Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic and Personalized Routing in PreGo

Existing routing services calculate the best route from source to destination over a road network graph. Most commercial routing services offer the best route in terms of either the shortest travel distance or the shortest travel time (with or without considering current traffic conditions). While travel distance and travel time are crucial route preferences for the commuter, other preferences are equally, or even more, important. Examples of other route preferences include fuel consumption, gas emissions, road safety, points of interest along the route, construction activities, open shops and restaurants. While some route preferences are static (e.g., travel distance and points of interests), other route preferences are dynamic and vary according to the time of the day (e.g., traffic-dependent travel time and the number of open shops/restaurants). Volunteered Geographic information (VGI) has been proposed as an approach to collect massive amounts of route information and, more specifically, the time varying parameters. This demo presents PreGo, a time-dependent multi-preference routing engine. During the demo, audience would interact with the PreGo routing engine to (1) find the optimal route w.r. t. The user's personal preferences for a given start time, (2) dynamically obtain the best start time for a trip given a set of preferences, (3) feed the system with VGI and examine their effect on the chosen route at real time, and (4) examine the correctness and efficiency of the PreGo selected routes compared to routes chosen by other commercial systems.
Application of Dimensionality Reduction in Recommender System - A Case Study

Abstract : We investigate the use of dimensionality reduction to improve performance for a new class of data analysis software called "recommender systems" Recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to the problem of making product recommendations during a live customer interaction. These systems are achieving widespread success in E-commerce nowadays, especially with the advent of the Internet. The tremendous growth of customers and products poses three key challenges for recommender systems in the E-commerce domain. These are: producing high quality recommendations, performing many recommendations per second for millions of customers and products, and achieving high coverage in the face of data sparsity. One successful recommender system technology is collaborative filtering, which works by matching customer preferences to other customers in making recommendations. Collaborative filtering has been shown to produce high quality recommendations, but the performance degrades with the number of customers and products. New recommender system technologies are needed that can quickly produce high quality recommendations, even for very largescale problems. This paper presents two different experiments where we have explored one technology called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to reduce the dimensionality of recommender system databases. Each experiment compares the quality of a recommender system using SVD with the quality of a recommender system using collaborative filtering. The first experiment compares the effectiveness of the two recommender systems at predicting consumer preferences based on a database of explicit ratings of products. The second experiment compares the effectiveness of the two recommender systems at producing Top-N lists based on a real-life customer purchase database from an E-Commerce site. Our experience suggests that SVD has the potential to meet many of the challenges of recommender systems, under certain conditions.
Differentiating hope from optimism by examining self-reported appraisals and linguistic content

ABSTRACT Even though hope and optimism are both positive states about desired future events, we hypothesized that their appraisals differ. Specifically, we hypothesized that hope would be associated with greater appraisals of uncertainty, importance, effortful action, morality, unpleasantness, and fear than optimism. Based on action identification theory, we also hypothesized that hope would encourage using more concrete language than optimism. In three experiments, respondents wrote about possible future events that instilled feelings of either hope or optimism. We assessed appraisals via respondents’ self-reports and by coding events for appraisal-relevant language. An internal meta-analysis of three experiments revealed that, compared to optimism, hope involved more uncertainty, importance, effortful action (self-reports only), unpleasantness, fear, and concrete language, but not more morality. These data suggest that even though hope arises when the distal future seems more uncertain and unpleasant, hope might help people obtain their goals by signaling importance, effort, and promoting concrete thinking.
Psychosomatic Symptoms as Physical Dreams: Emotional Experiences Given Expression through the Body

Abstract This article offers a view of psychosomatic symptoms as experiential phenomena that function as “physical dreams. ” The author suggests a way of perceiving psychosomatic symptoms either as "undreamt" dreams or as "interrupted" dreams, reflecting the various ways in which patients are able to utilize their symptoms in undertaking unconscious psychological work. For this work to be carried out, patients, as well as their analysts, need to have some ability to engage in intersubjective “dream-work” with the patient’s symptomatology. In the tradition of Bion's conception of the dual function of the contact-barrier, I propose viewing psychosomatic symptoms as constructions by which aspects of the psyche-soma are rendered conscious or unconscious in the service of psychological work. With the analyst's aid, the analysand may restart his or her interrupted “physical” dreaming and/or (re)form an “undreamt” dream, transferring and transforming “physical” into “psychical” material and verse versa.
Finding needles in noisy haystacks

