Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Soft-output sphere detection for coded Unique Word OFDM

Unique Word (UW) OFDM is an attractive alternative to conventional cyclic-prefix OFDM as it offers the potential to apply more sophisticated detection schemes, resulting in improved performance both in uncoded as well as coded transmission. In this paper, we study soft-output detection schemes suited for coded UW-OFDM transmission. In particular, we present an efficient implementation of near-optimum soft-output detection based on the soft-output sphere decoder (SOSD) algorithm. The performance and complexity of this approach is compared to a low-complexity linear detector (linear minimum mean squared error, LMMSE), which uses exact statistics of the residual noise for computation of the soft output. The conducted numerical simulations emphasize that the SOSD constitutes the decoding reference for uncoded as well as coded UW-OFDM transmission. Nevertheless, the LMMSE offers a good performance trade-off at a constant complexity, while the SD's complexity is variable.
Prediction of s-triazine components lipophilicity of total herbicides

A liquid chromatography method has been developed and validated for the determination of mathematical models for prediction of the lipophilicity of s-triazine compounds. Correlation between retention factors, RM 0 , of several s-triazine derivatives and their physico-chemical and structural properties has been studied by TLC on silica gel impregnated with paraffin oil. The research in this paper is focused on testing the influence of chemical structure on the retentive behavior newly synthesized derivatives of triazine. Retention mechanism has been determined using the following mobile phases: water-acetone, water-acetonitrile, water-dioxane, water-tetrahydrofuran, water- methanol and water-ethanol, by changing the volume fraction of modifier in the mobile phase. The reversed-phase chromatographic process has been carried out on impregnated silica gel. Then, the relationship between lipophilic character of molecules, logP, and chromatographic retention parameters has been determine. Relationships between these molecular descriptors and retention factors have been established, and their predictive and interpretive ability has been evaluated. Relationships equation between the retention factors and various lipophilicity descriptors of s-triazine derivatives hase been suggested as linear and multiple linear forms, QSRR models, and the obtained correlation coefficients estimated are relatively higher than 0,90.
Active Hose: an artificial elephant's nose with maneuverability for rescue operation

Proposes both the design concept and the driving mechanism of a flexible robot with multiple degrees of freedom to dive into debris. Up to now, several kinds of pneumatic robots with flexibility have been developed, however, they could not perform multiple degrees of freedom with high bending moment. A new type of robot, called Active Hose, is proposed which has multiple degrees of freedom by connecting units of two degrees freedom in series and has high bending moment by introducing a spine structure and using the deformation of spiral tubes. Active Hose with this performance can be expected to be applied to rescue operations such as searching for victims under debris just after an earthquake, supplying fresh air and drinking water for victims, and carrying air jacks so as to make a room for the victims to escape.
Multimerization of Hepatitis Delta Antigen Is a Critical Determinant of RNA Binding Specificity

ABSTRACT Hepatitis delta virus (HDV) RNA forms an unbranched rod structure that is associated with hepatitis delta antigen (HDAg) in cells replicating HDV. Previous in vitro binding experiments using bacterially expressed HDAg showed that the formation of a minimal ribonucleoprotein complex requires an HDV unbranched rod RNA of at least about 300 nucleotides (nt) and suggested that HDAg binds the RNA as a multimer of fixed size. The present study specifically examines the role of HDAg multimerization in the formation of the HDV ribonucleoprotein complex (RNP). Disruption of HDAg multimerization by site-directed mutagenesis was found to profoundly alter the nature of RNP formation. Mutant HDAg proteins defective for multimerization exhibited neither the 300-nt RNA size requirement for binding nor specificity for the unbranched rod structure. The results unambiguously demonstrate that HDAg binds HDV RNA as a multimer and that the HDAg multimer is formed prior to binding the RNA. RNP formation was found to be temperature dependent, which is consistent with conformational changes occurring on binding. Finally, analysis of RNPs constructed with unbranched rod RNAs successively longer than the minimum length indicated that multimeric binding is not limited to the first HDAg bound and that a minimum RNA length of between 604 and 714 nt is required for binding of a second multimer. The results confirm the previous proposal that HDAg binds as a large multimer and demonstrate that the multimer is a critical determinant of the structure of the HDV RNP.
Cardiovascular Death and Nonfatal Myocardial Infarction in Acute Coronary Syndrome Patients Receiving Coronary Stenting Are Predicted by Residual Platelet Reactivity to ADP Detected by a Point-of-Care Assay: A 12-Month Follow-Up

