Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scene text character recognition based on image-to-class distance metric learning

With the increasing needs from a variety of real world applications like context retrieval and aid reading, scene text recognition is attracting more and more attention from the computer vision community. Scene text character (STC) recognition plays an important role in this task. However, recognition of STC is a challenging task due to a series of problems, like different illumination conditions, heavy occlusions and complex backgrounds. STC recognition can be further divided into two stages: feature representation and multi-class classification. Most work have been done to find better feature representation. In this paper, we focus on the stage of multi-class classification and propose a novel method names KNN based image-to-class distance metric learning (T2CDML). We first implement a global histogram of oriented gradients (GHOG) descriptor for feature representation. Then the KNN based I2CDML method is introduced to deal with the STC classification. Our KNN based I2CDML is robust to high intra-class variations. Besides, the proposed method supports incremental learning. To better evaluate our method, we conduct a series of experiments on two benchmark datasets, CHARS74K and ICDAR2003CH. Compared with other existing methods, our experimental results on these two datasets demonstrate very promising performance of the proposed method on recognizing characters in complex natural scenes.
Haar-Like Filtering with Center-Clipped Emphasis for Speech Detection in Sensornet

The use of haar-like filtering for resourced-constrained speech detection in sensornet application is explored. The simple haar-like filters having variable filter width and shift width are trained to learn appropriate filter parameters from the training samples to detect speech. To further refine the accuracy, the center-clipped emphasis is proposed as a new degree of freedom for more adaptive Haar-like filter designs. Our method yielded speech/nonspeech classification accuracy of 98.33% for the input length of 0.1s. Compared with high performance feature extraction method MFCC (Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficient), the proposed haar-like filtering can be approximately 98.40% efficient in terms of the amount of add and multiply computation while capable of achieving the error rate of only 1.63% relative to MFCC.
MIS Project Teams: An Investigation of Cognitive Style Implications

A profusion of technology is insufficient to implement effective computer systems without the full utilization of human resources to develop such systems. The issue of fully developing and utilizing available human resources is currently receiving careful scrutiny in the MIS literature. One methodology for fully utilizing human resources has been maximizing productivity by stressing team effort. This research focuses on evaluating the systems development activities of two MIS project teams. Empirical evidence was gathered from interviews with MIS personnel and key users concerning strengths/weaknesses of the two project teams. Analysis was performed to determine the personality characteristics (as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) of the MIS staff. The results of this analysis indicated a void of certain personality styles in project team one. This void correlated with weaknesses ascertained from the interview data for project team one. Project team two, with all four personality types represented, was evaluated as very successful. Recommendations are made for assembling project teams based on these findings.
On Persistence in Latin American Mutual Fund Performance

Persistence in the performance of US mutual funds investing in Latin America is examined using a sample free of survivorship-bias covering the period 2000-2010. Strong evidence of persistence is found, especially more recent years. Overall, Latin American funds performing well (poorly) in any quarter tend to outperform (underperform) the market the following month to a higher degree than what has been documented for US and other emerging market funds. The persisting positive abnormal returns of previously wellperforming funds could be a sign of the relative inefficiency in the Latin American equity markets which would offer fund managers more opportunities to exploit market inconsistencies.
Code Structure Visualization

This thesis describes a tool that helps programmers to get insight in software projects and also helps them to manage projects. The tool, called Code Structure Visualizer (CSV), visualizes the structure of source code by augmenting a textual representation of source code with a graphical representation of the structure. The structure is represented by drawing shaded cushions for each syntactic construct on top of the textual layout. The tool also provides means of interactively navigating and querying source code. The information used in visualizing the structure of source code is extracted from the code using a specially built fact extractor. The design of this fact extractor is also described in this thesis.
The forgotten Americans

Does the American Dream still exist when nearly 30 million Americans live in families in which workers find a paycheck and poverty in the same envelope? Just as Michael Harrington's The Other America shocked the nation with its disclosure of poverty in the 1960s, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy's The Forgotten Americans exposes the breadth of poverty that exists today among responsible, hardworking Americans. At the end of the prosperous 1980s, the number of Americans living in working-poor families equaled the combined populations of the nation's 25 largest cities. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this situation is not largely confined to minorities, women, the undereducated or young adults. It is commonplace for workers from nearly all segments of society to be employed in low-paying jobs even during good economic times. The Forgotten Americans reveals the betrayal of the hopes and expectations of these industrious people through broad-based factual evidence and the real-life stories of individual families. Their hardship has been ignored at enormous cost to them and the country. Numerous problems at the forefront of national debate-welfare dependency, crime, and the inadequate performance of many American school children-are closely connected to the existence of working poverty on a large scale. Unless corrective action is taken, the country risks the creation of a deeply fractured society arising from the despair of millions of employed people who have discovered that practicing the work ethic yields little reward. The problem is staggering and often misunderstood by politicians, the media, and the public. Once Schwarz and Volgy have outlined the implications of this social and economic tragedy, they propose effective solutions that require simple changes to existing policies-solutions that are politically feasible and can be accomplished without new taxes.
Multiple integral representation for functionals of Dirichlet processes

