Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Motor control testing of upper limb function after botulinum toxin injection: a case study.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate changes in upper extremity function in a hemiparetic patient after treatment with botulinum toxin (BTX) using motor-control testing (MCT) techniques. DESIGN Interventional with longitudinal study, open label. SETTING A children's hospital and a motor-control laboratory at a major academic center. PARTICIPANTS A 16-year-old male with right hemiparetic cerebral palsy and a healthy 12-year-old control subject. INTERVENTIONS BTX injections to the elbow and wrist flexors. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES MCT was used to examine 4 upper extremity movements: forward reach, bilateral rhythmic movements (both muscle homologous and direction homologous), isometric pinch, and hand tapping. The patient was tested before treatment and at 2, 4, 6, 12, 18, and 24 weeks after treatment. In addition, range of motion (ROM), the Ashworth scale of spasticity, Functional Independence Measure, and the mobility and activities of daily living (ADL) sections of the Pediatric Evaluation of the Disability Inventory were performed. RESULTS Forward reach demonstrated little change initially despite patient reports of "feeling looser. " Improvement was noted after 18 weeks, but returned to baseline level at 24 weeks. Bilateral rhythmic movements also showed slight improvement at 18 weeks. Pinch force increased significantly after 2 weeks, but declined again at 6 weeks. Improvements occurred in ROM and the Ashworth rating of spasticity, but were not temporally associated with each other or with MCT results. Functional assessment data did not change during the study period. CONCLUSIONS Improvements in more complex motor tasks were noted after significant delay from the time of treatment, while simpler tasks demonstrated a more rapid improvement, followed by a rapid return to baseline levels. This case suggests that MCT techniques can provide quantitative and qualitative data, which can add new information about upper extremity motor disability and the outcome of treatment.
No-reference quality assessment for contrast-distorted image

Contrast change is a special type of image distortion which is vitally important for visual perception of image quality, while little investigates has been dedicated to the contrast-distorted images. A proper contrast change not only reduces human visual perception, instead of improving it. This characteristic determines that full-reference way cannot assess contrast-distorted images properly. In this paper, we propose a no-reference way for contrast-distorted image assessment. Five statistical features are extracted from the distortion image, and two features are extracted from the phase congruence (PC) map of distortion image. These features and human mean opinion scores (MOS) of training images are jointly utilized to train a model of support vector regression (SVR). The quality of testing image is evaluated by this learned model. Experiments on CCID2014 database demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed metric.
A Partial-Distribution-Fault-Aware Protocol for Consistent Updates in Distributed Storage Systems

Distribution of data and erasure tolerant-codes allow to store data reliably in distributed systems. Whereby most techniques are directed to failures of storage resources, also erroneously accessing clients and network interruptions may disturb the storage system operation and cause data loss. Particularly, updates that get partially effective onto distributed data may leave data in an inconsistent state and indirectly destroy data content. Besides, redundancy and data can be left in a state that does not allow to tolerate failures anymore. In this paper, we propose a protocol that takes these issues into account. The protocol forces update consistency in partial distribution scenarios and is correlated with the distribution and coding scheme. It is based on a two-phase commit protocol and a two-layered data structure for buffering updates. For block-wise and sequential access, the protocol cost is hidden in the sequence of accesses related to consecutive blocks.
Annual Power Load Forecasting Using Support Vector Regression Machines: A Study on Guangdong Province of China 1985-2008

Load forecasting has always been the essential part of an efficient power system operation and planning. A novel approach based on support vector machines is proposed in this paper for annual power load forecasting. Different kernel functions are selected to construct a combinatorial algorithm. The performance of the new model is evaluated with a real-world dataset, and compared with two neural networks and some traditional forecasting techniques. The results show that the proposed method exhibits superior performance. Keywords—combinatorial algorithm, data mining, load forecasting, support vector machines
Variable future-time reference in French: A comparison of learners in a study-abroad and a foreign-language context

