Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Client QoE-Oriented Segment Selection for DASH

A segment selection method controlled by Quality of Experience (QoE) factors for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is presented in this paper. Current rate adaption algorithms aim to eliminate buffer underrun events by significantly reducing the code rate when experiencing pauses in replay. In reality, however, viewers may choose to accept a level of buffer underrun in order to achieve an improved level of picture fidelity or to accept the degradation in picture fidelity in order to maintain the service continuity. The proposed rate adaption scheme in our work can maximize the user QoE in terms of both continuity and fidelity (picture quality) in DASH applications. It is shown that using this scheme a high level of quality for streaming services, especially at low packet loss rates, can be achieved. Our scheme can also maintain a best trade-off between continuity-based quality and fidelity-based quality, by determining proper threshold values for the level of quality intended by clients with different quality requirements. In addition, the integration of the rate adaptation mechanism with the scheduling process is investigated in the context of a mobile communication network and related performances are analyzed.
English-Chinese Name Transliteration by Latent Analogy

Name transliteration plays an important role in many natural language processing applications. Numerous machine learning techniques which adopt a top-down strategy have been applied to this task. Those approaches require a highly accurate English and Chinese alignment data and tend to dismiss relevant contexts when whey have been seen too infrequently in the alignment data. In this paper, a novel bottom-up approach for English-Chinese name transliteration that allows us to carry out direct orthographical mapping between two languages is proposed. Our English-Chinese transliteration approach has three steps. We first make a neighborhood of locally relevant transliteration names by using a latent semantic analysis of the appropriate graphemic form. We then align those names in neighborhoods via locally optimal sequence alignment. Finally, the maximum likelihood estimate is computed for every position to obtain probable Chinese transliteration of the given English name. The experimental results confirm its effectiveness in English-Chinese name transliteration.
Research on Tennis Technique and Tactics Decision Support Based on Theory of Association Data Mining

The result of tennis match were great influenced by the level of technique and tactics decision-making, and how to find the characteristics of athletes' technique and tactics from mass data is a urgent problem which is needed to be shoveled, in order to make up the insufficiency of traditional statistical method and provide scientific basis for tennis technique and tactics decision-making. Based on association data mining theory and the Weka data mining platform, association data mining model was established, which was about the association between the stroke placement, stroke technique, stroke line and score of tennis technique and tactics. Specific case research were carried out from the following three perspectives, i.e. the association analysis between the last two stroke placement, line and win or lose of each point, the association analysis between the first three stroke placement and win or lose point in serve game, the association analysis between the first two stroke placement and win or lose point in service game. The research results indicate that the data mining model were capable of providing objective and scientific decision support for technique and tactics decision-making in tennis game and daily tennis technique and tactics training.
Constraint programming systems for modeling music theories and composition

Constraint programming is well suited for the computational modeling of music theories and composition: its declarative and modular approach shares similarities with the way music theory is traditionally expressed, namely by a set of rules which describe the intended result. Various music theory disciplines have been modeled, including counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, form, and instrumentation. Because modeling music theories “from scratch” is a complex task, generic music constraint programming systems have been proposed that predefine the required building blocks for modeling a range of music theories. After introducing the field and its problems in general, this survey compares these generic systems according to a number of criteria such as the range of music theories these systems support.
2 Social Anxiety Disorder

1.1 Epidemiology of social anxiety disorder (SAD) SAD, also known as social phobia, is characterised by excessive fear of embarrassment or humiliation in social situations, which in turn leads to marked distress or avoidance of these situations and functional impairment as described in DSM-IV-TR. It is a common disorder with early onset, significant comorbidity and functional impairment (Meron Ruscia et al., 2008). SAD has been ranked as one of the top ten chronic disorders – mental or physical – in terms of its effects on objective outcomes, such as days of work lost and reduced health-related quality of life (Alonso, 2004). According to the National Comorbidity Survey, SAD is the most reported anxiety disorder and has a lifetime prevalence of 12% (Kessler et al., 2005), with considerable coexisting psychiatric disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and substance-related disorders.Lifetime prevalence of social anxiety disorder among Turkish university students was 23% (Dilbaz 2006). Co-occurring SAD and depression carry a substantial risk of suicide, which further complicates treatment (Beesdo et al., 2007; Thase, 2007). SAD symptoms normally emerge during early adolescence and continue throughout adulthood; they affect women more often than men (Fehm et al., 2005). In clinical samples the ratio of male and female changes in the favour of males. (Dilbaz and Güz 2002). Trials suggest that social anxiety even below the diagnostic threshold is clearly associated with adverse outcomes like elevated risk for comorbid disorders and associated with impairment in diverse areas of life. Despite the growing understanding of this condition, information is lacking on key aspects of the disorder and many individuals, including doctors, psychiatrists and patients, unaware about this condition.
How Much to Make and How Much to Buy‘ An Analysis of Optimal Plural Sourcing Strategies

