Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neural Grasp Distance Fields for Robot Manipulation

We formulate grasp learning as a neural field and present Neural Grasp Distance Fields (NGDF). Here, the input is a 6D pose of a robot end effector and output is a distance to a continuous manifold of valid grasps for an object. In contrast to current approaches that predict a set of discrete candidate grasps, the distance-based NGDF representation is easily interpreted as a cost, and minimizing this cost produces a successful grasp pose. This grasp distance cost can be incorporated directly into a trajectory optimizer for joint optimization with other costs such as trajectory smoothness and collision avoidance. During optimization, as the various costs are balanced and minimized, the grasp target is allowed to smoothly vary, as the learned grasp field is continuous. We evaluate NGDF on joint grasp and motion planning in simulation and the real world, outperforming baselines by 63 % execution success while generalizing to unseen query poses and unseen object shapes. Project page: https://sites.google. com/view/neural-grasp-distance-fields.
DRAFT Preliminary Results : Please do not quote . Evaluating the Impact of Transport Costs in Latin America

Applying a multi-region, recursive dynamic general equilibrium model, this study evaluates the impact of a reduction of trade transport costs in Latin America, which are now considered as a significant impediment to trade. The novelty of this study is three-fold. First, the model applies very rigorous and precise estimates of ad valorem transport costs and relevant elasticity of substitution on trade for Latin America (Moreira, Volpe and Blyde: 2008). Second, it accommodates the concept of the “effective price and quantity”, introduced by Hertel, Walmsley and Itakura (2001). The simulation results on trade are fairly consistent with the econometric estimates (Moreira, Volpe and Blyde: 2008). Third, the model, which is built on the updated 2008 new SAMs, traces growth trajectories and captures the time-path dynamic and cumulative effects. The simulation results show very promising and strong gains due to reducing transport costs. A 10-percent reduction of transport costs in Latin America would increase the region’s real GDP by more than 2 percent. The impact on trade is more dynamic. The intra-regional exports jump by 22 percent, equivalent to $33.8 billion at 2008 prices. But reflecting the initial heterogeneity in the structure of transport costs, the positive impact is fairly asymmetric over sectors and countries. The simulation results also show that an improvement of transport infrastructure is by far an effective policy option to foster growth and trade than tariffs do: in terms of real GDP, it generates 10 times greater gains, and 4.5 times larger effects on trade.
Automated Logging Drone: A Computer Vision Drone Implementation

In recent years, Artiﬁcial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) have become the pinnacle of technology with new developments seemingly every day. This technology along with more powerful drone technology have made autonomous surveillance more sought after. Here an overview of the Automated Logging Drone (ALD) project is presented along with examples of how this project can be used with more reﬁning and added features.
The Enabling or Constraining Formalization of Innovation Process Controls? A Story in the Eye of the Beholder

Formal control mechanisms may both enable and constrain organizational innovation processes. Yet prior research provides little understanding of how organizational actors come to perceive formal control mechanisms as either enabling or constraining for organizational innovation. In a two-year field study of a specialty chemicals producer’s change trajectory involving the formalization of the innovation process and the crafting of innovation roles, we elaborate theory on the emergence and implications of organizational formalization. We find that whether organizational actors perceive formalization as enabling or constraining is contingent on the degree to which they adapt their roles to the emerging control mechanisms. Our findings further show that ambiguities arising from the creation and modification of innovation roles invite organizational actors to actively involve in shaping formal control mechanisms. This active shaping become a means for organizational actors to craft their new roles. Synthesizing these findings, we develop a theoretical model of how the creation and modification of roles triggers organizational actors’ agency for the creation of new formal structures. Our work contributes to the theoretical understanding of organizational formalization processes and has important implications for designing enabling controls for innovation.
Pedagogy Enhancement with Mobile Learning : A Case Study of the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce

This paper shares a success story of the planning, development, and evaluation of a hybrid learning pedagogy, called iHybrid, adopted at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC), one of leading private universities in Thailand. The university deployed a cloud-based learning platform, which has accommodated the 21st century learning concept that everyone can learn anything, anytime, anywhere via mobile devices. Since 2011, all new students were given an iPad and are able to access three online resource pools including ELearning System, Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle) and iTunes U. Currently, 410 lecturers (80%) and more than 10,000 students (60%) have joined the iHybrid program. Drawing on both CTE perspectives and student feedback, the paper describes successful transformation process, proposes an iHybrid framework and a learning model, reports adoption results, assimilates success factors, discusses some issues, and assesses the implications for future offerings of all courses through the iHybrid mode. Keywords—Pedagogy Enhancement; M-Learning; Case Study; Blended Learning; iTunes U; iPad, UTCC.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Activity as a Mediator Between Users and Their Auditory Environment in an Urban Pocket

