Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Visual self-motion feedback affects the sense of self in virtual reality

We assessed how self-motion affects the visual representation of the self. We constructed a novel virtual reality experiment that systematically varied an avatar’s motion and also biological sex. Participants were presented with pairs of avatars that visually represented the participant (“self avatar”), or another person (“opposite avatar”). Avatar motion either corresponded with the participant’s motion, or was decoupled from the participant’s motion. The results show that participants identified with i) “self avatars” over “opposite avatars”, ii) avatars moving congruently with self-motion over incongruent motion, and importantly iii) identification with the “opposite avatar” over the “self avatar” when the opposite avatar’s motion was congruent with self-motion. Our results suggest that both self-motion and biological sex are relevant to the body schema and body image and that congruent bottom-up visual feedback of self-motion is particularly important for the sense of self and capable of overriding top-down self-identification factors such as biological sex.
Long-Term Stabilization of Temporal and Spectral Drifts of a Burst-Mode OPCPA System

We demonstrate a stabilization system for temporal and spectral drifts of an OPCPA pump-probe laser at the FLASH soft-x-ray FEL-facility. We achieve drifts of 5.7fs rms and 3.2nm rms, respectively over two days. © 2019 The Author(s)
Conclusion : Reconstructing and Modelling Past Oceans Paleoceanography of the Late Cenozoic ( Elsevier ) Volume 1 : Methods in Late Cenozoic Paleoceanography

The science of reconstructing past climates has evolved rapidly over the past three decades. Having started as a subdiscipline of geology and geochemistry [Imbrie and Imbrie, 1979], it is today an interdisciplinary research field which unifies a large international scientific community. Some of the most innovative and suprising research in this field has important implications for future climate change. As such, paleoscience is today recognized as being of great relevance to societal concerns. For example, ice core analyzes revealed that greenhouse gas levels are higher today than they have been for hundreds of thousands of years. In other words, anthropogenic impacts are pushing the climate system towards a state for which there is no “reference climate” in paleo records of the Quaternary. Therefore a better understanding of the climate system and feedbacks within the climate system is crucial for our future. Another disconcerting finding of paleoresearch is the fact that the climate system is highly non-linear: in the past, rapid and large amplitude climate change has occured in response to slowly varying, small amplitude forcing. It is critical that policy makers understand what paleoscience has to say about rapid climate change in order to fully understand the significance of future rapid climate change. The UN-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes the importance of understanding past climate change to predict future climate scenarios and has devoted an entire chapter in the fourth assessment report (AR4) to paleoclimates. The ocean’s high heat capacity and its ability to transport energy and to sequester and release greenhouse gases give it an important role in helping to determine the state of the planet’s climate. Compared to the atmosphere, the ocean has a long response time to perturbations and this makes it a key player in climate change on timescales of hundreds to ten thousands of years. Thus, paleoceanography is a crucial component of paleoclimatic research.
Edge Detection from RGB-D Image Based on Structured Forests

This paper looks into the fundamental problem in computer vision: edge detection. We propose a new edge detector using structured random forests as the classifier, which can make full use of RGB-D image information from Kinect. Before classification, the adaptive bilateral filter is used for the denoising processing of the depth image. As data sources, information of 13 channels from RGB-D image is computed. In order to train the random forest classifier, the approximation measurement of the information gain is used. All the structured labels at a given node are mapped to a discrete set of labels using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method. NYUD2 dataset is used to train our structured random forests. The random forest algorithm is used to classify the RGB-D image information for extracting the edge of the image. In addition to the proposed methodology, the quantitative comparisons of different algorithms are presented. The results of the experiments demonstrate the significant improvements of our algorithm over the state of the art.
A Survey on the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem: Variants and Solution Approaches

