Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficient visual obstacle avoidance for robotic mower

We present a novel method for robotic mower's lawn obstacle avoidance as well as motion control, which is based on the Gabor texture classification and drivable region search methods. In our approach, a camera is applied to obtain real-time image streams of lawn scenes, Gabor filters are then applied for extracting robust texture features. Based on the compressed features, a SVM model is trained and used to perform the grass texture classification task. The maximum connected drivable region is computed via a breadth-first search method (BFS) according to the classification results. By restricting the BFS method in a polygon window area, we accelerate the region search step by 64% compared with searching the whole image. The whole program is built on the Robot Operating System (ROS) for the purpose of expansion. Experiments have been performed on the robotic mower under complex scenes, including various obstacles, seasons and lighting conditions. The obstacle avoidance rate tested is 97.7% in a 75 m∗40 m area, which proves the efficiency and superiority of our proposed method.
Robust Estimation for Mixture of Probability Tables based on beta-likelihood

Modeling of a large joint probability table is problematic when its variables have a large number of categories. In such a case, a mixture of simpler probability tables could be a good model. And the estimation of such a large probability table frequently has another problem of data sparseness. When constructing mixture models with sparse data, EM estimators based on the β-likelihood are expected more appropriate than those based on the log likelihood. Experimental results show that a mixture model estimated by the βlikelihood approximates a large joint probability table with sparse data more appropriately than EM estimators.
Photobleaching kinetics, photoproduct formation, and dose estimation during ALA induced PpIX PDT of MLL cells under well oxygenated and hypoxic conditions

Fluorescence photobleaching and photoproduct formation were investigated during δ-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) induced protoporphyrin IX (PpIX) PDT of MLL cells in vitro . Cells were incubated in either 0.1 or 1.0 mM ALA for 4 h and were treated with 532 nm or 635 nm light under well oxygenated or hypoxic conditions. Fluorescence spectra were acquired during treatment. Photobleaching and photoproduct formation were quantified using singular value decomposition fitting of fluorescence spectra to experimentally determined basis spectra for PpIX, photoprotoporphyrin (Ppp), product II (peak at 655 nm), and product III (peak at 618 nm). PpIX photobleaching occurred under both normal and hypoxic conditions. The photobleaching kinetics could not be explained by purely first- or second-order photobleaching kinetics, and were attributed to differences in PpIX binding at the two ALA incubation concentrations. Ppp was the main photoproduct and accumulated in higher levels in the absence of oxygen, likely a result of reduced Ppp photobleaching under hypoxia. Increases in product II fluorescence occurred mainly in the presence of oxygen. To assess potential fluorescence based PDT dose metrics, cell viability was measured at select times during treatment using a colony formation assay. Cell survival correlated well to changes in product II fluorescence, independent of oxygenation, sensitizer concentration, and treatment wavelength, suggesting that this product is primarily a result of singlet oxygen mediated reactions and may potentially be useful to quantify singlet oxygen dose during PDT.
Reconstructing Health Psychology: An Introduction

T H I S I S S U E of the Journal of Health Psychology includes an edited selection of some of the papers that were presented at the First International Conference on Critical and Qualitative Approaches to Health Psychology [www.med.mun.ca/health99/] which was held in St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada on 28–31 July 1999. As a collection, it provides an entry to the current critical debates about theory and method within health psychology. This introduction very briefly looks back on the development of these debates, summarizes some of the issues contained in this special issue and considers how these debates can be extended.
Holistic Rationality and a Complement Model for Natural Sciences and Christian Theology Interaction

A complement model is proposed to account for the interaction between the natural sciences and Christian theology that cultivates cooperation between the two disciplines. This model is based upon a conception of holistic rationality, in which the two main epistemological conceptions of rationality—instrumental and categorical—are enriched in terms of the axiological and metaphysical stances towards what is preferably and possibly knowable and of an epistemic subject’s ethical stance. The axiological and the ethical stances consist of values and virtues, respectively, while the metaphysical stance involves absolute presuppositions. This conception of rationality, in which rules and principles or ends and means, are expanded with respect to values, virtues, and presuppositions, permits an analysis of the interplay between science and theology at a foundational level in terms of the formulation, appraisal, and acceptance of scientific and theological knowledge. Moreover, it provides practitioners in both disciplines an opportunity to combine rationally in a complementary fashion their epistemic claims to form a comprehensive world picture, which captures the world’s complexity but still maintains the integrity of each discipline’s epistemic claims.
Complexity Measures Effectiveness in Feature Selection

