Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transparency and Tuning of Wave-Based Bilateral Teleoperation Systems

When force feedback is employed in bilateral teleoperation of a robotic system, classical control techniques can become unstable in the presence of communication latency. An established solution to this problem employs the scattering transformation to guarantee passivity. This transformation requires the selection of a wave impedance parameter that strongly affects transparency to the operator. It is widely recognized that a large impedance value is well suited to contact tasks and a low value is preferable for free motion. However, in any realistic manipulation task, both forms of motion will exist during at least a portion of the task. Some amount of free motion will typically be necessary during approach to the contact site; and, even after transition to contact has occurred, free motion considerations will still dominate on the axes parallel to the manipulated surface. This paper explores analytically this tradeoff, proposing an optimal solution from the linear systems theory. Choice of controller gains is additionally discussed. Attention is also given to the feedback-passivized scheme of Chopra et al. , which is shown to be free of the fundamental wave impedance tradeoff that dominates the classical wave-based approach.
The Case Against Statistical Significance Testing

In recent years the use of traditional statistical methods in educational research has increasingly come under attack. In this article, Ronald P. Carver exposes the fantasies often entertained by researchers about the meaning of statistical significance. The author recommends abandoning all statistical significance testing and suggests other ways of evaluating research results. Carver concludes that we should return to the scientific method of examining data and replicating results rather than relying on statistical significance testing to provide equivalent information.
A High Performance 5.4 GHz 3V Voltage Controlled Oscillator in 0.35-≥m BiCMOS Technology

This paper presents a fully integrated 5.4-GHz CMOS Voltage-controlled Oscillator (VCO) with a low phase noise and ultra linear VCO gain (Kvco) in 0.35-µm SiGe (Silicon Germanium) BiCMOS technology. In order to increase the linearity of the VCO, a resonant circuit is proposed that consists of four parallel p-n junction varactor pairs. The VCO operate at a bias current of 3.13 mA and a supply voltage of 3.0 V with a corresponding DC power consumption of about 9.3 mW. The VCO gain changes from 214 MHz/V to 271 MHz/V. The CMOS VCO shows a fine frequency tuning range of 786 MHz. In addition, a low phase noise of-120.976 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset was obtained.
Near-linear time, Leakage-resilient Key Evolution Schemes from Expander Graphs

We develop new schemes for deterministically updating a stored cryptographic key that provide security against an internal adversary who can control the update computation and leak bounded amounts of information to the outside world. Our schemes are much more efficient than the previous schemes for this model, due to Dziembowski, Kazana and Wichs (CRYPTO 2011). Specifically, our update operation runs in time quasilinear in the key length, rather than quadratic, while offering a similar level of leakage resilience. In order to design our scheme, we strengthen the connections between the model of Dziembowski et al. and “pebbling games”, showing that random-oracle-based key evolution schemes are secure as long as the graph of the update function’s calls to the oracle has appropriate combinatorial properties. This builds on a connection between pebbling and the random oracle model first established by Dwork, Naor and Wee (CRYPTO 2005). Our scheme’s efficiency relies on the existence (which we show) of families of “local” bipartite expander graphs of constant degree.
Tradeoffs for the Design of Programmable Interconnections in FPGAs

In this paper we present the methodology developed for the design of the programmable interconnections of a novel FPGA architecture. This methodology implies creating workbenches with several CMOS switches (the interconnection element to be tailored) linked by long metal paths modelled as transmission lines and equally loaded (at first) after each interconnection element. These multi-switch paths are driven by variable size CMOS inverters. This approach emulates a high granularity FPGA composed of large Look-Up Tables (LUTs) linked by long metal paths connected by programmable CMOS switches. Once given the projected delay and the prospective load to be driven, a tradeoff can be found for the buffer strength and the CMOS switch in terms of required speed and area wasted. This tradeoff tries to minimize not only the total delay from the begining of the interconnection to the end of the multi-switch line but also the local delays from the beginning of the line to each intermediate point after an interconnection element. As a consequence, the average delay is reduced and a significant area reduction is achieved. The impact of the average delay in the maximum operating frquency is found to be important in large grain synchronous designs. The effect of the load asymmetry is also studied, in order to have aditional input when dealing with routing problems.
Hierarchical Domain Partitioning For Hierarchical Architectures

