Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Falling detection using multiple doppler sensors

Recently, various kinds of healthcare systems for the elderly have been developed. Falling detection is one of the important tasks to protect them from crucial accidents. Cameras, acoustic sensors, and accelerometers are mainly used to detect the falling. However, from the viewpoint of false alarm rate, privacy issues, and intrusiveness of the devices, each method has its own shortcomings. Doppler sensor is a palm-sized device, and can be implemented for highly accurate human activity recognition without wearable sensors. Doppler sensor is less sensitive to the movements orthogonal to the irradiation direction. Thus, a method to compensate this characteristic is needed. We propose falling detection using multiple Doppler sensors to raise the precision of falling detection covering the multi-directions of the target movement. Two or three sensors are exploited, and the extracted sensor data is processed by a feature combination or selection method. The resulting data are classified by support vector machine (SVM) or k-nearest neighbors (k-NN). We evaluate several kinds of falling, “Standing - Falling,” “Walking - Falling,” and “Standing up - Falling,” and non-falling like “Walking,” “Lying on floor,” “Picking up,” and “Sitting on a chair. ” These activities are tested toward 8 directions spaced at respective intervals of 45 degrees. The results show that the combination method, using three sensors, achieves 95.5 % accuracy of falling detection, and the selection method, using three sensors, achieves 93.3 % accuracy. We also discuss the accuracy of each activity direction and the viability of these methods for the practical use.
A Mouse Model Characterizing Features of Vascular Dementia With Hippocampal Atrophy

Background and Purpose— We have previously described effects of chronic cerebral hypoperfusion in mice with bilateral common carotid artery stenosis (BCAS) using microcoils for 30 days. These mice specifically exhibit working memory deficits attributable to frontal-subcortical circuit damage without apparent gray matter changes, indicating similarities with subcortical ischemic vascular dementia. However, as subcortical ischemic vascular dementia progresses over time, the longer-term effects that characterize the mouse model are not known. Methods— Comprehensive behavioral test batteries and histological examinations were performed in mice subjected to BCAS for up to 8 months. Laser speckle flowmetry and 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography were performed to assess cerebral blood flow and metabolism at several time points. Results— At 2 hours after BCAS, cerebral blood flow in the cerebral cortex temporarily decreased to as much as 60% to 70% of the control value but gradually recovered to >80% at 1 to 3 months. At 5 to 6 months after BCAS, reference and working memory were impaired as demonstrated by the Barnes and radial arm maze tests, respectively. Furthermore, 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography demonstrated that hippocampal glucose utilization was impaired at 6 months after BCAS. Consistent with these behavioral and metabolic abnormalities, histological analyses demonstrated hippocampal atrophy with pyknotic and apoptotic cells at 8 months after BCAS. Conclusions— These results suggest that the longer-term BCAS model replicates advanced stages of subcortical ischemic vascular dementia when hippocampal neuronal loss becomes significant.
Zometool Rationalization of Freeform Surfaces

An ever broader availability of freeform designs together with an increasing demand for product customization has lead to a rising interest in efficient physical realization of such designs, the trend toward personal fabrication. Not only large-scale architectural applications are (becoming increasingly) popular but also different consumer-level rapid-prototyping applications, including toy and 3D puzzle creation. In this work we present a method for do-it-yourself reproduction of freeform designs without the typical limitation of state-of-the-art approaches requiring manufacturing custom parts using semi-professional laser cutters or 3D printers. Our idea is based on a popular mathematical modeling system (Zometool) commonly used for modeling higher dimensional polyhedra and symmetric structures such as molecules and crystal lattices. The proposed method extends the scope of Zometool modeling to freeform, disk-topology surfaces. While being an efficient construction system on the one hand (consisting only of a single node type and nine different edge types), this inherent discreteness of the Zometool system, on the other hand gives rise to a hard approximation problem. We base our method on a marching front approach, where elements are not added in a greedy sense, but rather whole regions on the front are filled optimally, using a set of problem specific heuristics to keep complexity under control.
Sliding mode vector control of three phase induction motor

