Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Time Domain Passivity Control for Position-Position Teleoperation Architectures

This article presents a method for passivating the communication channel of a symmetric position-position teleoperation architecture on the time domain. The time domain passivity control approach has recently gained appeal in the context of timedelayed teleoperation because passivity is not established as a design constraint, which often forces conservative rules, but rather as a property which the system must preserve during operation. Since passivity is a network property, the first design rule within this framework is to represent consistent and comprehensible circuit (i.e., network) representations of the mechanical teleoperation system. In particular, the energetic behavior of these networks is interesting because it allows straightforward conclusions about system stability. By means of so-called passivity observers (PO) and passivity controllers (PC) (Hannaford & Ryu, 2001), the energetic response of a delayed communication channel is captured and modulated over time so that the network in question never becomes nonpassive. The case analyzed in this paper tackles a communication channel that conveys position data back and forth. This type of channel does not offer intuitive network representation since only flows are actually being transmitted. Although energy clearly travels from one side to the other, port power identification, as defined by the correlated pair flow and effort, is not evident. This work first investigates how this kind of channel can be represented by means of circuit networks even with the lack of physical effort being transmitted through the channel, and identifies which networks are susceptible to become nonpassive due to the channel characteristics (i.e., time delay, discretization or package loss). Once achieved, a distributed control structure is presented based on a PC series that keeps the system at the verge of passivity (and therefore stability) independent from the channel properties. The results obtained by the simulation and by experiment sustain the presented approach.
Multiscale simulations of star polymer melts

Depending on the architecture, polymers are observed to show different dynamical and rheological properties. The results obtained from this work will not only contribute to a fundamental understanding of the character of star polymeric systems, but also possibly help to design industrial architecturally complex polymer materials with specific macroscopic properties. Simulations are carried out with coarse-grained method at multiple levels. The Twentanglement algorithm for mesoscopic simulations of polymers is extended to study three armed polymers with various arm lengths. Firstly, a star with three moderately entangled linear arms is studied to test the method. The segmental diffusions are calculated, where it is found that the branch point diffuses the slowest and the free ends move the fastest. By increasing the arm length, the star polymers gradually show a slower diffusion than both matching linear chains, as well as a delayed relaxation. Furthermore, in this work the zero shear viscosities of star melts are calculated from their stress moduli. The observed exponential scaling law in the arm molecular mass of star polymer shows a reasonable agreement with experimental and theoretical investigations for very large star polymers presented in the literature. Besides, the asymmetric three-armed polymer melts have also been studied. The presence of the agile side chain allows for relatively fast local stress relaxations and dilates the tube constraining the backbone. The investigation of polymer systems at different time and length scales requires different coarse graining levels. We present a highly coarse grained model, Responsive Particle Dynamics (RaPiD). In this model, the coarse grained forces can be split into conservative interactions described by the extended Flory-Huggins potential, 'transient' forces depending on the contacts between polymers to represent entanglement effects, and random thermal forces. In this work, the parameterization is obtained in a bottom-up approach as well as considerations of polymer concepts in physics. The radial distribution function generated by RaPiD reproduces the small scale simulation data very well. The shear stress modulus as calculated in RaPiD is in reasonable agreement with the small scale simulations. This work proves that a many-body model is capable of describing the system dynamics very well.
Application of multi-objective constraint optimization in aerodynamic high-lift design

This lecture deals with the application of numerical optimization for aerodynamic design of high-lift systems, which is a multi-objective constraint design problem. The applied mathematical fundamentals of numerical optimization are briefly outlined. A description of the design targets and constraints for high-lift wings is given, followed by a detailed analysis of the properties of the flow calculation for the use within optimization and the suitability of optimization algorithms for this type of design problem. Another focus is set on the practical issues resulting from a long time experience in applying numerical optimization to aerodynamic design. of high-lift systems for transport aircraft.
Magnetic solid-phase extraction for determination of sulpiride in human urine and blood using high-performance liquid chromatography.

A novel and efficient sample preconcentration technique based on the Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles (Fe3O4 MNPs) coated with silica (SiO2) has been developed for extraction and determination of sulpiride. The functionalized MNPs showed excellent dispersibility in aqueous solution and were applied to magnetic solid-phase extraction of sulpiride from human urine and blood prior to high-performance liquid chromatography analysis. The separation, preconcentration and desorption procedure was completed in 10 min. Optimal experimental conditions, including sample pH, the amount of the MNPs, eluent type and volume, and the ultrasonication time were studied and established. The method showed good linearity for the determination of sulpiride in the concentration range of 10-1000 ng/mL in urine and blood. The recovery of the method was in the range between 91.2 and 97.5%, and the limit of detection was 2 ng/mL for sulpiride in human blood and urine. The results indicated that the present procedure is a suitable pretreatment method for biological samples.
Evidence against the "early protection-delayed death" hypothesis of superoxide dismutase therapy in experimental myocardial infarction. Polyethylene glycol-superoxide dismutase plus catalase does not limit myocardial infarct size in dogs.

