Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Support of Spatial–Temporal Neighbors for Depth Map Sequence Up-sampling

Depth map up-sampling methods have achieved remarkable improvement by exploiting sensor fusion techniques where they assume that the depth map discontinuities and image edges coincide, and the depth values of the temporal neighbors are stable during time variation. However, inherent noise of depth data acquired by active range sensors often violates these assumptions, and results in undesirable error propagation. To alleviate the error propagation, this letter presents a new adaptive supporting method of spatially-temporally neighboring samples. On the basis of a spatial-temporal Markov random field model, the weight coefficients of the smoothness terms are adaptively computed according to the reliability of neighboring samples. The experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the previous works in terms of quantitative and qualitative criteria.
Connectivity of inhomogeneous random graphs

We find conditions for the connectivity of inhomogeneous random graphs with intermediate density. Our results generalize the classical result for G(n, p), when p=clogn/n . We draw n independent points Xi from a general distribution on a separable metric space, and let their indices form the vertex set of a graph. An edge (i, j) is added with probability min(1,κ(Xi,Xj)logn/n) , where κ≥0 is a fixed kernel. We show that, under reasonably weak assumptions, the connectivity threshold of the model can be determined. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg. , 45, 408‐420, 2014
A scene-based dependable indoor navigation system

We propose a topology-based Bayesian visual navigation framework, with which we represent the world environment as a collection of scenes. The proposed topological map consists of nodes represented as a bag of visual line words and edges represented as both an adjacency list and relative motion information to perform the transition between topological nodes. Our proposed Bayesian localization framework uses two measurement models: a visual line word-based place model and a path-matching model. To enable a mobile robot to reach to a desired destination, a coastal path is planned in such a way that maximizes the possibility of following the reference path defined as a sequence of scenes encountered when building the topological map, while avoiding possible collisions by leveraging a local grid map constructed in real time from Kinect depth information. To show the validity of our proposed framework, we provide several extensive experimental results in several indoor environments under different conditions, such as illumination changes and visual occlusions.
Infrastructure-based delay tolerant network communication

The applicability of Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) routing protocols is generally quite restricted to extremely mobile environments. All nodes including terminal hosts and routers are mobile, and there is no infrastructure available. This paper presents the utilization of a scheme that combines multiple DTN regions for infrastructure-based DTN communication. This is achieved through stationary devices with store-and-forward capabilities located at the border between various areas which cover both infrastructure-less and infrastructure-based environments. In this scenario, the nodes' movements are restricted to their region; sources and destinations might be located in different regions. The fixed nodes collect all the messages created by sources and transfer it to the destination nodes in other regions, if within communication range. Therefore, the existence of fixed nodes shall resolve the problem of mapping routes for different regions. In addition, we analyze the influence of diverse network conditions when the mobile nodes move around the network area.
A PSO and Simulated Annealing Hybrid Algorithm to Task Allocation Problem for Holonic Manufacturing System

This paper focuses on the dynamic reconfiguration and task optimization of holonic manufacturing systems (HMS). The concept of dynamic virtual clustering is extended to the control process of a holarchy or holonic organization. The mediator-based dynamic virtual clustering mechanism is presented firstly. Then a negotiation strategy based on the contract net protocol is proposed for cooperative action among holons. Finally, a hybrid algorithm based on PSO and simulated annealing for holon task allocation is described to support the optimum organization of a holarchy. PSO employs a collaborative population-based search, which is inspired by the social behavior of bird flocking. It combines local search (by self experience) and global search (by neighboring experience), possessing high search efficiency. SA employs certain probability to avoid becoming trapped in a local optimum and the search process can be controlled by the cooling schedule. The hybrid algorithm combines the high speed of PSO with the powerful ability to avoid being trapped in local minimum of SA. We compare the PSO algorithm to both GA and SA models, the simulation results show that the proposed model and algorithm are effective
Effect of serum concentration on hybridoma cell growth and monoclonal antibody production at various initial cell densities.

Hybridoma cells (S3H5/gamma 2bA2) were cultivated using RPMI 1640 media with different serum concentrations at various initial cell densities. It was found that the serum requirement for cell growth was population-dependent. At an initial cell density of 1.10(4) cells/ml, the minimum serum concentration for cell growth was 5% (v/v) and reduced to 1% at the initial cell density of 1.10(5) cells/ml. When the initial density was increased to 1.10(6) cells/ml, serum was not needed for cell growth. The maximum cell density and the integral of viable cells over cultivation time increased as serum concentration or initial cell density was increased. However, specific antibody production rate was almost constant at 0.16 pg/cell.hr irrespective of serum concentration or initial cell density.
International summit on the nutrition of adolescent girls and young women: consensus statement

