Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gabor features and LDA based face recognition with ANN classifier

Although many approaches for face recognition have been proposed in the past, none of them can overcome the main problem of lighting, pose and orientation. For a real time face recognition system, these constraints are to be a major challenge which has to be addressed. In this proposed work, a methodology is adopted for improving the robustness of a face recognition system based on two well-known statistical modeling methods to represent a face image: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). These methods extract the discriminant features from the face. Preprocessing of human face image is done using Gabor wavelets which eliminates the variations due to pose, lighting and features to some extent. PCA and LDA extract low dimensional and discriminating feature vectors and these feature vectors were used for classification. The classification stage uses Backpropagation neural network (BPN) as classifier. This proposed system has been successfully tested on ORL face data base with 400 frontal images corresponding to 40 different subjects of variable illumination and facial expressions. The results are compared with standard eigen face method using distance measure as classifier. The system gives a better recognition rate compared to other standard techniques.
A software pipeline for 3D animation generation using mocap data and commercial shape models

We propose a software pipeline to generate 3D animations by using the motion capture (mocap) data and human shape models. The proposed pipeline integrates two animation software tools, Maya and MotionBuilder in one flow. Specifically, we address the issue of skeleton incompatibility among the mocap data, shape models, and animation software. Our objective is to generate both realistic and accurate motion-specific animation sequences. Our method is tested by three mocap data sets of various motion types and five commercial human shape models, and it demonstrates better visual realisticness and kinematic accuracy when compared with three other animation generation methods.
The Evolving Roles of the IS Project Director

It is recognized that the implementation of a cross-functional enterprise system requires a more sustained and comprehensive change management program than is the case for classical IS application development. We can presume that the tools and techniques used to conduct such projects will differ, as will the roles and the responsibilities of each contributor to the projects. The impacts of this type of project on the organizational culture command the presence of an active and increased leadership. Confronted with this new challenge, companies are putting into place project management organizations that take into account the technological and the organizational complexity of their IS enterprise projects, as well as the presence of external contributors (software package suppliers, integrators) and internal stakeholders (end-users, process owners, IT support personnel). These organizations are usually headed by a project director, an internal resource whose concerns lie not only with the technological aspects of the Copyright © 2004. HEC Montréal 3 The Evolving Roles of the IS Project Director Carmen Bernier, Lucie Léveillé et Vital Roy project, but principally with the overall business solution aspects that the new system purports to introduce. This is what justifies our interest in the study of the managerial roles played by this principal actor in the implementation of cross-functional enterprise systems. The primary objective of this case-based research consists in identifying the dominant managerial roles exerted by the internal project directors in the implementation of a cross-functional enterprise system. For this purpose, we propose to compare the roles of project directors engaged in high organizational transformation projects to those of project directors engaged in low level of transformation IS projects. Evidence shows that, in order to comply with the allotted budget and schedule, the project director must adopt a sometimes transactional, sometimes transformational style of management. In an IS project involving a high level of organizational transformation, the transformational roles of the internal project director were found to be more dominant than in an IS project with a low level of organizational transformation. Conversely, within a low level of organizational transformation project, the transformational roles and transactional roles were both exerted by the internal project director to differing degrees, but the transactional roles were more dominant. Contrary to our expectations, however, in high level of organizational transformation projects, the transactional roles and the transformational roles appeared to be exerted at a comparable level.
XIANG REN RESEARCH STATEMENT OVERVIEW My

My research focuses on turning massive unstructured text corpora into structured databases of factual knowledge, for better management, exploration and analysis of large corpora. In today’s computerized and information-based society, text data is rich but often also “messy”. We are inundated with vast amounts of text corpora, written in different genres (from grammatical news articles and scientific papers to noisy social media posts), covering topics in various domains (e.g., medical records, corporate reports, legal acts). Can computational systems automatically identify various real-world entities mentioned in a new corpus and use them to summarize recent news events reliably? Can computational systems capture and represent different relations between biomedical entities from massive and rapidly emerging life science literature? How might computational systems represent the facts contained in a collection of medical reports as a relational table to support answering detailed queries or running data mining tasks?
Comparative analysis of location and zone based routing in VANET with IEEE802.11p in city scenario

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging category of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). It is a collection of vehicles rather than mobile nodes to communicate with other vehicles and road side infrastructure units. Because of constraint road patterns and very high speed of vehicles, routing is a challenge in VANET. Most of the authors analyzed the performance of topology based routing protocols. This paper analyzed the performance of location aided routing (LAR) and zone routing protocol (ZRP) geographical protocols for city environment. Real time traces of vehicular movements are generated using a traffic simulator-VanetMobiSim with intelligent driver model (IDM). Packet delivery ratio, throughput, average delay, normalized routing load and lost packet ratio metrics are used to evaluate the performance of LAR and ZRP using ns2 along with IEEE802.11p. The analysis of results is performed using AWK programming script.
Differentiating between data-mining and text-mining terminology

