Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A win-win camera: Quality-enhanced power-saving images on mobile OLED displays

Mobile systems will increasingly feature emerging OLED displays, whose power consumption is highly dependent on the image content. Existing OLED power-saving techniques change users' visual experience or degrade images' visual quality in exchange for power reduction, or seek a chance to also enhance image quality by employing a compound objective function. This paper presents a win-win scheme that always enhances image quality and reduces power consumption simultaneously. We define metrics to assess the profit and the cost for potential image enhancement and power reduction. Then, we propose algorithms that ensure the transformation of images into their quality-enhanced power-saving versions. Finally, the proposed scheme is realized as a practical camera application on mobile devices. The results of experiments conducted on a commercial tablet with a popular image database are very encouraging and provide valuable insights for future research and practices.
Unified nvTCAM and sTCAM architecture for improving packet matching performance

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) allows controlling applications to install fine-grained forwarding policies in the underlying switches. Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) enables fast lookups in hardware switches with flexible wildcard rule patterns. However, the performance of packet processing is severely constrained by the capacity of TCAM, which aggravates the processing burden and latency issues. In this paper, we propose a hybrid TCAM architecture which consists of NVM-based TCAM (nvTCAM) and SRAM-based TCAM (sTCAM), utilizing nvTCAM to cache the most popular rules to improve cache-hit-ratio while relying on a very small-size sTCAM to handle cache-miss traffic to effectively decrease update latency. Considering the special rule dependency, we present an efficient Rule Migration Replacement (RMR) policy to make full utilization of both nvTCAM and sTCAM to obtain better performance. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture outperforms current TCAM architectures.
Understanding Representation Fidelity: Guidelines for Experimental Evaluation of Conceptual Modeling Techniques

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in experimental research on conceptual modeling in information systems analysis and design. There is a need to explicitly identify the objectives of specific experiments in this area, and the role that assumptions play in experimental design. We provide four guidelines for developing materials for experiments aimed at evaluating conceptual modeling techniques, based on the premise that the primary purpose of conceptual modeling is to facilitate communication between analysts and users in validating domain knowledge relevant to an information system. We offer the guidelines as recommendations to assist the development of experiment materials that support meaningful tests of domain semantics, and present empirical evidence to illustrate the value of two of the guidelines. We also evaluate the degree to which a selection of recent experiments on conceptual modeling adheres to the guidelines, and consider implications of that assessment.
The PWM strategies of grid-connected distributed generation active NPC inverters

The Neutral Point Clamped topology due to high efficiency, low leakage current and EMI, its integration is widely used in the distributed generation (DG) systems. However the main disadvantage of the NPC inverter is given by an unequal distribution of the losses in the semiconductor devices, which leads to an unequal distribution of temperature. By using the Active NPC topology, the power losses distribution problem is alleviated. The modulation strategy is a key issue for losses distribution in this topology. In this paper two known strategies are discussed and a new proposed PWM strategy, namely the Adjustable Losses Distribution (ALD) PWM strategy is proposed for better losses distribution in the Active NPC (ANPC) topology. Simulations using Simulink and the PLECS toolbox have been done for evaluating efficiency of different NPC topologies and some experimental results are presented in this paper to validate the operation of the different strategies.
IMAGING THERMOGRAMS AT CENTIMETER AND MILLIMETER WAVELENGTHS *

The thermal emission of human skin at micrometer wavelengths has been used in clinical infrared thermography for over one decade. Recently, the emission of the human body at centimeter and millimeter wavelengths has been studied for clinical applicat ions. '4 The advantage of these long wavelengths is their good depth-viewing capabilities; they can directly measure subcutaneous temperatures, in contrast to conventional infrared thermography, which is limited to the measurement of skin temperatures only. This paper will briefly review emission characteristics of the human body, describe thermographic imaging instrumentation operating at several different wavelengths, and present preliminary clinical findings on treatment monitoring of arthritis, detection of tumors in the brain and thyroid, and detection of breast cancer.
Effects and binding of insulin-like growth factor I in the isolated soleus muscle of lean and obese mice: comparison with insulin.

