Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
"Small-World" Networks of Mobile Robots

In order for a group of robots to coordinate collaboration during multi-robot tasks (Fontan & Mataric 1998), they need to communicate in an intelligent, purposeful way (Gerkey & Mataric 2000). If small groups of robots are involved, global communication (broadcasting, or one-to-all) is usually sufficient. The main advantage is that all the acquired information is available to all the members of the group. However when the number of robots increases so does the amount of data to handle. Information overflow can affect the performance of the separate teams working on different subtasks while limitations of the communication channel can cause interference and reduce the overall performance. A potential alternative to this would be to support local (oneto-a few) communication amongst the robots. The connectivity of such networks (communication topology) is usually assumed to be either completely regular (each robot communicates with its immediate neighbors forming a communication lattice), or completely random (each member of the group communicates with some random other members). However many biological, technological, and social networks lie somewhere between these two extremes (regular lattices vs. random graphs). Recently, a new form of coupled systems called “small-world” networks (Watts & Strogatz 1998), (Collins & Chow 1998), have been used to successfully describe the interactions of systems that can be highly clustered, like regular lattices, yet have small characteristic path lengths like random graphs. Regular networks are also known as “large-world” networks. They are highly clustered while the characteristic path length is large, scaling with the typical dimension n of the network. High clustering is appropriate for certain types of robotic tasks when information produced by individual robots is more likely to be used by neighboring robots. For example, a large number of robots distributed amongst a few teams each performing a different task that requires only local collaboration (e.g. one team is drillingand analyzing soil samples from a certain area while another team is assembling a solar panel) would benefit from such an arrangement of the communication sub-networks between the robots. On the other end, if these teams perform tasks that call for global collaboration (e.g. each team maps neighboring areas) then the size of the characteristic path length results in increased delays for the information to flow from one robot to all the others in the colony. This type of communication topology would reduce the efficiency of the collaboration amongst the sub-groups. In this latter case a random-graph type of connectivity would be ideal. Small characteristic path lengths would ensure that the information gathered by each individ-
Simulation and Analysis of a Shared Extended Mind

Some types of animals exploit patterns created in the environment as external mental states, thus obtaining an extension of their mind. In the case of social animals, the creation and exploitation of such patterns can be shared, which supports a form of shared extended mind or collective intelligence. This article explores this shared extended mind principle for social animals in more detail. The focus is on formal analysis and formalization of the dynamic properties of the processes involved, both at the local level (the basic mechanisms) and the global level (the emerging properties of the whole), and their relationships. A case study in social ant behavior in which the shared extended mind plays an important role is used as an illustration. For this case, simulations are described based on specifications of local properties, and global properties are specified and verified.
Approximation schemes , cliques , colors and densest subgraphs

In this thesis we study the problem of finding the densest k-subgraph of a given graph G = (V, E). We present algorithms of polynomial time as well as approximation results on special graph classes. Analytically, we study polynomial time algorithms for the densest k-subgraph problem on weighted graphs of maximal degree two, on weighted trees even if the solution is disconnected, and on interval graphs with intersection only between two consecutive cliques. Moreover, we present a polynomial time approximation scheme for the densest k-subgraph problem on a star of cliques and a polynomial time algorithm on a tree of cliques of bounded degree. Finally, in the last part of the thesis we analyze a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the densest k-subgraph problem on chordal graphs.
Franchising hospitality services

Part one - Franchising organization and debates Introduction (Stephen Taylor) History and development (Christina Fullop) Franchising Research: a failed literature? (Stuart Price) Entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs? (Alison Morrison) Empowered franchisees? (Conrad Lashley) Financial fundamentals (Alison Morrison and Angus McMillan) Part two - Franchising at sub-sector level Catering (Stephen Ball) Hotels (Stephen Taylor) Licensed retail (Guy Lincoln and Conrad Lashley) Travel, trade and transport (Lesley Pender) The case of McDonalds Restaurants Limited (Conrad Lashley)
An architecture for using metadata to manage ubiquitous communications and services: A position paper

Ubiquitous communication depends on distributed machine intelligence that relates the needs of the tasks to be performed to the available system services and resources. A critical part of this process is the understanding of contextually-sensitive data that can influence the offering and delivery of these resources and services. This paper describes a new extension of the FOCALE autonomic architecture that is designed specifically to manage ubiquitous computing and communications systems. This extension is focused on embedding intelligence into computing nodes, which enables individual nodes to communicate intelligently with the FOCALE autonomic manager. In this way, each node can contribute to the collective knowledge of the system while having its behavior orchestrated by FOCALE.
The intrinsic genetic and epigenetic regulator factors as therapeutic targets, and the effect on fetal globin gene expression

