Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved IIR Low-Pass Smoothers and Differentiators with Tunable Delay

Regression analysis using orthogonal polynomials in the time domain is used to derive closed-form expressions for causal and non-causal filters with an infinite impulse response (IIR) and a maximally-flat magnitude and delay response. The phase response of the resulting low-order smoothers and differentiators, with low-pass characteristics, may be tuned to yield the desired delay in the pass band or for zero gain at the Nyquist frequency. The filter response is improved when the shape of the exponential weighting function is modified and discrete associated Laguerre polynomials are used in the analysis. As an illustrative example, the derivative filters are used to generate an optical-flow field and to detect moving ground targets, in real video data collected from an airborne platform with an electro-optic sensor.
Death-defying acts: a meeting review on apoptosis.

Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is the process by which a cell will actively commit suicide under tightly controlled circumstances. The apoptotic death process is associated with pronounced morphological changes in the cell as well as intranucleosomal DNA fragmentation. These criteria distinguish apoptosis from necrosis, which is cell death that occurs usually in response to physical injury. The last several years have produced an explosion of both interest in and information about apoptosis, not unlike that which occurred for the cell cycle in the 1980s. In the past, investigators did not appreciate the significance of cell death, and experiments with cell death as an outcome most often ended up in the trash. There was also a lack of molecular reagents with which to study cell death. Now, however, apoptosis is emerging as a key biological regulatory mechanism, possibly no less significant than regulation of cell growth and differentiation. Apoptosis is essential in many aspects of normal development and is required for maintaining homeostasis. Failure to regulate apoptosis negatively is associated with degenerative diseases, and failure to regulate apoptosis positively is associated with cancer and autoimmune disease. Thus, too much or to little cell death can have catastrophic consequences. Developing molecular approaches to study apoptosis in diverse systems is now the main objective of many laboratories. Some unifying themes have emerged: (1) Apoptosis may arise from incompatible or conflicting growth signals; (2) multiple pathways exist for induction of apoptosis; and (3) apoptosis can be a multistep process. This review is not meant to be comprehensive, but it is an attempt to highlight the most significant and interrelated developments presented by the participants at The Fifth Annual Pezcoller Symposium. 1
Design of a Lookup Table Circuit Based on TMR Logic and Its Application to an Immediate Wake-Upable FPGA

あらまし 高機能性・低消費電力性を達成する回路技術として,筆者らは tunneling magneto-resistive (TMR) 素子と MOS トランジスタを組み合わせた回路技術(TMR ロジック)を考案してきた. 本論文では,TMR ロ ジック活用の典型例として field-programmable gate array (FPGA)の lookup table (LUT)回路に対し,その 高性能化手法を提案する. まず,LUT 回路を TMR ロジックに基づき構成することで回路情報が不揮発性記憶 素子に内蔵されるため,外部不揮発性メモリを必要とせず,データ復帰に伴う電力消費及び遅延を大幅に低減で き,かつ電源をオフにすることで静的電力の完全遮断を可能とする. また従来 TMRロジックに基づく回路構成 では,MOS トランジスタと TMR 素子による論理回路網を正論理と負論理で実現し,それらの出力を差動対回 路で判定して演算を実現していたが,提案回路では差動対の片側をある適切なしきい電流値に固定することで, 回路全体のコンパクト化が達成できることを示す. 最後に,具体的な演算回路を本提案手法で構成し,その有用 性を定量的に評価した結果を示す. キーワード FPGA,Lookup table,漏れ電流,TMR 素子,DyCML
A competition-based recommender system

There are a large number of items with users' ratings on the internet. Instead of predicting items' ratings with the item content or the user-item-rating matrix, this paper proposes an approach to predict items' ratings basing on paired comparisons among contents of items with different ratings. We assume that the user interest on each item can be represented by the combination of different content features, and employ Bradley-Terry model to confirm the user interest value of each feature. Experimental results show that the competition-based recommender system outperforms popular approaches.
12-bit non-calibrating noise-immune redundant SAR ADC for system-on-a-chip

