Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
QTLNetwork: mapping and visualizing genetic architecture of complex traits in experimental populations

SUMMARY QTLNetwork is a software package for mapping and visualizing the genetic architecture underlying complex traits for experimental populations derived from a cross between two inbred lines. It can simultaneously map quantitative trait loci (QTL) with individual effects, epistasis and QTL-environment interaction. Currently, it is able to handle data from F(2), backcross, recombinant inbred lines and double-haploid populations, as well as populations from specific mating designs (immortalized F(2) and BC(n)F(n) populations). The Windows version of QTLNetwork was developed with a graphical user interface. Alternatively, the command-line versions have the facility to be run in other prevalent operating systems, such as Linux, Unix and MacOS. AVAILABILITY http://ibi.zju. edu.cn/software/qtlnetwork.
The use of temporal speech and lip information for multi-modal speaker identification via multi-stream HMMs

Investigates the use of temporal lip information, in conjunction with speech information, for robust, text-dependent speaker identification. We propose that significant speaker-dependent information can be obtained from moving lips, enabling speaker recognition systems to be highly robust in the presence of noise. The fusion structure for the audio and visual information is based around the use of multi-stream hidden Markov models (MSHMM), with audio and visual features forming two independent data streams. Recent work with multi-modal MSHMMs has been performed successfully for the task of speech recognition. The use of temporal lip information for speaker identification has been performed previously (T.J. Wark et al., 1998), however this has been restricted to output fusion via single-stream HMMs. We present an extension to this previous work, and show that a MSHMM is a valid structure for multi-modal speaker identification.
The Self-Testing COTS Components ( STECC ) Strategy – a new form of improving component testability ∗

Development of a software system from existing components can surely have various benefits, but can also entail a series of problems. One type of problems is caused by a limited exchange of information between the developer and user of a component. A limited exchange and thereby a lack of information can have various consequences, among them the requirement to test a component prior to its integration into a software system. A lack of information cannot only make test prior to integration necessary, it can also complicate this tasks. However, difficulties in testing can be avoided if certain provisions to increase testability are taken beforehand. This article describes a new form of improving testability of, particularly commercial, components, theself-testing COTS components (STECC) strategy .
Social Online Video Experiences

Participation in social organizations such as team sports, volunteer and religious organizations has been diminishing over the past few decades (Putnam, 2001). One reason for this decline is television (Putnam, 1995). Instead of going to bars or bowling alleys after work – places where people can form new relationships and expand their social networks – people instead go home to watch the latest sitcom or reality TV show. While it has been argued that news and current affairs programs " [do] not seem to be damaging to the democratic health of society " (Norris, 1996, p. 479), the act of watching television is a socially isolating activity because it eliminates the social context in which new relationships are formed. Online video provides an opportunity to build social capital among viewers. Because the act of watching video is online, viewers are able to simultaneously watch video and interact with each other. However, it is unclear whether the passive act of watching a video can be combined with active social interaction; watching a video and interacting with others both require attentional resources, and these activities may be mutually distracting. Thus, while online video provides an opportunity to build social capital and enable people to create and maintain relationships, it will only be successful at this if viewers are able to manage their attention between the two activities. If these activities prove incompatible because of overwhelming amounts of distraction, then online video communities may not be able to help rebuild the social capital lost to television. The goal of this thesis is to design for social online video experiences. This includes understanding existing social practices around online video, measuring the impact of watching together on social relationships, helping people manage their attention between interaction and video, and helping people find others to interact with while watching. This understanding will help online video designers build communities of viewers, and ultimately, fulfill the potential of online video as a socially engaging activity capable of rebuilding the social capital lost to television. In this thesis, I will examine the activity of watching together from two perspectives: an individual group of people who watch a video and chat with each other, and an online community of viewers. For groups of individuals who watch and chat together, I will demonstrate that the experience is both enjoyable and social. Although chatting while watching is distracting, this distraction does not …
User needs to the test: evaluating a terminological knowledge base on the environment by trainee translators 1

