Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Iterative equalization with adaptive soft feedback

In this letter, a novel equalization algorithm applying soft-decision feedback and designed for binary transmission is introduced. In contrast to conventional decision-feedback equalization (DFE), iterations are necessary, because a simple matched filter serves as feedforward filter, which collects signal energy, but creates noncausal intersymbol interference. The rule for generating soft decisions is adapted continuously to the current state of the algorithm. In most cases, standard DFE methods are clearly outperformed. For a class of certain channel impulse responses, performance of maximum-likelihood sequence estimation is attained, in principle. The high performance of the scheme is explained using results from neural network theory.
Acquisition of Brain Na Sensitivity Contributes to Salt-Induced Sympathoexcitation and Cardiac Dysfunction in Mice With Pressure Overload

In animal models of salt-sensitive hypertension, high salt augments sympathetic outflow via central mechanisms. It is not known, however, whether pressure overload affects salt sensitivity, thereby modifying central sympathetic outflow and cardiac function. We induced left ventricular hypertrophy with aortic banding in mice. Four weeks after aortic banding (AB-4), the left ventricle wall thickness was increased without changing the percentage fractional shortening. AB-4 mice were then fed either a high-salt (8%) diet or regular-salt diet for additional 4 weeks. Cardiac dysfunction, wall thickness, and 24-hour urinary catecholamine excretion were increased with high-salt diet compared with regular-salt diet. We then examined brain Na sensitivity. Intracerebroventricular infusion of high-Na (0.2 mol/L) artificial cerebrospinal fluid into AB-4 mice and mice Sham-4 increased urinary catecholamine excretion, arterial pressure, and heart rate more in AB-4 mice than in Sham-4 mice. Intracerebroventricular infusion of an epithelial Na channel blocker (benzamil) into mice with high-salt diet significantly decreased urinary catecholamine excretion and improved cardiac function. Infusion of either an angiotensin II type 1 receptor blocker or a Rho-kinase inhibitor also attenuated the salt-induced sympathetic hyperactivation and cardiac dysfunction in mice with high-salt diet. The levels of angiotensin II type 1 receptor and phosphorylated moesin, a substrate of Rho-kinase, were significantly greater in AB-4 mice than in Sham-4 mice. These results suggest that mice with pressure overload acquire brain Na sensitivity because of the activation of epithelial Na channel via Rho-kinase and angiotensin II, and this mechanism contributes to salt-induced sympathetic hyperactivation, further pressure overload, and cardiac dysfunction.
Ecological Morphology of Locomotor Performance in Squamate Reptiles

Relationships between morphology, physiology, or biochemistry, on the one hand, and behavior and ecology, on theother, have been widely documented, as this volume attests. Such relationships provide a idence that most, if not all, organisms are to some extent "adapted" to their current environment. Quantifying how well adapted an organism is, or testing the biological and statist~cal significance of putative adaptations, may, however, be very difficult (Brooks and McLennan, 1991; Harvey and Pagel, 1991; Losos and Miles, chap. 4, this volume). As well, many studies in ecological morphology, and in the conceptually related fields of phqsiological ecology (Feder et al., 1987) and comparative biochemistry (Hochachka and Somero, 1984), have ignored the crucial intermediate step of organismal performance (Arnold, 1983; Huey and Stevenson, 1979; Losos, 1990b) when trying to correlate morphology with ecology. In this chapter, we review the literature pertaining to the ecological morphology of locomotor performance in repiles and relate this knowledge to current paradigms and analytical techniques in organismal and evolutionary biology. We will argue that both maximal whole-animal performame abilities (what an animal can do when pushed to its limits; generally measured in the laboratory, and not to be confused with ejiciency; see Gans, 1991; Lauder, 1991) and behavior (what an animal actually does when f x e d with behavioral options; best measured in the field) must be considered when attempting to understand the mechanistic bases of relationships between morphology and ecologj. Locomotion is i n many ways ideally suited for studies of ecological morphology. Most behaviorinvolves locomotion, and measures of both locornotorperformance (e.g. speec, stamina? and its morphological bases (e.g., limb length, heart size) come e a d y to mind. Some reptiles aregood subjects for measurement of locomotor performance in the laborarory (e.g., with racetracks or ireadmills), for quantifying its morphological, physiological, and biochemical bases, and for Locomotor Performance in Squamate Reptiles 241
Ultra efficientand robust estimation of the attenuation map in PET imaging

