Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis and evaluation of the stability of a biologically inspired, Leg loss tolerant gait for six- and eight-legged walking robots

This article analyzes and evaluates the stability of the biologically inspired gait of the DLR Crawler, a walking hexapod robot, with respect to leg loss. Using a kinematic simulation, ranges of velocity commands that result in stable gait coordination are determined for both cases, the undamaged robot and the robot experiencing the loss of a single leg. The results give insight how to adjust the motion commands after the loss of a leg. Further, a simplified dynamic simulation is used to analyze the effect of leg loss on the walking stability. Heuristic measures like curvature and length of the traveled path, roll and pitch angles are employed to evaluate the walking stability and performance. Some methods like shifting the COG or stiffening the variably compliant joints are proposed and discussed with respect to their ability to improve the walking performance in case of leg loss. In the end, the presented concepts are extended and for the first time applied to a simulated eight-legged robot.
Don’t Let Google Know I’m Lonely

From buying books to finding the perfect partner, we share our most intimate wants and needs with our favourite online systems. But how far should we accept promises of privacy in the face of personalized profiling? In particular, we ask how we can improve detection of sensitive topic profiling by online systems. We propose a definition of privacy disclosure that we call ε-indistinguishability, from which we construct scalable, practical tools to assess the learning potential from personalized content. We demonstrate our results using openly available resources, detecting a learning rate in excess of 98% for a range of sensitive topics during our experiments.
Molecular Interactions of Fullerene Derivatives in Human Serum and Inflammatory Cells

Fullerenes are a class of nanomaterials with unique electronic properties that can be harnessed for use in various applications. We have found their biologic function critically depends on the structure of the side chain moieties added to the core carbon cage. A therapeutic candidate termed C70-Tetraglutamate (TGA), previously shown to have potent anti-inflammatory properties, was selected to determine the molecular interactions in human serum and in resting or FceRI-activated human mast cells (MC). The identity of TGAbinding molecules was analyzed using NanoLC-MS/MS peptide sequencing technology. We found that TGA predominately bound to alpha-2-macroglobulin precursor, Serpin peptidase inhibitor, and serum albumin in human serum. In non-activated MC, TGA interacted predominantly with aminopeptidase N precursor, dipeptidyl peptidase 4, and human fibroblast activation. In MC activated through FceRI, predominant interactions were observed between TGA and annexin A5, superoxide dismutase, and lysosomal membrane glycoprotein. These studies for the first time identify serum and cellular substrates of a fullerene-based anti-inflammatory compound which serves as a starting point for determining the mechanism of action of this therapeutic candidate.
Phonological processing and reading in children with speech sound disorders.

PURPOSE To examine the relationship between phonological processing skills prior to kindergarten entry and reading skills at the end of 1st grade, in children with speech sound disorders (SSD). METHOD The participants were 17 children with SSD and poor phonological processing skills (SSD-low PP), 16 children with SSD and good phonological processing skills (SSD-high PP), and 35 children with typical speech who were first assessed during their prekindergarten year using measures of phonological processing (i.e., speech perception, rime awareness, and onset awareness tests), speech production, receptive and expressive language, and phonological awareness skills. This assessment was repeated when the children were completing 1st grade. The Test of Word Reading Efficiency was also conducted at that time. First-grade sight word and nonword reading performance was compared across these groups. RESULTS At the end of 1st grade, the SSD-low PP group achieved significantly lower nonword decoding scores than the SSD-high PP and typical speech groups. The 2 SSD groups demonstrated similarly good receptive language skills and similarly poor articulation skills at that time, however. No between-group differences in sight word reading were observed. All but 1 child (in the SSD-low PP group) obtained reading scores that were within normal limits. CONCLUSION Weaknesses in phonological processing were stable for the SSD-low PP subgroup over a 2-year period.
An Acute Case of Intoxication with Cyanobacteria and Cyanotoxins in Recreational Water in Salto Grande Dam, Argentina

Cyanobacterial blooms and hepatotoxic microcystins (MCs) usually occur in summer, constituting a sanitary and environmental problem in Salto Grande Dam, Argentina. Water sports and recreational activities take place in summer in this lake. We reported an acute case of cyanobacterial poisoning in Salto Grande dam, Argentina, which occurred in January 2007. Accidentally, a young man was immersed in an intense bloom of Microcystis spp. A level of 48.6 μg·L−1 of microcystin-LR was detected in water samples. Four hours after exposure, the patient showed nausea, abdominal pain and fever. Three days later, dyspnea and respiratory distress were reported. The patient was hospitalized in intensive care and diagnosed with an atypical pneumonia. Finally, a week after the exposure, the patient developed a hepatotoxicosis with a significant increase of hepatic damage biomarkers (ALT, AST and γGT). Complete recovery took place within 20 days. This is the first study to show an acute intoxication with microcystin-producing cyanobacteria blooms in recreational water.
Modeling Individual Driving Route Preferences from Relative Feedback

