Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INVERSE HALFTONING BASED ON THE ANISOTROPIC LPA-ICI DECONVOLUTION

A new inverse halftoning algorithm for restoring a continuous tone image from a given error diffusion halftone image is presented. The algorithm is based on a novel anisotropic deconvolution strategy [14, 15]. The linear model of error diffusion halftoning proposed by Kite et al. [19] is exploited. It approximates error diffusion as the sum of the convolution of the original grayscale image with a speciÞc kernel and colored random noise. Under this model the inverse halftoning can be therefore formulated as a special deconvolution problem. The deconvolution is performed following the RI-RWI (regularized inverse-regularizedWiener inverse) scheme [14] and exploiting the recently introduced anisotropic LPA-ICI estimator [15]. This adaptive varying scale estimator, based on the directional local polynomial approximation (LPA) technique and the intersection of conÞdence intervals (ICI) scale selection algorithm, allows near optimal edge adaptation. As a result, the reconstructed continuous tone image presents smooth areas faithful to the unknown original and yet preserves all the details found in the halftone. Conventional inverse-halftoning algorithms often produce estimates that are either oversmooth (loss of details) or still noisy. Simulation experiments conÞrm the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed algorithm, both visually and in mean-squared-error sense.
Evaluation of Prehospital Blood Products to Attenuate Acute Coagulopathy of Trauma in a Model of Severe Injury and Shock in Anesthetized Pigs

ABSTRACT Acute trauma coagulopathy (ATC) is seen in 30% to 40% of severely injured casualties. Early use of blood products attenuates ATC, but the timing for optimal effect is unknown. Emergent clinical practice has started prehospital deployment of blood products (combined packed red blood cells and fresh frozen plasma [PRBCs:FFP], and alternatively PRBCs alone), but this is associated with significant logistical burden and some clinical risk. It is therefore imperative to establish whether prehospital use of blood products is likely to confer benefit. This study compared the potential impact of prehospital resuscitation with (PRBCs:FFP 1:1 ratio) versus PRBCs alone versus 0.9% saline (standard of care) in a model of severe injury. Twenty-four terminally anesthetised Large White pigs received controlled soft tissue injury and controlled hemorrhage (35% blood volume) followed by a 30-min shock phase. The animals were allocated randomly to one of three treatment groups during a 60-min prehospital evacuation phase: hypotensive resuscitation (target systolic arterial pressure 80 mmHg) using either 0.9% saline (group 1, n = 9), PRBCs:FFP (group 2, n = 9), or PRBCs alone (group 3, n = 6). Following this phase, an in-hospital phase involving resuscitation to a normotensive target (110 mmHg systolic arterial blood pressure) using PRBCs:FFP was performed in all groups. There was no mortality in any group. A coagulopathy developed in group 1 (significant increase in clot initiation and dynamics shown by TEG [thromboelastography] R and K times) that persisted for 60 to 90 min into the in-hospital phase. The coagulopathy was significantly attenuated in groups 2 and 3 (P = 0.025 R time and P = 0.035 K time), which were not significantly different from each other. Finally, the volumes of resuscitation fluid required was significantly greater in group 1 compared with groups 2 and 3 (P = 0.0067) (2.8 ± 0.3 vs. 1.9 ± 0.2 and 1.8 ± 0.3 L, respectively). This difference was principally due to a greater volume of saline used in group 1 (P = 0.001). Prehospital PRBCs:FFP or PRBCs alone may therefore attenuate ATC. Furthermore, the amount of crystalloid may be reduced with potential benefit of reducing the extravasation effect and later tissue edema.
The cellular mechanisms of leukocyte-mediated decidual spiral artery remodelling

