Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigations into the role of the medial temporal lobes in autism.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental psychiatric syndrome characterised by impairments in three domains: social interaction, communication, and restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests. The neuropathology associated with Autism is unclear. A recently developed animal model implicates the medial temporal lobes in Autism. Bachevalier and colleagues have demonstrated that bilateral ablation of the medial temporal lobes of neonatal monkeys leads to the development of a constellation of symptoms similar to those of Autism. This thesis investigates the hypothesis that medial temporal lobe abnormality is responsible for some of the cognitive and behavioural impairments seen in individuals with Autism. A number of different techniques are used to compare the brain structure and cognitive and behavioural function of children with Autism with those of normal controls. The neuropsychological investigations described in Part I revealed an impairment in episodic memory and no evidence of impaired semantic memory or recognition memory. Additionally, a protocol of tests of executive functions revealed a deficit in a task sensitive to the functioning of the orbitoffontal cortex and a motor checklist revealed co-ordination difficulties consistent with cerebellar abnormality. Part II describes investigations of brain structure, using a variety of magnetic resonance techniques. A new analysis technique was developed specifically to examine bilateral abnormalities in developmental disorders. This technique revealed bilateral abnormalities in the amygdala, hippocampal formation, orbitoffontal cortex, superior temporal gyrus and cerebellum in children with Autism. In Part III, the functional integrity of three event related potentials was investigated. These components were selected as they have been shown to be disrupted by medial temporal lobe abnormality. The results suggest that any functional abnormality of these waveforms is of a more subtle nature than could be detected through the paradigms used in this thesis. In summary, convergent evidence of abnormality in the medial temporal lobes, orbitoffontal cortex and the cerebellum in Autism was obtained. Chapter
Implementing Poincaré Sections for a Chaotic Relaxation Oscillator

We propose an electronic implementation to record Poincaré sections of dynamical systems exhibiting chaos. Poincaré sections are obtained by sampling and holding the maxima of a sequence of pulses of a chaotic relaxation oscillator versus the same temporal sequence shifted by one unit. By using these sections we are able to detail the transition to chaos via torus breakdown.
Performance Analysis of Optimized Content Extraction for Cyrillic Mongolian Learning Text Materials in the Database

This paper had developed and tested optimized content extraction algorithm using NLP method, TFIDF method for word of weight, VSM for information search, cosine method for similar quality calculation from learning document at the distance learning system database. This test covered following things: 1) to parse word structure at the distance learning system database documents and Cyrillic Mongolian language documents at the section, to form new documents by algorithm for identifying word stem; 2) to test optimized content extraction from text material based on e-test results (key word, correct answer, base form with affix and new form formed by word stem without affix) at distance learning system, also to search key word by automatically selecting using word extraction algorithm; 3) to test Boolean and probabilistic retrieval method through extended vector space retrieval method. This chapter covers: to process document content extraction retrieval algorithm, to propose recommendations query through word stem, not depending on word position based on Cyrillic Mongolian language documents distinction.
Rapid-prototyping of high-performance RISC cores with VHDL

The authors present some experiences they have obtained in the conception and description of a SPARC v8 IU core to be embedded in custom applications. Its design has been carried out using VHDL-based tools such as Synopsys for debugging and synthesis, and Cascade's Epoch for the final implementation stage. These experiences have been gathered into a proposed methodology for the rapid design of high-performance embeddable cores.
Eye-safe imaging and tracking laser scanner system for space applications

This paper discuses the development of a short wavelength infrared laser ranging scanner system at the Canadian Space Agency in cooperation with the National Research Council Canada. A laser source at 1.54 micrometers wavelength is chosen for its relatively eye-safe property. The scanner system is to be considered for use as a space vision system for applications such as robot vision, satellite acquisition and tracking and high resolution 3D imaging for inspection. As an active system, this laser scanner offers an important advantage over conventional vision systems by providing its own illumination and having no dependence on ambient lighting. While providing relatively eye-safe operation, the choice of IR wavelength also improves the background rejection of solar radiation, the latter being about 5.8 times lower than in the visible. The system possesses two modes of operation for making range measurements: triangulation for short distances (0.5 m to 20 m) and time- of-flight for greater range (10 m to beyond 1 km). A short pulse high repetition rate laser is required for time-of- flight measurements. For space applications, the laser must be compact, rugged and efficient while operating in the eye- safe spectrum (1.5 to 1.8 micrometers ). Currently, a YAG laser with an OPO is used to demonstrate the system's operation at 1.54 micrometers , but is too bulky for a space environment. Eventually it will be replaced with a more compact and efficient fiber laser currently being developed. This paper presents the results of the capabilities and performance of the scanner.
Early Adoption - Parallel Computing: Keys to a Future in Computing

