Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Motion analysis of articulated objects from monocular images

This paper presents a new method of motion analysis of articulated objects from feature point correspondences over monocular perspective images without imposing any constraints on motion. An articulated object is modeled as a kinematic chain consisting of joints and links, and its 3D joint positions are estimated within a scale factor using the connection relationship of two links over two or three images. Then, twists and exponential maps are employed to represent the motion of each link, including the general motion of the base link and the rotation of other links around their joints. Finally, constraints from image point correspondences, which are similar to that of the essential matrix in rigid motion, are developed to estimate the motion. In the algorithm, the characteristic of articulated motion, i.e., motion correlation among links, is applied to decrease the complexity of the problem and improve the robustness. A point pattern matching algorithm for articulated objects is also discussed in this paper. Simulations and experiments on real images show the correctness and efficiency of the algorithms.
The Evolution of Flexible Behavioral Repertoires in Cephalopod Molluscs

Cephalopods are a large and ancient group of marine animals with complex brains. Forms extant today are equipped with brains, sensors, and effectors that allow them not to just exist beside modern vertebrates as predators and prey; they compete fiercely with marine vertebrates at every scale from small crustaceans to sperm whales. We review the evolution of this group’s brains, learning ability and complex behavior. We outline evidence that although competition with vertebrates has left a deep impression on the brains and behavior of cephalopods, the original reorganization of their complex brains from their molluscan ancestors might have been forged in ancient seas millions of years before the advent of bony fishes.
Beyond the Dopamine Receptor: Regulation and Roles of Serine/Threonine Protein Phosphatases

Dopamine plays an important modulatory role in the central nervous system, helping to control critical aspects of motor function and reward learning. Alteration in normal dopaminergic neurotransmission underlies multiple neurological diseases including schizophrenia, Huntington’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Modulation of dopamine-regulated signaling pathways is also important in the addictive actions of most drugs of abuse. Our studies over the last 30 years have focused on the molecular actions of dopamine acting on medium spiny neurons, the predominant neurons of the neostriatum. Striatum-enriched phosphoproteins, particularly dopamine and adenosine 3′:5′-monophosphate-regulated phosphoprotein of 32 kDa (DARPP-32), regulator of calmodulin signaling (RCS), and ARPP-16, mediate pleiotropic actions of dopamine. Notably, each of these proteins, either directly or indirectly, regulates the activity of one of the three major subclasses of serine/threonine protein phosphatases, PP1, PP2B, and PP2A, respectively. For example, phosphorylation of DARPP-32 at Thr34 by protein kinase A results in potent inhibition of PP1, leading to potentiation of dopaminergic signaling at multiple steps from the dopamine receptor to the nucleus. The discovery of DARPP-32 and its emergence as a critical molecular integrator of striatal signaling will be discussed, as will more recent studies that highlight novel roles for RCS and ARPP-16 in dopamine-regulated striatal signaling pathways.
A review on routing protocols for application in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are harshly restricted by storage capacity, energy and computing power. So it is essential to design effective and energy aware protocol in order to enhance the network lifetime. In this paper, a review on routing protocol in WSNs is carried out which are classified as data-centric, hierarchical and location based depending on the network structure. Then some of the multipath routing protocols which are widely used in WSNs to improve network performance are also discussed. Advantages and disadvantages of each routing algorithm are discussed thereafter. Furthermore, this paper compares and summarizes the performances of routing protocols.
Uncertainty and group identification: Moderation by warmth and competence as cues to inclusion and identity validation

Abstract Drawing upon uncertainty-identity theory, we argue that self-uncertainty creates a motivated mindset in which people desire to have their social identity validated thorough inclusion, and that this transforms the meaning of group warmth and competence to cue inclusion. US College students (N = 289) participated in an on-line experiment in which self-uncertainty and the perceived warmth and competence of their college were primed, and group identification was measured as the dependent variable. As predicted, the three-way interaction significantly affected group identification. Specifically, uncertainty weakened identification with cold-but-competent groups. We also found that uncertainty strengthened identification with cold-and-incompetent groups. This research highlights the preference for certain group attributes under uncertainty.
Specificity and Generality of Enhanced Priming Effects for Self-Generated Study Items

