Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
3D hand posture estimation and task semantic monitoring technique for human-robot collaboration

We develop a monitoring system for human-robot collaboration (HRC) of hybrid automation. The system enables the production line to avoid product defects as well as guarantee a real-time warning system in a cellular manufacturing (CM). A task semantic monitoring system includes the three-dimensional (3D) hand posture estimation and the motion trajectory monitoring. The coordinate of hand, the motion of hand, and the semantic of hand are identified by two integrated modules. The verification is executed by applying the system to the assembly lines for power protector.
Linkage disequilibrium mapping in trisomic populations: Analytical approaches and an application to congenital heart defects in Down syndrome

Many of the birth defects associated with trisomy exhibit both variable expressivity and incomplete penetrance. This variability suggests that it is allelic variation and not simply the presence of an additional chromosome that leads to the development of certain trisomy‐associated birth defects. With the proper tools, one may use trisomic populations to identify genes involved in the development of specific birth defects. A trisomic population may be advantageous over a normal population if the defect is over‐represented in the trisomic population. Alternatively, one can view the trisomic populations as a “model system” to offer insight into aspects of both normal and abnormal embryonic development. Standard disomic linkage disequilibrium mapping approaches need to be adjusted to account for the presence of the additional genetic material in the trisomic individuals. We present an approach for linkage disequilibrium mapping of variable phenotypes in a trisomic population that adequately accounts for the additional alleles and the pattern of non‐independent inheritance. We establish the laboratory methods and statistical tools necessary to conduct an association study in a trisomic population. As an example, we have applied these tools to a pilot study of Down syndrome–associated congenital heart defects. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Analysis of Physical Activity Propagation in a Health Social Network

Modeling physical activity propagation, such as the activity level and intensity, is the key to prevent the cascades of obesity, and help spread wellness and healthy behavior in a social network. However, there has been lacking of scientific and quantitative study to elucidate how social communication may deliver physical activity interventions. In this work we introduce a Community-level Physical Activity Propagation (CPP) model to analyze physical activity propagation and social influence at different granularities (i.e., individual level and community level). CPP is a novel model which is inspired by the well-known Independent Cascade and Community-level Social Influence models. Given a social network, we utilize a hierarchical approach to detect a set of communities and their reciprocal influence strength of physical activities. CPP provides a powerful tool to discover, summarize, and investigate influence patterns of physical activities in a health social network. The detail experimental evaluation shows not only the effectiveness of our approach but also the correlation of the detected communities with various health outcome measures (i.e., both existing ones and our novel measure, named Wellness score, which is a combination of lifestyle parameters, biometrics, and biomarkers). Our promising results potentially pave a way for knowledge discovery in health social networks.
The Ethical Infrastructure of Legal Practice in Larger Law Firms: Values, Policy and Behaviour

This paper examines the impact of the cultures and organisational structures of large law firms on individual lawyers' ethics. The paper suggests that large law firms in Australia should consciously design and implement 'ethical infrastructures' to counteract pressures for misbehaviour and positively promote ethical behaviour and discussion. The paper goes on to explain what implementing ethical infrastructures in law firms could and should mean by reference to what Australian law firms are already doing and US innovations in this area. Finally, the paper warns that the 'ethical infrastructure' of a firm should not be seen merely as the formal ethics policies explicitly enunciated by management. Formal and legalistic ethical infrastructures that fail to support or encourage the development of individual lawyers' awareness of their own ethical values and ethical judgment in practice will be useless.
AI: inventing a new kind of machine

A means-ends approach to engineering an artificial intelligence machine now suggests that we focus on the differences between human capabilities and the best computer programs. These differences suggest two basic limitations in the "symbolic" approach. First, human memory is much more than a storehouse where structures are put away, indexed, and rotely retrieved. Second, human reasoning involves more than searching, matching, and recombining previously stored descriptions of situations and action plans. Indeed, these hypotheses are related: Remembering and reasoning both involve reconceptualization. This short paper outlines recent work in situated cognition, robotics, and neural networks that suggests we frame the problem if AI in terms of inventing a new kind of machine.
FOXO1 Is Involved in the Effects of Cigarette Smoke Extract on Osteoblastic Differentiation of Cultured Human Periosteum-derived Cells