An international summit focusing on the difficult challenge of providing adequate nutrition for adolescent girls and young women in low‐ and middle‐income countries was held in Portland, Oregon in 2015. Sixty‐seven delegates from 17 countries agreed on a series of recommendations that would make progress toward improving the nutritional status of girls and young women in countries where their access to nutrition is compromised. Delegate recommendations include: (1) elevate the urgency of nutrition for girls and young women to a high international priority, (2) raise the social status of girls and young women in all regions of the world, (3) identify major knowledge gaps in the biology of adolescence that could be filled by robust research efforts, (4) and improve access to nutrient‐rich foods for girls and young women. Attention to these recommendations would improve the health of young women in all nations of the world.
ACCESS TO EMPLOYMENT WITH AGE AND GENDER: RESULTS OF A CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT

Several concurrent hypotheses have been proposed in order to take into account the persistence of under-employment of persons aged over 50, in France. In this paper, we are interested in the labour demand. We construct and implement an experimental protocol allowing testing four hypotheses currently discussed: the unobservable distance from retirement by the recruiter; the supposed depreciation of skills in a context with repeated technological shocks; the supposed inability of professional retraining, eventually differentiated by gender; a taste discrimination against older workers, as the result of social norms. To test each of these hypotheses, we have conducted four separate campaigns of testing for evaluating them. Between mid-January and mid-August 2015, we have sent, 6 361 applications allocated on seven occupations and twenty-eight profiles. The research investigates a statistical processing of results of these testings. Our results indicate which must necessarily combine several hypotheses to take into account the under-employment of seniors, in France: the difficulties of professional retraining following a shock in the employment career; the social norms inducing a negative representation of the older workers through the employers. Seniors are both victims of the depreciation of the human capital and age discriminations in access to employment, which will especially penalise men in their professional retraining. The classical explanation by the distance from retirement is the only one which isn’t statistical validated.
Neural sensor fusion for spatial visualization on a mobile robot

An ARTMAP neural network is used to integrate visual information and ultrasonic sensory information on a B14 mobile robot. Training samples for the neural network are acquired without human intervention. Sensory snapshots are retrospectively associated with the distance to the wall, provided by on-board odometry as the robot travels in a straight line. The goal is to produce a more accurate measure of distance than is provided by the raw sensors. The neural network effectively combines sensory sources both within and between modalities. The improved distance percept is used to produce occupancy grid visualizations of the robot's environment. The maps produced point to specific problems of raw sensory information processing and demonstrate the benefits of using a neural network system for sensor fusion.
Fast Support Vector Data Descriptions for Novelty Detection

Support vector data description (SVDD) has become a very attractive kernel method due to its good results in many novelty detection problems. However, the decision function of SVDD is expressed in terms of the kernel expansion, which results in a run-time complexity linear in the number of support vectors. For applications where fast real-time response is needed, how to speed up the decision function is crucial. This paper aims at dealing with the issue of reducing the testing time complexity of SVDD. A method called fast SVDD (F-SVDD) is proposed. Unlike the traditional methods which all try to compress a kernel expansion into one with fewer terms, the proposed F-SVDD directly finds the preimage of a feature vector, and then uses a simple relationship between this feature vector and the SVDD sphere center to re-express the center with a single vector. The decision function of F-SVDD contains only one kernel term, and thus the decision boundary of F-SVDD is only spherical in the original space. Hence, the run-time complexity of the F-SVDD decision function is no longer linear in the support vectors, but is a constant, no matter how large the training set size is. In this paper, we also propose a novel direct preimage-finding method, which is noniterative and involves no free parameters. The unique preimage can be obtained in real time by the proposed direct method without taking trial-and-error. For demonstration, several real-world data sets and a large-scale data set, the extended MIT face data set, are used in experiments. In addition, a practical industry example regarding liquid crystal display micro-defect inspection is also used to compare the applicability of SVDD and our proposed F-SVDD when faced with mass data input. The results are very encouraging.
Modularized Bidirectional Grid-Connected Inverter With Constant-Frequency Asynchronous Sigma–Delta Modulation

