Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hyperspectral Shallow-Water Remote Sensing with an Enhanced Benthic Classifier

Hyperspectral remote sensing inversion models utilize spectral information over optically shallow waters to retrieve optical properties of the water column, bottom depth and reflectance, with the latter used in benthic classification. Accuracy of these retrievals is dependent on the spectral endmember(s) used to model the bottom reflectance during the inversion. Without prior knowledge of these endmember(s) current approaches must iterate through a list of endmember—a computationally demanding task. To address this, a novel lookup table classification approach termed HOPE-LUT was developed for selecting the likely benthic endmembers of any hyperspectral image pixel. HOPE-LUT classifies a pixel as sand, mixture or non-sand, then the latter two are resolved into the three most likely classes. Optimization subsequently selects the class (out of the three) that generated the best fit to the remote sensing reflectance. For a coral reef case, modeling results indicate very high benthic classification accuracy (>90%) for depths less than 4 m of common coral reef benthos. These accuracies decrease substantially with increasing depth due to the loss of bottom information, especially the spectral signatures. We applied this technique to hyperspectral airborne imagery of Heron Reef, Great Barrier Reef and generated benthic habitat maps with higher classification accuracy compared to standard inversion models.
An Epidemic Model of Computer Worms with Time Delay and Variable Infection Rate

With rapid development of Internet, network security issues become increasingly serious. Temporary patches have been put on the infectious hosts, which may lose efficacy on occasions. This leads to a time delay when vaccinated hosts change to susceptible hosts. On the other hand, the worm infection is usually a nonlinear process. Considering the actual situation, a variable infection rate is introduced to describe the spread process of worms. According to above aspects, we propose a time-delayed worm propagation model with variable infection rate. Then the existence condition and the stability of the positive equilibrium are derived. Due to the existence of time delay, the worm propagation system may be unstable and out of control. Moreover, the threshold of Hopf bifurcation is obtained. The worm propagation system is stable if time delay is less than . When time delay is over , the system will be unstable. In addition, numerical experiments have been performed, which can match the conclusions we deduce. The numerical experiments also show that there exists a threshold in the parameter , which implies that we should choose appropriate infection rate to constrain worm prevalence. Finally, simulation experiments are carried out to prove the validity of our conclusions.
Arctic tundra shrub invasion and soot deposition: Consequences for spring snowmelt and near-surface air temperatures

[1] Invasive shrubs and soot pollution both have the potential to alter the surface energy balance and timing of snow melt in the Arctic. Shrubs reduce the amount of snow lost to sublimation on the tundra during the winter leading to a deeper end-of-winter snowpack. The shrubs also enhance the absorption of energy by the snowpack during the melt season by converting incoming solar radiation to longwave radiation and sensible heat. Soot deposition lowers the albedo of the snow, allowing it to more effectively absorb incoming solar radiation and thus melt faster. This study uses the Colorado State University Regional Atmospheric Modeling System version 4.4 (CSU-RAMS 4.4), equipped with an enhanced snow model, to investigate the effects of shrub encroachment and soot deposition on the atmosphere and snowpack in the Kuparuk Basin of Alaska during the May–June melt period. The results of the simulations suggest that a complete invasion of the tundra by shrubs leads to a 2.2°C warming of 3 m air temperatures and a 108 m increase in boundary layer depth during the melt period. The snow-free date also occurred 11 d earlier despite having a larger initial snowpack. The results also show that a decrease in the snow albedo of 0.1, owing to soot pollution, caused the snow-free date to occur 5 d earlier. The soot pollution caused a 1.0°C warming of 3 m air temperatures and a 25 m average deepening of the boundary layer.
Effectiveness, safety, and long-term outcomes of non-powered mechanical sheaths for transvenous lead extraction

Aims To analyse the effectiveness, safety and long-term outcomes of conventional non-powered mechanical systems for transvenous lead extraction (TLE) performed by experienced first operators. Outcomes were assessed according to lead location and type of operating room in which the procedure was performed. Methods and results Data from 2049 patients (mean age: 65 years), with infectious (40%) or non-infectious (60%) indications, were analysed over a mean of 3.37 (±2.29) years. A total of 3426 leads were extracted; and, overall, 95% full procedural, 4% partial procedural, and 98% clinical success were demonstrated. Within the patient cohort, 1.8% (37/2049) experienced major complications, with cardiac tamponade being predominant (30/37). Cardiac tamponade was identified as the main cause of mortality, as well as the cause of all procedure-related deaths (6/2049; 0.3%). Cardiac tamponade occurred in 1.8% of atrial and 0.3% of right ventricular lead extractions, with fatal tamponade reported in 9% of atrial, 40% of ventricular, and 67% of coronary sinus lead extractions. No association between lead location and cardiac tamponade-related mortality was observed; however, lead location did affect the success of pericardiocentesis. The cardiac tamponade-related mortality rate was 37% when TLE was performed in an electrophysiology laboratory. No deaths were reported when the procedure was performed in a cardiac surgery or hybrid operating room. Long-term survival was improved when TLE was performed due to non-infectious indications, rather than pocket infection or lead-related endocarditis (P < 0.001). Conclusion Using conventional non-powered mechanical sheaths, TLE was effective even in patients at high risk of complications.
The role of the daily feeding rhythm in the regulation of the day/night rhythm in triglyceride secretion in rats

