Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved Hyperspectral Image Denoising Employing Sparse Representation

Hyper spectral imaging is the latest imaging technologies which observe the Earth's surface using some hyper spectral sensors. The aim of this imaging is to obtain the spectrum for each detailed pixels carrying the image of the scene, for classifying objects, identifying materials. Noisy elements can decrease the classification accuracy by affecting the boundaries of particular objects so it will affect on the important part of interest. So extraction of valuable information becomes difficult and can say that noise can create artifacts and loss of spatial resolution. To overcome this problem HSI (hyper spectral imaging) denoising (removing noise) is an important preprocess step before these images/data are analyzed. It has been proved that there is much global and local redundancy and correlation (RAC) in both spatial/spectral dimensions on HSI. So this proposed system is focused on jointly using the global and local RAC in spatial/spectral domains and to eliminate spectral distortion, low-rank constraint is used which deal with the global RAC in the spectral domain. The system aims to reduce the time complexity in achieving improved denoising of the hyper spectral image than other existing methods. The system focuses on improving values of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measurement (SSIM) and feature similarity index measurement (FSIM) indices.
Using MILOS to build an on-line photo album: the PhotoBook

Building new digital library applications requires a developement platform that offers standard and powerful building blocks to support application developers. In this paper we discuss our experience of using MILOS, a multimedia content management system oriented to the construction of digital libraries, to build a demanding application dedicated to non-professional users. Specifically, we discuss the design and implementation of an on-line photo album (PhotoBook), which is a digital library application that allows people to manage their own photos, to share them with friends, and to make them publicly available and
Anti-social behavior detection in audio-visual surveillance systems

In this paper we propose a general purpose framework for detection of unusual events. The proposed system is based on the unsupervised method for unusual scene detection in web{cam images that was introduced in [1]. We extend their algorithm to accommodate data from different modalities and introduce the concept of time-space blocks. In addition, we evaluate early and late fusion techniques for our audio-visual data features. The experimental results on 192 hours of data show that data fusion of audio and video outperforms using a single modality.
Design for Mobile Learning in Museums

This chapter discusses the design challenges of mobile museum learning applications. Museums are undoubtedly rich in learning opportunities to be further enhanced with effective use of mobile technology. A visit supported and mediated by mobile devices can trigger the visitors’ motivation by stimulating their imagination and engagement, giving opportunities to reorganize and conceptualise historical, cultural and technological facts in a constructive and meaningful way. In particular, context of use, social and constructivist aspects of learning and novel pedagogical approaches are important factors to be taken in consideration during the design process. A thorough study of existing systems is presented in the chapter in order to offer a background for extracting useful design approaches and guidelines. The chapter closes with a discussion on our experience in designing a collaborative learning activity for a cultural history museum.
Multisensor fusion using homotopy particle filter

Homotopy particle filters (HPFs), recently developed by Daum and Huang [1], present an alternative nonlinear filtering approach to sampling-based particle filters. Homotopy filters perform information update using the flow of particles to regions with high measurement likelihood. The particle flows in HPFs are solutions to a Fokker-Plank equation governing the dynamics of the posterior density function. The resulting partial differential equation is highly under-determined and has many solutions. In this work we study the nonzero-diffusion flow, and show its advantage in multisensor fusion. The nonzero-diffusion flow was chosen because it has the form of an information filter (inverse-covariance filter), and this feature makes it suitable for integration of measurement contributions from different sensors. The effectiveness of the HPF with nonzero diffusion flow as a fusion mechanism was evaluated for tracking a moving target using multiple range and bearing sensors. It is shown that the HPF requires several orders of magnitude fewer particles than a sampling-based particle filter, without loss in state estimator performance.
Transport pathways for Asian pollution outflow over the Pacific: Interannual and seasonal variations

[1] The meteorological pathways contributing to Asian pollution outflow over the Pacific are examined with a global three-dimensional model analysis of CO observations from the Transport and Chemical Evolution over the Pacific (TRACE-P) aircraft mission (February–April 2001). The model is used also to place the TRACE-P observations in an interannual (1994–2001) and seasonal context. The major process driving Asian pollution outflow in spring is frontal lifting ahead of southeastward-moving cold fronts (the leading edge of cold surges) and transport in the boundary layer behind the cold fronts. Orographic lifting over central and eastern China combines with the cold fronts to promote the transport of Chinese pollution to the free troposphere. Outflow of seasonal biomass burning in Southeast Asia during spring takes place mostly by deep convection but also by northeastward transport and frontal lifting, mixing with the anthropogenic outflow. Boundary layer outflow over the western Pacific is largely devoid of biomass burning influence. European and African (biomass burning) plumes in Asian outflow during TRACE-P were weak (<60 ppbv and 20 ppbv CO, respectively) and were not detectable in the observations because of superposition of the much larger Asian pollution signal. Spring 2001 (La Nina) was characterized by unusually frequent cold surge events in the Asian Pacific rim and strong convection in Southeast Asia, leading to unusually strong boundary layer outflow of anthropogenic emissions and convective outflow of biomass burning emissions in the upper troposphere. The Asian outflow flux of CO to the Pacific is found to vary seasonally by a factor of 3–4 (maximum in March and minimum in summer). The March maximum results from frequent cold surge events and seasonal biomass burning emissions.
Effect of Perceived Academic Stress on Students' Performance

