Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning the Locomotion of Different Body Sizes Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Ensuring the realism of 3D animation is essential to maintaining audience immersion. Motion synthesis aims to generate realistic motion from only high-level control parameters (e.g. the trajectory to follow). In particular, physical motion synthesis uses physically-based animation, where all motion is the result of simulated forces. To ensure realism, these techniques can aim to imitate reference motion capture data. The advantage of physically-based animation is the ability to produce emergent, and physically-realistic, responses to unexpected external disturbances e.g. different terrains. An important consideration for methods that use motion capture data is retargeting, i.e. how to apply the resulting animations to characters whose physical properties do not match those of the motion capture actor. Existing physical motion synthesis research does not place much focus on efficient retargeting, and thus existing techniques can take many hours to train controllers for a modified character model. In this dissertation, we look at whether it is possible to train adaptive controllers that can quickly adapt to different body parameters. This could be used to develop a tool for physically-based animation where animators can edit characters interactively. We build our experiments around DeepMimic, a recent method for physical motion synthesis that uses deep Reinforcement Learning to imitate reference motion capture data. The DeepMimic authors show it is possible to retarget the motion data to different models with DeepMimic, but this requires many hours of training. We use this method as our baseline. We implement and compare two approaches (both inspired by sim-to-real transfer research for robotics): linearly combining base controllers to produce a new controller fitted to the desired body parameters, and domain randomisation. We evaluate these methods on a humanoid model with varying scales and limb lengths, and demonstrate that it is indeed possible to train controllers that can adapt to different body parameters with no online computation as opposed to needing many hours. These controllers follow the reference motion as well as the baseline can, whilst also demonstrating comparable robustness to external forces.
The Self-Protection Adaptive Roller Kit (SPARK) -- Negating the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Threat for Soldiers and Vehicles

Abstract : The number one threat to Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), which has been responsible for almost 40 percent of U.S. casualties in Operation Iraqi Freedom. There are numerous ways to activate IEDs, ranging from crude timers to command wires to remote activation via cell phone. However, one of the most common activation methods is a pressure-sensitive trigger that relies on targets to activate the IED by rolling over it themselves as they would, for example, in a vehicle. Commonly called the "Victim-Operated IED," it is typically buried beneath the many long roads that U.S. and Coalition Forces patrol on a daily basis. One of the newest weapons in our arsenal against this threat is the SPARK, a modular mine roller system designed to be mounted on tactical wheeled platforms. It is currently being used in Iraq on three platforms: the M114/1151 armored High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), the RG-31, and the M900 5-ton truck series. SPARK is managed by Product Manager IED Defeat/Protect Force (PM IEDD/PF), which is a part of the Project Manager Close Combat Systems (PM CCS), Program Executive Office Ammunition (PEO Ammo), based at Picatinny Arsenal, NJ. Two SPARK configurations are currently available in theater. The track-width front roller configuration attaches to the frame of the RG-31 and the HMMWV, the two vehicles most commonly used for deliberate route-clearance operations. The full-width configuration attaches both a front and rear roller to the M900 5-ton truck series. This version is intended for use on vehicles that are part of fast-moving logistical convoys.
Antimicrobial Resistance on Farms: A Review Including Biosecurity and the Potential Role of Disinfectants in Resistance Selection.

Resistance to therapeutic antimicrobial agents is recognized as a growing problem for both human and veterinary medicine, and the need to address the issue in both of these linked domains is a current priority in public policy. Efforts to limit antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on farms have so far focused on control of the supply and use of antimicrobial drugs, plus husbandry measures to reduce infectious disease. In the United Kingdom and some other countries, substantial progress has been made recently against targets on agricultural antimicrobial drug use. However, evidence suggests that resistant pathogenic and commensal bacteria can persist and spread within and between premises despite declining or zero antimicrobial drug use. Reasons for this are likely complex and varied but may include: bacterial adaptations to ameliorate fitness costs associated with maintenance and replication of resistance genes and associated proteins, horizontal transmission of genetic resistance determinants between bacteria, physical transfer of bacteria via movement (of animals, workers, and equipment), ineffective cleaning and disinfection, and co-selection of resistance to certain drugs by use of other antimicrobials, heavy metals, or biocides. Areas of particular concern for public health include extended-spectrum cephalosporinases and fluoroquinolone resistance among Enterobacteriaceae, livestock-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and the emergence of transmissible colistin resistance. Aspects of biosecurity have repeatedly been identified as risk factors for the presence of AMR on farm premises, but there are large gaps in our understanding of the most important risk factors and the most effective interventions. The present review aims to summarize the present state of knowledge in this area, from a European perspective.
Trends in Premature Mortality From Acute Myocardial Infarction in the United States, 1999 to 2019

