Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TurboQuad: A leg-wheel transformable robot using bio-inspired control

The ability of the robot to negotiate the terrain strongly depends on its morphology and control strategy. Wheeled morphology is extremely good on the flat terrain, and the legged morphology has great mobility on the rough terrain, as proved by the legged animals. Thus, as the terrain nowadays is highly mixed with natural rough terrain, artificial rough terrain (ex: stair, bumps, etc), and artificial flat terrain (ex: road), designing a good robotic platform which can operated on all three categories may be a good solution. In the last few decades researchers have come up with two different approaches to elevate robots' adaption to the environment: one is to design special mechanisms to overcome uneven terrain, and the other is to focus on behavioral development of a given robot to adapt different situations. Both approaches exist, but only a few works tried to solve the problem from both aspects simultaneously.
Interchangeable components for hands-on assembly based modelling

Interchangeable components allow an object to be easily reconfigured, but usually reveal that the object is composed of parts. In this work, we present a computational approach for the design of components which are interchangeable, but also form objects with a coherent appearance which conceals their composition from parts. These components allow a physical realization of Assembly Based Modelling, a popular virtual modelling paradigm in which new models are constructed from the parts of existing ones. Given a collection of 3D models and a segmentation that specifies the component connectivity, our approach generates the components by jointly deforming and partitioning the models. We determine the component boundaries by evolving a set of closed contours on the input models to maximize the contours' geometric similarity. Next, we efficiently deform the input models to enforce both C0 and C1 continuity between components while minimizing deviation from their original appearance. The user can guide our deformation scheme to preserve desired features. We demonstrate our approach on several challenging examples, showing that our components can be physically reconfigured to assemble a large variety of coherent shapes.
Stream authentication scheme for the use over the IP telephony

We propose a streaming authentication scheme for the use over the IP telephony. To clear the strict real-time transmission requirements of the IP telephony, the latency and interval between signatures are adjusted dynamically according to the transmission quality of the network. This provides efficient signing and continuous authentication during real-time streaming. We show our scheme's advantages over previously proposed schemes by comparing delay on the sender and receiver side, and tolerance to packet loss.
Dynamic Correspondences: An Object-Oriented Approach to Tracking Sound Reconstructions

This paper reports the results of a research project that experiments with crosstabulation in aiding phonemic reconstruction. Data from the Tupi stock was used, and three tests were conducted in order to determine the efficacy of this application: the confirmation and challenging of a previously established reconstruction in the family; testing a new reconstruction generated by our model; and testing the upper limit of simultaneous, multiple correspondences across several languages. Our conclusion is that the use of cross tabulations (implemented within a database as pivot tables) offers an innovative and effective tool in comparative study and sound reconstruction.
MR in mouse models of cardiac disease

Transgenic and knockout mice can be used to study the genes and basic mechanisms involved in heart disease, and have therefore assumed a central role in modern cardiac research. MRI and MRS techniques have recently been developed for mice that enable the quantitative or semi‐quantitative in vivo assessment of cardiac anatomy, function, perfusion, infarction, Ca2+ influx, and metabolism. With these techniques, the normal mouse heart has been shown to be well suited as a model of human cardiac disease. The roles of individual genes in normal cardiac physiology have recently been studied by MR, including the role of neuronal nitric oxide synthase in β‐adrenergic stimulation, the roles of the inducible nitric oxide synthase and myoglobin in function, dilation, and energetics, and the role of cardiac troponin I in contractility. Furthermore, with a mouse model of myocardial infarction, the roles of the angiotensin II type 2 receptor, xanthine oxidase inhibitors, blood coagulation factor XIII, and inducible nitric oxide synthase in post‐infarct function and remodeling have been further elucidated. Non‐invasive in vivo MRI and MRS in mice provide a unique and powerful means for phenotyping genetically engineered mice and can improve our understanding of the roles of specific genes and proteins in cardiac physiology and pathophysiology. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Balancing ministry and management : an exploratory study of pastoral work activities

Afin de definir les caracteristiques de l'activite pastorale, l'A. analyse les attitudes de cinq membres du clerge evangelique protestant. On decouvre alors que les activites pastorales sont fatigantes; elles sont marquees par leur brievete, leur fragmentation et leur variete. Les pasteurs temoignent d'une preference pour l'action directe plutot que pour la reflexion et pour l'expression orale plutot qu'ecrite. Ainsi, l'activite pastorale possede des aspects du ministere, mais aussi de gestion: un role interpersonnel, un role informationnel, un role decisionnel, un role professionnel
The Balance of Liberal and Vocational Values in Hospitality Higher Education: Voices of Graduates

