Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuro-adaptive Formation Maintenance and Control of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots

In this paper, the problem of fleet navigation with formation control and maintenance under leaderfollower strategy has been addressed using simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)-based navigation unit and artificial potential field approaches. Agents are nonholonomic ground robots. In the proposed approach, the leader or virtual leader is assumed to be the center of the formation and its navigation is guaranteed using SLAMbased controller. On the other hand, potential field control strategy is used to position all followers in a certain formation around their leader. In this work, we represents the case where the dynamic is completely unknown. In such case, an on-line NN-based adaptive model estimator is used to approximate the robot nonlinear dynamic and guarantee the tracking of a desired path. In both cases, the control strategy adds an inner loop to the system’s configuration. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.
Unified multi-mode signal detector for LTE-A downlink MIMO system

This paper presents a low power and small area multi-mode MIMO detector targeting the LTE-A downlink. The detector supports the detection of spatial-multiplexing, spatialdiversity, and space-division-multiple-access MIMO signals of different antenna configurations and modulation schemes. Costefficiency is achieved by algorithm and architecture co-design where low-complexity, near-maximum-likelihood (ML) detection algorithms are proposed for these three MIMO technologies respectively with most of the mathematical operations being reused. A unified parallel VLSI architecture is accordingly developed that achieves high detection throughput and runtime reconfigurability to support different MIMO modes. The proposed detector has been designed using a 65-nm CMOS technology with 88.2K equivalent gate-count, representing a 22% less hardware-resource use than the state of art in the open literature. Operating at 1.2-V supply with 165-MHz clock, the detector achieves a 1.98Gb/s peak throughput with a energy consumption of 51.8 pJ/b, which is shown to be the most energyefficient design compared with other 64-QAM detectors.
Humor and Episodic Memory following Frontal versus Posterior Brain Lesions

10 frontal versus 10 posterior brain-lesioned patients were studied as to their capacity to use feelings (a humor response) to aid episodic memory. Both groups were inferior to 10 controls, and frontal-lesioned patients were inferior to those with posterior lesions. However, the former had more trouble using visual cues to aid memory. Consequently, the differences between frontal- and posterior-lesioned patients may not be specifically related to differences in using “feeling” cues to facilitate memory.
Computational error estimates for Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics with nearly crossing potential surfaces

The difference of the values of observables for the time-independent Schroedinger equation, with matrix valued potentials, and the values of observables for ab initio Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics, of the ground state, depends on the probability to be in excited states and the electron/nuclei mass ratio. The paper first proves an error estimate (depending on the electron/nuclei mass ratio and the probability to be in excited states) for this difference of microcanonical observables, assuming that molecular dynamics space-time averages converge, with a rate related to the maximal Lyapunov exponent. The error estimate is uniform in the number of particles and the analysis does not assume a uniform lower bound on the spectral gap of the electron operator and consequently the probability to be in excited states can be large. A numerical method to determine the probability to be in excited states is then presented, based on Ehrenfest molecular dynamics and stability analysis of a perturbed eigenvalue problem.
Tree height integrated into pantropical forest biomass estimates

Abstract. Aboveground tropical tree biomass and carbon storage estimates commonly ignore tree height (H). We estimate the effect of incorporating H on tropics-wide forest biomass estimates in 327 plots across four continents using 42 656 H and diameter measurements and harvested trees from 20 sites to answer the following questions: 1. What is the best H-model form and geographic unit to include in biomass models to minimise site-level uncertainty in estimates of destructive biomass? 2. To what extent does including H estimates derived in (1) reduce uncertainty in biomass estimates across all 327 plots? 3. What effect does accounting for H have on plot- and continental-scale forest biomass estimates? The mean relative error in biomass estimates of destructively harvested trees when including H (mean 0.06), was half that when excluding H (mean 0.13). Power- and Weibull-H models provided the greatest reduction in uncertainty, with regional Weibull-H models preferred because they reduce uncertainty in smaller-diameter classes (≤40 cm D) that store about one-third of biomass per hectare in most forests. Propagating the relationships from destructively harvested tree biomass to each of the 327 plots from across the tropics shows that including H reduces errors from 41.8 Mg ha−1 (range 6.6 to 112.4) to 8.0 Mg ha−1 (−2.5 to 23.0). For all plots, aboveground live biomass was −52.2 Mg ha−1 (−82.0 to −20.3 bootstrapped 95% CI), or 13%, lower when including H estimates, with the greatest relative reductions in estimated biomass in forests of the Brazilian Shield, east Africa, and Australia, and relatively little change in the Guiana Shield, central Africa and southeast Asia. Appreciably different stand structure was observed among regions across the tropical continents, with some storing significantly more biomass in small diameter stems, which affects selection of the best height models to reduce uncertainty and biomass reductions due to H. After accounting for variation in H, total biomass per hectare is greatest in Australia, the Guiana Shield, Asia, central and east Africa, and lowest in east-central Amazonia, W. Africa, W. Amazonia, and the Brazilian Shield (descending order). Thus, if tropical forests span 1668 million km2 and store 285 Pg C (estimate including H), then applying our regional relationships implies that carbon storage is overestimated by 35 Pg C (31–39 bootstrapped 95% CI) if H is ignored, assuming that the sampled plots are an unbiased statistical representation of all tropical forest in terms of biomass and height factors. Our results show that tree H is an important allometric factor that needs to be included in future forest biomass estimates to reduce error in estimates of tropical carbon stocks and emissions due to deforestation.
Genuine Savings: A Critical Analysis of its Policy-Guiding Value