Background Evaluating premature (<65 years of age) mortality because of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) by demographic and regional characteristics may inform public health interventions. Methods and Results We used the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER (Wide‐Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research) death certificate database to examine premature (<65 years of age) age‐adjusted AMI mortality rates per 100 000 and average annual percentage change from 1999 to 2019. Overall, the age‐adjusted AMI mortality rate was 13.4 (95% CI, 13.3–13.5). Middle‐aged adults, men, non‐Hispanic Black adults, and rural counties had higher mortality than young adults, women, NH White adults, and urban counties, respectively. Between 1999 and 2019, the age‐adjusted AMI mortality rate decreased at an average annual percentage change of −3.4 per year (95% CI, −3.6 to −3.3), with the average annual percentage change showing higher decline in age‐adjusted AMI mortality rates among large (−4.2 per year [95% CI, −4.4 to −4.0]), and medium/small metros (−3.3 per year [95% CI, −3.5 to −3.1]) than rural counties (−2.4 per year [95% CI, −2.8 to −1.9]). Age‐adjusted AMI mortality rates >90th percentile were distributed in the Southern states, and those with mortality <10th percentile were clustered in the Western and Northeastern states. After an initial decline between 1999 and 2011 (−4.3 per year [95% CI, −4.6 to −4.1]), the average annual percentage change showed deceleration in mortality since 2011 (−2.1 per year [95% CI, −2.4 to −1.8]). These trends were consistent across both sexes, all ethnicities and races, and urban/rural counties. Conclusions During the past 20 years, decline in premature AMI mortality has slowed down in the United States since 2011, with considerable heterogeneity across demographic groups, states, and urbanicity. Systemic efforts are mandated to address cardiovascular health disparities and outcomes among nonelderly adults.
Multi-Task Multi-Scale Learning For Outcome Prediction in 3D PET Images

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Predicting patient response to treatment and survival in oncology is a prominent way towards precision medicine. To this end, radiomics has been proposed as a field of study where images are used instead of invasive methods. The first step in radiomic analysis in oncology is lesion segmentation. However, this task is time consuming and can be physician subjective. Automated tools based on supervised deep learning have made great progress in helping physicians. However, they are data hungry, and annotated data remains a major issue in the medical field where only a small subset of annotated images are available. METHODS In this work, we propose a multi-task, multi-scale learning framework to predict patient's survival and response. We show that the encoder can leverage multiple tasks to extract meaningful and powerful features that improve radiomic performance. We also show that subsidiary tasks serve as an inductive bias so that the model can better generalize. RESULTS Our model was tested and validated for treatment response and survival in esophageal and lung cancers, with an area under the ROC curve of 77% and 71% respectively, outperforming single-task learning methods. CONCLUSIONS Multi-task multi-scale learning enables higher performance of radiomic analysis by extracting rich information from intratumoral and peritumoral regions.
Consumption of fish balls “tsumire” may help prevent liver function deterioration in aged rats

Background: Possible health benefits of fish balls tsumire consumption on human health have been deduced based on the results of our earlier study investigating tsumire consumption by young (6-weeks-old) Sprague-Dawley rats. Aim: The objectives of this study were to evaluate the effect of tsumire intake on aged rats by feeding them a diet containing 5% dried tsumire. Methods: Biomarker levels and organ weight of 80-weeks-old Sprague-Dawley rats that were fed with tsumire were examined for potential health benefits. Results: Following 84 days of administering tsumire-containing diet, we found a decrease in some liver function parameters, such as the levels of AST, ALT, ALP and LAP, in the tsumire-fed rats compared to control rats provided with normal diet. In particular, significantly reduced LDH levels were observed in the experimental group. Conclusions: The results can be extrapolated to possible beneficial effects of consumption of tsumire on human health.
Marine fisheries along the southwest coast of India