ABSTRACT Introduction: The effort to induce fetal globin or Hb F gene expression as an alternative therapy for blood transfusion has been ongoing for few decades, with promising results evident in patients with hemoglobinopathies. Although the clinical outcomes have been satisfactory and significant, there are still concerns about the safety of Hb F inducers in the long-term. There are potent inducers which lose their potency and safety over the course of therapy. Area covered: In this work, efforts have been made to review the latest findings on intrinsic genetic and epigenetic factors which are able to induce the gene expression of fetal globin in adult patients with beta (β)-thalassemia Major, Intermedia and sickle cell disease (SCD). Expert commentary: To meet a satisfying therapeutic outcome in patients with hemoglobinopathies, in addition to adopting a potent Hb F inducer, a continuous level of gamma (γ)-globin gene over the course of therapy in safety condition also needs to be considered. Therefore, to reach this aim, it is suggested that the experiment designers consider the safety and long-term characteristics of the inducers simultaneously, by examining their synergistic effects.
Visual Summarization of the Social Image Collection Using Image Attractiveness Learned from Social Behaviors

How to effectively summarize a large-scale image collection is still an important and open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel method to effectively generate a summary of the social image collection using image attractiveness learned from the social behaviors conducted in Flickr. To this end, we exploit the note information of Flickr images. The notes of Flickr images are user generated bounding boxes with text annotations assigned on the interesting image regions. Using the visual features extracted from the images that have notes, we have generated the attractiveness models for various concepts. Finally, the attractiveness models are exploited to make a summary of the social image collection. Through various user studies on the image collections from Flickr groups, we show the feasibility of our method and discuss further directions.
Simultaneous multi-beam analog beamforming and coded grating lobes for initial access in mmWave systems

The use of beamforming techniques in millimeter wave systems is essential for compensating for high path losses. However, directional transmission and reception caused by beamforming creates additional challenges for initial beam access. In general, conventional access methods yield prolonged association times. Hence this paper presents a novel fast access scheme based upon simultaneous multi-beam beamforming, along with grating lobes and beam coding. The proposed beamformer eliminates the gain and directivity deficiencies associated with wide beams in hierarchical codebook structures.
Cross-Dielectric-Slab-Loaded Archimedean Spiral Antenna

In this letter, a cross-dielectric-slab-loaded Archimedean spiral antenna (SLASA) is investigated. Cross dielectric slab (CDS) is made by two slabs (plates) of FR-4 dielectric material (dielectric constant 4.3 and loss tangent 0.025) fixed vertically at 90 ° to each other and attached on the top of the Archimedean spiral antenna. It is found that the dielectric slab significantly enhances gain of the Archimedean spiral antenna (ASA) in the bandwidth of 6:1. The gain increases with frequency, without affecting the 3-dB axial ratio in the operating frequency band. The CDS is a lightweight structure having low fabrication cost. The measured S11, input impedance, and radiation pattern are presented to support the efficacy of the proposed structure.
Cortical processing mechanism for vocalization with auditory verbal feedback

To investigate the relationship between motor and sensory speech center, cortical activity was examined using PET while normal subjects perceived their own voice which sounded different to the articulated one. The results showed significant activation in the superior temporal gyri with absence of activity in the supplementary motor area (SMA). In a previous study we found significant activation in SMA with no activity in the superior temporal gyrus when normal subjects simply vocalized. Thus, two different cortical pathways for vocalization were delineated: programmed pathway in SMA, and pathway with auditory verbal feedback. The former is thought to be the mature system in the adult, and the latter may be related to speech acquisition.
Numerical Simulation of Droplet-Based Microfluidics - A Review

This paper discusses the features and applications of interface tracking techniques for modeling droplet-based microfluidics. The paper reviews the state of the art of methods for tracking and capturing the interface. These methods are categorized as the implicit and the explicit methods. The explicit methods need to reconstruct the interface by recon- necting the markers on the interface. The implicit techniques implicitly describe the interface as a simple function. Thus, complicated topological changes of interface can be handled naturally and automatically. The implicit methods reviewed in this paper are the volume-of-fluid method, the phase-field method, the Lattice-Boltzmann method and the level-set method. The explicit methods mainly include the boundary-integral methods and the tracking methods.
USENIX Association Proceedings of HotOS IX : The 9 th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems

