Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Representation and structure in connectionist models

Abstract : This paper focuses on the nature of representations in connectionist models. It addresses two issues: Can connectionist models develop representations which possess internal structure and which provide the basis for productive and systematic behavior; and Can representations which are fundamentally context-sensitive support grammatical behavior which appears to be abstract and general? Results from two simulations are reported. The simulations address problems in the distinction between type and token, the representation of lexical categories, and the representation of grammatical structure. The results suggest that connectionist representations can indeed possess internal structure and enable systematic behavior, and that a mechanism which is sensitive to context is capable of capturing generalizations of varying degrees of abstractness.
High maternal pre-pregnancy BMI is associated with increased offspring peer-relationship problems at 5 years

Background Peer relationships are an important aspect of child development that are often overlooked. Maternal pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) may influence peer relationships through intrauterine mechanisms affecting fetal neurodevelopment or through postnatal mechanisms including social discrimination of the obese mother/child. This study aimed to determine the relationship between maternal pre-pregnancy BMI and child peer-relationship problems around 5 years old, including preterm and term-born children. Methods and findings Maternal BMI and offspring peer-relationship problems were assessed in participants of three French birth cohorts: EDEN (n = 1,184 children born at term), ELFE (n = 10,889 children born ≥33 weeks of gestation) and EPIPAGE-2 (n = 2,646 children born 23–34 weeks of gestation). Reported or measured pre-pregnancy weight (kg) and height (m) were collected from mothers and used to calculate BMI (kg/m2). Offspring peer-relationship problems were assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire at 5.5 years. Logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios (OR) of a high peer-relationship problem score (≥3) in EDEN and ELFE, and generalized estimated equations were used in EPIPAGE-2 to account for the large number of multiple births. Paternal BMI was used as a negative control in sensitivity analyses. Maternal pre-pregnancy obesity was associated with increased odds of a high peer-relationship problem score in all three cohorts, independent of confounding factors [adjusted OR 2.27 (1.32, 3.88); 1.52 (1.29, 1.78); 1.44 (1.04, 1.99); for EDEN, ELFE and EPIPAGE-2, respectively]. Additional analysis based on negative controls (i.e., adjusting for paternal BMI) showed the same pattern of associations. Conclusion High maternal pre-pregnancy BMI is associated with greater likelihood of a high peer-relationship trouble score in offspring around 5 years of age in both children born preterm and at term.
Transcriptome analysis reveals immune and metabolic regulation effects of Poria cocos polysaccharides on Bombyx mori larvae

Poria cocos polysaccharides (PS) have been used as Chinese traditional medicine with various pharmacological effects, including antiviral, anti-oxidative, and immunomodulatory activities. Herein Bombyx mori silkworm was used as a model animal to evaluate the immunomodulatory effects of PS via detecting the changes of innate immune parameters and explore the underlying molecular mechanism of the immunoregulatory effect of PS using Illumina HiSeq Xten platform. The results presented here demonstrated that a hemocoel injection of PS significantly enhanced the cellular immunity of silkworm, including hemocyte phagocytosis, microaggregation, and spreading ability. A total of 335 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were screened, including 214 upregulated genes and 121 downregulated genes by differential expression analysis. Gene annotation and enrichment analyses showed that many DEGs related to immune signal recognition, detoxification, proPO activation, carbohydrate metabolism, and lipid metabolism were significantly upregulated in the treatment group. The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes-based Gene Set Enrichment Analysis also revealed that the more highly expressed gene sets in the PS treatment silkworm were mainly related to immune signal transduction pathways and energy metabolism. In addition, the activity of four enzymes related to immunity and energy metabolism—including phenoloxidase, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, hexokinase, and fatty acid synthetase—were all significantly increased in the larvae injected with PS. We performed qRT-PCR to examine the expression profile of immune and metabolic-related genes, which further verified the reliability of our transcriptome data and suggested that PS can regulate the immunity of silkworm by enhancing the cellular immunity and modulating the expression levels of genes related to immune responses and physiological metabolism. These findings will lay a scientific foundation for the use of PS as an immunomodulator in disease prevention in human beings or animals.
Spatial confinement, magnetic localization, and their interactions on massless Dirac fermions

