Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantum evolution across singularities: the case of geometrical resolutions

We continue the study of time-dependent Hamiltonians with an isolated singularity in their time dependence, describing propagation on singular space-times. In previous work, two of us have proposed a ``minimal subtraction'' prescription for the simplest class of such systems, involving Hamiltonians with only one singular term. On the other hand, Hamiltonians corresponding to geometrical resolutions of space-time tend to involve multiple operator structures (multiple types of dependence on the canonical variables) in an essential way. We consider some of the general properties of such (near-)singular Hamiltonian systems, and further specialize to the case of a free scalar field on a two-parameter generalization of the null-brane space-time. We find that the singular limit of free scalar field evolution exists for a discrete subset of the possible values of the two parameters. The coordinates we introduce reveal a peculiar reflection property of scalar field propagation on the generalized (as well as the original) null-brane. We further present a simple family of pp-wave geometries whose singular limit is a light-like hyperplane (discontinuously) reflecting the positions of particles as they pass through it.
Essays in rural energy, forest dependency and covariates of fuel saving technologies in Ethiopia

This study examines the coping mechanisms of rural households to fuel wood scarcity by using survey data from randomly selected rural households in Ethiopia. The determinants of collection of other biomass energy sources were also examined. The results of the empirical analysis show that rural households residing in forest-degraded areas respond to fuel wood shortages by increasing their labour input to fuel wood collection. However, for households in high forest cover regions, forest stock and forest access may be more important factors than scarcity of fuel wood in determining household’s labour input to fuel wood collection. The study also finds that there is no evidence for substitution between fuel wood and dung or fuel wood and crop residues. Supply side strategies alone may not be effective in addressing the problem of forest degradation and biodiversity losses. Any policy on natural resource management in general and rural energy problems in particular should make a distinction between regions of different forest degradation level.
Insulin regulates alveolar epithelial function by inducing Na+/K+-ATPase translocation to the plasma membrane in a process mediated by the action of Akt

Stimulation of Na+/K+-ATPase translocation to the cell surface increases active Na+ transport, which is the driving force of alveolar fluid reabsorption, a process necessary to keep the lungs free of edema and to allow normal gas exchange. Here, we provide evidence that insulin increases alveolar fluid reabsorption and Na+/K+-ATPase activity by increasing its translocation to the plasma membrane in alveolar epithelial cells. Insulin-induced Akt activation is necessary and sufficient to promote Na+/K+-ATPase translocation to the plasma membrane. Phosphorylation of AS160 by Akt is also required in this process, whereas inactivation of the Rab GTPase-activating protein domain of AS160 promotes partial Na+/K+-ATPase translocation in the absence of insulin. We found that Rab10 functions as a downstream target of AS160 in insulin-induced Na+/K+-ATPase translocation. Collectively, these results suggest that Akt plays a major role in Na+/K+-ATPase intracellular translocation and thus in alveolar fluid reabsorption.
Using Web Services and Workflow Ontology in Multi- Agent Systems

In this paper, we introduce a transactional workflow ontology for multi-agent systems and web services. Both technologies use messaging, service descriptions and directory services to implement the overall architecture. As web services have already been extended with workflow specifications by IBM, HP and Microsoft, it is natural to apply workflows to agent systems as well. We detected a problem with inflexibility in BriefsAgents, our FIPA standard multi-agent system prototype that uses ontology for data transmission between agents. Ontology-based transaction and workflow control enable agents and web services to use the ontology instances to drive their internal state, instead of hardwired implementation. In addition, they can communicate their workflow to other agents and services and enable co-operation with parties that are not known at implementation time. The proposed workflow ontology supports advances transaction models to improve reliability in these distributed systems. We also cover the necessary tools for using this transactional workflow ontology.
UsimagTool : an Interactive Research Tool for Ultrasound Image Processing

We present here an open source software package called UsimagToolwhich consist of a set of algorithms and a graphic user interface (GUI) specially designed for research purposes in Ultrasound image processing. This tool is based on the C++ open source libraries ITK, VTK and FLTK. One of its main features is its modular and flexible architecture, which allow developers to modify or include image processing algorithms very fast. UsimagTool includes several algorithms developed specifically for Ultrasound data processing, that has been coded using the ITK and VTK convention. The algorithms included and described here are new implementations and they are not part of the official ITK or VTK releases. They are three filters (anisotropic Wiener, Speckle Reduction Anisotropic Diffusion, and Tensor guided Anisotropic Diff usion) one segmentation algorithm based on a Markov random field model, and a demons registration suitable for US data. There is also a user friendly GUI designed for segmentation and registration tasks, with three independent viewer s to display simultaneously three different data sets. The GU I can be easily adapted or modified with little effort for other tasks, for instance it can be redesigned for clinical use.
Estimating Demand Elasticities Using Nonlinear Pricing

