Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bayesian Beamforming for Mobile Millimeter Wave Channel Tracking in the Presence of DOA Uncertainty

This paper proposes a Bayesian approach for angle-based hybrid beamforming and tracking that is robust to uncertain or erroneous direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. Because the resolution of the phase shifters is finite and typically adjustable through a digital control, the DOA can be modeled as a discrete random variable with a prior distribution defined over a discrete set of candidate DOAs, and the variance of this distribution can be introduced to describe the level of uncertainty. The estimation problem of DOA is thereby formulated as a weighted sum of previously observed DOA values, where the weights are chosen according to a posteriori probability density function (pdf) of the DOA. To alleviate the computational complexity and cost, we present a motion trajectory-constrained a priori probability approximation method. It suggests that within a specific spatial region, a directional estimate can be close to true DOA with a high probability and sufficient to ensure trustworthiness. We show that the proposed approach has the advantage of robustness to uncertain DOA, and the beam tracking problem can be solved by incorporating the Bayesian approach with an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms a number of state-of-the-art benchmarks.
Aerosol measurements at the South Pole

The Geophysical Monitoring for Climatic Change (GMCC) program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates an atmospheric monitoring observatory at Amundsen-Scott Station, South Pole. Long-term measurements of carbon dioxide, ozone, aerosols, and other background pollutants are obtained to understand their possible effects on the earth's climate. The aerosol measurement program consists of the continuous measurement of condensation nuclei (CN) concentration and aerosol scattering extinction coefficient (σ Sp ) During 1982, Nuclepore-filter aerosol samples were taken for subsequent analysis by the proton-induced X-ray emission (PIXE) technique with 8-h time resolution. A time series of sodium, chlorine, and sulfur concentrations shows that the sulfur and CN records are similar and that the sodium, chlorine, and σ Sp records are similar. Large episodes of sodium are measured at the ground in the austral winter and are apparently caused by large-scale transport from coastal regions and vertical transport to the surface during times of surface warming and weakening of the surface temperature inversion. These episodes are characterized by increases in sodium concentration, Cl/Na ratio, σ Sp , and particle size, and decreases in non-sea-salt sulfur concentration, suggesting a decrease in atmospheric acidity and a displacement of sulfuric acid aerosol. An analysis of back trajectories suggests transport times of several days from the Antarctic coast. A nearly continuous record of South Pole CN measurements from 1974 to the present, and σ Sp , measurements from 1979 to the present, has now been accumulated. The CN data show an annual cycle with a maximum exceeding 100 cm -3 in the austral summer and a minimum of about 10 cm -3 in the winter. The σ Sp data show an annual cycle markedly different from that of CN with a maximum in late winter, a secondary maximum in summer, and a minimum in May. Angstrom exponents calculated from the multiwavelength σ Sp data show a strong annual cycle suggesting larger particles in the winter than in the summer. DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0889.1986. tb00189.x
Effect of heparin binding protein on post capacitation sperm motility and viability of frozen thawed buffalo semen

The present study was conducted to assess the effects of exogenous supplementation of heparin binding protein (HBP) in capacitation medium on sperm motility and viability of frozen thawed buffalo semen. Buffalo semen straws from 10 bulls were procured from Central Frozen Semen Production and Training Institute, Hesseraghatta, Banglore-560088. The frozen straws were thawed at 37oC for 30 seconds and emptied into a 15mL sterile plastic centrifuge tube containing 1mL capacitation medium (control), addition of 25μg/mL (treatment I), 50μg/mL (treatment II) and 100μg/mL (treatment III) of HBP . The contents were incubated at 37oC for 2 hours and sperm motility and viability were assessed. The post capacitation sperm motility was significantly (P<0.05) higher in HBP treatment I (64.00% ± 2.21), II (68.00% ± 1.33) and III (66.00% ± 2.21) as compared to control (55.00% ±2.23). Among treatments, insignificant difference was observed in sperm motility though higher percentages of sperm were motile in HBP treatment II. Sperm viability was significantly (P<0.05) higher in HBP treatment I (85.30% ± 0.77), II (86.65% ± 0.92) and III (85.65% ± 0.82) as compared to control (79.80% ±0.73). Among treatments, insignificant difference was observed in sperm viability though more sperm were viable in HBP treatment II. This study revealed that HBP enhanced post capacitation sperm motility and viability which are requisites for successful fertilization.
Principles and paradigms for developing artificial pastures

