Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Overtaking and giving way: Design and validation of a lightweight extended cellular automata urban traffic simulator

In the present article our purpose is to share the design and some initial validation test results we have developed with a new extended cellular automata simulation model. Such new model is equipped to simulate both overtaking and two basic driving behaviour rough patterns: Some virtual drivers facilitate others drivers' manoeuvres and some do not do so.
Adaptive and nonadaptive changes in phenological synchrony

Organisms in seasonal environments are known to adjust their phenology in response to climate change (1, 2), that is, they change their schedules of seasonal occurrence and annual life-history events. In particular, the advancement of spring emergence and activities is one of the strongest and best-documented ecological responses to climate change (1, 3, 4). As the rate of advancement varies between species, for example at different trophic levels, the occurrence of interacting species may become asynchronous, altering or disrupting the ecological interactions—a phenomenon referred to as the match–mismatch hypothesis (4, 5). While many studies have documented changes in phenological synchrony, with various effects on the focal species’ populations (4, 6, 7), we still lack a general picture of how widespread changes we see in phenological synchrony and how they affect ecological communities. In PNAS, Kharouba et al. (8) address this topic in a meta-analysis on 54 pairs of interacting species. The phenologies of the studied species advanced with an average rate of ca . 4 d per decade. Importantly, phenological synchrony of the species pairs was changing at a rapid and accelerating pace, with an average of 6.1 d per decade, either toward more or toward less synchrony. This change was approximately 10 times faster compared with what happened before 1981, which was used as a baseline in this study. Climate change is recognized as a major threat to global biodiversity (9). Changes in phenological synchrony have raised serious concerns about adverse population-level consequences. Insectivorous birds and their prey (caterpillars) have for a long time been a model system for studying match–mismatch. In birds there is correlative evidence for species with increasing phenological mismatch showing more negative population trends (7, 10, 11). Despite these results, a wide range of patterns have been … [↵][1]1Email: andreas.linden{at}iki.fi. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1
Neural Correlates of Sleep Disturbance in Alzheimer’s Disease: Role of the Precuneus in Sleep Disturbance

Background: Sleep disturbance may affect the development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but the neural correlates of sleep disturbance in AD have not been fully clarified. Objective: To examine the factors associated with sleep disturbance in AD. Methods: A retrospective study was performed in 63 patients with AD. None of the patients had been prescribed antidementia or psychoactive drugs, and all underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) before medication. Sleep disturbance was defined as a score of at least 1 point on the sleep disturbance subscale of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI). Whole brain image analysis was performed using SPM8 and VBM8. A two-sample t-test was used to compare patients with AD with (n = 19) and without (n = 44) sleep disturbance, with age and gender included as covariates. The statistical thresholds were set to an uncorrected p-value of 0.001 at the voxel level and a corrected p-value of 0.05 at the cluster level. In addition, pineal gland volume (PGV) measured using MRI, and white matter hyperintensity (WMH) assessed with the modified Fazekas scale were compared between patients with AD with and without sleep disturbance using independent group t-tests. Results: In whole brain analysis, the precuneus volume in patients with AD with sleep disturbance was significantly smaller than those without sleep disturbance. There were no significant differences in PGV and WMH between the two groups. Conclusion: Sleep disturbance in AD was associated with reduction of precuneus volume. This suggests that the precuneus might be an important region in sleep disturbance in AD.
A Persistent Daily Rhythm in Photosynthesis

The luminescent marine dinoflagellate, Gonyaulax polyedra, exhibits a diurnal rhythm in the rate of photosynthesis and photosynthetic capacity measured by incorporation of C14O2, at different times of day. With cultures grown on alternating light and dark periods of 12 hours each, the maximum rate is at the 8th hour of the light period. Cultures transferred from day-night conditions to continuous dim light continue to show the rhythm of photosynthetic capacity (activity measured in bright light) but not of photosynthesis (activity measured in existing dim light). Cultures transferred to continuous bright light, however, do not show any rhythm. Several other properties of the photosynthetic rhythm are similar to those of previously reported rhythms of luminescence and cell division. This similarity suggests that a single mechanism regulates the various rhythms.
Automatic gesture recognition for wheelchair control

In this work we propose an approach for controlling a wheel chair using Motion Capture, particularly gestures from the face are considered as commands for the basic control operations required for driving a wheelchair. Gesture recognition is carried out training an Artificial Neural Network, which is one of the most successful classifier in Pattern Recognition. Based on our experimentation, the proposed approach was able to detect gestures related to order commands which is useful for controlling a wheelchair by users with restricted mobility or disability in legs, arms or hands.
Prediction of Effluent Parameters of Wastewater Treatment Plant Based on Improved Least Square Support Vector Machine with PSO

