Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection and Tracking of Moving Objects Using 2.5D Motion Grids

Autonomous vehicles require a reliable perception of their environment to operate in real-world conditions. Awareness of moving objects is one of the key components for the perception of the environment. This paper proposes a method for detection and tracking of moving objects (DATMO) in dynamic environments surrounding a moving road vehicle equipped with a Velodyne laser scanner and GPS/IMU localization system. First, at every time step, a local 2.5D grid is built using the last sets of sensor measurements. Along time, the generated grids combined with localization data are integrated into an environment model called local 2.5D map. In every frame, a 2.5D grid is compared with an updated 2.5D map to compute a 2.5D motion grid. A mechanism based on spatial properties is presented to suppress false detections that are due to small localization errors. Next, the 2.5D motion grid is post-processed to provide an object level representation of the scene. The detected moving objects are tracked over time by applying data association and Kalman filtering. The experiments conducted on different sequences from KITTI dataset showed promising results, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed method.
Semantic Role Labelling with minimal resources: Experiments with French

This paper describes a series of French semantic role labelling experiments which show that a small set of manually annotated training data is superior to a much larger set containing semantic role labels which have been projected from a source language via word alignment. Using universal part-of-speech tags and dependencies makes little difference over the original fine-grained tagset and dependency scheme. Moreover, there seems to be no improvement gained from projecting semantic roles between direct translations than between indirect translations.
Size distributions of ionic aerosols measured at Waliguan Observatory: Implication for nitrate gas‐to‐particle transfer processes in the free troposphere

[1] Waliguan Observatory (WO) is a land-based Global Atmosphere Watch baseline station on the Tibetan Plateau. Size-resolved ionic aerosols (NH4+, Na+, K+, Ca2+, Mg2+, SO42−, Cl−, NO3− CO32−, formate, acetate and oxalate), organic aerosols, black carbon and gaseous HNO3 and SO2 were measured during an intensive fall-winter field experiment. The observational data were analyzed with a focus on the partitioning of nitrate between the gas and particle phases. Nitrate was found to exist mainly in the particle phase with a typical particulate-to-total nitrate ratio, i.e., NO3−(p)/(NO3−(p) + HNO3(g)), of about 0.9. It was also found that the size distribution pattern of particulate nitrate at WO varied in different samples and the amount of particulate nitrate residing in the fine mode (Dp < 2.0 μm) was typically larger than or comparable with that in the coarse mode. A gas-particle chemical equilibrium model was used to predict these particulate nitrate size distributions. The size distributions of particulate nitrate were reasonably reproduced with the model within the uncertainties caused by the detection limits. The chemical pathways for the formation of particulate nitrate at WO were analyzed with the size distributions of measured ionic aerosols. It was demonstrated that fine nitrate particles may have been produced by the reaction of gaseous nitric acid with gaseous ammonia, while coarse nitrate particles may have been generated via the condensation of nitric acid on the surface of mineral aerosols. The signature of biomass burning at WO was found to be associated with black carbon as well as the accumulation of potassium and oxalate in the fine particles.
AUDIO-BASED DEVICE DISCOVERY AND PAIRING IN SMART URBAN SPACES

In this thesis we studied plausibility of using audio to discover and pair smart devices in smart urban spaces. We created SONDI, an audio-based device discovery and pairing system using pre-existing capabilities of smart devices like phones and tablets. Special emphasis was placed to make system as unobtrusive as possible to human hearing. We designed and tested two different audio signature pairing methods and evaluated basic properties of audio signals in pairing process. We tested in the methods in variety of expected use environments and cases. Using this new found information we created a demonstration system for proximity passed secure pairing procedure with all necessary components. System is based on smart phone application which detects and identifies unique audio signatures on near real-time without interfering with normal usage of the smart device. We also created all necessary server components to collect data from our demo setup. Based on our findings we also present several suggestions how to further develop the system.
Mouse Genetic Approaches to Investigating Calcium/Calmodulin-Dependent Protein Kinase II Function in Plasticity and Cognition

The knock-out of -calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) was the kickoff for a new subfield in neuroscience, in which mouse mutants are used as a tool to gain insight into the molecular basis of cognition and brain plasticity. In our review, we give an overview of the CaMKII mutants that have since been developed, and we summarize the key findings that these studies have provided on the function of CaMKII in hippocampal plasticity, cortical plasticity, and learning and memory. Furthermore, we discuss recent results that misregulation of CaMKII function may cause the neurological symptoms in Angelman’s syndrome (AS).
Generic object recognition using CAD-based multiple representations

