Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reduced-effort generation of indoor radio maps using crowdsourcing and manifold alignment

Constructing radio maps for indoor environments using either measurements or signal propagation models suffers from extensive work loads and/or significant radio map inaccuracies. In this paper, we propose a Wi-Fi radio map generation and update solution in indoor environments using a propagation modeling simulator, a limited number of labeled calibration fingerprints and many crowdsourced unlabeled measurements, using manifold alignment. This semi-supervised, dimensionality reduction transfer learning method estimates the location of unlabeled crowdsourced radio signal observations by aligning them with the calibration fingerprints and the simulated radio map in a low-dimensional space. It thus reduces the calibration cost and can be easily deployed in any indoor environment given its floor plan and few calibration fingerprints. In addition to simple deployment, our solution can easily re-construct new radio maps in cases of changes in time, device or floor plans, which significantly reduces the large re-calibration load. Testing results show that the proposed solution can achieve as low as 6.4 to 6 dBm root mean square error in radio signal estimation with 15% to 30% of the full fingerprinting load.
A 2.5 V 256-level non-volatile analog storage device using EEPROM technology

This integrated circuit stores 256 analog voltage levels in high density, non-volatile memory with /spl sim/7.5m V resolution per level. By contrast, the multilevel storage capacity of a typical digital non-volatile memory is 4-level per cell. The integrated circuit operates over a voltage range of 2.5 V to 5.5 V. Previous analog storage implementation use a 5.0 V supply for /spl sim/12 mV equivalent resolution per level in a 128 k EEPROM.
Maturational Atrioventricular Nodal Physiology in the Mouse

Mouse AV Nodal Maturation. Introduction: Dual AV nodal physiology is characterized by discontinuous conduction from the atrium to His bundle during programmed atrial extrastimulus testing (A2V2 conduction curves), AV nodal echo beats, and induction of AV nodal reentry tachycardia (AVNRT). The purpose of this study was to characterize in vivo murine maturational AV nodal conduction properties and determine the frequency of dual AV nodal physiology and inducible AVNRT.
A double-blind, rct testing beneficial modulation of BDNF in middle-aged, life style-stressed subjects: a clue to brain protection?

INTRODUCTION The aim of this prospective study was to see whether LD-1227, a quality-controlled marine nutraceuticals shown to protect experimental stress-induced hyppocampal degeneration, could beneficially modulate BDNF, as measured in the serum, in otherwise healthy but work-stressed individuals. MATERIALS AND METHODS Forty-eight men and women between the ages of 38 and 62 reporting high-demanding work activity but with an overall positive attitude towards their personal life were recruited. Subjects were divided in two group (24 patients each) and blindly supplemented for 2 month with: a) LD-1227 400mg or b) placebo. A third group of healthy non-stressed subjects was used as well. Blood samples were taken before and after the supplementation period. Unstimulated saliva was collected and tested for amylase while serum levels were used to measure BDNF. State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and psychological well-being assessment (PSWB) were measured too. Patients with Val66Met functional polymorphism of BDNF excluded those given their reported association with an impaired release of BDNF. RESULTS RESULTS showed that, as compared to healthy, non-stressed individuals, stressed ones has a trend decrease of BDNF and this was significantly increased by LD 12-1227 supplementation and the same inverse phenomenon occurred to salivary amylase (p<0.05). No change was noted in the PSQI score but, either STAI or PSWB tests scored better in LD-1227 supplemented subjects. CONCLUSION The present data suggest that LD-1227 is beneficially affecting neuromodulation and related symptoms during common stressful life conditions and may have the potential as tools in a neuroprotective clinical strategy.
Microtubule Motor Protein Kar3 Is Required for Normal Mitotic Division and Morphogenesis in Candida albicans

ABSTRACT The kinesin-related protein Kar3 is a minus end-directed molecular motor that plays a multifunctional role in microtubule-directed nuclear movement. Previously, it was shown that Candida albicans Kar3p is critical for nuclear fusion during mating as kar3 mutants were defective in karyogamy. In this study, we confirm that Kar3p is required for nuclear congression in mating but that neither Kar3p nor the dynein motor protein Dyn1p is required for nuclear migration in the mating projection prior to cell fusion. In addition, we show that C. albicans Kar3p plays an important role in the cell and colony morphology of mitotically dividing cells, as evidenced by diminished filamentation of kar3 cells on Spider medium and an increased tendency of mutant cells to form pseudohyphal cells in liquid culture. Loss of Kar3p also led to defects in nuclear division, causing cells to grow slowly and exhibit reduced viability compared to wild-type cells. Slow growth was due, at least in part, to delayed cell cycle progression, as cells lacking Kar3p accumulated in anaphase of the cell cycle. Consistent with a role in mitotic division, Kar3 protein was shown to localize to the spindle pole bodies. Finally, kar3 cells exhibited unstable or aberrant mitotic spindles, a finding that accounts for the delay in cell cycle progression and decreased viability of these cells. We suggest that the altered morphology of kar3 cells is a direct consequence of the delay in anaphase, and this leads to increased polarized growth and pseudohypha formation.
Towards Improving Low-Resource Speech Recognition Using Articulatory and Language Features