16 1.0 Introduction . 22 1.1 Decidualisation and spiral artery development . 23 1.2 Embryo implantation and villous development . 25 1.3 Trophoblast differentiation and function . 27 1.3.1 Regulation of Trophoblast differentiation . 28 1.4 Immune cells . 30 1.4. 1 Decidual natural killer cells (dNK) . 30 1.4. 1.1 dNK cells origin . 31 1.4. 1.2 dNK cell function . 32 1.4. 2 Macrophages . 35 1.4. 2.1 Macrophage origin and phenotypes . 35 1.5 Spiral artery remodelling . 38 1.5. 1 Complications arising from impaired SpA remodelling . 38 1.5. 2 General features of SpA remodelling . 39 1.5. 3 Remodelling prior to trophoblast arrival . 40 1.5. 3.1 dNK cells involvement in SpA remodelling . 41 1.5. 3.2 Macrophage involvement in SpA remodelling . 44 1.5. 4 Trophoblast-dependent remodelling and evidence of apoptosis in SpA remodelling . 45 1.5. 5 Possible role of neutrophils in the late remodelling stage . 46 1.6: Chemokines . 47 1.6. 1 Role of chemokines in leukocyte recruitment into the endometrium and decidua: . 52 1.6. 2 Chemokine regulation of trophoblast function: . 53 1.6. 3 Chemokines in EC apoptosis . 54 1.7 Matrix metalloproteinases (MMP) . 55 1.8 Possible role of ECM peptides during SpA remodelling . 58 1.9 In Vitro models to study spiral artery remodelling . 59 1.10 Summary . 60 1.11 Aims & Hypothesis . 61
RF CMOS-MEMS cantilever resonator

This paper presents use of the simple cantilever beam as RF CMOS-MEMS resonator, which can be scaled like transistor with improved performance. This resonator can be used in the oscillator and filter part of RF transceiver, which can actually be fabricated on chip without losing its Q-factor. The cantilever beam resonator was designed using COMSOL4.3b™ and produce resonance frequency at 10.2MHz, pull-in voltage at 1.5V and Q of 10000.
PERCEPTIONS OF IDENTITY , GENDER AND IDIOLECT IN PROSODICALLY ALTERED SPEECH USING A COMPOSITE MODEL APPROACH

The paper describes a series of perceptual experiments in which the prosodic parameters F0, energy, voicing and timing of utterances were systematically altered and the resulting speech resynthesised for a group of listeners. Using the linear-prediction source/filter model of production composite neutral spectral models were composed from the speech of two or more speakers. Listener responses on the basis of perceived identity, gender and idiolect were correlated with the systematic alterations of the prosodic parameters. Perceptions of identity were found to be correlated with both the static and dynamic properties of all parameters, though listeners employed different cues for different speakers. Perceptions of gender were based solely on the mean value of F0. Perception of idiolect was found only to correlate with utterance duration: shorter duration utterances were perceived as more cultivated, while longer duration was perceived as broader.
A Grid and Density Based Fast Spatial Clustering Algorithm

Density-based spatial clustering algorithm DBSCAN has a relatively low efficiency since it carries out a large number of useless distance computing; Grid-based spatial clustering algorithm is more efficient, but the clustering result has a low accuracy. Considering the advantage and disadvantages of the two algorithms, this paper proposes a grid and density based fast clustering algorithm GNDBSCAN. This algorithm performs density-based clustering on datasets space, which has been divided by grids. It improves the efficiency of clustering and at the same time, maintains high accuracy for clustering results.
Optimal Decision Support System Using Multilayer Neural Networks for Incinerator Control

—In the field of industrial control, there has been a significant increase in the use of AI based techniques. For various control problems there has been successful implementation of different Intelligent techniques like Fuzzy Logic, Artificial Neural Network and other Hybrids. One of the major byproducts recovered from crude oil is sulfur. Sulfur is recovered from crude oil using the Modified Clause process, upto 98 percent of the sulfur can be recovered by this method. The remaining 2 percent of the sulfur is one of the major constituents of waste gases and is released into the atmosphere. Waste gases cannot be directly released into the atmosphere as it has sulfur compounds and other harmful constituents. Oxidizing waste gases before releasing it into the atmosphere makes it safe for the environment. Oxidization of waste gases is done by the process of incineration. The incineration process requires fuel gas to achieve this. To use minimum fuel gas and to maximize oxidization, the incinerator needs to be optimized. This paper presents a neural network which is modeled for optimal control of incinerator in Sulfur Recovery Block of refineries. An Artificial Neural Network based Inverse Plant is modeled to achieve optimal control. The Neural Network model was developed by using the neural network tool box in MATLAB.
Heuristic formulas to dimension buffers in a DSL access network carrying persistent TCP-controlled traffic

