Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tracking Control of Unmanned Surface Vessels Based on Fully Actuated System Approaches

Considering the complication and high requirements of controller design in unmanned surface vessels (USVs) from the perspective of under-actuated model, this paper investigates the tracking control of USVs in terms of fully actuated system approaches (FASA). We firstly propose a high-order fully actuated (HOFA) model of USV for path tracking. Then, using the idea and method of FASA controller design, a control law is proposed to make the closed-loop system obtain the dynamic characteristics we expect and decouple it into two linear systems, which can be achieved with simple and easy computation. The proposed USV path tracking control law achieves global asymptotic stability without continuous angular and forward velocity excitations. The effectiveness of this method is verified through MATLAB simulation.
Investigations of attention in autism spectrum disorder : are anomalies in attention related to the development of sociocommunicative impairments?

While a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is based on impairments and anomalies in the domains of communication, reciprocal social interaction, and restricted and repetitive behaviors, attentional abnormalities have been considered an associated feature of the disorder since it was originally described. Prior research, reviewed in Chapter 1, has demonstrated that individuals with ASD exhibit early and pervasive impairments in the adaptive allocation of attention. The ubiquitous nature of attentional dysfunction in ASD has prompted the hypothesis that aberrant attentional modulation may act as a significant contributing factor in the development of higher-level sociocommunicative deficits. The objective of the studies presented in this dissertation was to further elucidate patterns of attentional strengths and weaknesses in ASD and to examine whether atypical attentional processes are related to core ASD deficits in social and communication functions. The study presented in Chapter 2 employs behavioral and eye- tracking measures to investigate novelty processing in ASD, and, furthermore, examines how sensitivity to new information is related to sociocommunicative impairments in ASD. Chapter 3 presents an investigation of three attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive control) and how efficiency of each attentional network is associated with ASD symptomatology. Chapters 4 and 5 present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of activation and connectivity of attentional networks associated with visual search in ASD, and how behavioral and neural indices of search are related to deficits in social and communicative abilities. Together, results from these studies provide further evidence of atypical attention function in ASD. Moreover, findings from these chapters demonstrate that decreased sensitivity to new information (Chapter 2), reduced alerting efficiency (Chapter 3), and increased search efficiency (Chapter 5) are related to increased symptom severity in children and adolescents with ASD. A preliminary framework for understanding the distinct pattern of attentional strengths and weaknesses, and how these may be related to the development of the triad of impairments and anomalies used to define ASD is outlined. Lastly, potential avenues for future research and possible treatment implications based on the results and conclusions are discussed
What You Check is What You Get: Authoring with jEditOQMath

jEditOQMath is an authoring tool for the intelligent learning environment Active Math. Its editing interface is a simple source editor. However the wealth and power of the authoring tool lies elsewhere, namely in its integration into the learning platform, so that authors design a great learning experience and not simply a great content editing view. In this paper, we describe the tool and propose to name its paradigm WYCIWYG: What you Check is What You Get. The instrumental approach of human computer interaction is applied to analyze the practice and to explain how the edited source becomes the instrument to communicate with the learning environment.
The therapeutic encounter in same‐sex couple counselling – the client's perspective

Abstract Aim: To gain insight into the client's experiences of the counsellor and the therapeutic encounter in same-sex couple counselling. Method: Opportunity sampling using e-mail and agency contacts and advertising in a journal and magazines resulted in nine respondents being interviewed. The transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Respondents were sensitive to the way in which the counsellor related to them and their couple relationship. Four themes were identified: the counsellor's comfort and discomfort; overcompensating for sexual orientation; needing to protect the counsellor; and the uncertainty and not knowing about the counsellor. Discussion: The client's perception of the counsellor's underlying sense of discomfort will impact on the counselling relationship and therefore the efficacy of the process. This applies when the counsellor is perceived as tentative through being over cautious, or through lack of knowledge of same-sex relationships. In addition, being overly gay af.
DNA Assembly Technologies Based on Homologous Recombination

