Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Feature-Adaptive Semi-Supervised Framework for Co-saliency Detection

Co-saliency detection, which refers to the discovery of common salient foreground regions in a group of relevant images, has attracted increasing attention due to its widespread applications in many vision tasks. Existing methods assemble features from multiple views toward a comprehensive representation, however overlook the efficacy disparity among various features in detecting co-saliency. This paper proposes a novel feature-adaptive semi-supervised (FASS) framework for co-saliency detection, which seamlessly integrates multi-view feature learning, graph structure optimization and co-saliency prediction in a unified solution. In particular, the FASS exploits the efficacy disparity of multi-view features at both view and element levels by a joint formulation of view-wise feature weighting and element-wise feature selection, leading to an effective representation robust to feature noise and redundancy as well as adaptive to the task at hand. It predicts co-saliency map by optimizing co-saliency label prorogation over a graph of both labeled and unlabeled image regions. The graph structure is optimized jointly with feature learning and co-saliency prediction to precisely characterize underlying correlation among regions. The FASS is thus able to produce satisfactory co-saliency map based on the effective exploration of multi-view features as well as inter-region correlation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., iCoseg, Cosal2015 and MSRC, have demonstrated that the proposed FASS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Outage Probability of Full Duplex Relay in OLOS Underground Mine Environments

Expanding the coverage of network with different techniques is necessity and demand of today’s life. As the population increases the demand for more solutions to give more capacity and to reach everyone on the whole world with network increases. This paper considers the design of dual-hop full-duplex (FD) Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Relay for workers in the underground mine tunnel area, with an obstructed line of sight OLOS conditions, where the relay is equipped with two antennas, while the source and destination are armed with a single antenna. This paper aims to investigate the outage probability performance when the communication channel is obstructed by a vehicle in a mine tunnel. In this case, the radio signal is obstructed, and no communication is possible, we proposed an investigative relay, installed around that vehicle, with scheme Zero-Forcing Beam-Forming (ZFBF) to avoid obstruction and enable communication again. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can efficiently minimize the outage probability.
Bayesian Distance Clustering

Model-based clustering is widely used in a variety of application areas. However, fundamental concerns remain about robustness. In particular, results can be sensitive to the choice of kernel representing the within-cluster data density. Leveraging on properties of pairwise differences between data points, we propose a class of Bayesian distance clustering methods, which rely on modeling the likelihood of the pairwise distances in place of the original data. Although some information in the data is discarded, we gain substantial robustness to modeling assumptions. The proposed approach represents an appealing middle ground between distance- and model-based clustering, drawing advantages from each of these canonical approaches. We illustrate dramatic gains in the ability to infer clusters that are not well represented by the usual choices of kernel. A simulation study is included to assess performance relative to competitors, and we apply the approach to clustering of brain genome expression data.
Whole synthetic pathway engineering of recombinant protein production

The output from protein biomanufacturing systems is a function of total host cell biomass synthetic capacity and recombinant protein production per unit cell biomass. In this study, we describe how these two properties can be simultaneously optimized via design of a product‐specific combination of synthetic DNA parts to maximize flux through the protein synthetic pathway and the use of a host cell chassis with an increased capability to synthesize both cell and product biomass. Using secreted alkaline phosphatase (SEAP) production in Chinese hamster ovary cells as our example, we demonstrate how an optimal composition of input components can be assembled from a minimal toolbox containing rationally designed promoters, untranslated regions, signal peptides, product coding sequences, cell chassis, and genetic effectors. Product titer was increased 10‐fold, compared with a standard reference system by (a) identifying genetic components that acted in concert to maximize the rates of SEAP transcription, translation, and translocation, (b) selection of a cell chassis with increased biomass synthetic capacity, and (c) engineering the host cell factory’s capacity for protein folding and secretion. This whole synthetic pathway engineering process to design optimal expression cassette–chassis combinations should be applicable to diverse recombinant protein and host cell‐type contexts.
An AC Four-Terminal Low Value Resistance Bridge