The effects and binding of insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) in skeletal muscle were investigated in the isolated mouse soleus muscle from normal lean and goldthioglucose- obese mice. In muscles from lean mice, IGF-I stimulated 2-deoxyglucose uptake, glycolysis, and glycogen synthesis and activated glycogen synthase. The latter effect occurred in the absence of glucose in the incubation medium, as was also observed with insulin. The maximal effects of IGF-I and insulin on 2-deoxyglucose uptake were not additive. IGF-I was about 4–9% as potent as insulin (half-maximal effects occurred with 5-14 nM IGF-I) and nearly as effective as insulin. A specific binding of [125I]iodo-IGF-I was observed, which was not inhibited by unlabeled insulin or proinsulin. IGF-I was less than 1% (on a molar basis) as potent as insulin in competing with [125I]iodoinsulin binding. Unlike [125I]iodoinsulin binding, [125I]iodo-IGF-l binding was similar in muscles from lean and goldthioglucose-obese mice. As observed with insulin,.
The Mind Behind Crowdfunding: An Empirical Study of Speech Emotion in Fundraising Success

In online crowdfunding, individuals gather information from two primary sources, video pitches and text narratives. However, while the attributes of the attached video may have substantial effects on fundraising, previous literature has largely neglected effects of the video information. Therefore, this study focuses on speech information embedded in videos. Employing the machine learning techniques including speech recognition and linguistic style classifications, we examine the role of speech emotion and speech style in crowdfunding success, compared to that of text narratives. Using Kickstarter dataset in 2016, our preliminary results suggest that speech information –the linguistic styles– is significantly associated with the crowdfunding success, even after controlling for text and other project-specific information. More interestingly, linguistic styles of the speech have a more profound explanatory power than text narratives do. This study contributes to the growing body of crowdfunding research by providing the unexplored aspect of retrieving speech information from the video.
Computer-aided definition of sizing procedures and optimization problems of mechatronic systems

This article is dedicated to the generation of sizing procedures used during the preliminary optimal design of physical parts of mechatronic systems. The knowledge necessary to such design is composed of two layers: mechatronic system layer and component layer. Such knowledge can be represented by algebraic equations directly or by the use of meta-modeling techniques. Constraint networks and graphs theory are used here to represent and order the constraints and the links between those algebraic models in order to obtain a well-posed optimization problem. The selected or developed algorithms are finally illustrated with typical problems of component selection.
P300 and the Stroop Effect in Overweight Minority Adolescents

Aim: The goal was to examine the relationship between a risk factor for poor cognitive control and a health outcome of growing public significance – an excess body mass – among adolescents. Methods: To this end, 109 adolescents aged 14–20 years were recruited and assigned to 1 of 4 groups defined by the crossing of the absence versus presence of a parental history (PH) of externalizing disorders with a body mass index (BMI) percentile (BMIP) <85 versus ≧85. The principal measure estimating cognitive control was the P300 event-related electroencephalographic response recorded during the Stroop task. Results: The analyses revealed a synergistic interaction between BMIP rank, PH and trial type: the increase in P300 latency and the decrease in response accuracy, elicited by the presence of interfering information, were markedly greater in high-BMIP subjects with a PH of externalizing disorders than in the other subject groups. Analyses of a later component, the N450, previously associated with the Stroop interference effect, revealed no effect of BMI or PH. Conclusions: We conclude that subjects with both a PH of externalizing disorders and an excess BMI constitute a unique group that is less able to resolve cognitive conflict than others. The excessive delay in P300 evoked by conflicting response demands in these subjects may be a marker of a heritable factor that increases risk for both excess body mass and substance use disorders.
Personalization of mobile applications in cultural heritage environments

Mobile technology has been used for indoors and outdoors applications related to Cultural Heritage over many years. Mobile applications in museums and other sites of culture can satisfy visitors' needs through the provision of contextualized contents and services. Personalization of these services is necessary as the amount of available information often exceeds the cognitive capacity of the visitors. The factors to be taken in consideration during design of personalized mobile applications in cultural heritage environments are the subject of this paper. A formal description of these factors allows both for a systematic survey of existing practice, and for supporting the design process of mobile CH applications in the future.
TTUI-SM: A New Specification Model for Tabletop Tangible User Interfaces

In the scenario of computational interfaces development, research efforts aim to offer new ways of interaction that are closer to the natural way in which humans interact with the real world. Amongst the diversity of interface modalities, the tabletop tangible interfaces make the link between physical and virtual objects, enabling to grasp and interact with their components in a physical manner, besides including multitouch interactions. However, in the development process of this kind of interface, there is a lack of a specification model that supports not only the physical object interactions but also multitouch interactions, arranging the specification in a more agile manner, easier to document and implement. Hence, this paper presents a new specification model for tabletop tangible user interface named TTUI-SM that arranges each interface element by components. A diagrammatic tool named TTUI-SMT was developed based on this model, which makes the interface specification and development faster, easier and automated. Both tool and model were submitted to an experiment where results were gathered to evaluate them under the proposed benefits.
Bridging the gap between users' expectations and system evaluations

What users expect of a robot strongly influences their ratings of the interaction. If the robot satisfies the expectations, the users are usually pleased. If not, their experience of the interaction is negative. We as robot designers strive to design for positive interaction experiences. Therefore, users' expectations need to be taken into account. However, in this paper we argue that not all expectations are equally important. Based on a semantic differential questionnaire, we show a correlation between the perceived importance of users' expectations and the difficulty to satisfy them in interaction. The paper argues that this correlation allows to identify the most important improvements that should be made to robot systems but also to find attributes which the robot is quite good at already.
Depressive symptoms among frail elderly in ordinary living: who is affected and who is treated?

