Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Semantic Paintbrush: Interactive 3D Mapping and Recognition in Large Outdoor Spaces

We present an augmented reality system for large scale 3D reconstruction and recognition in outdoor scenes. Unlike existing prior work, which tries to reconstruct scenes using active depth cameras, we use a purely passive stereo setup, allowing for outdoor use and extended sensing range. Our system not only produces a map of the 3D environment in real-time, it also allows the user to draw (or 'paint') with a laser pointer directly onto the reconstruction to segment the model into objects. Given these examples our system then learns to segment other parts of the 3D map during online acquisition. Unlike typical object recognition systems, ours therefore very much places the user 'in the loop' to segment particular objects of interest, rather than learning from predefined databases. The laser pointer additionally helps to 'clean up' the stereo reconstruction and final 3D map, interactively. Using our system, within minutes, a user can capture a full 3D map, segment it into objects of interest, and refine parts of the model during capture. We provide full technical details of our system to aid replication, as well as quantitative evaluation of system components. We demonstrate the possibility of using our system for helping the visually impaired navigate through spaces. Beyond this use, our system can be used for playing large-scale augmented reality games, shared online to augment streetview data, and used for more detailed car and person navigation.
The complexity of finite-valued CSPs

Let Γ be a set of rational-valued functions on a fixed finite domain; such a set is called a finite-valued constraint language. The valued constraint satisfaction problem, VCSP(Γ), is the problem of minimising a function given as a sum of functions from Γ. We establish a dichotomy theorem with respect to exact solvability for all finite-valued languages defined on domains of arbitrary finite size. We show that every core language Γ either admits a binary idempotent and symmetric fractional polymorphism in which case the basic linear programming relaxation solves any instance of VCSP(Γ) exactly, or Γ satisfies a simple hardness condition that allows for a polynomial-time reduction from Max-Cut to VCSP(Γ). In other words, there is a single algorithm for all tractable cases and a single reason for intractability. Our results show that for exact solvability of VCSPs the basic linear programming relaxation suffices and semidefinite relaxations do not add any power. Our results generalise all previous partial classifications of finite-valued languages: the classification of {0,1}-valued languages containing all unary functions obtained by Deineko et al. [JACM'06]; the classifications of {0,1}-valued languages on two-element, three-element, and four-element domains obtained by Creignou [JCSS'95], Jonsson et al. [SICOMP'06], and Jonsson et al.[CP'11], respectively; the classifications of finite-valued languages on two-element and three-element domains obtained by Cohen et al. [AIJ'06] and Huber et al. [SODA'13], respectively; the classification of finite-valued languages containing all {0,1}-valued unary functions obtained by Kolmogorov and Zivny [JACM'13]; and the classification of Min-0-Ext problems obtained by Hirai [SODA'13].
A machine learning approach for Twitter spammers detection

The ever-increasing popularity of Social Networks offers unprecedented opportunities to aggregate people and exchange information, but, at the same time, opens new modalities for cyber-crime perpetrations. The spamming phenomenon, so spread-out in emails, is now affecting microblogs, and exploits specific mechanisms of the messaging process. The paper proposes an inductive-learning method for the detection of Twitter-spammers, and applies a Random-Forest approach to a limited set of features that are extracted from traffic. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches to this problem.
Practical Aspects of Development of Universal Emulsifiers for Aqueous Bituminous Emulsions

A highly promising approach to the improvement of the properties of bituminous compositions for road building (BCRB) is introduction of surfactants that increase the strength of the adhesive bond between bitumen and the rock material surface and provide required rheological properties of BCRB as a result of emulsification of the bitumen binder in the aqueous medium. The performance characteristics, including the breaking rate of a bituminous emulsion (BE) are controlled by introducing modifying additives both into the dispersed phase and into the dispersion medium. The additives used for dispersion medium are usually stabilizers, organic and inorganic acids, or polymers and this issue has been comprehensively studied. The effect of petroleum fraction-based products on the BE properties is less studied. Only few studies dealing with BE modification with petroleum-based products were performed in Russia. Russian industry produces a limited range of surfactants and many of them, while having high emulsifying capacity, do not promote adhesion. Furthermore, they are rather expensive due to complex and multistage processes for their production.
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute Globalisation, Domestic Inflation and Global Output Gaps: Evidence from the Euro Area

