Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accelerated whole breast irradiation in early breast cancer patients with adverse prognostic features

Purpose Accelerated whole breast irradiation (AWBI) and conventional whole breast irradiation (CWBI) were compared to determine whether AWBI is as effective as CWBI in patients with early breast cancer and adverse prognostic features. Patients and methods We included 330 patients who underwent breast-conserving surgery (BCS) and post-operative radiation therapy (RT) using AWBI for pT1-2 and pN0-1a breast cancer from 2007 to 2010. These patients were matched with 330 patients who received CWBI according to stage, age (±3 years), and the year of BCS. AWBI of 39 Gy and CWBI of 50.4 Gy were given in 13 and 28 fractions, respectively. Results Median follow-up time was 81.9 months. There were no statistically significant differences between the AWBI and CWBI groups in terms of age, stage, tumor grade, or molecular subtype. More patients with Ki-67 index ≥ 14% were present in the AWBI group (AWBI 47.0% vs. CWBI 10.3%; P<0.01). The 5-year ipsilateral breast tumor relapse (IBTR) rates for the AWBI and CWBI groups were 0.8% and 1.8%, respectively (P=0.54). High tumor grade was a statistically significant risk factor for IBTR (5-year IBTR rate: 2.9%; P=0.01). Ki-67 ≥ 14% was marginally related to IBTR (5-year IBTR rate: 2.2%; P=0.07). There were no statistically significant differences in the hazard ratios between the AWBI and CWBI groups according to any of the risk factors. There were no acute grade 3 toxicities in the AWBI group. There were no late grade 3 toxicities in either group. Conclusions AWBI is comparable to CWBI in early breast cancer with adverse prognostic features.
An adaptable storage slicing algorithm for content delivery networks

Several works study the performance of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) under various network infrastructure and demand conditions. Some go even further while considering demand elasticity by leveraging on Cloud elasticity where each Content Service Provider (CSP) is served only the amount of storage space and network throughput that it needs and pays accordingly. Many of today's CDN implementations are based on these proposals. However, the allocation of virtual servers in cloud computing is not yet very fine-grained and suffers from limitations and time constraints for reallocation. This work proposes an efficient cache slicing mechanism that frees the CDN provider from dedicating a different virtual surrogate for each CSP in each location. This is achieved by dealing internally with the allocation space for each CSP in a shared surrogate, while still providing services in terms of network storage allowing a CSP to select and pay the amount of content that can be stored. We show that the proposed approach deals better with peak surrogate usage, and reduces the total network traffic by around 15% and cross-traffic by as much as 35% under some scenarios.
Image Indexing and Retrieval Using Cross-entropy Measures

| In content-based image indexing and retrieval, images are indexed based on the image attributes like, color, texture, shape. These attributes are used in enabling image retrieval based on query images. A user provides a sample image and the images in the database that are similar to the sample image are retrieved. Image content is represented in the form of feature vectors or histograms. In this paper, color content of the image represented in the form of probability density functions is used as image signatures for image indexing and retrieval. Similarity measure based on cross-entropy measure, speciically Kullback-Leibler measure, de-ned on probability density functions is used for comparing the signature of the images. Some results of image indexing and retrieval are presented.
The Fuzzy Front End of Experience Design: workshop proceeding

Defining and deciding user experience (UX) goals is a core part of any user experience oriented design project. UX goals can be based on different information sources and reasoning. In user-centered design, emphasis is naturally given to users and their needs. However, in work context also content of the work, organizational cultures and even business models effect on what are meaningful user experience goals for a product or service. This paper describes a study of UX goal defining in concept development of a paper quality control system for paper mills. UX goals were defined during the concept development by combining 1) existing knowledge of ergonomics, usability and UX in control rooms, 2) opinions and viewpoints of users-to-be of the quality control system, and 3) knowledge and viewpoints of the product development organization. The resulted UX goals were: 1) learnability, 2) awareness, 3) control, and 4) success. The goals reflect user needs, company strategies, and technical opportunities. The paper presents also examples of design guidelines and evaluation heuristics and instruments derived from the UX goals. Design guidelines and ways to evaluate the UX of designs are an important way to ensure that UX thinking extends through the whole design project. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). Position paper in workshop “The Fuzzy Front End of Experience Design”, organized in conjunction with NordiCHI'14, Oct 26-3
Eliminating Reconciliation Cost in Secret Key Generation for Body-Worn Health Monitoring Devices

