Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A fast and robust scan matching algorithm based on ML-NDT and feature extraction

In this paper, we introduce a fast and robust scan matching method that combines the Multi-Layered Normal Distributions Transform (ML-NDT) and a feature extraction algorithm into a single framework. This is achieved by first applying the conventional NDT generation process to the reference scan, and the plane segments are extracted with the help of Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm for the input scan. Thus, the proposed method provides three significant advantages with respect to conventional methods. The first one is that the proposed method is more robust to outliers since it is based on the matching of certain geometric structures. The second one is that the registration step is much faster because the number of points to be matched is very less with respect to all scanned points. Therefore, this process can be considered as a special sampling strategy. Finally, it is showed that the extracted features can also be used in feature based probabilistic SLAM methods such as Kalman Filters, Information Filters, and Particle Filters after applying merging procedure. Since the plane segments are already registered, the data association problem can be easily solved even without any odometry measurement. This can be considered as the most powerful part of the algorithm because data association problem in three dimensions is quite difficult problem. As a result, on the one hand, it is obtained a robust and fast scan matching; on the other hand, it is possible to extend the method for feature extraction algorithm in SLAM problems with a little extra computation. The method is applied to real experimental data and the results are quite affirmative.
Open Access Research Article Socioeconomic Determinants of Psychotropic Drug Utilisation among Elderly: a National Population-based Cross-sectional Study

Background: Psychotropic drugs are commonly utilised among the elderly. This study aimed to analyse whether two socioeconomic determinants-income and marital status-are associated with differences in utilisation of psychotropic drugs and potentially inappropriate psychotropic drugs among elderly in Sweden. Methods: All individuals aged 75 years and older who had purchased a psychotropic drug in Sweden during 2006 were included (68.7% women, n = 384712). Data was collected from national individual-based registers. Outcome measures were utilisation of three or more psychotropic drugs and utilisation of potentially inappropriate psychotropic drugs, as classified by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. Results: Individuals with low income were more likely to utilise three or more psychotropic drugs compared to those with high income; adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 1.12 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.10-1.14). The non-married had a higher probability for utilising three or more psychotropic drugs compared to the married (aOR 1.22; CI 1.20-1.25). The highest probability was observed among the divorced and the never married. Potentially inappropriate psychotropic drugs were more common among individuals with low compared to high income (aOR 1.14; CI 1.13-1.16). Compared to the married, potentially inappropriate psychotropic drug utilisation occurred more commonly among the non-married (aOR 1.08; CI 1.06-1.10). The never married and the divorced had the highest probability. Conclusions: There was an association between socioeconomic determinants and psychotropic drug utilisation. The probability for utilising potentially inappropriate psychotropics was higher among individuals with low income and among the non-married. Background Psychotropic drugs are common among the elderly and represent a considerable proportion of inappropriate drugs used in this population [1]. The elderly are especially vulnerable to drug-related adverse health outcomes , and exposure to inappropriate drugs is associated with an increased risk of such events [2]. Socioeconomic determinants (e.g., poverty and lack of social support) influence health. Low socioeconomic status is associated with a higher prevalence of overall morbidity, including psychiatric morbidity [3-5], but also a decreased access to high-quality care and a lower consumer demand [6,7].
Reliability analysis of multi-path multi-stage interconnection network

In this paper, we examine the reliability of multi-path multi-stage interconnection networks (MINs) of different class. The bounded expressions for the time-dependent reliability for 16 × 16 Zeta Networks (ZTNs) and 16 × 16 Augmented Shuffle-Exchange Networks (ASENs) are derived. Furthermore, reliability upper bound and lower bound that is useful for the analysis of large networks is derived. The "full-access" criterion and "dead-fault" model is used for the reliability analysis. All numerical and simulation results for networks as large as 512 × 512 are provided. The studies of hardware cost and cost-effectiveness have also been carried out for network size as large as 512 × 512. The simulation study reveals that ZTNs are better in terms of cost and cost-effectiveness while both networks are equally reliable in terms of upper bounds.
Behavioral Effects of Mortality Salience: An Experimental Study

The study is intended to explain the effect of Mortality Salience (MS) on consumer behaviors. In a first part, we present a state of the art of Terror Management Theory (TMT) and its contributions in management sciences by focusing on the impact of MS on consumption. In a second part, we illustrate the results of an experiment testing the effect of death reminders on consumption choices. The results of the experiment show that the reminders of death generate, for the most part of participants, pro-materialistic consumption choices. Based on these results, we highlight the effect the death reminders can generate on Lebanese consumers.
Biologically self-assembled memristive circuit elements

