Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of a Simple Programmable Control Timer

Conserving electricity has become increasingly important as energy rates and shortages have increased. Consumers can find a number of ways to cut back on their electrical use, especially with appliances commonly found in the home. Any economy that wants to advance must therefore embrace time management and proper conservation of electrical power supply. This can be achieved through limiting wastage in the limited power supply. The programmable control timer can be use to put ON or OFF any electrical appliance connected to it while the user attends to other things knowing fully well that Electronic Assistance is available. The user can preset the device to a certain value. This is possible with the use of set button on the device. The set button must be pressed to enable the time input buttons to be pressed. After presetting a certain time value, which is shown on the digital display, a press on the count button makes the preset time to countdown to zero. After attaining a “000” value, the appliance connected to its output sockets goes either ON or OFF.
Fuzzy clustering with ambiguity for multi-classifiers fusion: clustering-classification cooperation

The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate the performance of multi-classifiers fusion based on fuzzy clustering with ambiguity. The problem is seen from the multi-decision point of view (i.e. several classification modules). Each classification module is specialized on a particular region of the features space. These regions are obtained by fuzzy clustering and constitute the original data set by union.
An Enhanced Pretty Good Privacy (EPGP) System with Mutual Non-Repudiation

Enhanced Pretty Good Privacy (EPGP) is a new cryptosystem based on Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), used for the purpose of secure e-mail message communication over an open network. The idea of EPGP, introduced in this paper, addresses PGP's main drawback of incomplete non-repudiation service, and therefore, attempts to increase the degree of security and efficiency of e-mail message communication.
Fault Tolerance Connectors for Unreliable Web Services

Web Services are commonly used to implement service oriented architectures/applications. Service-oriented applications are large-scale distributed applications, typically highly dynamic, by definition loosely coupled and often unstable due to the unreliability of Web Services, which can be moved, deleted, and are subject to various sources of failures. In this paper, we propose customizable fault-tolerance connectors to add fault-tolerance to unreliable Web Services, thus filling the gap between clients and Web Service providers. Connectors are designed by clients, providers or dependability experts using the original WSDL description of the service. These connectors insert detection actions (e.g. runtime assertions) and recovery mechanisms (based on various replications strategies). The connectors can use identical or equivalent available service replicas. The benefits of this approach are demonstrated experimentally.
Monocular Parallel Tracking and Mapping with Odometry Fusion for MAV Navigation in Feature-Lacking Environments

Despite recent progress, autonomous navigation on Micro Aerial Vehicles with a single frontal camera is still a challenging problem, especially in feature-lacking environments. On a mobile robot with a frontal camera, monoSLAM can fail when there are not enough visual features in the scene, or when the robot, with rotationally dominant motions, yaws away from a known map toward unknown regions. To overcome such limitations and increase responsiveness, we present a novel parallel tracking and mapping framework that is suitable for robot navigation by fusing visual data with odometry measurements in a principled manner. Our framework can cope with a lack of visual features in the scene, and maintain robustness during pure camera rotations. We demonstrate our results on a dataset captured from the frontal camera of a quadrotor flying in a typical feature-lacking indoor environment.
Waste heat recovery technologies in turbocharged automotive engine? A review

Significant waste heat recovery technologies have been developed to recover exhaust heat and turn it into useful energy such as in downsizing the engine or to regain the auto-electricity. Extensive work and research in energy recovery have been identified in the automotive sector; therefore the main objective of this paper is to assess each waste heat recovery technology based on current developments, research trends and its future in an automotive application. The study looked into potential energy recoveries, performances of each technology and other factors affecting the implementation. As a result, the article drew the conclusion that waste heat recovery and its utilization will remain a good prospect in future automotive engine application.
China in 2005 Revisited: The Implications of International Capital Mobility

This paper revisits the analysis of the implications of China's economic growth on her trading partners presented in Arndt et al. (1997) using a dynamic, applied general equilibrium model that features international capital mobility. We find that accounting for the impact of China's growth on international capital markets reverses some of the findings in the paper by Arndt et al. In particular, net creditor regions lose while net debtor regions benefit from an economic slowdown in China due to the resulting decline in the cost of capital. Our analysis also reveals the importance of capital accumulation effects which interact with non-capital factor productivity and tax distortions in determining regional welfare.
Void-Supercluster Alignments

