Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Facilita: reading assistance for low-literacy readers

Texts are the media content primarily available on Web sites and applications. However, this heavy use of texts creates an accessibility barrier to those who cannot read fluently in their mother tongue due to both text length and linguistic complexity. To offer an accessible alternative to these readers, shorter and simplified versions of text content should be provided. Taking that into consideration, this paper introduces Facilita, an assistive technology to help lower-literacy users to understand the text content of Web applications. Facilita generates an accessible content from Web pages automatically, using summarization and simplification techniques. It is also important to consider interface design requirements, since Facilita's target audience (the functionally illiterate) is often classified as computer illiterate as well. Thus, interaction and user interface design were developed considering the limitations and skills of the functionally illiterate.
Similar Predictive Accuracy of the Static-99R Risk Tool for White, Black, and Hispanic Sex Offenders in California

Although considerable research has found overall moderate predictive validity of Static-99R, a sex offender risk prediction tool, relatively little research has addressed its potential for cultural bias. This prospective study evaluated the predictive validity of Static-99R across the three major ethnic groups (White, n = 789; Black, n = 466; Hispanic, n = 719) in the state of California. Static-99R was able to discriminate recidivists from nonrecidivists among White, Black, and Hispanic sex offenders (all area under the curve [AUC] values >.70; odds ratios >1.39). Base rates (at a Static-99R score of 2) with a fixed 5-year follow-up across ethnic groups were very similar (2.4%-3.0%) but were significantly lower than the norms (5.6%). The current findings support the use of Static-99R in risk assessment procedures for sex offenders of White, Black, and Hispanic heritage, but it should be used with caution in estimating absolute sexual recidivism rates, particularly for Hispanic sex offenders.
A priority assignment strategy of processing elements over an on-chip bus

The number of bus transactions in System-on-Chip (SoC) grows significantly in recent years. Because of different timing constraints for different applications, how to find a proper priority assignment for processing elements (PEs) of SoC becomes very challenging. In this paper, we first show that the priority assignment problem with one unique priority for each PE is NP-complete. When each bus transaction can have one unique priority, we propose an optimal priority assignment algorithm for a given workload. We then propose a priority assignment strategy based on Simulated Annealing (SA) for PEs, where bus arbitration is done in a priority-driven fashion. The objective is to minimize the number of priorities needed for each PE and to satisfy the timing constraints of applications. The experimental results show some encouraging results in priority assignment.
The application and research of the intelligent fault diagnosis for marine diesel engine

The marine diesel engine is a complex system, which has the important function to guarantee the marine security. In this paper a novel approach of optimizing and training fuzzy neural network based on the ant colony algorithm is proposed for the intelligent fault diagnosis of this kind of diesel engine. The structure and the parameter of fuzzy neural network for fault diagnosis system are introduced. Its weight and the threshold value are trained by the ant colony optimization algorithm. This method may effectively avoid the question that the BP algorithm usually chosen to train network easily to sink into the partial extreme value and also has the characteristics of quick convergence. Finally this fuzzy neural network system optimized by ant colony algorithm training is applied in the fault diagnosis of the marine diesel engine. The comparison of simulation results shows good performance and validity of the proposed method.
Reproducibility of a short semi-quantitative food group questionnaire and its performance in estimating nutrient intake compared with a 7-day diet diary in the Million Women Study

Abstract Objectives To assess the short- and long-term reproducibility of a short food group questionnaire, and to compare its performance for estimating nutrient intakes in comparison with a 7-day diet diary. Design Participants for the reproducibility study completed the food group questionnaire at two time points, up to 2 years apart. Participants for the performance study completed both the food group questionnaire and a 7-day diet diary a few months apart. Reproducibility was assessed by kappa statistics and percentage change between the two questionnaires; performance was assessed by kappa statistics, rank correlations and percentages of participants classified into the same and opposite thirds of intake. Setting A random sample of participants in the Million Women Study, a population-based prospective study in the UK. Subjects In total, 12 221 women aged 50–64 years. Results In the reproducibility study, 75% of the food group items showed at least moderate agreement for all four time-point comparisons. Items showing fair agreement or worse tended to be those where few respondents reported eating them more than once a week, those consumed in small amounts and those relating to types of fat consumed. Compared with the diet diary, the food group questionnaire showed consistently reasonable performance for the nutrients carbohydrate, saturated fat, cholesterol, total sugars, alcohol, fibre, calcium, riboflavin, folate and vitamin C. Conclusions The short food group questionnaire used in this study has been shown to be reproducible over time and to perform reasonably well for the assessment of a number of dietary nutrients.
State of Art: Cross Lingual Information Retrieval System for Indian Languages

