SIRIS-Lab/unlabelled-sti-corpus huggingface dataset:
Photorealistic real-time rendering of spherical raindrops with hierarchical reflective and refractive maps

Synthesizing rainy images is a common challenge found in film, game engines, driving simulators, and architectural design. Simulating light transport through a raindrop's optical properties is a view-dependent problem, and large quantities of raindrops are required to produce a plausible rainy scene. Accurate methods for rendering raindrops exist but are often off-line techniques that are cost prohibitive for real-time applications. Most real-time solutions use textures to approximate the appearance of moving raindrops as streaks. These approaches produce plausible results but do not address the problem of temporal effects such as slow-motion or paused simulations. In such conditions, streak-based approximations are not suitable, and proper raindrop geometry should be considered. This paper describes a straight-forward approach for rendering raindrops in such temporal conditions. The proposed technique consists of a preprocessing stage that generates a raindrop mask and a run-time stage that renders raindrops as screen-aligned billboards. The mask's contents are adjusted on the basis of the viewpoint, viewing direction, and raindrop position. The proposed method renders millions of raindrops at real-time rates in current graphics hardware, making it suitable for applications that require high-visual quality without compromising performance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Eclogites of the Late Cambrian–Early Ordovician North Kokchetav tectonic zone (northern Kazakhstan): structural position and petrology

Abstract We consider the structural position and petrology of eclogites in the North Kokchetav accretion-collision zone located north of the Kokchetav metamorphic belt formed by high- and ultrahigh-pressure rocks. In the Early Ordovician North Kokchetav tectonic zone, thin sheets of mylonite and diaphthoric gneisses with eclogites are tectonically conjugate with the volcanic and sedimentary rocks of the Stepnyak paleoisland-arc zone. Eclogites have been revealed at two sites of the North Kokchetav tectonic zone—Chaikino and Borovoe. The Chaikino eclogites formed at 800–850 °C and 18–20 kbar, and the Borovoe eclogites, at 750–800 °C and 17–18 kbar. Study of pyroxene-plagioclase symplectite replacing omphacite of the eclogites at both sites has recognized three stages of regressive magmatism: (1) formation of coarse-grained clinopyroxene-plagioclase symplectite at 760–790 °C and 11–12 kbar, (2) formation of fine-grained clinopyroxene-plagioclase symplectite at 700–730 °C and 7–8 kbar, and (3) amphibolization of pyroxene at 570–600 °C and 5–6 kbar. The Ar-Ar age of muscovite from the Borovoe mica schists hosting eclogites is 493 ± 5 Ma, which corresponds to the time of cooling of metamorphic rocks to &amp;lt;370 °C. Hence, the peak of high-pressure metamorphism and all recognized stages of retrograde changes are dated to the Cambrian. The geological data evidence that eclogite-schist-gneiss sheets were localized in the accretion-collision zone and became conjugate with sedimentary and volcanic rocks no later than in the Middle Ordovician.
Emotions first. feeling reason: the role of emotions in reasoning

‘Emotions First’: Neuroscientists have recently discovered the primacy of feelings and emotions over reasoning, in our mental life. On the basis of these results, cognitive scientists are developing a semantics of conceptual classification, grounded on feelings and emotions towards the world. My work for the Marie Curie aims to show that the ancient Greek philosophers developed theories of action, where the battle between our desires and feelings towards the world grounded the pattern of rationality that emerged from this battle. On my reading of ancient philosophy – primarily Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics – the process of reasoning arises from a calculus of feelings and emotions (culminating in love), which aim towards the organism’s good. Socrates held that every human has an innate desire for his or her own good; the human organism struggles to find the good, guided by the desires of the soul. Plato and Aristotle saw the human soul as a locus of desires and motivations, whose contest constitutes deliberation for the good. For both philosophers, the soul’s competing motivations and feelings towards the world result in pleasure, if the competition outcome is successful, and in pain, if not. The successful competition is reasoning, the unsuccessful, miscalculation. I aim to investigate the hypothesis that ‘the emotional quest for the good of the organism is constitutive of rationality’ in an international research-hotbed of ‘emotions in reasoning’, at the Philosophy Centre of Edinburgh University, where philosophy meets cognitive science on ‘emotive lateral thinking’ and on the ‘extended knowledge hypothesis’. The training I can receive at this Center will empower me to present in the best theoretical framework the ancients’ intuition that the calculus of feelings can shed light into the origins of rationality. This is my ambition for the Marie Curie Fellowship.
The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Theory

