Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Forests Growth Monitoring Based on Tree Canopy 3D Reconstruction Using UAV Aerial Photogrammetry

Land cover monitoring is a major task for remote sensing. Compared to traditional methods of forests monitoring which mostly use orthophotography from satellites or aircraft, there is very little research on the use of 3D canopy structure to monitor forest growth. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aerial could be a novel and feasible platform to generate more timely and high resolution forest 3D canopy images. In spring, the forest is supposed to experience rapid growth. In this research, we used a small UAV to monitor campus forest growth in spring at 2-day intervals. Each time, 140 images were acquired and the ground surface dense point cloud was reconstructed at high precision. Excess Green indexes (ExG) was used to extract the green canopy points. The segmented point cloud was triangulated using the greedy projection triangulation method into a mesh and its area was calculated. Forest canopy growth was analyzed at three levels: forest level, selected group level and individual tree level. A logistic curve was used to fit the time series canopy growth. Strong correlation was found R2 = 0.8517 at forest level, R2 = 0.9652 at selected group level and R2 = 0.9606 at individual tree level. Moreover, high correlation was found between canopies. By observing these results, we can conclude that the ground 3D model can act as a useful data type to monitor forest growth. Moreover UAV aerial remote sensing has advantages when monitoring forests in periods when the ground vegetation is growing and changing fast.
Sim-to-Real Domain Adaptation For High Energy Physics

Particle physics or High Energy Physics (HEP) studies the elementary constituents of matter and their interactions with each other. Machine Learning (ML) has played an important role in HEP analysis and has proven extremely successful in this area. Usually, the ML algorithms are trained on numerical simulations of the experimental setup and then applied to the real experimental data. However, any discrepancy between the simulation and real data may lead to dramatic consequences concerning the performances of the algorithm on real data. In this paper, we present an application of domain adaptation using a Domain Adversarial Neural Network trained on public HEP data. We demonstrate the success of this approach to achieve sim-to-real transfer and ensure the consistency of the ML algorithms performances on real and simulated HEP datasets.
Development of the Permanent Dentition

In past decades, morphologic, molecular, and cellular mechanisms that govern tooth development have been extensively studied. These studies demonstrated that the same signaling pathways regulate development of the primary and successional teeth. Mutations of these pathways lead to abnormalities in tooth development and number, including aberrant tooth shape, tooth agenesis, and formation of extra teeth. Here, we summarize the current knowledge on the development of the primary and successional teeth in animal models and describe some of the common tooth abnormalities in humans.
Palatability and Defense of Eastern Newt (Notophthalmus viridescens) Larvae and Metamorphic Juveniles against Predatory Dragonfly Nymphs

Abstract We examined the predator–prey relationship between nymphs of the predatory dragonfly Anax junius (Common Green Darner) and larval and metamorphic Notophthalmus viridescens (Eastern Newt), some of which may contain the potent neurotoxin, tetrodotoxin. First, we conducted a palatability study to determine which life-history stages were palatable to dragonflies. We also tested the metamorphosis and survival rates of larval newts when exposed to predatory dragonflies in small microcosms. Finally, we tested the predator avoidance behavior of larval newts in response to chemical cues from a control, food stimulus, and predatory dragonflies. All life-history stages (small and large larvae, and recent metamorphs) were palatable to dragonflies. In microcosm trials, we found that newt larvae had a lower chance of surviving and transforming when dragonflies were present compared to a control. Finally, newt larvae decreased movement significantly when exposed to predatory dragonfly stimulus compared to either a control or food stimulus. These results suggest dragonflies are effective predators of newts from hatching through metamorphosis. However, the larvae do possess behavioral avoidance mechanisms that likely reduce the risk of predation by dragonflies.
Lizards as Predators of Butterflies: Shape of Wing Damage and Effects of Eyespots

