Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
No-Reference Image Quality Assessment for Defocus Restoration

Even though both full-reference and no-reference image quality assessments are extensively applied to evaluate degraded images e.g. blurred, noised, compressed and distorted, few of them especially the no-reference species are suitable for image restoration. The goal of this work is to propose a no-reference quality assessment for defocus restoration. Because of that most optical systems have circular aperture, the defocusing is an isotropic filter to blur the edges. As a result, the change of edge location detected by Canny algorithm will be small after defocusing. Otherwise, smooth regions will be smoother after defocusing. Therefore, the locations of edges and smooth regions will not change. We get those invariant points from defocus image to form two point sets, one containing edge points, another containing the centers of smooth regions. The two point sets are used to form patches in restoration image, and image patch structure metric is proposed for those patches to score the local restoration quality. At last, the quality assessment for defocus restoration is modeled as an overall measure by all of the patches structure metric. Experiments on simulated defocus image and real defocus images are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this assessment.
Adaptive, Application-Specific Garbage Collection

In this paper, we describe a novel execution environment that can dynamically switch between garbage collection systems. As such, it enables selection of the most appropriate allocator and collector for a given application and underlying resource availability. Our system is novel in that it is able to switch between a wide range of diverse collection systems. It uses program annotations to guide selection of the collection system. In addition, it can automatically identify when to switch collectors when program execution behavior warrants it, i.e., it is adaptive. Our system introduces little overhead and accurately identifies the best collector for a wide range of benchmarks and heap sizes.
Neuromuscular Damage and Repair after Dry Needling in Mice

Objective. Some dry needling treatments involve repetitive and rapid needle insertions into myofascial trigger points. This type of treatment causes muscle injury and can also damage nerve fibers. The aim of this study is to determine the injury caused by 15 repetitive punctures in the muscle and the intramuscular nerves in healthy mouse muscle and its ulterior regeneration. Methods. We repeatedly needled the levator auris longus muscle of mice, and then the muscles were processed with immunohistochemistry, methylene blue, and electron microscopy techniques. Results. Three hours after the dry needling procedure, the muscle fibers showed some signs of an inflammatory response, which progressed to greater intensity 24 hours after the procedure. Some inflammatory cells could still be seen when the muscle regeneration was almost complete seven days after the treatment. One day after the treatment, some changes in the distribution of receptors could be observed in the denervated postsynaptic component. Reinnervation was complete by the third day after the dry needling procedure. We also saw very fine axonal branches reinnervating all the postsynaptic components and some residual sprouts the same day. Conclusion. Repeated dry needling punctures in muscle do not perturb the different stages of muscle regeneration and reinnervation.
ID* Lite: improved D* Lite algorithm

Robot navigation has been of great importance especially under unknown or keep-changing environment. In order to solve this kind of problems, many algorithms have been brought up. D* Lite is generally considered as one of the most functional ones. The better performance of D* Lite largely depends on relatively less updating rather than recalculating terrain cost from scratch between robot movements. However, D* Lite still needs updating, i.e. recalculation, every time a terrain change is discovered. In this paper, we give an efficient method to check out when such recalculation can be fully or partially avoided. Experimental results show that it speeds up to 5 times for a variety of benchmarks including a novel and realistic benchmark. Our idea results in an improved version of D* Lite which we call ID* Lite. Moreover, it can be easily embedded into D* Lite variants such as DD* Lite and anytime D* etc.
Impact of Large-Scale Afforestation on Surface Temperature: A Case Study in the Kubuqi Desert, Inner Mongolia Based on the WRF Model

Afforestation activities in the Kubuqi Desert, Inner Mongolia, China, have substantially increased tree and shrub coverage in this region. In this study, the response of the surface temperature to afforestation is simulated with the Weather Research and Forecasting model. The surface temperature changes are decomposed into contributions from the intrinsic surface biophysical effect and atmospheric feedback, using the theory of intrinsic biophysical mechanism. The effect of afforestation on the surface temperature is 1.34 K, −0.48 K, 2.09 K and 0.22 K for the summer daytime, the summer nighttime, the winter daytime and the winter nighttime, respectively, for the grid cells that have experienced conversion from bare soil to shrub. The corresponding domain mean values are 0.15 K, −0.2 K, 0.67 K, and 0.06 K. The seasonal variation of surface temperature change is mainly caused by changes in roughness and Bowen ratio. In the daytime, the surface temperature changes are dominated by the biophysical effect, with albedo change being the main biophysical factor. In the nighttime, the biophysical effect (mainly associated with roughness change) and the atmospheric feedback (mainly associated with change in the background air temperature) contribute similar amounts to the surface temperature changes. We conclude that the atmospheric feedback can amplify the influence of the surface biophysical effect, especially in the nighttime.
Logical settings for concept learning from incomplete examples in First Order Logic

