Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An optimal solution to the linear search problem for a robot with dynamics

In this paper we derive the control policy that minimizes the total expected time for a point mass with bounded acceleration, starting from the origin at rest, to find and return to an unknown target that is distributed uniformly on the unit interval. We apply our result to proof-of-concept hardware experiments with a planar robot arm searching for a metal object using an inductive proximity sensor. In particular, we show that our approach easily extends to optimal search along arbitrary curves, such as raster-scan patterns that might be useful in other applications like robot search-and-rescue.
Ergonomic Assessment Methods for the Evaluation of Hand Held Industrial Products:A Review

In the segment of industrial products, hand held products occupy a major section. An important issue in design of these products is to identify the factors that lead to human comfort and those leading to discomfort. The aim of this paper is to discuss some approaches for product evaluation and to discuss their significance in designing better products. Usability testing is increasingly being realized as an important tool for evaluating products. Comfort and discomfort assessment has been a topic of major concern when comparing and evaluating products. The understanding of the two terms in the context of product evaluation and the methods for evaluating comfort and discomfort experience have also been discussed. The work reviewed provides a solid foundation on which any future research for product development and assessment can be performed and analyzed.
tDCS of the Cerebellum: Where Do We Stand in 2016? Technical Issues and Critical Review of the Literature

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) is an up-and-coming electrical neurostimulation technique increasingly used both in healthy subjects and in selected groups of patients. Due to the high density of neurons in the cerebellum, its peculiar anatomical organization with the cortex lying superficially below the skull and its diffuse connections with motor and associative areas of the cerebrum, the cerebellum is becoming a major target for neuromodulation of the cerebellocerebral networks. We discuss the recent studies based on cerebellar tDCS with a focus on the numerous technical and open issues which remain to be solved. Our current knowledge of the physiological impacts of tDCS on cerebellar circuitry is criticized. We provide a comparison with transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS), another promising transcranial electrical neurostimulation technique. Although both tDCS and tACS are becoming established techniques to modulate the cerebellocerebral networks, it is surprising that their impacts on cerebellar disorders remains unclear. A major reason is that the literature lacks large trials with a double-blind, sham-controlled, and cross-over experimental design in cerebellar patients.
Managing breaches of containment and eradication of invasive plant populations

Containment can be a viable strategy for managing invasive plants, but it is not always cheaper than eradication. In many cases, converting a failed eradication programme to a containment programme is not economically justified. Despite this, many contemporary invasive plant management strategies invoke containment as a fallback for failed eradication, often without detailing how containment would be implemented. We demonstrate a generalized analysis of the costs of eradication and containment, applicable to any plant invasion for which infestation size, dispersal distance, seed bank lifetime and the economic discount rate are specified. We estimate the costs of adapting eradication and containment in response to six types of breach and calculate under what conditions containment may provide a valid fallback to a breached eradication programme. We provide simple, general formulae and plots that can be applied to any invasion and show that containment will be cheaper than eradication only when the size of the occupied zone exceeds a multiple of the dispersal distance determined by seed bank longevity and the discount rate. Containment becomes proportionally cheaper than eradication for invaders with smaller dispersal distances, longer lived seed banks, or for larger discount rates. Both containment and eradication programmes are at risk of breach. Containment is less exposed to risk from reproduction in the ‘occupied zone’ and three types of breach that lead to a larger ‘occupied zone’, but more exposed to one type of breach that leads to a larger ‘buffer zone’. For a well-specified eradication programme, only the three types of breach leading to reproduction in or just outside the buffer zone can justify falling back to containment, and only if the expected costs of eradication and containment were comparable before the breach. Synthesis and applications. Weed management plans must apply a consistent definition of containment and provide sufficient implementation detail to assess its feasibility. If the infestation extent, dispersal capacity, seed bank longevity and economic discount rate are specified, the general results presented here can be used to assess whether containment can outperform eradication, and under what conditions it would provide a valid fallback to a breached eradication programme.
INTER:D: a drum sound equalizer for controlling volume and timbre of drums

A drum sound equalizer, called INTER:D, is described that enables a listener to control the volume and timbre of bass and snare drum sounds in commercial compact-disc recordings. Although the characteristics of the drum sounds are often closely related to the impression made by a musical piece, conventional graphic equalizers cannot adjust their characteristics because they have volume sliders only for the frequency bands. INTER:D provides drum-specific volume sliders that directly control the frequency components of drum sounds, enabling a listener to intuitively cut or boost the volume of each drum. In addition, INTER:D enables a listener to replace the original timbre of each drum with another timbre selected from a drop-down list. These interactive functions are achieved using an automatic music content analysis system based on low-level audio signal processing. This system can estimate the power spectrogram of each drum sound and detect the onset times in a musical piece. Subjective experiments showed that INTER:D can add a new dimension to the way users experience music.
A probabilistic graphical model approach for human activity recognition using skeleton data

