Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Application of Adaptive Controllers in Teleoperation Systems: A Survey

A survey of the adaptive controllers deployed to address major inherent control issues in robotic teleoperation systems is carried out. The study in particular explores the application of adaptive controllers in dealing with master and slave model uncertainties, operator and environment force model uncertainties, unknown external disturbances, and communication delay. The reviewed literature is structured according to the objectives envisaged for the adaptive controllers. Meanwhile, some adaptive methods deployed in human-robot interaction, where robots collaborate with people and actively support them, and local robot control, where robot manipulators are controlled at the same location as the operator, are also considered in the review as they can be used in teleoperation with some minor adjustment. A comparison of the strengths, deficiencies, and requirement of methods in each category is carried out. The study indicates that the majority of the proposed methods either require additional hardware such as sensors, or assume an accurate model of the system under study. The possible future research directions are outlined based on the gaps identified in the survey.
Phase contrivance modulated artificial metasurface embedded with rotated slot

The scattering characteristics of a novel type of metasurface consisting of a width modulated microstrip line loaded by a slot are presented. The rotation angle of the slot about the unit cell symmetry center controls the scattering from the unit cell. The proposed design allows efficient control of the reflection phase reducing the design time for holographic surfaces or reflectarrays. Theoretical details and results of the numerical analysis of the reflection phase and of the surface impedance behavior are presented. In particular a unit cell of overall dimensions of 4.5×4.0×1.58 mm exhibits a quasi-constant bandwidth of 2.5 GHz while the resonance is linearly tuned from 9.8 GHz to 11.5 GHz.
Improving motivation and performance through personal development in large introductory software engineering courses

In 1993, the first year class in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth totalled just 93 students. This year it is 190. In line with most universities in the UK the total number of students in the department has more than doubled in the last five years and as is typical, the number of staff is largely unchanged. This paper describes two main development phases that have been undertaken to enhance the student experience and improve the quality of our teaching despite the ever-increasing workload.
Organic residues on rooting and yield of sugarcane in Typic Quartzipsamments soil

Associada ao insumo quimico, a utilizacao de residuos renovaveis como fonte de nutrientes pode proporcionar melhor eficiencia do mesmo, disponibilizando maior quantidade de nutrientes a planta, alem de reduzir as quantidades aplicadas. O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar a influencia de diferentes residuos orgânicos associados a um fertilizante quimico (NPK) no enraizamento e na produtividade da cana-de-acucar. O experimento foi conduzido em solo classificado como Neossolo Quartzarenico ortico em area localizada no municipio de Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, de outubro de 2010 a setembro de 2013. As parcelas experimentais foram de 4 x 5 m (20 m2) e os tratamentos constituidos por cama de frango (10 t ha-1), torta de filtro (10 t ha-1), vermicomposto (10 t ha-1) e vinhaca (300 m3 ha-1) associados a adubacao basica de NPK e testemunha (somente a adubacao basica). Todas as fontes foram aplicadas nos sulcos antes do plantio, com excecao da vinhaca, atraves de fertirrigacao. O delineamento foi em blocos ao acaso, com quatro repeticoes. Nos resultados observou-se que o tratamento com torta de filtro obteve a maior quantidade de raizes refletindo, assim, em ganho de produtividade, tanto no 1o como no 2o corte.
Point of Load for LHC experiments: Testing the behaviour in hostile environment

Devices used in future experiments at LHC will be called to work in a very hostile environment. Power supply is a key aspect in this scenario, and new converters will be re-designed in order to meet the future requirements. Moreover, also Point of Load (PoL) converters, as circuits able to adapt the voltage level for each board, device and situation, need to be re-designed in order to meet the future specifications. In this paper, both experimental activity for verify the compliance with the hostile environment of a commercial PoL and the features of an ad- hoc designed PoL will be presented and discussed.
Persistent millennial-scale link between Greenland climate and northern Pacific Oxygen Minimum Zone under interglacial conditions

