Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testing Re nements by Re ning Tests

One of the potential bene ts of formal methods is that they o er the possibility of reducing the costs of testing. A speci cation acts as both the benchmark against which any implementation is tested, and also as the means by which tests are generated. There has therefore been interest in developing test generation techniques from formal speci cations, and a number of di erent methods have been derived for state based languages such as Z, B and VDM. However, in addition to deriving tests from a formal speci cation, we might wish to re ne the speci cation further before its implementation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between testing and re nement. As our model for test generation we use a DNF partition analysis for operations written in Z, which produces a number of disjoint test cases for each operation. In this paper we discuss how the partition analysis of an operation alters upon re nement, and we develop techniques that allow us to re ne abstract tests in order to generate test cases for a re nement. To do so we use (and extend existing) methods for calculating the weakest data re nement of a speci cation.
A Study Of Bagging And Boosting Approaches To Develop Meta-Classifier

-- Classification is one of the data mining techniques that analyses a given data set and induces a model for each class based on their features present in the data. Bagging and boosting are heuristic approaches to develop classification models. These techniques generate a diverse ensemble of classifiers by manipulating the training data given to a base learning algorithm. They are very successful in improving the accuracy of some algorithms in artificial and real world datasets. We review the two popular ensemble algorithms such as Boosting, Bagging. In this paper we study the classification task with more emphasis on boosting and bagging methods classification. In this paper, we present online versions of bagging and boosting that require only one pass through the training data. Boosting induces the ensemble of weak classifiers together to create one strong classifier. In boosting successive models give extra weights to the earlier predictors. While In bagging, each model is independently constructed using a bootstrap sample of the data set. In the end, overall prediction is made by majority voting.
Multi-Target Tracking using a 3D-Lidar sensor for autonomous vehicles

Environmental perception is a prerequisite for autonomous driving and also a challenging task particularly in cluttered dynamic environments such as complex urban situations. In this paper, we present a robust algorithm for Multi-Target Tracking (MTT) using a Velodyne 3D HDL-64 Lidar sensor. The main contribution of this paper is a practical framework for selecting and representing useful information from the sensor raw data. Since the sensor produces a huge amount of data, a perception algorithm cannot be carried out in real-time without simplifying the sensor information. Unlike prior works, we introduce hybrid ground classification and the Region of Interest (ROI) identification method in order to filter out the amount of unwanted raw data for the actual tracking. And the environment is also abstracted based on an occupancy grid map. Moreover, we introduce feature based object geometry for precise estimation of the system state. In contrast to prior approaches, which use object geometry for the classification, we use it in order to compensate the unintended dynamics caused by shape change or occlusion. Our proposed MTT algorithm is able to run in real-time with an average processing time of 20ms. We evaluate it using our experimental vehicle “Leonie” in complex urban scenarios.
Synthesizer user interface design-lessons learned from a heuristic review

In this paper, we review the types of user interfaces used in electronic synthesizers, both hardware and software, and conduct a heuristic review on a number of representative examples. The process of building and editing sounds in modern commercial synthesizers requires a good understanding, both of the system architecture and of the synthesis engine itself, as the user/system dialog is conducted in system-specific terms, rather than in terms familiar to a musician. User interfaces of contemporary synthesizers may be procedural, presenting the user with a set of functional modules which generate/process sound, or alternatively, offer the means of creating/editing sound, using direct manipulation techniques. We conclude that neither style emerges as being better suited to the task of sound synthesis; in this domain, direct manipulation is limited in the degree of control afforded, while the form filling style characteristic of fixed architecture synthesizers is slow and laborious.
Receptive field properties in the cat's area 17 in the absence of on- center geniculate input

Most neurons of area 17 in the cat respond to both light and dark stimuli, and it is often assumed that these responses originate from the on-center and off-center cells, respectively, of the lateral geniculate nucleus. This has not been demonstrated experimentally, however. Whether the on and off pathways make unique contributions to some of the response properties characteristic of visual cortex, such as orientation selectivity, is also unknown. The aim of these experiments was to investigate these questions by inactivating the retinogeniculate on pathway. In cats in which D,L-2-amino-4- phosphonobutyric acid (APB) had been injected into one eye, we found that, in the geniculate layers driven by that eye, there were no cells with on-center responses (Horton, J. C., and H. Sherk (1984) J. Neurosci. 4: 374–380). The on pathway appeared to have been inactivated. To see how cortical receptive fields were affected, we examined 184 binocular cells in area 17 contralateral to the injected eye. Each cell still had a normal receptive field in the ipsilateral eye, and we compared the cell's response properties in that eye with those in the eye injected with APB to assess the drug's effects. Overall responsiveness in the injected eye was severely reduced, and responses to the onset of stationary light stimuli were almost entirely abolished. Responses to moving light edges were weak or absent in most cells but still strong in a few; simple cells tended to have more vigorous light edge responses than complex cells. The general reduction in responsiveness, and the specific reduction in light edge responses, indicated that the on and off pathways both contribute (directly or indirectly) to the responses of most cells in area 17. The remaining responses to light edges we think originated mainly from the on- surrounds of off-center geniculate cells. Responses to moving dark edges were somewhat depressed compared to those in the normal eye. There was, however, no systematic change in direction selectivity and no reduction in specificity for orientation or length. In general, receptive field properties remained surprisingly normal despite the conspicuous reduction in responsiveness.
Model-based formant-to-area mapping with labial cross-section constraints

