Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation on Different Interferometric Coherence Optimization Methods

The interferometric coherence optimization methods are based on the definition of projection vectors, which is the way to combine the information occuring from the polarimetric channels of both interferometric images. An important point is the physical interpretation of the projection vectors in terms of scattering characteristics. An optimization algorithm has been first proposed by Cloude and Papathanassiou(referred as C & P algorithm [2]) , based on the selection of the best pair of projection vectors. The C & P algorithm leads to a 3 × 3 complex eigenvector problem, each projection vector representing a selected mechanism for each image. We prove first that the C & P algorithm corresponds mathematically to the most general optimization of the interferometric coherence. This means that the interferograms formed by using these mechanisms have the highest possible coherence. Nevertheless a major drawback of the C & P algorithm is that in neighboring resolution cells the optimal scattering mechanisms can vary significantly, introducing discontinuities into the extracted height differences. Moreover, the C & P algorithm does not fix uniquely the phase difference between the two projection vectors. Although an additional condition can be freely fixed, an attempt to apply the C & P algorithm to a selected set of our data led to an unexploitable height mapping. In this paper an alternative coherence optimization algorithm using the same projection vector for both images is proposed. This method is tested and compared with the first one in terms of physical interpretation and results ; the properties of the projection vectors obtained by both methods are discussed. Finally, some tests have been carried out in order to assess the height estimations obtained from both methods.
An Approach to Modeling Heterogeneous Resources for Information Extraction

In this paper, we describe an approach that aims to model heterogeneous resources for information extraction. Document is modeled in graph representation that enables better understanding of multi-media document and its structure which ultimately could result better cross-media information extraction. We also describe our proposed algorithm that segment document-based on the document modeling approach we described in this paper.
Spectrum segmentation for wideband sensing of radio signals

Spectrum sensing is a key factor for either the development of Cognitive Radio or the implementation of instruments able to automatically monitor the radio spectrum. Within the process of spectrum sensing, segmentation aims to detect the boundaries of the transmission channels in a wide frequency range. The paper proposes a new spectrum segmentation method characterized by low processing time. The developed histogram-based method is described in the paper. Several experimental tests on emulated and actual signals are presented to prove the effectiveness of the method in terms of success percentage, processing time.
Immunocytolocalization of extensin in developing soybean seed coats by immunogold-silver staining and by tissue printing on nitrocellulose paper

In soybean seed coats the accumulation of the hydroxyproline-rich glycoprotein extensin is regulated in a developmental and tissue- specific manner. The time course of appearance of extensin during seed development was studied by Western blot analysis and by immunogold- silver localization. Using these techniques extensin was first detected at 16-18 d after anthesis, increasing during development to high levels at 24 d after anthesis. Immunogold-silver localization of extensin in the seed coat showed marked deposition of the glycoprotein in the walls of palisade epidermal cells and hourglass cells. The immunolocalization of extensin in developing soybean seeds was also made by a new technique--tissue printing on nitrocellulose paper. It was found that extensin is primarily localized in the seed coat, hilum, and vascular elements of the seed.
How P2P streaming systems scale over time under a flash crowd?

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live video streaming systems have recently received significant attention, with commercial deployment gaining increased popularity in the Internet. It is evident in our empirical experiences with real-world systems that, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of viewers trying to join a program in the first few minutes of a live broadcast. This phenomenon in live streaming systems, referred as the flash crowd, poses unique challenges in the system design. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model to capture the inherent relationship between time and scale during a flash crowd. We derive an upper bound on the system scale, and then demonstrate that the timing factor plays a critical role for such a system to scale. In addition, our analysis also brings a more indepth understanding with respect to the use of Gossip protocols, i.e., the effects of partial knowledge.
Rényi Divergence Variational Inference

This paper introduces the variational R\'enyi bound (VR) that extends traditional variational inference to R\'enyi's alpha-divergences. This new family of variational methods unifies a number of existing approaches, and enables a smooth interpolation from the evidence lower-bound to the log (marginal) likelihood that is controlled by the value of alpha that parametrises the divergence. The reparameterization trick, Monte Carlo approximation and stochastic optimisation methods are deployed to obtain a tractable and unified framework for optimisation. We further consider negative alpha values and propose a novel variational inference method as a new special case in the proposed framework. Experiments on Bayesian neural networks and variational auto-encoders demonstrate the wide applicability of the VR bound.
Distributed Coordinated Spectrum Sharing MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio

