Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scalable Height Field Self‐Shadowing

We present a new method suitable for general purpose graphics processing units to render self‐shadows on dynamic height fields under dynamic light environments in real‐time. Visibility for each point in the height field is determined as the exact horizon for a set of azimuthal directions in time linear in height field size and the number of directions. The surface is shaded using the horizon information and a high‐resolution light environment extracted on‐line from a high dynamic range cube map, allowing for detailed extended shadows. The desired accuracy for any geometric content and lighting complexity can be matched by choosing a suitable number of azimuthal directions. Our method is able to represent arbitrary features of both high‐ and low‐frequency, unifying hard and soft shadowing. We achieve 23 fps on 1024×1024 height fields with 64 azimuthal directions under a 256×64 environment lighting on an Nvidia GTX 280 GPU.
Host Immune Response to Chlamydia Infection

1. protection against intracellular bacteria is mediated by T cells, which are interacting, not directly with the pathogen, but with the infected cell surface; antibodies exhibit a minor effect on the immune protection against intracellular infections; 2. infections by intracellular bacteria is accompanied by delayed hypersensitivity reactions that occur after the local administration of soluble antigens, mediated by T cells, whose effectors are macrophages; 3. tissular reactions to antiintracellular bacteria are granulomatous in nature, both the protective responses and pathology being caused by them. Breaking granuloma favors pathogen dissemination and extension of lesions; 4. intracellular bacteria are expressing little or no toxic effects to the host cell, and pathology results from the activation of the immune response, mediated primarily by T lymphocytes. In contrast, extracellular bacteria secrete extracellular toxins, some of them being extremely potent and producing direct tissue damage; 5. intracellular bacteria are well adapted for coexisting with the host cell for long periods, by maintaining a balance between the persistent infection and the protective immunity mechanisms, resulting in a long incubation period and the development of a chronic infectious process. The infection per se is distinct from the pathological process. In contrast, extracellular bacteria cause acute infections, which are triggered soon after infection and ending after the immune response reaches an optimal intensity.
A Spatial Econometric Model of the Korean Economy

Using Korean regional data a spatial simultaneous equation model was developed and estimated using a generalized spatial three-stage least squares procedure. This model contains 10 equations for local finance, the labor market, and the housing market -local revenue, local expenditures, housing units, population, economically active population, number of students, inand out-commuting, number of firms, and employment in non-basic sectors. Employment and economic development expenditures are the main drivers of the model. A significant crosscounty and cross-equation spillover effect is estimated. Reduced form estimates were derived from structural equations, and it is found that additional employment opportunities generated in a certain county will have a positive impact on all sectors of the economy, including local finance, the housing market, demography, and the labor market. The spatial spillover effect is estimated on neighboring counties resulted from the employment opportunities created in a residence county. It appears that the estimated parameters tend to be sensitive to the specification of weight matrices. The model was validated based on forecasting accuracy of in-sample data using mean absolute percentage error.
A hybrid finite-difference/low-rank solution to anisotropy acoustic wave equations

P-wave extrapolation in anisotropic media suffers from SV-wave artifacts and computational dependency on the complexity of anisotropy. The anisotropic pseudodifferential wave equation cannot be solved using an efficient time-domain finite-difference (FD) scheme directly. The wavenumber domain allows us to handle pseudodifferential operators accurately; however, it requires either smoothly varying media or more computational resources. In the limit of elliptical anisotropy, the pseudodifferential operator reduces to a conventional operator. Therefore, we have developed a hybrid-domain solution that includes a space-domain FD solver for the elliptical anisotropic part of the anisotropic operator and a wavenumber-domain low-rank scheme to solve the pseudodifferential part. Thus, we split the original pseudodifferential operator into a second-order differentiable background and a pseudodifferential correction term. The background equation is solved using the efficient FD scheme, and the correction term is approximated by the low-rank approximation. As a result, the correction wavefield is independent of the velocity model, and, thus, it has a reduced rank compared with the full operator. The total computation cost of our method includes the cost of solving a spatial FD time-step update plus several fast Fourier transforms related to the rank. The accuracy of our method is of the order of the FD scheme. Applications to a simple homogeneous tilted transverse isotropic (TTI) medium and modified BP TTI models demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
Renal Function Outcome Prognosis in Septic and Non-septic Acute Kidney Injury Patients