The objective of this paper is to propose a modularized bidirectional single-phase grid-connected inverter (BGI) with constant-frequency asynchronous sigma-delta modulation (CF-ASDM) control for the renewable energy (RE)-supplied dc power system. The proposed BGI can be operated either in the inverter mode (IM) or rectified mode (RM); both are necessary features for the RE-supplied dc power system. By comparing to the conventional ASDM with variable switching frequency, the proposed CF-ASDM can simplify the filter design and can reduce the computational burden of the digital signal processor while maintaining the merit of quick dynamic response. Moreover, the proposed BGI has a redundant central controller which can increase the system reliability. The major contribution of this paper includes developing the modularized BGI with CF-ASDM control scheme for IM and RM operations thoroughly and applying it to the RE-supplied dc power system successfully. In this paper, the mathematical equations to achieve the constant switching frequency operation for the CF-ASDM will be derived. Computer simulations and hardware experiments are shown to verify the performance of the proposed modularized BGI with CF-ASDM control.
Experimental Evaluation of Flooding Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks will often be deployed in environments where the nodes of the networks are unattended and have little or no physical protection against tampering. The nodes of mobile ad hoc networks are thus susceptible to compromise. The networks are particularly vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks launched through compromised nodes or intruders. In this paper, we investigated the effects of flooding attacks in Network Simulation 2 (ns-2) and measured the packet delivery ratio and packet delay under different flooding frequency and different number of attack nodes. Simulation results show that with the increase the flooding frequency and the number of attack nodes, network performance drops. Meanwhile the packet delay firstly increases and then decline to a value of stability in the end.
On the Use of DSC-MRI for Measuring Vascular Permeability

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Contrast agent extravasation has been shown to confound brain tumor perfusion measurements with DSC–MR imaging, necessitating the use of correction techniques (eg, Weisskoff, Bjornerud). Leakage parameters (K2 and Ka) postulated to reflect vessel permeability can be extracted from these correction methods; however, the biophysical interpretation of these parameters and their relationship to commonly used MR imaging measures of vascular permeability (eg, contrast agent volume transfer constant, [Ktrans]) remain unclear. Given that vascular density, as assessed by blood volume, and vascular permeability, as reflected by Ktrans (and potentially K2 or Ka), report on unique and clinically informative vascular characteristics, there is a compelling interest to simultaneously assess these features. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We acquired multiecho DSC–MR imaging data, allowing the simultaneous computation and voxelwise comparison of single- and dual-echo derived measures of K2, Ka and Ktrans in patients with glioma. This acquisition enabled the investigation of competing T1 and T2* leakage effects and TE dependency on these parameters. RESULTS: K2 and Ka displayed nonsignificant (P = .150 and P = .060, respectively) voxelwise linear correlations with Ktrans, while a significant (P < .001) inverse relationship was observed between K2 and Ka (coefficient of determination [r2] = 0.466–0.984). Significantly different (P < .005) mean estimates were found between voxels exhibiting predominately T1 and T2* effects for K2 and Ka. Ktrans, however, was observed to be similar between these voxels (0.109 versus 0.092 minutes−1). Significant differences (P < .001) in extracellular-extravascular volume fraction (ve) (0.285 versus 0.167) were also observed between cohorts. Additionally, K2 and Ka were found to have a significant quadratic relationship (P = .031 and P = .005, respectively) with ve. CONCLUSIONS: Estimates of vascular permeability in brain tumors may be simultaneously acquired from multiple-echo DSC–MR imaging via Ktrans; however, caution should be used in assuming a similar relationship for K2 and Ka.
Experimental Analysis of Sources of Error in Evolutionary Studies Based on Roche/454 Pyrosequencing of Viral Genomes

Factors affecting the reliability of Roche/454 pyrosequencing for analyzing sequence polymorphism in within-host viral populations were assessed by two experiments: 1) sequencing four clonal simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) stocks and 2) sequencing mixtures in different proportions of two SIV strains with known fixed nucleotide differences. Observed nucleotide diversity and frequency of undetermined nucleotides were increased at sites in homopolymer runs of four or more identical nucleotides, particularly at AT sites. However, in the mixed-strain experiments, the effects on estimated nucleotide diversity of such errors were small in comparison to known strain differences. The results suggest that biologically meaningful variants present at a frequency of around 10% and possibly much lower are easily distinguished from artifacts of the sequencing process. Analysis of the clonal stocks revealed numerous rare variants that showed the signature of purifying selection and that elimination of variants at frequencies of less than 1% reduced estimates of nucleotide diversity by about an order of magnitude. Thus, using a 1% frequency cutoff for accepting a variant as real represents a conservative standard, which may be useful in studies that are focused on the discovery of specific mutations (such as those conferring immune escape or drug resistance). On the other hand, if the goal is to estimate nucleotide diversity, an optimal strategy might be to include all observed variants (even those at less than 1% frequency), while masking out homopolymer runs of four or more nucleotides.
Analyzing Job Mobility with Job Turnover Intentions: An International Comparative Study

