Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatiotemporal frequency responses of cat retinal ganglion cells

Spatiotemporal frequency responses were measured at different levels of light adaptation for cat X and Y retinal ganglion cells. Stationary sinusoidal luminance gratings whose contrast was modulated sinusoidally in time or drifting gratings were used as stimuli. Under photopic illumination, when the spatial frequency was held constant at or above its optimum value, an X cell's responsivity was essentially constant as the temporal frequency was changed from 1.5 to 30 Hz. At lower temporal frequencies, responsivity rolled off gradually, and at higher ones it rolled off rapidly. In contrast, when the spatial frequency was held constant at a low value, an X cell's responsivity increased continuously with temporal frequency from a very low value at 0.1 Hz to substantial values at temporal frequencies higher than 30 Hz, from which responsivity rolled off again. Thus, 0 cycles X deg-1 became the optimal spatial frequency above 30 Hz. For Y cells under photopic illumination, the spatiotemporal interaction was even more complex. When the spatial frequency was held constant at or above its optimal value, the temporal frequency range over which responsivity was constant was shorter than that of X cells. At lower spatial frequencies, this range was not appreciably different. As for X cells, 0 cycles X deg-1 was the optimal spatial frequency above 30 Hz. Temporal resolution (defined as the high temporal frequency at which responsivity had fallen to 10 impulses X s-1) for a uniform field was approximately 95 Hz for X cells and approximately 120 Hz for Y cells under photopic illumination. Temporal resolution was lower at lower adaptation levels. The results were interpreted in terms of a Gaussian center-surround model. For X cells, the surround and center strengths were nearly equal at low and moderate temporal frequencies, but the surround strength exceeded the center strength above 30 Hz. Thus, the response to a spatially uniform stimulus at high temporal frequencies was dominated by the surround. In addition, at temporal frequencies above 30 Hz, the center radius increased.
Catalytic nanomotors: remote-controlled autonomous movement of striped metallic nanorods.

Powering nanoscale machinery by nanosized motors that move by in situ conversion of stored chemical energy is one of the most interesting challenges facing nanotechnology. Such a procedure would circumvent the need for an external macroscopic power source. In nature, nanoscale motors typically operate by energy derived from the enzymatic catalysis of spontaneous reactions. At the nanoscale, interfacial forces dominate over inertia and, in principle, can be harnessed to move nanoobjects. Indeed, we have recently described the autonomous, non-Brownian movement of platinum/gold (Pt/ Au) nanorods with spatially defined zones that catalyze the spontaneous decomposition of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) to oxygen (O2) in aqueous solutions at the platinum end of the rods. These rods are moved by an interfacial tension gradient resulting from the dissolution of the less polar oxygen in the medium around the platinum end. The sustained catalytic reaction results in the interfacial tension gradient being continuously re-established as the rod moves. While the above system displayed autonomous movement, the direction of movement was subject to random fluctuations. Directed motion is needed for catalytic nanomotors to be useful in a number of potential applications. Herein, we present a method for controlling the directionality of nanorods by using an external magnetic field. Striped nanorods with platinum, nickel, gold, nickel, and gold segments were employed (Figure 1). The platinum segment serves as a catalyst for the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, whereas the ferromagnetic nickel segments can be magnetized and used to control the direction of rod movement. Whitesides and coworkers have shown that electroplating nickel segments shorter than the diameter of the rod, results in a rod that could be magnetized transversely rather than longitudinally. 5] Furthermore, the nickel segments in our striped nanorods are single domains because their lengths are less than the critical domain size (150 nm). After fabrication and magnetization of the nickel segments, the rods were imaged by scanning electron microscopy (SEM; Figure 1). Dark-field microscopy was used to observe rod movement in dilute solutions of hydrogen peroxide. We remotely controlled the direction in which the rods moved with a NeFeB magnet that had a field strength of approximately 550 G with respect to the sample, if it is assumed there is a constant field strength for the very small area of observation under the microscope objective (ca. 100 mm). When a magnetic field is applied, a majority of the rods orient themselves perpendicular to the magnetic field lines and move the platinum end forward (Figure 2). This ability to
Commercial Ripening Starter Microorganisms Inoculated into Cheese Milk Do Not Successfully Establish Themselves in the Resident Microbial Ripening Consortia of a South German Red Smear Cheese

