Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Resiliency of MUSIC Direction Finding Against Antenna Sensor Coupling

Many classical direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithms suffer from sensitivity to sensor coupling. By applying a group of auxiliary sensors in a uniform linear array (ULA), we prove the resiliency of the MUSIC direction finding algorithm against array sensor coupling. We show that the performance of MUSIC algorithm under antenna array with unknown coupling can be very close to the case with known coupling. We can also estimate the mutual coupling coefficients before refining the DOA estimates by utilizing an extended sensor array. Moreover, our analysis on the effect of mutual coupling in direction finding illustrates the existence of some blind angles which should be avoided when the array is designed. Our simulation results corroborate our analysis.
Usability Testing for Serious Games: Making Informed Design Decisions with User Data

Usability testing is a key step in the successful design of new technologies and tools, ensuring that heterogeneous populations will be able to interact easily with innovative applications. While usability testing methods of productivity tools (e.g., text editors, spreadsheets, or management tools) are varied, widely available, and valuable, analyzing the usability of games, especially educational "serious" games, presents unique usability challenges. Because games are fundamentally different than general productivity tools, "traditional" usability instruments valid for productivity applications may fall short when used for serious games. In this work we present a methodology especially designed to facilitate usability testing for serious games, taking into account the specific needs of such applications and resulting in a systematically produced list of suggested improvements from large amounts of recorded gameplay data. This methodology was applied to a case study for a medical educational game, MasterMed, intended to improve patients' medication knowledge. We present the results from this methodology applied to MasterMed and a summary of the central lessons learned that are likely useful for researchers who aim to tune and improve their own serious games before releasing them for the general public.
People's Intention towards Public Bicycle System in Wuhan

Public bicycle system is considered as an essential part of the public transport system in large and medium cities owing to its zero emissions and accessibility. This study was undertaken to establish a conceptual framework for describing the behavioral intention of using public bicycle. A structural equation model was then employed to formulate the relationship between individual's behavioral intention of using public bicycle and its influencing factors. A set of questionnaires was designed and 202 citizens in Wuhan were interviewed in order to collect the required data for empirical study purpose. The study results indicate that the behavioral intention of using public bicycle is influenced not only by the satisfaction towards biking environments and the perceived degree of security and risks, the attitude towards public bicycle and social personality also plays an important role. For inspiring an individual's willingness to using public bicycle, improving the quality of biking environments is a short cut for encouraging people to using public bicycle. The long-term approach for promoting green transportation is to nourish the right attitude toward public bicycle, and thus promote the development of public transportation system.
Comparison of Expert Adjudicated Coronary Heart Disease and Cardiovascular Disease Mortality With the National Death Index: Results From the REasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) Study

Background The National Death Index (NDI) is widely used to detect coronary heart disease (CHD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths, but its reliability has not been examined recently. Methods and Results We compared CHD and CVD deaths detected by NDI with expert adjudication of 4010 deaths that occurred between 2003 and 2013 among participants in the REGARDS (REasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke) cohort of black and white adults in the United States. NDI derived CHD mortality had sensitivity 53.6%, specificity 90.3%, positive predictive value 54.2%, and negative predictive value 90.1%. NDI‐derived CVD mortality had sensitivity 73.4%, specificity 84.5%, positive predictive value 70.6%, and negative predictive value 86.2%. Among NDI‐derived CHD and CVD deaths, older age (odds ratios, 1.06 and 1.04 per 1‐year increase) was associated with a higher probability of disagreement with the adjudicated cause of death, whereas among REGARDS adjudicated CHD and CVD deaths a history of CHD or CVD was associated with a lower probability of disagreement with the NDI‐derived causes of death (odds ratios, 0.59 and 0.67, respectively). Conclusions The modest accuracy and differential performance of NDI‐derived cause of death may impact CHD and CVD mortality statistics.
Optimization of wireless bandwidth utilization

On wireless networks, the bandwidth is shared between the clients, which means that the available bandwidth always fluctuates. Adaptive multimedia contents are required because of this fluctuation in order to optimize the wireless available bandwidth. In this article, we describe NetMoVie a new architecture for the management of adaptive streaming based on the RTP standard. NetMoVie optimizes the bandwidth by providing a hybrid encoding solution and also reduces the time needed to change the quality delivered to the clients.
Social media resources for participative design research

We present our experiences of novel value from online social media for Participative Design (PD) research. We describe how particular social media (e.g. Facebook, Pinterest, WhatsApp and Twitter) were used during a five-year project on learning space design by the researcher and interested teachers across all research phases (contextual review, user studies, PD action research). Social media were used to source and share comments, photographs and video documentation, supporting participation in design research. Based on our experiences, we provide recommendations on informed worthwhile use of social media to enrich PD research by increasing diversity, recursivity and timely access to insights, informants, inspirations and influencers.
Social knowledge influences reasoning in cross-cultural studies involving differences in knowledge about social conduct and relationships