The object of the presentation is model-based formant-to-area mapping. The objective is the examination of the morphological similarity between observed and mapped area functions that may involve constraints on the labial cross-section. The vocal tract model is a concatenation of truncated cones the cross-sections of which are inferred by means of an inverse mapper that is based on a locally linear relation between observed formant frequency increments and calculated cross-section increments. The corpus comprises eight speakers who have sustained 77 vowels. Results show that constraining the labial cross-section improves the similarity between recorded and calculated area functions. The increase is less than 10 %, however. Also, fixing the labial cross-sections for French rounded back vowels, the area functions of which are difficult to infer from acoustic data, does not qualitatively improve the similarity between observed and inferred area functions.
Considering application domain ontologies for data mining

The dramatically explosion of data and the growing number of different data sources are exposing researchers to a new challenge - how to acquire, maintain and share knowledge from large databases in the context of rapidly applied and evolving research. This paper describes a research of an ontological approach for leveraging the semantic content of ontologies to improve knowledge discovery in databases. We analyze how ontologies and knowledge discovery process may interoperate and present our efforts to bridge the two fields, knowledge discovery in databases and ontology learning for successful database usage projects.
SFE1, a Constituent of the Fertilization Envelope in the Sea Urchin Is Made by Oocytes and Contains Low-Density Lipoprotein-Receptor-Like Repeats1

Abstract At fertilization in most animals, cortical granules of the egg or oocyte secrete their contents, whose function it is to modify the extracellular matrix. This modified matrix then participates in the block to polyspermy and protection for early embryonic development. In the sea urchin, contents of the cortical granules are secreted within 30 sec of insemination. Several of these content proteins then bind to the nascent vitelline layer of the egg and lift off the cell surface to form a stable, impervious, fertilization envelope. At least six major proteins are present in the envelope, and recently we have identified cDNA clones of two, ovoperoxidase, and SFE9. Here we report on the identification and characterization of SFE1, a constituent of the fertilization envelope of the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, that has revealing characteristics of how the envelope might form and what protein interaction domains might predominate. We present the largest cDNA sequence we were able to identify representing approximately two thirds of the predicted protein coding region. The C-terminal half of the cognate SFE1 protein contains two different amino acid repeat motifs: a cysteine-rich (15%) motif of 40 amino acids that is tandemly repeated 22 times and is followed by a serine/threonine-rich (38%) repeat of 63 amino acids that is tandemly repeated 3.5 times. Surprisingly, just N-terminal to the cysteine-rich repeat region is a sequence of five repeats with similarity to repeats in another cortical granule protein, SFE9, and to the motif originally identified in the receptor of low-density lipoproteins, the LDLr motif. The amino acid composition deduced from the partial SFE1 cDNA is similar also to the composition of proteoliaisin, a protein thought to tether the ovoperoxidase to the vitelline layer of the egg and thereby sequester the crosslinking activity of the ovoperoxidase to a limited population of proteins in the fertilization envelope. However, by use of monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies to SFE1 and proteoliaisin, we show here that they are distinct gene products. We also show that SFE1 is packed selectively into the cortical granules and then is crosslinked into the fertilization envelope following fertilization. In situ RNA hybridization analysis shows that the mRNA of SFE1 (9 kilobases) is present in oocytes selectively and is turned over rapidly in the oocyte following germinal vesicle breakdown. Our findings suggest that the gene encoding this major product of the egg is activated concomitantly with the other cortical granule-specific products already identified, and that a common LDLr-like motif of the fertilization envelope may reveal a structural mechanism for protein interactions in its construction.
Tai chi improves cognitive and physical function in the elderly: a randomized controlled trial