The number of Web Users accessing the Internet becomes huge now a day. Also, all sorts of information can be obtained anytime by anybody from the Web. In India plenty of people are speaking diversified local languages. Only a very few percentage of population know English language and they can express their queries in English in a right way. Though, the network shrank the Globe, the language diversification is a great barrier to enjoy the benefits of the digital life. Cross Lingual Information Retrieval provides the solution for that barrier, by allowing the user to ask the query in the local language and then to get the documents in another language (English). In Cross Lingual Information Retrieval environment, the data interaction is not restricted by the language. Information Retrieval tries to match a user’s description of their information need with relevant information in a collection of documents or other data. Thereby it tries to resolve the language mismatch between the documents and queries.
Modularizing Scratch Code to Develop Interactive Media Content

 Abstract—Scratch has widely been recognized for its ability to teach children programming skills and helps to develop self-confidence. This study proposes another target group of audience who can capitalize on Scratch to reap multifold benefits—educators. Educators have been reluctant towards adopting new pedagogies to teach because of the difficulties faced when learning the advanced technologies the pedagogies are built on. By using modularized Scratch programming code templates, educators can develop a wide variety of interactive media content, ranging from games to interactive art, in order to better engage their students and increase learning effectiveness. This study demonstrates how modularized Scratch programming is easy to learn and produces interactive media reflecting the use of new education pedagogies. We created a set of Scratch code modules for the development of computer games to show how the modules can be used to develop a variety of educational games, including but not limited to business simulation games and adventure games to meet various learning objectives.
Proceedings of the General Track: 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference

Storage systems frequently maintain identical copies of data. Identifying such data can assist in the design of solutions in which data storage, transmission, and management are optimised. In this paper we evaluate three meth-ods used to discover identical portions of data: whole (cid:2)le content hashing, (cid:2)xed size blocking, and a chunking strategy that uses Rabin (cid:2)ngerprints to delimit content-de(cid:2)ned data chunks. We assess how effective each of these strategies is in (cid:2)nding identical sections of data. In our experiments, we analysed diverse data sets from a variety of different types of storage systems including a mirrored section of sunsite.org. uk, different data pro-(cid:2)les in the (cid:2)le system infrastructure of the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, source code distribution trees, compressed data, and packed (cid:2)les. We report our experimental results and present a comparative analysis of these techniques. This study also shows how levels of similarity differ between data sets and (cid:2)le types. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages in the application of these methods in the light of our experimental results.
A distributed SVM method based on the iterative MapReduce

Linear classification is useful in many applications, but training large-scale data remains an important research issue. Recent advances in linear classification have shown that distributed methods can be efficient in improving the training time. However, for most of the existing training methods,based on MPI or Hadoop, the communication between nodes is the bottleneck. To shorten the communication between nodes, we propose and analyze a method for distributed support vector machine and implement it on an iterative MapReduce framework. Through our distributed method, the local SVMs are generic and can make use of the state-of-the-art SVM solvers. Unlike previous attempts to parallelize SVMs the algorithm does not make assumptions on the density of the support vectors, i.e., the efficiency of the algorithm holds also for the “difficult” cases where the number of support vectors is very high. The performance of the our method is evaluated in an experimental environment. By partitioning the training dataset into smaller subsets and optimizing the partitioned subsets across a cluster of computers, we reduce the training time significantly while maintaining a high level of accuracy in both binary and multiclass classifications.
Using semi-lagrangian formulations with automatic code generation for environmental modeling

An import issue for numerical weather prediction modes (NWP) is the time it takes to produce a valid forecast. One factor, which greatly influences this simulation time is the size of the time step. However, time step size is often limited by the numerical stability of the used advection schemes. Available schemes include semiimplicit Eulerian and semi-Lagrangian schemes. In principal, semi-Lagrangian formulations result in irregular communications on parallel architectures. In this paper we describe automatic code generation for a semi-implicit scheme with a semi-Lagrangian formulation. We describe how code can be generated from a mathematical specification of the advection model, the embedding of the formulations in the CTADEL code generation tool and we show the parallelization of the code. Finally, we show results from preliminary experiments we have conducted with the generated code and the reference code from a production NWP on a number of different architectures.
Phase Reconciliation for Contended In-Memory Transactions