ABSTRACT Production of smear-ripened cheese critically depends on the surface growth of multispecies microbial consortia comprising bacteria and yeasts. These microorganisms often originate from the cheese-making facility and, over many years, have developed into rather stable, dairy-specific associations. While commercial smear starters are frequently used, it is unclear to what degree these are able to establish successfully within the resident microbial consortia. Thus, the fate of the smear starters of a German Limburger cheese subjected to the “old-young” smearing technique was investigated during ripening. The cheese milk was supplemented with a commercial smear starter culture containing Debaryomyces hansenii, Galactomyces geotrichum, Arthrobacter arilaitensis, and Brevibacterium aurantiacum. Additionally, the cheese surface was inoculated with an extremely stable in-house microbial consortium. A total of 1,114 yeast and 1,201 bacterial isolates were identified and differentiated by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Furthermore, mitochondrial DNA restriction fragment length polymorphism, random amplified polymorphic DNA, repetitive PCR, and pulsed field gel electrophoresis analyses were used to type selected isolates below the species level. The D. hansenii starter strain was primarily found early in the ripening process. The G. geotrichum starter strain in particular established itself after relocation to a new ripening room. Otherwise, it occurred at low frequencies. The bacterial smear starters could not be reisolated from the cheese surface at all. It is concluded that none of the smear starter strains were able to compete significantly and in a stable fashion against the resident microbial consortia, a result which might have been linked to the method of application. This finding raises the issue of whether addition of starter microorganisms during production of this type of cheese is actually necessary.
Microstructure and Properties of Zirconia Co-Doped with Yttria and Cenosphere Coating Prepared by Air Plasma Spraying

Conventional yttria partially stabilized zirconia (YSZ) coating and zirconia co-doped with yttria and cenosphere (ZCYC) coating have been deposited by air plasma spraying (APS). Scanning electron microscope, energy spectrum analysis equipment were used to characterize the microstructure of the coatings. Pore structures made by cenosphere were found inside the ZCYC. It is noticed that adding 20% volume fraction of cenosphere in the YSZ poweders can reduce the density of the coating by 13.2%, compared with the conventional coating. The co-doping with yttria and cenophere improves the the corrosion resistance of the coating. The coating has good shock thermal and abrasion resistances with cenosphere.
Dynamic calibration of a structured light system via planar motion

Active vision is widely used in robotics. However, it should be calibrated carefully before a vision task. In this paper, we propose a closed-form solution for dynamic calibration and 3D reconstruction using structured light system. In this system, we assume that the light planes cast from the DLP projector are calibrated and kept constant while the principal point of the camera is known. When the camera undergoes a planar motion, its effective focal lengths (measured in width and height of the pixels respectively) and motion parameters can be calibrated dynamically. Then the 3D reconstruction can be effectively carried out with only a single image of the concerned scene. This feature is significant for many dynamic environments. In some practical applications, such as robot navigation along ground plane, planar motion is sufficient and our method provides an effective solution.
Contrast M-Mode Echocardiography in Diagnosis of Atrial Septal Defect in Acyanotic Patients

Contrast echocardiograms during normal quiet respiration and during the Valsalva maneuver were performed in 15 patients with atrial septal defect (ASD) by injecting saline solution into an antecubital vein. Contrast shunting (the appearance of contrast echoes in the left heart) was observed not only in four patients with severe pulmonary hypertension (group 2), but also in 11 patients with uncomplicated ASD (group 1). Contrast shunting was prominent in all group 2 patients. In group 1, contrast shunting was sometimes subtle and difficult to recognize, but at other times was very obvious and similar to the findings in group 2. Contrast shunting was generally more pronounced during the Valsalva maneuver than during normal respiration, although there were exceptions. The amount of contrast appearing in the left heart did not correlate with the size of the defect. Small right-to-left shunts which are clinically insignificant but detectable by contrast echocardiography are present, or can be provoked by the Valsalva maneuver, in most patients with ASD. Contrast echocardiography is a useful, noninvasive method to detect interatrial communication, even in acyanotic patients
MADden: query-driven statistical text analytics

In many domains, structured data and unstructured text are both important natural resources to fuel data analysis. Statistical text analysis needs to be performed over text data to extract structured information for further query processing. Typically, developers will need to connect multiple tools to build off-line batch processes to perform text analytic tasks. MADden is an integrated system developed for relational database systems such as PostgreSQL and Greenplum for real-time ad hoc query processing over structured and unstructured data. MADden implements four important text analytic functions that we have contributed to the MADlib open source library for textual analytics. In this demonstration, we will show the capability of the MADden text analytic library using computational journalism as the driving application. We show real-time declarative query processing over multiple data sources with both structured and text information.
Camera Calibration 1.1 Introduction Z. Zhang, "camera Calibration", Chapter 2, Pages 4-43

