Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning 3D structure from 2D images using LBP features

An automatic machine learning strategy for computing the 3D structure of monocular images from a single image query using Local Binary Patterns is presented. The 3D structure is inferred through a training set composed by a repository of color and depth images, assuming that images with similar structure present similar depth maps. Local Binary Patterns are used to characterize the structure of the color images. The depth maps of those color images with a similar structure to the query image are adaptively combined and filtered to estimate the final depth map. Using public databases, promising results have been obtained outperforming other state-of-the-art algorithms and with a computational cost similar to the most efficient 2D-to-3D algorithms.
Semiparametric Regression in Capture–Recapture Modeling

Summary Capture–recapture models were developed to estimate survival using data arising from marking and monitoring wild animals over time. Variation in survival may be explained by incorporating relevant covariates. We propose nonparametric and semiparametric regression methods for estimating survival in capture–recapture models. A fully Bayesian approach using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations was employed to estimate the model parameters. The work is illustrated by a study of Snow petrels, in which survival probabilities are expressed as nonlinear functions of a climate covariate, using data from a 40‐year study on marked individuals, nesting at Petrels Island, Terre Adélie.
Making Performance Analysis and Tuning Part of the Software Development Cycle

Although there are a number of performance tools available to Department of Defense (DoD) users, the process of performance analysis and tuning has yet to become an integral part of the DoD software development cycle. Instead, performance analysis and tuning is the domain of a small number of experts who cannot possibly address all the codes that need attention. We believe the main reasons for this are a lack of knowledge about these tools, the real or perceived steep learning curve required to use them, and the absence of a centralized method that incorporates their use in the software development cycle. This paper presents ongoing efforts to enable a larger number of DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) users to benefit from available performance analysis tools by integrating them into the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform (Eclipse/PTP), an integrated development environment for parallel programs.
Workgroup accord and change-oriented behavior in public service organizations: Mediating and contextual factors

Abstract Workgroup relationships are characterized by interdependence and intensity and can produce powerful norms that shape how work is performed. This study focuses on the effect of workgroup accord, defined as positive exchange, cooperation, and consensus among workgroup members, on change-oriented behavior in public service organizations. Change-oriented behavior denotes discretionary corrective or creative initiatives on the part of employees, and workgroup accord is hypothesized to increase change-oriented behavior both directly and indirectly via organizational commitment. The theoretical model is operationalized using survey data collected from employees of the Australian Public Service. The results of regression analysis are consistent with the hypothesis that workgroup accord positively influences organizational commitment, which in turn facilitates change-oriented behavior. However, a negative direct effect renders the total effect of workgroup accord on change-oriented behavior non-significant. Additionally, the findings suggest that innovation climate and employee performance agreement efficacy each positively moderate the negative relationship between workgroup accord and change-oriented behavior.
CAN REINFORCEMENT COMPLETE SPECIATION?

Hybridization is common in nature, even between “good” species. This observation poses the question of why reinforcement is not always successful in leading to the evolution of complete reproductive isolation. To study this question, we developed a new “quasi‐linkage disequilibrium” (QLD) approximation to obtain the first analytic results for the evolution of modifiers that increase mate discrimination against hybrids and heterospecifics. When such modifiers have small effects, they evolve more readily under a one‐allele than a two‐allele mechanism (sensu Felsenstein 1981). The strength of selection on the modifier decreases as hybrids decrease in frequency, and so further reinforcement may not occur once hybridization is sufficiently rare. The outcome is qualitatively different when modifiers have large effects, however, for example, when a single mutation can cause complete reproductive isolation. In this case, modifiers in a two‐allele mechanism can be selected as or more strongly than those in a one‐allele mechanism. Furthermore, they can spread under quite general conditions. Thus, whether complete closure of genetic introgression by reinforcement occurs may depend on the size of effects that mutations have on the sensory systems used in mate choice.
Space in social interaction. An introduction

This issue addresses the relation between language and space by studying everyday settings of social interaction. All contributions analyse videorecorded instances of interaction and focus, to different degrees, on the ways in which the available multimodal resources – talk, gaze, gesture, body positioning, objects, etc. – are used and coordinated for the practical purposes of the interaction. The authors employ research methods developed in empirically grounded approaches to interaction such as conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and multimodal interaction analysis. This issue is organised around four main thematic areas – Spatialities, Interactional space, Place names and deictics, Evolving spaces – that are also the fil rouge of the following state of the art developments on the relevance of space in linguistic investigations.
The Innovation Experience : towards an organisational learning perspective of innovation