The origins of the recombinant DNA technology can be traced back to the discovery of restriction enzymes and the generation of the first recombinant DNA molecule over 40 years ago (1–3). Since then, and with the emergence of PCR, scientists have generated a number of elegant cloning systems that enable the manipulation of DNA fragments in various ways (for recent reviews see Refs 4–7). Some remarkable examples include the poly-merase cycling assembly of oligonucleotides (8), thermostable ligation (9), topoisomerase-based cloning Due to the value that these technologies have, many of them have turned into commercial products. In the postgenomic era and with the advent of the emerging synthetic biology field, which uses complex combinations of genetic elements to design circuits with new properties, the manipulation and analyses of large set of genes becomes a crucial necessity. In this chapter we offer a review of DNA assembly strategies based on homologous recombination, which present important advantages over other methods. Homologous recombination is the exchange of genetic information between two similar or identical molecules of DNA. This exchange occurs in a precise, specific, and faithful manner, and thus presents an excellent tool for genetic engineering for seamless gene fusion. The mechanism requires the presence of homologous regions, DNA sequence stretches shared by the recombining fragments. The term " homologous recombination in vitro " is commonly referred to the joining of two or more DNA fragments that share end-terminal homology. The reaction is driven by purified enzymes involved in the double-strand DNA break-repair mechanisms such as DNA polymerases, DNA ligases, exonucleases, and single-strand DNA binding proteins. In vitro recombina-tion protocols take advantage of improved PCR techniques to introduce sequence identity at the ends of adjacent DNA fragments that otherwise do not share significant homology. A common element in the in vitro recombi-nation methods is the generation of complementary single-strand overhangs in the DNA fragments to be joined. Different techniques employ different approaches to generating complementary overhangs. A number of in vitro methods use digestion with exonucleases to generate long complementary overhangs, thereby allowing efficient base pairing between adjacent fragments. For example " ligation-independent cloning " (LIC), uses PCR primers that are designed in such a way that the first 12 bases at the 5 0-end must lack one particular nucleotide. The (3 0 ! 5 0) exonuclease activity of T4 DNA polymerase is used in combination with the corresponding dNTP to specifically remove …
Investigating the Combination between Pre-processing Technique and Text Vectorization for Machine Learning Model in Investor Comment Classification

Recently predicting the stock price will increase or decrease has been an exciting topic to research for academia and practitioner. Based on our literature review, one of the significant parameters that affect stock price increase or decrease is a sentiment from the news or social media. In this research, we utilize CS-2K composed of 1853 labelled investor comments and conduct an investigation of the combination of data balancing techniques such as SMOTE and SMOTE Tomek and text vectorization techniques, namely TF-IDF and Doc2Vec on machine three selected machine learning linear support vector machine, artificial neural network and XGBoost, after the experiment, we found that the highest weighted average f1-score is when combining SMOTE + TF-IDF in Linear SVM, that obtain 54% weighted average f1-score. The overall experiment proves that SMOTE and SMOTE Tomek improve the weighted average f1-score up to 13% on TF-IDF. However, on the other hand, SMOTE and SMOTE Tomek + Doc2Vec reduce its score up to 5% on every machine learning model when classifying complex investor comments.
ShotTagger: tag location for internet videos

Social video sharing websites allow users to annotate videos with descriptive keywords called tags, which greatly facilitate video search and browsing. However, many tags only describe part of the video content, without any temporal indication on when the tag actually appears. Currently, there is very little research on automatically assigning tags to shot-level segments of a video. In this paper, we leverage user's tags as a source to analyze the content within the video and develop a novel system named ShotTagger to assign tags at the shot level. There are two steps to accomplish the location of tags at shot level. The first is to estimate the distribution of tags within the video, which is based on a multiple instance learning framework. The second is to perform the semantic correlation of a tag with other tags in a video in an optimization framework and impose the temporal smoothness across adjacent video shots to refine the tagging results at shot level. We present different applications to demonstrate the usefulness of the tag location scheme in searching, and browsing of videos. A series of experiments conducted on a set of Youtube videos has demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.
Toward Ensuring Health Equity: Readability and Cultural Equivalence of OMERACT Patient-reported Outcome Measures

Objective. The goal of the Outcome Measures in Rheumatology (OMERACT) 12 (2014) equity working group was to determine whether and how comprehensibility of patient-reported outcome measures (PROM) should be assessed, to ensure suitability for people with low literacy and differing cultures. Methods. The English, Dutch, French, and Turkish Health Assessment Questionnaires and English and French Osteoarthritis Knee and Hip Quality of Life questionnaires were evaluated by applying 3 readability formulas: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid grade level, and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook; and a new tool, the Evaluative Linguistic Framework for Questionnaires, developed to assess text quality of questionnaires. We also considered a study assessing cross-cultural adaptation with/without back-translation and/or expert committee. The results of this preconference work were presented to the equity working group participants to gain their perspectives on the importance of comprehensibility and cross-cultural adaptation for PROM. Results. Thirty-one OMERACT delegates attended the equity session. Twenty-six participants agreed that PROM should be assessed for comprehensibility and for use of suitable methods (4 abstained, 1 no). Twenty-two participants agreed that cultural equivalency of PROM should be assessed and suitable methods used (7 abstained, 2 no). Special interest group participants identified challenges with cross-cultural adaptation including resources required, and suggested patient involvement for improving translation and adaptation. Conclusion. Future work will include consensus exercises on what methods are required to ensure PROM are appropriate for people with low literacy and different cultures.
An Algorithm for the Optimization of Finite Element Integration Loops

