Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GAN

In standard generative adversarial network (SGAN), the discriminator estimates the probability that the input data is real. The generator is trained to increase the probability that fake data is real. We argue that it should also simultaneously decrease the probability that real data is real because 1) this would account for a priori knowledge that half of the data in the mini-batch is fake, 2) this would be observed with divergence minimization, and 3) in optimal settings, SGAN would be equivalent to integral probability metric (IPM) GANs. We show that this property can be induced by using a relativistic discriminator which estimate the probability that the given real data is more realistic than a randomly sampled fake data. We also present a variant in which the discriminator estimate the probability that the given real data is more realistic than fake data, on average. We generalize both approaches to non-standard GAN loss functions and we refer to them respectively as Relativistic GANs (RGANs) and Relativistic average GANs (RaGANs). We show that IPM-based GANs are a subset of RGANs which use the identity function. Empirically, we observe that 1) RGANs and RaGANs are significantly more stable and generate higher quality data samples than their non-relativistic counterparts, 2) Standard RaGAN with gradient penalty generate data of better quality than WGAN-GP while only requiring a single discriminator update per generator update (reducing the time taken for reaching the state-of-the-art by 400%), and 3) RaGANs are able to generate plausible high resolutions images (256x256) from a very small sample (N=2011), while GAN and LSGAN cannot; these images are of significantly better quality than the ones generated by WGAN-GP and SGAN with spectral normalization.
Haematological Values for Children, Adults and Geriatrics in Nnewi and Environs, Anambra State, Nigeria

Background: Haematological parameters are very important in defining the health status of individuals. Hence availability of haematological reference ranges have been used as discriminators for individuals that are healthy or ill. Some independent factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, geographical location, lifestyle and method of assays are known to affect reference ranges, therefore in establishing reference ranges one must put these factors into consideration. Methodology: A cross sectional study was conducted in Nnewi and its environ, and a total of 1,947 subjects were selected for this study using stratified random method. Whole blood sample was collected in EDTA bottle and tri-sodium citrate bottle from each subject for the haematological parameters. Kruskal Wallis and Man-Whitney statistical tool were used for the multivariable and two variables analysis respectively, using SPSS version 21 software package. Result: Significant differences (p=0.00) were observed among the different age groups; the adults had Hb, PCV and RBC values higher when compared with that of the children and the geriatrics. PT and CT tests showed significantly lower values (p=0.00) in the adults when compared to the children and geriatrics. No significant differences (p=0.276) were seen among the children, adults and geriatrics in MCV, INR and BT. Conclusion: Some of the haematological parameters vary among the age groups; children, adults and geriatrics. The haematological values obtained from this study for children, adults and geriatrics, can serve as a reference values to guide health care providers in management of patients in Nnewi and its environ.
Minimally Invasive Surgical Treatments for Obstructive Sleep Apnea

O bstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is recognized primarily as a problem of the upper airway. Although narrowing or actual obstruction of the airway during the night can be found in only 1 or 2 areas of the upper airway, most often sleep apnea involves the entire pharyngeal upper airway passages. Three regions are considered to be of major concern: the nasal cavity region, the retropalatal region, and the retrolingual region. As the level of these 3 regions descends, the volume of tissue from the nose to the base of the tongue increases significantly. This leads to increased difficulty treating OSA with each descending region as well as to a lower success rate overall. Sometimes, the problem causing OSA is limited to only 1 region but may involve 2 or even all 3 regions. Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy and other positive airway pressure (PAP) therapies have been considered a safe and effective treatment for OSA. Unfortunately, compliance rates, even among patients who use it to successfully eliminate their symptoms, can vary from 50% to 70%. Complaints about using CPAP and other PAP therapies range from skin irritation, discomfort to the nose or nasal passages, and eye problems to claustrophobia from wearing a mask. Patients who are unable or unwilling to use CPAP therapy can be candidates for surgical treatment of OSA.2 This article discusses surgical options for adult patients who have OSA who choose not to use CPAP therapy, the reasons to perform surgery for adults who have OSA, and the desired outcomes of surgery for OSA with a focus on minimally invasive procedures. Interventions for pediatric patients are not addressed.
Multimodal Molecular Imaging: Current Status and Future Directions

