bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Synaptic clef segmentation method based on fractal dimension for ATUM-SEM image of mouse cortex
Authors: Ma Chao , Shen Lijun , Deng Hao , Li Jialin
Published: August 2021

It is well known that neurons communicate through synapses in the nervous system, and the size, morphology, and connectivity of synapses determine the functional properties of the neural network. Therefore, synapses have always been one of the key objects of neuroscience. Due to the technical advance in electron microscope (EM), the physical structure of synapses can be observed at high resolution. Nevertheless, to date, the automatic analysis of the synapse in EM images is still a challenging task. In this paper, we proposed a fractal dimension-based segmentation method for synaptic clef of mouse cortex on EM image stack. Our method does not require a lot of groundtruth to train the model, and shows better adaptive anti-noise performance. That should be ascribed to the stability of segmentation-related key parameters in the data from same tissue. In this way, we only need to give initial values, and then gradually adjust these key parameters. Experiments reveal that our method achieves the desired results, and reduces the time in artificial annotating, so that researchers can focus more on the analysis of segmentation results.
Zero distribution of v-adic multiple zeta values over 𝔽q(t)
Authors: Shen Qibin
Published: August 2021

This paper aims to study the zero distribution of [Formula: see text]-adic multiple zeta values over function fields. We show that the interpolated [Formula: see text]-adic MZVs at negative integers only vanish at what we call the “trivial zeros”, for degree one finite place over rational function fields. And we conjecture that this result can be generalized to all finite places.
Mordell–Weil ranks and Tate–Shafarevich groups of elliptic curves with mixed-reduction type over cyclotomic extensions
Authors: Lei Antonio , Lim Meng Fai
Published: August 2021

Let [Formula: see text] be an elliptic curve defined over a number field [Formula: see text] where [Formula: see text] splits completely. Suppose that [Formula: see text] has good reduction at all primes above [Formula: see text]. Generalizing previous works of Kobayashi and Sprung, we define multiply signed Selmer groups over the cyclotomic [Formula: see text]-extension of a finite extension [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] where [Formula: see text] is unramified. Under the hypothesis that the Pontryagin duals of these Selmer groups are torsion over the corresponding Iwasawa algebra, we show that the Mordell–Weil ranks of [Formula: see text] over a subextension of the cyclotomic [Formula: see text]-extension are bounded. Furthermore, we derive an aysmptotic formula of the growth of the [Formula: see text]-parts of the Tate–Shafarevich groups of [Formula: see text] over these extensions.
Hankel determinants of sequences related to Bernoulli and Euler polynomials
Authors: Dilcher Karl , Jiu Lin
Published: August 2021

We evaluate the Hankel determinants of various sequences related to Bernoulli and Euler numbers and special values of the corresponding polynomials. Some of these results arise as special cases of Hankel determinants of certain sums and differences of Bernoulli and Euler polynomials, while others are consequences of a method that uses the derivatives of Bernoulli and Euler polynomials. We also obtain Hankel determinants for sequences of sums and differences of powers and for generalized Bernoulli polynomials belonging to certain Dirichlet characters with small conductors. Finally, we collect and organize Hankel determinant identities for numerous sequences, both new and known, containing Bernoulli and Euler numbers and polynomials.
The Pintz–Steiger–Szemerédi estimate for intersective quadratic polynomials in function fields
Authors: Li Guoquan
Published: August 2021

Let [Formula: see text] be the polynomial ring over the finite field [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] elements. For a natural number [Formula: see text] let [Formula: see text] be the set of all polynomials in [Formula: see text] of degree less than [Formula: see text] Let [Formula: see text] be a quadratic polynomial over [Formula: see text] Suppose that [Formula: see text] is intersective, that is, which satisfies [Formula: see text] for any [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text] where [Formula: see text] denotes the difference set of [Formula: see text] Let [Formula: see text] Suppose that [Formula: see text] and that the characteristic of [Formula: see text] is not divisible by 2. It is proved that [Formula: see text] for any [Formula: see text] where [Formula: see text] is a constant depending only on [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]
Exact Quantum 1-Query Algorithms and Complexity
Authors: Qiu Daowen , Xu Guoliang
Published: August 2021

Deutsch–Jozsa problem (D–J) has exact quantum 1-query complexity (“exact” means no error), but requires super-exponential queries for the optimal classical deterministic decision trees. D–J problem is equivalent to a symmetric partial Boolean function, and in fact, all symmetric partial Boolean functions having exact quantum 1-query complexity have been found out and these functions can be computed by D–J algorithm. A special case is that all symmetric Boolean functions with exact quantum 1-query complexity follow directly and these functions are also all total Boolean functions with exact quantum 1-query complexity obviously. Then there are pending problems concerning partial Boolean functions having exact quantum 1-query complexity and new results have been found, but some problems are still open. In this paper, we review these results regarding exact quantum 1-query complexity and in particular, we also obtain a new result that a partial Boolean function with exact quantum 1-query complexity is constructed and it cannot be computed by D–J algorithm. Further problems are pointed out for future study.
Global and local scaling limits for the β = 2 Stieltjes–Wigert random matrix ensemble
Authors: Forrester Peter J.
Published: August 2021

