Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Manhattan and Piecewise-Planar Constraints for Dense Monocular Mapping

This paper presents a variational formulation for real-time dense 3D mapping from a RGB monocular sequence that incorporates Manhattan and piecewise-planar constraints in indoor and outdoor man-made scenes. The state-of-the-art variational approaches are based on the minimization of an energy functional composed of two terms, the first one accounting for the photometric compatibility in multiple views, and the second one favoring smooth solutions. We show that the addition of a third energy term modelling Manhattan and piecewise-planar structures greatly improves the accuracy of the dense visual maps, particularly for low-textured man-made environments where the data term can be ambiguous. We evaluate two different methods to provide such Manhattan and piecewise-planar constraints based on 1) multiview superpixel geometry and 2) multiview layout estimation and scene understanding. Our experiments include the largest map produced by variational methods from a RGB sequence and demonstrate a reduction in the median depth error up to a factor 5×.
Ranking and Selecting Features Using an Adaptive Multiple Feature Subset Method

We propose a method called adaptive multiple feature subset (AMFES), which ranks and selects features at a reasonable computation cost. In the AMFES ranking procedure, we conduct an iterative process. At the initial stage, we compute features’ strength (i.e., degree of usefulness) based on various subsets drawn from the pool of all features. We then rank features according to their strength thus derived. At each subsequent stage, we input half of features that were top-ranked from the previous stage. We then re-rank them in the same fashion as we do at the first stage. In the AMFES selection procedure, we conduct a sequential batch search to tremendously reduce the computation cost. Compared with a few other methods, we show by experiments that AMFES achieves higher or comparable test accuracy rates. When achieving comparable rates, AMFES selects a smaller number of features. We argue that the employment of multiple feature subsets can diminish the ill effect of feature correlation, which explains the advantage of AMFES over other methods on the experimental data sets.
Characterization of Cochlear, Vestibular and Cochlear-Vestibular Electrically Evoked Compound Action Potentials in Patients with a Vestibulo-Cochlear Implant

The peripheral vestibular system is critical for the execution of activities of daily life as it provides movement and orientation information to motor and sensory systems. Patients with bilateral vestibular hypofunction experience a significant decrease in quality of life and have currently no viable treatment option. Vestibular implants could eventually restore vestibular function. Most vestibular implant prototypes to date are modified cochlear implants to fast-track development. These use various objective measurements, such as the electrically evoked compound action potential (eCAP), to supplement behavioral information. We investigated whether eCAPs could be recorded in patients with a vestibulo-cochlear implant. Specifically, eCAPs were successfully recorded for cochlear and vestibular setups, as well as for mixed cochlear-vestibular setups. Similarities and slight differences were found for the recordings of the three setups. These findings demonstrated the feasibility of eCAP recording with a vestibulo-cochlear implant. They could be used in the short term to reduce current spread and avoid activation of non-targeted neurons. More research is warranted to better understand the neural origin of vestibular eCAPs and to utilize them for clinical applications.
Carotid Intima-Media Thickness and Antihypertensive Treatment: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Background and Purpose— Hypertension promotes carotid intima-media thickening. We reviewed the randomized controlled trials that evaluated the effects of an antihypertensive drug versus placebo or another antihypertensive agent of a different class on carotid intima-media thickness. Methods— We searched the PubMed and the Web of Science databases for randomized clinical trials, published in English before 2005, and included 22 trials. Results— In 8 trials including 3329 patients with diabetes or coronary heart disease, antihypertensive treatment initiated with an angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor, a &bgr;-blocker, or a calcium-channel blocker (CCB), compared with placebo or no-treatment, reduced the rate of intima-media thickening by 7 &mgr;m/year (P=0.01). In 9 trials including 4564 hypertensive patients, CCBs, ACE inhibitors, an angiotensin II receptor blocker or an &agr;-blocker, compared with diuretics or &bgr;-blockers, in the presence of similar blood pressure reductions, decreased intima-media thickening by 3 &mgr;m/year (P=0.03). The overall beneficial effect of the newer over older drugs was largely attributable to the decrease of intima-media thickening by 5 &mgr;m/year (P=0.007) in 4 trials of CCBs involving 3619 patients. In 5 trials including 287 patients with hypertension or diabetes, CCBs compared with ACE inhibitors did not differentially affect blood pressure, but attenuated intima-media thickening by 23 &mgr;m/year (P=0.02). The treatment induced changes in carotid intima-media thickness correlated with the changes in lumen diameter (P=0.02), but not with the differences in achieved blood pressure (P>0.53). Conclusions— CCBs reduce carotid intima-media thickening. This mechanism might contribute to their superior protection against stroke.
Success Exponent of Wiretapper: A Tradeoff between Secrecy and Reliability

