Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SAR amplitude probability density function estimation based on a generalized Gaussian model

In the context of remotely sensed data analysis, an important problem is the development of accurate models for the statistics of the pixel intensities. Focusing on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, this modeling process turns out to be a crucial task, for instance, for classification or for denoising purposes. In this paper, an innovative parametric estimation methodology for SAR amplitude data is proposed that adopts a generalized Gaussian (GG) model for the complex SAR backscattered signal. A closed-form expression for the corresponding amplitude probability density function (PDF) is derived and a specific parameter estimation algorithm is developed in order to deal with the proposed model. Specifically, the recently proposed "method-of-log-cumulants" (MoLC) is applied, which stems from the adoption of the Mellin transform (instead of the usual Fourier transform) in the computation of characteristic functions and from the corresponding generalization of the concepts of moment and cumulant. For the developed GG-based amplitude model, the resulting MoLC estimates turn out to be numerically feasible and are also analytically proved to be consistent. The proposed parametric approach was validated by using several real ERS-1, XSAR, E-SAR, and NASA/JPL airborne SAR images, and the experimental results prove that the method models the amplitude PDF better than several previously proposed parametric models for backscattering phenomena.
Sequential combination of intravenous recombinant tissue plasminogen activator and intra-arterial urokinase in acute ischemic stroke.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Combined intravenous (IV) and intra-arterial (IA) thrombolytic therapy may be faster and easier to initiate than monotherapy, and its recanalization rate may be better as well. The sequential combination of recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rTPA) and urokinase (UK) has synergistic and complementary effects on clot lysis. We prospectively evaluated the effectiveness and safety of sequential combination of IV rTPA and IA UK in acute ischemic stroke. METHODS IV rTPA was administered to patients with acute stroke within 3 hours of onset. Those whose condition had not improved at the end of rTPA infusion were further treated with selective IA UK. We evaluated baseline and 30-day National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) scores and 90-day modified Rankin Scale scores. RESULTS Thirty patients were initially treated with IV rTPA; 24 were further treated with IA UK. Four patients who had rapid reocclusion following initial successful IA therapy received IV abciximab. Fourteen of 24 patients who underwent angiography had an effective perfusion state of Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction grade 3 flow. Median baseline and 30-day NIHSS scores were 18 and 2, respectively. Eighteen patients improved to a modified Rankin scale score of 0 or 1 after 90 days. Symptomatic hemorrhage developed in two patients. CONCLUSION The strategy of using conventional-dose IV rTPA and the sequential combination of IA UK in patients without an early clinical response to IV treatment was safe and feasible. This strategy achieved high complete arterial recanalization rates and good functional outcomes.
Advances in GaN Crystals and Their Applications

This special issue looks at the potential applications of GaN-based crystals in both fields of nano-electronics and optoelectronics. The contents will focus on the fabrication and characterization of GaN-based thin films and nanostructures. It consists of six papers, indicating the current developments in GaN-related technology for high-efficiency sustainable electronic and optoelectronic devices, which include the role of the AlN layer in high-quality AlGaN/GaN heterostructures for advanced high-mobility electronic applications and simulation of GaN-based nanorod high-efficiency light-emitting diodes for optoelectronic applications. From the results, one can learn the information and experience available in the advanced fabrication of nanostructured GaN-based crystals for nano-electronic and optoelectronic devices.
AALTO-YLIOPISTON TEKNILLINEN KORKEAKOULU DIPLOMITYÖN TIIVISTELMÄ Tekijä : Henri Ruotsalainen Työn nimi : Tutkielma ortogonaalisten sarjakehitelmien hyödyntämisestä adaptiivisissa

ii Abstract (In Finnish) . iii Preface . iv
Detecting Smooth Cluster Changes in Evolving Graphs

Clustering vertices in graphs or in sequences of graphs has important applications in network science, bioinformatics, and other areas. Most research to date has focused on static graphs or sequences where the number of vertices does not change. We propose a new algorithm that successfully partitions the vertices of a graph sequence into smooth clusters, even when the number of vertices is allowed to vary over time. Our approach uses spectral clustering and relies on applying the k partition problem to a graph constructed from the input graph sequence. Several experiments demonstrate the performance of our method and its advantages over existing methods.
Automatic coastline detection in non-locally filtered tandem-X data

The detection of coastlines in SAR imagery has been studied for more than two decades now. Whereas the first works were based on the exploitation of amplitude imagery and the corresponding need to deal with speckle noise [1, 2, 3], with the ERS-1/2 tandem configuration also coherence maps started to be used as input. Based on the insights gained on these experiments, later the authors began to exploit both amplitude and coherence imagery simultaneously, finally giving way to the first approach using the original complex SAR data for statistically motivated coastline extraction.
Generalized correlation for biomolecular dynamics