In order to ensure high-quality and on-time delivery in logistic distribution processes, it is necessary to efficiently manage the delivery fleet. Nowadays, due to the new policies and regulations related to greenhouse gas emission in the transport sector, logistic companies are paying higher penalties for each emission gram of CO2/km. With electric vehicle market penetration, many companies are evaluating the integration of electric vehicles in their fleet, as they do not have local greenhouse gas emissions, produce minimal noise, and are independent of the fluctuating oil price. The well-researched vehicle routing problem (VRP) is extended to the electric vehicle routing problem (E-VRP), which takes into account specific characteristics of electric vehicles. In this paper, a literature review on recent developments regarding the E-VRP is presented. The challenges that emerged with the integration of electric vehicles in the delivery processes are described, together with electric vehicle characteristics and recent energy consumption models. Several variants of the E-VRP and related problems are observed. To cope with the new routing challenges in E-VRP, efficient VRP heuristics and metaheuristics had to be adapted. An overview of the state-of-the-art procedures for solving the E-VRP and related problems is presented.
Shading- and highlight-invariant color image segmentation using the MPC algorithm

Anew color image segmentation algorithm is presented in this paper. This algorithm is invariant to highlights and shading. This is accomplished in two steps. First, the average pixel intensity is removed form each RGB coordinate. This transformation mitigates the effects of highlights. Next, the Mixture of Principal Components algorithm is used to perform the segmentation. The MPC is implicitly invariant to shading due to the inner vector product or vector angle being used as similarity measure. Since the new coordinate system contains negative numbers, it is necessary to modify the MPC algorithm since in its original form it does not distinguish between positive and negative color space coordinates. Results on artificial and real images illustrate the effectiveness of the method. Finally, the use of the total within-cluster variance is investigated as possible criterion for selecting the number of clusters for the new algorithm.
Resource Sharing Behavior in a Socialized Peer-to-Peer Internet Environment

Retrieving resources which are interesting, useful, relevant, and valuable to users is always a challenge for researchers and vendors of Information Retrieval in a Peer-to-Peer (P2PIR) environment. Current research of document-based P2PIR focused mainly on the feasibility of extending IR operations and the concept of social network analysis (SNA) has been adopted as a methodology to model interrelationships among actors in ad hoc environments. The authors demonstrate the possibility to discover characteristics of users in a P2P environment by means of the Zipf long-tail distribution. It can efficiently categorize the shared information with small portions of its contents. The results indicate that for any document corpus shared by users in a P2P environment the long-tail distribution applies also. Since behavioral profiles of users can be systematically and efficiently discovered by analysis based on the long-tail distribution, the research result of this socialized approach to resource discovery in a P2P environment can provide a feasible and efficient solution.
Situation awareness in airport environment based on Semantic Web technologies

In the present paper the authors show how the application of Semantic Web technologies, i.e. ontology and rule languages, can be used to describe situations and enhance situation awareness providing also suggested actions to the human operator in a data fusion architecture aimed at airport security. The paper presents the ontology design, i.e. main classes and relationship, and the possible roles for situation categorization including the application of rules. In addition, an insight of alternative options including their pros and cons in terms of representation expressivity and complexity, is provided. An analysis of the architectural issues and their impacts considering available technologies and their limitations have been included in the present paper. In order to validate the proposed approach both from the representation and from the complexity point of view, a comparison with a well-established framework, i.e. Situation Ontology developed by Vistology, has been carried out in terms of language complexity and dynamic behaviour in order to assess the performance and limits of the proposed system.
PaCGEN: Automatic system for critical path selection based on multiple parameters

Path delay faults are tested via selected critical paths in a tested digital circuit. The critical paths can be specified e.g. by static timing analysis (STA), dynamic timing analysis (DTA) and others. Many parameters such as multiple input switching, power supply noise, type of propagated signal edge (rising, falling) and others affecting the signal delay propagation and thus they can increase path criticality. The impact of each parameter to the path delay faults has been solved and published in some papers but their joint effects should be also investigated. A new general technique for path criticality calculation based on influence of multiple parameters, STA and new defined formula for path criticality calculation has been proposed. A new automatic system, named PaCGen, for critical paths selection is presented in the paper.
Remotely Sensing Image Fusion Based on Wavelet Transform and Human Vision System