Current study explored the effect of academic stress on students’ performance and the impact of demographic variables like gender, age and educational level. A sample of one hundred and fifty students was taken from different universities located in Islamabad. Seventy- five respondents were males and the remaining seventy-five were females. The results showed significant effect of academic stress on student’s performance. There was a non-significant difference between male and female university students on scores on the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). A significant difference between junior and senior students was found on the PSS. Academic stress was found to be higher in younger students than older students. There was a non-significant difference on PSS scores among students when stress was measured at the beginning and at the end of the semester.
Ricean K-factor analysis of indoor channel measurements at 3.7 GHz

This paper presents analysis results of the wideband MIMO channel based on indoor measurements. An accurate characterization of the K-factor is very important in design issues, especially for MIMO and broadband networks. We have performed measurement campaigns for the indoor wideband channel using the Band Exploration and Channel Sounding (BECS) system developed by ETRI at 3.7 GHz with 100 MHz RF bandwidth. Based on the measured data, we analyze the Ricean K-factor characteristics of the indoor channel.
A 92-year-old man with primary cutaneous diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma manifesting as a giant scalp mass

Rationale: Primary cutaneous non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) is an uncommon entity, representing 10% of all extranodal NHLs. Among all cutaneous sites, the scalp is a rare site of representation. Patient concerns: A 92-year-old Chinese man visited our hospital with a multiple-nodular huge scalp mass on the right parieto-occipital regions. The mass was of 7-month duration and progressively enlarging in size. Diagnoses: On the basis of the result of biopsy, diffuse large B-cell NHL was diagnosed. Interventions: The mass was partially resected by surgery and no further treatment was conducted due to the advanced age and poor physical status. Outcomes: The tumor relapsed in situ after 6 months and the patient died after 2 years. Lessons: This case highlighted the limited access to standard treatment options in patients with advanced age. A thorough examination is necessary to decide upon the treatment for the primary cutaneous lymphoma.
FEED EFFICIENCY IN THE RANGE BEEF COW : WHAT SHOULD WE BE LOOKING AT ?

INTRODUCTION Beef cow efficiency is a critically important topic for range cow producers. Feed efficiency, or the ability to convert grazed forages into production, is obviously an important aspect of overall cow efficiency. The late Bob Taylor from CSU made the statement " profitable cattle are usually productive, but productive cattle are not always profitable " (Taylor, 1994). That is an inherently important concept in the efficiency discussion, as it leads us to question the important metrics in determining feed efficiency in the cow. Efficiency must be associated with biological type of cow, not just cow size. Higher milking cows have higher maintenance requirements, even when the cows are not in lactation (Ferrell and Jenkins, 1984). A five-year study evaluated the efficiency of different breeds types supplied varying levels of feed input (dry matter intake) throughout each year (Jenkins and Ferrell, 1994). Larger, higher output type cows (breeds) had a greater weaning weight per pound of feed consumed per cow exposed when in a liberal feed situation than did moderate output breeds. However, when feed supply was restricted, the moderate type breeds had a greater weaning weight per pound of forage consumed per cow exposed than the larger breeds. There are certainly differences within breeds, but the point is that biological type of cow is important in terms of their production across varying feed supplies. Note that the environment is not necessarily related to a certain part of the country. One Northern Great Plains rancher might strive to run cows on native range with no hay and limited supplement, while another might have the option to winter cows on crop aftermath and ethanol production by-products (at relatively low costs). Therefore, a rancher must look at the environment and system that cows are running in and evaluate the key metrics of performance in those systems. Patterson and Richards (2007) concluded that a key metric to evaluate is unit cost of production, or the cost to produce a pound of calf. You can lower unit cost of production by increasing output (lbs of calf weaned/cow exposed) or by lowering cost. Other examples of key metrics were listed as: 1) pregnancy rate 2) weaning weight/cow exposed 3) cows bred in the first 21 days of the breeding season 4) cow body condition score in at pregnancy testing Ranchester, WY
CDC42 and Rac1 control different actin-dependent processes in the Drosophila wing disc epithelium

