Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Novel Blind Channel Estimation for a 2x2 MIMO System

A novel blind channel estimation method based on a simple coding scheme for a 2 by 2 multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system is described. The proposed algorithm is easy to implement in comparison with conventional blind estimation algorithms, as it is able to recover the channel matrix without performing singular value decomposition (SVD) or eigenvalue decomposition (EVD). The block coding scheme accompanying the proposed estimation approach requires only a block encoder at the transmitter without the need of using the decoder at the receiver. The proposed block coding scheme offers the full coding rate and reduces the noise power to half of its original value. It eliminates the phase ambiguity using only one additional pilot sequence.
Evolution of Idiopathic Epiretinal Membrane Studied by Optical Coherence Tomography

Purpose To study the evolution of idiopathic epiretinal membrane (IERM) as examined by optical coherence tomography (OCT) in the 1-mm-diameter circle centered on the fovea. Methods In a case series study 71 subjects (71 eyes) with idiopathic epiretinal membrane and macular thickness greater than 220±10 μm were evaluated by OCT. The fellow healthy eye of 52 patients was used as the control group. The mean follow-up was 36 months. Measurements of macular thickness at baseline and at the final examination were performed. Best-corrected visual acuity was expressed as the number of letters read on the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study chart. Results Within the inner macular central circle of 1 mm diameter the thickness of the fovea increased by an average of 12.29% (p<0.001) during follow-up in the study group while in the control group the foveal thickness decreased by −0.44% (p=0.43). The mean increase of the fovea thickness was accompanied by a modest decrease of best-corrected visual acuity from a mean 43.26 letters at baseline to a mean 39.20 letters at the last examination (p<0.001). Conclusions In the study group the macular thickness increased during a mean follow-up period of 36 months. The average increase between the baseline and the final examination at the inner central circle of 1 mm diameter was 12.29%. Decrease of the macular thickness was not observed in any of the studied cases. The mean decrease of visual acuity was 9.4%. OCT also depicted with accuracy the changing morphology of the affected macula during the study period.
Pathways to Teaching: Latino Student Choice and Professional Identity Development in a Teacher Training Magnet Program Special Issue: Partnering for Equity

This paper reports on one component of a school-university collaborative in El Paso, Texas, to create pathways to college and the teaching profession for Latino and Latina high school students. As part of the Institute for Educational Inquiry's “Diversity in Teaching and Teacher Education” initiative (1997–2000) at The University of Texas—El Paso, the authors developed a program of mentoring, professional development, college socialization, and research activities with high school students and teachers at Riverside High School's Socratic Institute (SI), an innovative, predominately Latino teacher training magnet school. This article reports on a part of the school-university collaborative that brought university faculty and Latino doctoral students into contact with high school SI students in organized research. Through surveys and semi-structured interviews, Socratic student participants reveal what they know about teaching, how they assess and make sense of teaching practice, and how they take on and articulate their identity and emerging teaching personae. Responses reveal why these Latino students choose teaching as a career, and point to the Socratic Institute as an important pre-pre-service model for the recruitment of Latino/a students to the teaching profession and college.
Mobile Robot Localization Using Biased Chirp-Spread-Spectrum Ranging

In this paper, we propose a method of mobile robot localization based on chirp-spread-spectrum (CSS) ranging. By using the CSS system, the distances between a mobile robot and CSS nodes fixed at known coordinates can be measured according to the time of flight of radio frequency signals. Based on the measured distances, the coordinates of a mobile robot can be calculated by the method of trilateration. To deal with measurement noise, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) can be applied to estimate the coordinate of the mobile robot. These measured distances, however, are not only noisy but also biased. Therefore, the estimated coordinates of the mobile robot represent inconsistent values. To solve the problem of bias, we define a scaling factor, which corresponds to the change of the magnitude of a measured distance vector that is due to biases. Based on the scaling factor, we develop a new biased measurement model and apply the EKF to our model for estimating the coordinates of a mobile robot. Through localization experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Library And Information Science Research in Developing Countries and Eastern European Countries: A Brief Bibliometric Perspective