When a new discipline emerges, it usually takes some time and a great deal of academic discussion before concepts and terms become standardized. Text mining is one such new discipline. In a groundbreaking article, Untangling text data mining, Hearst (1999) tackled the problem of clarifying text-mining concepts and terminology. This article is aimed at building on Hearst's ideas by pointing out some inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and suggesting an improved and extended categorization of data-mining and text-mining approaches.
Experiments on learning, methods and voting.

Publisher's copyright statement: This is the accepted version of the following article: Noussair, C. N. and Shachat, J. (2014), Experiments on Learning, Methods and Voting. Paci c Economic Review, 19 (3): 255 259, which has been published in nal form at http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/1468-0106.12064. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
A tree-to-tree alignment-based model for statistical machine translation

This paper presents a novel statistical machine translation (SMT) model that uses tree-to-tree alignment between a source parse tree and a target parse tree. The model is formally a probabilistic synchronous tree-substitution grammar (STSG) that is a collection of aligned elementary tree pairs with mapping probabilities (which are automatically learned from word-aligned bi-parsed parallel texts). Unlike previous syntax-based SMT models, this new model supports multi-level global structure distortion of the tree typology and can fully utilize the source and target parse tree structure features, which gives our system more expressive power and flexibility. The experimental results on the HIT bi-parsed text show that our method performs significantly better than Pharaoh, a state-of-the-art phrase-based SMT system, and other syntax-based methods, such as the synchronous CFG-based method on the small dataset.
Energy aware software evolution for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are subject to high levels of dynamism arising from changing environmental conditions and application requirements. Reconfiguration allows software functionality to be optimized for current environmental conditions and supports software evolution to meet variable application requirements. Contemporary software modularization approaches for WSNs allow for software evolution at various granularities; from monolithic re-flashing of OS and application functionality, through replacement of complete applications, to the reconfiguration of individual software components. As the nodes that compose a WSN must typically operate for long periods on a single battery charge, estimating the energy cost of software evolution is critical. This paper contributes a generic model for calculating the energy cost of the reconfiguration in WSN. We have embedded this model in the LooCI middleware, resulting in the first energy aware reconfigurable component model for sensor networks. We evaluate our approach using two real-world WSN applications and find that (i.) our model accurately predicts the energy cost of reconfiguration and (ii.) component-based reconfiguration has a high initial cost, but provides energy savings during software evolution.
Combining multideterminantal wave functions with density functionals to handle near-degeneracy in atoms and molecules

Control of near-degeneracy effects and dynamical correlation in atoms and molecules is within sight, thanks to an economical method that mixes configuration interaction (CI) and density functional theory (DFT). The influence of the size of the configuration-space has been studied for light systems including elements of the first and second period of the Periodic Table.
Study of sea wave height based on radar image texture feature of radar images: An introduction

This paper proposed a texture's feature of gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) as a calibrator of the sea wave height. Texture in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images represent the surface roughness of the sea or the wave height. As an archipelago country which has 70% sea of entire region, Indonesia needs and must have early warning system to provide transportation and fisherman safety circumvent the accident. Object of research are the P band full polarization Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image acquired from coastal of East Kalimantan. These polarization are; horizontal-horizontal, horizontal-vertical, vertical-horizontal and vertical-vertical. Extraction of feature is done under observation angle 0° and adjacent pixels is 1. The results showed homogeneity is a consistent and toughest feature in horizontally-vertically polarization and vertical-vertical polarization and this feature can be used as a calibrator.
The Monetary Transmission Mechanism in the Euro Area: More Evidence from VAR Analysis (Mtn Conference Paper)

This paper applies the identified VAR methodology to synthetic euro area data from 1980 till 1998 to study the macro-economic effects of an unexpected change in monetary policy in the euro area. The focus is on the area-wide monetary transmission. It is shown that the overall macro-economic effects of a monetary policy shock in the euro area are very similar to those estimated for the United States and are surprisingly stable over time. In addition, the paper contains a number of robustness checks with alternative identification schemes and examines how various real and financial variables (such as the GDP or money components) respond to an area-wide monetary policy impulse JEL Classification: E52
On the Feasibility of Optical Circuit Switching for High Performance Computing Systems

