Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High-latitude moisture structure determined from HIRS water vapour imagery

Abstract An atmospheric transmittance model has been applied to Antarctic radiosonde ascents in order to examine the high-latitude normalized weighting functions (NWF) of the water vapour channels on the High Resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder (HIRS). In the Antarctic coastal region the 6·7 μ radiances are shown to be largely atmospheric in origin and imagery created from these data can provide useful diagnostic information on tropospheric water vapour, even during the winter months. The 7·3μm data contain a large surface contribution and have less value as a diagnostic tool. An example is shown of HIRS water vapour imagery of the Antarctic at a time when a cold front was descending from the Antarctic Plateau to the coastal area. The imagery clearly showed the dry air behind the front and provided information that was not available with any other imagery channel. A second example of a North Atlantic polar low shows the contaminating effect of cloud when deep atmospheric systems are being examined.
Learning to Shade Hand-drawn Sketches

We present a fully automatic method to generate detailed and accurate artistic shadows from pairs of line drawing sketches and lighting directions. We also contribute a new dataset of one thousand examples of pairs of line drawings and shadows that are tagged with lighting directions. Remarkably, the generated shadows quickly communicate the underlying 3D structure of the sketched scene. Consequently, the shadows generated by our approach can be used directly or as an excellent starting point for artists. We demonstrate that the deep learning network we propose takes a hand-drawn sketch, builds a 3D model in latent space, and renders the resulting shadows. The generated shadows respect the hand-drawn lines and underlying 3D space and contain sophisticated and accurate details, such as self-shadowing effects. Moreover, the generated shadows contain artistic effects, such as rim lighting or halos appearing from back lighting, that would be achievable with traditional 3D rendering methods.
Location Prediction over Sparse User Mobility Traces Using RNNs: Flashback in Hidden States!

Location prediction is a key problem in human mobility modeling, which predicts a user's next location based on historical user mobility traces. As a sequential prediction problem by nature, it has been recently studied using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Due to the sparsity of user mobility traces, existing techniques strive to improve RNNs by considering spatiotemporal contexts. The most adopted scheme is to incorporate spatiotemporal factors into the recurrent hidden state passing process of RNNs using context-parameterized transition matrices or gates. However, such a scheme oversimplifies the temporal periodicity and spatial regularity of user mobility, and thus cannot fully benefit from rich historical spatiotemporal contexts encoded in user mobility traces. Against this background, we propose Flashback, a general RNN architecture designed for modeling sparse user mobility traces by doing flashbacks on hidden states in RNNs. Specifically, Flashback explicitly uses spatiotemporal contexts to search past hidden states with high predictive power (i.e., historical hidden states sharing similar contexts as the current one) for location prediction, which can then directly benefit from rich spatiotemporal contexts. Our extensive evaluation compares Flashback against a sizable collection of state-of-the-art techniques on two real-world LBSN datasets. Results show that Flashback consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RNNs involving spatiotemporal factors by 15.9% to 27.6% in the next location prediction task.
Characteristics and causes of shallow seismicity in andesite volcanoes

Recent observations from Soufriere Hills volcano in Montserrat reveal a wide variety of seismic signals. We focus here on characteristics of long-period events, and their role in the pressurization of the volcanic plumbing system. These events can occur in swarms and merge into tremor, an observation that sheds further light on the generation and composition of harmonic tremor. A two-dimensional finite-difference method has been employed to model major features of low-frequency seismic signatures and compare them with the observations. A depth-dependent seismic velocity model for a fluid-filled conduit is used that accounts for the varying gas content in the magma. We analyse episodes of tremor that show shifting spectral lines and model those in terms of changes in excess pressure due to unloading and degassing events. Potential trigger mechanisms are suggested and discussed.
Sim2Real Viewpoint Invariant Visual Servoing by Recurrent Control

