Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
3D tele-immersion platform for interactive immersive experiences between remote users

Tele-immersion (TI) related technologies can change the way people interact and bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds. However, while the technology itself advances, most developed platforms have complex setups and require large investments. In this work, a low-cost platform is introduced, integrating multiple TI-related advances. Focusing on ease of use and rapid deployment, a fast and fully automatic calibration method is proposed. The platform enables real-time 3D reconstruction of users and their placement into a pre-authored 3D environment. Moreover, interaction is achieved through the user's body posture, removing the need for additional equipment and enabling natural control while immersed. Developing a real-time TI platform requires the efficient integration of several multidisciplinary elements. An elegant, minimal solution to these challenges is proposed and validated in a prototype TI multiplayer game, SpaceWars.
Effect of deposition time SnO2 thin film deposited using thermal CVD for humidity sensor application

The effect of SnO2 thin film thickness as humidity sensor application has been investigated. In this paper, Humidity sensitivity of SnO2 thin film at different thickness deposited by thermal chemical vapor deposition were presented. The electrical, optical and structural properties of SnO2 thin film deposited at different deposition time using thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD) were investigated. The thin films were characterized using current-voltage (I–V) measurement (Keithley 2400) and photoluminescence (PL) measurement (Horiba Jobin Yvon-DU420A-OE-325 system) for electrical and optical properties respectively. The structural propeties has been characterized using field emmision scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) (JEOL JSM 6701F). The humidity measurement were conducted on Au metal contact deposited on SnO2 thin film that connected to a circuit using copper wire. The sensor were characterized using I–V measurement (Keithley 2400) in a humidity chamber (ESPEC SH-261) and the chamber has been set at same room temperature (25 °C) but different percent relative humidity (RH %) at 40 RH% to 90 RH. Deposition time for 60 minutes show high sensitivity . PL measurement revealed one peak at about between range red emission for all thin film. FESEM image show SnO2 nanoparticle growth on the nucleation site of gold catalyst.
The influence factors of medical professionalism

Abstract As the relationship between physicians and patients deteriorated in China recently, medical conflicts occurred more frequently now. Physicians, to a certain extent, also take some responsibilities. Awareness of medical professionalism and its influence factors can be helpful to take targeted measures and alleviate the contradiction. Through a combination of physicians’ self-assessment and patients’ assessment in ambulatory care clinics in Chengdu, this research aims to evaluate the importance of medical professionalism in hospitals and explore the influence factors, hoping to provide decision-making references to improve this grim situation. From February to March, 2013, a cross-sectional study was conducted in 2 tier 3 hospitals, 5 tier 2 hospitals, and 10 community hospitals through a stratified-random sampling method on physicians and patients, at a ratio of 1/5. Questionnaires are adopted from a pilot study. A total of 382 physicians and 1910 patients were matched and surveyed. Regarding the medical professionalism, the scores of the self-assessment for physicians were 85.18 ± 7.267 out of 100 and the scores of patient-assessment were 57.66 ± 7.043 out of 70. The influence factors of self-assessment were physicians’ working years (P = 0.003) and patients’ complaints (P = 0.006), whereas the influence factors of patient-assessment were patients’ ages (P = 0.001) and their physicians’ working years (P < 0.01) and satisfaction on the payment mode (P = 0.006). Higher self-assessment on the medical professionalism was in accordance with physicians of more working years and no complaint history. Higher patient-assessment was in line with elder patients, the physicians’ more working years, and higher satisfaction on the payment mode. Elder patients, encountering with physicians who worked more years in health care services or with higher satisfaction on the payment mode, contribute to higher scores in patient assessment part. The government should strengthen the medical professionalism for young physicians and improve the payment mode.
The Storage of Time Intervals Using Oscillating Neurons

A mechanism to store and recall time intervals ranging from hundreds of milliseconds to tens of seconds is described. The principle is based on beat frequencies between oscillating elements; any small group of oscillators codes specifically for an interval equal to the lowest common multiple of their oscillation periods. This mechanism could be realized in the nervous system by an output neuron, excited by a group of pacemaker neurons, and able to select via a Hebbian rule a subgroup of pacemaker cells to encode any given interval, or small number of intervals (for example, a pattern of pulses). Recall could be achieved by resetting the pacemaker cells and setting a threshold for activation of the output unit. A simulation is described and the main features of such an encoding scheme are discussed.
Time Series of Polarimetric Indicators and their Potential Relationships with Biophysical Parameters of Agricultural Crops