We present an algorithm for the optimization of a class of finite-element integration loop nests. This algorithm, which exploits fundamental mathematical properties of finite-element operators, is proven to achieve a locally optimal operation count. In specified circumstances the optimum achieved is global. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate significant performance improvements over the state of the art in finite-element code generation in almost all cases. This validates the effectiveness of the algorithm presented here and illustrates its limitations.
Computer-Simulation Technique for Low Dose Computed Tomographic Screening

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to assess the relative influence of noise and artifact in detecting lung nodules on low dose computed tomographic (CT) screening. Methods: We develop the computer-simulation technique that allows tube current simulation and virtual nodule insertion in any CT images. The tube current simulation uses a reduction model that adds random Gaussian noise distribution to existing projection data. The virtual nodules are generated using a dedicated CT simulation tool with same scanner geometry. Results: The coefficient of the correlations between the contrast-to-noise ratio of the actual scan and simulated tube current images was 0.98. There was no difference in CT number between virtual nodules and actual nodules [t test results = 0.60, t50(0.01) = 2.70 at 10 mA] and the coefficient of the correlations of the image noise was 0.99. Conclusions: Our technique is useful for systematic evaluation of radiation dose reduction and structure visibility in low-dose CT screening.
GALOIS GROUPS OF CUBICS AND QUARTICS (NOT IN CHARACTERISTIC 2)

For a field K and separable f(X) in K[X], the Galois group of f(X) over K permutes the roots of f(X) in a splitting field. Labeling the roots as r1, . , rn provides an embedding of the Galois group into Sn. We recall two theorems about this embedding. 1 Theorem 1.1. Let f(X) ∈ K[X] be separable of degree n with Galois group Gf over K. (a) If f(X) is irreducible over K then |Gf | is divisible by n. (b) The polynomial f(X) is irreducible in K[X] if and only if Gf is a transitive subgroup of Sn. Definition 1.2. If f(X) ∈ K[X] factors in a splitting field as f(X) = c(X−r1) · · · (X−rn), then the discriminant of f(X) is defined to be
Situations relationnelles et gestion des grossesses non prévues à Dakar

De nombreuses etudes ont souligne l’augmentation des grossesses non planifiees chez les jeunes en Afrique subsaharienne, mais rares sont celles qui se sont interessees a l’evolution concomitante des aspirations des jeunes dans les domaines de la sexualite et de la parentalite. A partir d’une recherche menee a Dakar au Senegal, cet article analyse la complexite des enjeux individuels et collectifs autour d’une grossesse inattendue, et montre que cette notion renvoie a une reflexion plus ample sur les enjeux contraceptifs en debut de vie sexuelle. L’etude s’appuie sur 74 recits de vie de femmes et d’hommes recueillis entre 2007 et 2008 a Dakar dans le cadre de la recherche ECAF (Emergency Contraception in Africa) financee par l’Union europeenne. La collecte des donnees repose sur une approche biographique de type qualitative qui met en perspective les trajectoires residentielle, scolaire, professionnelle, affective ou conjugale, et contraceptive des individus. Les resultats revelent quatre dimensions structurantes de la relation a la maternite : le contexte relationnel dans lequel la grossesse survient, le jeu de pouvoir entre les differents protagonistes (individus, couples, familles et/ou entourage), les relations de pouvoir fondees sur le genre, et l’insecurite croissante des conditions de vie.
Robust audio surveillance using spectrogram image texture feature

A sound signal produces a unique texture which can be visualized using a spectrogram image and analyzed for automatic sound recognition. In this paper, we explore the use of a well-known image texture analysis technique called the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) for sound recognition in an audio surveillance application. The GLCM captures the distribution of co-occurring values at a given offset. Unlike most other similar research which derive features from the GLCM, we use the matrix values itself to form the feature vector with analysis carried out in subbands. When compared to a baseline feature from related work, the proposed spectrogram image texture feature (SITF) gives marginally lower results under clean and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions but significantly better results are achieved at low SNR, where the baseline feature was seen to be less effective.
ELISA FOR RANKL-OPG COMPLEX IN MOUSE SERA

A sensitive sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for the mouse RANKL-OPG complex was developed by utilizing a polyclonal antibody that recognizes mouse soluble RANKL as an immobilized capture component and mouse OPG IgG labeled with peroxidase. We could quantify the RANKL-OPG complex level (detection limit: 1 pmol/L). Employing this assay system, we demonstrated that the RANKL-OPG complex was constitutively present in the serum of OPG+/− mice, but not in that of OPG−/− or wild-type C57BL/6 J mice.
Arginine challenge unravels persistent disturbances of urea cycle and gluconeogenesis in abstinent alcoholics.

