Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Autonomous Flight in Unknown Indoor Environments

This paper presents our solution for enabling a quadrotor helicopter, equipped with a laser rangefinder sensor, to autonomously explore and map unstructured and unknown indoor environments. While these capabilities are already commodities on ground vehicles, air vehicles seeking the same performance face unique challenges. In this paper, we describe the difficulties in achieving fully autonomous helicopter flight, highlighting the differences between ground and helicopter robots that make it difficult to use algorithms that have been developed for ground robots. We then provide an overview of our solution to the key problems, including a multilevel sensing and control hierarchy, a high-speed laser scan-matching algorithm, an EKF for data fusion, a high-level SLAM implementation, and an exploration planner.1 Finally, we show experimental results demonstrating the helicopter's ability to navigate accurately and autonomously in unknown environments.
Topologies and control of grid connected power converters

This paper presents an overview of current control practices for three phase power converter acting as an asynchronous interface between a synchronous voltage source and a power electronic controlled voltage source. The paper starts with glimpse of the common topologies, and branches out to the control techniques from linear to non-linear, dc loops to ac loops, stationary frame to synchronous reference frame, predictive to hysteresis etc. The surveys of these controllers under faulty as well as distorted grid conditions and a few possible future trends in control were also presented as a concluding section.
On the Factor Refinement Principle and its Implementation on Multicore Architectures

We propose a divide and conquer adaptation of the factor refinement algorithm of Bach, Driscoll and Shallit. For an ideal cache of Z words, with L words per block, the original approach suffers from O(n2/L) cache misses, meanwhile our adaptation incurs O(n2/ZL) cache misses only. We have realized a multithreaded implementation of the latter using Cilk++ targeting multicores. Our code achieves linear speedup on 16 cores for sufficiently large input data.
Culturing the Empathic Health Professional: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract The selection of our future healthcare professionals is primarily based on a combination of their undergraduate grade point average (GPA) and national examinations, primarily the medical college admissions test (MCAT) or graduate record examination (GRE). Much focus is applied to “getting students ready” to excel in these areas through a combination of heavy individual science curricular components and training in analytical thinking. In contrast, there is little or no emphasis on developing empathy in these students, despite strong evidence that this skill is a requirement for effective patient recovery. In this monograph, I will explore our current understanding of the two types of empathy—affective and cognitive—looking at both brain chemistry and social fabric in maintaining their development. In trying to solve the problem of learning cognitive empathy, I have drawn on more than 20 years of classroom discussion and rubric development with undergraduate health majors, and I suggest that cogni.
U.S. Congressional Committees and SEC Enforcement Against Financial Misconduct

We document that firms in jurisdictions served by powerful representation on U.S. congressional committees that have Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) oversight responsibilities are less likely to face regulatory scrutiny for financial misconduct. Conditional on the issuance of an SEC enforcement action, the same firms also receive materially smaller monetary penalties relative to other transgressing firms. An exogenous decrease in a firm's powerful committee representation results in an increase in the likelihood that the firm will subsequently face SEC enforcement actions. Our findings do not appear to be driven by regulatory capture but rather, by firm and auditor efforts to limit exposure to political costs. In sum, political representation on specific U.S. congressional committees appears to have direct effects on the financial reporting practices of constituent firms. We thank Charles Stewart for providing congressional committee membership data and Diego Garcia and Øyvind Norli for providing geographic location of firm operations data.
Convergence of Mesh Adaptive Direct Search to Second-Order Stationary Points

A previous analysis of second-order behavior of generalized pattern search algorithms for unconstrained and linearly constrained minimization is extended to the more general class of mesh adaptive direct search (MADS) algorithms for general constrained optimization. Because of the ability of MADS to generate an asymptotically dense set of search directions, we are able to establish reasonable conditions under which a subsequence of MADS iterates converges to a limit point satisfying second-order necessary or sufficient optimality conditions for general set-constrained optimization problems.
Resource Selection Strategies for a CNP-Based Resource Management Model

In this paper, we propose a resource management model that extends the contract net protocol by integrating the advantages of the matchmaking technique. Our model addresses the issues of matchmaker overload and the lack of up-to-date resource state information suffered by the original matchmaking model. It also enables resource requesters to obtain a list of qualified resources with which they can narrow down the selection of resources and reduce the number of ineffective communication messages. In addition, we present five strategies to facilitate resource selection on our model from the perspective of turnaround time and reporton experiments to evaluate their performance. The experiment results show that, in the presence of resource contention, the probabilistic strategies outperform random and the deterministic ones, and the performance of the presented strategies executed on our model is superior to their performance on the original matchmaking model.
TO REALITY-HUMANOID ROBOTS