We previously found that superoxide dismutase (SOD) did not limit myocardial infarct size after 40 or 90 minutes of ischemia and 4 days of reperfusion in dogs. Because some other studies have shown limitation of infarct size after shorter periods of reperfusion, we postulated that our negative results might be due to late reperfusion injury mediated by superoxide anions produced after excretion of SOD. To test this "early protection-delayed death" hypothesis, we have examined whether SOD, conjugated to polyethylene glycol (PEG-SOD) to prolong its circulating half-life, limited myocardial infarct size. The circumflex artery was occluded for 90 minutes followed by 4 days of reperfusion. PEG-SOD (total dose, 10,000 units/kg) and catalase (55,000 units/kg) were given during the 30 minutes before reperfusion. Plasma SOD levels in the treated group were 330 +/- 20 units/ml at the onset of reperfusion and 140 +/- 10 units/ml on day 4 (circulating half-life, 75 +/- 5 hours) versus 5 +/- 1 units/ml in controls. Histological infarct size was 37.1 +/- 4.2% of the area at risk in the treated group (n = 11) versus 44.5 +/- 6.2% in controls (n = 10) (p = NS). Infarct size and collateral blood flow were inversely related in controls; PEG-SOD and catalase did not shift this regression (p = NS by analysis of covariance). Thus, infarct size was not limited when measured after 4 days of reperfusion, even though plasma SOD exceeded 100 units/ml throughout this reperfusion period. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Efficient Computation of Iceberg Cubes by Bounding Aggregate Functions

The iceberg cubing problem is to compute the multidimensional group-by partitions that satisfy given aggregation constraints. Pruning unproductive computation for iceberg cubing when nonantimonotone constraints are present is a great challenge because the aggregate functions do not increase or decrease monotonically along the subset relationship between partitions. In this paper, we propose a novel bound prune cubing (BP-Cubing) approach for iceberg cubing with nonantimonotone aggregation constraints. Given a cube over n dimensions, an aggregate for any group-by partition can be computed from aggregates for the most specific n--dimensional partitions (MSPs). The largest and smallest aggregate values computed this way become the bounds for all partitions in the cube. We provide efficient methods to compute tight bounds for base aggregate functions and, more interestingly, arithmetic expressions thereof, from bounds of aggregates over the MSPs. Our methods produce tighter bounds than those obtained by previous approaches. We present iceberg cubing algorithms that combine bounding with efficient aggregation strategies. Our experiments on real-world and artificial benchmark data sets demonstrate that BP-Cubing algorithms achieve more effective pruning and are several times faster than state-of-the-art iceberg cubing algorithms and that BP-Cubing achieves the best performance with the top-down cubing approach.
Boosting Precision and Recall of Dictionary-Based Protein Name Recognition

Dictionary-based protein name recognition is the first step for practical information extraction from biomedical documents because it provides ID information of recognized terms unlike machine learning based approaches. However, dictionary based approaches have two serious problems: (1) a large number of false recognitions mainly caused by short names. (2) low recall due to spelling variation. In this paper, we tackle the former problem by using a machine learning method to filter out false positives. We also present an approximate string searching method to alleviate the latter problem. Experimental results using the GE-NIA corpus show that the filtering using a naive Bayes classifier greatly improves precision with slight loss of recall, resulting in a much better F-score.
Acute and Subacute Effects of Urban Air Pollution on Cardiopulmonary Emergencies and Mortality: Time Series Studies in Austrian Cities

