Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Observations on Surveillance Imaging After Endovascular Sealing of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms With the Nellix System

Purpose: To describe and interpret the findings of computed tomography images acquired before and after endovascular aneurysm sealing (EVAS) with the Nellix endoprosthesis and consider the potential implications of these findings on EVAS planning and performance. Methods: A retrospective review was performed of perioperative imaging from 30 consecutive patients (median age 79 years; 19 men) undergoing elective EVAS at our center between December 2013 and November 2014. The images were systematically reviewed specifically looking for endobag collapse, aortic thrombus compression, and aortic wall disruption according to definitions set a priori. Results: There was no perioperative mortality or endoleak after the EVAS procedure. Endobag collapse, which could potentially result in type II endoleak if occurring near a patent side branch, was seen in the endobags of 12 patients. Aortic thrombus compression, which affects the accuracy of preoperative volume measurements in predicting the amount of polymer needed to perform EVAS, was seen in 15 patients. There was one aortic wall disruption, which could potentially result in intraoperative hemorrhage, though this did not occur in this case. Conclusion: These observations and their potential implications should help clinicians in planning and performing EVAS, as well as in interpreting postoperative imaging.
Functional Plasticity Triggers Formation and Pruning of Dendritic Spines in Cultured Hippocampal Networks

Despite widespread interest in dendritic spines, little is known about the mechanisms responsible for spine formation, retraction, or stabilization. We have now found that a brief exposure of cultured hippocampal neurons to a conditioning medium that favors activation of the NMDA receptor produces long-term modification of their spontaneous network activity. The conditioning protocol enhances correlated activity of neurons in the culture, in a process requiring an increase in [Ca2+]i and is associated with both formation of novel dendritic spines and pruning of others. The novel spines are likely to be touched by a presynaptic terminal, labeled with FM4-64 dye, whereas the absence of such terminals increases the likelihood of spine pruning. These results indicate that long-term functional changes are correlated with morphological modifications of dendritic spines of neurons in a network.
Wide Spectral Characteristics of Si Photonic Crystal Mach-Zehnder Modulator Fabricated by Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Process

Optical modulators for optical interconnects require a small size, small voltage, high speed and wide working spectrum. For this purpose, we developed Si slow-light Mach-Zehnder modulators via a 180 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process. We employed 200 μm lattice-shifted photonic crystal waveguides with interleaved p-n junctions as phase shifters. The group index spectrum of slow light was almost flat at ng ≈ 20 but exhibited ±10% fluctuation over a wavelength bandwidth of 20 nm. The cutoff frequency measured in this bandwidth ranged from 15 to 20 GHz; thus, clear open eyes were observed in the 25 Gbps modulation. However, the fluctuation in ng was reflected in the extinction ratio and bit-error rate. For a stable error-free operation, a 1 dB margin is necessary in the extinction ratio. In addition, we constructed a device with varied values of ng and confirmed that the extinction ratio at this speed was enhanced by larger ng up to 60. However, this larger ng reduced the cutoff frequency because of increased phase mismatch between slow light and radio frequency signals. Therefore, ng available for 25 Gbps modulation is limited to up to 40 for the current device design.
Does Work Stress Lead to Office Clutter, and How? Mediating Influences of Emotional Exhaustion and Indecision

Despite popular articles and books, researchers have failed to examine how office clutter emerges and potential mediators underlying clutter in personal workspaces. We hypothesized that workers whose jobs require them to deal with a heavy volume of work at a rapid pace would be more likely to experience job strain (i.e., emotional exhaustion), which, in turn, depletes their energy and makes workers more likely to delay decisions. Decisional procrastination (indecision) was expected to increase office clutter, which itself is a physical stressor. Data from an Internet survey with 290 U.S. office workers recruited through Prolific Academic supported the hypotheses. This study is the first to examine clutter as a physical stressor in the workplace. A greater understanding of the factors that promote office clutter might help organizations and workers address sources of workspace conditions and personal habits that impede productivity and well-being.
Conflict-Based Diagnosis of Discrete Event Systems: Theory and Practice

We present a conflict-based approach to diagnosing Discrete Event Systems (DES) which generalises Reiter's Diagnose algorithm to a much broader class of problems. This approach obviates the need to explicitly reconstruct the system's behaviors that are consistent with the observation, as is typical of existing DES diagnosis algorithms. Instead, our algorithm explores the space of diagnosis hypotheses, testing hypotheses for consistency, and generating conflicts which rule out successors and other portions of the search space. Under relatively mild assumptions, our algorithm correctly computes the set of preferred diagnosis candidates. We investigate efficient symbolic representations of the hypotheses space and provide a SAT-based implementation of this framework which is used to address a real-world problem in processing alarms for a power transmission system.
Controlling privacy with trust-aware link prediction in online social networks

