Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Heart rate variability and surface electromyography of trained cyclists at different cadences

The heart rate variability (HRV) and surface electromyography (sEMG) are important tools in the evaluation of cardiac autonomic system and neuromuscular parameters, respectively. The aim of the study was to evaluate the behavior of HRV and sEMG of the vastus lateralis in two exercise protocols on a cycle ergometer at 60 and 80 rpm. Eight healthy men cyclists who have trained for at least two years were evaluated. Reduction was observed followed by stabilization of RMSSD and SDNN indices of HRV (p<0.05) along with increases in the amplitude of the sEMG signal (p<0.05) in both protocols. Significant correlations were observed between the responses of HRV and sEMG in the cadence of 60 rpm (RMSSD and sEMG: r = -0.42, p=0.03; SDNN and sEMG: r = -0.45, p=0.01) and 80 rpm (RMSSD and sEMG: r = -0.47, p=0.02; SDNN and sEMG: r = -0.49, p=0.01), yet no difference was observed for these variables between the two protocols. We concluded that the parasympathetic cardiac responses and sEMG are independent of cadences applied at the same power output.
Non-trivial characteristic invariants of homogeneous foliated bundles

— The authors have given a construction of characteristic classes for foliated bundles which generalizes the Chern-Weil construction for the characteristic classes of principal bundles. In this paper these classes are evaluated for the particular case of locally homogeneous foliated bundles. The generalized characteristic homomorphism is then the composition of three maps. The first of these maps is associated to the representation defining a foliated vector bundle from a foliated principal bundle. The second map is expressible purely in terms of relative Lie algebra and Weil algebra cohomology. The third map can be interpreted as the characteristic homomorphism of a flat bundle. The computation of the characteristic homomorphism reduces then to purely algebraic problems which can be solved with the methods discussed in earlier papers. Many non-trivial realizations of secondary characteristic invariants in various geometric contexts are given.
Credible Confidence: A Pragmatic View on the Frequentist vs Bayesian Debate

The debate between Bayesians and frequentist statisticians has been going on for decades. Whilst there are fundamental theoretical and philosophical differences between both schools of thought, we argue that in two most common situations the practical differences are negligible when off-the-shelf Bayesian analysis (i.e., using ‘objective’ priors) is used. We emphasize this reasoning by focusing on interval estimates: confidence intervals and credible intervals. We show that this is the case for the most common empirical situations in the social sciences, the estimation of a proportion of a binomial distribution and the estimation of the mean of a unimodal distribution. Numerical differences between both approaches are small, sometimes even smaller than those between two competing frequentist or two competing Bayesian approaches. We outline the ramifications of this for scientific practice.
Current knowledge of external sulfate attack

This paper offers an update of the current understanding of sulfate attack, with emphasis on the sulfates present in an external water source percolating through, and potentially reacting with, the cement matrix. The paper considers the explanations put forward to explain sulfate attack, both from a chemical and microstructural perspective. Similarly, this paper reviews work on the physical damage caused by the precipitation of sulfate salts in porous materials. With the increased use of binary and ternary blends, this paper also considers the impact of binder composition on sulfate resistance, and similarly reviews how the nature of the sulfate species can affect the nature and extent of any deterioration. This then leads on to the important consideration of differences between field- and lab-based studies, reviewing the effect of various experimental parameters on sulfate resistance. This latter topic is of great importance to anyone who wishes to carry out such experiments.
The logistic S.D.E. *** DOUBLON DE HAL-01096323 ***

We consider the logistic S.D. E which is obtained by addition of a diffusion coefficient of the type β √ x to the usual and deterministic Verhust-Volterra differential equation. We show that this S.D. E is the limit of a sequence of birth and death Markov chains. This permits to interpret the solution Vt as the size at time t of a self-controlled tumor which is submitted to a radiotherapy treatment. We mainly focus on the family of stopping times Tε, where Tε is the first hitting of level ε > 0 by (Vt). We calculate their Laplace transforms and also the first moment of Tε. Finally we determine the asymptotic behavior of Tε, as ε→ 0.
Resource Evaluation of Quantum Linear Systems Algorithm for Application to Electromagnetic Scattering Problems

Current limitations in quantum computing technology do not allow for very large applications of quantum algorithms, and it is the nature of quantum algorithms not only to be able to solve problems of interest much more quickly than classical means but also to do so with less resources which makes them so promising. One such problem of interest is the application of the Quantum Linear Systems Algorithm, along with a few other subroutines, to the calculation of an electromagnetic scattering cross-section via finite element methods. This work composes a resource analysis of the algorithm as well as required subroutines. Additionally, this work details the primary contributors to the resources involved as well as methods to decrease these resource requirements. The particular problem of interest to this work is the EM scattering of an aerodynamic cone within a square computational finite element region of 50 × 50 to 400 × 400 grid points. The mesh sizes resulted in a range of resource requirement from 453 to 477 logical qubits. However, varying the desired bit precision independently between 8-bit to 128-bit created resource requirements from 133 to 853 logical qubits. The desired precision of the calculations created a much larger effect on the resource requirement of the application of the algorithm.
The Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid About the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid

