Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A simple method for modeling wrinkles on human skin

Realism of rendered human skin can be strongly enhanced by taking into account skin wrinkles. However, modeling wrinkles is a difficult task, and considerable time and effort are necessary to achieve satisfactory results. This paper presents a simple method to easily model wrinkles on human skin, taking into account the properties of real wrinkles. Wrinkles are specified using intuitive parameters, and are generated over a triangle mesh representing a body part, such as a hand or a face. Wrinkled skin surfaces are rendered at an interactive frame rate, dynamically modulating wrinkle amplitude according to skin surface deformation while animating the body part. We demonstrate the ability of our method to model realistic wrinkle shapes by comparing them with real wrinkles.
Exploring perceptual differences of experts and the public on diabetes

More and more health consumers have shared their interests in healthcare topics with peers in online health social websites while there has been the rapid surge in volume of biomedical literatures. In this paper, we applied entity and relation extraction techniques to academic literature and social media's contents in the field of diabetes to find distinctions between the perceptions of biomedical experts and the public. We analyzed and compared the experts' and the public's networks constituted by the extracted entities and relations. The results confirmed that there are some differences in their views, i.e., biomedical entities that interest them and relations within their knowledge range.
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF WINE ECONOMISTS

We investigate the effect of excellence on firm profitability focusing on markets where vertical integration is necessary to achieve product quality and there is limited business scalability. Using data from Italian wine guides, we show that excellence – as measured by wine quality – and vertical integration – as measured by private instead of cooperative ownership – do lead to higher prices of the bottles sold. However, in a second exercise we study the determinants of Italian wineries’ Return of Invested Capital (ROIC) and obtain mixed results. We show that excellence – as measured by firm and collective reputation – is irrelevant. Vertical integration – as measured by in house production of grapes and wine – ensures a better performance, but the most profitable firms are bottlers, which deliver the worst products. Results suggest that excellence and vertical integration are valuable assets, but also that their importance might heavily depend on the scalability of business.
A Method of 3D Reconstruction from Image Sequence

In this paper, a method of 3D reconstruction from an image sequence acquired by a moving camera is presented. The internal parameters and the motion of the camera are absolutely unknown. Firstly, the features of the reconstruction object are detected in each image, and are matched between image pairs. A new method of angel filtering is used to eliminate false correspondences. Fundamental matrix can be computed and projective reconstruction is set up. Secondly, camera self- calibration method is used to get the internal parameters. Epipolar geometry is used to obtain a pairwise image rectification. Dense correspondence matches are then computed. Finally, the 3D model is reconstructed based on the self- calibrated result and dense correspondences map. The feasibility of this approach is illustrated by the experiment.
Music Perception : Paper ICA 2016-727 Effects of lighting on impressions of popular music

This study focused on the effects of lighting colors on impressions of popular music in an actual room, in contrast to a previous study, in which impressions of classical piano music were evaluated for colored images of a piano player generated through computer graphics. The previous study did not clarify the effect of the lighting color on the difference in impression compared with that under normal white lighting. This study investigated the impressions of six pieces of popular music in a room under LED lighting in colors of white, red, yellow, green, and blue. The results of listening experiments conducted with 10 listeners were as follows: Red lighting induces strong and dirty impressions, and blue lighting induces dark and gloomy impressions. These results are consistent with those of the previous study. In addition, the finding of the previous study that appropriate matching between the music and the lighting color enhances the impression created by the music itself was generally observed. However, the degree to which this tendency holds true was found to somewhat depend on the lighting color.
PKOPT: Faster k-Optimal Solution for DCOP by Improving Group Selection Strategy

A significant body of work in multiagent systems over more than two decades has focused on multi-agent coordination. Many challenges in multi-agent coordination can be modeled as Distributed Constraint Optimizations (DCOPs). Many complete and incomplete algorithms have been introduced for DCOPs but complete algorithms are often impractical for large-scale and dynamic environments which lead to study incomplete algorithms. Some incomplete algorithms produce k-optimal solutions; a k-optimal solution is the one that cannot be improved by any deviation by k or fewer agents. In this paper we focus on the only k-optimal algorithm which works for arbitrary k, entitled as KOPT. In both complete and incomplete algorithms, computational complexity is the major concern. Different approaches are introduced to solve this problem and improve existing algorithms. The main contribution of this paper is to decrease computational complexity of KOPT algorithm by introducing a new method for selecting leaders which should assign new values to a group of agents. This new approach is called Partial KOPT (PKOPT). PKOPT is an effective method to reduce computational load and power consumption in implementation. This paper under various assumptions presents an analysis of sequential and stochastic PKOPT algorithms.
On Bias Plus Variance

