Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WSNs Power Consumption Reduction using Clustering and Multiple Access Techniques

Energy consumption is one of the important challenge in WSNs deployment and applications. This is because power of WSNs is limited by battery which is difficult if not impossible to replace or recharge in some manner in the sensor nodes. Power consumption can be controlled in WSNs in more than one layer. In this thesis, power efficiency problems and techniques of enlarging battery life using WSNs physical layer are investigated in the second layer MAC sublayer. The latter has been achieved using the multiple access techniques, TDMA and CDMA. Initially, the research attempt to divide the WSN nodes into clusters such that at any time only one specific cluster will operate and the remaining cluster switched off to reduce the power consumption. Each cluster consists of several nodes and one sub-station (SS), all the nodes in one cluster send its data to the (SS) that forwards the data to main station (MS). Furthermore, the link between nodes, SS, and MS is controlled and scheduled such that cluster and node switched to active or sleep modes. Four systems with multi-types of multiple access are proposed and tested. These systems are classified according to the way multiple access provided in the link: TDMA-TDMA-OFDM system, CDMA-CDMA system, CDMA-TDMA-OFDM system, and TDMA-OFDMTDMA-OFDM system. These systems have been simulated and investigated. By comparing the results of each system with different case of cluster, it has been found that the less consumed power is achieved with 8 clusters of 16 nodes/cluster case. The results also show that the best performance is achieved with CDMA-CDMA system with 8 clusters of 16 nodes/cluster case.
Modeling and Formal Verification of Hardware Designs

We investigate applying of an actor-based language, Rebeca, for hardware design. Rebeca is based on reactive objects with formal foundation. Hence, available tools for model checking provide u s with formal verification support. In our approach, system design process is started from Rebeca in hig h levels of abstraction. Formal verification is then u sed to verify the design. We show the process of system design using Rebeca. A case study is used to show t he process of modeling and verification.
Working Memory in Writing: Empirical Evidence From the Dual-Task Technique

The dual-task paradigm recently played a major role in understanding the role of working memory in writing. By reviewing recent findings in this field of research, this article highlights how the use of the dual-task technique allowed studying the processing and short-term storage functions of working memory involved in writing. With respect to processing functions of working memory (namely, attentional and executive functions), studies investigated resource allocation, step-by-step management, and parallel coordination of the writing processes. With respect to short-term storage in working memory, experiments mainly attempted to test Kellogg's (1996) proposals on the relationship between the writing processes and the slave systems of working memory. The dual-task technique proved fruitful in understanding the relationship between writing and working memory because researchers exploited its major advantage, namely, its flexibility.
Fast, Automatic, Topology-Preserving Gradient Mesh Generation for Image Vectorization

Gradient mesh vector graphics representation, used in commercial software, is a regular grid with speciﬁed position and color, and their gradients, at each grid point. Gradient meshes can compactly represent smoothly changing data, and are typically used for single objects. This paper advances the state of the art for gradient meshes in several signiﬁcant ways. Firstly, we introduce a topology-preserving gradient mesh representation which allows an arbitrary number of holes . This is important, as objects in images often have holes, either due to occlusion, or their 3D structure. Sec-ondly, our algorithm uses the concept of image manifolds, adapting surface parameterization and ﬁtting techniques to generate the gradient mesh in a fully automatic manner. Existing gradient-mesh algorithms require manual interaction to guide grid construction, and to cut objects with holes into disk-like regions. Our new al-gorithm is empirically at least 10 times faster than previous approaches. Furthermore, image segmentation can be used with our new algorithm to provide automatic gradient mesh generation for a whole image . Finally, ﬁtting errors can be simply controlled to balance quality with storage.
Object detection and tracking for a vision guided automated suspended cell injection process

Object detection and tracking under the microscopic field of view is an important part in a vision based automated cell injection system. This paper introduces a novel method for recognizing and tracking the cell, the holding pipette and the injection pipette in an Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) process. The algorithm for identification firstly automatically segmented the microscopic image by Otsu's method, and then calculated the roundness and elongation features of every separated region after removing tiny blobs by judging their areas. The holding pipette was identified by a modified template matching technique, which used the contour information of the object instead of the whole body, resulting in a shorter processing time. The objects were tracked by applying identification method to every frame of the video, with a movement estimation constraint of the holding pipette when performing the matching. Experiment was carried out and the performance of the proposed method was evaluated.
Two proposals for robust PCA using semidefinite programming

