Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Joint bundled camera paths for stereoscopic video stabilization

This paper presents a method to stabilize shaky stereoscopic videos captured by hand-held devices. Directly applying traditional monocular video stabilization techniques to two views independently is problematic as it often brings undesirable vertical disparities and produces inaccurate horizontal disparities, which violate original stereoscopic disparity constraints, leading to erroneous depth perception. In this paper, we show that monocular video stabilization methods, such as the bundled camera paths stabilization, can be extended for stereoscopic videos by taking additional disparity constraints during the stabilization. In particular, we first estimate disparities between two views. Then, we compute camera motions as meshes of bundled paths for each view. Next, we smooth paths of two views separately and iteratively. During each iteration, we adjust the meshes of one view by our proposed `Joint Disparity and Stability mesh Warp (JDSW)'. The final result is generated after several iterations of paths smoothing and meshes adjusting, in which temporal stability and correct depth perception are achieved simultaneously. We evaluate our method by various challenging stereoscopic videos with different camera motions and scene types. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Therapy outcome after multidisciplinary treatment for chronic neck and chronic low back pain: a prospective clinical study in 365 patients

Objectives: This prospective longitudinal clinical study analyses the therapy outcome of 365 patients with either chronic neck (n = 134) or low back (n = 231) pain treated with a multidisciplinary biopsychosocial therapy approach. Methods: Patients with chronic neck pain (NP) or low back pain (LBP) for 3 months or longer, corresponding sick leave for longer than 6 weeks, and clearly defined inclusion and exclusion criteria underwent a 3‐week standardized inpatient multidisciplinary biopsychosocial therapy. Baseline sociodemographic, occupational, functional, and psychological data at entry into the study (T0) were comparable in both groups. At the 6‐month follow‐up (T1), five different therapy outcomes were analysed in both groups: back‐to‐work status, generic health status (the 36‐item Short Form Health Survey, SF‐36), pain intensity (visual analogue scale), functional capacity (Hannover back capacity score), and satisfaction with the therapy. Results: Both treatment groups improved significantly in all outcome criteria between T0 and T1. In the total group, the back‐to‐work rate was 67.4%. At the final follow‐up there were no significant differences between the group with chronic NP and the group with chronic LBP in the outcome criteria back‐to‐work status, improvement of health status and functional capacity, satisfaction with therapy, and reduction of pain. Conclusion: Evaluation of the main results of this study suggests that patients with chronic NP also derive significant benefit from a multidisciplinary treatment strategy, demonstrated in the literature so far mainly for patients with chronic LBP.
Calibration of the accelerometer triad of an inertial measurement unit, maximum likelihood estimation and Cramér-Rao bound

In this paper, a simple method to calibrate the accelerometer cluster of an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is proposed. The method does not rely on using a mechanical calibration platform that rotates the IMU into different precisely controlled orientations. Although the IMU is rotated into different orientations, these orientations do not need to be known. Assuming that the IMU is stationary at each orientation, the norm of the input is considered equal to the gravity acceleration. As the orientations of the IMU are unknown, the calibration of the accelerometer cluster is stated as a blind system identification problem where only the norm of the input to the system is known. Under the assumption that the sensor noises have a white Gaussian distribution the system identification problem is solved using the maximum likelihood estimation method. The accuracy of the proposed calibration method is compared with the Cramér-Rao bound for the considered calibration problem.
Instructional Videos for Supporting Older Adults Who Use Interactive Systems

The study reported in this paper investigated the usefulness of different instructions for guiding inexperienced older adults through interactive systems. It was designed to compare different media in relation to their social as well as their motivational impact on the elderly during the learning process. Precisely, the video was compared with textual help and the impact of model age (young versus old) on knowledge acquisition was explored. As a research object, a simulated ticket-vending machine was used. Results show that video-supported knowledge acquisition is better than text, but in relation to model age, no significant differences were found.
Ethyl ent-15α-[(2-methoxybenzyloxy)methyl]-16-oxobeyeran-20-oate

The title compound, C31H44O5, was synthesized from isosteviol (systematic name: ent-16-ketobeyeran-19-oic acid). In the molecule, the three six-membered rings adopt chair conformations and the stereochemistry of the A/B and B/C ring junctions are trans. The five-membered ring D adopts an envelope conformation with the methylene C atom as the flap.
Who Cares about Creative Contributions to Electronic Knowledge Sharing Databases? Effects of Top Management Openness, Affective Commitment, In-Role Behavior, Technological Adequacy and Job Security

