Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Augmented Vehicular Reality

Autonomous vehicle prototypes today come with line-of-sight depth perception sensors like 3D cameras. These 3D sensors are used for improving vehicular safety in autonomous driving, but have fundamentally limited visibility due to occlusions, sensing range, and extreme weather and lighting conditions. To improve visibility and performance, we explore a capability called Augmented Vehicular Reality (AVR). AVR broadens the vehicle's visual horizon by enabling it to wirelessly share visual information with other nearby vehicles. We show that AVR is feasible using off-the-shelf wireless technologies, and it can qualitatively change the decisions made by autonomous vehicle path planning algorithms. Our AVR prototype achieves positioning accuracies that are within a few percentages of car lengths and lane widths, and it is optimized to process frames at 30fps.
A 14-bit current-mode /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ DAC based upon rotated data weighted averaging

A new dynamic element matching (DEM) algorithm, referred to as rotated data weighted averaging (RDWA), is implemented in a third-order /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with 64/spl times/ oversampling and a conversion bandwidth of 25 kHz. The systematic and random errors are considered in the design of the 14-bit converter. The /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ DAC is fabricated in a 2-/spl mu/m CMOS process and includes the on-chip reconstruction filter. The prototype was designed to test the performance of the DAC without DEM, with data weighted averaging (DWA), and with RDWA. The results show that the new RDWA algorithm is capable of achieving first-order noise shaping while eliminating the signal-dependent harmonic distortion present in DWA.
SimilarMove: Similarity-based Prediction for Moving Object Future Path

Trajectory prediction has a significant impact on many location-based services such as local search, traffic management, and routing services. Existing trajectory prediction techniques utilize the object's motion history to predict the future path(s). However, these techniques fail when the history is unavailable which realistically happens for multiple reasons such as; history might be difficult to obtain, newly registered user has no past history, or previously recorded data is protected for privacy reasons. This paper introduces a novel system named SimilarMove to predict the future paths of moving objects on road networks without relying on their past trajectories. SimilarMove analyzes the motion pattern of the moving object under investigation and identifies other moving objects that show similar motion patterns. Then, a Markov Model is adopted to digest this set of similar motion patterns and produce the next potential movements of the object under investigation along with their likelihoods. A key aspect of SimilarMove lies in achieving a high quality prediction while being efficient in terms of performance.
HaptDoll: an interactive device for tactile sensation with virtual companion doll

With the advance of display technology, the virtual reality technique has become more valuable than ever, which then promotes the development of VR/AR interactive contents. VR has the potential to provide experiences and deliver results that cannot be otherwise achieved. However, interacting with immersive applications is not always straightforward and it is not just about an interface for the user to reach their goals. It is also about users working in an intuitive attitude that is a comfortable experience and devoid of frustration. This work provides solutions to the issues of being too hard for the user to have intuitive experiences in the virtual scenario. For the intuitive experience, we developed a wireless wearable device which is set on the user's upper-body to detect the activities then import them into the virtual environment. For interactive and immersive VR contents, we developed a companion doll that provides haptic feedback in the real-world and six emotional expressions in the virtual world.
Visual Pigments of Single Primate Cones

Single parafoveal cones from human and monkey retinas were examined in a recording microspectrophotometer. Three types of receptors with maximum absorption in the yellow, green, and violet regions of the spectruin were found. Thus the commonly held belief, for which there has previously been no direct and unequivocal evidence, that color vision is mediated by several kinds of receptors (possibly three), each containing photopigments absorbing in diflerent regions of the spectrum, is confirmed.
Developmental plasticity, morphological variation and evolvability: a multilevel analysis of morphometric integration in the shape of compound leaves