Equivocation rate has been widely used as an information-theoretic measure of security after Shannon[10]. It simplifies problems by removing the effect of atypical behavior from the system. In [9], however, Merhav and Arikan considered the alternative of using guessing exponent to analyze the Shannon's cipher system. Because guessing exponent captures the atypical behavior, the strongest expressible notion of secrecy requires the more stringent condition that the size of the key, instead of its entropy rate, to be equal to the size of the message. The relationship between equivocation and guessing exponent are also investigated in [6][7] but it is unclear which is a better measure, and whether there is a unifying measure of security. Instead of using equivocation rate or guessing exponent, we study the wiretap channel in [2] using the success exponent, defined as the exponent of a wiretapper successfully learn the secret after making an exponential number of guesses to a sequential verifier that gives yes/no answer to each guess. By extending the coding scheme in [2][5] and the converse proof in [4] with the new Overlap Lemma 5.2, we obtain a tradeoff between secrecy and reliability expressed in terms of lower bounds on the error and success exponents of authorized and respectively unauthorized decoding of the transmitted messages. From this, we obtain an inner bound to the region of strongly achievable public, private and guessing rate triples for which the exponents are strictly positive. The closure of this region is equivalent to the closure of the region in Theorem 1 of [2] when we treat equivocation rate as the guessing rate. However, it is unclear if the inner bound is tight.
Apoptosis of Purified CD4+ T Cell Subsets Is Dominated by Cytokine Deprivation and Absence of Other Cells in New Onset Diabetic NOD Mice

BACKGROUND Regulatory T cells (Treg) play a significant role in immune homeostasis and self-tolerance. Excessive sensitivity of isolated Treg to apoptosis has been demonstrated in NOD mice and humans suffering of type 1 diabetes, suggesting a possible role in the immune dysfunction that underlies autoimmune insulitis. In this study the sensitivity to apoptosis was measured in T cells from new onset diabetic NOD females, comparing purified subsets to mixed cultures. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Apoptotic cells are short lived in vivo and death occurs primarily during isolation, manipulation and culture. Excessive susceptibility of CD25(+) T cells to spontaneous apoptosis is characteristic of isolated subsets, however disappears when death is measured in mixed splenocyte cultures. In variance, CD25(-) T cells display balanced sensitivity to apoptosis under both conditions. The isolation procedure removes soluble factors, IL-2 playing a significant role in sustaining Treg viability. In addition, pro- and anti-apoptotic signals are transduced by cell-to-cell interactions: CD3 and CD28 protect CD25(+) T cells from apoptosis, and in parallel sensitize naïve effector cells to apoptosis. Treg viability is modulated both by other T cells and other subsets within mixed splenocyte cultures. Variations in sensitivity to apoptosis are often hindered by fast proliferation of viable cells, therefore cycling rates are mandatory to adequate interpretation of cell death assays. CONCLUSIONS The sensitivity of purified Treg to apoptosis is dominated by cytokine deprivation and absence of cell-to-cell interactions, and deviate significantly from measurements in mixed populations. Balanced sensitivity of naïve/effector and regulatory T cells to apoptosis in NOD mice argues against the concept that differential susceptibility affects disease evolution and progression.
Similarity Mapping with Enhanced Siamese Network for Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking has recently become an important area of computer vision, especially for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Despite growing attention, achieving high performance tracking is still challenging, with state-of-the- art systems resulting in high complexity with a large number of hyper parameters. In this paper, we focus on reducing overall system complexity and the number hyper parameters that need to be tuned to a specific environment. We introduce a novel tracking system based on similarity mapping by Enhanced Siamese Neural Network (ESNN), which accounts for both appearance and geometric information, and is trainable end-to-end. Our system achieves competitive performance in both speed and accuracy on MOT16 challenge, compared to known state-of-the-art methods.
FastID: An undeceived router for real-time identification of WiFi terminals