This study analyzed job-turnover intentions in twenty-five countries with data from the 1997 International Social Survey Program. Results show that high turnover intentions, measured as the proportion of employed individuals that report a very likely change of job in the next 12 months, can be observed in Canada, 17.0 percent, the U.S., 14.3 percent, and Great Britain, 14.3 percent. Low turnover intentions are encountered in Japan, 1.8 percent, Spain, 3.0 percent, and several Eastern European countries. The determinants of turnover intentions are, in a number of cases, the same as those observed in many studies on actual turnovers. Determinants of turnover intentions do vary substantially among countries. However, union membership, public-sector employment, job satisfaction, job security, and firm pride are significant in most countries. The high turnover intentions observed in Great Britain, France, and, to a lesser extent, Canada can be explained by the subjective measures considered in this study. Especially Great Britain and France have very low rankings of job satisfaction, job security, advancement opportunities, and firm pride. Despite having the same turnover intentions, Great Britain and the United States differ substantially with regard to the subjective determinants. Whereas the high turnover intentions in Great Britain can be explained by the relatively poor perceived job satisfaction, job security, and firm pride, high turnover intentions in the United States coexist with relatively high levels of job satisfaction, job security, advancement opportunities, firm pride, and, most notably, good perceived labor market opportunities.
Structural basis of filamin A functions

Filamin A (FLNa) can effect orthogonal branching of F-actin and bind many cellular constituents. FLNa dimeric subunits have N-terminal spectrin family F-actin binding domains (ABDs) and an elongated flexible segment of 24 immunoglobulin (Ig) repeats. We generated a library of FLNa fragments to examine their F-actin binding to define the structural properties of FLNa that enable its various functions. We find that Ig repeats 9–15 contain an F-actin–binding domain necessary for high avidity F-actin binding. Ig repeats 16–24, where most FLNa-binding partners interact, do not bind F-actin, and thus F-actin does not compete with Ig repeat 23 ligand, FilGAP. Ig repeats 16–24 have a compact structure that suggests their unfolding may accommodate pre-stress–mediated stiffening of F-actin networks, partner binding, mechanosensing, and mechanoprotection properties of FLNa. Our results also establish the orientation of FLNa dimers in F-actin branching. Dimerization, mediated by FLNa Ig repeat 24, accounts for rigid high-angle FLNa/F-actin branching resistant to bending by thermal forces, and high avidity F-actin binding and cross-linking.
On the Positive Effects of Overconfident Self-Perception in Teams

In this paper, we study the individual payoff effects of overconfident self-perception in teams. In particular, we demonstrate that the welfare of an overconfident agent in a team of one rational and one overconfident agent or a team of two overconfident agents can be higher than that of the members of a team of two rational agents. This result holds irrespective of the assumption about the agents’ awareness of their colleague’s bias. Moreover, we show that an overconfident agent is always better of when he is unaware of a potential bias of his colleague.
An essential role for Rab27a GTPase in eosinophil exocytosis

Eosinophil degranulation has been implicated in inflammatory processes associated with allergic asthma. Rab27a, a Rab‐related GTPase, is a regulatory intracellular signaling molecule expressed in human eosinophils. We postulated that Rab27a regulates eosinophil degranulation. We investigated the role of Rab27a in eosinophil degranulation within the context of airway inflammation. Rab27a expression and localization in eosinophils were investigated by using subcellular fractionation combined with Western blot analysis, and the results were confirmed by immunofluorescence analysis of Rab27a and the granule membrane marker CD63. To determine the function of eosinophil Rab27a, we used Ashen mice, a strain of Rab27a‐deficient animals. Ashen eosinophils were tested for degranulation in response to PAF and calcium ionophore by measuring released EPX activity. Airway EPX release was also determined by intratracheal injection of eosinophils into mice lacking EPX. Rab27a immunoreactivity colocalized with eosinophil crystalloid granules, as determined by subcellular fractionation and immunofluorescence analysis. PAF induced eosinophil degranulation in correlation with redistribution of Rab27a+ structures, some of which colocalized with CD63+ crystalloid granules at the cell membrane. Eosinophils from mice had significantly reduced EPX release compared with normal WT eosinophils, both in vitro and in vivo. In mouse models, Ashen mice demonstrated reduced EPX release in BAL fluid. These findings suggest that Rab27a has a key role in eosinophil degranulation. Furthermore, these findings have implications for Rab27a‐dependent eosinophil degranulation in airway inflammation.
Burst Time Prediction in Cascades

Studying the bursty nature of cascades in social media is practically important in many applications such as product sales prediction, disaster relief, and stock market prediction. Although the cascade volume prediction has been extensively studied, how to predict when a burst will come remains an open problem. It is challenging to predict the time of the burst due to the ``quick rise and fall'' pattern and the diverse time spans of the cascades. To this end, this paper proposes a classification based approach for burst time prediction by utilizing and modeling rich knowledge in information diffusion. Particularly, we first propose a time window based approach to predict in which time window the burst will appear. This paves the way to transform the time prediction task to a classification problem. To address the challenge that the original time series data of the cascade popularity only are not sufficient for predicting cascades with diverse magnitudes and time spans, we explore rich information diffusion related knowledge and model them in a scale-independent manner. Extensive experiments on a Sina Weibo reposting dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach in accurately predicting the burst time of posts.