Feature selection is an important pre-processing step usually mandatory in data analysis by Machine Learning techniques. Its objective is to reduce data dimensionality by removing irrelevant and redundant features from a dataset. In this work we investigate how the presence of irrelevant features in a dataset affects the complexity of a classification problem solution. This is performed by monitoring the values of some complexity measures extracted from the original and preprocessed datasets. These descriptors allow estimating the intrinsic difficulty of a classification problem. Some of these measures are then used in feature ranking. The results are promising and reveal that the complexity measures are indeed suitable for estimating feature importance in classification datasets.
Efficient Mapping of Applications for Future Chip-Multiprocessors in Dark Silicon Era

The failure of Dennard scaling has led to the utilization wall that is the source of dark silicon and limits the percentage of a chip that can actively switch within a given power budget. To address this issue, a structure is needed to guarantee the limited power budget along with providing sufficient flexibility and performance for different applications with various communication requirements. In this article, we present a general-purpose platform for future many-core Chip-Multiprocessors (CMPs) that benefits from the advantages of clustering, Network-on-Chip (NoC) resource sharing among cores, and power gating the unused components of clusters. We also propose two task mapping methods for the proposed platform in which active and dark cores are dispersed appropriately, so that an excess of power budget can be obtained. Our evaluations reveal that the first and second proposed mapping mechanisms respectively reduce the execution time by up to 28.6% and 39.2% and the NoC power consumption by up to 11.1% and 10%, and gain an excess power budget of up to 7.6% and 13.4% over the baseline architecture.
FAME, a novel conditioning regimen for allogeneic stem cell transplantation for lymphoma, does not earn fame

To the Editor: Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is an established treatment for hematological malignancies. The procedure starts with a conditioning regimen to eradicate malignant cells and to suppress the host immune system to ensure engraftment of donor stem cells. Cyclophosphamide combined with either busulfan or total body irradiation has been established as a standard regimen for allogeneic HSCT for leukemia. On the other hand, there is no standard conditioning regimen in allogeneic HSCT for lymphoma. Although the BEAM regimen, a combination of carmustine, etoposide, cytarabine, and melphalan, has been established as an effective conditioning regimen for autologous HSCT for lymphoma, there are concerns regarding its immunosuppressive effect to ensure donor cell engraftment when used for allogeneic HSCT [1]. Therefore, in this study, we substituted fludarabine for carmustine to enhance the immunosuppressive effect. From another perspective, this regimen is an intensified version of the combination of fludarabine and melphalan (FM), a widely used reduced‐intensity conditioning regimen, by adding etoposide and cytarabine. We named this novel regimen FAME, and we evaluated its safety and efficacy in allogeneic HSCT for lymphoma. However, this prospective study was terminated because of unexpected excessive toxicities. We included patients with relapsed or refractory lymphoma who were not candidates for a conventional conditioning regimen because of advanced age (50–70years) or a previous history of autologous HSCT. Patients were required to have a human leukocyte antigen‐identical donor or one antigen‐ mismatched, or a matched unrelated donor. Patients with an Eastern Cooperative OncologyGroup performance status 2–4 were excluded. This protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Jichi Medical University, and written informed consent was obtained from all patients/donors. The FAME regimen consisted of fludarabine at 25mg/ m/day from day 7 to 3, cytarabine at 200mg/m × 2/day from day 6 to 3, etoposide at 200mg/m /day from day 6 to 3, and melphalan at 140mg/m/day on day 2. Prophylaxis against graft‐versus‐host disease (GVHD) consisted of cyclosporine at 3mg/kg/day or tacrolimus at 0.03mg/kg/ day as a continuous infusion from day 1 and methotrexate at 10–15mg/m/day on day 1, 7–10mg/m/day on days 3 and 6, and optionally on day 11. The primary end point was the achievement of donor cell engraftment without any grade III–IV regimen‐related toxicities (RRT) according to the Bearman’s criteria within 28 days after HSCT. Fourteen patients were planned to be included in this study to reject any treatment with a success rate of less than 60%
Development of a Test-Rig for a Modern Motorcycle Engine

This paper presents experimental activities that have been performed in the Automotive Engineering Centre laboratories in Universiti Malaysia Pahang for developing a test-rig based on a modern motorcycle engine. The experimental engine test-rig was developed based on an eddy current dynamometer which was coupled to a four-stroke singlecylinder SI motorcycle engine. Moreover, the test-rig consists of all the measurement equipment, sensors and auxiliaries kits for carrying out engine testing in a sufficient way. The results of these activities have been used for validation of a one-dimensional model developed based on that single cylinder engine. Both the in-cylinder pressure trace and brake torque were used to validate the engine model. There was good agreement between the simulation and experimental results. The constructed test-rig can be utilized for further research and development programs.
Propofol Increases Myofilament Ca2+ Sensitivity and Intracellular pH via Activation of Na+–H+ Exchange in Rat Ventricular Myocytes

