Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Variational Message Passing with Structured Inference Networks

Recent efforts on combining deep models with probabilistic graphical models are promising in providing flexible models that are also easy to interpret. We propose a variational message-passing algorithm for variational inference in such models. We make three contributions. First, we propose structured inference networks that incorporate the structure of the graphical model in the inference network of variational auto-encoders (VAE). Second, we establish conditions under which such inference networks enable fast amortized inference similar to VAE. Finally, we derive a variational message passing algorithm to perform efficient natural-gradient inference while retaining the efficiency of the amortized inference. By simultaneously enabling structured, amortized, and natural-gradient inference for deep structured models, our method simplifies and generalizes existing methods.
Observations of Participation in Development Initiatives on Enterprise Income and Asset in Peninsular Malaysia

Abstract This study examined the impact of access to working capital and microenterprise development training programmes on microenterprise income and assets among participants from various development initiatives in the eKasih (National Poverty Data Bank) in Peninsular Malaysia. Adopting a cross-sectional design, we collected data from randomly selected 300 micro-entrepreneurs from the list of development organizations available in the eKasih (National Poverty Data Bank), located in four states in Peninsular Malaysia. Quantitative data were collected through structured interviews from October to November 2017. Findings revealed that the ‘length of participation in development programs’ increased microenterprise income and assets among low-income participants in Peninsular Malaysia. The total amount of economic loan received was also found to increase microenterprise assets. However, the effect on microenterprise income was not clear. In addition, development training programmes were found to have no substantial effect on both microenterprise income and assets. This article ascertained a mixed result of participation in development programmes on microenterprise income and assets among low-income households in Peninsular Malaysia. Development policymakers and organizations should review the effectiveness of the programmes and redesign their products and services to achieve their objectives.
Effect of Frictional Conditions on the Generation of Fine Grain Layers in Drawing of Thin Steel Wires

The process of drawing thin carbon steel wires through conical dies is used as an experimental method for determining the effect of frictional conditions and die angle on the generation of fine grain layers in the vicinity of the friction surface. In this study, a quantitative criterion for determining the thickness of fine grain layers is proposed. The criterion is based on the coefficient of anisotropy that characterizes the shape of grains. It is shown that fine grain layers are generated under all frictional conditions investigated, but the thickness of the layer depends on these conditions and die angle.
Spectator Sports, Belonging, and Subjective Well-being 1 TITLE: Enhancing Older Adults’ Sense of Belonging and Subjective Well-being through Sport Game Attendance, Team identification, and Emotional support Author note

Objective: We investigate how (a) attendance at sport games and (b) identification with a sport team as fans (i.e., supporters of the team) influence older adults’ perceptions of emotional support, belonging and subjective well-being (SWB). Methods: An experimental pilot study was conducted with 50 older adults, followed by a main survey study administered to 534 older adults from various communities across the United States. Results: Pilot study results indicated that game attendance and team identification had a positive and significant influence on older adults’ perceptions of emotional support from fellow team fans. These results were replicated in the main study, which also showed that older adults’ perceived emotional support from fellow fans was positively associated with their sense of belonging which predicted their SWB. Discussion: The findings provide insights into how older adults may be engaged in meaningful forms of social life to help them maintain and enhance mental health.
Multilingual Students' Perceptions of and Experiences with Instructor Feedback Methods in a U.S. First-Year Composition Class

While instructor feedback has generally been recognized as an essential factor in enhancing writing proficiency for multilingual writers, little known research has focused on students’ perceptions of and their experiences with different modes of instructor feedback. In addition, impacts of various feedback methods on students’ writing have remained debatable. This case study seeks to gain an in-depth understanding of the meaning and significance of three instructor feedback methods, namely written, oral, and audio-visual feedback, from students’ perspectives. Furthermore, it offers additional insights into the impacts of these three instructor feedback methods on students’ writing. To be more precise, this study aims to answer two main research questions: (a) What are multilingual students’ attitudes toward instructor feedback methods (i.e., written, oral, and audio-visual feedback)? and (b) How do these instructor feedback methods impact multilingual students’ writing and their writing experiences? In order to answer these questions, qualitative data, including three open-ended questionnaires administered after each specific feedback method is employed, transcriptions of thirty-minute recorded interviews with individual students after the implementation of the three feedback methods, and students’ written artifacts from their three ENG 101 essays, were collected from the two consenting students within one-semester of their first-year composition class at a Midwestern state university. Thematic content analysis of the questionnaire and interview data through the use of NVivo software program were organized into four critical areas: (1) Students’ introduction of their experiences with feedback, (2) Students’ various attitudes toward feedback, (3) Students’ applications of feedback,
Fabrication of an all-polysaccharide composite film from hemicellulose and methylcellulose