This paper describes a current transformer based ac four-terminal low value resistance measurement bridge. The design and performance of this bridge is presented, which compares resistors from 10 to 0.1 ohm over a frequency range of 100 Hz-10kHz. The reference ratio arm used in this bridge is a special designed high accurate zero-flux current transformer (ZFCT). The current ratio value of the ZFCT is self-calibrated by using the conventional build up method. An auxiliary current transformer combined with variable impedance is used to constitute the wagner circuit.
A multiplier-type microwave FET mixer

Generally the nonlinearity of a semiconductor diode or transistor is utilized for mixing operation. In that type of mixer the two input signals are combined to one port while the output can be filtered from the other port. This requires high local oscillator power and higher order sideband signals are also generated. This paper presents a multiplier-type microwave FET mixer which does not exhibit the mentioned problems. In a multiplier-type mixer there are two or three ports and the two input signals are applied to different ports. We designed and realized a mixer with its filters in a microstrip structure and verified its functionality by simulations and measurements. The mixer operates at 2GHz, however, the design methods may be used for higher frequencies as well. The presented work gives way to develop a similar tunable circuit suitable for use in a software-defined radio network such as the 5G system.
Does fatigue and distress in a clinical cohort of adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome correlate with fatigue and distress in their parents?

OBJECTIVES Previous studies have found that parents of children with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) are more fatigued, and mothers are more distressed than healthy controls. Managing the disabling symptoms of CFS can result in disruption and burden for the family. Most research has focused on mothers. This study sought to further explore the associations between adolescent fatigue and distress and parental fatigue and distress, as well as family functioning, including both mothers and fathers. DESIGN Cross-sectional study of a clinical cohort of consecutive attenders at a specialist chronic fatigue unit. METHODS Questionnaires were completed by adolescents (N = 115, age 11-18) with a confirmed diagnosis of CFS and their mothers (N = 100) and fathers (N = 65). RESULTS Maternal fatigue was significantly correlated with maternal distress, but not with adolescent fatigue, depression, anxiety, or functioning. This pattern held true for paternal fatigue. Maternal and paternal anxiety and depression were significantly correlated with family functioning. Paternal and maternal distress were correlated with each other. Mothers and fathers tended to have a consistent view of family functioning. Family functioning, specifically being overwhelmed by difficulties and scoring lower on strengths and adaptability, was positively associated with adolescent depression. Unexpectedly, higher levels of adolescent fatigue and poorer physical functioning were associated with better family functioning as rated by the mother. CONCLUSIONS Parents of adolescents with fatigue scored near to or within normative range for non-clinical samples on distress, fatigue, and family functioning. Parental distress may contribute to or result from poorer family functioning. Family functioning, particularly building strengths and adaptability, may be clinically important in CFS, as well as attending to parental (particularly paternal) distress in families where adolescents are low in mood.
Effects of psoralen on the pharmacokinetics of anastrozole in rats

Abstract Context: Psoralen and anastrozole are always used together for breast cancer patients in Chinese clinics. Objective: This study investigates the effects of psoralen on the pharmacokinetics of anastrozole in rats and its potential mechanism. Materials and methods: The pharmacokinetics of orally administered anastrozole (0.5 mg/kg) with (test group) or without (Control group) psoralen pretreatment (20 mg/kg/day for 10 days) in male Sprague-Dawley rats (six rats in each group) were investigated. The plasma concentration of anastrozole was determined using a sensitive and reliable LC-MS/MS method. Additionally, the effects of psoralen on the intestine transport and metabolic stability of anastrozole (1 μM) were investigated using a Caco-2 cell transwell model and rat liver microsome incubation systems. Results: The results indicated that psoralen could significantly increase the Cmax (from 56.74 ± 3.17 ng/mL to 83.26 ± 6.87 ng/mL), and t1/2 (from 10.80 ± 1.05 to 14.29 ± 1.38 h) of anastrozole (p < 0.05). Psoralen could also significantly decrease the efflux ratio of anastrozole from 1.88 to 1.32 (p < 0.05). Additionally, the intrinsic clearance rates of anastrozole decreased significantly (from 62.83 to 43.97 μL/min/mg protein) (p < 0.05) with psoralen pretreatment in rat liver microsome incubation systems. Discussion and conclusions: This study indicates that when the rats were pretreated with psoralen, the system exposure of anastrozole would be increased significantly. The results showed that the herb-drug interaction between psoralen and anastrozole might occur when they were co-administered, and future studies in humans also need to investigate its herb-drug interaction potential.
A Hybrid Swapping Scheme Based On Per-Process Reclaim for Performance Improvement of Android Smartphones (August 2018)

