Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Context Information as Augmented Reality

The vision of Ubiquitous Computing [41] by Mark Weiser describes a new generation of computers as being part of the environment and invisible to the user. Such an environment would consist of systems embedded in everyday items. These systems would allow users to interact with them in a casual manner and would communicate with each other. Many of these systems would have sensors that measure environmental attributes, or “context”, such as temperature, ambient light levels, humidity or wireless Internet signals in a dynamic fashion. This information would be used to facilitate decision processes within the devices, but also may be useful to a user in understanding their environment. This dissertation investigates the architecture for the collection and display of dynamic context information as part of an augmented reality system. A novel interactive environment called the Context-Aware Augmented Reality (CAAR) system is presented, which visualises environmental context such as temperature and luminance. This environment moves the focus of interaction between user and computer from a discrete site such as the desktop, to the user’s whole environment. The system is then evaluated in terms of its facilitation of a greater awareness of a user’s environment, and also as an enhancement to current human-computer interaction technologies.
India ’ s monetary integration with the rest of Asia : A feasibility study

This paper is a pioneering attempt to include India with east and Southeast Asia to study the existence of the economic criteria for a common currency. The analysis in this paper shows that significant complementarities in trade exist among these countries, most of them experience similar shocks and labor mobility is already present. These results point to the fact that the cost of adopting a single currency may be minimal, while huge benefits could accrue from enhanced trade. The paper also recognizes the importance of yen for the success of the monetary union in Asia. JEL Classification: F33, F36, F42, E32
The path assigned mean shift algorithm: A new fast mean shift implementation for colour image segmentation

This paper presents a novel method for colour image segmentation derived from the mean shift theorem. When applied to colour image segmentation tasks, the path assigned mean shift algorithm performed 1.5 to 5 times faster than existing fast mean shift methods such as the hierarchical 'neighbourhood consistency' FMS Method proposed by Zhang with comparable results. The complexity of the new PAMS algorithm can be represented as O(Phi2) where Phi represents the total number of unassigned points per iteration of the algorithm.
Bad bugs need old drugs: a stewardship program's evaluation of minocycline for multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections.

BACKGROUND Minocycline is an "old-drug" with Food and Drug Administration approval for the treatment of infection due to Acinetobacter species. The purpose of this study is to describe an Antimicrobial Stewardship Program's evaluation of minocycline for the treatment of patients with multidrug resistant A. baumannii (MDR-AB) infections. METHODS This study evaluated hospitalized adult patients (September 2010 through March 2013) who received minocycline intravenously (IV) for a MDR-AB infection. Clinical and microbiological outcomes were analyzed. Secondary outcomes included infection-related mortality, length of hospital stay (LOS), infection-related LOS, intensive care unit (ICU) LOS, mechanical ventilation days, and 30-day readmission. RESULTS A total of 55 patients received minocycline. Median age was 56 (23-85) years, 65% were male with an APACHE II score of 21 (4-41). Clinical success was achieved in 40/55 (73%) patients treated with minocycline monotherapy (n = 3) or in combination with a second active agent (n = 52). Overall 43 (78%) patients demonstrated documented or presumed microbiologic eradication. Infection-related mortality was 25%. Hospital LOS was 31 (5-132) and infection-related LOS was 16 (2-43) days. Forty-seven (85%) patients were admitted to the ICU for a LOS of 18 (2-78) days. Thirty-nine (71%) patients required mechanical ventilation for 6 (2-29) days. One patient had a 30-day readmission. CONCLUSIONS The response rate to minocycline monotherapy or in combination for the treatment of MDR-AB infections is encouraging as therapeutic options are limited. Prospective studies in patients with MDR-AB infections will help establish the role of minocycline alone or in combination with other antimicrobials.
A revisit of the calibration of the local volatility surface for European options

We revisit the calibration of local volatility surface for European options across all strikes and maturities of the same underlying. We don’t assume any shape of the volatility surface except that the volatility surface is smooth. There is no interpolation or extrapolation of either the option prices or the volatility surface. Because of the smoothness assumption, we apply a second order Tikhonov regularization. Automatic differentiation is employed as an efficient way to obtain the gradient of cost function with respect to the local volatility surface. We choose the Tikhonov regularization parameter as one of the singular values of the Jacobian matrix of the Dupire model. Finally we perform numerical tests for both volatility models with known analytical solutions of European option prices and real market data aimed at assessing and verifying the aforementioned techniques.
Privacy-Preserving Techniques and System for Streaming Databases

