Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using a Robotic Neck Brace for Movement Training of the Head–Neck

Coordinated head–neck movement is a challenge for patients with neurological disorders, such as cerebral palsy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Neck collars are commonly used to stabilize the head–neck in these patients. These collars are mostly rigid and uncomfortable to wear for extended periods of time. We have developed a robotic neck brace to assist head–neck motion. In this letter, we focus on using the robotic neck brace for training of the head-neck motion using forces applied on the head. A force controller is implemented to deliver a moment to correct the head motion in an ‘assist-as-needed’ fashion. A human study was designed to assess the performance of the robotic neck brace with the force controller. Ten young healthy adults participated in the experiment. They were asked to perform a lateral bending motion in the coronal plane of the head-neck with and without the assistance of the brace. The motions were conducted under two conditions: i) with visual feedback, ii) with visual and force feedback. We found that the rotational movement errors were significantly reduced ($p< 0.05$) during training with the force field when compared to visual feedback alone. As expected, this change was not retained during post-training. We conclude that the force controller is able to provide the desirable force assistance to help coordinate the head motion.
Linearized Single Sideband Modulation Link With High SFDR Performance

A linearized fiber optic link without dispersion induced power fading is presented. It is based on using a dual-drive dual-polarization modulator to generate a single sideband (SSB) RF modulated optical signal and an orthogonally linear polarized unmodulated optical signal. The link is linearized and consequently the third-order spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR3) is largely increased by designing the angle of a linear polarizer connected to the modulator output to suppress the third-order intermodulation distortion. The two Mach Zehnder modulators inside the dual-polarization modulator are biased at the quadrature point. Hence, there is no degradation in the link second-order spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR2) performance compared with the conventional quadrature-biased Mach Zehnder modulator link. Experimental results demonstrate an SSB modulation link without dispersion induced power fading and a record measured SFDR3 of $121.4~\text {dB}\! \cdot \! \textrm {Hz}^{\mathrm {4/5}}$ .
A Soft Reclosing Model for Hybrid DC Circuit Breaker in VSC-MTDC System

Using hybrid DC circuit breakers (HDCCB) to isolate faults in voltage source converter based multiterminal high voltage direct current (VSC-MTDC) system is a common fault protection solution. Many temporary faults would occur due to the use of long overhead lines, thus it's required to reclose HDCCB at the faulty line after fault is isolated and cleared. Over-current limiting is very important for the security and reliability of DC system during the reclosing process. A soft reclosing model (SRM) for HDCCB to limit the reclosing over-current is proposed in this paper. Operation procedure and detailed mathematical analysis are carried out to design circuit parameter of SRM. The proposed model is evaluated in a 5 terminal VSC-MTDC system. Compared to traditional reclosing method, this proposal can effectively limit the reclosing over-current to reduce the impact when reclosing on fault in DC system, thus the security and reliability of DC system can be improved.
An End-to-End Hierarchical Classification Approach for Similar Gesture Recognition

Human action recognition from the RGB video is widely applied on varies real applications. Many works have been done by researchers in computer vision and machine learning area to address the challenges and complexity involved in video-based human action recognition. Deep learning approaches including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) have been introduced in the human action recognition research area. However, due to the drawbacks of the CNNs, recognizing actions with similar gestures and describing complex actions is still very challenging. Hence, an end-to-end hierarchical classification architecture has been proposed in this paper to resolve the confusion between similar gesture. The proposed approach firstly classifies the whole dataset and generates the accuracy for each class in stage 1. Based on the confusion matrix obtained from stage-1, the approach combines the most confused similar gesture pairs into one class, and classify them along with all other class, in the stage-2. In stage 3, similar gesture pairs will be classified by binary classifiers, which will increase the performance of each class and the overall accuracy. We apply and evaluate the developed models to recognize the similar human actions on the both KTH and UCF101 dataset. The result shows that the proposed approach can boost the classification performance on both the datasets. The proposed architecture is robust and any classification technique can be used in stage 1 and stage 2.
A Touring and Navigation Service Platform for Mobile Digital Culture Heritage (M-DCH)

