Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-time correlogram tracking for airborne traffic surveillance

This paper presents a real-time moving object tracking system for airborne traffic video surveillance. The motion segmentation and tracking in this scenario is difficult because of the small size of the object, motion of camera and inconsistency in detected object shape. Here we present correlogram template matching system employed for tracking. Candidate objects for tracking are initially tagged by moving object segmentation. Tagged objects are then tracked using a novel integral histogram approach which provides good tradeoff between memory and processing time. Common model drift problem in the tag and track scenario is addressed by feedback mechanism.
Structuring dimensions for collaborative systems evaluation

Collaborative systems evaluation is always necessary to determine the impact a solution will have on the individuals, groups, and the organization. Several methods of evaluation have been proposed. These methods comprise a variety of approaches with various goals. Thus, the need for a strategy to select the most appropriate method for a specific case is clear. This research work presents a detailed framework to evaluate collaborative systems according to given variables and performance levels. The proposal assumes that evaluation is an evolving process during the system lifecycle. Therefore, the framework, illustrated with two examples, is complemented with a collection of guidelines to evaluate collaborative systems according to product development status.
OligoWiz 2.0—integrating sequence feature annotation into the design of microarray probes

OligoWiz 2.0 is a powerful tool for microarray probe design that allows for integration of sequence annotation, such as exon/intron structure, untranslated regions (UTRs), transcription start site, etc. In addition to probe selection according to a series of probe quality parameters, cross-hybridization, Tm, position in transcript, probe folding and low-complexity, the program facilitates automatic placement of probes relative to the sequence annotation. The program also supports automatic placement of multiple probes per transcript. Together these facilities make advanced probe design feasible for scientists inexperienced in computerized information management. Furthermore, we show that probes designed using OligoWiz 2.0 give rise to consistent hybridization results ().
Integration of connectionist methods and chaotic time‐series analysis for the prediction of process data

A connectionist‐based time‐series analysis method is described that includes chaotic characterization, fractal analysis together with statistical data processing in an adaptive fuzzy neural network environment. The applied fuzzy neural network (FuNN) can utilize as well as generate knowledge during an iterative learning and adaptation procedure. Two major aspects of the present work are (1) incorporating knowledge into the fuzzy neural network based on the nonlinear deterministic, chaotic analysis of the signals and (2) refining and updating the knowledge base by the FuNN using adaptive learning techniques. Examples include the standard gas‐furnace benchmark data analysis and also an application to a case study of multivariate signal analysis as part of a project for establishing a plantwise monitoring and process control system. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Numeric Mutation: Improved Search in Genetic Programming

Genetic programming is relatively poor at discovering useful numeric constants for the terminal nodes of its sexpression trees. In this paper we outline an adaptation to genetic programming, called numeric mutation. ~,Ve provide empirical evidence and analysis that demonstrate that numeric mutation makes a statistically significant increase in genetic programming’s performance for symbolic regression problems.
hypermedia novel – hymn a new storytelling paradigm

In this paper we present a new storytelling approach, called Hypermedia Novel (HYMN), that extends the classical narration concept of a story. We develop an underlying modular concept – the narration module – that facilitates a new manner of reception as well as creation of a story. The HYMN focuses on the recipient and his role of consuming a story and a heterogeneous group of creative authors by providing narration modules and their interfaces without defining the granularity of the modules. Using several kinds of multimedia elements and a hyperlink structure, we present a first demonstrator that implements this new concept. We also discuss improvements, e.g. MPEG-4/7, that support both reception by the audience, and the process of creating the story by a dispersed team of authors.
Improved global localization and pose tracking of an autonomous mobile robot via fuzzy adaptive extended information filtering

This paper presents an improved global localization method and an improved pose tracking approach for an indoor autonomous mobile robot (AMR) with ultrasonic and laser scanning measurements using a fuzzy extended information filtering scheme. An ultrasonic self-localization system, consisting of two ultrasonic transmitters and three receivers, is presented to estimate both the unknown global position and orientation of the AMR in a world frame, and a fuzzy adaptive extended information filter (FAEIF) is proposed to improve estimation accuracy for the ultrasonic localization system. With the odometric data from the driving wheels and the laser scanning measurements from the robot's surrounding, a FAEIF-based pose tracking algorithm is proposed to continuously keep track of the robot's poses at slow speeds less than 100 cm/sec. The proposed algorithms were implemented using an industrial personal computer with a computation speed of 800MHz, and standard C++ programming techniques. The system prototype together with experimental results has been used to confirm the merit of the proposed methods in comparison with the well-known EIF
The Prevalence of Disclosure of HIV Status to HIV-Infected Children in Western Kenya.

