Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generation of Realistic Cut-In Maneuvers to Support Safety Assessment of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs) attract constantly growing attention from academics and industry as more and more vehicles are equipped with such technology. Level-3 ADASs, like the DRIVE PILOT from Mercedes-Benz AG, are expected to appear more and more on the market in the next few years. However, automated driving raises new challenges for the system validation required for series approval. The replacement of a human driver as control instance expands the range of variants to be validated and verified. The scenario-based validation approach meets these challenges by simulating only specific safety-critical driving scenarios using software-in-the-loop simulation. According to the current state of the art, various safety-relevant driving scenarios are parameterized as idealized maneuvers which, however, requires a great modeling effort, and at the same time, such simplifications may bias the safety assessment. Therefore, a novel approach using artificial intelligence methods is taken here to generate more realistic driving scenarios. Namely, a generative model based on a variational autoencoder is trained with real-world data and then used to generate trajectories for a specific driving maneuver. Through a comprehensive analysis of the synthetic trajectories, it becomes clear that the generative model can learn and replicate relevant properties of real driving data as well as their probabilistics much better than the mathematical models used so far. Furthermore, it is proven that both the statistical properties and the time characteristics are almost equal to those of the input data.
Near-field potentials index local neural computations more accurately than population spiking

Local field potentials (LFP) are low-frequency extracellular voltage fluctuations thought to primarily arise from synaptic activity. However, unlike highly localized neuronal spiking, LFP is spatially less specific. LFP measured at one location is not entirely generated there due to far-field contributions that are passively conducted across volumes of neural tissue. We sought to quantify how much information within the locally generated, near-field low-frequency activity (nfLFP) is masked by volume-conducted far-field signals. To do so, we measured laminar neural activity in primary visual cortex (V1) of monkeys viewing sequences of multifeatured stimuli. We compared information content of regular LFP and nfLFP that was mathematically stripped of volume-conducted far-field contributions. Information content was estimated by decoding stimulus properties from neural responses via spatiotemporal multivariate pattern analysis. Volume-conducted information differed from locally generated information in two important ways: (1) for stimulus features relevant to V1 processing (orientation and eye-of-origin), nfLFP contained more information. (2) in contrast, the volume-conducted signal was more informative regarding temporal context (relative stimulus position in a sequence), a signal likely to be coming from elsewhere. Moreover, LFP and nfLFP differed both spectrally as well as spatially, urging caution regarding the interpretations of individual frequency bands and/or laminar patterns of LFP. Most importantly, we found that population spiking of local neurons was less informative than either the LFP or nfLFP, with nfLFP containing most of the relevant information regarding local stimulus processing. These findings suggest that the optimal way to read out local computational processing from neural activity is to decode the local contributions to LFP, with significant information loss hampering both regular LFP and local spiking. Author’s Contributions Conceptualization, D.A. T. , J.A. W, and A.M.; Data Collection, J.A. W. , M.A.C. , K.D. ; Formal Analysis, D.A. T. and J.A. W. ; Data Visualization, D.A. T. and J.A. W. ; Original Draft, D.A. T. , J.A. W. , and A.M.; Revisions and Final Draft, D.A. T. , J.A. W. , M.A.C. , K.D. , M.T. W. , A.M.B. , and A.M. Competing Interests The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Sources and fluxes of inorganic carbon in a deep, oligotrophic lake (Loch Ness, Scotland)

The main river inflows to Loch Ness and several depths in the water column within the loch were sampled over an annual cycle. The carbon isotope composition of total dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) from the samples was determined as well as that of phytoplankton from the loch. Values of δ13C for DIC in the rivers indicated that this DIC was derived from soil respiration in the catchment and achieved only partial equilibrium with the atmosphere during river transport. Riverine loading accounted for most of the DIC in Loch Ness, and the great depth of the loch relative to its surface area allows only limited exchange with the atmosphere. Despite the low productivity in Loch Ness, DIC concentrations in the low alkalinity water are appreciably influenced by plankton metabolism, and seasonal fluctuations in δ13C of DIC and phytoplankton revealed the particular impact of photosynthetic carbon fixation on DIC. However, the photosynthetic depletion of DIC during summer does not offset the riverine loading sufficiently to prevent the loch waters being supersaturated with CO2 throughout the year. Annual efflux of CO2 from Loch Ness is estimated to be 253 × 106 mol yr−1, of which around one quarter may be due to net heterotrophic mineralization within the loch of organic carbon of terrestrial origin. The remainder is attributable to inorganic carbon input to the lake via river inflow and derived from prior mineralization of soil organic matter within the drainage area. This annual efflux of CO2 can represent around 6% of net ecosystem production in the catchment.
Cross-Domain Meta-Learning Under Dual-Adjustment Mode for Few-Shot Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification with limited training samples has been well studied in recent years. Among them, the few-shot learning (FSL) technique demonstrates excellent processing capability under limited labeled samples. Nevertheless, the current FSL-based works provide scarce attention to effective class prototypes and metric types, resulting in high generalization error and poor interpretation during the cross-domain testing phase. A dual-adjustment mode-based cross-domain meta-learning (DMCM) method for few-shot HSI classification is proposed to tackle this issue. Specifically, a three-dimensional ghost attention network (TGAN) with strong learning capability without massive parameters is first constructed. Meanwhile, a dual-adjustment mode comprising intracorrection (IC) and interalignment (IA) learning strategies is then adopted to solve domain shift issue via episode-level meta-tasks, where IC and IA focus on effective class prototypes and data distribution differences between domains, respectively. Afterward, considering that the traditional Euclidean distance metric is insensitive to the distribution of within-class samples, the class-covariance metric (CCM) is employed to account for the distribution in feature space of each class to optimize decision boundary and alleviate the misclassification problem. Extensive experiments on three publicly available target hyperspectral datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The codes will be available on the website at https://github.com/HlEvag/DMCM.git.
A detailed numerical investigation of two-phase flows inside a planar flow-blurring atomizer