Execution of a program almost always involves multiple address spaces, possibly across separate machines. Here, an approach to reducing such costs using compiler optimization techniques is presented. This paper elaborates on the overall vision, and as a concrete example, describes how this compiler assisted approach can be applied to the optimization of system call performance on a single host. Preliminary results suggest that this approach has the potential to improve performance significantly depending on the program’s system call behavior.
Algorithm for Correcting the Keratometric Error in the Estimation of the Corneal Power in Keratoconus Eyes after Accelerated Corneal Collagen Crosslinking

Purpose To analyze the errors associated to corneal power calculation using the keratometric approach in keratoconus eyes after accelerated corneal collagen crosslinking (CXL) surgery and to obtain a model for the estimation of an adjusted corneal refractive index (nkadj) minimizing such errors. Methods Potential differences (ΔPc) among keratometric (Pk) and Gaussian corneal power (PcGauss) were simulated. Three algorithms based on the use of nkadj for the estimation of an adjusted keratometric corneal power (Pkadj) were developed. The agreement between Pk(1.3375) (keratometric power using the keratometric index of 1.3375), PcGauss, and Pkadj was evaluated. The validity of the algorithm developed was investigated in 21 keratoconus eyes undergoing accelerated CXL. Results P k(1.3375) overestimated corneal power between 0.3 and 3.2 D in theoretical simulations and between 0.8 and 2.9 D in the clinical study (ΔPc). Three linear equations were defined for nkadj to be used for different ranges of r1c. In the clinical study, differences between Pkadj and PcGauss did not exceed ±0.8 D nk = 1.3375. No statistically significant differences were found between Pkadj and PcGauss (p > 0.05) and Pk(1.3375) and Pkadj (p < 0.001). Conclusions The use of the keratometric approach in keratoconus eyes after accelerated CXL can lead to significant clinical errors. These errors can be minimized with an adjusted keratometric approach.
Eliminating Packet Loss Accumulation in Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems

To eliminate packet loss accumulation and overcome bursty packet loss problems caused by peer departures in peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems, a multisource structure combining with a distributed forward error correction (FEC) scheme is proposed. In the proposed structure, each peer connects to multiple parents according to the prespecified FEC packets ensemble and each parent forwards partial streaming packets to the peer. If one or few parents fail, other parents can still provide remaining part of streaming packets that can be used to recover the missing packets by using packet level FEC scheme. Packet loss probability and packet loss accumulation from parent peers to child peers in tree-based P2P streaming systems are investigated. The analysis and NS2 simulation results show that packet loss probability is reduced and furthermore the packet loss accumulation can be eliminated when an appropriate FEC protection is used.
Secret Key Agreement from Correlated Gaussian Sources by Rate Limited Public Communication

We investigate the secret key agreement from correlated Gaussian sources in which the legitimate parties can use the public communication with limited rate. For the class of protocols with the one-way public communication, we show a closed form expression of the optimal trade-off between the rate of key generation and the rate of the public communication. Our results clarify an essential difference between the key agreement from discrete sources and that from continuous sources. key words: Bin Coding, Gaussian Sources, Privacy Amplification, Quantization, Rate Limited Public Communication, Secret Key Agreement
Research on cross-language text similarity calculation

Cross-language text similarity calculation is a critical and fundamental problem in natural language processing. It is widely used in cross-language research, such as cross-language information retrieval. In this paper, we used the LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) model to calculate similarities of Tibetan and Chinese texts at the topic level. Through topic modelling and forecasting, the texts are mapped to the feature space of topics. This method reduced the dimensions of text space vector and improved the speed and efficiency of computation.
Towards a Legal Reasoning System based on Description Logics: A Position Paper

Legal reasoning is concerned with various kinds of legal concepts that relate to another concepts used in our daily life. Although those legal concepts are abstract in the sense that there always exist possibilities to interpret them in various ways, lawyers seem to understand them as real things at least in their "legal reality". For instance, Japanese Civil Codes include a notion of falsity that means a false declaration of intention. In spite of its abstractness, well-trained lawyers can judge that one legal act involves the falsity and that the others do not. From this point of view, it seems natural to consider that each legal act has its legal identity. Since the standard first order logic (FOL, for short) is founded on the assumption that every object treated within the logic has its identity, it seems natural to develop a way of representing the legal acts as first-order terms denoting individual objects. However, they are highly related each other at their conceptual level. For instance, a person fills the role of agent in a contract. Thus the two concepts "person" and "contract" are related by the role "agent". Recently in Japan, some researchers [12; 17] try to develop a legal ontology consisting legal concepts and conceptual relationships between them. The latter ones can be roles in description logics. So if we like to build a large legal knowledge base, we would have a description logic containing many legal conceptual terms linked by roles. Based on this, an efficient reasoner (RKB interpreter) would be designed as an extension of FOL prover, for both DL and FOL makes the same assumption that each object has its identity and every concept is a set of objects.
The Relationship Between Affect and Performance in Competitive Intercollegiate Tennis: A Dynamic Conceptualization and Application

