Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Comparison of Text, Voice, and Screencasting Feedback to Online Students

ABSTRACT The emergence of simple video and voice recording software has allowed faculty to deliver online course content in a variety of rich formats. But most faculty are still using traditional text comments for feedback to students. The author launched a study comparing student and faculty perceptions of text, voice, and screencasting feedback. The results provide some interesting insights into the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of feedback. The author finishes with best practices for providing screencasting feedback to students.
Algorithms and computation : 26th international symposium, ISAAC 2015, Nagoya, Japan, December 9-11, 2015 : proceedings

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation, ISAAC 2015, held in Nagoya, Japan, in December 2015. The 65 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 180 submissions for inclusion in the book. The focus of the volume is on the following topics: computational geometry; data structures; combinatorial optimization and approximation algorithms; randomized algorithms; graph algorithms and FPT; computational complexity; graph drawing and planar graphs; online and streaming algorithms; and string and DNA algorithms.
A Hybrid Approach for Selection of Optimal Process Parameters in Abrasive Water Jet Cutting

A hybrid approach combining fuzzy logic principles and a genetic approach for selecting optimal parameters in abrasive water jet cutting of any material with predetermined thickness was presented.A fuzzy model was built with the knowledge base formed by means of experimental data.This particular model predicts the depth of cut achievable with any given set of process parameters.A genetic algorithm employed in combination with a fuzzy model automatically determines the best combination of process parameters in abrasive water jet cutting of any material.The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by a case study dealing with abrasive water jet cutting of black granite.
VISUAL EVALUATION OF CIE 2015 CONE FUNDAMENTAL-BASED 10° COLOUR MATCHING FUNCTIONS FOR LIGHTING APPLICATIONS

The CIE 2015 cone fundamental-based colour-matching functions (CMFs), especially the 10° CMFs, are expected to improve visual colour matching in lighting applications. The chromaticity specifications for lighting products are based on the CIE 1931 CMFs (2° observer) and are given by correlated colour temperature (CCT) and the distance from Planckian locus (Duv). To study the impact of introducing the CIE 2015 CMFs, computational analyses were first made to determine the magnitude of changes in CCT and Duv values for various lighting sources. The results showed significant changes in both CCT and Duv. Then vision experiments were conducted to compare the CIE 2015 CMFs and the CIE 1931 CMFs for visual colour matching of lights with various spectral distributions. The results showed that CIE 2015 10° CMFs performed better overall but also that there is a strong dependence on the age of subjects and the spectral distribution of light sources.
Research on Optimizing the Template Frame in DNA Computing

The encoding problem is a most fundamental issue in DNA based computing.Its difficulty lies in how can we assure that each code could accurately identify itself in linear DNA sequences.Therefore,how to use those codes effectively becomes an urgent problem.In this paper,we introduce the concept of template frame and its shift distance property based on the template strategy.Then,we study the influence of the length of labels,single labels and multiple labels on the shift distance.The result shows that the multiple label method can improve the shift distance property dramatically.Finally,we point out some possible directions for further studying.
Mapping prosody to reference in L2

Akmajian, A. , & Jackendoff, R. (1970). CoreferenLality and stress. LinguisMc Inquiry. Balogh, J. E. (2003). Pronouns, prosody, and the discourse anaphora weighLng approach. (Unpublished doctoral dissertaLon). UCSD. Chen, A. , & Lai, V. T. (2011). Comb or coat: The role of intonaLon in online reference resoluLon in a second language. In Sound and Sounds. Studies presented to M.E. H. (Bert) Schouten on the occasion of his 65th birthday. UiL OTS. Grüter, T. , Rohde, H. , & Schafer, A. J. (in press). Coreference and discourse coherence in L2: The roles of grammaLcal aspect and referenLal form. LinguisMc Approaches to Bilingualism. Grüter, T. , Rohde, H. , & Schafer, A. J. (2014). The role of discourse-level expectaLons in non-naLve speakers’ referenLal choices. In Proceedings of BUCLD 38. Cascadilla Press. Huang, B. H. & Jun, S. -A. (2011). The effect of age on the acquisiLon of second language prosody. Language and Speech. Kehler, A. , Kertz, L. , Rohde, H. , & Elman, J. L. (2008). Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of SemanMcs. Kim, K. , Grüter, T. , & Schafer, A. J. (2013) Effects of event-structure and topic/focus-marking on pronoun reference in Korean. CUNY Poster. Pennington, M.C. & Ellis, N.C. (2000). Cantonese speakers’ memory for English sentences with prosodic cues. The Modern Language Journal. Roberts, L. , Gullberg, M. , & Indefrey, P. (2008). Online pronoun resoluLon in L2 discourse: L1 influence and general learner effects. Studies in Second Language AcquisiMon. Sorace, A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of ‘interface’ in bilingualism. LinguisMc Approaches to Bilingualism. Ueno, M. , & Kehler, A. (2010). The interpretaLon of null and overt pronouns in Japanese: GrammaLcal and pragmaLc factors. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual MeeMng of the CogniMve Science Society. Zubizarreta, M. L. & Nava, E. (2011). Encoding discourse-based meaning: Prosody vs. syntax. ImplicaLons for second language acquisiLon. Lingua. • L2ers’ show significant use of contrasLve intonaLon on antecedents (Exp1), but not pronouns (Exp2) to determine pronoun reference.
The adjusted Viterbi training for hidden

