Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self-Supervised Multiscale Adversarial Regression Network for Stereo Disparity Estimation

Deep learning approaches have significantly contributed to recent progress in stereo matching. These deep stereo matching methods are usually based on supervised training, which requires a large amount of high-quality ground-truth depth map annotations that are expensive to collect. Furthermore, only a limited quantity of stereo vision training data are currently available, obtained either by active sensors (Lidar and ToF cameras) or through computer graphics simulations and not meeting requirements for deep supervised training. Here, we propose a novel deep stereo approach called the “self-supervised multiscale adversarial regression network (SMAR-Net),” which relaxes the need for ground-truth depth maps for training. Specifically, we design a two-stage network. The first stage is a disparity regressor, in which a regression network estimates disparity values from stacked stereo image pairs. Stereo image stacking method is a novel contribution as it not only contains the spatial appearances of stereo images but also implies matching correspondences with different disparity values. In the second stage, a synthetic left image is generated based on the left–right consistency assumption. Our network is trained by minimizing a hybrid loss function composed of a content loss and an adversarial loss. The content loss minimizes the average warping error between the synthetic images and the real ones. In contrast to the generative adversarial loss, our proposed adversarial loss penalizes mismatches using multiscale features. This constrains the synthetic image and real image as being pixelwise identical instead of just belonging to the same distribution. Furthermore, the combined utilization of multiscale feature extraction in both the content loss and adversarial loss further improves the adaptability of SMAR-Net in ill-posed regions. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that SMAR-Net outperforms the current state-of-the-art self-supervised methods and achieves comparable outcomes to supervised methods. The source code can be accessed at: https://github.com/Dawnstar8411/SMAR-Net.
Monodirectional Tissue P Systems With Promoters

Tissue <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> systems with promoters provide nondeterministic parallel bioinspired devices that evolve by the interchange of objects between regions, determined by the existence of some special objects called <italic>promoters</italic>. However, in cellular biology, the movement of molecules across a membrane is transported from high to low concentration. Inspired by this biological fact, in this article, an interesting type of tissue <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> systems, called monodirectional <italic>tissue</italic> <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> <italic>systems with promoters</italic>, where communication happens between two regions only in one direction, is considered. Results show that finite sets of numbers are produced by such <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> systems with one cell, using any length of symport rules or with any number of cells, using a maximal length 1 of symport rules, and working in the maximally parallel mode. Monodirectional tissue <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> systems are Turing universal with two cells, a maximal length 2, and at most one promoter for each symport rule, and working in the maximally parallel mode or with three cells, a maximal length 1, and at most one promoter for each symport rule, and working in the flat maximally parallel mode. We also prove that monodirectional tissue <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> systems with two cells, a maximal length 1, and at most one promoter for each symport rule (under certain restrictive conditions) working in the flat maximally parallel mode characterizes regular sets of natural numbers. Besides, the computational efficiency of monodirectional tissue <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> systems with promoters is analyzed when cell division rules are incorporated. Different uniform solutions to the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT problem) are provided. These results show that with the restrictive condition of “monodirectionality,” monodirectional tissue <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> systems with promoters are still computationally powerful. With the powerful computational power, developing membrane algorithms for monodirectional tissue <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> systems with promoters is potentially exploitable.
STUDY OF A BISTABLE FLOW ON TWO PARALLEL CIRCULAR CYLINDERS WITH A MIXTURE MODEL APPROACH

