Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bipedal robotic running with partial hybrid zero dynamics and human-inspired optimization

This paper presents a method for achieving stable “human-like” running in simulation by using human-inspired control. Data from human running experiments are processed, analyzed and split into the two domains: stance phase and flight phase. By examining this data, we present a set of outputs, i.e., functions of the kinematics, which appear to represent human running; moreover, we show that this output data can be described by the time-solution to a linear spring-mass-damper-termed the canonical locomotion function. This observation motivates the construction of a human-inspired optimization that determines the parameters of the canonical locomotion function that provide the best fit of the human data while simultaneously enforcing partial hybrid zero dynamics, i.e., that the human outputs track the canonical locomotion functions even through impacts. The main result is a method for numerically solving this optimization problem that provably results in stable robotic running. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate the “human-like” robotic running obtained through this procedure.
Consciousness and the Binding Problem

Abstract: It is proposed that phenomenal awareness, the ability to be aware of one's sensations and feelings, emerges from the capacity of evolved brains to analyze their own cognitive processes by iterating and reapplying on themselves the very same cortical operations that they use for the interpretation of signals from the outer world. Search for the neuronal substrate of awareness therefore converges with the search for the cognitive mechanisms through which brains analyze their environment. The hypothesis is put forward that the mammalian brain generates continuously highly dynamic states that, when modulated by input signals, rapidly converge towards points of transient stability that correspond to the respective input constellation. It is proposed that these states are characterized by the dynamic binding of feature‐specific cells into functionally coherent cell assemblies which as a whole represent the constellation of features defining a particular perceptual object. Arguments are presented that favor the notion that the cognitive operations supporting awareness consist of an iteration of such dynamic binding processes which then lead to the formation of higher‐order assemblies that correspond to the contents of conscious awareness. Experimental data are reviewed relating to the questions of how assemblies are formed and which signatures define the relations among the responses of distributed neurons. It is argued that assemblies self‐organize through reciprocal interactions of neurons coupled by reentrant loops and that the signature of relatedness consists of the transient synchronization of the discharges of the respective neurons. Evidence is presented that these synchronization phenomena depend on the same state variables as awareness: Both require for their manifestation activated brain states characterized by desynchronized EEGs. It is concluded that phenomenal awareness is amenable to neurobiological reductionism; but it is also proposed that self‐consciousness requires a different explanatory approach because it emerges from the dialogue between different brains and hence has the quality of a cultural construct.
Sequences in the 5′ Nontranslated Region of Hepatitis C Virus Required for RNA Replication

ABSTRACT Sequences in the 5′ and 3′ termini of plus-strand RNA viruses harbor cis-acting elements important for efficient translation and replication. In case of the hepatitis C virus (HCV), a plus-strand RNA virus of the family Flaviviridae, a 341-nucleotide-long nontranslated region (NTR) is located at the 5′ end of the genome. This sequence contains an internal ribosome entry site (IRES) that is located downstream of an about 40-nucleotide-long sequence of unknown function. By using our recently developed HCV replicon system, we mapped and characterized the sequences in the 5′ NTR required for RNA replication. We show that deletions introduced into the 5′ terminal 40 nucleotides abolished RNA replication but only moderately affected translation. By generating a series of replicons with HCV-poliovirus (PV) chimeric 5′ NTRs, we could show that the first 125 nucleotides of the HCV genome are essential and sufficient for RNA replication. However, the efficiency could be tremendously increased upon the addition of the complete HCV 5′ NTR. These data show that (i) sequences upstream of the HCV IRES are essential for RNA replication, (ii) the first 125 nucleotides of the HCV 5′ NTR are sufficient for RNA replication, but such replicon molecules are severely impaired for multiplication, and (iii) high-level HCV replication requires sequences located within the IRES. These data provide the first identification of signals in the 5′ NTR of HCV RNA essential for replication of this virus.
Quality of service for ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing

Quality-of-service (QoS) is a desirable feature for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) due to the growth of multimedia applications. However, the mobile nature and dynamic topology of MANETs make it difficult to provide QoS assurance in such networks. In this paper we propose a QoS routing protocol based on AODV (QS-AODV), which creates routes according to application QoS requirements. A local repair mechanism is used to improve the packet delivery ratio. It is shown that QS-AODV provides performance comparable to AODV under light traffic conditions. In heavy traffic, QS-AODV provides higher packet delivery ratios and lower routing overheads, at a cost of slightly longer end-to-end delays. The effects of mobility on performance is also presented.
Airway pressure release ventilation during acute lung injury: A prospective multicenter trial

