Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enable an Automatic Validation of OCL Constraints in the Context of Java Data Objects

In this paper we present an approach to validate OCL constraints in the context of Java Data Objects (JDO). Based on RECODER1, a Java framework for source code metaprogramming, we have implemented a source code precompiler. Its objective is to modify the source code of a single class by adding the code to handle the validation of OCL constraints. To enable the JDO runtime environment to check these constraints e.g. before a persistent capable object is stored, the pre-compiler implements the methods defined in the InstanceCallbacks interface. Since JDO represents a data store independent abstraction layer, this approach ensures data integrity for any arbitrary data store. Moreover, as long as the constraints are loaded dynamically from a configuration file at runtime, it ensures also an easy adjustment of OCL constraints without the need of recompilation.
A partial scan algorithm based on reduced scan shift

This paper presents a partial scan algorithm, called PARES (Partial scan Algorithm based on REduced Scan shift), which designs partial scan circuits and generates short test sequences. PARES is based on the reduced scan shift, in which flip flops (FFs) required to be controlled and observed are determined for each test vector in order to reduce scan shift operations. PARES selects FFs which are more frequently required to be controlled or observed as a scanned FF. Short test sequence can be obtained by reducing scan shift operations. Since fault coverage may be not possibly high because of unscanned FFs, techniques to increase fault coverage are also proposed. The order of test vectors are determined such that the values of unscanned FFs after applying a test vector is equivalent to next applied test vector. Moreover, appropriate values are assigned to primary inputs in scan shift operations in order to detect more faults. Finally experimental results for ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits are given. <<ETX>>
Graceful Language Extensions and Interfaces

Grace is a programming language under development aimed at education. Grace is object-oriented, imperative, and block-structured, and intended for use in first- and second-year object-oriented programming courses. We present a number of language features we have designed for Grace and implemented in our self-hosted compiler. We describe the design of a pattern-matching system with object-oriented structure and minimal extension to the language. We give a design for an object-based module system, which we use to build dialects, a means of extending and restricting the language available to the programmer, and of implementing domain-specific languages. We show a visual programming interface that melds visual editing (à la Scratch) with textual editing, and that uses our dialect system, and we give the results of a user experiment we performed to evaluate the usability of our interface.
Practical Fault-Tolerance for Mobile Agents

The amount of computational resources available on the Internet is increasing. Effectively using these resources for distributed computations is challenging. An infrastructure called computational grids provides tools for structuring and deploying large-scale distributed computations on the Internet. One of the key problems in computational grids is managing the available computational resources; tools based on mobile agents are being advocated to solve this problem. However, to be widely adopted, such tools must be robust towards failures in the grid environment, and thus require effective mechanisms for mobile agent fault-tolerance. To gain insight on how grid applications perform on the Internet, this dissertation investigates two master-worker algorithms, one based on group communication and one based on message flooding. Both algorithms are executed in simulations using Internet communication traces. The results from running and evaluating the algorithms are used to infer requirements for our mobile agent fault-tolerance approach. This dissertation then derives a fault-tolerant mobile agent protocol. The protocol is rooted in the primary-backup approach, where a set of backups monitor the progress of the mobile agent during the computation. The protocol allows the set of backups to be changed during the computation to adapt to the current network topology. The dissertation then describes an implementation of our protocol on top of a mobile agent platform, and evaluates the performance of the protocol. The results show that explicit management of backups can be beneficial to performance, and that our protocol is applicable outside the scope of mobile agent computations.
Prevalence of Intestinal Parasites in Vegetables Sold in Some Local Markets in Port-Harcourt, Rivers-State, Nigeria

