Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LMAC: LTE-assisted MAC protocol to reduce delay for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

Reducing message delivery delay in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications is critical to the safety of drivers, but it faces great challenges since most vehicles have not equipped with wireless radios and existing ad-hoc MAC protocols are not efficient to reduce delay due to interference. In this paper, we leverage the drivers' smartphones to realize V2V Communications and propose a LTE-assisted MAC protocol (LMAC) to reduce the delay. LMAC collects all vehicles' locations via LTE and reduce the delay using two methods. First, it introduces a centralized algorithm to assign time slots for vehicles which reduces the delay due to interference and the time to wait for the assigned slots. Second, it uses vehicle locations and message spread directions to properly eliminate the redundant transmission. Simulations show that LMAC can reduce delay by more than 30% than existing methods.
Virus spreading analysis in networked control systems: A transport dynamics based approach

Networked control systems (NCSs) are vulnerable to the cyber-threats of computer viruses. The cyberattacks on NCSs must intensively influence physical processes such as the safety-critical nuclear plants, through feedback actuation. To keep the cybersecurity to design proper anti-virus scheme, it is necessary to study the virus spreading dynamics on NCSs. In this paper, the virus spreading is modeled as a transport phenomenon. By extending the ectropy for thermodynamic systems, the stability and equilibrium states of the processes of single virus spreading in a heterogeneous NCS as well as multiple viruses spreading in a homogeneous NCS are analyzed. Numerical simulation results verify the theoretic rationality and show the influence of system parameters to the virus spreading.
A constructionist cognitive model of virtual presence

This paper proposes a cognitive model of presence which emphasizes the interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes, and the subsequent creation of temporary representations of an environment in working memory. These temporary representations (which we term constructions) are formations of meaning about the environment, which allow a subject to make inferences and interact in that environment. We argue that this constructionist position follows from the existence of hypothesis selection models of presence such as proposed by Slater & Steed. Finally, we contrast our model to that of Wirth et al and discuss some of the implications of this model for presence in unfamiliar or unrealistic environments
Mitigation of pollen limitation in the lowbush blueberry agroecosystem: effect of augmenting natural pollinators

Growers of small fruit crops often supplement the natural pollinator community by introducing pollinators into commercial orchards and fields, but there are relatively few studies that test the extent to which such interventions increase fruit yield. To test whether plants are limited by pollen availability, inflorescences in 78 commercial lowbush blueberry fields during three years were hand-pollinated either with supplemental outcross pollen, or marked and left as controls (open-pollination). Maximum fruit set with supplemental pollination was in the range 50–65%, whereas with open-pollination, it was slightly, but significantly lower, in the range of 47–57%, suggesting that pollen limitation can affect fruit set. In a two-year experiment, we augmented native pollinators with introduced honey bees, bumble bees, and leaf cutter bees and all combinations in 48 fields. Stigmatic pollen loads were influenced by the total numbers of managed bees in a field in 2010 but not 2011. The presence of leaf cutter bees had a small but positive effect on seed set in 2010, and honey bees had a small but negative influence on seed set in 2011. There was a strong correlation between fruit set reproductive output of supplementally pollinated and open-pollinated plants, suggesting that plant health or plant resources influence reproductive success. Temperature variation among regional groupings of fields was minimal and is unlikely to have accounted for differences among fields in fruit set. We propose several reasons why, despite pollen-limitation of fruit and seed set of blueberry plants, augmentation of the pollinator community of lowbush blueberry did not significantly increase reproduction. These include pollinator-mediated transfer of self-pollen followed by subsequent fruit abortion due to inbreeding depression and resource limitation for fruit maturation. Management practices that focus on increasing outcross pollen receipt, or plant resources for fruit set may have greater overall benefit than pollinator augmentation alone.
A hybrid mobility model based on social, cultural and language diversity

Human Mobility Models (HMMs) have become increasingly relevant in different application domains including networks designed for data dissemination protocols. Most existing HMMs consider the temporal and spatial features of human mobility. In addition, many recent HMMs based on social networks have begun to take into account social factors, which naturally influence the results of the HMMs. Unfortunately, these mobility models do not focus on the impact of several important social factors that can affect a person's actions, such as language, citizenship, and culture. This paper introduces a hybrid human mobility model that integrates social behavior, cultural and language factors into HMMs in order to measure their effect on human mobility, as well as temporal and spatial features. Results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model.
Moving Objects Detection and Tracking Framework for UAV-based Surveillance

