Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Motion Segmentation via Synchronization

In this paper we consider the problem of segmenting points in a collection of images that contain multiple moving objects. Our contribution is three-fold: (i) we propose a matrix representation of segmentation that permits to formulate the problem in terms of "synchronization" of binary matrices; (ii) we derive a spectral solution to solve such a problem, which is inspired by previous works on synchronization of rotations, homographies, rigid motions and permutations; (iii) we explain how our solution can be interpreted in terms of spectral clustering. The proposed approach is validated on both synthetic and real scenarios, in addition to the Hopkins benchmark.
Privacy-Preserving Decision Tree Training and Prediction against Malicious Server

Privacy-preserving machine learning enables secure outsourcing of machine learning tasks to an untrusted service provider (server) while preserving the privacy of the user’s data (client). Attaining good concrete efficiency for complicated machine learning tasks, such as training decision trees, is one of the challenges in this area. Prior works on privacy-preserving decision trees required the parties to have comparable computational resources, and instructed the client to perform computation proportional to the complexity of the entire task. In this work we present new protocols for privacy-preserving decision trees, for both training and prediction, achieving the following desirable properties: 1. Efficiency: the client’s complexity is independent of the training-set size during training, and of the tree size during prediction. 2. Security: privacy holds against malicious servers. 3. Practical usability: high accuracy, fast prediction, and feasible training demonstrated on standard UCI datasets, encrypted with fully homomorphic encryption. To the best of our knowledge, our protocols are the first to offer all these properties simultaneously. The core of our work consists of two technical contributions. First, a new low-degree polynomial approximation for functions, leading to faster protocols for training and prediction on encrypted data. Second, a design of an easy-to-use mechanism for proving privacy against malicious adversaries that is suitable for a wide family of protocols, and in particular, our protocols; this mechanism could be of independent interest.
Danish University Colleges Dissipation of pterosin B in acid soils – Tracking the fate of the bracken fern carcinogen ptaquiloside Skourti-Stathaki,

Bracken ferns (Pteridium sp.) are well-known for their toxicity, especially the carcinogenic properties which are ascribed to their content of ptaquiloside and ptaquiloside-like substances. Ptaquiloside leach from the ferns and may cause contamination of drinking water. Pterosin B is formed by acid hydrolysis of ptaquiloside. Pterosin B is adsorbed more strongly and it is expected to have a slower turnover than ptaquiloside in soils. We thus hypothesized that pterosin B may serve as an indicator for any past presence of ptaquiloside. Pterosin B degradation was studied in acid forest soils from bracken-covered and bracken-free reference areas. Soil samples were incubated with pterosin B at 21C at 3 and 8 μg g for 10 days, whereas sterile (autoclaved) samples were incubated for 23 days. Pterosin B showed unexpected fast degradation in soils with full degradation in topsoils of 2 to 5 days. Pterosin B dissipation followed the sum of two-first order reactions. The initial fast reaction with half-lives of 0.7 to 3.5 h contributed 11 to 59% of the total pterosin B degradation, while the slow reaction was 20 to 100 times slower than the fast reaction. Total dissipation half-lives were shorter for loamy sand (4 h) than for sandy loam soils (28 h). No degradation of pterosin B took place under sterile conditions assuming observed dissipation during the first 3 h could be attributed to irreversible sorption. Faster dissipation was observed in top soils compared to subsoils. Our results demonstrate that pterosin B is microbial degraded and that pterosin B is as unstable as ptaquiloside and hence cannot be used as an indicator for former presence of ptaquiloside in soil.
Towards Guided Wave Robotic NDT Inspection: EMAT Size Matters

The first steps towards fast robotic screening of wall thinning in the industrially relevant example of 10mm thick steel plates are reported. Electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs) are used to generate and detect guided shear horizontal wavemodes, as these show promise for this type of inspection. EMATs are miniaturised to reduce magnetic drag on ferritic steels, and are designed to produce SH0 and SH1 wavemodes with 22mm wavelength, which is suitable for testing wall thinning in these samples. Miniaturisation and the resulting reduction of magnetic drag force allows the EMATs to be mounted on a small crawler robot which can then be used to scan the sample / structure.
Japanese-Russian TMU Neural Machine Translation System using Multilingual Model for WAT 2019

We introduce our system that is submitted to the News Commentary task (Japanese<->Russian) of the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation. The goal of this shared task is to study extremely low resource situations for distant language pairs. It is known that using parallel corpora of different language pair as training data is effective for multilingual neural machine translation model in extremely low resource scenarios. Therefore, to improve the translation quality of Japanese<->Russian language pair, our method leverages other in-domain Japanese-English and English-Russian parallel corpora as additional training data for our multilingual NMT model.
RethNet: Object-by-Object Learning for Detecting Facial Skin Problems

