Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Super-Resolution on Moving Objects and Background

Unlike most super-resolution (SR) methods described in literature, which perform only SR reconstruction on the background of an image scene, we propose a framework that performs SR reconstruction simultaneously on the background and on moving objects. After registration of the background, moving objects are detected and to each moving object registration is applied. The fusion and deblurring tasks of the framework are performed by the well-known method of Hardie. To evaluate the performance of the framework the triangle orientation discrimination (TOD) method is used. The TOD method quantitatively measures the SR performance on the image background and on moving objects. From experiments it can be concluded that under proper conditions, the SR performance on moving objects is similar as the SR performance on the background.
Performance of H.264 compressed video streams over 802.11b based MANETs

We address the problem of video streams transmission in 802.11b based mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Through the study of the delivery of a live encoded video stream, we expose the characteristics of different routing protocols and the infeasibility to provide QoS. The analysis shows the impact of a MANET on H.264 real-time video flows in terms of packet loss, end-to-end delay, jitter and distortion, and the behavior of H.264 error resilience tools in order to determine their effectiveness on such network scenarios. The results show that video traffic has demands that are hard to be met by a standard MANET, and that improvements are required in terms of routing protocols and QoS provisioning either on the MAC layer or at IP level using traffic shaping tools. Also, most of H.264 error resilience tools are not so effective as expected with this kind of networks, being the random macroblock updating the most effective one we have tested.
Postsynaptic Expression of a New Calcium Pathway in Hippocampal CA3 Neurons and Its Influence on Mossy Fiber Long-Term Potentiation

Long-term potentiation (LTP) in the CA1 region of the hippocampus is induced by postsynaptic Ca2+ influx via NMDA receptors (NMDARs). However, this synaptic plasticity occurs independently of NMDARs when Ca2+-permeable AMPA receptors (AMPARs) are expressed at postsynaptic sites using various genetic techniques, indicating that an increase in Ca2+ level at critical postsynaptic sites, regardless of its entry pathway, triggers the induction of LTP at CA1 synapses. In contrast, NMDARs are sparsely distributed on mossy fiber (MF) synapses in CA3 hippocampal neurons, and most evidence favors the presynaptic mechanism for LTP induction, although some reports suggested a postsynaptic mechanism. In this study, we examined whether Ca2+ influx through the newly produced postsynaptic receptors during high-frequency stimulation affects the induction of MF LTP. For this purpose, we expressed Ca2+-permeable AMPARs in CA3 pyramidal neurons by Sindbis viral-mediated gene transfer of the unedited form of the glutamate receptor 2 (GluR2Q) subunit, as a new pathway for postsynaptic Ca2+ entry, in rat hippocampal organotypic cultures. Virally expressed myc-tagged GluR2Q was detected at the complex spines known as the thorny excrescences, which serve as postsynaptic targets for MF synaptic input, on the proximal apical dendrites of CA3 pyramidal cells. Furthermore, endogenous Ca2+-impermeable AMPARs at MF synapses were converted into Ca2+-permeable receptors by GluR2Q expression. However, the postsynaptic expression of Ca2+-permeable AMPARs had no significant influence on the two types of MF LTP induced by different stimulus protocols. These results supported the notion that MF LTP is independent of postsynaptic Ca2+.
Providing Ad Links to Travel Blog Entries Based on Link Types

Content-targeted advertising systems are becoming an increasingly important part of the funding for free web services. These programs automatically find relevant keywords on a web page, and then display ads based on those keywords. We propose a method for providing links to ads for travel products (which we call ad links) automatically. We extract keywords from citing areas of travel information links, and provide appropriate ad links. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted experiments. We obtained a high precision for the extraction of keywords and provision of ad links.
Demographic buffering and compensatory recruitment promotes the persistence of disease in a wildlife population

Abstract Demographic buffering allows populations to persist by compensating for fluctuations in vital rates, including disease‐induced mortality. Using long‐term data on a badger (Meles meles Linnaeus, 1758) population naturally infected with Mycobacterium bovis, we built an integrated population model to quantify impacts of disease, density and environmental drivers on survival and recruitment. Badgers exhibit a slow life‐history strategy, having high rates of adult survival with low variance, and low but variable rates of recruitment. Recruitment exhibited strong negative density‐dependence, but was not influenced by disease, while adult survival was density independent but declined with increasing prevalence of diseased individuals. Given that reproductive success is not depressed by disease prevalence, density‐dependent recruitment of cubs is likely to compensate for disease‐induced mortality. This combination of slow life history and compensatory recruitment promotes the persistence of a naturally infected badger population and helps to explain the badger's role as a persistent reservoir of M. bovis.
NEW PRECISION ORBITS OF BRIGHT DOUBLE-LINED SPECTROSCOPIC BINARIES. VI. HD 24623 AND V923 SCORPII