The key to success and survival in constantly changing, volatile and turbulent competitive environments is to be able to learn as an organisation and adapt to this chaotic environment by constantly changing organisational strategies, operations, practices, routines and actions. Organisations however have persistent problems in adjusting themselves and implementing necessary actions before an existence-threatening crisis hits them, even though often they see what happens in their environment. This research examines these problems and details how organisational learning systems and mechanisms speed up learning and change. The paper also describes how interpretive schemes and perceptions create constrains on organisations‟ innovation and change efforts by creating habitual behaviours that are primarily nonadaptive and thus dysfunctional in constantly changing competitive environments. The research contributes to the ongoing debates on the subject of innovation by showing the role of organisational learning processes and managerial perceptions for improved innovativeness.
Existence and characterization of affine bivariate pseudoframes with filter banks

The advantages of frames and their promising features in various application have attracted a lot of interest and effort in recent years. In this work, the notion of affine bivariate pseudoframes is developed. The notion of a bivariate generalized multiresolution structure (BGMRS) is proposed. A new method for constructing one BGMRA of Paley-Wiener subspaces of space L2 (R2) is established. The sufficient condition for the existence of affine bivariate pseudoframes with filter banks is provided by means of a generalized multiresolution structure. Finally, we introduce the notion of the pyramid decomposition scheme.
Demographic Analysis of Breeding Structure in Japanese Thoroughbred Population

To investigate the breeding structure in the Japanese Thoroughbred population, we applied a demographic analysis to the populations of foals produced from 1978 to 2005. The migration rate estimated from the proportion of foals produced by imported breeding horses was around 40% over the investigated period. After early 1990s, the migration rate through stallions imported from USA sharply increased. The average generation interval was within range of 10.5–11.5 years. The longer generation interval of Thoroughbred was considered to be a reflection of the fact that Thoroughbred horses begin breeding only after completing their performance in races. After the peak of 729 in 1993, the number of sires of foals progressively declined to 358 in 2005. Although the coefficient of variation of the progeny number of sires was within range of 1.0–1.2 until early 1990s, it gradually increased and reached the value of 1.6–1.7 in recent years. The effective number of sires consistently decreased after the peak of 302.6 in 1992, and reached 120–130 in recent years, which is 25–30% of the actual number of sires. In parallel, the demographic estimate of the effective population size declined after early 1990s. The main cause of the observed change in the breeding structure was inferred to be the intensive use of a limited number of stallions for breeding.
Speaker Recognition via Statistics of Acoustic Feature Distribution

In recent years, with the widely application of speaker recognition, besides recognition precision, people pay more attention to processing speed. The traditional recognition frame which directly uses acoustic feature sequence to match the model of target speaker doesn't work well in real time environment. So new recognition frame based on the statistic of acoustic feature sequence has arisen. By using acoustic feature distribution around common codebook to model speaker's charactistic, a new speaker recognition algorithm is proposed in this paper. The common codebook is generated via the training data from all reference speakers, which is used to classify speech feature space, and the model of each reference speaker is described by the statistics of speaker's acoustic feature distribution around the common codebook. In the recognition, pairwise sequence alignment is adopted to measure the distortion between the acoustic feature distribution of test speech and each reference speaker model, and recognition result is derived by distortion comparison. Experimental results showed that the method proposed in this paper can save calculation and space resource while having better performance over current algorithm which also is based on the statistic of speaker's acoustic feature distribution.
Social Presence and Use of Internet-Delivered Interventions: A Multi-Method Approach

Objective Internet-delivered interventions can effectively change health risk behaviors and their determinants, but adherence to intervention websites once they are accessed is very low. This study tests whether and how social presence elements can increase website use. Methods A website about Hepatitis A, B, and C virus infections was used in a preparatory lab-based eye-tracking study assessing whether social presence elements attract participants' attention, because this is a prerequisite for affecting website use. In the following field study, 482 participants representative of the Dutch population were randomized to either a website with or a website without social presence elements. Participants completed a questionnaire of validated measures regarding user perceptions immediately after exposure to the website. Server registrations were used to assess website use. Results Participants in the experimental condition focused on the social presence elements, both in terms of frequency (F(1, 98) = 40.34, p<. 001) and duration (F(1, 88) = 39.99, p<. 001), but did not differ in website use in comparison with the control condition; neither in terms of the number of pages visited (t(456) = 1.44, p = . 15), nor in terms of time on the website (t(456) = 0.01, p = . 99). Conclusions Adding social presence elements did not affect actual use of an intervention website within a public health context. Possible reasons are limited attention for these elements in comparison with the main text and the utilitarian value of intervention websites.
Policy-based network dimensioning for IP differentiated services networks

