Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Comparison of Real and Virtual Worlds for Human Factors Experimentation

This paper considers the use of virtual reality (VR) as a general purpose experimental tool, particularly in the area of human factors experimentation. A comparison of VR and conventional experiments is given in the context of current studies of the cognitive effects of visual delays, and conclusions are drawn. The main findings of this paper are that using VR as an experimental tool allows automation of data capture and yields large amounts of statistically clean data. In addition VR allows the experimenter to refine and extend experimental environments as required, although this does require a large initial investment of resources.
A new sub-300mV 8T SRAM cell design in 90nm CMOS

In this paper, we present a new 8 transistors (8T) design for Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) cell. In this design during write operation one of the inverters of the cell becomes weaker so that changing the stored data in the cell is more likely in write operation. This leads to increase the write ability of the cell. We used one PMOS and one NMOS transistor to float supply voltage and ground rails and therefore making the cell weaker. By separating the write and read access transistors, we could size them individually so the read Static Noise Margin (SNM) and read stability can be increased. Our design satisfies 4. 5σ criterion for writing and reading at supply voltage of 300mV and 3. 7σ at 250mV. Simulation results in 90nm technology show that the proposed 8T SRAM cell decreases write and read delays by 45% and 58% over conventional 6T SRAM cell at supply voltage of 500mV, where the power consumption for single write operation is decreased by 54%. Finally, the proposed 8T SRAM cell has been redesigned using 16nm PTM Bulk and FinFET transistors. The simulation results show considerable improvement of hold and read SNMs for FinFET.
Toward more reflexive, empowering, and ethical metaphorical organizational research

This study aims to take forward Gareth Morgan’s call for more reflexivity and self-deconstruction in metaphorical organizational research by developing a novel framework for the production and use of metaphors. Drawing on psychoanalytic theorizing, this framework seeks to move the field toward an approach to metaphors in which metaphors can be explored as symptoms of our struggles with unconscious desire. This, in turn, offers opportunities for engaging in more reflexive, empowering, and ethical metaphorical research.
A Calculation Model for Serum Ionized Calcium Based on an Equilibrium Equation for Complexation

Measurement of ionized calcium is more important than measurement of total calcium in serum samples. In the present study, equations were derived from complexation and acid dissociation equilibrium equations, and were used to determine the concentration of ionized calcium from the observed serum concentrations of total calcium, albumin, total protein, and inorganic phosphate. The ionized calcium concentration was calculated in 67 serum samples from healthy subjects and 34 outpatients previously identified as having abnormal serum calcium levels. The correlation coefficient between our method (y) and the calcium-ion-selective electrode method (x) was 0.953 and the linear regression equation was y = 0.97x at pH 7.4 with a factor of α = 0.21, which was based on the differences between the concentrations of calcium phosphorus compounds obtained by the electrode method and by calculation. The developed calculation is as useful and accurate as the electrode method, and therefore extremely useful for clinical diagnoses.
Structural and behavioral modeling with monadic logics

Logic offers the possibility of modeling and reasoning about hardware and software. But which logic? We propose monadic logics of strings and trees as good candidates for many kinds of discrete systems. These logics are natural, decidable, yet substantially more expressive, extensions of Boolean logic. We motivate their applicability through examples.
Determining the Number of Attackers and Localizing Multiple Adversaries in Wireless Spoofing Attacks

Wireless spoofing attacks are easy to launch and can significantly impact the performance of networks. Although the identity of a node can be verified through cryptographic authentication, conventional security approaches are not always desirable because of their overhead requirements. In this paper, we propose to use location information, a physical property associated with each node, hard to falsify, and not reliant on cryptography, as the basis for (1) detecting spoofing attacks; (2) determining the number of attackers when multiple adver- saries masquerading as a same node identity; and (3) localizing multiple adversaries. We formulate the problem of determining the number of attackers as a multi-class detection problem. We first propose two cluster-based mechanisms to determine the number of attackers. We then develop SILENCE that employs the minimum distance testing of RSS values in addition to cluster analysis and can achieve better accuracy than other methods under study that merely use cluster analysis alone. We further developed an integrated detection and localization system that can localize the positions of multiple attackers. We evaluated our techniques through two testbeds using both an 802.11 (WiFi) network and an 802.15. 4 (ZigBee) network in two real office buildings. Our experimental results show that SILENCE can achieve over 90% Hit Rate and Precision when determining the number of attackers. Additionally, our localization results using a representative set of algorithms provide strong evidence of high accuracy of localizing multiple adversaries.
Risk Reduction and Cost Synergy in Mergers and Acquisitions via Supply Chain Network Integration

