Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved small-object detection using YOLOv8: A comparative study

In the last decade or so, deep neural networks have evolved at a rapid pace, where computer vision has been constantly refreshing its best performance and has been integrated into our lives. In the field of target detection, YOLO model is a popular real-time target detection algorithm model that is fast, efficient, and accurate. This research aims to optimize the latest YOLOv8 model to improve its detection of small objects and compare it with another different version of YOLO models. To achieve this goal, we used the classical deep learning algorithm YOLOv8 as a benchmark and made several improvements and optimizations. We optimized the definition of the detection head, narrowed its perceptual field, and increased its number, allowing the model to better focus on the detailed information of small objects. We compared the optimized YOLOv8 model with other classical YOLO models, including YOLOv3 and YOLOv5n. The experimental results show that our optimized model improves small object detection with higher accuracy. This research provides an effective solution for small object detection with good application prospects. With the continuous development and improvement of the technology, we believe that the YOLO algorithm will continue to play an essential role in object detection and provide a reliable solution for various real-time applications.
Role of Wind-Sand Disturbance in the Formation and Development of Tamarix taklamakanensis Community

Formation, development and degeneration of Tamarix taklamakanensis M.T. Liu community may be affected by wind-sand disturbance. On the basis of field survey and experiments that took eight years from 1994, it was found that the plant community was formed in wet and low-lying land, developed in sand burying land, and died out in the land with strong wind erosion and severe sand burying. In the initial stage of the community formation, the low-lying land that was formed by wind erosion provided a suitable habitat for seed germination and plant rooting, but salt stress from ground water reduced seedling survival rate. In the developing stage of the community, sand burying stimulated vigorous growth of the shrubs. In the degenerative stage of the community, the wind erosion and sand burying resulted in dying out of the shrubs. It is therefore concluded that wind-sand disturbance has a positive role in the formation and development of the community, and is in a close association with the process of the community degeneration. Taking the habitat of T. taklamakanensis into account, it may be appropriate to note that, under the conditions of frequent disturbance and severe stress, desert pioneer species are adaptable and able to survive. This might be a supplement to the CSR strategy.
Analysis and Design of Load-Independent Series Resonant Power Amplifier With Constant Current Output and Its Application for WPT System

This article presents an analysis and design of a load-independent (LI) series resonant (SR) power amplifier with constant current (CC) output, along with its application for an MHz wireless power transfer (WPT) system. A novel inverse Class E power amplifier is introduced, which essentially produces a sinusoidal output current even with a low-<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$</tex-math></inline-formula> SR filter. Besides, the proposed amplifier achieves zero-current switching and CC output simultaneously, regardless of the load resistance. The LI operation is obtained for a specific set of component values, whose design conditions are clarified analytically in this article. The experiment was carried out with a WPT system incorporating the proposed amplifier as a transmitter and the Class D rectifier as a receiver. Although the input reactance of the Class D rectifier changed against dc-load variations due to the parasitic capacitances, the proposed amplifier showed consistent CC operation by using the low-<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$</tex-math></inline-formula> SR filter. Also, the proposed WPT system maintained a low total harmonic distortion of the transmission current over the wide load range, even with the low-<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$</tex-math></inline-formula> output filter. The prototype WPT system with the proposed amplifier achieved 88% power-delivery efficiency with 60 W output power at 3.39 MHz transmission frequency. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed amplifier.
The perceived impact of the Internet on family and social relations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

This thesis considers the adoption of technology and perceived changing social attitudes and relations. Specifically it considers if there have been any perceived changes in family or social relations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and, if so, can this be traced to the relatively recent shift to allow more widespread access to the internet. Traditionally the KSA has been characterised as a traditional, socially conservative society with a strong reliance on extended kinship groups. These family units have traditionally been the focus for much social interaction, especially for the female members and a regular round of face to face interaction was an important part of the social norms. The adopted research design was a variant of the mixed methods methodology. In this case a questionnaire was issued to 300 young people at two universities and one high school in Riyadh. Following this, 50 interviews were conducted. These were a mixture of some under 28 (drawn from the questionnaire sample) and those over 28 (found using purposive sampling. The research was designed to explore if the internet was perceived by respondents as having an impact due to time displacement (i.e. time spent on line was reducing face to face interaction) or in terms of any perceived changes of underlying attitudes towards the norms of Saudi society. Broadly, the findings were that there was evidence that the internet was perceived as having led to significant changes in social relations due to time displacement. However, from the interviews, it was clear that to many women in the KSA the internet offered the means to sidestep traditional restrictions on social interaction. While most reported no change in social attitudes, those with relatively heavy usage did report an impact on both acceptance of existing cultural norms and social relationship.
Nutrient uptake studies conducted in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) using integrated nutrient management treatments

