Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Symbolic analysis of electric networks with higher order summative cofactors and parameter decision diagrams

The paper introduces the concept of higher order summative cofactors (HOSCs) to the circuit analysis. Although the concept is not new, it is not well known. In the paper, some mathematical background of HOSCs is presented. The further development of the concept of HOSC will yield computer implementation arithmetic of HOSC. A cancellation‐free symbolic analysis technique, which is based on HOSC arithmetic, is presented. This technique allows results to be created directly from a netlist in the form of a binary decision diagram, which is called a parameter decision diagram. Additionally, HOSC arithmetic allows the calculation to be started in many places (sometimes distant) simultaneously. The techniques of rolling up the already analyzed parts of a circuit, which is built into HOSC arithmetic, result in a novel multilevel hierarchical analysis method that is called hierarchical parameter decision diagram (HPDD). Unlike in most hierarchical methods, the results that are obtained based on the subcircuit representation in HPDD always maintain a cancellation‐free form. The HPDD always represents the sum of the product form, which is heavily compressed due to the self‐similarities of the actual circuit. The time that is required for any recalculation of the transfer functions is greatly reduced. Analysis of models that are based on pathological components is also a natural consequence of using HOSC arithmetic.
Piano Genie

We present Piano Genie, an intelligent controller which allows non-musicians to improvise on the piano. With Piano Genie, a user performs on a simple interface with eight buttons, and their performance is decoded into the space of plausible piano music in real time. To learn a suitable mapping procedure for this problem, we train recurrent neural network autoencoders with discrete bottlenecks: an encoder learns an appropriate sequence of buttons corresponding to a piano piece, and a decoder learns to map this sequence back to the original piece. During performance, we substitute a user's input for the encoder output, and play the decoder's prediction each time the user presses a button. To improve the intuitiveness of Piano Genie's performance behavior, we impose musically meaningful constraints over the encoder's outputs.
ATLANTIC-PRIMATES: a dataset of communities and occurrences of primates in the Atlantic Forests of South America.

Primates play an important role in ecosystem functioning and offer critical insights into human evolution, biology, behavior, and emerging infectious diseases. There are 26 primate species in the Atlantic Forests of South America, 19 of them endemic. We compiled a dataset of 5,472 georeferenced locations of 26 native and 1 introduced primate species, as hybrids in the genera Callithrix and Alouatta. The dataset includes 700 primate communities, 8,121 single species occurrences and 714 estimates of primate population sizes, covering most natural forest types of the tropical and subtropical Atlantic Forest of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina and some other biomes. On average, primate communities of the Atlantic Forest harbor 2 ± 1 species (range = 1-6). However, about 40% of primate communities contain only one species. Alouatta guariba (N = 2,188 records) and Sapajus nigritus (N = 1,127) were the species with the most records. Callicebus barbarabrownae (N = 35), Leontopithecus caissara (N = 38), and Sapajus libidinosus (N = 41) were the species with the least records. Recorded primate densities varied from 0.004 individuals/km2 (Alouatta guariba at Fragmento do Bugre, Paraná, Brazil) to 400 individuals/km2 (Alouatta caraya in Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil). Our dataset reflects disparity between the numerous primate census conducted in the Atlantic Forest, in contrast to the scarcity of estimates of population sizes and densities. With these data, researchers can develop different macroecological and regional level studies, focusing on communities, populations, species co-occurrence and distribution patterns. Moreover, the data can also be used to assess the consequences of fragmentation, defaunation, and disease outbreaks on different ecological processes, such as trophic cascades, species invasion or extinction, and community dynamics. There are no copyright restrictions. Please cite this Data Paper when the data are used in publications. We also request that researchers and teachers inform us of how they are using the data.
Model-based Optical Flow: Layers, Learning, and Geometry