A common, yet diicult, task for people is planning satisfactory driving routes. Automatic systems for driving directions exist, but one of their major diiculties is the range of individual diierence regarding what constitutes a good route and a bad route. We introduce an adaptive user interface for route planning that uses relative feedback to model individual route preferences. Our experiments test three adaptive algorithms for relative preferences on two feature sets. The results show that all algorithms perform similarly on the training data, but the simpler algorithms have the better test performance, probably because the more complex algorithms t the noise in the training data. We intend to improve the accuracy of our adaptive algorithms by feature engineering and incorporating domain knowledge about route preferences.
Sparse and Redundant Representation Modeling—What Next?

Signal processing relies heavily on data models; these are mathematical constructions imposed on the data source that force a dimensionality reduction of some sort. The vast activity in signal processing during the past decades is essentially driven by an evolution of these models and their use in practice. In that respect, the past decade has been certainly the era of sparse and redundant representations, a popular and highly effective data model. This very appealing model led to a long series of intriguing theoretical and numerical questions, and to many innovative ideas that harness this model to real engineering problems. The new entries recently added to the IEEE-SPL EDICS reflect the popularity of this model and its impact on signal processing research and practice. Despite the huge success of this model so far, this field is still at its infancy, with many unanswered questions still remaining. This paper1 offers a brief presentation of the story of sparse and redundant representation modeling and its impact, and outlines ten key future research directions in this field.
E-BACH: Entropy-Based Clustering Hierarchy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Environmental wireless sensor networks are usually composed of a large group of cooperating wireless sensor nodes spread over an area of interest. They often operate in remote locations and thus must be designed for energy-efficiency and reliability. At the same time, their deployment and operational characteristics must correspond to the spatial distribution of the phenomena of interest. There are a number of approaches that attempt to resolve this trade-off between energy consumption and quality of collected data. Most of them concentrate directly on energy efficiency and communication aspects of network operation. In this contribution, we propose a new method that uses data quality as the primary goal of network optimization. Based on the concept of data entropy, it develops a hierarchical heterogeneous network where individual nodes sample the measured quantities according to the potential information gain. This can be used to save energy by lowering sampling rates of nodes at location with low variability of monitored variables or high correlation with other nodes.
The Importance of Noise in Strongly Coupled Small Inhibitory Neuronal Networks : Theoretical Effects in the Hermissenda Eye

Neural information processing may depend importantly on the ability of a network to vary its firing rate continuously in response to continuous changes in its input. In strongly inhibitory networks of oscillating neurons, subsets of neurons that are intrinsically more active can silence the rest of the neural population. If excitatory drive is increased to the whole network, the silenced neurons may become active and inhibit the silencing neurons, thereby slowing the firing rate of the silencers. This leads to a non-monotonic relationship between excitatory input and output firing rate of the network. The presence of noise in the network can disrupt this non-monotonic relationship by disallowing the more active subset of neurons from completely silencing the rest of the network, thereby producing continuous responses in network behavior.
A clp Gene Homologue Belonging to the Crp Gene Family Globally Regulates Lytic Enzyme Production, Antimicrobial Activity, and Biological Control Activity Expressed by Lysobacter enzymogenes Strain C3

ABSTRACT Lysobacter enzymogenes strain C3, a biological control agent for plant diseases, produces multiple extracellular hydrolytic enzymes and displays antimicrobial activity against various fungal and oomycetous species. However, little is known about the regulation of these enzymes or their roles in antimicrobial activity and biocontrol. A study was undertaken to identify mutants of strain C3 affected in extracellular enzyme production and to evaluate their biocontrol efficacy. A single mini-Tn5-lacZ1-cat transposon mutant of L. enzymogenes strain C3 that was globally affected in a variety of phenotypes was isolated. In this mutant, 5E4, the activities of several extracellular lytic enzymes, gliding motility, and in vitro antimicrobial activity were reduced. Characterization of 5E4 indicated that the transposon inserted in a clp gene homologue belonging to the Crp gene family of regulators. Immediately downstream was a second open reading frame similar to that encoding acetyltransferases belonging to the Gcn5-related N-acetyltransferase superfamily, which reverse transcription-PCR confirmed was cotranscribed with clp. Chromosomal deletion mutants with mutations in clp and between clp and the acetyltransferase gene verified the 5E4 mutant phenotype. The clp gene was chromosomally inserted in mutant 5E4, resulting in complemented strain P1. All mutant phenotypes were restored in P1, although the gliding motility was observed to be excessive compared with that of the wild-type strain. clp mutant strains were significantly affected in biological control of pythium damping-off of sugar beet and bipolaris leaf spot of tall fescue, which was partially or fully restored in the complemented strain P1. These results indicate that clp is a global regulatory gene that controls biocontrol traits expressed by L. enzymogenes C3.
Solving Concurrent Markov Decision Processes