Real-world applications of computer vision usually involve a variety of object models making a single model representation somewhat inadequate for object recognition. Multiple representations, on the other hand, allow different matching strategies to be applied for the same object, or even for different parts of the same object. The paper is concerned with the use of CAD-derived hierarchical models having multiple representations/spl minus/concave/convex edges and straight homogeneous generalized cylinder/spl minus/for generic object recognition in outdoor visible imagery. The authors also present a refocused matching algorithm that uses a hierarchically structured model database to facilitate generic object recognition. Experimental results demonstrating generic recognition of objects in perspective, aerial images are presented. <<ETX>>
Localized instabilities at conifolds

We consider the M-theory lifts of configurations of type IIA D6-branes intersecting at angles. In supersymmetry preserving cases, the lifts correspond to special holonomy geometries, like conifolds and $G_2$ holonomy singularities. Transitions in which D6-branes approach and recombine lift to topology changing transition in these geometries. In some instances non-supersymmetric configurations can be reliably lifted, leading to the same topological manifolds, but endowed with non-supersymmetric metrics. In these cases the phase transitions are driven dynamically, due to instabilities localized at the singularities. Even though in non-compact setups the instabilities relax to infinity, in compact situations there exist nearby minima where the instabilities dissappear and the decay reaches a well-defined (in general supersymmetric) endpoint.
Performance of decode-and-forward cooperative communications with channel estimation errors over Rayleigh fading channels

Channel estimation error problem is among the main causes of performance degradation in wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the impact of channel estimation error on cooperative communications. We analyze the symbol error rate (SER) performance of decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative communications with channel estimation error over Rayleigh channels. The exact SER expressions and the upper bound expressions for M-PSK are derived. Simulations are finally provided to verify the correctness of our analysis. Given to high SNR, it shows that performance does not improve along with increasing SNR. The SER performance depends more on the channel link between relay and destination than link between source and relay.
Bioactive Fatty Acids Reduce Development of Gastric Cancer Following Duodenogastric Reflux in Rats

Background: Bioactive fatty acids such as the eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and the modified fatty acid analogue, tetradecylthioacetic acid (TTA), are known to influence inflammatory processes in the body. Our aim was to investigate if diets containing fish oil (FO) enriched with bioactive fatty acids could affect inflammation and development of glandular stomach carcinogenesis in a duodenogastric reflux (DGR) animal model. We also wanted to evaluate if a high-fat diet might increase the risk of developing gastric cancer compared to a low-fat diet. Methods: 185 rats operated on with a gastroenterostomy were randomly allocated to 5 different treatment groups given: low-fat, high-fat, high-fat + FO, high-fat + TTA or high-fat + FO + TTA. The stomachs were removed after 50 weeks and examined by light microscopy with hematoxylin and eosin staining (HE). Immunohistochemical staining against COX-2, PCNA and p53 was performed when adenocarcinomas were found. The plasma fatty acid profile was determined. Results: Adenocarcinomas developed in 21% of animals fed the low-fat diet, 35% in the high-fat group, 16% in the high-fat + TTA group, 21% in the high-fat + FO group and 8.6% in the high-fat + FO + TTA treatment group. COX-2 and PCNA were positive whereas p53 was negative in the majority of the samples. The anti-inflammatory fatty acid index increased after treatment with FO and in combination with FO and TTA. Conclusion: FO and TTA in combination with a high-fat diet significantly lower the risk of developing adenocarcinomas in rats subjected to duodenogastric reflux. This is most likely due to a selective modulation of inflammation.
Recover Subjective Quality Scores from Noisy Measurements

Simple quality metrics such as PSNR are known to not correlate well with subjective quality when tested across a wide spectrum of video content or quality regime. Recently, efforts have been made in designing objective quality metrics trained on subjective data, demonstrating better correlation with video quality perceived by human. Clearly, the accuracy of such a metric heavily depends on the quality of the subjective data that it is trained on. In this paper, we propose a new approach to recover subjective quality scores from noisy raw measurements, by jointly estimating the subjective quality of impaired videos, the bias and consistency of test subjects, and the ambiguity of video contents all together. Compared to previous methods which partially exploit the subjective information, our approach is able to exploit the information in full, yielding better handling of outliers without the need for z-scoring or subject rejection. It also handles missing data more gracefully. Lastly, as side information, it provides interesting insights on the test subjects and video contents.
Fenofibrate plus Metformin Produces Cardioprotection in a Type 2 Diabetes and Acute Myocardial Infarction Model

