Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Computation of Color

This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of color vision, focussing on the phenomenon of color constancy formulated as a computational problem. The primary contributions of the thesis are (1) the demonstration of a formal framework for lightness algorithms; (2) the derivation of a new lightness algorithm based on regularization theory; (3) the synthesis of an adaptive lightness algorithm using ``learning'''' techniques; (4) the development of an image segmentation algorithm that uses luminance and color information to mark material boundaries; and (5) an experimental investigation into the cues that human observers use to judge the color of the illuminant. Other computational approaches to color are reviewed and some of their links to psychophysics and physiology are explored.
Stochastic Comparative Statics in Markov Decision Processes

In multiperiod stochastic optimization problems, the future optimal decision is a random variable whose distribution depends on the parameters of the optimization problem. I analyze how the expected value of this random variable changes as a function of the dynamic optimization parameters in the context of Markov decision processes. I call this analysis stochastic comparative statics. I derive both comparative statics results and stochastic comparative statics results showing how the current and future optimal decisions change in response to changes in the single-period payoff function, the discount factor, the initial state of the system, and the transition probability function. I apply my results to various models from the economics and operations research literature, including investment theory, dynamic pricing models, controlled random walks, and comparisons of stationary distributions.
The propagator of the finite XXZ spin-$\tfrac{1}{2}$ chain

We derive contour integral formulas for the real space propagator of the spin-\tfrac1212 XXZ chain. The exact results are valid in any finite volume with periodic boundary conditions, and for any value of the anisotropy parameter. The integrals are on fixed contours, that are independent of the Bethe Ansatz solution of the model and the string hypothesis. The propagator is obtained by two different methods. First we compute it through the spectral sum of a deformed model, and as a by-product we also compute the propagator of the XXZ chain perturbed by a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction term. As a second way we also compute the propagator through a lattice path integral, which is evaluated exactly utilizing the so-called FF-basis in the mirror (or quantum) channel. The final expressions are similar to the Yudson representation of the infinite volume propagator, with the volume entering as a parameter. As an application of the propagator we compute the Loschmidt amplitude for the quantum quench from a domain wall state.
The mediating role of Courageous coping in the relations between spirituality and social support with resilience among adolescents with hemophilia

In addition to physical disorders, people with hemophilia face complex psychological problems. Hence, protective factors such as coping strategies, social support, and spirituality to improve psychological health should be determined. This study examined the role of courageous coping as a mediator in the interrelationships between spirituality as well as social support and resilience among adolescents with hemophilia. In this descriptive-analytical study, the participants were 372 adolescents with hemophilia aged 11–21 years. Connor–Davidson resilience scale, Jalowiec Coping scale, Perceived Social Support Scale, and spirituality scale were the instruments used in this study. The analysis results of Pearson correlation revealed a significant positive relationship between spirituality as well as social support and resilience. Also, it was determined that courageous coping is a thorough mediator between spirituality and resilience. The mediating role of courageous coping did not reach meaningful levels between social support and resilience, meaning that zero was included in bootstrap interval, CI 95% (β =.026, CI [-.002, .089]). Social support, adopting a spiritual strategy, and using coping strategies played a crucial role among the adolescents to promote their level of resilience to cope with hemophilia.
White-dwarf red-giant mergers, early-type R stars, J stars and lithium

Early-type R stars and J stars are a special type of carbon star, having enhanced nitrogen ([N/Fe] � 0.5), lithium, a low 12 C/ 13 C ratio (< 15) and no s-element enhancements. The merger of a helium white dwarf with a red giant is regarded to be a possible model for the origin of early-type R stars, but the details of nucleosynthesis are not clear. In this paper we investigate three possible channels for helium white-dwarf + red-giant mergers, and find that, amongst the three, only a high-mass helium white dwarf subducted into a low core-mass red giant can make an early-type R star. Nucleosynthesis of elements carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and lithium correspond well with the observations. Furthermore, we find that the J stars may represent a short and luminous stage in the evolution of an early-R star.
The status of homelessness: Access to housing for asylum-seeking migrants as an instrument of migration control in Italy and Sweden

Homelessness and other forms of destitution among asylum-seeking migrants are currently on the rise across Europe, as migrants’ access to social rights, including housing, has been restricted through repressive migration policies, fuelled by the welfare nationalism and chauvinism that surge among European states. This article explores the largely overlooked homelessness experienced by migrants seeking asylum in two different geographic and political contexts: Italy and Sweden. Building on research conducted over six years, including interviews with state officials, social and NGO workers, and testimonies of asylum-seeking migrants, we trace the logics and effects of policies that not only fail to deliver minimum welfare provisions to asylum-seeking migrants, but which produce and use homelessness as a way of controlling this group. The implications for asylum-seeking migrants include racialised discrimination, class-based and poverty-related health issues, and other harms, which are the direct result of policies that render access to fundamental social rights, including housing, into instruments of migration control.
Investigating Open Access Publishing Practices of Early and Mid‐Career Researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences Disciplines