In recent past, the rapid developing of mobile internet inspires the widespread use of WiFi (IEEE 802.11) technology. In WiFi, the access control of a terminal to the router remains a significant challenge because the PIN (password) and MAC address are easy to guess and forge. In this paper, we present FastID - a practical system that identifies WiFi terminals in real-time by fingerprinting their clocks. Previous approaches of clock fingerprinting require tens of minutes or even hours for clock data collection, and thus cannot be applied into real-time WiFi terminal identification. Even worse, unstable wireless communications and unknown status of terminals' OSes may further degrade the accuracy of fingerprint computation. In comparison, FastID performs fast clock fingerprinting based on the timestamps carried by terminals' ICMP packets. Moreover, FastID employs simple but efficient techniques to remove outliers of collected clock data and differentiate terminals based on the similarity of their distributions, making it suitable for fast terminals identification. FastID is implemented on an off-the-shelf commercial WiFi router and extensively evaluated based on 10 commodity WiFi terminals. Experimental results show that FastID is able to identify terminals with high accuracy and low cost within several seconds.
Adipose-Derived Mesenchymal Stromal/Stem Cells: Tissue Localization, Characterization, and Heterogeneity

Adipose tissue as a stem cell source is ubiquitously available and has several advantages compared to other sources. It is easily accessible in large quantities with minimal invasive harvesting procedure, and isolation of adipose-derived mesenchymal stromal/stem cells (ASCs) yields a high amount of stem cells, which is essential for stem-cell-based therapies and tissue engineering. Several studies have provided evidence that ASCs in situ reside in a perivascular niche, whereas the exact localization of ASCs in native adipose tissue is still under debate. ASCs are isolated by their capacity to adhere to plastic. Nevertheless, recent isolation and culture techniques lack standardization. Cultured cells are characterized by their expression of characteristic markers and their capacity to differentiate into cells from meso-, ecto-, and entodermal lineages. ASCs possess a high plasticity and differentiate into various cell types, including adipocytes, osteoblasts, chondrocytes, myocytes, hepatocytes, neural cells, and endothelial and epithelial cells. Nevertheless, recent studies suggest that ASCs are a heterogeneous mixture of cells containing subpopulations of stem and more committed progenitor cells. This paper summarizes and discusses the current knowledge of the tissue localization of ASCs in situ, their characterization and heterogeneity in vitro, and the lack of standardization in isolation and culture methods.
Tenascin‐C inhibits β1 integrin‐dependent T lymphocyte adhesion to fibronectin through the binding of its fnIII 1 – 5 repeats to fibronectin