Automated motion detection and tracking of ground moving objects using aerial platforms is challenging due to the small object size in comparison with objects such as buildings, as well as the fact that flying cameras can undergo rapid translations and rotations. As such, our objectives are to develop a system for gathering useful information from aerial images by mapping visited areas through image mosaic king and to detect moving objects in the captured video. To do so, the Moving Objects Detection and Tracking (MODAT) framework has been developed to facilitate the application and combination of various relevant computer vision and image processing techniques in order to achieve our objectives.
Quality of service management for real-time embedded information systems

Explores further how dynamic and distributed quality-of-service (QoS) management functions can be added to avionics applications built using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) standards and components, to provide more powerful adaptive software capabilities. This paper describes contributions in two principal areas. First, it outlines a QoS management architecture that meets the distributed resource management needs of real-time information systems, and describes our recent extensions to that architecture. Second, it presents empirical evidence of the utility and feasibility of dynamic and adaptive system behavior in realistic real-time embedded information systems. The discussion centers on the identification of key architectural features, and describes initial qualitative and quantitative results that are used to assess the benefits and costs of these segments of the overall architecture.
HEB in the Spotlight: Transcriptional Regulation of T-Cell Specification, Commitment, and Developmental Plasticity

The development of T cells from multipotent progenitors in the thymus occurs by cascades of interactions between signaling molecules and transcription factors, resulting in the loss of alternative lineage potential and the acquisition of the T-cell functional identity. These processes require Notch signaling and the activity of GATA3, TCF1, Bcl11b, and the E-proteins HEB and E2A. We have shown that HEB factors are required to inhibit the thymic NK cell fate and that HEBAlt allows the passage of T-cell precursors from the DN to DP stage but is insufficient for suppression of the NK cell lineage choice. HEB factors are also required to enforce the death of cells that have not rearranged their TCR genes. The synergistic interactions between Notch1, HEBAlt, HEBCan, GATA3, and TCF1 are presented in a gene network model, and the influence of thymic stromal architecture on lineage choice in the thymus is discussed.
High Resolution Prediction of Calcium-Binding Sites in 3D Protein Structures Using FEATURE

Metal-binding proteins are ubiquitous in biological systems ranging from enzymes to cell surface receptors. Among the various biologically active metal ions, calcium plays a large role in regulating cellular and physiological changes. With the increasing number of high-quality crystal structures of proteins associated with their metal ion ligands, many groups have built models to identify Ca2+ sites in proteins, utilizing information such as structure, geometry, or homology to do the inference. We present a FEATURE-based approach in building such a model and show that our model is able to discriminate between nonsites and calcium-binding sites with a very high precision of more than 98%. We demonstrate the high specificity of our model by applying it to test sets constructed from other ions. We also introduce an algorithm to convert high scoring regions into specific site predictions and demonstrate the usage by scanning a test set of 91 calcium-binding protein structures (190 calcium sites). The algorithm has a recall of more than 93% on the test set with predictions found within 3 Å of the actual sites.
Speci cation and Veri cation of MediaConstraints using UPPAAL ?

If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent. ac.uk/contact.html Citation for published version Bowman, Howard and Faconti, Giorgio and Massink, M. (1998) Specification and Verification of Media Constraints using UPPAAL. In: 5th Eurographics Workshop on the Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems, DSV-IS 98, Jun 03-05, 1998, Abington, England,.
A Compact 70 Watt Power Amplifier MMIC Utilizing S-Band GaN on SiC HEMT Process

The design and measured performance of a compact power amplifier MMIC utilizing a 0.25 μm S-band GaN HEMT process technology is presented. Measured in-fixture results for the two-stage amplifier at 35V drain bias showed a nominal small-signal gain of 30 dB, a minimum output power of 50 W and a minimum PAE of 45% in the 3.1-4.3 GHz band. A peak output power of 60W, PAE of 48.3% were measured at 3.3 GHz with 35V operation. At 40V operation, this MMIC is capable of greater than 70W output power. With a compact 4.1×3.1 mm2 die area, an output power density of 5.6W/mm2 Psat per die area for a single fully monolithic S-band HPA is demonstrated. In addition, the MMIC PA provides near constant efficiency over a wide range of bias voltages enabling desirable Psat control with modulation of drain voltage.
Hysteresis Re-chunking Based Metadata Harnessing Deduplication of Disk Images

Metadata-related overhead can significantly impact the performance of data deduplication systems, including the real duplication elimination ratio and the deduplication throughput. The amount of metadata produced is mainly determined by the chunking mechanism for the input data stream. In this paper, we propose a metadata harnessing deduplication (MHD) algorithm utilizing a duplication-distribution-based hysteresis re-chunking strategy. MHD harnesses the metadata by dynamically merging multiple non-duplicate chunks into one big chunk represented by one hash value while dividing big chunks straddling duplicate and non-duplicate data regions into small chunks represented with multiple hashes. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a lower metadata overhead and a higher deduplication throughput for a given duplication elimination ratio, as compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms such as the Bimodal, Sub Chunk and Sparse Indexing algorithms.
Generalized sampling: stability and performance analysis