*Correspondence: Daniel C. Krawczyk, Center for BrainHealth®, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, 2200 Mockingbird Lane, Dallas, TX 75235, USA e-mail: daniel.krawczyk@ utdallas.edu Relational reasoning ability relies upon by both cognitive and social factors. We compared analogical reasoning performance in healthy controls (HC) to performance in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and individuals with schizophrenia (SZ). The experimental task required participants to find correspondences between drawings of scenes. Participants were asked to infer which item within one scene best matched a relational item within the second scene. We varied relational complexity, presence of distraction, and type of objects in the analogies (living or non-living items). We hypothesized that the cognitive differences present in SZ would reduce relational inferences relative to ASD and HC. We also hypothesized that both SZ and ASD would show lower performance on living item problems relative to HC due to lower social function scores. Overall accuracy was higher for HC relative to SZ, consistent with prior research. Across groups, higher relational complexity reduced analogical responding, as did the presence of non-living items. Separate group analyses revealed that the ASD group was less accurate at making relational inferences in problems that involved mainly non-living items and when distractors were present. The SZ group showed differences in problem type similar to the ASD group. Additionally, we found significant correlations between social cognitive ability and analogical reasoning, particularly for the SZ group. These results indicate that differences in cognitive and social abilities impact the ability to infer analogical correspondences along with numbers of relational elements and types of objects present in the problems.
Exploring Music Diversity Needs Across Countries

Providing diversity in recommendations has shown to positively influence the user's subjective evaluations such as satisfaction. However, it is often unknown how much diversity a recommendation set needs to consist of. In this work, we explored how music users of Last.fm apply diversity in their listening behavior. We analyzed a dataset with the music listening history of 53,309 Last.fm users capturing their total listening events until August 2014. We complemented this dataset with The Echo Nest features and Hofstede's cultural dimensions to explore how music diversity is applied across countries. Between 47 countries, we found distinct relationships between the cultural dimensions and music diversity variables. These results suggest that different country-based diversity measurements should be considered when applied to a recommendation set in order to maximize the user's subjective evaluations. The country-based relationships also provide opportunities for recommender systems to personalize experiences when user data is limited by being able to rely on the user's demographics.
IlluminaGUI: Graphical User Interface for analyzing gene expression data generated on the Illumina platform

UNLABELLED IlluminaGUI is a graphical user interface implemented for analyzing microarray data from the Illumina BeadChip platform. All key components of a microarray experiment, including quality control, normalization, inference and classification methods are provided in a 'point and click' approach. IlluminaGUI is implemented as a R package based on the R-Tcl/Tk interface and is available for platforms on which R runs including Windows, Mac and Unix-type machines. AVAILABILITY http://IlluminaGUI.dnsalias. org
Large eddy simulation applications in gas turbines

The gas turbine presents significant challenges to any computational fluid dynamics techniques. The combination of a wide range of flow phenomena with complex geometry is difficult to model in the context of Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) solvers. We review the potential for large eddy simulation (LES) in modelling the flow in the different components of the gas turbine during a practical engineering design cycle. We show that while LES has demonstrated considerable promise for reliable prediction of many flows in the engine that are difficult for RANS it is not a panacea and considerable application challenges remain. However, for many flows, especially those dominated by shear layer mixing such as in combustion chambers and exhausts, LES has demonstrated a clear superiority over RANS for moderately complex geometries although at significantly higher cost which will remain an issue in making the calculations relevant within the design cycle.
Energy management and control of plug-in hybrid electric vehicle charging stations in a grid-connected hybrid power system

The charging infrastructure plays a key role in the healthy and rapid development of the electric vehicle industry. This paper presents an energy management and control system of an electric vehicle charging station. The charging station (CS) is integrated to a grid-connected hybrid power system having a wind turbine maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controlled subsystem, photovoltaic (PV) MPPT controlled subsystem and a controlled solid oxide fuel cell with electrolyzer subsystem which are characterized as renewable energy sources. In this article, an energy management system is designed for charging and discharging of five different plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) simultaneously to fulfil the grid-to-vehicle (G2V), vehicle-to-grid (V2G), grid-to-battery storage system (G2BSS), battery storage system-to-grid (BSS2G), battery storage system-to-vehicle (BSS2V), vehicle-to-battery storage system (V2BSS) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) charging and discharging requirements of the charging station. A simulation test-bed in Matlab/Simulink is developed to evaluate and control adaptively the AC-DC-AC converter of non-renewable energy source, DC-DC converters of the storage system, DC-AC grid side inverter and the converters of the CS using adaptive proportional-integral-derivate (AdapPID) control paradigm. The effectiveness of the AdapPID control strategy is validated through simulation results by comparing with conventional PID control scheme.
New Gold Nanostructures for Sensor Applications: A Review