Although open access (OA) to research outputs has been proven to improve research readership, citation, and impact, the uptake of OA in some disciplines has remained low. In this paper, we investigated and compared OA publishing practices of early career and mid‐career researchers in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) disciplines in Canada. The descriptive survey design with the use of online questionnaire was employed. Participants were drawn from a group of 15 public research universities via their openly available emails on university websites. Survey data was analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings show that in the last three years, 74.1% of mid‐career researchers have published in OA journals, compared to 63.1% of early career researchers. However, OA publishing of monographs (21.3%) and conference proceedings (29.9%), as well as the frequency and extent OA publishing remains low among all participants. ANOVA results (F [2, 218] = 3.683, p = .027, 𝜂2 = .033) showed that 3.3% of the variance in researchers' OA publishing frequency can be attributed to their disciplines. Overall, OA publishing among researchers in the HASS disciplines is still low. Hence, there is a need to identify factors that facilitate or hinder HASS researchers' OA publishing.
Screen Media Modeling & Mentoring: Parents' Views

Screen media modeling and mentoring is an important factor of family media practices and for tech readiness of digital youth. The authors conducted a qualitative study to examine the media practices within families with children ages 5–11. Semi structured interviews with 51 parents revealed that parents and other significant people, such as grandparents, siblings, friends, and community members, mentor or model media practices with children but practices vary between families and within contexts. Further, there are direct and sustained impacts on children's screen media behaviors when parents actively participate in mentoring or modeling of screen media with their children. Findings also shed light on other influencing factors of screen media engagement, such as modeling styles, parent's prior experience and comfort with technology, personal backgrounds, and concerns about their own use of screen media. Findings are useful as information professionals engage with children when navigating the post‐Covid digital landscape.
Transforming the Scholarly Publishing Lindworm

Transformative Agreements [“TA”]—contracts for academic publication premised on an initial term of restricted access followed by a switch, often many years later, to Open Access—are increasingly promoted by publishers and, to a lesser extent, academic institutions, as a means of achieving a future reality where our shared fount of cultural, intellectual, and scientific works are openly accessible for all to read. Supporters of TA laud benefits like transparency, streamlined costs for libraries, and investments in the future of Open Access. We find, however, that TA reproduce, rather than relieve or transform, existing challenges facing Open Access and we invoke King Lindworm, a fairytale about transformation as a metaphor to assist understandings of how TA might fall short of their purported aim.
Paving the Speedway to the IT Harbor: How Chinese Programming Boot Camp Prepares Chinese Migrants for IT Jobs in the United States

In recent years, Chinese migrants have become one primary source of computing professional labor in the United States. Within the Chinese migrant community, the computing profession was depicted as a new framework of success and a harbor to ease the stress caused by precarious immigration status. To successfully obtain a job in the IT industry, many Chinese migrants turned to the Chinese programming boot camp (PBC) for professional training in programming, which made Chinese PBC the intermediary between Chinese migrant professionals and the American companies demanding skilled programmers. In this research based on qualitative interviews with the founders, employees, and clients, I illustrated how Chinese PBC constructed computing knowledge into a set of techniques and skills to solve and present algorism problems. I interpreted this knowledge construction in the context of racialized and mystified computing profession in the Chinese migrant community.
A theory of turbulence. Part 1:Towards solutions of the Navier-stokes equations

In this visualisation the instantaneous local velocity is expressed in terms of four components to capture the development of and interactions between coherent structures in turbulent flows. It is then possible to isolate the terms linked with each major type of structure and identify the corresponding subsets of the Navier-Stokes equations that are easier to solve than the full version. Each of these subsets applies to a domain in the flow field not a flow regime. The traditional statistics of turbulence are shown to be not specific to turbulent flow. In particular the Reynolds stresses, the probability density function, the dissipation, the production and the energy spectrum are obtained from one subset associated with unsteady "laminar" flow. The evidence also indicates that the Kolmogorov scale does not represent an eddy size and more importantly that it does not require the assumption of local isotropy. Applications of this visualisation include a proposal for a theoretical closure of the Reynolds equations, the collapse of velocity and skin friction profiles for Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid flows in all geometries into unique master curves. A new partial derivative is introduced that decouples the effect of diffusion and convection simplifying the mathematical solution of subsets of the NS equations with implications for a more efficient generation of computational fluid dynamics packages. Finally the consequences to turbulent heat and mass transfer are examined.
RF-URL: unsupervised representation learning for RF sensing

