Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Illumination independent marker tracking using cross-ratio invariance

Marker tracking is used in numerous applications. Depending on the context and its constraints, tracking accuracy can be a crucial component of the application. In this paper, we firstly highlight that the tracking accuracy depends on the illumination, which is usually not controlled in most applications. Particularly, we show how corner detection can shift of several pixels when light power or background context change, even if the camera and the marker are static in the scene. Then, we propose a method, based on the cross ratio invariance, that allows to re-estimate the corner extraction so that the cross ratio of the marker model corresponds to the one computed from the extracted corners in the image. Finally, we show on real data that our approach improves the tracking accuracy, particularly along the camera depth axis, up to several millimeters, depending on the marker depth.
Leaf area index estimation of boreal forest using ENVISAT ASAR

A method for retrieval of leaf area index (LAI) using ENVISAT Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar vertical/horizontal (VV/HH) polarization ratio was derived for boreal forests. Five alternating polarization single-look complex images of the test site were acquired in summer 2003. The swath range from IS1-IS6 was studied. The VV/HH polarization ratio correlated quite well with the ground truth LAI values. The mean error of the LAI estimates was 0.27 for the test site with mixed forest when data from all images and stands were used without separating between species (or swaths). The respective mean LAI estimation error was 0.3 for Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst. ) and 0.07 for Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) dominated stands.
Designing an Analyzable and Resilient Embedded Operating System

Multi-Processor Systems on Chip (MPSoCs) are gaining traction in the embedded systems market. Their use will allow consolidation of a variety of applications into a single computing platform. At the same time the probability of transient hardware malfunctions manifesting at the software level increases. These applications integrated into the MPSoC possess a range of different requirements in terms of timing, safety and resource demand. Hence, it is impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all solution that allows reliable execution in future MPSoC systems. In this paper, we present ASTEROID, a set of hardware and operating system mechanisms that aim to provide reliable execution in such a diverse environment.
Electrocardiographic left ventricular hypertrophy with strain pattern: prevalence, mechanisms and prognostic implications

Summary Background Electrocardiographic left ventricular hypertrophy with strain pattern has been documented as a marker for left ventricular hypertrophy. Its presence on the ECG of hypertensive patients is associated with a poor prognosis. This review was undertaken to report the prevalence, mechanism and prognostic implications of this ECG abnormality. Materials and methods: We conducted a comprehensive search of electronic databases to identify studies relating to the title of this review. The search criteria were related to the title. Two of the reviewers independently screened the searches. Results Results were described qualitatively. The data were not pooled because there were no randomised studies on the topic. The prevalence of ECG strain pattern ranged from 2.1 to 36%. The highest prevalence was reported before the era of good antihypertensive therapy. The sensitivity as a measure of left ventricular hypertrophy ranged from 3.8 to 50%, while the specificity was in the range of 89.8 to 100%. Strain pattern was associated with adverse cardiovascular risk factors as well as increased all-cause and CV morbidity and mortality. ST-segment depression and T-wave inversion on the ECG was recognised as the strongest marker of morbidity and mortality when ECG-LV H criteria were utilised for risk stratification in hypertensive subjects. Conclusion Electrocardiographic strain pattern identifies cardiac patients at higher risk of cardiovascular-related as well as all-cause morbidity and mortality.
Pathophysiology and Treatment of Coagulopathy in Massive Hemorrhage and Hemodilution

Fluid resuscitation after massive hemorrhage in major surgery and trauma may result in extensive hemodilution and coagulopathy, which is of a multifactorial nature. Although coagulopathy is often perceived as hemorrhagic, extensive hemodilution affects procoagulants as well as anticoagulant, profibrinolytic, and antifibrinolytic elements, leading to a complex coagulation disorder. Reduced thrombin activation is partially compensated by lower inhibitory activities of antithrombin and other protease inhibitors, whereas plasma fibrinogen is rapidly decreased proportional to the extent of hemodilution. Adequate fibrinogen levels are essential in managing dilutional coagulopathy. After extensive hemodilution, fibrin clots are more prone to fibrinolysis because major antifibrinolytic proteins are decreased. Fresh frozen plasma, platelet concentrate, and cryoprecipitate are considered the mainstay hemostatic therapies. Purified factor concentrates of plasma origin and from recombinant synthesis are increasingly used for a rapid restoration of targeted factors. Future clinical studies are necessary to establish the specific indication, dosing, and safety of novel hemostatic interventions.
Quasi-classical rate coefficient calculations for the rotational (de)excitation of H2O by H2

