Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mapping by Dragging and Fitting of Wire-Frame Models

Semi-automatic measurement of objects with regular shapes can be performed efficiently in three steps: (1) selection of an object model and approximate alignment of its wire frame by an image analyst, (2) precise alignment to the image by a fitting algorithm, and (3) correction of fitting errors, again by the image analyst. This paper presents a new approach to perform these three steps using the same principle in all three steps. The developed approach allows the image analyst to drag both points and lines of the projected wire frame, including curved edges and contour edges, in order to align these features with the image contents. Using the described algorithm, there is no need for the image analyst to specify which parameters of the object models are to be adapted in order to improve the alignment. The performance of the fitting step is analyzed and compared with an alternative approach.
Parallel Information Processing.

Parallel processing was covered in 1979 in Volume 14 of ARIST as a part of Lee Hollaar's chapter on computer architecture (Unconventional Computer Architectures for Information Retrieval. The increased importance of this technology, especially as it is the basis for supercomputers (now more correctly referred to as computers with massively parallel architectures), make the Rasmussen chapter particularly timely. The author reviews their relevance to information storage and retrieval (IS&R) problems. Current activities include many research projects and some practical implementations. The chapter focuses on the use of theses parallel processors for processing text, primarly documents and document surrogates
Inquiry-Based Learning Using Everyday Objects: Hands-On Instructional Strategies That Promote Active Learning in Grades 3-8

Acknowledgments About the Authors Dedication Introduction: Welcome to Inquiry-Based Learning Using Everyday Objects (Object-Based Inquiry) Part I. Object-Based Learning 1. What Is Object-Based Inquiry? The Reality of Object-Based Learning Why Use Object-Based Inquiry? Time to Begin Your Journey 2. How Do I Gather Collections? Getting Started Expanding Your Collection Storing Your Collections 3. How Do I Get Started? Planning the Classroom Grouping Your Students Planning Your Lessons Avoiding the Pitfalls Benefits Roles of the Teacher and Students 4. Where Do I Start With Planning? Things to Consider Step One: Developing Essential Understandings Step Two: Identifying Specific Objectives Step Three: Locating the Objects Step Four: Question Development Conclusion 5. How Do I Assess? Formative Assessment Summative Assessment Part II. Lesson Plans 6. Language Lesson Plans Why Do Tigers Have Stripes? What Makes a Poem Perfect? She Sells Sea Shells What's Your Fantasy? 7. Science Lesson Plans Zone Home Birds of a Feather Whose Track Is That? Science Rocks 8. Social Studies Lesson Plans I'm a Mystery: What's My History Can You Dig History? Where in America Are You? Flower Power 9. Math Lesson Plans Measuring Madness Architectural Geometry What's For Dinner? What Part of Fractions Is Difficult? Glossary Index
A dynamic approach for evaluating earthwork hauls in construction

A graph theoretic approach is developed for accurately computing haulage costs in earthwork projects. This is vital as haulage is a predominant factor in the real cost of earthworks. A variety of metrics can be used in our approach, but a fuel consumption proxy is recommended. This approach is novel as it considers the constantly changing terrain that results from cutting and filling activities and replaces inaccurate “static” calculations that have been used previously. The approach is also capable of efficiently correcting the violation of top down cutting and bottom up filling conditions that can be found in existing earthwork assignments and sequences. This approach assumes that the project site is partitioned into uniform blocks. A directed graph is then utilised to describe the terrain surface. This digraph is altered after each cut and fill, in order to reflect the true state of the terrain. A shortest path algorithm is successively applied to calculate the cost of each haul and these costs are summed to provide a total cost of haulage
Advanced Methods in Distance Education: Applications and Practices for Educators, Administrators and Learners

Courses and programs being delivered at a distance require a unique set of professional competencies. Whether using synchronous or asynchronous methods of instruction, systematic instructional design can help stimulate motivation, increase interaction and social presence, and authenticate learning outcomes. Principles of adult learning, including self-directed and studentcentered learning approaches are emphasized in these Advanced Methods in Distance Education: Applications and Practices for Educators, Administrators and Learners. It is designed to be theory to practice, with readers gaining the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities to be successful in teaching or training using technology-mediated instruction. Major sections include: Foundations of Teaching and Learning at a Distance, Adult Learning, Instructional Design, Technology Knowledge and Skills, Administrative Issues, and Future Directions.
Using an Electronic Voting System to Promote Active Reflection on Coursework Feedback

