Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transfer Learning of Ground Robot Terrain Experience

For autonomous robots deployed in unknown environments, it is beneﬁcial to reason about their traversability over the surrounding terrain, which can improve robots’ future path-planning decisions. Creating a model assessing traversability for each robot is a challenging task, thus making it desirable to exchange the knowledge about traversability between various robots. However, in a team of heterogeneous robots, the models assessing traversability cannot be shared directly among the members, as robots can possess diﬀerent morphology or sensory equipment and experience the terrain diﬀerently. In this thesis, we propose an approach using transfer learning capable of transferring models assessing traversability between heterogeneous robots. The individual traversability assessment models used by the particular robots are created using convolutional neural networks that assess the diﬃculty of traversal through terrain from observations of exteroceptive sensors. Pre-trained convolutional neural networks capable of assessing traversability are transferred between the robot from the source domain to the robot in the target domain to propagate the knowledge among heterogeneous robots. After transferring the neural network between the robots, the network is retrained again using data available in the target domain to be accommodated to the diﬀerent tasks. Using real heterogeneous robots, we conducted experiments validating the feasibility of the proposed knowledge transfer approach.
HYPO-OSMOLARITY AND GLUCOSE STARVATION LOCALIZES SLM1 TO MITOCHONDRIA- A NOVEL STRESS RESPONSE

Synthetic Lethal with Mss4 1 (Slm1) is a key protein found in the crossroad of the Membrane Compartment of Can1 (MCC) and the Membrane Compartment of TORC2 (MCT). The two compartments on the plasma membrane of budding yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae ) are responsible for APC transporter regulation and sphingolipid synthesis respectively, altogether maintaining the homeostasis of the plasma membrane. By altering its localization between the MCC and the MCT, Slm1 serves as a signal that communicates the stress condition. And yet, neither the MCC, the MCT, nor Slm1 itself had been reported in the context of mitochondria or metabolism. In this study, we report Slm1 localizes to mitochondria under the combination of glucose starvation and hypo-osmotic stress. We also identified the first 173 amino acids to be critical for such localization. These findings give access to the study of Slm1’s role in mitochondrial function, and a stress response pathway that has never been studied before—a pathway that relays stress signals to the regulation of cell metabolism.
MANIFESTATION OF OPTIMISM AMONG MIDDLE-AGED PEOPLE IN THE CONTEXT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING

psychological well-being and self-efficacy than those who have the low levels of social desirability and the high levels of optimism; the subjects who are inclined to use unrealistic optimism as a protective mechanism, have the higher indicators of social desirability and are characterized by the lower indicators of psychological well-being and self-efficacy. Conclusions. The correlations between optimism and psychological components confirm the theoretical information about optimism and pessimism as the independent psychological characteristics of the individual, which in its turn, take part in the experience of the personality of psychological well-being.
Knowledge and attitude among outpatient women visiting a healthcare center in northern Iran regarding breast self-examination: a cross-sectional study Attitude in breast self-examination

Purpose – Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent malignancies worldwide. This study aimed to compare the level ofknowledge and attitudeof females regarding Breastcancerand to determinethe roleof knowledge, attitude and barriers in performing regular self-examination. Design/methodology/approach – Non-physician females aged 18 years old or above were enrolled in this cross-sectional study in two groups of usual clients and healthcare staff from January 2018 to January 2019 from a healthcare center in Sari, a major city in the northern district of Iran. A questionnaire was used to score theparticipants ’ knowledgeandattitudelevelsusingquestionsabouttheparticipants ’ knowledgeandattitude towards Breast cancer along with their status on Breast self-examination and barriers. Mean scores were used for statistical analysis using SPSS V25. p < 0.05 was considered significant. Findings – Afinaldatasetof279femaleswerecollected.Asignificantdifferenceintheknowledgeandattitude regarding breast cancer was found between the two study groups ( p < 0.001). The practice of BSE was significantly lower in the usual clients compared to non-physician healthcare staff ( p < 0.001). The most frequentbarriersfornotperformingaregularBSEwerefearoffindingamassinusualclients(17.8%)andlackofconfidenceinhealthcarestaff(3.8%). Research limitations/implications – Limitations include single-centered sample selection. Practicalimplications – Giventheimportanceofearlydetectioninbreastcancerpreventionandthegeneral taboo regarding breast cancer screening methods in certain parts of the world, leading to poor results in early detection and prevention, the authors believe that it is of superior importance to address and promote positive attitudes in general population towards breast self-examination. Originality/value – Given the importance of early detection in breast cancer prevention, and the general taboo regarding breast cancer screening methods in certain parts of the world, leading to poor results in early detection and prevention, the authors believe that it is of superior importance to address and promote positive attitudes in general population toward breast self-examination. The authors of this study believe that the manuscript represents honest and original work.
Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviors as Risk Factors of Obesity among Rural Adolescents Journal of Child & Adolescent Behavior