Correlated motions in biomolecules are often essential for their function, e.g., allosteric signal transduction or mechanical/thermodynamic energy transport. Because correlated motions in biomolecules remain difficult to access experimentally, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are particular useful for their analysis. The established method to quantify correlations from MD simulations via calculation of the covariance matrix, however, is restricted to linear correlations and therefore misses part of the correlations in the atomic fluctuations. Herein, we propose a general statistical mechanics approach to detect and quantify any correlated motion from MD trajectories. This generalized correlation measure is contrasted with correlations obtained from covariance matrices for the B1 domain of protein G and T4 lysozyme. The new method successfully quantifies correlations and provides a valuable global overview over the functionally relevant collective motions of lysozyme. In particular, correlated motions of helix 1 together with the two main lobes of lysozyme are detected, which are not seen by the conventional covariance matrix. Overall, the established method misses more than 50% of the correlation. This failure is attributed to both, an interfering and unnecessary dependence on mutual orientations of the atomic fluctuations and, to a lesser extent, attributed to nonlinear correlations. Our generalized correlation measure overcomes these problems and, moreover, allows for an improved understanding of the conformational dynamics by separating linear and nonlinear contributions of the correlation. Proteins 2006. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Veer: A trajectory-based peer selection algorithm for networks of vehicles

We propose Veer, a peer selection algorithm for file exchange in vehicular ad hoc networks. The innovative aspect of Veer is that it relies on embedded GPS devices to determine individual mobility patterns and, consequently, to help select the peers that increase the probability that a file transfer succeeds. Transfer opportunities are computed in advance based on an estimation of the contact time window between a node and its selected peers. We show that such an opportunistic one-hop transfer mechanism leads to better results than traditional multi-hop file transfers both in terms of goodput and delivery ratio.
GLOBAL GEOMETRIC DEMOSAICKING By Sira Ferradans

Demosaicking is a particular case of interpolation problem where, from a scalar image in which each pixel has either the red, the green or the blue component, we want to interpolate the full-color image. State of the art demosaicking algorithms perform interpolation along edges, but these edges are estimated locally. We propose a global method to estimate image edges, inspired by the image inpainting literature. This method has a time complexity of O(S), where S is the number of pixels in the image, and compares favorably with the state of the art algorithms both visually and in most relevant image quality measures.
Encoding types in ML-like languages

A Hindley-Milner type system such as ML's seems to prohibit type-indexed values, i.e., functions that map a family of types to a family of values. Such functions generally perform case analysis on the input types and return values of possibly different types. The goal of our work is to demonstrate how to program with type-indexed values within a Hindley-Milner type system.Our first approach is to interpret an input type as its corresponding value, recursively. This solution is type-safe, in the sense that the ML type system statically prevents any mismatch between the input type and function arguments that depend on this type.Such specific type interpretations, however, prevent us from combining different type-indexed values that share the same type. To meet this objection, we focus on finding a value-independent type encoding that can be shared by different functions. We propose and compare two solutions. One requires first-class and higher-order polymorphism, and, thus, is not implementable in the core language of ML, but it can be programmed using higher-order functors in Standard ML of New Jersey. Its usage, however, is clumsy. The other approach uses embedding/projection functions. It appears to be more practical.We demonstrate the usefulness of type-indexed values through examples including type-directed partial evaluation, C printf-like formatting, and subtype coercions. Finally, we discuss the tradeoffs between our approach and some other solutions based on more expressive typing disciplines.
Plasmonic Black Metasurface by Transfer Printing

In various applications simultaneous large optical absorption and large thermal and electrical conductivity are desired. As bulk materials cannot fulfill that need, metamaterials have been developed that often require complicated nanotechnology. The work presents the facile fabrication of black metasurfaces consisting of silver only. Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) are transfer printed onto a silver film from a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) stamp. Numerical simulations confirm that gap plasmon modes between the particles and the film are responsible for increased absorption and also show that a nanoscale variation of the AgNP size increases the spectral width and magnitude of the absorption. The presented transfer printing enables such control of the AgNP size by introducing a relief at the PDMS stamp surface. In a case study a grating relief of a period of 277 nm is used. The resulting highly conductive metasurface shows large absorption of up to 97% for transversal magnetic polarization and over 70% for unpolarized light from the near‐ultraviolet to near‐infrared range for incident angles below 45°.
Multi-Scale 3D Imaging of Strain and Structure with Dark-Field X-Ray Microscopy

