Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acquiring a broad range of empirical knowledge in real time by temporal-difference learning

Several robot capabilities rely on predictions about the temporally extended consequences of a robot's behaviour. We describe how a robot can both learn and make many such predictions in real time using a standard algorithm. Our experiments show that a mobile robot can learn and make thousands of accurate predictions at 10 Hz. The predictions are about the future of all of the robot's sensors and many internal state variables at multiple time-scales. All the predictions share a single set of features and learning parameters. We demonstrate the generality of this method with an application to a different platform, a robot arm operating at 50 Hz. Here, learned predictions can be used to measurably improve the user interface. The temporally extended predictions learned in real time by this method constitute a basic form of knowledge about the dynamics of the robot's interaction with the environment. We also show how this method can be extended to express more general forms of knowledge.
Role of serum interleukin-6 in deciding therapy for multidrug resistant oral lichen planus

Background Oral lichen planus (OLP) is a T cell mediated immune response. T cells locally present in the involved tissues release cytokines like interleukin-6 (IL-6), which contributes to pathogenesis of OLP. Also IL-6 has been associated with multidrug resistance protein (MRP) expression by keratinocytes. Correspondingly, upregulation of MRP was found in OLP. We conducted this study to evaluate the effects of various drugs on serum IL-6 in OLP; and correlation of these effects with the nature of clinical response and resistance pattern seen in OLP lesions with various therapeutic modalities. Thus we evaluated the role of serum IL-6 in deciding therapy for multidrug resistant OLP. Material and Methods Serum IL-6 was evaluated in 42 erosive OLP (EOLP) patients and 10 normal mucosa and 10 oral squamous cell carcinoma cases using ELISA technique. OLP patients were randomly divided into 3 groups of 14 patients each and were subjected to Pimecrolimus local application, oral Mycophenolate Mofetil (MMF) and Methotrexate (MTX) alongwith Pimecrolimus local application. IL-6 levels were evaluated before and after treatment. Results Serum IL-6 levels were raised above 3pg/ml in 26.19% erosive OLP (EOLP) cases (mean- 3.72±8.14). EOLP (5%) cases with IL-6 levels above 5pg/ml were resistant in MTX group. However significant decrease in serum IL-6 corresponding with the clinical resolution was seen in MMF group. Conclusions Significantly raised IL-6 levels in EOLP reflect the chronic inflammatory nature of the disease. As serum IL-6 levels significantly decreased in MMF group, correspondingly no resistance to treatment was noted. However with MTX there was no significant decrease in IL-6 and resistance to treatment was noted in some, especially plaque type lesions. Thus IL-6 can be a possible biomarker in deciding the best possible therapy for treatment resistant OLP. Key words:Lichen planus, biological markers, cytokines, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, immunosuppressive agents.
Agricultural Prices and Income Distribution among Farmers: A Whole-Household, Multi-Country, Multi-Year Analysis

Recent studies have emphasized that the poorest farmers are often net buyers of key commodities and therefore harmed by rising prices. We use LSMS data from Tanzania, Vietnam and Guatemala to test the degree of net purchases or sales by income level. We find that poorer farmers may be net buyers of individual crops, but only the poorest are net buyers of all crops. More generally, net sales among poor farmers are low. We conclude that agricultural price changes have a diverse but limited influence on poor farmers’ welfare, because their farm sales tend to be offset by food purchases.
On binary representations for biometric template protection

The main objective of the thesis is to extract biometric binary strings from real-valued features, leaving independent, discriminative and reliable biometic features an important assumption in the research. Unfortunately, in practice, most of the biometric features retain large intra-class variations. Consequently, the extracted bits are still error-prone, even though the quantization and coding procedure is well-designed. If the bits are less reliable, an advanced ECC is required, otherwise the number of secrets dramatically decreases. Another weak point is that the bit extraction procedure relies on the user-dependent feature distributions. However, in most of the current systems, only a few samples are captured for every enrolled user, making it difficult to accurately estimate the feature distributions. For these reasons, the future work will focus on the following aspects: * Improving feature quality / Higher feature quality directly gives more reliable features and therefore benefits in reliable bits. The straightforward solution to improve the feature quality is to optimize the biometric capture procedure. For instance, to provide a more controlled verification environment, or to improve the quality of the features that are captured, by enhancing both the hardware and the software of the biometric sensors. An alternative solution is to introduce a quality control step. Finally, despite the common PCA or LDA feature reduction methods, it is possible to employ some other methods to extract more reliable features. * Improving the modeling of the feature distributions / Optimal quantization intervals and bit allocation are dependent on the biometric feature distributions, which are estimated from the samples of the enrolled users. However, in practice, it is impossible to obtain a sufficiently large number of samples during the enrollment. Further work would be to define, for every user, a proper number of samples required for a good estimation. As a result, the number of samples required could vary from user to user. Furthermore, an adaptive system could be gradually enrich the modeling of the feature distributions. * Designing ECC / An ECC that can recover more erroneous bits will give better recognition performance as well as more secret bits. Therefore, according to the bit error probabilities of the biometric features, an advanced ECC is desirable. * Comparing or employing multiple biometric modalities / In addition to the template protection purpose, extracting biometric binary strings enables the opportunity to compute and compare the capacities of different biometric modalities. For instance, how many secret bits does this biometric fingerprint application really have? as compared to the other application? Furthermore, for a single biometric modality, the number of secret bits is relatively low. Thus, employing multiple biometric modalities might increase the number of secret bits.
Knowledge Management Practices in Small Enterprises

