Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Remote Sensing of Environment

With the advent of Sentinel-2, it is now possible to generate large-scale chlorophyll content maps with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, suitable for monitoring ecological processes such as vegetative stress and/or decline. However methodological gaps exist for adapting this technology to heterogeneous natural vegetation and for transferring it among vegetation species or plan functional types. In this study, we investigated the use of Sentinel-2A imagery for estimating needle chlorophyll (Ca+b) in a sparse pine forest undergoing significant needle loss and tree mortality. Sentinel-2A scenes were acquired under two extreme viewing geometries (June vs. December 2016) coincident with the acquisition of high-spatial resolution hyperspectral imagery, and field measurements of needle chlorophyll content and crown leaf area index. Using the highresolution hyperspectral scenes acquired over 61 validation sites we found the CI chlorophyll index R750/R710 and Macc index (which uses spectral bands centered at 680 nm, 710 nm and 780 nm) had the strongest relationship with needle chlorophyll content from individual tree crowns (r= 0.61 and r= 0.59, respectively; p < 0.001), while TCARI and TCARI/OSAVI, originally designed for uniform agricultural canopies, did not perform as well (r= 0.21 and r= 0.01, respectively). Using lower-resolution Sentinel-2A data validated against hyperspectral estimates and ground truth needle chlorophyll content, the red-edge index CI and the Sentinel-specific chlorophyll indices CI-Gitelson, NDRE1 and NDRE2 had the highest accuracy (with r values> 0.7 for June and>0.4 for December; p < 0.001). The retrieval of needle chlorophyll content from the entire Sentinel-2A bandset using the radiative transfer model INFORM yielded r= 0.71 (RMSE=8.1 μg/cm) for June, r= 0.42 (RMSE=12.2 μg/cm) for December, and r= 0.6 (RMSE=10.5 μg/cm) as overall performance using the June and December datasets together. This study demonstrates the retrieval of leaf Ca+b with Sentinel-2A imagery by red-edge indices and by an inversion method based on a hybrid canopy reflectance model that accounts for tree density, background and shadow components common in sparse forest canopies.
Vision Navigation Based on the Fusion of Feature-based Methods and Direct Methods

Vision navigation is an alternative to Global Position System (GPS) in environments where access to GPS is denied. Yet, the classical feature-based method has to extract feature observations from the image as input, which performs poor in environments with little features. To address this problem, a fusion of feature-based method and direct method is designed. The feature-based method is used in feature rich regions, while the direct method is used in regions with little features. Thus we utilize the fusion of two methods to improve the environmental adaptability of vision navigation. To improve the robustness to outliers, the Huber weight function is applied. Then the nonlinear optimization method is utilized to obtain the optimal camera pose. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can meet the needs of real-time autonomous navigation.
Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi E ff ectively Enhances the Growth of Gleditsia sinensis Lam . Seedlings under Greenhouse Conditions

The Chinese honey locust tree Gleditsia sinensis Lam. (Fabaceae) is a precious ecological and economic tree species that has wide-ranging usage. However, knowledge regarding seedling cultivation (especially the use of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF)) is scarce, which limits the developent of Gleditsia plantations. A pot experiment was carried out under greenhouse conditions to estimate the effects of three AMF strains (Funneliformis mosseae 1, Funneliformis mosseae 2, and Diversispora tortuosa) on the growth, photosynthetic rate, and nutrient content of G. sinensis seedlings. Results showed that the growth parameters (seedling height, basal diameter, dry biomass) of the seedlings were significantly increased by each of the three AMF strains, associated with high root colonization rates (greater than 75%). Chlorophyll concentrations and photosynthetic rates were also increased by AMF, and phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) content in the three organs (leaf, stem, and root), and nitrogen (N) content in the leaf and stem of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) seedlings were significantly higher than in non-AM seedlings. Mycorrhizal dependency of the AM seedlings was greater than 350%, and significantly correlated with the increased P and K content in all three organs and increased N content in the leaf and stem. Positive effects of F. mosseae on growth and the nutrient content of seedlings were higher than those of D. tortuosa, but no significant different effects on G. sinensis seedlings were observed between the two strains of F. mosseae. Hence, growth of G. sinensis seedlings was effectively enhanced by AMF, with F. mosseae being more suitable for the inoculation of G. sinensis seedlings. These results indicate that arbuscular mycorrhization is beneficial for the growth of young G. sinensis plants. Further research is needed to determine whether the effects can be reproduced in a forest situation.
Explorer Two Decades of Unsupervised POS tagging---How Far Have We Come ?