ABSTRACT. In warm climates, lizards may be important as predators of butterflies and thus exert selection pressure on butterfly colour patterns, including eyespots. However, this has received little attention. Two studies reported no evidence that butterfly eyespots deflect lizard attacks, while possible intimidating effects of butterfly eyespots on lizards have not been investigated. We exposed common evening brown butterflies (Melanitis leda) with a wide range of eyespot sizes (dry season forms with very small and faint eyespots, intermediate phenotypes with small eyespots, and wet season forms with large or very large eyespots) to house geckos, and recorded the location and shape of wing surface loss. We supplemented these data with direct observations of attacks of house geckos (Hemidactylus frenatus) and bronze skinks (Eutropis macularia) on common evening brown butterflies. We found that about three quarters of symmetrical wing surface loss, and about half of the non-symmetrical wing surface loss was rounded like the mouth of a gecko. Symmetrical as well as non-symmetrical wing surface loss was significantly more common in hindwings. We surmise that rounded wing surface loss and a bias in symmetrical wing surface loss to hindwings can be taken as evidence for failed lizard attacks. Rounded wing surface loss was more common in butterflies with small eyespots than in those with very small eyespots or with large eyespots. This suggests that small eyespots can deflect lizard attacks away from the head towards the wing margins, and that large eyespots can thwart lizard attacks. In four cases, skinks appeared to explore rather than attack butterfly eyespots. In contrast to earlier studies, our data provide evidence that butterfly eyespots can be an effective defence against lizards, and thus that predation by lizards can select for eyespots in butterflies.
Neurone abstrait : une formalisation de l'intégration dendritique et ses propriétés algébriques. (Abstract neuron : formalizing dendritic integration and algebraic properties)

Les neurones biologiques communiquent par le biais d’impulsions electriques, appelees spikes, et les fonctions cerebrales emergent notamment de la coordination entre les receptions et emissions de ces spikes. Par ailleurs, il est largement admis que la fonction de chaque neurone depend de sa morphologie. Les dendrites conditionnent l’integration spatio-temporelle des spikes recus et influent sur les temps d’occurrence des spikes emis. Elles sont donc fondamentales pour l’etude in silico des mecanismes de coordination, et en particulier pour l’etude des assemblees de neurones. Les modeles de neurones existants prenant en compte les dendrites, sont generalement des modeles mathematiques detailles, souvent a base d’equations differentielles, dont la simulation necessite des ressources de calculs importantes. De plus, leur complexite intrinseque rend difficile l’analyse et les preuves sur ces modeles. Dans cette these, nous proposons un modele de neurone integrant des dendrites d’une maniere abstraite. Dans l’objectif d’ouvrir la porte aux methodes formelles, nous etablissons une definition rigoureuse du cadre de modelisation et mettons en evidence des proprietes algebriques remarquables de l’integration dendritique. Nous avons notamment demontre qu’il est possible de reduire la structure d’un neurone en preservant sa fonction d’entree/sortie. Nous avons ainsi revele des classes d’equivalence dont nous savons determiner un representant canonique. En s’appuyant sur la theorie des categories et par des morphismes de neurones judicieusement definis, nous avons ensuite analyse plus finement ces classes d’equivalence. Un resultat surprenant decoule de ces proprietes : un simple ajout de delais dans les modeles informatiques de neurones permet de prendre en compte une integration dendritique abstraite, sans representer explicitement la structure arborescente des dendrites. A la racine de l’arborescence dendritique, la modelisation du soma contient inevitablement une equation differentielle lorsque l’on souhaite preserver l’essence du fonctionnement biologique. Ceci impose de combiner une vision analytique avec la vision algebrique. Neanmoins, grace a une etape prealable de discretisation temporelle, nous avons egalement implemente un neurone complet en Lustre qui est un langage formel autorisant des preuves par model checking. Globalement, nous apportons dans cette these un premier pas encourageant vers une formalisation complete des neurones, avec des proprietes remarquables sur l’integration dendritique.
Efficient Code Generation for Hardware Accelerators by Refining Partially Specified Implementations. (Génération de code efficace pour accélérateurs matériels par raffinement d'implémentations partiellement spécifiées)

