Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Simple Method for 3-Dimensional Photorealistic Modeling and Consideration of Reconstructing Error

The process of creating photorealistic 3-dimensional computer graphic (3DCG) images is divided into two stages, i.e., modeling and rendering. Automatic rendering has gained popularity, and photorealistic rendering is generally used to render different types of images. However, professional artists still model characters manually. Moreover, not much progress has been achieved with regard to 3-D shape data acquisition techniques that can be applied to facial modeling; this is an important problem hampering the progress of 3DCG. Generally, a laser and a highly accurate camera are used to acquire 3-D shape data. However, this technique is time-consuming and expensive. Further, the eyes may be damaged during measurements by this method. In order to solve these problems, we have proposed a simple method for 3-D shape data acquisition using a projector and a web camera. This method is economical, simple, and less time-consuming than conventional techniques. In this paper, we describe the setup of the projector and web camera, shape data acquisition process, image processing, and generation of a photorealistic model. Moreover, we show reconstructing error and improved accuracy.
Valid Location Measuring in Location Dependent Data for Mobile Environments

Data caching is a crucial issue to improve systemperformance for service centers and increase access efficiencyfor mobile clients in mobile environments. Unlike conventionaldistributed systems, the mobility of users is the major characteristicin a mobile computing environment so that the valueof data may depend on location, and processing of a queryat one site may give different results than that at another. In this paper, we study issues on the efficiency of temporaldependentand spatial-dependent for location-dependent data ina mobile computing environment. We provide the method calledvalid location measuring (VLM) for representing the impacts onsystem performance with data valid scope and time-stamp oflocation-dependent data over wireless environments. Simulationexperiments are conducted to compare the performance of ourmethod with other issues. The results show that our schemesoutperform the conventional strategies.
A Possible Mechanism of Action of the Chemopreventive Effects of Sarcotriol on Skin Tumor Development in CD-1 Mice

Sarcophine derivatives have been suggested to be chemopreventive in nature. One of its derivatives, Sarcotriol (ST), was investigated to study the skin cancer chemopreventive effects in female CD-1 mice. Three groups (control, promotion, initiation) of 30 female CD-1 mice each were taken. Carcinogenesis was initiated with 7, 12- dimethylbenz (a) anthracene (DMBA) and promoted with 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13- acetate (TPA). One hour before treating with DMBA (200 nmol/100 μl acetone), control and promotion groups were treated with acetone (100 μl) and initiation group with ST (30μg/100μl of acetone). Beginning one week after initiation with DMBA, control and initiation groups were treated with acetone and promotion group with ST (30μg/100μl of acetone), one hour before treating with TPA (5 nmol/100 μl acetone). This was carried out twice a week for the next 20 weeks. The effects of ST on 3H-thymidine incorporation in epidermal DNA, the possible role of apoptotic proteins and COX-2 involved in the prevention of skin tumor development of CD-1 mice were investigated. Tumor incidence and multiplicity was found to be 100%, 73%, 100% and 8.2, 4.8, 9.7 in control, promotion and initiation groups respectively. ST treatment resulted in a significant (P < 0.05) inhibition in the incorporation of 3H-thymidine in epidermal DNA. The promotion group showed higher levels of caspase-3, -8 and –9 compared to the control. COX-2 expression was significantly lower (P < 0.05) in the promotion group as compared to the control. No significant difference in caspase-3, -8, -9 and COX-2 levels were observed in the initiation group compared to control. Together, this study confirms the chemopreventive effects of ST, and for the first time identifies the stage of carcinogenesis at which ST exerts its chemopreventive effect, and elucidates the mechanism possibly by inducing apoptosis and decreasing the COX-2 levels, contributing to its overall cancer chemopreventive effects in the mouse skin cancer model.
SMS linguistic profiling authentication on mobile device

It is commonly acknowledged that mobile devices now form an integral part of an individual's everyday life. As the amount of valuable and sensitive information stored on a mobile device increases, so does the need for effective security. In order to protect unauthorised access, an authentication system is required. Biometric authentication has proven to be a more reliable solution than knowledge based and token based techniques. Indeed, biometric techniques are uniquely individual, impossible to forget or lose, difficult to reproduce or falsify and difficult to change or hide. Despite the well known advantages of biometric authentication approaches, the majority of current state-of-the-art mobile devices embrace point of entry authentication systems including PIN/passwords and one time fingerprint verification. This paper introduces a feasibility study into a novel biometric technique for mobile devices, linguistic profiling. This investigation sought to authenticate users based on their writing vocabulary and style of SMS messages. The findings, based upon 30 participants, revealed the feasibility of the approach. While an overall average Equal Error Rate (EER) of 24% is unacceptably high, several users experienced an EER of 0%, suggesting significant potential to apply the technique for a subset of the population.
Rule-based layout solving and its application to procedural interior generation

