Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Load Aware Channel-Width Assignments in Wireless LANs

Measurements studies show that there exist large spatial and temporal fluctuations in the traffic load handled by different access points in Wireless LANs. In order to alleviate this problem, researchers have proposed various load-balancing techniques based for instance on channel assignment, power control, or client allocation. Fundamentally, however, assigning each AP the same amount of bandwidth (one channel) can inevitably lead to inefficient usage of the spectrum. In this work, we address the problem by adaptively tuning a radio parameter that has so far been largely untouched in Wireless LAN networks: the channel-width. Particularly, we show that a significant improvement in network capacity and per-client fairness can be achieved if the channel-widths at different APs are made a function of the traffic load. We propose the use of dynamic-width channels, where every AP adjusts its center-frequency and channel width to match its current traffic load. Our techniques are made possible by recent advances in radio hardware design and do not require changes in current hardware. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme through analysis and simulations using real-world scenarios.
The Cambridge Companion to Spenser

Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Chronology Introduction: The relevance of Edmund Spenser A. Hadfield 1. Spenser's life and career R. Rambuss 2. Historical contexts: Britain and Europe D. J. Baker 3. Ireland: policy, poetics and parody R. McCabe 4. Spenser's pastorals: The Shepardes Calender and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe P. Cheney 5. The Faerie Queene, I-III S. L. Wofford 6. The Faerie Queene, IV-VII A. Hadfield 7. Spenser's shorter poems A. L. Prescott 8. Spenser's languages: writing in the ruins of English W. Maley 9. Sexual politics L. Gregerson 10. Spenser's religion J. King 11. Spenser and classical traditions C. Borrow 12. Spenser and contemporary vernacular poetry R. Greene 13. Spenser's influence P. Alpers Index.
Distribution Dynamics of Recombinant Lactobacillus in the Gastrointestinal Tract of Neonatal Rats

One approach to deliver therapeutic agents, especially proteins, to the gastro-intestinal (GI) tract is to use commensal bacteria as a carrier. Genus Lactobacillus is an attractive candidate for use in this approach. However, a system for expressing exogenous proteins at a high level has been lacking in Lactobacillus. Moreover, it will be necessary to introduce the recombinant Lactobacillus into the GI tract, ideally by oral administration. Whether orally administered Lactobacillus can reach and reside in the GI tract has not been explored in neonates. In this study, we have examined these issues in neonatal rats. To achieve a high level of protein expression in Lactobacillus, we tested the impact of three promoters and two backbones on protein expression levels using mRFP1, a red fluorescent protein, as a reporter. We found that a combination of an L-lactate dehydrogenase (ldhL) promoter of Lactobacillus sakei with a backbone from pLEM415 yielded the highest level of reporter expression. When this construct was used to transform Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus delbrueckii and Lactobacillus acidophilus, high levels of mRFP1 were detected in all these species and colonies of transformed Lactobacillus appeared pink under visible light. To test whether orally administered Lactobacillus can be retained in the GI tract of neonates, we fed the recombinant Lactobacillus casei to neonatal rats. We found that about 3% of the bacteria were retained in the GI tract of the rats at 24 h after oral feeding with more recombinant Lactobacillus in the stomach and small intestine than in the cecum and colon. No mortality was observed throughout this study with Lactobacillus. In contrast, all neonatal rats died within 24 hours after fed with transformed E. coli. Taken together, our results indicate that Lactobacillus has the potential to be used as a vehicle for the delivery of therapeutic agents to neonates.
Autonomous Self-Localization of Mobile Robots through Reference Point Based Computer Vision

This paper demonstrates a method for global localization of autonomous mobile robots based on the creation of visual memory maps, through detection and description of reference points from captured images, associated to odometer data in a specific environment. The proposed procedure, coupled with specific knowledge of the environment, allows for localization to be achieved through the pairing of these memorized features with the scene being observed in real time. Experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method for the localization of mobile robots in indoor environments. The results are analyzed and navigation alternatives and possible future refinements are discussed.
Vehicle's Orientation Measurement Method by Single-Camera Image Using Known-Shaped Planar Object