The economic and financial collapse of 2008 and 2009 due to the credit crisis in the U.S. with global ramifications impacted dramatically the landscape for mergers and acquisitions (M&As). It is anticipated that, if there is a new merger wave, then a larger percentage of M&A deals will be more strategic than those in the wave that ended prior to this crisis, with special attention given to the increasingly risk-averse environment. In addition, it is expected that firms will seek to take advantage of existing strengths, be they in a particular region or in terms of distribution networks. This paper provides a methodological framework to enable decision-makers involved in M&As to quantify the potential gains through supply chain network integration in terms of risk reduction and cost synergy. In particular, we develop new pre-merger and post-merger network models that capture the economic activities of firms who seek to determine their expected total cost and risk-minimizing product flows subject to demand satisfaction. We utilize a mean-variance approach to capture the risk associated with cost uncertainty. In addition, we propose three new synergy measures: the expected total cost synergy, the relative risk reduction synergy, and the absolute risk reduction synergy for the assessment of the potential strategic advantages. We illustrate the analytical framework with two sets of numerical examples which yield interesting managerial implications. The first set of examples demonstrates how the uncertainty surrounding the costs influences both the cost synergy and the risk reduction achievable through M&As. The second set of examples shows that decision-makers with distinct concerns should focus on specific synergy measures.
Think Aloud-method during fMRI to determine neuronal correlates of subjective experience of video game playing

The subjective experience of video games and its consequences have been subject of public debate as well as of scientific research. Recently, neuroimaging has been applied to study the neural correlates of behaviour during video games [1]. Nevertheless, systematic research on game experience in general and the search for its neural correlates in special is still at its starting point and remains a fascinating topic for future investigations. To investigate central dimensions of video game experience we applied Think Aloud (TA), i.e. an introspective method to assess structured retrospective reflections on thoughts and feelings while re-watching one’s own playing [2]. Originating from psychological research, the TA was developed from the much older introspection method. Introspection is based on the assumption that a person is able to observe his or her thoughts, feelings, and cognitive processes, as well as one is able to observe processes in the outside world. These skills can also be trained so that the subject can observe them in a systematic way and make them accessible to others by verbalizing them.
Towards Tangible "Virtual Money" - Position Paper

Today, money forms its own virtual world that is destructive to real economy; monetary economy formed by circulation of money has grown in an imbalanced way to have unproportionate influences over the real economy that consists solely of production, distribution and consumption. Virtual world technology can potentially lower the cost of alternative forms of economy that existed in the past, and bring tangibility, or agreement with real economy, back to money. But most available economy systems in the virtual worlds today are equally destructive as the monetary system in the real world. This position paper proposes revived forms of commodity money (common merchandise being used as a medium of exchange) and drafts in real terms (exchange tickets with promises of providing equivalent commodities as specified), utilizing virtual world technology to form tangible monetary systems for the benefit of both virtual and real economies.
Overview of intrusion detection using data-mining and the features selection

Most of traditional intrusion detection systems, Anomaly-Based detection and Signature-based detection, suffer from many drawbacks. This paper exposes the limits and drawback of traditional Intrusion detection systems. Consequently the main goal of this paper is to expose data mining techniques and approaches to improve the performance of the traditional intrusion detection system to identify known and unknown attack's patterns.
Answering Arabic Why-Questions

A Question Answering (QA) system is concerned with building a system that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural language. Compared to other languages, little effort was directed towards QA systems for Arabic. Due to the difficulty of handling why-questions, most Arabic QA systems tend to ignore it. In this article, we specifically address the why-question for Arabic using two different approaches and compare their performance and the quality of their answer. The first is the baseline approach, a generic method that is used to answer all types of questions, including factoid; and for the second approach, we use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). We evaluate both schemes using a corpus of 700 textual documents in different genres collected from Open Source Arabic Corpora (OSAC), and a set of 100 question-answer pairs. Overall, the performance measures of recall, precision, and c@1 was 68% (all three measures) for the baseline approach, and 71%, 78%, and 77.4%, respectively, for the RST-based approach. The recently introduced extension of the accuracy, the c@1 measure, rewards unanswered questions over those wrongly answered.
Deformable 3D Fusion: From Partial Dynamic 3D Observations to Complete 4D Models

