Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Advances in DSM generation and higher level information extraction From high resolution optical stereo satellite data

The automatic generation of digital surface models (DSM) of urban areas from high and very high resolution (VHR) stereo data from satellites is still a research issue. Image matching algorithms from computer vision have been introduced and adopted to satellite imagery in recent years. These algorithms do not work using local optimisation like area based matching but try to optimize a global cost function. Analysis shows that matching approaches based on epipolar images like semi-global matching (SGM) and new methods using total generalized variation (TGV) yield the best results. Especially satellites like Worldview-2, GeoEye-1 and Pleiades exhibit very high spatial resolution and geometric quality and can therefore be used to generate DSMs with good properties. If several stereo images from one orbit are available, a combination of DSMs generated by different stereo pairs leads to even better results. Using these DSMs, which already show urban area features in high detail, further higher level information can be extracted and new products can be generated. The main focus of this contribution is to present and analyse several derived information products which can be generated using the DSMs generated from satellite stereo data together with panchromatic and multispectral images. In many applications the product of interest is not the DSM but the digital terrain model (DTM), which exhibits not the height of objects like buildings or trees but the underlying terrain. In this paper a selected method and example for generating DTM from DSM is presented. A further issue is to extract real 3D objects like buildings using DSM and the derived DTM data. Different methods have been developed and are presented using typical examples in densely build city areas including validation results. At least larger buildings can be automatically extracted with sufficient accuracy; even the roof shape (gable or flat roof) can be extracted and modelled. Since automatic change detection is generally a very difficult topic in image processing, information on height or 3D properties are of advantage when used in the change detection procedure. Therefore, if stereo data sets from different dates are available, automatic 3D change detection can be performed using the corresponding DSMs. Since the change detection results depend very much on the quality of the DSMs they generally have to be improved using the multispectral information. Two methods have been developed and are shown and compared using examples from dense urban and industrial areas. The presented results show that due to the good data quality and resolution of satellite image data and the corresponding DSMs, it has become feasible to derive higher level and detailed geo-information regarding 3D relevant object classes and change detection.
University of Lethbridge's Participation in TREC 2007 QA Track

Question Answering (QA) is retrieving answers to natural language questions from a collection of documents rather than retrieving relevant documents containing the keywords of the query which is performed by search engines. What a user usually wants is often a precise answer to a question. For example, given the question “Who won the nobel prize in peace in 2006? ” what a user really wants is the answer “Dr. Muhammad Yunus”, in stead of reading through lots of documents that contain the words “win”, “nobel”,“prize”, “peace” and “2006” etc. This means that question answering systems will possibly be integral to the next generation of search engines. The Text Retrieval Conference, TREC1 QA track is the major large-scale evaluation environment for open-domain question answering systems. The questions in the TREC-2007 QA track are clustered by target, which is the overall theme or topic of the questions. The track has three types of questions: 1. factoid that require only one correct response, 2. list that require a non redundant list of correct responses and 3. other questions that require a non redundant list of facts about the target that has not already been discovered by a previous answer. We took the approach of designing a question answering system that is based on document tagging and question classification. Question classification extracts useful information (i.e. answer type) from the question about how to answer the question. Document tagging extracts useful information from the documents, which will be used in finding the answer to the question. We used different available tools to tag the documents. Our system classifies the questions using manually developed rules.
Energy Harvesting communication system with SOC-dependent energy storage losses

The popularity of Energy Harvesting Devices (EHDs) has grown in the past few years, thanks to their capability of prolonging the network lifetime. In reality, EHDs are affected by several inefficiencies, e.g., energy leakage, battery degradation or storage losses. In this work we consider an energy harvesting transmitter with storage inefficiencies. In particular, we assume that when new energy has to be stored in the battery, part of this is wasted and the losses depend upon the current state of charge of the device. This is a practical realistic assumption, e.g., for a capacitor, that changes the structure of the optimal transmission policy. We analyze the throughput maximization problem with a dynamic programming approach and prove that, given the battery status and the channel gain, the optimal transmission policy is deterministic. We derive numerical results for the energy losses in a capacitor and show the presence of a loop effect that degrades the system performance if the optimal policy is not considered.
Trajectory tracking control of an omnidirectional mobile robot with friction compensation

This paper presents and discusses the trajectory tracking control design with friction compensation for a three wheeled omnidirectional mobile robot. Firstly, a dynamic model without considering the friction forces is derived. Part of the control effort is used to compensate the friction effects, which is estimated by an extended state observer without using a friction model. Then traditional resolved acceleration control is applied to the robot, based on the derived dynamic model. In addition, stability analysis of the controller and observer is presented. Experimental results show that the proposed control design is efficient in compensating the friction effects and in improving the tracking control performances.
An abstract interpretation-based framework for software watermarking