The performance of principal component analysis suffers badly in the presence of outliers. This paper proposes two novel approaches for robust principal component analysis based on semidefinite programming. The first method, maximum mean absolute deviation rounding, seeks directions of large spread in the data while damping the effect of outliers. The second method produces a low-leverage decomposition of the data that attempts to form a low-rank model for the data by separating out corrupted observations. This paper also presents efficient computational methods for solving these semidefinite programs. Numerical experiments confirm the value of these new techniques.
Sexual Behavior and Condom Use among Seasonal Dalit Migrant Laborers to India from Far West, Nepal: A Qualitative Study

Background Around 41% of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) cases in Nepal occur in seasonal migrant laborers. Dalit migrant laborers represent the largest proportion of reported HIV cases in the Far Western Region (Sudur Pashchimanchal, or Far West), Nepal. The study’s objectives were to assess sexual behavior, condom use status and HIV risk perception among Dalit migrant laborers to India from Far West Region, Nepal. Methods The study was conducted among Dalit male migrant laborers aged 15 years and above who had migrated for at least six months of the last two years to India. For the sampling the village development committees (VDCs) from Achham, Doti and Kanchanpur districts of Nepal were purposively selected. The data were collected in March and April 2011 via ten in-depth interviews and four focus group discussions and analyzed using content analysis. Results Poor socio-economic status, caste-related discrimination, and lack of employment opportunities push large groups of young Dalits to migrate to India for employment, where they engage in sex with female sex workers (FSWs). The participants described unmarried status, peer influence, alcohol use, low-priced sex with FSWs and unwillingness to use condoms as common factors of their migration experience. Lack of awareness on HIV/AIDS was common among study participants. Awareness of HIV/AIDS and faithful, monogamous partnerships are reported as factors influencing safer sexual behavior. Conclusions Dalits are an especially vulnerable population among migrant laborers and may be over-represented in new HIV infections in Nepal. Comprehensive surveying and health promotion programs targeted to this population are urgently needed and potent methods of stopping HIV spread.
Correlation, Causation, Motivation, and Second Language Acquisition

It is well known to anyone who has taken even an introductory course in statistics that "correlation does not mean causation. " This is a truism! The present article examines four truisms about correlation, demonstrating that they are not always true. For example, under certain conditions, correlation can imply causation, though these conditions are seldom satisfied in most applications. Nonetheless, there are many of us who are interested in investigating individual differences, and in making inferences of the type that this individual difference variable is related to, mediates, moderates, or even causes or influences that individual difference variable. Generally speaking, the analytic procedures we use involve the correlation coefficient in one form or another. I propose four steps that researchers can follow to accumulate evidence that increases one's confidence in the validity of a particular causal model. These steps are illustrated by reviewing research on individual differences in second language acquisition. This approach is not conclusive, of course, but it does force one to examine the implications of the model, thus leading to further insights and research. Although the focus here is on second language acquisition, the generalizations apply to other areas of research that are concerned with individual differences.
PERFORMANCE OF MICROBIAL FUEL CELL UNDER PSYCROPHILIC AND MESOPHILIC TEMPERATURE

Good amount of research is going on to produce low cost microbial fuel cells (MFCs) and scale them up for field application. This current research is based on the objective of observing the functioning of a low cost MFC for generating energy along with simultaneous treatment of wastewater under two different operating temperature ranges namely psycrophilic (temperature less than 20 °C) and mesophilic (operating temperature of 30 °C) temperatures. Performance of three similar MFCs, fabricated using an earthen pot, was evaluated under these temperature ranges while treating synthetic wastewater. Maximum power densities of 14.2 mW/m 2 at resistance of 119 Ω, 20.62 mW/m 2 at resistance of 99 Ω, 21.65 mW/m 2 at resistance of 97 Ω were obtained for the three MFCs at mesophilic temperature; whereas operation at psychrophilic temperatures resulted in the power densities of 8.69 mW/m 2 at resistance of 317 Ω, 10.50 mW/m 2 at resistance of 151 Ω, 15.52 mW/m 2 at resistance of 99 Ω. Average COD removal of 30.12 ± 11.62 %, 80.66 ± 4.14 % and 74.12 ± 2.47 % were obtained in the three different operating conditions namely without temperature control (operating temperature of 11 13 0 C) and non acclimatized inoculum, with temperature control (operating temperature of 30 0 C) and then without temperature control (operating temperature of 15 17 0 C) and acclimatized bacteria respectively. It is concluded that electrogenic bacterial growth is favored under mesophilic temperature; however, MFCs can be operated even at psychrophilic temperatures once the anodic biofilm is acclimatized at elevated temperature.
Learning to listen? Exploring discourses and images of masculine leadership through corporate videos