Sliding Mode Control (SMC) is a robust control scheme based on the concept of changing the structure of the controller in response to the changing state of the system in order to obtain a desired response. A high speed switching control action is used to switch between different structures of the controller and the trajectory of the system is forced to move along a chosen switching manifold in the state space. This thesis work presents a new sensorless vector control scheme consisting on the one hand of a speed estimation algorithm which overcomes the necessity of the speed sensor and on the other hand of a novel variable structure control law with an integral sliding surface that compensates the uncertainties that are present in the system. In this work, an indirect field-oriented induction motor drive with a sliding-mode controller is presented. The design includes rotor speed estimation from measured stator terminal voltages and currents. The estimated speed is used as feedback in an indirect vector control system achieving the speed control without the use of shaft mounted transducers. Stability analysis based on Lyapunov theory is also presented, to guarantee the closed loop stability. The high performance of the control scheme under load disturbances and parameter uncertainties is also demonstrated.
PREDICTABILITY OF VOICING ASSIMILATION IN SPEECH PRODUCTION

During speaking, the mental lexicon is accessed (i) to select the necessary words, and (ii) to retrieve their phonological and syntactic patterns. However, the nature of real-time activation of words and phonological rules is largely unknown. This paper deals with the temporal properties of voicing assimilation (i) in language acquisition, (ii) in spontaneous speech, and (iii) in repetition tasks. Results show that (i) by the age of 4 Hungarianspeaking children acquire this phonological rule without mistakes, (ii) in spontaneous speech if the pause between two words does not exceed 55 ms, voicing assimilation takes place; however, if it exceeds 324 ms, voicing assimilation does not apply, (iii) in repetition tasks subjects retrieved voicing assimilation successfully in about 71% of all possible cases.
Improving a general-purpose Statistical Translation Engine by Terminological lexicons

The past decade has witnessed exciting work in the field of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). However, accurate evaluation of its potential in real-life contexts is still a questionable issue.In this study, we investigate the behavior of an SMT engine faced with a corpus far different from the one it has been trained on. We show that terminological databases are obvious resources that should be used to boost the performance of a statistical engine. We propose and evaluate a way of integrating terminology into a SMT engine which yields a significant reduction in word error rate.
A humanistic approach to divorce and family mediation in the South African context : a comparative study of Western-style mediation and African humanistic mediation

This article explores the principles and processes of Western-style divorce and family mediation, as well as the principles and processes of African humanistic mediation, as they are applied in South Africa. Critique, as well as the advantages of both approaches, is dealt with. Similarities between the principles are explored. This strategy is informed by holistic knowledge. The knowledge relied upon sometimes demonstrates conflicting worldviews and is in a specific cultural context. The challenge is to find a holistic way of mediation in South Africa. This article proposes ways in which humanistic mediation can be used to positively influence and change the current family mediation practice in South Africa.
Conscious and Unconscious Processes: The Effects of Motivation

The process-dissociation procedure has been used in a variety of experimental contexts to assess the contributions of conscious and unconscious processes to task performance. To evaluate whether motivation affects estimates of conscious and unconscious processes, participants were given incentives to follow inclusion and exclusion instructions in a perception task and a memory task. Relative to a control condition in which no performance incentives were given, the results for the perception task indicated that incentives increased the participants' ability to exclude previously presented information, which in turn both increased the estimate of conscious processes and decreased the estimate of unconscious processes. However, the results also indicated that incentives did not influence estimates of conscious or unconscious processes in the memory task. The findings suggest that the process-dissociation procedure is relatively immune to influences of motivation when used with a memory task, but that caution should be exercised when the process-dissociation is used with a perception task.
Mean platelet volume: a quick, easy determinant of thrombotic risk?

