Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Planning Practical Paths for Tentacle Robots

Robots with many degrees of freedom with one fixed end are know n astentacle robotsdue to their similarity to the tentacles found on squid and octopus. Tentacle robots ffer advantages over traditional robots in many scenarios due to their enhanced flexibility and reachabilit y. Planning practical paths for these devices is challenging due to their high degrees of freedom (DOFs). Samplin g-based path planners are a commonly used approach for high DOF planning problems but the solutions fo und using such planners are often not practical in that they do not take into account soft application-speci fic onstraints during the planning process. This paper describes a general sample adjustment method for tent acl robots, which adjusts the randomly generated nodes within their local neighborhood to satisfy soft c nstraints required by the problem. The approach is demonstrated on a planar tentacle robot composed of ten Ro botis Dynamixel AX-12 servos.
The Mitotic Arrest Deficient Protein MAD2B Interacts with the Clathrin Light Chain A during Mitosis

BACKGROUND Although the mitotic arrest deficient protein MAD2B (MAD2L2) is thought to inhibit the anaphase promoting complex (APC) by binding to CDC20 and/or CDH1 (FZR1), its exact role in cell cycle control still remains to be established. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Using a yeast two-hybrid interaction trap we identified the human clathrin light chain A (CLTA) as a novel MAD2B binding protein. A direct interaction was established in mammalian cells via GST pull-down and endogenous co-immunoprecipitation during the G2/M phase of the cell cycle. Through subsequent confocal laser scanning microscopy we found that MAD2B and CLTA co-localize at the mitotic spindle. Clathrin forms a trimeric structure, i.e., the clathrin triskelion, consisting of three heavy chains (CLTC), each with an associated light chain. This clathrin structure has previously been shown to be required for the function of the mitotic spindle through stabilization of kinetochore fibers. Upon siRNA-mediated MAD2B depletion, we found that CLTA was no longer concentrated at the mitotic spindle but, instead, diffusely distributed throughout the cell. In addition, we found a marked increase in the percentage of misaligned chromosomes. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE Previously, we identified MAD2B as an interactor of the renal cell carcinoma (RCC)-associated protein PRCC. In addition, we found that fusion of PRCC with the transcription factor TFE3 in t(X;1)(p11;q21)-positive RCCs results in an impairment of this interaction and a concomitant failure to shuttle MAD2B to the nucleus. Our current data show that MAD2B interacts with CLTA during the G2/M phase of the cell cycle and that depletion of MAD2B leads to a marked increase in the percentage of misaligned chromosomes and a redistribution of CLTA during mitosis.
Improved CamShift tracking algorithm based on motion detection

The traditional Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift Algorithm (CamShift) is widely used, but its drawback is unsatisfactory performance due to counting aU pixels when calculating the color histogram and back projection using a rectangular box to select the target. We propose an improved CamShift Algorithm based on motion detection. When calculating the color histogram of a target within the rectangular box, it adds a mask layer to remove background pixels around targets. When calculating the back projection, it adds a mask layer to remove all background pixels within the window to eliminate the interference of similar color in the background. The experimental results show that this improved algorithm utilizes the color feature better and keeps the tracking right even when background interference exists.
Study of selective gate recess etching of InGaAs/InAlAs/InGaAs metamorphic HEMT structures using succinic acid based etchant

Metamorphic HEMTs on GaAs substrates are promising devices of today as they are operated at even higher frequencies for microwave applications compared to pseudomorphic HEMTs. The selective removal of n+ InGaAs ohmic contact layer from the top of the device structure poses a major challenge during fabrication. We have studied the influence of temperature on the selectivity of etch rate between the n+ InGaAs and underlying InAlAs layers using succinic acid based etchant. The etchant was composed of succinic acid solution mixed with hydrogen peroxide and deionized water. The pH of the solution was adjusted to 5 by adding NH4OH. The etch rates at different temperatures between 14degC to 30degC were estimated by profiling the etched pattern using atomic force microscopy (AFM). Surface roughness of the etched area also was studied using AFM. It was found that the selectivity has improved with temperature. This is possibly due to simultaneous occurrence of low etch rates of InAlAs due to presence of aluminum oxide and high etch rates of InGaAs due to increased temperature. It was also found that the surface roughness was higher at lower temperatures contrary to the observations made in the case of pseudomorphic HEMTs.
Using pattern analysis of in vivo proton MRSI data to improve the diagnosis and surgical management of patients with brain tumors

