Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“Real-time monitoring of heart rate by processing of Microsoft Kinect™ 2.0 generated streams”

This paper presents a novel solution for noninvasive real-time heart rate monitoring by the Microsoft device Kinect™ version 2.0. In this paper, it is firstly evaluated the state of the art concerning the solutions for non-invasive detection of vital signs and secondly it is presented the implementation and the tests of a novel methodology for evaluating the heart rhythm by a non-invasive monitoring system based on Kinect™ 2.0 sensor, acting at medium/long distance. The standard method to monitor physiological information exploits photoplethysmographic images, in fact, changes in blood volume can be determined from the spectra of light reflected from (or transmitted through) body tissues. Using a mathematical processing developed and written in Python code, the study shows how it is possible to real-time estimate the heart rate of people in front of the sensor at distance 2.5 m. In order to prove the correctness of the method proposed, two different tests are implemented and 30 different subjects are involved in the test phase. The first test aims to detect the real-time heart rate while the subject is in standing position for 1 minute. The second test gathers heart rate data while subject is performing three different series of rehabilitation exercises. During the tests, each subject wears a pulse oximeter for comparing the values acquired through the Kinect™.
Hidden Markov modelling of simultaneously recorded cells in the associative cortex of behaving monkeys

A widely held idea regarding information processing in the brain is the cell-assembly hypothesis suggested by Hebb in 1949. According to this hypothesis, the basic unit of information processing in the brain is an assembly of cells, which can act briefly as a closed system, in response to a specific stimulus. This work presents a novel method of characterizing this supposed activity using a hidden Markov model. This model is able to reveal some of the underlying cortical network activity of behavioural processes. In our study the process in hand was the simultaneous activity of several cells recorded from the frontal cortex of behaving monkeys. Using such a model we were able to identify the behavioural mode of the animal and directly identify the corresponding collective network activity. Furthermore, the segmentation of the data into the discrete states also provides direct evidence for the state dependence of the short-time correlation functions between the same pair of cells. Thus, this cross-correlat.
Risk‐aware Path Planning for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles using Predictive Ocean Models

Recent advances in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technology have facilitated the collection of oceanographic data at a fraction of the cost of ship‐based sampling methods. Unlike oceanographic data collection in the deep ocean, operation of AUVs in coastal regions exposes them to the risk of collision with ships and land. Such concerns are particularly prominent for slow‐moving AUVs since ocean current magnitudes are often strong enough to alter the planned path significantly. Prior work using predictive ocean currents relies upon deterministic outcomes, which do not account for the uncertainty in the ocean current predictions themselves. To improve the safety and reliability of AUV operation in coastal regions, we introduce two stochastic planners: (a) a Minimum Expected Risk planner and (b) a risk‐aware Markov Decision Process, both of which have the ability to utilize ocean current predictions probabilistically. We report results from extensive simulation studies in realistic ocean current fields obtained from widely used regional ocean models. Our simulations show that the proposed planners have lower collision risk than state‐of‐the‐art methods. We present additional results from field experiments where ocean current predictions were used to plan the paths of two Slocum gliders. Field trials indicate the practical usefulness of our techniques over long‐term deployments, showing them to be ideal for AUV operations.
Learning a control field for simultaneous state transformation in CO molecules

We employ a numerical optimal control algorithm to learn optimal control fields for achieving a special simultaneous state transformation in CO molecules. The simultaneous state transformation means that for different initial states, the same control fields can accomplish the control task of driving them into relevant desired target states. The sampling-based learning control method is applied to design robust control fields for the state transformation task. A special simultaneous transformation of two states is considered and numerical results show excellent performance for the control task.
Two-Dimensional Beam Tracing from Visibility Diagrams for Real-Time Acoustic Rendering

We present an extension of the fast beam-tracing method presented in the work of Antonacci et al. (2008) for the simulation of acoustic propagation in reverberant environments that accounts for diffraction and diffusion. More specifically, we show how visibility maps are suitable for modeling propagation phenomena more complex than specular reflections. We also show how the beam-tree lookup for path tracing can be entirely performed on visibility maps as well. We then contextualize such method to the two different cases of channel (point-to-point) rendering using a headset, and the rendering of a wave field based on arrays of speakers. Finally, we provide some experimental results and comparisons with real data to show the effectiveness and the accuracy of the approach in simulating the soundfield in an environment.
Information and/or Communication: Interactions

