Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Theoretical Explanation for Perplexing Behaviors of Backpropagation-based Visualizations

Backpropagation-based visualizations have been proposed to interpret convolutional neural networks (CNNs), however a theory is missing to justify their behaviors: Guided backpropagation (GBP) and deconvolutional network (DeconvNet) generate more human-interpretable but less class-sensitive visualizations than saliency map. Motivated by this, we develop a theoretical explanation revealing that GBP and DeconvNet are essentially doing (partial) image recovery which is unrelated to the network decisions. Specifically, our analysis shows that the backward ReLU introduced by GBP and DeconvNet, and the local connections in CNNs are the two main causes of compelling visualizations. Extensive experiments are provided that support the theoretical analysis.
Multivariate analysis of inflammatory endotypes in recurrent nasal polyposis in a Chinese population.

BACKGROUND Chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps (CRSwNP) remains a challenging clinical problem due to its propensity for recurrence. However, data on the frequency of CRSwNP recurrence after surgery in China are rare. METHODS 78 CRSwNP patients undergoing functional endoscopic sinus surgery were followed-up for 8 years and classified into recurrent and non-recurrent groups. A cluster analysis of the CRSwNP based on inflammatory endotypes was performed, and the endotypes were secondarily matched with clinical phenotypes. RESULTS The recurrence rate of CRSwNP in Southwest China was 21.8% over 8 years post-surgery. The CRSwNP was classified into 4 clusters: cluster 1 (higher expression of IL-5, IgE, and ECP and high positivity rate for SE-IgE); cluster 2 (higher concentrations of IL-6, IL-8 and MPO); cluster 3 (higher concentrations of TNF-alpha; and IFN-gamma); and cluster 4 (higher expression of IL-17). Cluster 1 (type-2 inflammation) exhibited the highest recurrence rate, co-morbid asthma and atopy. Notably, the ECP/MPO ratio increased significantly in patients with non-type-2 recurrent CRSwNP 8 years after the first surgery. CONCLUSION Different inflammatory endotypes of CRSwNP exhibited clearly different prognoses. The type-2 subgroup had high recurrence and co-morbid asthma rates comparable to the rates reported in Western countries.
Does image grid visualization affect password strength and creation time in graphical authentication?

Nowadays, technological advances introduce new visualization and user interaction possibilities. Focusing on the user authentication domain, graphical passwords are considered a better fit for interaction environments which lack a physical keyboard. Nonetheless, the current graphical user authentication schemes are deployed in conventional layouts, which introduce security vulnerabilities associated with the strength of the user selected passwords. Aiming to investigate the effectiveness of advanced visualization layouts in selecting stronger passwords, this paper reports a between-subject study, comparing two different design layouts a two-dimensional and a three dimensional. Results provide evidence that advanced visualization techniques provide a more suitable framework for deploying graphical user authentication schemes and underpin the need for considering such techniques for providing assistive and/or adaptive mechanisms to users aiming to assist them to create stronger graphical passwords.
ON POSITTVTTY OF FOURIER TRANSFORMS

This note concerns Fourier transforms on the real positive line. In particular, we seek conditions on a real function u(x) in x > 0, that ensure that its Fourier-cosine transform v(t) — JQ°° u(x) cos xt dx is positive. We prove first that this is so for all t > 0, if u"(i) > 0 for all x > 0, that is, that everywhere-convex functions have everywhere-positive Fourier-cosine transforms. We then obtain a complex-plane criterion for some types of non-convex u(x). Finally we consider criteria on u(x) that imply positivity of v(t) for t > t0, for some to > 0.
Transcriptomic Analysis of Pseudoscorpion Venom Reveals a Unique Cocktail Dominated by Enzymes and Protease Inhibitors

Transcriptomic and genomic analyses have illuminated the diversity of venoms in three of the four venomous arachnid orders (scorpions, spiders, and ticks). To date, no venom gland transcriptome analysis has been available for pseudoscorpions, the fourth venomous arachnid lineage. To redress this gap, we sequenced an mRNA library generated from the venom glands of the species Synsphyronus apimelus (Garypidae). High-throughput sequencing by the Illumina protocol, followed by de novo assembly, resulted in a total of 238,331 transcripts. From those, we annotated 131 transcripts, which code for putative peptides/proteins with similar sequences to previously reported venom components available from different arachnid species in protein databases. Transcripts putatively coding for enzymes showed the richest diversity, followed by other venom components such as peptidase inhibitors, cysteine-rich peptides, and thyroglobulin 1-like peptides. Only 11 transcripts were found that code for putatively low molecular mass spider toxins. This study constitutes the first report of the diversity of components within pseudoscorpion venom.
Break-taking behaviour pattern of long-distance freight vehicles based on GPS trajectory data