It is of keen interest to researchers understanding different approaches to confine massless Dirac fermions in graphene, which is also a central problem in making electronic devices based on graphene. Here, we studied spatial confinement, magnetic localization and their interactions on massless Dirac fermions in a graphene triangular resonator. Using scanning tunneling microscopy, we visualized quasibound states temporarily confined in the nanoscale resonator. Large perpendicular magnetic fields condensed the massless Dirac fermions in the resonator into Landau levels (LLs). The spatial confinement of the resonator affects the Landau quantization, which enables us to experimentally measure the spatial extent of the wave functions of the LLs as (N)^(1/2)lB (N is index of the LLs and lB=(h/eB)^(1/2) is the magnetic length). Our experiment indicates that the magnetic fields increase the trapping time of the quasibound states by more than twice and gradually change the energy of the quasibound states by introducing an extra geometric phase. Moreover, a sudden jump of a quasibound state in energy, ~ 20 meV, is observed when the quasibound state comes across a LL with the same energy, implying strong Coulomb repulsion between electrons in the quasibound state and the LL.
The comprehension and production of Wh- questions among Malay children with developmental language disorders: Climbing the syntactic tree

This study is an investigation of both comprehension and production of Wh- questions in Malay-speaking children with a developmental language disorder (DLD). A total of 15 Malay children with DLD (ages 7;0–9;11 years) were tested on a set of Wh- questions (who subject and object, which subject and object), comparing their performance with two control groups [15 age-matched typically developing (TD) children and 15 younger TD language-matched children]. Malay children with DLD showed a clear asymmetry in comprehension of Wh- questions, with a selective impairment for which NP questions compared with who questions. Age-matched controls performed at ceiling in all Wh- questions, while the language-matched group reported a subject/object asymmetry selective for the which NP, as reported in other languages. In production, both children with DLD and younger children showed a preference for questions with in situ Wh- elements, a structure that is allowed in colloquial Malay, but which is not produced by the age-matched TD group. Several non-adult-like strategies were adopted particularly by the children with DLD to avoid complex sentences, including substitution with yes/no echo questions, production of the wrong Wh- question, and use of a generic Wh- element. The study provides an insight on the mastery of Wh- questions in both typical Malay children and children with DLD. Implications for the definition of a clinical marker for DLD in a free word order language with Wh- in situ option will be discussed.
Back to basics: A role of reading, writing, and arithmetic teaching

This study has assessed the role of reading, writing, and arithmetic teaching among adult learners in Saudi Arabia. A quantitative approach was used by recruiting 186 students divided into three groups, namely, the write to learn (WTL) group, traditional teaching group, and individual technology use (ITU) group. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for the analysis of the arithmetic and literacy test scores of the students. The findings showed that the performance of the WTL group was most effective among the three groups. The results showed that the learning capacity of adults could be improved by refining their writing and reading skills. The formative feedback, collaborative environment, and engagement helped improve the learning scores. It shows that the use of information and communication technology (ICT) should be accurately implemented along with the formation of a collaborative environment.
International research on labor in agri-food value chains: A bibliometric review from web of science

