Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Benchmarking of image watermarking algorithms for digital rights management

We discuss the issues related to image watermarking benchmarking and scenarios based on digital rights management requirements. We show that improvements are needed in image quality evaluation, especially related to image geometrical deformation assessments, in risk evaluation related to specific delivery scenarios and in multidimensional criteria evaluation. Efficient benchmarking is still an open issue and we suggest the use of open-source Web-based evaluation systems for collective progress in this domain.
The Impact of Goals On Software Project Management: An Experimental Investigation

Over the last three decades, a significant stream of research in organizational behavior has established the importance of goals in regulating human behavior. The precise degree of association between goals and action, however, remains an empirical question since people may, for example, make errors and/or lack the ability to attain their goals. This may be particularly true in dynamically complex task environments, such as the management of software development.To date, goal setting research in the software engineering field has emphasized the development of tools to identify, structure, and measure software development goals. In contrast, there has been little micro-empirical analysis of how goals affect managerial decision behavior. The current study attempts to address this research problem. We investigated the impact of different project goals on software project planning and resource allocation decisions and, in turn, on project performance. The research question was explored through a role-playing project simulation game in which subjects played the role of software project managers. Two multi-goal structures were tested, one for cost/schedule and the other quality/schedule. The cost/schedule group opted for smaller cost adjustments and was more willing to extend the project completion time. The quality/schedule group, on the other hand, acquired a larger staff level in the later stages of the project, and allocated a higher percentage of the larger staff level to quality assurance. A cost/schedule goal led to lower cost, while a quality/schedule goal led to higher quality. These findings suggest that given specific software project goals, managers do make planning and resource allocation choices in such a way that will meet those goals. The implications of the results for project management practice and research are discussed.
A Discrete-cepstrum Based Spectrum-envelope Estimation Scheme and Its Example Application of Voice Transformation

Approximating a spectral envelope via regularized discrete cepstrum coefficients has been proposed by previous researchers. In this paper, we study two problems encountered in practice when adopting this approach to estimate the spectral envelope. The first is which spectral peaks should be selected, and the second is which frequency axis scaling function should be adopted. After some efforts of trying and experiments, we propose two feasible solution methods for these two problems. Then, we combine these solution methods with the methods for regularizing and computing discrete cepstrum coefficients to form a spectral-envelope estimation scheme. This scheme has been verified, by measuring spectral-envelope approximation error, as being much better than the original scheme. Furthermore, we have applied this scheme to building a system for voice timbre transformation. The performance of this system demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed spectral-envelope estimation scheme.
Scalable coding of HDTV pictures using the MPEG coder

The MPEG-2 coding standard, soon to be put into commercial use, uses DCTs and motion compensation for coding digital images at variable sizes and bitrates. Performing motion estimation at HDTV picture sizes is, however, computationally very expensive. This thesis explores ways of coding High Definition Television images by using the MPEG coder for coding a low resolution image extracted from the original and a simpler coding scheme for the high resolution components of the original not dealt with by the MPEG coder. The advantages of such an implementation are low computational cost and the availability of two bitstreams capable of simultaneously displaying the same image at different resolutions. Two distinct approaches to the problem are proposed and implemented. Experiments on images of differing characteristics show that although the methods developed here are predictably not as efficient as MPEG itself, they do perform well in terms of providing two levels of quality images at high compression rates. This research was supported by the Television of Tomorrow research consortium at the MIT Media Laboratory. Thesis Supervisor: V. Michael Bove, Jr. Title: Associate Professor
Syntactic markedness and the definition of sentence topic

University of Illinois Sentence topics are linguistic constituents, with syntactic and semantic properties which single them out for a linking function in the process of relating a sentence to its discourse context. This paper explores the relation between the linguistic properties of sentence topics and their use as discourse links in sentence processing. It proposes a set of criteria for distinguishing relatively weak or strong topic NP's, based on syntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties. Syntactically defined topics include subjects and those in 'marked' NP positions, where the surface features define grammatical function in an ambiguous or indirect way. Implications of this proposal are drawn for several languages, and for various models of language processing. *
Supply Noise Suppression by Triple-Well Structure

