Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Highly Efficient Compact Pose SLAM with SLAM++

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a well-known estimation method used in many robotic and computer vision applications. Under Gaussian assumption, the MLE converts to a nonlinear least squares (NLS) problem. Efficient solutions to NLS exist and they are based on iteratively solving sparse linear systems until convergence. In general, the existing solutions provide only an estimation of the mean state vector, the resulting covariance being computationally too expensive to recover. Nevertheless, in many simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) applications, knowing only the mean vector is not enough. Data association, obtaining reduced state representations, active decisions and next best view are only a few of the applications that require fast state covariance recovery. Furthermore, computer vision and robotic applications are in general performed online. In this case, the state is updated and recomputed every step and its size is continuously growing, therefore, the estimation process may become highly computationally demanding. This paper introduces a general framework for incremental MLE called SLAM++, which fully benefits from the incremental nature of the online applications, and provides efficient estimation of both the mean and the covariance of the estimate. Based on that, we propose a strategy for maintaining a sparse and scalable state representation for large scale mapping, which uses information theory measures to integrate only informative and non-redundant contributions to the state representation. SLAM++ differs from existing implementations by performing all the matrix operations by blocks. This led to extremely fast matrix manipulation and arithmetic operations. Even though this paper tests SLAM++ efficiency on SLAM problems, its applicability remains general.
Pretreatment with Pyridostigmine Bromide Does not Induce Cellular Toxicity

Soldiers are exposed to multiple stress conditions adverse psychological, physico-chemical and environmental conditions during warfare which can result in significant physical and chemical alterations in the biological system. The effects of carbamate (pyridostigmine bromide, PB) pretreatment prior to physiological stress and organophosphorous compound, DFP (diisopropylfluorophosphate) exposure have been investigated on rats. This study attempts to decipher the level of cellular toxicity imparted by PB pretreatment by assessing drug efflux transportation of the PB or DFP and possible genotoxicity with respect to chromosomal aberrations, in addition to total antioxidant status (TAS) of blood under such circumstances. Total antioxidant status was observed to be more than 50% potentiated with sign-free dose of PB. Immunohistochemical studies show that drug efflux transporter P-glycoprotein receptors were not quantitatively upregulated by physical stress or hyperthermia or hypothermia or sign-free dosage (0.075 mg/Kg after intramuscular injection) of the xenobiotic pyridostigmine bromide. Treatment with high doses (8-16mg/ml) of PB on alternate days for a week caused 10 -20% increase in the receptor count, indicating the toxicity level. Further, sign-free dose of pyridostigmine does not induce genotoxicity as far as chromosomal breakage is concerned. In silico docking studies show that the pyridostigmine molecule binds with maximum affinity to asparagine(1235), threonine(1199) and arginine(1229) in the C-terminal half of the P-glycoprotein. So, pretreatment with sign-free dose of pyridostigmine bromide offers sufficient protection from stress against organophosphorous DFP exposure as observed from these molecular studies and does not significantly alterP-glycoprotein receptors quantitatively.
Anti‐stromal therapy with imatinib inhibits growth and metastasis of gastric carcinoma in an orthotopic nude mouse model