Creating the artificial human has always been the desire of mankind and the dream for many scientists and engineers. Nevertheless, it proved to be more difficult than one would imagine. We are now at a time where the technology permits us to draw closer to our quest. To conquer the quest, building humanoid robots would be a good start. We have seen various humanoid robots unveiled over the past few years. Though they are at the cutting-edge of current technology, they are a far cry from the artificial human. Nevertheless, these humanoids represent our first step towards the creation of the arti-ficial human. This article looks at the current state, the benefits and the future research directions of humanoid robots research.
Quantum verification of matrix products

We present a quantum algorithm that verifies a product of two <i>n</i> × <i>n</i> matrices over any integral domain with bounded error in worst-case time <i>O</i>(<i>n</i><sup>5/3</sup>) and expected time <i>O</i>(<i>n</i><sup>5/3</sup>/ min(<i>w</i>, √<i>n</i>)<sup>1/3</sup>), where ω is the number of wrong entries. This improves the previous best algorithm [3] that runs in time <i>O</i>(<i>n</i><sup>7/4</sup>). We also present a quantum matrix multiplication algorithm that is efficient when the result has few nonzero entries.
Some remarks on sampling methods in molecular dynamics

We present an overview of sampling techniques in molecular dynamics. We start with phase-space sampling techniques, and recall that deterministic methods may suffer from non-ergodicity problems. Then, we focus on methods relying on stochastic perturbations of the usual Hamiltonian dynamics. We also consider the problem of free energy computations, where the measure to sample is supported by a submanifold which is a level set of a so-called reaction coordinate.
The Local and Global Effects of Traffic Shaping (Extended Version)

The Internet is witnessing explosive growth in traffic, in large part due to bulk transfers. Delivering such traffic is expensive for ISPs because they pay other ISPs based on peak utilization. To limit costs, many ISPs are deploying ad-hoc traffic shaping policies that specifically target bulk flows. However, there is relatively little understanding today about the effectiveness of different shaping policies at reducing peak loads and what impact these policies have on the performance of bulk transfers. In this paper, we compare several traffic shaping policies with respect to (1) the achieved reduction in peak network traffic and (2) the resulting performance loss for bulk transfers. We identified a practical policy that achieves peak traffic reductions of up to 50% with only limited performance loss for bulk transfers. However, we found that the same policy leads to large performance losses for bulk transfers when deployed by multiple ISPs along a networking path. Our analysis revealed that this is caused by certain TCP characteristics and differences in local peak utilization times. We present a data staging service that counteracts the deleterious end-to-end effects of local traffic shaping by delaying bulk data at appropriate points in the network to consume bandwidth when available. We show that the service is incrementally deployable and has reasonable storage requirements.
Research Paper: A Randomized Trial of "Corollary Orders" to Prevent Errors of Omission

OBJECTIVE Errors of omission are a common cause of systems failures. Physicians often fail to order tests or treatments needed to monitor/ameliorate the effects of other tests or treatments. The authors hypothesized that automated, guideline-based reminders to physicians, provided as they wrote orders, could reduce these omissions. DESIGN The study was performed on the inpatient general medicine ward of a public teaching hospital. Faculty and housestaff from the Indiana University School of Medicine, who used computer workstations to write orders, were randomized to intervention and control groups. As intervention physicians wrote orders for 1 of 87 selected tests or treatments, the computer suggested corollary orders needed to detect or ameliorate adverse reactions to the trigger orders. The physicians could accept or reject these suggestions. RESULTS During the 6-month trial, reminders about corollary orders were presented to 48 intervention physicians and withheld from 41 control physicians. Intervention physicians ordered the suggested corollary orders in 46.3% of instances when they received a reminder, compared with 21.9% compliance by control physicians (p < 0.0001). Physicians discriminated in their acceptance of suggested orders, readily accepting some while rejecting others. There were one third fewer interventions initiated by pharmacists with physicians in the intervention than control groups. CONCLUSION This study demonstrates that physician workstations, linked to a comprehensive electronic medical record, can be an efficient means for decreasing errors of omissions and improving adherence to practice guidelines.
Attribute-Based Proxy Re-Encryption with Keyword Search

Keyword search on encrypted data allows one to issue the search token and conduct search operations on encrypted data while still preserving keyword privacy. In the present paper, we consider the keyword search problem further and introduce a novel notion called attribute-based proxy re-encryption with keyword search (), which introduces a promising feature: In addition to supporting keyword search on encrypted data, it enables data owners to delegate the keyword search capability to some other data users complying with the specific access control policy. To be specific, allows (i) the data owner to outsource his encrypted data to the cloud and then ask the cloud to conduct keyword search on outsourced encrypted data with the given search token, and (ii) the data owner to delegate other data users keyword search capability in the fine-grained access control manner through allowing the cloud to re-encrypted stored encrypted data with a re-encrypted data (embedding with some form of access control policy). We formalize the syntax and security definitions for , and propose two concrete constructions for : key-policy and ciphertext-policy . In the nutshell, our constructions can be treated as the integration of technologies in the fields of attribute-based cryptography and proxy re-encryption cryptography.
A Multi-Tier Framework for Understanding Spoken Language

