Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Demo: Luxapose: indoor positioning with mobile phones and visible light

We explore the indoor positioning problem with unmodified smartphones and slightly-modified commercial LED luminaires. The luminaires - modified to allow rapid, on-off keying - transmit their identifiers and/or locations encoded in human-imperceptible optical pulses. A camera-equipped smartphone, using just a single image frame capture, can detect the presence of the luminaires in the image, decode their transmitted identifiers and/or locations, and determine the smartphone's location and orientation relative to the luminaires. Continuous image capture and processing enables continuous position updates. The key insights underlying this work are (i) the driver circuits of emerging LED lighting systems can be easily modified to transmit data through on-off keying; (ii) the rolling shutter effect of CMOS imagers can be leveraged to receive many bits of data encoded in the optical transmissions with just a single frame capture, (iii) a camera is intrinsically an angle-of-arrival sensor, so the projection of multiple nearby light sources with known positions onto a camera's image plane can be framed as an instance of a sufficiently-constrained angle-of-arrival localization problem, and (iv) this problem can be solved with optimization techniques.
Spectral Synchronization of Multiple Views in SE(3)

This paper addresses the problem of rigid-motion synchronization (a.k.a. motion averaging) in the Special Euclidean Group SE(3), which finds application in structure-from-motion and registration of multiple three-dimensional (3D) point-sets. After relaxing the geometric constraints of rigid motions, we derive a simple closed-form solution based on a spectral decomposition, which is then projected onto SE(3). Our formulation is extremely efficient, as rigid-motion synchronization is cast to an eigenvalue decomposition problem. Robustness to outliers is gained through Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares. Besides providing a theoretically appealing solution, since our method recovers at the same time both rotations and translations, we demonstrate through experimental results that our approach is significantly faster than the state of the art, while providing accurate estimates of rigid motions.
An empirical method to estimate the LMC distance using B-stars in eclipsing binary systems

We present a new method to determine the distance to B-stars in eclipsing binary systems. The method is completely empirical, and it is based on the existence of a very tight linear relationship between the V -band “zero magnitude angular diameter” and the Stromgren colour index c 1 for B-stars; we have empirically calibrated this relationship using local single B-stars with accurate angular diameters, and B-stars in eclipsing binaries with precise radii and parallax determinations. By studying the differential behaviour of this relationship as predicted by theoretical stellar evolution models, we find that it is independent of the stellar metallicities for a range of [Fe/H] values between the solar one and that of young stars in the Magellanic Clouds. The method, which also provides the value of the reddening to the system, is discussed in detail, together with a thorough estimate of the associated errors. We conclude that accurate Stromgren photometry obtainable with 1.5 m-class telescopes of the LMC eclipsing binaries HV 2274 and HV 982 will allow to obtain an empirical LMC distance with an accuracy of the order of 0.13 mag.
Ghosting Reduction and Estimation in Anaglyph Stereoscopic Images

In this paper are presented the developed algorithms and program system implementation for stereoscopic anaglyph deghosting based on parallax and color adjustment. The stereoscopic technique based on color separation of the images, intended for the left and the right eye respectively, by means of Red and Cyan color filters (anaglyph glasses) is used. Methods and algorithms for estimation and reduction of ghosting effect associated with anaglyph stereo images as well as an approach to measure and analyze this effect are suggested. The program results of the developed ghosting reduction algorithm with intensity transformation of Red and Green channels are compared to the PS basic processing method of anaglyphs. The achieved results can be used for stereoscopic imaging suitable for the printed media, Internet 3D application, art presentation and visualization on all currently widespread screens.
Fuzzy metrics and peer groups for impulsive noise reduction in color images

A new method for removing impulsive noise pixels in color images is presented. The proposed method applies the peer group concept defined by means of fuzzy metrics in a novel way to detect the noisy pixels. Then, a switching filter between the identity operation and the Arithmetic Mean Filter (AMF) is defined to perform a computationally efficient filtering operation over the noisy pixels. Comparisons in front of classical and recent vector filters are provided to show that the presented approach reaches a very good relation between noise suppression and detail preserving.
A Radio Survey for Linear and Circular Polarization in Low-Luminosity Active Galactic Nuclei

We conducted a Very Large Array survey of 11 low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (LLAGNs) for linear and circular polarization at 8.4 GHz. We detected circular polarization in one source (M81*) and linear polarization in three sources. Sensitivity limits were ~0.1% for both modes of polarization in nine of 11 sources. The detections confirm the importance of nonthermal emission in LLAGNs. However, detection rates for circular and linear polarization are lower for these sources than for more powerful AGNs. Fractional linear polarization in detected sources is also lower than in more powerful AGNs. The weak linear polarization in the survey sources indicates their overall similarity to Sgr A*. Confusion with thermal sources, depolarization, and weaker, less extended jets may contribute to these differences. We detect a rotation measure ≳7 × 104 rad m-2 for NGC 4579. This may arise from magnetized plasma in the accretion, outflow, or interstellar regions. Inverted spectra are present in both M81* and Sgr A* and absent from all sources in which circular polarization is not detected. This suggests that optical depth effects are important in the creation of circular polarization.
Destabilizing Environmentalism: Epiphanal Change and the Emergence of Pro-Nuclear Environmentalism