Abstract This study seeks to advance understanding of second-language (L2) acquisition of future-time reference in French, by comparing the developmental trajectories of learners living in and away from the target-language setting. Study-abroad learners in France (n = 45), foreign-language learners living in the US (n = 37), and native speakers of Hexagonal French (n = 30) participated in this study. They completed a written-contextualized task, a language-proficiency test and a background questionnaire. For each written-contextualized-task item, participants selected from among three responses that differed with respect to the form (inflectional future, periphrastic future, present). Items were designed to test for the influence of three factors on the form selected: presence/absence of a lexical temporal indicator, temporal distance, and (un)certainty. Additionally, two extra-linguistic factors were examined: learning context and proficiency level. The analyses of frequency and the multinomial logistic regressions suggest that, despite developmental similarities between learning contexts, acquisitional paths of study-abroad and foreign-language learners were not identical. Résumé Cette étude cherche à faire progresser notre compréhension de l'acquisition de la référence temporelle au futur en français langue seconde, en comparant les trajectoires développementales d'apprenants vivant ou non dans le milieu de la langue-cible. Des apprenants participant à un séjour en France (n = 45), d'autres vivant aux États-Unis (n = 37) et des locuteurs natifs du français hexagonal (n = 30) ont participé à la présente étude. Ils ont réalisé une tâche d’écriture contextualisée et un test de compétence linguistique, et répondu à un questionnaire de profil linguistique. Pour chaque item d’écriture contextualisée, les participants devaient choisir parmi trois réponses de forme différente (futur fléchi, futur périphrastique, présent). Les items étaient conçus pour tester l'influence de trois facteurs sur la forme choisie : la présence ou l'absence d'un indicateur temporel lexical, la distance temporelle et la certitude. Nous avons également examiné deux facteurs extralinguistiques : le contexte d'apprentissage et le niveau de compétence. Les analyses de fréquence et de régression multinomiale logistique suggèrent qu'en dépit de développements similaires entre les contextes d'apprentissage, la trajectoire acquisitionnelle des apprenants participant à un échange linguistique et celle des apprenants en contexte américain ne sont pas identiques.
A generic framework for workpiece-based programming of cooperating industrial robots

This paper describes the development of a framework for developing and testing a workpiece-based programming approach for cooperating industrial robots executing a load sharing or load transporting task. By allowing the user to specify the workpiece trajectory instead of those of the robots, the level of programming complexity decreases significantly. Utilizing new Human Machine Interfaces and force/torque sensors, an acute reduction of both time and cost incurred in programming cooperating robots work cell could be achieved. A sensor-based control architecture guarantees that the robots cooperatively move the workpiece along the specified trajectory without any excessive forces arising on the workpiece due to misalignment. The whole process can be recorded and native code can be automatically generated for each robot. To validate the approach, a prototype is derived from the framework. Implementation aspects and the underlying control architecture as well as experimental results will be presented.
Location-based services for dynamic range queries

To conserve the usage of energy, indexing techniques have been developed in a wireless mobile environment. However, the use of interleaved index segments in a broadcast cycle increases the average access latency for the clients. In this paper, we present the broadcast-based location dependent data delivery scheme (BBS) for dynamic range queries. In the BBS, broadcasted data objects are sorted sequentially based on their locations, and the server broadcasts the location dependent data along with an index segment. Then, we present a data prefetching and caching scheme, designed to reduce the query response time. The performance of this scheme is investigated in relation to various environmental variables, such as the distributions of the data objects, the average speed of the clients, and the size of the service area.
ECOS: Practical Mobile Application Offloading for Enterprises

Offloading has emerged as a promising idea to allow handheld devices to access intensive applications without performance or energy costs. This could be particularly useful for enterprises seeking to run line-of-business applications on handhelds. However, we must address two practical roadblocks in order to make offloading amenable for enterprises: (i) ensuring data privacy and the use of trusted offloading resources, and (ii) accommodating offload at scale with diverse handheld objectives and compute resource capabilities. We present the design and implementation of an Enterprise-Centric Offloading System (ECOS) which augments prior offloading proposals to address these issues. ECOS uses a logically central controller to opportunistically leverage diverse compute resources, while tightly controlling where specific applications offload depending on privacy, performance, and energy constraints of users and applications. A wide range of experiments using a real prototype establish the effectiveness of our approach.
Towards Topic-to-Question Generation

This paper is concerned with automatic generation of all possible questions from a topic of interest. Specifically, we consider that each topic is associated with a body of texts containing useful information about the topic. Then, questions are generated by exploiting the named entity information and the predicate argument structures of the sentences present in the body of texts. The importance of the generated questions is measured using Latent Dirichlet Allocation by identifying the subtopics (which are closely related to the original topic) in the given body of texts and applying the Extended String Subsequence Kernel to calculate their similarity with the questions. We also propose the use of syntactic tree kernels for the automatic judgment of the syntactic correctness of the questions. The questions are ranked by considering both their importance (in the context of the given body of texts) and syntactic correctness. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study has accomplished this task in our setting. A series of experiments demonstrate that the proposed topic-to-question generation approach can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art results.
The Impact of Visual Information on Reference Assignment in Sentence Production