Both TiO2 and HfO2 are common materials for semiconductor fabrication that have shown memristive properties. Nanoparticles of these metal oxides have great prospect to provide nanoscale materials with tunable electronic properties for integration in advanced circuits such as neuromorphic networks based on memristive crossbar elements. We seek to take advantage of the unique interaction between the phosphate end-group of DNA and Ti02/Hf02 nanoparticles to enable a guided assembly of circuit elements via specific nucleotide sequences in a bottom-up fashion.
Does a Species’ Extinction–Proneness Predict Its Contribution to Nestedness? A Test Using a Sunbird-Tree Visitation Network

Animal pollinators and the plants they pollinate depend on networks of mutualistic partnerships and more broadly on the stability of such networks. Based mainly on insect-plant visitation networks, theory predicts that species that are most prone to extinction contribute the most to nestedness, however empirical tests are rare. We used a sunbird-tree visitation network within which were both extinction prone vs non extinction prone sunbird species to test the idea. We predicted that the extinction prone species would contribute the most to nestedness. Using local abundance as a proxy for extinction risk we considered that locally rare sunbird species, by virtue of their small population size and associated demographic stochasticity to be more at risk of extinction than the common species. Our network was not strongly nested and all sunbird species made similar contributions to nestedness, so that in our empirical test, extinction proneness did not predict contribution to nestedness. The consequences of this finding remain unclear. It may be that network theory based on plant-insect mutualisms is not widely applicable and does not work for tree- sunbird mutualistic networks. Alternatively it may be that our network was too small to provide results with any statistical power. Without doubt our study highlights the problems faced when testing network theory in the field; a plethora of ecological considerations can variously impact on results.
A fuzzy hypermatrix-based skin color filtering method

In this paper, a classification method is proposed. The idea behind the classifier is the pre-calculation of fuzzy membership function values that are stored in fuzzy multidimensional arrays (so-called fuzzy hypermatrices) so their data can be accessed quickly run-time using the parameter values of the input data. This paper focuses on the 3 dimensional 2-class case in order to achieve rapid skin area identification based on pixel color using the images of a camera. A training algorithm is presented and the performance is illustrated by an image processing problem.
Contingency Contracting and Its Impact on the Use of Punctuation Skills by Fifth Graders with Learning Disabilities.

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of contingency contracting on the percentage of correctly used punctuation marks in free writing tasks. Participants were three 11-year-old boys with learning disabilities (LD). A multiple-baseline across-subjects design was employed to test our prediction that the students would show significant improvements once the agreement went into effect. Overall outcomes indicated that the approach was very successful. The results are discussed in the context of the study limitations. Implications for future research are provided.
Applications, Application Requirements and Metrics Editor Martin Schmucker (fhg)

While deliverable D.WVL. 7 was focused on forensic tracking1, this document gives an overview of perceptual hashing and the research activities with ECRYPT. The focus of this document is applications of perceptual hashing techniques, their requirements and related metrics. The introduction in chapter 1 starts with a short summary of deliverable D.WVL. 7. The relation of this deliverable and deliverable D.WVL. 6 is explained as well. This summary revises applications and problems that are relevant for this deliverable D.WVL. 12. Relevant standardisation activities are addressed in chapter 2. Here, a brief overview of MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 is given and the relevance for perceptual hashing technologies and vice versa is described. This chapter and the following chapters are split in two sections: content identification and content authentication and verification to reflect the different applications for perceptual hashing technologies. After the introduction to the different application scenarios with an view from standardisation, corresponding metrics are given in 3. Here, the basic foundations are revised. Chapter 4 gives an overview of the partners’ work. The summary in chapter 5 concludes this document with an outlook on future and potential research. Forensic tracking includes perceptual hashing techniques for tracking content and content usage as well as watermarking for the same application scenarios. Furthermore, watermarking techniques can be applied in applications where additional information has to be embedded into the content itself. Among these applications is the identification of leaks or traitors. Applications, Application Requirements and Metrics Editor Martin Schmucker (FHG) Contributors Michael Arnold (FHG), Andreas Uhl (GAUSS), Xuebing Zhou (FHG) 24. February 2006 Revision 1.0 The work described in this report has in part been supported by the Commission of the European Communities through the IST program under contract IST-2002-507932. The information in this document is provided as is, and no warranty is given or implied that the information is fit for any particular purpose. The user thereof uses the information at its sole risk and liability.
Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms applied to optimize the oilfields development

