Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lifted bijections for low distortion surface mappings

This paper introduces an algorithm for computing low-distortion, bijective mappings between surface meshes. The algorithm recieves as input a coarse set of corresponding pairs of points on the two surfaces, and follows three steps: (i) cutting the two meshes to disks in a consistent manner; (ii) jointly flattening the two disks via a novel formulation for minimizing isometric distortion while guaranteeing local injectivity (the flattenings can overlap, however); and (iii) computing a unique continuous bijection that is consistent with the flattenings. The construction of the algorithm stems from two novel observations: first, bijections between disk-type surfaces can be uniquely and efficiently represented via consistent locally injective flattenings that are allowed to be globally overlapping. This observation reduces the problem of computing bijective surface mappings to the task of computing locally injective flattenings, which is shown to be easier. Second, locally injective flattenings that minimize isometric distortion can be efficiently characterized and optimized in a convex framework. Experiments that map a wide baseline of pairs of surface meshes using the algorithm are provided. They demonstrate the ability of the algorithm to produce high-quality continuous bijective mappings between pairs of surfaces of varying isometric distortion levels.
A Complete Analytic Inversion of Supernova Lines in the Sobolev Approximation

We show that the shape of P Cygni line profiles of photospheric-phase supernova can be analytically inverted to extract both the optical depth and the source function of the line—i.e., all the physical content of the model for the case when the Sobolev approximation is valid. Under various simplifying assumptions, we derive formulae that give S(r) and τ(r) in terms of derivatives of the line flux with respect to wavelength. The transition region between the minimum and the maximum of the line profile turns out to give especially interesting information on the optical depth near the photosphere. The formulae give insights into the relationship between line shape and physical quantities that may be useful in interpreting observed spectra and detailed numerical calculations.
A survey of game theoretic approaches in smart grid

The concept of smart grid to transform the age-old power grid into a smart and intelligent electric power distribution system is, currently, a hot research topic. Smart grid offers the merging of electrical power engineering technologies with network communications. Game theory has featured as an interesting technique, adopted by many researchers, to establish effective smart grid communications. The use of game theory, to date, has offered solutions to various decision making problems, ranging from distributed load management to micro storage management in smart grid. Interestingly, different researchers have different objectives or problem scopes for adopting game theory in smart grid. Nevertheless, all the game theoretic approaches for making effective smart grid solutions have a common aspect, namely the Nash equilibrium, arriving at which may lead to an optimal solution to the relevant problem. In this paper, we survey a number of game theory-based applications to solve different problems in smart grid. This survey reveals that game theory can be apparently simple yet become an effective technique to facilitate intelligent decision making in smart grid frameworks.
Design of multichannel QMF banks via frequency-domain optimizations

Design of uniform multirate filter banks is studied via frequency domain optimizations. Efficient and reliable design algorithms are developed using state-space computations. In our approach, analysis filter banks are designed to achieve frequency domain specifications dictated by subband coding requirements, and synthesis filter banks are designed to minimize the reconstruction error in frequency domain under the constraint of zero-aliasing error. The design criterion is chosen to be the /spl Hscr//sub /spl infin// or Chebyshev norm. A state-space solution is derived for /spl Hscr//sub /spl infin//, optimization, and numerical algorithms are developed to obtain the optimal-synthesis filter bank. Moreover, the asymptotic perfect reconstruction property (in the sense that time-delay approaches to infinity) is established for the optimal /spl Hscr//sub /spl infin//, solution of the synthesis filter bank. The results in this paper generalize our earlier work for the two channel case to the M-channel case.
Efficient Conservative Visibility Culling Using the Prioritized-Layered Projection Algorithm

We propose a novel conservative visibility culling technique based on the Prioritized-Layered Projection (PLP) algorithm. PLP is a time-critical rendering technique that computes, for a given viewpoint, a partially correct image by rendering only a subset of the geometric primitives, those that PLP determines to be most likely visible. Our new algorithm builds on PLP and provides an efficient way of finding the remaining visible primitives. We do this by adding a second phase to PLP which uses image-space techniques for determining the visibility status of the remaining geometry. Another contribution of our work is to show how to efficiently implement such image-space visibility queries using currently available OpenGL hardware and extensions. We report on the implementation of our techniques on several graphics architectures, analyze their complexity, and discuss a possible hardware extension that has the potential to further increase performance.
A MATURE GALAXY CLUSTER AT z = 1.58 AROUND THE RADIO GALAXY 7C 1753+6311