Flow-blurring atomization is an innovative twin-fluid atomization approach that has demonstrated superior effectiveness in producing fine sprays compared to traditional airblast atomization methods. In flow-blurring atomizers, the high-speed gas flow is directed perpendicular to the liquid jet. Under specific geometric and physical conditions, the gas penetrates back into the liquid nozzle, resulting in a highly unsteady bubbly two-phase mixing zone. Despite the remarkable atomization performance of flow-blurring atomizers, the underlying dynamics of the two-phase flows and breakup mechanisms within the liquid nozzle remain poorly understood, primarily due to the challenges in experimental measurements of flow details. In this study, detailed interface-resolved numerical simulations are conducted to investigate the two-phase flows generated by a planar flow-blurring atomizer. By varying key dimensionless parameters, including the dynamic-pressure ratio, density ratio, and Weber number, over wide ranges, we aim to comprehensively characterize their effects on the two-phase flow regimes and breakup dynamics.
Impacts environnementaux sur l’érosion des sols au Pléistocène supérieur et à L’holocène dans le cratère de maar du lac du Bouchet (Massif central, France)

Une nouvelle utilisation des donnees palynologiques, sedimentologiques et chronostratigraphiques issues de la sequence sedimentaire intracraterique du maar du Lac du Bouchet (Massif central, France) permet d’etudier les relations entre les changements environnementaux et l’erosion des sols au Pleistocene superieur et a l’Holocene dans le cratere de cet appareil volcanique. Une methode de calcul du volume et de la masse des couches de sediments deposes a l’interieur du cratere a ete elaboree afin d’evaluer les taux moyens d’erosion a la surface du bassin versant. Ces taux ont ete tres eleves pendant les periodes les plus froides du dernier episode glaciaire wurmien (Lanterne I et III, Dryas ancien), avec des valeurs comprises entre 180 et 210 t.km-2.an-1. Au contraire, durant les periodes temperees interglaciaires de l’Eemien et de l’Holocene, la vitesse de l’erosion a ete plus lente, variant entre 10 et 50 t.km-2.an-1. Les analyses polliniques et sedimentologiques des depots lacustres intracrateriques permettent d’interpreter ces chiffres dans le cadre de l’evolution paleoenvironnementale regionale. Au cours des periodes froides, l’erosion detritique a ete forte et intense dans le bassin versant du Lac du Bouchet, car la vegetation basse et ouverte a caractere steppique protegeait moins bien le substrat des agents meteoritiques. Par contre, durant les episodes climatiques temperes, la vegetation forestiere qui recouvrait la surface du bassin versant a induit une reduction des flux sedimentaires. D’autre part, on a pu constater une hausse des taux d’erosion dans la seconde moitie de l’Holocene, a partir du Subboreal, en relation avec les deforestations regionales d’origine anthropique pour l’exploitation agricole du territoire.
Remote Sensing Applications To Support Sustainable Natural Resource Management

