Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Case Study in Asynchronous Voice Conferencing for Language Instruction

In the past decade, text-based asynchronous communication technology has been used as a teaching tool and has been researched extensively for its pedagogical implications. Thus far, the research has consistently identified two major benefits of asynchronous communication technology: (1) a deeper thought process manifested in the discussion threads and (2) the facilitation of collaborative learning. However, text-based communication is restricted to written words that may be advantageous in some subject areas but is impedimental in language instruction where oral skills are essential for communicative competency. This paper describes a pilot project in the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme at the University of Alberta where two courses incorporated a voice-based conferencing tool called Wimba. Students took part in organized debates and discussions in class and online to improve their oral skills. An evaluation survey was conducted at the end of the pilot project to test students' reactions and determine the effectiveness of the combination of Wimba and oral learning activities. There is no doubt that more research is needed to investigate the emerging field of voice-based asynchronous technology. The EAP pilot project serves as a case study at the intersection of this new technology and language instruction. Etude de cas pour une conférence orale asynchrone pour l’apprentissage des langues. Dans la dernière décennie, la technologie de communication asynchrone basée sur des textes À été utilisée comme outil d’enseignement et a donné lieu À des recherches nombreuses sur ses implications pédagogiques. Jusqu À présent la recherche a identifié chaque fois 2 bénéfices majeurs de la technologie de communication asynchrone. 1. un processus de pensée approfondi que se manifeste dans les fils de la discussion 2. la facilitation de l’apprentissage en coopération. Cependant, la communication basée sur les textes est limitée aux mots écrits ce qui peut etre avantageux dans certains domaines mais peut gérer l’apprentissage des langues où les compétences orales sont essentielles. Cet article décrit un projet pilote du programme »English for Academic Purposes« À l’Université d’Alberta où 2 cours ont incorporé un outil de conférence basé sur la voix appelé Wimba. Les étudiants ont pris part À des discussions et débats organisés en classe et en ligne pour améliorer leurs compétences orales. On a procédé À une enquête d’évaluation À la fin du projet pilote pour tester les réactions des étudiants et déterminer l’efficacité de la combinaison de Wimba et des autres activités d’apprentissage oral. Sans aucun doute il faudra davantage de recherches pour étudier le champ émergeant de la technologie asynchrone basée sur la voix. Le projet pilote EAT fournit une étude de cas utile À l’intersection de cette nouvelle technologie et de l’enseignement des langues.
KleinPAT: optimal mode conflation for time-domain precomputation of acoustic transfer

We propose a new modal sound synthesis method that rapidly estimates all acoustic transfer fields of a linear modal vibration model, and greatly reduces preprocessing costs. Instead of performing a separate frequencydomain Helmholtz radiation analysis for each mode, our method partitions vibration modes into chords using optimal mode conflation, then performs a single time-domain wave simulation for each chord. We then perform transfer deconflation on each chord’s time-domain radiation field using a specialized QR solver, and thereby extract the frequency-domain transfer functions of each mode. The precomputed transfer functions are represented for fast far-field evaluation, e.g., using multipole expansions. In this paper, we propose to use a single scalar-valued Far-field Acoustic Transfer (FFAT) cube map. We describe a GPU-accelerated vector wavesolver that achieves high-throughput acoustic transfer computation at accuracy sufficient for sound synthesis. Our implementation, KleinPAT, can achieve hundredto thousand-fold speedups compared to existing Helmholtz-based transfer solvers, thereby enabling large-scale generation of modal sound models for audio-visual applications.
Tensor maps for synchronizing heterogeneous shape collections

Establishing high-quality correspondence maps between geometric shapes has been shown to be the fundamental problem in managing geometric shape collections. Prior work has focused on computing efficient maps between pairs of shapes, and has shown a quantifiable benefit of joint map synchronization, where a collection of shapes are used to improve (denoise) the pairwise maps for consistency and correctness. However, these existing map synchronization techniques place very strong assumptions on the input shapes collection such as all the input shapes fall into the same category and/or the majority of the input pairwise maps are correct. In this paper, we present a multiple map synchronization approach that takes a heterogeneous shape collection as input and simultaneously outputs consistent dense pairwise shape maps. We achieve our goal by using a novel tensor-based representation for map synchronization, which is efficient and robust than all prior matrix-based representations. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach across a wide range of geometric shape datasets and the applications in shape clustering and shape co-segmentation.
Stylizing video by example