Marine fisheries production in India has increased from 0.5 million t in 1950 to 2.47 million t in 1997. The gross value of fisheries landings in India was US$2.37 billion in 1997. The contribution of fisheries to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has risen from 0.7% in 1980 - 81 to 1.2% in 1994 - 95. The contribution to agricultural GDP has risen from 1.9% to 4%. Fisheries production also plays a critical role in food security and livelihood in rural areas. The southwest (SW) coast, while only 16% of the Indian coastline, is an important area for marine fisheries production, contributing 31.7% (0.74 million t) in 1993 - 98. This production is dominated by pelagic (59% of landings) and demersal species (23%). However, the open access system has resulted in rapid increases in fishing effort, particularly in the coastal areas. The density of fishers inshore has increased from 3.6 to 8.5 fishers per km2 in the past four decades. This excess effort has resulted in overfishing of the stocks and lower economic rent from the fishery. The overall objective of coastal fisheries management along the southwest coast of India is sustainable coastal fisheries development. This requires key ecological, social, economic and administrative issues to be addressed. Ecological sustainability requires the reduction of the excess effort through limited entry and effort reduction schemes, appropriate exploitation patterns through improved gear selectivity and restoration of the degraded coastal environment through integrated coastal zone management initiatives. Key social interventions include: creation of alternative employment to reduce fisher numbers, prevention/management of increasing intra- and inter-sectoral conflicts and empowerment of artisanal fishers through co-management schemes, social legislation and improved support/welfare schemes. The key economic issues include declining earnings, particularly of artisanal fishers, which requires; optimizing fleet composition for economic returns, improvement of the marketing system and cold storage chains, improvement of post-harvest processes to increase product value. The key administrative needs are a strong fisheries policy that balances welfare concerns with sustainability, effective implementation of regulations, and increased government resources for fisheries management. Project briefs covering the key interventions are provided, however these require further review and improvement in collaboration with concerned stakeholders.
Etude du comportement thermique des bâtiments en contact avec le sol par l'analyse modale

Nous developpons dans ce travail un logiciel detaille de simulation thermique des bâtiments en contact avec le sol. Nous avons utilise l'ANALYSE MODALE des transferts thermiques du systeme "bâtiment-sol". De nombreux cas peuvent etre traites : bâtiment sur terre-plein ou semi-enterre en presence d'une nappe phreatique avec une repartition uniforme ou partielle de l'isolant au niveau du plancher bas. Le traitement du probleme se fait alors en trois parties : - Analyse modale et reduction de chaque sous-systeme thermique (monodimensionnel au niveau de la paroi, bidimensionnel au niveau du sol). Les matrices caracterisant les sous-systemes reduits sont stockees dans une bibliotheque, - Construction du systeme thermique global (parois+sol) a partir des sous-systemes thermiques reduits, -Resolution du systeme global. Nous montrons sur quelques exemples les avantages (gain de temps de calcul, prise en compte de non-linearites, bibliotheque de cas courants) d'une telle methodologie.
Supplementary Information for “ Spectral mapping of brain functional connectivity from diffusion imaging ”

4 Supplementary methods: AAL-parcellated dataset 11 4.1 Study subjects . 11 4.2 MRI data acquisition . 11 4.3 Connectivity estimates . 12 4.3. 1 Functional connectivity . 12 4.3. 2 Structural connectivity . 13 4.4 Cortical parcellation . 14 4.4.1 Brain region masks . 14 4.4.2 Atlases and upsampling procedure . 14 4.5 Connectivity matrices . 14
Cooperation Speeds Surfing: Use Co-Bandit!

In this paper, we explore the benefit of cooperation in adversarial bandit settings. As a motivating example, we consider the problem of wireless network selection. Mobile devices are often required to choose the right network to associate with for optimal performance, which is non-trivial. The excellent theoretical properties of EXP3, a leading multi-armed bandit algorithm, suggest that it should work well for this type of problem. Yet, it performs poorly in practice. A major limitation is its slow rate of stabilization. Bandit-style algorithms perform better when global knowledge is available, i.e., when devices receive feedback about all networks after each selection. But, unfortunately, communicating full information to all devices is expensive. Therefore, we address the question of how much information is adequate to achieve better performance. We propose Co-Bandit, a novel cooperative bandit approach, that allows devices to occasionally share their observations and forward feedback received from neighbors; hence, feedback may be received with a delay. Devices perform network selection based on their own observation and feedback from neighbors. As such, they speed up each other's rate of learning. We prove that Co-Bandit is regret-minimizing and retains the convergence property of multiplicative weight update algorithms with full information. Through simulation, we show that a very small amount of information, even with a delay, is adequate to nudge each other to select the right network and yield significantly faster stabilization at the optimal state (about 630x faster than EXP3).
JOLTS : checkpointing and coordination in grid systems

