Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Control of Robots with Visco-Elastic Joints

Feedback linearization is a viable nonlinear control technique for solving trajectory tracking problems in robots with (and without) elastic joints. However, the additional presence of dissipative effects due to joint viscosity destroys full state feedback linearizability. For robots with visco-elastic joints, the use of a static state feedback can achieve at most input-output linearization and decoupling, since an internal nonlinear dynamics is left in the closed-loop system. Although the stability properties of this unobservable dynamics still guarantee perfect output tracking in nominal conditions, control design based on static feedback becomes ill-conditioned as joint viscosity decreases. Instead, resorting to a nonlinear dynamic state feedback leads to the same closed-loop properties, but with a regularized control effort for any level of joint viscosity and elasticity. Static and dynamic nonlinear feedback control designs are presented for a reduced and a complete dynamic model of visco-elastic joint robots. A numerical comparison on a simple case study illustrates the benefits of the dynamic input-output linearization approach.
Autosomal Recessive Hypercholesterolemia Protein Interacts with and Regulates the Cell Surface Level of Alzheimer's Amyloid β Precursor Protein*

The familial Alzheimer's disease gene product amyloid β protein precursor (AβPP) is sequentially processed by β- and γ-secretases to generate the Aβ peptide. Although much is known about the biochemical pathway leading to Aβ formation, because extracellular aggregates of Aβ peptides are considered the cause of Alzheimer's disease, the biological role of AβPP processing is only recently being investigated. Cleavage of AβPP by γ-secretase releases, together with Aβ, a COOH-terminal AβPP intracellular domain, termed AID. Hoping to gain clues about proteins that regulates AβPP processing and function, we used the yeast two-hybrid system to identify proteins that interact with the AID region of AβPP. One of the interactors isolated is the autosomal recessive hypercholesterolemia (ARH) adapter protein. This molecular interaction is confirmed in vitro and in vivo by fluorescence resonance energy transfer and in cell lysates. Moreover, we show that reduction of ARH expression by RNA interference results in increased levels of cell membrane AβPP. These data assert a physiological role for ARH in AβPP internalization, transport, and/or processing.
Combined Influence of the Arctic Oscillation and the Scandinavia Pattern on Spring Surface Air Temperature Variations Over Eurasia

The present study investigated the joint impacts of the spring Arctic Oscillation (AO) and the Scandinavia (SCAND) teleconnection pattern on spring surface air temperature (SAT) variations over the midhigh latitude Eurasia. It is found that the connection of the spring AO (SCAND) to the first two empirical orthogonal function (EOF) modes of the spring Eurasian SAT variations depends strongly on the phase of the spring SCAND (AO) index. The EOF1 and EOF2 modes display same sign variation and tripole pattern, respectively. In the in‐phase AO‐SCAND years, the mid‐high latitude Eurasia is covered by same sign SAT anomalies, and the spring AO and SCAND indices both have a strong (weak) connection with the EOF1 (EOF2) mode. In the out‐of‐phase AO‐SCAND years, the SAT anomalies over the mid‐high latitude Eurasia are featured by a tripole pattern, and the connection of the spring AO and SCAND indices with the EOF1 (EOF2) is insignificant (significant). Differences in the distribution of SAT anomalies between the in‐phase and out‐of‐phase AO‐SCAND years are attributed to the constructive and destructive superposition of atmospheric circulation anomalies related to the spring AO and SCAND indices. The observed joint impacts of the spring AO and SCAND on spring Eurasian SAT variations are captured by a historical simulation of the flexible global ocean‐atmosphere‐land system model, spectral version 2. Analysis indicates that the prediction skill of the spring Eurasian SAT variations related to the first two EOF modes is enhanced when taking both the spring AO and SCAND signals into account.
Private information retrieval

We describe schemes that enable a user to access k replicated copies of a database (k/spl ges/2) and privately retrieve information stored in the database. This means that each individual database gets no information on the identity of the item retrieved by the user. For a single database, achieving this type of privacy requires communicating the whole database, or n bits (where n is the number of bits in the database). Our schemes use the replication to gain substantial saving. In particular, we have: A two database scheme with communication complexity of O(n/sup 1/3/). A scheme for a constant number, k, of databases with communication complexity O(n/sup 1/k/). A scheme for 1/3 log/sub 2/ n databases with polylogarithmic (in n) communication complexity.
Reliable Provisioning of Spot Instances for Compute-intensive Applications

