Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A power amplifier integrated with a composite right/left-handed metamaterial antenna

We designed, simulated and fabricated an active integrated antenna based on an infinite wavelength composite right/left-handed metamaterial structure. Due to its nonlinear dispersion characteristic, the realized antenna does not show a resonance behavior at the second and third harmonic. This property can be exploited for the profitable termination of the higher harmonics as used in class-F or inverse class-F power amplifier concepts. The advantage over classical high efficiency concepts is the reduced circuit complexity since there is no need for an additional resonator tank.
An Enhanced Scheduling Scheme for QoS in Mobile WiMAX Networks

The Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) standard, that is, the IEEE 802.16e standard supports point-to-multipoint (PMP). Scheduling in WiMAX become one of the most challenging issues, since it is responsible for distributing available resources among users to meet the QoS criteria such as delay, delay jitter, fairness and throughput requirements. However, no specific scheduling mechanism has been defined to provide QoS through five kinds of service class differentiation. In this paper we propose a novel Priority based Scheduling scheme to support various services by considering the QoS constraints of each class. The simulation results show the average throughput, average per user throughput, fairness index, average end to end delay and average delay jitter with different loads and different speeds. From these results it is concluded that the proposed scheme provides QoS support for each class efficiently for Mobile WiMAX.
School Management and Leadership in Education

The history of educational management in our schools is traditionally operated by unqualified personnel. Our model of management has been created through practice and experience-based systems. But this form of management is neither effective nor satisfactory. It creates additional stress and work for the teaching staff and does not provide an educationally conducive environment. The new theories of educational management and leadership styles applied today in The United Kingdom are very important for school improvement and student performance. Approximately twenty-five percent of our population is enrolled in school, and these students require support and management in a modern way. As educational autonomy increases, so do the responsibilities of school directors and principals. This calls for qualified managers to fulfill tasks, empower teachers, and provide support to the evolving educational system. For this reason, universities should provide graduate studies for educational administration and management and should receive governmental support for the institutions designated with the task of training new educational managers. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014. v4n3p303
Characterization of an Experimental Vaccine for Bovine Respiratory Syncytial Virus

ABSTRACT Bovine respiratory syncytial virus (BRSV) and human respiratory syncytial virus (HRSV) are major causes of respiratory disease in calves and children, respectively, and are priorities for vaccine development. We previously demonstrated that an experimental vaccine, BRSV-immunostimulating complex (ISCOM), is effective in calves with maternal antibodies. The present study focuses on the antigenic characterization of this vaccine for the design of new-generation subunit vaccines. The results of our study confirmed the presence of membrane glycoprotein (G), fusion glycoprotein (F), and nucleoprotein (N) proteins in the ISCOMs, and this knowledge was extended by the identification of matrix (M), M2-1, phosphoprotein (P), small hydrophobic protein (SH) and of cellular membrane proteins, such as the integrins αVβ1, αVβ3, and α3β1. The quantity of the major protein F was 4- to 5-fold greater than that of N (∼77 μg versus ∼17 μg/calf dose), whereas G, M, M2-1, P, and SH were likely present in smaller amounts. The polymerase (L), M2-2, nonstructural 1 (NS1), and NS2 proteins were not detected, suggesting that they are not essential for protection. Sera from the BRSV-ISCOM-immunized calves contained high titers of IgG antibody specific for F, G, N, and SH. Antibody responses against M and P were not detected; however, this does not exclude their role in protective T-cell responses. The absence of immunopathological effects of the cellular proteins, such as integrins, needs to be further confirmed, and their possible contribution to adjuvant functions requires elucidation. This work suggests that a combination of several surface and internal proteins should be included in subunit RSV vaccines and identifies absent proteins as potential candidates for differentiating infected from vaccinated animals.
CRIM Notebook Paper - TRECVID 2010 Surveillance Event Detection