Cigarette smoke is associated with delayed fracture healing, alterations in mineral content, and osteoporosis, however, its effects on osteoblastic differentiation of osteoprogenitor cells are not fully understood. In the present study, we examined the effects of cigarette smoke extract (CSE) on osteoblastic differentiation of cultured human periosteum-derived cells. We found that CSE inhibited alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity, mineralization and Runx2 transactivation of the periosteum-derived cells. Nucleofection of RUNX2 into the periosteum-derived cells increased expression of endogenous osteocalcin (OC) and ALP genes in osteogenic induction medium and increased OC expression in non-osteogenic medium. Treatment of the periosteum-derived cells with CSE resulted in decreased phosphorylation of AKT and forkhead box protein O1 (FOXO1). The AKT phosphorylation-resistant mutant, FOXO1-A3, inhibited transcriptional activity of RUNX2 in the periosteum-derived cells. The current study suggests one mechanism by which CSE exposure leads to inhibition of osteoblastic differentiation of cultured human periosteum-derived cells.
Le Changement A L'Echelle Des Pratiques De Controle : Le Cas D'Une Universite Française

This article reports on participant research undertaken at a French university to understand the way change operates (or fails to operate) at the level of control practices. The university concerned introduced an ERP system intended to replace several practices including budget management practices. We approach the field of the study through these practices, seen as dynamic routines. This makes it possible to analyse how budget control practices change-or fail to change-following institutional impetus. Studying two of these practices, we highlight the centrality of scripts and the formation of actor networks that can spread change, or on the contrary prevent it. Comparison of the research findings with analysis frameworks derived from ANT offer a simultaneous grasp of the impact of institutional pressures and the actors' roles in implementation of these new control methods at local level.
An Effective Approach for Allocating VMs to Reduce the Power Consumption of Virtualized Cloud Environment

Current orientation of computing is based on "Pay for Use" model known as Cloud computing which provides the services with remote virtualized data centers. It has composition of various virtual machines different in numbers and types. These VMs contain their own computational resources to provide the services to the users. Some of the VM's task may include scheduling and distribution of resources under the specified scheduling and management policies enabling efficient resource allocation and utilization. Because of virtual resource utilization by all the users in shared or dedicated mode based on pay per use basis, lot of energy is consumed. Energy consumption has aroused a question among researchers to develop the technique or methods to optimize it. To understand or measure the energy consumption, we conduct analysis and we suggest a new formula approach instead of old approach for allocation of virtual machine in cloud environment, which improve the power efficiency of cloud data center.
Individuals with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities at Work?! Activities in Special Day Service Centers in Germany

All individuals have the right to participate in activities. Therefore, productive work or other meaningful activities can promote the individuals' quality of life. While realizing work related activities for individuals with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) is an issue in clinical practice in general, special day service centers in Germany intend to provide work related activities for all individuals of the target group. The aim of the present study was to analyze the activities of all special day service centers in a northern urban region of Germany, in order to describe to what extent such activities could promote the work related quality of life of the individuals with PIMD. Four special day service centers participated in the present study. Data were collected in a diary for one individual with PIMD per group (n = 30). Goals and content were analyzed focusing on the relation with a work related quality of the life model (operationalized as interaction, experience of competences, and self‐determination). The results show that communication and self‐efficacy (as parts of interaction and experience of competences) are often goal and/or content of the presented activities. Stimulation of self‐determination was rarely ticked as a goal. The most important conclusion of the present study is that participation in work related activities of individuals with PIMD is possible. Including elements such as communication, motor activation, and experience of self‐efficacy, the activities can be described as activities promoting the quality of life in individuals with PIMD. Still, different types of special day service centers are needed. Focusing on either work related activities, education, and/or leisure activities accounts for the different needs of individuals with PIMD according to their different characteristics and different phases of life.
The Horus and Ensemble projects: accomplishments and limitations

The Horus and Ensemble efforts culminated a multi-year Cornell research program in process group communication used for fault-tolerance, security and adaptation. Our intent was to understand the degree to which a single system could offer flexibility and yet maintain high performance, to explore the integration of fault tolerance with security and real-time mechanisms, and to increase trustworthiness of our solutions by applying formal methods. Here, we summarize the accomplishments of the effort and evaluate the successes and failures of the approach.
Exploiting Spatial Degrees of Freedom for High Data Rate Ultrasound Communication with Implantable Devices

We propose and demonstrate an ultrasonic communication link using spatial degrees of freedom to increase data rates for deeply implantable medical devices. Low attenuation and millimeter wavelengths make ultrasound an ideal communication medium for miniaturized low-power implants. While a small spectral bandwidth has drastically limited achievable data rates in conventional ultrasonic implants, a large spatial bandwidth can be exploited by using multiple transducers in a multiple-input/multiple-output system to provide spatial multiplexing gain without additional power, larger bandwidth, or complicated packaging. We experimentally verify the communication link in mineral oil with a transmitter and a receiver 5 cm apart, each housing two custom-designed mm-sized piezoelectric transducers operating at the same frequency. Two streams of data modulated with quadrature phase-shift keying at 125 kbps are simultaneously transmitted and received on both channels, effectively doubling the data rate to 250 kbps wit.
Comparison of Fujisaki-model extractors and F0 stylizers

