Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An inertial sensor-based system to develop motor capacity in children with cerebral palsy

Learning to communicate with alternative augmentative communication devices can be difficult because of the difficulty of achieving controlled interaction while simultaneously learning to communicate. What is needed is a device that harnesses a child's natural motor capabilities and provides the means to reinforce them. We present a kinematic sensor-based system that learns a child's natural gestural capability and allows him/her to practice those capabilities in the context of a game. Movement is captured with a single kinematic sensor that can be worn anywhere on the body. A gesture recognition algorithm interactively learns gesture models using kinematic data with the help of a nearby teacher. Learned gesture models are applied in the context of a game to help the child practice gestures to gain better consistency. The system was successfully tested with a child over two sessions. The system learned four candidate gestures: lift hand, sweep right, twist right and punch forward. These were then used in a game. The child showed better consistency in performing the gestures as each session progressed. We aim to expand on this work by developing qualitative scores of movement quality and quantifying algorithm accuracy on a larger population over long periods of time.
A Secure and Practical Electronic Voting Scheme for Real World Environments

SUMMARY In this paper, we propose a practical and secure electronic voting scheme which meets the requirements of large scale general elections. This scheme involves voters, the administrator or so called the government and some scrutineers. In our scheme, a voter only has to communicate with the administrator three times and it ensures independence among voters without the need of any global computation. This scheme uses the threshold cryptosystem to guarantee the fairness among the candidate's campaign and to provide mechanism for achieving the function that any voter can make an open objection to the tally if his vote has not been published. This scheme preserves the privacy of a voter against the administrator, scrutineers, and other voters. Completeness, robustness, and veriiability of the voting process are ensured and hence no one can produce a false tally, corrupt or disrupt the election.
NMR structure of the hRap1 Myb motif reveals a canonical three-helix bundle lacking the positive surface charge typical of Myb DNA-binding domains.

Mammalian telomeres are composed of long tandem arrays of double-stranded telomeric TTAGGG repeats associated with the telomeric DNA-binding proteins, TRF1 and TRF2. TRF1 and TRF2 contain a similar C-terminal Myb domain that mediates sequence-specific binding to telomeric DNA. In the budding yeast, telomeric DNA is associated with scRap1p, which has a central DNA-binding domain that contains two structurally related Myb domains connected by a long linker, an N-terminal BRCT domain, and a C-terminal RCT domain. Recently, the human ortholog of scRap1p (hRap1) was identified and shown to contain a BRCT domain and an RCT domain similar to scRap1p. However, hRap1 contained only one recognizable Myb motif in the center of the protein. Furthermore, while scRap1p binds telomeric DNA directly, hRap1 has no DNA-binding ability. Instead, hRap1 is tethered to telomeres by TRF2. Here, we have determined the solution structure of the Myb domain of hRap1 by NMR. It contains three helices maintained by a hydrophobic core. The architecture of the hRap1 Myb domain is very close to that of each of the Myb domains from TRF1, scRap1p and c-Myb. However, the electrostatic potential surface of the hRap1 Myb domain is distinguished from that of the other Myb domains. Each of the minimal DNA-binding domains, containing one Myb domain in TRF1 and two Myb domains in scRap1p and c-Myb, exhibits a positively charged broad surface that contacts closely the negatively charged backbone of DNA. By contrast, the hRap1 Myb domain shows no distinct positive surface, explaining its lack of DNA-binding activity. The hRap1 Myb domain may be a member of a second class of Myb motifs that lacks DNA-binding activity but may interact instead with other proteins. Other possible members of this class are the c-Myb R1 Myb domain and the Myb domains of ADA2 and Adf1. Thus, while the folds of all Myb domains resemble each other closely, the function of each Myb domain depends on the amino acid residues that are located on the surface of each protein.
XMM-Newton Observation of the 5.25 Millisecond Transient Pulsar XTE J1807–294 in Outburst