The EM procedure is a principal tool for parameter estimation in the hidden Markov models. However, applications replace EM by Viterbi extraction, or training (VT). VT is computationally less intensive, more stable and has more of an intuitive appeal, but VT estimation is biased and does not satisfy the following fixed point property. Hypothetically, given an infinitely large sample and initialized to the true parameters, VT will generally move away from the initial values. We propose adjusted Viterbi training (VA), a new method to restore the fixed point property and thus alleviate the overall imprecision of the VT estimators, while preserving the computational advantages of the baseline VT algorithm. Simulations elsewhere have shown that VA appreciably improves the precision of estimation in both the special case of mixture models and more general HMMs. However, being entirely analytic, the VA correction relies on infinite Viterbi alignments and associated limiting probability distributions. While explicit in the mixture case, the existence of these limiting measures is not obvious for more general HMMs. This paper proves that under certain mild conditions, the required limiting distributions for general HMMs do exist.
Formal [3+2]cycloaddition of benzylic cations with alkenes

The reaction of benzylic cations with styrenes affords dihydro(1H)indenes in good yield via a formal [3+2] atom cycloaddition. The cations were generated from quinone methides and benzylic alcohols. (E)-Styrenes participate in the reaction with remarkable stereoselectivity affording dihydro(1H)indenes with three stereogenic centers with >40:1 diastereselectivity. A possible transition state for the reaction is discussed. Less activated centers such as dihydropyran and methylcyclohexene afforded cycloadduts in 66% and 51% yields, respectively
Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) but not its homologue D‐dopachrome tautomerase (D‐DT) promotes fibroblast motility in a CD44/CD74‐independent manner

Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) and D‐dopachrome tautomerase (D‐DT) are paralogous pro‐inflammatory cytokines with chemokine‐like functions. Whereas cytosolic MIF plays a role in cell cycle, secreted MIF and D‐DT activate second messenger signalling through a CD44/CD74 receptor complex. To differentiate between receptor‐ and non‐receptor‐mediated events, COS‐7/M6 fibroblasts deficient in CD44/CD74 (WT) were employed to generate stable cell lines expressing CD44 and CD74. Chemokinesis (random single‐cell motility) was assessed in cells stimulated with native recombinant MIF/D‐DT, enzyme‐null recombinant MIF, inhibitors of MIF's tautomerase activity, and inhibitors of clathrin‐ and non‐clathrin‐dependent endocytosis. In the presence of CD44/CD74, both MIF and D‐DT stimulated chemokinesis but only MIF enhanced chemokinesis in the absence of receptors. The stimulatory effect of MIF on migration depended on its tautomerase activity and lipid raft/caveolae‐mediated, but not clathrin‐mediated endocytosis. To observe a direct effect of MIF and D‐DT on actin dynamics, actin polymerization was quantified in an in vitro actin assembly assay. MIF but not D‐DT decreased the rate of F‐actin assembly. By decreasing the rate of cell extract‐driven actin assembly, MIF phenocopies the function of F‐actin capping proteins. Moreover, stimulation with MIF increased the number of prominent F‐actin stress fibres in COS‐7/M6 WT. Taken together, MIF stimulates fibroblast chemokinesis independent of its receptors, likely by directly modulating the actin cytoskeleton. MIF‐mediated chemokinesis appears to depend on lipid raft/caveolae‐mediated endocytosis. D‐DT triggers chemokinesis only in the presence of MIF/D‐DT receptors – CD44/CD74 – implying D‐DT requires the classical receptor‐driven second‐messenger transduction pathway.
Efficient Cover Song Identification using approximate nearest neighbors

Automatically detecting cover songs imply being robust to several kinds of musical modulations. Timbral variance can be accounted at the feature level, but key and most importantly tempo variations have to be dealt with at the retrieval stage. For that purpose, most state of the art approaches consider exhaustive search based on song to song matching methods that fail at scaling up. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid technique. It first retrieves the approximate neighbors of each query chroma descriptor. In a second stage, the temporal consistency is exploited to further filter out some matches, thereby filtering irrelevant songs. Our method performs a search in a dataset comprising 80 songs in about 1s, while achieving satisfactory accuracy compared to the best performing techniques of the state of the art.
State-based join-points: Motivation and requirements

