Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A two-stage acquisition scheme based on multiple correlator outputs for UWB signals

In ultra-wideband (UWB) channels, the signal energy in the acquisition receiver spreads over correlator outputs due to rich multipaths, making the output of each correlator have only a small portion of the total energy. To enhance the acquisition performance for UWB signals by exploiting the signals spread over a number of correlator outputs, this paper proposes a two-stage acquisition scheme. In the proposed scheme, decision variables are formed by combining a multiple of correlator outputs, allowing it possible to make use of the signal energy spread over the outputs jointly. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can provide a gain of about 0.6dB over the conventional schemes in various UWB channel environments.
First quasi-Lagrangian in situ measurements of Antarctic Polar springtime ozone: observed ozone loss rates from the Concordiasi long-duration balloon campaign

Abstract. We present ozone measurements made using state-of-the-art ultraviolet photometers onboard three long-duration stratospheric balloons launched as part of the Concordiasi campaign in austral spring 2010. Ozone loss rates calculated by matching air parcels sampled at different times and places during the polar spring are in agreement with rates previously derived from ozonesonde measurements, for the vortex average, ranging between 2 and 7 ppbv per sunlit hour or between 25 and 110 ppbv per day. However, the geographical coverage of these long-duration stratospheric balloon platforms provides new insights into the temporal and spatial patterns of ozone loss over Antarctica. Very large ozone loss rates of up to 230 ppbv per day (16 ppbv per sunlit hour) are observed for air masses that are downwind of the Antarctic Peninsula and/or over the East Antarctic region. The ozone loss rate maximum downstream of the Antarctic Peninsula region is consistent with high PSC occurrence from CALIPSO and large ClO abundances from MLS satellite observations for 12–22 September 2010, and with a chemical box model simulation using JPL 2011 kinetics with full chlorine activation.
Optimizing Robotic Single Legged Locomotion with Reinforcement Learning

Humans and animals show a remarkable level of proficiency in their ways of locomotion. They exploit the dynamics of the whole body to perform a variety of motions such as jumping and running. The nature of legged robots raises big challenges for controlling these systems. High degrees of freedom (DOF) and highly nonlinear non-smooth dynamics (due to interaction with the environment) count amongst these difficulties. Our goal is to perform highly dynamic jumping and hopping maneuvers with a robotic leg while optimally exploiting the capabilities of the hardware in terms of maximum jump height, jump distance, and energy efficiency. We build on our platform ScarlETH [1], an articulated robotic leg which is electrically driven in the hip and knee joints by highly compliant Series Elastic Actuators (SEA) [2].
Standing-up control and ramp-climbing control of a spherical wheeled robot

This paper proposes a new type of spherical wheeled robot with an annular support leg. It can keep statically stable when powered off and automatically stand up with the assistance of the support leg when powered on. The stability of the robot at equilibrium is verified firstly using the planar simplified model. And the robot is proved to be controllable. Thus a double-closed loop control system is designed to stabilize the robot. Based on it, the standing-up control system and ramp-climbing control system are realized by changing control structure and using fuzzy control strategies. The design of the annular support leg, the experimental results and conclusions are also described in this paper.
The Reluctance of African-Americans to Engage in Therapy

Monique Williamson, M.S. University of Nebraska 2014 Advisor: Yan Xia This thesis is presented with the intent to explore the reasoning behind why members of the African-American culture are reluctant to enter into therapy. While the numbers of African-Americans who enter therapy continue to rise there are still persistent stigmas that make therapy a taboo option for solving problems. The goal of this qualitative study is to identify (1) if there truly is reluctance in the African-American community, (2) why the African-American community is reluctant, (3) what are the stigmas regarding mental health and therapy from the perspectives of American participants, and (4) what would help break the barriers to professional help seeking. There were two themes that are important to the body of knowledge surrounding African American reluctance to enter therapy. The first is African Americans are reluctant to enter therapy and seek professional treatment because of cultural norms that have been propagated into African American thinking and the second is fear of discrimination and race is not a factor that prevents African Americans from seeking therapy. Acknowledgements I have been extremely lucky to be surrounded by loving and supportive people. Mommy and Daddy thank you for being the best parents anyone could ask for. I realize now that every lesson you enforced had a purpose and you made me a better woman. Tyrone, you are my best friend, as well as my brother. I am so grateful that I simply get to be your sister. You are my conscious when I lose my way and I love you for it. Grandma, I especially want to thank you for establishing my spiritual connection to God. There have been many times when I was distraught and turning to the Bible passages that you always had me read got me through the tough times. My spirituality is the base on which I have built my life. To the rest of my family, you all played a significant part and helped me on my way; I am humbled by your love. To my cohort, I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to share this experience with. You were always there to help and support me and I will always cherish the time we had together and your friendship. Dr. Reisgbig and Dr. Goosby thank you so much for your support and wisdom. Everything you suggested made my thesis so much better. Last I want to thank my advisor, Dr. Yan Xia. You saw my potential and pushed me to make sure that I exposed it to the world. I am eternally thankful that I was placed in your care during this process. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract Acknowledgements Chapters
RNA-Mediated Programming of Developmental Genome Rearrangements in Paramecium tetraurelia