Using new radial velocities obtained at KPNO and Fairborn Observatory, we have determined improved spectroscopic orbits for two double-lined F-type binaries, HD 24623 and V923 Sco. The orbital periods are 19.66304 and 34.8386 days, respectively, so it is not surprising that their orbits have relatively high eccentricities of nearly 0.5. The orbital dimensions (a1sin i and a2sin i) and minimum masses (m1sin 3i and m2sin 3i) have accuracies of 0.2% or better. Extensive photometry of HD 24623 with the T4 0.75 m automatic photometric telescope at Fairborn Observatory shows no evidence of eclipses. Instead, a very weak reflection effect is seen, making the system a new variable star. Our spectroscopic ephemeris for V923 Sco indicates that the eclipse detected by Bolton and Herbst is a partial eclipse of the primary but detection of the secondary eclipse is uncertain. For HD 24623, we have determined spectral types of F2 dwarf and F4 dwarf for the primary and secondary, respectively. Our spectral types are F4 dwarf for the two components of V923 Sco. Both components of HD 24623 are rotating more slowly than their pseudosynchronous velocities, as is the primary of V923 Sco. However, the secondary of V923 Sco is likely rotating pseudosynchronously.
A Bayesian Approach to Device-Free Localization: Modeling and Experimental Assessment

Device-free positioning allows to localize and track passive targets (i.e., not carrying any electronic device) moving in an area monitored by a dense network of low-power and battery-operated wireless sensors. The technology is promising for a wide number of applications, ranging from ambient intelligence in smart spaces, intrusion detection, emergency and rescue operations in critical areas. In this paper, a new approach is proposed where both the average path-loss and the fluctuations of the received signal strength induced by the moving target are jointly modeled based on the theory of diffraction. A novel stochastic model is derived and used for the evaluation of fundamental performance limits. The model is proved to be tight enough to be adopted for real-time estimation of the target location. The proposed localization system is validated by extensive experimental studies in both indoor and outdoor environments. The model calibration is addressed in practical scenarios to compare the performance of different Bayesian online localization methods. The test-bed system supports efficient and flexible target tracking, without requiring any action from the end-users. In addition, the technology is proven to be readily applicable over the existing IEEE 802.15. 4 compliant PHY layer standard, by adapting the low-level MAC firmware.
New directions in multilingual information access

This workshop attempted to present the state-of-the-art in multilingual information access (MLIA) research and development, including cross-language information retrieval and question-answering and multilingual, multi-document summarization. Our goal was to delineate current research areas as well as suggest new areas for future research and development. The workshop also focused on practical issues of scalability and practical application of MLIA in digital libraries and web portals. In addition to an invited keynote, 17 research and position papers were selected for the proceedings which may be found at http://ucdata.berkeley. edu/sigir2006-mlia.htm.
Design and implementation of an adaptive cruise control system based on supervised actor-critic learning

A novel adaptive cruise control (ACC) system is proposed in this paper. A hierarchical control framework is adopted for the adaptive cruise control problem. For the upper level, a supervised actor-critic (SAC) reinforcement learning approach is presented to obtain the desired acceleration controller. In the lower level, throttle and brake controllers calculate the required throttle and/or brake signals based on the desired longitudinal acceleration. Feed-forward neural networks are used to implement the actor and critic components of the SAC learning algorithm. An online learning mechanism is introduced to implement the SAC training process. dSPACE simulator is used to verify the effectiveness of the ACC system. Typical emergency braking scenario is simulated to test the adaptability of the ACC system. Road condition change (e.g. wintry or wet conditions) simulation is first investigated to evaluate the robustness of the ACC system. Performance of the proposed ACC system is proved to be very practical.
Measuring Inequalities without Linearity in Envy: Choquet Integrals for Symmetric Capacities