Context. The interpretation of water line emission from existing observations and future HIFI/Herschel data requires a detailed knowledge of collisional rate coefficients. Among all relevant collisional mechanisms, the rotational (de)excitation of H 2 O by H 2 molecules is the process of most interest in interstellar space. Aims. To determine rate coefficients for rotational de-excitation among the lowest 45 para and 45 ortho rotational levels of H 2 O colliding with both para and ortho-H 2 in the temperature range 20-2000 K. Methods. Rate coefficients are calculated on a recent high-accuracy H 2 O-H 2 potential energy surface using quasi-classical trajectory calculations. Trajectories are sampled by a canonical Monte-Carlo procedure. H 2 molecules are assumed to be rotationally thermalized at the kinetic temperature. Results. By comparison with quantum calculations available for low lying levels, classical rates are found to be accurate within a factor of 1-3 for the dominant transitions, that is those with rates larger than a few 10 -12 cm 3 s -1 . Large velocity gradient modelling shows that the new rates have a significant impact on emission line fluxes and that they should be adopted in any detailed population model of water in warm and hot environments.
Nocturia Improvement With Surgical Correction of Sleep Apnea

Purpose To evaluate changes in nocturia after surgical correction of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Methods A total of 66 patients were included in the present study. All had been diagnosed with OSA syndrome by polysomnography and underwent uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UPPP). Preoperative and postoperative lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), quality of life (QoL), and nocturia episodes were evaluated using the International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS) and overactive bladder symptom score (OABSS) questionnaires. Three months postoperatively, telephone interviews were performed to determine the success of surgery, current LUTS, and nocturia episodes. Patients were divided into surgical success and failure groups. Surgical success was defined as snoring decrease more than 50% based on the patient’s subjective judgment. Results The response rate was 56% and success rate was 73%. In all patients, nocturia episodes significantly decreased from 1.7±1.1 to 0.8±1.2 (P=0.002). Mean IPSS score, OABSS score, and QoL scores were also significantly improved. The success group showed a significant decrease in nocturia episodes, and total IPSS, OABSS, and QoL scores. However, the failure group did not show significant changes in all parameters. Conclusions OSA correction improved nocturia as well as other LUTS. These improvements were not observed in the failure group. This study shows that OSA is a cause of nocturia and that other LUTS and nocturia can be improved by surgical correction of OSA.
The Development of an Operating System for Reconfigurable Computing

An operating system (OS) for reconfigurable computing uses new versions of algorithms for the allocation of area to tasks, the partitioning of an application to fit selected allocated areas and the placement and routing inside partitions. The algorithms have small deterministic and bounded run times with near linear time complexity making them suitable to run in between time slices or at the initial loading stage of applications. Tests on the prototype with benchmark examples show that it is a feasible and that fragmentation of the area of the FPGA among many users is manageable.
The JOS Linguistically Tagged Corpus of Slovene

The JOS language resources are meant to facilitate developments of HLT and corpus linguistics for the Slovene language and consist of the morphosyntactic specifications, defining the Slovene morphosyntactic features and tagset; two annotated corpora (jos100k and jos1M); and two web services (a concordancer and text annotation tool). The paper introduces these components, and concentrates on jos100k, a 100,000 word sampled balanced monolingual Slovene corpus, manually annotated for three levels of linguistic description. On the morphosyntactic level, each word is annotated with its morphosyntactic description and lemma; on the syntactic level the sentences are annotated with dependency links; on the semantic level, all the occurrences of 100 top nouns in the corpus are annotated with their wordnet synset from the Slovene semantic lexicon sloWNet. The JOS corpora and specifications have a standardised encoding (Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines TEI P5) and are available for research from http://nl.ijs. si/jos/ under the Creative Commons licence.
Life Extension Factor Klotho Prevents Mortality and Enhances Cognition in hAPP Transgenic Mice

Aging is the principal demographic risk factor for Alzheimer disease (AD), the most common neurodegenerative disorder. Klotho is a key modulator of the aging process and, when overexpressed, extends mammalian lifespan, increases synaptic plasticity, and enhances cognition. Whether klotho can counteract deficits related to neurodegenerative diseases, such as AD, is unknown. Here we show that elevating klotho expression decreases premature mortality and network dysfunction in human amyloid precursor protein (hAPP) transgenic mice, which simulate key aspects of AD. Increasing klotho levels prevented depletion of NMDA receptor (NMDAR) subunits in the hippocampus and enhanced spatial learning and memory in hAPP mice. Klotho elevation in hAPP mice increased the abundance of the GluN2B subunit of NMDAR in postsynaptic densities and NMDAR-dependent long-term potentiation, which is critical for learning and memory. Thus, increasing wild-type klotho levels or activities improves synaptic and cognitive functions, and may be of therapeutic benefit in AD and other cognitive disorders.
Analytic Expression of the Genus in a Weakly Non-Gaussian Field Induced by Gravity