Citation for published version (APA): Bild, E. , Steele, D. , Pfeffer, K. , Bertolini, L. , & Guastavino, C. (2018). Activity as a Mediator Between Users and Their Auditory Environment in an Urban Pocket Park: A Case Study of Parc du Portugal (Montreal, Canada). In F. Aletta, & J. Xiao (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Perception-Driven Approaches to Urban Assessment and Design (pp. 100-125). (Advances in Civil and Industrial Engineering). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-3637-6.ch005
WP / 19 / 43 Sovereigns and Financial Intermediaries Spillovers

We examine the spillover effects between sovereigns and banks in a model with a heterogeneous banking system. An increase in sovereign’s default risk affects financial intermediaries through two channels in this model. First, banks’ funding costs might increase, inducing higher interest rates on loans and bonds and a cut back in these assets. Second, financial regulator’s risk-weighted asset framework would assign higher weights to lower quality assets, implying a portfolio rebalancing and more deleveraging. While capital adequacy requirements weaken the impact of shocks emerging from the real economy, they amplify the effect of shocks on banks’ balance sheets. JEL Classification Numbers: H63, F34, G15
WP / 19 / 100 Discriminatory Pricing of Over-the-Counter Derivatives by

New regulatory data reveal extensive price discrimination against non-financial clients in the FX derivatives market. The client at the 90th percentile pays an effective spread of 0.5%, while the bottom quarter incur transaction costs of less than 0.02%. Consistent with models of search frictions in over-the-counter markets, dealers charge higher spreads to less sophisticated clients. However, price discrimination is eliminated when clients trade through multi-dealer request-for-quote platforms. We also document that dealers extract rents from captive clients and market opacity, but only for contracts negotiated bilaterally with unsophisticated clients. This version: May 7th 2019. First version: December 15, 2017. JEL Codes: G14, G18, D4
How does mindfulness modulate self-regulation in preadolescent children? Kaunhoven, Rebekah; Dorjee, Dusana Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews

Pre-adolescence is a key developmental period in which complex intrinsic volitional methods of selfregulation are acquired as a result of rapid maturation within the brain networks underlying the self-regulatory processes of attention control and emotion regulation. Fostering adaptive self-regulation skills during this stage of development has strong implications for physical health, emotional and socioeconomic outcomes during adulthood. There is a growing interest in mindfulness-based programmes for pre-adolescents with initial findings suggesting self-regulation improvements, however, neurodevelopmental studies on mindfulness with pre-adolescents are scarce. This analytical review outlines an integrative neuro-developmental approach, which combines self-report and behavioural assessments with event related brain potentials (ERPs) to provide a systemic multilevel understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms of mindfulness in pre-adolescence. We specifically focus on the N2, error related negativity (ERN), error positivity (Pe), P3a, P3b and late positive potential (LPP) ERP components as indexes of mindfulness related modulations in non-volitional bottom-up self-regulatory ttention control
Binding German ( i n ) direct o bjects : Spell-Out s trategies for d isambiguation

Despite Grewendorf’s (1988) well-known German binding data with the double-object verb zeigen ‘show’, which suggests that the direct object (DO) is generated higher than the indirect object (IO), this paper argues for the canonical surface order of IO>DO as base order. Highlighting the exceptional status of Grewendorf's examples, building on Featherston & Sternefeld’s (2003) quantitative acceptability rating study, and exploiting the fact that zeigen can also be used as inherently reflexive with idiomatic meaning, and we appeal to Bruening's (2010) theory of idiom formation as well as the Encyclopedia within Distributed Morphology (Marantz 1997, Embick & Noyer 2007) and propose a flexible SpellOut mechanism within a derivational approach to binding (e.g. Hornstein 2001 and Zwart 2002) that can override narrow syntactic case licensing by realizing nominals with different morphological case.
Safe Real-World Autonomous Driving by Learning to Predict and Plan with a Mixture of Experts

The goal of autonomous vehicles is to navigate public roads safely and comfortably. To enforce safety, traditional planning approaches rely on handcrafted rules to generate trajectories. Machine learning-based systems, on the other hand, scale with data and are able to learn more complex behaviors. However, they often ignore that agents and self-driving vehicle trajectory distributions can be leveraged to improve safety. In this paper, we propose modeling a distribution over multiple future trajectories for both the self-driving vehicle and other road agents, using a unified neural network architecture for prediction and planning. During inference, we select the planning trajectory that minimizes a cost taking into account safety and the predicted probabilities. Our approach does not depend on any rule-based planners for trajectory generation or optimization, improves with more training data and is simple to implement. We extensively evaluate our method through a realistic simulator and show that the predicted trajectory distribution corresponds to different driving profiles. We also successfully deploy it on a self-driving vehicle on urban public roads, confirming that it drives safely without compromising comfort. The code for training and testing our model on a public prediction dataset and the video of the road test are available at https://woven.mobi/safepathnet.
Relationship between PaO 2 / FiO 2 and number of regions with B-line on transthoracic lung ultrasound : a prospective , observational study

