Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High-Rate Space Coding for Reconfigurable 2x2 Millimeter-Wave MIMO Systems

Author(s): Vakilian, Vida; Mehrpouyan, Hani; Hua, Yingbo; Jafarkhani, Hamid | Abstract: Millimeter-wave links are of a line-of-sight nature. Hence, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems operating in the millimeter-wave band may not achieve full spatial diversity or multiplexing. In this paper, we utilize reconfigurable antennas and the high antenna directivity in the millimeter-wave band to propose a rate-two space coding design for 2x2 MIMO systems. The proposed scheme can be decoded with a low complexity maximum-likelihood detector at the receiver and yet it can enhance the bit-error-rate performance of millimeter-wave systems compared to traditional spatial multiplexing schemes, such as the Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time Architecture (VBLAST). Using numerical simulations, we demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed code and show its superiority compared to existing rate-two space-time block codes.
A generative model for 3D urban scene understanding from movable platforms

3D scene understanding is key for the success of applications such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. However, existing approaches either produce a mild level of understanding, e.g., segmentation, object detection, or are not accurate enough for these applications, e.g., 3D pop-ups. In this paper we propose a principled generative model of 3D urban scenes that takes into account dependencies between static and dynamic features. We derive a reversible jump MCMC scheme that is able to infer the geometric (e.g., street orientation) and topological (e.g., number of intersecting streets) properties of the scene layout, as well as the semantic activities occurring in the scene, e.g., traffic situations at an intersection. Furthermore, we show that this global level of understanding provides the context necessary to disambiguate current state-of-the-art detectors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a dataset composed of short stereo video sequences of 113 different scenes captured by a car driving around a mid-size city.
TESTING THE EQUIVALENCE OF DISJUNCTIVE LOGIC PROGRAMS

To solve a problem in answer set programming (ASP), one constructs a logic program so that its answer sets correspond to the solutions of the problem and computes the answer sets of the program using a special purpose search engine. The encodings are not unique, i.e. several versions of a program can be used e.g. in optimizing the execution time or space. Since the solutions to the problem correspond to answer sets of the program, it is necessary to ensure that the different encodings yield the same output. In ASP this means that one has to check whether given two logic programs have the same answer sets, i.e., whether they are semantically equivalent. We consider in this thesis the class of disjunctive logic programs, that form a proper generalization of normal logic programs. The equivalence of logic programs P and Q can naturally be verified using an explicit cross-check of all the answer sets of both programs. The aim in this thesis is, however, to develop a systematic method for testing the equivalence so that a naive cross-check of answer sets is not needed. The idea is to translate logic programs P and Q into a single logic program that has an answer set if and only if P has an answer set that is not an answer set of Q. Thus answer sets of the translation (if found), act as a counter-examples for the equivalence of P and Q. The counterexamples for equivalence divide naturally in two types. Thus the search for counterexamples can be performed separately for both types using a two-phased translation. We have implemented the translation functions. Experiments with the implementation show that in several cases the translation-based approach is superior to the naive cross-checking approach, especially, if the programs to be tested have several answer sets and are likely to be nonequivalent. If the number of answer sets is low, then the naive cross-checking approach is likely to be faster. Furthermore, in general it is faster to use the two-phased translation.
A Two-stage Kalman Filtering Approach for Robust and Real-time Power Systems State Tracking

As electricity demand continues to grow and renewable energy increases its penetration in the power grid, realtime state tracking becomes essential for system monitoring and control. Recent developments in phasor technology make realtime dynamic state estimation possible with high-speed timesynchronized data provided by synchronized Phasor Measurement Units (PMU). In this paper we present a two-stage Kalman filtering approach to estimate the static states of voltage magnitudes and phase angles, as well as the dynamic states of generator rotor angles and generator speeds. Kalman filters achieve optimal performance only when the system noise characteristics have known statistical properties (zero-mean, Gaussian, and spectrally white). However in practice the process and measurement noise models are usually difficult to obtain. Thus in the first stage, we estimate the static states from raw PMU measurements, using a lightweight but efficient adaptive Kalman filtering algorithm called Adaptive Kalman Filter with Inflatable Noise Variances (AKF with InNoVa), which can identify and reduce the impact of incorrect system modeling and/or bad PMU measurements. In the next stage, the estimated bus voltages are fed into an extended Kalman filter to obtain the dynamic state estimations. Simulations demonstrate its robustness to sudden changes of system dynamics and erroneous PMU measurements.
An ontology based approach to automating data integration in scientific workflows