Cdc42 and Rac1 are members of the rho family of small guanosinetriphosphatases and are required for a diverse set of cytoskeleton-membrane interactions in different cell types. Here we show that these two proteins contribute differently to the organization of epithelial cells in the Drosophila wing imaginal disc. Drac1 is required to assemble actin at adherens junctions. Failure of adherens junction actin assembly in Drac1 dominant-negative mutants is associated with increased cell death. Dcdc42, on the other hand, is required for processes that involve polarized cell shape changes during both pupal and larval development. In the third larval instar, Dcdc42 is required for apico-basal epithelial elongation. Whereas normal wing disc epithelial cells increase in height more than twofold during the third instar, cells that express a dominant-negative version of Dcdc42 remain short and are abnormally shaped. Dcdc42 localizes to both apical and basal regions of the cell during these events, and mediates elongation, at least in part, by effecting a reorganization of the basal actin cytoskeleton. These observations suggest that a common cdc42-based mechanism may govern polarized cell shape changes in a wide variety of cell types.
Randomised controlled trial of nurse practitioner versus general practitioner care for patients requesting “same day” consultations in primary care

Abstract Objective: To ascertain any differences between care from nurse practitioners and that from general practitioners for patients seeking “same day” consultations in primary care. Design: Randomised controlled trial with patients allocated by one of two randomisation schemes (by day or within day). Setting: 10 general practices in south Wales and south west England. Subjects: 1368 patients requesting same day consultations. Main outcome measures: Patient satisfaction, resolution of symptoms and concerns, care provided (prescriptions, investigations, referrals, recall, and length of consultation), information provided to patients, and patients' intentions for seeking care in the future. Results: Generally patients consulting nurse practitioners were significantly more satisfied with their care, although for adults this difference was not observed in all practices. For children, the mean difference between general and nurse practitioner in percentage satisfaction score was −4.8 (95% confidence interval −6.8 to −2.8), and for adults the differences ranged from −8.8 (−13.6 to −3.9) to 3.8 (−3.3 to 10.8) across the practices. Resolution of symptoms and concerns did not differ between the two groups (odds ratio 1.2 (95% confidence interval 0.8 to 1.8) for symptoms and 1.03 (0.8 to 1.4) for concerns). The number of prescriptions issued, investigations ordered, referrals to secondary care, and reattendances were similar between the two groups. However, patients managed by nurse practitioners reported receiving significantly more information about their illnesses and, in all but one practice, their consultations were significantly longer. Conclusion: This study supports the wider acceptance of the role of nurse practitioners in providing care to patients requesting same day consultations.
A note on fermionic mesons in holographic QCD

We study the fermionic sector of a probe D8-brane in the supergravity background made of D4-branes compactified on a circle with supersymmetry broken explicitly by the boundary conditions. At low energies the dual field theory is effectively four-dimensional and has proved surprisingly successful in recovering qualitative and quantitative properties of QCD. We investigate fluctuations of the fermionic fields on the probe D8-brane and interpret these as mesinos (fermionic superpartners of mesons). We demonstrate that the masses of these modes are comparable to meson masses and show that their interactions with ordinary mesons are not suppressed.
Hierarchical model with piecewise latent process for globally sparse / locally smooth brain generators imaging

Noninvasive measurement techniques like EEG (electroencephalography) or MEG (magnetoencephalography) provide a good time resolution but suffer of a lack of spatial resolution. Source reconstruction is a solution for increasing the spatial resolution. It requires to solve an ill-posed inverse problem where the challenge is to restrict the source space, making a compromise between smooth and sparse constraints. We propose a model that introduces a piecewise latent process to ensure local homogeneity and global sparsity of the source. The method is developed in a Bayesian framework and the source reconstruction is expressed as the minimum mean square error, computed with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm. In addition to the source reconstruction, the method also provides a segmented solution that can be relevant for classification issues. The main contribution is the novel application of such a probabilistic model and its comparison with existing approaches. We apply the method on simulated EEG recordings and show the positive influence of the latent process.
On the evolution of the cosmic supernova rates

Ongoing searches for supernovae (SNe) at cosmological distances have recently started to provide a link between SN Ia statistics and galaxy evolution. We use recent estimates of the global history of star formation to compute the theoretical Type Ia and Type II SN rates as a function of cosmic time from the present epoch to high redshifts. We show that accurate measurements of the frequency of SN events in the range 0 < z < 1 will be valuable probes of the nature of Type Ia progenitors and the evolution of the stellar birth rate in the Universe. The Next Generation Space Telescope should detect of order 20 Type II SNe per 4 × 4 arcmin2 field per year in the interval 1 < z < 4.
Interactive GPU-Based Volume Rendering for Medical Image