See also Chu SG, Becker RC, Berger PB, Bhatt DL, Eikelboom JW, Konkle B, Mohler ER, Reilly MP, Berger JS. Mean platelet volume as a predictor of cardiovascular risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis. This issue, pp 148–56; Brækkan SK, Mathiesen EB, Njølstad I, Wilsgaard T, Størmer J, Hansen JB. Mean platelet volume is a risk factor for venous thromboembolism: the Tromsø Study. This issue, pp 157–62.
A Review of Image Contrast Enhancement Methods and Techniques

In this study we aim to provide a survey of existing enhancement techniques with their descriptions and present a detailed analysis of them. Since most of the images while capturing are affected by weather, poor lighting and the acquiring device itself, they suffer from poor contrast. Sufficient Contrast in an image makes an object distinguishable from the other objects and the background. Contrast enhancement improves the quality of images for human observer by expanding the dynamic range of input gray level. A plethora enhancement techniques have though emerged, none of them deem to be a universal one, thus becoming selective in application. In such a scenario, it has become imperative to provide a comprehensive survey of these contrast enhancement techniques used in digital image processing.
Trusted Storage over Untrusted Networks

We consider distributed storage over two untrusted networks, whereby coding is used as a means to achieve a prescribed level of confidentiality. The key idea is to exploit the algebraic structure of the Vandermonde matrix to mix the input blocks, before they are stored in different locations. The proposed scheme ensures that eavesdroppers with access to only one of the networks are unable to decode any symbol even if they are capable of guessing some of the missing blocks. Information-theoretic techniques allow us to quantify the achievable level of confidentiality. Moreover, the proposed approach is shown to offer low complexity and optimal rate.
Surgical Management of Unilateral Superior Oblique Palsy: Thirty Years of Experience

Introduction and Purpose We describe the clinical characteristics of 252 patients with unilateral superior oblique palsy who underwent strabismus surgery. We assess if a predetermined surgical strategy, based on preoperative alignment and motility measurements, was effective in treating these patients. On this basis, the patients were divided into three different treatment groups. Methods Two-hundred fifty-two patients were identified retrospectively and classified into three groups according to the performed procedures: 1) inferior oblique weakening; 2) inferior rectus recession; 3) combined inferior oblique weakening and inferior rectus recession. Demographic and clinical data were recorded. Criteria for surgical success included good postoperative alignment (distance, primary position alignment ≤5Δ), and improvement of diplopia and of abnormal head posture. Subgroup analyses of surgical outcome were performed for small (<12Δ) versus large (>20Δ) preoperative hypertropia in the group that underwent inferior oblique weakening, and for inferior oblique disinsertion-myectomy versus inferior oblique recession. Results Mean forced primary position (PP) hypertropia decreased from 14. 3Δ (range 3–37Δ) to 4. 5Δ (range 0–30Δ) in Group 1, from 13Δ (range 1–30Δ) to 2Δ (range -20–20Δ) in Group 2, and from 25. 7Δ (range 6–40Δ) to 1. 3Δ (range -12–18Δ) in Group 3. Group 1 had the lowest re-operation rate (7.6%), followed by Group 2 (16%) and Group 3 (25.9%). Final surgical success rates were similar in three groups. Inferior oblique weakening was more predictable for small primary position hypertropia, but still yielded 85% success rate in large deviations. Inferior oblique disinsertion-myectomy resulted in more favorable results than inferior oblique recession (P < 0.05). Conclusion When a predetermined surgical strategy is applied to individual patients with unilateral superior oblique palsy, excellent functional improvement can be achieved in the majority of patients.
Pairwise domain adaptation module for CNN-based 2-D/3-D registration

