Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scale Proportionate Histograms of Oriented Gradients for Object Detection in Co-Registered Visual and Range Data

Research in automated object detection has mainly addressed detection in 2-D intensity images. The best performing systems exhibit a high degree of robustness to variation in object scale, rotation and viewpoint. Depending on the context of the detection task, rotation and viewpoint can be controlled for, but estimating object scale is usually not possible without additional sensing apparatus. Objects must be searched for at all scales where they are likely to be present. Range sensors allow for direct distance measurements to be taken and the generation of range maps or point clouds that when co-registered against standard 2-D visual images create 3-D images. Knowledge of depth obviates the need to search over the entire scale space for an object, but this also allows for the object's scale itself to be incorporated into the detection scheme. Most existing object detection schemes use range only to constrain the detection search space or to discard detections that do not match the expected object scale. This paper presents a novel feature extraction and detection method that calculates scale proportionate histograms of oriented gradients (Pro-HOG) by exploiting known depth in an image. Pro-HOG is evaluated against a reference implementation of the original histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) feature extractor for detection of images of cars in the PASCAL Visual Object Classes 2007 dataset. High quality detection results are achieved on the real world Earthmine dataset using a Pro-HOG feature detector trained with the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset. It is demonstrated that Pro-HOG's detection accuracy is comparable to HOG but at much reduced computational overhead.
Environment Induced Shadowing of Urban Millimeter-Wave Access Links

In this letter, we investigate how environment induced shadowing influences a 28.5 GHz access link in an urban open square scenario. Shadowing is caused by cars, buses, lorries, and pedestrians passing between the small cell base station and the mobile user terminal. We isolate typical single shadowing events and provide a model for their description. We also present statistical evaluations that can be used as input to 5G access channel models.
Draft Genome Sequence of Natronolimnobius baerhuensis CGMCC 1.3597T, an Aerobic Haloalkaliphilic Archaeon Isolated from a Soda Lake

ABSTRACT The haloalkaliphilic archaeon Natronolimnobius baerhuensis was isolated from a soda lake in Inner Mongolia (China), growing optimally at about 20% NaCl and pH 9.0. The draft genome consists of approximately 3.91 Mb and contains 3,810 predicted genes. Some genes that regulate intracellular osmotic stress and pH homeostasis were identified, providing insight into specific adaptations to this double-extreme environment.
A minimum discrimination information approach for hidden Markov modeling

A new iterative approach for hidden Markov modeling of information sources which aims at minimizing the discrimination information (or the cross-entropy) between the source and the model is proposed. This approach does not require the commonly used assumption that the source to be modeled is a hidden Markov process. The algorithm is started from the model estimated by the traditional maximum likelihood (ML) approach and alternatively decreases the discrimination information over all probability distributions of the source which agree with the given measurements and all hidden Markov models. The proposed procedure generalizes the Baum algorithm for ML hidden Markov modeling. The procedure is shown to be a descent algorithm for the discrimination information measure and its local convergence is proved.
An Empirical Framework for Testing Theories About Complimentarity in Organizational Design

This paper studies alternative empirical strategies for estimating the effects of organization design practices on performance, as well as the factors which determine organizational design, in a cross-section of firms. Our economic model is based on a firm where multiple organizational design practices are en endogenously determined, and these organizational design practices affect output through an 'organizational design production function. ' The econometric model includes unobserved exogenous variation in the costs and returns to each of the individual practices. The model is used to evaluate how different econometric strategies for testing theories about complementarity can be interpreted under alternative assumptions about the economic and statistical environment. We identify plausible hypotheses about the joint distribution of the unobservables under which several different approaches from the existing literature will yield biased and inconsistent estimates. We show that the sign of the bias depends on two factors: whether the organzational design practices are complements, and the correlation between the unobserved returns to each practice. We find several sets of conditions under which the sign of the bias can be determined, and we provide economic interpretations. Our analysis shows that for a particular set of hypotheses, a variety of different procedures may all yield qualitatively similar biases, presenting a challenge for the identification of complementarity. We then propose a structural approach, which is based on a system of simultaneous equations describing productivity and the demand for organizational design practices. As long as exogenous variables are observed which are uncorrelated with the unobserved returns to practices, the structural parameters are identified, yielding consistent tests for complementarity as well as the cross-equation restrictions implied by static optimization of the organizatin's profit function.
Dynamic Reconfiguration of Silicon Photonic Circuit Switched Interconnection Networks

