Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Practical robust control for flexible joint robot manipulators

In this paper we proposed a practical robust controller which has simple structure, more easy tuning factor, and control forms having direct relation with control performance. This robust control is designed using the motor side dynamics directly. The design procedure consists of three parts. A model based computed torque control part to decrease stead-state errors, a feedback based control part to increase control accuracy, and robust control part to maintain the tracking performance using the nonlinear H-infinity control. The designed robust control is applied to a 6 DOF robot manipulator with joint flexibilities. The proposed robust controller has better tracking performance and advantage in its application.
Utility of a Novel Oatp1b2 Knockout Mouse Model for Evaluating the Role of Oatp1b2 in the Hepatic Uptake of Model Compounds

We generated the organic anion transporting polypeptide (Oatp) 1b2 knockout (KO) mouse model and assessed its utility to study hepatic uptake using model compounds: cerivastatin, lovastatin acid, pravastatin, simvastatin acid, rifampicin, and rifamycin SV. A selective panel of liver cytochromes P450 (P450s) (Cyp3a11, Cyp3a13, Cyp3a16, Cyp2c29, and Cyp2c39) and transporters [Oatp1b2, Oatp1a1, Oatp1a4, Oatp1a5; organic anion transporter (Oat) 1, Oat2, Oat3; multidrug resistance gene 1 (Mdr1) a, Mdr1b; bile salt export pump, multidrug resistance associated protein (Mrp) 2, Mrp3; breast cancer resistance protein] were measured by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction in both KO and wild-type (WT) male mice. Male KO and WT mice received each model compound s.c. at 3 mg/kg. Blood and liver samples were obtained at 0, 0.5, and 2 h postdose and analyzed using liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry. Liver/plasma concentration ratio (Kp,liver) was calculated. Student's t test was used to compare the mRNA and Kp,liver between the KO and WT mice. A similar mRNA expression was observed between the KO and WT for the selected P450s and transporters except for Oatp1b2, for which the level was negligible in the KO but prominent in the WT mice with P < 0.0001. The in vivo results showed a differential effect of Oatp1b2 on hepatic uptake of the model compounds, indicating that Oatp1b2 plays a more significant role in the hepatobiliary disposition of rifampicin and lovastatin than the other compounds tested. This study suggests the Oatp1b2 mouse as a useful in vivo tool to understand drug targeting and disposition in the liver.
OLDA based online handwriting recogntion

The paper presents the work carried out in recognizing online handwritten data using OLDA. A comparative study on the performance of OLDA and RLDA in terms of recognition accuracy and recognition speed is carried out. Online handwritten Kannada basic character data is used for the experiments. Writer independent experiments are carried with 3750 samples for training and 1550 samples for testing. With estimate feature and nearest neighbor as a classifier, an average maximum recognition accuracy of 88.7% and 88.5% has been achieved with OLDA and RLDA respectively. While OLDA has achieved the best recognition accuracy with only 20 eigen vectors, RLDA has taken 25 eigen vectors. The experiments reveal that the performance of OLDA is better than that of RLDA in terms of recognition accuracy, computation cost and also the memory requirements.
Action recognition in low quality videos by jointly using shape, motion and texture features

Shape, motion and texture features have recently gained much popularity in their use for human action recognition. While many of these descriptors have been shown to work well against challenging variations such as appearance, pose and illumination, the problem of low video quality is relatively unexplored. In this paper, we propose a new idea of jointly employing these three features within a standard bag-of-features framework to recognize actions in low quality videos. The performance of these features were extensively evaluated and analyzed under three spatial downsampling and three temporal downsampling modes. Experiments conducted on the KTH and Weizmann datasets with several combination of features and settings showed the importance of all three features (HOG, HOF, LBP-TOP), and how low quality videos can benefit from the robustness of textural features.
Integrating Syntax and Semantics into Spoken Language Understanding

This paper describes several experiments combining natural language and acoustic constraints to improve overall performance of the MIT VOYAGER spoken language system. This system couples the SUMMIT speech recognition system with the TINA language understanding system to answer spoken queries about navigational assistance in the Cambridge, MA, area. The overall goal of our research is to combine acoustic, syntactic and semantic knowledge sources. Our first experiment showed improvement by combining acoustic score and parse probability normalized for number of terminals. Results were further improved by the use of an explicit rejection criterion based on normalized parse probabilities. The use of the combined parse/acoustic score, together with the rejection criterion, gave an improvement in overall score of more than 33% on both training and test data, where score is defined as percent correct minus percent incorrect. Experiments on a fully integrated system which uses the parser to predict possible next words to the recognizer are now underway.
Perceived physicality in audio-enhanced force input

