Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A new approach to Eng-lish Grammar on semantic principles

A. Introduction: Orientation Grammatical sketch B. The semantic types: Noun, adjective and verb types Primary-A type verbs Primary-B type verbs Secondary verb types C. Some grammatical topics: I know that it seems that he'll make me want to describe her starting to say that she knows that it seems that . : complement clauses I kicked at the bomb, which exploded, and wakened you up : transitivity and causatives The plate, which had been eaten off, was owned by my aunt : passives What sells slowly, but wears well? : promotion to subject She gave him a look, they both had a laugh and then took a stroll : GIVE A VERB , HAVE A VERB , and TAKE A VERB constructions list of adjective and verb types, with sample members.
Optic Flow With a Stereoscopic Display: Sustained Influence on Speed of Locomotion

Previous studies have shown that walking speeds can be modulated over short timescales by varying the rate of optic flow. This study investigated whether the modulating effect of optic flow on treadmill walking speed could be sustained for the longer time periods necessary for rehabilitation. An animated moving walkway was created in 3D Studio Max and rendered into a stereoscopic movie using Virtalis StereoWorks. The movie was projected (moving towards the subjects) onto a 5m wide screen in front of a self-paced treadmill. The movie was projected at three different speed conditions (0.75m/s, 1.5m/s and 3.0m/s) in counterbalanced order. Nine participants were instructed to maintain ‘comfortable walking speed’ throughout the 5 minute duration of each speed condition. A significant difference was found between the mean walking speeds of the participants at different animation speeds (ANOVA p<0.01); with lower animation speed associated with faster walking speeds and vice versa. This modulating effect was sustained for the duration of each 5-minute test, which suggests that it does have potential for use in rehabilitation and training. This study used healthy subjects, and further work is proposed to investigate the extent of this modulating effect on clinical groups.
On the Compositional Analysis of Hierarchical Components with Explicit Ports

We propose an analysis method for the behaviour of large scale components following their modular and hierarchical structure. The method mirrors the different verification tasks concerning the developer of a single component and the system architect who puts components together. Our main results provide, first, criteria under which the deadlock freeness of hierarchical components can be checked and, secondly, criteria which allow for checking the correctness of components w.r. t. the observable behaviour at their explicit ports. For the static structure of components we use UML 2.0 notation and for the description of behaviours we use I/O-transition systems.
Adapting and Developing Linguistic Resources for Question Answering

As information retrieval becomes more focussed, so too must the techniques involved in the retrieval process. More precise responses to queries require more precise linguistic analysis of both the queries and the factual documents from which the information is being retrieved. In this thesis, I present research into using existing linguistic tools to analyse questions. These tools, as supplied, often underperform on question analysis. I present my work on adapting these tools, and creating new resources for use in developing new tools tailored to question analysis. My work has shown that in order to adapt the treebank- and f-structure annotation algorithmbased wide coverage LFG parsing resources of Cahill et al. (2004) to analyse questions from the ATIS corpus, only the c-structure parser needs to be retrained, the annotation algorithm remains unchanged. The retrained c-structure parser needs only a small amount of appropriate training data added to its training corpus to gain a significant improvement in both c-structure parsing and f-structure annotation. Given the improvements made with a relatively small amount of question data, I developed QuestionBank, a question treebank, to determine what further gains can be made using a larger amount of question data. My question treebank is a corpus of 4000 parse annotated questions. The questions were taken from a number of sources and the question treebank was “bootstrapped” in an incremental parsing, hand correction and retraining approach from raw data using existing probabilistic parsing resources. Experiments with QuestionBank show that it is an effective resource for training parsers to analyse questions with an improvement of over 10% on the baseline parsing results. In further experiments I show that a parser retrained with QuestionBank can also parse newspaper text (Penn-II Treebank Section 23) with state-of-the-art accuracy. Long distance dependencies (LDDs) are a vital part of question analysis in determining semantic roles and question focus. I have designed and implemented a novel method to recover WH-traces and coindexed antecedents in c-structure trees from parser output which uses the f-structure LDD resolution method of Cahill et al (2004) to resolve the dependencies and then “reverse engineers” the corresponding syntactic components in the c-structure tree.
Fuzzy sequential pattern mining in incomplete databases