Most materials and minerals have hierarchical structures whose dynamics span several length and time scales, giving rise to bulk properties that differ markedly from the properties of its foundational crystalline elements. Understanding and predicting this interplay therefore requires multi-scale experimental techniques that can rapidly swap between different length scales and make in-situ three-dimensional (3D) movies of these crystalline elements, including their symmetry, strain and orientation. Probing local crystallography favors diffraction-based approaches, yet existing 3D techniques are seldom multi-scale. Electron methods provide high spatial resolution but are destructive; limited to thin foils or involve serial sectioning. Scanning and coherent X-Ray methods are rapidly progressing towards 1 nm resolution, but tend to be slow and may cause radiation damage in delicate samples. Furthermore, all current methods face the challenge that the illuminated part of a bulk sample comprises many structural elements whose diffraction signals may overlap, preventing data analysis and interpretation.
Olfactory Attraction of the Larval Parasitoid, Hyposoter horticola, to Plants Infested with Eggs of the Host Butterfly, Melitaea cinxia

Abstract Parasitoids locate inconspicuous hosts in a heterogeneous habitat using plant volatiles, some of which are induced by the hosts. Hyposoter horticola Gravenhost (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) is a parasitoid of the Glanville fritillary butterfly Melitaea cinxia L. (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae). Melitaea cinxia lays eggs in clusters on leaves of Plantago lanceolata L. (Lamiales: Plantaginaceae) and Veronica spicata L. (Lamiales: Plantaginaceae). The parasitoid oviposits into host larvae that have not yet hatched from the egg. Thus, though H. horticola is a parasitoid of Melitaea cinxia larvae, it must find host eggs on plants that have not been fed on by the larvae. Using a Y-tube olfactometer, the response of H. horticola to odors of Melitaea cinxia and extracts of the attacked plant species were tested. Three week-old eggs (near hatching) were attractive to young H. horticola, but one week-old eggs were attractive only to old or experienced H. horticola. Melitaea cinxia larvae were not attractive. A water extract of P. lanceolata was attractive, but ethanol or hexane extracts were not. None of the extracts of V. spicata were attractive. Leaves of V. spicata were attractive only if harboring eggs, but P. lanceolata leaves with eggs were not. Free flying H. horticola in a large outdoor enclosure were presented with host and plant cues. As in the olfactometer, V. spicata was attractive only when eggs were on it, and P. lanceolata was somewhat attractive with or without eggs. This study shows for the first time that a parasitoid of larvae uses egg volatiles or oviposition-induced plant volatiles, to find host larvae, and that Melitaea cinxia eggs or traces of oviposition induce the production of these volatiles by the plant. Based on the results, and given the natural distribution of the plants and M. cinxia eggs, parasitism of Melitaea cinxia eggs on P. lanceolata would be expected to be low. Instead, under natural conditions, a fraction of the eggs in virtually all egg clusters are parasitized on both plant species. The mismatch between the experimental results and the natural pattern of host-parasitoid interactions is discussed in terms of the expected coupling foraging cues with foraging success.
Pressurized vascular systems for self-healing materials

An emerging strategy for creating self-healing materials relies on embedded vascular networks of microchannels to transport reactive fluids to regions of damage. Here we investigate the use of active pumping for the pressurized delivery of a two-part healing system, allowing a small vascular system to deliver large volumes of healing agent. Different pumping strategies are explored to improve the mixing and subsequent polymerization of healing agents in the damage zone. Significant improvements in the number of healing cycles and in the overall healing efficiency are achieved compared with prior passive schemes that use only capillary forces for the delivery of healing agents. At the same time, the volume of the vascular system required to achieve this superior healing performance is significantly reduced. In the best case, nearly full recovery of fracture toughness is attained throughout 15 cycles of damage and healing, with a vascular network constituting just 0.1 vol% of the specimen.
Generalized distance based matching of nonbinary images

We develop a technique to perform efficient and accurate matching to detect the occurence(s) of a template in a scene. The template may describe an object or a textured surface. Representative binary features such as edge points for objects and a set of intensity extrema for textured surfaces are extracted from both test and template images. The search is based on a three-stage "coarse-fine-final" matching. First, we match with the binarized template skipping positions in horizontal and vertical directions and find a number of highest ranking matching positions. Second, we search in neighborhoods centered at the stated positions and find improved matching positions. Finally, some error measure between the original, i.e. gray level or color, test and template images is computed at the fine positions as the final matching. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme achieves significant reduction in computational complexity with virtually no loss of detection performance.
MARKET COVERAGE OF THE EUTR - WHAT SHARE OF WOOD IMPORTS INTO THE EU IS COVERED BY THE EUTR?

Illegal Logging is one of the major global causes of deforestation and degradation of forests. To combat the negative effects of illegal logging, the European Union (EU) introduced various forest related policies and measures. Among them is the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR). The objective of the presented analysis is to identify the percentage share that the EUTR applies to wood and wood-based products. We analysed the imports into the EU by using different reference units: the import value in Euro, the roundwood equivalent and the wood fibre equivalent. Our results show that about 90% of the imported quantities and 74% of the imported values are covered by the EUTR. This means, that in 2013 the EU imported a total wood quantity of 6 million m³ wood fibre equivalents (or 17 million m³ roundwood equivalents, respectively) which is not covered by the EUTR. This amount is almost equally distributed between wood products and paper products. Coverage ratios for further differentiated product groups differ. Typically, raw materials have a higher coverage ratio, and finished products have a lower coverage ratio. The wood quantities that are not covered by the EUTR are highly concentrated between a few commodities like wood charcoal, other articles of wood, recovered paper, printed books and brochures.
Prostate cancer cell cycle regulators: response to androgen withdrawal and development of androgen independence.

