Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design of Data Model for Urban Transport GIS

Constructing the data model for public transportation by integrating the spatial and the non-spatial information, is the basis of reasonable plan and effective management of urban public transport. This paper presents a transit data model based on geographic information systems (GIS) technology, which utilizes arc-node networks, and manages the foundational bus data with point, link, polygon and record features. In this model, a transport network is generated and maintained in a dynamic manner, and hence supports planning, construction, management, operation and optimization functions for transit facilities and routes, as well as day-to-day transactions. Public transportation GIS established on this model foundation will remarkably upgrade the construction level and the urban service ability.
Improving Search on the Semantic Desktop using Associative Retrieval Techniques

While it is agreed that semantic enrichment of resources would lead to better search results, at present the low coverage of resources on the web with semantic information presents a major hurdle in realizing the vision of search on the Semantic Web. To address this problem we investigate how to improve retrieval performance in a setting where resources are sparsely annotated with semantic information. We suggest employing techniques from associative information retrieval to find relevant material, which was not originally annotated with the concepts used in a query. We present an associative retrieval system for the Semantic Desktop and show how the use of associative retrieval increased retrieval performance.
Parameterized diff

This paper extends the notion of minimum edit distance in strings to parameterized edit distance, based on operations of insertion, deletion, and parameterized match (2, 11. The parameterized match operation models global substitution, commonly available in editors. Algorithms are described for calculating minimum parameterized edit distance and reporting minimal edit scripts. Several applications are discussed, and the techniques are also extended to approximate parameterized pattern matching.
Skew-Insensitive Join Processing in Shared-Disk Database Systems

Skew effects are still a significant problem for efficient query processing in parallel database systems. Especially in shared-nothing environments, this problem is aggravated by the substantial cost of data redistribution. Shared-disk systems, on the other hand, promise much higher flexibility in the distribution of workload among processing nodes because all input data can be accessed by any node at equal cost. In order to verify this potential for dynamic load balancing, we have devised a new technique for skew-tolerant join processing. In contrast to conventional solutions, our algorithm is not restricted to estimating processing costs in advance and assigning tasks to nodes accordingly. Instead, it monitors the actual progression of work and dynamically allocates tasks to processors, thus capitalizing on the uniform access pathlength in shared-disk architectures. This approach has the potential to alleviate not only any kind of data-inherent skew, but also execution skew caused by query-external workloads, by disk contention, or simply by inaccurate estimates used in predictive scheduling. We employ a detailed simulation system to evaluate the new algorithm under different types and degrees of skew.
Judge Experience in Torts Litigation : An Empirical Study

The effect of attorney and judge experience in litigation has not been fully explored, as detailed measures of jurist experience are not available. Using a unique data set from Taiwan, we measure attorney (judge) experience by the total number of civil cases they have represented (rendered) from 2000 to 2014. Combining these data with another unique data set we compiled from pain and suffering damages lawsuits regarding personal injury in a structural equation model, we find that both district court judges and plaintiff attorneys follow the recent changes in damages assessment practice in high courts. Court awards were subject to the anchoring effect cast by plaintiffs’ claims. In addition, the more experienced the plaintiff attorneys were, the more the plaintiffs’ claims deviated from the historical trend of court-adjudicated pain and suffering damages. Thus, through the indirect effect of higher claims, experienced plaintiff attorneys earned their clients higher amounts of pain and suffering damages. Whether defendants hire attorneys and whether defendant attorneys and judges † A draft of this paper has been presented at the Theodore Eisenberg Empirical Legal Studies Conference held at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law on June 2–3, 2015; Hamburg Lectures on Law and Economics on May 27, 2015; BACT seminar at Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics on June 5, 2015; Staff Seminar at Singapore Management University Faculty of Law on July 29, 2015; the 2015 East Asian Law and Society Annual Meeting held at Waseda University, Tokyo on August 3–6, 2015. We thank Janet Ainsworth, Shilpi Bhattacharya, Gary Chan, Dawn Chutkow, Thomas Eger, Michael Faure, Talia Fisher, Chris Reinders Folmer, Hualing Fu, Jerg Gutmann, Michael Heise, Han-wei Ho, Pey Woan Lee, KK Lim, Jing Liu, Kee Yang Low, Peter Mascini, Konstantinos Pilpilides, Issi Rosen-Zvi, Agnes Strauß, Hang Wu Tang, Stefan Voigt, Franziska Weber, Yixin Xu, Eyal Zamir for helpful comments. With due respects, we thank the several judges and attorneys who attend the two round table discussions on judge and attorney experience for kindly sharing their insights with us. We also thank Alice Kuo, Jian-Hua Lai, Chieh-Yu Liu, Hilary Tsai, Yu-June Tseng, and Tien-hsin Wang for research assistance. Da-wei David Juang (the former CEO of pingluweb.com) provided us with the judge and attorney experience data, which are invaluable for this research. * Associate Research Professor & Director of Center for Empirical Legal Studies, Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. kleiber@sinica.edu.tw. ** Distinguished Research Fellow and Director, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica; Executive Director, Center of Institution and Behavior Studies, Academia Sinica; Professor, Department of Economics, National Taiwan University. kongpin@gate.sinica.edu.tw *** Associate Professor, Department of Economics, National Cheng Kung University. ever@mail.ncku. edu.tw
Circular polarized microstrip patch array antenna for wireless LAN applications

