Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Competitive searching in a generalized street

We consider the problem of a robot which has to find a path in an unknown simple polygon from one point <italic>s</italic> to another point <italic>t</italic>, based only on what it has seen so far. A <italic>Street</italic> is a polygon for which the two boundary chains from <italic>s</italic> to <italic>t</italic> are mutually weakly visible, and the set of streets was the only class of polygons for which a competitive search algorithm was known. We define a new, strictly larger class of polygons, called <italic>generalized streets</italic> or <inline-equation> <f> <sc>G</sc></f> </inline-equation>-streets which are characterized by the property that every point on the boundary of a <inline-equation> <f> <sc>G</sc></f> </inline-equation>-street is visible from a point on a horizontal line segment connecting the two boundary chains from <italic>s</italic> to <italic>t</italic>. We present an on-line strategy for a robot placed at <italic>s</italic> to find <italic>t</italic> in an unknown rectilinear <inline-equation> <f> <sc>G</sc></f> </inline-equation>-street; the length of the path created is at most 9 times the length of the shortest path in the <italic>L</italic><subscrpt>1</subscrpt> metric. This is optimal since we show that no strategy can achieve a smaller competitive factor for all rectilinear <inline-equation> <f> <sc>G</sc></f> </inline-equation>-streets. Compared to the <italic>L</italic><subscrpt>2</subscrpt>-shortest path, the strategy is 9.06-competitive which leaves only a very small gap to the lower bound of 9.
Assisting elders via dynamic multi-tasks planning: a Markov decision processes based approach

This paper presents a novel planning approach to assist elders with memory deficit to carry out complex daily activities. The proposed planner uses Markov decision processes (MDPs) in dynamic multi-tasks planning to help memory-impaired elders achieving and finalising their activities of daily living (ADLs) already undertaken. The article also reports empirical results of the experimental validation and discusses distinctions between our approach and related works.
Onset of three-dimensional unsteady states in small-aspect-ratio Taylor–Couette flow

A numerical investigation of the onset of three-dimensional states in Taylor–Couette flow for aspect ratio one is presented. Two main branches exist, one preserving and the other breaking the reflection symmetry about the mid-plane. Both branches become three-dimensional via Hopf bifurcations to rotating waves with different azimuthal wavenumbers. Moreover, the symmetric branch exhibits secondary Hopf bifurcations and transitions to complex spatio-temporal dynamics at Reynolds numbers $\hbox{\it Re}\,{\sim}\,1000$. The analysis of the three-dimensional solutions shows that the dynamics is driven by the jet of angular momentum erupting from the inner cylinder boundary layer and its interactions with the sidewall and endwall layers. The various solutions are organized by a lattice of spatial and spatio-temporal symmetry subgroups which provides a framework for the relationships between the solution types and for the symmetry-breaking bifurcations. The results obtained agree with previous experimental results and help clarify many aspects of the mode competition at the higher $\hbox{\it Re}$ values.
Applying hierarchical graphs to pedestrian indoor navigation

In this paper we propose to apply hierarchical graphs to indoor navigation. The intended purpose is to guide humans in large public buildings and assist them in wayfinding. We start by formally defining hierarchical graphs and explaining the particular benefits of this approach. In the main part, we suggest an algorithm to automatically construct such a multi-level hierarchy from floor plans. The algorithm is guided by the idea to exploit domain-specific characteristics of indoor environments. Besides this, two particular problems are addressed: first, how to incorporate three-dimensional elements in the hierarchy, and second, the need for extending the hierarchy at complex geometrical regions with implicit decision points. An extended version of this paper is also available [1].
Human papilloma virus (HPV) molecular diagnostics

