Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance of TOA estimation algorithms in different indoor multipath conditions

Using TOA to determine the distance between the transmitter and the receiver is the most popular technique for accurate indoor positioning. Accuracy of measuring the distance using TOA is sensitive to the bandwidth of the system and the multipath condition between the wireless terminal and the access point. The behavior of the distance measurement error using TOA techniques in LOS and OLOS indoor environments are substantially different. In general, as the bandwidth increases the distance measurement error decreases. However, for the so called undetected direct path (UDP) conditions the system exhibits substantially high distance measurement errors that can not be eliminated with the increase in the bandwidth of the system. In this paper we provide an analysis of the behavior of super-resolution and traditional TOA estimation algorithms in LOS, OLOS and UDP conditions in indoor areas. The analysis is based on the frequency domain measurements of the indoor radio channel propagations in several indoor areas with special attention to the UDP conditions.
Interactive visualization of weighted three-dimensional alpha hulls

An interactive visualization of weighted three-dimensional α-hulls is presented for static and dynamic spheres. The α-hull is analytically computed and represented by a triangulated mesh. The entire surface is computed and displayed in real-time at interactive rates. The weighted three-dimensional α-hulls are equivalent to smooth molecular surfaces of biochemistry. Biochemistry applications of interactive computation and display of α-hulls or smooth molecular surfaces are outlined.
Finding the bias and prestige of nodes in networks based on trust scores

Many real-life graphs such as social networks and peer-to-peer networks capture the relationships among the nodes by using trust scores to label the edges. Important usage of such networks includes trust prediction, finding the most reliable or trusted node in a local subgraph, etc. For many of these applications, it is crucial to assess the prestige and bias of a node. The bias of a node denotes its propensity to trust/mistrust its neighbours and is closely related to truthfulness. If a node trusts all its neighbours, its recommendation of another node as trustworthy is less reliable. It is based on the idea that the recommendation of a highly biased node should weigh less. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to compute the bias and prestige of nodes in networks where the edge weight denotes the trust score. Unlike most other graph-based algorithms, our method works even when the edge weights are not necessarily positive. The algorithm is iterative and runs in O(km) time where k is the number of iterations and m is the total number of edges in the network. The algorithm exhibits several other desirable properties. It converges to a unique value very quickly. Also, the error in bias and prestige values at any particular iteration is bounded. Further, experiments show that our model conforms well to social theories such as the balance theory (enemy of a friend is an enemy, etc.).
New insights into the molecular mechanism of interleukin‐10‐mediated immunosuppression

Interleukin‐10 (IL‐10) is an important immunomodulatory cytokine, which has attracted much attention because of its anti‐inflammatory properties. It reduces antigen presentation and inhibits T cell activation. IL‐10‐treated myeloid cells lose their ability to respond toward the endotoxin lipopolysaccharide (LPS) with the production of several proinflammatory mediators. Thereby, IL‐10 limits excessive inflammatory reactions in response to endotoxin as it occurs in colitis or endotoxin shock. Mice can be tolerized toward endotoxin shock when pretreated with a sublethal dose of LPS. This can be mimicked in vitro as LPS desensitization, resulting in a similar LPS hyporesponsiveness as observed with IL‐10 pretreatment. However, an early block in LPS signaling characterizes LPS desensitization, whereas IL‐10 seems to target late events. Controversial reports have been published where IL‐10 would interfere with the induction of proinflammatory mediators, and little is known about the molecular mechanisms behind the anti‐inflammatory activities of IL‐10. Some recent publications have tried to gain more insight into the molecular mechanism of IL‐10 by gene‐expression profiling and functional studies in myeloid‐derived cells. These results are reviewed here and compared with the progress that has been made to understand the induction of endotoxin tolerance by LPS itself.
Multitouch Gesture Learning and Recognition System

We build a system that learns and recognizes multitouch gestures – movements of human fingers on a multitouch surface. We form an example vocabulary of gestures that demonstrates the subtleties of finger movements that can be recognized. A video processing system extracts a feature set representing these movements. We recognize the spatial arrangement of fingers in a gesture to address issues regarding the preprocessing of the feature set for consistency across samples of a gesture. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are then used to learn gestures by example, and then consistently recognize them. We present an evaluation that demonstrates the robustness of the methodology.
COMPARISON OF TWO TECHNIQUES FOR MEASURING LEAF WATER POTENTIAL IN Vitis vinifera VAR

