Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Detection of Point-Like Targets in Spectrally Symmetric Interference

We address adaptive radar detection of targets embedded in ground clutter dominated environments characterized by a symmetrically structured power spectral density. At the design stage, we leverage on the spectrum symmetry for the interference to come up with decision schemes capable of capitalizing the a-priori information on the covariance structure. To this end, we prove that the detection problem at hand can be formulated in terms of real variables and, then, we apply design procedures relying on the GLRT, the Rao test, and the Wald test. Specifically, the estimates of the unknown parameters under the target presence hypothesis are obtained through an iterative optimization algorithm whose convergence and quality guarantee is thoroughly proved. The performance analysis, both on simulated and on real radar data, confirms the superiority of the considered architectures over their conventional counterparts which do not take advantage of the clutter spectral symmetry.
Implementing and Evaluating Priority Control Mechanism for Heterogeneous Remote Monitoring IoT System

All people expect the Internet of Things (IoT) to grow. Accordingly, there are various IoT devices. There is an extremely wide variety of data from IoT devices such as images, and sounds. It will become possible to construct a heterogeneous remote monitoring IoT system using various valuations of IoT devices. However, a heterogeneous remote monitoring IoT system cannot send data in completely because almost all mobile network services for the IoT system do not guarantee bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a priority control mechanism for a heterogeneous remote monitoring IoT system. The proposed mechanism enables a best-effort IoT system that guarantees only the minimum necessary data telecommunications. The proposed mechanism controls the priority by using application requirements. We implemented the proposed mechanism and evaluated its effectiveness with a sending ratio and average delay time of each priority. The sending ratio results of each priority increased to 29.2% in daytime. The average delay time results of each priority decreased by up to 96.0% in nighttime.
Knowledge.Bio: A Web Application for Exploring, Building and Sharing Webs of Biomedical Relationships Mined from PubMed

Knowledge.Bio is a web platform that enhances access and interpretation of knowledge networks extracted from biomedical research literature. The interaction is mediated through a collaborative graphical user interface for building and evaluating maps of concepts and their relationships, alongside associated evidence. In the first release of this platform, conceptual relations are drawn from the Semantic Medline Database and the Implicitome, two compleme ntary resources derived from text mining of PubMed abstracts. Availability— Knowledge.Bio is hosted at http://knowledge.bio/ and the open source code is available at http://bitbucket.org/sulab/kb1/. Contact— asu@scripps.edu; bgood@scripps.edu
Assessing tree and stand biomass: a review with examples and critical comparisons

There is considerable interest today in estimating the biomass of trees and forests for both practica1 forestry issues and scientific purposes. New techniques and procedures are brought together along with the more traditional approaches to estimating woody biomass. General model forms and weighted analysis are reviewed, along with statistics for evaluating and comparing biomass models. Additivity and harmonization are addressed, and weight-ratio and density-integral approaches are discussed. Subsampling methods on trees to derive unbiased weight estimates are examined. , and ratio and difference sampling estimators are considered in detail. Errorcomponents forstand biomass estimates are examined. This paper reviews quantitative principles and gives specific examples for prediction of tree biomass. The examples should prove useful for understanding the principles involved
Celebration, loss, and organizational identity at entrepreneurial firms

