Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Analysis of Cognitive Radio Spectrum Sensing Methods in Communication Networks

The term DSRC which stands for Dedicated Short Range Communication, is a recent technique, that permits high data transmission in conveyance communication. Particularly, FM0 encoding and Manchester encoding schemes are adopted for DSRC standards to obtain dc balance and ensure reliability of signal. Regardless, the code variance between FM0 and Manchester restricts the designer to design a fully reusable DSRC Encoder. To overcome this limitation, Similarity Oriented Logic Simplification technique was proposed, which will result in improving the hardware utilization rate to 100% so that power and area can be reduced. Radio Frequency Identification [RFID] technology is one of the noteworthy converging technologies in this era. They are used in many fields including Logistics and Supply Chain, Race timing, Library system and so on. RFID technology can be implemented with Intelligent Transportation System, to make it applicable in Electronic Toll Collection system. For accommodating RFID in DSRC system, Miller encoding technique should be incorporated in this architecture. Miller encoding is widely used for encoding higher frequency radio signals. This project deals with the two types of encoding schemes such as FM0 and Manchester encoding that is used code the DSRC information and again encode it with miller codes for RFID communications.
An Interferometric Sensor for Monitoring Respiratory and Heart Rate of the Human Body

This paper focuses on current trends in the noninvasive biomedical monitoring of the human body using a fiber-optic interferometric sensor. An interferometric sensor encapsulated into a thin circular layer of material polyurethane (code PU430 – PH30). This used material is immune to electromagnetic interference (EMI). The sensor is primarily designed for use in electromagnetic interference environments (MRI). The monitored vital parameters of the human body are respiratory rate (RR) and heart rate (HR). The sensor was tested in a laboratory environment on the ten volunteers upon their written consent, when the subjects tested were monitored in the supine and sitting position of the body. Testing was performed towards the reference ECG and the piezoelectric respiratory belt. Based on the objective Bland-Altman analysis (for respiratory rate averaging 96.49 % and for heart rate averaging 95.64 %), the sensor may be acceptable to clinicians. (the sensor is primarily intended for monitoring not for the diagnosis).
Sequential intravenous-to-oral outpatient antibiotic therapy for MRSA bacteraemia: one step closer

Background Published guidelines call for prolonged courses of intravenous (iv) antibiotics for the treatment of MRSA bloodstream infection (BSI) to ensure eradication of deep foci and decrease relapse risk. Sequential iv-to-oral antibiotic therapy has been successfully applied to other serious infections but has not been evaluated for MRSA BSI. Objectives To compare outcomes in adults completing MRSA BSI therapy with oral versus parenteral antibiotics in the outpatient setting [oral outpatient antibiotic therapy (OOAT) versus outpatient parenteral antibiotic therapy (OPAT)]. Methods This was a single-centre, retrospective, cohort study between 2008 and 2018. The primary outcome was 90 day clinical failure (MRSA BSI recurrence, deep-seated MRSA infection or all-cause mortality). Analyses were adjusted for confounding using inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW). Results A total of 492 patients were included (70 OOAT, 422 OPAT). In general, OOAT patients had characteristics consistent with a lower risk of poor outcomes; however, after IPTW key prognostic factors were balanced. In IPTW-adjusted analysis, there was non-significant reduction in the rate of 90 day clinical failure in the OOAT group compared with the OPAT group [adjusted HR (aHR) 0.379, 95% CI 0.131-1.101]. In analyses restricted to pre-specified subgroups defined by index infection complexity and comorbidity burden, findings were consistent with the main analysis. Furthermore, OOAT patients had a significantly reduced rate of 90 day hospital readmission (aHR 0.603, 95% CI 0.388-0.937). Conclusions We provide preliminary evidence that selected patients with MRSA BSI may have at least equivalent clinical outcomes with OOAT versus OPAT and provide support to ongoing and future studies evaluating oral antibiotics for MRSA BSI.
Semantic Style Creation

Visual style transfer involves combining the content of one image with the style of another, and recent work has produced some compelling results. This paper proposes a re-lated task that requires additional system intelligence and autonomy—that of style creation . Rather than using the style of an existing source image, the goal is to have the system autonomously create a rendering style based on a simple (text-based) semantic description. Results demonstrate the system’s ability to autonomously create interesting, semantically appropriate styles that can be applied for image rendering.
On-Tree Detection and Counting of Apple Using Color Thresholding and CHT

