Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficient Estimation for Small Multi-Rotor Air Vehicles Operating in Unknown, Indoor Environments

Efficient Estimation for Autonomous Multi-Rotor Helicopters Operating in Unknown, Indoor Environments John C. Macdonald Jr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Doctor of Philosophy In this dissertation we present advances in developing an autonomous air vehicle capable of navigating through unknown, indoor environments. The problem imposes stringent limits on the computational power available onboard the vehicle, but the environment necessitates using 3D sensors such as stereo or RGB-D cameras whose data requires significant processing. We address the problem by proposing and developing key elements of a relative navigation scheme that moves as many processing tasks as possible out of the time-critical functions needed to maintain flight. We present in Chapter 2 analysis and results for an improved multirotor helicopter state estimator. The filter generates more accurate estimates by using an improved dynamic model for the vehicle and by properly accounting for the correlations that exist in the uncertainty during state propagation. As a result, the filter can rely more heavily on frequent and easy to process measurements from gyroscopes and accelerometers, making it more robust to error in the processing intensive information received from the exteroceptive sensors. In Chapter 3 we present BERT, a novel approach to map optimization. The goal of map optimization is to produce an accurate global map of the environment by refining the relative pose transformation estimates generated by the real-time navigation system. We develop BERT to jointly optimize the global poses and relative transformations. BERT exploits properties of independence and conditional independence to allow new information to efficiently flow through the network of transformations. We show that BERT achieves the same final solution as a leading iterative optimization algorithm. However, BERT delivers noticeably better intermediate results for the relative transformation estimates. The improved intermediate results, along with more readily available covariance estimates, make BERT especially applicable to our problem where computational resources are limited. We conclude in Chapter 4 with analysis and results that extend BERT beyond the simple example of Chapter 3. We identify important structure in the network of transformations and address challenges arising in more general map optimization problems. We demonstrate results from several variations of the algorithm and conclude the dissertation with a roadmap for future work.
The effect of voice input on information exchange in computer supported asynchronous group communication

Computer support for group communication in the business environment is examined. Study of group activities in videotaped business meetings identified information exchange as the most frequent communication task. Existing computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems for group communication are typically based on keyboard input, and this may limit their utility. A voice input prototype system for asynchronous (time separated transactions) group communication (AGC) with simulated conversion to text was developed and tested to determine if advantages over conventional keyboard input computer conferencing existed, and whether this method would have any effect on the information exchange task. An experiment utilizing 12 groups of 5 subjects compared the voice input prototype to an existing keyboard input computer conferencing system for an information exchange task, and over all test subjects, voice input resulted in an increase of the number of words contributed by 151% and an increase in the information facts disclosed by 38%. For test subjects holding a high proportion of available facts, voice input resulted in increases of 204% in words and 39% for facts. Effective input speed was 150 words per minute for voice input. These results imply that for future asynchronous group communication systems supporting information exchange, incorporation of voice input capability, coupled with large vocabulary, connected word, speaker independent speech recognition should be considered.
Analisis Faktor-faktor Pengaruh Inovasi Produk yang Berdampak pada Keunggulan Bersaing UKM Makanan dan Minuman di Wilayah Harjamukti Kota Cirebon

Usaha Kecil dan Menengah (UKM) merupakan salah satu pilar dan kekuatan yang berkontribusi dalam perekonomian Indonesia. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis: 1) Pengaruh orientasi strategik terhadap inovasi produk, 2) Pengaruh orientasi pasar terhadap inovasi produk, 3) Pengaruh inovasi produk terhadap keunggulan bersaing produk. Pengumpulan data dalam penelitian ini menggunakan daftar pertanyaan atau kuesioner. Hasil penelitian menunjukan bahwa orientasi strategik(X1) dan orientasi pasar(X2) berpengaruh secara signifikan terhadap Inovasi produk (Y1) dengan taraf uji α=5% (p-value=0,022 < α). Inovasi produk memiliki pengaruh positif terhadap keunggulan bersaing sebesar 13.1%. hal ini berarti bahwa apabila perusahaan ingin mempunyai keunggulan bersaing, maka perusahaan dapat menciptakannya melalui kegiatan-kegiatan inovasi terhadap produk yang dihasilkannya.
English Language Skills

