pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Detecting shadows and low-lying objects in indoor and outdoor scenes using homographies

Many computer vision applications apply background suppression techniques for the detection and segmentation of moving objects in a scene. While these algorithms tend to work well in controlled conditions they often fail when applied to unconstrained real-world environments. This paper describes a system that detects and removes erroneously segmented foreground regions that are close to a ground plane. These regions include shadows, changing background objects and other low-lying objects such as leaves and rubbish. The system uses a set-up of two or more cameras and requires no 3D reconstruction or depth analysis of the regions. Therefore, a strong camera calibration of the set-up is not necessary. A geometric constraint called a homography is exploited to determine if foreground points are on or above the ground plane. The system takes advantage of the fact that regions in images off the homography plane will not correspond after a homography transformation. Experimental results using real world scenes from a pedestrian tracking application illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach
Large-eddy simulation of spectral coherence in a wind turbine wake

This work is mainly dedicated to the study of the characteristics of spectral coherence of turbulence fluctuations in wind turbine wakes. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code has been implemented using a large-eddy simulation (LES) approach, which is thought to be conceptually more suitable for studying the turbulence evolution in a wind turbine wake. Comparisons with experimental data from the Nørrekær Enge II Windfarm, in Denmark, and with an analytical model proposed by Panofsky and Dutton have been performed, and the results are found to be in reasonable agreement with both
A Service based Development Environment on Web 2.0 Platforms

Governments are investing on the IT adoption and promoting the socalled e-economies as a way to improve competitive advantages. One of the main government’s actions is to provide internet access to the most part of the population, people and organisations. Internet provides the required support for connecting organizations, people and geographically distributed developments teams. Software developments are tightly related to the availability of tools and platforms needed for products developments. Internet is becoming the most widely used platform. Software forges such as SourceForge provide an integrated tools environment gathering a set of tools that are suited for each development with a low cost. In this paper we propose an innovating approach based on Web2.0, services and a method engineering approach for software developments. This approach represents one of the possible usages of the internet of the future
Relating data—parallelism and (and—) parallelism\ud
in logic programs

Much work has been done in the áreas of and-parallelism and data parallelism in Logic Programs. Such work has proceeded to a certain extent in an independent fashion. Both types of parallelism offer advantages and disadvantages. Traditional (and-) parallel models offer generality, being able to exploit parallelism in a large class of programs (including that exploited by data parallelism techniques). Data parallelism techniques on the other hand offer increased performance for a restricted class of programs. The thesis of this paper is that these two forms of parallelism are not fundamentally different and that relating them opens the possibility of obtaining the advantages of both within the same system. Some relevant issues are discussed and solutions proposed. The discussion is illustrated through visualizations of actual parallel executions implementing the ideas proposed
Site-controlled Ag nanocrystals grown by molecular beam epitaxy-Towards plasmonic integration technology

We demonstrate site-controlled growth of epitaxial Ag nanocrystals on patterned GaAs substrates by molecular beam epitaxy with high degree of long-range uniformity. The alignment is based on lithographically defined holes in which position controlled InAs quantum dots are grown. The Ag nanocrystals self-align preferentially on top of the InAs quantum dots. No such ordering is observed in the absence of InAs quantum dots, proving that the ordering is strain-driven. The presented technique facilitates the placement of active plasmonic nanostructures at arbitrarily defined positions enabling their integration into complex devices and plasmonic circuits
Implementation of a module for risk of ozone impacts assessment to vegetation in the integrated assessment modelling system for the Iberian peninsula. Evaluation for wheat and holm oak

A module to estimate risks of ozone damage to vegetation has been implemented in the Integrated Assessment Modelling system for the Iberian Peninsula. It was applied to compute three different indexes for wheat and Holm oak; daylight AOT40 (cumulative ozone concentration over 40 ppb), cumulative ozone exposure index according to the Directive 2008/50/EC (AOT40-D) and PODY (Phytotoxic Ozone Dose over a given threshold of Y nmol m−2 s−1). The use of these indexes led to remarkable differences in spatial patterns of relative ozone risks on vegetation. Ozone critical levels were exceeded in most of the modelling domain and soil moisture content was found to have a significant impact on the results. According to the outputs of the model, daylight AOT40 constitutes a more conservative index than the AOT40-D. Additionally, flux-based estimations indicate high risk areas in Portugal for both wheat and Holm oak that are not identified by AOT-based methods
Uniform Distributed Pushdown Automata Systems.