Although the benefits of knowledge sharing have been widely recognized, organizations often encounter difficulties in making them happen. It is important to understand what influence employees contribute to knowledge sharing. Using survey responses from 173 employees of a large US university, we found that employees' creative contributions to an electronic knowledge sharing database (EKSDB) are directly influenced by their levels of affective commitment, perceptions of creative contributions as an in-role behavior, and perceptions of technological adequacy. Top management openness affects employee contribution indirectly through employee affective commitment and perception of creative contributions as an in-role behavior. In addition, the effects of employee affective commitment and perceptions of creative contribution as an in-role behavior on employee contribution are moderated by employee job security. By including intrinsic, extrinsic, and contextual variables, this model improves upon previous representations of factors leading employees' to make creative contributions to an EKSDB.
Research of the Path Planning Complexity for Autonomous Mobile Robot under Dynamic Environments

By using the two methods of Lyapunov exponent and power spectra analysis, it is tested and verified that chaotic phenomenon exists in time sequence of distance information that autonomous mobile robot has got from sensors between robots and obstacles. The complexity of path planning for autonomous mobile robot through sensors is explained under dynamic environments by use of chaotic phenomenon. The existence of chaotic phenomenon makes the path planning for autonomous mobile robot under dynamic environments NP-hard and also lays the foundation for revealing why navigation of autonomous mobile robot under dynamic environments is NP-hard
Vascular endothelial growth factor C as a predictor of early recurrence and poor prognosis of resected stage I non-small cell lung cancer.

INTRODUCTION Stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is potentially curable after completely resection, but early recurrence may infl uence prognosis. This study hypothesises that vascular endothelial growth factor C (VEGF-C) plays a key role in predicting early recurrence and poor survival of patients with stage I NSCLC. MATERIALS AND METHODS The expression of VEGF-C was immuno-histochemically (IHC) analysed in tumour samples of primary stage I NSCLC and correlated to early recurrence (< 36 months), disease-free survival, and overall survival in all 49 patients. RESULTS Early recurrence was identifi ed in 16 patients (33%), and the early recurrence rate in strong and weak VEGF-C activity was significantly different (P = 0.016). VEGF-C was also an independent risk factor in predicting early recurrence (HR = 3.98, P = 0.02). Patients with strong VEGF-C staining also had poor 3-year disease-free survival (P = 0.008) and overall survival (P = 0.007). CONCLUSION Strong VEGF-C IHC staining could be a biomarker for predicting early recurrence and poor prognosis of resected stage I NSCLC, if the results of the present study are confirmed in a larger study. A more aggressive adjuvant therapy should be used in this group of patients.
Skill-based Exception Handling and Error Recovery for Collaborative Industrial Robots

Moving robots from their carefully designed and encapsulated work cells into the open, less structured human workspace for collaboration with workers requires robust error detection and recovery strategies. Foreseeing all possible uncertainties and unexpected events and to program in recovery actions at setup time is unfeasible. Online learning of nominal execution behaviour and automatic detection of anomalies using an Extended Markov Model, combined with interactively trained Bayesian networks for mapping anomalies to error causes and recovery actions, enables automatic recovery from previously experienced errors. A three-layered user-friendly model of errors—causes— responses and a simple GUI allows non-expert user to define new recovery activities and error causes when not yet handled anomalies occur. I. MOTIVATION Today's robot systems for industrial applications rely on a structured environment to avoid errors. Parts, fixtures, tools and stations have defined positions and the workspace is encapsulated to avoid intruders that could possibly endanger this defined environment. Expected exceptions from the nominal case that were either foreseen during the planning of the robot system, or occurred during the setup phase of the system are coped with by integrating additional sensors, adapting tool-, fixture and part geometries and adding additional branches to the robot program to cope with these deviations. Furthermore, as many robotic systems are complicated, any exceptions and breakdowns occurring after system setup often require external technicians or engineers to diagnose and solve problems. Such strictly controlled and carefully designed work cells are only economically feasible if the designed robot system will run unobstructed for a long time. Small and mid- sized enterprises (SMEs) are often characterized by a much more agile production style and consequently rely on human workspaces. Moving robots out of their strictly controlled and carefully designed spaces into human workspaces, which are by nature unstructured environments with a high degree of uncertainty, requires significantly enhanced robustness towards unforeseen events and geometric or other uncertainties. (The additional need for safety measures to protect the human co-worker from injuries is out of scope of this work, see e.g. (22), (12) and many others. ) A SME suitable robot system therefore needs semi automatic exception handling and error recovery capabilities that allow non-expert users to manage exceptions (internally and externally triggered) occurring in daily operation. We propose a novel skill-based exception handling and error
A scientometric analysis of 15 years of CHINZ conferences

CHINZ is the annual conference of the New Zealand Chapter of the Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) of the ACM. In this paper we analyse the history of CHINZ through citations, authorship and online presence. CHINZ appears to compare well with the larger APCHI conference on citation-based measures. 42% of CHINZ papers were found as open access versions on the web.
A wave-based anisotropic quadrangulation method

