bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Nonparametric clustering for image segmentation
Authors: Menardi Giovanna 
Published: November 2019

AbstractImage segmentation aims at identifying regions of interest within an image by grouping pixels according to their properties. This task resembles the statistical one of clustering, yet many standard clustering methods fail to meet the basic requirements of image segmentation since the identified segments are often biased toward predetermined shapes and their number is rarely determined automatically. Nonparametric clustering is, in principle, free from these limitations and particularly suitable for the task of image segmentation. We discuss the application of nonparametric clustering to image segmentation and provide an algorithm specific for this task. Pixel similarity is evaluated in terms of the density of the color representation. The adjacency structure of the pixels is exploited to introduce a simple, yet effective method to identify image segments as disconnected high‐density regions. The proposed method answers to the need of both segmenting an image and detecting its boundaries and can be seen as a generalization to color images of the class of thresholding methods.
Glutathione Depletion in a Benign Manner by MoS2‐Based Nanoflowers for Enhanced Hypoxia‐Irrelevant Free‐Radical‐Based Cancer Therapy
Authors: Wu Si , Liu Xinping , Ren Jinsong , Qu Xiaogang 
Published: November 2019

AbstractTumor hypoxia significantly diminishes the efficacy of reactive oxygen species (ROS)‐based therapy, mainly because the generation of ROS is highly oxygen dependent. Recently reported hypoxia‐irrelevant radical initiators (AIBIs) exhibit promising potential for cancer therapy under different oxygen tensions. However, overexpressed glutathione (GSH) in cancer cells would potently scavenge the free radicals produced from AIBI before their arrival to the specific site and dramatically limit the therapeutic efficacy. A synergistic antitumor platform (MoS2@AIBI‐PCM nanoflowers) is constructed by incorporating polyethylene‐glycol‐functionalized molybdenum disulfide (PEG‐MoS2) nanoflowers with azo initiator and phase‐change material (PCM). Under near‐infrared laser (NIR) irradiation, the photothermal feature of PEG‐MoS2 induces the decomposition of AIBI to produce free radicals. Furthermore, PEG‐MoS2 can facilitate GSH oxidation without releasing toxic metal ions, greatly promoting tumor apoptosis and avoiding the introduction of toxic metal ions. This is the first example of the use of intelligent MoS2‐based nanoflowers as a benign GSH scavenger for enhanced cancer treatment.
Facilitating program performance profiling via evolutionary symbolic execution
Authors: Aquino Andrea , Braione Pietro , Denaro Giovanni , Salza Pasquale 
Published: November 2019

SummaryPerformance profiling can benefit from test cases that hit high‐cost executions of programs. In this paper, we investigate the problem of automatically generating test cases that trigger the worst‐case execution of programs and propose a novel technique that solves this problem with an unprecedented combination of symbolic execution and evolutionary algorithms. Our technique, which we refer to as ‘Evolutionary Symbolic Execution’, embraces the execution cost of the program paths as the fitness function to pursue the worst execution. It defines an original set of evolutionary operators, based on symbolic execution, which suitably sample the possible program paths to make the search process effective. Specifically, our technique defines a memetic algorithm that (i) incrementally evolves by steering symbolic execution to traverse new program paths that comply with execution conditions combined and refined from the currently collected worse program paths and (ii) periodically applies local optimizations to the execution conditions of the worst currently identified program path to further speed up the identification of the worst path. We report on a set of initial experiments indicating that our technique succeeds in generating good worst‐case test cases for programs with which existing approaches cannot cope. Also, we show that, as far as the problem of generating worst‐case test cases is concerned, the distinguishing evolutionary operators based on symbolic execution that we define in this paper are more effective than traditional operators that directly manipulate the program inputs.
Experimental study on the mechanical properties and the microstructure of hybrid‐fiber‐reinforced concrete under an early stage
Authors: Huang Hua , Yuan Yujian , Zhang Wei , Zhu Liang 
Published: November 2019