In this paper we introduce a general probabilistic graphical model for human everyday activity recognition. The proposed model is a discriminative graphical model with hidden variables for modeling body pose and sequential order of them. We use a unified framework for prediction task that is faster and more efficient than structured support vector machine and hidden conditional random fields. We have trained and tested the model on RGB-D videos and the result was comparable to the state of the art.
Characterization of the twitter @replies network: are user ties social or topical?

In recent years, social media services have become a global phenomenon on the Internet. The popularity of these services provides an opportunity to study the characteristics of online social networks and the communities that emerge in them. This paper presents an analysis of the users' interactions in the implicit network derived from tweet replies of a specific dataset obtained from a popular micro-blogging service, Twitter. We analyze the influence of the topics of the tweet messages on the interaction among users, to determine if the social aspect prevails over the topic in the moment of interaction. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to investigate if people selectively choose whom to reply to based on the topic or, otherwise, if they reply to anyone about anything. We found that the social aspect predominantly conditions users' interactions. For users with larger and denser ego-centric networks, we observed a slight tendency for separating their connections depending on the topics discussed.
Improving AGV systems: Integration of advanced sensing and control technologies

This paper focuses on the integration of advanced sensing and control technologies into advanced systems of multiple Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). In particular, we focus on the key technologies developed within the Plug-and-Navigate Robots (PAN-Robots) project, highlighting how those results contribute to improving the performance of AGV systems.
Are evolutionary algorithm competitions characterizing landscapes appropriately

Currently, researchers in the field of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are very interested in competitions where new algorithm implementations are evaluated and compared. Usually, EA users perform their algorithm selection by following the results published in these competitions, which are typically focused on average performance measures over benchmark sets. These sets are very complete but the functions within them are usually classified into binary classes according to their separability and modality. Here we show that this binary classification could produce misleading conclusions about the performance of the EAs and, consequently, it is necessary to consider finer grained features so that better conclusions can be obtained about what scenarios are adequate or inappropriate for an EA. In particular, new elements are presented to study separability and modality in more detail than is usually done in the literature. The need for such detail in order to understand why things happen the way they do is made evident over three different EAs.
Genetic improvement of Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) - present and future.

We mainly (but not exclusively) draw upon research and development work carried out by The WorldFish Center (WorldFish). We review the current state of development of selection programs that have had a main focus on growth rate and body traits. There is evidence of sustained gains of 10 to 15 per cent per generation over more than six generation. To date, these gains have not been accompanied by any undesirable correlated response. The prospects for altering sexual dimorphism and the shape of the fish appear to be very limited, however. We also examine the issue of the appropriate environment for selection. Not surprisingly, experimental evidence on genotype by environment interaction suggests that this is more likely to be of importance when the environments in question are markedly dissimilar. We argue that no universal guidelines can be prescribed regarding the need for more than one selection program to cope with different production environments, but that instead, each case should be examined in its own right. Finally, we discuss traits likely to be candidates for inclusion in future, more elaborate, breeding objectives for Nile tilapia, and comment on selection methods that may be implemented in the future.
Variability in the Geotechnical properties of some residual clay soils from southwestern Nigeria

Abs tract— Some residual clay soils from southwestern Nigeria have been investigated with a view to elucidating their geotechnical properties and determine the possible variations in these properties in relation to the sampling distance. Eight bulk residual soil samples from two test pits separated 30m apart at intervals of 0.5m up to a depth of 2.0m were analyzed in the laboratory to determine specific gravity, grain size distribution, consistency limits, linear shrinkage, unconfined compressive strength and compaction characteristics. The data generated were subsequently subjected to statistical analysis. The investigations revealed that the soils are generally well graded, inorganic, with medium to high plasticity and hence compressibility and are of the same geologic origin. Statistical T-test showed no significant difference exists between the soils in terms of specific gravity, liquid limit, plastic limit, plasticity index, linear shrinkage, % clay size fraction, amount of fines, unconfined compressive strength and optimum moisture content. However the maximum dry density of the soils from both pits differed significantly. Although most of the parameters examined are not as varied and showed insignificant difference, the equations generated provide an option in the estimation of properties considering the close sampling distance.
An Integrated Handover Scheme for Fast Mobile IPv6 Over IEEE 802.16e Systems