The major obstacle for learning-based RF sensing is to obtain a high-quality large-scale annotated dataset. However, unlike visual datasets that can be easily annotated by human workers, RF signal is non-intuitive and non-interpretable, which causes the annotation of RF signals time-consuming and laborious. To resolve the rapacious appetite of annotated data, we propose a novel unsupervised representation learning (URL) framework for RF sensing, RF-URL, to learn a pre-training model on large-scale unannotated RF datasets that can be easily collected. RF-URL utilizes a contrastive framework to mind the gap between signal-processing-based RF sensing and learning-based RF sensing. By constructing positive and negative pairs through different signal processing representations, RF-URL seamlessly integrates the existing RF signal processing algorithms into the learning-based networks. Moreover, the RF-URL is carefully designed to take into account the asymmetric characteristics of different RF signal processing representations. We show that RF-URL is universal to a variety of RF sensing tasks by evaluating RF-URL in three typical RF sensing tasks (human gesture recognition, 3D pose estimation and silhouette generation) based on two general RF devices (WiFi and radar). All experimental results strongly demonstrate that RF-URL takes an important step towards learning-based solutions for large-scale RF sensing applications.
Anisotropy in the all-sky distribution of galaxy morphological types

We present the first study of the isotropy of the distribution of morphological types of galaxies in the Local Universe out to around 200 Mpc using more than 60,000 galaxies from the HyperLeda database. We divide the sky into two opposite hemispheres and compare the abundance distribution of the morphological types, $T$, using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test. This is repeated for different directions in the sky and the KS statistic as a function of sky coordinates is obtained. For three samples of galaxies within around 100, 150, and 200 Mpc, we find a significant hemispherical asymmetry with a vanishingly small chance of occurring in an isotropic distribution. Astonishingly, regardless of this extreme significance, the hemispherical asymmetry is aligned with the Celestial Equator at the 97.1-99.8% and with the Ecliptic at the 94.6-97.6% confidence levels, estimated using a Monte Carlo analysis. Shifting $T$ values randomly within their uncertainties has a negligible effect on this result. When a magnitude limit of $B\leq 15$ mag is applied, the sample within 100 Mpc shows no significant anisotropy after random shifting of $T$. However, the direction of the asymmetry in the samples within 150 and 200 Mpc and $B\leq 15$ mag is found to be within an angular separation of 32 degrees from $(l,b)=(123.7, 24.6)$ with 97.2% and 99.9% confidence levels, respectively. This direction is only 2.6 degrees away from the Celestial North Pole. Unless the Local Universe has a significant anisotropic distribution of galaxy types aligned with the orientation or the orbit of the Earth (which would be a challenge for the Cosmological Principle), our results show that there seems to be a systematic bias in the classification of galaxy morphological types between the data from the Northern and the Southern Equatorial sky. Further studies are absolutely needed to find out the exact source of this anisotropy.
Warm-started quantum sphere decoding via reverse annealing for massive IoT connectivity

With the continuous growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), the trend of increasing numbers of IoT devices will continue. To increase the network's capability to support a large number of active devices accessing a network concurrently, this work presents IoT-ResQ, a warm-started quantum annealing-based multi-device detector via quantum reverse annealing (RA). Unlike in typical quantum forward annealing (FA) protocol, IoT-ResQ's RA starts its search operation on a controllable candidate classical state, instead of a quantum superposition, and thus allows refined local quantum search around the initial state. This procedure can provide an opportunity of utilizing both conventional classical- and quantum-based detectors together in a hybrid synergy, to boost quantum optimization performance, mitigating the effect of quantum decoherence and noise on quantum hardware. In our evaluation, IoT-ResQ achieves nearly two to three orders of magnitude better BER and over 2X packet success rate with packet size of 32-byte compared to other quantum and conventional detectors at SNR 9 dB to support 48 active IoT devices with QPSK modulation (implying 48,000 deployed devices with 0.1% wake-up radio rate at a time), requiring ≈ 140 μs pure compute time for detection.
CORE-lens: simultaneous communication and object recognition with disentangled-GAN cameras