Value chains are an important driver for the current labor dynamics in the agri-food sector, and agri-food value chain sustainability strongly depends on decent work conditions. An increasing literature body have been investigated the interactions between chain agents and how it impacted labor issues. Our aim was to map the scientific landscape of the scientific knowledge on labor in agri-food value chains. We performed a bibliometric review of 343 articles indexed in the Web of Science based on descriptive and network analysis of articles metadata, which covered authors, journals, citation times, keywords and countries. We showed that labor in agri-food value chains has an international audience, despite that knowledge production was largely built by a restraint leading scientific network. Overall, the scientific knowledge is organized into four main research domains on labor in agri-food value chains: (1) labor governance in global value chains through standards, (2) employment in value chains and impacts on socioeconomic conditions of rural areas, (3) gender issues and value chains, (4) labor and upgrading in global value chains. The controversies in the international literature regarding labor issues in the agri-food value chains, and blind spots of current research are discussed.
Poly(aniline-co-melamine)@MnFe2O4 nanocatalyst for the synthesis of 4,4′-(arylmethylene) bis (1H-pyrazole-5-ol) derivatives, and 1,4- dihydropyrano[2,3-c]pyrazoles and evaluation of their antioxidant, and anticancer activities

In this work, magnetic poly(aniline-co-melamine) nanocomposite as an efficient heterogeneous polymer-based nanocatalyst was fabricated in two steps. First, poly(aniline-co-melamine) was synthesized through the chemical oxidation by ammonium persulfate, then the magnetic nanocatalyst was successfully prepared from the in-situ coprecipitation method in the presence of poly(aniline-co-melamine). The resulting poly(aniline-co-melamine)@MnFe2O4 was characterized by FTIR, FESEM, XRD, VSM, EDX, TGA, and UV-vis analyses. The catalytic activity of poly(aniline-co-melamine)@MnFe2O4 was investigated in the synthesis of 4,4′-(arylmethylene)bis(1H-pyrazole-5-ol) derivatives, and new alkylene bridging bis 4,4′-(arylmethylene)bis(1H-pyrazole-5-ol) derivatives in excellent yields. The yield of 1,4-dihydropyrano[2,3-c]pyrazoles, 4,4′-(arylmethylene)bis(1H-pyrazol-5-ol), yields, and new alkylene bridging bis 4,4′-(arylmethylene)bis(1H-pyrazol-5-ol) derivatives were obtained 89%–96%, 90%–96%, and 92%–96%, respectively. The poly(aniline-co-melamine)@MnFe2O4 nanocatalyst can be recycled without pre-activation and reloaded up to five consecutive runs without a significant decrease in its efficiency. In addition, the antioxidant activity of some derivatives was evaluated by DPPH assay. Results showed that the maximum antioxidant activity of 4,4′-(arylmethylene)bis(1H-pyrazole-5-ol) derivatives and 1,4-dihydropyrano[2,3-c]pyrazoles were 75% and 90%, respectively. Furthermore, 4,4′-(arylmethylene)bis(1H-pyrazole-5-ol) derivatives and 1,4-dihydropyrano[2,3-c]pyrazoles showed good potential for destroying colon cancer cell lines. Consequently, the poly(aniline-co-melamine)@MnFe2O4 nanocomposite is an excellent catalyst for green chemical processes owing to its high catalytic activity, stability, and reusability.
Fast Vortex Method for the Simulation of Flows Inside Channels With and Without Injection

A fast vortex method is presented for the simulation of fluid flows inside two-dimensional channels,The first channel studied is formed by two parallel walls simulating the entrance length of a developing flow.The second channel is similar to the first one but with an injection of a secondary fluid through a slot on one of its walls,In both cases,results are presented for flows at low Reynolds numbers and for flows at a high Reynolds number The numerical method used is based on the Random Vortex Method and on the Vortex-In-Cell Algorithm.Physical analyses of the numerical results are also presented.mostly in application to film cooling.
Multiplicative regularization for contrast profile inversion

In this paper we discuss a new type of regularization technique for the nonlinear inverse scattering problem, namely the multiplicative technique. The main advantage is that we do not have to determine the regularization parameter before the inversion process is started. We consider different norms of the total variation as regularization factor. Specifically, we investigate a weighted L2‐norm, and by using an appropriate updating scheme we show that this multiplicative regularization factor does not increase the nonlinearity of the inversion problem. Numerical examples using synthetic and experimental data demonstrate the robustness of the presented method.
Multi-instance Referring Image Segmentation of Scene Sketches based on Global Reference Mechanism

