Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Basic Properties of Slow-Fast Nonlinear Dynamical System in the Atmosphere-Ocean Aggregate Modeling

Complex dynamical processes occurring in the earth’s climate system are strongly nonlinear and exhibit wave-like oscillations within broad time-space spectrum. One way to imitate essential features of such processes is using a coupled nonlinear dynamical system, obtained by combining two versions of the wellknown Lorenz (1963) model with distinct time scales that differ by a certain time-scale factor. This dynamical system is frequently applied for studying various aspects of atmospheric and climate dynamics, as well as for estimating the effectiveness of numerical algorithms and techniques used in numerical weather prediction, data assimilation and climate simulation. This paper examines basic dynamic, correlation and spectral properties of this system, and quantifies the influence of the coupling strength on power spectrum densities, spectrograms and autocorrelation functions. Key-Words: dynamical system, earth’s climate system, numerical weather prediction, spectral properties
Quantum Computing and Information Security

Quantum computing, if realized on a large and commercial scale, will provide significantly more powerful computers that could threaten global information security. Modern methods for encrypting data could become obsolete as quantum computing methods break methods used now by more traditional computing techniques. Commercial machines that make use of quantum algorithms to reduce problem sizes of cracking encryptions, if current development trends in quantum computing continue, could be completed sooner rather than later. Such super-fast computing machines would threaten data and network security, resulting in a threat to the global economy. To ease the transition to this more powerful form of computing, such as quantum safe encryption, researchers need to focus on methods for preventing data insecurity. This paper looks at methods of securing data transmission and possible security flaws that could be easily exploited by a proposed quantum computer.
Quantification of Macular Microvascular Changes in Patients With Retinitis Pigmentosa Using Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography.

Purpose To evaluate the microvascular changes in eyes with RP quantitatively using optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) and to determine whether the correlations between these indices and the severity of RP are significant. Methods This was a retrospective, observational study. The medical records of 53 RP patients and 46 controls were reviewed. The OCTA images were obtained with the Cirrus 5000 with Angioplex, and an automated program was used to analyze the microvascular patterns. The perfusion density (PD) and vessel length density (VLD) were used as indices of the microvascular density, whereas the vessel diameter index (VDI) was used as a measure of the caliber of the vessels. The width of the ellipsoid zone (EZ) in the OCT images and the mean deviation (MD) of the Humphry Field Analyzer (HFA) were used to determine the severity of the RP. Student's t-tests and Spearman's correlation tests were used. Results Both the PD and VLD in the superficial and deep plexuses and the whole retina were significantly reduced, and the VDI was significantly increased in RP patients compared with the corresponding values of the controls (P < 0.001). Spearman's rank tests indicated the RP severity was significantly correlated with the PD and VLD in all three layers (P < 0.001, r ranging from 0.50 to 0.87) and significantly correlated with VDI in the deep and the whole retina (P < 0.001, ranging from -0.64 to -0.73). Conclusions Quantitative changes in the microvascular density might be useful for examining the pathophysiology of RP.
Improving Score-Informed Source Separation for Classical Music through Note Refinement

Signal decomposition methods such as Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) demonstrated to be a suitable approach for music signal processing applications, including sound source separation. To better control this decomposition, NMF has been extended using prior knowledge and parametric models. In fact, using score information considerably improved separation results. Nevertheless, one of the main problems of using score information is the misalignment between the score and the actual performance. A potential solution to this problem is the use of audio to score alignment systems. However, most of them rely on a tolerance window that clearly affects the separation results. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel method to refine the aligned score at note level by detecting both, onset and offset for each note present in the score. Note refinement is achieved by detecting shapes and contours in the estimated instrument-wise time activation (gains) matrix. Decomposition is performed in a supervised way, using training instrument models and coarsely-aligned score information. The detected contours define time-frequency note boundaries, and they increase the sparsity. Finally, we have evaluated our method for informed source separation using a dataset of Bach chorales obtaining satisfactory results, especially in terms of SIR.
How to Visualize Success: Presenting Complex Data in a Writing Strategy Tutor

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have been successful at improving students' performance across a variety of domains. To help achieve this widespread success, researchers have identified important behavioral and performance measures that can be used to guide instruction and feedback. Most systems, however, do not present these measures to the teachers who employ the systems in classrooms. The current paper discusses visualizations that will be displayed to teachers using the writing strategy tutor, Writing Pal. We present visualizations for both classroom and student level data and offer descriptions of each.
Handling Real-World Context Awareness, Uncertainty and Vagueness in Real-Time Human Activity Tracking and Recognition with a Fuzzy Ontology-Based Hybrid Method

