Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mask Based Mobility Model A new mobility model with smooth trajectories

This paper presents a new mobility model: the mask based mobility model (MBMM). This model is based on ad hoc mobility studies and uses Markov chains to choose direction when simulating human displacement. The proposed model simulates real human displacement taking into account some information like terrain characteristic and urban infrastructure. After a brief overview of existing mobility models, the main features of MBMM are exposed: direction, path correction and attraction power, showing major advantages of the proposed model compared to already published works. Then simulation results for model validation purpose have shown a high degree of realism for individual motion.
Factorial Invariance of the Scale Beliefs About Children’s Adjustment in Same-Sex Families in Spanish, Chilean, and Hispanic University Students

This study examines the factorial invariance of the Scale on Beliefs About Children’s Adjustment in Same-Sex Families (SBCASSF) across countries in three samples: Chilean, Spanish, and Hispanic university students. The scale analyzes attitudes toward the consequences of the rearing and education of children by parents with a homosexual sexual orientation. The instrument consists of two subscales: Individual Opposition and Normative Opposition. The Spanish sample is composed of 199 university students, the Chilean sample is made up of 279 students, and the Hispanic sample consists of 114 students. The results provide empirical evidence for the reliability of the SBCASSF in the samples from the countries and its factorial invariance (strict invariance). Results are also provided about differences between countries and by sex. The SBCASSF could be a potentially useful measure for educators, psychologists, and other mental health professionals who wish to study beliefs about the child-rearing practices of same-sex parents.
Quantum corrections to the entropy for higher spin fields in hyperbolic space

We calculate the one-loop corrections to the free energy and to the entropy for fields with arbitrary spins in the space $S^1\otimes H^N$. For conformally invariant fields by means of a conformal transformation of the metric the results are valid in Rindler space with $D=N+1$ dimensions. We use the zeta regularization technique which yields an ultraviolet finite result for the entropy per unit area. The problem of the infinite area factor in the entropy which arises equally in Rindler space and in the black hole background is addressed in the light of a factor space $H^N/\Gamma$.
An image retrieval method based on a genetic algorithm

This paper describes an image retrieval system based on a genetic algorithm with an interactive mechanism that dynamically reflects the subjectivity of individual users in the retrieval results. A technique for enhancing circumstantial dependence that corresponds to a change of the user's mind is also newly presented. In this approach, without explicit representation of the desired image, the image is nevertheless induced through feature selection based on the diverse, fragmentary, and ambiguous subjective intent of the user. This points the way to a powerful image retrieval system that is capable of guessing the subjective intent in the mind of the user and is not dependent on overt representation of images.
Automated GUI Test Case Generation

GUI (Graphical User Interface) testing is complex and inefficient in nowadays software testing. This paper proposed a framework for automated GUI test case generation. The framework includes a reverse engineering of executive GUI to create GUI information and event-flow model. According to these information and model, an ant colony algorithm is applied to generate test cases. Our study shows that by identifying valid event interactions, the generated test cases are capable of finding deep faults without infeasible problems, the configuration of different parameters for ant colony and the good design of our framework provide flexible interfaces to control test suites.
Path planning and control system design for cleaning robot

This paper describes the path planning method based on biologically inspired neural network and proposes a novel robot control system. Firstly, the principle of the biologically inspired neural network is introduced and its application is analyzed. Secondly, the computer modeling and simulation are conducted and show that this method is effective. Moreover, path planning experiments are accomplished by the cleaning prototype, and the results show the path planning algorithm and the control system feasible. Finally, several necessary measures corresponding to different error reasons are presented to improve the precision of this control system.
Integrated Servo-Mechanical Design of a Fine Stage for a Coarse/Fine Dual-Stage Positioning System

Traditionally, the coarse and fine mechanical stages within a dual-stage positioning system are designed separately without consideration about their control performance in dual-stage integration. In this paper, a flexure-based Lorentz motor fine stage is designed concurrently with a simple PID controller to perform the dual-stage positioning, based on the existing coarse stage. The design of fine stage is carried out using a proposed integrated servo-mechanical design approach, where various specifications are considered and formulated as constraints in an optimization problem. Through the approach, both the plant modal parameters and controller parameters of fine stage are concurrently solved. It demonstrates that through suitable mechanical plant design, the fine stage can fulfill various control specifications by only using a simple PID controller, e.g., to compensate sensitivity peak, maintain stability, etc. Meanwhile, the proposed design approach also ensures certain open-loop positioning performance and the decoupling property of coarse/fine stages. The prototype of designed fine stage is fabricated, and experimental investigation indicates that the sensitivity peak is effectively reduced from 14.5 dB of coarse stage to 7.1 dB in the dual-stage system, and the fine stage is able to achieve submicrometer accuracy. The maximal tracking error is also reduced significantly from about 20 μm via the coarse stage to less than 2 μm through dual-stage positioning.
A bandwidth-aware algorithm for dynamic service placement in size-fixed networks

