Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does altitude level of a prior time‐trial modify subsequent exercise performance in hypoxia and associated neuromuscular responses?

We examined the influence of prior time‐trials performed at different altitudes on subsequent exercise in moderate hypoxia and associated cardiometabolic and neuromuscular responses. In normobaric hypoxia (simulated altitude 2000 m; FiO2: 0.163), 10 healthy males performed (1) an incremental test to exhaustion (VO2max_2000) and (2) a test to exhaustion at 80% of the power output associated to VO2max_2000 for a reference time (947 ± 336 sec). Thereafter, two sessions were conducted in a randomized order: a cycle time‐trial corresponding to the reference time (TT1) followed 22 min later (passive rest at 2000 m) by a 6‐min cycle time‐trial (TT2). TT1 was either performed at 2000 or 3500 m (FiO2: 0.135), while TT2 was always performed at 2000 m. As expected, during TT1, the mean power output (247 ± 42 vs. 227 ± 37 W; P < 0.001) was higher at 2000 than 3500 m. During TT2, the mean power output (256 ± 42 vs. 252 ± 36 W) did not differ between conditions. Before and after TT1, maximal isometric voluntary contraction torque in knee extensors (pooled conditions: −7.9 ± 8.4%; P < 0.01), voluntary activation (−4.1 ± 3.1%; P < 0.05), and indices of muscle contractility (peak twitch torque: −39.1 ± 11.9%; doublet torques at 100 Hz: −15.4 ± 8.9%; 10/100 Hz ratio: −25.8 ± 7.7%; all P < 0.001) were equally reduced at 2000 m or 3500 m. Irrespective of the altitude of TT1, neuromuscular function remained similarly depressed after TT1 both before and after TT2 at 2000 m. A prior time‐trial performed at different altitude influenced to the same extent performance and associated cardiometabolic and neuromuscular responses during a subsequent exercise in moderate hypoxia.
A control architecture for active vision systems enabling real time operation

An active vision system has to enable the implementation of reactive visual processes and of elementary visual behaviors in real time. Therefore the control architecture is extremely important. In this paper we discuss a number of issues related with the implementation of a real-time control architecture and describe the architecture we are using with our "binocular heads". Another important issue of the operation of active vision binocular heads is their integration into more complex robotic systems. We claim that higher levels of autonomy and integration can be obtained by designing the system architecture based on the concept of purposive behavior. Finally we describe a system where the integration of an active vision stereo head in a mobile robot has been performed, with real-time performance.
Network inference using informative priors

Recent years have seen much interest in the study of systems characterized by multiple interacting components. A class of statistical models called graphical models, in which graphs are used to represent probabilistic relationships between variables, provides a framework for formal inference regarding such systems. In many settings, the object of inference is the network structure itself. This problem of “network inference” is well known to be a challenging one. However, in scientific settings there is very often existing information regarding network connectivity. A natural idea then is to take account of such information during inference. This article addresses the question of incorporating prior information into network inference. We focus on directed models called Bayesian networks, and use Markov chain Monte Carlo to draw samples from posterior distributions over network structures. We introduce prior distributions on graphs capable of capturing information regarding network features including edges, classes of edges, degree distributions, and sparsity. We illustrate our approach in the context of systems biology, applying our methods to network inference in cancer signaling.
Resolving Personal Names in Email Using Context Expansion

This paper describes a computational approach to resolving the true referent of a named mention of a person in the body of an email. A generative model of mention generation is used to guide mention resolution. Results on three relatively small collections indicate that the accuracy of this approach compares favorably to the best known techniques, and results on the full CMU Enron collection indicate that it scales well to larger collections.
Coordination of Distributed Storage with Wind Energy in a Rural Distribution System

While distributed generation brings many benefits to the distribution system it may also result in increased distribution losses. Energy storage systems can be used to help manage the energy in a system over time and is a promising technology for optimal operation of a distribution network. This paper considers how to optimally operate a number of distributed energy storage devices in a distribution system with large amounts of wind generation. The problem is formulated and solved for a number of different wind scenarios and storage characteristics (locations and ratings). Results show that distributed energy storage can decrease the system losses and help facilitate the introduction of large amounts of distributed wind.
Robust Overlapping Decentralized Control for Multi-area Longitudinal Power Systems

The problems of robust overlapping decentralized control for a class of multiarea longitudinal power systems are discussed in this paper. A special overlapping decomposition method is presented in terms of inclusion principle. Based on the decomposition, a new control method is formed by means of Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) approach of Organically-Structured Control (OSC). The proposed method is applied to a three-area longitudinal power system, and the simulation results show that the performances of the controllers designed by proposed method are better than the one by OSC directly. Copyright © 2005 IFAC
Quad crawler robot navigation using animal walking gait

