Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Angle Difference Method for Vehicle Navigation in Multilevel Road Networks With a Three-Dimensional Transport GIS Database

Multilevel road networks such as grade-separated interchanges and elevated roads have been increasingly used to solve traffic congestion in large cities. When navigating a vehicle in a multilevel road network, identifying the location of the vehicle in different road levels is of equal importance to identifying its planar location, particularly for overlapping and parallel roads. Although they can be represented and visualized in the existing navigation system, at present, it is difficult to guide a vehicle through such a multilevel road network because the existing vehicle positioning system uses consumer-grade GPS, and the transport geographic information system (GIS-T) database is mainly 2-D-based. The location of a vehicle on diffrent road levels in multilevel road networks is often overlooked. This paper examines the deficiency of existing approaches in supporting vehicle navigation in multilevel road networks with consumer-grade GPS. It proposes to use an angle difference method that compares the vehicle pitch angle with the inclination angles of different road levels calculated from road elevations stored in the proposed GIS-T database to snap the vehicle to the appropriate road level when the vehicle is entering or exiting a multilevel road network. The angle difference method is implemented based on consumer-grade assisted GPS (A-GPS) and onboard vehicle pitch angle measurement with smartphone. Experiment results prove that the angle difference method have high accuracy in determining the road level when the vehicle is driving in a parallel multilevel road network.
A design of wideband 3-dB coupler with N-section microstrip tandem structure

New design equations and a 3-dB microstrip coupler example for N-section tandem connected structure with wide bandwidth are presented. The proposed four-port S-parameters and equations are obtained from a port reduction method. The designed microstrip 3-dB coupler not only does not need high impedance lines, but also uses tight coupling gaps differently from conventional couplers such as Lange couplers, parallel coupled line couplers, etc. The measured data agrees well with the expected data, which show a wide bandwidth of 42%, an amplitude imbalance of /spl plusmn/0.5 dB, a phase unbalance of 1.0/spl deg/, and isolation characteristics of 15 dB at the band of 3.6 to 5.5 GHz.
Taylor Model Based Verified Integration for the Volterra Equations and the Lorenz System

One of the important fields in validated methods is solving initial value problems in ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The typical problem of overestimation in interval arithmetic is mostly caused by the lack of information of functional dependency. The dependency problem that is related to cancellation is one issue to be overcome. Besides, in the case of solving a system of multidimensional ODEs, there arises the so-called wrapping effect, which is caused by the inflation of the size of the geometric set enclosing the validated solution set at each time step. The wrapping effect is a particular form of the dependency problem based on the connection of current dynamical values on initial conditions, which often is more dramatic than the other sources of overestimation. The history of development of new schemes for verified integration of ODEs illustrates the struggle with those two challenging questions [13, 6, 14, 7, 15]. The Taylor model method [10, 9] combines interval method for validation and high order automatic differentiation for local functional behavior. The method models a function f in the domain ~ D by a high order multivariate Taylor polynomial P and the remainder error interval I :
Et si l'immigration était un bienfait ? : l'impact positif de la gratitude intergroupe dans la relation entre français natifs et immigrés

La litterature montre clairement le role des emotions collectives (i.e., repondant a des evenements impliquant le groupe d'appartenance) sur les relations intergroupes. Les etudes existantes ont majoritairement examine les effets benefiques des emotions morales negatives (e.g., culpabilite ; Wohl & Branscombe, 2005) ou des emotions suscitees par des evenements negatifs (e.g., sympathie ; Iyer. Leach, & Crosby, 2003), sur les relations intergroupes. Dans cette lignee, nous souhaitions examiner l'effet d'une emotion morale et positive : la gratitude, une emotion generee par la perception d'avoir ete la cible de la bienveillance d'autrui (McCullough, Kilpatrick, Emmons, & Larson, 2001). Au dela de ses benefices intra-individuels, la gratitude favorise les tendances pro-sociales, renforce les relations (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006) et diminue l'usage des stereotypes (Jackson, Lewandowski, Fleury, & Chin, 2001). Si les benefices de cette emotion ont ete largement examines dans un contexte interpersonnel (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006), aucune etude, a notre connaissance, ne s'est interessee a son impact en tant qu'emotion collective au niveau des rapports intergroupes. Ce travail de these a ainsi pour objectif d'identifier les conditions d'apparition de la gratitude collective et les effets de celle-ci sur la perception et les attitudes a l'egard des immigres. Nous predisions que (a) la saillance des contributions positives de l'immigration susciterait de la gratitude collective chez les membres de l'endogroupe. En retour, (b) la gratitude collective engendrerait moins de prejuges et plus de comportements positifs envers les immigres. A cette fin, nous avons mene deux etudes correlationnelles (une transversale et une longitudinale) et six etudes experimentales, impliquant un total de 1913 participants. Dans ces dernieres, les emotions etaient induites en manipulant plusieurs methodes distinctes : lecture de textes, visionnage de supports video, rappel d'evenements historiques. Les resultats montrent que la connaissance des contributions des immigres s'accompagne de niveaux plus eleves de gratitude collective envers les immigres, comparee a une condition controle ou une autre emotion positive (e.g., joie). En retour, le ressenti de gratitude collective est associe a une reduction des prejuges, une augmentation des attitudes positives envers les immigres et une plus forte perception de cooperation entre les groupes, comparativement aux autres conditions. Les resultats mettent egalement en lumiere le role moderateur de l'orientation politique sur la propension a ressentir de la gratitude collective. L'ensemble de nos resultats suggere ainsi que la gratitude collective a un effet benefique dans l'amelioration des relations intergroupes.
Interview Evaluation of Leadership To Unify School Improvement Efforts (LUSIE).

