Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Study of Volumetric Methods for Face Reconstruction

This paper presents an early study about a reconstruction method that extends previous space carving methods to handle all characteristics of human faces: complex non-Lambertian materials, untextured areas, highly detailed geometry, etc. This face study is seen as a preliminary step to a more general framework for non-Lambertian reconstruction. We therefore avoid specific techniques like parameterized face models. Since we expose our early studies, we mainly present the related existing work and discuss the pros and cons of each approach. We aim at discerning the strength and weaknesses of the classical tools in order to adapt and improve them to handle non-Lambertian materials while overcoming their limitations. We show our first results which are promising and validate our global approach. Throughout the discussion, we raise several questions that identify complex issues related to our goal. We provide some hints that pave the way for a better understanding of the global problem. We are confident in that further studies will lead to significant improvements over existing methods.
Energy Efficient MANET Routing Protocols for Nomadic Networks

This paper presents some novel approaches for energy efficient routing in mobile ad-hoc networks. Two known energy preserving techniques, Span and BECA/AFECA, are combined with a well-known re-active routing protocol, AODV, to create a new energy efficient routing protocol. Furthermore, the protocol is tuned towards usage in a nomadic network setting, i.e., a setting where some nodes are stationary and have a steady power source. The protocols are simulated extensively to examine their energy preserving capabilities, and the results of these simulations are presented and discussed.
Linking organizational knowledge management drivers to knowledge management performance: an exploratory study

Despite the active interest in managing organizational knowledge as a strategic resource, most organizations do not yet understand the challenges involved in implementing knowledge management initiatives. Much of the knowledge management literature has been either conceptual or based on individual implementation cases. This study aimed at identifying the several key drivers for developing organizational knowledge management capability and examining their relationships with knowledge management performance. Using data collected from the 66 Korean firms, the study found that knowledge management drivers such as learning orientation, knowledge sharing intention, knowledge management system quality, reward, and knowledge management team activity were significantly related to the organizational knowledge management performance - knowledge quality and user knowledge satisfaction. The study also found that the knowledge management stage of an organization moderates the relationship between some of the knowledge management drivers and knowledge management performance variables.
The Validity Exploration of General Procrastination Scale (Lay, 1986)

Procrastination is defined as the act of “putting off or delaying an action to a later time. ” (Bachrach, 2012). Measuring procrastination is important for better understanding of this so common habit, but also, for diagnosing and therapy of it. Lay (1986) matched procrastination with traits, big 5 theory, perfectionism, anxiety, agitation, dejection, and self-discrepancy etc. His scale General Procrastination Scale (GPS) consists of 20 items. Responses across items are summed to obtain a single score, and according to the instructions of GPS, the scale is one-factor only scale, with Cronbach alpha of 0,82 (Lay, 1986) and a retest reliability of 0,80 (Ferrari, 1989). The purpose of this research is to explore psychometric characteristics of procrastination scale by Lay (1986). For this purpose, scale was applied to 480 undergraduate students. Results of this study conformed the evidence of high reliability of scale (α= 0.876). Factorial analysis at first showed five factors that were not interpretable, but rotated factorial analysis by employing Equamax rotation with Kaiser’s Normalization, showed clearer structure. According to this, there are 5 components of this scale: Factor 1. Good planning: items 8, 14, 15, 18, and 20. Factor 2. Delaying: items 5,9,11,12 and 19. Factor 3. Doing things in last minute: items 16 and 17. Factor 4. Good time management: items 3,4,6 and 13. Factor 5: Poor time management: items 1,2,7 and 10.
The effectiveness and sustainability of foreign exchange market interventions and sterilisation policies

