Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Doppler Estimation Based on Frequency Average and Remodulation for Underwater Acoustic Communication

Underwater acoustic communication channel is time varying and has Doppler effect due to wind, sea surface roughness, and platform motion. We have to recognize the changing channel state and apply it to communication technique for increasing transmission efficiency in the underwater acoustic channel. In this paper, we propose more reliable Doppler estimation method based on frequency average and remodulation. We conducted the simulation and sea trial to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. When the channel coding technique was not applied, the uncoded bit error rate performance of the proposed method was improved about maximum 50.3% compared with conventional method.
Virtual Reality in the Treatment of Fibromyalgia: A Pilot Study

The aim of this article is to present preliminary data on the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) as an adjunct to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in the treatment of fibromyalgia (FM). The sample comprised six women diagnosed with FM according to the American College of Rheumatology guidelines (1990). The treatment program consisted of 10 sessions of group CBT with the support of an adaptive virtual environment containing a specific content for developing relaxation and mindfulness skills. Patients were assessed at pretreatment, post-treatment, and at a 6-month follow-up for the following outcome variables: functional status related to pain, depression, a negative and positive affect, and coping skills. The results showed the long-term benefits of significantly reduced pain and depression and an increased positive affect and use of healthy coping strategies. This is the first study showing a preliminary utility of VR in treating FM.
Camera calibration with precise extraction of feature points using projective transformation

In this paper, we propose a method for precise camera calibration which conducts feature point extraction and camera parameter estimation iteratively. Many of conventional researches on camera calibration have focused on how to calculate camera parameters using data obtained from input images, that is, location of feature points. However, these input images suffer from distortions caused by perspective and lens imperfections. In our proposed method, at the beginning of the procedure, projective transformation matrices between image planes and a calibration target and lens distortion parameters are approximately estimated. These parameters are used in order to reduce the influence of distortions in input images. After the removal of distortions, feature points in processed images are localized precisely and used to update/calculate the projective transformation matrices, the lens distortion parameters and intrinsic camera parameters. These procedures are iterated until they converge and this iteration results in precise estimation of the parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been recognized through experiments using synthesized data and real images.
An Ensemble Approach to Financial Entity Matching for the FEIII 2016 Challenge

Financial entities are often referred to with ambiguous descriptions and identifiers. To tackle this issue, the Financial Entity Identification and Information Integration1 (FEIII) Challenge requires participants to automatically reconcile financial entities among three datasets: the Federal Financial Institution Examination Council2 (FFIEC), the Legal Entity Identifiers (LEI) and the Security and Exchange Commission3 (SEC). Our approach is based on the combination of different Naive Bayes classifiers through an ensemble approach. The evaluation on the Gold Standard developed by the challenge organizers shows F1-scores that are above the average of the other participants for the two proposed tasks.
Noise analysis of regularized EM for SPECT reconstruction

The ability to theoretically model the propagation of photon noise through tomographic reconstruction algorithms is crucial in evaluating reconstructed image quality as a function of parameters of the algorithm. Here, the authors show the theoretical expressions for the propagation of Poisson noise through tomographic SPECT reconstructions using regularized EM algorithms with independent Gamma and multivariate Gaussian priors. The authors' analysis extends the work in H.H. Barrett et al., Phys. Med. Biol., vol. 39, p. 833-46 (1994), in which judicious linearizations were used to enable the propagation of a mean image and covariance matrix from one iteration to the next for the (unregularized) EM algorithm. To validate their theoretical analyses, the authors use a methodology in D.W. Wilson et al., Phys. Med. Biol., vol. 39, p. 847-71 (1994) to compare the results of theoretical calculations to Monte Carlo simulations. The authors also demonstrate an application of the theory to the calculation of an optimal smoothing parameter for a regularized reconstruction. The smoothing parameter is optimal in the context of a quantitation task, defined as the minimization of the expected mean-square error of an estimated number of counts in a hot lesion region. The authors' results thus demonstrate how the theory can be applied to a problem of potential practical use.
Signcryption or How to Achieve Costsignature & Encryption Costsignature +

Secure and authenticated message delivery/storage is one of the major aims of computer and communication security research. The current standard method to achieve this aim is \(digital) signature followed by encryption". In this paper, we address a question on the cost of secure and authenticated message delivery/storage, namely, whether it is possible to transport/store messages of varying length in a secure and authenticated way with an expense less than that required by \signature followed by encryption". This question has apparently never been addressed in the literature since the invention of public key cryptography. We then present a positive answer to the question. In particular, we discover a new cryptographic primitive termed as \signcryption" which simultaneously ful lls both the functions of digital signature and public key encryption in a logically single step, and with a cost signi cantly smaller than that required by \signature followed by encryption". For typical security parameters for high level security applications (size of public moduli = 1536 bits), signcryption costs 58% (50%, respectively) less in computation time and 85% (91%, respectively) less in message expansion than does \signature followed by encryption" based on the discrete logarithm problem (factorization problem, respectively). The saving in cost brought to society by this new technology is potentially huge, especially in the emerging era of electronic commerce in which the assurance of secure and authenticated transactions and communications is a key to its success as well as public acceptance.
CRITERIA FOR ASPHALT-RUBBER CONCRETE IN CIVIL AIRPORT PAVEMENTS: MIXTURE DESIGN. FINAL REPORT

