Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Automatic detection of relevant head gestures in American Sign Language communication

An automated system for detection of head movements is described The goal is to label relevant head gestures in video of American Sign Language (ASL) communication. In the system, a 3D head tracker recovers head rotation and translation parameters from monocular video. Relevant head gestures are then detected by analyzing the length and frequency of the motion signal's peaks and valleys. Each parameter is analyzed independently, due to the fact that a number of relevant head movements in ASL are associated with major changes around one rotational axis. No explicit training of the system is necessary Currently, the system can detect "head shakes. " In experimental evaluation, classification performance is compared against ground-truth labels obtained from ASL linguists. Initial results are promising, as the system matches the linguists' labels in a significant number of cases.
Gene Looping Is Conferred by Activator-dependent Interaction of Transcription Initiation and Termination Machineries*

Gene looping juxtaposes the promoter and terminator regions of RNA polymerase II-transcribed genes in yeast and mammalian cells. Here we report an activator-dependent interaction of transcription initiation and termination factors during gene looping in budding yeast. Chromatin analysis revealed that MET16, INO1, and GAL1p-BUD3 are in a stable looped configuration during activated transcription. Looping was nearly abolished in the absence of transcription activators Met28, Ino2, and Gal4 of MET16, INO1, and GAL1p-BUD3 genes, respectively. The activator-independent increase in transcription was not accompanied by loop formation, thereby suggesting an essential role for activators in gene looping. The activators did not facilitate loop formation directly because they did not exhibit an interaction with the 3′ end of the genes. Instead, activators physically interacted with the general transcription factor TFIIB when the genes were activated and in a looped configuration. TFIIB cross-linked to both the promoter and the terminator regions during the transcriptionally activated state of a gene. The presence of TFIIB on the terminator was dependent on the Rna15 component of CF1 3′ end processing complex. Coimmunoprecipitation revealed a physical interaction of Rna15 with TFIIB. We propose that the activators facilitate gene looping through their interaction with TFIIB during transcriptional activation of genes.
The chow parameters problem

In the 2nd Annual FOCS (1961), C. K. Chow proved that every Boolean threshold function is uniquely determined by its degree-0 and degree-1 Fourier coefficients. These numbers became known as the Chow Parameters. Providing an algorithmic version of Chow's theorem --- i.e., efficiently constructing a representation of a threshold function given its Chow Parameters --- has remained open ever since. This problem has received significant study in the fields of circuit complexity, game theory and the design of voting systems, and learning theory. In this paper we effectively solve the problem, giving a randomized PTAS with the following behavior: Theorem: Given the Chow Parameters of a Boolean threshold function f over n bits and any constant ε > 0, the algorithm runs in time O(n2 log2 n) and with high probability outputs a representation of a threshold function f' which is ε-close to f. Along the way we prove several new results of independent interest about Boolean threshold functions. In addition to various structural results, these include the following new algorithmic results in learning theory (where threshold functions are usually called "halfspaces"): An ~O(n2)-time uniform distribution algorithm for learning halfspaces to constant accuracy in the "Restricted Focus of Attention" (RFA) model of Ben-David et al. [3]. This answers the main open question of [6]. An O(n2)-time agnostic-type learning algorithm for halfspaces under the uniform distribution. This contrasts with recent results of Guruswami and Raghavendra [21] who show that the learning problem we solve is NP-hard under general distributions. As a special case of the latter result we obtain the fastest known algorithm for learning halfspaces to constant accuracy in the uniform distribution PAC learning model. For constant ε our algorithm runs in time ~O(n2), which substantially improves on previous bounds and nearly matches the Ω(n2) bits of training data that any successful learning algorithm must use.
On the Rates of Convergence From Surrogate Risk Minimizers to the Bayes Optimal Classifier

In classification, the use of 0–1 loss is preferable since the minimizer of 0–1 risk leads to the Bayes optimal classifier. However, due to the nonconvexity of 0–1 loss, this optimization problem is NP-hard. Therefore, many convex surrogate loss functions have been adopted. Previous works have shown that if a Bayes-risk consistent loss function is used as a surrogate, the minimizer of the empirical surrogate risk can achieve the Bayes optimal classifier as the sample size tends to infinity. Nevertheless, the comparison of convergence rates of minimizers of different empirical surrogate risks to the Bayes optimal classifier has rarely been studied. Which characterization of the surrogate loss determines its convergence rate to the Bayes optimal classifier? Can we modify the loss function to achieve a faster convergence rate? In this article, we study the convergence rates of empirical surrogate minimizers to the Bayes optimal classifier. Specifically, we introduce the notions of consistency intensity and conductivity to characterize a surrogate loss function and exploit this notion to obtain the rate of convergence from an empirical surrogate risk minimizer to the Bayes optimal classifier, enabling fair comparisons of the excess risks of different surrogate risk minimizers. The main result of this article has practical implications including: 1) showing that hinge loss (SVM) is superior to logistic loss (Logistic regression) and exponential loss (Adaboost) in the sense that its empirical minimizer converges faster to the Bayes optimal classifier and 2) guiding the design of new loss functions to speed up the convergence rate to the Bayes optimal classifier with a data-dependent loss correction method inspired by our theorems.
Scale-Aware Fast R-CNN for Pedestrian Detection

