Panasonic (Germany)

BACKGROUND: Human poisoning by pesticides has long been seen as a severe public health problem. As early as 1990, a task force of the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that about one million unintentional pesticide poisonings occur annually, leading to approximately 20,000 deaths. Thirty years on there is no up-to-date picture of global pesticide poisoning despite an increase in global pesticide use. Our aim was to systematically review the prevalence of unintentional, acute pesticide poisoning (UAPP), and to estimate the annual global number of UAPP. METHODS: We carried out a systematic review of the scientific literature published between 2006 and 2018, supplemented by mortality data from WHO. We extracted data from 157 publications and the WHO cause-of-death database, then performed country-wise synopses, and arrived at annual numbers of national UAPP. World-wide UAPP was estimated based on national figures and population data for regions defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). RESULTS: In total 141 countries were covered, including 58 by the 157 articles and an additional 83 by data from the WHO Mortality Database. Approximately 740,000 annual cases of UAPP were reported by the extracted publications resulting from 7446 fatalities and 733,921 non-fatal cases. On this basis, we estimate that about 385 million cases of UAPP occur annually world-wide including around 11,000 fatalities. Based on a worldwide farming population of approximately 860 million this means that about 44% of farmers are poisoned by pesticides every year. The greatest estimated number of UAPP cases is in southern Asia, followed by south-eastern Asia and east Africa with regards to non-fatal UAPP. CONCLUSIONS: Our study updates outdated figures on world-wide UAPP. Along with other estimates, robust evidence is presented that acute pesticide poisoning is an ongoing major global public health challenge. There is a need to recognize the high burden of non-fatal UAPP, particularly on farmers and farmworkers, and that the current focus solely on fatalities hampers international efforts in risk assessment and prevention of poisoning. Implementation of the international recommendations to phase out highly hazardous pesticides by the FAO Council could significantly reduce the burden of UAPP.

This paper describes the in-loop deblocking filter used in the upcoming High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard to reduce visible artifacts at block boundaries. The deblocking filter performs detection of the artifacts at the coded block boundaries and attenuates them by applying a selected filter. Compared to the H.264/AVC deblocking filter, the HEVC deblocking filter has lower computational complexity and better parallel processing capabilities while still achieving significant reduction of the visual artifacts.

In this paper, a generalized proportional fair (GPF) scheduling algorithm is presented, which allows tweaking the trade-off between fairness and throughput performance for best effort traffic in a cellular downlink scenario. The GPF is extended to frequency scheduling in an OFDMA system by performing dynamic channel allocation on a subband basis including link adaptation by adaptive modulation and coding. In this way, multiuser diversity can be utilized in time domain - as for CDMA - and in frequency domain. Compared to a system without frequency scheduling, this increases the system throughput and yields an improved fairness with respect to the allocated resources and with respect to the achieved data-rate per user. OFDMA system level simulations are carried out in order to analyze short/long-term fairness, multiuser diversity gain and system throughput of various GPF configurations with and without applying frequency scheduling.

With the ever growing demand of data applications, traditional cellular networks face the challenges of providing enhanced system capacity, extended cell coverage, and improved minimum throughput in a cost-effective manner. Wireless relay stations, especially when operating in a halfduplex operation, make it possible without incurring high site acquisition and backhaul costs. Design of wireless relay stations faces the challenges of providing backward compatibility, minimizing complexity, and maximizing efficiency. This article provides an overview of the challenges and solutions in the design of relay stations as one of the salient features for 3GPP LTE advanced.

