bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Multi-Omic Analyses Provide Links between Low-Dose Antibiotic Treatment and Induction of Secondary Metabolism in Burkholderia thailandensis
Authors: Li Anran , Mao Dainan , Yoshimura Aya , Rosen Paul C. , Martin W. Lance , Gallant Étienne , Wühr Martin , Seyedsayamdost Mohammad R.
Published: February 2020

The discovery of antibiotics ranks among the most significant accomplishments of the last century. Although the targets of nearly all clinical antibiotics are known, our understanding regarding their natural functions and the effects of subinhibitory concentrations is in its infancy. Stimulatory rather than inhibitory functions have been attributed to low-dose antibiotics. Among these, we previously found that antibiotics activate silent biosynthetic genes and thereby enhance the metabolic output of bacteria. The regulatory circuits underlying this phenomenon are unknown. We take a first step toward elucidating these circuits and show that low doses of trimethoprim (Tmp) have cell-wide effects on the saprophyte
Burkholderia thailandensis
. Most importantly, inhibition of one-carbon metabolic processes by Tmp leads to an accumulation of homoserine, which induces the production of an otherwise silent cytotoxin via a LuxR-type transcriptional regulator. These results provide a starting point for uncovering the molecular basis of the hormetic effects of antibiotics.
Improving Characterization of Understudied Human Microbiomes Using Targeted Phylogenetics
Authors: Rosa Bruce A. , Mihindukulasuriya Kathie , Hallsworth-Pepin Kymberlie , Wollam Aye , Martin John , Snowden Caroline , Dunne William Michael , Weinstock George M. , Burnham Carey-Ann D. , Mitreva Makedonka
Published: February 2020

The human microbiome plays a critically important role in health and disease, but current understanding of the mechanisms underlying the interactions between the varying microbiome and the different host environments is lacking. Having access to a database of fully sequenced bacterial genomes provides invaluable insights into microbial functions, but currently sequenced genomes for the human microbiome have largely come from a limited number of body sites (primarily feces), while other sites such as the skin, respiratory tract, and urinary tract are underrepresented, resulting in as little as 13% of bacterium-derived reads mapping to known bacterial genomes. Here, we sequenced and assembled 665 new bacterial genomes, prioritized from a larger database to select underrepresented body sites and bacterial taxa in the existing databases. As a result, we substantially improve mapping rates for samples from the Human Microbiome Project and provide an important contribution to human bacterial genomic databases for future studies.
Actin Is Required for Cellular Development and Virulence of
Botrytis cinerea
via the Mediation of Secretory Proteins
Authors: Li Hua , Zhang Zhanquan , Qin Guozheng , He Chang , Li Boqiang , Tian Shiping
Published: February 2020

The cytoskeleton is an important network that exists in cells of all domains of life. In eukaryotic cells, actin is a vital component of the cytoskeleton. Here, we report that BcactA, an actin protein in
B. cinerea
, can affect the growth, sporulation, and virulence of
B. cinerea
. Furthermore, iTRAQ-based proteomic analysis showed that BcactA affects the abundance of 40 extracellular proteins, including 11 down-accumulated CWDEs. Among them, two CWDEs, cellobiohydrolase (BcCBH) and β-endoglucanase (BcEG), contributed to the virulence of
B. cinerea
, indicating that
bcactA
plays a crucial role in regulating extracellular virulence factors. These findings unveil previously unknown functions of BcactA in mediating growth, sporulation, and virulence of
B. cinerea
.
Reducing maternal mortality in China in the era of the two-child policy
Authors: Liu Jue , Song Li , Qiu Jie , Jing Wenzhan , Wang Liang , Dai Yue , Qin Geng , Liu Min
Published: February 2020

Reducing maternal mortality ratio (MMR) is of great concern worldwide. After the implementation of the two-child policy in 2013, the number of live births and the proportion of high-risk pregnancies both increased, and these bring new challenges to the reduction of MMR. China implemented a package of nationwide strategies in April 2016, the Five Strategies for Maternal and Newborn Safety (FSMNS). The FSMNS consists of five components: (1) pregnancy risk screening and assessment strategy, (2) case-by-case management strategy for high-risk pregnancies, (3) referral and treatment strategy for critically ill pregnant women and newborns, (4) reporting strategy for maternal deaths (and 5) accountability strategy. To better implement the FSMNS, China formulated a unified pregnancy risk screening form. After risk assessment and classification, medical records of all the pregnant women are labelled with green (low risk), yellow (moderate risk), orange (high risk), red (highest risk) or purple (infectious disease) for tailored management. By the implementation of FSMNS, China has already kept the MMR stable and cause it to enter a controlled decline. MMR in China has declined by 21.1%, from 23.2 per 100 000 live births in 2013 to 18.3 per 100 000 live births in 2018. The country’s challenges and experience in reducing the MMR could provide useful lessons for other countries.
Addressing power imbalances in global health: Pre-Publication Support Services (PREPSS) for authors in low-income and middle-income countries
Authors: Busse Clara , August Ella
Published: February 2020