We introduce a new example-based approach to video stylization, with a focus on preserving the visual quality of the style, user controllability and applicability to arbitrary video. Our method gets as input one or more keyframes that the artist chooses to stylize with standard painting tools. It then automatically propagates the stylization to the rest of the sequence. To facilitate this while preserving visual quality, we developed a new type of guidance for state-of-art patch-based synthesis, that can be applied to any type of video content and does not require any additional information besides the video itself and a user-specified mask of the region to be stylized. We further show a temporal blending approach for interpolating style between keyframes that preserves texture coherence, contrast and high frequency details. We evaluate our method on various scenes from real production setting and provide a thorough comparison with prior art.
NeuroSkinning

We present a deep-learning-based method to automatically compute skin weights for skeleton-based deformation of production characters. Given a character mesh and its associated skeleton hierarchy in rest pose, our method constructs a graph for the mesh, each node of which encodes the mesh-skeleton attributes of a vertex. An end-to-end deep graph convolution network is then introduced to learn the mesh-skeleton binding patterns from a set of character models with skin weights painted by artists. The network can be used to predict the skin weight map for a new character model, which describes how the skeleton hierarchy influences the mesh vertices during deformation. Our method is designed to work for non-manifold meshes with multiple disjoint or intersected components, which are common in game production and require complex skeleton hierarchies for animation control. We tested our method on the datasets of two commercial games. Experiments show that the predicted skin weight maps can be readily applied to characters in the production pipeline to generate high-quality deformations.
Direct delta mush skinning and variants

A significant fraction of the world's population have experienced virtual characters through games and movies, and the possibility of online VR social experiences may greatly extend this audience. At present, the skin deformation for interactive and real-time characters is typically computed using geometric skinning methods. These methods are efficient and simple to implement, but obtaining quality results requires considerable manual "rigging" effort involving trial-and-error weight painting, the addition of virtual helper bones, etc. The recently introduced Delta Mush algorithm largely solves this rig authoring problem, but its iterative computational approach has prevented direct adoption in real-time engines. This paper introduces Direct Delta Mush, a new algorithm that simultaneously improves on the efficiency and control of Delta Mush while generalizing previous algorithms. Specifically, we derive a direct rather than iterative algorithm that has the same ballpark computational form as some previous geometric weight blending algorithms. Straightforward variants of the algorithm are then proposed to further optimize computational and storage cost with insignificant quality losses. These variants are equivalent to special cases of several previous skinning algorithms. Our algorithm simultaneously satisfies the goals of reasonable efficiency, quality, and ease of authoring. Further, its explicit decomposition of rotational and translational effects allows independent control over bending versus twisting deformation, as well as a skin sliding effect.
Predicting Essential Genes of Escherichia coli based on Clustering Method

Essential genes are important to the survival or reproduction of organisms. Computational methods for predicting essential genes are mainly supervised classification methods. These methods need label information of genes which the newly sequenced genes are absence. This encourages us to use unsupervised methods to predict essential genes. Here, the K-means clustering algorithm was used to predict the essential genes of Escherichia coli after the Relief algorithm was used to weight the features. A membership calculation method based on Euclidean distance between genes was designed to get AUC (area under curve) score. The average AUC score was 0.989. This research enables a satisfied prediction of essential genes.
Information and Agricultural Development in Tanzania: a critique

Provides a critical evaluation of the relationship between the flow of information and the pace and process of agricultural change and development in rural Tanzania. Examines the adequacy of the diffusion of innovation model from which the hypothesis of the positive relationship between information and agricultural development is deduced. Highlights the major weakness of the applicability of this model in explaining and predicting the process of agricultural change and development in a developing country like Tanzania. Drawing from an extensive literature review and empirical findings, the paper makes some policy recommendations.
Method for predicting motion artifacts in matrix displays

Abstract— A method is proposed to measure and characterize motion artifacts in matrix displays. By using a fast, V(λ)‐corrected photodiode and a data‐acquisition system, accurate measurements of the temporal luminance behavior (step response) are recorded. The motion artifacts of LCDs and PDP displays are predicted from these measurements using the properties of the human‐visual system. The method is validated with perceptual evaluation experiments, for which a new evaluation protocol is established. In the end, new measures are proposed to quantify the motion‐rendering performance of these matrix displays.
The Role of Color in Palliative Care for Children