We examined a set of 21 core journals in the field of library and information science (LIS) from 1980–1999 for articles with either principal or co-authors from developing countries (DCs) and the formerly socialist Eastern European countries (EECs). We found that only 826 (7·9%) of a total of 10 400 articles published in 21 journals are from DCs or EECs. The numbers of articles with authors from China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Botswana, Ghana, Kuwait, and Taiwan considerably increased and those of India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Brazil, and Poland decreased. Using a bibliometric indicator we found that among the countries with declining trends in the numbers of articles, LIS research is receiving high priority in Nigeria and Pakistan whereas among the countries with increasing trends in articles, it is receiving low priority in China, Turkey and Taiwan. A ‘co-word’ analysis based on the key words and thematic noun- phrases in the titles and abstracts of a sample of 102 articles published in 1996 to 1999 indicated that bibliometrics is the most frequent topic in LIS research in major DCs and EECs. Information retrieval, information need and information use is among the topics of relatively high interest for the researchers working in DCs in Asia and Africa.
Bangla online handwriting recognition using recurrent neural network architecture

Recognition of unconstrained handwritten texts is always a difficult problem, particularly if the style of handwriting is a mixed cursive one. Among various Indian scripts, only Bangla has this additional difficulty of tackling mixed cur-siveness of its handwriting style in the pipeline of a method towards its automatic recognition. A few other common recognition difficulties of handwriting in an Indian script include the large size of its alphabet and the extremely cursive nature of the shapes of its alphabetic characters. These are among the reasons of achieving only limited success in the study of unconstrained handwritten Bangla text recognition. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models have often been used for solving difficult real-life pattern recognition problems. Recurrent Neural Network models (RNN) have been studied in the literature for modeling sequence data. In this study, we consider Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network model, a useful member of this family. In fact, Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) neural networks is a special kind of RNN and have recently attracted special attention in solving sequence labelling problems. In this article, we present a BLSTM architecture based approach for unconstrained online handwritten Bangla text recognition.
Event analysis of pulse-reclosers in distribution systems through sparse representation

The pulse-recloser uses pulse testing technology to verify that the line is clear of faults before initiating a reclose operation, which significantly reduces stress on the system components (e.g. substation transformers) and voltage sags on adjacent feeders. Online event analysis of pulse-reclosers are essential to increases the overall utility of the devices, especially when there are numerous devices installed throughout the distribution system. In this paper, field data recorded from several devices were analyzed to identify specific activity and fault locations. An algorithm is developed to screen the data to identify the status of each pole and to tag time windows with a possible pulse event. In the next step, selected time windows are further analyzed and classified using a sparse representation technique by solving an ℓ1-regularized least-square problem. This classification is obtained by comparing the pulse signature with the reference dictionary to find a set that most closely matches the pulse features. This work also sheds additional light on the possibility of fault classification based on the pulse signature. Field data collected from a distribution system are used to verify the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method.
On asymptotically optimal confidence regions and tests for high-dimensional models

We propose a general method for constructing confidence intervals and statistical tests for single or low-dimensional components of a large parameter vector in a high-dimensional model. It can be easily adjusted for multiplicity taking dependence among tests into account. For linear models, our method is essentially the same as in Zhang and Zhang [J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Stat. Methodol. 76 (2014) 217-242]: we analyze its asymptotic properties and establish its asymptotic optimality in terms of semiparametric efficiency. Our method naturally extends to generalized linear models with convex loss functions. We develop the corresponding theory which includes a careful analysis for Gaussian, sub-Gaussian and bounded correlated designs.
The ROSE Source-to-Source Compiler Infrastructure

The development of future software for proposed new computer architectures is expected to make significant demands on compiler technologies. Significant rewriting of applications will be likely to support the use of new hardware features and preserve the current software investment. Existing compilers provide little support for the broad range of research efforts addressing exascale challenges, such as parallelism, locality, resiliency, power efficiency, etc. The economics of how new machines will change an existing code base of software, that is too expensive to manually rewrite, may well drive automated mechanisms to transform existing software to take advantage of future machine features. This approach will lessen the cost and delay of the move to new, and possibly radically different, future architectures. Source-to-source compilers provides a pragmatic vehicle to support research, development, and deployment of novel compiler technologies by compiler experts or even advanced application developers. Within a source-to-source approach the input source code is read by the compiler, an internal representation (IR) is constructed, the IR is the basis of analysis that is used to guide transformations, the transformations occur on the IR, the IR is used to regenerate new source code, which is then compiled by a backend compiler. Our source-to-source compiler, ROSE, is a project to support the requirements of DOE. Work on ROSE has focused on the development of a community based project to define source-to-source compilation for a broad range of languages especially targeted at DOE applications (addressing robustness and large scale codes as required for DOE applications). Novel research areas are most easily supported when they can leverage significant tool chains that interact and use source code while allowing the hardware vendor’s own compiler for low level optimizations. In fact, high level optimization are rarely feasible for existing low level compilers for common languages such as C, C++, and Fortran. ROSE addresses the economics of how compiler research can be moved closer to the audience with significant technical performance problems and for whom the hardware is likely to be changing significantly in the next decade. Within ROSE it is less the goal to solve all problems than to permit domain experts to better solve their own problems. This talk will focus on the design and motivation for ROSE as an open community source-to-source compiler infrastructure to support performance optimization, tools for analysis, verification and software assurance, and general cus
STABILIZER: Enabling Statistically Rigorous Performance Evaluation

