Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Human Robot Collaboration in Masonry Work Using Immersive Virtual Environments

ABSTRACT: With the advent of collaborative robots, there is a great potential to improve work performance by human-robot collaboration in engineering tasks. Construction is no exception. Many construction tasks are based on the movement of objects (e.g., material), which are viable candidates for human-robot collaboration. However, due to the physically imposing nature of robot operations and the unstructured environments typical in construction, it is crucial to provide a safe and reliable environment for human workers when performing collaborative work with robots. In this paper, we use Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) to evaluate a human response to robots (e.g. perceived safety, trust, and team identification) while performing collaborative construction tasks with robots. By adopting IVEs, various types of robots, interactions, and tasks can be easily tested and evaluated to determine the best HRC practice, without the need to build and evaluate a physical prototype. Several experimental scenarios simulating collaborative masonry tasks were implemented using the Unity3D Game Engine and an Oculus Rift 3D Head-Mounted Display (HMD). The results demonstrate that it is important to take into account work environment of human-robot collaboration in order to understand how humans perceive robots when working with them.
The politics of adaptive climate management: Scientific recipes and lived reality

While excited about the ground‐breaking work coming out of the epistemic community promoting adaptive (climate) management (AM), we worry about its tendency to ignore normative implications originating in the implicit worldviews underlying AM literature. Generally, AM has a “green” ideology and focuses on the bioregion as the only sensible level for analysis and action. This tendency for systemic functionalism of AM‐as‐(green)‐policy‐prescription depoliticizes an issue (“what to do about climate change”) that is political through and through. For example, those who stand to lose their livelihood as a result of AM plans or simply cannot adapt so fast may resist AM propositions. Implementing AM in practice thereby often leads to social and institutional engineering to overcome resistance. AM in academia seems quite far removed from the “real worlds” of social deliberation and praxis where policy is made and implemented, and where other values and interests than those implicit in AM prevail. We therefore highlight the importance of practices on the ground, claiming AM is not achieved by bioregional policies, but developed “on the hoof” at locally appropriate scales. Everyday professional work is characterized by “organized improvisation” where tacit professional and experiential knowledge are of prime importance.
Performance considerations on composite applications

Long lasting business applications in conjunction with modern software architecture may introduce old problems in a new fashion. Applications built in a service oriented environment can leverage existing infrastructure and enable cross-business functionality. Performance has been and is still one important research topic in enterprise applications once more because new architecture paradigms bring new challenges to areas which appeared to be uncritical. This paper considers several aspects of performance of applications which are assembled of different components, mainly using services for the joining. Also some thoughts are given about possible ways to improve or rather prevent lacking performance in such an environment
Analysis of secondary structural and physicochemical changes in protein–protein complexes

Conformation switching in protein–protein complexes is considered important for the molecular recognition process. Overall analysis of 123 protein–protein complexes in a benchmark data-set showed that 6.8% of residues switched over their secondary structure conformation upon complex formation. Amino acid residue-wise preference for conformation change has been analyzed in binding and non-binding site residues separately. In this analysis, residues such as Ser, Leu, Glu, and Lys had higher frequency of secondary structural conformation change. The change of helix to coil and sheet to coil conformation and vice versa has been observed frequently, whereas the conformation change of helix to extended sheet occurred rarely in the studied complexes. Influence of conformation change toward the N and C terminal on either side of the binding site residues has been analyzed. Further, analysis on φ and ψ angle variation, conservation, stability, and solvent accessibility have been performed on binding site residues. Knowledge obtained from the present study could be effectively employed in the protein–protein modeling and docking studies.
Can We Really Recover Data if Storage Subsystem Fails?

