Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Persistent formation control of multi-robot networks

This paper presents a method for controlling formations of mobile robots. In particular, the problem of maintaining so-called ¿persistent formations¿ while moving the formation from one location to another is defined and investigated. A method for accomplishing such persistent formation motions is presented, and the method is demonstrated in simulation and with a prototype network of robots.
Optimal robot localization in trees

The problem of localization, that is, of a robot finding its position on a map, is an important task for autonomous mobile robots. It has applications in numerous areas of robotics ranging from aerial photography to autonomous vehicle exploration. In this paper we present a new strategy LPS (Localize-by-Placement-Separation) for a robot to find its position on a map, where the map is represented as a geometric tree of bounded degree. Our strategy exploits to a high degree the self-similarities that may occur in the environment. We use the framework of competitive analysis to analyze the performance of our strategy. In particular, we show that the distance traveled by the robot is at most O (√n) times longer than the shortest possible route to localize the robot, where n is the number of vertices of the tree. This is a significant improvement over the best known previous bound of O(n2/3). Moreover, since there is a lower bound of Ω(√n), our strategy is optimal up to a constant factor. Using the same approach we can also show that the problem of searching for a target in a geometric tree, where the robot is given a map of the tree and the location of the target but does not know its own position, can be solved by a strategy with a competitive ratio of O(√n), which is again optimal up to a constant factor. 2001 Elsevier Science
The Evaluation on the Cadmium Net Concentration for Soil Ecosystems

Yixing, known as the “City of Ceramics”, is facing a new dilemma: a raw material crisis. Cadmium (Cd) exists in extremely high concentrations in soil due to the considerable input of industrial wastewater into the soil ecosystem. The in situ technique of diffusive gradients in thin film (DGT), the ex situ static equilibrium approach (HAc, EDTA and CaCl2), and the dissolved concentration in soil solution, as well as microwave digestion, were applied to predict the Cd bioavailability of soil, aiming to provide a robust and accurate method for Cd bioavailability evaluation in Yixing. Moreover, the typical local cash crops—paddy and zizania aquatica—were selected for Cd accumulation, aiming to select the ideal plants with tolerance to the soil Cd contamination. The results indicated that the biomasses of the two applied plants were sufficiently sensitive to reflect the stark regional differences of different sampling sites. The zizania aquatica could effectively reduce the total Cd concentration, as indicated by the high accumulation coefficients. However, the fact that the zizania aquatica has extremely high transfer coefficients, and its stem, as the edible part, might accumulate large amounts of Cd, led to the conclusion that zizania aquatica was not an ideal cash crop in Yixing. Furthermore, the labile Cd concentrations which were obtained by the DGT technique and dissolved in the soil solution showed a significant correlation with the Cd concentrations of the biota accumulation. However, the ex situ methods and the microwave digestion-obtained Cd concentrations showed a poor correlation with the accumulated Cd concentration in plant tissue. Correspondingly, the multiple linear regression models were built for fundamental analysis of the performance of different methods available for Cd bioavailability evaluation. The correlation coefficients of DGT obtained by the improved multiple linear regression model have not significantly improved compared to the coefficients obtained by the simple linear regression model. The results revealed that DGT was a robust measurement, which could obtain the labile Cd concentrations independent of the physicochemical features’ variation in the soil ecosystem. Consequently, these findings provide stronger evidence that DGT is an effective and ideal tool for labile Cd evaluation in Yixing.
A computational procedure for life assessment of UHP reciprocating seals with reference to fatigue and leakage

A calculation procedure is shown for assessing the working life of reciprocating plastic seals for Ultra High Pressure (UHP) applications. Two main damage phenomena are considered, low cycle fatigue and wear, associated with structural failure or leakage respectively. An integrated approach, based on a finite element analysis of the seal, is proposed to evaluate both fatigue failure and leakage occurrence. The model takes into account non-linear effects due to seal contact interactions, material cyclic behaviour and its dependence on hydrostatic pressure. Fatigue life is predicted by combining equivalent strain range calculated in the critical points with life curve of the material. Leakage prediction is made by calculating a leakage index, based on instroke and outstroke pressure gradients and related to contact pressure profile change due to wear. Seal design can be optimised by choosing seal material and geometry so to delay fatigue failure and leakage, scheduling their occurrence at the same time.
Stating with Certainty or Stating with Doubt: Intercoder Reliability Results for Manual Annotation of Epistemically Modalized Statements

Texts exhibit subtle yet identifiable modality about writers' estimation of how true each statement is (e.g., definitely true or somewhat true). This study is an analysis of such explicit certainty and doubt markers in epistemically modalized statements for a written news discourse. The study systematically accounts for five levels of writer's certainty (ABSOLUTE, HIGH, MODERATE, LOW CERTAINTY and UNCERTAINTY) in three news pragmatic contexts: perspective, focus, and time. The study concludes that independent coders' perceptions of the boundaries between shades of certainty in epistemically modalized statements are highly subjective and present difficulties for manual annotation and consequent automation for opinion extraction and sentiment analysis. While stricter annotation instructions and longer coder training can improve inter-coder agreement results, it is not entirely clear that a five-level distinction of certainty is preferable to a simplistic distinction between statements with certainty and statements with doubt.
FTY720-induced lymphocyte homing modulates post-transplant preservation/reperfusion injury.

