Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Information Extraction and Data Acquisition for News Articles Filtering and Recommendation

and contributions Ever growing information overload on the web poses new challenges to information processing and filtering. In this doctoral thesis we implement and test our idea of a semantic information filtering systems based on co-occurrence analysis of named entities. We use information extraction techniques to link facts from unstructured documents (texts we want to filter) to Linked Data web resources (e.g. DBpedia or other Wikipedia based resources). The document enrichment with structured data enables new ways of documents filtering, searching and exploration. The doctoral thesis addresses three topics: Information filtering in documents linked to a backing knowledge base, data acquisition from semi-structured web resources and the main focus is given to named entity recognition, disambiguation and linking in web documents. All three discussed topics support further evolution of intelligent information filtering systems. In particular, the main contributions of the doctoral thesis are as follows: 1. We proposed, developed and tested a framework for on demand crawling of Linked Data. 2. We proposed and evaluated various context based approaches to named entity disambiguation. 3. We compared two state of the art frameworks for named entity recognition on nonEnglish texts. 4. We constructed a comprehensive dataset based on all English Wikipedia articles for named entity disambiguation. The dataset reflects link structure and named entity co-occurrences in paragraphs from Wikipedia. These co-occurrences are then used for entity linking based on the context of an entity represented as the group of entities co-occurring in the same paragraph. 5. We designed a new approach to effectively deal with data obtained from Wikipedia. We work with about 10 records reflecting entity occurrences in Wikipedia. Instead of dealing with up to 10 combinations of records, we reduced the workload dramatically using sorted datasets and in-memory computation. 6. We provide deep insides in the structure of links between Wikipedia articles and evaluate link usage patterns. 7. Publicly available benchmarks testing named entity linking often contain records that do not need very sophisticated disambiguation approaches. Most frequent sense of an entity is often a correct guess. We compiled two new named entity linking benchmarks based on data extracted from Wikipedia that test the ability to disambiguate rather rare meanings of entities, where the real context has to be taken into account.
A Bottom-Up Approach to Design Coordination

The design industry like any other industry could benefit from process support for its practitioners. However, what constitutes legitimate process support for designers is a difficult research question. In order to support designers in their processes, first one needs to know what designers do. This is not only a question of knowing what designers do in general, but also what particular designers do in their own individual design practice. How to find out what designers do, that is, how to acquire knowledge abouttheir design processes, is also a difficult research question. Providing process support for designers is seen as a task, which cannot be divorced from design process acquisition. That is, one is unlikely to provideprocess support, without acquiring an understanding, what individual designers actually do, and conversely, one is unlikely to acquire an understanding of what designers do, without providing process support for designers. An application whose goal it is to provide both design process support for designers working in collaborative design teams, and also acquires a particular type of design process representationof design processes, is described.
Tourism and Hospitality Universities in Austria: What's in the Difference?

Abstract This paper reports on an exploratory study into the perceived differences of educational institutions in Austria. In this, a set of four institutions in and around Vienna, are compared on the basis of a questionnaire measuring student choice components for studying tourism and hospitality degrees. The set of institutions comprise one private university, one public university and two universities of applied sciences. The comparison of these institutions was considered of particular interest as the recent reorganisation of degree structures in Austria, according to the Bologna process (European Union's agreement on the standardization of higher education programs), is likely to reshape the educational environment in Austria.
The Role of Leaders in AVID Schools and the Impact on Student Achievement

The Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program is designed to provide resources and strategies to enable underrepresented minority students to attend four-year colleges. Research indicates that the success of the students enrolled in AVID depends on the strict adherence to the AVID components. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the principal and administrator‟s understanding of, commitment to and involvement in AVID accounted for the difference in student achievement between a successful school and one that is not. AVID is a program with demonstrated results, however it is costly. Building principals have to be willing to use a teaching position to staff the AVID coordinator/teacher position, and school districts have to employ tutors for the twice-weekly tutorial sessions. In these difficult fiscal times, districts are looking for places to make adjustments. AVID‟s demonstrated effectiveness for students in an individual building, as well as district-wide, will be the key to keeping AVID from falling subject to budget cuts. Some of AVID‟s 11 essentials are instructionally based, such as Cornell Notes and WICR, which directly impact what occurs within the walls of the classroom. Others are more leadership-based, such as staffing and policies for student selection. Yet a third set consists of things which are not actually essentials or may be less tangible, but still have a great impact on AVID, such as the perception of AVID students by peers, the perception of AVID students by the school community in general, and the understanding and oversight of the program within the building. This study focused on the essentials that are leadership based as well as those which
Millimetre wave aviation security scanner