Multicore main-memory database performance can collapse when many transactions contend on the same data. Contending transactions are executed serially--either by locks or by optimistic concurrency control aborts--in order to ensure that they have serializable effects. This leaves many cores idle and performance poor. We introduce a new concurrency control technique, phase reconciliation, that solves this problem for many important workloads. Doppel, our phase reconciliation database, repeatedly cycles through joined, split, and reconciliation phases. Joined phases use traditional concurrency control and allow any transaction to execute. When workload contention causes unnecessary serial execution, Doppel switches to a split phase. There, updates to contended items modify per-core state, and thus proceed in parallel on different cores. Not all transactions can execute in a split phase; for example, all modifications to a contended item must commute. A reconciliation phase merges these per-core states into the global store, producing a complete database ready for joined-phase transactions. A key aspect of this design is determining which items to split, and which operations to allow on split items. Phase reconciliation helps most when there are many updates to a few popular database records. Its throughput is up to 38x higher than conventional concurrency control protocols on microbenchmarks, and up to 3x on a larger application, at the cost of increased latency for some transactions.
A fully integrated Software-Defined FDD transceiver tunable from 0.3-to-1.6 GHz

An ideal Software Defined Radio (SDR) requires a reconfigurable, intergrated, widely-frequency-tunable transceiver able to support different RX/TX duplex schemes. Here we present an integrated transceiver capable of supporting both TDD and FDD operation with >25dB integrated RX-TX isolation from 0.3-1.6GHz without any off-chip switches or filters. The transceiver uses an artificial transmission line (TL) and distributed PA to separate TX and RX. TX noise in the RX band is further suppressed by >13dB an RX-tracking PA degeneration circuit.
What Makes a Good Answer in Community Question Answering? An Analysis of Assessors' Criteria

Community question answering (CQA) has recently become a popular means of satisfying personal information needs, and methods for effectively retrieving information from CQA archives are attracting research interest as the number of reusable questions and answers are rapidly increasing. Rather than having to post a question and wait for an answer, an individual can often obtain an immediate answer by searching the archives. However, as the quality of archived answers varies widely, a method is needed for effectively extracting high-quality answers. In this study, we manually selected random questions and answers from the archives for Yahoo! Chiebukuro, a Japanese CQA site equivalent to Yahoo! Answers, had them evaluated by four assessors, and identified the criteria used by the assessors in their evaluations. These criteria should be useful in constructing a model for identifying high-quality answers.
Testing the FormalCheck Query Library

FormalCheck is a Computer-Aided Design tool developed jointly by Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs Research and its Advanced Technologies Design Automation Lab, for the automatic verification of hardware designs. Design Automation supports FormalCheck both internally and commercially. The utility of this tool lies in its ability to offer a more reliable means for checking the correctness of a control circuit than is afforded with simulation, together with a greater speed and ease of application than is possible using simulation. It is applied to a circuit by posing queries about the circuit (relating to its proper operation) which the tool then answers either in the affirmative, or in the negative– presenting a trace to a point where the circuit fails to exhibit the behavior defined in the query. Internally to the tool, each query is translated into an automaton model, against which the circuit is checked. It therefore is absolutely critical that the automata models generated by the queries conform to the intentions of the designers who formulate the queries. We have tested this conformance and established a regression test bench for the query mechanism, by establishing two unrelated automata generators for queries, and a means to test that the generated automataare equivalent.
Low Profile Wide Band Antennas using Electromagnetic Bandgap Structures with Magneto-Dielectric Materials

In this paper, a novel application for magneto-dielectric materials is introduced. Using magneto-dielectric materials, a compact wide band electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure is designed. The numerical results show that this EBG has an in-phase reflection bandwidth of 70% which is several times greater than a conventional EBG resonating at the same frequency while its cell size is smaller. Using this EBG as the ground plane, a low profile unidirectional spiral antenna is designed to operate over the 8 to 18 GHz. The VSWR and gain of the designed low profile antenna is shown to be comparable to the PEC backed spiral antenna (backing at lambda/4), while achieving a 72% reduction in profile.
A Distributed Learning Algorithm for Communication Development

