Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vision Based Control of Model Helicopters

The purpose of this paper is to explore control methodologies and vision algorithms to develop an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). UAVs include unmanned aircrafts, helicopters, blimps and other flying vehicles. An autonomous UAV brings enormous benefits and is suitable for applications like search and rescue, surveillance, remote inspection, military applications, therefore saving time, reducing costs and keeping human pilots away from dangerous flight conditions. UAVs are especially useful when (i) the working environment is inaccessible or hard to reach (planetary environments), (ii) flight is dangerous (due to war, contaminated environmental conditions), (iii) flight is monotonous, (vi) flight time is extended (atmospheric observations, data relay), (v) flight is not possible even by a skilled pilot (movie making, flight of experimental vehicles). Various unmanned vehicles are in service in military and civilian areas. Fixed-wing vehicles have long-range since they are energy efficient, but they lack the maneuverability required for many UAV tasks. Blimps are easy to control when there are fewer disturbances like wind, and lift comes from natural buoyancy, but they lack maneuverability as well. The rotary-wing aerial vehicles (also called rotorcraft) such as helicopters have distinct advantages over conventional fixed-wing aircraft and blimps on surveillance and inspection tasks, since they can take-off and land in limited space and can easily hover above any target. Moreover, helicopters have the advantage of superior maneuverability. Unfortunately, this advantage comes from the dynamically unstable nature of the vehicle and it makes helicopters very hard to control. Sophisticated sensors, fast on-board computation, and suitable control methods are required to make rotorcraft based UAV stable. Autonomy defined as “the quality or state of being self-governing”. Most of the commercial UAVs involve little or no autonomy. The goal is to increase the level of autonomy to fully autonomous operation including take-off, landing, hover (if platform capable of), way point navigation to more advanced autonomy modes such as searching, avoiding danger, combat, refueling, returning to base, etc. In addition, autonomy requires cooperation and communication with other vehicles. Currently a military UAV is supported with almost a dozen personnel to perform piloting, communications, and to control payload systems. The goal in the future is to reduce the personnel/UAV ratio (which is greater-equal to one currently) to lower than one, meaning that one personnel controlling various UAVs. Moreover, the vehicles will be autonomous to control their actions, interact with other vehicles to perform missions. This can be a commander controlling a fleet of military vehicles for combat, or a group of fire fighting UAVs commanded to extinguish a fire.
Language as Destiny? Or Not

Benjamin Whorf has had an astoundingly long-lasting effect on psychology, anthropology and linguistics. I first encountered the Whorf hypothesis when I was an undergraduate, reading selections from his 1956 book – the idea that our languages constrained our thought intrigued me to no end. During graduate work in the seventies, however, I gathered that the hypothesis was dead, discredited by research showing the cross-cultural universality of color perception despite variations in color naming [Heider, 1972]. Starting in the 1990s, though, Whorf has turned out not to be as dead as had been rumored. An increasing volume of work has appeared that indicates that his obituary was written prematurely, with doubt even cast on the conclusions concerning color [Davidoff, Davies, & Roberson, 1999]. A fundamental part of this neo-Whorfian movement has been Stephen Levinson’s thinking about spatial language and cognition. It is valuable to have most of his arguments and data gathered together in this thought-provoking book. Briefly, Levinson’s work (conducted with a number of collaborators) revolves around the fact that certain languages of the world – unlike, for example, English – describe spatial relations in absolute terms, best glossed as north/south/east/west, rather than in relative terms such as right/left. Thus, for example, these languages might describe a knife as to the north of a plate rather than to its right. This way of speaking has certain disadvantages, such as the fact that four diners seated at a square table would each describe their knife–plate arrangements differently, despite the fact that the ‘picture’ the knife and plate present to each diner’s eye is identical. But the absolute mode of speaking about space also has advantages, notably its definitive and unambiguous method of communicating location. If these facts were all that Levinson discussed, we would hardly have a controversial book, merely an anthropological curiosity. The gripping part of the argu-
A Continuum Damage Mechanics Model for the Static and Cyclic Fatigue of Cellular Composites

