Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Circulatory response to passive and active changes in posture

To understand the sequence of hemodynamic events elicited by active (stand-up) and passive (head-up tilt, HUT) changes in posture, we monitored heart rate and arterial blood pressure continuously in ten healthy volunteers at rest, during rapid tilts (75/spl deg/ HUT over 2 secs), slow tilts (75/spl deg/ HUT over 50 secs), and stand tests. A marked initial transient drop in mean arterial pressure (MAP) and increase in heart rate (HR) seen during rapid tilt, RT, and stand-up, SU, were absent during slow tilt, ST. While the magnitudes of transient heart rate peak and blood pressure minimum for RT and SU, respectively, were different, their relative timing was well preserved. We attribute the timing to the response of homeostatic reflex mechanisms. No statistically significant difference could be detected when comparing steady-state values of MAP and HR for SU and HUT 140 seconds after the onset of the respective stress.
OmniMapper: A modular multimodal mapping framework

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is not a problem with a one-size-fits-all solution. The literature includes a variety of SLAM approaches targeted at different environments, platforms, sensors, CPU budgets, and applications. We propose OmniMapper, a modular multimodal framework and toolbox for solving SLAM problems. The system can be used to generate pose graphs, do feature-based SLAM, and also includes tools for semantic mapping. Multiple measurement types from different sensors can be combined for multimodal mapping. It is open with standard interfaces to allow easy integration of new sensors and feature types. We present a detailed description of the mapping approach, as well as a software framework that implements this, and present detailed descriptions of its applications to several domains including mapping with a service robot in an indoor environment, large-scale mapping on a PackBot, and mapping with a handheld RGBD camera.
In vivo biocompatibility and bioactivity of in situ synthesized hydroxyapatite/polyetheretherketone composite materials

Hydroxyapatite/polyetheretherketone (HA/PEEK) composite materials were prepared via an in situ synthesis process in order to achieve strong bonding between PEEK matrix and hydroxyapatite fillers, and ultimately to improve the mechanical properties of the composites. In the study, the biocompatibility of the synthesized HA/PEEK materials was investigated by acute toxicity test, hemolytic test, sensitization test, pyrogen test, intradermal test, and toxicity assay test on animal tissue and cells for the purpose of examining the possible adverse effects of the residue organic chemicals from the in situ synthesis process. In vivo bioactivity of both lab-synthesized PEEK and HA/PEEK composites with various HA content was also studied. It is found that the in situ synthesized composite materials possess good biocompability without toxicity. Although the bioactivity of the material increases with HA content, the composite material with 5.6 vol % HA exhibits satisfactory bioactivity without compromising its excellent mechanical performance, which hints to a potential use as load-bearing orthopedic material. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci., 2013
KNN Technique for Analysis and Prediction of Temperature and Humidity Data

The research investigates the data mining technique K-Nearest Neighbor resulting in a predictor for numerical series. The series experimented with come from the climatic data usually hard to forecast due to uncertainty. One approach of prediction is to spot patterns in the past, when it is known in advance what followed them and verify it on more recent data. If a pattern is followed by the same outcome frequently enough, it can be concluded that it is a genuine relationship. Because this approach does not assume any special knowledge or form of the regularities, the method is quite general applicable to other series not just climate. The research searches for an automated pattern spotting, it involves data mining technique K-Nearest Neighbor for prediction of temperature and humidity data for a specific region. The results of the research for temperature and humidity prediction by K-Nearest Neighbor were satisfactory as it is assumed that no forecasting technique can be 100 % accurate in prediction.
A Survey of Patent Users An Analysis of Tasks , Behavior , Search Functionality and System Requirements

With a growing interest in Patent Information Retrieval, there is a need to better understand the context associated with patent users, their tasks, needs and expectations of patent search systems and applications. Patent search is known to be a complex, difficult and challenging activity, usually requiring expert Patent Information Specialists to spend a substantial amount of time sourcing (or not) documents relevant to their particular task. Information Retrieval provides a whole array of possible techniques and tools which could be applied to ease the burden of such retrieval tasks, and also make searching patents more accessible to non-Patent Information Specialists. In this paper, we report the findings from a survey of patent users conducted to ascertain information about patent users and their search requirements with respect to Information Retrieval systems and applications.
fMRI and EEG Predictors of Dynamic Decision Parameters during Human Reinforcement Learning

