Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prognostic and predictive testing of molecular markers in breast cancer by real-time quantitative PCR

textabstractThis chapter provides a general overview of breast cancer, including the relevance of measuring gene expression in the primary breast tumor in relation to the progression of the disease and the tumor response to treatment. To better understand the concept of breast cancer, extra emphasis will be put on breast cancer subtypes, staging and grading, and the tumor micro-environment that harbors the epithelial cancer cells. Currently available biomarkers to assess outcome of breast cancer patients in general (i.e. prognosis) as well as biomarkers currently available to assess patient outcome in response to therapy (i.e. prediction) will be discussed. After this it should become clear that there is still an urgent need for new biomarkers. How this search for additional biomarkers can be achieved by measuring mRNAgene expression in the primary tumor of patients diagnosed with breast cancer, will be explained in more detail.
CHAPTER 183 Velocity measurements close to rippled beds

Velocity measurements have been made with a Laser Doppler Anemometer in oscillatory flow over rippled beds. The ripples were naturally formed in an oscillating tray rig and then stabilised. Both large-scale mixing, repeatable from cycle to cycle, and turbulence were found to have a significant effect on the velocity profile. Large-scale mixing, which is associated with vortex formulation and ejection, was seen to dominate in the immediate vicinity of the bed but turbulent mixing appeared to be more important at large height. The variation in turbulence intensity with height was found to be qualitatively similar to that previously observed with threedimensional roughness in oscillatory flow. Time-mean velocities are not well predicted by existing theory. The present measurements show only two recirculating cells per ripple wavelength. Introduction The sea bed is frequently covered with ripples. Although much progress has been made in recent years there is still relatively little information about the way in which bed geometry changes the velocity distribution. It is the aim of the present investigation to provide more data. The results are relevant to problems such as sediment transport by waves, wave height attenuation and dispersion of pollutants in the sea. Experimental apparatus and test conditions The measurements were made in the apparatus described by Lee-Young and Sleath (1988). This consists of a steady flow flume with a section of bed which can oscillate with simple harmonic motion. In the present experiments 1 Graduate Student, Cambridge University Engineering Department, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, England. 2 Reader, ditto
Pollution Havens and Factor Endowments: the Case of Consumption-Generated Pollution

The Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) predicts that trade liberalization will cause dirty industry to migrate to poor countries, whereas the Factor Endowment Hypothesis (FEH) predicts the opposite. Empirical evidence has run slightly in favour of the FEH, but largely has suggested trade makes little difference to pollution trends. Antweiler et al. 2001 investigated production-generated (―smokestack‖) pollution and suggested an explanation that the PHH and the FEH work against each other, so the net result turns out to be rather small. This paper provides further evidence on this by investigating the effect of international trade on consumption-generated (―tailpipe‖) pollution. Our theoretical model predicts that the trade induced composition effect only depends on the stringency of environmental policy (the mechanism of the PHH) but not the capital-labour ratio (the mechanism of the FEH). Without an offsetting effect we expect pollution to rise under trade liberalization in low-income countries, counter to the case with smokestack pollution. We test this prediction using an international panel of data on carbon monoxide emissions, most of which are consumption-generated rather than production-generated. The results support our theoretical predictions: the trade elasticity of tailpipe pollution is negatively correlated with relative income. In addition, unlike the findings by Antweiler et al. that trade has no adverse effect on the environment, by estimating overall scale, technique and trade-induced composition effects, our results suggest that further 2 openness will increase carbon monoxide emissions. Therefore, the trade liberalization may affect smokestack and tailpipe pollution differently.
Electrospinning of Fibres with Hydrophobic Surface

A mutual correlation between the structure of electrospun fibrous layers prepared from polyvinylbutyral and their wettability was investigated within this study. Therefore, polyvinylbutyral was dissolved in a good solvent (mixtures of tetrahydrofuran and dimethylsulfoxide in volume ratios 9:1 and 8:2) and a poor solvent (methanol, ethanol), respectively due to the significant impact on the final structure of fibres. Besides, various concentrations of polyvinylbutyral in particular solvents and their mixtures were studied. In the first step, polyvinylbutyral solutions were tested by means of various methods, namely electrical conductivity, surface tension and rheological behaviour was measured. Subsequently, nanofibrous layers were produced via electrospinning and characterized via scanning electron microscopy and contact angle measurements.
Interactive comment on “Inference of analytical flow duration curves in Swiss alpine environments” by Ana Clara Santos et al