Approach we have tested in each of your submitted runs. Only one run was provided for our first year in this competition. Our system is an adaptation of an outdoor video-surveillance system composed of a realtime blob tracker and an offline scene understanding module that accumulates statistics about observed objects over a long period of time. In particular, statistics about object height and velocity are accumulated over time using a non parametric approach. For the “Object Put” event, we followed a dual foreground segmentation approach where the output difference between a short term and a long term model is used for triggering potential alerts. For Pointing, we applied the learning of compound spatio-temporal features based on a data mining method. Relative contribution of each component of our approach . From the results, the tracking system, originally designed for outdoors scenes, appears to be the weak component in our system. We need to improve the background/foreground segmentation in order to produce less fragmented objects. Also, we don’t have a pedestrian or upper-body detector available this year (it is planned for next year however) so we are tracking many foreground objects that are not pertinent. What we learned about runs/approaches and the research question(s) that motivated them . For the PersonRuns task, we adopted a simple non parametric approach where we are looking for velocity outliers on trajectories provided by our tracker. Results were not up to our expectations mainly because our object tracker is not performing well enough. For the ObjectPut task, we were looking for a fast and low level approach that could detect static objects appearing in the image foreground. It produced results beyond our expectations. The approach, however, is not able to separate static persons versus real static objects leading to a high number of false alarms. For “ Pointing ”, we implemented a recent method based on a data mining of spatio-temporal grouping of local corners. This method demonstrated promising results on action recognition datasets but has never been applied before in a video surveillance application.
A qualitative evaluation criterion for human-robot interaction system in achieving collective tasks

This work intends to identify common performance metrics for task-oriented human-robot interaction. We present a methodology to assess the system performance of a human-robot team in achievement of collective tasks. We propose a systematic approach that addresses the performance of both the human user and the robotic agent as a team. Toward this end, we attempt to determine the true time that an operator has to dedicate to a robot in action. We define the robot attention demand (RAD) as a function of both direct interaction time (DIT) and indirect interaction time (IIT), where the IIT is a direct consequence of the human trust in automation. We propose a two-level fuzzy temporal model to evaluate the human trust in automation while interacting with robots. Another fuzzy temporal model is presented to evaluate the human reliability during interaction time. The model is then generalized to accommodate multi-robot scenarios. Sequential and parallel robot cooperation schemes with varying levels of task dependency are considered. The fuzzy knowledge bases are further updated by implementing an application robotic platform where robots and users interact naturally to complete tasks with varying levels of complexity. User feedback is noted and used to tune the knowledge base rules where needed, to better represent a human expert's knowledge.
Antioxidant Activity of β-Carotene Compounds in Different in Vitro Assays

β-Carotene (BC) is the most abundant carotenoid in human diet, almost solely as (all-E)-isomer. Significant amounts of (Z)-isomers of BC are present in processed food as well as in mammalian tissues. Differences are described for the activity of various BC isomers in forming retinal and protecting against cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Eccentric cleavage of BC leads to degradation products such as carotenals. A variety of negative consequences were published for the non-vitamin A active BC metabolites, such as inducing the carcinogenesis of benzo[a]pyrene, impairing mitochondrial function, or increasing CYP activity. To increase the knowledge on the antioxidant activity, a variety of BC isomers and metabolites were tested in various in vitro assays. In the present study, no ferric reducing activity (FRAP assay) was observed for the BC isomers. Between the major BC isomers (all-E, 9Z, and 13Z) no significant differences in bleaching the ABTS●+ (αTEAC assay) or in scavenging peroxyl radicals (ROO●) generated by thermal degradation of AAPH (using a chemiluminescence assay) were detected. However, the (15Z)-isomer was less active, maybe due to its low stability. The degradation to β-apo-carotenoids increased FRAP activity and ROO● scavenging activity compared to the parent molecule. Dependence on chain length and character of the terminal function was determined in αTEAC assay with following order of increasing activity: β-apo-8’-carotenal < β-apo-8’-carotenoic acid ethyl ester < 6’-methyl-β-apo-6’-carotene-6’-one (citranaxanthin). The results indicate that BC does not lose its antioxidant activity by degradation to long chain breakdown products.
Developments in geographical offender profiling: commentary on Bayesian journey to crime.

The Bayesian approach covered in this special issue complements the earlier ways of exploring offenders' crime location choices. It is different from earlier approaches in dealing directly with large local data sets of solved crimes to develop statistical models as compared with attempts to derive more generic ways of conceptualising an offender's geographical crime pattern. The two approaches can thus be seen to enshrine different epistemologies; the Bayesian being about a process for deriving patterns in geographically specific data sets, the earlier centre-of-gravity-oriented approaches seeking to establish general theories and principles that are broadly independent of any given locality. They are consequently sensitive to different types of bias in the data available. However, the interesting results achieved through the analysis of Bayesian patterns within crime data does further the consideration of the similarities across offenders in their use of locations for crime and thus has theoretical as well as practical implications. Therefore, these two approaches need to build on each other. This complementarity provides a useful example for other areas of Investigative Psychology. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An image-to-image loop-closure detection method based on unsupervised landmark extraction

