Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coupled Dynamical System Based Hand-Arm Grasp Planning under Real-Time Perturbations

Robustness to perturbation has been advocated as a key element to robot control and efforts in that direction are numerous. While in essence these approaches aim at "endowing robots with a flexibility similar to that displayed by humans", few have actually looked at how humans react in the face of fast perturbations. We recorded the kinematic data from human subjects during grasping motions under very fast perturbations. Results show a strong coupling between the reach and grasp components of the task that enables rapid adaptation of the fingers in coordination with the hand posture when the target object is perturbed. We develop a robot controller based on Coupled Dynamical Systems that exploits coupling between two dynamical systems driving the hand and finger motions. This offers a compact encoding for a variety of reach and grasp motions that adapts on-the-fly to perturbations without the need for any re-planning. To validate the model we control the motion of the iCub robot when reaching for different objects.
Contaminant detection probability in heterogeneous aquifers and corrected risk analysis for remedial response delay

A Monte Carlo stochastic model was developed to simulate contaminant transport from an instantaneous source into heterogeneous, two‐dimensional aquifers. Probabilities of detection Pd and contaminated groundwater areas were calculated for different arrangements of monitoring wells. It was shown that detection decreases as heterogeneity increases. Monitoring with 20 wells provides high detection, while 3 wells result in four out of five contamination cases to remain undetected. For fixed heterogeneity, for each well arrangement, Pd increases up to a certain value with increasing transverse dispersion coefficient aT and then it decreases. The frequency of sampling is critical in heterogeneous aquifers with bi‐annual or monthly sampling improving Pd by 40%, and 70%, respectively, relative to that by annual sampling. It appears that at a minimum sampling should take place twice a year, with the once‐in‐a‐month sampling appearing the optimum choice considering the effort involved and the improvements in detection. In heterogeneous aquifers a large number of monitoring wells sampled infrequently does not perform any better in terms of detection than a lower number of wells sampled regularly. Finally, we propose an expression that accounts for the delay between detection and remedial action in order to provide a correction to decision analyses that evaluate the economic worth of well monitoring. Our expression illustrates that delays of over 3 years are equivalent to reducing the economic performance of 12 wells to that of a lower number of wells, or equally, having to consider higher failure costs than those assumed in current risk analyses.
A data-driven approach for online adaptation of game difficulty

Dynamic adaptation of games with the objective of catering to the individual players' level of standard is an emerging and challenging research area of artificial intelligence in digital game. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach for dynamic adaptation of game scenario difficulties. The goal is to fit the performance of the player to the desired conditions set by the designer. To this end, the data on player's in-game performance and dynamic game states are utilized for making adaptation decisions. Trained artificial neural networks are used to capture the relationship between dynamic game state, player performance, adaptation decision and the resultant game difficulty. Based on the predicted difficulty, adaptation of both direction and magnitude can be performed more effectively. Experimental study on a training game application is presented to demonstrate the efficiency and stability of the proposed approach.
Post-operative Rehabilitation of a Bilateral Uncemented Total Hip ReplacementRheumatoid Arthritis Patient. A Case Study

Background and Purpose: Total hip replacement (THR) is one of the most frequently performed orthopedic surgery in India and worldwide. Thousands of people undergo THR every year in hopes of improving their functional abilities and reducing their disability levels. The purpose of this case report is to document acute care outcome measures in Rheumatoid arthritis patient who had undergone bilateral THR and to assess the possible implications that a short staging period might have on the patient’s ability to recover. Case Presentation: A 44 years old rheumatoid arthritis patient with severe restriction in mobility had undergone bilateral Uncemented total hip replacement following which patient was rehabilitated for strength, gait and functional abilities. Outcomes: Modified Harris Hip Score was taken preoperatively, Post-operative day 6, 3 weeks, 6 weeks for both the hips. Discussion: Many studies support an early and intensive Physiotherapy following THR but there are limited literature on rehabilitation in case of rheumatic arthritis patient who had undergone bilateral THR. This study includes an early acute care Physiotherapy from day 1 up to 6 weeks which helped the patient in resuming his daily activities early.
Recurrent-Neural-Network-Based Multivariable Adaptive Control for a Class of Nonlinear Dynamic Systems With Time-Varying Delay