Trainee translators and their use of lexicographical and terminographical resources when translating specialised texts can shed light on the close relation between Terminology, Lexicography, Translation and Knowledge Acquisition. Although the definition of users’ profiles and their needs has been an habitual concern in Lexicography and Terminology research, there are not many studies dealing with methodological aspects in the design of empirical studies to evaluate lexicographic and terminographical resources. In this context, we designed a questionnaire to evaluate and validate for translation a terminological knowledge base on the environment, called EcoLexicon. The questionnaire was completed on-line by 3rd year students of the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the University of Granada (Spain). With this research, we aim at shedding some light on methodological aspects in the design of empirical studies to evaluate general and specialised resources for translating, as well as using the results obtained in the questionnaire to make some improvements to EcoLexicon for translators.
Self-adaptive distributed power control for opportunistic QOS provision in wireless communication networks

Emerging wireless communication networks are required to provide data services which tolerate large variations of link quality. Such applications allow flexible power control procedures. In this paper, we approach the distributed power control problem from an automatic control point of view. A new framework for opportunistic power control is proposed, where the target quality of service at each link is determined by a linear quadratic regulator controller according to a given self-adaptive criterion. Stability and convergence of proposed framework are analytically guaranteed, while its performance is confronted with other algorithms through computer simulations.
Store Separation Simulation using Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian based Solver on Oct-tree Grid

Work here considers three dimensional simulation of flow involving moving impermeable boundaries with respect to a static oct-tree based Cartesian mesh. Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) based compressible solver is developed to take into account the relative motion of solid body in the computational domain. Finite Volume Method (FVM) based compressible solver is first validated against some standard test cases of flow over a wedge, forward facing step etc. Later the very well known 1D piston problem is selected for validation of the ALE framework. All the validations done are in good agreement with theoretical, numerical and experimental results. A further application is done to investigate store separation problem. Keyword: ALE, Finite Volume Method, Cartesian Mesh, Compressible Solver, Moving Boundary, Unsteady Simulation
Arbitrage Pricing of Multi-person Game Contingent Claims

We introduce a class of financial contracts involving several parties by extending the notion of a two-person game option (see Kifer (2000)) to a contract in which an arbitrary number of parties is involved and each of them is allowed to make a wide array of decisions at any time, not restricted to simply `exercising the option'. The collection of decisions by all parties then determines the contract's settlement date as well as the terminal payoff for each party. We provide sufficient conditions under which a multi-person game option has a unique arbitrage price, which is additive with respect to any partition of the contract.
The Many Shades of Rose-Colored Glasses: An Evolutionary Approach to the Influence of Different Positive Emotions

We present an evolutionary framework for examining the influence of different positive emotions on cognition and behavior. Testing this framework, we investigate how two positive emotions-pride and contentment-influence product desirability. Three experiments show that different positive emotions (compared with a neutral control condition) have specific effects on judgment that are consistent with the proposed underlying evolved function of each positive emotion. As predicted by the framework, the specific influences of pride and contentment on product desirability are mediated by the triggering of emotion-specific functional motives. Overall, an evolutionary approach presents important research implications and practical applications for how and why discernible positive and negative emotions influence thinking and behavior. We discuss the implications of an evolutionary approach for the study of emotions, highlighting key similarities and differences between this and other approaches, as well as noting the advantages of incorporating an evolutionary approach. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc.
VARIABILITY IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Second language learning outcomes are highly variable, due to a variety of factors, including individual differences, exposure conditions, and linguistic complexity. However, exactly how these factors interact to influence language learning is unknown. This article examines the relationship between these three variables in language learners. Native English speakers were exposed to an artificial language containing three sentence patterns of varying linguistic complexity. They were randomly assigned to two groups—incidental and instructed—designed to promote the acquisition of implicit and explicit knowledge, respectively. Learning was assessed with a grammaticality judgment task, and subjective measures of awareness were used to measure whether exposure had resulted in implicit or explicit knowledge. Participants also completed cognitive tests. Awareness measures demonstrated that learners in the incidental group relied more on implicit knowledge, whereas learners in the instructed group relied more on explicit knowledge. Overall, exposure condition was the most significant predictor of performance on the grammaticality judgment task, with learners in the instructed group outperforming those in the incidental group. Performance on a procedural learning task accounted for additional variance. When outcomes were analyzed according to linguistic complexity, exposure condition was the most significant predictor for two syntactic patterns, but it was not a predictor for the most complex sentence group; instead, procedural learning ability was.
Separable Model Predictive Control via Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Large-scale Systems