We report on the discovery of a z = 1.58 mature cluster around the high-redshift radio galaxy 7C 1753+6311, first identified in the Clusters Around Radio-loud active galactic nuclei survey. Two-thirds of the excess galaxies within the central 1 Mpc lie on a red sequence with a color that is consistent with an average formation redshift of zf ∼ 3. We show that 80 ± 6% of the red sequence galaxies in the cluster core are quiescent, while the remaining 20% are red due to dusty star formation. We demonstrate that the cluster has an enhanced quiescent galaxy fraction that is three times that of the control field. We also show that this enhancement is mass dependent: 91 ± 9% of the M * > 10 10.5 ? > M⊙ cluster galaxies are quiescent, compared to only 36 ± 2% of field galaxies, whereas the fraction of quiescent galaxies with lower masses is the same in the cluster and field environments. The presence of a dense core and a well-formed, quiescent red sequence suggest that this is a mature cluster. This means that distant radio galaxies do not solely reside in young, uncollapsed protoclusters, rather they can be found in clusters in a wide range of evolutionary states.
The Contribution of Functional Brain Networks and Oscillations to the Development of Cognitive Control

Adolescence is a qualitatively unique period of development when cognitive control abilities are available but are unreliably engaged, which can lead to risk-taking behavior impacting survival. The specific neural mechanisms contributing to the maturation of cognitive control remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) to study brain networks and oscillations underlying cognitive control development in both the resting state and during a cognitive flexibility task. In the first study, we found that the organization of brain networks was established prior to adolescence. However, a network of brain regions anchored in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and anterior insula (aIns) significantly increased its influence over other brain networks via increased network integration during the resting state, resulting in faster correct responses on a cognitive control task. In the second study, we leveraged increased temporal resolution using MEG to further probe resting state connectivity changes with age. We found similar medial prefrontal regions became less coupled in their interactions with the rest of the brain, specifically in the theta band (5-9 Hz oscillations), and were related to developmental decreases in impulsivity. As such, these results suggest there are developmental increases in the flexibility of resting state connectivity, which may afford less effortful instantiation of cognitive control. The third study directly tested age-related changes in brain oscillations during a cognitive flexibility paradigm. We found evidence of strong induction of theta band oscillations in the ACC when task switching that scaled positively with average reaction time. Similar to our resting state MEG findings, we found that the prominence of ACC theta band rhythms decreased with development, suggesting that during cognitive flexibility, adolescents need to engage greater cognitive control to switch between cognitive demands compared to adults. Taken together, these results inform a model of adolescent development such that the specialization of medial prefrontal systems plays a primary role in developmental improvements in cognitive control as they strengthen their integration with other networks. Increased network integration affords these regions the ability to more flexibly engage other brain regions, supporting the maturation of cognitive control.
The Shaping of a Triangle Steel Plate into an Equilateral Vertical Steel by Finite-Element Modeling

The orthogonal processes to shape the triangle steel plate into a equilateral vertical steel are examined by an incremental elasto-plastic finite-element method based on an updated Lagrangian formulation. The highly non-linear problems due to the geometric changes, the inelastic constitutive behavior and the boundary conditions varied with deformation are taken into account in an incremental manner. On the contact boundary, a modified Coulomb friction mode is specially considered. A weighting factor r-minimum is employed to limit the step size of loading increment to linear relation. In particular, selective reduced integration was adopted to formulate the stiffness matrix. The simulated geometries of verticality could clearly demonstrate the vertical processes until unloading. A series of experiments and simulations were performed to validate the formulation in the theory, leading to the development of the computer codes. The whole deformation history and the distribution of stress, strain and thickness during the forming process were obtained by carefully considering the moving boundary condition in the finite-element method. Therefore, this modeling can be used for judging whether a equilateral vertical steel can be shaped successfully. The present work may be expected to improve the understanding of the formation of the equilateral vertical steel. Keywords—elasto-plastic, finite element, orthogonal pressing process, vertical steel.
Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors Selectively Target Homology Dependent DNA Repair Defective Cells and Elevate Non-Homologous Endjoining Activity