AbstractBased on the fixed aspect ratio of 650 for carbon fiber (CF) in hybrid‐fiber‐reinforced concrete (HFRC), this study investigated the effect of polypropylene fiber (PPF) and the aramid fiber (AF) aspect ratio on the mechanical properties of HFRC under the early stage. For this purpose, compressive, splitting tensile, and flexural tests were carried out to obtain the optimal hybridization parameters with respect to the aspect ratio of polypropylene fiber (PPF‐AR) and aramid fiber (AF‐AR) in HFRC. Additionally, the microstructure of HFRC was also examined by scanning electron microscope method to investigate the bond properties between fiber and a concrete matrix. It can be found from the results that the failure modes of overall tests are a ductile failure. The enhancement of tensile strength is attributed to PPF‐AR, whereas AF‐AR mainly tends to improve the performance in compressive and flexural strength. Meanwhile, the aspect ratio of fibers has little effect on the tensile‐to‐compressive‐strength ratio (TC‐R) or the flexural‐to‐compressive‐strength ratio (FC‐R) of early‐stage HFRC.
Effect of soil properties on the seismic damage assessment of historical masonry minaret–soil interaction systems
Authors: Hökelekli Emin , Al‐Helwani Amjad 
Published: November 2019

SummaryThe interaction between soil and structure plays a crucial role on accurate determination of structures' seismic behavior. The assumption of fixed base structure has been commonly used in traditional design works, and the interaction between soil and structure is thus often neglected. In addition, historical masonry structures particularly built on elastic soil media may be significantly affected seismic behavior of the structure under earthquakes. In this research, the damage distribution on a historical masonry minaret is numerically investigated under horizontal earthquake ground motion. Alaca Mosque minaret was built in 1271 in Bolvadin district of Afyon province. The historical masonry minaret was chosen as the subject of the study. Nonlinear seismic time history analyses were conducted for fixed‐based and different soil properties under horizontal earthquake ground motion. The horizontal (East–West) component acceleration records of Dinar earthquake (Mw = 6.1) that took place on October 10, 1995, were used during the analyses. Maximum displacement, maximum/minimum principal stresses, and damage ratios were determined by nonlinear analyses performed considering fixed base and soil–structure interaction. The analysis results showed that soil–structure interaction had significant effect on the structural behavior of the minaret, such that, the minaret that was expected to get damage in the case of fixed base did not get any damage when soil–structure interaction was considered.
The Internet 3.0
Authors: Stjernfelt Frederik , Lauritzen Anne Mette 
Published: November 2019

AbstractOn September 11, 2001, Internet users searched Google for information on the unfathomable events taking place in Manhattan. But the search “New York Twin Towers” came up with no hits. A full month had passed since the words “twin towers” had last been indexed. This meant that at this crucial moment, the term as a search object had not been updated. All the search results Google came up with were frustratingly irrelevant for the acute needs of the users. As an emergency solution, Google created a breaking news page featuring “News and Information on the US Attacks”, which was placed on top of the search list. The page featured links to the websites of news outlets and other news organizations as well as useful links to aid organizations, emergency aid, phone numbers of airlines and hospitals. This episode made Google, during the following year, develop a news filter as part of its search algorithm. This meant that current headlines now came up on top of the search list when a user entered the relevant search words.
Teaching Systematic Review
Authors: Nind Melanie 
Published: November 2019

AbstractThis chapter is about teaching systematic review; it is not, however, the product of a systematic review. It combines and builds on insights from two sets of research experiences: being taught about how to conduct systematic reviews ahead of doing this myself, and more recently, conducting study of the Pedagogy of Methodological Learning for the National Centre for Research Methods in the UK. The latter engaged teachers and learners in the process of building capability and capacity in the co-construction of understandings of what is important in teaching and learning advanced social science research methods, including systematic review. The chapter advocates teaching systematic review in ways that support critical thinking, utilising deep knowledge of the method and a willingness to be reflexive and open about its messy realities.
Reparametrization modes, shadow operators, and quantum chaos in higher-dimensional CFTs
Authors: Haehl Felix M. , Reeves Wyatt , Rozali Moshe 
Published: November 2019

