Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Will Retinal Implants Restore Vision ?

Vision is an enormously complex form of information processing that depends on a remarkable neuroprocessor at the back of the eye called the retina. Seeing is initiated when light passing through the pupil of the eye is focused by the lens onto the retina’s sensory neuroepithelium (Fig. 1). This results in the projection of a reduced, upside-down image of the object onto the roughly 130 million photoreceptor cells (rods and cones) in the outermost layer of the retina. The cones, providing chromatic (color) images of high spatial resolution, and the rods, required for achromatic vision with less spatial resolution in dim light, transform local luminance and color patterns of the projected image into electrical and chemical signals. These signals then activate a complex circuit of retinal neurons: horizontal cells, bipolar cells, amacrine cells, and ganglion cells. Visual information from the retina’s 130 million photoreceptors is compressed into electrical signals carried by 1.2 million highly specialized ganglion neurons, whose axons form the optic nerve. The optic nerve transmits visual information via the lateral geniculate nucleus to the primary visual cortex of the brain. Blindness can result when any step of the optical pathway—the optics, the retina, the optic nerve, visual cortex, or other cortical areas involved in the processing of vision— sustains damage. In Germany, 17,000 patients become blind every year for whom there is no effective treatment or cure; about 50% of all blindness is caused by damage to the retina (1). Blinding diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration (the most common form of blindness in the elderly), cause progressive degeneration of the outer retina. Although there are many examples of electrical devices that can support or replace the function of defective tissues—such as cochlear implants for the hearing impaired [see the Viewpoint by Rauschecker and Shannon on page 1025 (2)] or pacemakers for individuals with heart disease—restoring vision with electrical devices implanted into the retina is much more difficult. The transformation of visual scenes into the electrical “images” carried by the optic nerve to the brain requires that numerous sensory neurons are stimulated in parallel and in a spatially correct order to enable three-dimensional objects to be accurately encoded.
A unique cross section through the skin of the dinosaur Psittacosaurus from China showing a complex fibre architecture

This paper reports on a unique preservation of soft tissues in the ventrolateral region of the plant-eating dinosaur Psittacosaurus from the Jehol biota of China. The preservation is of a deep cross section through the dermis, which includes multiple layers of collagenous fibres in excess of 25, among the highest recorded in vertebrates, with a further 15 more layers (poorly preserved) estimated for the entire height of the section. Also, for the first time in a dinosaur two fibre layers parallel to the skin surface are preserved deep within the dermis at the base of the cross section. These fibre layers comprise regularly disposed fibres arranged in left- and right-handed geodesic helices, matching the pattern at the surface and reasonably inferred for the entire section. As noted from the studies on modern-day animals, this fibre structure plays a critical part in the stresses and strains the skin may be subjected to and is ideally suited to providing support and protection. Psittacosaurus gives a remarkable, unprecedented understanding of the dinosaur skin.
Real-time inference of mental states from facial expressions and upper body gestures

We present a real-time system for detecting facial action units and inferring emotional states from head and shoulder gestures and facial expressions. The dynamic system uses three levels of inference on progressively longer time scales. Firstly, facial action units and head orientation are identified from 22 feature points and Gabor filters. Secondly, Hidden Markov Models are used to classify sequences of actions into head and shoulder gestures. Finally, a multi level Dynamic Bayesian Network is used to model the unfolding emotional state based on probabilities of different gestures. The most probable state over a given video clip is chosen as the label for that clip. The average F1 score for 12 action units (AUs 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 15, 17, 18, 25, 26), labelled on a frame by frame basis, was 0.461. The average classification rate for five emotional states (anger, fear, joy, relief, sadness) was 0.440. Sadness had the greatest rate, 0.64, anger the smallest, 0.11.
Stability of Aqueous Barium Titanate Suspensions for MLCC Inkjet Printing

BaTiO3-based materials are currently used for the fabrication of multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC) because of their high dielectric properties. The inkjet printing (IJP) process can be used to fabricate MLCC of complex configurations by integrating internal electrodes and dielectric layers in a single step using a multi printing-head system. Stabilized aqueous suspensions of BaTiO3-based powders are required to obtain dielectric inks adapted to IJP. This study investigates the influence of BaTiO3 powder hydrolysis in water on the surface chemistry and stability in relationship with the milling step used to adjust the powder grain size to IJP. Optimum parameters for a good stability of BaTiO3 suspensions are identified. The selected dispersant is a polyacrylate (PAA) for which the content is adjusted to minimize the sedimentation rates as required by IJP. Moreover, the addition of ethylene glycol is shown to be necessary to avoid the formation of a gel structure which could result from the interaction of borates ions leached from the surface of BaTiO3 with the PAA dispersant. A mechanism of gel formation is proposed.
Modified Traffic Cellular Automaton for the Density Classification Task