BACKGROUND As antiretroviral therapy (ART) allows the world's 2.3 million human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected children to grow and thrive, these children need to be informed of their HIV status. Neither the prevalence of disclosure to children nor its impact has been evaluated in most resource-limited settings. METHODS We conducted a prospective assessment of a random sample of HIV-infected children ages 6-14 years enrolled in HIV care at a large referral clinic in Eldoret, Kenya. Clinicians administered questionnaires to children and caregivers independently at routine clinic visits to assess disclosure status, ART adherence, stigma, and depression. Children's demographic and clinical characteristics were extracted from chart review. We calculated descriptive statistics and performed logistic regression to assess the association between disclosure and other characteristics. RESULTS Two hundred seventy children-caregiver dyads completed questionnaires. The mean child age was 9.3 years (standard deviation 2.6); 49% were male, and 42% were orphans. 11.1% of children had been informed of their HIV status (N = 30). Of those under 10 years, 3.3% knew their status, whereas 9.2% of 10- to 12-year-olds and 39.5% of 13- to 14-year-olds knew they had HIV. Only age was significantly associated with disclosure status in both bivariate analyses (P < .0001) and multiple logistic regression (odds ratio 1.67, 95% confidence interval 1.36-2.05) when considering social demographics, disease stage variables, adherence, stigma measures, and depression. CONCLUSIONS Rates of informing children in western Kenya of their HIV status are low, even among older children. Guiding families through developmentally appropriate disclosure processes should be a key facet of long-term pediatric HIV management.
Mental Models of Information: The 1993-94 AASL/Highsmith Research Award Study.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the following broad question: When students are seeking and using information, why do they make the decisions they make? The study examined the decisions made by twenty-six students as they completed a classroom assignment that required them to seek and use information. The study found that a learning experience is composed of a variety of intertwined “learning strands. ” When differences existed between student understandings on any strand and the understandings required by the task, students were likely to try skills from other strands to overcome the problem.
Bio-inspired model for object recognition based on histogram of oriented gradients

Hierarchical Model and X (HMAX) is an outstanding bio-inspired model for object recognition. But there are still some limitations such as its poor invariance to rotation and processing speed. To lessen these limitations and improve the model's performance, we extend the HMAX model and propose a novel representation method by combining HMAX with Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), denoted as HOG-HMAX. In our model, prototypes and image patches are HOG descriptors rather than natural images. Instead of directly using Euclidean distance, the neural response is computed by a normalized dot-product operation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, experiments are conducted on three benchmark databases: Caltech5, Caltech101 and Caltech256. Experimental results show that the proposed HOG-HMAX model not only keeps good tolerance to scale and position change, but also reduces the disturbances of illumination and rotational change. Furthermore, our method has significant advantage in the computational complexity. The recognition performance of HOG-HMAX model has been greatly improved in comparison with the standard HMAX model.
An action learning approach to the question: are ambulance response time targets achievable?

ABSTRACT In recent years, NHS Ambulance Trusts throughout the UK have consistently failed to achieve their response time targets for both actual and potential life-threatening calls. To avoid a media and public outcry, the NHS response has been to change the basic parameters upon which the response time targets are calculated. An action learning study, which considered patient experience from initial response to outcome, concluded that the ambulance service must move away from the nearest crew response model to one which provides a defined multi-organisational service to specific categories of need. A key issue with the learning sets, which were made up of front-line crews, was understanding the Trust-wide picture and where acceptable new procedures could provide economic benefits to the Trust, benefits to the patients and help achieve the response time targets. A simulation model driven by parameters agreed by the action learning sets provided proof that new procedures would generate the required benefits. The learning sets also identified that the public should adjust their expectations to understanding that an immediate front-line ambulance response would only be despatched in life-threatening cases, but there would be alternative slower responses for all other cases.
Digital Watermarking, Fingerprinting and Compression: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

The ease with which digital data can be duplicated and distributed over the media and the Internet has raised many concerns about copyright infringement. In many situations, multimedia data (e.g., images, music; movies, etc) are illegally circulated, thus violating intellectual property rights. In an attempt to overcome this problem, watermarking has been suggested in the literature as the most effective means for copyright protection and authentication. Watermarking is the procedure whereby information (pertaining to owner and/or copyright) is embedded into host data, such that it is: (i) hidden, i.e., not perceptually visible; and (ii) recoverable, even after a (possibly malicious) degradation of the protected work. In this thesis, we prove some theoretical results that establish the fundamental limits of a general class of watermarking schemes. The main focus of this thesis is the problem of joint watermarking and compression of images, which can be briefly described as follows: clue to bandwidth or storage constraints; a watermarked image is distributed in quantized form, using RQ bits per image dimension, and is subject to some additional degradation (possibly due to malicious attacks). The hidden message carries RW bits per image dimension. Our main result is the determination of the region of allowable rates ( RQ, RW), such that: (i) an average distortion constraint between the original and the watermarked/compressed image is satisfied, and (ii) the hidden message is detected from the degraded image with very high probability. Using notions from information theory, we prove coding theorems that establish the rate region in the following cases: (a) general i.i. d. image distributions, distortion constraints and memoryless attacks, (b) memoryless attacks combined with collusion (for fingerprinting applications), and (c) general—not necessarily stationary or ergodic—Gaussian image distributions and attacks, and average quadratic distortion constraints. Moreover, we prove a multi-user version of a result by Costa on the capacity of a Gaussian channel with known interference at the encoder.
Recommender Systems Using Harmonic Analysis