Semantic segmentation is a hot topic in computer vision where the most challenging tasks of object detection and recognition have been handling by the success of semantic segmentation approaches. We propose a concept of objectby-object learning technique to detect 11 types of facial skin lesions using semantic segmentation methods. Detecting individual skin lesion in a dense group is a challenging task, because of ambiguities in the appearance of the visual data. We observe that there exist co-occurrent visual relations between object classes (e.g., wrinkle and age spot, or papule and whitehead, etc.). In fact, rich contextual information significantly helps to handle the issue. Therefore, we propose REthinker blocks that are composed of the locally constructed convLSTM/Conv3D layers and SE module as a one-shot attention mechanism whose responsibility is to increase network's sensitivity in the local and global contextual representation that supports to capture ambiguously appeared objects and co-occurrence interactions between object classes. Experiments show that our proposed model reached MIoU of 79.46% on the test of a prepared dataset, representing a 15.34% improvement over Deeplab v3+ (MIoU of 64.12%).
Approaches of Novel drug delivery systems for Anti-HIV agents

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a pandemic disease spreading very rapidly all over the world, causing approximately 15,000 or more new infections every day and the community acquiring sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is prone to easily acquire this HIV infections. The objective of the current review is to describe the comprehensiveness of the various advanced anti-HIV drug delivery systems and compounds that have been developed for targeting drugs to the macrophages, gastric mucosa and brain. Novel drug delivery system gives an opportunity to bypass the shortcomings related to the anti-retroviral treatment. It helps in addressing towards the complexity of dosage form development such as instability, insolubility and limited entrapment of the drugs. Several optional routes have been identified for the management of the ARV therapy which includes transdermal, mucosal (vaginal, rectal, buccal, etc.) and also lymphatic delivery, with the application of novel systems like nanoparticles, vesicular systems (liposomes, niosomes, ethosomes, emulsomes), micellar assemblies, etc. This review spotlights the prospectives of novel drug release systems used in preventing the transmission and treatment of retroviral infections.
STOCK MARKETS AND BUBBLES

The analysis of stock prices dynamics has always been a field of scientific controversies. Mainstream economists have usually defended a specific version of the Present Value Model (PVM), according to which stock prices can be considered rational forecasts of discounted future dividends (for a survey, see Campbell et al. 1997). However, since the publication of Shiller’s (1981) volatility tests, various empirical rejections to PVM convinced economists to reexamine its basic hypotheses. In order to defend the idea that stock prices correctly reflect fundamentals it has been said that PVM still holds if the hypothesis of a constant discount rate for future dividends is substituted by the assumption that it can change over time because of modifications in agents preferences or behaviour towards risk (Campbell et al. 1997). On the other side, the critics of PVM interpreted its empirical rejections as a proof of the existence of speculative bubbles, i.e. systematic price deviations from effectual dividends. We can distinguish at
SHADING: PASSIVE COOLING AND ENERGY CONSERVATION IN BUILDINGS

Buildings consume significant large amount of energy for cooling, heating, ventilation and lighting in buildings to create desirable thermal comfort conditions. In warm and tropical climates excess solar gain results in high cooling energy consumption. The depletion of conventional energy and high cost of non-conventional energy enforces a demand for energy conscious designs of buildings. Natural and passive cooling uses nonmechanical methods to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature. Natural cooling can be achieved by proper layout and orientation of building, appropriate shape, insulation, high thermal capacity and resistance of the building materials, good landscape design, proper shading devices, overhangs, external surface finish. The most effective method to cool a building in summer is to keep the heat from building up in the first place. The most important passive cooling strategy, regardless of mass is shading. Shading is a simple method to block the sun before it can get into the building. Shading minimizes the incident solar radiation and cool the building effectively and hence dramatically affect building energy performance. In this paper an attempt has been made to study different shading strategies that can be employed to shade the building, which provides natural cooling and finally helps in energy conservation in buildings.
Data Integration Challenges for CIM in Large Infrastructure: A Case Study of Dallas Horseshoe Project