The theory of compressed sensing shows that samples in the form of random projections are optimal for recovering sparse signals in high-dimensional spaces (i.e., finding needles in haystacks), provided the measurements are noiseless. However, noise is almost always present in applications, and compressed sensing suffers from it. The signal to noise ratio per dimension using random projections is very poor, since sensing energy is equally distributed over all dimensions. Consequently, the ability of compressed sensing to locate sparse components degrades significantly as noise increases. It is possible, in principle, to improve performance by "shaping" the projections to focus sensing energy in proper dimensions. The main question addressed here is, can projections be adaptively shaped to achieve this focusing effect? The answer is yes, and we demonstrate a simple, computationally efficient procedure that does so.
Hierarchical Modulation - the transmission of two independent DVB-T multiplexes on a single frequency

Hierarchical modulation  a variant of the digital terrestrial television standard, DVB-T  has received relatively little attention to date in the planning processes. It enables the transmission of two independent DVB-T multiplexes on a single TV frequency channel, with different transmission qualities (high priority and low priority). The high-priority multiplex can be used, in particular, for portable indoor and mobile reception.
Intravenous Versus Combined (Intravenous and Intra-Arterial) Thrombolysis in Acute Ischemic Stroke: A Transcranial Color-Coded Duplex Sonography–Guided Pilot Study

Background and Purpose— Determine feasibility and safety of intravenous (IV) versus combined (IV-IA [intra-arterial]) thrombolysis guided by transcranial color-coded duplex sonography (TCCD). Methods— Thirty-three patients eligible for IV thrombolysis, within 3 hours of onset of symptoms, with occlusion in middle cerebral artery territory (TCCD monitoring, thrombolysis in brain ischemia [TIBI] flow grade [0–3]), underwent IV thrombolysis (tissue plasminogen activator, 0.9 mg/kg). In case of recanalization (modification of TIBI score ≥1) after 30 minutes IV thrombolysis was continued over 1 hour; otherwise, it was discontinued, with subsequent IA thrombolysis. Recanalization was determined by TIBI (TCCD) and angiographically by thrombolysis in myocardial infarction (TIMI) flow grades. Clinical outcome measures were assessed at baseline, 24 hours (NIHSS) and 3 months (modified Rankin Scale). Results— In the IV group, 10/17 patients (59%) with complete or partial recanalization after 30 minutes had a favorable outcome at 3 months (modified Rankin Scale 0 to 2). TIBI flow grades 3 to 5 after 30 minutes of IV thrombolysis predicted a good prognosis compared with TIBI grades 1 to 2 (P<0.05). In the combined IV/IA therapy group (no recanalization after 30 minutes), 9/16 patients (56%) had a favorable outcome at 3 months. One symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage occurred in each group. Conclusions— Combined IV-IA versus IV thrombolysis guided by TCCD was feasible and safe. Recanalization after 30 minutes of IV thrombolysis led to a favorable outcome in 59% of the patients, provided TIBI flow grades were of 3 to 5. In the absence of early recanalization during IV thrombolysis, there was clinical benefit to proceed to IA therapy for a significative proportion of patients (56%).
A RIGOROUS TREATMENT OF THE PERTURBATION THEORY FOR MANY-ELECTRON SYSTEMS

Four point correlation functions for many electrons at finite temperature in periodic lattice of dimension d (≥1) are analyzed by the perturbation theory with respect to the coupling constant. The correlation functions are characterized as a limit of finite dimensional Grassmann integrals. A lower bound on the radius of convergence and an upper bound on the perturbation series are obtained by evaluating the Taylor expansion of logarithm of the finite dimensional Grassmann Gaussian integrals. The perturbation series up to second-order is numerically implemented along with the volume-independent upper bounds on the sum of the higher order terms in the 2-dimensional case.
B-Raf inhibitor vemurafenib in combination with temozolomide and fotemustine in the killing response of malignant melanoma cells

In the treatment of metastatic melanoma, a highly therapy-refractory cancer, alkylating agents are used and, for the subgroup of BRAFV600E cancers, the B-Raf inhibitor vemurafenib. Although vemurafenib is initially beneficial, development of drug resistance occurs leading to tumor relapse, which necessitates the requirement for combined or sequential therapy with other drugs, including genotoxic alkylating agents. This leads to the question whether vemurafenib and alkylating agents act synergistically and whether chronic vemurafenib treatment alters the melanoma cell response to alkylating agents. Here we show that a) BRAFV600E melanoma cells are killed by vemurafenib, driving apoptosis, b) BRAFV600E melanoma cells are neither more resistant nor sensitive to temozolomide/fotemustine than non-mutant cells, c) combined treatment with vemurafenib plus temozolomide or fotemustine has an additive effect on cell kill, d) acquired vemurafenib resistance of BRAFV600E melanoma cells does not affect MGMT, MSH2, MSH6, PMS2 and MLH1, nor does it affect the resistance to temozolomide and fotemustine, e) metastatic melanoma biopsies obtained from patients prior to and after vemurafenib treatment did not show a change in the MGMT promoter methylation status and MGMT expression level. The data suggest that consecutive treatment with vemurafenib and alkylating drugs is a reasonable strategy for metastatic melanoma treatment.
An approach for model reconstruction based on multi-view scans registration

