Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strategic changes in problem solving

One way to study how individuals reason to solve problems is to see how they develop strategies to solve a series of related problems. This paper accordingly presents a theory explaining how they do so: When individuals solve a series of problems, their initial moves are constrained solely by perceptual and cognitive characteristics of the problems. They deduce the consequences of tactical moves, whether or not these moves are successful in advancing them towards a solution. As they master these tactics, however, a strategic shift occurs. The deduced knowledge comes to constrain the generation of moves, through the discovery of global constraints. Three experiments investigating a series of “matchstick” problems corroborated the theory.
The accuracy and scalability of continuous-time Bayesian inference in analogue CMOS circuits

This paper discusses the idea of Bayesian inference in factor graphs implemented as continuous-time current-mode analogue CMOS circuits using Gilbert multipliers for arithmetic operations. The computational accuracy, accounting for the systematic and random (fabrication mismatch) errors, and the scalability of such realisations were verified in simulations of networks consisting of 5 - 121 nodes implemented using models from a standard 90 nm CMOS technology. The obtained results show a relatively short settling time, typically below 3 μs at a power less than 7 mW, with the equivalent computational speed of over 35 arithmetic operations per nanosecond but with a limited accuracy, mainly affected by fabrication mismatch. Such realisations could be used in applications requiring fast and low power approximate Bayesian inference.
Optimization of Ohmic Contact Metallization Process for AlGaN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistor

In this paper, a manufacturing process was developed for fabricating high-quality AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) on silicon carbide (SiC) substrates. Various conditions and processing methods regarding the ohmic contact and pre-metal-deposition etching processes were evaluated in terms of the device performance. In order to obtain a good ohmic contact performance, we tested a Ti/Al/Ta/Au ohmic contact metallization scheme under different rapid thermal annealing (RTA) temperature and time. A -based reactive-ion etching (RIE) method was performed before the ohmic metallization, since this approach was shown to produce a better ohmic contact compared to the as-fabricated HEMTs. A HEMT with a 0.5 gate length was fabricated using this novel manufacturing process, which exhibits a maximum drain current density of 720 mA/mm and a peak transconductance of 235 mS/mm. The X-band output power density was 6.4 W/mm with a 53% power added efficiency (PAE).
Topicalization in German particle verb constructions: The role of semantic transparency 

In this paper, we investigate topicalization patterns of German particle verbs by comparing the syntactic behavior of semantically transparent and non-transparent particle verb constructions. We propose a classification that allows us to cover the whole transparency spectrum and to distinguish between fully transparent and fully non-transparent particle verbs. Given this classification, we report on a questionnaire study that provides empirical evidence for the claim that information structural constraints in combination with the degree of semantic transparency govern topicalization patterns in particle verb configurations. We conclude by pointing out potential additional constraints on topicalization in particle verb constructions that go beyond information structure.
Long-term exploration & tours for energy constrained robots with online proprioceptive traversability estimation

This paper is concerned with how a localised and energy-constrained robot can maximise its time in the field by taking paths and tours that minimise its energy expenditure. A significant component of a robot's energy is expended on mobility and is a function of terrain traversability. We estimate traversability online from data sensed by the robot as it moves, and use this to generate maps, explore and ultimately converge on minimum energy tours of the environment. We provide results of detailed simulations and parameter studies that show the efficacy of this approach for a robot moving over terrain with unknown traversability as well as a number of a priori unknown hard obstacles. We also present preliminary experimental results to show the feasibility of this approach in natural terrain.
Islet Surface Heparinization Prevents the Instant Blood-Mediated Inflammatory Reaction in Islet Transplantation

OBJECTIVE—In clinical islet transplantation, the instant blood-mediated inflammatory reaction (IBMIR) is a major factor contributing to the poor initial engraftment of the islets. This reaction is triggered by tissue factor and monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1, expressed by the transplanted pancreatic islets when the islets come in contact with blood in the portal vein. All currently identified systemic inhibitors of the IBMIR are associated with a significantly increased risk of bleeding or other side effects. To avoid systemic treatment, the aim of the present study was to render the islet graft blood biocompatible by applying a continuous heparin coating to the islet surface. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—A biotin/avidin technique was used to conjugate preformed heparin complexes to the surface of pancreatic islets. This endothelial-like coating was achieved by conjugating barely 40 IU heparin per full-size clinical islet transplant. RESULTS—Both in an in vitro loop model and in an allogeneic porcine model of clinical islet transplantation, this heparin coating provided protection against the IBMIR. Culturing heparinized islets for 24 h did not affect insulin release after glucose challenge, and heparin-coated islets cured diabetic mice in a manner similar to untreated islets. CONCLUSIONS—This novel pretreatment procedure prevents intraportal thrombosis and efficiently inhibits the IBMIR without increasing the bleeding risk and, unlike other pretreatment procedures (e.g., gene therapy), without inducing acute or chronic toxicity in the islets.
Tennis Player Segmentation for Semantic Behavior Analysis

