Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved Visual Odometry based on Transitivity Error in Disparity Space: A Third-eye Approach

Accurate estimation of ego-motion heavily relies on correct point correspondences in the context of visual odometry. In order to ensure a metric reconstruction of camera motion, we can refer to the 3D structure of the scene. In this paper we present an indicator for evaluating the accuracy of stereo-based 3D point measurements as well as for filtering out low-confidence correspondences for ego-motion estimation. In a typical binocular system, the left and right images are matched to produce a disparity map. For a trinocular system, however, the map can be derived indirectly via disparity maps of both cameras with respect to the third camera. The difference between an explicitly matched disparity map and its indirect construction defines a transitivity error in disparity space (TED). We evaluate the effectiveness of TED from different perspectives, using a trinocular vehicle-mounted vision system. Results presented in 3D Euclidean space, or in 2D images show improvements of more than 7.5%, indicating that, by taking TED into account, more consistency is ensured for ego-motion estimation.
Method of Calculating the Free Energy of Three-Dimensional Ising-Like System in an External Field with the Use of the $\rho^6$ Model

The microscopic approach to calculating the free energy of a three-dimensional Ising-like system in a homogeneous external field is developed in the higher non-Gaussian approximation (the $\rho^6$ model) at temperatures above the critical value of $T_c$ ($T_c$ is the phase-transition temperature in the absence of an external field). The free energy of the system is found by separating the contributions from the short- and long-wave spin-density oscillation modes taking into account both the temperature and field fluctuations of the order parameter. Our analytical calculations do not involve power series in the scaling variable and are valid in the whole field-temperature plane near the critical point including the region in the vicinity of the limiting field $\tilde h_c$, which divides external fields into the weak and strong ones (i.e., the crossover region). In this region, the temperature and field effects on the system are equivalent, the scaling variable is of the order of unity, and power series are not efficient. The obtained expression for the free energy contains the leading terms and terms determining the temperature and field confluent corrections.
Host-Range Restriction of Vaccinia Virus E3L Deletion Mutant Can Be Overcome In Vitro, but Not In Vivo, by Expression of the Influenza Virus NS1 Protein

During the last decades, research focused on vaccinia virus (VACV) pathogenesis has been intensified prompted by its potential beneficial application as a vector for vaccine development and anti-cancer therapies, but also due to the fear of its potential use as a bio-terrorism threat. Recombinant viruses lacking a type I interferon (IFN) antagonist are attenuated and hence good vaccine candidates. However, vaccine virus growth requires production in IFN-deficient systems, and thus viral IFN antagonists that are active in vitro, yet not in vivo, are of great value. The VACV E3 and influenza virus NS1 proteins are distinct double-stranded RNA-binding proteins that play an important role in pathogenesis by inhibiting the mammalian IFN-regulated innate antiviral response. Based on the functional similarities between E3 and NS1, we investigated the ability of NS1 to replace the biological functions of E3 of VACV in both in vitro and in vivo systems. For this, we generated a VACV recombinant virus lacking the E3L gene, yet expressing NS1 (VVΔE3L/NS1). Our study revealed that NS1 can functionally replace E3 in cultured cells, rescuing the protein synthesis blockade, and preventing apoptosis and RNA breakdown. In contrast, in vivo the VVΔE3L/NS1 virus was highly attenuated after intranasal inoculation, as it was unable to spread to the lungs and other organs. These results indicate that there are commonalities but also functional differences in the roles of NS1 and E3 as inhibitors of the innate antiviral response, which could potentially be utilized for vaccine production purposes in the future.
Interleukin-17 Expression Positively Correlates with Disease Severity of Lupus Nephritis by Increasing Anti-Double-Stranded DNA Antibody Production in a Lupus Model Induced by Activated Lymphocyte Derived DNA

Lupus nephritis is one of the most serious manifestations and one of the strongest predictors of a poor outcome in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Recent evidence implicated a potential role of interlukin-17 (IL-17) in the pathogenesis of lupus nephritis. However, the correlation between IL-17 expression level and the severity of lupus nephritis still remains incompletely understood. In this study, we found that serum IL-17 expression level was associated with the severity of lupus nephritis, which was evaluated by histopathology of kidney sections and urine protein. Of note, we showed that enforced expression of IL-17 using adenovirus construct that expresses IL-17 could enhance the severity of lupus nephritis, while blockade of IL-17 using neutralizing antibody resulted in decreased severity of lupus nephritis. Consistently, we observed an impaired induction of lupus nephritis in IL-17-deficient mice. Further, we revealed that IL-17 expression level was associated with immune complex deposition and complement activation in kidney. Of interest, we found that IL-17 was crucial for increasing anti-double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) antibody production in SLE. Our results suggested that IL-17 expression level positively correlated with the severity of lupus nephritis, at least in part, because of its contribution to anti-dsDNA antibody production. These findings provided a novel mechanism for how IL-17 expression level correlated with disease pathogenesis and suggested that management of IL-17 expression level was a potential and promising approach for treatment of lupus nephritis.
An Application of Uncertain Reasoning to Requirements Engineering