In two experiments, we investigated the finding that priming effects in wordfragment completion are enhanced for self-generated study items. The first experiment showed that priming in word-fragment completion was not reliably enhanced unless words were generated at study from a fragment identical to that used at test. The second experiment showed that priming in an anagram-solving task was similarly enhanced by anagram solving at study. These generation effects, therefore, seem highly specific with respect to stimulus identity but readily generalizable with respect to task. Theoretically, these findings are consistent with both transfer-appropriate processing and memory-systems accounts of performance in implicit memory tests.
Shared Mechanisms of Alcohol and Other Drugs

Identifying the changes that occur in the brain as a result of alcohol and other drug (AOD) use is important to understanding the development of AOD addiction. The nerve cell signaling chemical (i.e., neurotransmitter) γ-aminobutync acid (GABA) plays an important role in the brain chemistry of addiction. Most drugs interact with binding molecules (i.e., receptors) for specific neurotransmitters and either block or facilitate binding at these receptors. Thus, cannabis and opiates act via receptors intended for internally derived (i.e., endogenous) cannabinoid and opiate substances. In contrast, alcohol does not appear to activate specific receptors. However, alcohol influences the activity of many transmitter systems including GABA and endogenous opioids and cannabinoids.
Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO) Algorithm for Control of Nulls and Sidelobes in a Concentric Circular Antenna Array (CCAA)

The ever increasing wireless communication research is giving rise to a plethora of new communication techniques. There is also a wide spread increase in the use of existing systems such as mobiles, Wi-Fi, RADARS, Space communications etc. Consequently, the electromagnetic spectrum is getting overcrowded and there is an increase in interference due to use of multiple devices with in a small cluster. So, design of antennas with small sidelobe levels and nulls in interference direction is needed. This paper illustrates the procedure for placing nulls in the interference direction while reducing sidelobe level (SLL) of a CCAA under the constraint of fixed FNBW (as in the case of uniform excitation). IWO is used to find the excitation amplitudes of a three ring CCAA that satisfy the desired goal better. Three design examples are provided. IWO is more robust and efficient algorithm than GA, PSO and Simulated Annealing etc. General Terms Antenna Array Optimization, Global Optimization Algorithms
Generic ownership: the case of java collections

In recent years, several prototypes have been proposed to extend Java with ownership types. To varying degrees, these proposals omit many features of Java such as static declarations, enum types, arrays, exceptions, inner classes, constructors, interfaces, equals, clone, and wildcards. In this project, we will try to address these features. In order to evaluate the adequacy of generic ownership encapsulation, the general purpose implementations of the Java Collections Framework will be refactored; then, measurements of performance time overheads will be conducted using tools for Java benchmarking.
Calmodulin and ATP support activity of the Cav1.2 channel through dynamic interactions with the channel

Cav1.2 channels maintain activity through interactions with calmodulin (CaM). In this study, activities of the Cav1.2 channel (α1C) and of mutant‐derivatives, C‐terminal deleted (α1CΔ) and α1CΔ linked with CaM (α1CΔCaM), were compared in the inside‐out mode. α1CΔ with CaM, but not without CaM, and α1CΔCaM were active, suggesting that CaM induced channel activity through a dynamic interaction with the channel, even without the distal C‐tail. ATP induced α1C activity with CaM and enhanced activity of the mutant channels. Okadaic acid mimicked the effect of ATP on the wildtype but not mutant channels. These results supported the hypothesis that CaM and ATP maintain activity of Cav1.2 channels through their dynamic interactions. ATP effects involve mechanisms both related and unrelated to channel phosphorylation. CaM‐linked channels are useful tools for investigating Cav1.2 channels in the inside‐out mode; the fast run‐down is prevented by only ATP and the slow run‐down is nearly absent.
Pilot phase I-II study on 5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine (Decitabine) in patients with metastatic lung cancer.