Reference is the cognitive mechanism that binds real-world entities to their conceptual counterparts. Recent psycholinguistic studies using eye-tracking have shed light on the mechanisms used to establish shared referentiality across linguistic and visual modalities. It is unclear, however, whether vision plays an active role during linguistic processing. Here, we present a language production experiment that investigates how cued sentence encoding is influenced by visual properties in naturalistic scenes, such as the amount of clutter and the number of potential actors, as well as the animacy of the cue. The results show that clutter and number of actors correlate with longer response latencies in production, and with the generation of more complex structures. Cue animacy interacts with both clutter and number of actors, demonstrating a close coupling of linguistic and visual processing in reference assignment.
Land-surface segmentation to delineate elementary forms from Digital Elevation Models

—In this paper, we introduce an algorithm to delineate elementary forms on Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). Elementary forms are defined by constant values of fundamental morphometric properties and limited by discontinuities of these properties. A multiresolution segmentation technique was customized to partition the layers of altitude derivatives into homogeneous divisions through a self-scalable procedure, which reveals the pattern encoded within the data. Layers were segmented successively, following the order of elevation derivatives, i.e. gradient, aspect, profile curvature, and plan curvature. Each segmentation was followed by extraction of elementary forms, thus leaving only heterogeneous surfaces for further segmentation steps. The sequential selection of elementary forms was based on dynamic thresholds of: 1) the inner variance of the respective land-surface variable (LSV); 2) the difference between the mean LSV value of the target segment and the mean LSV values of its adjacent segments; and 3) the shape indices of segments. The results were compared with an existing manually-drawn geomorphological map to evaluate the potential of the algorithm of producing morphologically meaningful land-surface divisions. The evaluation showed that most segments are either directly comparable with manual delineations, or have a clear morphological meaning. We conclude that algorithmic delineation of elementary forms from real DEMs is feasible; more work is needed, however, to design a fully operational process.
O F Jus Tice Pr O G Ra Ms Bja N National Institute of Justice Victim Costs and Consequences: a New Look Victim Costs and Consequences: a New Look Introduction

s Sponsor special projects and research and development programs that will improve and strengthen the criminal justice system and reduce or prevent crime. s Conduct national demonstration projects that employ innovative or promising approaches for improving criminal justice. s Develop new technologies to fight crime and improve criminal justice. s Evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice programs and identify programs that promise to be successful if continued or repeated. s Recommend actions that can be taken by Federal, State, and local governments as well as private organizations to improve criminal justice. s Carry out research on criminal behavior. s Develop new methods of crime prevention and reduction of crime and delinquency. s Basic research on career criminals that led to the development of special police and prosecutor units to deal with repeat offenders. s Research that confirmed the link between drugs and crime. s The research and development program that resulted in the creation of police body armor that has meant the difference between life and death to hundreds of police officers. s Pioneering scientific advances such as the research and development of DNA analysis to positively identify suspects and eliminate the innocent from suspicion. s The evaluation of innovative justice programs to determine what works, including drug enforcement, community policing, community anti-drug initiatives, prosecution of complex drug cases, drug testing throughout the criminal justice system, and user accountability programs. s Creation of a corrections information-sharing system that enables State and local officials to exchange more efficient and cost-effective concepts and techniques for planning, financing, and constructing new prisons and jails. s Operation of the world's largest criminal justice information clearinghouse, a resource used by State and local officials across the Nation and by criminal justice agencies in foreign countries. the needs of the criminal justice field. The Institute actively solicits the views of criminal justice professionals to identify their most critical problems. Dedicated to the priorities of Federal, State, and local criminal justice agencies, research and development at the National Institute of Justice continues to search for answers to what works and why in the Nation's war on drugs and crime. Health and Human Services. Opinions or points of view expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the sponsoring agencies.
Strathprints Institutional Repository Maximum Likelihood Doa Estimation in Unknown Colored Noise Fields

Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Copyright c and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (http:// strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in unknown noise environments is an important but challenging problem. Several methods based on maximum likelihood (ML) criteria and parameterization of signals or noise covariances have been established. Generally, to obtain the exact ML (EML) solutions, the DOAs must be jointly estimated along with other noise or signal parameters by optimizing a complicated nonlinear function over a high-dimensional problem space. Although the computation complexity can be reduced via derivation of suboptimal approximate ML (AML) functions using large sample assumption or least square criteria, nevertheless the AML estimators still require multi-dimensional search and the accuracy is lost to some extent. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) based solution is proposed here to compute the EML functions and explore the potential superior performances. A key characteristic of PSO is that the algorithm itself is highly robust yet remarkably simple to implement, while processing similar capabilities as other evolutionary algorithms such as the genetic algorithm (GA). Simulation results confirm the advantage of paring PSO with EML, and the PSO-EML estimator is shown to significantly outperform AML-based techniques in various scenarios at less computational costs.
Integration of digital image analysis for automated measurements into a photogrammetric stereo evaluation system

The purpose of the introduced project is to achieve a combination of photogrammetric measurement techniques and procedures of digital image analysis in one stereoscopic evaluation system, which can be used in architectural surveying, building preservation and archaeology. Digital stereoscopic examination allows users an estimation of the spatial dimension and the surface texture of objects. The integration of automated image analysis techniques simplifies the stereoscopic measurement procedure and offers an increase in accuracy. Due to the substantial similarities of stereoscopic image pairs, correlation techniques provide measurements of subpixel precision for corresponding image points. Already within the process of image orientation this technique allows the use of natural unmarked tie points. Separate signalized control points are no longer necessary. The stereoscopic measurement process itself is simplified by an automated correlation-based depth determination for manual single point measurements. An adapted expansion algorithm for the same process even offers the possibility to measure profiles and object surfaces automatically. Additionally an included interface for the integration of tacheometric measurements and laser scanner point clouds allows a combined object evaluation. Digital surface models (DSM) can be created by triangulation and edited within the stereo model. In combination with the high resolution image material of the stereo evaluation, high-quality unwrappings, ortho images and 3D models can be generated. Taking various approaches for camera modelling into consideration, analogue and digital amateur cameras as well as panoramic cameras, can be used for stereoscopic recording in addition to the common metrical cameras. * Corresponding author.
A Novel Stopped-Flow Assay for Quantitating Carbonic-Anhydrase Activity and Assessing Red-Blood-Cell Hemolysis

We report a novel carbonic-anhydrase (CA) assay and its use for quantitating red-blood-cell (RBC) lysis during stopped-flow (SF) experiments. We combine two saline solutions, one containing HEPES/pH 7.03 and the other, ~1% CO2/44 mM HCO3-/pH 8.41, to generate an out-of-equilibrium CO2/HCO3- solution containing ~0.5% CO2/22 HCO3-/pH ~7.25 (10°C) in the SF reaction cell. CA catalyzes relaxation of extracellular pH to ~7.50: HCO3- + H+ → CO2 + H2O. Proof-of-concept studies (no intact RBCs) show that the pH-relaxation rate constant (kΔpH)—measured via pyranine fluorescence—rises linearly with increases in [bovine CAII] or [murine-RBC lysate]. The y-intercept (no CA) was kΔpH = 0.0183 s−1. Combining increasing amounts of murine-RBC lysate with ostensibly intact RBCs (pre-SF hemolysis ≅0.4%)—fixing total [hemoglobin] at 2.5 μM in the reaction cell to simulate hemolysis from ostensibly 0 to 100%—causes kΔpH to increase linearly. This y-intercept (0% lysate/100% ostensibly intact RBCs) was kΔpH = 0.0820 s−1, and the maximal kΔpH (100% lysate/0% intact RBCs) was 1.304 s−1. Thus, mean percent hemolysis in the reaction cell was ~4.9%. Phenol-red absorbance assays yield indistinguishable results. The increase from 0.4 to 4.9% presumably reflects mechanical RBC disruption during rapid mixing. In all fluorescence studies, the CA blocker acetazolamide reduces kΔpH to near-uncatalyzed values, implying that all CA activity is extracellular. Our lysis assay is simple, sensitive, and precise, and will be valuable for correcting for effects of lysis in physiological SF experiments. The underlying CA assay, applied to blood plasma, tissue-culture media, and organ perfusates could assess lysis in a variety of applications.