Quad-pol measurements at L-band acquired during the AGRISAR’06 campaign have been used in order to compute time series of entropy, alpha angle and anisotropy from an agricultural area with a simultaneous dedicated ground-data acquisition. The study has been focused on winter wheat, maize and rape crops, and the biophysical parameters considered were crop coverage, BBCH phase, Leaf Area Index (LAI), wet biomass and crop height. Time series of these polarimetric indicators and their relationship to crop development parameters and phenological stages have been analyzed. Results reveal the potential of some of these observables for both the detection of particular crop conditions and for continuous crop monitoring. A second part of this work is focused on a preliminary analysis on the potential of hybrid-pol architecture decomposition parameters for agricultural monitoring. Time series of such parameteres have been also computed and their potential sensitivity during the growing season has been addressed.
Perceiving Hierarchical Musical Structure in Auditory and Visual Modalities

iii List of Tables . vi List of Figures . vii Perceiving Hierarchical Musical Structure in Auditory and Visual Modalities . 1 Experiment 1 . 16 Method . 16 Participants . 16 Stimuli and Materials. 17 Procedure . 22 Planned Analyses . 26 Results . 27 Discussion . 33 Experiment 2 . 38 Method . 38 Participants . 38 Stimuli . 40 Measures . 42 Procedure . 44 Planned Analyses . 46 Results . 47 Discussion . 56 General Discussion . 60
Grammatical Constraints on Intra-sentential Code-Switching: From Theories to Working Models

We make one of the first attempts to build working models for intra-sentential code-switching based on the Equivalence-Constraint (Poplack 1980) and Matrix-Language (Myers-Scotton 1993) theories. We conduct a detailed theoretical analysis, and a small-scale empirical study of the two models for Hindi-English CS. Our analyses show that the models are neither sound nor complete. Taking insights from the errors made by the models, we propose a new model that combines features of both the theories.
Visual Hallucinations in the Psychosis Spectrum and Comparative Information From Neurodegenerative Disorders and Eye Disease

Much of the research on visual hallucinations (VHs) has been conducted in the context of eye disease and neurodegenerative conditions, but little is known about these phenomena in psychiatric and nonclinical populations. The purpose of this article is to bring together current knowledge regarding VHs in the psychosis phenotype and contrast this data with the literature drawn from neurodegenerative disorders and eye disease. The evidence challenges the traditional views that VHs are atypical or uncommon in psychosis. The weighted mean for VHs is 27% in schizophrenia, 15% in affective psychosis, and 7.3% in the general community. VHs are linked to a more severe psychopathological profile and less favorable outcome in psychosis and neurodegenerative conditions. VHs typically co-occur with auditory hallucinations, suggesting a common etiological cause. VHs in psychosis are also remarkably complex, negative in content, and are interpreted to have personal relevance. The cognitive mechanisms of VHs in psychosis have rarely been investigated, but existing studies point to source-monitoring deficits and distortions in top-down mechanisms, although evidence for visual processing deficits, which feature strongly in the organic literature, is lacking. Brain imaging studies point to the activation of visual cortex during hallucinations on a background of structural and connectivity changes within wider brain networks. The relationship between VHs in psychosis, eye disease, and neurodegeneration remains unclear, although the pattern of similarities and differences described in this review suggests that comparative studies may have potentially important clinical and theoretical implications.
Turning Up the Heat: Inflammasome Activation by Fungal Pathogens

Since its first description in 2002 [1], the inflammasome has been implicated in the mechanisms underlying a growing number of infectious, autoimmune, and metabolic diseases [2]. Regarding infectious processes, several studies have shown the involvement of this critical component of innate immunity in the outcome of infection with nearly every class of microbe, including fungi [3]. Innate immunity is the frontline of defense against infection and relies on the ability of its main players (phagocytes and epithelial barriers) to detect conserved components of microbes or pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs). In fungi, the carbohydrate polymers of the cell wall, such as chitin, β-glucan, and mannan are the major PAMPs recognized by the host’s innate immune cells; this recognition occurs via germline-encoded receptors termed pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) [4]. In addition to PAMPs, endogenous molecules associated with damaged host cells, or damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), are released during tissue injury and activate PRRs. This innate detection system includes the Toll-like receptors (TLRs), C-type lectin receptors (CLRs), RIG-I-like receptors (RLRs), NOD-like receptors (NLRs), and AIM2-like receptors (ALRs). Although the main fungal- recognition PRRs (CLRs and TLRs) are bound to the cytoplasmic membrane of innate immune cells [4], fungal sensing by PRRs located in the cytosol, such as the NLRs and ALRs, is becoming increasingly evident. A number of NLRs and ALRs can assemble into the inflammasome, a multiprotein complex consisted of PRRs such as NLRP3 (NLR family, pyrin domain-containing 3), NLRC4, or AIM2, adaptor protein ASC (apoptosis-associated speck-like protein containing a caspase activation and recruitment domain (CARD), and procaspase-1 [3]. Upon formation of the complex, procaspase-1 is cleaved into an active cysteine protease, which further cleaves the proinflammatory cytokines IL-1β and IL-18 into their mature forms, followed by unconventional secretion. IL-1β and IL-18 mediate several innate antimicrobial responses and are critical to direct adaptive Th17/Th1 cellular responses [5]. In addition, inflammasome activation causes pyroptosis, a lytic inflammatory form of cell death [2,5].
Scaling Up Information Updates in Distributed Condition Monitoring