While many theories of the firm seek to explain when firms make rather than buy, in practice firms often make and buy the same input- they engage in plural sourcing. We argue that explaining the mix of external procurement and internal sourcing for the same input requires moving away from individual transaction level analysis, to a consideration of complementarities across and constraints within modes of procurement. We thus create analytical foundations for making empirical predictions about when plural sourcing is likely to be optimal and the optimal mix of internal and external sourcing. Our framework also proves useful for assessing the possible biases in transaction level make-or-buy studies arising from ignoring complementarities and constraints.
Feature-based sentiment analysis in online Arabic reviews

Social media has given web users a venue for expressing and sharing their thoughts and opinions on different topics and events. Each day millions of user generated comments are raised on the web and analyzing these opinions to discover useful information pieces manually is costly and time-consuming. Thus, automatic mining techniques are highly desirable. By investigating the current state of automatic sentiment analysis tools, a lack of tools for analyzing languages rather than English was highly observed. Most of the researches on Opinion Mining are tailored for English language, and research on mining Arabic reviews is going in very slow rate. This study proposes a feature-based sentiment analysis technique for mining Arabic user generated reviews. The extraction and weighting of sentiments and features are executed automatically from a set of annotated reviews using Part Of Speech (POS) tagging feature. The collected features are organized into a tree structure representing the relationship between the objects being reviewed and their components. Furthermore, an automatic expandable approach of Arabic feature and sentiment words using free online Arabic lexicons and thesauruses is introduced. For extracting and analyzing feature-sentiment pairs five rules is proposed. Finally, a lexicon-based classification is performed to evaluate the performance of each rule. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to automatically extract and identify the polarity for a large number of feature-sentiment expressions and achieve high accuracy.
FashionAsk: pushing community answers to your fingertips

We demonstrate a multimedia-based question-answering system, named FashionAsk, by allowing users to ask questions referring to pictures snapped by mobile devices. Specifically, instead of asking verbose questions to depict visual instances, direct pictures are provided as part of questions. To answer these multi-modal questions, FashionAsk performs a large-scale instance search to infer the names of instances, and then matches with similar questions from community-contributed QA websites as answers. The demonstration is conducted on a million-scale dataset of Web images and QA pairs in the domain of fashion products. Asking a multimedia question through FashionAsk can take as short as five seconds to retrieve the candidate answer as well as suggested questions.
Subsentential utterances, ellipsis, and pragmatic enrichment

It is argued that genuinely subsentential phrases, such as a discourse-initial utterance of “From France” to indicate the provenance of an item, provide evidence for the reality of the pragmatic process of free enrichment. I consider recent attempts to treat such discourse-initial fragments as linguistic ellipsis of some kind while accommodating the difference between these cases and accepted types of ellipsis such as sluicing and gapping (for example Merchant 2007a,b). I claim that the mechanisms they posit to save an ellipsis story have no role in an account of performance (an account of the processes of utterance interpretation). An argument against the enrichment approach from the indeterminacy of the content of subsentential utterances is discussed, and refuted, and it is shown how this indeterminacy is accommodated in a contextualist pragmatic theory.
Multi-agent systems for grid energy management: A short review

The electric grid is currently undergoing important changes: it is evolving from an entirely centralized structure to a decentralized one, mainly due to the massive development of distributed renewable energy sources. This evolution toward what we now call the smart grid requires new control methods. These methods must be able to withstand new requirements, such as the highly distributed nature of the grid, the ability to run in islanding mode, the intermittency of renewable energy sources and the limited bandwidth for communications. Multi-agent systems (MAS) have characteristics that meet these requirements. In contrary to classical analytical methods, the grid is considered as a collection of simple entities called agents corresponding to sources, loads and other components, evolving in a given environment. A certain degree of distributed or collective intelligence can be achieved through the interaction of these agents with each other, cooperating or competing to reach their goals. This article is a short review of several multi-agent systems published in the literature and used for grid energy management. It presents a number of concepts and experiments used by researchers to apply this promising method. Various approaches and their results are compared, in order to give the reader a global perspective of the state of the art in this precise domain.
Mortality in well controlled HIV in the continuous antiretroviral therapy arms of the SMART and ESPRIT trials compared with the general population