Abstract
We study two novel approaches to efficiently encoding universal constraints imposed by conformal symmetry, and describe applications to quantum chaos in higher dimensional CFTs. The first approach consists of a reformulation of the shadow operator formalism and kinematic space techniques. We observe that the shadow operator associated with the stress tensor (or other conserved currents) can be written as the descendant of a field ε with negative dimension. Computations of stress tensor contributions to conformal blocks can be systematically organized in terms of the “soft mode” ε, turning them into a simple diagrammatic perturbation theory at large central charge.Our second (equivalent) approach concerns a theory of reparametrization modes, generalizing previous studies in the context of the Schwarzian theory and two-dimensional CFTs. Due to the conformal anomaly in even dimensions, gauge modes of the conformal group acquire an action and are shown to exhibit the same dynamics as the soft mode ε that encodes the physics of the stress tensor shadow. We discuss the calculation of the conformal partial waves or the conformal blocks using our effective field theory. The separation of conformal blocks from shadow blocks is related to gauging of certain symmetries in our effective field theory of the soft mode.These connections explain and generalize various relations between conformal blocks, shadow operators, kinematic space, and reparametrization modes. As an application we study thermal physics in higher dimensions and argue that the theory of reparametrization modes captures the physics of quantum chaos in Rindler space. This is also supported by the observation of the pole skipping phenomenon in the conformal energy-energy two-point function on Rindler space.
Sex differences in metabolic regulation and diabetes susceptibility
Authors: Tramunt Blandine , Smati Sarra , Grandgeorge Naia , Lenfant Françoise , Arnal Jean-François , Montagner Alexandra , Gourdy Pierre 
Published: November 2019

AbstractGender and biological sex impact the pathogenesis of numerous diseases, including metabolic disorders such as diabetes. In most parts of the world, diabetes is more prevalent in men than in women, especially in middle-aged populations. In line with this, considering almost all animal models, males are more likely to develop obesity, insulin resistance and hyperglycaemia than females in response to nutritional challenges. As summarised in this review, it is now obvious that many aspects of energy balance and glucose metabolism are regulated differently in males and females and influence their predisposition to type 2 diabetes. During their reproductive life, women exhibit specificities in energy partitioning as compared with men, with carbohydrate and lipid utilisation as fuel sources that favour energy storage in subcutaneous adipose tissues and preserve them from visceral and ectopic fat accumulation. Insulin sensitivity is higher in women, who are also characterised by higher capacities for insulin secretion and incretin responses than men; although, these sex advantages all disappear when glucose tolerance deteriorates towards diabetes. Clinical and experimental observations evidence the protective actions of endogenous oestrogens, mainly through oestrogen receptor α activation in various tissues, including the brain, the liver, skeletal muscle, adipose tissue and pancreatic beta cells. However, beside sex steroids, underlying mechanisms need to be further investigated, especially the role of sex chromosomes, fetal/neonatal programming and epigenetic modifications. On the path to precision medicine, further deciphering sex-specific traits in energy balance and glucose homeostasis is indeed a priority topic to optimise individual approaches in type 2 diabetes prevention and treatment.
Subsidy Entrepreneurs: an Inquiry into Firms Seeking Public Grants
Authors: Gustafsson Anders , Tingvall Patrik Gustavsson , Halvarsson Daniel 
Published: November 2019

Abstract
This paper studies the incentives and characteristics of firms that apply for, and eventually receive, one or multiple governmental grants intended to stimulate innovation and growth. The analysis departs from a contest model in which entrepreneurs are free to allocate their effort between production and seeking grants. The results suggest that highly productive entrepreneurs abstain from seeking grants, moderately productive firms allocate a share of their effort to grant seeking, and low-productivity firms allocate most resources to seeking grants. Due to their efforts in seeking grants, these low-productive subsidy entrepreneurs also have a relatively high probability of receiving the grants. Using comprehensive data over grants from the three largest grant-distributing agencies in Sweden, we find concordant evidence of a negative relation between the probability of receiving a grant and firm productivity. As we go from single- to multiple-grant-supported firms, this negative relation becomes more pronounced.
Monitoring the side effects with DSC caused by cyclophosphamide treatment
Authors: Farkas Péter , Könczöl Franciska , Lőrinczy Dénes 
Published: November 2019

