Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A volumetric penetration measure for 6-DOF haptic rendering of streaming point clouds

We present a novel method to define the penetration volume between a surface point cloud and arbitrary 3D CAD objects. Moreover, we have developed a massively-parallel algorithm to compute this penetration measure efficiently on the GPU. The main idea is to represent the CAD object's volume by an inner bounding volume hierarchy while the point cloud does not require any additional data structures. Consequently, our algorithm is perfectly suited for streaming point clouds that can be gathered online via depth sensors like the Kinect. We have tested our algorithm in several demanding scenarios and our results show that our algorithm is fast enough to be applied to 6-DOF haptic rendering while computing continuous forces and torques.
Cyclodextrin and phospholipid complexation in solubility and dissolution enhancement: a critical and meta-analysis

Introduction: Poor solubility and dissolution of drugs are the major challenges in drug formulation and delivery. In order to improve the solubility and dissolution profile of drugs, various methods have been investigated so far. The cyclodextrin (CD) complexation and phospholipid (PL) complexation are among the exhaustively investigated methods employed for more precise improvement of the solubility and dissolution of poorly water-soluble drugs. Areas covered: The article discusses the CD and PL complexation techniques of solubility and dissolution enhancement. Various studies reporting the CD and PL complexation as the potential approaches to improve the dissolution, absorption and the bioavailability of the drugs have been discussed. The article critically reviews the physicochemical properties of CDs and PLs, eligibility of drugs for both the complexation, thermodynamics of complexation, methods of preparation, characterization, advantages, limitation and the meta-analysis of some studies for both the techniques. Expert opinion: The CD and PL complexation techniques are very useful in improving solubility and dissolution (and hence the bioavailability) of biopharmaceutical classification system Class II and Class IV drugs. The selection of a particular kind of complexation can be made on the basis of eligibility criteria (of drugs) for the individual techniques, cost, stability and effectiveness of the complexes.
Evaluation of the clinical course of dry eye syndrome.

OBJECTIVE To assess subjective symptoms, tear function factors, and ocular surface morphology in the clinical course of patients with dry eye syndrome under treatment within an observation period of up to 8 years. METHODS In 97 patients (78 women and 19 men) with ocular discomfort, a clinical diagnosis of dry eye syndrome was made based on typical symptoms and a reduced tear film breakup time of less than 10 seconds. Subsequent evaluations revealed a diagnosis of aqueous tear deficiency in 9 patients, meibomian gland dysfunction in 32 patients, and aqueous tear deficiency combined with meibomian gland dysfunction in 30 patients, aqueous tear deficiency associated with Sjögren syndrome in 12 patients, and aqueous tear deficiency and meibomian gland dysfunction associated with Sjögren syndrome in 14 patients. Follow-up assessments were performed 12 to 94 months (mean follow-up, 40 months) after the initial diagnosis. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES In different subgroups of dry eye tear film breakup time, Schirmer test without local anesthesia (Schirmer I), fluorescein and rose bengal staining, impression cytology, as well as subjective dry eye symptoms and frequency of tear substitute application were compared at baseline and after a follow-up of 1 to 8 years (mean, 3.3 years). RESULTS At baseline, tear film function and ocular surface test results found more pathologic abnormalities and more severe subjective symptoms in patients with aqueous tear deficiency associated with Sjögren syndrome and aqueous tear deficiency and meibomian gland dysfunction associated with Sjögren syndrome compared with the other groups who had dry eye syndrome. No differences in frequency of tear substitute application were observed. At follow-up, tear breakup time, Schirmer I test results, and corneal fluorescein staining improved compared with baseline values, whereas rose bengal staining and impression cytology of the conjunctival surface remained almost unchanged. Subjective symptoms and frequency of artificial tear application were reduced. CONCLUSIONS Within the observation period of up to 8 years, the dry eye syndrome improved or stabilized under appropriate treatment. Although no patient was completely cured, subjective reports as well as frequency of artificial tear application were reduced.
Distributed, low contention task allocation

Designing a good task allocation algorithm faces the challenge of allowing high levels of throughput, so that tasks are executed fast and processor parallelism is exploited, while still guaranteeing a low level of memory contention, so that performance does not suffer because of limitations on processor-to-memory bandwidth. In this paper, we present a comparative study of throughput and contention guarantees provided by load balancing networks, a new class of distributed, asynchronous algorithms for real-time task allocation in shared memory multiprocessors. Load balancing networks generalize balancing networks, to accommodate tasks with varying completion times.
Exact and asymptotic analysis of largest eigenvalue based spectrum sensing

