Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Online Replanning Approach for Crop Fields Mapping with Autonomous UAVs

For managing production at the scale of crop fields, maps of plant pests are used to support farmer decisions. Such maps are costly to obtain since they require intensive surveys in the field, most of the time performed by human annotators or with human-controlled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this paper, we look at the next challenge from an AI planning point of view: flying fully autonomous UAVs equipped with online sequential decision-making capabilities for pests sampling and mapping in crop fields. Following existing work, we use a Markov Random Field framework to represent knowledge about the uncertain map and its quality, in order to compute an optimised pest-sampling policy. Since this planning problem is Pspace hard, thus too hard to be exactly solved either offline or online, we propose an approach interleaving planning and execution, inspired by recent works on fault-tolerant planning. From past observations at a given time step, we compute a full plan consisting in a sequence of observed locations and expected observations untill the end of the pest-sampling phase. The plan is then applied until the number of actual observations that differ from expected ones exceeds a given threshold, which triggers a new replanning episode. Our planning method favourably compares on the problem of weed map construction against an existing greedy approach - the only one working online - while adding the advantage of being adapted to the autonomous UAVs' flying time constraints.
Effect of different long-chain fatty acids on cholecystokinin release in vitro and energy intake in free-living healthy males

Long-chain fatty acids have been shown to suppress appetite and reduce energy intake (EI) by stimulating the release of gastrointestinal hormones such as cholecystokinin (CCK). The effect of NEFA acyl chain length on these parameters is not comprehensively understood. An in vitro screen tested the capacity of individual NEFA (C12 to C22) to trigger CCK release. There was a gradient in CCK release with increasing chain length. DHA (C22) stimulated significantly (P < 0·01) more CCK release than all other NEFA tested. Subsequently, we conducted a randomised, controlled, crossover intervention study using healthy males (n 18). The effects of no treatment (NT) and oral doses of emulsified DHA-rich (DHA) and oleic acid (OA)-rich oils were compared using 24 h EI as the primary endpoint. Participants reported significantly (P = 0·039) lower total daily EI (29 % reduction) with DHA compared to NT. There were no differences between DHA compared to OA and OA compared to NT. There was no between-treatment difference in the time to, or EI of, the first post-intervention eating occasion. It is concluded that NEFA stimulate CCK release in a chain length-dependent manner up to C22. These effects may be extended to the in vivo setting, as a DHA-based emulsion significantly reduced short-term EI.
Interactive Governance: Advancing the Paradigm

Introduction 1. The Governance Debate and the Rise of Interactive Governance 2. Governance in other Disciplines: One Approach or Many? 3. Power and Politics In Interactive Governance 4. Measuring Governance 5. Horizontal, Vertical, and Diagonal Governance 6. Institutionalizing Interactive Governance 7. Metagovernance: The Art of Governing Interactive Governance 8. New Roles and Role Dilemmas in Interactive Governance 9. Assessing and Improving Effective Interactive Governance 10. Assessing And Improving The Democratic Quality of Interactive Governance 11. Transparency and Governance 12. Conclusions References
A new approach merging markov and DCT features for image splicing detection

Splicing detection is of fundamental importance in digital image forensics. Recent image forensic research has resulted in a number of tampering detection techniques utilizing statistical features. Fusion of multiple features provides promises for improving detection performance. In this paper, we propose a new splicing detection approach based on the features utilized for steganalysis. We merge Markov process based features and discrete cosine transform (DCT) features for splicing detection. The proposed approach can achieve an accuracy of 91.5% with a 109-dimensional feature vector. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance over the prior arts.
Data Association Based Tracking Traffic Objects

For the widely demanding of adaptive multiple moving objects tracking in intelligent transportation field, a new type of traffic video based multi-object tracking method is presented. Background is modeled by difference of Gaussians (DOG) probability kernel and background subtraction is used to detect multiple moving objects. After obtaining the foreground, shadow is eliminated by an edge detection method. A type of particle filtering combined with SIFT method is used for motion tracking. A queue chain method is used to record data association among different objects, which could improve the detection accuracy and reduce the complexity. By actual road tests, the system tracks multi-object with a better performance of real time and mutual occlusion robustness, indicating that it is effective for intelligent transportation system.
Collaborative puzzle game - an interface for studying collaboration and social interaction for children who are typically developed or who have Autistic Spectrum Disorder