Recommender systems provide recommendations on variety of personal activities or relevant items of interest. They can play a significant role for E-commerce and in daily personal decisions. However, existing recommender systems still face challenges in dealing with sparse data and still achieving high accuracy and reasonable performance. The issue with missing rating leads to inaccuracies when trying to match items or users for rating prediction. In this paper, we propose to address these challenges with the use of Harmonic Analysis. The paper extends on our previous work, and provides a comprehensive coverage of the method with additional experiments. The method provides a novel multiresolution approach to the user-item matrix and extracts the interplay between users and items at multiple resolution levels. New affinity matrices are defined to measure similarities among users, among items, and across items and users. Furthermore, the similarities are assessed at multiple levels of granularity allowing individual and group level similarities. These affinity matrices thus produce multiresolution groupings of items and users, and in turn lead to higher accuracy in matching similar context for ratings, and more accurate prediction of new ratings. The evaluation of the system shows superiority of the solution compared to state of the art solutions for user-based collaborative filtering and item-based collaborative filtering.
VISAGE: A Query Interface for Clinical Research

We present the design and implementation of VISAGE (VISual AGgregator and Explorer), a query interface for clinical research. We follow a user-centered development approach and incorporate visual, ontological, searchable and explorative features in three interrelated components: Query Builder, Query Manager and Query Explorer. The Query Explorer provides novel on-line data mining capabilities for purposes such as hypothesis generation or cohort identification. The VISAGE query interface has been implemented as a significant component of Physio-MIMI, an NCRR-funded, multi-CTSA-site pilot project. Preliminary evaluation results show that VISAGE is more efficient for query construction than the i2b2 web-client.
Further Studies on Arcanobacterium phocisimile: a Novel Species of Genus Arcanobacterium

Arcanobacterium phocisimile, a newly described species with the type strain A. phocisimile 2698T isolated from a vaginal swab of a harbour seal and four additional A. phocisimile strains also isolated from four harbour seals could reliably be identified by phenotypic properties, by matrix assisted laser desorption ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS), and by sequencing the genomic targets 16S rDNA and 16S-23S rDNA intergenic spacer region and the genes rpoB and gap. The A. phocisimile strains investigated in the present study were isolated together with several other bacterial species indicating that the pathogenic importance of A. phocisimile remains unclear. However, the detection of peptidic spectra by MALDI-TOF MS and the presented phenotypic and genotypic approach might help to identify A. phocisimile in future.
It was a bit of a race: Gamification of version control

The adoption of software engineering practices cannot always be achieved by education or processes. However, social software has the potential for supporting deliberate behavior change. We present preliminary results of an experiment in which we encouraged computer science students to make more frequent commits to version control by using a social software application. We provided a web-based newsfeed of commits that also displayed a leaderboard. While we have yet to analyze the data, interviews we conducted with the participants allow for first qualitative insights.
ASYNCHRONOUS WEIGHTED ADDITIVE SCHWARZ METHODS

A class of asynchronous Schwarz methods for the parallel solution of nonsingular linear systems of the form is investigated. This class includes, in particular, an asynchronous algebraic Schwarz method as well as asynchronous multisplitting. Theorems are obtained demonstrating c onvergence for the cases when 1 is nonnegative and when is an -matrix. The results shown are for both the situations with or without overlap between the domains in which an underlying mesh is divided, if such a mesh exists. Numerical experiments on systems of up to over ten million variables on up to 256 processors are presented. They illustrate the c onvergence properties of the method, as well as the fact that when the domains are not all of the same size, the asynchronous method can be up to 50% faster than the corresponding synchronous one. 1. Introduction. Consider the discretization of a linear second order elliptic boundary value problem (b.v.p.) on a domain Ω, and a fixed number of open subdomainsΩ Ω, 1 , such that Ω Ω. In general, one may assume that contiguous subdomains have a nonempty intersection and, in fact, this intersection may be larger than just the boundary of the subdomains, i.e., there may be some overlap between contiguous subdomains; see Section 4 for specific examples of these subdomains. The general idea of the Schwarz Alternating Procedure (SAP) is to solve the b.v. p. restricted to each subdomain, using as boundary conditions the function values of the (ap- proximate) solution of neighboring subdomains. This process is repeated and, under certain conditions, the process converges to the solution of the b.v. p. on Ω. In the additive Schwarz approach, which is the one considered in this paper, the approximate solution on Ω is obtained by adding up the solutions on all subdomains. When there is overlap, some weights are introduced to keep the resulting approximation consistent with the original b.v. p. These ideas go back to Schwarz (21), and have been revived in the last decade as the basis for domain decomposition methods, where these procedures are used as a preconditioner for the solution of the discretized nonsingular linear system
Comparison of spectral subtraction methods used in noise suppression algorithms