Daily pollution data (collected in Graz over 16 years and in the Linz over 18 years) were used for time series studies (GAM and case-crossover) on the relationship with daily mortality (overall and specific causes of death). Diagnoses of patients who had been transported to hospitals in Linz were also available on a daily basis from eight years for time series analyses of cardiopulmonary emergencies. Increases in air pollutant levels over several days were followed by increases in mortality and the observed effects increased with the length of the exposure window considered, up to a maximum of 15 days. These mortality changes in Graz and Linz showed similar patterns like the ones found before in Vienna. A significant association of mortality could be demonstrated with NO2, PM2.5 and PM10 even in summer, when concentrations are lower and mainly related to motor traffic. Cardiorespiratory ambulance transports increased with NO2/PM2.5/PM10 by 2.0/6.1/1.7% per 10 µg/m3 on the same day. Monitoring of NO2 (related to motor traffic) and fine particulates at urban background stations predicts acute effects on cardiopulmonary emergencies and extended effects on cardiopulmonary mortality. Both components of urban air pollution are indicators of acute cardiopulmonary health risks, which need to be monitored and reduced, even below current standards.
Age differences in sexual relationships and HIV transmission : statistical analyses of bio-behavioural survey data from Southern Africa

148 SAMENVATTING . 150 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . 153 LIST OF PUBLICATIONS . 156 APPENDIX A . 157 APPENDIX B . 164 APPENDIX C . 171 APPENDIX D . 179 APPENDIX E . 188 REFERENCES . 190
Shape adaptive estimation of variance in steerable pyramid domain and its application for spatially adaptive image enhancement

In the recent years, denoising based on the spatially adaptive algorithms that employ anisotropic adaption have been developed. These methods are able to match to the local statistics, preserve the edges and truly remove the noise from the texture of the images. On the other hand, a huge proportion of image enhancement methods are implemented in the sparse domains (e.g., wavelets, curvelets, contourlets and steerable pyramid decomposition) due to impressive properties of these transforms such as heavy-tailed nature of marginal distribution, locality and multiresolution. In this paper we try to establish a relation between two mentioned approaches by estimating the local variances of steerable pyramid coefficients using a shape-adaptive window.
Finger Pricking and Pain: A Never Ending Story

Without finger pricking, no self-measurement of blood glucose (SMBG) is possible. However, the number of scientific studies dealing with this topic, which is highly relevant for patients, is surprisingly small. This is in sharp contrast to the number of papers about blood glucose meters and SMBG in general. This article highlights a number of aspects that are relevant when it comes to finger pricking and pain. There is a clear improvement in the technology employed in the many different lancing devices that are on the market nowadays; however, no good head-to-head comparison study has been performed to date. The invention of novel devices for finger pricking will most likely bring more attention to this topic.
Neuron-Specific mRNA Complexity Responses during Hippocampal Apoptosis after Traumatic Brain Injury

In an effort to understand the complexity of genomic responses within selectively vulnerable regions after experimental brain injury, we examined whether single apoptotic neurons from both the CA3 and dentate differed from those in an uninjured brain. The mRNA from individual active caspase 3(+)/terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated biotinylated UTP nick end labeling [TUNEL(–)] and active caspase 3(+)/TUNEL(+) pyramidal and granule neurons in brain-injured mice were amplified and compared with those from nonlabeled neurons in uninjured brains. Gene analysis revealed that overall expression of mRNAs increased with activation of caspase 3 and decreased to below uninjured levels with TUNEL reactivity. Cell type specificity of the apoptotic response was observed with both regionally distinct expression of mRNAs and differences in those mRNAs that were maximally regulated. Immunohistochemical analysis for two of the most highly differentially expressed genes (prion and Sos2) demonstrated a correlation between the observed differential gene expression after traumatic brain injury and corresponding protein translation.
An Investigation of Prosody in Hindi Narrative Speech

This paper investigates how prosodic elements such as prominences and prosodic boundaries in Hindi are perceived. We approach this using data from three sources: (i) native speakers of Hindi without any linguistic expertise (ii) a linguistically trained expert in Hindi prosody and finally, (iii) classifiers trained on English for automatic prominence and boundary detection. We use speech from a corpus of Hindi narrative speech for our experiments. Our results indicate that non-expert transcribers do not have a consistent notion of prosodic prominences. However, they show considerable agreement regarding the placement of prosodic boundaries. Also, relative to the nonexpert transcribers, there is higher agreement between the expert transcriber and the automatically derived labels for prominence (and prosodic boundaries); this suggests the possibility of using classifiers for the automatic prediction of these prosodic events in Hindi.
Examining Implicit Attitudes towards Exercisers with a Physical Disability