Background— The clinical impact of platelet aggregation assessed by point-of-care assays is unknown. We sought to evaluate whether high residual platelet reactivity (RPR) to ADP during clopidogrel therapy, measured by a point-of-care assay, predicts adverse clinical events in acute coronary syndrome patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention. Methods and Results— We used the VerifyNow P2Y12 assay (Accumetrics Inc, San Diego, Calif) to determine RPR to ADP in 683 patients with acute coronary syndrome undergoing dual-antiplatelet therapy who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention with bare-metal or drug-eluting stent implantation. All patients received a single 600-mg clopidogrel loading dose followed by 75 mg of clopidogrel daily and 100 to 325 mg of aspirin daily. The end points of the study at follow-up of 12 months were cardiovascular death, nonfatal myocardial infarction (MI), and target-vessel revascularization. At a 12-month follow-up, we found 51 ischemic events (24 cardiovascular deaths [3.5%], 27 nonfatal MIs [3.9%]) and 40 target-vessel revascularizations (5.8%). By receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis, the optimal cutoff value in predicting 12-month cardiovascular death and nonfatal MI was P2Y12 reaction unit values ≥240. RPR, defined in the presence of P2Y12 reaction unit values above this cutoff, was found to be a significant and independent predictor of cardiovascular death and nonfatal MI in a model that adjusted for cardiovascular risk factors, renal failure, reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, multivessel disease, total stent length, bifurcation lesions, number of lesions treated, type of stent, and use of glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitors (cardiovascular death: hazard ratio 2.55, 95% CI 1.08 to 6.07, P=0.034; nonfatal MI: hazard ratio 3.36, 95% CI 1.49 to 7.58, P=0.004). No significant association was found between high RPR and the risk of target-vessel revascularization. Conclusions— RPR to ADP with clopidogrel therapy, measured by the point-of-care assay VerifyNow P2Y12, is able to detect acute coronary syndrome patients at risk of 12-month cardiovascular death and nonfatal MI. The optimal cutoff value was identified as being 240 P2Y12 reaction units.
Large margin distribution machine for hyperspectral image classification

Abstract. Support vector machine (SVM) classifiers are widely applied to hyperspectral image (HSI) classification and provide significant advantages in terms of accuracy, simplicity, and robustness. SVM is a well-known learning algorithm that maximizes the minimum margin. However, recent theoretical results pointed out that maximizing the minimum margin leads to a lower generalization performance than optimizing the margin distribution, and proved that the margin distribution is more important. In this paper, a large margin distribution machine (LDM) is applied to HSI classification, and optimizing the margin distribution achieves a better generalization performance than SVM. Since the raw HSI feature space is not the most effective space for representing HSI, we adopt factor analysis to learn an effective HSI feature and the learned features are further filtered by a structure-preserved filter to fully exploit the spatial structure information of HSI. The spatial structure information is integrated in the feature learning process to obtain a better HSI feature. Then we propose a multiclass LDM to classify the filtered HSI feature. Experimental results show that the proposed LDM with feature learning method achieves the classification performance of the state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and three quantitative evaluations and indicates that LDM has a high generalization performance.
Don't Care Filling for Better Diagnostic Test Set

Before delivering, the manufactured ICs are tested for defects. Diagnosis is the procedure to determine the sites where defects are likely to be present in a chip that failed a test set. For any diagnosis algorithm the accuracy of diagnosis depends on the test pattern set employed. More the test pattern set distinguishes fault pairs, more is the diagnosis quality. This paper addresses issue of assigning values to don't care bits (X bits) in the test pattern set so that the circuit can be reasonably diagnosed by analyzing the output response. For this, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based approach has been proposed to fill the don't-care bits. The proposed algorithm when run on full-scan ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits shows significant improvement over 0-fill and 1-fill based don't care filling and reasonably good improvement over random-fill based techniques.
cDNA Cloning of a Novel, Developmentally Regulated Immediate Early Gene Activated by Fibroblast Growth Factor and Encoding a Nuclear Protein*

We have utilized the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based differential display methodology (Liang, P., and Pardee, A. B. (1992) Science 257, 967–969) to identify a novel transcript whose expression levels increased inXenopus embryo explants during mesoderm induction by fibroblast growth factor. The PCR product was used to clone a 2.3-kilobase pair cDNA representing this transcript, which we have named er1 (early response1). The er1 cDNA contained a single open reading frame predicted to encode a protein of 493 amino acid residues. A data base homology search revealed that the predicted ER1 amino acid sequence contains three regions of similarity to the rat and human proteins encoded by the metastasis-associated gene, mta1, and two regions of similarity to the Caenorhabditis eleganssequence that is similar to mta1. The fibroblast growth factor-induced increase in er1 steady-state levels was not dependent on de novo protein synthesis, demonstrating thater1 is an immediate-early gene. Northern blot analysis revealed a single 2.8-kilobase pair mRNA that was observed predominantly during the initial cleavage and blastula stages ofXenopus development, with little or no detectable mRNA during subsequent development. Quantitative PCR analysis of early developmental stages showed that er1 peaked during late blastula. Computer-assisted analysis of the predicted ER1 amino acid sequence revealed two putative nuclear localization signals, four highly acidic regions clustered at the N terminus and a proline-rich region located near the C terminus. Subcellular localization by immunocytochemistry revealed that the ER1 protein was targeted exclusively to the nucleus. Transactivation assays using various regions of ER1 fused to the DNA binding domain of GAL4 demonstrated that the N-terminal acidic region is a potent transactivator. These data suggest that ER1 may function as a transcription factor.
Leveraging Personal Networks to Support Knowledge Management in a Public Sector Organisation in Kuwait