ABSTRACT The challenges brought by tensions between liberal and vocational values are faced by all designers, deliverers, and students in higher education curricula. This study aims to explore the perceived balance of liberal and vocational values in hospitality higher education among graduates. This exploratory study uses surveys and interviews with Le Cordon Bleu (LCB) hospitality degree graduates to address the study aim. The findings indicate a primarily vocational orientation among the study respondents. Three themes emerged from the analysis: food and beverage orientation, the relevance of skills acquisition, and human nature/experience. The findings develop further knowledge of higher education curricula and alumni experiences. The understanding developed in the paper and the implications presented are important for designers and deliverers of hospitality higher education curricula in order to determine how curricula may be more optimally managed.
A novel yield optimization technique for digital CMOS circuits design by means of process parameters run-time estimation and body bias active control

This work presents a novel approach to optimize digital integrated circuits yield referring to speed, dynamic power and leakage power constraints. The method is based on process parameter estimation circuits and active control of body bias performed by an on-chip digital controller. The associated design flow allows us to quantitatively predict the impact of the method on the expected yield in a specific design. We present the architecture scheme, the theoretical foundation, the estimation circuits used, and two application case studies, referring to an industrial 0.13-/spl mu/m CMOS process data. The approach results to be remarkably effective at high operating temperature. In the presented case study, initial yields below 14% are improved to 86% by using a single controller and a single set of estimation circuits per die.
Generating Referential Descriptions Under Conditions of Uncertainty

Algorithms for generating referring expressions typically assume that an object in a scenary can be identified through a set of commonly agreed properties. This is a strong assumption, since in reality properties of objects may be perceived differently among people, due to a number of factors including vagueness, knowledge discrepancies, and limited perception capabilities. Taking these discrepancies into account, we reinterpret concepts of algorithms generating referring expressions in view of uncertainties about the appearance of objects. Our model includes two complementary measures of likelihood in object identification, and adapted property selection and termination criteria. The approach is relevant for situations with potential perception problems and for scenarios with knowledge discrepancies between conversants.
SeptiFast for diagnosis of sepsis in severely ill patients from a Brazilian hospital

ABSTRACT Objective To test and validate a multiplex real-time polymerase chain reaction method for bloodstream infections, as well as to compare the results with conventional blood culture. Methods A total of 114 consecutive patients with clinical evidence of sepsis were submitted to blood culture and LightCycler™ SeptiFast tests. Results More positive specimens (23; 20.2%) were detected using the LightCycler™ SeptiFast than the blood culture (17; 14.9%), with an agreement of 86.8%. Discordant results were seen in four patients positive only to blood culture, ten positive only to LightCycler™ SeptiFast and one to different pathogens found by each test. Infections with microorganisms detected only using blood culture reassured the need to perform both tests. The mean time to results for blood culture was 5 days for negative and 3.5 days for positive results. LightCycler™ SeptiFast results were achieved in less than 8 hours. Conclusion LightCycler™ SeptiFast showed a high potential as a test to be carried out concomitantly with blood culture for sepsis diagnosis in severely ill patients. This test allowed a faster diagnosis of bacterial and fungal infections that helped to reduce hospital stay and to control the use of antibiotics. LightCycler™ SeptiFast can also eventually detect microorganism and infections that are hardly detected by blood culture, especially Candida non-albicans infections.
Permethrin 1% Creme Rinse for the Treatment of Pediculus humanus var capitis Infestation

Abstract: Permethrin 1% creme rinse (NIX) was tested as a treatment for Pediculus humanus var capitis (head lice) in a placebo‐controlled, double‐blinded, randomized study. As a positive control, a third arm of the study included nonrandomized, but investigator‐blinded, treatment with 1% lindane shampoo (Kwell). At 14 days after treatment, 97% of patients treated with permethrin were free of lice compared to 6% of placebo‐treated patients (P < 0.001) and 43% of the lindane‐treated group. Permethrin was 70% ovicidal compared to 14% for placebo (P< 0.001) and 45% for lindane. No adverse experiences were noted during this study. Permethrin 1% demonstrated high pediculicidal and ovicidal activities, which in combination with its low mammalian toxicity, residual activity, and cosmetic properties, make it an excellent treatment for pediculosis capitis.
Challenges, Choices, and Decisions of Women in Higher Education

This research examined challenges, choices, and decisions of women professors in higher education. Special attention was given to Latina professors. This article reviewed the literature on established theories of representative bureaucracy and contextualized faculty women, especially Latinas, in this proportional representation framework. Answers were sought to three research questions: Are Hispanic, Black, and Asian women keeping pace with their White peers in higher education; are women as a group in higher education keeping pace with their male counterparts; and what obstacles, if any, must female professors overcome? Study results suggest that although women comprise nearly half of all postsecondary teachers, they are not keeping pace with White males in terms of promotion to tenured professorships. Education demographics illustrate that Latinas, in particular, are not achieving tenure and promotion and are not proportionately represented in higher education suggesting that mentoring may be a key variable to promotion within higher education.
Deep Learning for Person Reidentification Using Support Vector Machines

