Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NicePic!: a system for extracting attractive photos from flickr streams

A large number of images are continuously uploaded to popular photo sharing websites and online social communities. In this demonstration we show a novel application which automatically classifies images in a live photo stream according to their attractiveness for the community, based on a number of visual and textual features. The system effectively introduces an additional facet to browse and explore photo collections by highlighting the most attractive photographs and demoting the least attractive.
Temporal and Spatial Calibration of a freehand 3D ultrasound reconstructions system by using an N-wire phantom

Freehand three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound is a method for reconstructing a 3D volume from two-dimensional (2D) ultrasound (US) images. Indeed, the US scan is very common in the medical world; it is a noninvasive, fast and cheap exam. The objective is to enable the practitioner to have a 3D visualization inside the body, in real-time. The medical staff can rotate, move or scale it inside the 3D space. Another important possibility is a view inside the volume. In order to do so, we must move the US probe on the area of interest and the movement, the path is taken in by the Polaris Spectra System. The problem is that the system follows the probe and not the scan plane. The objective is to define the transformation between the US probe markers (rigid body) and the scan plan. For this, the system must be calibrate. During the calibration, the user must use a phantom with known dimensions. For this system, the method of improved N-wire phantom-based freehand ultrasound is used. We must make a temporal and a spatial calibration to obtain different matrixes which enable to know the different offset and transformation for having a good 3D reconstruction.
Event Linking: Grounding Event Reference in a News Archive

Interpreting news requires identifying its constituent events. Events are complex linguistically and ontologically, so disambiguating their reference is challenging. We introduce event linking, which canonically labels an event reference with the article where it was first reported. This implicitly relaxes coreference to co-reporting, and will practically enable augmenting news archives with semantic hyperlinks. We annotate and analyse a corpus of 150 documents, extracting 501 links to a news archive with reasonable inter-annotator agreement.
Goal-oriented Requirements Engineering for Self-Adaptive Service Compositions

Self-Adaptation is a fundamental feature for service compositions in order to react to problems that come from their loose coupling. Due to the lack of modeling possibilities for adaptation in existing goalbased approaches, a new methodology is introduced here for specifying adaptation in existing goal models. Further, the approach offers continuous integration of adaptation throughout the whole development process allowing requirements traceability. This seminar thesis is based on the papers [3] and [4] by Luciano Baresi and Liliana Pasquale.
PQLX noise model for the URZ station in the Matata region of New Zealand

This paper includes the main topics associated with seismic noise modeling. First part will describe the seismic noise modeling bases and its corresponding mathematical approaches. The second part will review the main approaches taken in practice to find the noise models. Two main research performed by Peterson [1] and McNamara [2] will be studied. The third part reviews the software tool developed in this regard. The PASCAL Quick Look eXtended (P.Q.L.X) package developed by Boaz [3–5], will be introduced and applied to build up a noise model for the URZ station in Matata, New Zealand [6]. It is shown that the noise model is consistent with the URZ sensor installation and geological features in the URZ region. Such a model serves to reproduce accurate characteristics of the noise sources within the URZ region which are of great importance to improving earthquake detection in the URZ region.
Pupils’ perceptions of the religious links to terrorism

Abstract With the increased requirement to incorporate counter-terrorism measures into the British education system, teachers are now expected to discuss terrorism within the classroom setting. However, this is a challenging endeavour due to the complex nature of the phenomenon, including definitional questions and links made to certain ideologies, in particular religious motivations. This paper explores my research findings from a project conducted over several years into pupils’ perceptions of terrorism and its links to religion in general, as well as the specific links made with Islam, Sikhism and Christianity. To contextualise the research, a brief overview of the methods and results has been provided, followed by an analysis of the issues raised. Overall, the pupils thought that religion in general, as well as Islam in particular, was something that motivated terrorism. However, many pupils also expressed concerns about associating entire religious communities with terrorism, perceiving it as a stereotype, and expressed interest in discovering more about how and why religion was used to justify such violent attacks.
Natural balance of multicell converters