Due to the proliferation of data generating devices such as sensors in scientific applications, data integration has become most challenging task since the data stemming from these devices are extremely heterogeneous in terms of structure (schema) and semantics (interpretation). In practice, integration and transformation is typically performed by the scientists manually; in fact extensive efforts are required. The approaches for automating data integration task as much as possible are badly needed. DaltOn is a generic framework that offers various functionalities for managing the data in scientific applications. In this paper, we present DaltOn's functionality for automating data integration task based on exploitation of ontologies. In addition, we also elaborate the specific module of our framework which is responsible for implementing the functionality. At last, we also present core algorithms that demonstrate a good evaluation of our approach.
VioNeS - Visual Support for the Analysis of the Next Sub-volume Method

Computational simulation is an established method to gain insight into cellular processes. As the resulting data sets are usually large and complex, visualization can play a significant role in data analysis. In this paper, we focus on the visualization of simulation output from the Next Sub-volume Method, a spatial simulation algorithm. In addition to the spatial context of the simulation output, its heterogeneous data types, multiple variables, and the temporal context make high demands on the visualization. To cope with these challenging characteristics, we systematically explore possible visualization concepts with respect to these characteristics. From these findings, we derive our specific solution to visualize the data from the Next Sub-volume Method, using a framework of multiple coordinated views that emphasize the spatial context of the data. Combining these views with a highly interactive user interface, the user is able to adapt the visualization to his current analysis goals and explore the data in its complexity.
Functional Studies of Heading Date-Related Gene TaPRR73, a Paralog of Ppd1 in Common Wheat

Photoperiod response-related genes play a crucial role in duration of the plant growth. In this study, we focused on TaPRR73, a paralog of “Green Revolution” gene Ppd1 (TaPRR37). We found that overexpression of the truncated TaPRR73 form lacking part of the N-terminal PR domain in transgenic rice promoted heading under long day conditions. Association analysis in common wheat verified that TaPRR73 was an important agronomic photoperiod response gene that significantly affected heading date and plant height; expression analysis proved that specific alleles of TaPRR73-A1 had highly expressed levels in earlier heading lines; the distribution of haplotypes indicated that one of these alleles had been selected in breeding programs. Our results demonstrated that TaPRR73 contributed to regulation of heading date in wheat and could be useful in wheat breeding and in broadening adaptation of the crop to new regions.
Robust Super-Exponential Methods for Blind Equalization of MIMO-IIR Systems

The so called "super-exponential" methods (SEMs) are attractive methods for solving multichannel blind deconvolution problem. The conventional SEMs, however, have such a drawback that they are very sensitive to Gaussian noise. To overcome this drawback, the robust super-exponential method (RSEM) were proposed for single-input single-output infinite impulse response (SISO-IIR) channels and for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) static channels (instantaneous mixtures). While the conventional SEMs use the second- and higher-order cumulants of observations, the RSEM uses only the higher-order cumulants of observations. Since higher-order cumulants are insensitive to Gaussian noise, the RSEM is robust to Gaussian noise. We proposed an RSEM extended to the case of MIMO-IIR channels (convolutive mixtures). To show the validity of the proposed RSEM, some simulation results are presented
Analysis of fair scheduling and connection admission control in differentiated services wireless networks

We present a Markov-based model to analyse both connection-level and packet-level quality-of-service (QoS) measures under fair scheduling in differentiated services wireless networks. In our model, two queues are used - one for QoS sensitive traffic and the other for best effort traffic. Connection admission control (CAC) is applied to the QoS sensitive traffic to avoid performance degradation, while there is no connection admission control for the best effort traffic. We obtain connection-level QoS measures (e.g., connection blocking probability) and packet-level QoS measures (i.e., mean number of packets in queue and mean packet delay), and we investigate their inter-dependencies. Typical numerical results show that the connection admission control method can affect the packet-level QoS performance significantly. The proposed analytical model would be useful for design, analysis, and optimization of differentiated services (DiffServ) wireless IP networks.
Neural network based auto association and time-series prediction for biosignal processing in brain-computer interfaces