Software watermarking consists in the intentional embedding of indelible stegosignatures or watermarks into the subject software and extraction of the stegosignatures embedded in the stegoprograms for purposes such as intellectual property protection. We introduce the novel concept of abstract software watermarking. The basic idea is that the watermark is hidden in the program code in such a way that it can only be extracted by an abstract interpretation of the (maybe non-standard) concrete semantics of this code. This static analysis-based approach allows the watermark to be recovered even if only a small part of the program code is present and does not even need that code to be executed. We illustrate the technique by a simple abstract watermarking protocol for methods of Java™ classes. The concept applies equally well to any other kind of software (including hardware originally specified by software).
Crosstalk between the Circadian Clock and Innate Immunity in Arabidopsis

The circadian clock integrates temporal information with environmental cues in regulating plant development and physiology. Recently, the circadian clock has been shown to affect plant responses to biotic cues. To further examine this role of the circadian clock, we tested disease resistance in mutants disrupted in CCA1 and LHY, which act synergistically to regulate clock activity. We found that cca1 and lhy mutants also synergistically affect basal and resistance gene-mediated defense against Pseudomonas syringae and Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis. Disrupting the circadian clock caused by overexpression of CCA1 or LHY also resulted in severe susceptibility to P. syringae. We identified a downstream target of CCA1 and LHY, GRP7, a key constituent of a slave oscillator regulated by the circadian clock and previously shown to influence plant defense and stomatal activity. We show that the defense role of CCA1 and LHY against P. syringae is at least partially through circadian control of stomatal aperture but is independent of defense mediated by salicylic acid. Furthermore, we found defense activation by P. syringae infection and treatment with the elicitor flg22 can feedback-regulate clock activity. Together this data strongly supports a direct role of the circadian clock in defense control and reveal for the first time crosstalk between the circadian clock and plant innate immunity.
Maintenance of Oxygenation during One‐Lung Ventilation: Effect of Intermittent Reinflation of the Collapsed Lung with Oxygen

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect on oxygenation of intermittent inflation with oxygen of the collapsed lung during one-lung ventilation (OLV). Sixteen patients were studied during pulmonary surgery. Balanced anesthesia with nitrous oxide and an inspired oxygen fraction of 0.5 was used. The control group (N=8) had a median PaO2 of 19.2 (range 12.2--30.2) kPa before OLV, and 10.2 (8.2--16.0) kPa after 9 minutes of OLV without further reduction in PaO2 for another 10 minutes. In the treatment (inflation) group, the collapsed lung was manually inflated with 2 liters of oxygen and was then immediately allowed to collapse again. This procedure was repeated every 5 minutes during OLV. PaO2 increased more than 4 kPa following each inflation in seven patients. In the eighth, PaO2 remained high throughout OLV. Although PaO2 decreased between inflations, it never reached the level observed in controls during 19 minutes of OLV.
A New Axes Re-ordering Method in Parallel Coordinates Visualization

Visualization and interaction of multidimensional data always requires optimized solutions to integrate the display, exploration and analytical reasoning of data into one visual pipeline for human-centered data analysis and interpretation. Parallel coordinate, as one of the popular multidimensional data visualization techniques, is suffered from the visual clutter problem. Though changing the ordering of axis is a straightforward way to address it, optimizing the order of axis is a NP-complete problem. In this paper, we propose a new axes re-ordering method in parallel coordinates visualization: a similarity-based method, which is based on the combination of Nonlinear Correlation Coefficient (NCC) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) algorithms. By using this approach, the first remarkable axe can be selected based on mathematics theory and all axis are re-ordered in line with the degree of similarities among them. Meanwhile, we would also propose a measurement of contribution rate of each dimension to reveal the property hidden in the dataset. At last, case studies demonstrate the rationale and effectiveness of our approaches: NCC reordering method can enlarge the mean crossing angles and reduce the amount of polylines between the neighboring axes. It can reduce the computational complexity greatly in comparison with other re-ordering methods.
The Southern Ocean ecosystem under multiple climate change stresses ‐ an integrated circumpolar assessment