This study aims to investigate the current knowledge management practices in small firms. The qualitative method was employed in this study. The data was collected from the semi structural interviews, the checklist, and the observation of relevant documents. Two companies were selected as the case companies. Moreover, the owner managers of both case companies had participated as the interviewees. The results discussed by identifying the activities concerning KM processes of both case companies which were knowledge creation, knowledge storage, knowledge transferring, and knowledge application. In addition, the barriers in KM implementation of both case companies also discussed. The results would provide small firms with the guidelines for a successful implementation of knowledge management principles.
Annular Ring Patch Antenna for Wearable Applications

The concept of being connected anywhere and everywhere is the main driving force for developing and researching the potential Wireless Body Area Networks operated in WLAN and HiperLAN bands. This paper presents design, development and evaluation of a copper based annular ring microstrip antenna suitable for wearable applications in WLAN band. Both simulated and experimental results on the performance characteristics of this antenna are presented.
Chromospheric models of dwarf M stars.

We present chromospheric models for two dM stars consideredas\basal"starsduetothelowlevelofchromospheric activity, and compare them with the model for a very active, flare star obtained in a previous paper. These models are not based on a single spectral feature, but on the continuum in a broad wavelength range (3500 - 9000 A), on many line proles corresponding to three different atoms (H, Ca, Na), and on the Mg II h and k flux. We show that a marked chromosphere is present even for stars with the lowest levels of activity, and that the active stars have both a chromospheric temperature rise at larger column mass and a higher chromospheric temperature. These characteristics are responsible for the presence of the Balmer lines in emission in the dMe stars. We also show that the additional energy required to transform a dM star into an active star must be deposited in the high chromosphere, just below the transition region.
Poverty reduction efforts in Nigeria 1996 – 2004: a micro level analysis of the relative importance of income growth and redistribution.

A common narrative on Africa’s development process is that specific country policies of income growth and redistribution are necessary for poverty reduction. For growth theoreticians, economic growth must be pursued while for political economists, redistribution is necessary to cushion the detrimental effect of reform policies. These views appear to converge in the many policies and programmes implemented over the years by the Nigerian government. In light of this, we accounted for the effect of these variables using two recent national household survey data sets collected by the National Bureau of statistics in 1996 and 2004 upon which we applied three commonly used poverty indices(FGT) and the Shapely decomposition analytical framework. For robustness, we carried out complementary analysis using the stochastic dominance test and growth incidence curve. Results showed that for the whole country, rural and urban areas respectively, income growth component accounted for -16%, -10% and -10%, while the redistribution component represented -5%, -7% and -4%, suggesting on the average a poverty reducing role. However, a more disaggregated pattern of changes in per capita income reveal that the poor did not benefit much.
Proof Weaving

Mulhern Automated proof assistants provide few facilities for incremental development. Generally, if the underlying structures on which a proof is based are modified, the developer must redo much of the proof. Yet incremental development is really the most natural approach for proofs of programming language properties [5, 12]. We propose " proof weaving " , a technique that allows a proof developer to combine small proofs into larger ones by merging proof objects. We automate much of the merging process and thus ease incremental proof development for programming language properties. To make the discussion concrete we take as an example the problem of proving type-soundness by proving progress and preservation [17] in Coq [3, 7]. However we believe that the methods can be generalized to other proof assistants which generate proof objects, and most directly to those proof assistants which exploit the Curry-Howard isomorphism in representing proof terms as λ-terms [16], e.g. Isabelle and Minlog. We rely on the proof developer to initially prove type-soundness for " tiny " languages. Each of these languages encapsulates a single well-defined programming feature. For example, a tiny language of booleans can be restricted to the terms True, False, and If and their accompanying typing and evaluation rules. Tiny languages have relatively small and easily developed proofs of type-soundness. Having developed a repository of small languages along with their associated soundness proofs, the developer builds larger languages by combining small languages in a pairwise progression. Proofs are woven together using a multiphase approach. In the first phase, we rely explicitly on the fact that the proofs are developed using induction on the structure of the terms of the language 2. The two proofs being merged thus have a similar structure; each proof is the application of the induction principle for the terms of the language to subproofs corresponding to each term. We extract these subproofs from the already existing proofs for each tiny language and apply the induction principle for the combined language to each extracted proof. Generally there will not be a completed proof at the end of the first phase. Each subproof may contain transparent dependencies 3 on parts of the language in the same way that the whole proof contains a transparent dependency on the structure of terms. In the second phase, we rewrite each term that contains a transparent dependency introducing place holders, i.e., " holes " , for each …
A recursive filter for 3 D MAP reconstruction