Noise coupling mechanism analysis is done for a successive approximation (SAR) type ADC. In the light of this, a simple redundant SAR architecture is presented that nulls conversion phase noise; non-ideal circuit behavior and is compared with the reported work which, in most cases, optimize for conversion speed alone. The 12-bit multi-channel non-calibrating charge re-distribution type SAR-ADC integrated with a large system-on-a-chip is fabricated as a test-chip and a fully integrated device in 130 nm 5 metal 1 poly CMOS "digital" process. Test-chip results show no observable degradations when switching noise was restricted to the conversion phase alone while it shows 3db SNR degradation otherwise. Though designed for 200KSPS settling time, silicon results illustrates maximum operation at 2MSPS using margins actually designed for noise. On the final integrated version, 11.4 bit ENOB and 71.5 db SNR was recorded in the presence of digital switching substrate noise/IO switching noise and board ground noises
Pax2 contributes to inner ear patterning and optic nerve trajectory.

During gestation, the paired box-containing gene Pax2 is expressed in the mid-hindbrain area, developing eye and inner ear. We generated Pax2 null mutant mice, which show the requirement of Pax2 for the establishment of axonal pathways along the optic stalks and ventral diencephalon. In mutant brains, the optic tracts remain totally ipsilateral due to agenesis of the optic chiasma. Furthermore, Pax2 mutants show extension of the pigmented retina into the optic stalks and failure of the optic fissure to close resulting in coloboma. In the inner ear, Pax2 mutants show agenesis of the cochlea and the spiral ganglion, i.e., the parts of the organ responsible for auditory function and in whose primordium Pax2 is expressed. Our results identify Pax2 as a major regulator of patterning during organogenesis of the eye and inner ear and indicate its function in morphogenetic events required for closure of the optic fissure and neural tube.
Cofactoring-Based Upper Bound Computation for Covering Problems Congguang Yang Maciej Ciesielski

This paper introduces an efficient technique to compute a tight upper bound for the unate and binate covering problems. It is known that a covering problem can be solved by finding a shortest path on a BDD representing a satisfiability formula. Our technique is based on finding an approximation to the shortest path by identifying a path on a BDD composed of as many negative edges as possible. This operation is performed by iterative cofactoring without actually building a BDD. The results show that our technique generates very tight upper bound, with more than half of the test cases resulting in the optimum solution in just a few iterations.
Space-time beamforming for multiuser wireless relay networks

The paper is concerned with a multiuser communication network, which is assisted by multiple relays. It has been observed through our previous related works that the conventional simultaneous beamforming at parallel amply-and-forward (AF) relays is not quite effective and often infeasible to target practically desirable signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) at the destinations. To overcome this shortage, we propose the time-division for multiple-user transmission to the relays so the later can perform beamforming on signals received from the individuals and then parallelly forward its combinations at once to the destinations. The optimal beamforming problem is a nonconvex quadratically constrained optimization, which is globally solved by our tailored algorithm of nonsmooth optimization. Its found global optimal solutions are shown very effective and over-perform other possible multi-user relay beamformings.
A Landsat composite covering all Amazonia for applications in ecology and conservation