We point out that a proper use of the Hoeffding--ANOVA decomposition for symmetric statistics of finite urn sequences, previously introduced by the author, yields a decomposition of the space of square-integrable functionals of a Dirichlet--Ferguson process, written $L^2(D)$, into orthogonal subspaces of multiple integrals of increasing order. This gives an isomorphism between $L^2(D)$ and an appropriate Fock space over a class of deterministic functions. By means of a well-known result due to Blackwell and MacQueen, we show that each element of the $n$th orthogonal space of multiple integrals can be represented as the $L^2$ limit of $U$-statistics with degenerate kernel of degree $n$. General formulae for the decomposition of a given functional are provided in terms of linear combinations of conditioned expectations whose coefficients are explicitly computed. We show that, in simple cases, multiple integrals have a natural representation in terms of Jacobi polynomials. Several connections are established, in particular with Bayesian decision problems, and with some classic formulae concerning the transition densities of multiallele diffusion models, due to Littler and Fackerell, and Griffiths. Our results may also be used to calculate the best approximation of elements of $L^2(D)$ by means of $U$-statistics of finite vectors of exchangeable observations.
A graph based data mining method for collaborative learning space in learning commons

A graph based data mining method, which discovers automatically usage patterns from user-to-user and user-to-object interactions in a collaborative learning space, is proposed. The proposal describes mathematically observed users, objects, and their interactions at a given time as a set of graphs (a usage pattern) whose node is a user or an object and edge is assigned depending on a physical distance between two nodes. It is validated that the proposal can provide useful data for interview planning and evidences for interview results. On the validation, detection of frequent local usage patterns, detection of rare spatial layouts among usage patterns, and grouping hours containing similar local usage patterns are demonstrated with the 324 pictures taken at the collaborative learning space in Chiba University Library.
Preliminary A New Perspective on the Canadian Manufacturing Innovation-Productivity Linkage

Empirical analysis on innovation often uses one of four indicators of innovation: R&D spending, patents, investment in machinery and equipment (M&E), and skilled workers. In this paper, we model innovation as an unobservable latent variable that underlies these four indicators. We then examine the relationship between innovation and productivity. We find that R&D, patents, skilled workers, and investment in M&E are all correlated with innovation. Our measure of innovation shows that most manufacturing industries became more innovative over the 1980-97 period. The pace of innovation accelerated in the 1990s for the electrical and electronic products industry. A regression analysis shows that innovation has a positive and statistically significant impact on productivity. It takes one to three years for innovation to generate an impact on productivity. Please send comments to Jianmin Tang, Micro Economic Policy Analysis Branch, Industry Canada, 5 Floor West, 235 Queen Street, Ottawa, Canada, K1A 0H5. Email: tang.jianmin@ic.gc. ca; Tel: 613-946-1621 * We thank Zhiqi Chen and Someshwar Rao for very helpful comments and suggestions. Views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of Industry Canada nor Statistics Canada.
Economic Development and the Organization of Production

How important is managerial talent in accounting for cross country income differences? We address this question using a model that distinguishes between workers human capital and managers human capital. In our model, the ablest people leverage their talent and this has important consequences for a countryâ€™s standard of livings. A key object for the existing literature argument is the returns to schooling. Once we distinguish between workers and managers: returns to schooling appear as profits rather than wages. We consider an overlapping generations economy where each individual chooses to be a manager or a worker depending on its human capital (as in Lucas, 1978), individual accumulate human capital both in school and on the job (as in Ben-Porath, 1967), and production occurs in teams where there is sorting between workers and managers (as in Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg, 2006). By nesting a model of managerial occupational choice and endogenous skill accumulation in a framework in which the span of control is endogenous, we develop a rich framework that yields a number of empirical implications. We find that (1) aggregate output is more sensitive to managerial talent than worker talent, (2) the span of control of managers is constrained by workers human capital, and (3) small variations in human capital can have large effects on wages and profits so that incentives to accumulate human capital at the top of the distribution are large. We calibrate the model to the US economy and show that it can rationalize simultaneously the life-cycle of wages of managers and workers as well as the life-cycle of firms. We then ask how much variations do we need to account for output per capita differences? Preliminary results show that modest distortions can lead to large income differences.
When is Enough, Enough? Market Reaction to Highly Dilutive Stock Option Plans and the Subsequent Impact on CEO Compensation