Abstract Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is becoming a menace worldwide, especially to the developing world, due to its involvement in a variety of malignancies, with cervical cancer being the most important and prevalent. There are many HPV types; HPV 16/18 are the most carcinogenic but few others are also characterized as high-risk (HR). They can cause a variety of low- or high-grade cellular abnormalities, most frequently detected in a routine Pap test. Most infections clear within 2 years, however, a minority persists and potentially could progress to cervical cancer. Molecular tests detecting HPV DNA, RNA or proteins are now being available either commercially or in-house developed. DNA detection is nowadays an established tool for diagnosis and monitoring of HPV-related disease, however, there is lack of a reference method and standardization with reference materials. The various available test formats create confusion on which molecular test to choose and what are its limitations. Therefore, the need for lab accreditation and participation in proficiency testing has to be stressed. Novel HPV biomarkers (RNA, protein etc.) are now intensively examined for their inclusion as adjunct tools. Recently, developed prophylactic vaccines for HPV 16/18 have already proven safe and efficient and raise high expectations for the complete eradication of these types in the future.
Characterization and computation of optimal distributions for channel coding

This paper concerns the structure of capacity-achieving input distributions for stochastic channel models, and a renewed look at their computational aspects. The following conclusions are obtained under general assumptions on the channel statistics. i) The capacity-achieving input distribution is binary for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The proof is obtained on comparing the optimization equations that determine channel capacity with a linear program over the space of probability measures. ii) Simple discrete approximations can nearly reach capacity even in cases where the optimal distribution is known to be absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure. iii) A new class of algorithms is introduced based on the cutting-plane method to iteratively construct discrete distributions, along with upper and lower bounds on channel capacity. It is shown that the bounds converge to the true channel capacity, and that the distributions converge weakly to a capacity-achieving distribution.
Computation of Q-factors of dielectric-loaded cylindrical cavity resonators

Based on the one-dimensional finite element method a general formulation is presented for the calculation of the conductor Q-factor, Q/sub c/, associated with metallic losses of cylindrical cavity resonators loaded axisymmetrically with dielectrics. The formulation is employed to accurately determine Q/sub c/ relating to the first few modes of the cylindrical cavity resonator loaded with a hollow cylindrical dielectric as well as to obtain Q/sub c/ relating to the fundamental mode (TE/sub 01 delta /) of the ring resonator on a microstrip substrate. >
Disorder in BaTiO3 and SrTiO3 and the “Ferroelectric” Transition in SrTi18O3

A quadrupole coupling induced 47Ti and 49Ti satellite background is observed in the cubic phases of BaTiO3, SrTiO3 and oxygen 18 enriched SrTi18O3. The satellite background demonstrates that all Ti ions are dynamically disordered between several off‐center sites. No splitting or broadening of the central Ti 1/2 → −1/2 NMR transitions is seen on going through the “ferroelectric” transition in SrTi18O3 at Tc = 25 K. It seems that in contrast to BaTiO3 the Ti disorder is still present.
The Ladder Rung Walking Task: A Scoring System and its Practical Application.

Progress in the development of animal models for/stroke, spinal cord injury, and other neurodegenerative disease requires tests of high sensitivity to elaborate distinct aspects of motor function and to determine even subtle loss of movement capacity. To enhance efficacy and resolution of testing, tests should permit qualitative and quantitative measures of motor function and be sensitive to changes in performance during recovery periods. The present study describes a new task to assess skilled walking in the rat to measure both forelimb and hindlimb function at the same time. Animals are required to walk along a horizontal ladder on which the spacing of the rungs is variable and is periodically changed. Changes in rung spacing prevent animals from learning the absolute and relative location of the rungs and so minimize the ability of the animals to compensate for impairments through learning. In addition, changing the spacing between the rungs allows the test to be used repeatedly in long-term studies. Methods are described for both quantitative and qualitative description of both fore- and hindlimb performance, including limb placing, stepping, co-ordination. Furthermore, use of compensatory strategies is indicated by missteps or compensatory steps in response to another limb’s misplacement.
Making Programming Masculine

