Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Motion tasks for robot manipulators on embedded 2-D manifolds

In this paper we present a methodology to drive the end effector of a robotic manipulator across the surface of an object in the workspace. Three typical tasks are considered, namely stabilization of the end effector over the object's surface, motion planning and eventually trajectory tracking of the end effector across the object's surface. The proposed controllers utilize navigation functions and are based on the belt zone vector fields concept. The derived dynamic controllers are realized using an integrator backstepping methodology. The derived feedback based controllers guarantee global convergence and collision avoidance. The closed form solution provides fast feedback rendering the methodology particularly suitable for implementation on real time systems. The properties of the proposed methodology are verified through non-trivial computer simulations
Multiple Load-Source Integration in a Multilevel Modular Capacitor Clamped DC-DC Converter Featuring Fault Tolerant Capability

A multilevel modular capacitor clamped dc-dc converter (MMCCC) will be presented in this paper with some of its advantageous features. By virtue of the modular nature of the converter, it is possible to integrate multiple loads and sources to the converter at the same time. The modular construction of the MMCCC topology provides transformer like taps in the circuit, and depending on the conversion ratio of the converter, it becomes possible to connect several dc sources and loads at these taps. The modularity of the new converter is not limited to this transformer like operation, but also provides redundancy and fault bypass capability in the circuit. Using the modularity feature, some redundant modules can be operated in bypass state, and during any fault, these redundant modules can be used to replace a faulty module to maintain an uninterrupted operation. Thus, this MMCCC topology could be a solution to establish a power management system among multiple sources and loads having different operating voltages.
PACS et mariages en France : une analyse économique

Cette these porte sur les impacts economiques du pacs et du mariage en France. Elle s'articule autour de trois axes. Le chapitre 2 evalue l'impact de la fiscalite sur le nombre de pacs contractes en France. Le chapitre 3 cherche a determiner si le pacs se substitue au mariage en etudiant l'evolution des taux de mariage et de l'âge au premier mariage depuis la mise en place du pacs in 1999. Le chapitre 4 s'interroge sur l'impact economique du mariage en evaluant l'effet du mariage sur les contraintes de credit des couples. Si la fiscalite a joue un role indeniable dans la progression du nombre de pacs contractes chaque annee en France, celui-ci ne semble pas avoir augmente au detriment du mariage, dont l'evolution recente prolonge la modification du paysage matrimonial observee depuis 25 ans, a savoir une baisse des taux de mariage et un recul de l'âge au premier mariage. Si la baisse du nombre de mariages contractes, associee au developpement de la cohabitation hors mariage introduit une distinction entre couples non-maries et couples maries, ces derniers ont plus souvent des projets d'investissement mais ils ne sont pas pour autant avantages sur le marche du credit. Ils souffrent de plus mauvaises conditions d'emprunt, traduisant une selection dans le mariage des couples les plus enclins a investir.
Partially observable Markov decision processes with reward information

In a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), if the reward can be observed at each step, then the observed reward history contains information for the unknown state. This information, in addition to the information contained in the observation history, can be used to update the state probability distribution. The policy thus obtained is called a reward-information policy (RI-policy); an optimal RI policy performs no worse than any normal optimal policy depending only on the observation history. The above observation leads to four different problem-formulations for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) depending on whether the reward function is known and whether the reward at each step is observable.
Comparison of Interpolating Functions and Interpolating Points in Full-Wave Multilevel Green's Function Interpolation Method

The difficulty for the solution of full-wave electromagnetic problems using multilevel Green's function interpolation method (MLGFIM) lies in applying interpolating approaches to efficiently and accurately approximate Green's function with rapidly changing phase term. We compare various interpolating schemes when radial basis function (RBF) is employed for the interpolation of scattered data of Green's function. We show that the infinitely smooth Gaussian (GA) RBF has the best interpolation accuracy. In order to improve the interpolation efficiency, a new kind of staggered Tartan grid is proposed. A good calculation method for the shape parameter in GA RBF is given to solve its sensitivity to the group size and the number of interpolation points. Based on the analysis of variation of the number of interpolation points with electric length of the group, adaptive choice of the types of interpolation functions and interpolation points are employed. Numerical examples show that the computational efficiency of this new interpolation scheme is much improved over the previously reported ones.
A Simple and Robust Equal-Power Transmit Diversity Scheme