Objectives . This research extends theory on celebration and loss to entrepreneurial firms. We ask: 1) How do entrepreneurial firms enact celebration and loss? 2) How do these enactments affect organizational identity at entrepreneurial firms? Prior Work. Celebration and loss are linked to organizational identity. Legitimizing events include strategy away days (Bourque & Johnson, 2008), company parties (Rosen, 2000), award giving practices (Anand & Watson, 2004), and parting ceremonies (Harrison & Sutton, 1986). But these activities require slack resources and stable context. What happens to these processes when firms compete in volatile business contexts with scarce resources and rapid change? Approach. We utilize a qualitative, inductive approach based on narrative interviews at entrepreneurial firms. Preliminary interviews with 10 entrepreneurs presented evidence of the enactment of celebration and loss, identified via review of the audiorecordings by both researchers. Follow-up interviews have focused on identifying successes and failures and the acknowledgement of those circumstances via ritual or specific practices. Additional interviews will be conducted through 2011, totalling 2-3 hours of interviews with 30-40 individuals. Results. Celebration and loss within small firm entrepreneurs are self-referential, meaning making devices (Albert & Whetten, 1985). We characterize muted forms of celebration and loss, across structural and psychological dimensions, that create organizational identity indicative of small firm volatility. Celebration, affected by executive team expectations, is often muted, taking the form of simplistic gift giving or informal acknowledgements of common goals. In cases of loss, identity forming practices are sometimes deliberately if unselfconsciously discounted. Rapid change at these firms, however, may attenuate the impact of defensive routines or actions (Brown and Starkey, 2000). to the success of the venture. Additional research is needed to determine when de-emphasizing acknowledgement practice is detrimental to organizational outcomes, and to confirm mechanisms by which entrepreneurial firms benefit from intentionally muting celebration and loss.
Holistic Face Recognition through Multivariate Analysis and Genetic Algorithms

Several works regarding facial recognition have dealt with methods which identify isolated characteristics of the face or with templates which encompass several regions of it. In this paper we introduce a new technique which approaches the problem holistically dispensing with the need to identify geometrical characteristics or regions of the face. The characterization of a face is achieved by randomly sampling selected attributes of the pixels of its image. From this information we construct three sets of data (which we generically denote as “spectra”), which correspond to the values of low frequencies, gradient and entropy of the image. We approximate the three spectra with three different polynomials minimizing the data fitness error in the minimax sense. Using a genetic algorithm (GA) we are able to circumvent the problem of dimensionality inherent to higher degree approximations. The GA yields the degree and values of a set of coefficients of the polynomials approximating the spectra of the image of a face. We train our system by finding three characteristic polynomials from a random sample of the image pixels for each face (say Fi) in the data base. We recognize a face (say F) by finding its characteristic polynomials and calculating Mahalanobis’ distance from F’s polynomial to each of the Fi’s polynomials. The winner is the polynomial closer to F’s. With the data base we tested we achieve 97.5% precision. Furthermore, the method may be applied to almost any kind of pattern recognition. keywords: holistic face recognition, genetic algorithms, multivariate approximation, face spectra, supervised learning.
FaceRipper Automatic Face Indexer and Tagger for Personal Albums and Videos

Digitized multimedia data do not have any structure in raw form and so is not amenable for information extraction by a machine. Consider the problem of creating structure over images by tagging it with labels which can easily be processed by machines and meaningful to humans. Being faces most important part of images, we consider problem of tagging them and indexing images or videos based on faces. In the work, face detection,feature extraction and face classification algorithms are studied as building blocks of the tagging system. Each of them are implemented and experimentally evaluated on their respective benchmark datasets. Applicability of descriptive local features of person’s face for face tagging is studied. We propose novel, positive semi definite kernels to calculate similarity between face. The kernels use attributed pointsets, derived from local descriptors, which are known to handle occlusion. These attributed point-set based kernels capture the notion of neighborhoods and further enhances the power of the local descriptors. Experiment are done using face-similarity for face recognition on benchmark data sets, face tagging and indexing personal albums and videos are conducted.
Novel morphological and genetic markers for the discrimination of three European Pityokteines (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae) species