Most of wastewater effluent parameters are difficult to measure online. Many soft-sensing methods have been used to predict them, such as the mechanistic approaches and artificial neural networks. In this paper, improved least squares support vector machines for regression (LS-SVR) is proposed. Benchmark Simulation Model No.1 (BSM1) is used to generate input-output data, then effluent parameters, COD (chemical oxygen demand), BOD (biochemical oxygen demand), TN (total nitrogen), SNH (ammonium nitrogen) and Tss (total suspended solids) forecast model is built. The parameters of LS-SVR are optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO) in order to obtain a more accurate model. The study shows that the improved LS-SVR modeling approach is capable of predicting the wastewater treatment plant effluent parameters with a good degree of accuracy and is adapted to the changes of the weather.
An effective crypto-biometric system for secure email in wireless environment

The popularity of mobile devices such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are growing at a fast pace. Mobile devices are able to provide email services to support user's mobility. However, as the wireless environment is inherently insecure, a secure system is required for the service. To secure email systems from being attacked, various approaches have been developed. It is reported that existing technologies still cannot overcome various threats and attacks on the use of conventional passphrases. Motivated by this circumstance, the work presented in this research aims to contribute to an enhanced method of securing email services. A bio-passphrase based on a robust biometric key approach is proposed for OpenPGP to protect the private key. It is planned for mobile devices equipped with iris recognition system. The proposed bio-passphrase is extracted from a crypto-biometric system that merges the iris biometric and cryptographic operations. The proposed crypto-biometric system ensures the avoidance of biometric template storage, either in a central database or a smartcard. Moreover, users may have several bio-passphrases or private keys for different applications as the key diversity can be performed easily. We then demonstrate that our approach can improve the security of email system in wireless environment significantly.
A case study of usability evaluation of an InfoVis tool for analyzing Twitter

This paper1 presents a case study to identify the characteristics of an information visualization tool that facilitates its learning and adoption process in the context of professional practice. We identified the principal categories that explain the most important aspects on the usefulness of the info vis tool that emerged during the practical use of the system and the challenges for its adoption. Our results point to the value of allowing more consideration of the user needs and may direct a future research on the development of information visualization tools.
Admissible Record-Oriented Evaluation Plans for Declarative Updates

Efficient evaluation strategies for declarative updates have rarely been investigated. Due to possible dependencies between the resulting database state and the order in which records (objects) are processed, usually declarative updates are evaluated in a set-oriented way in order to ensure a deterministic evaluation. In this paper, we show that such dependencies can be detected by exploiting knowledge about conflicts between the operations that are used to access the database during the update evaluation. Thus most declarative updates can also be evaluated deterministically, and in some cases more efficiently, in a record-oriented way. We show that some of the detected conflicts can be relaxed or even be ignored, while a deterministic evaluation can still be guaranteed.
Binaural phase effects in the auditory brainstem response.

: This study investigated the possibility of a correlate of the masking level difference (MLD) in the auditory brainstem response (ABR), given that behavioral data indicate the brainstem origination of the MLD. Previous studies have reported MLD characteristics in the late auditory evoked potentials. In the present study, stimuli were presented in S(o)N(o) and S pi N(o) to female adults with normal hearing. In experiment 1, a binaural phasic difference potential (BPD) was derived by subtracting the suprathreshold ABRs to S(o)N(o) from S pi N(o) for tone pips of 500 to 4000 Hz. The magnitude of the BPD was inversely related to frequency. In experiment 2, thresholds to 500-Hz tone pips in S(o)N(o) and S pi N(o) were equal. In a case study of a subject with no behavioral MLD, the 500-Hz BPD was abnormal on one side, suggesting unilateral interruption of phase synchrony in the brain stem. Thus, the results of this study, in conjunction with previous studies on late potential correlates of the MLD, suggest that the ability to maintain phase information through the brain stem is necessary but not sufficient to generate the MLD.
Accurate and explicit differentiation of wireless and congestion losses

In recent years mobile computing has experienced an explosive growth, mainly due to the integration of wireless networks with the wired Internet. To deploy bandwidth-greedy multimedia applications on such heterogeneous environments, efficient congestion control algorithms are required. When congestion control protocols such as TFRC are used to transmit multimedia flows, they need to differentiate between congestion losses and wireless losses to behave correctly and efficiently. Currently proposed end-to-end loss differentiation mechanisms can not reliably predict the differences between congestion and wireless losses. In this paper, we explore explicit loss differentiation. We have designed a simple window framework to explicitly and accurately differentiate these losses. By deploying agents at the boundaries of wireless links, we show that we can efficiently implement our window-based scheme with low overhead. We also point out current limitations of our scheme.
Intracoronary brachytherapy in the porcine model: a different animal.