Due to the variations of viewpoint, pose, and illumination, a given individual may appear considerably different across different camera views. Tracking individuals across camera networks with no overlapping fields is still a challenging problem. Previous works mainly focus on feature representation and metric learning individually which tend to have a suboptimal solution. To address this issue, in this work, we propose a novel framework to do the feature representation learning and metric learning jointly. Different from previous works, we represent the pairs of pedestrian images as new resized input and use linear Support Vector Machine to replace softmax activation function for similarity learning. Particularly, dropout and data augmentation techniques are also employed in this model to prevent the network from overfitting. Extensive experiments on two publically available datasets VIPeR and CUHK01 demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Effect of glycoPEGylation on factor VIIa binding and internalization

Summary. Recombinant coagulation factor VIIa (rFVIIa), which is widely used for treatment of bleeding episodes in haemophilia patients with inhibitors, is cleared from the circulation relatively fast with a plasma half‐life of 2–4 h. PEGylation is an established and clinically proven strategy for prolonging the circulatory life‐time of bio‐therapeutic proteins. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of glycoPEGylation of rFVIIa on rFVIIa binding to its cellular receptors and its subsequent internalization. rFVIIa and glycoPEGylated rFVIIa were labeled with 125I and the radio‐iodinated proteins were used to monitor rFVIIa binding and uptake in endothelial cells and fibroblasts. FVIIa‐TF activity at the cell surface was analyzed by a factor X activation assay. Modification of rFVIIa with PEG impaired rFVIIa binding to both endothelial cell protein C receptor and tissue factor (TF) on cell surfaces. The internalization of PEGylated rFVIIa in endothelial cells and fibroblasts was markedly lower compared to the internalization of rFVIIa in these cells. PEGylated rFVIIa was able to activate factor X on TF expressing cell surfaces at a rate similar to that of unmodified rFVIIa when the cells were not subjected to multiple washings to remove the free ligand. General effects such as steric hindrance or changes in electrostatic binding properties of the modified rFVIIa to its receptors are probably responsible for this impairment rather than a loss of specific recognition of the receptors, which could explain near normal activation of factor X by glycoPEGylated rFVIIa on TF expressing cells while its uptake is reduced.
The novel conserved mitochondrial inner-membrane protein MTGM regulates mitochondrial morphology and cell proliferation

Although several proteins involved in mediating mitochondrial division have been reported in mammals, the mechanism of the fission machinery remains to be elucidated. Here, we identified a human nuclear gene (named MTGM) that encodes a novel, small, integral mitochondrial inner-membrane protein and shows high expression in both human brain tumor cell lines and tumor tissues. The gene is evolutionarily highly conserved, and its orthologs are 100% identical at the amino acid level in all analyzed mammalian species. The gene product is characterized by an unusual tetrad of the GxxxG motif in the transmembrane segment. Overexpression of MTGM (mitochondrial targeting GxxxG motif) protein results in mitochondrial fragmentation and release of mitochondrial Smac/Diablo to the cytosol with no effect on apoptosis. MTGM-induced mitochondrial fission can be blocked by a dominant negative Drp1 mutant (Drp1-K38A). Overexpression of MTGM also results in inhibition of cell proliferation, stalling of cells in S phase and nuclear accumulation of γ-H2AX. Knockdown of MTGM by RNA interference induces mitochondrial elongation, an increase of cell proliferation and inhibition of cell death induced by apoptotic stimuli. In conclusion, we suggest that MTGM is an integral mitochondrial inner-membrane protein that coordinately regulates mitochondrial morphology and cell proliferation.
Mice Deficient in LRG-47 Display Enhanced Susceptibility to Trypanosoma cruzi Infection Associated with Defective Hemopoiesis and Intracellular Control of Parasite Growth

IFN-γ is known to be required for host control of intracellular Trypanosoma cruzi infection in mice, although the basis of its protective function is poorly understood. LRG-47 is an IFN-inducible p47GTPase that has been shown to regulate host resistance to intracellular pathogens. To investigate the possible role of LRG-47 in IFN-γ-dependent control of T. cruzi infection, LRG-47 knockout (KO) and wild-type (WT) mice were infected with the Y strain of this parasite, and host responses were analyzed. When assayed on day 12 after parasite inoculation, LRG-47 KO mice, in contrast to IFN-γ KO mice, controlled early parasitemia almost as effectively as WT animals. However, the infected LRG-47 KO mice displayed a rebound in parasite growth on day 15, and all succumbed to the infection by day 19. Additional analysis indicated that LRG-47-deficient mice exhibit unimpaired proinflammatory responses throughout the infection. Instead, reactivated disease in the KO animals was associated with severe splenic and thymic atrophy, anemia, and thrombocytopenia not observed in their WT counterparts. In addition, in vitro studies revealed that IFN-γ-stimulated LRG-47 KO macrophages display defective intracellular killing of amastigotes despite normal expression of TNF and NO synthetase type 2 and that both NO synthetase type 2 and LRG-47 are required for optimum IFN-γ-dependent restriction of parasite growth. Together, these data establish that LRG-47 can influence pathogen control by simultaneously regulating macrophage-microbicidal activity and hemopoietic function.
ON THE WORK AND VISION OF DMITRY DOLGOPYAT