This brief discusses the impact of twin- and triple-well structures on power supply noise, and a substrate model for simulating the power supply noise. We observed Vss noise reduction by the resistive network of the p-substrate and Vdd noise reduction by the junction capacitance of a triple-well structure on a 90-nm test chip. Measurement results also showed that the total noise reduction of a triple-well structure is superior to that of a twin-well structure. The measurement results correlate well with the results obtained from the power supply noise simulation using a hierarchical resistive mesh model. Our simulation-based verification indicates that in common CMOS design, a triple-well structure can reduce the power supply drop by 10%-40% or the decoupling capacitance area by 5%-10%. We also verified that supply drop sensitivity to variation of the well junction capacitance is sufficiently small and that supply noise reduction using a triple-well structure is robust to process variation.
HyberBF Networks for Gender Classification

314 on faces of people not represented in the training set (79% correct) The performance on a testing set, having null intersection with the training set, has been estimated with a leave-one-out strategy. Having n available examples, training was done on the rst n ? 1 data leaving the last one for testing. The data set was then rotated, so that each of the available examples was used in turn as a testing example. The performance was estimated by taking the percentage of correct gender assessment on the resulting tests. The performance obtained is of 79% correct classiications.
The Effect of Failure Prognosis and Mitigation on the Reliability of Permanent-Magnet AC Motor Drives

Fault diagnosis and its extensions to failure prognosis aim to develop methods that decrease outages and thus increase reliability. Among these methods are redundancies and changes of topology, power levels, and control algorithms. Since diagnosis methods are imperfect, false positives and negatives, as well as delayed fault diagnosis, may occur. Although the diagnosis of a fault can lead to appropriate maintenance, the estimation of the time to failure through prognosis can lead to the timely mitigation of the fault and, in turn, can extend the lifetime and reliability of the drive. In this paper, we present a new approach to the mitigation of permanent-magnet ac motors that uses a failure prognosis method to predict failures and the remaining useful life and uses the output of the prognosis algorithm to decide when to modify the system and mitigate the fault. A methodology to calculate the mean time between failures with and without mitigation is also presented. The proposed approach is illustrated through a simple example of how the prognosis of failure due to a developing intermittent open circuit in one of the phases increases the drive reliability.
Automatic verification of parameterised multi-agent systems

A key problem in verification of multi-agent systems by model checking concerns the fact that the state-space of the system grows exponentially with the number of agents present. This often makes practical model checking unfeasible whenever the system contains more than a few agents. In this paper we put forward a technique to establish a cutoff result, thereby showing that systems with an arbitrary number of agents can be verified by checking a single system consisting of a number of agents equal to the cutoff of the system. While this problem is undecidable in general, we here define a class of parameterised interpreted systems and a parameterised temporal-epistemic logic for which the result can be shown. We exemplify the theoretical results on a robotic example and present an implementation of the technique as an extension of MCMAS, an open-source model checker for multi-agent systems.
Dual Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry Body Composition Reference Values from NHANES

In 2008 the National Center for Health Statistics released a dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) whole body dataset from the NHANES population-based sample acquired with modern fan beam scanners in 15 counties across the United States from 1999 through 2004. The NHANES dataset was partitioned by gender and ethnicity and DXA whole body measures of %fat, fat mass/height2, lean mass/height2, appendicular lean mass/height2, %fat trunk/%fat legs ratio, trunk/limb fat mass ratio of fat, bone mineral content (BMC) and bone mineral density (BMD) were analyzed to provide reference values for subjects 8 to 85 years old. DXA reference values for adults were normalized to age; reference values for children included total and sub-total whole body results and were normalized to age, height, or lean mass. We developed an obesity classification scheme by using estabbody mass index (BMI) classification thresholds and prevalences in young adults to generate matching classification thresholds for Fat Mass Index (FMI; fat mass/height2). These reference values should be helpful in the evaluation of a variety of adult and childhood abnormalities involving fat, lean, and bone, for establishing entry criteria into clinical trials, and for other medical, research, and epidemiological uses.
Eye-tracking product recommenders' usage

Recommender systems have emerged as an effective decision tool to help users more easily and quickly find products that they prefer, especially in e-commerce environments. However, few studies have tried to understand how this technology has influenced the way users search for products and make purchase decisions. Our current research aims at examining the impact of recommenders by understanding how recommendation tools integrate the classical economic schemes and how they modify product search patterns. We report our work in employing an eye tracking system and collecting users' interaction behaviors as they browsed and selected products to buy from an online product retail website offering over 3,500 items. This in-depth user study has enabled us to collect over 48,000 fixation data points and 7,720 areas of interest from eighteen users, each spending more than one hour on our site. Our study shows that while users still use traditional product search tools to examine alternatives, recommenders definitely provide users with new opportunities in their decision process. More specifically, users actively click and gaze at products recommended to them, up to 40% of the time. In addition, recommendation areas are highly attractive, drawing users to add 50% more items to their baskets as a traditional tool does. Observing that users consult the recommendation area more as they are close to the end of their search process, it seems that recommenders enhance users' decision confidence by satisfying their need for diversity. Based on these results, we derive several interaction design guidelines that can significantly improve users' satisfaction and perception of product recommenders.
HYPERBOLIC GEOMETRY