As we know that the 3D medical images are usually in large scalar, the traditional volume rendering method which running on CPU can not achieve interactive rendering speed. Recently, GPU-accelerated direct volume rendering has positioned itself as an efficient tool for the display and visual analysis of volume data. To facilitate the usage of well developed hardware resource, a graphics processing unit (GPU)-based volume ray-casting algorithm is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm implement ray casting operation completely in GPU. The algorithm re-samples volume data, represented as a stack of 3D texture, onto a sampling surface. The ray-casting algorithm performs in fragment shaders. Additionally we apply early ray termination. At last we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm with several medical volume data. It proved that the proposed algorithm can perform an interactive rate even for direct volume rendering while keeping the high image quality. Keywords-Volume Rendering; Medical Image; Texture; Graphic Processing Unit(GPU)
An improved method of object fragmentation

Background modeling plays a key role of event detection in intelligent surveillance systems. Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is a popular background modeling method in latest surveillance systems. However, the model will result in object fragmentation if the objects' color is likely to its background. In our paper, we present a different mechanism which compares the area of original pictures with background pictures in HSV color space. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can recover the lost part of objects caused by GMM model partly and enhance objects' integrity comparing to GMM. A drawback of this method is that it may impact the speed of computing when there are too many moving objects in frames.
Linearly compressed pages: A main memory compression framework with low complexity and low latency

Data compression is a promising technique to address the increasing main memory capacity demand in future systems. Unfortunately, directly applying previously proposed compression algorithms to main memory requires the memory controller to perform non-trivial computations to locate a cache line within the compressed main memory. These additional computations lead to significant increase in access latency, which can degrade system performance. Solutions proposed by prior work to address this performance degradation problem are either costly or energy inefficient. In this paper, we propose a new main memory compression framework that neither incurs the latency penalty nor requires costly or power-inefficient hardware. The key idea behind our proposal is that if all the cache lines within a page are compressed to the same size, then the location of a cache line within a compressed page is simply the product of the index of the cache line within the page and the size of a compressed cache line. We call a page compressed in such a manner a Linearly Compressed Page (LCP). LCP greatly reduces the amount of computation required to locate a cache line within the compressed page, while keeping the hardware implementation of the proposed main memory compression framework simple. We adapt two previously proposed compression algorithms, Frequent Pattern Compression and Base-DeltaImmediate compression, to fit the requirements of LCP. Evaluations using benchmarks from SPEC CPU 2006 and five server benchmarks show that our approach can significantly increase the effective memory capacity (69% on average). In addition to the capacity gains, we evaluate the benefit of transferring consecutive compressed cache lines between the memory controller and main memory. Our new mechanism considerably reduces the memory bandwidth requirements of most of the evaluated benchmarks (46%/48% for CPU/GPU on average), and improves overall performance (6.1%/13.9%/10.7% for single-/two-/four-core CPU workloads on average) compared to a baseline system that does not employ main memory compression.
Omega network hash construction

Problem statement: Cryptographic hash functions are important cryptographic primitives. They are commonly used for data integrity checking and data authentication. Most of the cryptographic hash functions are based on the Merkle-Damgard construction. The basic Merkle-Damgard construction runs over the input sequentially, which can lead to problems when the input size is large since the computation time increases linearly. Approach: Therefore, an alternative architecture which can reduce the computation time is needed, especially in today’s world where multi-core processors and multithreaded programming are common. An Omega Network Hash Construction (ONHC) run parallel in multi-core machine has been proposed as an alternative to the existing hash constructions. Result: The ONHC performed better than the Merkle-Damgard construction. ONHC permutation architecture also showed improved security strength in term of digest value randomness when compared to Merkle-Damgard construction. Conclusion: Therefore, it is believed that the proposed ONHC is a valuable structure that can improve the performance of any hash function that can run on top of it.
Neural mechanisms underlying social conformity in an ultimatum game

When individuals’ actions are incongruent with those of the group they belong to, they may change their initial behavior in order to conform to the group norm. This phenomenon is known as “social conformity. ” In the present study, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate brain activity in response to group opinion during an ultimatum game. Results showed that participants changed their choices when these choices conflicted with the normative opinion of the group they were members of, especially in conditions of unfair treatment. The fMRI data revealed that a conflict with group norms activated the brain regions involved in norm violations and behavioral adjustment. Furthermore, in the reject-unfair condition, we observed that a conflict with group norms activated the medial frontal gyrus. These findings contribute to recent research examining neural mechanisms involved in detecting violations of social norms, and provide information regarding the neural representation of conformity behavior in an economic game.