Background and Purpose: The three palearctic species Pityokteines spinidens, P. curvidens and P. vorontzowi are main pests on Abies species and their impact on Abies stands is increasing. As the three scolytid species, particularly females, are difficult to distinguish, this study aimed to find additional morphological characters for identification. Further, part of the mitochondrial COI gene was sequenced to develop a significant barcode marker for future use. MaterialandMethods: All three bark beetle species were collected from logs in Croatia (Litori} and Trako{}an), in order to quantify the number of strial and interstrial punctures. Insect DNA was extracted and PCR products were purified, directly sequenced, aligned and analyzed by MP analysis and Bayesian analysis. Results and Conclusion: The number of punctures in the first and second interstriae between the elytral base and the sutural tubercle proved to be a valuable tool for the differentiation of P. spinidens from P. curvidens and P. vorontzowi. This morphological feature was consistent with the number of punctures which varied for the first and the second interstriae in P. spinidens compared to P. curvidens and P. vorontzowi. The mitochondrial COI gene provided another means in the discrimination of Pityokteines species, revealing that P. curvidens and P. vorontzowi are sister species.
Learning symmetrical model for head pose estimation

This paper tackles the problem of head pose estimation which has been considered an important research task for decades. The proposed approach selects a set of features from the symmetrical parts of the face. The size of bilateral symmetrical area of the face is a good indicator of the Yaw head pose. We train a Decision Tree model in order to recognize head pose with regard to the areas of symmetry. The approach does not need the location of interest points on face and is robust to partial occlusion. Tests were performed on a different dataset from that used for training the model and the results demonstrate that the change in the size of the regions that contain a bilateral symmetry provides accurate pose estimation.
What Role for the Party Group Leader? A Latent Variable Approach to Leadership Effects on Party Group Cohesion in the European Parliament

Previous research has identified several structural and situational factors that affect party cohesion in parliamentary voting behaviour. The potential role of leadership has been neglected so far. The authors apply a latent variable approach to model leadership effects in roll call votes from the European Parliament (EP), 1979–2001. Other things being equal, their findings suggest that a small but significant 7 per cent share of the total variance in party group cohesion is due to the party group leaders. About 40 per cent of this leader component can be accounted for by their experience inside the European institutions, their career prospects, and their ideological positions.
A HIGH-ORDER IMMERSED-BOUNDARY METHOD FOR SIMULATION OF INCOMPRESSIBLE FLOWS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have had two wonderful years at Vanderbilt University. I would like to use this chance to express my gratitude to those who have helped me during this period of time. First, I want to thank my advisor, Dr. Haoxiang Luo. His support and wealth of knowledge guided me through the obstacles in my research. He was also willing to share his experience as a graduate student with me to help me choose the best career path. When I was making one of hardest decisions in my life, switching from the PhD program to the Master program, he was there providing suggestions and support. I As a foreigner, it was not easy for me to fit in the life here. But I was lucky to have Suzanne Weiss and my friend Qian Zhang with me all the way. Moreover, I owe my gratitude to all my previous and current labmates They not only helped me with my research, but also made my life easier. Being a teaching assistant for two years was a wonderful experience. I am sincerely appreciative to the Mechanical Engineering Department for the finical support. Last but not least, I offer my most sincere thanks to my parents and my sister. Their love and support means the world to me! ii CONTENTS
The Role of Power in Conflict in Adult Close Relationships

Past research has shown that conflict occurs regularly in close relationships and has significant implications for relationship wellbeing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of perceived power in conflict resolution in romantic relationships. The study examined the power, relationship satisfaction, and conflict behaviors of 37 dating couples. Participants provided ratings of power and relationship satisfaction, and then participated in a 6-minute videotaped conflict discussion, which was systematically observed and coded for both positive and negative conflict behaviors. Results indicated that individuals with high perceived power demonstrated less positive and more negative affect during conflict. Furthermore, results demonstrated that perceived power equality versus inequality is associated with a number of behavioral tendencies during conflict, and gender is a significant moderator of these associations. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
Intermittency and multifractality: A case study via parabolic stochastic PDEs