We investigated whether fenofibrate, metformin, and their combination generate cardioprotection in a rat model of type 2 diabetes (T2D) and acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Streptozotocin-induced diabetic- (DB-) rats received 14 days of either vehicle, fenofibrate, metformin, or their combination and immediately after underwent myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R). Fenofibrate plus metformin generated cardioprotection in a DBI/R model, reported as decreased coronary vascular resistance, compared to DBI/R-Vehicle, smaller infarct size, and increased cardiac work. The subchronic treatment with fenofibrate plus metformin increased, compared with DBI/R-Vehicle, total antioxidant capacity, manganese-dependent superoxide dismutase activity (MnSOD), guanosine triphosphate cyclohydrolase I (GTPCH-I) expression, tetrahydrobiopterin : dihydrobiopterin (BH4 : BH2) ratio, endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) activity, nitric oxide (NO) bioavailability, and decreased inducible NOS (iNOS) activity. These findings suggest that PPARα activation by fenofibrate + metformin, at low doses, generates cardioprotection in a rat model of T2D and AMI and may represent a novel treatment strategy to limit I/R injury in patients with T2D.
Scalable In-Memory Transaction Processing with HTM

We propose a new HTM-assisted concurrency control protocol, called HTCC, that achieves high scalability and robustness when processing OLTP workloads. HTCC attains its goal using a two-pronged strategy that exploits the strengths of HTM. First, it distinguishes between hot and cold records, and deals with each type differently - while accesses to highly contended data are protected using conventional fine-grained locks, accesses to cold data are HTM-guarded. This remarkably reduces the database transaction abort rate and exploits HTM's effectiveness in executing low-contention critical sections. Second, to minimize the overhead inherited from successive restarts of aborted database transactions, HTCC caches the internal execution states of a transaction for performing delta-restoration, which partially updates the maintained read/write set and bypasses redundant index lookups during transaction re-execution at best effort. This approach is greatly facilitated by HTM's speedy hardware mechanism for ensuring atomicity and isolation. We evaluated HTCC in a main-memory database prototype running on a 4 socket machine (40 cores in total), and confirmed that HTCC can scale near-linearly, yielding high transaction rate even under highly contended workloads.
Short-time wavelet estimation in the homomorphic domain

Wavelet estimation plays an important role in many seismic processes like impedance inversion, amplitude versus offset (AVO) and full waveform inversion (FWI). Statistical methods of wavelet estimation away from well control are a desirable tool to support seismic signal processing. One of these methods based on Homomorphic analysis has long intrigued as a potentially elegant solution to the wavelet estimation problem. Yet a successful implementation has proven difficult. We propose here a method based short-time homomorphic analysis which includes elements of the classical cepstrum analysis and log spectral averaging. Our proposal increases the number of segments, thus reducing estimation variances. Results show good performance on realistic synthetic examples.
The H2 Control Problem: State-space and Transfer-function Solutions

The H2 control problem consists of stabilizing the control system while minimizing the H2 norm of its transfer function. Several solutions to this problem are available. For systems in state space form, an optimal regulator can be obtained in observer form by solving two algebraic Riccati equations. For systems described by transfer functions, either Wiener-Hopf optimization or projection results can be applied. The optimal regulator is then obtained using operations with proper stable rational matrices: inner-outer factorizations and stable projections. The aim of this paper is to compare the two approaches. It is well understood that the inner-outer factorization is equivalent to solving an algebraic Riccati equation. However, why are the stable projections not needed in the state-space approach? The difference between the two approaches derives from a different construction of doubly coprime proper stable factors used to represent the plant. The transfer-function approach takes any fixed doubly coprime factors, while the state-space approach parametrizes all such factors and those selected obviate the need for stable projections
Improving Flash Resource Utilization at Minimal Management Cost in Virtualized Flash-Based Storage Systems

Effectively leveraging Flash resources has emerged as a highly important problem in enterprise storage systems. One of the popular techniques today is to use Flash as a secondary-level host-side cache in the virtual machine environment. Although this approach delivers IO acceleration for VMs’ IO workloads, it might not be able to fully exploit the outstanding performance of Flash and justify the high cost-per-GB of Flash resources. In this paper, we design new VMware Flash Resource Managers (vFRM and glb-vFRM) under the consideration of both performance and the incurred cost for managing Flash resources. Specifically, vFRM and glb-vFRM aim to maximize the utilization of Flash resources with minimal CPU, memory and IO cost in managing and operating Flash for a dedicated enterprise workload and multiple heterogeneous enterprise workloads, respectively. Our new Flash resource managers adopt the ideas of thermodynamic heating and cooling to identify data blocks that can benefit the most from being put on Flash and migrate data blocks between Flash and magnetic disks in a lazy and asynchronous mode. Experimental evaluation of the prototype shows that both vFRM and glb-vFRM achieve better cost-effectiveness than traditional caching solutions, i.e., obtaining IO hit ratios even slightly better than some of the conventional algorithms as Flash size increases yet costing orders of magnitude less IO bandwidth.
SENSOR : Data-Driven Sensor Networks Final Report ( September 2003 to August 2006 ) : Activities and Findings