Time-of-Flight (TOF) PET data determines the attenuation map up to a constant. MLAA (Maximum Likelihood Activity and Attenuation Estimation) was proposed for this purpose. However, in real systems the estimated attenuation map usually results in bias and artifacts, due to various factors such as non-uniform timing resolution, detector timing drift, and biased scatter estimation. Moreover, MLAA has much higher computational cost than conventional PET reconstruction. Improving the practical performance of MLAA is important. We proposed an efficient and robust emission-attenuation joint estimation framework, based on the condition that regions with almost uniform attenuation coefficients are segmented. Following the derivation, the update of attenuation map only requires a few weighted additions in sinogram space, which reduces overall computational cost significantly compared with conventional MLAA, as the latter demands at least two backward projections in each iteration. Furthermore, as the parameter space for the attenuation map is reduced and that the math model encourages an averaging effect in reach region, the bias and artifacts due to various factors above can be reduced. We used clinical TOF PET data to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. In each iteration, the computation time for updating the attenuation map was less than 20% of that for conventional MLAA, leading to significant improvement in overall computation efficiency (twice as fast as conventional MLAA). More importantly, the method resulted in high quantitative accuracy. In population study, SUV computed with the estimated attenuation map and the CT based attenuation map had maximum relative error less than 5.7% in multiple VOIs including the spine, liver, kidney, and heart. Our method can be used as a robust and efficient solution to estimate the attenuation map for quantitative PET image reconstruction, based on a single assumption that the attenuation coefficients are similar in each segmented regions. The numerical error caused by treating attenuation coefficients as uniform within each segmented region is acceptable.
Direct Depth Recovery from Motion Blur Caused by Random Camera Rotations Imitating Fixational Eye Movements

It has been reported that small involuntary vibrations of a human eyeball for fixation called ”fixational eye movements” play a role of image analysis, for example contrast enhancement and edge detection. This mechanism can be interpreted as an instance of stochastic resonance, which is inspired by biology, more specifically by neuron dynamics. A depth recovery method has been proposed, which uses many successive image pairs generated by random camera rotations imitating fixational eye movements. This method, however, is not adequate for images having fine texture details because of an aliasing problem. To overcome this problem, we propose a new integral formed method for recovering depth, which uses motion blur caused by the same camera motions, i.e. many random small camera rotations. As an algorithm, we examine a method directly recovering depth without computing a blur function. To confirm the feasibility of our scheme, we perform simulations using artificial images.
Robust PUF based authentication

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) can be seen as the fingerprint of a device. PUFs are ideal objects for device authentication due to its uniqueness. In this paper, PUF based authentication is studied from an information theoretical perspective considering compound sources, which models uncertainty in the PUF knowledge and some attack classes. It is shown, that authentication is robust against source uncertainty and a special class of attacks. The secrecy privacy capacity region is derived.
Interevent Time Distribution of Renewal Point Process, Case Study: Extreme Rainfall in South Sulawesi

The study of time distribution of occurrences of extreme rain phenomena plays a very important role in the analysis and weather forecast in an area. The timing of extreme rainfall is difficult to predict because its occurrence is random. This paper aims to determine the inter event time distribution of extreme rain events and minimum waiting time until the occurrence of next extreme event through a point process approach. The phenomenon of extreme rain events over a given period of time is following a renewal process in which the time for events is a random variable τ. The distribution of random variable τ is assumed to be a Pareto, Log Normal, and Gamma. To estimate model parameters, a moment method is used. Consider Rt as the time of the last extreme rain event at one location is the time difference since the last extreme rainfall event. if there are no extreme rain events up to t0, there will be an opportunity for extreme rainfall events at (t0, t0 + δt0). Furthermore from the three models reviewed, the minimum waiting time until the next extreme rainfall will be determined. The result shows that Log Nrmal model is better than Pareto and Gamma model for predicting the next extreme rainfall in South Sulawesi while the Pareto model can not be used.
Meaningful Service Classifications for Flexible Service Descriptions

We present a formal underpinning for \textit{Web service classes} by viewing them as a set of services that fulfill a logical combination of constraints on functional and non-functional properties. A hierarchy of service classes is automatically derived by their formal definition and can be exploited for an efficient service retrieval. In addition, we show in this paper how service classes can be used (i) to create service descriptions without specifying precise property values and (ii) to create service requests that can use service classes to express ranges of desired property values.
The COSMO SKYMED constellation turn on the l'aquila earthquake: Dinsar results of the morfeo project