As a way to increase the actual main memory capacity of Android smartphones, most of them make use of zRAM swapping, but it has limitation in increasing its capacity since it utilizes main memory. Unfortunately, they cannot use secondary storage as a swap space due to the long response time and wear-out problem. In this paper, we propose a hybrid swapping scheme based on per-process reclaim that supports both secondary-storage swapping and zRAM swapping. It attempts to swap out all the pages in the working set of a process to a zRAM swap space rather than killing the process selected by a low-memory killer, and to swap out the least recently used pages into a secondary storage swap space. The main reason being is that frequently swap- in/out pages use the zRAM swap space while less frequently swap-in/out pages use the secondary storage swap space, in order to reduce the page operation cost. Our scheme resolves both the response time and wear-out problems of secondary-storage swapping and zSWAP, and overcomes the size limitation of the zRAM swap space. According to performance measurements, it also increased the extension ratio of main memory by 15 ~ 17% and 6 ~ 17% and reduced the page operation cost by 9 ~ 22% and 18 ~ 28%, respectively, compared with zRAM swapping and zSWAP.
Computing Images Invariant Characteristics with Chain Coding

The paper investigates the properties of invariant moments of binary images, which is necessary for their formation and analysis in the problem of pattern recognition of graphic images. It is shown that the invariants have different sensitivity to the changes in the input data, which determines the strategy of their choice. Invariant $Xy$ moments are used for the pattern recognition and distance measurements. The paper discusses the method of calculation of invariant characteristics for the binary images. The results of experimental determination of the quality of recognition are presented by their contour images of the various objects, as well as the results of the comparison of recognition using different sets of invariant moments. The proposed approaches to object recognition based on the method of chain coding can be provided the reduction of the amount of data and can be used for image recognition in the technical vision systems.
Source-to-Drain Tunneling Analysis in FDSOI, DGSOI, and FinFET Devices by Means of Multisubband Ensemble Monte Carlo

The inclusion of quantum effects in the transport direction plays an important role in the extensive research of ultrascaled electronic devices. In this context, it is necessary to study how these phenomena affect different technological architectures in order to conclude which one can be the best candidate to replace standard technology. This paper presents the implementation of direct source-to-drain tunneling effect in a multisubband ensemble Monte Carlo simulator showing its influence in different structures such as fully depleted silicon-on-insulator, double-gate silicon-on-insulator, and FinFET devices. The differences in the potential profile and the electron distribution in the subbands for these architectures modify the number of electrons affected by this quantum mechanism and, therefore, their short-channel behavior.
Toward Efficient Simultaneous Detection and Segmentation

To solve the low-speed problem of two-stage based framework for object detection and instance segmentation, we creatively introduce the large separated convolution to the typical two-stage method. In our method, the two-branches separated large kernel convolution operation is applied before the ROI pooling layer, which is able to reduce the complexity of the follow-up process to a great extent and make the ROI pooling much more efficient. Furthermore, the subnet of region-based convolution network is carefully simplified and designed for obtaining better performances. Extensive evaluation experiments on Microsoft COCO datasets show that our method provides ∽2x speedup compared with the original Mask R-CNN method and results in a comparable detection and segmentation performances.
Activity Recognition for a Smartphone and Web-Based Human Mobility Sensing System