BACKGROUND A novel immunomodulator, FTY720, modulates lymphocyte migration to injured tissues via enhanced lymphocyte sequestration to secondary lymphoid organs. We tested whether or not single-dose FTY720 (0.5 mg/kg) pretreatment rescues renal grafts from post-transplant preservation/reperfusion injury. METHODS Rat renal grafts were cold-preserved in University of Wisconsin (UW) solution for 4 hours and then transplanted into syngeneic or allogeneic recipients that received a single dose of FTY720 24 hours before transplantation. Flow cytometry analysis of peripheral blood and lymph nodes was performed to confirm the biologic effect of FTY720. Grafts were harvested after 24 hours. Renal sections were examined histologically and stained for intracellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), vascular cellular adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1), platelet endothelial cellular adhesion molecule-1 (PECAM-1), major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II, and inflammatory cells. Interleukin-1 (IL-1) production was determined in renal protein extracts. RESULTS FTY720 pretreatment significantly increased CD3+ T-cell sequestration to lymph nodes in the face of peripheral lymphopenia. Isografts and allografts from the FTY720-treated groups did not develop increased creatinine (0.55 +/- 0.12 in isografts and 0.62 +/- 0.08 mg/dL in allografts), compared with vehicle controls (2.28 +/- 0.20 in isografts and 2.24 +/- 0.18 mg/dL in allografts). Kidneys from FTY720-treated groups also showed lower acute tubular damage scores. Furthermore, FTY720 decreased neutrophil influx, although circulating neutrophils were unchanged. FTY720 also prevented postischemic IL-1 intragraft production not affecting infiltration with recipient ED-1+ macrophages and MHC class II-positive cells. Expression of ICAM-1, VCAM-1, and PECAM did not differ among groups. CONCLUSION FTY720 ameliorated morphologic and functional consequences of post-transplant reperfusion injury. Thus, FTY720-induced peripheral T-cell absence may influence intragraft IL-1 production and neutrophil infiltration, despite proadhesive endothelial properties. FTY720 may broaden the utility in renal transplantation as a pretreatment strategy against preservation/reperfusion injury.
Distributed Training of Neural Network Language Models CS 244 B Project Report , Autumn 2014

The purpose of statistical language models is to estimate the joint probability distribution over sequences of words in a language. Typically, the modelled distribution is the conditional probability P (wi|wi−k, . . . , wi−1) of a word wi given its preceding context {wi−k, . , wi−1} for some window of size k. Language models are used in a wide range of applications involving natural language such as statistical machine translation, automatic speech recognition, spelling correction, parsing, and optical character recognition. Neural network language models (NNLMs) [1] are a subclass of statistical language models that model P (wi|wi−k, . . . , wi−1) using a neural network. NNLMs have recently become an increasingly popular class of models in the machine learning and natural language processing communities. In this project, we implemented a distributed system for NNLM training. The model is trained by maximizing the likelihood of the training data with optimization performed using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). For each input (a length-k sequence of words), we compute the loss with respect to the target word (the word immediately following the context). This loss is backpropagated through the network to obtain the gradient of the objective function with respect to the parameters of the model. As with other statistical language models, NNLMs are trained on large text corpora of the order of hundreds of millions or billions of words [2]. The architecture of our system is based on that of existing systems for distributed training of large-scale neural networks [4, 3]. In [4], computation is distributed over clusters of up to ∼ 5000 machines, while in [3], extremely large networks upwards of 2 billion parameters in size are trained using a cluster of 120 nodes. For this project, we train much smaller networks of about 2 million parameters.
An algorithm for automatically designing deterministic mechanisms without payments

Mechanism design is the art of designing the rules of the game so that a desirable outcome is reached even though the agents in the game behave selfishly. This is a difficult problem because the designer is uncertain about the agents¿ preferences and the agents may lie about their preferences. Traditionally, the focus in mechanism design has been on designing mechanisms that are appropriate for a range of settings. While this approach has produced a number of famous mechanisms, much of the space of possible settings is still left uncovered. In contrast, in automated mechanism design (AMD), a mechanism is computed on the fly for the setting at hand¿a universally applicable approach.
Laser irradiation of the chick embryo germinal crescent.

