Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The carrot and the stick : The role of praise and punishment in human-robot interaction

This paper presents two studies that investigate how people praise and punish robots in a collaborative game scenario. In a first study, subjects played a game together with humans, computers, and anthropomorphic and zoomorphic robots. The different partners and the game itself were presented on a computer screen. Results showed that praise and punishment were used the same way for computer and human partners. Yet robots, which are essentially computers with a different embodiment, were treated differently. Very machine-like robots were treated just like the computer and the human; robots very high on anthropomorphism / zoomorphism were praised more and punished less. However, barely any of the participants believed that they actually played together with a robot. After this first study, we refined the method and also tested if the presence of a real robot, in comparison to a screen representation, would influence the measurements. The robot, in the form of an AIBO, would either be present in the room or only be represented on the participants' computer screen (presence). Furthermore, the robot would either make 20% errors or 40% errors (error rate) in the collaborative game. We automatically measured the praising and punishing behavior of the participants towards the robot and also asked the participant to estimate their own behavior. Results show that even the presence of the robot in the room did not convince all participants that they played together with the robot. To gain full insight into this human-robot relationship it might be necessary to directly interact with the robot. The participants unconsciously praised AIBO more than the human partner, but punished it just as much. Robots that adapt to the users' behavior should therefore pay extra attention to the users' praises, compared to their punishments.
Finite Element Modeling of Episodic Edifices

Episodic edifices have a diversity of significant solicitations in contemporary machineries and engineering owing to their exclusive electromagnetic properties. Frequently used episodic edifices comprise; occurrence selective surfaces, visual grilles, phased collection projections, photonic bandgap supplies, and numerous metamaterials. The scrutiny of episodic edifices has all the time been a significant area in computational electromagnetics. This episode, describes a precise and effectual arithmetical study, grounded on a higher-order finite element method (FEM), for depicting the electromagnetic properties of an episodic edifices. Grounded on the Floquet theory, episodic frontier conditions and radioactivity conditions are foremost resultant for the unit cell of an episodic edifice. The FEM is formerly applied to unravel Maxwell’s reckonings in the unit cell. To augment the precision and effectiveness of the FEM, rounded elements are employed to discretize the unit cell and higherorder course basis functions are used to enlarge the electrical arena. The asymptotic waveform evaluation (AWE) is applied to implement wild frequency and rawboned curves. To prove the proficiency of the projected FEM, we apply it to the scrutiny of episodic absorbers, incidence selective edifices, and phased collection aerial. For the aerial analysis, a severe waveguide port condition is industrialized to precisely model the aerial feed edifices. In all the occurrences premeditated, acceptable outcomes are obtained. Key words : Episodic, edifice, absorbers, waveguide, electromagnetic. DOI : 10.7176/CEIS/10-1-04
SMALLHOLDER ADOPTION OF SOIL AND WATER CONSERVATION PRACTICES IN NORTHERN GHANAr Conservation Practices in Northern Ghana

Both governmental and non-governmental organizations are engaged in the promotion of soil and water conservation practices in Northern Ghana, but adoption is believed to be low. This study thus examines the determinants of conservation practices adoption by farming households in the area. Data for the study were collected from 445 households located in 15 communities in Northern Ghana. Univariate, bivariate and multivariate probit models were used to analyse the decision to adopt six conservation practices in the area. Results show that the major determinants of adoption are plot and cropping characteristics such as location; and socio-economic and institutional variables such as number of contacts with extension officers, membership in farmer association and distance to major market. A policy implication of the study is the strengthening of extension service in the area to significantly boost conservation adoption.
The Participation of MedGIFT Group at ImageCLEFmed 2010

This article presents the participation of the MedGIFT group in ImageCLEFmed 2010. Since 2004, the group has participated in the medical image retrieval tasks of ImageCLEF (ImageCLEFmed) each year. The main goal is to provide a baseline by using the same technology each year, and to search for further improvement if possible. There are three types of tasks for ImageCLEFmed 2010: modality classi-ﬁcation, image–based retrieval and case–based retrieval. The MedGIFT group participated in all three tasks. For ad–hoc retrieval and case–based retrieval tasks, two existing retrieval engines were used: the GNU Image Finding Tool (GIFT) for visual retrieval and Apache Lucene for text. Fusion strategies were also tried out to combine results from two engines. For the modality classiﬁcation, a purely visual approach was used with GIFT for the visual retrieval and a kNN (k–Nearest Neighbors) classiﬁer for the classiﬁcation. Results show that the best textual run outperforms the best visual run by a factor of 30 in terms of mean average precision. Baselines provided by Apache Lucene and GIFT are ranked above the average among textual runs and visual runs respectively in ad–hoc retrieval. In the case– based retrieval task the Lucene baseline is the third best automatic run. For modality classiﬁcation, GIFT and the kNN–based approach perform slightly better than the average of visual approaches.
Online Cloud Transcoding and Distribution for Crowdsourced Live Game Video Streaming

