Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Motion Artifact Suppression in Impedance Pneumography Signal for Portable Monitoring of Respiration: An Adaptive Approach

The focus of this paper is motion artifact (MA) reduction from the impedance pneumography (IP) signal, which is widely used to monitor respiration. The amplitude of the MA that contaminates the IP signal is often much larger than the amplitude of the respiratory component of the signal. Moreover, the morphology and frequency composition of the artifacts may be very similar to that of the respiration, making it difficult to remove these artifacts. The proposed filter uses a regularization term to ensure that the pattern of the filtered signal is similar to that of respiration. It also ensures that the amplitude of the filter output is within the expected range of the IP signal by imposing an <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\varepsilon$</tex-math></inline-formula>-tube on the filtered signal. The adaptive <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\varepsilon$</tex-math></inline-formula>-tube filter is 100 times faster than the previously proposed nonadaptive version and achieves higher accuracies. Moreover, the experimental results, using several different performance measures, suggest that the proposed method outperforms popular MA reduction methods such as normalized least mean squares (NLMS) and recursive least squares (RLS) as well as independent component analysis (ICA). When used to extract the respiratory rate, the adaptive <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\varepsilon$</tex-math></inline-formula>-tube achieves a mean error of 1.27 breaths per minute (BPM) compared to 4.72 and 4.63 BPM for the NLMS and RLS filters, respectively. When compared to the ICA algorithm, the proposed filter has an error of 1.06 BPM compared to 3.47 BPM for ICA. The statistical analyses indicate that all of the reported performance improvements are significant.
Regulation of Connexin-Based Channels by Fatty Acids

In this mini-review, we briefly summarize the current knowledge about the effects of fatty acids (FAs) on connexin-based channels, as well as discuss the limited information about the impact FAs may have on pannexins (Panxs). FAs regulate diverse cellular functions, some of which are explained by changes in the activity of channels constituted by connexins (Cxs) or Panxs, which are known to play critical roles in maintaining the functional integrity of diverse organs and tissues. Cxs are transmembrane proteins that oligomerize into hexamers to form hemichannels (HCs), which in turn can assemble into dodecamers to form gap junction channels (GJCs). While GJCs communicate the cytoplasm of contacting cells, HCs serve as pathways for the exchange of ions and small molecules between the intra and extracellular milieu. Panxs, as well as Cx HCs, form channels at the plasma membrane that enable the interchange of molecules between the intra and extracellular spaces. Both Cx- and Panx-based channels are controlled by several post-translational modifications. However, the mechanism of action of FAs on these channels has not been described in detail. It has been shown however that FAs frequently decrease GJC-mediated cell-cell communication. The opposite effect also has been described for HC or Panx-dependent intercellular communication, where, the acute FA effect can be reversed upon washout. Additionally, changes in GJCs mediated by FAs have been associated with post-translational modifications (e.g., phosphorylation), and seem to be directly related to chemical properties of FAs (e.g., length of carbon chain and/or degree of saturation), but this possible link remains poorly understood.
Atrial Fibrillation after Inhalational Lung Injury: A Troubling Complication of a Rare Problem

Atrial fibrillation (AF) has been associated with lung diseases like pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease but has only infrequently been associated with inhalational lung injury. We report two cases of resistant AF, which developed in young healthy manual laborers shortly after inhalational lung injury due to massive quantity of pesticides and anhydrous ammonia, respectively. They had no evidence of valvular or structural heart disease and did not have any previous medical problems. The AF was resistant to antiarrhythmic drugs and required pulmonary vein isolation in first patient and possibly the second patient who is currently being evaluated for this procedure. These arrhythmias may reflect direct myocardial injury during and after exposure. Alternatively, multiple mechanisms can cause atrial fibrillation in lung diseases, including hypoxemia, acidemia, inflammatory mediators, and structural changes in the atria and ventricle, and these could lead to AF in inhalational lung injury cases. AF needs to be excluded when patients present with palpitations after inhalational lung injury, especially since, if unrecognized, AF may lead to complications, like thromboembolic phenomenon and tachycardiomyopathy.
Time‐assisted authentication protocol

Authentication is the first step toward establishing a service provider and customer association. In a mobile network environment, a lightweight and secure authentication protocol is one of the most significant factors to enhance the degree of service persistence. This work presents a secure and lightweight keying and authentication protocol suite termed time‐assisted authentication protocol (TAP). The TAP improves the security of protocols with the assistance of time‐based encryption keys and scales down the authentication complexity by issuing a reauthentication ticket. While moving across the network, a mobile customer node sends a reauthentication ticket to establish new sessions with service‐providing nodes. Consequently, this reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. In the keying protocol suite, a key distributor controls the key generation arguments and time factors, while other participants independently generate a keychain based on key generation arguments. We undertake a rigorous security analysis and prove the security strength of TAP using communicating sequential processes and rank function analysis.
A Financial Risk Identification Matrix Model of Enterprise