Recently, the CR (cognitive radio) technology is gathering more and more attention because it has the capacity to deal with the scarce of the precious spectrum resource. Within the domain of CR technology, channel management of CR is of utmost importance due to its key role in the performance enhancement of the transmission and the minimum interference to the primary users as well. An 802.11 WLAN based ad-hoc protocol using the cognitive radio has been proposed in this paper. It provides the detection and protection for incumbent systems around the communication pair by separating the spectrum into the data channels and common control channel. By adding the available channel list into the RTS and CTS, the communication pair can know which data sub channels are available (i.e., no incumbent signal). We proposed an ENNI (exchanging of neighbor nodes information) mechanism to deal with the hidden incumbent device problem. The simulation results show that by using our protocol the hidden incumbent device problem (HIDP) can be solved successfully.
Animal personality and pace-of-life syndromes: do fast-exploring fairy-wrens die young?

The pace-of-life syndrome (POLS) hypothesis for animal personality proposes that variation among individuals in life-history strategies is associated with consistent differences in behavior. We tested predictions of this hypothesis in the superb fairy-wren, Malurus cyaneus, by investigating long-term individual differences in risk-related behaviors (latency to enter a novel artificial environment, exploration, activity and response to mirror image stimulation) and survival. We found consistent differences between individuals in these behaviors (adjusted repeatability of exploration of artificial novel environment = 0.37). Individual differences were consistent over several years and bi-variate analyses showed a significant among-individual correlation (‘behavioral syndrome’) between exploration behavior at two life stages (young adult and old adult). Docility at the nestling stage predicted exploration behavior of juveniles. Behavioral traits measured in a risky context were correlated with one another, forming a behavioral syndrome of coping strategies ranging from ‘proactive’ to ‘reactive’. Nestlings that were more active and exploratory in isolation were less docile during handling, while adults that entered the artificial environment fast were more exploratory, active, and aggressive in the artificial environment. Exploration behavior increased within individuals as they aged and when they were in poorer condition, consistent with expectations of more risk-prone behavior with lower residual reproductive value (reduced ‘asset protection’). Risk-related behavior predicted the probability of apparent survival: more exploratory individuals were less likely to be present in the population twelve months later. Our findings suggest that, consistent with the predictions of the POLS hypothesis, individual variation in survival is associated with consistent individual differences in risk-related behavior that are maintained long-term and span developmental boundaries.
Software Quality Models: A Comparative Study

Software testing requires the use of a model for test selection and test verification. Model-based testing is very effective for software design and development. Model-based testing has a lot of benefits, test suite growth with the product, manage the model instead of cases, automation is cheaper and more effective, one implementation per model, then all cases are free. Model-based testing is a general term that signifies an approach that bases common testing tasks such as test case generation and test result evaluation on a model of application under test. The fundamental tasks for Model-based testing including gathering the necessary information to build a model, the steps in building a model, and generating and evaluating tests from a model. There are a number of models, but few models are good for testing. By using some models such as McCall, Boehm, FURPS, Dromey and ISO 9126 the qualities are tested. Each model has its own quality characteristics along with the factors and subfactors. One of the great advantages of model-based development is the opportunity to start simulation and testing activities. This allows the developer to focus on specific errors at each development stage. The benefit of quality models is that they are simpler to use and the benefit of quality management is that they probably more to the point capture the idea of quality. Software quality model is the representation of the characteristics of the software that describe the quality. This paper discusses the features of the models McCall, Boehm, FURPS, Dromey and ISO 9126. By using these models the quality characteristics are compared.
Elevated Heat Shock Protein 60 Levels Are Associated With Higher Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Chinese