Camera calibration is a necessary step in 3D computer vision in order to extract metric information from 2D images. It has been studied extensively in computer vision and photogrammetry, and even recently new techniques have been proposed. In this chapter, we review the techniques proposed in the literature include those using 3D apparatus (two or three planes orthogonal to each other, or a plane undergoing a pure translation, etc.), 2D objects (planar patterns undergoing unknown motions), 1D objects (wand with dots) and unknown scene points in the environment (self-calibration). The focus is on presenting these techniques within a consistent framework.
Research Participation Among Older Adults With Mobility Limitation

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to examine reasons for participation in clinical research among older adults with mobility limitation. A purposive sample of 20 men and 20 women aged 70 years or older was recruited. Data were collected by audiotaped telephone interviews using a semistructured interview guide and transcribed verbatim. Participants expect privacy, professionalism by research staff, and respectful treatment. Benefits to protocol adherence include personal education, comparison of their health status with that of others, opportunity to maintain vitality, and altruism. Barriers to protocol adherence are apprehension, in particular a negative impact on their health care, randomization to the control group, and experimental drugs; and inconvenience. Factors promoting study completion are obligation, reciprocity, receipt of test results, health promotion, and socialization. Implications include meeting expectations, providing health education and study results to participants, reducing barriers to participation, and presenting opportunities for interaction with others.
Anonymizing user location and profile information for privacy-aware mobile services

Due to the growing use of mobile devices, location-based services have become popular. A location service often requires the user's exact location to provide appropriate services and this brings the risk of threats to privacy. In this paper, we propose an anonymization method for users of location-based services in mobile environments. The anonymization approach is based on the well-known k-anonymity concept, but has additional features. We consider the situation that a mobile service (e.g., mobile advertisement) utilizes mobile users' profiles for its service. Since a profile contains privacy information such as the age and address of the user, the use of profile information brings another kind of privacy threat. The anonymization method proposed in this paper considers not only location information but also privacy-related attributes in the user's profile. The location anonymizer, a trusted third-party placed between users and mobile application services, anonymizes the location and profile attributes based on the request. We define a similarity measure between mobile users for anonymization purposes. The similarity is used for related users in terms of their locations and profile attributes. We present the concept behind our method and the anonymization algorithm, and then show some experimental results.
Research on Traffic Matrix Estimation

The traffic matrix is one of the crucial inputs in many network planning and traffic engineering tasks, it is agreed that accurate traffic matrices are crucial, but it is usually impossible to directly measure traffic matrices. So, it is an important research topic to infer traffic matrix by reasonably modeling, and incorporating the measurement data of limited links, as well as other prior information. This paper presents the basic concept of traffic matrix and its estimation mechanism, categorizes and analyzes more than twenty different approaches to traffic matrix estimation problem proposed recently, and summarizes current research achievements on traffic matrix estimation problem. This paper also discusses the performance and estimation errors of current approaches. Finally, future research directions and potential applications of these researches are identified.
Lyndon Words and Short Superstrings

In the shortest superstring problem, we are given a set of strings {s1,. ,sk} and want to find a string that contains all si as substrings and has minimum length. This is a classical problem in approximation and the best known approximation factor is 2 1/2, given by Sweedyk [19] in 1999. Since then no improvement has been made, howerever two other approaches yielding a 2 1/2-approximation algorithms have been proposed by Kaplan et al. [10] and recently by Paluch et al. [16] --- both based on a reduction to maximum asymmetric TSP path (Max-ATSP-Path) and structural results of Breslauer et al. [5]. In this paper we give an algorithm that achieves an approximation ratio of 2 11/23, breaking through the longstanding bound of 2 1/2. We use the standard reduction of Shortest-Superstring to Max-ATSP-Path. The new, somewhat surprising, algorithmic idea is to take the better of the two solutions obtained by using: (a) the currently best 2/3-approximation algorithm for Max-ATSP-Path and (b) a naive cycle-cover based 1/2-approximation algorithm. To prove that this indeed results in an improvement, we further develop a theory of string overlaps, extending the results of Breslauer et al. [5]. This theory is based on the novel use of Lyndon words, as a substitute for generic unbordered rotations and critical factorizations, as used by Breslauer et al.
Proxemic-Aware Controls: Designing Remote Controls for Ubiquitous Computing Ecologies

Remote controls facilitate interactions at-a-distance with appliances. However, the complexity, diversity, and increasing number of digital appliances in ubiquitous computing ecologies make it increasingly difficult to: (1) discover which appliances are controllable; (2) select a particular appliance from the large number available; (3) view information about its status; and (4) control the appliance in a pertinent manner. To mitigate these problems we contribute proxemic-aware controls, which exploit the spatial relationships between a person's handheld device and all surrounding appliances to create a dynamic appliance control interface. Specifically, a person can discover and select an appliance by the way one orients a mobile device around the room, and then progressively view the appliance's status and control its features in increasing detail by simply moving towards it. We illustrate proxemic-aware controls of assorted appliances through various scenarios. We then provide a generalized conceptual framework that informs future designs of proxemic-aware controls.
Urban ecosystems and the North American carbon cycle