The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Theory recenters theory in the boldest, most thought-provoking form possible within the criminological enterprise. Written by a team of internationally respected specialists, it provides readers with a clear overview of criminological theory, enabling them to reflect critically upon the variety of theoretical positions - traditional, emergent and desirable - that are constitutive of the discipline at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each chapter has been specially commissioned to include the following: A¢â,¬Â¢A brief historical overview of the theoretical perspective A¢â,¬Â¢Core ideas and key associated concepts A¢â,¬Â¢A critical review of the contemporary status of the perspective A¢â,¬Â¢Reflections on future developments In addition, the Handbook features a substantive introduction by the editors, providing a review of the development of criminological theory, the state of contemporary criminological theory and emergent issues and debates.
Augmented reality assisted farmer's intelligence toolkit

By the year 2050, the global population is set to touch 9.6 billion; one major challenge the world is going to face is feeding it’s population. Add to it the many challenges that plague the farming industry such as the change in climatic conditions, extreme weather conditions and impact on the environment, which have to be overcome in order to meet the demand for more food. 
Farmers deal on a daily basics with huge amounts of data which they have to interpret and act in accordance.
The Nexlys Lda’s Augmented Reality Assisted Farmer's Intelligence Toolkit(FIT) is a system designed to support the farmers in their daily operations. 
FIT aims to take the interaction between the farmers, their plantation fields and the deployed technological resources to a new level. It will deliver intelligence data via an Augmented Reality(AR) display and will allow farmers to interact with operational assets.
FIT will provide better, more streamlined crop management; maximize existing investments; reduce operation and management costs; reduce losses; improve profitability and working conditions.
FIT’s target customers are all farmers and farmer’s organizations.. 
The objectives of this feasibility assessment are to define market niches, consumer needs, evaluate relevant legislation and ethical aspects, identify and solve market barriers, determine the FIT’s technical feasibility, as well the economic and social impact of it’s commercialization. 
Within 5 years, the FIT’s commercialization will create a return on investment of 207%, grow the company sustainability and create the conditions to hire 60+ staff. Most importantly it will contribute as an answer to the European Union(EU)’s sustainable development Goal 2.  End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
Coin Based Universal Mobile Battery Charger

The coin-based mobile battery charger developed in this paper is providing a unique service to the rural public where grid power is not available for partial/full daytime and a source of revenue for site providers. The coin-based mobile battery charger can be quickly and easily installed outside any business premises. The mobile phone market is a vast industry, and has spread into rural areas as a essential means of communication.While the urban population use more sophisticated mobiles with good power batteries lasting for several days, the rural population buy the pre owned mobile phones that require charging frequently. Many times battery becomes flat in the middle of conversation particularly at inconvenient times when access to a standard charger isn't possible. The coin-based mobile battery chargers are designed to solve this problem. The user has to plug the mobile phone into one of the adapters and insert a coin; the phone will then be given a micro-pulse for charging. It does not bring a mobile from 'dead' to fully charged state. The charging capacity of the mobile is designed with the help of pre defined values. It is, of course, possible to continue charging the mobile by inserting more coins. This compact and lightweight product is designed to cater for the growing number of rural mobile users worldwide. A suitable microcontroller is programmed for all the controlling applications. The source for charging is obtained from direct power grid and solar energy in case of non availability of grid power.
DRONE FOR SURFACE DEFECTS INSPECTION

The present disclosure relates to a drone (100) for inspecting surface defects in an enclosed environment. The drone (100) comprises: a body (102) comprising a set of guard frames (104); a set of propellers (108) for moving the drone (100), each propeller (108) configured to be mounted to one of the guard frames (104); a set of sensors (112) for cooperatively navigating the drone (100) in the enclosed environment; and an inspection module (114) configured to be mounted to the body (102), the inspection module (114) comprising a set of cameras (116) for capturing visual data of the surface defects, wherein the visual data is subsequently processed to thereby inspect the surface defects.
Maker education and anthropocene: Brazilian and Colombian ecologization / Educação Maker e antropoceno: ecologização no intercâmbio Brasil-Colômbia

The use of natural resources on our planet must be addressed on the environmental agendas of all governments.In this period known as Anthropocene, global warming is critical to the 21 st century environmental agenda, affecting biogeochemical cycles and planetary biodiversity.Education is a key factor in scientific information and debate on the ecological crisis.Maker education is used in greening approach with renewable materials.This case study presents initiatives from the Brazilian Professional and Technological Education.The results are analyzed in cooperation with Colombian researchers, amplifying initiatives for greening approach in educational institutions in both countries.
Deciphering the molecular mechanisms of hiv dna nuclear import and the impact of 3d genome organization on integration site selection