Silicon photonic interconnection networks can provide significant advantages in bandwidth densities and data communication energy efficiencies over electronic-interconnected systems. However, due to the circuit switched nature of photonics, the latencies associated with circuit setup and reconfiguration must be managed to avoid added delays in application execution time. This work characterizes circuit setup latencies and explores architectural solutions and methodologies for amortizing the setup latencies. We first collect data on the initialization delay of an end-to-end silicon photonic link using the latest generation of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware to control a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI)based 2x2 switch and a microring-based demultiplexing filter. We demonstrate nano-second scale broadband switching for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), and a scalable FPGAbased method for wavelength locking and thermal stabilization of the microring demultiplexer. The burst-mode receiver synchronization time of the FPGA is also measured for a 20 Gbps datapath. Using the collected data we then estimate the overall delay to set up an optical circuit, and investigate the effects of a circuit management technique to amortize this delay. The technique is adapted from cache optimization and relies on a metric called circuit reuse distance (CRD). Reuse distance profiles are generated based on a group of representative HPC applications with different communications patterns, and the potential to amortize circuit setup delay over multiple circuit requests is shown. Simulations show that a Markov transition matrix based reuse distance prediction method has significantly higher accuracy than traditional maximum likelihood prediction. Additionally, we show that two replacement policies using Markov chain prediction effectively increase the hit rate compared to the least recently used policy. Keywords— circuit switched; reuse distance; silicon photonics; initialization; replacement; cache; RDMA; FPGA
Music retagging using label propagation and robust principal component analysis

The emergence of social tagging websites such as Last.fm has provided new opportunities for learning computational models that automatically tag music. Researchers typically obtain music tags from the Internet and use them to construct machine learning models. Nevertheless, such tags are usually noisy and sparse. In this paper, we present a preliminary study that aims at refining (retagging) social tags by exploiting the content similarity between tracks and the semantic redundancy of the track-tag matrix. The evaluated algorithms include a graph-based label propagation method that is often used in semi-supervised learning and a robust principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm that has led to state-of-the-art results in matrix completion. The results indicate that robust PCA with content similarity constraint is particularly effective; it improves the robustness of tagging against three types of synthetic errors and boosts the recall rate of music auto-tagging by 7% in a real-world setting.
Tricellulin constitutes a novel barrier at tricellular contacts of epithelial cells

For epithelia to function as barriers, the intercellular space must be sealed. Sealing two adjacent cells at bicellular tight junctions (bTJs) is well described with the discovery of the claudins. Yet, there are still barrier weak points at tricellular contacts, where three cells join together. In this study, we identify tricellulin, the first integral membrane protein that is concentrated at the vertically oriented TJ strands of tricellular contacts. When tricellulin expression was suppressed with RNA interference, the epithelial barrier was compromised, and tricellular contacts and bTJs were disorganized. These findings indicate the critical function of tricellulin for formation of the epithelial barrier.
A tutorial introduction to the minimum description length principle

This tutorial provides an overview of and introduction to Rissanen's Minimum Description Length (MDL) Principle. The first chapter provides a conceptual, entirely non-technical introduction to the subject. It serves as a basis for the technical introduction given in the second chapter, in which all the ideas of the first chapter are made mathematically precise. The main ideas are discussed in great conceptual and technical detail. This tutorial is an extended version of the first two chapters of the collection "Advances in Minimum Description Length: Theory and Application" (edited by P.Grunwald, I.J. Myung and M. Pitt, to be published by the MIT Press, Spring 2005).
MATERIAL PROPERTY NEEDS IN MODELING METAL MACHINING

ABSTRACT Different laws of how flow stress varies with strain, strain rate, and temperature, from different authors, are reviewed and compared for their predictions of behavior in the primary and secondary shear conditions of metal machining. Despite differences in their structure, the laws give similar numerical values of flow stress in primary shear conditions, but show large differences in secondary shear. Friction laws are also discussed. There is a need to develop secondary shear yield and friction laws.
Optimal Reduction of Large Image Databases for Location Recognition

For some computer vision tasks, such as location recognition on mobile devices or Structure from Motion (SfM) computation from Internet photo collections, one wants to reduce a large set of images to a compact, representative subset, sometimes called ``key frames'' or ``skeletal set''. We examine the problem of selecting a minimum set of such key frames from the point of view of discrete optimization, as the search for a minimum connected dominating set (CDS) of the graph of pair wise connections between the database images. Even the simple minimum dominating set (DS) problem is known to be NP-hard, and the constraint that the dominating set should be connected makes it even harder. We show how the minimum DS can nevertheless be solved to global optimality efficiently in practice, by formulating it as an integer linear program (ILP). Furthermore, we show how to upgrade the solution to a connected dominating set with a second ILP if necessary, although the complete method is no longer globally optimal. We also compare the proposed method to a previous greedy heuristic. Experiments with several image sets show that the greedy solution already performs remarkably well, and that the optimal solution achieves roughly 5% smaller key frame sets which perform equally well in location recognition and SfM tasks.
Secure compilation of a multi-tier web language