In this paper we present the design and some initial observations of the Collaborative Puzzle Game, an interactive play system designed with two main purposes: 1) to study social interactions and collaboration in boys with Autistic Spectrum Disorders and with typical development, and 2) to test the feasibility of the system as an instrument for the rehabilitation of social abilities of boys with ASD. Designed to run on the DiamondTouch, an interactive table supporting multi-user interaction, the CPG allows to implement “enforced collaboration”, an interaction paradigm where actions on digital objects that can be performed only through the simultaneous touch of two or more users.
Whole Exome Sequencing of Growing and Non-Growing Cutaneous Neurofibromas from a Single Patient with Neurofibromatosis Type 1

The growth behaviors of cutaneous neurofibromas in patients with Neurofibromatosis type 1 are highly variable. The role of the germline NF1 mutation, somatic NF1 mutation and mutations at modifying loci, are poorly understood. We performed whole exome sequencing of three growing and three non-growing neurofibromas from a single individual to assess the role of acquired somatic mutations in neurofibroma growth behavior. 1–11 mutations were identified in each sample, including two deleterious NF1 mutations. No trends were present between the types of somatic mutations identified and growth behavior. Mutations in the HIPPO signaling pathway appeared to be overrepresented.
Methylation analysis on individual chromosomes: improved protocol for bisulphite genomic sequencing.

Here we report on the modification of a genomic sequencing protocol, published by Frommer el al. (6), which allows the determination of the methylation status of cytosine residues on individual chromosomes. The method is based on PCR amplification from chemically modified genomic DNA, in which unmethylated cytosine residues have been converted into uracil by deamination. Sequencing of individual PCR products establishes the position of each 5-methylcytosine on individual chromosomes (6). On single-stranded DNA, a high concentration of sodium bisulphite at pH 5.0 induces deamination of cytosine residues but not of 5-methylcytosine residues (1—4). In double-stranded DNA, the rate of cytosine deamination is less than 0.1 % of the rate in single-stranded DNA (4,5). We have applied bisulphite genomic sequencing to study DNA methylation in the mouse Insulin-like growth factor 2 (Igfl) gene (7). Initially, we chose the published reaction conditions (6), but used glass beads for the subsequent purification of the DNA. On several independent reactions, not all the unmethylated cytosine residues had become deaminated. In the sequenced PCR products clustered stretches of DNA remained unmodified, presumably because they had become double-stranded during treatment (Fig. 1 A). We therefore introduced the following modifications in the protocol which resulted in full chemical conversion in most of the PCR products analysed (7, Fig. IB): 1, DNA was alkalinedenatured directly prior to treatment; 2, the DNA concentration was decreased and the bisulphite concentration increased and 3, treatment was performed at a lower temperature to increase the extent of cytosine sulfonation at pH 5.0 (5) and to reduce annealing of single-stranded DNA sequences during treatment. These modifications did not affect 5-methylcytosine residues which remained unconverted (7).
Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics

We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn't the case - economists simply didn't have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy. With "Political Arithmetic", Nobel Prize - winning economist Robert William Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking - Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover's interest in business cycles as President Harding's commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression - and shows how, through trial and error, measurements, and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making. The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, "Political Arithmetic" is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.
Use of P2P Overlays for Distributed Data Caching in Public Scientific Computing

Many types of distributed scientific and commercial applica tions require the submission of a large number of independent jobs. One highly successful and low cost mechanism for acquiring the necessary compute power is the ”public-resource computing” paradigm, which exploits the computational power of private computers. Recently decentralized peer-to-peer and super-peer technologies have been proposed for adaptation in these systems. A superpeer protocol, proposed earlier by this group, is used for th e execution of jobs based upon the volunteer requests of workers, and a super-peer overlay is used to perform two kinds of matching operations: the assignment of jobs to workers and providing workers the input data needed for job execution. This paper extends this super-peer protocol to account for a more dynamic and general scenario, in which: (i) workers can leave the network at any time; (ii) each job is executed multiple times, either to obtain better stat istical accuracy or to perform parameter sweep analysis; and, (iii) input data is replicated and distributed to multiple d ata caches on-the-fly, in an effort to improve performance in terms of data availability, fault tolerance and execution t ime. A simulation study was performed to analyze the latest iteration of the super-peer protocol and specifically evalu ate the new features.
Silk: A Simulation Study of Regulating Open Normative Multiagent Systems

