Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role determination in human-human interaction

Physical human-robot interaction can be significantly improved when being aware about the role each partner takes in a joint manipulation task. This holds especially in computer assisted teleoperation, where depending on the identified role of the human, different roles can be assigned to the assistance function. This work proposes a method for the determination of two non exclusive roles, an executor and conductor. Hereby the executor refers to the person who mainly contributes to the execution of the task and the conductor to the person who takes the decision and controls the motion. The method is based on the analysis of haptic data, whereby the signs of force and motion signals are evaluated. Two different cases are considered in the analysis: direct interaction of the two partners as well as interaction via an object. The effort each operator makes to either carry out the task or initiate a change in the task is also estimated. The proposed method can be used to actively influence the role assignment, to extract features or for task segmentation.
Design, fabrication and control of a multi-material-multi-actuator soft robot inspired by burrowing worms

We present the design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired multi-material multi-actuator soft robot capable of locomoting inside pipes. The bodies of natural earthworms are composed of repeated deformable structural units, called metameres, that generate the peristaltic body motions required for limbless underground burrowing and above-ground crawling. In an earthworm, each individual metamere is actuated by circular and longitudinal muscles that are activated synchronously by the animal's nervous system. Here, adopting the basic functional principles of metameric worms, we propose a new pneumatically-driven soft robotic system that mimics the motions and replicates the functionality of a single burrowing earthworm's segment. The suitability of the proposed approach is demonstrated experimentally through three basic locomotion tests: horizontal motion, vertical motion and oblique motion inside a varying-slope transparent pipe.
Adaptive Memory-Based Regression

Memory-based methods obtain accurate predictions from empirical data without explicitly modeling the underlying process. For each query, a local model is rst tailored on the query itself, then used to perform the prediction, and nally discarded. In this paper, we consider local models which are linear in the parameters. This allows us to adopt, on a local scale, powerful and well-understood methods from classical linear statistics. In particular, we discuss here a fast cross-validation procedure that can be eeectively used, on a query-by-query basis, to select the features, the neighbors and the polynomial degree of the local approximator. Experimental results in the time-series prediction domain are presented.
Cooperation incentives in wireless Ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks heavily rely on nodes' cooperation for packet forwarding. As a result, misbehaving, malicious, and selfish nodes can significantly degrade the performance of the network. To cope with this issue and to stimulate cooperation among selfish mobile nodes, a continuous research effort is done on identifying nodes trust and reputation. In this paper, we survey recently proposed reputation and incentive schemes for ad hoc networks. In order to help in the design of different reputation systems tailored to specific applications and network topologies, we classify the different approaches that have been used in the literature and present the different alternatives for each approach. Finally, we conclude this paper and present suggestions for future work.
Age-related Changes in Brain Regional Activity during Chewing: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Age-related changes in mastication-induced brain neuronal activity have been suggested. However, in humans, little is known about the anatomical regions involved. Using fMRI during cycles of rhythmic gum-chewing and no chewing, we have examined the effect of aging on brain regional activity during chewing in young adult (19–26 yrs), middle-aged (42–55 yrs), and aged (65–73 yrs) healthy humans. In all subjects, chewing resulted in a bilateral increase in the BOLD signals in the sensorimotor cortex, cerebellum, thalamus, supplementary motor area, and insula, and a unilateral increase in the right prefrontal area. In the first three regions, the signal increases were attenuated in an age-dependent manner, whereas, in the right prefrontal area, the converse was seen. The remaining two regions showed no significant differences with ages. These results indicate that chewing causes regional increases in neuronal activity in the brain, some of which are age-dependent.
Toward automated categorization of mobile health and fitness applications

In recent years, with the explosive adoption of smart phone devices, mobile health and fitness applications have been increasingly used by healthcare practitioners and the general public to manage electronic health records, chronic medical conditions, dietary references etc. Despite the rapid growth in the number of mobile and fitness applications on various platforms, very little work has been done to quantitatively and qualitatively assess these applications to guide users in the selection process. Automatic categorization of mobile health and fitness applications is the first step in this direction. In this paper, we report results from crawling 1,430 Android and 62,286 iOS apps in Nov. 2013. Among them, 1,399 apps were manually classified to one or multiple categories out of a total of 11 categories. Text mining tools were applied to the description section of the apps for keyword extraction, feature selection and automatic categorization. The classifiers we experimented with have comparable performance with Linear SVC achieving the highest precision, recall and f1 scores of 0.89, 0.79 and 0.88, respectively.
A volumetric approach to biased estimation: Demonstration on shrinkage estimators