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Copyright c the Korean Society of Anesthesiologists, 2019 K S C V A Relationship between PaO2/FiO2 and number of regions with B-line on transthoracic lung ultrasound: a prospective, observational study Jae Chul Koh, Jung Hwa Hong, Tae Dong Kweon, Ju Yeon Park, Eunji Ko, and Ji Young Kim
Psychosocial Studies of the Individual’s Changing Perspectives in Alzheimer’s Disease

Dyfyniad o'r fersiwn a gyhoeddwyd / Citation for published version (APA): Toms, G. , Lawrence, C. , & Clare, L. (2015). Awareness, Self, and the Experience of Dementia: Foundations of a Psychologically Minded Approach. In C. Dick-Muehlke, & R. Li (Eds.), Psychosocial Studies of the Individual's Changing Perspectives in Alzheimer's Disease (First ed., pp. 132-158). ( Advances in Psychology, Mental Health, and Behavioral Studies (Apmhba) Book). Pennsylvania: IGI Global.
4 Advances in Streamflow Prediction : A Multimodel Statistical Approach for Application on Water Resources Management

The growing demand for urban water users, industrial, environmental and agricultural, makes the task of managing water resources is becoming more complex. Obtaining accurate simulations and forecasting of water availability is a key step in efficient planning, operation and management of these resources. This is the reason because the development of reliable surface water flow forecasting methods for real-time operational water resources management becomes increasingly important. Because of this, in recent years, interest in predictability of river discharge variability has increased markedly in most of the world regions. The hydrological system acts as spatial and temporal integrator of precipitation (rain and snow), temperature, and related evapotranspiration over a specific region. Therefore, seasonal to decadal streamflow variability in many large river-basins can be controlled by corresponding changes in large scale atmospheric circulation patterns. The relationship between these climatic regimes and its hydrological response, through its streamflow, presents different grades of complexity according to the physical characteristics of the basin. Nevertheless, streamflow can be better related with important patterns of climate teleconnections than precipitation or temperature fields, since variations in precipitation are amplified in streamflow, and in general, it is easier to detect a change in discharge than directly in the basic climatic variables (Dettinger & Diaz, 2000; Trigo et al., 2004). On seasonal timescales, anomalous atmospheric conditions are often linked with seasonal variations in the rivers streamflow and reservoir storages, via variations in precipitation and temperature (Dettinger & Diaz, 2000; Cullen et al., 2002; Trigo et al., 2004). The interannual climate and hydrologic fluctuations are modulated by, or superimposed upon, lower frequency variations with decadal and longer time scales. The sources of these lower frequency climate variations are uncertain but may have roots in the tropics (Trenberth & Hoar, 1996), in the extratropical oceans (Pacific: Latif & Barnett, 1994; Atlantic: Deser & Blackmon, 1993; Tanimoto et al., 1993; Houghton, 1996), or in some interplay of the two (e.g., Graham et al., 1994; Jacobs et al., 1994). Usually, the skill of the long-range forecasts is associated with the introduction of predictors that represent the slow varying components of the climate system such as sea surface temperatures (SST) (Koster et al., 2010). Consequently, variability in SST can help provide predictive information about the
Calculation and Analysis of an Analytical Model for Magnetic Field Monitoring Based on TREE in Eddy Current Testing

─ In this work, theoretical model for magnetic field monitoring rather than traditional detection of coil impedance is investigated and analyzed. The truncated region eigenfunction expansion (TREE) method [1] offers analytical expressions by truncating the solution region to a finite length, so magnetic field can be derived in a series of proper eigenfunctions instead of the integral form, as it traditionally happens. The influences of truncation interval h, the number of summation n and excitation current frequency f on magnetic field above conductive plate for the model accuracy are estimated. The comparison of the results obtained between theoretical calculation and the finite element method shows excellent agreement under certain conditions. An applicative example is presented to assess the proposed theory to different conductor problem using the eddy current field derived by the analytical solution. The analytical model can be beneficial for analysis, parametric studies and development of eddy current testing system. Index Terms ─ Analytical model, eddy current testing, finite element method, magnetic field.
AGeneral Approximation Scheme for Solutions of Various Problems in Fixed Point Theory

