Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ViSE: Vision-Based 3D Real-Time Shape Estimation of Continuously Deformable Robots

—The precise control of soft and continuum robots requires knowledge of their shape. The shape of these robots has, in contrast to classical rigid robots, inﬁnite degrees of freedom. To partially reconstruct the shape, proprioceptive techniques use built-in sensors resulting in inaccurate results and increased fabrication complexity. Exteroceptive methods so far rely on placing reﬂective markers on all tracked components and triangulating their position using multiple motion-tracking cameras. Tracking systems are expensive and infeasible for deformable robots interacting with the environment due to marker occlusion and damage. Here, we present a regression approach for 3D shape estimation using a convolutional neural network. The proposed approach takes advantage of data-driven supervised learning and is capable of real-time marker-less shape estimation during inference. Two images of a robotic system are taken simultaneously at 25 Hz from two different perspectives, and are fed to the network, which returns for each pair the parameterized shape. The proposed approach out-performs marker-less state-of-the-art methods by a maximum of 4.4% in estimation accuracy while at the same time being more robust and requiring no prior knowledge of the shape. The approach can be easily implemented due to only requiring two color cameras without depth and not needing an explicit calibration of the extrinsic parameters. Evaluations on two types of soft robotic arms and a soft robotic ﬁsh demonstrate our method’s accuracy and versatility on highly deformable systems in real-time. The robust performance of the approach against different scene modiﬁcations (camera alignment and brightness) suggests its generalizability to a wider range of experimental setups, which will beneﬁt downstream tasks such as robotic grasping and manipulation. †
Exogenous cueing of visual attention using small, directional, tactile cues applied to the fingertip*

The deployment of visual spatial attention can be significantly influenced in an exogenous, presumably bottom-up manner. Traditionally, spatial cueing paradigms have been utilized to come to such conclusions. Although these paradigms have primarily made use of visual cues, spatially correspondent tactile cues have also been successfully employed. However, one property of tactile cues not thoroughly explored in this context is the influence of their specific directionality on the subsequent deployment of visual attention. Thus, the current study sought to evaluate the potential utility of small, directional tactile cues as a means to exogenously direct visual spatial attention. Tactile cues were employed by a small shearing of the fingertip’s skin in either the leftward of rightward direction. A modified spatial cueing paradigm was used to compare reaction time performance across both traditional-visual and directionaltactile cues at cue-target onset asynchronies of 100, 200, 400 and 800 ms. The results indicated that both visual and tactile cues mediated the deployment of exogenous visual spatial attention. However, differences between the two modalities were observed in terms of both the magnitude and the pattern of the associated cueing effects. Further, there appeared to be a general rightward bias in performance irrespective of cue modality. Overall, the current work offers preliminary evidence that small, directional tactile stimulation may influence the allocation of attention across space in a manner at least partially distinct to traditional visual cueing tasks. Yet, further research will be required to explicitly determine the underlying mechanisms.
Organizational trust in a networked world: Analysis of the interplay between social factors and Information and Communication Technology

Purpose – Trust is a social factor at the foundations of human action. The pervasiveness of trust explains why it has been studied by a large variety of disciplines, and its complexity justifies the difficulties in reaching a shared understanding and definition. As for all the social factors, trust is continuously evolving as a result of the changes in social, economic and technological conditions. The internet and many other Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions have changed organizational and social life. Such mutated scenarios challenged what researchers know about trust, thus several studies tried to investigate the difference between online and traditional (physical) environments. The purpose of this paper is to solve this multi‐dimensional puzzle by presenting a conceptual framework that will take into consideration the complexity of ICT mediated‐trust.Design/methodology/approach – The extant literature still lacks a homogeneous framework and presents a large amount of different.
Stacked Semantics-Guided Attention Model for Fine-Grained Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) is generally achieved via aligning the semantic relationships between the visual features and the corresponding class semantic descriptions. However, using the global features to represent fine-grained images may lead to sub-optimal results since they neglect the discriminative differences of local regions. Besides, different regions contain distinct discriminative information. The important regions should contribute more to the prediction. To this end, we propose a novel stacked semantics-guided attention (S2GA) model to obtain semantic relevant features by using individual class semantic features to progressively guide the visual features to generate an attention map for weighting the importance of different local regions. Feeding both the integrated visual features and the class semantic features into a multi-class classification architecture, the proposed framework can be trained end-to-end. Extensive experimental results on CUB and NABird datasets show that the proposed approach has a consistent improvement on both fine-grained zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks.
Near-vertical-incidence seismic reflections from the “Conrad” discontinuity