Molecular imaging has emerged at the end of the last century as an interdisciplinary method involving in vivo imaging and molecular biology aiming at identifying living biological processes at a cellular and molecular level in a noninvasive manner. It has a profound role in determining disease changes and facilitating drug research and development, thus creating new medical modalities to monitor human health. At present, a variety of different molecular imaging techniques have their advantages, disadvantages, and limitations. In order to overcome these shortcomings, researchers combine two or more detection techniques to create a new imaging mode, such as multimodal molecular imaging, to obtain a better result and more information regarding monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment. In this review, we first describe the classic molecular imaging technology and its key advantages, and then, we offer some of the latest multimodal molecular imaging modes. Finally, we summarize the great challenges, the future development, and the great potential in this field.
Synthesis of Energy-Bounded Planar Caging Grasps Using Persistent Homology

For applications such as manufacturing, caging grasps restrict object motion without requiring complete immobilization, providing a robust alternative to force- and form-closure grasps. Energy-bounded cages are a new class of caging grasps that relax the requirement of complete caging in the presence of external forces such as gravity or constant velocity pushing in the horizontal plane with Coulomb friction. We address the problem of synthesizing planar energy-bounded cages by identifying gripper and force-direction configurations that maximize the energy required for the object to escape. We present Energy-Bounded-Cage-Synthesis-2-D (EBCS-2-D), a sampling-based algorithm that uses persistent homology, a recently-developed multiscale approach for topological analysis, to efficiently compute candidate rigid configurations of obstacles that form energy-bounded cages of an object from an <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\alpha $ </tex-math></inline-formula>-shape approximation to the configuration space. If a synthesized configuration has infinite escape energy then the object is completely caged. EBCS-2-D runs in <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(s^{3} + s n^{2})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> time, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$s$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of samples and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of object and obstacle vertices, where typically <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n \ll s$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. We observe runtimes closer to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(s)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for fixed <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. We implement EBCS-2-D using the persistent homology algorithms toolbox and study performance on a set of seven planar objects and four gripper types. Experiments suggest that EBCS-2-D takes 2–3 min on a 6 core processor with 200 000 pose samples. We also confirm that an rapidly-exploring random tree* motion planner is unable to find escape paths with lower energy. Physical experiments on a five degree of freedom Zymark Zymate and ABB YuMi suggest that push grasps synthesized by EBCS-2-D are robust to perturbations. Data and code are available at <uri>http://berkeleyautomation.github. io/caging/</uri>. <italic>Note to Practitioners</italic>—For automation applications in manufacturing where object models are precisely known, “energy-bounded cages” are a robust approach to robot grasping in the presence of gravity or friction. This paper presents a synthesis algorithm for planar instances, where the object can be modeled as a planar extrusion and the motion occurs in the vertical or horizontal plane. We also present experiments with robots and a website with code and data.
An experimental view on PureB silicon photodiode device physics

PureB silicon photodiode technology is distinguished by enabling nm-shallow junction depths that bring the light-sensitive region right up to the Si surface. Robust light-entrance windows can be made from as little as a layer of 2-nm-thick pure boron while obtaining low dark currents. The understanding that these attractive properties are due to the creation of a layer of fixed negative charge when boron is deposited on silicon is supported by extensive experimental observations some of which will be reviewed in this paper. For example, PureB p+n-like diodes with equally attractive I-V characteristics can be fabricated with boron layers deposited in the temperature range from 700°C down to 400°C, at which temperature no doping of the bulk Si can be expected. A number of electrical test structures, specifically developed to study the behavior of as-deposited PureB junctions will be discussed along with experiments designed to investigate the influence of post-processing steps, in particular thermal/laser annealing steps. The experiments show that post-processing can degrade the interface and cause an increase in the otherwise ideal diode saturation current even in situations where the interface is replaced by ultrashallow p+-doped bulk Si regions.
Locomotor and Elevational Distribution of a Mountainous Lizard, Takydromus hsuehshanensis, in Taiwan

mountainous lizard, Takydromus hsuehshanensis, in Taiwan. Zoological Studies 48(4): 477-484. We investigated the impact of environmental temperature on elevational distributions of a high-mountainous lizard, Takydromus hsuehshanensis, by examining the thermal sensitivity of its locomotor performance. Its sprint speed was measured at 9 body temperatures after 2 wk of acclimation at 2 different temperatures. The same measurements were performed on a closely related species, T. formosanus, which lives at lower elevations. The results indicated that (1) T. hsuehshanensis was capable of maintaining normal locomotor performance within a body temperature range which approximates summer temperatures of lowland areas; (2) T. formosanus was able to run significantly faster than T. hsuehshanensis within a certain range of body temperatures; (3) these 2 species did not differ in their thermal sensitivities of the locomotor performance; and (4) temperature acclimation treatments did not affect the locomotor performance of these 2 species. We concluded that locomotor performance is not a crucial factor limiting the distribution of T. hsuehshanensis in lowland areas. http://zoolstud.sinica. edu.tw/Journals/48.4/477.pdf
Sewage Sludge Microbial Structures and Relations to Their Sources, Treatments, and Chemical Attributes

