Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generalized non-reflecting boundaries for fluid re-simulation

When aiming to seamlessly integrate a fluid simulation into a larger scenario (like an open ocean), careful attention must be paid to boundary conditions. In particular, one must implement special "non-reflecting" boundary conditions, which dissipate out-going waves as they exit the simulation. Unfortunately, the state of the art in non-reflecting boundary conditions (perfectly-matched layers, or PMLs) only permits trivially simple inflow/outflow conditions, so there is no reliable way to integrate a fluid simulation into a more complicated environment like a stormy ocean or a turbulent river. This paper introduces the first method for combining non-reflecting boundary conditions based on PMLs with inflow/outflow boundary conditions that vary arbitrarily throughout space and time. Our algorithm is a generalization of state-of-the-art mean-flow boundary conditions in the computational fluid dynamics literature, and it allows for seamless integration of a fluid simulation into much more complicated environments. Our method also opens the door for previously-unseen post-process effects like retroactively changing the location of solid obstacles, and locally increasing the visual detail of a pre-existing simulation.
Can Common Clinical Parameters Be Used to Identify Patients Who Will Need Insulin Treatment in Gestational Diabetes Mellitus?

OBJECTIVE To identify patients with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) who will need antenatal insulin treatment (AIT) by using a risk-prediction tool based on maternal clinical and biochemical characteristics at diagnosis. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Data from 3,009 women attending the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital GDM Clinic, Australia, between 1995 and 2010 were studied. A risk engine was developed from significant factors identified for AIT using a logistic regression model. RESULTS A total of 51% of GDM patients required AIT. Ethnicity, gestation at diagnosis, HbA1c, fasting and 60-min glucose at oral glucose tolerance test, BMI, and diabetes family history were significant independent determinants of AIT. Notably, only 9% of the attributable risk for AIT can be explained by the clinical factors studied. A modeled risk-scoring system was therefore a poor predictor of AIT. CONCLUSIONS Baseline maternal characteristics including HbA1c alone cannot predict the need for AIT in GDM. Lifestyle, compliance, or as yet unmeasured influences play a greater role in determining AIT.
Sniffer-based inference of the causes of active scanning in WiFi networks

Active scanning (AS) is a mechanism provided by the 802.11 standard by which WiFi clients proactively search for access points (APs) in their vicinity. To do so, a client sends out a probe request, in response to which all APs that hear the request send a probe response. Prior works have reported severe degradation in performance of WiFi networks due to excessive AS. In practice, a client triggers AS due to many causes, for example, when the screen of a smartphone turns on, or on the loss of beacons from its AP. This work provides an automated, client and AP agnostic, sniffer-based mechanism to diagnose the causes of AS. We study many existing WiFi driver implementations and user space applications to arrive at the main causes of AS. We propose mechanisms to infer the true cause of AS from logs collected by a WiFi sniffer. We evaluate the efficacy of inference in a controlled manner in which we trigger AS by introducing the causes of AS. While the inference is fairly accurate with F — Score greater than 0.57 for most causes, 3/7 causes are detected with F — Score greater than 0.80. We use the proposed mechanisms to diagnose the causes of AS in three real-world WiFi datasets. Excessive AS is often caused due to underlying issues in the network, for example, inadequate coverage by APs, or bad client behavior. With our mechanism, we believe, WiFi network administrators will be better equipped to diagnose these issues.
Chromosomal regions which control sporulation in Bacillus subtilis.

