Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Art and technology at Pixar: SIGGRAPH ASIA 2018 course notes

As described by this now famous quote "The art challenges technology, and the technology inspires art", technology has always played an important part in Pixar's movie making process. This course will show how we develop and utilize new technical advancements to tell more appealing stories, using real-world examples from our latest movie Incredibles 2. This is a direct refresher of the previous course from Siggraph Asia 2015. Since that time, Pixar's pipeline has been heavily restructured, switching its main rendering algorithm to pathtracing. We will describe how that technology has now matured, and how we were able to reintroduce complete artistic control in this new physically based world. At the same time, the pipeline kept evolving and we introduced a new stage that didn't exist before, in the form of deep compositing. Finally we'll focus on USD, OpenSubdiv and the Hydra render engine, to showcase how the whole pipeline is moving toward real-time feedback, not only for rendering, but also for many other departments such as animation, simulation and crowds.
Fostering CSCL Adoption: An Approach to Professional Development Focused on Orchestration

: Conceptual barriers are often cited as an important obstacle for the integration of innovative, ICT-enabled practice (such as CSCL) in authentic educational settings. Although professional development (PD) can be used to overcome these barriers, there is a dearth of descriptions of PD programs that foster change towards CSCL practice. This paper presents an approach to PD centered on the notion of orchestrating CSCL activities, and exemplifies it through teacher workshops. The evidence from a mixed methods evaluation of two such workshops highlights the potential of this approach in driving conceptual change, and increasing the perceived feasibility of using CSCL, even in limited-time PD interventions. The results also show the limitations of the approach when used in isolation, hinting at multi-level coordinated actions (e.g. institutional, policy-level ones) to further foster CSCL practice.
Association between "solute carrier family 30 member 8" (SLC30A8) gene polymorphism and susceptibility to type 2 diabetes mellitus in Chinese Han and minority populations: an updated meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES In China, some studies have been reported that solute carrier family 30 member 8 (SLC30A8) gene polymorphism might increase the risk of T2DM, but some are not. The aim of this meta-analysis was to systematically investigate the association between the rs13266634 polymorphism of the SLC30A8 gene and T2DM in Chinese Han and ethnic minority populations. METHODS AND STUDY DESIGN All published electronic articles were retrieved from Pubmed, Web of Knowledge, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang database, VIP database and Google scholar. Pooled OR and 95% CI were calculated using random- or fixed-effects models. RESULTS Twenty-five articles involving 62,285 subjects were included in this metaanalysis. Considering the total population, significant associations between the rs13266634 polymorphism and T2DM were observed under the allele model (C vs T: OR=1.23, 95% CI=1.18-1.29), the additive models ( CC vs TT: OR=1.44, 95% CI=1.32-1.56; CC vs CT: OR=1.08, 95% CI=1.02-1.15; CT vs TT: OR=1.25, 95% CI=1.15- 1.37), the dominant model (CC vs CT+TT: OR=1.24, 95% CI=1.17-1.32) and the recessive model (CC+CT vs TT: OR=1.26, 95% CI=1.16-1.35). Based on subgroup analysis, besides the CC vs CT model, these associations were stronger in the ethnic minority groups than in the Han population. Moreover, no association was observed under the CC vs CT model (OR=1.26, 95% CI=0.95-1.66, p=0.105) in ethnic minority groups. CONCLUSIONS Chinese C allele carriers could have an increased risk of T2DM. Well-designed future studies should be conducted with a larger sample size to better understand this association in ethnic minority groups.
Georges et Geneviève Frêche, Les prix des grains, des vins et des légumes à Toulouse (1486- 1868)

C'est bien ce que démontre J . GOY à propos des dîmes arlésiennes. Cherchant des séries quantitatives, les économistes retournent aux sources : comptabilités d'exploitations, dîmes en nature ou en argent, baux de domaine, rendements et appréciations plus ou moins statistiques du produit agricole. Or les archives du chapitre Saint-Trophime d'Arles permettent de tracer en milliers de setiers le produit de la dîme du blé de 1660 à 1789. Cette courbe présente-t-elle quelque croissance spectaculaire au XVIII siècle? Certes, le produit de la dîme croît à partir de 1712, mais ce n'est là qu'un rattrapage des « temps colbertiens ». Les données portées sur un graphique offrent un aspect en cuvette qui justifie cette analyse. On regrettera que l'éditeur italien n'ait pas publié les graphiques et ne propose au lecteur que des données chiffrées. Souhaitons qu'il répare cette lacune dans un prochain numéro de sa revue.
Changes in Autonomy and Participation in Seniors After Stroke