This paper examines the use of Bayesian Networks to tackle one of the tougher problems in requirements engineering, translating user requirements into system requirements. The approach taken is to model domain knowledge as Bayesian Network fragments that are glued together to form a complete view of the domain specific system requirements. User requirements are introduced as evidence and the propagation of belief is used to determine what are the appropriate system requirements as indicated by user requirements. This concept has been demonstrated in the development of a system specification and the results are presented here.
Potential Therapies by Stem Cell-Derived Exosomes in CNS Diseases: Focusing on the Neurogenic Niche

Neurodegenerative disorders are one of the leading causes of death and disability and one of the biggest burdens on health care systems. Novel approaches using various types of stem cells have been proposed to treat common neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, or stroke. Moreover, as the secretome of these cells appears to be of greater benefit compared to the cells themselves, the extracellular components responsible for its therapeutic benefit have been explored. Stem cells, as well as most cells, release extracellular vesicles such as exosomes, which are nanovesicles able to target specific cell types and thus to modify their function by delivering proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. Exosomes have recently been tested in vivo and in vitro as therapeutic conveyors for the treatment of diseases. As such, they could be engineered to target specific populations of cells within the CNS. Considering the fact that many degenerative brain diseases have an impact on adult neurogenesis, we discuss how the modulation of the adult neurogenic niches may be a therapeutic target of stem cell-derived exosomes. These novel approaches should be examined in cellular and animal models to provide better, more effective, and specific therapeutic tools in the future.
Do Monetary Incentives Crowd Out Intrinsic Motivation ? A Field Test in the Workplace . ∗

Economists have long been intrigued by an influential strand of psychology positing that monetary payments may crowd out an agent’s intrinsic interest in a task and thus harm performance. We present the first explicit test in economics for whether this crowding out occurs in the workplace. Further, we investigate whether the evidence for crowding out in psychology is consistent with a different hypothesis—retaliation or disappointment from expected-but-unfulfilled payments— formalized in a novel model of reference-dependent reciprocity. Our field experiment, building on the two-session canonical test in psychology for crowding out, invites intrinsically motivated volunteers for a blind tasting, a common task in market research. After dealing with the typical confounds in the canonical test—ambiguity in the identification of an intrinsically motivating task, satiation and fatigue—we find evidence not for crowding out, but rather for the retaliation or disappointment hypothesis. JEL Codes: C93, D03, J33, M52, M55. ∗We thank Kaitlyn Croteau, Cathy Le, Tiffany Lin, Karen O’Brien and Ignacio Osorio for excellent research assistance. We also thank Jason Abaluck, Daylian Cain, Jason Dana, Kelsey Jack, Lisa Kahn, Botond Kőszegi, Ian Larkin, Ulrike Malmendier, Stephan Meier, Pedro Rey-Biel, Olav Sorenson, Amy Wrzesniewski and seminar participants at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad de Chile, University of Warwick, Yale University and the 36th Annual NBER Summer Institute in Personnel Economics for comments. This research was partly funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Whitebox Behavioral Grants at Yale University. †constanca.esteves-sorenson@yale.edu, Yale University. ‡rosario.macera@uc.cl, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. §brocer1@southernct.edu, Southern Connecticut State University.
On Lower Bounds for Regret in Reinforcement Learning

This is a brief technical note to clarify the state of lower bounds on regret for reinforcement learning. In particular, this paper: - Reproduces a lower bound on regret for reinforcement learning, similar to the result of Theorem 5 in the journal UCRL2 paper (Jaksch et al 2010). - Clarifies that the proposed proof of Theorem 6 in the REGAL paper (Bartlett and Tewari 2009) does not hold using the standard techniques without further work. We suggest that this result should instead be considered a conjecture as it has no rigorous proof. - Suggests that the conjectured lower bound given by (Bartlett and Tewari 2009) is incorrect and, in fact, it is possible to improve the scaling of the upper bound to match the weaker lower bounds presented in this paper. We hope that this note serves to clarify existing results in the field of reinforcement learning and provides interesting motivation for future work.
Wideband measurements of angle and delay dispersion for outdoor and indoor peer-to-peer radio channels at 1920 MHz

