Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficient coding of stroke-rendered paintings

There are more and more applications of non-photorealistic rendered images, sketches and drawings. Several techniques for generating such imagery are widely known. The stochastic painting-based painterly image (and video) generation presented herein is a multi-purpose image rendering and representation method, suitable for many purposes: painterly rendering, storing, compression or indexing. It incorporates many new features like multiscale edge following, stroke-set optimizations, templates, color morphology, etc. We demonstrate that the presented technique (called enhanced stochastic paintbrush transformation or eSPT) is suitable for fast high quality painterly rendering, providing good lossless painted compression ratios and features that make it suitable for many applications. One of these we wish to emphasize is the suitability to code painted images in a way that does not introduce any coding artifacts (blockiness, ringings, etc.) but provides a compact form of representation that still retains the main property of a painting: that it is a painting after all.
ASGrid: autonomic management of hybrid sensor grid systems and applications

In this paper, we propose an autonomic management framework (ASGrid) to address the requirements of emerging large-scale applications in hybrid grid and sensor network systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first who proposed the notion of autonomic sensor grid systems in a holistic manner, aiming at non-trivial large applications. To bridge the gap between the physical world and the digital world and facilitate information analysis and decision making, ASGrid is designed to smooth the integration of sensor networks and grid systems and efficiently use both on demand. Under the blueprint of ASGrid, we present several building blocks that fulfill the following major features: (1) self-configuration through content-based aggregation and associative rendezvous mechanisms; (2) self-optimisation through utility-based sensor selection, model-driven hierarchical sensing task scheduling and auction-based game-theoretic approach for grid scheduling; (3) self-protection through ActiveKey dynamic key management and S3Trust trust management mechanisms. Experimental and simulation results on these aspects are presented.
A Mixed Software Rejuvenation Policy for Multiple Degradations Software System

Software rejuvenation is a preventive and proactive technology to counteract the phenomenon of software aging and system failures, and to improve the system reliability. In this paper we present a mixed software rejuvenation policy for an operational software system with multiple degradation states, which considers both the history information and the current running state. By this policy, the system is rejuvenated when it achieves to a degradation threshold or it comes to the pre-determined rejuvenation interval. For comparison, standard rejuvenation policy is also discussed. Continuous-time Markov chains are used to describe the multiple degradation states model. To evaluate these polices expediently, we utilize deterministic and stochastic Petri nets (DSPN) to solve the models. Numerical results show that the deployment of software rejuvenation in the system leads to significant improvement in availability and throughput. And the mixed rejuvenation policy is better than the standard rejuvenation policy.
Energy-efficient fusion estimation for wireless sensor networks with packet losses

This paper is concerned with the optimal fusion estimation for a discrete-time stochastic dynamic process in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with random packet losses. The various sensors in the WSN transmit measurements with a period that is integer multiple of the measurement sampling period to save energy, and the overall estimation system is described as a double-rate stochastic system with multiple stochastic parameters. The optimal fusion Kalman filters are designed by using the innovation analysis approach and are presented in terms of a set of recursive Riccati and Lyapunov equations. It is shown that the filtering performance critically depends on the measurement transmission period and the packet loss probabilities. An illustrative example is finally to show the effectiveness of the proposed results.
QPatch: the past, present and future of automated patch clamp

The QPatch 16 significantly increases throughput for gigaseal patch clamp experiments, making direct measurements in ion channel drug discovery and safety testing feasible. Released to the market in the Autumn of 2004 by Sophion Bioscience, the QPatch originated from work done at NeuroSearch (Denmark) in the early days of automated patch clamp. Today, the QPatch provides many unique features. For example, only the QPatch includes an automated cell preparation station making several hours of unattended operation possible. The 16-channel electrode array, called the QPlate, includes glass-coated microfluidic channels for less compound absorption and, hence, more accurate IC50 values. The microfluidic pathways also allow for very small amounts of compound used for each experiment (∼ 5 µl per addition). Only the QPatch has four independent pipetting heads for more efficient liquid handling (especially for ligand-gated ion channel experiments). Patch clamp recordings with the QPatch match the high quality of conventional patch clamp and in some cases the results are even better. For example, only the QPatch includes 100% series resistance compensation for the elimination of false positives due to voltage errors. Finally, the modular QPatch 16 was designed with more channels in mind. The upgrade pathway to 48-channels (the QPatch HT) will be discussed.
The social construction of AIDS during a time of evolving access to antiretroviral therapy in rural Malawi