ObjectiveTo evaluate the feasibility of airway pressure release ventilation (APRV) in providing ventilatory support to patients with acute lung injury of diverse etiology and mild-to-moderate severity. DesignProspective, multicenter, nonrandomized crossover trial. SettingICUs in six major referral hospitals. PatientsFifty adult patients with respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation and positive end-expiratory airway pressure. InterventionsAfter optimization of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), conventional ventilation and APRV were administered sequentially for 30 mins. During APRV, the CPAP level and airway pressure release level were adjusted to prevent hypoxemia, while the degree of ventilatory support was adjusted by altering the frequency of pressure release. Measurements and Main ResultsCirculatory and ventilatory pressures, arterial blood gases and pH, heart rate, and respiratory rate were measured. Alveolar ventilation was augmented adequately in 47 of 50 patients by APRV. Adjustment of APRV required an increase in mean CPAP from 13 ± 3 (SD) to 21 ± 9 cm H2O and a release pressure of 6 ± 5 cm H2O. This airway pressure pattern produced a mean airway pressure comparable to that pressure achieved during conventional ventilation. Failure of APRV in three patients could be attributed to an inadequate level of CPAP or an inadequate APRV rate. While maintaining oxygenation of arterial blood and circulatory function, APRV allowed a substantial (55 ± 17%; p < .0001) reduction in peak airway pressure compared with conventional positive pressure ventilation adjusted to deliver a comparable or lower level of ventilatory support. ConclusionsAPRV is a feasible alternative to conventional mechanical ventilation for augmentation of alveolar ventilation in patients with acute lung injury of mild-to-moderate severity.
Spatial attention and saccadic camera motion

An important aspect of computer-controlled camera motion systems is that of the generation of saccadic movements, which shift the camera gaze quickly from one fixation position to another. Recent psychophysical experiments suggest that there exists a causal connection between spatial shifts in visual attention and the production of saccadic eye movements in humans. Motivated by this experimental evidence, we propose a winner-take-all based model of exogenous spatial attention, involving both sustained and transient feature detection channels, and link it to the targetting and triggering of saccadic eye movements. We show that this model accounts for a range of oculomotor phenomena observed in human subjects. We describe the application of this model to a robotic camera gaze control system.
Ultrawideband planar disc monopole

A new ultrawideband, sleeved transmission line- fed rectangular planar disc monopole antenna with a considerably small ground plane size is presented. Experiments have been carried out to investigate the impedance and radiation behavior of the antenna and the results are compared with the numerically simulated data. The antenna offers an ultrabroadband performance in the frequency band 0.5-9.0 GHz with a VSWR of less than 2.5:1.
Methodology for MR diffusion tensor imaging of the cat spinal cord

Magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of the spinal cord is challenging because of the cord's thin structure and the presence of physiological and susceptibility artifacts. To circumvent these issues, we developed a methodology for imaging the thoraco-lumbar spinal cord of cats at 3 T using single-shot spin-echo echo planar imaging (ss-SE-EPI). The proposed method could potentially be applied to humans since it was developed on a clinical scanner with a standard spine coil. Results provide (i) suggestions for optimal slice orientation and phase encoding direction; (ii) an assessment of the benefits of parallel imaging to reduce geometric distortions; (iii) feasibility of acquiring quality diffusion weighted data in 13 minutes at a resolution of 1.1 mm and (iv) determination of axonal disruption, in two cats with complete spinal cord transection, using tractography.
Steady State Visually Evoked Potentials detection using a single electrode consumer-grade EEG device for BCI applications

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) implement a direct communication pathway between the brain of an user and an external device, as a computer or a machine in general. One of the most used brain responses to implement non-invasive BCIs is the so called steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP). This periodic response is generated when an user gazes to a light flickering at a constant frequency. The SSVEP response can be detected in the user's electroencephalogram (EEG) at the corresponding frequency of the attended flickering stimulus. In SSVEP based BCIs, multiple stimuli, flickering at different frequencies, are commonly presented to the user, where to each stimulus is associated a command for an actuator. One of the limitations to a wider adoption of BCIs is given by the need of EEG acquisition devices and software tools which are commonly not meant for end-user usage. In this work, exploiting state-of-the-art software tools, the use of a low cost easy to wear single electrode EEG device is demonstrated to be exploitable to implement simple SSVEP based BCIs. The obtained results, although less impressive than the ones obtainable with professional EEG equipment, are interesting in view of practical low cost BCI applications meant for end-users.
Social Interactions and Malaria Preventive Behaviors in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the existence of social interactions in malaria preventive behaviors in Sub-Saharan Africa, that is, whether an individual's social environment has an influence on the individual's preventive behaviors. We focus on the two population groups which are the most vulnerable to malaria (children under 5 years and pregnant women) and on two preventive behaviors (sleeping under a bednet and taking intermittent preventive treatment during pregnancy). We define the social environment of the individual as people living in the same region. To detect social interactions, we calculate the size of the social multiplier by comparing the effects of an exogenous variable at individual and regional levels. Our data come from 92 surveys for 29 Sub-Saharan countries between 1999 and 2012, and they cover approximately 660,000 children and 95,000 women. Our results indicate that there are social interactions in malaria preventive behaviors in the form of social multipliers effects of women's education and household wealth. The long-run effects of these characteristics on preventive behaviors at the regional level are larger than those apparent at the individual level.
Improving soil surface properties: a driving force for conservation tillage under semi-arid conditions