The Leadership to Unify School Improvement Efforts (LUSIE) project worked with school leadership teams from 11 schools in 3 West Virginia county districts to create school plans for improvement. The school leadership teams, a total of 66 people representing a cross-section of each school community, accomplished this at four retreats held in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1996 and 1997. At the fourth retreat, LUSIE participants wrote a guide for other West Virginia schools involved in creating state-required Unified School Improvement Plans. Telephone interviews conducted with 23 participants found that most participants seemed pleased with LUSIE and their resultant school plans, although some expressed skepticism concerning implementation of the plans. Many noted their appreciation of the opportunity to communicate with other educators and people concerned about education. Several respondents said they had developed new competence in communicating and organizing change. The three students interviewed felt the proceedings were irrelevant or ineffective. The evaluation resulted in the following recommendations: integrate students more fully into LUSIE activities; initiate follow-up activities to support schools in the implementation of their plans; and address the concerns of those who noted a disjuncture between theoretical considerations and the practical applications of the work accomplished. Two appendices present the interview protocol and the evaluation standards checklist. (TD) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** Interview Evaluation of Leadership to Unify School Improvement Efforts (LUSIE)
Information transmission using a generalized chopper amplifier: Comparison of modulation schemes

In this paper we compare the capacity of different modulation schemes for a chopper amplifier. Using a simple theoretical model for noise we derive the capacity of unmodulated, chopper modulated and randomly modulated amplifiers. Experimental measurements of standard and randomly modulated amplifiers are performed and the information rates compared. When the chopping frequency is constrained to be the same, standard chopping provides higher information transmission than no modulation or random chopping.
Prima de riesgo y volatilidad en el mercado de valores español

En este trabajo se analiza la variabilidad de la prima de riesgo en el mercado de valores espanol a lo largo del periodo 1970-90. Un primer enfoque estudia la relacion rentabilidad-riesgo, a traves de un modelo ARIMA para la variable explicativa. Un analisis exploratorio de la volatilidad, utilizando tecnicas no parametricas, pone de manifiesto la posibilidad de introducir un modelo GARCH-M, cuyo interes reside en la generacion por el propio modelo de medidas de la incertidumbre. Las estimaciones obtenidas indican la existencia de una volatilidad persis-tente en el periodo analizado, lo cual es consistente con las actuales teorias de formacion de precios. Ademas, los resultados indican que en el ultimo decenio, al inversor espanol se le ha compensado suficiente-mente el riesgo asumido, asi como aparente ineficiencia en el mercado en algun subperiodo maestral.
Incorporation of Pharmacogenomics into Routine Clinical Practice: the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC) Guideline Development Process

The Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC) publishes genotype-based drug guidelines to help clinicians understand how available genetic test results could be used to optimize drug therapy. CPIC has focused initially on well-known examples of pharmacogenomic associations that have been implemented in selected clinical settings, publishing nine to date. Each CPIC guideline adheres to a standardized format and includes a standard system for grading levels of evidence linking genotypes to phenotypes and assigning a level of strength to each prescribing recommendation. CPIC guidelines contain the necessary information to help clinicians translate patient-specific diplotypes for each gene into clinical phenotypes or drug dosing groups. This paper reviews the development process of the CPIC guidelines and compares this process to the Institute of Medicine’s Standards for Developing Trustworthy Clinical Practice Guidelines.
Intra-Household Allocation of Time and Resources: Empirical Evidence on a Sample of Italian Households with Young Children

