Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measures to Predict The Individual Variability of Corticospinal Responses Following Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation

Individual responses to transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) are varied and therefore potentially limit its application. There is evidence that this variability is related to the contributions of Indirect waves (I-waves) recruited in the cortex. The latency of motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) can be measured through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), allowing an individual’s responsiveness to tDCS to be determined. However, this single-pulse method requires several different orientations of the TMS coil, potentially affecting its reliability. Instead, we propose a paired-pulse TMS paradigm targeting I-waves as an alternative method. This method uses one orientation that reduces inter- and intra-trial variability. It was hypothesized that the paired-pulse method would correlate more highly to tDCS responses than the single-pulse method. In a randomized, double blinded, cross-over design, 30 healthy participants completed two sessions, receiving 20 min of either anodal (2 mA) or sham tDCS. TMS was used to quantify Short interval intracortical facilitation (SICF) at Inter stimulus intervals (ISIs) of 1.5, 3.5 and 4.5 ms. Latency was determined in the posterior-anterior (PA), anterior-posterior (AP) and latero-medial (LM) coil orientations. The relationship between latency, SICF measures and the change in suprathreshold MEP amplitude size following tDCS were determined with Pearson’s correlations. TMS measures, SICI and SICF were also used to determine responses to Anodal-tDCS (a-tDCS). Neither of the latency differences nor the SICF measures correlated to the change in MEP amplitude from pre-post tDCS (all P > 0.05). Overall, there was no significant response to tDCS in this cohort. This study highlights the need for testing the effects of various tDCS protocols on the different I-waves. Further research into SICF and whether it is a viable measure of I-wave facilitation is warranted.
Characteristics of rain events at an inland locality in northeastern Borneo, Malaysia

Understanding the intensity and duration of tropical rain events is critical to modelling the rate and timing of wet‐canopy evaporation, the suppression of transpiration, the generation of infiltration‐excess overland flow and hence to erosion, and to river responsiveness. Despite this central role, few studies have addressed the characteristics of equatorial rainstorms. This study analyses rainfall data for a 5 km2 region largely comprising of the 4 km2 Sapat Kalisun Experimental Catchment in the interior of northeastern Borneo at sampling frequencies from 1 min−1 to 1 day−1.
A state-space approach to modeling functional time series application to rail supervision

This article introduces a state-space model for the dynamic modeling of curve sequences within the framework of railway switches online monitoring. In this context, each curve has the peculiarity of being subject to multiple changes in regime. The proposed model consists of a specific latent variable regression model whose coefficients are supposed to evolve dynamically in the course of time. Its parameters are recursively estimated across a sequence of curves through an online Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. The experimental study conducted on two real power consumption curve sequences from the French high speed network has shown encouraging results.
Acoustifc Emission for Structural Integrity of Concrete from Fresh to Damaged Masayasu Ohtsu

Applications of acoustic emission (AE) to structural integrity of concrete are summarized, dealing with both fresh and hardened concrete. Under mixing concrete, AE activity is applied to estimate the consistency. After hardened, in a uniaxial compression test, AE activity is modeled by the rate process theory and is correlated with the damage degree. For inspection of reinforced concrete (RC) members, the damage is qualified, based on Kaiser effect. Following the theoretical treatment, identification of cracking mechanisms by SiGMA procedure is discussed. Thus, AE characteristics of concrete are clarified from the fresh state to the damaged, and their applications to structural integrity of concrete structures are demonstrated.
A prosody-based approach to end-of-utterance detection that does not require speech recognition

In previous work we showed that state-of-the-art end-of-utterance detection (as used, for example, in dialog systems) can be improved significantly by making use of prosodic and/or language models that predict utterance endpoints, based on word and alignment output from a speech recognizer. However, using a recognizer in endpointing might not be practical in certain applications. We demonstrate that the improvements due to the prosodic knowledge can be realized largely without alignment information, i.e., without requiring a speech recognizer. A prosodic end-of-utterance detector using only speech/nonspeech detection output is still considerably more accurate and has lower latency than a baseline system based on pause-length thresholding.
TSP Problem Using Modified ABC Based on Dynamically Division of Bees

Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABC) is an optimization algorithm used to find out the global optima. In ABC, each bee stores the information of feasible solution or candidate solution and stochastically modifies this over time, based on the information provided by neighboring bees, it speculative modifies over time and based on the best solution found by the bee itself. In this proposed work, the swarms of bees are dynamically divided into smaller groups and search process is performed by independent smaller group of bees. Also in original ABC algorithm, an additional operator, i.e. Mutation operator, is used in the artificial bee colony algorithm after the employed bee phase. Experiments are performed on the travelling salesman problem (TSP) to check the accuracy of proposed algorithm. Also proposed algorithm results are compared with previously defined algorithms like standard ABC algorithm and ABC with SPV algorithm.
Avoiding Useless Packet Transmission for Multimedia over IP Networks: The Case of Multiple Congested Links