We report on the results obtained for the millisecond transient X-ray pulsar XTE J1807-294 in a 40 minute orbital period system, based on an XMM-Newton target-of-opportunity observation carried out during 2003 March. The source was found at a luminosity level of about 2 × 1036 ergs s-1 in the 0.5-10 keV range (assuming a distance of 8 kpc). We confirm the presence of the 5.25 ms pulsations (after accounting for the orbital modulation) and find a pulsed fraction of 5.8% in the 0.3-10 keV band. The pulse shape is nearly sinusoidal. The spectral continuum of the source is well fitted by an absorbed Comptonization model plus a soft component. No emission or absorption lines have been detected in the 0.3-10 keV (0.5-10 keV) range with upper limits of 10-40 eV. The reported analysis represents the first detailed study of this source, the fourth belonging to the ultracompact binary system class hosting an accreting neutron star.
Narrow-Band Analysis of Nonstationary Processes

The behaviour of averaged periodograms and cross-periodograms of a broad class of nonstationary processes is studied. The processes include nonstationary ones that are fractional of any order, as well as asymptotically stationary fractional ones. The cross-periodogram can involve two nonstationary processes of possibly different orders, or a nonstationary and an asymptotically stationary one. The averaging takes place either over the whole frequency band, or over one that degenerates slowly to zero frequency as sample size increases. In some cases it is found to make no asymptotic difference, and in particular we indicate how the behaviour of the mean and variance changes across the two-dimensional space of integration orders. The results employ only local-to-zero assumptions on the spectra of the underlying weakly stationary sequences. It is shown how the results can be applied in fractional cointegration with unknown integration orders.
Performance Degradation Detection of Virtual Machines Via Passive Measurement and Machine Learning

Virtualization is commonly used for efficient operation of servers in datacenters. The autonomic management of virtual machines enhances the advantages of virtualization. Therefore, for the development of such management, it is important to establish a method to accurately detect the performance degradation in virtual machines. This paper proposes a method that detects degradation via passive measurement of traffic exchanged by virtual machines. Using passive traffic measurement is advantageous because it is robust against heavy loads, non-intrusive to the managed machines, and independent of hardware/software platforms. From the measured traffic metrics, performance state is determined by a machine learning technique that algorithmically determines the complex relationships between traffic metrics and performance degradation from training data. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are confirmed experimentally.
Adjustable Delay Buffer Allocation under Useful Clock Skew Scheduling

This paper proposes a graph-based algorithm for solving the adjustable delay buffer (ADB) allocation problem optimally under useful clock skew scheduling. Our algorithm supports additional features: extending the optimality to the allocation of ADBs with quantized delay values, extending the optimality to the allocation of ADBs with delay upper bound, and extending to the consideration of the delay variability of clock buffers. In addition, we propose two acceleration techniques for speeding up the computation. The first one is speeding up the graph traversal of our optimal solver without sacrificing the optimality while the second one, supplementing our algorithm, is to deal with the extremely large designs at the expense of the allocation quality. The experiments with benchmark circuits show that our algorithm reduces the number of ADBs by 23.3% on average over the results produced by the conventional ADB allocation under useful clock skew scheduling and reduces the number of ADBs by 86.3% on average over that produced by the previous optimal ADB allocation under bounded clock skew constraint. In addition, our optimal algorithm runs 30–460 times faster than the prior work.
A Study on the Relationships between Leisure Activity Involvement , Well-Being , the Benefits of Serious Leisure Activity , and Sports Volunteer Self-Actualization in the Changhua National Games