The contextual knowledge and local expertise that researchers from low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) contribute to studies in these settings enrich the research process and subsequent publications. However, health researchers from LMICs are under-represented in the scientific literature. Distally, power imbalances between LMICs and high-income countries, which provide funding and set priorities for research in LMICs, create structural inequities that inhibit these authors from publishing. More proximally, researchers from LMICs often lack formal training in research project management and in publishing peer-reviewed research. Though academic journals may value research from LMICs conducted by local researchers, they have limited time and financial resources to support writing, causing them to reject manuscripts with promising results if they lack development. Pre-Publication Support Service (PREPSS) is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation that works to meet this need. PREPSS provides onsite training, peer-review and copy editing services to researchers in LMICs who wish to publish their health research in peer-reviewed journals. Authors are not charged for these services. After receiving PREPSS services, authors submit their manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal. The PREPSS model is one of many interventions necessary to restructure global health research to better support health researchers in LMICs and reduce current power imbalances.
Sex differences in response to exercise heat stress in the context of the military environment
Authors: Corbett Jo , Wright J , Tipton M J
Published: February 2020

Women can now serve in ground close combat (GCC) roles, where they may be required to operate alongside men in hot environments. However, relative to the average male soldier, female soldiers are less aerobically fit, with a smaller surface area (AD), lower mass (m) with higher body fat and a largerAD/m ratio. This increases cardiovascular strain, reduces heat exchange with the environment and causes a greater body temperature increase for a given heat storage, although a largeAD/m ratio can be advantageous. Physical employment standards for GCC roles might lessen the magnitude of fitness and anthropometric differences, yet even when studies control for these factors, women sweat less than men at high work rates. Therefore, the average female soldier in a GCC role is likely to be at a degree of disadvantage in many hot environments and particularly during intense physical activity in hot-arid conditions, although heat acclimation may mitigate some of this effect. Any thermoregulatory disadvantage may be exacerbated during the mid-luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, although the data are equivocal. Likewise, sex differences in behavioural thermoregulation and cognition in the heat are not well understood. Interestingly, there is often lower reported heat illness incidence in women, although the extent to which this is influenced by behavioural factors or historic differences in role allocation is unclear. Indeed, much of the extant literature lacks ecological validity and more work is required to fully understand sex differences to exercise heat stress in a GCC context.
Determining the optimum anatomical coverage of side plates for the VIRTUS body armour and load carriage system
Authors: Breeze Johno , Fryer R N , Lewis E
Published: February 2020

Introduction

Side plates are worn by UK Armed Forces as part of the VIRTUS body armour and load carriage systems to protect the thorax and abdomen from high-velocity threats. The VIRTUS project has provided the impetus to objectively demonstrate the anatomical coverage provided by side plates.

Method

CT scans of 120 male UK Armed Forces personnel were analysed to ascertain the vertical distance between the anterior axillary fold and iliac crest, and horizontal distance between anterior and posterior borders of the liver, delineating the boundaries of essential medical coverage from the side aspects. The percentage of shot-lines intersected by the existing Enhanced Combat Body Armour (ECBA) plates as well as an optimised plate based on the maximum potential dimensions of essential coverage was determined in the Coverage of Armour Tool.

Results

ECBA plates were 101 mm shorter and 4 mm narrower than a plate with dimensions providing essential medical coverage for the 50th percentile subject (157×315 mm). Coverage increased by 35% when using two ECBA plates as side coverage in addition to using the front and rear OSPREY plates in the VIRTUS vest. Two side plates with dimensions providing essential medical coverage for the 50th percentile increased anatomical coverage by a further 16%.

Conclusions

This analysis has provided strong evidence that ECBA plates are already optimised for side protection, despite not being originally designed for this purpose. They are correctly positioned within the VIRTUS soft body armour vest and the width of the ECBA plate is only 3% less than what would be optimum size for the 50th percentile. Although the height of the plate could be increased to further enhance the anatomical coverage, it is unlikely that this would be acceptable in terms of the human factors, equipment integration or additional mass.
Paediatrics on exercise ASKARI SERPENT: reflections and recommendations for pre-deployment training
Authors: Wilkins Daniel
Published: February 2020

The British Army has a long history of training in Kenya, including delivering health outreach to the local population on Exercise ASKARI SERPENT. This article presents data from two iterations of Exercise ASKARI SERPENT in which children accounted for almost 40% of all patients treated. Short case vignettes highlight the technical and non-technical challenges faced when treating children, before recommendations are made for pre-deployment training for Exercise ASKARI SERPENT and similar future deployments which may see military clinicians delivering treatment to the local population.
What constitutes a ‘successful’ recovery? Patient perceptions of the recovery process after a traumatic injury
Authors: Rosenberg Graeme , Zion Sean R , Shearer Emily , Bereknyei Merrell Sylvia , Abadilla Natasha , Spain David A , Crum Alia J , Weiser Thomas G
Published: February 2020

Background

As the number of patients surviving traumatic injuries has grown, understanding the factors that shape the recovery process has become increasingly important. However, the psychosocial factors affecting recovery from trauma have received limited attention. We conducted an exploratory qualitative study to better understand how patients view recovery after traumatic injury.