Objective: The aim of this study is to explore relationship between Physical activity and sedentary behavior (screen time) and obesity among adolescents in rural areas. Methodology: Cross-sectional study was conducted in 2011 using a multistage randomization method. It surveyed 370 from rural areas of Riyadh region in Saudi Arabia. Results: This study found a strong association between the moderate to vigorous METs and overweight and obesity among male participants (p<0.001). Prolonged screen time has strong association with overweight in males (p=0.01) and females (p<0.001). Similar association found between screen time and obesity in males and females (p<0.001). Conclusion: low physical activity and prolonged screen time are the main predictors for overweight or obesity or both of them in rural adolescents.
Matrix Completion with Covariate Information and Informative Missingness

We study the problem of matrix completion when the missingness of the matrix entries is dependent on the unobserved response values themselves and hence the missingness itself is informative. Furthermore, we allow to take into account the covariate information to establish its relation with the response and hence enable prediction. We devise a novel procedure to simultaneously complete the partially observed matrix and assess the covariate effect. Allowing the matrix dimensions as well as the number of covariates to grow ultra-high, under the classic low-rank matrix and sparse covariate effect assumptions, we rigorously establish the statistical guarantee of our procedure and the algorithmic convergence. The method is demonstrated via simulation studies and is used to analyze a Yelp data set and a MovieLens data set. keywords: matrix completion, informative missing, low rank, sparse, tensor 1. Motivation and Introduction Matrix completion has become a popular research topic in both statistics and computer science, mainly driven by the commercial need from online providers. Consider a concrete example from Yelp, where the scores from a total of n customers evaluating m restaurants are of interest. Let Yij be an indicator denoting whether the evaluation of the ith subject regarding the jth restaurant is positive, where i = 1, . , n, j = 1, . ,m. Let Y be the collection of Yij ’s, i.e. Y is a n ×m matrix. Obviously, not everyone will evaluate every restaurant, so many elements in Y are missing. Let Rij denote the corresponding missingness index and let R be the corresponding matrix formed by the collection of Rij ’s. It is sensible to suspect that the very fact of missingness is related to the potential evalua∗. Currently in Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, UCSF. †. Corresponding Author. c ©2022 Huaqing Jin, Yanyuan Ma and Fei Jiang. License: CC-BY 4.0, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Attribution requirements are provided at http://jmlr.org/papers/v23/20-748.html.
A hierarchical multidimensional graded response model with application to the study of sustainability perception

Hierarchical multidimensional item response theory (IRT) models have been developed to incorporate a general trait and more than one dimension of speciﬁc traits through diﬀerent latent structures. In this study, we propose to insert a hierarchical multidimensional structure in the Samejima’s graded response model. In order to estimate the parameters of the proposed model, we use a Bayesian approach through the No-U-Turn Sampler algorithm, a Markov chain Monte Carlo method. Simulation study is conducted to evaluate the parameter recovery in diﬀerent scenarios. The results indicated that NUTS algorithm properly recovers all parameters and is accurate for all simulated scenarios. In order to demonstrate the practical applica-tions of the proposed model, we consider actual data about sustainability perception of the Paran´a III Basin residents in Brazil. The results suggest that (a) the model is appropriate to the data; (b) compared with the unidi-mensional graded response model, the proposed model better describe the data, providing useful information about the dimensions of speciﬁc traits and the relationship between them and the general trait; and (c) the use of a model with a hierarchical multidimensional structure should be based on the context of the data.
BeSt: The Belief and Sentiment Corpus

We present the BeSt corpus, which records cognitive state: who believes what (i.e., factuality), and who has what sentiment towards what. This corpus is inspired by similar source-and-target corpora, specifically MPQA and FactBank. The corpus comprises two genres, newswire and discussion forums, in three languages, Chinese (Mandarin), English, and Spanish. The corpus is distributed through the LDC.
A Global Survey of Android Dual-Use Applications Used in Intimate Partner Surveillance