In recent years, empowered by rich media generation devices and convenient Internet access, Crowdsourced Live Game Video Streaming (CLGVS) has become one of the most popular Internet services. Twitch.tv, the most well-known CLGVS platform in the world, allows gamers to broadcast their gaming videos over the Internet. With the prevalence of mobile devices, viewers can watch gamers playing video games anywhere, anytime, on any devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, or personal computers). However, the heterogeneity of user devices makes conventional solutions hard to ensure user-perceived quality. In this paper, we address the problem of cost-effective adaptive live game video streaming from the perspective of CLGVS service providers. Our purpose is to minimize the operational cost for CLGVS service providers by making live transcoding decisions, bit-rate adaptation decisions, and datacenter assignment decisions dynamically. Meanwhile, our algorithm also ensures good-enough service quality for viewers. Due to the diversity of game genres, we also consider game genres when designing our algorithm. To achieve the above purpose, we formulate the problem into a constrained stochastic optimization problem. By leveraging the Lyapunov optimization framework, we derive the online strategy with provable performance bound. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, we further conduct a series of trace-driven simulations. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in terms of operational cost and service quality. Our proposed algorithm can reduce operational cost by up to 50% while achieving good-enough viewer QoE compared with other alternatives.
Dna2 is a structure-specific nuclease, with affinity for 5′-flap intermediates

Dna2 is a nuclease/helicase with proposed roles in DNA replication, double-strand break repair and telomere maintenance. For each role Dna2 is proposed to process DNA substrates with a 5′-flap. To date, however, Dna2 has not revealed a preference for binding or cleavage of flaps over single-stranded DNA. Using DNA binding competition assays we found that Dna2 has substrate structure specificity. The nuclease displayed a strong preference for binding substrates with a 5′-flap or some variations of flap structure. Further analysis revealed that Dna2 recognized and bound both the single-stranded flap and portions of the duplex region immediately downstream of the flap. A model is proposed in which Dna2 first binds to a flap base, and then the flap threads through the protein with periodic cleavage, to a terminal flap length of ∼5 nt. This resembles the mechanism of flap endonuclease 1, consistent with cooperation of these two proteins in flap processing.
Drag-and-Pop and Drag-and-Pick: Techniques for Accessing Remote Screen Content on Touch- and Pen-Operated Systems

Drag-and-pop and drag-and-pick are interaction techniques designed for users of pen- and touch- operated display systems. They provide users with access to screen content that would otherwise be impossible or hard to reach, e.g., because it is located behind a bezel or far away from the user. Drag-and-pop is an exten- sion of traditional drag-and-drop. As the user starts dragging an icon towards some target icon, drag-and-pop responds by temporarily moving potential target icons towards the user's current cursor location, thereby allow- ing the user to interact with these icons using comparably small hand movements. Drag-and-Pick extends the drag-and-pop interaction style such that it allows activating icons, e.g., to open folders or launch applications. In this paper, we report the results of a user study comparing drag-and-pop with traditional drag-and-drop on a 15' (4.50m) wide interactive display wall. Participants where able to file icons up to 3.7 times faster when using the drag-and-pop interface.
Cell wall, lignin and fatty acid-related transcriptome in soybean: Achieving gene expression patterns for bioenergy legume

Increasing efforts to preserve environmental resources have included the development of more efficient technologies to produce energy from renewable sources such as plant biomass, notably through biofuels and cellulosic residues. The relevance of the soybean industry is due mostly to oil and protein production which, although interdependent, results from coordinated gene expression in primary metabolism. Concerning biomass and biodiesel, a comprehensive analysis of gene regulation associated with cell wall components (as polysaccharides and lignin) and fatty acid metabolism may be very useful for finding new strategies in soybean breeding for the expanding bioenergy industry. Searching the Genosoja transcriptional database for enzymes and proteins directly involved in cell wall, lignin and fatty acid metabolism provides gene expression datasets with frequency distribution and specific regulation that is shared among several cultivars and organs, and also in response to different biotic/abiotic stress treatments. These results may be useful as a starting point to depict the Genosoja database regarding gene expression directly associated with potential applications of soybean biomass and/or residues for bioenergy-producing technologies.
Investigating naming convention adherence in Java references