Storing state in the client tier (in forms or cookies, for example) improves the efficiency of a web application, but it also renders the secrecy and integrity of stored data vulnerable to untrustworthy clients. We study this general problem in the context of the Links multi-tier programming language. Like other systems, Links stores unencrypted application data, including web continuations, on the client tier; hence, Links is open to attacks that expose secrets, and modify control flow and application data. We characterise these attacks as failures of the general principle that ecurity properties of multi-tier applications should follow from review of the source code (as opposed to the detailed study of the files compiled for each tier, for example). We eliminate these threats by augmenting the Links compiler to encrypt and authenticate any data stored on the client. We model this compilation strategy as a translation from a core fragment of the language to a concurrent lambda-calculus equipped with a formal representation of cryptography. To formalize source-level reasoning about Links programs, we define a type-and-effect system for our core language; our implementation can machine-check various integrity properties of the source code. By appeal to a recent system of refinement types for secure implementations, we show that our compilation strategy guarantees all the properties provable by our type-and-effect system.
ELECTRICAL INSTABILITY DUE TO REGIONAL INCREASE IN EXTRACELLULAR POTASSIUM ION CONCENTRATION.

INTRODUCTION Ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation are the two most dangerous arrhythmias. Both are related to reentrant electrical activity in the ventricles. Many studies of arrhythmias consider a homogeneous sheet of cardiac tissue. Since normal ventricular myocardium is inhomogeneous and inhomogeneities play an important role in the induction of reentry, we investigate the effect of a localized inhomogeniety developed at the border between normal and ischemic region. METHODS We used the bidomain model to represent the electrical properties of cardiac tissue and a modified version of the dynamic Luo-Rudy (LRd) model to represent the active properties of the membrane. To investigate the effect of a localized inhomogeneity, the extracellular potassium [K]e concentration is raised to 10 mM from normal [K]e (4 mM) on the right half of the tissue. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION A train of cathodal stimuli are applied from the lower left corner of the tissue with different basic cycle lengths (BCL). At certain BCL, the spatial heterogeneity created with regional elevation of [K]e can lead to action potential instability (alternans) in the normal and border regions, and 2:1 conduction block in the ischemic region. We observed the reentry when local heterogeneity in [K]e is changed from 10 to 12 mM on the right half of the virtual ventricular myocardium sheet. CONCLUSION Electrical alternans occur during high heart rates and are observed in patients suffering from ventricular tachycardia. It is an early indication of left ventricular systolic impairment. This study will help to evaluate alternans as a predictor and guide for antiarrhythmic therapy.
Effect of high-dose plerixafor on CD34+ cell mobilization in healthy stem cell donors: results of a randomized crossover trial

Hematopoietic stem cells can be mobilized from healthy donors using single-agent plerixafor without granulocyte colony-stimulating factor and, following allogeneic transplantation, can result in sustained donor-derived hematopoiesis. However, when a single dose of plerixafor is administered at a conventional 240 μg/kg dose, approximately one-third of donors will fail to mobilize the minimally acceptable dose of CD34+ cells needed for allogeneic transplantation. We conducted an open-label, randomized trial to assess the safety and activity of high-dose (480 μg/kg) plerixafor in CD34+ cell mobilization in healthy donors. Subjects were randomly assigned to receive either a high dose or a conventional dose (240 μg/kg) of plerixafor, given as a single subcutaneous injection, in a two-sequence, two-period, crossover design. Each treatment period was separated by a 2-week minimum washout period. The primary endpoint was the peak CD34+ count in the blood, with secondary endpoints of CD34+ cell area under the curve (AUC), CD34+ count at 24 hours, and time to peak CD34+ following the administration of plerixafor. We randomized 23 subjects to the two treatment sequences and 20 subjects received both doses of plerixafor. Peak CD34+ count in the blood was significantly increased (mean 32.2 versus 27.8 cells/μL, P=0.0009) and CD34+ cell AUC over 24 hours was significantly increased (mean 553 versus 446 h cells/μL, P<0.0001) following the administration of the 480 μg/kg dose of plerixafor compared with the 240 μg/kg dose. Remarkably, of seven subjects who mobilized poorly (peak CD34+ ≤20 cells/μL) after the 240 μg/kg dose of plerixafor, six achieved higher peak CD34+ cell numbers and all achieved higher CD34+ AUC over 24 hours after the 480 μg/kg dose. No grade 3 or worse drug-related adverse events were observed. This study establishes that high-dose plerixafor can be safely administered in healthy donors and mobilizes greater numbers of CD34+ cells than conventional-dose plerixafor, which may improve CD34+ graft yields and reduce the number of apheresis procedures needed to collect sufficient stem cells for allogeneic transplantation. (ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier: NCT00322127)
How Physically Active Are People with Stroke in Physiotherapy Sessions Aimed at Improving Motor Function? A Systematic Review