This paper highlights the integration challenges for Civil Information Modeling (CIM) in highway infrastructure projects and documents the principal data sources necessary for advancing its applications in project work processes. Researchers and practitioners have positively evaluated the benefits of CIM towards accomplishing several work processes such as model-based design coordination, spatial and temporal conflicts resolution, constructability analyses, work area management, and visualization, among others. Nonetheless, CIM technology and processes have not been adequately integrated with the project delivery practices of highway infrastructure. A significant challenge in this regard is the lack of standardized knowledge towards understanding the data requirements for developing and utilizing CIM models. Quite often, the necessary information resides in the databases of several coordinating agencies and the integration processes mandate retrieving the data from multiple, disparate sources to create models. This study evaluates the modeling practices followed in a large infrastructure project in Dallas, Texas and discusses the opportunities and challenges for streamlining CIM integration for design and construction activities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) engineers to gather insights into the data requirements and deduce the practical challenges encountered while collecting and fusing the information. Lessons learned from this study can act as a reference for assimilating the information requirements and a valuable resource for both novice professionals and experts developing models for project delivery
Revisiting the Sustainable Happiness Model and Pie Chart: Can Happiness Be Successfully Pursued?

ABSTRACT The Sustainable Happiness Model (SHM) has been influential in positive psychology and well-being science. However, the ‘pie chart’ aspect of the model has received valid critiques. In this article, we start by agreeing with many such critiques, while also explaining the context of the original article and noting that we were speculative but not dogmatic therein. We also show that subsequent research has supported the most important premise of the SHM – namely, that individuals can boost their well-being via their intentional behaviors, and maintain that boost in the longer-term. However, such effects may be weaker than we initially believed. We describe three contemporary models descended from the thinking embodied in the SHM – the Eudaimonic Activity Model, the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention model, and the Positive Activity Model. Research testing these models has further supported the premise that how people live makes a difference for their well-being.
A DECENTRALIZED CONFERENCING TOOL FOR AD HOC DISTRIBUTED WORKGROUPS

Open source software (OSS) projects are an extreme case of geographically distributed development, with individual developers scattered throughout the world. In addition to relying upon asynchronous communication tools, a number of OSS project members use chat-based communication tools, mainly for bug triage and rapid decision-making about project evolution. However, simple chats do not fit well the needs of structured meetings. This paper presents P2PConference, a tool to conduct text-based conferences over a distance. The tool provides basic features for simple brainstorming sessions as well as more sophisticated features to accommodate the needs of other types of meetings, such as presentations and panels. P2PConference requires no infrastructure and administration costs since it adopts a decentralized architecture and it is implemented upon the JXTA peer-to-peer platform. The decentralized architectural solution makes the tool well suited to support ad hoc distributed workgroups.
Prognostic nomogram integrated baseline serum lipids for patients with non-esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.

Background Serum lipids have been documented as prognostic biomarkers in several types of cancer, however the prognostic value of serum lipids in non-esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (non-ESCC) is not clear. The purpose of this study was to investigate the prognostic roles of serum lipids in non-ESCC and to establish a novel effective nomogram for overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) in patients with non-ESCC. Methods We retrospectively analyzed the prognostic values of pretreatment serum lipids, including total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), apolipoproteinA-I (ApoAI), and apolipoprotein B (ApoB) and three lipid derivatives: atherogenic index [AI: (TC-HDL-C)/HDL-C], THR (TG/HDL-C) and LHR (LDL-C/HDL-C) in non-ESCC patients. Prognostic factors predictive of OS and DFS were determined by univariate and cox hazards analysis, and prognostic nomograms were established. The predictive power of independent prognostic factors was compared adopting time-dependent ROC. Comparisons between the nomograms and traditional TNM staging systems were evaluated using the C-index and decision curve analysis. Results A total of 180 non-ESCC patients were recruited in this prospective study between January 2006 and December 2016. Four (cancer type, TNM stage, TC, and TG) and five (cancer type, TNM stage, TC, TG, and LDL-C) independent prognostic factors were chosen to generate the nomogram for OS and DFS, respectively. Our results showed that the area under curves (AUCs) of cancer type and TG were higher than TNM stage for OS. For DFS, however, AUCs of cancer type, TG and LDL-C were higher than the TNM stage. The C-index of the nomogram for predicting the OS was 0.69, which was significantly higher than that of TNM stage (0.58, P=0.005). In addition, for DFS, the C-index of the nomogram was significantly higher than that of the TNM stage (0.70 vs. 0.60, P=0.001). Furthermore, decision curve analysis showed that the predictive accuracy of the prognostic nomogram for OS and DFS were both higher than the TNM stage. Conclusions Our study demonstrated that pretreatment of serum lipids based on the prognostic nomogram could be applied to predict the OS and DFS in non-ESCC patients.
The role of spirituality in psychosocial rehabilitation.