Spatial diversity techniques are now used in most wireless communications systems to improve robustness to signal fading. On the downlink of cellular systems, low-cost requirements of the user terminal tend to favor transmit diversity over receive diversity, and Alamouti's transmit diversity technique appears today in most wireless communications systems standards. But in terms of the total transmit power, Alamouti's technique loses 3 dB with respect to optimum transmit diversity which requires perfect Channel State Information (CSI) at the transmitter. In this paper, we introduce a simple transmit diversity technique that relies on simple power measurements at the receiver which comes very close to optimum transmit diversity performance when assuming perfect CSI is available at the transmitter while relaxing the transmit power requirements by 3 dB. In this technique, the same power is transmitted from the two antennas and the phase difference of the signals received from the two channels is constrained to be smaller than π/N, where N is a predefined parameter. Its performance is studied in narrowband fading channels, in OFDM systems operating on frequency-selective channels, and in the presence of channel estimation errors.
Execution-driven simulation of a superscalar processor

Describes an accurate and efficient simulator for a superscalar processor, the IBM RISC System/6000. This simulator was developed to obtain timing estimates for the execution of programs in an execution-driven simulation system. The simulator uses a new technique called in situ profiling, and a simplified runtime model of the RS/6000 processor to obtain dynamic timing estimates. The runtime model simulates the functional units of the processor as well as the data cache. It incorporates a novel approach to simulate the synchronization of the fixed-point and floating-point units which allows accurate timing predictions at relatively low cost. The time estimates produced by the profiler are typically within 5% of the measured times for a variety of programs. <<ETX>>
Coordinated beamforming for the multicell multi-antenna wireless system

In a conventional wireless cellular system, signal processing is performed on a per-cell basis; out-of-cell interference is treated as background noise. This paper considers the benefit of coordinating base-stations across multiple cells in a multi-antenna beamforming system, where multiple base-stations may jointly optimize their respective beamformers to improve the overall system performance. Consider a multicell downlink scenario where base-stations are equipped with multiple transmit antennas employing either linear beamforming or nonlinear dirty-paper coding, and where remote users are equipped with a single antenna each, but where multiple remote users may be active simultaneously in each cell. This paper focuses on the design criteria of minimizing either the total weighted transmitted power or the maximum per-antenna power across the base-stations subject to signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) constraints at the remote users. The main contribution of the paper is an efficient algorithm for finding the joint globally optimal beamformers across all base-stations. The proposed algorithm is based on a generalization of uplink-downlink duality to the multicell setting using the Lagrangian duality theory. An important feature is that it naturally leads to a distributed implementation in time-division duplex (TDD) systems. Simulation results suggest that coordinating the beamforming vectors alone already provide appreciable performance improvements as compared to the conventional per-cell optimized network.
Database resources of the National Center for Biotechnology Information

Eric W. Sayers, Tanya Barrett, Dennis A. Benson, Stephen H. Bryant, Kathi Canese, Vyacheslav Chetvernin, Deanna M. Church, Michael DiCuccio, Ron Edgar, Scott Federhen, Michael Feolo, Lewis Y. Geer, Wolfgang Helmberg, Yuri Kapustin, David Landsman, David J. Lipman, Thomas L. Madden, Donna R. Maglott, Vadim Miller, Ilene Mizrachi, James Ostell, Kim D. Pruitt, Gregory D. Schuler, Edwin Sequeira, Stephen T. Sherry, Martin Shumway, Karl Sirotkin, Alexandre Souvorov, Grigory Starchenko, Tatiana A. Tatusova, Lukas Wagner, Eugene Yaschenko and Jian Ye
Modular High-Power Shunt-Interleaved Drive System: A Realization up to 35 MW for Oil & Gas Applications

The paper describes experimental results of a medium-voltage, modular, 35 MW drive for oil & gas applications realized by interconnecting voltage-source three-level converters equally sharing the motor current. Drives rated for tens of Megawatts are increasingly needed as torque helpers for gas turbines in the oil & gas industry and one envisions that they will replace them completely in the future. These drives must be very reliable, often capable of reversible power flow and high power quality when connected to weak grids in remote areas. The pronounced torsional eigenmodes of large compressors and gas turbines demand for very low torque harmonic content.
Positively Selected Effector Genes and Their Contribution to Virulence in the Smut Fungus Sporisorium reilianum

Plants and fungi display a broad range of interactions in natural and agricultural ecosystems ranging from symbiosis to parasitism. These ecological interactions result in coevolution between genes belonging to different partners. A well-understood example are secreted fungal effector proteins and their host targets, which play an important role in pathogenic interactions. Biotrophic smut fungi (Basidiomycota) are well-suited to investigate the evolution of plant pathogens, because several reference genomes and genetic tools are available for these species. Here, we used the genomes of Sporisorium reilianum f. sp. zeae and S. reilianum f. sp. reilianum, two closely related formae speciales infecting maize and sorghum, respectively, together with the genomes of Ustilago hordei, Ustilago maydis and Sporisorium scitamineum to identify and characterize genes displaying signatures of positive selection. We identified 154 gene families having undergone positive selection during species divergence in at least one lineage, among which 77% were identified in the two investigated formae speciales of S. reilianum. Remarkably, only 29% of positively selected genes encode predicted secreted proteins. We assessed the contribution to virulence of nine of these candidate effector genes in S. reilianum f. sp. zeae by deleting individual genes, including a homologue of the effector gene pit2 previously characterized in U. maydis. Only the pit2 deletion mutant was found to be strongly reduced in virulence. Additional experiments are required to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the selection forces acting on the other candidate effector genes, as well as the large fraction of positively selected genes encoding predicted cytoplasmic proteins.
End-to-End Rate-Distortion Optimized MD Mode Selection for Multiple Description Video Coding