This work developed an open accessed Mobile Digital Culture Heritage (M-DCH) platform called Demodulating and Encoding Heritage (DEH) that allows users to download M-DCH contents and upload M-DEH contents. For the M-DCH content concern, DEH interprets M-DEH from the viewpoint of point, line, area and story/site. Point of Interest (POI) is the basic unit of M-DCH and can contain text plus image/pictures, video or audio. A Line of Interest (LOI) is a sequence of POIs in which a visiting sequence of the composed POIs is enforced to have the temporal or spatial view and interpretation of the contained POIs. An Area of Interest (AOI) is a set of POIs in which the composed POIs are related, but the visiting of them can be random. A Story/Site of Interest (SOI) can contain many units, in which each unit can be a POI, a LOI or an AOI, to describe a complete story or a site of culture heritage. For the technical concern, DEH defines a new scenario of the grouping function. A group in DEH is composed of a group creator/leader and some members. In addition to the regular group functions i.e., sharing the content to group members, which belongs to the "read" action, defined in common social network, e.g., FB, Line, and WeChat, DEH's grouping function allows the group creator/leader to have the privilege of modifying contents created by group members, which belongs to the "write" action. This function is especially needed for content creation and sharing that is instructed/advised/guided in the teacher-student way. A set of metadata elements was defined for POI, LOI, AOI and SOI respectively such that the system can conveniently manipulate the M-DEH contents. The DEH platform was implemented by utilizing many tools for web and mobile APPs, e.g., Django for web API and Node.js for mobile API, based on the techniques of Location Based Service (LBS) and Geographical Information System (GIS).
Performance Optimization of Multithreaded 2D FFT on Multicore Processors: Challenges and Solution Approaches

Fast Fourier transform (FFT) is a key routine employed in application domains such as molecular dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, signal processing, image processing, and condition monitoring systems. Its performance on latest multicore platforms is therefore of paramount concern to the high performance computing community. The inherent complexities however in these platforms such as severe resource contention and non-uniform memory access (NUMA) pose formidable challenges. We study in this work the performance profiles of multithreaded 2D fast Fourier transforms provided in three highly optimized packages, FFTW-2.1. 5, FFTW-3.3. 7, and Intel MKL FFT on a modern Intel Haswell multicore processor consisting of thirty-six cores. First, we show that all the three routines demonstrate drastic performance variations and therefore their average performances are considerably lower than their peak performances. The ratio of average to peak performance for the 2D FFT routines from the three packages are 40%, 30%, and 24%. We demonstrate that the average and peak performance of FFTW-2.1. 5, last updated in 1999, is better than FFTW-3.3. 7 suggesting that extensive machine optimization using architecture-specific techniques can be harmful in the long run since hardware platforms undergo drastic changes. We also show that while the average performance of Intel MKL FFT is better than FFTW-3.3. 7, it is outperformed by FFTW-3.3. 7 for many problem sizes. Also the width of the performance variations for Intel MKL FFT are severe compared to FFTW-3.3. 7. Based on our study, we conclude that improving the average performance of FFT by removal of performance variations on modern multicore processors constitutes a tremendous research challenge. We propose three possible solution approaches to remove the performance variations and suggest future directions.
Compact tri-band BPF based on embeded asymmetric T-shape stub-loaded resonators

In this article, a compact tri-band bandpass fllter(BPF) is proposed by using T-shape asymmetrical stub-loaded resonators (ASLRs). The resonator, which consists of a main transmission line and T-shape-loaded stub is utilized to obtain two frequencies at 2.48 GHz and 4.48 GHz. Then, embedding into the sides of coupled-line a symmetrical to produce a passband at 3.58 GHz, so that a tri-band BPF is successfully designed. The fabricated tri-band BPF have compact sizes of $32\ \mathbf{mm} \times 28\ \mathbf{mm}$. In addition, good in-band return loss, and wide passband can be also observed. Good agreement is shown between the simulated and measured results.
A Wireless Power and Information Simultaneous Transfer Technology Based on 2FSK Modulation Using the Dual Bands of Series–Parallel Combined Resonant Circuit

In this paper, a new wireless power and information simultaneous transfer (WPIT) technology based on binary frequency shift keying (2FSK) modulation using the dual bands of a series–parallel combined resonant circuit (SPRC), SPRC-2FSK-WPIT technology, is proposed. Conventional 2FSK-WPIT technologies commonly employ single resonant band, and due to the insufficient utilization of system resonance, they have inherent disadvantages, such as low efficiency and low system quality factor. In the proposed technology, the system employs dual resonant bands of the SPRC and both of the system carriers use the resonant frequencies, and so the disadvantages of the conventional 2FSK-WPIT technology are eliminated. Optimal design of the SPRC-2FSK-WPIT system is conducted. In the optimized system, the two carriers have similar power and information transfer characteristics, and so a high WPIT performance, including stable power transmission, is guaranteed. The proposed technology is validated by experimental results. The experimental prototype shows up to 20 kb/s of communication rate with maintaining the power transfer efficiency over 85% at the distance of 50 mm.
Design and Development of Svace Static Analyzers