Modern architectures have made program behavior brittle and unpredictable, making software performance highly dependent on its execution environment. Even apparently innocuous changes, such as changing the size of an unused environment variable, can—by altering memory layout and alignment—alter performance by 33% to 300%. This unpredictability makes it difficult for programmers to debug or understand application performance. It also greatly complicates the evaluation of performance optimizations, since slight changes in the execution environment can have a greater impact on performance than a typical optimization. We present STABILIZER, a compiler and runtime system that enables statistically rigorous performance evaluation. STABILIZER eliminates measurement bias by comprehensively and repeatedly randomizing the placement of functions, stack frames, and heap objects in memory. Random placement makes anomalous layouts unlikely and independent of the environment, and re-randomization ensures they are shortlived when they do occur. We demonstrate that applications compiled with STABILIZER deliver normally-distributed execution times, enabling the use of standard statistical tools for hypothesis testing. We demonstrate its use by testing the effectiveness of standard optimizations used in the LLVM compiler; we find that, across the SPEC CPU2000 and CPU2006 benchmark suites, the effect of the -O3 optimization level versus -O2 is indistinguishable from noise.
Cognitive ergonomics: it's all in the mind

In this paper a distinction is made between classical ergonomics as dealing with the quality of working and cognitive ergonomics as dealing with the quality of work including the joint system products. It is argued that classical ergonomics can be seen as embracing a dualism, where the effects of work on the body are considered separately from the effects of work on the mind. This continues the mechanistic tradition of Western psychology. The aim of cognitive ergonomics is to describe (1) how work affects the mind, as well as (2) how the mind affects work. Work is all in the mind in the sense that the quality of work depends on the person's understanding of the situation (goals, means, constraints) and in the sense that the design of a worksystem depends on the designer's understanding, in particular the conceptualization of the people in the system. In cognitive ergonomics, the reliability of performance—and in particular the reliability of cognition—become central issues. The differences between classic.
A digital microphone array for distant speech recognition

In this paper, the design, implementation and testing of a digital microphone array is presented. The array uses digital MEMS microphones which integrate the microphone, amplifier and analogue to digital converter on a single chip in place of the analogue microphones and external audio interfaces currently used. The device has the potential to be smaller, cheaper and more flexible than typical analogue arrays, however the effect on speech recognition performance of using digital microphones is as yet unknown. In order to evaluate the effect, an analogue array and the new digital array are used to simultaneously record test data for a speech recognition experiment. Initial results employing no adaptation show that performance using the digital array is significantly worse (14% absolute WER) than the analogue device. Subsequent experiments using MLLR and CMLLR channel adaptation reduce this gap, and employing MLLR for both channel and speaker adaptation reduces the difference between the arrays to 4.5% absolute WER.
Hardness Estimation of LWE via Band Pruning

This paper, examining the hardness of the search LWE problem, is a refined continuation of previous works including (Lindner-Peikert 2011, Liu-Nguyen 2013, Aono et al. 2013) using lattice reduction and lattice vector enumeration. We adopt the attack to the LWE using discrete Gaussian distribution, and propose a new bounding method named band pruning in lattice enumeration. We update the security estimations for several parameter sets proposed in the literature. Finally, using the data gained in our experiments, we derive an explicit formula linking the LWE’s parameters with the bit security.
Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis

We present a short survey of multigrid–based solvers for symmetric eigenvalue problems. We concentrate our attention on “off the shelf” and “black box” methods, which should allow solving eigenvalue problems with minimal, or no, effort on the part of the developer, taking advantage of already existing algorithms and software. We consider a class of such methods, where the multigrid only appears as a blackbox tool for constructing the preconditioner of the stiffness matrix, and the base iterative algorithm is one of well-known off-the-shelf preconditioned gradient methods such as the locally optimal block preconditioned conjugate gradient method. We review some known theoretical results for preconditioned gradient methods that
Getting Them There, Keeping Them There: Benefits of an Extended School Day Program for High School Students