This article presents several additive corrections to the conventional quadratic loss bias-plus-variance formula. One of these corrections is appropriate when both the target is not fixed (as in Bayesian analysis) and training sets are averaged over (as in the conventional bias plus variance formula). Another additive correction casts conventional fixed-trainingset Bayesian analysis directly in terms of bias plus variance. Another correction is appropriate for measuring full generalization error over a test set rather than (as with conventional bias plus variance) error at a single point. Yet another correction can help explain the recent counterintuitive bias-variance decomposition of Friedman for zero-one loss. After presenting these corrections, this article discusses some other loss function-specific aspects of supervised learning. In particular, there is a discussion of the fact that if the loss function is a metric (e.g., zero-one loss), then there is bound on the change in generalization error accompanying changing the algorithm's guess from h1 to h2, a bound that depends only on h1 and h2 and not on the target. This article ends by presenting versions of the bias-plus-variance formula appropriate for logarithmic and quadratic scoring, and then all the additive corrections appropriate to those formulas. All the correction terms presented are a covariance, between the learning algorithm and the posterior distribution over targets. Accordingly, in the (very common) contexts in which those terms apply, there is not a bias-variance trade-off or a bias-variance dilemma, as one often hears. Rather there is a bias-variance-covariance trade-off.
A Polynomial Algorithm to Prove Deadlock-Freeness of Wormhole Networks

Deadlocks are an important issue in wormhole networks and a lot of works have been done on deadlock avoidance. Sufficient and necessary deadlock-freeness conditions have been proposed and used to build deadlock-free wormhole networks. But none of these works provide an efficient way to verify if a given network is deadlock-free. The present article proposes a new sufficient and necessary condition associated with a polynomial algorithm to check if a given network is deadlock-free. This new algorithm identifies {\em escape paths} from channels that are involved in circular dependencies. Identifying escape paths can be easily done by studying strongly connected components of the dependency graph instead of studying individually each cycle. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in a tool for automatic detection of deadlocks in wormhole networks (ODI). ODI has been used to establish the deadlock-freeness of complex realistic networks and networks with defective routers.
/spl times/pipesCompiler: a tool for instantiating application specific networks on chip

Future systems on chips (SoCs) will integrate a large number of processor and storage cores onto a single chip and require networks on chip (NoC) to support the heavy communication demands of the system. The individual components of the SoCs will be heterogeneous in nature with widely varying functionality and communication requirements. The communication infrastructure should optimally match communication patterns among these components accounting for the individual component needs. In this paper we present /spl times/pipesCompiler, a tool for automatically instantiating an application-specific NoC for heterogeneous multi-processor SoCs. The /spl times/pipesCompiler instantiates a network of building blocks from a library of composable soft macros (switches, network interfaces and links) described in SystemC at the cycle-accurate level. The network components are optimized for that particular network and support reliable, latency-insensitive operation. Example systems with application-specific NoCs built using the /spl times/pipesCompiler show large savings in area (factor of 6.5), power (factor of 2.4) and latency (factor of 1.42) when compared to a general-purpose mesh-based NoC architecture.
Dependable and secure TMO scheme

In a real-time distributed computing environment, security is critical to protect the system from unauthorized access especially since such systems are being used in time critical applications. Access control mechanisms have been introduced during the last several decades and have offered a basic and powerful means for enforcing security. In this paper, we examine the concepts of the TMO (time triggered message triggered object) scheme that provides guaranteed real-time services in a distributed object computing environment. We also examine access control mechanisms; such as the traditional model, the RBAC (role-based access control) model and the UCON (usage control) model. The main contribution of this paper is applying the traditional, RBAC and UCON models to the TMO scheme in order to provide a secure real-time distributed environment
Antichains for the Automata-Based Approach to Model-Checking

We propose and evaluate antichain algorithms to solve the universality and language inclusion problems for nondeterministic Buchi automata, and the emptiness problem for alternating Buchi automata. To obtain those algorithms, we establish the existence of simulation pre-orders that can be exploited to efficiently evaluate fixed points on the automata defined during the complementation step (that we keep implicit in our approach). We evaluate the performance of the algorithm to check the universality of Buchi automata using the random automaton model recently proposed by Tabakov and Vardi. We show that on the difficult instances of this probabilistic model, our algorithm outperforms the standard ones by several orders of magnitude.
Potentials and Challenges of Mobile Media in Museums