Objectives: Depression is common but not always recognized and often undertreated among elderly. Cardiovascular diagnoses have been reported to be associated with depression. The study examined if this association could be confirmed in a frail elderly population. It also assessed the association between high depressive scores and certain health complaints and the use of certain drugs, respectively. Method: A total of 153 frail elderly in ordinary living were included. The association between depressive symptoms, assessed by geriatric depression scale (GDS) 20, and an inpatient diagnose of cerebrovascular disease or heart failure was assessed. Depressive symptoms were also compared with health complaints and background data. Furthermore, the use of certain drugs, such as antidepressants and other psychotropics, was compared with depressive symptoms. Results: Risk of depression was seen in 52% of the patients. Those showing risk of depression more often received municipal care or help with medication distribution and were more often treated with sedatives. They also had significantly more health complaints. No differences were found between those who had or did not have a diagnosis of heart failure or transient ischemic attack (TIA)/stroke during hospital care the previous year regarding risk for depression or treatment with antidepressants, respectively. Sixteen per cent were treated with antidepressants and this group was significantly younger than those who were not treated. Conclusion: Those elderly with a GDS score indicating a risk for depression have poorer health, are more dependent on help and are more often treated with sedatives. The study could not confirm an association between heart failure or TIA/stroke and risk for depression.
RECOGNITION OF OCCURRENCE AND LOCALIZATION OF CLEAVAGE SITE IN SIGNAL PEPTIDES

Motivation: Automatic recognition of signal peptides and cleavage sites in proteins is a topical issue for both detection of their cellular localization and solving of applied medical and biotechnological problems. The available recognition methods utilize either amino acid substitution matrices (von Heijne, 1986) or neuronal network algorithms using a 20letter amino acid code (Nielsen et al., 1997). In this work, the feasibility of using physicochemical characteristics of amino acids for recognizing cleavage sites in signal peptides is studied. The algorithm AddDel (Zagoruiko, 1999) was applied for selecting the significant characteristics. Cleavage sites were recognized by a sliding test technique. The rule of ”k nearest neighbors” at k = 1 was used as a decisive rule. Results: A method for selecting the informative subset of characteristics was developed and the decisive rule based on the membership function was constructed. Testing of the method proposed using a large amount of experimental data has demonstrated that it detects the cleavage sites correctly and localizes at a rate of 85%.
A parametric feature extraction and classification strategy for brain-computer interfacing

Parametric modeling strategies are explored in conjunction with linear discriminant analysis for use in an electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI). A left/right self-paced typing exercise is analyzed by extending the usual autoregressive (AR) model for EEG feature extraction with an AR with exogenous input (ARX) model for combined filtering and feature extraction. The ensemble averaged Bereitschaftspotential (an event related potential preceding the onset of movement) forms the exogenous signal input to the ARX model. Based on trials with six subjects, the ARX case of modeling both the signal and noise was found to be considerably more effective than modeling the noise alone (common in BCI systems) with the AR method yielding a classification accuracy of 52.8 /spl plusmn/ 4.8% and the ARX method an accuracy of 79.1 /spl plusmn/ 3.9% across subjects. The results suggest a role for ARX-based feature extraction in BCIs based on evoked and event-related potentials.
Reliable and Scalable Data Acquisition from IoT Domains

In this work we have examined aspects of reliable and scalable acquisition of big data from IoT domains. We have modeled the performance of CoAP enabled cross proxy IoT gateway towards the domain of CoAP enabled IoT devices. We focused on maintaining freshness of cache records at the proxy while maintaining low delay and low energy communications. We show that non-confirmable CoAP mode works well with acknowledged mode of 6LoWPAN/IEEE 802.15. 4 cluster and that high delay and timeout values proposed in CoAP can be avoided. To support data freshness limit imposed by CoAP we have included sensor replicas which report the same variable. We have shown that addition of sensor replicas together with proactive cache update can ensure low record outdate probability while combination of proactive and reactive cache update can still have low outdate probability while limiting energy expenditure of nodes.
Assessing Leukocyte-endothelial Interactions Under Flow Conditions in an Ex Vivo Autoperfused Microflow Chamber Assay