The need to determine the variables that help characterize the real water status of vineyards calls for further research aimed at testing current techniques for water status quantification, and particularly for the determination of leaf water potential (LWP). The Scholander Pressure Chamber (SPC) has been widely used and considered as the reference technique. Yet, the frequent use of thermocouple psychrometers and, more specifically, of water activity meters (WAMs) demands a comparative analysis of the performance of SPC and WAMs and the applicability of WAMs to plant samples instead of soil samples, which has seldom been studied. This paper presents a comparison of two techniques for the determination of leaf water potential in Vitis vinifera var. Albariño in Galicia (NW Spain), WAMs (two models: WP4 and WP4-T) and SPC (model 600-PMS). In addition, this paper presents an assessment of the time required to perform determinations with the three instruments tested. The performances of the three instruments were assessed during two seasons: in 2011, we assessed SPC performance against WAM performance; in 2010, we assessed the performances of the two models of WAM. The comparison between SPC and WP4 was carried out by randomly selecting 22 vines under two irrigation treatments [rainfed (R) and irrigation] and with two irrigation systems [surface drip irrigation (DI) and subsurface drip irrigation (SDI)]. LWP readings were taken simultaneously with SPC and WAM model WP4. The performance of the two WAM models was assessed in terms of calibration protocol and measurement protocol. To this end, five vines were randomly selected and the following physiological indicators were determined: predawn and midday LWP, predawn and midday osmotic LWP and stem water potential. The time required for measurements was computed for the three instruments. Results reveal a strong correlation between LWP values measured with SPC and WAM (WP4 model), with coefficients of determination above 0.84. According to the results, WAMs are more versatile than SPC, but SPC measurements require less time. Among WAMs, WP4 produces faster measurements than WP4-T and requires fewer calibrations per sample. The use of a WP4 WAM to take real measurements produced reliable results and allowed for the determination of plant water status according to different irrigation treatments showing high sensitivity to plant water status variations among treatments.
Emotion recognition using Kinect motion capture data of human gaits

Automatic emotion recognition is of great value in many applications, however, to fully display the application value of emotion recognition, more portable, non-intrusive, inexpensive technologies need to be developed. Human gaits could reflect the walker’s emotional state, and could be an information source for emotion recognition. This paper proposed a novel method to recognize emotional state through human gaits by using Microsoft Kinect, a low-cost, portable, camera-based sensor. Fifty-nine participants’ gaits under neutral state, induced anger and induced happiness were recorded by two Kinect cameras, and the original data were processed through joint selection, coordinate system transformation, sliding window gauss filtering, differential operation, and data segmentation. Features of gait patterns were extracted from 3-dimentional coordinates of 14 main body joints by Fourier transformation and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The classifiers NaiveBayes, RandomForests, LibSVM and SMO (Sequential Minimal Optimization) were trained and evaluated, and the accuracy of recognizing anger and happiness from neutral state achieved 80.5% and 75.4%. Although the results of distinguishing angry and happiness states were not ideal in current study, it showed the feasibility of automatically recognizing emotional states from gaits, with the characteristics meeting the application requirements.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation over the primary motor cortex disrupts early boost but not delayed gains in performance in motor sequence learning

In humans the consolidation of recently learned motor skills is a multi‐step process. We previously showed that performance on the finger‐tapping task (FTT; i.e. a sequential motor skill) temporarily improves early on, 5–30 min after practice has ended, but not 4 h later. In the absence of any further practice to the task, this early boost in performance was predictive of the performance levels eventually achieved 48 h later, suggesting its functional relevance for long‐term memory consolidation [ Hotermans, Peigneux, Maertens de Noordhout, Moonen, and Maquet (2006) Early boost and slow consolidation in motor skill learning. Learn. Mem., 13, 580–583]. Here, we focused on the role of the primary motor cortex (M1) in consolidation using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) applied immediately before testing at 30 min, 4 or 24 h after practice of the FTT. Immediately after learning, rTMS over M1 depressed the early boost in performance, but did not affect the delayed improvement observed 48 h later. Four and 24 h after practice, rTMS did not disrupt performance anymore. These results suggest that M1 supports performance during the early post‐training phase of motor skill consolidation, but is no longer mandatory in the subsequent, delayed stages of consolidation.
Lhx2 Expression Promotes Self-Renewal of a Distinct Multipotential Hematopoietic Progenitor Cell in Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Embryoid Bodies