This paper describes the development of a vehicle's orientation measurement system using a single camera. We applied a single camera calibration method using a planar pattern to measure the orientation from the camera to a planar object. With this technique, the orientation from camera to planar object can be obtained when using feature coordinates of more than 4 points on a planar object image. We thus proposed a method for measuring a vehicle's orientation. The license plate, which is of a standard size, is used as the planar object. Its corner points are tracked by an active contour tracking method. The effectiveness of our proposed method has been verified through experiments using real vehicle images.
Hourly pedestrian population trends estimation using location data from smartphones dealing with temporal and spatial sparsity

This paper describes a pedestrian population trend estimation method using location data of smartphone users. This technique is intended to be an alternative to traffic censuses using tally counters. Traffic censuses using tally counters are still commonly used to survey the number of pedestrians despite their cost and limitations in area and time. The proposed approach can replace the traffic census by using smartphone users' location data accumulated on Yahoo! Japan. Moreover, it is low cost because it uses location data collaterally acquired from smartphone users, and it has no limits in terms of area or time. This means pedestrian population trends in arbitrary and times about which we want to know can be estimated. The proposed technique is based on the assumption that the number of location data in an area is proportional to the population volume, but it also eliminates some data to increase pedestrian accuracy. In the elimination step, some location data that should not be counted as pedestrians are excluded by estimating transport modes from anteroposterior location data. The supplement step tackles the problem of data shortage when a target area is a small region by using a Gaussian kernel. The Gaussian kernel smoother is also used to deal with data interpolation in the time direction, and it enables us to estimate time-continuous pedestrian volumes in arbitrary areas. To evaluate the approach, a manual traffic survey was conducted in five areas on 11 days and the ground truth data are acquired. Experimental result shows the approach successfully estimate pedestrian population trends in areas. The proposed method makes less than one-tenth the mean squared errors of hourly pedestrian number estimation than the conventional approach.
No Project Exists In A Vacuum: Organizational Effects In Enterprise Information System Development

Abstract : Information technology (IT) projects have a well-documented potential for complexity, difficulty, and failure. Typical explanations focus on project-related issues, but in some cases success or failure depends less on the project and more on the dynamic interaction of organizational factors at the portfolio level. This thesis focuses on the interplay of explicit and implicit organizational factors in complex organizations, and their effect on the outcome of IT projects. Through implicit organizational factors, a poorly executed, unhealthy project may infect healthy projects, similar to the spread of a contagion. This thesis utilizes a study of the United States Coast Guard WatchKeeper and Mission and Asset Scheduling Interface systems development as an example of the contagion effect. Analysis revealed three classes of implicit organizational factors that impacted project outcomes: capacity, control, and funding priorities. From an organizational perspective, implicit factors were found to play a much more significant role in affecting the outcome of projects than explicit factors. This is important because managers at various levels of hierarchy tend to focus only on explicit factors, often ignoring implicit factors. Several recommendations for improving project and portfolio management are presented based on this finding.
Development of Quinoxaline 1, 4-Dioxides Resistance in Escherichia coli and Molecular Change under Resistance Selection