Naming conventions can help the readability and comprehension of code, and thus the onboarding of new developers. Conventions also provide cues that help developers and tools extract information from identifier names to support software maintenance. Tools exist to automatically check naming conventions but they are often limited to simple checks, e.g. regarding typography. The adherence to more elaborate conventions, such as the use of noun and verbal phrases in names, is not checked. We present Nominal, a naming convention checking library for Java that allows the declarative specification of conventions regarding typography and the use of abbreviations and phrases. To test Nominal, and to investigate the extent to which developers follow conventions, we extract 3.5 million reference - field, formal argument and local variable - name declarations from 60 FLOSS projects and determine their adherence to two well-known Java naming convention guidelines that give developers scope to choose a variety of forms of name, and sometimes offer conflicting advice. We found developers largely follow naming conventions, but adherence to specific conventions varies widely.
EPSMS and the Document Occurrence Representation for Authorship Identification - Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2011

This paper describes the participation of the PISIS team in the authorship identification track of PAN’11. We adopted two different strategies for the tasks of authorship attribution and authorship verification. For authorship attribution we performed experiments with a document occurrence representation using a standard classification-based approach. Results obtained with this approach were mixed: in the small data sets distributional representations resulted very helpful, although in the large data sets a simple bag-of-words approach outperformed the document occurrence approach. For authorship verification we adopted a classification-based approach and proposed a modification to Ensemble Particle Swarm Model Selection (EPSMS) for selecting classification models for each task. This approach obtained acceptable performance in two out of the three data sets.
A quickstart in frequent structure mining can make a difference

Given a database, structure mining algorithms search for substructures that satisfy constraints such as minimum frequency, minimum confidence, minimum interest and maximum frequency. Examples of substructures include graphs, trees and paths. For these substructures many mining algorithms have been proposed. In order to make graph mining more efficient, we investigate the use of the "quickstart principle", which is based on the fact that these classes of structures are contained in each other, thus allowing for the development of structure mining algorithms that split the search into steps of increasing complexity. We introduce the GrAph/Sequence/Tree extractiON (Gaston) algorithm that implements this idea by searching first for frequent paths, then frequent free trees and finally cyclic graphs. We investigate two alternatives for computing the frequency of structures and present experimental results to relate these alternatives.
Prioritizing JUnit test cases in absence of coverage information

Better orderings of test cases can detect faults in less time with fewer resources, and thus make the debugging process earlier and accelerate software delivery. As a result, test case prioritization has become a hot topic in the research of regression testing. With the popularity of using the JUnit testing framework for developing Java software, researchers also paid attention to techniques for prioritizing JUnit test cases in regression testing of Java software. Typically, most of them are based on coverage information of test cases. However, coverage information may need extra costs to acquire. In this paper, we propose an approach (named Jupta) for prioritizing JUnit test cases in absence of coverage information. Jupta statically analyzes call graphs of JUnit test cases and the software under test to estimate the test ability (TA) of each test case. Furthermore, Jupta provides two prioritization techniques: the total TA based technique (denoted as JuptaT) and the additional TA based technique (denoted as JuptaA). To evaluate Jupta, we performed an experimental study on two open source Java programs, containing 11 versions in total. The experimental results indicate that Jupta is more effective and stable than the untreated orderings and Jupta is approximately as effective and stable as prioritization techniques using coverage information at the method level.
Creating and interpreting abstract visualizations of emotion

People use non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions, body language, and tonal variations in speech, to help communicate emotion; however, these cues are not always available in computer-supported environments. Without emotional cues, we can have difficulty communicating and relating to others. In this paper, we develop and evaluate a system for creating abstract visualizations of emotion using arousal and valence. Through two user studies, we show that without prior training, people can naturally understand the represented emotion conveyed by the visualization.
INTER-INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN THE RESPONSES OF VO2MAX TO PHYSICAL ACTIVITY COUNSELLING

Low cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2max) is an important risk factor for diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers, making lifestyle interventions especially relevant. There is purported to be substantial inter-individual differences in how VO2max responds to lifestyle/exercise interventions. Recently, we described the appropriate approach for quantifying these inter-individual differences. Therefore, we aimed to apply this approach to quantify inter-individual differences in the responses of VO2max. We re-analysed data from the influential ‘Activity Counselling Trial’ (ACT), which was designed to determine the effects of general lifestyle assistance as well as formal counselling on physical activity and VO2max in 479 men and 395 women. Importantly, an appropriate comparator group was also present in order to quantify ‘true’ inter-individual differences in VO2max response. For women, the ‘true’ inter-individual responses in VO2max (expressed as a SD) were found to be±129 (95% Confidence interval: −40 to 187) ml/min in the general lifestyle assistance group and±93 (−91 to 160) ml/min in the formal lifestyle counselling group. For men, true individual differences in response were±116 (95%CI: −130 to 210) ml/min and±148 (−105 to 234) ml/min in the assistance and counselling groups, respectively. Although the mean increase in VO2max was greater in women, this increase corresponded to a trivial effect size. This application of the appropriate analyses to the ACT dataset indicate that, on average, the effects of activity counselling on VO2max were small, although there were moderate ‘true’ inter-individual differences in the VO2max response in women (0.34 SD) and small ‘true’ inter-individual differences in men (0.27 SD). Further genotype investigation may therefore be warranted in order to determine the mediators of this observed heterogeneity in response.
Identification of bovine papillomavirus E1 mutants with increased transforming and transcriptional activity