Large quantities of sporulation mutants have been isolated with a variety of mutagens. The genetic sites for asporogeny have been localized on the chromosome of Bacillus subtilis through transduction with phage PBSI. Through these procedures specific portions of the chromosome which are associated with sporulation have been identified. Although asporogenic (Sp−) defects were observed to be scattered throughout the four linkage groups of the genetic map of B. subtilis, only three extensive Sp− linkage groups were identified. The first linkage group of Sp− markers is located at the proximal end of the chromosome between the cys A and ery markers. The second cluster of spore genes mapped to the right of ura, and the third linkage group of spore markers mapped to the left of lys-2. Defects within specific regions of the first and third spore gene clusters obstructed some early products of sporogenesis.
Time-Varying and Frequency-Selective Channel Estimation with Unequally Spaced Pilot Symbols

In this paper, an accurate and computationally efficient algorithm is proposed for estimating time-varying and frequency-selective fading channel with unequally spaced pilot symbols. By employing the time-varying coefficient polynomial interpolation method, it is proved that the time-varying channel impulse response can be estimated by the product of a constant matrix and the fading information at pilot symbol positions. Furthermore, a least square off-line training algorithm is presented to optimally calculate the constant matrix, taking into consideration of the statistics of channel fading and noise. The new algorithm can also be applied for estimating flat fading channel with equally spaced pilot symbols as a special case. Simulation results indicate that our new channel estimation algorithm leads to small mean square error for fading estimation and provides bit error rate performance close to that of the perfect channel estimation.
Second Law Analysis of Laminar Flow In A Channel Filled With Saturated Porous Media

The entropy generation rate in a laminar flow through a channel filled with saturated porous media is investigated. The upper surface of the channel is adiabatic and the lower wall is assumed to have a constant heat flux. The Brinkman model is employed. Velocity and temperature profiles are obtained for large Darcy number (Da) and used to obtain the entropy generation number and the irreversibility ratio. Generally, our result shows that heat transfer irreversibility dominates over fluid friction irreversibility (i.e. 0 < o < 1), and viscous dissipation has no effect on the entropy generation rate at the centerline of the channel.
Behavior control for a mobile robot by multihierarchical neural network

A mobile robot with behavior controlled by a neural network, and its learning method are presented. The robot has four wheels and travels with two motors; it has twelve sensors for detecting internal conditions and changes in environment. The sensor signals are fed into the input layer of the network, and the network outputs motor control commands. The network model is divided into two subnetworks connected to each other with a short-term memory to process time-dependent data. The robot can learn various habits by changing the patterns to be taught. One example, the habits to play a cops-and-robbers game, was taught. Through training, the robots learned habits such as capture and escape. <<ETX>>
Aesthetics and inspiration for visualization design: bridging the gap between art and science

Most information visualization research and design is being performed in computer science and engineering labs by technically trained individuals. Within the digital arts and design communities, on the other hand, there is a parallel discourse regarding artistic visualization aesthetics and interaction design experimentation. Unfortunately, there has been limited exchange and collaboration between infoVis researchers and artists. This paper provides pointers to resources which can provide aesthetic and conceptual inspiration for visualization design in order to bridge the gap in visualization discourse between science, art, technology, and design. The examples given, intended to generate ideas for visualization metaphors and interaction models, are drawn from experiments in algorithmic art, architecture, artificial life, and the natural environment.
Design of Cascade Adaptive Fuzzy Sliding-Mode Control for Nonlinear Two-Axis Inverted-Pendulum Servomechanism

Because the dynamic characteristic of a two-axis inverted-pendulum servomechanism is a nonlinear underactuated system, it is difficult to design a suitable control scheme that realizes real-time stabilization and accurate tracking control simultaneously. In general, the techniques developed for fully actuated systems cannot be used directly in underactuated systems. In this study, a cascade adaptive fuzzy sliding-mode control (AFSMC) scheme including inner and outer control loops is investigated for the stabilizing and tracking control of a nonlinear two-axis inverted-pendulum servomechanism. The aim of the inner control loop is to design an AFSMC law with fuzzy estimators so that the stick-angle vector can fit the stick-angle command vector derived from the stick-angle reference model. In the outer loop, the reference signal vector is designed via a fuzzy path-planning scheme so that the cart position vector tracks the cart-position command vector and the stick-angle tracking-error vector converges to zero simultaneously. All adaptive algorithms in the cascade AFSMC system are derived in the sense of Lyapunov stability analysis, so that system stability can be guaranteed in the entire closed-loop system. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by numerical simulations and experimental results, and the superiority of the cascade AFSMC system is indicated in comparison with a cascade sliding-mode control system.
Hybrid error correction method using HEVC standard in heterogeneous environment