There is significant interest in preparing packaging film from sustainable polysaccharides, especially hemicellulose (HC). Hemicellulose isolated from wheat straw tends to aggregate into dissolved particles in aqueous solutions and to form poor films. When methylcellulose (MC) was added into the HC solution, HC and MC formed a HC-MC complex. With increased MC content, the size of the HC-MC complex decreased, and its surface charge increased at the same time. When 35 wt% MC was added into the HC, a continuous HC-MC film formed in the layer structure. The HC-MC film with 75 wt% MC showed a more compact layer structure compared with other films. The tensile strengths of the HC-MC film increased with the MC addition. When MC was added to 75 wt%, the tensile strengths of the HC-MC film reached their maximum values, which were higher than that of MC film. This high film strength suggested these HC-MC composite films have potential applications in packaging material.
Item Response Theory: An Introduction to Latent Trait Models to Test and Item Development

Testing in educational system perform a number of functions, the results from a test can be used to make a number of decisions in education. It is therefore well accepted in the education literature that, testing is an important element of education. To effectively utilize the tests in educational policies and quality assurance its validity and reliability estimates are necessary. There are two generally acceptable frameworks used in evaluating the quality of test in educational and psychological measurements, these are; Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT). The estimates of test items validity and reliability depend on a particular measurement model used. It is vital for a test developer to be familiar with the different test development and item analysis methods in order to facilitate the development of a new test. The CTT is a traditional approach which was widely criticise in the measurement community for its shortcomings such as sample dependency of coefficient measures and estimates of measurement error. However, the IRT is a modern approach which provides solutions to most of the CTT’s identified shortcomings. This paper therefore, provides a comprehensive overview of the IRT and its procedures as applied to test item development and analysis. The paper concludes with some suggestions for test developers and test specialists at all levels to adopt IRT for its identified crucial theoretical and empirical gains over CTT. IRT based parameter estimates should be superior and reliable than CTT based parameter estimates. With these features, IRT can help resolve the problems associated with test design based on CTT.
Determinasi Faktor Fundamental Makroekonomi dan Indeks Harga Saham Syariah Internasional terhadap Indeks Harga Saham Syariah Indonesia

The capital market is a source of fresh funds in the long and short-term. The existing of the institution is not only a source of funding but also as an investment facility. This study aims to measure the impact of macroeconomic conditions (BI Rate, Exchange Rate and World Oil Prices) and the international Sharia stock index (Dow Jones Islamic Market Index Japan and Dow Jones Islamic Market Index US) on the Indonesian Sharia Stock Index with using the error correction model (ECM). The results showed that BI rate and DJIM US have the significant effect (5%) on Indonesian Sharia Stock Index in the short, while the exchange rate and DJIM Japan are significant at the 10%, and the world oil price is not significant. In the long-term, BI Rate, exchange rate, DJIM US and DJIM Japan have a significant effect, while the world oil price has not a significant effect.
Unsupervised Detection of Emergent Patterns in Large Image Collections

With the advent of modern image acquisition and sharing technologies, billions of images are added to the Internet every day. This huge repository contains useful information, but it is very hard to analyze. If labeled information is available for this data, then supervised learning techniques can be used to extract useful information. Visual pattern mining approaches provide a way to discover visual structures and patterns in an image collection without the need of any supervision. The Internet contains images of various objects, scenes, patterns, and shapes. The majority of approaches for visual pattern discovery, on the other hand, find patterns that are related to object or scene categories. Emergent pattern mining techniques provide a way to extract generic, complex and hidden structures in images. This thesis describes research, experiments, and analysis conducted to explore various approaches to mine emergent patterns from image collections in an unsupervised way. These approaches are based on itemset mining and graph theoretic strategies. The itemset mining strategy uses frequent itemset mining and rare itemset mining techniques to discover patterns. The mining is performed on a transactional dataset which is obtained from the BoW representation of images. The graph-based approach represents visual word co-occurrences obtained from images in a co-occurrence graph. Emergent patterns form dense clusters in this graph that are extracted using normalized cuts. The patterns that are discovered using itemset mining approaches are: stripes and parallel lines ; dots and checks ; bright dots ; single lines ; intersections ; and frames. The graph based approach revealed various interesting patterns, including some patterns that are related to object categories.
Relaying Strategies and Protocols for Efficient Wireless Networks

