Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of Binomial and Chebyshev Distribution on Dielectric Resonator Antenna Array

For wireless communication systems, the antenna is one of the most critical components for transmission as well as reception point of view. Good design of the antenna can relax system requirements and improve overall system performance. In addition to receiving or transmitting energy, an antenna in an advanced wireless system is usually required to optimize or accentuate the radiation energy in some directions and suppress it in others. Thus the antenna must also serve as a directional device in addition to a probing device. Many applications require radiation characteristics that may not be achievable by a single element. It may, however, be possible that an aggregate of radiating elements in an electrical and geometrical arrangement (an array) will result in the desired radiation characteristics [1]. The arrangement of the array may be such that the radiation from the elements adds up to give a radiation maximum in a particular direction or directions, minimum in others, or otherwise as desired. In this paper we concentrated on the electrical and geometrical properties of array elements that give a radiation maximum in a particular direction and minimum in others. We investigate the binomial and chebyshev distribution for linear and rectangular dielectric resonator antenna array.
An inexact Gauss-Newton method for inversion of basal sliding and rheology parameters in a nonlinear Stokes ice sheet model

Abstract We propose an infinite-dimensional adjoint-based inexact Gauss-Newton method for the solution of inverse problems governed by Stokes models of ice sheet flow with nonlinear rheology and sliding law. The method is applied to infer the basal sliding coefficient and the rheological exponent parameter fields from surface velocities. The inverse problem is formulated as a nonlinear least-squares optimization problem whose cost functional is the misfit between surface velocity observations and model predictions. A Tikhonov regularization term is added to the cost functional to render the problem well-posed and account for observational error. Our findings show that the inexact Newton method is significantly more efficient than the nonlinear conjugate gradient method and that the number of Stokes solutions required to solve the inverse problem is insensitive to the number of inversion parameters. The results also show that the reconstructions of the basal sliding coefficient converge to the exact sliding coefficient as the observation error (here, the noise added to synthetic observations) decreases, and that a nonlinear rheology makes the reconstruction of the basal sliding coefficient more difficult. For the inversion of the rheology exponent field, we find that horizontally constant or smoothly varying parameter fields can be reconstructed satisfactorily from noisy observations.
Optimization for time-driven link sleeping reconfigurations in ISP backbone networks

Backbone network energy efficiency has recently become a primary concern for Internet Service Providers and regulators. The common solutions for energy conservation in such an environment include sleep mode reconfigurations and rate adaptation at network devices when the traffic volume is low. It has been observed that many ISP networks exhibit regular traffic dynamicity patterns which can be exploited for practical time-driven link sleeping configurations. In this work, we propose a joint optimization algorithm to compute the reduced network topology and its actual configuration duration during daily operations. The main idea is first to intelligently remove network links using a greedy heuristic, without causing network congestion during off-peak time. Following that, a robust algorithm is applied to determine the window size of the configuration duration of the reduced topology, making sure that a unified configuration with optimized energy efficiency performance can be enforced exactly at the same time period on a daily basis. Our algorithm was evaluated using on a Point-of-Presence representation of the GÉANT network and its real traffic matrices. According to our simulation results, the reduced network topology obtained is able to achieve 18.6% energy reduction during that period without causing significant network performance deterioration. The contribution from this work is a practical but efficient approach for energy savings in ISP networks, which can be directly deployed on legacy routing platforms without requiring any protocol extension.
Sex and Deleterious Mutations

The evolutionary advantage of sexual reproduction has been considered as one of the most pressing questions in evolutionary biology. While a pluralistic view of the evolution of sex and recombination has been suggested by some, here we take a simpler view and try to quantify the conditions under which sex can evolve given a set of minimal assumptions. Since real populations are finite and also subject to recurrent deleterious mutations, this minimal model should apply generally to all populations. We show that the maximum advantage of recombination occurs for an intermediate value of the deleterious effect of mutations. Furthermore we show that the conditions under which the biggest advantage of sex is achieved are those that produce the fastest fitness decline in the corresponding asexual population and are therefore the conditions for which Muller's ratchet has the strongest effect. We also show that the selective advantage of a modifier of the recombination rate depends on its strength. The quantification of the range of selective effects that favors recombination then leads us to suggest that, if in stressful environments the effect of deleterious mutations is enhanced, a connection between sex and stress could be expected, as it is found in several species.
The Effect of Learner Corpus Size in Grammatical Error Correction of ESL Writings

