Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A sampling-based local trajectory planner for autonomous driving along a reference path

In this paper, a state space sampling-based local trajectory generation framework for autonomous vehicles driving along a reference path is proposed. The presented framework employs a two-step motion planning architecture. In the first step, a Support Vector Machine based approach is developed to refine the reference path through maximizing the lateral distance to boundaries of the constructed corridor while ensuring curvature-continuity. In the second step, a set of terminal states are sampled aligned with the refined reference path. Then, to satisfy system constraints, a model predictive path generation method is utilized to generate multiple path candidates, which connect the current vehicle state with the sampling terminal states. Simultaneously the velocity profiles are assigned to guarantee safe and comfort driving motions. Finally, an optimal trajectory is selected based on a specified objective function via a discrete optimization scheme. The simulation results demonstrate the planner's capability to generate dynamically-feasible trajectories in real time and enable the vehicle to drive safely and smoothly along a rough reference path while avoiding static obstacles.
Oblivious evaluation of multivariate polynomials

Abstract. One of the fundamental problems of multi-party computation is Oblivious Polynomial Evaluation. In that problem, that was introduced by Naor and Pinkas, Alice has a polynomial and Bob has a point . The goal is to allow Bob to compute so that Alice remains oblivious of and Bob of , apart from what is implied by and . We introduce the multivariate version of this problem, where x and are vectors, and offer an efficient secure protocol. In addition, we discuss several applications that may be solved efficiently using oblivious multivariate polynomial evaluation, such as private linear algebraic computations and private support vector machines (SVM).
Softball Petechiae: A Novel Cutaneous Finding in a Patient Participating in Post-Exercise Massage

We report a case of a 39-year-old healthy male presenting with an eruption consisting of evenly spaced, well-circumscribed, round, petechial macules over a discrete region on his back. A detailed history revealed that the man participated in a high-intensity combination workout routine and post-exercise massage. He reported using a regulation-sized dimpled softball in order to massage the musculature of his back. A diagnosis of traumatic petechiae was established. A growing fitness culture encouraging high-intensity training and post-exercise massage coupled with the high costs of professional masseuse services has led to the increased use of self-massage techniques using both traditional and non-traditional massage equipment. The topography of this equipment and the rise in post-exercise self-massage may lead to an increase in traumatic rashes of varying clinical and cosmetic significance.
Do 'Faculty of 1000' (F1000) ratings of ecological publications serve as reasonable predictors of their future impact?

There is an increasing demand for an effective means of post-publication evaluation of ecological work that avoids pitfalls associated with using the impact factor of the journal in which the work was published. One approach that has been gaining momentum is the 'Faculty of 1000' (hereafter F1000) evaluation procedure, in which panel members identify what they believe to be the most 'important' recent publications they have read. Here I focused on 1530 publications from 7 major ecological journals that appeared in 2005, and compared the F1000 rating of each publication with the frequency with which it was subsequently cited. The mean and median citation frequencies of the 103 publications highlighted by F1000 was higher than for all 1530 publications, but not substantially so. Further, the F1000 procedure did not highlight any of the 11 publications that were each cited over 130 (and up to 497) times, while it did highlight 14 publications that were each cited between 4 and 9 times. Further, 46% and 31% of all manuscripts highlighted by F1000 were cited less often than the mean and median respectively of all 1530 publications. Possible reasons for the F1000 process failing to identify high impact publications may include uneven coverage by F1000 of different ecological topics, cronyism, and geographical bias favoring North American publications. As long as the F1000 process cannot identify those publications that subsequently have the greatest impact, it cannot be reliably used as a means of post-publication evaluation of the ecological literature.
Active experience of audiovisual cultural content: the virtual binocular interface

This paper describes the main novel developments which have been introduced and experimented with in "Viaggiatori di Sguardo", a permanent interactive installation. The objectives and resulting interaction design choices are briefly explained, and the system architecture briefly sketched. Then, the paper focuses on the novel full-body pointing interaction mechanism based on the mimicking of the use of binoculars. The permanent installation "Viaggiatori di Sguardo" was opened on December 2009 at Palazzo Ducale, Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, and has been visited up to now by about 5,000 visitors. Results from the evaluation of such a novel interface are presented, and future developments briefly discussed.
A Design Framework for Technology-Mediated Public Participatory System for the Environment