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a pervasive societal problem that affects millions of people around the world. IPV perpetrators increasingly weaponize digital technologies like mobile applications (“apps”) to spy on, monitor, and harass victims. Surveillance-capable apps can have legitimate use cases, for example, locating children, and are therefore easily available on various mobile app stores like the Google Play Store. Nevertheless, these applications are easily repurposed by abusers to track their victims. The problem of such dual-use apps in IPV is global. However, current understanding of the ecosystem of such apps is limited to English-language apps, potentially limiting its relevance to non-English speaking IPV survivors across the world. In this paper, we study the prevalence of dualuse applications found in 15 languages and 27 countries. We collected 51,868 unique apps in 2020 from the Google Play Store, using queries such as “track wife’s location. ” Through a semi-manual analysis of a subset of these apps, we discovered 854 unique dualuse apps, and estimate that among the apps collected from Google Play, 3,988 are dual-use apps. We found notable differences in app search results, suggested queries, and marketed capabilities of dual-use apps across different languages. For instance, we identified that 18% of dual-use apps do not have an English description, and 28% could not be found using English queries. Google Play (cursorily) blocks certain queries referring explicitly to intimate partner surveillance (IPS) to discourage potential abusers, but the blocking efficacy varies across languages. For example, we found that 80% of explicit IPS queries for English are blocked, but none for Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Malay, Thai, and Vietnamese. Thus, abusers fluent in those languages can evade such blocking with no effort.
RUCIR at the NTCIR-16 Session Search (SS) Task

This paper presents the participation of the RUCIR group, an information retrieval research group in Renmin University of China, in the NTCIR-16 Session Search Task. We will discuss the approach we used to generate the session search runs, and introduce the main experimental results. More specifically, we use the state-of-the-art context-aware ranking model COCA, which is based on BERT and contrastive learning, to generate the runs we submitted to the task. In addition, we use the BM25 algorithm and usefulness labels to make our ranking results more accurate. Official results show that our best run outperforms all other participants’ runs in terms of all official metrics in both subtasks.
Measuring the economic impact of Commonwealth Scholarships: Identifying Methodologies for Cost Benefit Analysis and Value for Money

instrument used to make allocation decisions in education has been the so-called “rate of return” analysis – originally formulated by Psacharopoulos et al (1986) and subsequently proofed by Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2002). These analyses researched the private and social rates of return on educational investment across 98 countries. Overall, their findings suggest that in developing countries both private and social returns to primary and secondary education are significantly higher than for tertiary education. In their 2002 study, for instance, Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2002) find that while the social rate of return is of the order of roughly 18.9% for primary education, the return on tertiary education is of just 10.9%. These findings imply that the effectiveness of targeting primary and secondary education is higher.
A qualitative study of smartwatch usage and its usability

This study aims to explore usability issues of watch‐type wearable devices and to suggest guidelines for improved operation of smartwatches. To do so, we conducted a series of surveys, interviews, and task performance experiments. Thirty smartwatch users from ages 20 to 43 years were recruited. Users’ experiences of smartwatches were collected via a weeklong, online‐based diary study, which consisted of various tasks to be completed while smartwatches were in use. Our study assessed usability problems associated with those tasks, concurrent tasks conducted while interacting with smartwatches, pain points/discomfort that users had while interacting with their devices, and requirements/requests of the smartwatch users. During the week of tracking, participants were asked to complete the usability evaluation three times a day using usability principles we designed for the study: information display, control, learnability, interoperability, and preference. In addition, task performance tests were conducted for the tasks most frequently conducted on touch‐based displays: number entry, swiping, and scrolling. Specific usability issues of smartwatches were identified and summarized for each usability principle by triangulating survey, interview, and task performance evaluation results. Based on the insights from the results of the study, we conclude by suggesting guidelines for further enhancing users’ experience of future smartwatches.
Executive Climate Risk Analysis for Identifying and Weighing Adaptation Strategies in Niger’s Agricultural Sector

diversification, (high or low) or future economic development pathway (negative or positive). Thus, all four analysed strategies were found to be economically beneficial under the current as well as the projected future climate compared to business-as-usual agricultural practices. More specifically, the results indicate that for our case studies, ISFM for millet and cowpea intercropping has the most positive return on a rather small-scale investment , followed by irrigated alfalfa fodder production, agroforestry for millet and cowpea intercropping, and vegetables and crops production with off-season irrigation.
Extent Estimation of Sailing Boats Applying Elliptic Cones to 3D LiDAR Data

In this paper, approximating the shape of a sailing boat using elliptic cones is investigated. Measurements are assumed to be gathered from the target's surface recorded by 3D scanning devices such as multilayer LiDAR sensors. Therefore, different models for estimating the sailing boat's extent are presented and evaluated in simulated and real-world scenarios. In particular, the measurement source association problem is addressed in the models. Simulated investigations are conducted with a static and a moving elliptic cone. The real-world scenario was recorded with a Velodyne Alpha Prime (VLP-128) mounted on a ferry of Lake Constance. Final results of this paper constitute the extent estimation of a single sailing boat using LiDAR data applying various measurement models.
Trading for Economies of Scale: The Cost Efficiency of Cap-and-Trade in Common-Pool Resources

