Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EVALUATION OF A RANGE IMAGING SENSOR CONCERNING RESOLUTION AND ILLUMINATION

The introduction of range imaging devices opens new applications in the field of close range photogram metry, especially for measuring as well as modeling of objects and intern al e vironments. To evaluate the real potential of such devices, it becomes necessary to know its limitations and capabilities. Within this work aspects related to the range vari ation and accuracy (i) and resolution (ii) of a range imaging device (PMD CamCub e 2.0) will be investigated. i) One drawback of the data which is captured with RIM sensors is the absolute range accuracy. Var ious studies have been proposed on this subject. Ou r study focuses especially on the tuneable shutter speed of the sensor. For hi gh shutter speed strong variations on the measured range and intensity, due to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be expected. For low shutter speed a systematic error on the range measurement, caused by sensor saturation effects and the measurement princ iple can be expected. ii) If areas in different ran ges are partly illuminated a nonreliable range value is obtained, due to superimpos ed single measured range values within the instanta neous field of view (IFOV), which implies a combination of the surfaces at diff erent ranges. The measured range depends on the ill uminated area size and the distance between the surfaces. Having this in mind, a special reference object was constructed, a test box with various sized slots at its front. The idea for the experiment is to determ ine the smallest slot where the beam can penetrate without suffering the multiple surfaces effect at different ranges. The measured s lot size provides a minimum area in a specific rang e to obtain reliable RIM measurements. Therefore an experimental setup was b uild up and the derived results are presented. * Corresponding author: Jorge A.S. Centeno
Toward standardization of carbohydrate-deficient transferrin ( CDT ) measurements : I . Analyte definition and proposal of a candidate reference method 1 )

An alcohol-associated change in the serum transferrin glycoform pattern, carbohydrate-deficient transferrin This position paper was commissioned by IFCC, but it does 1) not carry any official endorsement by IFCC. IFCC Sections printed in J. Clin. Chem. Clin. Biochem. are 2) listed in the Cumulative Index, which appeared in connection with the contents of this journal in Volume 27, 1989 and since 1991 have been printed in (Eur.) J. Clin. Chem. Clin. Biochem. IFCC 1991/1 Vol. 29, 435–457 IFCC 1991/2 Vol. 29, 531–535 IFCC 1991/3 Vol. 29, 577–586 IFCC 1991/4 Vol. 29, 767–772 IFCC 1992/1 Vol. 30, 901–905 IFCC 1994/1 Vol. 32, 639–655 IFCC 1995/1 Vol. 33, 247–253 IFCC 1995/2 Vol. 33, 399–404 IFCC 1995/3 Vol. 33, 623–625 IFCC 1995/4 Vol. 33, 627–636 IFCC 1995/5 Vol. 33, 637–660 IFCC 1997/1 Vol. 35, 317–344 IFCC 1997/2 Vol. 35, 345–349 IFCC 1997/3 Vol. 35, 805–831 IFCC 1997/4 Vol. 35, 833–843 For IFCC sections printed in Clin. Chem. Lab. Med. since 1998, please visit the link http://degruyter.com/journals/ extenza, where they are freely accessible. *Corresponding author: Anders Helander, Chair, IFCC-WGCDT, Alcohol Laboratory, L7:03, Karolinska University Hospital Solna, 171 76 Stockholm, Sweden Phone: q46-8-51771530, Fax: q46-8-51771532, E-mail: anders.helander@ki.se Received for publication December 19, 2006 (CDT), is used as a biomarker of chronic moderate to heavy alcohol consumption. A current limitation in CDT analysis is the lack of standardization, which hampers clinical and analytical comparison between studies. This situation prompted initiation of a Working Group (WG) on CDT Standardization under the auspices of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC). The standardization work aims to define and validate the analyte, select a reference method, work out procedures for the production of reference materials, and make suggestions for the clinical usage of CDT. The first recommendation of the WG is that disialotransferrin should be the primary target molecule for CDT measurement and the single analyte on which CDT standardization is based. It is further recommended that HPLC should be the analytical principle considered as the basis of an interim reference method until a suitable mass spectrometric reference method is established. In clinical use, CDT should be expressed in a relative amount (% CDT), to compensate for variations in the total transferrin concentration. Clin Chem Lab Med 2007;45:558–62.
A novel non-iterative architecture for broadcast MIMO