This work proposes a new approach, named as the volumetric design (VD), of developing biased estimators of deterministic parameters that are known in advance to belong to a compact subset in the parameter space. For analytical tractability, this approach is demonstrated on the choice of the shrinkage parameter of an estimator that scales the celebrated minimum variance unbiased estimator (MVUE) towards zero, where a spherical set is taken as the a priori knowledge on the parameters and the mean-squared error is adopted as the performance measure. Similar to the existing methods of the minimax (MX) and the deepest minimum criterion (DMC) estimators, the VD estimator also belongs to the class of admissible estimators that dominate the MVUE on the provided parameter (spherical) set. However, as its fundamental difference, it corresponds to the estimator that has the largest total relative volume on which it dominates the other estimators in this class, thereby achieving the best volumetric robustness in this manner.
slender Rice, a Constitutive Gibberellin Response Mutant, Is Caused by a Null Mutation of the SLR1 Gene, an Ortholog of the Height-Regulating Gene GAI/RGA/RHT/D8

The rice slender mutant (slr1-1) is caused by a single recessive mutation and results in a constitutive gibberellin (GA) response phenotype. The mutant elongates as if saturated with GAs. In this mutant, (1) elongation was unaffected by an inhibitor of GA biosynthesis, (2) GA-inducible α-amylase was produced by the aleurone layers without gibberellic acid application, and (3) endogenous GA content was lower than in the wild-type plant. These results indicate that the product of the SLR1 gene is an intermediate of the GA signal transduction pathway. SLR1 maps to OsGAI in rice and has significant homology with height-regulating genes, such as RHT-1Da in wheat, D8 in maize, and GAI and RGA in Arabidopsis. The GAI gene family is likely to encode transcriptional factors belonging to the GRAS gene superfamily. DNA sequence analysis revealed that the slr1-1 mutation is a single basepair deletion of the nuclear localization signal domain, resulting in a frameshift mutation that abolishes protein production. Furthermore, introduction of a 6-kb genomic DNA fragment containing the wild-type SLR1 gene into the slr1-1 mutant restored GA sensitivity to normal. These results indicate that the slr1-1 mutant is caused by a loss-of-function mutation of the SLR1 gene, which is an ortholog of GAI, RGA, RHT, and D8. We also succeeded in producing GA-insensitive dwarf rice by transforming wild-type rice with a modified SLR1 gene construct that has a 17–amino acid deletion affecting the DELLA region. Thus, we demonstrate opposite GA response phenotypes depending on the type of mutations in SLR1.
Complete algorithms for feeding polyhedral parts using pivot grasps

To rapidly feed industrial parts on an assembly line, Carlisle et al. (1994) proposed a flexible part feeding system that drops parts on a flat conveyor belt, determines position and orientation of each part with a vision system, and then moves them into a desired orientation. When a part is grasped with two hard finger contacts and lifted, it pivots under gravity into a stable configuration. The authors refer to the sequence of picking up the part, allowing it to pivot, and replacing it on the table as a pivot grasp. The authors show that under idealized conditions, a robot arm with four degrees of freedom (DOF) can move (feed) parts arbitrarily in 6 DOF using pivot grasps. This paper considers the following planning problem: Given a polyhedral part shape, coefficient of friction, and a pair of stable configurations as input, find pairs of grasp points that will cause the part to pivot from one stable configuration to the other. For a part with n faces and m stable configurations, the authors give an O(m/sup 2/n log n) algorithm to generate the m/spl times/m matrix of pivot grasps. When the part is star-shaped, this reduces to O(m/sup 2/n). Since pivot grasps may not exist for some transitions, multiple steps may be needed. Alternatively, the authors consider the set of grasps where the part pivots to a configuration within a "capture region" around the stable configuration; when the part is released, it will tumble to the desired configuration. Both algorithms are complete in that they are guaranteed to find pivot grasps when they exist.
Image Based Monitoring for Combustion Systems

A novel method of on-line flame detection in video is proposed. It aims to early detect the current state of the combustion system and prevent the system from further degradation and occurrence of failure. The proposed method consists of hidden Markov model (HMM) and multiway principal component analysis (MPCA). MPCA is used to extract the cross-correlation among spatial relationships in the low dimensional space while HMM constructs the temporal behavior of the sequence of the spatial features. The probability distribution of the normal status can be trained by the images collected from the normal operation processes. The proposed method can generate simple probability monitoring charts to track the progress of the current transition state sequence and monitor the occurrence of the observable upsets. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, data from the monitoring practice in the real combustion systems are conducted.
Stationary and impulsive injection of electron beams in converging magnetic field