The triuvirate: parallel programming, parallel ar- chitecture and parallel algorithms is the mantra for education and research in parallel computing (2). These three are necessary subareas that will prepare an undergraduate srudent to pursue studies in computational science or to develop software systems that exploit parallelism to solve NP-hard problems. We have been developing a curriculum that will take UG students in their freshmen year up through the masters level in parallel computing. The goal is to prepare students for the future of computing and to eventually institute a doctoral program in computational science or computer science.
Collecting Pairs of Word Senses and Their Context Sentences for Generating English Vocabulary Tests

This paper describes our ongoing work for automatically generating multiple-choice questions for English vocabulary tests. Vocabulary-type questions consist of four components: a target word, context sentences, a correct choice and distractors. To generate such type of questions, identifying the word sense of a target word in a context is crucial to create a correct choice in the context sentences. We propose a novel Backward method that utilizes the existing search engine API to obtain context sentences for a given target word sense and further applied word sense disambiguation to confirm the retrieved context sentences. Our preliminary experiment showed that the proposed method achieved 0.951 in accuracy in collecting word sense-context pairs.
Interorbital spin exchange in a state-dependent optical lattice

This thesis reports on the creation of a state-dependent optical lattice for two-orbital ytterbium quantum gases and the observation of a tunable interorbital spin-exchange coupling between itinerant and localized magnetic moments. Ultracold gases of earth-alkaline-like atoms, such as ytterbium, in state-dependent optical lattices have recently been suggested for the simulation of a large variety of paradigmatic orbital models and phenomena. These include Kondoand Anderson-type models featuring heavy-fermion physics, Kondo spin screening, or colossal magnetoresistance. In analogy to electrons in distinct orbitals of solid-state systems, fermionic ytterbium atoms in the electronic ground state and the metastable exited clock state exhibit different mobility in the optical lattice. A strong decoupling of the nuclear spin and the electronic angular momentum results in SU(N)-symmetric interactions and the emergence of a natural spin-exchange coupling through two interorbital scattering channels. We present and characterize our orbital lattice implementation which relies on different ac polarizabilities of the clock states and is general for all earth-alkaline-like atoms. It is expected to preserve the SU(N) symmetry of the interactions and the strong localization of the excitedstate atoms limits lossy collisions. By preparing mixtures of nuclear spins and electronic orbitals, subject to spin-exchange interactions, we take a first step towards the realization of the Kondo lattice model with ultracold atoms. Through optical spectroscopy between the two clock states, we characterize the strong interorbital interactions in the presence of the lattice potential. In a setting with low lattice filling factors, the interorbital on-site interactions in conjunction with the mobility of the ground-state atoms lead to an effective spin-exchange coupling, analogous to the one in the well-known Kondo Hamiltonian. The associated exchange process is observed through magnetization dynamics resulting from initial spin imbalances between different orbitals. We find that the exchange coupling can be controlled resonantly via the external confinement. This is enabled through coupling to center-of-mass excited bound states of the spin-singlet scattering channel.
Causes of Dimming and Brightening in China Inferred from Homogenized Daily Clear-Sky and All-Sky in situ Surface Solar Radiation Records (1958–2016)

This paper presents a study on long-term surface solar radiation (SSR) changes over China under clear- and all-sky conditions and analyzes the causes of the “dimming” and “brightening. ” To eliminate the nonclimatic signals in the historical records, the daily SSR dataset was first homogenized using quantile-matching (QM) adjustment. The results reveal rapid dimming before 2000 not only under all-sky conditions, but also under clear-sky conditions, at a decline rate of −9.7 ± 0.4 W m−2 decade−1 (1958–99). This is slightly stronger than that under all-sky conditions at −7.4 ± 0.4 W m−2 decade−1, since the clear-sky dimming stopped 15 years later. A rapid “wettening” of about 40-Pa surface water vapor pressure (SWVP) from 1985 to 2000 was found over China. It contributed 2.2% to the SSR decline under clear-sky conditions during the whole dimming period (1958–99). Therefore, water vapor cannot be the main cause of the long-term dimming in China. After a stable decade (1999–2008), an intensive brightening appeared under the clear-sky conditions at a rate of 10.6 ± 2.0 W m−2 decade−1, whereas a much weaker brightening (−0.8 ± 3.1 W m−2 decade−1) has been observed under all-sky conditions between 2008 and 2016. The remarkable divergence between clear- and all-sky trends in recent decades indicates that the clouds played two opposite roles in the SSR changes during the past 30 years, by compensating for the declining SSR under the cloud-free conditions in 1985–99 and by counteracting the increasing SSR under cloud-free conditions in 2008–16. Aerosols remain as the main cause of dimming and brightening over China in the last 60 years, although the clouds counteract the effects of aerosols after 2000.
Increasing Efficiency of Leaky-Wave Antenna by Using Substrate Integrated Slab Waveguide