The intensity and/or extent of the northeastern Pacific Oxygen Minimum Zone (OMZ) varied in-phase with the Northern Hemisphere high latitude climate on millennial timescales during the last glacial period, indicating the occurrence of atmospheric and oceanic connections under glacial conditions. While millennial variability was reported for both the Greenland and the northern Atlantic Ocean during the last interglacial period, the climatic connections with the northeastern Pacific OMZ has not yet been observed under warm interglacial conditions. Here we present a new geochemical dataset, spanning the past 120 ka, for major components (terrigenous fraction, marine organic matter, biogenic opal, and carbonates) generated by X-ray fluorescence scanning alongside with biological productivity and redox sensitive trace element content (Mo, Ni, Cd) of sediment core MD02-2508 at 23° N, retrieved from the northern limit of the modern OMZ. Based on elemental ratios Si / Ti (proxy for opal), Cd / Al and Ni / Al, we suggest that biological productivity was high during the last interglacial (MIS5). Highly resolved opal reconstruction presents millennial variability corresponding to all the Dansgaard-Oeschger interstadial events over the last interglacial, while the Mo / Al ratio indicates reduced oxygenation during these events. Extremely high opal content during warm interstadials suggests high diatom productivity. Despite the different climatic and oceanic background between glacial and interglacial periods, rapid variability in the northeastern Pacific OMZ seems to be tightly related to Northern Hemisphere high latitude climate via atmospheric and possibly oceanic processes.
Universals and Cultural Differences in Recognizing Emotions

159 cultural groups at rates better than predicted by random guessing. However, recent research has also documented evidence for an in-group advantage , meaning that people are generally more accurate at judging emotions when the emotions are expressed by members of their own cultural group rather than by members Abstract Moving beyond the earlier nature-versus-nurture debate, modern work on the communication of emotion has incorporated both universals and cultural differences. Classic research demonstrated that the intended emotions in posed expressions were recognized by members of many different monkeys could not express thought (for more recent developments, see Allen, 2003). SiS is an overarching scientific hypothesis that unifies diverse findings about spoken language perception and production. The evidence for it is derived both from comparative research that taps the natural abilities of nonhuman animals and from behavioral, developmental , and biological studies of humans. Much basic research remains to be done. Knowledge gained from this research will yield both a model of language function and an account of spoken language as part of the human genetic endowment. R d. , C h i c a g o , I L 6 0 6 2 6 ; e-m a i l : jtrout@luc.edu. 2. A performance function is a graph that depicts how behavior on a task—such as percentage of responses that are correct—changes with carefully controlled changes along a dimension of the stimulus. 3. The premotor cortex is an area near the front of the brain that appears to store much gestural information about motor activities such as moving the hands or the mouth. Effects of first formant onset properties on voicing judgments result from processes not specific to humans. Cortical mechanisms subserving object grasping and action recognition: A new view on the cortical motor functions. of a different cultural group. These new findings provide initial support for a dialect theory of emotion that has the potential to integrate both classic and recent findings. Further research in this area has the potential to improve cross-cultural communication. The scientific study of how people express emotion has been inter-t w i n e d w i t h t h e q u e s t i o n o f whether or not emotions are universal across cultures and species. Many psychology textbooks de
Multicore Magnetic Nanoparticles for Magnetic Particle Imaging