The eigenvalue probability density function (PDF) for the Gaussian unitary ensemble has a well-known analogy with the Boltzmann factor for a classical log-gas with pair potential [Formula: see text], confined by a one-body harmonic potential. A generalization is to replace the pair potential by [Formula: see text]. The resulting PDF first appeared in the statistical physics literature in relation to non-intersecting Brownian walkers, equally spaced at time [Formula: see text], and subsequently in the study of quantum many-body systems of the Calogero–Sutherland type, and also in Chern–Simons field theory. It is an example of a determinantal point process with correlation kernel based on the Stieltjes–Wigert polynomials. We take up the problem of determining the moments of this ensemble, and find an exact expression in terms of a particular little q-Jacobi polynomial. From their large N form, the global density can be computed. Previous work has evaluated the edge scaling limit of the correlation kernel in terms of the Ramanujan ([Formula: see text]-Airy) function. We show how in a particular [Formula: see text] scaling limit, this reduces to the Airy kernel.
Outpatient Neuromodulation May Avert the Need for Surgery in Patients with Painful Cutaneous Neuromas
Authors: Das Abhishek K. , Ng Chye Yew
Published: August 2021

Background: Traumatic neuromas are a result of abnormal neural regeneration after nerve injury. Neuropathic pain arising from neuroma can be debilitating.

Methods: This was a retrospective review of a consecutive series of patients who presented with a painful cutaneous neuroma secondary to direct trauma or surgery. The diagnosis was made by the presence of neuropathic symptoms in the dermatome of a cutaneous nerve and a positive Tinel sign. Local anaesthetic injection was performed for confirmation of diagnosis. Each patient was offered optimisation of medical therapy and physiotherapy for desensitisation. Outpatient neuromodulation was offered as an alternative to neuroma surgery. The primary aim of treatment was symptom reduction such that neuroma surgery was no longer required.

Results: This study included 50 patients with painful cutaneous neuromas. Surgery was the commonest cause. The most frequently injured nerves were superficial radial nerve, digital nerve and dorsal ulnar cutaneous nerve, together comprising over 60% of cases. After receiving neuromodulation, 18 (36%) patients experienced sufficient symptom relief and did not wish to pursue neuroma surgery.

Conclusions: Surgery is the commonest cause of a painful cutaneous neuroma. Following optimisation of pharmacotherapy and physiotherapy, neuromodulation may offer symptom relief such that neuroma surgery may be avoided in approximately one third of cases.
Radial Osteotomy for Kienböck Disease: Clinical and Radiological Comparison between Younger and Older Patients
Authors: Yamamoto Michiro , Tatebe Masahiro , Nakagawa Yasunobu , Kurimoto Shigeru , Iwatsuki Katsuyuki , Hirata Hitoshi
Published: August 2021

Background: The usefulness of radial osteotomy for older patients remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to compare the clinical and radiological outcomes of radial osteotomy with volar locking plate between younger and older patients with Kienböck disease stages II to IIIB.

Methods: This was a retrospective comparative study of 21 consecutive patients treated at our department. Lichtman’s classification was used for staging, and four patients had stage II, six patients had stage IIIA, and 11 patients had stage IIIB disease. We divided them into two groups to compare the radiological and clinical results between younger (younger than 40 years) and older patients. The mean follow-up periods in the younger and older groups were 4 and 3.6 years, respectively. For radiological assessment, we evaluated the carpal height ratio (CHR), Stahl index, and union of the fractured lunate. For clinical assessment, we examined the range of motion of the wrist, grip strength, numeric rating scale (NRS) for pain, and the patient-reported Hand20 score preoperatively and at the final follow-up.

Results: There were 12 patients in the younger group with a mean age of 23 years (range, 12–37 years), and 9 in the older group with a mean age of 56 years (range, 40–74 years). There were no intra- and post-operative complications in either group. Radiological improvement, including CHR, Stahl index, and union of the fractured lunate, was more common in the younger group than in the older one, as was the case for clinical improvement. However, even in the older group, significant clinical improvement, including the range of motion of the wrist, NRS for pain, and the Hand20 score, was seen postoperatively.