Tennis player silhouette extraction is a preliminary step fundamental for any behavior analysis processing. Automatic systems for the evaluation of player tactics, in terms of position in the court, postures during the game and types of strokes, are highly desired for coaches and training purposes. These systems require accurate segmentation of players in order to apply posture analysis and high level semantic analysis. Background subtraction algorithms have been largely used in sportive context when fixed cameras are used. In this paper an innovative background subtraction algorithm is presented, which has been adapted to the tennis context and allows high precision in player segmentation both for the completeness of the extracted silhouettes. The algorithm is able to achieve interactive frame rates with up to 30 frames per second, and is suitable for smart cameras embedding. Real experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is suitable in tennis contexts.
A Survey of the Research on Future Internet and Network Architectures

The Internet was designed for academic use more than 40 years ago. After having been used commercially, many unpredictable requirements have emerged, including mobility, security and content distribution. In addition, the Internet has become so ossified that fulfilling new requirements is difficult. Instead of developing ad-hoc solutions, re-designing clean-slate Internet architectures has become a key research challenge in networking communities. This survey paper addresses key research issues and then introduces ongoing research projects from Japan, the United States and the European Union. key words: New Generation Network, future Internet, clean-slate design
Reducing geometry-processing overhead for novel viewpoint creation

Maintaining a high steady frame rate is an important aspect in interactive real-time graphics. It is mainly influenced by the number of objects and the number of lights to be processed for a 3d scene. The upper-bound effort for rendering a scene is then defined by the number of objects times the number of lights, i. e. O(NO · NL). Deferred shading reduces this upper bound to the number of objects plus the number of lights, i. e. O(NO + NL), by separating the rendering process into two phases: geometry processing and lighting evaluation. The geometry processing rasterizes all objects but only retains visible fragments in a G-Buffer for the current viewpoint. The lighting evaluation then only needs to process those surviving fragments to compute the final image (for the current viewpoint). Unfortunately, this approach not only trades computational effort for memory but also requires the re-creation of the G-Buffer every time the viewpoint changes. Additionally, transparent objects cannot be encoded into a G-Buffer and must be separately processed. Post-rendering 3d warping [Mark et al. 1997] is one particular technique that allows to create images from G-Buffer information for new viewpoints. However, this only works with sufficient fragment information. Objects not encoded in the G-Buffer, because they were not visible from the original viewpoint, will create visual artifacts at discontinuities between objects. We propose fragment-history volumes (FHV) to create novel viewpoints from a discrete representation of the entire scene using current graphics hardware and present an initial performance comparison.
PBL State Estimation with Surface Observations, a Column Model, and an Ensemble Filter

Abstract Following recent results showing the potential for using surface observations of temperature, water vapor mixing ratio, and winds to determine PBL profiles, this paper reports on experiments with real observations. A 1D column model with soil, surface-layer, and PBL parameterization schemes that are the same as in the Weather Research and Forecasting model is used to estimate PBL profiles with an ensemble filter. Surface observations over the southern Great Plains are assimilated during the spring and early summer period of 2003. To strictly quantify the utility of the observations for determining PBL profiles in the ensemble filter framework, only climatological information is provided for initialization and forcing. The analysis skill, measured against rawinsondes for an independent verification, is compared against climatology to quantify the influence of the observations. Sensitivity to changing parameterization schemes, and to prescribed values of observation error variance, is examined. Tem.
A Comparison of Melody Extraction Methods Based on Source-Filter Modelling

This work is partially supported by the European Union/nunder the PHENICX project (FP7-ICT-601166) and the/nSpanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under/nCASAS project (TIN2015-70816-R) and Maria de Maeztu/nUnits of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502)
Financial auditing and surveys: how are financial auditors using information technology?: an approach using expert interviews

For many years, studies on Models for Individual Information Technology Acceptance were carried out and many approaches were released. All these models were meant to advance and define the determinant contributions on the user agreement on Information System and how this value can be a determinant factor to Information System adoption and success. The acceptance of Computer Assisted Audit Tools and Techniques is referred as difficult among internal auditors. This problem can arises when available tools and procedures involve relevant and complex background in several topics as Mathematics, Statistic and Advanced Concepts and Techniques on Information Systems. ANOVA or Data Mining algorithms and Artificial Intelligence on auditing procedures are examples of these evidences. This study intends to fully understand the way financial auditors use Information Technologies in their Auditing Tasks. To accomplish this main objective we did in-depth interviews focused upon financial auditors group. Is our intention to analyze and classify their contributions in order to provide further insights to the present research.
Preserving privacy in geo-targeted advertising