Abstract Analysis of knowledge management practices in a selected ministry in Kuwait showed that knowledge workers in the public sector identify personal contacts using traditional methods, but make heavy use of social networking tools and services to support personal networks. They communicate regularly with contacts that have expertise in their area of responsibility and prefer to follow up with those contacts whose work they admire. Knowledge workers perform a variety of activities on personal networks to strengthen knowledge management. However, a review of these activities indicates that there is a need to place more emphasis on collaborative learning through social bookmarks, reflecting and commenting on blogs, and editing wikis to provide effective support for knowledge management.
Secret Sharing and Information Hiding by Shadow Images

Secret sharing schemes and information hiding schemes have been separately developed by many researchers over years. Some researchers have been integrated information hiding technique into their proposed secret sharing scheme with the purpose of hiding shares and authentication. However, the combination of a secret sharing scheme and an information hiding technique with high embedding capacity is not explored by researchers. This paper presents a new secret sharing and information hiding scheme by grayscale images. The proposed scheme embeds a secret image and a secret bit stream into two shadow images. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves very high embedding capacity (i.e. about 3 bits per pixel). Furthermore, after the secret bit stream has been extracted, the secret image can be completely restored pixel by pixel.
Olfactory working memory: the role of perceived odor name-ability

All Rights Reserved iv ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among three factors: perceived odorant name ability, whether the odorant was ingested through a single nostril or both nostrils, and how the odorant is represented in working memory. Participants smelled odorants through the left or right nostril or with both nostrils and then provided an identifying label for each odor and rated how accurately their label represented the odor. After a short delay, the participants were given a new stimulus set consisting of new and old odorants. Participants were asked to provide a label for the odor and determine whether the odor was new or old. These ratings were used to evaluate how odors are represented in working memory. A significant main effect showing a both nostril advantage in odor naming accuracy compared to single nostril accuracy was observed. v DEDICATION To my parents for all of their encouragement and endless support; to my sister Chelsea for keeping me motivated. Thank you for all your support. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis has been the culmination of a very long journey. First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor Dr. David Ross. Thank you for all the hours of tireless work you have put into this project with me and thank you for pushing me to become a better researcher and student. I would also like to thank my committee members Dr. Amye Warren and Dr. Brian O'Leary who have supported me and my work from the first day I entered the program. Thank you.
Social justice leadership in multicultural schools: the case of an ethnically divided society

This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study focusing on the perceptions of elementary school principals who espouse a critical multicultural approach and show signs of a social justice leadership style. The study has taken place in an ethnically divided society (Cyprus) in which the political situation seems to influence the ways in which school leaders perceive issues of justice and multiculturalism. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 principals who espoused a critical multicultural approach and subscribed to values of social justice leadership. The analysis of these principals’ interviews reveals two important findings—one concerning the conceptualization of critical multiculturalism in a society that suffers from ethnic division and the other concerning the contextualization of social justice leadership in this setting. The paper discusses the implications for leadership preparation programmes and for future research on social justice leadership and critical multiculturalism.
Efficient Orchestration Mechanisms for Congestion Mitigation in NFV: Models and Algorithms

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has recently gained momentum among network operators as a means to share their physical infrastructure among virtual operators, which can independently compose and configure their communication services. However, the spatio-temporal correlation of traffic demands and computational loads can result in high congestion and low network performance for virtual operators, thus leading to service level agreement breaches. In this paper, we analyze the congestion resulting from the sharing of the physical infrastructure and propose innovative orchestration mechanisms based on both centralized and distributed approaches, aimed at unleashing the potential of the NFV technology. In particular, we first formulate the network functions composition problem as a non-linear optimization model to accurately capture the congestion of physical resources. To further simplify the network management, we also propose a dynamic pricing strategy of network resources, proving that the resulting system achieves a stable equilibrium in a completely distributed fashion, even when all virtual operators independently select their best network configuration. Numerical results show that the proposed approaches consistently reduce resource congestion. Furthermore, the distributed solution well approaches the performance that can be achieved using a centralized network orchestration system.
Feeling Me, Feeling You