In a multiagent system, a (social) norm describes what the agents may expect from each other. Norms promote autonomy (an agent need not comply with a norm) and heterogeneity (a norm describes interactions at a high level independent of implementation details). Researchers have studied norm emergence through social learning where the agents interact repeatedly in a graph structure. In contrast, we consider norm emergence in an open system, where membership can change, and where no predetermined graph structure exists. We propose Silk, a mechanism wherein a generator monitors interactions among member agents and recommends norms to help resolve conflicts. Each member decides on whether to accept or reject a recommended norm. Upon exiting the system, a member passes its experience along to incoming members of the same type. Thus, members develop norms in a hybrid manner to resolve conflicts. We evaluate Silk via simulation in the traffic domain. Our results show that social norms promoting conflict resolution emerge in both moderate and selfish societies via our hybrid mechanism.
Salmonella stimulate macrophage macropinocytosis and persist within spacious phagosomes

Light microscopic studies of phagocytosis showed that Salmonella typhimurium entered mouse macrophages enclosed in spacious phagosomes (SP). Viewed by time-lapse video microscopy, bone marrow-derived macrophages exposed to S. typhimurium displayed generalized plasma membrane ruffling and macropinocytosis. Phagosomes containing Salmonella were morphologically indistinguishable from macropinosomes. SP formation was observed after several methods of bacterial opsonization, although bacteria opsonized with specific IgG appeared initially in small phagosomes that later enlarged. In contrast to macropinosomes induced by growth factors, which shrink completely within 15 min, SP persisted in the cytoplasm, enlarging often by fusion with macropinosomes or other SP. A Salmonella strain containing a constitutive mutation in the phoP virulence regulatory locus (PhoPc) induced significantly fewer SP. Similar to Yersinia enterocolitica, PhoPc bacteria entered macrophages in close-fitting phagosomes, consistent with that expected for conventional receptor-mediated phagocytosis. These results suggest that formation of SP contributes to Salmonella survival and virulence.
The Demand for Industrial Materials, 1950-57

Only eight or nine years ago, at the time of the Korean war, it was widely believed that there would be a continuing world-wide shortage of many primary products; that there was a long-term tendency for the prices of primary products to rise faster than the prices of manufactured goods; and that, as a consequence, the terms of trade were bound to go on turning in favour of primary producing countries and against manufacturing nations such as Britain.
A Linguistic Service Ontology for Language Infrastructures

This paper introduces conceptual framework of an ontology for describing linguistic services on network-based language infrastructures. The ontology defines a taxonomy of processing resources and the associated static language resources. It also develops a sub-ontology for abstract linguistic objects such as expression, meaning, and description; these help define functionalities of a linguistic service. The proposed ontology is expected to serve as a solid basis for the interoperability of technical elements in language infrastructures.
A Novel Quality Metric for Image Fusion Based on Mutual Information and Structural Similarity ?

We present a novel objective image quality assessment method for image fusion based on mutual information and structural similarity. A simplified formula was deduced to compute the information amount transformed from the source images to the final fused image. With this formula we managed to resolve the overlapping information problem immediately and predigested the calculation extremely. Moreover we adopted the mutual information and the structural similarity metric to image fusion schemes, and put forward a novel performance evaluation method without the interference of the reference image. Experimental results show that the proposed metric is well correlated with human subjective evaluations and thus can be used to compare the results of different fusion methods.
Applying Evolutionary Psychology to a Serious Game about Children's Interpersonal Conflict

This article describes the use of evolutionary psychology to inform the design of a serious computer game aimed at improving 9–12-year-old children's conflict resolution skills. The design of the game will include dynamic narrative generation and emotional tagging, and there is a strong evolutionary rationale for the effect of both of these on conflict resolution. Gender differences will also be taken into consideration in designing the game. In interview research in schools in three countries (Greece, Portugal, and the UK) aimed at formalizing the game requirements, we found that gender differences varied in the extent to which they applied cross-culturally. Across the three countries, girls were less likely to talk about responding to conflict with physical aggression, talked more about feeling sad about conflict and about conflicts over friendship alliances, and talked less about conflicts in the context of sports or games. Predicted gender differences in anger and reconciliation were not found. Results are interpreted in terms of differing underlying models of friendship that are motivated by parental investment theory. This research will inform the design of the themes that we use in game scenarios for both girls and boys.
Vietnam’s Trade Policy Dilemmas