In this project, we adopted a database approach to unite the seemingly conflicting requirements of scalability and flexibility in monitoring the physical world. The objective of this research was to build a new distributed data management layer that scales with the growth of sensor interconnectivity and computational power on the sensors over the next decades. Our system is designed to create the abstraction of a single processing node without centralizing data or computation. Since sensor networks are heavily resource-constrained, our research focused on cross-layer optimizations that are needed to exploit opportunities for the preservation of resources. Due to the regularity of query processing patterns we designed query-layer specific routing algorithms that are optimized — not for general point-to-point communication — but for the more regular types of communication patterns that are generated by a query layer. The main results of this project include a new MAC layer protocol that explores energy-delay tradeoffs, optimization techniques for processing multiple queries, a new approach to data aggregation based on the paradigm of universal optimization, new algorithms for efficient event notification in sensor networks, and a new algorithm for efficient data archival in sensor networks. The project also had an REU component in which we implemented a method for locating cars using a sensor ad hoc network. We now elaborate on the specific activities and findings.
In Vitro Cadmium-Induced Alterations in Growth and Oxidative Metabolism of Upland Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.)

Cadmium (Cd) is a toxic pollutant, which cause both dose- and time-dependent physiological and biochemical alterations in plants. The present in vitro study was undertaken to explore Cd-induced physiological and biochemical changes in cotton callus culture at 0, 550, 700, 850, and 1000 μM Cd for four different stress periods (7, 14, 21, and 28 days). At 1000 μM Cd, mean growth values were lower than their respective control. The cell protein contents decreased only after 7-day and 14-day stress treatment. At 550 μM Cd, malondialdehyde (MDA) contents decreased after various stress periods except 21-day period. Superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity at 1000 μM Cd improved relative to its respective controls in the first three stress regimes. Almost a decreasing trend in the hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and peroxidase (POD) activities at all Cd levels after different stress periods was noticed. Ascorbate peroxidase (APX) activity descended over its relevant controls in the first three stress regimes except at 700 μM Cd after 14- and 21-day stress duration. Moreover, catalase (CAT) mean values significantly increased as a whole. From this experiment, it can be concluded that lipid peroxidation as well as reactive oxygen species (ROS) production was relatively higher as has been revealed by higher MDA contents and greater SOD, CAT activities.
GeoSemOLAP: Geospatial OLAP on the Semantic Web Made Easy

The proliferation of spatial data and the publication of multidimensional (MD) data on the Semantic Web (SW) has led to new opportunities for On-Line Analytical Processing (SOLAP) over spatial data using SPARQL. However, formulating such queries results in verbose statements and can easily become very difficult for inexperienced users. Hence, we have developed GeoSemOLAP to enable users without detailed knowledge of RDF and SPARQL to query the SW with SOLAP. GeoSemOLAP generates SPARQL queries based on high-level SOLAP operators and allows the user to interactively formulate queries using a graphical interface with interactive maps.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports Valuing the Treasury's Capital Assistance Program Valuing the Treasury's Capital Assistance Program

This paper presents preliminary findings and is being distributed to economists and other interested readers solely to stimulate discussion and elicit comments. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and are not necessarily reflective of views at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors. Abstract The Capital Assistance Program (CAP) was created by the U.S. government in February 2009 to provide backup capital to large financial institutions unable to raise sufficient capital from private investors. Under the terms of the CAP, a participating bank receives contingent capital by issuing preferred shares to the Treasury combined with embedded options for both parties: the bank gets the option to redeem the shares or convert them to common equity, with conversion mandatory after seven years; the Treasury earns dividends on the preferred shares and gets warrants on the bank's common equity. We develop a contingent claims framework in which to estimate market values of these CAP securities. The interaction between the competing options held by the buyer and issuer of these securities creates a game between the two parties, and our approach captures this strategic element of the joint valuation problem and clarifies the incentives it creates. We apply our method to the eighteen publicly held bank holding companies that participated in the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (the stress test) launched together with the CAP. On average, we estimate that, compared with a market transaction, the CAP securities carry a net value of approximately 30 percent of the capital invested for a bank participating to the maximum extent allowed under the terms of the program. We also find that the net value varies widely across banks. We compare our estimates with abnormal stock price returns for the stress test banks at the time the terms of the CAP were announced; we find correlations between 0.78 and 0.85, depending on the precise choice of period and set of banks included. These results suggest that our valuation aligns with shareholders' perception of the value of the program, prompting questions about industry reactions and the overall impact of the program. comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.