Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simple method for calibrating omnidirectional stereo with multiple cameras

Cameras can give useful information for the autonomous navigation of a mobile robot. Typically, one or two cameras are used for this task. Recently, an omnidirectional stereo vision system that can cover the whole surrounding environment of a mobile robot is adopted. They usually adopt a mirror that cannot offer uniform spatial resolution. In this paper, we deal with an omnidirectional stereo system which consists of eight cameras where each two vertical cameras constitute one stereo system. Camera calibration is the first necessary step to obtain 3D information. Calibration using a planar pattern requires many images acquired under different poses so it is a tedious step to calibrate all eight cameras. In this paper, we present a simple calibration procedure using a cubic-type calibration structure that surrounds the omnidirectional stereo system. We can calibrate all the cameras on an omnidirectional stereo system in just one shot.
Maximum likelihood beamforming in the presence of outliers

The problem of maximum likelihood beamforming in the presence of outliers is considered. In practice, outliers occur due to malfunctioning of sensors or as a consequence of strong impulsive noise. The performance of beamformers based on maximum likelihood or minimum mean square error type criteria is seriously degraded by outliers. One solution to combat this would be to optimally detect the failed sensors and the presence of impulses. The complexity of this direct solution increases exponentially with the number of array sensors and time samples. The authors propose an alternative method that models outliers as impulsive noise and detects impulses by using the residue of l/sub 1/ beamformer. This technique is developed, and its efficiency is discussed. <<ETX>>
Modelling and Analysis of a Sigfox-Based IoT Network Using uppaalsmc

Wireless sensor nodes are usually powered by batteries that have limited energy capacity. In many applications, the nodes are installed in inaccessible locations where they are problematic to replace or recharge. Therefore, energy optimization is crucial for increasing the node’s lifetime. This study presents a method for the analysis and prediction of the energy consumption of Sigfox-based wireless sensor nodes. The method is illustrated in a use case where the nodes monitor the water level in drainage lines in cities to improve surface and wastewater management. We propose a formal model-based technique using the UPPAAL statistical model checker tool to model and analyze the node’s lifetime. Statistical model checking (SMC) provides a highly scalable technique for the performance analysis of complex cyber-physical systems. The model captures the energy-related behavior of the node, the Sigfox radio specification, and the sensor, each parameterized with values from the device’s datasheets. Furthermore, we calibrate the model using measurements obtained from real-world hardware. Finally, we evaluate a collection of strategies to optimize the battery lifetime of the node. We simulate the model with a 10000-mAh battery, and the results indicate that we can extend the node’s lifetime from 202 days to 2.71 years using our most optimized transmission strategy.
In Vitro Effect of Enzymes and Human Milk Oligosaccharides on FODMAP Digestion and Fecal Microbiota Composition

Fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols (FODMAPs) cause intestinal discomfort in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). An enzyme mix (2500 SU invertase, 2400 GalU α-galactosidase, 10,000 ALU β-galactosidase) optimized for FODMAP digestion, and/or human milk oligosaccharides (HMO) (2′-FL, DFL, and LNnT), were evaluated for effects on microbial community activity and composition in short-term colonic incubations using the fecal microbiota of four patients with IBS-D symptoms under the following test conditions: (i) FODMAP, (ii) pre-digested (with enzyme mix) FODMAP, (iii) FODMAP + HMO, and (iv) pre-digested FODMAP + HMO. Pre-digested FODMAP reduced short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) production versus FODMAP; HMO restored this. A 10-day experiment with the simulator of the human intestinal microbial ecosystem (SHIME®), using fecal samples from two patients with IBS-D, further evaluated these findings. FODMAP resulted in decreased microbial diversity versus blank. Pre-digestion with the enzyme mix restored microbial diversity, improved FODMAP digestibility, and reduced gas pressure versus undigested FODMAP; however, SCFA production decreased. HMO restored SCFA production along with an increase in gas pressure and increased abundance of Lachnospiraceae. When used in combination, the FODMAP enzyme mix and HMO may resolve FODMAP-related IBS symptoms while maintaining a healthy gut microbiome via prebiotic activity.
Thermally activated below-band-gap excitation behind green photoluminescence in ZnO

We explore the temperature dependence of the photoluminescence (PL) and photoluminescence excitation characteristics of the green emission band in undoped ZnO crystals. We find that there exists a thermally assisted luminescence channel, which tends to dominate over the existing luminescence channel especially under below-band-gap excitation. Shallow donor electrons are likely to contribute to the thermally assisted luminescence process by being thermally excited from the donor levels to the conduction band. We hence suggest that the shallow donor centers, which are presumably attributed to zinc interstitials and will not act as emitting centers by themselves, are indirectly responsible for the green PL emission. The most probable candidate of the emitting center is the neutral oxygen vacancy, showing the green emission either via a direct internal emission process or an indirect thermally assisted emission process in combination with shallow donor centers.
Metalloproteinase-9 in the ocular surface of patients with implanted Boston type 1 keratoprosthesis.

