Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
GEF: A Self-Programming Robot Using Grammatical Evolution

Grammatical Evolution (GE) is that area of genetic algorithms that evolves computer programs in high-level languages possessing a BNF grammar. In this work, we present GEF (“Grammatical Evolution for the Finch”), a system that employs grammatical evolution to create a Finch robot controller program in Java. The system uses both the traditional GE model as well as employing extensions and augmentations that push the boundaries of goal-oriented contexts in which robots typically act including a meta-level handler that fosters a level of self-awareness in the robot. To handle contingencies, the GEF system has been endowed with the ability to perform meta-level jumps. When confronted with unplanned events and dynamic changes in the environment, our robot will automatically transition to pursue another goal, changing fitness functions, and generate and invoke operating system level scripting to facilitate the change. The robot houses a raspberry pi controller that is capable of executing one (evolved) program while wirelessly receiving another over an asynchronous client. This work is part of an overall project that involves planning for contingencies. In this poster, we present the development framework and system architecture of GEF, including the newly discovered meta-level handler, as well as some other system successes, failures, and insights.
Reduced candidate mechanism for an algebraic code-excited linear-prediction codebook search

Underlain by algebraic codebook search, a reduced candidate mechanism (RCM) is proposed in this work to reduce the search complexity required. To begin with, the contribution made by each pulse pertaining to each track is evaluated, and then the hit probability of the top pulses in terms of contribution against the optimal pulses identified by a full search is found. Based upon such analysis, the RCM approach proposed performs a search procedure after the top N pulses, 1≤N≤8, in contribution sorting are chosen as candidate pulses. It is demonstrated by experiments that an application of RCM for N=2, designated as RCM-2, to G.729A yields a search complexity that is 5% of that required in G.729A, 25% of a global pulse replacement method (iteration=2) and 33% of a iteration-free pulse replacement method at the cost of 1% speech quality. The RCM proposed is validated as a means to cut the computational complexity considerably.
Recherches méthodologiques sur la sculpture en terre cuite africaine : application à un corpus de sculptures archéologiques - en contexte et hors contexte - de la culture Nok (Nigéria)

C'est en 1928 que la toute premiere sculpture Nok est decouverte, dans la region de Jos (Nigeria central). Dans les annees 50-70, l'exploitation intensive des mines d'etain, en revele un grand nombre d'autres. Malgre les quelques fouilles entreprises, la connaissance que nous en avons demeure extremement succincte. De surcroit, cette region subit depuis une dizaine d'annees un pillage sans precedent de ses sites archeologiques qui a mis au jour plusieurs milliers de sculptures. L'absence quasi systematique de donnees de contexte pour ces sculptures Nok et l'impossibilite actuelle d'entreprendre des fouilles nous ont incites a developper une reflexion sur l'approche methodologique des sculptures archeologiques affectees d'un tel handicap. En tant que temoins et illustrations de l'histoire, elles nous invitent a les interroger comme de veritables sources d'informations socioculturelles. Pour ce faire, ce sont les outils de 1 'histoire de l' art et ceux de l' archeometrie que nous avons mis en oeuvre si bien que l' originalite de cette demarche reside dans la multiplication des approches. Ces sculptures ont ainsi apporte de precieuses informations sur la societe qui les a engendrees et sur l'environnement dans lequel elles ont ete creees.
Well Plate—Coupled Microfluidic Devices Designed for Facile Image-Based Cell Adhesion and Transmigration Assays

Microfluidic devices have become invaluable tools in recent years to model biological phenomena. Here, the authors present a well plate microfluidic (WPM) device for conducting cell biology assays under shear flow. Physiological shear flow conditions of cell-cell and cell-ligand adhesion within this device produce results with higher biological significance than conventional well plates. The WPM format also produced significant work flow advantages such as faster liquid handling compared to static well plate assays. The authors used the VLA-4—VCAM-1 cell adhesion model as the basis for a rapid, higher throughput adhesion inhibition screen of monoclonal antibodies against VLA-4. Using the WPM device, they generated IC50 dose-response curves 96 times faster than conventional flow cells. The WPM device was also used to study transmigration of mononuclear cells through endothelial cell monolayers. Twenty-four channels of transmigration data were generated in a single experiment.
On the Properties of Design-Relevant Classes for Design Anomaly Assessment

Several object-oriented systems have their respective designs documented by using only a few design-relevant classes, which we will refer to as key classes. In this paper, we automatically detect key classes, and investigate some of their properties, and evaluate their role for assessing design. We propose focusing on such classes to make design decisions during maintenance tasks as those classes of this type are, by definition, more relevant than non-key classes. First, we show that key classes are more prone to bad smells than non-key classes. Although, structural metrics of key classes tend to be, in general, higher than non-key classes, there are still a significant set of non-key classes with poor structural metrics, suggesting that prioritizing design anomaly assessment using key classes would likely to be more effective.
Virtualization of a Photonic Reservoir Computer