Abstract. Bistable flow is found in turbulent cross-flow impinging on two side-by-side circular cylinders, where the flow who emanates through the gap between them presents a flip-flopping wake characterized by a biased flow switching at irregular intervals. The study of the behavior of the bistability phenomenon in simplified geometries, as in the case of two tubes placed side-by-side, helps in understanding the parameters and variables that influence more complex geometries, like banks of tubes or rods, found in the nuclear and process industries, which are the most common geometry used in heat exchangers. To better characterize this behavior, which can represent an additional source of dynamic instabilities, this work presents a study where a finite mixture model is applied to analyze the probabilistic distribution functions (PDF) of the phenomenon. Velocity time series, obtained in an aerodynamic channel using a double hot wire anemometer probe, are used as input data to obtain the PDF of the axial and transverse velocity components. The experiments were performed with a Reynolds number of 4.36×10 and a pitch-todiameter ratio of p/d=1.26, where "p" is the pitch or the distance between the centers of the cylinders and "d" the diameter. The bistable phenomenon is considered as an incomplete data problem and PDF-estimation is performed using the time series as observed data. The observed data is classified according to a family of PDF, and the number of clusters is considered fixed and equal to two. An expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is applied to estimate the maximum log-likelihood function, to know what the probability distribution function is more likely to have produced the observed data. Results show that in the changes between the flow modes, the increase in the axial velocity component is accompanied by the increase of the transverse component. The velocity components PDF present the predominance of two major concentrations, but with different shapes. A value that represents the mean frequency of the changes between the flow modes, called pseudo-frequency, analyzed after decomposition of the signal through a discrete wavelet transform could be defined. An analysis of length growth of the PDF to their level of reconstruction by discrete wavelet transform (DWT) of velocity components shows a gradual loss of information on small scales. Comparisons between the probabilities of occurrences of the velocity signals together with the DWT show a similar behavior, but there is no evident correlation between the changes with time. The bivariate scenario provides a joint analysis of the time series, and shows the relationship between the PDF in the measurement plane.
Treatment-resistant hypertension in the hemodialysis population: a 44-h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring-based study.

BACKGROUND Uncontrolled hypertension notwithstanding the use of at least three drugs or hypertension controlled with at least four drugs, the widely accepted definition of treatment-resistant hypertension (TRH), is considered as a common problem in the hemodialysis population. However, to date there is no estimate of the prevalence of this condition in hemodialysis patients. METHOD We estimated the prevalence of TRH by 44-h ambulatory BP monitoring (ABPM) in 506 hemodialysis patients in 10 renal units in Europe included in the registry of the European Renal and Cardiovascular Medicine (EURECAm,), a working group of the European Association, European Dialysis and Transplantation Association (ERA EDTA). In a sub-group of 114 patients, we tested the relationship between fluid overload (Body Composition monitor) and TRH. RESULTS The prevalence of hypertension with 44-h ABPM criteria was estimated at 85.6% (434 out of 506 patients). Of these, 296 (58%) patients were classified as uncontrolled hypertensive patients by 44-h ABPM criteria (≥130/80 mmHg). Two hundred and thirteen patients had uncontrolled hypertension while on treatment with less than three drugs and 210 patients were normotensive while on drug therapy (n = 138) or off drug treatment (n = 72). The prevalence of TRH was 24% (93 among 386 treated hypertensive patients). The prevalence of predialysis fluid overload was 33% among TRH patients, 34% in uncontrolled hypertensive patients and 26% in normotensive patients. The vast majority (67%) of hemodialysis patients with TRH had no fluid overload. CONCLUSION TRH occurs in about one in four treated hypertensive patients on hemodialysis. Fluid overload per se only in part explains TRH and the 67% of these patients show no fluid overload.
UDK: 371.235.2 =========================================================================== TEACHERS' PERCEPTION OF STORIES: DIFFERENT METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES IN STORY-BASED PRACTICE

The studies on teachers' perception of stories and the way they are using them are not in abundance. This fact together with the awareness that stories are inseparable part of our life, made it interesting to go deeper into the analysis of teachers' views and approaches to stories. LaFlamme (1975) argues for a more meaningful story time in preschool where children will not be only passive listeners, but active participants. Mottley and Telfer (1997) and Tin, Nonis, Lim, and Honig (2013) studies are referring to teachers’ perception of the importance of stories in children’s lives and what are teachers’ expectation and concerns regarding stories.
Evolution of Physical Fitness in Formative Female Basketball Players: A Case Study

Over the last few years, team sports increased the amount of physical demand and its importance. Therefore, work related to physical fitness and its assessment is essential to achieving success. However, there are few studies on this subject at the formative stage. The purpose of this study was then to analyze the physical fitness of an under-18 (U18) women’s team divided by game positions. In addition, physical fitness at different times of the season was characterized to identify differences and determine its evolution. To assess physical fitness, tests of aerobic and anaerobic capacities, lower body strength, centripetal force, agility and speed were carried out as designed in the SBAFIT battery. Each player was equipped with an inertial microtechnology device for the collection of data. This research is classified as empirical, with quasi-experimental methodology. The results showed significant differences in variables of the test of aerobic and anaerobic capacities, speed, agility (generic and specific), and centripetal force (right) based on game position and the moment of the season. The results also showed the importance of the specific physical aspect in relation to an optimal improvement in physical fitness, since training sessions and competition do not allow all players to improve equally or efficiently.
Calcium utilization during reproduction in big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus)

