Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cognitive and robotic systems: Speeding up integration and results

Nowadays, state-of-the-art robots are capable of millimetric motion accuracy by performing highly repetitive tasks, however, as a constraint they operate in highly structured environments where objects are in known and predictable locations. Thus, it is not surprising that robots are more often used in high-volume operations such as painting and welding, rather than operations where diversity of actions, direct contact with humans, and variability of the environment meet fundamental requirements. Social robotics is an area of research that aims to make viable the direct interaction of robots with humans in unstructured environments. It uses several techniques, such as, machine learning, cognitive modeling, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and ontology. One factor that compromises the rapid evolution of social robotics is the difficulty in modeling cognitive systems due to the volume and complexity of information produced by a chaotic world full of sensory information. In addition, the validation of results with the use of real environments involving buildings, streets and people presents a high cost of installation and maintenance. This article offers two strategies to speed up the evolution of social robotics. The first involves the definition of OntCog ontology that models the senses captured by the agent robotic sensors. This modeling facilitates the reproduction of experiments associated with cognitive models and the comparison among different implementations. The second is associated with the development of Robot House Simulator (RHS), which provides an environment where a robot and a human character can interact socially with increasing levels of cognitive processing. An unprecedented feature of this simulator is to provide information about all the senses of the robot, actually only the sense of vision or touch has been considered in the existing robotic simulators.
Evaluation of 4'-[methyl-14C]thiothymidine for in vivo DNA synthesis imaging.

UNLABELLED We evaluated 4'-[methyl-11C]thiothymidine ([methyl-11C]S-dThd) to obtain a thymidine analog that might prove simpler to use for imaging DNA synthesis and that might follow the same biochemistry as its surrogate. METHODS [Methyl-14C]S-dThd was synthesized by rapid methylation of 5-trimethylstannyl-4'-thio-2'-deoxyuridine via a palladium-mediated Stille coupling reaction with 14C-methyl iodide. Degradation of [methyl-14C]S-dThd, when incubated in human blood, was analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The in vivo potential of [methyl-14C]S-dThd was evaluated by studying its distribution in EMT-6 mammary carcinoma-bearing mice. 2-Fluoro-2'-deoxycytidine, a potent inhibitor of DNA synthesis, was used to modulate cell proliferation. Tissue extraction was also performed to investigate the incorporation of [methyl-14C]S-dThd into DNA. RESULTS [Methyl-14C]S-dThd was obtained in a 31%-41% radiochemical yield (calculated from 14C-methyl iodide) at 130 degrees C, 5-min reaction in N,N-dimethylformamide followed by semipreparative HPLC purification. The radiochemical purity of [methyl-14C]S-dThd was >99% and the specific activity was 2.04 GBq/mmol (according to the specific activity of 14C-methyl iodide). [2-14C]Thymidine, when incubated with human blood, demonstrated rapid degradation. In contrast, [methyl-14C]S-dThd was stable with <3% degradation at 60 min. An in vivo distribution study showed the accumulation of radioactivity in proliferating tissues (spleen, thymus, duodenum, and tumor). On the other hand, the radioactivity of nonproliferating tissues (lung, liver, kidney, and muscle) was rapidly cleared in parallel with the clearance of blood radioactivity. The tumor uptake of [methyl-14C]S-dThd was high (8.8 percentage injected dose per gram at 60 min) and selective (tumor-to-blood ratio, 12.2 at 60 min). 2-Fluoro-2'-deoxycytidine pretreatment significantly reduced the tumor uptake of [methyl-14C]S-dThd. Relative blood flow as measured by the uptake of 4-[N-methyl-14C]iodoantipyrine was similar between the treated and untreated groups. Tissue extraction studies showed that most of the total tissue radioactivity of rapidly proliferating tissues was recovered in the DNA fraction at 60 min after [methyl-14C]S-dThd injection. CONCLUSION The labeling procedure is rapid and suitable for 11C labeling. Positron-labeled 4'-thiothymidine should be useful for imaging DNA synthesis by PET.
PET Kinetic Modelling with Basis Pursuit 3 PET Kinetic Modelling with Basis Pursuit 3 Reversible Irreversible Plasm a R eference