Abstract In this paper, an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) based real-time model predictive control (MPC) algorithm is presented. With the use of indicator function and by introducing extra consensus constraints, the constrained MPC problem can be formulated as a separable MPC problem, which can be computed very efficiently by projected gradient descent ADMM update steps and Riccati recursions. The sequence of the objective value of this constrained real-time ADMM-type MPC algorithm satisfies a linear convergence rate. The procedure is also extended to distributed systems with constraints, in which the variables of each subsystems communicate with their neighbors and update in the Gauss-Seidel way. An illustrative example shows the effectiveness of this approach.
Dynamic Allocation of Subcarriers and Powers in a Multiuser OFDM Cellular Network

This paper considers a resource allocation problem in the downlink of a multiuser, multicell OFDM cellular network with frequency selective fading and imperfect channel state information. Each user has a given data rate requirement. The task is to determine power and subcarrier allocations for users to ensure that users’ outage probabilities are low. A two-layer approach is used. The higher layer allocates powers based on the average gains of the links, with cells coupled via the mutual interference between them. To improve the performance in frequency selective fading, the lower layer allocates discrete subcarriers to the users in a way which takes into account statistical knowledge about the subcarriers.
ExpExpExplosion : Uniform Interpolation in General EL Terminologies Technical Report

Although EL is a popular logic used in large existing knowledge bases, to the best of our knowledge no procedure has yet been proposed that computes uniform EL interpolants of general EL terminologies. Up to now, also the bounds on the size of uniform EL interpolants remain unknown. In this paper, we propose an approach based on proof theory and the theory of formal tree languages to computing a finite uniform interpolant for a general EL terminology if it exists. Further, we show that, if such a finite uniform EL interpolant exists, then there exists one that is at most triple exponential in the size of the original TBox, and that, in the worst-case, no shorter interpolants exist, thereby establishing the triple exponential tight bounds on their size.
Sleepiness and cognition in young adults who gamble and use alcohol

Abstract Background and aims: Past research suggests that sleep problems are associated with increased risky decision-making. Similarly, gambling disorder and alcohol use disorder are also associated with increased risky decision-making. Individuals with gambling disorder or alcohol use disorder have also reported higher rates of sleep problems compared to normal healthy controls. As such, we sought to examine whether sleep problems play a role in the development of alcohol use disorder or gambling disorder. Methods: One hundred and forty-one individuals who gamble and use alcohol, yet do not meet criteria for gambling disorder or alcohol use disorder, were assessed to determine the correlation between sleepiness, amount of sleep obtained, decision-making, and alcohol or gambling behaviors. Results: Our results suggest that inconsistent sleep patterns may be associated with increased frequency of alcohol use and gambling. We did not, however, find a significant correlation between sleep factors and decision-making. Discussion: Further research is needed to examine the specific relationship between sleep patterns and alcohol use and gambling frequency. Overall these data suggest that sleepiness or sleep and risky decision-making is not a significant factor in gambling and alcohol use behaviors in individuals not meeting criteria for alcohol use disorder or gambling disorder.
Adaptive Compressive Sensing and Processing of Delay-Doppler Radar Waveforms

Compressive sensing and processing handles high-resolution delay-Doppler radar measurements using a low sampling rate, simple receiver design, and inexpensive processing when Nyquist rate sensing and processing becomes impractical. The benefits of compressive sensing and processing are, however, offset by an increase in estimation error that is introduced when processing compressed measurements versus measurements sampled at the Nyquist rate. In this work, an adaptive compressive sensing and processing method is proposed for the radar tracking problem. The adaptive scheme naturally incorporates information on target state that is readily available from a particle filter based tracker. The proposed method is shown to improve tracking performance over nonadaptive compressive sensing and processing, while maintaining low-sampling rates, a computationally inexpensive operation, and a simple receiver design.
Fault tolerant adaptive mission planning with semantic knowledge representation for autonomous underwater vehicles

This paper proposes a novel approach for autonomous mission plan recovery for maintaining operability of unmanned underwater vehicles. It combines the benefits of knowledge-based ontology representation, autonomous partial ordering plan repair and robust mission execution. The approach uses the potential of ontology reasoning in order to orient the planning algorithms adapting the mission plan of the vehicle. It can handle uncertainty and action scheduling in order to maximize mission efficiency and minimise mission failures due to external unexpected factors. Its performance is presented in a set of simulated scenarios for different concepts of operations for the underwater domain. The paper concludes by showing the results of a trial demonstration carried out on a real underwater platform. The results of this paper are readily applicable to land and air robotics.
Finding and visualizing inter-site clan graphs