Circular polarization plays a vital role in the wireless communication systems due to their flexibility in orientation at transmission and reception of signals. For proper reception of signal, the antenna performance has to be improved with high main beam gain and increased directivity. The gain and directivity of circularly polarized single patch antenna is increased by array antenna. The patch antenna produces circular polarization with dual and orthogonal feed lines and the same is achieved with a single diagonal feed to the patch. This work attempts to build a 2.4 GHz circular polarized four element broad side array antenna with diagonally fed patch antennas without polarizer. The designed structure is simulated to study the performance with various orientations of the patches for the diagonally fed array. The array is combined with matched strip lines and an impedance transformer at the output to obtain a return loss of 17 dB, gain of 8 dB and directivity of 10 dB at 2.4 GHz.
Semantic Dementia Versus Nonfluent Progressive Aphasia: Neuropsychological Characterization and Differentiation

BackgroundEarly progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) may be difficult to differentiate from semantic dementia (SD) in a nonspecialist setting. There are descriptions of the clinical and neuropsychological profiles of patients with PNFA and SD but few systematic comparisons. MethodWe compared the performance of groups with SD (n=27) and PNFA (n=16) with comparable ages, education, disease duration, and severity of dementia as measured by the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale on a comprehensive neuropsychological battery. Principal components analysis and intergroup comparisons were used. ResultsA 5-factor solution accounted for 78.4% of the total variance with good separation of neuropsychological variables. As expected, both groups were anomic with preserved visuospatial function and mental speed. Patients with SD had lower scores on comprehension-based semantic tests and better performance on verbal working memory and phonological processing tasks. The opposite pattern was found in the PNFA group. ConclusionsNeuropsychological tests that examine verbal and nonverbal semantic associations, verbal working memory, and phonological processing are the most helpful for distinguishing between PNFA and SD.
Range sensor evaluation for use in Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance Systems

The Intelligent Transportation Institute at the University of Minnesota is developing a Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance System - Stop Sign Assist (CICAS-SSA) for rural intersections as an alternative to signalized intersections. When deployed, the system will provide a driver stopped at a thru-stop intersection information about the available gaps in the mainline road traffic stream. The system uses surveillance sensors alongside the major road to determine the state1 of the intersection; this state information is used to determine whether the gaps that exist are unsafe, thereby triggering a warning to a driver not to initiate the desired maneuver. The system is capable of sending intersection state information to the vehicle (I2V) so that gap information can be displayed in the vehicle. Low cost automotive radar/laser sensors form the basis of the surveillance system. Described herein is a performance evaluation of a Delphi ESR radar sensor (ESR), an Ibeo Lux laser sensor (LUX), and a Smartmicro Umrr9 radar sensor (UMRR9). Each sensor was mounted adjacent to the shoulder on US 52 while a probe vehicle equipped with dual frequency, carrier phase DGPS was driven past. The accuracy of the position and speed measurements for each sensor were determined by comparison with the DGPS position and speed measured at the probe vehicle. An analysis was conducted to determine which sensor provided the best performance:cost ratio when used as a CICAS-SSA mainline sensor.
Differential Evolution with Mixed Distribution Mutation Operation

To solve the premature convergence problem of the conventional differential evolution, an improved differential evolution algorithm is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm introduces mixed distribution mutation operation which combines gaussian distribution mutation and cauchy distribution mutation by a proportion for maintaining the balance of the exploration and exploitation. Experimental results show that the novel algorithm achieves better performance.
Estimation of linkage disequilibrium and interspecific gene flow in Ficedula flycatchers by a newly developed 50k single-nucleotide polymorphism array