We study the question of how a local learning algorithm, executed by multiple distributed agents, can lead to a global system of communication. First, the notion of a perfect communication system is defined. Next, two measures of communication system quality are specified. It is shown that maximization of these measures leads to perfect communication production. Based on this principle, local adaptation rules for communication development are constructed. The resulting stochastic algorithm is validated in computational experiments. Empirical analysis indicates that a mild degree of stochasticity is instrumental in reaching states that correspond to accurate communication.
Beyond the bolus: transgenic tools for investigating the neurophysiology of learning and memory

Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying learning and memory in the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit is a central challenge of systems neuroscience. For more than 40 years, electrophysiological recordings in awake, behaving animals have been used to relate the receptive fields of neurons in this circuit to learning and memory. However, the vast majority of such studies are purely observational, as electrical, surgical, and pharmacological circuit manipulations are both challenging and relatively coarse, being unable to distinguish between specific classes of neurons. Recent advances in molecular genetic tools can overcome many of these limitations, enabling unprecedented control over neural activity in behaving animals. Expression of pharmaco- or optogenetic transgenes in cell-type-specific “driver” lines provides unparalleled anatomical and cell-type specificity, especially when delivered by viral complementation. Pharmacogenetic transgenes are specially designed neurotransmitter receptors exclusively activated by otherwise inactive synthetic ligands and have kinetics similar to traditional pharmacology. Optogenetic transgenes use light to control the membrane potential, and thereby operate at the millisecond timescale. Thus, activation of pharmacogenetic transgenes in specific neuronal cell types while recording from other parts of the circuit allows investigation of the role of those neurons in the steady state, whereas optogenetic transgenes allow one to determine the immediate network response.
Joint evaluation of reduced feedback scheme, scheduling, and rate adaptation in OFDMA systems with feedback delays

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems exploit multiuser diversity and frequency-selectivity to achieve high spectral efficiencies. However, they require considerable feedback for scheduling and rate adaptation, and are sensitive to feedback delays. We develop a comprehensive analysis of the OFDMA system throughput as a function of the feedback scheme, frequency-domain scheduler, and discrete rate adaptation rule in the presence of feedback delays. We analyze the popular best-n and threshold-based feedback schemes. We show that for both the greedy and round-robin schedulers, the throughput degradation, given a feedback delay, depends primarily on the fraction of feedback reduced by the feedback scheme and not the feedback scheme itself. Even small feedback delays at low vehicular speeds are shown to significantly degrade the throughput. We also show that optimizing the link adaptation thresholds as a function of the feedback delay can effectively counteract the detrimental effect of delays.
Video Games and Agency in Contemporary Society

In recent years, the idea of player control, or agency, has become central and explicit in certain video games and genres, affecting many debates concerning the study or definitions of video games. In spite of this, the notion of agency in video games has been rarely explicitly explored or defined in relation to its sociological and political dimensions. Hence, drawing on actor–network theory, (neo-)Foucauldian governmentality studies, and empirical data gathered over a 3-year period, this article expands to our understanding of video game player agency and, moreover, argues that video games provide an important example and perspective to consider the contemporary nature and political basis of agency.
Invasion thresholds and the evolution of nonequilibrium virulence

The enterprise of virulence management attempts to predict how social practices and other factors affect the evolution of parasite virulence. These predictions are often based on parasite optima or evolutionary equilibria derived from models of host‐parasite dynamics. Yet even when such models accurately capture the parasite optima, newly invading parasites will typically not be at their optima. Here we show that parasite invasion of a host population can occur despite highly nonoptimal virulence. Fitness improvements soon after invasion may proceed through many steps with wide changes in virulence, because fitness depends on transmission as well as virulence, and transmission improvements can overwhelm nonoptimal virulence. This process is highly sensitive to mutation supply and the strength of selection. Importantly, the same invasion principle applies to the evolution of established parasites, whenever mutants arise that overcome host immunity/resistance. A host population may consequently experience repeated invasions of new parasite variants and possible large shifts in virulence as it evolves in an arms race with the parasite. An experimental study of phage lysis time and examples of mammalian viruses matching some of these characteristics are reviewed.
Fostering Participation in Competitive Procurement

A seminal result in the theory of competitive bidding holds that the buyer can lower the expected awarding price of a procurement contract by setting a reserve price below her opportunity cost for realizing the project. In this paper, we first provide a non-technical explanation for this result, then review how the "optimal reserve price" varies with the degree of interdependence among suppliers' production costs and the risk of collusion in the procurement market. The paper also discusses how the buyer can foster the participation of new entrants or Small and Medium Enterprises in the procurement market.