Medical data collected by wearable wireless sensor devices must be adequately secured. A prerequisite for mass deployment of these secure systems is the ability to periodically renew cryptographic keys without user involvement. Recent work has shown that two communicating devices can generate secret keys directly from measurements of their common wireless channel, which is symmetric but cannot be inferred in detail by an eavesdropper. These schemes may, however, yield mismatching keys at the two ends, requiring reconciliation mechanisms with high implementation and energy costs, unsuitable for resource-poor body-worn devices. In this work, we demonstrate a scheme for secret-key generation able to construct shared keys with near-perfect agreement, thereby avoiding reconciliation costs. Our specific contributions are: (1) we identify non-simultaneous probing of the channel by the link end-points as the dominant cause of channel measurement disagreement; (2) we develop a practical filtering scheme to reduce this disagreement, dramatically improving signal correlation between the two ends without affecting key entropy; and (3) we show that by restricting key generation to periods of significant channel fluctuation, we achieve near-perfect key agreement. We demonstrate in several representative body-worn settings that our scheme can generate secret bits with 99.8% agreement, and so yield near-perfect matching 128-bit keys approximately every half hour.
Acupuncture Injection Combined with Electrokinetic Injection for Polydimethylsiloxane Microfluidic Devices

We recently reported acupuncture sample injection that leads to reproducible injection of nL-scale sample segments into a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microchannel for microchip capillary electrophoresis. The advantages of the acupuncture injection in microchip capillary electrophoresis include capability of minimizing sample loss and voltage control hardware and capability of introducing sample plugs into any desired position of a microchannel. However, the challenge in the previous study was to achieve reproducible, pL-scale sample injections into PDMS microchannels. In the present study, we introduce an acupuncture injection technique combined with electrokinetic injection (AICEI) technique to inject pL-scale sample segments for microchip capillary electrophoresis. We carried out the capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) separation of FITC and fluorescein, and the mixture of 10 μM FITC and 10 μM fluorescein was separated completely by using the AICEI method.
Double Hopf bifurcation in corotating spiral Poiseuille flow

Nonlinear dynamics of the spiral Poiseuille problem for moderate axial through flow is investigated numerically within the corotating regime for medium gap geometry. The neighborhood of a double Hopf bifurcation point of the linear stability boundary, where spiral waves of opposite axial phase propagation compete, is explored by accurately solving time-dependent Navier-Stokes equations with a solenoidal spectral method. The mode interaction generates a quasiperiodic stable regime of interpenetrating spirals, which coexists with stable limit cycles associated with the aforementioned spiral waves of opposite helicoidal orientation. The spatiotemporal properties of the computed solutions are explained and discussed in terms of equivariant bifurcation and normal form theories. Similar flows have also been observed experimentally in the past within the corotating region.
A Hybrid Method for Online Trajectory Planning of Mobile Robots in Cluttered Environments

This paper presents a method for online trajectory planning in known environments. The proposed algorithm is a fusion of sampling-based techniques and model-based optimization via quadratic programming. The former is used to efficiently generate an obstacle-free path while the latter takes into account the robot dynamical constraints to generate a time-dependent trajectory. The main contribution of this work lies on the formulation of a convex optimization problem over the generated obstacle-free path that is guaranteed to be feasible. Thus, in contrast with previously proposed methods, iterative formulations are not required. The proposed method has been compared with state-of-the-art approaches showing a significant improvement in success rate and computation time. To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach for online planning, the proposed method was applied to the fluid autonomous navigation of a quadcopter in multiple environments consisting of up to 200 obstacles. The scenarios hereinafter presented are some of the most densely cluttered experiments for online planning and navigation reported to date. A video of the experiments can be found at https://youtube/DJ1IZRL5t1Q.
The Discrete 2-Center Problem

Abstract. We present an algorithm for computing the discrete 2-center of a set P of n points in the plane; that is, computing two congruent disks of smallest possible radius, centered at two points of P , whose union covers P . Our algorithm runs in time O(n4/3log5n) .
Semifluxons in superconductivity and cold atomic gases

Josephson junctions (JJs) and junction arrays are well-studied devices in superconductivity. With external magnetic fields one can modulate the phase in a long junction and create traveling, solitonic waves of magnetic flux, called fluxons. Today, it is also possible to devise two different types of junctions: depending on the sign of the critical current density , they are called 0- or π-junctions. In turn, a 0–π junction is formed by joining two of these junctions. As a result, one obtains a pinned Josephson vortex of fractional magnetic flux, at the 0–π boundary. Here, we analyze this arrangement of superconducting junctions in the context of an atomic bosonic quantum gas, where two-state atoms in a double well trap are coupled in an analogous fashion. There, an all-optical 0–π JJ is created by the phase of a complex valued Rabi frequency and we derive a discrete four-mode model for this situation, which qualitatively resembles a semifluxon.
Ethical climate, organizational‐professional conflict and organizational commitment: A study of Chinese auditors

