Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Novel Anthropomorphic Robot Hand and its Master Slave System

Future humanoid robots will execute various complicated tasks based on communication with human users. These humanoid robots will be equipped with anthropomorphic robot hands much like the human hand. The robots will eventually supplant human labor in the execution of intricate and dangerous tasks in areas such as manufacturing, space exploration and the seabeds. Many multi-fingered robot hands (Salisbury & Craig, 1982) (Jacobsen et al., 1984) (Jau, 1995) (Kyriakopoulos et al., 1997) have been developed. These robot hands are driven by actuators in a location remote from the robot hand frame and are connected by tendon cables. Elasticity in the tendon cable causes inaccurate joint angle control, and the long wiring of tendon cables may obstruct the motion of the robot when the hand is attached to the tip of a robot arm. To solve these problems, robot hands in which the actuators are built into the hand (Bekey et al., 1990) (Rosheim, 1994) (Lin & Huang, 1996) (Butterfass et al., 2001) (Namiki et al., 2003) (Yamano et al., 2003) have been developed. However, these hands have the problem that their movement differs from that of the human hand because both the number of fingers and the number of joints in the fingers are insufficient. Recently, many reports (Fearing, 1990) (Howe, 1994) (Shimojo et al., 1995) (Johnston et al., 1996) (Jockusch et al., 1997) have been presented on the use of tactile sensors that attempt to realize adequate object manipulation through contact with the fingers and palm. There has been only the slight development of a hand that combines a 6-axes force sensor attached to the fingertips with a distributed tactile sensor mounted on the hand surface. To provide a standard robot hand used to study grasping and dexterous manipulation, our group has developed the Gifu Hand I (Kawasaki & Komatsu, 1998) (Kawasaki & Komatsu, 1999), the Gifu Hand II (Kawasaki et al., 1999), the Gifu Hand III (Mouri et al., 2002), and the kinetic humanoid hand (Kawasaki et al., 2004). This paper presents a novel robot hand called the KH (Kinetic Humanoid) Hand type S for sign language, which requires a high degree of fingertip velocity. In addition, we construct a PC-based master slave system to demonstrate effectiveness in grasping and manipulating objects. An experiment involving grasping and manipulating objects by the master slave control is shown. Our results show that the KH Hand type S has a higher potential than previous robot hands in rendering a picturesque hand shape and performing dexterous object manipulations like the human hand.
Zoos as a Source of Free Choice Learning

This paper reports on an inquiry into the use of zoos as a source of informal or free choice learning. The study was contexualised within the zoo's environmental enrichment programme (an animal husbandry principle that seeks to develop species-typical behaviour for captive animals by using naturalistic enclosures or artificial items that stimulate animal interest). Visitor perceptions and actual use of the zoo were investigated using structured interviews based on an interview protocol that elicited their perspectives of the nature and character of zoo settings including the use of photographs of selected exhibits to induce stimulated recall. These data were triangulated with unobtrusive observation at the same exhibits (Bitgood et al., 1988). The visitors spent little time at a given exhibit, and rated the more naturalistic or enriched exhibits more favourably, but older visitors seemed less concerned with naturalness of exhibits. The zoo considers that it has an important role in education and provides many opportunities for learning for both general visitors and school groups. Both general visitors and school groups reported that the prime purpose of their visit was for entertainment. It appears learning of science at the zoo is limited for general visitors, however, the learning of science for school children is enhanced by pre- and post-visit activities and strong curricula links.
Accurate investigation of the high-k soft phonon scattering mechanism in metal gate MOSFETs

We report an experimental study of the mobility in TiN/HfO/sub 2/ gate stacks focused on the accurate determination of the HfO/sub 2/ remote soft phonon scattering mechanism. The high-K intrinsic mechanism is clearly dissociated from Coulomb scattering which generally dominates the mobility degradation in high-K/metal gate stacks. The temperature dependence of this additional phonon scattering mechanism is nearly linear. This scattering mechanism is shown to be negligible with a metal gate for a SiO/sub x/ interfacial layer (IL) thicker than 9-10/spl Aring/. For a IL thickness of 7/spl ring/A, this mechanism degrades the electron mobility at high effective fields by /spl sim/16% at 300K and /spl sim/13%at 400K.
Robo2–Slit and Dcc–Netrin1 Coordinate Neuron Axonal Pathfinding within the Embryonic Axon Tracts