A quantitative assessment of observed and projected environmental changes in the Southern Ocean (SO) with a potential impact on the marine ecosystem shows: (i) large proportions of the SO are and will be affected by one or more climate change processes; areas projected to be affected in the future are larger than areas that are already under environmental stress, (ii) areas affected by changes in sea‐ice in the past and likely in the future are much larger than areas affected by ocean warming. The smallest areas (<1% area of the SO) are affected by glacier retreat and warming in the deeper euphotic layer. In the future, decrease in the sea‐ice is expected to be widespread. Changes in iceberg impact resulting from further collapse of ice‐shelves can potentially affect large parts of shelf and ephemerally in the off‐shore regions. However, aragonite undersaturation (acidification) might become one of the biggest problems for the Antarctic marine ecosystem by affecting almost the entire SO. Direct and indirect impacts of various environmental changes to the three major habitats, sea‐ice, pelagic and benthos and their biota are complex. The areas affected by environmental stressors range from 33% of the SO for a single stressor, 11% for two and 2% for three, to <1% for four and five overlapping factors. In the future, areas expected to be affected by 2 and 3 overlapping factors are equally large, including potential iceberg changes, and together cover almost 86% of the SO ecosystem.
SOMR: Towards a Security-Oriented MapReduce Infrastructure

MapReduce system over a cloud computing infrastructure has made an extensive use in the field of finance, medical health, scientific research, traffic, energy and so on which attracts more and more attention on the security of the platform. Due to the sensitivity of the data in these fields, the user suffers great threat on their privacy and security. And the wrong results produced by the MapReduce platform may mislead the user to a big disaster. Current solutions mainly focus on the procedure of encryption before transmission and storage and decryption when processing. However, these solutions cannot prevent the user data stolen by the data processing program and the wrong result produced by the platform. In this paper, we propose a Security-Oriented MapReduce (SOMR) infrastructure that integrates the big-data processing framework, key management system and trusted computing infrastructure to ensure the security of every operation. While big data processing framework controls the life cycle of the cloud computing platform, key management system provides the trust assurance of encryption and trusted computing infrastructure makes measurable verification on the platform, SOMR presents a persistent security guarantee on the user data and processing results. We implemented SOMR on the infrastructure of OpenStack with Sahara, Barbican and OAT. The evaluations on our prototype showed that the platform can resist many typical attacker behaviors, and the overheads can be reduced to a very low level.
TORISHIKI-KAI, An Autogenerated Web Search Directory

With this research we present a system that suggests valuable complementary information relevant to a user's topic of interest, in the form of keywords. For this purpose we have automatically constructed a Web search directory called TORISHIKI-KAI from a large collection of Web documents, using state of the art knowledge acquisition methods. TORISHIKI-KAI maps out the use context of the terms input by the user, and classifies topically related search terms according to semantic categories such as potential troubles, methods or tools in order to help the user find potentially valuable "unknown unknowns".
Service Offering in Solution Marketing – A Case Study

The shift in industrial suppliers’ business logic from marketing products to marketing solutions sets challenges in creating effective service offerings. In this paper we focus on a solution provider’s service offering and its formulation. Based on a literature review from the solution marketing, service marketing, and project marketing literature we suggest a conceptual framework of the solution provider’s service offering elements. Through two empirical cases about industrial solution providers we then examine these elements and illustrate the offering formulation process of a solution provider. The findings from the case study allow us to propose a revised conceptual framework of a solution provider’s offering formulation.
Knowledge Flow Analysis for Security Protocols

Knowledge flow analysis offers a simple and flexible way to find flaws in security protocols. A protocol is described by a collection of rules constraining the propagation of knowledge amongst principals. Because this characterization corresponds closely to informal descriptions of protocols, it allows a succinct and natural formalization; because it abstracts away message ordering, and handles communications between principals and applications of cryptographic primitives uniformly, it is readily represented in a standard logic. A generic framework in the Alloy modelling language is presented, and instantiated for two standard protocols, and a new key management scheme.
Shaping communicative colour signals over evolutionary time

Many evolutionary forces can shape the evolution of communicative signals, and the long-term impact of each force may depend on relative timing and magnitude. We use a phylogenetic analysis to infer the history of blue belly patches of Sceloporus lizards, and a detailed spectrophotometric analysis of four species to explore the specific forces shaping evolutionary change. We find that the ancestor of Sceloporus had blue patches. We then focus on four species; the first evolutionary shift (captured by comparison of S. merriami and S. siniferus) represents an ancient loss of the belly patch by S. siniferus, and the second evolutionary shift, bounded by S. undulatus and S. virgatus, represents a more recent loss of blue belly patch by S. virgatus. Conspicuousness measurements suggest that the species with the recent loss (S. virgatus) is the least conspicuous. Results for two other species (S. siniferus and S. merriami) suggest that over longer periods of evolutionary time, new signal colours have arisen which minimize absolute contrast with the habitat while maximizing conspicuousness to a lizard receiver. Specifically, males of the species representing an ancient loss of blue patch (S. siniferus) are more conspicuous than are females in the UV, whereas S. merriami males have evolved a green element that makes their belly patches highly sexually dimorphic but no more conspicuous than the white bellies of S. merriami females. Thus, our results suggest that natural selection may act more immediately to reduce conspicuousness, whereas sexual selection may have a more complex impact on communicative signals through the introduction of new colours.
Scaling of Color Image using B-spline Curves