This work presents the development and evaluation of an intelligent system to evaluate the performance of evolutionary algorithms under a distributing processing platform and using expert knowledge. The testbed is a decision support system applied to optimize the development alternatives in an heterogeneous oilfield. An alternative involves the number, location, trajectory and type of petroleum wells that are utilized among the exploitation time. The implemented framework consists in three modules: evolutionary algorithm, reservoir simulator and NPV computing and some inputs related to the expert knowledge. The outcomes obtained in this work are consistent with the viewpoint of the experts. This fact shows the suitability to use evolutionary algorithms in the petroleum engineering area. Keywords-oil field development; evolutionary algorithms; optimization; distributed systems
Commodity Price Booms : Macroeconomic and Distributional Implications

Global real food prices increased by about fifty percent between 2003 and 2013. This increase occurred after a two-decade period of food price stability. It is of concern because food prices may affect disproportionately those who are economically vulnerable. Indeed, households in low income countries (LICs) devote half of their budget to food while households in developed nations devote less than 15 percent. It is also true, however, that a larger fraction of households are food producers in LICs and most of the exports of these countries relate to commodities. As a result, the impact of increases in food prices on LICs is not obvious. In this paper, we derive the quantitative implications of observed changes in food prices on macroeconomic aggregates and the distribution of income, and study the implications of some of the policies currently being debated to mitigate the impact of this shock. Our tool of analysis is a multi-sector dynamic general equilibrium model that includes key features of LICs economies and heterogenous agents subject to idiosyncratic and aggregates shocks. We calibrate the model to Ghana, which has unique household panel data. We find this shock can have strong distributional implications that operate through general equilibrium effects by changing the price of domestic food, and thus the purchasing power of farmers vis-a-vis other agents. Non distortionary food subsidies can partially undo the negative effects of this shock. ⇤The authors are grateful to U.K.’s DFID for the generous financial support. We thank Paolo Falco for his extensive help with the GUHPS data set, as well as the participants of the Oxford CSAE 2014 conference for their generous feedback. The views express herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IMF
On the stability of interval matrices

A new method is proposed for computing a lower bound to the stability margin of an interval matrix family, thus providing also a sufficient condition for stability. The method is based on Gershgorin's theorem and on the optimal selection of the eigenvectors of the nominal system: the optimization considerably improves previous bounds reported in literature. The analytical results make the solution extremely simple. Numerical experiments show that several problems involving uncertain systems can be solved efficiently by the proposed method, also in view of the comparisons with other methods proposed in the literature.
Relevance Feedback versus Local Context Analysis as Term Suggestion Devices: Rutgers' TREC-8 Interactive Track Experience

Query formulation and reformulation is recognized as one of the most difficult tasks that users in information retrieval systems are asked to perform. This study investigated the use of two different techniques for supporting query reformulation in interactive information retrieval: relevance feedback and Local Context Analysis , both implemented as term−suggestion devices. The former represents techniques which offer user control and understanding of term suggestion; the latter represents techniques which require relatively little user effort. Using the TREC−8 Interactive Track task and experimental protocol, we found that although there were no significant differences between two systems implementing these techniques in terms of user preference and performance in the task, subjects using the Local Context Analysis system had significantly fewer user−defined query terms than those in the relevance feedback system. We conclude that term suggestion without user guidance/control is the better of the two methods tested, for this task, since it required less effort for the same level of performance. We also found that both number of documents saved and number of instances identified by subjects were significantly correlated with the criterion measures of instance recall and precision, and conclude that this suggests that it is not necessary to rely on external evaluators for measurement of performance of interactive information retrieval in the instance identification task.
A Cluster of Recently Inserted Transposable Elements Associated with siRNAs in Gossypium raimondii

Stabilization of transposable element (TE) copy number involves the biosynthesis of short silencing RNAs (siRNAs) and further initialization of siRNA‐mediated TE silencing. To gain insight into the relationship between the biosynthesis of siRNAs and their source TEs, we examined the co‐evolutionary dynamics and expression of these two entities by characterizing the siRNA distribution across the genome of Gossypium raimondii Ulbr. We identified an unusual region at the 3’ end of chromosome 1 with significantly enriched siRNA coverage. Analysis of the correlation pattern between uniquely mapped siRNAs and those mapping to multiple regions implicated active biogenesis of siRNAs from these potential young TEs. Furthermore, divergence estimates of TEs within this region confirmed that the majority of TEs are young. Active transcription of the source TEs and their positive correlation with expressed siRNAs indicates that sufficient expression of TEs may be necessary to generate siRNAs and maintain the silenced state of recently transposed TEs.
Performance Experiment of a Hydraulic Force Feedback Teleoperation Robot Based on Position and Rate Control

