Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of a Lower Body Exoskeleton Load Carriage Assistive Device on Oxygen Consumption and Kinematics During Walking with Loads

Abstract : The purpose of this study was to investigate the metabolic cost of wearing a prototype exoskeleton (EXO) while walking with a range of heavy loads, and to analyze the associated gait biomechanics. Ten Army enlisted men participated in the study. Oxygen consumption (VO2) and gait biomechanics were measured while Soldiers walked at 4.83 km/h and 0% grade under three realistic load weight configurations that were comprised of Army clothing and equipment: fighting load (20 kg), approach march load (40 kg), and emergency approach march load (55 kg). The volunteers were tested under all load configurations with and without wearing the EXO prototype. Mean VO2 significantly increased while wearing the EXO compared to not wearing the EXO across all conditions. Mean VO2 scaled to body mass and scaled to total mass also significantly increased while wearing the EXO. Mean VO2 and mean VO2 scaled to body mass significantly increased with load, however, there were no significant EXO by load interaction effects for both the non-scaled and scaled VO2. The kinematic and kinetic data revealed significant changes when wearing EXO compared to not wearing EXO. In summary, volunteers walked with shorter and faster strides; maintained a more flexed posture with reduced movement at the individual leg joints; braked with higher ground reaction forces at heel strike; and pushed off with lower force at toe off. This study demonstrated that use of an exoskeleton prototype increases users' metabolic cost while carrying various loads and alters their gait biomechanics compared to conventional load carriage using a backpack.
Latent Bandits

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem where the reward distributions are indexed by two sets -one for arms, one for type- and can be partitioned into a small number of clusters according to the type. First, we consider the setting where all reward distributions are known and all types have the same underlying cluster, the type's identity is, however, unknown. Second, we study the case where types may come from different classes, which is significantly more challenging. Finally, we tackle the case where the reward distributions are completely unknown. In each setting, we introduce specific algorithms and derive non-trivial regret performance. Numerical experiments show that, in the most challenging agnostic case, the proposed algorithm achieves excellent performance in several difficult scenarios.
ranscranial direct current stimulation decreases convulsions and spatial emory deficits following pilocarpine-induced status pilepticus in immature rats

Purpose: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a recently available, noninvasive brain stimulation technique. The effects of cathodal tDCS on convulsions and spatial memory after status epilepticus (SE) in immature animals were investigated. Methods: Rats underwent lithium–pilocarpine-induced SE at postnatal day (P) 20–21 and received daily 30-min cathodal tDCS for 2 weeks at P23-36 through a unilateral epicranial electrode at 200 A. After tDCS, convulsions over 2 weeks were estimated by 20-h/day video monitoring. The rats were tested in a water maze for spatial learning at P50-53 and the brains were examined for cell loss and mossy fiber tDCS) tatus epilepticus mmature rat europrotective effect ognitive performance sprouting. Results: Long-term treatment with weak cathodal tDCS reduced SE-induced hippocampal cell loss, supragranular and CA3 mossy fiber sprouting, and convulsions (reduction of 21%) in immature rats. The tDCS treatment also rescued cognitive impairment following SE. Conclusions: These findings suggested that cathodal tDCS has neuroprotective effects on the immature rat hippocampus after pilocarpine-induced SE, including reduced sprouting and subsequent improvements . Such in cognitive performance
SCHWA: PETE Using CCG Dependencies with the C&C Parser

This paper describes the SCHWA system entered by the University of Sydney in SemEval 2010 Task 12 -- Parser Evaluation using Textual Entailments (Yuret et al., 2010). Our system achieved an overall accuracy of 70% in the task evaluation. We used the C&C parser to build CCG dependency parses of the truth and hypothesis sentences. We then used partial match heuristics to determine whether the system should predict entailment. Heuristics were used because the dependencies generated by the parser are construction specific, making full compatibility unlikely. We also manually annotated the development set with CCG analyses, establishing an upper bound for our entailment system of 87%.
Reactive Systems: Modelling, Specification and Verification; is written by L. Aceto, et al; and published by Cambridge University Press; distributed by Cambridge University Press; © 2007, (hardback), ISBN 978-0-521-87546-2, pp. 300

Seemingly, reviewing this book represents a kind of a 'silly' challenge. 'Normally,' when I review a book, I try to find what is good, and what its failings are. This book describes, as its' subtitle states, the issues and techniques of modelling, specifying and verifying 'reactive' systems. There is not a plethora of literature
Improvement of Estimation Accuracy of Factor Scores from Feature Values of Statements