In recent years, much interest in improving the stability of walking robot has motivated the researchers to investigate and understand the fundamental principles of biological animal gait locomotion. However, maintaining the stability of a robot is not easy as it seems, the main problem in developing walking robot is how the walking robot can obtain gait stability during walking and the workspace limitation. Studies are done to implement the biological aspects of animal into the robot kinematic design, leg configuration and control structures. This project is focused on the development of a novel class of crawler robot, which mimics the locomotion of four legged animal. The fundamental gait of lizard locomotion has been adopted as a basic concept of the developed quad crawler locomotion. The kinematics of the leg mechanism is developed and verified with simulation studies. The experimental studies are carried out to investigate the stability issues while walking and navigate in the environment. The experimental results are discussed and compared with the existing work.
Univariate Filter Technique for Unsupervised Feature Selection Using a New Laplacian Score Based Local Nearest Neighbors

Knowing the actual relevant features of a given data set can speed up the learning and classification processes. Most of the studies on feature selection techniques concern the classification in supervised learning. Very few studies focus on unsupervised classification. However, selecting the relevant features in unsupervised learning is more difficult than supervised learning since the topology of the given data space must be strongly preserved. These are a few proposed techniques, especially filter technique based on Laplacian score, for unsupervised feature selection. However, these techniques concern only local topology of the data clusters. In this paper, a new univariate filtering technique, called Laplacian++, is proposed and based on the strong constraint on the global topology of the data space. We apply Laplacian++ to several public datasets of UCI repository of machine learning databases and compare its performance with Laplacian score. The experimental results signify that the performance of our proposed technique is obviously better than those from the other techniques.
Generalist–specialist trade-off during thermal acclimation

The shape of performance curves and their plasticity define how individuals and populations respond to environmental variability. In theory, maximum performance decreases with an increase in performance breadth. However, reversible acclimation may counteract this generalist–specialist trade-off, because performance optima track environmental conditions so that there is no benefit of generalist phenotypes. We tested this hypothesis by acclimating individual mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) to cool and warm temperatures consecutively and measuring performance curves of swimming performance after each acclimation treatment. Individuals from the same population differed significantly in performance maxima, performance breadth and the capacity for acclimation. As predicted, acclimation resulted in a shift of the temperature at which maximal performance occurred. Within acclimation treatments, there was a significant generalist–specialist trade-off in responses to acute temperature change. Surprisingly, however, there was also a trade-off across acclimation treatments, and animals with greater capacity for cold acclimation had lower performance maxima under warm conditions. Hence, cold acclimation may be viewed as a generalist strategy that extends performance breadth at the colder seasons, but comes at the cost of reduced performance at the warmer time of year. Acclimation therefore does not counteract a generalist–specialist trade-off and, at least in mosquitofish, the trade-off seems to be a system property that persists despite phenotypic plasticity.
Molecular and ecological evidence for small‐scale isolation by distance in an endangered damselfly, Coenagrion mercuriale

Coenagrion mercuriale (Charpentier) (Odonata: Zygoptera) is one of Europe's most threatened damselflies and is listed in the European Habitats directive. We combined an intensive mark‐release‐recapture (MRR) study with a microsatellite‐based genetic analysis for C. mercuriale from the Itchen Valley, UK, as part of an effort to understand the dispersal characteristics of this protected species. MRR data indicate that adult damselflies are highly sedentary, with only a low frequency of interpatch movement that is predominantly to neighbouring sites. This restricted dispersal leads to significant genetic differentiation throughout most of the Itchen Valley, except between areas of continuous habitat, and isolation by distance (IBD), even though the core populations are separated by less than 10 km. An urban area separating some sites had a strong effect on the spatial genetic structure. Average pairwise relatedness between individual damselflies is positive at short distances, reflecting fine‐scale genetic clustering and IBD both within‐ and between‐habitat patches. Damselflies from a fragmented habitat have higher average kinship than those from a large continuous population, probably because of poorer dispersal and localized breeding in the former. Although indirect estimates of gene flow must be interpreted with caution, it is encouraging that our results indicate that the spatial pattern of genetic variation matches closely with that expected from direct observations of movement. These data are further discussed with respect to possible barriers to dispersal within the study site and the ecology and conservation of C. mercuriale. To our knowledge, this is the first report of fine‐scale genetic structuring in any zygopteran species.
Tests of factorization in diffractive charm production and double pomeron exchange