1The paper deals with a series of catchments in Switzerland with various geospatial and climatic characteristics. The authors compared the performance of linear against nonlinear stochastic model and found out that nonlinear one outperforms. The general idea would be interesting to the hydrology community, however, it needs to be more developed. Moreover, since the paper is going to be studied by a wide range of people, it is needed to explain some concepts and parameters with more details and better
Anti-phase collective synchronization with intrinsic in-phase coupling of two groups of electrochemical oscillators

The synchronization of two groups of electrochemical oscillators is investigated during the electrodissolution of nickel in sulfuric acid. The oscillations are coupled through combined capacitance and resistance, so that in a single pair of oscillators (nearly) in-phase synchronization is obtained. The internal coupling within each group is relatively strong, but there is a phase difference between the fast and slow oscillators. The external coupling between the two groups is weak. The experiments show that the two groups can exhibit (nearly) anti-phase collective synchronization. Such synchronization occurs only when the external coupling is weak, and the interactions are delayed by the capacitance. When the external coupling is restricted to those between the fast and the slow elements, the anti-phase synchronization is more prominent. The results are interpreted with phase models. The theory predicts that, for anti-phase collective synchronization, there must be a minimum internal phase difference for a given shift in the phase coupling function. This condition is less stringent with external fast-to-slow coupling. The results provide a framework for applications of collective phase synchronization in modular networks where weak coupling between the groups can induce synchronization without rearrangements of the phase dynamics within the groups. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Coupling functions: dynamical interaction mechanisms in the physical, biological and social sciences’.
Synchronization transitions caused by time-varying coupling functions

Interacting dynamical systems are widespread in nature. The influence that one such system exerts on another is described by a coupling function; and the coupling functions extracted from the time-series of interacting dynamical systems are often found to be time-varying. Although much effort has been devoted to the analysis of coupling functions, the influence of time-variability on the associated dynamics remains largely unexplored. Motivated especially by coupling functions in biology, including the cardiorespiratory and neural delta-alpha coupling functions, this paper offers a contribution to the understanding of effects due to time-varying interactions. Through both numerics and mathematically rigorous theoretical consideration, we show that for time-variable coupling functions with time-independent net coupling strength, transitions into and out of phase- synchronization can occur, even though the frozen coupling functions determine phase-synchronization solely by virtue of their net coupling strength. Thus the information about interactions provided by the shape of coupling functions plays a greater role in determining behaviour when these coupling functions are time-variable. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Coupling functions: dynamical interaction mechanisms in the physical, biological and social sciences’.
Parameterized Animated Activities

This work addresses the development of a character animation editing method that accommodates animation changes while preserving the animator’s original artistic intent. Our goal is to give the artist control over the automatic editing of animations by extending them with artist-defined metadata. We propose a metadata representation that describes which aspects of an animation can be varied. To make the authoring process easier, we have developed an interface for specifying the metadata. Our method extracts a collection of trajectories of both effectors and objects for the animation. We approximate and parameterize the trajectories with a series of cubic Bézier curves. Then, we generate a set of high-level parameters for editing which are related to trajectory deformations. The only possible deformations are those that preserve the fine structure of the original motion. From the trajectories, we use inverse kinematics to generate a new animation that conforms to the user’s edits while preserving the overall character of the original.
Contact Preserving Shape Transfer For Rigging-Free Motion Retargeting

Retargeting a motion from a source to a target character is an important problem in computer animation, as it allows to reuse existing rigged databases or transfer motion capture to virtual characters. Surface based pose transfer is a promising approach to avoid the trial-and-error process when controlling the joint angles. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate whether shape transfer instead of pose transfer would better preserve the original contextual meaning of the source pose. To this end, we propose an optimization-based method to deform the source shape+pose using three main energy functions: similarity to the target shape, body part volume preservation, and collision management (preserve existing contacts and prevent penetrations). The results show that our method is able to retarget complex poses, including several contacts, to very different morphologies. In particular, we introduce new contacts that are linked to the change in morphology, and which would be difficult to obtain with previous works based on pose transfer that aim at distance preservation between body parts. These preliminary results are encouraging and open several perspectives, such as decreasing computation time, and better understanding how to model pose and shape constraints.
Ageing is Not a Disease: Pitfalls for the Acceptance of Self-Management Health Systems Supporting Healthy Ageing