Wavelet transform has many good characteristics, used extensively in image fusion. In recent years, many algorithms have been developed, but there exist some inherent defects such as image blur, burr phenomenon, zigzag boundaries and image discontinuity. In this theory, without considering disadvantages of HVS, especially fused image should preserve brightness and texture features which are the most sensitive to eye, so a new algorithm combining them is proposed. Firstly, by calculating brightness and texture metrics in different wavelet decomposition subimages. And then, by using root mean square rule to get fused low frequency and high frequency coefficients respectively. Finally, performing inverse wavelet transform by the concatenation of low frequency and high frequency to gain fused image. In order to evaluate different algorithms, the assessment metric based on HVS is adopted, which is a more comprehensive and effective measure. Experiments merging IKONOS Pan image(resolution is 1 meter) with multispectral image (resolution is 4 meter) show that the proposed algorithm is the best on brightness, contrast, texture, definition, resolution, object edge regardness of visual effect and objective metric, also verifing human visual characteristic to be considered in image fusion.
Topic Maps e-Learning Portal Development.

Topic Maps, ISO/IEC 13250 standard, are designed to facilitate the organization and navigation of large collections of information objects by creating meta-level perspectives of their underlying concepts and relationships. The underlying structure of concepts and relations is expressed by domain ontologies. The Topics Maps technology can become the core of an e-learning portal that will integrate different kinds of information and knowledge resources, available in the educational institution – this idea was explored in the Ph.D. dissertation of the author. The offered portal solution promises to bring advantages both for content consumers (students) and content providers (teachers, administrative staff), but numerous problems hinder the practical implementation of this portal and therefore it requires certain changes in the functioning of the educational institution and asks teachers, teaching assistants and e-courses designers to change their routines and to develop new skills. In the paper we offer a new methodology for development and maintenance of the Topic Maps e-learning portal and we briefly present a pilot application.
A Gender-specific Role For Phosphatidylethanolamine N-Methyltransferase-derived Phosphatidylcholine in the Regulation of Plasma High Density and Very Low Density Lipoproteins in Mice*

Phosphatidylethanolamine N-methyltransferase (PEMT)is involved in a secondary pathway for production of phosphatidylcholine (PC) in liver. We fed Pemt–/–mice a high fat/high cholesterol diet for 3 weeks to determine whether or not PC derived from PEMT is required for very low density lipoprotein secretion. Lipid analyses of plasma and liver indicated that male Pemt–/– mice accumulated triacylglycerols in their livers and were unable to secrete the same amount of triacylglycerols from the liver as did Pemt+/+ mice. Plasma levels of triacylglycerol and both apolipoproteins B100 and B48 were significantly decreased only in male Pemt–/– mice. Experiments in which mice were injected with Triton WR1339 showed that, whereas hepatic apoB100 secretion was decreased in male Pemt–/– mice, the decrease in plasma apoB48 in male Pemt–/– mice was not due to reduced secretion. Moreover, female and, to a lesser extent, male Pemt–/– mice showed a striking 40% decrease in plasma PC and cholesterol in high density lipoproteins. These results suggest that, even though the content of hepatic PC was normal in PEMT-deficient mice, plasma lipoprotein levels were profoundly altered in a gender-specific manner.
Bamboo-Preliminary scaling results on multiple hybrid nodes of Knights Corner and Sandy Bridge processors

We discuss our experience in using Bamboo to automatically optimize a stencil method on an Intel Xeon Phi-based cluster. We describe our solutions to three challenges: tolerating the high cost of inter-node communication, mapping program parallelism to multicore and many-core processors, and balancing workloads on-node across heterogeneous resources. We present results on TACC’s Stampede system. While details of how to optimize stencil methods will differ from that of other applications motifs, the 3 issues we have brought up will apply as well. Keywords—MIC, Intel Xeon Phi, data-driven, virtualization, latency hiding, load balancing, heterogeneity.
An improved P2P file system scheme based on IPFS and Blockchain