Sewage sludges generation and their disposal have become one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. They have great microbial diversity that may impact wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) efficiency and soil quality whether used as fertilizers. Therefore, this research aimed to characterize microbial community diversity and structure of 19 sewage sludges from São Paulo, Brazil, as well as to draw their relations to sludge sources [domestic and mixed (domestic+industrial)], biological treatments (redox conditions and liming), and chemical attributes, using molecular biology as a tool. All sludges revealed high bacterial diversity, but their sources and redox operating conditions as well as liming did not consistently affect bacterial community structures. Proteobacteria was the dominant phylum followed by Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes; whereas Clostridium was the dominant genus followed by Treponema, Propionibacterium, Syntrophus, and Desulfobulbus. The sludge samples could be clustered into six groups (C1 to C6) according their microbial structure similarities. Very high pH (≥11.9) was the main sludge attribute segregating C6, that presented very distinct microbial structure from the others. Its most dominant genera were Propionibacterium > > Comamonas > Brevundimonas > Methylobacterium ∼Stenotrophomonas ∼Cloacibacterium. The other clusters’ dominant genera were Clostridium > > Treponema > Desulfobulbus ∼Syntrophus. Moreover, high Fe and S were important modulators of microbial structure in certain sludges undertaking anaerobic treatment and having relatively low N-Kj, B, and P contents (C5). However, high N-Kj, B, P, and low Fe and Al contents were typical of domestic, unlimed, and aerobically treated sludges (C1). In general, heavy metals had little impact on microbial community structure of the sludges. However, our sludges shared a common core of 77 bacteria, mostly Clostridium, Treponema, Syntrophus, and Comamonas. They should dictate microbial functioning within WWTPs, except by SS12 and SS13.
Millimeter-Wave Wideband Circularly Polarized Planar Complementary Source Antenna With Endfire Radiation

A novel circularly polarized (CP) complementary source antenna with endfire radiation is proposed in Ka-band. With the existence of two antipodal notches etched at the edges of the two broad walls of an open-ended substrate-integrated waveguide, two orthogonal electric field components radiated from the equivalent magnetic current, and the electric currents separately can be excited simultaneously. The magnitude and phase differences between the two filed components can be controlled effectively by properly tuning the dimensions of the notches. The operating mechanism and the design procedure of the antenna are analyzed in detail. Wide −10 dB impedance and 3 dB axial ratio bandwidths of 64% and 51%, a gain varying from 3.1 to 6.4 dBic, and the symmetrical radiation pattern are obtained. In order to further increase the gain and front-to-back ratio (FTBR) of the antenna, a dielectric rod structure is then integrated with the antenna. An overlapped operating bandwidth of 41%, an improved gain up to 12 dBic and the stable radiation pattern with an FTBR close to 20 dB are verified by a fabricated prototype. The antenna presented in this paper provides a new mean to design the wideband endfire CP antenna with a simple configuration, which would be attractive for future millimeter-wave wireless systems.
A Novel Geometric Framework on Gram Matrix Trajectories for Human Behavior Understanding

In this paper, we propose a novel space-time geometric representation of human landmark configurations and derive tools for comparison and classification. We model the temporal evolution of landmarks as parametrized trajectories on the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of fixed-rank. Our representation has the benefit to bring naturally a second desirable quantity when comparing shapes–the spatial covariance–in addition to the conventional affine-shape representation. We derived then geometric and computational tools for rate-invariant analysis and adaptive re-sampling of trajectories, grounding on the Riemannian geometry of the underlying manifold. Specifically, our approach involves three steps: (1) landmarks are first mapped into the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of fixed-rank to build time-parameterized trajectories; (2) a temporal warping is performed on the trajectories, providing a geometry-aware (dis-)similarity measure between them; (3) finally, a pairwise proximity function SVM is used to classify them, incorporating the (dis-)similarity measure into the kernel function. We show that such representation and metric achieve competitive results in applications as action recognition and emotion recognition from 3D skeletal data, and facial expression recognition from videos. Experiments have been conducted on several publicly available up-to-date benchmarks.
Nonlinear Antiswing Control for Crane Systems With Double-Pendulum Swing Effects and Uncertain Parameters: Design and Experiments