Recently, a shift from curative to preventive care is promoted, by which patients are expected to become active and use diverse forms of self-management health systems (SMHS), i.e., integrated solutions that present data from multiple sensors and/or self-reports, possibly enhanced with risk assessment and decision support, to perform health-related actions. This is promoted as contributing to living longer and healthier, assisting ageing-in-place. Hence, older adults have also become a potential target of SMHS. While studies are performed on uses and attitudes of specific patient groups towards SMHS, studies that focus on older, including the oldest, adults are scarce. Therefore, we report on a qualitative study with 20 older adults (mean age = 80). Through thematic analysis, we identified four themes (i.e., enforced use of technology; need for support in technology use; equivocal stance towards sharing data; hypothetical value of technology for healthy ageing) to provide a deeper understanding of older adults' attitudes and engagement with information- and communication technologies (ICT) in general and SMHS in particular. We also present four pitfalls, unified by a central concept "Ageing is not a disease'', along with design considerations for future SMHS.
A Robust Interactive Facial Animation Editing System

Over the past few years, the automatic generation of facial animation for virtual characters has garnered interest among the animation research and industry communities. Recent research contributions leverage machine-learning approaches to enable impressive capabilities at generating plausible facial animation from audio and/or video signals. However, these approaches do not address the problem of animation edition, meaning the need for correcting an unsatisfactory baseline animation or modifying the animation content itself. In facial animation pipelines, the process of editing an existing animation is just as important and time-consuming as producing a baseline. In this work, we propose a new learning-based approach to easily edit a facial animation from a set of intuitive control parameters. To cope with high-frequency components in facial movements and preserve a temporal coherency in the animation, we use a resolution-preserving fully convolutional neural network that maps control parameters to blendshapes coefficients sequences. We stack an additional resolution-preserving animation autoencoder after the regressor to ensure that the system outputs natural-looking animation. The proposed system is robust and can handle coarse, exaggerated edits from non-specialist users. It also retains the high-frequency motion of the facial animation. The training and the tests are performed on an extension of the B3D(AC)23032 database [Fanelli et al. 2010], that we make available with this paper at http://www.rennes. centralesupelec.fr/biwi3D.
Connecting Global and Local Agent Navigation via Topology

We present a novel topology-driven method for improving the navigation of agents in virtual environments. In agent-based crowd simulations, the combination of global path planning and local collision avoidance can cause conflicts and undesired motion. These conflicts are related to the decisions to pass obstacles or agents on certain sides. In this paper, we define an agent’s navigation behavior as a topological strategy amidst obstacles and other agents. We show how to extract such a strategy from a global path and from a local velocity. Next, we propose a simulation framework that computes these strategies for path planning, path following, and collision avoidance. By detecting conflicts between strategies, we can decide reliably when and how an agent should re-plan an alternative path. As such, this work bridges a long-existing gap between global and local planning. Experiments show that our method can improve the behavior of agents while preserving real-time performance. It can be applied to many agent-based simulations, regardless of their specific navigation algorithms. The strategy concept is also suitable for explicitly sending agents in particular directions.
Automatic Sign Dance Synthesis from Gesture-based Sign Language

Automatic dance synthesis has become more and more popular due to the increasing demand in computer games and animations. Existing research generates dance motions without much consideration for the context of the music. In reality, professional dancers make choreography according to the lyrics and music features. In this research, we focus on a particular genre of dance known as sign dance, which combines gesture-based sign language with full body dance motion. We propose a system to automatically generate sign dance from a piece of music and its corresponding sign gesture. The core of the system is a Sign Dance Model trained by multiple regression analysis to represent the correlations between sign dance and sign gesture/music, as well as a set of objective functions to evaluate the quality of the sign dance. Our system can be applied to music visualization, allowing people with hearing difficulties to understand and enjoy music.
Volume Maps: An Implicit Boundary Representation for SPH