ABSTRACT Plasma triglyceride (TG) levels show a clear daily rhythm, however, thus far it is still unknown whether this rhythm results from a daily rhythm in TG production, TG uptake or both. Previous studies have shown that feeding activity affects plasma TG concentrations, but it is not clear how the daily rhythm in feeding activity affects plasma TG concentrations. In the present study, we measured plasma TG concentrations and TG secretion rates in rats at 6 Zeitgeber times to investigate whether plasma TG concentrations and TG secretion show a daily rhythm. We found that plasma TG concentrations and TG secretion show a significant day/night rhythm. Next, we removed the daily rhythm in feeding behavior by introducing a 6-meals-a-day (6M) feeding schedule to investigate whether the daily rhythm in feeding behavior is necessary to maintain the daily rhythm in TG secretion. We found that the day/night rhythm in TG secretion was abolished under 6M feeding conditions. Hepatic apolipoprotein B (ApoB) and microsomal TG transfer protein (Mttp), which are both involved in TG secretion, also lost their daily rhythmicity under 6M feeding conditions. Together, these results indicate that: (1) the daily rhythm in TG secretion contributes to the formation of a day/night rhythm in plasma TG levels and (2) a daily feeding rhythm is essential for maintaining the daily rhythm in TG secretion.
VLSI implementation of a configurable IP Core for quantized discrete cosine and integer transforms

In this paper, a low‐complexity and highly integrated IP Core for image/video transformations is presented. It can perform quantized 8×8 DCT and quantized 8 × 8/4 × 4 H.264 integer transforms on the presented configurable architecture using integer shift–add arithmetic operations. The MPEG‐4/H.264 experimental and circuit simulation results show that the reconfigurable modules and the CORDIC‐Scaler can not only approximate the arbitrary scaling values for different video standards efficiently but also achieve very high throughput and retain good transformation quality compared with the default methods in terms of PSNR. Therefore, the proposed IP Core is very suitable for low‐complexity multi‐purpose Video Codecs in SoC designs. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Optimization of coronary optical coherence tomography imaging using the attenuation-compensated technique: a validation study

Aim To optimize conventional coronary optical coherence tomography (OCT) images using the attenuation-compensated technique to improve identification of plaques and the external elastic lamina (EEL) contour. Methods and Results The attenuation-compensated technique was optimized via manipulating contrast exponent C, and compression exponent N, to achieve an optimal contrast and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This was applied to 60 human coronary lesions (38 native and 22 stented) ex vivo conventional coronary OCT images acquired from heart autopsies of 10 patients and matching histology was available as reference. Three independent reviewers assessed the conventional and attenuation-compensated OCT images blindly for plaque characteristics and EEL detection. Conventional OCT and compensated OCT assessment were compared against histology. Using an optimized algorithm, the attenuation-compensated OCT images had a 2-fold improvement in contrast between different tissues in both stented and non-stented epicardial coronaries (P < 0.05). Overall sensitivity and specificity for plaque classification increased from 84 to 89% and from 92 to 94%, respectively, with substantial agreement among the three reviewers (Fleiss' Kappa k, 0.72 and 0.71, respectively). Furthermore, operators were 2.5 times more likely to identify the EEL contour in the attenuation-compensated OCT images (k = 0.72) than in the conventional OCT images (k = 0.36). Conclusion The attenuation-compensated technique can be retrospectively applied to conventional OCT images and improves the detection of plaque characteristics and the EEL contour. This approach could complement conventional OCT imaging in the evaluation of plaque characteristics and quantify plaque burden in the clinical setting.
MOCA: An inter/intra-chip optical network for memory

The memory wall problem is due to the imbalanced developments and separation of processors and memories. It is becoming acute as more and more processor cores are integrated into a single chip and demand higher memory bandwidth through limited chip pins. Optical memory interconnection network (OMIN) promises high bandwidth, bandwidth density, and energy efficiency, and can potentially alleviate the memory wall problem. In this paper, we propose an optical inter/intra-chip processor-memory communication architecture, called MOCA. Experimental results and analysis show that MOCA can significantly improve system performance and energy efficiency. For example, comparing to Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC), MOCA can speedup application execution time by 2.6×, reduce communication latency by 75%, and improve energy efficiency by 3.4× for 256-core processors in 7 nm technology.
Switching Laws Design for Stability of Finite and Infinite Delayed Switched Systems With Stable and Unstable Modes