A recently introduced probabilistic methodology (Kamata, Tenenbaum, & Hanin, 2002) was implemented in the current study to ascertain the idiosyncratic Individual Affect-related Performance Zones (IAPZs) of four intercollegiate tennis players. The current study advances upon previous empirical works by its use of multiple performance levels, use of athletes’ introspective affective intensity, and recording multiple data points duringcompetition. Results present within- and between-player comparisons, and highlight the dynamic nature of competitive athletic events. A brief discussion regarding the implications of this methodology and the pursuant results for sport psychology consultants is also proffered. Being idiosyncratic in nature, the observations from this study are not intended to generalize across samples, but rather to introduce how knowledge of the systematic and dynamic linkage between an individual’s affect and his or her performance can be uncovered and possibly used with individual athletes to.
The changing psychology of culture in German‐speaking countries: A Google Ngram study

This article provides evidence for the long-term affiliation between ecological and cultural changes in German-speaking countries, based on the assumptions derived from social change and human development theory. Based on this theory, the increase in urbanisation, as a measure of ecological change, is associated with significant cultural changes of psychology. Whereas urbanisation is linked to greater individualistic values and materialistic attitudes, rural environments are strongly associated with collectivistic values like allegiance, prevalence of religion, and feelings of belonging and benevolence. Due to an increase in the German urbanisation rate over time, our study investigates whether Germany and the German-speaking countries around show the presumed changes in psychology. By using Google Books Ngram Viewer, we find that word frequencies, signifying individualistic (collectivistic) values, are positively (negatively) related to the urbanisation rate of Germany. Our results indicate that predictions about implications of an urbanising population for the psychology of culture hold true, supporting international universality of the social change and human development theory. Furthermore, we provide evidence for a predicted reversal for the time during and after World War II, reflecting Nazi propaganda and influence.
The Task-Relevant Attribute Representation Can Mediate the Simon Effect

Researchers have previously suggested a working memory (WM) account of spatial codes, and based on this suggestion, the present study carries out three experiments to investigate how the task-relevant attribute representation (verbal or visual) in the typical Simon task affects the Simon effect. Experiment 1 compared the Simon effect between the between- and within-category color conditions, which required subjects to discriminate between red and blue stimuli (presumed to be represented by verbal WM codes because it was easy and fast to name the colors verbally) and to discriminate between two similar green stimuli (presumed to be represented by visual WM codes because it was hard and time-consuming to name the colors verbally), respectively. The results revealed a reliable Simon effect that only occurs in the between-category condition. Experiment 2 assessed the Simon effect by requiring subjects to discriminate between two different isosceles trapezoids (within-category shapes) and to discriminate isosceles trapezoid from rectangle (between-category shapes), and the results replicated and expanded the findings of Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, subjects were required to perform both tasks from Experiment 1. Wherein, in Experiment 3A, the between-category task preceded the within-category task; in Experiment 3B, the task order was opposite. The results showed the reliable Simon effect when subjects represented the task-relevant stimulus attributes by verbal WM encoding. In addition, the response times (RTs) distribution analysis for both the between- and within-category conditions of Experiments 3A and 3B showed decreased Simon effect with the RTs lengthened. Altogether, although the present results are consistent with the temporal coding account, we put forth that the Simon effect also depends on the verbal WM representation of task-relevant stimulus attribute.
Content-based tag propagation and tensor factorization for personalized item recommendation based on social tagging

In this article, a novel method for personalized item recommendation based on social tagging is presented. The proposed approach comprises a content-based tag propagation method to address the sparsity and “cold start” problems, which often occur in social tagging systems and decrease the quality of recommendations. The proposed method exploits (a) the content of items and (b) users' tag assignments through a relevance feedback mechanism in order to automatically identify the optimal number of content-based and conceptually similar items. The relevance degrees between users, tags, and conceptually similar items are calculated in order to ensure accurate tag propagation and consequently to address the issue of “learning tag relevance. ” Moreover, the ternary relation among users, tags, and items is preserved by performing tag propagation in the form of triplets based on users' personal preferences and “cold start” degree. The latent associations among users, tags, and items are revealed based on a tensor factorization model in order to build personalized item recommendations. In our experiments with real-world social data, we show the superiority of the proposed approach over other state-of-the-art methods, since several problems in social tagging systems are successfully tackled. Finally, we present the recommendation methodology in the multimodal engine of I-SEARCH, where users' interaction capabilities are demonstrated.