Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A 550-MSample/s 8-Tap FIR digital filter for magnetic recording read channels

An area-efficient low-power and low-latency 550-MSample/s FIR filter for magnetic recording read channel applications is presented. A parallel direct type II architecture operates on real-time deinterleaved (even and odd) input data samples and employs a fast low-area multiplier based on selection of radix-8 premultiplied coefficients in conjunction with one-hot encoded bus leading to a very compact layout and reduced power dissipation. The chip has been fabricated using a 0.18-/spl mu/m L-effective CMOS technology and is currently being used in commercial applications.
Environmental Factors Contributing to the Spread of H5N1 Avian Influenza in Mainland China

Background Since late 2003, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreaks caused by infection with H5N1 virus has led to the deaths of millions of poultry and more than 10 thousands of wild birds, and as of 18-March 2008, at least 373 laboratory-confirmed human infections with 236 fatalities, have occurred. The unrestrained worldwide spread of this disease has caused great anxiety about the potential of another global pandemic. However, the effect of environmental factors influencing the spread of HPAI H5N1 virus is unclear. Methodology/Principal Findings A database including incident dates and locations was developed for 128 confirmed HPAI H5N1 outbreaks in poultry and wild birds, as well as 21 human cases in mainland China during 2004–2006. These data, together with information on wild bird migration, poultry densities, and environmental variables (water bodies, wetlands, transportation routes, main cities, precipitation and elevation), were integrated into a Geographical Information System (GIS). A case-control design was used to identify the environmental factors associated with the incidence of the disease. Multivariate logistic regression analysis indicated that minimal distance to the nearest national highway, annual precipitation and the interaction between minimal distance to the nearest lake and wetland, were important predictive environmental variables for the risk of HPAI. A risk map was constructed based on these factors. Conclusions/Significance Our study indicates that environmental factors contribute to the spread of the disease. The risk map can be used to target countermeasures to stop further spread of the HPAI H5N1 at its source.
Design and Analysis of a Scalable Watermarking Scheme for the Scalable Audio Coder

In this paper, we present a scalable approach to lossless watermarking for audio signals. The proposed watermarking framework is built on a recently standardized two-layer scalable audio coder advanced audio zip (AAZ) . By embedding watermarks in both the core layer and enhancement layer bitstreams in a special way, the watermark distortion in either layer is compensated by the watermark in the opposite layer. The proposed spread-spectrum-based solution overcomes both the problem of introducing noninvertible distortions in lossy watermark approaches and the problem of nonadaptive embedding in lossless watermarking approaches. Theoretic analysis and experiment results further confirm the validity of the proposed framework in terms of payload, robustness, data expansion property, and perceptual quality
Shot Boundary Detection Using Structural Similarity Index

Shot boundary detection (SBD) is the first step towards video indexing and content based video management. Due to availability of low cost storage media devices, and broadband data connection, digital videos are becoming widely used. However, the increasing availability of digital video has not been accompanied by an increase in its ease of accessibility. If we want to see a clip of interest, we have to sequentially browse through the video. This is an extremely time consuming and tedious process. So, accurate shot boundary detection plays vital role to organize video contents into meaningful parts for video scene analysis. A shot is defined as an unbroken sequence of frames taken from camera. Shot transitions can be either abrupt (cut) or gradual (fades, dissolves, wipes). In this paper, a new shot boundary detection (SBD) method is proposed using Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) Index. The abrupt cuts are identified using SSIM and gradual transitions(fades) are identified using standard deviation plot of the frames in the video. The proposed method only needs mean, standard deviation and co-variance of the frames as basic input parameters for detecting cuts and gradual transitions. The performance of the proposed method is comparable with that of the existing global and local histogram method for SBD.
Experimental Results of Image-based Adaptive Visual Servoing of 2D Robots under Jacobian and Dynamic Friction Uncertainties

A globally convergent visual feedback control scheme is proposed for dynamical planar robot arms subject to uncertain camera, robot, analytical Jacobian and dynamic friction parameters. When complex friction arises, visual servoing suffers to drive the robot to the desired trajectories, in particular in slow motion and velocity reversals, which are typical motion regime in visual servoing due to the vision system properties. Moreover, dynamic friction is usually neglected in motion control and it is not the exception in visual servoing literature. In order to prove the theory described in this paper, the real-time OS, Linux-RTAI, is used to obtain experimental results of this controller on a direct-drive robot manipulator. Results suggest its excelent performance.
GPU-based cloud service for multiple sequence alignments with regular expression constrains