In an increasingly globalized world, there is a rising demand for speech recognition systems. Systems for languages like English, German or French do achieve a decent performance, but there exists a long tail of languages for which such systems do not yet exist. State-of-the-art speech recognition systems feature Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Being a data driven method and therefore highly dependent on sufficient training data, the lack of resources directly affects the recognition performance. There exist multiple techniques to deal with such resource constraint conditions, one approach is the use of additional data from other languages. In the past, is was demonstrated that multilingually trained systems benefit from adding language feature vectors (LFVs) to the input features, similar to i-Vectors. In this work, we extend this approach by the addition of articulatory features (AFs). We show that AFs also benefit from LFVs and that multilingual system setups benefit from adding both AFs and LFVs. Pretending English to be a low-resource language, we restricted ourselves to use only 10h of English acoustic training data. For system training, we use additional data from French, German and Turkish. By using a combination of AFs and LFVs, we were able to decrease the WER from 18.1% to 17.3% after system combination in our setup using a multilingual phone set.
Secure and efficient fine-grained data access control scheme in cloud computing

Cloud computing, which provides quite inexpensive and dynamically scalable computing services via network and communication infrastructures, is increasingly important for future information and communication technologies. At the same time, it brings many new chal- lenges for data security and access control when sensitive data are shared and stored on cloud servers. To protect the data privacy, cryptographic methods are usually used. Attribute-based encryption is a good way to implement access control. However, in practical application, efficiency of attribute-based encryption schemes is rather low due to a large number of algebraic operations. Thus, it is very important to improve efficiency of user addition/revocation and file re-encryption. In this paper we introduce an improved data access control scheme based on attribute-based encryption. Our scheme significantly improves the efficiency of adding and revoking user access to the cloud.
Atomistic locking and friction.

When solid bodies contact and slide against each other, the frictional phenomenon occurs. The origin of the related frictional force is studied by assuming the existence of two clean crystal surfaces, which follows the current experimental trends. This study theoretically clarifies the atomistic origin of the frictional force intrinsically generated by the molecular interactions between the constituent atoms of solids, but not the force extrinsically generated by surface asperities, the existence of foreign atoms, etc. Furthermore, this study assumes that the constituent atoms of the two contacting surfaces interact with each other due to the interaction potential. This study found that there are two origins: atomistic locking and dynamic locking. Atomistic locking occurs when the configuration of the atoms on a contact surface continuously changes with the sliding distance and when the interatomic potentials have an arbitrary strength. In contrast, dynamic locking occurs when the configuration discontinuously changes due to the dynamic process and if the interatomic potential is stronger than a specific given value. A criterion is derived for the occurrence of dynamic locking. From studying various systems, it can be seen that dynamic locking is unlikely to occur in realistic systems. The frictional forces due to atomistic locking are calculated for \ensuremath{\alpha}-iron. One other important finding prior to the experiments is that certain unique cases exist where the frictional force exactly vanishes if completely clean solid surfaces are prepared.
A Noisy-Or Discriminative Restricted Boltzmann Machine for Recognizing Handwriting Style Development

Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) and their variants have attracted a lot of attention recently. They have been applied widely, e.g., In handwriting recognition, document categorization and object recognition. Unfortunately, an RBM requires a large parameter space since it is a fully-connected bipartite graph, especially with high dimensional input spaces. Moreover, it is still unclear how it selects discriminative features for classification problems. This necessitates the selection of effective and discriminative features for recognition. In this paper, we propose a Noisy-Or discriminative restricted Boltzmann machine (Abbr. As NDRBM or Noisy-Or RBM), which combines RBM and Noisy-Or gate function. On the one hand, it can greatly reduce the parameter space. Furthermore, this model extends the RBM into a multiple instance learning scenario-to help select discriminative features or regions. An approximate approach is proposed to make the NDRBM practical. We apply our method on handwriting style development recognition and recognition rates are observed to be better than competitive baselines on two data sets (cursive and handprint data from Grades 2-4).
USER ADOPTION OF MANDATORY E-GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS: NOTARIAL SYSTEM IN ALBANIA, AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSE

E-Government has high priority for governments worldwide, with much effort and money being invested into government digital initiatives. For such efforts to be worthy, a high rate of adoption of e-government is needed. Technology adoption is one of the most mature areas in information technology (IT) research and many adoption models have been developed for this purpose. Most studies in this field have been focused on voluntary use of systems and mainly from a business context, with minor emphasize on an e-government. A major distinction between technologies of e-government and other online technologies, is that the use of certain e-government technologies is mandatory, rather than voluntary. This paper provides a short introduction of e-government, followed by a review of the most well-known information technology (IT) adoption models at the individual level. Using previous research results, the study will identify the determinant constructs and their relationship for adoption of the digital notarial system of Albania. Finally, the paper proposes a theoretical framework for private professional adoption of mandatory e-government information systems.
THE IMPACT OF MANAGERIAL OVERCONFIDENCE AND ABILITY ON AUDITOR GOING-CONCERN DECISIONS AND AUDITOR TERMINATION

I examine the influence of managerial overconfidence and ability on 1) auditors’ decision to issue a going concern opinion and 2) auditor dismissal rates after issuing a going concern opinion. When there is substantial doubt about the entity's ability to continue as a going concern for a reasonable period of time, auditing standards prescribe that auditors obtain and evaluate information about client management’s remedy plans. I find that clients with overconfident managers are more likely to receive a going concern opinion. I also show that managerial ability mitigates the positive association between managerial overconfidence and the likelihood of a going concern opinion. Additionally, I examine how these managerial attributes influence auditor retention decisions, and find that auditors are more likely to be dismissed after issuance of a going concern opinion when the client company has overconfident management. Finally, I find that the association between managerial overconfidence and auditor dismissal is stronger when management is more powerful than the company’s audit committee.
Overconfident CEO Appointments: Determinants and Consequences on Competitors

This chapter analyzes the determinants of overconfident CEO appointments and the effect these appointments on competitor stock performance during managerial turnover within the firm. It also analyzes the turnovers that take place in S&P 500 firms and find that an overconfident successor appointed to the firm pertains to a significant positive impact on competitor’s stock price. The author also finds that when the outgoing CEO is overconfident it is more likely for the firm to have an overconfident successor.
Second Opinions and Price Competition: Inefficiency in the Market for Expert Advice

We analyze a market where the consumer must rely on expers to identify the correct type of service. Medical services, repair services and various types of consulting and advisory services belong to this broad category. Our focus is on situations where the diagnosis of the consumer's needs is costly and the expert's effort is unobservable. We develop a model where experts offer competing contracts and consumers may gather multiple opinions. In various contractual settings, we explore the incentives that a competitive sampling of prices and opinions provides for experts to exert effort. We find that there is a tension between price competition and quality of the advise provided in equilibrium. Under all the contracting scenarios considered, the equilibrium fails to realize the second best welfare optimum. In some of the cases, no gains from trade are realized. On the other hand, limiting price competition via price control increases total welfare. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
The Optical Mass-Luminosity Relation at the End of the Main Sequence (0.08-0.20 M☉)

The empirical mass-luminosity relation at M is presented for stars with masses 0.08-0.20 M☉ based upon new observations made with Fine Guidance Sensor 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope. The targets are nearby, red dwarf multiple systems in which the magnitude differences are typically measured to ±0.1 mag or better. The M values are generated using the best available parallaxes and are also accurate to ±0.1 mag, because the errors in the magnitude differences are the dominant error source. In several cases this is the first time the observed sub-arcsecond multiples have been resolved at optical wavelengths. The mass-luminosity relation defined by these data reaches to M=18.5 and provides a powerful empirical test for discriminating the lowest mass stars from high-mass brown dwarfs at wavelengths shorter than 1 μm.
Pike, Matthew and Ramchurn, Richard and Wilson, Max L. (2015) Two-way Affect Loops in multimedia

A users interaction with a film typically involves a One Way Affect (1WA), in which the film being consumed has an affect on the consumer. Recent advances in physiological monitoring technology however has facilitated the notion of a Two Way Affect Loop (2WAL), in which a film piece can be dynamically affected by a consumers physiology or behaviour. This paper outlines an agenda for further investigating 2WAL, setting research questions and the influence of related research areas.
The Impact of Water Access on Short-Term Migration in Rural India

Migration is an important risk-reduction strategy for households in developing countries. In this paper, we examine the impact of irrigation and its interaction with rainfall on short-term migration decisions in India. Our results show that migration responds to costs, and that deep fossil-water wells, which provide a constant source of water, eliminate any benefit of short-term migration. Our results also demonstrate that electricity availability lowers the likelihood of short-term migration even in areas where groundwater is significantly reduced. This suggests that regions with access to electricity can adapt and shift to new technologies that facilitate additional groundwater extraction.
Sensitivity analysis using the power oscillation flow method

The power oscillation flow method is a small signal sensitivity method which is able to determine an index that assesses the degree of participation of the power flowing at each transmission element, or being consumed at each load of the power system, in the formation of each swing mode. In this way, the power oscillation flow method is an extension of the participation factors traditionally used in Modal Analysis theory, which allow us to determine the way in which the swing modes are affected by the state variables of the synchronous machine and their associated control systems. In this paper we describe the basics of the power oscillation flow method and its application to a detailed power system model. The effect of different static load characteristics in the results of the method is assessed. In addition, we explore the sensitivity information provided by the method and its possible application to control power system poorly damped or unstable oscillation problems.
Fish Oil and Glycemic Control in Diabetes: A meta-analysis

