Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The model for the online shopping supply chain and its optimization based on online to offline

With regard to the network optimization problem of online supply chain based on online to offline, the super network theory is used to construct the model of the supply chain. Then the independent optimization is modeled based on the single supply chain member, and the integrated optimization is modeled based on all the supply chain members according to the optimization theory of the variational inequality. Further more, the two models are compared by simulation application. Finally, the paper concludes the supply chain can gain more economic benefit and bring win-win effect to all its members if they invest on the online to offline operation on the condition that all its members' profit is maximized.
Improving the speed of the Method of Moments technique in large body scattering problems using the sparse matrix method

The Method of Moments (MoM) when applied for scattering analysis of a large body, generates a dense matrix. In this paper, a sparse matrix is generated from the dense matrix. The thresholding elemental method is applied to obtain a sparse matrix, by assuming that the electromagnetic interaction between sufficiently far away elements is zero. This technique is applied to compute the bistatic radar cross section (RCS) of canonical shapes and a complex shaped aircraft. It is found that for a maximum inaccuracy of 2 dBm2 in RCS, the amount of sparsity generated can be in the range of 40 to 75%, and the corresponding CPU time saving will be of the order of 8 to 34% for objects of different size. It is also observed from the analysis, that with increasing electrical size of the scatterer, the sparsity and hence saving in CPU time increases.
Scheduling of heterogeneous data streams in the downlink of a dynamic OFDM-FDMA wireless cell

In this technical report the performance of a combined linkand physical layer approach [11] is studied for the downlink of a cellular OFDM-FDMA transmission system. This is done for two traffic load scenarios: In the heterogeneous scenario the simultaneous transmission of Webpages, via HTTP and TCP, and MPEG-4 coded VBR video streams, via UDP, is considered, while in the homogeneous scenario only HTTP is transmitted. For the heterogeneous case a new scheduling scheme is proposed, which provides the adaption of the bit-rates of the transmitted video streams to the estimated load of the transmission system. For the applied filter semantic information, provided by the application layer, is considered. The presented performance analysis shows that this approach accelerates the downlink of a Web-page for up to 32% on the average in addition to the gain of up to 100%, found for the linkand physical layer approach.
Unconstrained Bangla online handwriting recognition based on MLP and SVM

With the increasing popularity of pen-based digital devices, online handwriting recognition has generated potential markets in India. Hand-held devices equipped with pen-based technologies are now affordable to a large section of Indian population. However, till date little research has been done on online handwriting recognition of an Indian script. On the other hand, India is a multilingual country and Bangla is its second most popular language used by nearly 220 million people in India and Bangladesh. Unconstrained handwriting in Bangla is cursive in nature unlike other Indian scripts. Difficulties of designing a recognition system for unconstrained Bangla handwriting are mainly due to the fact that Bangla has a very large alphabet set consisting of nearly 300 shapes many of which are very complex and also there are a large number of shape similar characters. In this article, we describe preliminary results of our recent study on limited vocabulary Bangla cursive handwriting recognition based on somewhat unusual combination of multilayer perceptron (MLP) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. We simulated the proposed approach on two vocabularies of sizes 50 and 110 and the recognition performance on these two are comparable.
Good practice guidance on the use of self-help materials within IAPT services

The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided:
Segmentation of Peripheral Blood Smear Images Using Tissue-Like P Systems

Segmentation of medical images is a highly challenging process, especially when dealing with blood smear images, which have a very complex cell structure. The tissue-like P Systems, actually based on the methodology of cell and tissue behavior in a human body, are used in various areas of computation. Segmentation of medical images is one such area where these systems can be used, whereby the various objects in the images can be identified. The proposed work aims at segmenting the nuclei of the White Blood Cells (WBCs) of the peripheral blood smear images, which can help to identify various pathological conditions. In the first approach, segmentation is color based. The second approach is intensity based. In the third approach, morphology is used to strengthen the findings from the results.
Long-term storage and management of encrypted biomedical data in real scenarios

This paper emphasizes the development and application of technologies to effective guarantying the confidentiality and integrity of patient data in Grid-enabled biomedical applications. By strongly focusing on the interaction between security technologies and the human environment, this paper relates the experience of developing a model for the storage and management of encrypted medical data in the Grid. The ideas and concepts behind the proposed solution are briefly explained, as well as the components implementing the model in an OGSA compliant architecture. TRENCADIS, a project for managing DICOM structured reporting objects for use in a Valencian cyberinfrastructure for medical imaging in oncology (CVIMO), is currently adopting the architecture as a core component.
The production of functionality by the elderly: a household production function approach