The history of parallel computing shows that good performance is heavily dependent on data locality. Prior knowledge of data access patterns allows for optimizations that reduce data movement, achieving lower data access latencies. Compilers and runtime systems, however, have difficulties in speculating on locality issues among threads. Future multicore architectures are likely to present a hierarchical model of parallelism, with multiple threads on a core and multiple cores on a chip. With such a system, data affinity and localization becomes even more important to efficiently use per-core resources. We show how an application programming interface (API) with the right abstractions can conveniently indicate data locality and that a system can use this information to place threads in a way that minimizes cache miss rates and interconnect traffic. This information is often well understood and easily expressed by the programmer but is typically lost to the system, forcing runtime environments to rediscover it on the fly; a far more costly approach. Our system is particularly well suited for the trend in manycore architectures towards large numbers of simple cores connected by a decentralized interconnect fabric. We study a set of data-parallel benchmarks and show that our technique yields up to a 25% performance gain with 17% reduction in energy.
Respects for similarity

This article reviews the status of similarity as an explanatory construct with a focus on similarity judgments. For similarity to be a useful construct, one must be able to specify the ways or respects in which two things are similar. One solution to this problem is to restrict the notion of similarity to hard-wired perceptual processes. It is argued that this view is too narrow and limiting. Instead, it is proposed that an important source of constraints derives from the similarity comparison process itself. Both new experiments and other evidence are described that support the idea that respects are determined by processes internal to comparisons
Policy and Performance in American Higher Education: An Examination of Cases across State Systems

Policy and Performance in American Higher Education presents a new approach to understanding how public policy influences institutional performance, with practical insight for those charged with crafting and implementing higher education policy. Public institutions of higher learning are called upon by state governments to provide educational access and opportunity for students. Paradoxically, the education policies enacted by state legislatures are often complex and costly to implement, which can ultimately detract from that mission. Richard Richardson, Jr., and Mario Martinez evaluate the higher education systems of five states to explain how these policies are developed and how they affect the performance of individual institutions. The authors compare the higher education systems of New Mexico, California, South Dakota, New York, and New Jersey and describe the difficulty of enforcing state policies amid increasing demands for greater efficiency and accountability. In the process they identify the "rules in use"-rules that are central to the coherence and performance of higher education systems-that administrators apply to meet organizational goals within the constraints of changing, sometimes conflicting federal and state policies. Incorporating rich data from seven years of observations, interviews, and research, Richardson and Martinez offer a clear comparative framework for understanding state higher education.
Automated computerized analysis of speech in psychiatric disorders

Purpose of review Disturbances in communication are a hallmark feature of severe mental illnesses. Recent technological advances have paved the way for objectifying communication using automated computerized semantic, linguistic and acoustic analyses. We review recent studies applying various computer-based assessments to the natural language produced by adult patients with severe mental illness. Recent findings Automated computerized methods afford tools with which it is possible to objectively evaluate patients in a reliable, valid and efficient manner that complements human ratings. Crucially, these measures correlate with important clinical measures. The clinical relevance of these novel metrics has been demonstrated by showing their relationship to functional outcome measures, their in-vivo link to classic ‘language’ regions in the brain, and, in the case of linguistic analysis, their relationship to candidate genes for severe mental illness. Summary Computer-based assessments of natural language afford a framework with which to measure communication disturbances in adults with severe mental illnesses. Emerging evidence suggests that they can be reliable and valid, and overcome many practical limitations of more traditional assessment methods. The advancement of these technologies offers unprecedented potential for measuring and understanding some of the most crippling symptoms of some of the most debilitating illnesses known to humankind.
Earth Mover Distance on superpixels

Earth Mover Distance (EMD) is a popular distance to compute distances between Probability Density Functions (PDFs). It has been successfully applied in a wide selection of problems of image processing. This success comes from two reasons, a physical one, since it computes a physical cost to transport an element of mass between two images or two histograms, and a statistical one, since it is a cross-bin metric (as opposed to a bin-wise metric). In computer vision, these features are useful since small variation of illuminance can shift the histogram. However, histograms are not a sufficient statistic to discriminate images since they ignore all geometric correlations. In addition, transport also called flow of an histogram loose the information of geometric flow to warp one image on to an other. This paper proposes a new construction of EMD between images. This construction approximates the EMD between two images, by computing a pixel-wise transport at the complexity cost of computing an EMD between 1-D Histograms and preserves the geometrical and topological structure of the image. This construction simply relies on a segmentation of the image (also called superpixelization of the image). Results on matching on images shows the stability of the method even when the superpixelizations are highly inconsistent across images.
Compositional and Decidable Checking for Dependent Contract Types