The germinal crescent of head-fold and one-somite-stage chicken embryos was irradiated with multiple pulses of a microbeam ruby laser. Primordial germ cells were not detected in the gonad primordium of six laser-irradiated 5-day embryos; ten laser-irradiated embryos had varying numbers of primordial germ cells. Ten control embryos had gonad primordia populated with many primordial germ cells.
Modeling Propagation Momentum of Topics Based on their Participants' Brightness

For social networking services like micro-blog that require unidirectional weak authentication, the link quality and strength of social network demonstrate the characteristics of heterogeneity and distortion. Given the fact that user participation is one of the main impetuses to social network evolution, we present a measure called user brightness to evaluate user activeness which is subsequently used to calculate propagation momentum of specific topic. Based on data-driven approach, it attributes the change of user activeness to his active participation in multi-topics, and the social network evolution and the dynamic change of network topology to aggregated activeness of massive users. The algorithm is low overhead and supports incremental update. Experiments on real data retrieved from Chinese micro-blogs shows that the proposed method demonstrates the momentum of topics very well.
A criterion for the enhancement of time-frequency masks in missing data recognition

Despite their effectiveness for robust speech processing, missing data techniques are vulnerable to errors in the classification of the input speech signal's time-frequency points. A direct method for the removal of these mask errors is through the top-down optimization of the estimated mask, however this requires a measure to evaluate the mask quality without a priori noise knowledge. In this paper we propose the normalized likelihood confidence as such a criterion for robust speaker recognition. In this approach the accuracy with which an estimated mask classifies time-frequency points as corrupt or reliable is related to its likelihood score confidence. This is based on the conceptual effect of binary mask errors on the model likelihood distributions produced by accumulated marginalization densities. Experimental results confirm a relationship between the normalized likelihood distance and the accuracy of the time-frequency mask produced by various estimation strategies.
Draft Whole-Genome Sequence of the Type Strain Bacillus aquimaris TF12T

ABSTRACT Bacillus aquimaris TF12 is a Gram-positive bacteria isolated from a tidal flat of the Yellow Sea in South Korea. We report the draft whole-genome sequence of Bacillus aquimaris TF12, the type strain of a set of bacteria typically associated with marine habitats and with a potentially high biotechnology value.
Parallel merge sort

We give a parallel implementation of merge sort on a CREW PRAM that uses n processors and O(logn) time; the constant in the running time is small. We also give a more complex version of the algorithm for the EREW PRAM; it also uses n processors and O(logn) time. The constant in the running time is still moderate, though not as small.
Structural influence on the Rashba-type spin splitting in surface alloys

The Bi/Ag(111), Pb/Ag(111), and Sb/Ag(111) surface alloys exhibit a two-dimensional band structure with a strongly enhanced Rashba-type spin splitting, which is in part attributed to the structural asymmetry resulting from an outward relaxation of the alloy atoms. In order to gain further insight into the spin splitting mechanism, we have experimentally determined the outward relaxation of the alloy atoms in these surface alloys using quantitative low-energy electron diffraction. The structure plays an important role in the size of the spin splitting as it dictates the potential landscape, the symmetry as well as the orbital character. Furthermore, we discuss the band ordering of the Pb/Ag(111) surface alloy as well as the reproducible formation of Sb/Ag(111) surface alloys with unfaulted (face-centered cubic) and faulted (hexagonally close-packed) top layer stacking.
Experimental investigation on the influence of axial magnetic field on the lifetime of cathode spot of vacuum arc

In this paper, the characteristic of the lifetime of CS of vacuum arc with single CS in external axial magnetic field (AMF) up to 220mT is investigated experimentally at a constant arc current of 20A. Experiments are conducted with Cu and CuCr25 butt contacts in a demountable vacuum chamber. The uniform constant AMF (Bn) within the inter-contacts region is supplied by Nd-Fe-B permanent magnets. The arc voltage are measured by a high-voltage probe respectively, and recorded by an oscilloscope with a sample rate of 1.25GS/s, i.e., a time resolution of 0.8ns. The influence of AMF on the lifetime of CS is mainly investigated through a statistical analysis on the oscillation of arc voltage caused by the extinguishment of an old CS and the formation of a new CS. Experimental results show that the lifetime of CS exhibited a distribution similar to a Gaussian distribution, where its average value is approximately ranging from 80ns to 110ns under applied AMFs. Result also indicated that, the average lifetimes of CS of both Cu and CuCr25 electrodes increase significantly with Bn in a certain range of external AMF, e.g., 0≤Bn≤60mT, after which it decrease slowly with further increase of external AMF (60mT ≤Bn≤220mT). In addition, the average lifetime of CS of CuCr25 electrode is longer that of Cu electrode.
Separable covariance arrays via the Tucker product, with applications to multivariate relational data