In this article we discuss potential scenarios of use for mobile media in museums and the challenges they pose. We examine how the characteristics of mobile technology suit the specific characteristics of a museum setting. Based on these considerations different ways to support visitors with mobile devices are put forward: attentional focus and guidance; satisfaction of situational interest; information adaptation to a specific visitor and to a specific location; information elaboration through facilitation of knowledge exchange and documentation of the visit, as well as assistance in exhibition evaluation. Implications for the development of mobile applications in museums are derived.
Molecular cloud turbulence and the star formation efficiency: enlarging the scope

Abstract We summarize recent numerical results on the control of the star formation efficiency (SFE), addressing the effects of turbulence and the magnetic field strength. In closed-box numerical simulations, the effect of the turbulent Mach number ${\cal M}_{\rm s}$ depends on whether the turbulence is driven or decaying: In driven regimes, increasing ${\cal M}_{\rm s}$ with all other parameters fixed decreases the SFE, while in decaying regimes the converse is true. The efficiencies in non-magnetic cases for realistic Mach numbers ${\cal M}_{\rm s}$ 10 are somewhat too high compared to observed values. Including the magnetic field can bring the SFE down to levels consistent with observations, but the intensity of the magnetic field necessary to accomplish this depends again on whether the turbulence is driven or decaying. In this kind of simulations, a lifetime of the molecular cloud (MC) needs to be assumed, being typically a few free-fall times. Further progress requires determining the true nature of the turbulence driving and the lifetimes of the clouds. Simulations of MC formation by large-scale compressions in the warm neutral medium (WNM) show that the generation of the clouds' initial turbulence is built into the accumulation process that forms them, and that the turbulence is driven for as long as accumulation process lasts, producing realistic velocity dispersions and also thermal pressures in excess of the mean WNM value. In simulations including self-gravity, but neglecting the magnetic field and stellar energy feedback, the clouds never reach an equilibrium state, but rather evolve secularly, increasing their mass and gravitational energy until they engage in generalized gravitational collapse. However, local collapse events begin midways through this process, and produce enough stellar objects to disperse the cloud or at least halt its collapse before the latter is completed. Simulations of this kind including the missing physical ingredients should contribute to a final resolution of the MC lifetime and the origin of the low SFE problems.
Web Service Composition Integrating QoS Optimization and Redundancy Removal

As more and more web services are available over the Internet, people have many choices to use one or some of them to fulfill their tasks. When the task is adequtely complicated, it is necessary to compose the related web services to complete it effectively and efficiently. Many algorithms have already been proposed to solve the web service composition problem by trying to find the candidate solutions with the best quality of service(QoS) while satisfying the functional goal. However, we may always find that the final solutions contain redundant services that is unnecessary and may cause extra executing costs. Hence, it is significant to remove the redundant services in the service composition process. In this paper, we address the above issues and propose a novel web service composition algorithm by integrating both QoS optimization and redundancy removal. Experimental results on the benchmark WSC'09 datasets have proven that our algorithm keeps less redundant services remained in the solution while keeping very good QoS performance.
Ant colony algorithms for constructing Bayesian multi-net classifiers

Bayesian Multi-nets BMNs are a special kind of Bayesian network BN classifiers that consist of several local Bayesian networks, one for each predictable class, to model an asymmetric set of variable dependencies given each class value. Deterministic methods using greedy local search are the most frequently used methods for learning the structure of BMNs based on optimizing a scoring function. Ant Colony Optimization ACO is a meta-heuristic global search method for solving combinatorial optimization problems, inspired by the behavior of real ant colonies. In this paper, we propose two novel ACO-based algorithms with two different approaches to build BMN classifiers: ABC-Miner^{mn}_l and ABC-Miner^{mn}_g. The former uses a local learning approach, in which the ACO algorithm completes the construction of one local BN at a time. The latter uses a global approach, which involves building a complete BMN classifier by each single ant in the colony. We experimentally evaluate the performance of our ant-based algorithms on 33 benchmark classification datasets, where our proposed algorithms are shown to be significantly better than other commonly used deterministic algorithms for learning various Bayesian classifiers in the literature, as well as competitive to other well-known classification algorithms.
Large-System Analysis of Joint User Selection and Vector Precoding for Multiuser MIMO Downlink