This paper presents a theoretical and experimental study on the limitations of copy-on-write snapshots and incremental backups in terms of data recoverability. We provide mathematical proofs of our new findings as well as implementation experiments to show how data recovery is done in case of various failures. Based on our study, we propose a new system architecture that will overcome the problems of existing technologies. The new architecture can provide two-way data recovery capability with the same storage overheads and can be implemented fairly easily on existing systems. We show that the new architecture has maximum data recoverability and is practically feasible.
Beyond the Personal Software Process: Metrics collection and analysis for the differently disciplined

Pedagogues such as the Personal Software Process (PSP) shift metrics definition, collection, and analysis from the organizational level to the individual level. While case study research indicates that the PSP can provide software engineering students with empirical support for improving estimation and quality assurance, there is little evidence that many students continue to use the PSP when no longer required to do so. Our research suggests that this "PSP adoption problem" may be due to two problems: the high overhead of PSP-style metrics collection and analysis, and the requirement that PSP users "context switch" between product development and process recording. This paper overviews our initial PSP experiences, our first attempt to solve the PSP adoption problem with the LEAP system, and our current approach called Hackystat. This approach fully automates both data collection and analysis, which eliminates overhead and context switching. However, Hackystat changes the kind of metrics data that is collected, and introduces new privacy-related adoption issues of its own.
The SKINT1-Like Gene Is Inactivated in Hominoids But Not in All Primate Species: Implications for the Origin of Dendritic Epidermal T Cells

Dendritic epidermal T cells, which express an invariant Vγ5Vδ1 T-cell receptor and account for 95% of all resident T cells in the mouse epidermis, play a critical role in skin immune surveillance. These γδ T cells are generated by positive selection in the fetal thymus, after which they migrate to the skin. The development of dendritic epidermal T cells is critically dependent on the Skint1 gene expressed specifically in keratinocytes and thymic epithelial cells, suggesting an indispensable role for Skint1 in the selection machinery for specific intraepithelial lymphocytes. Phylogenetically, rodents have functional SKINT1 molecules, but humans and chimpanzees have a SKINT1-like (SKINT1L) gene with multiple inactivating mutations. In the present study, we analyzed SKINT1L sequences in representative primate species and found that all hominoid species have a common inactivating mutation, but that Old World monkeys such as olive baboons, green monkeys, cynomolgus macaques and rhesus macaques have apparently functional SKINT1L sequences, indicating that SKINT1L was inactivated in a common ancestor of hominoids. Interestingly, the epidermis of cynomolgus macaques contained a population of dendritic-shaped γδ T cells expressing a semi-invariant Vγ10/Vδ1 T-cell receptor. However, this population of macaque T cells differed from rodent dendritic epidermal T cells in that their Vγ10/Vδ1 T-cell receptors displayed junctional diversity and expression of Vγ10 was not epidermis-specific. Therefore, macaques do not appear to have rodent-type dendritic epidermal T cells despite having apparently functional SKINT1L. Comprehensive bioinformatics analysis indicates that SKINT1L emerged in an ancestor of placental mammals but was inactivated or lost multiple times in mammalian evolution and that Skint1 arose by gene duplication in a rodent lineage, suggesting that authentic dendritic epidermal T cells are presumably unique to rodents.
Role of Liver X Receptor in AD Pathophysiology

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the major cause of dementia worldwide. The pharmacological activation of nuclear receptors (Liver X receptors: LXRs or Retinoid X receptors: RXR) has been shown to induce overexpression of the ATP-Binding Cassette A1 (ABCA1) and Apolipoprotein E (ApoE), changes that are associated with improvement in cognition and reduction of amyloid beta pathology in amyloidogenic AD mouse models (i.e. APP, PS1: 2tg-AD). Here we investigated whether treatment with a specific LXR agonist has a measurable impact on the cognitive impairment in an amyloid and Tau AD mouse model (3xTg-AD: 12-months-old; three months treatment). The data suggests that the LXR agonist GW3965 is associated with increased expression of ApoE and ABCA1 in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex without a detectable reduction of the amyloid load. We also report that most cells overexpressing ApoE (86±12%) are neurons localized in the granular cell layer of the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. In the GW3965 treated 3xTg-AD mice we also observed reduction in astrogliosis and increased number of stem and proliferating cells in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus. Additionally, we show that GW3965 rescued hippocampus long term synaptic plasticity, which had been disrupted by oligomeric amyloid beta peptides. The effect of GW3965 on synaptic function was protein synthesis dependent. Our findings identify alternative functional/molecular mechanisms by which LXR agonists may exert their potential benefits as a therapeutic strategy against AD.
Characterizing Variation of Branch Angle and Genome-Wide Association Mapping in Rapeseed (Brassica napus L.)