What is output-based aid? OBA is a strategy for supporting the delivery of basic services— water, sanitation, electricity, telecommunications, transport, education, health care—where policy concerns would justify public funding to complement or replace user fees. How can GPOBA help? GPOBA can assist in the design and development of pilot OBA projects, and can help identify and disseminate emerging knowledge on issues related to OBA approaches through studies, publications, workshops, and conferences. GPOBA can also contribute to the funding of subsidized payments for the provision of services under OBA schemes.
University of Groningen Dose-response effects of light at night on the reproductive physiology of great tits (Parus major) Dominoni,

Citation for published version (APA): Dominoni, D. M. , de Jong, M. , Bellingham, M. , O'Shaughnessy, P., van Oers, K. , Robinson, J., . Helm, B. (2018). Dose-response effects of light at night on the reproductive physiology of great tits (Parus major): Integrating morphological analyses with candidate gene expression. Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A: Ecological and Integrative Physiology, 329(8-9), 473-487. https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.2214
Emergent Coordination Through Competition

We study the emergence of cooperative behaviors in reinforcement learning agents by introducing a challenging competitive multi-agent soccer environment with continuous simulated physics. We demonstrate that decentralized, population-based training with co-play can lead to a progression in agents' behaviors: from random, to simple ball chasing, and finally showing evidence of cooperation. Our study highlights several of the challenges encountered in large scale multi-agent training in continuous control. In particular, we demonstrate that the automatic optimization of simple shaping rewards, not themselves conducive to co-operative behavior, can lead to long-horizon team behavior. We further apply an evaluation scheme, grounded by game theoretic principals, that can assess agent performance in the absence of pre-defined evaluation tasks or human baselines.
K-M-P String Matching

The beautiful Knuth-Morris-Pratt string matching algorithm finds the leftmost occurrence of a character string pattern in a character string text in linear time, using character-to-character comparisons. However, the original presentation of the algorithm, and presentations based on it are more complicated and less clear than they could be, partly because of the intricate loops of the algorithm. The best presentation is CLRS3, chapter 32; it is highly polished, but still quite complex, especially the proof of correctness. The alternative version presented here, a recursive, memoized (CLRS3, chapter 15) version, is more readily understood and analyzed.
Entity Bases: Large-Scale Knowledgebases for Intelligence Data

Abstract : This report describes new technology for rapidly integrating information from heterogeneous sources. First, we consider the problem of integrating records about entities harvested from multiple sources. We address this problem by developing the technology to build massive entity knowledgebases, which we call EntityBases. The key idea is to create a comprehensive knowledgebase for the entities of interest. In order to build such a knowledge base, we address the issues of linking entities with noisy, multi-valued attributes obtained from heterogeneous sources and providing a virtual repository that can be efficiently queried. This report describes how we have addressed these issues and shows how an EntityBase can be used for understanding and linking text documents. We also consider the problem of on-demand information integration and describe a novel smart copy and paste (SCP) architecture that seamlessly combines the design-time and run-time aspects of data integration.
Thermal spin pumping mediated by magnons in the semiclassical regime

We microscopically analyze thermal spin pumping mediated by magnons, at the interface between a ferromagnetic insulator and a non-magnetic metal, in the semiclassical regime. The generation of a spin current is discussed by calculating the thermal spin transfer torque, which breaks the spin conservation law for conduction electrons and operates the coherent magnon state. Inhomogeneous thermal fluctuations between conduction electrons and magnons induce a net spin current, which is pumped into the adjacent non-magnetic metal. The pumped spin current is proportional to the temperature difference. When the effective temperature of magnons is lower than that of conduction electrons, localized spins lose spin angular momentum by emitting magnons and conduction electrons flip from down to up by absorbing all the emitted momentum, and vice versa. Magnons at the zero mode cannot contribute to thermal spin pumping because they are eliminated by the spin-flip condition. Consequently thermal spin pumping does not cost any kind of applied magnetic fields.
Information And Optimal Investment In Defaultable Assets