Aim: The objective of this study was to evaluate prognostic impact of clinical factors on outcome of renal function in septic and non-septic acute kidney injury (AKI) patients. Methods: The prospective, observational, clinical study was performed at Nephrology Clinic and Clinic for Infectious Diseases, University Clinical Centre Sarajevo. One hundred patients with diagnosis of AKI were enrolled in the study, and divided into two groups: septic and non-septic AKI patients. Clinical parameters included causes and type of AKI, pre-existing comorbidities and different treatment modalities. Patients were followed up until discharge or death. Renal function outcome was defined by creatinine clearance values at discharge. Results: Septic AKI patients had significantly longer hospital stay (p=0.03), significantly worse renal function outcome (p<0.001), and higher burden of comorbidities (70.6% vs. 60.6%), compared to non-septic patients. Septic AKI patients were almost three times less likely to receive renal replacement therapy (8.8% vs. 24.4%) and they had significant delay in initiation of dialysis (p=0.03). By multivariate analysis, sepsis (95% CI 0.128-0.967, p=0.043) and hypertension (95% CI 0.114-0.788, p=0.015) were independent predictors of adverse renal function outcome in AKI patients. Postrenal type of AKI was independent predictor of renal function recovery in non-septic AKI patients (95% CI 1.174-92.264, p=0.035), while Failure, as third class of AKI, was independent predictor of non-recovered renal function only in septic AKI patients (95% CI 0.026 to 0.868, p=0.034). Conclusion: Septic AKI patients are clinically distinct compared to non-septic AKI patients with different prognostic factors and poorer renal function outcome.
Assessing the attack resilience capabilities of a fortified primary-backup system

Primary-Backup service replication does not constrain that the service be built as a deterministic state machine. It is meant to tolerate crashes, not intrusions. We consider an approach, called FORTRESS, for adding intrusion-resilience capability to a primary-backup server system. It involves using proxies that block clients from directly accessing servers, and periodically randomizing the executables of proxies and servers. We argue that proxies and proactive randomization can offer sound defense against attacks including de-randomization attacks. Using simulations, we then compare the attack resilience that FORTRESS adds to a primary-backup server system with that attainable through state machine replication (SMR) that is fit only for deterministic services. A significant observation is that FORTRESS emerges to be more resilient than an SMR system of four server replicas that are diversely randomized at the start and are subject to proactive recovery throughout.
Multi-Residual Networks

In this article, we take one step toward understanding the learning behavior of deep residual networks, and supporting the hypothesis that deep residual networks are exponential ensembles by construction. We examine the effective range of ensembles by introducing multi-residual networks that significantly improve classification accuracy of residual networks. The multi-residual networks increase the number of residual functions in the residual blocks. This is shown to improve the accuracy of the residual network when the network is deeper than a threshold. Based on a series of empirical studies on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, the proposed multi-residual network yield $6\%$ and $10\%$ improvement with respect to the residual networks with identity mappings. Comparing with other state-of-the-art models, the proposed multi-residual network obtains a test error rate of $3.92\%$ on CIFAR-10 that outperforms all existing models.
Meeting intensity as an indicator for project pressure: Exploring meeting profiles

Meetings are hot spots of communication and collaboration in software development teams. Both distributed and co-located teams need to meet for coordination, communication, and collaboration. It is difficult to assess the quality of these three crucial aspects, or the social effectiveness and impact of a meeting: Personalities, psychological and professional aspects interact. It is, therefore, challenging to identify emerging communication problems or to improve collaboration by studying a wealth of interrelated details of project meetings. However, it is relatively easy to count meetings, and to measure when and how long they took place. This is objective information, does not violate privacy of participants, and the data might even be retrieved from project calendars automatically. In an exploratory study, we observed 14 student teams working on comparable four-month projects. Among many other aspects, we counted and measured meetings. In this contribution, we compare the meeting profiles qualitatively, and derive a number of hypotheses relevant for software projects.
Noisy speech recognition using blind spatial subtraction array technique and deep bottleneck features

In this study, we investigate the effect of blind spatial subtraction arrays (BSSA) on speech recognition systems by comparing the performance of a method using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) with a method using Deep Bottleneck Features (DBNF) based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Performance is evaluated under various conditions, including noisy, in-vehicle conditions. Although performance of the DBNF-based system was much more degraded by noise than the MFCC-based system, BSSA improved the performance of both methods greatly, especially when matched condition training of acoustic models was employed. These results show the effectiveness of BSSA for speech recognition.
Species interactions–area relationships: biological invasions and network structure in relation to island area