We investigate here concept learning from incomplete examples. Our first purpose is to discuss to what extent logical learning settings have to be modified in order to cope with data incompleteness. More precisely we are interested in extending the learning from interpretations setting introduced by L. De Raedt that extends to relational representations the classical propositional (or attribute-value) concept learning from examples framework. We are inspired here by ideas presented by H. Hirsh in a work extending the Version space inductive paradigm to incomplete data. H. Hirsh proposes to slightly modify the notion of solution when dealing with incomplete examples: a solution has to be a hypothesis compatible with all pieces of information concerning the examples. We identify two main classes of incompleteness. First, uncertainty deals with our state of knowledge concerning an example. Second, generalization (or abstraction) deals with what part of the description of the example is sufficient for the learning purpose. These two main sources of incompleteness can be mixed up when only part of the useful information is known. We discuss a general learning setting, referred to as "learning from possibilities" that formalizes these ideas, then we present a more specific learning setting, referred to as "assumption-based learning" that cope with examples which uncertainty can be reduced when considering contextual information outside of the proper description of the examples. Assumption-based learning is illustrated on a recent work concerning the prediction of a consensus secondary structure common to a set of RNA sequences.
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think

Join us for lively discussion as Professor Wansink reveals the research surrounding the search to help companies develop " win-win " strategies to help people eat more nutritiously and control their portions and, in turn, leverage those strategies in a fast-paced, competitive marketplace. This event is open to the public with a $45 registration fee. Registration is free for current University of Minnesota students and Carlson School faculty. RSVP required: carlsonschool.umn. edu/mindlesseating A reception will follow the talk. Brian Wansink is the Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Nutritional Science at Cornell University and the director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. His consumer-relevant research has been prominently featured in the New York Times, Time Magazine, and numerous other national outlets.
Sharing R&D Investments in Cleaner Technologies to Mitigate Climate Change

This paper examines international cooperation on technological development as an alternative to international cooperation on GHG emission reductions. It is assumed that when countries cooperate they coordinate their investments so as to minimize the agreement costs of controlling emissions and that they also pool their R&D efforts so as to fully internalize the spillover effects of their investments in R&D. In order to analyze the scope of cooperation, an agreement formation game is solved in three stages. First, countries decide whether or not to sign the agreement. Then, in the second stage, signatories (playing together) and non-signatories (playing individually) select their investment in R&D. Finally, in the third stage, each country decides its level of emissions non-cooperatively. For linear environmental damages and quadratic investment costs, our findings show that the maximum participation in a R&D agreement consists of six countries and that participation decreases as the coalition information exchange decreases until a minimum participation consisting of three countries is reached. We also find that the grand coalition is stable if the countries sign an international research joint venture but in this case the effectiveness of the agreement is very low.
A combined approach to speaker authentication using claimant-specific acoustic universal structures

In this paper, a novel approach to online cohort selection is proposed which combines the cohort sets obtained using acoustic universal structure (AUS) and speaker specific cohort selection (SSCS). To obtain the cohort set using AUS, a confusion matrix is first generated using the distance between the structure of test utterance and the AUS of speaker. The confusion matrix is normalized using the iterative proportional fitting (IPF) method. The normalized confusion matrix along with a simple distance metric is used to select a cohort set based on similarity for each client speaker. A similar procedure is followed to obtain the cohort set using the SSCS method. Both these cohort sets are combined to obtain a single cohort set. Normalization statistics are then computed from this cohort set, which is used in the final scoring for authenticating the claimed speaker identity. Speaker verification experiments conducted on the NIST 2002 SRE, NIST 2004 SRE and YORO database, show reasonable improvement over conventional techniques used in speaker verification in terms of equal error rate and decision cost function values.
Large-scale lexical semantics for speech recognition support

This paper presents a study on the use of wide-coverage semantic knowledge for large vocabulary (theoretically unrestricted) domain-independent speech recognition. A machine readable dictionary was used to provide the semantic information about the words and a semantic model was developed based on the conceptual association between words as computed directly from the textual representations of their meanings. The findings of our research suggest that the model is capable of capturing phenomena of semantic associativity or connectivity between words in texts and considerably reducing the semantic ambiguity in natural language. The model can cover both short and long-distance semantic relationships between words and has shown signs of robustness across various text genres. Experiments with simulated speech recognition hypotheses indicate that the model can efficiently be used to reduce the word error rates when applied to word lattices or N-best sentence hypotheses.
Modeling and Simulating of Omni Directional Soccer Robot Omid