A total of 492 vegetable leaves samples made up of cabbage (27), bitter leaves (50), garden egg leaves (44), green leaves (66), green onion (47), lettuce (51), pumpkin leaves (111), parsley (26) and water leaves (70), bought randomly from various local markets in Port-Harcourt was analyzed for the presence of some parasite stages. About 145(29.5%) out 492 samples examined were contaminated with various parasite stages. Green leaves had the highest level of contamination (40.9%), followed by bitter leaves (38.8%), while cabbage recorded the lowest (7.4%). Out of 202 parasite stages identified, the eggs of Ascaris lumbricoides were the most predominant 39 (19.3%), followed by the cysts of Entarmoeba histolytica 31 (15.3%), whereas the oocysts Cryptosporidium parvum and eggs of Strongyloides stercolaris had the least 4(1.9%). Green leaves and pumpkin leaves harboured 8 (80.0%) and 7(70%) respectively out of 10 different types of parasites obtained in this study; cabbage and parsley had only 3 (30.0%). Pumpkin leaves recorded the highest level eggs of Ascaris lumbricoides 18(30%), eggs of Fasciola species 10 (16.7%), cysts of Entamaeba histolytica 8 (50.0%), eggs of Giardia lambia 7(11.7%), whereas cabbage overall had the lowest percentage of parasites with Ancylostoma duodenale 2 (50.0%); eggs of Toxoplasma gondii 1 (25.0%) and eggs of Strongyloides stercolaris 1 (25.0%). The present study revealed the potential hazard of vegetable leaves sold in some local markets in Port – Harcourt. Though the vegetables are properly de-contaminated after sales at the point of preparation/cooking, it is also very necessary for the de-contamination to be done before sales. There is need for monitoring by educating both vendors and consumers on the good sanitary practices during processing displaying and sale of the vegetable products and possible danger of contaminated and spoiled vegetables.
A survey of reading services provided to students with reading disabilities

A Survey of Reading Services Provided to Students with Reading Disabilities. (December 2005) Margaret Harding Christen, B.A., University of Massachusetts – North Dartmouth Campus; M.Ed., University of the Virgin Islands Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Richard I. Parker This research investigated the extent of special education reading services provided to students with a diagnosed reading disability, and examined potential demographic differences in service delivery. Special education eligibility folders of 512 students from 11 Texas school districts were examined. Trained research teams utilizing a reliable data collection template conducted on-site visits and recorded student folder data during a six-week period. National statistics report that 37% of fourth grade students do not possess basic reading skills. Half of the students presently receiving special education services are qualified as a student with a learning disability and 80% of these students are reported to be learning disabled in the areas of basic reading or reading comprehension. Previous research studies have reported that students with a diagnosed disability in reading are not always provided the specialized instruction needed. This study reported on: (a) current practices in Texas for the 512 students whose files were reviewed with respect to special education reading services: (b) what state demographics
Detection System for Grey and Colour Images Based on Extracting Features of Difference Image and Renormalized Histogram

The literature has introduced many steganalysis methods intended to combat speciﬁc steganography techniques and to detect particular image formats. This paper proposes a detection system based on extracting histogram features. The features are extracted by exploiting the histogram of diﬀerence image, which is usually a generalised Gaussian distribution centred at 0. The histogram of diﬀerence image and the renormalized histogram are created for clean and stego images, therefore using the peak value and renormalized histogram as features for classiﬁcation. To obtain the diﬀerence between neighbouring pixels, the diﬀerence images are computed for four directions (vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and anti-diagonal). The renormalized histogram of the diﬀerence image is created a number of times (n) for the four directions. This work implements two commonly-used steganography methods: the Least Signiﬁcant Bit (LSB) and F5 al-gorithm to create a large database of stego images for system evaluation. Colour and grey images with diﬀerent formats are chosen for training and testing the system. These formats are lossless and lossy compressions, with all features extracted from each colour channel (RGB) separately. The size of hidden ﬁles plays an important role in terms of detection. Therefore, to improve the proposed systems detection capacity, diﬀerent sizes of hidden ﬁles have been considered. The proposed detection system was trained and tested to distinguish stego images from clean ones using the Discriminant Analysis (DA) classiﬁcation method and Multilayer Perceptron neural network (MLP). The experimental results prove that the proposed system possesses reliable detection ability and accuracy. The chosen classiﬁcation methods show dissimilar performance in terms of classifying grey and colour images. The system holds more generalisability than previous systems by covering diﬀerent types of stego images, image formats and hidden ﬁle sizes. In addition, extensive experimental results show that the proposed steganalysis system outperforms some previous detection methods.
Social profiles for dynamically configurable agents in large scale cloud, grid, and heterogeneous infrastructures