We consider here uniform distributed pushdown automata systems (UDPAS), namely distributed pushdown automata systems having all components identical pushdown automata. We consider here just a single protocol for activating/deactivating components, namely a component stays active as long as it can perform moves, as well as two ways of accepting the input word: by empty stacks (all components have empty stacks) or by final states (all components are in final states), when the input word is completely read. We mainly investigate the computational power of UDPAS accepting by empty stacks and a few decidability and closure properties of the families of languages they define. Some directions for further work and open problems are also discussed
Signal-to-noise ratio of the MEG signal after preprocessing

Background\ud
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) provides a direct measure of brain activity with high combined spatiotemporal resolution. Preprocessing is necessary to reduce contributions from environmental interference and biological noise.\ud
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New method\ud
The effect on the signal-to-noise ratio of different preprocessing techniques is evaluated. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was defined as the ratio between the mean signal amplitude (evoked field) and the standard error of the mean over trials.\ud
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Results\ud
Recordings from 26 subjects obtained during and event-related visual paradigm with an Elekta MEG scanner were employed. Two methods were considered as first-step noise reduction: Signal Space Separation and temporal Signal Space Separation, which decompose the signal into components with origin inside and outside the head. Both algorithm increased the SNR by approximately 100%. Epoch-based methods, aimed at identifying and rejecting epochs containing eye blinks, muscular artifacts and sensor jumps provided an SNR improvement of 5–10%. Decomposition methods evaluated were independent component analysis (ICA) and second-order blind identification (SOBI). The increase in SNR was of about 36% with ICA and 33% with SOBI.\ud
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Comparison with existing methods\ud
No previous systematic evaluation of the effect of the typical preprocessing steps in the SNR of the MEG signal has been performed.\ud
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Conclusions\ud
The application of either SSS or tSSS is mandatory in Elekta systems. No significant differences were found between the two. While epoch-based methods have been routinely applied the less often considered decomposition methods were clearly superior and therefore their use seems advisable
On correctness in RDF stream processor benchmarking

Two complementary benchmarks have been proposed so far for the evaluation and continuous improvement of RDF stream processors: SRBench and LSBench. They put a special focus on different features of the evaluated systems, including coverage of the streaming extensions of SPARQL supported by each processor, query processing throughput, and an early analysis of query evaluation correctness, based on comparing the results obtained by different processors for a set of queries. However, none of them has analysed the operational semantics of these processors in order to assess the correctness of query evaluation results. In this paper, we propose a characterization of the operational semantics of RDF stream processors, adapting well-known models used in the stream processing engine community: CQL and SECRET. Through this formalization, we address correctness in RDF stream processor benchmarks, allowing to determine the multiple answers that systems should provide. Finally, we present CSRBench, an extension of SRBench to address query result correctness verification using an automatic method
Cooperative localization in mobile networks using nonparametric variants of belief propagation

Of the many state-of-the-art methods for cooperative localization in wireless sensor networks (WSN), only very few adapt well to mobile networks. The main problems of the well-known algorithms, based on nonparametric belief propagation (NBP), are the high communication cost and inefficient sampling techniques. Moreover, they either do not use smoothing or just apply it o ine. Therefore, in this article, we propose more flexible and effcient variants of NBP for cooperative localization in mobile networks. In particular, we provide: i) an optional 1-lag smoothing done almost in real-time, ii) a novel low-cost communication protocol based on package approximation and censoring, iii) higher robustness of the standard mixture importance sampling (MIS) technique, and iv) a higher amount of information in the importance densities by using the population Monte Carlo (PMC) approach, or an auxiliary variable. Through extensive simulations, we confirmed that all the proposed techniques outperform the standard NBP method
A scalable approach for content based image retrieval in cloud datacenter

The emergence of cloud datacenters enhances the capability of online data storage. Since massive data is stored in datacenters, it is necessary to effectively locate and access interest data in such a distributed system. However, traditional search techniques only allow users to search images over exact-match keywords through a centralized index. These techniques cannot satisfy the requirements of content based image retrieval (CBIR). In this paper, we propose a scalable image retrieval framework which can efficiently support content similarity search and semantic search in the distributed environment. Its key idea is to integrate image feature vectors into distributed hash tables (DHTs) by exploiting the property of locality sensitive hashing (LSH). Thus, images with similar content are most likely gathered into the same node without the knowledge of any global information. For searching semantically close images, the relevance feedback is adopted in our system to overcome the gap between low-level features and high-level features. We show that our approach yields high recall rate with good load balance and only requires a few number of hops
Advances in technologies and techniques for ambient intelligence