Changes in the rapeseed branch angle alter plant architecture, allowing more efficient light capture as planting density increases. In this study, a natural population of rapeseed was grown in three environments and evaluated for branch angle trait to characterize their phenotypic patterns and genotype with a 60K Brassica Infinium SNP array. Significant phenotypic variation was observed from 20 to 70°. As a result, 25 significant quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with branch angle were identified on chromosomes A2, A3, A7, C3, C5, and C7 by the MLM model in TASSEL 4.0. Orthologs of the functional candidate genes involved in branch angle were identified. Among the key QTL, the peak SNPs were close to the key orthologous genes BnaA.Lazy1 and BnaC.Lazy1 on A3 and C3 homologous genome blocks. With the exception of Lazy (LA) orthologous genes, SQUMOSA PROMOTER BINDING PROTEIN LIKE 14 (SPL14) and an auxin-responsive GRETCHEN HAGEN 3 (GH3) genes from Arabidopsis thaliana were identified close to two clusters of SNPs on the A7 and C7 chromosomes. These findings on multiple novel loci and candidate genes of branch angle will be useful for further understanding and genetic improvement of plant architecture in rapeseed.
Exploration scavenging

We examine the problem of evaluating a policy in the contextual bandit setting using only observations collected during the execution of another policy. We show that policy evaluation can be impossible if the exploration policy chooses actions based on the side information provided at each time step. We then propose and prove the correctness of a principled method for policy evaluation which works when this is not the case, even when the exploration policy is deterministic, as long as each action is explored sufficiently often. We apply this general technique to the problem of offline evaluation of internet advertising policies. Although our theoretical results hold only when the exploration policy chooses ads independent of side information, an assumption that is typically violated by commercial systems, we show how clever uses of the theory provide non-trivial and realistic applications. We also provide an empirical demonstration of the effectiveness of our techniques on real ad placement data.
The role of emotions on pacing strategies and performance in middle and long duration sport events

Thepacing strategy may be defined as the process in which the total energy expenditure during exercise is regulated on a moment-to-moment basis in order to ensure that the exercise bout can be completed in a minimum time and without a catastrophic biological failure. Experienced athletes develop a stable template of the power outputs they are able to sustain for different durations of exercise, but it is not known how they originally develop this template or how that template changes with training and experience. While it is understood that the athlete's physiological state makes an important contribution to this process, there has been much less interest in the contribution that the athlete's emotional status makes. The aim of this review is to evaluate the literature of physiological, neurophysiological and perceptual responses during exercise in order to propose a complex model interpretation of this process which may be a critical factor determining success in middle- and long-duration sporting competitions. We describe unconscious/physiological and conscious/emotional mechanisms of control, the focus of which are to ensure that exercise terminates before catastrophic failure occurs in any bodily system. We suggest that training sessions teach the athlete to select optimal pacing strategies by associating a level of emotion with the ability to maintain that pace for exercise of different durations. That pacing strategy is then adopted in future events. Finally, we propose novel perspectives to maximise performance and to avoid overtraining by paying attention also to the emotional state in training process.
Estimating Membership Functions in a Fuzzy Network Model for Part-of-Speech Tagging