A mixture design procedure is developed to allow the use of ashpalt-rubber binders in concrete for flexible airport pavement. The asphalt-rubber is produced by reacting asphalt with ground, scrap tire rubber to produce the binder for the asphalt-rubber concrete. The report includes procedures for laboratory preparation of asphalt-rubber binders using an equipment setup that was found by researchers to produce laboratory binders with similar properties to field processes. The rubber-asphalt concrete mixture design procedure includes adjustments to the aggregate gradation to permit space for the rubber particles in the ashpalt-rubber binder as well as suggested mixing and compaction temperatures, and compaction efforts. While the procedure has been used in the laboratory to successfully produce asphalt-rubber concrete mixtures, it should be evaluated in the field to ensure that consistent results can be achieved in a production environment.
64-Channel UWB Wireless Neural Vector Analyzer SOC With a Closed-Loop Phase Synchrony-Triggered Neurostimulator

An ultra wideband (UWB) 64-channel responsive neural stimulator system-on-chip (SoC) is presented. It demonstrates the first on-chip neural vector analyzer capable of wirelessly monitoring magnitude, phase and phase synchronization of neural signals. In a closed-loop, abnormal phase synchrony triggers the programmable-waveform biphasic current-mode neural stimulator. To implement these functionalities, the SoC integrates 64 neural recording amplifiers with tunable switched-capacitor (SC) bandpass filters, 64 multiplying 8-bit SAR ADCs, 64 programmable 16-tap FIR filters, a tri-core CORDIC processor, 64 biphasic current stimulation channels, and a 3.1-10.6 GHz UWB wireless transmitter onto a 4 mm × 3 mm 0.13 μm CMOS die. To minimize both the area and power dissipation of the SoC, the SAR ADC is re-used as a multiplier for FIR filtering and as a DAC and duty cycle controller for the biphasic neural stimulator. The SoC has been validated in the early detection and abortion of seizures in freely moving rodents on-line and in early seizure detection in humans off-line.
Regular exercise is associated with emotional resilience to acute stress in healthy adults

Physical activity has long been considered beneficial to health and regular exercise is purported to relieve stress. However empirical evidence demonstrating these effects is limited. In this study, we compared psychophysiological responses to an acute psychosocial stressor between individuals who did, or did not, report regular physical exercise. Healthy men and women (N = 111) participated in two experimental sessions, one with the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and one with a non-stressful control task. We measured heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol, and self-reported mood before and at repeated times after the tasks. Individuals who reported physical exercise at least once per week exhibited lower heart rate at rest than non-exercisers, but the groups did not differ in their cardiovascular responses to the TSST. Level of habitual exercise did not influence self-reported mood before the tasks, but non-exercisers reported a greater decline in positive affect after the TSST in comparison to exercisers. These findings provide modest support for claims that regular exercise protects against the negative emotional consequences of stress, and suggest that exercise has beneficial effects in healthy individuals. These findings are limited by their correlational nature, and future prospective controlled studies on the effects of regular exercise on response to acute stress are needed.
Synthesis, Antimicrobial and cytotoxic activity of New Heterocyclic Hybrids Based on 2,5-Dimethylpyrrole and Pyrrole Scaffolds

A series of 4-(2,5-dimethylpyrrol-1-yl)/4-pyrrol-1-yl benzoic acid hydrazide analogs, some derived triazoles, azetidinones, thiazolidinones, and pyrroles have been synthesized in good yields and structures of these compounds were established by IR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR, mass spectral, and elemental analysis. These compounds were evaluated for their preliminary in vitro antibacterial, antifungal, and antitubercular activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37 Rv strain by the broth dilution assay method. Twenty one of these compounds displayed good antimicrobial activity, with a MIC value of 1-4 μg/ml. Several compounds 4c, 8-10, 15b-15h, and 16b-16d exhibited good in vitro antitubercular activity with MIC value 1-2 μg/ml. Further, some title compounds were also assessed for their cytotoxic activity (IC50) against mammalian Vero cell lines and A549 (lung adenocarcinoma) cell lines using the MTT assay method. The results revealed that these compounds exhibit antitubercular activity at non-cytotoxic concentrations.
Managing spastic hypertonia in children with cerebral palsy via repetitive passive knee movements.