The fatigue behavior of a cellular composite with an epoxy matrix and glass foam granules is analyzed and modeled by means of continuum damage mechanics. The investigated cellular composite is a particular type of composite foam, and is very similar to syntactic foams. In contrast to conventional syntactic foams constituted by hollow spherical particles (balloons), cellular glass, mineral, or metal place holders are combined with the matrix material (metal or polymer) in the case of cellular composites. A microstructural investigation of the damage behavior is performed using scanning electron microscopy. For the modeling of the fatigue behavior, the damage is separated into pure static and pure cyclic damage and described in terms of the stiffness loss of the material using damage models for cyclic and creep damage. Both models incorporate nonlinear accumulation and interaction of damage. A cycle jumping procedure is developed, which allows for a fast and accurate calculation of the damage evolution for constant load frequencies. The damage model is applied to examine the mean stress effect for cyclic fatigue and to investigate the frequency effect and the influence of the signal form in the case of static and cyclic damage interaction. The calculated lifetimes are in very good agreement with experimental results.
Experiments on Command Shaping Control of a Manipulator with Flexible Links

Minimizingvibrationsofamaneuverede exiblemanipulatorisachallengingtask.Resultsarepresentedofaseries of experimental tests carried out on the Space Robot Simulator assembly, which has been set up at the Spacecraft Research and Design Center of the Naval Postgraduate School. The manipulator is planar with two rotational degrees of freedom and two links, of which either one or both can be e exible in bending. The manipulator e oats on air cushions on a granite table. The task of the experiments was to test the effectiveness of the command input shaping technique on the near-minimum-time tracking control of a e exible manipulator. A recently introduced sliding mode control method with smooth joint friction compensation was applied to track either an open- or a closed-reference end-effector path, mapped into joint space. This controller guarantees a very precise tracking of thejoint referencemotion, despite thehigh and poorlymodeled jointfriction torques. Satisfying results,intermsof vibration reduction, have been obtained on point-to-point trajectories and on closed-path trajectories. The results are compared with those obtained with a different command shaping technique.
A Randomized Trial to Evaluate Lopinavir/Ritonavir versus Saquinavir/Ritonavir in HIV-1-Infected Patients: The Maxcmin2 Trial

Objective To assess the rate of protocol-defined treatment failure and safety of lopinavir/ritonavir (LPV/r) and saquinavir/ritonavir (SAQ/r). Design Open-label, prospective, randomized (1:1), international multi-centre trial. Methods Adult HIV-1-infected patients were assigned LPV/r 400/100 mg twice daily or SAQ/r 1000/100 mg twice daily with two or more nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs)/non-NRTIs. All patients, whether on or off the assigned treatment, were followed for 48 weeks. Results Of 339 randomized patients, 324 initiated assigned treatment (intention-to-treat/exposed [ITT/e] population). At 48 weeks, treatment failure occurred in 29/163 (18%) and 53/161 (33%) of patients in the LPV/r and SAQ/r arms, respectively (ITT/e, P=0.002, log rank test). In an analysis that also considered those patients who discontinued treatment as having failed treatment (ITT/e/discontinuation=failure), 40/161 (25%) LPV/r-treated individuals versus 63/161 (39%) SAQ/R-treated individuals failed treatment (P=0.005, log rank test). Discontinuation of the assigned treatment occurred in 23/163 (14%) patients in the LPV/r-treated group, compared with 48/161 (30%) in the SAQ/r-treated group (ITT/e; P=0.001). The primary reasons for premature discontinuation were non-fatal adverse events (LPV/r: 12/163; SAQ/r: 21/161) and patients’ choice (LPV/r: 7/163; SAQ/r: 8/161). In the on-treatment analysis of time to treatment failure, no difference was observed between the two arms (P=0.27, log rank test). Conclusion LPV/r had better antiretroviral effects compared with SAQ/r at the doses and in the formulations studied. This may have been a result of patients’ preferences and ability to adhere to assigned therapy, rather than a result of differences in the intrinsic potency of the study protease inhibitors.
On Reverse Engineering-Based Hardware Trojan Detection

