Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Bayesian Blackboard for Information Fusion

Abstract : A Bayesian blackboard is just a conventional, knowledge-based blackboard system in which knowledge sources modify Bayesian networks on the blackboard. As an architecture for intelligence analysis and data fusion this has many advantages: the blackboard is a shared workspace or "corporate memory" for collaborating analysts; analyses can be developed over long periods of time with information that arrives in dribs and drabs; the computer's contribution to analysis can range from data-driven statistical algorithms up to domain-specific, knowledge-based inference; and perhaps most important, the control of intelligence-gathering in the world and inference on the blackboard can be rational, that is, grounded in probability and utility theory. The Bayesian blackboard architecture presented here, called AIID, serves both as a prototype system for intelligence analysis and as a laboratory for testing mathematical models of the economics of intelligence analysis.
The influence of leader-member exchange relations on employee engagement and work role performance

The paper aims to establish the relationship between leader member exchange (LMX) relationship and work role performance through the dynamic process of employee engagement. The study outlines why and how leadership is important for employee engagement and effective work role performance. Adopting a survey based research design, a sample of 198 Indian working managers at different levels including various sectors has supported our hypotheses that employee engagement mediates the relations between LMX and work role performance. It provides empirical insights about how employee engagement process influences the LMX and work role performance relationships. The results also suggest that high quality relationship of employees with their leaders is positively related to employee engagement and their work role performance.
PROCESSING DIGITAL X-RAY IMAGES AND ITS APPLICATION IN THE AUTOMATED VISUAL INSPECTION OF ALUMINUM CASTINGS

In this paper we present a brief overview of several techniques used in digital image processing for X-ray testing. The paper introduces the reader to the image processing theory employed in this NDT. Methodologies and principles will be outlined. Some application examples are given when inspecting aluminum castings followed by the limitations of the applicability of the methodologies used.
Preserving Privacy in Cloud Computing Environment using Map Reduce Technique

Most of the cloud services require users to share personal data like electronic medical record for data analysis and data mining, bringing privacy concerns. The data sets can be anonymized by using generalization method to attain such privacy requirement. At present the proportion of data in several cloud application growing greatly in congruence with the bid data trend, therefore it is a challenge for currently used software tools to capture , maintain and process such large-scale data within a suffient time. Consequently , it is difficult for achieving privacy due to their inefficiency in handling large scale data sets. In this paper, we propose a scalable two phase top down specialization(TDS) approach to anonymize large-scale data sets using map reduce technique on cloud computing. To achieve the specialization computation in a highly scalable way, we draft a group of creative map reduce jobs in both the phases of our approach. As a result, the experimental evaluation shows that the scalability and efficiency of TDS can be significantly enriched over existing approaches.
What constitutes inclusion? : a critical discourse analysis of the views of young people identified as falling within the autism spectrum, their parents and their learning support assistants

Inclusion of young people identified as having a disability has recently become a much debated issue both internationally as well as locally in Malta. This gave rise to the move from special schools to mainstream schooling for all young people to have a quality education. Moreover, the idea of what needs to be done to cater for the diverse needs of all young people to thrive in a serene and welcoming environment is greatly discussed. This thesis will examine what constitutes inclusion to different stakeholders, more specifically what constitutes inclusion to young people identified as falling within the autism spectrum, parents, and learning support assistants (L.S.A.s). A qualitative approach will be adopted for this study, involving six young people identified as falling within the autism spectrum, six parents and six L.S. A.s. The research adopts a qualitative methodology, using participant produced images, semi-structured interviews and critical discourse analysis. The theoretical framework that underpins this research is that of social constructionism. Six young people identified as falling in different spectra of the autism spectrum were chosen and given a camera. They were asked to take photos of what they like and dislike at school. This was followed by semi-structured interviews for the young people who responded verbally and discussions using social stories for young people who did not respond verbally. Semi-structured interviews were then carried out with the young people, parents and L.S. A.s. Carla Willig’s six-step methodological approach to critical discourse analysis was adopted to analyse the interviews. The research gave insight on various aspects of what constitutes inclusion for different stakeholders including inclusion as relational and inclusion as one-size-fits-all as two examples. The study indicates that different stakeholders viewed inclusion differently. Lacunae were also found such as, for example the lack of voice that young people identified as falling within the autism spectrum have, and the need for more training programmes to equip L.S. A.s and other teaching professionals with the necessary skills to cater for the diverse needs of such young people.
Three-dimensional instabilities in a discretely heated annular flow: Onset of spatio-temporal complexity via defect dynamics