We have used pattern analysis of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (1H MRSI) data in a variety of situations related to the clinical management of patients with brain tumors and other cerebral space‐occupying lesions (SOLs). Here, we review how ‘leave‐one‐out’ linear discriminant analyses (LDAs) of in vivo 1H MRSI spectral patterns have enabled us to quickly, accurately, and non‐invasively: (1) discriminate amongst tissue arising from the five most common types of supratentorial tumors found in adults, and (2) use the metabolic heterogeneity of cerebral SOLs to predict certain pathological characteristics that are useful in guiding stereotaxic biopsy and selective tumor resection. These findings suggest that pattern analysis of 1H MRSI data can significantly improve the diagnostic specificity and surgical management of patients with certain cerebral SOLs. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
How to assess customer opinions beyond language barriers?

The main focus of this paper is to introduce an approach to sentiment classification for documents in different languages. The method is based on language-specific resources available for English. First, documents are translated to English using standard translation software. For polarity detection, sentiment-bearing terms are identified by means of SentiWordNet. Polarity scores calculated for words of three word classes are exploited by a machine learning classifier for determining the document polarity. The introduced method is tested and evaluated on movie reviews in six different languages. The results show that polarity can be correctly determined even if language specific resources are unavailable.
A new mutation, gld, that produces lymphoproliferation and autoimmunity in C3H/HeJ mice

A newly discovered autosomal recessive mutation, generalized lymphoproliferative disease (gld), in the C3H/HeJ strain of mice, determines the development of early onset massive lymphoid hyperplasia with autoimmunity. Significant lymph node enlargement is apparent as early as 12 wk of age. By 20 wk, lymph nodes are 50-fold heavier than those of coisogenic C3H/HeJ-+/+ mice. There is a concomitant increase in the numbers of peripheral blood lymphocytes. Analysis of C3H-gld lymph node lymphocyte subsets by immunofluorescence indicates an increase in numbers of B cells, T cells, and null (Thy-1-, sIg-) lymphocytes by 6-, 15-, and 33-fold compared with congeneic control mice. Serologically, gld/gld mice develop antinuclear antibodies (including anti-dsDNA), thymocyte-binding autoantibody, and hypergammaglobulinemia with major increases in several immunoglobulin isotypes. Mutant gld mice live only one-half as long as normal controls (12 and 23 mo, respectively). Interstitial pneumonitis was found in virtually all C3H-gld mice autopsied when moribund. Although immune complexes were detected in the glomerulus by immunofluorescence techniques, only 14% of the autopsied mice had significant lupus-like nephritis. Vascular disease was not found. The pattern of early onset massive lymph node enlargement, hypergammaglobulinemia, and production of antinuclear autoantibodies resembles the basic abnormal phenotype induced by the lpr (lymphoproliferation) mutation. The mutations gld and lpr are not allelic. Linkage studies indicate that gld is located between Pep-3 and Lp on chromosome 1. This new mutation adds another genetically well-defined model to the list of murine lymphoproliferative/autoimmune disorders that may be exploited to gain a clearer understanding of immunoregulatory defects and for identifying common pathogenetic factors involved in systemic autoimmune diseases.
Behavioral interface specification languages

