Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning based visual servoing

This paper proposes a method for learning a hand-eye calibration and its application for visual servoing. The goal is to develop a technique that combines the strengths of existing visual servoing methods. Particularly, as in image-based visual servoing, the error is measured in the visual space while the motor command is position-based. Hence this method approximates the visuomotor function that relates variations in the visual space to variations in the motor space at a global scale. The method used for approximating the visuomotor function is derived from the field of reinforcement learning, making our hand-eye calibration autonomous, continuous and adaptable. The visuomotor function is modeled by a linear combination of polynomials, each spanning a non-mutually exclusive subset of the visual space. Each polynomial represents the utility of motor commands for the servoing task. The goal of the calibration is to approximate the parameters of these polynomials while the system interacts with its environment. Preliminary results include centering a target in the image in which the system learns the motor commands that eliminates the errors in the visual space and generalizes the result to neighboring states in the visual space, depths and motor commands.
On the relationship between the algebraic connectivity and graph's robustness to node and link failures

We study the algebraic connectivity in relation to the graph's robustness to node and link failures. Graph's robustness is quantified with the node and the link connectivity, two topological metrics that give the number of nodes and links that have to be removed in order to disconnect a graph. The algebraic connectivity, i.e. the second smallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix, is a spectral property of a graph, which is an important parameter in the analysis of various robustness-related problems. In this paper we study the relationship between the proposed metrics in three well-known complex network models: the random graph of Erdos-Renyi, the small-world graph of Watts-Strogatz and the scale-free graph of Barabasi-Albert. From (Fielder, 1973) it is known that the algebraic connectivity is a lower bound on both the node and the link connectivity. Through extensive simulations with the three complex network models, we show that the algebraic connectivity is not trivially connected to graph's robustness to node and link failures. Furthermore, we show that the tightness of this lower bound is very dependent on the considered complex network model.
AES Proposal : Rijndael

5. Implementation Aspects 13 5.1 8-bit Processor 13 5.2 32-bit Processor 14 5.2. 1 The Round Transformation 14 5.2. 2 Parallelism 15 5.2. 3 Hardware Suitability 16 5.3 The Inverse Cipher 16 5.3. 1 Inverse of Component Transformations 16 5.3. 2 Inverse of a two-round Rijndael variant 17 5.3. 3 Algebraic Properties 17 5.3. 4 The Equivalent Inverse Cipher Structure 18 5.3. 5 Implementations of the Inverse Cipher 19
Production, Perception, and Distribution of Breathy Sonorants in Marathi

Breathy sonorants are crosslinguistically rare, and while a small amount of existing work has focused on their acoustic properties much remains to be learned about their perception and their language-internal distribution. Herein, breathy sonorants in Marathi are investigated via instrumental acoustic analysis, a perception experiment, and corpus analysis. Results reveal that breathy sonorants are under-represented language-internally in addition to being typologically rare. The acoustic differences associated with sonorant phonation contrasts are less robust than those in obstruents. They are also prone to more perception errors than obstruents, and breathy sonorants are more heavily restricted phonotactically than breathy obstruents. These data contribute to a more nuanced understanding of breathy sonorants, and lend potential insight into their typology.
The Role of Cardiac Tissue Alignment in Modulating Electrical Function

Introduction: Most cardiac arrhythmias are associated with pathology‐triggered ion channel remodeling. However, multicellular effects, for example, exaggerated anisotropy and altered cell‐to‐cell coupling, can also indirectly affect action potential morphology and electrical stability via changed electrotonus. These changes are particularly relevant in structural heart disease, including hypertrophy and infarction. Recent computational studies showed that electrotonus factors into stability by altering dynamic properties (restitution). We experimentally address the question of how cell alignment and connectivity alter tissue function and whether these effects depend on the direction of wave propagation.
Integrated link adaptation and power control for wireless IP networks

In this paper, we prove that the problem of maximizing data throughput by adaptive modulation and power control while meeting packet error requirements is NP-complete. A heuristic algorithm for integrated link adaptation and power control is thus proposed to achieve specified error rates and to improve overall throughput for real-time applications in wireless IP networks. The algorithm divides terminals into groups according to their signal path gains, and periodically adapts transmissions based on the required error rates, actual error statistics and average transmission power of each terminal group. Transmission power is adjusted by an enhanced Kalman-filter method to ensure successful reception. Simulation results reveal that the algorithm consistently delivers the specified error performance, and attempts to maximize network throughput for a wide range of parameter settings.
Gravitational Thermodynamics of Schwarzschild-de Sitter Space