The transition to three-dimensional and unsteady flow in an annulus with a discrete heat source on the inner cylinder is studied numerically. For large applied heat flux through the heater (large Grashof number Gr), there is a strong wall plume originating at the heater that reaches the top and forms a large scale axisymmetric wavy structure along the top. For Gr ≈ 6 × 109, this wavy structure becomes unstable to three-dimensional instabilities with high azimuthal wavenumbers m ∼ 30, influenced by mode competition within an Eckhaus band of wavenumbers. Coexisting with some of these steady three-dimensional states, solution branches with localized defects break parity and result in spatio-temporal dynamics. We have identified two such time dependent states. One is a limit cycle that while breaking spatial parity, retains spatio-temporal parity. The other branch corresponds to quasi-periodic states that have globally broken parity.
Extracting common sense knowledge from text for robot planning

Autonomous robots often require domain knowledge to act intelligently in their environment. This is particularly true for robots that use automated planning techniques, which require symbolic representations of the operating environment and the robot's capabilities. However, the task of specifying domain knowledge by hand is tedious and prone to error. As a result, we aim to automate the process of acquiring general common sense knowledge of objects, relations, and actions, by extracting such information from large amounts of natural language text, written by humans for human readers. We present two methods for knowledge acquisition, requiring only limited human input, which focus on the inference of spatial relations from text. Although our approach is applicable to a range of domains and information, we only consider one type of knowledge here, namely object locations in a kitchen environment. As a proof of concept, we test our approach using an automated planner and show how the addition of common sense knowledge can improve the quality of the generated plans.
MIKA: A tagged corpus for modern standard Arabic and colloquial sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis (SA) and opinion mining (OM) becomes a field of interest that fueled the attention of research during the last decade, due to the rise of the amount of internet documents (especially online reviews and comments) on the social media such as blogs and social networks. Many attempts have been conducted to build a corpus for SA, due to the consideration of importance of building such resource as a key factor in SA and OM systems. But the need of building these resources is still ongoing, especially for morphologically-Rich language (MRL) such as Arabic. In this paper, we present MIKA a multi-genre tagged corpus of modern standard Arabic (MSA) and colloquial. MIKA is manually collected and annotated at sentence level with semantic orientation (positive or negative or neutral). A number of rich set of linguistically motivated features (contextual Intensifiers, contextual Shifter and negation handling), syntactic features for conflicting phrases and others are used for the annotation process. Our data focus on MSA and Egyptian dialectal Arabic. We report the efforts of manually building and annotating our sentiment corpus using different types of data, such as tweets and Arabic microblogs (hotel reservation, product reviews, and TV program comments).
Selecting Nodes with Inhomogeneous Profile for Labeling for Network-Based Semi-supervised Learning

Network-based Semi-Supervised Learning (NbSSL) propagates labels in affinity-networks by taking advantage of the network topology likewise information spreading in trust networks. In NbSSL, not only the unlabeled data instances, but also the labeled ones, are able to bias the classification performance. Herein, we show some results and discussion on this phenomenon. Even the suitability of the free parameters of the NbSSL algorithms varies according to the available labeled data. Indeed, we propose a method for selecting representative data instances for labeling for NbSSL. In our sense the represent ability of a node is related to how inhomogeneous is its profile concerning the whole network. The proposed method uses Complex Networks centrality measures to identify which nodes present inhomogeneous profile. We perform this study by applying three NbSSL algorithms on Girvan-Newman and Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi modular networks. In the former, the nodes with high clustering coefficient are good representatives of the data and the nodes with high betweenness are the good representatives ones in the later. A high clustering coefficient means that the node lies in a much connected motif (clique) whereas a high betweenness means that the node lies interconnecting the modular structures. These results reveal the ability to improve the NbSSL performance by selecting representative data instances for manual labeling.
COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY AND EVOLUTION: FROM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO ARTIFICIAL LIFE

There is a traditional belief in the computability of nature and society, but it has run into severe difficulties. Computability is only simple for linear problems. But most problems in the world are nonlinear and complex—from the biological evolution of life to the ecological, economic, and social dynamics of human society. Classical physics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have often been inspired by the linear world view of the Laplacean demon.
A Conceptual Usability Framework for Mobile Service Consumers