Biocompatible magnetic nanoparticles are interesting tracers for diagnostic imaging techniques, including magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic particle imaging (MPI). Here, we will present our studies of the physical and especially magnetic properties of dextran coated multicore magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles, with promising high MPI signals revealed by magnetic particle spectroscopy (MPS) measurements. The Nanomag-MIP particles with a hydrodynamic diameter of 106 nm show an increase of the MPS amplitude by a factor of about two at the 3rd harmonic, as compared to Resovist. In particular, the signal improves progressively with the order of the harmonic, a prerequisite for better spatial resolution. To understand this behavior, we investigated the samples using quasistatic magnetization measurements yielding bimodal size distributions for both systems, and magnetorelaxometry providing the mean effective anisotropy constant. The mean effective magnetic diameter of the dominant larger size mode is 19 nm with a dispersion parameter of σ = 0.3 for Nanomag-MIP, and 22 nm with σ = 0.25 for Resovist. However, about 80% of the magnetic nanoparticles of Nanomag-MIP belong to this larger size mode whereas in Resovist only 30% do. The remaining Resovist particles are in the range of 5 nm, and, in practice, do not contribute to the MPI signal.
Stochastic Gradient Descent: Going As Fast As Possible But Not Faster

When applied to training deep neural networks, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) often incurs steady progression phases, interrupted by catastrophic episodes in which loss and gradient norm explode. A possible mitigation of such events is to slow down the learning process. This paper presents a novel approach to control the SGD learning rate, that uses two statistical tests. The first one, aimed at fast learning, compares the momentum of the normalized gradient vectors to that of random unit vectors and accordingly gracefully increases or decreases the learning rate. The second one is a change point detection test, aimed at the detection of catastrophic learning episodes; upon its triggering the learning rate is instantly halved. Both abilities of speeding up and slowing down the learning rate allows the proposed approach, called SALeRA, to learn as fast as possible but not faster. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that SALeRA performs well in practice, and compares favorably to the state of the art.
Screening Discrimination in a Broader Context

I employ simulations to investigate the impact of screening discrimination, which addresses discrimination in hiring. I extend a well-known model of screening discrimination by including minority firms, wages, worker preferences and competition among the firms for workers. The Gale-Shapley algorithm is used to find a stable matching of heterogeneous workers to heterogeneous firms. Screening discrimination gives majority applicants an advantage in the hiring process, but this advantage is reduced by the presence of minority firms. In this broader context, screening discrimination produces segregated firms but has little impact on median wages or employment probabilities. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Multi-cell aware opportunistic random access

We propose a decentralized multi-cell aware opportunistic random access (MA-ORA) protocol that almost achieves the optimal throughput scaling in a K-cell random access network with one access point (AP) and N users in each cell. Under our MA-ORA protocol, users opportunistically transmit with a predefined physical layer data rate in a decentralized manner if the desired signal power to the serving AP is sufficiently large and the generating interference power to other APs is sufficiently small. It is proved that the aggregate throughput scales as k/e (1 − ∊)log(SNR log N) in a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime if N scales faster than SNR k−1/1−δ for small constants ∊,δ > 0. Our analytical result is validated by computer simulations.
Risk and protective factors for thrombosis in systemic lupus erythematosus: results from a large, multi-ethnic cohort

Objectives: Few studies have examined thrombosis in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), none have included Asian-Americans, and most have had small sample sizes. We analysed risk factors for thrombosis in a large, multi-ethnic SLE cohort. Methods: We studied 1930 SLE subjects, including Caucasians, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanics. Data were derived from questionnaires and medical records. Documented history of thrombosis was the primary outcome. Explanatory variables included age at SLE diagnosis, gender, ethnicity, disease duration, smoking, antiphospholipid antibody (aPL) status, nephritis and specific medications. Results: Smoking (OR 1.26, p = 0.011), longer disease duration (OR 1.26 per 5 years p = 0.027×10−7), nephritis (OR 1.35, p = 0.036), aPL positivity (OR 3.22, p<10−9) and immunomodulating medication use (OR 1.40, p = 0.011) were statistically significant risk factors for thrombosis. Younger age at SLE onset was protective (OR 0.52 for age ⩽20, p = 0.001). After adjusting for disease severity and incorporating propensity scores, hydroxychloroquine use remained significantly protective for thrombosis (OR 0.62, p = 4.91×10−4). Conclusions: This study confirms that older age at onset, longer disease duration, smoking, aPL positivity, history of nephritis and immunomodulating medication use are risk factors for thrombosis in SLE. These data are the first to confirm in a large and ethnically diverse SLE cohort that hydroxychloroquine use is protective for thrombosis.
Host-parasite relationship in paracoccidioidomycosis.

