Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Support vector regression and classification based multi-view face detection and recognition

A support vector machine-based multi-view face detection and recognition framework is described. Face detection is carried out by constructing several detectors, each of them in charge of one specific view. The symmetrical property of face images is employed to simplify the complexity of the modelling. The estimation of head pose, which is achieved by using the support vector regression technique, provides crucial information for choosing the appropriate face detector. This helps to improve the accuracy and reduce the computation in multi-view face detection compared to other methods. For video sequences, further computational reduction can be achieved by using a pose change smoothing strategy. When face detectors find a face in frontal view, a support vector machine-based multi-class classifier is activated for face recognition. All the above issues are integrated under a support vector machine framework. Test results on four video sequences are presented, among them the detection rate is above 95%, recognition accuracy is above 90%, average pose estimation error is around 10/spl deg/, and the full detection and recognition speed is up to 4 frames/second on a Pentium II 300 PC.
Nighttime salivary cortisol measurement as a simple, noninvasive, outpatient screening test for Cushing's syndrome in children and adolescents.

OBJECTIVE There is currently no optimal test to screen for endogenous Cushing's syndrome (CS) in children. Traditional 24-hour urine or midnight serum cortisol values may be difficult to obtain or elevated by venipuncture stress. We hypothesized that salivary cortisol measurement is a reliable way to screen for CS in children. STUDY DESIGN Sixty-seven children (5-17 years) were studied: 24 obese volunteers, 29 non-obese volunteers, and 14 children with CS. Saliva was obtained at 7:30 AM, bedtime, and midnight for measurement of free cortisol by radioimmunoassay. RESULTS Salivary cortisol was detectable in all morning and evening samples from patients with CS but was frequently undetectable in healthy children at bedtime (66%) and at midnight (90%). With cut points that excluded healthy children, a midnight salivary cortisol value of 7.5 nmol/L (0.27 microg/dL) identified 13 of 14 patients with CS, whereas a bedtime value >27.6 nmol/L (1 microg/dL) detected CS in 5 of 6 patients. The diagnostic accuracies of midnight salivary cortisol and urinary free cortisol per square meter were the same (93%). CONCLUSION Salivary cortisol measurement at bedtime or midnight rules out CS in nearly all cases. Nighttime salivary cortisol sampling is thus a simple, accurate way to screen for hypercortisolism in children.
Solving Dynamic Models with Heterogeneous Agents and Aggregate Uncertainty with Dynare or Dynare

uncertainty can be solved using Dynare or Dynare++ software that implements a perturbation approach. When the explicit aggregation algorithm (XPA) is used to obtain aggregate laws of motion, this can be accomplished by combining a Dynare program with a very simple Matlab program. When the Krusell-Smith algorithm is used, then the Matlab program needed is somewhat more involved, but still relatively simple. We calculate and compare first and second-order numerical solutions using both algorithms. These numerical procedures are also compared with the algorithm that solves the individual policy rules with a projection instead of a perturbation procedure. Finally, we discuss a procedure that efficiently chooses which cross-sectional moments to include as aggregate state variables when nonlinearities are important and the mean is not a sufficient statistic.
Mission from Mars: a method for exploring user requirements for children in a narrative space

In this paper a particular design method is propagated as a supplement to existing descriptive approaches to current practice studies especially suitable for gathering requirements for the design of children's technology. The Mission from Mars method was applied during the design of an electronic school bag (eBag). The three-hour collaborative session provides a first-hand insight into children's practice in a fun and intriguing way. The method is proposed as a supplement to existing descriptive design methods for interaction design and children.
Adaptive Task Scheduling for an Assembly Task Coworker Robot Based on Incremental Learning of Human's Motion Patterns

Future robots are expected to share the same workspace with humans and work in cooperation with them to improve productivity and maintain the quality of products. Considering this situation, we have developed a novel assembly task co-worker robot to support workers in their task by delivering the parts and tools to workers. Although such systems have improved work efficiency by predicting human's motion patterns, it is necessary to collect worker's data in advance and regenerate its model whenever the worker is changed. In this letter, we extend the previous system by installing an online learning algorithm and create a worker-dependent model without collecting data in advance. Trajectory prediction with high precision can be realized because of the worker-dependent model and effective utilization of the regularity of the worker's behavior. An adaptive task scheduling system based on the predicted result of the worker's behavior is proposed for improving work efficiency. Implementing the proposed algorithm, we evaluate the effectiveness of the task scheduling system by experiment.
Fibre damage in unbleached reinforcement pulp – The effect of hemicelluloses and lignin on the susceptibility of fibres to damage during oxygen delignification