This paper extends Becker's model of the household production function of human capital to the production of elderly functionality. In this model, elderly functionality is produced with the direct inputs of assistive devices, personal assistance, and nutritional intake. Education, endowment variables (like genetic endowment and sex) and health conditions (like stroke) determine the production function environment. Data from the Survey of Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest-Old (AHEAD) are used to estimate a production function of bathing functionality, using a two-stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, input demands for the endogenous functionality inputs are estimated, recognizing health heterogeneity. The results suggest that reverses in functionality caused by age and health conditions can be partially compensated for by the use of assistive devices (like grab bars and bathing equipment), secure nutritional intake, and moderate alcohol consumption. However, non-inputs like chronic health conditions, age, sex and genetic endowment exert a strong influence on the level of functionality.
Virtual Bicycle : An User Interface Tool for Navigation in Virtual Worlds

One of the most complicated tasks when working with three-dimensional virtual worlds is the navigation process. Usually, this process requires the use of buttons and key-sequences and the development of interaction metaphors which frequently makes the interaction process artificial and inefficient. In these environments, very simple tasks, like look upward and downward can became extremely complicated. To overcome these obstacles, this work presents an interaction model for three-dimensional virtual worlds, based on the interpretation of the natural gestures of a real user while he/she is walking in a real world. This model is an example of a non-WIMP(Window, Icon, Menu, Pointer) interface. To test this model we created a device named virtual-bike. With this device, the user can navigate through the virtual environment exactly as if he were riding a real bike.
Evaluating Sketchy Lines for the Visualization of Qualitative Uncertainty

We report on results of a series of user studies on the perception of visual variables that are commonly used in the literature to depict uncertainty. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the ﬁrst formal evaluation of the use of these variables to facilitate an easier reading of uncertainty in visualizations that rely on line graphical primitives. In addition to blur, dashing and grayscale, we investigate the use of 'sketchiness' as a visual variable because it conveys visual impreciseness that may be associated with data quality. Inspired by work in non-photorealistic rendering and by the features of hand-drawn lines, we generate line trajectories that resemble hand-drawn strokes of various levels of proﬁciency--ranging from child to adult strokes--where the amount of perturbations in the line corresponds to the level of uncertainty in the data. Our results show that sketchiness for the visualization of uncertainty in lines is as intuitive as blur; although people subjectively prefer dashing style over blur, grayscale and sketchiness. We discuss advantages and limitations of each technique and conclude with design considerations on how to deploy these visual variables to effectively depict various levels of uncertainty for line marks.
Machine and acoustical condition dependency analyses for fast acoustic likelihood calculation techniques

The acceleration of acoustic likelihood calculation has been an important research issue for developing practical speech recognition systems. And there are various specification machines and various acoustical conditions in the fields to which speech recognition is applied. In this paper, we reveal the machine and acoustical condition dependencies of fast acoustic likelihood calculation techniques. We employed state likelihood recycling as an approximation technique, batch state likelihood calculation as a technique based on computer architecture, and their combinations with or without acoustic backing-off that were our previously proposed efficient techniques. We evaluated and analyzed these four techniques in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition experiments by using four machines with different types of CPUs (Intel Pentium 4, Xeon, Core 2 Duo and Xeon X5570) under two acoustical conditions (clean and noisy). The combined technique with acoustic backing-off exhibited the best acceleration performance while preventing word accuracy degradation under all of the experimental conditions. The experimental and analytical results obtained in this paper are informative especially for developing speech recognition systems that are used in the fields.
Using CLP to Automatically Generate Test Sequences for Synchronous Programs with Numeric Inputs and Outputs

Lutess is a testing environment designed for synchronous software specified with Lustre, a synchronous data-flow language. It makes possible to automatically generate test input sequences in conformance with a specification of the software external behavior and of guiding directives such as operational profiles and behavioral patterns. Lutess deals with software and specifications involving only Boolean inputs and outputs. In this paper we propose an extension of Lutess, using constraint logic programming (CLP), making possible to deal with numeric inputs and outputs. In particular, we define an appropriate execution model for test input generation and show how test data generation according to the main guiding facilities of Lutess can still be performed. Furthermore, operational profile based generation becomes more powerful thanks to the introduction of CLP solvers capabilities which make possible to associate occurrence probabilities to any Boolean expression
Incentive Magnitude, Job Satisfaction, Perceived Stress, and Performance: Interrelationships in an Organizational Simulation