Compilers looking for an efficient implementation of a function must find which optimizations are the most beneficial. This is a complex problem, especially in the early steps of the compilation process. Each decision may impact the transformations available in subsequent steps. We propose to represent the compilation process as the progressive refinement of a partially specified implementation. All potential decisions are exposed upfront and commute. This allows for making the most discriminative decisions first and for building a performance model aware of which optimizations may be applied in subsequent steps. We apply this approach to the generation of efficient GPU code for linear algebra and yield performance competitive with hand-tuned libraries.
Tuning Networks for Prosocial Behavior: From Senseless Swarms to Smart Mobs [Commentary]

Social media have been seen to accelerate the spread of negative content such as disinformation and hate speech, often unleashing a reckless herd mentality within networks, further aggravated by malicious entities using bots for amplification. So far, the response to this emerging global crisis has centered around social media platform companies making reactive moves that appear to have greater symbolic value than practical utility. Proposes a solution to favor prosocial behavior via social networks.
E-squads: A novel paradigm to build privacy-preserving ubiquitous applications. (Les e-squads : Un nouveau paradigme pour la conception d'applications ubiquitaires respectant le droit à la vie privée)

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has proved to be dangerous for the people's right to privacy: more and more connected appliances are sharing personal data about people's daily lives to private parties beyond their control. Still, we believe that the IoT could just as well become a guardian of our privacy, would it escape the centralised cloud model. In this thesis, we explore a novel concept, the e-squad: to make one's connected devices collaborate through gossip communication to build new privacy-preserving services. We show how an e-squad can privately build knowledge about their user and leverage this information to create predictive applications. We demonstrate that collaboration helps to overcome the end-devices' poor availability and performance. Finally, we federate e-squads to build a robust anonymous file exchange service, proving their potential beyond the single-user scenario. We hope this manuscript inspires the advent of more humane and delightful technology.
Research and Implementation of Road Traffic Sign IdentiFIcation System

It is helpful to enhance traffic safety by driving information which is provided by the roadside traffic signs. However, as the traffic sign information cannot be seen immediately while driving, drivers always ignore a lot of important driving information. To solve this problem, an automatic traffic sign identification system which took road as an example was proposed. The system has been developed with image recognition technology and can provide the identification result of related driving information to drivers. The system proposed in this study was divided into two parts. Firstly, through the brightness of the image, the possible traffic sign image and its position could be quickly detected with the classifier trained by Haar Cascade in Haar-like with AdaBoost method. Secondly, the detected images could be classified by the convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier designed with GoogLeNet Network Architecture in TensorFlow library and Python program language. To speed up the recognition process and the correctness of recognition result, a method was proposed in this study to avoid analyzing those areas without traffic signs. In the method, the collected road videos were divided into 12 regions to find out the non-traffic sign areas. After carrying out this method, the recognition speed has been improved 11.24 frame/sec from to 12.04 frame/sec. Besides, the precision of the system can be improved from 80.97
Matrix decompositions and algorithmic applications to (hyper)graphs. (Décomposition de matrices et applications algorithmiques aux (hyper)graphes)