This paper is dedicated to investigating and analyzing the role of color in palliative care for children with life-threatening conditions. Although the color-emotion association for children has been addressed by various studies, the differences between healthy and seriously sick children on how to perceive and preference colors are rarely touched upon from a psychological and clinical perspective. Eighty children (39 boys, 41 girls), aged from 6 to 8, consisted of healthy and ill participants. A combination of questionnaire and color assessment was used to determine whether or not the participants' health condition is independent of the selection and preference of the colors and emotions they have chosen. A bunch of interesting findings are examined and discussed, which might be of certain significance to the future psychological assessment, intervention and treatment for children in a palliative setting.
Parametrization quantization with free boundaries for trimmed quad meshing

The generation of quad meshes based on surface parametrization techniques has proven to be a versatile approach. These techniques quantize an initial seamless parametrization so as to obtain an integer grid map implying a pure quad mesh. State-of-the-art methods following this approach have to assume that the surface to be meshed either has no boundary, or has a boundary which the resulting mesh is supposed to be aligned to. In a variety of applications this is not desirable and non-boundary-aligned meshes or grid-parametrizations are preferred. We thus present a technique to robustly generate integer grid maps which are either boundary-aligned, non-boundary-aligned, or partially boundary-aligned, just as required by different applications. We thereby generalize previous work to this broader setting. This enables the reliable generation of trimmed quad meshes with partial elements along the boundary, preferable in various scenarios, from tiled texturing over design and modeling to fabrication and architecture, due to fewer constraints and hence higher overall mesh quality and other benefits in terms of aesthetics and flexibility.
The training effects of principle knowledge on fault diagnosis performance

In regard to the effectiveness of types of knowledge on fault diagnosis performance, many experimental studies showed that training with procedural knowledge (diagnostic rules) is very effective to enhance diagnosis performance. But the effects of training with principle knowledge (theoretical knowledge) have been controversial. Some studies went so far as to claim that principle knowledge is not useful for diagnosis. However, common experience suggests that understanding the principles of system dynamics is valuable in certain diagnostic situations. In this study, we conducted an experiment to investigate the value of principle knowledge in various fault situations. A context‐free digital logic circuit including 41 gates of three basic types was simulated for the subjects to diagnose. The experimental results showed that instructing principle knowledge has positive effects that are dependent on the complexity of diagnostic problems. The observations also provide insights on how fault diagnosis benefits from principle knowledge. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hum Factors Man 17: 263–282, 2007.
Tensor Decomposition of Non-EEG Physiological Signals for Visualization and Recognition of Human Stress

Recognition of physical and mental responses to stress is important for the purpose of stress management to reduce its negative effects in health. Wearable technology, mainly using electroencephalogram (EEG), provides information such as tracking fitness activity, disease detection, and neurological states of individuals. However, the recording of EEG signals from a wearable device is inconvenient. This study introduces the application of tensor decomposition of non-EEG data for visualizing and tracking neurological status with implication to human stress recognition. Results obtained from testing the proposed method using a PhyioNet database show visualizations that can well separate four groups of neurological statuses obtained from twenty healthy subjects, and very high up to 100% classification of the neurological statuses. The investigation suggests the potential application of tensor decomposition for the analysis of physiological measurements collected from multiple sensors. The proposed study can significantly contribute to the advancement of wearable technology for human stress monitoring.
Principles of computerized tomographic imaging

Tomography refers to the cross-sectional imaging of an object from either transmission or reflection data collected by illuminating the object from many different directions. The impact of tomography in diagnostic medicine has been revolutionary, since it has enabled doctors to view internal organs with unprecedented precision and safety to the patient. There are also numerous nonmedical imaging applications which lend themselves to methods of computerized tomography, such as mapping of underground resources.cross-sectional imaging of for nondestructive testing.the determination of the brightness distribution over a celestial sphere.three-dimensional imaging with electron microscopy. Principles of Computerized Tomographic Imaging provides a tutorial overview of topics in tomographic imaging covering mathematical principles and theory.how to apply the theory to problems in medical imaging and other fields.several variations of tomography that are currently being researched.
The sound of feedback in higher education

Whilst there is considerable literature on feedback for students and on the use of audio feedback, literature in the area of podcasting assignment feedback (PAF) remains sparse. Partly, this may be due to a lack of clarity about what counts as feedback, the way in which feedback is located pedagogically and the relationship between feedback pedagogy and feedback practices. Podcasting as a whole is also largely under‐researched. This article explores recent research on, and practices used for, PAF. It argues that PAF should be based on the principles of dialogic learning.
GTC control system: an overview