Part-of-speech (POS) induction is one of the most popular tasks in research on unsupervised NLP. Many different methods have been proposed, yet comparisons are difficult to make since there is little consensus on evaluation framework, and many papers evaluate against only one or two competitor systems. Here we evaluate seven different POS induction systems spanning nearly 20 years of work, using a variety of measures. We show that some of the oldest (and simplest) systems stand up surprisingly well against more recent approaches. Since most of these systems were developed and tested using data from the WSJ corpus, we compare their generalization abilities by testing on both WSJ and the multilingual Multext-East corpus. Finally, we introduce the idea of evaluating systems based on their ability to produce cluster prototypes that are useful as input to a prototype-driven learner. In most cases, the prototype-driven learner outperforms the unsupervised system used to initialize it, yielding state-of-the-art results on WSJ and improvements on nonEnglish corpora.
Post-transcriptional regulation of miR-27 in murine Material Supplemental

In mammals, microRNAs (miRNAs) can play diverse roles in viral infection through their capacity to regulate both host and viral genes. Recent reports have demonstrated that specific miRNAs change in expression level upon infection and can impact viral production and infectivity. It is clear that miRNAs are an integral component of viral–host interactions, and it is likely that both host and virus contain mechanisms to regulate miRNA expression and/or activity. To date, little is known about the mechanisms by which miRNAs are regulated in viral infection. Here we report the rapid down-regulation of miR-27a in multiple mouse cell lines as well as primary macrophages upon infection with the murine cytomegalovirus. Down-regulation of miR-27a occurs independently from two other miRNAs, miR-23a and miR-24, located within the same genomic cluster, and analysis of primiRNA levels suggest that regulation occurs post-transcriptionally. miR-27b, a close homolog of miR-27a (20/21 nucleotide identity), also decreases upon infection, and we demonstrate that both miR-27a and miR-27b exert an antiviral function upon over-expression. Drug sensitivity experiments suggest that virus entry is not sufficient to induce the down-regulation of miR-27 and that the mechanism requires synthesis of RNA. Altogether, our findings indicate that miR-27a and miR-27b have antiviral activity against MCMV, and that either the virus or the host encodes molecule(s) for regulating miR-27 accumulation, most likely by inducing the rapid decay of the mature species.
Hybridization of fuzzy time series and fuzzy ontologies in the diagnosis of complex technical systems

The article provides a formal description of fuzzy ontologies and features of the representation of elements of fuzzy axioms in FuzzyOWL notation. An ontological model for assessing the state of helicopter units has been developed. According to the proposed approach, the summarizing of the state of a complex technical system is carried out by means of an inference based on a fuzzy ontology. As part of this work, experiments were conducted to search for anomalous situations and search for possible faulty helicopter units using the developed approach to the integration of fuzzy time series and fuzzy ontology. The proposed approach of hybridization of fuzzy time series and fuzzy ontologies made it possible to reliably recognize anomalous situations with a certain degree of truth, and to find possible faulty aggregates corresponding to each anomalous situation.
Comparative movement analysis for a sympatric dhole and golden jackal in a human-dominated landscape