A kinetic modelling approach for the quantification of in vivo tracer studies with dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) is presented. The approach is based on a general compartmental description of the tracer’s fate in vivo and determines a parsimonious model consistent with the measured data. The technique involves the determination of a sparse selection of kinetic basis functions from an overcomplete dictionary using the method of basis pursuit denoising. This enables the characterization of the systems impulse response function from which values of the systems macro parameters can be estimated. These parameter estimates can be obtained from a region of interest analysis or as parametric images from a voxel based analysis. In addition, model order estimates are returned which correspond to the number of compartments in the estimated compartmental model. Validation studies evaluate the methods performance against two pre-existing data led techniques, namely graphical analysis and spectral analysis. Application of this technique to measured PET data is demonstrated using [C]diprenorphine (opiate receptor) and [C]WAY-100635 (5-HT1A receptor). Whilst, the method is presented in the context of PET neuroreceptor binding studies, it has general applicability to the quantification of PET/SPET radiotracer studies in neurology, oncology and cardiology.
Towards a practical snapshot algorithm

An atomic snapshot memory is an implementation of a multiple location shared memory that can be atomically read in its entirety without having to prevent concurrent writing. The design of wait-free implementations of atomic snapshot memories has been the subject of extensive theoretical research in recent years. This paper introduces the coordinated-collect algorithm, a novel wait-free atomic snapshot construction which we believe is a first step in taking snapshots from theory to practice. Unlike former algorithms, it uses currently available multiprocessor synchronization operations to provide an algorithm that has only O(1) update complexity and O(n) scan complexity, with very small constants. Empirical evidence collected on a simulated distributed shared-memory multiprocessor shows that coordinated-collect outperforms all known wait-free, lock-free, and locking algorithms in terms of overall throughput and latency. <<ETX>>
X-Ray Structural Characterization of Cyclometalated Luminescent Pt(II) Complexes

The cyclometalated complexes represent one of the most interesting and broadly studied class of organotransition metal complexes. Although there is a strong interest in studying the mechanism of this bond-activation process, cyclometalation is a highly attractive and versatile synthetic approach for generating organometallic systems, with very important application potential (Crabtree, 2005). There are both mononuclear and dinuclear species, but also polynuclear cyclometalated complexes are known (Diez et al., 2011). Many reviews and books have been dedicated to this topic over the past years and one of the most recent can be found here (Albrecht, 2010). The cyclometalation process consists of a transition metal-mediated activation of a C-R bond to form a metallacycle that contains a metal-carbon σ bond (Hill, 2002). On the other hand, cyclometalation can be regarded as a special case of oxidative addition, in which a C−R (in most cases, C-H) bond in a ligand oxidatively adds to a metal to give rise to a ring. Although many examples are described, by far most of cyclometalation reactions occur via C-H bond activation. The reaction product is a metallacycle in which the metal is bound by a chelate Cdonor ligand. It is important to note that such chelation leads to organometallic compounds with increased stability. Altogether, the cyclometalation reaction has been widely studied because it represents probably one of the mildest route for activating strong C-H and C-R bonds. The tendency of transition metal salts to undergo cyclometalation reaction, and, in particular, ortho-metalation reaction, with heteroaromatic ligands (mostly including nitrogen donors, but oxygen-, sulfurand phosphorus-containing ligands have also been cyclometalated) to give five-memberd metallocycles has been demonstrated with various metals, including, for instance, Re(I), Pt(II), Pd(II). This review will take into account only the cyclometalated Pt(II) complexes with nitrogen-containing ligands. In comparison with Pd(II), which is by far the most used metal in cyclometalation reactions, the cycloplatination reaction is not so intensively studied and not very easy to accomplish (cycloplatination reactions which took about four weeks or required relatively forcing conditions, e.g., refluxing toluene, with poor yields, have been reported). However, it is possible to increase the yields and reduce the time of reaction by using different starting materials such as bis(η3-allyl)-di-μ-chlorodiplatinum(II) or PtCl2(DMSO)2, etc, although K2PtCl4 or [Pt2Me4(μ-SMe2)2)] are commonly used to yield cyclometalated species. In most of the cases, the reaction products are halo-bridged dimers, that can be used further to form
A Model Introducing SOAs Quality Attributes Decomposition

