threats for RL applications in safety-critical systems including drones, medical analysis, and self-driving cars.
Whole-Genome Sequencing and Comparative Genome Analysis Provided Insight into the Predatory Features and Genetic Diversity of Two Bdellovibrio Species Isolated from Soil

Bdellovibrio spp. are predatory bacteria with great potential as antimicrobial agents. Studies have shown that members of the genus Bdellovibrio exhibit peculiar characteristics that influence their ecological adaptations. In this study, whole genomes of two different Bdellovibrio spp. designated SKB1291214 and SSB218315 isolated from soil were sequenced. The core genes shared by all the Bdellovibrio spp. considered for the pangenome analysis including the epibiotic B. exovorus were 795. The number of unique genes identified in Bdellovibrio spp. SKB1291214, SSB218315, W, and B. exovorus JJS was 1343, 113, 857, and 1572, respectively. These unique genes encode hydrolytic, chemotaxis, and transporter proteins which might be useful for predation in the Bdellovibrio strains. Furthermore, the two Bdellovibrio strains exhibited differences based on the % GC content, amino acid identity, and 16S rRNA gene sequence. The 16S rRNA gene sequence of Bdellovibrio sp. SKB1291214 shared 99% identity with that of an uncultured Bdellovibrio sp. clone 12L 106 (a pairwise distance of 0.008) and 95–97% identity (a pairwise distance of 0.043) with that of other culturable terrestrial Bdellovibrio spp. , including strain SSB218315. In Bdellovibrio sp. SKB1291214, 174 bp sequence was inserted at the host interaction (hit) locus region usually attributed to prey attachment, invasion, and development of host independent Bdellovibrio phenotypes. Also, a gene equivalent to Bd0108 in B. bacteriovorus HD100 was not conserved in Bdellovibrio sp. SKB1291214. The results of this study provided information on the genetic characteristics and diversity of the genus Bdellovibrio that can contribute to their successful applications as a biocontrol agent.
Standard Cell Library Evaluation with Multiple lithography-compliant verification and Improved Synopsys Pin Access Checking Utility

While standard cell layouts are drawn with minimum design rules to maximize the benefit of design area shrinkage, the complicated design rules have caused difficulties with signal routes accessing the pins in standard cell layouts. As a result, it has become a great challenge for physical layout designers to design a standard cell layout that is optimized for area, power, timing, signal integrity, and printability. Multiple design iterations are required to consider pin accessibility during standard cells layout to increase the number of feasible solutions available to the router. In this work, we will demonstrate several improvements with the Synopsys PAC methodology, such as reducing the number of cells required for each Synopsys 'testcell' with the same cell abutment condition, increasing the complexity of the pin connection for better pin accessibility evaluation. We also recommend additional constraints to improve the probability of detecting pin accessibility issues. We also integrate other physical verification methods to access the design rule compliance and the printability of standard cells. We hope that the easy to use utility enables layout engineers to perform the verification, simplifying the verification methodology.
Allocation of Interferon Gamma mRNA Positive Cells in Caecum Hallmarks a Protective Trait Against Histomonosis