Paracoccidioidomycosis (Pbmycosis) is a systemic disease confined to Latin America; its endemic areas extends from Mexico through Central and South America down to Argentina. Paracoccidioides brasiliensis (Pb), its agent, causes disease and mortality specially in rural populations being a major public health problem1). The disease was first reconized by Adolfo Lutz in 1908, in Sao Paulo. Its agent was identified by Floriano de Almeida and its clinical and pathological features described by Pupo and CunhaMota, the three of them from the, today, University of Sao Paulo Medical School1). Eighty years after the first references to this mycosis we still do not know for sure the habitat of the fungus or how man is infected. As a consequence we also do not know the early manifestations of this disease that after an insidious onset and slow course end up compromissing several organs in an umpredictable sequence. The great majority of the knowledge on host parasite relationship in Pbmycosis is based on clinical and radiological descriptions of lesions and on the study of biopsies obtained when the infection is already well stablished; a few studies have included autopsies done almost always in patients who died in the final stages of the disease. The result of these difficulties is that certain concepts about the pathogenesis of Pbmycosis have been mainly derived from animal experiments in which large number of P, brasiliensis in its yeast form have been inoculated in susceptible animals. Yeasts almost certainly are not the infecting forms of the fungus since yeasts only develop at temperatures well above the ones observed in the environment where the man-fungus interaction appears to occur. Experimental animal models are somewhat artificial but they have offered useful information and allowed a progressively better understanding of this mycosis2). Early investigators were of the opinion that the fungus invaded throught the oropharingeal mucosa but latter clinical and radiological evidences, experimentaly corroborated suggested that the lungs were the portal of entry. Nowadays the majority of the data favor the inhalatory route with early pulmonary lesions as the rule; exceptionally trauma and other routes have been reasonably well documented. Once within the tissues the parasite can either be destroyed or allowed to multiply to produce a primary inoculation lesion. The fungus is then drained to the regional lymph nodes where a satelite lymphatic lesion is stablished. As described in tuberculosis, a Pbmycotic primary complex with
Scalable Multi-Parameter Outlier Detection Technology

The real-time detection of anomalous phenomena on streaming data has become increasingly important for applications ranging from fraud detection, financial analysis to traffic management. In these streaming applications, often a large number of similar continuous outlier detection queries are executed concurrently. In the light of the high algorithmic complexity of detecting and maintaining outlier patterns for different parameter settings independently, we propose a shared execution methodology called SOP that handles a large batch of requests with diverse pattern configurations. First, our systematic analysis reveals opportunities for maximum resource sharing by leveraging commonalities among outlier detection queries. For that, we introduce a sharing strategy that integrates all computation results into one compact data structure. It leverages temporal relationships among stream data points to prioritize the probing process. Second, this work is the first to consider predicate constraints in the outlier detection context. By distinguishing between target and scope constraints, customized fragment sharing and block selection strategies can be effectively applied to maximize the efficiency of system resource utilization. Our experimental studies utilizing real stream data demonstrate that our approach performs 3 orders of magnitude faster than the startof-the-art and scales to 1000s of queries.
Energy Efficient Power Allocation Algorithm for Downlink Massive MIMO with MRT Precoding

