Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Specular reflection reduction with multi-flash imaging

We present a novel method to reduce the effect of specularities in digital images. Our approach relies on a simple modification of the capture setup: a multi-flash camera is used to take multiple pictures of the scene, each one with a differently positioned light source. We then formulate the problem of specular highlights reduction as solving a Poisson equation on a gradient field obtained from the input images. Experimental results are demonstrated on real and synthetic images. The entire setup can be conceivably packaged into a self-contained device, no larger than existing digital cameras.
Description, Characterization and Assessment of a BioInspired Shoulder Joint-First Link Robot for NeuroRobotic Applications

The development of innovative exoskeletons for the upper limb requires a strong collaboration between robotics and neuroscience. The robotic system will be deeply coupled to the human user and the exoskeleton design should be based on the human model in terms of biomechanics, and control and learning strategies. This paper presents the preliminary results of the design process of the Neurobotics exoskeleton (NEUROexos). A bioinspired three joints-three links robotic arm is under development for implementing bioinspired control strategies and for obtaining a human-like robotic arm to be used for assessing active exoskeletons in fully safe conditions. In particular, this paper presents the shoulder joint-first link prototype, the selected actuation system, the actuator modelling and identification, and the experimental evaluation of the prototype capability to replicate the human shoulder kinematics during the execution of a catching task
GATEKEEPER: Mostly Static Enforcement of Security and Reliability Policies for JavaScript Code

The advent of Web 2.0 has lead to the proliferation of client-side code that is typically written in JavaScript. This code is often combined -- or mashed-up -- with other code and content from disparate, mutually untrusting parties, leading to undesirable security and reliability consequences. This paper proposes GATEKEEPER, a mostly static approach for soundly enforcing security and reliability policies for JavaScript programs. GATEKEEPER is a highly extensible system with a rich, expressive policy language, allowing the hosting site administrator to formulate their policies as succinct Datalog queries. The primary application of GATEKEEPER this paper explores is in reasoning about JavaScript widgets such as those hosted by widget portals Live.com and Google/IG. Widgets submitted to these sites can be either malicious or just buggy and poorly written, and the hosting site has the authority to reject the submission of widgets that do not meet the site's security policies. To show the practicality of our approach, we describe nine representative security and reliability policies. Statically checking these policies results in 1,341 verified warnings in 684 widgets, no false negatives, due to the soundness of our analysis, and false positives affecting only two widgets.
Lying obliquely—a clinical sign of cognitive impairment: cross sectional observational study

Objective To determine if failure to spontaneously orient the body along the longitudinal axis of a hospital bed when asked to lie down is associated with cognitive impairment in older patients. Design Cross sectional observational study. Setting Neurology department of a university hospital in Germany. Participants Convenience sample of 110 older (≥60 years) inpatients with neurological conditions and 23 staff neurologists. Main outcome measures The main outcome measure was the association between the angle of the body axis and the results of three cognitive screening tests (mini-mental state examination, DemTect, and clock drawing test). Staff doctors were shown photographs of a model taken at a natural viewing able to determine their subjective perspective of what constitutes oblique. Results 110 neurological inpatients (mean age 70.9 (SD 6.8) years) were included after exclusions. Evidence of cognitive impairment was found in 34, with scores indicating dementia in eight, according to the mini-mental state examination, and in 11 according to the DemTect. Across all patients, the mean angular deviation of the body axis from the longitudinal axis of the bed (range 0-23°) correlated linearly with the mini-mental state examination (r=−0.480), DemTect (r=−0.527), and the clock drawing test (r=−0.552) scores (P<0.001 for all), even after removing age as a covariate. Overall, 90% of staff neurologists considered a minimal body angle of 7° to be oblique. Angular deviation of at least 7° predicted cognitive impairment according to the three different tests, with specificities between 89% and 96% and sensitivities between 27% and 50%. Conclusion Clinicians might suspect cognitive impairment in mobile older inpatients with neurological disorders who spontaneously position themselves obliquely when asked to lie on a bed.
Antioxidant Activity of Gymnema sylvestre Leaf Extract and Glibenclamide in Alloxan Treated Albino Rats