Part 1 Sentences and paragraphs: the right length for a sentence punctuating the beginnings and ends of a sentence when to start a new paragraph presentation skills piece/peace practice/practise points to remember. Part 2 Full stops and commas: full stops, question marks and exclamation marks the only definite rules about commas you and I/you and me accept/except points to remember. Part 3 Complete sentences writing a complete sentence a subject a verb of/off of/have points to remember. Part 4 Three basic spelling rules: i before e plurals of nouns ending in "y" doubled consonants two/to/too affect/effect points to remember. Part 5 Singulars and plurals: making the verb agree with the subject the verb "to be" collective nouns personal/personnel lend/borrow points to remember. Part 6 Possessive apostrophes: which word takes the apostrophe? where does the apostrophe go? singular nouns which end in "s" seperate where/were points to remember. Part 7 Omission apostrophes: how and when to use the omission apostrophe when to use omission apostrophes in business when to use "more. " or ". er" whether/weather points to remember. Part 8 Its and their: Its and its their, there and they're apostrophes in plurals did/done points to remember. Part 9 Quotation marks: using double quotation marks using single quotation marks common phrases - seperate or together? sight/site points to remember. Part 10 Semi-colons and colons: when and how to use a semi-colon when and how to use a colon to lie and to lay different from/to/than points to remember. Part 11 Hyphens, dashes and brackets: when and how to use hyphens when and how to use dashes when and how to use brackets brackets and full stops none stationary/stationery points to remember. Part 12 Abbreviations: the common abbreviations time, weight and measurement abbreviations whose/who's/who/when teach/learn them/those points to remember. Part 13 Writing for special occasions: letter of complaint thank you letter letter of condolence poster or leaflet newspaper article radio script points to remember. Appendices: commonly mis-spelled words, confusibles.
Information search in web archives

Web archives preserve information that was published on the web or digitized from printed publications. Many of that information is unique and historically valuable. However, users do not have dedicated tools to nd the desired information, which hampers the usefulness of web archives. This dissertation investigates solutions towards the advance of web archive information retrieval (WAIR) and contributes to the increase of knowledge about its technology and users. The thesis underlying this work is that the search results can be improved by exploiting temporal information intrinsic to web archives. This temporal information was leveraged from two di erent angles. First, the long-term persistence of web documents was analyzed and modeled to better estimate their relevance to a query. Second, a temporal-dependent ranking framework that learns and combines ranking models speci c for each period was devised. This approach contrasts with a typical single-model approach that ignores the variance of web characteristics over time. The proposed approach was empirically validated through various controlled experiments that demonstrated their superiority over the state-of-the-art in WAIR.
Dynamic modeling of Internet congestion control

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has successfully governed the Internet congestion control for two decades. It is by now, however, widely recognized that TCP has started to reach its limits and that new congestion control protocols are needed in the near future. This has spurred an intensive research effort searching for new congestion control designs that meet the demands of a future Internet scaled up in size, capacity and heterogeneity. In this thesis we derive network fluid flow models suitable for analysis and synthesis of window based congestion control protocols such as TCP. In window based congestion control the transmission rate of a sender is regulated by: (1) the adjustment of the so called window, which is an upper bound on the number of packets that are allowed to be sent before receiving an acknowledgment packet (ACK) from the receiver side, and (2) the rate of the returning ACKs. From a dynamical perspective, this constitutes a cascaded control structure with an outer and an inner loop. The first contribution of this thesis is a novel dynamical characterization and an analysis of the inner loop, generic to all window based schemes and formed by the interaction between the, so called, ACK-clocking mechanism and the network. The model is based on a fundamental integral equation relating the instantaneous flow rate and the window dynamics. It is verified in simulations and testbed experiments that the model accurately predicts dynamical behavior in terms of system stability, previously unknown oscillatory behavior and even fast phenomenon such as traffic burstiness patterns present in the system. It is demonstrated that this model is more accurate than many of the existing models in the literature. In the second contribution we consider the outer loop and present a detailed fluid model of a generic window based congestion control protocol using queuing delay as congestion notification. The model accounts for the relations between the actual packets in flight and the window size, the window control, the estimator dynamics as well as sampling effects that may be present in an end-to-end congestion control algorithm. The framework facilitates modeling of a quite large class of protocols. The third contribution is a closed loop analysis of the recently proposed congestion control protocol FAST TCP. This contribution also serves as a demonstration of the developed modeling framework. It is shown and verified in experiments that the delay configuration is critical to the stability of the system. A conclusion from the analysis is that the gain of the ACK-clocking mechanism dramatically increases with the delay heterogeneity for the case of an equal resource allocation policy. Since this strongly affects the stability properties of the system, this is alarming for all window based congestion control protocols striving towards proportional fairness. While these results are interesting as such, perhaps the most important contribution is the developed stability analysis technique.
To the international computing community: A new East-West challenge