[Purpose] To investigate the effect of Tai Chi on cognitive and physical function in the elderly. [Subjects and Methods] A randomized trial design was used. A total 150 subjects were enrolled and were divided into Tai Chi and control groups. Subjects in the Tai Chi group participated Tai Chi for 6 months, and subjects in the control group participated in other non-athletic activities. [Results] There were no differences between the groups in the one leg standing time with eyes open, left grip strength, or the Frontal Assessment Battery at bedside after 3 and 6 months of intervention. The Mini-Mental State Examination scores after 3 and 6 months were higher in the Tai Chi group than in the control group. The right grip strength after 3 months increased more in the Tai Chi group than in the control group. Both the 5-m high walking speed and 10-m normal walking speed were significantly lower after 3 and 6 months of Tai Chi practice. [Conclusion] These results suggest that regular Tai Chi practice may improve cognitive and physical function in the elderly.
Short- and Long-run Phillips Trade-offs and the Cost of Disinflationary Policies

This paper studies the joint behaviour of inflation and unemployment in Spain over the period 1964–95 in order to estimate dynamic Phillips trade-offs and sacrifice ratios in response to a demand shock. We organize our empirical approach as a structural (albeit eclectic) one. In so doing, we use a Structural VAR to identify demand shocks in a framework where the high persistence in both series allows us to differentiate between permanent and transitory components. Our eclecticism comes from using three alternative identifying schemes which fit the data equally well, but place different emphasis on the effects of demand shocks on the unemployment rate. Our estimates suggest, according to the reader’s prior belief (Keynesian or monetarist), that a one percentage point reduction in inflation following an aggregate demand contraction is associated with cumulated output losses of between 2.6% and 5% over five years.
An Agent Infrastructure for Distributed Simulations over HLA and a Case Study Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper proposes an agent infrastructure (theatre) centered on Java for distributed simulations over HLA/RTI. The architecture rests on actors (agents) as the basic building blocks. Actors have a public message interface and encapsulate a state of local variables and a behavior patterned as a finite state machine. Actors interact to one another by asynchronous message passing. At the system level, theatres are used as the execution platforms for actors. Theatres naturally map on to HLA federates. Actors can migrate between theatres for configuration or load-balancing concerns. The paper introduces Theatre and shows its application to a complex simulation model based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The case study is an open agent-based distributed model where mobile agents follow communication patterns established at runtime
Are Statistical Reporting Agencies Getting It Right? Data Rationality and Business Cycle Asymmetry

This article provides new evidence on the rationality of early releases of industrial production (IP) and producer price index (PPI) data. Rather than following the usual practice of examining only first available and fully revised data, we examine the entire revision history for each variable. Thus we are able to assess, for example, whether earlier releases of data are in any sense “less” rational than later releases, and when data become rational. Our findings suggest that seasonally unadjusted IP and PPI become rational after approximately 3–4 months, whereas seasonally adjusted versions of these series remain irrational for at least 6–12 months after initial release. For all variables examined, we find evidence that the remaining revision is predictable from its own past or from publicly available information in other economic and financial variables. In addition, we find a clear increase in the volatility of revisions during recessions, suggesting that early data releases are less reliable in tougher economic times. Finally, we explore whether nonlinearities in economic behavior manifest themselves in the form of nonlinearities in the rationality of early releases of economic data, by separately analyzing expansionary and recessionary economic phases and by allowing for structural breaks. These types of nonlinearities are shown to be prevalent and in some cases to lead to incorrect inferences concerning data rationality when they are not taken into account.
Rigid stabilization of facial expressions

Facial scanning has become the industry-standard approach for creating digital doubles in movies and video games. This involves capturing an actor while they perform different expressions that span their range of facial motion. Unfortunately, the scans typically contain a superposition of the desired expression on top of un-wanted rigid head movement. In order to extract true expression deformations, it is essential to factor out the rigid head movement for each expression, a process referred to as rigid stabilization. In order to achieve production-quality in industry, face stabilization is usually performed through a tedious and error-prone manual process. In this paper we present the first automatic face stabilization method that achieves professional-quality results on large sets of facial expressions. Since human faces can undergo a wide range of deformation, there is not a single point on the skin surface that moves rigidly with the underlying skull. Consequently, computing the rigid transformation from direct observation, a common approach in previous methods, is error prone and leads to inaccurate results. Instead, we propose to indirectly stabilize the expressions by explicitly aligning them to an estimate of the underlying skull using anatomically-motivated constraints. We show that the proposed method not only outperforms existing techniques but is also on par with manual stabilization, yet requires less than a second of computation time.
A refined Quicksort asymptotic

The complexity of the Quicksort algorithm is usually measured by the number of key comparisons used during its execution. When operating on a list of n data, permuted uniformly at random, the appropriately normalized complexity Yn is known to converge almost surely to a non-degenerate random limit Y. This assumes a natural embedding of all Yn on one probability space, e.g., via random binary search trees. In this note a central limit theorem for the error term in the latter almost sure convergence is shown: n 2 log n (Yn − Y) d −→ N (n → ∞), where N denotes a standard normal random variable.
Interleukin 2, but Not Other Common γ Chain–Binding Cytokines, Can Reverse the Defect in Generation of Cd4 Effector T Cells from Naive T Cells of Aged Mice

