Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Closing the Recognition Loop : Recognizing and Searching for Objects in the Real World

In 1966, psychologist J. J. Gibson wrote, ”we see because we move; we move because we see. ” While the latter statement is often taken for granted, the former is important, as well. We have developed a robotic system that can find and identify objects whether or not they are initially visible and update knowledge of the locations of such objects. To that end, our system combines a number of key components: visual-inertial Structure from Motion with topological mapbuilding to localize the robot and map the environment, real-time occlusion detection to guide an efficient search of the environment, object recognition/categorization, and path planning/navigation to guide low-level control. This abstract will briefly describe the overall system and these components, with references to longer works for details. A real-time demo will be on-site at the workshop.
In situ image-based modeling

We present an interactive image-based modelling method for generating 3D models within an augmented reality system. Applying real time camera tracking, and high-level automated image analysis, enables more powerful modelling interactions than have previously been possible. The result is an immersive modelling process which generates accurate three dimensional models of real objects efficiently and effectively. In demonstrating the modelling process on a range of indoor and outdoor scenes, we show the flexibility it offers in enabling augmented reality applications in previously unseen environments.
Distributed Consensus $+$ Innovation Particle Filtering for Bearing/Range Tracking With Communication Constraints

A constrained sufficient statistic (CSS)-based distributed particle filter (CSS/DPF) implementation is proposed for nonlinear bearing-only and joint bearing/range tracking applications in sensor networks. The CSS/DPF runs localized particle filters at nodes constituting the sensor network and uses the resulting local sufficient statistics (LSS) to compute the global sufficient statistics (GSS) for the overall system. The CSS/DPF is, therefore, a two-step procedure: i) the means of the LSSs for the local filters are computed by running average consensus algorithms, which are then used to derive the corresponding GSSs, and ii) each node renews the local weights of the localized particle filters using the updated GSSs. The attractive feature of the CSS/DPF is the reduced number of consensus runs as compared with the state-of-art consensus-based DPF implementations. To further reduce the consensus overhead, we couple the CSS/DPF with the distributed unscented particle filter (DUPF), collectively referred to as the CSS/DUPF, which extends the linear consensus and innovation framework to nonlinear distributed estimation. Our Monte Carlo simulations show that the performance of the CSS/DUPF follows that of the centralized particle filter, even with a limited number of iterations per consensus run.
Mahalanobis distance Minimization Mapping: M3

This paper presents a versatile linear regression method between high-dimensional spaces based on Mahalanobis distance minimization criterion. Standard regression methods suffer from “multi-collinearity” problem, which makes regressions unstable and unreliable. For solving this problem, dimensionality reduction methods, such as PCR, PLS, and CCA, are widely used. These dimensionality reduction methods can robustly capture the major correlations between input and output variables by suppressing the minor correlations. However, the minor correlations are sometimes necessary for estimating natural outputs. In this paper, we propose Mahalanobis-distance Minimization Mapping (M3), which avoids multi-collinearity problem without reducing the dimensionality. M3 estimates the most likely output according to the training sample distribution. We conducted experiments for comparing the accuracy among M3, CCA, and other methods, and we confirmed that M3 always estimates the most accurate outputs among them.
Fast non-local image denoising using a hardware implementation

The problem of noise removal is a critical issue in image restoration because it must maintain the integrity of relevant image information. Considering all the necessary tasks for a quantitative analysis of images, the noise removal is an essential step to increase their quality and improve the performance of such analysis. For non-local means (NLM) denoising approach presented by Buades et al., notable denoising results are obtained at the expense of high computational cost. This paper proposes a hardware implementation of the NLM algorithm with less computation time. Besides being faster than the software approach, this implementation produces comparable results in terms of mean-squared error (MSE) and perceptual image quality.
A FRAMEWORK FOR PROCESSING K-BEST SITE QUERY

A novel query in spatial databases is the K-Best Site Query (KBSQ for short). Given a set of objects O, a set of sites S, and a user-given value K, a KBSQ retrieves the K sites from S such that the total distance from each object to its closest site is minimized. The KBSQ is indeed an important type of spatial queries with many real applications. In this paper, we investigate how to efficiently process the KBSQ. We first propose a straightforward approach with a cost analysis, and then develop the K Best Site Query (KBSQ) algorithm combined with the existing spatial indexes to improve the performance of processing KBSQ. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods.
An asymmetrical half-bridge forward converter with current doubler