Financial risk is a critical variable in forming enterprise’s financial crisis, the cyclical showing of which is an objective law undecided by the will of people. Although financial risk identification is very important to enterprise, but there is still not an effective way. Combing with matrix identification principles, this paper puts forward a matrix model for enterprise to identify its financial risks. Firstly, it divides financial risks of enterprise into three types what are financial environment-adaptation risk and financial resource-allocation risk and financial stakeholder-cooperation risk. Secondly, it explores the identification principle of three-dimensional financial risks. Thirdly, it builds a matrix identification model for identifying three-dimensional financial risks of enterprise and gives an algorithm. The result shows that financial risk identification matrix model can provide theoretical and technical support for enterprise’s financial risk identifying system.
Effects of isoflavones on breast density in pre- and post-menopausal women: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

BACKGROUND Isoflavones from soy and red clover exert modest hormonal effects in women, but the relevance to risk of breast cancer is unclear. The aim of this meta-analysis was to assess the effects of isoflavone-rich foods or supplements on a biomarker of breast cancer risk, women's mammographic density. METHODS Electronic searches were performed on The Cochrane Library, Medline and EMBASE (to June 2009), and reference lists and trial investigators were consulted to identify further studies. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of isoflavone-rich foods or supplements versus placebo with a duration of at least 6 months were included in our analysis. Inclusion/exclusion, data extraction and validity assessment were carried out independently in duplicate, and meta-analysis used to pool study results. Subgrouping, sensitivity analysis, assessment of heterogeneity and funnel plots were used to interpret the results. RESULTS Eight RCTs (1287 women) compared isoflavones with placebo for between 6 months and 3 years. Meta-analysis suggested no overall effect of dietary isoflavones on breast density in all women combined [mean difference (MD) 0.69%, 95% confidence interval (CI) −0.78 to 2.17] or post-menopausal women (MD −1.10%, 95% CI −3.22 to 1.03). However, there was a modest increase in mammographic density in premenopausal women (MD 1.83%, 95% CI 0.25–3.40) without heterogeneity but this effect was lost in one of three sensitivity analyses. CONCLUSIONS Isoflavone intake does not alter breast density in post-menopausal women, but may cause a small increase in breast density in premenopausal women. Larger, long-term trials are required to determine if these small effects are clinically relevant.
Touring the internet in a TCP sidecar

An accurate router-level topology of the Internet would benefit many research areas, including network diagnosis, inter-domain traffic engineering, and overlay construction. We present TCP Sidecar and Passenger, two elements of a system for router-level Internet topology discovery. Sidecar transparently injects measurement probes into non-measurement TCP streams, while Passenger combines TTL-limited probes with the often-ignored IP record route option. The combined approach mitigates problems associated with traceroute-based topology discovery, including abuse reports, spurious edge inference from multi-path routing, unresolved IP aliases, long network timeouts, and link discovery behind NATs and firewalls. We believe that we are the first mapping project to measure MPLS use with ICMP extensions and record route behavior when the TTL is not decremented. We are able to discover NATs when monitoring TCP connections that tunnel through them. In this paper, we present preliminary results for TCP Sidecar and Passenger on PlanetLab. Our experiments inject measurement probes into traffic generated both from the CoDeeN Web proxy project and from a custom web crawler to 166,745 web sites.
Swarm-based descriptor combination and its application for image classification

In this paper, we deal with the descriptor combination problem in image classification tasks. This problem refers to the definition of an appropriate combination of image content descriptors that characterize different visual properties, such as color, shape and texture. In this paper, we propose to model the descriptor combination as a swarm-based optimization problem, which finds out the set of parameters that maximizes the classification accuracy of the Optimum-Path Forest (OPF) classifier. In our model, a descriptor is seen as a pair composed of a feature extraction algorithm and a suitable distance function. Our strategy here is to combine distance scores defined by different descriptors, as well as to employ them to weight OPF edges, which connect samples in the feature space. An extensive evaluation of several swarm-based optimization techniques was performed. Experimental results have demonstrated the robustness of the proposed combination approach.
Exploiting DMA for Performance and Energy Optimized STREAM on a DSP