The role of spirituality in mental health and general wellness has begun to receive much needed attention in the psychological literature. Historically, however, mental health researchers and practitioners alike have generally neglected spirituality. There have been at least three significant barriers to the acceptance of spirituality as a clinical tool in mental health treatment. These barriers are identified in the article as (a) the history of mental health treatment; (b) professional stereotypes; and (c) confusion and fears over the meaning of spirituality. Although more empirical evidence is needed to investigate the role of spirituality and how to integrate spiritual beliefs in treatment, the time may have come to incorporate spirituality in the mental health professional's tool kit.
Design specification, commission and calibration of the University of Strathclyde's Fully Turbulent Flow Channel (FTFC) facility

Measurements in the Fully Turbulent Flow Channel (FTFC) are presented for Reynolds number up to 3.3∙10^5, based on the mean bulk velocity and the channel height. The FTFC is a new experimental facility recently installed at the Department of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Marine Engineering of the University of Strathclyde. It is a high aspect ratio flow channel with a three-meter-long testing section, designed for the indirect measurement of the drag caused by surface characteristics. The main advantage of this channel is that the measurements of the pressure drop along the test section can be combined with laser-based boundary layer measurement techniques such as LDA, PIV, etc. The present work focuses on the design features and the calibration of the new experimental facility, with hydraulically smooth control panels produced on purpose. The interest in these data originates from the fact that channel flow serves as a reference flow for varying special surface structures, such as fouling control coatings, as well as some drag reduction mechanisms such as riblets, dimples, tubercles, in the presence of some biofouling types.
Drinking Water Quality Assessment in Selected Barangays in Laoang , Northern Samar , Philippines

This study aimed to assess drinking water quality of the different water sources in Barangays Vigo, Yapas and Tinoblan in Laoang Northern Samar. Water sources were: deep well, pump well and communal faucets. Water quality is based on the physical, chemical and bacteriological properties for each of the eight sampling stations. Three sampling periods were made at an interval of at least 15 days from January-February, 2012. Findings revealed that most water sources were within the permissible limits in terms of color, odor, pH, total dissolved solids (TDS), salinity, dissolved oxygen (DO) and nitrite. However, hardness and alkalinity were beyond the allowable limits. All water samples were positive for fecal coliforms. Thus, this study concludes that all water sources tested are not safe and not potable.
Grid Reconfiguration Method for Off-Grid DOA Estimation

Off-grid algorithms for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation have become attractive because of their advantages in resolution and efficiency over conventional ones. In this paper, we propose a grid reconfiguration direction of arrival (GRDOA) estimation method based on sparse Bayesian learning. Unlike other off-grid methods, the grid points of GRDOA are treated as dynamic parameters. The number and position of the grid points are varied iteratively via a root method and a fission process. Then, the grid gets reconfigured through some criteria. By iteratively updating the reconfigured grid, DOAs are estimated completely. Since GRDOA has fewer grid points, it has better computational efficiency than the previous methods. Moreover, GRDOA can achieve better resolution and relatively higher accuracy. Numerical simulation results validate the effectiveness of GRDOA.
Kusumah, Ferdi Perdana; Kyyra, Jorma Bi-directional Power Transfer of a Contactless Electric Vehicle Charger Using Direct Three- Phase to Single-Phase AC/AC Converter

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) This material is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user. Kusumah, Ferdi Perdana; Kyyra, Jorma
The impact of maternal work participation on duration of breastfeeding among poor women in South India.

This article attempts to identify the magnitude of the effect of maternal work participation on duration of breastfeeding with data from poor women in Tamil Nadu a southern state of India where female labour-force participation is considerably higher (29.9 per cent according to the 1991 census) than in most other states in India. This paper also explores further an aspect of the link between maternal work participation and duration of breastfeeding that has not been touched on so far owing to non-availability of data. If one looks at the available literature the work status variable pertains to activity during a reference period often a one-year period prior to a survey. In fact many large-scale surveys including the Demographic Health Survey (DHS) World Fertility Survey (WFS) Census and the recent National Family Health Survey (NFHS) normally collect information on current economic activity i.e. usual activity during a reference period prior to the survey. But it has been noted that work status changes over life. Some of the women working during the last year may not have been working for time periods in the past. In particular many women stop working during late pregnancy and resume work only after a few months or even a year after delivery. In an analysis of breastfeeding work status at that time is more relevant than work status at or just before the time of the survey. The risk of terminating breastfeeding would possibly be influenced by whether the woman was working at the time rather than working during a reference period prior to the survey. Hence this paper also examines the effect of work status at the time of breastfeeding on the risk of terminating breastfeeding among poor women. (excerpt)