Background The objectives were to determine the extent and mechanism of action by which propofol increases myofilament Ca2+ sensitivity and intracellular pH (pHi) in ventricular myocytes. Methods Freshly isolated adult rat ventricular myocytes were used for the study. Cardiac myofibrils were extracted for assessment of myofibrillar actomyosin adenosine triphosphatase (ATPase) activity. Myocyte shortening (video edge detection) and pHi (2′,7′-bis-(2-carboxyethyl)-5(6′)-carboxyfluorescein, 500/440 ratio) were monitored simultaneously in individual cells field-stimulated (0.3 Hz) and superfused with HEPES-buffered solution (pH 7.4, 30°C). Results Propofol (100 &mgr;m) reduced the Ca2+ concentration required for activation of myofibrillar actomyosin ATPase from pCa 5.7 ± 0.01 to 6.6 ± 0.01. Increasing pHi (7.05 ± 0.03 to 7.39 ± 0.04) with NH4Cl increased myocyte shortening by 35 ± 12%. Washout of NH4Cl decreased pHi to 6.82 ± 0.03 and decreased myocyte shortening to 52 ± 10% of control. Propofol caused a dose-dependent increase in pHi but reduced myocyte shortening. The propofol-induced increase in pHi was attenuated, whereas the decrease in myocyte shortening was enhanced after pretreatment with ethylisopropyl amiloride, a Na+–H+ exchange inhibitor, or bisindolylmaleimide I, a protein kinase C inhibitor. Propofol also attenuated the NH4Cl-induced intracellular acidosis, increased the rate of recovery from acidosis, and attenuated the associated decrease in myocyte shortening. Propofol caused a leftward shift in the extracellular Ca2+–shortening relation, and this effect was attenuated by ethylisopropyl amiloride. Conclusions These results suggest that propofol increases the sensitivity of myofibrillar actomyosin ATPase to Ca2+ (i.e., increases myofilament Ca2+sensitivity), at least in part by increasing pHivia protein kinase C–dependent activation of Na+–H+ exchange.
Robust Stability of Distributed Delay Systems

Abstract We present an LMI condition for robust stability of uncertain distributed delay systems (DDS). It is based on recent results for DDS with rational delay kernels. After the incorporation of uncertain kernels, the new approach is now applicable to any time-varying, uncertain, piecewise continuous delay kernel. The stability analysis is formulated as an LMI and at the same time uses explicitly the information about the nominal delay kernel. This is the main advantage of the new approach compared to existing solutions. The performance of the approach is illustrated in an example.
Joint DoA and bandwidth estimation of unknown signals through single snapshot data and MT-BCS approach

A novel strategy for the estimation of the direction-of-arrivals (DoAs) and the bandwidth of multiple signals impinging on a linear array is introduced. Starting from the voltages measured at the output of the array elements at a single time instant, the retrieval of the DoAs is addressed by means of a customized strategy based on the Multi-Tasks Bayesian Compressive Sensing (MT-BCS) in order to correlate the solutions obtained over different frequency samples. The spectral correlation allows to improve the accuracy of the DoAs recovery, although the single instant data acquisition, and to have an estimation of the signals bandwidth. A preliminary numerical result is reported to shown the behavior of the proposed method.
Terrain motion measurements over European urban areas using Persistent Scatterer Interferometry

In this contribution Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) processings done in the framework of the FP7 Project PanGEO over a number of European sites are presented. After a short introduction of the PanGEO project, we present the data used, the processing done and the results of the PSI analysis. The influence of specifics as the presence of large non-urban areas, significant topography, seasonal effects, special deformation characteristics, and the size of the available data stacks on the processing are highlighted.
Android malicious application detection using permission vector and network traffic analysis

In this technology world, smartphones are greatly adopted by people due to the need of personal communication, Internet and many more requirements. Users are attracted to use the android operating system due its availability for low-cost and millions of freely available applications. The popularity of android operating system is also welcomes the attackers. Statistics have shown that, the growth of android malware is becomes double by every year. Hence android platform is more vulnerable to malwares. Researchers are proposed various models. Some of these models are completely fail to detect unseen variants of malware, while remaining models are inefficient to detect new malware families. In this paper, we briefly explain about android architecture, structure of android application and also characterized android malware based on their installation, activation and payloads types. We proposed a hybrid model to detect the malware based on permission bit-vector and network traffic. We constructed a decision tree classifier to detect the android malware. Our results show that combination of permission bit-vector and network traffic analysis is highly efficient by achieved 95.56% of detection accuracy.
Fatigue experiences in hepatocellular carcinoma patients during six weeks of stereotactic radiotherapy.