Due to the recent advancement in procedural generation techniques, games are presenting players with ever growing cities and terrains to explore. However most sandbox-style games situated in cities, do not allow players to wander into buildings. In past research, space planning techniques have already been utilized to generate suitable layouts for both building floor plans and room layouts. We introduce a novel rule-based layout solving approach, especially suited for use in conjunction with procedural generation methods. We show how this solving approach can be used for procedural generation by providing the solver with a user-defined plan. In this plan, users can specify objects to be placed as instances of classes, which in turn contain rules about how instances should be placed. This approach gives us the opportunity to use our generic solver in different procedural generation scenarios. In this paper, we will illustrate mainly with interior generation examples
Dynamic Object Identification Using Background Subtraction and Its Gradual Development

The project proposes efficient dynamic identification and people counting based on background subtraction using dynamic threshold approach with mathematical morphology. Here these different methods are used effectively for object identification and compare these performance based on accurate detection. Here the techniques frame differences, dynamic threshold based detection will be used. After the object foreground detection, the parameters like speed, velocity motion and sensitivity will be manipulated. For this, most of previous methods depend on the assumption that the background is static over short time periods. In dynamic threshold based object detection, morphological process and filtering also used effectively for unwanted pixel removal from the background. The background frame will be updated by comparing the current frame intensities with reference frame. Along with this dynamic threshold, mathematical morphology also used which has an ability of greatly attenuating color variations generated by background motions while still highlighting dynamic objects. Finally the simulated results will be shown that used approximate median with mathematical morphology approach is effective rather than prior background subtraction methods in dynamic texture scenes and performance parameters of moving object such sensitivity, speed and velocity will be evaluated.
Laplacian-based Design: Sketching 3D Shape

The sketch-based shape modeling is one of the most challenging and active problems in computer graphics. In this paper, we present an interactive modeling system for generating free-form surfaces using a 2D sketch interface. Since inferring 3D shape from 2D sketches is an one to many function with no unique solution, we propose to interpret the given 2D curve to be the projection of the 3D curve that has minimum curvature among all the candidates in 3D. In this way, firstly, we present an algorithm to efficiently find a close approximation of this minimum curvature 3D space curve. In the second step, our system could identify the 3D surfaces automatically, and then we apply Delaunay triangulation on these surfaces. Finally, the shape of the triangular surface mesh that follows the 3D profile curves is computed using harmonic interpolation by solving Laplacian equations. We present experimental results on various kinds of drawings by the interactive modeler
Fuzzy-valued evolution strategy for evolving neural networks with fuzzy weights and biases

In this paper, we propose an extension of evolution strategy (ES) for evolving fuzzy-valued neural networks (FNNs). In the proposed ES, values in the genotypes are not real numbers but fuzzy values. We apply our fuzzy-valued ES (FES) to the approximate modeling of fuzzy functions with FNNs. Experimental results showed that an FNN trained by our FES could approximate a hidden test function to a certain extent, despite t that the learning was not supervised.
Detecting natural changes of cone–excitation ratios in simple and complex coloured images

Ratios of excitations in each cone–photoreceptor class produced by light reflected from pairs of surfaces in a scene are almost invariant under natural illuminant changes. The stability of these spatially defined ratios may explain the remarkable ability of human observers to efficiently discriminate illuminant changes from changes in surface reflectances. Spatial cone–excitation ratios are not, however, exactly invariant. This study is concerned with observers' sensitivity to these invariance violations. Simulations of Mondrian paintings with either 49 or two natural surfaces under Planckian illuminants were presented as images on a computer–controlled display in a two–interval experimental design: in one interval, the surfaces underwent an illuminant change; in the other interval, the surfaces underwent the same change, but the images were then corrected so that, for each cone class, ratios of excitations were preserved exactly. Although the intervals with corrected images corresponded individually to highly improbable natural events, observers systematically misidentified them as containing the illuminant changes, the probability of error increasing as the violation of invariance in the other interval increased. For the range of illuminants and surfaces tested, sensitivity to violations of invariance was found to depend on cone class: it was greatest for long–wavelength–sensitive cones and least for short–wavelength–sensitive cones. Spatial cone–excitation ratios, or some closely related quantities, seem to be the cues preferred by observers for making inferences about surface illuminant changes.
“It’s Not Like a Movie. It’s Not Hollywood:” Competing Narratives of a Youth Mentoring Organization