Conclusions: Radial osteotomy appears to be a safe and reliable option in older symptomatic patients with Kienböck disease stages II to IIIB.
Distal Radius Fracture with Bone Fragment Protruded into the Radiocarpal Joint: Two Case Reports
Authors: Tada Kaoru , Ikeda Kazuo , Tsuchiya Hiroyuki
Published: August 2021

Distal radius fractures often involve comminuted fragments of the dorsal cortex of the radius, but bone fragments rarely protrude into the radiocarpal joint. We report two cases of distal radius fracture with bone fragment protrusion into the radiocarpal joint. To the best of our knowledge, there are no English reports of distal radius fracture with bone fragment protrusion into the radiocarpal joint. Despite the rarity of these cases, clinicians should still be mindful of such injuries and not overlook the possibility of presence of bone fragments within the joint. Missed intra-articular fragments may cause pain, limited range of motion, and subsequent osteoarthritis.
Use of the Extensor Carpi Ulnaris Half-Slip for Treating Chronic Neglected Volar Dislocation of the Distal Radioulnar Joint
Authors: Morisaki Shinsuke , Tsuchida Shinji , Oda Ryo , Toyama Shogo , Takahashi Kenji
Published: August 2021

Volar dislocation of the distal radioulnar joint (DRUJ) is a rare injury. Furthermore, few reports exist regarding DRUJ dislocation with simultaneous elbow dislocation. Elbow dislocation is easily diagnosed and reduced, whereas a DRUJ dislocation is easily missed because of an inaccurate or missed examination of the wrist, which results in a chronic condition. We experienced a case of simultaneous elbow and volar DRUJ dislocation; the latter was found 2 months postinjury. To treat chronic volar dislocation of the DRUJ, surgical methods should include reconstruction of the triangle fibrocartilage complex because of scar tissue and severe instability. In this paper, we describe triangle fibrocartilage complex reconstruction by using the extensor carpi ulnaris half-slip. It is the first report of applying this technique for chronic volar DRUJ dislocation. This technique has a role in creating strong stabilization of the DRUJ and can be an effective treatment option.
Insidious Onset Compartment Syndrome of the Forearm in a Teenager: A Case Report and Review of the Literature
Authors: Iwata Hidetoshi , Okamoto Hideki , Kawaguchi Yohei , Endo Kojiro , Joyo Yuji , Aiba Hisaki , Murakami Satona , Murakami Hideki
Published: August 2021

Compartment syndrome affecting the upper extremities is a relatively underreported event compared with compartment syndrome affecting the lower extremities. Moreover, insidious onset forearm compartment syndrome has been rarely reported and is usually limited to single case reports. We report a compartment syndrome of the forearm in a teenager. She hit her right proximal forearm lightly on the cash register, but there was no pain. However, the next day, she had difficulty in moving her right hand. Although she underwent electrotherapy, her right forearm gradually became swollen, and she felt numbness in the ring and little fingers of her right hand. Six day after the onset, she came to our hospital and underwent fasciotomy. There was no aftereffect, and very good functional recovery was obtained. All clinicians need to keep the case of forearm compartment syndrome in a young individual with a diffuse course, such as in this case in mind.
The Limits to Machine Consciousness
Authors: Kak Subhash
Published: August 2021

It is generally accepted that machines can replicate cognitive tasks performed by conscious agents as long as they are not based on the capacity of awareness. We consider several views on the nature of subjective awareness, which is fundamental for self-reflection and review, and present reasons why this property is not computable. We argue that consciousness is more than an epiphenomenon and assuming it to be a separate category is consistent with both quantum mechanics and cognitive science. We speak of two kinds of consciousness, little-C and big-C, and discuss the significance of this classification in analyzing the current academic debates in the field. The interaction between the system and the measuring apparatus of the experimenter is examined both from the perspectives of decoherence and the quantum Zeno effect. These ideas are used as context to address the question of limits to machine consciousness.
DTA-PUF: Dynamic Timing-aware Physical Unclonable Function for Resource-constrained Devices
Authors: Tsiokanos Ioannis , Miskelly Jack , Gu Chongyan , O’neill Maire , Karakonstantis Georgios
Published: August 2021

In recent years, physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have gained a lot of attention as mechanisms for hardware-rooted device authentication. While the majority of the previously proposed PUFs derive entropy using dedicated circuitry, software PUFs achieve this from existing circuitry in a system. Such software-derived designs are highly desirable for low-power embedded systems as they require no hardware overhead. However, these software PUFs induce considerable processing overheads that hinder their adoption in resource-constrained devices. In this article, we propose DTA-PUF, a novel, software PUF design that exploits the instruction- and data-dependent dynamic timing behaviour of pipelined cores to provide a reliable challenge-response mechanism without requiring any extra hardware. DTA-PUF accepts sequences of instructions as an input challenge and produces an output response based on the manifested timing errors under specific over-clocked settings. To lower the required processing effort, we systematically select instruction sequences that maximise error-rate. The application to a post-layout pipelined floating-point unit, which is implemented in 45 nm process technology, demonstrates the effectiveness and practicability of our PUF design. Finally, DTA-PUF requires up to 50× fewer instructions than existing software processor PUF designs, limiting processing costs and resulting in up to 26% power savings.
Investigating the Effects of Individual Cognitive Styles on Collaborative Gameplay
Authors: Alharthi Sultan A. , Raptis George E. , Katsini Christina , Dolgov Igor , Nacke Lennart E. , Toups Dugas Phoebe O.
Published: August 2021

