Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Editorial: Walking in real and virtual environments

This special issue is devoted to understanding human movement by walking in real and virtual environments, investigating activities including obstacle avoidance, estimation of travel distance, visuomotor calibration of walking, gender differences in path integration, heading assessment in low vision and visual speed-matching on a feedback-controlled walking machine (treadmill). Whether implicitly or explicitly, every study in the issue takes a comparative approach, relating the activity in the virtual world to its counterpart in the real world, and vice versa, as without cross-validating one realm with the other it is arguably impossible to get it right. Necessarily, this is also a multidisciplinary area of research and thus, appropriately, the background of the contributors to this issue range from computer science to psychology, engineering to neuroscience, optics to ophthalmology and others. Indeed, there is as much of a goal for the issue to understand multimodal processing in human locomotion as there is to further the technology of virtual reality through its understanding, two aspects that embody the cross-disciplinary ethos of ACM TAP. The capability for a user to move around in the virtual, as in the real, world has long been a key requirement and challenge for virtual reality technologists and scientists. Full motion for navigation in virtual environments (VEs) using joy-stick, mouse or keyboard, can be effective but does not mimic important aspects of human action nor, it seems, do all graphic environments convey navigational cues equivalently. What can we learn from human locomotor movement and behavior in the real world that could yield a better interface in virtual reality (VR), and how can we use VR to improve our understanding of the former? Obstacle avoidance is no less than a requirement to our survival while moving, and thus to faithfully include it in VR requires a comparison to be made between its characteristics in VR and the real world. In Fink et al. in this issue, small but reliable differences are found in locomotor paths, as subjects’ avoided
Evaluating an Expectation-Driven Question-Under-Discussion Model of Discourse Interpretation

According to Question-Under-Discussion (QUD) models of discourse interpretation, clauses cohere with the preceding context by virtue of providing answers to (usually implicit) questions that are situated within a speaker's goal-driven strategy of inquiry. In this article we present four experiments that examine the predictions of a QUD model of interpretation when cast in terms of an integrated, expectation-driven model of discourse processing. The results of these studies together support the predictions of the model, demonstrating that contextual cues affect comprehenders' expectations about ensuing QUDs (Experiment 1), QUD expectations in turn influence the interpretation of discourse-dependent linguistic expressions (Experiment 2), and the biases associated with those expressions in turn influence the anticipation of QUDs (Experiments 3a and b).
Face Sketch Landmarks Localization in the Wild

In this letter, we propose a method for facial landmarks localization in face sketch images. As recent approaches and the corresponding datasets are designed for ordinary face photos, the performance of such models drop significantly when they are applied on face sketch images. We first propose a scheme to synthesize face sketches from face photos based on random-forests edge detection and local face region enhancement. Then we jointly train a Cascaded Pose Regression based method for facial landmarks localization for both face photos and sketches. We build an evaluation dataset, called Face Sketches in the Wild (FSW), with 450 face sketch images collected from the Internet and with the manual annotation of 68 facial landmark locations on each face sketch. The proposed multi-modality facial landmark localization method shows competitive performance on both face sketch images (the FSW dataset) and face photo images (the Labeled Face Parts in the Wild dataset), despite the fact that we do not use extra annotation of face sketches for model building.
The missing link: integrating paper and electronic documents

Despite the prevalence of computers and on-line documents, paper persists. As physical objects, paper documents are easy to use, flexible, portable and have proven extremely difficult to replace. Even though they all use computers, engineers still annotate large paper engineering drawings, video producers still sketch and rearrange paper storyboards, air traffic controllers still plan traffic flows with paper flight strips, and biologists still record experiments and organise multimedia data in paper notebooks.In this article, I argue that we should seriously reconsider the urge to replace all paper documents with on-line ones, accessible only with a mouse and keyboard and viewable only a screen. Instead, we should begin to think about "interactive paper": which maintains the ease-of-use of physical paper, while enabling us to benefit from the full spectrum of interactive computing.
Model reference adaptive iterative learning control for linear systems