This paper draws upon a set of conversational journals collected over the past decade in rural Malawi, to understand how perceptions of AIDS are constructed as talk of antiretroviral therapy (ART) filters through social networks. Three distinct treatment eras frame our analysis: the early ART era (2001–2003), the ART expansion era (2004–2006) and the later ART era (2007–2009). We find that the early ART era was characterised by widespread fatalism as people recalled experiences with dying family and friends from what was perceived as an incurable and deadly disease. During the ART expansion era, AIDS fatalism was gradually replaced with a sense of uncertainty as rural Malawians became faced with two opposing realities: death from AIDS and prolonged life after ART. In the later ART era, the journals chart the rise of more optimistic beliefs about AIDS as rural Malawians slowly became convinced of ART's therapeutic payoffs. We conclude with an example of how ART created difficulties for rural Malawians to socially diagnose the disease and determine who was a safe sexual partner.
School Social Fragmentation, Economic Deprivation and Social Cohesion and Adolescent Physical Inactivity: A Longitudinal Study

Objectives To examine the independent influence of school economic deprivation, social fragmentation, and social cohesion on the likelihood of participating in no physical activity among students. Methods Data are from a large-scale longitudinal study of schools based in disadvantaged communities in Quebec, Canada. Questionnaires were administered every year between 2002 and 2008 among n = 14,924 students aged 12 to 18 from a sample of 70 schools. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses were conducted. Multilevel modeling was utilized to account for the clustering of students within schools. Schools were categorized as being low, moderate or high economic deprivation, social fragmentation and social cohesion. Those who indicated that they do no participate in any physical activity during the week were identified as being physically inactive. Results In baseline multilevel cross-sectional analyses, adolescents attending schools in the highest (compared to the lowest) levels of socioeconomic deprivation and social fragmentation were more likely to be physically inactive (OR = 1.33, 95% CI = 1.03, 1.72; and OR = 1.24, 95% CI = 0.98, 1.56, respectively). Conversely, students attending schools with the highest cohesion were less likely to be physically inactive (OR = 0.78, 95% CI = 0.61, 0.99). In longitudinal analysis, physically active students who attended schools with the highest social fragmentation were more likely to become physically inactive over two years (OR = 1.65, 95% CI = 1.09, 2.51). Conclusion The school socioeconomic environment appears to be an important contextual influence on participation in no physical activity among adolescents. Following adolescents beyond two years is necessary to determine if these environments have a lasting effect on physical activity behavior.
A gecko inspired wall-climbing robot based on electrostatic adhesion mechanism

In this paper, the design, analysis and fabrication of a quadruped wall-climbing robot is presented. Inspired by the climbing gaits of geckos, the robot has kinematics similar to a gecko's motion. Unlike geckos stick on the wall surface with Van del Waals force, the robot is based on electrostatic adhesion force induced by a specifically designed electrostatic adhesive footpad. By combining the bionic gait design of the gecko and the unique properties of electrostatic adhesion mechanism, the robot has advantages of light weight, low energy consumption, flexible movement and high adaptability to different wall surfaces. Climbing experiments on the surface of a high-rise glass window are demonstrated, and the robot can achieve straight climbing and turning robustly and agilely. The potential applications of this robot are reconnaissance, inspection, cleaning and repairing.
On the Integration of Production and Financial Hedging Decisions in Global Markets

We study the integrated operational and financial hedging decisions faced by a global firm who sells to both home and foreign markets. Production occurs either at a single facility located in one of the markets or at two facilities, one in each market. The company has to invest in capacity before the selling season starts when the demand in both markets and the currency exchange rate are uncertain. The currency exchange rate risk can be hedged by delaying allocation of the capacity to specific markets until both the currency and demand uncertainties are resolved and/or by buying financial option contracts on the currency exchange rate when capacity commitment is made. A mean-variance utility function is used to model the firm's risk aversion in decision making. We derive the joint optimal capacity and financial option decision, and analyze the impact of the delayed allocation option and the financial options on capacity commitment and the firm's performance. We show that the firm's financial hedging strategy ties closely to, and can have both quantitative and qualitative impact on, the firm's operational strategy. The use, or lack of use of financial hedges, can go beyond affecting the magnitude of capacity levels by altering global supply chain structural choices, such as the desired location and number of production facilities to be employed to meet global demand.
Chapter 2. Language variation at the prosody-syntax interface: Focus in European Spanish