GPS tracking enables the collection of large quantities of data on animal movements which can help guide conservation efforts. Using movement data from a dhole (Cuon alpinus) and a golden jackal (Canis aureus), we demonstrate the efficacy of movement analysis techniques to explore and contrast the movement patterns of these two individuals. The jackal used a 151 km2 local convex hull home ranged covering mostly agricultural lands during the monitoring period, but the dhole restricted its movements to protected forest and a home range size of 33 km2. Autocorrelation functions demonstrated consistent nocturnal activity for the jackal and diurnal activity for the dhole. K-means cluster analysis of step lengths and turning angles along with semi-variograms showed that the jackal utilised larger areas and traveled longer distances than the dhole. By combining a comparative approach with simple movement analysis techniques, insights into the space use strategies of canids can be gained in order to enhance our ability to develop effective conservation strategies for these largely persecuted species.
A SCALABLE FRAMEWORK FOR AIS DATA ANALYSIS AND VISUALISATION

In AIS Data Explorer, users are able to visualise large marine datasets on an interactive map. Client visualisations include heat maps, grid maps and trajectories. Data to be displayed can be filtered by dimensions including area of interest, time period, ship type and ship status. Moreover, it allows user to implement algorithms and analyse data of interest.
Motion Segmentation and Synthesis for Latency Mitigation in a Cloud Robotic Tele-Operation System

Network latency is a major problem in Cloud Robotics for human robot interaction such as tele-operation. Routing delays can be highly variable in a heterogeneous computing environment, imposing challenges to reliably tele-operate a robot with a closed-loop feedback controller. In this work, we attempt to solve the latency problemwithmachine learning (ML) and supervised shared autonomy. By sharing Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), Hidden Semi-Markov Models (HSMMs), and linear quadratic tracking (LQT) controllers between the Cloud and the robot, we build a motion recognition, segmentation, and synthesis framework for Cloud Robotic tele-operation. We further introduce a set of latency mitigation network protocols under this framework. As a proof-of-concept, we program a dynamic robot arm using this framework to perform learned hand-written letter motions. With this task, we benchmark the motion recognition errors, motion synthesis errors, and the latency mitigation performances of this Cloud Robotic tele-operation system.
A Randomized Study of Biomimetic Peptides Efficacy and Impact on the Growth Factors Expression in the Hair Follicles of Patients with Telogen Effluvium

© 2018 Alexey Alekseevich Kubanov et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License -NonCommercial-ShareAlikeUnported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). *Corresponding Author Yulia Albertovna Gallyamova; Department of Dermatovenereology and Cosmetology, Russian Medical Academy of Continuous Professional Education, 2/1 Barrikadnaya St., Moscow, 123995, Russia. E-mail: yulya.gallyamova. 69 @ mail.ru A Randomized Study of Biomimetic Peptides Efficacy and Impact on the Growth Factors Expression in the Hair Follicles of Patients with Telogen Effluvium
Continuous Relaxation of Symbolic Planner for One-Shot Imitation Learning

We address one-shot imitation learning, where the goal is to execute a previously unseen task based on a single demonstration. While there has been exciting progress in this direction, most of the approaches still require a few hundred tasks for meta-training, which limits the scalability of the approaches. Our main contribution is to formulate one-shot imitation learning as a symbolic planning problem along with the symbol grounding problem. This formulation disentangles the policy execution from the inter-task generalization and leads to better data efficiency. The key technical challenge is that the symbol grounding is prone to error with limited training data and leads to subsequent symbolic planning failures. We address this challenge by proposing a continuous relaxation of the discrete symbolic planner that directly plans on the probabilistic outputs of the symbol grounding model. Our continuous relaxation of the planner can still leverage the information contained in the probabilistic symbol grounding and significantly improve over the baseline planner for the oneshot imitation learning tasks without using large training data.
Measuring capital charge for a credit loan portfolio : VaR and TCE