Through analysing corporate videos, this article examines two chief executive officer leadership narratives in a UK Building Society that reflected and reproduced certain discourses of masculinity; the first expressed this through military images and metaphors while the second emphasised sport. This article makes three arguments for why certain expressions of masculinity may disengage those whose support managers are endeavouring to enlist. The first is that not all employees are attracted to images of war, conquest or competition. The second is that masculine sporting and warring discourses may repel staff when they are wielded against them. The final argument is that disenchantment is likely to result from enactments of masculinity that treat critical voices as a threat and where leaders simply seek to win the argument, silence opposition and refuse to ‘listen’ to alternative points of view. This analysis of leadership discourses is distinctive because it explores the visible (watching) and the verbal (listening). In this way, it exposes ‘hidden, gendered practices’ that are all too often neglected.
FPGA design and implementation of truncated multipliers using bypassing technique

In this paper, we investigate the design and implementation of standard and fixed-width 8 x 8 multipliers using row bypassing technique. The design is described using VERILOG Hardware Descriptive Language and implemented using XILINX ISE 12.1v tool. Multipliers are a core part of any data path circuit and in many multimedia applications; we require both inputs and outputs to have the same bit width. For these type of applications the standard multipliers is not the best choice because an n-bit input will produce a 2n-bit output. An n-bit output i.e., a fixed width multiplier can be obtained by truncating the least significant partial products of the multiplier. The comparison table shows that a significant reduction of FPGA resources and delay can be achieved using fixed-width multipliers instead of standard multipliers.
Robotic versus Open Radical Cystectomy: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Objective To critically review the currently available evidence of studies comparing robot-assisted radical cystectomy (RARC) with open radical cystectomy (ORC). Methods A comprehensive review of the literature from Pubmed, Web of Science and Scopus was performed in April 2014. All relevant studies comparing RARC with ORC were included for further screening. A pooled meta-analysis of all comparative studies was performed and publication bias was assessed by a funnel plot. Results Nineteen studies were included for the analysis, including a total of 1779 patients (787 patients in the RARC group and 992 patients in the ORC group). Although RARC was associated with longer operative time (p <0.0001), patients in this group might benefit from significantly lower overall perioperative complication rates within 30 days and 90 days (p = 0.005 and 0.0002, respectively), more lymph node yields (p = 0.009), less estimated blood loss (p <0.00001), lower need for perioperative and intraoperative transfusions (p <0.0001 and <0.0001, respectively), and shorter postoperative length of stay (p = 0.0002). There was no difference between two groups regarding positive surgical margin rates (p = 0.19). Conclusions RARC appears to be an efficient alternative to ORC with advantages of less perioperative complications, more lymph node yields, less estimated blood loss, lower need for transfusions, and shorter postoperative length of stay. Further studies should be performed to compare the long-term oncologic outcomes between RARC and ORC.
An Improvement of Resource Allocation for Migration Process in Cloud Environment

Virtualmachine(VM)migrationhasrecentlyemergedasapotentialtooltoimprovetheperformance, cost and fault tolerance of data centers. However, migratingVMs requires more hardware resources to reserve target slots during the migration.A large number of simultaneous migrations can exhaust the physical resources of a data center. Consequently, the system may deny new service requests. In this paper, we introduce an efficient strategy to limit the number of target slots used for the migration process with the aim of maintaining high data center availability. In particular, the number of target slots is determined by the tradeoff between the waiting time of the queued migration processes and theprobabilitythatthesystemrejectsnewuserrequestsduetothelackofavailableresources.Wealso propose a method to reduce the waiting time of the migration process by adding a sufficient number of slots during the migration process. Accordingly, a data center can use fewer resources while still guaranteeing the quality of the service. The efficiency of our proposed method is demonstrated by the experimental results.
Supervised query modeling using wikipedia

We use Wikipedia articles to semantically inform the generation of query models. To this end, we apply supervised machine learning to automatically link queries to Wikipedia articles and sample terms from the linked articles to re-estimate the query model. On a recent large web corpus, we observe substantial gains in terms of both traditional metrics and diversity measures.
Interference Constraint Graph — A new specification for mixed-criticality systems

Current research in mixed-criticality systems assumes that any task of lower criticality levels can be dropped at anytime in order to guarantee the schedulability of tasks of higher criticality levels. However, in an industrial mixed-criticality system, tasks may interfere with each other only under certain scenarios. Currently a designer does not have any means to specify or control this. The paper proposes the Interference Constraint Graph (ICG) which specifies the allowed interferences between tasks. The new specification formalism generalizes and can easily express many of the existing mixed-criticality scheduling conditions. In spite of its generality, we show that standard fixed-priority scheduling can be efficiently applied. Experiments demonstrate that the ICG model enables systematic reduction of the number of tasks that can be dropped.
Learning from Large, Complex Data with Applications in Natural Language Processing