Abstract: Many lecturers use coursework as the primary mechanism for providing students with feedback on their learning. However, against the models of Laurillard and Kolb which view learning as a cyclical process, they provide little or no scaffolding to support effective assimilation of the feedback by the students. This paper proposes a pedagogical script for using an electronic voting system (EVS) to promote the necessary assimilation, based on the generation of discussion found in Mazur's Peer Instruction method. The script's use in three case studies is described. Staff and students found the sessions beneficial over traditional remediation mechanisms. Over three-quarters of the final session was spent in students working on and discussing the misunderstandings apparent in their coursework. Feedback and reflection are essential to learning, and have been represented in many educational theories and frameworks. For example, Laurillard's dialogue model of learning (Laurillard, 2002) embodies feedback in the communications between the teacher and learner, and reflection on this feedback in their thought processes; Kolb's learning cycle (Kolb, 1984) depends on feedback and subsequent reflection generated from the results of actively working with the material under study; and collaborative learning (Matthews, 1996) depends on the interplay amongst learners and between teacher and learner, again embodying both feedback and reflection. These models view learning as a cyclic process, which may require many iterations of the communication, processing, feedback and reflection loop before the learning is successful.
The effect of money as a context on students' mental computation performance in years 3, 5, 7 and 9

The pwposc of this study was to research the effcct of money as a context on school students' mental computational pcrfonnance and strategy choices across a range of ages. This study adds to exisling research, which has compared students' mental computational methods with their written methods, by the provision of the single common context of money. The c:,,ntcnt topics of whole and other rational numbers (simple ftactions, decimals, and some pm:entqcs) were covered. Forty-eight primary &c:hool students plus sixteen secondary school students were involved in this study, with equal nwnbm of both genders from the two primary schools and cne secondary achool in the Perth metropolitan area. The method followed ~ii& both quantitativ_. ,y scoring test results-and qualitative-through tape-recorded interviews. Students' prior experiences with money were documenlcd and pcr.lbnnance data were collected on students' mental computation ability for the two sets of math1:111atically identical items prmcnted in a money-context and context•ln:e. Student strategy choices were also documenled. The semi-structured interviews consisted of nine money experience questions such as, How often do yor, get pocket money or an allowance? In addition, 10, 12, 13, and 13 pairs of mental computation items for YClllll 3, 5, 7 and 9 rcspccliv4. 'ly. Wltero possible, common items were used a. ~ss two or more year levels to ascertain growth in mental computation skills. Ovmill, results round that the context presentation did not make a difference to student perf'onnance and there was no conclation found between )*ibnnance and student prcrerence for one presenlation or the other. No pcrfonnance differences were foWld for gender. Year 3 recorded the lowest process scores, while Year 7 recorded the highest process scores although all the items used al both Year 7 and Year ! I were identical. The greatest growth in mental computation perronnance was round to occur from Year 3 to Year 5 and from Year 5 to Year·? Further, for Year 3, results found that the context presentation had a negative impact on student perfonnance. Some students were found to be using written methods mentally. A. ,alysis or individual items revealad that context had a positive influence in some cases. However, despite the emphasis in modem curricula on the use of context, it appears that such an approach may have little value i£usad in contrived ralher thM real situations. Recommendations for teaching practice include promoting real experiences at school by linking students' out-of-school experiences to classroom learning, such u exploring students' pcck:et-monc:y purchasing power or promoting mental computation for a variaty or context
Exploiting idle cycles in networks of workstations

Studies have shown that workstations are idle a significant fraction of the time. Traditional idle resource harvesting systems define a social contract that permits guest jobs to run only when a workstation is idle. To enforce this contract, guest jobs are stopped and migrated as soon as the owner resumes use of their machines. However, such systems waste many opportunities to exploit idle cycles because of overly conservative estimates of resource contention. In this thesis, we present a new policy, called Linger-Longer, that refines the social contract to permit fine-grain cycle stealing. Linger-Longer allows guest jobs to linger on a machine at low priority even when local tasks are active. Also, we developed a new adaptive job migration scheme based on runtime cost/benefit analysis. Our simulation study shows that the Linger-Longer policy can improve the throughput of guest jobs on a cluster by up to 60% with only a few percent slowdown of local jobs. The simulation also demonstrates that guest parallel jobs can perform better with our new approach than with the traditional runtime reconfiguration approach. To limit the impact of guest jobs' resource use, new local resource scheduling policies and mechanisms are required. We present a suite of mechanisms to support prioritized use of CPU, memory, I/O and network bandwidth. An overall prototype of the Linger-Longer system has been implemented in Linux. The prototype integrates the operating system extensions for resource throttling and a new adaptive migration policy module while leveraging general job scheduling and checkpointing mechanisms of an existing system. Using this prototype, we conduct a head-to-head performance comparison between our fine-grain cycle stealing policies and the traditional coarse-grain cycle stealing policies. The experiment on a Linux cluster with a set of benchmark applications show that, overall, Linger-Longer can improve the guest job throughput by 50% to 70%, with only a 3% host job slowdown.
Analogies Out of the Blue: When History Seems to Retell Itself