The cultivation area and yield of artificial pastures are a symbol reflecting the development level of animal husbandry in a country. In this paper, the critical roles of artificial pastures in safeguarding world's grain and food security were elaborated, and the present status and future trends in the development of artificial pastures worldwide in general, and in China in particular, were reviewed. The principles, key scientific and technical issues and development paradigms in establishing high-efficiency and sustainable pastures were summarized. Our analyses show that the major trend in the development of artificial pastures worldwide is characterized by diverse and rich genetic resources of forage species, advanced technology and management, highly specialized sectors, close coupling of the cultivation zone and the animal-raising zone, as well as substantial promotion of the government. Because the development of artificial pastures is largely dependent on the status of soil water and frost free period in north China. Therefore, accurate-farming of pastures should be exploited and adopted with great efforts both theoretically and practically to develop highly human-oriented and designed techniques for regulating and interfering pasture cultivation and processing and utilization of forages. Special emphasis should be laid on the regional distribution of cultivation zones, coupling of the cultivation zone and the animal-raising zone, and functional conversion and replacement between croplands and pastures. Based on our decade-long field studies and extension work in the agro-pastoral zone of north China, we put forward three optimized production paradigms for developing artificial pastures and related economic sectors. Finally, we advocate the urgency for formulating a scientifically based national route-map of developing artificial pastures in China.
Developing a “values teaching responsibility perception scale” for prospective teachers

In this study a measurement device that could be used to determine the values teaching responsibility perceptions of prospective teachers was aimed to be developed. For this purpose, literature on values teaching was investigated and the views of prospective teachers were taken and a 46 itemed item pool was prepared. The items were reorganized according to expert views and 46 item preliminary form was prepared. This preliminary form was applied to 274 prospective teachers 206 of whom were female and 62 were male studying in different grades and departments of Gazi University Gazi Faculty of Education in 2018-2019 academic year Autumn semester. Validity and reliability analyses were conducted on the data set obtained from the application. The data set was applied first Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) for construct validity and then Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was applied on a different group of 352 prospective teachers 278 of whom were female and 80 male. At the end of exploratory factor analysis, a scale form consisting of 35 items and 4 sub-dimensions was obtained. The four factor structure about the scale explains the 61.46% of the total variance. According to the reliability analysis Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient for the overall scale is . 97, for sub-dimensions respectively as . 93, . 93, . 88 and . 84. The model fit indices for the scale at the end of the confirmatory factor analysis are determined as RMSEA, . 064; χ2/df=2.1; SRMR=. 06; IFI=. 90; CFI=. 90. Values obtained from this shows that the scale construct is validated.
Antigenicity of Campylobacter jejuni flagella

We studied the antigenicity of a wild-type flagellate and motile (F+M+) Campylobacter jejuni strain (81116) and two daughter mutants, one flagellate and immotile (F+M-) and one aflagellate and immotile (F-M-). By sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of acid-extracted surface proteins, a 63-kilodalton (kDa) band identified from sheared flagella as the flagellar protein was present in the F+M+ and F+M- strains but not in the F-M- strain. No other differences in protein profile among the three strains were noted. By Western blotting, serum from rabbits immunized with either the F+M+ or F-M- strain detected a 63-kDa protein in the F+M+ and F+M- strains but not in the F-M- strain. That the F-M- antiserum recognized the 63-kDa band suggests that small amounts of this protein or a cross-reacting antigen is present on the F-M- strain. By counterimmunoelectrophoresis of the acid-extracted preparations with immune sera, all three strains were found to share three major antigens, but a fourth antigen with a net positive charge was present only in the F+M+ and F+M- strains. Antisera to five C. jejuni and two Campylobacter fetus strains recognized the 63-kDa protein of purified F+M+ flagella in Western blots, demonstrating a common antigen is present, but enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay results suggest that the sharing of this antigen among Campylobacter strains is variable.
Co-occurrence Patterns of Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is an important social and public health problem, affecting millions of women worldwide. Violence in a relationship can occur in multiple ways, including physical violence, psychological aggression, and sexual violence. In this study, utilizing data from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), we comprehensively investigate the interplay between physical, psychological, and sexual violence, in terms of their co-occurrence patterns, their relation to trauma symptoms and overall health of victims. For this purpose, we perform network analysis and develop a visualization technique that enables in-depth navigation of the three-dimensional (physical, psychological, sexual) space of violence. Our findings show that physical violence tends to significantly co-occur with psychological abuse, and violence intensifies when both are present. We also find that sexual violence tends to overlap less with other types of violence, particularly with physical violence. Milder forms of psychological abuse are prominent in the population and seem to represent a separate type of abuse (micro-aggression) in terms of its occurrence patterns. Finally, we observe that trauma symptoms and health problems tend to be reported more by survivors at the presence of intense psychological aggression. Our findings can be useful in developing treatments that target different patterns of IPV.
Tendencies in Multi-Agent Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