Background— Although heat shock protein 60 (Hsp60) is implicated in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis, its role in coronary heart disease (CHD) is uncertain. This study explored the influence of circulating Hsp60 on CHD in a large case-control study, as well as the impact of acute myocardial infarction on Hsp60 levels in a prospective study. Methods and Results— Plasma Hsp60 and anti-Hsp60 antibody levels were determined by immunoassay. In the case-control study (1003 patients with CHD, 1003 matched control subjects), Hsp60 levels were higher in patients with CHD and were related to CHD (OR comparing extreme quartiles=4.14, P<0.0001). This association remained after adjustment for traditional risk factors (P for trend <0.0001). Individuals having high levels of Hsp60 (greater than the median of 160.24 ng/mL) and anti-Hsp60 antibody (greater than the median of 38.42 U/mL) were at a greater risk of CHD than those with low levels (OR 2.30, P<0.0001). Stronger additive effects (OR 14.04, P<0.0001) were apparent at higher Hsp60 and anti-Hsp60 antibody levels (>1000 ng/mL and greater than the median of 38.42 U/mL, respectively). The simultaneous presence of high Hsp60 and anti-Hsp60 antibody levels, current smoking, hypertension, and diabetes were cumulatively associated with CHD. Individuals who had any 4 or more of these 5 factors had an OR of 38.61 for CHD (P<0.0001) compared with individuals who had none of these factors. For the prospective study, blood was drawn from 20 patients immediately after admission for acute myocardial infarction and 2, 3, and 7 days thereafter. Hsp60 levels were significantly higher on the day of and the day after arrival than 7 days after an acute myocardial infarction (P=0.011 and P=0.026, respectively). Conclusions— Elevated Hsp60 levels are associated with an increased risk for CHD, and Hsp60 and anti-Hsp60 antibody levels combine to increase this risk. In addition, acute myocardial infarction induces Hsp60 release.
Dynamic regulation of PU.1 expression in multipotent hematopoietic progenitors

PU.1 is an Ets family transcription factor that is essential for fetal liver hematopoiesis. We have generated a PU.1 gfp reporter strain that allowed us to examine the expression of PU.1 in all hematopoietic cell lineages and their early progenitors. Within the bone marrow progenitor compartment, PU.1 is highly expressed in the hematopoietic stem cell, the common lymphoid progenitor, and a proportion of common myeloid progenitors (CMPs). Based on Flt3 and PU.1 expression, the CMP could be divided into three subpopulations, Flt3+ PU.1hi, Flt3− PU.1hi, and Flt3− PU.1lo CMPs. Colony-forming assays and in vivo lineage reconstitution demonstrated that the Flt3+ PU.1hi and Flt3− PU.1hi CMPs were efficient precursors for granulocyte/macrophage progenitors (GMPs), whereas the Flt3− PU.1lo CMPs were highly enriched for committed megakaryocyte/erythrocyte progenitors (MEPs). CMPs have been shown to rapidly differentiate into GMPs and MEPs in vitro. Interestingly, short-term culture revealed that the Flt3+ PU.1hi and Flt3− PU.1hi CMPs rapidly became CD16/32high (reminiscent of GMPs) in culture, whereas the Flt3− PU.1lo CMPs were the immediate precursors of the MEP. Thus, down-regulation of PU.1 expression in the CMP is the first molecularly identified event associated with the restriction of differentiation to erythroid and megakaryocyte lineages.
Well-Pointed Coalgebras

For endofunctors of varieties preserving intersections, a new description of the final coalgebra and the initial algebra is presented: the former consists of all well-pointed coalgebras. These are the pointed coalgebras having no proper subobject and no proper quotient. The initial algebra consists of all well-pointed coalgebras that are well-founded in the sense of Osius and Taylor. And initial algebras are precisely the final well-founded coalgebras. Finally, the initial iterative algebra consists of all finite well-pointed coalgebras. Numerous examples are discussed e.g. automata, graphs, and labeled transition systems.
Towards the next generation of video and image quality metrics: Impact of display, resolution, contents and visual attention in subjective assessment

Two decades of research in video and image quality assessment has led to the design of subjective assessment protocols and objective metrics. In order to get good performances, most of research works have restricted their focus of interest on SD format or below and on distortion stemming from coding artifacts or transmission error. Considering up-coming services such as HDTV or scalable video coding, next generation of quality metric should take into account more factors that affect the end user quality of experience. In this paper, a review of factors is proposed considering subjective quality assessment. The four studied factors include display, resolution, content and visual attention. Each factor reveals open issues in quality assessment.
Differentiated Coverage Based Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

previous research on sensor network security mainly considers homogeneous sensor networks, where all sensor nodes have the same capabilities. Research has shown that homogeneous ad hoc networks have poor performance and scalability. The many-to-one traffic pattern dominates in sensor networks, and hence a sensor may only communicate with a small portion of its neighbors. Key management is a fundamental security operation. Most existing key management schemes try to establish shared keys for all pairs of neighbor sensors, no matter whether these nodes communicate with each other or not, and this causes large overhead. In this paper, we adopt a heterogeneous sensor network model to overcome these problems. Sensing coverage is a fundamental problem in sensor networks and has been well studied over the past years. However, most coverage algorithms only consider the uniform coverage problem, that is, all the areas have the same coverage degree requirement. In many scenarios, some key areas need high coverage degree while other areas only need low coverage degree. We propose a differentiated coverage algorithm which can provide different coverage degrees for different areas. The algorithm is energy efficient since it only keeps minimum number of sensors to work.
Domain Mapping for Product-line Requirements

