目的：利用高分辨率定量CT（QCT）成像特征来预测间质肺疾病（ILD）的纤维纤维诊断和预后。方法：40名ILD患者（20例常规间质性肺炎（UIP），20个非UIP模式ILD）由2位放射科医生的专家共识分类，随后持续了7年。记录临床变量。分割肺场后，使用基于晶格的方法（TM模型）提取了总共26个纹理特征。将TM模型与先前基于直方图的模型（HM）进行了比较，以便将UIP与非UIP分类。为了进行预后评估，进行了生存分析，将专家诊断标签与TM指标进行比较。结果：在分类分析中，TM模型的表现优于HM方法，AUC为0.70。虽然在COX回归分析中，UIP与非UIP专家标签的生存曲线在统计学上并没有差异，但TM QCT特征允许该队列的统计学意义分区。结论：TM模型在区分非UIP模式方面优于HM模型。最重要的是，TM允许将队列分配为不同的生存群体，而专家UIP与非UIP标签则不得。 QCT TM模型可以改善ILD的诊断，并提供更准确的预后，更好地指导患者管理。

在聚类分析中，一个普遍的第一步是扩展旨在将其分配到群集中的数据。即使多年来已经引入了许多不同的技术，但可以说，在此预处理阶段的主力是将数据除以每个维度的标准偏差。就像按标准偏差的分裂一样，可以说大多数缩放技术都扎根于某种统计数据。在这里，我们探讨了数据的多维形状的使用，旨在通过某种方法（例如K-均值）在聚类之前获得缩放因子，以明确使用样品之间的距离。我们从宇宙学和相关领域的领域借用了最近引入的形状复杂性概念，在我们使用的变体中，我们是一个相对简单，依赖数据的非线性函数，我们可以证明可以用来帮助确定适当的缩放因子。为了关注所谓的“中距”距离，我们制定了一个受约束的非线性编程问题，并使用它来产生候选缩放比例因素集，可以根据数据的进一步考虑（例如，通过专家知识）筛选出来。我们为一些标志性数据集提供结果，突出了新方法的优势和潜在劣势。这些结果通常在所使用的所有数据集中是正面的。

已经广泛地研究了使用虹膜和围眼区域作为生物特征，主要是由于虹膜特征的奇异性以及当图像分辨率不足以提取虹膜信息时的奇异区域的使用。除了提供有关个人身份的信息外，还可以探索从这些特征提取的功能，以获得其他信息，例如个人的性别，药物使用的影响，隐形眼镜的使用，欺骗等。这项工作提出了对为眼部识别创建的数据库的调查，详细说明其协议以及如何获取其图像。我们还描述并讨论了最受欢迎的眼镜识别比赛（比赛），突出了所提交的算法，只使用Iris特征和融合虹膜和周边地区信息实现了最佳结果。最后，我们描述了一些相关工程，将深度学习技术应用于眼镜识别，并指出了新的挑战和未来方向。考虑到有大量的眼部数据库，并且每个人通常都设计用于特定问题，我们认为这项调查可以广泛概述眼部生物识别学中的挑战。

The Elo algorithm, due to its simplicity, is widely used for rating in sports competitions as well as in other applications where the rating/ranking is a useful tool for predicting future results. However, despite its widespread use, a detailed understanding of the convergence properties of the Elo algorithm is still lacking. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive (stochastic) analysis of the Elo algorithm, considering round-robin (one-on-one) competitions. Specifically, analytical expressions are derived characterizing the behavior/evolution of the skills and of important performance metrics. Then, taking into account the relationship between the behavior of the algorithm and the step-size value, which is a hyperparameter that can be controlled, some design guidelines as well as discussions about the performance of the algorithm are provided. To illustrate the applicability of the theoretical findings, experimental results are shown, corroborating the very good match between analytical predictions and those obtained from the algorithm using real-world data (from the Italian SuperLega, Volleyball League).

We describe a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) that simulates the flow induced by the astronomical tide in a synthetic port channel, with dimensions based on the Santos - S\~ao Vicente - Bertioga Estuarine System. PINN models aim to combine the knowledge of physical systems and data-driven machine learning models. This is done by training a neural network to minimize the residuals of the governing equations in sample points. In this work, our flow is governed by the Navier-Stokes equations with some approximations. There are two main novelties in this paper. First, we design our model to assume that the flow is periodic in time, which is not feasible in conventional simulation methods. Second, we evaluate the benefit of resampling the function evaluation points during training, which has a near zero computational cost and has been verified to improve the final model, especially for small batch sizes. Finally, we discuss some limitations of the approximations used in the Navier-Stokes equations regarding the modeling of turbulence and how it interacts with PINNs.