One of the challenges in continual fruit cultivation is to approximately calculate the number of fruits on a tree. This helps to get yield estimation for different farm operation. On-tree detection and counting of apple fruits in a correct manner is a challenging task in computer vision. This work implements circular Hough transform (CHT) and colour thresholding in an iterative manner in image processing method to detect and count each apple fruit. The fruit identified by CHT which were clearly visible are preferred for early harvesting than the partially visible fruits. The methodology proposed in this paper has the capability to detect and count fully visible as well as partially visible apple fruit. The precedence of Circular Hough Transform is to detect and count overlapping fruit. The count evaluated by the proposed algorithm results in 97.70% of accuracy.
Aberrant Cerebellar–Cerebral Functional Connectivity in Children and Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder

The cerebellum, which forms widespread functional networks with many areas in the cerebral cortices and subcortical structures, is one of the brain regions most consistently reported to exhibit neuropathological features in patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, cerebellar functional connectivity (FC) studies in patients with ASD have been very sparse. Using resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) analysis, we investigated the FC of the hemispheric/vermal subregions and the dentate nucleus of the cerebellum with the cerebral regions in 36 children and adolescents [16 participants with ASD, 20 typically developing (TD) participants, age: 6–15 years]. Furthermore, an independent larger sample population (42 participants with ASD, 88 TD participants, age: 6–15 years), extracted from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) II, was included for replication. The ASD group showed significantly increased or decreased FC between “hubs” in the cerebellum and cerebral cortices, when compared with the TD group. Findings of aberrant FCs converged on the posterior hemisphere, right dentate nucleus, and posterior inferior vermis of the cerebellum. Furthermore, these aberrant FCs were found to be related to motor, executive, and socio-communicative functions in children and adolescents with ASD when we examined correlations between FC and behavioral measurements. Results from the original dataset were partially replicated in the independent larger sample population. Our findings suggest that aberrant cerebellar–cerebral FC is associated with motor, socio-communicative, and executive functions in children and adolescents with ASD. These observations improve the current knowledge regarding the neural substrates that underlie the symptoms of ASD.
Cooperative Rendezvous Protocols for Improved Performance and Overlap

With the emergence of larger multi-/many-core clusters and new areas of HPC applications, performance of large message communication is becoming more important. MPI libraries use different rendezvous protocols to perform large message communication. However, existing rendezvous protocols do not take the overall communication pattern into account or make optimal use of the Sender and the Receiver CPUs. In this work, we propose a cooperative rendezvous protocol that can provide up to 2x improvement in intra-node bandwidth and latency for large messages. We also propose designs to dynamically choose the best rendezvous protocol for each message based on the overall communication pattern. Finally, we show how these improvements can increase the overlap of intra-node communication and computation with inter-node communication and lead to application level benefits at scale. We evaluate the proposed designs on three different architectures - Intel Xeon, Knights Landing, and OpenPOWER against state-of-the-art MPI libraries including MVAPICH2 and Open MPI. Compared to existing designs, the proposed designs show benefits of up to 19% with Graph500, 16% with CoMD, and 10% with MiniGhost.
A Study of Human-Robot Copilot Systems for En-route Destination Changing

In this paper, we introduce the problem of enroute destination changing for a self-driving car, and we study the effectiveness of human-robot copilot systems as a solution. The copilot system is one in which the autonomous vehicle not only handles low-level vehicle control, but also continually monitors the intent of the human passenger in order to respond to dynamic changes in desired destination. We specifically consider a vehicle parking task, where the vehicle must respond to the user's intent to drive to and park next to a particular roadside sign board, and we study a copilot system that detects the passenger's intended destination based on gaze. We conduct a human study to investigate, in the context of our parking task, (a) if there is benefit in using a copilot system over manual driving, and (b) if copilot systems that use eye tracking to detect the intended destination have any benefit compared to those that use a more traditional, keyboard-based system. We find that the answers to both of these questions are affirmative: our copilot systems can complete the autonomous parking task more efficiently than human drivers can, and our copilot system that utilizes gaze information enjoys an increased success rate over one that utilizes typed input.
Channels of Impact: User Reviews When Quality is Dynamic and Managers Respond

We examine the effect of managerial response on consumer voice in a dynamic quality environment. We argue that, in this environment, the consumer is motivated to write reviews by, in addition to altruism, the possibility that the reviews will impact the quality of the service directly. We examine this empirically in a scenario in which reviewers receive a credible signal that the service provider is listening. Specifically, we examine the managerial response feature allowed by many review platforms. We hypothesize that managerial responses will stimulate reviewing activity and that, because managers respond more and in more detail to negative reviews, we hypothesize that managerial responses will particularly stimulate negative reviewing activity. Using a multiple-differences specification, we show that reviewing activity and particularly negative reviewing is indeed stimulated by managerial response. Our specification exploits comparison of the same hotel immediately before and after response initiation and compares a given hotels reviewing activity on sites with review response initiation to sites that do not allow managerial response.
Left ventricular end-systolic volume is a more sensitive marker of acute response to cardiac resynchronization therapy than contractility indices: insights from an experimental study