In multiplayer collaborative games, players need to coordinate their actions and synchronize their efforts effectively to succeed as a team; thus, individual differences can impact teamwork and gameplay. This article investigates the effects of cognitive styles on teams engaged in collaborative gaming activities. Fifty-four individuals took part in a mixed-methods user study; they were classified as field-dependent (FD) or independent (FI) based on a field-dependent–independent (FD-I) cognitive-style-elicitation instrument. Three groups of teams were formed, based on the cognitive style of each team member: FD-FD, FD-FI, and FI-FI. We examined collaborative gameplay in terms of team performance, cognitive load, communication, and player experience. The analysis revealed that FD-I cognitive style affected the performance and mental load of teams. We expect the findings to provide useful insights on understanding how cognitive styles influence collaborative gameplay.
GAVIN
Authors: Khan Anam Ahmad , Newn Joshua , Kelly Ryan M. , Srivastava Namrata , Bailey James , Velloso Eduardo
Published: August 2021

Annotation is an effective reading strategy people often undertake while interacting with digital text. It involves highlighting pieces of text and making notes about them. Annotating while reading in a desktop environment is considered trivial but, in a mobile setting where people read while hand-holding devices, the task of highlighting and typing notes on a mobile display is challenging. In this article, we introduce GAVIN, a gaze-assisted voice note-taking application, which enables readers to seamlessly take voice notes on digital documents by implicitly anchoring them to text passages. We first conducted a contextual enquiry focusing on participants’ note-taking practices on digital documents. Using these findings, we propose a method which leverages eye-tracking and machine learning techniques to annotate voice notes with reference text passages. To evaluate our approach, we recruited 32 participants performing voice note-taking. Following, we trained a classifier on the data collected to predict text passage where participants made voice notes. Lastly, we employed the classifier to built GAVIN and conducted a user study to demonstrate the feasibility of the system. This research demonstrates the feasibility of using gaze as a resource for implicit anchoring of voice notes, enabling the design of systems that allow users to record voice notes with minimal effort and high accuracy.
Robust Cross-lingual Task-oriented Dialogue
Authors: Xiang Lu , Zhu Junnan , Zhao Yang , Zhou Yu , Zong Chengqing
Published: August 2021

Cross-lingual dialogue systems are increasingly important in e-commerce and customer service due to the rapid progress of globalization. In real-world system deployment, machine translation (MT) services are often used before and after the dialogue system to bridge different languages. However, noises and errors introduced in the MT process will result in the dialogue system's low robustness, making the system's performance far from satisfactory. In this article, we propose a novel MT-oriented noise enhanced framework that exploits multi-granularity MT noises and injects such noises into the dialogue system to improve the dialogue system's robustness. Specifically, we first design a method to automatically construct multi-granularity MT-oriented noises and multi-granularity adversarial examples, which contain abundant noise knowledge oriented to MT. Then, we propose two strategies to incorporate the noise knowledge: (i) Utterance-level adversarial learning and (ii) Knowledge-level guided method. The former adopts adversarial learning to learn a perturbation-invariant encoder, guiding the dialogue system to learn noise-independent hidden representations. The latter explicitly incorporates the multi-granularity noises, which contain the noise tokens and their possible correct forms, into the training and inference process, thus improving the dialogue system's robustness. Experimental results on three dialogue models, two dialogue datasets, and two language pairs have shown that the proposed framework significantly improves the performance of the cross-lingual dialogue system.
Deep Learning Approach for the Morphological Synthesis in Malayalam and Tamil at the Character Level
Authors: Premjith B. , Soman K. P.
Published: August 2021

Morphological synthesis is one of the main components of
Machine Translation (MT)
frameworks, especially when any one or both of the source and target languages are morphologically rich. Morphological synthesis is the process of combining two words or two morphemes according to the Sandhi rules of the morphologically rich language. Malayalam and Tamil are two languages in India which are morphologically abundant as well as agglutinative. Morphological synthesis of a word in these two languages is challenging basically because of the following reasons: (1) Abundance in morphology; (2) Complex Sandhi rules; (3) The possibilty in Malayalam to form words by combining words that belong to different syntactic categories (for example, noun and verb); and (4) The construction of a sentence by combining multiple words. We formulated the task of the morphological generation of nouns and verbs of Malayalam and Tamil as a character-to-character sequence tagging problem. In this article, we used deep learning architectures like
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)
,
Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTM)
,
Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)
, and their stacked and bidirectional versions for the implementation of morphological synthesis at the character level. In addition to that, we investigated the performance of the combination of the aforementioned deep learning architectures and the
Conditional Random Field (CRF)
in the morphological synthesis of nouns and verbs in Malayalam and Tamil. We observed that the addition of CRF to the Bidirectional LSTM/GRU architecture achieved more than 99% accuracy in the morphological synthesis of Malayalam and Tamil nouns and verbs.
FTT-NAS: Discovering Fault-tolerant Convolutional Neural Architecture
Authors: Ning Xuefei , Ge Guangjun , Li Wenshuo , Zhu Zhenhua , Zheng Yin , Chen Xiaoming , Gao Zhen , Wang Yu , Yang Huazhong
Published: August 2021