Recently, service oriented architecture (SOA) has been popularized with the emergence of standards like Web services. Nevertheless, the shift to this architectural paradigm could potentially involve significant risks including projects abandonments. With this in mind, the question of evaluating SOA quality arose. The appearance of methods like ATAM or SAAM propelled software architecture evaluation to a standard stage for any paradigm. However, there still are a number of concerns that have been raised with these methods; in particular their cost in terms of time and money, essentially because of the hand-operated nature of the evaluations conducted. The model proposed in this paper for evaluating SOAs takes as a starting point the McCall model; it allows the whole architecture to be decomposed in three types of quality attributes (factor, criterion and metric)
Groundwater quality: Ethiopia

Ethiopia, with a total area of some 1,127,000 square kilometres, is a landlocked country in East Africa, situated to the west of Somalia and north of Kenya. The terrain consists largely of high mountains and plateaux with elevations above 1500 m, divided from south-west to north-east by the East African Rift Valley, a major structural feature some 40– 60 km wide and in places 1000 m below the flanking plateau areas. The Rift extends across Ethiopia via Lakes Rudolf and Chamo in the south- west, Awasa, Nazret, Mile and Lake Afrera in the north (Figure 1). The Awash River flows along much of the northern section. The southern part of the Rift, extending between Lake Chamo and the Awash River is known as the Lakes District and is a zone with numerous lakes, largely elongated parallel to the Rift axis. Some of these are freshwater lakes while some are alkaline and saline. The floor of the Rift rises from the south-west to a maximum altitude of more than 1800 m north of Lake Zwai, beyond which it descends into the low-lying Afar section of the Rift, which is in large part below sea level. Elevation in Ethiopia varies from the highest point at Ras Deshen Terara (4620 m) to the lowest in the Danakil Depre ssion (-125 m; northern section of the Afar Depression). The Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia (bordering Somalia) is also a flat-lying plain, with an elevation of around 600 m
Performance Evaluation of Multiple-Bit Delay Detection with Majority Vote Decision Rule in Optical DPSK Systems

In this paper, the performance of multiple-bit delay detection (MBDD) systems in optical differential phase shift keying (DPSK) is investigated. Assuming that the dominant noise in the system is originated by the optical amplifier and using Gaussian approximation, we present a closed form equation which predicts the overall bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the system as a function of the number of delay segments, optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) at the receiver, and bandwidth of the optical bandpass filter. It is shown that with a large number of delay segments, the performance of MBDD system approaches to the performance of homodyne coherent detection.
A New Methodology to Calibrate the Congestion Wave for the Cell Transmission Model for Urban Traffic

This paper presents a new traffic flow model to capture complex urban traffic dynamics. We present an extension of the Cell Transmission Model for Urban Traffic (CTM-UT). It is suitable to represent complex flow interactions among lane groups at upstream of signalized intersections and at intersection with determination capacity. Our model is a simple and versatile simulation framework designed to realistically simulate the dynamic queue interactions. It can represent the potential capacity of minor flow obstructed at intersection for large scale urban network. In this paper we present our macroscopic simulation model considering also an optimization calibration method for congestion wave. A comparison between our model and Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) is done.
Morphable face reconstruction with multiple images