The estimation of motion in video sequences establishes temporal correspondences between pixels and surfaces and allows reasoning about a scene using multiple frames. Despite being a focus of research for over three decades, computing motion, or optical flow, remains challenging due to a number of difficulties, including the treatment of motion discontinuities and occluded regions, and the integration of information from more than two frames. One reason for these issues is that most optical flow algorithms only reason about the motion of pixels on the image plane, while not taking the image formation pipeline or the 3D structure of the world into account. One approach to address this uses layered models, which represent the occlusion structure of a scene and provide an approximation to the geometry. The goal of this dissertation is to show ways to inject additional knowledge about the scene into layered methods, making them more robust, faster, and more accurate. First, this thesis demonstrates the modeling power of layers using the example of motion blur in videos, which is caused by fast motion relative to the exposure time of the camera. Layers segment the scene into regions that move coherently while preserving their occlusion relationships. The motion of each layer therefore directly determines its motion blur. At the same time, the layered model captures complex blur overlap effects at motion discontinuities. Using layers, we can thus formulate a generative model for blurred video sequences, and use this model to simultaneously deblur a video and compute accurate optical flow for highly dynamic scenes containing motion blur. Next, we consider the representation of the motion within layers. Since, in a layered model, important motion discontinuities are captured by the segmentation into layers, the flow within each layer varies smoothly and can be approximated using a low dimensional subspace. We show how this subspace can be learned from training data using principal component analysis (PCA), and that flow estimation using this subspace is computationally efficient. The combination of the layered model and the low-dimensional subspace gives the best of both worlds, sharp motion discontinuities from the layers and computational efficiency from the subspace. Lastly, we show how layered methods can be dramatically improved using simple semantics. Instead of treating all layers equally, a semantic segmentation divides the scene into its static parts and moving objects. Static parts of the scene constitute a large majority of what is shown in typical video sequences; yet, in such regions optical flow is fully constrained by the depth structure of the scene and the camera motion. After segmenting out moving objects, we consider only static regions, and
InfiniTouch: Finger-Aware Interaction on Fully Touch Sensitive Smartphones

Smartphones are the most successful mobile devices and offer intuitive interaction through touchscreens. Current devices treat all fingers equally and only sense touch contacts on the front of the device. In this paper, we present InfiniTouch, the first system that enables touch input on the whole device surface and identifies the fingers touching the device without external sensors while keeping the form factor of a standard smartphone. We first developed a prototype with capacitive sensors on the front, the back and on three sides. We then conducted a study to train a convolutional neural network that identifies fingers with an accuracy of 95.78% while estimating their position with a mean absolute error of 0.74cm. We demonstrate the usefulness of multiple use cases made possible with InfiniTouch, including finger-aware gestures and finger flexion state as an action modifier.
MobiLimb: Augmenting Mobile Devices with a Robotic Limb

In this paper, we explore the interaction space of MobiLimb, a small 5-DOF serial robotic manipulator attached to a mobile device. It (1) overcomes some limitations of mobile devices (static, passive, motionless); (2) preserves their form factor and I/O capabilities; (3) can be easily attached to or removed from the device; (4) offers additional I/O capabilities such as physical deformation and (5) can support various modular elements such as sensors, lights or shells. We illustrate its potential through three classes of applications: As a tool, MobiLimb offers tangible affordances and an expressive controller that can be manipulated to control virtual and physical objects. As a partner, it reacts expressively to users' actions to foster curiosity and engagement or assist users. As a medium, it provides rich haptic feedback such as strokes, pat and other tactile stimuli on the hand or the wrist to convey emotions during mediated multimodal communications.
Hospital in the home nurses’ assessment decision making: an integrative review of the literature

Aim: To describe what is currently known about nurses’ assessment decisions when providing care to patients at home or in their usual place of residence. Methods: In August 2018, an integrative literature review using a systematic approach was conducted using specific search terms to search Informit, MEDLINE and Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL). The literature search was not limited by date, and included published papers or unpublished dissertations written between 1980 and 2018. Results: In total 25 full papers were assessed for inclusion in this review; seven met the inclusion criteria. Three themes were identified from this review: i) nurse education and experience; ii) assessment informing decision-making and iii) knowing the patient. Conclusion: Nurses’ education, experience, abilities, prior learning, beliefs, attitudes and values are key factors in the delivery of home-based nursing care, and strongly influence how assessments, clinical judgements and decisions are made. Impact Statement: An understanding of home based nurses’ decisions and response to clinical deterioration is needed to inform Hospital in the Home nursing-specific curricula.
Role of pyrimidine salvage pathway in the maintenance of organellar and nuclear genome integrity

Nucleotide biosynthesis proceeds through a de novo pathway and a salvage route. In the salvage route, free bases and/or nucleosides are recycled to generate the corresponding nucleotides. Thymidine kinase (TK) is the first enzyme in the salvage pathway to recycle thymidine nucleosides as it phosphorylates thymidine to yield thymidine monophosphate. The Arabidopsis genome contains two TK genes -TK1a and TK1b- that show similar expression patterns during development. In this work, we studied the respective roles of the two genes during early development and in response to genotoxic agents targeting the organellar or the nuclear genome. We found that the pyrimidine salvage pathway is crucial for chloroplast development and genome replication, as well as for the maintenance of its integrity, and is thus likely to play a crucial role during the transition from heterotrophy to autotrophy after germination. Interestingly, defects in TK activity could be partially compensated by supplementation of the medium with sugar, and this effect resulted from both the availability of a carbon source and the activation of the nucleotide de novo synthesis pathway, providing evidence for a compensation mechanism between two routes of nucleotide biosynthesis that depend on nutrient availability. Finally, we found differential roles of the TK1a and TK1b genes during the plant response to genotoxic stress, suggesting that different pools of nucleotides exist within the cells and are required to respond to different types of DNA damage. Altogether, our results highlight the importance of the pyrimidine salvage pathway, both during plant development and in response to genotoxic stress.
On Practical Issues for Stochastic STDP Hardware With 1-bit Synaptic Weights