Scene sketch segmentation based on referring expression plays an important role in sketch editing of anime industry. While most existing referring image segmentation approaches are designed for the standard task of generating a binary segmentation mask for a single or a group of target(s), we think it necessary to equip these models with the ability of multi-instance segmentation. To this end, we propose GRM-Net, a one-stage framework tailored for multi-instance referring image segmentation of scene sketches. We extract the language features from the expression and fuse it into a conventional instance segmentation pipeline for filtering out the undesired instances in a coarse-to-fine manner and keeping the matched ones. To model the relative arrangement of the objects and the relationship among them from a global view, we propose a global reference mechanism (GRM) to assign references to each detected candidate to identify its position. We compare with existing methods designed for multi-instance referring image segmentation of scene sketches and for the standard task of referring image segmentation, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach.
The induced magnetic field of the moon - Conductivity profiles and inferred temperature.

Electromagnetic induction in the moon driven by fluctuations of the interplanetary magnetic field is used to determine the lunar bulk electrical conductivity. The earlier data are now augmented by an order of magnitude. The present data clearly show the north-south and east-west transfer function difference as well as the high-frequency rollover suggested earlier. The difference is shown to be compatible over the midfrequency range (0.001 to 0.01 Hz) with a noise source associated with the compression of the local remanent field by solar wind dynamic pressure fluctuations. The rollover of the transfer functions is shown to result from higher order magnetic multipole radiation; electric multipoles appear supressed, although a vestigial TM interaction may still be present. Models for two, three, and four layer; current layer, double current layer, and core plus current layer moons are generated by inversion of the data, using a theory that incorporates higher-order multipoles.
Visual-Inertial Odometry using Square-Root UKF on Lie groups to estimate orientation of monocular camera

– The oculomotor system is responsible for directing and controlling eye movements in humans but also in other animals. Eye saccades are extremely fast and accurate movements and the 6 extra-ocular muscles are able to control the orientation of the eye in a two-dimensional manifold. This makes modelling and design of a bio-inspired robotic eye a very challenging problem to solve. One of the goals of the ORIENT project is to develop a prototype robotic eye that can mimic the human system. Estimating the 3D orientation of the mechanical prototype is crucial to develop control strategies that could help us further improve the design. In previous works, this estimation was done using an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a camera separately. However, the camera can only be used for low frequency estimation due to motion blur, and the IMU suﬀers from poor signal-to-noise ratio in slow movements. The main focus of this work is to develop an algorithm that fuses the information of these two sensors to estimate the orientation of the camera, using an approach very common in Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO). We use the recently introduced Unscented Kalman Filter on Lie Groups methodology and compare to the ground-truth. We assess the performance of the ﬁlter in simulation and with a real world dataset, obtained using the Kinova Gen3 robotic arm. Finally, we discuss how this approach can be used in the robotic eye and suggest possible improvements for future work.
Development of a Maximum Power Point Tracker system for the project T´ecnico Solar Boat