This paper investigates how the perceived physicality of the action of applying force with a finger on a rigid surface (such as on a force-sensing touch screen) can be enhanced using real-time synthesized audio feedback. A selection of rich and evocative audio designs was used. Additionally, audio-tactile cross-modal integration was encouraged, by observing that the main rules of multisensory integration were supported. The study conducted showed that richness of perceived physicality increased considerably, mostly in its auditory expression (what pressing sounded like). In addition, in many instances it was observed that the haptic expression of physicality also increased (what pressing felt like), including some perception of compliance. This last result was particularly interesting as it showed that audio-tactile cross-modal integration might be present.
Perceived Control Over Aging-Related Declines

The belief that people are in control of desired outcomes, including those associated with aging, is a hallmark of American culture. Nevertheless, older adults are less likely than the young to believe there are things that can be done to control aging-related declines in areas such as memory. Within age groups, individual differences in control beliefs are related to cognitive performance, health, and well-being. Mechanisms linking perceived control and positive outcomes include adaptive behaviors such as strategy use and physical activity. There is some evidence that control beliefs can be modified in later life, as illustrated in an intervention for fear of falling. Further work is needed to examine the antecedents of perceived control in later life and the implications of control beliefs in other aging-related domains.
Geneva Emotion Wheel Rating Study

Emotions are an integral part of interactions with other people (e.g., colleagues) and objects (e.g. consumer goods). The assessment of emotional reactions is therefore important when striving to understand how to improve such interactions, e.g., when designing positive consumer experiences. central component of emotions, the “feeling component,” is inherently subjective and can only be assessed with self-report measures, such as the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW; Scherer, 2005). The aim of the current study was to empirically justify the theoretically derived placement of 40 emotion labels in the GEW prototype version 2.0. In a forthcoming chapter (see Scherer, Shuman, Fontaine, & Soriano, 2013), the further development of the GEW based on ratings across emotion components (and even in different language groups) is described. Geneva Emotion Wheel Rating Study (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate. net/publication/280880848_Geneva_Emotion_Wheel_Rating_Study [accessed Aug 31, 2017].
A Dominant Gene for Male Sterility in Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge

A natural male sterile mutant of Salvia miltiorrhiza (Labiatae, Sh-B) was found during field survey in 2002. Our objective was to analyze its genetic mechanism for producing F1 hybrid seeds and to develop a molecular marker linked to male sterile gene for selection of a hybrid parent line. The segregation ratios of male sterile plants to fertile plants in the progenies of both testcross and backcross were 1:1 in continuous experiments conducted in 2006–2009. The male sterile Sh-B was heterozygous (Msms). The male sterile plants could capture most pollen (2 granule/cm2·24 h) with row ratio (female : male 2 : 1) within 45-cm distance and harvest the largest amount of 6495 g hybrid seeds per hectare. We also developed DNA markers linked to the male sterile gene in a segregating population using bulked segregant analysis (BSA) and amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) techniques. The segregating population was subjected to BSA-AFLP with 128 primer combinations. One out of fourteen AFLP markers (E11/M4208) was identified as tightly linked to the dominant male sterile gene with a recombination frequency of 6.85% and at a distance of 6.89 cM. This marker could be converted to PCR-based assay for large-scale selection of fertile plants in MAS (marker-assisted selection) at the seedling stage. Blastn analysis indicated that the male sterile gene sequence showed higher identity with nucleotides in Arabidopsis chromosome 1–5, and was more likely to encode S-adenosylmethionine-dependent methyltransferase, in which DNA methylation regulated the development of plant gametogenesis.
Prefrontal cortical deficits in type 1 diabetes mellitus: brain correlates of comorbid depression.

CONTEXT Neural substrates that may be responsible for the high prevalence of depression in type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) have not yet been elucidated. OBJECTIVE To investigate neuroanatomic correlates of depression in T1DM. DESIGN Case-control study using high-resolution brain magnetic resonance images. SETTINGS Joslin Diabetes Center and McLean Hospital, Massachusetts, and Seoul National University Hospital, South Korea. PARTICIPANTS A total of 125 patients with T1DM (44 subjects with ≥1 previous depressive episodes [T1DM-depression group] and 81 subjects who had never experienced depressive episodes [T1DM-only group]), 23 subjects without T1DM but with 1 or more previous depressive episodes (depression group), and 38 healthy subjects (control group). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Spatial distributions of cortical thickness for each diagnostic group were compared with the control group using a surface-based approach. Among patients with T1DM, associations between metabolic control measures and cortical thickness deficits were examined. RESULTS Thickness reduction in the bilateral superior prefrontal cortical regions was observed in the T1DM-depression, T1DM-only, and depression groups relative to the control group at corrected P < . 01. Conjunction analyses demonstrated that thickness reductions related to the influence of T1DM and those related to past depressive episode influence were observed primarily in the superior prefrontal cortical region. Long-term glycemic control levels were associated with superior prefrontal cortical deficits in patients with T1DM (β = -0.19, P = .02). CONCLUSIONS This study provides evidence that thickness reduction of prefrontal cortical regions in patients with T1DM, as modified by long-term glycemic control, could contribute to the increased risk for comorbid depression.
Anonymizing Social Network Using Bipartite Graph