In practical applications, industrial cranes may exhibit double-pendulum swing effects, due to many factors, such as large payload scales and non-negligible hook masses. Currently, for double-pendulum cranes, most available methods are open-loop controllers designed based on linearized crane dynamics; even for existing closed-loop approaches, they are also mostly developed using linearized dynamics and require the exact knowledge of system parameters, which makes them sensitive to parametric uncertainties. To handle these issues, we present an adaptive antiswing control strategy for crane systems with double-pendulum swing effects and uncertain/unknown parameters, which can make the trolley accurately reach the target position with reduced overshoots and effectively eliminate the double-pendulum swing angles at the same time. A complete stability analysis, based upon the full nonlinear dynamics (i.e., without linearizing the dynamics), is included to support the theoretical derivations. We present hardware experimental results to demonstrate that the proposed controller achieves better performance than existing ones and exhibits good robustness. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by the issue of controlling a crane system when double-pendulum swing effects are excited and present. The double-pendulum effects can happen in many practical scenarios and make the crane manual operation very challenging. Moreover, most existing crane control approaches are developed based upon single-pendulum crane models and they may not work normally in the presence of the double-pendulum phenomenon. In addition, usually, the model parameters, including rope length and trolley/hook/payload masses, are not exactly known in practice, which may badly degrade the performance of the control approaches requiring exact model knowledge. Toward this end, we suggest a new control method for cranes suffering from double-pendulum effects to achieve satisfactory performance. The presented control method is robust against parametric uncertainties and it can suppress the double-pendulum swing, reduce the trolley overshoots, and improve the efficiency. Preliminary physical experiments carried out on a double-pendulum crane hardware test bed indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In our future work, we will apply the suggested control approach to industrial crane systems to improve their working efficiency.
Engineered Flock House Virus for Targeted Gene Suppression Through RNAi in Fruit Flies (Drosophila melanogaster) in Vitro and in Vivo

RNA interference (RNAi) is a powerful tool to study functional genomics in insects and the potential of using RNAi to suppress crop pests has made outstanding progress. However, the delivery of dsRNA is a challenging step in the development of RNAi bioassays. In this study, we investigated the ability of engineered Flock House virus (FHV) to induce targeted gene suppression through RNAi under in vitro and in vivo condition. As proxy for fruit flies of agricultural importance, we worked with S2 cells as derived from Drosophila melanogaster embryos, and with adult stages of D. melanogaster. We found that the expression level for all of the targeted genes were reduced by more than 70% in both the in vitro and in vivo bioassays. Furthermore, the cell viability and median survival time bioassays demonstrated that the recombinant FHV expressing target gene sequences caused a significantly higher mortality (60–73% and 100%) than the wild type virus (24 and 71%), in both S2 cells and adult insects, respectively. This is the first report showing that a single stranded RNA insect virus such as FHV, can be engineered as an effective in vitro and in vivo RNAi delivery system. Since FHV infects many insect species, the described method could be exploited to improve the efficiency of dsRNA delivery for RNAi-related studies in both FHV susceptible insect cell lines and live insects that are recalcitrant to the uptake of naked dsRNA.
An Algorithmic Framework For Differentially Private Data Analysis on Trusted Processors

Differential privacy has emerged as the main definition for private data analysis and machine learning. The {\em global} model of differential privacy, which assumes that users trust the data collector, provides strong privacy guarantees and introduces small errors in the output. In contrast, applications of differential privacy in commercial systems by Apple, Google, and Microsoft, use the {\em local model}. Here, users do not trust the data collector, and hence randomize their data before sending it to the data collector. Unfortunately, local model is too strong for several important applications and hence is limited in its applicability. In this work, we propose a framework based on trusted processors and a new definition of differential privacy called {\em Oblivious Differential Privacy}, which combines the best of both local and global models. The algorithms we design in this framework show interesting interplay of ideas from the streaming algorithms, oblivious algorithms, and differential privacy.
Use of faecal and stomach contents in assessing food niche relationships : A case study of two sympatric species of Podarcis Lizards (Sauria : Lacertidae)

La niche trophique de deux especes de lezards (Podarcis muralis et P. sicula) a ete etudiee en analysant a la fois des contenus stomacaux et des pelotes fecales. Des comparaisons ont ete conduites entre les deux especes, portant sur leurs spectres trophiques, les largeurs et les recouvrements de leurs niches alimentaires. L'analyse fondee sur les contenus stomacaux a fourni les donnees les plus completes et les plus detaillees. Podarcis sicula est apparu comme un predateur plus generaliste que P muralis, le recouvrement de niche entre ces deux especes etant tres faible. Les donnees differentes qui existent dans la litterature, montrant un plus fort recouvrement, seraient dues a des preferences alimentaires locales et a l'utilisation de methodes d'analyse differentes.