Background We have previously used the ATAD5-luciferase high-throughput screening assay to identify genotoxic compounds with potential chemotherapeutic capabilities. The successful identification of known genotoxic agents, including the histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi) trichostatin A (TSA), confirmed the specificity of the screen since TSA has been widely studied for its ability to cause apoptosis in cancer cells. Because many cancers have acquired mutations in DNA damage checkpoints or repair pathways, we hypothesized that these cancers may be susceptible to treatments that target compensatory pathways. Here, we used a panel of isogenic chicken DT40 B lymphocyte mutant and human cell lines to investigate the ability of TSA to define selective pathways that promote HDACi toxicity. Results HDACi induced a DNA damage response and reduced viability in all repair deficient DT40 mutants although ATM-nulls were least affected. The most dramatic sensitivity was observed in mutants lacking the homology dependent repair (HDR) factor BLM or the non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) and HDR factors, KU/RAD54, suggesting an involvement of either HDR or NHEJ in HDACi-induced cell death. To extend these findings, we measured the frequencies of HDR and NHEJ after HDACi treatment and monitored viability in human cell lines comparably deficient in HDR or NHEJ. Although no difference in HDR frequency was observed between HDACi treated and untreated cells, HDR-defective human cell lines were clearly more sensitive than wild type. Unexpectedly, cells treated with HDACis showed a significantly elevated NHEJ frequency. Conclusions HDACi targeting drugs induced significant increases in NHEJ activity in human cell lines but did not alter HDR frequency. Moreover, HDR is required for cellular resistance to HDACi therapy; therefore, NHEJ does not appear to be a critical axis for HDACi resistance. Rather, HDACi compounds induced DNA damage, most likely double strand breaks (DSBs), and HDR proficiency is correlated with cell survival.
Multi agent system approach for vulnerability analysis of online social network profiles over time

Nowadays, we witness a flood of continuously changing information from a variety of web sources. New challenges to track information changes in real time require new methods in web information retrieval using multi agent system (MAS) technology. This research continues previous work on extracting data from online social networks (OSNs) by using an agent in each user profile to monitor its updates, which are sent to a controller agent that saves a history of each user's activity in a local repository, as well as applying a vulnerability measure to users' profiles. An algorithm making use of MAS within the online social network retrieval system (OSNRS) is proposed. Our experiments on data extraction show that using MAS simplifies the process of tracking profile's history and opens the opportunity of understanding the dynamic behaviour of OSN users especially when it is combined with text mining. The application of the vulnerability measure over time highlighted that in the case of this experiment the structure of the node's network, rather than the contents of the node, changed over time. The validation of the vulnerability measure showed that friends of a profile, that disclose their personal details online, may not leak personal details about the profile.
An Efficient Algorithm for Video Superresolution Based on a Sequential Model

In this work, we propose a novel procedure for video superresolution, that is, the recovery of a sequence of high-resolution images from its low-resolution counterpart. Our approach is based on a “sequential” model (i.e., each high-resolution frame is supposed to be a displaced version of the preceding one) and considers the use of sparsity-enforcing priors. Both the recovery of the high-resolution images and the motion fields relating them is tackled. This leads to a large-dimensional, nonconvex and nonsmooth problem. We propose an algorithmic framework to address the latter. Our approach relies on fast gradient evaluation methods and modern optimization techniques for nondifferentiable/nonconvex problems. Unlike some other previous works, we show that there exists a provably convergent method with a complexity linear in the problem dimensions. We assess the proposed optimization method on several video benchmarks and emphasize its good performance with respect to the state of the art.
Joint Multiple Watermarking and Non-Expansion Visual Cryptography

This paper proposes a scheme to hide two watermarks in visual secret sharing of a gray level image. One watermark is embedded during secret image halftoning, and the other watermark is hidden during the halftone image encryption. A non-expansion visual secret sharing model is used to encrypt the halftone image. In data extraction, only exclusive-OR operation is needed. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our scheme.
DETC 2005 / DAC-84813 SELECTIVE CLAY MILLING FOR INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPING

Prototyping plays an important role in industrial product designs. In this paper, for achieving a more intuitive and interactive prototyping, a selective clay milling center is introduced based on a synthesis of clay modeling, 3Dimensional (3-D) scanning, robot machining and advanced geometric tools. In the system, the product shape design may start either from a physical hand-made clay model or a virtual Computer-Aided Design (CAD) model. Via 3-D scanning techniques, manual modifications of the clay model can be captured in the CAD form and in the meantime, geometric modifications of the CAD model can be fed back to the physical model by an efficient robot machining method, named selective clay milling. This design cycle is repeated until a satisfied prototype iterates. For a better control of the interactions between the manual modeling and robot milling, a 3-D scanning based calibration system has been developed in order to arbitrarily position the workpiece in the design process. With several experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed system is shown and the possible applications of the proposed system in industrial product design are described as well.
ENHANCEMENT OF SPINE BONE SURFACES FROM ULTRASOUND DATA USING IMPROVED LOCAL PHASE TENSOR FILTER