Gold based structures such as nanoparticles (NPs) and nanowires (NWs) have widely been used as building blocks for sensing devices in chemistry and biochemistry fields because of their unusual optical, electrical and mechanical properties. This article gives a detailed review of the new properties and fabrication methods for gold nanostructures, especially gold nanowires (GNWs), and recent developments for their use in optical and electrochemical sensing tools, such as surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS).
Named Entity Recognition from Tweets

Entries in microblogging sites are very short. For example, a 'tweet' (a post or status update on the popular microblogging site Twit- ter) can contain at most 140 characters. To comply with this restric- tion, users frequently use abbreviations to express their thoughts, thus producing sentences that are often poorly structured or ungrammatical. As a result, it becomes a challenge to come up with methods for au- tomatically identifying named entities (names of persons, organizations, locations etc.). In this study, we use a four-step approach to automatic named entity recognition from microposts. First, we do some preprocess- ing of the micropost (e.g. replace abbreviations with actual words). Then we use an off-the-shelf part-of-speech tagger to tag the nouns. Next, we use the Google Search API to retrieve sentences containing the tagged nouns. Finally, we run a standard Named Entity Recognizer (NER) on the retrieved sentences. The tagged nouns are returned along with the tags assigned by the NER. This simple approach, using readily available components, yields promising results on standard benchmark data.
A systematic topological method for fingerprint singular point detection

Singular point detection is an important issue in fingerprint image analysis. General methods like Poincare index method can detect singular points in non-arch type fingerprints but fail on arch-type fingerprints. Some more sophisticated methods like complex filter method also face the same problem. In this paper, we propose a systematic method for detecting singular points in fingerprint images which utilizes the most fundamental topological feature of acquired fingerprints as the basis for singular point identification. The method differentiates the input fingerprint between arch type and non-arch type. For non-arch type fingerprints singular points are detected as intersection points in a c(>2) level segmentation map. As for arch type fingerprints, singular points are identified from the symmetric line of the fingerprint structure. The method is evaluated using the NIST DB4 database and compared with the complex filter method. The proposed method attains near 90% success rate in detecting singular points and the displacement from ground truth is comparable to that of the complex filter method. Moreover our method is more than once faster in CPU time.
Bias in the estimation of false discovery rate in microarray studies

MOTIVATION The false discovery rate (FDR) provides a key statistical assessment for microarray studies. Its value depends on the proportion pi(0) of non-differentially expressed (non-DE) genes. In most microarray studies, many genes have small effects not easily separable from non-DE genes. As a result, current methods often overestimate pi(0) and FDR, leading to unnecessary loss of power in the overall analysis. METHODS For the common two-sample comparison we derive a natural mixture model of the test statistic and an explicit bias formula in the standard estimation of pi(0). We suggest an improved estimation of pi(0) based on the mixture model and describe a practical likelihood-based procedure for this purpose. RESULTS The analysis shows that a large bias occurs when pi(0) is far from 1 and when the non-centrality parameters of the distribution of the test statistic are near zero. The theoretical result also explains substantial discrepancies between non-parametric and model-based estimates of pi(0). Simulation studies indicate mixture-model estimates are less biased than standard estimates. The method is applied to breast cancer and lymphoma data examples. AVAILABILITY An R-package OCplus containing functions to compute pi(0) based on the mixture model, the resulting FDR and other operating characteristics of microarray data, is freely available at http://www.meb.ki.se/~yudpaw CONTACT yudi.pawitan@meb.ki.se and alexander.ploner@meb.ki.se.
Non-contact evaluation of spot-welded nugget size based on measuring diffracted Lamb waves by focused air-coupled ultrasound

Spot-welding is widely used in various fields of industries. Since the size and quality of a welded nugget are closely related to the bonding strength of the weld, its quantitative evaluation is important to improve the reliability of the welded structure. In this work, a nugget sizing method based on measuring Lamb waves diffracted at the nugget boundary of a spot weld is proposed. In this method, the nugget size is estimated from the amplitude distribution of Lamb wave diffracted at the nugget boundary when a pair of air-coupled ultrasonic transducers is being scanned near a spot weld. A pair of focused transducers of center frequency of 0.3 MHz is employed. An imitation specimen is firstly evaluated to verify to the validity of the proposed method. Based on the result, the method is applied to the nugget sizing of three spot welds fabricated with different electric currents. Although the estimated values almost agree with those obtained by a water-immersion ultrasonic method, there are certain discrepancies between them due to structural disorders at the nugget/base material interface.
Cholinergic left-right asymmetry in the habenulo-interpeduncular pathway