In the April 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, sandwiched between “ The Bachelor Girls of Japan ” and “ A Dog Speaks: Why a Girl Should Own a Pooch, ” there appeared a curious little essay entitled simply “ The Computer Girls. ” As the article explained, these were the female “ computer programmers ” who taught the dazzling new “ miracle machines ” called computers “ what to do and how to do it. ” There were already more than 20,000 women working as computer programmers in the United States, argued the article ’ s author, Lois Mandel, and there was an immediate demand for 20,000 more. Not only could a talented “ computer girl ” command as much $20,000 a year, but the opportunities for women in computing were effectively “ unlimited. ” The rapid expansion of the computer industry meant that “ sex discrimination in hiring ” was unheard of, Mandel confi dently declared, and anyone with aptitude — male or female, college educated or not — could succeed in the fi eld. And not only were women in computing treated as equals, but they actually had many advantages over their male colleagues. Programming was “ just like planning a dinner, ” Mandel quoted the noted computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper as saying, “ You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it ’ s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘ naturals ’ at computer programming ” [1] . It would be easy to dismiss “ The Computer Girls ” as a fl uff piece, a half hearted attempt by Cosmopolitan to capitalize on contemporary interest in the computer revolution. To modern readers the very language of the “ computer girl ” appears condescending and sexist. The analogy between computer programming and recipe creation seems forced and superfi cial (see Fig. 8.3 ). At times the article descends into what seems almost a parody of formulaic Cosmopolitanism , such as when Sally Brown, “ a redhead from South Bend, Making Programming Masculine
A Study of the Effects of Processing Conditions on Mechanical Properties of Polypropylene/Multiwall Carbon Nanotube Nanocomposites Using Design of Experiments

This research work studies the effects of processing conditions on mechanical properties of polymer nanocomposites. Polypropylene (PP) nanocomposites reinforced with 0.5 and 2.5 %wt multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) were prepared via melt compounding and formed by injection molding. 2k Full Factorial design was used to plan the experiments and determine the influences of the processing conditions on mechanical properties and carbon nanotube dispersion in the nanocomposites. These conditions consist of five factors: (a) %wt content of MWCNTs (0.5 and 2.5 %wt), (b) barrel temperature (190 and 220°C), (c) injection velocity (25 and 45 mm/sec), (d) screw rotational speed (75 and 227 rpm) and (e) holding pressure (45 and 65 bar) while injection pressure and cooling time were set at 75 bar and 50 sec, respectively, for all conditions. The samples were examined by Young’s modulus and tensile strength using a Universal Testing Machine (UTM). In addition, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) was applied to study the dispersion of carbon nanotubes in the nanocomposites. The results showed that PP/MWCNT nanocomposites had Young’s modulus of 1,740 MPa and tensile strength of 34.5 MPa while original PP had 1,450 MPa and 28 MPa, respectively. Therefore, the mechanical properties were improved significantly with the content of MWCNTs. Full Factorial experiments investigate that significant factors are %wt, barrel temperature, injection velocity, and screw rotational speed. Moreover, SEM showed that a high content of MWCNTs led to a highly oriented skin layer with well-dispersed MWCNTs.
Effects of Calcium Channel Blockade on Renal Vascular Resistance Responses to Changes in Perfusion Pressure and Angiotensin‐Converting Enzyme Inhibition in Dogs