Part-of-speech POS tagging is a process of assigning a POS to each word in a sentence. Because many words are often ambiguous in their POSs, POS tagging must be able to select the most proper POS sequence for a given sentence. Recently, probabilistic approaches have shown very promising results to solve such ambiguity problems. Probabilistic approaches, however, usually require lots of training data to get reliable probabilities. To alleviate such restriction, we use fuzzy membership functions instead of probability distributions. Such a POS tagging model is called a fuzzy network POS tagging model. The membership functions are automatically estimated by using probabilities and neural networks with a learning algorithm. Experiments show that the performance of the fuzzy network POS tagging model is much better than that of a hidden Markov model under a limited amount of training data.
Endurance performance is enhanced by intermittent hyperbaric exposure via up‐regulation of proteins involved in mitochondrial biogenesis in mice

This study was designed to (1) investigate the effects of acute hyperbaric exposure on muscle mRNA expression levels, and (2) clarify the mechanisms by which intermittent hyperbaric exposure improves endurance capacity. Experiment 1: Male mice were subjected to acute 1‐h hyperbaric exposure (1.3 atmospheres absolute with 20.9% O2). The expression of peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor gamma coactivator 1‐alpha (PGC‐1α) mRNA significantly increased in the soleus (7.2‐fold) and red gastrocnemius muscles (Gr, 5.1‐fold) 3 h after hyperbaric exposure. Peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor alpha (PPARα) mRNA levels significantly increased in the plantaris (PL, 2.9‐fold) and Gr (2.3‐fold) 3 h after hyperbaric exposure. Experiment 2: Mice were subjected to exercise training with (HypTr) and without (Tr) 1‐h hyperbaric exposure for 4 weeks. Increases in maximal exercise capacity were significantly greater in HypTr than in Tr. In PL, activity levels of 3‐hydroxyacyl‐CoA‐dehydrogenase and citrate synthase (CS) were significantly greater in HypTr than in Tr. CS and phosphofructokinase activities both markedly increased in the white gastrocnemius muscle (Gw) in HypTr only. PGC‐1α expression in the nucleus was significantly greater in HypTr than in Tr in PL (4.8‐fold), Gr (3.2‐fold), and Gw (15‐fold). Protein levels of mitochondrial transcription factor A and heat shock protein 70 significantly increased after training with hyperbaric exposure. These results suggest that exercise training with intermittent hyperbaric exposure represents a beneficial strategy for increasing endurance performance by facilitating oxidative and glycolytic capacities and the expression of proteins involved in mitochondrial biogenesis in the hindlimb muscles.
Extending the Scope of Inquiry in Interlanguage Pragmatics : The Case of Focus Constructions

This paper proposes that the field of inquiry in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) needs to be extended beyond the cross-cultural investigation of speech acts, and argues that pragmatic knowledge of a foreign/second language (L2) includes more than the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities for understanding and performing speech acts. It is suggested to study advanced L2 learners' comprehension and use of syntactic means of information focusing, known as focus constructions, which are pragmatically-motivated variations of the basic word order. The paper outlines that knowledge of the principles of information organization in discourse, and the use of linguistic devices for information highlighting clearly relate to L2 pragmatic knowledge. Investigating these phenomena in advanced interlanguage may also be a rewarding enterprise with respect to the interrelationship of learners' grammatical and pragmalinguistic abilities, an important yet unresolved issue in ILP research. Finally, the paper discusses some pedagogical implications for foreign language teaching.
Fungicide sensitivity of Trichoderma spp. from Agaricus bisporus farms in Serbia