The need for increased computational power is growing faster than our ability to produce faster computers. Already researchers are proposing systems that require peta-flop capable super computers, a far cry from what is currently capable. To meet such high computational requirements, networks of computers will be required. While it is possible to network together computers to achieve a single task, making that network more flexible to handle a multitude of different tasks is the promise of grid computing. Grid systems are slowly appearing that are designed to run many independent tasks, and provide the ability for programs to migrate between machines before completion. However, these systems lack coordination capabilities. Many grid systems/environments allow multiple tasks to communicate/coordinate with each other based on various paradigms, but don’t provide migration capabilities. This thesis proposes a system, called JOLTS, that attempts to fill a gap by providing both checkpointing and coordination capabilities. The coordination model offered by JOLTS is based on the Objective Linda coordination language, with some additions. This thesis will show that the object space model is an effective form of coordination and communication, and can effectively be combined with checkpointing capabilities inside the same grid system.
Parallel Feedback Communications for Magnetic MIMO Wireless Power Transfer System

Receiver (RX) feedback and power transfer channel estimation are essential for enhancing the context-aware ability for magnetic resonant coupling (MRC) enabled wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. Solutions are not highly efficient and immature in MIMO scenarios. In this work, we investigate the concurrent feedback communications for multiple RXs equipped with oscillating circuits. We discover an interesting clustering phenomenon, where the TX currents form clusters in corresponding to the combined RX "Open-Short" states. Based on this, we propose a parallel multi-stage decoding scheme by identifying the combined state for each cluster. In symbol clustering stage, we introduce two-layer clustering mechanism to tackle the "dominant RXs" challenge which causes inaccurate classification results. In cluster identification stage, we solve the "ambiguous identification candidates" challenge by calibration based on power transfer channel condition estimation. We have implemented the prototype testbed using off-the-shelf components. Our experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Our system supports communication within valid charging area even under significant interference from other RX. The simulation results further suggest the scalability of the proposed scheme, and the accuracy for power transfer channel estimation.
A COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT SOLUTION APPROACHES FOR A MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF HEMODIALYSIS.

R. Hussain 1 , A. Ali 1 , Mohammad Munir 2 and Sadia Nasar 1 . 1. Mirpur University of Science and Technology (MUST), Mirpur-10250(AJK ), Pakistan. 2. Government Postgraduate College No 1, Abbottabad, Pakistan. Manuscript Info Abstract . Manuscript History
Effects of landscape heterogeneity and clearfell harvest size on beetle (Coleoptera) biodiversity in plantation forests

Compared to natural forests, fast-growing plantations of exotic species such as Pinus radiata are often perceived as marginal habitat or unsuitable habitat for most native species. By studying Coleoptera (beetles) in a variety of landscape elements (pasture, native forest and different aged Pinus radiata stands) in a highly modified and fragmented landscape in New Zealand I aimed to determine the value of exotic plantation forests for native biodiversity, and how these species are affected by different sized clearfell harvest areas. Pitfall trap sampling of beetles showed that plantation forest stands can provide suitable complimentary habitat to native forest for many species. Rarefied species richness of Carabidae, Scarabaeidae and Scolytinae was not significantly different between habitats, however, habitat types differed significantly in their beetle community composition. Comparing different production habitats, Pinus radiata stands had a beetle community composition most similar to native forest. However, a small minority of species, e.g., Dichrochile maura, were restricted to native forest habitat highlighting the importance of retaining indigenous ecosystems within plantations. Unlike human modified habitats, native forests did not provide suitable habitat for exotic species. Clearfell harvesting is controversial and its impact on biodiversity is a key constraint for many forest certification programs, such as that administered by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Despite this, no replicated manipulative experimental studies of the impact of different sized clearfell harvest areas on biodiversity have been undertaken at scales relevant to the New Zealand forest industry. One potential model of the impact of different clearfell harvest sizes is the concept of a threshold size. A threshold scenario may occur where clearfell harvest impacts increase at a rate disproportionate to the change in clearfell size over a small range of harvest areas, but impacts remain relatively unchanged either side of the threshold zone. I sampled Coleoptera in experimentally created 0.01, 0.05, 0.5, 5.0, 50 and 500 ha clearfells within Pinus radiata plantations in the central North Island of New Zealand. The wide range of clearfell harvest sizes, including some very small areas, such as 0.01 ha was instigated in an attempt to document potential clearfell harvest size thresholds. Rarefied native beetle species richness was higher in harvest areas compared to adjacent mature plantation stands. The beetle species richness in 5 ha and 500 ha harvest areas was significantly greater species than that in small 0.01 – 0.5 ha harvest areas. Although, the high