The capacity of the (DSL) access network keeps increasing, while at the same time there is a trend to support, on top of web browsing applications that spurred the initial popularity of the Internet, more and more applications (e.g. peer-to-peer, time-shifted TV) that require the transport of long-lived flows over such an access network. During the transport of these long-lived flows associated with these (non-time-critical) applications it is important that the last mile link is efficiently used and that each flow gets its fair share of the available capacity and this is what TCP, ideally suited for these non-time-critical applications, aims to do. We work under the assumption that the rest of the network and the upstream, which needs to transport the ACKs, are appropriately dimensioned and thus we concentrate on the downlink and its associated link buffer (in a DSL access network it is in the DSLAM) which has a crucial impact on the efficiency and the fairness of the transport in “last mile”. Studies show that persistent TCP flows have the greatest impact on buffer requirement (and not short-lived (web) flows). We show that both requirements can be fulfilled by choosing the buffer large enough (so that there is no packet loss). We develop a heuristic formula to calculate the required buffer size. Unfortunately, this buffer size may turn out to be too large to be implemented in state-of-the-art access equipment. So, we also show how efficiency and fairness react to a smaller buffer in case the buffer acceptance discipline is Drop-tail or RED. We show that Drop-tail cannot achieve fairness and that RED, if appropriately dimensioned, can (and we also present a methodology for its configuration).
‘I can try it’: negotiating masculinity through football in the playground

ABSTRACT The research presented explores the negotiation of hegemonic masculinity through football in a group of school children between three and five years of age in a school in Spain. The article shows that in the construction of masculinity within the school, football plays an important role. In this sense, it shows how the playing of football created a double system of exclusion. On the one hand, girls were excluded from the football field and, on the other hand, some children looked for strategies to exclude younger school children. At the same time, a classification of the various masculinities was created based on the skills they had and their overall ability of the sport. However, through football some children also found a way to negotiate their masculinity. In line with this issue, the struggle of powers and tensions that football provoked among the peer group is shown. The data analysis has been conducted under a post-structuralist lens for an in-depth study of the process of exclusion, differentiation and surveillance through the sport.
Do Good Workplace Relationships Encourage Employee Whistle-Blowing?

Abstract The literature contains mixed arguments and evidence regarding how employee willingness to blow the whistle is affected by interpersonal relationships in organizations. This article examines whether there is a curvilinear relationship between interpersonal relationships and whistle-blowing intentions, by operationalizing interpersonal relationships with the person-group fit and person-supervisor fit variables. By using the 2015 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey data, this article finds that the curvilinear relationship does exist: when the person-group fit and person-supervisor fit become very high, the intention to blow the whistle dwindles. As a result, this article argues that the impacts of workplace relationships on whistle-blowing intention would not be simply linear, but curvilinear.
Melody recognition system

The purpose of the presented research was the development of a melody search system that would allow to find a song in a music database, based on humming the tune of a known song fragment. The melody recognition in the developed system is based on comparing vectors of voice pitch values. The best match of the humming pitch vector against all the recordings in the database is searched. An original frequency and time scaling approach was implemented to improve recognition accuracy. The system performance was tested with the use of live humming recordings of four volunteers with a small database.
Study on Perception and Communication Systems for Safety of Vulnerable Road Users