Human activity attracting a lot of research activity in several fields including the use of wireless sensors, positioning technologies and techniques, embedded computing, remote sensing and energy management among others.\ud
There are a number of applications where the results of those investigations can be applied, including ambient intelligence to support human activity, particularly the elderly and disabled people. Ambient intelligence is a new paradigm for the information and communications technologies where the electronic/digital environment takes care of the people presence and their needs, becoming an active, adaptive and responsive environment
A stochastic model of autocatalytic reaction networks

Erworben im Rahmen der Schweizer Nationallizenzen (http://www.nationallizenzen.ch)Autocatalytic cycles are rather widespread in nature and in several theoretical models of catalytic reaction networks their emergence is hypothesized to be inevitable when the network is or becomes sufficiently complex. Nevertheless, the emergence of autocatalytic cycles has been never observed in wet laboratory experiments. Here, we present a novel model of catalytic reaction networks with the explicit goal of filling the gap between theoretical predictions and experimental findings. The model is based on previous study of Kauffman, with new features in the introduction of a stochastic algorithm to describe the dynamics and in the possibility to increase the number of elements and reactions according to the dynamical evolution of the system. Furthermore, the introduction of a temporal threshold allows the detection of cycles even in our context of a stochastic model with asynchronous update. In this study, we describe the model and present results concerning the effect on the overall dynamics of varying (a) the average residence time of the elements in the reactor, (b) both the composition of the firing disk and the concentration of the molecules belonging to it, (c) the composition of the incoming flux
Exact steady-state Wigner function for a nondegenerate parametric oscillator

We consider the model of a nondegenerate parametric oscillator, in the adiabatic limit of strongly damped pump mode, and find an exact analytic solution for the joint two-mode Wigner function in the steady-state regime. The one-mode Wigner functions for the individual signal and idler modes are derived as well. This gives an explicit and complete phase-space representation of this two-mode nonequilibrium quantum system. Simple examples are given illustrating the phase-space images of optical bistability and the phase diffusion effect
Intact facial adaptation in autistic adults

Adaptation paradigms seek to bias subsequently viewed stimuli through prolonged exposure to an adapting stimulus, thereby giving rise to an aftereffect. Recent experiments have found that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show reduced facial aftereffects, prompting some researchers to speculate that all individuals with ASD exhibit deficient facial adaptation. However, caution is required when generalizing findings from samples of children with ASD to the wider ASD population. The reduced facial aftereffects seen in child samples may instead reflect delayed or atypical developmental trajectories, whereby individuals with ASD are slower to develop adaptive mechanisms. In the present study, two experiments were conducted to determine whether high-functioning adults with ASD also show diminished aftereffects for facial identity and expression. In Experiment 1, using a procedure that minimized the contribution of low-level retinotopic adaptation, we observed substantial aftereffects comparable to those seen in matched controls, for both facial identity and expression. A similar pattern of results was seen in Experiment 2 using a revised procedure that increased the contribution of retinotopic adaptation to the facial aftereffects observed. That adults with autism can show robust facial aftereffects raises the possibility that group differences are seen only at particular points during development, and may not be a lifelong feature of the condition
Angular distribution of radiation by relativistic electrons in a thin crystal

ThéorieThe results of theoretical investigation of angular distributions of radiation from a relativistic electron passing through a thin crystal at a small angle to the crystal axis are presented. The electron trajectories in crystal were simulated using the binary collision model which takes into account both coherent and incoherent effects at scattering. The angular distribution of radiation was calculated as a sum of radiation from each electron. It is shown that there are nontrivial angular distributions of the emitted photons, which is connected to the superposition of the coherent scattering of electrons by atomic rows (doughnut scattering effect) and the suppression of the radiation due to the multiple scattering effect (similar to the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect in an amorphous matter). The orientation dependence of angular distribution of radiation is also analyzed
Autism spectrum traits in children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

-Objective:  

Assess the prevalence of autistic traits (AST) in pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and relate them to OCD co-morbidity and compare them with published normative data.