The relationship between species number and island area is a fundamental rule in ecology. However, the extent to which interactions with exotic species and how the structure of species interactions is related to island area remain unexplored. Here, I document the relationship between island area and (i) interactions with exotic species and (ii) network structure of species interactions in the context of mutualistic interactions between ants and extrafloral nectary-bearing plants on the oceanic Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands, Japan. Pooled data contained 122 interactions among 19 plant (including five exotic) and 23 ant (including 20 exotic) species. Of the observed interactions, 82.8 per cent involved at least one exotic species, ranging from 68.2 to 86.4 per cent among islands. The number of links including exotic species increased in proportion to island area, although the number of links excluding exotic species did not. These results indicate that the number of interactions with exotic species increased in proportion to island area. Connectance, or the proportion of interactions actually observed among all possible interactions, decreased with island area. Nestedness, an asymmetry index in the species interaction network, also decreased with island area. Therefore, island area affects both the number of interactions with exotic species and the network structure.
Physically-consistent sensor fusion in contact-rich behaviors

We describe an accurate approach to state estimation which fuses any available sensor data with physical consistency priors. This is done by combining the advantages of recursive estimation and fixed-lag smoothing: at each step we re-estimate the trajectory over a time window into the past, but also use a recursive prior obtained from the previous time step via internal simulation. We also incorporate a physics engine into the estimator, which makes it possible to adjust the state estimates so that the inferred contact interactions are consistent with the observed accelerations. The estimator can utilize contact sensors to improve accuracy, but even in the absence of such sensors it reasons correctly about contact forces. Estimation speed and accuracy are demonstrated on a 28-DOF humanoid robot (Darwin) in a walking task. Timing tests and leave-one-out cross-validation show that the proposed approach can be used in real-time and is substantially more accurate than the EKF, without any over-fitting. A video of our results is attached.
An End to the Middle

The last fifteen years has seen a vast proliferation of middleboxes to solve all manner of persistent limitations in the Internet protocol suite. Examples include firewalls, NATs, load balancers, traffic shapers, deep packet intrusion detection, virtual private networks, network monitors, transparent web caches, content delivery networks, and the list goes on and on. However, most smaller networks in homes, small businesses and the developing world are left without this level of support. Further, the management burden and limitations of middleboxes are apparent even in enterprise networks. We argue for a shift from using proprietary middle-box harware as the dominant tool for managing networks toward using open software running on end hosts. We show that functionality that seemingly must be in the network, such as NATs and traffic prioritization, can be more cheaply, flexibly, and securely provided by distributed software running on end hosts, working in concert with vastly simplified physical network hardware.
Development of visualizations for social network analysis of chatroom text

In this paper a set of visualization tools and related ideas are introduced for extracting and analyzing social network features present within persistent, multi-speaker, multi-topic, quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication systems enacted over the internet, i.e., internet chatrooms. Preliminary models of these tools are applied to a real-world chatroom dataset. Results suggest the utility of such tools for enhancing the usability of digital text communications and the understanding of social structures and dynamics within the virtual world. Potentially promising visualization methods and areas of future research are discussed.
Gaussian Processes for Personalized e-Health Monitoring With Wearable Sensors

Advances in wearable sensing and communications infrastructure have allowed the widespread development of prototype medical devices for patient monitoring. However, such devices have not penetrated into clinical practice, primarily due to a lack of research into “intelligent” analysis methods that are sufficiently robust to support large-scale deployment. Existing systems are typically plagued by large false-alarm rates, and an inability to cope with sensor artifact in a principled manner. This paper has two aims: 1) proposal of a novel, patient-personalized system for analysis and inference in the presence of data uncertainty, typically caused by sensor artifact and data incompleteness; 2) demonstration of the method using a large-scale clinical study in which 200 patients have been monitored using the proposed system. This latter provides much-needed evidence that personalized e-health monitoring is feasible within an actual clinical environment, at scale, and that the method is capable of improving patient outcomes via personalized healthcare.
Combination chemotherapy in metastatic malignant melanoma. A randomized study of three DTIC‐containing combinations

The activity of three DTIC‐containing combinations was compared in a prospective randomized study. Of 101 patients randomized to receive one of the three regimens, 95 received adequate trials. Response rates were as follows: DTIC+cyclophosphamide 7/29 (24%); DTIC+vinblastine 6/34 (18%); DTIC+procarbazine 4/32 (13%). None of these response rates is significantly superior to any of the others. When the activity of the combination is analyzed by sex, DTIC+cyclophosphamide appears more active in females than the other regimens, but the difference is not statistically significant. Response to treatment is associated with significant prolongation of life; the median survival among responders was 11 months, while those who progressed lived a median of 4 months from the start of therapy. Toxicity of all regimens appeared to be about the same; therapy with DTIC+procarbazine was associated with significantly more nausea and vomiting. This study has failed to demonstrate clearly that any of three combinations is superior to any of the others.
Capillary Forces in Micro-Fluidic Self-Assembly