Early studies of market reaction to stock option plans have found positive increases in stock prices upon the announcement of these plans. However, since in the mid-1990's, shareholders have become increasingly critical of stock option plans, and voted against them in growing numbers. Are shareholders fed up with the continued growth in option compensation, and if so, what are boards of directors doing in response to these concerns? In this paper, we use data from the 1998 proxy season to reevaluate market reaction to management-sponsored proposals for stock option plans, the level of shareholder opposition to these plans, and the effect of this opposition on corporate boards' awards of CEO compensation in subsequent years. In the first half of the paper, we conduct an event study similar to those done for early stock option plans from the 1980's and early 1990's. However, we expect to find that the market will react differently to plans that exhibit the high levels of potential dilution of shareholder ownership and certain "shareholder unfriendly" aspects of the plans that make shareholders more likely to vote against such plans. Our findings support part of our hypothesis: we find that higher levels of potential dilution in executive-only plans result in significantly negative cumulative market adjusted returns in the 3-day period surrounding the proxy date, but that plans that include repricing provisions, permit executives to borrow money from the firm in order to exercise options, or that allow the issuance of restricted stock, do not experience significantly negative returns. In the second part of the paper, we present evidence regarding the factors that affect shareholder voting opposition to stock option plans and the impact of this opposition on subsequent CEO compensation. In cross-sectional regressions, we find a significantly negative relationship between the percentage vote against the option proposal and the percentage change in salary and in total pay from the 1999 to 1998 compensation years. We interpret this finding to support the idea that boards of directors respond to shareholder concerns about CEO option awards by reducing executive pay in the year after a high level of shareholder opposition.
A Complement to Enhanced Instruction Register File against Embedded Software Falsification

Instruction set randomization (ISR), which modifies or enhances instruction coding of processors, is one of the cost-effective techniques to obfuscate embedded software. Using an Instruction Register File (IRF) for ISR was proposed and explored, while the existing technique lacked a protection against falsification of software. This study presents a complementary table to the IRF named Instruction Rejection Register File (IRRF). It forces the processors to use some of the enhanced instruction codes given by the IRF, which are incomprehensible to attackers, rather than their original codes. According to our evaluation, a 512-entry IRRF covered up to 52.5% of the execution and its cost was additional 1.7% of logic and three RAM elements with 15% performance overhead.
QTL Analysis and Candidate Gene Mapping for the Polyphenol Content in Cider Apple

Polyphenols have favorable antioxidant potential on human health suggesting that their high content is responsible for the beneficial effects of apple consumption. They control the quality of ciders as they predominantly account for astringency, bitterness, color and aroma. In this study, we identified QTLs controlling phenolic compound concentrations and the average polymerization degree of flavanols in a cider apple progeny. Thirty-two compounds belonging to five groups of phenolic compounds were identified and quantified by reversed phase liquid chromatography on both fruit extract and juice, over three years. The average polymerization degree of flavanols was estimated in fruit by phloroglucinolysis coupled to HPLC. Parental maps were built using SSR and SNP markers and used for the QTL analysis. Sixty-nine and 72 QTLs were detected on 14 and 11 linkage groups of the female and male maps, respectively. A majority of the QTLs identified in this study are specific to this population, while others are consistent with previous studies. This study presents for the first time in apple, QTLs for the mean polymerization degree of procyanidins, for which the mechanisms involved remains unknown to this day. Identification of candidate genes underlying major QTLs was then performed in silico and permitted the identification of 18 enzymes of the polyphenol pathway and six transcription factors involved in the apple anthocyanin regulation. New markers were designed from sequences of the most interesting candidate genes in order to confirm their co-localization with underlying QTLs by genetic mapping. Finally, the potential use of these QTLs in breeding programs is discussed.
Integrating traffic estimation and dynamic channel reconfiguration in Wireless Mesh Networks