Relativistic hyperbolic geometry is a model of the hyperbolic geometry of Lobachevsky and Bolyai in which Einstein addition of relativistically admissible velocities plays the role of vector addition. The adaptation of barycentric coordinates for use in relativistic hyperbolic geometry results in the relativistic barycentric coordinates. The latter are covariant with respect to the Lorentz transformation group just as the former are covariant with respect to the Galilei transformation group. Furthermore, the latter give rise to hyperbolically convex sets just as the former give rise to convex sets in Euclidean geometry. Convexity considerations are important in non-relativistic quantum mechanics where mixed states are positive barycentric combinations of pure states and where barycentric coordinates are interpreted as probabilities. In order to set the stage for its application in the geometry of relativistic quantum states, the notion of the relativistic barycentric coordinates that relativistic hyperbolic geometry admits is studied. 11 On the Use of Gyrobarycentric Coordinates 12 Relativistic-Hyperbolic Barycentric Coordinates and the Geometry of Relativistic Quantum States
A prospective study on educational level and adaptation to cancer, within one year after the diagnosis, in an older population

Socio‐economic status (SES) has often been associated with health disparities and mortality in cancer patients, yet systematic research into the role of SES in the course of the disease is lacking. This prospective study intends to examine the role of SES (i.e. educational level in this study) in psychological and physical adaptation to cancer. Ninety‐nine cancer patients were followed from a community‐based survey. Pre‐ and post‐morbid data on patients' quality of life (QoL) were available. Adaptation was defined by looking at the level and pattern of scores on QoL scales from pre‐ to post‐disease assessments. Results show some non‐significant trends that more high‐educated patients managed to adapt completely to cancer in relation to role and physical functioning when compared with low‐educated participants. Furthermore, the greater part of high‐educated patients who completely adapted in physical functioning achieved this result more rapidly without an initial deterioration. Unexpectedly, these differences were not significant when tested in a regression model. Hence, although there are some indications for differences in adaptation to role and physical functioning between educational groups, we did not find any evidence that proved such a relation. For the group as a whole, it is very interesting to see that based on our operationalization of adaptation, only a small percentage of patients deteriorated from pre‐ to post‐disease assessments. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Discovering Synonyms and Other Related Words

Discovering synonyms and other related words among the words in a document collection can be seen as a clustering problem, where we expect the words in a cluster to be closely related to one another. The intuition is that words occurring in similar contexts tend to convey similar meaning. We introduce a way to use translation dictionaries for several languages to evaluate the rate of synonymy found in the word clusters. We also apply the information radius to calculating similarities between words using a full dependency syntactic feature space, and introduce a method for similarity recalculation during clustering as a fast approximation of the high-dimensional feature space. Finally, we show that 69-79% of the words in the clusters we discover are useful for thesaurus construction.
The Ribosomal Database Project (RDP-II): sequences and tools for high-throughput rRNA analysis

The Ribosomal Database Project (RDP-II) provides the research community with aligned and annotated rRNA gene sequences, along with analysis services and a phylogenetically consistent taxonomic framework for these data. Updated monthly, these services are made available through the RDP-II website (http://rdp.cme.msu.edu/). RDP-II release 9.21 (August 2004) contains 101 632 bacterial small subunit rRNA gene sequences in aligned and annotated format. High-throughput tools for initial taxonomic placement, identification of related sequences, probe and primer testing, data navigation and subalignment download are provided. The RDP-II email address for questions or comments is rdpstaff@msu.edu.
Face recognition with enhanced local gabor binary pattern from human fixations

Performance of automatic face recognition algorithm has increased considerably over the past decades. However, face recognition under changes in lighting conditions remains a challenging issue for computers. In this paper, we propose a novel face recognition algorithm inspired by information taken from human fixation patterns. We augment a LGBP (Local Gabor Binary Pattern) algorithm - a well-known face recognition algorithm - to allocate different weights to each facial part during processing. For deriving the weights, we analyzed data from a human face recognition experiment using eye-tracking. Eye-tracking allows us to determine the facial parts during the recognition process which represent salient regions for human processing. Face images are pre-processed during the recognition step using a weight mask based on the salient regions from the eye-tracking data. A comparison with the standard non-weighted LGBP approach demonstrates the efficacy of our method with the weighted method performing better under lighting changes.
Motivational and emotional dynamics of social values