—Modeling and simulation in robotics research has always been one of the most beneficial ways of evaluating structural and behavioral designs before implementation in real world. Robot soccer is a research domain started from 1998 as a practical league of RoboCup international competitions. Simulating omni-directional wheels of such robots has recently been a controversial issue among developers. In this paper an innovative simulator including all the features of small size soccer robots in a 5 on 5 game, is introduced. In addition, a novel technique in modeling omni directional wheels is applied with considering just two parameters of wheels: longitude and lateral. The advantages of this simulation environment are shown via investigation of its feasible computation time and accuracy in robots' performance estimation.
Lesions of Cholinergic Pedunculopontine Tegmental Nucleus Neurons Fail to Affect Cocaine or Heroin Self-Administration or Conditioned Place Preference in Rats

Cholinergic input to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) is known to contribute to reward. Although it is known that the pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus (PPTg) provides an important source of excitatory input to the dopamine system, the specific role of PPTg cholinergic input to the VTA in cocaine reward has not been previously determined. We used a diphtheria toxin conjugated to urotensin-II (Dtx::UII), the endogenous ligand for urotensin-II receptors expressed by PPTg cholinergic but not glutamatergic or GABAergic cells, to lesion cholinergic PPTg neurons. Dtx::UII toxin infusion resulted in the loss of 95.78 (±0.65)% of PPTg cholinergic cells but did not significantly alter either cocaine or heroin self-administration or the development of cocaine or heroin conditioned place preferences. Thus, cholinergic cells originating in PPTg do not appear to be critical for the rewarding effects of cocaine or of heroin.
Server-side detection of malware infection

We review the intertwined problems of malware and online fraud, and argue that the fact that service providers often are nancially responsible for fraud causes a relative lack of incentives for clients to manage their own security well. This suggests the need for a server-side tool to determine the security posture of clients before letting them transact. We introduce an exceedingly lightweight audit mechanism to address this need -- permitting for post-mortem infection analysis -- and prove its security properties based on standard cryptographic hardness assumptions. We describe a deployment architecture that aligns the incentives of participants in order to facilitate quick adoption and widespread use of the technology. Our approach is exible enough to protect even low-end computing devices like mobile handsets, which future malware will target heavily, but whose power and bandwidth limitations result in poor effectiveness for traditional anti-virus solutions. A contribution of independent potential value is the enabling of a centralized analysis of malware-related events, which promises to extend the power of detection in comparison to what today's decentralized paradigm allows.
A Workbench for Information Retrieval Experimentation

AbstractThis paper describes a general model of information retrieval systems and processes and itsimplementation as a workbench for information retrieval experimentation in Common Lisp.A brief overview discusses the motivation for and goals of such a workbench. A generalmodel of retrieval systems is presented which identiﬁes two functional components, partitionersand transformersand a single aggregate data type, collections, and how they interact. Theworkbench and its implementation are discussed in general terms, including the core classesand methods and a small group of applications which have been developed for it. Finally,there is a brief discussion of the usefulness of Common Lisp as the implementation languagefor the workbench and its conceptual aﬃnity for information retrieval system modeling. 1 Introduction The world is ﬁlled with information retrieval systems: online catalogs and data services, indexingservices, help desks, phone books, information ﬁlters, back-of-the-bookindexes, DBMS, ﬁle systems,address books, and so on. All of these are systems which allow one to “retrieve” or “select”information of one sort or another from a collection of related objects. Though we all recognize acertain fundamental similarity shared by all such information retrieval (or selection) systems, therehas as yet been little work done to describe or model them within any sort of uniﬁed framework.Where models do exist, diﬀerent types of selection system are modeled within their own domain,e.g. Library Science, Information Science, Computer Science, etc. The models produced by thesedisciplines have many domain speciﬁc features that do not map well into any of the other domains,and they emphasize diﬀerent facets of their respective systems, such as size or speed, eﬀectiveness,work ﬂow, user friendliness, etc., and so, model very diﬀerent sorts of system behavior.In the ﬁeld of computer based information retrieval, most experimental systems and researchprojects focus on one particular function or “module” of retrieval systems such as a matching1
Antibiotic choice may not explain poorer outcomes in patients with Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia and high vancomycin minimum inhibitory concentrations.