Methods

This qualitative, descriptive study was conducted at a Level One university trauma center. Participants 1–3 years postinjury were purposefully sampled to include common blunt-force mechanisms of injuries and a range of ages, socioeconomic backgrounds and injury severities. Semi-structured interviews explored participants’ perceptions of self and the recovery process after traumatic injury. Interviews were transcribed verbatim; the data were inductively coded and thematically analyzed.

Results

We conducted 15 interviews, 13 of which were with male participants (87%); average hospital length of stay was 8.9 days and mean injury severity score was 18.3. An essential aspect of the patient experience centered around the recovery of both the body and the ‘self’, a composite of one’s roles, values, identities and beliefs. The process of regaining a sound sense of self was essential to achieving favorable subjective outcomes. Participants expressed varying levels of engagement in their recovery process, with those on the high end of the engagement spectrum tending to speak more positively about their outcomes. Participants described their own subjective interpretations of their recovery as most important, which was primarily influenced by their engagement in the recovery process and ability to recover their sense of self.

Discussion

Patients who are able to maintain or regain a cohesive sense of self after injury and who are highly engaged in the recovery process have more positive assessments of their outcomes. Our findings offer a novel framework for healthcare providers and researchers to use as they approach the issue of recovery after injury with patients.

Level of evidence

III—descriptive, exploratory study.
Facile caffeine electrochemical detection via electrodeposited Ag nanoparticles with modifier polymers on carbon paste sensor at aqueous and micellar media
Authors: Shehata M. , Azab S.M. , Fekry A.M.
Published: February 2020

The analysis and detection of caffeine (Caf) is very useful due to its widespread usage in several daily consumed beverages, food products, and pharmacological preparations with various physiological effects. The preparation of a newly electrodeposited Ag nanoparticles – cellulose acetate phthalate (CAP) – chitosan (Chit) modified carbon paste (ACCMCP) sensor for sensitive determination of Caf in 0.01 mol L−1H3PO4solution (pH 1.0–5.0) both in aqueous and micellar media (0.5 mmol L−1SDS) was achieved. The interaction of Caf was monitored using electrochemical techniques such as cyclic voltammetry, differential pulse voltammetry, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and chronoamperometry, and surface characterization was carried out using X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, and energy dispersive X-ray techniques. The linear detection range of Caf was between 4 and 500 μmol L−1(r2= 0.955) and the limit of detection obtained from the calibration plot was 0.252 μmol L−1. The sensor was applicable for detecting Caf in numerous real samples with recoveries from 98.03% to 101.60% without interference of any accompanying species, which ensures high method selectivity.
Interactions among defoliation level, species, and soil richness determine foliage production during and after simulated spruce budworm attack
Authors: Wu Yuanyuan , MacLean David A. , Hennigar Chris , Taylor Anthony R.
Published: February 2020

Defoliation level and site type are thought to influence tree response during spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana (Clemens)) outbreaks. We determined the effects of four manual defoliation treatments (0%, 50%, 100%, and 100% + bud removal of current foliage) for 3 years on foliage production of balsam fir (Abies balsamea (L.) Mill.), black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) Britton, Sterns & Poggenb.), and white spruce (Picea glauca (Moench) Voss) trees on four site-quality classes. After 3 years of defoliation and 2 years of recovery, foliage biomass was reduced by 34%–98%. During defoliation, the number of shoots generally increased and shoot length of spruce generally decreased, especially on rich sites. During recovery, the number of shoots increased substantially, shoot length decreased, and bud destruction reduced the number of shoots by about 50% compared with that of trees that received the 100% defoliation treatment. Defoliation did not substantially affect needle length. Trees on rich sites had two- to fourfold greater foliage production than trees on poor sites. Effects of site and defoliation differed among species, but site quality, especially nutrition, played an important role in production of shoots and needles and the tree’s ability to withstand defoliation. Black spruce had more limited ability to recover foliage biomass, only producing more shoots, whereas balsam fir and white spruce had stronger ability to recover needle and shoot length, respectively.
High-resolution laser resonance ionization spectroscopy of $$^{143-147}$$Pm
Authors: Studer Dominik , Ulrich Jiri , Braccini Saverio , Carzaniga Tommaso Stefano , Dressler Rugard , Eberhardt Klaus , Heinke Reinhard , Köster Ulli , Raeder Sebastian , Wendt Klaus
Published: February 2020

We present the results of high-resolution laser spectroscopy of the long-lived radioactive isotopes $$^{143-147}$$143-147Pm. The hyperfine structures and isotope shifts in two different atomic ground-state transitions at 452 nm and 468 nm were probed by in-source laser spectroscopy at the RISIKO mass separator in Mainz, using the PI-LIST ion source. From the hyperfine coupling constants the nuclear magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole moments for $$^{143-147}$$143-147Pm were derived, and the measured isotope shifts allowed the extraction of changes in nuclear mean square charge radii.
Sensitivity on anomalous neutral triple gauge couplings via ZZ production at FCC-hh
Authors: Yilmaz A. , Senol A. , Denizli H. , Turk Cakir I. , Cakir O.
Published: February 2020