In this paper, a novel approach to achieve model reconstruction based on global features is proposed on the ground of our research on multi-view scans registration. The algorithm combines the rigid registration and non-rigid registration. Principle component analysis (PCA) is adopted to achieve the rough pair-wise registration. Then, we do some research on the features selection and feature correspondence and propose an improved method to achieve fine pair-wise registration based on Iterative Closest Points (ICP). Finally, an effective global features non-rigid registration is proposed based on thin-plate splines (TPS), which overcomes both the accumulation errors generated in the process of pair-wise registration and errors induced by laser devices. The feasibility and usability of the algorithm are confirmed through related experiments.
Fast Linear Solvers for Laplacian Systems UCSD Research Exam

Solving a system of linear equations is a fundamental problem that has deep implications in the computational sciences, engineering, and applied mathematics. The problem has a long history and, until recently, has not broken polynomial time bounds. In this report we present a survey of the algorithms that solve symmetric diagonally dominant linear systems in near-linear time. We also discuss a new linear solver which uses random walk approximations to achieve sublinear time, assuming a random walk step takes unit time. The recent success of these algorithms has inspired their advocacy as a new class of algorithmic primitives. We discuss the progress being made to this end and present a few ways these fast linear solvers may be applied to various graph problems.
TAX CAPACITY DISPARITIES AND FISCAL EQUALIZATION: THE CASE OF SPANISH LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

In the absence of an equalization grant system, like we justify occurs in Spain at the local level of government, those governments that bear a decrease in their level of tax capacity will have to adjust their budget either by increasing their level of tax effort, by reducing their level of public services and/or by incurring in a deficit. By means of a dynamic panel data analysis, and using a database from municipalities of the province of Barcelona (1993-99), we describe that process of fiscal adjustment. About a 25% of the shock is internalized through an increase in tax effort, a 35% through a reduction in public expenditure (mainly investment), while the rest (40%) is covered by an increase in the level of debt (i.e., the adjustment is delayed). However, this process of fiscal adjustment is very much influenced by the political situation of the municipality. Coalition and minority governments (“weak” governments) tend to delay the (unavoidable) fiscal adjustment, and a 70% of their shock is covered by an increase in the level of debt, while the rest of municipalities (“strong” governments) adjust immediately (80% reduction in public expenditure and 20% increase in tax effort). Leftist governments tend to react mostly through increases in tax effort, while rightist governments tend to reduce public expenditure to a greater extent. Finally, we find that municipalities tend to react differently in front of a negative (28%) and a positive (26%) shock with respect to the level of tax effort. Hence, municipalities are relatively reluctant to decrease taxes.
Estimation of conditional densities and sensitivity measures in nonlinear dynamical systems

Using locally polynomial regression, we develop nonparametric estimators for the conditional density function and its square root, and their partial derivatives. Two measures of sensitivity to initial conditions in nonlinear stochastic dynamic systems are proposed, one of which relates Fisher information with initial-value sensitivity in dynamical systems. We propose estimators for these, and show asymptotic normality for one of them. We further propose a simple method for choosing the bandwidth. The methods are illustrated by simulation of two well-known models in dynamical systems.
Dumbbell Calibration for a Multi-Camera Tracking System

Camera calibration is a preliminary and key work for building up a multi-camera visual tracking system. The purpose of calibration is to obtain transformations between several camera frames, so that each camera knows "where" the other cameras are with respect to itself. In this paper, we describe and implement a technique to determine the transformation of a two-camera tracking system by using a dumbbell as the calibration object. The dumbbell prop is novel and easy to be handled. By putting it within the common view field of two cameras, we firstly extract conies of dumbbell balls from raw images by color separation and ellipse fitting. The intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of each camera are recovered from the conies using linear approaches. Then, we present a method to calculate camera coordinates transformation based on the extrinsic parameters and the multiple view geometries. Experimental results are carried to further demonstrate the practicality of the proposed methods.
Energy-momentum tensor correlators and viscosity