The molecular mechanisms regulating the expansion of the hematopoietic system including hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in the fetal liver during embryonic development are largely unknown. The LIM-homeobox gene Lhx2 is a candidate regulator of fetal hematopoiesis since it is expressed in the fetal liver and Lhx2−/− mice die in utero due to severe anemia. Moreover, expression of Lhx2 in embryonic stem (ES) cell-derived embryoid bodies (EBs) can lead to the generation of HSC-like cell lines. To further define the role of this transcription factor in hematopoietic regulation, we generated ES cell lines that enabled tet-inducible expression of Lhx2. Using this approach we observed that Lhx2 expression synergises with specific signalling pathways, resulting in increased frequency of colony forming cells in developing EB cells. The increase in growth factor-responsive progenitor cells directly correlates to the efficiency in generating HSC-like cell lines, suggesting that Lhx2 expression induce self-renewal of a distinct multipotential hematopoietic progenitor cell in EBs. Signalling via the c-kit tyrosine kinase receptor and the gp130 signal transducer by IL-6 is necessary and sufficient for the Lhx2 induced self-renewal. While inducing self-renewal of multipotential progenitor cells, expression of Lhx2 inhibited proliferation of primitive erythroid precursor cells and interfered with early ES cell commitment, indicating striking lineage specificity of this effect.
Is There a European Solidarity? Attitudes Towards Fiscal Assistance for Debt-Ridden European Union Member States

This paper analyses if European citizens are willing to show solidarity with debt-ridden EU member states during the recent crisis. Based on a theoretical concept comprehending four dimensions of solidarity - generalised willingness to support, existence of social cleavages, reasons of supporting others, acceptance of conditions a crisis country has to meet to receive assistance - we derived hypotheses stating that the existence of a European wide solidarity is rather unlikely. We analysed data from two Eurobarometer surveys 2010 and 2011 and a unique survey conducted in Germany and Portugal in 2012. Descriptive and multilevel analyses indicated that in 2010 and 2011, a narrow majority of all EU citizens supported fiscal assistance for crisis countries, and socio-economic and cultural cleavages in attitudes regarding financial assistance for crisis countries were rather low. Findings from the two country comparison showed that the willingness to show solidarity was predominantly guided by moral reasoning instead of the respondent’s self-interest. However, German and Portuguese respondents disagree on austerity measures, with the exception of social spending cuts. Taken all together, we come to the conclusion that recent years have brought a new legitimacy to the use of EU bailout measures which are now a given European practice.
Functional factor VIII made with von Willebrand factor at high levels in transgenic milk

Summary. Background: Current manufacturing methods for recombinant human factor VIII (rFVIII) within mammalian cell cultures are inefficient, hampering the production of sufficient amounts for affordable, worldwide treatment of hemophilia A. However, rFVIII has been expressed at very high levels by the transgenic mammary glands of mice, rabbits, sheep, and pigs. Unfortunately, it is secreted into milk with low specific activity, owing in part to the labile, heterodimeric structure that results from furin processing of its B domain. Objectives: To express biologically active rFVIII in the milk of transgenic mice through targeted bioengineering. Methods: Transgenic mice were made with a mammary‐specific FVIII gene (226/N6) bioengineered for efficient expression and stability, encoding a protein containing a B domain with no furin cleavage sites. 226/N6 was expressed with and without von Willebrand factor (VWF). 226/N6 was evaluated by ELISA, SDS‐PAGE, western blot, and one‐stage and two‐stage clotting assays. The hemostatic activity of immunoaffinity‐enriched 226/N6 was studied in vivo by infusion into hemophilia A knockout mice. Results and conclusions: With or without coexpression of VWF, 226/N6 was secreted into milk as a biologically active single‐chain molecule that retained high specific activity, similar to therapeutic‐grade FVIII. 226/N6 had > 450‐fold higher IU mL−1 than previously reported in cell culture for rFVIII. 226/N6 exhibited similar binding to plasma‐derived VWF as therapeutic‐grade rFVIII, and intravenous infusion of transgenic 226/N6 corrected the bleeding phenotype of hemophilia A mice. This provides proof‐of‐principle for the study of expression of 226/N6 and perhaps other single‐chain bioengineered rFVIIIs in the milk of transgenic livestock.
Improving Interpretation of the Decay Index for DNA Sequence Data

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Quality Estimation-guided Data Selection for Domain Adaptation of SMT

Supplementary data selection is a strongly motivated approach in domain adaptation of statistical machine translation systems. In this paper we report a novel approach of data selection guided by automatic quality estimation. In contrast to the conventional approach of using the entire target-domain data as reference for data selection, we restrict the reference set only to sentences poorly translated by the baseline model. Automatic quality estimation is used to identify such poorly translated sentences in the target domain. Our experiments reveal that this approach provides statistically significant improvements over the unadapted baseline and achieves comparable scores to that of conventional data selection approaches with significantly smaller amounts of selected data.
KUNLP System for NTCIR-4 Korean-English Cross-Language Information Retrieval