We study the sensitivity of anomalous neutral triple gauge couplings (aNTGC) via $$pp \rightarrow ZZ$$pp→ZZ production in the 4$$\ell $$ℓ channel at 100 TeV center of mass energy of future circular hadron collider, . The analysis including the realistic detector effects is performed in the mode where both Z bosons decay into same-flavor, oppositely charged lepton pairs. The sensitivities to the charge–parity (CP)-conserving couplings $$C_{{\tilde{B}}W} / \Lambda ^{4}$$CB~W/Λ4 and CP-violating couplings $$C_{WW} / \Lambda ^{4}$$CWW/Λ4, $$C_{BW} / \Lambda ^{4}$$CBW/Λ4 and $$C_{BB} / \Lambda ^{4}$$CBB/Λ4 obtained at 95% Confidence Level using the invariant mass distribution of the 4$$\ell $$ℓ system reconstructing the leading and sub-leading Z boson candidates are $$[-\,0.09, \,\, +\,0.09]$$[-0.09,+0.09], $$[-\,0.21, \,\, +\,0.21]$$[-0.21,+0.21], $$[-\,0.26, \,\, +\,0.26]$$[-0.26,+0.26], and $$[-\,0.10, \,\, +\,0.10]$$[-0.10,+0.10] in units of $$\hbox {TeV}^{-4}$$TeV-4, respectively.
Certain algebraic invariants of edge ideals of join of graphs
Authors: Kumar Arvind , Kumar Rajiv , Sarkar Rajib
Published: February 2020

Let [Formula: see text] be a simple graph and [Formula: see text] be its edge ideal. In this paper, we study the Castelnuovo–Mumford regularity of symbolic powers of edge ideals of join of graphs. As a consequence, we prove Minh’s conjecture for wheel graphs, complete multipartite graphs, and a subclass of co-chordal graphs. We obtain a class of graphs whose edge ideals have regularity three. By constructing graphs, we prove that the multiplicity of edge ideals of graphs is independent from the depth, dimension, regularity, and degree of [Formula: see text]-polynomial. Also, we demonstrate that the depth of edge ideals of graphs is independent from the regularity and degree of [Formula: see text]-polynomial by constructing graphs.
A theoretical study on cyclometalated iridium (III) complexes by using a density functional theory
Authors: Erkan Sultan , Karakaş Duran
Published: February 2020

Cyclometalated iridium (III) complexes (Ir1–Ir4) are calculated in detail with computational chemistry methods. The calculated structural parameters of Ir3 are compared with experimental values and a good fit is obtained. IR spectra are calculated at B3LYP/LANL2DZ/6-31G(d) level in the gases phase. Calculated1H-NMR chemical shift values of the mentioned complexes are compared with the experimental data and all chemical shifts are assigned to the respective atoms. The quantum chemical parameters such as absolute hardness ([Formula: see text]), absolute softness ([Formula: see text]) electronegativity ([Formula: see text]), chemical potential ([Formula: see text]) and electronic charges ([Formula: see text]) are calculated and are associated with the experimental anti-cancer properties of the related complexes. Nonlinear optic properties of the Ir1–Ir4 were investigated with the average linear polarizability ([Formula: see text]), the anisotropy of the polarizability ([Formula: see text]), first hyperpolarizability ([Formula: see text]) values. Hole transfer ([Formula: see text]), electron transfer integrals ([Formula: see text]), hole reorganization energies ([Formula: see text]) and electron reorganization energies ([Formula: see text]) are examined. In addition, molecular docking study was performed. It was found that the molecular docking results are similar to the experimental anti-cancer trend.
Influence of Li2CO3 addition on electrical and magnetic properties of Ni0.6Mg0.4Fe2O4
Authors: Hassan M. R. , Islam M. T. , Khan M. N. I.
Published: February 2020

In this research, influence of adding Li2CO3 (at 0%, 2%, 4%, 6%) on electrical and magnetic properties of [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]Fe2O4 (with 60% Ni and 40% Mg) ferrite has been studied. The samples are prepared by solid state reaction method and sintered at 1300∘C for 6[Formula: see text]h. X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns show the samples belong to single-phase cubic structure without any impurity phase. The magnetic properties (saturation magnetization and coercivity) of the samples have been investigated by VSM and found that the higher concentration of Li2CO3 reduces the hysteresis loss. DC resistivity increases with Li2CO3 contents whereas it decreases initially and then becomes constant at lower value with temperature which indicates that the studied samples are semiconductor. The dielectric dispersion occurs at a low-frequency regime and the loss peaks are formed in a higher frequency regime, which are due to the presence of resonance between applied frequency and hopping frequency of charge carriers. Notably, the loss peaks are shifted to the lower frequency with Li2CO3 additions.
Isarn Dharma Word Segmentation Using a Statistical Approach with Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Somsap Sittichai , Seresangtakul Pusadee
Published: February 2020