: Diabetes represents a state of increased oxidative stress, which is mainly based on evidence of increased lipid peroxidation or indirect evidence of reduced antioxidant enzymes in animal models. The aim of this study was to evaluate the potential activity of the aqueous extract of Gymnema sylvestre leaf extract at a dose of 300 mg/kg b wt on lipid peroxidation and antioxidant enzymes in control and alloxan-induced diabetic rats, and to compare it with the standard hypoglycemic drug, glibenclamide (3 mg/kg b wt). Gymnema sylvestre (GS) and glibenclamide (GBC) were administered orally for 21 days, and the effects on lipid peroxidation markers, including thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) and antioxidant enzymes such as glutathione-S-transferase (GST), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), superoxide dismutase (SOD), and catalase (CAT) activities in the blood and kidney were studied. The experimental findings suggested that Gymnema sylvestre considerably recovered the lipid peroxidation (TBARS) indicators to normal and increased antioxidant levels in the blood and kidney, thus confirming that the aqueous extract of Gymnema sylvestre leaves helps protect against oxidative stress and its complications. Reference drugs also showed a significant increase in the levels of GST, GPx, SOD, and CAT and decreased lipid peroxidation in the blood and kidney . GBC was found to be more effective in reducing oxidative stress.
A bio-inspired approach to task assignment of multi-robots

In this paper, a SOM (self organizing map)-based approach to task assignment of multi-robots in 3-D dynamic environments is proposed. This approach intends to mimic the operating mechanism of biological neural systems, and integrates the advantages and characteristics of biological neural systems. It is capable of dynamically planning the paths of multi-robots in 3-D environments under uncertain situations, such as when some robots are added in or broken down or when more than one robot is needed for some special task locations. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach are demonstrated by simulation studies.
EyeCon-- a motion sensing tool for creating interactive dance , music and video projections

EyeCon is a video-based motion sensing system which allows performers to generate or control music and projected images through their movements and gestures in space. It was developed Frieder Weiß as an applicationdriven project of the Palindrome inter-media performance group and is thus more a tool for artists than for researchers. EyeCon does, however, allow motion sensing according to a variety of movement parameters and lends itself to experimentation with media mapping. Unique and largely unexplored problems face composers, graphic artists and choreographers as they collaborate on interactive performance works, not the least of which is settling on schemes for mapping the various parameters of human movement to those within the world of sound and image. Among the myriad mapping alternatives, good design choices are paramount to creating effective interactive performance works. The authors have made progress in understanding the special issues involved and are devising strategies for these choices.
Surface engineering of SPIONs: role of phosphonate ligand multivalency in tailoring their efficacy

We report the design of scaffolds containing mono-, bis-, and tris-phosphonate coordinating groups, and a polyethylene glycol chain, for stabilizing superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs), using simple and versatile chemistry. We demonstrate that the number of anchoring phosphonate sites on the ligand influence the colloidal stability, magnetic and biological properties of SPIONs, and the latter do not solely depend on attaching moieties that can enhance their aqueous dispersion. These parameters can be tailored by the number of conjugation sites on the ligand, as evidenced from dynamic light scattering at various salt concentrations, magnetic relaxivities and cell viability studies.
Semantically Coherent Co-Segmentation and Reconstruction of Dynamic Scenes

In this paper we propose a framework for spatially and temporally coherent semantic co-segmentation and reconstruction of complex dynamic scenes from multiple static or moving cameras. Semantic co-segmentation exploits the coherence in semantic class labels both spatially, between views at a single time instant, and temporally, between widely spaced time instants of dynamic objects with similar shape and appearance. We demonstrate that semantic coherence results in improved segmentation and reconstruction for complex scenes. A joint formulation is proposed for semantically coherent object-based co-segmentation and reconstruction of scenes by enforcing consistent semantic labelling between views and over time. Semantic tracklets are introduced to enforce temporal coherence in semantic labelling and reconstruction between widely spaced instances of dynamic objects. Tracklets of dynamic objects enable unsupervised learning of appearance and shape priors that are exploited in joint segmentation and reconstruction. Evaluation on challenging indoor and outdoor sequences with hand-held moving cameras shows improved accuracy in segmentation, temporally coherent semantic labelling and 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes.
Application of the Generalized Clapeyron Equation to Freezing Point Depression and Unfrozen Water Content

Freezing point and unfrozen water content are key parameters in modeling the heat and mass transfer under the cyclic change of atmosphere temperature. It is theoretically revealed the relation between the measured pore pressure and true pore pressure with physicochemical interactions. A new generalized Clapeyron equation is derived, which addresses the relationship among the measured pore water, ice‐liquid capillary pressure, and pore solution concentration for the frozen soil. The generalized Clapeyron equation is applied to derive the expressions for the freezing point and unfrozen water content in frozen soils at various thermodynamical conditions. The freezing point of soil is calculated and compared with the experimental results, showing that the freezing point depression becomes more pronounced as water content decreases and solution concentration increases. It is also shown that the NaCl solution with relatively high concentration in soil pore approximates the ideal dilute solution while Na2CO3 and some other solutions in soil are significantly different than the ideal dilute solution. Upon assuming the unfrozen water content is only determined by the capillary pressure, the Clapeyron equation links the soil water characteristic curve into the soil freezing characteristic curve. The unfrozen water content in the saline frozen soil and the frozen soil under overburden pressure is also calculated according to the expression derived from the generalized Clapeyron equation.
Automatic data partitioning in software transactional memories