This paper presents the analysis and design of an asymmetrical half-bridge forward converter with current doubler. This converter can minimize the switching power loss by realizing the zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) during the turn-on conditions. The principle of the converter operation is explained and analyzed. In order to achieve the ZVS conditions, the required interlock delay time between gate signals of two switches, the leakage transformer inductance is needed. The simulation results from a 30 V/20 A 80 kHz are also presented, which is used to verify the theoretical analysis.
Documents de Travail du Centre d ’ Economie de la Sorbonne A Cross-Sectional Performance Measure for Portfolio Management

Sharpe-like ratios have been traditionally used to measure the performances of portfolio managers. However, they are known to suffer major drawbacks. Among them, two are intricate: (1) they are relative to a peer’s performance and (2) the best score is generally assumed to correspond to a “good” portfolio allocation, with no guarantee on the goodness of this allocation. Last but not least (3) these measures suffer significant estimation errors leading to the inability to distinguish two managers’ performances. In this paper, we propose a cross-sectional measure of portfolio performance dealing with these three issues. First, we define the score of a portfolio over a single period as the percentage of investable portfolios outperformed by this portfolio. This score quantifies the goodness of the allocation remedying drawbacks (1) and (2). The new information brought by the cross-sectionality of this score is then discussed through applications. Secondly, we build a performance index, as the average cross-section score over successive periods, whose estimation partially answers drawback (3). In order to assess its informativeness and using empirical data, we compare its forecasts with those of the Sharpe and Sortino ratios. The results show that our measure is the most robust and informative. It validates the utility of such cross-sectional performance measure.
Current Physical and Mental Health of Former Collegiate Athletes

Background: There is a dearth of research on the current health of former collegiate athletes. Purpose: To examine the current health and related correlates in a cohort of former collegiate athletes who played in a diverse range of men’s and women’s sports with various levels of contact. Study Design: Cross-sectional study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods: Former collegiate athletes (N = 3657) were asked to complete an online questionnaire addressing sports history, medical history, and demographics. The questionnaire also included the Veterans RAND 12-Item Health Survey (VR-12), which yielded 2 composite scores for physical (PCS) and mental (MCS) health. The VR-12 PCS and MCS scores were compared with published US normative data using t tests and analyses of variance. Results: Mean PCS and MCS scores of the 797 respondents with complete data (21.9% of target sample; average, 14.5 years since last played collegiate sport) were 53.0 ± 6.1 and 51.7 ± 9.4, respectively. When stratified by age and sex, PCS and MCS scores were similar to normative scores in the United States. Lower PCS scores were associated with sustaining ≥3 concussions, playing in collision sports during college, and sustaining a career-ending injury (all, P < .001). No association was found between concussion and MCS scores (P = .06). Among former collegiate athletes, prevalent medical conditions included anxiety (16.2%), hypercholesterolemia/high cholesterol (10.6%), and depression (10.4%). Additionally, 5.8% screened positive for alcohol dependence, and 5.8% screened positive for disordered eating (eg, binge eating, purging). These findings were more prevalent than those reported by the World Health Organization as representative of the US population. Conversely, there was a lower prevalence of depression, bipolar disorders, and attention deficit disorder, with or without hyperactivity (ADD/ADHD), than in the World Health Organization US population data sample. Conclusion: Former collegiate athletes appear similar to the general US population on many aspects of mental and physical health. However, observed health deficits associated with previous sports injuries warrant ongoing monitoring of the health and well-being of former collegiate athletes.
Ergodic theory of chaos and strange attractors

Physical and numerical experiments show that deterministic noise, or chaos, is ubiquitous. While a good understanding of the onset of chaos has been achieved, using as a mathematical tool the geometric theory of differentiable dynamical systems, moderately excited chaotic systems require new tools, which are provided by the ergodic theory of dynamical systems. This theory has reached a stage where fruitful contact and exchange with physical experiments has become widespread. The present review is an account of the main mathematical ideas and their concrete implementation in analyzing experiments. The main subjects are the theory of dimensions (number of excited degrees of freedom), entropy (production of information), and characteristic exponents (describing sensitivity to initial conditions). The relations between these quantities, as well as their experimental determination, are discussed. The systematic investigation of these quantities provides us for the first time with a reasonable understanding of dynamical systems, excited well beyond the quasiperiodic regimes. This is another step towards understanding highly turbulent fluids.
Specifying and Iterating over Virtual Datasets

We are concerned with the following problem: How do we allow a community of researchers to define, implement, and share computational procedures able to process diverse data stored in many different formats? Standard data formats and data access APIs can help, but are not general solutions due to their assumption of homogeneity. We propose a new approach to this problem based on a separation of concerns between logical and physical structure. We use XML Schema as a type system for expressing the logical structure of datasets, and define a separate notion of a mapping that combines declarative and procedural elements to describe physical representations. Thus, for example, a collection of environmental data might be mapped variously to a set of files, a relational database, or a spreadsheet, but can look the same in all three cases to the user who accesses the data via its logical structure. This separation of concerns allows us to specify scientific workflows that operate over complex datasets with, for example, selector and iterator constructs being used to select and compute on sets of dataset elements–regardless of whether the sets in question are files in a directory, tables in a database, or columns in a spreadsheet.
Is Implied Correlation Worth Calculating?