This letter presents a possibility of increasing the radiation efficiency of double-sided leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) by using the substrate integrated slab waveguide (SISW). The idea originates from the fact that double-sided LWAs usually operate on the second mode, and the attenuation constant of the second mode in the SISW is smaller than that in the standard substrate integrated waveguide (SIW). This inherently leads to an increase of antenna radiation efficiency, as less power is dissipated by the traveling wave. In order to prove this concept, two antennas have been designed with the same characteristics (central frequency of 28 GHz, pointing angle of 50°, and beamwidth of 10°), one based on SIW and the other based on SISW. Our experimental verification yields 64% radiation efficiency for the SIW LWA and 80% radiation efficiency for the SISW LWA, thus proving the theoretical and simulated predictions.
Robust and flexible landmarks detection for uncontrolled frontal faces in the wild

In this paper, we propose a robust facial landmarking scheme for frontal faces which can be applied on both controlled and uncontrolled environment. This scheme is based on improvement/extension of the tree-structured facial landmarking scheme proposed by Zhu and Ramanan. The whole system is divided into two main parts: face detection and face landmarking. In the face detection part, we proposed a Tree-structured Filter Model (TFM) combined with Viola and Jones face detector to significantly reduce the false positives while maintaining high accuracy. For the facial landmarking step, we improve the accuracy and the amount of the facial landmarks by readjusting the face structure to provide better geometrical information. Furthermore, we expand the face models into Multi-Resolution (MR) models with the adaptive landmark approach via landmark reduction to train the face models to be able to detect facial landmarks on face images with resolutions as low as 30x30 pixels. Our experiments show that our proposed approaches can improve the accuracy of facial landmark detection on both controlled and uncontrolled environment. Furthermore, they also show that our MR models are more robust on detecting facial components (eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth) on very small faces.
Three Essays on the Study of Persistence via Impulse-Response Confidence Bands with Application to Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) Processes

The two-step simulation-based method introduced in this thesis combines Indirect Inference jointly with Monte Carlo (MC) test methods to deliver identification robust confidence sets for finite samples. In the first chapter, a general framework is introduced, which considers three auxiliary estimating functions: two-sided forward and backward looking regressions with leads and lags, long- autoregressions and empirical autocorrelations. The first simulation stage is incorporated to calibrate parameter estimates. In the second simulation stage, the resulting objective functions are inverted applying the MC test to obtain joint confidence sets. The empirical focus is on Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) processes, since identification and boundary issues raise enduring complications for estimation and inference. In particular, simultaneous impulse-responses confidence bands are derived for ARMA processes via confidence set projections. Supporting simulation studies illustrate the accurate size and good power of our method. The following chapters introduce further refinements to our framework with empirical applications. The second chapter investigates the persistence of oil shocks via impulse-response confidence bands. For the particular case of non-Gaussian Stable distribution, the “Local” Monte Carlo (LMC) test method is applied in the second stage, which is based on calibrations of the nuisance parameters of skewness and kurtosis. By studying long and short weekly samples as well as monthly samples, we find that shocks to oil returns are not permanent, since they are able to dissipate in short to middle time frames of approximately twenty periods. Our findings support the usefulness of impulse-responses obtained from asymmetric and heavy tailed distributions as a tool to understand the uncertainty surrounding commonly applied forecasting techniques. Lastly, the third chapter assesses the persistence of shocks on a measure of idiosyncratic risk (MIR) computed for a non-diversifiable portfolio of Telecom stocks. The two-stage simulation based method is applied with a particular refinement; the average of the statistics of the three estimating functions is computed as a forth resulting test statistic to harvest information from the other three. We conclude that a shock to the MIR can be described as having a short-lived large impact and relatively small oscillatory effects, which remain close to zero approximately after eight months.
Improvement of Pressure Calculations in the Moving Particle Semi-Implicit Method for Free-Surface Flows