It has been observed that in the heterogeneous environment for the transmission of multimedia data packet loss rate and packet length is varying. Also, there is a need to recover the data at the receiver end even in the worst environment conditions by error correction and detection techniques. Forward error correction (FEC) provides poor performance when packet loss is higher and packet length is larger. As per survey, it is proved that multiple description coding (MDC) out performs than FEC in this condition. The performance of MDC is even better when High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is used as a source coding standard. On considering this point, we have proposed a scheme in which HEVC is used as a prior stage of MDC and we use FEC as the standard encoder to implement MDC. In this scheme, three routes are defined for sending the packets, according to the environment conditions and available bandwidth the one which best suits will be selected. As HEVC is used to fulfill the demand of sending high resolution video by reducing bit rate requirement by providing better coding efficiency [3] which is the key point of using it in our scheme. Due to this, better video quality will be obtained for 4k × 2k resolution and even the problem with the heterogeneous environment will be solved. By the results we have observed that at low bit rate performance of HEVC is better than H264 in terms of PSNR and when packet length is large and packet loss rate is high then combination of MDC and FEC (a double or multiple description coding scheme) outperforms FEC (a single description coding scheme).
Joint dynamic sparse learning and its application to multi-view face recognition

We propose a novel joint dynamic sparsity regularization for joint learning of multiple tasks (i.e., multiple observations of the same physical event by a set of homogeneous or heterogeneous sensors). The proposed method not only combines the strength of different tasks but also has the flexibility of selecting a set of different atoms for each task, with a class-wise constraint, which is more flexible and even crucial in many real-world scenarios. We develop an efficient learning algorithm for the joint dynamic sparsity using the accelerated proximal gradient descent. The proposed method is applied to a multi-view face recognition task and the experimental results on the public CMU Multi-PIE dataset verify its effectiveness.
Solving SDPs for synchronization and MaxCut problems via the Grothendieck inequality

A number of statistical estimation problems can be addressed by semidefinite programs (SDP). While SDPs are solvable in polynomial time using interior point methods, in practice generic SDP solvers do not scale well to high-dimensional problems. In order to cope with this problem, Burer and Monteiro proposed a non-convex rank-constrained formulation, which has good performance in practice but is still poorly understood theoretically. In this paper we study the rank-constrained version of SDPs arising in MaxCut and in synchronization problems. We establish a Grothendieck-type inequality that proves that all the local maxima and dangerous saddle points are within a small multiplicative gap from the global maximum. We use this structural information to prove that SDPs can be solved within a known accuracy, by applying the Riemannian trust-region method to this non-convex problem, while constraining the rank to be of order one. For the MaxCut problem, our inequality implies that any local maximizer of the rank-constrained SDP provides a $ (1 - 1/(k-1)) \times 0.878$ approximation of the MaxCut, when the rank is fixed to $k$. We then apply our results to data matrices generated according to the Gaussian ${\mathbb Z}_2$ synchronization problem, and the two-groups stochastic block model with large bounded degree. We prove that the error achieved by local maximizers undergoes a phase transition at the same threshold as for information-theoretically optimal methods.
Asymmetry of Deep Medullary Veins on Susceptibility Weighted MRI in Patients with Acute MCA Stroke Is Associated with Poor Outcome