This paper presents a dedicated approach to detect loop closures using visually salient patches. We introduce a novel, energy maximization based saliency detection technique which has been used for unsupervised landmark extraction. We explain how to learn the extracted landmarks on-the-fly and re-identify them. Furthermore, we describe the sparse location representation we use to recognize previously seen locations in order to perform reliable loop closure detection. The performance of our method has been analyzed both on an indoor and an outdoor dataset, and it has been shown that our approach achieves quite promising results on both datasets.
Bayes factor scoring of GMMs for speaker verification

This paper implements and assesses the Bayes factor as a replacement verification criterion to the likelihood-ratio test in the context of GMM-based speaker verification. An advantage of the Bayesian method is that model parameters are considered random variables, allowing for the incorporation of prior information and uncertainty of parameter estimates into the scoring process. A novel development of Bayes factors for GMMs is presented based on incremental adaptation that is well-suited to inclusion in existing state-of-the-art GMM-UBM systems. Experiments on the 1999 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation corpus demonstrate improved performance over expected log-likelihood ratio scoring particularly when combined with the feature mapping technique.
5-HTTLPR modulates the recognition accuracy and exploration of emotional facial expressions

Individual genetic differences in the serotonin transporter-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR) have been associated with variations in the sensitivity to social and emotional cues as well as altered amygdala reactivity to facial expressions of emotion. Amygdala activation has further been shown to trigger gaze changes toward diagnostically relevant facial features. The current study examined whether altered socio-emotional reactivity in variants of the 5-HTTLPR promoter polymorphism reflects individual differences in attending to diagnostic features of facial expressions. For this purpose, visual exploration of emotional facial expressions was compared between a low (n = 39) and a high (n = 40) 5-HTT expressing group of healthy human volunteers in an eye tracking paradigm. Emotional faces were presented while manipulating the initial fixation such that saccadic changes toward the eyes and toward the mouth could be identified. We found that the low vs. the high 5-HTT group demonstrated greater accuracy with regard to emotion classifications, particularly when faces were presented for a longer duration. No group differences in gaze orientation toward diagnostic facial features could be observed. However, participants in the low 5-HTT group exhibited more and faster fixation changes for certain emotions when faces were presented for a longer duration and overall face fixation times were reduced for this genotype group. These results suggest that the 5-HTT gene influences social perception by modulating the general vigilance to social cues rather than selectively affecting the pre-attentive detection of diagnostic facial features.
Strathprints Institutional Repository Güneş (2015) Why Aren't Users Using Protection? Investigating the Usability of Smartphone Locking. In: 17th International Conference on Human-computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. Acm, New York, Pp. 284-294. Isbn 978-1-4503-3652-9 Why Aren't Use

Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (http://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. ABSTRACT One of the main reasons why smartphone users do not adopt screen locking mechanisms is due to the inefficiency of entering a PIN/pattern each time they use their phone. To address this problem we designed a context-sensitive screen locking application which asked participants to enter a PIN/pattern only when necessary, and evaluated its impact on efficiency and satisfaction. Both groups of participants, who prior to the study either locked or did not lock their phone, adopted our application and felt that unlocking their phone only when necessary was more efficient, did not annoy them and offered a reasonable level of security. Participants responded positively to the option of choosing when a PIN/pattern is required in different contexts. Therefore, we recommend that designers of smartphone locking mechanisms should consider ceding a reasonable level of control over security settings to users to increase adoption and convenience, while keeping smartphones reasonably secure.
A transformation-based learning approach to language identification for mixed-lingual text-to-speech synthesis

Recent progress in corpus-based concatenativetext-to-speech synthesis has generated some interest in systems that are capable of synthesizing text from more than one language. In this paper we describe the language identiﬁcation component of such a mixed-lingual text-to-speech system. Relying only on the input text, we employ two different meth-ods, namely a transformation based learning approach and a stochastic n-gram approach, and we describe the combination of both methods. While the transformation-based learning approach already produces average error rates of less than 2 percent and outperforms the n-gram classiﬁcation scheme, the combination of both methods results in a further error reduction of up to 50 percent.
Association between Genetic Subgroups of Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Defined by High Density 500 K SNP-Arrays and Tumor Histopathology