This paper focuses on the break-taking behaviour pattern of long-distance freight vehicles, providing a new perspective on the study of behaviour patterns and simultaneously providing a reference for transport management departments and related enterprises. Based on Global Positioning System (GPS) trajectory data, we select stopping points as break-taking sites of long-distance freight vehicles and then classify the stopping points into three different classes based on the break-taking duration. We then explore the relationship of the distribution of the break-taking frequency between the three single classifications and their combinations, on the basis of the break-taking duration distribution. We find that the combination is a Gaussian distribution when each of the three individual classes is a Gaussian distribution, contrasting with the power-law distribution of the break-taking duration. Then we experimental analysis the distribution of the break-taking durations and frequencies, and find that, for the durations, the three single classifications can be fitted individually by an Exponential distribution and together by a Power-law distribution, for the frequencies, both the three single classifications and together can be fitted by a Gaussian distribution,so that can validate the above theoretical analysis. Key words: break-taking behaviour, long-distance freight vehicle, statistical analysis
Research on Algorithm for Feature Extraction and Classification of Motor Imagery EEG Signals

This paper made a research on the feature extraction and pattern recognition of left and right hands motor imagery EEG signals. In combination with the data from BCI Competition III, denoising preprocessing is carried out for EEG signals firstly; and then, the relative wavelet energy is extracted as a feature vector from the Channels C3 and C4 by use of the algorithm for relative wavelet energy, and pattern recognition is carried out by use of the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN). Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves good classification results.
Identification of an immune modulation locus utilising a bovine mammary gland infection challenge model

Inflammation of the mammary gland following bacterial infection, commonly known as mastitis, affects all mammalian species. Although the aetiology and epidemiology of mastitis in the dairy cow are well described, the genetic factors mediating resistance to mammary gland infection are not well known, due in part to the difficulty in obtaining robust phenotypic information from sufficiently large numbers of individuals. To address this problem, an experimental mammary gland infection experiment was undertaken, using a Friesian-Jersey cross breed F2 herd. A total of 604 animals received an intramammary infusion of Streptococcus uberis in one gland, and the clinical response over 13 milkings was used for linkage mapping and genome-wide association analysis. A quantitative trait locus (QTL) was detected on bovine chromosome 11 for clinical mastitis status using micro-satellite and Affymetrix 10 K SNP markers, and then exome and genome sequence data used from the six F1 sires of the experimental animals to examine this region in more detail. A total of 485 sequence variants were typed in the QTL interval, and association mapping using these and an additional 37 986 genome-wide markers from the Illumina SNP50 bovine SNP panel revealed association with markers encompassing the interleukin-1 gene cluster locus. This study highlights a region on bovine chromosome 11, consistent with earlier studies, as conferring resistance to experimentally induced mammary gland infection, and newly prioritises the IL1 gene cluster for further analysis in genetic resistance to mastitis.
Building Conceptual Dictionaries for an Integrated Narrative Generation System

Abstra ct Integrated Narrative Generation System (INGS) is a framework for integrating our previous researches on narrative generation. INGS integrates various narrative generation modules into an organic architecture. This paper presents a verb conceptual dictionary and a noun conceptual dictionary to be used in INGS. Each of the dictionaries has a conceptual hierarchy with single inheritance by is-a relations. A terminal concept in the verb conceptual dictionary describes one or more case frame(s), the constraints of the main elements and a sentence pattern. The basic description of each terminal concept in the noun conceptual dictionary associates the concept to the other noun concept. The purpose of the study is not developing general conceptual dictionaries, but building them as a mechanism in narrative generation, especially in INGS. Actually, we have combined the two developed conceptual dictionaries with INGS. In this paper, we will present the basic mechanisms based on the cooperation of two types of conceptual dictionary through an implemented narrative generation system, INGS.
Resin monoterpene defenses decline within three widespread species of pine (Pinus) along a 1530‐m elevational gradient