Humans are remarkably proficient at controlling their limbs and tools from a wide range of viewpoints. In robotics, this ability is referred to as visual servoing: moving a tool or end-point to a desired location using primarily visual feedback. In this paper, we propose learning viewpoint invariant visual servoing skills in a robot manipulation task. We train a deep recurrent controller that can automatically determine which actions move the end-effector of a robotic arm to a desired object. This problem is fundamentally ambiguous: under severe variation in viewpoint, it may be impossible to determine the actions in a single feedforward operation. Instead, our visual servoing approach uses its memory of past movements to understand how the actions affect the robot motion from the current viewpoint, correcting mistakes and gradually moving closer to the target. This ability is in stark contrast to previous visual servoing methods, which assume known dynamics or require a calibration phase. We learn our recurrent controller using simulated data, synthetic demonstrations and reinforcement learning. We then describe how the resulting model can be transferred to a real-world robot by disentangling perception from control and only adapting the visual layers. The adapted model can servo to previously unseen objects from novel viewpoints on a real-world Kuka IIWA robotic arm. For supplementary videos, see: https://www.youtube. com/watch? v=oLgM2Bnb7fo
Mid‐latitude (30°–60° N) climatic warming inferred by combining borehole temperatures with surface air temperatures

We construct a mid‐latitude (30°–60° N) reduced temperature‐depth profile from a global borehole temperature database compiled for climate reconstruction. This reduced temperature profile is interpreted in terms of past surface ground temperature change and indicates warming on the order of 1°C over the past 100 to 200 years. The combination of an initial temperature (the primary free parameter) with the last 140 years of gridded surface air temperature (SAT) data yields a synthetic temperature profile that is an excellent fit to observations, accounting for 99% of the observed variance and a RMS misfit of only 12 mK. The good correlation suggests that this reduced temperature profile shares much information with the mean SAT record over large areas and long time‐scales. Our analysis indicates 0.7°±0.1°C of ground warming between pre‐industrial time and the 1961–1990 mean SAT.
Performance and Cost Tradeoffs in Metal-Programmable Structured ASICs (MPSAs)

As process technology scales, the design effort and nonrecurring engineering (NRE) costs associated with the development of integrated circuits is becoming extremely high. Structured ASICs offer one solution to these problems. However, to realize their full potential, their performance and cost advantages, architectures, and CAD must be fully understood. We believe that this can lead to wider adoption of structured ASICs. In this paper, we take a step in this direction and investigate the area, delay, power, and cost tradeoffs in metal-programmable structured ASICs (MPSAs). In particular, we quantify the impact of the number of user-defined (custom) metal mask layers on these metrics. Results indicate that for lowest cost, the number of custom layers should be minimized, especially for small die sizes (e.g., less than 100 mm2). Delay and power, however, can be improved by a few additional custom layers. With two custom metal layers, MPSAs can be 2x - 10x cheaper than cell-based ICs (CBICs).
Aerosol effect on the warm rain formation process: Satellite observations and modeling

This study demonstrates how aerosols influence the liquid precipitation formation process. This demonstration is provided by the combined use of satellite observations and global high‐resolution model simulations. Methodologies developed to examine the warm cloud microphysical processes are applied to both multi‐sensor satellite observations and aerosol‐coupled global cloud‐resolving model (GCRM) results to illustrate how the warm rain formation process is modulated under different aerosol conditions. The observational analysis exhibits process‐scale signatures of rain suppression due to increased aerosols, providing observational evidence of the aerosol influence on precipitation. By contrast, the corresponding statistics obtained from the model show a much faster rain formation even for polluted aerosol conditions and much weaker reduction of precipitation in response to aerosol increase. It is then shown that this reduced sensitivity points to a fundamental model bias in the warm rain formation process that in turn biases the influence of aerosol on precipitation. A method of improving the model bias is introduced in the context of a simplified single‐column model (SCM) that represents the cloud‐to‐rain water conversion process in a manner similar to the original GCRM. Sensitivity experiments performed by modifying the model assumptions in the SCM and their comparisons to satellite statistics both suggest that the auto‐conversion scheme has a critical role in determining the precipitation response to aerosol perturbations and also provide a novel way of constraining key parameters in the auto‐conversion schemes of global models.
Melt supply variations to a magma‐poor ultra‐slow spreading ridge (Southwest Indian Ridge 61° to 69°E)