—The use of renewable energy sources has been growing considerably through the last years, with solar energy being one of the protagonists of this growth. Solar energy’s road has been promising, reaching a point where it’s possible to power almost any type of load, from industrial and domestic installations to electric vehicles. Given solar cells’ low efﬁciency, it’s crucial to maximize the energy produced by photovoltaic systems. In order to achieve this goal, the Maximum Power Point Tracker is created. The MPPT is a device that seeks to ensure that a solar panel is always working at its maximum power point, thus maximizing the produced energy. This paper consists of the design and development of an MPPT prototype, developed for one of Tecnico Solar Boat’s vessels. The goal is to perform a complete study going through the stages of investigation, design and ﬁnally, prototyping. This document begins with the theoretical component, analyz- ing the boat’s electrical system which contains 5 solar modules with a total peak power of 1.2kW and a Li-Po battery of 1.5kWh. After, the design of the DC-DC converter is done, which is the fundamental block of the MPPT. The DC-DC converter allows rising the solar panels’ voltage to match the battery’s value, working as connection between both components. After, an introduction is made about MPPT algorithms ex- plaining how they work. Several algorithms such as Perturb & Observe and Fuzzy Logic are explained, discussing their respective advantages and disadvantages. After concluding the theoretical stage, the prototyping phase begins. During this phase, the circuit and PCB are designed, and after, all the components are soldered. With the prototype ﬁnalized, several tests are performed to conﬁrm the correct behaviour of the MPPT.
Segmentation of the Lungs on X-Ray Thorax Images with the U-Net CNN Architecture

Lungs are one of the most important parts of the human body. They are very susceptible to various disorders and diseases. For this reason, it is necessary to detect or diagnose the lungs. In this study, we present a method for lung segmentation using the CNN method U-Net architecture. The initial stage was pre-processed did a 1-1 correspondence to equalize the amount of training data and testing data and resized the image so all images have the same size. The process continued with the CLAHE (Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization), and after that, the segmentation process was carried out according to the method. This study used a dataset from the Kaggle website. The results used the CNN method of the U-Net architecture in data get an average accuracy of 91.68%, sensitivity 92.80%, and specificity 89.15%, precision 95.07, and F1-Score 93. 92%. Based on the performance evaluation results, it was concluded that the method proposed in the study is great and valid in the lungs segmentation on X-Ray Thorax images.
Vehicle tracking in urban environment

The main purpose of this work is to develop a vehicle tracking system based on video images. The developed system uses a webcamera and the objects, in this case vehicles, are detected using the You Only Look Once (YOLO) system. The matching between detections is done with a Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) feature tracker. Which by using corner point features from the initial detections and tracking them to the following frames, it is able to match detections across frames. Once matched, the projection of the objects in the camera plane onto the ground plane is calculated and presented. The main challenges of this task are object occlusion and object association across frames. The approach for this was the integration of the feature tracking method into the object detection method. This way when the detector fails (occlusion for example) it is still possible to track features and keep an object track continuous. The feature tracking also aids with object association since each feature will be associated with an object. The system was tested and evaluated in a real trafﬁc scenario of a crossroad. It performs well in regular trafﬁc, while being able to keep tracks in situations with small and medium occlusion. This work shows how using both a static object detection method and a dynamic feature tracking method results in a more robust multi object tracking system.
Brane solutions and integrability: a status report

We review the status of the integrability and solvability of the geodesics equations of motion on symmetric coset spaces that appear as sigma models of supergravity theories when reduced over respectively the timelike and spacelike direction. Such geodesic curves describe respectively timelike and spacelike brane solutions. We emphasize the applications to black holes.
MIRA: Mental Imagery for Robotic Affordances

Humans form mental images of 3D scenes to support counterfactual imagination, planning, and motor control. Our abilities to predict the appearance and affordance of the scene from previously unobserved viewpoints aid us in performing manipulation tasks (e.g., 6-DoF kitting) with a level of ease that is currently out of reach for existing robot learning frameworks. In this work, we aim to build artificial systems that can analogously plan actions on top of imagined images. To this end, we introduce Mental Imagery for Robotic Affordances (MIRA), an action reasoning framework that optimizes actions with novel-view synthesis and affordance prediction in the loop. Given a set of 2D RGB images, MIRA builds a consistent 3D scene representation, through which we synthesize novel orthographic views amenable to pixel-wise affordances prediction for action optimization. We illustrate how this optimization process enables us to generalize to unseen out-of-plane rotations for 6-DoF robotic manipulation tasks given a limited number of demonstrations, paving the way toward machines that autonomously learn to understand the world around them for planning actions.