Methods:  

Pediatric patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (n = 109) according to the DSM-IV were studied using parent ratings of the Autistic Symptom/Syndrome Questionnaire to assess AST symptoms as a continuous rather than categorical trait. The KSADS, a semi-structured psychiatric interview, was used for the psychiatric diagnostic evaluation. Also, the Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale was used to assess OCD severity and other clinical features.

Results:  

AST was common among our patients. Symptom scores were highest in cases with co-morbid Autistic Spectrum Disorders, but cases with other co-morbidities as tics/Tourette and attention/behavioral disorders also scored higher. All sub-groups, including OCD without these co-morbidities scored higher than the Swedish normative group. Using ANOVA, co-morbid ASD and tics/Tourette (plus a term for gender by tic interaction indicating that girls with tics scored high, otherwise low) and pathological doubt contributed (R2 = .41) to the AST-traits, while OCD severity and co-morbid anxiety- and depressive disorders did not.

Conclusion:  

AST traits are prevalent in OCD and seem to be intricately associated with the co-morbidities as well as the OCD syndrome itself. The findings might have implication for our nosological understanding of OCD which currently is discussed
The Genomic HyperBrowser: an analysis web server for genome-scale data

The immense increase in availability of genomic scale datasets, such as those provided by the ENCODE and Roadmap Epigenomics projects, presents unprecedented opportunities for individual researchers to pose novel falsifiable biological questions. With this opportunity, however, researchers are faced with the challenge of how to best analyze and interpret their genome-scale datasets. A powerful way of representing genome-scale data is as feature-specific coordinates relative to reference genome assemblies, i.e. as genomic tracks. The Genomic HyperBrowser (http://hyperbrowser.uio.no) is an open-ended web server for the analysis of genomic track data. Through the provision of several highly customizable components for processing and statistical analysis of genomic tracks, the HyperBrowser opens for a range of genomic investigations, related to, e.g., gene regulation, disease association or epigenetic modifications of the genome.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
Microstructural characterization of ball-milled metal matrix nanocomposites (Cr, Ni, Ti)-25 wt. % (Al2O3np, SiCnp)

The microstructure of high-temperature metals such as Ti, Ni, and Cr can be modified using ceramic nanoparticles to form metal matrix nanocomposites (MMNCs). Such materials are generally prepared via powder metallurgy routes. In this study, 25 wt. % SiCnp and Al2O3np were separately ball-milled as a reinforcement of Ti, Cr, and Ni matrices to investigate their effects on the phase formation and morphology of the MMNCs. The XRD, SEM, and FESEM results indicated that the alumina-metal system could not be thermodynamically stable in a high-energy ball mill, while the SiC reinforcement could be retained and milled with the metals even after 24 hours. It was further observed that the distribution of nanoparticles was not affected by the type of metal, ceramic, and milling time. Finally, it was determined that the nanoparticles significantly reduced the average particle size of composite powders
Unsteady flow field in a mini VAWT with relative rotation blades: analysis of temporal results

The present wind turbine is a small one which can be used on roofs or in gardens.
This turbine has a vertical axis. Each turbine blade combines a rotating movement around its
own axis and around the main rotor axis. Due to this combination of movements, flow around
this turbine is highly unsteady and needs to be modelled by unsteady calculation. The present
work is an extended study starting in 2009. The benefits of combined rotating blades have been
shown. The performance coefficient of this kind of turbine is very good for some blade stagger
angles. Spectral analysis of unsteady results on specific points in the domain and temporal
forces on blades was already presented for elliptic blades. The main aim here is to compare two
kinds of blades in case of the best performances
Mathematical simulation of motion of working medium at finishing-grinding treatment in the oscillating reservoir

The results of mathematical simulation have been carried out for the pattern of working medium motion providing the technological process of finishing–grinding treatment in an oscillating reservoir. With use of physics laws, it is ascertained and grounded that the flow of granules at the plane wall of reservoir is travelling oppositely to the source of vibrations, whereas the granules are drifting on the cycloid–trochoid trajectories from the wall of reservoir, where the looped displacement is maximal, to the center of reservoir in which the shift of granules is reduced to minimum because of damping and dissipation effect. The received theoretical regulations have a fundamental nature and can be used at the account of technological parameters of designed vibration machines