In computational neuroscience, synaptic plasticity learning rules are typically studied using the full 64-bit floating point precision computers provide. However, for dedicated hardware implementations, the precision used not only penalizes directly the required memory resources, but also the computing, communication, and energy resources. When it comes to hardware engineering, a key question is always to find the minimum number of necessary bits to keep the neurocomputational system working satisfactorily. Here we present some techniques and results obtained when limiting synaptic weights to 1-bit precision, applied to a Spike-Timing-Dependent-Plasticity (STDP) learning rule in Spiking Neural Networks (SNN). We first illustrate the 1-bit synapses STDP operation by replicating a classical biological experiment on visual orientation tuning, using a simple four neuron setup. After this, we apply 1-bit STDP learning to the hidden feature extraction layer of a 2-layer system, where for the second (and output) layer we use already reported SNN classifiers. The systems are tested on two spiking datasets: a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) recorded poker card symbols dataset and a Poisson-distributed spike representation MNIST dataset version. Tests are performed using the in-house MegaSim event-driven behavioral simulator and by implementing the systems on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) hardware.
Parallel Backscatter in the Wild: When Burstiness and Randomness Play With You

Parallel backscatter is a promising technique for high throughput, low power communications. The existing approaches of parallel backscatter are based on a common assumption, i.e. the states of the collided signals are distinguishable from each other in either the time domain or the IQ (the In-phase and Quadrature) domain. We in this paper disclose the superclustering phenomenon, which invalidates that assumption and seriously affects the decoding performance. Then we propose an interstellar travelling model to capture the bursty Gaussian process of a collided signal. Based on this model, we design Hubble, a reliable signal processing approach to support parallel backscatter in the wild. Hubble addresses several technical challenges: (i) a novel scheme based on Pearson’s Chi-Square test to extract the collided signals’ combined states, (ii) a Markov driven method to capture the law of signal state transitions, and (iii) error correction schemes to guarantee the reliability of parallel decoding. Theoretically, Hubble is able to decode all the backscattered data, as long as the signals are detectable by the receiver. The experiment results demonstrate that the median throughput of Hubble is $11.7\times $ higher than that of the state-of-the-art approach.
Direct modification of spermatogonial stem cells using lentivirus vectors in vivo leads to efficient generation of transgenic rats

Spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) transmit genetic information to the next progeny in males. Thus, SSCs are a potential target for germline modifications to generate transgenic animals. In this study, we report a technique for the generation of transgenic rats by in vivo manipulation of SSCs with a high success rate. SSCs in juvenile rats were transduced in vivo with high titers of lentivirus harboring enhanced green fluorescent protein and mated with wild-type females to create founder rats. These founder rats expressed the transgene and passed on the transgene with an overall success rate of 50.0%. Subsequent generations of progeny from the founder rats both expressed and passed on the transgene. Thus, direct modification of SSCs in juvenile rats is an effective means of generating transgenic rats through the male germline. This technology could be adapted to larger animals, in which existing methods for gene modification are inadequate or inapplicable, resulting in the generation of transgenic animals in a variety of species.
Maternal dietary patterns and risk of adverse pregnancy (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and gestational diabetes mellitus) and birth (preterm birth and low birth weight) outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract Objective Epidemiological studies have indicated that dietary patterns during pregnancy are associated with adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes such as hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP), gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), preterm birth (PTB) and low birth weight (LBW). However, the results of these studies are varied and inconsistent. The present study aimed to assess the association between dietary patterns and the risk of adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Seven databases were searched for articles. Two reviewers performed the study selection and data extraction. A random-effects model was used to estimate pooled effect sizes of eligible studies. Setting Studies conducted all over the world were incorporated. Subjects The review focused on pregnant women. Results A total of twenty-one studies were identified. Adherence to a healthy dietary pattern (intake of vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains) was significantly associated with lower odds (OR; 95 % CI) of pre-eclampsia (0·78; 0·70, 0·86; I 2=39·0 %, P=0·178), GDM (0·78; 0·56, 0·99; I 2=68·6 %, P=0·013) and PTB (0·75; 0·57, 0·93; I 2=89·6 %, P=0·0001). Conclusions Our review suggests that dietary patterns with a higher intake of fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and fish are associated with a decreased likelihood of adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes. Further research should be conducted in low-income countries to understand the impact of limited resources on dietary intake and adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes.
MiR‐208b regulates cell cycle and promotes skeletal muscle cell proliferation by targeting CDKN1A