Abstract To support the ossification of fetal and neonatal bones, reproductive females must transfer calcium to their offspring. The extent to which calcium is mobilized from maternal bone is related inversely to the amount of calcium ingested. Insectivorous bats consume a low-calcium diet, and thus, a reproductive female may experience a conflict over allocating dietary calcium to self-maintenance or her developing offspring. We tested the ability of big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) to use elevated concentrations of dietary calcium to determine if available dietary calcium limits the amount of calcium that mothers transfer to their offspring. During late pregnancy and early lactation captive bats were fed diets with calcium content 10 times greater than (high-calcium) or equivalent to (low-calcium) diets consumed by free-ranging individuals. We measured the calcium content of guano produced by mothers as an indicator of calcium absorption and the calcium content of their young as a measure of total calcium allocated to offspring development. Females on the high-calcium diet defecated 13 times more calcium than females on the low-calcium diet, and no difference in body concentrations of calcium existed between pups produced by females on low- and high-calcium diets. This suggests that limited calcium intake does not constrain calcium transfer to offspring in big brown bats. It is likely that the calcium demands of offspring production are met largely by mobilizing maternal skeletal calcium.
Amplitude versus spatially modulated electrotactile feedback for myoelectric control of two degrees of freedom

Objective. Artificial proprioceptive feedback from a myoelectric prosthesis is an important aspect in enhancing embodiment and user satisfaction, possibly lowering the demand for visual attention while controlling a prosthesis in everyday tasks. Contemporary myoelectric prostheses are advanced mechatronic systems with multiple degrees of freedom, and therefore, to communicate the prosthesis state, the feedback interface needs to transmit several variables simultaneously. In the present study, two different configurations for conveying proprioceptive information of wrist rotation and hand aperture through multichannel electrotactile stimulation were developed and evaluated during online myoelectric control. Approach. Myoelectric recordings were acquired from the dominant forearm and electrotactile stimulation was delivered on the non-dominant forearm using a compact interface. The first feedback configuration, which was based on spatial coding, transmitted the information using a moving tactile stimulus, whereas the second, amplitude-based configuration conveyed the position via sensation intensity. Thirteen able-bodied subjects used pattern classification-based myoelectric control with both feedback configurations to accomplish a target-reaching task. Main results. High task performance (completion rate > 90%) was observed for both configurations, with no significant difference in completion rate, time to reach the target, distance error and path efficiency, respectively. Significance. Overall, the results demonstrated that both feedback configurations allowed subjects to perceive and interpret two feedback variables delivered simultaneously, despite using a compact stimulation interface. This is an encouraging result for the prospect of communicating the full state of a multifunctional hand prosthesis.
Phosphorylation of the Chaperone-Like HspB5 Rescues Trafficking and Function of F508del-CFTR

Cystic Fibrosis is a lethal monogenic autosomal recessive disease linked to mutations in Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator (CFTR) protein. The most frequent mutation is the deletion of phenylalanine at position 508 of the protein. This F508del-CFTR mutation leads to misfolded protein that is detected by the quality control machinery within the endoplasmic reticulum and targeted for destruction by the proteasome. Modulating quality control proteins as molecular chaperones is a promising strategy for attenuating the degradation and stabilizing the mutant CFTR at the plasma membrane. Among the molecular chaperones, the small heat shock protein HspB1 and HspB4 were shown to promote degradation of F508del-CFTR. Here, we investigated the impact of HspB5 expression and phosphorylation on transport to the plasma membrane, function and stability of F508del-CFTR. We show that a phosphomimetic form of HspB5 increases the transport to the plasma membrane, function and stability of F508del-CFTR. These activities are further enhanced in presence of therapeutic drugs currently used for the treatment of cystic fibrosis (VX-770/Ivacaftor, VX-770+VX-809/Orkambi). Overall, this study highlights the beneficial effects of a phosphorylated form of HspB5 on F508del-CFTR rescue and its therapeutic potential in cystic fibrosis.
Efficient Community Search over Large Directed Graph: An Augmented Index-based Approach