With the fast evolvement of embedded deep-learning computing systems, applications powered by deep learning are moving from the cloud to the edge. When deploying neural networks (NNs) onto the devices under complex environments, there are various types of possible faults: soft errors caused by cosmic radiation and radioactive impurities, voltage instability, aging, temperature variations, malicious attackers, and so on. Thus, the safety risk of deploying NNs is now drawing much attention. In this article, after the analysis of the possible faults in various types of NN accelerators, we formalize and implement various fault models from the algorithmic perspective. We propose Fault-Tolerant Neural Architecture Search (FT-NAS) to automatically discover convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures that are reliable to various faults in nowadays devices. Then, we incorporate fault-tolerant training (FTT) in the search process to achieve better results, which is referred to as FTT-NAS. Experiments on CIFAR-10 show that the discovered architectures outperform other manually designed baseline architectures significantly, with comparable or fewer floating-point operations (FLOPs) and parameters. Specifically, with the same fault settings, F-FTT-Net discovered under the feature fault model achieves an accuracy of 86.2% (VS. 68.1% achieved by MobileNet-V2), and W-FTT-Net discovered under the weight fault model achieves an accuracy of 69.6% (VS. 60.8% achieved by ResNet-18). By inspecting the discovered architectures, we find that the operation primitives, the weight quantization range, the capacity of the model, and the connection pattern have influences on the fault resilience capability of NN models.
The Research on Rejoining of the Oracle Bone Rubbings Based on Curve Matching
Authors: Tian Yaolin , Gao Weize , Liu Xuxing , Chen Shanxiong , Mo Bofeng
Published: August 2021

The rejoining of oracle bone rubbings is a fundamental topic for oracle research. However, it is a tough task to reassemble severely broken oracle bone rubbings because of detail loss in manual labeling, the great time consumption of rejoining, and the low accuracy of results. To overcome the challenges, we introduce a novel CFDA&CAP algorithm that consists of the Curve Fitting Degree Analysis (CFDA) algorithm and the Correlation Analysis of Pearson (CAP) algorithm. First, the orthogonalization system is constructed to extract local features based on the curve features analysis. Second, the global feature descriptor is depicted by using coordinate points sequences. Third, we screen candidate curves based on the features as well as the CFDA algorithm, so the search range of the candidates is narrowed down. Finally, image recommendation libraries for target curves are generated by adopting the CAP algorithm, and the rank for each target matching curve generates simultaneously for result evaluation. With experiments, the proposed method shows a good effect in rejoining oracle bone rubbings automatically: (1) it improves the average accuracy rate of curve matching up to 84%, and (2) for a low-resource task, the accuracy of our method has 25% higher accuracy than that of other methods.
Mining Domain Terminologies Using Search Engine's Query Log
Authors: Ni Weijian , Liu Tong , Zeng Qingtian , Xie Nengfu
Published: August 2021

Domain terminologies are a basic resource for various natural language processing tasks. To automatically discover terminologies for a domain of interest, most traditional approaches mostly rely on a domain-specific corpus given in advance; thus, the performance of traditional approaches can only be guaranteed when collecting a high-quality domain-specific corpus, which requires extensive human involvement and domain expertise. In this article, we propose a novel approach that is capable of automatically mining domain terminologies using search engine's query log—a type of domain-independent corpus of higher availability, coverage, and timeliness than a manually collected domain-specific corpus. In particular, we represent query log as a heterogeneous network and formulate the task of mining domain terminology as transductive learning on the heterogeneous network. In the proposed approach, the manifold structure of domain-specificity inherent in query log is captured by using a novel network embedding algorithm and further exploited to reduce the need for the manual annotation efforts for domain terminology classification. We select
Agriculture
and
Healthcare
as the target domains and experiment using a real query log from a commercial search engine. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches.
Construction of a Corpus of Rhetorical Devices in Slogans and Structural Analysis of Antitheses
Authors: Niwa Ayana , Okazaki Naoaki , Wakimoto Kohei , Nishiguchi Keisuke , Mouri Masataka
Published: August 2021