Typically, Markov decision problems (MDPs) assume a single action is executed per decision epoch, but in the real world one may frequently execute certain actions in parallel. This paper explores concurrent MDPs, MDPs which allow multiple non-conflicting actions to be executed simultaneously, and presents two new algorithms. Our first approach exploits two provably sound pruning rules, and thus guarantees solution optimality. Our second technique is a fast, sampling-based algorithm, which produces c1ose-to-optimal solutions extremely quickly. Experiments show that our approaches outperform the existing algorithms producing up to two orders of magnitude speedup.
Tying Hands Versus Sticky Fingers : Credible Commitment in Authoritarian Regimes

Recent work on authoritarian regimes has explored how rulers use institutional reforms to solve their inherent commitment problems. In times of crisis, autocrats have various tools to pacify or co-opt the opposition. Depending on the severity of the threat, however, the promise of future transfers and other distributive payments may not be su cient. Given the autocrat’s capacity to defect in the future, such a promise is ultimately incredible. The autocrat may simply wait until the protests abate and then return to their previous distributive policy. According to conventional wisdom, solving this dynamic commitment problem requires an institutional mechanism to tie the ruler’s hands. In the following paper, I challenge this literature, arguing that these accounts ignore the role of non-institutional and informal commitment devices. I present a Markov model of regime change and show how rulers can credibly commit, absent any institutional reform, by o↵ering public sector jobs as a form of private goods. In contrast to fiscal transfers or consumption subsidies, public jobs are sticky and thus provide the ruler with a means to (more) credibly promise future redistribution. While no job is entirely safe, firing public sector workers comes at a high cost. By increasing the public sector, the autocrat can raise the costs of future defection, thereby making today’s promises more credible and helping buy-o↵ the opposition without formal institutional change. The model demonstrates the conditions under which a ruler will swallow a poison pill, inflating the public sector today– and thus introducing profound labor market ine ciencies– to credibly commit to future redistribution tomorrow. As such, it o↵ers an alternative account for the robustness of authoritarian regimes, especially those most unconstrained, like the absolutist monarchies of the rentier Arab Gulf.
Achieving Budget-Balance with Vickrey-Based Payment Schemes in Exchanges

Generalized Vickrey mechanisms have received wide attention in the literature because they are efficient and strategy-proof, i.e. truthful bidding is optimal whatever the bids of other agents. However it is well-known that it is impossible for an exchange, with multiple buyers and sellers, to be efficient and budget-balanced, even putting strategy-proofness to one side. A market-maker in an efficient exchange must make more payments than it collects. We enforce budget-balance as a hard constraint, and explore payment rules to distribute surplus after an exchange clears to minimize distance to Vickrey payments. Different rules lead to different levels of truth-revelation and efficiency. Experimental and theoretical analysis suggest a simple Threshold scheme, which gives surplus to agents with payments further than a certain threshold value from their Vickrey payments. The scheme appears able to exploit agent uncertainty about bids from other agents to reduce manipulation and boost allocative efficiency in comparison with other simple rules.
Procedural multiresolution for plant and tree rendering

Modeling and rendering of plants and trees requires generating and processing large numbers of polygons. Geometry simplification methods may be used to reduce the polygon count and obtain a multiresolution representation. However, those methods fail to preserve the visual structure of a tree. We propose a different approach: procedural multiresolution. We build procedural models that reflect a tree's visual structure at different resolution levels. The models are based on parametric L-systems. Our method takes a parametric chain representing a tree and generates a new chain with embedded multiresolution information. The algorithm is based on a metric that quantifies the relevance of the branches of a tree. The representation supports efficient geometry extraction and produces good visual results.
Travail, affection et pouvoir dans les groupes restreints