In developing a real-world complex application, we experience the major problem that complex concerns do not easily map onto low-level aspects with join-points based on fixed points in the program code. It is our observation that modularizing concerns and quantification are to be tackled at design-time, using suitable abstractions, with a translation to dynamic weaving at run-time. In particular, we argue that ‘abstract states’ of software entities (a concern consists of software entities) are a promising instrument for defining higher-level join-points for concerns. The specification and quantification of concerns in terms of abstract states typically result in dynamic weaving, i.e. depending on run-time states of the software entities. Based on experience, we provide requirements for supporting concern modelling and quantification at design-time, as well as an initial sketch of an approach that we investigate in this perspective. The approach is based on a new type of higher-level join-points, called state-based join-points and serves as an example of the necessity for advanced dynamic (state-based) aspect weaving. The approach is motivated and illustrated through a scenario in a real-world application, namely decentralized control software for several automatic guided vehicles in an industrial transportation system.
In vitro screening for antioxidant and antimicrobial properties of three lebanese medicinal plants crude extracts

Background: Despite its small geographic area, Lebanon is characterized by a natural wealth in medicinal plants. Lebanese flora has about 2600 species, where >100 are endemic and are used in traditional medicine for their therapeutic effects. Objective: To evaluate the antioxidant and antimicrobial activities of dichloromethane, methanol, and aqueous crude extracts of three Lebanese medicinal plants: Geranium robertianum, Asphodelus microcarpus, and Alcea setosa. Materials and Methods: The antioxidant activity of different crude extracts was determined using the free radical, 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl. Antimicrobial activity was evaluated in a plate-hole diffusion assay against two Gram-negative (Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Escherichia coli) bacterial strains, one Gram-positive (Staphylococcus aureus) bacterial strain, and a fungal strain (Candida albicans). Results: Methanol and aqueous extracts of G. robertianum possessed high scavenging activity (Radical scavenging activity (RSA) >85%) at 0.3 mg/mL followed by the extracts of A. microcarpus which showed a moderate activity. G. robertianum extracts exhibited good inhibition diameters against S. aureus growth. Conclusion: Obtained results give an overall view on the bioactivities of three Lebanese medicinal plants crude extracts.
On Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary teaching is a quite important aspect in English teaching. The author focuses on the vocabulary teaching approaches in the view of language in-put as the second language, that is, language unit, collocation, regular phrase and etc. It is pointed out that vocabulary teaching should be connected with semantic net with imagination, comparing and association.
Formal aspects of object identity in database manipulation

This thesis contains a study of the impact of object identity on the manipulation of object-oriented databases. In particular due to the possibility for object creation, i.e., the presence of identifiers of new objects in the result of a query or update, various new questions have arisen which have not been considered in the study of conventional database queries and updates. First, we consider the representation of complex values by typed networks of abstract objects. Two different objects in such a network may represent the same complex value, i.e., duplicates can occur. We consider various means for the elimination of such duplicates, and establish the connections that exist between these different operations. We also study the notion of object creation from the most general point of view, and pursue the following question in great depth: when can a data manipulation language supporting object creation be called computationally complete? Finally, we study a new form of non-determinism in database queries, called semi-determinism, inspired by the problem of copy elimination put forward by Abiteboul and Kanellakis. Semi-determinism arises naturally in the context of object creation, but has also unexpected applications in more efficiently expressing deterministic queries using non-determinism.
Emerging non-volatile memory based physical unclonable functions

Cybersecurity has drawn tremendous attentions from academia and industry in the recent years, thanks to the proliferation of extensively connected devices and computers. While software-defined service has been demonstrated effective in many other applications, safeguarding sensitive information that virtually resides in the communication channels, computation nodes and data storage elements remains a critical issue that may require sagacious solution leveraging on the advantageous attributes of hardware. Hardware-based security solutions for accelerating cryptographic primitives like hash function and block cipher using hardware fabrics on FPGA and ASIC has been studied comprehensively in the literature. As an essential part, the storage element for preserving secret keys is alway the target of adversarial attacks. Unfortunately, conventional methods for key preservation such as applying a “One-Time-Programmable” Non-Volatile Memory (OTP NVM) storage where the key is restricted for read only by authorized identities, has been experimentally demonstrated vulnerable to varieties of physical attacks. The technology of Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) emerged at the right moment, when traditional approaches failed to circumvent this issue. Compared to the OTP NVM, PUF is superior in the security strength against physical attacks owing to its inherently tamper-evident property and physical randomness that renders predicting unknown secret patterns extracted from it a difficult job. The incentive of research in this dissertation is to improve the security and reliability of existing PUF implementations supported by applying emerging Non-Volatile-Memory (eNVM) technologies. Even though PUF is recognized as an efficient primitive for key preservation/generation and cryptographic protocols, it has been criticized for low reliability under certain environmental conditions and limited strength of security against intelligent attacks. The research in this dissertation will review these problems firstly, and propose several PUF designs using the eNVM media to achieve the best performance in security and reliability with minimum overhead. The first PUF design is featured by physically reconfiguration property, that is, the key pool of the PUF can be dynamically refreshed as required. Compared to an existing instance called “logically reconfigurable PUF”, the proposed design does not need any auxiliary components for algorithmically refreshing challenges and responses of a PUF. An illustrative
Facebook Is a Source of Social Capital Building Among University Students