Social networks applications have become popular for sharing information. Social networks data usually contain users'private information. So privacy preservation technologies should be exercised to protect social networks against various privacy leakages and attacks. In this paper, we give an approach for anonymizing social networks which can be represented as bipartite graphs. We propose automorphism publication to protect against multiple structural attacks and develop a BKM algorithm. We perform experiments on bipartite graph data to study the utility and information loss measure.
Improving the Efficiency of Viewpoint Composition

In this paper, we concentrate on the problem of finding the viewpoint that best satisfies a set of visual composition properties, often referred to as Virtual Camera or Viewpoint Composition. Previous approaches in the literature, which are based on general optimization solvers, are limited in their practical applicability because of unsuitable computation times and limited experimental analysis. To bring performances much closer to the needs of interactive applications, we introduce novel ways to define visual properties, evaluate their satisfaction, and initialize the search for optimal viewpoints, and test them in several problems under various time budgets, quantifying also, for the first time in the domain, the importance of tuning the parameters that control the behavior of the solving process. While our solver, as others in the literature, is based on Particle Swarm Optimization, our contributions could be applied to any stochastic search process that solves through many viewpoint evaluations, such as the genetic algorithms employed by other papers in the literature. The complete source code of our approach, together with the scenes and problems we have employed, can be downloaded from https://bitbucket.org/rranon/smart-viewpoint-computation-lib.
Covariance-Based Interpolation

I test and extend an image interpolation algorithm designed for digital images to suite seismic data sets. The problem of data interpolation can be addressed by determining a lter based on global and local covariance estimates. Covariance estimates have enough information to discern the presence of sharp discontinuities (edges) without the need to explicitly determine the dips. The proposed approach has given encouraging results for a variety of textures and seismic data sets. However, when sampling is too coarse (aliasing) a proxy data set needs to be introduced as an intermediate step. In images with bad signalto-noise ratio, covariance captures the trend of the signal as well as that of the noise; to handle such situations, a model-styling goal (regularization) is incorporated within the interpolation scheme. Various test cases are illustrated in this article, including one using post-stack 3D data from the Gulf of Mexico.
Fast Boosting-based Part-of-Speech Tagging and Text Chunking with Efficient Rule Representation for Sequential Labeling

This paper proposes two techniques for fast sequential labeling such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging and text chunking. The first technique is a boosting-based algorithm that learns rules represented by combination of features. To avoid time-consuming evaluation of combination, we divide features into not used ones and used ones for learning combination. The other is a rule representation. Usual POS taggers and text chunkers decide the tag of each word by using the features generated from the word and its surrounding words. Thus similar rules, for example, that consist of the same set of words but only differ in locations from current words, are generated. We use a rule representation that enables us to merge such rules. We evaluate our methods with POS tagging and text chunking. The experimental results show that our methods show faster processing speed than taggers and chunkers without our methods while maintaining accuracy.
A Dark Side of Subcortical Diffusion-Weighted Lesions?: Characteristics, Cause, and Outcome in Large Subcortical Infarction The Bergen Norwegian Stroke Cooperation Study

Background and Purpose— Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is highly accurate in identifying and locating ischemic stroke injury. Few studies using DWI have investigated large subcortical infarctions (LSIs). We aimed to study clinical characteristics, cause, and outcome in patients with ischemic stroke with LSI diagnosed on DWI and compare these with those who had lacunar DWI lesions or DWI lesions located elsewhere. Methods— Patients with stroke admitted between February 2006 and July 2013 were prospectively registered in a stroke database and examined with DWI. Patients with DWI lesions classified as LSI (subcortical, ≥15 mm) were compared with those with lacunar lesions (subcortical, <15 mm, lacunar infarction [LI]), cortical lesions (cortical infarction [CI]), or no LSI, which included LI, CI, mixed cortical–subcortical, cerebellar, brain stem, and combined lesion locations. Results— A total of 1886 patients with ischemic stroke were included, of which 128 patients (6.8%) had LSI, 317 (16.8%) LI, and 544 (28.8%) CI. The no LSI group included 1758 patients. Occlusive pathology in the proximal middle cerebral artery was more frequent in patients with acute stroke with LSI. Lacunar syndrome was associated with LSI when compared with CI and no LSI. Unknown cause was frequent in the LSI group (60.4%) and independently associated with LSI in the LSI versus LI (P<0.001), LSI versus CI (P=0.002), and LSI versus no LSI population (P<0.001). LSI was independently associated with unfavorable outcome, whether compared with LI (P=0.002), CI (P<0.001), or no LSI (P=0.002). Conclusions— LSI is associated with distinct clinical characteristics, unknown cause, and unfavorable outcome, which separates this stroke entity from patients with lacunar subcortical DWI lesions or DWI lesions located elsewhere.
AniMesh