Neural networks (NNs) can be deployed in many different ways in signal processing applications. This paper illustrates how neural networks are employed in a prediction based preprocessing framework, referred to as neural-time-series-prediction-preprocessing (NTSPP), in an electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI). NTSPP has been shown to increase feature separability by mapping the original EEG signals via time-series-prediction to a higher dimensional space. Preliminary results of a similar novel framework are also presented where, instead of using predictive NNs, auto-associative NNs are employed and features are extracted from the output of auto-associative NNs trained to specialize on EEG signals for particular brain states. The results show that this preprocessing framework referred to as auto-associative NN preprocessing (ANNP) also has the potential to improve the performance of BCIs. Both the NTSPP and ANNP are compared with and deployed in conjunction with the well know common spatial patterns (CSP) to produce a BCI system which significantly outperforms either approach operating independently and has the potential to produce good performances even with a lower number of EEG channels compared to a multichannel BCI. Multichannel BCIs normally perform better that 2-3 channel BCIs however reducing the number of EEG channels required can positively impact on the time needed to mount electrodes and minimize the obtrusiveness of the electrode montage for the user. It is also shown that NTSPP can improve the potential for employing existing BCI methods with minimal subject-specific parameter tuning to deploy the BCI autonomously. Results are presented with six different classification approaches including various statistical classifiers such as Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and a Bayes classifier.
A feedforward architecture accounts for rapid categorization

Primates are remarkably good at recognizing objects. The level of performance of their visual system and its robustness to image degradations still surpasses the best computer vision systems despite decades of engineering effort. In particular, the high accuracy of primates in ultra rapid object categorization and rapid serial visual presentation tasks is remarkable. Given the number of processing stages involved and typical neural latencies, such rapid visual processing is likely to be mostly feedforward. Here we show that a specific implementation of a class of feedforward theories of object recognition (that extend the Hubel and Wiesel simple-to-complex cell hierarchy and account for many anatomical and physiological constraints) can predict the level and the pattern of performance achieved by humans on a rapid masked animal vs. non-animal categorization task.
THE LOCAL HOSTS OF TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE

We use multi-wavelength, matched aperture, integrated photometry from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and the RC3 to estimate the physical properties of 166 nearby galaxies hosting 168 well-observed Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). The ultraviolet (UV) imaging of local SN Ia hosts from GALEX allows a direct comparison with higher-redshift hosts measured at optical wavelengths that correspond to the rest-frame UV. Our data corroborate well-known features that have been seen in other SN Ia samples. Specifically, hosts with active star formation produce brighter and slower SNe Ia on average, and hosts with luminosity-weighted ages older than 1 Gyr produce on average more faint, fast, and fewer bright, slow SNe Ia than younger hosts. New results include that in our sample, the faintest and fastest SNe Ia occur only in galaxies exceeding a stellar mass threshold of ∼1010 M☉, leading us to conclude that their progenitors must arise in populations that are older and/or more metal rich than the general SN Ia population. A low host extinction subsample hints at a residual trend in peak luminosity with host age, after correcting for light-curve shape, giving the appearance that older hosts produce less-extincted SNe Ia on average. This has implications for cosmological fitting of SNe Ia, and suggests that host age could be useful as a parameter in the fitting. Converting host mass to metallicity and computing 56Ni mass from the supernova light curves, we find that our local sample is consistent with a model that predicts a shallow trend between stellar metallicity and the 56Ni mass that powers the explosion, but we cannot rule out the absence of a trend. We measure a correlation between 56Ni mass and host age in the local universe that is shallower and not as significant as that seen at higher redshifts. The details of the age–56Ni mass correlations at low and higher redshift imply a luminosity-weighted age threshold of ∼3 Gyr for SN Ia hosts, above which they are less likely to produce SNe Ia with 56Ni masses above ∼0.5 M☉.
Whole Genome Sequences of a Male and Female Supercentenarian, Ages Greater than 114 Years

Supercentenarians (age 110+ years old) generally delay or escape age-related diseases and disability well beyond the age of 100 and this exceptional survival is likely to be influenced by a genetic predisposition that includes both common and rare genetic variants. In this report, we describe the complete genomic sequences of male and female supercentenarians, both age >114 years old. We show that: (1) the sequence variant spectrum of these two individuals’ DNA sequences is largely comparable to existing non-supercentenarian genomes; (2) the two individuals do not appear to carry most of the well-established human longevity enabling variants already reported in the literature; (3) they have a comparable number of known disease-associated variants relative to most human genomes sequenced to-date; (4) approximately 1% of the variants these individuals possess are novel and may point to new genes involved in exceptional longevity; and (5) both individuals are enriched for coding variants near longevity-associated variants that we discovered through a large genome-wide association study. These analyses suggest that there are both common and rare longevity-associated variants that may counter the effects of disease-predisposing variants and extend lifespan. The continued analysis of the genomes of these and other rare individuals who have survived to extremely old ages should provide insight into the processes that contribute to the maintenance of health during extreme aging.
High-Dose Simvastatin Exhibits Enhanced Lipid-Lowering Effects Relative to Simvastatin/Ezetimibe Combination Therapy