This study aims to investigate the relationships between leisure involvement, well-being, the benefits of serious leisure activities, and self-actualization for 2011 Changhua National Games volunteers. It selects 265 sports volunteer workers who participated in the 2011 Changhua National Games using convenience sampling. The results of the study show: 1. Leisure activity involvement for the sports volunteers has a significant impact on their well-being; 2. Sports volunteers’ leisure activity involvement has a significant impact on their self-actualization; 3. Sports volunteers’ leisure activity involvement has a significant impact on the benefits of serious leisure activities; 4. The benefits of serious leisure activities for the sports volunteers do not have a significant impact on their well-being; 5. The benefits of serious leisure activities for sports volunteers have a significant impact on their self-actualization; 6. The benefits of serious leisure activities for sports volunteers have mediating effects on the relationship between leisure involvement and self-actualization.
A Detail Preserving Filter for Impulse Noise Detection and Removal

It is imperative to remove impulse noise corrupted pixels in images, in order to facilitate the subsequent processing such as image analysis, segmentation, pattern recognition etc. Many linear and non linear filtering techniques have been proposed earlier to remove impulse noise, however the removal of impulse noise is often accomplished at the expense of blurred and distorted features of edges; therefore it is necessary to preserve the edges and fine details during filtering. In this paper a no reference blur metric based iterative edge preserving filtering technique has been proposed, that is selective on noisy and edge pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed filter is superior over the state of art filters in maintaining higher peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), near ideal structural similarity index measurement (SSIM) and lower blur.
Analysis of Dermal Papilla Cell Interactome Using STRING Database to Profile the ex Vivo Hair Growth Inhibition Effect of a Vinca Alkaloid Drug, Colchicine

Dermal papillae (DPs) control the formation of hair shafts. In clinical settings, colchicine (CLC) induces patients’ hair shedding. Compared to the control, the ex vivo hair fiber elongation of organ cultured vibrissa hair follicles (HFs) declined significantly after seven days of CLC treatment. The cultured DP cells (DPCs) were used as the experimental model to study the influence of CLC on the protein dynamics of DPs. CLC could alter the morphology and down-regulate the expression of alkaline phosphatase (ALP), the marker of DPC activity, and induce IκBα phosphorylation of DPCs. The proteomic results showed that CLC modulated the expression patterns (fold > 2) of 24 identified proteins, seven down-regulated and 17 up-regulated. Most of these proteins were presumably associated with protein turnover, metabolism, structure and signal transduction. Protein-protein interactions (PPI) among these proteins, established by Search Tool for the Retrieval of Interacting Genes/Proteins (STRING) database, revealed that they participate in protein metabolic process, translation, and energy production. Furthermore, ubiquitin C (UbC) was predicted to be the controlling hub, suggesting the involvement of ubiquitin-proteasome system in modulating the pathogenic effect of CLC on DPC.
Bottom-up Named Entity Recognition using Two-stage Machine Learning Method

This paper proposes Japanese bottom-up named entity recognition using a two-stage machine learning method. Most work has formalized Named Entity Recognition as a sequential labeling problem, in which only local information is utilized for the label estimation, and thus a long named entity consisting of several morphemes tends to be wrongly recognized. Our proposed method regards a compound noun (chunk) as a labeling unit, and first estimates the labels of all the chunks in a phrasal unit (bunsetsu) using a machine learning method. Then, the best label assignment in the bunsetsu is determined from bottom up as the CKY parsing algorithm using a machine learning method. We conducted an experimental on CRL NE data, and achieved an F measure of 89.79, which is higher than previous work.
Potential-based Downstream Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks designed for periodic monitoring, various many-to-one upstream (sensor-to-sink) routing protocols have been studied. Potential-based routing (PBR) is one such protocol, and can achieve low overhead, high scalability, and efficient load balancing. However, in PBR, unicast messages such as special instructions from a sink node to a certain node are not taken into consideration. In this paper, we propose a potential-based downstream routing protocol (PBDR), in which each sink node constructs an independent potential field and all sensor nodes and sink nodes have a set of potentials determined on each potential field. We refer to the set of potentials as virtual coordinates, based on which we define virtual distance. When a node with downstream data decides a next hop, it calculates the virtual distances from neighbor nodes to the destination node, and forwards the data to the neighbor node closest to the destination node. Through simulation experiments, we show that, given a suitable node density, PBDR attains a data delivery ratio greater than 99.5%. We also show that the data delivery ratio recovers immediately after the failure of 30% of sensor nodes or the failure of a sink node. Keywords-sensor networks; potential-based routing; downstream routing; simulation.
Analysis of RNA Interference Lines Identifies New Functions of Maternally-Expressed Genes Involved in Embryonic Patterning in Drosophila melanogaster