The main motivation for this thesis comes from the lack of studies on issues related to central bank’s monetary sterilisation bonds (MSBs). The MSBs have been, in particular, issued in emerging economies to offset the impacts of sterilised FX market interventions. The objectives of this thesis are to examine the impacts of and motivation for sterilised FX interventions and to explore methodologies to assess the sustainability of MSB-dependent sterilisation policy. Chapter 2 overviews the main theoretical issues and statistical facts related to sterilisations, Chapter 3 and 4 investigate the impacts, profits and motives of sterilised FX interventions in selected countries, focusing on the asymmetric intervention preferences. Chapter 5 compares the degree of sterilisation and de facto capital mobility – focusing on emerging countries under inflation targeting – by estimating sterilisation and offset coefficient with panel data for 30 countries. Chapter 6 proposes several methodologies for assessing the sustainability of MSB-dependent sterilisation policy. We modify theories of fiscal sustainability and then derive central bank's intertemporal budget constraint, which is separated from the central governments. Several sustainability conditions are obtained, based on cointegration relation between total revenues and expenditures or on central bank’s monetary reaction function. Then, the sustainability tests are applied to empirical studies on the Bank of Korea’s sterilisation policy.
Assessment of LTE Wireless Access for Monitoring of Energy Distribution in the Smart Grid

While LTE has been widely rolled out for human-type services, it is also a promising solution for cost-efficient connectivity of the smart grid monitoring equipment. This is a type of machine-to-machine (M2M) traffic that consists mainly of sporadic uplink transmissions. In such a setting, the amount of traffic that can be served in a cell is not constrained by the data capacity, but rather by the signaling constraints in the random access channel and control channel. In this paper, we explore these limitations using a detailed simulation of the LTE access reservation protocol (ARP). We find that 1) assigning more random access opportunities may actually worsen performance and 2) the additional signaling that follows the ARP has very large impact on the capacity in terms of the number of supported devices; we observed a reduction in the capacity by almost a factor of 3. This suggests that a lightweight access method, with a reduced number of signaling messages, needs to be considered in standardization for M2M applications. Additionally we propose a tractable analytical model to calculate the outage that can be rapidly implemented and evaluated. The model accounts for the features of the random access, control channel, and uplink and downlink data channels, as well as retransmissions.
AMORTIGUACIÓN DE LOS SALTOS VERTICALES SEGÚN EL PROPÓSITO DEL MOVIMIENTO DEPORTIVO POSTERIOR

El principal objetivo ha sido detectar las diferencias biomecanicas de tres modelos de aterrizaje: a) aterrizaje discreto (AD), con mision de amortiguar un salto vertical, b) aterrizaje preparatorio al salto vertical (APS) y c) aterrizaje que precedia a una carrera (APC). Han participado 29 deportistas donde el salto constituye una habilidad basica. Se ha utilizado una plataforma de fuerza sincronizada a una camara de video que registraba el plano sagital de los saltos. Los resultados indican que los APS y APC amortiguan mas los picos de fuerza de reaccion vertical que los AD. El modelo cinematico utilizado para los APS fue similar al AD, aunque la mayor actividad neural y refleja propia del ciclo estiramiento-acortamiento para realizar el posterior salto vertical haria mas eficiente la absorcion de impactos. La estrategia utilizada para los APC muestra un incremento del riesgo de lesion como consecuencia del desplazamiento hacia delante de la tibia.
Genetics of Dizygotic Twinning: A Feasibility Study for a Biobank

Abstract To locate the genes that make a substantial contribution to variation in natural dizygotic twinning in humans, large-scale studies are needed. New studies should not stop at DNA genotyping, but collect material that allow gene-expression analysis, transcriptomics, proteomics and endocrinology. In this article we describe a pilot study to examine the feasibility, effectiveness and logistics of large-scale nationwide sample collection in Dutch families in which two or more sisters have given birth to spontaneous dizygotic twins. Pedigree data and addresses from family members of proband mothers were collected by telephone. Blood and urine samples were collected during a home visit, and handled in the afternoon. All participants were bled between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. after overnight fasting. Blood samples of fertile women with a natural cycle were collected on the second, third or fourth day of their menstrual cycle. The effects of transportation and storage on blood quality, lipids, RNA with and without challenge, lymphocytes and other parameters were examined. Genomic DNA was isolated from blood and cells were immortalized using Epstein–Barr virus. In 78.6% of the women with a natural cycle blood samples were collected on the second, third or fourth day of the menstrual cycle. This percentage is likely to increase with the more dense geographical distribution of participants in the larger population. We conclude that the pilot study demonstrated the feasibility of this protocol to collect good quality of plasma, DNA, RNA and lymphocyte samples by home visits.
Action and Language — Action-Based Neurolinguistics Approach