Reservoir computer is an efficient dynamical computing concept that was introduced at the onset of this century for processing time-dependent signals. Several photonic implementations have demonstrated good performances, taking advantage of the components developed for optical telecommunications. However, in implementations based on a delay line that use an input desynchronized with respect to the period of the delay line, the effective used bandwidth is generally far from the one allowed by the physical setups. To use more of the available bandwidth, we propose an original solution that consists on time interleaving several reservoirs on the same physical setup. These are then used to process several tasks independently, but simultaneously on the same physical setup. We call them virtual reservoir computers. We report a proof-of-concept demonstration with three virtual reservoirs. The present results further demonstrate the versatility of photonic reservoir computing.
QRP05-6: Combined Adaptive Congestion Control Method for Communication-Broadcasting Integrated Services

This paper proposes a combined adaptive congestion control method for massive and intensive telecommunication traffic expected in communication-broadcasting integrated services. The proposed method adaptively controls data transmissions from viewers by combining transmission restriction and delayed transmission depending on the congestion states, so that the severe congestion can be avoided effectively. Furthermore, it utilizes the broadcasting channel which is not only reliable, but also scalable for controlling the responses from vast numbers of viewers. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through experiments on a test bed where approximately one million viewers are emulated. The obtained results quantitatively demonstrate the performance of the adaptive control method and its effectiveness under massive and intensive traffic conditions.
New Second-Order Finite Difference Scheme for the Problem of Contaminant in Groundwater Flow

We develop a new efficient second-order finite difference scheme for two-dimensional problem of contaminant in groundwater flow. Theoretical analysis shows that the scheme is second-order convergence in the L2 norm and is unconditionally stable. Numerical results demonstrate that the error measures of the second-order scheme are several times smaller than those of the standard implicit finite difference scheme.
An approach for ordered dither using artificial neural network

Ordered dither is one of the popular techniques for digital halftoning where the original continuous tone image is thresholded against an orderly generated screen matrix. This paper presents a technique to generate the screen matrix using three-layer back-propagation multi layer perceptron (BP-MLP) artificial neural network (ANN) model. The image raw data has been preprocessed prior feeding to the input layer. The output obtained at the hidden layer of the model has been considered as the screen matrix for ordered dither. The results achieved using this technique have been evaluated subjectively as well as objectively using commonly used quality indices like peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), universal quality index (UQI) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM).
Lactic Dehydrogenase Virus

In search of a simple diagnostic procedure for the early detection of cancer, many investigators have looked for differences in the enzyme activity of the blood of normal and tumor-bearing animals. In 1954, Hill and Levi (25) found that the enzyme lactic dehydrogenase (LDH) was elevated in the blood of a number of patients with malignancies. Shortly thereafter, similar findings were reported in tumor-bearing mice (34, 54). In 1960, while studying the relationship between enzyme elevation and tumor growth, Riley (55) found that, when he inoculated plasma or cellfree extracts from the tissues of tumor-bearing mice into normal mice, the recipients developed a 5to 10-fold increase in plasma LDH activity within 48 hr. The enzyme elevation persisted for months, despite the fact that the animals failed to develop tumors or show any signs of illness or gross pathology. Riley showed that this agent which elevated plasma LDH replicated in mice and could be serially transmitted. Most important was the fact that, of the 26 different types of mouse tumors originally studied, all contained this lactic dehydrogenase agent (55). The widespread distribution of this agent initially suggested that it might be integrally related to the neoplastic process (55). However, reports from a number of laboratories soon revealed that it was not associated with all serially transplanted tumors (1, 36, 37, 47, 71), was rarely recovered from primary mouse tumors, and was never found in rat tumors (37). Further studies showed that the iIoloney virus (which induces leukemia in both mice and rats) produced a 5to 10-fold increase in plasma LDH activity in mice but not in rats (37). When the Moloney leukemia virus was passed in rats and injected back into mice, it produced the usual leukemia in mice but was no longer able to produce the enzyme elevation. Thus, it became apparent that the Moloney leukemia virus had been contaminated with the lactic dehydrogenase agent and that the latter agent had been eliminated by rat passage because of species specificity (37). These and subsequent studies showed that the lactic dehydrogenase agent was a virus (9, 40, 42), and was not integrally related to the Moloney leukemia virus or to the neoplastic process but was simply being carried as a contaminant by a number of serially transplanted tumors. The present review summarizes what is known about the lactic dehydrogenase virus (LDV), discusses the factors that might be responsible for its unusual manifestations, and considers the role that this widely disseminated, but previously unsuspected, virus might have played in the results and interpretations of a number of experiments.
Protease Inhibitors Cause Necrotic Cell Death in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii by Inducing the Generation of Reactive Oxygen Species