In Multi-user, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) wireless cellular where Quality of Service (QoS) is interference-limited, a variety of power control, precoding and decoding non-linear problems exist. Even though the sum capacity of centralized schemes (either at transmission or reception) has already been computed, the search for efficient practical schemes which can achieve this capacity is still ongoing. This paper examines the precoder and decoder joint design from a new perspective and proposes a new non-iterative architecture, which is novel, practical, and low in complexity. This new perspective is referred to as embedded power loading. The goal is to obtain a practical design for the power and bit loading, which maximizes the sum rate with user Bit Error Rate (BER) requirements in the Broadcast Channel (BC). By means of simulation results, this work shows that, although heuristically designed, our proposal achieves approximately the sum rate with a substantial reduction of complexity.
Eagle-Eye: A near-optimal statistical framework for noise sensor placement

The relentless technology scaling has led to significantly reduced noise margin and complicated functionalities. As such, design time techniques per se are less likely to ensure power integrity, resulting in runtime voltage emergencies. To alleviate the issue, recently several works have shed light on the possibilities of dynamic noise management systems. Most of these works rely on on-chip noise sensors to accurately capture voltage emergencies. However, they all assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that the placement of the sensors is given. It remains an open problem in the literature how to optimally place a given number of noise sensors for best voltage emergency detection. In this paper, we formally define the problem of noise sensor placement along with a novel sensing quality metric (SQM) to be maximized. We then put forward an efficient algorithm to solve it, which is proved to be optimal in the class of polynomial complexity approximations. Experimental results on a set of industrial power grid designs show that compared with a simple average-noise based heuristic and two state-of-the-art temperature sensor placement algorithms aiming at recovering the full map or capturing the hot spots at all times, the proposed method on average can reduce the miss rate of voltage emergency detections by 7.4x, 15x and 6.2x, respectively.
Quasinormal modes and holography

Quasinormal frequencies of electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetime can be identified with poles of the corresponding real-time Green's functions in a holographically dual finite temperature field theory. The quasinormal modes are defined for gauge-invariant quantities which obey an incoming-wave boundary condition at the horizon and a Dirichlet condition at the boundary. As an application, we explicitly find poles of retarded correlation functions of R-symmetry currents and the energy-momentum tensor in strongly coupled finite temperature N=4 supersymmetric SU(Nc) Yang-Mills theory in the limit of large Nc.
From causal to z-linearizable transactional memory

The current generation of time-based transactional memories (TMs) has the advantage of being simple and efficient, and providing strong linearizability semantics. Linearizability matches well the goal of TM to simplify the design and implementation of concurrent applications. However, long transactions can have a much lower likelihood of committing than smaller transactions because of the strict ordering constraints imposed by linearizability. We investigate the use of weaker semantics for TM and introduce a new consistency criterion that we call z-linearizability. By combining properties of linearizability and serializability, z-linearizability provides a good trade-off between strong semantics and good practical performance even for long transactions.
ALLOCENTRIC VS. EGOCENTRIC SPATIAL MEMORY ENCODING: EVIDENCE OF A COGNITIVE SPATIAL MAP FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TESTING Master's Thesis- C. Sevigny McMaster- Psychology ALLOCENTRlC VS. EGOCENTRlC SPATIAL MEMORY ENCODING: EVIDENCE OF A COGNITIVE SPATIAL MAP FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TESTING