For many purposes, the Web page is too small a unit of interaction. Users often want to interact with larger-scale entities, particularly collections of topically related items. We report three innovations that address this user need. l We replaced the web page with the web sire as the basic unit of interaction and analysis* We defined a new information structure, the clan graph, that groups together sets of related sites. l We invented a new graph visualization, the auditorium visualization, that reveals important structural and content properties of sites within a clan graph. We have discovered interesting information that can be extracted from the structure of a clan graph. We can identify structurally important sites with many incoming or outgoing links. Lii between sites serve important functions: they often identify “f? ont door” pages of sites, sometimes identify especially significant pages within a site, and occasionally contain informative anchor text.
Fast Iris Detection and Localization Algorithm Based on AdaBoost Algorithm and Neural Networks

In this paper, we propose an iris detection and localization method based on AdaBoost algorithm and neural networks with local interconnection structures to overcome the limits in the current iris detection and localization algorithms. It has three features: Firstly, according to the features of the iris image, we design a set of local interconnection neural networks iris classifiers with different receptive fields and different complexity. Secondly, we use AdaBoost algorithm to integrate neural networks classifiers to generate a chief classifier with powerful iris detection ability. Thirdly, cascade connection structure is applied to increase the detection speed. Experimental results show that this algorithm has very high detection accuracy and speed. It can solve the iris detection and localization problems efficiently in the case of with large face region and cataract patients
SAW: System-assisted wear leveling on the write endurance of NAND flash devices

The write endurance of NAND Hash memory adversely impacts the lifetime of flash devices. A flash cell is likely to wear out after undergoing excessive program/erase (P/E) flips. Wear leveling is hence employed to spread erase operations as evenly as possible. It is traditionally conducted by the flash translation layer (FTL), a management firmware residing in Hash devices. In this paper, we shall propose a novel wear leveling algorithm involving the operating system (OS). We will show that our operating System-Assisted Wear leveling (SAW) algorithm can significantly improve the wear evenness. SAW takes advantage of OS's knowledge about files at a higher level of abstraction, and provides useful hints to the lower-level FTL to accommodate data. A prototype based on a file system and an FTL has been developed to verify the effectiveness of SAW. Experiments show that wear evenness can be improved by as much as 85.0% compared to the state-of-the-art FTL wear leveling schemes.
Managing uncertainty in call centres using Poisson mixtures

We model a call centre as a queueing model with Poisson arrivals having an unknown varying arrival rate. We show how to compute prediction intervals for the arrival rate, and use the Erlang formula for the waiting time to compute the consequences for the occupancy level of the call centre. We compare it to the current practice of using a point estimate of the arrival rate (assumed constant) as forecast. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Time-dependent calculation of ionization in potassium at midinfrared wavelengths

We study the dynamics of the potassium atom in the midinfrared (12-, 13-, and 14-photon ionization), high-intensity, short laser pulse regime. We ascertain numerical convergence by comparing the results obtained by the direct expansion of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation onto B splines to those obtained by the eigenbasis expansion method. We present ionization curves in the 12-, 13-, and 14-photon ionization range for potassium. The ionization curve of a scaled system, namely hydrogen starting from the $2s,$ is compared to the 12-photon results. In the 13-photon regime, a dynamic resonance is found and analyzed in some detail. The results for all wavelengths and intensities, including hydrogen, display a clear plateau in the peak heights of the low-energy part of the above threshold ionization spectrum, which scales with the ponderomotive energy ${U}_{p}$ and extends to $(2.8\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}{0.5)U}_{p}. $
Image-Based Shadow Removal via Illumination Chromaticity Estimation

Removing shadows in color images is an important research problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel shadow removal approach, which effectively removes shadows from textured surfaces, yielding high quality shadow-free images. Our approach aims at calculating scale factors to cancel the effect of shadows. Based on the regional gray edge hypothesis, which assumes the average of the reflectance differences in a region is achromatic, the scale factors can be computed without the restrictions that former algorithms need. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and improves the performance of former scale-based shadow removal methods.