Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning thresholds for PV change detection from operators' labels

Page Views (PVs) are very crucial for search engines due to their close relationship to the revenue. When PVs change significantly, operators must be informed so that they can diagnose and fix the problem quickly, and prevent further loss. In reality, PVs can be counted in many ways (e.g., PVs originated from different ISPs), and different PVs are of different interest to operators (e.g., the PVs of a larger ISP is more important). As a result, different PVs often require different detection standards, or thresholds. However, attempts to tune a number of thresholds have been hampered by the cost of the manual effort involved. To address the above problem, we propose a practical framework, called PTL (practical threshold learning). Operators only need to provide a few simple labels about the detection results, then PTL will automatically tune the thresholds for different PVs. Using 4-month PVs from a global top search engine, our evaluation demonstrates that PTL can improve the accuracy of detection dramatically. More importantly, it introduces very little labeling overhead for operators. For example, when detecting the PVs of 103 ISPs, PTL can reduce the overall false negative rate from 96% to 9% using only 29 labels per week on average.
A Novel Optimum Data Duplication Approach for Soft Error Detection

Soft errors are a growing concern for computer reliability. To mitigate the effects of soft errors, a variety of software-based fault tolerance methodologies have been proposed for their low costs. Data duplication techniques have the advantage of flexible and general implementation with strong capacity for error detection. However, the trade-off between reliability, performance and memory overhead should be carefully considered before employing data duplication techniques. In this paper, we first introduce an analytical model, named PRASE (Program Reliability Analysis with Soft Errors), which is able to access the impact of soft errors for the reliability of a program. Furthermore, the analytical result of PRASE points out a factor about data reliability weight, which meters the criticality of data for the overall reliability of the target program. Based on PRASE, we propose a novel data duplication approach, called ODD, which can provide the optimum error coverage under system performance constraints. To illustrate the effectiveness of our method, we perform several fault injection experiments and performance evaluations on a set of simple benchmark programs using the SimpleScalar tool set.
Simulation and Modeling for Aging and Particle Shape Effect on Airflow
 Dynamics and Filtration Efficiency of Human Lung

The respiratory system undergoes various physiological and immunological changes with age. After birth, alveolization is one of the main factor associated with progressive growth of lung, which is relatively poorly analysed in respect of lung function. In this study we considered growth of lung caused by progressive increment in number of alveoli and simultaneously calculated its effect on airflow dynamics and filtration efficiency of human lung from childhood to age of 30. Incorporating the idea of filtration through lung with respect to age biofilter model is used by assuming porosity of lung varied with respect to number of alveoli and their surface area. Transportation and deposition properties of nanoparticles of various shapes during inhalation is taken under consideration by using particle shape factor. Generalized Navier Stokes equation is used for flow dynamics and finite difference scheme is used to solve the problem numerically. Simulation is done by using user defined code on MATLAB at very fine grid. Results indicate that the filtration efficiency of lung decreases as age increases from childhood to age of 30; additionally, nonspherical nanoparticles with high aspect ratio’s will take a longer time to be filterd from lung as compared to spherical nanoparticles of the same diameter.
Formal verification of timed systems: a survey and perspective

An overview of the current state of the art of formal verification of real-time systems is presented. We discuss commonly accepted models, specification languages, verification frameworks, state-space representation schemes, state-space construction procedures, reduction techniques, pioneering tools, and finally some new related issues. We also make a few comments according to our experience with verification tool design and implementation.
Bayesian Optimal Approximate Message Passing to Recover Structured Sparse Signals

We present a novel compressed sensing recovery algorithm - termed Bayesian Optimal Structured Signal Approximate Message Passing (BOSSAMP) - that jointly exploits the prior distribution and the structured sparsity of a signal that shall be recovered from noisy linear measurements. Structured sparsity is inherent to group sparse and jointly sparse signals. Our algorithm is based on approximate message passing that poses a low complexity recovery algorithm whose Bayesian optimal version allows to specify a prior distribution for each signal component. We utilize this feature in order to establish an iteration-wise extrinsic group update step, in which likelihood ratios of neighboring group elements provide soft information about a specific group element. Doing so, the recovery of structured signals is drastically improved. We derive the extrinsic group update step for a sparse binary and a sparse Gaussian signal prior, where the nonzero entries are either one or Gaussian distributed, respectively. We also explain how BOSSAMP is applicable to arbitrary sparse signals. Simulations demonstrate that our approach exhibits superior performance compared to the current state of the art, while it retains a simple iterative implementation with low computational complexity.
Twofold pictorial experience, propositional imagining and recognitional concepts: a critique of Walton’s visual make-believe