Variation and count of mobile devices accrue each day and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) decompose the systems into loosely coupled and platform independent software services that facilitate integration of mobile devices to enterprise systems as a service consumer or provider. The prosperity of interactive systems is relayed on the realization amount of user needs according to User Centered Design (UCD) requires the approach of how user prefers doing their tasks instead of forcing them such that the preference effecting factors are user’s experience, ability and so on. Beyond the UCD user’s personality could shape her/his preferences. In this paper we propose our context adaptable User Interface (UI) providing framework to enhance usability for various mobile service consumers; our framework include user personality and its dimensions, user movement speed, user role in movement, available bandwidth, memory and processing power as effecting factors in presenting appropriate UI and shifting between access modalities.
Aerosol invigoration and restructuring of Atlantic convective clouds

Clouds and precipitation play crucial roles in the Earth's energy balance, global atmospheric circulation and the availability of fresh water. Aerosols may modify cloud properties and precipitation formation by modifying the concentration and size of cloud droplets, and consequently the strength of cloud convection, and height of glaciation levels thus affecting precipitation patterns. Here we evaluate the aerosol effect on clouds, using large statistics of daily satellite data over the North Atlantic Ocean. We found a strong correlation between the presence of aerosols and the structural properties of convective clouds. These correlations suggest systematic invigoration of convective clouds by pollution, desert dust and biomass burning aerosols. On average increase in the aerosol concentration from a baseline to the average values is associated with a 0.05 ± 0.01 increase in the cloud fraction and a 40 ± 5mb decrease in the cloud top pressure.
Wirelength Optimization for Multilevel Hierachical FPGA

The traditional placement methods for the island-style FPGA suffer from the conflicts of the unique architecture of the multilevel hierachical FPGA and the increasing capacity of FPGA. In this paper, we present an improved partitioning-based placement algorithm with three heuristic strategies, partition granularity strategy, vacancy distribution strategy and edge-weight assignment strategy. The partition granularity strategy works by deciding the number of sub-regions used to place blocks, vacancy distribution strategy acts through keeping each sub-region in relative balance and the edge-weight assignment strategy guides the min-cut partitions by giving the different weight to each nets, has abilities to deal with the circuits containing Macro-blocks. Experiments on MCNC benchmark circuits show that our algorithm implements the placement with an average gain of 16.7% decrease of the total wirelength compared to the basic partitioning-based algorithms, but without increase in runtime.
A survey of code‐based change impact analysis techniques

Software change impact analysis (CIA) is a technique for identifying the effects of a change, or estimating what needs to be modified to accomplish a change. Since the 1980s, there have been many investigations on CIA, especially for code‐based CIA techniques. However, there have been very few surveys on this topic. This article tries to fill this gap. And 30 papers that provide empirical evaluation on 23 code‐based CIA techniques are identified. Then, data was synthesized against four research questions. The study presents a comparative framework including seven properties, which characterize the CIA techniques, and identifies key applications of CIA techniques in software maintenance. In addition, the need for further research is also presented in the following areas: evaluating existing CIA techniques and proposing new CIA techniques under the proposed framework, developing more mature tools to support CIA, comparing current CIA techniques empirically with unified metrics and common benchmarks, and applying the CIA more extensively and effectively in the software maintenance phase. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
From Clinging to Digging: The Postembryonic Skeletal Ontogeny of the Indian Purple Frog, Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis (Anura: Nasikabatrachidae)

The Indian Purple frog, Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis, occupies a basal phylogenetic position among neobatrachian anurans and has a very unusual life history. Tadpoles have a large ventral oral sucker, which they use to cling to rocks in torrents, whereas metamorphs possess adaptations for life underground. The developmental changes that underlie these shifts in habits and habitats, and especially the internal remodeling of the cranial and postcranial skeleton, are unknown. Using a nearly complete metamorphic series from free-living larva to metamorph, we describe the postembryonic skeletal ontogeny of this ancient and unique monotypic lineage. The torrent-dwelling larva possesses a dorsoventrally flattened body and a head with tiny dorsal eyes, robust lower and upper jaw cartilages, well-developed trabecular horns, and a definable gap between the trabecular horns and the tip of the snout. Unlike tadpoles of many other frogs, those of Nasikabatrachus retain larval mouthparts into late metamorphic stages. This unusual feature enables the larvae to maintain their clinging habit until near the end of metamorphosis. The subsequent ontogenetic shift from clinging to digging is correlated with rapid morphological changes and behavioral modifications. Metamorphs are equipped with a shortened tibiafibula and ossified prehallical elements, which likely facilitate initial digging using the hind limbs. Subsequently, the frogs may shift to headfirst burrowing by using the wedge-shaped skull, anteriorly positioned pectoral girdle, well-developed humeral crests and spatula-shaped forelimbs. The transition from an aquatic life in torrents to a terrestrial life underground entails dramatic changes in skeletal morphology and function that represent an extreme in metamorphic remodeling. Our analysis enhances the scope for detailed comparative studies across anurans, a group renowned for the diversity of its life history strategies.
Continuous and Transient Vesicle Cycling at a Ribbon Synapse