The application of Artificial Intelligence mechanisms allows the development of systems capable to solve very complex engineering problems. Multi-agent systems (MAS) are one paradigm that allows an alternative way to design distributed control systems. While research in this area grew exponentially before 2009, there is a need to understand the status quo of the field from 2009 to June 2017. An extension of the results of a SLR related to Multi-Agent Systems, its applications and research gaps, following Kitchenham and Wholin guidelines are presented in this paper. From the analysis of 279 papers (out of 3522 candidates), our findings suggest that: a) there were 20 gaps related to agent-oriented methodologies; coordination, cooperation and negotiation; modelling, developing, testing and debugging; b) 24 gaps related to specific domains (recycling, dynamic evacuation, hazard management, health-care, industry, logistics and manufacturing, machine learning, ambient assisted living); and 14 gaps related to specific areas within MAS (A-Teams, dynamic MAS and mobile agents, ABMS, evolutionary MAS, and self-organizing MAS). These gaps specify lines of research where the MAS community must work to achieve the unification of the agent-oriented paradigm; as well as strengthen ties with the industry.
Title : Multiple DNA viruses identified in multimammate mouse ( Mastomys natalensis ) populations from across regions of Sub-Saharan Africa

Authors: Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer, Léonce Kouadio, Emmanuel CouacyHymann, Nafomon Sogoba, Kyle Rosenke, Andrew J. Davison, Fabian Leendertz, Michael A. Jarvis, Heinz Feldmann, Bernhard Ehlers 1 P3 "Viral Evolution", Robert Koch-Institute, Berlin, Germany 2 LANADA/Central Laboratory for Animal Diseases, Bingerville, Côte d’Ivoire 3 P3 " Epidemiology of highly pathogenic microorganisms", Robert Koch-Institute, Berlin, Germany 4 Malaria Research and Training Center, international Center of Excellence in Research, Faculty of Medicine and Odontostomatology, University of Sciences, Techniques and Technologies of Bamako, Bamako, Mali 5 Laboratory of Virology, Division of Intramural Research, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Hamilton, MT, USA 6 MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, Glasgow, United Kingdom 7 School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, United Kingdom; and The Vaccine Group Ltd, Plymouth, United Kingdom 8 Division 12 “Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Viruses Affecting Immunocompromised Patients”, Robert Koch Institut, Berlin, Germany
Characterization of endophytic diazotrophs isolated from molasses grass

Molasses grass (Melinis minutiflora Beauv.) is a good fodder in tropical area. In this study, endophytic bacteria with high nitrogenase activity were isolated from the roots and stems of molasses grass grown in Guangdong province by using a selective medium under anaerobic or aerobic conditions. SDS-PAGE of whole-cell proteins clustered all the 15 isolates into a single group. 16S rDNA sequence analysis showed that these isolates belonged to the genus Azospirillum, and were closely related to A. lipoferum. BIOLOG test indicated that the representative strain, TMCY243, from molasses grass was able to utilize a wider range of carbon sources than the type strain DSM 1691 of A. lipoferum. Based on these results, we concluded that the endophytic diazotrophs isolated from molasses grass represented a new species of Azospirillum. This bacterium distributed widely in association with its host plant in the subtropic regions of China.
The AGN fuelling/feedback cycle in nearby radio galaxies – III. 3D relative orientations of radio jets and CO discs and their interaction

This is the third paper of a series exploring the multifrequency properties of a sample of eleven nearby low-excitation radio galaxies (LERGs) in the southern sky. We are conducting an extensive study of different galaxy components (stars, dust, warm and cold gas, radio jets) with the aim of better understanding the AGN fuelling/feedback cycle in LERGs. Here, we present new, deep, sub-kpc resolution Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) data for five sample sources at 10 GHz. Coupling these data with previously acquired Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) CO(2–1) observations and measurements of comparable quality from the literature, we carry out for the first time a full 3D analysis of the relative orientations of jet and disc rotation axes in six FR I LERGs. This analysis shows (albeit with significant uncertainties) that the relative orientation angles span a wide range (≈30○–60○). There is no case where both axes are accurately aligned and there is a marginally significant tendency for jets to avoid the disc plane. Our study also provides further evidence for the presence of a jet-CO disc interaction (already inferred from other observational indicators) in at least one source, NGC 3100. In this case, the limited extent of the radio jets, along with distortions in both the molecular gas and the jet components, suggest that the jets are young, interacting with the surrounding matter and rapidly decelerating.
Rethinking the Extraction and Interaction of Multi-Scale Features for Vessel Segmentation