Cloud computing providers are now offering their unused resources for leasing in the spot market, which has been considered the first step towards a full-fledged market economy for computational resources. Spot instances are virtual machines (VMs) available at lower prices than their standard on-demand counterparts. These VMs will run for as long as the current price is lower than the maximum bid price users are willing to pay per hour. Spot instances have been increasingly used for executing compute-intensive applications. In spite of an apparent economical advantage, due to an intermittent nature of biddable resources, application execution times may be prolonged or they may not finish at all. This paper proposes a resource allocation strategy that addresses the problem of running compute-intensive jobs on a pool of intermittent virtual machines, while also aiming to run applications in a fast and economical way. To mitigate potential unavailability periods, a multifaceted fault-aware resource provisioning policy is proposed. Our solution employs price and runtime estimation mechanisms, as well as three fault-tolerance techniques, namely check pointing, task duplication and migration. We evaluate our strategies using trace-driven simulations, which take as input real price variation traces, as well as an application trace from the Parallel Workload Archive. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of executing applications on spot instances, respecting QoS constraints, despite occasional failures.
Consequences of Suppressing Thoughts about Tinnitus and the Effects of Cognitive Distraction on Brain Activity in Tinnitus Patients

Tinnitus is the perception of sound in the absence of any appropriate external stimulus. Based on the clinical observation that tinnitus patients may distract themselves from their sounds, we performed an experimental test on the effects of suppressing thoughts about tinnitus with 45 tinnitus patients, to systematically evaluate the immediate consequences of suppressing thought vs. attending to tinnitus. Suppression instructions tended to lead to a subsequent decrease in tinnitus-related thoughts, whereas attention to tinnitus resulted in an increase in such thoughts. No effects were seen in a control group who neither suppressed nor attended to their tinnitus. In an independent positron emission tomography study of cerebral blood flow with 8 patients we found that silent backward counting (‘serial sevens test’) led to a decrease in neural activity in auditory cortex, as well as perceived decrease of tinnitus loudness and annoyance. Thus, distraction that altered the tinnitus experience seemed to attenuate auditory cortex activity.
An orthotopic xenograft model of human nonseminomatous germ cell tumour

We have established the first example of an orthotopic xenograft model of human nonseminomatous germ cell tumour (NSGCT). This reproducible model exhibits many clinically relevant features including metastases to the retroperitoneal lymph nodes and lungs, making it an ideal tool for research into the development and progression of testicular germ cell tumours. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign http://www.bjcancer. com
Automatic translation of Fortran to JVM bytecode

This paper reports on the design of a Fortran‐to‐Java translator whose target language is the instruction set of the Java Virtual Machine. The goal of the translator is to generate Java implementations of legacy Fortran numerical codes in a consistent and reliable fashion. The benefits of directly generating bytecode are twofold. First, compared with generating Java source code, it provides a much more straightforward and efficient mechanism for translating Fortran GOTO statements. Second, it provides a framework for pursuing various compiler optimizations, which could be beneficial not only to our project, but to the Java community as a whole. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Towards Intelligent Data Analysis: The Metadata Challenge

Once analyzed correctly, data can yield substantial benefits. The process of analyzing the data and transforming it into knowledge is known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). The plethora and subtleties of algorithms in the different steps of KDD, render it challenging. An effective user support is of crucial importance, even more now, when the analysis is performed on Big Data. Metadata is the necessary component to drive the user support. In this paper we study the metadata required to provide user support on every stage of the KDD process. We show that intelligent systems addressing the problem of user assistance in KDD are incomplete in this regard. They do not use the whole potential of metadata to enable assistance during the whole process. We present a comprehensive classification of all the metadata required to provide user support. Furthermore, we present our implementation of a metadata repository for storing and managing this metadata and explain its benefits in a real Big Data analytics project.
Wikitology: Using Wikipedia as an Ontology

Identifying topics and concepts associated with a set of documents is a task common to many applications. It can help in the annotation and categorization of documents and be used to model a person's current interests for improving search results, business intelligence or selecting appropriate advertisements. We have investigated using Wikipedia's articles and associated pages as a topic ontology for this purpose. The benefits of the approach are that the ontology terms are developed through a social process, maintained and kept current by the Wikipedia community, represent a consensus view, and have meaning that can be understood by reading the associated pages.
Iterative multiuser detection for LDPC MIMO SC‐FDMA communication systems

In order to provide high quality services, current communication systems require high‐data transmission rate and good error performance. Because single‐carrier frequency division multiple access (SC‐FDMA) is with the desirable characteristics of orthogonal frequency division multiple access and the low peak‐to‐average power ratio of single‐carrier transmission schemes, it has been adopted as the uplink transmission scheme in 3GPP long‐term evolution to approach the demand for data transmission rates and error performance. By combining multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) techniques with the SC‐FDMA modulation scheme, MIMO SC‐FDMA systems can achieve high data rates over broadband wireless channels. In this paper, we propose the iterative multiuser detection scheme for the low‐density parity‐check‐coded MIMO SC‐FDMA communication systems. On the basis of the property of space‐frequency block coding, we develop the frequency domain minimum mean‐squared error and zero‐forcing equalisers with multiuser interference cancellation technique on each subcarrier to recover the transmitted symbols. Some simulation examples for uplink scenario are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Supporting parallel soft real-time applications in virtualized environment