Leukocyte-endothelial interactions are early and critical events in acute and chronic inflammation and can, when dysregulated, mediate tissue injury leading to permanent pathological damage. Existing conventional assays allow the analysis of leukocyte adhesion molecules only after the extraction of leukocytes from the blood. This requires the blood to undergo several steps before peripheral blood leukocytes (PBLs) can be ready for analysis, which in turn can stimulate PBLs influencing the research findings. The autoperfused micro flow chamber assay, however, allows scientists to study early leukocytes functional dysregulation using the systemic flow of a live mouse while having the freedom of manipulating a coated chamber. Through a disease model, the functional expression of leukocyte adhesion molecules can be assessed and quantified in a micro-glass chamber coated with immobilized endothelial adhesion molecules ex vivo. In this model, the blood flows between the right common carotid artery and left external jugular vein of a live mouse under anesthesia, allowing the interaction of native PBLs in the chamber. Real-time experimental analysis is achieved with the assistance of an intravital microscope as well as a Harvard Apparatus pressure device. The application of a flow regulator at the input point of the glass chamber allows comparable physiological flow conditions amongst the experiments. Leukocyte rolling velocity is the main outcome and is measured using the National Institutes of Health open-access software ImageJ. In summary, the autoperfused micro flow chamber assay provides an optimal physiological environment to study leukocytes endothelial interaction and allows researchers to draw accurate conclusions when studying inflammation.
Method proposal for blob separation in segmented images

Image segmentation has been and still is a challenge in computer vision. Regardless of the methods used to perform this task, almost always the result is the same: a set of areas representing locations of various items found in the image. If we wish to classify the areas into two types of data, the problem becomes separating foreground from background. Our proposed method starts with this supposition: that the image is segmented and as a result we obtain a mask where the white pixels represent foreground and the black ones are the background. Another supposition we make, is that the items have almost the same size and shape. The goal is to obtain the locations of all the items in the image. This algorithm has numerous applications such as item localization, measurement, validation, etc.
On synchronizable binary cyclic codes (Corresp.)

In this correspondence a method is presented whereby the average synchronization-error-correcting capability of Tavares' subset codes may be improved with no additional cost in rate and with only a small increase in the complexity of encoding and decoding. The method consists simply in shifting every word of the subset codes in such a way so that the shifted versions have a maximum number of leading and trailing zeros. A lower bound on the increase in synchronization-error-correcting capability provided by this method is derived.
A comparison of palpation guided and ultrasound guided percutaneous biceps brachii tenotomy in dogs

Summary The purpose of this study was to compare palpation guided and ultrasound guided techniques for biceps brachii tenotomy in dogs. The differences between the two tenotomy procedures in muscle incision length, confidence level of tenotomy, percentage tendon transection, difficulty of tendon location or transection, or amount of haemorrhage, were not significant. The ultrasound guided tenotomy procedure took significantly longer to perform and required a longer skin incision, but these differences were not considered to be clinically important. With palpation guided tenotomy, several surrounding muscular and tendinous structures were damaged. We concluded that ultrasound guided tenotomy is an accurate method of tendon identification because it allowed for complete transection in 10 out of 11 tendons, and provides a method for checking completeness of tendon transection after the procedure.
Impairment of Hippocampal Mossy Fiber LTD in Mice Lacking mGluR2

Subtype 2 of the metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluR2) is expressed in the presynaptic elements of hippocampal mossy fiber—CA3 synapses. Knockout mice deficient in mGluR2 showed no histological changes and no alterations in basal synaptic transmission, paired-pulse facilitation, or tetanus-induced long-term potentiation (LTP) at the mossy fiber—CA3 synapses. Long-term depression (LTD) induced by low-frequency stimulation, however, was almost fully abolished. The mutant mice performed normally in water maze learning tasks. Thus, the presynaptic mGluR2 is essential for inducing LTD at the mossy fiber—CA3 synapses, but this hippocampal LTD does not seem to be required for spatial learning.
10 years experience in the application of the Reinforced Feedback in Virtual Environment (RFVE) for neurorehabilitation: Preliminary results from a retrospective analysis in stroke patients

Many applications of virtual reality appeared in different fields of the rehabilitation medicine. Nevertheless poor evidences of their effectiveness still exist. The aim of this original paper was to present the results of a retrospective analysis of 10 years of a non-immersive VR system application, for the treatment of the motor upper limb impairment in stroke patients. We observed a significant improvement in the motor outcomes, compared to standard rehabilitation, nevertheless a translation of the same effect on harder outcome such as independence wasn't observed.