This paper investigates the effectiveness of the domain mapping technique to enhance the requirements specification of product lines. Domain Mapping uses glossary terms and relations among software components to determine common definitions and requirements that are applicable across products. Introduction As systems become more complex and inter-reliant, there is an increased need for complete and accurate documentation [5]. There must exist a broad, general base of comprehension such that the transition from requirements documentation to implementation is carried out in the appropriate and intended manner. The ideal option is to locate the inconsistencies and missing information early in the life cycle in order to appropriately mitigate the problem before it arises. In the cases of product lines, the general base of knowledge must assume enough depth to be beneficial for each product yet provide expression of assumptions for all components that inherit from it. Thus, this paper shows the beneficial use of analyzing the requirements documents using the domain mapping technique for product lines.
Prevention of UV radiation–induced immunosuppression by IL-12 is dependent on DNA repair

The immunostimulatory cytokine IL-12 is able to antagonize immunosuppression induced by solar/ultraviolet (UV) radiation via yet unknown mechanisms. IL-12 was recently found to induce deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) repair. UV-induced DNA damage is an important molecular trigger for UV-mediated immunosuppression. Thus, we initiated studies into immune restoration by IL-12 to discern whether its effects are linked to DNA repair. IL-12 prevented both UV-induced suppression of the induction of contact hypersensitivity and the depletion of Langerhans cells, the primary APC of the skin, in wild-type but not in DNA repair-deficient mice. IL-12 did not prevent the development of UV-induced regulatory T cells in DNA repair-deficient mice. In contrast, IL-12 was able to break established UV-induced tolerance and inhibited the activity of regulatory T cells independent of DNA repair. These data identify a new mechanism by which IL-12 can restore immune responses and also demonstrate a link between DNA repair and the prevention of UV-induced immunosuppression by IL-12.
A Proposed Method for Improved Sound-Print Selection for Identification Purposes

: - Today the fast, real-time pattern recognition algorithms, that are used on audio data in order to find the meaning of the stream media, are more an more important. The main problem with these algorithms is that it is so hard to select them how to recognize the required patterns. A method based on distance maximization, which is able to choose quickly the pattern that later will be used as reference by the pattern recognition algorithms, from the records is given in this paper.
Calibrating and centering quasi-central catadioptric cameras

Non-central catadioptric models are able to cope with irregular camera setups and inaccuracies in the manufacturing process but are computationally demanding and thus not suitable for robotic applications. On the other hand, calibrating a quasi-central (almost central) system with a central model introduces errors due to a wrong relationship between the viewing ray orientations and the pixels on the image sensor. In this paper, we propose a central approximation to quasi-central catadioptric camera systems that is both accurate and efficient. We observe that the distance to points in 3D is typically large compared to deviations from the single viewpoint. Thus, we first calibrate the system using a state-of-the-art non-central camera model. Next, we show that by remapping the observations we are able to match the orientation of the viewing rays of a much simpler single viewpoint model with the true ray orientations. While our approximation is general and applicable to all quasi-central camera systems, we focus on one of the most common cases in practice: hypercatadioptric cameras. We compare our model to a variety of baselines in synthetic and real localization and motion estimation experiments. We show that by using the proposed model we are able to achieve near non-central accuracy while obtaining speed-ups of more than three orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art non-central models.
A Cache Replacement Method for Crowded Streaming Cache Servers Responding to Rapidly Changing Access Patterns

The emergence of high quality video streaming services over the Internet has caused significant increases in the volume of traffic. Until now, cache technologies that have deployed frequently requested content in the proximity of users to mitigate traffic have been widely deployed on the Internet to improve user experiences and make them more effective. However, even when a cached object becomes a candidate for eviction due to lower access frequency, the object cannot be evicted since it is locked in working status until delivery is completed. This degrades the cache hit ratio and it has recently become much more common in high access traffic environments. This paper proposes a new method of replacing caches, called scheduled eviction of lingering caches (SELC). SELC selects an eviction candidate object based on replacement latency and shuts new access out by redirecting the access to an origin server so as to unlock the object by completing delivery for existing requests. Consequently, SELC can preserve cache space for emerging content. The results we obtained from simulations indicated that the proposed method could improve the cache hit ratio of crowded cache servers in an environment of rapidly changing access frequency.