Recent widening of data mining application areas have lead to new issues. For instance, frequent sequence discovery techniques that were developed for customer behaviour analysis are now applied to analyse industrial or biological databases. Thus frequent sequence mining algorithm must be adapted to handle particular characteristics of these data. Among these specificities one should consider numerical attributes and incomplete data. In this paper, we propose a method for discovering crisp or fuzzy sequential patterns from an incomplete database. This approach uses partial information contained in incomplete records, only temporary discarding the missing part of the record. Experiments run on various synthetic datasets show the validity of our proposal as well in terms of quality as in terms of the robustness to the rate of missing values.
Cluster randomised trials

Cluster Randomised Trials discusses the design, conduct, and analysis of health trials that randomise groups of individuals to different treatments. It explores the advantages of cluster randomization, with special attention given to evaluating the effects of interventions against infectious diseases. Avoiding unnecessary mathematical detail, the book covers basic concepts underlying the use of cluster randomisation, such as direct, indirect, and total effects. The authors also present an array of design issues in cluster randomised trials (CRTs), including strategies for minimizing contamination effects, the use of stratification and restricted randomisation to improve balance between treatment arms, special methods for sample size calculation, and alternatives to the simplest two-arm CRT. After covering analytical methods for CRTs, such as regression methods, the authors examine ethical issues, trial monitoring, interim analyses, reporting, and interpretation. Although the book mainly focuses on medical and public health applications, it shows that the rigorous evidence of intervention effects provided by CRTs has the potential to inform public policy in a wide range of other areas. The book encourages readers to apply the methods to their own trials, reproduce the analyses presented, and explore alternative approaches.
A Novel Heuristic for a Class of Independent Tasks in Computational Grids

Scheduling is an essential layer in grid environment. Now-a-days, the computational grids are the important platform for job scheduling. The performance of the computational grids can be improved using an ecient scheduling heuristic. A user submits a job to grid resource broker. The broker is responsible for dividing a job into a number of tasks. It maps the task and the resource to nd a perfect match. The main goal is to minimize the processing time and maximize the resource utilization. Mode of scheduling plays the key role in Grid Scheduling. In Grid, mode of scheduling is of two types: immediate and batch mode. Immediate mode takes one after another task in a serial sequence. But, batch mode takes in a random sequence. Task assignment is mainly based on the mode selection. Task may be assigned to the resource in a batch or as soon as it arrives. In this thesis, we have introduced three immediate mode heuristics such as First-DualMake, Best- DualMake and Worst-DualMake (dened as X-DualMake) and a new mode of heuristic called as intermediate mode (or Multi- batch mode). In our immediate mode scheduling heuristics, jobs are scheduled based on resource idle time. Intermediate mode considers random arrival of task in a multi-batch sequence. Alternatively, arrival of tasks are unknown in this mode. Here, we have taken a range of task arrival for simplicity. This mode is introduced to be a part of the real life aspects. The eight immediate mode heuristics are simulated and the experimental results are discussed. The two existing approaches: Min-Min and Max-Min are experimented with intermediate mode scheduling. We have taken two performance measures: makespan and resource utilization to evaluate the performance.
Semantic conceptions of information

“I love information upon all subjects that come in my way, and especially upon those that are most important. ” Thus boldly declares Euphranor, one of the defenders of Christian faith in Berkley's Alciphron (Dialogue 1, Section 5, Paragraph 6/10, see Berkeley [1732]). Evidently, information has been an object of philosophical desire for some time, well before the computer revolution, Internet or the dot.com pandemonium (see for example Dunn [2001] and Adams [2003]). Yet what does Euphranor love, exactly? What is information? The question has received many answers in different fields. Unsurprisingly, several surveys do not even converge on a single, unified definition of information (see for example Braman [1989], Losee [1997], Machlup and Mansfield [1983], Debons and Cameron [1975], Larson and Debons [1983]).
Content Learning on Websites: The Effects of Information Personalization

Information personalization is a popular and effective way used especially by online content providers to reduce user effort for the assessment of abundant information load. Based on learning and goal setting theories, in this paper we argue that the successful role of information personalization can be attributed to the effect of increased content learning, which is a key driver of consumer website evaluation and loyalty. In addition, we distinguish between two dimensions of information personalization and suggest that effort reduction due to information personalization is not necessarily beneficial. Based on two experimental studies using a health information website, we demonstrate that personalization content, which decreases the effort through offering dense information tailored to the users’ needs, leads to beneficial behavioral outcomes (website evaluation and revisit intention) due to the mediating role of increased content learning. Personalization interaction, which decreases the effort through the process by which the personalized content is generated, has the opposite effects due to the decreased ability of information retention.
Conflit vitesse-précision et loi de Fitts

