Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deep motion transfer without big data

This paper presents a novel motion transfer algorithm that copies content motion into a specific style character. The input consists of two motions. One is a content motion such as walking or running, and the other is movement style such as zombie or Krall. The algorithm automatically generates the synthesized motion such as walking zombie, walking Krall, running zombie, or running Krall. In order to obtain natural results, the method adopts the generative power of deep neural networks. Compared to previous neural approaches, the proposed algorithm shows better quality, runs extremely fast, does not require big data, and supports user-controllable style weights.
Exposure criteria for evaluating lumbar spine load.

OBJECTIVE As a part of regular revision of the List of Occupational Diseases in the Czech Republic, efforts have been made to add a new item so that lumbar spine disease caused by overload may be recognized as occupational one, with adherence to the valid national rules, that is, clinical criteria are met and objective assessment confirms working conditions under which, according to recent scientific knowledge, such an occupational disease develops. The aim is to provide information on the use of a proposed method for working condition assessment in a real setting, based on the initial experiences gained from a pilot study carried out to validate the method. METHODS Working conditions were assessed in 55 individuals with chronic low back pain (25 males, 30 females; mean age 45.6 years; mean length of employment 15.6 years). The assessment was based on estimating compressive force on the L4/L5 intervertebral disc when performing potentially high-risk work tasks which were entered into four types of checklists throughout their work shifts. The compression values were calculated using a special module that was developed. RESULTS In 24 cases comprehensive assessment of all tasks performed showed fulfillment of the proposed criteria of working conditions needed for recognition of occupational disease. Those included healthcare, foundry and forest workers, production operators, cabinetmakers, locksmiths, bricklayers, etc. In all the cases, lumbar spine overload was associated with work tasks requiring combinations of manual handling of objects and trunk rotation or bending. The criteria were not met in 31 subjects. The mean length of employment was 15.4 and 15.8 years in patients who met and did not meet the proposed criteria, respectively. CONCLUSION The proposed method proved to be applicable in occupational hygiene evaluation in a real setting.
A 77GHz Antenna-in-Package with Low-Cost Solution for Automotive Radar Applications

This work proposes a low-cost Antenna in package (AiP) solution implemented on Advanced single sided substrates (aS3 package) for 77-GHz automotive radar applications. The impact of fabrication tolerances is also studied in this work. This work demonstrates firstly the 77-GHz losses of the transition from chip to package among flip-chip ball grid array (FCBGA) package, flip chip chip scale (FCCSP) package, Fan out wafer level chip scale package (Fan-out WLP), and aS3 package. Although Fan-out WLP can minimizes 77-GHz losses of transition from chip to package plus package to PCB, low-cost AiP solutions are very important for 77-GHz automotive radar applications. The proposed AiP solution on aS3 package has low losses of transition from chip to package, and the performance of designed antenna on aS3 package meets the requirements of 77-GHz automotive radar systems. Finally, this work also demonstrates the impact of fabrication inaccuracies on the bandwidth and radiation pattern of AiP on aS3 package. This work provides a cost-effective AiP approach for 77-GHz automotive radar systems.
Reported Direct and Indirect Contact with Dromedary Camels among Laboratory-Confirmed MERS-CoV Cases

Dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) are now known to be the vertebrate animal reservoir that intermittently transmits the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) to humans. Yet, details as to the specific mechanism(s) of zoonotic transmission from dromedaries to humans remain unclear. The aim of this study was to describe direct and indirect contact with dromedaries among all cases, and then separately for primary, non-primary, and unclassified cases of laboratory-confirmed MERS-CoV reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) between 1 January 2015 and 13 April 2018. We present any reported dromedary contact: direct, indirect, and type of indirect contact. Of all 1125 laboratory-confirmed MERS-CoV cases reported to WHO during the time period, there were 348 (30.9%) primary cases, 455 (40.4%) non-primary cases, and 322 (28.6%) unclassified cases. Among primary cases, 191 (54.9%) reported contact with dromedaries: 164 (47.1%) reported direct contact, 155 (44.5%) reported indirect contact. Five (1.1%) non-primary cases also reported contact with dromedaries. Overall, unpasteurized milk was the most frequent type of dromedary product consumed. Among cases for whom exposure was systematically collected and reported to WHO, contact with dromedaries or dromedary products has played an important role in zoonotic transmission.
Interleukin 4 is inactivated via selective disulfide-bond reduction by extracellular thioredoxin