Figure 1, following the appendix, originated 20 years ago from Ryszard Michalski. As in scienti c discovery, it is required to conjecture some plausible Law, in this case governing what kinds of trains are Eastbound and what kinds Westbound. A few years later, Donald Michie published the trains problem in the British popular computer press. The post-bag contained some neat conjectures from readers, such as:
Bollywoodizing Diasporas: Reconnecting to the NRI through Popular Hindi Cinema

____________________________ This project explores the recent shift in focus of popular Hindi (Bollywood) films from domestic characters encountering social issues, to members of the South Asian diaspora (primarily in the West) negotiating their ethnic identities. This project offers insights into the evolution of the Bollywood narrative where identities are being renegotiated and connections with traditional Indian culture are being challenged. Acknowledging the economic liberalization of India as catalyst, this paper examines the representation of the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and their connectedness with the diasporic reality in which they live. The representation is discussed in terms of the impact that religion, gender, sexuality, and regional/national politics have on the creation of a hybridized ethnic identity. Moreover, recent NRI-centric films are openly utilizing the diasporic characters as a safer experimental platform to negotiate these complex issues. The 2003 release of Kal Ho Naa Ho acts as the central example of a film that follows all the Bollywood conventions, yet due to its complete focus on the diaspora, can also be seen as non-Bollywood. The film's multiple subplots, tackling a wide range of issues among the diaspora, offer an engaging explanation of India's portrayal of its expatriates as a socially liberal, affluent, culturally liminal, and hybridized ethnic population within their host societies. Finally, the project delves into the visible shift of Hindi cinema from a dominantly India-centric industry to the realm of transnational cinema via images of the NRI.
A web personalization artifact for utility-sensitive review analysis

A WEB PERSONALIZATION ARTIFACT FOR UTILITY-SENSITIVE REVIEW ANALYSIS By Long Flory, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Business at Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015. Major Director: Dr. Kweku-Muata Osei-Bryson, Professor, Information Systems Online customer reviews are web content voluntarily posted by the users of a product (e.g. camera) or service (e.g. hotel) to express their opinions about the product or service. Online reviews are important resources for businesses and consumers. This dissertation focuses on the important consumer concern of review utility, i.e., the helpfulness or usefulness of online reviews to inform consumer purchase decisions. Review utility concerns consumers since not all online reviews are useful or helpful. And, the quantity of the online reviews of a product/service tends to be very large. Manual assessment of review utility is not only time consuming but also information overloading. To address this issue, review helpfulness research (RHR) has become a very active research stream dedicated to study utility-sensitive review analysis (USRA) techniques for automating review utility assessment. Unfortunately, prior RHR solution is inadequate. RHR researchers call for more suitable USRA approaches. Our current research responds to this urgent call by addressing the research problem: What is an adequate USRA approach? We address this problem by offering novel Design Science (DS) artifacts for personalized USRA (PUSRA). Our proposed solution extends not only RHR research but also web personalization research (WPR), which studies web-based solutions for personalized web provision. We have evaluated the proposed solution by applying three evaluation methods: analytical, descriptive, and experimental. The evaluations corroborate the practical efficacy of our proposed solution. This research contributes what we believe (1) the first DS artifacts to the knowledge body of RHR and WPR, and (2) the first PUSRA contribution to USRA practice. Moreover, we consider our evaluations of the proposed solution the first comprehensive assessment of USRA solutions. In addition, this research contributes to the advancement of decision support research and practice. The proposed solution is a web-based decision support artifact with the capability to substantially improve accurate personalized webpage provision. Also, website designers can apply our research solution to transform their works fundamentally. Such transformation can add substantial value to businesses.
Wideband Channel Characterization for MIMO Scenario

WIDEBAND CHANNEL CHARACTERIZATION FOR MIMO SCENARIO Justin T. Holzer Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Master of Science Because broadband wireless systems benefit from accurate channel characterization, there is growing interest in broadband wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel models. This thesis verifies the suitability of the Saleh Valenzuela with Angle (SVA) model for wideband MIMO communication models. While recent wideband MIMO measurements have been obtained by switching a single transmit/receive pair over all possible antenna pair combinations, a simultaneous probing system is superior because of the time required for the antenna-switching channel measurements. This work provides two different wideband channel estimation algorithms based on simultaneous transmission from and reception on all antennas. Simulated data from an electromagnetic ray tracing tool is used (as a substitute for measured data) to obtain propagation data. One of the wideband estimation algorithms is then used to extract MIMO channel data from propagation data. From these estimated channels, parameters such as capacity, coherence bandwidth, RMS delay spread and maximum delay spread are compared (statistically) to those obtained from the SVA model. The comparisons of the different parameters show the ability of the SVA model to simulate wideband MIMO communication channels.
Structuring the argument : multidisciplinary research on verb argument structure