Capturing the 3D motion of dynamic, non-rigid objects has attracted significant attention in computer vision. Existing methods typically require either complete 3D volumetric observations, or a shape template. In this paper, we introduce a template-less 4D reconstruction method that incrementally fuses highly-incomplete 3D observations of a deforming object, and generates a complete, temporally-coherent shape representation of the object. To this end, we design an online algorithm that alternatively registers new observations to the current model estimate and updates the model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach at reconstructing non-rigidly moving objects from highly-incomplete measurements on both sequences of partial 3D point clouds and Kinect videos.
ID-Based Multi-Proxy Signature and Blind Multisignature from Bilinear Pairings

Multi-proxy signature allows the original signer delegate his singing power to a group of proxy signers. Blind proxy-signature allows the user to obtain a signature of a message from several signers in a way that each signer learns neither the message nor the resulting signature. Plenty of multi-proxy signature and blind multisignature schemes have been proposed under the certificate-based (CA-based) public key systems. In this paper, we firstly propose an identity-based (IDbased) multi-proxy signature scheme and an ID-based blind multisignature scheme from bilinear pairings. Since there seems no ID-based threshold signature schemes up to now, both the proposed schemes can be regarded as a special case of corresponding variants of ID-based threshold signature.
Compositional model-checking for real-time systems

A major problem in applying model checking to finite–state systems is the potential combinatorial explosion of the state space arising from parallel composition. Solutions of this problem have been attempted for practical applications using a variety of techniques. Recent work by Andersen [And95] proposes a very promising compositional model checking technique, which has experimentally been shown to improve results obtained using Binary Decision Diagrams. In this paper we make Andersen’s technique applicable to systems described by networks of timed automata. We present a quotient construction, which allows timed automata components to be gradually moved from the network expression into the specification. The intermediate specifications are kept small using minimization heuristics suggested by Andersen. The potential of the combined technique is demonstrated using a prototype implemented in CAML. ∗This work has been supported by the European Communities under CONCUR2, BRA 7166 †Basic Research in Computer Science, Centre of the Danish National Research Foundation. ‡Dept. of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Fredrik Bajers Vej 7-E, DK-9220 Aalborg, Denmark, (email: {fl,kgl}@iesd.auc.dk) fax: (45) 98.15. 81.29
Findings from a practical project concerning Web usage mining

In a practical project a statistical analysis of the Web log files of the domain www.volkswagen. de was carried out by using the CRISP-DM procedure. For the preprocessing phase, more profound findings could be gained than are usually described in many studies. Since the aim was to deduce significant statements while measuring the effect, tests of significance for e-metrics were used in addition to the commonly described procedure.
Cooperative usability practices

Usability activities are often applied to development processes as a means of bridging the gap between users and developers. Due to this middle position, which at times can be extremely vulnerable, usability groups need to cooperate and establish appropriate relations with both users and development teams. They need to cooperate with users to obtain knowledge about their work practices, and they need to cooperate with developers to make them apply this knowledge about work practice. In this article we provide an overview of the practices of usability groups in the three U.S. and the three Danish companies featured in this section. Based on their practices, we discuss the usability groups’ relations to developers and users and examine some of the differences between the groups and between the countries. The Danish companies: Bang & Olufsen (B&O), Danfoss, and Kommunedata (KMD), were the first three Danish companies to have usability lab facilities. These three companies are participating in our research project, “Usability in Danish Industry,” which is a three-year project that aims at developing the theoretical and practical foundations of usability work. As part of “Usability in Danish Industry,” studies of usability practices have been conducted in 12 U.S. companies. Most of the studies have had a duration of several days and are based upon both observations of the work of usability specialists and interviews with a number of different people, including usability specialists and their managers. In this article we focus on the three U.S. companies featured in this section: IBM, American Institutes for Research (AIR), and Microsoft. In a previous overview of usability labs, Nielsen [5] focuses on quantitative measurements of the physical characteristics of the lab: size of the floor space, number of rooms, number of cameras, existence of one-way mirrors, and number of staff members. Our overview Usability engineering and
Prediction of Protein-Destabilizing Polymorphisms by Manual Curation with Protein Structure