In this study, we developed an Isarn Dharma word segmentation system. We mainly focused on solving the word ambiguity and unknown word problems in unsegmented Isarn Dharma text. Ambiguous Isarn Dharma words occur frequently in word construction due to the writing style without tone markers. Thus, words can be interpreted as having different tones and meanings in the same writing text. To overcome these problems, we developed an Isarn Dharma character cluster–(IDCC) based statistical model and affixation and integrated it with the named entity recognition method (IDCC-C-based statistical model and affixation with named entity recognition (NER)). This method integrates the IDCC-based and character-based statistical models to distinguish the word boundaries. The IDCC-based statistical model utilizes the IDCC feature to disambiguate any ambiguous words. The unknown words are handled using the character-based statistical model, based on the character features. In addition, linguistic knowledge is employed to detect the boundaries of a new word based on the construction morphology and NER. In evaluations, we compared the proposed method with various word segmentation methods. The experimental results showed that the proposed method performed slightly better than the other methods when the corpus size increased. Using the test set, the proposed method obtained the best F-measure of 92.19, an F-measure that was better than the IDCC longest matching grouping at 2.85.
Punjabi to ISO 15919 and Roman Transliteration with Phonetic Rectification
Authors: Abbas Muhammad Raihan , Asif Dr. Khadim Hussain
Published: February 2020

Transliteration removes the script barriers. Unfortunately, Punjabi is written in four different scripts, i.e., Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, Devnagri, and Latin. The Latin script is understandable for nearly all factions of the Punjabi community. The objective of our work is to transliterate the Punjabi Gurmukhi script into Latin script. There has been considerable progress in Punjabi to Latin transliteration, but the accuracy of present-day systems is less than 50% (Google Translator has approximately 45% accuracy). We do not have the facility of a rich parallel corpus for Punjabi, so we cannot use the corpus-based techniques of machine learning that are in vogue these days. The existing systems of transliteration follow grapheme-based approach. The grapheme-based transliteration is unable to handle many scenarios such as tones, inherent schwa, glottal stops, nasalization, and gemination. In this article, the grapheme-based transliteration has been augmented with phonetic rectification where the Punjabi script is rectified phonetically before applying character-to-character mapping. Handling the inherent short vowel schwa was the major challenge in phonetic rectification. Instead of following the fixed syllabic pattern, we devised a generic finite state transducer to insert schwa. The accuracy of our transliteration system is approximately 96.82%.
Subword Attentive Model for Arabic Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Beseiso Majdi , Elmousalami Haytham
Published: February 2020

Social media data is unstructured data where these big data are exponentially increasing day to day in many different disciplines. Analysis and understanding the semantics of these data are a big challenge due to its variety and huge volume. To address this gap, unstructured Arabic texts have been studied in this work owing to their abundant appearance in social media Web sites. This work addresses the difficulty of handling unstructured social media texts, particularly when the data at hand is very limited. This intelligent data augmentation technique that handles the problem of less availability of data are used. This article has proposed a novel architecture for hand Arabic words classification and understands based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks. Moreover, the CNN technique is the most powerful for the analysis of Arabic tweets and social network analysis. The main technique used in this work is character-level CNN and a recurrent neural network stacked on top of one another as the classification architecture. These two techniques give 95% accuracy in the Arabic texts dataset.
Is Rank Aggregation Effective in Recommender Systems? An Experimental Analysis
Authors: Oliveira Samuel E. L. , Diniz Victor , Lacerda Anisio , Merschmanm Luiz , Pappa Gisele L.
Published: February 2020

Recommender Systems are tools designed to help users find relevant information from the myriad of content available online. They work by actively suggesting items that are relevant to users according to their historical preferences or observed actions. Among recommender systems, top-
N
recommenders work by suggesting a ranking of
N
items that can be of interest to a user. Although a significant number of top-
N
recommenders have been proposed in the literature, they often disagree in their returned rankings, offering an opportunity for improving the final recommendation ranking by aggregating the outputs of different algorithms.

Rank aggregation was successfully used in a significant number of areas, but only a few rank aggregation methods have been proposed in the recommender systems literature. Furthermore, there is a lack of studies regarding rankings’ characteristics and their possible impacts on the improvements achieved through rank aggregation. This work presents an extensive two-phase experimental analysis of rank aggregation in recommender systems. In the first phase, we investigate the characteristics of rankings recommended by 15 different top-
N
recommender algorithms regarding agreement and diversity. In the second phase, we look at the results of 19 rank aggregation methods and identify different scenarios where they perform best or worst according to the input rankings’ characteristics.