Abstract The aim of this pilot study was to assess the levels of autonomy and participation in community-dwelling older adults who have suffered a stroke. Eighteen participants were recruited from various stroke groups in Toronto, Ontario. Demographic information was collected and the Folstein Mini-Mental Status Exam (MMSE) was administered as a screening tool. The Functional Autonomy Measurement Scale (SMAF), the CES-D depression scale and the Impact on Participation and Autonomy (IPA) were administered. The IPA was readministered approximately 3 months later, in order to examine if scores had changed over time. No participants showed any indication of significant cognitive impairment as measured by the MMSE. The mean for the CES-D total scores was 7.68 with a standard deviation of 6.8. This is significantly lower than a score of 16, which indicates depression. The mean for the initial total SMAF scores for the sample was 14.37 with a standard deviation of 10.73. This indicates minimal functional impairment. The total mean IPA scores decreased from time 1 to time 2 with a statistically significant decrease in the family role subscale of the IPA. Items on this subscale were concerned with household duties. Implications are discussed. Further research could investigate which resources provided within the client's environment and from health care services contribute to greater autonomy and participation in daily activities. Through understanding the changes in autonomy and participation that older adults experience after a stroke, health care providers can ensure that their goal of enabling full participation, self-determination and independence is achieved.
Performance metrics for an application-driven selection and optimization of psychophysical sampling procedures

When estimating psychometric functions with sampling procedures, psychophysical assessments should be precise and accurate while being as efficient as possible to reduce assessment duration. The estimation performance of sampling procedures is commonly evaluated in computer simulations for single psychometric functions and reported using metrics as a function of number of trials. However, the estimation performance of a sampling procedure may vary for different psychometric functions. Therefore, the results of these type of evaluations may not be generalizable to a heterogeneous population of interest. In addition, the maximum number of trials is often imposed by time restrictions, especially in clinical applications, making trial-based metrics suboptimal. Hence, the benefit of these simulations to select and tune an ideal sampling procedure for a specific application is limited. We suggest to evaluate the estimation performance of sampling procedures in simulations covering the entire range of psychometric functions found in a population of interest, and propose a comprehensive set of performance metrics for a detailed analysis. To illustrate the information gained from these metrics in an application example, six sampling procedures were evaluated in a computer simulation based on prior knowledge on the population distribution and requirements from proprioceptive assessments. The metrics revealed limitations of the sampling procedures, such as inhomogeneous or systematically decreasing performance depending on the psychometric functions, which can inform the tuning process of a sampling procedure. More advanced metrics allowed directly comparing overall performances of different sampling procedures and select the best-suited sampling procedure for the example application. The proposed analysis metrics can be used for any sampling procedure and the estimation of any parameter of a psychometric function, independent of the shape of the psychometric function and of how such a parameter was estimated. This framework should help to accelerate the development process of psychophysical assessments.
Securing Vehicular Networks with VIBES

One of the biggest challenges in making vehicular networks a reality is security. Aside from the clear need for vehicles to be able to authenticate messages from certain personnel, such as police officers and ambulances, secure end-to-end communication will also benefit numerous distributed applications that will be running over these vehicular networks. In this paper, we argue that four design goals must be met for any feasible VANET security system: it must (1) be scalable and allow for correct and efficient authentication, encryption, and key distribution and revocation, (2) be delay tolerant, (3) be DoS resistant, and (4) utilize existing infrastructure in a fashion such that it is readily deployable today, with minimal infrastructure changes. We present and analyze VIBES, a system using Identity-based Encryption and Signatures that meets these design goals and addresses much of the practical issues surrounding the implementation of a vehicular network security system. Furthermore, we show a performance evaluation comparing it to popular certificate-based schemes.
Trust Model Development for Cloud Environment using Fuzzy Mamdani and Simulators

Nowadays, Cloud computing is an expanding area in research and industry, which involves virtualization, distributed computing, internet, software, security, web services and etc. A cloud consists of several elements such as clients, data centers and distributed servers, internet and it includes fault tolerance, high availability, effectiveness, scalability, flexibility, reduced overhead for users, reduced cost of ownership, on demand services and etc. Now the next factor is coming, cost of Virtual machines on Data centers and response time. So this paper develop trust model in cloud computing based on fuzzy logic, to explores the coordination between Data Centers and user bound to optimize the application performance, cost of Virtual machines on Data centers and response time using Cloud Computing Analyst.
Review and Discussion on different techniques of Anomaly Detection Based and Recent Work