In real life, the strength of the relationship among people indicates the level of trust. People tend to trust their friends, family members' opinions rather than unfamiliar one. Since this is a human characteristic and the phenomena of social network services which allow users to post their information, diaries, albums, and experiences, the need of identifying reliable people within social networks become a fundamental goal to prevent unreliable users accessing these rich information. In this study, we propose a capacity-based algorithm that adapts Advogato trust metric for identifying people of trust based on weighted relationships. Our method finds all possible trustworthy users who are connected to a target user in his/her personal network and prevents unreliable users from impacting on a personal network. We present experimental results that show how our algorithm performs better than existing alternatives.
Control Design and Performance Analysis of force Reflective Teleoperators - A Passivity Based Approach

In this thesis, the problem of controlling a surgical master and slave system with force reflection is studied. The problem of stiff contacts between the slave and the environment is given specific attention. The work has been carried out at KTH based on an initial cooperation with Karolinska Sjukhuset. The aim of the over all project is to study the possibilities for introduction of a force reflective teleoperator in neurological skullbase operations for the particular task of bone milling and thereby, hopefully, increase patient safety, decrease surgeon workload and cost for the society. The main contributions of this thesis are: Derivation of a dynamical model of the master and operator’s finger system and, experimental identification of ranges on model parameter values. Based on this model, the interaction channel controllers optimized for transparency are derived and modified to avoid the influence of the uncertain model parameters. This results in a three channel structure. To decrease the influence of the uncertain parameters locally at the master, a control loop is designed such that the frequency response of the reflected force is relatively unaffected by the uncertainties, a result also confirmed in a transparency analysis based on the H-matrix. The developed teleoperator control structure is tested in experiments where the operator could alter the contact force without facing any problems as long as the slave is in contact with the environment. As a result of the severe difficulties for the teleoperator to move from free space motion to in-contact manipulation without oscillative behaviour, a new detection algorithm based on passivity theory is developed. The algorithm is able to detect the non-passive behaviour of the actual teleoperator induced by the discrete change in system dynamics occurring at the contact instant. A stabilization controller to be activated by the detection algorithm is designed and implemented on the master side of the teleoperator. The detection algorithm and the stabilization controller are shown highly effective in real experiments. All major research results presented in the thesis have been verified experimentally.
The influence of post event misinformation on children's reports of a unique event versus an instance of a repeated event

Much of what is known about the influence of postevent misinformation on children's event reports is based on studies in which children were exposed to the target event once. Nelson and her colleagues (e.g., 1986) have reported a considerable array of data that demonstrates that children's reports of a routine, or of an instance of a routine, is quite different from their reports of a unique event. Based on this literature on children's script memory it seemed reasonable to speculate that prior similar experiences with the target event would mitigate and/or heighten the influence of suggestions on children's reports of an instance of a routine. In Experiment 1, 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds participated in one or four play sessions. Children in the 4-sessions condition (4-S) participated in play sessions on four consecutive days. During each session some target details remained the same (fixed) and some changed (variable). The single play session in the 1-session condition (1-S) was identical to the last play session in the 4-S condition. Three days later children were asked to think about the last play session and to answer related questions. Embedded in some of the questions were suggestions that things had happened during the final play session that had not occurred during any of the play sessions. Some of the suggestions
Iteration at Different Levels: Multi-Level Methods fro Structured Markov Chains

For the stationary analysis of large Markov chains in continuous and discrete time a wide variety of solution techniques has been applied in the past. Empirical comparisons show that in particular so called multi-level approaches that perform iterations at different levels are the most efficient solvers for a wide class of Markov chains. The methods combine ideas from aggregation disaggregation methods and algebraic multigrid. The talk gives an overview of the basic ideas of multi level approaches and shows which design alternatives for the algorithms exist. In particular it considers different forms of defining levels, available alternatives to realize prolongation and interpolation operations, different cycle types and different stopping criteria for the smoothing operations at each level. The last part of the talk is devoted to implementation issues and data structures that are necessary for an efficient realization of multi-level methods.
Of Hobos and Highfliers: Disentangling the Classes and Careers of Technology-based Entrepreneurs*