Background and Purpose Due to its sensitivity to deoxyhemoglobin, susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) enables the visualization of deep medullary veins (DMV) in patients with acute stroke, which are difficult to depict under physiological circumstances. This study assesses the asymmetric appearance of prominent DMV as an independent predictor for stroke severity and outcome. Materials and Methods SWI of 86 patients with acute middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke were included. A scoring system from 0 (no visible DMV) to 3 (very prominent DMV) was applied for both hemispheres separately. A difference of scores between ipsi- and contralateral side was defined as asymmetric (AMV+). Occurrence of AMV+ was correlated with the National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) Score on admission and discharge, as well as the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at discharge. Ordinal regression analysis was used to evaluate NIHSS and mRS as predictors of stroke severity, clinical course of disease and outcome. Results 55 patients displayed AMV+ while 31 did not show an asymmetry (AMV–). Median NIHSS on admission was 17 (11–21) in the AMV+ group and 9 (5–15) in the AMV– group (p = 0.001). On discharge median NIHSS was 11 (5–20) for AMV+ and 5 (2–14) for AMV– (p = 0.005). The median mRS at discharge was 4 (3–5) in the AMV+ group and 3 (1–4) in AMV– (p = 0.001). Odds ratio was 3.19 (95% CI: 1.24–8.21) for AMV+ to achieve a higher mRS than AMV– (p = 0.016). Conclusion The asymmetric appearance of DMV on SWI is a fast and easily evaluable parameter for the prediction of stroke severity and can be used as an additional imaging parameter in patients with acute MCA stroke.
Resolution properties of multiple aperture passive radar system based on GNSS signals

The influence of the receiver position on imaging resolution of a passive radar system with multiple GNSS transmitters and a fixed ground receiver was analyzed. The spatial spectrum model is used to analyze the resolution properties of the system in accordance with the Fourier transform connection between the target scattering function and the echo in the spatial spectral domain, and the corresponding conclusion that the receiver position has negligible effect on the resolution of the system is drawn. This conclusion plays an important theoretical guiding role in the receiver position design of the passive radar system with multiple GNSS transmitters and ground receivers.
Liver Resection Versus Transplantation for Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Cirrhotic Patients

ObjectiveCurrently, there is considerable controversy about the place of transplantation in the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). This study compared resection to transplantation in cirrhotic patients with HCC in order to determine reasonable indications of each treatment. Summary Background DataThe usual procedure is to resect when feasible and to transplant in other cases. MethodsThree-year survival with and without recurrence was analyzed in 60 patients who underwent resection and 60 who underwent transplantation. Several prognostic factors, such as size, number of nodules, portal thrombus, and histologic form, were studied. ResultsIn terms of overall survival rates, resection and transplantation yield the same results (50% vs. 47%, respectively, at 3 years). For transplantation, however, the rate for survival without recurrence is better than that for resection (46% vs. 27%, respectively; p < 0.05). In the case of small uninodular or binodular tumors (> 3 cm), transplantation has much better results than resection (survival without recurrence, 83% vs. 18%, respectively; p < 0.001). However, it seems that a group of patients with high risk of recurrence after transplantation can be determined (diffuse form, more than two nodules > 3 cm, or presence of portal thrombus). ConclusionsThe best indication for transplantation seems to be patients with small and uninodular or binodular tumors; until now, these patients were considered to be the best candidates for resection. Patients undergoing transplantation for unresectable, large, multinodular or diffuse tumors seem to represent bad indications for transplantation. These results could help define reasonable indications for transplantation in an era with a shortage of liver grafts.
Expression of cbsA Encoding the Collagen-Binding S-Protein of Lactobacillus crispatusJCM5810 in Lactobacillus casei ATCC 393T

ABSTRACT The cbsA gene encoding the collagen-binding S-layer protein of Lactobacillus crispatus JCM5810 was expressed inL. casei ATCC 393T. The S-protein was not retained on the surface of the recombinant bacteria but was secreted into the medium. By translational fusion of CbsA to the cell wall sorting signal of the proteinase, PrtP, of L. casei, CbsA was presented at the surface, rendering the transformants able to bind to immobilized collagens.
Consistent Segmentation Based Color Correction for Coarsely Registered Images

