Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Length bias in Encoder Decoder Models and a Case for Global Conditioning

Encoder-decoder networks are popular for modeling sequences probabilistically in many applications. These models use the power of the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture to capture the full dependence among variables, unlike earlier models like CRFs that typically assumed conditional independence among non-adjacent variables. However in practice encoder-decoder models exhibit a bias towards short sequences that surprisingly gets worse with increasing beam size. In this paper we show that such phenomenon is due to a discrepancy between the full sequence margin and the per-element margin enforced by the locally conditioned training objective of a encoder-decoder model. The discrepancy more adversely impacts long sequences, explaining the bias towards predicting short sequences. For the case where the predicted sequences come from a closed set, we show that a globally conditioned model alleviates the above problems of encoder-decoder models. From a practical point of view, our proposed model also eliminates the need for a beam-search during inference, which reduces to an efficient dot-product based search in a vector-space.
Effect of edible dyes on value addition and post-harvest life of tuberose spikes

Tuberose is one of the most imperative bulbous crops with white fragrant florets, used for loose as well as cut flowers. All the commercial varieties have white colour flower only which is limiting factor in its popularity and marketing. By using edible dyes this issue may be solved for getting higher price in market as well as consumers satisfaction. An investigation was carried out to study the effect of food dyes on value addition and post harvest life of cut spikes of tuberose cv. Local Double in completely randomized design with factorial concept consisting thirty-six treatment combinations and one absolute control. Different treatments of food dyes and immersion time considerably induced colour in tuberose spikes without affecting postharvest life. The results revealed that 4% lemon yellow food dye with one hour immersion of tuberose cut spikes was found best in improving vase life (6.02 days), floret diameter (3.29 cm), opening of florets (49.66%) and visual appearance with minimum physiological loss in weight (16.91 % and 34.04 % at second and fourth day, respectively). Tinted tuberose cut spikes aids higher net return than white flowers, which will benefit farmers in fetching good prices.
The Mn-Carbonate Rich Black Shales of the Bangombe Plateau, Francevillian Basin, Gabon

Eight drill cores cutting through the Mn-carbonate bearing black shales from the Bangombe Plateau were studied. Mn-carbonates (up to 80 m thick) are underlain by laminated pyrite rich shales with organic carbon contents of about 4 wt. % and MnO contents of about 6 wt. %. Mn and Fe, S poor shales are intercalated. Mn-carbonate rich shales (20-29 wt. % MnO) have low contents of phyllosilicates, but are rich in organic carbon (about 7 wt. %) with moderate S contents (about 2 wt. %). All shale facies were deposited in a closed basin through suspension settling and precipitations under anoxic conditions. The Mn-carbonates, towards the top, were formed most likely under suboxic conditions. Pyrite and Mn-carbonates are characterized by bacteriomorphous structures. The latter are composed of micrometric carbonates finely intergrown with clays, quartz and organic matter. They formed around and corroded the dolomite and/or organic matter. Mn-carbonates and pyrite both form also several tenths of micrometer large agglomerates and sub-automorphous grains. The agglomerates can be attributed to evolving diagenesis. Carbonate chemistry varies mainly from rhodochrosite to dolomite. The present results point to primary microbial Mn-carbonate formation. No signs for a Mn-oxide precursor were detected. Slumping and shearing structures, distortion and disruption of thin pyrite beds indicate synsedimentary deformations.
Axial light field for curved mirrors: Reflect your perspective, widen your view

Mirrors have been used to enable wide field-of-view (FOV) catadioptric imaging. The mapping between the incoming and reflected light rays depends non-linearly on the mirror shape and has been well-studied using caustics. We analyze this mapping using two-plane light field parameterization, which provides valuable insight into the geometric structure of reflected rays. Using this analysis, we study the problem of generating a single-viewpoint virtual perspective image for catadioptric systems, which is unachievable for several common configurations. Instead of minimizing distortions appearing in a single image, we propose to capture all the rays required to generate a virtual perspective by capturing a light field. We consider rotationally symmetric mirrors and show that a traditional planar light field results in significant aliasing artifacts. We propose axial light field, captured by moving the camera along the mirror rotation axis, for efficient sampling and to remove aliasing artifacts. This allows us to computationally generate wide FOV virtual perspectives using a wider class of mirrors than before, without using scene priors or depth estimation. We analyze the relationship between the axial light field parameters and the FOV/resolution of the resulting virtual perspective. Real results using a spherical mirror demonstrate generating 140° FOV virtual perspective using multiple 30° FOV images.
Political Stability And The Well-Being Of First Nations In Saskatchewan: Implications for the Proposed First Nations Elections Act