We investigate alignments between the spin axes of cosmic voids and the principal axes of nearby superclusters using the Millennium Run simulation of a ΛCDM cosmology. The concept of void spin was first introduced by Lee & Park in 2006 to quantify the tidal effect on voids from the surrounding matter distribution. Our numerical analysis reveals that the void spin axes are strongly aligned with the supercluster minor axes, antialigned with the major axes, and have no correlations with the intermediate axes. We provide physical explanations for these numerical results based on tidally induced correlations. It is expected that our work will provide a new insight into the characterization of the cosmic web on the largest scale.
Evaluating and Integrating Treebank Parsers on a Biomedical Corpus

It is not clear a priori how well parsers trained on the Penn Treebank will parse significantly different corpora without retraining. We carried out a competitive evaluation of three leading treebank parsers on an annotated corpus from the human molecular biology domain, and on an extract from the Penn Treebank for comparison, performing a detailed analysis of the kinds of errors each parser made, along with a quantitative comparison of syntax usage between the two corpora. Our results suggest that these tools are becoming somewhat over-specialised on their training domain at the expense of portability, but also indicate that some of the errors encountered are of doubtful importance for information extraction tasks. Furthermore, our inital experiments with unsupervised parse combination techniques showed that integrating the output of several parsers can ameliorate some of the performance problems they encounter on unfamiliar text, providing accuracy and coverage improvements, and a novel measure of trustworthiness. Supplementary materials are available at http://textmining.cryst. bbk.ac. uk/ac105/.
The “New” Virtual Consumer: Exploring the Experiences of New Users

The development of virtual worlds began long before the invention of computers; the minds of children at play would create fantasy or virtual worlds in which to explore or interact. However, the development of the computer provided an opportunity for these worlds to expand from within an individual’s mind to fixed video game environments and shared, interactive communities co-created by the users. The high growth of various virtual worlds globally that has occurred in recent years has prompted a number of Fortune 2000 companies to either enter the virtual space, or at least monitor the development and potential of avatar-based marketing. Although the current number of participants in virtual worlds is growing, in comparison to the overall consumer population, these numbers still represent just a very small percentage. To maximize the value that can be achieved and enhance the return on investment in a virtual world presence, organizations need to not only successfully market to the existing members of the virtual world, but they also need to effectively recruit real world consumers into the virtual world and retain them through positive interactions. Following the experiences of 40 undergraduate business students and 10 MBA graduate students as they enter the virtual world of Second Life for the first time, their 12 week journey is documented through weekly personal blog entries, online discussion groups, and exit interviews. The students’ comments and discussions provide insight into the mind of the new entrant to the virtual world. These insights guide suggestions for improving the experience of new virtual consumers in order to create long-term consumer relationships with an organization’s virtual presence.
Modeling the Regulatory Mechanisms by Which NLRX1 Modulates Innate Immune Responses to Helicobacter pylori Infection

Helicobacter pylori colonizes half of the world’s population as the dominant member of the gastric microbiota resulting in a lifelong chronic infection. Host responses toward the bacterium can result in asymptomatic, pathogenic or even favorable health outcomes; however, mechanisms underlying the dual role of H. pylori as a commensal versus pathogenic organism are not well characterized. Recent evidence suggests mononuclear phagocytes are largely involved in shaping dominant immunity during infection mediating the balance between host tolerance and succumbing to overt disease. We combined computational modeling, bioinformatics and experimental validation in order to investigate interactions between macrophages and intracellular H. pylori. Global transcriptomic analysis on bone marrow-derived macrophages (BMDM) in a gentamycin protection assay at six time points unveiled the presence of three sequential host response waves: an early transient regulatory gene module followed by sustained and late effector responses. Kinetic behaviors of pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) are linked to differential expression of spatiotemporal response waves and function to induce effector immunity through extracellular and intracellular detection of H. pylori. We report that bacterial interaction with the host intracellular environment caused significant suppression of regulatory NLRC3 and NLRX1 in a pattern inverse to early regulatory responses. To further delineate complex immune responses and pathway crosstalk between effector and regulatory PRRs, we built a computational model calibrated using time-series RNAseq data. Our validated computational hypotheses are that: 1) NLRX1 expression regulates bacterial burden in macrophages; and 2) early host response cytokines down-regulate NLRX1 expression through a negative feedback circuit. This paper applies modeling approaches to characterize the regulatory role of NLRX1 in mechanisms of host tolerance employed by macrophages to respond to and/or to co-exist with intracellular H. pylori.
Circulating Proteomic Signatures of Chronological Age