Brewer, C. Kenneth, Ph.D., May 2007 Forestry Remote sensing applications to support sustainable natural resource management Chairperson: Dr. LLoyd P. Queen The original design of this dissertation project was relatively simple and straightforward. It was intended to produce one single, dynamic, classification and mapping system for existing vegetation that could rely on commonly available inventory and remote sensing data. This classification and mapping system was intended to provide the analytical basis for resource planning and management. The problems encountered during the first phase of the original design transformed this project into an extensive analysis of the nature of these problems and a decade-long remote sensing applications development endeavor. What evolved from this applications development process is a portion of what has become a “system of systems” to inform and support natural resource management. This dissertation presents the progression of work that sequentially developed a suite of remote sensing applications designed to address different aspects of the problems encountered with the original project. These remote sensing applications feature different resource issues, and resource components and are presented in separate chapters. Chapter one provides an introduction and description of the project evolution and chapter six provides a summary of the work and concluding discussion. Chapters two through five describe remote sensing applications that represent related, yet independent studies that are presented essentially as previously published. Chapter two evaluates different approaches to classifying and mapping fire severity using multi-temporal Landsat TM data. The recommended method currently represents the analytical basis for fire severity data produced by the USDA Forest Service and the US Geological Survey. Chapter three also uses multi-temporal Landsat data and compares quantitative, remote-sensingbased change detection methods for forest management related canopy change. The recommended method has been widely applied for a variety of forest health and disaster response applications. Chapter four presents a method for multi-source and multi-classifier regional land cover mapping that is currently incorporated in the USDA Forest Service Existing Vegetation Classification and Mapping Technical Guide. Chapter five presents a study using nearest neighbor imputation methods to generate geospatial data surfaces for simulation modeling of vegetation through time and space. While these results have not yet been successful enough to support widespread adoption and implementation, it is possible that these general methods can be adapted to perform adequately for simulation modeling data needs.
An Optimization-based Time-optimal Velocity Planning for Autonomous Driving

: Velocity planning plays an important role in motion planning of automated driving as it must meet safety, comfort, and traffic regulation requirements. Therefore, it is necessary to consider Jerk constraint and dynamic obstacle constraint. However, the introduction of these constraints makes velocity planning a non-convex optimization problem, significantly increasing computational complexity. To address these challenges, this paper investigates an optimization-based time-optimal velocity planning method. The non-convex and non-linear problems caused by Jerk constraint and dynamic obstacle constraint are addressed by realizing constraint linearization through velocity filtering with acceleration as the threshold. The linear programming (LP) method is then used twice to calculate a time-optimal velocity profile that satisfies the given constraints. Furthermore, when hard constraints are unable to satisfy obstacle avoidance planning, a dynamic constraint frame strategy is proposed to relax the hard constraints and fully utilize the dynamic performance of the ego-vehicle to avoid obstacles. Finally, simulations are conducted in various driving scenarios to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The simulation results demonstrate that the approach proposed in this paper can quickly generate velocity profiles that meet safety and comfort constraints, within a short planning period. Additionally, the dynamic constraint frame strategy can improve the dynamic adaptability of the
The influence of polyphenols on atherosclerosis development

Polyphenols represent one of the biggest and most widespread groups of secondary plant metabolites with more than 8000 polyphenolic compounds. Fruits, vegetables and beverages such as tea and red wine are the main sources of polyphenols. A significant number of studies indicate the ability of certain polyphenols to delay the development of atherosclerosis. According to the same polyphenols reduce lipid deposition, oxidative stress, inflammation of the blood vessel wall, proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells and endothelial dysfunction. The widespread use of polyphenols requires further research on bioavailability, absorption and transformation. It is necessary to determine the effect of individual polyphenols as well as the interaction with other bioactive compounds, define the dietary reference intake and the safety of use in certain subpopulations.
The Siding Spring cometary encounter with Mars: A natural experiment for the Martian atmosphere?

On 19 October 2014 comet C/2013 A1 will encounter Mars. The planet is anticipated to pass through the coma resulting in a greater than four order‐of‐magnitude increase in the accretion of dust with 430 tonnes of dust with diameters between 1 µm and 12.4 mm surviving atmospheric passage. At high altitude, the dust would impact temperature and may affect limb dust extinction and cloud formation. The UV photolysis of the organic carbon content of the dust, 1.9 to 4.6 tonnes, would have a negligible effect on atmospheric methane. Should C/2013 A1 brighten, increases in upper atmospheric accretion of coma particles will exceed the background dust and the population of small coma particles may be constrained from orbital measurements. For M1 < –1.3, methane produced might be measurable by the Sample Analysis at Mars Tunable Laser Spectrometer instrument onboard Curiosity.
A DNase T6SS effector requires its MIX domain for secretion