PURPOSE To characterize the presence of ocular surface inflammation, using matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9) as a marker, in the ocular surface of eyes with implanted Boston Keratoprosthesis type 1 (KPro). METHODS Patients with implanted KPro at a single tertiary center were recruited to assess ocular inflammation. MMP-9 was measured using InflammaDry® test in both eyes of each patient. The non-KPro eye served as control. Rate of positivity of MMP-9 was compared between groups. Possible associations between ocular surface inflammation and the development of postoperative complications were evaluated using univariate statistical analysis. RESULTS Fifty eyes from 25 patients were included. The mean age was 50 years old. Non-inflammatory indications for KPro were predominant among patients. Eighty eight percent of KPro eyes had a positive test for MMP-9 while only 25% of control eyes were positive (p<001). The most common complications were retroprosthetic membrane, epithelial defects, and sterile corneal melt. The presence of a strong positive result was associated to a higher frequency of complications (80% of eyes) compared to a faint positive test (54%) and a negative test (33%). CONCLUSION The KPro device appears to increase MMP-9 levels in the ocular surface. High MMP-9 levels may be associated with higher risk of complications. MMP-9 testing can be useful to assess subclinical ocular surface inflammation with a potential role in the postoperative care of KPro patients.
Calibrating probabilistic forecasts from an NWP ensemble

A post-processing method for calibrating probabilistic forecasts of continuous weather variables is presented. The method takes an existing probability distribution and adjusts it such that it becomes calibrated in the long run. The original probability distributions can be ones such as are generated from a numerical weather prediction (NWP) ensemble combined with a description of how uncertainty is represented by this ensemble. The method uses a calibration function to relabel raw cumulative probabilities into calibrated cumulative probabilities based on where past observations verified on past raw probability forecasts. Applying the calibration method to existing probabilistic forecasts can be beneficial in cases where the underlying assumptions used to construct the probabilistic forecast are not in line with nature’s generating process of the ensemble and corresponding observation. The method was tested on a forecast data set with five different forecast variables and was verified against the corresponding analyses. The calibration method reduced the calibration deficiency of the forecasts down to the level expected for perfectly calibrated forecasts. When the raw forecasts exhibited calibration deficiencies, the calibration method improved the ignorance score significantly. It was also found that the ensemble-uncertainty model used to create the original probability distribution affected the ignorance score.
Acupuncture for Women with Overactive Bladder: Perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Related Mechanism

Purpose Overactive bladder (OAB) syndrome is one of the most common diseases in urology and affects quality of life. Although the current treatment for OAB is based on oral medications, there are limitations and many patients have difficulty accepting drug-induced adverse effects. This review aimed to analyze the efficacy of acupuncture and its related mechanisms and provide a preliminary therapeutic regimen. Methods Two authors independently searched PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library up to April 2022. They searched related English literature and extracted the data under a standard form based on the search strategy. Clinical trials which included OAB women with the treatment of acupuncture were included. Common acupuncture alone without other pharmacotherapy, external treatments was in the treatment group. The control interventions may include any active treatments, sham placebo, or no establishment of a control group. Outcomes included 3-day or 24-hour voiding diary, overactive bladder symptom score, etc. The Cochrane risk of bias tool was also used to assess the methodological quality of the randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Results We analyzed five RCTs and one comparative study on acupuncture for OAB to review and discuss the acupoint location, treatment course, and retention time based on clinical evidence and treatment ideas in traditional Chinese medicine. Additionally, we used the available evidence to reveal and discuss the acupuncture mechanisms for OAB. Acupuncture may regulate bladder function by inhibiting C-fibers, modulating nerve growth factors and reducing spontaneous contractions of the detrusor muscle. Conclusion Combined with the available evidence, the combination of local acupoints and distal acupoints should be necessary to consider, especially the lumbosacral acupoints, the small abdomen acupoints and the lower limb acupoints. Among them, acupuncture at SP4, CV4 and KI3 are strongly recommended. The treatment course of acupuncture should be no less than 4 weeks and maintain the frequency of acupuncture no less than once a week. The duration of each session should be no less than 20 minutes. In addition, investigations remain necessary to verify acupuncture’s efficacy and precise mechanism for OAB treatment in further exploration.
Systematic Design Method for Mutual Coupling Reduction in Closely Spaced Patch Antennas