BACKGROUND: Severe hypoglycemic episodes are a barrier for achieving optimal glycemic control. Sensor-augmented pump (SAP) therapy with insulin in combination with a novel mechanism of automatic insulin shutoff (low glucose suspend [LGS]) can be used to prevent and reduce hypoglycemia. In a prospective study, we investigated the effect of the LGS algorithm on the frequency of hypoglycemia in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes under real-life conditions. METHODS: Twenty-one patients with type 1 diabetes (10.8±3.8 years old, duration of diabetes 5.9±3.0 years, pump therapy for 3.7±1.7 years, glycated hemoglobin level 7.8±1.1%) from three pediatric centers used the Paradigm(®) Veo(™) system (Medtronic Minimed, Northridge, CA) during two subseqent time periods: SAP without LGS for 2 weeks and then SAP with LGS enabled for 6 weeks. The primary objective was to assess the frequency of hypoglycemic episodes when using the LGS feature with an insulin delivery shutoff of a maximum of 2 h at a sensor glucose level below 70 mg/dL (3.9 mmol/L). RESULTS: In total, 1,298 LGS alerts occurred (853 shorter than 5 min). Forty-two percent of LGS activations (>5 min) lasted less than 30 min, whereas 24% had a duration of 2 h. The number of hypoglycemic excursions (average/day) was reduced during SAP+LGS (<70 mg/L, 1.27±0.75 vs. 0.95±0.49, P=0.010; ≤40 mg/dL, 0.28±0.18 vs. 0.13±0.14, P=0.005) as was the time spent in hypoglycemia (average minutes/day, 101±68 vs. 58±33, P=0.002) without significant difference in the mean glucose level (145±23 vs. 148±19 mg/dL). No episodes of severe hyperglycemia or diabetic ketoacidosis were observed following LGS activation. CONCLUSIONS: The present investigation provides evidence that SAP with LGS reduces the frequency of hypoglycemia without compromising safety.

Throughout the last decades, the Robotics Community has influenced the Autonomous Vehicles field in multiple different areas ranging from Scene Understanding and Decision Making to Vehicle Control and Optimal Path Planning. Existing path planning algorithms such as A-star, Dijkstra and Graph-based approaches, although providing good optimal path approximations, are suffering from high-runtimes to convergence. This paper presents an innovative and computationally efficient approach of fusing the well-known Hybrid A-star search engine with the Visibility Diagram planning to find the shortest possible non-holonomic path in a hybrid (continuous-discrete) environment for valet parking. The primary novelty of our method stems from two points: at first, we use the Visibility Diagram to introduce an improved and application-aware cost function for the Hybrid A-star algorithm, and then the derived shortest path is used to provide the correct waypoints for the Hybrid A-star to plan the optimum path in regard to the non-holonomic constraints. The method has been extensively tested and proven to up to 40% (20% in average) faster than Hybrid A-star algorithm.

This paper provides an overview of the optional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna scheme adopted in ATSC 3.0 to improve robustness or increase capacity via additional spatial diversity and multiplexing by sending two data streams in a single radio frequency channel. Although it is not directly specified, it is expected in practice to use cross-polarized 2×2 MIMO (i.e., horizontal and vertical polarization) to retain multiplexing capabilities in line-of-sight conditions. MIMO allows overcoming the channel capacity limit of single antenna wireless communications in a given channel bandwidth without any increase in the total transmission power. But in the U.S. MIMO can actually provide a larger comparative gain because it would be allowed to increase the total transmit power, by transmitting the nominal transmit power in each polarization. Hence, in addition to the MIMO gains (array, diversity, and spatial multiplexing), MIMO could exploit an additional 3 dB power gain. The MIMO scheme adopted in ATSC 3.0 re-uses the single-input single-output antenna baseline constellations, and hence it introduces the use of MIMO with non-uniform constellations.

This paper presents an advanced hybrid ARQ technique applicable to QAM multilevel modulation formats together with type II hybrid ARQ (automatic repeat request) schemes, in which at least part of the initially transmitted bits is repeated in retransmissions. The presented technique averages over retransmissions the variations in bit reliabilities caused by the signal constellation of multilevel modulation formats to improve decoding performance. It is shown that by rearranging the signal constellation for retransmissions a significant gain in hybrid ARQ performance is achieved with only a marginal increase in complexity.