At the Research Farm, A.K. S. University, Satna (M.P.), a field experiment was carried out during the rabi season of 2022–2023 to examine the impact of wheat yield and nutrient uptake. The wheat variety Pusa Tejas, HI-8759 showed a noticeably greater grain yield of 40.86 q/ha after applying 100% RDF (N-120 P-60 K-40), along with the largest total uptake of N, P, and K (143.56, 23.51, and 122.08 kg/ha, respectively). The study found that applying 100% RDF or T 2 to wheat yielded significantly higher grain yield and maximum total uptake of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. However, T 7 (75% RDF + Vermicompost @ 4 t/ha + Azotobacter ) was superior in terms of yield, but the apparent yield was significant in terms of parameters. After the wheat was harvested, the larger dose of integrated nutrient supply enhanced the remaining attributes of the
Facial Cellulitis and Skin Abscess: A Case of a Simple Bone Cyst in the Mandibular Bone

Cellulitis, abscess, or both are among the most common skin and soft tissue infections. Typically, cellulitis arises due to bacterial penetration through breaches in the skin's protective barrier. However, in cases of facial cellulitis, it is necessary to consider not only the breakdown of the skin barrier but also to differentiate odontogenic cellulitis. A prompt and accurate diagnosis of facial infections stemming from dental issues, coupled with the administration of antibiotics and dental interventions, played a crucial role in resolving this condition. Odontogenic cellulitis often develops as a result of dental caries. However, we experienced a case of odontogenic cellulitis and skin abscess occurring due to a simple bone cyst in the mandible, even in the absence of dental caries. Proper imaging examinations are crucial for diagnosis.
Evaluation of Tomato Germplasm against Tomato Brown Rugose Fruit Virus and Identification of Resistance in Solanum pimpinellifolium

The tomato is one of the most important vegetable crops grown worldwide. Tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV), a seed-borne tobamovirus, poses a serious threat to tomato production due to its ability to break the resistant genes (Tm-1, Tm-2, Tm-22) in tomatoes. The objective of this work was to identify new resistant source(s) of tomato germplasm against ToBRFV. To achieve this aim, a total of 476 accessions from 12 Solanum species were tested with the ToBRFV US isolate for their resistance and susceptibility. As a result, a total of 44 asymptomatic accessions were identified as resistant/tolerant, including thirty-one accessions of S. pimpinellifolium, one accession of S. corneliomulleri, four accessions of S. habrochaites, three accessions of S. peruvianum, and five accessions of S. subsection lycopersicon hybrid. Further analyses using serological tests identified four highly resistant S. pimpinellifolium lines, PI 390713, PI 390714, PI 390716, and PI 390717. The inheritance of resistance in the selected lines was verified in the next generation and confirmed using RT-qPCR. To our knowledge, this is a first report of high resistance to ToBRFV in S. pimpinellifolium. These new genetic resources will expand the genetic pool available for breeders to develop new resistant cultivars of tomato against ToBRFV.
Detecção de discurso de ódio em português usando CNN combinada a vetores de palavras

The current work has proposed to study and to implement a convolutional neural network (CNN) allied to pre-trained (Wang2Vec and GloVe) and trainable word embeddings for hate speech detection in Portuguese. For sake of comparison, the implementation used different gradient descent optimizer functions (RMSprop, Adagrad, Adadelta and Adam), aiming to contrast the performance at each function. For such task, it were used three datasets of comments in Portuguese, annotated as offensive or not offensive. We have concluded that using this proposed approach the results were superior to those from the baseline, achieving higher F-score and accuracy measures.
La alimentación estival de la tórtola común (Streptopelia turtur) en el sur de España

L'alimentation estivale de la tourterelle des bois a ete etudiee a partir de l'analyse de 64 tractus digestifs preleves sur des oiseaux tues a la chasse dans la province de Grenade du 15 aout au 20 septembre au cours des annees 1988 a 1990
Forecasting Tree Root Architecture as a Complement to Proactive Urban
 Green Space Design

Stewarding newly planted urban trees to maturity involves consideration of above- and belowground factors. While landscape architects and urban planners often focus on aboveground tree aspects, understanding root structure and function is crucial, especially in urban areas with limited underground space and diverse soil conditions. To address the importance and challenges of belowground planning for urban tree roots, we propose a protocol for site assessment and demonstrate root growth forecasting as a complement to existing urban planning approaches. This paper describes adaptations to a plant root architecture simulator, RootBox, and its subsequent application in 4 scenarios created to assess its efficacy as a complement to the phase of urban planning that prescribes vegetation type and planting location in the context of a myriad of other site considerations. RootBox was parameterized based on observed conformity of root growth simulations to generalized tree root architecture reported in the literature. Root growth forecasts for each scenario illustrate that plausible urban tree root system architectures—specifically, commonly observed root growth habits—can be produced by RootBox.In-situroot detection (e.g., with an air spade or hydro-vac) at predetermined time intervals can provide model validation and the opportunity to backward reconfigure RootBox parameters for forecast accuracy. The adapted RootBox is a flexible, proof-of-concept solution for predicting urban tree root architecture, considering the site and soil conditions pre-established in the planning process. When used with other relevant tools, RootBox can offer valuable insights during the design or rejuvenation of urban spaces.
Endophytic fungi in buckwheat seeds: exploring links with flavonoid accumulation