To elucidate the proteomic features of aging in plasma, the subproteome targeted by the SOMAscan assay was profiled in blood samples from 202 females from the TwinsUK cohort. Findings were replicated in 677 independent individuals from the AddNeuroMed, Alzheimer’s Research UK, and Dementia Case Registry cohorts. Results were further validated using RNAseq data from whole blood in TwinsUK and the most significant proteins were tested for association with aging-related phenotypes after adjustment for age. Eleven proteins were associated with chronological age and were replicated at protein level in an independent population. These were further investigated at gene expression level in 384 females from the TwinsUK cohort. The two most strongly associated proteins were chordin-like protein 1 (meta-analysis β [SE] = 0.013 [0.001], p = 3.66 × 10−46) and pleiotrophin (0.012 [0.005], p = 3.88 × 10−41). Chordin-like protein 1 was also significantly correlated with birthweight (0.06 [0.02], p = 0.005) and with the individual Framingham 10-years cardiovascular risk scores in TwinsUK (0.71 [0.18], p = 9.9 × 10−5). Pleiotrophin is a secreted growth factor with a plethora of functions in multiple tissues and known to be a marker for cardiovascular risk and osteoporosis. Our study highlights the importance of proteomics to identify some molecular mechanisms involved in human health and aging.
Roles of Commensal Microbiota in Pancreas Homeostasis and Pancreatic Pathologies

The pancreas plays a central role in metabolism, allowing ingested food to be converted and used as fuel by the cells throughout the body. On the other hand, the pancreas may be affected by devastating diseases, such as pancreatitis, pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PAC), and diabetes mellitus (DM), which generally results in a wide metabolic imbalance. The causes for the development and progression of these diseases are still controversial; therefore it is essential to better understand the underlying mechanisms which compromise the pancreatic homeostasis. The interest in the study of the commensal microbiome increased extensively in recent years, when many discoveries have illustrated its central role in both human physiology and maintenance of homeostasis. Further understanding of the involvement of the microbiome during the development of pathological conditions is critical for the improvement of new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. In the present review, we discuss recent findings on the behavior and functions played by the microbiota in major pancreatic diseases and provide further insights into its potential roles in the maintenance of pancreatic steady-state activities.
Navigational Indices and Full Text Search by Automated Analyses of Screen Recorded Data

Lecture recording provides learning material for local and distance education. Screen recording offers a flexible technique for lecture recording as it allows to capture virtually any material displayed during a presentation. Unfortunately, the navigational features and search abilities are rather limited, because grabbing and storing pixel data deprives the structure and content of the source documents. This paper presents how analyses of such pixel based recordings deliver useful navigational indices and provide full-text search automatically. In order to establish these research results, we have (partly) implemented the ideas within our own screen recording environment called TeleTeachingTool.
Actions speak louder than words: searching human action video based on body movement

Human action video search is a frequent demand in multimedia applications, and conventional video search schemes based on keywords usually fail to correctly find relevant videos due to noisy video tags. Observing the widespread use of Kinect-like depth cameras, we propose to search human action videos by directly performing the target action with body movements. Human actions are captured by Kinect and the recorded depth information is utilized to measure the similarity between the query action and each human action video in the database. We use representative depth descriptors without learning optimization to achieve real-time and promising performance as compatible as those of the leading methods based on color images and videos. Meanwhile, a large Depth-included Human Action video dataset, namely DHA, is collected to prove the effectiveness of the proposed video search system.
Convolutional Neural Networks for Croatian Traffic Signs Recognition

We present an approach to recognition of Croatian traffic signs based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). A library for quick prototyping of CNNs, with an educational scope, is first developed. An architecture similar to LeNet-5 is then created and tested on the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits where comparable results were obtained. We analyze the FERMASTIF TS2010 dataset and propose a CNN architecture for traffic sign recognition. The presented experiments confirm the feasibility of CNNs for the defined task and suggest improvements to be made in order to improve recognition of Croatian traffic signs.
Visual saliency based segmentation of multiple objects using variable regions of interest

This paper presents a segmentation method of multiple object regions based on visual saliency. Our method comprises three steps. First, attentional points are detected using saliency maps (SMs). Subsequently, regions of interest (RoIs) are extracted using scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT). Finally, foreground regions are extracted as object regions using GrabCut. Using RoIs as teaching signals, our method achieved automatic segmentation of multiple objects without learning in advance. As experimentally obtained results obtained using PASCAL2011 dataset, attentional points were extracted correctly from 18 images for two objects and from 25 images for single objects. We obtained segmentation accuracies: 64.1%, precision; 62.1%, recall, and 57.4%, F-measure. Moreover, we applied our method to time-series images obtained using a mobile robot. Attentional points were extracted correctly for seven images for two objects and three images for single objects from ten images. We obtained segmentation accuracies of 58.0%, precision; 63.1%, recall, and 58.1%, F-measure.
“ That ’ s not just me ” : Encouraging Minority Participation Using Deceptive Group Decision Visualization