The existing R&D efforts for protecting vulnerable road users (VRU) are mainly based on perception techniques, which aim to detect VRUs utilizing vehicle embedded sensors. The efficiency of such a technique is largely affected by the sensor's visibility condition. Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication can also contribute to the VRU safety by allowing vehicles and pedestrians to exchange information. This solution is, however, largely affected by the reliability of the exchanged information, which most generally is the GPS data. Since perception and communication have complementary features, we can expect that a combination of such approaches can be a solution to the VRU safety. This is the motivation of the current work. We develop theoretical models to present the characteristics of perception and communications systems. Experimental studies are conducted to compare the performances of these techniques in real-world environments. Our results show that the perception system reliably detects pedestrians and other objects within 50 m of range in the line-of-sight (LOS) condition. In contrast, the V2P communication coverage is approximately 340 and 200 meters in LOS and non-LOS (NLOS) conditions, respectively. However, the communication-based system fails to correctly position the VRU w.r. t the vehicle, preventing the system from meeting the safety requirement. Finally, we propose a cooperative system that combines the outputs of the communication and perception systems.
PolyMage: Automatic Optimization for Image Processing Pipelines

This paper presents the design and implementation of PolyMage, a domain-specific language and compiler for image processing pipelines. An image processing pipeline can be viewed as a graph of interconnected stages which process images successively. Each stage typically performs one of point-wise, stencil, reduction or data-dependent operations on image pixels. Individual stages in a pipeline typically exhibit abundant data parallelism that can be exploited with relative ease. However, the stages also require high memory bandwidth preventing effective utilization of parallelism available on modern architectures. For applications that demand high performance, the traditional options are to use optimized libraries like OpenCV or to optimize manually. While using libraries precludes optimization across library routines, manual optimization accounting for both parallelism and locality is very tedious. The focus of our system, PolyMage, is on automatically generating high-performance implementations of image processing pipelines expressed in a high-level declarative language. Our optimization approach primarily relies on the transformation and code generation capabilities of the polyhedral compiler framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model-driven compiler for image processing pipelines that performs complex fusion, tiling, and storage optimization automatically. Experimental results on a modern multicore system show that the performance achieved by our automatic approach is up to 1.81x better than that achieved through manual tuning in Halide, a state-of-the-art language and compiler for image processing pipelines. For a camera raw image processing pipeline, our performance is comparable to that of a hand-tuned implementation.
SWARM ROBOTICS : RESEARCH EXPERIENCE FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

The paper reports an exploratory project to provide research experiences on swarm robotics to high school students. A group of three simple mobile robots (Lego NXT) was used to study ‘search and rescue’ operation. A bio-inspired global optimization technique called particle swarm optimization (PSO) was used as the main algorithm. Each robot was placed in pre-defined positions with a target position corresponding to a single target. The robots would search in spirals till the target was found by any one of the robots. Once the target was detected the robots would reach the target using the PSO algorithm. Results of initial exploratory efforts were encouraging. The students got a first-hand experience of implementing swarm robotics as a real-time engineering application.
Multimodal assessment of depression from behavioral signals

Reliable, valid, and efficient assessment of depression is critical to identify individuals in need of treatment and to gauge treatment response. Current methods of assessment are limited to subjective measures of patient self-report and clinical interview. They fail to take into account observable measures of behavior that could better inform detection of the occurrence and severity of depression. Recent advances in computer vision, signal processing, and machine learning have potential to meet the need for improved depression screening, diagnosis, and ascertainment of severity (i.e., assessment). This chapter reviews these advances. We describe multimodal measures of behavior and physiology, how these measures can be processed to extract features sensitive to depression, and how classification or prediction may be used to provide automatic assessment of depression occurrence and severity.
Rac1 Controls Schwann Cell Myelination through cAMP and NF2/merlin

