Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An efficient joint channel estimation and decoding algorithm for turbo-coded space-time orthogonal frequency division multiplexing receivers

The challenging problem in the design of digital receivers of today's and future high-speed, high data-rate wireless communication systems is to implement the optimal decoding and channel estimation processes jointly in a computationally feasible way. Without realising such a critical function perfectly at receiver, the whole system will not work properly within the desired performance limits. Unfortunately, direct implementation of such optimal algorithms is not possible mainly due to their mathematically intractable and computationally prohibitive nature. A novel algorithm that reaches the performance of the optimal maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm with a feasible computational complexity is proposed. The algorithm makes use of a powerful statistical signal processing tool called the expectation-maximisation (EM) technique. It iteratively executes the MAP joint channel estimation and decoding for space-time block-coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems with turbo channel coding in the presence of unknown wireless dispersive channels. The main novelty of the work comes from the facts that the proposed algorithm estimates the channel in a non-data-aided fashion and therefore except a small number of pilot symbols required for initialisation, no training sequence is necessary. Also the approach employs a convenient representation of the discrete multipath fading channel based on the Karhunen-Loeve (KL) orthogonal expansion and finds MAP estimates of the uncorrelated KL series expansion coefficients. Based on such an expansion, no matrix inversion is required in the proposed MAP estimator. Moreover, optimal rank reduction is achieved by exploiting the optimal truncation property of the KL expansion resulting in a smaller computational load on the iterative estimation approach.
Progress in Nonprehensile Manipulation for Special Issue of IJRR

This paper reviews my recent research in robotic manipulation, and speculates on potentially fruitful directions for future work. My recent work is focused on nonprehensile manipulation : manipulating objects without grasping them. In particular the paper surveys work on: a single joint robot that orients parts on a conveyor belt; a robot that uses dynamics to snatch, roll, or throw objects; hitting things to position them; manipulating things whose shapes are not completely known; and integration of manipulation with locomotion. In the future, a broad view of robotics will allow us to focus on fundamental principles and at the same time address a variety of new applications.
Dicyclohexylammonium trimethylbis(hydrogen phenylphosphonato)stannate(IV)

In the title compound, (C12H24N)[Sn(CH3)3(C6H6O3P)2], the SnMe3 residues are axially coordinated by two monodentate [PhPO3H]− anions, leading to a trigonal–bipyramidal geometry for the SnIV atom. The two [SnMe3(PhPO3H)2]− anions in the unit cell are associated into infinite chains along the a axis by O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds involving the hydroxy group of the hydrogen phenylphosphonate ion. The chains interact with one another via O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds along the c axis. These networks of anions assemble with the dicyclohexylammonium ion through N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming a three-dimensional network.
New Strategies for Advanced Neuroendocrine Tumors in the Era of Targeted Therapy

Low- to intermediate-grade neuroendocrine tumor (NET) constitutes a group of indolent malignancies that share the capacity for secreting hormones and neuroamines. Until recently, there were few therapeutic options for oncologic control. The PROMID study showed that octreotide long-acting repeatable formulation can delay tumor growth in midgut NETs. And, recent phase III studies showed both everolimus and sunitinib improved progression-free survival in pancreatic NETs, validating the phosphoinositide 3-kinase/Akt/mTOR pathway and angiogenesis as important targets for further advances. Ongoing and planned pivotal studies targeting these pathways in other NET subtypes may widen their therapeutic application. Development of rational combinations may further improve therapeutic outcome. These successes and our improved understanding of the underlying molecular biology are likely to lead to further important advances on the horizon. Clin Cancer Res; 18(7); 1830–6. ©2012 AACR.
The effect of extended release tolterodine used for overactive bladder treatment on female sexual function

ABSTRACT Introduction Overactive bladder (OAB) is a common condition, especially in middle aged women, requiring long term therapy with anticholinergics to maintain symptoms relief. The aim of the study was to determine the effect of tolterodine extended release (ER) used for OAB treatment on the sexual function of women. Materials and Methods Between August 2010 and August 2014, 220 women with confirmed OAB, attended Urogynecology Outpatient Clinic and were prospectively enrolled in this study. 158 women were evaluated, with a comprehensive history, physical examination, urodynamic studies and Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) questionnaire. 73 patients of group A (control group) received no treatment and 85 patients of group B received an anticholinergic regimen – tolterodine ER 4mg once daily. Data were evaluated again in accordance with FSFI after three months, using SPSS software. Results A statistically significant increase was noted in group B in domains of desire (pre-treatment 2.5±0.2 to 4.5±0.2 post-treatment), arousal (3.1±0.2 to 3.1±0.2 respectively), lubrication (3.4±0.3 to 4.3±0.3 respectively), orgasm (3.5±0.3 to 4.5±0.3 respectively), satisfaction (2.6±0.2 to 4.2±0.3 respectively) and pain (2.4±0.2 to 4.6±0.4 respectively) after three months treatment with tolterodine ER. In group A there were no statistically significant changes in pre and post treatment values (p>0.05). Total FSFI score for group B was significantly higher after tolterodine treatment (26.5±1.5) compared to pre-treatment values (17.4±1.4, p<0.01) and to control group A (17.7±1.2 and 17.9±1.5, p>0,05) respectively. Conclusions This preliminary study demonstrates that treatment of OAB with tolterodine ER was found to have positive effect on sexual function of patients with OAB.
Privacy in content-oriented networking: threats and countermeasures