An advertising slogan is a sentence that expresses a product or a work of art in a straightforward manner and is used for advertising and publicity. Moving the consumer's mind and attracting their interest can significantly influence sales. Although rhetorical techniques in a slogan are known to improve the effectiveness of advertising, not much attention has been devoted to analyze or automatically generate sentences with the techniques. Therefore, we constructed a large corpus of slogans and revealed the linguistic characteristics of the basic statistics and rhetorical devices. Another point of focus was antitheses, of which the usage rates are relatively high and which have a specific sentence structure and lexical constraints. The generation of a slogan that contains an antithesis necessitates the structure of sentences, known as templates, to be extracted and also requires knowledge of word pairs with semantic contrast. Thus, the next step involved analysis of the structure to extract the sentence structure and lexical knowledge about the antithesis. Despite its simple architecture, the proposed method exceeds the prediction accuracy and efficiency of a comparable method. Lexical knowledge that is not available in existing dictionaries was also extracted.
Benchmark of Bitrate Adaptation in Video Streaming
Authors: Chen Jessica , Milner Henry , Stoica Ion , Zhan Jibin
Published: August 2021

The HTTP adaptive streaming technique opened the door to cope with the fluctuating network conditions during the streaming process by dynamically adjusting the volume of the future chunks to be downloaded. The bitrate selection in this adjustment inevitably involves the task of predicting the future throughput of a video session, owing to which various heuristic solutions have been explored. The ultimate goal of the present work is to explore the theoretical upper bounds of the QoE that any ABR algorithm can possibly reach, therefore providing an essential step to benchmarking the performance evaluation of ABR algorithms. In our setting, the QoE is defined in terms of a linear combination of the average perceptual quality and the buffering ratio. The optimization problem is proven to be NP-hard when the perceptual quality is defined by chunk size and conditions are given under which the problem becomes polynomially solvable. Enriched by a global lower bound, a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm along the dynamic programming approach is presented. When the minimum buffering is given higher priority over higher perceptual quality, the problem is shown to be also NP-hard, and the above algorithm is simplified and enhanced by a sequence of lower bounds on the completion time of chunk downloading, which, according to our experiment, brings a 36.0% performance improvement in terms of computation time. To handle large amounts of data more efficiently, a polynomial-time algorithm is also introduced to approximate the optimal values when minimum buffering is prioritized. Besides its performance guarantee, this algorithm is shown to reach 99.938% close to the optimal results, while taking only 0.024% of the computation time compared to the exact algorithm in dynamic programming.
Idea Co-creation on Social Media Platforms
Authors: Bharati Pratyush , Du Kui , Chaudhury Abhijit , Agrawal Narendra M.
Published: August 2021

Innovation scholars have long been discussing social media as a rich source of information, knowledge, and new ideas, yet, whether or how social media can directly intervene with organizational ideation processes remains unclear. In this study, we investigate the impact of external and enterprise social media platforms on organizational ideation. Grounded in 79 cases and adapting social capital theory in social media contexts, this study attempts to develop a theory of social ideation. Social ideation consists of social media-enabled mechanisms that generate social capital, enable multi-level social exchanges, foster idea co-creation activities such as idea sourcing, filtering, elaboration, and integration, and ultimately lead to effective ideation. Our study contributes to social media and innovation research by revealing the intermediary mechanisms that link the use of social media platforms to organizational ideation performance.
Development and Validation of an Autophagy‐Related Signature for Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma
Authors: Liu Chang , Wu Wenling , Xu Meng , Mi Jinglin , Xu Longjiang , Wang Rensheng
Published: August 2021

Introduction. HNSCC is the sixth most frequent type of malignant carcinoma with a low prognosis rate. In addition, autophagy is important in cancer development and progression. The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential significance of ARGs in the diagnosis and treatment of HNSCC. Materials and Methods. Expression data and clinical information of HNSCC samples were collected from the TCGA database, and a list of ARGs was obtained from the MSigDB. Then, we used R software to perform differential expression analysis and functional enrichment analysis. Further analysis was also performed to find out the survival‐related ARGs in HNSCC, and two prognosis‐related ARGs, FADD and NKX2‐3, were selected to construct a prognosis prediction model. Moreover, some methods were applied to validate the prognosis prediction model. Finally, we used cell lines and clinical tissue samples of HNSCC to analyze the importance of FADD and NKX2‐3. Results. We screened a total of 38 differentially expressed ARGs, and enrichment analysis showed that these genes were mainly involved in autophagy. Then, we selected FADD and NKX2‐3 to construct a prognosis model and the risk score calculated by the model was proved to be effective in predicting the survival of HNSCC patients. Additionally, significant differences of the clinicopathological parameters could also be observed in the risk scores and the expression of NKX2‐3 and FADD. The expression of FADD and NKX2‐3 in cell lines and HNSCC tissue samples also showed the same trends. Conclusions. ARGs may be a potential biomarker for HNSCC prognosis, and targeted therapies for FADD and NKX2‐3 are possible to be a new strategy of HNSCC treatment.
Pascu-Type Analytic Functions by Using Mittag-Leffler Functions in Janowski Domain
Authors: Mashwan Wali Khan , Ahmad Bakhtiar , Khan Muhammad Ghaffar , Mustafa Saima , Arjika Sama , Khan Bilal
Published: August 2021