The rapid decline in biodiversity associated with environmental degradation has encouraged governments worldwide to take urgent action aimed at monitoring and documenting its current state. In response, governmental and non-governmental institutions have supported the rise of technologymediated public participatory systems, also known as citizen science initiatives, designed to encourage citizen participation in gathering relevant environmental data using their mobile devices. However, despite the ubiquitousness of mobile phones, there is a disturbing paucity of these systems in developing nations as compared to the developed nations. A review of the literature dealing with the extant participatory systems offers interesting insights regarding this uneven distribution. This paper explicates the design of extant participatory systems and the constraints in translating it to the context of developing nations often characterized by low levels of literacy and ICT skills, lack of appropriate devices, sparse internet connectivity and high data costs. Following design science principles the paper identifies the problem and delineates a solution. Taking inspiration from social science theories on enabling access to and motivating participation in environmental systems, the meta-requirements for design are identified and associated design principles are extracted. Future directions for researching operational aspects are discussed along with a description of the potential design architecture of the participatory system.
Consistency Management of Replicas in Wireless Grid Environment

In a wireless network, an user has the possibility of remaining link while moving in a more or less spread geographical perimeter, it is the reason for which they intend to sometimes speak about "mobility". The wireless Grid represent a new type of network of distribution of means linking up mobile phones and other implements of edge some with the others with different access points. In this article, we offer a service allowing to manage the consistency of the replicas of data in such environment where the users can move at any time. Offered service combines between optimistic and pessimistic approaches. We go shown with the aid of several results of experimentation which our proposal allows to reduce in a remarkable manner the number of divergences and conflicts between replicas of the same data in environment Wireless Grid.
Individual differences in change blindness

The present work shows the existence of systematic individual differences in change blindness. It can be concluded that the sensitivity for changes is a trait. That is, persons differ in their ability to detect changes, independent from the situation or the measurement method. Moreover, there are two explanations for individual differences in change blindness: a) capacity differences in visual selective attention that may be influenced by top-down activated attention helping to focus attention onto relevant stimuli b) differences in working memory capacity or in decision making. In accordance with this, age-related individual differences in the sensitivity for changes can be explained by attentional processes and by confidence in the own ratings. Together, the present work might form the basis for a more application-oriented research on individual differences in change blindness and its underlying processes.
Fixed-structure H∞ control design for linear Individual Pitch Control of two-bladed wind turbines

In this paper, a fixed-structure Individual Pitch Control (IPC) design method for two-bladed wind turbines is presented. IPC is an active load reduction technique designed to lower wind turbine loads, which are caused by continuously varying wind conditions. Based on load measurements, the once-per-revolution (1P) loads and harmonics of this frequency (2P, 3P, etc.) can be reduced by rotating (pitching) the blades along their axes. Instead of using the typical Multi-Blade Coordinate (MBC) transformation for IPC, a linear coordinate transformation specifically for two-bladed wind turbines is considered. The advantage of using this transformation is that only a single simple Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) controller is required to reduce the odd harmonic loads (1P, 3P, etc.). A second SISO controller can be used to reduce the even harmonic loads (2P, 4P, etc.). Moreover, the coordinate transformation allows for fixed-structure controller design, which makes it highly suitable for practical application. With nonsmooth H∞-controller synthesis, the optimal controller parameters for the new IPC design method can be found. The performance of the resulting controller is evaluated by means of a high-fidelity simulation of a two-bladed wind turbine.
A functional polymorphism in the COMT gene and performance on a test of prefrontal cognition.

OBJECTIVE In the prefrontal cortex, the enzyme catechol O-methyltransferase (COMT) is critical in the metabolic degradation of dopamine, a neurotransmitter hypothesized to influence human cognitive function. The COMT gene contains a functional polymorphism, Val158Met, that exerts a fourfold effect on enzyme activity. The current study investigated whether prefrontal cognition varies with COMT genotype. METHOD Val158Met was genotyped in 73 healthy volunteers. A task of prefrontal cognition, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, was also administered. RESULTS Subjects with only the low-activity met allele made significantly fewer perseverative errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test than did subjects with the val allele. CONCLUSIONS These data are consistent with those of previous studies, suggesting that a functional genetic polymorphism may influence prefrontal cognition.
The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Modeling Quantum Entanglements in Quantum Language Models Conference Item

Recently, a Quantum Language Model (QLM) was proposed to model term dependencies upon Quantum Theory (QT) framework and successively applied in Information Retrieval (IR). Nevertheless, QLM’s dependency is based on co-occurrences of terms and has not yet taken into account the Quantum Entanglement (QE), which is a key quantum concept and has a significant cognitive implication. In QT, an entangled state can provide a more complete description for the nature of realities, and determine intrinsic correlations of considered objects globally, rather than those co-occurrences on the surface. It is, however, a real challenge to decide and measure QE using the classical statistics of texts in a post-measurement configuration. In order to circumvent this problem, we theoretically prove the connection between QE and statistically Unconditional Pure Dependence (UPD). Since UPD has an implementable deciding algorithm, we can in turn characterize QE by extracting the UPD patterns from texts. This leads to a measurable QE, based on which we further advance the existing QLM framework. We empirically compare our model with related models, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
From the trastuzumab era to new target therapies: beyond revolution.