In the last decades, considerable efforts have been spent to characterize what makes NP-hard problems tractable. A successful approach in this line of research is the theory of parameterized complexity introduced by Downey and Fellows in the nineties.In this framework, the complexity of a problem is not measured only in terms of the input size, but also in terms of a parameter on the input.One of the most well-studied parameters is tree-width, a graph parameter which measures how close a graph is to the topological structure of a tree.It appears that tree-width has numerous structural properties and algorithmic applications.However, only sparse graph classes can have bounded tree-width.But, many NP-hard problems are tractable on dense graph classes.Most of the time, this tractability can be explained by the ability of these graphs to be recursively decomposable along vertex bipartitions $(A,B)$ where the adjacency between $A$ and $B$ is simple to describe.A lot of graph parameters -- called width measures -- have been defined to characterize this ability, the most remarkable ones are certainly clique-width, rank-width, and mim-width.In this thesis, we study the algorithmic properties of these width measures.We provide a framework that generalizes and simplifies the tools developed for tree-width and for problems with a constraint of acyclicity or connectivity such as Connected Vertex Cover, Connected Dominating Set, Feedback Vertex Set, etc.For all these problems, we obtain $2^{O(k)}\cdot n^{O(1)}$, $2^{O(k \log(k))}\cdot n^{O(1)}$, $2^{O(k^2)}\cdot n^{O(1)}$ and $n^{O(k)}$ time algorithms parameterized respectively by clique-width, Q-rank-width, rank-width and mim-width.We also prove that there exists an algorithm solving Hamiltonian Cycle in time $n^{O(k)}$, when a clique-width decomposition of width $k$ is given.Finally, we prove that we can count in polynomial time the minimal transversals of $\beta$-acyclic hypergraphs and the minimal dominating sets of strongly chordal graphs.All these results offer promising perspectives towards a generalization of width measures and their algorithmic applications.
Why whales are big but not bigger: Physiological drivers and ecological limits in the age of ocean giants

It's the prey that matters Although many people think of dinosaurs as being the largest creatures to have lived on Earth, the true largest known animal is still here today—the blue whale. How whales were able to become so large has long been of interest. Goldbogen et al. used field-collected data on feeding and diving events across different types of whales to calculate rates of energy gain (see the Perspective by Williams). They found that increased body size facilitates increased prey capture. Furthermore, body-size increase in the marine environment appears to be limited only by prey availability. Science, this issue p. 1367; see also p. 1316 Gigantism in whales is both driven and limited by prey capture and availability. The largest animals are marine filter feeders, but the underlying mechanism of their large size remains unexplained. We measured feeding performance and prey quality to demonstrate how whale gigantism is driven by the interplay of prey abundance and harvesting mechanisms that increase prey capture rates and energy intake. The foraging efficiency of toothed whales that feed on single prey is constrained by the abundance of large prey, whereas filter-feeding baleen whales seasonally exploit vast swarms of small prey at high efficiencies. Given temporally and spatially aggregated prey, filter feeding provides an evolutionary pathway to extremes in body size that are not available to lineages that must feed on one prey at a time. Maximum size in filter feeders is likely constrained by prey availability across space and time.
The biology of big

Whales became the world's largest animals thanks to giant gulps of “bite-size” prey With so many recent scientific advances focused on the mini, micro, nano, and molecular scales, there is a tendency to overlook the titanic biology of giants that share the Earth. The sheer magnitude of a scientific undertaking to study an oceanic, 25-m-long, 95,000-kg wild blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus)—the largest vertebrate in the animal kingdom—has long left researchers with little more than brief glimpses of their presence when the leviathan surfaces to breathe. On page 1367 of this issue, Goldbogen et al. (1) describe how they took advantage of developments in microprocessor technology to design submersible wildlife tags. The authors used the new tools to measure the feeding performance and prey choices of the largest mammals in the seas. These data revealed the ecological and evolutionary factors that drive the biology of being, not just big, but the biggest ever—perhaps the biggest possible.
NON- DETRIMENT FINDINGS CONSULTATION IN TERMS OF SECTION 62(3) OF THE NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT:

Barbara Dallas Creecy, Minister of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries, hereby, under section 62A of the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act, 2004 (Act No. 10 of 2004), give notice of my intention to repeal non -detriment findings for Ceratotherium simum simum (white rhinoceros) made by the Scientific Authority, published under Government Notice No. 575 in the Government Gazette No. 40021 of 27 May 2016; and, under section 62(3) of the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act, 2004 ( Act No.10 of 2004), give notice of my intention to publish non -detriment findings for Ceratotherium simum simum (white rhinoceros) made by the Scientific Authority in the Schedule hereto.
Biochemical Mechanisms and Cross Resistance Patterns of Chlorpyrifos Resistance in a Laboratory-Selected Strain of Diamondback Moth, Plutella xylostella (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae)