Local color correction methods transfer colors between corresponding regions. However, inconsistent segmentation between the source image and the target image tends to degrade the correction result. In this paper, we propose a local color correction technique for coarsely registered images. In the segmentation step, it enforces the consistent segmentation on both source and target images to alleviate the inaccurate registration problem. In the color transfer step, it uses the region confidences and the bilateral-filter-like color influence maps to improve the color correction result. The experiment shows the proposed method achieves improved color correction results compared with the global methods and the recent local color correction methods.
Haptics for tangible interaction: a vibro-tactile prototype

Research on tangible interaction and digital haptics has rarely intertwined, despite the natural relationship between physicality and touch. This paper addresses this relatively unexplored domain by presenting the Haptic Wheel, a freestanding single-axis rotational controller incorporating vibro-tactile cues. In addition to describing the hardware and implementation, the paper discusses the potential application of the system for eyes-free interaction, password entry and as an active puck on a tabletop system. The paper suggests that systems with active haptic feedback have unexploited potential as tools for tangible interaction.
Effect of Change in Portal Venous Blood Flow Rates on the Performance of a 2.45-GHz Microwave Ablation Device.

PURPOSE To investigate the effect of change in portal venous blood flow rates on the size and shape of ablations created by a 2.45-GHz microwave ablation device. MATERIALS AND METHODS This study was exempt from review by the institutional animal care and use committee. An in vitro bovine liver model perfused with autologous blood via the portal vein at five flow rates (60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 mL/min per 100 g of liver) was used to evaluate the effect of change in flow rates on the size and shape of coagulation created by a 2.45-GHz, 140-W microwave ablation device operated for 5 and 10 minutes. Three ablations per ablation time were conducted in each of 10 livers, with two livers perfused at each flow rate. Short- and long-axis diameters were measured from gross specimens, and volume and sphericity index were calculated. General linear mixed models that accounted for correlations within the liver were used to evaluate the effects of lobe, flow, and ablation time on size and sphericity index of ablations. RESULTS Flow did not have a significant effect on the size or shape of coagulation created at 5 or 10 minutes (P > .05 for all tests). The mean short- and long-axis diameters and volume were 3.2 cm (95% confidence interval [CI]: 3.1, 3.3), 5.6 cm (95% CI: 5.4, 5.8), and 30.2 cm(3) (95% CI: 28.4, 32.1) for the 5-minute ablations and 3.8 cm (95% CI: 3.7, 3.9), 6.5 cm (95% CI: 6.3, 6.7), and 49.3 cm(3) (95% CI: 47.5, 51.2), for the 10-minute ablations, respectively. The mean sphericity index for both 5- and 10-minute ablations was 34.4% (95% CI: 32%, 36.7%). CONCLUSION Change in portal venous blood flow rates did not have an effect on the size and shape of ablations created by a 2.45-GHz microwave ablation device.
Does a Virtual Talking Face Generate Proper Multimodal Cues to Draw User’s Attention to Points of Interest?

We present a series of experiments investigating face-to-face interaction between an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) and a human interlocutor. The ECA is embodied by a video realistic talking head with independent head and eye movements. For a beneficial application in face-to-face interaction, the ECA should be able to derive meaning from communicational gestures of a human interlocutor, and likewise to reproduce such gestures. Conveying its capability to interpret human behaviour, the system encourages the interlocutor to show appropriate natural activity. Therefore it is important that the ECA knows how to display what would correspond to mental states in humans. This allows to interpret the machine processes of the system in terms of human expressiveness and to assign them a corresponding meaning. Thus the system may maintain an interaction based on human patterns. During a first experiment we investigated the ability of our talking head to direct user attention with facial deictic cues (Raidt, Bailly et al. 2005). Users interact with the ECA during a simple card game offering different levels of help and guidance through facial deictic cues. We analyzed the users performance and their perception of the quality of assistance given by the ECA. The experiment showed that users profit from its presence and its facial deictic cues. In the continuative series of experiments presented here, we investigated the effect of an enhancement of the multimodality of the deictic gestures by adding a spoken instruction.