Activity-based models in transport modeling and prediction are built from a large number of observed trips and their purposes. However, data acquired through traditional interview-based travel surveys is often inaccurate and insufficient. Recently, a human mobility sensing system, called Future Mobility Survey (FMS), was developed and used to collect travel data from more than 1,000 participants. FMS combines a smartphone and interactive web interface in order to better infer users activities and patterns. This paper presents a model that infers an activity at a certain location. We propose to generate a set of predictive features based on spatial, temporal, transitional, and environmental contexts with an appropriate quantization. In order to improve the generalization performance of the proposed model, we employ a robust approach with ensemble learning. Empirical results using FMS data demonstrate that the proposed method contributes significantly to providing accurate activity estimates for the user in our travel-sensing application.
Seamless Multi-Projection Revisited

This paper introduces a novel photometric compensation technique for inter-projector luminance and chrominance variations. Although it sounds as a classical technical issue, to the best of our knowledge there is no existing solution to alleviate the spatial non-uniformity among strongly heterogeneous projectors at perceptually acceptable quality. Primary goal of our method is increasing the perceived seamlessness of the projection system by automatically generating an improved and consistent visual quality. It builds upon the existing research of multi-projection systems, but instead of working with perceptually non-uniform color spaces such as CIEXYZ, the overall computation is carried out using the RLab [10, pp. 243–254] color appearance model which models the color processing in an adaptive, perceptual manner. Besides, we propose an adaptive color gamut acquisition, spatially varying gamut mapping, and optimization framework for edge blending. The paper describes the overall workflow and detailed algorithm of each component, followed by an evaluation validating the proposed method. The experimental results both qualitatively and quantitatively show the proposed method significant improved the visual quality of projected results of a multi-projection display with projectors with severely heterogeneous color processing.
Use of Indigenous Hanseniaspora vineae and Metschnikowia pulcherrima Co-fermentation With Saccharomyces cerevisiae to Improve the Aroma Diversity of Vidal Blanc Icewine

Using novel non-Saccharomyces strains is regarded as an effective way to improve the aroma diversity of wines to meet the expectations of consumers. The non-Saccharomyces Hanseniaspora vineae and Metschnikowia pulcherrima have good aromatic properties useful for the production of table wine. However, no detailed information is available on their performances in icewine fermentation. In this study, simultaneous and sequential fermentation trials of indigenous M. pulcherrima CVE-MP20 or H. vineae CVE-HV11 with S. cerevisiae (SC45) were performed in 50-L fermenters of Vidal icewine, respectively. The results showed that SC45 cofermented with different non-Saccharomyces strains could generate a distinct aroma quality of icewine compared with four S. cerevisiae strain monocultures as evidenced by principal component analysis (PCA). Mixed fermentation of MP20/SC45 produced higher contents of acetate esters and β-damascenone with lower C6 alcohols relative to SC45 monoculture. Interestingly, HV11/SC45 generated the highest amounts of C6 alcohols [(Z)-3-hexen-1-ol and (E)-3-hexen-1-ol], higher alcohols (isobutanol, isopentanol, and 2-phenylethanol), acetate esters (2-phenethyl acetate and isoamyl acetate), cis-rose oxide, β-damascenone, and phenylacetaldehyde. Compared with simultaneous inoculation, sequential inoculation could achieve higher aroma diversity and produce higher intensity of fruity, flowery, and sweet attributes of icewine as assessed by calculating the odor activity values (OAVs). Our results verified the desired enological characteristics of H. vineae strain in icewine fermentation and also demonstrated that using indigenous non-Saccharomyces and Saccharomyces strains is a feasible way to improve aroma diversity of icewine products, which could provide an alternative way to meet the requirement of wine consumers for diversified aromatic quality.
Oncometabolite induced primary cilia loss in pheochromocytoma