Behavioral interface specification languages provide formal code-level annotations, such as preconditions, postconditions, invariants, and assertions that allow programmers to express the intended behavior of program modules. Such specifications are useful for precisely documenting program behavior, for guiding implementation, and for facilitating agreement between teams of programmers in modular development of software. When used in conjunction with automated analysis and program verification tools, such specifications can support detection of common code vulnerabilities, capture of light-weight application-specific semantic properties, generation of test cases and test oracles, and full formal program verification. This article surveys behavioral interface specification languages with a focus toward automatic program verification and with a view towards aiding the Verified Software Initiative—a fifteen-year, cooperative, international project directed at the scientific challenges of large-scale software verification.
Era of Big Data Processing: A New Approach via Tensor Networks and Tensor Decompositions

Many problems in computational neuroscience, neuroinformatics, pattern/image recognition, signal processing and machine learning generate massive amounts of multidimensional data with multiple aspects and high dimensionality. Tensors (i.e., multi-way arrays) provide often a natural and compact representation for such massive multidimensional data via suitable low-rank approximations. Big data analytics require novel technologies to efficiently process huge datasets within tolerable elapsed times. Such a new emerging technology for multidimensional big data is a multiway analysis via tensor networks (TNs) and tensor decompositions (TDs) which represent tensors by sets of factor (component) matrices and lower-order (core) tensors. Dynamic tensor analysis allows us to discover meaningful hidden structures of complex data and to perform generalizations by capturing multi-linear and multi-aspect relationships. We will discuss some fundamental TN models, their mathematical and graphical descriptions and associated learning algorithms for large-scale TDs and TNs, with many potential applications including: Anomaly detection, feature extraction, classification, cluster analysis, data fusion and integration, pattern recognition, predictive modeling, regression, time series analysis and multiway component analysis. Keywords: Large-scale HOSVD, Tensor decompositions, CPD, Tucker models, Hierarchical Tucker (HT) decomposition, low-rank tensor approximations (LRA), Tensorization/Quantization, tensor train (TT/QTT) - Matrix Product States (MPS), Matrix Product Operator (MPO), DMRG, Strong Kronecker Product (SKP).
Influence of carbon content on the nanotribology of W-S-C films

The objective of the present work is to evaluate the influence of carbon content on nanotribological response of reactively sputtered W-S-C thin film. Towards that purpose, W-S-C film containing varying amount of carbon was deposited on tool steel substrate using reactive sputtering. The nanohardness and lateral force microscopy of these films are determined using a nanoindenter and an atomic force microscope (AFM). The results show that the hardness and the pull off force are the maximum at intermediate carbon content. High carbon also appears detrimental for tribology at low load.
AT&T VoiceBuilder: A Cloud-Based Text-to-Speech Voice Builder Tool

The AT&T V OICE B UILDER provides a new tool to researchers and practitioners who want to have their voices synthesized by a high–quality, commercial–grade text-to-speech (TTS) system without the need to install, conﬁgure, or manage speech processing software and equipment. It is implemented as a web service on the AT&T Speech Mashup Portal 1 . The system records, processes, and validates users’ utterances, and provides a web service API to make the new voice immediately available to real-time applications. All the procedures are fully-automated to avoid human intervention.
Analysis of AES Hardware Implementations