OBJECTIVE Most children with cerebral palsy have increased muscle tension in the lower extremities, which inevitably leads to abnormal gait characteristics. Proper management of excessive muscle tension is therefore of great importance. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of continuous passive motion on children with cerebral palsy, regarding their lower extremity spastic hypertonia and ambulatory function. DESIGN A repeated measures design. SUBJECTS Sixteen children with cerebral palsy. METHODS Intervention was applied to the subject's knees with a continuous passive motion device (at velocities of 15 and 0º/s) for 20 min. Effects were evaluated via variables measuring range-of-motion, muscle tone, and ambulatory function before, immediately after, and 30 min after intervention. RESULTS For the 15º/s intervention, significant differences were found in time, intervention, and interaction among variables, including active range-of-motion of the knee (increased), relaxation index (increased), Modified Ashworth Scale (decreased), Timed Up-and-Go (decreased), and 6-Minute Walk test (increased). No difference was found in passive range of motion measurements. For the 0º/s control condition, none of the dependent variables demonstrated statistically significant differences. CONCLUSION Repetitive passive movement can reduce lower extremity spastic hypertonia in children with cerebral palsy, and improve ambulatory function in terms of walking speed.
Physiology and Pathophysiology of CLC-1: Mechanisms of a Chloride Channel Disease, Myotonia

The CLC-1 chloride channel, a member of the CLC-channel/transporter family, plays important roles for the physiological functions of skeletal muscles. The opening of this chloride channel is voltage dependent and is also regulated by protons and chloride ions. Mutations of the gene encoding CLC-1 result in a genetic disease, myotonia congenita, which can be inherited as an autosmal dominant (Thomsen type) or an autosomal recessive (Becker type) pattern. These mutations are scattered throughout the entire protein sequence, and no clear relationship exists between the inheritance pattern of the mutation and the location of the mutation in the channel protein. The inheritance pattern of some but not all myotonia mutants can be explained by a working hypothesis that these mutations may exert a “dominant negative” effect on the gating function of the channel. However, other mutations may be due to different pathophysiological mechanisms, such as the defect of protein trafficking to membranes. Thus, the underlying mechanisms of myotonia are likely to be quite diverse, and elucidating the pathophysiology of myotonia mutations will require the understanding of multiple molecular/cellular mechanisms of CLC-1 channels in skeletal muscles, including molecular operation, protein synthesis, and membrane trafficking mechanisms.
The Tangram stream query processing system

Tangram, an environment for modeling which is under development at UCLA, is discussed. One of the driving concepts behind Tangram has been the combination of large-scale data access and data reduction with a powerful programming environment. The Tangram environment is based on PROLOG, extending it with a number of features, including process management, distributed database access, and generalized stream processing. The authors describe the Tangram stream processor, the part of the Tangram environment performing query processing on large streams of data. The paradigm of transducers on streams is used throughout this system, providing a database flow computation capability. <<ETX>>
Cementitious Stabilization

The principal materials used for the cementitious stabilization and modification of highway pavement materials are lime, fly ash, and portland cement. Whereas lime and portland cement are manufactured products, fly ash is a by-product of the burning of coal at electric power generating stations. As a consequence, fly ash generally exhibits greater variability than is seen in the other products. By-products such as kiln dust and fluidized bed ash from various manufacturing and energy generating processes are used to a lesser extent. While all of these products and by-products are used for similar purposes, different testing, design, construction, and quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) methodologies have been developed for each. Stabilization projects are almost always site-specific, requiring the application of standard test methods, along with fundamental analysis and design procedures, to develop an acceptable solution. As with any such process, adherence to strict environmental constraints is vital to project success. The use of cementitious materials makes a positive contribution to economic and resource sustainability because it allows enhancement of both standard and substandard in situ soils to levels consistent with the requirements of a given application.
Random Beamforming in Millimeter-Wave NOMA Networks

This paper investigates the coexistence between two key enabling technologies for fifth generation (5G) mobile networks, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. Particularly, the application of random beamforming to mmWave-NOMA systems is considered in order to avoid the requirement that the base station know all the users’ channel state information. Stochastic geometry is used to characterize the performance of the proposed mmWave-NOMA transmission scheme by using key features of mmWave systems, i.e., that mmWave transmission is highly directional and potential blockages will thin the user distribution. Two random beamforming approaches that can further reduce the system overhead are also proposed, and their performance is studied analytically in terms of sum rates and outage probabilities. Simulation results are also provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed schemes and verify the accuracy of the developed analytical results.
STUDIES WITH FABRICATED SWITCHBOARD DATA: EXPLORING SOURCES OF MODEL-DATA MISMATCH

