Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lessons from Developing and Deploying the Cricket Indoor Location System

The Cricket indoor location project has been active for four years. We have developed three different versions of the system. The first version was an early proofof-concept (Cricket v0), which led to the first prototype (Cricket v1). Cricket v1 has seen extensive use by us and by a few other research groups in the community. During this time, we have learned a number of lessons from application designers, users, and system maintainers. We break these lessons into platform flexibility, where we discuss the Cricket API, embedded software platform, and hardware interfaces; location accuracy, where we discuss Cricket v1’s performance and limitations, and deployment issues, where we discuss energy consumption and system management. We discuss how these lessons have helped improve the design of the next generation of Cricket, Cricket v2, whose key features we detail. Like Cricket v1, the Cricket v2 hardware design and software will be released as open-source; v2 units will also be commercially available by early 2004. We believe that the lessons described in this paper will be useful to people interested in building or using indoor location systems.
Energy-Efficient Broadcasting in Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

3 Energy efficient broadcasting without range adjustment 10 3.1 Clustering based broadcasting protocols . 11 3.2 Neighbor elimination based broadcasting protocols . 11 3.3 Distance-based and probabilistic protocols . 11 3.4 Coverage and connected dominating set based broadcasting . 12 3.5 Forwarding neighbors based broadcasting protocols . 13 3.6 Impact of realistic physical layer . 16 3.7 Beaconless broadcasting . 17
Space shepherd: Search and rescue of illegal immigrants in the mediterranean sea through satellite imagery

This paper presents the preliminary results obtained within a research project aimed to assess the feasibility of a system to monitor the immigration flows in the Southern Mediterranean Sea by solely relying on images coming from scientific and commercial satellites, which already operates on a regular basis. “Space Shepherd”, a project funded by Politecnico di Milano, Italy, has the ultimate goal of integrating information coming from a number of satellites to 1) monitor remotely the Southern Mediterranean Sea, 2) detect the presence of possible vessels, 3) identify the migrant vessels and keep the authorities informed, 4) track the vessels and issue warnings in case of danger, 5) support the search and rescue operations. The methodology for scheduling image acquisitions is presented, as well as the algorithms for automatic detection of vessels in both optical and SAR images. The performances of the system are discussed, and its feasibility is assessed.
Serum Brain Natriuretic Peptide Concentration 60 Days After Surgery as a Predictor of Long-Term Prognosis in Patients Implanted With a Left Ventricular Assist Device

Mechanical circulatory support by a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) is used to bridge patients with advanced heart failure to transplant or as a definitive treatment. We retrospectively sought predictors of long-term outcome in a cohort of 83 patients who had undergone LVAD treatment. We subjected perioperative clinical data of patients to statistical analysis to establish parameters associated with all-cause mortality, and the cutoff values, sensitivity, and specificity of those that had a statistically significant relation with survival. Mean follow-up was 717 days (standard deviation, 334 days; range, 17–1,592 days). Fourteen patients (16.8%) died, but nine (10.8%) were weaned from support. Serum brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) concentration measured 60 days after implantation was significantly associated with all-cause mortality. The optimal BNP cutoff value to predict death during LVAD support was 322 pg/ml, with a sensitivity of 71.4% and specificity of 79.8%. Two-year survival was 92.0% in those with 60 days serum BNP concentration <322 pg/ml compared with 70.5% in those in whom it was ≥322 pg/ml (p = 0.003). The relation between BNP and survival likely reflects recovery of native myocardial function and improvements in global health and should assist clinicians in the on-going management of long-term LVAD therapy.
Impaired place navigation in place and matching‐to‐place swimming pool tasks follows both retrosplenial cortex lesions and cingulum bundle lesions in rats