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between the political stability of First Nations in Saskatchewan and a number of measures of social and economic well-being. Our results show that among First Nations in Saskatchewan the average term of elected leadership is 4.5 years. Simple descriptive statistics support the basic hypothesis that more stability, represented as less frequent changes in elected Chiefs, is associated with better socio-economic outcomes for First Nation communities. Our findings also show evidence that there are limits to how much more socio-economic gains can be achieved by increasing political stability of First Nation governments. At some point the positive contribution of greater stability to socio-economic outcomes decreases, such that it may eventually reduce, rather than improve positive socioeconomic outcomes. With this paper we hope to inform the current debate of the merits or risks associated with any future changes in First Nation elections and their resulting systems of governance.
Minimization of Energy Consumption of Wireless Sensor Networks Using Fuzzy Logic

Extending the lifetime of the wireless sensor networks has always been a crucial challenge for the researchers. Most of the energy is consumed in data transmission to the sink. In the recent past some researchers have suggested mobile sink method to minimize energy consumption in wireless sensor networks. The movement of sink is governed by fuzzy logic based mechanism. In this work base station is allowed to move only on a predefined circular path making it practically more feasible. Simulation results are compared with the method having stationary base station. Simulation results show that our scheme reduces energy consumption and thereby enhances lifetime of wireless sensor network by a significant amount as compared to stationary base station case.
Improvement of Panax notoginseng saponin accumulation triggered by methyl jasmonate under arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi

Panax notoginseng is a highly valued perennial medicinal herb plant in Yunnan Province, China, and the taproots are the main medicinal parts that are rich in active substances of P. notoginseng saponins. The main purpose of this study is to uncover the physiological and molecular mechanism of Panax notoginseng saponin accumulation triggered by methyl jasmonate (MeJA) under arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) by determining physiological indices, high-throughput sequencing and correlation analysis. Physiological results showed that the biomass and saponin contents of P. notoginseng, the concentrations of jasmonic acids (JAs) and the key enzyme activities involved in notoginsenoside biosynthesis significantly increased under AMF or MeJA, but the interactive treatment of AMF and MeJA weakened the effect of AMF, suggesting that a high concentration of endogenous JA have inhibitory effect. Transcriptome sequencing results indicated that differential expressed genes (DEGs) involved in notoginsenoside and JA biosynthesis were significantly enriched in response to AMF induction, e.g., upregulated genes of diphosphocytidyl-2-C-methyl-d-erythritol kinases (ISPEs), cytochrome P450 monooxygenases (CYP450s)_and glycosyltransferases (GTs), while treatments AMF-MeJA and salicylhydroxamic acid (SHAM) decreased the abundance of these DEGs. Interestingly, a high correlation presented between any two of saponin contents, key enzyme activities and expression levels of DEGs. Taken together, the inoculation of AMF can improve the growth and saponin accumulation of P. notoginseng by strengthening the activities of key enzymes and the expression levels of encoding genes, in which the JA regulatory pathway is a key link. This study provides references for implementing ecological planting of P. notoginseng, improving saponin accumulation and illustrating the biosynthesis mechanism.
Mechanism of Protein Kinetic Stabilization by Engineered Disulfide Crosslinks

The impact of disulfide bonds on protein stability goes beyond simple equilibrium thermodynamics effects associated with the conformational entropy of the unfolded state. Indeed, disulfide crosslinks may play a role in the prevention of dysfunctional association and strongly affect the rates of irreversible enzyme inactivation, highly relevant in biotechnological applications. While these kinetic-stability effects remain poorly understood, by analogy with proposed mechanisms for processes of protein aggregation and fibrillogenesis, we propose that they may be determined by the properties of sparsely-populated, partially-unfolded intermediates. Here we report the successful design, on the basis of high temperature molecular-dynamics simulations, of six thermodynamically and kinetically stabilized variants of phytase from Citrobacter braakii (a biotechnologically important enzyme) with one, two or three engineered disulfides. Activity measurements and 3D crystal structure determination demonstrate that the engineered crosslinks do not cause dramatic alterations in the native structure. The inactivation kinetics for all the variants displays a strongly non-Arrhenius temperature dependence, with the time-scale for the irreversible denaturation process reaching a minimum at a given temperature within the range of the denaturation transition. We show this striking feature to be a signature of a key role played by a partially unfolded, intermediate state/ensemble. Energetic and mutational analyses confirm that the intermediate is highly unfolded (akin to a proposed critical intermediate in the misfolding of the prion protein), a result that explains the observed kinetic stabilization. Our results provide a rationale for the kinetic-stability consequences of disulfide-crosslink engineering and an experimental methodology to arrive at energetic/structural descriptions of the sparsely populated and elusive intermediates that play key roles in irreversible protein denaturation.
Bloom filter-based scalable multicast: methodology, design and application