Due to design and fabrication outsourcing to foundries, the problem of malicious modifications to integrated circuits (ICs), also known as hardware Trojans (HTs), has attracted attention in academia as well as industry. To reduce the risks associated with Trojans, researchers have proposed different approaches to detect them. Among these approaches, test-time detection approaches have drawn the greatest attention. Many test-time approaches assume the existence of a Trojan-free (TF) chip/model also known as “golden model. ” Prior works suggest using reverse engineering (RE) to identify such TF ICs for the golden model. However, they did not state how to do this efficiently. In fact, RE is a very costly process which consumes lots of time and intensive manual effort. It is also very error prone. In this paper, we propose an innovative and robust RE scheme to identify the TF ICs. We reformulate the Trojan-detection problem as clustering problem. We then adapt a widely used machine learning method, ${K}$ -means clustering, to solve our problem. Simulation results using state-of-the-art tools on several publicly available circuits show that the proposed approach can detect HTs with high accuracy rate. A comparison of this approach with our previously proposed approach [1] is also conducted. Both the limitations and application scenarios of the two methods are discussed in detail.
Identification of Genomic Regions Associated with Phenotypic Variation between Dog Breeds using Selection Mapping

The extraordinary phenotypic diversity of dog breeds has been sculpted by a unique population history accompanied by selection for novel and desirable traits. Here we perform a comprehensive analysis using multiple test statistics to identify regions under selection in 509 dogs from 46 diverse breeds using a newly developed high-density genotyping array consisting of >170,000 evenly spaced SNPs. We first identify 44 genomic regions exhibiting extreme differentiation across multiple breeds. Genetic variation in these regions correlates with variation in several phenotypic traits that vary between breeds, and we identify novel associations with both morphological and behavioral traits. We next scan the genome for signatures of selective sweeps in single breeds, characterized by long regions of reduced heterozygosity and fixation of extended haplotypes. These scans identify hundreds of regions, including 22 blocks of homozygosity longer than one megabase in certain breeds. Candidate selection loci are strongly enriched for developmental genes. We chose one highly differentiated region, associated with body size and ear morphology, and characterized it using high-throughput sequencing to provide a list of variants that may directly affect these traits. This study provides a catalogue of genomic regions showing extreme reduction in genetic variation or population differentiation in dogs, including many linked to phenotypic variation. The many blocks of reduced haplotype diversity observed across the genome in dog breeds are the result of both selection and genetic drift, but extended blocks of homozygosity on a megabase scale appear to be best explained by selection. Further elucidation of the variants under selection will help to uncover the genetic basis of complex traits and disease.
Preliminary results on the Linux libpcap model identification

The article presents the results of studies in which models of the Linux system packet capture operations were identified. Performance of the kernel-level packet filters was recorded in a series of adequately designed experiments. Based on the collected data linear models of CPU workload were estimated and analyzed in time and frequency domain. Models of low orders were obtained that provide satisfactory fit to estimation data with normally distributed residuals.
The Epidemiology of Cutaneous Malignant Melanoma in Nova Scotia

Background Since 1993, the annual increase in cutaneous malignant melanoma (MM) incidence has been one of the highest for all cancers registered in Canada, with the leading rate in Nova Scotia (NS). The purpose of the present study was to document the pathological and epidemiological data on MM cases found in NS. Patients and Methods All MM cases identified by the Nova Scotia Cancer Registry from January 1998 to December 2002 were evaluated. The five-year survival outlook, by major prognostic factors, was also determined. In addition, the annual incidence and mortality rates from 1972 to 2002 were computed. Results Between 1998 and 2002, 925 MM cases were recorded. The age-standardized incidence rate for males and females in this period was 19.2 and 16.1 per 100,000 respectively. Men 65 years of age or older had the highest age-specific rate. The most common MM had a Breslow's depth of less than 1.0 mm (61.9%) and was Clark's level II (34.9%). There was no significant seasonal variation noted in the time of diagnosis. Survival analyses indicated that sex, age, tumour location and thickness were significant independent predictors. Despite the increase in incidence, there have only been modest changes in the annual mortality rate. Conclusion The incidence of MM in NS increases with age, and is nearly double for men 65 years of age or older, compared with women in the same age group. Thin melanomas on the extremities of young females have the best prognosis in NS, which is similar to other parts of the world. Incidence appears to be unrelated to season. Public health interventions are necessary to reduce the burden of this disease.
Antibiotic resistance among clinical isolates of Haemophilus influenzae in the United States in 1994 and 1995 and detection of beta-lactamase-positive strains resistant to amoxicillin-clavulanate: results of a national multicenter surveillance study