This paper tests whether the proposition that globalisation has led to greater sensitivity of domestic inflation to the global output gap (the " global output gap hypothesis ") holds for the euro area. The empirical analysis uses quarterly data over the period 1979-2003. Measures of the global output gap using two different weighting schemes (based on PPPs and trade data) are considered. We find little evidence that global capacity constraints have either explanatory or predictive power for domestic consumer price inflation in the euro area. Based on these findings, the prescription that central banks should specifically react to developments in global output gaps does not seem to be justified for the euro area. am very grateful to Stephane Dees and Filippo di Mauro for kindly sharing the dataset of their study and to Benoît Mojon, Warwick McKibbin and an anonymous referee for a number of helpful suggestions. The views in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.
Evaluation of the ERETIC method as an improved quantitative reference for 1H HR‐MAS spectroscopy of prostate tissue

The Electronic REference To access In vivo Concentrations (ERETIC) method was applied to 1H HR‐MAS spectroscopy. The accuracy, precision, and stability of ERETIC as a quantitative reference were evaluated in solution and human prostate tissue samples. For comparison, the reliability of 3‐(trimethylsilyl)propionic‐2,2,3,3‐d4 acid (TSP) as a quantitation reference was also evaluated. The ERETIC and TSP peak areas were found to be stable in solution over the short‐term and long‐term, with long‐term relative standard deviations (RSDs) of 4.10% and 2.60%, respectively. Quantification of TSP in solution using the ERETIC peak as a reference and a calibrated, rotor‐dependent conversion factor yielded results with a precision ≤2.9% and an accuracy error ≤4.2% when compared with the expected values. The ERETIC peak area reproducibility was superior to TSP's reproducibility, corrected for mass, in both prostate surgical and biopsy samples (4.53% vs. 21.2% and 3.34% vs. 31.8%, respectively). Furthermore, the tissue TSP peaks exhibited only 27.5% of the expected area, which would cause an overestimation of metabolite concentrations if used as a reference. The improved quantification accuracy and precision provided by ERETIC may enable the detection of smaller metabolic differences that may exist between individual tissue samples and disease states. Magn Reson Med 61:525–532, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
On-line robust modeling of nonlinear systems using support vector regression

To improve robustness of support vector regression (SVR) in nonlinear systems on-line modeling, the relationship between outliers and the robustness of SVR is derived mathematically, and a new modeling method using SVR is proposed. The relationship indicates that the effect of outliers to SVR is decided by the training data distribution and the distance between outliers and the support vectors nearest to them. Therefore, in the method, each component of the training data is normalized into the same range, and then the components representing the system output are compressed differently to change the training data distribution to reduce the effects of the outliers. Meanwhile, a data updating criterion is presented to eliminate outliers. The method is applied to multichannel electrohydraulic force servo synchronous loading system to predict the load output, and the results show its effectiveness.
Epidemiological characteristics and molecular basis of fluoroquinolone-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae strains isolated in Korea and nearby countries.

OBJECTIVES This study was performed to examine the cause of the increase in quinolone-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae (QRNG) observed in Korea. METHODS The antimicrobial susceptibilities of 190 isolates of gonococci from Korea in 2000 were examined by NCCLS methods, and subsets of these isolates underwent mutation analysis of the quinolone resistance-determining regions (QRDRs) of gyrA and parC. Molecular epidemiological characterization of 25 Korean isolates and 54 isolates from overseas was performed by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and the results compared. RESULTS Most (172, 90.5%) of the 190 gonococci tested displayed reduced susceptibility to ciprofloxacin. All strains with high-level ciprofloxacin resistance (ciprofloxacin MIC >/= 4 mg/L) contained a double amino acid alteration at the 91 and 95 positions in the QRDR of GyrA and a single alteration in ParC. PFGE types of high-level QRNG in Korea were mostly different from those of other nearby countries. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that the observed increase in ciprofloxacin-resistant isolates is due to the mutation and spread of Korean multiclonal isolates rather than importation from overseas.
Emergency Management in the Highways of the Future - A Performance-based Multilayered ITS Architecture Design Proposal

Emergency management is one of the key aspects within the day-to-day operation procedures in a highway. Efficiency in the overall response in case of an incident is paramount in reducing the consequences of any incident. However, the approach of highway operators to the issue of incident management is still usually far from a systematic, standardized way. This paper attempts to address the issue and provide several hints on why this happens, and a proposal on how the situation could be overcome. An introduction to a performance based approach to a general system specification will be described, and then applied to a particular road emergency management task. A real testbed has been implemented to show the validity of the proposed approach. Ad-hoc sensors (one camera and one laser scanner) were efficiently deployed to acquire data, and advanced fusion techniques applied at the processing stage to reach the specific user requirements in terms of functionality, flexibility and accuracy. KeywordsHighway, Emergency management, ITS architecture, Service Specification, Ad-hoc services, User
Does implementation of reforms authorized in Section 28 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act affect the complexity of the questions asked of young alleged victims in court?