In order to avoid the problem of mismatch between the questioner and the respondent, we have conducted impression evaluation experiment and nine factors are obtained as a result. Then factor scores of any other statements are tried to be estimated by using multiple regression analysis. This result, however, shows that the estimation accuracy was insufficient and that the ninth factor could not be obtained. To improve the estimation accuracy, some feature values, such as word image ability and closing sentence expressions are introduced in this paper. The result of the analysis shows that the estimation accuracy is drastically improved and that closing sentence expressions as well as style or content of sentences are significant for estimation accuracy.
Combined auditory and articulatory training improves phonological deficit in children with dyslexia

A group of 19 children with dyslexia aged 7 years 2 months to 10 years 9 months were selected from a clinical sample and tested using a large neuropsychological battery in order to specify the severity and subtype of dyslexia as well as the presence of comorbid conditions. Thereafter, they received a standardised training of 6 weeks of daily auditory exercises aimed at reinforcing explicit and implicit phonological awareness. Ten participants also received specific training of the sensory-motor aspects of articulatory production of individual phonemes during the first 3 weeks of auditory training, whereas the remaining received the same specific training during the last 3 weeks of auditory training. Repetition, phonological awareness, reading and spelling were assessed before the first session, between the two sessions and after the second session. Results confirm the overall efficiency of intensive phonological training, even with exclusively auditory material. The main outcome of this study is a significant improvement of phonology and non-word reading specifically during the periods where the two methods were associated, suggesting a significant contribution of articulatory training to the observed improvement. Finally performance to a motor tapping task proved to be one of the best predictors of training efficiency while comorbid co-ordination or attention deficit did not interfere. Results are interpreted with reference to current theories about mechanisms underlying dyslexia.
One-handed gesture recognition using ultrasonic Doppler sonar

This paper presents a new device based on ultrasonic sensors to recognize one-handed gestures. The device uses three ultrasonic receivers and a single transmitter. Gestures are characterized through the Doppler frequency shifts they generate in reflections of an ultrasonic tone emitted by the transmitter. We show that this setup can be used to classify simple one-handed gestures with high accuracy. The ultrasonic doppler based device is very inexpensive - $20 USD for the whole setup including the acquisition system, and computationally efficient as compared to most traditional devices (e.g. video). These gestures, could potentially be used to control and drive a device.
Assessing the Performance of Sensor Fusion Methods: Application to Magnetic-Inertial-Based Human Body Tracking

Information from complementary and redundant sensors are often combined within sensor fusion algorithms to obtain a single accurate observation of the system at hand. However, measurements from each sensor are characterized by uncertainties. When multiple data are fused, it is often unclear how all these uncertainties interact and influence the overall performance of the sensor fusion algorithm. To address this issue, a benchmarking procedure is presented, where simulated and real data are combined in different scenarios in order to quantify how each sensor’s uncertainties influence the accuracy of the final result. The proposed procedure was applied to the estimation of the pelvis orientation using a waist-worn magnetic-inertial measurement unit. Ground-truth data were obtained from a stereophotogrammetric system and used to obtain simulated data. Two Kalman-based sensor fusion algorithms were submitted to the proposed benchmarking procedure. For the considered application, gyroscope uncertainties proved to be the main error source in orientation estimation accuracy for both tested algorithms. Moreover, although different performances were obtained using simulated data, these differences became negligible when real data were considered. The outcome of this evaluation may be useful both to improve the design of new sensor fusion methods and to drive the algorithm tuning process.
Caleydo: Design and evaluation of a visual analysis framework for gene expression data in its biological context

The goal of our work is to support experts in the process of hypotheses generation concerning the roles of genes in diseases. For a deeper understanding of the complex interdependencies between genes, it is important to bring gene expressions (measurements) into context with pathways. Pathways, which are models of biological processes, are available in online databases. In these databases, large networks are decomposed into small sub-graphs for better manageability. This simplification results in a loss of context, as pathways are interconnected and genes can occur in multiple instances scattered over the network. Our main goal is therefore to present all relevant information, i.e., gene expressions, the relations between expression and pathways and between multiple pathways in a simple, yet effective way. To achieve this we employ two different multiple-view approaches. Traditional multiple views are used for large datasets or highly interactive visualizations, while a 2.5D technique is employed to support a seamless navigation of multiple pathways which simultaneously links to the expression of the contained genes. This approach facilitates the understanding of the interconnection of pathways, and enables a non-distracting relation to gene expression data. We evaluated Caleydo with a group of users from the life science community. Users were asked to perform three tasks: pathway exploration, gene expression analysis and information comparison with and without visual links, which had to be conducted in four different conditions. Evaluation results show that the system can improve the process of understanding the complex network of pathways and the individual effects of gene expression regulation considerably. Especially the quality of the available contextual information and the spatial organization was rated good for the presented 2.5D setup.
A System for Extracting and Ranking Name Aliases in Emails

