Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Novel Method for Palmprint Recognition Based on Wavelet Transform

A novel method for palmprint recognition based on wavelet transform is presented in this paper. Because palmprint's principal lines, wrinkles and ridges have characteristics of various resolutions, a method for multi-scale wavelet transform analysis is utilized in palmprint recognition. There are three steps in the scheme, which are image preprocessing, feature extraction and recognition. Original palmprint image is aligned, segmented and enhanced firstly. Then it is decomposed into multi-scale wavelet sub-images. After the wavelet sub-images are segmented into variable blocks, the mean of each block is calculated to form a normalized vector, which corresponds to wavelet sub-image. Finally, the feature vectors of each wavelet sub-image are combined into a vector, called the palmprint feature. Feature matching is based on Euclidean distance between feature vectors and nearest neighbor distance (NND) rule. Experimental results based on PolyU palmprint database illustrate that the approach is valid in palmprint recognition
Bionic assembly system: new concept of self-organising multirobot system

Changing manufacturing environment characterised by aggressive competition on a global scale and rapid changes in process technology requires creating production systems that are themselves easily upgradeable and into which new technologies and new functions can be readily integrated. To answer these novel requirements, Bionic Assembly System (BAS) is presented. BAS is based on concepts of autonomy, cooperation and intelligence of its units. The system proposes use of autonomous mobile robots in production environment instead of using AGV's. Mobile robots are giving flexibility to the system and increase dynamics of the whole process. In this paper concept of the system is presented with focus on transport mobile robots, which are a backbone of the system.
Telerehabilitation after total knee replacement in Italy: cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis of a mixed telerehabilitation-standard rehabilitation programme compared with usual care

Objectives To assess cost-effectiveness and cost utility of telerehabilitation (TR) versus standard rehabilitation (SR) after total knee replacement (TKR). Design Markov decision modelling of cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis based on patient-level and secondary data sources employing Italian National Health Service (NHS; Ita-NHS) and Society perspectives. Setting Primary care units (PCUs) in Italy. Participants Patients discharged after TKR. Interventions Mixed SR-TR service (10 face-to-face sessions and 10 telesessions) versus SR (20 face-to-face sessions) Primary and secondary outcome measures The incremental cost per additional knee flexion range of motion (ROM) and per QALY gained by SR-TR compared with SR. Second, we considered the probability of being cost-effective and the probability of being more effective and less expensive. Results TR appears to be the cost-effective in the base case and in all of the considered scenarios, but is no longer more effective and less expensive if transportation costs are excluded. Comparing SR-TR with SR, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) adopting the Ita-NHS perspective for the base case was −€117/ROM gained. The cost-effectiveness probability for SR-TR was 0.98 (ceiling ratio: €50/ROM), while the joint probability of being more effective and less expensive was 0.87. Assuming that TR would increase health-related quality of life (HRQOL) utilities by 2.5%, the ICER adopting Ita-NHS perspective is −€960/QALY (cost-effectiveness probability: 1; ceiling ratio: €30 000/QALY). All the performed sensitivity analyses did not change the conclusions, but if transportation costs were excluded, the probability for SR-TR of being more clinically effective and less expensive reduced to 0.56. Conclusions The analysis suggested SR-TR to be cost-effective, even less expensive and more effective if the PCUs provide ambulance transportations. However, the uncertainty related to TR costs, HRQOL and long-term clinical outcomes raises important topics for future research, which should be addressed to confirm our estimates. Trial registration number ISRCTN45837371.
Abnormal moving vehicle detection for driver assistance system in nighttime driving

This paper proposes a new approach of abnormal vehicle detection for frontal and lateral collision warnings in nighttime driving using monocular vision. Motion information is used to estimate moving objects. An empirical threshold range is introduced to eliminate efficiently most of non-vehicle regions. Vehicle candidates are segmented by using K-means clustering. An analysis is performed carefully to consider what initial K value is optimal for vehicle region segmentation. The vehicle candidates are classified by using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification. The aforementioned method has high ability to retain the abnormal moving vehicles. The detected abnormal vehicles consist of on-coming, overtaking, change speed, change lane, and road-side parking. These vehicles are dangerous with respect to the host vehicle. Experimental results show that the proposal approach is useful for real-time collision warning function of driver assistance system in nighttime driving.
Implications of psychological phenomenons for recommender systems