Significance Macrophages are important regulators of the immune system. They display remarkable phenotypic plasticity in response to environmental cues. Classical macrophage activation occurs in response to inflammatory signals, whereas alternative macrophage activation results from exposure to IL-4 and/or IL-13. The mechanistic basis for differential regulation of macrophages by IL-4 and IL-13 remains poorly understood. We show through in vitro and in vivo experiments that thioredoxin 1, a redox protein cofactor, preferentially inactivates IL-4 over IL-13, by reduction of a specific disulfide bond. As extracellular levels of thioredoxin are elevated in many pathological conditions, our results highlight a novel pharmacologically promising immunomodulatory mechanism. Thioredoxin 1 (TRX), an essential intracellular redox regulator, is also secreted by mammalian cells. Recently, we showed that TRX activates extracellular transglutaminase 2 via reduction of an allosteric disulfide bond. In an effort to identify other extracellular substrates of TRX, macrophages derived from THP-1 cells were treated with NP161, a small-molecule inhibitor of secreted TRX. NP161 enhanced cytokine outputs of alternatively activated macrophages, suggesting that extracellular TRX regulated the activity of interleukin 4 (IL-4) and/or interleukin 13 (IL-13). To test this hypothesis, the C35S mutant of human TRX was shown to form a mixed disulfide bond with recombinant IL-4 but not IL-13. Kinetic analysis revealed a kcat/KM value of 8.1 μM−1⋅min−1 for TRX-mediated recognition of IL-4, which established this cytokine as the most selective partner of extracellular TRX to date. Mass spectrometry identified the C46–C99 bond of IL-4 as the target of TRX, consistent with the essential role of this disulfide bond in IL-4 activity. To demonstrate the physiological relevance of our biochemical findings, recombinant TRX was shown to attenuate IL-4–dependent proliferation of cultured TF-1 erythroleukemia cells and also to inhibit the progression of chronic pancreatitis in an IL-4–driven mouse model of this disease. By establishing that IL-4 is posttranslationally regulated by TRX-promoted reduction of a disulfide bond, our findings highlight a novel regulatory mechanism of the type 2 immune response that is specific to IL-4 over IL-13.
Evaluating Bluetooth Low Energy for IoT

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is the short-range, single-hop protocol of choice for the edge of the IoT. Despite its growing significance for phone-to-peripheral communication, BLE's smartphone system performance characteristics are not well understood. As others, we experienced mixed erratic performance results in our BLE based smartphone-centric applications. In these applications, developers can only access low-level functionalities through multiple layers of OS and hardware abstractions. We propose an experimental framework for such systems, with which we perform experiments on a variety of modern smartphones. Our evaluation characterizes existing devices and gives new insight about peripheral parameters settings. We show that BLE performances vary significantly in non-trivial ways, depending on SoC and OS with a vast impact on applications.
Low incidence of recurrent Buruli ulcers in treated Australian patients living in an endemic region

We examined recurrent Buruli ulcer cases following treatment and assumed cure in a large cohort of Australian patients living in an endemic area. We report that while the recurrence rate was low (2.81 cases/year/1000 population), it remained similar to the estimated risk of primary infection within the general population of the endemic area (0.85–4.04 cases/year/1,000 population). The majority of recurrent lesions occurred in different regions of the body and were separated by a median time interval of 44 months. Clinical, treatment and epidemiological factors combined with whole genome sequencing of primary and recurrent isolates suggests that in most recurrent cases a re-infection was more likely as opposed to a relapse of the initial infection. Additionally, all cases occurring more than 12 months after commencement of treatment were likely re-infections. Our study provides important prognostic information for patients and their health care providers concerning the nature and risks associated with recurrent cases of Buruli ulcer in Australia.
Glutamate Activity Regulates and Dendritic Development of J-RGCs

Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) have a wide variety of dendritic architectures, which are critical for the formation of their function-specific synaptic circuitry. The developmental regulation of the dendrites of RGCs is thought to be subtype dependent. The purpose of this study is to characterize the dendritic development of a genetically identified RGC subtype, JamB RGCs (J-RGCs), and the roles of glutamate receptor activity on the dendritic development of these cells. We show that the dendrites of J-RGCs are strictly ramified in the outer portion of the inner plexiform layer (IPL) of the retina at the age of postnatal day 8 (P8), mimicking the ramification pattern of adults. However, several other important features of dendrites undergo substantial developmental refinement after P8. From P8 to P13, the dendritic development of J-RGCs is characterized by a dramatic increase of dendritic length and the size of the dendritic field. After eye opening, the dendritic development of J-RGCs is characterized by a tremendous decrease of the number of dendritic protrusions (spine-like structures) and a consolidation of the size of the dendritic field. To determine whether the dendritic development of J-RGCs is regulated by glutamatergic activity, we conditionally knocked out the expression of an obligatory subunit of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs), NR1 (Grin1), in J-RGCs. We found that J-RGCs with the NMDAR mutation have decreased dendrite outgrowth and dendritic field expansion but increased number of dendritic protrusions before eye opening. To determine if visual experience regulates the development of J-RGC dendrites, we raised the mice in complete darkness after birth. Light deprivation prevented the decrease in the number of dendritic protrusions and the consolidation of the dendritic field of wild type (WT) mice after eye opening. However, light deprivation has no additional effect on the number of dendritic protrusions or the size of the dendritic field of J-RGCs with NMDAR mutation. Together, these results revealed the roles of light stimulation and NMDAR activity on the dendritic development of J-RGCs.
Discrete-time Risk-sensitive Mean-field Games

In this paper, we study a class of discrete-time mean-field games under the infinite-horizon risk-sensitive discounted-cost optimality criterion. Risk-sensitivity is introduced for each agent (player) via an exponential utility function. In this game model, each agent is coupled with the rest of the population through the empirical distribution of the states, which affects both the agent's individual cost and its state dynamics. Under mild assumptions, we establish the existence of a mean-field equilibrium in the infinite-population limit as the number of agents ($N$) goes to infinity, and then show that the policy obtained from the mean-field equilibrium constitutes an approximate Nash equilibrium when $N$ is sufficiently large.
Practical denoising for VFX production using temporal blur

We present a simple, efficient, and reliable approach to denoising final ray traced renders during VFX production. Rather than seeking to remove all noise, we combine several simple steps that reduce noise dramatically. Our method has performed well on a wide variety of shows in Image Engine's recent portfolio, including Game of Thrones Season 7, Lost in Space, and Thor: Ragnarok.
Robust Adaptive Tracking Control of a Class of Uncertain Multi-Mode Nonlinear Systems with Unknown Disturbances

This paper studies robust adaptive tracking control for a family of multi-mode nonlinear systems. Adaptive laws using tuning functions are proposed to address the parametric uncertainties and unknown disturbances, which can avoid the problem of over-parameterization. In addition, the variation law of the modes is developed based on the mode-dependent sojourn time scheme, which exploits the information of each subsystem, i.e., sojourn time is realized in a subsystem sense. Based on the proposed time-constraint scheme, variation signals that are less conservative than those based on sojourn time are designed. Globally uniformly ultimately bounded stability of the closed-loop multi-mode system is guaranteed. Furthermore, the steady-state performance characterized by an ultimate bound of the tracking error is presented. A numerical simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.
A Novel SDN-based Architecture and Traffic Steering Method for Service Function Chaining