We introduce AniMesh, a system that supports interleaved modeling and animation creation and editing. AniMesh is suitable for rapid prototyping and easily accessible to non-experts. Source animations can be obtained from commodity motion capture devices or by adapting canned motion sequences. We propose skeleton abstraction and motion retargeting algorithms for finding correspondences and transferring motion between skeletons, or portions of skeletons, with varied topology. Motion can be copied-and-pasted between kinematic chains with different skeletal topologies, and entire model parts can be cut and reattached, while always retaining plausible, composite animations.
Selected Coordination Motor Abilities of Students of the University of Physical Education During Survival Training

Abstract Introduction. Taking up emergency actions when fighting various types of natural disasters requires appropriate psychophysical preparation. Thanks to the development of technique, coordination motor abilities have gained greater importance than physical strength and endurance in such activities. The purpose of the present work was to assess the impact of 36 hours of survival activities and sleep deprivation on selected coordination motor abilities in students of the University of Physical Education. Material and methods. The study involved 12 male students of the University of Physical Education in Warsaw, specialising in “Physical Education in Uniformed Services”. The age of the participants was 21.0 ± 0.74 years, their body height was 179.5 ± 5.6 cm, and their body mass was 74.6 ± 8.0 kg. The assessment was performed based on the following coordination motor ability tests: a test measuring the differentiation of the use of forearm muscle strength, a running motor adjustment test, and a measurement of divided attention. A test involving shooting from a pneumatic gun and a measurement of the maximal force of the forearm were also carried out. Tests and trials were conducted before training (P1), after 24 hours of training (P2), after completing the training - that is after 36 hours of training (P3), and after 12 hours of rest (P4). During the training, the participants completed 12 km on foot, paddled for approximately 6 hours, rowed kayaks for about 4 hours, and performed survival tasks. Results. The analysis of the results of the study of maximal force and the ability to differentiate forearm muscle strength showed that the forearm muscle strength remained at the same level during the entire training. The ability to differentiate forearm muscle strength deteriorated after night training. There were no statistically significant differences in the results of the running motor adjustment tests and in shooting performance between individual measurements. Conclusions. Participation in long-term survival training with very low intensity, combined with sleep deprivation, caused a temporary deterioration in the ability to differentiate forearm muscle strength. This may indicate that people involved in rescue operations during which the psychophysical load is small will be able to perform tasks correctly for a long time.
Ranking social bookmarks using topic models

Ranking of resources in social tagging systems is a difficult problem due to the inherent sparsity of the data and the vocabulary problems introduced by having a completely unrestricted lexicon. In this paper we propose to use hidden topic models as a principled way of reducing the dimensionality of this data to provide more accurate resource rankings with higher recall. We first describe Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and then show how it can be used to rank resources in a social bookmarking system. We test the LDA tagging model and compare it with 3 non-topic model baselines on a large data sample obtained from the Delicious social bookmarking site. Our evaluations show that our LDA-based method significantly outperforms all of the baselines.
Total Coliform and Escherichia Coli Counts in 99 Florida Lakes with Relations to Some Common Limnological Factors

Abstract The degree of bacterial contamination of 99 Florida lakes was studied using total coliform and Escherichia coli (E. coli) counts as indicators. Over 75% of the 4055 samples analyzed for total colifoms and over 98% analyzed for E. coli were below Florida's state standards for total and fecal coliform bacteria, respectively. Thus, there is little evidence of widespread fecal contamination in the Florida lakes examined during this study. Future bacterial sampling in lake systems should consider the facts that open-water samples had significantly lower total coliform and E. coli counts than littoral samples, and that the variance in bacterial counts is greater among lakes over time than spatially within lakes. Additionally, lake trophic status and aquatic bird abundance were also positively related to both total coliform and E. coli counts, while lake surface area and percent area covered with aquatic macrophytes (PAC) showed no significant relations. The method of waste management around lakes is often a concern to many people citing septic tank systems for polluting aquatic systems. However, the data examined in this study showed no difference in bacterial counts between lakes managing waste with septic tanks and those with central waste water treatment systems. A routine, inexpensive bacterial monitoring program is recommended for lakes used for body-contact recreational activities to be safe and relieve concerns of the public about potential health problems.