Group decision making often leads to putting pressure on minority group members, who might have useful information but find it hard to share them under group pressure. Traditional solutions such as devil’s advocacy, while being effective, are not always practical due to imposing specific processes. This study investigates the effects of increasing saliency of minority’s opinion in visual representation of group decision state, on group decision making process. Our findings suggest that providing manipulated situational awareness through visualizations can hardly affect a small-group face-to-face decision making process and more studies are required to explore opportunities of using manipulated situation awareness.
Subspace-Based Iterative Semiblind Channel Estimation for MIMO-OFDM Considering Residual Error

A new approach to subspace-based channel estimation for multiple-input-multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems is proposed. The proposed method exploits both the receive diversity and the statistical property of the received signal based on the iterative algorithm. To reduce the effect of residual error affecting the accuracy of the noise subspace, a measure called the Hermitian angle is introduced. In addition, the forgetting factor is used to consider a time-varying channel.
Increased frequency of reproductive health problems among fathers of boys with hypospadias.

BACKGROUND Some studies have suggested an association between paternal subfertility and hypospadias among their sons, although the association has not been systematically investigated. We therefore compared male reproductive health among a group of fathers of boys with hypospadias and a group of fathers to normal children. METHODS A total of 64 fathers of boys with hypospadias participated; 349 partners of pregnant women served as a control group. All men delivered a semen sample, had a blood sample drawn, underwent a physical examination and completed a questionnaire. RESULTS Fathers of boys with hypospadias had a significantly lower median sperm concentration (54.1 x 10(6)/ml) (P = 0.004) and total sperm count (222.0 x 10(6)) (P = 0.009) than the controls (81.2 and 326.0 x 10(6)/ml). In addition, the fathers of boys with hypospadias more often reported to have had disorders in the urogenital system (hypospadias, cryptorchidism and testicular cancer) (11/64) (P < 0.001) than the control group (16/349). No significant differences in waiting time to pregnancy was observed, however, 15% of fathers to boys with hypospadias had received fertility treatment. CONCLUSIONS Fathers of boys with hypospadias not only have an increased frequency of hypospadias, but also decreased semen quality. Most likely fathers and sons share the same susceptibility genes for reproductive dysfunction, but additional impact of environmental factors cannot be excluded.
A Polypyrrole-based Strain Sensor Dedicated to Measure Bladder Volume in Patients with Urinary Dysfunction

This paper describes a new technique to measure urine volume in patients with urinary bladder dysfunction. Polypyrrole – an electronically conducting polymer - is chemically deposited on a highly elastic fabric. This fabric, when placed around a phantom bladder, produced a reproducible change in electrical resistance on stretching. The resistance response to stretching is linear in 20%-40% strain variation. This change in resistance is influenced by chemical fabrication conditions. We also demonstrate the dynamic mechanical testing of the patterned polypyrrole on fabric in order to show the feasibility of passive interrogation of the strain sensor for biomedical sensing applications.
Impulse Noise Reduction in Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging Using Fuzzy Filters

Noise contamination in a magnetic resonance (MR) image could occur during acquisition, storage, and transmission in which effective filtering is required to avoid repeating the MR procedure. In this paper, an iterative asymmetrical triangle fuzzy filter with moving average center (ATMAVi filter) is used to reduce different levels of salt and pepper noise in a brain MR image. Besides visual inspection on filtered images, the mean squared error (MSE) is used as an objective measurement. When compared with the median filter, simulation results indicate that the ATMAVi filter is effective especially for filtering a higher level noise (such as noise density = 0.45) using a smaller window size (such as 3 3) when operated iteratively or using a larger window size (such as 5 5) when operated non-iteratively.
CamQuest: design and evaluation of a tablet application for educational use in preschools

This paper describes the design, testing and evaluation of CamQuest, a tablet application intended for educational practice in preschools. CamQuest enables children to search for and photograph geometrical shapes in their surroundings with the tablet camera. In this paper, the results of three encounters with preschool children aged four to five are presented and discussed, as well as the design and concept of CamQuest. Each encounter with children was carried out with a different approach; testing, codesigning, and evaluating. The application can be used as a pedagogical tool, which enables preschool children to recognize and explore geometrical shapes in their environment through using digital media.