Currently, the way that computers communicate has been changed, such as the increased management cost and the decreased performance. In order to resolve the problem, IT companies often outsource their part function to service providers. Many services require a similar infrastructure, therefore, we design a generic resource pool in which many services can share these resources. For this purpose, the first step is to propose a new dynamic and distributed algorithm for allocating resources to a set of services. Additionally, the proposed algorithm takes into account server resources (CPU and memory) and network related resources (delay and bandwidth), and the distributed algorithm takes CPU and bandwidth as the variables for the objective function. And it aims at maximizing the satisfied demand. Based on the distributed algorithm, the percentage of the satisfied demand is maximized. New algorithm is then used to do service placement and server selection.
Identification and Characterisation of a Copper-inducible Metallothionein Gene from Cockle , Anadara granosa (

The cockle, Anadara granosa, was experimentally exposed to low (0.1 mg/L) and sublethal (1.0 mg/L) doses of copper (Cu) for a period of 24 hrs. Significant increase in Cu concentrations in whole tissues and hepatopancreas compared to control animals were observed. In order to study the effect of copper exposure at molecular levels, a subtractive cDNA library was constructed from the hepatopancreas of cockles exposed to 1.0 mg/L Cu. Screening of the subtractive cDNA library using reverse northern analysis resulted in several differentially expressed genes, including one that codes for metallothionein (MT). The complete coding sequence of the MT gene (designated as AnaMT2) reveals an open reading frame of 234 bp in length that encodes a 77 amino acid polypeptide as revealed by the deduced amino acid composition. Although showing similarities with other molluscan MTs, AnaMT2 can be distinguished by its lower glycine and higher asparagine and proline content. Expression analysis of the AnaMT2 by northern analysis indicated higher mRNA level in cockle exposed to 1.0 mg/L Cu and was undetectable in those treated with 0.1 mg/L. This suggests that AnaMT2 represents a primarily inducible MT not highly expressed under basal conditions.
WP. 32 Confidentiality Protection by Controlled Tabular Adjustment Using Metaheuristic Methods

Controlled tabular adjustment is an SDL methodology based on a mixed integer linear programming model. We develop new hybrid heuristics and new metaheuristic learning approaches for solving this model, and examine their performance. Our new approaches are based on partitioning the problem into its discrete and continuous components, and first creating a hybrid that reduces the number of binary variables through a grouping procedure that combines an exact mathematical programming model with constructive heuristics. We then replace the MILP with an evolutionary scatter search approach that extends the method to large problems with over 9000 entries. Finally, we introduce a new metaheuristic learning method that significantly improves the quality of solutions obtained.
Cardiorespiratory and Muscle Metabolic Responses During Conventional Versus Motion Sensor-Assisted Strategies for Functional Electrical Stimulation Standing After Spinal Cord Injury.

This is a case series study with the objective of comparing two motion sensor automated strategies to avert knee buckle during functional electrical stimulation (FES)-standing against a conventional hand-controlled (HC) FES approach. The research was conducted in a clinical exercise laboratory gymnasium at the University of Sydney, Australia. The automated strategies, Aut-A and Aut-B, applied fixed and variable changes of neurostimulation, respectively, in quadriceps amplitude to precisely control knee extension during standing. HC was an "on-demand" increase of stimulation amplitude to maintain stance. Finally, maximal FES amplitude (MA) was used as a control condition, whereby knee buckle was prevented by maximal isometric muscle recruitment. Four AIS-A paraplegics undertook 4 days of testing each, and each assessment day comprised three FES standing trials using the same strategy. Cardiorespiratory responses were recorded, and quadriceps muscle oxygenation was quantified using near-infrared spectroscopy. For all subjects, the longest standing times were observed during Aut-A, followed by Aut-B, and then HC and MA. The standing times of the automated strategies were superior to HC by 9-64%. Apart from a lower heart rates during standing (P = 0.034), the automation of knee extension did not promote different cardiorespiratory responses compared with HC. The standing times during MA were significantly shorter than during the automated or "on-demand" strategies (by 80-250%). In fact, the higher isometric-evoked quadriceps contraction during MA resulted in a greater oxygen demand (P < 0.0001) and wider arteriovenous oxygen extraction (P = 0.08) when compared with the other strategies. In conclusion, even though increased standing times were demonstrated using automated control of knee extension, physiological benefits compared with HC were not evident.
The Influencing Factors of Knowledge Sharing Behavior on College Students in Virtual Communities