We present predictions for the diffractive production of heavy quarks in deep-inelastic scattering and hadron-hadron collisions and for double diffractive dijet production in hadron-hadron collisions. With the assumption of hard scattering factorization, the predictions are made using diffractive parton densities that we have previously fitted to HERA data. Comparisons of our predictions with preliminary data from HERA and the Tevatron indicate that factorization is obeyed in diffractive DIS but fails in hadron-induced processes.
Linear zonal atmospheric prediction for adaptive optics

We compare linear zonal predictors of atmospheric turbulence for adaptive optics. Zonal prediction has the possible advantage of being able to interpret and utilize wind-velocity information from the wavefront sensor better than modal prediction. For simulated open-loop atmospheric data for a 2- meter 16-subaperture AO telescope with 5 millisecond prediction and a lookback of 4 slope-vectors, we find that Widrow-Hoff Delta-Rule training of linear nets and Back- Propagation training of non-linear multilayer neural networks is quite slow, getting stuck on plateaus or in local minima. Recursive Least Squares training of linear predictors is two orders of magnitude faster and it also converges to the solution with global minimum error. We have successfully implemented Amari's Adaptive Natural Gradient Learning (ANGL) technique for a linear zonal predictor, which premultiplies the Delta-Rule gradients with a matrix that orthogonalizes the parameter space and speeds up the training by two orders of magnitude, like the Recursive Least Squares predictor. This shows that the simple Widrow-Hoff Delta-Rule's slow convergence is not a fluke. In the case of bright guidestars, the ANGL, RLS, and standard matrix-inversion least-squares (MILS) algorithms all converge to the same global minimum linear total phase error (approximately 0.18 rad2), which is only approximately 5% higher than the spatial phase error (approximately 0.17 rad2), and is approximately 33% lower than the total 'naive' phase error without prediction (approximately 0.27 rad2). ANGL can, in principle, also be extended to make non-linear neural network training feasible for these large networks, with the potential to lower the predictor error below the linear predictor error. We will soon scale our linear work to the approximately 108-subaperture MMT AO system, both with simulations and real wavefront sensor data from prime focus.
The associated system of HE 2347-4342

We present an analysis of the complex associated system of the high-redshift QSO HE 2347-4342. Absorption features of $\ion{H}{i}$, $\ion{C}{iii}$, $\ion{C}{iv}$, $\ion{N}{v}$, and $\ion{O}{vi}$ with up to 16 components occur in the optical spectral range located up to $1500\,\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$ redwards from the emission line. Apparently, $\ion{C}{iv}$ and $\ion{N}{v}$ show the line locking effect. A quantivative analysis of the line distribution comparing simulated spectra with randomly distributed doublets reveals, however, no statistical evidence for its physical reality. Using photoionization calculations to emulate the observed ion column densities we constrain the quasar's spectral energy distribution. Absorbers in the velocity range of $200 {-} 600\,\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$ can be modelled successfully with a spectral index of $\alpha \sim -3$ at energies higher than $3 {-} 4\,\mathrm{Ryd}$, which is an energy distribution similar to the QSO continuum suggested by Mathews & Ferland ([CITE]). The analysis of a group of high velocity absorbers ($v > 1300\,\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$) leads to a harder energy distribution. The large amount of helium ($\log N_{\mathrm{\ion{He}{ii}}} > 16.3$) associated with these absorbers implies that they are responsible for the observed absence of the proximity effect (Reimers et al. [CITE]). Clouds located more distant from the quasar may be shielded from the high energy part of the quasar continuum due to optically thick absorption shortward of $228\,\mathrm{\AA}$ by the high velocity absorbers. A group of absorbers with $900 < v < 1200\,\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$, in particular a cloud at $1033\,\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$, which has the most reliable column density measurements, can be modelled neither with photoionzation nor under the assumption of collisionally ionized gas. Possible explanations are a multiphase medium with a mixture of photo and collisionally ionized gas and/or gas in non-equilibrium.
WormGender – Open-Source Software for Automatic Caenorhabditis elegans Sex Ratio Measurement