Since the introduction of percutaneous coronary balloon angioplasty, restenosis has remained the most challenging problem facing interventional cardiologists. Stenting has reduced the need for clinically driven repeat revascularization, but has far from eliminated it. As early as 1989, intravascular brachytherapy was proposed as a means to ameliorate the proliferative component of restenosis after angioplasty. After promising results in early animal studies, brachytherapy was introduced as a treatment for the prevention of restenosis in clinical trials.1,2 This treatment was directed primarily at the very challenging subgroup of patients with in-stent restenosis. See p 2459 In the present issue of Circulation Coussement et al3 describe an unfavorable 6-month outcome after catheter-based β-irradiation in a porcine coronary model. The results described may provide some insights into the biology of restenosis inhibition with brachytherapy, or they may be a finding limited by the idiosyncrasies of this particular animal model and not directly relevant to humans. In this study, normal pig coronary arteries exposed to 20 or 30 Gy of β-irradiation delivered by a 186Re-liquid filled balloon after overdistension balloon injury demonstrated greater neointimal areas and thrombosis at 6 months compared with nonirradiated vessels. On the basis of the discrepancy between the 6-month outcomes in clinical trials and these animal data, the investigators have proposed that the “direct extrapolation of the long-term outcome of endovascular irradiation in the pig coronary artery preparation of restenosis to the human setting is not appropriate. ” Before we cast aside the utility of the various animal models of restenosis, we should explore the possible differences between pigs and humans, which may have produced these divergent results. One obvious explanation is that humans have an underlying atherosclerotic process, which usually manifests in the fifth or sixth decade of life, whereas balloon injury in the pig, as in the …
A Resistive RAM-Based FPGA Architecture Equipped With Efficient Programming Circuitry

Despite the considerable effort has been put on the application of Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays FPGAs, previously suggested designs are not mature enough to substitute the state of-the-art SRAM-based counterparts mainly due to the inefficient building blocks and/or the overhead of programming structure which can impair their potential benefits. In this paper, we present a Resistive Random Access Memory RRAM-based FPGA architecture employing efficient Switch Box (SB) and Look-Up Table (LUT) designs with programming circuitry integrated in both SB and LUT designs that creates area and power efficient programmable components while precluding performance overhead to these blocks. In addition, we present an efficient scheme to load the configuration bitstream into the memory elements, which makes the configuration time comparable to that of SRAM-based FPGAs. Besides, we investigate the correct functionality and reliability of the programming structure subject to fluctuations in attributes of RRAM cells. Using Versatile Place and Route (VTR) tool with the obtained characteristics of the proposed blocks demonstrate that the average area and delay of the proposed FPGA architecture are 59.4% and 20.1% less than conventional SRAM-based FPGAs. Compared with a recent RRAM-based architecture, the proposed architecture improves the area and power by 49.7% and 33.8% while keeps the delay intact.
An Exploration of Social Connectedness as a Predictor of Quality of Life in Acquired Brain Injury Survivors

Research on quality of life in ABI survivors has focused on four domains: psychological, physical, social, and cognitive (Upadhyay, 2007). Social relationships, in particular, can help ABI survivors more effectively cope with changes in their lives, help maintain a healthy outlook, and can help with seeking further understanding of the consequences of sustaining a ABI (Hibbard et al, 2002). The current study sought to examine if social connectedness is predictive of quality of life in ABI survivors. Participants were 71 individuals who have sustained a ABI and who currently or in the past participated in a long term rehabilitation program. The study utilized data from a previously collected outcome data set of ABI survivors participating in a residential and/ or outpatient brain injury rehabilitation program located in Southern New Jersey. Results from the study indicated that the Participation subscale and total QoL on the WHOQoLBREF were positively correlated. The total MPAI-IV score as not significantly correlated with total WHOQoL-BREF despite being close to significance, p=. 063. Due to having a smaller sample, there was not sufficient enough of power to reach significance. Additionally, the Participation subscale and Social Relationships subscale were negatively correlated indicating that both subscales were indicative of measuring the quality of social connectedness. Overall, it was found that social relationships accounted for 36 % of the variance in total QoL when compared to several other variables found in the research including age at time of injury, time since injury, relationship status, and current age. Strengths, limitations, potential implications, and explanations of the study’s outcomes are also explored.
Efficient Source Discovery and Service Composition for Ubiquitous Computing Environments