The paper builds the influential factor model of virtual community knowledge sharing behavior from the four dimensions. By using structural equation model, the paper makes an empirical research on the key factors of promoting the college students' knowledge sharing behavior in the virtual community and the impact of knowledge sharing behavior of virtual community members on the community loyalty.
Collisional and Rotational Disruption of Asteroids

Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their formation, these small bodies have kept at least some unmodified primordial material from the solar nebula. However, the structural properties of asteroids have been modified considerably since their formation. Thus, we can find among them a great variety of physical configurations and dynamical histories. In fact, with only a few possible exceptions, all asteroids have been modified or completely disrupted many times during the age of the Solar System. This picture is supported by data from space mission encounters with asteroids that show much diversity of shape, bulk density, surface morphology, and other features. Moreover, the gravitational attraction of these bodies is so small that some physical processes occur in a manner far removed from our common experience on Earth. Thus, each visit to a small body has generated as many questions as it has answered. In this review we discuss the current state of research into asteroid disruption processes, focusing on collisional and rotational mechanisms. We find that recent advances in modeling catastrophic disruption by collisions have provided important insights into asteroid internal structures and a deeper understanding of asteroid families. Rotational disruption, by tidal encounters or thermal effects, is responsible for altering many smaller asteroids, and is at the origin of many binary asteroids and oddly shaped bodies.
Goal-Oriented Elaboration of Security Requirements

We suggest an approach to software development that integrates elaboration of security requirements at an early stage of the software life cycle. Reasoning about security in goal-oriented requirements engineering allows one to anticipate malicious behaviours of agents in the environment of the software-to-be and thereby systematically build more robust systems. We will elaborate attack patterns whose instantiation on a specific system will generate resolution strategies to avoid them, either by design strenghtening or by some alternative design. Cryptographic techniques will contribute to build secure systems that are resistant against hostile environment agents. The suggested approach is based on a formal specification methodology that has been validated on industrial projects. Acknowledgements I am grateful to my supervisor, Axel van Lamsweerde, for his helpful guidance in my work. I am grateful to Emmanuel Letier for his insightful advice and tips about the KAOS spirit. I am grateful to Christophe Ponsard for our discussions about the run-time aspects of security. I would like to thank Bashar Nuseibeh and the Requirements Engineering Group at Imperial College London for their warm welcome. During these five months I had the opportunity to taste what research is like. I also thank the Policy Group at Imperial College for their helpful experience about security management issues with the Ponder framework. I am grateful to everybody else who gave me support during my work.
Additive Manufacturing of CFRP Composites Using Fused Deposition Modeling: Effects of Carbon Fiber Content and Length

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies have been successfully applied in various applications. Fused deposition modeling (FDM), one of popular AM techniques, is most widely used method for manufacturing of plastic materials. Due to the poor strength properties of pure plastic materials, there is a critical need to improve mechanical properties for FDM-fabricated pure plastic parts. One of the possible methods is adding reinforced materials (such as carbon fibers) into plastic materials to form carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) composites. The investigation in this paper is going to test if the properties of CFRP composites part will be enhanced compared with pure plastic part made by FDM. There are three major steps in this paper including producing thermoplastic matrix CFRP composites filaments extruded after blending plastic pellets and carbon fiber powder, printing parts in FDM process, and conducting tensile test. Effects of carbon fiber content and length on the mechanical properties (tensile strength, Young’s modulus, toughness, ductility, and yield strength) of specimens are investigated. This investigation will also provide guidance for future investigations of fabricating thermoset matrix CFRP composites by AM techniques. © 2015 ASME
The detection performance of Neyman-Pearson detector for MIMO radar in K-distributed sea clutter

Use of multiple transmit and receive antennas have become a popular research area in radar community after the success of the same concept in communication. It is shown by Fishler et al. in [1] that multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar has considerable advantages compared to traditional radar and phased array radar systems. In this paper, detection performance of MIMO radar using Neyman-Pearson detector is investigated in K-distributed sea clutter for a practical scenario. Also, spiki-ness of K-distributed MIMO radar clutter is discussed with respect to the number of nodes.
Prevalence of Protozoa Species in Drinking and Environmental Water Sources in Sudan