This paper presents representation techniques as the image can be represented in Cubic B-splines that are used to represent the curvilinear features of an image. The algorithm is devised to convert a raster image into vector image. The algorithm first detects the curvilinear features of the image, then based on the curvilinear edges and feature attributes it constructs a triangulation, and finally iteratively optimizes the vertex color attributes and updates the triangulation. The results of the used techniques are presented. Compared with existing vector representation technique this method provides advantages for various image operations. This method is useful to vectorize the images of fonts, logos, blueprints and maps.
Component-Oriented Programming Languages : Messages vs . Methods , Modules vs . Types ( Extended Abstract )

We are concerned with the design of programming languages th at upport the paradigm of component-oriented programming. Lang u ges based on the accepted idea of combining modular and object-oriented con cepts fail to provide adequate support. We argue that messages should be separate d from methods to address this shortcoming. We introduce the concept of sta nd-alone messages, give examples for its utility, and compare it to related appr oaches and language constructs. Besides leading to interesting insights on the interaction of modular and object-oriented concepts, we believe that stand-alone messages also provide a useful basis for further research on component-oriented pr ogramming languages.
Drug repositioning for orphan diseases

The need and opportunity to discover therapeutics for rare or orphan diseases are enormous. Due to limited prevalence and/or commercial potential, of the approximately 6000 orphan diseases (defined by the FDA Orphan Drug Act as <200 000 US prevalence), only a small fraction (5%) is of interest to the biopharmaceutical industry. The fact that drug development is complicated, time-consuming and expensive with extremely low success rates only adds to the low rate of therapeutics available for orphan diseases. An alternative and efficient strategy to boost the discovery of orphan disease therapeutics is to find connections between an existing drug product and orphan disease. Drug Repositioning or Drug Repurposing--finding a new indication for a drug--is one way to maximize the potential of a drug. The advantages of this approach are manifold, but rational drug repositioning for orphan diseases is not trivial and poses several formidable challenges--pharmacologically and computationally. Most of the repositioned drugs currently in the market are the result of serendipity. One reason the connection between drug candidates and their potential new applications are not identified in an earlier or more systematic fashion is that the underlying mechanism 'connecting' them is either very intricate and unknown or indirect or dispersed and buried in an ever-increasing sea of information, much of which is emerging only recently and therefore is not well organized. In this study, we will review some of these issues and the current methodologies adopted or proposed to overcome them and translate chemical and biological discoveries into safe and effective orphan disease therapeutics.
The Role of Retinal Carotenoids and Age on Neuroelectric Indices of Attentional Control among Early to Middle-Aged Adults

One apparent consequence of aging appears to be loss of some aspects of cognitive control. This loss is measurable as early as mid-adulthood. Since, like many aspects of cognition, there is wide variance among individuals, it is possible that behavior, such as one’s diet, could drive some of these differences. For instance, past data on older humans and non-human primates have suggested that dietary carotenoids could slow cognitive decline. In this study, we tested how early such protection might manifest by examining a sample (n = 60) of 25–45 year olds. Carotenoid status was assessed by directly measuring macular pigment optical density (MPOD) which has shown to be highly correlated with the primary carotenoid in brain, lutein. Cognitive control was measured using event-related potentials during the performance of cognitive control tasks designed to tap into different aspects of attentional (i.e., selective attention, attentional inhibition, and response inhibition) control. Our results showed that, across participants, MPOD was related to both age and the P3 component of participants’ neuroelectric profile (P3 amplitude) for attentional, but not response, inhibition. Although younger adults exhibited larger P3 amplitudes than their older adult counterparts, older subjects with higher MPOD levels displayed P3 indices similar to their younger adult counterparts in amplitude. Furthermore, hierarchical regression analyses showed that age was no longer a significant predictor of P3 amplitude when MPOD was included as a predictor in the model, suggesting that MPOD may partially contribute to the relationship between age and P3 amplitude. In addition, age and MPOD were shown to have independent associations with intraindividual variability of attentional control, such that younger individuals and individuals with higher MPOD showed less intraindividual variability. These results show a relationship between retinal carotenoids and neuroelectric indices underlying cognitive control. The protective role of carotenoids within the CNS may be evident during early and middle adulthood, decades prior to the onset of older age.