In different application domains as well as areas of research anomaly detection is one of the well-studied problems. There are many techniques presented by different authors successfully and accurate anomaly detection by different researchers. Methods presented are specific to applications or some other domains of research. Some techniques presented are based on data mining and machine learning domains. The main aim of this paper is to summarize the different types of methods presented for anomaly detection. In this paper we have presented the key components of anomaly detection which will be helpful for researcher to understand the existing techniques of anomaly detection. First we will give the overview of intrusion detection systems, then the key components of anomaly detection system. Later we will discuss the different techniques of anomaly detection. In addition to this review, we will present the most recent technique presented over the anomaly detection in this paper.
Enhanced OFDM time and frequency synchronization through optimal code correlation

A pseudo-random noise (PN)-sequence synchronization method is proposed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) time and frequency synchronization. By using two PN-sequences as the OFDM training symbols, all synchronizations can be accurately achieved. The peak correlation property of the PN-sequence makes time synchronization much more robust and accurate. Frequency synchronization precision is improved by averaging over the whole PN-sequence. At the same time, this method has it large frequency synchronization range. Finally, the residue time offset is estimated into the channel response.
Man to Machine, Applications in Electromyography

The study of electrical signals due to muscle activation has been evolving since Francesco Redi found electrical generation in the muscles of the electric ray fish in 1666 (Fishman, Wilkins, 2011), Dubois discovered electrical activation in voluntary muscles in 1849 (Blanc, Dimanico, 2010), and Mari coined the term Electromyography in 1922 (Raz, et al., 2006). Evolving over the following decades, electromyography has found widespread use in clinical settings as well as extensive use in ergonomic assessment and biomechanics research laboratories. As with many technologies, the discovery of electromyography occurred long before inexpensive and robust hardware was developed to utilize the vast amount of information available from myoelectric signals. Until recently, existing technology could not support efficient generation of repeatable robust signals for even highly sophisticated research laboratories, let alone the widespread availability of affordable, robust hardware required to propagate electromyography through the research communities. New high-speed computation tools make real-time analysis feasible. With the emergence of low cost hardware, high speed wireless communication technology, and low cost, high speed computing/signal processing equipment, Electromyography is becoming available to a whole new set of experimenter. With these advances making electromyography a feasible option in many situations, we see the emergence of a key period in the evolution of the technology. Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides a convenient and relatively noninvasive avenue for determining muscle activation, particularly as highly portable devices become available. Of course with the benefits of wider availability, we must consider the risks inherent in this spread, as the practitioners involved move from electromyography specialists, to technologists in other fields, using electromyography either part time, or only occasionally. Electromyography is a detailed art, and can easily lead to erroneous conclusions if not practiced carefully. With new applications, particularly where electromyography is employed as a means for humans to control electromechanical systems, care must be taken to insure that these systems are developed with robust safety systems, and improper assumptions about electromyography do not cause harm, injury, or even death.
Incisional Hernia: lisk factors, prevention, and repair

textabstractIncisional hernia is a major health care problem. It is one of the most frequent longterm complications of abdominal surgery and it continues to be a significant problem for patients as well as surgeons. As a result of advances in surgical knowledge and increase in the variety and number of abdominal incisions, the incidence of postoperative incisional hernias has increased rapidly. Unfortunately, attempts of repair of these hernias have not been uneventful, with high rates of hernia recurrence, and considerable rates of morbidity and mortality, making many surgeons hesitant to undertake incisional hernia repair. On the other hand, however, delay in repair may have serious clinical consequences. Apart from discomfort and pain, incisional hernias may predispose to incarceration or strangulation of primarily small bowel, which is almost certainly fatal if not promptly reduced. Also, as a consequence of the impact on health, incisional hernias have enormous economic consequences. At this time no consensus has been reached about whether, how, and when to operate on a patient with an incisional hernia. To solve the incisional hernia problem, first of all methods of prevention are needed. Furthermore, once an incisional hernia has developed, ideally, methods of repair that do not lead to recurrence or other complications should be available. In this thesis, several clinical studies have been undertaken in an attempt to determine the most effective way to repair and prevent incisional hernia herniation and recurrence.
An Intelligent System For Automated Arabic Text Categorization

New technological developments have resulted in a dramatic increase in the availability of on-line text-newspaper articles, incoming (electronic) mail, technical reports, etc. This led to the need for methods that help users organize such information. Text Categorization may be the solution for the increased need for advanced techniques. Text Categorization is the classification of units of natural language texts with respect to a set of predefined categories. Categorization of documents is challenging, as the number of discriminating words can be very large. Machine learning approaches are applied to build an automatic text classifier by learning from a set of previously classified documents
paGAN: real-time avatars using dynamic textures