We present a study of data simulated using acoustic models trained on Switchboard data, and then recognized using various Switchboard-trained acoustic models. The Switchboard-trained models yield word error rates of about 47 percent, on real Switch-board conversations. When data is simulated using the acoustic models, but in a way that insures that the pronunciations in our recognition dictionary are “perfect”, the WER drops by nearly a factor of ﬁve. If instead we use hand-labeled phonetic transcriptions to fabricate data that more realistically represents the way words are pronounced – rendering our recognition pronunciations imperfect – we obtain WERs in the low 40’s, rates that are fairly similar to those seen in actual speech data. Taken as a whole, these and other experiments we describe in the paper suggest that there is a substantial mismatch between real speech data and our speech models. The use of simulation in speech recognition research appears to be a promising tool in our efforts to understand and reduce the size of this mismatch.
A Distant Supervision Approach to Semantic Role Labeling

Semanticrolelabelinghasbecomeakeymodule for many language processing applications such as question answering, information extraction, sentiment analysis, and machine translation. To build an unrestricted semantic role labeler, the ﬁrst step is to develop a comprehensive proposition bank. However, creating such a bank is a costly enterprise, which has only been achieved for a handful of languages. In this paper, we describe a technique to build proposition banks for new languages using distant supervision. Starting from PropBank inEnglishandlooselyparallelcorporasuchas versions of Wikipedia in different languages, we carried out a mapping of semantic propositions we extracted from English to syntactic structures in Swedish using named entities. We trained a semantic parser on the generated Swedishpropositionsandwereporttheresults we obtained. Using the CoNLL 2009 evaluation script, we could reach the scores of 52.25 for labeled propositions and 62.44 for the unlabeled ones. We believe our approach can be appliedtotrainsemanticrolelabelersforother resource-scarce languages.
Low-power hardware implementation of movement decoding for brain computer interface with reduced-resolution discrete cosine transform

This paper describes a low-power hardware implementation for movement decoding of brain computer interface. Our proposed hardware design is facilitated by two novel ideas: (i) an efficient feature extraction method based on reduced-resolution discrete cosine transform (DCT), and (ii) a new hardware architecture of dual look-up table to perform discrete cosine transform without explicit multiplication. The proposed hardware implementation has been validated for movement decoding of electrocorticography (ECoG) signal by using a Xilinx FPGA Zynq-7000 board. It achieves more than 56× energy reduction over a reference design using band-pass filters for feature extraction.
Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte and Platelet-to-Lymphocyte Ratios as Predictors of Survival and Metastasis for Recurrent Hepatocellular Carcinoma after Transarterial Chemoembolization

Purpose To evaluate whether neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR) predict survival and metastasis in patients after transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) for recurrent hepatocellular carcinoma (RHCC). Materials and Methods Clinical and laboratory data from 132 RHCC patients treated with TACE from January 2003 to December 2012 were retrospectively reviewed. Prognostic factors were assessed by multivariate analysis, and the predictive values of NLR and PLR for overall survival (OS) and extrahepatic metastases were compared. Results Pretreatment mean NLR and PLR were 3.1 and 137, respectively. The 0.5-, 1-, and 2-year OS rates were 93.7%, 67.1%, and 10.1% in the low NLR group and 81.1%, 18.9%, and 3.8% in the high NLR group, respectively (P = 0.017). The corresponding OS rates in the low and high PLR groups were 92.5%, 58.1%, and 9.7% and 84.6%, 23.1%, and 2.6%, respectively (P = 0.030). The discriminatory performance predicting 1-year survival probability was significantly poorer for NLR (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.685, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.598–0.763) than for PLR (AUC = 0.792, 95% CI 0.712–0.857; P = 0.0295), but was good for both ratios for predicting post-TACE extrahepatic metastasis. Multivariate analysis indicated that high PLR (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.373, 95% CI = 0.216-0.644, P < 0.001, vascular invasion (HR = 0.507, 95% CI = 0.310–0.832, P = 0.007), and multiple tumors (HR= 0.553, 95% CI = 0.333–0.919, P = 0.022) were independent prognostic factors for OS. Conclusions High NLR and PLR were both associated with poor prognosis and metastasis in RHCC patients treated with TACE, but high PLR was a better predictor of 1-year OS. High PLR, vascular invasion, and multiple tumors were independent, unfavorable prognostic factors.
Image-based comparison of pre-modern coins and medals

In Numismatics it is of central importance to find out which dies were used to mint a specific coin. For this purpose, coins have to be compared directly with each other. However, different states of preservation turn a comparison into a challenge. Partly degenerated regions which are caused by abrasion and corrosion present considerable difficulties. Furthermore, within a comparison based on images, different directions of illumination can lead to completely different impressions. In this contribution, it is described how the acquisition of coin images can be enhanced by a ThreeColor Selective Stereo Gradient Method. The resulting reflection images can be aligned with each other by a Modified Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm. This technique helps the numismatist in deciding, and thus decreases the effort of the comparison. So far, the proposed illumination and registration technique has been tested on 14 die-identical coin images of 6 different coin types.