Over a decade of research has demonstrated the positive effects of extended school day programs on various elementary and middle school student outcomes, both in the short and long term. The efficacy of extended school day programs in promoting academic outcomes among high school students is less well understood. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining school attendance, credit attainment, and standardized reading and math scores in a group of students at risk of academic failure who participated in extended school day programming. The study compared their outcomes to those of a group of demographically similar students who did not participate in the program. The extended school day program is provided within a full-service Schools Uniting Neighborhoods (SUN) Community School (CS) in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area. Results suggest an advantage for SUN students in terms of better school attendance and earning credits toward graduation, but not in terms of standardized test scores. Implications for future research and extended school day policy are discussed.
Effect of Dopamine, Dimethoxyphenylethylamine, Papaverine, and Related Compounds on Mitochondrial Respiration and Complex I Activity

Abstract: We report the effect of papaverine, tetrahydropapaverine, laudanosine, dimethoxyphenylethylamine, dopamine, and its metabolites on mitochondrial respiration and activities of the enzymes in the electron transfer complexes, as mitochondrial toxins may be implicated in the etiology and the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease. Papaverine was the most potent inhibitor of complex I and NADH‐linked mitochondrial respiration among the compounds tested next to rotenone. Tetrahydropapaverine, dimethoxyphenylethylamine, and laudanosine also inhibited NADH‐linked mitochondrial respiration and complex I activity in this order. Dopamine and its metabolites showed either no inhibition or only very weak inhibition. Compounds with dimethoxy residues in the phenyl ring were associated with more potent inhibition of complex I than those without. Our results warrant further studies on these and some related compounds as candidate neurotoxins causing Parkinson's disease.
Decisions regarding intracranial complications from acute mastoiditis in children

Purpose of reviewTo review the clinical findings and treatment algorithms for intracranial complications of acute mastoiditis, such as sigmoid sinus thrombosis, otitic hydrocephalus, intracranial abscess, and otitic meningitis. We also briefly discuss the clinical sequelae of these complications. Recent findingsRecent changes in the microbiology and treatment paradigms of otitis media have the potential to influence the rates of intracranial complications of mastoiditis; however, evidence supporting a resultant increase in the rates of these complications is lacking. SummaryAntibiotic therapy and myringotomy with ventilation tube placement, with or without mastoidectomy, are the mainstays of treatment for intracranial complications of acute mastoiditis. Adjunct treatment, such as anticoagulation for sigmoid sinus thrombosis, is often used; however, the rarity of these complications makes establishing appropriate levels of evidence to support their use difficult.
Modeling the Information Quality of Object Tracking Systems

Advances in information and communication technologies, such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), mobile and wireless mesh networks, bring us closer to the vision of “Internet of Things”, a global network of people, products or objects that can be easily readable, recognizable, locatable, and manageable over the world wide web. Such a network can provide ubiquitous and real-time information on movements of objects; and object tracking systems monitor the moving objects and register their on-going location in the context of higher-level applications, such as supply chain management, food traceability and retail, where monitoring of objects is required. This paper investigates information quality of object tracking systems and proposes an analytical model that measures the degree of information completeness of object tracking systems based on the scope and depth of their data capturing capabilities. We demonstrate that the information completeness of object tracking systems is influenced by the configuration of object tracking systems. The model may be used for both ex-ante and ex-post evaluations of object tracking systems, under the auspices of their information quality requirements, considering that their use is expected to blossom in the “Internet-ofThings” era.
Needs for developing culturally oriented supportive learning with the aid of Information and Communication Technologies

This article demonstrates the inadequacy of access and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and networked learning for many people in non‐Western societies and for those who belong to ethno‐cultural minority groups. Especially, immigrants have great needs in the domain of learning the language of the host country as a foreign or second language. In addition, another important issue is the development of multi‐language websites (such as educational programmes, curricula, and software) in order to bring out culture as an important dimension which should be incorporated in modern ICT implementations. This paper synthesises evidence from the literature about culture and technologies in order to gain new insights in the fields of Intercultural Education and ICTs and gives insights for the development of ICT learning materials that are accessible to multicultural users and respect their different cultural needs, in particular to those users from non‐Western societies.