In this paper, we propose a model reference adaptive control (MRAC) strategy for continuous‐time single‐input single‐output (SISO) linear time‐invariant (LTI) systems with unknown parameters, performing repetitive tasks. This is achieved through the introduction of a discrete‐type parametric adaptation law in the ‘iteration domain’, which is directly obtained from the continuous‐time parametric adaptation law used in standard MRAC schemes. In fact, at the first iteration, we apply a standard MRAC to the system under consideration, while for the subsequent iterations, the parameters are appropriately updated along the iteration‐axis, in order to enhance the tracking performance from iteration to iteration. This approach is referred to as the model reference adaptive iterative learning control (MRAILC). In the case of systems with relative degree one, we obtain a pointwise convergence of the tracking error to zero, over the whole finite time interval, when the number of iterations tends to infinity. In the general case, i.e. systems with arbitrary relative degree, we show that the tracking error converges to a prescribed small domain around zero, over the whole finite time interval, when the number of iterations tends to infinity. It is worth noting that this approach allows: (1) to extend existing MRAC schemes, in a straightforward manner, to repetitive systems; (2) to avoid the use of the output time derivatives, which are generally required in traditional iterative learning control (ILC) strategies dealing with systems with high relative degree; (3) to handle systems with multiple tracking objectives (i.e. the desired trajectory can be iteration‐varying). Finally, simulation results are carried out to support the theoretical development. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
JDMM: a java memory model for non-cache-coherent memory architectures

As the number of cores continuously grows, processor designers are considering non coherent memories as more scalable and energy efficient alternatives to the current coherent ones. The Java Memory Model (JMM) requires that all cores can access the Java heap. It guarantees sequential consistency for data-race-free programs and no out-of-thin-air values for non data-race-free programs. To implement the Java Memory Model over non-cache-coherent and distributed architectures Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) are most likely to employ software caching. In this work, i) we provide a formalization of the Java Memory Model for non-cache-coherent and distributed memory architectures, ii) prove the adherence of our model with the Java Memory Model and iii) evaluate, regarding its compliance to the Java Memory Model, a state-of-the-art Java Virtual Machine implementation on a non-cache-coherent architecture.
Hydrogen Sulfide Increases Nitric Oxide Production and Subsequent S-Nitrosylation in Endothelial Cells

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and nitric oxide (NO), two endogenous gaseous molecules in endothelial cells, got increased attention with respect to their protective roles in the cardiovascular system. However, the details of the signaling pathways between H2S and NO in endothelia cells remain unclear. In this study, a treatment with NaHS profoundly increased the expression and the activity of endothelial nitric oxide synthase. Elevated gaseous NO levels were observed by a novel and specific fluorescent probe, 5-amino-2-(6-hydroxy-3-oxo-3H-xanthen-9-yl)benzoic acid methyl ester (FA-OMe), and quantified by flow cytometry. Further study indicated an increase of upstream regulator for eNOS activation, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), and protein kinase B (Akt). By using a biotin switch, the level of NO-mediated protein S-nitrosylation was also enhanced. However, with the addition of the NO donor, NOC-18, the expressions of cystathionine-γ-lyase, cystathionine-β-synthase, and 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase were not changed. The level of H2S was also monitored by a new designed fluorescent probe, 4-nitro-7-thiocyanatobenz-2-oxa-1,3-diazole (NBD-SCN) with high specificity. Therefore, NO did not reciprocally increase the expression of H2S-generating enzymes and the H2S level. The present study provides an integrated insight of cellular responses to H2S and NO from protein expression to gaseous molecule generation, which indicates the upstream role of H2S in modulating NO production and protein S-nitrosylation.
Incorporating sparse representation phone identification features in automatic speech recognition using exponential families

Sparse representation phone identification features (SPIF) is a recently developed technique to obtain an estimate of phone posterior probabilities conditioned on an acoustic feature vector. In this paper, we explore incorporating SPIF phone posterior probability estimates in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) task by including them as additional features of exponential densities that model the HMM state emission likelihoods. We compare our proposed approach to a number of other well known methods of combining feature streams or multiple LVCSR systems. Our experiments show that using exponential models to combine features results in a word error rate reduction of 0.5% absolute (18.7% down to 18.2%); this is comparable to best error rate reduction obtained from system combination methods, but without having to build multiple systems or tune the system combination weights.
Time to Angiographic Reperfusion in Acute Ischemic Stroke: Decision Analysis