Bloom filter based multicast has recently been proposed as a promising methodology for scalable multicasting. The basic idea underpinning this family of multicast mechanisms is to encode the multicast routing information into a Bloom filter carried in the packet. Thus, the routers are relieved from maintaining per-group forwarding states and able to support multicasting with improved scalability, compared to traditional IP multicast. In this article, we first review the evolution path of multicast protocols to shed light on the impetus that had driven the multicasting technology forward. We then discuss several representative Bloom filter based multicast protocols, with revealing their core design issues. While multicast is normally considered the most efficient way for delivering multimedia services, how to fully leverage the advantages of Bloom filter based multicast protocols to facilitate multimedia delivery is still an open issue. In this regard, we present a design that exploits a Bloom-filter based multicast protocol to accelerate the channel zapping in an IPTV system. Moreover, we point out the open research issues hoping to promote new development in the field.
Low coherence compressed channel estimation for high mobility MIMO OFDM systems

In this paper, a low coherence compressed channel estimation method is proposed for high mobility MIMO OFDM systems. High mobility always causes large Doppler frequency spread which costs large spectrum and time resources to obtain the accurate channel state information (CSI). As numerous recent experimental studies have shown that high mobility broadband wireless channels tend to have some inherent sparsity, compressed sensing (CS) has been introduced to utilize the inherent sparsity and reduce the CSI estimation complexity. In this paper, the coherence of CS is studied and we prove that lower coherence leads to better CS performance. An iterative algorithm is proposed to reduce the coherence by designing pilots with the known channel model before transmitted. Numerical results confirm that the proposed method has satisfied channel estimation performance in high mobility environments.
Supercritical CO2 extraction of volatile oils from Sardinian Foeniculum vulgare ssp. vulgare (Apiaceae): chemical composition and biological activity

This article reports the results on the composition and antifungal effect of volatile extracts obtained from the aerial parts of Sardinian wild fennel (Foeniculum vulgare Mill.), by supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) and by hydrodistillation (HD). The extracts were analysed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry for qualitative composition and gas chromatography-flame ionisation detector to establish the percentage of constituents. The main components were fenchone (7.1% vs. 8.8%), estragole (34.9% vs. 42.6%) and (E)-anethole (24.6% vs. 43.4%) in the SFE and HD extract, respectively. Minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) were measured according to the reference Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) broth macrodilution protocols. Minimum lethal concentrations were determined by subsequent subculturing of the same cell suspensions in solid medium. The essential oil was more active against Candida albicans, whereas the supercritical fluid extract possesses higher activity against Candida guillermondii and Cryptococcus neoformans, with MIC values of 0.32 μL/mL.
Global localization of a mobile robot in indoor environment using special frequency analysis of 2D range data

We propose a new approach for finding a location when a mobile robot stays in a indoor environment. In this approach, a spatial frequency analysis is applied to 2D range data obtained by a laser scanner, which is conducted as follows: first, a mobile robot surveys the whole subject area, collecting 2D range data consecutively at short intervals. The collected 2D range data are used as a reference. Second, the robot is placed somewhere in the environment, then it takes current 2D range data at the place, and finds its location out in the reference data. All the 2D range data are treated as binary images and are transformed into the spatial frequency domain. Matching between the reference and current 2D range data is conducted on the spatial frequency domain. This method has an advantage of exploiting the cross-correlation index for similarity evaluation of the matching.
Multi-view descriptor mining via codeword net for action recognition

Action recognition is an important yet challenging task in computer vision. A successful and widely used framework in this field is the Bag of Visual Words (BoVW), wherein the first step is to extract local features. One critical property of local features is that they are often multi-view, e.g., dense trajectory feature includes both appearance and motion properties. Different types of features are aligned together in coding and pooling thus leading the process to be heavily entangled. Our motivation is to disentangle each sub-descriptor and let them contribute to the maximum extent. To achieve this, a codeword net is constructed via exploiting the relation between features and codewords. Based on the codeword net, features from the same viewpoint are pooled together. Experiments on two large scale action recognition datasets, UCF50 and HMDB51, demonstrate that our approach can enhance the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Characteristic Analysis of Direct-Drive Wind Power Generator considering Permanent Magnet Shape and Skew Effects to Reduce Torque Ripple Based on Analytical Approach

In this study, the design for a direct-drive permanent magnet (PM) wind power generator is presented, and its characteristics are analyzed based on analytical approach. In order to confirm their influence on the torque ripple characteristics, both the shape design and the skew effects of the PM are thoroughly studied. In particular, we performed an analytically based electromagnetic field analysis in order to investigate the influence of the AC/DC load conditions on our model. By manufacturing a model using an experimental construction setup, we validate the results of our analytical approach.
Building Specialized Bilingual Lexicons Using Large Scale Background Knowledge