Mining potential information about person identity in emails is one of the popular research topics in email mining. This paper focuses on mining name aliases of a user from emails. Firstly, a system for extracting and ranking name aliases is proposed, which includes two modules: the Alias Extraction Module and the Alias Authority Ranking Module. Secondly, the methods used in the Alias Authority Ranking Module to rank the authority of name aliases of a user are presented in detail, which are based on email communication relation analysis and morphologically similar alias clustering. At last, we evaluate the proposed methods on the public subset of the Enron corpus. Experiment results show that the proposed system can efficiently extract name aliases and find the authoritative aliases of a user.
Instrumental Variables Methods for the Correlated Random Coefficient Model: Estimating the Average Rate of Return to Schooling When the Return is Correlated with Schooling

This paper considers the use of instrumental variables to identify a correlated random coefficients model in which coefficients are correlated with (or stochastically dependent on) the regressors. A correlated random coefficients model is central to the human capital earnings model. Conditions are given under which instrumental variables identify the average rate of return. These conditions are applied to David Card's version of Gary Becker's Woytinsky lecture.
On the performance and energy efficiency of the PGAS programming model on multicore architectures

Using large-scale multicore systems to get the maximum performance and energy efficiency with manageable programmability is a major challenge. The partitioned global address space (PGAS) programming model enhances programmability by providing a global address space over large-scale computing systems. However, so far the performance and energy efficiency of the PGAS model on multicore-based parallel architectures have not been investigated thoroughly. In this paper we use a set of selected kernels from the well-known NAS Parallel Benchmarks to evaluate the performance and energy efficiency of the UPC programming language, which is a widely used implementation of the PGAS model. In addition, the MPI and OpenMP versions of the same parallel kernels are used for comparison with their UPC counterparts. The investigated hardware platforms are based on multicore CPUs, both within a single 16-core node and across multiple nodes involving up to 1024 physical cores. On the multi-node platform we used the hardware measurement solution called High definition Energy Efficiency Monitoring tool in order to measure energy. On the single-node system we used the hybrid measurement solution to make an effort into understanding the observed performance differences, we use the Intel Performance Counter Monitor to quantify in detail the communication time, cache hit/miss ratio and memory usage. Our experiments show that UPC is competitive with OpenMP and MPI on single and multiple nodes, with respect to both the performance and energy efficiency.
Green composites and coatings from agricultural feedstocks

Novel biocomposites have been prepared by the free radical polymerization of a tung oil-based resin using spent germ, the co-product of wet mill ethanol production, as a filler. The effect of filler particle size, amount of filler, amount of crosslinker, and molding pressure on the resulting composites has been investigated. When compared to the pure resin, an increase in storage modulus is observed when filler is added to the matrix. The thermal stabilities of the resulting composites lie between the stabilities of the resin and the spent germ. Decreasing the particle size results in an increase in both the storage modulus and the mechanical properties of the composites. As the amount of crosslinker, divinylbenzene, increases, an improvement in the thermal stabilities and mechanical properties is observed. The composites prepared are mainly composed of renewable resources, possess good thermal and mechanical properties, and have potential applications in the construction and automotive industries.
Deterministic crash recovery for NAND flash based storage systems

NAND flash memory has long been the dominant storage medium in mobile devices. However, power failure may occur at any time and result in loss of important data. Crash recovery therefore becomes vitally important in NAND flash memory storage systems. As flash translation layer (FTL) directly manages flash memory using various metadata, the problem of FTL crash recovery in NAND flash is how to efficiently and effectively maintain and recover the consistency of FTL metadata after system crash. In this paper, we present DCR, a deterministic approach to crash recovery for NAND flash based storage systems. The basic idea is to exploit the determinism of FTL and reproduce events that happened between the last checkpoint and the crash point during crash recovery. Different from existing approaches which have to scan the whole flash memory chip, we show that DCR can recover the system more efficiently by only checking a limited number of blocks based on deterministic FTL operations. We have implemented DCR for a block-level FTL and compared it with a popular version-based scheme using an ARM11-based embedded evaluation board. Experimental results show that DCR can greatly reduce recovery time and guarantee the consistency of FTL metadata after recovery.
Experimental Comparison of Extended Kalman and Particle Filter in Mobile Robotic Localization

This paper presents an implementation and comparison between odometry and probabilistic algorithms for the mobile robot localization problem in indoor environments.The hardware and software tools used for the experiments are briefly described. Also, a software architecture is proposed to make easier the development of computer applications including the tested algorithms which are used to get the results to compare.
Post-conversion sialylation of prions in lymphoid tissues