The targeted modification of hemicellulosic components and lignin was carried out using specific enzymes in order to study the role of these components in the susceptibility of fibres to damage during oxygen delignification. The results showed that: The removal of xylan, which combined with lignin serves the purpose of stress-equalizing matrix, leads to brighter pulp with lower kappa, but simultaneously to increased susceptibility of fibres to deform, with higher resistance to straightening during PFI refining. The removal of glucomannan, which is more associated with cellulose, affected mainly wet fibre strength measured as wet zero span, and less tear-tensile strength properties and fibre form than xylan. The removal of lignin resulted in improved pulp strength properties compared to reference samples. Based on these results, it can be suggested that the level of fibre damage in oxygen delignification is determined to some extent during the kraft pulping.
Reliable, deniable, and hidable communication over multipath networks

We consider the scenario wherein a transmitter Alice wants to (potentially) communicate to the intended receiver Bob over a multipath network, i.e., a network consisting of multiple parallel links, in the presence of a passive eavesdropper Willie, who observes an unknown subset of links. A primary goal of our communication protocol is to make the communication “deniable”, i.e., Willie should not be able to reliably estimate whether or not Alice is transmitting any covert information to Bob. Moreover, if Alice is indeed actively communicating, her covert messages should be information-theoretically “hidable” in the sense that Willie's observations should not leak any information about Alice's (potential) message to Bob - our notion of hidability is slightly stronger than the notion of information-theoretic strong secrecy well-studied in the literature. We demonstrate that deniability does not imply either hidability or (weak or strong) information-theoretic secrecy; nor does information-theoretic secrecy imply deniability. We present matching inner and outer bounds on the capacity for deniable and hidable communication over multipath networks.
Fluid-driven cracks in an elastic matrix in the toughness-dominated limit

The dynamics of fluid-driven cracks in an elastic matrix is studied experimentally. We report the crack radius R(t) as a function of time, as well as the crack shapes w(r,t) as a function of space and time. A dimensionless parameter, the pressure ratio Δpf/Δpv, is identified to gauge the relative importance between the toughness (Δpf) and viscous (Δpv) effects. In our previous paper (Lai et al. 2015 Proc. R. Soc. A 471, 20150255. (doi:10.1098/rspa.2015.0255)), we investigated the viscous limit experimentally when the toughness-related stresses are negligible for the crack propagation. In this paper, the experimental parameters, i.e. Young’s modulus E of the gelatin, viscosity μ of the fracturing liquid and the injection flow rate Q, were chosen so that the viscous effects in the flow are negligible compared with the toughness effects, i.e. Δpf/Δpv≫1. In this limit, the crack dynamics can be described by the toughness-dominated scaling laws, which give the crack radius R(t)∝t2/5 and the half maximum crack thickness W(t)∝t1/5. The experimental results are in good agreement with the predictions of the toughness scaling laws: the experimental data for crack radius R(t) for a wide range of parameters (E,μ,Q) collapse after being rescaled by the toughness scaling laws, and the rescaled crack shapes w(r,t) also collapse to a dimensionless shape, which demonstrates the self-similarity of the crack shape. The appropriate choice of the viscous or toughness scaling laws is important to accurately describe the crack dynamics. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Energy and the subsurface’.
Macroevolution of panicoid inflorescences: a history of contingency and order of trait acquisition.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Inflorescence forms of panicoid grasses (Panicoideae s.s.) are remarkably diverse and they look very labile to human eyes; however, when performing a close inspection one can identify just a small subset of inflorescence types among a huge morphospace of possibilities. Consequently, some evolutionary constraints have restricted, to some extent, the diversification of their inflorescence. Developmental and genetic mechanisms, the photosynthetic type and plant longevity have been postulated as candidate constraints for angiosperms and panicoids in particular; however, it is not clear how these factors operate and which of these have played a key role during the grass inflorescence evolution. To gain insight into this matter the macroevolutionary aspects of panicoid inflorescences are investigated. METHODS The inflorescence aspect (lax versus condensed), homogenization, truncation of the terminal spikelet, plant longevity and photosynthetic type were the traits selected for this study. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo methods were used to test different models of evolution and to evaluate the existence of evolutionary correlation among the traits. Both, models and evolutionary correlation were tested and analysed in a phylogenetic context by plotting the characters on a series of trees. For those cases in which the correlation was confirmed, test of contingency and order of trait acquisition were preformed to explore further the patterns of such co-evolution. KEY RESULTS The data reject the independent model of inflorescence trait evolution and confirmed the existence of evolutionary contingency. The results support the general trend of homogenization being a prerequisite for the loss of the terminal spikelet of the main axis. There was no evidence for temporal order in the gain of homogenization and condensation; consequently, the homogenization and condensation could occur simultaneously. The correlation between inflorescence traits with plant longevity and photosynthetic type is not confirmed. CONCLUSIONS The findings indicate that the lability of the panicoid inflorescence is apparent, not real. The results indicate that the history of the panicoids inflorescence is a combination of inflorescence trait contingency and order of character acquisition. These indicate that developmental and genetic mechanisms may be important constraints that have limited the diversification of the inflorescence form in panicoid grasses.
Automated Fault Diagnosis in Embedded Systems