There are a lot of increasing evidences to support the strong links between action and language. Action based approach proposed the hierarchical structure of language based on action control and concerned with action goal, context, intention, mirror neurons and object affordances. Action semantics proposed that action control and use of object need not only low-level action control, but also semantic knowledge. Action Semantics are hierarchically organized and selectively activated depending on the action intention of the actor and the context. This framework integrated declarative and procedural action knowledge, thus challenging the traditional divide between semantics and pragmatics and they might draw on common representational resources.
Some Software Engineering and Knowledge Representation Principles for the Design and Construction of Ontology-Based Linguistic Resources

Nowadays, ontologies have become a common component of natural language processing systems as well as of many others. Nevertheless, in spite of the existing explosion of ontological resources, they have been developed without a rigorous methodological approach. Furthermore the usage of semantic relations between concepts has been so subjective that has led to errors affecting the coherence of these ontologies. In this article, we introduce a methodology for the construction of ontological linguistic resources based on software engineering, and develop the first of its 3 stages, introducing notions of knowledge organization and control of semantic relations for the gradual and systematic development of well-designed and coherent ontologies.
Gene Expression Profiling of Clostridium botulinum under Heat Shock Stress

During growth, C. botulinum is always exposed to different environmental changes, such as temperature increase, nutrient deprivation, and pH change; however, its corresponding global transcriptional profile is uncharacterized. This study is the first description of the genome-wide gene expression profile of C. botulinum in response to heat shock stress. Under heat stress (temperature shift from 37°C to 45°C over a period of 15 min), 176 C. botulinum ATCC 3502 genes were differentially expressed. The response included overexpression of heat shock protein genes (dnaK operon, groESL, hsp20, and htpG) and downregulation of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase genes (valS, queA, tyrR, and gatAB) and ribosomal and cell division protein genes (ftsZ and ftsH). In parallel, several transcriptional regulators (marR, merR, and ompR families) were induced, suggesting their involvement in reshuffling of the gene expression profile. In addition, many ABC transporters (oligopeptide transport system), energy production and conversion related genes (glpA and hupL), cell wall and membrane biogenesis related genes (fabZ, fabF, and fabG), flagella-associated genes (flhA, flhM, flhJ, flhS, and motAB), and hypothetical genes also showed changed expression patterns, indicating that they may play important roles in survival under high temperatures.
A Distinguisher-Based Attack on a Variant of McEliece's Cryptosystem Based on Reed-Solomon Codes

Baldi et \textit{al.} proposed a variant of McEliece's cryptosystem. The main idea is to replace its permutation matrix by adding to it a rank 1 matrix. The motivation for this change is twofold: it would allow the use of codes that were shown to be insecure in the original McEliece's cryptosystem, and it would reduce the key size while keeping the same security against generic decoding attacks. The authors suggest to use generalized Reed-Solomon codes instead of Goppa codes. The public code built with this method is not anymore a generalized Reed-Solomon code. On the other hand, it contains a very large secret generalized Reed-Solomon code. In this paper we present an attack that is built upon a distinguisher which is able to identify elements of this secret code. The distinguisher is constructed by considering the code generated by component-wise products of codewords of the public code (the so-called "square code"). By using square-code dimension considerations, the initial generalized Reed-Solomon code can be recovered which permits to decode any ciphertext. A similar technique has already been successful for mounting an attack against a homomorphic encryption scheme suggested by Bogdanoc et \textit{al.}. This work can be viewed as another illustration of how a distinguisher of Reed-Solomon codes can be used to devise an attack on cryptosystems based on them.
BER Performance of a Vector Antenna Array versus a Uniform Linear In a Multipath Fading Channel

