Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-time EKF SLAM System Using Confidence Map Of Depth Information

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a technique to computationally construct or update a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously tracking a system’s location within the environment. In particular, vision-based SLAM employs a visual camera as a primary sensor. This system attempts to perform simultaneous tracking and feature mapping without additional sensing units, such as a laser sensor, gyroscope, and accelerometers. Stereo-based SLAM employs a stereo rig as the sensing unit, in which a pair of cameras is equipped so that it provides depth information acquired from binocular disparity. In this paper, we introduce a visual SLAM system using a confidence map of the depth estimates of feature points. The confidence map is used as a reliability measure of depth estimates by stereo vision. The experimental results show that the proposed system can obtain stable performance in a dynamic environment.
Intrathecal morphine analgesia after cervical and thoracic spinal cord tumor surgery.

OBJECT The aim of this study was to provide evidence for the effect of intrathecal morphine application after spinal cord tumor resection. METHODS Twenty patients participated in a prospective open proof-of-concept study. During dural closure, morphine (7 μg/kg) was injected into the subarachnoid space. All patients were monitored in an intensive care setting postoperatively. Pain, additional opioids given, and vital parameters were recorded. RESULTS Six patients received a mean morphine dose of 365 μg between C-3 and C-7 and 14 patients received a mean dose of 436 μg between T-2 and T-12. In the cervical and thoracic groups, the mean Numeric Rating Scale score was highest upon intensive care unit admission (1.2 and 2.5, respectively) and declined at 12 hours (0.5 and 0.8, respectively). Minimal extra morphine was required. Minor side effects occurred without consequence. CONCLUSIONS Intrathecal morphine for postoperative analgesia after resection of cervical and thoracic spinal cord tumors is effective and safe. These preliminary results require confirmation by larger comparative studies and further clinical experience.
Multi-Elimination ILU Preconditioners on GPUs

Iterative solvers for sparse linear systems often benefit from using preconditioners. While there are implementations for many iterative methods that leverage the computing power of accelerators, porting the latest developments in preconditioners to accelerators has been challenging. In this paper we develop a selfadaptive multi-elimination preconditioner for graphics processing units (GPUs). The preconditioner is based on a multi-level incomplete LU factorization and uses a direct dense solver for the bottom-level system. For test matrices from the University of Florida matrix collection, we investigate the influence of handling the triangular solvers in the distinct iteration steps in either single or double precision arithmetic. Integrated into a Conjugate Gradient method, we show that our multi-elimination algorithm is highly competitive against popular preconditioners, including multi-colored symmetric Gauss-Seidel relaxation preconditioners, and (multi-colored symmetric) ILU for numerous problems.
Fail pattern identification for memory built-in self-repair

With the advent of deep submicron technology and system-on-chip (SOC) design methodology, we are seeing on-chip memory cores to represent a growing percentage of the chip area. The yield of an SOC is usually dominated by the memory yield, so the improvement of memory yield is crucial in SOC development. In this work, we propose a built-in self-repair (BISR) scheme for memory yield improving. The novelty of our approach is that we can identify the fail patterns so that appropriate spare elements (e.g., spare rows, columns, words, or blocks) can be allocated to repair the defective memory. Some BISR methods are discussed and compared. We select the scheme that uses fewer spare elements than others given the same repair rate. The area overhead of the BISR scheme is only 2.2% for an 8K/spl times/64 memory.
Effect of Diet-Induced Vitamin D Deficiency on Rotator Cuff Healing in a Rat Model