The density classification task asks to design a cellular automaton that converges to the uniform configuration that corresponds to the state that is in majority in the initial configuration. We investigate connections of this problem to state-conserving cellular automata. We propose a modified traffic CA that washes out finite islands in the same way as the Gacs, Kurdyumov and Levin automaton, but is also guaranteed to converge to a uniform configuration on rings of odd size. We find experimentally several good classifiers that are close to state-conserving cellular automata, and we observe that the best performing known density classifier by Wolz and de Oliveira is only a simple swap away from a state-conserving automaton.
Reliability in grid computing systems

In recent years, grid technology has emerged as an important tool for solving compute‐intensive problems within the scientific community and in industry. To further the development and adoption of this technology, researchers and practitioners from different disciplines have collaborated to produce standard specifications for implementing large‐scale, interoperable grid systems. The focus of this activity has been the Open Grid Forum, but other standards development organizations have also produced specifications that are used in grid systems. To date, these specifications have provided the basis for a growing number of operational grid systems used in scientific and industrial applications. However, if the growth of grid technology is to continue, it will be important that grid systems also provide high reliability. In particular, it will be critical to ensure that grid systems are reliable as they continue to grow in scale, exhibit greater dynamism, and become more heterogeneous in composition. Ensuring grid system reliability in turn requires that the specifications used to build these systems fully support reliable grid services. This study surveys work on grid reliability that has been done in recent years and reviews progress made toward achieving these goals. The survey identifies important issues and problems that researchers are working to overcome in order to develop reliability methods for large‐scale, heterogeneous, dynamic environments. The survey also illuminates reliability issues relating to standard specifications used in grid systems, identifying existing specifications that may need to be evolved and areas where new specifications are needed to better support the reliability. Published in 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The digital TV filter and nonlinear denoising

Motivated by the classical TV (total variation) restoration model, we propose a new nonlinear filter-the digital TV filter for denoising and enhancing digital images, or more generally, data living on graphs. The digital TV filter is a data dependent lowpass filter, capable of denoising data without blurring jumps or edges. In iterations, it solves a global total variational (or L(1)) optimization problem, which differs from most statistical filters. Applications are given in the denoising of one dimensional (1-D) signals, two-dimensional (2-D) data with irregular structures, gray scale and color images, and nonflat image features such as chromaticity.
Optimisation of neural state variables estimators of two-mass drive system using the Bayesian regularization method

The paper deals with the application of neural networks for state variables estimation of the electrical drive system with an elastic joint. The torsional vibration suppression of such drive system is achieved by the application of a special control structure with a state-space controller and additional feedbacks from mechanical state variables. Signals of the torsional torque and the load-machine speed, estimated by neural networks are used in the control structure. In the learning procedure of the neural networks a modified objective function with the regularization technique is introduced. For choosing the regularization parameters, the Bayesian interpretation of neural networks is used. It gives a possibility to calculate automatically these parameters in the learning process. In this work results obtained with the classical Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm and the expanded one by a regularization function are compared. High accuracy of the reconstructed signals is obtained without the necessity of the electrical drive system parameters identification. Simulation results show good precision of both presented neural estimators for a wide range of changes of the load speed and torque. Simulation results are verified by the laboratory experiments.
Average-Time Games on Timed Automata

An average-time game is played on the infinite graph of configurations of a finite timed automaton. The two players, Min and Max, construct an infinite run of the automaton by taking turns to perform a timed transition. Player Min wants to minimise the average time per transition and player Max wants to maximise it. A solution of average-time games is presented using a reduction to average-price game on a finite graph. A direct consequence is an elementary proof of determinacy for average-time games. This complements our results for reachability-time games and partially solves a problem posed by Bouyer et al., to design an algorithm for solving average-price games on priced timed automata. The paper also establishes the exact computational complexity of solving average-time games: the problem is EXPTIME-complete for timed automata with at least two clocks.
Light-induced damage and its diagnosis in two-photon excited autofluorescence imaging of retinal pigment epithelium cells