Language can be approached from many different vantage points – neuroanatomy, psychology, phonetics, hearing, vision, physics, information theory, formal logic, and so on. Most scientific and linguistic accounts have focused on defining units of analysis, such as the phoneme, the word, and the phrase. Some of the more ingenious, such as Articulation Theory (Fletcher and Galt, 1940; French and Steinberg, 1947; Fletcher, 1953; Allen, 1994) and the Speech Transmission Index (Houtgast and Steeneken, 1985) characterize speech communication mostly in terms of equations. To date, all such efforts have failed, largely because language is extraordinarily multi-dimensional and not particularly amenable to simplifying assumptions. The great American linguist, Edward Sapir, characterized the problem very succintly: “All grammars leak. ” (Sapir, 1921, p. 39). No language can be captured entirely in terms of a closed system of equations; there are always exceptions to the rules. Humans are particularly adept at learning exceptions and accepting them as “normal. ”
Rotating membranes on G 2 manifolds, logarithmic anomalous dimensions and N = 1 duality

We show that the E−S ~ log S behaviour found for long strings rotating on AdS5 × S5 may be reproduced by membranes rotating on AdS4 × S7 and on a warped AdS5 M-theory solution. We go on to obtain rotating membrane configurations with the same E−K ~ log K relation on G2 holonomy backgrounds that are dual to {} = 1 gauge theories in four dimensions. We study membrane configurations on G2 holonomy backgrounds systematically, finding various other Energy-Charge relations. We end with some comments about strings rotating on warped backgrounds.
Corpus-based Japanese morphological analysis

The goal of this study is to improve corpus-based Japanese morphological analysis which is composed by word segmentation and part-of-speech (below POS) tagging. We divide the problem of Japanese morphological analysis into three subproblems: models for known word, models for unknown word and corpus maintenance schema. Firstly, we discuss Markov model-based approaches for known word processing. We point phenomena which are difficult to be analyzed by a simple Markov model. Special transactions are necessary for these phenomena. Therefore, we introduce three extensions for Markov model: lexicalized POS, position-wise grouping and selective trigram. Secondly, we discuss unknown word processing. We newly propose an offline model for unknown word based on a pattern recognition approach. Unknown words are extracted from the text by chunking in advance. Next, the POSs for the extracted words are estimated by a word sense disambiguation-like approach. Thirdly, we discuss maintenance schema for word segmented and POS tagged corpus. The corpus maintenance is a crucial issue for corpus-based models. We propose a relational database usage to keep consistency in the corpora. The relational database enables us synchronous transaction between the lexicon and the corpora. Therefore, the risk of discrepancy in the corpus is reduced by the proposed method. As side issues, we discuss Japanese named entity extraction and filler filtering. Japanese named entity extraction is an application in information extraction. We propose two extensions for the application. One is a character-based chunking method which solves a word boundary discrepancy problem. The other is use of point-wise n-best answers of Japanese morphological analyzer which makes the model robust. The proposed method achieves the best accuracy in the preceding works. Filler filtering is a preprocessing for Japanese morphological analysis. Many fillers and disfluencies appear in transcriptions of spoken language. These phenomena are factors of the errors in Japanese morphological analysis. We introduce a pattern recognition method for filler and disfluency filtering from the transcription.
Themed Issue Article: Stress in Vertebrates Measures of physiological stress: a transparent or opaque window into the status, management and conservation of species?

Conservation physiology proposes that measures of physiological stress (glucocorticoid levels) can be used to assess the status and future fate of natural populations. Increases in glucocorticoids may reflect a more challenging environment, suggest ing that the influence of human activities on free-living animals could be quantified by measuring glucocorticoids. Biomedical studies suggest that chronic increases in glucocorticoids can have detrimental effects on survival and reproduction, which could influence the viability of populations. Here, we discuss the use of measurements of glucocorticoids in conservation physiology. We first provide an overview of the different methods to quantify glucocorticoids and their utility in conservation physiology. We then discuss five questions we think are essential for conservation physiologists to address. We highlight how intrinsic (e.g. sex, reproductive status, age, recent experiences) and ecological factors (e.g. predation, food availability, snowfall) can, by themselves or through their interactions with anthropogenic disturbances, affect the physiological stress response and mask any general patterns about the effects of anthropogenic disturbances on glucocorticoids. Using a meta-analysis, we show that anthropogenic disturbances are consistently associated with increased glucocorticoids regardless of the type of human disturbance. We also show that males may be more sensitive to anthropogenic disturbances than females and that faecal glucocorticoids, but not baseline plasma glucocorticoids, consistently increase in response to anthropogenic disturbances. Finally, we discuss how increases in glucocorticoids in free-living animals can sometimes enhance survival and reproduction. Unfortunately, our literature analysis indicates that this observation has not yet gained traction, and very few studies have shown that increases in glucocorticoid levels resulting from anthropogenic disturbances decrease survival or reproduction. We think that the use of measures of glucocorticoids in conservation physiology has tremendous potential, but there are still a number of methodological concerns, in addition to several crucial questions that should be addressed.
The Flipped Classroom in a Terminal College Mathematics Course for Liberal Arts Students