The prevalence of multicore processors and virtualization technology enables parallel soft real-time applications to run in virtualized environment. However, current hypervisors do not provide adequate support for them because of soft real-time constraints and synchronization problems, which result in frequent deadline misses and serious performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel soft real-time scheduling algorithm which addresses them well, and implement a parallel soft real-time scheduler, named Poris, based on Xen. Our evaluation shows that Poris shortens the execution time of PARSEC benchmark by up to 44.12% compared to Credit scheduler.
MonetDB/DataCell: Online Analytics in a Streaming Column-Store

In DataCell, we design streaming functionalities in a modern relational database kernel which targets big data analytics. This includes exploitation of both its storage/execution engine and its optimizer infrastructure. We investigate the opportunities and challenges that arise with such a direction and we show that it carries significant advantages for modern applications in need for online analytics such as web logs, network monitoring and scientific data management. The major challenge then becomes the efficient support for specialized stream features, e.g., multi-query processing and incremental window-based processing as well as exploiting standard DBMS functionalities in a streaming environment such as indexing. This demo presents DataCell, an extension of the MonetDB open-source column-store for online analytics. The demo gives users the opportunity to experience the features of DataCell such as processing both stream and persistent data and performing window based processing. The demo provides a visual interface to monitor the critical system components, e.g., how query plans transform from typical DBMS query plans to online query plans, how data flows through the query plans as the streams evolve, how DataCell maintains intermediate results in columnar form to avoid repeated evaluation of the same stream portions, etc. The demo also provides the ability to interactively set the test scenarios and various DataCell knobs.
Tumor-Produced Secreted Form of Binding of Immunoglobulin Protein Elicits Antigen-Specific Tumor Immunity

Binding of immunoglobulin protein (BiP) is a major molecular chaperone localized in endoplasmic reticulum (ER). It has been demonstrated to interact with nascent Ig. However, contrary to other ER-resident heat shock proteins such as gp96, calreticulin, and ORP150, it is not clear whether tumor-derived BiP plays a role in inducing antitumor immunity. In this study, we show that the tumor-derived secreted form of BiP is capable of inducing antitumor CD8+ T cell responses. We constructed an ER-retention signal KDEL-deleted mutant of BiP cDNA and transfected it to tumor cells, which resulted in continuous secretion of tumor-derived BiP into the extracellular milieu. We show that this secreted BiP is taken up by bone marrow-derived dendritic cells, and thereafter BiP-associated Ag peptide is cross-presented in association with MHC class I molecules, resulting in elicitation of an Ag-specific CD8+ T cell response and antitumor effect. This strategy to boost antitumor immune responses shows that a tumor could be its own cellular vaccine via gene modification of the secretion of the tumor Ag–BiP complex.
The Coagulant Action of Russell's Viper Venom; The Use of Antivenom in Defining its Reaction with a Serum Factor

IN 1903, Lamb and Hanna showed that the intravenous injection of Russell’s viper (Daboia) venom in animals caused massive thrombosis, but when the venom was tested on oxalated or citrated blood in vitro, Lamb (1903) and Martin (1905) found that it had little coagulant activity. Though Arthus (1919) pointed out that, like tissue thromboplastin, the venom required ionized calcium for its action, its coagulant power continued to be under-estimated, and Iswariah and David (1932) even maintained that there was no evidence that it increased the coagulability of the blood in vivo or in vitro. Barnett and Macfarlane (1934) investigated the coagulant action of venom from 22 varieties of snakes, using as an indicator haemophilic blood which required no anticoagulant. They found that Russell’s viper venom (RVV) was far more potent as a coagulant than any of the others tested and it was therefore used, in high dilution, as a local haemostatic for the control of haemophilic bleeding (Macfarlane and Bariiett, 1934). The venom then became commerically available under the name ‘Stypven’. The mode of action of this venom, which produces a demonstrable effect on clotting in concentrations of less than 0.01 ug. per ml. of blood, has since been much studied. Because it has no thrombin-like action commensurate with its ability to clot blood or plasma in the presence of ionized calcium it was assumed that the venom behaves like tissue thromboplastin and it was therefore used for a time as a substitute for brain extract in routine one-stage prothrombin time estimations (Fullerton, 1940; Witts and Hobson, 1940). Wide discrepancies between the results of this modification and Quick’s original method when applied in the control of drcoumarin therapy (Witts, 1942; Wilson, 1947) led to a realization that the venom and tissue thromboplastin must act in different ways. One difference had already been found, this being that venom appears to require phospholipid. The addition of (crude) lecithin or cephalin greatly increases its clotting power (Trevan and Macfarlane, 1938 ; Edsall, 1941) and the removal of platelets and lipids from plasma by centrifuging or extraction greatly reduces its coagulability by venom, this being restored by replacing the extracted fat or adding various phospholipid preparations (Macfarlane, Trevan and Attwood, 1941). Another difference is that Factor VII is not required for the action of the venom (Jenhns, 1954; Rapaport, Aas and Owren, 1954a) and thus the Factor-VII reduction caused by dicoumarin therapy may be undetected if venom is used instead of a tissue thromboplastin. The venom resembles tissue thromboplastin in requiring Factor V (Rapaport, Aas and Owren, 1954b), though Hall (1956) raised some doubts on this point. Factor X is almost by definition a co-factor for Russell’s viper venom, the reduction of this factor in the Stuart-Prower clotting defect being recognized and measured by delayed clotting with the venom (Hougie, 1956; Denson, 1958).
PCA Based Computation of Illumination-Invariant Space for Road Detection