Seismological experiments at a location near Lomond in southern Alberta yielded consistently good reflection quality as the shot-to-detector distance was increased from 1.5 to 15 km. A tapered array of sixteen 7½-cps seismometers and multiple holes were used. From a T2 versus X2 analysis the average velocity from the Mississippian formation ( at a depth of 1.7 km) to a strong reflector was found to be 6.37 km/sec. The depth to the reflector was 34 km. This is within 1 km of the depth to a discontinuity obtained on a reversed refraction profile. There is little indication of coherent arrivals between the near-surface layers and the reflector at 11.4 sec, and we are confident that this is a true reflector and not a multiple from some shallower horizon. Traces for the horizontal geophones on some of the records indicate near-normal incidence for the event. There are some weaker reflections at times of up to 15 sec, but more analyses will be necessary in order to determine whether these are primary events.
Do I Really Want to Know? A Cognitive Dissonance-Based Explanation of Other-Regarding Behavior

We investigate to what extent genuine social preferences can explain observed other-regarding behavior. In a dictator game variant subjects can choose whether to learn about the consequences of their choice for the receiver. We find that a majority of subjects showing other-regarding behavior when the payoffs of the receiver are known, choose to ignore these consequences if possible. This behavior is inconsistent with preferences about outcomes. Other-regarding behavior may also be explained by avoiding cognitive dissonance as in Konow (2000). Our experiment's choice data is in line with this approach. In addition, we successfully relate individual behavior to proxies for cognitive dissonance.
Partially-Observed Decoupled Data-based Control (POD2C) for Complex Robotic Systems

—This paper develops a systematic data-based approach to the closed-loop feedback control of high-dimensional robotic systems using only partial state observation. We ﬁrst develop a model-free generalization of the iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator (iLQR) to partially-observed systems us-ing an Autoregressive–moving-average (ARMA) model, that is generated using only the input-output data. The ARMA model results in an information state , which has dimension less than or equal to the underlying actual state dimension. This open-loop trajectory optimization solution is then used to design a local feedback control law, and the composite law then provides a solution to the partially observed feedback design problem. The efﬁcacy of the developed method is shown by controlling complex high dimensional nonlinear robotic systems in the presence of model and sensing uncertainty and for which analytical models are either unavailable or inaccurate.
The Cretaceous-Tertiary biotic transition

Mass extinctions are recognized through the study of fossil groups across event horizons, and from analyses of long-term trends in taxonomic richness and diversity. Both approaches have inherent flaws, and data that once seemed reliable can be readily superseded by the discovery of new fossils and/or the application of new analytical techniques. Herein the current state of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) biostratigraphical record is reviewed for most major fossil clades, including: calcareous nannoplankton, dinoflagellates, diatoms, radiolaria, foraminifera, ostracodes, scleractinian corals, bryozoans, brachio-pods, molluscs, echinoderms, fish, amphibians, reptiles and terrestrial plants (macrofossils and palynomorphs). These reviews take account of possible biasing factors in the fossil record in order to extract the most comprehensive picture of the K-T biotic crisis available. Results suggest that many faunal and floral groups (ostracodes, bryozoa, ammonite cephalopods, bivalves, archosaurs) were in decline throughout the latest Maastrichtian while others (diatoms, radiolaria, benthic foraminifera, brachiopods, gastropods, fish, amphibians, lepidosaurs, terrestrial plants) passed through the K-T event horizon with only minor taxonomic richness and/or diversity changes. A few microfossil groups (calcareous nannoplankton, dinoflagellates, planktonic foraminifera) did experience a turnover of varying magnitudes in the latest Maastrichtian-earliest Danian. However, many of these turnovers, along with changes in ecological dominance patterns among benthic foraminifera, began in the latest Maastrichtian. Improved taxonomic estimates of the overall pattern and magnitude of the K-T extinction event must await the development of more reliable systematic and phylogenetic data for all Upper Cretaceous clades.
Theory and measurement of bidirectional reflectance for signature analysis

The application of advanced low observable treatments to ground vehicles has led to a requirement for a better understanding of effects of light scattering from surfaces. Measurements of the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) fully describe the angular scattering properties of materials, and these may be used in signature simulations to quantitatively characterize the optical effects of surface treatments on targets. This paper reviews the theoretical and experimental techniques for characterizing the BRDF of surfaces and examines some of the popular parameterized BRDF representations that are used in signature calculations.
Modelling and Forecasting Noisy Realized Volatility

Several methods have recently been proposed in the ultra-high frequency financial literature to remove the effects of microstructure noise and to obtain consistent estimates of the integrated volatility (IV) as a measure of ex post daily volatility. Even bias-corrected and consistent realized volatility (RV) estimates of IV can contain residual microstructure noise and other measurement errors. Such noise is called ''realized volatility error''. As such errors are ignored, we need to take account of them in estimating and forecasting IV. This paper investigates through Monte Carlo simulations the effects of RV errors on estimating and forecasting IV with RV data. It is found that: (i) neglecting RV errors can lead to serious bias in estimators; (ii) the effects of RV errors on one-step-ahead forecasts are minor when consistent estimators are used and when the number of intraday observations is large; (iii) even the partially corrected R^2 recently proposed in the literature should be fully corrected for evaluating forecasts. This paper proposes a full correction of R^2. An empirical example for S&P 500 data is used to demonstrate the techniques developed in this paper.
Rent's rule and parallel programs: characterizing network traffic behavior