In multipath environments, the transmitted signal polarization is affected by channel fading which results in a multipath polarized signal component on the receiver side. These receivers usually employ single polarized uniform linear antenna array (ULA) which measure one component of the received electromagnetic (EM) signal. In rich scattering environments, however, it may be possible to improve the performance by using “vector antennas”, as they can detect up to six independent components of the EM field. In this paper, we consider the advantage of vector antenna (VA) over uniform linear array (ULA) receiver for code-division multiple-access (CDMA) signals in a multiuser environment. We consider a closed loop power control (CLPC) for a beamformer-RAKE receiver for wireless CDMA multiuser system. The performance enhancement in Bit Error Rate (BER) is investigated for matched-filter receivers using various VA’s and ULA for a fading multipath channel. Analysis, theoretical curves, and simulations of VA and ULA receivers suggest that VA can better exploit multipath and therefore significantly improve the diversity gain and bit-error-rate performance of CDMA signals in the presence of a frequency selective rich multipath channel. Keywords— code-division multiple-access , multipath channels, polarization diversity , receiver diversity , power control.
Dietary protein intake is associated with body mass index and weight up to 5 y of age in a prospective cohort of twins

Background: Few large epidemiologic studies have investigated the role of postweaning protein intake in excess weight and adiposity of young children, despite children in the United Kingdom consistently consuming protein in excess of their physiologic requirements. Objective: We investigated whether a higher proportion of protein intake from energy beyond weaning is associated with greater weight gain, higher body mass index (BMI), and risk of overweight or obesity in children up to 5 y of age. Design: Participants were 2154 twins from the Gemini cohort. Dietary intake was collected by using a 3-d diet diary when the children had a mean age of 21 mo. Weight and height were collected every 3 mo, from birth to 5 y. Longitudinal models investigated associations of protein intake with BMI, weight, and height, with adjustment for age at diet diary, sex, total energy intake, birth weight/length, and rate of prior growth and clustering within families. Logistic regression investigated protein intake in relation to the odds of overweight or obesity at 3 and 5 y of age. Results: A total of 2154 children had a mean ± SD of 5.7 ± 3.2 weight and height measurements up to 5 y. Total energy from protein was associated with higher BMI (β = 0.043; 95% CI: 0.011, 0.075) and weight (β = 0.052; 95% CI: 0.031, 0.074) but not height (β = 0.088; 95% CI: −0.038, 0.213) between 21 mo and 5 y. Substituting percentage energy from fat or carbohydrate for percentage energy from protein was associated with decreases in BMI and weight. Protein intake was associated with a trend in increased odds of overweight or obesity at 3 y (OR = 1.10; 95% CI 0.99, 1.22, P = 0.075), but the effect was not statistically significant at 5 y. Conclusion: A higher proportion of energy from protein during the complementary feeding stage is associated with greater increases in weight and BMI in early childhood in this large cohort of United Kingdom children.
Preprint : Clip Art Rendering of Smooth Isosurfaces

Clip art is a simplified illustration form consisting of layered filled polygons or closed curves used to convey 3-D shape information in a 2-D vector graphics format. This paper focuses on the problem of direct conversion of smooth surfaces, ranging from the free-form shapes of art and design to the mathematical structures of geometry and topology, into a clip art form suitable for illustration use in books, papers and presentations. We show how to represent silhouette, shadow, gleam and other surface feature curves as the intersection of implicit surfaces, and derive equations for their efficient interrogation via particle chains. We further describe how to sort, orient, identify and fill the closed regions that overlay to form clip art. We demonstrate the results with numerous renderings used to illustrate the paper itself.
Replication of origin containing adenovirus DNA fragments that do not carry the terminal protein