With the rising interest in personalized VR and gaming experiences comes the need to create high quality 3D avatars that are both low-cost and variegated. Due to this, building dynamic avatars from a single unconstrained input image is becoming a popular application. While previous techniques that attempt this require multiple input images or rely on transferring dynamic facial appearance from a source actor, we are able to do so using only one 2D input image without any form of transfer from a source image. We achieve this using a new conditional Generative Adversarial Network design that allows fine-scale manipulation of any facial input image into a new expression while preserving its identity. Our photoreal avatar GAN (paGAN) can also synthesize the unseen mouth interior and control the eye-gaze direction of the output, as well as produce the final image from a novel viewpoint. The method is even capable of generating fully-controllable temporally stable video sequences, despite not using temporal information during training. After training, we can use our network to produce dynamic image-based avatars that are controllable on mobile devices in real time. To do this, we compute a fixed set of output images that correspond to key blendshapes, from which we extract textures in UV space. Using a subject's expression blendshapes at run-time, we can linearly blend these key textures together to achieve the desired appearance. Furthermore, we can use the mouth interior and eye textures produced by our network to synthesize on-the-fly avatar animations for those regions. Our work produces state-of-the-art quality image and video synthesis, and is the first to our knowledge that is able to generate a dynamically textured avatar with a mouth interior, all from a single image.
Feature-preserving detailed 3D face reconstruction from a single image

Dense 3D face reconstruction plays a fundamental role in visual media production involving digital actors. We improve upon high fidelity reconstruction from a single 2D photo with a reconstruction framework that is robust to large variations in expressions, poses and illumination. We provide a global optimization step improving the alignment of 3D facial geometry to tracked 2D landmarks with 3D Laplacian deformation. Face detail is improved through, extending Shape from Shading reconstruction with fitted albedo prior masks, together with a fast proportionality constraint between depth and image gradients consistent with local self-occlusion behavior. Together these measures better preserve the crucial facial features that define an actor's identity, and we illustrate this through a variety of comparisons with related works.
Automated synthesis of a high speed Cordic algorithm with the Cathedral-III compilation system

The automated design methodology of the Cathedral-III system is presented. The Cathedral-III system is an environment for efficient synthesis of high-throughput digital-signal-processing circuits. The system translates a behavioral description, expressed in the Silage language, into an intermediate signal flow graph representation, which is assembled and optimized into a dedicated bit-sliced architecture. The Cordic algorithm is used as test-vehicle to demonstrate the features of the Cathedral-III methodology. <<ETX>>
A fresh look at writing

In an era when teachers struggle for quality time with their students, Donald Graves introduces a text that creates lifetime writers as well as responsible learners--a text that focuses on teaching that lasts. "A Fresh Look at Writing" is Graves's most comprehensive book yet. In it, he expands on many of his earlier approaches, examining portfolios, record keeping, methods for teaching conventions, spelling, and a rich range of genre including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He demonstrates how to bring writing into your own life and experience the joys of the craft along with the students. "Actions," glossed objectives appearing throughout the book, provide new ways to understand yourself and reach your students. With them, Graves helps you profit from your own history as learner, listen to children more effectively, discover their potential, yet expect more from them. "A Fresh Look at Writing" is a true resource for professionals who want the latest ideas on the teaching of writing, as well as for preservice teachers about to step into the classroom for the first time. The accompanying Professional's Guide assists those who want to build a writing or language arts course around the text. It features a detailed, week-by-week description of fourteen sessions, including guidelines for background preparation in writing; reading and working with children; classroom demonstration; and journal reflection. In addition, the guide shows how "A Fresh Look at Writing" can be used as a supplement to reading courses, research studies, summer courses, and workshops. To learn more about Donald Graves, visit www.donaldgraves. org.
Transformer saturation and unusual system oscillation in capacitively coupled half-bridge or full-bridge forward converters: causes, analyses, and cures

In capacitively coupled bridge converters, duty-ratio unbalanced can cause transformer saturation and resulting transistor destruction. Independently, modulation of the transistor storage time by variations of collector current can cause low-frequency system oscillation which leads also to transformer saturation, and additionally causes low-frequency conducted EMI which is difficult to filter. A resistor shunting the coupling capacitor is suggested as a simple but effective cure for both problems. Mathematical analyses for both phenomena, a design procedure for selecting the proper value of shunt resistance, and experimental results that confirm the analyses are presented. <<ETX>>