In VLSI systems, Rent's rule characterizes the locality of interconnect between different subsystems, and allows an efficient layout of the circuit on a chip. With rising complexities of both hardware and software, Systems-on-Chip are converging to multiprocessor architectures connected by a Network-on-Chip. Here, packets are routed instead of wires, and threads of a parallel program are distributed among processors. Still, Rent's rule remains applicable, as it can now be used to describe the locality of network traffic. In this paper, we analyze network traffic on an on-chip network and observe the power-law relation between the size of clusters of network nodes and their external bandwidths. We then use the same techniques to study the time-varying behavior of the application, and derive the implications for future on-chip networks.
ARCS: an aggregated related column scoring scheme for aligned sequences

MOTIVATION Biologists frequently align multiple biological sequences to determine consensus sequences and/or search for predominant residues and conserved regions. Particularly, determining conserved regions in an alignment is one of the most important activities. Since protein sequences are often several-hundred residues or longer, it is difficult to distinguish biologically important conserved regions (motifs or domains) from others. The widely used tools, Logos, Al2co, Confind, and the entropy-based method, often fail to highlight such regions. Thus a computational tool that can highlight biologically important regions accurately will be highly desired. RESULTS This paper presents a new scoring scheme ARCS (Aggregated Related Column Score) for aligned biological sequences. ARCS method considers not only the traditional character similarity measure but also column correlation. In an extensive experimental evaluation using 533 PROSITE patterns, ARCS is able to highlight the motif regions with up to 77.7% accuracy corresponding to the top three peaks. AVAILABILITY The source code is available on http://bio.informatics. indiana.edu/projects/arcs and http://goldengate.case. edu/projects/arcs
Rossby waves detected in global ocean colour data

We demonstrate for the first time the detectability of mid‐latitude Rossby waves in global ocean colour data from the Japanese Ocean Colour and Temperature Scanner (OCTS) and U.S. Sea‐viewing Wide Field‐of‐view Sensor (SeaWiFS) radiometers. By producing longitude‐time plots of the merged OCTS and SeaWiFS datasets we observe at some latitudes westward propagating signals. Their signature is much weaker than the annual phytoplankton cycle, but can be highlighted by filtering the plots. The main propagating speed is estimated with the Radon Transform and increases equatorward, as expected for Rossby waves. A comparison with both speeds derived from altimeter data and the zonal mean of the speed predicted by a recent theory of Rossby wave propagation shows a broad agreement. We conclude that Rossby waves are sometimes observable in the ocean colour field and thus have some effects on biology, and we suggest two simple hypotheses for the underlying interaction mechanism.
Tantal-aeschynite, a new mineral of the aeschynite group from the Borborema region, north-eastern Brazil

Summary Tantal-aeschynite occurs as idiomorphic metamict crystals in the Raposa pegmatite at São José do Sabugí, Paraíba State, NE. Brazil. Morphological data, microscopic properties, and differential thermal analysis results are given. Electron-microprobe analyses yielded a formula: {Ca0·28(Yt,Ln)0·425(Th,U)0·11}(Ta0·75Ti0·62Nb0·595Fe0·05)O6. Yttrium is the predominant rare-earth element, with cerium and neodymium as most abundant lanthanides. The tantal-aeschynite unit cell has (after heating) a 5·34, b 10·97, c 7·38 Å. An indexed X-ray powder pattern (similar to that of aeschynite) is presented.
Deterministic Frequency-Wavenumber Methods and Direct Measurements of Rupture Propagation During Earthquakes Using a Dense Array'