This paper describes our Korean-English crosslanguage information retrieval system for NTCIR-4. Our system is based on a query translation approach with a bilingual dictionary and co-occurrence information between English terms in English corpus. In this year, we have focused on translation of unknown words. We have expanded the existing bilingual dictionary by gathering some of the Korean-English translation pairs for Korean words from Web manually. For other unknown not contained in the expanded bilingual dictionary, we automatically transliterated into English using pre-constructed mapping table. Some issues for processing Korean queries and documents are also described, such as identification of Korean phrases. On evaluation collections for NTCIR-4, performance of our system is 30.25% for description query type, 33.33% for title query type, and 32.47% for combination query type of description and narrative in relax scoring. Post-submission experiments show that our expanded dictionary and transliteration mechanism improve the performance of our system.
Burst Initiation and Termination in Phasic Vasopressin Cells of the Rat Supraoptic Nucleus: A Combined Mathematical, Electrical, and Calcium Fluorescence Study

Vasopressin secreting neurons of the rat hypothalamus discharge lengthy, repeating bursts of action potentials in response to physiological stress. Although many electrical currents and calcium-dependent processes have been isolated and analyzed in these cells, their interactions are less well fathomed. In particular, the mechanism of how each burst is triggered, sustained, and terminated is poorly understood. We present a mathematical model for the bursting mechanism, and we support our model with new simultaneous electrical recording and calcium imaging data. We show that bursts can be initiated by spike-dependent calcium influx, and we propose that the resulting elevation of bulk calcium inhibits a persistent potassium current. This inhibition depolarizes the cell above threshold and so triggers regenerative spiking and further calcium influx. We present imaging data to show that bulk calcium reaches a plateau within the first few seconds of the burst, and our model indicates that this plateau occurs when calcium influx is balanced by efflux and uptake into stores. We conjecture that the burst is terminated by a slow, progressive desensitization to calcium of the potassium leak current. Finally, we propose that the opioid dynorphin, which is known to be secreted from the somatodendritic region and has been shown previously to regulate burst length and phasic activity in these cells, is the autocrine messenger for this desensitization.
Modeling the Habitat Range of Phototrophs in Yellowstone National Park: Toward the Development of a Comprehensive Fitness Landscape

The extent to which geochemical variation shapes the distribution of phototrophic metabolisms was modeled based on 439 observations in geothermal springs in Yellowstone National Park (YNP), Wyoming. Generalized additive models (GAMs) were developed to predict the distribution of phototrophic metabolism as a function of spring temperature, pH, and total sulfide. GAMs comprised of temperature explained 38.8% of the variation in the distribution of phototrophic metabolism, whereas GAMs comprised of sulfide and pH explained 19.6 and 11.2% of the variation, respectively. These results suggest that of the measured variables, temperature is the primary constraint on the distribution of phototrophs in YNP. GAMs comprised of multiple variables explained a larger percentage of the variation in the distribution of phototrophic metabolism, indicating additive interactions among variables. A GAM that combined temperature and sulfide explained the greatest variation in the dataset (53.4%) while minimizing the introduction of degrees of freedom. In an effort to verify the extent to which phototroph distribution reflects constraints on activity, we examined the influence of sulfide and temperature on dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) uptake rates under both light and dark conditions. Light-driven DIC uptake decreased systematically with increasing concentrations of sulfide in acidic, algal-dominated systems, but was unaffected in alkaline, cyanobacterial-dominated systems. In both alkaline and acidic systems, light-driven DIC uptake was suppressed in cultures incubated at temperatures 10°C greater than their in situ temperature. Collectively, these quantitative results indicate that apart from light availability, the habitat range of phototrophs in YNP springs is defined largely by constraints imposed firstly by temperature and secondly by sulfide on the activity of these populations that inhabit the edges of the habitat range. These findings are consistent with the predictions from GAMs and provide a quantitative framework from which to translate distributional patterns into fitness landscapes for use in interpreting the environmental constraints that have shaped the evolution of this process through Earth history.
Grid based routing in cognitive radio networks for concurrent communication

Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) exploits the spectrum hole in licensed bands by allowing co located cognitive users to communicate among themselves when licensed users are idle. In such opportunistic communication, the cognitive users need to vacate the channel as and when the licensed user becomes active. Most of the time such sudden termination of ongoing sessions of cognitive devices leads to unacceptable overhead and degrades service quality. So, in this paper a new routing protocol is proposed which emphasizes on concurrent communication of cognitive users rather than opportunistic communication. In concurrent communication cognitive devices are allowed to communicate even in the presence of licensed users activity by controlling the transmission power of cognitive devices such that they do not interfere with the ongoing conversation of licensed users. The algorithm is based on the full location information with the assumption that each of the cognitive device can detect the location information of its own and any other cognitive device in the network. All cognitive devices are arranged into grid cells and every grid selects a grid Head (gH) based on some predefined criteria who takes care of routing. Further, the protocol also suggests a routing zone and forwarding region based on the location of the destination in order to reduce routing overhead and faster route establishment. The simulated results of the protocol is compared with CAODV protocol and observed an improvement in packet delivery ratio and routing overhead.