PURPOSE To compare fatigue experiences and related factors during the first 6 weeks of stereotactic radiotherapy (SRT) for liver cancer patients with and without fatigue before SRT. PATIENTS AND METHODS Subjects (n = 91) were liver cancer patients receiving SRT at two teaching hospitals in northern Taiwan. Data were collected at seven times: the week before SRT (T0) and the end of each of the first 6 weeks of SRT (T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, and T6). Study variables were fatigue intensity, fatigue interference (with patients' daily life), functional status, symptom distress, sleep disturbance, depressive status, radiation dose, stage of cancer, and selected laboratory data. RESULTS Subjects were divided at T0 into two groups by fatigue level: those without (group 1, n = 32) and with (group 2, n = 59) pretreatment fatigue distress. Patients in group 2 had higher levels of fatigue intensity and interference than did patients in group 1. Both groups had similar patterns of fatigue interference, peaking at T5. However, patterns of average fatigue intensity differed slightly. In group 2, fatigue intensity remained constant until T3 and then increased to a peak at T5. In group 1, fatigue intensity increased to a peak between T4 and T5. Generalized estimating equation analysis showed significant differences between groups in fatigue intensity and interference across 6 weeks. Examination of factors related to fatigue after SRT indicated that sleep disturbance significantly predicted both fatigue intensity and interference in group 1, but depressive status, overall symptom distress, and education level predicted fatigue intensity and interference for group 2. CONCLUSION Liver cancer patients with or without fatigue before treatment had different fatigue experiences across 6 weeks of radiation therapy. Fatigue experiences of liver cancer patients receiving SRT can be better understood through future studies exploring patients' long-term fatigue changes and responses to fatigue-management interventions.
Adaptive characterization of jitter noise in sampled high-speed signals

We estimate the root-mean-square (RMS) value of timing jitter noise in simulated signals similar to measured high-speed sampled signals. The simulated signals are contaminated by additive noise, timing jitter noise, and time shift errors. Before estimating the RMS value of the jitter noise, we align the signals (unless there are no time shift errors) based on estimates of the relative shifts from cross-correlation analysis. We compute the mean and sample variance of the aligned signals based on repeated measurements at each time sample. We estimate the derivative of the noise-free signal based, in part, on a regression spline fit to the average of the aligned signals. Our initial estimate of the RMS value of the jitter noise depends on estimated derivatives and sample variances at time samples where the magnitude of the estimated derivative exceeds a selected threshold. This initial estimate is generally biased. Using a parametric bootstrap approach, we adaptively adjust this initial estimate of the RMS value of the jitter noise based on an estimate of this bias. We apply our method to real data collected at NIST. We study how results depend on the derivative threshold.
Correlates and predictors of psychological distress among Afghan refugees in San Diego County

The psychological effects of war and resulting displacement continue to negatively impact Afghan refugees. The purpose of this study was to investigate factors that are associated with and predict psychological distress symptoms among Afghan refugees. We analyzed data from a diverse sample of 130 Afghan refugees recruited through non-random sampling in the San Diego area. Participants completed self-report questionnaires consisting of a culturally validated measure of psychological distress – the Afghan Symptom Checklist – alongside standardized measures of acculturation, social support and perceived stress. In bivariate analyses, older age, older age at migration, female gender, being widowed, having lower education, being unemployed, unable to comfortably pay monthly bills, having lower acculturation and social support, and higher levels of perceived stress were associated with psychological distress. However, only few variables – female gender, widowed, unable to comfortably pay monthly bills and perceived stress – remained significant in multivariate analysis. The findings from this study contribute to understanding the social determinants of distress that affect Afghans in exile, even after long-term resettlement in the USA. These reported outcomes support the need for continued research with Afghans, alongside the implementation of culturally relevant psychosocial interventions that emphasize prevention of post-resettlement stressors immediately upon resettlement.
SEMG De-Noising Based on the Lifting Wavelet Transform

In order to improve the surface electromyography (SEMG) pattern recognition ability of hand movement, this paper presents a de-noising method based on lifting wavelet transform. Firstly, high frequency detail coefficients of multilayer signals are obtained from original SEMG using the lifting wavelet decomposition with lifting algorithm. Then the coefficients are treated by the soft and the hard threshold method separately. Finally, a noise decreased signal is obtained through reconstructing the filtered coefficients. The de-noising experiments of standard sine adding noise signal and real SEMG are carried on. The results show that the lifting wavelet is an obvious better de-noising method compared to the first generation wavelet. In addition, the hard threshold method is more ideal for SEMG de-noising than the soft threshold method.