The multicell converter topology is said to possess a natural voltage balancing property. This paper models multicell converters for the general case of p-cells. It describes the relationship between the models for different numbers of cells in a generic model for a p-cell multicell converter. The switching functions used in switching these converters are mathematically analyzed. Equivalent circuits are derived and presented. The switching and balancing properties of these converters are mathematically analyzed. Multicell converters were modeled previously for both sinusoidal and fixed duty-cycle references. The model discussed is valid for any modulation method. The conditions for balanced cell capacitor voltages are presented from the aforementioned mathematical synthesis. The balancing property of these converters is also proved mathematically from the presented properties and conditions for natural balancing are discussed. The balancing properties and conditions are formulated and presented as a "natural balance theory for multicell converters". Simulation and experimental results are included to verify the presented balance theory and properties. Conclusions presented include conditions for the theory to be valid as well as possible extensions to the theory and practical implications on converter design.
Neural signature of fictive learning signals in a sequential investment task

Reinforcement learning models now provide principled guides for a wide range of reward learning experiments in animals and humans. One key learning (error) signal in these models is experiential and reports ongoing temporal differences between expected and experienced reward. However, these same abstract learning models also accommodate the existence of another class of learning signal that takes the form of a fictive error encoding ongoing differences between experienced returns and returns that “could-have-been-experienced” if decisions had been different. These observations suggest the hypothesis that, for all real-world learning tasks, one should expect the presence of both experiential and fictive learning signals. Motivated by this possibility, we used a sequential investment game and fMRI to probe ongoing brain responses to both experiential and fictive learning signals generated throughout the game. Using a large cohort of subjects (n = 54), we report that fictive learning signals strongly predict changes in subjects' investment behavior and correlate with fMRI signals measured in dopaminoceptive structures known to be involved in valuation and choice.
Relationship of College Students' Response Styles on the Strong Interest Inventory to Scores on the Beck Depression Inventory and the Career Thoughts Inventory

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among college students' response styles on the Occupations section of the Strong Interest Inventory (Sil), as indicated by the "Like," "Dislike," and "Indifferent" percent indexes, and their scores on the Career Thoughts Inventory (CTI) and the Beck Depression InventorySecond Edition (BDl-ll). The Sil is a career interest inventory that measures a person's level of interest across a wide range of areas including occupations and leisure activities. When presented with an item on the Sil, an individual indicates whether he or she likes, dislikes, or is indifferent to that particular occupation or activity. The CTI measures dysfunctional thinking in career problem solving and decision making. The higher a person's scores on the CTI, the more dysfunctional are his or her career thoughts. The BDI-ll is a self-report instrument for measuring the severity of depression in adolescents and adults. The higher a person's scores on the BDl-ll, the more severe is his or her level of depression. This study also explored gender differences among the aforementioned variables. The participants were 170 college students who had enrolled in a First Year Studies course during Fall 2003. This study was primarily correlational in design, and the statistical methods used were the Pearson product moment correlation and regression
Challenges Toward User-Centric Multimedia

Currently, much research aims at coping with the shortcomings in multimedia consumption that may exist in a user's current context, e.g., due to the absence of appropriate devices at many locations, a lack of capabilities of mobile devices, restricted access to content, or non-personalized user interfaces. Recently, solutions to specific problems have been emerging, e.g., wireless access to multimedia repositories over standardized interfaces; however, due to usability restrictions the user has to spend much effort to or is even incapable of fulfilling his/her demands. The vision of user-centric multimedia places the user in the center of multimedia services to support his/her multimedia consumption intelligently, dealing with the aforementioned issues while minimizing required work. Essential features of such a vision are comprehensive context awareness, personalized user interfaces, and multimedia content adaptation. These aspects are addressed in this paper as major challenges toward a user-centric multimedia framework.
Why New Programming Languages for Simulation?

Writing highly performant simulations requires a lot of human effort to optimize for an increasingly diverse set of hardware platforms, such as multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and distributed machines. Since these optimizations cut across both the design of geometric data structures and numerical linear algebra, code reusability and portability is frequently sacriﬁced for performance. Webelieve the key to make simulation programmers more productive at developing portable and performant code is to introduce new linguistic abstractions, as in rendering and image processing. In this perspective, we distill the core ideas from our two languages, Ebb and Simit, that are published in this journal.
Large-scale magnetic field of the G8 dwarf ξ Bootis A