Quinoxaline 1, 4-dioxides (QdNOs) has been used in animals as antimicrobial agents and growth promoters for decades. However, the resistance to QdNOs in pathogenic bacteria raises worldwide concern but it is barely known. To explore the molecular mechanism involved in development of QdNOs resistance in Escherichia coli, 6 strains selected by QdNOs in vitro and 21 strains isolated from QdNOs-used swine farm were subjected to MIC determination and PCR amplification of oqxA gene. A conjugative transfer was carried out to evaluate the transfer risk of QdNOs resistant determinant. Furthermore, the transcriptional profile of a QdNOs-resistant E. coli (79O4-2) selected in vitro with its parent strain 79–161 was assayed with a prokaryotic suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) PCR cDNA subtraction. The result showed that more than 95% (20/21) clinical isolates were oqxA positive, while all the 6 induced QdNOs-resistant strains carried no oqxA gene and exhibited low frequency of conjugation. 44 fragments were identified by SSH PCR subtraction in the QdNOs-resistant strain 79O4-2. 18 cDNAs were involved in biosynthesis of Fe-S cluster (narH), protein (rpoA, trmD, truA, glyS, ileS, rplFCX, rpsH, fusA), lipoate (lipA), lipid A (lpxC), trehalose (otsA), CTP(pyrG) and others molecular. The 11 cDNAs were related to metabolism or degradation of glycolysis (gpmA and pgi) and proteins (clpX, clpA, pepN and fkpB). The atpADG and ubiB genes were associated with ATP biosynthesis and electron transport chain. The pathway of the functional genes revealed that E. coli may adapt the stress generated by QdNOs or develop specific QdNOs-resistance by activation of antioxidative agents biosynthesis (lipoate and trehalose), protein biosynthesis, glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation. This study initially reveals the possible molecular mechanism involved in the development of QdNOs-resistance in E. coli, providing with novel insights in prediction and assessment of the emergency and horizontal transfer of QdNOs-resistance in E. coli.
Social Capabilities for Autonomous Virtual Characters

In this paper we describe our work toward the creation of affective multimodal virtual characters endowed with communicative and other socially significant capabilities. While much work in modern game AI has focused on issues such as path-finding and squad-level AI, more highly-detailed behaviour for small groups of interacting game characters has been lacking in the literature. We apply our extensive background knowledge from the domain of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA’s) to the task of creating autonomous humanoid game characters capable of displaying believable and expressive social behaviours. We believe that in order to reach our aim, we ought to endow the agents with humanlike capabilities. The agents should be able to sense the virtual world and recognise the intentions of the other agents, to engage in and maintain a conversation, to have the ability to be engaged, to communicate verbally and non-verbally and to display expressive behaviours. In this paper we describe our methodology and
Multistage Cutting Stock Problems of Two and More Dimensions

In earlier papers [Opns. Res. 9, 849-859 1961, and 11, 863-888 1963] the one-dimensional cutting stock problem was discussed as a linear programming problem. There it was shown how the difficulty of the enormous number of columns occurring in the linear programming formulation could be overcome by solving a knapsack problem at every pivot step. In this paper higher dimensional cutting stock problems are discussed as linear programming problems. The corresponding difficulty of the number of columns cannot in general be overcome for there is no efficient method for solving the generalized knapsack problem of the higher dimensional problem. However a wide class of cutting stock problems of industry have restrictions that permit their generalized knapsack problem to be efficiently solved. All of the cutting stock problems that yield to this treatment are ones in which the cutting is done in stages. In treating these practical cutting problems, one often encounters additional conditions that affect the solution. An example of this occurs in the cutting of corrugated boxes, which involves an auxiliary sequencing problem. This problem is discussed in some detail, and a solution described for the sequencing problem under given simplifying assumptions.
Feasibility of Bootstrapping an Arabic WordNet Leveraging Parallel Corpora and an English WordNet

In this paper, we propose the automatic bootstrapping of a Modern Standard Arabic WordNet on the lexeme level using Arabic English parallel corpora and an English WordNet. We address the feasibility of such an endeavor and present a qualitative evaluation of the meaning correspondences cross linguistically between Arabic and English. We further present an automatic means of performing this task using an unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation System. We test the feasibility of the bootstrapping by qualitatively evaluating the meaning definition projection of English words onto their Arabic translations. We manually evaluate 447 word instances of the Arabic words that correspond to correctly sense tagged English words using English WordNet 1.7. from the SENSEVAL 3 data. The words evaluated correspond to Nouns, verbs, adjectives in English. We find that for Arabic verbs, adjectives and nouns, on average 52.3% of all the words examined, the corresponding English WordNet set of definitions are sufficient as definitions for the Arabic translation word; 39.96% of the Arabic words correspond to specific subsets of the WordNet definitions; and finally, 7.8% of the Arabic words comprise supersets of their corresponding English WordNet translation definitions. These results are very encouraging as they are similar to those obtained by researchers building EuroWordNet.
The Role of +4U as an Extended Translation Termination Signal in Bacteria