The spectral subtraction method is a well-known noise reduction technique. Most implementations and variations of the basic technique advocate subtraction of the noise spectrum estimate over the entire speech spectrum. However, real world noise is mostly colored and does not affect the speech signal uniformly over the entire spectrum. In this paper, the artifacts introduced by STSA methods will describe, and how the spectral subtraction method is modified to counter these artifacts. The EVRC noise suppression algorithm will discuss in some detail. Finally, some of the methods will compare based on the attenuation given an estimate of the SNR and the results will show with diagrams.
Applications of the Transmission Line Matrix Method to Microwave Scanning Microscopy

A three-dimensional transmission-line matrix (TLM) model was developed to simulate microwave-scanning microscopy. A TLM algorithm that allows the simulation of the scanning was developed. Numerical modeling was carried out for frequencies that are commonly used in microwave nondestructive testing (1GHz - 20GHz). Structures with local discontinuities in the electric permittivity are modeled numerically. The excitation parameters used in numerical modeling of scanning microwave microscopy were determined based on an initial frequency experimental response obtained from a plate with known permittivity. The numerical model developed in this paper is based on the symmetric condensed node. The description of the TLM algorithm is given in a Hilbert space using a three-index notation.
Tucker Gaussian Process for Regression and Collaborative Filtering

We introduce the Tucker Gaussian Process (TGP), a model for regression that regularises a Gaussian Process (GP) towards simpler regression functions for enhanced generalisation performance. We derive it using a novel approach to scalable GP learning, and show that our model is particularly well-suited to grid-structured data and problems where the dependence on covariates is close to being separable. A prime example is collaborative filtering, for which our model provides an effective GP based method that has a low-rank matrix factorisation at its core. We show that TGP generalises classical Bayesian matrix factorisation models, and goes beyond them to give a natural and elegant method for incorporating side information.
DREIDING: A generic force field for molecular simulations

We report the parameters for a new generic force field, DREIDING, that we find useful for predicting structures and dynamics of organic, biological, and main-group inorganic molecules. The philosophy in DREIDING is to use general force constants and geometry parameters based on simple hybridization considerations rather than individual force constants and geometric parameters that depend on the particular combination of atoms involved in the bond, angle, or torsion terms. Thus all bond distances are derived from atomic radii, and there is only one force constant each for bonds, angles, and inversions and only six different values for torsional barriers. Parameters are defined for all possible combinations of atoms and new atoms can be added to the force field rather simply. This paper reports the parameters for the "nonmetallic" main-group elements (B, C, N, 0, F columns for the C, Si, Ge, and Sn rows) plus H and a few metals (Na, Ca, Zn, Fe). The accuracy of the DREIDING force field is tested by comparing with (i) 76 accurately determined crystal structures of organic compounds involving H, C, N, 0, F, P, S, CI, and Br, (ii) rotational barriers of a number of molecules, and (iii) relative conformational energies and barriers of a number of molecules. We find excellent results for these systems.
UX_Mate: from facial expressions to UX evaluation

In this paper we propose and evaluate UX_Mate, a non-invasive system for the automatic assessment of User eXperience (UX). In addition, we contribute a novel database of annotated and synchronized videos of interactive behavior and facial expressions. UX_Mate is a modular system which tracks facial expressions of users, interprets them based on pre-set rules, and generates predictions about the occurrence of a target emotional state, which can be linked to interaction events. The system simplifies UX evaluation providing an indication of event occurrence. UX_Mate has several advantages compared to other state of the art systems: easy deployment in the user's natural environment, avoidance of invasive devices, and extreme cost reduction. The paper reports a pilot and a validation study on a total of 46 users, where UX_Mate was used for identifying interaction difficulties. The studies show encouraging results that open possibilities for automatic real-time UX evaluation in ecological environments.