What are the neural dynamics of choice processes during reinforcement learning? Two largely separate literatures have examined dynamics of reinforcement learning (RL) as a function of experience but assuming a static choice process, or conversely, the dynamics of choice processes in decision making but based on static decision values. Here we show that human choice processes during RL are well described by a drift diffusion model (DDM) of decision making in which the learned trial-by-trial reward values are sequentially sampled, with a choice made when the value signal crosses a decision threshold. Moreover, simultaneous fMRI and EEG recordings revealed that this decision threshold is not fixed across trials but varies as a function of activity in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and is further modulated by trial-by-trial measures of decision conflict and activity in the dorsomedial frontal cortex (pre-SMA BOLD and mediofrontal theta in EEG). These findings provide converging multimodal evidence for a model in which decision threshold in reward-based tasks is adjusted as a function of communication from pre-SMA to STN when choices differ subtly in reward values, allowing more time to choose the statistically more rewarding option.
Scalar operand networks

The bypass paths and multiported register files in microprocessors serve as an implicit interconnect to communicate operand values among pipeline stages and multiple ALUs. Previous superscalar designs implemented this interconnect using centralized structures that do not scale with increasing ILP demands. In search of scalability, recent microprocessor designs in industry and academia exhibit a trend toward distributed resources such as partitioned register files, banked caches, multiple independent compute pipelines, and even multiple program counters. Some of these partitioned microprocessor designs have begun to implement bypassing and operand transport using point-to-point interconnects. We call interconnects optimized for scalar data transport, whether centralized or distributed, scalar operand networks. Although these networks share many of the challenges of multiprocessor networks such as scalability and deadlock avoidance, they have many unique requirements, including ultra-low latency (a few cycles versus tens of cycles) and ultra-fast operation-operand matching. This work discusses the unique properties of scalar operand networks (SONs), examines alternative ways of implementing them, and introduces the AsTrO taxonomy to distinguish between them. It discusses the design of two alternative networks in the context of the Raw microprocessor, and presents timing, area, and energy statistics for a real implementation. The paper also presents a 5-tuple performance model for SONs and analyzes their performance sensitivity to network properties for ILP workloads.
Tavis-Cummings model beyond the rotating wave approximation: Quasidegenerate qubits

The Tavis-Cummings model for more than one qubit interacting with a common oscillator mode is extended beyond the rotating wave approximation (RWA). We explore the parameter regime in which the frequencies of the qubits are much smaller than the oscillator frequency and the coupling strength is allowed to be ultra-strong. The application of the adiabatic approximation, introduced by Irish, et al. (Phys. Rev. B \textbf{72}, 195410 (2005)), for a single qubit system is extended to the multi-qubit case. For a two-qubit system, we identify three-state manifolds of close-lying dressed energy levels and obtain results for the dynamics of intra-manifold transitions that are incompatible with results from the familiar regime of the RWA. We exhibit features of two-qubit dynamics that are different from the single qubit case, including calculations of qubit-qubit entanglement. Both number state and coherent state preparations are considered, and we derive analytical formulas that simplify the interpretation of numerical calculations. Expressions for individual collapse and revival signals of both population and entanglement are derived.
Enablement of Consumer-Oriented Interoperable Systems With Integration of CIM and Green Button Standards

Future grid evolutions promise to promote the interoperability in the consumer domain. CIM (mainly IEC61970 and IEC61968) is an established standard in the industry to enable the interoperable data exchanges at the upstream levels like generation, transmission and distribution, while the Green Button standards (OpenADE, NAESB ESPI, NIST SGIP-PAP 20, PAP10) are the emerging smart grid standards to standardize the information on energy usage, interfaces at the downstream end-consumer level. This paper presents the various modeling issues, and techniques to move toward integrating these standards to enable the interoperable services at the consumer levels. The challenging task is to identify the options to promote the interoperability between the end-consumer and upstream levels for future grid evolutions. This paper begins to address this issue by identifying the requirements like integrating the external services data from the end-consumer oriented third party tools to EMS/DMS, hierarchical tagging of consumers, combined semantics for third party applications, inter-utility migration of consumers/prosumers, and dynamic consumer/prosumer open access interactions. However, this involves extensions and mappings between the existing CIM, and the green button standards. Without affecting much the base packages, it should be either incorporated in the CIM or Green Button standards at the domain modeling as a separate package. A set of new classes and attributes to the existing CIM and the corresponding XML tags for Green Button standards to realize the integration is proposed. The authors' contributions also strengthen the arguments for creating a separate green button profile for the existing upstream standards.
Antimicrobial properties of nanorods: Chemical or physical kill?