In this paper, a novel method for the differentiation of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells after light-induced damage by two-photon excitation is presented. Fresh samples of RPE cells of pig eyes are obtained from local slaughterhouse. Light-induced damage is produced by the output from Ti: sapphire laser which is focused onto the RPE layer. We study the change of the autofluorescence properties of RPE after two-photon excitation with the same wavelength. Preliminary results show that after two-photon excitation, there are two clear changes in the emission spectrum. The first change is the blue-shift of the emission peak. The emission peak of the intact RPE is located at 592nm, and after excitation, it shifts to 540nm. It is supposed that the excitation has led to the increased autofluorescence of flavin whose emission peak is located at 540nm. The second change is the increased intensity of the emission peak, which might be caused by the accelerated aging because the autofluorescence of RPE would increase during aging process. Experimental results indicate that two-photon excitation could not only lead to the damage of the RPE cells in multiphoton RPE imaging, but also provide an evaluation of the light-induced damage.
Impulsive Synchronization of Generalized Lorenz Systems

The generalized Lorenz system contains a class of three-dimensional autonomous quadratic chaotic systems, including Lorenz systems, Chen systems, Lü systems, unified chaotic systems and some other chaotic systems. In this paper, the impulsive synchronization of two generalized Lorenz systems is studied. By exploring the structure knowledge of the system, sufficient conditions are derived. In addition, by converting the process of determining the upper bound of impulsive interval into an optimization problem, some less conservative conditions than the existing results are obtained. Simulation results also verify the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes.
The logic of RDF and SPARQL: a tutorial

The Resource Description Framework (RDF [Hayes, 2004]) is a W3C standard language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web; RDF provides a common framework for expressing this information so it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning. In this tutorial, RDF will be presented as a data model in the database sense. Its motivations will be analysed, and its current formal status revised. The data model can be understood both from a graph theoretical perspective and from a logical perspective. While the former has been the focus of most theoretical (see, e.g., [Gutierrez et al., 2004]) and practical approaches to RDF, the logical view of RDF has been mostly neglected by the community so far. Two provably correct (w.r.t. the normative W3C definitions of RDF [Hayes, 2004]) logical reconstructions of RDF will be presented, by reducing (a fragment of) it to a classical first-order framework suitable for knowledge representation (first developed in [de Bruijn et al., 2005]), and by encoding the full RDF data model in the HiLog logic introduced by Kifer et al. several years ago [Chen et al., 1993]. An emphasis will be given to three main characteristics of RDF: the presence of anonymous bnodes, the non-well-foundedness of the basic rdf:type relation, and the presence of the RDF vocabulary in the mode itself.In the second part of the tutorial, the relation of the logical reconstructions of RDF with a database perspective will be introduced. An RDF database is seen as a model of a suitable theory in first order logic or in HiLog. While in the pure RDF sense the two approaches are equivalent, it will be shown how the difference becomes relevant whenever additional constraints (e.g., in the form of ontologies or database dependencies) are introduced in the framework. In order to allow for additional constraints (e.g., in the standard W3C OWL-DL ontology language [Patel-Schneider et al., 2004]) while keeping the framework first order, only a fragment of RDF can be considered; this restriction is not needed if the framework is in HiLog (see, e.g., [Motik, 2005]). Various complexity and decidability results will be summarised. In the last part of the tutorial, the W3C standard query language for RDF (SPARQL [Prud'hommeaux and Seaborne, 2006]) will be presented. SPARQL is currently a candidate recommendation. The core of SPARQL is a conjunctive query language, with the added complication that the data model includes existential information in the form of bnodes, and that bnodes may be returned by the query. The formal semantics of the core query language will be given. The problem of the canonical representation of the answer set will be introduced, since bnodes introduce a behaviour similar to the null values in SQL. Complexity results for query answering will be given for different cases. Finally, the possible extensions of SPARQL with various classes of constraints will be discussed.
On Automatic Assignment of Verb Valency Frames in Czech

Many recent NLP applications, including machine translation and information retrieval, could benefit from semantic analysis of language data on the sentence level. This paper presents a method for automatic disambiguation of verb valency frames on Czech data. For each verb occurrence, we extracted features describing its local context. We experimented with diverse types of features, including morphological, syntax-based, idiomatic, animacy and WordNet-based features. The main contribution of the paper lies in determining which ones are most useful for the disambiguation task. The considered features were classified using decision trees, rule-based learning and a Naïve Bayes classifier. We evaluated the methods using 10-fold cross-validation on VALEVAL, a manually annotated corpus of frame annotations containing 7,778 sentences. Syntax-based features have shown to be the most effective. When we used the full set of features, we achieved an accuracy of 80.55% against the baseline 67.87% obtained by assigning the most frequent frame.
The Influence of Stabilisation on the Structure of Knits and Tensile Properties of Their Yarns