Recent studies have revealed that platelet‐derived growth factor (PDGF) plays a role in promoting progressive tumor growth in several organs; however, whether PDGF plays such a role in gastric carcinoma is undetermined. We examined whether inhibition of PDGF receptor (PDGF‐R) tyrosine kinase signaling by imatinib affects tumor growth and metastasis in an orthotopic nude mouse model of human gastric carcinoma. TMK‐1 human gastric carcinoma cells were injected into the gastric wall of nude mice. Groups of mice (n = 10 each) received sterile water (control), low‐dose imatinib (50 mg/kg/day), high‐dose imatinib (200 mg/kg/day), cancer chemotherapeutic agent irinotecan (5 mg/kg/week), or imatinib (50 mg/kg/day or 200 mg/kg/day) and irinotecan (5 mg/kg/week) in combination for 28 days. Tumor growth and metastasis were assessed. Resected tumors were analyzed immunohistochemically. Carcinoma‐associated fibroblasts, pericytes and lymphatic endothelial cells in stroma expressed high levels of PDGF‐R; carcinoma cells did not. Treatment with imatinib alone did not inhibit tumor growth and metastasis; however, treatment with irinotecan alone or combined with imatinib significantly inhibited tumor growth. Only treatment with high‐dose imatinib and irinotecan in combination inhibited lymph node and peritoneal metastases. Immunohistochemically, only imatinib alone or in combination with irinotecan was shown to significantly decrease the stromal reaction, microvessel area and pericyte coverage of tumor microvessels. These effects were marked with high‐dose imatinib. In conclusion, administration of PDGF‐R tyrosine kinase inhibitor in combination with irinotecan appears to impair the progressive growth of gastric carcinoma by blockade of PDGF‐R signaling pathways in stromal cells.
A cryptographic file system for UNIX

Although cryptographic techniques are playing an increasingly important role in modern computing system security, user-level tools for encrypting file data are cumbersome and suffer from a number of inherent vulnerabilities. The Cryptographic File System (CFS) pushes encryption services into the file system itself. CFS supports secure storage at the system level through a standard Unix file system interface to encrypted files. Users associate a cryptographic key with the directories they wish to protect. Files in these directories (as well as their pathname components) are transparently encrypted and decrypted with the specified key without further user intervention; cleartext is never stored on a disk or sent to a remote file server. CFS can use any available file system for its underlying storage without modification, including remote file servers such as NFS. System management functions, such as file backup, work in a normal manner and without knowledge of the key. This paper describes the design and implementation of CFS under Unix. Encryption techniques for file system-level encryption are described, and general issues of cryptographic system interfaces to support routine secure computing are discussed.
Parameter Estimation of Hidden Diffusion Processes: Particle Filter vs. Modified Baum-Welch Algorithm

We propose a new method for the estimation of parameters of hidden diffusion processes. Based on parametrization of the transition matrix, the Baum-Welch algorithm is improved. The algorithm is compared to the particle filter in application to the noisy periodic systems. It is shown that the modified Baum-Welch algorithm is capable of estimating the system parameters with better accuracy than particle filters.
Is Depression More Prevalent in Old Age?

Objective: To examine the prevalence of depression in old age and to review cross-age studies that reported age-related differences in prevalence. Method: Reports of studies that included data on the prevalence of depression in old age were reviewed, and conclusions from review articles were considered. Results: Findings have been inconsistent, but majority opinion holds that depression (especially ‘subsyndromal’) is common in old age. There may be two peaks in the prevalence rate of major depression, one in late old age and the other in middle age or earlier. Conclusions: The allocation of health care resources should not be determined by survey findings concerning the prevalence of major depression and dysthymia.
Biomimetic materials: A challenge for nano-scale self-assembly