To explain the origins of new scientific ideas, historians and philosophers of science point to examples where scientists appear to have drawn analogies between their scientific domain and some very different domain. By contrast, research from the psychology lab suggests that those kinds of analogies are very difficult to obtain in even the simplest situations. To resolve this potential conflict, we examine the analogies that occur in psychology lab group and formal colloquium settings. This approach can be viewed as a crosssectional approximation of an historical analysis. We find that as the setting moves further away from the original discovery, the way different types of analogies appear to be used changes. In particular, analogies between very different domains are never used in reasoning in the lab group, whereas they are frequently used in reasoning in formal colloquium presentations. Yet, we find that analogy between very similar domains remains an important source of new ideas and a method for solving problems in scientific settings.
Temporal Regularization Use in Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MRI

Temporal Regularization Use in Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MRI by Kimberly A. Khalsa Chair: Jeffrey A. Fessler Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) studies demand both high spatial and high temporal resolution. We need high spatial resolution to accurately visualize tissue morphology, and we need high temporal resolution to accurately follow the contrast kinetics of the tissue, which provide clinically important physiological information. We can only acquire so many measurements per unit time, however, and this limited data implies an inherent tradeoff between spatial and temporal resolution in the reconstructed image sequence. Most existing methods undersample the data and then employ some sort of data sharing technique in the k-space domain to recover the ‘missing’ data points. These data sharing schemes are based on an implicit assumption that the dynamic object varies smoothly in time. We present an image reconstruction scheme based on an object domain model that does not attempt any k-space data recovery, but rather explicitly uses the assumption of temporal smoothness in the image domain to estimate the image sequence that best fits the available data. Our proposed method is called Temporal Regularization Use in Image Reconstruction (TRUIR), and is a penalized likelihood formulation that includes spatial and temporal regularization terms in addition to the data fidelity term. This work presents our TRUIR formulation for both single coil and parallel imaging, and explores various aspects of TRUIR reconstructed image sequences. We evaluate the effect of the spatial and temporal regularization parameters on the resolution properties of TRUIR reconstructed image sequences, and present our work toward establishing selection criteria for these parameters. In evaluating our proposed TRUIR
Incorporating Provenance in Database Systems

The importance of maintaining provenance has been widely recognized, particularly with respect to highly-manipulated data. Currently there are two approaches: provenance generated within workflow frameworks, and provenance within a contained relational database. The workflow provenance allows workflow re-execution, and can offer some explanation of results. Within relational databases, knowledge of SQL queries and relational operators is used to express what happened to a tuple. There is a disconnect between these two areas of provenance research. Techniques that work in relational databases cannot be applied to workflow systems because of heterogeneous data types and black-box operators. Meanwhile, the real-life utility of workflow systems has not been extended to database provenance. In the gap between provenance in workflow systems and databases, there are myriads of systems that need provenance. For instance, when creating a new dataset, like MiMI, using several sources and processes, or building an algorithm that generates sequence alignments, like MiBlast. These hybrid systems cannot be mashed into a workflow framework and do not solely exist within a database. This work solves issues that block provenance usage in hybrid systems. In particular, we look at capturing, storing, and using provenance information outside of workflow and database provenance systems. We tackle the problem of how to capture provenance for manual tasks. Database provenance and workflow systems provide no support for tracking the provenance of user actions, but manual effort is often a large component of effort in these hybrid systems. We describe an approach to track and record the user's actions in a queryable form. Once provenance is captured, storage can become prohibitively expensive, in both hybrid and workflow systems. We utilize properties of provenance information and identify several techniques to reduce the provenance store. Additionally, usable provenance is a problem in workflow, database and hybrid provenance systems. Provenance contains both too much and too little information. Provenance from the black-boxes used in workflow and hybrid systems is impossible for a human to understand. We highlight the missing information that can assist user understanding, and develop a model of provenance answers to decrease information overload. Finally, workflow and database systems are designed to explain the results users see; they do not explain why items are not in the result. We allow researchers to specify what they are looking for and answer why it does not exist in the result set.
An approach for applying data assimilation techniques for studying cardiac arrhythmias