13 Gram-negative bacteria often employ the type VI secretion system (T6SS) to deliver diverse 14 cocktails of antibacterial effectors into rival bacteria. In many cases, even when the identity of 15 the delivered effectors is known, their toxic activity and mechanism of secretion are not. Here, 16 we investigate VPA1263, a Vibrio parahaemolyticus T6SS effector that belongs to a 17 widespread class of polymorphic effectors containing a MIX domain. We reveal a C-terminal 18 DNase toxin domain that mediates the antibacterial toxicity of this effector during competition. 19 Furthermore, we demonstrate that the VPA1263 MIX domain is necessary for T6SS-mediated 20 secretion; however, we find that it is dispensable for interaction of VPA1263 with the secreted 21 T6SS structural component, VgrG. Finally, we identify variants of the mobile genomic island 22 in which VPA1263 is encoded, and we show that each island variant carries a different cargo 23 of antibacterial T6SS effectors or anti-phage defense systems. Therefore, we propose that 24 these genomic islands are hotspots for bacterial defensive weapons. is present in a subset of V. parahaemolyticus genomes In this work, we aimed to investigate the toxic activity, secretion, and genomic neighborhood of VPA1263. We found that VPA1263 contains a C-terminal toxin domain 70 belonging to the HNH nuclease superfamily, and showed that this domain functions as a 71 DNase. Furthermore, we found that the MIX domain is required for secretion of VPA1263 via 72 the T6SS, even though it may not be required for interaction between VPA1263 and the T6SS 73 spike component, VgrG. These results provide the first experimental validation of the 74 hypothesis that MIX domains play a role in T6SS effector secretion. Moreover, they suggest 75 that binding to a secreted structural component of T6SS may not suffice to ensure T6SS- 76 mediated delivery. We also found that in addition to VPA1263, VpaI-6 encodes a predicted 77 anti-phage defense system. Analysis of genomic islands similar to VpaI-6 in other vibrios revealed a polymorphic cargo of defensive weapons, including anti-phage defense systems and antibacterial T6SS effectors.
Food security in rural Lebanon : links with diet and agriculture

La presente etude fait partie d’un projet multidisciplinaire effectue a l’universite americaine de Beyrouth. Elle est basee sur un echantillon de 798 individus dans trois communautes rurales libanaises ainsi qu’une analyse de marche et des politiques gouvernementales. Cette etude tente d’elucider si la qualite alimentaire est sacrifiee pour la quantite alimentaire dans une recherche de securite alimentaire. Une plus grande diversite alimentaire telle que definie par une consommation plus variee en groupes alimentaires est associee avec une plus grande securite alimentaire. En revanche, la collecte de plantes sauvages est associee a une plus grande insecurite alimentaire et l’auto-production d’aliments ne semble pas proteger de l’insecurite alimentaire. L’analyse des paniers normaux et « sante » montre qu’une alimentation diversifiee et plus saine est economiquement atteignable dans les communautes etudiees. Cependant, l’adoption de choix alimentaires plus sains est possiblement faite a l’encontre d’une politique gouvernementale qui n’encourage pas les aliments sante. %%%%As part of a larger interdisciplinary project at the American University of Beirut, this research is based on a survey of 798 individuals in three rural areas of Lebanon, a market survey and analysis of government policy. It asks if a trade-off is being made between food quantity and food quality in the attempt to achieve food security. More dietary diversity, measured by food groups, is found to be associated with greater food security; wild plant collection is associated with food insecurity due to problems of endogeneity; and self-production of food was not significantly correlated with food security. Analysis of normal and ‘healthy’ food baskets show that healthier, diverse diets are indeed within the economic reach of people in these communities, however the choice of better quality diets may be undercut by current government policies which unwittingly promote unhealthy foods. %%%%
Autonomous Parking Path Tracking Control Based on Interference Suppression

Owing to the increased demand for autonomous driving and advanced driver assistant systems, autonomous parking configurations have been widely researched. In order to solve the problem of path tracking accuracy degradation, caused by ignoring the external interference in the actual parking process and the uncertainty of vehicle steering modeling, a parking path tracking algorithm, combining Sliding Model Control (SMC) and Extended State Observer (ESO), is proposed. First, the vehicle kinematics model is established, which includes many external interference factors, such as lateral position, speed, heading angle, uncertainty parameters and time delay of steering mechanism. Considering the vehicle physical constraints and boundary condition constraints, during the parking process, the parking reference path is designed according to reverse outbound driving, while the parking collision analysis and path smoothing are further carried out. Next, an ESO is designed to observe and compensate the external disturbances and model uncertainties, treating these as the total disturbances of the system. On this basis, a SMC for parallel parking path tracking is designed. The observed value of ESO is used as the compensation in the SMC, to weaken the influence of external interference. Finally, using Matlab simulation, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed path planning and tracking control method are verified. The simulation results show that, the maximum tracking error of lateral position is less than 0.01m, whereas the maximum tracking error of heading angle is less than 2.5°. Comparing two control strategies, the control effect of the designed SMC with ESO is better than that of the traditional SMC controller, while the ability of resisting external interference is stronger. In addition, real vehicle tests are carried out, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method. The test results show that, the vehicle can safely park in the parking space, quickly and accurately, even if there is external interference. The proposed method can produce the parking trajectory according to the given constraints and control the vehicle to complete the parking operation accurately along the planned path.