Protease inhibitors affecting the activity of the proteasome were reported to induce programmed cell death (apoptosis) in some mammalian cell lines. Proteasome activity can be suppressed by specific peptide derivatives and by N‐tosyl‐lysine‐chloromethyl‐ketone (TLCK) and N‐tosyl‐phenylalanine‐chloromethyl‐ketone (TPCK), which affect the trypsine‐ and chymotrypsine‐like activities of the proteasome, respectively. Particularly TLCK and TPCK caused necrotic cell death in the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. As a control, the effects of these protease inhibitors on the survival of human WISH cells were also studied. Bleaching of the Chlamydomonas cells after addition of TLCK or TPCK indicated that reactive oxygen species (ROS) were involved in this process. Indeed, increased levels of ROS were detected in Chlamydomonas cells treated with TLCK or TPCK. Furthermore, cell death induced by these protease inhibitors was accelerated by illumination and prevented or slowed down by scavengers of ROS.
End-to-end queuing delay assessment in multi-service ip networks

Packet-based networks are more and more used to transport interactive streaming services like telephony and videophony. To guarantee a good quality for these services, the queuing delay and delay jitter introduced in the transport of voice or video flows over the packet-based network should be kept under control. Because data sources tend to increase their sending rate until (a part of) the network is congested, mixing real-time traffic and data traffic in one queue would lead to unacceptable high delays for real-time services. Therefore, voice and video packets need to get preferential treatment ( e.g. head-of-line priority) over data packets in the network nodes. Therefore, the queuing behavior of the voice and video packets can be studied more or less independently from the traffic generated by data services. Simple methods to assess the end-to-end delay are primordial. Since it is well known that an aggregate of voice (and CBR video) sources is accurately modeled by a Poisson arrival process and that delays in consecutive nodes are more or less statistically independent, this boils down to developing methods to calculate quantiles of the total queuing delay through a system of N statistically independent M/G/1 nodes. This paper develops four methods to calculate quantiles of the total queuing delay: a Gaussian method, a method based on the numerical inversion of the moment generating function of the total queuing delay developed by Abate and Whitt and two methods based on the assumption that the tail distribution of the individual queuing delay of one node is approximately exponential. The Gaussian method is the simplest, but only gives crude results. The method of Abate and Whitt is the most complex and breaks down for large quantiles. The methods based on the assumption of an exponential tail produce results that are more or less equally accurate as long as there is a node where the load is high enough.
Feedforward tracking control for lower-limb robot with antagonistic driven mechanism

This paper addresses a control issue for lower-limb robots with antagonistic actuated joints. The conventional control method has previously been used to compensate for the steady-state error with respect to a reference trajectory. However, the question of how to improve the tracking performance with respect to a reference trajectory remains a problem that needs to be solved. This paper proposes two feedforward (FF) control methods: based on a phase-lead filter and based on the inverse dynamics of the plant. The two proposed FF control methods significantly improve the tracking performance with respect to a reference trajectory. The effectiveness of the proposed control methods was confirmed by numerical simulations of a lower-limb robot with antagonistic actuated joints.
FishDrop: Estimation of reef fish population density and biomass using stereo cameras

Underwater Visual Census for fish population density and biomass measurements is the standard method for monitoring the health of a marine environment. Conducted within reef areas, it provides important documentation over time quantifying the success of reef protection and rehabilitation initiatives. The monitoring results are crucial to the formulation of strategies to improve reef resilience and increase productivity of reef fish communities.
Duplication Detection for Software Bug Reports based on Topic Model

The traditional duplicate bug reports detection approaches are usually based on vector space model. However, the experimental result is rarely satisfying since this method cannot distinguish semantic correlation among bug reports which written by natural languages. Topic model, as a method to model underlying topics of texts, can solve the problem of document similarity calculation methods used in the information retrieving. It can find the semantic topics among the texts through massive training data, and obtain semantic relatedness among documents. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel duplication detection method based on topic model. Through selecting bug reports with execution information and combing with classified information of bugs, not only does this new method overcome the problem of high dimension, sparse data and loud noise, but also avoid the problem of synonymy and ambiguity in the natural languages. Comparing to the traditional SVM method, the recall rate and precision rate of our proposed approach have obviously increased, which indicates the effectiveness of this new method.
Evaluation of an overlapping pubic and ischiatic osteotomy for the improvement of acetabular ventroversion in dogs: an ex vivo study