Abstract. Accurate two-dimensional to three-dimensional (2-D/3-D) registration of preoperative 3-D data and intraoperative 2-D x-ray images is a key enabler for image-guided therapy. Recent advances in 2-D/3-D registration formulate the problem as a learning-based approach and exploit the modeling power of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to significantly improve the accuracy and efficiency of 2-D/3-D registration. However, for surgery-related applications, collecting a large clinical dataset with accurate annotations for training can be very challenging or impractical. Therefore, deep learning-based 2-D/3-D registration methods are often trained with synthetically generated data, and a performance gap is often observed when testing the trained model on clinical data. We propose a pairwise domain adaptation (PDA) module to adapt the model trained on source domain (i.e., synthetic data) to target domain (i.e., clinical data) by learning domain invariant features with only a few paired real and synthetic data. The PDA module is designed to be flexible for different deep learning-based 2-D/3-D registration frameworks, and it can be plugged into any pretrained CNN model such as a simple Batch-Norm layer. The proposed PDA module has been quantitatively evaluated on two clinical applications using different frameworks of deep networks, demonstrating its significant advantages of generalizability and flexibility for 2-D/3-D medical image registration when a small number of paired real-synthetic data can be obtained.
Unemployment and Mental Disorders - an Empirical Analysis

The purpose of this paper is also to analyze the importance of unemployment and other social factors as risk factors for impaired mental health. It departs from previous studies in that we make use of information about first admissions to a psychiatric hospital or ward as our measure of mental illness. The database for our analyses has been constructed by merging two large Danish longitudinal data sets. The first is a panel of approximately 240.000 individuals which corresponds to 5 per cent of the Danish population aged 16-74, and contains detailed year-by-year information about the individuals' labour market behaviour, incomes, individual characteristics and so on from a fifteen-year period, 1976-91. The other panel is the Central Psychiatric Case register which contains all cases of psychic illness and their diagnoses (a little over 300.000 individuals and a little over one million cases) as registered in all Danish psychiatric hospitals and wards since 1969. The number of people found in both panels is a little over 15.000. We carry out analyses at two levels of the data. Firstly, we examine the determinants of first admission rates using aggregate time series data constructed from the Psychiatric case register. Secondly, we estimate conditional logistic regression models for case-control data on first admissions to a psychiatric hospital. The explanatory variables in the empirical analysis include age, gender, education, marital status, income, wealth, and unemployment (and length thereof) and other labour market statuses during the years preceding the first admission. This allows us to study whether unemployment as a risk factor differs between age groups, men and women, and single and married persons, and whether education and earnings have a moderating effect on the unemployment-mental illness relationship.
Building A Volunteer Community: Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham

This paper contributes to the literature examining the burgeoning field of academic crowdsourcing, by analysing the results of the crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, Transcribe Bentham. First, it describes how the project team sought to recruit volunteer transcribers to take part, and discusses which strategies were successes (and which were not). We then examine Transcribe Bentham's results during its six-month testing period (8 September 2010 to 8 March 2011), which include a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of website statistics, work completed by the amateur transcribers, as well as the demographics of the volunteer base and their motivations for taking part. The paper concludes by discussing the success of our community building with reference to this analysis. We find that Transcribe Bentham's volunteer transcribers have produced a remarkable amount of work – and continue to do so, carrying out the equivalent labour of a full-time transcriber – despite the nature and complexity of the task at hand.
Germinal-center type B-cell classification and clinical characteristics of Chinese pediatric diffuse large B-cell lymphoma: a report of 76 cases

Pediatric diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is a highly aggressive disease with unique clinical characteristics. This study analyzed the germinal-center type B-cell (GCB) classification and clinical characteristics of Chinese pediatric DLBCL. A total of 76 patients with DLBCL newly diagnosed in Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center between February 2000 and May 2011, with an age younger than 18 years, were included in the analysis. The male/female ratio was 3.47:1. The median age was 12 years (range, 2 to 18 years), and 47 (61.8%) patients were at least 10 years old. Of the 76 patients, 48 (63.2%) had stage III/IV disease, 9 (11.8%) had bone marrow involvement, 1 (1.3%) had central nervous system (CNS) involvement, and 5 (6.6%) had bone involvement. The GCB classification was assessed in 45 patients: 26 (57.8%) were classified as GCB subtype, and 19 (42.2%) were classified as non-GCB subtype. The modified B-NHL-BFM-90/95 regimen was administered to 50 patients, and the 4-year event-free survival (EFS) rate was 85.8%. Among these 50 patients, 31 were assessed for the GCB classification: 17 (54.8%) were classified as GCB subtype, with a 4-year EFS rate of 88.2%; 14 (45.2%) were classified as non-GCB subtype, with a 4-year EFS rate of 92.9%. Our data indicate that bone marrow involvement and stage III/IV disease are common in Chinese pediatric DLBCL patients, whereas the percentage of patients with the GCB subtype is similar to that of patients with the non-GCB subtype. The modified B-NHL-BFM-90/95 protocol is an active and effective treatment protocol for Chinese pediatric patients with DLBCL.
HIV‐1 Trafficking to the Dendritic Cell–T‐Cell Infectious Synapse Uses a Pathway of Tetraspanin Sorting to the Immunological Synapse