Human activity recognition is a key task in ambient intelligence applications to achieve proper ambient assisted living. There has been remarkable progress in this domain, but some challenges still remain to obtain robust methods. Our goal in this work is to provide a system that allows the modeling and recognition of a set of complex activities in real life scenarios involving interaction with the environment. The proposed framework is a hybrid model that comprises two main modules: a low level sub-activity recognizer, based on data-driven methods, and a high-level activity recognizer, implemented with a fuzzy ontology to include the semantic interpretation of actions performed by users. The fuzzy ontology is fed by the sub-activities recognized by the low level data-driven component and provides fuzzy ontological reasoning to recognize both the activities and their influence in the environment with semantics. An additional benefit of the approach is the ability to handle vagueness and uncertainty in the knowledge-based module, which substantially outperforms the treatment of incomplete and/or imprecise data with respect to classic crisp ontologies. We validate these advantages with the public CAD-120 dataset (Cornell Activity Dataset), achieving an accuracy of 90.1% and 91.07% for low-level and high-level activities, respectively. This entails an improvement over fully data-driven or ontology-based approaches.
Hormonal and substrate induction of tryptophan pyrrolase in regenerating rat liver.

The induction of tryptophan pyrrolase by hydrocortisone has been studied in rats following 70% hepatectomy. An alteration in the rate of induction was observed in both sham-operated and 70% hepatectomized rats early in the postoperative period. Normal maximal values were eventually reached, however. Later in the postoperative period, induction patterns were similar to those observed in unoperated rats. During the period in which DNA synthesis is known to occur following 70% hepatectomy, the induction of tryptophan pyrrolase by hydrocortisone was depressed in the 70% hepatectomized but not in the shamoperated rats. At this latter time period, induction of tryptophan pyrrolase by l-tryptophan was not diminished in the regenerating liver. It has been suggested by other workers that alterations in enzyme control mechanisms, such as the absolute or relative failure of tryptophan pyrrolase induction by cortisone in minimaldeviation hepatomas, may represent a fundamental biochemical alteration in tumors. This study shows that a depressed response to hormonal enzyme induction also occurs in non-neoplastic hepatic cells preparing to divide.
High-resolution 3D tau-p transform by matching pursuit

The 3D Tau-p transform is of vital significance for processing seismic data acquired with modern wide azimuth recording systems. This paper presents a 3D high resolution Tau-p transform based on the matching pursuit algorithm. 3D seismic data are first transformed to the frequency domain, and a sparse set of f-px-py coefficients are iteratively inverted by matching pursuit. When the data are spatially aliased, the inversion results are weighted by a total energy mask. The numerical examples demonstrate this scheme achieves a high resolution Tau-p transform that represents the input data accurately and handles spatial aliasing properly.
Applying Knowledge Discovery and Semantics for Detecting Anomalous Container Trips

Containers have become one of the most concrete breach for global security, and there is a pressing need of novel methods to target highly risky container shipments. In this paper we present the ongoing research carried out at the European Commission Joint Research Centre for the development of data mining and semantic approaches for route based risk indicators to discover anomalous container trips.
Lifetime-Dependent Effects of Bisphenol A on Asthma Development in an Experimental Mouse Model

Background Environmental factors are thought to contribute significantly to the increase of asthma prevalence in the last two decades. Bisphenol A (BPA) is a xenoestrogen commonly used in consumer products and the plastic industry. There is evidence and an ongoing discussion that endocrine disruptors like BPA may affect human health and also exert alterations on in the immune system. The aim of this study was to investigate age-dependent effects of BPA on the asthma risk using a murine model to explain the controversial results reported till date. Methods BALB/c mice were exposed to BPA via the drinking water for different time periods including pregnancy and breastfeeding. To induce an asthma phenotype, mice were sensitized to ovalbumin (OVA), followed by an intrapulmonary allergen challenge. Results BPA exposure during pregnancy and breastfeeding had no significant effect on asthma development in the offspring. In contrast, lifelong exposure from birth until the last antigen challenge clearly increased eosinophilic inflammation in the lung, airway hyperreactivity and antigen-specific serum IgE levels in OVA-sensitized adult mice compared to mice without BPA exposure. Surprisingly, BPA intake during the sensitization period significantly reduced the development of allergic asthma. This effect was reversed in the presence of a glucocorticoid receptor antagonist. Conclusions Our results demonstrate that the impact of BPA on asthma risk is strongly age-dependent and ranges from asthma-promoting to asthma-reducing effects. This could explain the diversity of results from previous studies regarding the observed health impact of BPA.
Invigorating hydrological research through journal publications