Let denote space-time white noise, and consider the following stochastic partial dierential equations: (i) _ u = 1 u 00 +u , started identically at one; and (ii) _ Z = 1 Z 00 + , started identically at zero. It is well known that the solution to (i) is intermittent, whereas the solution to (ii) is not. And the two equations are known to be in dierent universality classes. We prove that the tall peaks of both systems are multifractals in a natural large-scale sense. Some of this work is extended to also establish the multifractal behavior of the peaks of stochastic PDEs on R+ R d with d > 2. G. Lawler has asked us if intermittency is the same as multifractality. The present work gives a negative answer to this question. As a byproduct of our methods, we prove also that the peaks of the Brownian motion form a large-scale monofractal, whereas the peaks of the Ornstein{Uhlenbeck process on R are multifractal. Throughout, we make extensive use of the macroscopic fractal theory of M.T. Barlow and S.J. Taylor [3, 4]. We expand on aspects of the Barlow{Taylor theory, as well.
'Before Your Fountains' - Import Substitution, Oil Quotas and Rent Seeking in France (1920's-1970's)

This study re-assesses the most popular development policy of the 20th century, import substitution industrialization through quantitative restrictions of trade flows. The researches of Anne Krueger and Jagdish Bagwhati about quantitative restrictions in emerging countries concluded on their inefficiency, caused by rising rent capture by dominant companies, cities and social groups. In terms of volume though, developped countries accounted for the largest part of trade quantitative restrictions. Among them, France concentrated the most important restricted trade in volume, especially in the oil sector, its first trade post. This case-study of French oil products import quotas, based on new archival evidence, concludes on the macroeconomic effiency of this policy. We show that, contrary to the cases analysed by Anne Krueger and Jagdish Bagwhati, the industrialization rent and the rent capture remained low and diminished over time. The real problem was the endogenous imbalance of rent capture decomposition between agents of the system and the political risks it fostered. This imbalance mostly favored big companies, Paris to a lesser extent, and the Mines engineers around the “Corps des Mines”.
Regulation of keratinocyte shape, migration and wound epithelialization by IGF-1- and EGF-dependent signalling pathways

Adult epidermal keratinocytes migrate by crawling, a process that requires protrusion of the plasma membrane at the front of the cell and contraction of the cell body at the rear. We have found that epidermal growth factor (EGF) and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) influence keratinocyte shape differently. Whereas IGF-1 stimulates membrane protrusion and facilitates cell spreading, EGF induces contraction of keratinocytes. The effects of each growth factor on keratinocyte shape are mediated by distinct signal transduction pathways: EGF stimulates the activity of the classical mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway and IGF-1 stimulates phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase. Activation of these kinases is both necessary and sufficient to induce cell shape changes upon growth factor treatment. In addition, IGF-1-stimulated keratinocyte spreading depends on the activation of Rho family proteins. In vitro assays of wound re-epithelialization show that both growth factors stimulate migration of keratinocytes, and the activity of the respective signalling pathways is required for this re-epithelialization process. When added simultaneously, IGF-1 and EGF have additive effects on wound epithelialization. Our results show that IGF-1 and EGF can influence different components of the keratinocyte migration machinery that determines the speed of wound epithelialization.
BMP-2 Overexpression Augments Vascular Smooth Muscle Cell Motility by Upregulating Myosin Va via Erk Signaling