1. Information and Communication 2. Information Codes and Verbal Communication 3. Speach and Power 4. Greeks and the Study of Communiaction 5. Information Overload 6. Digitalization and Hermeneutics 7. The Technologizing of Verbalization 8. The Presence of Presence 9. Conclusion
Identifying Communication Intelligence for Drug Adoption in India

Most of the researches on drug adoption concentrate on suppliers' environment of new drug development and diffusion. Very little research considers on understanding of intention of drug usage through physician-patient interactions. This research investigates link between drug adoption and drug usage intention through communication intensity of physicians and patients within their drug usage relationships in India. A conceptual framework supports communication strategies to be developed based on disease complexities (type of disease and patients' lifestyle), physicians' self-confidence in the drug effectiveness and marketing incentives offered by pharmaceutical firms. An unstructured repertory grid survey involving fifteen physicians and a structured retrospective survey with two thousand patients at hospitals located in National Capital Region (NCR) were conducted to show the effects of firms' communication for drug usage. Data mining technique is used to analyse the data. The results show with increased marketing and word-of-mouth communication drug adoption for challenging disease also improves. An implication for managers is that both marketing and word- of-mouth communication operate through the firm's communication programming.
Regulation of presynaptic phosphatidylinositol 4,5-biphosphate by neuronal activity

Phosphatidylinositol 4,5-biphosphate (PIP2) has been implicated in a variety of cellular processes, including synaptic vesicle recycling. However, little is known about the spatial distribution of this phospholipid in neurons and its dynamics. In this study, we have focused on these questions by transiently expressing the phospholipase C (PLC)-delta1 pleckstrin homology (PH) domain fused to green fluorescent protein (GFP) in cultured hippocampal neurons. This PH domain binds specifically and with high affinity to PIP2. Live confocal imaging revealed that in resting cells, PH-GFP is localized predominantly on the plasma membrane. Interestingly, no association of PH-GFP with synaptic vesicles in quiescent neurons was observed, indicating the absence of detectable PIP2 on mature synaptic vesicles. Electrical stimulation of hippocampal neurons resulted in a decrease of the PH-GFP signal at the plasma membrane, most probably due to a PLC-mediated hydrolysis of PIP2. This was accompanied in the majority of presynaptic terminals by a marked increase in the cytoplasmic PH-GFP signal, localized most probably on freshly endocytosed membranes. Further investigation revealed that the increase in PH-GFP signal was dependent on the activation of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors and the consequent production of nitric oxide (NO). Thus, PIP2 in the presynaptic terminal appears to be regulated by postsynaptic activity via a retrograde action of NO.
Playing with the Bandwidth Conservation Law

We investigate performance bounds of P2P systems by application of the law of bandwidth conservation. This approach is quite general and allows us to consider various sharing systems such as fixed-rate streaming, VoD-type streaming, and elastic file sharing. Starting from a general law of bandwidth conservation, we consider several specific cases that apply to various P2P systems. For dynamic systems with a stationary arrival process, we show that simple seeding policies result in regimes where the download rates are arbitrarily fast. We consider a case with equal download rate among all peers as well as cases where the download rate is a function of upload rates, inspired by BitTorrent's tit-for-tat policy. In particular, we show that the sustainable proportion of free-riders is closely related to the tit-for-tat parameter.
Hole-istic Exploration and Production Strategies

In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the development of seismic data collection and analysis substantially reduced the risk in finding petroleum. The resulting geology and geophysics (G&G) revolutionized petroleum exploration. Decision analysis has traditionally been applied to the information derived from G&G to rank projects hole by hole, determining on an individual basis whether or not they should be explored and developed.
Localizations and Bulk Data Transfers in Embedded Systems using Ultra Protocol

: Over the last few years, there has been the remarkable improvement of wireless network systems (WENS), IT systems and sensor networks. Solid bulk data transfer is a WENS modular construction imperative that supports various applications, such as remote software update, video properties. Current reviews regularly develop the facilities to improve the multi-hop pipeline network with the time spread of open data. In any case, the transmission system created protocols and structure less along these lines initially received, posed enormous difficulties for the productive diffusion of organized data. In this study, we explore the problem of mass dispersion of organized mass data. Specifically, we propose reliable transmission outside of the application and encode impulsive tools to transmit packets however many as it would be wise in any space transmission. Consequently, the resulting transmission protocol can fully utilize any transmission aperture and proliferate on-line information as fast as it would be cautious. Performance is achieved by both tested and recreational tests show that, contrary to the state of the art protocols, ULTRA can significantly improve the performance of slower dispersion delay dispersion in 34.8% .
Influence of High Shear Dispersion on the Production of Cellulose Nanofibers by Ultrasound-Assisted TEMPO-Oxidation of Kraft Pulp