Background: Few studies have considered hormonal influences, particularly vitamin D, on healing. Hypothesis: Vitamin D deficiency would have a negative effect on the structure of the healing tendon-bone interface in a rat model and would result in decreased tendon attachment strength. Study Design: Controlled laboratory study. Methods: Vitamin D deficiency was induced in 28 male Sprague-Dawley rats using a specialized vitamin D–deficient diet and ultraviolet light restriction. Serum levels of vitamin D were measured after 6 weeks. These vitamin D–deficient animals (experimental group) plus 32 rats with normal vitamin D levels (controls) underwent unilateral detachment of the right supraspinatus tendon from the greater tuberosity of the humerus, followed by immediate repair using bone tunnel suture fixation. The animals were sacrificed at 2- and 4-week intervals after surgery for biomechanical analysis. A paired t test was used to compare serum vitamin D levels at day 0 and at 6 weeks. A nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare load-to-failure and stiffness values between the experimental group and controls. Bone density and new bone formation at the tendon insertion site on the greater tuberosity were assessed with micro–computed tomography (CT). The organization of collagen tissue, new bone formation, vascularity at the tendon-bone interface, fibrocartilage at the tendon-bone interface, and collagen fiber continuity between the tendon and bone tissue were evaluated with safranin O and picrosirius red staining. Results: Blood draws confirmed vitamin D deficiency at 6 weeks compared with time zero/baseline for rats in the experimental group (10.9 ng/mL vs 6.5 ng/mL, respectively; P < .001). Biomechanical testing demonstrated a significant decrease in load to failure in the experimental group compared with controls at 2 weeks (5.8 ± 2.0 N vs 10.5 ± 4.4 N, respectively; P < .006). There was no difference in stiffness at 2 weeks between the control and experimental groups. At 4 weeks, there was no significant difference in load to failure or stiffness between the control and experimental groups. Histological analysis showed less bone formation and less collagen fiber organization in the vitamin D–deficient specimens at 4 weeks as compared with controls. Micro-CT analysis showed no significant difference between groups for total mineral density and bone volume fraction of cortical, whole, or trabecular bone at 4 weeks. Conclusion: The biomechanical and histological data from this study suggest that low vitamin D levels may negatively affect early healing at the rotator cuff repair site. Clinical Relevance: It is estimated that 1 billion people worldwide are vitamin D deficient. In the deficient state, acutely injured rotator cuffs may have a reduced ability for tendon healing. Further studies are needed to determine the exact mechanism by which vitamin D affects tendon healing and whether vitamin D supplementation can improve rotator cuff tendon healing and reduce the incidence of retears.
A Half-Sized Post-Wall Short-Slot Directional Coupler with Hollow Rectangular Holes in a Dielectric Substrate

The authors realize a 50% length reduction of short-slot couplers in a post-wall dielectric substrate by two techniques. One is to introduce hollow rectangular holes near the side walls of the coupled region. The difference of phase constant between the TE 10 and TE 20 propagating modes increases and the required length to realize a desired dividing ratio is reduced. Another is to remove two reflection-suppressing posts in the coupled region. The length of the coupled region is determined to cancel the reflections at both ends of the coupled region. The total length of a 4-way Butler matrix can be reduced to 48% in comparison with the conventional one and the couplers still maintain good dividing characteristics; the dividing ratio of the hybrid is less than 0.1 dB and the isolations of the couplers are more than 20 dB.
Where Does it Begin? A Comparative Perspective on the Professional Preferences of First‐year Social Work Students