Spanish is generally considered a “Word Order Language” in the marking of focus. The syntactic strategies used to change the canonical word order seem to depend on focus type. Thus, prosodically motivated movement is proposed for information narrow focus, and focus fronting, clefting or focus in situ for contrastive focus. However, recent empirical studies do not fully agree with this assumption. This article investigates the effect of language variation and other factors such as focus type and focused constituent on the syntactic and phonological realization of focus in European Spanish. Our data demonstrate that Spanish resorts to both word order and intonation to different degrees depending especially on the language variety, but also on the focused constituent (subject or object) and the focus type (information and contrastive narrow focus).
Design and analysis of a hybrid encoded low power multiplier with reduced transition activity technique

Multiplication is an arithmetic process that is mostly used in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and communication applications. Efficient implementation of the multipliers is required in many applications. The design of hybrid encoded low power multiplier with Reduced Transition Activity Technique (RTAT) is presented in this paper. The proposed encoding technique reduces the number of switching activity and dynamic power consumption by analyzing the bit patterns in the input data. In this proposed encoding scheme, the operation is executed depends upon the number of 1's and its position in the multiplier data. The architecture of the proposed multiplier is designed using a low power full adder which consumes less power than the other adder architectures. The switching activity of the proposed multiplier has been reduced by 86% and 46% compared with conventional and Booth multiplier respectively. It is observed from the device level simulation using TANNER 12.6 EDA that the power consumption of the proposed multiplier has been reduced by 87% and 26% compared with conventional and Booth multiplier.
Surfactant Protein D Deficiency in Mice Is Associated with Hyperphagia, Altered Fat Deposition, Insulin Resistance, and Increased Basal Endotoxemia

Pulmonary surfactant protein D (SP-D) is a host defence lectin of the innate immune system that enhances clearance of pathogens and modulates inflammatory responses. Recently it has been found that systemic SP-D is associated with metabolic disturbances and that SP-D deficient mice are mildly obese. However, the mechanism behind SP-D's role in energy metabolism is not known. Here we report that SP-D deficient mice had significantly higher ad libitum energy intake compared to wild-type mice and unchanged energy expenditure. This resulted in accumulation but also redistribution of fat tissue. Blood pressure was unchanged. The change in energy intake was unrelated to the basal levels of hypothalamic Pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) and Agouti-related peptide (AgRP) gene expression. Neither short time systemic, nor intracereberoventricular SP-D treatment altered the hypothalamic signalling or body weight accumulation. In ad libitum fed animals, serum leptin, insulin, and glucose were significantly increased in mice deficient in SP-D, and indicative of insulin resistance. However, restricted diets eliminated all metabolic differences except the distribution of body fat. SP-D deficiency was further associated with elevated levels of systemic bacterial lipopolysaccharide. In conclusion, our findings suggest that lack of SP-D mediates modulation of food intake not directly involving hypothalamic regulatory pathways. The resulting accumulation of adipose tissue was associated with insulin resistance. The data suggest SP-D as a regulator of energy intake and body composition and an inhibitor of metabolic endotoxemia. SP-D may play a causal role at the crossroads of inflammation, obesity, and insulin resistance.
A NEW VALUE ITERATION METHOD FOR THE AVERAGE COST DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING PROBLEM∗

We propose a new value iteration method for the classical average cost Markovian decision problem, under the assumption that all stationary policies are unichain and that, furthermore, there exists a state that is recurrent under all stationary policies. This method is motivated by a relation between the average cost problem and an associated stochastic shortest path problem. Contrary to the standard relative value iteration, our method involves a weighted sup-norm contraction, and for this reason it admits a Gauss–Seidel implementation. Computational tests indicate that the Gauss–Seidel version of the new method substantially outperforms the standard method for difficult problems.
Exploring weakly supervised latent sentiment explanations for aspect-level review analysis

In sentiment analysis, aspect-level review analysis has been an important task because it can catalogue, aggregate, or summarize various opinions according to a product's properties. In this paper, we explore a new concept for aspect-level review analysis, latent sentiment explanations, which are defined as a set of informative aspect-specific sentences whose polarities are consistent with that of the review. In other words, sentiment explanations best represent a review in terms of both aspect and polarity. We formulate the problem as a structure learning problem, and sentiment explanations are modeled with latent variables. Training samples are automatically identified through a set of pre-defined aspect signature terms (i.e., without manual annotation on samples), which we term the way weakly supervised. Our major contributions lie in two folds: first, we formalize the use of aspect signature terms as weak supervision in a structural learning framework, which remarkably promotes aspect-level analysis; second, the performance of aspect analysis and document-level sentiment classification are mutually enhanced through joint modeling. The proposed method is evaluated on restaurant and hotel reviews respectively, and experimental results demonstrate promising performance in both document-level and aspect-level sentiment analysis.
Spectrum of Dirichlet Laplacian in a conical layer