Cellulose nanofibers can be produced using a combination of TEMPO, sodium bromide (NaBr) and sodium hypochlorite, and mechanical dispersion. Recently, this process has been the subject of intensive investigation. However, studies on the aspects of mechanical treatment of this process remain marginal. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the high shear dispersion parameters (e.g., consistency, stator-rotor gap, recirculation rate and pH) and determine their influences on nanocellulose production using ultrasound-assisted TEMPO-oxidation of Kraft pulp. All nanofiber gels produced in this study exhibited rheological behaviors known as shear thinning. From all the dispersion parameters, the following conditions were identified as optimal: 0.042 mm stator-rotor gap, 200 mL/min recycle rate, dispersion pH of 7 and a feed consistency of 2%. High quality cellulose gel could be produced under these conditions. This finding is surely of great interest for the pulp and paper industry.
Multiuser Collaboration with Networked Mobile Devices

This paper describes a multiuser collaboration infrastructure that enables multiple mission scientists to remotely and collaboratively interact with the visualization and planning software, using wireless networked personal digital assistants and other mobile devices. The infrastructure includes (1) human-computer interaction components to provide natural, fast, and accurate inputs, (2) a communications protocol to ensure reliable and efficient coordination of the input devices and host computers, (3) an application-independent middleware that maintains the states, sessions, and interactions of individual users of the software applications, and (4) an application programming interface to enable tight integration of applications and the middleware. The resulting technologies not only are applicable to NASA mission operations, but also useful in other situations such as design reviews, brainstorming sessions, and business meetings, as they can benefit from having the participants concurrently interact with the software applications (e.g., presentation applications and CAD design tools) to illustrate their ideas and provide inputs
Global and Local Influence-based Social Recommendation

Social recommendation has been widely studied in recent years. Existing social recommendation models use various explicit pieces of social information as regularization terms in recommendation, for instance, social links are considered as new constraints. However, social influence, an implicit source of information in social networks, is seldomly considered, even though it often drives recommendations in social networks. In this paper, we introduce a new global and local influence-based social recommendation model. Based on the observation that user purchase behaviour is influenced by both global influential nodes and the local influential nodes of the user, we formulate the global and local influence as an regularization terms, and incorporate them into a matrix factorization-based recommendation model. Experimental results on large data sets demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.
Service Orchestration Algorithm for Web Services: Evaluation and Analysis

With the growing need for service oriented architecture and the rise of cloud computing, web services have become the focus of many researchers and software developers. Our area of focus is web service composition. In this paper we are presenting an evaluation and analysis of the proposed orchestration algorithm in [1]. The algorithm is intended to orchestrate interactions between different web services. Generate a workflow of a set of web services in order to generate a composed service. We present an approach that aims to optimize the process of web service composition by assigning the best service and service activities. This involves taking into consideration several parameters such as the execution time, cost of communication between services that may reside in different locations, constraints imposed by the user and the quality of service (eg: response time, cost, reliability, availability, etc.). Our work can be implemented using a set of web services standards therefore it can be integrated in different environments. We are using WSDL for web service description, PBEL for business process description and creation, SOAP, messaging protocol, and WS-Policy to describe and create rules to be applicable on web services orchestration.
Metric Propositional Neighborhood Interval Logics on Natural Numbers

Interval temporal logics formalize reasoning about interval structures over linearly (or partially) ordered domains, where time intervals are the primitive ontological entities and truth of formulae is defined relative to time intervals, rather than time points. In this paper, we introduce and study Metric Propositional Neighborhood Logic (MPNL) over natural numbers. MPNL features two modalities referring, respectively, to an interval that is “met by” the current one and to an interval that “meets” the current one, plus an infinite set of length constraints, regarded as atomic propositions, to constrain the lengths of intervals. We argue that MPNL can be successfully used in different areas of artificial intelligence to combine qualitative and quantitative interval temporal reasoning, thus providing a viable alternative to well-established logical frameworks such as Duration Calculus. We show that MPNL is decidable in double exponential time and expressively complete with respect to a well-defined sub-fragment of the two-variable fragment FO2[N,=,<,s] of first-order logic for linear orders with successor function, interpreted over natural numbers. Moreover, we show that MPNL can be extended in a natural way to D. Bresolin University of Verona, Italy E-mail: davide.bresolin@univr.it D. Della Monica University of Udine, Italy E-mail: dario.dellamonica@uniud.it A. Montanari University of Udine, Italy E-mail: angelo.montanari@uniud.it V. Goranko Technical University of Denmark, Denmark E-mail: vfgo@imm.dtu. dk G. Sciavicco University of Murcia, Spain E-mail: guido@um.es cover full FO2[N,=,<,s], but, unexpectedly, the latter (and hence the former) turns out to be undecidable.
Meta cookie