ABSTRACT The germ line genome of ciliates is extensively rearranged during development of the somatic macronucleus. Numerous sequences are eliminated, while others are amplified to a high ploidy level. In the Paramecium aurelia group of species, transformation of the maternal macronucleus with transgenes at high copy numbers can induce the deletion of homologous genes in sexual progeny, when a new macronucleus develops from the wild-type germ line. We show that this trans-nuclear effect correlates with homology-dependent silencing of maternal genes before autogamy and with the accumulation of ∼22- to 23-nucleotide (nt) RNA molecules. The same effects are induced by feeding cells before meiosis with bacteria containing double-stranded RNA, suggesting that small interfering RNA-like molecules can target deletions. Furthermore, experimentally induced macronuclear deletions are spontaneously reproduced in subsequent sexual generations, and reintroduction of the missing gene into the variant macronucleus restores developmental amplification in sexual progeny. We discuss the possible roles of the ∼22- to 23-nt RNAs in the targeting of deletions and the implications for the RNA-mediated genome-scanning process that is thought to determine developmentally regulated rearrangements in ciliates.
MAXDET: Software for Determinant Maximization Problems User's Guide

Copyright c 1996 by Shao-Po Wu, Lieven Vandenberghe and Stephen Boyd. Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose without fee is hereby granted, provided that this entire notice is included in all copies of any software which is or includes a copy or modi cation of this software and in all copies of the supporting documentation for such software. This software is being provided \as is", without any express or implied warranty. In particular, the authors do not make any representation or warranty of any kind concerning the merchantability of this software or its tness for any particular purpose.
An Experiment in Automatic Generation of Protocols from HMSCs

We discuss the automatic protocol generation of protocols that can have a specification described by a local High level Message Sequence Chart (HMSC). We will use a synthesis method that allows to any local HMSC to be correctly implementable by adding some stamping information. And we will demonstrate its use by explaining in details the automatic generation of the operational model described by Communicationg Finite Automata of a simple transmission protocol based message's fragmentation, as well as its generated Promela code by our SOFAT tool.
Sex-ratio optimization with helpers at the nest

In many cooperatively breeding animals, offspring produced earlier in life assist their parents in raising subsequent broods. Such helping behaviour is often confined to offspring of one sex. Sex-allocation theory predicts that parents overproduce offspring of the helping sex, but the expected degree of sex-ratio bias was thought to depend on specific details of female and male life histories, hampering empirical tests of the theory. Here we demonstrate the following two theories. (i) If all parents produce the same sex ratio, the evolutionarily stable sex ratio obeys a very simple rule that is valid for a general class of life histories. The rule predicts that the expected sex-ratio bias depends on the product of only two parameters which are relatively easily measured: the average number of helping offspring per nest and the relative contribution to offspring production per helper. (ii) If the benefit of helping varies between parents, and parents facultatively adjust the sex ratio accordingly, then the population sex ratio is not necessarily biased towards the helping sex. For example, in line with empirical evidence, if helpers are produced under favourable conditions and parents do not adjust their clutch size to the number of helpers, then a surplus of the non-helping sex is expected.
A Model-based Approach for Combined Tracking and Resolution Enhancement of Faces in Low Resolution Video