In the October 2005 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine, Gabriel Hortobagy claimed that "the results of trastuzumab adjuvant trials are not evolutionary but revolutionary" [1]. In effect, from the early results of the first target therapy, tamoxifene, this is the first time that such enthusiastic and dramatic results, in terms of outcome of an adjuvant therapy, have been realized. Interim analysis of four randomized phase III trials, in patients with HER2-positive early-stage breast cancer, indicated significant improvement in disease-free survival (DFS) compared with chemotherapy alone [hazard ratio (HR) 0.48-0.64] and an overall survival (OS) benefit in three of the four trials (NCCTG N9831/NSABP B-31: HR 0.67, P = 0.015; HERA: HR 0.66; P = 0.0115) when trastuzumab was added to standard therapy. It is obvious that there are certain limitations in the use of this extraordinary drug. The first is that trastuzumab can only be used in a small number of patients; the majority (HER-2 negative) cannot benefit from its use. The second problem is the potential cardiotoxicity of this treatment. In clinical practice, treatment with trastuzumab can be resumed when the patients are no longer symptomatic and cardiac function is normalized. The third dilemma is whether the duration of therapy should be short or prolonged. The fourth problem concerns the high cost of trastuzumab treatment to the National Health Service, which is not to be disregarded. Finally, the fifth dilemma is to decide which patients should be treated with trastuzumab. It is obvious that all node-positive patients should receive treatment, but probably not all node-negative patients. Other potential strategies for evaluating response to trastuzumab therapy might include the assessment of surrogate markers of critical HER2-mediated signaling pathways, including the PI3K/Akt pathway, and circulating HER2 extracellular domain levels. In addition, the NSABP B-31 trial identified c-Myc amplification as a predictive factor for responsiveness to trastuzumab. Acquired and de novo resistance to trastuzumab is a significant clinical challenge.
Atrioventricular Conduction in Atrial Fibrillation: Pathophysiology and Clinical Implications

The atrioventricular (AV) node is the only conduction pathway between the atria and ventricles, it is located at the base of the right atrium. The conduction through the atrioventricular node is slow to allow the atria to pump blood into the ventricles before they contract. It also acts as a backup pacemaker, in case the sinoatrial node fails and limits the number of action potentials conducted to the ventricles during atrial fibrillation (AF). Despite this filtering function, adequate ventricular rate control in atrial fibrillation often requires utilization of pharmacological and/or non-pharmacological treatment modalities.
Using word posterior probabilities in lattice translation

In this paper we describe the statistical machine translation system developed at ITI/UPV, which aims especially at speech recognition and statistical machine translation integration, for the evaluation campaign of the Internationa l Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (2007). The system we have developed takes advantage of an improved word lattice representation that uses word posterior probabilities. These word posterior probabilities are the n added as a feature to a log-linear model. This model includes a stochastic finite-state transducer which allows an easy la ttice integration. Furthermore, it provides a statistical p hrasebased reordering model that is able to perform local reorderings of the output. We have tested this model on the Italian-English corpus, for clean text, 1-best ASR and lattice ASR inputs. The results and conclusions of such experiments are reported at the end of this paper.
Query-focused summarization by supervised sentence ranking and skewed word distributions

We present a supervised sentence ranking approach for use in extractive summarization. The supervised approach achieves domain independence by making use of a range of word distribution statistics as features, of the sort typically used for unsupervised domain-independent ranking. We present empirical trials on the DUC 2006 query-directed multi-document summarization task, and demonstrate that the very general machine learning approaches taken can provide competitive results for this task. The general approach provides great flexibility for incorporating many more features.
Promoting it streams in engineering admissions using Business Intelligence

In the Present scenario, there is huge amount of data is generated every moment which projects data analytics plays an important role in Business Intelligence. The data is analyzed and processed in almost all the technologies and departments but, it has somehow less contribution in the education sectors. According to the society, the growth of IT sector is not a valid aspect. So in order to justify never the IT stream will not fall in. For achieving this, data analytics are processed with the dynamic data set collected from the social environments. These structured and unstructured data sets will be grouped in data layer then analyzed in analytics layer and foretelling by using Business Intelligence reporting tool in reporting layer to provide a graphical representation for this issue. With the help of this, the layered conceptual BI model which we proposed will enrich the growth of intakes in IT streams will always be static in end user layer.
Computerized performance monitoring systems: use and abuse

