Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reasoning-Based Framework for Driving Safety Monitoring Using Driving Event Recognition

With the growing concern for driving safety, many driving-assistance systems have been developed. In this paper, we develop a reasoning-based framework for the monitoring of driving safety. The main objective is to present drivers with an intuitively understood green/yellow/red indicator of their danger level. Because the danger level may change owing to the interaction of the host vehicle and the environment, the proposed framework involves two stages of danger-level alerts. The first stage collects lane bias, the distance to the front car, longitudinal and lateral accelerations, and speed data from sensors installed in a real vehicle. All data were recorded in a normal driving environment for the training of hidden Markov models of driving events, including normal driving, acceleration, deceleration, changing to the left or right lanes, zigzag driving, and approaching the car in front. In addition to recognizing these driving events, the degree of each event is estimated according to its character. In the second stage, the danger-level indicator, which warns the driver of a dangerous situation, is inferred by fuzzy logic rules that address the recognized driving events and their degrees. A hierarchical decision strategy is also designed to reduce the number of rules that are triggered. The proposed framework was successfully implemented on a TI DM3730-based embedded platform and was fully evaluated in a real road environment. The experimental results achieved a detection ratio of 99 % for event recognition, compared with that achieved by four conventional methods.
The theory of transvers Nernst--Ettingshausen effect and thermopower of heated (hot) charge carriers in nondegenerate semiconductors in the case of high anisotropy of phonons distribution function

The transverse Nernst--Ettingshausen effect and thermopower of hot charge carriers in nondegenerate impure semiconductors placed at high electric and nonquantized magnetic fields in the nondiffusion approximation is studied. Arbitrary heating and mutual drag of electrons and long wavelength phonons interacting with electrons are considered. The spectrum of electrons is assumed to be strong nonparabolic in Kane two--band approximation. The case when the electron concentration is high and frequent interelectronic collisions lead to the equilibrium symmetric part of the electron distribution function with effective electron temperature is considered.
The seed and the earth. Biotechnology and the colonisation of regeneration.

Regeneration must take place in order for a society to be sustainable. Patriarchal systems and ways of thinking deny this, however, and hamper or prevent regeneration. Regeneration became devalued when it was assigned the so-called "female and animal" characteristics of passivity, materiality, and nature and, thus, distinguished from the "male and distinctly human" characteristics of activity, spirituality, culture. An example of this patriarchal construct at work is the colonization of the "new world," which was assigned the characteristic "terra nullius," empty land; indigenous people were thus considered part of the scenery and not quite human; invaders were described as "discoverers," pirates as "traders," and exterminating and enslaving became "civilizing" endeavors. When patriarchal thinkers turned their attention to agriculture, the living earth was seen as an inert substance which could be manipulated by usurping the very fertility of the soil and reassigning it to manmade, chemical fertilizers. Instead of augmenting land, these techniques have degraded and destroyed it. New varieties of seeds were designed, and the contributions of 10,000 years of farming were ignored. Indigenous seeds, called landraces, were considered valueless, like indigenous peoples before them. Value was added to seeds only after an investment of time and money. The economic impact of this artificial value assigned to a gift of nature will be seen in Third World countries as plant breeders demand "rights" under new utility patents. The plant breeders, who are attempting to substitute local plant diversity with patented seeds throughout the world, go so far as to want laws to prevent farmers from using seeds gleaned from patented plants they have cultivated. Biotechnology is now treating human reproduction in the same proprietary way. Childbirth has been mechanized, and knowledge and skills are considered to be lodged with physicians, not with mothers. By transforming pregnancy into a medical disease, professional management, once confined to abnormal cases, is now considered necessary in every case. In cases of "abnormal" infertility, physicians believe they "create" babies, using the woman's body as so much raw material. The absurdity of this notion of man as creator can be seen by the patent application for the gene sequence coding for the hormone relaxin, which is produced in female ovaries but is being treated as an "invention" which can be owned. This attempt on the part of man to totally engineer the world, including the basic regenerative functions of the seed and women's bodies, is brought into question by the current crisis in health and ecology. Thus, the ecology movement is trying to provide an alternative based on a partnership with nature and fostering natural agriculture and natural childbirth.
Hold-On : Protecting Against On-Path DNS Poisoning

Several attacks on DNS inject forged DNS replies without suppressing the legitimate replies. Current implementations of DNS resolvers are vulnerable to accepting the injected replies if the attacker’s reply arrives before the legitimate one. In the case of regular DNS, this behavior allows an attacker to corrupt a victim’s interpretation of a name; for DNSSECprotected names, it enables denial-of-service. We argue that the resolver should wait after receiving an initial reply for a “Hold-On” period to allow a subsequent legitimate reply to also arrive. We evaluate the feasibility of such an approach and discuss our implementation of a prototype stub resolver/forwarder that validates DNS replies using Hold-On. By validating the IP TTL and the timing of the replies, we show that the resolver can identify DNS packets injected by a nationstate censorship system, and that it functions without perceptible performance decrease for undisrupted lookups.
Interoperable services based on activity monitoring in Ambient Assisted Living environments