Embryonic patterning in Drosophila melanogaster is initially established through the activity of a number of maternally expressed genes that are expressed during oogenesis. mRNAs from some of these genes accumulate in the posterior pole plasm of the oocyte and early embryo and localize further into RNA islands, which are transient ring-like structures that form around the nuclei of future primordial germ cells (pole cells) at stage 3 of embryogenesis. As mRNAs from several genes with known functions in anterior–posterior patterning and/or germ cell specification accumulate in RNA islands, we hypothesized that some other mRNAs that localize in this manner might also function in these developmental processes. To test this, we investigated the developmental functions of 51 genes whose mRNAs accumulate in RNA islands by abrogating their activity in the female germline using RNA interference. This analysis revealed requirements for ttk, pbl, Hip14, eIF5, eIF4G, and CG9977 for progression through early oogenesis. We observed dorsal appendage defects in a proportion of eggs produced by females expressing double-stranded RNA targeting Mkrn1 or jvl, implicating these two genes in dorsal–ventral patterning. In addition, posterior patterning defects and a reduction in pole cell number were seen in the progeny of Mkrn1 females. Because the mammalian ortholog of Mkrn1 acts as an E3 ubiquitin ligase, these results suggest an additional link between protein ubiquitination and pole plasm activity.
Nearest neighbor-based importance weighting

Importance weighting is widely applicable in machine learning in general and in techniques dealing with data co-variate shift problems in particular. A novel, direct approach to determine such importance weighting is presented. It relies on a nearest neighbor classification scheme and is relatively straightforward to implement. Comparative experiments on various classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our so-called nearest neighbor weighting (NNeW) scheme. Considering its performance, our procedure can act as a simple and effective baseline method for importance weighting.
Parameter Calibration , Customer Load Balancing and Security Aspects for Multiplexing of BPO Infrastructure

Outsourcing, during its establishment phase, focused on the socio-economic and the managerial concerns of the companies, countries and people involved. As we progress toward the next generation of outsourcing, we need to ascertain a technology framework that would permit us to outsource in a secure and optimized manner with reduced reliance on litigations approach. This paper discusses Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) infrastructure from the parallel and distributed computing perspective. Multiplexing of BPO infrastructure using Customer Interface Array (CIA), is organized as a distributed environment across various service centers to minimize delays, maximize efficiency and improve customer satisfaction. Three primary parametersCustomer Satisfaction Rate (CSR), Cyber Crime Index (CCI) and Civil Infrastructure Status (CIS) take into account various social, economical, cultural and geographical aspects of BPO operations in which the service centers are located. The paper discusses a Fuzzy Logic based methodology for customer load balancing across the various service centers. This algorithm is for deployment at the level of the Inter-Dialoguing Processor (IDP), which is used as a resource for facilitating communication between the CIA and the various service centers. IDP is useful to establish context-awareness in BPO environment. The paper brings out the possibility of new hardware add-on cards with associated software development specifically tailored for BPO and IT outsourcing activities. Index-Terms: BPO, Outsourcing, Parallel and Distributed Processing, Fuzzy Logic, Performance Evaluation, Middleware Resource Management, Service Composition, Multicasting in Networks, Sourcing Governance Requirements
A NOVEL DESIGN OF REVERSIBLE SERIAL AND PARALLEL ADDER/SUBTRACTOR