This paper examines the labour supply decision of the household when the presence of pre-school children, creating non-separabilities in the use of time, is explicitly taken into account. A set of nested tests is obtained from the standard household utility model and from the collective one, both including a household production function measuring the quality of time provided to the children. The application of the tests to a sample of Italian households shows that the collective model considered in this paper cannot be rejected. For this demographic group we also find enough evidence against the income pooling hypothesis and against the Slutsky inter-person symmetry condition. However, the identification of the income sharing parameters shows that the distribution of the household non-labour income does not affect the household labour supply system. We also provide a measure of the bias implicit in the standard household utility approach, by comparing the labour supply elasticiticies obtained from the two models.
Measuring the Board Governance Capability in China by Means of Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms

This paper took a research on the Board of governance capacity measurement using the neural networks and genetic algorithms method. After constructing a measurement indicator system about Board of governance capacity, the paper took a empirical rearch on Chinese company’s board governance capacity using the listed companies as the data sample. The results show that NNGA model improved the networks' performance comparing with traditional NN model. This paper took a research on the Board of governance capacity measurement using the neural networks and genetic algorithms method. After constructing a measurement indicator system about Board of governance capacity, the paper took a empirical rearch on Chinese company’s board governance capacity using the listed companies as the data sample. The results show that NNGA model improved the networks' performance comparing with traditional NN model. The stochastic nature of NNGA networks' structures develop more heterogeneous structures than NN model which were chosen through a fixed procedure.
A novel approach to image matching using convex layers

This paper presents a novel algorithm for image matching, i.e. comparing them in order to obtain the similarity measure. We extract geometric features of images by binarizing them and calculating a set of convex layers. These serve as unique features for consequent image comparison and similarity measurement. Our approach has linear computational complexity, and copes with rotated, translated, and scaled images, while it is also rather robust up to moderate signal-to-noise ratios.
High-speed decompression architecture of compressed HTTP streams for the internet routers

In recent years, studies of DPI have been carried out actively. HTTP packets, which are a kind of DPI target, include GZIP compressed packets, and multi-streamed GZIP compressed HTTP cannot be analyzed directly on routers. Moreover, wire-rate processing is required to achieve on-router analysis. In this paper, HTTP decompressing architecture on routers supporting 40Gbps network is considered, and three mechanisms, which are parallelized architecture, cache architecture and piggy-back method, were proposed for achieving higher throughput. Hardware cost simulations by using Verilog HDL confirms it can achieve 10Gbps throughput at low circuit costs.
Endoglucanase production with the newly isolated Myceliophtora sp. i-1d3b in a packed bed solid state fermentor

This work is aimed to produce endoglucanase through solid state fermentation in a packed bed bioreactor with the use of the fungus Myceliophtora sp. I-1D3b using a mixture of wheat bran (WB) and sugar cane bagasse (SCB) as culture medium. Preliminary tests were performed in polypropylene plastic bags, controlling the variables temperature (40, 45, and 50°C), initial moisture content (75, 80, and 85%, w.b.), and weight proportion SCB/WB (1:1, 7:3, and 9:1). The highest enzyme activities in plastic bags were obtained using the substrate proportion of 7:3, 50°C temperature, and 80% initial moisture content (878 U/grams of dry solid). High activities of filter-paper cellulase and xylanase were also obtained in plastic bags and some results are reported. For the packed bed experiments, the temperature (45 and 50°C) and the air flow rate (80, 100 and 120L/h) were the controlled variables. Activity of endoglucanase was similar to plastic bag tests. A longitudinal gradient of moisture content, was observed increasing from the bottom to the top of the reactor, even though the longitudinal enzyme activity profile was flat for almost the whole bed. Air flow rate did not affect enzyme activity, while experiments carried out at 50°C showed higher enzyme activities. The maximum temperature peak observed was at about 6°C above the process temperature.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Treatment for A Woman with Bowel and Bladder Obsession

Changes in autonomic function which results from anxiety can lead to an urge to defecate or urinate. In some patients, an exaggeration in visceral sensations can be accompanied by obsession and catastrophic fears that the patient may imminently lose control of their bladder or bowel functioning. The condition, known as bowel/bladder control anxiety (henceforth BBCA) disorder can hurt the social quality of life. In this paper, a case of a woman with bowel/bladder control anxiety disorder is presented. The patient was treated using cognitive behavioral therapy (henceforth CBT) to manage her anxiety about the imminent loss of control of her bowel, which had pushed her to avoid traveling outside of her house. Treatment consisted of six sessions of CBT. At the end of the therapy, the patient reported increased confidence to go outside her home, suggesting that CBT could be useful in the management of bowel/bladder control anxiety disorders. © 2019 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy. org.uk
The Info Agent: an Interface for Supporting Users in Intelligent Retrieval