There is an ever greater need to forecast correlations in addition to standard deviations, both for managing risk exposure in a portfolio context such as value at risk, and for pricing derivatives whose payoffs depend on correlations among more than one random factor. Like volatilities, correlations can be estimated from historical security returns data or as implied values from market prices of options. In this article, Walter and Lopez consider using implied volatilities from sets of three foreign exchange options to compute the correlations that they imply. They examine the implied correlations that can be obtained from two currency trios, dollar-deutschemark-Swiss franc, and dollar-deutschemark-Japanese yen, and compare them against correlations estimated from standard statistical models applied to historical data, including GARCH. There is considerable time variation in measured correlations, but none of the estimation methods clearly dominates the others. Implied correlations appear to be more useful for the trio including the yen than for the one including the Swiss franc.
A review on recent techniques in multimodal biometrics

Today most applications are based on the secure accessing of openings to buildings, computer networks, laptops, cellular phones, bank transactions and ATMs. The aim of biometric recognition system is to ensure that the available services are utilized only by a legitimate user, or somebody else. This paper gives on overview of biometric recognition systems. It starts with the basic modalities taken for biometric system, and discusses about the procedure about how to recognize the person and various literatures and methodologies taken by many authors and the metrics to verify the recognition. The fusion methods adapted for biometric recognition plays an important role. All the fusion techniques which have been done on the particular biometric traits were discussed. Finally the normalization methods and the metrics used for evaluating the biometric system are discussed.
SkullConduct: Biometric User Identification on Eyewear Computers Using Bone Conduction Through the Skull

Secure user identification is important for the increasing number of eyewear computers but limited input capabilities pose significant usability challenges for established knowledge-based schemes, such as passwords or PINs. We present SkullConduct, a biometric system that uses bone conduction of sound through the user's skull as well as a microphone readily integrated into many of these devices, such as Google Glass. At the core of SkullConduct is a method to analyze the characteristic frequency response created by the user's skull using a combination of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features as well as a computationally light-weight 1NN classifier. We report on a controlled experiment with 10 participants that shows that this frequency response is person-specific and stable -- even when taking off and putting on the device multiple times -- and thus serves as a robust biometric. We show that our method can identify users with 97.0% accuracy and authenticate them with an equal error rate of 6.9%, thereby bringing biometric user identification to eyewear computers equipped with bone conduction technology.
Exploiting Herpes Simplex Virus Entry for Novel Therapeutics

Herpes Simplex virus (HSV) is associated with a variety of diseases such as genital herpes and numerous ocular diseases. At the global level, high prevalence of individuals who are seropositive for HSV, combined with its inconspicuous infection, remains a cause for major concern. At the molecular level, HSV entry into a host cell involves multiple steps, primarily the interaction of viral glycoproteins with various cell surface receptors, many of which have alternate substitutes. The molecular complexity of the virus to enter a cell is also enhanced by the existence of different modes of viral entry. The availability of many entry receptors, along with a variety of entry mechanisms, has resulted in a virus that is capable of infecting virtually all cell types. While HSV uses a wide repertoire of viral and host factors in establishing infection, current therapeutics aimed against the virus are not as diversified. In this particular review, we will focus on the initial entry of the virus into the cell, while highlighting potential novel therapeutics that can control this process. Virus entry is a decisive step and effective therapeutics can translate to less virus replication, reduced cell death, and detrimental symptoms.
Deep VLT infrared observations of X-ray dim isolated neutron stars

Context. X-ray observations have unveiled the existence of a family of radio-quiet Isolated Neutron Stars whose X-ray emission is purely thermal, and hence are dubbed X-ray dim isolated neutron stars (XDINSs). While optical observations have allowed thermal emission to be related to the neutron star cooling and the neutron star surface thermal map to be built, IR observations are critical to pinpoint a spectral turnover produced by an as yet unseen magnetospheric component, or the presence of a fallback disk. The detection of such a turnover can provide further evidence of a link between this class of isolated neutron stars and the magnetars, which show a distinctive spectral flattening in the IR. Aims. We present the deepest IR observations reported to date of five XDINSs, which we use to constrain a spectral turnover in the IR and the presence of a fallback disk. Methods. We used archived VLT observations of these neutron stars performed with the ISAAC instrument in the H-band (1.65 µm) and the available fallback disk models. Results. It was not possible to identify the IR counterpart down to limiting magnitudes H ∼ 21.5–22.9 for any of our targets. Although these limits are the deepest ever obtained for neutron stars of this class, they are not deep enough to rule out the existence and the nature of a possible spectral flattening in the IR. We also derive, using disk models, the upper limits on the mass inflow rate in a fallback disk. We find the existence of a putative fallback disk consistent (although not confirmed) with our observations.
IL-2 therapy and thymic production of naive CD4 T cells in HIV-infected patients with severe CD4 lymphopenia