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is considered as the main technological solution that will enable the aged and people in recovery to maintain their independence and a consequent high quality of life for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case. This goal is achieved by monitoring human's activities and deploying the appropriate collection of services to set environmental features and satisfy user preferences in a given context. However, both human monitoring and services deployment are particularly hard to accomplish due to the uncertainty and ambiguity characterising human actions, and heterogeneity of hardware devices composed in an AAL system. This research addresses both the aforementioned challenges by introducing 1) an innovative system, based on Self Organising Feature Map (SOFM), for automatically classifying the resting location of a moving object in an indoor environment and 2) a strategy able to generate context-aware based Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) services in order to maximize the users' comfort and hardware interoperability level. The overall system runs on a distributed embedded platform with a specialised ceiling-mounted video sensor for intelligent activity monitoring. The system has the ability to learn resting locations, to measure overall activity levels, to detect specific events such as potential falls and to deploy the right sequence of fuzzy services modelled through FML for supporting people in that particular context. Experimental results show less than 20% classification error in monitoring human activities and providing the right set of services, showing the robustness of our approach over others in literature with minimal power consumption.
Observation of a Long Primo Vessel in a Lymph Vessel from the Inguinal Node of a Rabbit

Though primo vessels are frequently found in the lymph near the abdominal aorta of rabbit by Alcian blue dye, the reproductions are still difficult to require considerable skills and technical know-how at dissected tissue of animal species. However, in the inguinal lymph node of a rabbit we found a long-type primo vascular system (LTP) dyed with Alcian blue, from an abdominal lymph vessel to an inguinal lymph node. The length of LTP was over an average length of 9.1 cm. The average diameters of the primo and the lymph vessels were about 23.9 μm and 242 μm, respectively. The primo vessels were not floating but adhered to lymph vessels with fascial connective tissue. These primo vessels might be a functional integration in the lymph system.
Association of Statins with Sensory and Autonomic Ganglionopathy

Objective To examine if statins have an effect on small nerve fibers. Methods This retrospective study evaluated the effect of statins in pure small-fiber neuropathy (SFN). Outcome measures were symptom scales (numbness, tingling, and autonomic symptoms), skin biopsies assessing epidermal nerve fiber density (ENFD), sweat gland nerve fiber density (SGNFD), and quantitative autonomic testing. Results One hundred and sixty participants with pure SFN were identified. Eighty participants (women/men, age ± SD 33/47, 68.1 ± 11.6 years old) were on statins for 53.5 ± 28.7 months to treat dyslipidemia and they were age and gender matched with 80 participants (33/47, 68.1 ± 9.5) that were off statins. ANOVA showed reduced ENFD/SGNFD at the proximal leg in the statin group [(count/mm) 8.3 ± 3.6/51.3 ± 14.2] compared to the off statin group (10.4 ± 3.8, p = 0.0008/56.4 ± 12.7, p = 0.018). There was no difference in ENFD/SGNFD at the distal leg in the statin group (4.9 ± 3.2/39.8 ± 15.7) compared to the off statin group (5.9 ± 3.4, p = 0.067/41.8 ± 15.9, p = 0.426). Statins did not affect symptom scales and the outcome of autonomic testing. Conclusion Statin use is associated with degeneration of sensory and autonomic fibers. The pattern of abnormalities, e.g., degeneration of proximal while sparing of distal fibers, is consistent with a non-length-dependent process with lesions in the dorsal root and the autonomic ganglia. The statin-associated sensory and autonomic ganglionopathy is mild.
A Bootstrap's Reliability Measure on Tests of Hypotheses

— Bootstrapping has gained popularity in different tests of hypotheses as an alternative in using asymptotic distribution if one is not sure of the distribution of the test statistic under a null hypothesis. This method, in general, has two variants – the parametric and the nonparametric approaches. However, issues on reliability of this method always arise in many applications. This paper addresses the issue on reliability by establishing a reliability measure in terms of quantiles with respect to asymptotic distribution, when this is approximately correct. The test of hypotheses used is F-test. The simulated results show that using nonparametric bootstrapping in F-test gives better reliability than parametric bootstrapping with relatively higher degrees of freedom.
An Enhanced Approach for Detection and Classification of Computed Tomography Lung Cancer

The paper presents approaches for nodule detection and extraction in axial lung computed tomography. The goal is to detect correctly pulmonary nodule to recognize and screen lung cancer patients. The pulmonary nodule detection is very challenging problem. The proposed model developed a hybrid efficient model based on affine-invariant representation and shape of segmented nodule. Due to large number of extracted features for all slices on patient, feature selection is an important step to select the most important feature for classification. We apply forward stepwise least squares regression that maximizes the Rsquared value, this criterion provides a fast preprocessing feature selection assessment for systems with huge volumes of features based on a linear models framework. Moreover, gradient boosting have been suggested to select the relevant features based on boosting approach. Classification of patients has been done by support vector machine. Kaggle DSB dataset is used to test the accuracy of our model. The results show major improvement in accuracy and the features are reduced.
Efficacy of oxime plus atropine treatment against soman poisoning in the atropinesterase-free rabbit.