The Southwest Indian Ridge (SWIR) to the east of the Melville Fracture zone receives anomalously low volumes of melt on average. However, a small number of ridge segments appear to receive more melt than this regional average. We use off‐axis bathymetry, gravity, and magnetic data to show that this melt distribution pattern, quite distinct from what is observed at the Mid‐Atlantic Ridge (MAR), has been a characteristic of the easternmost SWIR for at least the past 10 myr. We also show that segments of the easternmost SWIR are substantially shorter lived than most segments of the MAR. Melt distribution in our SWIR study area is therefore both more focused and more variable in time than at the MAR. We tentatively propose a mechanism by which strong and transient melt‐focusing events could be initiated by a localized increase in the volume of melt supplied by the melting mantle to the base of the axial lithosphere, causing thermal thinning of this lithosphere and along‐axis melt migration. These two processes may combine to effectively focus larger volumes of melt toward the center of future thick crust segments. Rapid melt extraction by dikes that feed large volcanic constructions on the seafloor, followed by tectonic disruption of these volcanic constructions by deep‐reaching faults, may then cool the axial lithosphere back to its original thickness and end the melt‐focusing events. The easternmost SWIR is also characterized by a common departure from isostatic compensation of seafloor topography and by a pronounced asymmetry of crustal thickness and seafloor relief between the two ridge flanks. At the faster spreading MAR, similar characteristics are found near the ends of ridge segments. We propose that spreading at the ultra‐slow SWIR during periods when the melt supply is low (i.e., most of the time for the easternmost SWIR) is dominated by large offset asymmetric normal faulting, with significant flexural uplift of the footwalls. Faults face either north or south, and changes in fault polarity are frequent, both along axis and along flow lines (i.e., with time). Producing large faults and maintaining high uncompensated reliefs require the axial lithosphere to be thick, a predictable characteristic for this ultra‐slow ridge, which has an anomalously low regionally averaged melt supply.
An internal energy theorem for the atmosphere and its association with turbulent (potential) temperature variances

An extended treatment of the internal energy as a thermodynamic potential in the energy‐entropy picture is presented in connection with atmospheric systems under turbulent conditions. One finds that a turbulent thermodynamically autonomous energy quantity, the turbulent internal energy (TIE) which belongs to the mean state internal energy depending on averaged state variables, can be derived. The elementary relevance of TIE becomes expediently represented by means of a second‐order Taylor approach; it explains TIE as the energetic response to the eddy variances of the independent thermodynamic variables of state (i.e. temperature and mass density or potential temperature). The difference of the novel concept of TIE to existing available energy formulations is discussed.
Interannual and Decadal Temperature Variability in the Southwest Pacific Ocean between 1955 and 1988.

Abstract The spatial and temporal variability of the southwest Pacific Ocean is examined with the aim of describing the physical processes operating on interannual and decadal timescales. The study takes advantage of a new temperature atlas of the upper 450 m of the southwest Pacific Ocean, obtained from 40 000 bathythermograph profiles between 1955 and 1988. Rotated principal components analysis was used to filter the important spatial and temporal scales of temperature variability in the data. Three different analyses are presented. They include two intraocean analyses and a joint analysis of subsurface ocean temperature, sea level pressure, and surface winds. The dominant El Nino mode describes the large vertical excursions of the thermocline in the western tropical Pacific in response to atmospheric forcing at a 3–6-month lag. More importantly, most of the retained modes, outside of the equatorial region, have time variations that correlate with El Nino. One ocean mode, with a spatial pattern represen.
Demo of Face2Face: real-time face capture and reenactment of RGB videos

