Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ARAnimator

Creating animated virtual AR characters closely interacting with real environments is interesting but difficult. Existing systems adopt video see-through approaches to indirectly control a virtual character in mobile AR, making close interaction with real environments not intuitive. In this work we use an AR-enabled mobile device to directly control the position and motion of a virtual character situated in a real environment. We conduct two guessability studies to elicit user-defined motions of a virtual character interacting with real environments, and a set of user-defined motion gestures describing specific character motions. We found that an SVM-based learning approach achieves reasonably high accuracy for gesture classification from the motion data of a mobile device. We present ARAnimator, which allows novice and casual animation users to directly represent a virtual character by an AR-enabled mobile phone and control its animation in AR scenes using motion gestures of the device, followed by animation preview and interactive editing through a video see-through interface. Our experimental results show that with ARAnimator, users are able to easily create in-situ character animations closely interacting with different real environments.
Cascaded tunable distributed amplifiers for serial optical links: Some design rules

In the framework of circuits for 5G, this paper presents an innovative power efficient method to design cascaded distributed amplifiers. Validation is achieved with a 55-nm CMOS technology by ST -Microelectronics developed for the mm-wave range. Several rules are specified for analysis and design of an optimum structure, making the part between the number of trans conductances to be distributed and the number of distributed stages to be cascaded. Attention is also paid to the trade-off between power consumption and tunability. The Cadence Virtuoso tool is used to simulate the design which shows a targeted gain of 20 dB±0.8 dB over a bandwidth of 120 GHz with a power consumption of 174mW and an estimated area of 0.3 mm2.
Key Mechanistic Principles and Considerations Concerning RNA Interference

Canonical RNAi, one of the so-called RNA-silencing mechanisms, is defined as sequence-specific RNA degradation induced by long double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). RNAi occurs in four basic steps: (i) processing of long dsRNA by RNase III Dicer into small interfering RNA (siRNA) duplexes, (ii) loading of one of the siRNA strands on an Argonaute protein possessing endonucleolytic activity, (iii) target recognition through siRNA basepairing, and (iv) cleavage of the target by the Argonaute’s endonucleolytic activity. This basic pathway diversified and blended with other RNA silencing pathways employing small RNAs. In some organisms, RNAi is extended by an amplification loop employing an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which generates secondary siRNAs from targets of primary siRNAs. Given the high specificity of RNAi and its presence in invertebrates, it offers an opportunity for highly selective pest control. The aim of this text is to provide an introductory overview of key mechanistic aspects of RNA interference for understanding its potential and constraints for its use in pest control.
The relationship between parasitoid size and fitness in the field, a study of Achrysocharoides zwoelferi (Hymenoptera: Eulophidae)

A knowledge of the relationship between body size and fitness is very important in many models of parasitoid behaviourial ecology. We estimated this relationship for Achrysocharoides zwoelferi (Hymenoptera, Eulophidae), a parasitoid of leaf mining moths (Gracillariidae) on willow (Salix). The size distribution of female wasps emerging from their pupae was compared with the size distribution of wasps caught while searching for hosts. A parametric statistical approach was used to obtain a function relating size to fitness. Laboratory estimates of the influence of size on a component of fitness, longetivity, were obtained under two different sets of experimental conditions. In the field, fitness increased rapidly with size over the first two-thirds of the observed size range, but plateaued (or possibly declined) in the last third of the range. One laboratory experiment showed no effect of size on fitness while the other did show an effect although much weaker than that observed in the field. This suggests caution in using results from the laboratory in parameterising behaviourial ecological models. The results are compared with two other field estimates of the influence of size on fitness which show broadly similar patterns.
PAG-IoT: A PUF and AEAD Enabled Trusted Hardware Gateway for IoT Devices