Chromosomes of eukaryotes adopt highly dynamic and complex hierarchical structures in the nucleus. The three-dimensional (3D) organization of chromosomes profoundly affects DNA functions, primarily transcription. During retroviral infection, histone-free viral DNA copy is synthesized from viral genomic RNA. vDNA will ultimately integrate into the host genome to ensure its maintenance and expression.  Understanding retrovirus-host interactions at the genomic level, and the peculiar mechanisms by which lentiviruses, including HIV-1, and their related gene transfer vectors, are imported into the nucleus, loaded with nucleosomes, integrate in, and interact with, the human genome will provide valuable information about lentiviral replication and establish the basis for the development of safer and more efficacious lentiviral vectors for human gene therapy. Our objectives are: 1-To identify and characterize cellular proteins associated with the HIV-1 PIC, and determine their roles in nuclear import and/or integration. 2-To explore the role of the epigenome of unintegrated vDNA in HIV-1 gene expression from unintegrated and integrated vDNA. 3- To determine the impact of nuclear organization on integration site selection and on viral and host transcription. State of the art technologies will be applied to achieve these challenging objectives. If successful, this project will make an outstanding contributions not only to the field of HIV biology but also for the development of safe lentiviral vectors for gene therapy.
Optimal Parallelogram Selection for Hierarchical Tiling

Loop tiling is an effective optimization to improve performance of multiply nested loops, which are the most time-consuming parts in many programs. Most massively parallel systems today are organized hierarchically, and different levels of the hierarchy differ in the organization of parallelism and the memory models they adopt. To make better use of these machines, it is clear that loop nests should be tiled hierarchically to fit the hierarchical organization of the machine; however, it is not so clear what should be the exact form of these hierarchical tiles. In particular, tile shape selection is of critical importance to expose parallelism of the tiled loop nests. Although loop tiling is a well-known optimization, not much is known about tile shape selection. In this article, we study tile shape selection when the shapes are any type of parallelograms and introduce a model to relate the tile shape of the hierarchy to the execution time. Using this model, we implement a system that automatically finds the tile shapes that minimize the execution time in a hierarchical system. Our experimental results show that in several cases, the tiles automatically selected by our system outperform the most intuitive tiling schemes usually adopted by programmers because of their simplicity.
Sharing strategies for European Research and Innovation Infrastructures

INNO  INFRA SHARE – Sharing Strategies for European Research and Innovation Infrastructures aims at improving efficiency and impact of the policies addressed to the exploitation of Research and Innovation Infrastructures (RII) for economic and social growth. Almost all EU regions encompass strategies on RII and in most cases Structural Funds measures address this topic and invest to start new research and innovation facilities, to enhance existing ones and to improve their exploitation for the benefit of the business sector. The project aims at developing appropriate solutions to improve RII governance, management, visibility, accessibility by companies in particular SMEs and with reference to KETs, which will improve the 8 policy instruments addressed. The partnership shares the goal to exploit local assets and investigate business models for long-term sustainability taking into account also possible synergies of 2014-2020 funds (e.g. EISF and H2020). Moreover, the focus will be on networking RII and promote collaboration opportunities, also at the international level, to better unleash their potential as enabler of competitiveness and growth for both local firms and foreign users and partners, adding a market-driven dimension to the research and technology one.
The partnership covers 8 European regions with common RIS3 priorities and will undertake a learning process, involving regional and national stakeholders, to get to a better understanding of the potential and needs of RII located in their areas, get advantage of successful experiences, learn from each other and share ideas and suggestions. The mutual learning will contribute to the design and implementation of 8 Action plans in respective territories to improve policy instruments performances and results, including new actions, projects, tools, governance mechanisms and networking, with the main target of increasing the number of companies accessing to RII and collaborating with research organizations.
Transactional memories for multi-processor FPGA platforms

Programming efficiency of heterogeneous concurrent systems is limited by the use of lock-based synchronization mechanisms. Transactional memories can greatly improve the programming efficiency of such systems. In field-programmable computing machines, a conventional fixed transactional memory becomes inefficient use of the silicon. We propose configurable transactional memory (CTM) as a mechanism to implement application specific synchronization that utilizes the field-programmability of such devices to match with the requirements of an application. The proposed configurable transactional memory is targeted at embedded applications and is area efficient compared to conventional schemes that are implemented with cache-coherent protocols. In particular, the CTM is designed to be incorporated in to compilation and synthesis paths of either high-level languages or during system creation process using tools such as Xilinx EDK. The proposed system supports an OpenMP-based programming paradigm for the efficient use of transactional memories. In addition, the conflict detection scheme can be configured to work either in lazy or in eager mode, depending on the application requirements. We study the impact of deploying a CTM using both micro-benchmarks and real applications as compared to a lock-based synchronization scheme. We have implemented the proposed scheme in a Xilinx Virtex4 device and found that the CTM can provide both higher programming efficiency, lower energy consumption and higher speedup than a fine-grained lock-based scheme.
Study of the corrosion behavior and the corrosion films formed on the surfaces of Mg–xSn alloys in 3.5wt.% NaCl solution