Multiple sequence alignments with constrains has become an important problem in the computational biology. The concept of constrained sequence alignment is proposed to incorporate the biologist's domain knowledge into sequence alignments such that the user-specified residues/segments are aligned together in the alignment results. Over the past decade, a series of constrained multiple sequence alignment tools were proposed in the literature. GPU-REMuSiC is a newest tool with the regular expression constrains and uses the graphics processing units (GPUs) with CUDA. GPU-REMuSiC can achieve 29× speedups for overall computation time by the experimental results. However, the execution environment of GPU-REMuSiC need to build, and it's a threshold for biologists to set up. Therefore, we design an intuitive friendly user interface for the potential cloud server with GPUs. Use the user interface through network, we can send the input data to remote server without cumbersome setting in local host. Finally, we can receive the alignment results from the remote cloud server with GPUs.
Targeting the membrane-anchored serine protease testisin with a novel engineered anthrax toxin prodrug to kill tumor cells and reduce tumor burden

The membrane-anchored serine proteases are a unique group of trypsin-like serine proteases that are tethered to the cell surface via transmembrane domains or glycosyl-phosphatidylinositol-anchors. Overexpressed in tumors, with pro-tumorigenic properties, they are attractive targets for protease-activated prodrug-like anti-tumor therapies. Here, we sought to engineer anthrax toxin protective antigen (PrAg), which is proteolytically activated on the cell surface by the proprotein convertase furin to instead be activated by tumor cell-expressed membrane-anchored serine proteases to function as a tumoricidal agent. PrAg's native activation sequence was mutated to a sequence derived from protein C inhibitor (PCI) that can be cleaved by membrane-anchored serine proteases, to generate the mutant protein PrAg-PCIS. PrAg-PCIS was resistant to furin cleavage in vitro, yet cytotoxic to multiple human tumor cell lines when combined with FP59, a chimeric anthrax toxin lethal factor-Pseudomonas exotoxin fusion protein. Molecular analyses showed that PrAg-PCIS can be cleaved in vitro by several serine proteases including the membrane-anchored serine protease testisin, and mediates increased killing of testisin-expressing tumor cells. Treatment with PrAg-PCIS also potently attenuated the growth of testisin-expressing xenograft tumors in mice. The data indicates PrAg can be engineered to target tumor cell-expressed membrane-anchored serine proteases to function as a potent tumoricidal agent.
Comparison of self-oscillating electronic ballasts dimming methods with power factor correction for fluorescent lamps

This paper presents a comparative analysis of dimmable self-oscillating electronic ballast for fluorescent lamps. A review of general dimming methods presented in the literature is performed. A general analysis of each dimming method is made, and the operation with power factor correction was considered in order to evaluate the characteristic of each topology and to define other circuits more adequate for this purpose. A comparison based on literature review and experimental results of the implemented prototypes is carried out in order to establish the main conclusion from this analysis.
Lysophosphatidic Acid Influences the Morphology and Motility of Young, Postmitotic Cortical Neurons

Lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) is a bioactive lysophospholipid that produces process retraction and cell rounding through its cognate receptors in neuroblastoma cell lines. Although the expression profile of LPA receptors in developing brains suggests a role for LPA in central nervous system (CNS) development, how LPA influences the morphology of postmitotic CNS neurons remains to be determined. Here we have investigated the effects of exogenous LPA on the morphology of young, postmitotic neurons in primary culture. When treated with LPA, these neurons responded by not only retracting processes but also producing retraction fiber "caps" characterized by fine actin filaments emanating from a dense core. Retraction fiber caps gradually vanished due to the outward spread of regrowing membranes along the fibers, suggesting a role for caps as scaffolds for regrowth of retracted processes. Furthermore, LPA also affects neuronal migration in vitro and in vivo. Taken together, these results implicate LPA as an extracellular lipid signal affecting process outgrowth and migration of early postmitotic neurons during development.
Why some patients prefer to become manic-depressive rather than schizophrenic.

This paper reports the authors' observations on fifteen families in which a young adult member had been diagnosed as manic-depressive. All families were seen in systemic family therapy, with intervals of four to six weeks between sessions. The circular questioning method developed by Selvini-Palazzoli [1] and her team was widely employed. All families could be described as extremely rigid and bound-up systems characterized by a "restrictive parental complementarity," typical dynamics of reciprocal delegation, and certain cognitive features and shared assumptions. These "manic-depressive" families show similarities as well as differences when compared with families with schizophrenic members (i.e., "schizo-present" families). Finally, some therapeutic implications of this view and approach are developed.
Improving the Quality of Context-Aware Applications: An Activity-Oriented Context Approach