Low-cost cryptographic security solutions are essential to protect resource-constrained devices or their respective data in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). A security concept is presented which realizes a lightweight and secure gateway for IoT devices. It grants multiple users individual access rights to IoT end nodes. Generally, Physical Unclonable Functions store keys or offer authentication cost-effectively because they provide a unique response which cannot be predicted even when given an identically constructed device. In this paper, we propose a secure gateway as a new application of PUFs for IoT by combining them with Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD). We discuss the security with respect to an attacker who wants to extend his access rights and who can target the communication data or the gateway itself. Additionally, an implementation demonstrates the feasibility of such a gateway. This paper serves as an example as to what kind of novel applications in the IoT are possible by a careful choice of individual security solutions.
How Can Software Testing be Improved by Analytics to Deliver Better Apps?

Many consider software testing to be necessary yet given the nature of testing and practical project constraints it cannot be comprehensive or complete. The resulting software has bugs including those that affect some users. Analytics of usage of apps may help illuminate testing that has been performed on existing releases and also inspire improvements to future testing. The Android ecosystem provides unusually rich analytics tools for developers of apps released in Google Play so my research focuses on this ecosystem to evaluate several analytics tools including Google Play Console, Android Vitals, which are integrated into the platform and the operating system, together with additional mobile analytics offerings from Google and Microsoft.
Population Dynamics of the Wandering Albatross, Diomedea exulans, of the Crozet Islands: Causes and Consequences of the Population Decline

Between 1966 and 1985 breeding populations of wandering albatrosses on three islands of the Crozet group decreased at annual rates of 2.6, 4.9 and 6%, but with a rapid decline, at all except one colony, between 1969 and 1975. For the whole study period, the mean age at first breeding was 11.2 yr in females and 12.1 yr in males. Since 1973 birds have bred at younger ages. Breeding success did not vary significantly over time but was correlated with the survival of breeding birds; it was the same for experienced breeders and for birds attempting a first breeding. Adult survival was 90.5% per year during the rapid decline period and 94.4% afterwards. Females appeared to have a higher mortality than males. Immature survival was low (71.5% per year between fledging and 5 yr old) but increased from 1966 to 1980: it was 91.8% per year between ages 6-11 yr. The high adult mortality appears to be the major cause of population decline and is assumed to result from accidental deaths in fishing tackle and from deliberate trapping or shooting by fishermen. Differential survival between males and females is probably due to their distribution when at sea, females foraging more frequently than males in waters where fishing activities occur. Likewise, immatures foraging in similar waters to females have suffered a high mortality. The consequences of the decline for the future of albatross populations in the southern hemisphere is discussed.
SmartWatch as a Kinaesthetic System for Shoulder Function Assessment

Management of shoulder pathologies involves measurement of range of motion (ROM) as well as assessing the quality and efficiency of that motion using different clinical tests. This work describes the preliminary results of using a smart watch to capture the direction of movement, velocity and ROM of the shoulder joint. ROM is the available amount of movement of a joint in different directions which can be either passive, active or active assisted. With the collected dataset and the proposed method, ROM could be estimated with a 9° error. Shoulder function or motion identification was validated by two different methods: i) rule engine and ii) machine learning approach. Rule base engine method was able to successfully identify the motions with accuracy of 91.94% and ML method with 10-Fold Validation reported a best performance of 94.17%. Proposed method, currently tested for some active motions of the shoulder, has the potential to be a very useful assist in quantifying and monitoring rehabilitation of the shoulder joint in multiple clinical situations.
Cache-oblivious nested-loop joins

We propose to adapt the newly emerged cache-oblivious model to relational query processing. Our goal is to automatically achieve an overall performance comparable to that of fine-tuned algorithms on a multi-level memory hierarchy. This automaticity is because cache-oblivious algorithms assume no knowledge about any specific parameter values, such as the capacity and block size of each level of the hierarchy. As a first step, we propose recursive partitioning to implement cache-oblivious nested-loop joins (NLJs) without indexes, and recursive clustering and buffering to implement cache-oblivious NLJs with indexes. Our theoretical results and empirical evaluation on three different architectures show that our cache-oblivious NLJs match the performance of their manually optimized, cache-conscious counterparts.
Identity, Distribution, and Hosts of Aphidius matricariae Haliday, an Important Parasite of the Green Peach Aphid, Myzus persicae (Hymenoptera: Aphidiidae — Homoptera: Aphidoidea)