In the embryonic vertebrate brain, early born neurons establish highly stereotyped embryonic axonal tracts along which the neuronal interconnections form. To understand the mechanism underlying neuron axonal pathfinding within the embryonic scaffold of axon tracts, we studied zebrafish anterior dorsal telencephalic (ADt) neuron development. While previous studies suggest the ADt neuronal axons extend along a commissural tract [anterior commissure (AC)] and a descending ipsilateral tract [supraoptic tract (SOT)], it is unclear whether individual ADt neuronal axons choose specific projection paths at the intersection between the AC and the SOT. We labeled individual ADt neurons using a forebrain-specific promoter to drive expression of fluorescent proteins. We found the ADt axonal projection patterns were heterogeneous and correlated with their soma positions. Our results suggest that cell intrinsic differences along the dorsal ventral axis of the telencephalon regulate the axonal projection choices. Next, we determined that the guidance receptors roundabout2 (Robo2) and deleted in colorectal cancer (Dcc) were differentially expressed in the ADt neurons. We showed that knocking down Robo2 function by injecting antisense morpholino oligonucleotides abolished the ipsilateral SOT originating from the ADt neurons. Knocking down Dcc function did not prevent formation of the AC and the SOT. In contrast, the AC was specifically reduced when Netrin1 function was knocked down. Further mechanistic studies suggested that Robo2 responded to the repellent Slit signals and suppressed the attractive Netrin signals. These findings demonstrate how Robo2–Slit and Dcc–Netrin coordinate the axonal projection choices of the developing neurons in the vertebrate forebrain.
Robust information extraction in a speech translation system

Speech processing systems must be able to cope with recognition errors or non grammatical input from the users. We present an approach used in Verbmobil to robustly process domain relevant information using cascaded automata. One set of automata is used to extract expressions representing relevant data for the travel planning and hotel reservation domains. This information is e.g. used by the dialogue processing module. Another set of automata is used to generate natural language expressions from these representations. This robust reduction-istic translation is one of four translation tracks within Verbmobil .
Maximum likelihood rule ensembles

We propose a new rule induction algorithm for solving classification problems via probability estimation. The main advantage of decision rules is their simplicity and good interpretability. While the early approaches to rule induction were based on sequential covering, we follow an approach in which a single decision rule is treated as a base classifier in an ensemble. The ensemble is built by greedily minimizing the negative loglikelihood which results in estimating the class conditional probability distribution. The introduced approach is compared with other decision rule induction algorithms such as SLIPPER, LRI and RuleFit.
Architecture for Real-Time Color Detection on Video Based on the Choquet Fuzzy Integral

Segmentation is the processes of classification of pixels according to certain criteria. Segmentation is widely used in a variety of application including monitoring, surveillance and object detection. The Choquet Fuzzy Integral has been used for segmentation achieving good results. The present work proposes an architecture for Choquet Fuzzy Integral implemented in VHDL. The current implementation achieves real-time execution.
Predicting Temporal Social Contact Patterns for Data Forwarding in Opportunistic Mobile Networks

In this paper, we predict nodes’ social contact patterns from the temporal perspective, and propose a novel approach to improve the performance of data forwarding in opportunistic mobile networks (OMNs). Specifically, considering both the average separating time and the variance of the separating time, we first introduce the definition of temporal closeness and temporal centrality. Then, several intuitive prediction methods are designed to predict nodes’ future temporal social contact patterns based on the observations from extensive real trace-driven simulation results. Afterward, based on the predicted temporal social contact patterns, we propose an efficient temporal closeness and centrality-based data forwarding strategy named TCCB for OMNs. The core idea of TCCB is to capture and utilize the temporal correlations to infer the future temporal social contact patterns in the remaining valid time of the data. Finally, extensive real trace-driven simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of TCCB. The results show that TCCB is close to Epidemic in terms of delivery ratio but with significantly reduced delivery cost. Furthermore, TCCB performs much better than Bubble Rap and Prophet in terms of delivery ratio, but the delivery cost of TCCB is very close to that of Bubble Rap.
Data Processing with Missing Information

We handle incomplete information in two aspects: One is about the web structure; the other is about information system with missing values. In the area of link analysis, the celebrated PageRank algorithm has proved to be a very effective paradigm for ranking results of web search algorithms. However, as the web continues to grow, it becomes more impossible for one search engine to crawl all the web page, as a result, the final page ranks computed by PageRank are only based on a subset of the whole web, which is found or visited by a crawler. This results in inaccuracy because of its incomplete information about the web structure. Can we find a way to get as much as information about the web structure based on the limited subset of the whole web so that the inaccuracy of the PageRank can be avoided as much as possible? We try to solve this kind of problem by proposing a new method for ranking pages. The main idea is that during the process of crawling, the information for unknown links can be used for link analysis, more specifically, we can use known information about links to predict the number of inlinks for each page that have already been found, and thus we can predict the information about unknown links and the link structure based on such information. In other words, the web pages already visited or found along with the known links form a known directed graph, whose structure is somewhat certain, and a random graph is formed based on the predicted number of inlinks, whose structure is somewhat uncertain, we then apply the combination of the known graph and the random graph to the PageRank algorithm to get the final page ranks. Experiments show this algorithm achieves encouraging results both in speed and in accuracy. In the area of information system, the dependency degree, γ is a traditional measure in Rough Set Theory to measure the dependency between the conditional attributes and the decision attributes. However, γ does not express the dependency accurately. More specifically, in extreme cases when there is no deterministic rule between the conditional attributes and the decision attributes, the dependency degree γ b comes zero, but there may exist some kinds of dependency between the conditional attributes and the decision attributes. To avoid such inaccuracy we introduce a generalized dependency degree, γ′ between two sets of attributes which counts both deterministic rules and indeterministic rules while γ only counts deterministic rules. Therefore γ′ is a generalization ofγ. We first give the definition of generalized dependency degree in terms of equivalence relation, then interpret it
Are Vicilins Another Major Class of Legume Lectins?