Given the emergence of IP networks and the Internet as the multi-service network of the future, it is plausible to consider its use for transporting demanding traffic with high bandwidth and low delay and packet loss requirements. Emerging technologies for scalable quality of service such as differentiated services (DiffServ) and MPLS can be used for premium quality traffic. We look at the problem of intra-domain provisioning in an automated manner from the point of view of an Internet service provider (ISP), i.e. we want to satisfy the contracts with our customers while optimizing the use of network resources. We also need to be able to guide the behavior of such an automated provisioning system dynamically in order to be able to meet the high-level business objectives. The emerging policy-based management paradigm is the means to achieve this requirement. We devise first a nonlinear programming formulation of the traffic engineering problem and show that we can achieve the objectives and meet the requirements of demanding customer traffic through the means of an automated provisioning system. We extend the functionality of the automated system through policies. Finally, we present example scenarios of the enforcement of network dimensioning policies.
GDVFA: A distributed algorithm based on grid and virtual forces for the redeployment of WSNs

The distributed virtual forces deployment algorithm provides a very good area coverage and guarantees network connectivity for a sufficient number of sensor nodes. It relies on local information between neighboring sensor nodes. However, its main drawback is node oscillations and hence a high amount of sensor node energy wasted. The grid based strategy divides the monitored area into virtual cells. Each cell center determines the position of a sensor node. In this paper we propose GDVFA that combines the advantages of both strategies: on the one hand coverage and connectivity for virtual forces strategy and on the other hand avoidance of node oscillations for grid strategy. Simulation results reported in this paper show that GDVFA considerably reduces the energy consumed by sensor nodes. This comes from: the detection of redundant nodes that are put in sleep mode, and the avoidance of node oscillations by stopping nodes.
Galactic-Scale Outflow and Supersonic Ram-Pressure Stripping in the Virgo Cluster Galaxy NGC 4388

The Hawaii Imaging Fabry-Perot Interferometer (HIFI) on the University of Hawaii 2.2 m telescope was used to map the Hα and [O III] λ5007 emission-line profiles across the entire disk of the edge-on Sb galaxy NGC 4388. We confirm a rich complex of highly ionized gas that extends ~4 kpc above the disk of this galaxy. Low-ionization gas associated with star formation is also present in the disk. Evidence for bar streaming is detected in the disk component and is discussed in a companion paper. Nonrotational blueshifted velocities of 50-250 km s-1 are measured in the extraplanar gas northeast of the nucleus. The brighter features in this complex tend to have more blueshifted velocities. A redshifted cloud is also detected 2 kpc southwest of the nucleus. The velocity field of the extraplanar gas of NGC 4388 appears to be unaffected by the inferred supersonic (Mach number M ≈ 3) motion of this galaxy through the ICM of the Virgo cluster. We argue that this is because the galaxy and the high-|z| gas lie behind a Mach cone with opening angle ~80°. The shocked ICM that flows near the galaxy has a velocity of ~500 km s-1 and exerts insufficient ram pressure on the extraplanar gas to perturb its kinematics. We consider several explanations of the velocity field of the extraplanar gas. Velocities, especially blueshifted velocities on the north of the galaxy, are best explained as a bipolar outflow that is tilted by >12° from the normal to the disk. The observed offset between the extraplanar gas and the radio structure may be due to buoyancy or refractive bending by density gradients in the halo gas. Velocity substructure in the outflowing gas also suggests an interaction with ambient halo gas.
A GRASP for graph planarization

A greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) is a metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization. In this paper, we describe a GRASP for the graph planarization problem, extending the heuristic of Goldschmidt and Takvorian [Networks 24 (1994) 69-73]. We review the basic concepts of GRASP: construction and local search algorithms. The implementation of GRASP for graph planarization is described in detail. Computational experience on a large set of standard test problems is presented. On almost all test problems considered, the new heuristic either matches or finds a better solution than previously described graph planarization heuristics. In several cases, previously unknown optimal solutions are found.
Hydroclimatology of the Mississippi River Basin