Cognitive radio (CR) is a promising technique for future wireless communication systems. In CR networks, dynamic spectrum access (DSA) of frequency is implemented to mitigate spectrum scarcity. Specifically, a secondary (unlicensed) user may be allowed to access the temporarily unused frequency bands granted to a primary (licensed) user. DSA has to be implemented so that the quality of service (QoS) promised to the primary user must be satisfied. The key point for this is the secondary user’s ability to detect the presence of the primary user correctly. Therefore a quick and reliable spectrum occupancy decision based on spectrum sensing becomes a critical issue irrespective of the architecture of the CR networks.
MRRR-based eigensolvers for multi-core processors and supercomputers

The real symmetric tridiagonal eigenproblem is of outstanding importance in numerical computations; it arises frequently as part of eigensolvers for standard and generalized dense Hermitian eigenproblems that are based on a reduction to tridiagonal form. For its solution, the algorithm of Multiple Relatively Robust Representations (MRRR or MR3 in short) - introduced in the late 1990s - is among the fastest methods. To compute k eigenpairs of a real n-by-n tridiagonal T, MRRR only requires O(kn) arithmetic operations; in contrast, all the other practical methods require O(k^2 n) or O(n^3) operations in the worst case. This thesis centers around the performance and accuracy of MRRR.
Pooled analysis of prognostic impact of urokinase-type plasminogen activator and its inhibitor PAI-1 in 8377 breast cancer patients.

BACKGROUND Urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA) and its inhibitor (PAI-1) play essential roles in tumor invasion and metastasis. High levels of both uPA and PAI-1 are associated with poor prognosis in breast cancer patients. To confirm the prognostic value of uPA and PAI-1 in primary breast cancer, we reanalyzed individual patient data provided by members of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer-Receptor and Biomarker Group (EORTC-RBG). METHODS The study included 18 datasets involving 8377 breast cancer patients. During follow-up (median 79 months), 35% of the patients relapsed and 27% died. Levels of uPA and PAI-1 in tumor tissue extracts were determined by different immunoassays; values were ranked within each dataset and divided by the number of patients in that dataset to produce fractional ranks that could be compared directly across datasets. Associations of ranks of uPA and PAI-1 levels with relapse-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS) were analyzed by Cox multivariable regression analysis stratified by dataset, including the following traditional prognostic variables: age, menopausal status, lymph node status, tumor size, histologic grade, and steroid hormone-receptor status. All P values were two-sided. RESULTS Apart from lymph node status, high levels of uPA and PAI-1 were the strongest predictors of both poor RFS and poor OS in the analyses of all patients. Moreover, in both lymph node-positive and lymph node-negative patients, higher uPA and PAI-1 values were independently associated with poor RFS and poor OS. For (untreated) lymph node-negative patients in particular, uPA and PAI-1 included together showed strong prognostic ability (all P<.001). CONCLUSIONS This pooled analysis of the EORTC-RBG datasets confirmed the strong and independent prognostic value of uPA and PAI-1 in primary breast cancer. For patients with lymph node-negative breast cancer, uPA and PAI-1 measurements in primary tumors may be especially useful for designing individualized treatment strategies.
Decentralized nonlinear feedback design with separable control contraction metrics

The problem under consideration is the synthesis of a distributed controller for a nonlinear network composed of input affine systems. The objective is to achieve exponential convergence of the solutions. To design such a feedback law, methods based on contraction theory are employed to render the controller-synthesis problem scalable and suitable to use distributed optimization. The nature of the proposed approach is constructive, because the computation of the desired feedback law is obtained by solving a convex optimization problem. An example illustrates the proposed methodology.
An Empirical Evaluation of a GPU Radiosity Solver

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of a GPU radiosity solver which was described in the authors previous work. The implementation is evaluated in regard to rendering times in comparision with a classical CPU implementation. Results show that the GPU implementation outperforms the CPU algorithm in most cases, most importantly, in cases where the number of radiosity elements is high. Furthermore, the impact of the projection – which is used for determining the visibility – on the quality of the rendering is assessed. Results gained with a hemispherical projection performed in a vertex shader and with a real non-linear hemispherical projection are compared against the results of the hemicube method. Based on the results of the evaluation, possible improvements for further research are pointed out.
Distance metric learning from uncertain side information with application to automated photo tagging