Optical methods were used to study the Ca2+dependence of vesicle cycling in bipolar cells isolated from goldfish retinas. Uniformly raising the Ca2+ concentration to between 0.8 and 20 μm produced a continuous vesicle cycle of balanced exocytosis and endocytosis with a maximum rate equivalent to the turnover of the entire surface membrane of a terminal every 2 min (or ∼900 vesicles sec−1). Increasing the Ca2+ concentration above 20 μminhibited continuous vesicle cycling. In contrast, influx of Ca2+ through voltage-gated channels produced a transient burst of exocytosis that increased the surface area of a terminal by a maximum of 12% (equivalent to the addition of 13,000 vesicles). Endocytosis was delayed until after Ca2+influx stopped and the average Ca2+ concentration in the terminal declined. Hence, a single terminal has mechanisms for both continuous and transient vesicle cycling.
Critical issues associated with adoption and use of open source software in public sector: insights from Tanzania

Two Open Source Software (OSS) projects in Tanzania are discussed as exemplar efforts for the adaptation and use of OSS in public sector. The projects investigated in this Action Research Study were from the Health and Education Sectors. The two projects are of important in that, they use two different approaches of embracing OSS where the Health Sector project uses an approach of getting existing and working open source software framework and customizes it with the help of contributors from Open Source Community, while the Education Sector project developed software from scratch under the auspice of OSS development approach. A comparative analysis of the two projects with the terms of the Open Source Software definition indicates that the two developed software did not take into consideration of all OSS terms. The study concludes that the deviation from the terms of OSS definition reflect incompatibility between free software and open source software philosophies which results into difficulties to comply with one of them. As a result the focus is to achieve the freedom to use the software for any purpose and for any number of computers and the freedom to maintain the software without depending on the author of the software.
Advocating Co-Productive Engagement with Marginalised People: A Specific Perspective on and by Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Co-production is gaining ground as a key dimension of public policy reform across the globe.This paper argues in favour of social welfare shaped by the principles of co-production and suggests that the promotion of democratic relationships is more likely to enable the agency and recovery of victim-survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The paper, based on an autoethnographical approach, is likely to be of relevance to social care practitioners who work with a range of marginalised people, particularly in liberal states that promote organisational cultures shaped disproportionately by risk. Cultures of risk, it is argued, promote power balances and ‘othering’, arguably an institutional perpetuation of the original abuse. Co-production, on the other hand, has the potential to legitimise expertise by experience, enabling victim-survivors to be reinstated as citizens with associated rights of participation. The paper subsequently draws out some of the benefits of co-production for practitioners whose professional engagement may be stifled. We suggest that co-production potentially points towards practice based on the valuing of expertise by experience and social solidarity.
Evolutionary conservation suggests a regulatory function of AUG triplets in 5′-UTRs of eukaryotic genes

By comparing sequences of human, mouse and rat orthologous genes, we show that in 5′-untranslated regions (5′-UTRs) of mammalian cDNAs but not in 3′-UTRs or coding sequences, AUG is conserved to a significantly greater extent than any of the other 63 nt triplets. This effect is likely to reflect, primarily, bona fide evolutionary conservation, rather than cDNA annotation artifacts, because the excess of conserved upstream AUGs (uAUGs) is seen in 5′-UTRs containing stop codons in-frame with the start AUG and many of the conserved AUGs are found in different frames, consistent with the location in authentic non-coding sequences. Altogether, conserved uAUGs are present in at least 20–30% of mammalian genes. Qualitatively similar results were obtained by comparison of orthologous genes from different species of the yeast genus Saccharomyces. Together with the observation that mammalian and yeast 5′-UTRs are significantly depleted in overall AUG content, these findings suggest that AUG triplets in 5′-UTRs are subject to the pressure of purifying selection in two opposite directions: the uAUGs that have no specific function tend to be deleterious and get eliminated during evolution, whereas those uAUGs that do serve a function are conserved. Most probably, the principal role of the conserved uAUGs is attenuation of translation at the initiation stage, which is often additionally regulated by alternative splicing in the mammalian 5′-UTRs. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that open reading frames starting from conserved uAUGs are significantly shorter than those starting from non-conserved uAUGs, possibly, owing to selection for optimization of the level of attenuation.