Plated jersey knits of different composition were knitted and stabilised under hydrothermal conditions of 85 °C for 10, 20 or 30 min in steam ambience. The influence of stabilisation duration on knit structure was estimated as well as change of mechanical properties of the yarns. The obtained data show that 10 min of stabilisation influenced markedly the structure of plated jersey knits comparing with the same effect of 20 min and 30 min. The results of specific breaking force of polyester, cotton and wool yarns show decrease in their strength due to knitting and hydrothermal stabilisation processes. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.5755/j01.ms.18.4. 3096
Effects of FSM minimization techniques on number of test paths in mobile applications MBT

Model Based Testing (MBT) is defined as the process of generating functional test cases based on a model that describes the behavior of an application under test (AUT). It is used to ensure that the intended purpose of the application will function as expected, where if any change in the behavior is encountered it would be reported as a bug. Previous research in MBT has only focused on automating the generation step of the application's model. Given that testing each path of the model would take infinite time since the generated model is usually huge and with multiple iterations, researchers have also focused on different techniques of test case selection and generation. However, it is not yet known if the generated model could be enhanced before the test case selection step, and whether this enhancement could positively affect the number of test paths or not. The aim of our research is to enhance MBT by first minimizing the generated model; removing any equivalent states; and examining the effect of minimization on the generated number of test paths using different test coverage criteria.
Management of acute coronary syndromes. Variations in practice and outcome; findings from the Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events (GRACE).

AIMS Despite advances in the treatment of acute coronary syndromes based on randomized trial data and published guidelines, the extent to which such treatments are applied in practice remains uncertain. Data from clinical trials derive from selected geographical areas and in highly selected populations of patients, and hence may not reflect the overall population. The aim of the study was to investigate variations in hospital management and outcome using unselected data collected in the prospective Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events (GRACE). METHODS AND RESULTS The 95 hospitals in GRACE were organized into 18 population-based clusters in 14 countries. Information was recorded about patient management and outcome during hospitalization and after discharge. Data on treatments administered were analysed by baseline condition, hospital type, by the presence or absence of a catheterization laboratory, and by geographical region. Of 11543 patients, 44% had an admission diagnosis of unstable angina, 36% presented with myocardial infarction, 9% were admitted to rule out a myocardial infarction, 7% had chest pain and 4% were hospitalized for 'other cardiac' and 'non-cardiac' diagnoses. Of the total GRACE population 38% had a final diagnosis of unstable angina, 30% ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction, 25% non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction, and 7% of 'other cardiac' and 'non-cardiac' final diagnoses. The event rates for hospital death or reinfarction were six and 2% for non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction, seven and 3% for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction, and 3% hospital death for unstable angina. The use of aspirin was similar across all hospital types and geographical regions. In contrast, the use of percutaneous coronary intervention and glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitors was higher (P<0.0001) in teaching hospitals and hospitals with catheterization laboratories and was also higher in the United States. At discharge a higher percentage (P<0.0001) of patients received angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors in hospitals without catheterization laboratories. The use of statins was lower in non-teaching hospitals and in centres without a catheterization laboratory. CONCLUSIONS The GRACE study reveals substantial differences in the management of patients based on hospital type and geographical location. Further analyses will determine whether such variations translate into differences in longer term outcomes. GRACE provides a multinational reference for the implementation of therapies of proven efficacy.
Rayleigh-instability-driven dewetting of thin Au and Ag films on indium-tin-oxide surface under nanosecond laser irradiations

Investigations have been carried out on laser-beam-induced nanoparticle (NP) formation in thin (5 nm) Au and Ag films on indium–tin-oxide substrate. After the irradiation the films were observed to break-up into NPs through a dewetting mechanism. This mechanism was investigated as a Rayleigh-instability-driven process. In fact, for each used laser fluence, the resulting Au and Ag NPs' mean size and surface-to-surface mean distance were quantified and correlated between them in the framework of the Rayleigh-instability theory showing an excellent agreement.
The Horse as a Model for Thermoregulatory Responses to Exercise

The horse has a remarkable athletic ability and is capable of exercise ranging from short bursts at maximal speed (- 20 m/ s) to endurance exercise (-4.5 mls for more than 10 h). On occasion these events are conducted when ambient temperature and humidity is high thereby imposing significant demands on the thermoregulatory system if body temperature is to be maintained within the relatively tight range required if detrimental hyperthermia is to be avoided. Given the horse's athletic and thermoregulatory capacity, investigation of responses to exercise in this species has provided useful comparative data. There are several reasons why the horse represents one of the most suitable animal models for the study of applied comparative thermoregulatory physiology. The horse and human are the only two species that depend principally on sweating for heat loss. both have a high exercise capacity and a similar vascular anatomy ofthe brain and the horse exercises willingly.