The (generalized) Gini indices rely on the social welfare function of a decision maker who behaves in accordance with Yaari's model, with a function f that transforms frequencies. This SWF can also be represented as the weighted sum of the welfare of all the possible coalitions in the society, where the welfare of a coalition is defined as the income of the worst-off member of that coalition. We provide a set of axioms (Ak) and prove that the three following statements are equivalent: (i) the decision maker respects (Ak); (ii) f is a polynomial of degree k; (iii) the weight of all coalitions withmore than k members is equal to zero.
Energy Efficient Deployment of Dense Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Traffic demand is increasing exponentially and operators will need to densify their networks with small cells to meet this demand. This has created economic and ecological concerns due to the high cost of energy and the associated greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, we apply tools from stochastic geometry to design a deployment strategy for multi-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Using appropriate approximations, we derive simple expressions that allow insights into the energy efficiency (EE) performance of biased and unbiased HetNets. We perform a comprehensive analysis on the effect of biasing on the EE performance of HetNets. We also formulate an optimization framework that minimizes the area power consumption (APC) of the HetNet subject to appropriate performance constraints. Our results show that significant energy savings can be made by appropriately biasing the HetNet and optimizing the BS densities and their transmit powers subject to the performance constraints.
Rating Bias and Preference Acquisition

Personalized systems and recommender systems exploit implicitly and explicitly provided user information to address the needs and requirements of those using their services. User preference information, often in the form of interaction logs and ratings data, is used to identify similar users, whose opinions are leveraged to inform recommendations or to filter information. In this work we explore a different dimension of information trends in user bias and reasoning learned from ratings provided by users to a recommender system. Our work examines the characteristics of a dataset of 100,000 user ratings on a corpus of recipes, which illustrates stable user bias towards certain features of the recipes (cuisine type, key ingredient, and complexity). We exploit this knowledge to design and evaluate a personalized rating acquisition tool based on active learning, which leverages user biases in order to obtain ratings bearing high-value information and to reduce prediction errors with new users.
Generating Scientific Illustrations in Digital Books

In this paper we introduce what we call the \text illustration problem": Given a (scientic or technical) text which a user is studying and interacting with, as well as a collection of geometric models pertaining to the domain of the text. Produce customized, accompanying illustrations. We provide a framework for solving this problem and show how knowledge representation can enhance the quality of the illustrations generated. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach through a prototypical system and show the results of applying it in the area of anatomy.
An evaluation of product review modalities for mobile phones

Research has shown that product reviews on the Internet not only support consumers when shopping, but also lead to increased sales for retailers. Recent approaches successfully use smart phones to directly relate products (e.g. via barcode or RFID) to corresponding reviews, making these available to consumers on the go. However, it is unknown what modality (star ratings/text/video) users consider useful for creating reviews and using reviews on their mobile phone, and how the preferred modalities are different from those on the Web. To shed light on this we conduct two experiments, one of them in a quasi-realistic shopping environment. The results indicate that, in contrast to the known approaches, stars and pre-structured text blocks should be implemented on mobile phones rather than long texts and videos. Users prefer less and rather well-aggregated product information while on the go. This accounts both for entering and, surprisingly, also for using product reviews.
An Improved Direct Trust Evaluation Algorithm for the Context-Aware Trust Model

The traditional trust models that concern single service with constant contexts are inapplicable to deal with the data sparsity problem caused by the diversity of services and contexts. The existing context-aware trust models try to solve this problem by referring to the similarity of services in trust evaluation with low calculation efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Leader-Follower clustering based direct trust evaluation algorithm for the context-aware trust model. The direct trust evaluation for the forthcoming interaction is on the basis of the clusters of trust reference set other than every recent interaction record. The simulation experiment shows that the proposed method can obtain accurate direct trust evaluation result even lacking recent interaction experience for the current service, but the calculation efficiency is higher than the existing context-aware trust evaluation methods.
On integral probability metrics, φ-divergences and binary classification

A class of distance measures on probabilities -- the integral probability metrics (IPMs) -- is addressed: these include the Wasserstein distance, Dudley metric, and Maximum Mean Discrepancy. IPMs have thus far mostly been used in more abstract settings, for instance as theoretical tools in mass transportation problems, and in metrizing the weak topology on the set of all Borel probability measures defined on a metric space. Practical applications of IPMs are less common, with some exceptions in the kernel machines literature. The present work contributes a number of novel properties of IPMs, which should contribute to making IPMs more widely used in practice, for instance in areas where $\phi$-divergences are currently popular. First, to understand the relation between IPMs and $\phi$-divergences, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which these classes intersect are derived: the total variation distance is shown to be the only non-trivial $\phi$-divergence that is also an IPM. This shows that IPMs are essentially different from $\phi$-divergences. Second, empirical estimates of several IPMs from finite i.i. d. samples are obtained, and their consistency and convergence rates are analyzed. These estimators are shown to be easily computable, with better rates of convergence than estimators of $\phi$-divergences. Third, a novel interpretation is provided for IPMs by relating them to binary classification, where it is shown that the IPM between class-conditional distributions is the negative of the optimal risk associated with a binary classifier. In addition, the smoothness of an appropriate binary classifier is proved to be inversely related to the distance between the class-conditional distributions, measured in terms of an IPM.
Enabling Automatic Clutter Reduction in Parallel Coordinate Plots