As the Internet struggles to cope with scalability, mobility, and security issues, new network architectures are being proposed to better accommodate the needs of modern systems and applications. In particular, Content-Oriented Networking (CON) has emerged as a promising next-generation Internet architecture: it sets to decouple content from hosts, at the network layer, by naming data rather than hosts. CON comes with a potential for a wide range of benefits, including reduced congestion and improved delivery speed by means of content caching, simpler configuration of network devices, and security at the data level. However, it remains an interesting open question whether or not, and to what extent, this emerging networking paradigm bears new privacy challenges. In this paper, we provide a systematic privacy analysis of CON and the common building blocks among its various architectural instances in order to highlight emerging privacy threats, and analyze a few potential countermeasures. Finally, we present a comparison between CON and today's Internet in the context of a few privacy concepts, such as, anonymity, censoring, traceability, and confidentiality.
A Counterexample to Temporal Differences Learning

Sutton's TD() method aims to provide a representation of the cost function in an absorbing Markov chain with transition costs. A simple example is given where the representation obtained depends on . For = 1 the representation is optimal with respect to a least-squares error criterion, but as decreases toward 0 the representation becomes progressively worse and, in some cases, very poor. The example suggests a need to understand better the circumstances under which TD(0) and Q-learning obtain satisfactory neural network-based compact representations of the cost function. A variation of TD(0) is also given, which performs better on the example.
Practical Parallel Processing for Realistic Rendering

A general global illumination method is presented which handles complex geometries using the concept of photon maps. The global illumination method is a two pass method in which the first pass consists of emitting photons from the light sources in the model and storing these in the photon map. The photon map is independent of scene geometry, it does not require tessellation of the objects and it can be used with procedural objects and any other objects that can be ray traced. Two layers of photons are used: One approximate global layer used for the simulation of soft indirect illumination on diffuse surfaces and one accurate layer used for the simulation of caustics. In the second pass the scene is rendered using optimized Monte Carlo ray tracing. The recursive nature of Monte Carlo ray tracing is avoided by using the results from the photon map. The method simulates Anisotropic reflection and caustics on complex surfaces and the results achieved has been verified by comparison with a brute force path tracing algorithm. The method has been parallelized on a network of 31 Silicon Graphics Workstations resulting in a speedup from 20 to 28. General Terms: Algorithms
Xpaaand: interaction techniques for rollable displays

We present a device concept and a prototype of a future mobile device. By featuring a rollable display, its display size and its form factor can be dynamically changed. Moreover, we investigate how physical resizing of the display can be used as an input technique for interacting with digital contents and present a set of novel interaction techniques. Evaluation results show that physical resizing of the display can improve the way we interact with digital contents on mobile devices.
Ontology Development for Military Applications

In order for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to become truly useful in high-level military applications it is necessary to identify, document, and integrate into automated systems the human knowledge that senior military professionals use to solve high-level problems. The skeletal structure for this work is provided through the development of an ontology. This paper presents brief overviews first on ontology development and then on the levels of war that senior military leaders deal with. This is followed by a description of the ontology development done for a course of action critiquing agent as part of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) High Performance Knowledge Bases (HPKB) program. A military course of action is a preliminary candidate plan for how a military organization might attempt to accomplish an assigned mission. Course of action development is done at each level of war, strategic, operational and tactical, but this agent was developed to support the lowest, which is the tactical level. The paper next describes the expansion and extension of the course of action ontology required to represent the military concept of center of gravity used at the strategic level, which is In Proceedings of the SouthEastern Regional ACM Conference, Atlanta, GA, March 16-17, 2001. 2 the highest of the levels of war. This later work is a part of the DARPA Rapid Knowledge Formation (RKF) program being investigated by the George Mason University Learning Agent Laboratory and the Knowledge Engineering Group at the United States Army War College (USAWC).
Self-Stabilizing Distributed Local Mutual Exclusion