Aims There are conflicting data and no consensus on how to measure acute response to cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT). This study investigates, which contractility indices are best markers of acute CRT response. Methods and results In eight anaesthetized dogs with left bundle branch block, we measured left ventricular (LV) pressure by micromanometer and end-diastolic volume (EDV) and end-systolic volume (ESV) by sonomicrometry. Systolic function was measured as LV ejection fraction (EF), peak rate of LV pressure rise (LV dP/dtmax) and as a gold standard of contractility, LV end-systolic elastance (Ees), and volume axis intercept (V0) calculated from end-systolic pressure-volume relations (ESPVR). Responses to CRT were compared with inotropic stimulation by dobutamine. Both CRT and dobutamine caused reduction in ESV (P < 0.01) and increase in LV dP/dtmax (P < 0.05). Both interventions shifted the ESPVR upwards indicating increased contractility, but CRT which reduced V0 (P < 0.01), caused no change in Ees. Dobutamine markedly increased Ees, which is the typical response to inotropic stimulation. Preload (EDV) was decreased (P < 0.01) by CRT, and there was no change in EF. When adjusting for the reduction in preload, CRT increased EF (P = 0.02) and caused a more marked increase in LV dP/dtmax (P < 0.01). Conclusion Increased contractility by CRT could not be identified by Ees, which is a widely used reference method for contractility. Furthermore, reduction in preload by CRT attenuated improvement in contractility indices such as EF and LV dP/dtmax. These results suggest that changes in LV volume may be more sensitive markers of acute CRT response than conventional contractility indices.
Performance Analysis of GaAs PC Based DC Optical Switch in Bar State

Nowadays, the field of photonics is growing fast and creating vast opportunities in various applications such as optical communication systems, integrated optics, optical memories and optical switching elements etc.,. The optical switching devices with low communication latency, reduced coupling length and reduced power consumption become more essential for interconnection of networks in next-generation data centers. Hence, the need to design ultra-fast optical switches plays major role in photonic integrated devices and circuits. Directional Coupler (DC) based on Photonic Crystal (PC) is used to implement all optical switches. In this paper, the various existing architectural designs of optical switch using PC based directional coupler and their corresponding performance metrics are discussed in detail. Further, an attempt has been made to develop a new structural design for directional coupler optical switch by appending certain modifications in the existing design structure in order to improve its output power.
Preferences for in‐person disclosure: Patients declining telephone disclosure characteristics and outcomes in the multicenter Communication Of GENetic Test Results by Telephone study

Telephone disclosure of cancer genetic test results is noninferior to in‐person disclosure. However, how patients who prefer in‐person communication of results differ from those who agree to telephone disclosure is unclear but important when considering delivery models for genetic medicine. Patients undergoing cancer genetic testing were recruited to a multicenter, randomized, noninferiority trial (NCT01736345) comparing telephone to in‐person disclosure of genetic test results. We evaluated preferences for in‐person disclosure, factors associated with this preference and outcomes compared to those who agreed to randomization. Among 1178 enrolled patients, 208 (18%) declined randomization, largely given a preference for in‐person disclosure. These patients were more likely to be older (P = 0.007) and to have had multigene panel testing (P < 0.001). General anxiety (P = 0.007), state anxiety (P = 0.008), depression (P = 0.011), cancer‐specific distress (P = 0.021) and uncertainty (P = 0.03) were higher after pretest counseling. After disclosure of results, they also had higher general anxiety (P = 0.003), depression (P = 0.002) and cancer‐specific distress (P = 0.043). While telephone disclosure is a reasonable alternative to in‐person disclosure in most patients, some patients have a strong preference for in‐person communication. Patient age, distress and complexity of testing are important factors to consider and requests for in‐person disclosure should be honored when possible.
Efficient Spiking Neural Networks With Logarithmic Temporal Coding