With the access to draft genome sequence assemblies and whole‐genome resequencing data from population samples, molecular ecology studies will be able to take truly genome‐wide approaches. This now applies to an avian model system in ecological and evolutionary research: Old World flycatchers of the genus Ficedula, for which we recently obtained a 1.1 Gb collared flycatcher genome assembly and identified 13 million single‐nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)s in population resequencing of this species and its sister species, pied flycatcher. Here, we developed a custom 50K Illumina iSelect flycatcher SNP array with markers covering 30 autosomes and the Z chromosome. Using a number of selection criteria for inclusion in the array, both genotyping success rate and polymorphism information content (mean marker heterozygosity = 0.41) were high. We used the array to assess linkage disequilibrium (LD) and hybridization in flycatchers. Linkage disequilibrium declined quickly to the background level at an average distance of 17 kb, but the extent of LD varied markedly within the genome and was more than 10‐fold higher in ‘genomic islands’ of differentiation than in the rest of the genome. Genetic ancestry analysis identified 33 F1 hybrids but no later‐generation hybrids from sympatric populations of collared flycatchers and pied flycatchers, contradicting earlier reports of backcrosses identified from much fewer number of markers. With an estimated divergence time as recently as <1 Ma, this suggests strong selection against F1 hybrids and unusually rapid evolution of reproductive incompatibility in an avian system.
Entity-Centric Preservation for Linked Open Data: Use Cases, Requirements and Models

Linked Open Data (LOD) plays an increasingly important role in the area of digital libraries and archives. It enables better semantic-based access methods and also gives the human reader more insights into linked entities. Since semantics is evolving over time, the temporal dimension has an increasing impact on the applicability of LOD to long-term archives. LOD does not necessarily provide a history. Therefore it is not possible to go back in time and access the document related LOD content at the time of the document creation. In this paper we propose to collect LOD information along with the Web content for Web archives to also ensure a good semantic coverage of a Web crawl. We discuss use cases and requirements and derive the general approach and related data models for the implementation.
Using targets appearance to improve pedestrian classification with a laser scanner

Detecting and tracking pedestrians accurately is essential to design efficient and robust collision avoidance systems. But traditional approaches to pedestrian detection and tracking in dense urban environments suffer from tracking failures and wrong classifications. We propose in this paper a system that recursively estimates the true outlines of every tracked target using a set of segments called ldquoAppearancerdquo. Both the state and the true contours of each target are recursively estimated and can then be used for accurate classification. We show also that accurate information on target outlines allow for a meticulous occlusions computation and an enhanced data association. The performances of this new approach is assessed through a qualitative and quantitative comparison with a state of the art pedestrian detection algorithm.
Compare Me Maybe : Crowd Entity Resolution Interfaces

We study the problem of enhancing entity resolution (ER) with the help of crowdsourcing. ER is the problem of identifying records that refer to the same real-world entity and can be an extremely difficult process for computer algorithms alone. For example, figuring out which images refer to the same person can be a hard task for computers, but an easy one for humans. An important component of crowdsourcing is the interface that is used for human and algorithm interaction. In this paper, we explore how the interface design along with other factors impact the human quality of comparing records. We also propose a model for separating good human workers from bad workers. Our analysis is based on extensive experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk using real and synthetic image datasets.
An Experimental Study on the Performance of Haptic Data Transmission in Networked Haptic Collaboration

In this paper, we present preliminary results of our ongoing networked virtual reality project by discussing the implementation and performance of an experimental haptic collaboration system; a networked haptic basketball game. In this game, online players feel like handling a real basketball since they are able to feel the sense of touch by using haptic interfaces. One of challenging issues in this implementation is haptic data transmission over the Internet to allow online multi-user play. Since haptic information is extremely sensitive to delay, jitter, and loss, the provision of timely transmission is critical. We carry out some experiments to compare the performance of the haptic data transmission under various delays, jitters, and losses of packets for two models; one is the position transfer model and the other is the force transfer model. We observe that loss of packets may reduce the force feedback in the Position Transfer Model and jitters are more sensitive than delays for both models.
Estimation on graphs from relative measurements

Large-scale sensor networks give rise to estimation problems that have a rich graphical structure. We studied one of these problems in terms of how such an estimate can be efficiently computed in a distributed manner as well as how the quality of an optimal estimate scales with the size of the network. Two distributed algorithms are presented to compute the optimal estimates that are scalable and robust to communication failures. In designing these algorithms, we found the literature on parallel computation to be a rich source of inspiration.
Staphylococcus aureus infections in children in an Iranian referral pediatric Hospital