The elevational gradient in plant defense (EGPD) hypothesis posits that natural enemy pressures increase alongside temperature across elevational climatic gradients, thereby selecting for enhanced defenses at lower elevations while leaving plants less defended at higher elevations. Phylogenetically constrained tests of this hypothesis are uncommon, with tests focused on defenses of mature trees in natural settings being exceedingly rare. In the absence of this information, predicting the spatiotemporal dynamics of forest pests that preferentially attack mature trees is rendered more difficult. Tree properties such as age, growth rate, and size have all been correlated with levels of tree defenses against insect pests. Thus, we sought to disentangle the interacting influences of these properties from possible elevational climatic effects on monoterpene concentrations, diversity, and intraspecific dissimilarity of constitutive resin within three widespread pines (Pinus contorta, Pinus ponderosa, and Pinus flexilis) across a 1530-m elevational transect in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, USA. Overall, we found some support for the EGPD hypothesis within all three of the pine species studied. However, while elevation and tree properties were strong predictors of the variation in monoterpene concentration and moderate predictors of variation in diversity and dissimilarity in P. contorta, they were a relatively weak set of predictors in P. ponderosa and P. flexilis. Significant, (negative) elevational effects were found for total monoterpene concentration in P. contorta and monoterpene diversity in P. ponderosa, while elevation had a significant negative effect on monoterpene concentration and diversity, and a positive effect on dissimilarity in P. flexilis. Nevertheless, tree age, size, and/or growth measures had significant influences on one or more monoterpene measures in all three of the pine species indicating a need to parse effects of these factors within studies of tree defenses across environmental gradients. Our results offer some support for the EGPD hypothesis while suggesting the presence of a variable hierarchy of drivers of pine defense and resistance across congeners in shared environments—a situation that presents challenges for predicting spatiotemporal patterns in secondary chemistry across species from a common set of potential drivers.
Cloning and Heterologous Expression of the Antibiotic Peptide (ABP) Genes from Rhizopus oligosporus NBRC 8631

We carried out protein sequencing of purified Antibiotic Peptide (ABP), and cloned two genes encoding this peptide as abp1 and abp2, from Rhizopus oligosporus NBRC 8631. Both genes contain an almost identical 231-bp segment, with only 3 nucleotide substitutions, encoding a 77 amino acid peptide. The abp gene product comprises a 28 amino acid signal sequence and a 49 amino acid mature peptide. Northern blot analysis showed that at least one of the abp genes is transcribed in R. oligosporus NBRC 8631. A truncated form of abp1 encoding only the mature peptide was fused with the α-factor signal peptide and engineered for expression in Pichia pastoris SMD1168H. Culture broth of the recombinant Pichia displayed ABP activity against Bacillus subtilis NBRC 3335 after induction of heterologous gene expression. This result indicates that mature ABP formed the active structure without the aid of other factors from R. oligosporus, and was secreted.
Examining associations between school food environment characteristics and sugar-sweetened beverage consumption among Canadian secondary-school students in the COMPASS study

Abstract Objective To examine associations between Canadian adolescents’ sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption and several school food environment characteristics, and to investigate differences in these characteristics between schools in provinces with voluntary (Alberta) v. mandatory (Ontario) provincial school nutrition policies. Design We used a questionnaire to assess the number of weekdays participants consumed three SSB categories (soft drinks, sweetened coffees/teas, energy drinks) and various sociodemographic and behavioural characteristics. We examined the in-school water fountain accessibility, vending machines’ contents and presence of various food outlets within schools’ 1 km buffer. We developed hierarchical Poisson regression models to identify associations between student- and school-level characteristics and students’ SSB outcomes. Setting Alberta and Ontario, Canada. Subjects Adolescents (n 41 829) from eighty-nine secondary schools. Results Compared with their Ontarian counterparts, Albertan participants had a significantly higher rate of SSB intake across all drink categories and SSB availability was significantly greater in Albertan schools’ vending machines. Availability of sweetened coffees/teas in school vending machines and access to restaurants within the school’s 1 km buffer were associated with increased SSB intake in three of the final models. Overall, the school food environment-level characteristics examined had a modest to negligible impact on student days of SSB intake. Conclusions We identified that the school food environment characteristics examined here had little impact on adolescents’ days of SSB consumption. While schools should adopt or maintain a comprehensive policy approach to discourage students’ SSB intake, population-level interventions focusing on other contexts (e.g. home and community) are needed to complement existing school-based interventions.
Tanovea ® for the treatment of lymphoma in dogs

Tanovea® (first named GS-9219, then VDC-1101, generic name: rabacfosadine) is a pro-prodrug or “double” prodrug of PMEG [9-(2-phosphonylmethoxyethyl)guanine], which has been conditionally approved by the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) for the treatment of lymphoma in dogs. Tanovea has been demonstrated to be effective against non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) in dogs, as well as canine cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, spontaneous canine multiple myeloma, naïve canine multicentric lymphoma and relapsed canine B-cell lymphoma. As a double prodrug of PMEG, GS-9219 is first converted intracellularly by hydrolysis to cPr-PMEDAP, then deaminated to PMEG, which is then phosphorylated twice to its active metabolite PMEGpp, acting at the level of the cellular DNA polymerases.
Sleep restriction and appetite control: waking to a problem?