A Spiking Neural Network (SNN) can be trained indirectly by first training an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with the conventional backpropagation algorithm, then converting it into an equivalent SNN. To reduce the computational cost of the resulting SNN as measured by the number of spikes, we present Logarithmic Temporal Coding (LTC), where the number of spikes used to encode an activation grows logarithmically with the activation value; and the accompanying Exponentiate-and-Fire (EF) neuron model, which only involves efficient bit-shift and addition operations. Moreover, we improve the training process of ANN to compensate for approximation errors due to LTC. Experimental results indicate that the resulting SNN achieves competitive performance in terms of classification accuracy at significantly lower computational cost than related work.
Functional Connectivity Changes of Key Regions for Motor Initiation in Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract Akinesia, a cardinal symptom of Parkinson’s disease, has been linked to abnormal activation in putamen and posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC). However, little is known whether clinical severity of akinesia is linked to dysfunctional connectivity of these regions. Using a seed-based approach, we here investigated resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) of putamen, pMFC and primary motor cortex (M1) in 60 patients with Parkinson’s disease on regular medication and 72 healthy controls. We found that in patients putamen featured decreases of connectivity for a number of cortical and subcortical areas engaged in sensorimotor and cognitive processing. In contrast, the pMFC showed reduced connectivity with a more focal cortical network involved in higher-level motor-cognition. Finally, M1 featured a selective disruption of connectivity in a network specifically connected with M1. Correlating clinical impairment with connectivity changes revealed a relationship between akinesia and reduced RSFC between pMFC and left intraparietal lobule (IPL). Together, the present study demonstrated RSFC decreases in networks for motor initiation and execution in Parkinson’s disease. Moreover, results suggest a relationship between pMFC-IPL decoupling and the manifestation of akinetic symptoms.
Monitoring and Warning System for the Elderly: A Case Study of Cardiac Arrhythmias

Thailand is experiencing an ageing population due to declining fertility rates and rising life expectancy pushing up the age median of the country. With the trend of ageing population continuing to the future, it is important for the long-term planning of the country to plan infrastructure to support the ageing society. One of the domains in which attention should be focused on is on healthcare, where increasing numbers of elderly patients will overload and challenge the existing healthcare system. Without change, it is likely that the existing system will not be capable of supporting the elderly population of the future. The research focuses on a condition called, cardiac arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeat. This condition can be a symptom of heart defect, constant monitoring is required for the patient. This research proposes a monitoring and warning system for cardiac arrhythmias, in which uses technology to help reduce the amount of medical manpower required. To increase the adoption rates, the acceptance framework for the elderly, including the components of the early warning system proposed by the United Nations, has been applied in the design of the proposed system. The system will monitor the Electrocardiogram (ECG) values, provide monitoring utilities, graphing ECG history, and includes a warning system that can automatically alert caregivers via SMS and call when an abnormal ECG status has been detected. Hence, enable the caregiver to help the elderly in emergency situations.
Fusion of Infrared and Visible Images through a Hybrid Image Decomposition and Sparse Representation

Aiming at the fusion of the infrared and visible images, a novel image fusion framework based on hybrid image decomposition and sparse representation is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the Gaussian and guided filters are used to decompose the source images into the small-scale texture details, large-scale edge and coarse-scale image information. The main infrared features are maintained in the large-scale edge information, which are used to determine the fused weights for the coarse-scale information. The sparse representation based fusion method is adopted for the fusion of the small-scale texture details and large-scale edge information, which makes the final fused image can effectively highlight the infrared targets, while preserving the texture details of the visible images as much as possible. So, the fused image is more consistent with the human visual perception effect. Experimental results show that method is superior to the currently used popular image fusion methods.
A Low-Complexity Autonomous 3D Localization Method for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by Binocular Stereovision Technology

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) boast for their small size, low cost, flexible maneuverability and good stealth, and are thus widely used in geological survey, target tracking and other fields. Without the expensive and bulky precision inertial navigation equipments, UAV could be difficult to localize during its course of flight because barely no global positioning system (GPS) signals can be detected. In order to address these issues, an autonomous three-dimensional (3D) localization method for UAV based on binocular stereovision technology is proposed in this conference paper. First, the optical principle of binocular stereovision technology and the estimation algorithm for the distance between the camera and the target are introduced. Then, both the least-squares (LS) and the least mean square (LMS) methods are applied in the localization algorithm. The complexities of both methods are calculated and compared. Simulation results validate that the proposed UAV autonomous 3D positioning method based on LMS has high positioning accuracy, strong universality and low complexity.
Thought Process Based Team Member Selection Using Contextual Sentiment Closeness

It is the teamwork that makes projects, companies and teams successful. Person alone is constrained by limitations. Even people with no shared thought processes and conflicting opinions cannot work together. Project undertaken by such teams lead to disastrous outcomes. Can two persons work together effectively? Can we determine and associate thought process to form effective groups? This paper focuses on determining thought process association of two persons to find out whether they can work together. This paper finds out closeness between responses by two individuals with reference to given context to determine whether they can work together in given scenario. The paper proposes contextual sentiment closeness (CSC) algorithm for the same. The algorithm further uses scenario pointer based reinforcement learning where team members collect thought process based rewards and penalties. Temporal Difference learning based approach calculates the maximum possible rewards and even suggest certain modifications required if any. This approach can help in selection of members for mission, projects and any critical activity. The selection based on responses compared with human selection on 200 samples and it gave over 81% accuracy.