This paper proposes a new method for remeshing a surface into anisotropically sized quads. The basic idea is to construct a special standing wave on the surface to generate the global quadrilateral structure. This wave based quadrangulation method is capable of controlling the quad size in two directions and precisely aligning the quads with feature lines. Similar to the previous methods, we augment the input surface with a vector field to guide the quad orientation. The anisotropic size control is achieved by using two size fields on the surface. In order to reduce singularity points, the size fields are optimized by a new curl minimization method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can successfully handle various quadrangulation requirements and complex shapes, which is difficult for the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Conditional reasoning in autism spectrum disorder : activation and integration of knowledge and belief

Reasoning from all knowledge and belief is an adaptive approach to thinking about the world. It has been robusdy shown that conditional 'if then' reasoning with ever}'day content is influenced by the background knowledge an individual has available. If we are presented with the statement 'if it rains, then ]ohn mil get wet' then we are told that it is raining and asked if John will get wet, we may consider a number of possibilities before answering the question; perhaps John has an umbrella or is sheltered from the rain. Hence, when engaged in conditional reasoning of this sort people typically draw on background knowledge to arrive at an informed response. People with autism tend not to process information in context. There is a wealth of evidence indicating that these individuals have a piecemeal rather than an integrative processing st}de. It was therefore h\^othesised that adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) would be less influenced by background knowledge when engaged in conditional reasoning with ever}'day content. Adolescents with ASD showed a weak or absent effect of available background knowledge on reasoning outcomes compared to a typically developing control group. This finding was demonstrated in two separate conditional reasoning tasks. These results were not explained by a failure to generate background knowledge or by differences in the beliefs held by the two groups regarding problem content. Within the tj'pical population a lack of contextualised reasoning was also found among participants with high scores on one particular autistic trait, attention to detail. The abilit}^ to integrate aU relevant information during conditional reasoning was also found to be dependent on available working memory resources. These results extend the known domains which demonstrate a lack of contextualised processing in autism. They also show that for individuals with autism reasoning without
Ckylark: A More Robust PCFG-LA Parser

This paper describes Ckylark, a PCFG-LA style phrase structure parser that is more robust than other parsers in the genre. PCFG-LA parsers are known to achieve highly competitive performance, but sometimes the parsing process fails completely, and no parses can be generated. Ckylark introduces three new techniques that prevent possible causes for parsing failure: outputting intermediate results when coarse-to-fine analysis fails, smoothing lexicon probabilities, and scaling probabilities to avoid underflow. An experiment shows that this allows millions of sentences can be parsed without any failures, in contrast to other publicly available PCFG-LA parsers. Ckylark is implemented in C++, and is available opensource under the LGPL license.1
BACE-1 is expressed in the blood–brain barrier endothelium and is upregulated in a murine model of Alzheimer’s disease

Endothelial cells of the blood–brain barrier form a structural and functional barrier maintaining brain homeostasis via paracellular tight junctions and specific transporters such as P-glycoprotein. The blood–brain barrier is responsible for negligible bioavailability of many neuroprotective drugs. In Alzheimer’s disease, current treatment approaches include inhibitors of BACE-1 (β-site of amyloid precursor protein cleaving enzyme), a proteinase generating neurotoxic β-amyloid. It is known that BACE-1 is highly expressed in endosomes and membranes of neurons and glia. We now provide evidence that BACE-1 is expressed in blood–brain barrier endothelial cells of human, mouse, and bovine origin. We further show its predominant membrane localization by 3D-dSTORM super-resolution microscopy, and by biochemical fractionation that further shows an abluminal distribution of BACE-1 in brain microvessels. We confirm its functionality in processing APP in primary mouse brain endothelial cells. In an Alzheimer’s disease mouse model we show that BACE-1 is upregulated at the blood–brain barrier compared to healthy controls. We therefore suggest a critical role for BACE-1 at the blood–brain barrier in β-amyloid generation and in vascular aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, particularly in the development of cerebral amyloid angiopathy.
Massive higher dimensional gauge fields as messengers of supersymmetry breaking

We consider theories with one or more compact dimensions with size r > 1/M, where M is the fundamental Planck scale, with the visible and hidden sectors localized on spatially separated `3-branes. ' We show that a bulk U(1) gauge field spontaneously broken on the hidden-sector 3-brane is an attractive candidate for the messenger of supersymmetry breaking. In this scenario scalar mass-squared terms are proportional to U(1) charges, and therefore naturally conserve flavor. Arbitrary flavor violation at the Planck scale gives rise to exponentially suppressed flavor violation at low energies. Gaugino masses can be generated if the standard gauge fields propagate in the bulk; ? and B? terms can be generated by the Giudice-Masiero or by the VEV of a singlet in the visible sector. The latter case naturally solves the SUSY CP problem. Realistic phenomenology can be obtained either if all microscopic parameters are order one in units of M, or if the theory is strongly coupled at the scale M. In either case, the only unexplained hierarchy is the `large' size of the extra dimensions in fundamental units, which need only be an order of magnitude. All soft masses are naturally within an order of magnitude of m3/2, and trilinear scalar couplings are negligible. Squark and slepton masses can naturally unify even in the absence of grand unification.
Host–pathogen protein interactions predicted by comparative modeling