Modern datasets are often in the form of matrices or arrays, potentially having correlations along each set of data indices. For example, data involving repeated measurements of several variables over time may exhibit temporal correlation as well as correlation among the variables. A possible model for matrix-valued data is the class of matrix normal distributions, which is parametrized by two covariance matrices, one for each index set of the data. In this article we describe an extension of the matrix normal model to accommodate multidimensional data arrays, or tensors. We generate a class of array normal distributions by applying a group of multilinear transformations to an array of independent standard normal random variables. The covariance structures of the resulting class take the form of outer products of dimension-specific covariance matrices. We derive some properties of these covariance structures and the corresponding array normal distributions, discuss maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimation of covariance parameters and illustrate the model in an analysis of multivariate longitudinal network data. Some key words: Gaussian, matrix normal, multiway data, network, tensor, Tucker decomposition.
Indoor online learning of feature maps using SPLL

Many indoor localisation systems based on existent radio communication networks use the received signal strength (RSS) as measured feature. The accuracy of such systems is directly related to the amount of labelled data, gathered during a calibration phase. This paper explores the algorithm based on previous works from the same authors, where an explicit calibration phase is avoided applying un-supervised online learning, while the system is already operational. Using probabilistic localisation and non-parametric density estimation, this approach uses unlabelled measurements to automatically learn a feature map with the probabilistic distribution of the measurements, starting only with a rough initial model, based on plausible physical properties. A real example in a highly structured office environment validates the introduced algorithm, covering discontinuities on the feature map and the imposed multimodal distributions.
Saving Darwin's muse: evolutionary genetics for the recovery of the Floreana mockingbird

The distribution of mockingbird species among the Galápagos Islands prompted Charles Darwin to question, for the first time in writing, the ‘stability of species’. Some 50 years after Darwin's visit, however, the endemic Floreana mockingbird (Mimus trifasciatus) had become extinct on Floreana Island and, today, only two small populations survive on two satellite islets. As Darwin noted, rarity often precedes extinction. To avert extinction, plans are being developed to reintroduce M. trifasciatus to Floreana. Here, we integrate evolutionary thinking and conservation practice using coalescent analyses and genetic data from contemporary and museum samples, including two collected by Darwin and Robert Fitzroy on Floreana in 1835. Our microsatellite results show substantial differentiation between the two extant populations, but our coalescence-based modelling does not indicate long, independent evolutionary histories. One of the populations is highly inbred, but both harbour unique alleles present on Floreana in 1835, suggesting that birds from both islets should be used to establish a single, mixed population on Floreana. Thus, Darwin's mockingbird specimens not only revealed to him a level of variation that suggested speciation following geographical isolation but also, more than 170 years later, return important information to their place of origin for the conservation of their conspecifics.
Network Modeling and Visualization System Based on Chinese Text

With the surge of complex network and the rapid growth of the text data, the network modeling and visualization analysis focusing on the text data are urgently needed. This paper proposes and implements such a framework and prototype system based on Chinese text. The system extracts entities and their relations from the Chinese text data, and then constructs three kinds of networks to discover the hidden information step by step with the visualization analysis technology. The experiment on Internet news verifies the effectiveness of the system.
Analysis of the compression behaviour of different composite lattice designs

Four all-composite lattice designs were produced using a lost-mould procedure that involved inserting carbon fibre tows through holes in a core. Following resin infusion and curing, samples were heated to melt the core, leaving well-defined lattice structures based on what are termed BCC, BCCz, FCC and F2BCC designs. Analytical and numerical models for predicting the mechanical properties of the four designs are presented and these results are compared with the experimental data from the quasi-static compression tests. Compression tests on the four lattice structures indicated that the F2BCC lattice offered the highest compression strength, although when normalized by relative density, the BCCz lattice structure out-performed other structures. Similarly, the specific compression strengths were found to be superior to those of more traditional core materials. A number of failure mechanisms were also highlighted, including strut buckling, fracture at the strut-skin joints and debonding of reinforcing members at the central nodes. Finally, it is believed that the properties of these lattices can be further increased using higher fibre volume fractions.
Optical property simulation of liquid crystal on silicon based on finite-difference time-domain method

In the design and development of Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS), one can predict possible problems and propose according solutions with calculating the director and optical characteristics of the liquid crystal. The optical property of LCoS is calculated with the Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method (FDTD) in this paper. The diffraction characteristics are exactly analyzed with incident plane wave and the computational space terminations are provided by a combination of the perfectly matched layer (PML) and periodic boundary conditions (PBC). The influences on optical properties of LCoS with different interpixel gap, pretilt angle and thickness are studied. The result shows that diffraction efficiency is greatly affected by the thickness of cell. It’s significant and offer reference for the design and manufacture of LCoS.