Monitoring complex conditions over multiple distributed, autonomous information agents can be expensive and difficult to scale. Information updates can lead to significant network traffic and processing cost, and high update rates can quickly overwhelm a system. For many applications, significant cost is incurred responding to changes at an individual agent that do not result in a change to an overriding condition. But often we can avoid much work of this sort by exploiting application semantics. In particular, we can exploit constraints on information change over time to avoid the expensive and frequent process of checking for a condition that cannot yet be satisfied. We motivate this issue and present a framework for exploiting the semantics of information change in information agents. We partition monitored objects based on a lower bound on the time until they can satisfy a complex condition, and filter updates to them accordingly. We present and implement a simple analytic model of the savings that accrue to our methods. Besides significantly decreasing the workload and increasing the scalability of distributed condition monitoring for many applications, our techniques can appreciably improve the agents' response time between a condition occurrence and its recognition.
Physico-Chemical Characteristics and Functional Properties of Chitin and Chitosan Produced by Mucor circinelloides Using Yam Bean as Substrate

Microbiological processes were used for chitin and chitosan production by Mucor circinelloides (UCP 050) grown in yam bean (Pachyrhizus erosus L. Urban) medium. The polysaccharides were extracted by alkali–acid treatment and structural investigations by X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform IR analysis, viscosity and thermal analysis by TG, DTG, and DTA were done. The highest biomass yield (20.7 g/L) was obtained at 96 hours. The highest levels of chitosan (64 mg/g) and chitin (500 mg/g) were produced at 48 and 72 hours, respectively. It was demonstrated that yam bean shows great potential as an economic medium and it is possible to achieve a good yield of chitosan with chemical properties that enable its use in biotechnological applications.
Towards selecting robust hand gestures for automotive interfaces

Driver distraction is a serious threat to automotive safety. The visual-manual interfaces in cars are a source of distraction for drivers. Automotive touch-less hand gesture-based user interfaces can help to reduce driver distraction and enhance safety and comfort. The choice of hand gestures in automotive interfaces is central to their success and widespread adoption. In this work we evaluate the recognition accuracy of 25 different gestures for state-of-the-art computer vision-based gesture recognition algorithms and for human observers. We show that some gestures are consistently recognized more accurately than others by both vision-based algorithms and humans. We further identify similarities in the hand gesture recognition abilities of vision-based systems and humans. Lastly, by merging pairs of gestures with high miss-classification rates, we propose ten robust hand gestures for automotive interfaces, which are classified with high and equal accuracy by vision-based algorithms.
Quantum Energy-based P Systems

Energy–based P systems have been recently defined as P systems in which the amount of energy manipulated and/or consumed during computations is taken into account. In this paper we propose two quantum versions of energy–based P systems. Both versions are defined just like classical energy–based P systems, but for objects and rules. Objects are represented as pure states in the Hilbert space C, whereas the definition of rules differs between the two models. In the former, rules are defined as bijective functions — implemented as unitary operators — which transform the objects from the alphabet. In the latter, rules are defined as generic functions which map the alphabet into itself. Such functions are implemented using a generalization of the Conditional Quantum Control technique, and may yield to non– unitary operators. Finally, we address some problems and outline some directions for future work.
Interdomaintraffic engineering with BGP

Traffic engineering is performed by means of a set of techniques that can be used to better control the flow of packets inside an IP network. We discuss the utilization of these techniques across interdomain boundaries in the global Internet. We first analyze the characteristics of interdomain traffic on the basis of measurements from three different Internet Service Providers and show that a small number of sources are responsible for a large fraction of the traffic. Across interdomain boundaries, traffic engineering relies on a careful tuning of the route advertisements sent via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). We explain how this tuning can be used to control the flow of the incoming and of the outgoing traffic and identify its limitations.
Local search and heterogeneities in weighted complex networks

a new algorithm based on a network measure, local betweenness centrality (LBC), for search in complex networks that are heterogeneous in node degree and edge weights. LBC search utilizes both the heterogeneities and performs the best in scale-free weighted networks. We further argue that the amount of information used by LBC search could be optimal.
Data normalization for DNA methylation profiles of cancer genomes