Trials of a real time millimetre wave imager have recently been conducted in the UK. The trials were conducted at London Gatwick airport and QinetiQ Farnborough. The aims of the trials were to evaluate passenger reaction to being screened by a millimetre wave imager, to assess the operational issues of using imaging technology to screen passengers in central search areas of airports, and to quantify the performance of the system using professional screeners who were trained to look for specific threat items. The results of the trial have suggested that public reaction to the possible introduction of the technology in UK airports has been favourable, and that the performance of the imager in detecting specific threat items concealed on passengers such as metal and ceramic weapons has been very encouraging. The performance of the system in detecting plastic explosives and more difficult threats is lower than that of ceramic and other weapons, but the overall performance achieved represents an important step forward in developing a reliable, safe and convenient means of screening passengers and staff in airports and other public places, where security is a prime concern.
Optimization for Simulation: Theory vs. Practice

Probably one of the most successful interfaces between operations research and computer science has been the development of discrete-event simulation software. The recent integration of optimization techniques into simulation practice, specifically into commercial software, has become nearly ubiquitous, as most discrete-event simulation packages now include some form of “optimization” routine. The main thesis of this article, however, is that there is a disconnect between research in simulation optimization—which has addressed the stochastic nature of discrete-event simulation by concentrating on theoretical results of convergence and specialized algorithms that are mathematically elegant—and the recent software developments, which implement very general algorithms adopted from techniques in the deterministic optimization metaheuristic literature (e.g., genetic algorithms, tabu search, artificial neural networks). A tutorial exposition that summarizes the approaches found in the research literature is included, as well as a discussion contrasting these approaches with the algorithms implemented in commercial software. The article concludes with the author’s speculations on promising research areas and possible future directions in practice. (Simulation Optimization; Simulation Software; Stochastic Approximation; Metaheuristics)
MAC implementation for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

This paper presents the implementation of IEEE 802.11 enhanced MAC (medium access control) layer that can be applied to wireless LAN for multimedia services. It is implemented in a hardware prototype that can interface with not only OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplex) physical layer at 5 GHz but also DSSS (direct sequence spread spectrum) physical layer at 2.4 GHz. The prototype can easily support the interface between the MAC layer and one of the two physical layers by changing the logic in a FPGA (field programmable gate array). To meet the high-speed requirement of physical layers, we designed the MAC protocol layer with hardwired logic and embedded firmware. This prototype can be utilized to the development of System IC (integrated circuit) for wireless communication.
Performance Investigation of Insulated Shallow Extension Silicon On Nothing (ISE-SON) MOSFET for Low Volatge Digital Applications

The circuit level implementation of nanoscale Insulated Shallow Extension Silicon On Nothing (ISE-SON) MOSFET has been investigated and compared with the other conventional devices i.e. Insulated Shallow Extension (ISE) and Silicon On Nothing (SON) using the ATLAS 3D device simulator. It can be observed that ISE-SON based inverter shows better performance in terms of Voltage Transfer Characteristics, noise margin, switching current, inverter gain and propagation delay. The reliability issues of the various devices in terms of supply voltage, temperature and channel length variation has also been studied in the present work. Logic circuits (such as NAND and NOR gate) and ring oscillator are also implemented using different architectures to illustrate the capabilities of ISE-SON architecture for high speed logic circuits as compared to other devices. Results also illustrates that ISE-SON is much more temperature resistant than SON and ISE MOSFET. Hence, ISE-SON enables more aggressive device scaling for low-voltage applications.
SUBJECT EXPRESSION IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE: CONSTRUCTION AND FREQUENCY EFFECTS

Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) has for long been considered as a Null-subject language due to its variability in regards to subject expression (e.g. Era bom porque eu diminuia de peso. era muito gordinha ‘That was good because then I could lose some weight. (I) was a bit chubby. ’ C33:179). Such variability has been attributed to the language’s once rich inflectional system, and the reported increase in rate of subject expression has been seen as a result of changes to the system (Barbosa, Duarte, & Kato, 2005; Monteiro, 1994b; Negrao & Viotti, 2000). Moreover, there is agreement among several scholars that the variability can still be accounted for in terms of traditional factors such as emphasis, clarity, and ambiguity of the Tense, Aspect, and Mood (TAM) system. In this work, I demonstrate that, rather than an effect of such pragmatic factors as these, subject expression in BP is to a large degree an artifact of the frequency of use of certain constructions of different degrees of fixedness. The analysis proposed here falls under the framework of usage-based linguistics in which grammar is believed to be shaped by discourse as speakers produce it online (Bybee, 2006). Thus, any linguistic pattern observed in speech is emergent and a result of repetition
Large-Scale Distributed Runtime System for DAG-Based Computational Framework