Targeted advertising has inherent privacy risks: ad providers aim to maximize the information inferred about the users in order to increase their click-through ratio. This in turn leads to long-term privacy risks for the users as their information is traded among ad agencies and unknown third parties. In this paper we focus on the privacy associated with information such as location and income, and their relationships with the ads served to users. We first show the possibility for an attacker to use topic modelling and machine learning techniques on ads served to a user as a means to accurately infer their location and income band within a city. We then attempt to reduce this risk of inference using obfuscation, or hiding in plain sight. The idea is to hide the targeted ads, not by relying on encryption, rather by producing just enough noise such that an attacker cannot distinguish between the actual ads served and the ads which are just noise. Our results are promising and demonstrate that efforts such as TrackMeNot can help advertising and users achieve a balance between targeted advertising and location privacy exposure.
Reliability analysis and improvement for multi-level non-volatile memories with soft information

This paper presents the systematic methodology of error correction scheme using low-density parity check (LDPC) codes to improve the reliability and endurance of multi-level cell (MLC) non-volatile memories. Using our realistic error model, the LDPC architecture with the scheme of non-uniform reference voltages (NURV) is proposed to trade off among error correction capability, area, and throughput, which can improve the bit-error-rate significantly.
Late Immature B Cells (IgMhighIgDneg) Undergo a Light Chain Receptor Editing Response to Soluble Self-Antigen1

Receptor editing is an important mechanism to modify the Ag specificity of newly developing B cells that are reactive with self-Ags. Previous studies have suggested that late immature B cells, bearing high levels of IgM on their cell surface, are unable to initiate receptor editing and instead are deleted by apoptosis. Using the hen egg lysozyme transgenic system, we show that IgMhigh late-immature B cells are fully capable of receptor editing to soluble self-Ag. This was demonstrated by the induction of new endogenous light chain locus rearrangements and by a single-cell flow cytometric assay using a recombination-activating gene 2-green fluorescence protein reporter transgene. These studies suggest that the developmental window available for immature B cells to edit their Ig receptors, at least in response to certain soluble Ags, extends through the IgMhigh late immature B cell stage.
What keeps them exercising? A qualitative exploration of exercise maintenance post-cardiac rehabilitation

Few individuals maintain their exercise levels post-cardiac rehabilitation. The objective of this study was to explore factors related to exercise maintenance post-cardiac rehabilitation. Participants were (a) 15 post-cardiac rehabilitation exercise maintainers and (b) 10 cardiac rehabilitation exercise professionals. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants in each group. The data were analysed abductively (combination of inductive and deductive) using content analysis to generate themes that linked to the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) and represented participants’ experiences and perceptions. Both the exercise maintainers and the exercise professionals identified seven common domains of the TDF relating to exercise maintenance post-cardiac rehabilitation: social influence, behavioural regulation, belief about capabilities, beliefs about consequences, reinforcements, emotions, and environment contexts and resources. Exercise maintainers also mentioned the domains of goals, optimism, social/professional role and identity, and memory/attention/decision process while the exercise professionals discussed the domain of knowledge about the benefits of exercise. In the inductive analysis, participants reported other themes (e.g. variety; cardiac rehabilitation improvements) not related to the TDF. Findings from this study highlighted similarities between both groups on seven theoretical domains and revealed insights (e.g. optimism and variety) that have rarely been examined with post-cardiac rehabilitation populations. This manuscript provides a greater understanding of the theoretical domains that could be fostered to facilitate long-term exercise participation among individuals completing a cardiac rehabilitation programme.
SEEING THE COLLISION OF A SUPERNOVA WITH ITS COMPANION STAR

The progenitors of Type Ia and some core collapse supernovae are thought to be stars in binary systems, but little direct observational evidence exists to confirm the hypothesis. We show that the collision of the supernova ejecta with its companion star should produce detectable emission in the hours and days following the explosion. The interaction occurs at distances ∼1011–1013 cm and shocks the impacting supernova debris, dissipating kinetic energy and re-heating the gas. Initially, some radiation may escape promptly through the evacuated region of the shadowcone, producing a bright X-ray (0.1–2 keV) burst lasting minutes to hours with luminosity L ∼ 1044 ergs s−1. Continuing radiative diffusion from deeper layers of shock-heated ejecta produces a longer lasting optical/UV emission, which exceeds the radioactively powered luminosity of the supernova for the first few days after the explosion. These signatures are prominent for viewing angles looking down upon the shocked region, or about 10% of the time. The properties of the emission provide a straightforward measure of the separation distance between the stars and hence (assuming Roche lobe overflow) the companion's radius. Current optical and UV data sets likely already constrain red giant companions. By systematically acquiring early time data for many supernovae, it may eventually be possible to empirically determine how the parameters of the progenitor system influence the outcome of the explosion.
Reordering Algorithms for Increasing Locality on Multicore Processors