Our results show that supervised rank aggregation methods provide improvements in the results of the recommended rankings in six out of seven datasets. These methods provide robustness even in the presence of a big set of weak recommendation rankings. However, in cases where there was a set of non-diverse high-quality input rankings, supervised and unsupervised algorithms produced similar results. In these cases, we can avoid the cost of the former in favor of the latter.
Flexible Multi-modal Hashing for Scalable Multimedia Retrieval
Authors: Zhu Lei , Lu Xu , Cheng Zhiyong , Li Jingjing , Zhang Huaxiang
Published: February 2020

Multi-modal hashing methods could support efficient multimedia retrieval by combining multi-modal features for binary hash learning at the both offline training and online query stages. However, existing multi-modal methods cannot binarize the queries, when only one or part of modalities are provided. In this article, we propose a novel
Flexible Multi-modal Hashing
(FMH) method to address this problem. FMH learns multiple modality-specific hash codes and multi-modal collaborative hash codes simultaneously within a single model. The hash codes are flexibly generated according to the newly coming queries, which provide any one or combination of modality features. Besides, the hashing learning procedure is efficiently supervised by the pair-wise semantic matrix to enhance the discriminative capability. It could successfully avoid the challenging symmetric semantic matrix factorization and
O
(
n
2
) storage cost of semantic matrix. Finally, we design a fast discrete optimization to learn hash codes directly with simple operations. Experiments validate the superiority of the proposed approach.
Discovering Underlying Plans Based on Shallow Models
Authors: Zhuo Hankz Hankui , Zha Yantian , Kambhampati Subbarao , Tian Xin
Published: February 2020

Plan recognition aims to discover target plans (i.e., sequences of actions) behind observed actions, with history plan libraries or action models in hand. Previous approaches either discover plans by maximally “matching” observed actions to plan libraries, assuming target plans are from plan libraries, or infer plans by executing action models to best explain the observed actions, assuming that complete action models are available. In real-world applications, however, target plans are often not from plan libraries, and complete action models are often not available, since building complete sets of plans and complete action models are often difficult or expensive. In this article, we view plan libraries as corpora and learn vector representations of actions using the corpora; we then discover target plans based on the vector representations. Specifically, we propose two approaches, DUP and RNNPlanner, to discover target plans based on vector representations of actions. DUP explores the EM-style (Expectation Maximization) framework to capture local contexts of actions and discover target plans by optimizing the probability of target plans, while RNNPlanner aims to leverage long-short term contexts of actions based on RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) framework to help recognize target plans. In the experiments, we empirically show that our approaches are capable of discovering underlying plans that are not from plan libraries without requiring action models provided. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches by comparing its performance to traditional plan recognition approaches in three planning domains. We also compare DUP and RNNPlanner to see their advantages and disadvantages.
Single Image Snow Removal Using Sparse Representation and Particle Swarm Optimizer
Authors: Huang Shih-Chia , Jaw Da-Wei , Chen Bo-Hao , Kuo Sy-Yen
Published: February 2020

Images are often corrupted by natural obscuration (e.g., snow, rain, and haze) during acquisition in bad weather conditions. The removal of snowflakes from only a single image is a challenging task due to situational variety and has been investigated only rarely. In this article, we propose a novel snow removal framework for a single image, which can be separated into a sparse image approximation module and an adaptive tolerance optimization module. The first proposed module takes the advantage of sparsity-based regularization to reconstruct a potential snow-free image. An auto-tuning mechanism for this framework is then proposed to seek a better reconstruction of a snow-free image via the time-varying inertia weight particle swarm optimizers in the second proposed module. Through collaboration of these two modules iteratively, the number of snowflakes in the reconstructed image is reduced as generations progress. By the experimental results, the proposed method achieves a better efficacy of snow removal than do other state-of-the-art techniques via both objective and subjective evaluations. As a result, the proposed method is able to remove snowflakes successfully from only a single image while preserving most original object structure information.
Generating Digital Painting Lighting Effects via RGB-space Geometry
Authors: Zhang Lvmin , Simo-Serra Edgar , Ji Yi , Liu Chunping
Published: February 2020

We present an algorithm to generate digital painting lighting effects from a single image. Our algorithm is based on a key observation: Artists use many overlapping strokes to paint lighting effects, i.e., pixels with dense stroke history tend to gather more illumination strokes. Based on this observation, we design an algorithm to both estimate the density of strokes in a digital painting using color geometry and then generate novel lighting effects by mimicking artists’ coarse-to-fine workflow. Coarse lighting effects are first generated using a wave transform and then retouched according to the stroke density of the original illustrations into usable lighting effects.