Context-awareness is one of the major research areas of pervasive computing. Context plays an important role in such systems. In most existing work, researchers view context as all elements in the environment of an application and use it just as passive data. This kind of context is unfavorable to the quality of context-aware applications. During the development of applications, it is difficult for developers to analyze, specify and organize everything in the environment accurately and completely. This kind of application is hard to be extended or modified when the requirements on environment change in the future. In the runtime, these applications have to deal with all the environment events even though they have nothing to do with the current user activity which should be served. In this paper, we propose an activity-oriented context (AOC) approach in order to improve the quality of context-aware applications. We give the AOC concept model and a context-aware software model with proactive activity-oriented context entity. We implement a platform to support context-awareness with activity-oriented context (PAOC). We also present a case study and an evaluation to demonstrate the usability and performance of our approach.
Soft-CsGDT: soft cost-sensitive Gaussian decision tree for cost-sensitive classification of data streams

Nowadays in many real-world scenarios, high speed data streams are usually with non-uniform misclassification costs and thus call for cost-sensitive classification algorithms of data streams. However, only little literature focuses on this issue. On the other hand, the existing algorithms for cost-sensitive classification can achieve excellent performance in the metric of total misclassification costs, but always lead to obvious reduction of accuracy, which restrains the practical application greatly. In this paper, we present an improved folk theorem. Based on the new theorem, the existing accuracy-based classification algorithm can be converted into soft cost-sensitive one immediately, which allows us to take both accuracy and cost into account. Following the idea of this theorem, the soft-CsGDT algorithm is proposed to process the data streams with non-uniform misclassification costs, which is an expansion of GDT. With both synthetic and real-world datasets, the experimental results show that compared with the cost-sensitive algorithm, the accuracy in our soft-CsGDT is significantly improved, while the total misclassification costs are approximately the same.
Face Retrieval on Large-Scale Video Data

Increasingly large amounts of video data raise the question if large-scale face retrieval is feasible. To find fast and accurate matching strategies, an according face track descriptor is constructed by using local features, extended by an encoding of the respective measurement conditions. The feature encoding allows collecting all features of one face track together in a single feature set, where cumulative descriptors, known from image or object retrieval applications, especially bag of words and fisher vectors, can be applied. These descriptors are known to be viable for large-scale retrieval applications. To explore large-scale video face retrieval, we first evaluate on the largest available public datasets, i.e. You Tube Faces Database (YTF) and Face in Action Database (FiA). Finally, the behaviour of face retrieval for increasing amounts of data is investigated by combining these datasets with 55K face tracks, collected from about 100 hours of TV data, making it the largest collection of face tracks we are aware of.
Towards a Uniform Treatment of Swedish Verb Syntax and Semantics

The paper discusses how different types of Swedish verbs can be treated uniformly by a Òrule schemaÓ approach to grammar in a unification based framework. The virtues of the method are exemplified at the syntactic and lexical levels, while the paper shows that some problems still occur in the semantics, mainly when aiming for a treatment which includes all types of auxiliaries. The theory outlined here incorporates the semantic information added by for example tense and modal auxiliaries as specific parameters in the verb semantics and relies on complicated subcategorization schemes to be treated by the lexicon, thus keeping the grammar rules as simple as possible.
Generation of “optimal” speed profile for motion planning

This paper presents how to compute "optimal" speed profile on a path that can be made by a path planner. "Optimality" is defined as the minimization of the trajectory total time under constraints on any number of its derivatives (speed, acceleration, jerk, .). Then the resulting trajectory can be used in real system to have precise control over it.
A merged RF CMOS LNA-Mixer design using geometric programming

This paper presents the design using geometric programming of a merged CMOS LNA-Mixer cell, intended for bluetooth application at 2.45GHz. A rigorous noise formulation taking into account on chip inductors non-idealities and parameters from inductor measurement results is provided. Design considerations to achieve geometric programming suitable expressions for noise, gain, and input matching, among others, are presented. As a result, the designed LNA-Mixer cell exhibits a single side band noise figure of 9.64dB, with a voltage gain of 21.5dB, input reflection co-efficient S11 of -28.7dB, in addition to a PIIP3=-2.06dBm. The circuit area is 0.93mm2 and consumes 8.67mW at 3.3V power supply in a 0. 35μm CMOS process.
AUTOMATED ANAL YSIS AND PREDICTION OF TIMING PARAMETERS IN EMBEDDED REAL-TIME SYSTEMS USING MEASURED DATA