We present a novel approach for real-time facial reenactment of a monocular target video sequence (e.g., Youtube video). The source sequence is also a monocular video stream, captured live with a commodity webcam. Our goal is to animate the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-render the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion. To this end, we first address the under-constrained problem of facial identity recovery from monocular video by non-rigid model-based bundling. At run time, we track facial expressions of both source and target video using a dense photometric consistency measure. Reenactment is then achieved by fast and efficient deformation transfer between source and target. The mouth interior that best matches the re-targeted expression is retrieved from the target sequence and warped to produce an accurate fit. Finally, we convincingly re-render the synthesized target face on top of the corresponding video stream such that it seamlessly blends with the real-world illumination. We demonstrate our method in a live setup, where Youtube videos are reen-acted in real time.
Object-based larch tree-crown delineation using high-resolution satellite imagery

Olgan larch is a traditional construction material used for the renovation of historical timber-frame buildings in China. However, acquiring the necessary large-sized larch trees from old-growth forests has become a challenge in China because of the rare and inaccessible distribution of these trees. In recent years, remote sensing imagery has provided a more effective alternative for delineating tree crowns automatically with high accuracy. In this study, an object-based method for delineating old-growth larch tree crowns using Geoeye-1 imagery is developed. Tree crown delineation results are tested and evaluated by field data. In addition, the correlation between delineated tree-crown and basal areas are quantitatively validated to ensure that the developed method can be applied for estimating the distribution of old-growth larch trees. Results demonstrate that the developed object-based larch tree-crown delineation method is reliable, thus providing a new technique for detecting old-growth larch tree resources in Northeastern China.
On the pre-treatment of municipal organic waste towards fuel production: a review

Lignocelluloses are the main constituents of municipal organic waste (MOW). In order to increase the production of fuels, via fermentations, the enzymatic hydrolysis is the first step towards a valorisation process. It is well-known that the hydrolysis of lignocelluloses is not very effective because of the high stability of the constituents. In this respect the pre-treatment of MOW is necessary to increase the efficiency of the biological processes. Several pre-treatment processes are reviewed and analysed in the paper and the drawbacks are pointed out. The fundamental scientific features are highlighted and details are given on the technological parameters. The increase in the availability of sugars after pre-treatment seems to be rather high. The necessity of setting up a design procedure and defining scale-up criteria for the full scale pre-treatment of MOW are problems that still need to be overcome in order to extend the technology to MSW treatment field. A pilot plant of adequate potentiality is shown in an attempt to cover this gap.
An alternative view on the origin of chemical and isotopic patterns in groundwater from the Milk River Aquifer, Canada

The Milk River artesian aquifer underlies 15,000 km2 of southern Alberta, Canada. It consists of thin (30–75 m thick) sandstone and is confined above by the Pakowki shale (typically 120 m thick) and below by the Colorado shale. The aquifer subcrops in southern Alberta and northern Montana. Groundwater movement is to the north, west, and east from the outcrop area (dominant recharge area). Cl− and I− concentrations increase in the direction of flow from less than 0.05 and 0.001 mmol/L, respectively, near the recharge area to more than 140 and 0.15 mmol/L at the northern edge of the aquifer. Similarly, waters become more enriched in oxygen 18 and deuterium from less than −21.0 and −167‰ near the recharge area to values approaching −8.0 and −70.0‰ in the north. Isotope values in the recharge area plot on the global meteoric water line and indicate that the recharge waters are isotopically unaltered meteoric waters. Downgradient from the recharge area the data deviate from the meteoric water line (slope of 6.3 instead of 8.0). Three mechanisms have been advanced to explain the origin of the chemical and isotopic patterns: the introduction of connate formation water through the Colorado shale and subsequent mixing with infiltrating meteoric water; a finite source of meteoric recharge mixing with more saline water in the aquifer; and chemical and isotopic enrichment due to ion filtration. Hydraulic conductivity and hydraulic head data, Cl− concentrations of drill cuttings and isotopic values from groundwater from the Colorado shale provide arguments for reevaluating these ideas. An alternative mechanism, based on diffusion between saline, isotopically enriched water in the Colorado shale and fresher, isotopically depleted water in the aquifer, is tested using an analytical mass transport model. Although uncertainty exists in the model parameters, results showed that the patterns in Cl−, I−, δ18O, and δ2H in the aquifer can be explained by aquitard diffusion. Further, aquitard diffusion must be considered when using chlorine 36 dating methods in aquifer-aquitard systems such as the Milk River aquifer.
Surimi dari Ikan Beloso (Saurida Tumbil Sp) dan Analisis Kandungan Gizinya