During peripheral nervous system development, Schwann cells (SCs) surrounding single large axons differentiate into myelinating SCs. Previous studies implicate RhoGTPases in SC myelination, but the mechanisms involved in RhoGTPase regulation of SC myelination are unknown. Here, we show that SC myelination is arrested in Rac1 conditional knock-out (Rac1-CKO) mice. Rac1 knock-out abrogated phosphorylation of the effector p21-activated kinase and decreased NF2/merlin phosphorylation. Mutation of NF2/merlin rescued the myelin deficit in Rac1-CKO mice in vivo and the shortened processes in cultured Rac1-CKO SCs in vitro. Mechanistically, cAMP levels and E-cadherin expression were decreased in the absence of Rac1, and both were restored by mutation of NF2/merlin. Reduced cAMP is a cause of the myelin deficiency in Rac1-CKO mice, because elevation of cAMP by rolipram in Rac1-CKO mice in vivo allowed myelin formation. Thus, NF2/merlin and cAMP function downstream of Rac1 signaling in SC myelination, and cAMP levels control Rac1-regulated SC myelination.
Dipeptides Inhibit Melanin Synthesis in Mel-Ab Cells through Down-Regulation of Tyrosinase

This study investigated the effects of proline-serine (PS) and valine-serine (VS) dipeptides on melanogenesis in Mel-Ab cells. Proline-serine and VS significantly inhibited melanin synthesis in a concentration-dependent manner, though neither dipeptide directly inhibited tyrosinase activity in a cell-free system. Both PS and VS down-regulated the expression of microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF) and tyrosinase. In a follow-up study also described here, the effects of these dipeptides on melanogenesis-related signal transduction were quantified. Specifically, PS and VS induced ERK phosphorylation, though they had no effect on phosphorylation of the cAMP response element binding protein (CREB). These data suggest that PS and VS inhibit melanogenesis through ERK phosphorylation and subsequent down-regulation of MITF and tyrosinase. Properties of these dipeptides are compatible with application as skin-whitening agents.
Risk-factors for antepartum fetal deaths in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

OBJECTIVE To assess risk factors for antepartum fetal deaths. METHODS A population-based case-control study was carried out in the city of São Paulo from August 2000 to January 2001. Subjects were selected from a birth cohort from a linked birth and death certificate database. Cases were 164 antepartum fetal deaths and controls were drawn from a random sample of 313 births surviving at least 28 days. Information was collected from birth and death certificates, hospital records and home interviews. A hierarchical conceptual framework guided the logistic regression analysis. RESULTS Statistically significant factors associated with antepartum fetal death were: mother without or recent marital union; mother's education under four years; mothers with previous low birth weight infant; mothers with hypertension, diabetes, bleeding during pregnancy; no or inadequate prenatal care; congenital malformation and intrauterine growth restriction. The highest population attributable fractions were for inadequacy of prenatal care (40%), hypertension (27%), intrauterine growth restriction (30%) and absence of a long-standing union (26%). CONCLUSIONS Proximal biological risk factors are most important in antepartum fetal deaths. However, distal factors - mother's low education and marital status - are also significant. Improving access to and quality of prenatal care could have a large impact on fetal mortality.
Input parameter modeling for combination strategies

Combination strategies are test methods that generate test cases based on input parameter models. This paper suggests a structured modeling method used to translate requirements expressed in a general format into an input parameter model suitable for combination strategies. This paper also describes results from two initial experiments exploring the efficiency and effectiveness of the modeling method. These results indicate that the resulting models may contain enough information to detect the vast majority of faults in the system under test. Further, results indicate that the modeling method is simple enough to use in practical testing.
The complete solution of mixed Burmester synthesis problems for four-bar linkages

Approaches to precision-point synthesis of four-bar linkages have typically specified only path-points or only poses, i.e., path-points with orientation. The former is known as “path synthesis,” while the latter is known as “rigid-body guidance,” sometimes referred to as a “Burmester problem. ” We consider the family of “mixed Burmester” synthesis problems in which some combination of path-points and poses are specified, with the extreme cases corresponding to the traditional approaches. The mixed problems that have, in general, a finite number of solutions include Burmester’s original five-pose problem and also Alt’s problem for nine path-points. The elimination of one path-point increases the dimension of the solution set by one, while the elimination of a pose increases it by two. Using techniques from numerical algebraic geometry, we tabulate the dimension and degree of all problems in this generalized Burmester family, and provide more details concerning all the zeroand one-dimensional cases.