Genuine savings (GS) is an established measure of weak sustainability (WS). It can be shown, with the help of a dynamic optimisation model, that an economy with persistently negative GS cannot be regarded as weakly sustainable. The main conclusion drawn from the empirical estimates of GS presented in this paper is that many resource intensive, developing economies appear to be weakly unsustainable, whereas developed countries are not. The paper praises the GS concept in terms of the positive contribution it has made to the measurement of WS and to the concept of sustainable development more generally. It then analyses, in some depth, the various criticisms of GS. These include the unrealistic assumption of an inter-temporally efficient economy, the dubious treatment of exogenous shocks and population growth, the inappropriate method for computing natural capital depreciation resulting from resource extraction, and the inadequate accounting for environmental pollution. We conclude that, despite various substantial problems, GS represents the best attempt at measuring WS so far with considerable scope for future development and improvement.
Analyzing Intrusion Detection System: An ensemble based stacking approach

Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is an application software which detects the presence of hostile or intrusive elements inside the system. As the nature and type of the intrusions are continuously changing, a simple IDS cannot completely tackle the security threat. In this paper, we have proposed an IDS model, which classifies different types of intrusion attacks based on Stacking classifier. Stacking is an ensemble based classifier. We have achieved good accuracy while classifying the KDD-Cup 99 dataset and that has been achieved with 10 fold cross validation.
Robust and Efficient Multi-robot Coverage

Area coverage is an important task for mobile robots, with many real-world applications. Motivated by potential efficiency and robustness improvements, there is growing interest in the use of multiple robots in coverage. Previous investigations of multi-robot coverage algorithms focused on the improved efficiency gained from the use of multiple robots, but did not formally addressed the potential for greater robustness. We address robustness and efficiency in a family of multi-robot coverage algorithms, based on spanning-tree coverage of approximate cell decomposition. We present off-line and on-line algorithms and analytically show that the algorithms are complete and robust, in that as long as a single robot is able to move, the coverage will be completed. We analyze the assumptions underlying the algorithms requirements and present a number of techniques for executing it in real robots. We show extensive empirical coverage-time results of running the algorithms in a number of different environments and several group sizes.
Cytogenetic characterization of Partamona cupira (Hymenoptera, Apidae) by fluorochromes

Four colonies of the stingless bee Partamona cupira (Hymenoptera: Apidae) were cytogenetically analyzed using conventional staining and the fluorochromes CMA3 e DAPI. The females have 2n = 34 chromosomes (2K = 32 M¯+2 A¯). Some females, however, presented an additional large B acrocentric chromosome, to a total of 2n = 35. Chromosome B and the chromosomal pairs 2, 9 and 10 showed CMA 3+ bands, indicating an excess of CG base-pairs. A clear association was verified between the P. helleri B chromosome SCAR marker and the presence of a B chromosome in P. cupira. The data obtained suggests that B chromosomes in P. helleri and P. cupira share a common origin.
A local roughness measure for 3D meshes and its application to visual masking

3D models are subject to a wide variety of processing operations such as compression, simplification or watermarking, which may introduce some geometric artifacts on the shape. The main issue is to maximize the compression/simplification ratio or the watermark strength while minimizing these visual degradations. However few algorithms exploit the human visual system to hide these degradations, while perceptual attributes could be quite relevant for this task. Particularly, the masking effect defines the fact that one visual pattern can hide the visibility of another. In this context we introduce an algorithm for estimating the roughness of a 3D mesh, as a local measure of geometric noise on the surface. Indeed, a textured (or rough) region is able to hide geometric distortions much better than a smooth one. Our measure is based on curvature analysis on local windows of the mesh and is independent of the resolution/connectivity of the object. The accuracy and the robustness of our measure, together with its relevance regarding visual masking have been demonstrated through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art and subjective experiment. Two applications are also presented, in which the roughness is used to lead (and improve) respectively compression and watermarking algorithms.
Characterizing the shear and bulk moduli of an idealized granular material