Surimi merupakan bahan makanan hasil rekayasa teknologi pengolahan pangan menggunakan bahan dasar ikan. Ikan beloso ( Saurida tumbil Sp) yang digunakan merupakan ikan berdaging putih. Ikan berdaging putih baik digunakan sebagai bahan dasar surimi karena akan menghasilkan kekuatan gel yang besar. Metode penelitian yang dilakukan meliputi produksi surimi melalui tahap persiapan, pemisahan daging dari tulang dan duri, pembilasan, pengepresan dan penapisan, dilanjutkan analisis kandungan gizi meliputi penentuan kadar air dan kadar abu dengan cara gravimetri; kadar protein dengan cara Kjedahl; dan kadar lemak dengan cara Soxhletasi. Mutu surimi ditentukan oleh sifat elastisitas, nilai gizi, dan warna. Pada penelitian ini dikaji tentang produksi surimi dengan variasi pH yaitu pH 2, 7, dan 10 ; konsentrasi garam 1%; 3%, dan 6% , serta hasil analisis kandungan gizi produk. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa variasi pH berpengaruh pada tekstur dan kandungan gizi produk. Hasil analisis kandungan gizi menunjukkan kadar air surimi pada pH 2 adalah 77,84%; pH 7 adalah 78,69% dan pH 10 adalah 78,65%. Kadar abu, untuk ketiga variasi pH tersebut berturut- turut adalah 0,71%; 0,95%, dan 1,22% ; kadar protein 14,38%; 18,8%, dan 12,65% ; kadar lemak adalah 1,17% ; 1,80%, dan 1,44%. Berdasarkan karakteristik tekstur dan kandungan protein, surimi pH 7 lebih baik dari surimi kedua pH lainnya, maka selanjutnya dilakukan penambahan variasi konsentrasi garam 1%, 3% dan 6%. Hasil analisis produk surimi dari ketiga variasi konsentrasi garam 1%, 3%, dan 6% adalah kandungan air berturut-turut 75,65%; 73,63%, dan 71,75%, kandungan abu 1,08%; 1,14%, dan 1,17%, kandungan proteinnya adalah 16,73%, 15,48%, dan 14,86%, kandungan lemaknya 1,28%, 0,76%, dan 0,79 %. Hasil tersebut mendekati standar gizi surimi yang disarankan oleh Badan Standarisasi Nasional. Kata Kunci: Surimi, Ikan beloso (Saurida tumbil Sp), Kandungan gizi.
Fast Release/Capture Sampling in Large-Scale Sensor Networks

Efficient estimation of global information is a common requirement for many wireless sensor network applications. Examples include counting the number of nodes alive in the network and measuring the scale of physically correlated events. These tasks must be accomplished at extremely low overhead due to the severe resource limitation of sensor nodes, which poses a challenge for large-scale sensor networks. In this paper, we develop a novel protocol FLAKE to efficiently and accurately estimate the global information of large-scale sensor networks based on the sparse sampling theory. Specially, FLAKE disseminates a small number of messages called seeds to the network and issues a query about which nodes receive a seed. The number of nodes that have the information of interest can be estimated by counting the seeds disseminated, the nodes queried, and the nodes that receive a seed. FLAKE can be easily implemented in a distributed manner due to its simplicity. Moreover, desirable tradeoffs can be achieved between the accuracy of estimation and the system overhead. Our simulations show that FLAKE significantly outperforms several existing schemes on accuracy, delay, and message overhead.