Data recorded by the SMART 1 array in Taiwan are used to make the first direct measurements of two-dimensional earthquake rupture propagation. Using frequencywavenumber techniques and ray theory, we obtain estimates of the spatial extent, duration, and directions of rupture propagation during two earthquakes located offshore Taiwan. Our estimates include uncertainties due to errors in fault plane location and orientation, velocity structure, and slowness (ray parameter) measured at the array. We find that the January 29, 1981, M L -6.3 Taiwan earthquake ruptured unilaterally updip and toward the west on a 60 ø dipping, 109 ø striking reverse fault. Using P waves, we find its fault length and duration to be 25 + 18 km and 7.4 + 3.4 s, respectively. •q waves indicate a fault length and duration of 27 + 15 km and 9.4 :k 3.6 s, respectively. We suggest that the November 14, 1986, M L = 7.0 Hualien, Taiwan earthquake was triggered by a shallow (h m 14 kin) foreshock M L ---5.4 which occurred on a subparallel or splay fault approximately 5 s before the mainshock. Based on P waves, rupture propagation during the foreshock is unilateral towards the northeast and slightly downdip on a 58 ø dipping, 38 ø striking reverse fault. Its spatial extent and duration are approximately 23 km and 5.4 s. The mainshock initiated at greater depth (h m 34 kin) than the foreshock with its primary direction of rupture unilateral toward the northeast and slightly updip on a 57 ø dipping, 43 ø striking reverse fault. Using P waves, we found a spatial extent and duration of 68 + 15 km and 12.4 + 2.2 s. •q waves indicate a similar extent, duration, and direction of propagation for the mainshock. However, we found it difficult to distinguish the foreshock and mainshock •q waves. We show, by example, that these results represent an improvement over what can be obtained using long-period (T > 5 s) teleseismic methods. Comparison of our results with those obtained using teleseismic data suggests either a short duration slip-time function or that most slip occurs near the rupture front. Our results indicate that much of the complexity in the seismograms recorded during these events, by the SMART 1 array, is due to spatial and temporal variations of the source. This suggests that, at least in some cases, predictions of both the phase and amplitude of strong ground motion, as a function of time, would require a priori knowledge of source properties. Finally, we recommend siting small (m 10 station) dense arrays on land above offshore subduction zones, which are considered seismic gaps, because they can provide more detailed measurements of rupture propagation than is presently possible.
HyperHistory

HyperHistory is a web browser extension supporting the user's browsing habits. Second only to processing information, finding it is the most essential task. As users frequently return to previously seen documents, this work focuses on revisitation patterns. The extension improves the browser's navigational facilities and alleviates some of the most urgent and well-documented issues both built-in and third-party solutions have not yet successfully solved. HyperHistory attempts to mend the rift between the user's mental model and the context-less representation the browser's history provides. Furthermore, the extension lessens the affordance necessary to efficiently gather and retrieve information by preserving the semantic context based on visited hyperlinks and estimating the value a single page has to the user.
InventSim: An Agent-Based Model of Product Invention

This study develops an agent-based simulation model (InventSim) of the process of product invention. Invention is conceptualised as a search on a landscape of product design possibilities, by a population of payo_-seeking agents (inventors). The agents employ a set of search heuristics in searching this landscape which embed individual & social learning, and expectations of future payo_s to proposed product inventions. In the simulation, agents compete for payo_s and co-evolve based on each other's actions. The simulation experiments examine the impact of agent's search heuristics on the societal rate of inventive progress. The results indicate that the forward-looking heuristics of election and thought-experiments are crucial in driving forward the inventive process, even when payo_ expectations for proposed product inventions are noisy.
Lipschitz Behavior of Solutions to Convex Minimization Problems

We derive the Lipschitz dependence of the set of solutions of a convex minimization problem and its Lagrange multipliers upon the natural parameters from an inverse function theorem for set-valued maps. This requires the use of contingent and Clarke derivatives of set-valued maps, as well as generalized second derivatives of convex functions.
Biokol för rening av kväve och fosfor ur dagvatten i Segeåns avrinningsområde

Stormwater from urban areas contain a number of pollutants, among which nitrogen and phosphorous have been of lesser focus. In this study I aim to investigate if biochar has the potential to fill the role as water filter in urban areas, and to pin point what should be experimentally investigated in order to evaluate biochar in comparison to two contemporary filter systems: bioreactors and chalk filters. In natural systems, nitrogen is most efficiently removed from water by denitrification, and phosphorous is removed by adsorption and precipitation. Biochar can facilitate microorganisms and capture materia crucial in the denitrification process and is, if produced in the right conditions, capable of retaining phosphorous with primarily magnesium oxide groups. When treated in slow pyrolysis at high temperatures, oak, sugarcane and rapeseed are good precursors to biochar. In order to get a high amount of magnesium oxides the precursor material of biochar can either be anaerobically digested or pretreated with magnesium. When measuring the potential of biochar to remove nitrogen from water, the experiments should focus on measuring conditions for bacteria, levels of oxygen in the filter and the efficiency by which nitrogen is removed. When measuring the potential of biochar to remove phosphorous from water, the experiments should focus on the efficiency and longevity of the retention capacity. In order to evaluate the potential for phosphorous and nitrogen to be removed in the same filter, the experiment should also focus on if phosphate is removed more efficiently in aerobic conditions than in anaerobic conditions. Biochar has a great potential to fill many roles in our society, removing nutrients from storm water may be one of them. The benefits of having biochar as a filter for stormwater extends beyond the removal of nitrogen and phosphorous, different kinds of pollutants may be caught in the process and eliminated.