Does knowing your own emotions relate to knowing those of others? We argue that our ability to experience and label our own emotions in a differentiated and specific manner is related to the ability to accurately perceive the level of emotions in others. In an experience sampling study among romantic couples, we tested the hypothesis that individuals with higher levels of emotion differentiation are characterized by higher levels of empathic accuracy (i.e., judge others’ emotions more accurately). In line with expectations, results showed that individuals who differentiate highly between their negative emotions are more able to accurately infer how pleasant their partners are feeling across daily life. This finding establishes a link between perceptions of our own and others’ emotions and provides evidence that the skills we use to understand our own emotions are also relevant for understanding how others feel.
Exploring callout design in selection task for ultra-small touch screen devices

Ultra-small touch screen devices tend to suffer from occlusion or the fat finger problem owing to their limited input area. A callout could solve these problems by displaying a copy of the occluded area in a non-occluded area. However, callout designs for ultra-small touch screen devices have not yet been explored in depth. In this study, we chose three design factors (each factor has two levels) from various factors and conducted an experiment to examine eight callout designs in the selection task for ultra-small touch screen devices. The results of our experiment matched the results from previous research; however, we also obtained results unique to ultra-small devices. The results showed that the selection speed was higher when the content of the callout was changed continuously, the error rate decreased when the content of the callout was changed continuously and a pointer was displayed to indicate the touched position within the callout, and the workload decreased when the content was changed continuously. Further, as a design factor, the position of the callout would not affect the selection performance.
Optical coherence microscopy for deep tissue imaging of the cerebral cortex with intrinsic contrast

We demonstrate Optical Coherence Microscopy (OCM) for in vivo imaging of the rat cerebral cortex. Imaging does not require addition of dyes or contrast agents, and is achieved through intrinsic scattering contrast and image processing alone. Furthermore, we demonstrate in vivo, quantitative measurements of optical properties and angiography in the rat cerebral cortex. Imaging depths greater than those achieved by conventional two-photon microscopy are demonstrated.
Photo-Realistic Talking-Heads from Image Samples

This paper describes a system for creating a photo-realistic model of the human head that can be animated and lip-synched from phonetic transcripts of text. Combined with a state-of-the-art text-to-speech synthesizer (TTS), it generates video animations of talking heads that closely resemble real people. To obtain a naturally looking head, we choose a "data-driven" approach. We record a talking person and apply image recognition to extract automatically bitmaps of facial parts. These bitmaps are normalized and parameterized before being entered into a database. For synthesis, the TTS provides the audio track, as well as the phonetic transcript from which trajectories in the space of parameterized bitmaps are computed for all facial parts. Sampling these trajectories and retrieving the corresponding bitmaps from the database produces animated facial parts. These facial parts are then projected and blended onto an image of the whole head using its pose information. This talking head model can produce new never recorded speech of the person who was originally recorded. Talking-head animations of this type are useful as a front-end for agents and avatars in multimedia applications such as virtual operators, virtual announcers, help desks, educational, and expert systems.
[Intraoperative measurement of stapes mobility using a hand-guided electromagnetic probe].

BACKGROUND The hearing results of otosurgery are still unsatisfactory. Even after successful implantation of middle ear prostheses there often remains an air bone gap of 30 dB or more. As possible reasons dislocation of the prostheses due to scar growth, changes in prostheses' attachment or ventilation disorders are being discussed. Decreased stapes mobility, which has been judged only manually up to now, is supposed to be a further reason. METHOD We are introducing a new electromagnetic probe. The output signal of this device is proportional to the impedance of the stapes-annular ligament cochlear fluid system at the sensor's resonance frequency (2.4 kHz). The advantage of this system is characterised by its hand-guidance. Injury of the sensitive stapes-annular ligament due to tremor movements of the surgeon can be excluded using a special construction of the sensor head. The maximum force of the sensor's tip onto the stapes during measurement is limited to below 5 mN. RESULTS Preliminary measurement results of 20 patients are presented with normal and abnormal stapes mobility. These results are compared to the subjective impression of the surgeon, who usually tested the stapes mobility by hand. As a result of our investigations probe measurements can detect more exactly decreased mobility of the stapes than the surgeon. CONCLUSIONS Our device may help to detect latent stapes fixation caused by chronic inflammation of the middle ear. The intraoperative measurement of stapes mobility may influence the strategy of the surgeon. Furthermore it would be helpful in patient consulting prior to a revision-tympanoplasty with predicting the potential hearing improvement.