Studies at small spatial extents have shown that local floristic and edaphic patterns within the hyper‐diverse Amazonian forests can be identified at a high thematic resolution using Landsat imagery. This suggests that Landsat images have the potential to indicate ecologically relevant environmental and biotic variation in the forests also at the extent of the entire basin. However, the full potential of Landsat data for these purposes has not yet been exploited in ecological and biodiversity research or in conservation applications. This is largely because the artifactual noise that is introduced by atmospheric and directional effects into multi‐scene composite images can swamp the subtle spectral differences between different types of primary forest. Here, we present a new Landsat TM/ETM+ image composite for the entire Amazon biome that largely overcomes these problems. It is based on more than 16 000 individual image acquisitions from the 10‐year period 2000–2009. The images were individually processed to directionally and topographically normalized surface reflectance and combined into 2.5 degree tiles using the medoid compositing criterion. Visual inspection showed that the resulting image composite is radiometrically clearly more consistent than other currently available Landsat composites. We tested the ecological relevance of the new Landsat composite by comparing its reflectance values with edaphic properties measured in more than 300 field sampling localities spread across 2000 km of Amazonia. We found a strong correlation between observed and predicted concentration of exchangeable base cations in the surface soil, which indicates that the compositing approach has succeeded in removing most of the artifactual noise. The Landsat composite image should be of great value for a multitude of applications in ecology, biodiversity research and conservation planning that require environmental data layers combining detailed spatial resolution, basin‐wide coverage and high radiometric accuracy.
NMDA Receptor 2 (NR2) C-Terminal Control of NR Open Probability Regulates Synaptic Transmission and Plasticity at a Cerebellar Synapse

The C-terminal domain of NMDA receptor 2 (NR2) subunits has been proposed to play a critical role in regulating NMDA receptor localization and function in postsynaptic densities. However, the mechanism of this regulation is not completely understood. In this paper we show that C-terminal truncation of NR2A and NR2C subunits in mice (NR2A/CΔC/ΔC) impairs synaptic transmission and plasticity at the cerebellar mossy fiber–granule cell relay. Activation of synaptic NMDA receptors could be distinguished from that of extrasynaptic receptors by using the glutamate scavenger glutamate pyruvate transaminase and the open channel blocker MK801. NR2A/CΔC/ΔC mice exhibited a specific reduction in synaptic NMDA receptor activation attributable to a severalfold decrease in channel open probability but not channel conductance. Immunodetection revealed normal developmental expression of NR subunit proteins. Quantitative immunogold analyses with an antibody to NR1 indicated that the reduction in receptor activation is not attributed to a reduced number of NR1-containing receptors in postsynaptic densities. Thus, NR2A/NR2C subunits and particularly their C termini regulate synaptic NMDA receptor activation and function by enhancing channel open probability, which is critical for long-term potentiation induction.
Adaptation in evolutionary computation: a survey

Adaptation of parameters and operators is one of the most important and promising areas of research in evolutionary computation; it tunes the algorithm to the problem while solving the problem. In this paper we develop a classification of adaptation on the basis of the mechanisms used, and the level at which adaptation operates within the evolutionary algorithm. The classification covers all forms of adaptation in evolutionary computation and suggests further research.
Quality of service using careful overbooking for optimal virtual network resource allocation

Virtual network embedding which maps the virtual networks to a substrate network is important for problems in the network virtualization. The conventional mapping methods only provide the exclusive service that allocates the whole bandwidth with a full availability to requests. This kind of service is not flexible enough to serve the variety of demands. With these observations, this paper has proposed to analyze the application of careful overbooking concept that uses flexible levels of availability to provide Service Level Agreements (SLA) to users. Based on this framework, virtual network subscribers are provided with a service that is most suitable with their tolerability to utilize the soft-guaranteed bandwidths. This helps to save the cost of subscribers and to increase the profitability of the provider. Furthermore, to route resultant traffics through a substrate network, we have applied a Mixed-Integer Programming formulation to minimize the virtual network cost. The reported numerical results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the cost of operating virtual network while guaranteeing the required carefully overbooked quality of service.
REMOTE CONTROLLED MODEL AIRCRAFT AS SENSOR PLATFORM FOR URBAN MODELLING

Several types of commercial sensor platforms exist for data acquisition in urban terrain. But when it comes down to purchasing data for a particular purpose, a mismatch between level of detail, age of information and price of data emerges. High resolution images that have an age of less than one week are not available at any reasonable price. Such data will be important to generate up to date city models with a high level of detail for various applications. Current research begins to focus on the computation of sensor trajectories from video sequences in real time which will lead to fast “structure from motion” and ﬁnally to the fully automatic generation of city models in very short time. In order to acquire suitable input data for such a processing chain, we have chosen to equip a small remote controlled model aircraft with a video camera. This paper will give a detailed overview of the system, report some experiences we had with a ﬁrst setup, outline the processing chain and present preliminary results we obtained from the ﬁrst video sequences.
Schizophrenia patients are impaired in empathic accuracy