Following paper examines hardware implementation methods regarding Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Compared to software implementation, migrating to hardware provides higher level of security and faster encryption speed. An overview of existing AES hardware implementation techniques are summarized. Then the direction of reconfigurable coprocessor as a cryptography hardware is proposed. Keywords— AES, Rijndael, coprocessor, hardware implementation, optimization.
Dynamic regulation of middle cerebral artery blood flow velocity in aging and hypertension.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Although aging and hypertension may predispose hypertensive elderly subjects to cerebral hypoperfusion during orthostatic stress, their effects on the acute cerebral autoregulatory response to hypotension are not known. METHODS Continuous middle cerebral artery blood flow velocity (BFV) (transcranial Doppler ultrasound) and mean arterial pressure (MAP, Finapres) were measured in response to (1) acute hypotension during standing, (2) steady-state sitting and standing, and (3) hypercarbia during CO(2) rebreathing in 10 healthy young subjects (age 24+/-1 years), 10 healthy elderly subjects (age 72+/-3 years), and 10 previously treated hypertensive elderly (age 72+/-2 years) subjects. CO(2) reactivity was computed as the slope of cerebrovascular conductance (CVC=BFV/MAP) versus end-expiratory CO(2). Coherence, transfer magnitudes, and phases between low-frequency MAP and BFV signals were computed from their autospectra during 5 minutes of sitting and standing. RESULTS MAP fell to a similar extent in all groups by an average of 21 to 26 mm Hg (22% to 26%) within 30 seconds of standing. Mean BFV also fell in all subjects but significantly less in the older subjects (-4.7+/-0. 7 cm/s in hypertensives and -5.3+/-1.2 cm/s in normotensives, P=NS) compared with younger subjects (-10.1+/-1.1 cm/s, P<0.05). CO(2) reactivity was greater in the young subjects (0.19+/-0.01) compared with normotensive (0.14+/-0.01, P<0.05) and hypertensive elderly subjects (0.11+/-0.02, P<0.05) (P=NS between elderly groups). Fewer hypertensive subjects had coherence between MAP and BFV signals; for subjects with coherence, there were no significant group differences in phase or transfer magnitudes in either sitting or standing positions. CONCLUSIONS Despite reduced CO(2) reactivity, elderly normotensive and previously treated hypertensive subjects retain cerebral autoregulatory capacity in response to acute orthostatic hypotension.
Signal conditioning techniques for robust speech recognition

Acoustic mismatch encountered in various training and testing conditions of hidden Markov model (HMM) based systems often causes severe degradation in speech recognition performance. For telephone based speech recognition tasks, acoustic mismatch can arise from various sources, such as variations in telephone handsets, ambient noise, and channel distortions. This paper presents three techniques for blind channel equalization, namely, cepstral mean subtraction (CMS), signal bias removal (SBR) and hierarchical signal bias removal (HSBR). Experimental results on various connected digits databases show a reduction in the digit error rate by 16%, 21%, and 28% when employing CMS, SBR, and HSBR, respectively. Our results also demonstrate that the HSBR technique outperforms SBR and CMS on every sub-data collection and exhibits consistent improvements even for short utterances.
Identity in Agent-Based Models : Issues and Applications

Identity plays a central role in many current events of interest and importance. This paper examines a representative sample of the computational social science (CSS) literature which incorporates notions of identity or processes of identity formation. Building on some of the ideas present in the modeling literature, we then proceed to introduce a multilevel conceptual framework for the modeling of complex and fluid identity dynamics, with a focus on competing and loosely defined political groups.
Genetic Identification of a Putative Vinyl Chloride Reductase in Dehalococcoides sp. Strain BAV1

ABSTRACT Dehalococcoides sp. strain BAV1 couples growth with the reductive dechlorination of vinyl chloride (VC) to ethene. Degenerate primers targeting conserved regions in reductive dehalogenase (RDase) genes were designed and used to PCR amplify putative RDase genes from strain BAV1. Seven unique RDase gene fragments were identified. Transcription analysis of VC-grown BAV1 cultures suggested that bvcA was involved in VC reductive dechlorination, and the complete sequence of bvcA was obtained. bvcA was absent in Dehalococcoides isolates that failed to respire VC, yet was detected in four of eight VC-respiring mixed cultures.
Online Continuous Measurement of the Operating Deflection Shape of Power Transmission Belts Through Electrostatic Charge Sensing