Keeping in view the various important applications of Mittag-Leffer functions in the fields of applied sciences, we introduce Pascu-type analytic functions utilizing the concept of Mittag-Leffler functions in the region of Janowski domain. Moreover, we investigate some useful properties of these functions such as sufficiency criteria, distortion and growth bounds, convex combination, radius of starlikeness, and some partial sum results.
Impacts of Urbanization on Extreme Regional Precipitation Events
Authors: Wu Wei , Ren Lei , Wei Yingjian , Guo Mengjing
Published: August 2021

Urbanization significantly impacts regional precipitation. In this study, using the city of Xi’an in China as a study area, we analyze the variation in land use and the characteristics of the variation in extreme precipitation events and discuss the response of urbanization to extreme precipitation. The main conclusions drawn are as follows. (1) The construction land area of the study area rapidly expanded in size from 80.76 km2 in 1984 to 400.3 km2 in 2018. The transfer of land use mainly occurred as the transfer from farmland to other types of land use. The urban land use intensity continues to increase. (2) The intensities and different frequency indices of extreme precipitations both show an increasing trend. In addition, the former exhibits periodic alternation with a dominant frequency of 21 years during the flood season, and both the fluctuation amplitude and maximum value of the periodic variation increase with time. (3) The urbanization in the study area has a significant impact on Rx1h and Rx2h precipitations, but little impact on the intensity of long-duration precipitation. Hence, urbanization significantly increases the intensity of extreme precipitation. After the 2000s, the urban building area, rainfall frequency, and rainfall intensity growth trends are highly consistent.
Matrix Structure of Jacobsthal Numbers
Authors: Ganie Abdul Hamid , AlBaidani Mashael M.
Published: August 2021

The main scenario of this paper is to introduce a new sequence of Jacobsthal type having a generalized orderj. Some basic properties will be studied concerning it. Also, we will establish the generalized Binet formula.
Psychological Stress Detection and Early Warning System Based on Wireless Network Transmission
Authors: Li Yaling
Published: August 2021

To improve the accuracy of stress detection and stress warning errors, this paper designed a new psychological stress detection and warning system based on wireless network transmission. To achieve this objective, we established a real-time setup. The hardware of the system is composed of pulse acquisition module, signal low-pass filtering and amplification module, real-time clock module, wireless network transmission module, and power supply module, respectively. Based on the aforementioned hardware platform, the system software is designed, mainly through the construction of pulse signal noise and the use of wavelet denoising threshold for sensing wavelet packet inverse transformation, to get the reconstructed signal. The peak point of the reconstructed signal is determined, and the value of pulse signal is extracted. According to the characteristic value’s extraction results, the degree of psychological stress is quantified using the psychological stress index (PSI). When the PSI exceeds a predefined threshold, it indicates an early warning of psychological stress. The experimental results show that the psychological stress detection of our system is consistent with the expert evaluation results, the warning time is short, and the practical application effect is good.
Study of Macro‐ and Mesodamage of Remolded Loess under Alternating Dry and Wet Conditions in an Acid Rain Environment
Authors: Ye Wanjun , Wu Yuntao , Bai Yang
Published: August 2021

As a national development plan, ecological protection of the Yellow River Basin has attracted extensive social attention in recent years. Considering the influence of acid rain on the engineering characteristics of loess in this area, we investigated changes in the physical and mechanical characteristics of remolded loess under the combined action of acid rain and dry‐wet cycles by means of triaxial tests, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy. The results are as follows: in the acidic environment, the stress‐strain relationship of remolded loess undergoes stress hardening after dry‐wet cycling. The cohesion and internal friction angle of remolded loess are negatively correlated with the number of cycles. From the multiscale analysis of the dry‐wet cycle process under acid rain condition, the T2 spectrum of the test soil has three peaks at the micropore level. With the increasing number of cycles, the spectral area increases gradually, and the sample transitions from small pores to large‐ and medium‐size pores. At the microscopic level, the clay mineral particles among soil particles decrease in size, the contact mode between soil particles develops from stable to unstable, the particles are gradually rounded, and the fractal dimension decreases. Chemical erosion and physical erosion are special features of this experiment. Physical erosion causes particle erosion and pore growth, while chemical erosion includes reactions by feldspar. Together, physical and chemical reactions aggravate the soil deterioration process. These research results have laid a good experimental foundation for the ecological protection of the Yellow River Basin.
Mechanical and Acoustic Responses of Brittle Geomaterials with a Hole under a Compressive Disturbance
Authors: Li Peng , Wu Yun-Quan , Zhang Ying
Published: August 2021