English as a Second Language (ESL) learners’ writings contain various grammatical errors. Previous research on automatic error correction for ESL learners’ grammatical errors deals with restricted types of learners’ errors. Some types of errors can be corrected by rules using heuristics, while others are difficult to correct without statistical models using native corpora and/or learner corpora. Since adding error annotation to learners’ text is time-consuming, it was not until recently that large scale learner corpora became publicly available. However, little is known about the effect of learner corpus size in ESL grammatical error correction. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the effect of learner corpus size on various types of grammatical errors, using an error correction system based on phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) trained on a large scale errortagged learner corpus. We show that the phrase-based SMT approach is effective in correcting frequent errors that can be identified by local context, and that it is difficult for phrase-based SMT to correct errors that need long range contextual information.
A novel framework for retrieval and interactive visualization of multimodal data

With the abundance of multimedia in web databases and the increasing user need for content of many modalities, such as images, sounds, etc., new methods for retrieval and visualization of multimodal media are required. In this paper, novel techniques for retrieval and visualization of multimodal data, i.e. documents consisting of many modalities, are proposed. A novel cross-modal retrieval framework is presented, in which the results of several unimodal retrieval systems are fused into a single multimodal list by the introduction of a cross-modal distance. For the presentation of the retrieved results, a multimodal visualization framework is also proposed, which extends existing unimodal similarity-based visualization methods for multimodal data. The similarity measure between two multimodal objects is defined as the weighted sum of unimodal similarities, with the weights determined via an interactive user feedback scheme. Experimental results show that the cross-modal framework outperforms unimodal and other multimodal approaches while the visualization framework enhances existing visualization methods by efficiently exploiting multimodality and user feedback.
Networked Windows NT system field failure data analysis

This paper presents a measurement-based dependability study of a Networked Windows NT system based on field data collected from NT System Logs from 503 servers running in a production environment over a four-month period. The event logs at hand contains only system reboot information. We study individual server failures and domain behavior in order to characterize failure behavior and explore error propagation between servers. The key observations from this study are: (1) system software and hardware failures are the two major contributors to the total system downtime (22% and 10%), (2) recovery from application software failures are usually quick, (3) in many cases, more than one reboots are required to recover from a failure, (4) the average availability of an individual server is over 99%, (5) there is a strong indication of error dependency or error propagation across the network, (6) most (58%) reboots are unclassified indicating the need for better logging techniques, (7) maintenance and configuration contribute to 24% of system downtime.
Comparable English-Russian Book Review Corpora for Sentiment Analysis Name 1

This paper presents a newly designed comparable corpora of book reviews consisting of two parts: Russian and English representing two very different languages. The corpora are comparable in terms of domain, style and size. This set of corpora may be of use for cross-lingual experiments in document-level sentiment classification. We also present brief description of the languageand domain-specific issues observed in these corpora.
Visual Servo with Dynamics : Control of an Unmanned Blimp ( Technical Report

Image-based control of free-ying mechanical systems is addressed, with application to an indoor, vision-guided blimp. A methodology is developed for performing visual servoing by incorporating the physical parameters of a mechanical system into the image plane dynamics. It is noted that under suitable conditions, namely the existence of a diieomorphism between image features and the robot pose, many of the tools from mechanical systems control theory can be used directly when applied in the image plane. It is also shown that when a suitable Jacobian map exists between the pose and image feature spaces, dynamics for vision-based control of aerial and underwater vehicles can easily be formulated. Experimental results demonstrate initial success at spatial tracking of simple objects.
A Delay-constrained Protocol for Shared Multicast Tree Construction

In this paper we present a multicast protocol for building and maintaining Delay-Constrained Multi-cast Shared Trees (DCMST). Our protocol is based on the search of available Delay-Constrained multi-path to graft a new receiver to the shared tree. The new receiver chooses the most promising route regarding to its available bandwidth. This improvesthe load balancing on the network and we ooer better routes for resource reservation. In dynamic source groups the DCMST may need to be frequently updated to satisfy the delay constraint, our protocol incorporates a least cost updating mechanism. The proposed protocol scales well due to the reduced search phase which is limited to only available links.
Love it or hate it!: interactivity and user types

This paper investigates general and individual evaluations of User Experience (UX) with interactive web sites. A series of studies investigate user judgment on web sites with different interactivity levels over repeated exposures. The more interactive websites produced more positive affect, had better design quality ratings, which improved with exposure, and were preferred. Differences between the more interactive sites indicated overall UX was influenced by users' preferences for interactive styles, with both sites having enthusiast, potential adopter, and non-adopter users. The implications for models and frameworks of UX are discussed.
Algorithms for Materialized View Design in Data Warehousing Environment