Wide area surveillance situations require many sensors, thus making the use of highresolution cameras prohibitive because of high costs and exponential growth in storage. Small and low cost CCTV cameras may produce poor quality video, and high-resolution CCD cameras in wide area surveillance can still yield low-resolution images of the object of interest, due to large distances from the camera. All these restrictions and limitations pose problems for subsequent tasks such as face recognition or vehicle registration plate recognition. Super-Resolution (SR) offers a way to increase the resolution of such images or videos and is well studied in the last decades (Farsiu et al., 2004; Park et al., 2003; Baker & Kanade 2002). However, most existing SR algorithms are not suitable for video sequences of faces because a face is a non-planar and non-rigid object, violating the underlying assumptions of many SR algorithms (Baker & Kanade, 1999). A common SR algorithm is the super-resolution optical flow (Baker & Kanade, 1999). Each frame is interpolated to twice its size and optical flow is used to register previous and consecutive frames, which are then warped into a reference coordinate system. The superresolved image is calculated as the average across these warped frames. However, the first step of interpolation introduces artificial random noise which is difficult to remove. Secondly, the optical flow is calculated between previous and consecutive frames preventing its use as an online stream processing algorithm. Also, accurate image registration requires precise motion estimation (Barreto et al., 2005) which in turn affects the quality of the super-resolved image as reported in (Zhao & Sawhney, 2002). Optical flow in general fails in low textured areas and causes problems in registering non-planar and nonrigid objects in particular. Recent techniques like (Gautama & van Hulle, 2002) calculate subpixel optical flow between several consecutive frames (with non-planar and non-rigid moving objects) however they are unable to estimate an accurate dense flow field, which is needed for accurate image warping. Although solving all the issues in a general case is difficult, as the general problem of superresolution is numerically ill-posed and computationally complex (Farsiu et al., 2004), we address a specific issue: Simultaneous tracking and increasing super-resolution of known object types, in our case faces, acquired by low resolution video. The use of an object-specific 3D mesh overcomes the issues with optic flow failures in low textured images. We avoid the O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w . in te ch w eb . o rg
TPI – a model for Test Process Improvement

Testing is often considered as an expensive and uncontrollable process. Testing takes too much time, costs a lot more than planned, and offers insufficient conception of the quality of the test process. Therefore, the quality of the information system and the risks for the business can be difficult to determine. Many organisations realise that improving the test process can solve these problems. However, in practice it turns out to be hard to define what steps to take for improving and controlling the process, and in what order. The Test Process Improvement (TPI) model has been developed based on the practical knowledge and experiences of test process development. TPI offers a viewpoint in the maturity of the test processes within the organisation. Based on this understanding the model helps to define gradual and controllable test process improvement steps. In this paper the contents and the structure of the TPI model is introduced. Also some general aspects of the test process improvement and its challenges are discussed.
Resilient and coherence preserving dissemination of dynamic data using cooperating peers

The focus of our work is to design and build a dynamic data distribution system that is coherence-preserving, i.e. the delivered data must preserve associated coherence requirements (the user-specified bound on tolerable imprecision) and resilient to failures. To this end, we consider a system in which a set of repositories cooperate with each other and the sources, forming a peer-to-peer network. In this system, necessary changes are pushed to the users so that they are automatically informed, about changes of interest. We present techniques 1) to determine when to push an update from one repository to another for coherence maintenance, 2) to construct an efficient dissemination tree for propagating changes from sources to cooperating repositories, and 3) to make the system resilient to failures. An experimental evaluation using real world traces of dynamically changing data demonstrates that 1) careful dissemination of updates through a network of cooperating repositories can substantially lower the cost of coherence maintenance, 2) unless designed carefully, even push-based systems experience considerable loss in fidelity due to message delays and processing costs, 3) the computational and communication cost of achieving resiliency is made to be low, and 4) surprisingly, adding resiliency actually improve fidelity even in the absence of failures.
1500-km transmission of 100-Gb/s coherent PM-QPSK with 10 cascaded 50-GHz wavelength selective switches

We demonstrate experimentally penalty-free transmission of 127-Gb/s coherent PM-QPSK signals through 10 cascaded 50-GHz commercial WSS over 1500-km SMF. Simulation results show that more than 40 cascades of such 50-GHz liquid-crystal based WSS is feasible.
Hedging and Pricing Options { using Machine Learning {

Options hedging has important applications in risk management. In its most simple form, options hedging is a trading strategy in a security and a risk-free bank account. An option written on the security is hedged by this strategy if the strategy is self-financing, and replicates the price of the option at all times and in all states of the world. In the simple Black Scholes model, where only one source of uncertainty is present, it can be shown that such strategies do exist and an analytical expression can be found for the proportion of wealth that should be invested in the underlying security. For an options seller as well as an options buyer, this trading strategy is important to know, since being short the option but long the hedging strategy or vice versa allows the seller/buyer to eliminate the risk associated with selling/buying the option. In a real life setting, many of the BlackScholes assumptions are violated. There are many sources of risk and agents incur transaction costs, so a perfect hedging strategy cannot be expected to exist. A more realistic approach for an options trader is to minimize, not eliminate, their risk by rebalancing their portfolio discretely. The size of the time steps between adjustments would then depend on the volatility of the market, the size of the portfolio, and the size of the transaction costs incurred at each trading round. A discretely rebalanced trading strategy will only approximately hedge the option, and it is not immediately clear how to choose the proportion of wealth to invest in the underlying security at each trade. If we abstract away from choosing the size of the time steps between portfolio adjustments, we are left with an interesting machine learning problem: How do we optimally choose the proportion of wealth to invest in the security, the so called delta, ∆, so that the value of our portfolio at the next readjustment point in time is as close as possible to the actual options price.
Improving the characterization of the alternative hypothesis via kernel discriminant analysis for likelihood ratio-based speaker verification