Significance The forebrain habenular nuclei (Hb) and their connections to the midbrain interpeduncular nucleus (IPN) have emerged as a valuable model to study left-right differences in the zebrafish brain. However, whether this pathway is enriched in the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and involved in nicotine addiction as in mammals is unresolved. We discovered a duplicated cholinergic gene locus that is predominantly expressed in the right Hb at larval stages. Through electrophysiology and pharmacology, we show that this asymmetrical cholinergic pathway is functional. Moreover, specific nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunits localize to the same subregions of the IPN that are activated by exposure of adults to nicotine. Our study firmly establishes the zebrafish as a valid model to study how Hb-IPN circuitry influences nicotine addiction. The habenulo-interpeduncular pathway, a highly conserved cholinergic system, has emerged as a valuable model to study left-right asymmetry in the brain. In larval zebrafish, the bilaterally paired dorsal habenular nuclei (dHb) exhibit prominent left-right differences in their organization, gene expression, and connectivity, but their cholinergic nature was unclear. Through the discovery of a duplicated cholinergic gene locus, we now show that choline acetyltransferase and vesicular acetylcholine transporter homologs are preferentially expressed in the right dHb of larval zebrafish. Genes encoding the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunits α2 and β4 are transcribed in the target interpeduncular nucleus (IPN), suggesting that the asymmetrical cholinergic pathway is functional. To confirm this, we activated channelrhodopsin-2 specifically in the larval dHb and performed whole-cell patch-clamp recording of IPN neurons. The response to optogenetic or electrical stimulation of the right dHb consisted of an initial fast glutamatergic excitatory postsynaptic current followed by a slow-rising cholinergic current. In adult zebrafish, the dHb are divided into discrete cholinergic and peptidergic subnuclei that differ in size between the left and right sides of the brain. After exposing adults to nicotine, fos expression was activated in subregions of the IPN enriched for specific nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunits. Our studies of the newly identified cholinergic gene locus resolve the neurotransmitter identity of the zebrafish habenular nuclei and reveal functional asymmetry in a major cholinergic neuromodulatory pathway of the vertebrate brain.
Clustering objects on a spatial network

Clustering is one of the most important analysis tasks in spatial databases. We study the problem of clustering objects, which lie on edges of a large weighted spatial network. The distance between two objects is defined by their shortest path distance over the network. Past algorithms are based on the Euclidean distance and cannot be applied for this setting. We propose variants of partitioning, density-based, and hierarchical methods. Their effectiveness and efficiency is evaluated for collections of objects which appear on real road networks. The results show that our methods can correctly identify clusters and they are scalable for large problems.
NACK-Oriented Reliable Multicast (NORM) Transport Protocol

This document describes the messages and procedures of the Negative- ACKnowledgment (NACK) Oriented Reliable Multicast (NORM) Protocol. This protocol is designed to provide end-to-end reliable transport of bulk data objects or streams over generic IP multicast routing and forwarding services. NORM uses a selective, negative acknowledgment mechanism for transport reliability and offers additional protocol mechanisms to allow for operation with minimal a priori coordination among senders and receivers. A congestion control scheme is specified to allow the NORM protocol to fairly share available network bandwidth with other transport protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). It is capable of operating with both reciprocal multicast routing among senders and receivers and with asymmetric connectivity (possibly a unicast return path) between the senders and receivers. The protocol offers a number of features to allow different types of applications or possibly other higher level transport protocols to utilize its service in different ways. The protocol leverages the use of FEC-based repair and other IETF reliable multicast transport (RMT) building blocks in its design.
A LDR image expansion method for displaying on HDR screen

With its excellent performance, the High Dynamic Range (HDR) display becomes more and more popular in many fields. As its availability and upcoming rapid development, the large amount of Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images needs to be expanded to benefit the advantages of HDR display. This urges the research of inverse tone mapping. In this paper, we propose a concise and effective approach to extend the dynamic range of LDR image. The scheme consists of three steps, first a non-linear expansion is performed to the LDR image for initial scaling, then the local average luminance of the original image is computed, finally an classic dodging and burning operation is used to extend the dynamic range from both the low and high levels. The implementation results show that the proposed method works well for incorrect exposed images. The image quality metric results suggest that our algorithm has better performance than other methods considered in the comparison.