Dendritic cells (DCs) are essential components of the early events of HIV infection. Here, we characterized the trafficking pathways that HIV‐1 follows during its capture by DCs and its subsequent presentation to CD4+ T cells via an infectious synapse. Immunofluorescence microscopy indicates that the virus‐containing compartment in mature DCs (mDCs) co‐labels for the tetraspanins CD81, CD82, and CD9 but contains little CD63 or LAMP‐1. Using ratio imaging of pH‐reporting fluorescent virions in live DCs, we show that HIV‐1 is internalized in an intracellular endocytic compartment with a pH of 6.2. Significantly, we demonstrate that the infectivity of cell‐free virus is more stable at mildly acidic pH than at neutral pH. Using electron microscopy, we confirm that HIV‐1 accumulates in intracellular vacuoles that contain CD81 positive internal membranes but overlaps only partially with CD63. When allowed to contact T cells, HIV‐1‐loaded DCs redistribute CD81, and CD9, as well as internalized HIV‐1, but not the immunological synapse markers MHC‐II and T‐cell receptor to the infectious synapse. Together, our results indicate that HIV‐1 is internalized into a non‐conventional, non‐lysosomal, endocytic compartment in mDCs and further suggest that HIV‐1 is able to selectively subvert components of the intracellular trafficking machinery required for formation of the DC–T‐cell immunological synapse to facilitate its own cell‐to‐cell transfer and propagation.
Aromatase expression in human peripheral blood leucocytes (PBLs) and in various tissues in primates: studies in elderly humans and cynomolgus monkeys

Previous analysis of aromatase gene and protein expression in peripheral blood leucocytes (PBLs), studied in children and adults, was extended to elderly subjects. In addition, we assessed whether aromatase expression in PBLs could be used as a parameter of aromatase expression in other tissues, using the cynomolgus monkey as model.
An Integrated Unequal Error Protection Scheme for the Transmission of Compressed Images with ARQ

In this paper we propose a new image transmission scheme for an image which has been compressed using wavelet image compression and coded with a Variable Length Code. The proposed scheme applies Unequal Error Protection (UEP) at three different stages, namely the source coding, channel coding and retransmission stage. UEP at the source coding stage is employed to unequally protect the image subbands against error propagation, which arises due to variable length coding. At the channel coding stage, UEP is applied by the use of Rate Compatible Punctured Convolutional codes to unequally allocate coding redundancy to the image subbands. Finally at the retransmission stage, UEP is applied by assigning different synchronization error tolerances to the image subbands. Gains of over 4 dB in terms of Peak to Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) is achieved by employing the integrated UEP scheme as compared to a standard Equal Error Protection Scheme.
Multi-stage delivery of malware

Malware signature detectors use patterns of bytes, or variations of patterns of bytes, to detect malware attempting to enter a systems. This approach assumes the signatures are both or sufficient length to identify the malware, and to distinguish it from non-malware objects entering the system. We describe a technique that can increase the difficulty of both to an arbitrary degree. This technique can exploit an optimization that many anti-virus systems use to make inserting the malware simple; fortunately, this particular exploit is easy to detect, provided the optimization is not present. We describe some experiments to test the effectiveness of this technique in evading existing signature-based malware detectors.