The paper presents spatio-temporal measurements for the peer-to-peer radio channel at a center frequency of 1920 MHz with 140 MHz of radio-frequency bandwidth. The measurements were taken using a spread-spectrum channel sounder and an automated spatial probing system that uses precise computer-controlled positioning and orientation of omnidirectional and directional (30/spl deg/ beamwidth) antennas to measure both the angles-of-arrival and time-delays of multipath components. We use a unitless definition of angular spread which we proposed previously (see Durgin, G.D. and Rappaport, T.S., IEE Electron. Lett., vol.34, no.25, p.2431-2, 1998). Transmitter-receiver configurations include six outdoor-to-outdoor cross-campus locations at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (17-219 ns rms delay spread, 0.36-0.91 angular spread), three outdoor-to-indoor locations (27-34 ns rms delay spread, 0.78-0.98 angular spread), and three indoor-to-indoor locations (29-45 ns rms delay spread, 0.73-0.90 angular spread). The paper also quantitatively describes a trend that shows how angular spread increases with increasing delay spread.
Effects of semantic relatedness on recall of stimuli preceding emotional oddballs

Semantic and episodic memory networks function as highly interconnected systems, both relying on the hippocampal/medial temporal lobe complex (HC/MTL). Episodic memory encoding triggers the retrieval of semantic information, serving to incorporate contextual relationships between the newly acquired memory and existing semantic representations. While emotional material augments episodic memory encoding at the time of stimulus presentation, interactions between emotion and semantic memory that contribute to subsequent episodic recall are not well understood. Using a modified oddball task, we examined the modulatory effects of negative emotion on semantic interactions with episodic memory by measuring the free-recall of serially presented neutral or negative words varying in semantic relatedness. We found increased free-recall for words related to and preceding emotionally negative oddballs, suggesting that negative emotion can indirectly facilitate episodic free-recall by enhancing semantic contributions during encoding. Our findings demonstrate the ability of emotion and semantic memory to interact to mutually enhance free-recall. (JINS, 2008, 14, 620–628.)
Detecting similar repositories on GitHub

GitHub contains millions of repositories among which many are similar with one another (i.e., having similar source codes or implementing similar functionalities). Finding similar repositories on GitHub can be helpful for software engineers as it can help them reuse source code, build prototypes, identify alternative implementations, explore related projects, find projects to contribute to, and discover code theft and plagiarism. Previous studies have proposed techniques to detect similar applications by analyzing API usage patterns and software tags. However, these prior studies either only make use of a limited source of information or use information not available for projects on GitHub. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that can effectively detect similar repositories on GitHub. Our approach is designed based on three heuristics leveraging two data sources (i.e., GitHub stars and readme files) which are not considered in previous works. The three heuristics are: repositories whose readme files contain similar contents are likely to be similar with one another, repositories starred by users of similar interests are likely to be similar, and repositories starred together within a short period of time by the same user are likely to be similar. Based on these three heuristics, we compute three relevance scores (i.e., readme-based relevance, stargazer-based relevance, and time-based relevance) to assess the similarity between two repositories. By integrating the three relevance scores, we build a recommendation system called RepoPal to detect similar repositories. We compare RepoPal to a prior state-of-the-art approach CLAN using one thousand Java repositories on GitHub. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that RepoPal achieves a higher success rate, precision and confidence over CLAN.
Presence of Actinobacterial and Fungal Communities in Clean and Petroleum Hydrocarbon Contaminated Subsurface Soil

Relatively little is known about the microbial communities adapted to soil environments contaminated with aged complex hydrocarbon mixtures, especially in the subsurface soil layers. In this work we studied the microbial communities in two different soil profiles down to the depth of 7 m which originated from a 30-year-old site contaminated with petroleum hydrocarbons (PHCs) and from a clean site next to the contaminated site. The concentration of oxygen in the contaminated soil profile was strongly reduced in soil layers below 1 m depth but not in the clean soil profile. Total microbial biomass and community composition was analyzed by phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) measurements. The diversity of fungi and actinobacteria was investigated more in detail by construction of rDNA-based clone libraries. The results revealed that there was a significant and diverse microbial community in subsoils at depth below 2 m, also in conditions where oxygen was limiting. The diversity of actinobacteria was different in the two soil profiles; the contaminated soil profile was dominated by Mycobacterium -related sequences whereas sequences from the clean soil samples were related to other, generally uncultured organisms, some of which may represent two new subclasses of actinobacteria. One dominating fungal sequence which matched with the ascomycotes Acremonium sp. and Paecilomyces sp. was identified both in clean and in contaminated soil profiles. Thus, although the relative amounts of fungi and actinobacteria in these microbial communities were highest in the upper soil layers, many representatives from these groups were found in hydrocarbon contaminated subsoils even under oxygen limited conditions.
Fast and Adaptive Detection of Pulmonary Nodules in Thoracic CT Images Using a Hierarchical Vector Quantization Scheme