Silver is known to possess antimicrobial properties that are of chemical origin. It is believed that either Ag atoms bind to thiol groups in bacterial enzymes, or Ag+ ions enter bacterial cells and denature the DNA molecule, to kill bacteria. In the case of silver nanorods, it is also possible that the tips of nanorods puncture bacterial cells and kill bacteria via a physical mechanism. To test this conjecture, we have compared the antimicrobial properties of silver and CdS nanorods. No significant difference is found between the two even though CdS does not possess the chemical properties of silver. This indicates that the physical kill mechanism may be more important than the chemical one and that nanorods of any material may possess antimicrobial properties. In that case, it is possible to overcome serious short and long term health hazard issues which have been posed by silver nanoparticles.
Methods for Collision-Free Navigation of Multiple Mobile Robots in Unknown Cluttered Environments

Navigation and guidance of autonomous vehicles is a fundamental problem in robotics, which has attracted intensive research in recent decades. This report is mainly concerned with provable collision avoidance of multiple autonomous vehicles operating in unknown cluttered environments, using reactive decentralized navigation laws, where obstacle information is supplied by some sensor system. Recently, robust and decentralized variants of model predictive control based navigation systems have been applied to vehicle navigation problems. Properties such as provable collision avoidance under disturbance and provable convergence to a target have been shown; however these often require significant computational and communicative capabilities, and don't consider sensor constraints, making real time use somewhat difficult. There also seems to be opportunity to develop a better trade-off between tractability, optimality, and robustness. The main contributions of this work are as follows; firstly, the integration of the robust model predictive control concept with reactive navigation strategies based on local path planning, which is applied to both holonomic and unicycle vehicle models subjected to acceleration bounds and disturbance; secondly, the extension of model predictive control type methods to situations where the information about the obstacle is limited to a discrete ray-based sensor model, for which provably safe, convergent boundary following can be shown; and thirdly the development of novel constraints allowing decentralized coordination of multiple vehicles using a robust model predictive control type approach, where a single communication exchange is used per control update, vehicles are allowed to perform planning simultaneously, and coherency objectives are avoided.
Socioeconomic deprivation and survival after stroke in China: a systematic literature review and a new population-based cohort study

Objective To assess the association of socioeconomic deprivation (SED) with survival after stroke in China. Design A systematic literature review and a new population-based cohort study. Setting and participants In urban and rural communities in Anhui, China, 2978 residents aged ≥60 years took part in baseline investigation and were followed up for 5 years; five published studies were identified for a systematic review. Primary and secondary outcome measures 167 of 2978 participants (5.6%) had doctor-diagnosed stroke at baseline or 1 year later. All-cause mortality in the follow-up. Results In the Anhui cohort follow-up of 167 patients with stroke, 64 (38.3%) died. Multivariate adjusted hazard ratio (HR) of mortality in patients with educational level of less than or equal to primary school was 1.88 (95% CI 1.05 to 3.36) compared to those having more than primary school education. Increased HR of mortality in patients living in a rural area was at borderline significant (1.64, 0.97 to 2.78), but the HR in patients with lower levels of occupation and income was not significant. Published studies showed a significant increase in stroke mortality in relation to some SED indicators. Pooled relative risk (RR) of mortality in patients with low education was 3.07 (1.27 to 7.34), in patients with low income 1.58 (1.50 to 1.65) and in patients living in rural areas 1.47 (1.37 to 1.58). Conclusions The evidence suggests the presence of a mortality gradient after stroke for material as well as social forms of deprivation in China. Inequalities in survival after stroke persist and need to be taken into account when implementing intervention programmes.
Experimental Investigation on the Rheology of Foams

In this study, the rheology of foams was investigated using aqueous foams and gelled foams and employing a pipe type viscometer. Water was used as the liquid phase for the aqueous foams while guar was used as the gelling agent for the gelled foams. Surfactant at 0.5% (vol ) concentration was used as the foaming agent. The flow data showed that foams behave like Herschel-Bulkley model fluids New empirical correlations have been developed from the experimental data to predict foam fluid apparent viscosity. These correlations are fimction of liquid phase properties and foam quality and are applicable to the foam systems tested in the wide range of shear rates and temperatures investigated. The use of these new correlations will provide more accurate estimation of the foam fluid rheological properties.
The Adaptor Molecule Act1 Regulates BAFF Responsiveness and Self-Reactive B Cell Selection during Transitional B Cell Maturation