Cap-and-trade (CAT) has been considered cost-effective because trading provides a means for the cap to flow towards their highest-valued use. I offer a new perspective of CAT: Cost efficiency owing to economies of scale. That is, if the average cost of a firm is decreasing, trading will allow the firm to expand their operation, thereby producing at lower per-unit costs. To examine this hypothesis, I overcome the unobserved-cost challenge by introducing a method to estimate output elasticity of costs and infer economies of scale using data on output and input quantity. I combine this method with various approaches of estimating a production function and the identification strategy of differencesin-differences framework that exploits the policy transition from non-tradable cap to capand-trade in Norwegian cod fishery. Results show vessels had economies of scale before trading and vessels acquiring caps expanded their operation and moved toward the minimum average cost levels. When decomposing the output growth into factors of economies of scale that capture the cost efficiency and the component due to productivity change that captures the cost effectiveness, I find economies of scale played the main role in the first few years after a vessel acquires caps, whereas productivity improvement dominates the output growth afterwards. The finding of gains owing to economies of scale suggests the gains of CAT and resource rent may be underestimated if only the cost effectiveness due to productivity heterogeneity is evaluated.
Mhd and radiation effects on natural convection flow in a porous medium past an infinite inclined plate with ramped wall temperature: an exact analysis

The unsteady magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) free convection flows in a porous medium past an infinite inclined plate with MHD and radiation effects are considered. It is assumed that the bounding infinite inclined plate has a ramped wall temperature. Exact solutions using the Laplace transform technique are obtained for the velocity and temperature fields. Expressions for nondimensional skin-friction and Nusselt number have been presented in tabular forms. The influence of various embedded flow parameters such as magnetic field parameter, radiation parameter and inclination angle on velocity and temperature have been analyzed through graphs and discussed.
Facilitating sustainability of a product's lifecycle impact in the early stages of product development

Due to the higher potential impact on a product’s sustainability, this research focuses on the early stages of the design process, and the delivery of simplified information to assist and guide designers in their decision-making process. A specific tool (Trophec) was developed with a ‘soft modelling’ approach as its main characteristic, which delivers a holistic perspective of the life cycle of a given product. Evidence was found indicating that around 80% of a product’s environmental impact can be traced back to the early stages of design, when designers work in a very intuitive, rapid and conceptual way. Furthermore, dozens of ‘eco-design’ tools, guides, checklist and working frames were explored. Existing research into some of these ‘eco-design’ tools has found that they were mainly used, or provided assistance to designers, at late stages of product development, when the product has already been conceived and many decisions have been made and subsequent compromises decided upon. These tools do not seem to respond appropriately to the culture and needs of designers in early stages. Moreover, these tools are not being used among other reasons because of their complexity and/or requirement of investing long periods of time and specialised knowledge. A test was developed in order to detect any influence of the tool in the designers’ working processes, in which graduate, undergraduate students and professional designers participated. The protocol consisted of a design task with a ‘think aloud’ method. The task was completed with a semi-structured interview. In parallel to these tests, the web-based tool was open to the public, registering data from more than 400 users from all over the World. These tests showed evidence related to designers not voluntarily incorporating sustainability criteria into their projects, as they perceive this activity as optional and to add later on the process, once the product is defined. Important statements were made in the interviews, in relation to the limited capability of designers to truly influence the outcome of the entire design process, understanding that some issues of it are determined by other departments or professionals within a company, normally management and marketing. All the previous supports findings in the literature review and highlight little change in the last 10 to 15 years. As major contribution of this research, stands the novel method used to capture, analyse and visualise the designers’ working processes, as well as the identification of certain basic conditions for the future testing and analysis of ‘soft modelling’ tools at early stages of new product development.
Electric vehicles in smart grid: a survey on charging load modelling

Electric vehicles (EVs) have been rapidly developed during the last few years due to the low-carbon industry and smart grid initiatives. Meanwhile, the impact of large-scale EVs' integration on the reliability and safety of power grids is becoming increasingly prominent. To address and solve these problems, challenges on EV charging control have been presented. Besides, the EV charging load modelling with improved accuracy and rationality is required. To investigate the influencing factors of EV charging load, this survey summarises the existing EV charging load modelling methods. In addition, a new research framework for a scale EV evolution model of charging load is proposed, with an emphasis on reducing the deficiencies of the existing research in dealing with the EV scale development. Moreover, the future research prospect of EV charging load modelling on power system planning, operation, and market design has also been discussed.