AIM: Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is often responsible for acute liver failure, drug withdrawal, boxed warnings or drug non-approval. Therefore, we conducted a case-control study to determine the hepatotoxic risk of a wide range of drugs. METHODS: The Berlin Case-Control Surveillance Study FAKOS included all 51 Berlin hospitals in a hospital network. Between 2002 and 2011, 198 patients with acute idiopathic hepatitis, 377 inpatient controls and 708 outpatient controls were ascertained. Case patients were thoroughly validated using anamnestic, clinical, laboratory and histological data. Drug exposure was obtained in a face-to-face interview. A possible drug aetiology was assessed in individual patients by applying the updated Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) scale. Drug risks were further quantified [odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI)] in a case-control design with unconditional logistic regression analysis. Drug intake in the last 28 days before index date was considered for the analysis. RESULTS: The study corroborated hepatotoxic risks for a number of drugs, including phenprocoumon (OR 3.3, 95% CI 1.5, 6.7), amiodarone (OR 5.5, 95% CI 1.3, 21.2), clozapine (OR 34.6, 95% CI 2.8, 824.9) and flupirtine (OR 40.2, 95% CI 5.5, 856.9). Increased risks were also suggested for less commonly reported substances such as angiotensin II receptor blockers, atypical antipsychotics and for biperiden, a drug never before reported to be hepatotoxic. CONCLUSIONS: Our study identified a large number of drugs as possible causes of hepatotoxicity. The observed risk for seldom reported substances highlights the need for further post-authorization safety studies not exclusively focusing on drugs already labelled as potentially hepatotoxic.

Sensorless position control of induction motors relies on the detection of rotor anisotropies. The repetitive transient excitation through the switched voltages of the pulsewidth-modulated inverter provides the test signals to identify the spatial orientation of the anisotropies that indicate the rotor position. The position information is contained in the inverter output voltages. These are measured against the neutral point of the star connected stator winding. The signals are heavily corrupted by disturbances. These originate from the propagation of traveling waves on a long motor cable and from the influence of high-frequency common-mode currents. The paper describes how a clean position signal is extracted in the presence of such noise.

Differential flatness of buck, buck-boost, and boost converter models is shown. Its benefits if used for controlling the output voltage of these converters are revealed by comparing the flatness-based control with passivity-based and linear control. Two observers for the boost converter are suggested one of which requires only the measurement of the converters output voltage. Both observers can be used with minor changes for the buck-boost converter. Two flatness-based online trajectory planning algorithms are suggested. They exploit the parametrization of the trajectories in the energy. One of them is designed to achieve fast setpoint transitions during converter start-up or despite sudden load steps while simultaneously respecting the converters physical constraints. The other one is considered for applications in power factor correction. Different stabilization strategies are compared. The viability of the observers, the algorithm, and the stabilization strategies are verified by simulations of switched nonideal converter models

This paper studies the joint user association and resource allocation in heterogeneous networks (HetNets) from a novel perspective, motivated by and generalizing the idea of fractional frequency reuse. By treating the multi-cell multi-user resource allocation as resource partitioning among multiple reuse patterns, we propose a unified framework to analyze and compare a wide range of user association and resource allocation strategies for HetNets, and provide an optimal benchmark for network performance. The enabling mechanisms are a novel formulation to consider all possible interference patterns or any pre-defined subset of patterns, and efficient sparsity-pursuit algorithms to find the solution. A notable feature of this formulation is that the patterns remain fixed during the resource optimization process. This creates a favorable opportunity for convex formulations while still considering interference coupling. More important, in view of the fact that multi-cell resource allocation is very computational demanding, our framework provides a systematic way to trade off performance for the reduction of computational complexity by restricting the candidate patterns to a small number of feature patterns. Relying on the sparsity-pursuit capability of the proposed algorithms, we develop a practical guideline to identify the feature patterns. Numerical results show that the identified feature patterns can significantly improve the existing strategies, and jointly optimizing the user association and resource allocation indeed brings considerable gain.