At the beginning, an approximate nonlinear autoregressive moving average (NARMA) model is employed to represent a class of multivariable nonlinear dynamic systems with time-varying delay. It is known that the disadvantages of robust control for the NARMA model are as follows: 1) suitable control parameters for larger time delay are more sensitive to achieving desirable performance; 2) it only deals with bounded uncertainty; and 3) the nominal NARMA model must be learned in advance. Due to the dynamic feature of the NARMA model, a recurrent neural network (RNN) is online applied to learn it. However, the system performance becomes deteriorated due to the poor learning of the larger variation of system vector functions. In this situation, a simple network is employed to compensate the upper bound of the residue caused by the linear parameterization of the approximation error of RNN. An e-modification learning law with a projection for weight matrix is applied to guarantee its boundedness without persistent excitation. Under suitable conditions, the semiglobally ultimately bounded tracking with the boundedness of estimated weight matrix is obtained by the proposed RNN-based multivariable adaptive control. Finally, simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed control.
Acoustic resonant oscillations between the atmosphere and the solid earth during the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption

Long-period harmonic Rayleigh waves were observed on seismometers during the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines. The amplitude spectrum of the Rayleigh waves shows two distinct peaks at periods of about 230 and 270 s. In the Earth’s atmosphere, long-wavelength standing acoustic waves are bounded in a low-sound-velocity channel between the thermosphere and the ground. The Rayleigh waves and the fundamental and first overtone of atmospheric acoustic waves trapped in the low-sound-velocity channels have approximately the same horizontal wavelength and frequency at periods of 230 and 270 s, respectively, i.e., the atmosphere and the solid earth satisfy the condition for acoustic resonant oscillations. The standing atmospheric long-wavelength acoustic waves set off by the eruption selectively excited seismic spheroidal modes near the resonant period through acoustic resonant coupling and resulted in harmonic Rayleigh waves. In contrast, gravity waves and Lamb waves (atmospheric boundary waves) do not couple to the ground efficiently and are not easily observed as ground disturbance on seismograms during volcanic eruptions.
An industrial perspective of power-aware reliable SoC design

Reliable SoC design is becoming one of important real design problems since the fast pace of semiconductor scaling and the introduction of new device structures and materials incur more reliability problems than can be solved in the given time frame (2 years/technology node). Reliable design mostly requires resource overhead (additional power consumption, silicon area, and execution time) to recover from errors. Minimizing the overhead in the reliable SoC design will give SoC industries a competitive edge. Especially, in the case of mobile SoC, mastering the overhead of power consumption is absolutely imperative. In this paper, we investigate reliable SoC design in terms of reducing the overhead of power consumption. First, we review the current practice of reliable SoC design and assess its impact on power consumption. Then, we present our perspective on new design methodology towards power-aware reliable SoC design.
A critical review of predefined diet quality scores

The literature on predefined indexes of overall diet quality is reviewed. Their association with nutrient adequacy and health outcome is considered, but our primary interest is in the make-up of the scores. In total, twenty different indexes have been reviewed, four of which have gained most attention, and many others were based on those four. The various scores differ in many respects, such as the items included, the cut-off values used, and the exact method of scoring, indicating that many arbitrary choices have been made. Correlations in intake between dietary components may not be adequately addressed. In general, diet quality scores show an association with mortality or disease risk, but these relations are generally modest. Existing indexes do not predict morbidity or mortality significantly better than individual dietary factors. Although conclusions from the review may provide guidance in the construction of a diet quality score, it is questionable whether a dietary score can be obtained that is a much better predictor of health outcome.
Case based human oriented delivery route optimization