The retrosplenial (RS) cortex (area 29) and the adjacent cingulum bundle (CG) are components of neural circuits that include the hippocampus. Given the evidence suggesting that the hippocampus plays a central role in spatial navigation, several lines of investigation have examined the possible contributions of these structures to spatial navigation. The combined and/or separate contributions of these structures have been difficult to establish because their close proximity usually results in combined injury after lesions and because there have been conflicting results related to lesion type and the strain of rat subjects. The purpose of the present study was to compare the effects of selective CG damage with selective RS damage in Long‐Evans rats, a domestic rat strain that displays superior spatial skills, and by using spatial behavior assessment procedures that are sensitive to CG damage. Rats with cytotoxic N‐methyl‐D‐aspartate (NMDA) RS lesions or surgical CG transection were tested on two spatial tasks in the Morris water task; a place learning task, sensitive to nonspatial and spatial behavior, and a matching‐to‐place task, sensitive to spatial behavior. Both the RS and CG groups were impaired on most measures relative to the control group on both the place task and the matching‐to‐place task. The results are discussed in relation to the anatomical organization of CG and RG projections to the hippocampus and with respect to their possible separate/conjoint contributions to spatial behavior. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
AIR (Aerial Image Retargeting): A novel technique for in-fab automatic model-based retargeting-for-yield

In this paper, we present a novel methodology for identifying lithography hot-spots and automatically transforming them into the lithography-friendly design space. This fast model-based technique is applied at the mask tape-out stage by slightly shifting and resizing the designs. It implicitly does a similar functionality as that of the Process Window OPC (PWOPC) but more efficiently. Being a relatively fast technique it also offers the means of providing the designer with all the design systematic deviations from the actual (on-wafer) parameters by including it in the parameter-extraction flow. We applied this methodology successfully to 28-nm Metal levels and showed that it efficiently (better quality and faster) improves the lithography-related yield and reliability issues.
Applying multi-agent system technology in practice: automated management and analysis of SCADA and digital fault recorder data

Summary form only given. This paper reports on the use of multi-agent system technology to automate the management and analysis of SCADA and digital fault recorder (DFR) data. The multi-agent system, entitled protection engineering diagnostic agents (PEDA), integrates legacy intelligent systems that analyze SCADA and DFR data to provide data management and online diagnostic information to protection engineers. Since November 2004, PEDA agents have been intelligently interpreting and managing data online at a transmission system operator in the UK. As the results presented in this paper demonstrate, PEDA supports protection engineers by providing access to interpreted power systems data via the corporate intranet within minutes of the data being received. In this paper the authors discuss their experience of developing a multi-agent system that is robust enough for continual online use within the power industry. The use of existing agent development toolsets and standards is also discussed
Australian rainfall trends and their relation to the southern oscillation index

Rainfall is the key climate variable that governs the spatial and temporal availability of water. In this study we identified monthly rainfall trends and their relation to the southern oscillation index (SOI) at ten rainfall stations across Australia covering all state capital cities. The nonparametric Mann–Kendall (MK) test was used for identifying significant trends. The trend free pre‐whitening approach (TFPW) was used to remove the effects of serial correlation in the dataset. The trend beginning year was approximated using the cumulative summation (CUSUM) technique and the influence of the SOI was identified using graphical representations of the wavelet power spectrum (WPS). Decreasing trends of rainfall depth were observed at two stations, namely Perth airport for June and July rainfall starting in the 1970s and Sydney Observatory Hill for July rainfall starting in the 1930s. No significant trends were found in the Melbourne, Alice Springs and Townsville rainfall data. The remaining five stations showed increasing trends of monthly rainfall depth. The SOI was found to explain the increasing trends for the Adelaide (June) and Cairns (April) rainfall data and the decreasing trends for Sydney (July) rainfall. Other possible climatic factors affecting Australian rainfall are also discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bioactive Coatings for Orthopaedic Implants—Recent Trends in Development of Implant Coatings