Dans le cas de mouvements rapides et precis diriges vers une cible, la loi de Fitts predit que le temps de mouvement est une fonction lineaire d’une combinaison mathematique particuliere entre l’amplitude du mouvement a realiser et la taille de la cible (indice de difficulte). Sur le plan theorique, cette loi comportementale se base sur la theorie du traitement de l’information (Shannon et Weaver 1949). Bien qu’elle soit consideree comme une loi tres robuste de la psychologie experimentale et que sa validite ait ete verifiee dans de nombreux cas experimentaux, differents modeles interpretatifs s’opposent sur la nature du controle qui s’opere dans ce type de mouvement. Certains modeles plaident en faveur d’un controle « iteratif » base sur les retroactions sensorielles pendant l’execution du geste, alors que d’autres plaident au contraire en faveur d’un controle « proactif » predetermine avant l’execution du geste. Cette dualite n’est pas encore completement elucidee. De plus, un autre point moins debattu mais qui demeure obscur concerne la nature des facteurs qui influencent la relation entre le temps de mouvement et l’index de difficulte. Cette revue se propose de discuter ces differents points.
A Streamflow Statistics (StreamStats) Web Application for Ohio

A StreamStats Web application was developed for Ohio that implements equations for estimating a variety of streamflow statistics including the 2-, 5-, 10-, 25-, 50-, 100-, and 500-year peak streamflows, mean annual streamflow, mean monthly streamflows, harmonic mean streamflow, and 25th-, 50th-, and 75th-percentile streamflows. StreamStats is a Web-based geographic information system application designed to facilitate the estimation of streamflow statistics at ungaged locations on streams. StreamStats can also serve precomputed streamflow statistics determined from streamflow-gaging station data. The basic structure, use, and limitations of StreamStats are described in this report. To facilitate the level of automation required for Ohio’s StreamStats application, the technique used by Koltun (2003) for computing main-channel slope was replaced with a new computationally robust technique. The new channel-slope characteristic, referred to as SL sub 10-85, differed from the National Hydrography Data based channel slope values (SL) reported by Koltun (2003) by an average of -28.3%, with the median change being -13.2%. In spite of the differences, the two slope measures are strongly correlated. The change in channel slope values necessitated revision of the full-model equations for flood-peak discharges presented by Koltun (2003). Average standard errors of prediction for the revised full-model equations presented in this report increased by a small amount over those reported by Koltun (2003), with increases ranging from 0.7 to 0.9%. Mean percentage changes in the revised regression and weighted flood-frequency estimates relative to regression and weighted estimates reported by Koltun (2003) were small, ranging from -0.72 to -0.25% and -0.22 to 0.07%, respectively.
Exploring the Energy Density Functional with High-Performance Computing

For theoretical nuclear physics to gain a comprehensive and quantitative understanding of all nuclei it is necessary to develop a framework where meaningful calculations can be made throughout the nuclear chart. Such a framework has been established; using nuclear Density Functional Theory along with massively parallel computing, it is now possible to analyze and predict global nuclear properties. For this work, large-scale mass tables were made using Skyrme Energy Density Functionals. Using the ground state binding energy, pairing gap, root-mean-square radius, and shape deformation data from these tables, the following global properties were analyzed: the two-proton and two-neutron drip lines, two-proton radioactivity, ground state reflection-asymmetric shapes, and neutron-skin thicknesses. These data were also used in the development of a new energy density functional. In order to determine the statistical and systematic uncertainties of these calculations, six different energy density functionals were used. Lastly, in an effort to better understand nuclear collective modes, parallel computing techniques were used in the development of a method to calculate the sum rules of energy centroids for giant resonances.
Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network

Learning management systems (LMSs) have dominated the teaching and learning landscape in higher education for the past decade, with a recent Delta Initiative report indicating that more than 90 percent of colleges and universities have a standardized, institutional LMS implementation. LMS-related decisions continue to rank among the most pressing IT issues for campus leaders and administrators, as explained in EDUCAUSE Review’s "Top-10 IT Issues, 2009," which lists several challenges associated with LMS implementations, including:
Il processo di cambiamento dell'indebolimento consonantico a Cortona: studio sociolinguistico