This research examined theoretical and emotional interrelations among social values, emotion, and action. Data from nine experiments revealed some novel and important findings. Experiments 1 to 3 examined the motivational dynamics of values by observing the effects of priming motivationally opposing values on judgment and behaviour. The results showed that priming tradition values reduced the better-than-average effect, but priming stimulation values increased it. Also, priming security values increased cleanliness behaviour, but priming self-direction values decreased it. Similarly, security values decreased curiosity behaviours, but priming self-direction values increased it. These findings supported the circular model's assumption about motivational interconnections between values. Experiments 4-9 examined the motivational dynamics of values by observing the effects of priming emotion on the importance of motivationally opposing values. Three types of negative emotion were primed: sadness, disgust, and shame. The results revealed that the context of the emotions determined their effect on values. Experiments 4 and 5 found that death-related sadness (e.g., passing away of a family member), but not failure-related sadness, led to increased importance of self-transcendence values (e.g., helpfulness) and decreased importance of self-enhancement values (e.g., self-success). Experiments 6 and 7 found that moral disgust (e.g., terrorists), but not hygiene disgust, led to increased importance of self-transcendence values and decreased importance of self-enhancement values. Experiment 8 found that moral shame, but not performance shame, led to increased importance of conservation values (e.g., conformity) and decreased importance of openness to change values (e.g., independence). Experiment 9 found that the context of shame interacts with prior individual differences to shape values and that these effects extend to value-relevant behaviour. Together, these findings provide novel support for important assumptions about motivational interconnections between values, while connecting these assumptions to extant evidence regarding the effects of goal and value priming on action and to evidence regarding the effects of emotion on social judgment and action. In addition, the results provide novel evidence in support of the importance of emotion appraisal processes in value-relevant judgment and behaviour.
Inbreeding-related trade-offs in stress resistance in the ant Formica exsecta

Inbred individuals and populations are predicted to suffer from inbreeding depression, especially in times of stress. Under natural conditions, organisms are exposed to more than one stressor at any one time, highlighting the importance of stress resistance traits. We studied how inbreeding- and immunity-related traits are correlated under different dietary conditions in the ant Formica exsecta. Its natural diet varies in the amount and nature of plant secondary compounds and the level of free radicals, all of which require detoxification to maintain organismal homeostasis. We found that inbreeding decreased general antibacterial activity under dietary stress, suggesting inbreeding-related physiological trade-offs.
Optimization of b-galactosidase production using Kluyveromyces lactis NRRL Y-8279 by response surface methodology

This paper investigates the production and optimization of β-galactosidase enzyme using synthetic medium by Kluyveromyces lactis NRRL Y-8279 in shake flask cultures. Among the different cell disintegration methods used, the highest specific activity was obtained when the cells were permeabilized using isoamyl alcohol. Response surface methodology was used to investigate the effects of four fermentation parameters (agitation speed, pH, initial substrate concentration and incubation time) on β-galactosidase enzyme production. Results of the statistical analysis showed that the fit of the model was good in all cases. Maximum specific enzyme activity of 4218.4 U g -1 was obtained at the optimum levels of process variables (pH 7.35, agitation speed 179.2 rpm, initial sugar concentration 24.9 g l -1 and incubation time 50.9 hrs). The response surface methodology was found to be useful in optimizing and determining the interactions among process variables in β-galactosidase enzyme production.
Utility-based Scheduling Frameworks for Efficient Quality-of-Service Differentiation in a Mixture of Real-time and Non-real-time Traffics

This paper proposes a utility-based scheduling framework for efficient differentiation of users’ Quality-of-Service (QoS) in a broadband wireless access system involving heterogeneous mixed traffic flows. The utility-based scheduling framework, called Maximum QoS Satisfaction (MQS), is based on three novel Radio Resource Allocation (RRA) techniques; delay-based scheduling policy for Real-Time (RT), minimum-rate-based scheduling policy for Non-Real-Time (NRT) and a throughput-based scheduling policy for Best-Effort (BE) services. Simulation study shows that MQS achieves superior performances in terms of average system throughput and user satisfaction both in single and heterogeneous mixed traffic scenarios, when compared to some existing ones.