Parallel self-assembly in the fluidic phase is a promising alternative technique to conventional pick-and-place assembly. In this work the hydrophobic-hydrophilic material system between binding sites for microparts is simulated with respect to alignment precision. The results are compared with experimental findings and allow predictions for the optimization of the fluidic self assembly technique.
Numerical Modeling of Plasmonic Nanoantennas with Realistic 3D Roughness and Distortion

Nanostructured plasmonic metamaterials, including optical nanoantenna arrays, are important for advanced optical sensing and imaging applications including surface-enhanced fluorescence, chemiluminescence, and Raman scattering. Although designs typically use ideally smooth geometries, realistic nanoantennas have nonzero roughness, which typically results in a modified enhancement factor that should be involved in their design. Herein we aim to treat roughness by introducing a realistic roughened geometry into the finite element (FE) model. Even if the roughness does not result in significant loss, it does result in a spectral shift and inhomogeneous broadening of the resonance, which could be critical when fitting the FE simulations of plasmonic nanoantennas to experiments. Moreover, the proposed approach could be applied to any model, whether mechanical, acoustic, electromagnetic, thermal, etc, in order to simulate a given roughness-generated physical phenomenon.
Bundle-branch block in middle-aged men: risk of complications and death over 28 years. The Primary Prevention Study in Göteborg, Sweden.

AIMS To investigate the long-term fate of men with bundle-branch block (BBB) from a general population sample. METHODS AND RESULTS Data were derived from 7392 men without a history of myocardial infarction or stroke, born between 1915 and 1925 and investigated between 1970 and 1973. All participants were followed from the date of their baseline examination until 1998. We identified 70 men with right-BBB and 46 men with left-BBB at baseline. In men with right-BBB, there was no increased risk of myocardial infarction, coronary death, heart failure, or all-cause mortality during follow-up. The multiple-adjusted hazard ratio for progression to high-degree atrioventricular block was 3.64 (99% confidence interval 0.79-16.72). In men with left-BBB, the hazard ratio for high-degree atrioventricular block was 12.89 (4.13-40.24). However, hazard ratio for all-cause mortality was 1.85 (1.15-2.97) when compared with men without BBB, mostly due to outside hospital coronary deaths, whose hazard ratio was 4.22 (1.90-9.34). CONCLUSION The presence of BBB was strongly associated with future high-degree atrioventricular block that was more pronounced for left-BBB. Men with left-BBB have a substantially increased risk of coronary death, mainly due to sudden death outside the hospital setting.
Empyema thoracis: a role for open thoracotomy and decortication

BACKGROUND Thoracentesis and antibiotics remain the cornerstones of treatment in stage I empyema. The management of disease progression or late presentation is controversial. Open thoracotomy and decortication is perceived to be synonymous with protracted recovery and prolonged hospitalisation. Advocates of thoracoscopic adhesiolysis cite earlier chest drain removal and hospital discharge. This paper challenges traditional prejudice towards open surgery. METHODS A five year audit of empyema cases referred to a regional cardiothoracic surgical unit analysing previous clinical course, surgical management, and outcome. RESULTS Between February 1992 and February 1997, the number of referrals to this centre increased dramatically. Twenty two children were referred for surgery (15 boys, seven girls; age range, 0.5–16 years). Before referral, patients had been unwell for 6–50 days (median, 15), had been treated with several antibiotics, and had undergone chest ultrasound (15 patients), computed tomography (five patients), pleural aspiration attempts (13 patients), and intercostal drainage (seven patients). The organism responsible was identified in only two cases (Streptococcus pneumoniae). Three patients had intraparenchymal abscess formation. Eighteen patients underwent open thoracotomy and decortication. Drain removal was performed on the first or second day. Fever resolved within 48 hours. Median hospital stay was four days. All patients had complete clinical and radiological resolution. CONCLUSIONS Treatment must be tailored to the disease stage. In stage II and III diseases, open decortication followed by early drain removal results in rapid symptomatic recovery, early hospital discharge, and complete resolution. In the early fibrinopurulent phase, alternative strategies should be considered. However, even in ideal cases, neither fibrinolysis nor thoracoscopic adhesiolysis can achieve more rapid resolution at lower risk. Key messages Management principles: treatment must be based on radiological staging and clinical status Antibiotics and drainage are usually successful in stage I disease Factors contributing to development of stage II and stage III disease: late presentation, failure to identify responsible organisms, inadequate antibiotic treatment, reluctance to drain, suboptimal drain placement, under use of ultrasound imaging for initial staging and assessment of treatment response, and late surgical referral Surgical results: in stage II and stage III empyema, open thoracotomy and decortication is followed by drain removal within 48 hours, prompt hospital discharge, and complete resolution. Using these results as a benchmark, alternative treatments should only be undertaken in carefully selected patients