A General Framework for Complex Network Applications

Complex network theory has been applied to solving practical problems from different domains. In this paper, we present a general framework for complex network applications. The keys of a successful application are a thorough understanding of the real system and a correct mapping of complex network theory to practical problems in the system. Despite of certain limitations discussed in this paper, complex network theory provides a foundation on which to develop powerful tools in analyzing and optimizing large interconnected systems.Comment: 8 page

A laser based differential power method for measuring the natural frequency of vibrations in a plastic string

The laser based non-contact and high bandwidth technique was developed to measure the natural frequency of vibrations in a thin string. The string, which is caused to vibrate by a piezoelectric actuator, was located in the middle of a beam of light from a laser. Changes in the power of the laser light resulting from micro-vibrations of the string were measured by a two-quadrant photo sensor. Tennis racket strings were selected for use in this experiment and vibrations were generated over a range of different frequencies to validate the laser measurement system. The results showed that the measured signals, which for analysis were subject to Fast Fourier Transformation, were coincident with the input frequency. Finally, the natural frequencies of strings subjected to different tension force were measured and analyzed to determine the validity of the method. The results showed a relative error of less than 0.6 %

Analyzing the influences of bicycle suspension systems on pedaling forces and human body vibration

Front and rear suspensions are commonly equipped on bicycles for the purpose of riding comfort especially for mountain bicycle. Suspension system includes damper for shock absorbing and spring for rebounding. Therefore suspension system would increase leg muscle forces for riding bicycle since damper dissipates some energy. ADAMS‎®‎/LifeMOD‎®‎ are proposed in this research to establish a bicycle-human integrated multibody dynamic model to investigate the impact of bicycle suspensions on cyclist’s leg muscle forces under various pedaling conditions and human body vibration for evaluation of riding comfort. Muscles studied include adductor magnus, rectus femoris, vastus lateralis and semitendinosus. Comfort analyses include the vibrating acceleration in vertical direction of lower torso and scapula. Pedaling conditions include riding on flat road, over a road bump, and climbing slope. The results indicate that suspension system increases the pedaling forces of vastus lateralis and semitendinosus. However suspension system decreases the pedaling forces of adductor magnus and rectus femoris. Suspension systems, especially the rear suspension, may effectively reduce human body vibrating acceleration. The integrated model built in this research may be used as reference for designing bicycle suspension systems. Also, the results of this study may be used as a basis of leg weight training to strengthen certain muscles for long-distance off-road cyclists

Right ventricular exclusion for hepatocellular carcinoma metastatic to the heart

We used for the first time a right ventricular exclusion procedure for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma metastatic to the right ventricle. Our case report shows that this surgical option can be effective as rescue therapy for right ventricular outflow tract obstruction secondary to myocardial metastasis in critically ill patients. Most notably, this technique can prevent inadvertent dislodgement of tumor cells

Design of near allpass strictly stable minimal phase real valued rational IIR filters

In this brief, a near-allpass strictly stable minimal-phase real-valued rational infinite-impulse response filter is designed so that the maximum absolute phase error is minimized subject to a specification on the maximum absolute allpass error. This problem is actually a minimax nonsmooth optimization problem subject to both linear and quadratic functional inequality constraints. To solve this problem, the nonsmooth cost function is first approximated by a smooth function, and then our previous proposed method is employed for solving the problem. Computer numerical simulation result shows that the designed filter satisfies all functional inequality constraints and achieves a small maximum absolute phase error

Learning Raw Image Denoising with Bayer Pattern Unification and Bayer Preserving Augmentation

In this paper, we present new data pre-processing and augmentation techniques for DNN-based raw image denoising. Compared with traditional RGB image denoising, performing this task on direct camera sensor readings presents new challenges such as how to effectively handle various Bayer patterns from different data sources, and subsequently how to perform valid data augmentation with raw images. To address the first problem, we propose a Bayer pattern unification (BayerUnify) method to unify different Bayer patterns. This allows us to fully utilize a heterogeneous dataset to train a single denoising model instead of training one model for each pattern. Furthermore, while it is essential to augment the dataset to improve model generalization and performance, we discovered that it is error-prone to modify raw images by adapting augmentation methods designed for RGB images. Towards this end, we present a Bayer preserving augmentation (BayerAug) method as an effective approach for raw image augmentation. Combining these data processing technqiues with a modified U-Net, our method achieves a PSNR of 52.11 and a SSIM of 0.9969 in NTIRE 2019 Real Image Denoising Challenge, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jiaming-Liu/BayerUnifyAug.Comment: Accepted by CVPRW 201

ADriver-I: A General World Model for Autonomous Driving

Typically, autonomous driving adopts a modular design, which divides the full stack into perception, prediction, planning and control parts. Though interpretable, such modular design tends to introduce a substantial amount of redundancy. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLM) and diffusion techniques have demonstrated their superior performance on comprehension and generation ability. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of interleaved vision-action pair, which unifies the format of visual features and control signals. Based on the vision-action pairs, we construct a general world model based on MLLM and diffusion model for autonomous driving, termed ADriver-I. It takes the vision-action pairs as inputs and autoregressively predicts the control signal of the current frame. The generated control signals together with the historical vision-action pairs are further conditioned to predict the future frames. With the predicted next frame, ADriver-I performs further control signal prediction. Such a process can be repeated infinite times, ADriver-I achieves autonomous driving in the world created by itself. Extensive experiments are conducted on nuScenes and our large-scale private datasets. ADriver-I shows impressive performance compared to several constructed baselines. We hope our ADriver-I can provide some new insights for future autonomous driving and embodied intelligence.Comment: Tech Repor

Discovering Chromatin Motifs using FAIRE Sequencing and the Human Diploid Genome

Background: Specific chromatin structures are associated with active or inactive gene transcription. The gene regulatory elements are intrinsically dynamic and alternate between inactive and active states through the recruitment of DNA binding proteins, such as chromatin-remodeling proteins. Results: We developed a unique genome-wide method to discover DNA motifs associated with chromatin accessibility using formaldehyde-assisted isolation of regulatory elements with high-throughput sequencing (FAIRE-seq). We aligned the FAIRE-seq reads to the GM12878 diploid genome and subsequently identified differential chromatin-state regions (DCSRs) using heterozygous SNPs. The DCSR pairs represent the locations of imbalances of chromatin accessibility between alleles and are ideal to reveal chromatin motifs that may directly modulate chromatin accessibility. In this study, we used DNA 6-10mer sequences to interrogate all DCSRs, and subsequently discovered conserved chromatin motifs with significant changes in the occurrence frequency. To investigate their likely roles in biology, we studied the annotated protein associated with each of the top ten chromatin motifs genome-wide, in the intergenic regions and in genes, respectively. As a result, we found that most of these annotated motifs are associated with chromatin remodeling, reflecting their significance in biology. Conclusions: Our method is the first one using fully phased diploid genome and FAIRE-seq to discover motifs associated with chromatin accessibility. Our results were collected to construct the first chromatin motif database (CMD), providing the potential DNA motifs recognized by chromatin-remodeling proteins and is freely available at http://syslab.nchu.edu.tw/chromatin