Streaming databases and other distributed, event-based systems are very useful tools for business and security applications. When event sources and event processing are distributed across multiple distinct domains, confidentiality and privacy issues emerge. These can be addressed by a number of cryptographic techniques. In this paper we consider high-performance symmetric encryption techniques. We build a system for privacy-preserving event correlation and evaluate the performance of the its techniques. We demonstrate efficient privacy-preserving event correlation using equality tests, greater-than comparisons and range queries. The results indicate that in comparable settings, it is therefore recommended to employ these techniques to address pertinent security and privacy concerns.
Vortex flows from centrifugal fan

A comprehensive work has been accomplished for the observation of flow details from a centrifugal fan inside an indoor unit of air conditioners. The present study is finding optimum flow paths in the system that supplies temperature-controlled air into the space human being. Fig. 1 shows the outlet grill of the system (left) and the flow details by PIV system (right) over the grill are objectives of this study. Experiments using PIV system are adopted for velocity measurements. Parallel works with velocity measurements for visualization of out flows illustrates the velocity vectors are good in accuracy. The present experimental rig is PIV system with a high-resolution digital camera. The distribution and patterns of the discharging velocities from the air-conditioner are very useful for design and improvements of the duct in the present unit. Vortex flows of the outlet flows appear in the velocity field of previous system. However, with the improvements referred with the velocity profiles, the efficiency of the system of the modified model increases by about 25%.
An integrated approach to shape based image retrieval

Shape is one of the primary low level image features in the newly emerged Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). Many shape representations have been proposed, and they are generally classified into contour-based methods and region-based methods. Contour-based methods capture shape boundary features while ignore shape inner content. Region-based methods capture shape inner features while do not emphasize on boundary features. It is known neither methods can produce ideal retrieval results in all situations. The shortcoming of both types of methods can be overcome by combine the strength of two methods. In this paper, a contour shape descriptor and a region shape descriptor are studied. Then a integrated shape descriptor, which combines a contour shape descriptors and the region shape descriptors, is presented. The integrated shape descriptors provide interactivity between users and the retrieval system and can improve retrieval performance. Retrieval results are given to show the comparison and the improvement.
A Novel Search Engine to trace Medical Information Needs using Medical Domain Ontology

— Information retrieval in medical domain is now sharing major part of the web search. Now a day’s most of the people especially adults are browsing health care and medical information at their homes using internet. Medical Information Retrieval System (MIRS) through search engines providing positive information to the user based on the fixed questionnaires. In this paper we build a model for naïve users, who are having minimal knowledge to feedback the system by opting listed relevant questionnaire. Along with the framework, we also built an Intelligent Medical Search Engine (IMSE) for searching medical information on World Wide Web (WC3). The implementation setup of IMSE uses medical Ontology and questionnaire to facilitate naive internet users to search for medical information. IMSE introduces and extends expert system technology into the search engine domain. IMSE uses several key techniques to improve its usability and search result quality.
Using Causality for Diagnosis

This paper introduces a theory of diagnosis for dynamic systems. System behavior is described in an action formalism. Diagnosing amounts to nd the history of the faults that explain the observations after a sequence of actions. The solution to the diagnosis problem provides an explanation for what components failed and when they did. Technically, the diagnosis problem is described by adding a condition to the rules aaected by faults and it is solved with causality simultaneously with the solution to the frame and ramiication problems .
Fish Distribution in Far Western Queensland, Australia: The Importance of Habitat, Connectivity and Natural Flows

The endorheic Lake Eyre Basin drains 1.2 million square kilometres of arid central Australia, yet provides habitat for only 30 species of freshwater fish due to the scarcity of water and extreme climate. The majority are hardy riverine species that are adapted to the unpredictable flow regimes, and capable of massive population booms following heavy rainfall and the restoration of connectivity between isolated waterholes. The remainder are endemic specialists from isolated springs with very restricted ranges, and many are listed under relevant state and national endangered species legislation and also by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). For these spring communities, which are sustained by water from the Great Artesian Basin, survival is contingent on suitable habitat persisting alongside extractive mining, agriculture and the imposition of alien species. For the riverine species, which frequently undertake long migrations into ephemeral systems, preservation of the natural flow regime is paramount, as this reinstates riverine connectivity. In this study, fish were sampled from the Bulloo River in the east to the Mulligan River in the west, along a temporal timeframe and using a standard set of sampling gears. Fish presence was influenced by factors such as natural catchment divides, sampling time, ephemerality and the occurrence of connection flows and flooding. Despite the comparatively low diversity of species, the aquatic systems of this isolated region remain in good ecological condition, and as such they offer excellent opportunities to investigate the ecology of arid water systems. However, the presence of both endangered species (in the springs) and invasive and translocated species more widely indicates that active protection and management of this unique area is essential to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem integrity.
A survey of Sparse Component Analysis for blind source separation: principles, perspectives, and new challenges