In this letter, six-pole filters are presented, in which the coaxial cavity resonators are arranged with 90 degree rotated spatial orientation. Cross-coupling between nonadjacent resonators will appear. In the new proposed filter topologies the cross-coupling elements are not arranged in separated triplet or quadruplet blocks. They interlace to form distributed cross-coupling. Synthesis of the distributed coupling matrix based on the symmetric canonical prototype is discussed. Two different bandpass filter topologies are presented. The first one has an inline arrangement of six orthogonal coaxial cavity resonators. Its distributed cross-coupling consists of four interlaced triplets, which generate two transmission zeros above the passband. The second filter design has a folded arrangement of two inline triplets with strong cross-coupling. An additional interlaced quadruplet pushes the resulting transmission zeros to the complex frequency domain. Measurement results of two corresponding filter prototypes confirm the predicted performance.

The evolution of automotive technology will eventually permit the automated driving system on the vehicle to handle all circumstances. Human occupants will be just passengers. This poses security issues that need to be addressed. This paper has two aims. The first one investigates strategies for robustifying scene analysis of adversarial road scenes. A taxonomy of the defense mechanisms for countering adversarial perturbations is initially presented, classifying those mechanisms in three major categories: those that modify the data, those that propose adding extra models, and those that focus on modifying the models deployed for scene analysis. Motivated by the limited number of surveys in the first category, we further analyze the approaches that utilize input transformation operations as countermeasures, further classifying them in supervised and unsupervised methods and highlighting both their strengths and weaknesses. The second aim of this paper is to publish CarlaScenes dataset produced using the CARLA simulator. An extensive evaluation study, on CarlaScenes, is performed testing the supervised deep learning approaches that have been either proposed for image restoration or adversarial noise removal. The study presents insights on the robustness of the aforementioned approaches in mitigating adversarial attacks in scene analysis operations.

Standardized hybrid video coding systems are based on motion compensated prediction with fractional-pel displacement vector resolution. In the recent video coding standard H.264/AVC, a displacement vector resolution of 1/4-pel is applied. In order to estimate and compensate these fractional-pel displacements, interpolation filters are used. So far, these interpolation filters are invariant. The same filter with the same filter-coefficients is applied for all sequences and for all images of a sequence. Therefore, it is not possible to consider nonstationary statistical properties of the video signal and the motion compensated prediction process like aliasing, quantization errors, and displacement estimation errors. This paper presents two techniques that improve the motion compensated prediction and accordingly the coding efficiency. The first technique applies an adaptive interpolation filter that uses filter-coefficients which are adapted once per image. The adapted filter-coefficients are coded and transmitted. The second technique is based on an increased displacement vector resolution of 1/8-pel. In combination, the developed techniques indicate bit-rate reductions up to 25 % compared to H.264/AVC.

After the development of the High-Efficiency Video Coding Standard (HEVC), ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG formed the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET), which started exploring video coding technology with higher coding efficiency, including development of a Joint Exploration Model (JEM) algorithm and a corresponding software implementation. The technology explored in the last version of the JEM further increases the compression capabilities of the hybrid video coding approach by adding new tools, reaching up to 30% bit rate reduction compared to HEVC based on the Bjøntegaard delta bit rate (BD-rate) metric, and further improvement beyond that in terms of subjective visual quality. This provided enough evidence to issue a joint Call for Proposals (CfP) for a new standardization activity now known as Versatile Video Coding (VVC). All technology proposed in the responses to the CfP was based on the classic block-based hybrid video coding design, extending it by new elements of partitioning, intra- and inter-picture prediction, prediction signal filtering, transforms, quantization/scaling, entropy coding, and in-loop filtering. This article provides an overview of technology that was proposed in the responses to the CfP, with a focus on techniques that were not already explored in the JEM context.