IPFS [1] is a peer-to-peer version controlled filesystem that synthesizes learnings from many previous successful systems. IPFS combines a distributed Hash table, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace [1]. IPFS is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open. According to the characteristics of IPFS, we propose an improved P2P file system scheme based on IPFS and Blockchain. We address the high-throughput problem for individual users in IPFS by introducing the role of content service providers. Consider data reliability and availability, storage overhead and other issues for service providers, we provide a novel zigzag-based storage model to improve the block storage model that IPFS provides. Moreover, we introduce blockchain to combine IPFS with this storage model. According to analysis, this proposed scheme can effectively solve the above problems.
LA NATURE CONCURRENTIELLE DE L’INDUSTRIE BANCAIRE MAROCAINE (2006–15) APPLICATION DU MODELE PANZAR & ROSSE

Cet article analyse l’evolution de la nature concurrentielle du marche bancaire marocain selon la methode de Panzar & Rosse (1987). Il exploite des donnees de Panel a deux periodes : 2006-10 et 2010-15. Ses resultats renforcent ceux des etudes empiriques precedentes surtout ceux de Bikker J. et al. , (2006), Stijn C. , (2009) et Hakam A, Filali A. F. , et Firano Z. , (2011). Ils confirment que la situation concurrentielle de l’industrie bancaire marocaine est une concurrence monopolistique a tendance de plus en plus concurrentielle durant les annees 2006 jusqu’a 2014. Le secteur reagissait donc, surtout vers la fin de la periode d’analyse, a la concurrence potentielle due notamment, entre autres, a l’arrivee des banques participatives.
Técnicas Baseadas em Subespaço para Reconstrução de Faces Parcialmente Ocluídas: Um Estudo Comparativo

Os sistemas de reconhecimento facial em ambientes nao controlados precisam lidar com variacoes de iluminacao, pose, expressao e oclusao, as quais introduzem variacoes intraclasse e degradam a performance de reconhecimento, diferentemente dos ambientes controlados que apresentam resultados satisfatorios. Comparada com problemas de pose, iluminacao e expressao, o problema relacionado a oclusao e relativamente pouco estudado na area. Na literatura existem algumas tecnicas baseadas em PCA que tem sido aplicadas ao problema de oclusao. No entanto, nao existe um estudo apresentando os pros e contras de cada variacao. Este trabalho visa apresentar um estudo comparativo envolvendo tecnicas baseadas em subespaco para a tarefa de reconstrucao de faces parcialmente ocluidas.
GLOBAL STRATEGIES FOR OPTIMIZING THE RELIABILITY AND PERFORMANCE OF U.S. ARMY MOBILE POWER TRANSFER SYSTEMS

Abstract : As the U.S. Army develops its 30-year science and technology strategy for ground systems, these systems are seen more as mobile power generation systems than just semi-autonomous mobile protection systems. As ground systems continue to have greater levels of electrification, they are perceived as key to providing power not only to the propulsion and mobility systems, but to protection systems, communications, information systems and a complex, ever-increasing suite of auxiliary power systems which are not limited to the vehicle platform itself, but to external systems and platforms. All power systems can be connected wirelessly, or through a microgrid. Therefore, optimizing the overall ground system along with an external suite of loads and sources through a power grid, as a system of systems, becomes crucial in vehicle design. This optimization problem for performance and reliability is complex when considering the outside grid and a mix of other sources and loads with uncertain power quality and availability. This paper proposes how this optimization problem can be formulated and solved, and attempts to change the perspective of the importance of the overall ground system as a power generation system on the battlefield, and for base operations, restoration and contingency operations. Because a microgrid is designed for a period of time, our optimization problem considers factors such as cost to operate, maintenance, reliability, repair time and logistics. This paper also focuses on optimizing the vehicle-microgrid system using these factors with emphasis on the vehicle to grid management where a vehicle is a mobile power generation system and a key part of the grid.
Automatic Dataset Labelling and Feature Selection for Intrusion Detection Systems