Physical experiments on wave propagation on granular material control two macroscopic parameters that are assumed to characterize the response of a given assembly: the isotropic pressure p0 and the solid volume fraction ϕ. Here, by means of numerical simulation, we investigate the effect of the coordination number (the average number of contacts per particle) and the fluctuation of the number of contacts per particle Z′. We adopt a numerical protocol to create several initial packings characterized by the same volume fraction and, for a given isotropic pressure, we are able to obtain different coordination numbers. That is, pressure and coordination number, for a given volume fraction, are independent. The result is that packings with fixed volume fraction and isotropic pressure exhibit a different elastic response. We attribute this behavior only to the coordination number as we find, surprisingly, that is linked to Z′.
Semantic knowledge facilities for a web‐based recipe database system supporting personalization

The recent explosive proliferation of interesting and useful data over the Web such as various recipes, while providing people with readily available information, brings out a challenging issue on how to manage such non‐conventional data effectively. To respond to the challenge, we have been developing a Web‐based recipe database system called Dish_Master to manage recipes in a novel way, which not only covers the static recipe attributes but also elucidates the dynamic cooking behaviors. In this paper, we present several semantic knowledge facilities devised in Dish_Master, including a set of semantic modeling and knowledge constructs to effectively represent recipe data, rules and constraints, and user profile aspects. With such a rich set of semantic knowledge facilities, Dish_Master lays down a solid foundation of providing users with personalized services such as adaptation and recommendation. Users can benefit from the system's real‐time consultation and automatic summarization of cuisine knowledge. The usefulness and elegance of Dish_Master are demonstrated through an experimental prototype system. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
9C-1 Beam Steering Approach for Speckle Characterization and Out-of-Plane Motion Estimation in Real Tissue

Out-of-plane motion in freehand 3D ultrasound can be estimated using the correlation of corresponding patches, leading to sensorless freehand 3D ultrasound systems. Previous work has shown that the motion estimation in a beef tissue is systematically underestimated by approximately 33% and that it can be improved to approximately 25% by limiting the correlation calculation to the fully developed speckle (FDS) patches [1]. The improvement in the accuracy is limited because FDS patches are rare in real tissue. Here, we propose beam steering for detecting FDS patches and we show that it significantly improves speckle detection. We further experiment the effect of beam steering on out-of-plane motion estimation using ex-vivo beef liver and steak experiment. Without steered images, we find a 17% error in the liver experiment. Beam steering reduces the error to 9%, a significant improvement which is mainly due to enhanced FDS detection. Beef steak results are even more promising: 14.8% error without beam steering is reduced to 3.2% error.
The Evolution of HoxD-11 Expression in the Bird Wing: Insights from Alligator mississippiensis

Background Comparative morphology identifies the digits of the wing of birds as 1,2 and 3, but they develop at embryological positions that become digits 2, 3 and 4 in other amniotes. A hypothesis to explain this is that a homeotic frame shift of digital identity occurred in the evolution of the bird wing, such that digits 1,2 and 3 are developing from embryological positions 2, 3 and 4. Digit 1 of the mouse is the only digit that shows no late expression of HoxD-11. This is also true for the anterior digit of the bird wing, suggesting this digit is actually a digit 1. If this is the case, we can expect closer relatives of birds to show no HoxD-11 expression only in digit 1. To test this prediction we investigate HoxD-11 expression in crocodilians, the closest living relatives of birds. Methodology/Principal Findings Using degenerate primers we cloned a 606 nucleotide fragment of exon 1 of the alligator HoxD-11 gene and used it for whole-mount in-situ detection in alligator embryos. We found that in the pentadactyl forelimbs of alligator, as in the mouse, late expression of HoxD-11 is absent only in digit 1. Conclusions/Significance The ancestral condition for amniotes is that late-phase HoxD-11 expression is absent only in digit 1. The biphalangeal morphology and lack of HoxD-11 expression of the anterior digit of the wing is like digit 1 of alligator and mouse, but its embryological position as digit 2 is derived. HoxD-11 expression in alligator is consistent with the hypothesis that both digit morphology as well as HoxD-11 expression are shifted towards posterior in the bird wing.
A process-based approach for ammonia emission measurements at a free-stall dairy

A protocol using flux chambers was employed to determine ammonia emission rates from different low level area sources (LLAS) including free stalls, open lots, manure composting areas, lagoons and separated solids in a central Texas dairy. Data including ammonia emissions from these sources were collected for summer and winter seasons of 2003. Ammonia concentration measurements were made using chemiluminescence-based analyzers. The estimated emission rates for the facility were 24.7±25.4 kg.day-1 for winter and 63.1 ±31.1 kg.day-1 for summer. This difference was due to temperature, loading rate of dairy waste, and bacterial activity of LLAS. The uncertainty analysis showed that 9.4% of ammonia sampling uncertainty was attributed to ammonia sensors, calibration gas impurity and air flow controllers. In winter, the compost and the free-stall contributed about 77% to the total emission rates for the facility. But in summer, 65% of overall ammonia emissions were contributed by two lagoons at the dairy. These results suggest that seasonally dependent best management practices may be needed to reduce annual average ammonia emissions from free stall dairies.
The Effects of Network Neighbours on Protein Evolution