We study optimal investment in an asset subject to risk of default for investors that rely on different levels of information. The price dynamics can include noises both from a Wiener process and a Poisson random measure with infinite activity. The default events are modeled via a counting process in line with large part of the literature in credit risk. In order to deal with both cases of inside and partial information we consider the framework of the anticipating calculus of forward integration. This does not require a priori assumptions typical of the framework of enlargement of filtrations. We find necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a locally maximizing portfolio of the expected utility at terminal time. We consider a large class of utility functions. In addition we show that the existence of the solution implies the semi-martingale property of the noises driving the stock. Some discussion on unicity of the maxima is included.
RECOGNITION OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES BASED ON BLOB DETECTION WITH AN EFFICIENT ALGORITHMS

This paper deals with blob features of human activities analysis in the video. Human Activity Recognition is an active area of research in computer vision with wide scale of applications in video surveillance, motion analysis, virtual reality interfaces, robot navigation and recognition, video indexing, browsing, HCI, choreography, sports video analysis etc. It analyzes the characteristic features of various human actions and classify them accordingly, which consist of following stages: Background subtraction, tracking, feature extraction and classification. We analyze human activities in the sequential frames because human activities can be considered as a temporal object which contains a series of frames. Firstly, we establish a statistical background model and extract foreground object through background subtraction in the video stream. Then, we use foreground blobs of the current frame and a series of frames before the current frame to form a new feature image in certain rules. Finally, we combine the non-zero pixels in the feature image into blobs using the connected component method. Then each blob corresponds to an activity which is characterized by the blob appearance. By recognizing blob features we can recognize activities. We use Advanced Gaussian Mixture algorithm and HMM model to extract features for each type of human activities and employ minimal Mahalanobis distance to classify the activity.
School of Chemical Technology Degree Programme of Chemical, Biochemical and Materials Engineering

This study investigated how mobile game companies influence gamer purchase behaviour when monetising their premium and free-to-play games. These approaches include methods and strategies that aim to acquire, retain, and then finally monetise players. Videography was used as the method to investigate and illustrate how iOS-based mobile games are monetised. The 40-minute videography part of this study (found at https://youtu.be/VS48tO2n0ow or https://vimeo.com/217374348) is comprised of interview footage with three mobile game professionals from two Helsinki-based companies and gameplay footage from 13 mobile games to illustrate topics discussed. This study found that the interviewed mobile game companies emphasise, firstly, the role of game design in monetising players, especially in free-to-play games. For monetisation, virtual goods and advertising are employed and designed as a part of the core game experience. Secondly, game companies care for their player community and design social game mechanics to acquire new players and retain existing ones. These activities include social media presence, managing an ingame community, and designing game mechanics that encourage players to play with their friends. Lastly, promotion and pricing strategies persuade players to increase purchase intention. These strategies include becoming featured on the App Store and in game media, promotion methods, such as time and placement-limited special offers, and psychological pricing methods, such as odd pricing and price anchoring. The findings illustrated the range of influence approaches that game companies consider. However, a small, non-diverse sample size of interviewed game professionals and their local, Nordic point of view limit the conclusions from this study. Nevertheless, this study observed new ideas for literature and recommended further research based on these findings, regarding advertising and game design, the importance of the App Store in mobile game development, and the effect of the relationship between players and game companies on player retention and monetisation.
MASL: a Language for Multi-Agent System

Our work takes place in the field of Multi-Agent Modular Robotic System. We propose to mix several paradigms of computation to offer a high-level point of view to the programmer into a new language, namely MASL for Multi-Agent System Language. Expressivity of MASL is illustrated on an example applied to a fleet of robots. A Multi-Robot System (MRS) can be characterized as a set of robots operating in the same environment that operate together to perform some global task. In this chapter, we regard MRS as a particular form of Multi-Agent System (MAS). The main differences between general MAS and MRS are: - The fact that in MRS direct communication is based on dedicated physical devices, resulting in a much more expensive and unreliable solution to attain coordination with respect to MAS. - The number of robots acting in the same environment is still quite limited with respect to the number of agents in a MAS. - Agents architectures in a MAS are usually deliberative (Nilsson, 1984) (Sense-Represent-Plan-Act), reactive (Brooks, 1989; Hudak et al., 2002) (subsumption architecture) or hybrid (Alur et al., 2000; Ingrand et al., 1996; Benjamin et al., 2004) as shown in figure 1 while in MRS we consider only the last two. The pure sense-represent-plan-act architecture, which is used to realize a high level deliberative behaviour, is not currently used in MRS because of its intrinsic limits, while the behaviour-based and the hybrid architectures are quite common, especially when the robot is situated in a highly dynamic environment, where a quick reaction to a new input is very important, being the environment itself uncertain and unpredictable. Robot programming is a difficult task that has been studied for many years (Lozano-Perez & Brooks, 1986). This particular field often covers some very different concepts such as methods or algorithms (planning, trajectory generation.). Therefore, languages are developed to implement these high-level considerations (Pembeci & Hager, 2001; Zielinski, 2000). Different approaches have appeared through functional (Armstrong, 1997; Atkin et al., 1999; King, 2002), deliberative or declarative (Dastani & van der Torre, 2003; Benjamin et al., 2004; Peterson et al., 1999), synchronous characteristics (Pembeci & Hager, 2001). Nonetheless, the difficulties of robot programming can by schematically summarized by two main characteristics: - One is that programming a set of elementary actions (primitives) on a robot often leads to (if not always) a program including many processes running in parallel with real-time constraints and local synchronizations.
Neural and Behavioral Correlates of PTSD and Alcohol Use