Multiple description (MD) video coding can be used to reduce the detrimental effects caused by transmission over lossy packet networks. A number of approaches have been proposed for MD coding, where each provides a different tradeoff between compression efficiency and error resilience. How effectively each method achieves this tradeoff depends on the network conditions as well as on the characteristics of the video itself. This paper proposes an adaptive MD coding approach which adapts to these conditions through the use of adaptive MD mode selection. The encoder in this system is able to accurately estimate the expected end-to-end distortion, accounting for both compression and packet loss-induced distortions, as well as for the bursty nature of channel losses and the effective use of multiple transmission paths. With this model of the expected end-to-end distortion, the encoder selects between MD coding modes in a rate-distortion (R-D) optimized manner to most effectively tradeoff compression efficiency for error resilience. We show how this approach adapts to both the local characteristics of the video and network conditions and demonstrates the resulting gains in performance using an H.264-based adaptive MD video coder.
Different Compartmentation of Responses to Brain Natriuretic Peptide and C-Type Natriuretic Peptide in Failing Rat Ventricle

We previously found a negative inotropic (NIR) and positive lusitropic response (LR) to C-type natriuretic peptide (CNP) in the failing heart ventricle. In this study, we investigated and compared the functional responses to the natriuretic peptides (NPs), brain (BNP) and C-type natriuretic peptide (CNP), and relate them to cGMP regulation and effects on downstream targets. Experiments were conducted in left ventricular muscle strips and ventricular cardiomyocytes from Wistar rats with heart failure 6 weeks after myocardial infarction. As opposed to CNP, BNP did not cause an NIR or LR, despite increasing cGMP levels. The BNP-induced cGMP elevation was mainly and markedly regulated by phosphodiesterase (PDE) 2 and was only marginally increased by PDE3 or PDE5 inhibition. Combined PDE2, -3, and -5 inhibition failed to reveal any functional responses to BNP, despite an extensive cGMP elevation. BNP decreased, whereas CNP increased, the amplitude of the Ca2+ transient. BNP did not increase phospholamban (PLB) or troponin I (TnI) phosphorylation, Ca2+ extrusion rate constant, or sarcoplasmatic reticulum Ca2+ load, whereas CNP did. Both BNP and CNP reduced the peak of the L-type Ca2+ current. Cyclic GMP elevations by BNP and CNP in cardiomyocytes were additive, and the presence of BNP did not alter the NIR to CNP or the CNP-induced PLB and TnI phosphorylation. However, a small increase in the LR to maximal CNP was observed in the presence of BNP. In conclusion, different responses to cGMP generated by BNP and CNP suggest different compartmentation of the cGMP signal and different roles of the two NPs in the failing heart.
MDG: measurement-driven guidelines for 802.11 WLAN design

Dense deployments of WLANs suffer from increased interference and as a result, reduced capacity. There are three main functions used to improve the overall network capacity: a) intelligent frequency allocation across APs, b) load-balancing of user affiliations across APs, and c) adaptive power-control for each AP. Several algorithms have been proposed in each category, but so far, their evaluation has been limited to: (a) each approach in isolation and, (b)simulations or small-scale testbeds. In this paper, we ask the question: what is the best way to combine these different functions? Our focus is to fully explore the interdependencies between the three functions in order to understand when and how to deploy them on a network. We follow a measurement-driven study to quantify the effects of three previously proposed optimization schemes (one for each category) on a relatively large testbed and in many different scenarios. Surprisingly, we find that blindly applying all the three optimization schemes is not always preferable; it can sometimes degrade the performance by as much as 24% compared to using only two of the schemes. We discover that there are explicit conditions that are conducive for applying specific combinations of the optimization schemes. We capture those conditions within a comprehensive framework, which we call MDG (Measurement-Driven Guidelines). While we derive suchguidelines based on measurements on one experimental testbed, we test their applicability and efficacy on a second testbed in a different location. We show that our framework improves network capacity consistently acrossboth testbeds, with improvements ranging from 22% to 142% with 802.11a, and 103% to 274% with 802.11g.
Medical humanities and their discontents: definitions, critiques, and implications.