We investigate the magnetic geometry of the active G8 dwarf ξ Bootis A (ξ Boo A), from spectropolarimetric observations obtained in 2003 with the MuSiCoS echelle spectropolarimeter at the Telescope Bernard Lyot (Observatoire du Pic du Midi, France). We repeatedly detect a photospheric magnetic field, with periodic variations consistent with rotational modulation. Circularly polarized (Stokes V) line profiles present a systematic asymmetry, showing up as an excess in amplitude and area of the blue lobe of the profiles. Direct modelling of Stokes V profiles suggests that the global magnetic field is composed of two main components, with an inclined dipole and a large-scale toroidal field. We derive a dipole intensity of about 40 G, with an inclination of 35° of the dipole with respect to the rotation axis. The toroidal field strength is of the order of 120 G. A noticeable evolution of the field geometry is observed over the 40 nights of our observation window and results in an increase in field strength and dipole inclination. This study is the first step of a long-term monitoring of ξ Boo A and other active solar-type stars, with the aim of investigating secular fluctuations of stellar magnetic geometries induced by activity cycles.
Economic Analysis of Rural Land Administration Projects

As part of its efforts to improve the rural economies of its client countries, the World Bank is supporting programs to strengthen land administration and undertake land reform. Land administration projects can include a variety of activities. Usually, the most expensive and that which is most likely to have direct, tangible benefits is land titling. The provision of titles to landowners is only part of complex process, however. Titles by themselves are unlikely to bring lasting benefits unless there is a functioning registry and cadastre and a system to adjudicate disputes. Land titling can generate many benefits, including improved efficiency of land markets, reduction in conflict over land, enhanced access to credit, and improved incentives to invest in agricultural production. Where the conditions are appropriate, titling can bring important benefits. Conditions, however, are not always appropriate. Moreover, land administration projects can be quite costly. Carrying out an economic analysis is necessary to determine whether the benefits to be achieved in a given situation are sufficient to justify the costs. Until recently, however, economic analyses have generally not been carried out for land administration projects. This manual explains the principles and approach that such an economic analysis should follow.
Workshop on Supervised and Unsupervised Ensemble Methods and Their Applications (suema'2007) Workshop on Supervised and Unsupervised Ensemble Methods and Their Applications (suema'2007) in Conjunction with the 3rd Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis Clustering Ensembles for 

Cluster ensembles offer a solution to challenges inherent to clustering arising from its ill-posed nature. In this paper we focus on the design of ensembles for categorical data. Our approach leverages diverse input clusterings discovered in random subspaces. We experimentally demostrate the efficacy of our technique in combination with the categorical clustering algorithm COOLCAT.
Semi-supervised single-label text categorization using centroid-based classifiers

In this paper we study the effect of using unlabeled data in conjunction with a small portion of labeled data on the accuracy of a centroid-based classifier used to perform single-label text categorization. We chose to use centroid-based methods because they are very fast when compared with other classification methods, but still present an accuracy close to that of the state-of-the-art methods. Efficiency is particularly important for very large domains, like regular news feeds, or the web. We propose the combination of Expectation-Maximization with a centroid-based method to incorporate information about the unlabeled data during the training phase. We also propose an alternative to EM, based on the incremental update of a centroid-based method with the unlabeled documents during the training phase. We show that these approaches can greatly improve accuracy relatively to a simple centroid-based method, in particular when there are very small amounts of labeled data available (as few as one single document per class). Using one synthetic and three real-world datasets, we show that, if the initial model of the data is sufficiently precise, using unlabeled data improves performance. On the other hand, using unlabeled data degrades performance if the initial model is not precise enough.
Unequal Error Protection for SPIHT-Coded Image Transmission Based on MIMO Adaptive Channel Assignment Policy

In this paper, a joint source-channel coding (JSCC) scheme for unequal error protection (UEP) based SPIHT-Coded Image transmission over wireless channels is proposed. SPIHT-Coded Image information is divided into different substreams according to their different importance. Each substream is transmitted differentially over MIMO system based on MIMO Adaptive Channel Assignment Policy (ACAP) to achieve unequal error protection. ACAP is able to assign different important substreams to corresponding subchannels with different qualities of MIMO in terms of estimated subchannel state information based on a training preamble. Simulation results show that the scheme with ACAP can achieve UEP for image transmission. The quality of reconstructed image improves obviously compared to the scheme without ACAP.
MOSSFARM: Model structure selection by fuzzy association rule mining

Effective methods for feature and model structure selection are very important for data-driven modeling, data mining, and system identification tasks. This paper presents a new method for selecting important variables (regressors) in nonlinear (dynamic) models with mixed discrete (categorical, fuzzy) and continuous inputs and outputs. The proposed method applies fuzzy association rule mining. The selection process of the important variables is based on two interesting measures of the mined association rules.
Identification and validation of AIB1 and EIF5A2 for noninvasive detection of bladder cancer in urine samples