Pathogens have evolved numerous strategies to infect their hosts, while hosts have evolved immune responses and other defenses to these foreign challenges. The vast majority of host–pathogen interactions involve protein–protein recognition, yet our current understanding of these interactions is limited. Here, we present and apply a computational whole‐genome protocol that generates testable predictions of host–pathogen protein interactions. The protocol first scans the host and pathogen genomes for proteins with similarity to known protein complexes, then assesses these putative interactions, using structure if available, and, finally, filters the remaining interactions using biological context, such as the stage‐specific expression of pathogen proteins and tissue expression of host proteins. The technique was applied to 10 pathogens, including species of Mycobacterium, apicomplexa, and kinetoplastida, responsible for “neglected” human diseases. The method was assessed by (1) comparison to a set of known host–pathogen interactions, (2) comparison to gene expression and essentiality data describing host and pathogen genes involved in infection, and (3) analysis of the functional properties of the human proteins predicted to interact with pathogen proteins, demonstrating an enrichment for functionally relevant host–pathogen interactions. We present several specific predictions that warrant experimental follow‐up, including interactions from previously characterized mechanisms, such as cytoadhesion and protease inhibition, as well as suspected interactions in hypothesized networks, such as apoptotic pathways. Our computational method provides a means to mine whole‐genome data and is complementary to experimental efforts in elucidating networks of host–pathogen protein interactions.
Simultaneous Radio to (Sub-) mm-Monitoring of Variability and Spectral Shape Evolution of potential GLAST Blazars

The Large Area Telescope (LAT) instrument onboard GLAST offers a tremendous opportunity for future blazar studies. In order to fully benefit from its capabilities and to maximize the scientific return from the LAT, it is of great importance to conduct dedicated multi‐frequency monitoring campaigns that will result comprehensive observations. Consequently, we initiated an effort to conduct a GLAST‐dedicated, quasi‐simultaneous, broad‐band flux‐density (and polarization) monitoring of potential GLAST blazars with the Effelsberg and OVRO radio telescopes (11 cm to 7 mm wavelength). Here, we present a short overview of these activities which will complement the multi‐wavelengths activities of the GLAST/LAT collaboration towards the ‘low‐energy’ radio bands. Further we will give a brief outlook including the extension of this coordinated campaign towards higher frequencies and future scientific aims.
Language as a Resource in Project Management: A Case Study and a Conceptual Framework

This study sheds light on how project managers can use language as a resource for communicating with local communities and stakeholders alike, and protect the legitimacy of their decisions and actions. The verbal accounts produced by a senior project management team are examined in-depth. The accounts address the claims raised by residents affected by the expansion of the Heathrow airport. The context for the talk-in-interaction is one of conflicting interests: the promoter undertakes actions to mitigate the impacts of the construction works, but some residents feel frustrated that the business can grow at the expenses of their welfare. The findings reveal that managers tend to acknowledge all claims even when perceiving they lack legitimacy. The analysis of the words and phrasing in the conversational turns that form the accounts reveals three tones - caring, assertive, and apologetic - that managers use intentionally to frame linguistically the acknowledgements. The study discusses how the tones fit with the extent to which, first, managers consider that the claims are factually correct, fair, and precise as opposed to unfair, exaggerated, or opportunistic; and second, managers find technical or institutional references available for constructing the accounts. It also discusses the effects of congruence - or the lack of it - between what managers mean to say about what the project team will do, what managers actually say, how listeners interpret what was said, and what the project team actually gets done.
Cartesian Controllers for Tracking of Robot Manipulators under Parametric Uncertainties

The relevance of robot manipulators in different processes has created the need to design efficient controllers with low computational costs. Although several applications for this problem are defined in operational coordinates, a wide variety of controllers reported in the literature are defined in joint coordinates. Then, for a joint robot control the desired joint references are computed from desired Cartesian coordinates using inverse mappings and its derivatives up to second order. However, computing the inverse kinematics mappings is difficult due to the ill-posed nature of these mappings. To circumvent the computation of inverse kinematics, a very old but not less important approach coined as Cartesian control can be used. Cartesian control deals with the problem of designing controllers in terms of desired Cartesian or operational coordinates. This allows saving a significant amount of time in real time applications due to the inherent simplification.