Legume lectins comprise a structurally related, Ca/Mn-dependent, widespread, abundant and well characterized lectin family when compared to the large number of lectins from other sources described in the literature. Strangely enough, no specific function has been assigned to them aside from a possible role in storage and/or defense. Using a recent and fine-tuned methodology capable of specific lectin identification, β-conglutin, Vicia faba vicilin and β-lathyrin, the vicilin storage globulins from Lupinus albus, V. faba and Lathyrus sativus, respectively, were shown to be capable of affinity binding to thoroughly washed erythrocyte membranes and of specific elution with appropriate sugars. Based on this evidence and on sparse data published in the literature, a second family of legume lectins is proposed: the 7S family of storage proteins from leguminous seeds, or family II of legume lectins. These lectins are also structurally related, widespread and well characterized. In addition, they self-aggregate in a Ca/Mg, electrostatic dependent manner and are even more abundant than the family I of legume lectins. Using the same evidence, reserve and defense roles may be attributed to family II of legume lectins.
Hello/goodbye new families: group work with five looked-after siblings in foster care together awaiting a move to separate adoptive families

This paper describes group work with five siblings aged between three and nine. They were taken into care following severe abuse involving neglect, physical and emotional abuse. In it, we consider the impact of the losses on the network and the children. We explore how Freud, in his paper ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917), and others who built on his work, helped us understand the children’s losses. The sibling group was planned in order to address the children’s need to say goodbye to their birth parents, their foster carers and to each other and to prepare them for their individual separate adoptions. The group ran for 18 months and ended when four children had been placed in their adoptive homes; the last child to be adopted was then seen individually until she was also placed. The group work is described with the use of quotes from sessional material to illuminate the processes for these children in facing their complicated and ambivalent losses, the mourning process and their progress towards becoming individuals in their own right rather than enacting fragmented functional parts/roles on behalf of their sibling group as a whole. Their mourning of the loss of each other was complicated by their earlier reliance on each other to manage the difficulties they had faced when surviving their abusive early lives together.
Experiment selection for causal discovery

Randomized controlled experiments are often described as the most reliable tool available to scientists for discovering causal relationships among quantities of interest. However, it is often unclear how many and which different experiments are needed to identify the full (possibly cyclic) causal structure among some given (possibly causally insufficient) set of variables. Recent results in the causal discovery literature have explored various identifiability criteria that depend on the assumptions one is able to make about the underlying causal process, but these criteria are not directly constructive for selecting the optimal set of experiments. Fortunately, many of the needed constructions already exist in the combinatorics literature, albeit under terminology which is unfamiliar to most of the causal discovery community. In this paper we translate the theoretical results and apply them to the concrete problem of experiment selection. For a variety of settings we give explicit constructions of the optimal set of experiments and adapt some of the general combinatorics results to answer questions relating to the problem of experiment selection.
Resolving Pronouns Robustly: Plumbing the Depths of Shallowness

In this paper, we explore various shallow techniques for salience-based pronoun resolution. We use simple noun chunking at the syntactic analysis stage and extract grammatical function information by pattern matching. Identifying subjects and objects is critical to salience calculations. We report that this important subject-object distinction can be made reliably with our shallow approach. We then explore a range of shallow semantic inference procedures (making use of only the text under consideration and lexical knowledge bases like WordNet) that significantly improve third-person pronoun resolution across a range of genre. We show how the same framework can also resolve relative pronouns with high accuracy. This is a result that might be relevant to other NLP applications like parsing.
Retaking the SAT

Using data on applicants to three selective universities, we analyze a college applicant’s decision to retake the SAT. We model this decision as an optimal search problem, and use the model to assess the impact of college admissions policies on retaking behavior. The most common test score ranking policy, which utilizes only the highest of all submitted scores, provides large incentives to retake the test. This places certain applicants at a disadvantage: those with high test-taking costs, those attaching low values to college admission, and those with “pessimistic” prior beliefs regarding their own ability.
Expert Systems With Applications