For DNA methylation data, many researchers believe that current normalization methods may distort the real difference between the methylation signals for normal and cancer samples. In this paper, using six methylation datasets for three cancer types, we found almost all of the differentially methylated (DM) genes detected in both the Quantile-normalized data and non-normalized data show consistent methylation states. In each dataset, more DM genes could be found in the Quantile-normalized data than in the non-normalized data. We showed that, for each dataset, the DM genes additionally selected in the Quantile-normalized data showed significantly consistent methylation states in another independent dataset for the same cancer, indicating that these extra DM genes are effective biological signals. Hence, the Quantile normalization method can be applied to normalize methylation data to increase the power of detecting DM genes. However, in some datasets, the methylation states of about 1% of DM genes selected in the Quantile-normalized data are opposite to those in the non-normalized data and we must filter out these false DM genes.
Stand age and tree species affect N 2 O and CH 4 exchange from afforested soils

Abstract. Afforestation of former agricultural land is a means to mitigate anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The objectives of this study were (1) to assess the effect of oak (Quercus robur) and Norway spruce (Picea abies [L.] Karst.) stands of different stand ages (13–17 and 40 years after afforestation, respectively) on N2O and CH4 exchange from the soil under these species and (2) identify the environmental factors responsible for the differences in gas exchange between tree species of different ages. N2O and CH4 fluxes (mean ± SE) were measured for two years at an afforested site. No species difference was documented for N2O emission (oak: 4.2 ± 0.7 μg N2O-N m−2 h−1, spruce: 4.0 ± 1 μg N2O-N m−2 h−1) but the youngest stands (1.9 ± 0.3 μg N2O-N m−2 h−1) emitted significantly less N2O than older stands (6.3 ± 1.2 μg N2O-N m−2 h−1). CH4 exchange did not differ significantly between tree species (oak: −8.9 ± 0.9, spruce: −7.7 ± 1) or stand age (young: −7.3 ± 0.9 μg CH4-C m−2 h−1, old: −9.4 ± 1 μg CH4-C m−2 h−1) but interacted significantly; CH4 oxidation in the soil increased with stand age in oak and decreased with age for soils under Norway spruce. We conclude that the exchange of N2O and CH4 from the forest soil undergoes a quick and significant transition in the first four decades after planting in both oak and Norway spruce. These changes are related to (1) increased soil N availability over time as a result of less demand for N by trees in turn facilitating higher N2O production in older stands and (2) decreasing bulk density and increased gas diffusivity in the top soil over time facilitating better exchange of N2O and CH4 with the atmosphere.
Decidability of Predicate Logics with Team Semantics

We study the complexity of predicate logics based on team semantics. We show that the satisfiability problems of two-variable independence logic and inclusion logic are both NEXPTIME-complete. Furthermore, we show that the validity problem of two-variable dependence logic is undecidable, thereby solving an open problem from the team semantics literature. We also briefly analyse the complexity of the Bernays-Schonfinkel-Ramsey prefix classes of dependence logic.
A Novel Approach to Auto Image Annotation Based on Pairwise Constrained Clustering and Semi-Na&#239;ve Bayesian Model

Automatic image annotation has been intensively studied for content-based image retrieval recently. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for this task. Our approach first performs the segmentation of images into regions, followed by the clustering of regions, before learning the associations between concepts and region clusters using the set of training images with pre-assigned concepts. The main focus of this paper and our main contributions are as follows. First, in the learning stage, we perform clustering of regions into region clusters by incorporating pair-wise constraints derived by considering the language model underlying the annotations assigned to training images. Second, in the annotation stage, to alleviate the restriction of the independence assumption between region clusters, we develop a greedy selection and joining algorithm to find the independent sub-sets of region clusters and employ a semi-naïve Bayesian (SNB) model to compute the posterior probability of concepts given those independent sub-sets. Experimental results show that our proposed system utilizing these two strategies outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in large image collection.
The clinical impact of serrated colorectal polyps

Serrated polyps (SPs) of the colorectum pose a novel challenge to practicing gastroenterologists. Previously thought benign and unimportant, there is now compelling evidence that SPs are responsible for a significant percentage of incident colorectal cancer worldwide. In contrast to conventional adenomas, which tend to be slow growing and polypoid, SPs have unique features that undermine current screening and surveillance practices. For example, sessile serrated polyps (SSPs) are flat, predominately right-sided, and thought to have the potential for rapid growth. Moreover, SSPs are subject to wide variations in endoscopic detection and pathologic interpretation. Unfortunately, little is known about the natural history of SPs, and current guidelines are based largely on expert opinion. In this review, we outline the current taxonomy, epidemiology, and management of SPs with an emphasis on the clinical and public health impact of these lesions.