Static analysis became the mainstream technology that is widely used in secure development lifecycles. As such it is covered by a lot of research works highlighting many diverse aspects. We would like to make this paper a single place that focuses on two important questions. First, it is a very long road to travel for a tool to be deployed in production, and the technology and design that actually worked is of interest. Second, once the tool has been made, it needs to be pushed further both with the evolutional approach of gradually improving analysis algorithms and with exploring completely new ideas, yet this task is not easy as inviting directions are many. This paper presents our view for the above problems in the context of a static analysis that strives to be fully automatic, scalable to modern computing systems, and generating good quality warnings. We derive the discussion from our experience put into the Svace static analyzers that have been made at ISP RAS and deployed to various production development environments.
A Review of the Analytics Techniques for an Efficient Management of Online Forums: An Architecture Proposal

E-learning is a response to the new educational needs of society and an important development in information and communication technologies because it represents the future of the teaching and learning processes. However, this trend presents many challenges, such as the processing of online forums which generate a huge number of messages with an unordered structure and a great variety of topics. These forums provide an excellent platform for learning and connecting students of a subject but the difficulty of following and searching the vast volume of information that they generate may be counterproductive. The main goal of this paper is to review the approaches and techniques related to online courses in order to present a set of learning analytics techniques and a general architecture that solve the main challenges found in the state of the art by managing them in a more efficient way: 1) efficient tracking and monitoring of forums generated; 2) design of effective search mechanisms for questions and answers in the forums; and 3) extraction of relevant key performance indicators with the objective of carrying out an efficient management of online forums. In our proposal, natural language processing, clustering, information retrieval, question answering, and data mining techniques will be used.
FFTX and SpectralPack: A First Look

We propose FFTX, a new framework for building high-performance FFT-based applications on exascale machines. Complex node architectures lead to multiple levels of parallelism and demand efficient ways of data communication. The current FFTW interface falls short in maximizing performance in such scenarios. FFTX is designed to enable application developers to leverage expert-level, automatic optimizations while navigating a familiar interface. FFTX is backwards compatible to FFTW and extends the FFTW Interface into an embedded Domain Specific Language (DSL) expressed as a library interface. By means of a SPIRAL-based back end, this enables build-time source-to-source translation and advanced performance optimizations, such as cross-library calls optimizations, targeting of accelerators through offload-ing, and inlining of user-provided kernels. We demonstrate the use of FFTX with the prototypical example of 1D and 3D pruned convolutions and discuss future extensions.
Design of a Compliant Mechanical Device for Upper Leg Rehabilitation

In this letter, a fully passive mechanism is introduced that is capable of generating a potential energy field, and therefore restoring forces, around a cyclic trajectory closely matching the normal human gait. The mechanism uses two sets of cable and pulley transmissions complemented by coupling gears to relate the elongation of two compliant cables to the angular positions of a user's hip and knee articulations. The design introduced does not require any sensor, actuator, or control scheme to help restoring a normal gait motion. Designing such a lightweight and inexpensive wearable gait training device for rehabilitation purposes, while minimizing interaction forces between the mechanism and the user if a prescribed trajectory is followed (i.e., maximizing transparency), is expected to decrease the dependence of patients on external care and therefore, increase their autonomy.
A Black-Box Based Script Repair Method for GUI Regression Test

Testing applications with GUI is one of the most tedious tasks in software development. Test automation alleviates this burden by executing scripts that simulate how users interact with GUI. However, in practice efforts spent on developing GUI test automation scripts can be wasteful when the application evolves and modifies GUI components that are referenced by the scripts. In this paper, we propose a new test script repair framework to address this problem. The framework of our method consists of three main modules. Firstly, the script processing module calculates a similarity matrix of each script pair. Secondly, the code analysis module maintains an object repair map which is used to store repair operations. Finally, the script update module applies the map to the scripts under repair. The repair rate of our method keeps increasing with more test script pairs provided and it could be more than 95%. Experiments also show that our method is better than the tool for scrip maintaining within QTP not only in repair rate but also in time consuming.
Maxlifd: Joint Maximum Likelihood Localization Fusing Fingerprints and Mutual Distances

Fusing mutual distance information with fingerprints can substantially improve indoor localization accuracy. Such distance information may be spatial (e.g., measurement among users or from installed beaconing devices) or temporal (e.g., via dead-reckoning). Previous approaches on distance-fusion often require deterministic distance measurement, consider fingerprints and distances separately, or are narrowly applicable to some specific sensing technology or scenario. Given the fact that fingerprint and distance measurements are intrinsically random, we propose Maxlifd, an accurate indoor localization framework fusing fingerprints and distances of arbitrary distributions via joint maximum likelihood. Maxlifd is a generic statistical/probabilistic framework applicable to a wide range of sensors (peer-assisted, INS, iBeacon, etc.) and fingerprints (Wi-Fi, RFID, etc.). It achieves low localization errors by a novel optimization formulation jointly considering mutual distances and fingerprint signals. Using generic probabilistic formulation, we further derive the lower bound on localization error for comprehensive performance analysis. We have implemented Maxlifd, and conducted extensive simulation and experimental trials in an international airport and our university campus. Our results show that Maxlifd achieves significantly lower errors than other state-of-the-art schemes (often by more than 30 percent). We experimentally verify that its performance does not depend sensitively on the exact knowledge of the underlying distributions beyond simple Gaussian.
Use of Resistive Superconducting Fault Current Limiter for Fuse–Recloser Coordination in Radial Distribution Networks Connected with Distributed Generation