Optical camera communication (OCC) enabled by LED and embedded cameras has attracted extensive attention, thanks to its rich spectrum availability and ready deployability. However, the close interactions between OCC and the indoor spaces have created two major challenges. On one hand, the stripe pattern incurred by OCC may greatly damage the accuracy of image-based object recognition. On the other hand, the patterns inherent to indoor spaces can significantly degrade the decoding performance of reflected OCC. To this end, we propose CORE-Lens as a pipeline to make the mutual interference transparent to existing OR and OCC algorithms. Essentially, CORE-Lens treats the two challenges as two sides of a signal mixture issue: the signals transmitted by OCC get mixed with background images so well that their features become entangled. Consequently, CORE-Lens exploits the idea of disentangled representation learning to separate the mixed signals in the feature space: while the GAN-reconstructed clean background images are used to perform object recognition, OCC decoding is conducted on the residual of the original image after subtracting the reconstructed background. Our extensive experiments on evaluating the real-life performance of CORE-Lens evidently demonstrate its superiority over conventional approaches.
TIMING SIGNATURES OF THE INTERNAL-SHOCK MODEL FOR BLAZARS

We investigate the spectral and timing signatures of the internal-shock model for blazars. For this purpose, we develop a semi-analytical model for the time-dependent radiative output from internal shocks arising from colliding relativistic shells in a blazar jet. The emission through synchrotron and synchrotron-self Compton radiation as well as Comptonization of an isotropic external radiation field are taken into account. We evaluate the discrete correlation function (DCF) of the model light curves in order to evaluate features of photon-energy-dependent time lags and the quality of the correlation, represented by the peak value of the DCF. The almost completely analytic nature of our approach allows us to study in detail the influence of various model parameters on the resulting spectral and timing features. This paper focuses on a range of parameters in which the γ-ray production is dominated by Comptonization of external radiation, most likely appropriate for γ-ray bright flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) or low-frequency peaked BL Lac objects (LBLs). In most cases relevant for FSRQs and LBLs, the variability of the optical emission is highly correlated with the X-ray and high-energy (HE: > 100 MeV) γ-ray emission. Our baseline model predicts a lead of the optical variability with respect to the higher-energy bands by 1–2 hr and of the HE γ-rays before the X-rays by about 1 hr. We show that variations of certain parameters may lead to changing signs of inter-band time lags, potentially explaining the lack of persistent trends of time lags in most blazars.
18F-FDG-PET in Mouse Models of Alzheimer's Disease

Suitable animal models and in vivo biomarkers are essential for development and evaluation of new therapeutic strategies in Alzheimer's disease (AD). 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG)-positron-emission tomography (PET) is an imaging biomarker that allows the assessment of cerebral glucose metabolism in vivo. While 18F-FDG-PET/CT is an established tool in the evaluation of AD patients, its role in preclinical studies with AD mouse models remains unclear. Here, we want to review available studies on 18F-FDG-PET/CT in AD mouse models in order to evaluate the method and its impact in preclinical AD research. Only a limited number of studies using 18F-FDG-PET in AD mice were carried out so far showing contradictory findings in cerebral FDG uptake. Methodological differences as well as underlying pathological features of used mouse models seem to be accountable for those varying results. However, 18F-FDG-PET can be a valuable tool in longitudinal in vivo therapy monitoring with a lot of potential for future studies.
A PANCHROMATIC VIEW OF PKS 0558−504: AN IDEAL LABORATORY TO STUDY THE DISK–JET LINK

PKS 0558−504 is the brightest radio-loud Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy (NLS1) at X-ray energies. Here we present results from the radio, optical, UV, and X-ray bands obtained with Swift, XMM-Newton, and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) during a ten-day monitoring campaign in 2008 September. The simultaneous coverage at several wavelengths makes it possible to investigate in detail the broadband spectral energy distribution (SED) and the energetics of this source. The main results can be summarized as follows. The ATCA reveals the presence of an extended radio emission in PKS 0558−504 with two lobe-like structures ∼7″ from the bright central source. The extended radio structure and the low value of the radio loudness similar to radio-quiet Seyfert galaxies coupled with constraints from higher energy bands argue against a jet-dominated emission in PKS 0558−504. The study of the SED, which is dominated by a nearly constant optical–UV emission, supports the conclusion that PKS 0558−504 is accreting at a super-Eddington rate. This conclusion was reached by assuming MBH = 2.5 × 108 M☉, which was obtained with a new scaling method based on X-ray spectral variability results. A comparison between the accretion luminosity and the kinetic power associated with the jet suggests that in this source, the accretion power dominates in agreement with the results obtained from radiation–magnetohydrodynamic simulations of Galactic black holes (GBHs) accreting at the Eddington rate. The combined findings from this panchromatic investigation strongly suggest that PKS 0558−504 is a large-scale analog of GBHs in their highly accreting intermediate state. More importantly, PKS 0558−504 may also be the prototype of the parent population of the very radio-loud NLS1s recently detected at γ-ray energies.