Objectives: IL-2 therapy increases memory and naive CD4 T cells in HIV-infected patients, but its effect on thymopoiesis is unknown. To investigate this effect, we quantified T-cell receptor rearrangement excision circles (TREC) in CD4 T cells from lymphopenic AIDS patients treated with highly active antiretroviral therapy and IL-2. Methods: CD4 cell subsets were evaluated by flow cytometry using anti-CD45RO/RA, CD62L, Ki67 and CD95 monoclonal antibodies. The proportion of recent thymic emigrant had been quantified by a real-time polymerase chain reaction assay for signal joint TREC in peripheral blood mononuclear and purified CD4 T cells. Results: At initiation of IL-2, TREC copies/μl of blood were correlated with naive T cell numbers and age. Both naive and TREC numbers/μl significantly increased over time in all patients, with a wide range of TREC increases. Higher percentages of CD4+CD45RO-negative cells positive for the Ki67 cell-cycle marker were found in patients with a low TREC increase, but remained stable under IL-2. TREC and naive cell recovery were correlated; they also correlated with the numbers of TREC and naive cells at the start of IL-2, and with age, suggesting a thymic origin for naive T-cell recovery. A mathematical model showing the linear recovery of naive cells and TREC under IL-2 also strongly suggested that a naive T-cell increase reflects thymic export and involves little net death and proliferation. Conclusion: Although we cannot rule out a mechanism of altered proliferation or death rate, the thymus plays an important role in the long-term recovery of naive T cells under IL-2 therapy.
A Preliminary Review on the Application of Feature Diagrams in Practice

For two decades, feature diagrams have been intensively studied as a means to specify variability and pilot configuration in software product line engineering. Surprisingly though, it seems that very few reports on the use of feature diagrams in practice are available. To test this claim, we started a systematic review of such reports. In the collected material, we tried to identify positive and negative feedback on the use of feature diagrams. In this paper, we present the first results of this work in progress and discuss the opportunity of extending it to a fully systematic review on a wider scale.
A Brief Introduction to Temporality and Causality

Causality is a non-obvious concept that is often considered to be related to temporality. In this paper we present a number of past and present approaches to the definition of temporality and causality from philosophical, physical, and computational points of view. We note that time is an important ingredient in many relationships and phenomena. The topic is then divided into the two main areas of temporal discovery, which is concerned with finding relations that are stretched over time, and causal discovery, where a claim is made as to the causal influence of certain events on others. We present a number of computational tools used for attempting to automatically discover temporal and causal relations in data.
A Western dietary pattern is associated with overweight and obesity in a national sample of Lebanese adolescents (13–19 years): a cross-sectional study

Abstract Adolescent obesity is associated with both immediate and longer-term health implications. This study aims to identify dietary patterns among a nationally representative sample of Lebanese adolescents aged between 13 and 19 years (n 446) and to assess the association of these patterns with overweight and obesity. Through face-to-face interviews, socio-demographic, lifestyle and anthropometric variables were collected. Dietary intake was assessed using a sixty-one-item FFQ. Dietary patterns were derived by factor analysis. The following two dietary patterns were identified: Western and traditional Lebanese. The Western pattern was characterised by high consumption of red meat, eggs and fast-food sandwiches. The traditional Lebanese pattern reflected high intakes of fruits and vegetables, legumes and fish. Female sex and a higher maternal education level were associated with a greater adherence to the traditional Lebanese pattern. As for the Western pattern, the scores were negatively associated with crowding index, physical activity and frequency of breakfast consumption. After adjustment, subjects belonging to the 3rd tertile of the Western pattern scores had significantly higher odds of overweight compared with those belonging to the 1st tertile (OR 2·3; 95 % CI 1·12, 4·73). In conclusion, two distinct dietary patterns were identified among adolescents in Lebanon: the traditional Lebanese and the Western, with the latter pattern being associated with an increased risk of overweight. The findings of this study may be used to guide the development of evidence-based preventive nutrition interventions to curb the obesity epidemic in this age group.