Buckwheat is a famous edible and medicinal coarse cereal which contain abundant of bioactive flavonoids, such as rutin. In this study, the composition and diversity of endophytic fungi in eight different buckwheat seeds were analyzed by high-throughput sequencing of ITS rDNA. Results showed that, the fungal sequences reads were allocated to 272 OTUs, of them, 49 OTUs were shared in eight buckwheat seeds. These endophytic fungi could be classified into 6 phyla, 19 classes, 41 orders, 79 families, 119 genera, and 191 species. At genus level, Alternaria sp. was the domain fungal endophyte. Besides, fungal endophytes belonged to the genera of Epicocum, Cladosporium, Botrytis, Filbobasidium, Stemphylium, and Vishniacozyma were highly abundant in buckwheat seeds. The total flavonoids and rutin contents in tartary buckwheat cultivars (CQ, XQ, CH, K2) were much higher than those in common buckwheat cultivars (HT, T2, T4, T8). For tartary buckwheat cultivars, the total flavonoids and rutin contents were ranging from 2.6% to 3.3% and 0.9% to 1.3%, respectively. Accordingly, the tartary buckwheat samples displayed stronger antioxidant activity than the common buckwheat. Spearman correlation heat map analysis was successfully found that certain fungal species from the genera of Alternaria, Botryosphaeria, Colletorichum and Diymella exhibited significant positive correlation with flavonoids contents. Results of this study preliminary revealed the fungi-plant interaction relationship at secondary metabolite level, and could provide novel strategy for increasing the flavonoids accumulation of buckwheat seeds, as well as improving their quality.
Toward using social media to support ridesharing services: challenges and opportunities

ABSTRACT Ridesharing has been attracting increasing attention from both academia and industry. One of the challenges posed by the study of ridesharing is to identify the most valuable information for improving the ridesharing decisions taken by participants. Another challenge is to use harvesting techniques to extract specific types of travel-related information. Many methods have been developed by the community in order to solve these issues. However, due to a lack of information sharing between different transit authorities and the difficulty of identifying subjective perceptions of the experience of ridesharing, understanding and evaluating how social media data might support or obstruct goals for mobility, safety and environmental sustainability in ridesharing is a difficult task. In this survey, we first analyze the literature on ridesharing with a focus on the properties and model of service, and introduce a framework to describe the major components required for a ridesharing service. Then, we illustrate the potential value of information extracted from social media and present the rationale for harvesting travel-related data. Finally, we detail some possible directions and different approaches for using social media data, and highlight their assets and drawbacks.
This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium.

The proliferation of automated face recognition in the commercial and government sectors has caused signiﬁcant privacy concerns for individuals. One approach to address these privacy concerns is to employ evasion attacks against the metric embedding networks powering face recognition systems: Face obfuscation systems generate imperceptibly perturbed images that cause face recognition systems to misidentify the user. Perturbed faces are generated on metric embedding networks, which are known to be unfair in the context of face recognition. A question of demographic fairness naturally follows: are there demographic disparities in face obfuscation system performance? We answer this question with an analytical and empirical exploration of recent face obfuscation systems. Metric embedding networks are found to be demographically aware: face embeddings are clustered by demographic. We show how this clustering behavior leads to reduced face obfuscation utility for faces in minority groups. An intuitive analytical model yields insight into these phenomena.
Inertial Measurement Unit-Based Estimation of Foot Trajectory for Clinical Gait Analysis

Gait analysis is used widely in clinical practice for the evaluation of abnormal gait caused by disease. Conventionally, medical professionals use motion capture systems or make visual observations to evaluate a patient’s gait. Recent biomedical engineering studies have proposed easy-to-use gait analysis methods involving wearable sensors with inertial measurement units (IMUs). IMUs placed on the shanks just above the ankles allow for the long-term monitoring of gait because the participant can walk with or without shoes during the analysis. As far as the authors know, there is no report of the gait analysis method that estimates stride length, gait speed, stride duration, stance duration, and swing duration at the same time. In this study, we tested a proposed gait analysis method that uses IMUs attached on the shanks to estimate foot trajectory and temporal gait parameters. We evaluated this proposed method by analyzing the gait of 10 able-bodied participants (mean age 23.1 years, nine men and one woman). Wearable sensors were attached to the participants’ shanks, and we measured three-axis acceleration and three-axis angular velocity with the sensors to estimate foot trajectory during walking. We compared gait parameters estimated from the foot trajectory obtained with the proposed method and those measured with a motion capture system. Mean accuracy (mean ± standard deviation) was –0.046 ± 0.026 m for stride length, –0.036 ± 0.026 m/s for gait speed, –0.002 ± 0.019 s for stride duration, –0.000 ± 0.016 s for stance duration, and –0.002 ± 0.022 s for swing duration. These results suggest that the proposed method is useful for evaluation of clinical gait parameters.
PnP-MFAMP-Net: A Novel Plug-and-Play Sparse Reconstruction Network for SAR Imaging