Background and Purpose— Our objective was to use decision analytic modeling to compare 2 treatment strategies of intravenous recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator (r-tPA) alone versus combined intravenous r-tPA/endovascular therapy in a subgroup of patients with large vessel (internal carotid artery terminus, M1, and M2) occlusion based on varying times to angiographic reperfusion and varying rates of reperfusion. Methods— We developed a decision model using Interventional Management of Stroke (IMS) III trial data and comprehensive literature review. We performed 1-way sensitivity analyses for time to reperfusion and 2-way sensitivity for time to reperfusion and rate of reperfusion success. We also performed probabilistic sensitivity analyses to address uncertainty in total time to reperfusion for the endovascular approach. Results— In the base case, endovascular approach yielded a higher expected utility (6.38 quality-adjusted life years) than the intravenous-only arm (5.42 quality-adjusted life years). One-way sensitivity analyses demonstrated superiority of endovascular treatment to intravenous-only arm unless time to reperfusion exceeded 347 minutes. Two-way sensitivity analysis demonstrated that endovascular treatment was preferred when probability of reperfusion is high and time to reperfusion is small. Probabilistic sensitivity results demonstrated an average gain for endovascular therapy of 0.76 quality-adjusted life years (SD 0.82) compared with the intravenous-only approach. Conclusions— In our post hoc model with its underlying limitations, endovascular therapy after intravenous r-tPA is the preferred treatment as compared with intravenous r-tPA alone. However, if time to reperfusion exceeds 347 minutes, intravenous r-tPA alone is the recommended strategy. This warrants validation in a randomized, prospective trial among patients with large vessel occlusions.
Asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes: conserved quantities

Asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes are considered in a general dimension d 4. As one might expect, the boundary conditions at infinity ensure that the asymptotic symmetry group is the anti-de Sitter group (although there is an interesting subtlety if d = 4). Asymptotic field equations imply that, associated with each generator of this group, there is a quantity Q which satisfies the expected `balance equation' if there is a flux of physical matter fields across the boundary at infinity and is absolutely conserved in the absence of this flux. Irrespective of the dimension d , all of these quantities vanish if the spacetime under considerations is (globally) anti-de Sitter. Furthermore, this result is required by a general covariance argument. However, it contradicts some of the recent findings based on the conjectured ADS/CFT duality. This and other features of our analysis suggest that, if a consistent dictionary between gravity and conformal field theories does exist in fully non-perturbative regimes, it would have to be more subtle than the one used currently.
Automated Generation of Message-Passing Programs: An Evaluation Using CAPTools

Scientists at NASA Ames Research Center have been developing computational aeroscience applications on highly parallel architectures over the past ten years. During that same time period, a steady transition of hardware and system software also occurred, forcing us to expend great efforts into migrating and re-coding our applications. As applications and machine architectures become increasingly complex, the cost and time required for this process will become prohibitive. In this paper, we present the first set of results in our evaluation of interactive parallelization tools. In particular, we evaluate CAPTool's ability to parallelize computational aeroscience applications. CAPTools was tested on serial versions of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks and ARC3D, a computational fluid dynamics application, on two platforms: the SGI Origin 2000 and the Cray T3E. This evaluation includes performance, amount of user interaction required, limitations and portability. Based on these results, a discussion on the feasibility of computer aided parallelization of aerospace applications is presented along with suggestions for future work.
View Dependent Modeling

There has been considerable interest in sketch based mesh modeling and e diting, from the simple, intuitive interface of Teddy [1], to the more recent techniques to preserve detail in an existing mesh while modifying it with sketched strokes [2]. These approaches apply to editing a single mes h that is consistent in all views, but it is often the case in 2D animation that a character will have a drastically dif ferent shape depending on the angle at which it is viewed. View dependent geometry seeks to provide a solution to animating 3D characte rs wi h meshes that should deform depending on the viewing angle [3]. With view dependent g ometry, a single mesh is represented by several sets of vertex positions specified at different views . Each view corresponds to a point on a sphere, and the mesh vertex positions are interpolated from three key view s that form a triangle containing the current view on the surface of the sphere. This project seeks to combine the idea of view dependent geometry with sketc h based mesh editing to create an interface for producing 3D characters that might behave more naturally for producing animation that mimics 2D styles. Specifically, focus is given to the problem of resolving mu ltiple, perhaps inconsistent, strokes drawn by a user to deform a mesh from several views. An appr o ch to view dependent geometry that does not require adequate coverage and spacing of key views is a lso described.
When maladaptive gene flow does not increase selection

Populations receiving high maladaptive gene flow are expected to experience strong directional selection—because gene flow pulls mean phenotypes away from local fitness peaks. We tested this prediction by means of a large and replicated mark‐recapture study of threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) in two stream populations. One of the populations (outlet) experiences high gene flow from the lake population and its morphology is correspondingly poorly adapted. The other population (inlet) experiences very low gene flow from the lake population and its morphology is correspondingly well adapted. Contrary to the above prediction, selection was not stronger in the outlet than in the inlet, a result that forced us to consider potential reasons for why maladaptive gene flow might not increase selection. Of particular interest, we show by means of a simple population genetic model that maladaptive gene flow can—under reasonable conditions—decrease the strength of directional selection. This outcome occurs when immigrants decrease mean fitness in the resident population, which decreases the strength of selection against maladapted phenotypes. We argue that this previously unrecognized effect of gene flow deserves further attention in theoretical and empirical studies.
Polynomial regression aided identification method for a class of mechanical systems