Adopting a careers perspective of entrepreneurship, we theorize new venture creation as a phase transition in the course of a career. We then analyze individuals' transitions to founding high-potential startups or entering self-employment in the high-technology ecology in the United States. We first show that machine learning models applied to the identity claims of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs can successfully classify types of entrepreneurial activity in the tech sector. Next, in an extensive risk set comprising two million career histories of could-be entrepreneurs, we show that the human capital and career-based antecedents of these two types of entrepreneurship are not just distinct—they typically are diametrically opposed. Results show that not only do these different groups of entrepreneurs, so-called "hobos and highfliers", exhibit stark differences in identity claims, but the individuals who create these ventures depart from fundamentally different social positions and career pathways. We conclude that an overly broad definition of entrepreneurship hampers the accumulation of systematic knowledge, and we suggest that future studies of entrepreneurship must adopt precision in the definition and measurement of the outcome variable.
Model based regression test reduction using dependence analysis

Model based testing is a system testing technique used to test software systems modeled by formal description languages, e.g., an extended finite state machine (EFSM). System models are frequently changed because of specification changes. Selective test generation techniques are used to test the modified parts of the model. However, the size of regression test suites still may be very large. In this paper, we present a model-based regression testing approach that uses EFSM model dependence analysis to reduce regression test suites. The approach automatically identifies the difference between the original model and the modified model as a set of elementary model modifications. For each elementary modification, regression test reduction strategies are used to reduce the regression test suite based on EFSM dependence analysis. Our initial experience shows that the approach may significantly reduce the size of regression test suites.
Student Perceptions of a Place-Based Outdoor Environmental Education Initiative: A Case Study of the “Kids in Parks” Program

Abstract This article reports on the perceptions of students who participated in a place-based endeavor, the “kids in parks” program, in the largest national park in South Africa. Feedback from students who participated in the program from 2011 to 2017 was analyzed to identify themes. A random sample of 350 messages from students over the seven-year period was then coded according to the themes to determine frequency. The students commented mostly on the wild animals and on the fulfillment of their basic needs. Though intended aims may not be met, the program does succeed in introducing the park to students.
Pattern Recognition of Wood Defects Types Based on Hu Invariant Moments

The recognition of wood defects is very significant for reasonable selection and scientific utilization of wood. X-ray was adopted as a measure method for wood nondestructive testing. The difference of X-ray intensity after exposure is tested in order to judge whether the wood defects exist or not. Then the defects images were processed effectively. A group of describing shape features parameters can be defined by extending Hu invariant moments theory. Those parameters not only have translation invariance, scaling invariance, rotation invariance, but also have lower computational complexity. Input the feature parameters into neural network after pretreatment, and then recognize the wood defects. The experimental results show that the ratio of recognition attains 86%. It is shown that this method is very successful for detection and classification of wood defects. This study offers a new method for automatic recognition of wood defects. KeywordsPattern Recognition; Hu invariant moments; Image processing; Neural network; Wood defects
Using Short Dependency Relations from Auto-Parsed Data for Chinese Dependency Parsing

Dependency parsing has become increasingly popular for a surge of interest lately for applications such as machine translation and question answering. Currently, several supervised learning methods can be used for training high-performance dependency parsers if sufficient labeled data are available. However, currently used statistical dependency parsers provide poor results for words separated by long distances. In order to solve this problem, this article presents an effective dependency parsing approach of incorporating short dependency information from unlabeled data. The unlabeled data is automatically parsed by using a deterministic dependency parser, which exhibits a relatively high performance for short dependencies between words. We then train another parser that uses the information on short dependency relations extracted from the output of the first parser. The proposed approach achieves an unlabeled attachment score of 86.52%, an absolute 1.24% improvement over the baseline system on the Chinese Treebank data set. The results indicate that the proposed approach improves the parsing performance for longer distance words.
INDEPENDENT CONTRASTS SUCCEED WHERE ANCESTOR RECONSTRUCTION FAILS IN A KNOWN BACTERIOPHAGE PHYLOGENY

Abstract Methods of ancestor reconstruction are important tools for evolutionary inference that are difficult to test empirically because ancestral states are rarely known with certainty. We evaluated reconstruction methods for continuous phenotypic characters using taxa from an experimentally generated bacteriophage phylogeny. Except for one slowly evolving character, the estimated ancestral states of continuous phenotypic characters were highly inaccurate and biased, even when including a known ancestor at the root. This error was caused by a directional trend in character evolution and by rapid rates of character evolution. Computer simulations confirmed that such factors affect reconstruction of continuous characters in general. We also used phenotypic viral characters to evaluate two methods that attempt to estimate the correlation between characters during evolution. Whereas a nonphylogenetic regression was relatively inaccurate and biased, independent contrasts accurately estimated the correlation between characters with little bias. Corresponding Editor: J. Losos
Conference key establishment protocol using a multivariate polynomial and its applications