In this paper, we consider the problem of pedestrian detection in natural scenes. Intuitively, instances of pedestrians with different spatial scales may exhibit dramatically different features. Thus, large variance in instance scales, which results in undesirable large intracategory variance in features, may severely hurt the performance of modern object instance detection methods. We argue that this issue can be substantially alleviated by the divide-and-conquer philosophy. Taking pedestrian detection as an example, we illustrate how we can leverage this philosophy to develop a Scale-Aware Fast R-CNN (SAF R-CNN) framework. The model introduces multiple built-in subnetworks which detect pedestrians with scales from disjoint ranges. Outputs from all of the subnetworks are then adaptively combined to generate the final detection results that are shown to be robust to large variance in instance scales, via a gate function defined over the sizes of object proposals. Extensive evaluations on several challenging pedestrian detection datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SAF R-CNN. Particularly, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Caltech [P. Dollar, C. Wojek, B. Schiele, and P. Perona, “Pedestrian detection: An evaluation of the state of the art,” IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. , vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 743–761, Apr. 2012], and obtains competitive results on INRIA [N. Dalal and B. Triggs, “Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. , 2005, pp. 886–893], ETH [A. Ess, B. Leibe, and L. V. Gool, “Depth and appearance for mobile scene analysis,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. , 2007, pp. 1–8], and KITTI [A. Geiger, P. Lenz, and R. Urtasun, “Are we ready for autonomous driving? The KITTI vision benchmark suite,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. , 2012, pp. 3354–3361].
Identify Online Store Review Spammers via Social Review Graph

Online shopping reviews provide valuable information for customers to compare the quality of products, store services, and many other aspects of future purchases. However, spammers are joining this community trying to mislead consumers by writing fake or unfair reviews to confuse the consumers. Previous attempts have used reviewers’ behaviors such as text similarity and rating patterns, to detect spammers. These studies are able to identify certain types of spammers, for instance, those who post many similar reviews about one target. However, in reality, there are other kinds of spammers who can manipulate their behaviors to act just like normal reviewers, and thus cannot be detected by the available techniques. In this article, we propose a novel concept of review graph to capture the relationships among all reviewers, reviews and stores that the reviewers have reviewed as a heterogeneous graph. We explore how interactions between nodes in this graph could reveal the cause of spam and propose an iterative computation model to identify suspicious reviewers. In the review graph, we have three kinds of nodes, namely, reviewer, review, and store. We capture their relationships by introducing three fundamental concepts, the trustiness of reviewers, the honesty of reviews, and the reliability of stores, and identifying their interrelationships: a reviewer is more trustworthy if the person has written more honesty reviews; a store is more reliable if it has more positive reviews from trustworthy reviewers; and a review is more honest if many other honest reviews support it. This is the first time such intricate relationships have been identified for spam detection and captured in a graph model. We further develop an effective computation method based on the proposed graph model. Different from any existing approaches, we do not use an review text information. Our model is thus complementary to existing approaches and able to find more difficult and subtle spamming activities, which are agreed upon by human judges after they evaluate our results.
Valuing guaranteed minimum death benefits in variable annuities and the option to lapse ∗

Many variable annuities provide money-back guarantees and market guarantees on invested principal. Embedded in some of these guarantees are stochastic maturity put options with adjustable strike prices. These variable annuities can be surrendered or lapsed at any time. The lapse option when exercised rationally represents an American style sell-back option that is exercised by the policyholder when the embedded put option is out-of-the-money. The death benefits we consider are only exercised involuntary, that is, upon the death of the policyholder. Critical to the valuation analysis is that the embedded put options have stochastic maturity and that the policyholder can exercise the lapse, or early-exercise, option feature to increase the value of the contract and thereby exposing the insurance company to loss of fees. We analyze specific variable annuity products by focusing on the lapse option when exercised either rationally or irrationally, taking into account the mortality risk and surrender charges.
The Role of Investment in Innovation on Asset Ownership in IT Outsourcing