throughout nature. Natural materials are a basis for materials design; because they have evolved creating properties that suit particular or diverse environments. Replicating natural materials is a strategy for designing optimally performing materials. There are several routes to biomimicry: 1) use biomaterials: minerals, wood and natural fibres directly in composites, 2) adapt natural processes: layer-by-layer formation, orientation and self-assembly to synthetic materials, 3) form synthetic or semi-synthetic structures that replicate natural morphologies. A further dimension is scale. Preparation of biomimetic materials has trended towards nano-scale where components, morphology and techniques are combined. Nano-dimensions provide large interfaces and structural perfection. Articles in EXPRESS POLYMER LETTERS present developments in biomimetic polymer materials that attract much interest. Material design, processing and component selection are requirements of characterisation techniques, with sensitivity and resolution at the nano-scale. X-ray scattering and transmission electron microscopy are theoretically suited. Surface force microscopy is a collection of techniques with growing specificity. The diffraction limitation of optical microscopy is circumvented with fluorescent nano-imaging adaptions. Infrared and Raman microscopy are emerging with nano-scale variants. Computation and interpretation of data form standard structure–property techniques provide indirect or inferred information about nano-materials. Most natural structural materials are composites, since component properties are retained, not averaged, and incongruous properties: hardness, toughness and strength are achieved simultaneously. Nacre is tough, hard and strong, yet it contains mainly calcium carbonate with minimal organic binder. Multiphase composites that contain platelets or fibrous inclusions focus anisotropic performance, with orientation imposed by processing or self-association. Natural materials are often not space-filling; they contain voids interspersed with structural regularity, commonly hexagonal features. Some voids are channels to convey nutrients to the living system. Synthetic analogies are foams and membranes. Foams decrease density more than mechanical properties, while membranes are functional materials. Foam, honeycomb and cantilevered structures are prepared, though they present most challenge at the nano-scale. Finite element modelling predicts that uniform strength is unnecessary; stress must be effectively transferred from regions of stress concentration. Biomimetic concepts have expanded to self-repair, typically containing reagent microcapsules or reversible reaction functionality. A living system with channels to convey repairing substances is an analogy, though in a renewable material a complexity is removal of damaged materials from repair sites to allow continued renewal. Can micro or nano bricks and mortar structures be prepared and controlled though self-assembly, including self-repair?
The influence of cholesterol on the motility of cochlear outer hair cells and the motor protein prestin

Conclusions: We provide evidence that cholesterol reduces electromotility in a dose-dependent matter. The data show that cholesterol modulates electromotility mainly by influencing the motor protein prestin, less by affecting the passive membrane properties. Objectives: Elevated serum cholesterol is linked to inner ear disorders and may influence hearing by altering membrane properties of outer hair cells (OHCs) and by affecting the motor protein prestin. In this study we wanted to determine whether cholesterol modulates the electromotility of OHCs and if this modulation results from effects on the membrane properties or on the motor protein prestin. Materials and methods: The motile responses of 12 isolated OHCs were investigated at increasing concentrations of 0, 0.1, and 1 mM extracellular cholesterol using the patch clamp technique and continuous video image analysis. To study effects on prestin, experiments were performed in 12 cells with half activated protein function and concentrations of 0 and 1 mM cholesterol. Results: Cholesterol at a concentration of 0.1 mM had no effect on motility. A concentration of 1 mM reduced maximal evoked shortening significantly by 29% in the depolarizing and by 9% in the hyperpolarizing direction. Investigating half activated motor proteins, 1 mM cholesterol reduced movements significantly by 18%, elongations decreased nonsignificantly by 5%.
Sphere Lower Bound for Rotated Lattice Constellations in Fading Channels

We study the error probability performance of rotated lattice constellations in frequency-flat Nakagami-m block-fading channels. In particular, we use the sphere lower bound on the underlying infinite lattice as a performance benchmark. We show that the sphere lower bound has full diversity. We observe that optimally rotated lattices with largest known minimum product distance perform very close to the lower bound, while the ensemble of random rotations is shown to lack diversity and perform far from it.
Loss of Quinone Reductase 2 Function Selectively Facilitates Learning Behaviors

High levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) are associated with deficits in learning and memory with age as well as in Alzheimer's disease. Using DNA microarray, we demonstrated the overexpression of quinone reductase 2 (QR2) in the hippocampus in two models of learning deficits, namely the aged memory impaired rats and the scopolamine-induced amnesia model. QR2 is a cytosolic flavoprotein that catalyzes the reduction of its substrate and enhances the production of damaging activated quinone and ROS. QR2-like immunostaining is enriched in cerebral structures associated with learning behaviors, such as the hippocampal formation and the temporofrontal cortex of rat, mouse, and human brains. In cultured rat embryonic hippocampal neurons, selective inhibitors of QR2, namely S26695 and S29434, protected against menadione-induced cell death by reversing its proapoptotic action. S26695 (8 mg/kg) also significantly inhibited scopolamine-induced amnesia. Interestingly, adult QR2 knock-out mice demonstrated enhanced learning abilities in various tasks, including Morris water maze, object recognition, and rotarod performance test. Other behaviors related to anxiety (elevated plus maze), depression (forced swim), and schizophrenia (prepulse inhibition) were not affected in QR2-deficient mice. Together, these data suggest a role for QR2 in cognitive behaviors with QR2 inhibitors possibly representing a novel therapeutic strategy toward the treatment of learning deficits especially observed in the aged brain.
Performance of TCP over ABR on ATM backbone and with various VBR traffic patterns

We extend our earlier studies of buffer requirements of TCP over ABR in two directions. First, we study the performance of TCP over ABR in an ATM backbone. On the backbone, the TCP queues are at the edge router and not inside the ATM network. The router requires buffer equal to the sum of the receiver window sizes of the participating TCP connections. Second, we introduce various patterns of VBR background traffic. The VBR background introduces variance in the ABR capacity and the TCP traffic introduces variance in the ABR demand. Some simple switch schemes are unable to keep up with the combined effect of highly varying demands and highly varying ABR capacity. We present our experiences with refining the ERICA+ switch scheme to handle these conditions.
Hardware-Accelerated Point-Based Rendering of Complex Scenes

High quality point rendering methods have been developed in the last years. A common drawback of these approaches is the lack of hardware support. We propose a novel point rendering technique that yields good image quality while fully making use of hardware acceleration.Previous research revealed various advantages and drawbacks of point rendering over traditional rendering. Thus, a guideline in our algorithm design has been to allow both primitive types simultaneously and dynamically choose the best suited for rendering. An octree-based spatial representation, containing both triangles and sampled points, is used for level-of-detail and visibility calculations. Points in each block are stored in a generalized layered depth image. McMillan's algorithm is extended and hierarchically applied in the octree to warp overlapping Gaussian fuzzy splats in occlusion-compatible order and hence z-buffer tests are avoided. We show how to use off-the-shelf hardware to draw elliptical Gaussian splats oriented according to normals and to perform texture filtering. The result is a hybrid polygon-point system with increased efficiency compared to previous approaches.
Anticoagulants in venous thromboembolism.

s should accompany all original articles. They should be up to 150 words long and should set out what was done, the principal findings, and their implications. References must be in the Vancouver style and their accuracy checked before submission. They should be numbered in the order in which they appear in the text. Each reference should include the names and initials of each author (or, if more than six, the first three followed by et at), the title of the article, the title of the journal (abbreviated according to the style of Index Medicus), the year, the volume, and the first and last page numbers. References to books should give the names of any editors, the place of publication, the publisher, and the year. Letters to the editor submitted for publication must be signed personally by all authors, who should include one degree or diploma. The editor reserves the customary right to style and if necessary shorten material accepted for publication and to determine the priority and time of publication. Detailed instructions are given in theBMJ dated 2 January 1988, p 48. 1288 BMJ VOLUME 297 19 NOVEMBER 1988
Computational Fluid Dynamics Study of Solids Deposition in Heavy Oil Transmission Pipeline

Previous studies have shown that transmission-quality heavy crude oil carries water-wetted solid particles, that these particles can accumulate on the pipe floor and cause under-deposit corrosion, and that the incidence of accumulation is strongly correlated to locations downstream of over-bends. This paper describes a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of light and heavy oil flow in a representative segment of a real transmission pipeline in which corrosion has been observed. The purpose was to gain insight into the key processes affecting deposition in heavy oil that do not occur for light oil and to offer suggestions for mitigation. The analysis suggests that the key effect in determining whether particles become trapped is the near-wall velocity of the flow, which is found to be significantly lower for heavy oil compared to light oil, especially downstream of over-bends. This causes particles near the pipe floor to move slowly and makes them susceptible to becoming trapped. It is interesting .
Monitoring, Control and Prevention Practices of Biomaterials Corrosion – An Overview