In this article we present a novel approach to identification of a class of mechanical systems that can be written in a form of Euler-Lagrage equations. This identification procedure is based on a polynomial regression that is employed for data smoothing and estimation. Procedure requires only the measurements of torques or forces that are used to control the system and measurements of angles or other co-ordinates that are used to specify the location of the system. This identification algorithm is demonstrated on the problem of identification of three link bipedal robot and the results indicate that the procedure is effective and over-performs classical approaches used to solve the problem.
The period of susceptibility to the physiological effects of unilateral eye closure in kittens

1. Kittens were visually deprived by suturing the lids of the right eye for various periods of time at different ages. Recordings were subsequently made from the striate cortex, and responses from the two eyes compared. As previously reported, monocular eye closure during the first few months of life causes a sharp decline in the number of cells that can be influenced by the previously closed eye.
A distributed optimization-based approach for hierarchical model predictive control of large-scale systems with coupled dynamics and constraints

We present a hierarchical model predictive control approach for large-scale systems based on dual decomposition. The proposed scheme allows coupling in both dynamics and constraints between the subsystems and generates a primal feasible solution within a finite number of iterations, using primal averaging and a constraint tightening approach. The primal update is performed in a distributed way and does not require exact solutions, while the dual problem uses an approximate subgradient method. Stability of the scheme is established using bounded suboptimality.
Significance of Gene Ranking for Classification of Microarray Samples

Many methods for classification and gene selection with microarray data have been developed. These methods usually give a ranking of genes. Evaluating the statistical significance of the gene ranking is important for understanding the results and for further biological investigations, but this question has not been well addressed for machine learning methods in existing works. Here, we address this problem by formulating it in the framework of hypothesis testing and propose a solution based on resampling. The proposed r-test methods convert gene ranking results into position p-values to evaluate the significance of genes. The methods are tested on three real microarray data sets and three simulation data sets with support vector machines as the method of classification and gene selection. The obtained position p-values help to determine the number of genes to be selected and enable scientists to analyze selection results by sophisticated multivariate methods under the same statistical inference paradigm as for simple hypothesis testing methods
High-resolution imaging of faint blue galaxies

We have used HRCam on the CFHT to obtain subarcsec images of 26 galaxies with z=0.1-0.7 from the redshift survey of Colless et al. The 17 galaxies of the primary sample have enhanced star formation indicated by [O II] equivalent widths greater than 20 A, while the nine galaxies of the comparison sample have equivalent widths of less than 10 A. By fitting exponential discs or r 1/4 bulges to B, V and I images, we derive scalelengths for the blue and red stellar populations and so establish the location of the star formation (in the nucleus or the disc) for each galaxy. We have also searched for nearby faint companions in order to determine whether the star formation might be linked to tidal interactions or mergers
Variable frame rate and length analysis for data compression in distributed speech recognition

This paper addresses the issue of data compression in distributed speech recognition on the basis of a variable frame rate and length analysis method. The method first conducts frame selection by using a posteriori signal-to-noise ratio weighted energy distance to find the right time resolution at the signal level, and then increases the length of the selected frame according to the number of non-selected preceding frames to find the right time-frequency resolution at the frame level. It produces high frame rate and small frame length in rapidly changing regions and low frame rate and large frame length for steady regions. The method is applied to scalable source coding in distributed speech recognition where the target bitrate is met by adjusting the frame rate. Speech recognition results show that the proposed approach outperforms other compression methods in terms of recognition accuracy for noisy speech while achieving higher compression rates.
Automatic control system of intelligent building based on WebAccess

This paper introduces an automatic control system based on Advantech WebAccess for intelligent buildings and using the renewable energy source solar energy to improve the working efficiency and realize the distributed control and centralized management of buildings. This system uses 485 Net and EtherNet as the communication network. The monitor and control of equipments is implemented on ADAM-5510/TCP controller and ADAM-5000/TCP controller of Advantech. The device management and control of the building is accomplished by WebAccess configuration software. Results show that the system design scheme based on WebAccess configuration software and ADAM controller is reasonable, and the research on the renewable energy source solar energy in intelligent buildingpsilas application is a worthwhile job.