ABSTRACT George Monbiot, the prominent British radical journalist and environmentalist, shocked his readers and contemporaries by responding to the nuclear power station accident at Fukushima in March 2011 by becoming actively supportive of nuclear energy. In this paper we present a discourse analysis of Monbiot's published articles which document this epiphanal transformation in his identity from orthodox to pro-nuclear environmentalist. Using a narrative theoretical approach which draws on Charles Taylor's conceptualization of identity as arising from the telling of (moral) stories, we show how an individual can actively draw on the complexity of existing discourses in a given field to create new discourses and so recreate their own, and potentially others’, identities. Monbiot's story matters because of his role, as an environmental ‘movement intellectual’, in shaping environmental discourse to a greater degree than most individuals, as well as being an example of how any individual can make new sense of even deeply held convictions. We suggest that a new environmentalism is developing, painfully born from and through conflicts within the orthodoxy, embodied in and shaped by the personal struggles of the movement's own intellectuals.
Surface plasmon resonance based refractive index sensor for liquids

A surface plasmon resonance (SPR) refractive index sensor for liquids was fabricated and characterized. A thin silver (Ag) film (545A) was deposited on a prism face and surface plasmon modes were excited along the interfaces of Ag and air, Ag and water and Ag and sugar solutions by prism-coupling using a He-Ne laser. The experimental SPR reflectance curves shifted continuously with increase in sugar concentration. Theoretical fitting of the SPR dip angles yielded the dielectric constant of Ag and refractive indices of water and sugar solutions. A maximum sensitivity of 1.4×10 - 4 R.I. U. (refractive index units) was achieved with SPR dip angle as variable parameter. With SPR reflectance as variable parameter at a fixed angle, the maximum sensitivity was 3.9×10 - 5 R.I. U. in a selected narrow range of refractive index.
Validation of Deleterious Mutations in Vorderwald Cattle

In Montbéliarde cattle two candidate mutations on bovine chromosomes 19 and 29 responsible for embryonic lethality have been detected. Montbéliarde bulls have been introduced into Vorderwald cattle to improve milk and fattening performance. Due to the small population size of Vorderwald cattle and the wide use of a few Montbéliarde bulls through artificial insemination, inbreeding on Montbéliarde bulls in later generations was increasing. Therefore, we genotyped an aborted fetus which was inbred on Montbéliarde as well as Vorderwald x Montbéliarde crossbred bulls for both deleterious mutations. The abortion was observed in an experimental herd of Vorderwald cattle. The objectives of the present study were to prove if one or both lethal mutations may be assumed to have caused this abortion and to show whether these deleterious mutations have been introduced into the Vorderwald cattle population through Montbéliarde bulls. The aborted fetus was homozygous for the SLC37A2:g.28879810C>T mutation (ss2019324563) on BTA29 and both parents as well as the paternal and maternal grandsire were heterozygous for this mutation. In addition, the parents and the paternal grandsire were carriers of the MH2-haplotype linked with the T-allele of the SLC37A2:g.28879810C>T mutation. For the SHBG:g.27956790C>T mutation (rs38377500) on BTA19 (MH1), the aborted fetus and its sire were heterozygous. Among all further 341 Vorderwald cattle genotyped we found 27 SLC37A2:g.28879810C>T heterozygous animals resulting in an allele frequency of 0.0396. Among the 120 male Vorderwald cattle, there were 12 heterozygous with an allele frequency of 0.05. The SLC37A2:g.28879810C>T mutation could not be found in further nine cattle breeds nor in Vorderwald cattle with contributions from Ayrshire bulls. In 69 Vorderwald cattle without genes from Montbéliarde bulls the mutated allele of SLC37A2:g.28879810C>T could not be detected. The SHBG:g.27956790C>T mutation appeared unlikely to be responsible for the present case of abortion and, in addition, we observed this mutation in a homozygous state in a living animal. In conclusion, we could demonstrate the first case of an aborted fetus carrying the deleterious SLC37A2:g.28879810C>T mutation homozygous and show that this deleterious mutation had been introduced through Montbéliarde bulls into Vorderwald cattle.
Observability normal forms for a class of switched systems with zeno phenomena