Joint replacement is a major orthopaedic procedure used to treat joint osteoarthritis. Aseptic loosening and infection are the two most significant causes of prosthetic implant failure. The ideal implant should be able to promote osteointegration, deter bacterial adhesion and minimize prosthetic infection. Recent developments in material science and cell biology have seen the development of new orthopaedic implant coatings to address these issues. Coatings consisting of bioceramics, extracellular matrix proteins, biological peptides or growth factors impart bioactivity and biocompatibility to the metallic surface of conventional orthopaedic prosthesis that promote bone ingrowth and differentiation of stem cells into osteoblasts leading to enhanced osteointegration of the implant. Furthermore, coatings such as silver, nitric oxide, antibiotics, antiseptics and antimicrobial peptides with anti-microbial properties have also been developed, which show promise in reducing bacterial adhesion and prosthetic infections. This review summarizes some of the recent developments in coatings for orthopaedic implants.
Identification of a cellulose synthase-associated protein required for cellulose biosynthesis

Cellulose synthase-interactive protein 1 (CSI1) was identified in a two-hybrid screen for proteins that interact with cellulose synthase (CESA) isoforms involved in primary plant cell wall synthesis. CSI1 encodes a 2,150-amino acid protein that contains 10 predicted Armadillo repeats and a C2 domain. Mutations in CSI1 cause defective cell elongation in hypocotyls and roots and reduce cellulose content. CSI1 is associated with CESA complexes, and csi1 mutants affect the distribution and movement of CESA complexes in the plasma membrane.
Soft Stacking

In this paper, we present a continuous approach to ordering 2D images when compositing. Previous methods for stacking image layers require them to appear in a single (though possibly different) order at every point in the image. Our soft stacking approach removes this restriction — allowing layers to stack as if they were volumes of fog, appearing partially in front of and partially in back of other layers within the same pixel, and moving smoothly through other layers across the image. Our approach involves augmenting each pixel with stacking coefficients— a necessary and sufficient representation for sub‐pixel stacking complexity. These stacking coefficients arise naturally when considering sub‐pixel stacking complexity, much as continuous (alpha) transparency arises when considering sub‐pixel coverage complexity.
Deamination as the basis of strand-asymmetric evolution in transcribed Escherichia coli sequences.

Analyses of sequence evolution in Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica have revealed that the pattern of nucleotide substitutions in enterobacterial genes is asymmetric. The incidence of C→T transitions is strongly biased toward the nontranscribed strand of DNA, which accumulates such changes at a twoto threefold higher rate than the complementary transcribed strand. We previously proposed that the asymmetric distribution of C→T substitutions was caused by strand-specific biases in the occurrence and repair of DNA damage during transcription (Francino et al. 1996; Francino and Ochman 1997). Two processes render mutations less likely to originate on the transcribed template strand than on its complement: (1) transcription-coupled repair is induced by RNA polymerases stalled at lesions on the template strand (Hanawalt 1995), and (2) cytosine deamination is less frequent on the template strand, which is shielded by the RNA polymerase and the nascent mRNA, than on the more exposed nontranscribed strand (Beletskii and Bhagwat 1996). However, the pattern of nucleotide substitutions in coding regions may reflect not only the underlying mutational process, but also the action of natural selection. Given that the majority of C→T substitutions in bacterial sequences occur at synonymous sites, selection on codon usage could potentially contribute to the generation of the observed asymmetry. To determine whether transcription alone, without the intervention of natural selection on codon usage, produces substitutional asymmetry in bacterial sequences, we analyzed patterns of substitution in two different noncoding regions: a transcribed but untranslated region, and the adjacent nontranscribed sequence. The detection of substitutional bias in the transcribed but untranslated region and the absence of bias in the nontranscribed sequence would confirm that transcription is necessary and sufficient to generate asymmetry, without a requirement for selection on codon usage. Furthermore, an increase in C→T substitutions with transcription would implicate deamination events in the nontranscribed strand as the principal cause of asymmetry, whereas a decrease in G→A substitutions with transcrip-
Automating Dynamic Reconfiguration for Non-Stop Dataflow Systems