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to focus on the effects of the ethical climate in Chinese certified public accounting (CPA) firms on auditors' perceptions of organizational-professional conflict (OPC) and affective organizational commitment (OC). We also test for differences in the perceived ethical climates of local and international CPA firms. Design/methodology/approach - The study is based on a survey of 167 professional auditors (seniors and managers) employed by local and international CPA firms operating in the People's Republic of China. Findings - Certain dimensions of the perceived ethical climate are significantly related to OPC, and to affective OC. As anticipated, there was also a strong negative relationship between OPC and OC. There was no clear pattern of differences in the perceived ethical climates in local and international CPA firms. Impression management was highly correlated with OPC, OC, and three of four ethical climate dimensions, suggesting that Chinese auditors bias their reports of these variables in a socially desirable fashion. Originality/value - To our knowledge, this is the first study to address the relationship between ethical climate and OPC, and the first to examine OPC and OC among auditors in Mainland China. The findings support our contention that the perceived ethical climate is a key determinant of OPC, suggesting that future research on OPC should place more emphasis on organizational characteristics. In addition, the apparent tendency of auditors to bias their reports of OPC, OC, and ethical climate stresses the importance of controlling for social desirability response bias in surveys of professional accountants.
Comprehensive Investigation of the Caveolin 2 Gene: Resequencing and Association for Kidney Transplant Outcomes

Caveolae are plasma membrane structures formed from a complex of the proteins caveolin-1 and caveolin-2. Caveolae interact with pro-inflammatory cytokines and are dysregulated in fibrotic disease. Although caveolae are present infrequently in healthy kidneys, they are abundant during kidney injury. An association has been identified between a CAV1 gene variant and long term kidney transplant survival. Chronic, gradual decline in transplant function is a persistent problem in kidney transplantation. The aetiology of this is diverse but fibrosis within the transplanted organ is the common end point. This study is the first to investigate the association of CAV2 gene variants with kidney transplant outcomes. Genomic DNA from donors and recipients of 575 kidney transplants performed in Belfast was investigated for common variation in CAV2 using a tag SNP approach. The CAV2 SNP rs13221869 was nominally significant for kidney transplant failure. Validation was sought in an independent group of kidney transplant donors and recipients from Dublin, Ireland using a second genotyping technology. Due to the unexpected absence of rs13221869 from this cohort, the CAV2 gene was resequenced. One novel SNP and a novel insertion/deletion in CAV2 were identified; rs13221869 is located in a repetitive region and was not a true variant in resequenced populations. CAV2 is a plausible candidate gene for association with kidney transplant outcomes given its proximity to CAV1 and its role in attenuating fibrosis. This study does not support an association between CAV2 variation and kidney transplant survival. Further analysis of CAV2 should be undertaken with an awareness of the sequence complexities and genetic variants highlighted by this study.
Actuator-Redundancy-Based Fault Diagnosis for Four-Wheel Independently Actuated Electric Vehicles

This paper presents a real-time actuator-redundancy-based fault diagnosis approach for four-wheel independently actuated (FWIA) in-wheel motor electric ground vehicles. The tire-road friction coefficient (TRFC), which is usually unknown, needs to be accurately estimated to calculate the in-wheel motor torque and evaluate the fault in real time. An observer is applied to each of the in-wheel motors to generate a TRFC estimate from the respective wheel. The individual estimates of the TRFC are merged using a voting scheme, which can reject the erroneous estimate from the faulty motor. Then, the resulting accurate TRFC estimate is adopted to calculate the residual for each of the in-wheel motors and to detect the possible actuator fault. Experimental results from a prototype FWIA electric ground vehicle are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed fault diagnosis method.
Prosodic effects on garden-path sentences

A garden-path sentence has temporary ambiguity that a reader or listener need to resolve. Prosody is well-known to have effects on sentence comprehension so it is expected that it wi ll affect the interpretation of garden-path sentences. However, i n an auditory comprehension test with natural speech, the gardenpath effect may be unclear because a listener can typically resolve th e ambiguity and recover from the garden-path effect when the senten ce is completed. Therefore, this paper investigates ways to enhance or suppress gardenpath interpretation in Mandarin by manipulating phr asing with pause insertion and pitch reset. The results show that lo ng pause at the garden-path site enhances the garden-path (wrong) i terpretation which cannot be undone by pitch reset that encourag es the correct phrasing. The most effective way in prosody to enha nce the gardenpath effect in Mandarin requires both long pause an d high pitch reset.
IF-Matching: Towards Accurate Map-Matching with Information Fusion