This paper studies the switching laws designed to maintain the stability of delayed switched nonlinear systems with both stable and unstable modes. The addressed time delays include finite and infinite delays. First, we consider the finitely delayed nonlinear switched systems and establish some delay differential inequalities that play an important role in the design of average dwell time (ADT)-based switching laws. Then, by employing multiple Lyapunov functions and the ADT approach, some delay-dependent switching laws for globally uniform exponential stability are derived. This approach establishes a relationship between time delay, ADT constant, and the ratio of total dwell time between stable and unstable modes. This method can guarantee the stability of finitely delayed switched systems with stable and unstable modes if the divergence rate and total dwell times of unstable modes can be effectively controlled and balanced by an ADT-based switching control with stable modes. Furthermore, based on multiple Lyapunov functions coupled with the Razumikhin technique, we study the infinitely delayed nonlinear switched systems and present some delay-independent switching laws for uniform stability and globally uniformly exponential stability. These can be applied to the cases in which the time delay in stable or unstable modes cannot be exactly observed, and the bound of the time delay may be unknown or infinite. The proposed results in this paper are more general than several recent works. Finally, some numerical examples and their computer simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the designed switching laws.
Biosorption of Heavy Metals: A Review

Industrial effluents containing heavy metals may consider a major source of contamination causes serious environmental problems. Decontamination of heavy metals from wastewater has been a challenged for a long time. A number of methods have been developed for removal of toxic metal ions from wastewaters such as precipitation, evaporation, electroplating, ion exchange, membrane processes, etc. However, these conventional technologies are providing expensive due to nonregenerable materials used, high cost and generation of toxic sludge. Biosorption is a process which represents a biotechnological innovation as well as a cost effective excellent tool for removing heavy metals from aqueous solutions. It represents a typical technique for using economical alternate biological materials for the purpose. Today, biosorption is one of the main components of environmental and bioresource technology. Application of microorganisms (specifically bacteria, algae, yeasts and fungi) as biosorbents for heavy metal removal have received growing interest due to high surface to volume ratio; large availability, rapid kinetics of adsorption and desorption and low cost. The aim of the present study is to review the removal of heavy metals from aqueous solutions using various materials of biological origin such as fungi, algae, yeast and bacterial biomass. This review discuss the significance of heavy metal removal from waste streams and provides brief overview of potential of biosorbents and biosorption technology, highlights the undelaying features of biosorption and the operation conditions such as pH, dose required, initial concentration, temperature, and treatment performance. Also sorption isotherms, sorption kinetics as well as models used to characterize biosorbent sorption are reviewed. KeywordsBiosorption; Adsorption; Heavy Metals; Wastewater; Fungi; Bacteria; Algae; Yeast
Autophagy-related gene ATG13 is involved in control of xylose alcoholic fermentation in the thermotolerant methylotrophic yeast Ogataea polymorpha

Lignocellulosic biomass belongs to main sustainable renewable sources for global energy supply. One of the main challenges in the conversion of saccharified lignocellulosic biomass into bioethanol is the utilization of xylose, since lignocellulosic feedstocks contain a significant amount of this pentose. The non-conventional thermotolerant yeast Ogataea polymorpha naturally ferments xylose to ethanol at elevated temperatures (45°C). Studying the molecular mechanisms of regulation of xylose metabolism is a promising way toward increased xylose conversion to ethanol. Insertional mutagenesis was applied to yeast O. polymorpha to identify genes involved in regulation of xylose fermentation. An insertional mutant selected as 3-bromopyruvate resistant strain possessed 50% increase in ethanol production as compared to the parental strain. Increase in ethanol production was caused by disruption of an autophagy-related gene ATG13. Involvement of Atg13 in regulation of xylose fermentation was confirmed by deletion of that gene. The atg13Δ strain also produced an elevated amount of ethanol from xylose. Insertion in ATG13 gene did not disrupt HORMA domain and did not lead to defects in autophagy whereas knock out of this gene impaired autophagy process. We suggest that Atg13 plays two different functions and its role in regulation of xylose fermentation differs from that in autophagy.
Degree Sequences with Repeated Values

A given nonincreasing sequence D = (d1, d2, · · · , dn) is said to contain a (nonincreasing) repetition sequence D∗ = (di1 , di2 , · · · , dik ) for some k ≤ n − 2 if all values of D −D∗ are distinct and for any dil ∈ D ∗ there exists some dt ∈ D −D∗ such that dil = dt. For any pair of integers n and k with n ≥ k + 2, we investigate the existence of a graphic sequence which contains a given repetition sequence. Our main theorem contains the known results for the special case di1 = dik if k = 1 or k = 2 (see [1, 5, 2]). 1supported in part by a foundation of Academia Sinica.
Global patterns of care in advanced stage mycosis fungoides/Sezary syndrome: a multicenter retrospective follow-up study from the Cutaneous Lymphoma International Consortium