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union—EGU in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow‐up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process and to share thoughts on future strategies. Journals were represented at the 2017 meeting by their editors, as shown in the list of authors. The main points on invigorating hydrological research through journal publications are communicated in this joint editorial published in the above journals.
The chemotherapy of Plasmodium berghei. I. Resistance to drugs

1. Strains of P. berghei resistant to sulphadiazine, pyrimethamine, and methylene blue were produced by treating acute infections with low doses of drug. 2. The strain resistant to methylene blue was sensitive to pamaquin, mepacrine, sulphadiazine, proguanil, pyrimethamine, and 2 : 4-diamino-6 : 7-camphano-pteridine. 3. The pyrimethamine-resistant strain was cross-resistant to proguanil and its active metabolite CPT, 2 : 4-diamino-6 : 7-camphanopteridine, 2 : 4-diamino-6 : 7-(l′-ethylindolo)-pteridine, and 2 : 4-diamino-5-p-chlorophenylpyrimidine. 4. The sulphadiazine-resistant strain was cross-resistant to pyrimethamine, sulphanilamide, proguanil and its active metabolite CPT, 2 : 4-diamino-6 : 7-dinhexylpteridine, and 2 : 4-diamino-6 : 7-diisopropylpteridine. It was as sensitive as the parent strain to quinine, mepacrine, chloroquin, pamaquin, methylene blue, and M 3349. 5. The action of sulphadiazine against the sulphadiazine-resistant strain was inhibited by the same doses of p-aminobenzoic acid and folic acid as were required with the parent strain, although the dose of sulphadiazine was increased 30-fold.
Optimal neural control for constrained robotic manipulators

In this paper, a neural network control based on optimal quadratic regulators is developed for the stabilization of constrained nonlinear robotic systems. This method of robotic control is performed by adding an optimal control, generated from the dynamics of the position error, to a neural control, estimated through a three layers neural network. Solving an algebraic Riccati equation, solutions of the Hamilton Jacobi Bellman (HJB) equation are found for the dynamic error optimal control. The adaptation algorithm of the neural control is derived from the Lyapunov analysis for the robotic system overall stability. The simulations results of a six degrees of freedom arm manipulator, Puma 560, with this neural optimal control, are presented to validate the proposed approach. Global stability, of the constrained robot, is assured through the developed controller, in the presence of uncertain gravity vector, viscous and Coulomb's friction and external disturbances.
Cold agglutinin disease in sepsis: A rare entity

Cold agglutinin disease (CAgD) is a type of autoimmune hemolytic anemia which generally occurs in adults and is characterized by the presence of IgM antibodies directed against polysaccharide antigens on red blood cell surface. A 16-year-old male, having clinical picture of sepsis and anemia, presented to the Emergency Department of our Institute in an Hemodynamically unstable condition. Investigation profile revealed hemolysis due to CAgD, which responded to corticosteroids, antibiotics and supportive treatment. This case highlights the importance of recognizing this entity in such type of cases presenting with sepsis and anemia.
Convergence analysis of the simplified distributed interference pricing in wireless networks

We consider the distributed pricing (DP) algorithm for adapting transmit beamforming vectors in a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output interference channel. Our objective is to maximize the sum of all user utilities. Each user announces an interference price which reflects the marginal cost of interference from other users. A particular user then updates its beamforming vector to maximize his utility minus the interference cost to other users. By local linearization of all user utilities, the beamformer update has a closed-form solution which is given by the dominant eigenvector of a matrix. We show that if the sum utility is quasiconvex with respect to the power gain vectors of the individual users, then the simplified DP algorithm must monotonically converge to a stationary point, where the power gain vector of a particular user is defined as the set of interference powers originating from that user's transmitter. We then demonstrate for the sum rate utility, that the quasiconvexity condition is only satisfied for the two user case but not for the general setting.
Coalescence 2.0: a multiple branching of recent theoretical developments and their applications

Population genetics theory has laid the foundations for genomics analyses including the recent burst in genome scans for selection and statistical inference of past demographic events in many prokaryote, animal and plant species. Identifying SNPs under natural selection and underpinning species adaptation relies on disentangling the respective contribution of random processes (mutation, drift, migration) from that of selection on nucleotide variability. Most theory and statistical tests have been developed using the Kingman’s coalescent theory based on the Wright-Fisher population model. However, these theoretical models rely on biological and life-history assumptions which may be violated in many prokaryote, fungal, animal or plant species. Recent theoretical developments of the so called multiple merger coalescent models are reviewed here (Λ-coalescent, beta-coalescent, Bolthausen-Snitzman, Ξ-coalescent). We explicit how these new models take into account various pervasive ecological and biological characteristics, life history traits or life cycles which were not accounted in previous theories such as 1) the skew in offspring production typical of marine species, 2) fast adapting microparasites (virus, bacteria and fungi) exhibiting large variation in population sizes during epidemics, 3) the peculiar life cycles of fungi and bacteria alternating sexual and asexual cycles, and 4) the high rates of extinction-recolonization in spatially structured populations. We finally discuss the relevance of multiple merger models for the detection of SNPs under selection in these species, for population genomics of very large sample size and advocate to potentially examine the conclusion of previous population genetics studies.
Construction of embedded Markov decision processes for optimal control of non-linear systems with continuous state spaces