Automated fault diagnosis is emerging as an important factor in achieving an acceptable and competitive cost/dependability ratio for embedded systems. In this paper, we survey model-based diagnosis and spectrum-based fault localization, two state-of-the-art approaches to fault diagnosis that jointly cover the combination of hardware and control software typically found in embedded systems. We present an introduction to the field, discuss our recent research results, and report on the application on industrial test cases. In addition, we propose to combine the two techniques into a novel, dynamic modeling approach to software fault localization.
Experimental Validation of Noninvasive Epicardial and Endocardial Activation Imaging

Background— Noninvasive imaging of cardiac activation before ablation of the arrhythmogenic substrate can reduce electrophysiological procedure duration and help choosing between an endocardial or epicardial approach. A noninvasive imaging technique was evaluated that estimates both endocardial and epicardial activation from body surface potential maps. We performed a study in isolated and in situ pig hearts, estimating activation from body surface potential maps during sinus rhythm and localizing endocardial and epicardial stimulation sites. Methods and Results— From 3 Langendorff-perfused pig hearts, 180 intramural unipolar electrograms were recorded during sinus rhythm and ectopic activation, together with pseudo–body surface potential map ECGs in 2 of them. From 4 other anesthetized pigs, 64-lead body surface potential maps were recorded during sinus rhythm and ventricular stimulation from 27 endocardial and epicardial sites. The ventricular activation pattern was computed from the recorded QRS complexes. For both Langendorff-perfused hearts, the calculated epicardial and endocardial activation patterns showed good qualitative correspondence to the patterns obtained with needle electrodes. Absolute timing difference for sinus rhythm was 10±5 and 11±8 ms respectively, and for ectopic activation 6±5 and 7±6 ms, respectively. Calculated activation for the in situ hearts in sinus rhythm was similar to patterns recorded in Langendorff-perfused hearts. During stimulation, the distance between the stimulation site and calculated site of earliest activation was 18 (15–27) mm, and 23 of 27 stimulation sites were correctly mapped to either endocardium or epicardium. Conclusions— Noninvasive activation imaging is able to determine earliest ventricular activation and discriminate endocardial from epicardial origin of activation with clinically relevant accuracy.
Automatic generation of suggestions for program investigation

Before performing a modification task, a developer usually has to investigate the source code of a system to understand how to carry out the task. Discovering the code relevant to a change task is costly because it is an inherently human activity whose success depends on a large number of unpredictable factors, such as intuition and luck. Although studies have shown that effective developers tend to explore a program by following structural dependencies, no methodology is available to guide their navigation through the typically hundreds of dependency paths found in a non-trivial program. In this paper, we propose a technique to automatically propose and rank program elements that are potentially interesting to a developer investigating source code. Our technique is based on an analysis of the topology of structural dependencies in a program. It takes as input a set of program elements of interest to a developer and produces a fuzzy set describing other elements of potential interest. Empirical evaluation of our technique indicates that it can help developers quickly select program elements worthy of investigation while avoiding less interesting ones.
An Internet Coordinate System to Enable Collaboration between ISPs and P2P Systems

P2P systems, which contribute a significant portion of today’s Internet traffic, build their overlay topology largely agnostic of the Internet underlay. This leads to traffic management challenges for ISPs on the one hand, and potentially inefficient neighbourhood selection for P2P nodes on the other hand. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel global Internet coordinate system, which can be used by P2P and other applications, to get estimates about path properties to potential neighbours/servers, both within and outside their ISPs. These estimates can be used, e.g., by P2P users to pick appropriate neighbours, so that both ISPs and P2P systems benefit. The coordinate system is built through ISP-P2P collaboration on the one hand, and collaboration between multiple ISPs on the other hand. In this paper, we also discuss which metrics can be provided by our coordinate system, and how it differs from existing coordinate systems.
The Augmented Web: Rationales, Opportunities, and Challenges on Browser-Side Transcoding