The interconnect plays a key role in both the cost and performance of large-scale HPC systems. The cost of future high-bandwidth electronic interconnects mushrooms due to expensive optical transceivers needed between electronic switches. We describe a potentially cheaper and more power-efficient approach to building high-performance interconnects. Through empirical analysis of HPC applications, we find that the bulk of inter-processor communication (barring collectives) is bounded in degree and changes very slowly or never. Thus we propose a two-network interconnect: An Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) network handling long-lived bulk data transfers, using optical switches; and a secondary lower-bandwidth Electronic Packet Switching (EPS) network. An OCS could be significantly cheaper, as it uses fewer optical transceivers than an electronic network. Collectives and transient communication packets traverse the electronic network. We present compiler techniques and dynamic run-time policies, using this two-network interconnect. Simulation results show that our approach provides high performance at low cost.
Compression domain volume rendering

A survey of graphics developers on the issue of texture mapping hardware for volume rendering would most likely find that the vast majority of them view limited texture memory as one of the most serious drawbacks of an otherwise fine technology. In this paper, we propose a compression scheme for static and time-varying volumetric data sets based on vector quantization that allows us to circumvent this limitation. We describe a hierarchical quantization scheme that is based on a multiresolution covariance analysis of the original field. This allows for the efficient encoding of large-scale data sets, yet providing a mechanism to exploit temporal coherence in non-stationary fields. We show, that decoding and rendering the compressed data stream can be done on the graphics chip using programmable hardware. In this way, data transfer between the CPU and the graphics processing unit (GPU) can be minimized thus enabling flexible and memory efficient real-time rendering options. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by demonstrating interactive renditions of Gigabyte data sets at reasonable fidelity on commodity graphics hardware.
Inter-temporal macroeconomic trade-offs and payoffs of human development strategies : An economy-wide modelling analysis

An economy-wide modelling analysis is conducted for four developing countries to quantify social and economic gains of human development investments that have been made to pursue Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In order for these gains to materialize, it is estimated that public spending would first need to be significantly scaled up to ensure MDG targets are met by 2015. Avoidance of MDG setbacks after 2015 would presumably continue to be highly costly for public finances. The final cost and the effect on economic growth would ultimately depend on macroeconomic hardships that the source of financing of public spending may trigger. At the same time, however, newly-added public spending to meet targets by 2015 is found to boost aggregate demand. The supply-side effect is that more factors are employed and productivity rises as qualified workers are demanded to deliver social services. This would spur economic growth up to 2015. It is further estimated that, as capital accumulates and productivity continues to grow with the employment of better-educated workers, past human development interventions would bring additional GDP growth—between 0.2 to 1.0 percentage points per year—after 2015. Options for countries to magnify long-term social and economic gains are also identified. JEL Classification: C68 (Computable General Equilibrium Models); F35 (Foreign Aid); H2 (Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue); H5 (National Government Expenditures and Related Policies); I25 (Education and Economic Development); I3 (Welfare and Poverty); J24 (Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labour Productivity); O4 (Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity); O11 (Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development). + The two authors are, respectively, Economic Affairs Officer at the Development Policy an Analysis Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DPAD/UN-DESA) and Lecturer at Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS) of University of La Plata and consultant of UN-DESA’s capacity development projects. Comments are welcome and can be addressed to the authors by email (sanchez-cantillo@un.org and martin@depeco.econo.unlp.edu.ar). The authors have elaborated this background paper to provide inputs for the elaboration of the United Nations World Economic and Social Survey (WESS) 2013. The paper was presented and discussed, on 23 April, 2013, as part of the Development Policy Seminar Series hosted by the Development Strategy and Policy Analysis Unit of DPAD/UN-DESA. The authors are grateful to Diyora Kabulova for her support in compiling key literature. Views and opinions expressed in the paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions to which they are affiliated.
Performance Analysis of Semi-Blind Hybrid DWT-SVD Based Watermarking Algorithm Using Daubechies Wavelet

Shivani Saxena , Vinod Todwal Department Of Information Technology Emailshivani.saxena004@gmail.com, Vinodtodwal@gmail.com Abstract The simplicity of the digital systems and the advancement of digital multimedia tools has made the storage, distribution and accessing of multimedia content very easy. This ease has rendered the contents over the digital me dia highly insecure. Digital data can be protected against illegal manipulation by embedding digital signature or watermark that helps in determining the legal or actual owner of the data. In this paper a robust watermarking algorithm is proposed and the result is analyzed on the bases of PSNR and NC.
Performance of VoIP over Multiple Co-Located IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