The structure of compound leaves provides flexibility for morphological change by variation in the shapes, sizes and arrangement of leaflets. Here, we conduct a multilevel analysis of shape variation in compound leaves to explore the developmental plasticity and evolutionary potential that are the basis of diversification in leaf shape. We use the methods of geometric morphometrics to study the shapes of individual leaflets and whole leaves in 20 taxa of Potentilla (sensu lato). A newly developed test based on the bootstrap approach suggests that uncertainty in the molecular phylogeny precludes firm conclusions whether there is a phylogenetic signal in the data on leaf shape. For variation among taxa, variation within taxa, as well as fluctuating asymmetry, there is evidence of strong morphological integration. The patterns of variation are similar across all three levels, suggesting that integration within taxa may act as a constraint on evolutionary change.
How to Recognize Epicardial Origin of Ventricular Tachycardias?

Percutaneous pericardial access for epicardial mapping and ablation of ventricular arrhythmias has expanded considerably in recent years. After its description in patients with Chagas disease, the technique has provided relevant in-formation on the arrhythmia substrate in other cardiomyopathies and has improved the results of ablation procedures in various clinical settings. Electrocardiographic criteria proposed for the recognition of the epicardial origin of ventricular tachycardias are mainly based on analysis of the first QRS components. Ventricular activation at the epicardium has a slow initial component reflecting the transmural activation and influenced by the absence of Purkinje system in the epicardium. Various parameters (pseudodelta wave, intrinsicoid deflection and shortest RS interval) of these initial intervals predict an epicardial origin in patients with scar-related ventricular tachycardias with right bundle branch block morphology. Using the same concept, the maximum deflection index was defined for the location of idiopathic epicardial tachycardias remote from the aortic root. Electrocardiogram criteria based on the morphology of the first component of the QRS (q wave in lead I) have been proposed in patients with nonischemic cardiomyopathy. All these criteria seem to be substrate-specific and have several limitations. Other information, including type of underlying heart disease, previous failed endocardial ablation, and evidence of epicardial scar on magnetic resonance imaging, can help to plan the ablation procedure and decide on an epicardial approach.
Quasi-Optimality of Adaptive Mixed FEMs for Non-selfadjoint Indefinite Second-Order Linear Elliptic Problems

Abstract The well-posedness and the a priori and a posteriori error analysis of the lowest-order Raviart–Thomas mixed finite element method (MFEM) has been established for non-selfadjoint indefinite second-order linear elliptic problems recently in an article by Carstensen, Dond, Nataraj and Pani (Numer. Math., 2016). The associated adaptive mesh-refinement strategy faces the difficulty of the flux error control in H⁢(div,Ω){H({\operatorname{div}},\Omega)} and so involves a data-approximation error ∥f-Π0⁢f∥{\lVert f-\Pi_{0}f\rVert} in the L2{L^{2}} norm of the right-hand side f and its piecewise constant approximation Π0⁢f{\Pi_{0}f}. The separate marking strategy has recently been suggested with a split of a Dörfler marking for the remaining error estimator and an optimal data approximation strategy for the appropriate treatment of ∥f-Π0⁢f∥L2⁢(Ω){\|f-\Pi_{0}f\|_{L^{2}(\Omega)}}. The resulting strategy presented in this paper utilizes the abstract algorithm and convergence analysis of Carstensen and Rabus (SINUM, 2017) and generalizes it to general second-order elliptic linear PDEs. The argument for the treatment of the piecewise constant displacement approximation uRT{u_{{\mathrm{RT}}}} is its supercloseness to the piecewise constant approximation Π0⁢u{\Pi_{0}u} of the exact displacement u. The overall convergence analysis then indeed follows the axioms of adaptivity for separate marking. Some results on mixed and nonconforming finite element approximations on the multiply connected polygonal 2D Lipschitz domain are of general interest.
Three-Dimensional Relationships between Hippocampal Synapses and Astrocytes