Delivery route optimization is a well-known NPcomplete problem based on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) involving 20-2000 cities though human oriented factors make the problem more complex. Despite of NP-completeness, the scheduling should be solved every time within interactive response time and below expert level error or local optimality, considering human oriented factors including personal, social, and cultural factors. To cope with this, Cases and NI (Nearest Insertion) are introduced into a Genetic Algorithm (GA), based on the insight that real problems are similar to previous ones. A solution can be derived from former solutions, considering human oriented factors as follows: (1) retrieving the most similar cases, (2) modifying them by removing and adding locations by NI, and (3) further optimizing them by a GA using only NI operations. This cannot only diminish the costs to compute new solutions from scratch but also inherit many parts of previous routes to respect human factors. Experimental evaluation revealed remarkable results. Though the most effective TSP solving method LKH needed more than 3 seconds, the proposed method yielded results within 3% of the worst error rate and in less than 3 seconds. Furthermore, the proposed method is able to inherit most of the delivery routes, while LKH leads to significant changes.
Hormonal Induction and Roles of Disabled-2 in Lactation and Involution

Disabled-2 (Dab2) is a widely expressed endocytic adaptor that was first isolated as a 96 KDa phospho-protein, p96, involved in MAPK signal transduction. Dab2 expression is lost in several cancer types including breast cancer, and Dab2 is thought to have a tumor suppressor function. In mammary epithelia, Dab2 was induced upon pregnancy and further elevated during lactation. We constructed mutant mice with a mosaic Dab2 gene deletion to bypass early embryonic lethality and to investigate the roles of Dab2 in mammary physiology. Loss of Dab2 had subtle effects on lactation, but Dab2-deficient mammary glands showed a strikingly delayed cell clearance during involution. In primary cultures of mouse mammary epithelial cells, Dab2 proteins were also induced by estrogen, progesterone, and/or prolactin. Dab2 null mammary epithelial cells were refractory to growth suppression induced by TGF-beta. However, Dab2 deletion did not affect Smad2 phosphorylation; rather TGF-beta-stimulated MAPK activation was enhanced in Dab2-deficient cells. We conclude that Dab2 expression is induced by hormones and Dab2 plays a role in modulating TGF-beta signaling to enhance apoptotic clearance of mammary epithelial cells during involution.
Spatial and chromatic interactions in the lateral geniculate body of the rhesus monkey.

THE RECEPTORS AND NERVE CELLS that make up the visual pathway must convey and interpret information on both the form and the color of retinal images. In higher mammals little is known about the degree to which nerve cells are specialized for handling these types of information. In a visual stimulus the importance of spatial attributes, and especially of dark-light contours, first became obvious with the discovery by Hartline (20 ) of lateral inhibition in the Limulus, a type of study that was extended to mammals when Kuffler (28) demonstrated t,hat the receptive fields of retinal ganglion cells in the cat are subdivided into a center and an opponent surround. The opponent principle, in which spatially separated excitatory and inhibitory regions are pitted against each other, has now been observed for retinal ganglion cells in the frog (1), the lizard (9), the rabbit (3), the rat (4), the ground squirrel (33), and the monkey (24). Similar effects have been seen in the lateral genie ulate bod . y and visual cortex in the cat (23, 25, 26), and also recently at these levels in the monkey. In 1958 De Valois and his collaborators (15) observed geniculate cells in the macaque monkey that were excited by one set of wavelengths and inhibited by another, making it apparent that in higher mammals the spectral composition of the stimulus was also an important variable. Similar opponent-color effects have since been described in the primate at the level of the retin . a1 ganglion cell (24), and in the visual cortex (34). I n the cat the absence or rarity of oppon . ent-color mecha nisms (19, 36 > may be related to an inferior ability to discriminate color (31, 32, 40); indeed since Svaetichin’s (41) original observation of opponent-color responses in the fish retina (Spotentials), similar response patterns have been seen only in animals thought to have good color vision. Given the existence of two opponent mechanisms system, one for the spatial variable and the other for in the monkey visual color, it is natural to ask whether these occupy the same channels, or are confined to separate groups of cells. In the goldfish it is clear from the work of Wagner, MacNichol, and Wolbarsht (43, 45) that opponent-color and opponent-spatial
Photocarcinogenesis and susceptibility to UV radiation in the v-Ha-ras transgenic Tg.AC mouse.