In this survey, we highlight the appealing features and challenges of Sparse Component Analysis (SCA) for blind source separation (BSS). SCA is a simple yet powerful framework to separate several sources from few sensors, even when the independence assumption is dropped. So far, SCA has been most successfully applied when the sources can be represented sparsely in a given basis, but many other potential uses of SCA remain unexplored. Among other challenging perspectives, we discuss how SCA could be used to exploit both the spatial diversity corresponding to the mixing process and the morphological diversity between sources to unmix even underdetermined convolutive mixtures. This raises several challenges, including the design of both provably good and numerically efficient algorithms for large-scale sparse approximation with overcomplete signal dictionaries.
Spectral efficiency of multicarrier CDMA

We analyze the spectral efficiency (sum-rate per subcarrier) of randomly spread synchronous multicarrier code-division multiple access (MC-CDMA) subject to frequency-selective fading in the asymptotic regime of number of users and bandwidth going to infinity with a constant ratio. Both uplink and downlink are considered, either conditioned on the subcarrier fading coefficients (for nonergodic channels) or unconditioned thereon (for ergodic channels). The following receivers are analyzed: a) jointly optimum receiver, b) linear minimum mean-square error (MMSE) receiver, c) decorrelator, and d) single-user matched filter.
An Ultra-Low-Power Wideband Inductorless CMOS LNA With Tunable Active Shunt-Feedback

This work presents and analyzes the design of a 1-V ultra-low power, compact, and wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA). The proposed LNA uses common-gate (CG) NMOS and PMOS transistors as input devices in a complementary current-reuse structure. Low power input matching is achieved by employing an active shunt-feedback architecture while the current of the feedback stage is also reused by the input transistor to improve the current efficiency of the LNA. A forward body biasing (FBB) scheme is exploited to tune the feedback coefficient. The complementary characteristics of the input stage leads to partial second-order distortion cancellation. The proposed inductorless LNA is implemented in an IBM 0.13-μm 1P8M CMOS technology and occupies only 0.0052 mm2. The measured LNA has a 12.3-dB gain 4.9-dB minimum noise figure (NF) input referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) of -10 dBm and 0.1-2.2-GHz bandwidth (BW), while consuming only 400 μA from a 1-V supply.
The Evolution of Extracellular Matrix

We present a perspective on the molecular evolution of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in metazoa that draws on research publications and data from sequenced genomes and expressed sequence tag libraries. ECM components do not function in isolation, and the biological ECM system or “adhesome” also depends on posttranslational processing enzymes, cell surface receptors, and extracellular proteases. We focus principally on the adhesome of internal tissues and discuss its origins at the dawn of the metazoa and the expansion of complexity that occurred in the chordate lineage. The analyses demonstrate very high conservation of a core adhesome that apparently evolved in a major wave of innovation in conjunction with the origin of metazoa. Integrin, CD36, and certain domains predate the metazoa, and some ECM-related proteins are identified in choanoflagellates as predicted sequences. Modern deuterostomes and vertebrates have many novelties and elaborations of ECM as a result of domain shuffling, domain innovations and gene family expansions. Knowledge of the evolution of metazoan ECM is important for understanding how it is built as a system, its roles in normal tissues and disease processes, and has relevance for tissue engineering, the development of artificial organs, and the goals of synthetic biology.
Observation Compression in DEC-POMDP Policy Trees

Representing agent policies compactly is essential for improving the scalability of multi-agent planning algorithms. In this paper, we focus on developing a pruning technique that allows us to merge certain observations from agent policies, while minimizing the loss of value. This is particularly important for solving finite-horizon decentralized POMDPs, where agent policies are represented as trees, and where the size of policy trees grows exponentially with the number of observations. We introduce a value-based observation compression technique that prunes the least valuable observations while maintaining an error bound on the value lost as a result of pruning. We analyze the characteristics of this pruning strategy and show empirically that it is effective. Thus, we use compact policies to obtain significantly higher values compared with the best existing DEC-POMDP algorithm.
A simple and rapid method for the preparation of plant genomic DNA for PCR analysis.