Given a graph G and a query vertex q, the topic of community search (CS), aiming to retrieve a dense subgraph of G containing q, has gained much attention. Most existing works focus on undirected graphs which overlooks the rich information carried by the edge directions. Recently, the problem of community search over directed graphs (or CSD problem) has been studied [Fang et al., 2019b]; it finds a connected subgraph containing q, where the in-degree and out-degree of each vertex within the subgraph are at least k and l, respectively. However, existing solutions are inefficient, especially on large graphs. To tackle this issue, in this paper we propose a novel index called D-Forest, which allows a CSD query to be completed within the optimal time cost. We further propose efficient index construction methods. Extensive experiments on six real large graphs show that our index-based query algorithm is up to two orders of magnitude faster than existing solutions.
A Two-Stage Matheuristic Algorithm for Classical Inventory Routing Problem

The inventory routing problem (IRP), which is NP-hard, tackles the combination of inventory management and transportation optimization in supply chains. It seeks a minimum-cost schedule which utilizes a single vehicle to perform deliveries in multiple periods, so that no customer runs out of stock. Specifically, the solution of IRP can be represented as how many products should be delivered to which customer during each period, as well as the route in each period. We propose a two-stage matheuristic (TSMH) algorithm to solve the IRP. The first stage optimizes the overall schedule and generates an initial solution by a relax-and-repair method. The second stage employs an iterated tabu search procedure to achieve a fine-grained optimization to the current solution. Tested on 220 most commonly used benchmark instances, TSMH obtains advantages comparing to the state-of-the-art algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain not only the optimal solutions for most small instances, but also better upper bounds for 40 out of 60 large instances. These results demonstrate that the TSMH algorithm is effective and efficient in solving the IRP. In addition, the comparative experiments justify the importance of two optimization stages of TSMH.
Statistical Learning with a Nuisance Component (Extended Abstract)

We provide excess risk guarantees for statistical learning in a setting where the population risk with respect to which we evaluate a target parameter depends on an unknown parameter that must be estimated from data (a "nuisance parameter"). We analyze a two-stage sample splitting meta-algorithm that takes as input two arbitrary estimation algorithms: one for the target parameter and one for the nuisance parameter. We show that if the population risk satisfies a condition called Neyman orthogonality, the impact of the nuisance estimation error on the excess risk bound achieved by the meta-algorithm is of second order. Our theorem is agnostic to the particular algorithms used for the target and nuisance and only makes an assumption on their individual performance. This enables the use of a plethora of existing results from statistical learning and machine learning literature to give new guarantees for learning with a nuisance component. Moreover, by focusing on excess risk rather than parameter estimation, we can give guarantees under weaker assumptions than in previous works and accommodate the case where the target parameter belongs to a complex nonparametric class. We characterize conditions on the metric entropy such that oracle rates---rates of the same order as if we knew the nuisance parameter---are achieved. We also analyze the rates achieved by specific estimation algorithms such as variance-penalized empirical risk minimization, neural network estimation and sparse high-dimensional linear model estimation. We highlight the applicability of our results in four settings of central importance in the literature: 1) heterogeneous treatment effect estimation, 2) offline policy optimization, 3) domain adaptation, and 4) learning with missing data.
Age-related differences in correction behavior for unintended acceleration

Although unintended acceleration caused by pedal misapplication is a cause of traffic accidents, fatal accidents may be avoided if drivers realize their error immediately and quickly correct how they are stepping on the pedal. This correction behavior may decline with age because the rate of fatal accidents is fairly higher for older adults than for younger adults. To investigate this possibility, the present study recruited older adults (n = 40, age range = 67–81 years) as well as younger adults (n = 40, age range = 18–32 years). In this study, they performed a pedal stepping task during which they were required to stop the simulated vehicle as quickly as possible when a red signal was presented on a monitor. During most trials, the vehicle decelerated/stopped when the brake pedal was applied in a normal manner. In a few trials, however, stepping on the brake pedal resulted in sudden acceleration of the vehicle (i.e., the occurrence of the unintended acceleration); when this occurred, the participants had to release the pedal and re-step on another pedal to decelerate/stop the vehicle as quickly as possible. We focused on the age-related differences of the reaction latencies during three time periods: from the appearance of the red signal on the screen until stepping on the pedal (Period 1), from stepping on the pedal until the release of the pedal (Period 2), and from the release of the pedal until re-stepping of another pedal (Period 3). The results showed that there was no age-related difference in the latency of Period 1, p = . 771, whereas those of Periods 2 and 3 were longer for the older adults (ps < .001). The results suggest that there are age-related differences in error detection and correction abilities under unintended situations with foot pedal manipulation.