Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sample-efficient Policy Optimization with Stein Control Variate

Policy gradient methods have achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. However, it still often suffers from the large variance issue on policy gradient estimation, which leads to poor sample efficiency during training. In this work, we propose a control variate method to effectively reduce variance for policy gradient methods. Motivated by the Stein's identity, our method extends the previous control variate methods used in REINFORCE and advantage actor-critic by introducing more general action-dependent baseline functions. Empirical studies show that our method significantly improves the sample efficiency of the state-of-the-art policy gradient approaches.
Cross-Layer Based MAC FEC Solution for IEEE 802.11a Links in Fading Channels

WLANs, due to the characteristics of the wireless medium, exhibit time and location dependent features. The ability to adapt to such conditions and enable optimal behavior is a key issue in future generation heterogeneous networks where WLANs are envisioned as an integral part. This paper uses a recently derived analytical model of the throughput performance of non-saturated contending IEEE 802.11a systems under fading conditions which is extended in order to define a novel, cross-layer based, throughput improvement MAC FEC scheme for IEEE 802.11a links.
Improving LSA-based Summarization with Anaphora Resolution

We propose an approach to summarization exploiting both lexical information and the output of an automatic anaphoric resolver, and using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to identify the main terms. We demonstrate that adding anaphoric information results in significant performance improvements over a previously developed system, in which only lexical terms are used as the input to SVD. However, we also show that how anaphoric information is used is crucial: whereas using this information to add new terms does result in improved performance, simple substitution makes the performance worse.
MEK5 and ERK5 are localized in the nuclei of resting as well as stimulated cells, while MEKK2 translocates from the cytosol to the nucleus upon stimulation

The ERK5 signaling cascade acts through sequential activation of MEKK2/3, MEK5 and ERK5 and transmits signals to a variety of stress and mitogenic related targets. In this study we examined the subcellular localization of the components of the ERK5 cascade and found that in resting, as well as in EGF-stimulated HeLa and Rat-1 cells, endogenous ERK5 is localized mainly in the nucleus. This location is different from the previously described location of exogenous ERK5, in the cytosol of resting cells, which is confirmed in this study. The reason for the different localization could be a saturation of anchoring moieties by the endogenous ERK5. Indeed, in situ detergent extraction analysis using Nonidet P-40, revealed that ERK5 is bound to detergent resistant moieties in the nucleus, while the exogenous protein fails to interact with those anchors. The upstream activator MEK5 is also localized in the nucleus both before and after EGF stimulation and is resistant to NP-40 extraction in resting cells. ERK5 remains bound to these nuclear moieties even after stimulation, while MEK5 is detached from the anchors but remains localized in the nucleus. Unlike ERK5 and MEK5, their upstream activator MEKK2 is localized mainly in the cytosol of resting cells, and translocates into the nucleus upon EGF stimulation, allowing transmission of signals to the nuclear MEK5. The nuclear localization of MEK5 and ERK5 is different from that of ERK1/2 and MEK1/2 in resting cells, indicating that each MAPK cascade uses distinct mechanisms to transmit extracellular signals to their nuclear targets.
A Systematic Review of Technology-Based Dietary Intake Assessment Validation Studies That Include Carotenoid Biomarkers

Technological advances have allowed for the evolution of traditional dietary assessment methods. The aim of this review is to evaluate the accuracy of technology-based dietary assessment methods to determine carotenoid and/or fruit and vegetable intake when compared with carotenoid biomarkers. An online search strategy was undertaken to identify studies published in the English language up to July 2016. Inclusion criteria were adults ≥18 years, a measure of dietary intake that used information and communication technologies that specified fruit and/or vegetable intake or dietary carotenoid, a biomarker of carotenoid status and the association between the two. Sixteen articles from 13 studies were included with the majority cross-sectional in design (n = 9). Some studies used multiple dietary assessment methods with the most common: food records (n = 7), 24-h diet recalls (n = 5), food frequency questionnaires (n = 3) and diet quality assessed by dietary screener (n = 1). Two studies were directly web based, with four studies using technology that could be completed offline and data later transferred. Two studies utilised technology in the collection of dietary data, while the majority (n = 11) automated the collection in combination with nutrient analysis of the dietary data. Four studies provided correlation values between dietary carotenoids with biomarkers, ranging from r = 0.13 to 0.62 with the remaining studies comparing a measure of fruit and vegetable intake with biomarkers (r = 0.09 to 0.25). This review provides an overview of technology-based dietary assessment methods that have been used in validation studies with objectively measured carotenoids. Findings were positive with these dietary assessment measures showing mostly moderate associations with carotenoid biomarkers.
Saccadic Momentum and Facilitation of Return Saccades Contribute to an Optimal Foraging Strategy