Nuclear extracts from adenovirus type 5 (Ad5) infected HeLa cells were used to study the template requirements for adenovirus DNA replication in vitro. When XbaI digested Ad5 DNA, containing the parental terminal protein (TP), was used as a template preferential synthesis of the terminal fragments was observed. The newly synthesized DNA was covalently bound to the 82 kD preterminal protein (pTP). Plasmid DNAs containing the Ad2 origin sequence or the Ad12 origin sequence with small deletions were analyzed for their capacity to support pTP-primed DNA replication. Circular plasmid DNAs were inactive. When plasmids were linearized to expose the adenovirus origin, both Ad2 and Ad12 TP-free fragments could support initiation and elongation similarly as Ad5 DNA-TP, although with lower efficiency. These observations indicate that the parental terminal protein is dispensable for initiation in vitro. The presence of 29 nucleotides ahead of the molecular end or a deletion of 14 base pairs extending into the conserved sequence (9-22) destroyed the template activity. DNA with a large deletion within the first 8 base pairs could still support replication while a small deletion could not. The results suggest that only G residues at a distance of 4-8 nucleotides from the start of the conserved sequence can be used as template during initiation of DNA replication.
Least Squares Temporal Difference Methods: An Analysis under General Conditions

We consider approximate policy evaluation for finite state and action Markov de- cision processes (MDP) with the least squares temporal difference (LSTD) algorithm, LSTD(λ), in an exploration-enhanced learning context, where policy costs are computed from observations of a Markov chain different from the one corresponding to the policy under evaluation. We establish for the discounted cost criterion that LSTD(λ) converges almost surely under mild, minimal conditions. We also analyze other properties of the iterates involved in the algorithm, including convergence in mean and boundedness. Our analysis draws on theories of both finite space Markov chains and weak Feller Markov chains on a topological space. Our results can be applied to other temporal difference algorithms and MDP models. As examples, we give a convergence analysis of a TD(λ) algorithm and extensions to MDP with compact state and action spaces, as well as a convergence proof of a new LSTD algorithm with state-dependent λ-parameters.
IMPROVED SPECTROSCOPIC PARAMETERS FOR TRANSITING PLANET HOSTS

We report homogeneous spectroscopic determinations of the effective temperature, metallicity, and projected rotational velocity for the host stars of 56 transiting planets. Our analysis is based primarily on the stellar parameter classification (SPC) technique. We investigate systematic errors by examining subsets of the data with two other methods that have often been used in previous studies (Spectroscopy Made Easy (SME) and MOOG). The SPC and SME results, both based on comparisons between synthetic spectra and actual spectra, show strong correlations between Teff, [Fe/H], and log g when solving for all three quantities simultaneously. In contrast the MOOG results, based on a more traditional curve-of-growth approach, show no such correlations. To combat the correlations and improve the accuracy of the temperatures and metallicities, we repeat the SPC analysis with a constraint on log g based on the mean stellar density that can be derived from the analysis of the transit light curves. Previous studies that have not taken advantage of this constraint have been subject to systematic errors in the stellar masses and radii of up to 20% and 10%, respectively, which can be larger than other observational uncertainties, and which also cause systematic errors in the planetary mass and radius.
The bigger the C-value, the larger the cell: genome size and red blood cell size in vertebrates.

Vertebrate genome sizes vary roughly 350-fold and correlate with a variety of cellular and organismal parameters. Most notable among these is the relationship between genome size ("C-value") and red blood cell (RBC) size, which can be identified within and among each of the five vertebrate classes. This relationship, in turn, leads to important associations between genome size and features such as metabolic rate (at least in homeotherms). The present article describes the correlation between genome size and RBC size in vertebrates and discusses some of the cytological, physiological, and evolutionary implications of this relationship.