Careful Channel Assignment (CA) and Link Scheduling (LS), tuned to the traffic demand in the network, are required to efficiently utilize Multi-Channel Multi-Radio (MC-MR) Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). In a dynamic network, where the traffic demand keeps changing with time, we need to reconfigure the CA and LS to suit to the changing demands. But, a change in CA leads to disruption of traffic resulting in a less reliable and lossy network. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to evaluate the efficiency of channel reconfiguration by taking into consideration the two conflicting objectives of maximizing network throughput and minimizing the reconfiguration overhead. A channel reconfiguration scheme that takes into account the current state of the network can find a new CA with significantly less overhead caused by reconfiguration. We propose and evaluate polynomially bounded heuristic algorithms for performing demand-based and state aware channel reconfiguration. Further, in a highly dynamic network scenario, performing reconfiguration very frequently to suit every traffic demand will lead to high reconfiguration overhead. Whereas doing it less frequently will lead to underutilization of the network. Hence, we propose a scheme that employs prediction techniques to estimate the future traffic demands in order to reduce the frequency of reconfiguration considering the long term traffic demand and conduct simulation studies to evaluate this scheme.
The Dark Side of Trust

Gargiulo identifies three behavioural consequences of trust. First, trust is associated with lower levels of monitoring, vigilance and safeguards towards the behaviour of the trusted party. Second, trust is associated with higher levels of commitment to the relationship with the person or party being trusted. Finally, trust is associated with an expansion of the scale and scope of the exchange between the parties.
Mandates and Democracy: Subject Index

1. Elections, mandates, and representation 2. Electoral politics and economic policy in Latin America 3. Explaining policy switches 4. Are parties what's wrong with democracy in Latin America? : neoliberalism without mandates: citizens respond 5. Mandates and democratic theory 6. Summary, predictions, unsettled questions References.
Electrostatic Interactions of Fluorescent Molecules with Dielectric Interfaces Studied by Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy

Electrostatic interactions between dielectric surfaces and different fluorophores used in ultrasensitive fluorescence microscopy are investigated using objective-based Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (TIR-FCS). The interfacial dynamics of cationic rhodamine 123 and rhodamine 6G, anionic/dianionic fluorescein, zwitterionic rhodamine 110 and neutral ATTO 488 are monitored at various ionic strengths at physiological pH. As analyzed by means of the amplitude and time-evolution of the autocorrelation function, the fluorescent molecules experience electrostatic attraction or repulsion at the glass surface depending on their charges. Influences of the electrostatic interactions are also monitored through the triplet-state population and triplet relaxation time, including the amount of detected fluorescence or the count-rate-per-molecule parameter. These TIR-FCS results provide an increased understanding of how fluorophores are influenced by the microenvironment of a glass surface, and show a promising approach for characterizing electrostatic interactions at interfaces.
Adaptive Basis Scan by Wavelet Prediction for Single-Pixel Imaging

Single-pixel camera imaging is an emerging paradigm that allows high-quality images to be provided by a device only equipped with a single point detector. A single-pixel camera is an experimental setup able to measure the inner product of the scene under view—the image—with any user-defined pattern. Postprocessing a sequence of point measurements obtained with different patterns permits to recover spatial information, as it has been demonstrated by state-of-the-art approaches belonging to the compressed sensing framework. In this paper, a new framework for the choice of the patterns is proposed together with a simple and efficient image recovery scheme. Our goal is to overcome the computationally demanding $\ell _1$ -minimization of the compressed sensing. We propose to choose patterns among a wavelet basis in an adaptive fashion, which essentially relies onto the prediction of the significant wavelet coefficients’ location. More precisely, we adopt a multiresolution strategy that exploits the set of measurements acquired at coarse scales to predict the set of measurements to be performed at a finer scale. Prediction is based on a fast cubic interpolation in the image domain. A general formalism is given so that any kind of wavelets can be used, which enables one to adjust the wavelet to the type of images related to the desired application. Both simulated and experimental results demonstrate the ability of our technique to reconstruct biomedical images with improved quality compared with compressive-sensing-based recovery. Application to the real-time fluorescence imaging of biological tissues could benefit from the proposed method.
Extremality Properties of Some Diophantine Series

We study the convergence properties of the series Ψ s (α) := with respect to the values of the real numbers α and s, where ||x|| is the distance of x to . For example, when s ∊ (0, 1], the convergence of Ψ s (α) strongly depends on the Diophantine nature of α, mainly its irrationality exponent. We also conjecture that Ψ s (α) is minimal at √5 for s ∊ (0, 1], and we present evidence in favor of that conjecture. For s = 1, we formulate a more precise conjecture about the value of the abscissa uk where the Fk -partial sum of Ψ1(α) is minimal, Fk being the kth Fibonacci number. A similar study is made for the partial sums of the series , which we conjecture to be minimal at √2/2.