The interest in saccadic IOR is funneled by the hypothesis that it serves a clear functional purpose in the selection of fixation points: the facilitation of foraging. In this study, we arrive at a different interpretation of saccadic IOR. First, we find that return saccades are performed much more often than expected from the statistical properties of saccades and saccade pairs. Second, we find that fixation durations before a saccade are modulated by the relative angle of the saccade, but return saccades show no sign of an additional temporal inhibition. Thus, we do not find temporal saccadic inhibition of return. Interestingly, we find that return locations are more salient, according to empirically measured saliency (locations that are fixated by many observers) as well as stimulus dependent saliency (defined by image features), than regular fixation locations. These results and the finding that return saccades increase the match of individual trajectories with a grand total priority map evidences the return saccades being part of a fixation selection strategy that trades off exploration and exploitation.
Telex: Principled System Support for Write-Sharing in Collaborative Applications

The Telex system is designed for sharing mutable data in a distributed environment, particularly for collaborative applications. Users operate on their local, persistent replica of shared documents; they can work disconnected and suffer no network latency. The Telex approach to detect and correct conflicts is application independent, based on an action-constraint graph (ACG) that summarises the concurrency semantics of applications. The ACG is stored efficiently in a multilog structure that eliminates contention and is optimised for locality. Telex supports multiple applications and multi-document updates. The Telex system clearly separates system logic (which includes replication, views, undo, security, consistency, conflicts, and commitment) from application logic. An example application is a shared calendar for managing multi-user meetings; the system detects meeting conflicts and resolves them consistently.
Speech and Language Technology in Education ( SLaTE 2009 ) Evaluating Diglossic Aspects of an Automated Test of Spoken Modern Standard Arabic

A fully automatic test of facility with spoken Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) was developed and evaluated. The paper notes the diglossic situation of MSA (where colloquial and formal languages are quite distinct), and presents the structure and scoring of the test. Evaluation of the reliability and validity of the test is described, with added analyses that compare not just learners and native speakers, but also educated and uneducated speakers of the formal dialect. Results suggest scores from this commercial test are suitable in selecting MSA speakers.
Belgium Al 2 O 3 / SiNx-Stacks at Increased Temperatures : Avoiding Blistering During Contact Firing

We investigate the passivation stability and blister formation during firing at 800°C of an Al2O3/SiNx stack deposited on p-type float zone silicon at different Al2O3 deposition set temperatures ranging from 170°C to 400°C. The actual wafer temperatures during Al2O3 deposition in the FlexAL reactor are determined using spectroscopic ellipsometry. After the firing step blistering can be observed for stacks featuring 15 nm thick Al2O3 layers grown at 170°C set temperature. We show that the deposition of the layer at higher set temperatures of 250°C, 300°C and 400°C reduces blister formation significantly. After firing, stacks with 15 nm thick Al2O3 layers deposited at set temperatures of 250°C and 300°C show the best passivation resulting in effective surface recombination velocities below 5 cm/s without significant blister formation. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the SiliconPV 2012 conference
Materialism: the road to happiness and life satisfaction among Singaporeans

Overseas research studies suggest that shopping can be utilised to establish individual identity and accord social recognition. In Singapore, shopping, an activity associated with materialism, is called a national pastime. Yet, only a handful of research studies have deliberated the roles of happiness and materialism in achieving life satisfaction compared to countries in the west. This study investigated whether materialism and happiness aid life satisfaction in Singapore. A New Materialism Scale was utilised to conduct a more holistic understanding of materialism, as scales utilised in earlier studies have not successfully explained consumer behaviour in recent years. For this study, 128 Singaporean undergraduates (69.5% female; 30.5% male) with a mean age of 21.82 years (SD= 2.17; age range 18-30), enrolled in the Psychology and Business programs at James Cook University, Singapore, were recruited. Results suggest that students between 18 and 30 relate material distinctiveness positively to life satisfaction; male respondents are as equally materialistic as female respondents; material success is most associated with Chinese students; material distinctiveness is linked to Indian students, while happiness levels moderate materialism levels and life satisfaction. An important implication of this study is the finding that there exists more to materialism in relation to life satisfaction and happiness among Singaporeans.
EDEX: Entity Preserving Data Exchange

Data Exchange creates an instance of a target schema from an instance of a source such that source data is reflected in the target instance. The prevailing approach for data exchange is based on generating and using schema mapping expressions representing high level relations between source and target. We show such class level schema mappings cannot resolve some ambiguous cases. We propose an Entity Preserving Data Exchange (EDEX) method that reflects source entities in the target independent of classification of entities. We show EDEX can reconcile such ambiguities while generates a core solution as an efficient solution.
The Tropos Metodology and its Metamodel ITC-irst