Collective flow has been observed in heavy ion collisions, with a large anisotropic component, and ideal hydrodynamic calculations had significant successful in describing the distribution of produced particles at the RHIC experiments. In order to account for this near ideal fluid behavior, the shear and bulk viscosity of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) must be computed from first principles in a regime where the QGP is not weakly coupled. In this talk I describe recent progress in computing energy-momentum tensor correlators on the lattice from which the viscosities can be extracted via Kubo formulas. I also show how to cumulate information from several channels, including at non-vanishing spatial momentum, in order to best constrain the viscosities. These methods should soon yield predictions at the higher temperatures that will be explored at the LHC experiments.
Power-aware Query Processing Over Sensor Networks

Recent advances in hardware technology make applications requiring large numbers of sensor devices possible, where each sensor device has computation, memory, and communication capabilities. Since sensor devices are powered by ordinary batteries, power is a limiting resource in sensor networks. Some work has been proposed to reduce the power usage by pushing part of the computation into the network to reduce communication cost, which is an expensive operation in sensor networks. In order to further reduce power usage based on the inherent property of sensor networks, we propose power-aware query processing techniques for aggregation queries. Instead of giving exact answers to users’ queries, we introduce precision into queries to give users full control of the tradeoff between precision and energy usage. By employing the notion of value prediction at the base station, the need for constant communication of sensed values from the sensor devices to the base station is avoided. Since communication is three orders of magnitude more expensive than computation, significant power savings can be realized extending the lifetime of sensor networks
Price Fairness Versus Pricing Fairness

This research note discusses the distinction between these two concepts of perceptions of fairness, based on the theory of distributive justice and procedural justice, in order to helps understand consumer behavior. With a sample of 250 tourists in French Polynesia and a structural equation model, tourists do not confuse price fairness and pricing fairness. The theoretical implications are that future research should use two distinct scales. For managers, the study suggests that the attention devoted to explaining the fairness of the pricing has more impact on consumer satisfaction than some attempts to explain the price.
Rural development in Morocco: alternative scenarios to the year 2000

In this study, an economywide model focused on Morocco's rural economy is used as a laboratory for analyzing issues at the core of such a rural development strategy.The model is used to explore the effects of alternative scenarios for water tariffs and sales, and supply-side advances (irrigation expansion, and accelerated productivity growth, both in agriculture and other sectors). Among these, instruments of tax policy and irrigation expansion are under the direct control of policymakers whereas other supply-side shifts are less directly influenced by government actions. The results demonstrate that, under realistic assumptions, it is possible to design a policy package and resulting development path that combine rapid and efficient growth in incomes and production throughout the economy with an improved relative position for the rural population.
Dynamics of Industry and Innovation: Organizations, Networks and Systems Examining Slack -innovation Relationship: Longitudinal Evidence from the Us Farm Equipment Industry (1996-2000) Evidence from the Us Farm Equipment Industry (1966-2000)

Ever since Cyert and March (1963) introduced the notion of organizational slack, its relationship to technological innovation has been a frequent topic of speculation yet an infrequent subject of empirical scrutiny. Here I argue that the relationship should be seen in a contingency perspective that not only discriminates between various types of innovations based upon boundary behavior in search processes and competence effects but also accounts for the effects of satisficing principle, models of aspiration, environmental contingencies and agency behavior. Using longitudinal data from farm equipment industry, I examine slack's relationship to two types of patent inventions that are both technological boundary spanning but organizationally may or may not be so. Overall results prove support to the baseline prediction that slack's relationship is not positive and linear for patents that cross both organizational and technological boundaries but of one that is inverted U-shaped and the tipping point is mediated through performance-aspiration interaction, environmental dynamism and the discipline imposed by institutional ownership. I also find that as the slack levels increase, these patents become more and more interdependent – they are being founded upon similar (if not identical) knowledge bases. Results concerning patents that are only technological boundary spanning lend weaker support to the predictions, though the very same conclusion indicates the utility of treating innovations (inventions) heterogeneously in studies of an organizational phenomenon's association with innovations (inventions). Abstract: Ever since Cyert and March (1963) introduced the notion of organizational slack, its relationship to technological innovation has been a frequent topic of speculation yet an infrequent subject of empirical scrutiny. Here I argue that the relationship should be seen in a contingency perspective that not only discriminates between various types of innovations based upon boundary behavior in search processes and competence effects but also accounts for the effects of satisficing principle, models of aspiration, environmental contingencies and agency behavior. Using longitudinal data from farm equipment industry, I examine slack's relationship to two types of patent inventions that are both technological boundary spanning but organizationally may or may not be so. Overall results prove support to the baseline prediction that slack's relationship is not positive and linear for patents that cross both organizational and technological boundaries but of one that is inverted U-shaped and the tipping point is mediated through performance-aspiration interaction, environmental dynamism and the discipline imposed by institutional ownership. I also find that as the slack levels increase, these patents …