BACKGROUND There are concerns about reduced efficacy of vancomycin in patients with Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia (SAB), especially when the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) nears the upper limit of the susceptible range. METHODS We examined the relationship between antibiotic treatment, 30-day mortality, and microbiologic parameters in a large Australasian cohort of patients with SAB. RESULTS We assessed 532 patients with SAB from 8 hospitals. All patients with methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) bacteremia were treated with vancomycin, and patients with methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) bacteremia received either flucloxacillin or vancomycin. Increasing vancomycin MIC was associated with increased mortality in vancomycin-treated patients. However, even in patients with MSSA bacteremia treated with flucloxacillin, mortality was also higher if the vancomycin Etest MIC of their isolate was >1.5 μg/mL, compared with those with lower MIC isolates (26.8% vs 12.2%; P < .001). After adjustment in a multivariate model, age, hospital-onset SAB and vancomycin MIC were independently associated with mortality, but methicillin resistance and antibiotic choice were not. CONCLUSIONS We have confirmed an association between higher vancomycin MIC and increased mortality in patients with SAB, but surprisingly this relationship was not related to the antibiotic treatment received, suggesting that the use of vancomycin per se is not responsible for the poorer outcome.
Aktivitas Fisik High Intensity Intermittent Exercise (HIIE) : Antara Obesitas dan Self-Esteem

The purpose of this study is to examined the activity of HIIE on BMI< Fat, and Self -esteem student obesity. Sample in this study was involved 12 students, which consist of 6 people control group received the Ergometer Cycling Low Intensity exercise and 6 people experimental group received the HIIE with protocol HIIE: 5 minutes warming up, 8 second cycle sprint followed by 12 s of low intensity cycling for a period of 20 min, and 5 minutes coolingdown. The two of group received duration of exercise about 30 minutes, frequency 3 time a week during 3 weeks. The research used experimental method, using technique Randomize Pretest-Posttest Control Group Design and Correlation Bivariate. The instrument to measure Self-esteem is used Self-esteem Inventory. Result: this study showed that HIIE decrease BMI with the pretest 35,7% and post test 33,4%, fat decrease with pretest 32,85% and postest 28,68%. Futhermore, HIIE increase self esteem, with the pretest 16,7% and post test 19%. This study showed that the activity of HIIE can decrease of obesity and improve student self esteem espesially for the obesity student. ABSTRAK Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui pengaruh aktivitas HIIE pada BMI< lemak, dan Self Esteem siswa. Jumlah sampel terdiri dari 12 orang yang terdiri dari 6 orang kelompok kontrol melakukan latihan Ergometer Cycing Low Intensity dan 6 orang kelompok eksperimen melakukan latihan latihan HIIE dengan durasi 30 menit, frekuensi latihan 3 kali seminggu. Protokol HIIE terdiri dari pemanasan 5 menit, sprint 8 detik diikuti 12 detik intensitas rendah selama 20 menit, dan pendinginan 5 menit. dan pendinginan 5 menit. Metode Eksperimen dengan menggunakan Randomixe Pretest-Posttest Control Group Design, instrumen untuk mengukur Self-esteem dengan Self-esteem Inventory dengan teknik analisis data uji-t dan korelasi Bivariate. Hasil: menunjukkan bahwa HIIE menurunkan BMI dengan hasil pretest 35,7% dan post test 33,4%, penurunan lemak dengan hasil pre-test menunjukkan 32,85% dan post-test 28,68%, HIIE meningkatkan self-esteem dengan hasil pre test menunjukkan 16,7% dan post-test 19%. Penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa HIIE mengalami penurunan obesitas dan meningkatkan self –esteem siswa.
A generalized demodulation approach to time-frequency projections for multicomponent signals

In this paper, we introduce a flexible approach for the time-frequency analysis of multicomponent signals involving the use of analytic vectors and demodulation. The demodulated analytic signal is projected onto the time-frequency plane so that, as closely as possible, each component contributes exclusively to a different ‘tile’ in a wavelet packet tiling of the time-frequency plane, and at each time instant, the contribution to each tile definitely comes from no more than one component. A single reverse demodulation is then applied to all projected components. The resulting instantaneous frequency of each component in each tile is not constrained to a set polynomial form in time, and is readily calculated, as is the corresponding Hilbert energy spectrum. Two examples illustrate the method. In order better to understand the effect of additive noise, the approximate variance of the estimated instantaneous frequency in any tile has been formulated by starting with pure noise and studying its evolving covariance structure through each step of the algorithm. The validity and practical utility of the resulting expression for the variance of the estimated instantaneous frequency is demonstrated via a simulation experiment.
Implementing Distributed Controllers for Systems with Priorities

Implementing a component-based system in a distributed way so that it ensures some global constraints is a challenging problem. We consider here abstract specifications consisting of a composition of components and a controller given in the form of a set of interactions and a priority order amongst them. In the context of distributed systems, such a controller must be executed in a distributed fashion while still respecting the global constraints imposed by interactions and priorities. We present in this paper an implementation of an algorithm that allows a distributed execution of systems with (binary) interactions and priorities. We also present a comprehensive simulation analysis that shows how sensitive to changes our algorithm is, in particular changes related to the degree of conflict in the system.