The widespread aphid parasite Aphidius matricariae Haliday is shown to be conspecific with: A. cirsii Haliday, arundinis Haliday, polygoni Marshall, lychnidis Marshall, valentinus Quilis, affinis Quilis, renominatus Hincks (all from Europe), phorodontis Ashmead, and nigriteleus Smith (both from North America). Rearing records from 40 aphid species are given, and Myzus persicae (Sulzer) is shown to be the most common and most important host. The rather sudden appearance of this parasite in field populations of M. persicae in California in 1957, its activity and distributional patterns up to 1960, the probability of its accidental introduction into North America at least 75 years ago in greenhouses, and its recent establishment outside of greenhouses are discussed.
Impact of leaf mining on the growth of Portulaca oleracea (common purslane) and its competitive interaction with Beta vulgaris (sugarbeet)

1. The combined attack by leaf mining larvae of the sawfly, Schizocerella pilicornis, and the weevil, Hypurus bertrandi, typically resulted in over 80% defoliation of fieldgrown Portulaca oleracea plants in the Central Valley of California. Incorporation of the insecticide aldicarb into the soil prior to planting protected the weed from attack by the insects. Comparison ofinsecticide-treated and non-treated plants demonstrated that the leaf mining reduced weed growth by 60-70%. 2. Under replacement series pot experiment conditions, leaf mining reversed the competitive interaction between sugarbeet and P. oleracea. Sugarbeet grew best in the presence of P. oleracea plants that were attacked by leaf miners; relative crowding coefficients for sugar beet exceeded 1.0. When P. oleracea was protected from leaf-miner attack, relative crowding coefficients for sugarbeet were all below 1.0. 3. Portulaca oleracea caused up to 80% yield loss in sugarbeet in additive field competition experiments. The magnitude of the sugarbeet yield loss increased with increasing density of P. oleracea; between 0.5 and 3.0 P. oleracea plants per m of crop row caused an economic loss depending on year. Soil-applied aldicarb insecticide did not alter the competitive interaction in 3 years out of 4, although the insecticide substantially protected P. oleracea from leaf mining. 4. Although P. oleracea was severely damaged by leaf miner feeding, this injury did not result in sufficient biological weed control to reduce the need for use of other weed management techniques.
Effects of Snail Grazing on Benthic Algal Community Structure in Different Nutrient Environments

The effects of interaction between nutrient availability and grazing intensity on the structure of benthic algai assemblages were investigated in an ephemeral stream. Small (250 ml) enclosures containing substrata releasing either: 1) no nutrient, 2) 0.5 M KH2 PO4 or 3) 0.5 M NaNO3 were exposed for 19 d to one of five densities of the snail Goniobasis ranging from 0 to 160 snails/m2. Algal standing crop (total cell density and community biovolume) on coverslips inside each enclosure decreased with increased grazing pressure in control and nitrate-enriched environments, but increased at low grazing pressure in the phosphate-enriched environment. Responses among constituent populations differed for three reasons: 1) stalked and loosely attached diatoms were more susceptible to snail grazing than firmly attached, prostrate algae; 2) some species were stimulated by phosphorus enrichment and/or grazing while others were not; 3) algal species differed in their response to interactions between grazing and nutrient enrichment. Two alternative hypotheses may explain this interaction: 1) grazers stimulate the growth of understory species by removing overlying cells; 2) excretion of nitrogenous compounds by grazers enhances the effects of phosphorus enrichment alone. Although diversity peaked at intermediate grazer densities in unenriched and nitrate-enriched environments, no significant change was found in phosphate-enriched environments, where the community was dominated either by grazer-sensitive populations that increased faster than they were grazed, or by grazer-resistant algae.
A STUDY OF FLUCTUATING ASYMMETRY