Generalized sampling provides a general mechanism for recovering an unknown input function f(x)/spl epsiv//spl Hscr/ from the samples of the responses of m linear shift-invariant systems sampled at 1/mth the reconstruction rate. The system can be designed to perform a projection of f(x) onto the reconstruction subspace V(/spl phi/)=span {/spl phi/(x-k)}/sub k/spl epsiv/Z/; for example, the family of bandlimited signals with /spl phi/(x)=sinc(x). This implies that the reconstruction will be perfect when the input signal is included in V(/spl phi/): the traditional framework of Papoulis' (1977) generalized sampling theory. Otherwise, one recovers a signal approximation f(x)/spl epsiv/V(/spl phi/) that is consistent with f(x) in the sense that it produces the same measurements. To characterize the stability of the algorithm, we prove that the dual synthesis functions that appear in the generalized sampling reconstruction formula constitute a Riesz basis of V(/spl phi/), and we use the corresponding Riesz bounds to define the condition number of the system. We then use these results to analyze the stability of various instances of interlaced and derivative sampling. Next, we consider the issue of performance, which becomes pertinent once we have extended the applicability of the method to arbitrary input functions, that is, when /spl Hscr/ is considerably larger than V(/spl phi/), and the reconstruction is no longer exact. We show that the generalized sampling solution is essentially equivalent to the optimal minimum error approximation. We then perform a detailed analysis for the case in which the analysis filters are in L/sub 2/ and determine all relevant bound constants explicitly. Finally, we use an interlaced sampling example to illustrate these various calculations.
5. Sampling and Estimation in Hidden Populations Using Respondent-Driven Sampling

Standard statistical methods often provide no way to make accurate estimates about the characteristics of hidden populations such as injection drug users, the homeless, and artists. In this paper, we further develop a sampling and estimation technique called respondent-driven sampling, which allows researchers to make asymptotically unbiased estimates about these hidden populations. The sample is selected with a snowball-type design that can be done more cheaply, quickly, and easily than other methods currently in use. Further, we can show that under certain specified (and quite general) conditions, our estimates for the percentage of the population with a specific trait are asymptotically unbiased. We further show that these estimates are asymptotically unbiased no matter how the seeds are selected. We conclude with a comparison of respondent-driven samples of jazz musicians in New York and San Francisco, with corresponding institutional samples of jazz musicians from these cities. The results show that some standard methods for studying hidden populations can produce misleading results.
Human rights and structural adjustment

'Structural adjustment' has been a central part of the development strategy for the 'third world'. Loans made by the World Bank and the IMF have been conditional on developing countries pursuing rapid economic liberalization programmes as it was believed this would strengthen their economies in the long run. M. Rodwan Abouharb and David Cingranelli argue that, conversely, structural adjustment agreements usually cause increased hardship for the poor, greater civil conflict, and more repression of human rights, therefore resulting in a lower rate of economic development. Greater exposure to structural adjustment has increased the prevalence of anti-government protests, riots and rebellion. It has led to less respect for economic and social rights, physical integrity rights, and worker rights, but more respect for democratic rights. Based on these findings, the authors recommend a human rights-based approach to economic development.
Using RFID to Detect Interactions in Ambient Assisted Living Environments

Elderly people with physical or cognitive disabilities such as visual impairment lack independence in their everyday activities, such as shopping in retail stores. Ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies can help. The authors of this article propose the use of RFID technologies to enable an AAL system in a retail store. This article presents an RFID-enabled intelligent system that can detect user-object interactions via a supervised machine learning algorithm. The authors' proposal detects RFID signals from different objects and classifies them as interacted or static objects through an automatic training system, achieving a detection accuracy over 86 percent.
An Evolutionary Computational Technique for Constrained Optimisation in Engineering Design

This paper presents a general, flexible, and yet efficient real coded evolutionary computational technique (ECT) for solving mechanical engineering design optimisation problems. This technique incorporates simulated annealing (SA) in the selection process of genetic algorithm (GA). It has been designed with genetic operator called the blend crossover (BLX) to provide a better search capability. Other features include concentration of search in better areas of search space and incorporation of some constraints into the coding. Extensive testing has been carried out on standard test problems taken from the literature. The efficiency, effectiveness and ease of application of the proposed technique are demonstrated by solving a gear design problem, a truss design problem and a spring design problem. The results obtained compare favourably with those reported in the literature and suggest the use of proposed technique in mechanical engineering design and process optimisation and is a step forward in meeting the challenges posed in the design by present day intelligent manufacturing systems.
A Semi Supervised Dialog Act Tagging for Telugu