The effect of long term conservation tillage (CT) application on soil organic carbon (SOC) concentration, and on stratification ratios (SR) of SOC, soluble organic carbon (SOCs), microbial biomass carbon (MBC) and protease activity (PA) has been studied. The SR was established dividing values of these variables at 0-5 cm depth by values at 10-25 cm depth. The results were compared with those obtained under traditional tillage (TT). The study was conducted in a wheat-sunflower crop rotation established in 1991 under rainfed conditions in south-west Spain. The results showed here correspond to the years 2001 (sunflower) and 2002 and 2004 (wheat). Despite a slight increase in SOC and the SR of SOC under CT compared to TT, noticeable and significant increases of SR of SOCs, MBC and PA were recorded in CT compared to TT. These increases reveal that the stratification of SOC under CT have consequences on soil functions beyond that of potentially sequestering more C in the soil. CT also improved soil quality by softening the loss of CaCO3, compared to TT.
A simple lift-off-based patterning method for micro- and nanostructuring of functional substrates for cell culture

The ability to produce cell patterning through precise surface engineering has stimulated the development of cellular bioassays that offer new insights on the mechanisms of cell adhesion, proliferation, differentiation and molecular signaling pathways. Here we describe a simple micropatterning technique combining supersonic cluster beam deposition of nanostructured titania films on bovine serum albumin functionalized substrates. A standard lift-off process enables us to generate complementary micropatterns of hydrophobic bovine serum albumin (cell-repellent) and hydrophilic nanostructured TiOx (cell-adhesive). We demonstrate the selective PC12 cell adhesion and growth on biocompatible nanostructured TiOx. We also observed that these functional micropatterned substrates promote a considerable enhancement of cell attachment and proliferation.
A systematic approach to the development of system programs

The brief history of the development of large programming systems shows a persistent inability to predict cost and time associated with it. For this reason I want to discuss some of the principles and practice which experience (either good or bad) has shown can yield a higher level of predictability. I do not pretend that these principles are always easy to apply or that they do not have to be interpreted to particular situations. However, I do believe that the principles are fundamental in that predictability can be guaranteed to increase if they are followed.
Focused retrieval with proximity scoring

We present in this paper a scoring method for information retrieval based on the proximity of the query terms in the documents. The idea of the method first is to assign to each position in the document a fuzzy proximity value depending on its closeness to the surrounding keywords. These proximity values can then be summed on any range of text -- including any passage or any element -- and after normalization this sum is used as the relevance score for the extent. Some experiments on the Wikipedia collection used in the INEX 2008 evaluation campaign are presented and discussed.
Video Object Segmentation via Global Consistency Aware Query Strategy

In this paper, we propose a video object segmentation method via global consistency aware query strategy. The aim is to obtain higher segmentation accuracy with less user annotation. Intuitively, we hope to annotate some frames to obtain better segmentation performance than to annotate other frames, which can be modeled by active learning framework. Specifically, we first generate a sample space of potential annotation regions via an object proposals method for each frame. Then, the annotation likelihood for the region is calculated in terms of annotation history and global consistency for the object in the video. Third, the segmentation result of the annotation region can be obtained by minimizing an MRF energy function. Fourth, the algorithm will provide the user with the most valuable frame to annotate, which has high annotation likelihood and large segmentation result change. Finally, the annotation is added to the framework to begin the next iteration. Experiments on a number of video sequences demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the user effort and obtain the higher segmentation accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
How do competition and collaboration affect supply chain performance? An agent based modeling approach