The gravitational evolution of the genus of the density field in large-scale structure is analytically studied in a weakly nonlinear regime using second-order perturbation theory. Weakly nonlinear evolution produces asymmetry in the symmetric genus curve for Gaussian initial density field. The effect of smoothing the density field in perturbation theory on the genus curve is also evaluated and gives the dependence of the asymmetry of the genus curve on spectra of initial fluctuations.
Receiving supportive communication from Facebook friends: A model of social ties and supportive communication in social network sites

This study distinguishes perceptions of, preferences for, and outcomes related to people’s social ties online. It expands understanding of when and why using social network sites (SNSs) provides people with several types of supportive communication by integrating users’ social capital and preference for weak tie support. Prior research is synthesized and extended to build a heuristic model of social ties and supportive communication in SNSs that considers network-based variables (i.e., social capital, preference for weak ties) as mechanisms that link the use of SNSs to the supportive messages people receive. A community sample (N = 553) completed an online questionnaire. Results indicated that intensity of Facebook use corresponds with both social capital and received support. Moreover, social capital mediates and preference for weak ties moderates the relationship between using Facebook and receiving support, and results differ according to the types of social capital and support under consideration. Facebook use, for example, only corresponds with receiving informational and esteem support when users exhibit sufficient preferences for weak tie support.
Sensor-based real-time adaptation of 3D video encoding quality for remote control applications

The availability of stereoscopic mobile devices, such as mobile phones, on the consumer market allows to attempt the development of low-cost remote control systems that can provide a real-time 3D video feedback. In this work we show how implement such a communication system by considering the stringent latency constraints of the remote control scenario. To reduce the impact of this issue, we observe that part of the latency is due to the limited processing power of the mobile device that cannot sustain video transmission at high quality with low latency. Thus, we propose to dynamically change the latency-quality trade-off at the transmitter to optimize the quality of experience as perceived by the operator of the remote control system, by taking into account, in real-time, the dynamics of the control operations. In more details, low-cost accelerometer and gyroscopic sensors are employed to decide in real-time how much latency has to be privileged over quality and vice versa, by selectively reducing the quality of one of the views in favor of a reduced overall latency. Comparisons with a non-adaptive higher-quality but also higher-latency system show that the operators prefer the adaptive system despite the video quality is slightly reduced in dynamic control conditions.
Enabling Autonomic Properties in Road Transport System

Current autonomic computing systems tend to rely on reactive rather than deliberative reasoning, that is, they use a simpler form of reasoning over sets of de�fined rules in order to be able to work in real-time. However, technology in areas such as automated planning or constraints processing have been developing rapidly, so that now it may be possible to deploy deliberative reasoning to real-time applications. In this paper, we introduce the problem of self-management of a road traffi�c network as a temporal planning problem. We design a road traffic model, and use it with domain independent planners to consider the feasibility of introducing it into tra�ffic management applications.
Detection of linear objects in ERS-1 SAR images using neural network technology

A classification method for the automatic detection of linear objects in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed. It is based on feature extraction using a line model, some basic cues from human vision and a neural network classification considering local and global parameters. The method is applied to ERS-1 SAR images to derive the locations of lake and forest boundaries. <<ETX>>
Shiga toxin in enterohemorrhagic E.coli: regulation and novel anti-virulence strategies

Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) are responsible for major outbreaks of bloody diarrhea and hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) throughout the world. The mortality associated with EHEC infections stems from the production and release of a potent Shiga toxin (Stx) by these bacteria. Stx induces cell death in endothelial cells, primarily in the urinary tract, causing HUS. Stx was first described in Shigella dysenteriae serotype I by Kiyoshi Shiga and was discovered later in EHEC. Multiple environmental cues regulate the expression of Stx, including temperature, growth phase, antibiotics, reactive oxygen species (ROS), and quorum sensing. Currently, there is no effective treatment or prophylaxis for HUS. Because antibiotics trigger Stx production and their use to treat EHEC infections is controversial, alternative therapeutic strategies have become the focus of intense research. One such strategy explores quorum sensing inhibitors as therapeutics. These inhibitors target quorum sensing regulation of Stx expression without interfering with bacterial growth, leading to the hypothesis that these inhibitors impose less selective pressure for bacteria to develop drug resistance. In this review, we discuss factors that regulate Stx production in EHEC, as well as novel strategies to prevent and/or minimize the development of HUS in infected subjects.
Bootless Boot: Reducing Device Boot Latency with Byte Addressable NVRAM