In a task oriented domain, recognizing the intention of a speaker is important so that the conversation can proceed in the correct direction. This is possible only if there is a way of labeling the utterance with its proper intent. One such labeling techniques is Dia-log Act (DA) tagging. This work focuses on discussing various n-gram DA tagging techniques. In this paper, a new method is proposed for DA tagging in Telugu using n-gram karakas with back-oﬀ as n-gram language modeling technique at n-gram level and Memory Based Learning at utterance level. The results show that the proposed method is on par with manual DA tagging.
Why did you record this video? An exploratory study on user intentions for video production

Why do people record videos and share them? While the question seems to be simple, user intentions have not yet been investigated for video production and sharing. A general taxonomy would lead to adapted information systems and multimedia interfaces tailored to the users' intentions. We contribute (1) an exploratory user study with 20 participants, examining the various facets of user intentions for video production and sharing in detail and (2) a novel set of user intention clusters for video production, grounded empirically in our study results. We further reflect existing work in specialized domains (i.e. video blogging and mobile phone cameras) and show that prevailing models used in other multimedia fields (e.g. photography) cannot be used as-is to reason about video recording and sharing intentions.
A DEEP CATALOG OF VARIABLE STARS IN A 0.66 deg2 LUPUS FIELD

We have conducted a wide-field photometric survey in a single 52′ × 52′ field towards the Lupus Galactic Plane in an effort to detect transiting Hot Jupiter planets. The data set also led to the detection of 494 field variables, all of which are new discoveries. This paper presents an overview of the project, along with the total catalog of variables, which comprises 190 eclipsing binaries (of contact, semi-contact, and detached configurations), 51 miscellaneous pulsators of various types, 237 long-period variables (P⩾ 2 d), 11 δ Scuti stars, 4 field RR Lyrae (3 disk and 1 halo) and 1 irregular variable. Our survey provides a complete catalog of W UMa eclipsing binaries in the field to V= 18.8, which display a Gaussian period distribution of 0.277 ± 0.036 d. Several binary systems are likely composed of equal-mass M-dwarf components and others display evidence of mass transfer. We find 17 candidate blue stragglers and one binary that has the shortest period known, 0.2009 d (V= 20.9). The frequency of eclipsing binaries (all types) is found to be 1.7 ± 0.4 × 10−3 per star, substantially higher (by a factor of 3–10) than previously determined in the halos of the globular clusters 47 Tuc and ω Cen. This indicates that cluster dynamics aid mass segregation and binary destruction.
Terrain Occlusion Using Binary Adaptive Ray Casting

Summary : Mission planners can benefit from determining regions of space occluded by terrain from sensor positions, e.g. in order to determine ingress and egress paths. Conventional approaches to computing occlusion using 2D or 2.5D representations of terrain are inefficient and do not scale well. Binary Adaptive Ray Casting uses intersection calculations accelerated by 3D hierarchical bounding volumes to perform adaptive interval probing. Candidate regions of dead ground are tested against a required tolerance for “shallowness” caused by grazing rays. The approach can be scaled arbitrarily on a cache-coherent non-uniform memory architecture to compute occluded terrain in near real-time.
The impact of the invisible : Cognitive deficits, behavioral changes, and fatigue after subarachnoid hemorrhage

A subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is a severe bleeding in the space that surrounds the brain. SAH occurs at a relatively young age, with a mean age between 40 and 60 years. A part of the SAH patients experiences problems in resuming their daily activities. There might be no visible consequences, however clear changes compared to the situation before SAH can be present. The main objective of this thesis was to investigate several (neuro)psychological consequences of SAH. Firstly, cognitive deficits regarding memory, attention, planning, and organisation are found. Specifically, patients can have impairments in 'social cognition': the ability to recognize others' emotions, understand the behavior of others and react adequately. These impairments are related to behavioral problems, such as reduced initiative. Even years after the SAH, patients report high rates of fatigue, especially described as a feeling of exhaustion resulting from mentally demanding activities. Also, symptoms such as stress sensitivity and irritability are common. Furthermore, the present study shows that consequences such as fatigue and cognitive problems are related to long-term outcome. Screening for these so called ‘invisible consequences’ (cognitive, behavioral, and emotional problems) is crucial to improve assessment, treatment methods and eventually outcome.