Background:Due to the success of antiretroviral therapy (ART), it is relevant to ask whether death rates in optimally treated HIV are higher than the general population. The objective was to compare mortality rates in well controlled HIV-infected adults in the SMART and ESPRIT clinical trials with the general population. Methods:Non-IDUs aged 20–70 years from the continuous ART control arms of ESPRIT and SMART were included if the person had both low HIV plasma viral loads (⩽400 copies/ml SMART, ⩽500 copies/ml ESPRIT) and high CD4+ T-cell counts (≥350 cells/&mgr;l) at any time in the past 6 months. Standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) were calculated by comparing death rates with the Human Mortality Database. Results:Three thousand, two hundred and eighty individuals [665 (20%) women], median age 43 years, contributed 12 357 person-years of follow-up. Sixty-two deaths occurred during follow up. Commonest cause of death was cardiovascular disease (CVD) or sudden death (19, 31%), followed by non-AIDS malignancy (12, 19%). Only two deaths (3%) were AIDS-related. Mortality rate was increased compared with the general population with a CD4+ cell count between 350 and 499 cells/&mgr;l [SMR 1.77, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.17–2.55]. No evidence for increased mortality was seen with CD4+ cell counts greater than 500 cells/&mgr;l (SMR 1.00, 95% CI 0.69–1.40). Conclusion:In HIV-infected individuals on ART, with a recent undetectable viral load, who maintained or had recovery of CD4+ cell counts to at least 500 cells/&mgr;l, we identified no evidence for a raised risk of death compared with the general population.
Image encryption scheme with key sequences based on Chaotic functions

The current information age demands enormous opportunities, where, the sensitive data and information is being exchanged, analyzed and made use of. It has led to several concerns and challenges, mainly in the areas of information privacy, authentication and integrity. This concern, attracted cryptographers to device more effective methodologies and algorithms to ensure better protection to sensitive information. In this context, the application of chaotic based systems is considered to design a pseudorandom sequence generator, which is used as a key stream generator in the additive Stream Cipher system. Chaotic map is a mathematic function that generates highly nonlinear and random real sequence which is very sensitive to initial conditions. In this view, this work focusses on the study of Logistic map, considered from a bunch of various Chaotic functions available [1], [2]. Chaotic real sequence is binarized using a new binarization algorithm using Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR), which is designed in such a way that the randomness of Chaotic real sequence is not affected as far as possible. Using Logistic map, about 50 sequences are generated each of length ≥ 106. To ensure the randomness of binary sequences, NIST(National Institute of Standards and Technology) test is used. It is observed that, all the sequences have strictly passed most of the NIST tests with an average passing proportion ≥ 0.87. These sequences are used as key sequences in image encryption and decryption. It is interesting to observe that, encrypted image does not contain any residual information. This result is cross verified by plotting the Histogram, computing the Correlation coefficient and Entropy of the output images. It is observed that, Histograms are almost flat indicating the equiprobable distribution of pixels. Also, Entropy of the encrypted image is close to 8 and Correlation coefficient value is very negligible indicating that neighboring pixels are heavily uncorrelated. As the key sequence based on Chaotic functions is sensitive to initial conditions, the sequence generated will be highly nonlinear and random which encourages one to use in cryptographic applications.
Analyzing photonic crystal waveguides by Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps

An efficient numerical method is developed for the modal analysis of two-dimensional photonic crystal waveguides (PCWs). Using the Dirichlet-to-Neumann (DtN) map of the supercell, the waveguide modes are solved from an eigenvalue problem formulated on two boundaries of the supercell, leading to significantly smaller matrices when it is discretized. The eigenvalue problem is linear even when the medium is dispersive. The DtN map of a domain is an operator that maps the wave field on the boundary of the domain to the normal derivative of the field. The DtN map of the supercell can be efficiently calculated by merging the DtN maps of the ordinary and defect unit cells.
Spatial and Temporal Genetic Analyses Show High Gene Flow Among European Corn Borer (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) Populations Across the Central U.S. Corn Belt

ABSTRACT European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis (Hübner), adults were sampled at 13 sites along two perpendicular 720-km transects intersecting in central Iowa and for the following two generations at four of the same sites separated by 240 km in the cardinal directions. More than 50 moths from each sample location and time were genotyped at eight microsatellite loci. Spatial analyses indicated that there is no spatial genetic structuring between European corn borer populations sampled 720 km apart at the extremes of the transects and no pattern of genetic isolation by distance at that geographic scale. Although these results suggest high gene flow over the spatial scale tested, it is possible that populations have not had time to diverge since the central Corn Belt was invaded by this insect ≈60 yr ago. However, temporal analyses of genetic changes in single locations over time suggest that the rate of migration is indeed very high. The results of this study suggest that the geographic dimensions of European corn borer populations are quite large, indicating that monitoring for resistance to transgenic Bt corn at widely separated distances is justified, at least in the central Corn Belt. High gene flow further implies that resistance to Bt corn may be slow to evolve, but once it does develop, it may spread geographically with such speed that mitigation strategies will have to be implemented quickly to be effective.
Corporate Reputation and Social Media: A Game Theory Approach