Abstract : Hazardous use of alcohol negatively impacts the treatment of PTSD. However, the mechanisms that underlie the association between PTSD and hazardous alcohol use in veterans are poorly understood. The current research takes a multi-level approach to study the psychological, behavioral, cognitive and neural relationships between PTSD and alcohol use. Progress to date has been focused on building the infrastructure to conduct neural imaging by training of personnel, setting up recruitment of veteran populations, and conducting test runs to ensure the recently purchased fMRI equipment and experimental procedures were suitable to test the study hypotheses with veteran participants. The ability to now conduct functional brain imaging at the University of South Dakota represents the first and only opportunity in the State of South Dakota to perform such research, and complements the strong emphasis and infrastructure already in place to conduct psychological, behavioral and cognitive assessment of South Dakota s underserved rural veteran population. Preliminary data collected in the current reporting period suggests that emotional stimuli used in the fMRI tasks elicit arousal responses and expected neural activity in non-veteran and veteran participants, thus validating the paradigms for testing the behavioral and neural association between PTSD and hazardous alcohol use. Research in the next funding period will build on recruitment efforts to increase subject numbers, thus allowing full analysis of the psychological, behavioral, cognitive and neural data to identify behavioral and neural predictors of poor psychological outcomes related to PTSD and hazardous alcohol use in South Dakota veterans. Overall, the current funding has built research infrastructure and tools to allow comprehensive studies regarding mental health and neurological issues specific to veterans in rural areas.
Recent Developments in Monocular SLAM within the HRI Framework

This chapter describes an approach to improve the feature initialization process in the delayed inverse-depth feature initialization monocular Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM), using data provided by a robot’s camera plus an additional monocular sensor deployed in the headwear of the human component in a human-robot collaborative exploratory team. The robot and the human deploy a set of sensors that once combined provides the data required to localize the secondary camera worn by the human. The approach and its implementation are described along with experimental results demonstrating its performance. A discussion on the usual sensors within the robotics field, especially in SLAM, provides background to the advantages and capabilities of the system implemented in this research.
Complementarities Between Universities and Technology Institutes: New Empirical Lessons and Perspectives

This paper investigates the different roles played by universities and technology institutes (TIs) as innovation partners of firms. Comparing the characteristics of Spanish firms collaborating with these agents allows us to better define complementarities among the target groups of these organizations. Our findings show that those firms collaborating with universities are bigger, have higher internal capabilities and are less dependent on their external relationships while firms collaborating with TIs are smaller, have weaker internal capabilities but are more open to their environment and thus more reliant on external sources. We point to the implications of these findings for regional development. Universities have a role as partners of more technologically advanced firms. TIs, on the other hand, partner those firms, which though also quite advanced, require more external help in their innovation processes. These results should help policy-makers in the definition of more complex regional strategies and the provision of tools aimed at different goals. Managers of universities, TIs and client firms should find these results of help in developing more positive collaborations with one another.
Koljusisesed verevalumid tõelise polütsüteemiaga haigel kerge trauma järel

Toelise polutsuteemia diagnoosiga 54aastasel naishaigel kujunesid parast kerget traumat – omalt jalalt kukkumist – ajusisene ja subduraalne verevalum vasemas ajupoolkeras. Hospitaliseerimise ajal oli haige teadvusel, pareesideta, esines sensomotoorne afaasia. Patsient oli polutsuteemia ravi katkestanud 5 aastat tagasi. Vereanaluuside jargi esines haigel trombotsutopeenia, trombotsuutide funktsiooni haire ja koagulopaatia. Vajalik oli valtimatu operatsioon ja vere huubivuse parandamiseks manustati haigele varskelt kulmutatud plasmat, desmopressiini ja traneksaamhapet. Operatsioon ja operatsioonijargne periood kulgesid tusistusteta, konehaire taandus. Hematoloogi hinnangul oli haigel polutsuteemia arenenud muelofibroosiks. Edasiseks raviks maarati hudroksukarbamiid. Eesti Arst 2017; 96(8):474–477