Protozoa are eukaryotic cells distributed worldwide in nature and are receiving increasing attention as reservoirs and potential vectors for the transmission of pathogenic bacteria. In the environment, on the other hand, many genera of the protozoa are human and animal pathogens. Only limited information is available on these organisms in developing countries and so far no information on their presence is available from Sudan. It is necessary to establish a molecular identification of species of the protozoa from drinking and environmental water. 600 water samples were collected from five states (Gadarif, Khartoum, Kordofan, Juba, and Wad Madani) in Sudan and analysed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and sequencing. 57 out of 600 water samples were PCR positive for protozoa. 38 out of the 57 positive samples were identified by sequencing to contain 66 protozoa species including 19 (28.8%) amoebae, 17 (25.7%) Apicomplexa, 25 (37.9%) ciliates, and 5 (7.6%) flagellates. This study utilized molecular methods identified species belonging to all phyla of protozoa and presented a fast and accurate molecular detection and identification of pathogenic as well as free-living protozoa in water uncovering hazards facing public health.
Dependency-based Distributed Intrusion Detection

Distributed network intrusion detection has attracted much attention recently. Our main focus in this work is on zero-day, slow-scanning worms, of which no existing signatures are available. We organize end hosts into regions based on network knowledge, which we posit is positively correlated to the dependency structure. Leveraging on this organization, we apply different intrusion detection techniques within and across regions. We use a hidden Markov model (HMM) within a region to capture the dependency among hosts, and use sequential hypothesis testing (SHT) globally to take advantage of the independence between regions. We conduct experiments on DETER, and preliminary results show improvement on detection effectiveness and reduction of communication overhead.
Unveiling Short-Term Dynamic of Urban Areas with Airborne LiDAR Data for Change Detection

Remote Sensing and Computer Vision, Universitaet Karlsruhe, Englerstr. 7, 76131, Karlsruhe, Germany Currently, as modern airborne small-footprint laser scanners (airborne LiDAR) are increasingly employed for various urban applications, e.g. building reconstruction, 3d city modeling and planning. Change detection for urban areas using LiDAR technique, which mainly served for damaged building assessment after unforeseen disasters, city ecology monitoring, etc, has been also entered into the scope of research. In contrast to common change detection tasks where the observed events span a long time range, the short-term dynamic refer to those events which frequently happen within a small temporal scale and are not easy and reliable to be detected by long-period observations. The short-term dynamical events have also become represent one of most important elements of urban changes and plays a key role in many applications. In this paper, we will propose approaches for detecting the short-term dynamic in view of change detection. To test and verify our approaches, multi-aspect airborne LiDAR data within a short revisiting interval and one-path LiDAR data, both of which are acquired over densely built-up areas, are applied respectively. For the multi-aspect data, we mainly deal with the anomaly events happing between every two revisiting flights. Then, it has to be distinguished between view-induced variants and real ones due to the acquisition setting of laser scanning. A spatial-context based height differencing method is introduced to describe and find the changed regions on the co-registered gridded surface. For the one-path data, the moving objects appearing in the urban traffic are our major issue. The scanning mechanism of airborne LiDAR leads to the motion artifacts for instantaneously moving vehicles. Our idea is to make use of this effect to classify the dynamical status of vehicles. The obtained results of experiments using simulated and real data showed us the feasibility and promising of the proposed approaches. Finally, this paper is concluded with present troubles and future works.
Small organ size contributes to the slow pace of life in tropical birds

SUMMARY Attributes of an animal’s life history, such as reproductive rate or longevity, typically fall along a ‘slow–fast’ continuum. Animals at the fast end of this continuum, such as temperate birds, are thought to experience high rates of mortality and invest more resources in reproduction, whereas animals at the slow end, such as tropical birds, live longer, have fewer offspring and invest more resources in self-maintenance. We have previously shown that tropical birds, compared with temperate species, have a reduced basal (BMR) and peak metabolic rate (PMR), patterns consistent with a slow pace of life. Here, we elucidate a fundamental linkage between the smaller mass of central organs of tropical species and their reduced BMR, and between their smaller flight muscles and reduced PMR. Analyses of up to 408 species from the literature showed that the heart, flight muscles, liver, pancreas and kidneys were smaller in tropical species. Direct measurements on 49 species showed smaller heart, lungs, flight muscles, liver, kidneys, ovaries and testes in tropical species, as well as lower feather mass. In combination, our results indicate that the benign tropical environment imposes a relaxed selection pressure on high levels of sustained metabolic performance, permitting species to reduce the mass of organs that are energetically costly to maintain. Brain, gizzard and intestine were exceptions, even though energy turnover of brain and intestine are high. Feather mass was 37% lower in tropical species compared with similar-sized temperate birds, supporting the idea that temperate birds require more insulation for thermoregulation.