In this paper, we investigate UPT avoidance problem with multiple congested links. We propose three different UPTA enforcement schemes — basic UPTA (B-UPTA), Partial UPTA (P-UPTA) and Centralised UPTA (C-UPTA). The challenge of UPT avoidance with multiple congested links is to determine global fairshare and enforce UPTA based on the global fairshare. We proposed the Bottleneck Fairshare Discovery (BFD) protocol to address this issue. BFD is a feedback mechanism proposed to assist UPTA in networks with multiple congested links. We describe the implementation of BFD with UPTA, taking WFQ as an example. Our simulation study shows that B-UPTA fails to detect UPT in some situations. P-UPTA can eventually detect UPT, but bandwidth may have been wasted on upstream links before UPT is detected. C-UPTA can avoid UPT in all situations, as it always drops useless packets at network edge. Simulation results suggest that, with C-UPTA, the achieved TCP throughput improvement is very close to the maximum theoretical value. In the paper, we also analyse the performance of C-UPTA quantitatively, in terms of TCP throughput, ﬁle download time, impact on video intelligibility, and impact on fairness. Our simulation results reveal that, for all six scenarios, the TCP throughput has been signiﬁcantly improved (with improvement factor up to 50%). As a result, ﬁle download times (for various ﬁle size) have been greatly reduced (more than 30%). On the other hand, incorporation of C-UPTA into WFQ has no signiﬁcant impact on intelligibility of the MPEG-2 video (with a difference less than 3%). For all six scenarios, C-UPTA maintains fairness which is comparable to WFQ. This proves that UPTA does not have any adverse impact on fairness performance of fair algorithms.
Toward an Integrated Model of Driver Behavior in Cognitive Architecture

Driving is a multitasking activity that requires drivers to manage their attention among various driving- and non-driving-related tasks. When one models drivers as continuous controllers, the discrete nature of drivers’ control actions is lost and with it an important component for characterizing behavioral variability. A proposal is made for the use of cognitive architectures for developing models of driver behavior that integrate cognitive and perceptual-motor processes in a serial model of task and attention management. A cognitive architecture is a computational framework that incorporates built-in, well-tested parameters and constraints on cognitive and perceptual-motor processes. All driver models implemented in a cognitive architecture necessarily inherit these parameters and constraints, resulting in more predictive and psychologically plausible models than those that do not characterize driving as a multitasking activity. These benefits are demonstrated with a driver model developed in the ACT-R cognitive architecture. The model is validated by comparing its behavior to that of human drivers navigating a four-lane highway with traffic in a fixed-based driving simulator. Results show that the model successfully predicts aspects of both lower-level control, such as steering and eye movements during lane changes, and higher-level cognitive tasks, such as task management and decision making. Many of these predictions are not explicitly built into the model but come from the cognitive architecture as a result of the model’s implementation in the ACT-R architecture.
Constructing folksonomies from user-specified relations on flickr

Automatic folksonomy construction from tags has attracted much attention recently. However, inferring hierarchical relations between concepts from tags has a drawback in that it is difficult to distinguish between more popular and more general concepts. Instead of tags we propose to use user-specified relations for learning folksonomy. We explore two statistical frameworks for aggregating many shallow individual hierarchies, expressed through the collection/set relations on the social photosharing site Flickr, into a common deeper folksonomy that reflects how a community organizes knowledge. Our approach addresses a number of challenges that arise while aggregating information from diverse users, namely noisy vocabulary, and variations in the granularity level of the concepts expressed. Our second contribution is a method for automatically evaluating learned folksonomy by comparing it to a reference taxonomy, e.g., the Web directory created by the Open Directory Project. Our empirical results suggest that user-specified relations are a good source of evidence for learning folksonomies.
Photosynthetic Control of Arabidopsis Leaf Cytoplasmic Translation Initiation by Protein Phosphorylation