In 1992, a non-interactive k-secure m-conference protocol based on an m-variate polynomial has been proposed. Each user needs to store a m-1-polynomial having degree k as a private share. A secret conference key involving m users can be computed by each conference member non-interactively using each private share. There is no overhead to exchange information in order to establish a conference key. However, the storage space of each user is exponentially proportional to the group size of the conference. In this paper, we propose a key establishment protocol using a multivariate polynomial in ZN, where N is a RSA modulus. One unique feature of using this special type of polynomials for conference key protocol is that the storage space of each user is fixed and is independent to the group size of the conference. User can use their shares obtained from a key generation center initially to establish conference keys consisting of different users. Furthermore, we propose two applications to demonstrate the importance of using this special type of polynomials to design solutions. One is the private reconstruction of secret in a secret sharing scheme over network, and the other is the secure group communication. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Preemptive priority queues for the performance evaluation of an optical MAN ring

We propose to compute mean packet delays in an optical MAN ring for different optical packet formats: FLP, SVLP and VLP. Several stations are connected to the ring. Each of them generates electronic packets (IP, Ethernet) which are transformed into optical packets. The MAC protocol is based on the empty slot procedure. The upstream station connected to the ring has the highest priority, and the priority decreases when we go downstream on the ring. The ring is slotted (synchronous) for FLP and SVLP, and unslotted (asynchronous) for VLP. We use priority queues with preemptive service disciplines in order to compute mean packet delays. Analytical results shows the impact of two important parameters on the performance of the MAN ring: the optical packet format, and the working of the ring (synchronous or asynchronous).
Micro-embedded Skimmer in Autonomous Underwater Micro-robots

Bio-inspired underwater micro-robots with inspire from dynamic variant spaces of animals utilizing of the ICPF (Ionic Conducting Polymer Films) actuator as a propulsion is developed recently. These micro-robots with multi Degrees of Freedom cause them walk smoothly in underwater environments have urgently been demanded with variety kinds of application such as medical, detection, and industry. In this micro-robot with inspire from the motional mechanism by ICPF actuators of an inchworm motion for grasping to the OOZE, and also the movement mechanism of jellyfish for sampling from the surface of the water in limited places according to the difference of the density of the water are used at the moment. We calculated and simulated the mechanism and walking speed of the micro-robot. A preliminary pattern was designed and also a collection of the research for appraisal the locomotion and the floating speed motion were done in detail. Employing ICPF as micro actuators to fabricate a four-finger gripper and six micro actuators were used to implement grasping.
An imperative formal calculus for Java

This paper presents a formal imperative calculus to formalize the semantics of class-based object-oriented programming languages. The tractability of this approach is demonstrated by our formalization of a core subset of the Java programming language called Cool: Core Object-Oriented Language. Cool is relatively small but retains many of modern class-based object-oriented languages' key features, including classes, inheritance, objects, virtual functions and dynamic method dispatch etc. The technical contribution of this paper can be summarized as: first, this paper formalizes a syntactic specification for Cool; second, this paper presents static semantics for Cool via typing rules, and its operational semantics via small-step transition relation. Finally, this paper proves that the formal calculus proposed is type safe.
Exploring Differences in Measurement and Reporting of Classroom Observation Inter-Rater Reliability.

Although inter-rater reliability is an important aspect of using observational instruments, it has received little theoretical attention. In this article, we offer some guidance for practitioners and consumers of classroom observations so that they can make decisions about inter-rater reliability, both for study design and in the reporting of data and results. We reviewed articles in two major journals in the fields of reading and mathematics to understand how researchers have measured and reported inter-rater reliability in a recent decade. We found that researchers have tended to report measures of inter-rater agreement above the . 80 threshold with little attention to the magnitude of score differences between raters. Then, we conducted simulations to understand both how different indices for classroom observation reliability are related to each other and the impact of reliability decisions on study results. Results from the simulation studies suggest that mean correlations with an outcome are slightly lower at lower levels of percentage of exact agreement but that the magnitude of score differences has a more dramatic effect on correlations. Therefore, adhering to strict thresholds for inter-rater agreement is less helpful than reporting exact point estimates and also examining measures of rater consistency.