Direct social service workers face a variety of difficulties including low pay, limited upward mobility, role ambiguity, and emotional exhaustion. This study adds to the understanding of the complexities of front-line service work with an analysis of the storytelling of case managers working with Big Brothers Big Sisters. Interview participants describe a problem of “volunteer expectations,” which they define as related to the organizational storytelling of the program: the images that entice people to volunteer do not match actual volunteer experiences. I argue that glamorized storytelling through marketing and recruitment tactics creates unintended, negative consequences for volunteers and case managers. This project contributes to the understanding of social services, emotion work, and the American “helping” culture.
Source Language Adaptation Approaches for Resource-Poor Machine Translation

Most of the world languages are resource-poor for statistical machine translation; still, many of them are actually related to some resource-rich language. Thus, we propose three novel, language-independent approaches to source language adaptation for resource-poor statistical machine translation. Specifically, we build improved statistical machine translation models from a resource-poor language POOR into a target language TGT by adapting and using a large bitext for a related resource-rich language RICH and the same target language TGT. We assume a small POOR–TGT bitext from which we learn word-level and phrase-level paraphrases and cross-lingual morphological variants between the resource-rich and the resource-poor language. Our work is of importance for resource-poor machine translation because it can provide a useful guideline for people building machine translation systems for resource-poor languages.Our experiments for Indonesian/Malay–English translation show that using the large adapted resource-rich bitext yields 7.26 BLEU points of improvement over the unadapted one and 3.09 BLEU points over the original small bitext. Moreover, combining the small POOR–TGT bitext with the adapted bitext outperforms the corresponding combinations with the unadapted bitext by 1.93–3.25 BLEU points. We also demonstrate the applicability of our approaches to other languages and domains.
No Pain , No Gain ? The Importance of Measuring Course Workload in Student Ratings of Instruction

Samples of about 200 undergraduate courses were investigated in each of 3 consecutive academic terms. Course survey forms assessed evaluative ratings, expected grades, and course workloads. A covariance structure model was developed in exploratory fashion for the 1st term's data, and then successfully cross-validated in each of the next 2 terms. The 2 major features of the successful model were that (a) courses that gave higher grades were better liked (a positive path from expected grades to evaluative ratings), and (b) courses that gave higher grades had lighter workloads (a negative relation between expected grades and workload). These findings support the conclusion that instructors' grading leniency influences ratings. This effect of grading leniency also importantly qualifies the standard interpretation that student ratings are relatively pure indicators of instructional quality.
Byzantium: Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Database Replication Providing Snapshot Isolation

Database systems are a key component behind many of today's computer systems. As a consequence, it is crucial that database systems provide correct and continuous service despite unpredictable circumstances, such as software bugs or attacks. This paper presents the design of Byzantium, a Byzantine fault-tolerant database replication middleware that provides snapshot isolation (SI) semantics. SI is very popular because it allows increased concurrency when compared to serializability, while providing similar behavior for typical workloads. Thus, Byzantium improves on existing proposals by allowing increased concurrency and not relying on any centralized component. Our middleware can be used with off-the-shelf database systems and it is built on top of an existing BFT library.
Data integration system : Toward a prototype

Date sources integration is one of the major challenges for nowadays enterprise information system. Indeed, because of growing heterogeneous systems, access to information is more and more complex. In this context, we have implemented a prototype of WASSIT, a data integration system based on mediation-adaptation architecture. This paper briefly describes the meta-model ontology used in the integration process of WASSIT. It also describes the prototype implemented features such as rewriting and execution modules.
Prosocial moral reasoning and behaviours: the role of ethics education

The relationship between students´ evaluation of the school subject Ethics Education and students´ type of prosocial moral reasoning and behaviours is described in the study. Prosocial moral reasoning, prosocial behaviour in the school questionnaire, and our own Ethics Education evaluation measure was used in the study. Research sample included students of 6th grades of 26 primary schools from the western part of Slovakia: 579 participants (49,7% female, Mage = 11,27; SD = .71). There is evidence which supports the idea that the positive attitude to Ethics Education is linked to developmentally higher types of reasoning and higher prevalence of prosocial behaviours.
Person, psychologist, and psychology suspended in a phase 1 science