The v-Ha-ras transgenic Tg.AC mouse line has proven to be a useful model for the study of chemical carcinogenic potential. We undertook experiments designed to study the effect of the physical carcinogen, UV radiation, on tumorigenesis in this mouse strain. Following a total of three exposures on alternating days to a radiation source covering a cumulative UVR exposure range of 2.6-42.6 kJ per m2, squamous papillomas developed by 4 wk after initial exposure in a dose-dependent manner. Malignancies developed within 18-30 wk following the initial UVR exposure and were all diagnosed as squamous cell carcinoma or spindle cell tumors. In contrast to other mouse stains used in photocarcinogenesis studies, few p53 mutations were found in Tg.AC malignancies upon polymerase chain reaction-single stranded conformational polymorphism analysis of exons 4-8 followed by sequencing of suspicious bands; however, all tumors analyzed by in situ hybridization expressed the v-Ha-ras transgene. Immunohistochemical analysis of UVR-exposed skin taken 24 h after the last of three exposures (13.1 kJ per m2 total UVR) showed expression of p53 in hair follicles and in interfollicular epidermis, which indicates that the gene was functional. Thus, although there are some differences between the Tg.AC and other mouse models, these results suggest that the Tg.AC mouse may be a useful model for the study of acute exposure photocarcinogenesis.
Mechanical Stretch Simulates Proliferation of Venous Smooth Muscle Cells Through Activation of the Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 Receptor

Objective—Activation and proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) occur in the venous neointima of vein grafts. VSMCs in a grafted vein are subjected to mechanical stretch; our goal is to understand the essential mechanical stretch-regulated signals that influence VSMCs during neointimal formation in vein grafts. Methods and Results—In cultured vein VSMCs, mechanical stretch induces proliferation and upregulation of both IGF-1 and IGF-1R. Stretch of VSMCs sustained tyrosine phosphorylation of both IGF-1R and its substrate, IRS-1; these responses were related to mechanical stretch-induced activation of Src and autocrine IGF-1 production. Mechanical stretch-activated IGF-1R is functional because there is a prolonged activation of IRS-1-associated phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI3K). When we knocked out IGF-1R, the mechanical stretch-induced increase in VSMC proliferation was blocked. To link mechanical stretch-activated IGF-1R cell signaling to venous VSMC proliferation in vivo, we also studied a vein graft model. Tamoxifen-inducible null deletion of IGF-1R in mice reduced the formation of neointima in the vein graft. Conclusions—Our results demonstrate for the first time that mechanical stretch activates IGF-1/IGF-1R signals in venous VSMCs, and we have uncovered a signaling pathway that leads to neointima formation in vivo.
Identification of Novel Small Molecules as Inhibitors of Hepatitis C Virus by Structure-Based Virtual Screening

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) NS3/NS4A serine protease is essential for viral replication, which is regarded as a promising drug target for developing direct-acting anti-HCV agents. In this study, sixteen novel compounds with cell-based HCV replicon activity ranging from 3.0 to 28.2 μM (IC50) were successfully identified by means of structure-based virtual screening. Compound 5 and compound 11, with an IC50 of 3.0 μM and 5.1 μM, respectively, are the two most potent molecules with low cytotoxicity.
Correlations between Oxidative DNA Damage, Oxidative Stress and Coenzyme Q10 in Patients with Coronary Artery Disease