Background Empathy is crucial for successful social relationships. Despite its importance for social interactions, little is known about empathy in schizophrenia. This study investigated the degree to which schizophrenia patients can accurately infer the affective state of another person (i.e. empathic accuracy). Method A group of 30 schizophrenia patients and 22 healthy controls performed an empathic accuracy task on which they continuously rated the affective state of another person shown in a video (referred to as the ‘target’). These ratings were compared with the target's own continuous self-rating of affective state; empathic accuracy was defined as the correlation between participants' ratings and the targets' self-ratings. A separate line-tracking task was administered to measure motoric/attentional factors that could account for group differences in performance. Participants' self-rated empathy was measured using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, and targets' self-rated emotional expressivity was measured using the Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire. Results Compared with controls, schizophrenia patients showed lower empathic accuracy although they performed the motoric tracking task at high accuracy. There was a significant group×target expressivity interaction such that patients showed a smaller increase in empathic accuracy with higher levels of emotional expressivity by the target, compared with controls. Patients' empathic accuracy was uncorrelated with self-reported empathy or clinical symptoms. Conclusions Schizophrenia patients showed lower empathic accuracy than controls, and their empathic accuracy was less influenced by the emotional expressivity of the target. These findings suggest that schizophrenia patients benefit less from social cues of another person when making an empathic judgement.
The Relationship between Sunlight Pattern Geometry and Visual Comfort in Daylit Offices

Sunlight in buildings is a multisensory phenomenon that can enhance occupants’ comfort, health, and connection with the outside environment through its dynamic luminous and thermal attributes. Current daylighting design guidelines limit sunlight penetration in work environments, reducing both its negative and positive effects on visual comfort and occupants’ satisfaction with their indoor environment. One gap in existing literature on sunlight exposure is the lack of addressing the effect of visual interest for both sunlight pattern geometry and its play of brilliants on visual comfort. This paper aims to examine differences in visual comfort and interest assessments under three different sunlight pattern geometries. This paper reports on the results of a quasi-experiment conducted in an office building in Portland, OR. Three experimental settings (hereafter test stations) were created at the office using different window treatments to create three sunlight geometries −Fractal Pattern, Striped Pattern, and ‘No-Pattern’− which were tested and compared for their impact on visual interest, visual comfort, and view quality. The study followed a withinsubjects design (same group experienced three different sunlight conditions) where 22 office employees completed a brief questionnaire at each test station, while quantitative environmental data were collected. Results showed that visual comfort and visual interest ratings for the Fractal Pattern were higher than those for the Striped Pattern, though the difference was not statistically significant. View ratings for the two patterns were significantly lower than those for No-Pattern (p<0.001). Interestingly, the relationship between the glare metric DGP and visual comfort ratings varied across the three stations. Further, the difference in visual interest between the Striped Pattern and No-Pattern stations was statistically significant (p<0.05). Overall, findings suggest that the visual interest of sunlight patterns and views influenced subjective visual comfort assessments. Implication of this study can inform the design of future facade systems to enhance occupants’ visual comfort, interest, and satisfaction with their indoor environment.
The roles of the amygdala in the affective regulation of body, brain, and behaviour