Three dimensional reconstruction aims at estimating a real function f defined on a subset of R. The function f usually conveys information about the organs properties to be used for medical diagnosis. Bayesian methods (e.g. MAP) are often used to address this problem since they allow to incorporate the available knowledge about the data and function to be estimated. However they are usually slow and exhibit a bad performance at transitions. This paper addresses both difficulties by approximating the MAP solution by the output of a set of recursive filters which are fast and provide better results at transitions. Keywords– 3D Reconstruction, MAP, IIR Filter, Medical Imaging
Scalable End-to-End Parallel Supercomputing and Application to Real-time Earthquake Modeling

We demonstrate a new scalable approach to real-time monitoring, visualization, and steering of massively parallel simulations from a personal computer. The basis is an endto-end approach to parallel supercomputing in which all components — meshing, partitioning, solver, and visualization — are tightly coupled and execute in parallel on a supercomputer. This approach avoids bottlenecks associated with transfer and storage of massive simulation outputs, thereby enabling real-time visualization and steering on supercomputers with thousands of processors. We have incorporated this methodology into a framework named Hercules, which targets octree-based finite element simulations. The submitted video demonstrates real-time monitoring and steering from a laptop PC of a 1024-processor simulation of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California. Because this end-to-end approach does not require moving large data over the network and is completely scalable, our approach shows promise for overcoming the challenges of visualization of petascale simulations.
Aldehyde dehydrogenase 1A1 confers intrinsic and acquired resistance to gemcitabine in human pancreatic adenocarcinoma MIA PaCa-2 cells

Gemcitabine (GEM) is the front-line standard chemotherapy used for the treatment of pancreatic cancer; however, chemoresistance to GEM remains the major obstacle to the successful control of this disease. Both the expression levels and activity of aldehyde dehydrogenase 1A1 (ALDH1A1) are important features of tumor-initiating and/or cancer stem cell properties in multiple types of human cancer. As one of the intrinsic properties of cancer stem cells is drug resistance, in this study, we examined the correlation between the level and activity of endogenous ALDH1A1 and GEM resistance in the MIA PaCa-2 cell line that contains high expression levels and activity of ALDH1A1. We used small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to deplete ALDH1A1 and investigate its potential role in conferring GEM resistance. The ALDH1A1 knockdown markedly reduced ALDH1A1 expression and activity and inhibited cell proliferation. Moreover, the combination of ALDH1A1-siRNA and GEM significantly decreased cell viability, increased apoptotic cell death and increased the accumulation of cells at the S-phase compared to the controls. Our data also demonstrated that ALDH1A1 expression and activity were significantly higher in the GEM-resistant MIA PaCa-2 cell line (MIA PaCa-2/GR), compared to the parental MIA PaCa-2 cell line (MIA PaCa-2/P). In the MIA PaCa-2/GR cells, the combination of ALDH1A1-siRNA and GEM also showed a significant decrease in cell viability and an increase in apoptotic cell death, emphasizing the importance of ALDH1A1 in both intrinsic and acquired GEM resistance. This potentially powerful combination treatment of ALDH1A1-siRNA and GEM warrants further investigation as an effective therapeutic regimen to overcome the resistance of pancreatic cancer to GEM.
Normalization: A Preprocessing Stage

As we know that the normalization is a pre-processing stage of any type problem statement. Especially normalization takes important role in the field of soft computing, cloud computing etc. for manipulation of data like scale down or scale up the range of data before it becomes used for further stage. There are so many normalization techniques are there namely Min-Max normalization, Z-score normalization and Decimal scaling normalization. So by referring these normalization techniques we are going to propose one new normalization technique namely, Integer Scaling Normalization. And we are going to show our proposed normalization technique using various data sets.
Gravity Modes in ZZ Ceti Stars. I. Quasi-adiabatic Analysis of Overstability