The IEEE 802.16e system supporting mobility on fixed wireless-MAN systems is supposed to be a mobile broadband wireless access (BWA) and evolve into 4G mobile communication systems. Although the system already defines its own mobility management algorithm, a network layer handover algorithm should be defined to support the mobility of mobile stations in the Internet. There are many active researches on how to apply the L3 handover protocol over the existing IEEE 802.16e L2 handover scheme, but most of the previous works have focused on the timing of L3 handover messages over the IEEE 802.16e L2 handover messages. In this paper, we propose a new handover scheme for fast mobile IPv6 over the IEEE 802.16e system. By integrating FMIPv6 with IEEE 802.16e system efficiently, the proposed scheme can minimize not only L3 handover latency but also packet losses.
Building New Spatial Interaction Models by Using Genetic Programming and a Supercomputer

An application of a parallel genetic programming approach to discovering new spatial interaction models is described. It is noted that geographic information systems have resulted in the creation of extremely data-rich environments but it is proving very difficult to exploit this situation because of the lack of suitable models and the difficulties of model creation by more traditional hypothetico-deductive routes. The author describes how to develop new models via a machine-based inductive approach. A Cray T3D parallel supercomputer with 512 processors is used to investigate the potential of this approach to building computer models. Results are described which allude to the potential power of the method for applications where there is a considerable amount of data but no suitable existing models and no good theoretical framework on which to base their development.
Do Incentive Contracts Crowd Out Voluntary Cooperation?

In this paper we provide experimental evidence indicating that incentive contracts may cause a strong crowding out of reciprocity-driven voluntary cooperation. This crowding out effect constitutes costs of incentive provision that have been largely neglected by economists. In our experiments the crowding out effect is so strong that the incentive contracts are less efficient than contracts without any incentives. Principals, nonetheless, prefer the incentive contracts because they allow them to appropriate a much larger share of the (smaller) total surplus and are, hence, more profitable for them.
Comparative experiments to evaluate the use of syllables for large-vocabulary automatic speech recognition

This paper motivates the use of syllables to enhance the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems when dealing with large-vocabulary speech. Arabic and English are considered in our paper to test the proposed approach. The Arabic database consists of sentences selected from different Arabic broadcast news, whereas for English speech, TIMIT database had been used to test our approach. Comparative experiments have indicated that the use of syllables as acoustic units for the recognition of both languages leads to an improvement in the recognition performance of HMM-based ASR systems. The Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) was used throughout our experiments. A series of experiments on speaker-independent continuous-speech recognition have been carried out using both databases. Using such an approach, experiments show that for Arabic database, the recognition rate using syllables outperforms the recognition rate obtained using monophones and triphones by 15.75% and 2.64%, respectively. On the other hand, for TIMIT database, the recognition rate using syllables outperforms the recognition rate using monophones and triphones by 40.08% and 19.74%, respectively.
The Large Polymerase Protein Is Associated with the Virulence of Newcastle Disease Virus

ABSTRACT Naturally occurring Newcastle disease virus (NDV) strains vary greatly in virulence, ranging from no apparent infection to severe disease causing 100% mortality in chickens. The viral determinants of NDV virulence are not completely understood. Cleavage of the fusion protein is required for the initiation of infection, and it acts as a determinant of virulence. The attachment protein HN was found to play a minor role in virulence. In this study, we have evaluated the role of the internal proteins (N, P, and L) in NDV virulence by using a chimeric reverse-genetics approach. The N, P, and L genes were exchanged individually between an avirulent NDV strain, LaSota, and an intermediate virulent NDV strain, Beaudette C (BC), and the N and P genes were also exchanged together. The recovered chimeric viruses were evaluated for their pathogenicity in the natural host, chickens. Our results showed that the pathogenicities of N and P chimeric viruses were similar to those of their respective parental viruses, indicating that the N and P genes probably play minor roles in virulence. However, replacement of the L gene of BC with that of LaSota significantly increased the pathogenicity of the L-chimeric virus, suggesting that the L gene probably contributes to the virulence of NDV. The L-chimeric BC virus was found to replicate at a 100-fold-higher level than its parental virus in chicken brain, suggesting that the increase in pathogenicity may be due to the increased replication level of the chimeric virus. Our findings offer new insights into the pathogenesis of NDV infection.
Hierarchical Latent Knowledge Analysis for Co-occurrence Data