Our algorithm is content-aware, with generated lighting effects naturally adapting to image structures, and can be used as an interactive tool to simplify current labor-intensive workflows for generating lighting effects for digital and matte paintings. In addition, our algorithm can also produce usable lighting effects for photographs or three-dimensional rendered images. We evaluate our approach with both an in-depth qualitative and a quantitative analysis that includes a perceptual user study. Results show that our proposed approach is not only able to produce favorable lighting effects with respect to existing approaches, but also that it is able to significantly reduce the needed interaction time.
Mediated Secure Multi-Party Protocols for Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Shmueli Erez , Tassa Tamir
Published: February 2020

Recommender systems have become extremely common in recent years and are utilized in a variety of domains such as movies, music, news, products, restaurants, and so on. While a typical recommender system bases its recommendations solely on users’ preference data collected by the system itself, the quality of recommendations can significantly be improved if several recommender systems (or vendors) share their data. However, such data sharing poses significant privacy and security challenges, both to the vendors and the users. In this article, we propose secure protocols for distributed item-based Collaborative Filtering. Our protocols allow to compute both the predicted ratings of items and their predicted rankings without compromising privacy nor predictions’ accuracy. Unlike previous solutions in which the secure protocols are executed solely by the vendors, our protocols assume the existence of a mediator that performs intermediate computations on encrypted data supplied by the vendors. Such a mediated setting is advantageous over the non-mediated one since it enables each vendor to communicate solely with the mediator. This yields reduced communication costs, and it allows each vendor to issue recommendations to its clients without being dependent on the availability and willingness of the other vendors to collaborate.
Algorithms to harvest the wind
Authors: Monroe Don
Published: February 2020

Wake steering can help ever-larger turbines work together more efficiently on wind farms.
Computing and community in formal education
Authors: Lachney Michael , Yadav Aman
Published: February 2020

Culturally responsive computing repurposes computer science education by making it meaningful to not only students, but also to their families and communities.
Dilemmas of artificial intelligence
Authors: Denning Peter J. , Denning Dorothy E.
Published: February 2020

Artificial intelligence has confronted us with a raft of dilemmas that challenge us to decide what values are important in our designs.
Constant delay enumeration for conjunctive queries
Authors: Berkholz Christoph , Gerhardt Fabian , Schweikardt Nicole
Published: February 2020

This paper is the tutorial we wish we had had available when starting our own research on constant delay enumeration for conjunctive queries. It provides precise statements and detailed, self-contained proofs of the fundamental results in this area.
Verification column
Authors: Lazić Ranko
Published: February 2020

In this compact but extensive and authoritative survey, the author provides a personal overview of recent progress in the highly valuable as well as scientifically challenging area of verifying randomised distributed algorithms, including an explicit invitation for researchers to join the effort of the community!
A mathematical model of the rat kidney. II. Antidiuresis
Authors: Weinstein Alan M.
Published: February 2020

Kidney water conservation requires a hypertonic medullary interstitium, NaCl in the outer medulla and NaCl and urea in the inner medulla, plus a vascular configuration that protects against washout. In this work, a multisolute model of the rat kidney is revisited to examine its capacity to simulate antidiuresis. The first step was to streamline model computation by parallelizing its Jacobian calculation, thus allowing finer medullary spatial resolution and more extensive examination of model parameters. It is found that outer medullary NaCl is modestly increased when transporter density in ascending Henle limbs from juxtamedullary nephrons is scaled to match the greater juxtamedullary solute flow. However, higher NaCl transport produces greater CO2 generation and, by virtue of countercurrent vascular flows, establishment of high medullary Pco2. This CO2 gradient can be mitigated by assuming that a fraction of medullary transport is powered anaerobically. Reducing vascular flows or increasing vessel permeabilities does little to further increase outer medullary solute gradients. In contrast to medullary models of others, vessels in this model have solute reflection coefficients close to zero; increasing these coefficients provides little enhancement of solute profiles but does generate high interstitial pressures, which distort tubule architecture. Increasing medullary urea delivery via entering vasa recta increases inner medullary urea, although not nearly to levels found in rats. In summary, 1) medullary Na+ and urea gradients are not captured by the model and 2) the countercurrent architecture that provides antidiuresis also produces exaggerated Pco2 profiles and is an unappreciated constraint on models of medullary function.
The Response of Tissue Mast Cells to TLR3 Ligand Poly(I:C) Treatment
Authors: Witczak Piotr , Brzezińska-Błaszczyk Ewa , Agier Justyna
Published: February 2020

Mast cells (MCs) are found mainly at the anatomical sites exposed to the external environment; thus, they are localized close to blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, and a multitude of immune cells. Moreover, those cells can recognize invading pathogens through a range of surface molecules known as pathogen recognition receptors (PRRs), mainly Toll-like receptors (TLRs). MCs are extensively engaged in the control and clearance of bacterial infections, but much less is known about their contribution to antiviral host response as well as pathomechanisms of virus-induced diseases. In the study, we employedin vivodifferentiated mature tissue mast cells freshly isolated from rat peritoneal cavity. Here, we demonstrated that rat peritoneal mast cells (rPMCs) express viral dsRNA-specific TLR3 molecule (intracellularly and on the cell surface) as well as other proteins associated with cellular antiviral response: IRF3, type I and II IFN receptors, and MHC I. We found that exposure of rPMCs to viral dsRNA mimic, i.e., poly(I:C), induced transient upregulation of surface TLR3 (while temporarily decreased TLR3 intracellular expression), type II IFN receptor, and MHC I. TLR3 ligand-stimulated rPMCs did not degranulate but generated and/or released type I IFNs (IFN-αand IFNβ) as well as proinflammatory lipid mediators (cysLTs), cytokines (TNF, IL-1β), and chemokines (CCL3, CXCL8). We documented that rPMC priming with poly(I:C) did not affect FcεRI-dependent degranulation. However, their costimulation with TLR3 agonist and anti-IgE led to a significant increase in cysLT and TNF secretion. Our findings confirm that MCs may serve as active participants in the antiviral immune response. Presented data on modulated FcεRI-mediated MC secretion of mediators upon poly(I:C) treatment suggests that dsRNA-type virus infection could influence the severity of allergic reactions.
Assessment of Occupational Health and Safety among Scavengers in Gaza Strip, Palestine
Authors: Al-Khatib Issam A. , Al-Sari’ Majed I. , Kontogianni Stamatia
Published: February 2020