With the advance of various location-acquisition technologies, a myriad of GPS trajectories can be collected every day. However, the raw coordinate data captured by sensors often cannot reflect real positions due to many physical constraints and some rules of law. How to accurately match GPS trajectories to roads on a digital map is an important issue. The problem of map-matching is fundamental for many applications. Unfortunately, many existing methods still cannot meet stringent performance requirements in engineering. In particular, low/unstable sampling rate and noisy/lost data are usually big challenges. Information fusion of different data sources is becoming increasingly promising nowadays. As in practice, some other measurements such as speed and moving direction are collected together with the spatial locations acquired, we can make use of not only location coordinates but all data collected. In this paper, we propose a novel model using the related meta-information to describe a moving object, and present an algorithm called IF-Matching for map-matching. It can handle many ambiguous cases which cannot be correctly matched by existing methods. We run our algorithm with taxi trajectory data on a city-wide road network. Compared with two state-of-the-art algorithms of ST-Matching and the winner of GIS Cup 2012, our approach achieves more accurate results.
A Constrained Line Search Optimization for Discriminative Training in Speech Recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel constrained line search to optimize the MMEE objective function for training discriminative HMMs. In our method, the MMI estimation is cast as a constrained maximization problem, where Kullback-Leibler divergence between models before and after parameters adjustment is introduced as a constraint during optimization. Then, based on the idea of line search, we show that a simple, closed-form solution can be derived under some approximation assumptions. The proposed optimization method have been investigated in two speech recognition tasks: TIDIGITS and Switchboard (mini-train). Experimental results show that the new training method achieves significant word error rate reduction when comparing with our best MLE models, i.e., relatively 63.8% on TIDIGITS and 6.1% on the Switchboard mini-train set, respectively. Our results also show that the constrained line search method consistently outperforms the popular EBW method in both tasks.
Autonomous control of running takeoff and landing for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle

This paper concerns about automatic flight control strategies for the running takeoff and landing of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Firstly, a dynamic model of fixed-wing UAVs is developed. Then the takeoff and landing control strategies are designed. The flight control strategies are designed to be segmented. A fixed-wing UAV named “Petrel” is used as an experimental platform. Finally, the flight experimental results are proposed to validate the automatic running takeoff and landing controller.
Survey on indoor localization system and recent advances of WIFI fingerprinting technique

Indoor localization has been an active research field for decades. Location determination is normally accomplished using the Global Positioning System (GPS) for outdoor environment. For indoor environment GPS does not work due to the lack of the sight line to satellite. Several technologies are deployed to construct an efficient indoor positioning system. A compromise between cost, accuracy and time deployment should be taken into account while choosing the best system. Most indoor localization approaches adopt WLAN as the basic schema of localizing due to many advantages. This paper gives an overview of indoor localization technologies, methods and performance metrics, and makes benchmark of existing solutions of Wi-Fi fingerprinting technique with detailed presentation of performances and limitations related to most important recent advances.
Research about game learning system to digital art

Interaction is a very important element in digital art. Some digital art works are even called game art because gamelike elements are expressed strongly. In general, interactive works adopting concepts such as `goal' or `contest' are called game art. An important fact is that those having the nature of game induce the spectators' involvement and immersion more than simple interactive works. If visible interaction is weak, spectators are not immersed much in the work. This study purposes to apply and implement the reinforcement learning technology, which is used in games that are highly interactive contents, for the interactivity of digital art works, and to evaluate and discuss the results.
Ascending frequency ordered prefix-tree: efficient mining of frequent patterns

Mining frequent patterns is a fundamental and important problem in many data mining applications. Many of the algorithms adopt the pattern growth approach, which is shown to be superior to the candidate generate-and-test approach significantly. We identify the key factors that influence the performance of the pattern growth approach, and optimize them to further improve the performance. Our algorithm uses a simple while compact data structure-ascending frequency ordered prefixtree (AFOPT) to organize the conditional databases, in which we use arrays to store single branches to further save space. We traverse our prefix-tree structure using a top-down strategy. Our experiment results show that the combination of the top-down traversal strategy and the ascending frequency item ordering method achieves significant performance improvement over previous works.
Diabetes, pre-diabetes and their risk factors in Malta: a study profile of national cross-sectional prevalence study

Background Type 2 diabetes mellitus constitutes a global epidemic and a major burden on health care systems across the world. Prevention of this disease is essential, and the development of effective prevention strategies requires validated information on the disease burden and the risk factors. Embarking on a nationally representative cross-sectional study is challenging and costly. Few countries undertake this process regularly, if at all. Method This paper sets out the evidence-based protocol of a recent cross-sectional study that was conducted in Malta. Data collection took place from November 2014 to January 2016. Results This study presents up-to-date national data on diabetes and its risk factors (such as obesity, smoking, physical activity and alcohol intake) that will soon be publicly available. Conclusion This protocol was compiled so that the study can be replicated in other countries. The protocol contains step-by-step descriptions of the study design, including details on the population sampling, the permissions required and the validated measurement tools used.