Appl Cognit Psychol. 2019;33:201–213. Summary This study examined whether the implementation of Section 28 (S28) of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act and the introduction of mandatory ground rules hearings reduced the complexity of the questions English lawyers asked when examining child witnesses. This study compared cases with (n = 43) and without (n = 43) the S28 special measures and involved children aged 6–15 testifying as alleged victims of sexual abuse. Defense lawyers' questions in the S28 condition comprised fewer words, clauses, false starts, multiple negatives, and temporal and numeric attributes than in the non‐S28 condition. When questioning younger children, lawyers used fewer words, clauses, references to “before/after,” and passive voice. These results demonstrated that S28 successfully reduced the complexity of the questions and that lawyers in both conditions partially adjusted the complexity of their questions to accommodate children's developmental capabilities.
A Review on Stability Analysis Methods for Switching Mode Power Converters

In distributed power generation systems a pivotal role is played by DC-DC power converters that are employed to connect local loads to local power sources. These converters are used either in combinations of series/parallel connections or as stand-alone devices. A lot of work has taken place in the stability analysis of these converters and several methods have been used/proposed with different properties, strengths and weaknesses. Describing all existing methods is probably a never ending task and therefore in this tutorial paper four different methods will be presented by pointing out their main properties and explaining briefly how they can be used in applications that involve power converters. More specifically, the chosen methods are based on 1) the Poincaré map, 2) Saltation matrix, 3) trajectory sensitivity, and 4) steady-state-response analysis of the discrete-time model. Simple case studies from previous publications are collected and presented in order to further explain these methodologies. Finally, this paper intents to describe some of the future challenges that exist in the area of stability analysis of power converters especially when these are employed in distributed generation applications.
Automated detection of CMEs

We have developed software that autonomously detects CMEs in image sequences from LASCO. The output of our software is a list of events, similar to the classic catalogs, with principle angle, angular width and velocity estimation for each CME. In contrast to catalogs assembled by human operators, these CME detections by software can be faster, which is especially important in the context of space weather, and possibly also more objective, as the detection criterion is written explicitly in a program. About 75 % of the catalog CMEs are recovered by the software. Since our software also found CMEs that were unreported in the catalogs, we prove that also these catalogs do not have a 100 % success rate.
Dating Life Experiences: An Exploratory Study of the Interrelationships between Personality, Online Dating and Subjective Well-Being

The present study explores the interrelationships between personality, online dating, motivations for use, and subjective well-being. Participation in the study took place online through recruitment via Amazon Mechanical Turk, with 346 participants (19-66 years old) completing the study. Participants completed the Big Five Inventory, an online dating motives scale along with several well-being measures: The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, Satisfaction with Life Scale, satisfaction with specific domains (romantic life, romantic relationship, and health), and the Beck Hopelessness Scale. Analyses revealed that individuals who have used online dating tools have lower overall life satisfaction and relationship satisfaction than those who have not; however, these relationships do not hold for those who have found a relationship partner online. Those who have found their present partner through online dating had higher romantic life satisfaction than others in the sample. People who perceive themselves to have had success using online dating provided higher ratings of life satisfaction, romantic life satisfaction, positive affect, and extroversion and indicated greater motivations to be using online dating tools to find love. Individuals higher in negative affect, pessimism, neuroticism, and/or lower in agreeableness had higher ratings for frequency of usage of online dating tools compared to others. The findings of the present study indicate that certain individuals may benefit more from online dating than others and add to our understanding of the relationships between online dating behaviour, personality and subjective well-being. Limitations, implications and future directions for research are discussed. DATING LIFE EXPERIENCES 3 Dating Life Experiences: An Exploratory Study of the Interrelationships between Personality, Online Dating and Subjective Well-Being
Safe flight envelope for overhead line inspection

The present work aims to improve the safety of overhead power line inspection and similar tasks. Due to the proximity of objects imposed by the inspection missions, the appliance of Extended Kalman Filter for quadrotor attitude control in a supervised environment was proposed. Verification of electrical lines and their infrastructure is an essential activity to ensure the undisturbed operation of the electrical grid and supply energy to final consumers. Development of versatile monitoring systems to inspect high voltage overhead lines represents an invaluable element for the maintenance of these, for corrective actions and especially preventive.
An efficient synchronization technique for multiprocessor systems on-chip