On April 6th 2009 a Mw=6.3 earthquake struck the area around the city of L'Aquila in Italy. SAR systems have been proven to be valuable sensors for analyzing the effect of earthquakes and monitoring post-seismic displacements. Due to the low deformation rate, the study of post-seismic events requires the use of a multi-temporal InSAR approach. COSMO/SKYMED is a constellation of SAR sensors of 4 X-band sensors operative also for the civilian use. Thanks to the availability of a stack of ascending acquisitions, ad hoc programmed by ASI on the area stricken by the earthquake, it was possible to provide post-seismic deformation maps by using two different multi-temporal interferometric approaches: the SPINUA and SBAS techniques. The work is carried out in the framework of the MORFEO project dedicated to the monitoring of the landslides risk by means of Earth Observation data. The displacement maps related to the post-seismic activity are presented and commented. The results clearly show the potentiality of the COSMO/SKYMED constellation use for emergency monitoring.
Cold-air pool detection tools in the Pyrenees valleys

Several possibilities can improve the temperature forecast, whether these use statistic or dynamic downscaling, both with disadvantages and compensations. The statistic methods need large amounts of AWS’ data that in complex terrain are only punctual values, which do not represent the area. On the other hand, the dynamic downscaling is very expensive when computing and its results are more qualitative than quantitative.
Optimal Distributed Controllers Realizable Over Arbitrary Networks

In this paper, we provide a general networked controller design methodology for networked plants and apply it to solve the optimal H2 networked control problem. Both the plant and the controller are interconnected systems, interacting over the same arbitrary directed network with noiseless and delay-free communication links. We introduce the notions of network implementability and network realizability and analyze the structure of network implementable and realizable systems. Based on the structural property of network implementable systems, under certain network-related constraints, we characterize the set of all stabilizing controllers that are implementable over the given network using the state-space version of Youla parametrization. Moreover, we provide a constructive procedure to implement the controllers as sub-systems interacting over the given network without affecting the stability of the feedback networked system. The distributed H2 control problem is then cast as a convex optimization problem and its solution is shown to provide the optimal distributed controller over the given network in terms of its network interacting components. The results of this paper allow one to apply many classical results and approaches of multivariable robust control theory to networked systems.
Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease from EEG by means of synchrony measures in optimized frequency bands

Several clinical studies have reported that EEG synchrony is affected by Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this paper a frequency band analysis of AD EEG signals is presented, with the aim of improving the diagnosis of AD using EEG signals. In this paper, multiple synchrony measures are assessed through statistical tests (Mann-Whitney U test), including correlation, phase synchrony and Granger causality measures . Moreover, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is conducted with those synchrony measures as features. For the data set at hand, the frequency range (5-6Hz) yields the best accuracy for diagnosing AD, which lies within the classical theta band (4-8Hz). The corresponding classification error is 4.88% for directed transfer function (DTF) Granger causality measure. Interestingly, results show that EEG of AD patients is more synchronous than in healthy subjects within the optimized range 5-6Hz, which is in sharp contrast with the loss of synchrony in AD EEG reported in many earlier studies. This new finding may provide new insights about the neurophysiology of AD. Additional testing on larger AD datasets is required to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
CTSR 2011-03 Digital Video Stabilization and Rolling Shutter Correction using Gyroscopes

In this paper we present a robust, real-time video stabilization and rolling shutter correction technique based on commodity gyroscopes. First, we develop a unified algorithm for modeling camera motion and rolling shutter warping. We then present a novel framework for automatically calibrating the gyroscope and camera outputs from a single video capture. This calibration allows us to use only gyroscope data to effectively correct rolling shutter warping and to stabilize the video. Using our algorithm, we show results for videos featuring large moving foreground objects, parallax, and low-illumination. We also compare our method with commercial image-based stabilization algorithms. We find that our solution is more robust and computationally inexpensive. Finally, we implement our algorithm directly on a mobile phone. We demonstrate that by using the phone’s inbuilt gyroscope and GPU, we can remove camera shake and rolling shutter artifacts in real-time. CR Categories: I.4. 3 [Computing Methodologies]: Image Processing and Computer Vision—Enhancement; I.4. 1 [Computing Methodologies]: Image Processing and Computer Vision— Digitization and Image Capture
Effective techniques for automatic extraction of Web publications

Research organisations and individual researchers increasingly choose to share their research findings by providing lists of their published works on the World Wide Web. To facilitate the exchange of ideas, the lists often include links to published papers in portable document format (PDF) or Postscript (PS) format. Generally, these publication Web sites are updated regularly to include new works. While manual monitoring of relevant Web sites is tedious, commercial search engines and information monitoring systems are ineffective in finding and tracking scholarly publications. Analyses the characteristics of publication index pages and describes effective automatic extraction techniques that the authors have developed. The authors’ techniques combine lexical and syntactic analyses with heuristics. The proposed techniques have been implemented and tested for more than 14,000 Web pages and achieved consistently high success rates of around 90 percent.
An automated design tool for analog layouts