In this paper, numerical improvements are implemented for solving for the pressure in the moving particle semi-implicit (MPS) method for free-surface flow simulations. The tensile instability problem is solved using a dynamic stabilization (DS) algorithm. The low numerical diffusion of this algorithm is shown through numerical tests. A free-surface treatment that includes an accurate free-surface particle detection algorithm and the implicit application of a free-surface boundary condition is used. The solution of the Navier–Stokes equation is improved using a particle shifting (PS) algorithm. The proposed MPS method for free-surface flow simulations is successfully applied in several benchmark tests and two- and three-dimensional dam break problems. The numerical simulation results agree well with the analytical and empirical ones. It is shown that the proposed MPS method effectively improves the stability and accuracy of simulations of free-surface flows.
Annotation Scheme for Chinese Treebank

The syntactically annotated corpora, commonly called ‘treebanks’, play an important role in empirical linguistics as well as in machine learning methods in natural language processing. After a brief summarization of several treebank annotation of different language, we proposed a new annotation scheme for Chinese treebank in this paper. Under this scheme, every Chinese sentence will be annotated with a complete parse tree, where each non terminal constituent is assigned with two tags. One is the syntactic constituent tag, which describes its external functional relation with other constituents in the parse tree. The other is the grammatical relation tag, which describes the internal structural relation of its sub components. These two tag sets consist of 16 and 27 tags respectively. They form an integrated annotation for the syntactic constituent in a parse tree through top down and bottom up descriptions. Based on this scheme, we built a 1,000,000 words Chinese treebank covering a balanced collection of journalistic, literary, academic, and other documents. The annotating experiments on different kinds of complex linguistic phenomena show the availability and compatibility of this annotation scheme.
On the solution of a problem of extended thermoelasticity theory (ETE) by using a complete finite element approach

: This paper attempts to apply a complete ﬁnite element approach for the solution of problems on coupled dynamical thermoelasticity theory. Presently, we employ the extended thermoelasticity theory proposed by Lord and Shulman (1969) and consider a problem of linear thermoelasticity for the hollow disk with a thermal shock applied on its inner boundary. The thermoelastic equations have been solved using the complete ﬁnite element approach, where we have used discretization in the time domain as well as space domain and applied the Galerkin’s approach of the ﬁnite element for both time and space domain. We implement our scheme for a particular case and carry out computational work to obtain the numerical solution of the problem. Further, we compare the present results with the solutions obtained by FEM with Newmark time integration method and the solutions obtained by a trans-FEM method in which Laplace transform technique is used for the time domain. We show that, there is a perfect match in solutions of complete ﬁnite element approach with trans-ﬁnite element method and Newmark method. The efﬁciency of the method with respect to computation time is also compared with other two methods.
A velocity corrected unresolved CFD-DEM coupled method to reproduce wake effects at moderate Reynolds number

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a corrected unresolved CFD-DEM method that can reproduce the wake effects in modeling particulate flows at moderate Reynolds number. Design/methodology/approach First, the velocity field in the wake behind a settling particle is numerically investigated by a resolved method, in which the finite volume method (FVM) is applied to model the fluid flow, discrete element method (DEM) is applied to simulate the motion of particles and immersed boundary method (IBM) is used to tackle fluid solid interaction. Second, an analytical scaling law is given, which can effectively describe the velocity field in the wake behind the settling particle at low and middle Reynolds numbers. Third, this analytical expression is incorporated into unresolved modeling to correct the relative velocity between the particle and its surrounding fluid and enable the influence of the wake of the particle on its neighboring particles. Findings Two numerical examples, the sedimentation of dual particles, a list of particles and even more particles are provided to show the effectiveness of the presented velocity corrected unresolved method (VCUM). It is found that, in both examples simulated with VCUM, the relative positions of the particles changed, and drafting & kissing phenomenon and particle clustering phenomenon were clearly observed. Practical implications The developed VCUM can be highly beneficial for modeling industrial particulate flows with DKT and particle clustering phenomena. Originality/value VCUM innovatively incorporates the wake effects into unresolved CFD-DEM method. It improves the computational accuracy of conventional unresolved methods with comparable results from resolved modeling, while the computational cost is greatly reduced.