A remote control robotic system using bilateral control is useful for performing restoration in damaged areas. The system consists of an excavator as the construction robot, and two joysticks for operating the robot from a safe place. A fork glove is equipped with the front end of the excavator as a hand for grasping task objects. The master and the slave in this system correspond to, respectively, the fork glove and the joysticks controlled by an operator. Two CCD cameras in slave side can carry the spot information to master side and the operator receives the message from two monitors. In such a remote control system, the operator needs to feel a realistic sense of task force brought about from a feedback force of the fork glove. The performance experiments of force feedback model base on position and rate control method are discussed, The performance experiments are carried out to one degree of freedom of fork-glove and include the efficiency of operation and subjective measures. The NASA-TLX is applied to measure the feeling of operators. After compare and analyze the experimental results of two modes with force feedback and without force feedback, that show the proposed force feedback model is validity.
Instantons , supersymmetric vacua , and emergent geometries

We study instanton solutions and superpotentials for the large number of vacua of the plane-wave matrix model and a 2+1 dimensional Super Yang-Mills theory on R× S2 with sixteen supercharges. We get the superpotential in the weak coupling limit from the gauge theory description. We study the gravity description of these instantons. Perturbatively with respect to a background, they are Euclidean branes wrapping cycles in the dual gravity background. Moreover, the superpotential can be given by the energy of the electric charge system characterizing each vacuum. These charges are interpreted as the eigenvalues of matrices from a reduction for the 1/8 BPS sector of the gauge theories. We also discuss qualitatively the emergence of the extra spatial dimensions appeared on the gravity side.
Neuroscience in HR: Steer and Take Charge

Abstract A leader builds an organisation and her/his mood and behaviour often drives the mood and behaviour of the team, and this has implications for the organisation. Current advances in neuroscience have revealed underlying brain patterns possibly associated with certain components of leadership. A leader could build her/his team by learning to manage herself/himself and others in an organisation during critical, challenging situations by using resources on their own volition to balance themselves. When leaders manage, attune themselves and lead, they create a climate of emotional and social intelligence, thereby building a culture leading an organisation into the future with sustained business results. This article attempts to look at why leaders need to continually work on themselves and explores different ways of building socially and emotionally intelligent leaders.
Detection of Outbreaks from Time Series Data Using Wavelet Transform

In this paper, we developed a new approach to detection of disease outbreaks based on wavelet transform. It is capable of dealing with two problems found in real-world time series data, namely, negative singularity and long-term trends, which may degrade the performance of current approaches to outbreak detection. To test this approach, we introduced artificail disease outbreaks and negative singularities into a real world dataset and applied it and two other algorithms-autoregressive (AR) and Multi-resolution Wavelet Auto-regressive (MWAR) - to this dataset. We compared the performance of these algorithms in terms of sensitivity, specificity and timeliness. The results showed that our approach had similar sensitivity and specificity and slightly better timeliness compared to the other two algorithms. When we introduced negative singularities, its performance did not degrade as much as the other two algorithms' performance. We conclude that our approach to detection, when compared to traditional approaches, may not be as susceptible to degradation of performance caused by negative singularities.
An Expressive Mechanism for Auctions on the Web

Auctions are widely used on the Web. Applications range from sponsored search to platforms such as eBay. In these and in many other applications the auctions in use are single-/multi-item auctions with unit demand. The main drawback of standard mechanisms for this type of auctions, such as VCG and GSP, is the limited expressiveness that they offer to the bidders. The General Auction Mechanism (GAM) of Aggarwal et al. [2009] takes a first step toward addressing the problem of limited expressiveness by computing a bidder optimal, envy-free outcome for linear utility functions with identical slopes and a single discontinuity per bidder-item pair. We show that in many practical situations this does not suffice to adequately model the preferences of the bidders, and we overcome this problem by presenting the first mechanism for piecewise linear utility functions with nonidentical slopes and multiple discontinuities. Our mechanism runs in polynomial time. Like GAM it is incentive compatible for inputs that fulfill a certain nondegeneracy assumption, but our requirement is more general than the requirement of GAM. For discontinuous utility functions that are nondegenerate as well as for continuous utility functions the outcome of our mechanism is a competitive equilibrium. We also show how our mechanism can be used to compute approximately bidder optimal, envy-free outcomes for a general class of continuous utility functions via piecewise linear approximation. Finally, we prove hardness results for even more expressive settings.