Can we leverage the audiovisual information already present in video to improve self-supervised representation learning? To answer this question, we study various pretraining architectures and objectives within the masked autoencoding framework, motivated by the success of similar methods in natural language and image understanding. We show that we can achieve significant improvements on audiovisual downstream classification tasks, surpassing the state-of-the-art on VGGSound and AudioSet. Furthermore, we can leverage our audiovisual pretraining scheme for multiple unimodal downstream tasks using a single audiovisual pretrained model. We additionally demonstrate the transferability of our representations, achieving state-of-the-art audiovisual results on Epic Kitchens without pretraining specifically for this dataset.

Integrated information theory (IIT) is a theoretical framework that provides a quantitative measure to estimate when a physical system is conscious, its degree of consciousness, and the complexity of the qualia space that the system is experiencing. Formally, IIT rests on the assumption that if a surrogate physical system can fully embed the phenomenological properties of consciousness, then the system properties must be constrained by the properties of the qualia being experienced. Following this assumption, IIT represents the physical system as a network of interconnected elements that can be thought of as a probabilistic causal graph, $\mathcal{G}$, where each node has an input-output function and all the graph is encoded in a transition probability matrix. Consequently, IIT's quantitative measure of consciousness, $\Phi$, is computed with respect to the transition probability matrix and the present state of the graph. In this paper, we provide a random search algorithm that is able to optimize $\Phi$ in order to investigate, as the number of nodes increases, the structure of the graphs that have higher $\Phi$. We also provide arguments that show the difficulties of applying more complex black-box search algorithms, such as Bayesian optimization or metaheuristics, in this particular problem. Additionally, we suggest specific research lines for these techniques to enhance the search algorithm that guarantees maximal $\Phi$.

Numerical association rule mining offers a very efficient way of mining association rules, where algorithms can operate directly with categorical and numerical attributes. These methods are suitable for mining different transaction databases, where data are entered sequentially. However, little attention has been paid to the time series numerical association rule mining, which offers a new technique for extracting association rules from time series data. This paper presents a new algorithmic method for time series numerical association rule mining and its application in smart agriculture. We offer a concept of a hardware environment for monitoring plant parameters and a novel data mining method with practical experiments. The practical experiments showed the method's potential and opened the door for further extension.

In this paper, we consider the problem where a drone has to collect semantic information to classify multiple moving targets. In particular, we address the challenge of computing control inputs that move the drone to informative viewpoints, position and orientation, when the information is extracted using a "black-box" classifier, e.g., a deep learning neural network. These algorithms typically lack of analytical relationships between the viewpoints and their associated outputs, preventing their use in information-gathering schemes. To fill this gap, we propose a novel attention-based architecture, trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL), that outputs the next viewpoint for the drone favoring the acquisition of evidence from as many unclassified targets as possible while reasoning about their movement, orientation, and occlusions. Then, we use a low-level MPC controller to move the drone to the desired viewpoint taking into account its actual dynamics. We show that our approach not only outperforms a variety of baselines but also generalizes to scenarios unseen during training. Additionally, we show that the network scales to large numbers of targets and generalizes well to different movement dynamics of the targets.

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is characterized by disorganised electrical activity in the atria and is known to be sustained by the presence of regions of fibrosis (scars) or functional cellular remodeling, both of which may lead to areas of slow conduction. Estimating the effective conductivity of the myocardium and identifying regions of abnormal propagation is therefore crucial for the effective treatment of AF. We hypothesise that the spatial distribution of tissue conductivity can be directly inferred from an array of concurrently acquired contact electrograms (EGMs). We generate a dataset of simulated cardiac AP propagation using randomised scar distributions and a phenomenological cardiac model and calculate contact electrograms at various positions on the field. A deep neural network, based on a modified U-net architecture, is trained to estimate the location of the scar and quantify conductivity of the tissue with a Jaccard index of $91$%. We adapt a wavelet-based surrogate testing analysis to confirm that the inferred conductivity distribution is an accurate representation of the ground truth input to the model. We find that the root mean square error (RMSE) between the ground truth and our predictions is significantly smaller ($p_{val}=0.007$) than the RMSE between the ground truth and surrogate samples.