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been seen as a promising technology to improve the spectrum efficiency (SE), reliability and energy efficiency (EE) for the next generation wireless communication systems. Excessive energy consumption of wireless communication networks induces both the increasing carbon emission and unaffordable operational expenditure in recent years. In this paper, energy efficient power allocation scheme is investigated for the massive MIMO system with the maximum ratio transmission (MRT) precoding, since MRT precoding can balance the system performance and complexity. As of the intractable expression of the received SINR at user terminal (UT), an approximate expression is deduced by proper simplification. Based on the simplified expression, a power allocation algorithm is proposed to achieve the optimal EE according to convex optimization theory. Compared with the power allocation scheme ignoring the inter user interference, the proposed power allocation algorithm can enhance EE and decrease transmission power, and does not impair the SE. Simulation results also show that both the EE and SE are improved by increasing the number of antennas at BS and the number of multiple UTs.
Comparative Energetics of the Giant Hummingbird (Patagona gigas)

Hummingbirds (family Trochilidae) represent an extreme outcome in vertebrate physiological design and are the only birds capable of sustained hovering. The giant hummingbird (Patagona gigas) is the largest trochilid, with a mass of ∼20 g, and is found over an altitudinal range from 0 to 4,500 m above sea level. We report here measurements of daily, basal, and hovering rates of oxygen consumption in the giant hummingbird; compare these values with data from smaller hummingbirds; and assess overall metabolic and allometric limits to trochilid body size. The sustained metabolic scope (i.e., the ratio of daily energy expenditure to basal metabolic rate) in the giant hummingbird is higher than that in smaller hummingbirds but lies below a proposed theoretical maximum value for endotherms. Scaling exponents in the allometric relationships for different modes of energetic expenditure were comparable, suggesting that the giant hummingbird, although a clear outlier in terms of body size, does not obviously deviate from metabolic relationships derived from other trochilid taxa.
PIE1, an ISWI Family Gene, Is Required for FLC Activation and Floral Repression in Arabidopsis Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at www.plantcell.org/cgi/doi/10.1105/tpc.012161.

Proper control of the floral transition is critical for reproductive success in flowering plants. In Arabidopsis, FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) is a floral repressor upon which multiple floral regulatory pathways converge. Mutations in PHOTOPERIOD-INDEPENDENT EARLY FLOWERING1 (PIE1) suppress the FLC-mediated delay of flowering as a result of the presence of FRIGIDA or of mutations in autonomous pathway genes. PIE1 is required for high levels of FLC expression in the shoot apex, but it is not required for FLC expression in roots. PIE1 is similar to ATP-dependent, chromatin-remodeling proteins of the ISWI and SWI2/SNF2 family. The role of PIE1 as an activator of FLC is consistent with the general role of ISWI and SWI2/SNF2 family genes as activators of gene expression. The pie1 mutation also causes early flowering in noninductive photoperiods independently of FLC; thus, PIE1 appears to be involved in multiple flowering pathways. PIE1 also plays a role in petal development, as revealed by the suppression of petal defects of the curly leaf mutant by the pie1 mutation.
Output sensitive extraction of silhouettes from polygonal geometry

An algorithm to allow real time interactive extraction and orthographic display of silhouettes of complex two-manifold polygonal object(s) is presented. An off-line pre-processing of all the edges of all polygons enables the efficient extraction of the silhouette edges in real time, once a viewing direction is prescribed. During the interactive session, the time complexity of extracting the silhouette edges is linear in the number of edges in the silhouette, and is typically in the order of O(/spl radic/n), where n is the number of polygons in the scene. The time complexity of the pre-processing stage is linear in n.
Digitally-Assisted Analog/RF Testing for Mixed-Signal SoCs

We propose a testing methodology for analog and radio-frequency (RF) circuitry that incorporates digital circuits for performance calibration and adaptation. We explore the reuse of built-in digital calibration circuitry, along with minor digital design-for-testability (DfT) modifications, to test and characterize analog/RF circuit performance. By observing the digital tuning signals captured in the digital calibration circuitry, the analog/RF performance can be closely estimated, thus enabling cost-effective Go/No-Go production testing. In this paper, we illustrate this testing methodology using a case study of a digitally-calibrated Weaver image-reject receiver.