Simple type systems perform compositional reasoning in that the type of a term depends only on the types of its subterms, and not on their semantics. Contracts offer more expressive abstractions, but static contract checking systems typically violate those abstractions and base their reasoning directly upon the semantics of terms. Pragmatically, this noncompositionality makes the decidability of static checking unpredictable. We first show how compositional reasoning may be restored using standard type-theoretic techniques, namely existential types and subtyping. Despite its compositional nature, our type system is exact, in that the type of a term can completely capture its semantics, hence demonstrating that precision and compositionality are compatible. We then address predictability of static checking for contract types by giving a type-checking algorithm for an important class of programs with contract predicates drawn from a decidable theory. Our algorithm relies crucially on the fact that the type of a term depends only the types of its subterms (which fall into the decidable theory) and not their semantics (which will not, in general).
The Impact of Plant Variety Protection Regulations on the Governance of Agri-Food Value Chains

More than 25 years after the 1991 reform of the Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV) treaty, the regulation of Plant Variety Protection (PVP) is still controversial. While the incentives to private innovations are unquestionable, concerns have been raised about farmers’ access to resources, the weakening of their bargaining power, their entrepreneurial freedom, and ultimately their welfare. Our paper investigates the effect of PVP regulation on the governance of agri-food value chains (AFVC) with a small-scale survey of kiwi producers in Italy. We found that AFVC trading-protected (club) plant varieties are more likely to exhibit captive governance forms than those trading the free varieties. Nevertheless, the producers of club kiwis achieve higher returns from their investments and bear less risk than others. Because of the high demand for the club fruits, the breeders must give farmers highly profitable contract terms in order to elicit the production and to promote the adoption of the new cultivar. As a consequence, farmers are capturing a share of the value of innovation, even if the breeders have a strong protection. The long-run sustainability of this win-win agreement between breeders and farmers might be jeopardized should the demand for the new varieties fall.
2 N ov 2 00 1 Why Quantum Theory ?

The usual formulation of quantum theory is rather abstract. In recent work I have shown that we can, nevertheless, obtain quantum theory from five reasonable axioms. Four of these axioms are obviously consistent with both classical probability theory and quantum theory. The remaining axiom requires that there exists a continuous reversible transformation between any two pure states. The requirement of continuity rules out classical probability theory. In this paper I will summarize the main points of this new approach. I will leave out the details of the proof that these axioms are equivalent to the usual formulation of quantum theory (for these see reference [1]).
Assessing statistical significance in multivariable genome wide association analysis

Motivation: Although Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) genotype a very large number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), the data are often analyzed one SNP at a time. The low predictive power of single SNPs, coupled with the high significance threshold needed to correct for multiple testing, greatly decreases the power of GWAS. Results: We propose a procedure in which all the SNPs are analyzed in a multiple generalized linear model, and we show its use for extremely high-dimensional datasets. Our method yields P-values for assessing significance of single SNPs or groups of SNPs while controlling for all other SNPs and the family wise error rate (FWER). Thus, our method tests whether or not a SNP carries any additional information about the phenotype beyond that available by all the other SNPs. This rules out spurious correlations between phenotypes and SNPs that can arise from marginal methods because the ‘spuriously correlated’ SNP merely happens to be correlated with the ‘truly causal’ SNP. In addition, the method offers a data driven approach to identifying and refining groups of SNPs that jointly contain informative signals about the phenotype. We demonstrate the value of our method by applying it to the seven diseases analyzed by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC). We show, in particular, that our method is also capable of finding significant SNPs that were not identified in the original WTCCC study, but were replicated in other independent studies. Availability and implementation: Reproducibility of our research is supported by the open-source Bioconductor package hierGWAS. Contact: peter.buehlmann@stat.math.ethz.ch Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Adaptation of the Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory (PFAI) into Turkish

The present study aimed at evaluate the psychometric properties of the 25-item Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory (PFAI), developed by Conroy, 2001, for Turkish middle school students to assess their fear of failure. The Turkish version of the PFAI was administered to two independent samples. Sample 1 consisted of 211 and sample 2 consisted of 977 middle school students. Confirmatory factor analyses supported fivefactor structure of Turkish version of the PFAI. Reliabilities were deemed acceptable. In addition, the five-factor PFAI was found to be invariant across gender. MANOVA results revealed small to no significant gender differences with respect to the PFAI sub-scale scores. Besides that, the canonical correlation analysis suggests that mastery avoidance, performance avoidance and performance approach goals are positively related to all dimensions of fear of failure. Although, mastery approach goals have a relationship between fear of shame and embarrassment and fear of having uncertain future, the strength of the relationship was small.
Plagiarism in natural and programming languages: an overview of current tools and technologies

report discusses in detail methods of plagiarism and its detection in both natural and programming languages. The increase of material now available in electronic form and improved access to this via the Internet is allowing, with greater ease than ever before, plagiarism that is either intentional or unintentional. Due to increased availability of On-line material, people checking for plagiarism are finding the task increasingly harder. Techniques for detecting both plagiarism in natural and programming languages are discussed in this report to provide the reader with a comprehensive introduction to this area. Also provided are examples of common techniques used in natural language plagiarism.
Simulink Implementation for Improvement of Vehicle Directional Control using Relay Experiment Method