Dr Idit Weiss is a lecturer at the Bob Shapell School of Social Work at Tel Aviv University. Her primary fields of interest are the links between social policy and the social work profession, the development of social work in Israel and the professional ideologies of social workers and social work students. She is currently co-ordinating an international study of the professional preferences and ideologies of social work studies in different countries. E-mail: iditweis@post.tau. ac.il Dr John Gal is a lecturer at the Baerwald School of Social Work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His primary fields of interest are social policy in Israel and a comparative perspective. In recent years he has undertaken research on issues relating to comparative social security, unem ployment, poverty and various aspects of social policy in the Israeli welfare stae. Dr Gal has published widely in scholarly journals and has edited a number of books on social policy in Hebrew and in English. His latest volume, co-edited with Dr Asher Ben-Arieh, is entitled Into the Promised Land: Issues in the Welfare State and is published by Praeger. E-mail: msjgsw@mscc.huji. ac.il Professor Ram A. Cnaan is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work. Dr Cnaan is the author of The Newer Deal: Social Work and Religion in Partnership (Columbia University Press, 1999) and is working on a second book The Invisible Caring Hand: American Congregations and the Provision of Welfare (Rutgers University Press). He is the Director of the Program for the Study of Organized Religion and Social Work at the University of Pennsyl vania School of Social Work. He is also Associate Director of CRRUCS (Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society), University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. Rea Maglajlic is a Ph.D. student at the Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, England. The theme of her Ph.D. dissertation is 'Cross-national Co-operative Inquiry in Social Work Education . She is currently working as a project manager for a Tempus project in Bosnia Herzegovina on Community Mental Health. E-mail: reima-ana.maglajlic@zg.tel. hr
Growing Up with Westerns: Masculinity and The Man from Laramie

I have always loved Westerns. I grew up with them. But I grew up with them in a distinctive way, at a particular time. My childhood Westerns were the technicolour ones of Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. That decade was the high water mark of the genre; and one of its main preoccupations, signi cantly enough, was growing up. What I want to explore here is how a particular childhood, with a speci c pattern of relationships, was partly shaped by early exposure to the cinema as a pre-eminent mode of entertainment; how I learned to see Westerns through the eyes of my father and older brother, and how the depiction of male behaviour in Westerns helped shape my relations with them; and how the experience of seeing one Western, The Man from Laramie, could be described as formative.1 My experience of Westerns was that they were serious. They were not just a matter of goodies versus baddies, cowboys versus Indians, of men in outsize hats trading macho challenges when they were not shooting at each other. This seriousness came partly from my father, who as a left-wing trade unionist saw cowboys as working men and the Western landscape as land stolen from its indigenous population. But it also came from Hollywood itself. The Man from Laramie was a serious Western made by a director (Anthony Mann) who used the genre to explore profound issues of human nature. And Westerns were also serious for me because the whole process of going to the cinema was overwhelming. The cinema was the largest place I had ever been in, and the size of the screen, with its accompanying level of sound, was simply terrifying. It was from the cinema, rather than books, that I learned what little I knew about narrative—at least at the level of character. This was so because the con icts they portrayed seemed to re ect those in my own family. Probably my  rst technicolour Western was Shane (1953). Dad took us to see it when I was about seven. I felt his excitement at seeing the Grand Teton mountains of Wyoming. This was the  rst time I had seen wild mountain scenery, and ever since I have derived great pleasure from the Westerns’ depiction of landscape. But Shane also depicted serious con ict between men, witnessed, moreover, by a young boy trying to make sense of male society. When The Man from Laramie  rst came out in 1955 I was in my eighth year. For a child who had numbed himself as a defence against what Lorna Sage has recently described as the ‘emotional claustrophobia’ of family life, the events depicted in the  lm were a bright, sharp reality. But for me the  lm was more than just a particularly vivid piece of cinema. The male world of my father, from which I felt
ENERGY REDUCTION AND DELAY MINIMIZATION IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS THROUGH ASIPS

Low energy consumption is a major design constraint for battery operated embedded systems such as wireless sensor networks or WSN. Low energy is more important compared to low power for such systems as it will increase lifetime of the system. The major component which can reduce energy is to reduce delay. WSN motes must power sensors, a processor, and a radio for wireless communication over long periods of time, and are therefore particularly sensitive to energy use. Recent techniques for reducing WSN energy consumption, such as aggregation, require additional computation to reduce the cost of sending data by minimizing radio data transmissions. Larger demands on the processor will require more computational energy, but traditional energy reduction approaches, such as multi-core scaling with reduced frequency and voltage may prove heavy handed and ineffective for motes. Instead, application-specific instruction set processor (ASIP) can reduce computational energy consumption by processing operations common to specific applications more efficiently than a general purpose processor. By the nature of their deeply embedded operation, motes support a limited set of applications, and thus the conventional general purpose computing paradigm may not be well-suited to mote operation. Both simple and complex operations can improve performance and use orders of magnitude less energy with ASIPs. This paper examines the design considerations of a ASIP for compressed Bloom filters, a data structure for efficiently storing set membership.
Patterns of Argumentation Strategies across Topics