Background Advanced-stage mycosis fungoides (MF)/Sézary syndrome (SS) patients are weighted by an unfavorable prognosis and share an unmet clinical need of effective treatments. International guidelines are available detailing treatment options for the different stages but without recommending treatments in any particular order due to lack of comparative trials. The aims of this second CLIC study were to retrospectively analyze the pattern of care worldwide for advanced-stage MF/SS patients, the distribution of treatments according to geographical areas (USA versus non-USA), and whether the heterogeneity of approaches has potential impact on survival. Patients and methods This study included 853 patients from 21 specialist centers (14 European, 4 USA, 1 each Australian, Brazilian, and Japanese). Results Heterogeneity of treatment approaches was found, with up to 24 different modalities or combinations used as first-line and 36% of patients receiving four or more treatments. Stage IIB disease was most frequently treated by total-skin-electron-beam radiotherapy, bexarotene and gemcitabine; erythrodermic and SS patients by extracorporeal photochemotherapy, and stage IVA2 by polychemotherapy. Significant differences were found between USA and non-USA centers, with bexarotene, photopheresis and histone deacetylase inhibitors most frequently prescribed for first-line treatment in USA while phototherapy, interferon, chlorambucil and gemcitabine in non-USA centers. These differences did not significantly impact on survival. However, when considering death and therapy change as competing risk events and the impact of first treatment line on both events, both monochemotherapy (SHR = 2.07) and polychemotherapy (SHR = 1.69) showed elevated relative risks. Conclusion This large multicenter retrospective study shows that there exist a large treatment heterogeneity in advanced MF/SS and differences between USA and non-USA centers but these were not related to survival, while our data reveal that chemotherapy as first treatment is associated with a higher risk of death and/or change of therapy and thus other therapeutic options should be preferable as first treatment approach.
Catchphrase Extraction from Legal Documents Using LSTM Networks

 Legal texts usually have a complex structure and reading through them is a time-consuming and strenuous task. Hence it is essential to provide the legal practitioners a concise representation of the text. Catchphrases are those phrases which state the important issues present in the text, thus effectively characterizing it. This paper proposes an approach for the subtask 1 of the task IRLed (Information Retrieval from Legal Documents), FIRE 2017. The proposed algorithm uses a three step approach for extracting catchphrases from legal documents.
Delay Analysis and Optimization in Cache-Enabled Multi-Cell Cooperative Networks

Caching at the base stations (BSs) has been widely adopted to reduce the delivery delay and alleviate the backhaul traffic between BSs and the core network. In this paper, we consider a collaborative content caching scheme among BSs in cache-enabled multi-cell cooperative networks, where the requested contents can be obtained from the associated BS, the other collaborative BSs or the core network. Novelly, we model the stochastic request traffic and derive a closed form expression for the average delay per request based on multi-class processor sharing queuing theory. We then formulate a cooperative caching optimization problem of minimizing the average delay under the finite cache size constraint at BSs and show it to be at least NP-complete. Furthermore, we prove it equivalent to the maximization of a monotone submodular function subject to matroid constraints, allowing us to adopt the common greedy algorithm with 1/2 performance guarantee. A heuristic greedy caching strategy is also developed, achieving a better performance than the conventional greedy solution. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the analytical results and demonstrate the performance gains obtained by our proposed caching scheme.
Mobile digital health devices and the diagnosis in real-time of myocardial ischaemia

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A metaheuristic bat inspired technique for cellular network optimization

Proper location management of the mobile users in the mobile cellular networks is of great importance in this era of wireless communications. This paper has solved the location management issue based on the reporting cell planning approach. The mobile location management comprises of two perspectives: location update and paging and it is developed as a cost optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a new metaheuristic popular, nature-inspired Bat Algorithm with the objective of minimizing the involved location management cost. We have compared the proposed approach with the state-of-the-art approaches available in the literature. Here the applicability of the Bat algorithm to the location management problem has been addressed using the reference networks as well the realistic networks of Odisha state. The computational results clearly show that the proposed approach performs as good as other approaches in terms of solution quality and has an added advantage of faster convergence.
Biologically Based Top-Down Attention Modulation for Humanoid Interactions

An adaptive perception system enables humanoid robots to interact with humans and their surroundings in a meaningful context-dependent manner. An important foundation for visual perception is the selectivity of early vision processes that enables the system to filter out low-level unimportant information while attending to features indicated as important by higher-level processes by way of top-down modulation. We present a novel way to integrate top-down and bottom-up processing for achieving such attention-based filtering. We specifically consider the case where the top-down target is not the most salient in any of the used submodalities.