Due to the new Basel Capital Accord, the banks need to develop a risk management tool for losses arising from credit loan portfolios before 2006. In order to quantify the aggregate loss from a credit loan portfolio, we employ an actuarial risk model. The Value at Risk (VaR) and tail conditional expectation (TCE, also known as TailVaR) are used to obtain the capital charge for a credit loan portfolio. It is assumed that the default arrival process follows the Poisson process and the loss sizes are assumed to be independent and identical truncated exponential. Applying the piecewise deterministic Markov processes theory, we obtain the explicit expression of the Laplace transform of the distribution of the aggregate losses. Transform analysis techniques from financial option pricing theory is used to derive the VaR and TCE numerically based on the Laplace transform of the distribution of the aggregate losses. JEL classfication: C16; C24; G21; G28
Brain–Computer Interfaces Handbook Technological and Theoretical Advances

Along with the tremendous increase of studies related to usability in the field of human– computer interaction (HCI), researchers in brain–computer interfaces (BCI) agree that the usability is also an indispensable quality of BCI systems. From this perspective, several researchers are trying to conduct usability evaluation of BCI systems. However, many previous studies have been only focused on the performance measurement such as accuracy and information transfer rate. Moreover, among most of them, there is no well-structured usability framework that is widely used for BCI. Thus, a simple and useful framework for measuring BCI usability for researchers to conduct usability evaluation is necessary. This chapter reviews the state of the art of BCI related to usability evaluation. We conducted a systematic literature review in accord with PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses). A total of 279 articles from 2000 to January 2016 were obtained and reviewed. As a result, we proposed the usability framework for BCI in the perspective of User, Task, Environment, Technology, Method, and Measurement characteristics. Moreover, we provided recommendations for future usability studies of BCI that can motivate researchers and practitioners in the perspectives of human factors and ergonomics/HCI. CONTENTS
A Springboard to the Domestic Arena ? Second-Order Success , First-Order Gains and the European Electoral Cycle

European Parliament (EP) elections offer a distinct incentive structure to voters as there is no government formation at stake. Triggering protest and non-strategical votes, small and radical parties enjoy structural advantages in the supranational contest. While these patterns are well established in the literature, it remains puzzling how success in the second-order arena impinges on the parties’ first-order trajectories. We lack a systematic understanding of the implications that the secondary elections themselves have on party competition within the domestic arena. This paper posits that EP elections serve as a springboard for success in the national arena. The institution of the EP elections along with the different voting calculi therein has unanticipated consequences for domestic party competition. Drawing on a novel database encompassing the electoral results of all EU member states in national and EP elections since 1979, the temporal distance between these elections, and their position within the respective electoral cycles, I show that particularly populist radical right parties benefit from a spillover of European success to the national arena. This effect is especially pronounced if the temporal distance between the national and the European election is close. The results suggest that the institution of EP elections not only provides these parties with a permeable forum for politicising Europe and their antagonism towards further integration, but that the European campaign also bestows salience upon their nationalistic policy demands.
Conduction mechanism change according to barrier height of oxide hetero-interface diode

Conduction mechanism change according to barrier height of oxide hetero-interface diode Bu-il Nam Program in Nano Science and Technology Department of Transdisciplinary Studies The Graduate School of Seoul National University An effective and facile strategy is proposed to demonstrate an engineered oxide hetero-interface of a thin film diode with a high current density and low operating voltage. The electrical characteristics of an oxide hetero-interface thin film diode are governed by two theoretical models: the space charge-limited current (SCLC) model and the Fowler-Nordheim (F-N) tunneling model. Interestingly, the dominant mechanism strongly depends on the insulator thickness, and the mechanism shift occurs at a critical thickness. This phenomenon is seen by a
Accelerated initial sti ! ness schemes for elastoplasticity