This paper deals with necessary and sufficient conditions to transform a class of switched systems to a particular form dedicated to observer design with and without zeno phenomena. Meanwhile, sufficient observability conditions for switched system with or without zeno phenomena are given. In the last section, some observer structures are proposed upon two academical examples.
On the Rayleigh-Taylor Instability for the two-Phase Navier-Stokes Equations

The two-phase free boundary problem with surface tension and downforce gravity for the Navier-Stokes system is considered in a situation where the initial interface is close to equilibrium. The boundary symbol of this problem admits zeros in the unstable halfplane in case the heavy fluid is on top of the light one, which leads to the well-known Rayleigh-Taylor instability. Instability is proved rigorously in an $L_p$-setting by means of an abstract instability result due to Henry.
A Tunable Mechanism for Identifying Trusted Nodes in Large Scale Distributed Networks

In this paper, we propose a simple randomized protocol for identifying trusted nodes based on personalized trust in large scale distributed networks. The problem of identifying trusted nodes, based on personalized trust, in a large network setting stems from the huge computation and message overhead involved in exhaustively calculating and propagating the trust estimates by the remote nodes. However, in any practical scenario, nodes generally communicate with a small subset of nodes and thus exhaustively estimating the trust of all the nodes can lead to huge resource consumption. In contrast, our mechanism can be tuned to locate a desired subset of trusted nodes, based on the allowable overhead, with respect to a particular user. The mechanism is based on a simple exchange of random walk messages and nodes counting the number of times they are being hit by random walkers of nodes in their neighborhood. Simulation results to analyze the effectiveness of the algorithm show that using the proposed algorithm, nodes identify the top trusted nodes in the network with a very high probability by exploring only around 45% of the total nodes, and in turn generates nearly 90% less overhead as compared to an exhaustive trust estimation mechanism, named TrustWebRank. Finally, we provide a measure of the global trustworthiness of a node; simulation results indicate that the measures generated using our mechanism differ by only around 0.6% as compared to TrustWebRank.
Scalable Genre and Tag Prediction with Spectral Covariance

Cepstral analysis is effective in separating source from filter in vocal and monophonic [pitched] recordings, but is it a good general-purpose framework for working with music audio? We evaluate covariance in spectral features as an alternative to means and variances in cepstral features (particularly MFCCs) as summaries of frame-level features. We find that spectral covariance is more effective than mean, variance, and covariance statistics of MFCCs for genre and social tag prediction. Support for our model comes from strong and state-of-the-art performance on the GTZAN genre dataset, MajorMiner, and MagnaTagatune. Our classification strategy based on linear classifiers is easy to implement, exhibits very little sensitivity to hyper-parameters, trains quickly (even for web-scale datasets), is fast to apply, and offers competitive performance in genre and tag prediction.
Unsupervised clustering with growing self-organizing neural network -- a comparison with non-neural approach

Usually used approaches for non-hierarchical clustering of data are well known k-means or k-medoids methods. However, these fundamental methods are poorly applicable in situations where number of clusters is almost unpredictable. Formerly, they were adapted to al- low splitting and merging when some defined criterion is met. On the other hand there are also methods based on artificial neural networks concretely on self-organizing maps. One of the interesting ideas in this domain is to allow growing of the net which corresponds to adapted k- means method. In this article we are going to compare both approaches in a view of ability to detect clusters in unknown data.
In vitro Antioxidant Activity, Phenolic Compounds and Protective Effect against DNA Damage Provided by Leaves, Stems and Flowers of Portulaca oleracea (Purslane)

This study analyzed the antioxidant properties of Portulaca oleracea L. , known as purslane. The samples (leaves, flowers and stems) were collected at two different locations in Portugal: Tavira (L1) and Vendas Novas (L2). Assays for total antioxidant activity, total phenolic content and ferric-reducing antioxidant power were conducted and, for both locations, significantly higher values (P<0,05) were observed for stems (508.8 and 982.3 mg AAE/100 g DW, 1008.6 and 2285.5 mg GAE/100 g DW, 121.0 and 166.3 mg TE/100 g DW, respectively for each location), than in leaves or flowers. In the DPPH assay, the three-plant parts from L2 reached the 50% inhibition rate in lower concentrations than plants from L1. On the other hand, higher concentrations of total monomeric anthocyanins were found in samples from L1 (95.5, 88.8 and 86.0 mg/L) than in samples from L2 (81.7, 70.5 and 59.8 mg/L). The same was true for phenolic acids, estimated by liquid-chromatography, where methanol extracts were used. Phenolic extracts from all three-plant parts from both locations showed protective effects on DNA against hydroxyl radicals. This work suggests the possibility of benefit to human health from its consumption, related to the high antioxidant activity of purslane, even the stems, usually discarded in daily consumption.
Optimization of the low-cost INS/GPS navigation system using ANFIS for high speed vehicle application