Aims. We study time-dependent precipitation of an electron beam injected into a flaring atmosphere with a converging magnetic field by considering collisional and Ohmic losses with anisotropic scattering and pitch angle diffusion. Two injection regimes are investigated: short impulse and stationary injection. The effects of converging magnetic fields with different spatial profiles are compared and the energy deposition produced by the precipitating electrons at different depths and regimes is calculated. Methods. The time dependent Fokker-Planck equation for electron distribution in depth, energy and pitch angle was solved numerically by using the summary approximation method. Results. Steady state injection was found to be established for beam electrons 0.07–0.2 s after the injection onset depending on the initial beam parameters. Energy deposition by a stationary beam is strongly dependent on a self-induced electric field but more weakly dependent on a magnetic field convergence. Energy depositions by short electron impulses are found to be insensitive to the self-induced electric field but are strongly affected by magnetic convergence. Short beam impulses are shown to produce sharp asymmetric hard X-ray bursts on a timescale of the order of tens of milliseconds, often observed in solar flares.
Multi-Modal Biometrics : An Overview

The topic of multi-modal biometrics has attracted strong interest in recent years. This paper categorizes approaches to multi-modal biometrics based on the biometric source, the type of sensing used, and the depth of collaborative interaction in the processing. This paper also attempts to identify some of the challenges and issues that confront research in multimodal biometrics.
Delay-Dependent Output Feedback Guaranteed Cost Control for Uncertain Discrete-Time Switched Delay Systems

This paper investigates the problem of delay-dependent output feedback guaranteed cost controller design for uncertain discrete-time switched systems with time-varying state delay. The uncertainties are assumed to have a structured linear fractional form. The objective is to design a switched dynamic output feedback controller guaranteeing the asymptotic stability of the resulting closed-loop system and minimizing a specified cost function. Based on a delay-dependent switched Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional (DDSLKF) combined with Finsler's Lemma, a novel delay-dependent robust performance analysis result is first proposed and in turn the output feedback controller synthesis is developed. It is shown that the controller parameters can be obtained by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness and less conservatism of the proposed approach.
Energy Efficient Analog-to-Information Converter for Biopotential Acquisition Systems

Analog to Information Converter (AIC) is the heart of an energy efficient bio potential acquisition system using compressed sensing (CS) technique. This paper presents the design and implementation of AIC. Charge redistribution Digital to Analog Convertors (DAC) is used for power and area efficiency. A successive approximation register (SAR) control logic and dynamic latch type comparator are used for low power operation. We have used 65nm CMOS technology for this design. The pseudorandom clock generator enables random under-sampling for the 12-bit Successive Approximation Register Analog to Digital Converter (SAR ADC). The designed AIC achieves a sample rate of 0.5 KS/s, an ENOB 9.54 bits, FOM 187 fJ/conv-step and consumes 69.66 nW with 1 V power supply.
DWT+LSB-based fragile watermarking method for digital Quran images

In this digital era, the authenticity of digital documents can be doubtful because it may suffer from tampering activity. Looking into Muslim community, the most important book/scripture is the Holy Quran. The Muslim community has put great efforts to ensure the authenticity of the printed Holy Quran. However, such effort is not accompanied for digital Holy Quran. In this paper, we propose a fragile watermarking method to preserve the authenticity of the digital Holy Quran. The Proposed method is considered as fragile watermarking method, which works on wavelet and spatial domains of digital Quran images. The authentication bits are embedded into each block of wavelet-transformed image. Then, the least significant bits of pixels are considered to embed another authentication bits. The experimental results show that the watermarked image is imperceptible and fragile to the common attacks.
Merging Results from Overlapping Databases in Distributed Information Retrieval

In this paper, we investigate the problem of results merging in distributed information retrieval when overlapping databases are used. We focus on two issues: score normalization and weights assignment for each of the component results. Empirical study with the TREC data has the following three findings: 1. The cubic regression model and logistic regression model are better than the commonly used zero-one score normalization method, 2. The weighting scheme of uneven similarity is an effective method of weights assignment. 3. Score normalization and weights assignment can be used separately or together in a results merging method to improve effectiveness. The findings obtained in this paper are very useful for effectiveness improvement when implementing a distributed information retrieval system.
The Novel Antidepressant Agomelatine Normalizes Hippocampal Neuronal Activity and Promotes Neurogenesis in Chronically Stressed Rats