Background. Using measures of explicit attitudes, physical activity status has been established as a factor that reduces the stigma able-bodied people hold towards people with physical disabilities. This phenomenon is called the exerciser stereotype. However, whether the exerciser stereotype exists when using measures of implicit attitudes remains unknown. Objective. The aims of this study were to evaluate the prevalence of negative implicit attitudes towards people with physical disabilities and determine whether implicit attitudes towards people with physical disabilities were influenced by the exerciser stereotype. Methods. One hundred able-bodied participants (82 females, 18 males) completed two implicit association tests (IATs): the Disability-Attitudes IAT and the Disability-Activity IAT. The Disability-Attitudes IAT measured implicit attitudes towards people who were not disabled relative to disabled; the Disability-Activity IAT measured attitudes towards people with a physical disability who were active relative to inactive. Results. Results revealed that 83.8% of participants had negative implicit attitudes towards people with a disability. Participants held more positive attitudes towards active versus inactive people with a physical disability. Conclusions. The study findings indicate that the exerciser stereotype exists implicitly and may undermine negative attitudes towards people with physical disabilities.
Enabling Network Mobility by Using IEEE 802 . 21 Integrated with the Entity Title Architecture

This work presents the integration of the IEEE 802.21 framework with the Entity Title Architecture (ETArch), a clean slate approach that is deployed atop OpenFlow. In the resultant architecture, network mobility is provided within the Workspace, a logical channel able to gather multiple communicating participants. This paper describes the main architecture components and the signaling approach deployed in a handover scenario by providing the details the integration between 802.21, OpenFlow and Entity Title Control protocols.
Nonlinear model predictive control of a four tank system: an experimental stability study

There are well-known theoretical examples that show that stability constraints in nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) are necessary in order to guarantee closed loop stability. In this paper it is shown that these stability constraints, derived from theory, are also essential in practice. In particular, an experimental study is carried out on a four tank system that illustrates the stability behavior of NMPC.
Factored conditional restricted Boltzmann Machines for modeling motion style

The Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machine (CRBM) is a recently proposed model for time series that has a rich, distributed hidden state and permits simple, exact inference. We present a new model, based on the CRBM that preserves its most important computational properties and includes multiplicative three-way interactions that allow the effective interaction weight between two units to be modulated by the dynamic state of a third unit. We factor the three-way weight tensor implied by the multiplicative model, reducing the number of parameters from O(N3) to O(N2). The result is an efficient, compact model whose effectiveness we demonstrate by modeling human motion. Like the CRBM, our model can capture diverse styles of motion with a single set of parameters, and the three-way interactions greatly improve the model's ability to blend motion styles or to transition smoothly among them.
STRESS AND SYLLABLE STRUCTURE IN ENGLISH: APPROACHES TO PHONOLOGICAL VARIATIONS ∗

We use phonological variation to refer to alternative forms that are available in a language, such as different syllable structures or word stress patterns in English. We discuss several approaches to such variations and argue for a new approach, in which all alternative forms observe a set of inviolable constraints. In particular, we propose that all English words observe four constraints: (a) a foot must be disyllabic, (b) stressed syllables must be heavy, (c) heavy syllables must have stress, and (d) the maximal syllable is CVX. We discuss the implications of our proposal for Optimality Theory and for the analysis of linguistic variation in general.
Habitat Quality and Geometry Affect Patch Occupancy of Two Orthopteran Species

Impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation on distribution and population size of many taxa are well established. In contrast, less is known about the role of within-patch habitat quality for the spatial dynamics of species, even though within-patch habitat quality may substantially influence the dynamics of population networks. We studied occurrence patterns of two Orthopteran species in relation to size, isolation and quality of habitat patches in an intensively managed agricultural landscape (16.65 km2) in the Swiss lowland. Occurrence of field crickets (Gryllus campestris) was positively related to patch size and negatively to the distance to the nearest occupied patch, two measures of patch geometry. Moreover, field crickets were more likely to occur in extensively managed meadows, meadows used at low intensity and meadows dominated by Poa pratensis, three measures of patch quality. Occurrence of the large gold grasshopper (Chrysochraon dispar) was negatively related to two measures of patch geometry, distance to the nearest occupied patch and perimeter index (ratio of perimeter length to patch area). Further, large gold grasshoppers were more likely to occupy patches close to water and patches with vegetation left uncut over winter, two measures of patch quality. Finally, examination of patch occupancy dynamics of field crickets revealed that patches colonized in 2009 and patches occupied in both 2005 and 2009 were larger, better connected and of other quality than patches remaining unoccupied and patches from which the species disappeared. The strong relationships between Orthopteran occurrence and aspects of patch geometry found in this study support the “area-and-isolation paradigm”. Additionally, our study reveals the importance of patch quality for occurrence patterns of both species, and for patch occupancy dynamics in the field cricket. An increased understanding of patch occupancy patterns may be gained if inference is based on variables related to both habitat geometry and quality.