A fast coupled-integral-equation (CIE) technique is developed to compute the plane-TE-wave scattering by a wide class of periodic 2D inhomogeneous structures with curvilinear boundaries, which includes finite-thickness relief and rod gratings made of homogeneous material as special cases. The CIEs in the spectral domain are derived from the standard volume electric field integral equation. The kernel of the CIEs is of Picard type and offers therefore the possibility of deriving recursions, which allow the computation of the convolution integrals occurring in the CIEs with linear amounts of arithmetic complexity and memory. To utilize this advantage, the CIEs are solved iteratively. We apply the biconjugate gradient stabilized method. To make the iterative solution process faster, an efficient preconditioning operator (PO) is proposed that is based on a formal analytical inversion of the CIEs. The application of the PO also takes only linear complexity and memory. Numerical studies are carried out to demonstrate the potential and flexibility of the CIE technique proposed. Though the best efficiency and accuracy are observed at either low permittivity contrast or high conductivity, the technique can be used in a wide range of variation of material parameters of the structures including when they contain components made of both dielectrics with high permittivity and typical metals.

The songflight and the territorial behaviour of courting male pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) were observed in an urban habitat of this bat species, in the city of Bayreuth in Bavaria. (1) Within the city limits, from the middle of July to the end of October but most intensively in September, the male bats occupied courtship territories averaging about 200 m in diameter. At night they patrolled these territories along regular flight routes emitting characteristic advertisement calls. By day they sheltered in crevices in buildings. (2) The courtship territories were densely distributed in the center of the inner city and rarer at the outskirts. As all known larger winter roosts as well as the ‘invasion centers’ (typical late summer swarming sites of this species) also were in the inner city, territories were situated around winter quarters, but not in the vicinity of the nursery roosts, which were lying at the edge of the city and outside it. (3) The males evidently arrange their courtship territories in such a way that as many females as possible pass through them when they inspect the winter roosts. That is, they are not defending resources important to the females; instead, they position their courtship territories near the resources the females require. As male territories are densely packed, the males offer a possibility for mate choice to the females, so that the mating system also bears some likeness to a lek.

Digital video coding standards apply hybrid coding. Each frame is partitioned into blocks of various sizes. For each block, motion compensated prediction with a translational motion model and prediction error coding is applied. The maximum block size of standards preceding HEVC is 16 × 16 samples, for HEVC it is increased to 64 × 64 samples. For non-translational motion the translational model leads to high data rate due to inaccurate prediction. Although an affine motion model can describe non-translational motion, the data rate of its additional parameters is often larger than the data rate reduction achieved by more accurate prediction, especially if small blocks are used. This paper investigates if HEVC's increased block size benefits the affine motion model. HEVC is extended such that for each block, either the translational or the affine motion model is used, selected by minimization of Lagrangian costs of data rate and summed absolute values of prediction error coefficients. For a set of ten test sequences of non-translational motion, the data rate is reduced by 6.3% in average and by 23.7% in maximum compared to HEVC at the same PSNR. Limiting the maximum block size to 16 × 16 samples, the average data rate reduction decreases to 0.1%, which proves synergy between the block size increase and the affine motion model.

The paper deals with a bi-directional switch based on N-channel enhancement-mode GaN FET. The proposed device is a Gate Injection Transistor monolithic solution to reduce the volume of the switch with high current density and blocking voltage of 600V. It features a dual-gate control pin and two power terminal. In the paper, the main characteristics of the bi-directional switch and the performance in the four-quadrant of operation are examined and discussed. The device characteristics are compared with the traditional MOSFET and IGBT solutions. The gate driver design issues are considered to optimize the switching transient of the GaN-based switch. Finally, an experimental evaluation of the GaN FET as the bidirectional circuit breaker is carried out in an AC power supply system to validate the effectiveness of the proposed monolithic new device.