The objective of this article was to investigate the acoustic emission (AE) precursor information and crack propagation mechanism of brittle granite specimens containing a hole under uniaxial compression using AE and digital image correlation (DIC) techniques. The results show that the existence of the opening in the specimen leads to the degradation of the mechanical properties, and the stress‐strain curve exhibits several stress drops. Each deformation stage of rock had different AE characteristics, so AE signals can be used to characterize the microscopic damage evolution of rock and predict the macroscopic failure process of the surrounding rock of the opening. The deformation field evolution process of the specimen containing an opening gradually develops from a uniform distribution to prominent local deformation, and the deformation of the local area near the opening is greater than that of other areas. The initiation of cracks begins around the opening, and the propagation of tensile cracks around the opening is primarily influenced by the nucleation and propagation in the strain localization area. The crack propagation evolution derived from DIC images can be combined with AE monitoring to accurately reveal the deformation and failure mechanism of the intact specimen containing an opening.
The Implications of Weather and Reflectivity Variations on Automatic Traffic Sign Recognition Performance
Authors: Seraj Mudasser , Rosales-Castellanos Andres , Shalkamy Amr , El-Basyouny Karim , Qiu Tony Z.
Published: August 2021

Automatic recognition of traffic signs in complex, real-world environments has become a pressing research concern with rapid improvements of smart technologies. Hence, this study leveraged an industry-grade object detection and classification algorithm (You-Only-Look-Once, YOLO) to develop an automatic traffic sign recognition system that can identify widely used regulatory and warning signs in diverse driving conditions. Sign recognition performance was assessed in terms of weather and reflectivity to identify the limitations of the developed system in real-world conditions. Furthermore, we produced several editions of our sign recognition system by gradually increasing the number of training images in order to account for the significance of training resources in recognition performance. Analysis considering variable weather conditions, including fair (clear and sunny) and inclement (cloudy and snowy), demonstrated a lower susceptibility of sign recognition in the highly trained system. Analysis considering variable reflectivity conditions, including sheeting type, lighting conditions, and sign age, showed that older engineering-grade sheeting signs were more likely to go unnoticed by the developed system at night. In summary, this study incorporated automatic object detection technology to develop a novel sign recognition system to determine its real-world applicability, opportunities, and limitations for future integration with advanced driver assistance technologies.
Depression Induced by CUMS Leads to Bladder Cancer Development and Local Tumor Immunosuppression in Mice
Authors: Qian Zhiyu , Ding Weihong , Zhou Qidong , Sun Chuanyu , Xu Ke
Published: August 2021

Depression is a common mental disease in bladder cancer patients, leading to a loss of happiness, an increase in the suicide rate, and higher mortality. However, the influence of depression on bladder tumor tissue remains unknown. In this current study, a subcutaneous bladder cancer xenograft model was established on male C57 mice with mouse bladder cell line MB49. Chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) was established to simulate depression in bladder cancer patients. The depression caused by CUMS was confirmed by testing sucrose preference and plasma cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) levels. Then, we measured and weighed tumors to demonstrate the promotion of tumor growth by CUMS. Immune-related cells and molecules were examined to reveal the mechanism. There is a significant decrease of CD8+/CD4+T cells ratio, NK cells, IL-2, and IFN-γ and a significant increase of T regs, IL-6, IL-1β, TNF-α, IL-10, and PGE2 in CUMS group, indicating the inhibition of immunity in the tumor microenvironment. Our results supported the perspective that depression exacerbated bladder cancer and revealed a possible mechanism. We suggest attaching importance to the psychological health of bladder cancer patients to prevent a worse prognosis induced by depression.
Predictive Mathematical Models of the Short-Term and Long-Term Growth of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Authors: Fernández-Martínez Juan Luis , Fernández-Muñiz Zulima , Cernea Ana , Kloczkowski Andrzej
Published: August 2021

The prediction of the dynamics of the COVID-19 outbreak and the corresponding needs of the health care system (COVID-19 patients’ admissions, the number of critically ill patients, need for intensive care units, etc.) is based on the combination of a limited growth model (Verhulst model) and a short-term predictive model that allows predictions to be made for the following day. In both cases, the uncertainty analysis of the prediction is performed, i.e., the set of equivalent models that adjust the historical data with the same accuracy. This set of models provides the posterior distribution of the parameters of the predictive model that adjusts the historical series. It can be extrapolated to the same analyzed time series (e.g., the number of infected individuals per day) or to another time series of interest to which it is correlated and used, e.g., to predict the number of patients admitted to urgent care units, the number of critically ill patients, or the total number of admissions, which are directly related to health needs. These models can be regionalized, that is, the predictions can be made at the local level if data are disaggregated. We show that the Verhulst and the Gompertz models provide similar results and can be also used to monitor and predict new outbreaks. However, the Verhulst model seems to be easier to interpret and to use.