A vast amount of computing resources are available throughout the world today. These are distributed worldwide, and are heterogeneous in platform, origins, motivations, ownership and control. Many large computational challenges also exist, which if addressed, would require a great amount of computing resources, often too much to be addressed by one single type of computing resource. In attempting to assemble enough resources to address these large challenges, two difficulties present; interoperability, and the diversity found in the social and economic backgrounds that both the work and resources may have. Multiple distributed agents offer an interoperability solution by wrapping services which need to interact with each other. Agents can represent computing resources and work, modelling and executing the types of interactions needed to make resource allocation decisions. In an ever changing resource allocation environment, agents need to be easy to create, configure and reconfigure. Social Grid Agents (SGAs) are designed to address resources allocation in grid computing. Being able to operate and communicate in a distributed heterogeneous environment, they offer a solution for interoperability. SGAs interact with one another and enforce the work allocation policies of the resources they represent. This is done using the Boolean matching features of the Classad language. But matching of subtle and nuanced social and economic backgrounds presents a challenge to Boolean matching mechanism. To overcome this challenge, agents need a mechanism which can describe and differentiate between the social and economic differences among the resources and work which they are allocating. This thesis extends previous research in Social Grid Agents. It enhances existing SGA technology to become more scalable and configurable. It also proposes using textual descriptions in unstructured language to describe the social and economic outlooks that computing resources and workloads may have. To measure the similarity between these descriptions, search technology is integrated into the agents. These descriptions are called ‘social profiles’. This thesis provides novel mechanisms to improve scalability, configurability and programmability of SGAs. Serialisation and class loading techniques are employed to achieve dynamic configurability of ‘live’ agents. An extensible and versatile format for the social profiles is developed. This thesis also provides mechanisms to exchange social profiles using distributed search technology and serialisation. Embedded search technology in SGAs allows quantitative similarity measurements to be determined for social profiles, yielding information useful in resource allocation decisions. An extensive set of experimental case studies demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques.
Website satisfaction dimensions: factors between satisfaction and dissatisfaction

According to the two-factor theory, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are different concepts. This study examines the influence of perceived ease of use (PEOU) as a context factor and perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived enjoyment (PEN) as content factors to further the influence on satisfaction, and dissatisfaction. The current study uses descriptive statistics, t-test, multiple regression analysis, ANOVA, and SEM. The study recruited 660 participants, of which 336 (50.90 percent) were males. The results not only confirm the two-factor theory but also indicate some interesting findings. The context factor not only impacted on dissatisfaction but also indirectly impacted the relationship between content factor and satisfaction. In a website which is not easy for using, the poor design would arouse the dissatisfaction of users. Users who accessed Facebook for communication seemed to ask for a website with higher usefulness, but users with playing purposes would try to explore it in an acceptable situation with lower perceived PEOU.
Efficient algorithms for collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering is a novel statistical technique to obtain useful information or to make predictions based on data from multiple agents. A large number of such datasets are naturally represented in matrix form. Typically, there exists a matrix M from which we know a (typically sparse) subset of entries M_ij for (i, j) in some set E. The problem then is to predict/approximate the unseen entries. This framework of matrix completion is extremely general and applications include personalized recommendation systems, sensor positioning, link prediction and so on. Low rank models have traditionally been used to learn useful information from such datasets. Low-dimensional representations simplify the description of the dataset and often yield predictive powers. As an added benefit, it is easier to store and retrieve low dimensional representations. Finally, many computationally intensive operations such as matrix multiplication and inversion are simplified with low dimensional representations. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has traditionally been used to find the lowdimensional representation of a fully revealed matrix. There are numerous algorithms for computing the SVD of a matrix including several parallel implementations and implementations for sparse matrices. However, when the matrix is only partially observed, we show that SVD techniques are sub-optimal. In this work, we will develop algorithms to learn a low rank model from a partially revealed matrix. These algorithms are computationally efficient and highly parallelizable. We will show that the proposed algorithms achieve a performance close to the fundamental limit in a number of scenarios. Finally, the algorithms achieve significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art algorithms on many real collaborative filtering datasets.
Simultaneous mechanical structure and control system design: optimization and convex approaches

In the design of a mechanical system, the structural design and the control system design may be performed simultaneously (integrated approach) or separately (sequential approach). By introducing the idea of a decomposable design problem, the problem of why and when the simultaneous structural and control design method should be used is first answered in this paper. A new mechanical structure and control design method, referred to as the extended multiple simultaneous specification (EMSS) design method is also proposed in this paper. Simultaneously selecting the structural parameters and the control parameters, a family of "sample systems" can be found. Subsequently, a closed-loop system, which satisfies all the design specifications, can be derived by this EMSS method. Two design examples using the optimization method and the EMSS method respectively to solve the mechanical system design problem are given in the end of this paper.
Impact of Online Summer Mathematics Bridge Program on Placement Scores and Pass Rates.