We previously demonstrated that amplified in breast cancer 1 (AIB1) and eukaryotic initiation factor 2 (EIF5A2) overexpression was an independent predictor of poor clinical outcomes for patients with bladder cancer (BCa). In this study, we evaluated the usefulness of AIB1 and EIF5A2 alone and in combination with nuclear matrix protein 22 (NMP22) as noninvasive diagnostic tests for BCa. Using urine samples from 135 patients (training set, controls [n = 50] and BCa [n = 85]), we detected the AIB1, EIF5A2, and NMP22 concentrations using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. We applied multivariate logistic regression analysis to build a model based on the three biomarkers for BCa diagnosis. The diagnostic accuracy of the three biomarkers and the model were assessed and compared by the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic. We validated the diagnostic accuracy of these biomarkers and the model in an independent validation cohort of 210 patients. In the training set, urinary concentrations of AIB1, EIF5A2, and NMP22 were significantly elevated in BCa. The AUCs of AIB1, EIF5A2, NMP22, and the model were 0.846, 0.761, 0.794, and 0.919, respectively. The model had the highest diagnostic accuracy when compared with AIB1, EIF5A2, or NMP22 (p < 0.05 for all). The model had 92% sensitivity and 92% specificity. We obtained similar results in the independent validation cohort. AIB1 and EIF5A2 show promise for the noninvasive detection of BCa. The model based on AIB1, EIF5A2, and NMP22 outperformed each of the three individual biomarkers for detecting BCa.
IMPROVED FREQUENCY BIAS FACTOR SIZING FOR NON-INTERACTIVE CONTROL

SUMMARY Frequency control can be considered to be one of the most crucial aspects of ancillary services. This paper revises the current basics of calculating the factors used in these control schemes, showing limitations of these, thus highlighting the need for new sizing methods. The basis for implementing these is presented, along with an explanation why it is not desirable to implement completely new control concepts. New sizing concepts are presented based on avoiding the determined limitations. A benchmark system applying these new sizing methods to a sample disturbance is derived.
The educational impact of implementation the education through adventure discipline in physical education and sports academic curriculum

Introduction: The inclusion in the curriculum for students of physical education specialization in Romania of a new discipline- Education through adventure (EA) falls within the current trends of practicing physical activities and modernization of the European curriculum. Purpose: The purpose of the study aims at assessing the educational level of implementation of EA discipline within the academic curriculum of physical education and sport specialization. Material and Methods: Study through the survey method based on a questionnaire concerning the assessment of the educational impact of implementing the EA disciplines. Participants: 72 students from physical education, University of Medicine and Pharmacy Targu Mures. The questionnaire on the assessment of the educational impact of implementing the EA discipline included 15 items with Linckert responses. Statistically processed with SPPS 20: Cronbach's alpha, effect size, the percentage of individual qualifications, the arithmetic mean, the standard deviation, t-test. Results: The 15-item questionnaire had a Cronbach reliability scores . 792. We identified five patterns that emerged explaining more than 60.2% of the variance. 54.82% consider relevant the educational discipline with maximum response, effect size of each ≥. 683 items, the results are statistically significant for all items, p <0.05. The study results reveal the major educational impact of EA discipline content, being considered by students as it follows: attractive, useful, effective with innovative relevance in the professional training. Conclusions: We recommend the conduct of future studies of impact assessment of EA specific activities on students’ motor abilities.
Sub-difference image of curvelet transform for crowd estimation: a case study at the Holy Haram in Madinah

Counting people and estimating their densities over a certain area is a fundamental task for many artificial intelligence systems. In this study, sub-difference images of curvelet transform are postulated as an efficient source for effective crowd estimation features. The new algorithm is described in detail in the form of a case study conducted at the Holy Haram in Madinah. The application of the difference images extracted by curvelet transform is thus proven to be efficient and useful for further studies. In addition, the proposed method is independent of any background modeling or background subtraction techniques. The method can also handle crowds of different sizes and strong perspective distortion conditions. The estimation procedure is performed using two versions of difference images generated by forward and customized inverse curvelet transforms. The proposed algorithm is then compared with normal difference image utilization.
New clock-gating techniques for low-power flip-flops

Two novel low power flip-flops are presented in the paper. The proposed flip-flops use new gating techniques that reduce power dissipation deactivating the clock signal. The presented circuits overcome the clock duty-cycle limitation of previously reported gated flip-flops. Circuit simulations with the inclusion of parasitics show that sensible power dissipation reduction is possible if the input signal has reduced switching activity. A 16-bit counter is presented as a simple low power application.