Background. The disruption of physiologic vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) migration initiates atherosclerosis development. The biochemical mechanisms leading to dysfunctional VSMC motility remain unknown. Recently, cytokine BMP-2 has been implicated in various vascular physiologic and pathologic processes. However, whether BMP-2 has any effect upon VSMC motility, or by what manner, has never been investigated. Methods. VSMCs were adenovirally transfected to genetically overexpress BMP-2. VSMC motility was detected by modified Boyden chamber assay, confocal time-lapse video assay, and a colony wounding assay. Gene chip array and RT-PCR were employed to identify genes potentially regulated by BMP-2. Western blot and real-time PCR detected the expression of myosin Va and the phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinases 1/2 (Erk1/2). Immunofluorescence analysis revealed myosin Va expression locale. Intracellular Ca2+ oscillations were recorded. Results. VSMC migration was augmented in VSMCs overexpressing BMP-2 in a dose-dependent manner. siRNA-mediated knockdown of myosin Va inhibited VSMC motility. Both myosin Va mRNA and protein expression significantly increased after BMP-2 administration and were inhibited by Erk1/2 inhibitor U0126. BMP-2 induced Ca2+ oscillations, generated largely by a “cytosolic oscillator”. Conclusion. BMP-2 significantly increased VSMCs migration and myosin Va expression, via the Erk signaling pathway and intracellular Ca2+ oscillations. We provide additional insight into the pathophysiology of atherosclerosis, and inhibition of BMP-2-induced myosin Va expression may represent a potential therapeutic strategy.
Simple Channel Estimation Techniques Based on Pilot-Assistance for STBC-Based MIMO-OFDM Systems

— With equipping multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver ends, the signals in the wireless OFDM systems could be transmitted over multipath fading channels for achieving benefits and high flexibility. In this paper, we focus on MIMO-OFDM systems that simultaneously perform channel estimation in order to combat additive noise, and multipath fading. The performance improvement is confirmed by simulations. Results show that the proposed MIMO-OFDM scheme is quite robust in practical environments.
A GP-based Video Game Player

A general video game player is an an agent that can learn to play different video games with no specific domain knowledge. We are working towards developing a GP-based general video game player. Our system currently extracts game state features from screen grabs. This information is then passed on to the game player. Fitness is computed from data obtained directly from the internals of the game simulator. For this paper, we compare three different types of game state features. These features differ in how they describe the position to the nearest object surrounding the player. We have tested our genetic programming game player system on three games: Space Invaders, Frogger and Missile Command. Our results show that a playing strategy for each game can be found efficiently for all three representations.
Novel α-MSH analog causes weight loss in obese rats and minipigs and improves insulin sensitivity

Obesity is a major burden to people and to health care systems around the world. The aim of the study was to characterize the effect of a novel selective α-MSH analog on obesity and insulin sensitivity. The subchronic effects of the selective MC4-R peptide agonist MC4-NN1-0182 were investigated in diet-induced obese (DIO) rats and DIO minipigs by assessing the effects on food intake, energy consumption, and body weight. The acute effect of MC4-NN1-0182 on insulin sensitivity was assessed by a euglycemic–hyperinsulinemic clamp study in normal rats. Three weeks of treatment of DIO rats with MC4-NN1-0182 caused a decrease in food intake and a significant decrease in body weight 7±1%, P<0.05 compared with 3±1% increase with the vehicle control. In DIO minipigs, 8 weeks of treatment with MC4-NN1-0182 resulted in a body weight loss of 13.3±2.5 kg (13±3%), whereas the vehicle control group had gained 3.7±1.4 kg (4±1%). Finally, clamp studies in normal rats showed that acute treatment with MC4-NN1-0182 caused a significant increase in glucose disposal (Rd) compared with vehicle control (Rd, mg/kg per min, 17.0±0.7 vs 13.9±0.6, P<0.01). We demonstrate that treatment of DIO rats or minipigs with a selective MC4-R peptide agonist causes weight loss. Moreover, we have demonstrated weight-independent effects on insulin sensitivity. Our observations identify MC4 agonism as a viable target for the treatment of obesity and insulin resistance.
The Recent Behavior of Business Fixed Investment in the United States and the Role of Computers

In the 1980s, U.S. real investment in high technology equipment has grown rapidly while other components of business fixed investment have been weak. The surge in real high technology investment has been accompanied by a very sharp decline in its relative price, leading to difficult index number problems. When a previously estimated model of business fixed investment was extended to cover the period through 1988, the equation for nonresidential structures performed much as before while that for producers` durable equipment substantially underpredicted recent actual outcomes. Further disaggregation revealed that the underprediction related to the computing component.