Corporate reputation is more and more the most valuable asset for a firm. In this day and age, corporate reputation, although an intangible asset is and will grow as the most essential asset to publicise and also protect. Social media are a formidable tool to publicise a firm's brand and improve its reputation. However, it can also be deadly. Indeed, associated with social media comes the 'buzz', i.e., the means to spread at an unprecedented speed and scale any information being true or false. In this paper, our aim is to propose a game theory approach with both a finite and an infinite horizon. The model presented here helps us evaluate the impact of social media on a firm's reputation. It also highlights the important parameters of a firm's reputation in this new digital era.
Participation of unemployment benefit recipients in active labor market programs: before and after the German labor market reforms

"Between 2005 and 2007 the German government raised a per-capita amount of around 10.000 Euros for each transition out of unemployment benefit receipt into basic social care, to be paid by the unemployment insurance. The so called 'Aussteuerungsbetrag' set strong incentives that investments in active labor market programs for unemployment benefit recipients should pay off - in terms of an exit from registered unemployment - before a transition into basic social care for needy jobseekers occurred. This raised considerable public concerns that less programs would be granted, in particular for hard-to-place workers. Our paper analyzes if these concerns were justified. We compare four cohorts, eligible for unemployment benefits at the beginning of their unemployment spell during March of the years 2003 to 2006. We conduct some descriptive analyses and estimate piecewise constant exponential hazard models to investigate the correlation between individual characteristics and transition rates into programs. The results show that transition rates into programs were in fact low across the 2005 cohort, but rather high for the 2006 cohort. The expectation that particular disadvantaged groups of unemployed would participate less in active labor market programs in the postreform period is not confirmed; their transition rates into programs were significantly higher across the 2006 cohort than in pre-reform cohorts. " (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
Genomics Reveals a Unique Clone of Burkholderia cenocepacia Harboring an Actively Excising Novel Genomic Island

Burkholderia cenocepacia is a clinically dominant form among the other virulent species of Burkholderia cepacia complex (Bcc). In the present study, we sequenced and analyzed the genomes of seven nosocomial Bcc isolates, five of which were isolated from the bloodstream infections and two isolates were recovered from the hospital setting during the surveillance. Genome-based species identification of the Bcc isolates using a type strain explicitly identified the species as B. cenocepacia. Moreover, single nucleotide polymorphism analysis revealed that the six isolates were clonal and phylogenetically distinct from the other B. cenocepacia. Comparative genomics distinctly revealed the larger genome size of six clonal isolates as well as the presence of a novel 107 kb genomic island named as BcenGI15, which encodes putative pathogenicity-associated genes. We have shown that the BcenGI15 has an ability to actively excise from the genome and forming an extrachromosomal circular form suggesting its mobile nature. Surprisingly, a homolog of BcenGI15 was also present in the genome of a clinical isolate named Burkholderia pseudomallei strain EY1. This novel genetic element is present only in the variants of B. cenocepacia and B. pseudomallei isolates suggesting its interspecies existence in the main pathogenic species of the genus Burkholderia. In conclusion, the whole genome analysis of the genomically distinct B. cenocepacia clinical isolates has advanced our understanding of the epidemiology and evolution of this important nosocomial pathogen as well as its relatives.
The Impact of the Number of Performance Measures and Incentive Framing on Performance in a Multidimensional Task Environment

This paper reports on the results of a 2x2 experiment, examining the impact of multiple performance measures (PM) and incentive framing on performance in a multidimensional environment. A comparison is made between the performance of people working under one PM and those working under three PM. Additionally, the performance of participants working under a bonus scheme is compared with a penalty-framed incentive scheme. The results indicate that it is better to use multiple PM, because it inspires higher effort intensity and better effort allocation. Furthermore, it is better to frame incentives as a penalty scheme, instead of as a bonus scheme, because loss aversion has a higher performance impact than perceived fairness. However, the difference between bonus and penalty schemes is not larger with multiple versus a single PM, because loss aversion under multiple PM is higher for bonuses than for penalties. Consequently, no additive effects were identified.