The oximes pralidoxime chloride (2-PAM), MMB4, and HI-6 were evaluated in combination with atropine as treatments against soman poisoning in atropinesterase-free rabbits. Animals were challenged i.m. with 2 x LD50 soman and treated at the onset of toxic signs with 50 mumols/kg of oxime and 5 or 13 mg/kg atropine. Survival and time to death were compared at 48 hours post-soman challenge. Survival rates in MMB4 and HI-6 treated animals were higher than in 2-PAM-treated animals. The increase in survival was significant at the 13 mg/kg dose of atropine. MMB4 and HI-6 also significantly delayed time to death after soman compared to 2-PAM. The results suggest that MMB4 and HI-6 have potential as useful oximes for treating soman poisoning.
Fast IP Network Recovery Using Multiple Routing Configurations

As the Internet takes an increasingly central role in our communications infrastructure, the slow convergence of routing protocols after a network failure becomes a growing problem. To assure fast recovery from link and node failures in IP networks, we present a new recovery scheme called Multiple Routing Configurations (MRC). MRC is based on keeping additional routing information in the routers, and allows packet forwarding to continue on an alternative output link immediately after the detection of a failure. Our proposed scheme guarantee s recovery in all single failure scenarios, using a single mechanism to handle both link and node failures, and without knowing the root cause of the failure. MRC is strictly connectionless, and assumes only destination based hop-by-hop forwarding. It can be implemented with only minor changes to existing solutions. In this paper we present MRC, and analyze its performance with respect to scalability, backup path lengths, and load distribution after a failure.
Matching and Predicting Street Level Images

The paradigm of matching images to a very large dataset has been used for numerous vision tasks and is a powerful one. If the image dataset is large enough, one can expect to find good matches of almost any image to the database, allowing label transfer [3, 15], and image editing or enhancement [6, 11]. Users of this approach will want to know how many images are required, and what features to use for finding semantic relevant matches. Furthermore, for navigation tasks or to exploit context, users will want to know the predictive quality of the dataset: can we predict the image that would be seen under changes in camera position? We address these questions in detail for one category of images: street level views. We have a dataset of images taken from an enumeration of positions and viewpoints within Pittsburgh. We evaluate how well we can match those images, using images from non-Pittsburgh cities, and how well we can predict the images that would be seen under changes in camera position. We compare performance for these tasks for eight different feature sets, finding a feature set that outperforms the others (HOG). A combination of all the features performs better in the prediction task than any individual feature. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to rank the matches and predictions of different algorithm conditions by comparing each one to the selection of a random image. This approach can evaluate the efficacy of different feature sets and parameter settings for the matching paradigm with other image categories.
The 6 th International Conference on Ambient Systems , Networks and Technologies ( ANT 2015 ) From mobile data towards better customer knowledge : proposals for an information framework

Along with the development of internet connected devices, Mobile Marketing is expected to be ubiquitous in the near future. In order to deliver right mobile offers, the need to better know the customer is now crucial. This article develops a theoretical marketing framework to categorise the most relevant information linked to mobile data which complements traditional CRM data models. Three dimensions are identified: context, time line and source of the information. The matching of this framework with the current and future mobile technologies is then analysed. c © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs.
La santé : un enjeu de plus en plus central dans les politiques publiques de développement international?

La sante occupe aujourd’hui une place centrale dans les problematiques de developpement international. Cette place parait toutefois ambigue dans les discours et politiques publiques de developpement : presentee a la fois comme fin mais aussi comme moyen du developpement. Reinterroger les notions de sante et de developpement dans leur historicite nous permet de mieux cerner l’importance relative de la sante dans le developpement. En explorant les contextes, savoirs et politiques sur trois periodes depuis 1945, nous faisons ressortir les enjeux politiques de la sante dans les strategies actuelles de developpement. La sante apparait alors comme un element de plus en plus important des transformations sociales contemporaines.
Stochastic Model Based Opportunistic Channel Access in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