Fast and quantitative analysis of animal phenotypes is one of the major challenges of current biology. Here we report the WormGender open-source software, which is designed for accurate quantification of sex ratio in Caenorhabditis elegans. The software functions include, i) automatic recognition and counting of adult hermaphrodites and males, ii) a manual inspection feature that enables manual correction of errors, and iii) flexibility to use new training images to optimize the software for different imaging conditions. We evaluated the performance of our software by comparing manual and automated assessment of sex ratio. Our data showed that the WormGender software provided overall accurate sex ratio measurements. We further demonstrated the usage of WormGender by quantifying the high incidence of male (him) phenotype in 27 mutant strains. Mutants of nine genes (brc-1, C30G12.6, cep-1, coh-3, him-3, him-5, him-8, skr-1, unc-86) showed significant him phenotype. The WormGender is written in Java and can be installed and run on both Windows and Mac platforms. The source code is freely available together with a user manual and sample data at http://www.QuantWorm. org/. The source code and sample data are also available at http://dx.doi. org/10.6084/m9.figshare. 1541248.
Understanding and capturing people's mobile app privacy preferences

Users are increasingly expected to manage a wide range of security and privacy settings. An important example of this trend is the variety of users might be called upon to review permissions when they download mobile apps. Experiments have shown that most users struggle with reviewing these permissions. Earlier research efforts in this area have primarily focused on protecting users' privacy and security through the development of analysis tools and extensions intended to further increase the level of control provided to users with little regard for human factor considerations. This thesis aims to address this gap through the study of user mobile app privacy preferences with the dual objective of both simplifying and enhancing mobile app privacy decision interfaces. Specifically, we combine static code analysis, crowdsourcing and machine learning techniques to elicit people's mobile app privacy preferences. We show how the resulting preference models can inform the design of interfaces that offer the promise of alleviating user burden when it comes to reviewing the permissions requested by mobile apps. Our contribution is threefold. First, we provide the first large-scale, in-depth analysis of mobile app data collection and usage practices as found in the Google Play app store. This includes an analysis of over 100,000 Android apps, the permissions they request and the different types of third parties with which they share information. Second, we introduce a crowdsourcing methodology to collect people's privacy preferences when it comes to granting permissions to mobile apps for different purposes (e.g. for internal purpose, for sharing with advertising networks) and use the results to develop new mobile app privacy decision interfaces. Third, by using machine teaming techniques to analyze privacy preferences from over 700 smartphone users, we show that, while these preferences are diverse, a relatively small number of privacy profiles can go a long way in simplifying the number of decisions users have to make. This last contribution offers the promise of alleviating user burden and ultimately increasing their control over their information. This thesis provides an important scientific basis for starting to reconcile mobile privacy and usability and, in particular, helping inform the design of more usable privacy interfaces and settings.
CPT-L: An efficient model for relational stochastic processes

Agents that learn and act in real-world environments have to cope with both complex state descriptions and non-deterministic transition behavior of the world. Standard statistical relational learning techniques can capture this complexity, but are often inefficient. We present a simple probabilistic model for such environments based on CP-Logic. efficiency is maintained by restriction to a fully observable setting.
Performance Outcomes of Purchasing Arrangements in Industrial Buyer-Vendor Relationships

Purchasing arrangements for repetitively used industrial supplies assume many different forms. Drawing on transaction cost analysis, the authors advance a conceptual framework that organizes these arrangements along a continuum of relationships. They use data from a survey of 140 OEM purchasers of bearings to demonstrate that performance in terms of acquisition costs is enhanced when, under conditions of uncertainty, firms introduce more relational elements into their purchasing arrangements. Possession cost performance improved when larger volumes of bearings were purchased. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Scalable and Anonymous Group Communication with MTor

Abstract This paper presents MTor, a low-latency anonymous group communication system. We construct MTor as an extension to Tor, allowing the construction of multi-source multicast trees on top of the existing Tor infrastructure. MTor does not depend on an external service to broker the group communication, and avoids central points of failure and trust. MTor’s substantial bandwidth savings and graceful scalability enable new classes of anonymous applications that are currently too bandwidth-intensive to be viable through traditional unicast Tor communication-e.g., group file transfer, collaborative editing, streaming video, and real-time audio conferencing. We detail the design of MTor and then analyze its performance and anonymity. By simulating MTor in Shadow and TorPS using realistic models of the live Tor network’s topology and recent consensus records from the live Tor network, we show that MTor achieves a 29% savings in network bandwidth and a 73% reduction in transmission time as compared to the baseline approach for anonymous group communication among 20 group members. We also demonstrate that MTor scales gracefully with the number of group participants, and allows dynamic group composition over time. Importantly, as more Tor users switch to group communication, we show that the overall performance and utilization for group communication improves. Finally, we discuss the anonymity implications of MTor and measure its resistance to traffic correlation.