Despite the great amount of knowledge produced by the neuroscientific literature on affective phenomena, current models tackling non-cognitive aspects of behaviour are often bio-inspired but rarely bio-constrained. This paper presents a theoretical account of affective systems centred on the amygdala (Amg). This account aims to furnish a general framework and specific pathways to implement models that are more closely related to biological evidence. The Amg, which receives input from brain areas encoding internal states, innately relevant stimuli, and innately neutral stimuli, plays a fundamental role in the motivational and emotional processes of organisms. This role is based on the fact that Amg implements the two associative processes at the core of Pavlovian learning (conditioned stimulus (CS)–unconditioned stimulus (US) and CS–unconditioned response (UR) associations), and that it has the capacity of modulating these associations on the basis of internal states. These functionalities allow the Amg to play an important role in the regulation of the three fundamental classes of affective responses (namely, the regulation of body states, the regulation of brain states via neuromodulators, and the triggering of a number of basic behaviours fundamental for adaptation) and in the regulation of three high-level cognitive processes (namely, the affective labelling of memories, the production of goal-directed behaviours, and the performance of planning and complex decision-making). Our analysis is conducted within a methodological approach that stresses the importance of understanding the brain within an evolutionary/adaptive framework and with the aim of isolating general principles that can potentially account for the wider possible empirical evidence in a coherent fashion.
Inadequate Reporting of Concomitant Drug Treatment in Cardiovascular Interventional Head‐to‐Head Trials

Optimal revascularization strategy is still under debate in patients with coronary artery disease, particularly due to the results of the Synergy Between Percutaneous Coronary Intervention With TAXUS and Cardiac Surgery (SYNTAX) trial. Although medical prevention has been clearly shown to be beneficial in coronary artery disease, it has been suggested that patients were significantly undertreated with evidence‐based medications for cardiovascular protection.
Arginase Reciprocally Regulates Nitric Oxide Synthase Activity and Contributes to Endothelial Dysfunction in Aging Blood Vessels

Background—Although abnormal l-arginine NO signaling contributes to endothelial dysfunction in the aging cardiovascular system, the biochemical mechanisms remain controversial. l-arginine, the NO synthase (NOS) precursor, is also a substrate for arginase. We tested the hypotheses that arginase reciprocally regulates NOS by modulating l-arginine bioavailability and that arginase is upregulated in aging vasculature, contributing to depressed endothelial function. Methods and Results—Inhibition of arginase with (S)-(2-boronoethyl)-l-cysteine, HCl (BEC) produced vasodilation in aortic rings from young (Y) adult rats (maximum effect, 46.4±9.4% at 10−5 mol/L, P <0.01). Similar vasorelaxation was elicited with the additional arginase inhibitors N-hydroxy-nor-l-arginine (nor-NOHA) and difluoromethylornithine (DFMO). This effect required intact endothelium and was prevented by 1H-oxadiazole quinoxalin-1-one (P <0.05 and P <0.001, respectively), a soluble guanylyl cyclase inhibitor. DFMO-elicited vasodilation was greater in old (O) compared with Y rat aortic rings (60±6% versus 39±6%, P <0.05). In addition, BEC restored depressed l-arginine (10−4 mol/L)–dependent vasorelaxant responses in O rings to those of Y. Arginase activity and expression were increased in O rings, whereas NOS activity and cyclic GMP levels were decreased. BEC and DFMO suppressed arginase activity and restored NOS activity and cyclic GMP levels in O vessels to those of Y. Conclusions—These findings demonstrate that arginase modulates NOS activity, likely by regulating intracellular l-arginine availability. Arginase upregulation contributes to endothelial dysfunction of aging and may therefore be a therapeutic target.
Age differences in the performance of information retrieval tasks

In two experiments younger (18-25 years) and older (60-70 years) participants performed an information retrieval task in which they searched for the answers to questions in a hierarchical menu structure. Participants' movement speed, spatial ability, spatial memory, working memory capacity and reasoning speed were measured. Results showed older participants to be slower than younger participants on overall latencies on the information retrieval task. This slowing increases with each consecutive step in the menu structure. Regression analysis showed that movement speed, reasoning speed and spatial ability predicted the overall latencies accurately. Modelling the consecutive steps showed that latencies on the first selection are predicted by movement speed and reasoning speed. Memory and spatial measures are predictors for latencies on steps further into the menu structure only. This finding is consistent with increased slowing of older participants for later selections and suggests that deep menu structures are less suited for older users.