Photosynthetic CO2 assimilation is the carbon source for plant anabolism, including amino acid production and protein synthesis. The biosynthesis of leaf proteins is known for decades to correlate with photosynthetic activity but the mechanisms controlling this effect are not documented. The cornerstone of the regulation of protein synthesis is believed to be translation initiation, which involves multiple phosphorylation events in Eukaryotes. We took advantage of phosphoproteomic methods applied to Arabidopsis thaliana rosettes harvested under controlled photosynthetic gas-exchange conditions to characterize the phosphorylation pattern of ribosomal proteins (RPs) and eukaryotic initiation factors (eIFs). The analyses detected 14 and 11 new RP and eIF phosphorylation sites, respectively, revealed significant CO2-dependent and/or light/dark phosphorylation patterns and showed concerted changes in 13 eIF phosphorylation sites and 9 ribosomal phosphorylation sites. In addition to the well-recognized role of the ribosomal small subunit protein RPS6, our data indicate the involvement of eIF3, eIF4A, eIF4B, eIF4G and eIF5 phosphorylation in controlling translation initiation when photosynthesis varies. The response of protein biosynthesis to the photosynthetic input thus appears to be the result of a complex regulation network involving both stimulating (e.g. RPS6, eIF4B phosphorylation) and inhibiting (e.g. eIF4G phosphorylation) molecular events.
OPUS: Online Patches and Updates for Security

We present OPUS, a tool for dynamic software patching capable of applying fixes to a C program at run-time. OPUS's primary goal is to enable application of security patches to interactive applications that are a frequent target of security exploits. By restricting the type of patches admitted by our system, we are able to significantly reduce any additional burden on the programmer beyond what would normally be required in developing and testing a conventional stop-and-restart patch. We hand-tested 26 real CERT [1] vulnerabilities, of which 22 were dynamically patched with our current OPUS prototype, doing so with negligible runtime overhead and no prior knowledge of the tool's existence on the patch programmer's part.
Why We Need an 'Accord' for Federal Reserve Credit Policy: A Note

An accord for Fed credit policy should supplement the monetary policy Accord of 1951 and should be based on three principles: (1) credit policy should not fund insolvent institutions, (2) credit policy should not fund expenditures that ought to get congressional authorization, and (3) Congress should not direct the Fed to transfer assets to the Treasury to reduce the federal deficit. The proposed accord is discussed with regard to three Fed credit policies: liquidity assistance to depository institutions, sterilized foreign exchange operations, and the transfer of Fed surplus to the Treasury.
Singular Configurations of Parallel Manipulators and Grassmann Geometry

Parallel manipulators have a specific mechanical architecture where all the links are connected both at the base and at the gripper of the robot. By changing the lengths of these links we are able to control the position1 of the gripper. In general, for a given set of links lengths there is only one position for the gripper. However, it may be suspected that in some cases more than one solution may be found for the position of the gripper: the robot is in a singular configuration. To determine these singular configurations the classical method is to find the roots of the determinant of the jacobian matrix. In our case the jacobian matrix is complex, and it seems not to be possible to find these roots. We propose here a new method based on Grassmann line geometry. The set of lines, P3, constitutes a linear variety of rank 6. We show that a singular configuration is obtained when the variety spanned by the lines associated to the robot links has a rank less than 6. An important feature of the varieties of this geometry is that they can be described by simple geometric rules. Thus to find the singular configurations of parallel manipulators we have to find the configuration in which the robot matches these rules. Such an analysis is performed on a special parallel manip ulator. We show that we find all the well-known singular configurations, and also some new ones.
A General Mathematical Algorithm for Predicting the Course of Unfused Tetanic Contractions of Motor Units in Rat Muscle

An unfused tetanus of a motor unit (MU) evoked by a train of pulses at variable interpulse intervals is the sum of non-equal twitch-like responses to these stimuli. A tool for a precise prediction of these successive contractions for MUs of different physiological types with different contractile properties is crucial for modeling the whole muscle behavior during various types of activity. The aim of this paper is to develop such a general mathematical algorithm for the MUs of the medial gastrocnemius muscle of rats. For this purpose, tetanic curves recorded for 30 MUs (10 slow, 10 fast fatigue-resistant and 10 fast fatigable) were mathematically decomposed into twitch-like contractions. Each contraction was modeled by the previously proposed 6-parameter analytical function, and the analysis of these six parameters allowed us to develop a prediction algorithm based on the following input data: parameters of the initial twitch, the maximum force of a MU and the series of pulses. Linear relationship was found between the normalized amplitudes of the successive contractions and the remainder between the actual force levels at which the contraction started and the maximum tetanic force. The normalization was made according to the amplitude of the first decomposed twitch. However, the respective approximation lines had different specific angles with respect to the ordinate. These angles had different and non-overlapping ranges for slow and fast MUs. A sensitivity analysis concerning this slope was performed and the dependence between the angles and the maximal fused tetanic force normalized to the amplitude of the first contraction was approximated by a power function. The normalized MU contraction and half-relaxation times were approximated by linear functions depending on the normalized actual force levels at which each contraction starts. The normalization was made according to the contraction time of the first contraction. The actual force levels were calculated initially from the recorded tetanic curves and subsequently from the modeled curves obtained from the summation of all models of the preceding contractions (the so called “full prediction”). The preciseness of the prediction was verified by two coefficients estimating the error between the modeled and the experimentally recorded curves. The proposed approach was tested for 30 MUs from the database and for three additional MUs, not included in the initial set. It was concluded that this general algorithm can be successfully used for modeling of a unfused tetanus course of a single MU of fast and slow type.
Digitized two-parameter spectrometer for neutron-gamma mixed field