A self-stabilizing system is a system such that it autonomously converges to a legitimate system state, regardless of the initial system state. The local mutual exclusion problem is the problem of guaranteeing that no two processes neighboring each other execute their critical sections at a time. The process identifiers are said to be chromatic if no two processes neighboring each other have the same identifiers. Under the assumption that the process identifiers are chromatic, this paper proposes two self-stabilizing local mutual exclusion algorithms; one assumes a tree as the topology of communication network and requires 3 states per process, while the other, which works on any communication network, requires n 1 states per process, where n is the number of processes in the system. We also show that the process identifiers being chromatic is close to necessary for a system to have a self-stabilizing local mutual exclusion algorithm. We adopt the shared memory model for communication and the unfair distributed daemon for process scheduling.
AMPK Activation through Mitochondrial Regulation Results in Increased Substrate Oxidation and Improved Metabolic Parameters in Models of Diabetes

Modulation of mitochondrial function through inhibiting respiratory complex I activates a key sensor of cellular energy status, the 5'-AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). Activation of AMPK results in the mobilization of nutrient uptake and catabolism for mitochondrial ATP generation to restore energy homeostasis. How these nutrient pathways are affected in the presence of a potent modulator of mitochondrial function and the role of AMPK activation in these effects remain unclear. We have identified a molecule, named R419, that activates AMPK in vitro via complex I inhibition at much lower concentrations than metformin (IC50 100 nM vs 27 mM, respectively). R419 potently increased myocyte glucose uptake that was dependent on AMPK activation, while its ability to suppress hepatic glucose production in vitro was not. In addition, R419 treatment of mouse primary hepatocytes increased fatty acid oxidation and inhibited lipogenesis in an AMPK-dependent fashion. We have performed an extensive metabolic characterization of its effects in the db/db mouse diabetes model. In vivo metabolite profiling of R419-treated db/db mice showed a clear upregulation of fatty acid oxidation and catabolism of branched chain amino acids. Additionally, analyses performed using both 13C-palmitate and 13C-glucose tracers revealed that R419 induces complete oxidation of both glucose and palmitate to CO2 in skeletal muscle, liver, and adipose tissue, confirming that the compound increases mitochondrial function in vivo. Taken together, our results show that R419 is a potent inhibitor of complex I and modulates mitochondrial function in vitro and in diabetic animals in vivo. R419 may serve as a valuable molecular tool for investigating the impact of modulating mitochondrial function on nutrient metabolism in multiple tissues and on glucose and lipid homeostasis in diabetic animal models.
EDUCATING INTERACTION, EXPERIENCE AND DIVERSITY

When we look at the developments within design over the last years, two major buzzwords emerge: interaction and experience. At the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering we try to anticipate and respond to these directions in design tuning our assignments towards experience and interaction and by developing new design tools, techniques and even a new structure for our design courses. These tools, techniques and courses do not only aim at supporting and enhancing interaction and experience, they also aim at diversity. Because experiences are highly personal, we believe that diversity is one of the key-issues to be addressed [1]. The new structure, called the Boulevard of Inspiration, trains design students to take advantage of and expand their personal competencies, capitalise on their drive and passion and explore an abundant number of tools and techniques especially through the first phases of the design process in order to gain a rich variety of products, which fit the diversity of users. In this paper we will show a few of our achievements and discuss that designing for interaction and experience using the Boulevard of Inspiration and design techniques such as Tinkering and IA-Cards, seems a tempting, rewarding and feasible concept for contemporary design education.
Locality considerations in exploring custom instruction selection algorithms

This paper explores custom instruction identifying methodologies for critical code segments of embedded applications, considering the locality in selection algorithms. We propose two policies for selection of custom instructions. In the first approach, called local selection, the structurally equal custom instructions are classified into the same group, called template, and the selection of custom instructions is done locally in each template. On the other hand, in the second approach no classification is made for the selection and the exploration is made globally on all the enumerated matches. We describe a design flow to establish the desired performance. We study the effects of locality on the overall speed and area of the system. Our experiments show that, locally selected custom instructions give better results in terms of both performance and performance per area.
A Feasibility Study of Host-Level Contention Detection by Guest Virtual Machines