A total of 1,537 clinical isolates of Haemophilus influenzae were recovered in 30 U.S. medical center laboratories between 1 November 1994 and 30 April 1995 and were characterized in a central laboratory with respect to serotype and beta-lactamase production and the in vitro activities of 15 oral antimicrobial agents. Overall, 36.4% of the isolates were found to produce beta-lactamase. The rank order of activity of six cephalosporins on the basis of MICs was cefixime > cefpodoxime > cefuroxime > loracarbef > or = cefaclor > cefprozil. On the basis of current National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) breakpoints ages of isolates found to be resistant or intermediate to these agents were as follows: 0.1, 0.3, 6.4, 16.3, 18.3, and 29.8, respectively (National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards. Methods for dilution antimicrobial susceptibility tests for bacteria that grow aerobically, 4th ed. M7-A4, 1995). Azithromycin was, on a weight basis, the most potent of the macrolides tested in this study, followed by erythromycin and then clarithromycin. Azithromycin was typically fourfold more active than erythromycin, which was, in turn, slightly more active than clarithromycin. However, when compared on the basis of the frequency of resistance determined by using current NCCLS breakpoints, there was essentially no difference between azithromycin and clarithromycin, i.e., 0.5 and 1.9%, respectively (P = 0.086). Interpretive breakpoints for erythromycin MIC tests versus H. influenzae have not been developed. Resistance to other non- beta-lactam agents was variable, as follows: trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, 9.0%; chloramphenicol, 0.2%; tetracycline, 1.3%; and rifampin, 0.3%. Two conspicuous findings in this study were the identification of 39 strains H. influenzae that were beta-lactamase negative but ampicillin intermediate or resistant (BLNAR) and, even more surprisingly, 17 beta-lactamase-positive isolates that were resistant to amoxicillin-clavulanate (BLPACR). Strains of H. influenzae in the first group have heretofore been very uncommon; organisms in the second group have not previously been described in the literature. The percentages of all study isolates comprised of BLNAR and BLPACR organisms were 2.5 and 1.1, respectively. Overall resistance to ampicillin was thus 38.9%, and that to amoxicillin-clavulanate was 4.5%.
Towards Rhythmic Content Processing of Musical Signals: Fostering Complementary Approaches

This paper is concerned with the handling of rhythm in music content processing applications. Keeping this framework in mind, we briefly report on terminology issues and the interdisciplinary nature of rhythm investigations, we then review approaches to computational modeling of rhythm and rhythm representation schemes. We comment the bottom-up and top-down oriented approaches to computational modeling and the parallel that some authors make with physiological and cognitive views on rhythm perception. We argue that investigations should be listener-oriented, signal-oriented and application-oriented.
The 2MASS Tully-Fisher relation for flat edge-on galaxies

The spiral edge-on galaxies from the “Revised Flat Galaxy Catalog” (RFGC) are identified with the Extended Source Catalog of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). The relative number of 2MASS detected galaxies is 2996/4236 = 0.71. We consider the statistical properties of the Tully-Fisher relations for the edge-on galaxies in the B, I, J, H and K_s bands. The slope of derived TF relations increases steadily from 4.9 in the B band to 9.3 in the K one. The effect is mainly due to the internal extinction, which is different in dwarf and giant spiral galaxies seen edge-on, that leads to the tight correlation between galaxy color and luminosity. The moderate scatter of the RFGC galaxies in the “color-luminosity” diagram, 0. ^m86, provides us with a “cheap” method of mass measurements of distances to galaxies on the basis of modern photometric sky surveys.
The dynamic Shapley Value in the game with spanning tree