AIMS Data on recovery from hormonal and metabolic sequelae of alcoholism in strictly controlled alcohol abstinence are mainly restricted to short-term abstention. Our previous findings of persistently decreased plasma and urinary urea concentrations in long-term abstinent alcoholics prompted us to further elucidate this unexplained phenomenon. METHODS The response of circulating urea cycle metabolites and glucose-regulating hormones to an intravenous load (30 g) of arginine hydrochloride was investigated in abstinent male alcoholics (n = 14) after complete recovery of all routine liver parameters and compared with that in healthy male controls (n = 15). RESULTS The arginine challenge provoked (i) higher peak concentrations of arginine and increased arginine/ornithine and ornithine/citrulline ratios in the plasma of abstinent alcoholics; (ii) augmented plasma glutamine concentrations in alcoholics in the presence of comparable levels in both experimental groups of plasma glutamate, ammonia, and nitrate/nitrite; (iii) parallel increases in plasma urea concentrations over the respective baseline levels but distinctly higher urinary urea excretion in controls; (iv) a blunted blood glucose response to arginine in alcoholics together with a reduced insulin and glucagon surge; and (v) an elevated growth hormone peak as compared with controls. CONCLUSIONS Application of an intravenous arginine challenge reveals profound and lasting metabolic and hormonal disturbances in abstinent alcoholics, affecting urea cycle and gluconeogenesis. The common denominator of many of these changes may be an acquired irreversible deficiency in cellular energy regulation.
Autologous Fat Grafting: Comparison of Techniques

Background. Despite more than a century of reporting in the medical literature, controversy still surrounds both the efficacy and longevity of autologous fat transplantation in subcutaneous soft tissue augmentation. Objective. To summarize the existing literature relating to the effectiveness of this procedure and to highlight differences in technique that may play a role in reported treatment successes and failures. Methods. Review of the literature and reporting of authors' observations and results. Conclusion. Autologous fat transplantation can be a gratifyingly effective treatment for subcutaneous augmentation that may produce permanent results in some cases. This article aims to clarify some of the differences in technique employed by doctors in this field and aims to enable the reader to better see the subtle, but sometimes important differences in methods used.
Robust Attitude Control for Flying-Wing UAV Using Modified Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

This paper proposes a modified incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (MINDI) control scheme for attitude tracking control of flying-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Based on the incremental dynamic inversion formulation, the angular rate controller is designed to alleviate the nonlinearity and coupling characteristics of the flying-wing configuration. Then, in order to address the impact of factors such as angular acceleration measurement errors and actuator faults on the control performance, a super-twisting-like fixed-time convergence algorithm is introduced to replace the linear control law in the nominal INDI method, ensuring rapid convergence of tracking errors. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively mitigates the impact of such errors and faults. Compared to the nominal INDI, the modified method exhibits stronger fault tolerance and robustness in the attitude tracking control of the flying-wing UAV.
Real-Time Charcoal Rendering Using Contrast Enhancement Operators

Recent work in non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) has found methods to render various artistic effects like pen and ink illustrations, pencil sketching, water color, engraving, and silhouette rendering. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to achieve the effects of charcoal rendering in real-time using contrast enhancement operators. Charcoal is a medium that has limited dynamic range and tonal resolution. Hence it is difficult for artists to reproduce all the rich textures, colors and tonal variations existing in the physical world. One of the basic techniques that artists use to overcome this is to exaggerate the tonal contrast existing in the real world. In this paper we use contrast enhancement operators (CEO) on textures and/or colors of the model to achieve contrast enhanced textures (CET) and contrast enhanced model (CEM) respectively. We use the CEM and the CET to generate several effects characteristic of charcoal drawings like broad grainy strokes and the smooth tonal variations that are achieved by smudging the charcoal by hand. Further, we also generate the closure effect that is used by artists to avoid artistically and perceptually unpleasant hard silhouette edges. We present a single pass rendering technique that uses one CET to produce all the above charcoal rendering effects at interactive rates using the traditional graphics pipeline.
Grasping Major Statements and Their Contradictions Toward Information Credibility Analysis of Web Contents

The World Wide Web contains wide variety of news reports, arguments, opinions, etc. that vary widely in quality. People judge the credibility of information on the Web for decision making in daily life. At present, while the quantity of information on the Web is explosively increasing, it is necessary to develop a system that supports such judgments. We have been developing an information credibility analysis system, WISDOM that considers the viewpoints of information contents, information senders, and information appearances. In this paper, as a viewpoint of information contents, we propose a method for providing a bird's eye view of major statements on a given topic and their contradictions. We evaluate the obtained statements in our experiments, and confirm the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, we discuss our future objectives.