Nonlinear pricing is prevalent in industries such as health care, public utilities, and telecommunications. However, this pricing scheme introduces bias into estimating elasticities for welfare analysis or policy changes. I develop a local elasticity estimation method that uses nonlinear price schedules to isolate consumers' expenditure choices from selection and simultaneity biases. This method improves over previous approaches by using commonly-available observational data and requiring only a single general monotonicity assumption. Using claims-level data on health insurance with two nonlinearities, I am able to measure two separate elasticities, and find that elasticity declines from −0.26 to−0.09 by the second nonlinearity. These estimates are then used to calculate moral hazard deadweight loss. This method enables estimation of many policies with nonlinear pricing which previous tools could not address.
Cutoff-free Propagation of Torsional Alfvén Waves along Thin Magnetic Flux Tubes

Propagation of torsional Alfvén waves along magnetic flux tubes has been extensively studied for many years, but no conclusive results regarding the existence of a cutoff frequency for these waves have been obtained. The main purpose of this paper is to derive new wave equations that describe the propagation of linear torsional Alfvén waves along thin and isothermal magnetic flux tubes and to use these wave equations to demonstrate that the torsional wave propagation is not affected by any cutoff frequency. It is also shown that this cutoff-free propagation is independent of the different choices of coordinate system and wave variables adopted in previous studies. A brief discussion of the implications of this cutoff-free propagation of torsional tube waves on theories of wave heating of the solar and stellar atmospheres is also given.
Software analytics for incident management of online services: An experience report

As online services become more and more popular, incident management has become a critical task that aims to minimize the service downtime and to ensure high quality of the provided services. In practice, incident management is conducted through analyzing a huge amount of monitoring data collected at runtime of a service. Such data-driven incident management faces several significant challenges such as the large data scale, complex problem space, and incomplete knowledge. To address these challenges, we carried out two-year software-analytics research where we designed a set of novel data-driven techniques and developed an industrial system called the Service Analysis Studio (SAS) targeting real scenarios in a large-scale online service of Microsoft. SAS has been deployed to worldwide product datacenters and widely used by on-call engineers for incident management. This paper shares our experience about using software analytics to solve engineers' pain points in incident management, the developed data-analysis techniques, and the lessons learned from the process of research development and technology transfer.
Cell-Free Layer (CFL) Analysis In A Polydimethysiloxane (PDMS) Microchannel: A Global Approach

The cell-free layer (CFL) is a hemodynamic phenomenon that has an important contribution to the rheological properties of blood flowing in microvessels. The present work aims to find the closest function describing RBCs flowing around the cell depleted layer in a polydimethysiloxane (PDMS) microchannel with a diverging and a converging bifurcation. The flow behavior of the CFL was investigated by using a high-speed video microscopy system where special attention was devoted to its behavior before the bifurcation and after the confluence of the microcahnnel. The numerical data was first obtained by using a manual tracking plugin and then analysed by an optimization technique using the genetic algorithm approach. The results show that for the majority of the cases the function that more closely resembles the CFL boundary is the trigonometric function.
Combined SIFT and bi-coherence features to detect image forgery

In this paper, we propose a new method to detect image copy-move tampering using SIFT and bi-coherence features. SIFT feature (scale invariant features transform), which is insensitive to geometrical and illumination distortions, has achieved good results for image region duplication detection as shown in [1], [2] and [3]. However, image deeper forensics analysis such as contents and motives is also important especially when images take the role of legal events. In this paper, we extract matched SIFT keypoints features in a digital image and cluster them based on three-Point Center Clustering (3PCC) method. To estimate the robust geometrical transform parameters between the matched points, Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm is adopted. At last, we introduce bi-coherence feature, a normalization higher-order statistic, to register the original source block of the image and the forged one for deeper forensics analysis. Several examples showing the effectiveness of this approach are given.
An Iterative Transfer Learning Based Ensemble Technique for Automatic Short Answer Grading

Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) techniques are designed to automatically assess short answers to questions in natural language, having a length of a few words to a few sentences. Supervised ASAG techniques have been demonstrated to be effective but suffer from a couple of key practical limitations. They are greatly reliant on instructor provided model answers and need labeled training data in the form of graded student answers for every assessment task. To overcome these, in this paper, we introduce an ASAG technique with two novel features. We propose an iterative technique on an ensemble of (a) a text classifier of student answers and (b) a classifier using numeric features derived from various similarity measures with respect to model answers. Second, we employ canonical correlation analysis based transfer learning on a common feature representation to build the classifier ensemble for questions having no labelled data. The proposed technique handsomely beats all winning supervised entries on the SCIENTSBANK dataset from the Student Response Analysis task of SemEval 2013. Additionally, we demonstrate generalizability and benefits of the proposed technique through evaluation on multiple ASAG datasets from different subject topics and standards.
Closeness : A New Privacy Measure for Data Publishing

We show that l-diversity has a number of limitations. In particular, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent attribute disclosure. Motivated by these limitations, we propose a new notion of privacy called “closeness. ” We present the base model t-closeness, which requires that the distribution of a multiple sensitive attribute in any equivalence class is close to the distribution of the attribute in the overall table (i.e., the distance between the two distributions should be no more than a threshold t). We then propose a more flexible privacy model called on; t-closeness that offers higher utility. We describe our desiderata for designing a distance measure between two probability distributions and present two distance measures. The k-anonymity privacy requirement for publishing micro data requires that each equivalence class (i.e., a set of records that are indistinguishable from each other with respect to certain “identifying” attributes) contains at least k records. Recently, several authors have recognized that k-anonymity cannot prevent attribute disclosure. The notion of ldiversity has been proposed to address this; ‘-diversity requires that each equivalence class has at least ‘wellrepresented values for each multiple sensitive attribute. We propose a novel privacy notion called “closeness. ” We formalize the idea of global background knowledge and propose the base model t-closeness which requires that the distribution of a multiple sensitive attribute in any equivalence class to be close to the distribution of the attribute in the overall table (i.e., the distance between the two distributions should be no more than a threshold t).
WIKI: : SCORE - A Collaborative Environment For Music Transcription And Publishing

Music sources are most commonly shared in music scores scanned or printed on paper sheets. These artifacts are rich in information, but since they are images it is hard to re-use and share their content in todays' digital world. There are modern languages that can be used to transcribe music sheets, this is still a time consuming task, because of the complexity involved in the process and the typical huge size of the original documents.WIKI::SCORE is a collaborative environment where several people work together to transcribe music sheets to a shared medium, using the notation. This eases the process of transcribing huge documents, and stores the document in a well known notation, that can be used later on to publish the whole content in several formats, such as a PDF document, images or audio files for example.
‘You look like a machito!’: a decolonial analysis of the social in/exclusion of female participants in a Colombian sport for development and peace organization

Abstract This article critically explores the relationship between the gendered nature of sport in Colombia and girls and young women’s social in/exclusion in football (soccer) through the lived experiences of female participants involved in a local Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) organization. Building on 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork and Lave and Wenger’s theory of Community of Practice (CoP), I explore the complex and connected gendered social elements that constrain girls and young women’s participation. Analyzing these processes and mechanisms through a decolonial lens, I reveal the existence of colonial residues that perpetuate and reinforce females positioning as peripheral actors in sport. The findings demonstrate how female participants are required to negotiate spaces with contradictory gendered meanings and confirm that social transformation within masculine structures is difficult to achieve. This research encourages SDP researchers to further engage with decolonial theory.
Multi-aspects Review Summarization Based on Identification of Important Opinions and their Similarity

The development of the Web services lets many users easily provide their opinions recently. Automatic summarization of enormous sentiments has been expected. Intuitively, we can summarize a review with traditional document summarization methods. However, such methods have not well-discussed "aspects". Basically, a review consists of sentiments with various aspects. We summarize reviews for each aspect so that the summary presents information without biasing to a specific topic. In this paper, we propose a method for multi- aspects review summarization based on evaluative sentence extraction. We handle three fea- tures; ratings of aspects, the tf -idf value, and the number of mentions with a similar topic. For estimating the number of mentions, we apply a clustering algorithm. By integrating these features, we generate a more appropriate summary. The experiment results show the effectiveness of our method.
A Hybrid Heuristic Approach for Disassembly/Recycle Applications

Over the past several years, heuristic methods are often used to find optimal solution(s) of disassembly/recycle sequencing problem, for it is a NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. In the proposed research, first, we present a method: product disassembly sequence planning problem could map onto a problem of searching the optimal tour in the disassembly feasibility information graph (DFIG). Then a genetic algorithm is proposed to search the optimal solution of disassembly/recycle problem. Optimization objective is the performance of a solution, which is mainly related with three factors: disassembling process, environment impact and disassembly & recycle line. In particular, scheduling disassembly & recycle line is also a NP-hard problem. Therefore, a heuristic genetic operator, combined with disassembly & recycle processes tree, is also presented to schedule the disassembly & recycle line
A geometric virtual structure approach to decentralized formation control