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has revolutionised the rapid analysis of mammalian genomic DNA (1). However, PCR is less useful in the analysis of plant DNA due to the difficulties in extracting nucleic acids from limited amounts of plant tissue. We have developed a method for the rapid extraction of small amounts of plant genomic DNA suitable for PCR analysis. The method is applicable to a variety of plant species and has the added advantage of not requiring any phenol or chloroform extraction. Thus it is possible to complete an extraction within 15 minutes without handling any hazardous organic solvents. Samples for PCR analysis (usually leaf tissue) are collected using the lid of a sterile Eppendorf tube to pinch out a disc of material into the tube. This ensures uniform sample size and also reduces the possibilities of contamination arising from handling the tissue. DNA is extracted as follows: The tissue is macerated (using disposable grinders from Bel-art Products: Scienceware, Pequannock, NJ, 07440 USA. catalog no 992) in the original Eppendorf tube at room temperature, without buffer, for 15 seconds. 400 yl of extraction buffer (200 mM Tris HC1 pH 7.5, 250 mM NaCl, 25 mM EDTA, 0.5% SDS) is added and the sample vortexed for 5 seconds. This mixture can then be left at room temperature until all the samples have been extracted (> 1 hour). The extracts are centrifuged at 13,000 rpm for 1 minute and 300 y\ of the supernatant transferred to a fresh Eppendorf tube. This supernatant is mixed with 300 /il isopropanol and left at room temperature for 2 minutes. Following centrifugation at 13,000 rpm for 5 minutes, the pellet is vacuum dried and dissolved in 100 /xl 1XTE. This DNA is stable at 4°C for greater than one year. 2.5 yX of this sample is sufficient for a standard 50 y\ PCR (Figure 1). When older tissue is used this may be increased to 25 /xl without any deleterious effect on the PCR. Using this protocol we have found it possible to process hundreds of individual samples in a single working day.
Guest column: the quantum PCP conjecture

The classical PCP theorem is arguably the most important achievement of classical complexity theory in the past quarter century. In recent years, researchers in quantum computational complexity have tried to identify approaches and develop tools that address the question: does a quantum version of the PCP theorem hold? The story of this study starts with classical complexity and takes unexpected turns providing fascinating vistas on the foundations of quantum mechanics and multipartite entanglement, topology and the so-called phenomenon of topological order, quantum error correction, information theory, and much more; it raises questions that touch upon some of the most fundamental issues at the heart of our understanding of quantum mechanics. At this point, the jury is still out as to whether or not such a theorem holds. This survey aims to provide a snapshot of the status in this ongoing story, tailored to a general theory-of-CS audience.
Evaluation of a Tool for Supporting Software Component Services in Embedded Real-Time Systems

Component-based software engineering denotes the practice of building software from pre-existing smaller products, in particular when this is done using standardized software component models. The main expected benefits of this practice over traditional software engineering approaches are increased productivity and timeliness of development projects. While the use of software component models has become common for desktop and server-side software, this is not the case in the domain of embedded real-time systems, presumably due to the special requirements such systems have to meet with respect to predictable timing and limited use of resources. Much research exists that aims to define new component models for this domain, typically focusing on source code components, static system configuration, and relatively narrow application domains.This dissertation explores the alternative approach of using components based on binary code, allowing dynamic configuration, and targeting a broader domain. A study of a general purpose component model shows that the model is compatible with real-time requirements, although putting some restrictions on its use may be necessary to ensure predictability. A case study demonstrates how the model has been used with advantage in an industrial control system. The dissertation furthermore proposes an approach for extending the component model with run-time services for embedded real-time systems. It presents a prototype tool for supporting such services, along with two empirical studies to evaluate the approach and the tool as well as the component model itself. One study shows that both the component model and the services provided by the tool result in very modest and predictable run-time overheads. The other study, evaluating the effects on productivity and quality of using the approach in a software development project, did not produce quantitative evidence, but concludes that the approach is promising and identifies possible adjustments to it and opportunities for further studies.
A Task-Centered Instructional Strategy.

AbstractBased on a review of instructional design models, previous papers identified first principles of instruction. These principles prescribe a cycle of instruction consisting of activation, demonstration, application, and integration. These instructional phases are best implemented in the context of real-world tasks. A Pebble-in-the-Pond approach to instructional development prescribes a task-centered, content-first instructional design procedure, which implements these first principles in the resulting instructional products. This conceptual paper elaborates the component analysis and instructional strategy phases of this instructional design model. This paper also integrates previous instructional strategy prescriptions from Component Display Theory with the content components of knowledge objects. The strategy for teaching within the context of a whole task consists of applying strategy components to these various knowledge components in a way that enables learners to see their interrelationships a.