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Bilingual Lexicon Induction from Non-Parallel Data with Minimal Supervision

Building bilingual lexica from non-parallel data is a long-standing natural language processing research problem that could benefit thousands of resource-scarce languages which lack parallel data. Recent advances of continuous word representations have opened up new possibilities for this task, e.g. by establishing cross-lingual mapping between word embeddings via a seed lexicon. The method is however unreliable when there are only a limited number of seeds, which is a reasonable setting for resource-scarce languages. We tackle the limitation by introducing a novel matching mechanism into bilingual word representation learning. It captures extra translation pairs exposed by the seeds to incrementally improve the bilingual word embeddings. In our experiments, we find the matching mechanism to substantially improve the quality of the bilingual vector space, which in turn allows us to induce better bilingual lexica with seeds as few as 10.
Multiple Source Detection without Knowing the Underlying Propagation Model

Information source detection, which is the reverse problem of information diffusion, has attracted considerable research effort recently. Most existing approaches assume that the underlying propagation model is fixed and given as input, which may limit their application range. In this paper, we study the multiple source detection problem when the underlying propagation model is unknown. Our basic idea is source prominence, namely the nodes surrounded by larger proportions of infected nodes are more likely to be infection sources. As such, we propose a multiple source detection method called Label Propagation based Source Identification (LPSI). Our method lets infection status iteratively propagate in the network as labels, and finally uses local peaks of the label propagation result as source nodes. In addition, both the convergent and iterative versions of LPSI are given. Extensive experiments are conducted on several real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Best Practices in Release Management of Large Projects

Today, with the nature of software assembled from legacy, existing independently produced and autonomous tested systems, it imposes great complexity in constructing a software release, this is especially true when a same software version is to deploy to an array of software releases targeting different environments. Reduction of defects during various phases of testing due to the deployment of wrong version of software into different environments, in a large solution projects is a huge challenge. The volume, rapid and intensive deployment required in large solution projects calls for accuracy, reliability and availability in its Software Release Management process that encompasses the planning, design, build, configuration, testing, and deployment of associated software components. In this paper we will be sharing the software release best practices applied in our National R&D Centre in ICT, discussing on the defined processes for its software release management.
A pr 2 01 8 On the Asymptotic Throughput of the kth Best Secondary User Selection in Cognitive Radio Systems

We analyze the asymptotic average and effective throughputs of a multiuser diversity scheme for a secondary multiuser network consisting of multiple secondary users (transmitters) and one secondary receiver. Considering a transmit power adaptation strategy at the secondary users to satisfy the instantaneous interference constraint at the primary receiver, the secondary receiver selects the k-th best secondary user for transmission, namely, the one with the k-th highest signal-tonoise ratio (SNR). We use extreme value theory to show that the k-th highest SNR converges uniformly in distribution to an inverse gamma random variable for a fixed k and large number of secondary users. We use this result to derive closed-form asymptotic expressions for the average and effective throughputs of the k-th best secondary user.
Nutraceuticals in Periodontal Health: A Systematic Review on the Role of Vitamins in Periodontal Health Maintenance

Periodontal disease, a relevant public health problem worldwide, is generally considered a common pathology of elderly people. In this respect, there is agreement about that nutritional status may be a modifying factor in the progression and healing of the periodontal tissues. Vitamins have been recommended as nutraceuticals for prevention and treatment of some pathological conditions, such as cardiovascular diseases, obesity or cancer. Thus, a systematic approach to determining how the different vitamin type could ameliorate periodontal risks or improve periodontal health is necessary to further the understanding of the potential benefits and risks of vitamins supplementation use. For this, a systematic review of English-written literature in PubMed until February 2018, which included both human and animal research on the relationship of each vitamin with periodontal disease, was conducted. Among all the analyzed vitamins those with antioxidant capacity and effects on immune system seem to be useful for prevention or improvement of periodontal disease, as well as those implicated in bone metabolism. In the first case, there are quite information in favor of various vitamins, mainly vitamin C, that is the most studied. In the second case, vitamin D seems to have the most relevant role.