In this paper, we present a novel method for the robust handling of static and dynamic rigid boundaries in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. We build upon the ideas of the density maps approach which has been introduced recently by Koschier and Bender. They precompute the density contributions of solid boundaries and store them on a spatial grid which can be efficiently queried during runtime. This alleviates the problems of commonly used boundary particles, like bumpy surfaces and inaccurate pressure forces near boundaries. Our method is based on a similar concept but we precompute the volume contribution of the boundary geometry and store it on a grid. This maintains all benefits of density maps but offers a variety of advantages which are demonstrated in several experiments. Firstly, in contrast to the density maps method we can compute derivatives in the standard SPH manner by differentiating the kernel function. This results in smooth pressure forces, even for lower map resolutions, such that precomputation times and memory requirements are reduced by more than two orders of magnitude compared to density maps. Furthermore, this directly fits into the SPH concept so that volume maps can be seamlessly combined with existing SPH methods. Finally, the kernel function is not baked into the map such that the same volume map can be used with different kernels. This is especially useful when we want to incorporate common surface tension or viscosity methods that use different kernels than the fluid simulation.
Why did the human cross the road?

‘‘Humans at rest tend to stay at rest. Humans in motion tend to cross the road – Isaac Newton. ” Even though this response is meant to be a joke to indicate the answer is quite obvious, this important feature of real world crowds is rarely considered in simulations. Answering this question involves several things such as how agents balance between reaching goals, avoid collisions with heterogeneous entities and how the environment is being modeled. As part of a preliminary study, we introduce a reinforcement learning framework to train pedestrians to cross streets with bidirectional traffic. Our initial results indicate that by using a very simple goal centric representation of agent state and a simple reward function, we can simulate interesting behaviors such as pedestrians crossing the road through crossings or waiting for cars to pass.
Defining Problems of Practices to Advance Inclusive Tactile Media Consumption and Production

Tactile media are important resources for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV) to access visual or graphical information as well as to develop tactile acuity. In this paper we present findings from a social learning design that was guided by the question, "What are the factors or issues that impact the tactile media consumption and production practices of BLV and other invested stakeholders? " From data collected during three Tactile Arts and Graphics Symposia-that gathered (N=64) BLV and sighted practitioners, researchers, and educators invested making information and experiences accessible through touch-we identified 34 issues that fall under four problems of practice, that impact tactile media practices. Based on these four problems of practice (and 34 underlying issues), we share recommendations to support the development of socio-technical systems that improve tactile access to information and full inclusion of people who are BLV in tactile media consumption and production.
Spatial Motion Doodles: Sketching Animation in VR Using Hand Gestures and Laban Motion Analysis

We present a method for easily drafting expressive character animation by playing with instrumented rigid objects. We parse the input 6D trajectories (position and orientation over time) – called spatial motion doodles – into sequences of actions and convert them into detailed character animations using a dataset of parameterized motion clips which are automatically fitted to the doodles in terms of global trajectory and timing. Moreover, we capture the expressiveness of user-manipulation by analyzing Laban effort qualities in the input spatial motion doodles and transferring them to the synthetic motions we generate. We validate the ease of use of our system and the expressiveness of the resulting animations through a series of user studies, showing the interest of our approach for interactive digital storytelling applications dedicated to children and non-expert users, as well as for providing fast drafting tools for animators.
Stylistic Locomotion Modeling and Synthesis using Variational Generative Models

We propose a novel approach to create generative models for distinctive styles of locomotion for humanoid characters. Our approach only requires a single or a few style examples and a neutral motion database. We are inspired by the observation that human styles can be easily distinguished from a few examples. However, learning a generative model for natural human motions which can display huge amounts of variations and randomness would require a lot of training data. Furthermore, it would require considerable efforts to create such a large motion database for each style. One solution for that is motion style transfer, which provides the possibility of converting the content of the motion from one style to the other. Typically style transfer focuses on transferring the content motion to target style explicitly. We propose a variational generative model to combine the large variation in neutral motion database and style information from a limited number of examples. We formulate the style motion modeling as a conditional distribution learning problem and style transfer is implicitly applied during the model learning process. A conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) is applied to learn the distribution and stylistic examples are used as constraints. We demonstrate that our approach can generate any number of natural-looking, various human motions with a similar style to the target.