So far, gustatory information has rarely been studied in relation to computers, even though there are lots of studies on visual, auditory, haptic and olfactory information. This scarcity of research on gustatory information has several reasons. One reason is that gustatory sensation is based on chemical signals, whose functions have not been fully understood yet. Another reason is that perception of gustatory sensation is affected by other factors, such as vision, olfaction, thermal sensation, and memories. Thus, complexity of cognition mechanism for gustatory sensation as described above makes it difficult to build up a gustatory display.
Telecommunications Reform, Access Regulation, and Internet Adoption in Latin America

The authors review the stylized facts on regulatory reform in telecommunications and its effects on telecommunications development and Internet penetration in Latin America. Relying on data from the International Telecommunication Union, the Information for Development Program (InfoDev), and the World Bank for 1990-99, the authors then test econometrically the determinants of the differences in Internet penetration rates across Latin America. The results show that effective implementation of the reform agenda in telecommunications regulation could accelerate adoption of the Internet in Latin America-even though it is only part of the solution (income levels, income distribution, and access to primary infrastructure are the main determinants of growth in Internet connections and use). Regulation will work by cutting costs. Cost cutting will require that regulators in the region take a much closer look at the design of interconnection rules and at the tradeoffs that emerge from the complex issues involved. It will also require a commitment to developing analytical instruments, such as cost models, to sort out many of the problems. Appropriate cost models will generate benchmarks that are much more consistent with the local issues and with the local cost of capital than international benchmarks will ever be for countries in unstable macroeconomic situations. Cost cutting will require an equally strong commitment to imposing regulatory accounting systems that reduce the information asymmetrics that incumbents use to reduce the risks of entry. All these changes will ultimately require a stronger commitment by competition agencies, since in many countries a failure to negotiate interconnection agreements will raise competition issues just as often as it will raise regulatory questions.
Spatial Properties and Functional Organization of Small Bistratified Ganglion Cells in Primate Retina

The primate visual system consists of parallel pathways initiated by distinct cell types in the retina that encode different features of the visual scene. Small bistratified cells (SBCs), which form a major projection to the thalamus, exhibit blue-ON/yellow-OFF [S-ON/(L+M)-OFF] light responses thought to be important for high-acuity color vision. However, the spatial processing properties of individual SBCs and their spatial arrangement across the visual field are poorly understood. The present study of peripheral primate retina reveals that contrary to previous suggestions, SBCs exhibit center-surround spatial structure, with the (L+M)-OFF component of the receptive field ∼50% larger in diameter than the S-ON component. Analysis of response kinetics shows that the (L+M)-OFF response in SBCs is slower than the S-ON response and significantly less transient than that of simultaneously recorded OFF-parasol cells. The (L+M)-OFF response in SBCs was eliminated by bath application of the metabotropic glutamate receptor agonist l-APB. These observations indicate that the (L+M)-OFF response of SBCs is not formed by OFF-bipolar cell input as has been suspected and suggest that it arises from horizontal cell feedback. Finally, the receptive fields of SBCs form orderly mosaics, with overlap and regularity similar to those of ON-parasol cells. Thus, despite their distinctive morphology and chromatic properties, SBCs exhibit two features of other retinal ganglion cell types: center-surround antagonism and regular mosaic sampling of visual space.
Incremental Commitment Model Process Guidelines for Software Engineering Class

Effectively communicating the software process model to the software engineers is essential in enabling them to understand the overall process as well as specific areas of focus. To satisfy the objective of helping students learn the software processes, an Electronic Process Guide (EPG) for the Incremental Commitment Model (ICM) has been developed by the University of Southern California (USC) Center for System and Software Engineering (CSSE) and has been experimented for its efficiency and effectiveness by software engineering students. This paper reports on the experimental results of utilizing the EPG of the ICM process to develop software systems comparing with the use of traditional paper-based guidelines in the past. The analyses focus on both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the software development process based on the objectives defined by Humphrey and Kellner [8], process model characteristics defined by Fuggetta [1], people-oriented process information aspects by Heidrich, et al. [6], and students’ performances and feedbacks.