The E1 open reading frame of bovine papillomavirus type 1 (BPV) has been shown previously to encode trans-acting functions, M and R, that are involved in extrachromosomal replication of the viral genome. We have determined that several E1 mutants mapping in both the M and R regions and a single mutant of the upstream regulatory region have a higher transforming activity on mouse C127 cells than the wild-type genome does. A representative mutant in M, a mutant in R, and the upstream regulatory region mutant were complemented in trans by the wild-type genome, but the two E1 mutants did not complement each other, suggesting that they affect the same inhibitory function. A long terminal repeat-activated clone constructed to express the intact E1 open reading frame reversed the high-transformation phenotype of the mutants. In contrast to the high-copy-number autonomous replication of the wild-type genome, the genomes of the E1 mutants were, as previously described for other E1 mutants, integrated at lower copy numbers in the transformed cells. Relative to the viral genome copy number, both the E1 M and R mutant transformed cells contained an average of 10-fold more BPV-specific transcripts than did the wild-type transformed cells. Cycloheximide treatment of the cells transformed by the E1 mutants did not lead to the rapid 10-fold increase in the accumulation of viral transcripts observed with the wild-type genome. These results suggest either that integration of the BPV genome makes it unresponsive to a labile repressor or that an E1 gene product, containing both M and R sequences, is a repressor of BPV transcription.
Semantic Roles for SMT: A Hybrid Two-Pass Model

We present results on a novel hybrid semantic SMT model that incorporates the strengths of both semantic role labeling and phrase-based statistical machine translation. The approach avoids major complexity limitations via a two-pass architecture. The first pass is performed using a conventional phrase-based SMT model. The second pass is performed by a re-ordering strategy guided by shallow semantic parsers that produce both semantic frame and role labels. Evaluation on a Wall Street Journal newswire genre test set showed the hybrid model to yield an improvement of roughly half a point in BLEU score over a strong pure phrase-based SMT baseline -- to our knowledge, the first successful application of semantic role labeling to SMT.
New dual-mode dual-band bandpass filter with quasi-elliptic function passbands and controllable bandwidths

New dual-mode dual-band bandpass filters with quasi-elliptic function responses are devised based on a single stepped-impedance resonator. The center of the resonator is grounded through a short high-impedance section which is equivalent to an inductor for providing coupling between the resonant modes. In addition, in order to increase the degree of freedom for the dual-band design, an interdigital capacitor is introduced so that both center frequencies and bandwidths of the two passbands can be controlled. Moreover, with the aid of source-load coupling, two extra transmission zeros can be created close to the passband edges and hence greatly improve the filter selectivity between the two passbands. Two filters are fabricated and measured to validate the proposed idea. The measured results show good agreement with the simulation.
X‐Space MPI: Magnetic Nanoparticles for Safe Medical Imaging

One quarter of all iodinated contrast X‐ray clinical imaging studies are now performed on Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) patients. Unfortunately, the iodine contrast agent used in X‐ray is often toxic to CKD patients’ weak kidneys, leading to significant morbidity and mortality. Hence, we are pioneering a new medical imaging method, called Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI), to replace X‐ray and CT iodinated angiography, especially for CKD patients. MPI uses magnetic nanoparticle contrast agents that are much safer than iodine for CKD patients. MPI already offers superb contrast and extraordinary sensitivity. The iron oxide nanoparticle tracers required for MPI are also used in MRI, and some are already approved for human use, but the contrast agents are far more effective at illuminating blood vessels when used in the MPI modality. We have recently developed a systems theoretic framework for MPI called x‐space MPI, which has already dramatically improved the speed and robustness of MPI image reconstruction. X‐space MPI has allowed us to optimize the hardware for five MPI scanners. Moreover, x‐space MPI provides a powerful framework for optimizing the size and magnetic properties of the iron oxide nanoparticle tracers used in MPI. Currently MPI nanoparticles have diameters in the 10‐20 nanometer range, enabling millimeter‐scale resolution in small animals. X‐space MPI theory predicts that larger nanoparticles could enable up to 250 micrometer resolution imaging, which would represent a major breakthrough in safe imaging for CKD patients.