We present some of the results and techniques due to Dolgopyat. The presentation avoids technicalities as much as possible while trying to focus on the basic ideas. We also try to present Dolgopyat's work in the context of a research program aimed at enlightening the relations between dynamical systems and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics.
Lifeline: Emergency Ad Hoc Network

Lifeline is a group of systems designed for mobile phones and battery powered wireless routers for forming emergency Ad hoc networks. Devices installed with Lifeline program can automatically form Ad hoc networks when cellular signal is unavailable or disrupted during natural disasters. For instance, large scale earthquakes can cause extensive damages to land-based telecommunication infrastructures. In such circumstances, mobile phones installed with Lifeline program can be used to send emergency messages by the victims who are trapped under collapsed buildings. In addition, Lifeline also provides a function for the rescuers to estimate the positions of the victims based on network propagation techniques. Lifeline also has the ability to recover from partial crash of network and nodes lost.
Knockout of a Bacterial-Type ATP-Binding Cassette Transporter Gene, AtSTAR1, Results in Increased Aluminum Sensitivity in Arabidopsis1[C][OA]

ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters represent a large family in plants, but the functions of most of these transporters are unknown. Here we report a gene, AtSTAR1, only encoding an ATP-binding domain of a bacterial-type ABC transporter in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). AtSTAR1 is an ortholog of rice (Oryza sativa) OsSTAR1, which has been implicated in aluminum (Al) tolerance. Knockout of AtSTAR1 resulted in increased sensitivity to Al and earlier flowering. Unlike OsSTAR1, AtSTAR1 was expressed in both the roots and shoots and its expression was not induced by Al or other stresses. Investigation of tissue-specific localization of AtSTAR1 through β-glucuronidase fusion revealed that AtSTAR1 was predominantly expressed at outer cell layers of root tips and developing leaves, whose localization is also different from those of OsSTAR1. However, introduction of OsSTAR1 into atstar1 mutant rescued the sensitivity of atstar1 to Al, indicating that AtSTAR1 has a similar function as OsSTAR1. Furthermore, we found that AtSTAR1 may interact with ALS3, a transmembrane-binding domain in Arabidopsis to form a complex because introduction of OsSTAR1, a functional substitute of AtSTAR1, into als3 mutant resulted in the loss of OsSTAR1 protein. All these findings indicate that AtSTAR1 is involved in the basic detoxification of Al in Arabidopsis.
Semantic indexing of soccer audio-visual sequences: a multimodal approach based on controlled Markov chains

Content characterization of sport videos is a subject of great interest to researchers working on the analysis of multimedia documents. In this paper, we propose a semantic indexing algorithm which uses both audio and visual information for salient event detection in soccer. The video signal is processed first by extracting low-level visual descriptors directly from an MPEG-2 bit stream. It is assumed that any instance of an event of interest typically affects two consecutive shots and is characterized by a different temporal evolution of the visual descriptors in the two shots. This motivates the introduction of a controlled Markov chain to describe such evolution during an event of interest, with the control input modeling the occurrence of a shot transition. After adequately training different controlled Markov chain models, a list of video segments can be extracted to represent a specific event of interest using the maximum likelihood criterion. To reduce the presence of false alarms, low-level audio descriptors are processed to order the candidate video segments in the list so that those associated to the event of interest are likely to be found in the very first positions. We focus in particular on goal detection, which represents a key event in a soccer game, using camera motion information as a visual cue and the "loudness" as an audio descriptor. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed multimodal approach.
Resistive Network Optimal Power Flow: Uniqueness and Algorithms

The optimal power flow (OPF) problem minimizes the power loss in an electrical network by optimizing the voltage and power delivered at the network buses, and is a nonconvex problem that is generally hard to solve. By leveraging a recent development on the zero duality gap of OPF, we propose a second-order cone programming convex relaxation of the resistive network OPF, and study the uniqueness of the optimal solution using differential topology, especially the Poincare-Hopf Index Theorem. We characterize the global uniqueness for different network topologies, e.g., line, radial, and mesh networks. This serves as a starting point to design distributed local algorithms with global behaviors that have low complexity, are computationally fast, and can run under synchronous and asynchronous settings in practical power grids.