We investigate the feasibility of detecting host-level CPU contention from inside a guest virtual machine (VM). Our methodology involves running benchmarks with deterministic and randomized execution times inside a guest VM in a private cloud testbed. Simultaneously, using the recently proposed COCOMA tool, we expose the guest VM to host-level CPU stealing events of increasing intensity. This leads us to observe that the use of hyper-threading in the host can hinder detection of CPU contention, which otherwise can be done accurately using the CPU steal metric. For systems where hyper-threading is enabled, we investigate the performance of some basic detection algorithms. We find that thresholding often outperforms more sophisticated statistical tests.
Preparation and microwave absorption of M type ferrite nanoparticle composites

The sol-gel method was used to obtain M type BaFe12O19 ferrite nanoparticles. Rod like and flake like ferrite nanoparticles can be successfully fabricated by controlling the heating process of the precursor. The phase attributes, morphology and grain size of BaFe12O19 ferrite were characterized by TEM and XRD. The complex permittivity and permeability of ferrite epoxy resin composites were measured in the Ku waveband (12.4–18 GHz). Ferrite composites containing short carbon fibres have also been fabricated in order to obtain higher complex permittivities of the composites. The reflectivities of these ferrite composites were calculated according to the measured electromagnetic parameters. The results show that the microwave absorption properties of ferrite composites can be effectively improved by filling them with short carbon fibres.
Electrosprayed polymer particles: Effect of the solvent properties

Electrospraying technology has been studied in many fields to produce particles of various substances from nanoscale to microscale sizes. Unlike pure liquids, droplets formed by electrospraying that are comprised of polymer solutions undergo additional solidification processes involving solvent evaporation, which primarily determine the particle size and morphology. Herein, the effects of the solvent properties on the morphology and dimensions of solidified particles were systematically studied. In general, the size of the solidified spherical particles with smooth surfaces reflected that of the initially formed liquid droplets, which could partially be estimated by theoretical equations developed for pure liquids. Particle sizes increased with an increase in polymer content and a decrease in the boiling point of the volatile solvent. Inhomogeneous drying processes related to phase separation or skin formation resulted in hollow, cuplike, and porous particle structures, with particle sizes and morphologies that were outside of the scope of the theoretical treatments. The selection of a proper solvent or solvent mixture seemed to be a convenient way to control the particle morphologies, such as hollow, cuplike, or porous structures. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009
Construction of a swine BAC library: application to the characterization and mapping of porcine type C endoviral elements

A porcine bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library was constructed using the pBeloBAC11 vector. It comprised 107,520 clones with an average insert size of 135 kb, representing an almost fivefold coverage of the swine haploid genome. Screening of the library allowed recovery of one to eight clones for 142 unique markers located all over the genome, while it failed for only one marker. About 4% chimeric clones were found. The library was also screened for the protease gene of type C porcine endoviral sequences (PERVs), and 62 clones were recovered, all but two of which contained one protease gene. We found 20 protease sequences (PERV-1 to PERV-20) which, despite differing by point mutations, were all coding sequences. The most frequent sequence, PERV-2, was 100% similar to a protease sequence expressed in the porcine PK-15 cell line. Most of the clones harbored envelope genes. Thirty-three BAC clones were mapped by fluorescence in situ hybridization to 22 distinct locations on 14 chromosomes, including the X and Y chromosomes. These overall results indicate that there is generally one PERV copy per integration site. Although PERV sequences were not tandemly arranged, clusters of integration sites were observed at positions 3p1.5 and 7p1.1. Southern blot experiments revealed 20–30 PERV copies in the Large White pig genome studied here, and variations in PERV content among pigs of different breeds were observed. In conclusion, this BAC collection represents a significant contribution to the swine large genomic DNA cloned insert resources and provides the first detailed map of PERV sequences in the swine genome. This work is the first step toward identification of potential active sites of PERV elements.
Knowledge-independent traffic monitoring: Unsupervised detection of network attacks

The philosophy of traffic monitoring for detection of network attacks is based on an acquired knowledge perspective: current techniques detect either the well-known attacks on which they are programmed to alert, or those anomalous events that deviate from a known normal operation profile or behavior. In this article we discuss the limitations of current knowledge-based strategy to detect network attacks in an increasingly complex and ever evolving Internet. In a diametrically opposite perspective, we place the emphasis on the development of unsupervised detection methods, capable of detecting network attacks in a changing environment without any previous knowledge of either the characteristics of the attack or the baseline traffic behavior. Based on the observation that a large fraction of network attacks are contained in a small fraction of traffic flows, we demonstrate how to combine simple clustering techniques to accurately identify and characterize malicious flows. To show the feasibility of such a knowledge-independent approach, we develop a robust multiclustering-based detection algorithm, and evaluate its ability to detect and characterize network attacks without any previous knowledge, using packet traces from two real operational networks.