Skeletal muscle is the most abundant tissue in the body. The development of skeletal muscle cell is complex and affected by many factors. A sea of microRNAs (miRNAs) have been identified as critical regulators of myogenesis. MiR‐208b, a muscle‐specific miRNA, was reported to have a connection with fiber type determination. However, whether miR‐208b has effect on proliferation of muscle cell was under ascertained. In our study, cyclin‐dependent kinase inhibitor 1A (CDKN1A), which participates in cell cycle regulation, was predicted and then validated as one target gene of miR‐208b. We found that overexpression of miR‐208b increased the expression of cyclin D1, cyclin E1, and cyclin‐dependent kinase 2 at the levels of messenger RNA and protein in cattle primary myoblasts in vivo and in vitro. Flow cytometry showed that forced expression of miR‐208b increased the percentage of cells at the S phase and decreased the percentage of cells at the G0/G1 phase. These results indicated that miR‐208b participates in the cell cycle regulation of cattle primary myoblast cells. 5‐Ethynyl‐20‐deoxyuridine and 3‐(4,5‐dimethylthiazol‐2‐yl)‐2,5‐diphenyltetrazolium bromide assays showed that overexpression of miR‐208b promoted the proliferation of cattle primary myoblasts. Therefore, we conclude that miR‐208b participates in the cell cycle and proliferation regulation of cattle primary skeletal muscle cell through the posttranscriptional downregulation of CDKN1A.
Hydroxymethylnitrofurazone treatment in indeterminate form of chronic Chagas disease: Reduced intensity of tissue parasitism and inflammation—A histopathological study

Hydroxymethylnitrofurazone (NFOH) is a nitrofurazone prodrug effective in vivo during acute infections, and it has less hepatotoxicity effect than the standard drug benznidazole (BZN) which has been used during short‐ and long‐term treatment. In the present study, we induced the indeterminate form of Chagas disease in mice with a Y strain of Trypanosoma cruzi and analysed the histopathological data about the effects of NFOH and BZN on different tissues, including the heart, skeletal muscle, liver, kidney, colon, spleen and brain. After infection, BALB/c mice were treated with NFOH (150 mg/kg) and BZN (60 mg/kg) for 60 days and then submitted to immunosuppression using dexamethasone (5 mg/kg) for 14 days. Two trained analysts, as part of a blind evaluation, examined the results using serial sections of 3 mm diameter in two different moments. The results showed reactivation of the disease only in the infected nontreated group (POS). After treatment, amastigote nests were found in the heart, colon, liver and skeletal muscle in the POS group and in the heart and liver of the BZN group. Interestingly, amastigote nests were not found in the NFOH and NEG groups. The histopathological analysis showed fewer tissue lesions and parasite infiltrates in the NFOH group when compared with the BZN and POS groups. We have not observed any increase in the levels of hepatocellular injury biomarkers (AST/ALT) in the NFOH group. These in vivo studies show the potential for NFOH as an effective and safe compound useful as an anti‐T. cruzi agent.
GridDrones: A Self-Levitating Physical Voxel Lattice for Interactive 3D Surface Deformations

We present GridDrones, a self-levitating programmable matter platform that can be used for representing 2.5D voxel grid relief maps capable of rendering unsupported structures and 3D transformations. GridDrones consists of cube-shaped nanocopters that can be placed in a volumetric 1xnxn mid-air grid, which is demonstrated here with 15 voxels. The number of voxels and scale is only limited by the size of the room and budget. Grid deformations can be applied interactively to this voxel lattice by manually selecting a set of voxels, then assigning a continuous topological relationship between voxel sets that determines how voxels move in relation to each other and manually drawing out selected voxels from the lattice structure. Using this simple technique, it is possible to create unsupported structures that can be translated and oriented freely in 3D. Shape transformations can also be recorded to allow for simple physical shape morphing animations. This work extends previous work on selection and editing techniques for 3D user interfaces.
Is the web ready for HTTP/2 server push?

HTTP/2 supersedes HTTP/1.1 to tackle the performance challenges of the modern Web. A highly anticipated feature is Server Push, enabling servers to send data without explicit client requests, thus potentially saving time. Although guidelines on how to use Server Push emerged, measurements have shown that it can easily be used in a suboptimal way and hurt instead of improving performance. We thus tackle the question if the current Web can make better use of Server Push. First, we enable real-world websites to be replayed in a testbed to study the effects of different Server Push strategies. Using this, we next revisit proposed guidelines to grasp their performance impact. Finally, based on our results, we propose a novel strategy using an alternative server scheduler that enables to interleave resources. This improves the visual progress for some websites, with minor modifications to the deployment. Still, our results highlight the limits of Server Push: a deep understanding of web engineering is required to make optimal use of it, and not every site will benefit.