Approximately 75–80% of the population of North America currently lives in urban areas as defined by national census bureaus, and urbanization is continuing to increase. Future trajectories of fossil fuel emissions are associated with a high degree of uncertainty; however, if the activities of urban residents and the rate of urban land conversion can be captured in urban systems models, plausible emissions scenarios from major cities may be generated. Integrated land use and transportation models that simulate energy use and traffic-related emissions are already in place in many North American cities. To these can be added a growing dataset of carbon gains and losses in vegetation and soils following urbanization, and a number of methods of validating urban carbon balance modeling, including top down atmospheric monitoring and urban ‘metabolic’ studies of whole ecosystem mass and energy flow. Here, we review the state of our understanding of urban areas as whole ecosystems with regard to carbon balance, including both drivers of fossil fuel emissions and carbon cycling in urban plants and soils. Interdisciplinary, whole-ecosystem studies of the socioeconomic and biophysical factors that influence urban carbon cycles in a range of cities may greatly contribute to improving scenarios of future carbon balance at both continental and global scales.
Privacy Assurance in Data-Aggregation for Multiple MAX Transactions

Mobile devices are now very popular in many applications, and there is a trend to use them in statistic surveys. The main technical issue is privacy assurance. In this paper, we propose a certification-based approach for privacy assurance in multiple transactions of a survey conducted by a third-party application (TPA), which wants to find the maximal values of private data of some member groups in a social society. In our proposal, the computation burden on an involved user to verify the privacy assurance does not increase with the number of users participating in the survey. Furthermore, similar to traditional surveys, the users only need to communicate with the TPA. These features distinguish our approach from the existing research in literature for secure multi-party computation.
Technical University of Lisbon CLEF 2008 Submission: TEL@CLEF Monolingual Task

We describe our participation in the TEL@CLEF task of the CLEF 2008 ad-hoc track, where we measured the retrieval performance of the IR service that is currently under development as part of the DIGMAP project. DIGMAP’s IR service is mostly based on Lucene, together with extensions for using query expansion and multinomial language modelling. In our runs, we experimented combinations of query expansion, Lucene’s off-the-shelf ranking scheme and the ranking scheme based on multinomial language modelling. Results show that query expansion and multinomial language modelling both result in increased performance.
Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium

Structural information in language is important for obtaining a better understanding of a human communication (e.g., sentence segmentation, speaker turns, and topic segmentation). Human communication involves a variety of multimodal behaviors that signal both propositional content and structure, e.g., gesture, gaze, and body posture. These non-verbal signals have tight temporal and semantic links to spoken content. In my thesis, I am working on incorporating non-verbal cues into a multimodal model to better predict the structural events to further improve the understanding of human communication. Some research results are summarized in this document and my future research plan is described.
Precise alias analysis for static detection of web application vulnerabilities

The number and the importance of web applications have increased rapidly over the last years. At the same time, the quantity and impact of security vulnerabilities in such applications have grown as well. Since manual code reviews are time-consuming, error-prone and costly, the need for automated solutions has become evident. In this paper, we address the problem of vulnerable web applications by means of static source code analysis. To this end, we present a novel, precise alias analysis targeted at the unique reference semantics commonly found in scripting languages. Moreover, we enhance the quality and quantity of the generated vulnerability reports by employing a novel, iterative two-phase algorithm for fast and precise resolution of file inclusions.We integrated the presented concepts into Pixy~\cite{jovanovic06:pixy_short}, a high-precision static analysis tool aimed at detecting cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in PHP scripts. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques, we analyzed three web applications and discovered 106 vulnerabilities. Both the high analysis speed as well as the low number of generated false positives show that our techniques can be used for conducting effective security audits.
A Proposal to Prevent Click-Fraud Using Clickable CAPTCHAs

Advertising on the Internet is a key factor for the success of several businesses nowadays. The Internet has evolved to a point where it has become possible to develop a business model completely based on Web advertising, which is important for the consolidation of such a model and the continuity of the Internet itself. However, it is often observed that some content publishers are dishonest and employ automated tools to generate traffic and profit by defrauding advertisers. Similarly, some advertisers use automated tools to click on the ads of their competitors, aiming to exhaust the budget of the competitor's marketing departments. In this paper, differently of recent click fraud detection mechanisms, that take place after the fraud has already occurred, we propose an approach for preventing automated click-fraud, based on the use of click able CAPTCHAs.