The relationship between sequence polymorphisms and human disease has been studied mostly in terms of effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) leading to single amino acid substitutions that change protein structure and function. However, less attention has been paid to more drastic sequence polymorphisms which cause premature termination of a protein’s sequence or large changes, insertions, or deletions in the sequence. We have analyzed a large set (n = 512) of insertions and deletions (indels) and single nucleotide polymorphisms causing premature termination of translation in disease-related genes. Prediction of protein-destabilization effects was performed by graphical presentation of the locations of polymorphisms in the protein structure, using the Genomes TO Protein (GTOP) database, and manual annotation with a set of specific criteria. Protein-destabilization was predicted for 44.4% of the nonsense SNPs, 32.4% of the frameshifting indels, and 9.1% of the non-frameshifting indels. A prediction of nonsense-mediated decay allowed to infer which truncated proteins would actually be translated as defective proteins. These cases included the proteins linked to diseases inherited dominantly, suggesting a relation between these diseases and toxic aggregation. Our approach would be useful in identifying potentially aggregation-inducing polymorphisms that may have pathological effects.
Strong field dynamics with ultrashort electron wave packet replicas

We investigate theoretically electron dynamics under a vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) attosecond pulse train, which has a controlled phase delay with respect to an additional strong infrared laser field. Using the strong field approximation and the fact that the attosecond pulse is short compared to the excited electron dynamics, we arrive at a minimal analytical model for the kinetic energy distribution of the electron as well as the photon absorption probability as a function of the phase delay between the fields. We analyze the dynamics in terms of electron wave packet replicas created by the attosecond pulses. The absorption probability shows strong modulations as a function of the phase delay for VUV photons of energy comparable to the binding energy of the electron, while for higher photon energies the absorption probability does not depend on the delay, in line with the experimental observations for helium and argon, respectively.
Multimodality segmentation and registration of 3D Pulmonary exams

Several medical imaging techniques are used to perform the Pulmonary Embolism diagnose. Multimodality imaging is usually used to achieve better morphological details. In this work we applied and compared 3D registration algorithms, after the segmentation of thoracic CT exam, ventilation and perfusion SPECT exams. The registration routine is applied using rigid body transformations, affine transformations and B-spline algorithm. In order to evaluate the registration performance, similarity metrics are used.
Evaluation of Unlimited Storage: Towards Better Data Access Model for “Sensor Network”

In sensor network a large amount of data need to be collected for future information retrieval. The data centric storage has become an important issue in sensor network. Storage nodes are used in this paper to store and process the collected data. This paper considers the storage node placement problem aiming to place unlimited storage nodes in sensor network to minimize the total energy cost for collecting the raw data and replying queries at the storage nodes. In this paper a strong data access model for placing storage nodes in sensor network is presented. Here we consider an application in which sensor networks provide real time data services to user. The main aim of this paper is to reduce the cost for raw data transfer, query diffusion, query reply by defining the best location of storage nodes in sensor network.
Millimeter Thin and Rubber-Like Solid-State Lighting Modules Fabricated Using Roll-to-Roll Fluidic Self-Assembly and Lamination

A millimeter thin rubber-like solid-state lighting module is reported. The fabrication of the lighting module incorporates assembly and electrical connection of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The assembly is achieved using a roll-to-roll fluidic self-assembly. The LEDs are sandwiched in-between a stretchable top and bottom electrode to relieve the mechanical stress. The top contact is realized using a lamination technique that eliminates wire-bonding.
Stereo Based Structure Recovery of Underwater Scenes from Automatically Restored Images

In this paper we present a fully automatic methodology for underwater image restoration which is based on classical physical models of light propagation in participating media. The technique uses pairs of images acquired from distinct viewpoints under the same environmental conditions. At the kernel of the method is an iterative algorithm that is based on a contrast metric that automatically estimates all parameters of the model with good accuracy at a significantly low computational cost. We then present an algorithm that uses the model with the estimated parameters to improve the quality of images of underwater scenes taken under natural illumination, (i.e. without any special light source). First we show the quality of parameters estimated by our approach by comparing against the same parameters obtained manually like in other works in the literature. Once better estimated parameters greatly influence the quality of restored images, we performed experiments with images taken from both synthesized and real scenes to verify the performance of the proposed method. Two main aspects were considered: image quality and quality of disparity maps produced by a standard stereo algorithm. Image quality was assessed by a quantitative measure of contrast, which is typically used in related literature. We also compare the results obtained by our methodology with those obtained with classic image enhancement tools. The results obtained with our methodology demonstrate improvement both in scene contrast of recovered underwater images and in the accuracy of the disparity maps under different water turbidity levels.