Selecting views to materialize is one of the most important decisions in designing a data warehouse. In this paper, we present a framework for analyzing the issues in selecting views to materialize so as to achieve the best combination of good query performance and low view maintenance. We first develop a heuristic algorithm which can provide a feasible solution based on individual optimal query plans. We also map the materialized view design problem as O-l integer programming problem, whose solution can guarantee an optimal solution.
Study of tricarboxylic acid cycle flux changes in human visual cortex during hemifield visual stimulation using 1H‐{13C} MRS and fMRI

The relationships between brain activity and accompanying hemodynamic and metabolic alterations, particularly between the cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen utilization (CMRO2) and cerebral blood flow (CBF), are not thoroughly established. CMRO2 is closely coupled to the rate of tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle flux. In this study, the changes in glutamate labeling during 13C labeled glucose administration were determined in the human brain as an index of alterations in neuronal TCA cycle turnover during increased neuronal activity. Two‐volume 1H‐{13C} MR spectroscopy (MRS) of the visual cortex was combined with functional MRI (fMRI) at 4 Tesla. Hemifield visual stimulation was employed to obtain data simultaneously from activated and control regions located symmetrically in the two hemispheres of the brain. The results showed that the fractional change in the turnover rate of C4 carbon of glutamate was less than that of CBF during visual stimulation. The fractional changes in CMRO2 (ΔCMRO2) induced by activation must be equal to or less than the fractional change in glutamate labeling kinetics. Therefore, the results impose an upper limit of ∼30% for ΔCMRO2 and demonstrate: 1) that fractional CBF increases exceed ΔCMRO2 during elevated activity in the visual cortex, and 2) that such an unequal change would explain the observed positive blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) effect in fMRI. Magn Reson Med 45:349–355, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Flaviviruses as a Cause of Undifferentiated Fever in Sindh Province, Pakistan: A Preliminary Report

Arboviral diseases are expanding worldwide, yet global surveillance is often limited due to diplomatic and cultural barriers between nations. With human encroachment into new habitats, mosquito-borne viruses are also invading new areas. The actual prevalence of expanding arboviruses is unknown in Pakistan due to inappropriate diagnosis and poor testing for arboviral diseases. The primary objective of this study was to document evidence of flavivirus infections as the cause of undifferentiated fever in Pakistan. Through a cooperative effort between the USA and Pakistan, patient exposure to dengue virus (DENV), West Nile virus (WNV), and Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) was examined in Sindh Province for the first time in decades. Initial results from the 2015 arbovirus season consisting of a cross-sectional study of 467 patients in 5 sites, DENV NS1 antigen was identified in 63 of the screened subjects, WNV IgM antibodies in 16 patients, and JEV IgM antibodies in 32 patients. In addition, a number of practical findings were made including (1) in silico optimization of RT-PCR primers for flavivirus strains circulating in the Middle East, (2) shipping and storage of RT-PCR master mix and other reagents at ambient temperature, (3) Smart phone applications for the collection of data in areas with limited infrastructure, and (4) fast and reliable shipping for transport of reagents and specimens to and from the Middle East. Furthermore, this work is producing a group of highly trained local scientists and medical professionals disseminating modern scientific methods and more accurate diagnostic procedures to the community.
Design Criteria of Two-Hop Based Wireless Networks with Non-Regenerative Relays in Arbitrary Fading Channels

In this paper we evaluate outage performances of multirelay amplify and forward (AF) transmission over fading channels. We focus on the uplink of a two-hop based network where N (with N ges 1) single antenna relay stations (RSs) serve as non-regenerative repeaters for the message transmitted by a single antenna source node (or mobile station MS). Performances are derived at high SNR for arbitrary fading distributions over each cooperative link. In Rayleigh fading the high price of cooperation in terms of signalling (e.g. during MS-to-RSs transmissions and control messages broadcasts) causes a significant loss in spectral efficiency. Instead, provided that the RSs can be strategically positioned to benefit from a channel with marginal diffusive fading component compared to Rayleigh, this paper shows that this loss in efficiency can be significantly alleviated depending on the particular propagation environment. Closed form conditions on the fading statistics for the relayed links are derived to guarantee that collaborative transmission performs as if the MS node would benefit from the same diversity and bandwidth efficiency provided by multi-antenna transmission. The proposed conditions are computed for arbitrary distributed fading for the relays-to-BS link and are specialized for Rice faded RSs-to-BS links.
Organizational changes towards a European academic field. A case study of frictions in the narratives of Europeanization at a German university from an institutional perspective