Fluctuating asymmetry, discussed below, is commonly used to estimate the effects of minor developmental accidents. These accidents differ between individuals, and there are also individual differences in resistance to these accidents. The ability to resist such developmental accidents will here be referred to as buffering against them. Because of the interrelations of morphogenetic systems, it is possible that an organism well buffered in one character is also well buffered in others, i.e., for this reason the microenvironmental perturbations on different systems in an individual may result in a tendency for the fluctuating asymmetry of different characters in that individual to be higher or lower than usual. Such a correlation in buffering capacities could also-be produced by differences in genotypes and environments acting separately'on different morphogenetic systems, but this is another matter. This investigation concerns the fluctuating asymmetry of different characters. No new evidence is given as to buffering against environmental stresses of a larger scale, such as temperature or the presence of parasites. A mean positive correlation between the fluctuating asymmetries of a number of un-
DQEMU: A Scalable Emulator with Retargetable DBT on Distributed Platforms

The scalability of a dynamic binary translation (DBT) system has become important due to the prevalence of multicore systems and large multi-threaded applications. Several recent efforts have addressed some critical issues in extending a DBT system to run on multicore platforms for better scalability. In this paper, we present a distributed DBT framework, called DQEMU, that goes beyond a single-node multicore processor and can be scaled up to a cluster of multi-node servers. In such a distributed DBT system, we integrate a page-level directory-based data coherence protocol, a hierarchical locking mechanism, a delegation scheme for system calls, and a remote thread migration approach that are effective in reducing its overheads. We also proposed several performance optimization strategies that include page splitting to mitigate false data sharing among nodes, data forwarding for latency hiding, and a hint-based locality-aware scheduling scheme. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on DQEMU with micro-benchmarks and the PARSEC benchmark suite. The results show that DQEMU can scale beyond a single-node machine with reasonable overheads. For ”embarrassingly-parallel” benchmark programs, DQEMU can achieve near-linear speedup when the number of nodes increases - as opposed to flattened out due to lack of computing resources as in current single-node, multi-core version of QEMU.
SupportArr: A Plugin to Comprehend Arrays for Novice Programmers

Comprehending arrays in programming is considered as one of the difficult tasks for novice programmers because of the complexity involved in their definition, declaration, and operations. Visualization of data structures and algorithms is a valuable learning aid for novice programmers. However, existing techniques show the visualization of code after compiling the program, rather than during the development process. To address this, we present SupportArr, a tool that helps in the visualization of arrays in C/C++ programming languages. The core idea is to provide an in-built IDE support for novice programmers to visualize the statements in code without executing the program. We conducted a preliminary experiment with 23 novice programmers and got a promising result from 84% of the participants.
Skin and Aestivational Cocoon of the Aquatic Amphibian, Siren intermedia Le Conte

The skin of Siren intermedia is fully metamorphosed, amphibian-like, and specialized in its cocoon-producing function. During aestivation in burrows in the bottoms of dry ponds, epidermal and dermal skin glands secrete a cocoon which covers the entire body except the mouth. This structure, remarkably like the cocoons of African lungfishes, retards desiccation and permits sirens to remain in periodically dry, aquatic environments. This adaptive strategy may be alternative to that of avoiding drought by overland movement to nearby water.
Compressed Domain Contactless Fall Incident Detection using UWB Radar Signals