Navigation is a very important area of spatial information research that presents researchers with a number of challenges. One of these challenges concerns the nature of spatial information encoding itself: is such encoding the result of a single mechanism system, a two-mechanism system or possibly a mixed system? One possible avenue of insight into this problem centers on the disorientation effect as described in Wang & Spelke (2000). A quick survey of basic findings, terminating with Waller & Hodgson (2006), indicates that there seem to be two systems at work. Moreover, the results obtained are based upon experiments carried out in actual reality. A virtual reality experiment was designed in an attempt to replicate the findings described in Waller & Hodgson (2006). The experiment is described in detail and its results are presented. These were found to be sufficiently reliable to justify pointing to a potentially rich field for future research, including such techniques as combining VR with fMRI to achieve more fine-grained results that cannot currently be obtained from the direct use of actual reality only. Underlying factors such as experimental control and data presentation are briefly described in the discussion section.
Circulating Galectin‐3 Is Associated With Cardiometabolic Disease in the Community

Background Circulating Galectin‐3 (Gal‐3) concentrations are associated with an increased incidence of heart failure, atrial fibrillation, chronic kidney disease, and mortality. Recent evidence suggests that Gal‐3 may also be an important modulator of cardiometabolic traits such as adiposity, insulin resistance, and hyperglycemia. We examined the associations of blood Gal‐3 concentrations and cardiometabolic disease traits in the Framingham Heart Study. Methods and Results In cross‐sectional analyses of 2946 Framingham Heart Study participants (mean age 59 years, 55% women), higher Gal‐3 concentrations were associated with higher body mass index, waist circumference, and triglycerides (P<0.0001 for all). Higher Gal‐3 was associated with greater odds of obesity (multivariable‐adjusted odds ratio 1.16 per 1‐SD increase in log–Gal‐3, 95% CI 1.06–1.28, P=0.002) and hypertension (odds ratio 1.18, 95% CI 1.07–1.29, P=0.0006). In prospective analyses, Gal‐3 was associated with incident metabolic syndrome (hazard ratio 1.22, 95% CI 1.10–1.36, P=0.0002) and diabetes (hazard ratio 1.21, 95% CI 1.04–1.41, P=0.02), in age‐ and sex‐adjusted, but not multivariable‐adjusted models. Conclusions In this large, community‐based sample, circulating Gal‐3 was associated with abdominal adiposity, dyslipidemia, and hypertension in cross‐sectional analyses, but Gal‐3 did not predict incident cardiometabolic disease after adjusting for cardiometabolic risk factors. Future investigations should focus on further elucidating mechanisms linking Gal‐3 with cardiometabolic disease and on assessing whether modulation of the Gal‐3 pathway might have positive cardiometabolic effects.
MOLECULAR EVIDENCE FOR GENETIC SUBDIVISIONS IN THE DESERT SHREW, NOTIOSOREX CRAWFORDI

Abstract Examination of cytochrome-b DNA sequences from specimens of Notiosorex crawfordi, the desert shrew, indicate that within this taxon there are at least 3 major subdivisions reflecting levels of variation more typical of species rather than subspecies. One of these cytochrome-b haplotypes was recently described as a previously unrecognized species; however, that paper was limited to the description of a species level name. We provide additional insight into subdivisions in N. crawfordi. One DNA haplotype is distributed in Texas, New Mexico, and eastern Arizona, a second haplotype in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, and the third haplotype in Baja California, Mexico. Nucleotide sequences obtained from intron 7 of the nuclear gene, beta fibrinogen, support the conclusions that 2 of the haplotypes occur sympatrically in southeastern Arizona and are not hybridizing with each other.
Enterprise Cloud Storage and Computation Security

Cloud computing acts as a computing paradigm that aims to provide huge amount of computing in a fully virtualized manner by aggregating resources and thus offering a single system view. Cloud Computing is also delivered as utility assuring customized and quality of service guaranteed computation environments for cloud users. While an enterprise organization is composed of different departments like finance, admin etc these departments are segregated as sub network zone which are thus interconnected via network. Securities are essential for authorization of storage and computing. In this paper we have proposed a privacy cheating discouragement and computation auditing approach that bridging secure storage and computation auditing in cloud. Privacy cheating discouragement is designated by verifier signature, batch verification and probabilistic sampling techniques. General Terms Enterprise Cloud Computing, Auditing Protocol, Verifier signature.
Cross-layer design for optimizing TCP performance