Agomelatine is a novel antidepressant which acts as a melatonergic (MT1/MT2) receptor agonist and serotonergic (5‐HT2C) receptor antagonist. The antidepressant properties of agomelatine have been demonstrated in animal models as well as in clinical studies. Several preclinical studies reported agomelatine‐induced effects on brain plasticity, mainly under basal conditions in healthy animals. Yet, it is important to unravel agomelatine‐mediated changes in the brain affected by psychopathology or exposed to conditions that might predispose to mood disorders. Since stress is implicated in the etiology of depression, it is valid to investigate antidepressant‐induced effects in animals subjected to chronic stress. In this context, we sought to determine changes in the brain after agomelatine treatment in chronically stressed rats. Adult male rats were subjected to footshock stress and agomelatine treatment for 21 consecutive days. Rats exposed to footshock showed a robust increase in adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and corticosterone. Chronic agomelatine treatment did not markedly influence this HPA‐axis response. Whereas chronic exposure to daily footshock stress reduced c‐Fos expression in the hippocampal dentate gyrus, agomelatine treatment reversed this effect and normalized neuronal activity to basal levels. Moreover, chronic agomelatine administration was associated with enhanced hippocampal cell proliferation and survival in stressed but not in control rats. Furthermore, agomelatine reversed the stress‐induced decrease in doublecortin expression in the dentate gyrus. Taken together, these data show a beneficial action of agomelatine in the stress‐compromised brain, where it restores stress‐affected hippocampal neuronal activity and promotes adult hippocampal neurogenesis.
Axiomatization of an importance index for k-ary games

We consider MultiCriteria Decision Analysis models which are defined over discrete attributes, taking a finite number of values. We do not assume that the model is monotonically increasing with respect to the attributes values. Our aim is to define an importance index for such general models, considering that they are equivalent to $k$-ary games (multichoice games). We show that classical solutions like the Shapley value are not suitable for such models, essentially because of the efficiency axiom which does not make sense in this context. We propose an importance index which is a kind of average variation of the model along the attributes. We give an axiomatic characterization of it.
Extremely dense face registration: Comparing automatic landmarking algorithms for general and ethno-gender models

Registration is a very important step in object recognition. Accurate detection of the eye centers, eye corners, mouth and nose are critical for face recognition and more broadly, for face processing. In this work, we have evaluated three techniques, namely AAM, Stacked ASM and CLM, for automatic detection of landmarks under the problem of extremely dense registration scheme for the face. Further we compare the efficacy of these techniques for the general case and for the specific case based on ethnicity and gender. It is shown that the performance of STASM and CLM are comparable and better than AAM. It is also shown that, in general, models trained on ethno-gender groups perform better than the models trained on general exemplars.
Research on epidemic critical threshold of risk of correctional SIS virus style

Some nodes which have innate immunity have not been considered by the dynamic equation of traditional SIS type. This paper improved the dynamic equation of risk spreading in the SIS type, and studied epidemic critical threshold of crisis when the risks of corrected SIS type spread in the uniformity network and non-uniform network. Based on the analytical results, a conclusion could be drawn that if the rate of congenital immunity is increased, then epidemic critical threshold is larger, and the virus is more difficult to travel in the network, so the crisis is more difficult to break out. This conclusion is more objective than the conclusions drawn by the scholars in the past.
Co-Infestation and Spatial Distribution of Bactrocera carambolae and Anastrepha spp. (Diptera: Tephritidae) in Common Guava in the Eastern Amazon

Field infestation and spatial distribution of introduced Bactrocera carambolae Drew and Hancock and native species of Anastrepha in common guavas [Psidium guajava (L.)] were investigated in the eastern Amazon. Fruit sampling was carried out in the municipalities of Calçoene and Oiapoque in the state of Amapá, Brazil. The frequency distribution of larvae in fruit was fitted to the negative binomial distribution. Anastrepha striata was more abundant in both sampled areas in comparison to Anastrepha fraterculus (Wiedemann) and B. carambolae. The frequency distribution analysis of adults revealed an aggregated pattern for B. carambolae as well as for A. fraterculus and Anastrepha striata Schiner, described by the negative binomial distribution. Although the populations of Anastrepha spp. may have suffered some impact due to the presence of B. carambolae, the results are still not robust enough to indicate effective reduction in the abundance of Anastrepha spp. caused by B. carambolae in a general sense. The high degree of aggregation observed for both species suggests interspecific co-occurrence with the simultaneous presence of both species in the analysed fruit. Moreover, a significant fraction of uninfested guavas also indicated absence of competitive displacement.
Exploring Ways to Investigate Instructors’ Roles in Facilitating Transformative Learning Processes for International Students

The purpose of this roundtable session is to identify, and develop ideas and methods to research ways in which face-to-face and online instructors of international students can most effectively facilitate positive transformation. The transitions and challenges that international students often experience will be discussed as well as varying perspectives about how these adult learners can be optimally supported. The benefits and limitations of previous research methods used to investigate international students’ transformation will be explored.