AbstractPolyneuropathy is defined as a simultaneous malfunction of several peripheral nerves, which could be a side effect of a cancer therapy (using cyclophosphamide) as well. In the daily use, it is very important to know the kinetics and metabolism of anticancer drugs because this way we can estimate their undesirable consequences to avoid the unwanted complications. Nowadays, the application of DSC in diagnosis of different diseases using blood compounds is increasing; therefore, the purpose of recent study was to introduce at the first time the DSC in the detection of cyclophosphamide-induced changes in plasma and red blood cells in case of an experimental animal model. Guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus, n = 60, in 12 different groups) underwent to cyclophosphamide treatment administrated intraperitoneally with the dose comparable to the human dosage. At the end of treatments, the animals were euthanized, and the experimental samples (plasma end red blood cells) were analyzed by a SETARAM Micro DSC-II calorimeter. The denaturation temperatures and the calorimetric enthalpies were calculated from the heat flow curves. Our results exhibited a dose-dependent difference between thermal parameters of untreated and treated samples, demonstrating that DSC is applicable in this field too. After deconvolution of DSC scans, the changes could be assigned to the attacked compounds. Recently published papers call the attention for this technique more frequently in the medical diagnosis because this way from small amount of sample very quickly and economically possible to detect and predict the expected and unwanted side effects of chemotherapeutic agents.
Robotic grasp detection based on image processing and random forest
Authors: Zhang Jiahao , Li Miao , Feng Ying , Yang Chenguang 
Published: November 2019

AbstractReal-time grasp detection plays a key role in manipulation, and it is also a complex task, especially for detecting how to grasp novel objects. This paper proposes a very quick and accurate approach to detect robotic grasps. The main idea is to perform grasping of novel objects in a typical RGB-D scene view. Our goal is not to find the best grasp for every object but to obtain the local optimal grasps in candidate grasp rectangles. There are three main contributions to our detection work. Firstly, an improved graph segmentation approach is used to do objects detection and it can separate objects from the background directly and fast. Secondly, we develop a morphological image processing method to generate candidate grasp rectangles set which avoids us to search grasp rectangles globally. Finally, we train a random forest model to predict grasps and achieve an accuracy of 94.26%. The model is mainly used to score every element in our candidate grasps set and the one gets the highest score will be converted to the final grasp configuration for robots. For real-world experiments, we set up our system on a tabletop scene with multiple objects and when implementing robotic grasps, we control Baxter robot with a different inverse kinematics strategy rather than the built-in one.
Evaluation of surface EMG-based recognition algorithms for decoding hand movements
Authors: Abbaspour Sara , Lindén Maria , Gholamhosseini Hamid , Naber Autumn , Ortiz-Catalan Max 
Published: November 2019

AbstractMyoelectric pattern recognition (MPR) to decode limb movements is an important advancement regarding the control of powered prostheses. However, this technology is not yet in wide clinical use. Improvements in MPR could potentially increase the functionality of powered prostheses. To this purpose, offline accuracy and processing time were measured over 44 features using six classifiers with the aim of determining new configurations of features and classifiers to improve the accuracy and response time of prosthetics control. An efficient feature set (FS: waveform length, correlation coefficient, Hjorth Parameters) was found to improve the motion recognition accuracy. Using the proposed FS significantly increased the performance of linear discriminant analysis, K-nearest neighbor, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), and support vector machine by 5.5%, 5.7%, 6.3%, and 6.2%, respectively, when compared with the Hudgins’ set. Using the FS with MLE provided the largest improvement in offline accuracy over the Hudgins feature set, with minimal effect on the processing time. Among the 44 features tested, logarithmic root mean square and normalized logarithmic energy yielded the highest recognition rates (above 95%). We anticipate that this work will contribute to the development of more accurate surface EMG-based motor decoding systems for the control prosthetic hands.
Operationalising transformative sustainability science through place-based research: the role of researchers
Authors: Horlings Lummina G. , Nieto-Romero Marta , Pisters Siri , Soini Katriina 
Published: November 2019