Automated photo tagging is essential to make massive unlabeled photos searchable by text search engines. Conventional image annotation approaches, though working reasonably well on small testbeds, are either computationally expensive or inaccurate when dealing with large-scale photo tagging. Recently, with the popularity of social networking websites, we observe a massive number of user-tagged images, referred to as "social images", that are available on the web. Unlike traditional web images, social images often contain tags and other user-generated content, which offer a new opportunity to resolve some long-standing challenges in multimedia. In this work, we aim to address the challenge of large-scale automated photo tagging by exploring the social images. We present a retrieval based approach for automated photo tagging. To tag a test image, the proposed approach first retrieves k social images that share the largest visual similarity with the test image. The tags of the test image are then derived based on the tagging of the similar images. Due to the well-known semantic gap issue, a regular Euclidean distance-based retrieval method often fails to find semantically relevant images. To address the challenge of semantic gap, we propose a novel probabilistic distance metric learning scheme that (1) automatically derives constraints from the uncertain side information, and (2) efficiently learns a distance metric from the derived constraints. We apply the proposed technique to automated photo tagging tasks based on a social image testbed with over 200,000 images crawled from Flickr. Encouraging results show that the proposed technique is effective and promising for automated photo tagging.
SYNTHESIS OF MULTIPERIOD HEAT EXCHANGER NETWORKS WITH A HYBRID META-HEURISTIC APPROACH: SIMULATED ANNEALING AND ROCKET FIREWORKS OPTIMIZATION

Optimal Heat Exchanger Network (HEN) designs can lead an industrial plant to significant reduction in operating and capital costs, as well as pollutant emissions and these optimal HENs can be designed with the aid of mathematical programming. An important aspect that can be taken into consideration in the design is the HEN ability of operating under different conditions, and the HEN that meet this feature is known as multiperiod. The synthesis of such HEN, however, requires the solution of a more complex problem. In optimal designs, not only single pieces of equipment must be able to operate under different temperature and flow rates, but also the HEN must perform such task with total annual costs (TAC) as low as possible. In this work, a meta-heuristic approach able to efficiently handle the multiperiod HEN synthesis problem is presented and applied to two case studies. The method could find solutions with better heat loads and stream fraction distributions among the heat exchangers, which led to efficient use of the available heat exchanging area in all periods. The HEN configurations achieved present lower TAC than the solutions reported in the literature, demonstrating the efficiency of the presented meta-heuristic strategy.
Chemical Constituents of Ligularia Nelumbifolia and L. Subspicata Hybrid Collected in Shangrila County, Yunnan Province of China

Four Ligularia individuals possessing morphological characters of both L. nelumbifolia and L. subspicata were discovered in Shangrila County, Yunnan Province, China. DNA sequencing showed that the specimens were hybrids of the two species and their maternal parent was L. subspicata. The chemical composition of the root extract was examined for three of them as well as L. nelumbifolia and L. subspicata collected sympatrically. Nelumol was isolated from L. nelumbifolia, and furanoeremophilanes from L. subspicata. While nelumol and furanoeremophilanes were detected in two of the hybrid samples, only furanoeremophilanes were detected in the others.
Floor Scale Modulo Lifting for QC-LDPC codes

In the given paper we present a novel approach for constructing a QC-LDPC code of smaller length by lifting a given QC-LDPC code. The proposed method can be considered as a generalization of floor lifting. Also we prove several probabilistic statements concerning a theoretical improvement of the method with respect to the number of small cycles. Making some offline calculation of scale parameter it is possible to construct a sequence of QC-LDPC codes with different circulant sizes generated from a single exponent matrix using only floor and scale operations. The only parameter we store in memory is a constant needed for scaling.
Application-specific Delta-encoding via Resemblance Detection

Many objects, such as files, electronic messages, and web pages, contain overlapping content. Numerous past research projects have observed that one can compress one object relative to another one by computing the differences between the two, but these delta-encoding systems have almost invariably required knowledge of a specific relationship between them—most commonly, two versions using the same name at different points in time. We consider cases in which this relationship is determined dynamically, by efficiently determining when a sufficient resemblance exists between two objects in a relatively large collection. We look at specific examples of this technique, namely web pages, email, and files in a file system, and evaluate the potential data reduction and the factors that influence this reduction. We find that delta-encoding using this resemblance detection technique can improve on simple compression by up to a factor of two, depending on workload, and that a small fraction of objects can potentially account for a large portion of these savings.
A new image-sequence haze removal system based on DM6446 Davinci processor

Poor visibility due to haze poses a challenge for driving and can significantly compromise safety. In this paper, we present an algorithm and an implementation that assists the driver by providing an electronic view that improves visibility via haze removal. Our optimized implementation on the Texas Instruments TMS320DM6446EVM DSP based evaluation board provides full D1 video resolution and frame processed for haze removal every 1.7 seconds. This near real-time implementation can significantly augment the drivers vision by providing updates at a rate comparable with the rate at which the driver looks at the rear-view mirror. The algorithm uses a dark channel prior with an edge-guided filter for fast implementation; both components are specifically modified for improving performance on the DM6446 processor. The system provides the first DSP-based embedded implementation of haze removal processing with near real-time performance and represents a significant speed-up and reduction in memory requirements over previously reported algorithms.
On-chip silicon-photonics based integrated vibrometer