We present a stochastic model-based opportunistic channel access and transmission scheme for cognitive radio enabled secondary users for single data channel. We refer to this scheme as Residual Idle Time Distribution based Scheme (RIBS). In this scheme, the SU randomly senses the channel and if the channel is sensed idle, then it uses residual idle time distribution to estimate its transmission duration such that the probability of its interference with PU is below a predefined threshold. We derive analytical formulae for various performance metrics of SU and validate them through simulations. Simulation experiments are conducted for two different scenarios. In the first scenario, we use synthetically generated channel occupancy data due to PU transmissions using two standard distributions (2-phase Erlang and Uniform distribution). In the second scenario, we use data collected by simulating a TDMA-based PU network that runs realistic applications (VoIP and Web browsing). A pair of sender and receiver SU uses RIBS to opportunistically transmit on the channel. Our simulation experiments show that SU can use RIBS to opportunistically transmit on the channel without violating the interference probability constraint. We also list some of the challenges in using RIBS in realistic scenarios, and provide a comprehensive methodology to use RIBS in such scenarios.
Kernelization Through Tidying A Case Study Based on s-Plex Cluster Vertex Deletion

We introduce the NP-hard graph-based data clustering problem s-Plex Cluster Vertex Deletion, where the task is to delete at most k vertices from a graph so that the connected components of the resulting graph are s-plexes. In an s-plex, every vertex has an edge to all but at most s − 1 other vertices; cliques are 1-plexes. We propose a new method for kernelizing a large class of vertex deletion problems and illustrate it by developing an O(ks)-vertex problem kernel for s-Plex Cluster Vertex Deletion that can be computed in O(ksn) time, where n is the number of graph vertices. The corresponding “kernelization through tidying” exploits polynomial-time approximation results.
Active Therapy for Chronic Low Back Pain: Part 1. Effects on Back Muscle Activation, Fatigability, and Strength

Design. Randomized prospective study of the effects of three types of active therapy on back muscle function in chronic low back pain patients. Objectives. To quantify the effects of 3 months active therapy on strength, endurance, activation, and fatigability of the back entensor muscles. Summary of Background Data. Many studies have documented an association between chronic low back pain and diminished muscular performance capacity. Few studies have quantified the changes in these measures following interventions using objective measurement techniques or related them to changes in clinical outcome. Methods. A total of 148 individuals (57% women) with chronic low back pain (age, 45.0 ± 10.0 years; duration of low back pain, 10.9 ± 9.5 years) were randomized to a treatment that they attended for 3 months: active physiotherapy, muscle reconditioning on devices, or low-impact aerobics. Before and after therapy, assessments were made of the following: trunk muscle strength (in flexion, extension, lateral bending, and axial rotation), erector spinae activation (maximal, and during forward bending movements), back extensor endurance (Biering-S/orensen test), and erector spinae fatigability (determined from changes in the median frequency of the surface electromyographic signal) during isometric and dynamic tests. Results. A total of 132 of 148 patients (89%) completed the therapy. Isometric strength in each movement direction increased in all groups post-therapy (P < 0.0008), most notably in the devices group. Activation of the erector spinae during the extension tests also increased significantly in all groups and showed a weak, but significant, relationship with increased maximal strength (P = 0.01). Pretherapy 55% of the subjects showed no relaxation of the back muscles at L5 when in the fully flexed position; no changes were observed in any group post-therapy. Endurance time during the Biering-S/orensen test increased significantly post-therapy in all groups (P = 0.0001), but there were no significant changes in EMG-determined fatigability. Fatigability of the lumbar muscles at L5 (EMG median frequency changes) during the dynamic test increased post-therapy (P = 0.0001) without group differences. Conclusion. Significant changes in muscle performance were observed in all three active therapy groups post-therapy, which appeared to be mainly due to changes in neural activation of the lumbar muscles and psychological changes concerning, for example, motivation or pain tolerance.
Multiple imputation by chained equations in praxis: Guidelines and review

Multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE) is an effective tool to handle missing data an almost unavoidable problem in quantitative data analysis. However, despite the empirical and theoretical evidence supporting the use of MICE, researchers in the social sciences often resort to inferior approaches unnecessarily risking erroneous results. The complexity of the decision process when encountering missing data may be what is discouraging potential users from adopting the appropriate technique. In this article, we develop straightforward step-by-step graphical guidelines on how to handle missing data based on a comprehensive literature review. It is our hope that these guidelines can help improve current standards of handling missing data. The guidelines incorporate recent innovations on how to handle missing data such as random forests and predictive mean matching. Thus, the data analysts who already actively apply MICE may use it to review some of the newest developments. We demonstrate how the guidelines can be used in praxis using the statistical program R and data from the European Social Survey. We demonstrate central decisions such as variable selection and number of imputations as well as how to handle typical challenges such as skewed distributions and data transformations. These guidelines will enable a social science researcher to go through the process of handling missing data while adhering to the newest developments in the field.