We analyze the stability of g-modes in white dwarfs with hydrogen envelopes. All relevant physical processes take place in the outer layer of hydrogen-rich material, which consists of a radiative layer overlaid by a convective envelope. The radiative layer contributes to mode damping, because its opacity decreases upon compression and the amplitude of the Lagrangian pressure perturbation increases outward. The convective envelope is the seat of mode excitation, because it acts as an insulating blanket with respect to the perturbed flux that enters it from below. A crucial point is that the convective motions respond to the instantaneous pulsational state. Driving exceeds damping by as much as a factor of 2 provided ωτc≥1, where ω is the radian frequency of the mode and τc≈4τth, with τth being the thermal time constant evaluated at the base of the convective envelope. As a white dwarf cools, its convection zone deepens, and lower frequency modes become overstable. However, the deeper convection zone impedes the passage of flux perturbations from the base of the convection zone to the photosphere. Thus the photometric variation of a mode with constant velocity amplitude decreases. These factors account for the observed trend that longer period modes are found in cooler DA variables. Overstable modes have growth rates of order γ~1/(nτω), where n is the mode's radial order and τω is the thermal timescale evaluated at the top of the mode's cavity. The growth time, γ−1, ranges from hours for the longest period observed modes (P≈20 minutes) to thousands of years for those of shortest period (P≈2 minutes). The linear growth time probably sets the timescale for variations of mode amplitude and phase. This is consistent with observations showing that longer period modes are more variable than shorter period ones. Our investigation confirms many results obtained by Brickhill in his pioneering studies of ZZ Cetis. However, it suffers from two serious shortcomings. It is based on the quasiadiabatic approximation that strictly applies only in the limit ωτc≫1, and it ignores damping associated with turbulent viscosity in the convection zone. We will remove these shortcomings in future papers.
Enhancing the Quality of Bio-Medical Video using Super Resolution

Medical imaging or videoing is an important diagnosis instrument to determine the presence of certain diseases. Therefore increasing the video resolution should significantly improve the diagnosis ability for corrective treatment. Furthermore, a better resolution may substantially improve automatic detection and image segmentation results. Despite the advances in acquisition technology and the show of optimized reconstruction algorithms, it is not easy to gain an approach at a desired resolution what is coming to one to imaging environments, the limitations of terrestrial imaging systems as well as quality-limiting factors a well known as Noise and Blur. An answer for this issue is the utilization of Super Resolution (SR) systems which can be utilized for handling of such images and hence videos. This paper depends on the remaking of low resolution videos to high resolution video. Thus, obtaining the high resolution video. Performance of this method was evaluated by means of objective image quality criteria PSNR, MSE, SSIM and MSSIM to determine the algorithm for Medical videos.
Consistent Global Land Cover Maps For Climate Modelling Communities: Current Achievements Of The ESA' Land Cover CCI

Led by the European Space Agency, the Climate Change Initiative land cover project focuses on the land cover observed as an Essential Climate Variable. Consultation mechanisms were established with the climate modelling community in order to identify its specific needs in terms of satellite-based global land cover products. Key finding was the needs for stable land cover data and a dynamic component in form of time-series. An innovative land cover concept is proposed, along with an new global land cover mapping approach, based on multi-year earth observation datasets. The corresponding products are presented, which consist of three successive and consistent global LC maps centred to the epochs 2000, 2005 and 2010.
Collocationsand Term Variation in Mechanical Engineering Discourse

Terminological collocations1 are one of the most typical and very frequent units of representation of concepts in many disciplines. Although traditionally considered to be unwelcome in terminology, synonymy is amply present in specialized languages. Consequently, the same phenomenon is reflected in terminological collocations. This paper aims to investigate synonymous collocations extracted from mechanical engineering texts in terms of the most frequent and relevant types of denominative variation in the selected English collocations as well as of their equivalents in German and Croatian. The analysis of variations in terminological collocations gives insight into the (non)substitutability of collocation constituents as one of the major characteristics of collocations. Extracted collocations are analysed within a two-tier framework structured at a paradigmatic and a syntagmatic level, which allows for the identification of the three types of term variation: morphological, syntagmatic and semantic. Focusing on the collocations with the structure noun + noun and adjective + noun the results show that constituents of both syntactic
An Investigation of Computer Icon Design

This research evaluates the connections between icon concreteness and entropy and user performance and aesthetic response using a mixed methods approach (2x2 experiment and interview) (n = 30 undergraduate students). Participants were shown a total of 12 icons under 4 conditions (concrete/low entropy, concrete/high entropy, abstract/low entropy, abstract/high entropy), three times each. Response time and accuracy was evaluated and interview data assessed the relative attractiveness of icons on these categories. User performance was best for concrete icons, while abstract icons were identified more slowly and less accurately. Interviews revealed a general preference for concrete/high-entropy icons, which were described as easy to understand and aesthetically appealing, although some respondents preferred the aesthetic design of concrete/low-entropy icons. Abstract icons were viewed as ambiguous, with high entropy detracting from aesthetic appeal. The results suggest interaction between concreteness and icon entropy, indicating that further research is needed to justify us of these characteristics in icon design.