Summary Objectives: To assess the potential of a new single-session surgical procedure, the overlapping pubic and ischiatic osteotomy (OPIO) for modification of bilateral hip conformation. We hypothesized that OPIO would be simple to perform with currently available surgical equipment, through a single surgical approach, with minimal potential morbidity, and that it would allow adequate simultaneous bilateral improvement of coxofemoral joint conformation in patients at risk of canine hip dysplasia. Methods: The OPIO procedure was performed in the pelves of five large breed canine cadavers. Computed tomography images of each cadaver were compared by measurement of the dorsal acetabular rim angle (DARA), acetabular angle (AA), dorso-ventral sacroiliac ratio (SR), and pubic inlet area before and after OPIO. Results: Coxofemoral joint conformation was improved after OPIO. Postoperative DARA was significantly decreased (mean: –5.09°) and AA was significantly increased (mean: 3.54°) after OPIO. The SR was not significantly different after OPIO, indicating minimal impact on the sacro-illiac joints by the procedure. Pubic inlet dimensions and area were significantly decreased after OPIO, but the overall effect on pelvic inlet area was clinically insignificant. Clinical significance: An OPIO allows some improvement of coxofemoral joint conformation in canine cadavers.
RAP, a specialized chaperone, prevents ligand‐induced ER retention and degradation of LDL receptor‐related endocytic receptors.

The multifunctional low density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor‐related protein (LRP) forms a complex with a receptor‐associated protein (RAP) within the secretory pathway. RAP inhibits ligand binding to LRP and is required for normal functional expression of LRP in vivo, suggesting a physiological function as a specialized chaperone. We have used RAP‐deficient mice, generated by gene targeting, to investigate the role of RAP in the biosynthesis and biological activity of LRP and other members of the LDL receptor gene family in various organs and in embryonic fibroblasts. Our results demonstrate that RAP is required for the proper folding and export of the receptors from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) by preventing the premature binding of co‐expressed ligands. Overexpression of apolipoprotein E (apoE), a high affinity ligand for LRP, results in dramatically reduced cellular LRP expression, an effect that is prevented by co‐expression of RAP. RAP thus defines a novel class of molecular chaperones that selectively protect endocytic receptors by binding to newly synthesized receptor polypeptides, thereby preventing ligand‐induced aggregation and subsequent degradation in the ER.
Roles of Candida albicans Dfg5p and Dcw1p Cell Surface Proteins in Growth and Hypha Formation

ABSTRACT The Candida albicans cell wall participates in both growth and morphological transitions between yeast and hyphae. Our studies here focus on Dfg5p and Dcw1p, two similar proteins with features of glycosylphosphatidylinositol-linked cell surface proteins. Mutants lacking Dfg5p are defective in alkaline pH-induced hypha formation; mutants lacking Dcw1p have no detected hypha formation defect. Both homozygote-triplication tests and conditional expression strategies indicate that dfg5 and dcw1 mutations are synthetically lethal. Therefore, Dfg5p and Dcw1p share a function required for growth. Epitope-tagged Dfg5p, created through an insertional mutagenesis strategy, is found in cell membrane and cell wall extract fractions, and endoglycosidase H digestion shows that Dfg5p undergoes N-linked mannosylation. Surprisingly, Dfg5p is required for expression of the hypha-specific gene HWP1 in alkaline media. Because Dfg5p is a cell surface protein, it is poised to generate or transmit an external signal required for the program of hypha-specific gene expression.
Adaptation of Gaussian ARD kernel for multiclass classification

The problem of optimizing Gaussian Automatic Relevance (ARD) kernel in a multiclass setting is considered. Unlike the conventional Gaussian kernel with a single width parameter, the Gaussian ARD kernel adopts multiple widths corresponding to the input features. We first present a model selection criterion named kernel distance-based class separability (KDCS) to evaluate the goodness of a kernel in multiclass classification scenario, then propose a gradient-based optimization algorithm to tune the width parameters of Gaussian ARD kernel via maximizing the KDCS criterion. This method is essentially a feature weighting method since each learned parameter indicates the relative importance of the corresponding feature. The proposed method is demonstrated with some UCI machine learning benchmark examples.
Existence of Quantum-Like Stationary States in Human Group Behavior

We scrutinize the movie views from the Netflix website and find that there exist four particular temporal patterns. In particular some movies have multiple periods of view creation and destruction. Based on these observations we suggest that there exist stationary states in the human complex behavior. A model based on Markovian process is proposed to describe the dynamics of the movie watching for individual films. The model can reproduce of the peak structure of the real watching curves for a class of films which suggests that concepts of state and transitions in physics can be applied to understand the human complex behavior. Keywordshuman complex behavior; temporal pattern; stationary states; markovian