The Euclidean Schwarzschild-de Sitter geometry may be considered as an extremum of two different action principles. If the thermodynamical parameters are held fixed at the cosmological horizon, one deals with the gravitational thermodynamical effects of the black hole but ignores those of the cosmological horizon. Conversely, if the macroscopical variables are held fixed at the black hole horizon, it is only the cosmological horizon thermodynamics which is dealt with. Both cases are analyzed. In particular, the internal energy U is calculated in the semiclassical approximation as a function of the mass parameter m of Schwarzschild de Sitter space. In the first case one finds U=+m, while in the second one gets U=-m. This suggests that de Sitter space is thermodynamically unstable under black hole formation.
MicroRNA‐21 induces 5‐fluorouracil resistance in human pancreatic cancer cells by regulating PTEN and PDCD4

Pancreatic cancer patients are often resistant to chemotherapy treatment, which results in poor prognosis. The objective of this study was to delineate the mechanism by which miR‐21 induces drug resistance to 5‐fluorouracil (5‐FU) in human pancreatic cancer cells (PATU8988 and PANC‐1). We report that PATU8988 cells resistant to 5‐FU express high levels of miR‐21 in comparison to sensitive primary PATU8988 cells. Suppression of miR‐21 expression in 5‐Fu‐resistant PATU8988 cells can alleviate its 5‐FU resistance. Meanwhile, lentiviral vector‐mediated overexpression of miR‐21 not only conferred resistance to 5‐FU but also promoted proliferation, migration, and invasion of PATU8988 and PANC‐1 cells. The proresistance effects of miR‐21 were attributed to the attenuated expression of tumor suppressor genes, including PTEN and PDCD4. Overexpression of PTEN and PDCD4 antagonized miR‐21‐induced resistance to 5‐FU and migration activity. Our work demonstrates that miR‐21 can confer drug resistance to 5‐FU in pancreatic cancer cells by regulating the expression of tumor suppressor genes, as the target genes of miR‐21, PTEN and PDCD4 can rescue 5‐FU sensitivity and the phenotypic characteristics disrupted by miR‐21.
Meaning-Less Differences: Exposing Fallacies and Flaws in “The Word Gap” Hypothesis That Conceal a Dangerous “Language Trap” for Low-Income American Families and Their Children

ABSTRACT The present article compares and contrasts linguistic findings from longitudinal studies of low-income Americans derived from evidence of recorded family speech interactions. Hart and Risley (1995) employed research assistants who spent 1 hour per month observing language usage among families from different socioeconomic backgrounds in their homes for 2.5 years. Baugh (1983) spent 40 hours per week during seven consecutive summers between 1969 and 1976 as a participant observer in a low-income African American community, conducting tape recorded interviews with African American families in various social circumstances during the final 4 years, which always included recorded interviews within each family home. Comparison of the linguistic results derived from the alternative data collection procedures allow for a reinterpretation of Hart and Risley’s (1995, 2003) conclusions, casting doubt on their findings as well as their speculations about future linguistic prospects for Americans from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds due to false positive interpretations of their results that wrongly conclude deceptively enticing causalities. Regrettably, the alleged “word gap” is another incarnation of a deficit language hypothesis that is fundamentally flawed and woefully uninformed by decades of extensive linguistic research that has been conducted by many different linguists in various American inner-city communities since 1968.
Stereo Vision Tracking System

Target tracking has become an area of interest in recent years. Target tracking is able to widen the perspective and view of the static camera to track a target, providing basic artificial intelligence features for robots, and serve as the platform for surveillance purpose. A tracking system is limited to a monocular vision which limits much of the information that is available in an image compared to a binocular or stereo vision. Among the advantages of stereo vision is 3D modeling of scene and depth estimation. In this work, an initial development study and implementation of stereo vision tracking system was done. In developing the stereo vision tracking system, a tracking algorithm was developed together with a depth estimation method to take advantage of the images obtained from having images from two cameras. The depth estimation was found to be 80% accurate for objects at a distance of 15 cm to 65 cm from the cameras.
Mining the blogosphere for top news stories identification

The analysis of query logs from blog search engines show that news-related queries occupy a significant portion of the logs. This raises a interesting research question on whether the blogosphere can be used to identify important news stories. In this paper, we present novel approaches to identify important news story headlines from the blogosphere for a given day. The proposed system consists of two components based on the language model framework, the query likelihood and the news headline prior. For the query likelihood, we propose several approaches to estimate the query language model and the news headline language model. We also suggest several criteria to evaluate the news headline prior that is the prior belief about the importance or newsworthiness of the news headline for a given day. Experimental results show that our system significantly outperforms a baseline system. Specifically, the proposed approach gives 2.62% and 10.19% further increases in MAP and P@5 over the best performing result of the TREC'09 Top Stories Identification Task.
Flexible cellulose nanofibril composite films with reduced hygroscopic capacity

Cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs), which are generated from abundant, environmentally friendly natural plant resources, display numerous interesting properties such as outstanding mechanical strength, negligible light scattering, and low thermal expansion (Zimmermann et al., 2010). These nanofibers are usually created by mechanical fibrillation or chemical oxidation of pulp fibers. CNFs have previously been utilized in a broad range of fields, such as special printing, package, medical carriers, filtration, polymeric reinforcement, energy storage, and electronics or display substrates (Siró and Plackett, 2010). After removing excess water in cellulose nanofibril suspensions, strong, flexible, dense, and translucence films are obtainable. These free-standing cellulose nanofibril films, produced by self-accessibly of individual nanofibrils via hydrogen bonds, are exceptional and of great potential applications. These materials are considered as potential alternatives in barrier package, optical substrates, flexible electronics substrates, and battery membranes (Siró and Plackett, 2010). However, due to abundant hydrophilic groups, these films are sensitive to humidity and water (Aulin et al., 2010). Hydrogen bonds between neighboring nanofibrils tend to deteriorate when absorbing moisture, resulting in a significant destruction of above stated properties. As a result, many attempts have recently been dedicated to modify or functionally treat cellulose nanofibril films to minimize their hygroscopic absorption. There are essentially two different approaches that have been applied. One involves modifications which convert the hydrophilic groups on nanofibrils into hydrophobic ones, for example, by means of surface silylation (Andresen et al. 2006; Lu et al. 2008) and acetylation (Tingaut et al. 2010). Such chemical treatments significantly decrease the wettability of nanofibrils, and lead to improved water-resistance for the resultant films. However, the individual nanofibrils in films were largely combined by hydrogen bonds created between neighboring hydroxyls. Conversion of hydroxyls into hydrophobic groups is likely to reduce the generation of hydrogen bonds, depending on the substitution of hydrophilic groups. Another approach is the incorporation of resins with CNFs or coating waterproof polymers onto CNF films, which have been shown to reduce the amount of moisture absorption in the resulting composite (Herriksson and Berglund 2008; Qing et al. 2012), thus providing the potential to conserve such properties of CNF composites at high humidity. In the present study, flexible cellulose nanofibril phenol formaldehyde (CNF/PF) composites with reduced hygroscopic capacity were produced by either filtering solution of well-mixed CNFs and PF resin or impregnating the PF into wet CNF films. Swelling of CNF films prior to adding PF facilitated the impregnation of PF resin …
Local Transform Features and Hybridization for Accurate Face and Human Detection

We propose two novel local transform features: local gradient patterns (LGP) and binary histograms of oriented gradients (BHOG). LGP assigns one if the neighboring gradient of a given pixel is greater than its average of eight neighboring gradients and zero otherwise, which makes the local intensity variations along the edge components robust. BHOG assigns one if the histogram bin has a higher value than the average value of the total histogram bins, and zero otherwise, which makes the computation time fast due to no further postprocessing and SVM classification. We also propose a hybrid feature that combines several local transform features by means of the AdaBoost method, where the best feature having the lowest classification error is sequentially selected until we obtain the required classification performance. This hybridization makes face and human detection robust to global illumination changes by LBP, local intensity changes by LGP, and local pose changes by BHOG, which considerably improves detection performance. We apply the proposed features to face detection using the MIT+CMU and FDDB databases and human detection using the INRIA and Caltech databases. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed LGP and BHOG feature attain accurate detection performance and fast computation time, respectively, and the hybrid feature improves face and human detection performance considerably.
Exploring the learning experiences of older mature undergraduate students

Abstract Mature students have been a significant feature of UK higher education for at least 40 years. Categorising all undergraduates who started their degrees over the age of 21, as mature masks significant diversity. Older mature students have been shown to get better degree outcomes than younger mature students and young students. This study explores the learning experience of six older mature students, who started their studies over the age of 40, in order to better understand this under- studied group. The findings suggest that confidence is of critical importance in underpinning the experience of this group, and that increased confidence leads to better time management and more integration into the wider student body. This has implications for lifelong learning, where developing strategies to improve the confidence of these learners can help accelerate their integration into the student body, and may have a positive impact on their retention.
A HSV-SILTP Based Shadow Suppression Approach for Moving Vehicle Extraction

This paper introduces a real-time method to extract vehicles in road environment, and mainly includes four parts as follows: firstly, using Double Level background learning method to obtain a stable background image and get a rough vehicle area. Secondly, using HSV color space and texture characteristics of SILTP mixed constraint method to suppress the influence of shadow. Thirdly, using Energy Density Analysis to enhance the area-of-interest, and finally, showing some experimental results.
Analysis and Control of a Capsubot