Recent studies show that glutamate transporter-mediated currents occur in astrocytes when glutamate is released from hippocampal synapses. These transporters remove excess glutamate from the extracellular space, thereby facilitating synaptic input specificity and preventing neurotoxicity. Little is known about the position of astrocytic processes at hippocampal synapses. Serial electron microscopy and three-dimensional analyses were used to investigate structural relationships between astrocytes and synapses in stratum radiatum of hippocampal area CA1 in the mature rat in vivo and in slices. Only 57 ± 11% of the synapses had astrocytic processes apposed to them. Of these, the astrocytic processes surrounded less than half (0.43 ± 22) of the synaptic interface. Other studies suggest that astrocytes extend processes toward higher concentrations of glutamate; thus the presence of astrocytic processes at particular hippocampal synapses might signal which ones are releasing glutamate. The distance between nearest neighboring synapses was usually (∼95%) <1 μm. Astrocytic processes occurred along the extracellular path between 33% of the neighboring synapses, neuronal processes occurred along the path between another 66% of the neighboring synapses, and only 1% of the synapses were close enough such that neither astrocytic nor neuronal processes occurred between them. These morphological arrangements suggest that the glutamate released at approximately two-thirds of hippocampal synapses might diffuse to other synapses, unless neuronal glutamate transporters are more effective than previously reported. The findings also suggest that physiological recordings made from hippocampal astrocytes do not uniformly sample the glutamate released from all hippocampal synapses.
The Evolution of Latent Networks

In spite of enormous previous efforts to model the growth of various networks, there have only been a few works that successfully describe the evolution of latent networks. In a latent network edges do not represent interactions between nodes, but show some proximity values. In this paper we analyze the structure and evolution of latent networks over time by looking at a wide range of document similarity networks, in which documents are nodes and their similarities are weighted edges. We use scientific papers as the corpora to determine the behavior of authors in choosing words for article titles. The aim of our work is to see whether term selection for titles depends on earlier published titles. In addition, we propose a model based on Yule process that best describes this growth behavior.
A communication-efficient causal broadcast publish/subscribe system. (Un système de publication/abonnement efficace et respectant l'ordre causale)

Widely applied by many approaches, the Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) paradigm enables nodes of a distributed system to disseminate information asynchronously. However, several existing Pub/Sub solutions present some limitations such as network contention of published messages or do not ensure causal order of delivered messages. This thesis investigates how to provide a communication-efficient Pub/Sub system, that respects causal order of delivered messages within the same topic and copes with problems of traffic overhead and message contention that exist in several tree-based solutions. Contrarily to several existing tree-based broadcast protocols, the contributions presented in this thesis build distributed spanning trees on top of a hypercube-like topology, such that trees rooted at different nodes are differently organized. The first contribution of the thesis consists of a causal broadcast protocol which reduces network traffic by aggregating messages without the use of timers. It exploits causal order of messages and common paths between different broadcast trees: the forwarding of some messages can be delayed and then combined with others, reducing message traffic. Different from existing timer-based approaches, it does not increase delivery latency. The second contribution is a new topic-based Pub/Sub system, the VCube-PS, which ensures causal delivery order for messages published to the same topic. While several other tree-based Pub/Sub approaches use one tree per topic and rendezvous points, VCube-PS creates a new spanning tree rooted on the source of every message that is published. Such a per-publisher tree approach reduces node contention when compared to the single tree one, specially in scenarios with “hot topics”, i.e., topics with high publication rates. Furthermore, the spanning tree built to disseminate a message associated to a given topic is composed only by known subscribers of the topic. Both contributions were implemented on top of the event-driven simulator PeerSim and were assessed according to different metrics and scenarios. Results confirm that the proposed causal aggregation protocol reduces both network traffic and delivery latencies. Moreover, it also reduces the number of non-deliverable messages that are kept in nodes’ buffers. Concerning the proposed Pub/Sub system, when compared to approaches with one single tree per topic, VCube- PS presented the lowest latency results when in presence of “hot topics”, since it intrinsically provides load balancing of dissemination paths. Moreover, VCube-PS generates less message traffic than the former and the extra delay necessary to ensure causal delivery order represents only a small percentage of the end-to-end latency.
Improving Software Dependability through Documentation Analysis