This paper explores optimization techniques of the synchronization mechanisms for MPSoCs based on complex interconnect (Network-on-Chip), targeted at future mobile systems. We suggest the architecture of the memory controller optimized to minimize synchronization overhead. The proposed solution is based on the idea of performing synchronization operations which require the continuous polling of a shared variable, thus featuring large contention (e.g. spin locks), locally in the memory. We introduce a HW module, which augments the memory controller, the Synchronization-operation Buffer (SB), which queues and manages the requests issued by the processors. Experimental validation has been carried out by using GRAPES, a cycle-accurate performance/power simulation platform. For an 8-processor target architecture, we show that the proposed solution achieves up to 40% performance improvement and 25% energy saving with respect to synchronization based on the caching of the synchronization variables and directory-based coherency protocol. Furthermore, we prove the scalability of the proposed approach when the number of processors increases.
Survey on Mobile Malware Analysis and Detection

The amazing advances of mobile phones enable their wide utilize. Since mobiles are joined with pariah applications, bundles of security and insurance issues are incited. But, current mobile malware analysis and detection advances are as yet flawed, incapable, and incomprehensive. On account of particular qualities of mobiles such as constrained assets, user action and neighborhood correspondence ability, consistent system network, versatile malware detection faces new difficulties, particularly on remarkable runtime malware area. This paper provides overview on malware classification, methodologies of assessment, analysis and on and off device detection methods on android. The work mainly focuses on different classification algorithms which are used as a part of dynamic malware detection on android.
An adaptive digital image watermarking technique for copyright protection

An adaptive digital image watermarking technique is proposed. The proposed method exploits the sensitivity of human eyes to adaptively embed a visually recognizable watermark in an image without affecting the perceptual quality of the underlying host image. In addition, the watermark will still be present if some lossy image processing operations such as low-pass filtering, median filtering, resampling, requantization, and lossy JPEG image compression are applied to the watermarked image. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed watermarking method.
An analysis of the in vitro and in vivo phenotypes of mutants of herpes simplex virus type 1 lacking glycoproteins gG, gE, gI or the putative gJ.

Mutants of herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) lacking glycoproteins gG, gE, gI or the putative gJ were constructed by inserting a lacZ expression cassette within the US4, US8, US7 and US5 genes respectively. Revertant viruses were then constructed by rescue with a wild-type DNA fragment. Each of these mutant viruses, by comparison with the parental virus HSV-1 SC16, exhibited normal particle to infectivity ratios, and had no discernible phenotypic abnormalities in baby hamster kidney-21 cells following high or low multiplicity infections. Infection of mice by scarification of the ear with these mutant viruses showed the following. (i) Interruption of the US5 (gJ) gene has no effect on the ability of HSV-1 to multiply at the inoculation site or its ability to enter or multiply in the peripheral or central nervous system (CNS). This shows that the US5 gene provides a convenient site for the insertion of foreign genes for both in vitro and in vivo studies. (ii) Disruption of the US4 (gG) gene results in marginal attenuation in the mouse ear model. (iii) Disruption of the US7 (gI) or US8 (gE) genes results in pronounced attenuation; virus was rapidly cleared from the inoculation site and was barely detectable in sensory ganglia or in the CNS. The failure of gI-negative or gE-negative viruses to replicate efficiently at the inoculation site in vivo led to the investigation of virus behaviour in epithelial cells in vitro. Viruses lacking gE or gI adsorbed to and entered these cells at normal rates compared with the parental virus, but formed minute plaques. This is consistent with a failure of cell-to-cell spread by the cell contact route. This was confirmed by measurement of the rate of increase in infectious centre numbers following low multiplicity infections. The view that gE and gI influence interactions between cells at the plasma membrane was reinforced by showing that the introduction of disrupted gE or gI genes into a syncytial, but otherwise syngeneic, background resulted in a non-syncytial phenotype. We conclude that the gE-gI complex plays a part, at least in some cell types, in the interactions at the cell surface that allow transmission of the virus from infected to uninfected cells by cell contact. In syncytial strains this leads to uncontrolled membrane fusion. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Modeling and analysis of circuit performance of ballistic CNFET

With the advent of carbon nanotube technology, evaluating circuit and system performance using these devices is becoming extremely important. In this paper, we propose a quasi-analytical device model for intrinsic ballistic CNFET, which can be used in any conventional circuit simulator like SPICE. This simple quasi-analytical model is seen to be effective in a wide variety of CNFET structures as well as for a wide range of operating conditions in the digital circuit application domain. We also provide an insight how the parasitic fringe capacitance in state-of-the-art CNFET geometries impacts the overall performance of CNFET circuits. We show that unless the device width can be significantly reduced, the effective gate capacitance of CNFET will be strongly dominated by the parasitic fringe capacitances and the superior performance of intrinsic CNFET over silicon MOSFET cannot be achieved in circuit