Analyzing the morphological attributes of blood vessels plays a critical role in the computer-aided diagnosis of many cardiovascular and ophthalmologic diseases. Although being extensively studied, segmentation of blood vessels, particularly thin vessels and capillaries, remains challenging mainly due to the lack of an effective interaction between local and global features. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model called PC-Net to segment retinal vessels and major arteries in 2D fundus image and 3D computed tomography angiography (CTA) scans, respectively. In PC-Net, the pyramid squeeze-and-excitation (PSE) module introduces spatial information to each convolutional block, boosting its ability to extract more effective multi-scale features, and the coarse-to-fine (CF) module replaces the conventional decoder to enhance the details of thin vessels and process hard-to-classify pixels again. We evaluated our PC-Net on the Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction (DRIVE) database and an in-house 3D major artery (3MA) database against several recent methods. Our results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PSE module and CF module, but also suggest that our proposed PC-Net sets new state of the art in the segmentation of retinal vessels (AUC: 98.31%) and major arteries (AUC: 98.35%) on both databases, respectively.
Algorithm 1026: Concurrent Alternating Least Squares for Multiple Simultaneous Canonical Polyadic Decompositions

Tensor decompositions, such as CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP), are widely used in a variety of applications, such as chemometrics, signal processing, and machine learning. A broadly used method for computing such decompositions relies on the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) algorithm. When the number of components is small, regardless of its implementation, ALS exhibits low arithmetic intensity, which severely hinders its performance and makes GPU offloading ineffective. We observe that, in practice, experts often have to compute multiple decompositions of the same tensor, each with a small number of components (typically fewer than 20), to ultimately find the best ones to use for the application at hand. In this article, we illustrate how multiple decompositions of the same tensor can be fused together at the algorithmic level to increase the arithmetic intensity. Therefore, it becomes possible to make efficient use of GPUs for further speedups; at the same time, the technique is compatible with many enhancements typically used in ALS, such as line search, extrapolation, and non-negativity constraints. We introduce the Concurrent ALS algorithm and library, which offers an interface to MATLAB, and a mechanism to effectively deal with the issue that decompositions complete at different times. Experimental results on artificial and real datasets demonstrate a shorter time to completion due to increased arithmetic intensity.
Lightweight, Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks for AMR-to-Text Generation

AMR-to-text generation is used to transduce Abstract Meaning Representation structures (AMR) into text. A key challenge in this task is to efficiently learn effective graph representations. Previously, Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) were used to encode input AMRs, however, vanilla GCNs are not able to capture non-local information and additionally, they follow a local (first-order) information aggregation scheme. To account for these issues, larger and deeper GCN models are required to capture more complex interactions. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic fusion mechanism, proposing Lightweight Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks (LDGCNs) that capture richer non-local interactions by synthesizing higher order information from the input graphs. We further develop two novel parameter saving strategies based on the group graph convolutions and weight tied convolutions to reduce memory usage and model complexity. With the help of these strategies, we are able to train a model with fewer parameters while maintaining the model capacity. Experiments demonstrate that LDGCNs outperform state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets for AMR-to-text generation with significantly fewer parameters.
Nonminimal Couplings and the Forgotten Field of Axion Inflation

We study the multifield dynamics of axion models nonminimally coupled to gravity. As usual, we consider a canonical $U(1)$ symmetry-breaking model in which the axion is the phase of a complex scalar field. If the complex scalar field has a nonminimal coupling to gravity, then the (oft-forgotten) radial component can drive a phase of inflation prior to an inflationary phase driven by the axion field. In this setup, the mass of the axion field is dependent on the radial field because of the nonminimal coupling, and the axion remains extremely light during the phase of radial inflation. As the radial field approaches the minimum of its potential, there is a transition to natural inflation in the angular direction. In the language of multifield inflation, this system exhibits ultra-light isocurvature perturbations, which are converted to adiabatic perturbations at a fast turn, namely the onset of axion inflation. For models wherein the CMB pivot scale exited the horizon during radial inflation, this acts to suppresses the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, without generating CMB non-Gaussianity or observable isocurvature perturbations. Finally, we note that the interaction strength between axion and gauge fields is suppressed during the radial phase relative to its value during the axion inflation phase by several orders of magnitude. This decouples the constraints on the inflationary production of gauge fields (e.g., from primordial black holes) from the constraints on their production during (p)reheating.