Currently, the sparse imaging problem of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is primarily addressed by compressed sensing (CS) theory, which introduces prior information into image restoration tasks via regularization. However, simple regularization constraints cannot provide the complex structural information of targets, and their denoising performance is unsatisfactory at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and sampling rates. In this letter, a novel sparse SAR reconstruction network is proposed based on plug-and-play (PnP) and approximated observation. First, a chirp-scaling algorithm (CSA) operator-derived approximated observation model is applied to reduce computational costs. Then, this sparse imaging problem is iteratively solved with a matched filter-based approximate message-passing (MFAMP) method. To overcome the limitations of prior models in existing sparse imaging methods, a PnP prior model is incorporated within the sparse reconstruction framework instead of using the $\ell_{1}$ sparse regularizer. Finally, the solution procedure is unfolded as a deep imaging network, dubbed as PnP-MFAMP-Net. Experimental results validate its robustness and superiority. Even at a sampling rate of 25%, PnP-MFAMP-Net can achieve a PSNR gain of approximately 15 dB compared to the AMP-Net.
Supplementary material for “ Simultaneous Clustering and Model Selection for Tensor Affinities ”

Proof. Let’s first consider mode = 3. For a fixed node (index) i, its slice matrix X (:, :, i) = ∑R r=1 yi(r) · zr ◦ zr, where yi ∈ R indicates to which cluster the node i belong. More specifically, if node i belongs to cluster r, yi(r) = 1, otherwise yi(r) = 0. Since a node cannot belong to multiple clusters, let’s say it is in cluster r. Then, X (:, : , i) = zr ◦ zr, which is rank one. When mode = 3, there is no 0 slice matrix, because a node i must belong to one cluster. We can also get an intuitive interpretation of the preceding by considering that the cube tensor must be in a block-diagonal form (obtained w.l.o.g. by permuting the nodes w.r.t their cluster labels). Now consider mode = 4. For fixed nodes (indices) i and j, the corresponding slice matrix X (:, :, i, j) = ∑R r=1 yi(r) · yj(r) · zr ⊗ zr. There are two cases: (1) if i and j belong to the same cluster r, X (:, :, i, j) = zr ◦ zr; (2) if i and j belong to different clusters, X (:, :, i, j) = 0. If mode > 4, the cases are very much the same as mode = 4.
Network stack specialization for performance

Contemporary network stacks are masterpieces of generality, supporting a range of edge-node and middle-node functions. This generality comes at significant performance cost: current APIs, memory models, and implementations drastically limit the effectiveness of increasingly powerful hardware. Generality has historically been required to allow individual systems to perform many functions. However, as providers have scaled up services to support hundreds of millions of users, they have transitioned toward many thousands (or even millions) of dedicated servers performing narrow ranges of functions. We argue that the overhead of generality is now a key obstacle to effective scaling, making specialization not only viable, but necessary. This paper presents Sandstorm, a clean-slate userspace network stack that exploits knowledge of web server semantics, improving throughput over current off-the-shelf designs while retaining use of conventional operating-system and programming frameworks. Based on Netmap, our novel approach merges application and network-stack memory models, aggressively amortizes stack-internal TCP costs based on application-layer knowledge, tightly couples with the NIC event model, and exploits low-latency hardware access. We compare our approach to the FreeBSD and Linux network stacks with nginx as the web server, demonstrating ~3.5x throughput improvement, while experiencing low CPU utilization, linear scaling on multicore systems, and saturating current NIC hardware.
La brecha de las noticias en Argentina: factores contextuales y preferencias de periodistas y público

This investigation examines the supply and demand of news in seven places in Argentina through a quantitative content analysis of the news more prominently published on homepages and “most read” lists over a period of seven months, including the presidential campaign and the 2015 presidential inauguration. The quantitative analysis of over 5500 news shows that there is a significant and consistent gap between the preferences of journalists and consumers and a greater variability in the preferences of membersof the public than in the choice of professional news producers. This paper uses these findings to reflect on the concepts of agenda-setting and monitorial citizenship.