A challenging problem in ultrasound based orthopaedic surgery is the identification and interpretation of bone surfaces. Recently we have proposed a new fully automatic ultrasound bone surface enhancement filter in the context of spine interventions. The method is based on the use of a Gradient Energy Tensor filter to construct a new feature enhancement metric, which we call the Local Phase Tensor. The goal of this study is to provide further improvements to the proposed filtering method by incorporating a-priori knowledge about the physics of ultrasound imaging and salient grouping of enhanced bone features. Typical ultrasound scan of the spine, there is a large soft tissue interface present close to the transducer surface with high intensity values similar to those of the bone anatomy response. Typical ultrasound image segmentation or enhancement methods will be affected by this thick soft tissue response. In order to weaken this soft tissue interface we calculate a new transmission map where features deeper in the ultrasound image have higher transmission values and shallow features have lower transmission values. The calculation of this new US transmission/attenuation map allows the proposed image enhancement method to mask out erroneous regions, such as the soft tissue interface, and improve the accuracy and robustness of the spine surface enhancement. The masked US images were used as an input to the LPT image enhancement method. In order to provide a more compact spine surface representation and further reduce the typical US imaging artifacts and soft tissue interfaces we calculate saliency Local Phase Tensor features. The saliency images are computed using Difference of Gaussian filters. Qualitative results, obtained from in vivo clinical scans, show a strong correspondence between enhanced features and the actual bone surfaces present in the ultrasound scans. Future work will include the extension of the proposed method to 3D and validation of the method in the context of intra-operative ultrasound image registration in CAOS applications.
Reference frames fit for controlling PWM rectifiers

The authors argue that one should keep things simple when controlling bidirectional pulsewidth modulation rectifiers by considering the utility grid as a virtual electric machine. The advantage is that the air-gap flux of this big machine can be directly measured in a straightforward way. Therefore, as shown in this paper, principles of field orientation can be applied to control the power flow, yielding high-dynamic performance.
Enhanced Temperature Control Method Using ANFIS with FPGA

Temperature control in etching process is important for semiconductor manufacturing technology. However, pressure variations in vacuum chamber results in a change in temperature, worsening the accuracy of the temperature of the wafer and the speed and quality of the etching process. This work develops an adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to improve the effectiveness. The proposed method adjusts every membership function to keep the temperature in the chamber stable. The improvement of the proposed algorithm is confirmed using a medium vacuum (MV) inductively-coupled plasma- (ICP-) type etcher.
The design and implementation of intelligent transportation Web services

The paper presents the design and implementation of an intelligent transportation Web service (ITWS) and studies various QoS requirements for the Web service infrastructure. In particular, we pay attention to the performance issues on ITWS data transmission and compression. Since SOAP message is a textual document, we can improve the data transmission time by compressing data on transmission. In our experiment, compressing data before or after SOAP serialization both can reduce the size of transmitted message down to as little as 2% and cut the response time to a quarter of the original message.
Analyzing the Technical Efficiency of School Districts

The parameters of a stochastic production frontier and the determinants of X inefficiency are estimated simultaneously using a maximum likelihood estimator proposed by Battese and Coelli (1995). Our results indicate that additional instructional and noninstruction expenditures improve student performance, but only by a small amount. In addition, we find that school district size, teacher education and experience, and teacher salary affect the technical efficiency of schools. JEL Code: F33, F41
Multimedia Search with Noisy Modalities: Fusion and Multistage Retrieval

We report our experiences from participating to the controlled experi- ment of the ImageCLEF 2010 Wikipedia Retrieval task. We built an experimental search engine which combines multilingual and multi-image search, employing a holistic web interface and enabling the use of highly distributed indices. Modali- ties are searched in parallel, and results can be fused via several selectable meth- ods. The engine also provides multistage retrieval, as well as a single text index baselines for comparison purposes. Experiments show that the value added by image modalities is very small when textual annotations exist. The contribution of image modalities is larger when search is performed in a 2-stage fashion, i.e., using image search for re-ranking a smaller set of only the top results retrieved by text. Furthermore, first splitting annotations to many modalities with respect to natural language and/or type and then fusing results has the potential of achieving better effectiveness than using all textual information as a single modality. Con- cerning fusion, the simple method of linearly combining evidence is found to be the most robust, achieving the best effectiveness.