Current benchmark reports of classiﬁcation algorithms generally concern common classiﬁers and their variants but do not include many algorithms that have been introduced in recent years. Moreover, important properties such as the dependency on number of classes and features and CPU running time are typically not examined. In this paper, we carry out a comparative empirical study on both established classiﬁers and more recently proposed ones on 71 data sets originating from different domains, publicly available at UCI and KEEL repositories. The list of 11 algorithms studied includes Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), Sparse Representation based Classiﬁcation (SRC), and Deep Learning (DL), which have not been thoroughly investigated in existing comparative studies. It is found that Stochastic Gradient Boosting Trees (GBDT) matches or exceeds the prediction performance of Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Random Forests (RF), while being the fastest algorithm in terms of prediction eﬃciency. ELM also yields good accuracy results, ranking in the top-5 , alongside GBDT, RF, SVM, and C4.5 but this performance varies widely across all data sets. Unsurprisingly, top accuracy performers have average or slow training time eﬃciency. DL is the worst performer in terms of accuracy but second fastest in prediction eﬃciency. SRC shows good accuracy performance but it is the slowest classiﬁer in both training and testing.
Numerical simulation of clipping-induced distortion in analog lightwave systems

Clipping is a fundamental source of distortion in subcarrier multiplexed lightwave system. The authors numerically simulate the clipping nonlinear distortion for CATV systems. The simulation results agree well with the Saleh clipping limit for effective modulation depths greater than 0.25. The composite second-order (CSO) and composite triple-beat (CTB) distortion are also predicted. The results indicate that the CSO and CTB distortion rise sharply at nearly the same value of the effective root-mean-square (RMS) modulation depth as the total nonlinear distortion (NLD). <<ETX>>
Strategic orientation and performance of internet‐based businesses

Abstract. Many of the pure internet‐based businesses that proliferated over the past 5 years have encountered serious problems as their lofty valuations have plunged. Industry observers have attributed this phenomenon to a variety of factors, generally framed in terms of poor conceptualization or implementation of the ‘business model’. This study explores an often‐used concept in strategic management called ‘strategic orientation’ and applies it to internet‐based businesses. Based on an analysis of over 100 public businesses, firms that cluster together with similar strategic orientation are observed. These strategic groups are then analysed for performance differences. The results are discussed with the intent of learning from the dot‐burn effects as we evolve to the next generation of internet‐based business.
Perspective and the rotating trapezoid.

Judgments of direction of motion were obtained for computer-generated motion-picture sequences of rectangles, trapezoids, circles, and ellipses rotating about a vertical axis and displayed at five perspectives, simulating viewing distances from infinity to close proximity to the figure. Accuracy ranged from 25% or less at the farthest perspective to close to 100% at the nearest perspective for rectangles and trapezoids. The Ames effect (perceived rotation of the rectangle and oscillation of the trapezoid) was found at intermediate perspectives. Rectangles and trapezoids were also generated with perspective variations in the horizontal or vertical dimensions only. Results for the vertical-perspective sequences were similar, but less accuracy was found for the other displays. With sufficiently close viewing distances, vertical-perspective changes resulting from rotary motion give rise to correct direction judgments but subjects resort to secondary information sources, such as relative sizes of vertical sides, when greater viewing distances render information from motion perspective ambiguous.
Self-report knowledge: At the crossroads of ability, interest, and personality.

The authors describe an approach to adult intellect on the basis of content, unlike the traditional approach, which is mostly based on process. Thirty-two academic knowledge scales were rated by 202 college students, who also completed ability, vocational interest, and personality scales. Analyses of knowledge clusters and individual scales were used to evaluate commonality across ability constructs (verbal and spatial ability), vocational interests (realistic, investigative, and artistic), and personality (typical intellectual engagement and openness). The results support knowledge differentiation across fluid and crystallized abilities, show a pattern of positive correlations of arts and humanities knowledge with typical intellectual engagement and openness, and show correlations between math and physical sciences knowledge and realistic and investigative interests. Implications for the study of adult intelligence are discussed.
A 0.8-V 0.25-mW Current-Mirror OTA With 160-MHz GBW in 0.18-$\mu{\hbox {m}}$ CMOS

A low-voltage low-power CMOS operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) with near rail-to-rail output swing is presented in this brief. The proposed circuit is based on the current-mirror OTA topology. In addition, several circuit techniques are adopted to enhance the voltage gain. Simulated from a 0.8-V supply voltage, the proposed OTA achieves a 62-dB dc gain and a gain-bandwidth product of 160 MHz while driving a 2-pF load. The OTA is designed in a 0.18-mum CMOS process. The power consumption is 0.25 mW including the common-mode feedback circuit