Joint user selection (US) and vector precoding (US-VP) is proposed for multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink. The main difference between joint US-VP and conventional US is that US depends on data symbols for joint US-VP, whereas conventional US is independent of data symbols. The replica method is used to analyze the performance of joint US-VP in the large-system limit, where the numbers of transmit antennas, users, and selected users tend to infinity while their ratios are kept constant. The analysis under the assumptions of replica symmetry (RS) and 1-step replica symmetry breaking (1RSB) implies that optimal data-independent US provides nothing but the same performance as random US in the large-system limit, whereas data-independent US is capacity-achieving as only the number of users tends to infinity. It is shown that joint US -VP can provide a substantial reduction of the energy penalty in the large-system limit. Consequently, joint US-VP outperforms separate US-VP in terms of the achievable sum rate, which consists of a combination of vector precoding (VP) and data-independent US. In particular, data-dependent US can be applied to general modulation, and implemented with a greedy algorithm. Index Terms Multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink, Multiple-input multiple-output broadcast channel ( MIMOBC), zero-forcing transmit beamforming, user selection, vector precoding, energy penalty, achievable rate, large-s ystem analysis, order statistics, statistical physics, replica method, re plica symmetry breaking (RSB).
Study on detailed stresses of crossbeam web cutout for steel orthotropic deck

Finite element analyses were carried out to probe into the stress characteristics of crossbeam web cutout for steel orthotropic deck. Considering the load distribution of wearing surface, stress characteristics were researched for the central crossbeam web cutout in the case of fixed wheel loads with totally symmetrical distribution. The results show that the maximum principal stress distributes primarily in region near the start point of crossbeam cutout. Keeping the longitudinal symmetric of wheel loads with respect to the central crossbeam, after altering loads transverse location, influence was investigated on the in-plane stresses of cutout. It is pointed out that stress distributes in the start point of crossbeam cutout is sensitive for the non-fixing transverse locations of wheel loads. In addition, keeping the transverse symmetric of wheel loads with respect to the central longitudinal rib, the influence on the out-plane stresses of cutout was evaluated by altering the longitudinal location of wheel load. A fact is disclosed that different longitudinal location of wheel loads is one of the important factors to determine the stress distributes in the start point of crossbeam cutout. What's more, stress of cutout was further discussed without load distribution of wearing surface. The transverse stress of the start point of crossbeam cutout is impacted significantly of the area distributed over by the wheel loads. Influencing factors of the stress distributes in the start point of crossbeam cutout are so multiple and complex that this part of steel orthotropic deck should be the emphatic work in the design and fabrication.
Ultra-low power MOSFET-only micromation multi-bit quantizer for implantable neural applications

Several power and area efficient multi-bit quantizers are discussed in this paper. Through the comparison and analysis of the reported quantizers, a novel ultra-low power MOSFET-only micromation one for implantable neural applications is proposed to optimize the area and power consumption with the use of high density MOSCAP and dynamic comparators. Simulated in a 0. 18µm 1P6M CMOS process, the density of the proposed series-PMOS capacitor reaches 2.1fF/µm2 at a 1.2V supply voltage, which is almost 1.5 times higher than that of the traditional Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) capacitor. The current power consumption of the proposed 9-level quantizer is only 0. 14µA clocked at 512 kHz, and its area cost is 11200µm2. Compared with the conventional architecture, over 95% power and 80% area are saved. The simulation results show that the proposed quantizer is suitable for Delta-Sigma modulator designs.
Nuclear factor 90 uses an ADAR2-like binding mode to recognize specific bases in dsRNA

Nuclear factors 90 and 45 (NF90 and NF45) form a protein complex involved in the post-transcriptional control of many genes in vertebrates. NF90 is a member of the dsRNA binding domain (dsRBD) family of proteins. RNA binding partners identified so far include elements in 3′ untranslated regions of specific mRNAs and several non-coding RNAs. In NF90, a tandem pair of dsRBDs separated by a natively unstructured segment confers dsRNA binding activity. We determined a crystal structure of the tandem dsRBDs of NF90 in complex with a synthetic dsRNA. This complex shows surprising similarity to the tandem dsRBDs from an adenosine-to-inosine editing enzyme, ADAR2 in complex with a substrate RNA. Residues involved in unusual base-specific recognition in the minor groove of dsRNA are conserved between NF90 and ADAR2. These data suggest that, like ADAR2, underlying sequences in dsRNA may influence how NF90 recognizes its target RNAs.