Bilingual lexicons are central components of machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval systems. Their manual construction requires strong expertise in both languages involved and is a costly process. Several automatic methods were proposed as an alternative but they often rely on resources available in a limited number of languages and their performances are still far behind the quality of manual translations. We introduce a novel approach to the creation of specific domain bilingual lexicon that relies on Wikipedia. This massively multilingual encyclopedia makes it possible to create lexicons for a large number of language pairs. Wikipedia is used to extract domains in each language, to link domains between languages and to create generic translation dictionaries. The approach is tested on four specialized domains and is compared to three state of the art approaches using two language pairs: FrenchEnglish and Romanian-English. The newly introduced method compares favorably to existing methods in all configurations tested.
Experience Guided Achievable Push Plan Generation for Passive Mobile Objects

I. OVERVIEW We contribute an algorithm that utilizes the observed effects of previously experimented and memorized pushing moves to generate achievable push plans for passive mobile objects (http://youtu.be/V2gf39mYepI). The most common scenarios in the push planning literature are pushing of a disk or box shaped quasi-static object with a smaller disk shaped or even point-sized robot, and the mathematical models are based on the single contact point of these two primitiveshaped entities. Our approach differs in the sense that • we deal with complex 3D real world objects that may contact the robot on more than a single point (Figure 1(c)), • the manipulated objects continue moving freely for a while after the push is ceased, • manipulation is performed in an environment crowded with obstacles (Figure 1(a)), • no explicit physical or mathematical model is constructed or learning-based mapping is built; only the pushing motions performed in the past and their corresponding observed effects are used for planning and execution (Figure 1(d)), • the push plan is generated by expanding an RRT tree based on achievable and non-colliding object trajectories (Figure 1(b)); hence, the probability of success is increased.
Cell Motility Dynamics: A Novel Segmentation Algorithm to Quantify Multi-Cellular Bright Field Microscopy Images

Confocal microscopy analysis of fluorescence and morphology is becoming the standard tool in cell biology and molecular imaging. Accurate quantification algorithms are required to enhance the understanding of different biological phenomena. We present a novel approach based on image-segmentation of multi-cellular regions in bright field images demonstrating enhanced quantitative analyses and better understanding of cell motility. We present MultiCellSeg, a segmentation algorithm to separate between multi-cellular and background regions for bright field images, which is based on classification of local patches within an image: a cascade of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) is applied using basic image features. Post processing includes additional classification and graph-cut segmentation to reclassify erroneous regions and refine the segmentation. This approach leads to a parameter-free and robust algorithm. Comparison to an alternative algorithm on wound healing assay images demonstrates its superiority. The proposed approach was used to evaluate common cell migration models such as wound healing and scatter assay. It was applied to quantify the acceleration effect of Hepatocyte growth factor/scatter factor (HGF/SF) on healing rate in a time lapse confocal microscopy wound healing assay and demonstrated that the healing rate is linear in both treated and untreated cells, and that HGF/SF accelerates the healing rate by approximately two-fold. A novel fully automated, accurate, zero-parameters method to classify and score scatter-assay images was developed and demonstrated that multi-cellular texture is an excellent descriptor to measure HGF/SF-induced cell scattering. We show that exploitation of textural information from differential interference contrast (DIC) images on the multi-cellular level can prove beneficial for the analyses of wound healing and scatter assays. The proposed approach is generic and can be used alone or alongside traditional fluorescence single-cell processing to perform objective, accurate quantitative analyses for various biological applications.
Retrieval of Wheat Growth Parameters With Radar Vegetation Indices

The radar vegetation index (RVI) has low sensitivity to changes in environmental conditions and has the potential as a tool to monitor vegetation growth. In this letter, we expand on previous research by investigating the radar response over a wheat canopy. RVI was computed using observations made with a ground-based multifrequency polarimetric scatterometer system over an entire wheat growth cycle. We analyzed the temporal variations of backscattering coefficients for L-, C-, and X-bands; RVI; vegetation water content (VWC); and fresh weight. We found that the L-band RVI was highly correlated with both VWC (r = 0.98) and fresh weight (r = 0.98). Based upon these analyses, linear equations were developed for estimation of VWC (root-mean-square error (RMSE = 0.126 kg m-2)) and fresh weight (RMSE = 0.12 kg m-2). In addition, the results of the wheat study were combined with previous investigations with other crops (e.g., rice and soybean). We found that a single linear relationship between L-band RVI and VWC can be used for all crop types (RMSE = 0.47 kg m-2). These results clearly demonstrate the potential of RVI as a robust method for characterizing vegetation canopies. VWC is a key input requirement for retrieving soil moisture from microwave remote sensing observations. The results of this investigation will be useful for the Soil Moisture Active and Passive mission (2014), which is designed to measure global soil moisture.