The humanities offer great potential for enhancing professional and humanistic development in medical education. Yet, although many students report benefit from exposure to the humanities in their medical education, they also offer consistent complaints and skepticism. The authors offer a pedagogical definition of the medical humanities, linking it to medicine as a practice profession. They then explore three student critiques of medical humanities curricula: (1) the content critique, examining issues of perceived relevance and intellectual bait-and-switch, (2) the teaching critique, which examines instructor trustworthiness and perceived personal intrusiveness, and (3) the structural/placement critique, or how and when medical humanities appear in the curriculum. Next, ways are suggested to tailor medical humanities to better acknowledge and reframe the needs of medical students. These include ongoing cross-disciplinary reflective practices in which intellectual tools of the humanities are incorporated into educational activities to help students examine and, at times, contest the process, values, and goals of medical practice. This systematic, pervasive reflection will organically lead to meaningful contributions from the medical humanities in three specific areas of great interest to medical educators: professionalism, "narrativity," and educational competencies. Regarding pedagogy, the implications of this approach are an integrated required curriculum and innovative concepts such as "applied humanities scholars. " In turn, systematic integration of humanities perspectives and ways of thinking into clinical training will usefully expand the range of metaphors and narratives available to reflect on medical practice and offer possibilities for deepening and strengthening professional education.
Joshua: An Open Source Toolkit for Parsing-Based Machine Translation

We describe Joshua, an open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. Joshua implements all of the algorithms required for synchronous context free grammars (SCFGs): chart-parsing, n-gram language model integration, beam-and cube-pruning, and k-best extraction. The toolkit also implements suffix-array grammar extraction and minimum error rate training. It uses parallel and distributed computing techniques for scalability. We demonstrate that the toolkit achieves state of the art translation performance on the WMT09 French-English translation task.
Decentralized charging control for large populations of plug-in electric vehicles: Application of the Nash certainty equivalence principle

The paper develops and illustrates a novel decentralized charging control algorithm for large populations of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The proposed algorithm is an application of the so-called Nash certainty equivalence principle (or mean-field games.) The control scheme seeks to achieve social optimality by establishing a PEV charging schedule that fills the overnight demand valley. The paper discusses implementation issues and computational complexity, and illustrates concepts with various numerical examples.
Performance evaluation of parallel algorithms for pricing multidimensional financial derivatives

We develop parallel algorithms for pricing a class of multidimensional financial derivatives employing a binomial lattice approach. We describe the algorithms, explain their complexities, and study their performance. The limitations posed by the problem size on the recursive algorithm and the solution to overcome this problem by an iterative algorithm are explained through experimental results using MPI. We first present analytical results for the number of computations and communications for both the algorithms. Since the number of nodes in a recombining lattice grows linearly with the problem size, it is feasible to price long-dated options using a recombining lattice. We have extended our algorithm to handle derivatives with many underlying assets and shown that the multi-asset derivatives offer a better problem for parallel computation. This is very important for the finance industry since long-dated derivatives with many underlying assets are common in practice.
Recent progress in quantifying colour reproduction quality

Quantifying the perceptual difference between original and reproduced (and inevitably modified) colour images is currently a key research challenge in the field of colour imaging. Such information can be extremely valuable for instance in the development of new equipment and algorithms for colour reproduction. While in many research areas it is common practice to obtain quantitative quality information by the use of perceptual tests, in which the judgments of several human observers are being collected and carefully analyzed statistically, this approach has serious limitations for practical use, in particular because of the time consumption. Motivated by this, and aided by the ever increasing available knowledge about the mechanisms of the human visual system, the quest for perceptual colour image quality metrics that can adequately predict human quality judgments of complex images, has been on for several decades. However, unfortunately, the ”holy grail” is yet to be found. This paper gives a selective presentation of recent research in this field. Aspects that are covered in particular include new models and metrics for full-reference colour image quality, and new frameworks and models quantifying quality in a printing workflow.
VGSC: A Web-Based Vector Graph Toolkit of Genome Synteny and Collinearity

Background. In order to understand the colocalization of genetic loci amongst species, synteny and collinearity analysis is a frequent task in comparative genomics research. However many analysis software packages are not effective in visualizing results. Problems include lack of graphic visualization, simple representation, or inextensible format of outputs. Moreover, higher throughput sequencing technology requires higher resolution image output. Implementation. To fill this gap, this paper publishes VGSC, the Vector Graph toolkit of genome Synteny and Collinearity, and its online service, to visualize the synteny and collinearity in the common graphical format, including both raster (JPEG, Bitmap, and PNG) and vector graphic (SVG, EPS, and PDF). Result. Users can upload sequence alignments from blast and collinearity relationship from the synteny analysis tools. The website can generate the vector or raster graphical results automatically. We also provide a java-based bytecode binary to enable the command-line execution.