In this paper, we propose and analyze novel and efficient cross-layer designs involving joint optimization of physical, link, and TCP layers in wireless. Particularly, we investigate the design of symbol mapping diversity (SMD) schemes using M-QAM at the physical layer for optimal goodput performance at the TCP layer. We present the design and TCP goodput analysis of two SMD schemes, one applying SMD at the TCP packet level, termed as full packet SMD (FP SMD), and the other applying SMD at the link layer (LL) packet level, termed as LL ARQ SMD. We show that although the LL ARQ SMD scheme offers good TCP goodput at high SNR, it performs poorer compared to the FP SMD scheme at low SNR because of increased delays incurred due to increased LL retransmissions at low SNR. We therefore propose and analyze a hybrid SMD scheme which adaptively switches modes (between LL ARQ SMD and FP SMD) based on measured LL packet error rate. We show that the hybrid SMD scheme combines the best TCP performance of both LL ARQ SMD and FP SMD under varying channel conditions.
A New Fuzzy DSS/ES for Stock Portfolio Selection using Technical and Fundamental Approaches in Parallel

A Decision Support System/Expert System for stock portfolio selection presented where at first step, both technical and fundamental data used to estimate technical and fundamental return and risk (1 phase); Then, the estimated values are aggregated with the investor preferences (2 phase) to produce convenient stock portfolio. In the 1 phase, there are two expert systems, each of which is responsible for technical or fundamental estimation. In the technical expert system, for each stock, twenty seven candidates are identified and with using rough sets-based clustering method (RC) the effective variables have been selected. Next, for each stock two fuzzy rulebases are developed with fuzzy C-Mean method and Takai-SugenoKang (TSK) approach; one for return estimation and the other for risk. Thereafter, the parameters of the rule-bases are tuned with backpropagation method. In parallel, for fundamental expert systems, fuzzy rule-bases have been identified in the form of “IF-THEN” rules through brainstorming with the stock market experts and the input data have been derived from financial statements; as a result two fuzzy rule-bases have been generated for all the stocks, one for return and the other for risk. In the 2 phase, user preferences represented by four criteria and are obtained by questionnaire. Using an expert system, four estimated values of return and risk have been aggregated with the respective values of user preference. At last, a fuzzy rule base having four rules, treats these values and produce a ranking score for each stock which will lead to a satisfactory portfolio for the user. The stocks of six manufacturing companies and the period of 2003-2006 selected for data gathering. Keywords—Stock Portfolio Selection, Fuzzy Rule-Base Expert Systems, Financial Decision Support Systems, Technical Analysis, Fundamental Analysis.
High-Level Cross-Resistance to Didanosine Observed in South African Children Failing an Abacavir- or Stavudine-Based 1st-Line Regimen

Background The knowledge-base of emerging drug resistance profiles in children exposed to abacavir-based antiretroviral regimens in South Africa is very limited. This study investigated the suitability of didanosine-based 2nd-line regimens for children in the context of antiretroviral drug resistance patterns emerging after 1st-line virologic failure. Methods A retrospective dataset of 354 antiretroviral drug resistant genotypes from children failing either abacavir (n = 81) or stavudine (n = 273) based 1st-line regimens, was analysed. Samples were sent to the HIV genotyping laboratory at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, for routine testing. Pol sequences were submitted to the Stanford HIV drug resistance database for genotypic predictions. Results Children were exposed to abacavir or stavudine-based 1st-line regimens for an average of 21 and 36 months, respectively. The frequency of reduced susceptibility to didanosine was substantial in the abacavir-exposed group (69.1%). This reduced susceptibility was commonly attributed to L74V/I (n = 44) and to a lesser extent K65R (n = 10) mutations. Didanosine resistance was observed in 43.2% of patients exposed to stavudine-based regimens. In contrast, most children remained susceptible to stavudine regardless of exposure to abacavir (77.8%) or stavudine (74.7%). At least 80% of children remained susceptible to zidovudine irrespective of stavudine or abacavir-exposure. The presence of the K65R mutation was more common after abacavir pressure (12.3% vs 1.8%). Conclusion Analysis revealed that didanosine-based 2nd-line regimens have limitations for South African children, given the high frequency of mutations that confer cross-resistance to didanosine; especially after abacavir-exposure. This data has influenced South African paediatric treatment guidelines, which now recommend zidovudine-based 2nd-line regimens.
Removal of artifacts from electrocardiogram using digital filter