Illumination changes such as shadows significantly affect the accuracy of various road detection methods, especially for vision-based approaches with an on-board monocular camera. To efficiently consider such illumination changes, we propose a PCA based technique, PCA-II, that finds the minimum projection space from an input RGB image, and then use the space as the illumination-invariant space for road detection. Our PCA based method shows 20 times faster performance on average over the prior entropy based method, even with a higher detection accuracy. To demonstrate its wide applicability to the road detection problem, we test the invariant space with both bottomup and top-down approaches. For a bottom-up approach, we suggest a simple patch propagation method that utilizes the property of the invariant space, and show its higher accuracy over other state-of-the-art road detection methods running in a bottom-up manner. For a top-down approach, we consider the space as an additional feature to the original RGB to train convolutional neural networks. We were also able to observe robust performance improvement of using the invariant space over the original CNN based methods that do not use the space, only with a minor runtime overhead, e.g., 50 ms per image. These results demonstrate benefits of our PCA-based illuminationinvariant space computation.
Population Structure of the Salamander Hynobius retardatus Inferred from a Partial Sequence of the Mitochondrial DNA Control Region

We investigated population structure of the salamander Hynobius retardatus in Hokkaido, Japan using partial sequences of the mitochondrial DNA control region (490 bp) from 105 individuals. The salamanders were collected from 28 localities representing the entire regional distribution of this species. Twenty different haplotypes distributed across three haplotype groups were identified. Group 1 was widely distributed in central, northern, and eastern Hokkaido, except Erimo; Groups 2 and 3 appeared exclusively in Erimo and southern Hokkaido, respectively. The genetic distance between the three groups was not very large, but the distributions of the groups never overlapped spatially, indicating a hierarchical population structure comprising three regional groups, which was also supported by analysis of molecular variance. The results suggest that the present population structure is affected by current genetic barriers, as well as by historical transitions of climate and landscape.
A Conspiracy of Random X and Model Violation against Classical Inference in Linear Regression

Following the econometric literature on model misspecification, we examine statistical inference for linear regression coefficients βj when the predictors are random and the linear model assumptions of first and/or second order are violated: E[Y |X1, . , Xp] is not linear in the predictors and/or V [Y |X1, . , Xp] is not constant. Such inference is meaningful if the linear model is seen as a useful approximation rather than part of a generative truth. A difficulty well-known in econometrics is that the required standard errors under random predictors and model violations can be very different from the conventional standard errors that are valid when the linear model is correct. The difference stems from a synergistic effect between model violations and randomness of the predictors. We show that asymptotically the ratios between correct and conventional standard errors can range between infinity and zero. Also, these ratios vary between predictors within the same multiple regression. This difficulty has consequences for statistics: It entails the breakdown of the classical ancillarity argument for predictors. If the assumptions of a generative regression model are violated, then the ancillarity argument for the predictors no longer holds, treating predictors as fixed is no longer valid, and standard inferences may lose their significance and confidence guarantees. The standard econometric solution for consistent inference under misspecification and random predictors is based on the “sandwich estimator” of the covariance matrix of β̂. A plausible alternative is the paired bootstrap which resamples predictors and response jointly. Discrepancies between conventional and bootstrap standard errors can be used as diagnostics for predictor-specific model violations, in analogy to econometric misspecification tests. The good news is that when model violations are sufficiently strong to invalidate conventional linear inference, their nature tends to be visible in graphical diagnostics.
Streaming Scenes to MPEG-4 Video-Enabled Devices

Streaming a remote walkthrough of a complex computer-generated environment is an emerging challenge in computer graphics. The size of most models precludes downloading the entire model from the server to the client. We stream real-time computer graphic scenes to handheld devices using object-based encoding from MPEG-4 and knowledge from a 3D model.