Primary cilia are sensory organelles involved in regulation of cellular signaling. Cilia loss is frequently observed in tumors; yet, the responsible mechanisms and consequences for tumorigenesis remain unclear. We demonstrate that cilia structure and function is disrupted in human pheochromocytomas – endocrine tumors of the adrenal medulla. This is concomitant with transcriptional changes within cilia-mediated signaling pathways that are associated with tumorigenesis generally and pheochromocytomas specifically. Importantly, cilia loss was most dramatic in patients with germline mutations in the pseudohypoxia-linked genes SDHx and VHL. Using a pheochromocytoma cell line derived from rat, we show that hypoxia and oncometabolite-induced pseudohypoxia are key drivers of cilia loss and identify that this is dependent on activation of an Aurora-A/HDAC6 cilia resorption pathway. We also show cilia loss drives dramatic transcriptional changes associated with proliferation and tumorigenesis. Our data provide evidence for primary cilia dysfunction contributing to pathogenesis of pheochromocytoma by a hypoxic/pseudohypoxic mechanism and implicates oncometabolites as ciliary regulators. This is important as pheochromocytomas can cause mortality by mechanisms including catecholamine production and malignant transformation, while hypoxia is a general feature of solid tumors. Moreover, pseudohypoxia-induced cilia resorption can be pharmacologically inhibited, suggesting potential for therapeutic intervention.
Compact Distributed Digitizers with Metrological Precision

Prototype distributed digitizers have been developed with metrological precision of the individual measurement nodes. A master controller aggregates the data of the nodes and performs all computational tasks. A crucial part of the system is the synchronization of the individual nodes at nanosecond level using white-rabbit technology. Fibre-optic communication is used to reduce interference and to obtain high isolation. When operated on battery power, this allows for special applications such as the measurement of currents in high-voltage lines. First results show that a phase difference between nodes of a few $\mu \mathbf{rad}$ can be achieved with a resolution of better than $0.1\ \mu \text{rad}$.
Digital Calibration of Operational Amplifiers and Influence of Calibration Circuitry

This paper presents the implementation of a digital calibration method for a variable-gain amplifier (VGA), where the amplifier input offset voltage is the calibration target. The whole system is implemented in 130 nm CMOS technology using the supply voltage of 600 mV. Firstly,fundamentals of calibration circuitry operation are described, followed by detailedexplanation of the proposed implementation. Then, investigation of possible undesired effects of calibration circuitry on the amplifier characteristics is performed. The whole calibration system wasverified through simulation for various temperatures using Cadence environment and BSIM3v3 transistor model version. The VGA was calibrated within the temperature range from $- 20 ^{\circ}C$ to $60 ^{\circ}C$, in which standard deviation of the inputoffset voltage reaches less than $802 \mu V$ and mean value is at most $450 \mu V$. Using the calibration, the standard deviation is reduced to 35% compared to the VGA without the calibration, while the change of mean value is rather negligible.
Pulse Position Modulation Based Energy Detection for Smart Grid Communication

Smart Grid Network (SGN) concept is developed for dynamically and automatically respond to changes in power grid conditions, which will require sensors to provide detection of signal for real-time information and status. The most distinguishing attribute of Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) in SG Communications is its non-coherent detection. It avoids complex channel estimation which becomes a very complicated process due to very large bandwidth and fine time resolution with large number of multipath components. In this paper, we analyze PPM based energy detection for sensing in smart grid networks where intelligent devices for power monitoring, smart sensors and smart meters for Home Area Network (HAN) or Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) can start transmission at any time. In contrast to well-known case of Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, we further extended our investigation to KG composite model and the effect of fading and shadowing severity is discussed extensively. Reduction in either the fading index m or shadowing parameter m0 influences the channel characteristics and declines the error performance. Hence, the presented results furnish guidelines for energy detection based sensing of PPM modulated signal for SGN various communication models.