Abstract In this paper, a special underactuated system – a capsule robot, also called capsubot, is studied to investigate the tracking control issue of underactuated dynamic systems. A seven-step motion strategy of the capsubot is proposed. A trajectory profile is designed based on the proposed motion strategy. By using this profile, the capsubot can move effectively in a desired direction. Three control approaches are investigated: an open-loop control approach, a closed-loop control approach using partial feedback linearization technique, and a simple switch control approach. Extensive simulation studies are conducted to demonstrate the proposed approaches.
Resolving the query inference problem using Steiner trees

The query inference problem is to translate a sentence of a query language into an unambiguous representation of a query. A query is represented as an expression over a set of query trees. A metric is introduced for measuring the complexity of a query and also a proposal that a sentence be translated into the least complex query which “satisfies” the sentence. This method of query inference can be used to resolve ambiguous sentences and leads to easier formulation of sentences.
A novel sensorless control strategy for BLDC motor drives using a fuzzy logic-based neural network observer

This paper presents a novel sensorless control method for brushless DC motors using two similar fuzzy logic-based neural network observers. Firstly, two fuzzy logic observers are designed and used to estimate back-EMF space vector components in the stationary reference frame. The inputs of the observers are measured values of line to line voltages and currents, and their outputs are back-EMF space vector components in the stationary reference frame. To determine the commutation instants, a new technique based on the sign of the back-EMF space vector components is proposed. In order to evade the difficulties pertaining to implementation of the fuzzy logic observers, instead of them, two neural network observers are designed which use inputs and output pairs of the fuzzy logic observers as training data. In other words, the fuzzy logic observers is replaced by two neural network ones with the same performance which are easier to implement. This method provides an accurate sensorless operation over wide speed range. The validity of the proposed method is verified through simulations done on a prototype BLDC.
Undirected Dependency Parsing

Dependency parsers, which are widely used in natural language processing tasks, employ a representation of syntax in which the structure of sentences is expressed in the form of directed links (dependencies) between their words. In this article, we introduce a new approach to transition‐based dependency parsing in which the parsing algorithm does not directly construct dependencies, but rather undirected links, which are then assigned a direction in a postprocessing step. We show that this alleviates error propagation, because undirected parsers do not need to observe the single‐head constraint, resulting in better accuracy.
Antagonists of monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 identified by modification of functionally critical NH2-terminal residues

Monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1 analogues were designed to determine the role of the NH2-terminal region in structure and function. The NH2-terminal residue was important for function and receptor binding, as it could not be deleted or extended. However the NH2-terminal pyroglutamate residue of the wild type was not essential as it could be replaced by several other noncyclic amino acids without loss of activity. Residues 7-10 were essential for receptor desensitization, but were not sufficient for function, and the integrity of residues 1-6 were required for functional activity. A peptide corresponding to MCP-1, 1-10 lacked detectable receptor-binding activities, indicating that residues 1-10 are essential for MCP-1 function, but that other residues are also involved. Several truncated analogues, including 8-76, 9-76, and 10-76, desensitized MCP-1-induced Ca2+ induction, but were not significantly active. These analogues were antagonists of MCP-1 activity with the most potent being the 9-76 analogue (IC50 = 20 nM) The 9-76 specifically bound to MCP-1 receptors with a Kd of 8.3 nM, which was three-fold higher than MCP-1 (Kd 2.8 nM). The 9-76 analogue desensitized the Ca2+ response to MCP-1 and MCP- 3, but not to other CC chemokines, suggesting that it is MCP receptor specific. The availability of these compounds will be helpful in evaluating MCP receptor antagonists as anti-inflammatory therapeutics.
Visualizing medical records with LifeLines

DESCRIPTION Computerized medical records pose tremendous problems to system developers, yet all the efforts to solve those problems will succeed only if appropriate attention is also given to user interface and information design [I 1. Long lists to scroll, clumsy searches, endless menus and lengthy dialogs lead to user frustration and rejection. We designed a general visualization technique for personal histories called LifeLines and are currently exploring its use for medical patient records.
A PDA-based Human-Robot Interaction using EMG-based Modified Morse code

The paper presents an innovative human-robot communication paradigm for people with disability using electromyography (EMG) signals via a personal digital assistant (PDA). The paper proposes a novel human-robot interaction architecture where the disabled people could interact with the robot using an EMG-based Morse code-inspired communication from portable devices. The user employs EMG signals to issue high-level commands to the robot that decomposes these commands into low-level primitive subtasks. Then, the robot dynamically constructs an action selection network to form the operational plan. The architecture is developed on a PDA that offers small and lightweight mobile interaction devices. Utilizing the PDA with EMG-based modified Morse code could provide flexibility, mobility, and durability for handicapped people to control the robot-aid system. The proposed paradigm has been implemented to develop a prototypical system, and the experiments also illustrate the conventionality, and the robustness of such a human-robot framework