We study the spectral properties of Dirichlet Laplacian on the conical layer of the opening angle π − 2θ and thickness equal to π. We demonstrate that below the continuum threshold, which is equal to 1, there is an infinite sequence of isolated eigenvalues and analyse properties of these geometrically induced bound states. By numerical computation we find examples of the eigenfunctions.
Evaluation of an enteric‐coated delayed‐release 5‐aminosalicylic acid tablet in patients with inflammatory bowel disease

Gastrointestinal transit of an enteric coated delayed release 5‐aminosalicylic acid tablet radiolabelled with III indium has been monitored in a total of 13 patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. More than 70% of the tablets disintegrated in the small intestine, on average 3.2 hours after emptying from the stomach. Dispersed preparation was detected in the proximal colon of all the patients, except one with an ileostomy. Mean peak plasma concentrations of 5‐aminosalicylic acid and its metabolite acetyl‐5‐aminosalicylic acid occurred 3–4 hours after gastric emptying. The tablets provide a reliable means of drug delivery to the ileum and proximal colon.
1 A NEW LOW COST APPROACH IN 200 MM AND 300 MM AMHS

There has been quite some speculation in the semiconductor industry recently with regard to the transition to 300 mm wafer fabs. In the meantime, it seems obvious that the ambitious time schedule will experience some changes and a severe delay. This delay in the launching of 300 mm wafer fabs forces the semiconductor industry to consider further improvements of 200 mm automation scenarios both in CIM/MES and AMHS. In this paper a new low cost approach for an Automated Material Handling System (AMHS) was investigated using a conveyor system for interbay transport and intrabay WIP buffering located on the subfloor of a wafer fab. For the first time a model wafer fab was simulated with a conveyor system responsible for the complete material handling. In comparison to the typical scenario where operators are responsible for lot transportation, the simulation results indicate that a conveyor system does not alter the key performance parameters of the wafer fab such as cycle time, WIP, and throughput, what probably not can be said for other types of AMHS systems. The AMHS system was built according to the results of the simulation conducted with the discrete event simulator AutoMod/AutoSched to provide improved production flexibility and to minimize the system and operational costs. Initial industry comments favor this concept. One advantage of this new approach is that it certainly helps to build experience before launching 300 mm AMHS automation.
Survey of automatic modulation classification techniques: classical approaches and new trends

The automatic recognition of the modulation format of a detected signal, the intermediate step between signal detection and demodulation, is a major task of an intelligent receiver, with various civilian and military applications. Obviously, with no knowledge of the transmitted data and many unknown parameters at the receiver, such as the signal power, carrier frequency and phase offsets, timing information and so on, blind identification of the modulation is a difficult task. This becomes even more challenging in real-world scenarios with multipath fading, frequency-selective and time-varying channels. With this in mind, the authors provide a comprehensive survey of different modulation recognition techniques in a systematic way. A unified notation is used to bring in together, under the same umbrella, the vast amount of results and classifiers, developed for different modulations. The two general classes of automatic modulation identification algorithms are discussed in detail, which rely on the likelihood function and features of the received signal, respectively. The contributions of numerous articles are summarised in compact forms. This helps the reader to see the main characteristics of each technique. However, in many cases, the results reported in the literature have been obtained under different conditions. So, we have also simulated some major techniques under the same conditions, which allows a fair comparison among different methodologies. Furthermore, new problems that have appeared as a result of emerging wireless technologies are outlined. Finally, open problems and possible directions for future research are briefly discussed.
Feedback and trust-related factors of consumer behavior in cross-border electronic commerce

Online shopping from foreign websites, or cross-border electronic commerce, has not become very common despite its potential advantages for consumers. This study investigated the factors that influence the intention to use a foreign website, using a model of consumer behavior with trust and risk. Additionally, it examines how feedback from users of different nationalities affects the relationships between those factors. A survey was conducted in Japan, which obtained 915 responses divided into three groups, corresponding to different scenarios of feedback in the website. The results showed that in a cross-border context Trust and Risk have an influence on Intention of Use that seems to be unaffected by the presence of feedback. However, other relationships are affected by the differences in the groups, such as the influence of general trust in electronic commerce on Trust in the website which is only significant when feedback information is shown.