Complex services composed of middleboxes are mainly used to meet the requirements of advanced services such as security services, monitoring systems, and personalized enterprise services. However, forwarding a traffic across middleboxes is a tedious and error-prone task. Service function chaining (SFC) presents different solutions to steer the traffic among intermediate service functions. However statically managing, deploying, and configuring an SFC remains a challenging task. Dynamic SFC has recently gained significant interest from big networking operators motivated by the emerging technologies of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In this paper, we present a new SDN based architecture and a novel header for traffic steering for dynamic SFC. Our results show that the header we describe in this paper does not increase the packet size nor the overhead.
Quantization effects and convergence properties of rigid formation control systems with quantized distance measurements

In this paper, we discuss quantization effects in rigid formation control systems when target formations are described by interagent distances. Because of practical sensing and measurement constraints, we consider in this paper distance measurements in their quantized forms. We show that under gradient‐based formation control, in the case of uniform quantization, the distance errors converge locally to a bounded set whose size depends on the quantization error, while in the case of logarithmic quantization, all distance errors converge locally to zero. A special quantizer involving the signum function is then considered with which all agents can only measure coarse distances in terms of binary information. In this case, the formation converges locally to a target formation within a finite time. Lastly, we discuss the effect of asymmetric uniform quantization on rigid formation control.
Efficiently sampling the realizations of bounded, irregular degree sequences of bipartite and directed graphs

Since 1997 a considerable effort has been spent on the study of the swap (switch) Markov chains on graphic degree sequences. All of these results assume some kind of regularity in the corresponding degree sequences. Recently, Greenhill and Sfragara published a breakthrough paper about irregular normal and directed degree sequences for which rapid mixing of the swap Markov chain is proved. In this paper we present two groups of results. An example from the first group is the following theorem: let d→ be a directed degree sequence on n vertices. Denote by Δ the maximum value among all in- and out-degrees and denote by |E→| the number of edges in the realization. Assume furthermore that Δ<12|E→|-4. Then the swap Markov chain on the realizations of d→ is rapidly mixing. This result is a slight improvement on one of the results of Greenhill and Sfragara. An example from the second group is the following: let d be a bipartite degree sequence on the vertex set U ⊎ V, and let 0 < c1 ≤ c2 < |U| and 0 < d1 ≤ d2 < |V| be integers, where c1 ≤ d(v) ≤ c2: ∀v ∈ V and d1 ≤ d(u) ≤ d2: ∀u ∈ U. Furthermore assume that (c2 − c1 − 1)(d2 − d1 − 1) < max{c1(|V| − d2), d1(|U| − c2)}. Then the swap Markov chain on the realizations of d is rapidly mixing. A straightforward application of this latter result shows that when a random bipartite or directed graph is generated under the Erdős—Rényi G(n, p) model with mild assumptions on n and p then the degree sequence of the generated graph has, with high probability, a rapidly mixing swap Markov chain on its realizations.
Frequency Reconfigurable Patch Antenna Using Pin Diodes with Directive and Fixed Radiation Pattern

This paper presents a frequency reconfigurable antenna, based on four PIN diodes implemented on one of each corner of a rectangular patch antenna. A combination of three switching configurations of the PIN diodes provides a current path modification, and consequently a variation on the operating frequencies. Simulated results are presented based on two approaches, the ideal case using a metal portion and the schematic case employing the equivalent circuit of the PIN diode. The proposed antenna is suitable for 5 GHz U-NII band. Results are obtained by using CST-MW simulator.
Effect of Graphene Nanoribbons (TexasPEG) on locomotor function recovery in a rat model of lumbar spinal cord transection