This paper presents an analysis of argumentation strategies in news editorials within and across topics. Given nearly 29,000 argumentative editorials from the New York Times, we develop two machine learning models, one for determining an editorial’s topic, and one for identifying evidence types in the editorial. Based on the distribution and structure of the identified types, we analyze the usage patterns of argumentation strategies among 12 different topics. We detect several common patterns that provide insights into the manifestation of argumentation strategies. Also, our experiments reveal clear correlations between the topics and the detected patterns.
Topsl : A domain-specific language for on-line surveys

There are currently few choices for social scientists who want to employ web-based surveys in their studies. They can either use a special-purpose language whose notion of flow control may be too limiting to express advanced survey designs, or use a generalpurpose language that gives them the freedom to make complicated survey designs but makes them reimplement infrastructure code for saving questions to disk, generating HTML, and so on with each new survey. In this paper, we introduce Topsl, a domain-specific language embedded in PLT Scheme that takes the middle road, giving survey authors a way to reuse survey infrastructure for new surveys while also allowing them to express complicated survey designs easily.
Rethinking Well-Being in Terms of Affliction and Equanimity: Development of a Holistic Well-Being Scale

This study aimed to validate a self-report assessment instrument developed based on the affliction-equanimity model of holistic well-being. An expert panel developed a pool of items, which were tested through an online questionnaire. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses were conducted. The analyses revealed seven factors related to affliction and equanimity and showed an adequate fit for the first-order seven-factor structure. The factors correlated in expected directions with measures of quality of life, mood, meaning of life, mindfulness, and hope. Results showed the 30-item Holistic Well-Being Scale had good psychometric properties and validity, and suggested its usefulness in future studies of holistic well-being.
Demo: UHD live video streaming with a real-time scalable HEVC encoder

In this paper we present a real-time streaming demonstration with a multi-layer architecture of a pipelined software High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) encoders with inter-layer prediction enabling Scalable HEVC (SHVC) encodings. This SHVC encoder is implemented on an innovative platform performing real-time encodings that already demonstrated promising performance with HDR, HFR and SHVC implementation in previous demonstrations [1], [2]. The transmitted content consists of a spatial SHVC bitstream composed of a High Definition (HD) Base Layer (BL) and an Ultra HD (UHD) Enhancement Layer (EL). The encoder reads an UHD video sequences through Serial Digital Interface (SDI) ports and broadcasts the SHVC bitstream through an Internet Protocol (IP) channel. The bitstream is then decoded using a GPAC player with a real-time decoder.
In response to these implementation and assessment difficulties , we are developing a web-based learning environment

We present Science Assistments, an interactive environment, which assesses students’ inquiry skills as they engage in inquiry using science microworlds. We frame our variables, tasks, assessments, and methods of analyzing data in terms of evidence-centered design. Specifically, we focus on the student model, the task model, and the evidence model in the conceptual assessment framework. In order to support both assessment and the provision of scaffolding, the environment makes inferences about student inquiry skills using models developed through a combination of text replay tagging [cf. Sao Pedro et al. 2011], a method for rapid manual coding of student log files, and educational data mining. Models were developed for multiple inquiry skills, with particular focus on detecting if students are testing their articulated hypotheses, and if they are designing controlled experiments. Student-level cross-validation was applied to validate that this approach can automatically and accurately identify these inquiry skills for new students. The resulting detectors also can be applied at run-time to drive scaffolding intervention.
Gimme' the context: context-driven automatic semantic annotation with C-PANKOW