We investigate to which extent data partitioning can help improve the performance of software transactional memory (STM). Our main idea is that the access patterns of the various data structures of an application might be sufficiently different so that it would be beneficial to tune the behavior of the STM for individual data partitions. We evaluate our approach using standard transactional memory benchmarks. We show that these applications contain partitions with different characteristics and, despite the runtime overhead introduced by partition tracking and dynamic tuning, that partitioning provides significant performance improvements.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Money, Happiness, and Aspirations: an Experimental Study

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the scientific study of happiness. Economists, in particular, find that happiness increases in income but decreases in income aspirations, and this work prompts examination of how aspirations form and adapt over time. This paper presents results from the first experimental study of how multiple factors—past payments, social comparisons, and expectations—influence aspiration formation and reported satisfaction. I find that expectations and social comparisons significantly affect reported satisfaction, and that subjects choose to compare themselves with similar subjects when possible. These findings support an aspirations-based theory of happiness.
Suicidal Behaviour in People with HIV/AIDS: A Review

Objective: To review the existing literature on suicidal behaviour in people with HIV/AIDS infection. Method: A search on the Index Medicus/MEDLINE database was performed, for articles that investigated and/or reviewed suicidal behaviour in people with HIV at any stage of the illness. Only articles written in English were used in this review. Results: Most studies have been done on homosexual/bisexual groups, with little data available for heterosexual populations or women. Studies show an increased rate of suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and completed suicide in individuals with HIV/AIDS. Of note, there is a high prevalence of psychiatric illness and substance abuse in those with suicidal behaviour. Conclusions: The increased rate of suicidal behaviour in HIV-infected persons is consistent with findings in other medically ill groups with chronic, life-threatening disorders. However, assessment of any possible direct effect of HIV/AIDS on suicidal behaviour is confounded by methodological limitations of many of the studies. More longitudinal studies encompassing other affected groups including heterosexual populations and women are needed to elucidate the relationship between suicidal behaviour and HIV/AIDS.
Indirect Correspondence-Based Robust Extrinsic Calibration of LiDAR and Camera

LiDAR and cameras have been broadly utilized in computer vision and autonomous vehicle applications. However, in order to convert data between the local coordinate systems, we must estimate the rigid body transformation between the sensors. In this paper, we propose a robust extrinsic calibration algorithm that can be implemented easily and has small calibration error. The extrinsic calibration parameters are estimated by minimizing the distance between corresponding features projected onto the image plane. The features are edge and centerline features on a v-shaped calibration target. The proposed algorithm contributes two ways to improve the calibration accuracy. First, we use different weights to distance between a point and a line feature according to the correspondence accuracy of the features. Second, we apply a penalizing function to exclude the influence of outliers in the calibration datasets. Additionally, based on our robust calibration approach for a single LiDAR-camera pair, we introduce a joint calibration that estimates the extrinsic parameters of multiple sensors at once by minimizing one objective function with loop closing constraints. We conduct several experiments to evaluate the performance of our extrinsic calibration algorithm. The experimental results show that our calibration method has better performance than the other approaches.
Linear Copositive Lyapunov Functions for Continuous-Time Positive Switched Systems

Continuous-time positive systems, switching among p subsystems, are introduced, and a complete characterization for the existence of a common linear copositive Lyapunov function for all the subsystems is provided. When the subsystems are obtained by applying different feedback control laws to the same continuous-time single-input positive system, the above characterization leads to a very easy checking procedure.
The point-range tree: a data structure for indexing intervals

<italic>In this paper, we propose a data structure, the Point-Range Tree (PR-Tree), specifically designed for indexing intervals. With the PR-Tree, a point data can be queried against a set of intervals to determine which of those intervals overlap the point. The PR-tree allows dynamic insertions and deletions while it maintains itself balanced. A balanced PR-Tree takes &Ogr;</italic>(log <italic>n</italic>) <italic>time for search. Insertion, deletion, and storage space have worst case requirements of &Ogr;</italic>(<italic>n</italic> log <italic>n</italic> + <italic>m</italic>), <italic>&Ogr;</italic>(<italic>n</italic> log<supscrpt>2</supscrpt> <italic>n</italic> + <italic>m</italic>), <italic>and &Ogr;</italic>(<italic>n</italic> log <italic>n</italic>), <italic>respectively, where n is the total number of intervals in the tree, and m the number of nodes visited during insertion and deletion. A modified version of the PR-Tree is also developed to minimize space usage. An additional advantage of the PR-Tree is that it can be easily extended to multi-dimensional domains. </italic>
Online Community Response to Major Disaster: A Study of Tianya Forum in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake

Immediately after the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, the netizens reacted and participated in the disaster response in many ways. This work examined a popular Chinese discussion forum during the first week after the earthquake, adopting both quantitative and qualitative approaches. A new message classification scheme was developed to categorize 2,266 discussion threads posted to the forum. Four important roles played by the forum were identified and further examined. Design implications for disaster response systems were drawn.
The Algorithm for Generating Ambient Occlusion Maps Based on the Differential Algorithm

This paper introduces an algorithm for generating ambient occlusion maps based on the differential algorithm, aiming to enhance the environmental occlusion effects in graphic rendering through advanced computational techniques. The algorithm is inspired by the principles of the differential algorithm and the lighting information stored in normal maps. By inputting a differential step size, it cleverly samples and computes the gradient information of the normal map, resulting in the generation of high-quality ambient occlusion maps. The unique advantage of the algorithm lies in its sensitivity to lighting information and its flexible application of the differential step size. By effectively capturing subtle gradient variations in the normal map, it provides a more realistic and refined effect for the final physically based rendering (PBR) material graphics rendering.
Reestimation and Best-First Parsing Algorithm for Probabilistic Dependency Grammars

This paper presents a reesthnation algorithm and a best-first parsing (BFP) algorithm for probabilistic dependency grummars (PDG). The proposed reestimation algorithm is a variation of the inside-outside algorithm adapted to probabilistic dependency grammars. The inside-outside algorithm is a probabilistic parameter reestimation algorithm for phrase structure grammars in Chomsky Normal Form (CNF). Dependency grammar represents a sentence structure as a set of dependency links between arbitrary two words in the sentence, and can not be reestimated by the inside-outside algorithm directly. In this paper, non-constituent objects, complete-llnk and complete-sequence are defined as basic units of dependency structure, and the probabilities of them are reestimated. The reestimation and BFP algorithms utilize CYK-style chart and the nonconstituent objects as chart entries. Both algoritbrn~ have O(n s) time complexities. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n There have been many efforts to induce grammars automatically from corpus by utilizing the vast amount of corpora with various degrees of annotations. Corpus-based, stochastic grammar induction has many profitable advantages such as simple acquisition and extension of linguistic knowledges, easy treatment of ambiguities by virtue of its innate scoring mechanism, and fail-soi~ reaction to ill-formed or extra-grammatical sentences. Most of corpus-based grammar inductions have concentrated on phrase structure gram° mars (Black, Lafferty, and Roukos, 1992, Lari and Young, 1990, Magerman, 1994). The typical works on phrase structure grammar induction are as follows(Lari and Young, 1990, Carroll, 1992b): (1) generating all the possible rules, (2) reestimating the probabilities of rules using the inside-outside algorithm, and (3) finally finding a stable grammar by eliminating the rules which have probability values close to 0. Generating all the rules is done by restricting the number of nonterminals and/or the number of the right hand side symbols in the rules and enumerating all the possible combinations. Chen extracts rules by some heuristics and reestimates the probabilities of rules using the inside-outside algorithm (Chen, 1995). The inside-outside algorithm learns a grammar by iteratively adjusting the rule probabilities to minimize the training corpus entropy. It is extensively used as reestimation algorithm for phrase structure grammars. Most of the works on phrase structure grammar induction, however, have partially succeeded. Estimating phrase structure grammars by minimizing the training corpus on-
Interesting conjugate points in formation constrained optimal multi-agent coordination

In this paper, an optimal coordinated motion planning problem is formulated where multiple agents have to reach given destination positions starting from given initial positions, subject to constraints on the admissible formation patterns. Solutions to the problem are reinterpreted as distance minimizing geodesies on a certain manifold with boundary. A geodesic on this manifold that possesses conjugate points will not be distance-minimizing beyond its first conjugate point. We study a particular instance of the problem, where a number of initially aligned agents tries to switch positions by rotating around their common centroid. We characterize analytically the complete set of conjugate points of a geodesic that naturally arises as a candidate solution. This allows us to prove that the geodesic does not correspond to an optimal coordinated motion when the angle of rotation exceeds a threshold that decreases to zero as the number of agents increases. Moreover, infinitesimal perturbations that improve the performance of the geodesic after it passes the conjugate points are characterized by a family of orthogonal polynomials.