A sharply transected spinal cord has been shown to be fused under the accelerating influence of membrane fusogens such as polyethylene glycol (PEG) (GEMINI protocol). Previous work provided evidence that this is in fact possible. Other fusogens might improve current results. In this study, we aimed to assess the effects of PEGylated graphene nanoribons (PEG-GNR, and called “TexasPEG” when prepared as 1wt% dispersion in PEG600) versus placebo (saline) on locomotor function recovery and cellular level in a rat model of spinal cord transection at lumbar segment 1 (L1) level. In vivo and in vitro experiments (n = 10 per experiment) were designed. In the in vivo experiment, all rats were submitted to full spinal cord transection at L1 level. Five weeks later, behavioral assessment was performed using the Basso Beattie Bresnahan (BBB) locomotor rating scale. Immunohistochemical staining with neuron marker neurofilament 200 (NF200) antibody and astrocytic scar marker glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) was also performed in the injured spinal cord. In the in vitro experiment, the effects of TexasPEG application for 72 hours on the neurite outgrowth of SH-SY5Y cells were observed under the inverted microscope. Results of both in vivo and in vitro experiments suggest that TexasPEG reduces the formation of glial scars, promotes the regeneration of neurites, and thereby contributes to the recovery of locomotor function of a rat model of spinal cord transfection.
Development of High-Stability, Low-Leakage 6Tr-SRAM with Single Data Line and Single Power Supply Using SOTB Process

This paper proposes a single data line, double-word line 6Tr-SRAM for use in Internet of Things (IoT) devices using a silicon-on-thin-BOX (SOTB) process to achieve a high reliability and a low power consumption. The layout area was reduced compared to a conventional 6Tr structure by using a uniform data line. The proposed SRAM is able to generate multiple electric potentials without the need for additional power sources by employing a self-controllable voltage level (SVL) circuit, which is a simplified form of a DC/DC converter. Further, it expands the operating margin for writes and reads by decreasing the memory-cell supply voltage and increasing the memory-cell supply ground voltage in writes, and by dropping the word line potential when reading. When the variance of the threshold (Vt) was 0 (TT) and the power supply voltage (VDD) was 1.2 V, the read and write margins expanded by multiples of 2.09 and 1.31 of the conventional 6Tr SRAM, respectively. The standby power caused by a leakage when data is being saved under the same conditions was reduced to 9.17% of that of the conventional SRAM. The area overhead the SVL circuit was 1.383% of that of the conventional form.
Random regression analyses to model the longitudinal measurements of yolk proportions in the laying chicken

Cubic spline function was used in a genetic evaluation to model the change of yolk proportion over the lay life. A total of 19,862 yolk proportion records of 2,324 hens was used. The evaluated submodels consisted of 3 to 6 knot models. The same knots were fitted for genetic and permanent environmental splines. The residual effects were specified to be independently and normally distributed, but with heterogeneous variance for each test week. (Co)variance components were estimated by the average information restricted maximum likelihood (AIREML) method. The best fitting random regression model (RRM) was a submodel with 4 knots at 32, 36, 52, and 72 wk of age for genetic and permanent environmental effects. The estimate of genetic variance was larger than that of permanent environmental variance at the same time point. The heritability of yolk proportion ranged from 0.32 to 0.55, and the repeatability ranged between 0.45 and 0.73. The genetic correlations between test wk were from moderate to unity. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first report on the use of a RRM to evaluate yolk proportion. The results of this study showed that random regression models with the spline function could be used for improvement of yolk proportion.
The Financialization of Food?

&NA; Commodity‐equity return co‐movements rose dramatically during the Great Recession. This development took place following what has been dubbed the “financialization” of commodity markets. We first document changes since 1995 in the relative importance of financial institutions’ activity in agricultural futures markets. We then use a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model to ascertain the role of that activity in explaining correlations between weekly grain, livestock, and equity returns from 1995‐2015. We provide robust evidence that, accounting for shocks that are idiosyncratic to agricultural markets, world business cycle shocks have a substantial and long‐lasting impact on the latter's co‐movements with financial markets. In contrast, changes in the intensity of financial speculation have an impact on cross‐market return linkages that is shorter‐lived and not statistically significant in all model specifications.
3D content creation exploiting 2D character animation

While 3D animation is constantly increasing its popularity, 2D is still largely in use in animation production. In fact, 2D has two main advantages. The first one is economic, as it is more rapid to produce, having a dimension less to consider. The second one is important for the artists, as 2D characters usually have highly distinctive traits, which are lost in a 3D transposition. An iconic example is Mickey Mouse, whom ears appear circular no matter which way he is facing.