In this paper, we firstly review the concerned issues on dynamic reconfiguration of non-stop dataflow systems with QoS requirement and what the related work have been done on these issues. Then we present our research by focusing on reconfiguration automation - automated reconfiguration planning and automated execution scheduling with taking the concerned issues on board. Significantly the automated planning removes the reliance of reconfiguration correctness on change administrators. Structures, such as version-visibility, restrict-segment and route-map, along with planning and scheduling algorithms, are proposed in this paper as the fundamentals to automate reconfiguration for maintaining the system's QoS and preserving the application integrity. All the proposed structures and algorithms have been fully implemented as an architectural meta-model called the RDF (Reconfigurable Dataflow) model. In this paper a dataflow system: the DEDSS (Data Encryption & Digital Signature System) is studied as a typical case on the RDF to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches to automating seamless and QoS-ensured reconfiguration of non-stop dataflow systems.
Towards spatial isolation design in a multi-core real-time kernel targeting safety-critical applications

In mixed-criticality systems, applications naturally have different safety criticality levels. Partitioning technology is usually used to enable the integration of such mixed criticality applications upon one platform, aiming at reducing hardware, power consumption and especially certification cost. Partitioning can prevent fault propagation among mixed-criticality applications, if spatial and temporal isolation are adequately ensured. This paper focuses on the solution of spatial isolation in the HARTEX kernel on a multi-core platform in terms of memory, communication between applications and I/O sharing. According to formulated isolation requirements, a simple partitioning multi-core hardware architecture is proposed using SoC and memory protection units, and the kernel is extended to support spatial isolation between the kernel and applications as well as between applications. Combined design of hardware and software can easily achieve this isolation. At last, the spatial isolation is evaluated using a statistical sampling method and its performance is tested in terms of task switch, system call and footprint.
Role of Body Mass Index History in Predicting Risk of the Development of Hypertension in Japanese Individuals: Toranomon Hospital Health Management Center Study 18 (TOPICS 18)

It has not been clarified whether overall adiposity in early adulthood or at the lifetime maximum weight would confer a residual risk of hypertension after considering the risk associated with current adiposity. Studied were 6121 Japanese without hypertension. The risk of developing hypertension 4 years after a baseline examination was investigated using the body mass index in the early 20s, at the lifetime maximum, or at the baseline examination. An elevated body mass index at baseline or at the maximum rather than in the early 20s was strongly associated with future hypertension. Compared with individuals with low body mass index both at baseline and in the early 20s, those with an elevated body mass index at the baseline alone had an odds ratio of 1.89 (95% confidence interval, 1.58–2.27) and those with an elevated body mass index both at baseline and in the early 20s had the highest odds ratio of 2.26 (1.76–2.89). Individuals with an elevated body mass index both at baseline and at the maximum had a 2.26-fold (1.87–2.72) increased risk of hypertension compared with those without the 2 factors. An elevated body mass index at the baseline examination weakened the favorable influence of a low body mass index in early adulthood on developing hypertension. Adding information on body mass index in early adulthood or at the maximum in addition to that at the baseline examination contributed to differentiating the risk of hypertension among Japanese, particularly among those with an elevated overall adiposity at present.
A Novel Encoding Scheme for Effective Biometric Discretization: Linearly Separable Subcode

Separability in a code is crucial in guaranteeing a decent Hamming-distance separation among the codewords. In multibit biometric discretization where a code is used for quantization-intervals labeling, separability is necessary for preserving distance dissimilarity when feature components are mapped from a discrete space to a Hamming space. In this paper, we examine separability of Binary Reflected Gray Code (BRGC) encoding and reveal its inadequacy in tackling interclass variation during the discrete-to-binary mapping, leading to a tradeoff between classification performance and entropy of binary output. To overcome this drawback, we put forward two encoding schemes exhibiting full-ideal and near-ideal separability capabilities, known as Linearly Separable Subcode (LSSC) and Partially Linearly Separable Subcode (PLSSC), respectively. These encoding schemes convert the conventional entropy-performance tradeoff into an entropy-redundancy tradeoff in the increase of code length. Extensive experimental results vindicate the superiority of our schemes over the existing encoding schemes in discretization performance. This opens up possibilities of achieving much greater classification performance with high output entropy.
Ontology-based Induction of High Level Classi cation Rules