In this paper, we demonstrate a compact Silicon photonics-based on-chip integrated interference vibrometer. Unlike conventional readout methods, the demonstrated system is alignment-free and offers multiplex sensing. The intensity that is modulated by the cantilever motion by a photodetector. We present the static and dynamic response of the cantilever by electrostatic excitation validated using ac commercial Laser-Doppler-Vibrometer. We also present a detailed simulation, optimisation and sensitivity analysis of the proposed on-chip vibrometer. Furthermore, the tunability of the sensor to achieve maximum sensitivity is demonstrated.
Fisher linear discriminant based person identification using visual evoked potentials

Biometrics is the technique of uniquely recognizing a person among a group of people. It is usually performed based on one or more of humanpsilas intrinsic physical or behavioral traits. One such trait is the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. In this paper, the feasibility of visual evoked potential (VEP) in the gamma band of EEG signal, as a physiological trait, is studied, and used to identify individuals in a group of 20 people. To this end, the parameters of the AR model together with the peak of the power spectrum density (PSD) of the gamma band VEP signal (GMVEP) are considered as main useful features. Next, the Fisherpsilas linear discriminant (FLD) is used to reduce the feature vector dimensions. Finally, the k nearest neighborhood (KNN) technique is employed to classify the data and the leave-one-out cross validation method is used for accuracy assessment. A correct classification rate of 100% is achieved.
Amobee at SemEval-2017 Task 4: Deep Learning System for Sentiment Detection on Twitter

This paper describes the Amobee sentiment analysis system, adapted to compete in SemEval 2017 task 4. The system consists of two parts: a supervised training of RNN models based on a Twitter sentiment treebank, and the use of feedforward NN, Naive Bayes and logistic regression classifiers to produce predictions for the different sub-tasks. The algorithm reached the 3rd place on the 5-label classification task (sub-task C).
Influence of Natural Amenities on Residential Property Values in a Rural Setting

Hedonic pricing has been used to identify values of nonmarket natural resource amenities. Most of these studies have been completed in suburban or urban communities rather than rural areas. The hedonic pricing study presented here includes developed residential parcel transactions occurring in a rural county in Michigan. We develop two hedonic pricing models using transaction data for two rural residential parcel types: developed parcels located in subdivisions, and developed parcels not located in subdivisions. Proximity to lakes and subdivision open areas positively affected the values of some parcel types, while proximity to forested land, publicly owned land, streams, and a National Scenic River did not have a positive influence. Results found in this study completed in a rural setting contrast with the results of other studies completed in suburban and urban settings.
Transmural Heterogeneity of Calcium Handling in Canine

Abstract— Spatial heterogeneity of the action potential and its influence on arrhythmia vulnerability is known. However, heterogeneity of intracellular calcium handling and, in particular, its effect on the electrophysiological substrate is less clear. Using optical mapping techniques, calcium transients and action potentials were recorded simultaneously from ventricular sites across the transmural wall of the arterially perfused canine left ventricular wedge preparation during steady-state baseline pacing and rapid pacing. During baseline pacing, the decay of intracellular calcium to diastolic levels and calcium transient duration were slower (70%, P <0.005) and longer (20%, P <0.005), respectively, closer to the endocardial surface compared with the epicardial surface. Tissue samples isolated from the left ventricular wall demonstrate that sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ ATPase (SERCA2a) expression was significantly less in the subendocardial and midmyocardial layers compared with the subepicardial layer. In contrast, no significant difference in the transmural expression of Na+-Ca2+ exchanger was observed. During rapid pacing, calcium transient alternans and increased levels of diastolic intracellular calcium were significantly greater (P <0.01) closer to the endocardium (101%±62% and 41%±15%, respectively) compared with the epicardium (12%±7% and 12%±14%, respectively). In conclusion, cells closer to the endocardium exhibit a slower decay of intracellular calcium compared with cells near the epicardium, which may be due in part to reduced expression of SERCA2a. As a possible consequence, calcium transient alternans and increased diastolic levels of intracellular calcium may occur preferentially closer to the endocardial surface.
Improving limited-view photoacoustic tomography with an acoustic reflector

Abstract. The versatility and real-time imaging capability of commercial linear array transducers make them widely used in clinical ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging. However, they often suffer from limited detection view. For instance, acoustic waves traveling at a grazing angle to the transducer surface are difficult to detect. In this letter, we propose a simple and easy approach to ameliorate this problem by using a 45-deg acoustic reflector. The reflector forms a virtual array that is perpendicular to the physical array, thereby doubling the detection coverage. The improvement in image quality in photoacoustic tomography was demonstrated through a hair phantom, a leaf skeleton phantom, and an ex vivo mouse ear experiment.