Internet users often face the challenge of identifying the most suitable product out of some product assortment available on a certain e-sales platform. Recommender systems can substantially alleviate this typically complex task. Since the rise of such systems a lot of effort has been done in developing different recommendation approaches and algorithms, which all of them have certain strengths and weaknesses. What has been widely ignored by the recommender community so far are the potentials and impacts of psychological and decision theoretical phenomenons, which already have been investigated and applied in the field of marketing. Such phenomenons promise big capability to support users in decision making when facing a comparison situation. This paper concentrates on two classes of phenomenons, which are decoy effects and serial position effects. Tightly coupled to these phenomenons is the problem of getting the utility function of a recommender right, as this function serves both as the basis of result set calculation as well as the fundament of exploitation of above mentioned phenomenons. Putting all these aspects together an extended architecture for recommender systems will be proposed in the end of the paper.
The Single-Case Reporting Guideline In BEhavioural Interventions (SCRIBE) 2016 Statement

ABSTRACT We developed a reporting guideline to provide authors with guidance about what should be reported when writing a paper for publication in a scientific journal using a particular type of research design: the single-case experimental design. This report describes the methods used to develop the Single-Case Reporting guideline In BEhavioural interventions (SCRIBE) 2016. As a result of 2 online surveys and a 2-day meeting of experts, the SCRIBE 2016 checklist was developed, which is a set of 26 items that authors need to address when writing about single-case research. This article complements the more detailed SCRIBE 2016 Explanation and Elaboration article (Tate et al., 2016) that provides a rationale for each of the items and examples of adequate reporting from the literature. Both these resources will assist authors to prepare reports of single-case research with clarity, completeness, accuracy, and transparency. They will also provide journal reviewers and editors with a practical checklist against which such reports may be critically evaluated. We recommend that the SCRIBE 2016 is used by authors preparing manuscripts describing single-case research for publication, as well as journal reviewers and editors who are evaluating such manuscripts. SCIENTIFIC ABSTRACT Reporting guidelines, such as the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Statement, improve the reporting of research in the medical literature (Turner et al., 2012). Many such guidelines exist and the CONSORT Extension to Nonpharmacological Trials (Boutron et al., 2008) provides suitable guidance for reporting between-groups intervention studies in the behavioural sciences. The CONSORT Extension for N-of-1 Trials (CENT 2015) was developed for multiple crossover trials with single individuals in the medical sciences (Shamseer et al., 2015; Vohra et al., 2015), but there is no reporting guideline in the CONSORT tradition for single-case research used in the behavioural sciences. We developed the Single-Case Reporting guideline In BEhavioural interventions (SCRIBE) 2016 to meet this need. This Statement article describes the methodology of the development of the SCRIBE 2016, along with the outcome of 2 Delphi surveys and a consensus meeting of experts. We present the resulting 26-item SCRIBE 2016 checklist. The article complements the more detailed SCRIBE 2016 Explanation and Elaboration article (Tate et al., 2016) that provides a rationale for each of the items and examples of adequate reporting from the literature. Both these resources will assist authors to prepare reports of single-case research with clarity, completeness, accuracy, and transparency. They will also provide journal reviewers and editors with a practical checklist against which such reports may be critically evaluated.
Inferring popular locations in urban for professional education

With the rapid development of urbane-centered economy, urban area has gone through strong but heterogeneous sprawl. In such complex urban systems, it is impossible to established teaching centers of night school in every district of city for continuing education programs. Part-time students tend to be educated in popular locations of city due to convenience. Since call logs and geographical nature of mobile phone data can provide an opportunity to measure human behavior and social dynamics, we investigate how to infer urban popular locations with large-scale quasi-social network for avoiding the limitation of data collection and even privacy problems. A large-scale quasi-social network model is developed via measuring the number of shared-user between zones, which is different from previous models for social network. We first verify whether or not this model also can show the social structure of given data, the ranking of places in the model have been calculated based on eigvalue metric. To understand the connections between popular locations of human activity and spatial structure, we present a method to infer the core zones in given region, and then we use a simple metric to evaluate the most popular locations of human activity.
Phoneme N-grams Based on a Polish Newspaper Corpus

The phonetical statistics of Polish were collected from a newspaper corpus of around 110 000 000 words. The paper presents summarisation of the data which are phoneme ngrams and some phenomena in the statistics including a distribution of frequency of triphones occurring. Triphone statistics apply context-dependent speech units which have an important role in automatic speech recognition systems. The standard phonetic alphabet for Polish, SAMPA, and methods of providing phonetic transcriptions
Expression of Protein Kinase C Isoforms in Pancreatic Islets and Liver of Male Goto-Kakizaki Rats, a Model of Type 2 Diabetes