Troposis an Agent-Oriented software development methodology tha t supports the software development process from the early requirements phase to the implementa tion. Here we introduce and discuss the Troposmetamodel, based on knowledge level concepts such as those of actor, goa l, plan, resource and social dependency, then we present TAOM4E, a modelling environment that supports the designer during theTroposmodelling activities. Copyright c © 2006 ITC-irst Document Identifier Deliverable D1.1 Project MIUR-FIRB project RBNE0195K5 “Knowledge Level Automated Software Engineering” Version v1.0 Date October 31, 2006 State Final Distribution Public Acknowledgements. This document is part of a research project funded by the FIRB 2001 Programme of the “Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca” as project nu mber RBNE0195K5. The partners in this project are: Istituto Trentino di Cultu ra (Coordinator), Università degli Studi di Trento, Università degli Studi di Genova, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”, DeltaDator S.p.A.
Arabidopsis L10 ribosomal proteins in UV-B responses

Ribosomal protein L10 (RPL10) is an ubiquitous protein that participates in joining the 40S and 60S ribosomal subunits into a functional 80S ribosome; however, increasing evidences indicate that RPL10 from various organisms has multiple extra ribosomal functions, besides being a constituent of ribosome and its role in translation. Arabidopsis thaliana contains in its genome three genes encoding RPL10, named RPL10A, RPL10B and RPL10C. Previously, we found that in maize and in A. thaliana, UV-B induces a reduction in protein biosynthesis, probably as a consequence of ribosomal damage; however, cellular recovery occurs in the absence of UV-B. Here, we show that RPL10s are differentially regulated by UV-B in a dosage and time dependent manner: RPL10C is induced, RPL10B is down regulated at high UV-B intensity, and RPL10A is not UV-B regulated. In addition, by coimmunoprecipitation studies using RPL10 antibodies and proteins from control and UV-B irradiated Arabidopsis plants, we demonstrate that RPL10 associates with different proteins under the two different conditions, including nuclear proteins, suggesting that at least one isoform may have extra-ribosomal roles.
Robust beamforming in cognitive radio

This letter considers the multi-antenna cognitive radio (CR) network, which has a single secondary user (SU) and coexists with a primary network of multiple users. Our objective is to maximize the service probability of the SU, subject to the interference constraints on the primary users (PUs) in the form of probability. Exploiting imperfect channel state information (CSI), with its error modeled by added Gaussian noise, we address the optimization for the beamforming weights at the secondary transmitter. In particular, this letter devises an iterative algorithm that can efficiently obtain the robust optimal beamforming solution. For the case with one PU, we show that a much simpler algorithm based on a closed-form solution for the antenna weights of a given power can be presented. Numerical results reveal that the optimal solution for the constructed problem provides an effective means to tradeoff the performance between the PUs and the SU, bridging the non-robust and worst-case based systems.
HUMAN PERSONALITY

that all the energy at man's disposal--coal, oil, lignite, peat, firewood and the muscles of working animals and of man himself-is derived from the photosynthesis of plants storing incident solar energy. Now photosynthesis by plants represents only about one-thousandth of the total radiant energy intercepted by the land surface in the growing season. How can man's inventive genius catch and store solar energy for his needs? Many have suggested direct transffirmation into electric energy, but the author is confident that a tremendous revolution awaits artificial photosynthesis yielding substances of high potential chemical energy. Once that has been accomplished man will be free from the thraldom of the green plant, and agriculture with its exacting demands may become extinct! The temptation is strong to quote extensively from this stimulating work, but considerations of space prescribe limits. The chapter "Embryos and Energy" reveals some extraordinary problems. What is the teleological significance of the rtotous expenditure of energy by the yeast plant and the bacillus of lactic fermentation? "The bacillus (lactic) is able to destroy from 178 to 14,980 times its own weight of lactose per hour. " The author naturally describes this as a very wasteful process. On the other hand, the transformation of the components of an egg into the muscles. glands, nerves, viscera, bones and feathers of the chick seems to take place without any detectable absorption of energy-a strange and fascinating problem. When dealing with growth-promoting substances, the author presents some remarkable results of experiments, including his own. When plants are emasculated by taking away the anthers before these are mature and when visiting pollen is prevented. growth-regulating substances, such as indol acetic or naphthalene acetic acids, applied to the stigma, produce a fully formed fruit devoid of seed. By the use of fluorescein the author obtained a number of seedless fruits Including several Cucurbltacere. This is a book not only to be read but to be owned.
Overexpression of Dyrk1A Causes the Defects in Synaptic Vesicle Endocytosis