We have previously shown that random sampling is an effective clutter reduction technique and that a sampling lens can facilitate focus+context viewing of particular regions. This demands an efficient method of estimating the overlap or occlusion of large numbers of intersecting lines in order to automatically adjust the sampling rate within the lens. This paper proposes several ways for measuring occlusion in parallel coordinate plots. An empirical study into the accuracy and efficiency of the occlusion measures show that a probabilistic approach combined with a 'binning' technique is very fast and yet approaches the accuracy of the more expensive 'true' complete measurement
Prevalence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Beijing strains in Punjab Pakistan

Beijing strains possess unique properties such as, multi-drug resistance, evasion of BCG vaccination and disseminating at a greater rate than nonBeijing strains. Various methods exist for the detection of Beijing strains such as, RFLP or spoligotyping; however, these methods require established cultures and DNA isolated in High concentration. Relatively newer methods such as, MIRU VNTR, are more expensive and require complex software for analysis. Warren and his coworkers in 2004 illustrated a simple, one step single tube multiplex PCR assay which proved to be a cost effective and easier method with eliminating the need for culturing. In our study, we collected 56 cultures from various districts of Punjab at Institute of Public Health, Lahore and analyzed them by method illustrated by Warren and coworkers, using primers to identify the Beijing strains by the presence of a characteristic deletion which occurs in all such strains. From our study, we found the prevalence of Beijing strains in Punjab is 8.9% of the TB infections.
A Replication Architecture for FTAG

In this paper we present a replication architecture based on the FTAG computation model. FTAG is a functional and attribute based language for programming fault-tolerant parallel applications [4]. In the replication technique developed an application is replicated on di erent group of processors. Each group is called a replica. All replicas are active [3] and compute concurrently a di erent piece of the application parallel code. In our model replicas cooperate not only to detect and mask failures but also to perform parallel computations. The developed replication technique takes full advantage of parallel computation to reduce computation time.
Using Inquiry-Based Learning to Support the Mathematical Learning of Students with SEBD

This paper, which draws on action research methodology, explores the use of inquirybased learning (IBL) in the teaching of mathematics to students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). The year-long study was conducted in a Form 3 secondary class that grouped 13 male students with SEBD in a Maltese secondary school. After first creating an IBL-friendly classr oom environment in the initial months, the actual implementation of IBL pedagogy in class began in the second term and spread over a 15 week period. The data included teacher ob servations that were recorded in a reflective research journal, two sessions of in-dep th interviews with students, student journal writing, samples of students’ work and stud ent marks in the school-based halfyearly and annual mathematics examinations. The findings indicate that the use of IBL in the mathematics classroom can benefit students w ith SEBD in a number of ways. These include infusing a sense of enjoyment during lessons, improved student behaviour and motivation to learn, and facilitating the learn ing of mathematics which generally translated in higher achievement levels.
Attentive Visual Recognition for Scene Exploration

Vision is an active process where behaviorally important information is selectively gathered. We present a model of scene exploration in which the high-resolution fovea is deployed to interesting regions by selective attention processes. The system switches between exploratory and recognition modes such that in exploration mode, regions of interest are investigated and in recognition mode, a given region is carefully examined as the recognition process is attempted for the particular region of the scene. Model simulations illustrate its behavior.
Responsibilities between the church and state in the field of elderly care in Finland

Abstract In the coming years, Finland will be faced with the challenges of an ageing population, including a rapid increase in the need of resources required for their care and support. Elderly care is being reformed in the Finnish society and the third sector, including religious institutions, it is considered to create opportunities to address problems in the current economic situation. This paper will focus on how public sector social workers define the role of church diaconal work performed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF) in the field of elderly services. The data were collected from 10 theme-based interviews conducted in 2009 with public sector social workers who worked with the elderly. Using frame analysis as a methodological tool, three frames were formed: ‘the Church providing psychosocial support’, ‘the Church organising communal activities’ and ‘the Church as safety net’. Analysing these frames through contractualism as a theoretical tool, it became clear they each represent a different form of contractual cooperation; these forms respectively being network, market and hierarchy. The results of this study suggest that social workers emphasize neutrality towards religious matters, but consider churches to be a trustworthy companion and are willing to transfer psychosocial support to the ELCF.