Kendall Walton has defined pictorial experience as a visual game of make-believe, which consists in imagining our actual seeing the representational prop to be a fictional face to face seeing the represented subject. To maintain a twofold awareness of these two visual aspects while avoiding a phenomenal clash between them, Walton needs to characterise visual make-believe as involving a propositional imagining. Unfortunately, the strategy does not seem to be successful. Whether propositional imagination is taken as a simple descriptive report or as conceptually penetrating our perception, Walton’s account is not able to secure the visual and the twofold character of pictorial recognition.
Fast subset scan for multivariate event detection

We present new subset scan methods for multivariate event detection in massive space–time datasets. We extend the recently proposed ‘fast subset scan’ framework from univariate to multivariate data, enabling computationally efficient detection of irregular space–time clusters even when the numbers of spatial locations and data streams are large. For two variants of the multivariate subset scan, we demonstrate that the scan statistic can be efficiently optimized over proximity‐constrained subsets of locations and over all subsets of the monitored data streams, enabling timely detection of emerging events and accurate characterization of the affected locations and streams. Using our new fast search algorithms, we perform an empirical comparison of the Subset Aggregation and Kulldorff multivariate subset scans on synthetic data and real‐world disease surveillance tasks, demonstrating tradeoffs between the detection and characterization performance of the two methods. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Does Distance Protect Canadian Workers from Offshoring ?

DVANCES IN COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY make it possible for workers in India to supply business services to head offices in Canada. This has the potential to put Canadian service workers in direct competition with much lower paid Indian workers. However, the services trade, like the goods trade, is subject to strong distance effects, both geographic and cultural, implying that the remote supply of services remains limited. We investigate this proposition by deriving a gravity equation for the services trade and estimating it for a large sample of countries and different categories of the services trade. We find that distance costs are high for many types of commercial services and we observe them declining over time for some categories of services trade. Our estimates suggest that delivery costs create a significant advantage for Canadian workers relative to competing workers in distant countries.
Highly Integrated E-Band Direct Conversion Receiver

This paper presents a highly integrated 70-98 GHz direct conversion receiver with 3 stage LNA, x6 frequency multiplier with buffer amplifier, and IQ-mixer suitable for Eband radio communication. The LNA, x6 and IQ-mixer are also presented separately. The LNA covers 65 to 95 GHz with 15 dB gain and minimum 5.5 dB noise figure, x6 covers 71 to 91 GHz with 0 to 8 dBm output power and the IQ-mixer an RF frequency from 70 to 95 GHz and IF frequency from DC to 12 GHz with only 8 dB conversion loss and better than 15 dB image reject. The complete receiver circuit shows an RF bandwidth of 70 to 98 GHz, LO bandwidth of 75 to 92 GHz and IF bandwidth from DC to more than 12 GHz. The conversion gain is 3 to 6 dB with a noise figure of 5 to 7 dB, the image rejection 15 dB to as high as 28 dB, and the input 1 dB compression point -12 dBm.
Purpose, Pedagogy and Philosophy: “Being” an Online Lecturer

Instructing online has become an increasingly common aspect of a university lecturer’s role. While research has developed an understanding of the student learning experience, less attention has been paid to the role of the lecturer. This study observed the practice of university lecturers teaching in a range of undergraduate degree programmes in the United Kingdom. The lecturers’ purpose, pedagogy, and philosophy emerged in the dialogic patterns of the online space. Practice was shaped by the lecturers’ epistemological positioning and their cultural values and beliefs. The practice, which was observed across different modules, reflected the different positions lecturers took when they approached online teaching. The research highlights the way in which a lecturers’ purpose, pedagogy, and philosophy are reflected in their online facilitation.
INFLUENCE OF ACCULTURATION ON THE BRAND SELECTION OF THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN THE UK

It is found throughout the literature that culture is an important influence on consumer behaviour. Those people who migrate to another country belong to a different class of consumers, who is influenced by home or host culture simultenously. This study is aimed to explore the influence of acculturation on the brand choice of the South Asian immigrants in the UK. This study used a quantitative methodology to test a proposed model, developed with the help of past studies. A survey instrument was developed to collect data from the South Asian immigrant population living in the UK. Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses. The study found that various personal factors like length of stay in the UK and income positively influence the acculturation, while acculturation decreasing with the increasing age among the South Asians in the UK.This study provides an insight about looking beyond the demographic variables while developing strategies to attract the market segments. The brand marketing management in the UK and other western countries while attracting the diaspora should understand the level of acculturation of their target market. The retailers may also conider the consumer cultural profile while deciding ther product mix.
Analysis and Design of a 60 GHz Wideband Voltage-Voltage Transformer Feedback LNA