Energy efficiency is of major concern in HPC. DSP architectures have the potential to offer highly competitive energy efficiency for applications requiring 64-bit floating-point precision. For STREAM, we achieved 1.47GB/J energy efficiency and 96% DDR3 memory bandwidth utilization on the Texas Instruments TMS320C6678 DSP by using its DMA engines for prefetching to avoid cache misses, which cause pipeline stalls in the DSP's cores, and to prevent write-allocate loads, which would significantly reduce performance. The DMA engines were also used to coordinate the DSPs cores and schedule main memory accesses to improve DDR3 bandwidth utilization. We briefly describe the instrumentation that we designed and implemented for accurate measurement of the core-related, on-chip memory, and DDR3 power consumption and the effectiveness of the DSP's power saving mechanisms to trade-off performance and energy efficiency.
BioE 332 Assignment 3 : Irregular spiking and high variability in balanced cortical networks with clustered connections

Cortical neurons in vivo exhibit highly irregular spiking patterns with statistics close to a Poisson process. The high variability of cortical responses seems inconsistent with the large number of synaptic connections received by each neuron. Indeed, consider a neuron receiving N independent synaptic inputs each with the strength g ∼ 1/N . The mean input to this neuron gN is of the order 1, and the variance of the input is g2N , which scales as 1/N . This means that the standard deviation of the input decrease as 1/ √ N , and should be very small for cortical neurons that receive ∼ 104 synaptic inputs, suggesting that regular spiking should prevail in the cortex. It turns out that the above argument does not hold in cortical circuits, where synapses appear to be very strong with g ∼ 1/ √ N . The input variance g2N is then of the order 1. Interestingly, the mean input can still be of the order 1 in such a network, if it operates in the balanced regime, where strong excitation and strong inhibition (gN ∼ √ N) nearly cancel each other. In the balanced state, spiking is driven by large fluctuations in the synaptic input and is nearly Poisson. In this assignment, we will explore the balanced state in a network model with clustered connectivity. In such a network, firing is irregular and the activity pattern randomly wanders between multiple co-existing attractors. As a result, neurons exhibit the supraPoisson spiking variability characteristic for spontaneous cortical activity. This model also captures reduction in spiking variability during stimulus-driven activity — a wide-spread cortical phenomenon. We will learn about:
An Opportunistic MAC Protocol Based on Statistical Spectrum Analysis

The current spectrum allocation model aims to avoid interferences in licensed spectrum communications without further concerns regarding spectrum usage. Because the radio spectrum is a finite resource, several approaches have been presented in order to improve the effectiveness of its utilization. The main contribution of this work is to present an opportunistic approach to spectrum sensing and allocation. Compared to other alternatives, our approach presents significant improvements in the spectrum access and utilization, improving network throughput up to 16 times.
Image Quality Modeling: Where Are We?

This review is focused on image quality model building, particularly in the context of the Image Quality Circle. There are two fundamentally different ways to modeling image quality; the impairment approach and the quality approach. Impairment looks at decreases in image quality from some reference or ideal. The quality approach attempts to model the judgment of image quality directly, independent of the reference. The more successful models are called perceptual models, and have perceptual attributes, the ness, as the dependent variables. Generalized weighted mean, or Minkowski metrics, are the most successful mathematical forms of image quality models. Several issues impeding implementation of image quality models remain; appropriate psychometric scaling of quality and nesses, and identification of the nesses, particularly for image coding, compression and processing applications. The Universal Image Quality Model is not on the horizon.
Cost effective gate drive circuit for MLI with constant number of conducting switches

This paper shows how a seven level MLI can be implemented using lower number of switches using gate drive circuits built with low cost gate drive ICs such as IR2110 family. The technique uses a single dc power supply to feed all the gate drives of an inverter. This type of implementation reduces the total cost of implementation of seven-level MLI and size of driver circuits. Another important feature of this proposed MLI is that the number of conducting switches remains the same during each level. This topology can be extended to a higher number of levels. A laboratory prototype has been developed consisting of single phase seven level MLI with constant number of conducting switches with gate drives and power MOSFETs with three voltage source of 12 V each giving 72 V peak to peak output. The proposed MLI can be used for higher voltage levels by using bootstrap diodes with higher voltage capacity.
Divided We Fall. Conflicts of Interests Regarding Fiscal Discipline in Municipal Hierarchies

Persistent budget deficits are commonly blamed on irresponsible governments. However, even if the government is fiscally responsible, the agents in charge of implementing the budget may be less concerned about fiscal discipline. According to the survey data analyzed in this paper, such conflicts of interests are associated with low fiscal performance and prevail in almost half of the Swedish municipalities. The empirical analysis points at some organizational features that may affect the prevalence of conflicts, and also indicates that conflicts may arise for reasons exogenous to the organization.
A Distributed Localization System Based on Phase Measurement for Wireless Sensor Networks