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the graphical representation of heart functionality. The ECG finds its importance in the detection of cardiac abnormalities. The electrocardiographic signals are often contaminated by noise from diverse sources. It is essential to reduce these disturbances and improve the accuracy as well as reliability. The noises that commonly disturb the basic electrocardiogram are power line interference, electrode contact noise, motion artifacts, electromyography (EMG) noise, and instrumentation noise. These noises can be classified according to their frequency content. The noise signals have been generated and added to the ECG signal taken from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Digital filter structure such as window based FIR filter is proposed to maximally remove the noise from the ECG signal. The performance of these window based filters has been analyzed on the basis of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR).
Efficient Coverage-Driven Stimulus Generation Using Simultaneous SAT Solving, with Application to SystemVerilog

SystemVerilog provides powerful language constructs for verification, and one of them is the covergroup functional coverage model. This model is designed as a complement to assertion verification, that is, it has the advantage of defining cross-coverage over multiple coverage points. In this article, a coverage-driven verification (CDV) approach is formulated as a simultaneous Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem that is based on covergroups. The coverage bins defined by the functional model are converted into Conjunction Normal Form (CNF) and then solved together by our proposed simultaneous SAT algorithm PLNSAT to generate stimuli for improving coverage. The basic PLNSAT algorithm is then extended in our second proposed algorithm GPLNSAT, which exploits additional information gleaned from the structure of SystemVerilog covergroups. Compared to generating stimuli separately, the simultaneous SAT approaches can share learned knowledge across each coverage target, thus reducing the overall solving time drastically. Experimental results on a UART circuit and the largest ITC benchmark circuits show that the proposed algorithms can achieve 10.8x speedup on average and outperform state-of-the-art techniques in most of the benchmarks.
Flashing up the storage layer

In the near future, commodity hardware is expected to incorporate both flash and magnetic disks. In this paper we study how the storage layer of a database system can benefit from the presence of both kinds of disk. We propose using the flash and the magnetic disk at the same level of the memory hierarchy and placing a data page to only one of these disks according to the workload of the page. Pages with a read-intensive workload are placed on the flash disk, while pages with a write-intensive workload are placed on the magnetic disk. We present a family of on-line algorithms to decide the optimal placement of a page and study their theoretical properties. Our system is self-tuning, i.e., our algorithms adapt page placement to changing workloads. We also present a buffer replacement policy that takes advantage of the asymmetric I/O properties of the two types of storage media to reduce the total I/O cost. Our experimental evaluation shows remarkable I/O performance improvement over both flash-only and magnetic-only systems. These results, we believe, exhibit both the potential and necessity of such algorithms in future database systems.
UNIFIED MULTI-SCALE CORNER

We define a universal gradient-based representation for V-, Tand X-type corners. This expression is used to define a corner detector, based on Moments of the Gradient in Scale-space (MoGS). The performance of this operator is compared with that of the Plessey and the Kitchen and Rosenfeld operators. The MoGS operator is shown to have better invariance to scale, to be more reliable and to provide better corner localisation than the other operators. The computation of corner attributes for edge orientation, aperture, contrast, corner type and size is illustrated.
Plays from Motions for Baseball Video Retrieval

There are many videos about sports. There is a large need for content-based video retrievals. In sports videos, the motions and camera works have much information about shots and plays. This paper proposes the same play retrieval method using the similar motion retrieval on videos. We can retrieve the similar motion parts based on motions shown in videos using the space-time images describing the motions. Using a finite state model of a play, we can retrieve the precise point of pitches from the pattern of estimated typical motions. This paper describes the method and the experimental results.