A tool that could be bene cial to the data mining community is one that facilitates the seamless integration of knowledge bases and databases. This kind of tool could form the foundation of a data mining system capable of nding interesting information using ontologies. In this paper, we describe a new algorithm based on the query facilities provided by such a tool, ParkaDB which is a knowledge representation system. Ontologies and relational databases are merged thus extending the range of queries that can be issued against databases. This extended query capability makes it possible to generalize from low-level concepts to high-level concepts on demand. Given this extended querying capability, we are developing a classi cation algorithm that will nd classi cation rules at multiple levels of abstraction.
Quantitative nucleic acid amplification by digital PCR for clinical viral diagnostics

Abstract In the past few years, interest in the development of digital PCR (dPCR) as a direct nucleic acid amplification technique for clinical viral diagnostics has grown. The main advantages of dPCR over qPCR include: quantification of nucleic acid concentrations without a calibration curve, comparable sensitivity, superior quantitative precision, greater resistance to perturbations by inhibitors, and increased robustness to the variability of the target sequence. In this review, we address the application of dPCR to viral nucleic acid quantification in clinical applications and for nucleic acid quantification standardization. Further development is required to overcome the current limitations of dPCR in order to realize its widespread use for viral load measurements in clinical diagnostic applications.
Evolutionary ensemble learning of fuzzy randomized neural network for posture recognition

Many works of human posture recognition have been published in the literature. Gesture and posture recognition by using Kinect Sensor is an important technique for many types of application. In this paper, we apply a neuro-fuzzy system for classification of human posture. A recent approach of learning algorithm for Single-layer hidden feedforward neural network (SLFN), known as Randomized Neural Network (RNN), has been attracting attention as a solution of several problems of traditional neural networks. However, the performance of RNN varies depending on the number of hidden neurons. In this paper, ensemble learning methods are therefore developed to deal with the issue, using Fuzzy-RNNs with various sizes of networks. Moreover, we utilize evolutionary algorithm to optimize the structure of ensembles. This paper discusses the effectiveness of the proposed approach, comparing with performance of some ensemble learning methods by using benchmark datasets and real measurement data of human posture.
Detection and Quantitation of N′-Nitrosonornicotine in Human Toenails by Liquid Chromatography-Electrospray Ionization-Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Specific biomarkers of tobacco carcinogen uptake are critical for investigations of the role of tobacco smoke exposure in human cancers. Two new biomarkers of human exposure to tobacco-specific carcinogens have been recently developed by our research group: urinary N′-nitrosonornicotine (NNN) and toenail 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanol (NNAL). In this study, we report the presence of NNN in human toenails. Toenails of 17 smokers were analyzed for total NNN. Mean total NNN level in these samples was 4.63 ± 6.48 fmol/mg toenail and correlated with previously reported total NNAL (r = 0.96; P < 0.0001), total nicotine (r = 0.48; P < 0.05), and total cotinine (r = 0.87; P < 0.0001). An interesting finding was that amounts of NNN in smokers' toenails were generally higher than those of total NNAL. The ratio of toenail NNN to NNAL averaged 2.8, whereas the previously reported ratio between these biomarkers in smokers' urine was 0.1. NNN was also found in toenail samples from 12 nonsmokers, averaging 0.35 ± 0.16 fmol/mg and positively correlating with toenail cotinine (r = 0.58; P = 0.05). The results of this study show the feasibility of quantifying NNN in human toenails, providing a potentially useful new biomarker of tobacco carcinogen exposure. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2008;17(4):945–8)