The transitional stage is a key check-point for elimination of autoreactive B cells in the periphery. This selection process requires fine regulation of signals received through BCR and B cell activating factor (BAFF) receptor. We previously identified the adaptor molecule Act1 as a negative regulator of BAFF-mediated signaling. Deficiency of Act1 in mice results in peripheral B cell hyperplasia and development of autoimmunity. In this study, we demonstrate that Act1 plays a critical role in the regulation of transitional B cell survival and maturation. We found that the ratio of late-transitional (T2) to early-transitional (T1) cells was increased in spleens from Act1-deficient mice. Moreover, BAFF stimulation induced better T1 cell survival and promoted more efficient maturation of T1 cells into T2 cells ex vivo in the absence of Act1. BAFF stimulation induced higher levels of the anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 member Mc1-l in Act1-deficient T1 cells than in wild-type control cells, suggesting that Mcl-1 might be one of the key effector molecules for BAFF-mediated survival of the Act1-deficient transitional B cells. Importantly, costimulation with BAFF was able to rescue Act1-deficient T1 cells from BCR-induced apoptosis more effectively than Act1-sufficient T1 B cells. Finally, by using hen egg lysozyme double transgenic mice, we demonstrated that Act1 deficiency can promote the maturation of Ag-specific autoreactive B cells. Taken together, our results suggest that the transitional stage is a critical point of action of Act1 in the elimination of autoreactive B cells and in the regulation of peripheral B cell homeostasis.
Glutathione metabolism in relation to the amino-acid permeation systems of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Occurrence of gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase: its regulation and the effects of permeation mutations on the enzyme cellular level.

A careful enzyme specificity analysis has revealed the presence of a typical gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The enzyme cellular level is low in the presence of NH4+ as a sole nitrogen source and rises when individual amino acids are used as nitrogen sources. The gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase appears to be repressed by NH+4 and escapes to the regulatory circuits under the control of glutamine and the glutamate-dehydrogenase . NH+4 complex. The transpeptidase cellular level is unaffected in mutants which have lost the general amino acid permease and specific systems for L-arginine and L-lysine. In contrast, a low enzyme level is observed when growing an apf mutant on urea; this mutant is most probably affected in a common element shared by all the amino acid permeation systems. Urea appears to be a nitrogen source which promotes a high transpeptidase level in the wild-type strain. The reported data are discussed in the light of the current theories about the intervention of glutathione metabolism in the translocation of amino acids.
AP5Z1/SPG48 frequency in autosomal recessive and sporadic spastic paraplegia

Hereditary spastic paraplegias (HSP) constitute a rare and highly heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative disorders, defined clinically by progressive lower limb spasticity and pyramidal weakness. Autosomal recessive HSP as well as sporadic cases present a significant diagnostic challenge. Mutations in AP5Z1, a gene playing a role in intracellular membrane trafficking, have been recently reported to be associated with spastic paraplegia type 48 (SPG48). Our objective was to determine the relative frequency and clinical relevance of AP5Z1 mutations in a large cohort of 127 HSP patients. We applied a targeted next‐generation sequencing approach to analyze all coding exons of the AP5Z1 gene. With the output of high‐quality reads and a mean coverage of 51‐fold, we demonstrated a robust detection of variants. One 43‐year‐old female with sporadic complicated paraplegia showed two heterozygous nonsynonymous variants of unknown significance (VUS3; p.[R292W];[(T756I)]). Thus, AP5Z1 gene mutations are rare, at least in Europeans. Due to its low frequency, systematic genetic testing for AP5Z1 mutations is not recommended until larger studies are performed to add further evidence. Our findings demonstrate that amplicon‐based deep sequencing is technically feasible and allows a compact molecular characterization of multiple HSP patients with high accuracy.
Exchanging Faces in Images

Pasting somebody's face into an existing image with traditional photo retouching and digital image processing tools has only been possible if both images show the face from the same viewpoint and with the same illumination. However, this is rarely the case for given pairs of images. We present a system that exchanges faces across large differences in viewpoint and illumination. It is based on an algorithm that estimates 3D shape and texture along with all relevant scene parameters, such as pose and lighting, from single images. Manual interaction is reduced to clicking on a set of about 7 feature points, and marking the hairline in the target image. The system can be used for image processing, virtual try‐on of hairstyles, and face recognition. By separating face identity from imaging conditions, our approach provides an abstract representation of images and a novel, high‐level tool for image manipulation.
Determination of the Young's Modulus of a TiN Thin Film by Nanoindentation: Analytical Models and FEM Simulation

The Young’s modulus of a titanium nitride thin film has been investigated in this study by means of nanoindentation technique. Nanoindentation measurements have been coupled to analytical models and finite elements simulation to decorrelate the effect of substrate from the Young’s modulus evaluation. Whereas analytical models did not lead to a converging solution towards experimental measurements, an identification based on finite elements calculations is shown necessary. Simulated contact stiffness versus contact areas have been fit with experiments and have led to a Young’s modulus of 200±20 GPa for a 180 nm thin film of TiN deposited on a ⟨100⟩ silicon substrate. This study confirms the property of the TiN deposited in thin films to have a different Young’s modulus from a bulk TiN. [DOI: 10.1380/ejssnt.2012. 624]