Efficient 3D face reconstruction is very important for face animation and recognition. The slow speed of the 3D morphable model is due to the texture mapping. To improve the speed, we only use the shape matching to recover the 3D shape and use texture mapping to get the texture. However, only with the shape information, one image is not enough for accurate 3D face reconstruction. So, we propose to use multiple images with the morphable shape model. First, with the feature points given on the multiple images, the 3D coordinates of the feature points are estimate by the pose estimation. Then, frontal and profile 2D morphable shape models are built to estimate the 3D morphable shape model. These two steps works iteratively to improve the result. At last, the texture is extracted from multiple images with the pose estimation from the estimated 3D face. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by the experimental results
The Seattle Heart Failure Model: Prediction of Survival in Heart Failure

Background— Heart failure has an annual mortality rate ranging from 5% to 75%. The purpose of the study was to develop and validate a multivariate risk model to predict 1-, 2-, and 3-year survival in heart failure patients with the use of easily obtainable characteristics relating to clinical status, therapy (pharmacological as well as devices), and laboratory parameters. Methods and Results— The Seattle Heart Failure Model was derived in a cohort of 1125 heart failure patients with the use of a multivariate Cox model. For medications and devices not available in the derivation database, hazard ratios were estimated from published literature. The model was prospectively validated in 5 additional cohorts totaling 9942 heart failure patients and 17 307 person-years of follow-up. The accuracy of the model was excellent, with predicted versus actual 1-year survival rates of 73.4% versus 74.3% in the derivation cohort and 90.5% versus 88.5%, 86.5% versus 86.5%, 83.8% versus 83.3%, 90.9% versus 91.0%, and 89.6% versus 86.7% in the 5 validation cohorts. For the lowest score, the 2-year survival was 92.8% compared with 88.7%, 77.8%, 58.1%, 29.5%, and 10.8% for scores of 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. The overall receiver operating characteristic area under the curve was 0.729 (95% CI, 0.714 to 0.744). The model also allowed estimation of the benefit of adding medications or devices to an individual patient's therapeutic regimen. Conclusions— The Seattle Heart Failure Model provides an accurate estimate of 1-, 2-, and 3-year survival with the use of easily obtained clinical, pharmacological, device, and laboratory characteristics.
Stochastic Game Theory: Adjustment to Equilibrium Under Noisy Directional Learning

This paper presents a dynamic model in which agents adjust their decisions in the direction of higher payoffs, subject to random error. This process produces a probability distribution of players' decisions whose evolution over time is determined by the Fokker-Planck equation. The dynamic process is stable for all potential games, a class of payoff structures that includes several widely studied games. In equilibrium, the distributions that determine expected payoffs correspond to the distributions that arise from the logit function applied to those expected payoffs. This "logit equilibrium" forms a stochastic generalization of the Nash equilibrium and provides a possible explanation of anomalous laboratory data.
Diversity assessment of macroinvertebrates in the dam progressed Subansiri river in the North –Eastern India

Different indices such as Shannon Index H, Pielou Index J, Simpson Index D, Simpson 1-D, Marglef Index Ma, Maclintos Evenness Index McE, Maclintos Index Mc of macroinvertebrates were analysed to know the health status of the downstream of river Subansiri (from the site of construction of the 2000MW Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project to its confluence with the Brahmaputra) prior to the construction of the dam. In the modality of operation of the dam, to generate power, the dam authority proposed to release only 06 m3 s-1 of water for 20 hours of the day and release some 2579 m3 s-1 of water for 4 hours during the ‘peak load demand period’ in the evening / night, without considering the adverse effect on aquatic life and environment.
Implicit interaction profiling for recommending spatial content

When individuals request task-relevant spatial content in the form of area maps, GIS applications typically return default maps displaying standard map content. Little effort is made by these applications to present users with personalized maps displaying spatial content tailored to users' specific interests. Maps generated usually contain superfluous information that hinders the user's end goal and is irrelevant in terms of their spatial content preferences. Users may then customize the map through toggling features on and off but this must be done repeatedly whenever they request a map. One solution is to demand explicit input from users, before presenting them with a map, detailing features of interest related to their current task. This, however, proves an expensive answer as the system is reliant on user input. Another solution is to store simplistic profile information whereby the user ticks several feature boxes. While simple customizations could be stored, only basic interaction information is captured in the user profiles. We outline an approach to solving this problem by providing personalized maps whereby only the most relevant spatial content is returned each time a user requests a map. Map personalization is realized by monitoring users' implicit interactions with maps when locating content and regions of interest. User preferences regarding map features and zones of interest are inferred from the actions executed. This is an attractive solution, as it requires no real effort from the user, other than standard usage. All map interactions are captured at the interface and the system learns users' interests by unobtrusively observing their behavior. A persistent user model storing information describing user interests related to spatial content is created and evolves over time.
Ultrawideband Channel Sounding within an Airbus 319