Trichoderma species, the causal agents of green mould disease, induce great losses in Agaricus bisporus farms. Fungicides are widely used to control mushroom diseases although green mould control is encumbered with difficulties. The aims of this study were, therefore, to research in vitro toxicity of several commercial fungicides to Trichoderma isolates originating from Serbian and Bosnia-Herzegovina farms, and to evaluate the effects of pH and light on their growth. The majority of isolates demonstrated optimal growth at pH 5.0, and the rest at pH 6.0. A few isolates also grew well at pH 7. The weakest mycelial growth was noted at pH 8.0–9.0. Generally, light had an inhibitory effect on the growth of tested isolates. The isolates showed the highest susceptibility to chlorothalonil and carbendazim (ED50 less than 1 mg L−1), and were less sensitive to iprodione (ED50 ranged 0.84–6.72 mg L−1), weakly resistant to thiophanate-methyl (ED50 = 3.75–24.13 mg L−1), and resistant to trifloxystrobin (ED50 = 10.25–178.23 mg L−1). Considering the toxicity of fungicides to A. bisporus, carbendazim showed the best selective toxicity (0.02), iprodione and chlorothalonil moderate (0.16), and thiophanate-methyl the lowest (1.24), while trifloxystrobin toxicity to A. bisporus was not tested because of its inefficiency against Trichoderma isolates.
Atheroprotective Effect of Oleoylethanolamide (OEA) Targeting Oxidized LDL

Dietary fat-derived lipid oleoylethanolamide (OEA) has shown to modulate lipid metabolism through a peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-alpha (PPAR-α)-mediated mechanism. In our study, we further demonstrated that OEA, as an atheroprotective agent, modulated the atherosclerotic plaques development. In vitro studies showed that OEA antagonized oxidized LDL (ox-LDL)-induced vascular endothelial cell proliferation and vascular smooth muscle cell migration, and suppressed lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced LDL modification and inflammation. In vivo studies, atherosclerosis animals were established using balloon-aortic denudation (BAD) rats and ApoE-/- mice fed with high-caloric diet (HCD) for 17 or 14 weeks respectively, and atherosclerotic plaques were evaluated by oil red staining. The administration of OEA (5 mg/kg/day, intraperitoneal injection, i.p.) prevented or attenuated the formation of atherosclerotic plaques in HCD-BAD rats or HCD-ApoE−/− mice. Gene expression analysis of vessel tissues from these animals showed that OEA induced the mRNA expressions of PPAR-α and downregulated the expression of M-CFS, an atherosclerotic marker, and genes involved in oxidation and inflammation, including iNOS, COX-2, TNF-α and IL-6. Collectively, our results suggested that OEA exerted a pharmacological effect on modulating atherosclerotic plaque formation through the inhibition of LDL modification in vascular system and therefore be a potential candidate for anti-atherosclerosis drug.
Non-contiguous processor allocation algorithms for distributed memory multicomputers

Current processor allocation techniques for highly parallel systems have thus far been restricted to contiguous allocation strategies for which performance suffers significantly due to the inherent problem of fragmentation. We are investigating processor allocation algorithms which lift the restriction on contiguity of processors in order to address the problem of fragmentation. Three non-contiguous processor allocation strategies: naive, random and the multiple buddy strategy (MBS) are proposed and studied in this paper. Simulations compare the performance of the non-contiguous strategies with that of several well-known contiguous algorithms. We show that non-contiguous allocation algorithms perform better overall than the contiguous ones, even when message-passing contention is considered. We also present the results of experiments on an Intel Paragon XP/S-15 with 208 nodes that show non-contiguous allocation is feasible with current technologies. <<ETX>>
Game of words: tagging places through crowdsourcing on public displays

In this paper we present Game of Words, a crowdsourcing game for public displays that allows the creation of a keyword dictionary to describe locations. It relies on crowdsourcing and gamification to identify, filter, and rank keywords based on their relevance to the location of the public display itself. We demonstrate that crowdsourcing on public displays can leverage users' knowledge of their environment, can work with a generic gaming task, and can be deployed on displays with multiple concurrent services. Our analysis shows that our approach has important benefits, such as the ability to identify undesired input, provide words of high semantic relevance, as well as a broader scope of keywords. Finally, our analysis also demonstrates that the chosen game design coped well with the challenges of this complex setting (i.e. public urban space) by disincentivising incorrect use of the system.