Vietnam faces alternative options in opening its economy to trade. It is about to join the World Trade Organization; as a member of the ASEAN Free Trade Area it is contemplating extending the regional trade area to include China, Korea and Japan; and it has recently concluded a bilateral agreement with the United States. Opening up to trade is a two-edged sword, with the beneficial effects of improved market access and resource allocation liable to be partially or totally offset by adverse terms of trade effects and significant, albeit one-off, cost of structural adjustment. Simulations of unilateral, bilateral, regional and multilateral liberalization reform and a tariff harmonization scenario are undertaken using a general equilibrium model, GTAP. Results indicate that significant welfare benefits could be obtained from unilateral liberalization without the need to negotiate with others. Harmonization of tariffs at the current average also shows to be beneficial in raising tariff revenues with little need for adjustment. The extension of AFTA brings moderate benefits, as does a multilateral reform which reduces applied tariffs by 50 per cent. There are only limited gains in the agricultural and resources sectors, as these major exports face low tariff barriers. However, the market for Vietnam's textiles and apparel is crucially important.
Enhanced Category Tuning Revealed by Intracranial Electroencephalograms in High-Order Human Visual Areas

The functional organization of human sensory cortex was studied by comparing intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings of local field potentials in neurosurgical patients with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) obtained in healthy subjects. Using naturalistic movie stimuli, we found a tight correlation between these two measures throughout the human sensory cortex. Importantly, the correlation between the iEEG and fMRI signals was site-specific, exhibiting neuroanatomically specific coupling. In several cortical sites the iEEG activity was confined strictly to one object category. This site selectivity was not limited to faces but included other object categories such as houses and tools. The selectivity of the iEEG signals to images of different object categories was remarkably higher when compared with the selectivity of the corresponding fMRI signals. A plausible interpretation of the fMRI and iEEG results concerns cortical organization in which object categories are organized in a mosaic of narrowly tuned object-selective clusters.
Digital disease detection and participatory surveillance: overview and perspectives for Brazil

ABSTRACT This study aimed to describe the digital disease detection and participatory surveillance in different countries. The systems or platforms consolidated in the scientific field were analyzed by describing the strategy, type of data source, main objectives, and manner of interaction with users. Eleven systems or platforms, developed from 1996 to 2016, were analyzed. There was a higher frequency of data mining on the web and active crowdsourcing as well as a trend in the use of mobile applications. It is important to provoke debate in the academia and health services for the evolution of methods and insights into participatory surveillance in the digital age.
A LOCAL COMPUTATIONAL SCHEME FOR HIGHER ORDER FINITE ELEMENT EIGENVALUE APPROXIMATIONS

Based on some coupled discretizations, a local computational scheme is proposed and analyzed in this paper for a class of higher order finite element eigenvalue approximations. Its efficiency is proven by theoretical and numerical evidences. It is shown that the solution of an eigenvalue problem in a higher order finite element space may be reduced to the solution of an eigenvalue problem in a lower order finite element space, and the solutions of some linear algebraic systems in the higher order finite element space by some local and parallel procedure. Motivated by efficient eigenvalue computations in quantum chemistry, in this paper, a local computation scheme is proposed and analyzed for a class of higher order finite element eigenvalue approximations. With this new proposed scheme, solving an elliptic eigenvalue problem will not be much more difficult than the local solutions of some standard elliptic boundary value problem. Our scheme is an iterative approach, which is related to that in (18, 19). The scheme in this paper, however, is based on global and local coupled discretizations. It is well known that efficient electronic structure computations are usually de- sired in quantum chemistry and nano-materials computations. In modern electronic structure computations, the so-called density functional theory is fundamental, with which Kohn-Sham equations need to be solved (7, 15, 16, 17, 21). Note that Kohn- Sham equations are nonlinear eigenvalue systems in three dimensions, the matrices resulting from both real space and reciprocal space techniques are large, and the number of eigenvalues and eigenvectors required is proportional to the number of atoms in the molecular system. Hence, an iteration procedure of solving a large number of eigenvalues of large scale linear systems must be involved. Moreover, in order to obtain the numerical solution with satisfactory accuracy, the number of iterations are usually very large, too. In a word, efficient electronic structure com- putations require large scale eigenvalue computing (7, 11, 16, 17, 22, 26, 29, 30). Therefore, it is significant to improve the approximation accuracy or reduce the computational cost in solving such linear eigenvalue problems (in three dimensions) at each iteration step. As the finite element method is one of most effective numerical methods, we shall consider to use the finite element scheme to discretize eigenvalue problems.
Local Directional Pattern (LDP) for face recognition

This paper presents a novel local feature descriptor, the Local Directional Pattern (LDP), for recognizing human face. A LDP feature is obtained by computing the edge response values in all eight directions at each pixel position and generating a code from the relative strength magnitude. Each face is represented as a collection of LDP codes for the recognition process.