In this article, a systematic design approach is presented to reduce the mutual coupling between a pair of closely spaced microstrip patch antennas (MPAs). This method can effectively overcome the main drawback of previous two-path cancellation methods, i.e., lack a systematic design guideline and heavily rely on the time-expensive trial-and-error procedure to mitigate mutual coupling in a best-effort manner. To this end, we first propose the concept and workflow of the systematic design method, and introduce the circuit-level modeling upon the proposed two coupling routes. Then, prototyped on a practical and simple physical structure, we perform certain accurate extractions and derive the rigorous conditions for both of isolation between two patches and impedance matching of a single patch based on these two paths. Afterwards, according to the circuit-level discussion on lumped elements, the corresponding decoupling structure could be implemented substantially and designed quantitatively at the antenna level for particularized closely spaced MPAs. Finally, a prototype is simulated, fabricated, and measured to validate the proposed method. The results show that the circuit-model calculation, full-wave simulation, and measurement are in good agreement. By virtue of such a simple decoupling structure, the poor 7-dB isolation is dramatically improved to 58 dB, and the isolation is enhanced beyond 20 dB in the entire impedance matching bandwidth range of 4.38 ~ 4.60 GHz (4.9%), with the closely center-to-center spacing of $0.37~{\lambda }_{0}$ .
A Hybrid Pairwise Likelihood Method

A modification to the pairwise likelihood method is proposed, which aims to improve the estimation of the marginal distribution parameters. This is achieved by replacing the pairwise likelihood score equations, for estimating such parameters, by the optimal linear combinations of the marginal score functions. A further advantage of the proposed estimator of marginal parameters, over pairwise likelihood, is that it is robust to misspecification of the bivariate distributions as long as the univariate marginal distributions are correctly specified. While alternating logistic regression can be seen as a special case of the proposed method, it is shown that an existing generalization of alternating logistic regression applicable to ordinal data is not the same as and is inferior to the proposed method because it replaces certain conditional densities by pseudodensities that assume working independence. The fitting of the multivariate negative binomial distribution is another scenario involving intractable likelihood that calls for the use of pairwise likelihood methods, and the superiority of the modified method is demonstrated in a simulation study. Two examples, based on the analyses of salamander mating and patient-controlled analgesia data, demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method. The possibility of combining optimally the pairwise, rather than marginal, scores is also considered and its difficulty and potential are discussed. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.
Traveling‐Wave Harmonic Generation Along Nonlinear Transmission Lines

A perturbation solution is developed for determining the steady‐state response of nonlinear TEM transmission lines and nonlinear cylindrical waveguides of arbitrary cross section. The nonlinear medium which is considered in this analysis is comprised of both nonlinear reactance and nonlinear resistance; and can be physically realized in the ferroelectric ceramic material composed of 73% BaTiO3 and 27% SrTiO3. From the results of the perturbation analysis and the known large signal microwave characteristics of this material, the properties of traveling‐wave harmonic generation in ferroelectric ceramics are investigated. To assess the characteristics of ferroelectric traveling‐wave harmonic generators, an example is worked out for an S‐band rectangular waveguide completely filled with the above mentioned ceramic and excited in the TE10 mode at the fundamental frequency of 3 kMc. The predicted behavior of this device is then compared with the experimental characteristics of a cavity‐type ferroelectric harmon.
Repair of Articular Cartilage Full Thickness Defects with Cultured Chondrocytes Placed on Polysulphonic Membrane - Experimental Studies in Rabbits

Autologous osteochondral transplantation is one of the methods that can be used to create hyaline or hyaline – like repair in the defect area. The purpose of the present study was to repair the full – thickness articular cartilage defects in nine rabbits’ knee joints with autologous cultured chondrocytes. An articular cartilage defect was created on the patellar groove of the femur. The defect was filled with the chondrocytes cultured in vitro and placed into the knee on a polysulphonic membrane. 8 weeks after the operation the reparative tissue was analyzed macroscopically and histologically. The surfaces of the reparative tissue were smooth, and the defects were filled with mature hyaline cartilage in five cases. In two cases the reparative hyaline cartilage was immature and there was worse integration of the grafted tissue into the adjacent normal cartilage. The surface of the grafted area was irregular, the reparative tissue was desintegrated and incompletely differentiated. The results suggest that transplantation of the autologous chondrocytes cultured in vitro and placed into the knee on the polysulphonic membrane is effective in repairing of the articular cartilage defect.
Simulation of edge-localized modes in a spherical tokamak: effects of ion diamagnetic drift

This paper presents the numerical modeling of nonlinear magnetohydro- dynamic (MHD) instabilities containing the effects of finite Larmor radius (FLR) in spherical tokamak geometry. Our results contain the comparison of small, intermediate, and large effects of the FLR. For small values, the linear and nonlinear behavior is not greatly modified, but with intermediate and large FLR, stabilizing effects on the higher wave number components are observed in the linear phase but in the nonlinear phase the overall properties are dominated by MHD effects. Similar filamentary structures are reproduced as found in some of the experimental observations as a result of the development of ballooning modes. The formation and the properties of filamentary type structures during edge-localized modes are also discussed.
Sound Speed Estimation for Distributed Aberration Correction in Laterally Varying Media