AbstractAmong scholars in sustainability science, there is an increasing recognition of the potential of place-based research in the context of transformative change towards sustainability. In this research, researchers may have a variety of roles; these are determined by the researcher’s engagement with the subject, the inherent theoretical, normative and methodological choices he or she makes, the researcher’s ambitions in contributing to change, and ethical issues. This article explores the varied roles of research fellows within the European Marie Curie ITN research program on sustainable place-shaping (SUSPLACE). By analysing 15 SUSPLACE projects and reflecting on the roles of researchers identified by Wittmayer and Schäpke (Sustain Sci 9(4):483–496, 2014) we describe how the fellows’ theoretical positionality, methods applied, and engagement in places led to different research roles. The methodology used for the paper is based on an interactive process, co-producing knowledge with Early Stage Researchers (fellows) of the SUSPLACE consortium. The results show a range of place meanings applied by the fellows. Varied methods are used to give voice to participants in research and to bring them together for joint reflection on values, networks and understandings, co-creating knowledge. Multiple conceptualisations of ‘sustainability’ were used, reflecting different normative viewpoints. These choices and viewpoints resulted in fellows each engaging in multiple roles, exploring various routes of sustainable place-shaping, and influencing place-relations. Based on our findings we introduce a framework for the ‘embodied researcher’: a researcher who is engaged in research with their ‘brain, heart, hands and feet’ and who integrates different roles during the research process.
Designing Preclinical Studies in Germline Gene Editing: Scientific and Ethical Aspects
Authors: Nordgren Anders 
Published: November 2019

AbstractHuman germline gene editing is often debated in hypothetical terms: if it were safe and efficient, on what further conditions would it then be ethically acceptable? This paper takes another course. The key question is: how can scientists reduce uncertainty about safety and efficiency to a level that may justify initiation of first-time clinical trials? The only way to proceed is by well-designed preclinical studies. However, what kinds of investigation should preclinical studies include and what specific conditions should they satisfy in order to be considered well-designed? It is argued that multispecies and multigenerational animal studies are needed as well as human embryo editing without implantation. In order to be possible to translate to first-time clinical trials, animal studies need to satisfy strict conditions of validity. Moreover, embryo studies intended for translation to first-time clinical trials need to correspond to the animal studies in experimental design (with exception of implantation). Only in this way can uncertainty about risk for harm (safety) and prospect of benefit (efficiency) in first-time clinical trials be reduced to a modest level. If uncertainty is not reduced to such a level, first-time clinical trials in germline gene editing should not be initiated.
Environmental factors and asthma hospitalization in Montreal, Canada, during spring 2006–2008: a synergy perspective
Authors: Robichaud Alain , Comtois Paul 
Published: November 2019

AbstractThe aim of this study is to analyze the synergy between environmental factors (pollutant, allergenic birch pollen, weather) and its relationship with asthma hospitalization in Montreal, Canada. The data is stratified into weather types and the study restricted to spring season to limit the impact of multiple confounders. Results shows that the daily count of asthma hospitalization (spring 2006–2008) in situation of warm fronts or trowals (daily average of 3.78 counts, CI 95% 2.95–4.61) was much higher (p < 0.001) than in other situations (2.49 counts, CI 95% 2.37–2.71). Moreover, the explained variance of asthma hospitalization due to air pollution rises from about less than 7% (in the case of no stratification) to about 28% (R = 0.53, p < 0.05 with stratification). Statistical tests for interaction and overall results point towards a synergy between environmental factors which exacerbates asthma. A new concept named frontal asthma is proposed to explain several results found here and in the open literature.