The objective of this paper is to provide directional control during handling maneuvers and effective isolation of passengers or pay load from road disturbances. Active suspension system is considered to be a way of increasing the freedom that one has to specify independently the characteristics of load carrying, handling and ride quality. In this paper, a quarter bus suspension system is simulated and the behaviour of the system has been analyzed for disturbances. A PID controller is designed by the method of relay experiment and is considered for control of the Quarter bus suspension system. General Terms Simulation, Modeling
Protecting BGP from Invalid Paths

The Internet’s interdomain routing protocol, BGP, is vulnerable to a number of potentially crippling attacks. Many promising cryptography-based solutions have been proposed, but none have been embraced by the necessary communities to garner significant adoption. This is largely due to the difficulty of developing and maintaining the necessary PKI infrastructure and changes to the BGP protocol that the proposed solutions require. Alternative solutions such as anomaly detectors have been unable to provide the same level of security as the cryptographic mechanisms. In this paper we create an anomaly detector and response mechanism capable of automatically stopping the propagation of invalid path attacks, a difficult class of attacks to detect. Our solution provides comparable security to the cryptographic methods and could be readily deployed with a simple software upgrade in participating networks.
PLANARIZATION AND INTEGRATION OF SHALLOW TRENCH ISOLATION

STI process flow and planarization requirements are reviewed. An STI planarization mask was designed and utilized for test wafer patterning to investigate STI CMP planarization. Test wafers were processed through a typical STI process sequence, including trench etch, trench liner oxidation, trench-fill, and CMP. Two different CVD techniques, ozone TEOS thermal CVD and HDPCVD, were investigated for trench-fill. CMP experiments were carried out with different process parameters and consumables. Extensive CMP characterization was carried out utilizing multiple metrology techniques. The results fit the previously reported “CMP dielectric planarization” model [1, 2] quite well.
Duplex ultrasound in the emergency department for the diagnostic management of clinically suspected deep vein thrombosis.

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the accuracy and safety of an emergency duplex ultrasound (EDUS) evaluation performed by emergency physicians in the emergency department. METHODS Consecutive adult patients suspected of having their first episode of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) presenting to the emergency department were included in the study. All examinations were performed by emergency physicians trained with a 30-hour ultrasound course. Based on EDUS findings, patients were classified into one of three groups: normal, abnormal, and uncertain. Patients with abnormal and uncertain findings were initially treated as having a DVT. Patients with normal EDUS findings were discharged from the emergency department without anticoagulant therapy. A formal duplex ultrasound evaluation was repeated by a radiologist in all patients within 24-48 hours. Patients with normal findings on duplex ultrasound evaluation were followed up for symptomatic venous thromboembolism for up to one month. RESULTS A total of 399 patients were studied. The EDUS findings were normal in 301 (75%), abnormal in 90 (23%), and uncertain in eight (2%). All abnormal test results were confirmed by the formal duplex ultrasound evaluation, and three patients (0.8%) with uncertain findings on EDUS examination were subsequently diagnosed as having a distal DVT (positive predictive value, 95% [95% confidence interval, 92% to 95%]; negative predictive value, 100% [95% confidence interval = 99% to 100%]). No patients with normal findings on EDUS examination died or experienced venous thromboembolism at the one-month follow-up. CONCLUSIONS EDUS examination yielded a high negative predictive value and good positive predictive value, allowing rapid discharge and avoiding improper anticoagulant treatment.
Deconvolution in Astronomy: A Review

This article reviews different deconvolution methods. The all‐pervasive presence of noise is what makes deconvolution particularly difficult. The diversity of resulting algorithms reflects different ways of estimating the true signal under various idealizations of its properties. Different ways of approaching signal recovery are based on different instrumental noise models, whether the astronomical objects are pointlike or extended, and indeed on the computational resources available to the analyst. We present a number of recent results in this survey of signal restoration, including in the areas of superresolution and dithering. In particular, we show that most recent published work has consisted of incorporating some form of multiresolution in the deconvolution process.