Purpose: Departing from institutional theory and the concept of organizational narratives, this study identifies frictions between university professors and university governance. These frictions pertain to the construction and operationalization of university Europeanization, on the way towards a Europeanized academic field. The organization in this study is in a discursive stand-by position, caused by both organizational structures, and contradicting accounts of Europeanization. Design: The data set comprises, first, a thematic analysis of the official internationalization strategy pursued by the university, and an interview with its initiator. Second, a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 13 professors is conducted, complemented by responses to short standardized questionnaires. Findings: The change process is described as mimetic isomorphism, and faculty opposes normative isomorphic change. Three main areas of friction are identified. First, this study demonstrates that professors and university leadership construct Europeanization differently. Second, professors express a high awareness of independence from university governance. Third, professors appear to partially align their and their staff's research activities with national standards. The university leadership, pushing for Europeanized standards, acknowledges the legitimacy of these conflicting strategies. Implications and Value: The Europeanization of higher education is investigated from an institutional-narratological view in an attempt to connect organizational research with research on societal Europeanization. Europeanization is subjected to intra-organizational struggles over the interpretation of the term. Counter-narratives of what Europeanization means should be recognized in order to pursue a pluralistic notion of Europeanization.
Enhanced Phone Posteriors for Improving Speech Recognition Systems

Using phone posterior probabilities has been increasingly explored for improving automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose two approaches for hierarchically enhancing these phone posteriors, by integrating long acoustic context, as well as phonetic and lexical knowledge. In the first approach, phone posteriors estimated with a multilayer perceptron (MLP), are used as emission probabilities in hidden Markov model (HMM) forward-backward recursions. This yields new enhanced posterior estimates integrating HMM topological constraints (encoding specific phonetic and lexical knowledge), and context. In the second approach, temporal contexts of the regular MLP posteriors are postprocessed by a secondary MLP, in order to learn inter- and intra-dependencies between the phone posteriors. These dependencies are phonetic knowledge. The learned knowledge is integrated in the posterior estimation during the inference (forward pass) of the second MLP, resulting in enhanced phone posteriors. We investigate the use of the enhanced posteriors in hybrid HMM/artificial neural network (ANN) and Tandem configurations. We propose using the enhanced posteriors as replacement, or as complementary evidences to the regular MLP posteriors. The proposed methods have been tested on different small and large vocabulary databases, always resulting in consistent improvements in frame, phone, and word recognition rates.
Real-time Planar World Modeling for Augmented Reality

We posit that the challenge of complete visual modeling and tracking of the outdoor urban world can be made tractable by using the simplifying assumption of textured planar surfaces. While recent methods have demonstrated dense and complex reconstructions in some cases, we advocate simpler models which more efficiently and effectively capture the semantic structure of the scene. We argue that this structure is what will enable rich augmented reality interaction and annotation techniques. We describe three potential benefits of the planar modeling approach: 1) interactive mobile modeling and annotation; 2) fast and robust tracking and relocalization using oriented patches; and 3) scalable and incremental world model construction from ad-hoc user contributions. We consider several research questions and technical challenges which must be addressed to achieve mobile creation of piecewise-planar models.
Does the Motor Level of the Paretic Extremities Affect Balance in Poststroke Subjects?

Background. Poststroke impairment may lead to fall and unsafe functional performance. The underlying mechanism for the balance dysfunction is unclear. Objective. To analyze the relation between the motor level of the affected limbs and balance in poststroke subjects. Method. A prospective, cross-sectional, and nonexperimental design was conducted in a rehabilitation institute. A convenience sample of 44 patients was assessed for motor level using Brunnstrom recovery stage (BRS) and Fugl-Meyer Assessment: upper (FMA-UE) and lower extremities (FMA-LE). The balance was measured by Berg Balance Scale (BBS), Postural Assessment Scale for Stroke Patients (PASS), and Functional Reach Test (FRT). Results. BRS showed moderate correlation with BBS (ρ = 0.54 to 0.60; P < 0.001), PASS (r = 0.48 to 0.64; P < 0.001) and FRT (ρ = 0.48 to 0.59; P < 0.001). FMA-UE also exhibited moderate correlation with BBS (ρ = 0.59; P < 0.001) and PASS (ρ = 0.60; P < 0.001). FMA-LE showed fair correlation with BBS (ρ = 0.50; P = 0.001) and PASS (ρ = 0.50; P = 0.001). Conclusion. Motor control of the affected limbs plays an important role in balance. There is a moderate relation between the motor level of the upper and lower extremities and balance. The findings of the present study may be applied in poststroke rehabilitation.