The performance of a likelihood ratio-based speaker verification system is highly dependent on modeling of the target speaker’s voice (the null hypothesis) and characterization of non-target speakers’ voices (the alternative hypothesis). To better characterize the ill-defined alternative hypothesis, this study proposes a new likelihood ratio measure based on a compositestructure Gaussian mixture model, the so-called GMM2. Motivated by the combined use of a variety of background models to represent the alternative hypothesis, GMM2 is designed with an inner set of mixture weights connected to the significance of each individual Gaussian density, and an outer set of mixture weights connected to the significance of each individual background model. Through the use of kernel discriminant analysis namely, Kernel Fisher Discriminant (KFD) or Support Vector Machine (SVM), GMM2 is trained in such a manner that the utterances of the null hypothesis can be optimally separated from those of the alternative hypothesis.
Hidden Costs of Graphical User Interfaces: Failure to Make the Transition from Menus and Icon Toolbars to Keyboard Shortcuts

Graphical interfaces allow users to issue commands using pull-down menus, icon toolbars, and keyboard shortcuts. Menus and icon toolbars are easier to learn, whereas keyboard shortcuts are more efficient. It would seem natural for users to migrate from the use of easy-to-learn menu and icon methods to the more efficient method of keyboard shortcuts as they gain experience. To investigate the extent to which this transition takes place, 251 experienced users of Microsoft Word were given a questionnaire assessing their choice of methods for the most frequently occurring commands. Contrary to our expectations, most experienced users rarely used the efficient keyboard shortcuts, favoring the use of icon toolbars instead. A second study was done to verify that keyboard shortcuts are, indeed, the most efficient method. Six participants performed common commands using menu selection, icon toolbars, and keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts were, as expected, the most efficient. These studies show that even experienced users are inefficient in their use of graphical interfaces. One possible way to improve user efficiency is for training programs to provide a roadmap for users to make the transition from using pull-down menus and clicking icon toolbars to issuing keyboard shortcuts.
Metaphoric Transfer Effect in Information Visualization Using Glyphs

Metaphor is the underlying mechanism of information communication. Although metaphors are ubiquitous in information visualization designs, different connotations influence users' information processing dissimilarly. However, visual metaphors imply interfering attributes caused by the source concepts, and lead to backfire effects on users' inferences. Understanding the pros and cons of metaphoric transfer effect in information visualization would help optimizing visualization designs, and improve efficiency and accuracy of information processing. This study empirically examines how metaphors influence different activities of information processing, including comprehension, inference and judgment in information visualization. Metaphors illustrating strongly implying semantic meanings in source domain can improve both the user's conceptual fluency in information comprehension, and the rate of correctness in information searching.
Measuring similarity of malware behavior

Malicious software (malware) represents a major threat for computer systems of almost all types. In the past few years the number of prevalent malware samples has increased dramatically due to the fact that malware authors started to deploy morphing (aka obfuscation) techniques in order to hinder detection of such polymorphic malware by anti-malware products. Using these techniques numerous variants of a malware can be generated. All these variants have a different syntactic representation while providing almost the same functionality and showing similar behavior. In order to effectively detect polymorphic malware it is advantageous (if not required) to know which malware samples are variants of a particular malware. Respective approaches for determining this relation between malware samples automatically are currently investigated by a number of researchers. A prerequisite for assessing this relation based on particular features of malware samples is an appropriate similarity or distance measure. In particular a number of approaches for clustering malware samples have been recently published. Thereby different similarity measures are used but without thoroughly discussing their choice. So it is an unanswered question which similarity measures are appropriate for determining respective relations between malware samples. To answer this question we study different distance measures in detail and discuss desirable properties of a distance measure for this particular purpose. We focus on behavioral features of malware and compare and experimentally evaluate different distance measures for malware behavior. Based on our results we identify a most appropriate distance measure for grouping malware samples based on similar behavior.