We consider the problem of constructing a suitable discrete-state approximation of an arbitrary non-linear dynamical system with continuous state space and discrete control actions that would allow close to optimal sequential control of that system by means of value or policy iteration on the approximated model. We propose a method for approximating the continuous dynamics by means of an embedded Markov decision process (MDP) model defined over an arbitrary set of discrete states sampled from the original continuous state space. The mathematical similarity between sets of barycentric coordinates (convex combinations) and probability mass functions is exploited to compute the transition matrices and initial state distribution of the MDP. Barycentric coordinates are computed efficiently on a Delaunay triangulation of the set of discrete states, ensuring maximal accuracy of the approximation and the resulting control policy.
Semantische Annäherung an "Landschaft" und "Kulturlandschaft"

Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Leibenath, Markus ; Gailing, Ludger: Semantische Annäherung an "Landschaft" und "Kulturlandschaft". In: Schenk, Winfried (Ed.) ; Kühn, Manfred (Ed.) ; Leibenath, Markus (Ed.) ; Tzschaschel, Sabine (Ed.) ; Akademie für Raumforschung und Landesplanung Leibniz-Forum für Raumwissenschaften (Ed.): Suburbane Räume als Kulturlandschaften. Hannover : Verl. d. ARL, 2012 (Forschungsund Sitzungsberichte der ARL 236). ISBN 978-3-88838-065-5, 58-79. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-335942
Developing Barbed Microtip-Based Electrode Arrays for Biopotential Measurement

This study involved fabricating barbed microtip-based electrode arrays by using silicon wet etching. KOH anisotropic wet etching was employed to form a standard pyramidal microtip array and HF/HNO3 isotropic etching was used to fabricate barbs on these microtips. To improve the electrical conductance between the tip array on the front side of the wafer and the electrical contact on the back side, a through-silicon via was created during the wet etching process. The experimental results show that the forces required to detach the barbed microtip arrays from human skin, a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer, and a polyvinylchloride (PVC) film were larger compared with those required to detach microtip arrays that lacked barbs. The impedances of the skin-electrode interface were measured and the performance levels of the proposed dry electrode were characterized. Electrode prototypes that employed the proposed tip arrays were implemented. Electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) recordings using these electrode prototypes were also demonstrated.
Change of measure for the square-root process

The square-root process is used to model interest rates and volatility in financial mathematics. The pricing of derivatives involving that process often requires simulating it, since there are often no explicit formulas for prices. We study how a change of measure (CM) may improve those simulations. We compare with Andersen's quadratic-exponential scheme (QE), which so far appears to be the most efficient technique to simulate the stochastic differential equation satisfied by the square-root process. An integer-dimension squared Bessel process, easy to simulate, is used to generate the law of the square-root process using a change of measure. The new method performs very well, and the two algorithms execute at similar speeds; however, CM is slower than QE if random number generation is taken into account, because CM requires more random numbers. The Radon-Nikodym derivative sometimes has a rather intriguing behavior, which is itself of interest. We propose an explanation.
Efficient Strategy-Proof Multicast in Selfish Wireless Networks

In this chapter, we study how to perform routing when each wireless node is selfish, i.e., a wireless node will always maximize its own benefit. Traditionally, it is assumed by the majority of the routing protocols for wireless networks that each wireless node will forward the packets for other nodes if it is asked to do so. However, this assumption may not be true in practice, especially when the wireless devices are owned by individual users. A node will deviate from a routing protocol if it will gain more benefit by doing so. In this chapter, we assume that each wireless node will incur a cost when it forwards a unit of data for some other nodes. A node will forward the data only if it gets a payment to compensate its cost. Its profit (or called utility) will then be the payment minus its cost if it did forward the data. For a multicast with a source node and a set of receiver nodes, we assume that they will pay the relay nodes to carry the traffic from the source to receivers. We assume that the cost of each agent is private and each agent can manipulate its reported cost to maximize its utility. A payment scheme is strategyproof if every agent maximizes its utility when it reports its cost truthfully. In this chapter, we propose several strategyproof mechanisms for multicast for selfish wireless networks when each node has a cost of forwarding a unit data based on various structures. We prove that each of our payment schemes is optimum for the corresponding structure used.