1. Acknowledgments, pvii 2. Introduction: Argumenting the structure (by Bachrach, Asaf), p1-19 3. Part I. The general issue: Verb argument structure 4. Can we dance without doing a dance? : Two opposite views on the integration of roots in the syntactic structure of the VP (by Acedo-Matellan, Victor), p23-43 5. Determining argument structure in sign languages (by Geraci, Carlo), p45-60 6. The mental representation and processing of light verbs (by Wittenberg, Eva), p61-80 7. Part II. Non-canonical argument structure realization 8. Luigi piace a Laura? : Electrophysiological evidence for thematic reanalysis with Italian dative object experiencer verbs (by Droge, Alexander), p83-118 9. Causative nominalizations: Implications for the structure of psych verbs (by Alexiadou, Artemis), p119-137 10. Part III. Neurobiological models 11. Neurocognitive mechanisms of verb argument structure processing (by Thompson, Cynthia), p141-168 12. Argument structure: Between linguistics and neuroimaging (by Shetreet, Einat), p169-183 13. Argument structure: Creating a productive space for theory and experimentation (by Ramchand, Giillian), p185-200 14. Language index, p201 15. Subject index, p203-205
Optimal Server Allocation in Zero-Buffer Tandem Queues

We study the server allocation problem for tandem queues in the absence of intermediate buffer space. Servers are assumed to be homogeneous and non-collaborative. We provide policies to maximize the throughput. We break down our work into four stages. First, we assume that all servers are dedicated. We propose an allocation algorithm that assigns servers to stations based on the mean service times and the current number of servers assigned to each station. The algorithm is proposed for stations with exponentially distributed service times, but where the service rate at each station may be different. We further study the impact on the proposed allocation method of including service time distributions with different coefficients of variation. Second, we consider tandem queues with both dedicated and flexible servers. We examine policies to dynamically assign flexible servers. When there is one flexible server and two stations each with a dedicated server, we completely characterize the optimal policy. We use the insights gained from applying the Policy Iteration algorithm on systems with three, four, and five stations to devise heuristics for systems of arbitrary size. Third, we study cases where flexibility is constrained such that flexible servers can only service two adjacent stations. We provide optimal policies for tandem queues with three and four stations and compare them with optimal policies for corresponding non-constrained cases. Fourth, we consider two parallel tandem queues with both dedicated servers and vertical flexible servers servers that can move between corresponding stations of the two tandem queues. The workload allocations are the same for each line and each vertical flexible server moves only between two corresponding stations. We examine policies for dynamic allocation of these vertical flexible servers. When each tandem queue has two stations, each station possesses a dedicated server,
Intra- and Inter-personal Coordination of Speech, Gesture and Breathing Movements (論文特集:人間と共生する情報システム)

This study is meant to contribute, from a psychological viewpoint, to the development of a ``symbiotic'' system, an intelligent system capable of ``living with'' human beings. We approach this by examining how people interact gesturally with each other, with a special focus on breathing movements. Within this general framework, the present paper reports two experiments conducted to examine the dynamics underlying intra- and inter-personal coordination of speech articulation, hand gesture movements, and breathing movements. The results reveal similarities as well as differences between intra- and inter-personal coordination, and we discuss their implications for existing theories of motor coordination, as well as for the development of human-machine symbiotic systems.
New algorithms for moving-bank multiple model adaptive estimation

The focus of this research is to provide methods for generating precise estimates in the face of potentially significant parameter variations such as system component failures. The standard Multiple Model Adaptive Estimation (MMAE) algorithm uses a bank of Kalman filters, each based on a different model of the system. A new moving-bank MMAE algorithm is developed based on exploitation of the density data available from the residuals of the Kalman filters within the MMAE. The methods used to exploit this information include various measures of the density data and a decision-making logic used to move, expand, and contract the MMAE bank of filters. Parameter discretization within the MMAE refers to selection of the parameter values assumed by the elemental Kalman filters. A new parameter discretization method is developed based on the probabilities associated with the generalized Chi-Squared random variables formed by residual information from the elemental Kalman filters within the MMAE. Modifications to an existing discretization method are also presented, permitting application of this method in real time and to nonlinear system models or linear/linearized models that are unstable or astable. These new algorithms are validated through computer simulation of an aircraft navigation system subjected to interference/jamming while attempting a successful precision landing of the aircraft.