The present paper analyzes the fuse-recloser coordination in radial distribution networks connected with distribution generation (DG) by using resistive superconducting fault current limiter (R-SFCL). Normally, fuses and reclosers are used to protect radial distribution networks against fault currents. Fuses and reclosers are coordinated in a way that reclosers clear temporary faults before the melting of fuses. However, when faults are permanent, fuses melt to clear fault current. This coordination between fuses and reclosers may not be maintained when DG is integrated with distribution networks. The impact of DG on fuse-recloser coordination depends on size, location, and type of DG. In this paper, R-SFCL is connected in series with the DG to limit the fault current contribution of that DG during fault period and mitigate its impact on fuse-recloser coordination. Different penetration levels of conventional synchronous generator (SG) are studied and different faults locations are tested. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the R-SFCL to maintain the fuse-recloser coordination in all the studied cases. All simulations are performed using MATLAB/Simulink package.
The Unequal Error Protection Applied In The Bit Stream With Optimization In The Bit Rate Using Whale Algorithm (WA)

The compression of image using analyzing techniques give us q high quality in the reconstructed image however in the case of transmission produce a sensitive (to the channel noise) image. In this paper we are going to use combination between error detection, source and channel coding with unequal distribution in the code rate our approach shows a high efficiency and optimization in the use of the code rate using Whale Algorithm (WA) (minimization in the redundant bits) compared to other approaches.
A Reverse Bearings Only Target Motion Analysis for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Navigation

We present a non-linear navigation solution, referred to as the Reverse Bearing Only Target Motion Analysis (Reverse BO-TMA). Reverse BO-TMA is a passive method for the self-localization of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Our method relies solely on bearing measurements based on the radiated noise of a passing vessel sailing along a known route. Compared to traditional range-based underwater localization methods, Reverse BO-TMA allows the AUV to remain farther from the reference vessel, and does not require collaboration or message exchange. We formalize the Reverse BO-TMA as an optimization problem, and offer both a least squares solution and an unscented Kalman filter solution. Numerical results show that Reverse BO-TMA provides accurate performance, in terms of both positioning and speed, which are close to the posterior Cramér-Rao lower bound. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we have implemented a prototype for Reverse BO-TMA and successfully tested it in three sea experiments. We show that the Reverse BO-TMA is suitable for the long-term deployment of an AUV and in cases where energy is scarce and cooperating anchors are not available.
Effects of the Hybrid Composition of Commercial Lithium-Ion Capacitors on Their Floating Aging

Lifetime of energy storage systems is a key factor that is extremely influenced by the operating conditions. For this reason, lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) and supercapacitors (SCs) were subjected to accelerated aging tests in several previous research in order analyze their lifespan. Lithium-ion capacitors (LiCs), which fall in between LiBs and SCs, are still considered as a novel technology. Their behavior during accelerated aging tests is not yet well studied in the literature. This paper focuses on studying the degradation of their properties during floating aging. Eighteen samples were tested under three different voltage values and two different temperatures over 12 months. Cells that were discharged to the minimum voltage showed a severe capacitance decrease that was much higher than the one of fully charged cells. The best storage voltage of LiCs was found to be 3 V, which is equivalent to a half charging state. The hybrid structure of LiCs was found to be the major cause of this change in behavior during aging at different voltages. Mechanisms that affect the electrodes and the internal composition of the cells in the diverse conditions were analyzed and predicted.
A Hand Gesture Set for Navigating and Interacting with 3D Virtual Environments

Recent advances in consumer-level VR technologies have increased interest in using hand gestures to interact more intuitively with computers. Unfortunately, there are still few accepted norms for gestures that map to functions, and identifying suitable hand gestures for a given use case is difficult. In this paper we review research on how to define a good gesture set. Based on this we develop and evaluate a hand gesture set for controlling and navigating interactive virtual environments, such as games or simulations. A user study shows that the resulting gesture set is intuitive, easy to perform and remember, and overall likeable. The lowest scores were received for gestures for changing the users's location.