We develop an economic model that relaxes assumptions in Property Rights Theory to allow for investment in innovation that can benefit both client and vendor in an IT outsourcing relationship. Our model offers an explanation for the empirically observed heterogeneity in asset ownership structure. We find that optimal ownership structure can vary due to the different incentives of the client and vendor and differences in the available set of investment opportunities. We show that scenarios exist where the client and vendor agree on the ownership structure and others where they disagree. When investment in innovation enables new services and features then the client should retain ownership of the assets and when it leads to cost savings then the vendor should own the assets. The client and vendor disagree on the asset ownership structure when the investment opportunities yield similar levels of benefits to both vendor and client. In this case neither party wants to own the assets. When there are multiple investment opportunities, both client and vendor prefer to own the assets. We find that allowing renegotiation leads to different ownership preferences. In the absence of renegotiation, the client and vendor agree on the ownership structure in most cases, however when renegotiation is allowed, they always disagree on the ownership structure. We find that allowing renegotiation leads to greater investment in innovation but also causes more gaming between the parties with ex post surplus extraction and more free-riding.
Book Review: Setting Global Standards: Guidelines for Creating Codes of Conduct in Multinational Corporations

Preface. PART ONE: THE ROLE OF MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF INCREASING GLOBALIZATION AND FREE TRADE. Chapter 1. The Blessings and Perils of Globalization: A Tale of Two Peoples. Chapter 2. Sweatshops and Human Rights Abuses: Evidence from the Field. PART TWO: MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS' RESPONSES TO CHANGE. Chapter 3. Multinational Corporations' Responses to Public Criticism: Failure of Communications Strategies. Chapter 4. Corporate Codes of Conduct: Parameters and Analysis. Chapter 5. Proactive Corporate Responses: Voluntary Codes of Conduct. PART THREE. GROUP-BASED APPROACHES. Chapter 6. The Sullivan Principles in South Africa: A Regionwide Approach to Codes of Conduct. Chapter 7. The United Nations Global Compact: Corporate Leadership in the World Economy. Chapter 8. The Fair Labor Association: Problems with an Industry-Based Approach to Codes of Conduct. PART FOUR: CASE STUDIES. Chapter 9. Nike, Inc.: Missed Opportunities to Effective Code Compliance. Chapter 10. The Walt Disney Company: A Progressive Approach to Monitoring Compliance. PART FIVE: NEW APPROACHES TO VIABLE CODES OF CONDUCT. Chapter 11. Guidelines for Creating Multinational Codes of Business Conduct. Chapter 12. Independent Monitoring Systems: Transparency in Code Implementation, Compliance, and Verification. Chapter 13. Mattel, Inc.: Global Manufacturing Principles-A Model Approach to Code Implementation and Independent Monitoring. PART SIX: LESSONS LEARNED AND UNLEARNED-GUIDELINES FOR THE FUTURE. Chapter 14. Corporate Social Accountability and International Codes of Conduct: An Assessment. Bibliography. Index.
Amplitude of the actomyosin power stroke depends strongly on the isoform of the myosin essential light chain

Significance Myosin is an enzyme that uses energy from ATP to exert force on another protein, actin, resulting in muscle contraction. Force is generated in the power stroke, when the actin–myosin complex transitions from a weak-binding structure (ATP bound to myosin) to a strong-binding structure (ADP). We detected the amplitude of the power stroke directly by measuring fluorescence resonance energy transfer from actin to myosin, with high time resolution following excitation with a pulsed laser. We found that the amplitude of the power stroke is strongly dependent on the form of the essential light chain that is bound to myosin. This provides a structural explanation for previous functional observations, with implications for muscle pathophysiology and therapeutic design. We have used time-resolved fluorescence resonance energy transfer (TR-FRET) to determine the role of myosin essential light chains (ELCs) in structural transitions within the actomyosin complex. Skeletal muscle myosins have two ELC isoforms, A1 and A2, which differ by an additional 40–45 residues at the N terminus of A1, and subfragment 1 (S1) containing A1 (S1A1) has higher catalytic efficiency and higher affinity for actin than S1A2. ELC’s location at the junction between the catalytic and light-chain domains gives it the potential to play a central role in the force-generating power stroke. Therefore, we measured site-directed TR-FRET between a donor on actin and an acceptor near the C terminus of ELC, detecting directly the rotation of the light-chain domain (lever arm) relative to actin (power stroke), induced by the interaction of ATP-bound myosin with actin. TR-FRET resolved the weakly bound (W) and strongly bound (S) states of actomyosin during the W-to-S transition (power stroke). We found that the W states are essentially the same for the two isoenzymes, but the S states are quite different, indicating a much larger movement of S1A1. FRET from actin to a probe on the N-terminal extension of A1 showed close proximity to actin. We conclude that the N-terminal extension of A1-ELC modulates the W-to-S structural transition of acto-S1, so that the light-chain domain undergoes a much larger power stroke in S1A1 than in S1A2. These results have profound implications for understanding the contractile function of actomyosin, as needed in therapeutic design for muscle disorders.
Gender and space in post-colonial French and Algerian cinema