The extracellular matrix consists of different proteins interacting to form a meshwork‐like structure. T lymphocyte adhesion to individual matrix proteins is mainly regulated at the adhesion receptor level, but it is conceivable that the composition of the matrix itself may affect T lymphocyte adhesion to individual proteins. We have addressed the latter point by studying the effect of the matrix protein tenascin‐C (TN‐C) on T lymphocyte adhesion to fibronectin. Here we report that TN‐C inhibits adhesion of T lymphocytes and MOLT‐4 lymphoma cells to fibronectin. We demonstrate that a TNC fragment consisting of fibronectin type III repeats 1 – 5 (TNfnIII 1 – 5) but not TNfnIII A – D and TNfnIII 6 – 8 inhibited α5β1 and α4β1 integrin‐mediated T lymphocyte and MOLT‐4 adhesion to fibronectin. At concentrations that did not inhibit adhesion, TNfnIII 1 – 5 still prevented MOLT‐4 cells from spreading on fibronectin. Preincubation and co‐immobilization of TNfnIII 1 –5 with fibronectin was more effective in inhibiting MOLT‐4 adhesion to fibronectin than soluble TNfnIII 1 – 5 present during the adhesion test. Using an enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay we could demonstrate binding of TNfnIII 1 – 5 to fibronectin and fibronectin fragments. Taken together, these data demonstrate that the TNfnIII 1 – 5 domain is implicated in the inhibition of T lymphocyte adhesion to fibronectin caused by TN‐C, and indicate that this effect involves the binding of TN‐C repeats TNfnIII 1 – 5 to fibronectin.
Knockdown of Indy/CeNac2 extends Caenorhabditis elegans life span by inducing AMPK/aak-2

Reducing the expression of the Indy (Acronym for ‘I'm Not Dead, Yet’) gene in lower organisms promotes longevity and leads to a phenotype that resembles various aspects of caloric restriction. In C. elegans, the available data on life span extension is controversial. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the role of the C. elegans INDY homolog CeNAC2 in life span regulation and to delineate possible molecular mechanisms. siRNA against Indy/CeNAC2 was used to reduce expression of Indy/CeNAC2. Mean life span was assessed in four independent experiments, as well as whole body fat content and AMPK activation. Moreover, the effect of Indy/CeNAC2 knockdown in C. elegans with inactivating variants of AMPK (TG38) was studied. Knockdown of Indy/CeNAC2 increased life span by 22 ± 3% compared to control siRNA treated C. elegans, together with a decrease in whole body fat content by ~50%. Indy/CeNAC2 reduction also increased the activation of the intracellular energy sensor AMPK/aak2. In worms without functional AMPK/aak2, life span was not extended when Indy/CeNAC2 was reduced. Inhibition of glycolysis with deoxyglucose, an intervention known to increase AMPK/aak2 activity and life span, did not promote longevity when Indy/CeNAC2 was knocked down. Together, these data indicate that reducing the expression of Indy/CeNAC2 increases life span in C. elegans, an effect mediated at least in part by AMPK/aak2.
Studying the effects of mobilization messages in a strategic environment: Applying the receive-accept-sample (RAS) model

The study of mobilization has presented scholars with an interesting puzzle as we attempt to identify who is responsive to mobilization messages. The framing of the debate by Kenneth M. Goldstein and Matthew Holleque (2010) pits competing theoretical arguments against one another without a satisfying conclusion. Some argue it is the least informed segments of the population who will be responsive (e.g., Rosenstone and Hansen 1993), while others posit it is those with high levels of political information and past involvement (e.g., Hillygus 2005). In this dissertation I present a third explanation that may provide a better framework for studying the debate. Applying John Zaller’s Receive-Accept-Sample (RAS) model to the study of mobilization, I find not only do individuals with moderate levels of past voting behavior respond to mobilization messages, but so do those with high and low levels. The key to the RAS model is exposure to the message. Thus understanding who is most likely to receive a mobilization message is central to this project. I conducted field experiments during a magisterial judicial election in a major U.S. city to collect my data. The purpose of those experiments was to capture the effects of mobilization messages on an individual’s probability of voting on Election Day. My results indicate including individuals who would normally not receive mobilization messages (i.e., those who do not have a history of voting) introduce selection bias. Once I control for that bias, I find not only are individuals with moderate levels of past voting behavior responsive, but so are those with high and low levels of past turnout. Receiving a get-out-the-vote door hanger two days prior to an election increases the probability of voting by 3.76% for moderate voters, 3.82% for frequent voters, and 2.88% for infrequent voters. The effects of mobilization messages are not limited to turnout. Perhaps more important than turnout, I found that a candidate who conducts a last minute GOTV drive can increase their vote share by as much as 25%. This dissertation breaks new ground on the effects of mobilization messages and contributes to a clearer picture of those effects.
The Yeast Oxysterol Binding Protein Kes1 Maintains Sphingolipid Levels