An exploratory study of computerized performance monitoring and control systems reveals both positive and negative effects. Responses of 50 clerical workers from 2 organizations with computerized monitoring were compared to 94 individuals from 3 organizations in similar jobs without computerized monitoring. The results indicate that computerized monitoring is associated with perceived increases in office productivity, more accurate and complete assessment of workers' performance, and higher levels of organizational control. Respondents indicate that managers overemphasize the importance of quantity and underemphasize the importance of quality in evaluating employee performance. Workers perceive increased stress, lower levels of satisfaction, and a decrease in the quality of their relationships with peers and management as a consequence of computerized monitoring. The relevance of existing models of performance monitoring is examined in light of these findings.
Gene Knockout Experiments to Quantify a G2/M Genetic Network Simulation for Mammary Cancer Susceptibility

A G2/M genetic network simulation is trained with tumor incidence data from knockout experiments. The genetic network is implemented using a neural network; knockout genotypes are simulated by removing nodes in the neural network. Two analyses are used to interpret the resulting network weights. We use a novel approach of fixing the network topology that allows knockout TSG (tumor suppressor gene) data from multiple studies to overlap and indirectly inform one another. The trained simulation is validated by reproducing qualitative mammary cancer susceptibilities of ATM, BRCA1, and p53 TSGs. The work described is valuable because it allows TSG mammary cancer susceptibility to be quantified using genetic network topology and in vivo knockout data.
Using evolutionary algorithms to select parameters from equivalence classes

This paper presents some ideas about an approach which aims at extending existing methodologies for functional testing. Experience in automotive applications has shown that when selecting parameters for functional testing, many times a tester has equivalence classes in mind. Instead of losing valuable information in the process, support should be given to make them manageable. The proposed approach suggests evolutionary testing strategies to search for critical representatives within equivalence classes.
Identification of wind turbine model for individual pitch controller design

The use of wind power has been increasing rapidly over last few decades and according to all predictions this trend is likely to continue. At the same time need for better cost effectiveness of wind power plants has stimulated growth in wind turbinespsila size and rated power. As wind turbines grow in size they are subject to extreme structural loads and fatigue. In order to reduce such loads advanced control methods are explored among which individual pitch control has demonstrated very promising results. To design an individual pitch controller suitable wind turbine model is required. Derivation of wind turbine model for individual pitch controller design is addressed in this paper.
Key indicators for monitoring of audiovisual quality

Automating multimedia quality checking is currently based on finding major audio/video artifacts. The “Monitoring Of Audio-Visual quality by key Indicators” (MOAVI) subgroup of the Video Quality Experts Group is an open collaborative project for developing No-Reference models for monitoring quality. MOAVI is a complementary, industry-driven alternative to Quality of Experience used to automatically measure quality by using simple indicators of perceived degradation. The goal is to develop a set of key indicators describing quality in general, and to select subsets for each potential application. Therefore, the MOAVI project concentrates on models based on key indicators contrary to models predicting overall quality.
The socioeconomic roots of shame and perceptions of social inadequacy

Introduction. Cumulating reports on the adverse health effects of income inequality hypothesise on underlying processes related to health compromising, negative social comparisons in people with a low socioeconomic status (compared to those who are socioeconomically better-off). As this hypothesis of “internalized inferiority” has not yet been examined explicitly, we set out to examine whether internalized inferiority is indeed more common in low socioeconomic status groups. Method. Dutch SMILE data on 1,477 participants, aged 58-94 in 2008 were used. Income in adulthood (measured several times between 2002 and 2008), education in adulthood (measured several times between 2002 and 2008), education of parents (measured in 2005), and poverty in childhood (measured in 2004) were related to general shame (measured in 2009) and social inadequacy (measured in 2004 and 2008), using logistic regression analyses. Results. Both education and income-related socioeconomic measures from childhood and adulthood had independent associations with social inadequacy. Poverty in childhood was related to reports of general shame. Discussion.In this cohort the socioeconomic status of middle-aged and older men and women, especially its financial component, impacts cognitions and feelings of internalized inferiority. Childhood socioeconomic circumstances, particularly experiences of poverty, contributed independently. Our findings suggest that negative social comparisons and internalized inferiority might be possible key players in the association between low socioeconomic status and poor health.