This thesis explores representations of narrative space and gender in 1960s French and Algerian cinema; an era marked, in both countries, by the spectre of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Until now, the two forms of cinema which arose out of this war have rarely been analysed in relation to each other. Doing so provides a crucial insight into how the dynamics of decolonization led to analogous patterns of cinematic representationparticularly in relation to patterns of gender and space. This thesis will be split into four chapters. In the first chapter, I provide a general overview of my methodological approach, the specific theorists that have informed my research, and a socio-cultural overview of the period focusing in particular on issues of space and gender. The second chapter will then shift to textual analysis, illustrating how a number of French films of the period, including Adieu Philippine (Rozier 1962), La Belle vie (Enrico 1963), Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais 1963), and Le Boucher (Chabrol 1969), critique a post-colonial modernization drive predicated upon neo-colonial processes of spatial marginalization in representing the domestic sphere as ‘contaminated’ by the figure of a traumatised appele. In this respect, patterns of narrative space will shown to be intrinsically intertwined with the politics of anti-colonial resistance. In the second half of this chapter, I will show how this desire to critique colonialism coexists with a gendered conservatism which elides or in some cases completely ignores the feminist agenda pursued by women (and men) during the 1960s. The third chapter will then discuss how the attainment of national sovereignty impacted upon Algerian cinema of the period. Within this framework, I will firstly show how La Bataille d’Alger (Pontecorvo 1966), Le Vent des Aures (Lakhdar-Hamina 1966) and L’Opium et le bâton (Rachedi 1969) use representations of spatial transgression (from the private to the public realm) as a signifier for anti-colonial resistance. Neverthelessas with the French films of the eraI will then draw attention to the ways in which these films draw from a constellation of retrograde gendered ideals in their depiction of the Revolution. The fourth chapter will then explore the few films which do not fit into this taxonomy, instead using patterns of narrative space in order to critique patriarchal ideology. In this section, I will explore films including Cleo de 5 a 7 (Varda 1962),
Gardnerella vaginalis and anaerobic bacteria in the etiology of bacterial (nonspecific) vaginosis.

G. vaginalis was originally described as the etiologic agent of bacterial vaginosis (nonspecific vaginitis) because it was recovered only from women with signs and symptoms of "bacterial vaginitis" and not from normal controls. Recent data have shown that G. vaginalis is present in normal women but at concentrations lower than the limit of sensitivity of the media formerly used. Detection of low concentrations of G. vaginalis in normal controls has been made possible by development of a selective and differential medium (HBT). Anaerobically performed studies of the vaginal flora have indicated that while lactobacilli predominate in the normal vagina with or without G. vaginalis, anaerobic bacteria including Bacteroides spp. , Peptococcus spp. , Eubacterium spp. and curved rods as well as G. vaginalis predominate in bacterial vaginosis. Anaerobic bacteria and G. vaginalis are decreased after appropriate therapy. After treatment with metronidazole, lactobacilli again predominate. Lactobacilli are less prevalent after treatment with ampicillin or amoxicillin. These data suggest that as in infections at other mucous membrane sites, bacterial vaginosis is a mixed infection involving a finite number of facultative and anaerobic species. The data also suggest an important role for facultative lactobacilli.
A process‐based operational framework for sustainability reporting in SMEs

Purpose – The paper aims to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in overcoming the difficulties they encounter in initiating sustainability reporting, proposing a “general” process for identifying a standard set of key sustainability indicators, that is specifically tailored on SMEs characteristics.Design/methodology/approach – The paper moves from the analysis of the existing international frameworks for sustainability reporting, and it discusses the main motivations whereby they are hardly applicable for SMEs. Then, it proposes a theoretical approach, which derives the set of key sustainability indicators starting from GRI, but explicitly considering SMEs specificities.Findings – The paper presents and discusses the application of the proposed approach to a network of Italian steel SMEs.Practical implications – The approach proposed can support SMEs to face the problems they face in implementing sustainability reporting (resource and capability constraints and lack of operative instruments to sup.
Toolkit for the analysis of current account imbalances

The fluctuating economies and differing experiences of countries before and after the economic crisis of 2008 indicate a complex network of possible influences. Persistent current account deficits and exchange rate misalignments frequently presage disruptive economic trends. The result can be external crises, exchange rate collapses, vulnerability to sudden stops, current account reversals, and economic slowdowns. When a growing number of countries run external deficits, investigation of the causes is warranted. It is crucial to understand the drivers of persistent current account deficits; the relative importance of cyclical and structural factors; conditions that imply external sustainability; sources of sustainable financing for the deficit; and steps governments can take to narrow the imbalance. This toolkit presents a framework that can be used to assess a country's external situation through the lens of the current and financial accounts. The framework is divided into three components: current account outcome analysis, current account diagnostics, and economic policy.