Les groupes restreints ont ete et seront au coeur de nos vies pendant toute notre existence et, pourtant, c'est depuis moins d'un siecle que chercheurs et theoriciens se penchent sur les rouages complexes de leur developpement. Cet ouvrage propose un modele qui postule la presence, dans tout groupe restreint, de trois zones dynamiques, les zones du travail, de l'affection et du pouvoir. L'evolution du groupe se joue donc dans ces trois zones, chacune comportant ses enjeux specifiques : pour la zone du travail, ils ont trait a la structuration du travail et a la mise en place d'un reseau de relations de travail satisfaisant pour ses membres ; pour la zone de l'affection, il s'agit de l'etablissement du reseau des relations affectives entre les membres et du developpement de la cohesion groupale ; pour la zone du pouvoir, les enjeux portent sur l'emergence et la consolidation d'une structure de pouvoir et d'un leadership relativement stables. Travail, affection et pouvoir dans les groupes restreints interessera autant la communaute des gestionnaires que les psychosociologues, psychologues, travailleurs sociaux et specialistes de l'animation et de la formation en groupe en leur fournissant un modele qui integre l'ensemble des phenomenes et processus groupaux que la recherche et l'intervention ont jusqu'a maintenant mis au jour.
Superimposed Training-Aided Channel Estimation for Multiple Input Multiple Output-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Systems over High-Mobility Environment

The combination of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) can achieve a lower error rate and/or enable highcapacity wireless communication systems by flexibly exploiting diversity gain and/or the spatial multiplexing gains. Such systems, however, rely upon the knowledge of propagation channels. In many mobile communication systems, transmission is impaired by both delay and Doppler spreads [1]-[7]. In such cases, explicit incorporation of the time-varying characteristics of mobile wireless channel is called for.
Developing Secure Objects

Distributed object systems are increasingly popular, and considerable effort is being expended to develop standards for interaction between objects. Some high-level requirements for secure distributed object interaction have been identified. However, there are no guidelines for developing the secure objects themselves. Some aspects of object-oriented design do not translate directly to traditional methods of developing secure systems. In this paper, we identify features of object oriented design that affect secure system development. In addition, we explore ways to derive secure object libraries from existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) class libraries that lack security, and provide techniques for developing secure COTS libraries with easily modifiable security policies.
Face Expression Recognition Based on Feature Fusion

The traditional Gabor transform need calculate convolution with whole image when extract expression feature. So, the feature dimensions are very large and computation complexity is very high. Though some improved methods can reduce the feature dimensions and computing cost by manually marking out the feature points, but those methods need intense human intervention and can not meet to the need of automatic recognition. In This paper, a new face expression recognition method are proposed based on feature fusion which combines the Gabor transform and ASM automatic feature orientation technology. Firstly, ASM technology is used to locate the feature point of a face shape. And then Gabor feature of feature point are extracted by using Gabor transform. Finally, the two feature sets are fused to implement the face expression recognition. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively utilize the local texture information and global shape information of expression and get better recognition effect.
Technology Mapping Using Fuzzy Logic

This paper presents a placement-driven technology mapping procedure based on fuzzy delay curves. The fuzziness has been introduced to deal with the inherent vagueness in wiring loads (derived from a dynamically updated placement) and used by the mapper to calculate the signal arrival times. In the process we describe a number of fuzzy operations which are needed to generate the fuzzy delay curves and to select a minimum area mapping solution satisfying a set of timing constraints. This procedure has been implemented and the results are on average 1% and 26% (5% and 3%)better in terms of area and delay compared to a technology mapping procedure with zero (crisp) wire load values.
Handset-Based Monitoring of Mobile Subscribers

No handset-based data on mobile subscriber behavior has been available earlier. The new monitoring software developed for Symbian smartphones provides a possibility for the fist time to obtain accurate usage-level data, making both descriptive comparisons and strict statistical analyses on various usage-level factors viable. The study finds that the WCDMA technology has positive effects on the usage of packet data services. In addition, it seems that the usage of new advanced services is best explained by demographic factors, whereas the conventional service usage can be predicted by simply measuring earlier usage activity. In addition, 3rd party application usage seems promising. From the business perspective the study suggests that advanced handsets have an effect on the data usage patterns, and that smartphone customization with e.g. 3rd party applications is perceived very important among subscribers. The monitoring platform also supports regulatory studies.
Mātārere: a Layered Framework for Specifying Event‐based Systems

Event‐based systems (EBS) have received increasing attention in the past decade from various communities. Central to these systems is the notion of event, which is often considered as ”a happening of interest”. An EBS encompasses a large range of functionalities on various technological levels (e.g., language, execution, or communication). Many approaches exist to handle events and the solutions are not always either defined on a clear level or well understood. This is mainly due to the difference between the communities that tackle the issues, which also leads to some confusion in the terminology. The notion of events itself is often not clearly defined and varies from one approach to the other. This paper presents Mātārere, a layer decomposition of a generic EBS into levels of abstraction. The goal of the solution proposed here is threefold: (1) provide unifying terminology, (2) understand better the various existing approaches which take place on different levels, and (3) offer some support to build an EBS using this uniform framework. A strength of our approach lies in the consideration of recursion ‐ in the sense that all layers may repeat themselves on different system levels ‐ allowing a better modeling of complex event‐based systems.