Statins are the frontline in cholesterol reduction therapies; however, their use in combination with agents that possess complimentary mechanisms of action may achieve further reductions in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Thirty-nine patients were treated with either 80 mg simvastatin (n=20) or 10 mg simvastatin plus 10 mg ezetimibe (n=19) for 6 weeks. Dosing was designed to produce comparable low-density lipoprotein cholesterol reductions, while enabling assessment of potential simvastatin-associated pleiotropic effects. Baseline and post-treatment plasma were analyzed for lipid mediators (eg, eicosanoids and endocannabinoids) and structural lipids by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. After statistical analysis and orthogonal projections to latent structures multivariate modeling, no changes were observed in lipid mediator levels, whereas global structural lipids were reduced in response to both monotherapy (R2Y=0.74; Q2=0.66; cross-validated ANOVA P=7.0×10−8) and combination therapy (R2Y=0.67; Q2=0.54; cross-validated ANOVA P=2.6×10−5). Orthogonal projections to latent structures modeling identified a subset of 12 lipids that classified the 2 treatment groups after 6 weeks (R2Y=0.65; Q2=0.61; cross-validated ANOVA P=5.4×10−8). Decreases in the lipid species phosphatidylcholine (15:0/18:2) and hexosyl-ceramide (d18:1/24:0) were the strongest discriminators of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol reductions for both treatment groups (q<0.00005), whereas phosphatidylethanolamine (36:3e) contributed most to distinguishing treatment groups (q=0.017). Shifts in lipid composition were similar for high-dose simvastatin and simvastatin/ezetimibe combination therapy, but the magnitude of the reduction was linked to simvastatin dosage. Simvastatin therapy did not affect circulating levels of lipid mediators, suggesting that pleiotropic effects are not associated with eicosanoid production. Only high-dose simvastatin reduced the relative proportion of sphingomyelin and ceramide to phosphatidylcholine (q=0.008), suggesting a pleiotropic effect previously associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.
Transmural electrophysiological heterogeneities in action potential duration increase the upper limit of vulnerability

Transmural dispersion in action potential duration (APD) has been shown to contribute to arrhythmia induction in the heart. However, its role in termination of lethal arrhythmias by defibrillation shocks has never been examined. The goal of this study is to investigate how transmural dispersion in APD affects cardiac vulnerability to electric shocks, in an attempt to better understand the mechanisms behind defibrillation failure. This study used a three- dimensional, geometrically accurate finite element bidomain rabbit ventricular model. Transmural heterogeneities in ionic currents were incorporated based on experimental data to generate the transmural APD profile recorded in adult rabbits during pacing. Results show that the incorporation of transmural APD heterogeneities in the model causes an increase in the upper limit of vulnerability from 26.7 V/cm in the homogeneous APD ventricles to 30.5 V/cm in the ventricles with heterogeneous transmural APD profile. Examination of shock-end virtual electrode polarisation and postshock electrical activity reveals that the higher ULV in the heterogeneous model is caused by increased dispersion in postshock repolarisation within the LV wall, which increases the likelihood of the establishment of intramural re-entrant circuits
Survey on network-based botnet detection methods

Botnets are an important security problem on the Internet. They continuously evolve their structure, protocols and attacks. This survey analyzes and compares the most important efforts carried out in a network-based detection area. It accomplishes four tasks: first, the comparison of previous surveys and the proposal of four new dimensions to analyze their classification schemes; second, a new classification and comparison of network-based botnet detection proposals, which includes the definition of 20 desired properties of every botnet detection paper; third, an extensive comparison between the most representative detection proposals; and fourth, the description of the most important problems and highlights in the area. We conclude that the area has achieved great advances so far, but there are still many open problems. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Two‐component diffusion tensor MRI of isolated perfused hearts

Nonmonoexponential MR diffusion decay behavior has been observed at high diffusion‐weighting strengths for cell aggregates and tissues, including the myocardium; however, implications for myocardial MR diffusion tensor imaging are largely unknown. In this study, a slow‐exchange‐limit, two‐component diffusion tensor model was fitted to diffusion‐weighted images obtained in isolated, perfused rat hearts. Results indicate that there are at least two distinct components of anisotropic diffusion, characterized by a “fast” component whose principal diffusivity is comparable to that of the perfusate, and a highly anisotropic “slow” component. It is speculated that the two components correspond to tissue compartments and have a general agreement with the orientations of anisotropy, or fiber orientations, in the myocardium. Moreover, consideration of previous studies of myocardial diffusion suggests that the presently observed fast component may likely be dominated by diffusion in the vascular space, whereas the slow component may include the intracellular and interstitial compartments. The implications of the results for myocardial fiber orientation mapping and limitations of the current two‐component model used are also discussed. Magn Reson Med 45:1039–1045, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.