Abstract : The level of productivity growth in the United States required to maintain our standard of living, provide for the national defense, and reduce the federal deficit can be realized only through increased efforts by organizations to improve their efficiency. At the individual level, attempts to improve productivity have generally included efforts to improve employee performance. This desired increase in productivity can, however, yield unintended outcomes. A s result, paralleling this increased productivity emphasis has been an increased interest in the mix of positive and negative effects of work and the work environment on the individual employee. Two areas of particular interest to researchers in recent years have been job satisfaction and job stress. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationships among monetary incentives, performance, job satisfaction, and perceived stress. The potential of monetary incentives to increase performance, together with their use in a broad spectrum of industries, has made incentives an important factor in the study of job satisfaction and stress. The current interest in productivity improvement makes the study of incentives doubly important.
Visualization in Classification Prob- Lems

In the simplest form support vector machines (SVM) define a separating hyperplane between classes generated from a subset of cases, called support vectors. The support vectors “mark” the boundary between two classes. The result is an interpretable classifier, where the importance of the variables to the classification, is identified by the coefficients of the variables defining the hyperplane. This paper describes visual methods that can be used with classifiers to understand cluster structure in data.
Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for Secure OFDMA Systems

In this paper, resource allocation for energy-efficient secure communication in an orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) downlink network is studied. The considered problem is modeled as a nonconvex optimization problem that takes into account the sum-rate-dependent circuit power consumption, multiple-antenna eavesdropper, artificial noise generation, and different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, including a minimum required secrecy sum rate and a maximum tolerable secrecy outage probability. The power, secrecy data rate, and subcarrier allocation policies are optimized for maximization of the energy efficiency of secure data transmission (bit/joule securely delivered to the users). The considered nonconvex optimization problem is transformed into a convex optimization problem by exploiting the properties of fractional programming, which results in an efficient iterative resource allocation algorithm. In each iteration, the transformed problem is solved by using dual decomposition. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed iterative resource allocation algorithm not only converges in a small number of iterations but maximizes the system energy efficiency and guarantees a nonzero secrecy data rate for the desired users as well. In addition, the obtained results unveil a tradeoff between energy efficiency and secure communication.
Eliciting positive student motivation for learning mathematics

Responding to an instrument we developed to give insights into students’ orientation to, and motivation for, learning mathematics, Year 8 students showed more confidence in their ability to learn mathematics and in their persistence than observations of their classes would indicate is warranted. They identified a negative influence of peers for some classmates but less for themselves, and had modest career aspirations. We believe teachers can assist students by becoming aware of their orientations to learning, their perceptions of the value of schooling, and their further vocational aspirations, and by finding ways to overcome factors inhibiting their engagement in school.
Abdominal electrodes analysis by statistical processing for fetal eletrocardiogram extraction

Obstetricians were asking the engineering support to study more extensively any technical possibility to electronically get some useful information from the whole PQRST complex of the fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) in order to identify eventual sign of fetal distress (FD). The latter should indeed be found as a more reliable information for the clinician with the potential benefit of increasing the sensibility as well as the specificity of the diagnosis of FD. A way to achieve this goal is Blind Source Separation. In this case, the extraction of an estimation of the fetal PQRST complex can be solved using Independent Component Analysis on signals recorded through electrodes located on the pregnant woman abdomen. Today, neither theoretical nor simulation considerations were investigated to determine an optimal number and location of these electrodes, despite possible important consequences on the extraction performances. We propose here a method to identify the location of electrodes (depending of the position of the fetus) that drive electrical components due to the fetus by analyzing the (joint and marginal) density functions of the recorded signals. This result allows to evaluate the ‘interesting’ sensors, therefore allowing electrode selection when many sensors are involved in the measure. We show several simulation results on artificial signals.
Realization of circularly polarized microstrip antenna using fractal