Booting is an essential process that loads an operating system (OS) to a main memory and initializes all the system. In this paper, we propose a new technique to shorten the boot-up time by using a non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM). This technique eliminates the kernel loading, the kernel decompression, and the reallocation of a kernel image by maintaining of the linux binary image at the non-volatile random access memory. The essence of locating OS binary image at NVRAM lies in how to re-initialize the segments that are updated as OS executes and have been initialized implicitly while OS is loaded onto memory from the storage device. We develop a Bootless Boot which completely removes the process of loading any of the kernel images. Bootless Boot consists of (i) object filter which identifies the kernel objects which need to be initialized every time OS boots up, (ii) explicit initialization module which explicitly re-initializes the objects identified by the object filter. Explicit initialization module is added to the linux kernel.
Sense beauty via face, dressing, and/or voice

Discovering the secret of beauty has been the pursuit of artists and philosophers for centuries. Nowadays, the computational model for beauty estimation has been actively explored in computer science community, yet with the focus mainly on facial features. In this work, we perform a comprehensive study of female attractiveness conveyed by single/multiple modalities of cues, i.e., face, dressing and/or voice, and aim to uncover how different modalities individually and collectively affect the human sense of beauty. To this end, we collect the first Multi-Modality Beauty (M2B) dataset in the world for female attractiveness study, which is thoroughly annotated with attractiveness levels converted from manual k-wise ratings and semantic attributes of different modalities. A novel Dual-supervised Feature-Attribute-Task (DFAT) network is proposed to jointly learn the beauty estimation models of single/multiple modalities as well as the attribute estimation models. The DFAT network differentiates itself by its supervision in both attribute and task layers. Several interesting beauty-sense observations over single/multiple modalities are reported, and the extensive experimental evaluations on the collected M2B dataset well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DFAT network for female attractiveness estimation.
IS Change Agents in Practice in a US-Chinese Joint Venture

This article presents a case study that documents how information systems (IS) principals in China strategically shifted to different change agent roles to accommodate various IS implementation contingencies in the organization. The case concerns a US-Chinese joint venture, located in China. The change agent models hypothesized by Markus and Benjamin (l996) serve as a lens to interpret the case. Based on observations of how these roles emerged in different phases of implementing packaged software, a meta-category called â€œadaptorâ€ is offered to visualize what the data revealed and to contribute to this emerging research area. Implications for practitioners and researchers are addressed.
The ethics of driverless cars

This paper critiques the idea of full autonomy, as illustrated by Oxford University's Robotcar. A fully autonomous driverless car relies on no external inputs, including GPS and solely learns from its environment using learning algorithms. These cars decide when they drive, learn from human drivers and bid for insurance in real time. Full autonomy is pitched as a good end in itself, fixing human inadequacies and creating safety and certainty by the elimination of human involvement. Using the ACTIVE ethics framework, an ethical response to the fully autonomous driverless cars is developed by addressing autonomy, community, transparency, identity, value and empathy. I suggest that the pursuit of full autonomy does not recognise the essential importance of interdependencies between humans and machines. The removal of human involvement should require the driverless car to be more connected with its environment, drawing all the information it can from infrastructure, internet and other road users. This requires a systemic view, which addresses systems and relationships, which recognises the place of driverless cars in a connected system, which is open to the study of complex relationships, both networked and hierarchical.
Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription-1 Is Critical for Apoptosis in Macrophages Subjected to Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress In Vitro and in Advanced Atherosclerotic Lesions In Vivo

Background— Macrophage apoptosis is a critical process in the formation of necrotic cores in vulnerable atherosclerotic plaques. In vitro and in vivo data suggest that macrophage apoptosis in advanced atheromata may be triggered by a combination of endoplasmic reticulum stress and engagement of the type A scavenger receptor, which together induce death through a rise in cytosolic calcium and activation of toll-like receptor-4. Methods and Results— Using both primary peritoneal macrophages and studies in advanced atheromata in vivo, we introduce signal transducer and activator of transcription-1 (STAT1) as a critical and necessary component of endoplasmic reticulum stress/type A scavenger receptor–induced macrophage apoptosis. We show that STAT1 is serine phosphorylated in macrophages subjected to type A scavenger receptor ligands and endoplasmic reticulum stress in a manner requiring cytosolic calcium, calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II, and toll-like receptor-4. Remarkably, apoptosis was inhibited by ≈80% to 90% (P<0.05) by STAT1 deficiency or calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II inhibition. In vivo, nuclear Ser-P-STAT1 was found in macrophage-rich regions of advanced murine and human atheromata. Most important, macrophage apoptosis was decreased by 61% (P=0.034) and plaque necrosis by 34% (P=0.02) in the plaques of fat-fed low density lipoprotein receptor null Ldlr−/− mice transplanted with Stat1−/− bone marrow. Conclusions— STAT1 is critical for endoplasmic reticulum stress/type A scavenger receptor–induced apoptosis in primary tissue macrophages and in macrophage apoptosis in advanced atheromata. These findings suggest a potentially important role for STAT1-mediated macrophage apoptosis in atherosclerotic plaque progression.