Recent trends in high performance computing present larger and more diverse computers using multicore nodes possibly with accelerators and/or coprocessors and reduced memory. These changes pose formidable challenges for applications code to attain scalability. Software frameworks that execute machine-independent applications code using a runtime system that shields users from architectural complexities offer a portable solution for easy programming. The Uintah framework, for example, solves a broad class of large-scale problems on structured adaptive grids using fluid-flow solvers coupled with particle-based solids methods. However, the original Uintah code had limited scalability as tasks were run in a predefined order based solely on static analysis of the task graph and used only message passing interface (MPI) for parallelism. By using a new hybrid multithread and MPI runtime system, this research has made it possible for Uintah to scale to 700K central processing unit (CPU) cores when solving challenging fluid-structure interaction problems. Those problems often involve moving objects with adaptive mesh refinement and thus with highly variable and unpredictable work patterns. This research has also demonstrated an ability to run capability jobs on the heterogeneous systems with Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators or Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The new runtime system for Uintah executes directed acyclic graphs of computational tasks with a scalable asynchronous and dynamic runtime system for multicore CPUs and/or accelerators/coprocessors on a node. Uintah’s clear separation between application and runtime code has led to scalability increases without significant changes to application code. This research concludes that the adaptive directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based approach provides a very powerful abstraction for solving challenging multiscale multiphysics engineering problems. Excellent scalability with regard to the different processors and communications performance are achieved on some of the largest and most powerful computers available today.
Effect of the thickness of insulators on the build up of a space charge distribution

When an electric stress is applied to an insulator, a space charge distribution may develop and have a strong effect on the electric strength of the material. It has already been reported that the thickness of the insulator may have an effect on the observed phenomena. In this paper we have investigated this effect, using the pressure wave propagation (PWP) method, and present experimental results which have been obtained on pure polyethylene samples of different thicknesses with similar electrodes, submitted to the same applied electric field. These results show that the distribution of space charge depends on the thickness for a given material, but not the maximum value of the charge density. The effect of dopant is also considered by comparison with already reported data.
Documenting Language, Culture, and Cognition: Language and Space among the Waorani

This paper looks to investigate the intersection between the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science through the discussion of documentation projects and documenting spatial language. In focusing on the language and culture of the Waorani, an indigenous group of the Amazonian region of Ecuador, this paper examines the properties of the language’s static locative constructions, the language’s status as an isolate, and the challenges and successes in the documentation process at present. This study also addresses these topics’ relation with the study of the intersection of space, language, and cognition by looking at some of the responses given by native speakers to the prompts in Bowerman and Pederson’s (1992) “Topological Relations Picture Series,” a set of line drawings that depict simple scenes such as an apple in a bowl. These speakers’ responses, as examples of spatial language use, offer what Stephen Levinson (1996:356) calls “more than just a privileged access to [cognition],” which is “the intermediate variable that promises to explain cultural propensities in spatial behavior. ” This paper supports Levinson’s claim that language, culture, and cognition are intimately linked and can be studied through spatial language expressions across cultures. Therefore, any conclusions drawn in this paper may bring the studies of anthropology, linguistics, and cognition closer to finding common ground and possibly contribute to the understanding of human behavior. Because of this, I argue that spatial language expressions are amongst the most important to elicit when doing documentation projects.
ASSESSMENT OF THE TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC POTENTIAL OF AUTOMATED ESTRUS DETECTION TECHNOLOGIES FOR DAIRY CATTLE

OF THESIS ASSESSMENT OF THE TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC POTENTIAL OF AUTOMATED ESTRUS DETECTION TECHNOLOGIES FOR DAIRY CATTLE Poor estrus detection can limit the reproductive performance of a dairy herd. One objective of this research was to evaluate an alternative method to traditional estrus detection in the form of automated monitoring technologies. To accomplish this, the first study considered the ability of automatically monitored parameters (activity, number of steps, lying bouts, lying time, feeding time, rumination time, and temperature) to detect estrus. A second study compared automated activity monitoring to timed artificial insemination as reproductive management strategies on commercial herds. The other objective of this research was to evaluate the economic potential of automated estrus detection technologies. This was accomplished by creating and evaluating a farm specific decision support tool to determine the net present value of adopting an automated estrus detection technology.
Digital reconstruction of multidimensional signals from their projections