Next generation wireless networks are expected to provide high data rate and satisfy the Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints of the users. A significant component of achieving these goals is to increase the efficiency of wireless networks by either optimizing current architectures or exploring new technologies which achieve that. The latter includes revisiting technologies which were previously proposed, but due to a multitude of reasons were ignored at that time. One such technology is relaying which was initially proposed in the latter half of the 1960s and then was revived in the early 2000s. In this dissertation, we study relaying in conjunction with resource allocation to increase the efficiency of wireless networks. In this regard, we differentiate between conventional relaying and relaying with buffers. Conventional relaying is traditional relaying where the relay forwards the signal it received immediately. On the other hand, in relaying with buffers or buffer-aided relaying as it is called, the relay can store received data in its buffer and forward it later on. This gives the benefit of taking advantage of good channel conditions as the relay can only transmit when the channel conditions are good. The dissertation starts with conventional relaying and considers the problem of minimizing the total consumed power while maintaining system QoS. After upper bounding the system performance, more practical algorithms which require reduced feedback overhead are explored. Buffer-aided relaying is then considered and the joint user-and-hop scheduler is introduced which exploits multi-user diversity (MUD) and 5 multi-hop diversity (MHD) gains together in dual-hop broadcast channels. Next joint user-and-hop scheduling is extended to the shared relay channel where two sourcedestination pairs share a single relay. The benefits of buffer-aided relaying in the bidirectional relay channel utilizing network coding are then explored. Finally, a new transmission protocol for overlay cognitive radios is derived. This protocol utilizes relays with buffers, requires only causal knowledge of the primary’s message at the secondary and incentivizes the primary to cooperate with the secondary and share its codebook.
New interconnection architectures for wireless networks

In this thesis, we investigate new aspects of addressing and routing in Spontaneous Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). Spontaneous wireless mesh networks promise a completely different architecture of the future Internet in comparison with its current state, but there are still many problems that have to be solved prior to the WMNs deployment. For example, routing in small static networks is easy. However, most real wireless networks are dynamic; links may go up and down, nodes join or leave the network and the WMN size may grow, which implies the problem of large routing tables. New kinds of spontaneous networks amplify this trend, they include thousands of nodes acting as routers. Several experimentations reported on scaling problems of topological routing protocols such as AODV, DSDV, DSR or OLSR. Classical routing algorithms should be replaced with suitable technologies that guarantee good scalability and offer robust connectivity. We have considered geographical routing algorithms, because they do not require complete knowledge of the global network topology to compute routes and thus they are much more scalable than topological algorithms. There are, however, many problems we need to solve. The most important one is that geographical algorithms suffer from poor performance. They can compute much longer paths than topological routing algorithms. In order to solve this problem, we first studied the behavior of the greedy geographical forwarding, the basic building block of geographical algorithms. Then, we designed two new routing protocols: Binary Waypoint Routing and Scalable Waypoint Routing. Our protocols do not require any additional overhead to discover the network topology, but instead they passively analyze the traffic to learn efficient routes. We gather pure geographical information that helps to forward packets. Our method of packet forwarding follows the topological properties of the network and in consequence improve the performance of geographical routing algorithms.
Bird Diversity of Lingai, Terengganu, Malaysia

This study was conducted to determine the species diversity of birds and to establish a checklist of bird species in Lingai, Terengganu, Malaysia. Two different sampling stations were chosen; which was old growth vegetation and agriculture area. Mist netting was conducted for five consecutive days, monthly from November 2012 to April 2013. A total of 83 individuals belonging to 14 families were sampled and recorded. From 25 different species, 59 individuals (71.1%) were netted from old growth vegetation while another 24 (28.9%) were netted from agriculture area. From the study, the Shannon-Weiner index was calculated where old growth vegetation gave a higher value of H’=2.526, than that of agriculture area with a value of H’=2.126. The test shows no significant difference in terms of bird diversity (t = 0.0074, df = 81, P>0.05) between both sites. The dominant species caught was stripe-throated bulbul (Pycnonotus fynlaysoni) followed by collared scops owl (Ottus bakkamoena). As a conclusion, the result shows that Lingai has a diverse bird community that must be conserved and more studies should be made in order to understand better on the diversity of birds in Lingai.
IDENTIFICATION OF URBANIZATION AXES IN THE SETTLEMENT SYSTEM OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC

Urbanization axes represent a relatively unexplored topic in social geography. Actually, however, they represent a natural part of all settlement systems. These structures are usually perceived only intuitively in settlement systems. The only urbanization axes that are used in social geography more frequently are the blue or the yellow banana. However, signifi cant European axes are defi ned rather on the basis of generalization of intensive reciprocal relations among the settlements within the axes. In case of the blue banana, for instance, its specifi cation is usually blamed for an excessive focus on quantifi able economic standpoints. We can more often come across a general term “development axes”. Their defi nition was dealt with by e.g. Hampl et al. (1987) or later Spurná (2008) applying the spatial correlation method. The basic development axes are defi ned by spatial development policy, which is a national spatial planning instrument. Spatial development policy is managed by the Ministry for Regional Development of the Czech Republic. Development axes at different hierarchical levels are defi ned in these principles of spatial development. There are defi ned overall 13 development axes with national importance (see MRD 2015). However, this is merely a generalization, empirically unfounded. These axes are defi ned along main road and railway communications. Development in these areas (mainly population growth of settlements) is only assumed and not scientifi cally substantiated.
Convolutional neural networkscheme–based optical camera communication system for intelligent Internet of vehicles

The evolution of the Internet of vehicles and growing use of mobile devices has created a demand for new wireless communication technologies. Optical camera communication, which uses light-emitting diodes as transmitters and cameras as receivers, has emerged as a promising alternative. Since light-emitting diodes and cameras are already exploring in traffic lights, vehicles, and public lightings, optical camera communication has the potential to intelligently handle transport systems. Although other technologies have been proposed or developed in both academia and industry, they are not yet mature enough to uphold the huge requirements of the Internet of vehicles. This study introduces a new intelligent Internet of vehicles system based on optical camera communication combined with convolutional neural networks. Optical camera communication is a promising candidate for maintaining interference-free and more robust communication, for supporting the Internet of vehicles. Convolutional neural network is introduced for precise detection and recognition of light-emitting diode patterns at long distances and in bad weather conditions. We propose an algorithm to detect the interested light-emitting diode signals (i.e. regions-of-interest), measure the distance using a stereo-vision technique to find out the desired targets, and simulate our proposed scheme using a MATLAB Toolbox. Thus, our system will provide great advantages for next-generation transportation systems.
Enhancing robustness of first responder communication in urban environments

Communication is crucial for first responders. Crisis management is nearly impossible without good means of communication. Unfortunately the communication technology used by first responders today does not scale well. Also most of the given infrastructure, such as cell towers, might be destroyed. In recent research ad-hoc and peer-to-peer based communication has been proposed to solve the problem of resilient communication. Most mobile devices are equipped with wireless transceivers that make them suitable to participate in ad-hoc networks. But node density might be too small for a connected topology. In this paper we, therefore, discuss the implications of an emergency switch for private wireless routers allowing them to transition to an emergency mode to create a supportive wireless mesh network. To analyze if such a network would result in a resilient topology real data from wireless routers in a city is gathered. We calculate the locations of private and public routers from GPS traces and compare the resulting networks with each other.
High throughput udp-based peer-to-peer secure data transfer

HIGH THROUGHPUT UDP-BASED PEER-TO-PEER SECURE DATA TRANSFER Fadime Tuğba Doğan M.S. in Computer Engineering Advisor: Can Alkan May 2018 High throughput sequencing (HTS) platforms have been developed in recent years. These technologies enable researchers to answer a wide range of biological questions by obtaining whole or targeted segments of genomes of individuals. However, HTS technologies generate very large amounts of data. Even after using the best compression algorithms, data size is still huge due to large original file size. As most of the genome projects’ contributors are located in different countries, transfer of the data becomes an important problem in genomics. Currently used methods for genome data sharing is transferring the files via File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Tsunami protocol or Aspera Software, storing them on public databases or clouds, working on the files stored on central servers and circulating external hard disks. However, all of these methods have some drawbacks like cost, speed, or privacy. In this thesis, to address this problem, we introduce an application called BioPeer. BioPeer uses an open source UDPbased UDT protocol written by Barchart, Inc for data transfer. We implement peer-to-peer file sharing architecture to BioPeer. This architecture is similar to BitTorrent, where large files are transferred in chunks, and synchronized between peers within the same project. To ensure every client is able to connect other clients, we employ NAT traversal via UDP hole punching method. So, users who are behind NAT devices are able to send and receive data from other peers. To provide secure file transfer, BioPeer encrypts files using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher. Symmetric encryption keys are exchanged via RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) algorithm. Additionally, content distribution network (CDN) infrastructure is implemented in order to achieve high throughput with BioPeer.