This study analyzes the influence of Facebook usage on building social capital among university students in Karachi by using a modified framework of technology acceptance model. Important information was gathered utilizing organized questionnaire containing items of Facebook intensity, social self-efficacy, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived playfulness (independent variables), intention to continue use (mediating variables), bridging social capital, and bonding social capital (dependent variables), while the specimen size includes 560 university students. Furthermore, the procedures utilized as a part of the study are reliability analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, partial least square-structural equation modeling to check the impact of these factors on the building of social capital. Findings show that Facebook intensity, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived playfulness, and social self-efficacy have a positive and significant impact on intention to continue use, while intention to continue use has a positive and significant impact on both dependent variables bridging social capital and bonding social capital concluding that social networking sites (Facebook) are helpful in building and maintaining social capital by creating intention to continue using them. This study provides useful insights about the youth experience of using Facebook and sharing information. Also, marketers would get benefit as this study would allow them to adopt effective marketing strategies.
Workshop on Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics

This paper investigates whether the wider context in which a sentence is located can contribute to a distributional representation of sentence meaning. We compare a vector space for sentences in which the features are words occurring within the sentence, with two new vector spaces that only make use of surrounding context. Experiments on simple subject-verbobject similarity tasks show that all sentence spaces produce results that are comparable with previous work. However, qualitative analysis and user experiments indicate that extra-sentential contexts capture more diverse, yet topically coherent information.
Contagious Content: Viral Video Ads Identification of Content Characteristics that Help Online Video Advertisements Go Viral

Why do some online video advertisements go viral while others remain unnoticed? What kind of video content keeps the viewer interested and motivated to share? Many companies have realized the need to innovate their marketing strategies and have embraced the newest ways of using technology, as the Internet, to their advantage as in the example of virality. Yet few marketers actually understand how, and academic literature on this topic is still in development. This study investigated which content characteristics distinguish successful from non-successful online viral video advertisements by analyzing 641 cases using Structural Equation Modeling. Results show that Engagement and Surprise are two main content characteristics that significantly increase the chance of online video advertisements to go viral.
Hα kinematics of S4G spiral galaxies – III. Inner rotation curves

We present a detailed study of the shape of the innermost part of the rotation curves of a sample of 29 nearby spiral galaxies, based on high angular and spectral resolution kinematic Halpha Fabry-Perot observations. In particular, we quantify the steepness of the rotation curve by measuring its slope dRvc(0). We explore the relationship between the inner slope and several galaxy parameters, such as stellar mass, maximum rotational velocity, central surface brightness ({\mu}0), bar strength and bulge-to-total ratio. Even with our limited dynamical range, we find a trend for low-mass galaxies to exhibit shallower rotation curve inner slopes than high-mass galaxies, whereas steep inner slopes are found exclusively in high-mass galaxies. This trend may arise from the relationship between the total stellar mass and the mass of the bulge, which are correlated among them. We find a correlation between the inner slope of the rotation curve and the morphological T-type, complementary to the scaling relation between dRvc(0) and {\mu}0 previously reported in the literature. Although we find that the inner slope increases with the Fourier amplitude A2 and decreases with the bar torque Qb, this may arise from the presence of the bulge implicit in both A2 and Qb. As previously noted in the literature, the more compact the mass in the central parts of a galaxy (more concretely, the presence of a bulge), the steeper the inner slopes. We conclude that the baryonic matter dominates the dynamics in the central parts of our sample galaxies.
Hausdorff Dimension in Inhomogeneous Diophantine Approximation

Let $\alpha $ be an irrational real number. We show that the set of $\varepsilon $-badly approximable numbers $$\begin{equation*} \textrm{Bad}^\varepsilon (\alpha):= \Big\{x\in [0,1]\,: \, \liminf_{|q| \to \infty} |q| \cdot \| q\alpha -x \| \geq \varepsilon \Big\} \end{equation*}$$has full Hausdorff dimension for some positive $\varepsilon $ if and only if $\alpha $ is singular on average. The condition is equivalent to the average $\frac{1}{k} \sum _{i=1, \cdots , k} \log a_i$ of the logarithms of the partial quotients $a_i$ of $\alpha $ going to infinity with $k$. We also consider one-sided approximation, obtain a stronger result when $a_i$ tends to infinity, and establish a partial result in higher dimensions.