The measurement of the operating deflection shape (ODS) of power transmission belts is of great importance for the fault diagnosis and prognosis of industrial belt drive systems. This paper presents a novel method based on an electrostatic sensor array to measure the ODS of a belt moving both axially and transversely. The electrostatic sensor integrates a charge amplifier that converts the induced charge on a strip-shaped electrode into a voltage signal. Finite-element simulations are performed to study the sensing characteristics of the sensor and the results reveal that the sensor can respond to vibration displacement. Construction of the ODS is achieved in the frequency domain using the ODS frequency response function. Comparative experimental studies with a high-accuracy laser displacement sensor were conducted on a purpose-built test rig and the results show that the vibration frequencies and their relative magnitudes obtained from both sensors agree well with each other. Experiments conducted over a range of belt axial speeds show that the belt vibrates at frequencies that are well separated and identifiable using a peak picking method. The measured ODSs of the first three vibration modes illustrate that the vibration displacement is larger in the middle of the belt span than at both ends and that the phase shift relative to the reference sensor at each measurement point increases monotonically along the belt running direction. The belt axial speed determines the vibration frequencies and displacement, which reaches the maximum amplitude around the natural frequency of the belt.
IDSS: A Novel Representation for Woven Fabrics

The appearance of woven fabrics is intrinsically determined by the geometric details of their meso/micro scale structure. In this paper, we propose a multiscale representation and tessellation approach for woven fabrics. We extend the Displaced Subdivision Surface (DSS) to a representation named Interlaced/Intertwisted Displacement Subdivision Surface (IDSS). IDSS maps the geometric detail, scale by scale, onto a ternary interpolatory subdivision surface that is approximated by Bezier patches. This approach is designed for woven fabric rendering on DX11 GPUs. We introduce the Woven Patch, a structure based on DirectX's new primitive, patch, to describe an area of a woven fabric so that it can be easily implemented in the graphics pipeline using a hull shader, a tessellator and a domain shader. We can render a woven piece of fabric at 25 frames per second on a low-performance NVIDIA 8400 MG mobile GPU. This allows for large-scale representations of woven fabrics that maintain the geometric variances of real yarn and fiber.
Adhesion of two elastic conforming solids with a single interface gap

The adhesive contact between a half-space with a single surface micro-groove and a flat half-space is investigated. Surface interaction is described by the Maugis–Dugdale adhesion model. The contact problem is reduced to a singular integral equation for a height of the interface gap, which is solved analytically. For evaluating widths of the gap and the adhesion zone, a system of two transcendental equations is obtained, which is solved numerically. Three stable equilibrium states are found. The gap width-applied pressure curves are characterized by discontinuities and hysteresis. The effects of the maximum groove height and the adhesive stress on the adhesive contact are studied. It is shown that the adhesion hysteresis is greater for smaller grooves and larger adhesive stresses.
An in vivo MRI Template Set for Morphometry, Tissue Segmentation, and fMRI Localization in Rats

Over the last decade, several papers have focused on the construction of highly detailed mouse high field magnetic resonance image (MRI) templates via non-linear registration to unbiased reference spaces, allowing for a variety of neuroimaging applications such as robust morphometric analyses. However, work in rats has only provided medium field MRI averages based on linear registration to biased spaces with the sole purpose of approximate functional MRI (fMRI) localization. This precludes any morphometric analysis in spite of the need of exploring in detail the neuroanatomical substrates of diseases in a recent advent of rat models. In this paper we present a new in vivo rat T2 MRI template set, comprising average images of both intensity and shape, obtained via non-linear registration. Also, unlike previous rat template sets, we include white and gray matter probabilistic segmentations, expanding its use to those applications demanding prior-based tissue segmentation, e.g., statistical parametric mapping (SPM) voxel-based morphometry. We also provide a preliminary digitalization of latest Paxinos and Watson atlas for anatomical and functional interpretations within the cerebral cortex. We confirmed that, like with previous templates, forepaw and hindpaw fMRI activations can be correctly localized in the expected atlas structure. To exemplify the use of our new MRI template set, were reported the volumes of brain tissues and cortical structures and probed their relationships with ontogenetic development. Other in vivo applications in the near future can be tensor-, deformation-, or voxel-based morphometry, morphological connectivity, and diffusion tensor-based anatomical connectivity. Our template set, freely available through the SPM extension website, could be an important tool for future longitudinal and/or functional extensive preclinical studies.