5-Aza-2'-deoxycytidine (5-AZA-CdR, Decitabine) is a nucleoside analog and an active drug for the therapy of acute leukemia. The incorporation of 5-AZA-CdR into DNA blocks DNA methylation and can result in the activation of specific genes, such as tumor suppressor genes. This novel mechanism of action of 5-AZA-CdR stimulated our interest in its potential for cancer therapy in patients with lung cancer. Using a colony assay we observed that 5-AZA-CdR showed a potent antineoplastic effect against two human lung carcinoma cell lines. The objective of this preliminary phase I-II study was to evaluate the toxicity and clinical efficacy of 5-AZA-CdR in patients with stage IV non-small cell lung carcinoma. There were 15 patients that entered the clinical study. For nine assessable patients that received 5-AZA-CdR by a single 8 h i.v. infusion of 200-660 mg/m2 for one or more cycles, the median survival duration was 6.7 months, with three patients surviving more than 15 months. The steady-state plasma concentration of 5-AZA-CdR during the infusion was estimated in some patients and was in the same range that produced activation of a tumor suppressor gene in human lung tumor cell lines as reported by other investigators. The major side effect of 5-AZA-CdR was hematopoietic toxicity which required a 5-6 week recovery period before the next cycle of therapy. This study suggests that 5-AZA-CdR may have some clinical activity against metastatic lung carcinoma using this type of dose schedule.
Serum leptin levels are higher in females affected by frontotemporal lobar degeneration than Alzheimer’s disease

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) includes different heterogeneous conditions, mainly characterised by personality changes, along with cognitive deficits in language and executive functions. Movement disorders are variably represented. Behavioural disturbances constitute the core feature of FTLD, and eating disorders represent one of the most distinguishing symptoms between FTLD and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The biochemical correlates of such dysfunctions remain to be defined. The adipocyte derived hormone leptin is known to play a foundamental role in food intake and energy balance. To understrand whether leptin could be involved in FTLD eating abnormalities, we measured serum leptin levels in 59 patients with FTLD compared with 25 with AD. Serum leptin levels in patients with FTLD were comparable with those in patients with AD. Nevertheless, females with FTLD showed significantly higher leptin levels compared with females with AD. No difference was found between FTDL and AD males or within the spectrum of patients with FTLD. Hyperphagic FTLD females showed higher circulating leptin levels in comparison with those without eating abnormalities; no differences were found between males with FTLD with respect to serum leptin and food intake disturbances. The present study showed a selective gender difference in leptin levels between females with FTLD and AD, which may suggest specific cognitive and behavioural networks need to be investigated.
Microvascular Effects of Centrally Acting Antihypertensive Drugs in Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats

We investigated the effects of oral long-term antihypertensive treatment using centrally acting sympathoinhibitory drugs on capillary density in the skin, skeletal muscle, and heart in the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR). Wistar Kyoto rats (WKY) were used as normotensive control groups. Functional capillary density was assessed using intravital fluorescence videomicroscopy and structural capillary density with histochemical analysis. Groups of 10 SHRs were orally treated over 28 days with clonidine (0.1 mg·kg−1·d−1), rilmenidine (1 mg·kg−1·d−1), or moxonidine (10 mg·kg−1·d−1). A group of WKY was also treated with clonidine (0.1 mg·kg−1·d−1). Treatment with all antihypertensive drugs induced a normalization of arterial pressure accompanied by a reversion of functional capillary rarefaction in the skeletal muscle and skin of SHR. Clonidine treatment also reduced arterial pressure and increased functional capillary density in the skin and skeletal muscle of WKY. Histochemical analysis showed that SHR had a lower capillary to fiber ratio in the skeletal muscle (P < 0.0001), which was normalized by all treatments. The capillary volume density to fiber volume density ratio in the left ventricle of SHR was also significantly reduced (P < 0.0001). However, myocardial capillary rarefaction was not altered by the different treatments. In conclusion, the results showed that long-term antihypertensive treatment with centrally acting drugs enhanced tissue perfusion and reversed capillary rarefaction in the skeletal muscle of SHRs.
Thread-shared software code caches