A proximity feed square fractal slot circularly polarized microstrip antenna is proposed in this paper. The realization of circular polarization is achieved by the asymmetrical feeding and fractal geometry. Due to self-similar and space filling property of the fractal, miniaturization of radiating patch is achieved. The proposed antenna has a 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth of 60 MHz and 10 dB return loss of 156 MHz. The maximum gain of 6.8 dB with radiation efficiency of 82% obtained in simulation results.
Fuzzy Sentiment Membership Determining for Sentiment Classification

Traditional support vector machine treats all samples using the same weight. Therefore it is very sensitive to noisy data. While the fuzzy support vector machine assigns lower weights to the samples which make small contributions to classification, thus it is beneficial to reduce the effects of noisy and unimportant data on the classification accuracy rate. In this paper, we propose a novel fuzzy sentiment membership determining method for solving sentiment classification task. We assume that strong intensity texts make more contributions to sentiment classification, while weak intensity texts are unimportant for the classification. In order to get the fuzzy sentiment membership of review texts, this paper proposes a three-layer sentiment propagation model. Firstly, we calculate the sentiment score of texts by the interrelations of the texts, topics and words, and ensure that the absolute value of sentiment score as the fuzzy sentiment membership degree of texts. Then, we train a fuzzy support vector machine to classify the samples from the test data sets. Finally, we conduct some experiments on four English reviews data sets from Amazon shopping websites. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of sentiment classification effectively.
High-performance W-band SiGe RFICs for passive millimeter-wave imaging

A W-band square-law detector was implemented in a commercial SiGe 0. 12µm BiCMOS process (IBM8HP, f<inf>t</inf> = 200 GHz) and was integrated with a SiGe LNA and SPDT switch. The combined LNA+Detector is 0.26 mm<sup>2</sup>, achieves a peak responsivity of µ4 MV/W at 94 GHz with a minimum NEP ≪ 0.02 pW/Hz<sup>1/2</sup>, and consumes 29 mA from a 1.2 V supply. A low-loss W-band SPDT is also integrated on some designs for an internal 50 ∼ reference. The chip can achieve a temperature resolution of 0.3–0.4 K with a 30 ms integration time and ∼ 20 GHz bandwidth. This represents, to our knowledge, the first W-band SiGe passive mm-wave imaging chip with state-of-the-art temperature sensitivity.
Hypergraph Construction and Its Application to the Compositional Modelling of Concurrency (Extended version)

We define a construction operation on hypergraphs using a colimit and show that its expressiveness concerning graph rewriting is equal to the graph expressions of Courcelle and the double-pushout approach of Ehrig. With an inductive way of representing graphs, graph rewriting arises naturally as a derived concept. The usefulness of our approach for the compositional modelling of concurrent systems is then shown by defining the semantics of a process calculus with mobility and of Petri nets.
3D matrix-based cell cultures: Automated analysis of tumor cell survival and proliferation

Three-dimensional ex vivo cell cultures mimic physiological in vivo growth conditions thereby significantly contributing to our understanding of tumor cell growth and survival, therapy resistance and identification of novel potent cancer targets. In the present study, we describe advanced three-dimensional cell culture methodology for investigating cellular survival and proliferation in human carcinoma cells after cancer therapy including molecular therapeutics. Single cells are embedded into laminin-rich extracellular matrix and can be treated with cytotoxic drugs, ionizing or UV radiation or any other substance of interest when consolidated and approximating in vivo morphology. Subsequently, cells are allowed to grow for automated determination of clonogenic survival (colony number) or proliferation (colony size). The entire protocol of 3D cell plating takes ~1 h working time and pursues for ~7 days before evaluation. This newly developed method broadens the spectrum of exploration of malignant tumors and other diseases and enables the obtainment of more reliable data on cancer treatment efficacy.
Financial Intermediaries and Economic Development: Evidence on Transaction Costs of Borrowing by the Poor

This study, while validating the increasing role for financial intermediaries in economic development, analyzes the importance of reducing the transaction costs for financial deepening and, consequently, economic growth.It shows that higher borrowing transaction costs for the poor in particular will retard the long-term growth of rural financial markets.Further, the empirical analysis based on our primary (survey) data indicates that the microfinance models of lending offer considerably lower costs of borrowing than those in regular models of direct lending by banks.The study suggests that microfinance model of lending can provide cost-efficient avenue for speedy financial development and, subsequently, economic growth.