Termination efficiency of stop codons depends on the first 3′ flanking (+4) base in bacteria and eukaryotes. In both Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, termination read-through is reduced in the presence of +4U; however, the molecular mechanism underlying +4U function is poorly understood. Here, we perform comparative genomics analysis on 25 bacterial species (covering Actinobacteria, Bacteriodetes, Cyanobacteria, Deinococcus-Thermus, Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, and Spirochaetae) with bioinformatics approaches to examine the influence of +4U in bacterial translation termination by contrasting highly- and lowly-expressed genes (HEGs and LEGs, respectively). We estimated gene expression using the recently formulated Index of Translation Elongation, ITE, and identified stop codon near-cognate transfer RNAs (tRNAs) from well-annotated genomes. We show that +4U was consistently overrepresented in UAA-ending HEGs relative to LEGs. The result is consistent with the interpretation that +4U enhances termination mainly for UAA. Usage of +4U decreases in GC-rich species where most stop codons are UGA and UAG, with few UAA-ending genes, which is expected if UAA usage in HEGs drives up +4U usage. In HEGs, +4U usage increases significantly with abundance of UAA nc_tRNAs (near-cognate tRNAs that decode codons differing from UAA by a single nucleotide), particularly those with a mismatch at the first stop codon site. UAA is always the preferred stop codon in HEGs, and our results suggest that UAAU is the most efficient translation termination signal in bacteria.
A quarterly macroeconometric model of the Spanish economy

This paper presents a new version of the Spanish quarterly macroeconometric model. The previous version [see Willman and Estrada (2002)] evidenced a number of shortcomings, some of which are redressed here. In particular, the model now uses seasonally and working days adjusted time series; it considers a breakdown by sector (government and private sectors), by external trade (euro area and rest of the world) and by investment (residential and productive); and finally, it includes wealth evaluated at market prices. While the long run properties of the old model have not changed substantially, in the short run different simulation exercises show that the new model provides stronger responses in the first two years and a prompter and faster return to the baseline values.
Analysis on DTO and DFO estimation accuracy of radar signal for location by dual satellites

Radar emitter's position can be estimated by dual satellites location system utilizing DTO (differential time offset) and DFO (differential frequency offset). Signal model received by dual satellites is given and the influence to signal accumulation by relative motion is analyzed in this paper. Then the upper limit of accumulated pulses' number is given. The Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLB) of DTO and DFO estimation of radar pulse signal are derived based on the CRLB of continuous signal. By Mount-Carlo simulations, the conclusions drawn in this paper are proved. The results can provide a theoretical basis for selection of accumulation duration and analysis of parameter estimation accuracy.
An Introduction to HyperDex and the Brave New World of High Performance, Scalable, Consistent, Fault-tolerant Data Stores