To cope with the problem of instability and imperfect reverse isolation, a millimeter-wave voltage-voltage transformer feedback low noise amplifier has been analyzed, designed, and measured in CMOS 65 nm technology. Analytical formulae are derived for describing the stability, gain, and noise in this circuit topology. An analogy with the classic concept of Masons's invariant is used to illustrate how the transformer feedback provides the required reverse isolation in the LNA. Based on the developed theoretical analysis, the circuit is implemented as a fully integrated 60 GHz two-stage differential low noise amplifier in 65 nm CMOS technology. A flat gain of 10 dB is achieved over the entire 6 GHz bandwidth. The measured noise figure is 3.8 dB.
Design and Communication Complexity of Self-Stabilizing Protocols Resilient to Byzantine Faults

Fault-tolerance is one of the most important properties in designing distributed systems. Self-stabilization guarantees that the system eventually behaves according to its specification regardless of the initial configuration. Byzantine fault resilience guarantees that the system behaves according to its specification in the presence of unbounded number of arbitrary malicious actions at Byzantine faulty processes. There exist many works that shows combinations of these two fault tolerance properties. This paper surveys the strategies of existing Byzantine fault resilient and self-stabilizing distributed protocols and presents complexity issues introduced by recent works.
Healing data races on-the-fly

Testing of concurrent software is extremely difficult. Despite all the progress in the testing and verification technology, concurrent bugs, the most common of which are deadlocks and races, make it to the field. This paper describes a set of techniques, implemented in a tool called ConTest, allowing concurrent programs to self-heal at run-time. Concurrent bugs have the very desirable property for healing that some of the interleaving produce correct results while in others bugs manifest. Healing concurrency problems is about limiting, or changing the probability of interleaving, such that bugs will be seen less. When healing concurrent programs, if a deadlock does not result from limiting the interleaving, we are sure that the result of the healed program could have been in the original program and therefore no new functional bug has been introduced. In this initial work which deals with different types of data races, we suggest three types of healing mechanisms: (1) changing the probability of interleaving by introducing sleep or yield statements or by changing thread priorities, (2) removing interleaving using synchronisation commands like locking and unlocking certain mutexes or waits and notifies, and (3) removing the result of "bad interleaving" by replacing the value of variables by the one that "should" have been taken. We also classify races according to the relevant healing strategies to apply.
Instability of word reading errors of typical and poor readers

We examined the instability of reading errors, that is whether a child reads the same word sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly, and whether typical readers differ in their instability from poor readers. With an interval of a few days, Dutch CVC words were read twice by typically developing first and second graders and reading-level matched poor readers. Error instability was considerable and second graders produced more unstable errors than first graders. Poor readers did not differ from typical readers, suggesting a developmental lag for poor readers. Of the word characteristics studied, frequency was the strongest predictor: the higher word frequency, the higher error instability. Our study indicates that error instability can be considered as an indicator of the transition from incompetence to reading competence.
Comparative and adaptation of step detection and step length estimators to a lateral belt worn accelerometer

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that predominantly alter patients' motor performance and compromises the speed, the automaticity and fluidity of natural movements. The patients fluctuate between periods in which they can move almost normally for some hours (ON state) and periods with motor disorders (OFF state). Gait properties are affected by the motor state of a patient: reduced stride length, reduced gait speed, increased stride width etc. The ability to assess the motor states (ON/OFF) on a continuous basis for long time without disturbing the patients' daily life activities is an important component of PD management. An accurate report of motor states could allow clinics to adjust the medication regimen to avoid OFF periods. The real-time monitoring will also allow an online treatment by combining, for instance, with automatic drug-administration pump doses. Many studies have attempted to extract gait properties through a belt-worn single tri-axial accelerometer. In this paper, a user friendly position is proposed to place the accelerometer and three step detection methods and three step length estimators are compared considering the proposed sensor placement in signals obtained from healthy volunteers and PD patients. Adaptation methods to these step length estimators are also proposed and compared. The comparison shows that the adapted estimators improve the performance with the new proposed step detection method and reduce errors in respect of the original methods.
Evaluating heuristic for EG portal design model

The effective use of an E-Government (EG) Portal depends on the ability of people to utilize electronic services. One of the main challenges in developing the EG Portal is selecting usability design guidelines that addressed the overall EG functions. Most government agencies tend to design their portal based on existing guidelines that are not directly related to the EG context. In this study, the basic functions and characteristics of the EG Portal were analyzed. The concept of usability, the design guidelines, and the heuristic were reviewed. A set of questionnaires was distributed to users to access its accuracy of the proposed heuristic for design model of EG portal. The result indicates that the heuristic in the design model could reduce the usability problems in the portal.
Oversegmentation avoidance in watershed-based algorithms for color images