Trisomy 21-linked Dyrk1A (dual-specificity tyrosine phosphorylation-regulated kinase 1A) overexpression is implicated in pathogenic mechanisms underlying mental retardation in Down syndrome (DS). It is known to phosphorylate multiple substrates including endocytic proteins in vitro, but the functional consequence of Dyrk1A-mediated phosphorylation on endocytosis has never been investigated. Here, we show that overexpression of Dyrk1A causes defects in clathrin-mediated endocytosis and specifically, in the recruitment of endocytic proteins to clathrin-coated pits in fibroblasts. Synaptic vesicle endocytosis also significantly slowed down as a result of Dyrk1A overexpression in cultured hippocampal neurons. These effects are dependent on Dyrk1A kinase activity. The inhibitory effect of Dyrk1A on synaptic vesicle endocytosis was confirmed in neuronal cultures derived from transgenic mice overexpressing Dyrk1A at levels found in DS. Pharmacological blockade of Dyrk1A with epigallocatechin gallate rescued the endocytic phenotypes found in transgenic neurons. Together, our results suggest that aberrant Dyrk1A-mediated phosphorylation of the endocytic machinery perturbs synaptic vesicle endocytosis, which may contribute to synaptic dysfunctions and cognitive deficits associated with DS.
Cartesian task allocation for cooperative, multilateral teleoperation under time delay

Field robots used in unstructured and dynamic environments - and teleoperation have shifted into the focus of a variety of industrial branches in the past few years. The lack of space in the atomic industry, on oil platforms and in space applications demands additional adaptations to current robotic setups. In this paper a MMSS (Multi-Master-Single-Slave) haptic teleoperation system is proposed through which one operator using two master arms can manipulate objects in a cooperative way via one slave robot and a virtual gripping point. To ease the execution of a peg-in-hole task of big objects, a task allocation in the cartesian frame of the virtual gripping point is introduced additionally. The stability of this multilateral system with time delay is guaranteed by the Time Domain Passivity Approach. Therefore the system is divided into several modular subsystems which renders the system easily adaptable to other scenarios.
From Videos to Verbs: Mining Videos for Activities using a Cascade of Dynamical Systems

Clustering video sequences in order to infer and extract activities from a single video stream is an extremely important problem and has significant potential in video indexing, surveillance, activity discovery and event recognition. Clustering a video sequence into activities requires one to simultaneously recognize activity boundaries (activity consistent subsequences) and cluster these activity subsequences. In order to do this, we build a generative model for activities (in video) using a cascade of dynamical systems and show that this model is able to capture and represent a diverse class of activities. We then derive algorithms to learn the model parameters from a video stream and also show how a single video sequence may be clustered into different clusters where each cluster represents an activity. We also propose a novel technique to build affine, view, rate invariance of the activity into the distance metric for clustering. Experiments show that the clusters found by the algorithm correspond to semantically meaningful activities.
VHDL-based design and design methodology for reusable high performance direct digital requency synthesizers

Design methodologies for high performance Direct Digital Fre-quen--cy Synthesizers (DDFS) are described. Traditional look-up tab-les (LUT) for sine and co-sine are merged with CORDIC-inter-po---la--tion into a hybrid architecture. This implements DDFS-sys-tems with high resolution without being specific to a particular tar-get technology. Amplitude constants were obtained from ma-the-matical trigonometric functions of the IEEE math_real pack-age. These constants were then written via simulation of a VHDL model into a fully synthesizable package. Systematic and detailed studies varying the synthesizers inherent parameters lead to a design optimum of the LUT/CORDIC-ra-tio, which mini-mizes power and silicon area for a given clock frequency.
A NOVEL MULTI-LEVEL BASED CROSS DEFECT PREDICTION MODEL FOR MULTIPLE SOFTWARE DEFECT DATABASES

In recent decades, as the size of the software products increases, the prediction of software metrics also increasing exponentially. The main objective of the quality software product is to significantly detect the software defects with minimum time and cost. It aims to make a meaningful impact on memory space and cost. A realistic assessment of metrics has significance importance in the prediction of software defects. Traditional software detection models are implemented in order to assess the metrics in the source code level. Neural Network (NN), SVM, Naïve bayes , logistic regression approaches as well as statistical approaches are used to assess the software metrics for defect prediction. These models are implemented to classify and cluster the software metrics in different software databases. Also, these approaches are used to enhancing the software quality to a great extent. Most of the traditional software defect prediction models are focused on Within-Company Defects Prediction (WCDP). One of the major limitations is that, lack of training information in the early phases of software testing process. Thus, the proposed feature selection based prediction model is used to assess the Cross-Company Defects Prediction (CCDP) on multiple defect databases. Proposed clustering based defect prediction model is used to group the new defects in the cross company defects for defect prediction. Experimental results proved that the proposed model has high computational accuracy compared to the existing software defect prediction models in terms of time and memory is concerned.