Is a psychology of the “person” a science? An art? Or is it a case of a “phase 1 science”—with its own logical rules and with a continuous character of changeability? Can it be any other than this, if the concept of a psychological person is always derived from a particular and always subject to its changeability? In a suspended phase 1 science, the psychologist’s role as a person, who is a thinker, is central. The psychologist’s thinking about the concept of the person is continuously engaged. It remains open to re-focus and to changes in its relation to other concepts and to target phenomena. Changes in the psychologist’s thinking keep discovery a dynamic process; yet move psychological concepts closer to accommodating scientific goals. A logical framework, which can accommodate this discovery mode, can achieve two contrary goals: changeability versus increased accommodation of scientific goals of sharpening hypotheses.
Design and modeling of planar transformer-based silicon integrated passive devices for wireless applications

This paper presents design and modeling techniques for integrated passive devices (IPDs) that can be stacked with RF chips in a highly integrated three-dimensional IC for wireless applications. The research starts to study winding and modeling techniques for high-efficiency planar transformers. In an Above-IC process for silicon IPDs, the planar transformers realized can provide a passive efficiency as high as near 90%. Based upon the proposed and modeled high-efficiency planar transformers, the research explores novel planar transformer-based structures for various kinds of wireless passive components including baluns, bandpass filters and power combiners to achieve miniature size as well as high performance.
Bandwidth-Aware Minimum Power Multicast Routing in Wireless Networks

Energy efficient multicast routing has been a blooming research field in wireless networks. However, this kind of multicast routing only addresses the transmission radius coverage might not be able to meet the bandwidth requirement of the users. In this paper, for the first time, we address the bandwidth aware minimum power multicast routing problem in wireless networks. We first formulate this problem as a mixed integer linear programming problem and then propose a Lagrangean relaxation based algorithm to solve this problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the existing pure power efficient multicast routing approaches under all tested cases, especially in large bandwidth request and fine radius granularity.
A land use regression road map for the Burrard Inlet Area Local Air Quality Study

Preface This report has been prepared by its authors based on a scope of work prepared by the Greater Vancouver Regional District. While the report has been reviewed by representatives of the GVRD as sponsors of the study, the findings and conclusions expressed in this report are the opinion of the consultant authors, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the GVRD. Background Several recent studies have measured and reported considerable spatial variability in the concentrations of traffic-related pollutants within urban areas (1-13). These " neighborhood scale " intra-urban differences tend not to be well-characterized by air quality monitoring networks, suggesting that exposure variation within the population is not well-characterized by regulatory monitoring networks. Land use regression (LUR) was first developed by public health researchers to address this misclassification of exposure, and the method has recently gained attention in the air quality management and urban planning communities.
Attitudes and Opinions of Female High School Athletes About Sports-Focused Mindfulness Training and Practices

Female high school athletes playing volleyball and soccer (N = 32) responded to a social validity questionnaire that inquired about their experiences with a sportfocused mindfulness training program. On average, the student-athletes rated most highly the effects of mindfulness training on emotional awareness and attention focusing, the contribution of mindfulness toward team play, the benefit of having coaches learn mindfulness skills, and the application of mindfulness to other sports. There were dissimilar ratings between the volleyball and soccer student-athletes concerning use of mindfulness when preparing for and during games. Most of the formal mindfulness practices taught during the training program were rated as being helpful to very helpful. We discuss factors influencing these findings and implications for mindfulness–sport performance research.
Investigation of deep Boltzmann machines for phone recognition

In the past few years, deep neural networks (DNNs) achieved great successes in speech recognition. The layer-wise pre-trained deep belief network (DBN) is known as one of the critical factor to optimize the DNN. However, the DBN has one shortcoming that the pre-training procedure is in a greedy forward pass. The top-down influences on the inference process are ignored, thus the pre-trained DBN is suboptimal. In this paper, we attempt to apply deep Boltzmann machine (DBM) on acoustic modeling. DBM has the advantages that a top-down feedback is incorporated and the parameters of all layers can be jointly optimized. Experiments are conducted on the TIMIT phone recognition task to investigate the DBM-DNN acoustic model. Comparing with the DBN-DNN with same amount of parameters, phone error rate on the core test set is reduced by 3.8% relatively, and additional 5.1% by dropout fine-tuning.
Fuzzy AHP Approach to TQM Strategy Evaluation

In recent years, many electronics producing firms have looked upon total quality management (TQM) strategy as a means by which they could maintain competitive advantage. This empirical research evaluates TQM strategic factors in order to determine the critical success factors in environmental uncertainty. Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is the proposed research methodology to discuss and tackle the different decision criteria like effective leadership, people management, customer focus, strategic plan and process management, being involved in identifying the TQM strategic critical success factors with uncertainty. The result shows that effective leadership is the most critical success factor in TQM strategy.