BACKGROUND Androgen withdrawal is a standard therapy for prostate cancer that results in a decrease in tumor volume and a decline in serum prostate-specific antigen in the majority of patients. To understand the factors associated with regression of prostate cancers after androgen withdrawal, we studied cell cycle regulator changes in the CWR22 human prostate cancer xenograft model. METHODS Established tumors in nude athymic BALB/c mice were sampled at various times after androgen withdrawal and after the development of androgen independence. Changes in the expression of cell cycle regulators were categorized into early and mid-to-late events. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS Early events included a decrease in androgen receptor expression, followed by a short-term increase in expression of the p53 and p21/WAF1 proteins and a marked decrease in the Ki67 proliferative index. Mid-to-late events included progressive and sustained increases in p27 and p16 protein expression, a decrease in retinoblastoma protein expression, and an increase in the transcription factor E2F1. Changes in apoptosis (programmed cell death) were not observed at any time after androgen withdrawal. These data suggest that androgen withdrawal results in a cell stress response, in which increased p53 protein produces a cell cycle arrest, without activation of p53-mediated apoptosis. The proliferative index is further decreased through the action of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors p27 and p16. Androgen-independent sublines emerged 80-400 days after androgen withdrawal, and these sublines had variable growth phenotypes but were associated with mdm2 protein overexpression and increased expression of cyclin D1. These results indicate that tumor regression in this human prostate cancer model is due to cell cycle arrest rather than to apoptosis and that the emergence of androgen independence is associated with a release from cell cycle arrest.
CUTS WITH SOFT MUST-LINK CONSTRAINTS FOR IMAGE SEGMENTATION AND CLUSTERING

Segmentation and clustering are common pre-processing tasks in many image understanding and computer vision applications. In some of these applications, expert users can often provide knowledge about which pixels or regions in an image should be grouped together, guiding the clustering or segmentation process to yield more meaningful results than could be achieved by fully automatic algorithms. In this paper, we discuss a popular clustering algorithm, Normalized Cuts, and we show that with a simple modification, it can be generalized to incorporate expert knowledge in the form of soft must-link constraints that give partial information about how pixels or regions should be grouped. By illustrating how our proposed algorithm performs on the tasks of clustering synthetic data, segmenting real photographic images, and classifying regions in hyperspectral imagery, we show that incorporating expert knowledge can significantly improve results in many settings.
Limited Anti-Inflammatory Role for Interleukin-1 Receptor Like 1 (ST2) in the Host Response to Murine Postinfluenza Pneumococcal Pneumonia

Interleukin-1 receptor like 1 (ST2) is a negative regulator of Toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling. TLRs are important for host defense during respiratory tract infections by both influenza and Streptococcus (S.) pneumoniae. Enhanced susceptibility to pneumococcal pneumonia is an important complication following influenza virus infection. We here sought to determine the role of ST2 in primary influenza A infection and secondary pneumococcal pneumonia. ST2 knockout (st2 −/−) and wild-type (WT) mice were intranasally infected with influenza A virus; in some experiments mice were infected 2 weeks later with S. pneumoniae. Both mouse strains cleared the virus similarly during the first 14 days of influenza infection and had recovered their weights equally at day 14. Overall st2−/− mice tended to have a stronger pulmonary inflammatory response upon infection with influenza; especially 14 days after infection modest but statistically significant elevations were seen in lung IL-6, IL-1β, KC, IL-10, and IL-33 concentrations and myeloperoxidase levels, indicative of enhanced neutrophil activity. Interestingly, bacterial lung loads were higher in st2−/− mice during the later stages of secondary pneumococcal pneumonia, which was associated with relatively increased lung IFN-γ levels. ST2 deficiency did not impact on gross lung pathology in either influenza or secondary S. pneumoniae pneumonia. These data show that ST2 plays a limited anti-inflammatory role during both primary influenza and postinfluenza pneumococcal pneumonia.
Linear alkylbenzenesulphonate (LAS) bioavailable to anaerobic bacteria as a source of sulphur

Biotransformation of linear alkylbenzenesulphonates (LAS) under anoxic conditions has not been reported previously. Anaerobic bacteria have been enriched which utilized LAS quantitatively as the sole added source of sulphur for growth in a glucose‐salts medium. One isolate, strain RZLAS, was examined and found to belong to a novel genus within the γ‐proteobacteria.