The oxysterol binding protein family are amphitropic proteins that bind oxysterols, sterols, and possibly phosphoinositides, in a conserved binding pocket. The Saccharomyces cerevisiae oxysterol binding protein family member Kes1 (also known as Osh4) also binds phosphoinositides on a distinct surface of the protein from the conserved binding pocket. In this study, we determine that the oxysterol binding protein family member Kes1 is required to maintain the ratio of complex sphingolipids and levels of ceramide, sphingosine-phosphate and sphingosine. This inability to maintain normal sphingolipid homeostasis resulted in misdistribution of Pma1, a protein that requires normal sphingolipid synthesis to occur to partition into membrane rafts at the Golgi for its trafficking to the plasma membrane.
A Computationally Improved Control Policy for FMS Using Crucial Marking/Transition-Separation Instances

Deadlock prevention, deadlock detection, and deadlock avoidance strategies are used to solve the dead-lock problems of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). The theory of regions has been recognized as the unique method for obtaining maximally permissive controllers in the existing literature. All legal and live maximal behavior of a Petri net model can be preserved by using a Marking/Transition-Separation Instance (MTSI). However, obtaining all sets of MTSIs is an extremely time consuming problem. This work proposes Crucial Marking/Transition-Separation Instances (CMTSIs) that allow designers to employ few MTSIs to deal with deadlocks. The advantage of the proposed policy is that a maximally permissive controller can be obtained with drastically reduced computation. Experimental results, by varying the markings of given net structures, indicate that it is the most efficient policy to obtain optimal controllers among existing methods based on the theory of regions.
Algorithme automatique non supervisé pour le Deft 2012 (Automatic unsupervised algorithm for Deft 2012) [in French]

Murat Ahat 1 Coralie Petermann 1, 2 Yann Vigile Hoareau 3 Soufian Ben Amor 1 Marc Bui 2 (1) Prism, Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, 35 avenue des Etats-Unis, F-78035 Versailles. (2) LaISC, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 41 rue Gay-Lussac, F-75005 Paris. (3) CHArt, 41 rue Gay-Lussac, F-75005 Paris. murat.ahat@prism.uvsq.fr, coralie.petermann@laisc.net, hoareau@lutin-userlab.fr, soufian.ben-amor@uvsq.fr, marc.bui@ephe.sorbonne. fr
Cyclic Entropy of Complex Networks

We calculate the cyclic entropy of a real virtual friendship network to have an insight on the degree of its robustness. Upon counting the number of cycles of different sizes in the network, a probability distribution function is resulted. An actual friendship network is found to have cyclic entropy bounded between random and small-world networks models. It has dual properties. Small world networks indicate the existence of critical network sizes: 150 and 700 at which the cyclic entropy is minimum. Scale-free networks have the highest cyclic entropy among all other complex network models regardless of the size of the network.
Radiative Processes, Spectral States and Variability of Black-Hole Binaries(Session 4 : Theoretical/Numerial Approaches to the Accretion Physics)

We review radiative processes responsible for X-ray emission in hard (low) and soft (high) spectral states of black-hole binaries. The main process in the hard state appears to be scattering of blackbody photons from a cold disk by thermal electrons in a hot inner flow, and any contribution from nonthermal synchrotron emission is at most small. In the soft states, blackbody disk emission dominates energetically, and its high-energy tail is due to scattering by hybrid, thermal/nonthermal electrons, probably in active regions above the disk surface. State transitions appear to correspond to a variable inner radius of the cold disk driven by changes of the accretion rate. The existence of two accretion solutions, hot and cold, in a range of the accretion rate leads to hysteresis in low-mass X-ray binaries.