This study compares four automatic methods for estimating Fujisaki-model parameters. Since interpolation and smoothing are necessary prerequisites for all approaches their (cid:2)tting accuracies are also compared with that of a novel stylisation method. A hand-corrected set of results from one of the meth-ods which was created on linguistic grounds served as a second benchmark. Although the four methods yield comparable re-sults with respect to their total errors, they show different error distributions. The manually corrected version provided a poorer approximation of the F0 contours than the automatic one
Location Comparison through Geographical Topics

With the increasing interest in location-based services, location comparison gains more and more attentions. One of the best ways to represent a location is to use topics that are generated near the location. In order to compare locations through such geographical topics, two conditions need to be met. One is that the topic set should be fixed but cover various aspects of all possible locations, and the other is that geographical topics often depend on each other. This paper proposes Probabilistic Explicit Semantic Analysis (PESA) that meets these conditions. PESA represents a location as a weighted topic vector where each topic is a Wikipedia concept. The number of Wikipedia concepts is fixed, but their enormous quantity allows PESA to be used to compare various locations. In addition, link information within Wikipedia articles is used to compute prior probabilities of topics considering their dependencies. That is, it enables PESA to model the topic dependency. PESA was evaluated using eighteen locations in three distinct geographical categories and compare it with LDA and ESA. The experimental results that PESA outperformed LDA and ESA highlighting its superiority in location comparison.
Adverse Childhood Experiences Are Associated With Detrimental Hemodynamics and Elevated Circulating Endothelin-1 in Adolescents and Young Adults

Growing evidence suggests that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) increase the risks for coronary heart disease and hypertension in mid and late adulthood. We previously reported that early life stress induces a hyperreactive endothelin-dependent cardiovascular phenotype in a rat model. In the present study, we evaluated whether exposure to ACEs is associated with greater peripheral resistance, arterial stiffness, blood pressure, or elevated circulating endothelin-1 levels in humans. In 221 healthy adolescents and young adults (mean age, 21 years; range, 13–29 years), we found a graded association of ACE exposure with plasma endothelin-1 levels, of which on average 18% and 24% were higher in participants with 1 ACE and ≥2 ACEs, respectively, compared with those with no ACEs (P=0.001). Participants with moderate/severe exposure to ACEs (≥2 ACEs) had significantly higher total peripheral resistance index (+12%), diastolic blood pressure (+5%), and pulse wave velocity (+9%) compared with those who were not exposed. These associations were independent of age, race, sex, body mass index, and childhood socioeconomic status. Our results indicate that early life stress promotes cardiovascular disease risk, specifically detrimental vascular and cardiac function, detectable in young adulthood.
Evidence of Gene−Environment Interaction for Two Genes on Chromosome 4 and Environmental Tobacco Smoke in Controlling the Risk of Nonsyndromic Cleft Palate

Nonsyndromic cleft palate (CP) is one of the most common human birth defects and both genetic and environmental risk factors contribute to its etiology. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) using 550 CP case-parent trios ascertained in an international consortium. Stratified analysis among trios with different ancestries was performed to test for GxE interactions with common maternal exposures using conditional logistic regression models. While no single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) achieved genome-wide significance when considered alone, markers in SLC2A9 and the neighboring WDR1 on chromosome 4p16.1 gave suggestive evidence of gene-environment interaction with environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) among 259 Asian trios when the models included a term for GxE interaction. Multiple SNPs in these two genes were associated with increased risk of nonsyndromic CP if the mother was exposed to ETS during the peri-conceptual period (3 months prior to conception through the first trimester). When maternal ETS was considered, fifteen of 135 SNPs mapping to SLC2A9 and 9 of 59 SNPs in WDR1 gave P values approaching genome-wide significance (10−6<P<10−4) in a test for GxETS interaction. SNPs rs3733585 and rs12508991 in SLC2A9 yielded P = 2.26×10−7 in a test for GxETS interaction. SNPs rs6820756 and rs7699512 in WDR1 also yielded P = 1.79×10−7 and P = 1.98×10−7 in a 1 df test for GxE interaction. Although further replication studies are critical to confirming these findings, these results illustrate how genetic associations for nonsyndromic CP can be missed if potential GxE interaction is not taken into account, and this study suggest SLC2A9 and WDR1 should be considered as candidate genes for CP.
Automatic Detection of Microaneurysms and Classification of Diabetic Retinopathy Images using SVM Technique