Abstract The corrosion behavior and the corrosion films formed on the surfaces of Mg–xSn (x = 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 wt.%) alloys in 3.5 wt.% NaCl solution were investigated by immersion tests, electrochemical measurements, corrosion morphology observations, and X-ray diffraction analysis. Immersion tests and electrochemical measurements illustrated that the best corrosion resistance was reported for the Mg–1.5Sn alloy. Both Mg(OH)2/SnO2 corrosion product film and Mg(OH)2/MgSnO3 clusters formed on Mg–1.5Sn alloy surface. Mg(OH)2/MgSnO3 clusters were compact and suppressed the cathodic effect of the impurity inclusions greatly. The Mg–xSn (x = 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0 wt.%) alloys only formed loose Mg(OH)2/SnO2 corrosion product film during the corrosion process.
Developing novel high temperature superconductor rotor windings for electric aircraft propulsion machines

The 2nd generation high temperature superconductor (2G HTS) machine has a significant advantage in high power density, enabling it to play a revolutionary role in electrical aircraft propulsion. However, existing research on 2G HTS machines reveals a major technique hurdle: the thermal stability of 2G HTS coils is too low for use in aviation. Being easily subject to damage during a quench or thermal fluctuation is unacceptable. The development of new technologies is a must to improve the thermal stability and reliability of HTS windings in electrical machines. A new winding technique, no-insulation (NI) coil, has been developed recently to improve the thermal stability of HTS coils in a high field magnet. The main idea is to remove the turn-to-turn electrical insulation. During a quench, the transport current can “bypass” the local normal region through its metallic turn-to-turn contact, significantly reducing the heat generated in the HTS. Therefore, NI coils are self-protecting compared to their insulated counterparts. 
This project will apply the NI technique to the HTS rotor windings of HTS synchronous machines, to significantly improve the thermal stability and reliability of the machine. This requires a clear understanding of the performance of NI HTS rotor windings in machine environments, which have not been studied yet. This project will substantially advance HTS machine technology by: 1) providing validated numerical tools to analyse the electromagnetic and thermal responses of NI coils in HTS machines; 2) proposing design strategies for using NI coils to improve stability and controllability. The novelty and originality of the project lies in the novel numerical methods for the NI coils and knowledge of the new characteristics of HTS machines with NI coils. This project will deliver a thorough understanding for the next generation of thermally reliable HTS machines with NI technology.
Protein structure, molecular mechanisms and human genetic disease: beyond the loss-of-function paradigm

The ability to identify damaging genetic variants is central to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of human disease. Computational phenotype predictors are widely used for prioritising likely pathogenic mutations, but their utility is limited by their accuracy. Conversely, experimental characterisation of variants is powerful but time consuming and difficult to perform on a large scale, limiting applicability in routine variant prioritisation. In this project, we will improve our ability to identify pathogenic variants through a combination of computational and experimental approaches. Fundamental to our strategy will be our consideration of alternate molecular mechanisms by which mutations can cause disease, in contrast to the current overwhelming focus on loss-of-function.

First, we will use structural bioinformatics to investigate the different molecular mechanisms underlying pathogenic mutations, and learn how they are related to protein structure and phenotype. Next, we will perform deep mutational scanning (DMS) on at least 10 human disease genes, enabling us to measure fitness and elucidate molecular mechanisms for all possible single amino-acid substitutions. This will facilitate the direct identification of novel pathogenic variants, and allow us to evaluate the performance existing computational phenotype predictors. Finally, we will implement our own computational variant prioritisation pipeline and meta-predictor, using our new understanding of molecular mechanisms to integrate computational phenotype and stability predictors and DMS data with structural and other protein-level features. Crucially, we will demonstrate the utility of our approach in application to sequencing data from clinical and population cohort studies. Together, the knowledge we learn, the experimental data we measure, and the tools we develop will improve our ability to identify novel pathogenic variants, and thus diagnose human genetic disorders.
Neural population dynamics during reaching

Most theories of motor cortex have assumed that neural activity represents movement parameters. This view derives from what is known about primary visual cortex, where neural activity represents patterns of light. Yet it is unclear how well the analogy between motor and visual cortex holds. Single-neuron responses in motor cortex are complex, and there is marked disagreement regarding which movement parameters are represented. A better analogy might be with other motor systems, where a common principle is rhythmic neural activity. Here we find that motor cortex responses during reaching contain a brief but strong oscillatory component, something quite unexpected for a non-periodic behaviour. Oscillation amplitude and phase followed naturally from the preparatory state, suggesting a mechanistic role for preparatory neural activity. These results demonstrate an unexpected yet surprisingly simple structure in the population response. This underlying structure explains many of the confusing features of individual neural responses.