Title of Thesis: AUTOMATED ANALYSIS AND PREDICTION OF TIMING PARAMETERS IN EMBEDDED REAL-TIME SYSTEMS USING MEASURED DA TA Degree Candidate: Gaurav Arora Degree and Y ear: Master of Science, Electrical Engineering, 1997 Thesis directed by: David B. Stewart, Assistant Professor Department of Electrical Engineering During the post-implementation stage of the software lifecycle of an embedded system, the developers are faced with the task of fine-tuning the system timing parameters. They are forced to resort to time consuming trial-and-error debugging methods. Our goal is to create an automated tool that facilitates the post-implementation debugging process. The main focus of this tool, which we call AFTER ( Assist inFine-Tuning ofEmbedded Real-time systems), is to detect anomalies with the system timing parameters and assist the developer in finding a solution for these problems in a systematic manner. AFTER uses raw timing data collected from the embedded system, analyzes it, then provides a temporal image of the current implementation, highlighting actual and potential problems. It can also be used in the predictor mode, where it allows the user to interact with it and assist him in narrowing down the exact fine-tuning optimizations required to solve the timing problems of the target system. The key contributions of this work are: combining the real-time scheduling theory of various research groups and extending it to create mathematical models for analyzing embedded real-time systems; creating an automated analysis and predictor tool that assists in fine-tuning of embedded real-time systems after implementation in a systematic manner. AUTOMATED ANAL YSIS AND PREDICTION OF TIMING PARAMETERS IN EMBEDDED REAL-TIME SYSTEMS USING MEASURED DATA
New delay-dependent stability and stabilization for T-S fuzzy time-delay systems under imperfect premise matching

This paper focus on the delay-dependent stability analysis and stabilization for the fuzzy control system with time delay under imperfect premise matching, in which the T-S fuzzy time-delay model and the fuzzy controller do not share the same membership functions. New delay-dependent stability conditions are proposed by selecting a new Lyapunov function. Moreover, a stabilizing condition including the information of membership functions of the fuzzy time-delay model and fuzzy controller is also obtained. Numerical example is presented to illustrate the less conservativeness and effectiveness of our method.
A Balanced-to-Unbalanced Microstrip Power Divider With Filtering Function

In this paper, a balanced-to-unbalanced microstrip power divider based on branch lines with several stubs and one resistor is proposed. The functions of power dividing, frequency selectivity, isolation between output ports, and common-mode suppression can be realized at the same time. The even-odd-mode equivalent circuits combining with the standard S-parameters and the mixed-mode S-parameters are adopted to derive the analytical equations at the center frequency. One or two transmission zeros can be achieved to enhance the out-of-band suppression. The center frequency, bandwidth, isolation, common-mode suppression, and the frequencies of transmission zeros can be controlled by the design procedure. To verify the theoretical prediction, two fabricated prototypes are designed and compared. One gets 7.7% 1-dB bandwidth with 0.6-dB insertion loss and one transmission zero. The other gets 1-dB bandwidth of 5% with 0.7-dB insertion loss and two transmission zeros. The isolation and common-mode suppression for both prototypes are better than 15 and 20 dB within the whole passband, respectively.
LIDAR-Aided SAR Interferometry Studies in Boreal Forest: Scattering Phase Center and Extinction Coefficient at X- and L-Band

Scattering phase center (SPC) location in boreal forests was studied in order to assist forest inventory with single- and quad-pol synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry. Airborne X- and L-band interferometric SAR data collected by the DLR E-SAR instrument in southern Finland during the FINSAR campaign was used in the study. A simple Random Volume over Ground (RVoG) model was employed as the theoretical framework for inversion of forest parameters and interpretation of the obtained results. LIDAR measurements of the canopy height and terrain elevation were used as reference and auxiliary data. The RVoG model was found to satisfactorily explain the SPC location inside the canopy in boreal forests. We show that when using X-band, the height of the SPC is typically about 75% of the canopy height, as predicted by the RVoG model; however, the retrieved extinction was found to be rather low. The feasibility of highly accurate tree height inversion using single-polarization X-band interferometry (with RMSE approaching 1.5 m) is demonstrated using a digital terrain model. For this purpose, the traditional polarimetric interferometry SAR technique for phase center retrieval is modified to include a complementary LIDAR measured terrain model. At L-band, the phase center height was determined to be around 50% of the canopy height and even lower, indicating that the ground contribution is significant. Moreover, several simplified inversion approaches for tree height and extinction coefficient retrieval were considered based on several boundary cases of the RVoG model, describing the canopy frequently encountered in boreal forest environments. These analyses allowed developing a combined approach for simultaneous estimation of both forest height and extinction in the boreal zone when an accurate elevation model of the terrain is available.
Breaking and repairing a convertible undeniable signature scheme

In 1990 Boyar, Cha.um, Damgard and Pedersen introduced the concept of convertible, undeniable signatures. They proved that those schemes exist iff oneway functions exist and further gave an example of a practical convertible undeniable scheme which is based on the ElGamal signature scheme. In this paper we present an attack on this signature scheme. After the conversion, that means, the signer releases the secret parameter so that his signature can be checked by any verifier, we can show that there is no security at all: A key only-attacker can forge the signature scheme universally. Thus this scheme might still be used as an undeniable signature scheme but it possesses only selective but no total convertibility. The attack can also be applied to Pedersen's modification of that scheme. We further show how the convertible, undeniable signature scheme can be repaired so that the attack doesn't fails and discuss a possibility to strengthen the security of the scheme.