Diamondback moth (Plutella xylostella) is a serious pest of cruciferous vegetables worldwide. In Iran, it is commonly controlled by using chlorpyrifos. Due to a range of biochemical and behavioral features, this pest can rapidly develop resistance to many insecticides from different groups. To achieve a better resistance management plan, a chlorpyrifos resistant strain of P. xylostella was selected under laboratory conditions and its cross resistance to five other insecticides and resistance characteristics were investigated. After 15 generations of selection, the selected strain (CLRS) developed 39.61-fold higher resistance to chlorpyrifos in comparison with susceptible strain (AL). CLRS exhibited 19.62-, 17.84-, 3.43and 3.33-fold cross resistance to hexaflumuron, indoxacarb, thiodicarb and flubendiamide, respectively, but showed no cross resistance to abamectin. Synergism and biochemical studies suggested potential involvement of Esterase (EST) in CLRS. However, no difference was seen for Glutahion-S-Transferase (GSTs) and Mixed Function Oxidase (MFO) in CLRS and AL strains. To determine the role of AcetylCholinEsterase (AChE) insensitivity in resistance mechanism, Kinetic parameters (Km and Vmax) and inhibitory effect of chlorpyrifos-oxon on this enzyme were evaluated. Affinities and hydrolyzing efficiencies of AChE in CLRS were higher than AL. This enzyme in CLRS was also less sensitive to inhibition by chlorpyrifos-oxon. Results indicated that chlorpyrifos resistance exhibited cross resistance to other insecticides from different classes and enhanced EST activity and AChE insensitivity were probably the main factors in chlorpyrifos resistance. These results can help the users of insecticides and can delay the resistance development of P. xylostella.
Effect of Intravenous Aminocaproid Acid on Blood Loss and Transfusion Requirements After Bilateral Varus Rotational Osteotomy: A Double-blind, Placebo-controlled Randomized Trial

Background: ε-Aminocaproic acid (EACA) is an antifibrinolytic agent that has been shown to decrease blood loss and transfusion requirements in several populations undergoing various surgical procedures. However, the efficacy of EACA has not been assessed in pediatric patients with cerebral palsy undergoing bilateral varus rotational femoral osteotomies. The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of intravenous EACA in reducing calculated intraoperative blood loss and transfusions in this population. Methods: Patients aged 18 years or younger were eligible. Patients were randomized to receive EACA or placebo (saline), and randomization was stratified based on sex and whether or not additional soft tissue or osseous procedures were performed. On the basis of retrospective data, the calculated sample size was 12 patients per arm to detect a difference of 250-mL blood loss. The primary outcome was calculated intraoperative blood loss. Secondary outcomes included transfusion requirements, 24-hour drain output, length of stay, and incidence of complications. Results: The mean age of patients in this study was 8 years (SD: 2.4 y). There were no differences in age, sex, height, weight, type of anesthesia, operative time, and associated procedures between the EACA and placebo groups (P>0.05). Preoperative hematocrit was lower in the EACA group (37.1 vs. 40.0, P=0.04). Calculated intraoperative blood loss was 536 mL in the EACA group and 628 mL in the placebo group (P=0.45). Transfusions were required in 62% of patients in the EACA group and 67% of patients in the placebo group (P=0.68). Total 24-hour drain output was 72.5 mL in the EACA group and 103.3 mL in the placebo group (P=0.37). Length of stay was similar between both groups, and there were no drug or placebo-related complications in either group. Conclusions: There was no difference in blood loss or transfusion requirements associated with EACA compared with placebo; however, this study is underpowered to detect smaller differences in blood loss. Additional studies with larger sample sizes are needed to confirm these findings and further elucidate the indications for antifibrinolytic agents in pediatric patients. Level of Evidence Level I.