Protein kinase C (PKC) is a family of protein kinases controlling protein phosphorylation and playing important roles in the regulation of metabolism. We have investigated expression levels of PKC isoforms in pancreatic islets and liver of diabetic Goto-Kakizaki (GK) rats with and without insulin treatment to evaluate their association with glucose homeostasis. mRNA and protein expression levels of PKC isoforms were assessed in pancreatic islets and liver of Wistar rats and GK rats with or without insulin treatment. PKCα and PKCζ mRNA expressions were down-regulated in islets of GK compared with Wistar rats. PKCα and phosphorylated PKCα (p-PKCα) protein expressions were decreased in islets of GK compared with insulin-treated GK and Wistar rats. PKCζ protein expression in islets was reduced in GK and insulin-treated GK compared with Wistar rats, but p-PKCζ was decreased only in GK rats. Islet PKCε mRNA and protein expressions were lower in GK compared with insulin-treated GK and Wistar rats. In liver, PKCδ and PKCζ mRNA expressions were decreased in both GK and insulin-treated GK compared with Wistar rats. Hepatic PKCζ protein expression was diminished in both GK rats with and without insulin treatment compared with Wistar rats. Hepatic PKCε mRNA expression was down-regulated in insulin-treated GK compared with GK and Wistar rats. PKCα, PKCε, and p-PKCζ expressions were secondary to hyperglycaemia in GK rat islets. Hepatic PKCδ and PKCζ mRNA expressions were primarily linked to hyperglycaemia. Additionally, hepatic PKCε mRNA expression could be under control of insulin.
Sheer class? The impact of degree performance on graduate labour market outcomes

We exploit individual-level administrative data for whole populations of UK university students for the leaving cohorts of 1985-1993 to investigate the determinants of graduate occupational earnings. Among other results, we find that there are significant differences in the occupational earnings of leavers, according to university attended, subject studied, and degree class awarded, ceteris paribus. We also find that the premium associated with the award of a high degree class increased between 1985/6 and 1993/4, a period of substantial expansion in the graduate population. We suggest that this is consistent with a signalling model of the returns to higher education qualifications.
What Do Depression Rating Scales Measure?

A large number of rating scales have been devised to assess the clinical construct of ‘depression’. These scales have been universally used in research with little consideration of their content, or how they relate to accepted definitions of depressive disorder. The scales are often arbitrarily selected and used for the study on the assumption that all measure the same construct. The item analysis of a number of the most widely used depression scales reveals a variation in the areas of psychopathology they cover; some scales place greater emphasis upon the assessment of anxiety than upon depressed mood. Since disturbance in neurobiological systems is manifest by specific aspects of affective and behavioural malfunction, and since psychodynamic factors lead to particular cognitive sets, the advancement of research will depend upon the construction and validation of more refined measures than are provided by the present approach.
Further Studies of Airfoils Supporting Non-Unique Solutions in Transonic Flow

Non-unique solutions of the Euler equations were originally discussed by Jameson in 1991 for several highly cambered airfoils which were the result of aggressive shape optimization. In 1999 Hafez and Guo found non-unique solutions for a symmetric parallel sided airfoil, and subsequently Kuzmin and Ivanova have discovered some fully convex symmetric airfoils that provide non-unique solutions. In this article four new symmetric airfoils, all of which exhibit non-unique solutions in a narrow band of transonic Mach numbers, were studied. The first, NU4 was the result of shape optimization. The second, JF1 is an extremely simple parallel sided airfoil. The third JB1, is also parallel sided but has continuous curvature over the entire profile. The fourth, JC6, is convex and C∞ continuous. CL − α plots of these airfoils exhibit three branches of zero angle of attack, the P, Z and N-branches with positive, zero and negative lift respectively. At some Mach numbers no stable Z-branch could be found. When the P-branch is continued to negative α in some cases there is a transition to the Z-branch, while in other cases there is a direct transition from the P to N-branch.
Contrasting characteristics and cache performance of technical and multi-user commercial workloads

Experience has shown that many widely used benchmarks are poor predictors of the performance of systems running commercial applications. Research into this anomaly has long been hampered by a lack of address traces from representative multi-user commercial workloads. This paper presents research, using traces of industry-standard commercial benchmarks, which examines the characteristic differences between technical and commercial workloads and illustrates how those differences affect cache performance. Commercial and technical environments differ in their respective branch behavior, operating system activity, I/O, and dispatching characteristics. A wide range of uniprocessor instruction and data cache geometries were studied. The instruction cache results for commercial workloads demonstrate that instruction cache performance can no longer be neglected because these workloads have much larger code working sets than technical applications. For database workloads, a breakdown of kernel and user behavior reveals that the application component can exhibit behavior similar to the operating system and therefore, can experience miss rates equally high. This paper also indicates that “dispatching” or process switching characteristics must be considered when designing level-two caches. The data presented shows that increasing the associativity of second-level caches can reduce miss rates significantly. Overall, the results of this research should help system designers choose a cache configuration that will perform well in commercial markets.
Incremental dependence analysis for interactive parallelization