We present a localization system based on phase measurement for wireless sensor networks. The system features at least 3 anchor nodes with known locations. The anchor nodes broadcast synchronized reference signal to the location-unknown user nodes. The user nodes measure relative phase offset of reference signals from different anchors, and the relative phase offset indicates relative distance offset between user nodes and anchors. The distance offset can be utilized by hyperbolic localization algorithm, from which the 2-D coordinates of all user nodes can be efficiently calculated by user node itself. The advantage of the proposed method is that the user node itself conducts ranging and localization in a completely distributed manner, with no necessity of information exchange with other user nodes. It thus effectively protects the location privacy of user nodes from radio exposure, while significantly reducing the network overloads.
Control and Cybernetics Adaptive Behavior of Autonomous Mobile Systems with New Action Selection Problem Solution

The article deals with the issue of controlling the autonomous mobile systems. Considered are the problems focusing around the use of controllers with distributed architecture. Contrary to hierarchical architecture, all layers of distributed controller are operating simultaneously, and have an access to both the receptors and to the effectors of the controlled autonomous mobile system. Simultaneous operation of all layers of the distributed architecture controller entails the emergence of the action selection problem. This problem consists in continuous taking decisions: which one of the layers, or which layers of the controller, should have an influence at given moment on the movement of the controlled mobile system. A proposal for a new solution of this problem is discussed. The results of experiments with the use of real mobile robot are presented.
Ordering Ambiguous Acts 1

We investigate what it means for one act to be more ambiguous than another. The question is evidently analogous to asking what makes one prospect riskier than another, but beliefs are neither objective nor representable by a unique probability. Our starting point is an abstract class of preferences constructed to be (strictly) partially ordered by a more ambiguity averse relation. We de ne two notions of more ambiguous with respect to such a class. A more ambiguous (I) act makes an ambiguity averse decision maker (DM) worse o¤ but does not a¤ect the welfare of an ambiguity neutral DM. A more ambiguous (II) act adversely a¤ects a more ambiguity averse DM more, as measured by the compensation they require to switch acts. Unlike more ambiguous (I), more ambiguous (II) does not require indi¤erence of ambiguity neutral elements to the acts being compared. Second, we implement the abstract de nitions to characterize more ambiguous (I) and (II) for two explicit preference families: -maxmin expected utility and smooth ambiguity. Our characterizations show that (the outcome of) a more ambiguous act is less robust to a perturbation in probability distribution governing the states. Third, the characterizations also establish important connections between more ambiguous and more informative as de ned on statistical experiments by Blackwell (1953) and others. Fourthly, we give applications to de ning ambiguity "in the small" and to the comparative statics of more ambiguous in a standard portfolio problem and a consumption-saving problem. JEL Classi cation Numbers: C44, D800, D810, G11
SIMPLE: A Strategic Information Mining Platform for Licensing and Execution

Intellectual Properties (IP), such as patents and trademarks, are one of the most critical assets in today’s enterprises and research organizations. They represent the core innovation and differentiators of an organization. When leveraged effectively, they not only protect a business from its competition, but also generate significant opportunities in licensing, execution, long term research and innovation. In certain industries, e. g. , Pharmaceutical industry, patents lead to multi-billion dollar revenue per year. In this paper, we present a holistic information mining solution, called SIMPLE, which mines large corpus of patents and scientific literature for insights. Unlike much prior work that deals with specific aspects of analytics, SIMPLE is an integrated and end-to-end IP analytics solution which addresses a wide range of challenges in patent analytics such as the data complexity, scale, and nomenclature issues. It encompasses techniques for patent data processing and modeling, analytics algorithms, web interface and web services for analytics service delivery and end-user interaction. We use real-world case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of SIMPLE.
Marketing Agricultural Commodities on Global Markets

Abstract The worldwide outbreak of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), also known as “mad cow” disease, suggests that world agriculture faces many issues in relation to marketing agricultural products and food safety. In May 2003, the discovery of the first domestically-originating North American BSE case, found in Canada, dominated discussions concerning the prospects of the industry inside the country, consequently creating uncertainty in the industry. Food-safety standard asymmetries have affected socio-political structures and the processes of the Canadian beef marketing channel. By considering the industry as a political economy, the concept of the task environment paradigm, as recognized in marketing literature, is integrated with the political economy framework. Dimensions of environmental uncertainty are presented. Personal testimony from beef producers is considered to add a human element to the theoretical discussion. Furthermore, this paper provides an empirical perspective on the means by which sudden effects from the macro-environment of a marketing channel create uncertainty, which is intensified in today's increasingly complex and turbulent agrifood markets.