Interacting proteins may often experience similar selection pressures. Thus, we may expect that neighbouring proteins in biological interaction networks evolve at similar rates. This has been previously shown for protein-protein interaction networks. Similarly, we find correlated rates of evolution of neighbours in networks based on co-expression, metabolism, and synthetic lethal genetic interactions. While the correlations are statistically significant, their magnitude is small, with network effects explaining only between 2% and 7% of the variation. The strongest known predictor of the rate of protein evolution remains expression level. We confirmed the previous observation that similar expression levels of neighbours indeed explain their similar evolution rates in protein-protein networks, and showed that the same is true for metabolic networks. In co-expression and synthetic lethal genetic interaction networks, however, neighbouring genes still show somewhat similar evolutionary rates even after simultaneously controlling for expression level, gene essentiality and gene length. Thus, similar expression levels and related functions (as inferred from co-expression and synthetic lethal interactions) seem to explain correlated evolutionary rates of network neighbours across all currently available types of biological networks.
Feeling crowded? Exploring presence in virtual crowds

Virtual reality experiments with virtual crowds are necessary to study human behavior under panic or stressful situations that cannot be evaluated in the real world (i.e., building evacuation due to fire). In order to carry out those experiments it is necessary to use a crowd simulation model in which a real person is seamlessly immersed and experiences a high sense of presence when interacting with such a crowd. This paper studies several crowd simulation models in order to determine which could best enhance presence for a user within a virtual environment. Egocentric features that affect presence are considered in the evaluation. Once we have a realistic simulation, we could use it to study human behavior and obtain relevant data. That data could then be used to update agent behaviors in the simulation system to further improve the overall realism of large groups of autonomous agents.
Public Debt Stock Sustainability in Selected OECD Countries

Among the different criteria used for testing sustainability of public debt, the econometric approach determines whether a government is able to sustain its budget deficits without defaulting on its debt. In this contribution, by linking three different motives proposed respectively by Trehan and Walsh (1991), Hakkio and Rush (1991) and Bohn (1995), we develop a compact step-wise test algorithm and apply that to the European economies, including the PIIGS countries and Turkey. Secondly, we introduce phase-space reconstruction methodology in order to locate the path for debt dynamics, which enables us to observe fiscal policy implications in short and medium-term. We conclude that most economies are characterized by sustainable debt policies with the exception of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and possibly United Kingdom. For the latter country, while the outcome of test algorithm indicates the sustainability of debt policy, phase-space examination shows that the reaction of the government to diverging debt stock GDP ratio cannot be sufficient to stabilize the path for debt dynamics.
A Compression-Based Approach for Coding Sequences Identification. I. Application to Prokaryotic Genomes

Most of the gene prediction algorithms for prokaryotes are based on Hidden Markov Models or similar machine-learning approaches, which imply the optimization of a high number of parameters. The present paper presents a novel method for the classification of coding and non-coding regions in prokaryotic genomes, based on a suitably defined compression index of a DNA sequence. The main features of this new method are the non-parametric logic and the costruction of a dictionary of words extracted from the sequences. These dictionaries can be very useful to perform further analyses on the genomic sequences themselves. The proposed approach has been applied on some prokaryotic complete genomes, obtaining optimal scores of correctly recognized coding and non-coding regions. Several false-positive and false-negative cases have been investigated in detail, which have revealed that this approach can fail in the presence of highly structured coding regions (e.g., genes coding for modular proteins) or quasi-random non-coding regions (e.g., regions hosting non-functional fragments of copies of functional genes; regions hosting promoters or other protein-binding sequences). We perform an overall comparison with other gene-finder software, since at this step we are not interested in building another gene-finder system, but only in exploring the possibility of the suggested approach.
Paper for presentation at the Elections , Public Opinion and Parties ( EPOP ) Conference , Wivenhoe House , University of Essex , September 2005 Tactical Unwind ?

Political developments in Britain since 2001 provide reason to believe that the nature of tactical voting at the 2005 general election may have been different in character from that in other recent elections. This paper examines the changes in party preference structure and finds no sign of greater distance between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Instead the most notable change is a collapse in hostility towards the Conservatives, which together with the drop in the number of Labour supporters provides cause for a small decline in Labour to Liberal Democrat tactical voting. Evidence from both direct survey measurement of tactical voting and constituency election results confirms this expectation, but otherwise there is little sign of change in the level or pattern of tactical voting.