Spatial variation in sound speed causes aberration in medical ultrasound imaging. Although our previous work has examined aberration correction in the presence of a spatially varying sound speed, practical implementations were limited to layered media due to the sound speed estimation process involved. Unfortunately, most models of layered media do not capture the lateral variations in sound speed that have the greatest aberrative effect on the image. Building upon a Fourier split-step migration technique from geophysics, this work introduces an iterative sound speed estimation and distributed aberration correction technique that can model and correct for aberrations resulting from laterally varying media. We first characterize our approach in simulations where the scattering in the media is known a-priori. Phantom and in-vivo experiments further demonstrate the capabilities of the iterative correction technique. As a result of the iterative correction scheme, point target resolution improves by up to a factor of 4 and lesion contrast improves by up to 10.0 dB in the phantom experiments presented.
Multi‐objective routing algorithms for low‐earth orbit satellite network

The low‐earth orbit (LEO) satellite network, composed of a large number of satellite nodes, is a hot research topic at present. Due to the characteristics of the large‐scale LEO satellite network, such as many satellite nodes, short orbit period, large dynamic change of topology, and unstable link‐state, its communication quality of service (QoS) requirements are difficult to meet. Aiming at this problem, various factors that may affect data transmission are first analyzed. The network link selection problem is modeled as a multi‐constraint optimization decision problem, a routing mathematical model based on linear programming (LP) is designed, and its solution is solved. Aiming at the problem of limited onboard computing resources, a multi‐object optimization Dijkstra algorithm (MOODA) is designed. The MOODA finds the optimal path according to the comprehensive performance of the link. It solves the problems of poor comprehensive QoS performance and the low degree of load balancing of the paths found by the Dijkstra algorithm. The simulation results show that the paths found by the two algorithms have good QoS, robustness, and load balancing performance.
How effective are TikTok misinformation debunking videos?

TikTok provides opportunity for citizen-led debunking where users correct other users’ misinformation. In the present study (N=1,169), participants either watched and rated the credibility of (1) a misinformation video, (2) a correction video, or (3) a misinformation video followed by a correction video (“debunking”). Afterwards, participants rated both a factual and a misinformation video about the same topic and judged the accuracy of the claim furthered by the misinformation video. We found modest evidence for the effectiveness of debunking on people’s ability to subsequently discern between true and false videos, but stronger evidence on subsequent belief in the false claim itself.
Numerical simulations of extreme precipitation in eastern China under A1B scenario

The regional climate model(RegCM3) developed by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics(ICTP) nested in one-way mode within the latest version of Community Climate System Model(CCSM3) from the National Center for Atmospheric Research(NCAR) is used to conduct a set of experiments to examine its capability of climate simulation for the past 50 years and to explore possible changes in extreme precipitation(EP) the next 100 years under the A1B scenario.Compared with the observation from the Climate Research Unit(CRU) at the University of East Anglia and CPC Merged Analysis of Precipitation(CMAP),RegCM3 reasonably reproduces the spatiotemporal distributions of precipitation and EP in eastern China.Based on the present-day analysis,this study examines the changes in monsoonal precipitation over eastern China in mid-and-late 21st century relative to the reference period of 1970—1999.It is found that the precipitation will increase over the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze river and areas to its north,and decrease over coastal areas to its south,especially in late-21st century.The various indices reflecting extreme events showed that the EP will enhance 10%～15% over the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and areas to its north,and weaken over the areas to its south.The summer monsoon will strengthen and shift northwards e under SERS A1B,bringing more water vapor and energy from the Indian Ocean and South China Sea for precipitation and eventually more precipitation over northern China.
Reconstruction and featurization of local region based on CAD surface models

To solve the edit modification problem of local region in CAD surface models,a reconstruction and featurization method of local region based on CAD surface models was proposed.The characteristic curves was taken as basic elements to reconstruct the shape of surface feature with certain precision and to achieve the featurization of local region with configuring high-level parameters.A-local region was selected from the existing surface model,and the selected local region was reconstructed by a suitable surface generation method from the obtained characteristic curves.The shape similarity was analyzed between the reconstructed surface and the source surface,and the reconstructed surface was parameterized based on the characteristic curves.Experimental results showed that the proposed method could quickly achieve the featurization of local region and support users to intuitively edit and modify freeform feature with a few high-level parameters.It was an effective method for reconstruction and featurization of local region in surface models.