Summary Introduction. Staphylococcus aureus is associated with various infections ranging from skin and soft tissues such as surgical site infections and abscesses to lower respiratory tracts and bloodstream. The aim of this study was to evaluate underlying condition of patients with S. aureus infections in an Iranian referral pediatric Hospital. Material and methods. Information was extracted retrospectively from the medical records of patients who were diagnosed with S. aureus infections. Data obtained about the study subjects included basic demographics, reason for admission, culture site, length of hospital stay, and methicillin susceptibility. Results. The underlyning condition of of patients with S.aureus infection during November 2011 and March 2013 were included in the study. The most frequent diagnosis in patients with S. aureus infection was jaundice (12%), abscess (10%), cellulitis (10%), wound infection (8%), septic arthritis (7%) and sezeire (5%). Wound was the most common infection sites among all subjects 34/98 (35%) following by blood (20/98, 20%) as well as skin and soft tissue (19/98, 19%). The proportion of MRSA infections among all S. aureus isolates was 79% (77/98) during the study period. In addition, 58/74 (78%) met the definition of Hospital-Associated Methicillin-Resistant S. aureus (HAMRSA) infections and the rest; 20/24 patients (83%), were classified as Community-Associated Methicillin-Resistant S. aureus (CA- MRSA). Conclusion. In our study, the high frequency of MRSA was found not only in HA S. aureus but also in CA S. aureus isolates; therefore, the strategic goals to optimize antimicrobial use including
Peer firms and board appointments in family firms

ABSTRACT This paper examines how neighbouring companies affect family firms’ decision to appoint non-family directors. Results indicate that being geographically close to firms with non-family directors increases a focal firm’s likelihood of having non-family members in its own board. This finding holds using a regulatory change that generates exogenous variations in the boards of local peer firms. Moreover, this finding is stronger when the firm is smaller, when the age similarity between local firm leaders is higher, and when the firm is located in areas that are densely populated or that feature strong attachment to the local community.
Wideband channel measurement and characterisation for wireless local loops

The multipath characteristics of the wireless local loop (WLL) channel were studied over both short and long time periods in urban and sub-urban high-rise and small-house environments. Wideband measurements were performed at a centre frequency of 1.3 GHz with a sliding correlation measurement system using a chip rate of 15 MHz. The receiver was situated at regular cellular base stations, and the transmitter with an omnidirectional antenna was moved to several rooms in different buildings around the base station sites. During the recordings the movement of people in the measurement rooms was restricted. The short-term results show a high degree of similarity in the multipath characteristics of the WLL channel in urban and sub-urban high-rise environments. The maximum measured values of delay spreads for the urban and suburban high-rise environments were 410 ns and 360 ns, respectively. For the sub-urban small-house environment the data indicate lower values of delay spread. The channel was shown to be very slowly fading, being in most situations essentially static over short time periods of the order of several tens of seconds. The variation of the channel characteristics over long time periods was shown to be significant.
A trust enhanced Recommender System for medicare applications

Recommender Systems are software tools that suggest the users, the required items based on the previous user-item interactions. Becoming extremely powerful, Recommender Systems can be accommodated into areas of vital importance. The proposed work aims to provide healthcare recommendations that include Blood Donor recommendations and Hospital Specialization. The system employs a model based collaborative filtering to predict the future requirements of items, following a specific scenario. The problems in the traditional recommender systems such as cold start and scalability are addressed. The system accommodates a trust factor in the classical recommender system and reaps the efficiencies of the k-means++ algorithm, which provides the threshold rating for the cold start users. The number of clusters required is computed using the slope statistic method. The results of the work show that the proposed system provides cost effective recommendations.
Tracking Motion and Proxemics using Thermal-sensor Array

Indoor tracking has all-pervasive applications beyond mere surveillance, for example in education, health monitoring, marketing, energy management and so on. Image and video based tracking systems are intrusive. Thermal array sensors on the other hand can provide coarse-grained tracking while preserving privacy of the subjects. The goal of the project is to facilitate motion detection and group proxemics modeling using an 8 x 8 infrared sensor array. Each of the 8 x 8 pixels is a temperature reading in Fahrenheit. We refer to each 8 x 8 matrix as a scene. We collected approximately 902 scenes with different configurations of human groups and different walking directions. We infer direction of motion of a subject across a set of scenes as left-to-right, right-to-left, up-to-down and down-to-up using cross-correlation analysis. We used features from connected component analysis of each background subtracted scene and performed Support Vector Machine classification to estimate number of instances of human subjects in the scene.
Optimizing information retrieval in question answering using syntactic annotation

One of the bottle-necks in open-domain question answering (QA) systems is the performance of the information retrieval (IR) component. In QA, IR is used to reduce the search space for answer extraction modules and therefore its performance is crucial for the success of the overall system. However, natural language questions are different to sets of keywords used in traditional IR. In this study we explore the possibilities of integrating linguistic information taken from machine annotated Dutch newspaper text into information retrieval. Various types of morphological and syntactic features are stored in a multi-layer index to improve IR queries derived from natural language input. The paper describes a genetic algorithm for optimizing queries send to such an enriched IR index. The experiments are based on the CLEF test sets for Dutch QA from the last two years. We could show an absolute improvement of about 8% in mean reciprocal rank scores compared to the base line using traditional IR with plain text keywords.