This paper discusses the dynamic Shapley Value in two-stage minimum cost spanning tree game. The cooperative behavior of players is defined. The characteristic function along the cooperative trajectory is computed and the Shapley Value for two-stage and one stage games is defined. Using the IDP(imputation distribution procedure) the dynamic Shapley Value is constructed.
In Vitro Evaluation of Guanidine Analogs as Sigma Receptor Ligands for Potential Anti-Stroke Therapeutics

Currently, the only Food and Drug Administration–approved treatment of acute stroke is recombinant tissue plasminogen activator, which must be administered within 6 hours after stroke onset. The pan-selective σ-receptor agonist N,N′-di-o-tolyl-guanidine (o-DTG) has been shown to reduce infarct volume in rats after middle cerebral artery occlusion, even when administered 24 hours after stroke. DTG derivatives were synthesized to develop novel compounds with greater potency than o-DTG. Fluorometric Ca2+ imaging was used in cultured cortical neurons to screen compounds for their capacity to reduce ischemia- and acidosis-evoked cytosolic Ca2+ overload, which has been linked to stroke-induced neurodegeneration. In both assays, migration of the methyl moiety produced no significant differences, but removal of the group increased potency of the compound for inhibiting acidosis-induced [Ca2+]i elevations. Chloro and bromo substitution of the methyl moiety in the meta and para positions increased potency by ≤160%, but fluoro substitutions had no effect. The most potent DTG derivative tested was N,N′-di-p-bromo-phenyl-guanidine (p-BrDPhG), which had an IC50 of 2.2 µM in the ischemia assay, compared with 74.7 μM for o-DTG. Microglial migration assays also showed that p-BrDPhG is more potent than o-DTG in this marker for microglial activation, which is also linked to neuronal injury after stroke. Radioligand binding studies showed that p-BrDPhG is a pan-selective σ ligand. Experiments using the σ-1 receptor-selective antagonist 1-[2-(3,4-dichlorophenyl)ethyl]-4-methylpiperazine dihydrochloride (BD-1063) demonstrated that p-BrDPhG blocks Ca2+ overload via σ-1 receptor activation. The study identified four compounds that may be more effective than o-DTG for the treatment of ischemic stroke at delayed time points.
Simple, portable and fast SIMD intrinsic programming: generic simd library

Using SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) is a cost-effective way to explore data parallelism on modern processors. Most processor vendors today provide SIMD engines, such as Altivec/VSX for POWER, SSE/AVX for Intel processors, and NEON for ARM. While high-level SIMD programming models are rapidly evolving, for many SIMD developers, the most effective way to get the performance out of SIMD is still by programming directly via vendor-provided SIMD intrinsics. However, intrinsics programming is both tedious and error-prone, and worst of all, introduces non-portable codes. This paper presents the Generic SIMD Library (https://github.com/genericsimd/generic_simd/), an open-source, portable C++ interface that provides an abstraction of short vectors and overloads most C/C++ operators for short vectors. The library provides several mappings from platform-specific intrinsics to the generic SIMD intrinsic interface so that codes developed based on the library are portable across different SIMD platforms. We have evaluated the library with several applications from the multimedia, data analytics and math domains. Compared with platform-specific intrinsics codes, using Generic SIMD Library results in less line-of-code, a 22% reduction on average, and achieves similar performance as platform-specific intrinsics versions.
Slotted programming for sensor networks

We advocate a novel programming approach we call slotted programming that not only addresses the specific hardware capabilities of sensor nodes, but also facilitates coding through a truly modular design. The approach is based on the temporal decoupling of the different tasks of a sensor node such that at any time at most one task is active. In contrast to traditional sensor network programming, slotted programming guarantees that each of these tasks can be implemented as an independent software module, simplifying not only the coding and testing phase, but also the code reuse in a different context. In addition, we believe that the proposed approach is highly qualified for energy efficient and real time applications. To substantiate our claims, we have implemented slotos, an extension to TinyOS that supports slotted programming. Within this framework, we demonstrate the advantages of the slotted programming paradigm.