Computer-aided detection (CADe) of pulmonary nodules is critical to assisting radiologists in early identification of lung cancer from computed tomography (CT) scans. This paper proposes a novel CADe system based on a hierarchical vector quantization (VQ) scheme. Compared with the commonly-used simple thresholding approach, the high-level VQ yields a more accurate segmentation of the lungs from the chest volume. In identifying initial nodule candidates (INCs) within the lungs, the low-level VQ proves to be effective for INCs detection and segmentation, as well as computationally efficient compared to existing approaches. False-positive (FP) reduction is conducted via rule-based filtering operations in combination with a feature-based support vector machine classifier. The proposed system was validated on 205 patient cases from the publically available online Lung Image Database Consortium database, with each case having at least one juxta-pleural nodule annotation. Experimental results demonstrated that our CADe system obtained an overall sensitivity of 82.7% at a specificity of 4 FPs/scan. Especially for the performance on juxta-pleural nodules, we observed 89.2% sensitivity at 4.14 FPs/scan. With respect to comparable CADe systems, the proposed system shows outperformance and demonstrates its potential for fast and adaptive detection of pulmonary nodules via CT imaging.
Contact Binaries with Additional Components . I The Extant Data

We have attempted to establish an observational evidence for presence of distant companions which may have acquired and/or absorbed the angular momentum during evolution of multiple systems thus facilitating or enabling formation of contact binaries. In this preliminary investigation we use several techniques (some of them distance-independent) and mostly disregard detection biases of individual techniques in an attempt to establish a lower limit to the frequency of triple systems. While the whole sample of 151 contact binary stars brighter than V max = 10 mag. gives a firm lower limit of 42% ± 5%, the corresponding number for the much better observed Northern-sky sub-sample is 59% ±8%. These estimates indicate that most contact binary stars exist in multiple systems.
Circadian Rhythms in the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus are Temperature-Compensated and Phase-Shifted by Heat Pulses In Vitro

Temperature compensation and the effects of heat pulses on rhythm phase were assessed in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). Circadian neuronal rhythms were recorded from the rat SCN at 37 and 31°Cin vitro. Rhythm period was 23.9 ± 0.1 and 23.7 ± 0.1 hr at 37 and 31°C, respectively; the Q10for tau was 0.99. Heat pulses were administered at various circadian times (CTs) by increasing SCN temperature from 34 to 37°C for 2 hr. Phase delays and advances were observed during early and late subjective night, respectively, and no phase shifts were obtained during midsubjective day. Maximum phase delays of 2.2 ± 0.3 hr were obtained at CT 14, and maximum phase advances of 3.5 ± 0.2 hr were obtained at CT 20. Phase delays were not blocked by a combination of NMDA [AP-5 (100 μm)] and non-NMDA [CNQX (10 μm)] receptor antagonists or by tetrodotoxin (TTX) at concentrations of 1 or 3 μm. The phase response curve for heat pulses is similar to ones obtained with light pulses for behavioral rhythms. These data demonstrate that circadian pacemaker period in the rat SCN is temperature-compensated over a physiological range of temperatures. Phase delays were not caused by activation of ionotropic glutamate receptors, release of other neurotransmitters, or temperature-dependent increases in metabolism associated with action potentials. Heat pulses may have phase-shifted rhythms by directly altering transcriptional or translational events in SCN pacemaker cells.
Campylobacter genotyping to determine the source of human infection.

BACKGROUND Campylobacter species cause a high proportion of bacterial gastroenteritis cases and are a significant burden on health care systems and economies worldwide; however, the relative contributions of the various possible sources of infection in humans are unclear. METHODS National-scale genotyping of Campylobacter species was used to quantify the relative importance of various possible sources of human infection. Multilocus sequence types were determined for 5674 isolates obtained from cases of human campylobacteriosis in Scotland from July 2005 through September 2006 and from 999 Campylobacter species isolates from 3417 contemporaneous samples from potential human infection sources. These data were supplemented with 2420 sequence types from other studies, representing isolates from a variety of sources. The clinical isolates were attributed to possible sources on the basis of their sequence types with use of 2 population genetic models, STRUCTURE and an asymmetric island model. RESULTS The STRUCTURE and the asymmetric island models attributed most clinical isolates to chicken meat (58% and 78% of Campylobacter jejuni and 40% and 56% of Campylobacter coli isolates, respectively), identifying it as the principal source of Campylobacter infection in humans. Both models attributed the majority of the remaining isolates to ruminant sources, with relatively few isolates attributed to wild bird, environment, swine, and turkey sources. CONCLUSIONS National-scale genotyping was a practical and efficient methodology for the quantification of the contributions of different sources to human Campylobacter infection. Combined with the knowledge that retail chicken is routinely contaminated with Campylobacter, these results are consistent with the view that the largest reductions in human campylobacteriosis in industrialized countries will come from interventions that focus on the poultry industry.