Software documentation contains critical information that describes a system’s functionality and requirements. Documentation exists in several forms, including code comments, test plans, manual pages, and user manuals. The lack of documentation in existing software systems is an issue that impacts software maintainability and programmer productivity. Since some code bases contain a large amount of documentation, we want to leverage these existing documentation to improve software dependability. Specifically, we utilize documentation to help detect software bugs and repair corrupted files, which can reduce the number of software error and failure to improve a system’s reliability (e.g., continuity of correct service). We also generate documentation (e.g., code comment) automatically to help developers understand the source code, which helps improve a system’s maintainability (e.g., ability to undergo repairs and modifications). In this thesis, we analyze software documentation and propose two branches of work, which focuses on three types of documentation including manual pages, code comments, and user manuals. The first branch of work focuses on documentation analysis because documentation contains valuable information that describes the behavior of the program. We automatically extract constraints from documentation and apply them on a dynamic analysis symbolic execution tool to find bugs in the target software, and we extract constraints manually from documentation and apply them on a structured-file parsing application to repair corrupted PDF files. The second branch of work focuses on automatic code comment generation to improve software documentation. For documentation analysis, we propose and implement DASE and DocRepair. DASE leverages automatically extracted constraints from documentation to improve a dynamic analysis symbolic execution tool. DASE guides symbolic execution to focus the testing on execution paths that execute a program’s core functionalities using constraints learned from the documentation. We evaluated DASE on 88 programs from five mature real-world software suites to detect software bugs. DASE detects 12 previously unknown bugs that symbolic execution would fail to detect when given no input constraints, 6 of which have been confirmed by the developers. In DocRepair we perform an empirical study to study and repair corrupted PDF files. We create the first dataset of 319 corrupted PDF files and conduct an empirical study on 119 real-world corrupted PDF files to study the common types of file corruption. Based on the result of the empirical study we propose a technique called DocRepair. DocRepair’s repair algorithm includes seven repair operators that utilizes manually extracted constraints from documentation to repair corrupted files. We evaluate DocRepair against three common PDF repair tools. Amongst the 1,827 collected corrupted files from over two corpora
Inhibition by omeprazole of proguanil metabolism: mechanism of the interaction in vitro and prediction of in vivo results from the in vitro experiments.

Both the antimalarial prodrug proguanil and the gastric proton pump inhibitor omeprazole are substrates for cytochrome P450 (CYP)2C19 and CYP3A. However, the relative contribution of each enzyme to proguanil bioactivation to cycloguanil and to the metabolism of omeprazole, as well as their potential to interact, remains to be examined. The bioactivation of proguanil to its active metabolite cycloguanil was studied in vitro in human liver microsomes and in vivo in 12 healthy subjects, in the absence and in the presence of omeprazole. The formation of cycloguanil from proguanil exhibited biphasic kinetic behavior in four of six human livers, indicating that at least two enzymes are responsible for this metabolic step. Cycloguanil formation activity did not correlate with immunoreactive CYP3A4 content or with CYP3A4 activity, as measured by testosterone 6beta-hydroxylation, suggesting that CYP3A4 plays a limited role in cycloguanil formation. Furthermore, troleandomycin (10 microM) inhibited only 10 to 17% of cycloguanil formation at proguanil concentrations of 100 and 500 microM. At a proguanil concentration of 20 microM, omeprazole at 10 microM inhibited cycloguanil formation in vitro by 47 +/- 59%. These in vitro results were consistent with the results of our in vivo study in healthy subjects, which showed a 32 +/- 11% decrease in proguanil apparent oral clearance and a 65 +/- 8% decrease in proguanil partial metabolic clearance to cycloguanil in the presence of omeprazole (both P < .001). We conclude that in vitro studies of proguanil metabolism and interactions are predictive of in vivo situations, that CYP2C19 is the main enzyme responsible for proguanil bioactivation to cycloguanil and that omeprazole inhibits this biotransformation in vitro and in vivo by inhibiting this enzyme.
An overlap-based human gait cycle detection