Without the proliferation of formal semantic annotations, the Semantic Web is certainly doomed to failure. In earlier work we presented a new paradigm to avoid this: the 'Self Annotating Web', in which globally available knowledge is used to annotate resources such as web pages. In particular, we presented a concrete method instantiating this paradigm, called PANKOW (Pattern-based ANnotation through Knowledge On the Web). In PANKOW, a named entity to be annotated is put into several linguistic patterns that convey competing semantic meanings. The patterns that are matched most often on the Web indicate the meaning of the named entity --- leading to automatic or semi-automatic annotation.In this paper we present C-PANKOW (Context-driven PANKOW), which alleviates several shortcomings of PANKOW. First, by downloading abstracts and processing them off-line, we avoid the generation of large number of linguistic patterns and correspondingly large number of Google queries.Second, by linguistically analyzing and normalizing the downloaded abstracts, we increase the coverage of our pattern matching mechanism and overcome several limitations of the earlier pattern generation process. Third, we use the annotation context in order to distinguish the significance of a pattern match for the given annotation task. Our experiments show that C-PANKOW inherits all the advantages of PANKOW (no training required etc.), but in addition it is far more efficient and effective.
Mouse Model for Pre‐Clinical Study of Human Cancer Immunotherapy

This unit describes protocols for developing tumors in mice, including subcutaneous growth, pulmonary metastases of B16 melanoma, and spontaneous melanoma in B‐Raf V600E/PTEN deletion transgenic mouse models. Two immunization methods to prevent B16 tumor growth are described using B16.GM‐CSF and recombinant vaccinia virus. A therapeutic approach is also included that uses adoptive transfer of tumor antigen–specific T cells. Methods including CTL induction, isolation, testing, and genetic modification of mouse T cells for adoptive transfer by using retrovirus‐expressing genes of interest are provided. Additional sections, including growing B16 melanoma, enumerating pulmonary metastases, tumor imaging technique, and use of recombinant viruses for vaccination, are discussed together with safety concerns. © 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Buffer-Safe and Cost-Driven Communication Optimization

This paper presents a new approach for optimizing communication of data parallel programs. Our techniques are based on unidirectional bit-vector data flow analyses that enable vectorizing, coalescing and aggregating communication, and overlapping communication with computation both within and across loop nests. Previous techniques are based on fixed communication optimization strategies whose quality is very sensitive to changes of machine and problem sizes. Our algorithm is novel in that we carefully examine tradeoffs between enhancing communication latency hiding and reducing the number and volume of messages by systematically evaluating a reasonable set of promising communication placements for a given program covering several (possibly conflicting) communication guiding profit motives. We useP3T, a state-of-the-art performance estimator, to ensure communication buffer safety and to find the best communication placement of all created ones. First results show that our method implies a significant reduction in communication costs and demonstrate the effectiveness of this analysis in improving the performance of programs.
The Importance of Social Movements

This discussion was conducted with Professor Alain Touraine by Tim Jordan on 20 September in Paris. The discussion has been divided into headings that correspond to the areas of questions that were asked. The social context for the discussion is important in understanding Professor Touraine's comments because the discussion occurred 9 days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks but before the bombing of Afghanistan began and with no chance of knowing what would follow.
Towards a Malay Derivational Lexicon: Learning Affixes Using Expectation Maximization

We propose an unsupervised training method to guide the learning of Malay derivational morphology from a set of morphological segmentations produced by a na¨ ive morphological analyzer. Using a morphology-based language model, we first estimate the probability of a given segmentation. We train the model with EM to find the segmentation that maxi- mizes the probability of each morpheme. We extract the set of affix patterns pro- duced by our algorithm and evaluate them against two references: a list of affix pat- terns extracted from our hand-segmented derivational wordlist and a derivational history produced by a stemmer.