We conducted these experiments to evaluate the selectivity of calcium channel blockade on the renal autoregulatory mechanism and on angiotensin II-mediated renal vasoconstnction. Experiments were performed in anesthetized dogs in which renal arterial pressure, renal blood flow, and glomerular filtration rate were measured at normal and reduced renal arterial pressure At control arterial pressures, renal arterial infusions of verapamil increased renal blood flow and glomerular filtration rate significantly The decreases in renal vascular resistance elicited with verapamil (n = 13) and nifedipine (n = 4) occurred only at renal arterial pressure levels within the normal autoregulatory range. Renal blood flow autoregulatory efficiency was markedly attenuated, and the pressure-flow relationship obtained during calcium channel blockade approached that of a passive system Systemic infusions of an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor (captopnl) during continued verapamil infusion caused further vasodilation at all renal arterial pressure values, as evidenced by an increase in slope of 27% of the pressure-blood flow relationship. This response was reversed by angiotensin II infusions. This shift indicates a reduction in minimal vascular resistance elicited by captopril, not obtainable with verapamil alone, and sensitive to angiotensin II. The effects of verapamil and nifedipine on renal blood flow autoregulation suggest a specific effect at preglomerular sites of potential operated membrane calcium channels in the autoregulatory phenomenon. The additional vasodilation elicited with captopril and reversed by angiotensin II indicates the presence of an angiotensin-sensitive postglomerular resistance component which is not influenced by calcium entry blockers
Comparative study of page-based and segment-based software DSM through compiler optimization

The experimental results clearly show that the performance of ADSM scheme is limited by the communication of unnecessary data, while that of the UDSM scheme is limited by the instrumentation overhead. The UDSM scheme reduces transmission of unnecessary data and automatically prevents the severe false sharing at fetch-on-write, which is the problem in the page-based scheme.
[Psychobiology of the emotions].

Feel lonely? What about reading books? Book is one of the greatest friends to accompany while in your lonely time. When you have no friends and activities somewhere and sometimes, reading book can be a great choice. This is not only for spending the time, it will increase the knowledge. Of course the b=benefits to take will relate to what kind of book that you are reading. And now, we will concern you to try reading the psychobiology of emotions as one of the reading material to finish quickly.
Plasticity between MyoC- and MyoA-Glideosomes: An Example of Functional Compensation in Toxoplasma gondii Invasion

The glideosome is an actomyosin-based machinery that powers motility in Apicomplexa and participates in host cell invasion and egress from infected cells. The central component of the glideosome, myosin A (MyoA), is a motor recruited at the pellicle by the acylated gliding-associated protein GAP45. In Toxoplasma gondii, GAP45 also contributes to the cohesion of the pellicle, composed of the inner membrane complex (IMC) and the plasma membrane, during motor traction. GAP70 was previously identified as a paralog of GAP45 that is tailored to recruit MyoA at the apical cap in the coccidian subgroup of the Apicomplexa. A third member of this family, GAP80, is demonstrated here to assemble a new glideosome, which recruits the class XIV myosin C (MyoC) at the basal polar ring. MyoC shares the same myosin light chains as MyoA and also interacts with the integral IMC proteins GAP50 and GAP40. Moreover, a central component of this complex, the IMC-associated protein 1 (IAP1), acts as the key determinant for the restricted localization of MyoC to the posterior pole. Deletion of specific components of the MyoC-glideosome underscores the installation of compensatory mechanisms with components of the MyoA-glideosome. Conversely, removal of MyoA leads to the relocalization of MyoC along the pellicle and at the apical cap that accounts for residual invasion. The two glideosomes exhibit a considerable level of plasticity to ensure parasite survival.
Author's Personal Copy Theoretical Computer Science Evolutionary Equilibrium in Bayesian Routing Games: Specialization and Niche Formation