Ultra-wideband (UWB) techniques are recently targeted as a broadband short range solution for in-flight-entertainment (IFE) systems. Despite the in-cabin channel can be considered as an indoor channel, under the current aviation regulations, and due to the usual metal cabins and cylindrical shapes, these scenarios are particular for wireless applications. In this paper is presented an experimental characterization of the UWB channel within an Airbus 319 aircraft cabin based on a real-time multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) UWB channel sounder. Here, the delay spread and coherent bandwidth have been calculated for different antennas configurations and distances. Besides, the in-cabin path-loss exponent has been calculated based on an extensively amount of data. Moreover, dynamic range metrics have been introduced for channel analysis and performance comparisons along the cabin.
Occurrence of 15 + 1 EU priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in various types of tea (Camellia sinensis) and herbal infusions

For the analysis of 15 + 1 EU priority PAH in tea and herbal infusions, an online-SPE-LVI-GC-MS method was developed. This method includes sample extraction of the tea and herbal infusions with saponification followed by an automated SPE clean-up step. For brews a liquid–liquid extraction with cyclohexane was performed before an automated SPE clean-up. Gas chromatographic separation was done using an Agilent J&W Select PAH (15 m × 0.15 mm × 0.10 µm) column, which allows the separation of the three benzofluoranthenes as well as triphenylene from chrysene. Method performance criteria such as method linearity, limit of quantitation (LOQ) and repeatability were determined and demonstrated that the method was fit for purpose. The method was used to analyse 15 + 1 EU priority PAH in 91 tea and herbal infusion samples. The levels of PAHs ranged from below 0.5 (LOQ) to 460 µg kg−1, with a median of 4.7 µg kg−1 and a mean of 39 µg kg−1 for BaP, and from below 1.0 (LOQ) to 2700 µg kg−1, with a median of 39 µg kg−1 and a mean of 250 µg kg−1 for total PAH, which were in good agreement with other studies reported in the literature. For the brews prepared under normal house preparation (20 g material in 2 L boiling tap water for 10 min), no total 15 + 1 PAH could be detected above the LOQ. With an extended brewing time of 30 min, a transfer rate between 0.25% and 0.52% could be determined, which results in no exceeding of the maximum limits given by the European Union directive for drinking water (EU Council Directive 98/83/EC).
Sequential Neutral Zone Classiers With Application to Longitudinal Data

Neutral zone classifiers include 'no-decision' as a classification outcome. This paper extends neutral zone classifiers to sequential contexts for analyzing longitudinal data. Applications could include medical diagnosis where a decision variable is repeatedly measured on each subject with the expectation of being able to ultimately identify a patient disease status. Sequential classifiers monitor the sequence of measurements and decide when to stop sampling and how to classify the subject. Bayesian sequential classification rules make classifications on the basis of the minimum expected loss. This approach is a challenge due to computational complexity associated with evaluating the expected future costs. We consider Gaussian contexts. In the homogeneous case we demonstrate the equivalence between sequential Bayesian classifier and a simpler boundary-based framework. A solution for the heterogeneous Gaussian case is presented using the boundary-based framework. A recursive algorithm is developed to efficiently determine decision boundaries that minimize the overall expected cost.Alternative decision boundaries which are competitive with the optimal decision boundaries are studied. Misclassification rates and expected sample size are investigated and the results are compared with non-sequential classifiers.