The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of flipping the classroom on final exam scores in a terminal general education college mathematics course for a diverse student population. We employed a quasiexperimental design. Seven instructors collectively taught 13 sections of each pedagogy (flipped/traditional). Six hundred thirty-two students participated. Common final exams were graded concurrently. Mixed-model analyses were performed. Students in flipped sections scored 5.1 percentage points higher on average than those in traditional sections (p = .02) when controlling for math SAT and financial aid status, an improvement of 7.8 points among Black students (p < .01) and 1.0 points among Whites (p = .67). The estimated average difference between White and Black students, conditional on covariates, was 5.2 percentage points in traditional sections (p < .01) and –1.6 in flipped sections (p = .39). The 6.8-point difference in achievement gap between pedagogies was statistically significant (p < .01). Flipping the classroom was associated with improved student performance, particularly among Black students.
ZDOCK: An initial‐stage protein‐docking algorithm

The development of scoring functions is of great importance to protein docking. Here we present a new scoring function for the initial stage of unbound docking. It combines our recently developed pairwise shape complementarity with desolvation and electrostatics. We compare this scoring function with three other functions on a large benchmark of 49 nonredundant test cases and show its superior performance, especially for the antibody‐antigen category of test cases. For 44 test cases (90% of the benchmark), we can retain at least one near‐native structure within the top 2000 predictions at the 6° rotational sampling density, with an average of 52 near‐native structures per test case. The remaining five difficult test cases can be explained by a combination of poor binding affinity, large backbone conformational changes, and our algorithm's strong tendency for identifying large concave binding pockets. All four scoring functions have been integrated into our Fast Fourier Transform based docking algorithm ZDOCK, which is freely available to academic users at http://zlab.bu. edu/∼rong/dock. Proteins 2003;52:80–87. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Efficient support for IP over ATM

With the explosive growth and pervasive reach of the Internet, it is becoming the de facto standard user network interface. The vast majority of new networking applications assume this interface. Consequently, ATM technology is increasingly used to carry IP datagrams. So far however, the control and signaling model of ATM has not been adequately optimized for this use. Moreover, the incompatibility of the quality of service models increase complexity as IP level RSVP reservations are translated into (close to) equivalent ATM QoS requests. UNITE is a lightweight signaling protocol for ATM, that substantially reduces the cost of connection setup, while providing flexible support for quality of service. In particular, UNITE does not incur an end-to-end setup delay, but instead makes the connection available for transmission almost immediately. In addition, the connection setup cost is sufficiently low to be amortized even for the shortest flows (one or two datagrams). UNITE's service model is generic, and thus is equally suitable to support either the ATM service model, or the RSVP service model or both. We describe how UNITE enables IP flows to better exploit the high forwarding performance of ATM switches, and avoids the complexities caused by service model mismatch.
BOOTSTRAPPING COMMUNICATION IN LANGUAGE GAMES: STRATEGY, TOPOLOGY AND ALL THAT

Semiotic dynamics is a fast growing field according to which language can be seen as an evolving and self-organizing system. In this paper we present a simple multi-agent framework able to account for the emergence of shared conventions in a population. Agents perform pairwise games and final consensus is reached without any outside control nor any global knowledge of the system. In particular we discuss how embedding the population in a non trivial interaction topology affects the behavior of the system and forces to carefully consider agents selection strategies. These results cast an interesting framework to address and study more complex issues in semiotic dynamics.
Trapping of neutral sodium atoms with radiation pressure.

We report the confinement and cooling of an optically dense cloud of neutral sodium atoms by radiation pressure. The trapping and damping forces were provided by three retroreflected laser beams propagating along orthogonal axes, with a weak magnetic field used to distinguish between the beams. We have trapped as many as ${10}^{7}$ atoms for 2 min at densities exceeding ${10}^{11}$ atoms ${\mathrm{cm}}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$. The trap was \ensuremath{\simeq}0.4 K deep and the atoms, once trapped, were cooled to less than a millikelvin and compacted into a region less than 0.5 mm in diameter.