Supply chain collaboration is considered to be the main driving force of supply chain success. In practice, however, ideal supply chain collaboration is difficult to achieve. In particular, a factor that is presumed to hinder collaboration is competition between firms. Even though several studies suggest that competition benefits supply chains, other studies come to the opposite conclusion. In order to address this issue, this paper proposes an agent-based modeling approach to understand how competition and collaboration between firms affects supply chains in the market in which they operate. The model represents customers, manufacturers, and suppliers collaborating and competing in a supply chain strategic space. Preliminary results presented in this paper are reported for the purpose of illustration. These show that it is the bounded-rationality of each agent that drives the emergent outcomes, and that the market structure is determined primarily by competitive behavior and not by demand.
Fast Conical Hull Algorithms for Near-separable Non-negative Matrix Factorization

The separability assumption (Donoho & Stodden, 2003; Arora et al., 2012a) turns non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) into a tractable problem. Recently, a new class of provably-correct NMF algorithms have emerged under this assumption. In this paper, we reformulate the separable NMF problem as that of finding the extreme rays of the conical hull of a finite set of vectors. From this geometric perspective, we derive new separable NMF algorithms that are highly scalable and empirically noise robust, and have several other favorable properties in relation to existing methods. A parallel implementation of our algorithm demonstrates high scalability on shared- and distributed-memory machines.
Label Pre-annotation for Building Non-projective Dependency Treebanks for French

The current interest in accurate dependency parsing make it necessary to build dependency treebanks for French containing both projective and non-projective dependencies. In order to alleviate the work of the annotator, we propose to automatically pre-annotate the sentences with the labels of the dependencies ending on the words. The selection of the dependency labels reduces the ambiguity of the parsing. We show that a maximum entropy Markov model method reaches the label accuracy score of a standard dependency parser (MaltParser). Moreover, this method allows to find more than one label per word, i.e. the more probable ones, in order to improve the recall score. It improves the quality of the parsing step of the annotation process. Therefore, the inclusion of the method in the process of annotation makes the work quicker and more natural to annotators.
Myosin IIA Modulates T Cell Receptor Transport and CasL Phosphorylation during Early Immunological Synapse Formation

Activation of T cell receptor (TCR) by antigens occurs in concert with an elaborate multi-scale spatial reorganization of proteins at the immunological synapse, the junction between a T cell and an antigen-presenting cell (APC). The directed movement of molecules, which intrinsically requires physical forces, is known to modulate biochemical signaling. It remains unclear, however, if mechanical forces exert any direct influence on the signaling cascades. We use T cells from AND transgenic mice expressing TCRs specific to the moth cytochrome c 88–103 peptide, and replace the APC with a synthetic supported lipid membrane. Through a series of high spatiotemporal molecular tracking studies in live T cells, we demonstrate that the molecular motor, non-muscle myosin IIA, transiently drives TCR transport during the first one to two minutes of immunological synapse formation. Myosin inhibition reduces calcium influx and colocalization of active ZAP-70 (zeta-chain associated protein kinase 70) with TCR, revealing an influence on signaling activity. More tellingly, its inhibition also significantly reduces phosphorylation of the mechanosensing protein CasL (Crk-associated substrate the lymphocyte type), raising the possibility of a direct mechanical mechanism of signal modulation involving CasL.
A Power Control MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract This paper presents a power control MAC protocol that allows nodes to vary transmit power level on a per-packet basis. Several researchers have proposed simple modifications of IEEE 802.11 to incorporate power control. The main idea of these power control schemes is to use different power levels for RTS–CTS and DATA–ACK. Specifically, maximum transmit power is used for RTS–CTS, and the minimum required transmit power is used for DATA–ACK transmissions in order to save energy. However, we show that these schemes can degrade network throughput and can result in higher energy consumption than when using IEEE 802.11 without power control. We propose a power control protocol which does not degrade throughput and yields energy saving.
Effects of IL-10 and glucose on expression of OPG and RANKL in human periodontal ligament fibroblasts

The effects of interleukin-10 (IL-10) and glucose on mRNA and protein expression of osteoprotegerin (OPG), and its ligand, receptor activator of nuclear factor-κB ligand (RANKL), were investigated in human periodontal ligament fibroblasts (HPDLFs). Primary HPDLFs were treated with different concentrations of IL-10 (0, 1, 10, 25, 50, and 100 ng/mL) or glucose (0, 5.5, 10, 20, 30, and 40 mmol/L). Changes in mRNA and protein expression were examined using the reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and Western blot analysis, respectively. After IL-10 treatment, mRNA and protein levels of OPG were increased, while mRNA and protein levels of RANKL were decreased (P<0.05), both in a concentration-dependent manner. Glucose stimulation had the opposite concentration-dependent effect to that of IL-10 on OPG and RANKL expression. IL-10 upregulated OPG expression and downregulated RANKL expression, whereas high glucose upregulated RANKL and downregulated OPG in HDPLFs. Abnormal levels of IL-10 and glucose may contribute to the pathogenesis of periodontal disease.