Significance In mammals, sialic acids are the most abundant terminal residues on cell-surface glycans and comprise “self-associated molecular patterns,” which protect the host from inappropriate activation of multiple immune pathways. In a striking illustration of molecular mimicry, a number of microbial pathogens recruit host sialic acids to decorate their surfaces and hide from the same immune responses. Prions are proteinaceous infectious agents, not conventional pathogens. This study found that sialylation of prions is enhanced upon their colonization of secondary lymphoid organs, via extracellular host sialylation machinery. Thus, prions may use strategies similar to other pathogens to camouflage themselves from the immune system, facilitating host invasion. Sialylated glycans on the surface of mammalian cells act as part of a “self-associated molecular pattern,” helping the immune system to recognize “self” from “altered self” or “nonself. ” To escape the host immune system, some bacterial pathogens have evolved biosynthetic pathways for host-like sialic acids, whereas others recruited host sialic acids for decorating their surfaces. Prions lack nucleic acids and are not conventional pathogens. Nevertheless, prions might use a similar strategy for invading and colonizing the lymphoreticular system. Here we show that the sialylation status of the infectious, disease-associated state of the prion protein (PrPSc) changes with colonization of secondary lymphoid organs (SLOs). As a result, spleen-derived PrPSc is more sialylated than brain-derived PrPSc. Enhanced sialylation of PrPSc is recapitulated in vitro by incubating brain-derived PrPSc with primary splenocytes or cultured macrophage RAW 264.7 cells. General inhibitors of sialyltranserases (STs), the enzymes that transfer sialic acid residues onto terminal positions of glycans, suppressed extrasialylation of PrPSc. A fluorescently labeled precursor of sialic acid revealed ST activity associated with RAW macrophages. This study illustrates that, upon colonization of SLOs, the sialylation status of prions changes by host STs. We propose that this mechanism is responsible for camouflaging prions in SLOs and has broad implications.
On the Presence of Green and Sustainable Software Engineering in Higher Education Curricula

Nowadays, software is pervasive in our everyday lives. Its sustainability and environmental impact have become major factors to be considered in the development of software systems. Millennials–the newer generation of university students–are particularly keen to learn about and contribute to a more sustainable and green society. The need for training on green and sustainable topics in software engineering has been reflected in a number of recent studies. The goal of this paper is to get a first understanding of what is the current state of teaching sustainability in the software engineering community, what are the motivations behind the current state of teaching, and what can be done to improve it. To this end, we report the findings from a targeted survey of 33 academics on the presence of green and sustainable software engineering in higher education. The major findings from the collected data suggest that sustainability is under-represented in the curricula, while the current focus of teaching is on energy efficiency delivered through a fact-based approach. The reasons vary from lack of awareness, teaching material and suitable technologies, to the high effort required to teach sustainability. Finally, we provide recommendations for educators willing to teach sustainability in software engineering that can help to suit millennial students needs.
Electric Utility Demand Side Management in Canada

Abstract Government, utility, and private subsidies for energy efficiency play a prominent role in current efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet the effectiveness of this policy approach is in dispute. One opportunity for empirical analysis is provided by the past energy efficiency subsidies, called demand-side management programs, offered by electric utilities in North America over several decades. Between 1990 and 2005, most electric utilities in Canada administered such programs, with total spending of $2.9 billion (CDN$2005). This paper uses the significant inter-annual variation in demand side management spending during this period to econometrically estimate the effectiveness of these subsidies. The resulting estimates indicate that these programs have not had a substantial impact on overall electricity consumption in Canada. doi: 10.5547/ISSN0195-6574-EJ-Vol32-No4-5
Particle Size Effect of Crumb Rubber on Rheology and Morphology of Asphalt Binders with Long-term Aging

ABSTRACT Two different particle sizes of crumb rubber at three different concentrations were mixed with two asphalts to investigate the effect of rubber particles on the fundamental internal microstructure of asphalt binders with respect to their long-term aging performance. The rheological, morphological, and chemical properties of unaged and aged unmodified and rubber modified asphalt binders were studied as a function of long-term oxidative aging. Based on the limited study, the results indicate that the amounts of rubber particles added into asphalt binder are asphalt dependent. For highly incompatible asphalt, rubber concentration has substantial effect on the long-term flow properties of asphalt binders. For compatible asphalt, addition of rubber increased the elasticity of asphalts and also reduced viscosity buildup with aging. In addition, particle size of rubber does not show significant differences in terms of its effect on the long-term aging characteristics of asphalt binder. Furthermore, results from atomic force microscopy (AFM) showed that some fractions of the rubber particles may be dissolved in the asphalt due to devulcanization of the rubber, and hence, could explain the appearance of “new” material in the AFM image of the recovered asphalt samples.