Both Global Positioning System (GPS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS) have complementary characteristics and their integration provides continuous and accurate navigation solution, compared to standalone INS or GPS. Extended Kalman filtering (EKF) is the most common INS/GPS integration technique used for this purpose. Kalman filter methods require prior knowledge of the error model of INS, which increases the complexity of the system. These methods have some disadvantages in terms of stability, robustness, immunity to noise effect, and observability, especially when used with low-cost MEMS-based inertial sensors. Therefore, in this paper, low-cost INS/GPS integration is enhanced based on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that are aimed at providing high-accuracy vehicle state estimates. First, the INS and GPS measurements are fused via an EKF method. Second, an artificial intelligence-based approach for the integration of INS/GPS measurements is improved based upon an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS). The performance of the two sensor fusion approaches are evaluated using a real field test data. The experiments have been conducted using a high speed vehicle. The results show great improvements in positioning for low-cost MEMS-based inertial sensors in terms of GPS blockage compared to the EKF-based approach.
Survivability index for a GPRS network

The GPRS network has been well integrated in global system for mobile (GSM) network, the most dominant cellular standard, to accomplish efficient spectrum utilization for data traffic. It has become a popular service which carries critical business and social information of many subscribers. The issue of survivability for a GPRS network requires more investigation. This work introduces a new measure of survivability, survivability index (SI), which takes into account following important features of a GPRS network (i) success probability in uplink contention, (ii) average wait time to get a dedicated slots (iii) throughput and (iv) availability. A weighted sum form is proposed and genetic algorithm (GA) is used to find optimum values of weights. Considering various failure scenarios the Survivability Index has been evaluated for a GPRS network.
Situation analysis for management of abnormal Pap smears in the lower southern Thailand.

OBJECTIVE To identify the resources for management of abnormal Pap smears and the treatment facilities in pre-invasive cervical neoplasia in the lower southern Thailand. METHODS After reviewing the necessary data, an expert meeting was scheduled for questionnaire development. The questionnaires were then sent to the general, regional, and university hospitals in the lower southern Thailand for self-evaluation and on-site visits were made for intensive interviews, exploring the services and treatment facilities for women with abnormal Pap smears. RESULTS All of the 12 target hospitals provided passive cervical cancer screening although the quality of cytological services was obscure and the process of patient notification for the results of the abnormal Pap smears was not convincing. There was a limitation in the pathological laboratory services. The incidence of the abnormal Pap smears in the one-year period of the study, defined as atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance (ASCUS) or above and high grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSIL) or above were 1.24% (95% CI 1.15-1.32) and 0.36% (95% CI 0.30-0.43) respectively. All but one hospital reported having a colposcope, but only one could provide standard colposcopy services. The efficiency of the referral system is questionable. CONCLUSION The resources for the management of abnormal Pap smears as well as the conventional referral system need to be reorganized. The data from this survey support the concept of a centralized colposcopy service with the University hospital as suitable place for the referral center. Two further 2 hospitals have potential for future development as referral centers.
A Millimeter-Wave Micromachined Air-Filled Slot Antenna Fed by Patch

In this paper, a millimeter-wave air-filled slot antenna is presented based on bulk silicon microelectromechanical systems micromachining technology. The antenna is suitable for system-in-package application by utilizing this silicon micromachining technique. To achieve high radiation efficiency in millimeter-wave band, three gold-plated silicon layers are bonded together to realize an air-filled slot antenna. The air-filled structure has the advantages of reducing transmission loss and enhancing the radiation gain. To mitigate the discontinuity between silicon and air, the proposed antenna employs a patch to feed the air-filled structure that also broadens the impedance bandwidth. Owing to the micromachining technique and the air-filled structure, the antenna can be easily integrated with integrated circuit without suffering from dielectric loss. The measured impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna is 56.3–63.4 GHz, and the measured peak gain is 7.8 dBi at 60 GHz.
Beamforming for Full-Duplex Multiuser MIMO Systems

We solve a sum rate maximization problem of full-duplex (FD) multiuser multiple-input–multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. Since additional self-interference (SI) in the uplink channel and cochannel interference (CCI) in the downlink channel are coupled in FD communication, the downlink and uplink multiuser beamforming vectors are required to be jointly designed. However, the joint optimization problem is nonconvex and difficult to solve due to the coupled effect. To properly address the coupled design issue, we reformulate the problem into an equivalent uplink channel problem by using the uplink and downlink channel duality known as multiple-access channel–broadcast channel duality (MAC–BC duality). Then, using a minorization–maximization (MM) algorithm based on an affine approximation, we obtain a solution for the reformulated problem. In addition, without any approximation and thus performance degradation, we develop an alternative algorithm based on iterative water filling (IWF) to solve the nonconvex problem. The proposed algorithms warrant fast convergence and low computational complexity.