Incrementally updating dependence information during interactive parallelization is a difficult proposition. We have developed a tool (PAT) that maintains dependence information during incremental transformations to a Fortran program, including loop parallelization, code <italic>replication, alignment</italic> and <italic>shifting</italic>, as well as <italic>insertion</italic> and <italic>deletion</italic> of code including parallel primitives. Our analysis is based on a variation on the standard approach to dependence graph generation, with program wide and local information separated in a <italic>sequential</italic> and a <italic>parallel</italic> dependence graph.
Dynamic consensus of multi-agent systems under Markov packet losses with defective transition probabilities

This paper is concerned with the consensus problem of discrete-time multi-agent systems (MASs) over lossy communication channels. The communication connection between agents at initial time is assumed to be accessible, which ensures that the system can reach consensus over ideal communication channels. However, the communication channel can be fading in practice, packet loss occurs inevitably. In this paper by modeling the packet losses as a Markov process with defective transition probabilities, a new description of the scenario of packet losses is addressed. Since the transition probabilities considered here comprise three types: known, uncertain within given intervals, and unknown, our model is more general and practical than previous results. A distributed protocol is introduced to achieve dynamic consensus. Sufficient condition for the mean-square consensus of discrete-time MASs is derived in the form of linear matrix inequalities. Numerical example is also given to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.
RF CMOS for microwave and mm-wave applications

RF CMOS is gaining significant momentum as the technology of choice for implementing product designs in the 1-10GHz band. With scaling pushing fT and fMAX of FET's beyond 300GHz and integration of back-end-of-line (BEOL) conducive to low-loss passives, CMOS is poised to address application needs in the X, K and V bands
Multiple free-radical scavenging capacity in serum

We have developed a method to determine serum scavenging-capacity profile against multiple free radical species, namely hydroxyl radical, superoxide radical, alkoxyl radical, alkylperoxyl radical, alkyl radical, and singlet oxygen. This method was applied to a cohort of chronic kidney disease patients. Each free radical species was produced with a common experimental procedure; i.e., uv/visible-light photolysis of free-radical precursor/sensitizer. The decrease in free-radical concentration by the presence of serum was quantified with electron spin resonance spin trapping method, from which the scavenging capacity was calculated. There was a significant capacity change in the disease group (n = 45) as compared with the healthy control group (n = 30). The percent values of disease’s scavenging capacity with respect to control group indicated statistically significant differences in all free-radical species except alkylperoxyl radical, i.e., hydroxyl radical, 73 ± 12% (p = 0.001); superoxide radical, 158 ± 50% (p = 0.001); alkoxyl radical, 121 ± 30% (p = 0.005); alkylperoxyl radical, 123 ± 32% (p>0.1); alkyl radical, 26 ± 14% (p = 0.001); and singlet oxygen, 57 ± 18% (p = 0.001). The scavenging capacity profile was illustrated using a radar chart, clearly demonstrating the characteristic change in the disease group. Although the cause of the scavenging capacity change by the disease state is not completely understood, the profile of multiple radical scavenging capacities may become a useful diagnostic tool.
Glucagon‐like peptide‐1 cleavage product GLP‐1 (9‐36) amide enhances hippocampal long‐term synaptic plasticity in correlation with suppression of Kv4.2 expression and eEF2 phosphorylation

Glucagon‐like peptide‐1 (GLP‐1) is an endogenous gut hormone and a key regulator in maintaining glucose homeostasis by stimulating insulin secretion. Its natural cleavage product GLP‐1 (9‐36), used to be considered a “bio‐inactive” metabolite mainly because of its lack of insulinotropic effects and low affinity for GLP‐1 receptors, possesses unique properties such as anti‐oxidant and cardiovascular protection. Little is known about the role of GLP‐1 (9‐36) in central nervous system. Here we report that chronic, systemic application of GLP‐1 (9‐36) in adult mice facilitated both the induction and maintenance phases of hippocampal long‐term potentiation (LTP), a major form of synaptic plasticity. In contrast, spatial learning and memory, as assessed by the Morris water maze test, was not altered by GLP‐1 (9‐36) administration. At the molecular level, GLP‐1 (9‐36) reduced protein levels of the potassium channel Kv4.2 in hippocampus, which is linked to elevated dendritic membrane excitability. Moreover, GLP‐1(9‐36) treatment inhibited phosphorylation of mRNA translational factor eEF2, which is associated with increased capacity for de novo protein synthesis. Finally, we showed that the LTP‐enhancing effects by GLP‐1 (9‐36) treatment in vivo were blunted by application of exendin(9‐39)amide [EX(9‐39)], the GLP‐1 receptor (GLP‐1R) antagonist, suggesting its role as a GLP‐1R agonist. These findings demonstrate that GLP‐1 (9‐36), which was considered a “bio‐inactive” peptide, clearly exerts physiological effects on neuronal plasticity in the hippocampus, a brain region critical for learning and memory.