Model estimated monthly water balance (WB) components (i.e., potential evapotranspiration, actual evapotranspiration, and runoff [R]) for 848 United States (U.S.) Geological Survey 8‐digit hydrologic units located in the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) are used to examine the temporal and spatial variability of the MRB WB for water years 1901 through 2014. Results indicate the MRB can be divided into nine subregions with similar temporal variability in R. The WB analyses indicated ~79% of total water‐year MRB runoff is generated by four of the nine subregions and most of the R in the basin is derived from surplus (S) water during the months of December through May. Furthermore, the analyses showed temporal variability in S is largely controlled by the occurrence of negative atmospheric pressure anomalies over the western U.S. and positive atmospheric pressure anomalies over the eastern U.S. coast. This combination of atmospheric pressure anomalies results in an anomalous flow of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico into the MRB. In the context of paleo‐climate reconstructions of the Palmer Drought Severity Index, since about 1900 the MRB has experienced wetter conditions than were experienced during the previous 500 years.
Wiki Mass Authoring for Experiential Learning: A Case Study

Web 2.0 services include sharing and collaborative technologies such as blogs, social networking sites, online office productivity tools, and wikis. Wikis are increasingly used for the design and implementation of pedagogy, for example to facilitate experiential learning. A U.S. governmentfunded project for system security risk assessment was conducted using a wiki powered by MediaWiki. Participants were geographically disbursed students, faculty, and industry partners with highly diverse backgrounds and expertise. The focus of this research was the experiential learning practiced by students carrying out the work of the project. Through the use of a wiki as a mass authoring tool, students constructed knowledge in the form of an annotated bibliography of extant systems security literature. Results from a student survey offered convincing support for the use of the wiki’s influence on students’ experiential learning, particularly through the benefit of observation and reflection, as well as the motivational influence of social norms. Lessons learned and possible extensions of the approach described in this study to other educational settings are discussed.
On sparse and low-rank matrix decomposition for singing voice separation

Over recent years there has been a growing interest in finding ways to transform signals/matrices into sparse or low-rank representations, i.e., representations which are sparse in support or of low redundancy. Such decompositions are proving to be particularly powerful for a variety of signal processing and compression problems. In this paper, we investigate the application of this technique to the challenging task of singing voice/accompaniment separation for popular music. The vocal part is modeled as a sparse signal, whereas the instrumental part is considered to be low-rank. In addition, to better account for the particular properties of music, two new algorithms are proposed to improve the decomposition, including the incorporation of harmonicity priors and a back-end drum removal procedure. Evaluations on the MIR-1K benchmark dataset show that the proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art by 0.01-2.41 db.
Toward Dynamic Signal Coding for Safe Communication Technology

This paper gives a theoretical background to dynamic generation of primitive polynomials, their usage in many fields including cryptography for a mobile communication systems. Presented polynomials and their generation over a Galois field is discussed. Additionally, the basic properties and arithmetic methods over finite fields of characteristic 3 are presented. The main objective of this paper is to outline the mathematical background for design and implementation for dynamic coding in mobile communication technology widely applied in telephones, computers and any device communicating over TCP/IP protocol.
Flavanols and Platelet Reactivity

Platelet activity and platelet-endothelial cell interactions are important in the acute development of thrombosis, as well as in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease. An increasing number of foods have been reported to have platelet-inhibitory actions, and research with a number of flavanol-rich foods, including, grape juice, cocoa and chocolate, suggests that these foods may provide some protection against thrombosis. In the present report, we review a series of in vivo studies on the effects of flavanol-rich cocoa and chocolate on platelet activation and platelet-dependent primary hemostasis. Consumption of flavanol-rich cocoa inhibited several measures of platelet activity including, epinephrine- and ADP-induced glycoprotein (GP) IIb/IIIa and P-Selectin expression, platelet microparticle formation, and epinephrine-collagen and ADP-collagen induced primary hemostasis. The epinephrine-induced inhibitory effects on GP IIb/IIIa and primary hemostasis were similar to, though less robust than those associated with the use of low dose (81 mg) aspirin. These data, coupled with information from other studies, support the concept that flavanols present in cocoa and chocolate can modulate platelet function through a multitude of pathways.