In this paper we consider Nash equilibria for the selfish task allocation game proposed in Koutsoupias, Papadimitriou (1999) [26], where a set of n users with unsplittable tasks of different size try to access m parallel links with different speeds. In this game, a player can use a mixed strategy (where he uses different links with a positive probability); then he is indifferent between the different link choices. This means that the player may well deviate to a different strategy over time. We propose the concept of evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) as a criterion for stable Nash equilibria, i.e. equilibria where no player is likely to deviate from his strategy. An ESS is a steady state that can be reached by a user community via evolutionary processes in which more successful strategies spread over time. The concept has been used widely in biology and economics to analyze the dynamics of strategic interactions. We first define a symmetric version of a Bayesian parallel links game where every player is not assigned a task of a fixed size but instead is assigned a task drawn from a distribution, which is the same for all players. We establish that the ESS is uniquely determined for a given symmetric Bayesian parallel links game (when it exists). Thus evolutionary stability places strong constraints on the assignment of tasks to links. We characterize ESS for the Bayesian parallel links game, and investigate the structure of evolutionarily stable equilibria: In an ESS, links acquire niches, meaning that there is minimal overlap in the tasks served by different links. Furthermore, all links with the same speed are interchangeable for every task with weight w: Every player must place a task with weight w on links having the same speed with the same probability. Also, bigger tasks must be assigned to faster links and faster links must have a bigger load. Finally, we introduce a clustering condition – roughly, distinct links must serve distinct tasks – that is sufficient for evolutionary stability, and can be used to find an ESS in many models. Published by Elsevier B.V.
Dendritic Polymers with a Core−Multishell Architecture: A Versatile Tool for the Stabilization of Nanoparticles

A core−multishell architecture based on a hyperbranched PEI core surrounded by a double layered shell of alkyl hydrophobic groups linked to a PEO chain was successfully used as stabilizer for the formation and the stabilization for hydrophilic and hydrophobic gold nanoparticles in a wide range of solvents.
Beyond linear chain: a journey through conditional random fields for information extraction from text

Information Extraction (IE) is a field at the crossroads of IR and NLP that studies methods for extracting information from text in such a way that this information can be used to populate a structured information repository. The main methods by means of which IE has been tackled rely on supervised learning;the best-performing such methods belong to the class of probabilistic graphical models, and, in particular, to the class of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). In this thesis we investigate two major aspects related to textual IE via CRFs: (a) the creation of CRFs models that can outperform the commonly adopted linear- chain CRFs, and the creation of methods for ensuring the quality of training data and for assessing the impact of training data quality on the accuracy of CRFs systems for IE. We start by facing the task of IE from medical documents written in the Italian language. We propose two novel approaches: (i) a cascaded, two-stage method composed by two layers of CRFs, and (ii) a confidence-weighted ensemble method that combines standard linear-chain CRFs and the proposed two-stage method. Both the proposed models are shown to outperform a standard linear-chain CRFs system. We then investigate aspect-oriented sentence-level opinion mining from product reviews, that consists in predicting, for all sentences in the review, whether the sentence expresses a positive, neutral, or negative opinion (or no opinion at all) about a specific aspect of the product. We propose a set of increasingly powerful models based on CRFs, including a hierarchical multi-label CRFs scheme that jointly models the overall opinion expressed in a product review and the set of aspect-specific opinions expressed in each of its sentences. The proposed CRFs models are shown to obtain better results than linear-chain CRFs. We then study the impact that the quality of training data has on the accuracy of an IE system via experiments performed on a dataset in which inter-coder agreement data are available. Finally, we investigate active learning techniques for a type of semi-supervised CRFs specifically devised for partially labeled sequences. We show that margin-based strategies always obtain the best results on the four tasks we have tested them on.
Multi-view Matrix Factorization for Linear Dynamical System Estimation

We consider maximum likelihood estimation of linear dynamical systems with generalized-linear observation models. Maximum likelihood is typically considered to be hard in this setting since latent states and transition parameters must be inferred jointly. Given that expectation-maximization does not scale and is prone to local minima, moment-matching approaches from the subspace identification literature have become standard, despite known statistical efficiency issues. In this paper, we instead reconsider likelihood maximization and develop an optimization based strategy for recovering the latent states and transition parameters. Key to the approach is a two-view reformulation of maximum likelihood estimation for linear dynamical systems that enables the use of global optimization algorithms for matrix factorization. We show that the proposed estimation strategy outperforms widely-used identification algorithms such as subspace identification methods, both in terms of accuracy and runtime.