The article presents own implementation of well-known region-based image segmentation method, the watershed transform. The implementation was intended for color image processing. In its original version, the watershed is a parameter-free algorithm, which often performs too accurate segmentation for a query image. Our modification introduces the second pass to the method that removes some irrelevant splitting lines and thus merges the regions. The algorithm was tested on microscopic histological images for cancer cell detection.
Parametric Channel Prediction for Narrowband MIMO Systems Using Polarized Antenna Arrays

A novel prediction scheme for polarized narrowband MIMO channels is proposed in this paper. The prediction scheme is based on estimation of the parameters of a double directional polarized propagation model. The proposed algorithm transforms the channel impulse response matrix in such a manner that a multidimensional extension of the ESPRIT algorithm can be utilized to jointly estimate the angles of arrival, angles of departure, Doppler shifts and complex polarimetric weights of the dominant multipath components. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms repeated application of one dimensional ESPRIT based approach with similar computational complexity.
A GENERIC LIBRARY FOR FREQUENT PATTERN MINING

A semi-automatic shift implementation system (100) for a manually shifted transmission (10) having gear ratios selectively engaged and disengaged by means of jaw clutches (48, 50) selectively positioned by a shift lever (57). The system will sense a transmission neutral condition, operation of a manually actuated switch (120), and a target gear ratio (GRT) and, upon sensing a transmission neutral condition and continued actuation of said switch, will automatically cause the system engine (102) to achieve a substantially synchronous speed (ES=IS=((OS*GRT)+/-E) for engaging the target ratio.
Semi-automatic update of applications in response to library changes

Software libraries provide leverage largely because they are used by many applications. As Parnas (1972, 1979), Lampson (1984) and others have noted, stable interfaces to libraries isolate the application from changes in the libraries. That is, as long as there is no change in a library's syntax or semantics, applications can use updated libraries simply by importing and linking the new version. However, libraries are indeed changed from time to time and the tedious job of adapting the application source to the library interface changes becomes a burden to multitudes of programmers. The paper introduces an approach and a toolset intended to reduce these costs. Specifically, in the authors' approach, a library maintainer annotates changed functions with rules that are used to generate tools that will update the applications that use the updated libraries. Thus, in exchange for a small added amount of work by the library maintainer, costs for each application maintainer can be reduced. They present the basic approach, describe the tools that support the approach, and discuss the strengths and limitation of the approach.
Passive Dynamic Walking

There exists a class of two-legged machines for which walking is a natural dynamic mode. Once started on a shallow slope, a machine of this class will settle into a steady gait quite comparable to human walking, without active control or en ergy input. Interpretation and analysis of the physics are straightforward; the walking cycle, its stability, and its sensi tivity to parameter variations are easily calculated. Experi ments with a test machine verify that the passive walking effect can be readily exploited in practice. The dynamics are most clearly demonstrated by a machine powered only by gravity, but they can be combined easily with active energy input to produce efficient and dextrous walking over a broad range of terrain.
The Role of Features and Context on Suicide Ideation Detection

There is a growing body of work studying suicide ideation, expressions of intentions to kill oneself, on social media. We explore the problem of detecting such ideation on Twitter, focusing on the impact of a set of features drawn from the literature and on the role of discussion context for this task. Our experiments show a signiﬁcant improvement upon the previously published results for the O’Dea et al. (2015) dataset on suicide ideation. Interestingly, we found that stylistic features helped while social media metadata features did not. Furthermore, discussion context was useful. To further understand the contributions of these different features and of discussion context, we present a discussion of our experiments in varying the feature representations, and examining their effects on suicide ideation detection on Twitter.
A Pre-Authentication Method for Secure Communications in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

We propose a pre-authentication method based on the scalable robust authentication protocol(SRAP). The SRAP features scalability and robustness by using group key signature system and R2V communications. Furthermore, it satisfies security issues such as confidentiality, privacy, and authentication, which are critical in VANETs environment, and outperforms previous researches. However, with SRAP, key request and authentication are repeatedly perform between a vehicle and an RSU, even if the vehicle is authenticated by the previous RSU. Our scheme modifies the key request stage of the SRAP and reduces the number of packets transmitted in the key reuqest stage which means that delays related to making and transmitting packets are reduced. In addition, calculation time is also decreased by using symmetric key encryption function. In this respect, our scheme makes efficient authentication process.