Correctly labelled datasets are commonly required. Three particular scenarios are highlighted, which showcase this need. When using supervised Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs), these systems need labelled datasets to be trained. Also, the real nature of the analysed datasets must be known when evaluating the efficiency of the IDSs when detecting intrusions. Another scenario is the use of feature selection that works only if the processed datasets are labelled. In normal conditions, collecting labelled datasets from real networks is impossible. Currently, datasets are mainly labelled by implementing off-line forensic analysis, which is impractical because it does not allow real-time implementation. We have developed a novel approach to automatically generate labelled network traffic datasets using an unsupervised anomaly based IDS. The resulting labelled datasets are subsets of the original unlabelled datasets. The labelled dataset is then processed using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based approach, which performs the task of feature selection. The GA has been implemented to automatically provide the set of metrics that generate the most appropriate intrusion detection results.
Cancer Therapy : Preclinical Tivantinib ( ARQ 197 ) Displays Cytotoxic Activity That Is Independent of Its Ability to Bind MET

Purpose: MET, the high-affinity receptor for hepatocyte growth factor, is frequently deregulated in human cancer. Tivantinib (ARQ197; Arqule), a staurosporine derivative that binds to the dephosphorylated MET kinase in vitro, is being tested clinically as a highly selectiveMET inhibitor. However, themechanismof action of tivantinib is still unclear. ExperimentalDesign:The activity of tivantinibwas analyzed inmultiple cellularmodels, including: cells displaying c-MET gene amplification, strictly ‘addicted’ toMET signaling; cells with normal c-MET gene copy number, not dependent on MET for growth; cells not expressing MET; somatic knockout cells in which the ATP-binding cleft of MET, where tivantinib binds, was deleted by homologous recombination; and a cell system ‘poisoned’ byMET kinase hyperactivation, where cells die unless cultured in the presence of a specific
Benefits of Color Coding Weapons Symbology for an Airborne Helmet-Mounted Display

We assessed the advantages of a color-coded weapons symbology for a helmetmounted display over monochrome symbology by measuring military pilots' performance while they flew air-to-air combat in a simulator. The pilots fired missiles significantly sooner without sacrificing probability of kill when using the color coded symbology, demonstrating a substantial practical benefit of color. Actual or potential applications of this work include the design of color codes for helmetmounted and other displays that use complex symbology to assist performance on cognitively challenging tasks.
Prevalence and Molecular Characterization of Plasmodium inui among Formosan Macaques (Macaca cyclopis) in Taiwan

Abstract Since the 1970s, no information on simian malaria has been documented in Taiwan, an area that is free from human malaria. To update the prevalence of simian malaria, a molecular-based survey was performed. Blood samples from 286 Formosan macaques (Macaca cyclopis) were tested for Plasmodium species by microscopy and nested polymerase chain reaction. Furthermore, the field isolates were characterized by sequencing the 42-kDa fragment of the merozoite surface protein 1 (MSP-142). Of the 286 blood samples analyzed, 7 (2.4%) were positive by microscopy and nested PCR. All malaria-infected Formosan macaques were those collected from southern Taiwan, whereas no evidence of malarial parasites was observed among monkeys from eastern and northern Taiwan. Molecular and phylogenetic analyses based on the asexual stage small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA) gene clearly identified these samples as a single infection with Plasmodium inui. Furthermore, phylogenetic analysis of the MSP-142 gene showed that the 7 field isolates were closely related to P. inui strains Taiwan I and II, which were obtained from Formosan macaques in 1963. These findings indicate that P. inui is the only cause of simian malaria in Taiwan, has been circulating in Formosan macaques at least for 46 yr, and has a geographic preference for southern Taiwan.