In this paper, a layout synthesis tool for the design of analog integrated circuits (ICs) is presented. This tool offers great flexibility that allows analog circuit designers to bring their special design knowledge and experiences into the synthesis process to create high-quality analog circuit layouts. Different from conventional layout systems that are limited to the optimization of single devices, our layout generation tool attempts to optimize more complex modules. This tool includes a complete tool suite that covers the following three major analog physical designs stages. 1) Module Generation: designers can develop and maintain their own technology- and application-independent module generators for subcircuits using an in-house developed description language. 2) Placement: a two-stage placement technique, tailored for the analog placement design, is proposed. In particular, this placement algorithm features a novel genetic placement stage followed by a fast simulated reannealing scheme. 3) Routing: the minimum-Steiner-tree-based global routing is developed, and it is actually integrated into the placement procedure to improve reliability and routability of the placement solutions. Following the global routing, a compaction-based constructive detailed routing finally completes the interconnection of the entire layout. Several testing circuits have been applied to demonstrate the design efficiency and the effectiveness of this tool. Experimental results show that this new layout tool is capable of producing high quality layouts comparable to those manually done by layout experts but with much less design time
Exploratory search interfaces: categorization, clustering and beyond: report on the XSI 2005 workshop at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland

The development and testing of systems to support users engaged in exploratory search activities (i.e., searches where the target may be undefined) is an challenge for the online search community. In this article we report on a workshop on exploratory search issues organized in conjunction with the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory's Annual Symposium and Open House in June 2005. This workshop brought together researchers from the fields of Information Seeking (IS), Information Retrieval (IR), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Visualization (IV) for a cross-disciplinary exploration of these and other issues. Although originally intended to focus on interfaces to support exploratory search the workshop blossomed into a rich discussion of not only interface issues, but also evaluation, the cognitive processes that underlie information exploration and research methods.
Development of Host Range Mutants of Xanthomonas campestris pv. translucens

Xanthomonas campestris pv. translucens is the causal agent of bacterial leaf streak of cereal grains and grasses, and individual strains within the pathovar differ in their host range among the cereals. Coinoculation of a wide-host-range and a narrow-host-range strain resulted in the wide-host-range reaction. Transposon and chemical mutagenesis of the wide-host-range strain Xct4, pathogenic on barley, wheat, rye, and triticale, resulted in variants with reduced host range. When pathogenicity was inactivated independently for barley, wheat, triticale, and rye, wild-type symptoms were retained on the other members in the host range. Testing of some host range mutants on additional varieties of the cereals indicated some cultivar specificity. In addition, mutants nonpathogenic on combinations of the hosts or on all hosts were isolated. This suggests that there are independent positive factors determining host range in this species, rather than an avirulence gene system such as those determining race specificity in other plant pathogens.
Modeling and Editing Isotropic BRDF

Reflectance properties of real-world opaque materials can be represented by bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). Non-parametric BRDF becomes the main aspect nowadays because of its verisimilitude and generality. This paper introduces our BRDF capture equipment and a new compact non-parametric model based on curves for isotropic BRDF. 3D isotropic BRDF data are captured and assembled into a 2D matrix, then decomposed to several 1D curves through twice matrix decomposition, each curve has its own feature, such as specular shape curve, diffuse color curve, etc. The data are compressed effectively, and then reconstructed by these 1D curves during real-time rendering. More important, artist can edit the captured reflectance by adjusting one or more meaningful 1D curve intuitively. Experimental results show that, our method can capture the reflectance data, model and edit BRDF effectively.
OPTIMAL CONTROL OF AN EPIDEMIC THROUGH EDUCATIONAL CAMPAIGNS

In this work we study the best strategy for educational campaigns during the outbreak of an epidemic. Assuming that the epidemic is described by the simplified SIR model and that the total time of the campaign is limited due to budget, we consider two possible scenarios. In the first scenario we have a campaign oriented to decrease the infection rate by stimulating susceptibles to have a protective behavior. In the second scenario we have a campaign oriented to increase the removal rate by stimulating the infected to remove themselves from the infected class. The optimality is taken to be to minimize the total number of infected by the end of the epidemic outbreak. The technical tool used to determine the optimal strategy is the Pontryagin Maximum Principle.