Today’s web personalization technologies use approaches like user categorization, configuration, and customization but do not fully support individualized requirements. As a significant portion of our social and working interactions are migrating to the web, we can expect an increase in these kinds of minority requirements. Browser-side transcoding holds the promise of facilitating this aim by opening personalization to third parties through web augmentation (WA), realized in terms of extensions and userscripts. WA is to the web what augmented reality is to the physical world: to layer relevant content/layout/navigation over the existing web to improve the user experience. From this perspective, WA is not as powerful as web personalization since its scope is limited to the surface of the web. However, it permits this surface to be tuned by developers other than the sites’ webmasters. This opens up the web to third parties who might come up with imaginative ways of adapting the web surface for their own purposes. Its success is backed up by millions of downloads. This work looks at this phenomenon, delving into the “what,” the “why,” and the “what for” of WA, and surveys the challenges ahead for WA to thrive. To this end, we appraise the most downloaded 45 WA extensions for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome as well as conduct a systematic literature review to identify what quality issues received the most attention in the literature. The aim is to raise awareness about WA as a key enabler of the personal web and point out research directions.
Linear Convergence of Accelerated Stochastic Gradient Descent for Nonconvex Nonsmooth Optimization

In this paper, we study the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method for the nonconvex nonsmooth optimization, and propose an accelerated SGD method by combining the variance reduction technique with Nesterov's extrapolation technique. Moreover, based on the local error bound condition, we establish the linear convergence of our method to obtain a stationary point of the nonconvex optimization. In particular, we prove that not only the sequence generated linearly converges to a stationary point of the problem, but also the corresponding sequence of objective values is linearly convergent. Finally, some numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. To the best of our knowledge, it is first proved that the accelerated SGD method converges linearly to the local minimum of the nonconvex optimization.
A New Tumorsphere Culture Condition Restores Potentials of Self-Renewal and Metastasis of Primary Neuroblastoma in a Mouse Neuroblastoma Model

Tumorsphere culture enriches and expands tumor cells, thus providing important resources for cancer studies. However, as compared with metastatic tissues, primary tumors in the nervous system rarely give rise to long-surviving tumorspheres, thereby seriously limiting studies on these cancers. This might be due to the limited self-renewal capability of tumor cells and/or to inappropriate culture conditions. The growth and maintenance of tumor cells may depend on microenvironments and/or cell origins (e.g., primary or metastatic; stem cell-like or progenitor-like). Here, we attempted to establish a tumorsphere culture condition for primary neuroblastoma (NB). Primary tumors in MYCN transgenic mice, a NB model, could be serially transplanted, suggesting that these tumors contain cells with a high self-renewal potential. However, primary tumors did not give rise to tumorspheres under a serum-free neurosphere culture condition. The newly established culture condition (named PrimNeuS) contained two critical ingredients: fetal bovine serum and β-mercaptoethanol were essential for tumorsphere formation as well as indefinite passages. The spheres could be passaged more than 20 times without exhaustion under this condition, exhibited a property of differentiation and formed tumors in vivo. Unexpectedly, PrimNeuS revealed that the MYCN transgenic mice had bone marrow metastasis. Furthermore, subcutaneous tumors derived from tumorspheres of primary tumors showed bone marrow metastasis. Taken together, PrimNeuS provides resources for the study of NB and can be used as a powerful tool for the detection of minimal residual disease and for in vitro evaluation prior to personalized therapy.
Electrospinning of aligned medical grade polyurethane nanofibres and evaluation of cell–scaffold interaction using SHED stem cells

Polyurethane (PU) nanofibres are widely used in tissue engineering of elastic tissues such as tendon and ligament, vascular and arterial grafts etc. Alignment of the PU nanofibres is also a desirable property of some tissues to mimic the morphology of the extracellular matrix. Elasthane™ 55D nanofibres were produced using a common electrospinning method and a rotating drum to collect the aligned fibres. Four flow rates and five collector speeds were investigated for their effects on nanofibres alignment and diameter. Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) images of nanofibrous webs were captured, and the diameter and alignment of the nanofibres were measured. Finally, stem cells from human exfoliated deciduous tooth (SHED) were seeded on the surface of the PU nanofibres to investigate the cell–scaffold interaction. Statistical results showed that the flow rate had a significant effect on the fibres diameter. Enhancing the flow rate led to increasing the diameter of the PU nanofibres. The results showed that the fibres alignment index was promoted by increasing the rotating speed of the collector. In addition, the morphological observation of SEM images indicated that cells grew in the alignment direction of the nanofibres. The results of this study can be applicable to produce and control the aligned PU nanofibres for specific applications such as vascular grafts, esophagus prosthesis, arterial grafts and tissue engineering of tendon and ligament.
Scaling Laws and Local Minima in Hebbian ICA

We study the dynamics of a Hebbian ICA algorithm extracting a single non-Gaussian component from a high-dimensional Gaussian background. For both on-line and batch learning we find that a surprisingly large number of examples are required to avoid trapping in a sub-optimal state close to the initial conditions. To extract a skewed signal at least O(N2) examples are required for N-dimensional data and O(N3) examples are required to extract a symmetrical signal with non-zero kurtosis.