The correlation of coronary artery disease (CAD) with pro-oxidant/antioxidant balance and oxidative DNA damage was investigated. Seventy-seven patients with CAD and 44 healthy individuals as control were included in this study. The comparative ratios of ubiquinol-10/ubiquinone-10, 8-hydroxy-2'-deoxyguanosine/deoxyguanosine and the level of MDA measured by HPLC and the activities of GPX and SOD by colorimetric approach in blood samples obtained from patients with CAD were unraveled. 8-OHdG/dG ratios, serum MDA level and GPX activity were found significantly elevated level in serum of CAD patients compared to control group. The SOD activity was observed in stable levels in CAD patients. Ubiquinol-10/ubiquinone-10 ratio was significantly lower in patients with CAD than the controls. The positive correlation was observed between 8-OHdG/dG ratios in both MDA levels and GPX activity, while the significant negative correlation was seemed between the ratio of 8-OHdG/dG and ubiquinol-10/ ubiquinone-10 as well as MDA levels and ubiquinol-10/ ubiquinone-10 ratio. We conclude that, both the disruption of pro-oxidant/antioxidant balance and oxidative stress in DNA may play an important role in the pathogenesis of coronary artery disease.
Proprioception as a mediator in the timing of motor responses.

The hypothesis that proprioceptive feedback from early portions of a total movement may serve as a cue for the anticipation and timing of a later portion was tested using 48 5s. The right-hand task involved anticipation (with no preview) of the coincidence of a moving and a stationary pointer, and proprioceptive feedback was manipulated by having 5s make a minimal movement or a small or large rotary movement with the left hand during the interval to be timed. Although neither absolute nor algebraic error was affected by the treatments, the number of beneficial anticipations (absolute errors less than 133 msec.) was significantly larger for intermediate than for minimal left-arm activity, supporting the view that proprioceptive feedback serves as a mediator in tasks requiring precise anticipation and timing.
Adaptive Control of Arm Movement based on Cerebellar Model

This study is an attempt to take advantage of a cerebellar model to control a biomimetic arm. Aware that a variety of cerebellar models with different levels of details has been developed, we focused on a high-level model called MOSAIC. This model is thought to be able to describe the cerebellar functionality without getting into the details of the neural circuitry. To understand where this model exactly fits, we glanced over the biology of the cerebellum and a few alternative models. Certainly, the arm control loop is composed of other components. We reviewed those elements with emphasis on modeling for our simulation. Among these models, the arm and the muscle system received the most attention. The musculoskeletal model tested independently and by means of optimization techniques, a human-like control of arm through muscle activations achieved. We have discussed how MOSAIC can solve a control problem and what drawbacks it has. Consequently, toward making a practical use of MOSAIC model, several ideas developed and tested. In this process, we borrowed concepts and methods from the control theory. Specifically, known schemes of adaptive control of a manipulator, linearization and approximation were utilized. Our final experiment dealt with a modified/adjusted MOSAIC model to adaptively control the arm. We call this model ORF-MOSAIC (Organized by Receptive Fields MOdular Selection And Identification for Control). With as few as 16 modules, we were able to control the arm in a workspace of 30 x 30 cm. The system was able to adapt to an external field as well as handling new objects despite delays. The discussion section suggests that there are similarities between microzones in the cerebellum and the modules of this new model. (Less)
Using and improving bio-ontologies stored in relational databases

Current persistent storage implementations of large bioontologies fall short in meeting usability and reusability requirements. Main limitations are demonstrated with two representative ontologies-stored-in-databases: the Gene Ontology and the Foundational Model of Anatomy. We discuss and propose several improvements for ontology development. Advantages of a better implementation are illustrated with granularity based querying. This granular information retrieval enables both retrieving more information quicker and can be used for improving and enlarging an ontology.
WATTS: a Web Annotation Tool for Surveillance Scenarios

In this paper, we present a web based annotation tool we developed allowing creating collaboratively a detailed ground truth for datasets related to visual surveillance and behavior understanding. The system persistence is based on a relational database and the user interface is designed using HTML5, Javascript and CSS. Our tool can easily manage datasets with multiple cameras. It allows annotating a person location in the image, its identity, its body and head gaze, as well as a potential occlusion or group membership. We justify each annotation type with regards to current trends of research in the computer vision community. We further detail how our interface can be used to annotate each of these annotations type. We conclude the paper with an usability evaluation of our system.