The specific genes and genetic pathways associated with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma are still largely unknown partially due to the low resolution of the techniques applied so far to their study. Here we used high-density 500 K single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-arrays to define those chromosomal regions which most commonly harbour copy number (CN) alterations and loss of heterozygozity (LOH) in a series of 20 PDAC tumors and we correlated the corresponding genetic profiles with the most relevant clinical and histopathological features of the disease. Overall our results showed that primary PDAC frequently display (>70%) extensive gains of chromosomes 1q, 7q, 8q and 20q, together with losses of chromosomes 1p, 9p, 12q, 17p and 18q, such chromosomal regions harboring multiple cancer- and PDAC-associated genes. Interestingly, these alterations clustered into two distinct genetic profiles characterized by gains of the 2q14.2, 3q22.1, 5q32, 10q26.13, 10q26.3, 11q13.1, 11q13.3, 11q13.4, 16q24.1, 16q24.3, 22q13.1, 22q13.31 and 22q13.32 chromosomal regions (group 1; n = 9) versus gains at 1q21.1 and losses of the 1p36.11, 6q25.2, 9p22.1, 9p24.3, 17p13.3 and Xp22.33 chromosomal regions (group 2; n = 11). From the clinical and histopathological point of view, group 1 cases were associated with smaller and well/moderately-differentiated grade I/II PDAC tumors, whereas and group 2 PDAC displayed a larger size and they mainly consisted of poorly-differentiated grade III carcinomas. These findings confirm the cytogenetic complexity and heterogenity of PDAC and provide evidence for the association between tumor cytogenetics and its histopathological features. In addition, we also show that the altered regions identified harbor multiple cancer associate genes that deserve further investigation to determine their relevance in the pathogenesis of PDAC.
Extraction and Selection of Dynamic Features of the Human Iris

The personal identification through iris texture analysis is a highly efficient biometric identification method. Some algorithms and techniques were developed, taking into consideration the texture features of the iris image in the human eye. Nonetheless, such features, due to the fact that they are static, they are also susceptible to fraud. That is, a picture can replace the iris in an analysis. For that reason, this paper proposes a method for extracting the texture features of the iris during the pupil contraction and dilation, in addition to the dynamic contraction and dilation features themselves. Therefore, it was developed a new image acquisition system through NIR (Near Infra-Red) illumination, considering the Consensual Reflex of the eyes. The features are measured according to a dynamic illumination standard controlled by the software and are afterwards selected by means of data mining. Then it is possible to increase the safety in the biometric recognition devices of people through their iris, for only living irises can be utilized. The results show a significant precision index in determining such features, despite being inferior to the ones obtained by means of static methodology.
Occurrence of ozone anomalies over cloudy areas in TOMS version-7 level-2 data

Abstract. This study investigates anomalous ozone distributions over cloudy areas in Nimbus-7 (N7) and Earth-Probe (EP) TOMS version-7 data and analyzes the causes for ozone anomaly formation. A 5°-longitude by 5°-latitude region is defined to contain a Positive Ozone Anomaly (POA) or Negative Ozone Anomaly (NOA) if the correlation coefficient between total ozone and reflectivity is > 0.5 or -0.5. The average fractions of ozone anomalies among all cloud fields are 31.8 ± 7.7% and 35.8 ± 7.7% in the N7 and EP TOMS data, respectively. Some ozone anomalies are caused by ozone retrieval errors, and others are caused by actual geophysical phenomena. Large cloud-height errors are found in the TOMS version-7 algorithm in comparison to the Temperature Humidity Infrared Radiometer (THIR) cloud data. On average, cloud-top pressures are overestimated by ~200 hPa (THIR cloud-top pressure 200 hPa) for high-altitude clouds and underestimated by ~150 hPa for low-altitude clouds (THIR cloud-top pressure > 750 hPa). Most tropical NOAs result from negative errors induced by large cloud-height errors, and most tropical POAs are caused by positive errors due to intra-cloud ozone absorption enhancement. However, positive and negative errors offset each other, reducing the ozone anomaly occurrence in TOMS data. Large ozone/reflectivity slopes for mid-latitude POAs show seasonal variation consistent with total ozone fluctuation, indicating that they result mainly from synoptic and planetary wave disturbances. POAs with an occurrence fraction of 30--60% occur in regions of marine stratocumulus off the west coast of South Africa and off the west coast of South America. Both fractions and ozone/reflectivity slopes of these POAs show seasonal variations consistent with that in the tropospheric ozone. About half the ozone/reflectivity slope can be explained by ozone retrieval errors over clear and cloudy areas. The remaining slope may result from there being more ozone production because of rich ozone precursors and higher photolysis rates over high-frequency, low-altitude clouds than in clear areas. Ozone anomalies due to ozone retrieval errors have important implications in TOMS applications such as tropospheric ozone derivation and analysis of ozone seasonal variation.