In a wide variety of applications it is necessary to infer the structure of a multidimensional object from a set of its projections. There has been a long-standing interest in this problem and a number of different techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we present a tutorial review of the reconstruction problem and some of the algorithms which have been proposed for its solution. In addition, we present a number of new algorithms that appear to have some advantages over previous algorithms. Some comparisons of these algorithms applied to reconstructions of two-dimensional pictures are given. Furthermore, a number of new theoretical results are presented relating to the minimum number of projections necessary for exact reconstruction.
Comparative Study of Sentiment Detection Techniques for Business Analytics

ii Acknowledgements . iv Biography . v List of Tables . ix List of Figures . x List of Abbreviations . xi 1. Problem Statement . 13 1.1 Problem Definition . 13 1.2 Problem Relevance . 17 2. Literature Review . 21 2.1 Machine Learning Techniques: An Overview . 21 2.2 Machine Learning Techniques: A Comparative Analysis . 23 2.3 Discussion of Selected Relevant Papers . 26 3. Research Roadmap . 70 3.1 Data Understanding . 70 3.2 Other Considerations . 77 3.3 Anticipated Benefits . 77 4. Preliminary Experimentation . 79 4.1 Data Collection . 79 4.2 Method . 79 4.3 Results: Sentiment Classification . 80 4.4 Results: Top Twitter Contributors to Positive and Negative Sentiment . 86
The effects of low-level laser therapy on condylar growth with a mandibular advancement appliance in rats.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of low-level laser therapy (LLLT) on condylar growth with a mandibular advancement appliance in rats. BACKGROUND DATA Researchers studied new methods such as laser, for mandibular condyle growth stimulation and acceleration with or without functional appliances in experimental animals, but the specific mechanism and laser energy density values for condylar biostimulation and bone cell activities are still unknown. METHODS Forty-eight 8-week-old male Wistar albino rats weighing between 260 and 280 g were randomly divided into four groups. Group I was the control group; group II was the mandibular advancement appliance group; group III was the 8 J/cm(2) (0.25 W, 20 sec) laser irradiation with mandibular advancement appliance group; and group IV was the 10 J/cm(2) (0.25 W, 25 sec) laser irradiation with mandibular advancement appliance group. Experimental rats in groups III and IV were stimulated with a low-level laser in the temporomandibular joint region bilaterally 15 times over 30 days. Morphological changes in the mandible were evaluated with lateral radiographs before and after the study with selected linear and angular measurements. Pearson correlation test, Friedman, Kruskal-Wallis, and Mann-Whitney U tests were used for statistical analysis. RESULTS According the lateral radiograph results, the growth of mandibles in the experimental groups was significantly more than that of the control group (p<0.05). Group III also showed greater mandibular growth than the other groups (p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS We concluded that an intraoral appliance with LLLT, including chosen parameters, can stimulate condylar growth and increase mandibular advancement.
A statistical model for generating pronunciation networks

Methods to predict detailed phonetic pronunciations from a coarse phonemic transcription are described. The phonemic base forms, obtainable from orthographic text by dictionary lookup and other means, do not specify fine phonetic detail such as flapping, glottal stop insertion, or the formation of syllabic nasals and liquids. These phenomena depend on the phonetic context (often spanning word boundaries), stress environment, speaking rate, and dialect. A procedure is presented that builds decision trees, trained on the TIMIT database, using some of these features to predict pronunciation alternatives. The resulting phonetic network predicts the correct pronunciation of a phoneme on test data from the same corpus approximately 83% of the time and the correct phone was in the top five guesses 99% of the time. <<ETX>>
High-power millimeter wave IMPATT oscillators with both hole and electron drift spaces made by ion implantation

CW powers of 640 mW at 50 GHz have been obtained from double-drift region IMPATT diodes. This result represents the highest product of CW power times frequency squared obtained to date from any IMPATT diode. The diodes are p+pnn+structures and have both hole and electron drift spaces. The systematic fabrication (by ion implantation) and the evaluation of the dc and millimeter wave characteristics are presented.
University Scientists as Seekers of Information: sources of references to periodical literature

This article studies the pattern of users' interaction with information sources in science, technology and social sciences at the Antwerp State University Centre. The results showed, first, that the main sources of references to periodical literature were citations at the ends of articles in journals and books, second, the increasing role of the current awareness type of publication in assisting in the selection of relevant articles and, third, decreased use of conventional abstract journals. Computerized information services scored very low, but greater usage of machine-readable data bases is expected upon introduction of interactive on-line systems.