This study deals with the occupational health and safety of valuable and recyclable waste collectors (called scavengers) in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. The analytical descriptive approach was used in this study to achieve this goal. Waste pickers in the study area are working informally at existing dumpsites, solid waste transfer stations, landfills, and community streets’ bins areas. A sample of 301 scavengers was surveyed filling a structured questionnaire designed for this purpose, during individual interviews. In addition, interviews with key Palestinian officials in the Gaza Strip have been conducted to provide accurate data and comprehensive information regarding waste pickers activities. The results showed that the occupational health and safety of the waste pickers is in constant deterioration mainly due to the informal nature of their work. The waste pickers are reportedly suffering in the current situation and the majority has no access to potable water, sanitation, and hygienically appropriate place to sleep and have meals. None of them has ever received occupational health and safety training. The study recommends that local decision makers should uptake short-term and long-term measures in waste management sector both aiming at improving this vulnerable social group’s health and safety life status.
Antimicrobial, Cytotoxic, and Antioxidant Potential of a Novel Flavone “6,7,4′‐Trimethyl Flavone” Isolated from Wulfenia amherstiana
Authors: Kakar Maria , Amin Muhammad Usman , Alghamdi Saad , Sahibzada Muhammad Umar Khayam , Ahmad Nisar , Ullah Naseem
Published: February 2020

Wulfenia amherstiana belongs to the Scrophulariaceae family and various plants of this family are known for their biological activities. The present study was focused on the isolation of bioactive compounds including a novel flavone 6,7,4′‐trimethyl flavone (TMF) along with three known flavonoids such as quercetin, rutin, and a steroid β‐sitosterol which were isolated from the ethanolic extract of W. amherstiana (Himalayan Wulfenia) through column chromatography and purified by using HPLC. Their structures were identified and elucidated through electron ionization mass spectroscopy (EIMS), 1DNMR (1H‐NMR and 13C‐NMR), and 2DNMR (COSY, HMQC, and HMBC) spectroscopy. The antimicrobial activities of this novel compound were evaluated through agar well diffusion method, while antioxidant and cytotoxic activities were assessed through 2,2‐diphenyl‐1‐picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free‐radical scavenging assay and brine shrimp lethality assay, respectively. The NMR data revealed that TMF is a novel compound. TMF showed potential antibacterial and antifungal activities against Staphylococcus aureus (MIC = 128 μg/ml) and Candida albicans (MIC = 128 μg/ml). The cytotoxic potential of TMF was determined from brine shrimp lethality assay with LD50 of 127.01 μg/ml. The free‐radical scavenging potential of TMF at various concentrations implicated its strong antioxidant activity in vitro. The results revealed that TMF demonstrated substantial antimicrobial activity against S. aureus and C. albicans, strong antioxidant activity, and moderately cytotoxic activity.
The Boundedness on Mixed Hardy Spaces
Authors: Ding Wei , Qin Meidi , Zhu Yueping
Published: February 2020

The boundedness of operators on Hardy spaces is usually given by atomic decomposition. In this paper, we obtain the boundedness of singular integral operators in mixed Journé class on mixed Hardy spaces by a direct method.
Synchronous Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia/Small Lymphocytic Lymphoma and Metastatic Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Cervix Involving the Coronary Arteries Leading to Acute Myocardial Infarction
Authors: Bernshteyn Michelle , Smith-Hannah Alexandria , Dhamoon Amit S.
Published: February 2020

A 66-year-old woman presented to the hospital with a one-month history of shortness of breath, fatigue, and postmenopausal vaginal bleeding and a one-week history of chest pain. This case report discusses the rare synchronous occurrence of two different malignancies in the setting of non-ST segment elevation myocardial infarction and the relation between these unfortunate events. Besides the case presented in this report, there have been only 13 reported cases of synchronous chronic lymphocytic leukemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma (CLL/SLL) associated with metastatic squamous cell carcinoma. While it is well known that malignancy causes a hypercoagulable state, there are other mechanisms which may have contributed to the patient’s myocardial ischemia including external vascular compression, tumor lysis syndrome, and anemia. This case report discusses the rarity of synchronous malignancies but the importance of understanding and consideration of cardiac events in this population.