At present, Diabetic Retinopathy was considered as the main cause of blindness for diabetic patients. The Diabetic Retinopathy can be identified at an earlier stage by detecting the microaneurysms in the retina of the patients. For this purpose, opthalmologists will regularly supervise the retinal images obtained using the color fundus camera. During this regular supervision the ophthalmologists should spend more amount of time and energy. The space required to store the normal and abnormal retinal images will also increases. A new method for detecting the microaneurysms from the color fundus retinal image based on feature classification was proposed in this project, to reduce the ophthalmologists’ time and energy for verifying the retinal images. The microaneurysms are detected from the color fundus image by applying the preprocessing techniques inorder to remove the optic disk and similar blood vessels using morphological operations. The preprocessed image was then used for feature extraction and these features were used for classification purpose. The classifier used is Support Vector Machine which improves sensitivity, specificity and gives an average accuracy of 90%.
Periodic structures in waveguides

We consider structures of period 2 spanning a two–dimensional waveguide of width 2N. Scattering problems, where Neumann conditions are imposed on the boundary of the structure and either Neumann or Dirichlet conditions are applied on the guide walls, are decomposed into N + 1 independent problems. The existence of at least N trapped modes is proved for the Neumann guide case, and for the Dirichlet case we prove that at least N − 1 such modes exist, this number increasing to N if a certain geometrical condition is satisfied.
Probabilistic Approach to Analysis of Death Traffic Accidents

The paper is devoted to analysis of data related to traffic accidents at one of the roads in Czech Republic. The data sets are available as discrete-valued variables providing results of traffic accident (with death or not) as well as conditions under which the accident has happened (weather, visibility, speed etc). Situation of a traffic accident is modeled within state-space framework. Estimation of accidents results is proposed with the help of Bayesian filtering based on determined probabilities.
Designing concurrent, distributed, and real-time applications with UML

Object-oriented concepts are crucial in software design because they address fundamental issues of adaptation and evolution. With the proliferation of object-oriented notations and methods, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) has emerged to provide a standardized notation for describing object-oriented models. However, for the UML notation to be effectively applied, it needs to be used with an object-oriented analysis and design method. This tutorial describes the COMET method for designing real-time and distributed applications, which integrates object-oriented and concurrency concepts and uses the UML notation.
Linking Hematopoietic Differentiation to Co-Expressed Sets of Pluripotency-Associated and Imprinted Genes and to Regulatory microRNA-Transcription Factor Motifs

Maintenance of cell pluripotency, differentiation, and reprogramming are regulated by complex gene regulatory networks (GRNs) including monoallelically-expressed imprinted genes. Besides transcriptional control, epigenetic modifications and microRNAs contribute to cellular differentiation. As a model system for studying the capacity of cells to preserve their pluripotency state and the onset of differentiation and subsequent specialization, murine hematopoiesis was used and compared to embryonic stem cells (ESCs) as a control. Using published microarray data, the expression profiles of two sets of genes, pluripotent and imprinted, were compared to a third set of known hematopoietic genes. We found that more than half of the pluripotent and imprinted genes are clearly upregulated in ESCs but subsequently repressed during hematopoiesis. The remaining genes were either upregulated in hematopoietic progenitors or in differentiated blood cells. The three gene sets each consist of three similarly behaving gene groups with similar expression profiles in various lineages of the hematopoietic system as well as in ESCs. To explain this co-regulation behavior, we explored the transcriptional and post-transcriptional mechanisms of pluripotent and imprinted genes and their regulator/target miRNAs in six different hematopoietic lineages. Therewith, lineage-specific transcription factor (TF)-miRNA regulatory networks were generated and their topologies and functional impacts during hematopoiesis were analyzed. This led to the identification of TF-miRNA co-regulatory motifs, for which we validated the contribution to the cellular development of the corresponding lineage in terms of statistical significance and relevance to biological evidence. This analysis also identified key miRNAs and TFs/genes that might play important roles in the derived lineage networks. These molecular associations suggest new aspects of the cellular regulation of the onset of cellular differentiation and during hematopoiesis involving, on one hand, pluripotent genes that were previously not discussed in the context of hematopoiesis and, on the other hand, involve genes that are related to genomic imprinting. These are new links between hematopoiesis and cellular differentiation and the important field of epigenetic modifications.