This paper shows the results of digital processing of output pulses from combined photon-neutron detector using a commercially available digitizer ACQUIRIS DP 210. The advantage of digital processing is reduction of the apparatus in weight and size, acceleration of measurement, and increased resistance to pile-up of pulses. The neutron and photon spectrum of radionuclide source 252Cf is presented.
A Real-time Lane Detection Algorithm Based on a Hyperbola-Pair Model

In this paper, we propose a real-time lane detection algorithm based on a hyperbola-pair lane boundary model. In stead of modeling each road boundary separately, we propose a model to describe the road boundary as two parallel hyperbolas on ground plane. By fitting points on pair road boundaries into this model, our method is able to make full use of road boundaries with existence of partial occlusion. Experiment in many different conditions, including various weather and road, demonstrates its high performance and accuracy
Exploring Secondary Science Teachers’ Enactment of Assessment Practices to Reflect Responsive Science Teaching for English Learners

ABSTRACT This study explored the enactment of formative assessment practices in 89 observed lessons across 15 middle and high school science teachers before and after they participated in workshops that coalesced around formative assessment, teaching science to English learners (ELs), and integrating Next Generation Science Standards with Common Core Literacy Standards. An observation rubric developed from the literature on formative assessment and teaching ELs in the context of science education looked at 7 assessment practices organized around 3 dimensions: assessment design, assessment use, and language/literacy considerations. Findings articulate distinct implementation levels across the assessment practices. Moreover, findings reveal 2 prototypical lesson types that did not fully reflect more responsive approaches to teaching ELs. Articulating commonly observed assessment practices could help refine research and instructional tools to support science teachers and teacher educators as they consider formative assessment through new perspectives.
5REXVW DQG (IILFLHQW ,PDJH $OLJQPHQW ZLWK 6SDWLDOO\ 9DU\LQJ ,OOXPLQDWLRQ 0RGHOV

Image alignment is one of the most important tasks in computer vision. In this paper, we explicitly model spatial illumination variations by low-order polynomial functions in an energy minimization framework. Data constraints for the alignment and illumination parameters are derived from the first-order Taylor approximation of a generalized brightness assumption. We formulate the parameter estimation problem in a weighted least-square framework by using the influence function from robust estimation to derive an iterative re-weighted least-square algorithm. A dynamic weighting scheme, which combines the factors from influence function, consistency of image gradients and nonlinear image intensity sensing, is used to improve the robustness of the image matching. In addition, a constrainsampling scheme and an estimation-warping alternating strategy are used in the proposed algorithm to improve its efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results are shown to demonstrate the robustness, efficiency and accuracy of the algorithm.
A performance analysis framework for optimizing OpenCL applications on FPGAs

Recently, FPGA vendors such as Altera and Xilinx have released OpenCL SDK for programming FPGAs. However, the architecture of FPGA is significantly different from that of CPU/GPU, for which OpenCL is originally designed. Tuning the OpenCL code for good performance on FPGAs is still an open problem, since the existing OpenCL tools and models designed for CPUs/GPUs are not directly applicable to FPGAs. In the paper, we present an FPGA-based performance analysis framework that can shed light on the performance bottleneck and thus guide the code tuning for OpenCL applications on FPGAs. Particularly, we leverage static and dynamic analysis to develop an analytical performance model, which has captured the key architectural features of FPGA abstractions under OpenCL. Then, we provide four programmer-interpretable metrics to quantify the performance potentials of the OpenCL program with input optimization combination for the next optimization step. We evaluate our framework with a number of user cases, and demonstrate that 1) our analytical performance model can accurately predict the performance of OpenCL programs with different optimization combinations on FPGAs, and 2) our tool can be used to effectively guide the code tuning on alleviating the performance bottleneck.
An algorithm for multitarget tracking with multiple asynchronous bearings-only sensors

An algorithm is developed for tracking multiple targets using distributed bearings-only sensors. It is assumed that the sensors report the measurements asynchronously and the processing is done centrally. The proposed algorithm first forms bearings-only (mono) tracks for each sensor and then combines them to form Cartesian position (stereo) tracks. The stereo tracks are initialized using a multidimensional assignment technique. Once the stereo tracks are initialized the mono tracks contributed to the stereo tracks are deleted and the stereo tracks are updated directly using the measurements from the sensors. As shown later in this paper the proposed algorithm is computationally simple and can provide better tracking performance compared to an existing algorithm. Simulations carried out to track multiple targets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.