Histomonosis is a parasitic disease of gallinaceous birds characterized by necrotic lesions in cacum and liver that usually turns fatal in turkeys while it is less severe in chickens. Vaccination using in vitro attenuated Histomonas meleagridis has been experimentally shown to confer protection against histomonosis. The protective mechanisms that underpin the vaccine-induced immune response are not resolved so far. Therefore, the actual study aimed to evaluate the location and quantitative distribution patterns of signature cytokines of type 1 [interferon gamma (IFN-γ)] or type 2 [interleukin (IL)-13] immune responses in vaccinated or infected hosts. An intergroup and interspecies difference in the spatial and temporal distribution patterns of cytokine mRNA positive cells was evident. Quantification of cells showed a significantly decreased percentage of IFN-γ mRNA positive cells at 4 days post-inoculation (DPI) in caeca of turkeys inoculated exclusively with the attenuated or the virulent inocula, compared to control birds. The decrement was followed by a surge of cells expressing mRNA for IFN-γ or IL-13, reaching a peak of increment at 10 DPI. By contrast, turkeys challenged following vaccination showed a slight increment of cecal IFN-γ mRNA positive cells at 4 DPI after which positive cell counts became comparable to control birds. The increase in infected birds was accompanied by an extensive distribution of positively stained cells up to the muscularis layer of cecal tissue whereas the vaccine group maintained an intact mucosal structure. In chickens, the level of changes of positive cells was generally lower compared to turkeys. However, control chickens were found with a higher percentage of IFN-γ mRNA positive cells in cecum compared to their turkey counterparts indicating a higher resistance to histomonosis, similar to the observation in immunized turkeys. In chickens, it could be shown that the changes of cytokine-positive cells were related to variations of mononuclear cells quantified by immunofluorescence. Furthermore, gene expression measured by reverse transcription quantitative real time PCR confirmed variations in organs between the different groups of both bird species. Overall, it can be concluded that a proportionally increased, yet controlled, allocation of IFN-γ mRNA positive cells in caeca hallmarks a protective trait against histomonosis.
An adaptive semantic dimensionality reduction approach for hyperspectral imagery classification

Hyperspectral imagery (HSI) is widely used for several fields of remote sensing such as agriculture, land cover monitoring, and deforestation. However, the HSI classification is a challenge task due to the large number of spectral bands, unavailability of training samples, and the high correlation inter-bands. To address these challenges, we propose in this work a semantic reduction dimensionality approach based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and mutual information-based band selection (MI). Firstly, we project the original HSI using PCA to obtain a novel subspace with lower dimensions. Using the obtained components, a set of rules can be generated to find the relevant spectral bands based on score contribution coefficient. Moreover, the mutual information (MI) is used to select the spectral bands that contain a higher information based on the entropy criterion. We propose then to exploit the selected bands for HSI classification using SVM technique. Experiment results demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective and perform for HSI classification compared to other dimensionality reduction approaches.
Generative Adversarial Image Synthesis with Decision Tree Latent Controller

This paper proposes the decision tree latent controller generative adversarial network (DTLC-GAN), an extension of a GAN that can learn hierarchically interpretable representations without relying on detailed supervision. To impose a hierarchical inclusion structure on latent variables, we incorporate a new architecture called the DTLC into the generator input. The DTLC has a multiple-layer tree structure in which the ON or OFF of the child node codes is controlled by the parent node codes. By using this architecture hierarchically, we can obtain the latent space in which the lower layer codes are selectively used depending on the higher layer ones. To make the latent codes capture salient semantic features of images in a hierarchically disentangled manner in the DTLC, we also propose a hierarchical conditional mutual information regularization and optimize it with a newly defined curriculum learning method that we propose as well. This makes it possible to discover hierarchically interpretable representations in a layer-by-layer manner on the basis of information gain by only using a single DTLC-GAN model. We evaluated the DTLC-GAN on various datasets, i.e., MNIST, CIFAR-10, Tiny ImageNet, 3D Faces, and CelebA, and confirmed that the DTLC-GAN can learn hierarchically interpretable representations with either unsupervised or weakly supervised settings. Furthermore, we applied the DTLC-GAN to image-retrieval tasks and showed its effectiveness in representation learning.
Automatic Detection of Visibility Faults by Layout Changes in HTML5 Web Pages

Modern HTML5 web pages (pages) often change various elements of their documents dynamically to provide rich functionality to users interactively. As users interact with a document via events, the combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript dynamically changes the document layout, which is the arrangement of the document elements visualized to the users. Web pages change their layouts not only to support user interaction but also to react to different screen sizes being used to run the pages. To support diverse devices with different screen sizes using a single web page document, developers use Responsive Web Design, which enables web page layouts to change when the sizes of the underlying devices change. While such dynamic features of web pages provide powerful experiences to users, they also make development of web pages more difficult. Even expert developers find it difficult to write HTML5 web pages correctly. In this paper, we first define the problem that functionalities of HTML5 web pages may become unusable due to layout changes, and propose a technique to detect the problem automatically. We show that our implementation detects such problems in real-world HTML5 web pages.