Two-mode and co-occurrence data have been frequently seen in the real world. We address the issue of predicting unknown cooccurrence events from known events. For this issue, we propose a new method that naturally combines observable co-occurrence events with their existing latent knowledge by using tlierarchical latent variables. This method builds a space-efficient hierarchical latent variable model and estimates the probability parameters of the model with an EM algorithm. In this paper, we focus on a data set of protein-protein interactions, a typical co-occurrence data set, and apply our method to the problem of predicting unknown protein-protein interactions, an important research issue in current computational biology. Using a real data set of protein-protein interactions and latent knowledge, we tested the performance of our method, comparing it with other recent machine learning approaches, including support vector machines. Our experimental results show that our method clearly outperforms the predictive performance obtained by other approaches. The results indicate that both our idea of using existing knowledge as a latent variable and our methodology implementing it are effective for drastically improving the predictive performance of existing unsupervised learning approaches for co-occurrence data.
Superresolution restoration of an image sequence: adaptive filtering approach

This paper presents a new method based on adaptive filtering theory for superresolution restoration of continuous image sequences. The proposed methodology suggests least squares (LS) estimators which adapt in time, based on adaptive filters, least mean squares (LMS) or recursive least squares (RLS). The adaptation enables the treatment of linear space and time-variant blurring and arbitrary motion, both of them assumed known. The proposed new approach is shown to be of relatively low computational requirements. Simulations demonstrating the superresolution restoration algorithms are presented.
Inbreeding effective population size and parentage analysis without parents

An important use of genetic parentage analysis is the ability to directly calculate the number of offspring produced by each parent (ki) and hence effective population size, Ne. But what if parental genotypes are not available? In theory, given enough markers, it should be possible to reconstruct parental genotypes based entirely on a sample of progeny, and if so the vector of parental ki values. However, this would provide information only about parents that actually contributed offspring to the sample. How would ignoring the ‘null’ parents (those that produced no offspring) affect an estimate of Ne? The surprising answer is that null parents have no effect at all. We show that: (i) The standard formula for inbreeding Ne can be rewritten so that it is a function only of sample size and ; it is not necessary to know the total number of parents (N). This same relationship does not hold for variance Ne. (ii) This novel formula provides an unbiased estimate of Ne even if only a subset of progeny is available, provided the parental contributions are accurately determined, in which case precision is also high compared to other single‐sample estimators of Ne. (iii) It is not necessary to actually reconstruct parental genotypes; from a matrix of pairwise relationships (as can be estimated by some current software programs), it is possible to construct the vector of ki values and estimate Ne. The new method based on parentage analysis without parents (PwoP) can potentially be useful as a single‐sample estimator of contemporary Ne, provided that either (i) relationships can be accurately determined, or (ii) can be estimated directly.
Absolute quantification of DcR3 and GDF15 from human serum by LC-ESI MS

Biomarkers are widely used in clinical diagnosis, prognosis and therapy monitoring. Here, we developed a protocol for the efficient and selective enrichment of small and low concentrated biomarkers from human serum, involving a 95% effective depletion of high‐abundant serum proteins by partial denaturation and enrichment of low‐abundant biomarkers by size exclusion chromatography. The recovery of low‐abundance biomarkers was above 97%. Using this protocol, we quantified the tumour markers DcR3 and growth/differentiation factor (GDF)15 from 100 μl human serum by isotope dilution mass spectrometry, using 15N metabolically labelled and concatamerized fingerprint peptides for the both proteins. Analysis of three different fingerprint peptides for each protein by liquid chromatography electrospray ionization mass spectrometry resulted in comparable concentrations in three healthy human serum samples (DcR3: 27.23 ± 2.49 fmol/ml; GDF15: 98.11 ± 0.49 fmol/ml). In contrast, serum levels were significantly elevated in tumour patients for DcR3 (116.94 ± 57.37 fmol/ml) and GDF15 (164.44 ± 79.31 fmol/ml). Obtained data were in good agreement with ELISA and qPCR measurements, as well as with literature data. In summary, our protocol allows the reliable quantification of biomarkers, shows a higher resolution at low biomarker concentrations than antibody‐based strategies, and offers the possibility of multiplexing. Our proof‐of‐principle studies in patient sera encourage the future analysis of the prognostic value of DcR3 and GDF15 for colon cancer patients in larger patient cohorts.