Cardiac electrical waves are responsible for coordinating functionality in the heart muscle. When these waves are disrupted, it is referred to as a cardiac arrhythmia, which can be life threatening. Over the last two decades, experimental techniques to study electrical waves in the heart have been improved. Nevertheless, methods for observing electrical waves in the heart still do not provide enough data to draw conclusions about wave propagation. Observations about wave propagation can be made on the surface of the heart, but to collect data on the interior, the methods currently available either do not provide high enough spatial resolution or change the conduction properties of the region to be observed. The lack of depth information leaves us uncertain as to the precise mechanisms by which waves cause arrhythmias. Numerical models have been developed for these wave dynamics, but they are only approximations for qualitative behavior. For decades, the weather-forecasting community has faced similar problems with the approximate nature of numerical models and lack of available data, and tools known as data assimilation have been developed within that community to deal with this problem. We aim to apply these methods to cardiac wave propagation. By combining observations with numerical models through dataassimilation techniques from weather forecasting, we will attempt to constrain wave dynamics in the heart muscle interior. In this thesis, we present the first approach for coupling data-assimilation techniques with a cardiac cellular model. Using the Fenton-Karma (FK) model of cardiac cellular processes to represent wave dynamics and the Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter data-assimilation technique, synthetic observations have been integrated with the FK model. By analyzing the sensitivity of state-variable values in the FK model, we have developed initial conditions for data assimilation that are able to quantitatively approximate wave behavior in a 1-D setting. This work will provide a proof of concept and give insight into challenges in the 2and 3-D cases.
Mechanisms for distributed shared memory

Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems simplify the task of writing distributed-memory parallel programs by automating data distribution and communication. Unfortunately, DSM systems control memory and communication using fixed policies, even when programmers or compilers could manage these resources more efficiently. This thesis proposes a new approach that lets users efficiently manage communication and memory on DSM systems. Systems provide primitive DSM mechanisms without binding them to fixed protocols (policies). Standard shared-memory programs use default protocols similar to those found in current DSM machines. Unlike current systems, these protocols are implemented in unprivileged software. Programmers and compilers are free to modify or replace them with optimized custom protocols that manage memory and communication directly and efficiently. To explore this new approach, this thesis: (1) identifies a set of mechanisms for distributed shared memory, (2) develops Tempest, a portable programming interface for mechanism-based DSM systems, (3) describes Stache, a protocol that uses Tempest to implement a standard shared-memory model, (4) summarizes custom protocols developed for six shared-memory applications, (5) designs and simulates three systems--Typhoon, Typhoon-1, and Typhoon-0--that support Tempest, and (6) describes a working hardware prototype of Typhoon-0, the simplest of those designs. Tempest combines fine-grain coherence support, an active message model, and virtual-memory-based page allocation to provide portability across a range of platforms. Typhoon, Typhoon-1, and Typhoon-0 support Tempest using different levels of custom hardware integration. Typhoon achieves high performance by integrating key components on one device. Typhoon-1 and Typhoon-0 use off-the-shelf parts for some of these components, trading some performance for simpler designs. Typhoon demonstrates that mechanism-based DSM systems can compete with hard-wired-protocol systems on unmodified shared-memory applications (within 25% across six benchmarks). Despite Typhoon's low overheads, custom protocols improve performance significantly for some applications--by 384% for one benchmark. Results for Typhoon-1 and Typhoon-0 on unmodified applications are varied, but custom protocols bring them within 13% and 47% of Typhoon, respectively. A working Typhoon-0 prototype demonstrates the feasibility of these designs. Measurements of the prototype's performance substantiate simulator projections.
An Investigation Into the Use of Simple Queries On Web IR Systems

I present in this paper the results of an investigation into the effects of query structure on the results retrieved by Web-based information retrieval systems. I selected 15 queries from a transaction log of a major Web search engine. All of these 15 quer ies were simple queries with no advanced operators (e.g., Boolean operators, phrase operators, etc.). Utilizing these queries, I submitted them to 5 major search engines, Alta Vista, Excite, FAST Search, Infoseek, and Northern Light. The 15 queries were th en modified using the various search operators supported by each of the 5 search engines. There were a total of 210 of these complex queries. The results obtained were then compared to the baseline results. There were 2,768 results returned by the set of a ll queries. I present the statistics from this comparison of results and discuss the analysis from various perspectives. In general, increasing the complexity of the queries had little effect on the results with a greater than a 70% overlap in results, on average. The implications of Web search engine design are discussed, as well as the directions for future research.