Software code caches are increasingly being used to amortize the runtime overhead of dynamic optimizers, simulators, emulators, dynamic translators, dynamic compilers, and other tools. Despite the now-wide spread use of code caches, techniques for efficiently sharing them across multiple threads have not been fully explored. Some systems simply do not support threads, while others resort to thread-private code caches. Although thread-private caches are much simpler to manage, synchronize, and provide scratch space for, they simply do not scale when applied to many-threaded programs. Thread-shared code caches are needed to target server applications, which employ hundreds of worker threads all performing similar tasks. Yet, those systems that do share their code caches often have brute-force, inefficient solutions to the challenges of concurrent code cache access: a single global lock on runtime system code and suspension of all threads for any cache management action. This limits the possibilities for cache design and has performance problems with applications that require frequent cache invalidations to maintain cache consistency. In this paper, we discuss the design choices when building thread-shared code caches and enumerate the difficulties of thread-local storage, synchronization, trace building, in-cache lookup tables, and cache eviction. We present efficient solutions to these problems that both scale well and do not require thread suspension. We evaluate our results in DynamoRIO, an industrial-strength dynamic binary translation system, on real-world server applications. On these applications our thread-shared caches use an order of magnitude less memory and improve throughput by up to four times compared to thread-private caches.
OKM : une extension des k-moyennes pour la recherche de classes recouvrantes

Résumé. Dans cet article nous abordons le problème de la classification (ou clustering) dans le but de découvrir des classes avec recouvrements. Malgré quelques avancées récentes dans ce domaines, motivées par des besoins applicatifs importants (traitements des données multimédia par exemple), nous constatons l’absence de solutions théoriques à ce problème. Notre étude consiste alors à proposer une nouvelle formulation du problème de classification par partitionnement, adaptée à la recherche d’un recouvrement des données en classes d’objets similaires. Cette approche se fonde sur la définition d’un critère objectif de qualité d’un recouvrement et d’une solution algorithmique visant à optimiser ce critère. Nous proposons deux évaluations de ce travail permettant d’une part d’appréhender le fonctionnement global de l’algorithme sur des données simples (vitesse de convergence, visualisation des résultats) et d’autre part d’évaluer quantitativement le bénéfice d’une telle approche sur une application de classification de documents textuels.
Free braided differential calculus, braided binomial theorem, and the braided exponential map

Braided differential operators ∂i are obtained by differentiating the addition law on the braided covector spaces introduced previously (such as the braided addition law on the quantum plane). These are affiliated to a Yang–Baxter matrix R. The quantum eigenfunctions expR(x‖v) of the ∂i (braided‐plane waves) are introduced in the free case where the position components xi are totally noncommuting. A braided R‐binomial theorem and a braided Taylor theorem expR(a‖∂)f(x)=f(a+x) are proven. These various results precisely generalize to a generic R‐matrix (and hence to n dimensions) the well‐known properties of the usual one‐dimensional q‐differential and q‐exponential. As a related application, it is shown that the q‐Heisenberg algebra px−qxp=1 is a braided semidirect product C[x]×C[ p] of the braided line acting on itself (a braided Weyl algebra) and similarly for its generalization to an arbitrary R‐ matrix.
Optimal Cut-point and Its Corresponding Youden Index to Discriminate Individuals Using Pooled Blood Samples