Biomaterials are materials used for many devices that can interact with biological systems to coexist for longer service with minimal failure. This paper provides an account of the chemical stability and biocompatibility in body environment of biomaterials. Corrosion is one of the major processes affecting the life and service of biomaterials devices made of metals and alloys. It has been observed that biomaterials corrosion occurs mainly by electrochemical reactions. This paper highlights the major corrosion processes. In order to reduce corrosion and achieve better biocompatibility; design, materials selection, and surface modifications are considered potential methods. The electrochemical techniques of mitigating corrosion are hereby examined in depth.
Parameter estimation for Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes driven by α-stable Lévy motions

The parameter estimation theory for stochastic dieren tial equa- tions driven by Brownian motions or general L evy processes with nite second moments has been well developed. In this paper, we consider the parameter estimation problem for Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes driven by -stable L evy motions. The classical maximum likelihood method does not apply in this context because the likelihood ratio does not exist. We shall use the trajec- tory tting method combined with the weighted least squares technique. We discuss the consistency and the asymptotic distributions of our estimators for general weights in both the ergodic and the non-ergodic cases.
GPU merge path: a GPU merging algorithm

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have become ideal candidates for the development of fine-grain parallel algorithms as the number of processing elements per GPU increases. In addition to the increase in cores per system, new memory hierarchies and increased bandwidth have been developed that allow for significant performance improvement when computation is performed using certain types of memory access patterns. Merging two sorted arrays is a useful primitive and is a basic building block for numerous applications such as joining database queries, merging adjacency lists in graphs, and set intersection. An efficient parallel merging algorithm partitions the sorted input arrays into sets of non-overlapping sub-arrays that can be independently merged on multiple cores. For optimal performance, the partitioning should be done in parallel and should divide the input arrays such that each core receives an equal size of data to merge. In this paper, we present an algorithm that partitions the workload equally amongst the GPU Streaming Multi-processors (SM). Following this, we show how each SM performs a parallel merge and how to divide the work so that all the GPU's Streaming Processors (SP) are utilized. All stages in this algorithm are parallel. The new algorithm demonstrates good utilization of the GPU memory hierarchy. This approach demonstrates an average of 20X and 50X speedup over a sequential merge on the x86 platform for integer and floating point, respectively. Our implementation is 10X faster than the fast parallel merge supplied in the CUDA Thrust library.
Food store access and household fruit and vegetable use among participants in the US Food Stamp Program

Abstract Objective: Recent research on access to food among low-income populations in industrialised countries has begun to focus on neighbourhood food availability as a key determinant of dietary behaviour. This study examined the relationship between various measures of food store access and household fruit and vegetable use among participants in the Food Stamp Program, America's largest domestic food assistance programme. Design: A secondary data analysis was conducted using the 1996–97 National Food Stamp Program Survey. The survey employed a 1-week food inventory method, including two at-home interviews, to determine household food use. Separate linear regression models were developed to analyse fruit and vegetable use. Independent variables included distance to store, travel time to store, ownership of a car and difficulty of supermarket access. All models controlled for a full set of socio-economic variables. Subjects: A nationally representative sample of participants (n = 963) in the Food Stamp Program. Results: After controlling for confounding variables, easy access to supermarket shopping was associated with increased household use of fruits (84 grams per adult equivalent per day; 95% confidence interval 5, 162). Distance from home to food store was inversely associated with fruit use by households. Similar patterns were seen with vegetable use, though associations were not significant. Conclusions: Environmental factors are importantly related to dietary choice in a nationally representative sample of low-income households, reinforcing the importance of including such factors in interventions that seek to effect dietary improvements.