The GTC project is in charge of the construction of an optical/IR 10-meter class telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos in Canary Islands. The GTC control system (GCS) will be responsible for the management and operation of the telescope, including its instrumentation. Its conceptual design has been completed in summer 1997. The continuous and rapid development of hardware, software and communications technology has permitted a greater complexity in control systems. In their turn, the development of active and adaptive optics, the new methods of optimizing available observing time and the continuous development programs to maintain telescope competitiveness present new challenges in the design of control systems. During its life-cycles, the GCS will be subject to continuous changes brought about by different factors, such as the advent of new technologies, the evolution of the requirements, the development of new instruments and fault correction. These factors must be taken on board with the minimum possible impact, not only on the project but also on the availability of the GTC once it enters into operation. This will only be possible through the selection and planning of an adequate technological framework that enables these changes to be assimilated throughout the life-cycle of the telescope. In this presentation the fundamental aspects of this framework along the current status of the control system design are outlined.
An iterative facility layout algorithm

In this paper we present a facility layout algorithm that iterates between a genetic algorithm with a slicing tree representation and a mixed-integer program with a subset of the binary variables set via the genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm is very good at finding low-cost solutions while maintaining shape constraints on the departments. The slicing tree representation and the mixed-integer program are compatible in terms of layout representation, with the mixed-integer program representation more general. The mixed-integer program allows us to relax the last remaining constraints of the slicing tree representation of the genetic algorithm. We present our genetic algorithm and the iterative algorithm, while illustrating their performance on test problems from the literature. In 10 of the 12 problems, new lower best-cost solutions are found.
Ontology-Based Knowledge Modeling for Collaborative Product Development

The process of Collaborative Product Development (CPD) comprises highly creative and knowledge-intensive tasks that involve extensive information exchange and communication among distributed teams. Traditional information management systems fail to provide adequate capability to support CPD, due to their inflexible data structures and hard-wired usage procedures, as well as their restricted ability to integrate process and product information. An ontology-based method of knowledge management is proposed to support CPD. The key idea hiding in the method is a flexible ontology-based schema with formally defined semantics that enables the capture and reuse of design knowledge. A part of CPD-oriented ontology library represented by UML is displayed.
Ambiguities and anomalies: What can eye-movements and event-related potentials reveal about second language sentence processing?

Second language sentence processing is examined here in light of several monolingual psycholinguistic models of parsing, as well as that of linguistic theories specifically adapted to account for second language acquisition in adult learners. We first examine studies that have primarily recorded eyemovements to trace syntactic processing. Syntactic-ambiguity resolution is used in these studies to address various current models of parsing, both in monolinguals and bilinguals. To illustrate how these models can be tested, we discuss a particular type of structural ambiguity: reduced relative clauses. Thereafter, we focus our attention on studies that have recorded eventrelated potentials during the processing of spoken and written sentences in bilinguals. In these studies, the accent is placed upon how semantic and syntactic anomalies, rather than ambiguities, are treated. We conclude with a quick comparison of these two approaches.
A spatial verification method applied to the evaluation of high‐resolution ensemble forecasts

The verification of ensemble systems is being operationally carried out in several meteorological centres. However, the main operational ensemble systems have a coarser spatial resolution with respect to the deterministic runs. Only recently, high‐resolution limited‐area ensembles have started to be run on a regular basis. Their verification requires combining the usual probabilistic evaluation with the statistical verification techniques which are being developed for high‐resolution model forecasts (1–10 km). These techniques permit to evaluate a deterministic forecast in a probabilistic manner, by taking into account the spatio‐temporal distribution of the forecast at different scales.
Effectiveness of fault detection for low-overhead self-testing VLSI circuits

Efficient procedures for estimating fault detection capabilities of self-testing circuits designed using the circular self-test path technique are presented. Based on the concept of the expected-state coverage, the probability of exhaustive testing and a lower bound on the worst-fault detection probability are derived. These fault detectability estimates can be helpful when designing self-testing circuits, as illustrated by an alternative built-in-self-test scheme for the 80386 microprocessor. <<ETX>>
Phonological Awareness and Naming Speed in the Prediction of Dutch Children's Word Recognition

Influences of phonological awareness and naming speed on the speed and accuracy of Dutch children's word recognition were investigated in a longitudinal study. The speed and accuracy of word recognition at the ends of Grades 1 and 2 were predicted by naming speed from both the beginning and end of Grade 1, after control for autoregressive relations, kindergarten letter knowledge, and vocabulary knowledge. Phonological awareness at the beginning of Grade 1 predicted only the accuracy of word recognition at the end of Grade 1. No evidence was found for reciprocal influences of word recognition skills on later phonological awareness or naming speed.