Costs can hamper the evaluation of the effectiveness of new biomarkers. Analysis of smaller numbers of pooled specimens has been shown to be a useful cost-cutting technique. The Youden index (J), a function of sensitivity (q) and specificity (p), is a commonly used measure of overall diagnostic effectiveness. More importantly, J is the maximum vertical distance or difference between the ROC curve and the diagonal or chance line; it occurs at the cut-point that optimizes the biomarker's differentiating ability when equal weight is given to sensitivity and specificity. Using the additive property of the gamma and normal distributions, we present a method to estimate the Youden index and the optimal cut-point, and extend its applications to pooled samples. We study the effect of pooling when only a fixed number of individuals are available for testing, and pooling is carried out to save on the number of assays. We measure loss of information by the change in root mean squared error of the estimates of the optimal cut-point and the Youden index, and we study the extent of this loss via a simulation study. In conclusion, pooling can result in a substantial cost reduction while preserving the effectiveness of estimators, especially when the pool size is not very large.
On the Structure of Reduced Kernel Lattice Bases

Lattice-based reformulation techniques have been used successfully both theoretically and computationally. One such reformulation is obtained from the lattice kerℤ(A)={x∈ℤn|Ax=0}. Some of the hard instances in the literature that have been successfully tackled by lattice-based techniques, such as market split and certain classes of knapsack instances, have randomly generated input A. These instances have been posed to stimulate algorithmic research. Since the considered instances are very hard even in low dimension, less experience is available for larger instances. Recently we have studied larger instances and observed that the LLL-reduced basis of kerℤ(A) has a specific sparse structure. In particular, this translates into a map in which some of the original variables get a "rich" translation into a new variable space, whereas some variables are only substituted in the new space. If an original variable is important in the sense of branching or cutting planes, this variable should be translated in a non-trivial way. In this paper we partially explain the obtained structure of the LLL-reduced basis in the case that the input matrix A consists of one row a. Since the input is randomly generated our analysis will be probabilistic. The key ingredient is a bound on the probability that the LLL algorithm will interchange two subsequent basis vectors. It is worth noticing that computational experiments indicate that the results of this analysis seem to apply in the same way also in the general case that A consists of multiple rows. Our analysis has yet to be extended to this general case. Along with our analysis we also present some computational indications that illustrate that the probabilistic analysis conforms well with the practical behavior.
Proliferation markers in tumours: interpretation and clinical value.

Proliferation is one of the most fundamental of biological processes because of its role in growth and in the maintenance of tissue homeostasis. In tumours especially, proliferation has traditionally received much attention. On the one hand, proliferation has been studied as an important cell biological mechanism in oncogenesis, often using rather laborious methods applicable only in experimental conditions, such as tritiated thymidine incorporation. On the other hand, assessment of proliferation has become popular in histopathology as a means of predicting the behaviour of tumours—that is, their likelihood of local recurrence, their metastatic potential, and the growth of metastases, and thereby the disease-free survival and survival to death. This is owing to the fact that diVerent methods have become available to assess certain properties of cellular proliferation that are readily available in daily histopathological practice. This has led to vast numbers of studies on the value of these methods for the diagnosis of diVerent kinds of tumours and clinical decision making. In this review we aim to provide an overview of methods currently available for assessment of proliferation, and to discuss critically their cell biological framework, their methodology, and some of the most important applications of these methods. First, however, a description of the cell cycle is necessary, to provide the context within which the diVerent methods of assessing proliferation will be interpreted.
Dense quarks, and the fermion sign problem, in a SU(N) matrix model

We study the effect of dense quarks in a SU(N) matrix model of deconfinement. For three or more colors, the quark contribution to the loop potential is complex. After adding the charge conjugate loop, the measure of the matrix integral is real, but not positive definite. In a matrix model, quarks act like a background Z(N) field; at nonzero density, the background field also has an imaginary part, proportional to the imaginary part of the loop. Consequently, while the expectation values of the loop and its complex conjugate are both real, they are not equal. These results suggest a possible approach to the fermion sign problem in lattice QCD.