A new generation of data storage systems is now emerging to support high-performance, large-scale Web services whose demands are ill-met by traditional RDBMSes. Dubbed the NoSQL movement, this trend has produced systems characterized by data stores that provide weak consistency guarantees and limit the system interface. We argue that these systems have too aggressively capitulated, that much stronger consistency, availability, and fault-tolerance properties are possible, and, further, that it is possible to provide these properties while offering a rich API, although not as rich as full-blown SQL. We report on a recent system called HyperDex, describe the new techniques it uses to combine strong consistency and fault-tolerance guarantees with high-performance, and go through a scenario to see how the system can be used by real applications. During the golden age of databases, when the canonical database users were banks and other financial institutions, providing strong guarantees of atomicity, consistency , isolation, and durability (ACID) were of paramount concern. More recently, however, the focus of data storage innovation has shifted away from supporting financial transactions to enabling Web services, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon . com, that need to respond to queries efficiently, scale up to vast numbers of users, and tolerate the server failures that are inescapable at Web scale. The flagship for this shift away from traditional RDBMS concerns towards properties that are better suited for Web services is a movement called NoSQL. This movement represents a constellation of new data storage systems that forego the traditional ACID guarantees of RDBMSs, along with their SQL interface, for improvements along the dimensions that matter to scalable Web applications. Although the NoSQL name suggests that the removal of SQL is the driving force behind the movement, it is really just the focal point for an overhaul of the storage system interface. For example, rather than having rigid schemas and support for complex search queries, most NoSQL systems have relaxed schemas and favor key-based operations whose implementation can be made scalable and efficient. Yet the NoSQL movement has, in many ways, tossed the baby out with the bath-water. Most NoSQL systems subscribe to an alternative to ACID called the BASE approach, whose fundamental pillars are Basically Available service, Soft-State, and Eventually Consistent data. It is true that achieving Web scale will require hard tradeoffs between conflicting desires; yet the BASE approach represents a capitulation across all fronts. It provides no fault-tolerance guarantee …
Achieving Context Awareness and Intelligence in Distributed Cognitive Radio Networks: A Payoff Propagation Approach

Cognitive Radio (CR) is a next-generation wireless communication system that exploits underutilized licensed spectrum to optimize the utilization of the overall radio spectrum. A Distributed Cognitive Radio Network (DCRN) is a distributed wireless network established by a number of CR hosts in the absence of fixed network infrastructure. Context awareness and intelligence are key characteristics of CR networks that enable the CR hosts to be aware of their operating environment in order to make an optimal joint action. This research aims to achieve context awareness and intelligence in DCRN using our novel Locally-Confined Payoff Propagation (LCPP), which is an important feature in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). The LCPP mechanism is suitable to be applied in most applications in DCRN that require context awareness and intelligence such as scheduling, congestion control, as well as Dynamic Channel Selection (DCS), which is the focus of this paper. Simulation results show that the LCPP mechanism is a promising approach. The LCPP mechanism converges to an optimal joint action including networks with cyclic topology. Fast convergence is possible. The investigation in this paper serve as an important foundation for future work in this research field.
Optimizing camera placement for localization accuracy

This paper presents the optimization of a camera placement for improved localization accuracy. It is the basis of a localization system aiming for high localization accuracy. This goal is achieved using several cameras with very redundant field-of-views. The paper presents the calculation of the localization accuracy - which depends on the camera model and the pixel quantizing error - at one specific point. A method is introduced for handling areas in a probabilistic sense instead of examining only one point. The accuracy can be improved by adding a new camera to the system. The calculation of the optimal position of the new camera at compliance to some restrictions is demonstrated. The Smart Mobile Eyes for Localization (SMEyeL) project is open-source: the source code, all measurement input data and documentation are public available.
Opportunistic splitting algorithm for underlay cognitive radio networks

Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) is one of the essential enabling techniques for Cognitive Radio (CR) technology. In this paper, the Opportunistic Splitting Algorithm (OSA), previously proposed for conventional systems, is exploited to allocate the resources in a CR system. The CR system is allowed to underlay the sub-carriers of an OFDM-based primary system. Several modifications are proposed to the OSA to suit a CR system without losing the main advantages of the OSA. The proposed CR-OSA can allocate resources without the need of a centralized controller and the decision is taken on the average in less than 2.5 mini-slots regardless of the number of users in the CR system. These results are shown analytically and using simulations. Different scenarios based on the nature of the rate needed by the CR system are also compared.