IEEE 802.11 WLAN has high data rates (e.g., 11 Mbps for 802.11b and 54 Mbps for 802.11g), while voice streams of VoIP typically have low-data-rate requirements (e.g., 29.2 Kbps). One may, therefore, expect WLAN to be able to support a large number of VoIP sessions (e.g., 200 and 900 sessions in 802.11b and 802.11g, respectively). Prior work by one of the authors, however, indicated that 802.11 is extremely inefficient for VoIP transport. Only 12 and 60 VoIP sessions can be supported in an 802.11b and an 802.11g WLAN, respectively. This paper shows that the bad news does not stop there. When there are multiple WLANs in the vicinity of each other-a common situation these days-the already low VoIP capacity can be further eroded in a significant manner. For example, in a 5 times 5, 25-cell multi-WLAN network, the VoIP capacities for 802.11b and 802.11g are only 1.63 and 10.34 sessions per AP, respectively. This paper investigates several solutions to improve the VoIP capacity. Based on a conflict graph model, we propose a clique-analytical call admission scheme, which increases the VoIP capacity by 52 percent from 1.63 to 2.48 sessions per AP in 802.11b. For 11g, the call admission scheme can also increase the capacity by 37 percent from 10.34 to 14.14 sessions per AP. If all the three orthogonal frequency channels available in 11b and 11g are used to reduce interferences among adjacent WLANs, clique-analytical call admission scheme can boost the capacity to 7.39 VoIP sessions per AP in 11b and 44.91 sessions per AP in 11g. Last but not least, this paper expounds for the first time the use of coarse-grained time-division multiple access (CoTDMA) in conjunction with the basic 802.11 CSMA to eliminate the performance-degrading exposed-node and hidden-node problems in 802.11. A two-layer coloring problem (which is distinct from the classical graph coloring problem) is formulated to assign coarse time slots and frequency channels to VoIP sessions, taking into account the intricacies of the carrier-sensing operation of 802.11. We find that CoTDMA can further increase the VoIP capacity in the multi-WLAN scenario by an additional 35 percent, so that 10 and 58 sessions per AP can be supported in 802.11b and 802.11g, respectively.
Integration Of Moodle Quizzes

Moodle is one of the most extended Learning Management Systems and is based on the open source (GPL) license agreement. We summarize the advantages of the use of this environment and show our six-year experience with the tools that Moodle provide. It would be of interest that any exhaustively used tool, such as quizzes, could reuse the knowledge that teachers store year after year in the Moodle database. In this work, a web-based tool allowing us to create, integrate, reuse and manipulate questions and quizzes is presented.
Dietary Blueberry and Bifidobacteria Attenuate Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Rats by Affecting SIRT1-Mediated Signaling Pathway

NAFLD model rats were established and divided into NAFLD model (MG group), SIRT1 RNAi (SI group), blueberry juice (BJ group), blueberry juice + bifidobacteria (BJB group), blueberry juice + SIRT1 RNAi (BJSI group), and blueberry juice + bifidobacteria + SIRT1 RNAi groups (BJBSI group). A group with normal rats was a control group (CG). BJB group ameliorated NAFLD, which was better than BJ group (P < 0.05). The lipid accumulation was lower in CG, BJ, and BJB groups than that in MG, SI, BJSI, and BJBSI groups (P < 0.05). The levels of SIRT1 and PPAR-α were higher in CG, BJ, and BJB groups than those in MG, SI, BJSI, and BJBSI groups (P < 0.05). The levels of SREBP-1c were lower in CG, BJ, and BJB groups than those in MG, SI, BJSI, and BJBSI groups (P < 0.05). The biochemical indexes SOD, GSH, and HDL-c were improved from CG to BJB group (P < 0.05). Inversely, the levels of AST and ALT, TG, TC, LDL-c, and MDA were decreased from CG to BJB group (P < 0.05). These changes enhance antioxidative capability and biochemical index of rats. Blueberry juice and bifidobacteria improve NAFLD by activating SIRTI-mediating signaling pathway.
Using PCA for Probabilistic Grammatical Inference on Trees ∗

We focus on the classical problem in grammatical inference of learning stochastic tree languages from finite samples of trees independently drawn according to a fixed unknown distribution. We consider here the class of stochastic tree languages that can be computed by rational tree series which can be viewed as a strict generalization of probabilistic tree automata. The class of rational stochastic tree languages has an algebraic characterization: All the residuals of a stochastic languages lie in a finite vector subspace. We propose a principle based on Principal Components Analysis to identify this vector subspace. This approach allows us to define a global solution of the problem instead of building an automaton iteratively as done by standard probabilistic grammatical inference algorithm. This is a way to tackle the main drawback of these approaches that is using statistical tests that rely on less and less examples when the structure grows. We provide an algorithm that computes an estimate of the target vector subspace and build a linear representation of a tree series giving an estimation of the target distribution. We notably show that in the case of tree languages, we have to consider the dual vector subspace to build the representation.