Under ideal conditions, Reversible logic gates produce zero power dissipation. So these can be used for low power VLSI design. This paper proposes a new reversible parallel adder/subtractor using 4*4 Reversible DKG gate that can work singly as a reversible full adder and a full subtractor. A serial adder/subtractor is also designed in this paper using Reversible Universal Shift registers and DKG gate. This paper provides a threshold to build more complex arithmetic systems using reversible logic.
Misallocation and Growth Boyan Jovanovic

Endogenous growth model in which training is a by-product of production, and when both firms and workers are heterogeneous. Two-period OLG. The young must work with the old, and as a result an assignment problem arises. We can calculate the transition dynamics analytically when the skill of the young is log-normally distributed and the initial human capital of the old generation is also log-normal. Assignment frictions translate only into level effects, with no effect on long-run growth. But rates of convergence to the BGP are slow. When types are private information, a sepaating equilibrium nonetheless emerges in which the allocations stay the same as in the full-information case, but not the prices PRELIMINARY — DO NOT CIRCULATE
Formal Approaches to Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networking, as a burgeoning technology, supports the monitoring of physical environments and control of sensor data, and has been widely applied in many fields. Due to its unique features, a number of formal theories, as well as verification tools, have been developed to make an in-depth study. In this paper, we propose a timed broadcasting language, the Timed Wireless Sensor Processes, with its operational semantics borrowing ideas from both the Timed CSP and the CBS. Moreover, we abstract a model of contention-based wireless sensor networking systems and formalize it using our language. We also simulate real-world scenarios in terms of labeled transition systems to demonstrate our methods in describing the dynamic behaviors of wireless systems.
The Rock Where We Stand: An Ethnography of Women's Activism in Newfoundland

Bay St. George in western Newfoundland is a region characterized by a boom and bust economy and shaped by the establishment of the Earnest Harmon American Airforce Base. This ethnography explores how women at the Bay St. George Women's Council deal specifically with the issues of single motherhood, child sexual abuse, and domestic violence, and examines the interplay of feminist and Newfoundland identification among these individuals. Drawing on 14 months of participant observation and interviews with women at the Council, George provides a much needed, specifically Canadian contribution to ethno-cultural studies, grass-roots activism, and feminist studies. The research successfully situates the particular concerns and political activism of these women in this rural region of Canada within the larger context of economic restructuring and neoliberal economic and social policies that continue to marginalize women in Canada and around the world. This important study continues the work of feminist ethnographies by such scholars as:Abu-Lughod, Behar, Cole, DiLeonardo, Ginsburg, and Lowenhaupt-Tsing. Avoiding the all too common pitfall of folkorization in rural studies, The Rock Where We Stand represents an innovative and experimental contribution to the field.
Optimal Data Acquisition and Height Retrieval in Repeat-Track Geosynchronous SAR Interferometry

Geosynchronous synthetic aperture radar (GEO SAR) will move in a high orbit of ~36,000 km with a long integration time of hundreds of seconds. It is obviously impacted by orbital perturbations and the Earth’s rotation, which can give rise to un-parallel repeated tracks and induce a squint-looking angle in the repeat-track SAR interferometry (InSAR). Thus, the traditional data acquisition method using in the zero-Doppler centroid (ZDC) configuration to generate the GEO InSAR pair will bring about the obvious rotation-induced decorrelation. Moreover, the conventional height retrieval model with the broadside mode imaging geometry and the approximate expression of the interferometric baseline will induce large height and localization errors in the GEO InSAR processing. In this paper, a novel data acquisition method is firstly presented based on a criterion of optimal minimal rotational-induced decorrelation (OMRD). It can significantly improve the coherence of the InSAR pair. Then, considering the localization equations in the squint-looking mode and the accurate expression of the interferometric baseline, a modified GEO InSAR height retrieval model is proposed to mitigate the height and localization errors induced by the conventional model. Finally, computer simulations are carried out for the verification of the proposed methods. In a typical inclined GEO InSAR configuration, the averaged total correlation coefficient increases more than 0.4, and height errors of hundreds of meters and localization errors of more than 10 degrees are removed.