In this paper we present a system that supports users in retrieving data in distributed and heterogeneous archives and repositories. The architecture is based on the metaphor of the software agents and incorporates innovative hints from other elds: distributed architectures, relevance feedback and active interfaces. The system has a cooperative and supportive role: it understands the user's needs and learns from his behavior. Its aim is to disengage the user from learning complex tools and from performing tedious and repetitive actions.
Armar II - a Learning and Cooperative Multimodal Humanoid Robot System

This paper gives an overview on current and forthcoming research activities of the Collaborative Research Center 588 "Humanoid Robots — Learning and Cooperating Multimodal Robots" which is located in Karlsruhe, Germany. Its research activities can be divided into the following areas: mechatronic robot system components like lightweight 7 DOF arms, 5-fingered dexterous hands, an active sensor head and a spine type central body and skills of the humanoid robot system; multimodal man-machine interfaces; augmented reality for modeling and simulation of robots, environment and user; and finally, cognitive abilities. Some of the research activities are described in this paper, and we introduce the application scenario testing the robot system. In particular, we present a robot teaching center and the execution which is of type "household. "
Estimation of Missing Values in Multimodal Biometric Fusion

The computation of any similarity score will be precluded by missing values. Missing values can be attributed to poor quality biometric data, poor data capture, or classifier error from computing the similarity scores. The presence of missing values in biometric systems can be inconvenient to the user, as the system will reject the submitted biometric data and request for another. It is therefore important for a biometric system to be prepared for, and able to deal with missing values. Currently methods for dealing with missing values can be categorised into: 1) (deletion) - deleting missing values; 2) (maximum likelihood) - computing maximum likelihood of observed data, while integrating out the missing values; 3) (imputation) - replacing missing values with estimated values. This paper adapts the popular k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) imputation method to produce three imputation methods for dealing with missing values in classification. We also introduces a forth category for dealing with missing values, called the exhaustive fusion framework. This method eliminates the need to predict or delete missing values. We show experimentally that our proposed methods provide an improved performance over the original k-NN and the widely used mean method for predicting missing data. These experiments were carried out using the newly developed BioSecure database and the popular XM2VTS database.
DOA Estimation of Quasi-Stationary Signals With Less Sensors Than Sources and Unknown Spatial Noise Covariance: A Khatri–Rao Subspace Approach

In real-world applications such as those for speech and audio, there are signals that are nonstationary but can be modeled as being stationary within local time frames. Such signals are generally called quasi-stationary or locally stationary signals. This paper considers the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of quasi-stationary signals. Specifically, in our problem formulation we assume: i) sensor array of uniform linear structure; ii) mutually uncorrelated wide-sense quasi-stationary source signals; and iii) wide-sense stationary noise process with unknown, possibly nonwhite, spatial covariance. Under the assumptions above and by judiciously examining the structures of local second-order statistics (SOSs), we develop a Khatri-Rao (KR) subspace approach that has two notable advantages. First, through an identifiability analysis, it is proven that this KR subspace approach can operate even when the number of sensors is about half of the number of sources. The idea behind is to make use of a ¿virtual¿ array structure provided inherently in the local SOS model, of which the degree of freedom is about twice of that of the physical array. Second, the KR formulation naturally provides a simple yet effective way of eliminating the unknown spatial noise covariance from the signal SOSs. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the KR subspace approach under various situations.
Mapping Antigenic Motifs in the Trypomastigote Small Surface Antigen from Trypanosoma cruzi

ABSTRACT The trypomastigote small surface antigen (TSSA) is a mucin-like molecule from Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas disease, which displays amino acid polymorphisms in parasite isolates. TSSA expression is restricted to the surface of infective cell-derived trypomastigotes, where it functions as an adhesin and engages surface receptors on the host cell as a prerequisite for parasite internalization. Previous results have established TSSA-CL, the isoform encoded by the CL Brener clone, as an appealing candidate for use in serology-based diagnostics for Chagas disease. Here, we used a combination of peptide- and recombinant protein-based tools to map the antigenic structure of TSSA-CL at maximal resolution. Our results indicate the presence of different partially overlapping B-cell epitopes clustering in the central portion of TSSA-CL, which contains most of the polymorphisms found in parasite isolates. Based on these results, we assessed the serodiagnostic performance of a 21-amino-acid-long peptide that spans TSSA-CL major antigenic determinants, which was similar to the performance of the previously validated glutathione S-transferase (GST)-TSSA-CL fusion molecule. Furthermore, the tools developed for the antigenic characterization of the TSSA antigen were also used to explore other potential diagnostic applications of the anti-TSSA humoral response in Chagasic patients. Overall, our present results provide additional insights into the antigenic structure of TSSA-CL and support this molecule as an excellent target for molecular intervention in Chagas disease.