To be truly pervasive the devices in a ubiquitous computing environment have to be able to form a “coalition” without human intervention. The Semantic Web provides the infrastructure for discovery and composition of device functionalities. AI planning has been a popular technology for automatic service discovery and composition in the Semantic Web. However, because the Web is so vast and changes so rapidly, a planning agent cannot make a closed-world assumption. This condition makes it difficult for an agent to know when it has gathered all relevant information or when additional searches may be redundant. To avoid redundancy we incorporate Local Closed World reasoning with HTN planning to compose Semantic Web services. In addition, when performing information gathering tasks on the Semantic Web, we use Local Closed World reasoning and a concept of “source relevance” to control the search process. We also describe a prototype agent that we have developed.
An approach to non-standard analysis

This note has two principal aims: to portray an essence of Non-Standard Analysis as a particular structure (which we call lim-rim), noting its interplay with the notion of ultrapower, and to present a construction of Non-Standard Analysis, viewed as a matter of mathematics, where the set *A of non-standard elements of a set A - "the adjunction of all possible limits" is a "good" kind of lim-rim which plays a role analogous to the algebraic closure of a field - "the adjunction of all roots of polynomials". In the same spirit as with algebraic closures, one has uniqueness up to isomorphism, and also universality and homogeneity, provided one has enough Generalized Continuum Hypothesis. The cardinality of *A will be just something like 2^(2^|A|), and one has a high degree of saturation.
A STRUCTURED WIKIPEDIA FOR MATHEMATICS

In this paper, we propose a new idea for developing a collaborative online system for storing mathematical work similar to Wikipedia, but much more suitable for storing mathematical results and concepts. The main idea proposed in this paper is to design a system that would allow users to store mathematics in a structured manner, which would make related work easier to find. The proposed system would use the structure provided by users to automatically link related results and provide users with additional search functionality that would be useful for finding related work. The system would be easy to use and flexible in terms of letting the users decide how much structure to add to each mathematical result to ensure that contributors are not overly burdened with having to add too much structure to each result. The system proposed in this paper is just one possible idea for organizing mathematics and many open questions remain, but we hope that this paper provides a good starting point for further discussion.
A Hierarchical Framework for Provenance Based on Fragmentation and Uncertainty

In the recent past, provenance – a research field that can be used to determine the origin and derivation history of data – has gained much attention [12]. Additionally, provenance is an important field for validating computation results. It covers coarse grained data as well as very fine grained information showing details of the implementation. Moreover, it is highly related to different topics such as causality [25]. Unfortunately, there is currently no global framework covering existing approaches and addressing the versatile characteristics of provenance. In this paper, we suggest a hierarchical framework for provenance based on its most general and common characteristics w.r. t. to the current state of the art. In fact, the framework contains different layers of abstraction. We discuss the use and limitations of all layers by means of existing models and formalisms that lay the foundation for each layer. Additionally, we explain the relationship between these layers and analyze how existing approaches interact with our framework.
Prototype of 3D reconstruction system for ultrasound imaging modalities: Case study handmade bone phantom

Bone problem can be examined using ultrasound imaging modalities. Using 3D imaging technologies, information of the bone could be acquired in one go, and analyzed later. Prototype of 3D reconstruction for ultrasound imaging modalities had been developed in this research. However, the system not yet integrated with any position tracker, thus testing for the system only done in a simulation by acquiring images from handmade bone phantom at known position. Two kind of phantoms had been made using gelatin and animal bone with certain composition and shape. Process in developed system consists of acquisition, segmentation, and reconstruction. For the segmentation purposes, two methods of segmentation had been constructed. Experiments show that by using first segmentation method, system capable of reconstructing bone object in both phantoms, while by using second segmentation method, system only succeed in reconstructing bone object from one of the phantoms, however, the reconstructed shape is in greater detail than the shape reconstructed using first segmentation method. Even without robotic positioning system, the developed 3D reconstruction system already capable of produce good results. Segmentation methods constructed is good enough to segment simple object, first method can be used for global purposes, while the second method is special method for one of the phantoms.