The work is a quantitative study of Labovian matrix which focuses on a predetermined series of linguistic variables having different realizations in Cortona, a city in eastern Tuscany. The linguistic elements which have been observed are strictly phonetic ; our special concern is the possible realizations of voiceless occlusives /k/, /t/, /p/ in an intervocalic context. We can see the introduction and the spread of Florentine-Sienese spirantization in a variety in which it is traditionally absent, and the correlated loss of local sonorization. In observing these phenomena and in analyzing the peculiarities of the Cortona dialect, a framework of co-relational and comparative sociolinguistics was adopted in order to verify the relationship between linguistic phenomena and social factors. The conclusion reached at the end of this study is that the Cortona dialect today is clearly influenced by the main varieties of Tuscan dialect and that the recent linguistic shift has a very strong connection with extralinguistic judgements expressed by speakers. This study also points out that the replacement of local traditional pronunciation in favour of innovative forms possessing Tuscan characteristics always has a precise social meaning and is, in fact, linked to the speakers' age, social class and gender
Haptic Tele-operation of Wheeled Mobile Robot and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle over the Internet

Teleoperation of ground/aerial vehicle extends operator’s ability (e.g. expertise, strength, mobility) into the remote environment, and haptic feedback enhances the human operator’s perception of the slave environment. In my thesis, two cases are studied: wheeled mobile robot (MWR) haptic tele-driving over the Internet and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) haptic teleoperation over the Internet. We propose novel control frameworks for both dynamic WMR and kinematic WMR in various tele-driving modes, and for a “mixed” UAV with translational dynamics and attitude kinematics. The recently proposed passive set-position modulation (PSPM) framework is extended to guarantee the passivity and/or stability of the closed-loop system with time-varying/packet-loss in the communication; and proved performance in steady state is shown by theoretical measurements. For UAV teleoperation, we also derive a backstepping trajectory tracking control with robustness analysis. Experimental results for dynamic/kinematic WMR and an indoor quadrotor-type UAV are presented to show the efficacy of the proposed control framework.
Collaborating through Talk: The Interactive Construction of Task-Oriented Dialogue in English and in Spanish

The present thesis is a study of connexity and coherence at all levels in conversation. Both interturn and intra-turn relationships are studied in a bilingual English-Spanish corpus of task-oriented conversations between dyads of two speakers each. The interlocutors have two conflicting agendas that cover a two to four week period, and are told to agree on an appointment within those two to four weeks. The speakers try to find a date on which they are both free to meet. I considered these conversations as texts, and thus set out to explore the discourse characteristics that hold them together. The main framework of study is the analysis of speech genres (Bakhtin 1986). These conversations are an instance of a genre, as a "staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of our culture" (Martin 1984, p.25). As such, they are divided in clear stages, the main three of which are: Opening, Task Performance and Closing. For these stages to be distinguishable, they need to contain different patterns of linguistic realizations. The linguistic and discourse characteristics studied include: Thematic Progression, Rhetorical Structure Analysis and Cohesion. These three types of analysis are unified under the textual metafunction of language, in the Hallidayan tradition. Halliday and Hasan (1976, p.29) divide the textual metafunction into structural and non-structural components. The structural one, at the clause level, is the thematic structure of the clause. The non-structural one is cohes ion. One of the elements of cohesion is conjunction, which I represented here not through Halliday's and Martin's conjunctive relations, but through a similar theory, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson 1988). This study is, then, one of text, textual metafunction and texture in a spoken genre. The study shall shed light onto how two speakers create a text interactively. The second goal of this work is to find out whether—and if so, how—that process is different in English and in Spanish. The tools used stem from traditions in the analysis of English. Some of them have been applied to other languages, sometimes not without controversy about their suitability. I have, consciously, avoided adaptations or reformulation s of the original theories. One obvious reason is that the methods needed to be constant, if any rigorous comparison between the results for the two languages was to be carried out. The other main reason was that I decided to explore a possible English bias in those theories. By applyi ng exactly the same types of analysis, we shall discover the suitability of the methodologies for the analysis of Spanish.
Investigating the effect of mutual coupling on SVD based beamforming over MIMO channels

This paper reports on investigations into a narrowband Multiple-Input MultipleOutput (MIMO) system that applies the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) beamforming over a Rician channel. Assuming that the two sides of the communication link have a perfect knowledge of Channel State Information (CSI), the system applies the SVD-based beamforming both at the transmitter and receiver. The assessment of the system performance takes into account Mutual Coupling (MC) that is present in the transmitting and receiving array antennas. It is shown that for some particular ranges of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and inter-element spacing, mutual coupling can increase the capacity and thus can be beneficial in terms of decreasing Symbol Error Rate (SER).