Background. Targeted physical activity drives functional recovery after stroke. This review aimed to determine the amount of time stroke survivors spend physically active during physiotherapy sessions. Summary of Review. A systematic search was conducted to identify published studies that investigated the use of time by people with stroke during physiotherapy sessions. Seven studies were included; six observational and one randomised controlled trial. People with stroke were found to be physically active for an average of 60 percent of their physiotherapy session duration. The most common activities practiced in a physiotherapy session were walking, sitting, and standing with a mean (SD) practice time of 8.7 (4.3), 4.5 (4.0), and 8.3 (2.6) minutes, respectively. Conclusion. People with stroke were found to spend less than two-thirds of their physiotherapy sessions duration engaged in physical activity. In light of dosage studies, practice time may be insufficient to drive optimal motor recovery.
IMPROVEMENT OF THE AUTOMATIC MOMS02-P DTM RECONSTRUCTION

Using high resolution optical satellite imagery for automatic DTM generation the validation of the digital terrain model becomes an issue. This problem is easily to overcome if a DTM already exists, as given in various European countries. For the validation of the MOMS02-P camera experiment the outcome of the data take M2P083C of March 14, 1997 is compared with the archived DTM of the Bavarian state survey department. The reconstructed MOMS-DTM has a size of 50kmx178km, within an estimated overall accuracy of about 11.6m. Investigations have shown, that this figure can be broken down taking into account various landscape types. This is necessary to come close to the expected height accuracy of the MOMS02-P experiment, what should be in the order of 6-7m.
UniDic for Early Middle Japanese: a Dictionary for Morphological Analysis of Classical Japanese

In order to construct an annotated diachronic corpus of Japanese, we propose to create a new dictionary for morphological analysis of Early Middle Japanese (Classical Japanese) based on UniDic, a dictionary for Contemporary Japanese. Differences between the Early Middle Japanese and Contemporary Japanese, which prevent a naive adaptation of UniDic to Early Middle Japanese, are found at the levels of lexicon, morphology, grammar, orthography and pronunciation. In order to overcome these problems, we extended dictionary entries and created a training corpus of Early Middle Japanese to adapt UniDic for Contemporary Japanese to Early Middle Japanese. Experimental results show that the proposed UniDic-EMJ, a new dictionary for Early Middle Japanese, achieves as high accuracy (97%) as needed for the linguistic research on lexicon and grammar in Japanese classical text analysis.
Use of transmission lines as near field antenna in UHF RFID

in this paper the use of simple transmission lines as “near-field antenna” for Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) applications is proposed. The limitation of the reading/identification zone to the “near field” region of the antenna is a challenging problem for UHF RFID application. Several solutions have been proposed during past years but most of them are complicate and expensive in the final implementation. In this paper a very simple solution based on a transmission line concept will show that is possible to achieve a limitation of the reading zone in a simple and effective way by using very simple “antenna” or better to say: “coupling mechanism system between RF signal generated by RFID reader and UHF RFID Tag”.
Analyzing the Moving Parts of a Large-Scale Multi-label Text Classification Pipeline: Experiences in Indexing Biomedical Articles

Medical subject headings (MeSH) is a controlled hierarchical vocabulary used by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to index biomedical articles. In the 2014 version of MeSH terminology there are a total of 27,149 terms. Librarians at the NLM tag each biomedical article to be indexed for the PubMed literature search system with terms from MeSH. This means the human indexers look at each article's full text and index it with a small set of descriptors, 13 on average, from over 27,000 descriptors available in MeSH. There have been many recent attempts to automate this process focused on using the article title and abstract text to predict MeSH terms for the corresponding article. There has also been an open automated biomedical indexing challenge, BioASQ [1], that started in 2013. The best general supervised learning framework in these challenges has been a pipeline with four different components: 1. pre-processing and feature extraction; 2. employing the binary relevance and/or nearest neighbor approaches to select a set of candidate terms; 3. ranking these candidate terms using corresponding informative features; and 4. applying label calibration to dynamically predict the number of top terms to be included in the final selection for the current instance. The specific details in how each of these components is implemented determines the performance variations of various entries in the challenge. In this paper, we analyze these moving parts of the MeSH indexing multilabel classification pipeline with experiments involving different combinations. Our best combination achieves ≈ 1% increase in micro F-score compared with the top performing team across the five weeks of the final batch of the BioASQ 2014 challenge. The main take away from our efforts is that small improvements/modifications to different components of the pipeline can offer moderate improvements to the overall performance of the method. Our experiences show that, at least thus far, top performances have resulted mostly due to these improvements rather than drastic changes of the core methodology.