Identification of a person by his/her style of walking is referred as gait recognition. Gait is one among the biometric used for human identification. In gait recognition, an inevitable step for accurate feature extraction is gait cycle detection. In this paper, a novel gait cycle detection algorithm based on the concept of overlap between legs during locomotion is proposed. To identify overlap, zero-crossing counts of silhouette frames as well as bottom halves of silhouette frames are considered. The efficiency of this algorithm is tested using normal walking sequence of subjects with 90° viewing angle from CASIA B as well as TUM-IITKGP human gait databases. The results obtained shows that gait cycle can be easily and efficiently detected with zero-crossing count of silhouette frames. Further zero-crossing counts taken from bottom halves of silhouette frames gives better performance.
Lossy Compressive Sensing Based on Online Dictionary Learning

In this paper, a lossy compression of hyperspectral images is realized by using a novel online dictionary learning method in which three dimensional datasets can be compressed. This online dictionary learning method and blind compressive sensing (BCS) algorithm are combined in a hybrid lossy compression framework for the first time in the literature. According to the experimental results, BCS algorithm has the best compression performance when the compression bit rate is higher than or equal to 0.5 bps. Apart from observing rate-distortion performance, anomaly detection performance is also tested on the reconstructed images to measure the information preservation performance.
Discordant association of the CREBRF rs373863828 minor allele with increased body mass index and protection from type 2 diabetes in Māori and Pacific (Polynesian) people living in Aotearoa New Zealand

Aim/Hypotheses The minor allele of CREBRF rs373863828 associates with increased body mass index (BMI) and reduced risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) in the Samoan population of Samoa and American Samoa. Our aim was to test rs373863828 for association with BMI and odds of T2D, gout and chronic kidney disease (CKD) in Māori and Pacific (Polynesian) people living in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2,286 adults. Methods Association analyses were performed by linear and logistic regression with BMI, log-transformed BMI, waist circumference, T2D, gout and CKD. Analyses were adjusted for age, sex, the first four genome-wide principal components, and (when appropriate) BMI, waist circumference and T2D. Results For the minor allele of rs373863828 the effect size for log-transformed BMI was 0.038 (95% CI [0.022-0.055], P=4.8x10−6) and for T2D was OR=0.59 (95% CI [0.47-0.73], P=1.9x10−6). There was no evidence for association of genotype with variance in BMI (P=0.13). Nor was there evidence for association with serum urate (β=0.012 mmol/L, Pc=0.10), gout (OR=1.00, P=0.98) or CKD (OR=0.91, P=0.59). Conclusions/interpretation Our results replicated, with very similar effect sizes, association of the minor allele of rs373863828 with higher BMI but lower odds of T2D among New Zealand Polynesian adults, as in Samoan adults living in Samoa and American Samoa.
Dynamics and termination cost of spatially coupled mean-field models

This work is motivated by recent progress in information theory and signal processing where the so-called spatially coupled design of systems leads to considerably better performance. We address relevant open questions about spatially coupled systems through the study of a simple Ising model. In particular, we consider a chain of Curie-Weiss models that are coupled by interactions up to a certain range. Indeed, it is well known that the pure (uncoupled) Curie-Weiss model undergoes a first-order phase transition driven by the magnetic field, and furthermore in the spinodal region such systems are unable to reach equilibrium in subexponential time if initialized in the metastable state. In contrast, the spatially coupled system is instead able to reach the equilibrium even when initialized to the metastable state. The equilibrium phase propagates along the chain in the form of a traveling wave. Here we study the speed of the wave front and the so-called termination cost-i.e., the conditions necessary for the propagation to occur. We reach several interesting conclusions about optimization of the speed and the cost.