It is our aim to prove strong convergence of a new iterative sequence to a common element of the solution set of a generalizedmixed equilibriumproblem; the null space of an inverse stronglymonotone operator; the set of common�xed points of a countable in�nite family of nonexpansive mappings; and the set of �xed points of a continuous pseudocontractive mapping. �oreover, the common element is also a unique solution of a variational inequality problem and optimality condition for a certain minimization problem. Our theorems generalize, improve, and unify several recently announced results.
M L ] 1 J an 2 01 8 Dynamic Pricing in High-dimensions

We study the pricing problem faced by a firm that sells a large number of products, described via a wide range of features, to customers that arrive over time. Customers independently make purchasing decisions according to a general choice model that includes products features and customers’ characteristics, encoded as d-dimensional numerical vectors, as well as the price offered. The parameters of the choice model are a priori unknown to the firm, but can be learned as the (binary-valued) sales data accrues over time. The firm’s objective is to minimize the regret, i.e., the expected revenue loss against a clairvoyant policy that knows the parameters of the choice model in advance, and always offers the revenue-maximizing price. This setting is motivated in part by the prevalence of online marketplaces that allow for real-time pricing. We assume a structured choice model, parameters of which depend on s0 out of the d product features. We propose a dynamic policy, called Regularized Maximum Likelihood Pricing (RMLP) that leverages the (sparsity) structure of the high-dimensional model and obtains a logarithmic regret in T . More specifically, the regret of our algorithm is of O(s0 log d · logT ). Furthermore, we show that no policy can obtain regret better than O(s0(log d+ logT )).
EFFECTIVENESS OF WEB AND COMPUTER-BASED CVD / T 2 DM INTERVENTIONS ON HEALTH BEHAVIOURS : AN UMBRELLA REVIEW

s on life sciences and biomedical topics. It comprises more than 28 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. It is maintained by National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). • Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR): (http://www.cochranelibrary.com/) CDSR is the collection of databases in medical research provided by Cochrane and other organisations. In its essence, it is a database of systematic reviews and meta-analyses which summarise and interpret the results in the healthcare field.
Diameter of the target artery and bypass 1 The ratio of diameters between the target artery and the bypass modifies hemodynamic parameters related to intimal hyperplasia in the distal end-to-side anastomosis Type of manuscript :

Background. Hemodynamics in the distal end-to-side anastomosis is related to early development of intimal hyperplasia and bypass failure. In this study we investigated the effect of diameter ratios between the target artery and the bypass at three different angles of the connection. Methods. The pulsatile flow field was visualized using particle image velocimetry in transparent models with three different angles of the connection (25°, 45°, 60°) and the diameter ratio between the bypass and the target artery was 4.6mm:6mm, 6mm:6mm, and 7.5mm:6mm. Six parameters including location and oscillation of the stagnation point, local energy dissipation, wall shear stress (WSS), oscillatory shear index, spatial and temporal gradient of WSS and their distribution in the target artery were calculated from the flow field. Results. In the wider bypass, the stagnation point oscillated in a greater range and was located more proximal to the anastomosis. Energy dissipation was minimal in a wider bypass with a more acute angle. The maximum WSS values were tree times greater in a narrow bypass and concentrated in a smaller circular region at the floor of the anastomosis. The oscillatory shear index increased with wider bypass and more acute angle. The maximum of spatial gradient of WSS concentrated around the floor and toe of the anastomosis and decreased with more acute angle and wider bypass, the temporal gradient of WSS was stretched more towards the side wall. Conclusion. Greater bypass to target vessel ratio and more acute anastomosis angle promote hemodynamics known to reduce formation of intimal hyperplasia.
Understanding Eco-Innovation Evolution : A Patent Analysis in the Energy Field Vito Albino

Eco-innovations are being recognized as fundamental means to foster sustainable development, as well as to create new business opportunities. Nowadays, the eco-innovation concept is gaining ground within both academic and practitioner studies, with the attempt to better understand the main dynamics underlying its nature and guide policy makers and companies in supporting their development. This paper contributes to extant literature on eco-innovation by providing a comprehensive and unique overview of the evolution of a specific type of eco-innovations that are playing a crucial role in the current socio-economic agenda, namely low-carbon energy technologies. Specifically, we focus our attention on the patenting activity of different countries and organizations over time, as well as on related policy initiatives. Accordingly, we collected 131,801 patents granted at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (U.S.PTO) from 1946 to 2010, and belonging to the ? Nuclear power generation? , ? Alternative energy production? , and ? Energy conservation? technological classes, as indicated by the International Patent Classification (IPC) Green Inventory. Our findings report patterns of distribution of low-carbon energy technologies? evolution, as well as major related environmental programs explaining the evolutionary trends, hence revealing how different events and needs have influenced these eco-innovations? development.