OBJECTIVE Hypertriglyceridemia is associated with cardiovascular disease in diabetes. Fibrates effectively lower, but do not always normalize, serum triglyceride levels. Fish oil supplements may then be added to lower serum triglyceride levels. Doubt remains whether the net effect of fish oil intake on glycemic control is beneficial in diabetes. We therefore performed a meta-analysis from published clinical trials. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Data sources were Medline (Cologne, Germany), Excerpta Medica, Current Contents, review articles, and published reference lists. Publications of 26 trials were selected, and all trials included more than five diabetes (IDDM and NIDDM) patients and addressed the effects offish oil (eicosapentaenoic acid [EPA] and docosahexaenoic acid [DHA]) on serum lipids and glucose tolerance. We (C.E.F, M.J.F.M.J.) extracted data independently based on predetermined criteria. Studies were classified according to design. RESULTS All studies combined showed a decrease in mean triglyceride concentrations in association with fish oil: −0.60 mmol/1 (95% CI, −0.84 to −0.33, P < 0.01) and a slight but significant increase in serum LDL cholesterol: 0.18 mmol/1 (95% CI, 0.04−0.32, P = 0.01), with both findings most prominent in NIDDM. No significant changes in HbA1c percentages occurred in diabetic subjects treated with fish oil. Fasting blood glucose levels were increased with borderline significance in NIDDM subjects (0.43 mmol/1 [95% CI, 0.00–0.87], P = 0.06) and were significantly lower in IDDM subjects (−1.86 mmol/1 [95% CI, −3.1 to −0.61], P < 0.05). Significant dose-response effects of EPA (g/day) on HbA1c and triglycerides and of DHA (g/day) on fasting blood glucose levels, HbA1c, and triglycerides were demonstrated only in NIDDM subjects. CONCLUSIONS The use of fish oil has no adverse affects on HbA1c in diabetic subjects and lowers triglyceride levels effectively by almost 30%. However, this may be accompanied by a slight increase in LDL cholesterol concentration. Fish oil may be useful in treating dyslipidemia in diabetes.
Reorganizing the Department of Veterans Affairs Acquisition and Logistics Office

OF THE THESIS REORGANIZING VA ACQUISITION AND LOGISTICS OFFICE by Kristine Clark American Public University System, April 24, 2016 Charles Town, West Virginia Professor Christi Bartman, Thesis Professor Abstract The Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking for suggestions on options to realign the services that provide support VA-wide. The goals of the proposed alignment should focus on increasing efficiencies and reducing costs. The project examines the organizational structure and design options and compares each for strengths and weaknesses against the requirements of the VA Acquisition and Logistics. It is also essential that the structure and design align with the new culture of the organization to avoid a conflict that will decrease the likelihood of successful implementation of the realignment. After a thorough evaluation of each structure and design option, it became clear that a functional alignment within a professional bureaucracy was the best fit to reach the needs of the VA, and the goals of the Secretary. The project finishes with fine-tuning additional parts of the organization, including span of control, depth of the hierarchy, decision authorities and degree of centralization. The final product is a new alignment and organizational chart that will increase efficiencies while empowering employees. Running Header: Reorganizing VA Acquisition And Logistics Office 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Learnings from the front end of radical product innovation in mature firms

The activities prior to the formal New Product Development (NPD) constitute the front end of product innovation. There is significant value in mastering the front end of product innovation, but difficult due to a high degree of uncertainty. BillerudKorsnäs is a mature firm with an ambition to find radical innovation. However, due to their history of incremental and process innovation, they need to adapt their front end of product innovation in order to facilitate more radical products. Hence, they need to learn from how other mature firms manage the front end of radical innovation, as well as what previous research emphasize. This master’s thesis provides brief examples and methods of how a mature firm with a focus on pulp and board material for packaging can work with the activities in the front end of radical product innovation. Eight interviews were conducted that provide insights and brief examples from BillerudKorsnäs, ABB Corporate Research, Bombardier Transportation Rail Control Solution, and Sandvik Coromant. This thesis comes to the conclusion that there are several activities, methods, and facilitating factors regarding the front end of radical product innovation. The observed companies do not rely on one single activity, method, or facilitating factor to enable radical innovation. Instead, they rely on a combination of individuals, informal networks, external collaborations and foremost experience in order to identify opportunities, generate ideas, and select ideas. In addition, they actively manage the facilitating factors by organizing to enable idea surfacing and sharing, utilizing various external collaborations, as well as making innovation a strategic priority.