Iterative methods for the solution of non-linear "nite element equations are generally based on variants of the Newton}Raphson method. When they are stable, full Newton}Raphson schemes usually converge rapidly but may be expensive for some types of problems (for example, when the tangent sti! ness matrix is unsymmetric). Initial sti! ness schemes, on the other hand, are extremely robust but may require large numbers of iterations for cases where the plastic zone is extensive. In most geomechanics applications it is generally preferable to use a tangent sti! ness scheme, but there are situations in which initial sti! ness schemes are very useful. These situations include problems where a nonassociated #ow rule is used or where the zone of plastic yielding is highly localized. This paper surveys the performance of several single-parameter techniques for accelerating the convergence of the initial sti! ness scheme. Some simple but e! ective modi"cations to these procedures are also proposed. In particular, a modi"ed version of Thomas' acceleration scheme is developed which has a good rate of convergence. Previously published results on the performance of various acceleration algorithms for initial sti! ness iteration are rare and have been restricted to relatively simple yield criteria and simple problems. In this study, detailed numerical results are presented for the expansion of a thick cylinder, the collapse of a rigid strip footing, and the failure of a vertical cut. These analyses use the Mohr}Coulomb and Tresca yield criteria which are popular in soil mechanics. Copyright ( 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Kuril – Kamchatka gridded digital bathymetry creation and analysis

In this paper, algorithms and an interface for creating detailed digital regular gridded bathymetry using digital sounding data are described, and examples of the data obtained for different regions of the Pacific are shown. In calculations of the depth at each grid point, the algorithm uses up to nine points from a data source. They are chosen using two criteria: the first one–– they must be located in various sectors (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW) from a calculating grid-point, and the second –– they must be the nearest ones to this point in each sector. Then the spline interpolation is used for defining the depth value in the grid-point. Another algorithm uses linear interpolation for obtaining depth value at the grid-point. The new digital bathymery on a rectangular grid with 1 and 0.5 arc minute resolution has been created for the Kuril–Kamchatka region. These data consist of four rectangular arrays of depth, which cover a 200 km zone around the Kuril Islands and Kamchatka from 41.00◦ up to 61.00◦ Northern latitude. The comparative analysis of this digital bathymetry has been carried out.
Kahraman Epidermal growth factor , tumor necrosis factor alpha , and thioredoxin in cerebral tissue following cerebral ischemia

Objective: In this study, the changes in the levels of the epidermal growth factor (EGF), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), and thioredoxine (TRX) in the cerebral tissue of rats following the cerebral ischemia model were investigated. Methods: The left middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) was done in 27 out of 48 rats recruited into the study for obtaining focal cerebral ischemia model (MCAO group). Twenty-one rats underwent a sham operation; the middle cerebral artery was exposed but not occluded (Sham group). EGF, TNF-α, and TRX levels were studied in the operated left and contralateral hemispheres at the 16th, 48th, and 96th hours, and on the 30th day after operation in both sham and MCAO groups. Results: EGF levels at 96th hour in MCAO group were higher than those of sham group in both right and left hemispheres; and also the levels of EGF at 48th hour in MCAO group were lower significantly than those of sham group in just left hemisphere. In MCAO group, TNF-α levels on the 30th day in right hemisphere were higher than those in left hemisphere. Whereas TRX levels at the 48th hour in right hemisphere were higher than those in left hemisphere. Conclusion: The results suggested that cerebral ischemia following MCAO might affect EGF, TNF-α and TRX levels in both ischemic and contralateral hemispheres in cerebral tissue; and this effect may change by the time passed after MCAO.
On the Proof-Oriented Design of a Context-Switching Service in the Pip Protokernel

The Pip protokernel is a kernel whose trusted computing base is reduced to its bare bones. The goal of such minimisation is twofold: reduce the attack surface and reduce the cost of the formal proof of security. In particular, multiplexing is not implemented in the kernel but in a partition whose code is executed in user mode. This of course assumes that the kernel provides minimal services dedicated to signal sending. In this paper, we describe a streamlined service designed to allow for inter-partition communication through userland structures that mimic the traditional Interrupt Descriptor Table.