We present a unified approach to decentralized formation control of a network of agents, where the agents are modeled in the framework of geometric mechanics. The approach naturally accommodates underactuation, second-order agent dynamics, and nonholonomic constraints. Overall formation objectives are specified for a virtual structure (VS), while individual agent objectives are defined relative to the VS. We restate the formation control problem as a coupled set of local two-body problems. We construct a decentralized formation controller assuming independent solution of the local problems, plus asymptotic consensus of the VS states. A constructive solution of the local problem completes the controller design. The method is illustrated on simulations of two planar systems-a waypoint tracking and formation reconfiguration problem, and a target intercept problem using proportional navigation. To our knowledge, these problems have not been previously solved in the control literature.
Dynamic maneuverability through voluntary morphosis in a four-legged robot

Dynamic maneuverability is an inherent skill of any legged animal locomotion. Thus it is useful and challenging for a physical four-legged robot that runs in open-loop control. This paper presents a concept of dynamic maneuverability in a four-legged system that can alter its morphology through leg reconfiguration, i.e., voluntary morphosis1. By exploiting this unique feature of the robot body, we designed a dynamic maneuverability control in open-loop that changes the leg length of the ipsilateral pairs of legs to smoothly control the turning of the robot on a particular gait. We verified our control approach on trot gait locomotion. Our results demonstrate that the maneuverability in a four-legged robot is mainly the result of an active change in robot morphology.
A Fully Integrated DC/DC Converter for Tunable RF Filters

A controllable high voltage DC/DC converter has been designed that can generate an output voltage from 0 to 30V with a 2.8V supply voltage. It is suitable for controlling MEMS and high voltage varicap devices in tunable filters. The proposed DC/DC converter uses a novel approach to decrease the output voltage by cascading two Dickson charge pumps (Dickson, 1976). It is operating with a clock frequency of 16MHz and is built in a 0.25mum Bi-CMOS technology
Code construction for space-time bit-interleaved coded modulation systems

Bit-interleaved coded modulation schemes give diversity gains on fading channels with higher order modulation constellations combined with conventional binary convolutional codes. By employing multiple transmit and receive antennas, both extended range and/or improved bandwidth efficiency can be achieved in space-time bit-interleaved coded modulation schemes. In this paper, we analyze the performance of this space-time coding scheme in a narrow band flat fading channel and single carrier modems. We give constructive binary codes that yield maximum diversity. We also show that the puncturing mechanism in general fails to achieve the full diversity in such a scheme.
Technology, duality, and foreign trade : the GNP function approach to modeling imports and exports / Ulrich Kohli

Part 1 Theoretical concepts: the duality between production and cost functions joint cost functions and variable profit functions non-jointness and separability. Part 2 The GNP function approach to modelling imports and exports the GNP function approach to modelling the demand for imports the GNP approach to modelling the supply for exports. Part 3 Empirical implementation: functional forms other technical issues. Part 4 "Closed-economy" models: aggregate production and revenue functions the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson and the specific-factors models. Part 5 The demand for imports and the supply of exports production and the demand for imports the GNP function, the demand for imports and the supply for exports in the short run and the medium run the translog GNP function - further empirical issues alternative function forms input requirements of output components. Part 6 Disaggregated trade models: disaggregation of imports disaggregation of exports. Part 7 Terms of trade, tariffs, technological change and welfare: technological change, terms of trade and growth.
Platform for timely portable-push information delivery

We have developed a platform and set of wearable information terminals that are capable of timely push information notification and delivery, based on the user action profile. The Wearable Life Navigator (WLN), a reliable assistant for the daily life, should prevent the missing of useful information, give useful hints in unexpected situations and enable easy communication control. The system is composed of Infrastructure and Wearables centered on the Wearable Gateway (WGW), a small and light palmsized processing unit worn by the user and serving as a communication hub for wireless connectivity. The Bluetooth landmarks deliver the local site information and serve as bulletin board type exchangers where unknown users with similar preferences can exchange information of common interest. WLN automatically learns the users profile and interacts and collaborates with different entities: another WLN, network appliance, public facility or web service. The in-situ experimental set-ups were focused on development of methods for implicit utility mining and push timing management that will deliver new mobile services and applications beyond the limits of the existing information terminals.