Falling down is one of the main reasons for hospitalization among the elderly. Constant monitoring of such vulnerable older adults and timely detection of fall incidents may significantly improve healthcare services. This paper presents a radar-based fall detection method using compressed features of the radar signals. The compressed features are obtained by using determinisitc row and column sensing. The time-frequency analysis is first performed on the radar time series and resulting spectrogram is projected onto a binary image representation. The binary images are then compressed using a 2D deterministic sensing technique by preserving the aspect ratio of the images in the compressed domain. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using several classifiers such as support vector machine, nearest neighbors, linear discriminant analysis and decision tree. It is shown that the proposed compressive sensing based method can improve fall versus non-fall activities recognition, as evidenced by high classification metrics for low compression ratios.
Transplantation of Gonads from Lethal to Normal Larvae in Drosophila melanogaster

Conclusion The distinct but limited development of the transplanted ovaries shows that this organ still has developmental potencies at a time when other organs, such as the imaginai discs, degenerate. This means that the lethal genetic constitution prevents further development in different organs at different periods of time. Whether the further development of the ovaries is based on autonomous potencies or whether it is a result of a favorable influence coming from the genetically normal host cannot be determined from these experiments. The striking difference found between the developmental potencies of transplanted ovaries and testes seems to be correlated with the fact that prior to transplantation, the testes during the third larval instar already show such deleterious changes brought about by the lethal conditions as to prevent their increase in size, whereas the ovaries seem not yet affected.
Effects of Phytase Supplementation of Low Protein Diets on Performance, Egg Quality Traits and Blood Biochemical Parameters of Laying Hens

Effects of phytase supplementation of low protein diets on performance, egg quality traits and blood biochemical parameters of laying hens were evaluated by using 216 Lohmann LSL-Lite hens. Birds were randomly divided in 36 cages (n=6). Based on a 3×2 factorial arrangement of treatments, 6 iso-caloric experimental diets consisting three levels of crude protein (CP, 150, 138, and 126 g/kg) and phytase (0 and 300 FTU/kg) were formulated and fed to hens with 6 replicates per diet. Collected data of feed intake (FI), egg production (EP), egg mass (EM) and calculated feed conversion ratio (FCR), egg quality traits and blood parameters during 7-wk trial period were analyzed based on completely randomized design. Decreasing dietary crude protein significantly decreased EP, EM and FI and increased FCR (P .05). Decreasing dietary CP significantly increased Haugh unit compared to the control group. In the second egg sampling period (wk 7), Haugh unit significantly Original Research Article Annual Research & Review in Biology, 4(4): 684-698, 2014 685 decreased in the hens fed low protein diets compared to the control group (P .05). There was no interaction between protein level and phytase on egg traits except for egg index (P < .05). There was no interaction between CP levels and phytase on blood parameters except for Heterophil count (P < .01). Interaction between protein levels and phytase on lymphocyte as well as heterophil to lymphocyte (H/L) ratio was significant (P < .05). In conclusion, feeding low CP diets significantly decreased blood levels of cholesterol, triglycerides and LDL in compared to the control group (P < .05).
A Multi-grained Reconfigurable Accelerator for Approximate Computing

An elastic neural network is implemented by FPGA for constructing the multi-grained reconfigurable accelerator (MGRA). On the basis of a novel bisection neural network (BNN) topology, the entire network on hardware is efficiently partitioned into arbitrary pieces with diamond-like shape (seen as "DiaNet") which perform regressions for retrieving arbitrary approximate calculations in parallel. By organizing massive DiaNets, the entire network is reconfigurable in fine-grained (functions of each DiaNet), mid-grained (DiaNet features), and coarse-grained (organization of DiaNets) without redundancy. In this work, a proof-of-concept BNN with 8x8 processing elements (PEs) is implemented by FPGA for performing six calculation units (CU) in parallel. Over various approximate computing tasks with one, two, and three operands, all calculations are retrieved with the inaccuracy less than 3.1%. The maximum hardware utilization of a single CU is reduced to 1.7%, 17.9%, and 7.6% of general arithmetic logic unit (ALU), approximate computing units powered by domain-specific architecture (DSA) and neural network, respectively.