Development of effectors from naive CD4 cells occurs in two stages. The early stage involves activation and limited proliferation in response to T cell receptor (TCR) stimulation by antigen and costimulatory antigen presenting cells, whereas the later stage involves proliferation and differentiation in response to growth factors. Using a TCR-transgenic (Tg+) model, we have examined the effect of aging on effector generation and studied the ability of γc signaling cytokines to reverse this effect. Our results indicate that responding naive CD4 cells from aged mice, compared with cells from young mice, make less interleukin (IL)-2, expand poorly between days 3 to 5, and give rise to fewer effectors with a less activated phenotype and reduced ability to produce cytokines. When exogenous IL-2 or other γc signaling cytokines are added during effector generation, the Tg+ cells from both young and aged mice proliferate vigorously. However, IL-4, IL-7, and IL-15 all fail to restore efficient effector production. Only effectors from aged mice generated in the presence of IL-2 are able to produce IL-2 in amounts equivalent to those produced by effectors generated from young mice, suggesting that the effect of aging on IL-2 production is reversible only in the presence of exogenous IL-2.
Fast Supervised Discrete Hashing and its Analysis

In this paper, we propose a learning-based supervised discrete hashing method. Binary hashing is widely used for large-scale image retrieval as well as video and document searches because the compact representation of binary code is essential for data storage and reasonable for query searches using bit-operations. The recently proposed Supervised Discrete Hashing (SDH) efficiently solves mixed-integer programming problems by alternating optimization and the Discrete Cyclic Coordinate descent (DCC) method. We show that the SDH model can be simplified without performance degradation based on some preliminary experiments; we call the approximate model for this the "Fast SDH" (FSDH) model. We analyze the FSDH model and provide a mathematically exact solution for it. In contrast to SDH, our model does not require an alternating optimization algorithm and does not depend on initial values. FSDH is also easier to implement than Iterative Quantization (ITQ). Experimental results involving a large-scale database showed that FSDH outperforms conventional SDH in terms of precision, recall, and computation time.
Bringing Human-Computer Interaction to an Agile Process Model

From an HCI point of view, actual development design processes do not consider adequately aspects of interaction design, nor participatory techniques for involving end users. Bonacin et al. [7] have proposed the Agile Inclusive Process Model (AIPM), a process model, based on agile methods, as well as on practices, methods and theories from Human-Computer Interaction, Participatory Design and Organizational Semiotics. In this technical report, we clarified and justified some of these practices and methods to emphasize and show the viability of considering them in software development processes.
Rate Selection Heuristics for Network Coding in Wireless Networks

We address the problem of efficient broadcasting in multi-hop wireless networks with network coding. Network coding was introduced by the seminal work of [1] as a new paradigm where intermediate nodes are mixing information from different flows (different bits or different packets). The problem that we are addressing is efficient broadcast, precisely: • Broadcast packets from one source to all nodes, with the minimum number of transmissions. Without network coding, finding the optimal solution is an NP complete problem. With network coding, essentially, nodes will retransmit coded packets with an average interval, defining a node rate. Finding an optimal solution consists in finding the coding nodes and their optimal rates. This can be formulated as a linear program, which can be solved in polynomial time [2]. However, we adopt a different, even simpler, approach: our previous work [3, 4] has shown a simple heuristic could achieve asymptotically the optimal efficiency for homogeneous large and dense wireless networks of the plane — and also that, noticeably, it outperforms methods not using network coding. This is true asymptotically, and for homogeneous networks. The heuristic need adjustments for less homogeneous, smaller or sparser networks, the topic of the poster. Our key contributions are the following: • We propose an improved heuristic for rate selection, inspired by [5]. It is based only on local topology information: knowledge of two-hop neighbors. • We study its performance on representative graphs with different densities (using min-cut calculation). We investigate and explain the variation of the performance.
Efficient code generation for ASIPs with different word sizes

We propose a complete methodology for extending our automatic ASIP (Architecture Specific Instruction set Processor) synthesis framework to a much wider target architecture space. In this new architecture space the width of the integer data word and of any hardware resource data path is user-definable and application specific. This methodology, developed on the basis of a retargetable C compiler (the SUIF compiler), requires the definition of a new intermediate format and a complete set of non-ambiguous rules determining the bit precision of each integer operation depending on the size of its operands. We also assess the implementation requirements and the complexity increases of the scheduler and the hardware template. Examples illustrate the methodology.