An online four-week summer mathematics bridge program was implemented at a Midwest university with historically low pass rates in College Algebra and Remedial Mathematics. Students who completed the four week program significantly increased their mathematics placement exam scores. These students also had a higher pass rate in their initial college mathematics course compared to the overall student population taking the same courses.
Multivariable adaptive actuator nonlinearity compensation

Many control systems are multivariable. Coupling dynamics in a multivariable system make it essentially more difficult to control than a single-variable system. In this paper, two adaptive schemes are developed for compensation of unknown nonsmooth nonlinearities at the input of a known multivariable linear plant: one with a state feedback design and the other with an output feedback design, based on a multivariable parameter estimation algorithm for coupled error models. Unlike their single-variable counterparts, some of the multivariable adaptive actuator nonlinearity compensation problems still remain unsolved if the linear plant is also unknown.
Semantic routed network for distributed search engines

Searching for textual information has become an important activity on the web. To satisfy the rising demand and user expectations, search systems should be fast, scalable and deliver relevant results. To decide which objects should be retrieved, search systems should compare holistic meanings of queries and text document objects, as perceived by humans. Existing techniques do not enable correct comparison of composite holistic meanings like: “evidences on role of DR2 gene in development of diabetes in Caucasian population”, which is composed of multiple elementary meanings: “evidence”, “DR2 gene”, etc. Thus these techniques can not discern objects that have a common set of keywords but convey different meanings. Hence we need new methods to compare composite meanings for superior search quality. In distributed search engines, for scalability, speed and efficiency, index entries should be systematically distributed across multiple index-server nodes based on the meaning of the objects. Furthermore, queries should be selectively sent to those index nodes which have relevant entries. This requires an overlay Semantic Routed Network which will route messages, based on meaning. This network will consist of fast response networking appliances called semantic routers. These appliances need to: (a) carry out sophisticated meaning comparison computations at high speed; and (b) have the right kind of behavior to automatically organize an optimal index system. This dissertation presents the following artifacts that enable the above requirements: (1) An algebraic theory, a design of a data structure and related techniques to efficiently compare composite meanings. (2) Algorithms and accelerator architectures for high speed meaning comparisons inside semantic routers and index-server nodes. (3) An overlay network to deliver search queries to the index nodes based on meanings. (4) Algorithms to construct a self-organizing, distributed meaning based index system. The proposed techniques can compare composite meanings ∼10 5 times faster than an equivalent software code and existing hardware designs. Whereas, the proposed index organization approach can lead to 33% savings in number of servers and power consumption in a model search engine having 700,000 servers. Therefore, using all these techniques, it is possible to design a Semantic Routed Network which has a potential to improve search results and response time, while saving resources.
Analysis of Lecturers on Factors Affecting Quality of Training in Teacher Education

This study investigated factors affecting quality of training in College of Education Hong, Adamawa State. The objective of the study was to assess the quality of training in the College. The quantitative research design was used. Two research questions guided the study. The sample consisted of 100 respondents, selected by simple random sampling technique. An instrument with 20 items titled Factor Affecting Quality of Training Questionnaire (FAQTQ) was used for data collection by the researchers. The instrument was validated through face and content validation by three experts from the Department of Science Education, Modibbo Adama University of Technology Yola, Nigeria. The test-retest method was used in determining the reliability of the instrument, and the reliability coefficient was calculated using person product Moment Correlation method which gave coefficients of stability of 0.73. Data collected for the study were analyzed using descriptive statistics of mean. Findings from the study revealed that, factors affecting students learning were inaccessibility to library internet and usage. It was recommended that the college authority should provide internet in the library and also organize seminars to orientate students on the advantages of using library to develop their learning skills.
Self-regulation in English Language Learning: Case Studies of Six Malaysian Undergraduates

i Acknowledgements ii List of figures viii List of tables viii Glossary ix CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1 Background to the language context in Malaysia 4 Overview of thesis chapters 8 CHAPTER TWO: Review of Literature 9 Introduction 9 English language teaching and learning in Malaysia 9 Malaysian schools 9 Malaysian universities 12 Self-regulated learning 14 Definitions 14 Relationship between self-regulated learning with autonomy 16 Components 17 Learning strategies 31 Self-regulated learning and academic achievement at university 34 Self-regulation in language learning 38 Cultural influences on self-regulation 43 Chapter summary 46 CHAPTER THREE: Theoretical Framework 48 Introduction 48 A social cognitive theory of self-regulation 48 Chapter summary 55 CHAPTER FOUR: Methodology 57 Introduction 57 An interpretivist paradigm 57 Qualitative research 58 Case study research design 60 Interpretive case study 61 Research questions 62 The research context 63 Language course 65 -