In order to efficiently exploit available parallelism, multicore processors must address contention for shared resources as cache hierarchy. This fact becomes even more important when irregular codes are executed on them, which is the case for sparse matrix ones. In this paper a technique for increasing locality of sparse matrix codes on multicore platforms is presented. The technique consists on reorganizing the data guided by a locality model which introduces the concept of windows of locality. The evaluation of the reordering technique has been performed on two different leading multicore platforms: Intel Core2Duo and Intel Xeon. Experimental results show important performance improvements when using our reordered matrices with respect to original ones. In particular, an average execution time reduction of about 30% is achieved considering different number of running threads. These results are due to an improved overall cache behavior. Likewise, a comparison of our proposal with some standard reordering techniques is included in the paper. Results point out that the reordering technique always outperforms standard algorithms and is effective for matrices with any structure.
Blind multiuser receiver design in ISI channels

In this paper, we present an alternative multiuser signal model and discuss its applications for blind multiuser receiver design. We compare the model with the conventional and signal subspace-based signal models as well as their applications in receiver design. The geometric interpretation, bit-error rate, signal processing bounds, etc., of these signal models and blind receivers are compared and discussed. From the analyses, the trade-offs between the complexity and performance of blind multiuser receiver design are presented. Computer simulations are finally provided to demonstrate the performance and theoretic analysis
Motion Imitation Based on Sparsely Sampled Correspondence

Existing techniques for motion imitation often suffer a certain level of latency due to their computational overhead or a large set of correspondence samples to search. To achieve real-time imitation with small latency, we present a framework in this paper to reconstruct motion on humanoids based on sparsely sampled correspondence. The imitation problem is formulated as finding the projection of a point from the configuration space of a human's poses into the configuration space of a humanoid. An optimal projection is defined as the one that minimizes a back-projected deviation among a group of candidates, which can be determined in a very efficient way. Benefited from this formulation, effective projections can be obtained by using sparse correspondence. Methods for generating these sparse correspondence samples have also been introduced. Our method is evaluated by applying the human's motion captured by a RGB-D sensor to a humanoid in real-time. Continuous motion can be realized and used in the example application of tele-operation.
The Affective Impact of Tutor Questions: Predicting Frustration and Engagement

Tutorial dialogue is a highly eﬀective way to support student learning. It is widely recognized that tutor dialogue moves can signiﬁcantly inﬂuence learning outcomes, but the ways in which tutor moves, student aﬀective response, and outcomes are related remains an open question. This paper presents an analysis of student aﬀective response, as evidenced by multimodal data streams, immediately following tutor questions. The ﬁndings suggest that students’ aﬀect immediately following tutor questions is highly predictive of end-of-session self-reported engagement and frustration. Notably, facial action units which have been associated with emotional states such as embarrassment, disgust, and happiness appear to play important roles in students’ expressions of frustration and engagement during learning. This line of investigation will aid in the development of a deeper understanding of the relationships between tutorial dialogue and student aﬀect during learning.
The Multisession Multilayer Broadcast Approach for Two Cooperating Receivers—How Many Sessions Are Required?

We consider the problem of transmission of a common message from a single source to two cooperating destination users, exhibiting different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). The cooperation is performed over a noiseless link with a total capacity limit Ccoop, which the users may utilize for conversation. In order to maximize the achievable throughput, it is suggested to employ a multilayer broadcast approach combined with multisession cooperation, such that every session another layer can be decoded. Since the cooperation link is limited, an efficient cooperation scheme is required. The relaying user performs compression which utilizes the side information of the decoder in the Wyner-Ziv (WZ) spirit. In multisession cooperation the compression is in the form of successive-refinement WZ coding. After the first user decodes a layer, the minimal required information is sent back to the second user to allow both of them to decode the message. The minimal required information is achievable with random coding using a binning strategy. While it is expected that multisession cooperation will be more efficient than a single-session cooperation we show that the maximal throughput is achieved with a single session cooperation. This is shown for the nonfading channel and for the ergodic fading case. Nonetheless, for the block fading channel it is already known that multilayering and multisession outperforms single session cooperation.