Machine learning techniques have been widely applied in many domains. For example, they have been shown to be effective in resolving ambiguity and modeling linguistic structure in human languages, leading to substantial advancements in information extraction, question answering, and machine translation. However, in many cases, high accuracy requires training on large amounts of data, exploiting various sources of learning signals and/or exploring complex input and output interactions. My research goal is to design practical algorithms to efficiently learn expressive models from large-scale data and massive quantities of knowledge. My study benefits both the theory and the practice of Machine Learning (ML) and helps application domains such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), where researchers often encounter large, complex data.
When time meets information retrieval: Past proposals, current plans and future trends

With the advent of Web search and the large amount of data published on the Web sphere, a tremendous amount of documents become strongly time-dependent. In this respect, the time dimension has been extensively exploited as a highly important relevance criterion to improve the retrieval effectiveness of document ranking models. Thus, a compelling research interest is going on the temporal information retrieval realm, which gives rise to several temporal search applications. In this article, we intend to provide a scrutinizing overview of time-aware information retrieval models. We specifically put the focus on the use of timeliness and its impact on the global value of relevance as well as on the retrieval effectiveness. First, we attempt to motivate the importance of temporal signals, whenever combined with other relevance features, in accounting for document relevance. Then, we review the relevant studies standing at the crossroads of both information retrieval and time according to three common information retrieval aspects: the query level, the document content level and the document ranking model level. We organize the related temporal-based approaches around specific information retrieval tasks and regarding the task at hand, we emphasize the importance of results presentation and particularly timelines to the end user. We also report a set of relevant research trends and avenues that can be explored in the future.
Looking at the Blogosphere Topology through Different Lenses

The blogosphere is a vast and dynamic complex network. Any examination of the structure of such a network is dependent on the selection of blogs sampled and the time frame of the sample. By comparing two large blog datasets, we demonstrate that samples may differ significantly in their coverage but still show consistency in their aggregate network properties. We further compare the structure of a blog dataset with and without spam blogs, which account for a majority of the links in one sample. We also show that properties such as degree distributions and clustering coefficients depend on t he
Adopting Agile in a large organization: balancing the old with the new

Much has been written about adopting agile software development within a large organisation. A key aspect of this significant organisational change is to ensure that a common understanding of the new technology emerges within all stakeholder groups. We propose that an analysis framework based on the concept of Technological Frames (TFs) can identify where understanding is in conflict across different stakeholder groups. We used TFs to analyse data collected in one organisation in the process of adopting an agile development approach. In doing so, we identified several dimensions (called ‘elements’ in TFs) which characterise a group’s understanding of agility. In this paper, we present these elements and describe the TFs for four distinct groups. We suggest that these elements may be used by other organisations adopting agile methods to help understand the views of different stakeholder groups.
Interaction with Tsg101 Is Necessary for the Efficient Transport and Release of Nucleocapsids in Marburg Virus-Infected Cells

Endosomal sorting complex required for transport (ESCRT) machinery supports the efficient budding of Marburg virus (MARV) and many other enveloped viruses. Interaction between components of the ESCRT machinery and viral proteins is predominantly mediated by short tetrapeptide motifs, known as late domains. MARV contains late domain motifs in the matrix protein VP40 and in the genome-encapsidating nucleoprotein (NP). The PSAP late domain motif of NP recruits the ESCRT-I protein tumor susceptibility gene 101 (Tsg101). Here, we generated a recombinant MARV encoding NP with a mutated PSAP late domain (rMARVPSAPmut). rMARVPSAPmut was attenuated by up to one log compared with recombinant wild-type MARV (rMARVwt), formed smaller plaques and exhibited delayed virus release. Nucleocapsids in rMARVPSAPmut-infected cells were more densely packed inside viral inclusions and more abundant in the cytoplasm than in rMARVwt-infected cells. A similar phenotype was detected when MARV-infected cells were depleted of Tsg101. Live-cell imaging analyses revealed that Tsg101 accumulated in inclusions of rMARVwt-infected cells and was co-transported together with nucleocapsids. In contrast, rMARVPSAPmut nucleocapsids did not display co-localization with Tsg101, had significantly shorter transport trajectories, and migration close to the plasma membrane was severely impaired, resulting in reduced recruitment into filopodia, the major budding sites of MARV. We further show that the Tsg101 interacting protein IQGAP1, an actin cytoskeleton regulator, was recruited into inclusions and to individual nucleocapsids together with Tsg101. Moreover, IQGAP1 was detected in a contrail-like structure at the rear end of migrating nucleocapsids. Down regulation of IQGAP1 impaired release of MARV. These results indicate that the PSAP motif in NP, which enables binding to Tsg101, is important for the efficient actin-dependent transport of nucleocapsids to the sites of budding. Thus, the interaction between NP and Tsg101 supports several steps of MARV assembly before virus fission.